Blood Is Dirt Read Free Page B

Where are you staying, Napier?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜That was close,’ said Bagado.
    â€˜We can still nail him.’
    â€˜You better be quick.’
    â€˜With all the competition out there, you mean?’
    â€˜I think he’s a dead man, or heading that way.’
    â€˜Really? He just looked a little scared to me.’
    â€˜Victim,’ said Bagado, shaking his head.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Is that why you asked him?’
    â€˜No. I thought I might go and hustle him some more this evening.’
    â€˜Even if he’s a dead man and he hasn’t got any money?’
    â€˜Nobody’s got less money than us, Bagado.’
    â€˜Do you want his croissant?’
    â€˜See what I mean?’

Chapter 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 neck-lock 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 the other end. Sympathy had been low on the ground—with lepers on the street it tended to be. I tried telling people it was the purine in anchovies and sardines rather than a weekly intake of a bottle of... what’s the point, you wouldn’t believe me anyway.
    I sniffed the air over Cotonou and caught the usual gagging mix of sea breath, rubbish, drains, grilled kebabs all wrapped in a heady concoction of diesel and two-stroke fumes. Yeah, the bicycles have gone and we’ve been overrun by a million mopeds. Marxism is finished.
    We had the Francophonie conference here at the end of last year and they stripped the place down, repainted it, repaired the roads and introduced mobile phones. In three months the Beninois became capitalists.
    The transition wasn’t completed without pain. The economy, in the jaws of the free market, was given a kick in the pants by the French who devalued the CFA franc by a hundred per cent to one hundred CFA to one French franc. The whimpering is still going on. Imports are hellishly expensive, trips to France are out, supporting kids in school in Europe is painful; on the other hand, exports are cheap. But who gives a damn about that if the wife can’t afford twelve metres of Dutch Wax African print to adorn her body? No one.
    I dragged myself back inside and called Heike—my English/ German girlfriend, the one who towed me out of the desert all those years ago, the one who works as a latterday saint for a German NGO * aid agency—to see if my priapic driver Moses’s blood-test results had come through. He’d been sick for a month and a half and my toe had been through hell on the brake pedal. Heike had persuaded him to go and see a doctor last week and it had been like a