A Darkening Stain by Robert Wilson Page B

little speech. And I realized that was what had happened to them. They had become incapable with love. They’d have had a better chance with heroin in their veins. They’d been destroyed.’
    He laughed to himself, a goose of a memory walking over him.
    â€˜Ah, Gifty, she wasn’t so fair. She would issue the warning lying naked in your bed, looking down at you kneeling between her legs with a hard-on so painful you could faint, her hands framing her open sex, pink and glistening like an open papaya. My God, it nearly destroyed me not to have had her.’
    â€˜Was this voodoo or what?’
    â€˜Gifty was deeply Christian,’ said Marnier, horrified. ‘This was no voodoo.’
    â€˜And she never fell in love with any of these guys herself.’
    â€˜At first, of course, but how can you love someone who has gone, who is not there, who is lost? There was nothing for her to love in these men.’
    â€˜Maybe she loved you, Jean-Luc. The only one who didn’t.’
    I’d hit the mark with that. Jean-Luc was going to flatter me with some more guff about ‘understanding Africa’ or ‘having the eye’, but he thought better of it and the steaks arrived. He jammed the knife into the corner of his two-fingered right hand and set to it.
    â€˜What happened to Gifty?’
    â€˜She died,’ he said, mincing the steak up in his jaws, his open-plan eating style revolting and transfixing in one. ‘She was murdered, in fact, by a Greek who ran a haulage business in Zaire. He stabbed her fifty-two times in the chest. A very jealous type. They still don’t use the hotel room where it happened.’
    â€˜And the Greek? Is he rotting in a Lomé jail?’
    â€˜No, no, no. He got out. Paid his money. But if it’s justice you’re interested in you might like to know that he had a fall on one of those transport boats on the Zaire river. He was crushed from the waist downwards by two barges lashed together. It took him three weeks to die.’
    A mountain of
frites
arrived and Marnier had Adèle spoon a load on to his blood-flooded plate. I liked this girl more. She wasn’t disturbed by Marnier, his face was his business, she dealt with him like anyone else. Jean-Luc concentrated on his food, only pausing to throw a glass of red into the mix. I had a feeling I knew who’d given the Greek a shove in the back on the Zaire river.
    Marnier insisted on finishing the meal with a
crème brûlée
apiece and strong black coffee, which Jean-Luc sent back twice until it was tarry enough for his taste. His fingers twitched, wanting a smoke, but he didn’t light up. A small boy appeared on his shoulder and murmured something in his ear. He stroked the boy’s head and gave him a couple of coins. We paid up. Adèle said maybe next time. Marnier replied for the both of us.
    We drove away from the restaurant area past the hotel and took a right turn up a dirt track moving away from the sea. The grasses were high after the rains, and the mosquitoes large and aggressive. After a few hundred metres we turned right again into a narrow single-laned track which took us to a small clearing where there was a mud-walled house with a tin roof of
ondulé.
    I parked round the back. Jean-Luc’s African was back from Togo. He was waiting for us on the covered concrete stoop at the rear of the house, which was lit by a couple of hurricane lamps. We climbed up on to the stoop. There was a shovel by the back door and a polypropylene sack of what looked like tools.
    We went into the house, which had bare concrete floors and consisted of four rooms. The two bedrooms at the back each had a bed and one a broom leaning against a wall. One of the rooms at the front was empty and the other had a table, four rafia-seated wooden chairs and a split-cane lounger. Marnier lowered himself on to the lounger and seemed to go into a doze. I sat at the table.
    Our shadows