Blood is Dirt. Robert Thomas Wilson

she couldn’t keep her knickers on. Now let’s forget my wife, my ex-wife. She’s not involved. She’s out of the picture.’

      ‘How do you suggest we get ourselves into the picture, Napier? No letter. No proof. Scant information which we have to wring out of you and you turn down the offer of the Lagos fraud squad. What do you want us to do? Hang around on street corners in downtown Lagos looking at people’s back pockets? Time-consuming. Expensive. How much money have you got on you? Maybe not much beyond your own expenses. You’re not giving us anything, Napier. Chuck us a bone, for God’s sake. Spill your guts or bow out. We’ve got some paperclip chains to make.’

      ‘Perhaps Mr Briggs is concerned that he’s done something illegal,’ said Bagado. Napier kicked himself back off the window and turned on him. ‘Transferring funds from overinvoicing on a government contract. Whose money is it?’

      ‘Ah, yes,’ said Napier, backing down, leaning against the window, easing another smoke out, keeping the chain going. ‘Embarrassing.’

      ‘What percentage did they offer you?’

      ‘Forty. Thirty-five for …’

      ‘Who was the other five for?’

      ‘Someone called Dan Emanalo. He doesn’t exist, nor does the company he works for.’

      ‘Which was?’

      ‘Chemiclean Limited. I supplied them with chemicals in drums. They had a government contract to supply sewage treatment systems.’

      ‘But they didn’t exist?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘But they miraculously paid you for supplying the chemicals?’

      Napier Briggs fell silent. He wasn’t a topnotch liar. He was pretty good at shutting up or spinning out half truths and he was an outstanding smoker, but lying … he just didn’t have it.

      ‘You’re binding up on us again, Napier.’

      ‘I have to think about this.’

      ‘Nothing’s going out of this room, Napier. Strictly P and C and all that.’

      ‘Where’s that coffee?’ he asked.

      ‘Coming.’

      Napier clasped the back of his neck and tried to squeeze the anguish out.

      ‘Why can’t I think?’

      ‘Maybe you’re scared, Napier?’

      ‘Did you have particular need of this ten million?’ asked Bagado.

      ‘Ten million?’

      ‘Thirty-five per cent of thirty million dollars.’

      ‘Yes. No,’ said Napier, and his face crumpled. He was losing it. We sat in the silence left over by the traffic. The coffee and croissants arrived. Two cafes au lait for Bagado and I, and a double tarantula juice for Napier. He sipped it, rattling the cup back into the saucer each time. Thinking. Thinking. The brain turning and turning like a hamster’s wheel.

      ‘What did you make supplying the sewage treatment chemicals?’

      ‘Two per cent of the shipping, about three thousand dollars, but I did the product as well. Took five per cent of that. I don’t usually do product.’

      ‘Who did you get the product off?’

      ‘Dupont,’ he said, too quickly.

      ‘French Dupont?’

      ‘Yes, it was,’ he said, wanting to fill that out a bit more but having nothing else to say.

      ‘Sweet deal?’

      ‘Very.’

      What are we talking about? Two hundred, three hundred grand.’

      ‘Something like that.’

      ‘Takes care of your running costs for a bit.’

      ‘Sure.’

      ‘Now, the ten million dollars, that’s different. That’s retirement money. Don’t have to push the pen any more, hump the phone to your ear. It can solve big problems, too, that kind of money.’

      ‘Like?’

      ‘Debts. Payoffs. Muscle.’

      Napier slugged back the last dram of tar and refitted the cup. He lit another cigarette and threw the old butt out on to the balcony. He folded his jacket over his arm and shook his legs in his trousers, which were clinging to those parts where dogs like to stick their noses. He picked up his zip-top briefcase by the ear.

      ‘It’s like going to a shrink, Napier,’ I said. ‘You have to relive the trauma to get over the neurosis. Have a think about things. Straighten them out in your head. Come back and talk to us again.’

      ‘Do you have a home number?’ ‘I do, but I don’t give it out. This kind of business and a happy home life don’t go together. You’ve got a card, I take it?’

      ‘Yeah. The guy in the British High Commission gave it to me.’

      ‘We have an answering machine here. Office hours are eight a.m. to one p.m. and five p.m. to eight p.m. Where are you staying, Napier?’

      ‘The Hotel du Lac, just across the lagoon there.’

      Bagado and I listened to the man who’d nearly been our tenth client scuffing down the untiled concrete stairs.

      ‘That was close,’ said Bagado.

      ‘We can still nail him.’

      ‘You better be quick.’

      ‘With all the competition out there, you mean?’

      ‘I think he’s a dead man, or heading that way.’

      ‘Really? He just looked a little scared to me.’

      ‘Victim,’ said Bagado, shaking his head.

      ‘Hotel du Lac,’ I said, thinking about that for a moment. ‘That’s middling, but they’re doing it up. It’s still cheapish. He must be a bit short. If he’d been in the Aledjo or the Sheraton, even the Golfe, I’d have felt better about him.’

      ‘Is that why you asked him?’

      ‘No. I thought I might go and hustle him some more this evening.’

      ‘Even if he’s a dead man and he hasn’t got any money?’

      ‘Nobody’s got less money than us, Bagado.’

      ‘Do you want his croissant?’

      ‘See what I mean?’

       2

      Bagado didn’t show for the evening sitting-around session. He had a sick daughter and a wife who’d had to take to the streets selling live chickens from a calabash. Life was getting hard for him. All the money he earned went straight out into the extended family, and worse than that-there just wasn’t enough for his brain to chew on.

      If I hadn’t heard from Napier Briggs by the close of business I was going to go round to the Hotel du Lac and try and necklock him into being a client, even a nonpaying client. Maybe we could do something on a commission basis for him like those ambulance-chasing lawyers do. Us, desperate? Forget it.

      I turned the light out to save on electricity and hobbled out on to the balcony to see if I could hook any other passing suckers who’d want help from a couple of strapped PIs working from a stripped-down cell in a dog-poo coloured apartment block at the epicentre of Cotonou’s pollution.

      I hobbled because I’d had gout. A bad bout of it, but I was coming out