Chapter 2: Chicken Voodoo
The Tiger Deal: The Set-Up
The communiqués between Magna Exchange’s head office in London and Tiger Enterprises in Hong Kong had been growing frantic in the last few weeks. Jocelyn and Felix had been kept up-to-date about developments, seeing they were both involved in the deal. The only person in the Magna inner circle who knew absolutely nothing about Tiger Enterprises was the third Magna child, Upton.
What Upton didn’t know was this: That Solomon Magna’s accountants, through some truly ingenious paperwork, had concocted a scheme whereby Magna Exchange would be taken over by Tiger Enterprises, a company which had substantial mining interests around the world, but made most of its money off transporting toxic waste and dumping it in Third World countries.
“Let me get this right,” Solomon Magna put it to Goodleigh. “We disperse our funds beforehand, get bought by Tiger, then lie low for several weeks before we buy ourselves and Hong Kong back under another name.”
He knew this was the plan, more or less, but liked asking his hunchbacked aide anyway.
“Is that it?”
Goodleigh nodded and then placed a pile of papers in front of Solomon Magna, who instinctively turned to the portrait of his fake ancestor.
“Grandfather Mortimer would be so proud of me.”
* * *
Bigelow Talks Funny
“What did you say?” Upton hollered into the telephone.
He’d been waiting for two hours already, the first hour for a connection from Prang to The Capital, the second hour for Bigelow to respond to his earlier request. Upton had asked his friend from the Shall We Go? Club to visit Little Victoriabourg on the pretext of picking up a case of whiskey for The Office of Imports. While Bigelow was there, more importantly, he could check if Thursday had followed his instructions and left the house.
“Tell you, sawful” Bigelow slurred. Upton gathered that his friend had either opened one of the bottles meant for The Office or had opened his own before going to Little Victoriabourg.
“Shack’s been built inna middlov ya frange-i-pange-i, wot. Four women, Thursdee, that biggun …”
“Mama Troy?”
“Thassit. Mohammed Troy. Two morovem. Damnedest thing, wot. A chicken, rye there.”
“What chicken?” Upton interrupted him. “Where?”
“Onna lawn, rye tin fronnov me. Hatta have a smallun, wot.”
Upton heard glass knocking the telephone receiver on the other end.
“Mohammed …”
“Mama Troy,” Upton corrected him.
“Thassit. Muammar Troy helda boddeen one hand, head innee other, and Thursdee … well, she jest hackta thingin two, wot.”
“I don’t believe it,” Upton said. Hacking a chicken in half? Thursday was full of more surprises than he’d bargained for. And to think she’d shared the house with him!
“Savage, man. Minds me of my ex-wife.” Bigelow said, then swallowed a mouthful of liquid. “Mmmm. Blood all overalawn, I tell ya.”
Upton cringed. He didn’t know how he could return to The Capital under the circumstances, what with Thursday on the rampage. Besides that, he felt responsible for it all, seeing he was the one who’d asked her to move out in the first place.
“What should I do?” he asked helplessly.
Bigelow didn’t waste a moment before answering.
“Come stay with me,” he said, all of a sudden sounding much more sober than he had in all the time Upton had known him, as if he had been waiting to be asked his advice. Then, just as quickly, he was slurring his words again. “We’ll workiddout. We’ll mekka plan, wot.”
* * *
The Iguana Deal: The Warm-Up
Jocelyn Magna touched up her lipstick and made sure her sarong was loose enough to fall off at the right moment after the waiter came through the hotel room door. The Iguana deal was so close, she could almost taste it. And whenever there was a good business deal about to take place, she felt like celebrating.
“Let’s see Felix outdo this one,” she said to the stocky woman with streaked platinum-blonde hair staring back at her in the mirror.
There was a knock at the door. As she walked across the room to answer it, she suddenly thought of something else and smiled. If Iguana turned out to be as big as she anticipated, she’d need at least two waiters to celebrate afterward. Maybe even three.
* * *
Thursday and Voodoo
On his way from Prang to the Shall We Go? Club to meet Bigelow, Upton split a tire on a pothole. He was also stopped at four roadblocks, all of them patrolled by uniformed men, something that usually would have bothered him. But he was so preoccupied with thinking about Thursday killing a chicken on his lawn that he didn’t even notice whether they were manned by soldiers, police, or civilians out to make a quick buck. He forked over two cartons of Benson & Hedges and twelve dollars in bribes without even blinking.
One thing Upton didn’t fail to notice, though, was that everyone was wearing sunglasses, which they kept on at all times, even after the sun had set. He counted one pair of Ray-Bans, two Salvatores with polarized lenses, one nylon pair with polycarbonate lenses whose label he couldn’t make out, and a purple pair by Adidas. The Ray-Bans had him worried for a moment, but fortunately their owner stayed in the background while his men did the bribing.
When Upton finally reached the Shall We Go? Club, Bigelow was sitting in a corner of the bar with Mavis, a pudgy black woman who was young enough to be his daughter and whom Upton had seen around before. She was wearing a miniskirt and clutching Bigelow’s sunburnt neck. The white man pecked Mavis’s cheek like he might a schoolgirl’s, then playfully shoved her away.
“Gemme a drink, sweety,” he said.
Once she’d sidled off to the bar, Bigelow told Upton that he didn’t have any good news to report. Thursday was still entrenched in Little Victoriabourg and it didn’t look as if she was about to give up her voodoo-chicken-slaughtering and her frangipani-desecrating anytime soon. Upton was going to have to stay at his house for a few days until they cleared things up.
Upton sat quietly with this news for a few moments. He could call the police, but what was he going to say? “Someone’s slaughtering a chicken in my yard”? That was hardly a crime in Africa. Bribing the police was also a possibility, but that would take a long time, especially seeing he hadn’t developed the same relationship with the police as he had with The Bureau for Exports.
Upton didn’t know why, but he started talking about the diary. Even though he was preoccupied with the news of Thursday, he hadn’t forgotten other events of the past twenty-four hours, namely the meeting with Ella Bazaar, the theft of the mystery animal, the diary she’d left behind. First thing he told Bigelow about was the diary.
“It’s about this guy Hercules, see.” Upton began, mispronouncing the name Hercule. He next told his friend about the canal being built and the elephants being shot and how it all sounded more like the Africa he’d expected than the one he now found himself in, beset by a chicken-slaying woman. Bigelow smiled vaguely every now and then, obviously more interested in finding out what was keeping Mavis. Upton was sure that Bigelow would appreciate the bit of information he’d kept until the end.
“But you know what else?” he said. Bigelow had finally got Mavis’s attention and was waving to her. “The woman I got the diary from – or, more correctly, who Mister Sulahman got it from – she had an animal with her.”
Bigelow looked back at him and raised an eyebrow. He was totally lost, so Upton repeated himself.
“Don’t you see? There was an animal with her.”
“Onna leash, wot?” Bigelow asked.
“No. In a bag.”
Bigelow scratched his head.
“Animal inna bag? Dizzent sound very good ta me.”
“No, it’s not what you think,” Upton replied excitedly. “It was in a cage before that. She put it in the bag. She was saving it.”
“Ya sure?” Bigelow asked skeptically.
Upton nodded, an unusually big grin on his face for someone whose house had so recently been taken over by a woman he hardly knew. He kept grinning until, at last, a light came into Bigelow’s drooping eyes and he grinned too.
“Oh, I see wot’s goin’ on. Young Upton’s fallin’ in love.”
* * *
The Wonderful Women from A.P.E.
It was one of the first things about himself that Upton had told Bigelow after they first met at the Shall We Go? Club.
“I like women who like animals,” he said.
Bigelow mumbled something noncommittal, seeing he didn’t mind what his women liked, so long as they were fat, like Mavis.
“Wusso special bout ammal wimmen?” he said, licking his lips. He’d just finished off a new drink that the bar was testing, the first batch of which, if Bigelow’s reaction was anything to go by, contained too much palm wine.
“Animal woman are different,” Upton continued, as if it was something he’d thought about this long and hard.
In fact Upton wasn’t sure when he’d come to his conclusion, or why. He sometimes thought that it might have had something to do with his mother, even though she had died more than two decades ago. She would sit on his bed at nighttime, telling him wonderful stories about adventure in far-off places, places they would go to together one day, Pépé the Labrador lying on the floor beside them. She would scratch Upton’s head while she talked, nape of his neck to forehead, and then she would scratch Pépé’s.
After his mother’s death, Upton had clung to Pépé for hours on end, seeing the dog was the closest thing to her he had left. The Chairman didn’t take kindly to this, however, and had Pépé put to sleep, after which he never let another animal in the house – unless, that is, it was one he could make a profit from, like the parrots in the basement.
As it happened, one of the first jobs Upton was assigned after starting to work at Magna Exchange was to go to the offices of Animals in Perpetual Endangerment. The Chairman wanted him to spy on A.P.E.’s members and find out how they were planning to sabotage the fur market, in which he had a substantial investment. Instead of spying, however, Upton preferred to sit in the foyer and pore over the organization’s brochure stand, contemplating not so much the battered seal pups in the pamphlets as the women from A.P.E. passing by.
The women were usually too busy to talk to him, although he’d once had a long phone conversation with an A.P.E. official calling to remind him of a monetary pledge he’d promised to make. Upton hadn’t paid enough attention to the brochures in A.P.E.’s offices, so he wasn’t sure what the organization did exactly and he didn’t know the difference between an animal that was endangered and one that was just dangerous.
“I’m most concerned about the plight of the thermador dragon,” he tried.
“That’s Komodor,” she corrected him, then, her foot in the door so to speak, went on at length about how tiger eyeballs and rhino horns were being used in the most hideous ways in Asia. Upton groaned at the mention of animal eyeballs and testicles, not only because he dreaded the speech the A.P.E. official was going to give him, but also because he had terrible memories of being forced to use the aphrodisiacs himself.
On a visit to Jocelyn in Manila, his older half-sister had made him inhale shredded Siberian bear testicles and rub himself with a cream made from the semen of a rare antelope called a kabarga. They didn’t do anything for him, and Jocelyn made sure to inform Solomon Magna that the cream, instead of making Upton horny, had given him a bad skin rash.
“Christ!” Solomon Magna replied. “He must be someone else’s child. It never would’ve failed on a real Magna.”
Upton didn’t tell the A.P.E. representative about Manila, although he did try to get her phone number before she hung up on him. Several weeks later, when Upton was losing hope he’d meet anyone at A.P.E., he came across Dee the zoo cage cleaner in the coffee shop. Seeing she looked all shook up, he asked her what was wrong. A good friend of hers who worked in the artificial insemination unit had, it appeared, gone to work that morning on a routine collection of elephant sperm, but had been knocked cold by an out-of-control pachyderm penis. He was in a stable condition in hospital, and she had just come back from seeing him. They talked until it was closing time, and Upton and Dee started dating the very next day.
No sooner had Upton started liking Dee, however, than she got an offer to work on a documentary film about swimming with killer whales. Nothing could stop her from leaving him. “It’s my dream,” she told Upton. “This is something I have to do.” For months afterward he moped around A.P.E.’s offices, hoping to meet someone new, but all he came away with was a pile of pamphlets he never read.
So when Upton was informed that he had been chosen to open Magna Exchange’s brand-new office in Africa, he was overjoyed. If there were animals anywhere, they would be in Africa. And if there were animals, there would be plenty of women like Dee. Africa would be like one giant branch of A.P.E.
He’d hardly arrived in The Capital and organized an office above Beauty 69 & Salon beauty salon before he went on his first safari. On that expedition and several others, he saw a reasonable number of roan, jackals and a cat or two, but he met not one animal woman.
Back in The Capital, meanwhile, there were lots of beautiful women who would be nice to Upton if he paid them enough, but they had nothing to do with animals, and they didn’t remind him of Dee or the women at A.P.E.
There was something else that made finding a woman even more difficult, and he admitted what it was to Bigelow one night after he’d drunk too much. Just as he was getting excited about finding animal women in Africa, Solomon Magna gave him a final warning before he said his goodbyes at head office.
“The mouth’s the key, boy,” he said. “They don’t call it the dark continent for nothing. You can never be too safe. Don’t even think of doing it the normal way. The best is the mouth. Use the mouth.”
Pretty Thing had been quite willing to let Upton use her mouth, and so had Gracie the Nigerian, but Upton just couldn’t. The mere thought of it made him grow soft, but that could also have been because using the mouth had been the Chairman’s suggestion. Upton meanwhile looked around the Volta Yacht & Verandah for the kind of girl who didn’t frequent the Shall We Go? Club, but they were all married, bloated by the humid weather, or both. He kept on wishing Dee was here. After a year, he was losing faith that he would ever come across someone like her. But now all that had changed. He had met Ella Bazaar.
* * *
Solomon Magna Relaxes with Beagles
The beagles were barking at an insanely high pitch when Solomon Magna drew up on his horse. Riding at the head of a posse in red coats and funny black hats were him and a man from Uruguay. For Solomon Magna their banter was foreplay before the business deal.
The South American, by way of a translator, was telling the Chairman of Magna Exchange that hunting jaguar was more to his liking than fox.
“Tell him I have shot my share of animals too,” Solomon Magna advised the translator, a buxom young woman whose backside he kept patting and whom he was confident he’d bed by sunset.
The woman said a few words to the South American. Solomon Magna continued.
“But business keeps me here now. Can’t get away as much as I used to. That’s why I am limited to this.”
The woman said several more words in Spanish, although Solomon Magna was sure they were what he’d told her to say. He sniffed disdainfully, suggesting he could do better than fox if he wanted to, then dug his heels into his horse’s flanks.
“Now let’s kill some of these bloody rodents. Hi-ho!”
* * *
Upton’s Not Very Original Idea
Upton knew he shouldn’t have had any of the palm wine Bigelow had given him. He was sure that’s what had brought on his headache. A sense of gloom settled over him, and he suddenly forgot the wonderful things that he’d been telling Bigelow about. Prang. Ella Bazaar. Animal women. All he could think of now was Thursday and what she might be getting up to in his garden and house at Little Victoriabourg.
“This couldn’t have come at a worse time,” he groaned, thinking of London’s demands on him.
Bigelow didn’t answer immediately.
“Sa new produck ya lookin’ for, right?”
“Head office hasn’t liked any of Mister Sulahman’s stuff,” Upton said, shaking his head. “I need to come up with something soon. If I don’t, you know what’ll happen.”
“Sa Yemen for you.”
Upton wondered if the desert in the Middle East could be any worse than the humid Gulf of Guinea.
“Mebbe it’s time you started looking somewhere else besides The Capital and Prang,” Bigelow suggested. He sounded more coherent than usual, but Upton was sure that could also be because, having drunk too much himself, his hearing was playing tricks on him. “Get way for a while. Sposed to be a new resort in Kinshasha.”
“Kinshasa’s too far,” Upton said miserably. “Besides, I can’t leave my secretary alone in the office.”
Bigelow thought for a moment, then smiled broadly.
“Well, how’s about La Cité then?” he said. “Spect you might even buy somethin’ French there. French produck”
Upton considered what Bigelow had said. La Cité was certainly a possibility, he had to admit. It was another city, in another country – one where they spoke another language and which had different markets – but it was barely a hundred miles away from The Capital. If he needed to return in a hurry, he could. As soon as the incident with Thursday blew over, he’d fly back.
“What about my office?”
“I’ll teck care of it, wot,” Bigelow said, gratefully accepting a full tumbler from a waiter. The glass was attached to his lips in no time. He gulped and then turned to Upton. “I’ll cover for ya. Down chew worry.”
Upton considered the offer.
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Coarse I am.”
“If head office doesn’t like lacquer sandals, then maybe I can find them the French-African equivalent. That’s what they might like. Something French.”
“Jess so,” the older man said. Then he added, “Spect you could look for this animal woman too.”
For a moment, Upton was confused. Concerned with his own situation at work and at Little Victoriabourg, he’d momentarily forgotten that the animal thief, Ella Bazaar, had given her address in the Prang Hotel regiester as La Cité. Suddenly Upton’s mind was racing ahead, the alcohol quickly wearing off.
“And if I found her, then maybe I could track down the carpy.”
“The wot?” Bigelow asked.
“I’m not exactly sure what that is, but it’s Mister Sulahman’s pet.”
“Zactly.”
* * *
Bigelow Talks Straight
Bigelow waited for Upton to leave the Shall We Go? Club before he called Mavis over. She didn’t cuddle the Englishman the way she did when Upton was around, but sat at the edge of the couch rather primly.
“Well,” she said, “it looks as if he’s taken the bait.”
Bigelow nodded, but he couldn’t help feeling apprehensive. It was the same apprehension he’d felt a month after his first meeting with Upton. That’s when he’d put in his first report to London.
“There’s not much that I can tell you so far,” he told his boss. “He’s a solitary kind of guy. He seems to be petrified of his father and he hates people wearing sunglasses. Pretty ordinary for Africa, I’d say.”
* * *
At Grand Independence
Without returning to Little Victoriabourg, Upton bought a spare set of clothes from Singh’s on Tetteh Ouarshie Circle, left his car at Bigelow’s house, and then caught a taxi to Grand Independence International Airport. The only plane he could get to La Cité was a six-hour flight via Ouagadougou, but Upton didn’t mind the detour. Like Hercules in the diary going to La Cité to build a canal, he was set on a course. And nothing could turn him back.
