The Big Killing Read Online Free PDF Page B

their own country with a bit of democracy. Now that the money had run out, the price of coffee and cocoa had dropped and the value of pineapples foundered, people had taken to thinking they could do no worse than have a crack at it themselves. The army had sensed a mood and had staged a rebellion and the air force had followed. In the confusion a lot of shops were emptied by people with no credit facilities but strong arms and big appetites.
    Order was re-established after a few pay rises were promised but not with the same respect for the law as before. Care had to be taken on the streets. There were a lot of fast young men who weren't above a little violence to get a handbag or a gold chain. People ran from their cars to the office and didn't bother to go out for a meal or try to see a film which might not make it to the last reel. Restaurants closed, businesses folded. Everybody stayed in and sweated by candlelight and drank very warm Beaujolais and thought about Geneva and other places of perfect order.
    I parked my car in the Novotel basement, picked up the hired Peugeot that blended in with all the other Peugeots that were the only cars in Ivory Coast unless you had a ministerial Mercedes or a bandit's BMW. I worked my way north up to the Banco National Park passing the
fanicos,
a bunch of immigrant workers who stood in thigh-deep water all day washing clothes by pounding them against rocks in the river, and headed west towards the coastal town of Grand Lahou. There were few cars out in the susurrating heat, which meant that I didn't have to eat someone else's dust, picking grit out of my eyes on the graded road.
    The drop point was in a pineapple plantation. Tracks had been cut through the fields for harvesting and one of these led down to a landing stage on the Ebrié lagoon, the body of water which stretched west from Abidjan about sixty miles. I decided to take Fat Paul's advice and check it out beforehand and then drink beer in Tiegba until time came for the drop at 8.30.
    I found a left turn with the orange arrow that George had told me about and took the dirt track between the acres of tilled grey earth with a foot-high pineapple every metre whichever way you looked. Three kilometres later the track dropped down steeply through thick vegetation to a large clearing of beaten and sun-baked earth from which a wooden jetty took off out into the lagoon.
    It was no cooler down by the water. There was no fresh breeze coming off it, just more humidity and insects. Out on the jetty, down between the warped and loosening slats of the walkway, the water had hardly the energy to slop around the wooden support struts. Through the haze I could just see the opposite bank of the lagoon. The sun, still high even though there was only another hour and a half's light in it, punished the scene and the sweat dripped off my eyebrows. I turned back and something flashed in the corner of my eye from high up in the vegetation on the bank. I ambled back towards the car, casting about like a retired colonel with no troops to inspect, and a fish came up for a fly, leaving concentric ripples. Another flash—high up to my right and I got a fix on it this time.
    Looking back from the jetty I could see another track dropped down at the far end of the clearing from where I'd parked. I stepped off the uncertain planking and picked up a stone and sent it on a blasé skim across the water. After a minute's fevered nonchalance I got back in the car and drove fast across the hard earth and up the other track. I broke through the vegetation and out on to the plateau of the pineapple plantation in time to see a whipped-up funnel of dust which hung well and long in the torpid air, making a screen of ash-grey voile through which the car, pulling away, was invisible.
    The terrain curved so that I couldn't see the main road to Abidjan and I had to drive a fast and dusty kilometre to find out that whoever had been watching me was in a large dark