Chapter 3: A Hog Postcard
The Toucan Deal: A Trio
The three men wore no shirts underneath their dark waistcoats, and their chests seemed almost unnaturally big. Felix Magna made a point of not staring at their huge pectorals as he instructed them to rough up Senor Alvarez.
“But don’t hurt him too much,” he added, smiling.
Senor Alvarez, or Giuseppe to his friends, was the owner of Toucan Tobacco, one of the most profitable cigarette factories in Central America and, as such, the latest company that Felix Magna had set his sights on taking over.
In the beginning, Senor Alvarez hadn’t wanted to sell, but Felix could already the old man’s resistance cracking. And all he’d had to do so far was to blow up Senor Alvarez’s Mercedes-Benz. Actually, the three men with big chests had blown it up, but Felix, as always, took, the credit for the malevolence he’d set in motion.
It was the first time Felix had used the trio, and the job had gone off more smoothly than he could have anticipated. He wasn’t sure that his own men could have done it better. He hadn’t seen the wreckage himself, but he’d heard the blast from his hotel in downtown Tegucigalpa, and he’d listened to the bombers describe the carnage afterward.
“There’s a bonus in it for you,” he shouted after the shirtless threesome as they sped off on their motorbikes in search of the to-be-roughed-up Senor Alvarez. Before getting into his limousine, where his bodyguards were waiting for him, Felix paused for a few moments, basking in the knowledge that he would soon be the owner of Toucan. Then he shouted into the air, “Beat that if you can, Jocelyn!”
* * *
Hôtel le Noix
Sweat from his hand seeping into the copy of Hercule Perpignon’s diary, Upton stepped off the plane and entered the hot night air of La Cité. It felt the same as The Capital – a humid African city on the Gulf of Guinea – but he knew it was different. It had to be. It was French, and it was the home of the mysterious woman called Ella Bazaar, and it was where Hercules had begun his journey in Africa.
As soon as his taxi crossed the causeway to the city center, Upton saw a sign for Vridi, the canal he’d read about in the diary. He was going to tell the driver to turn off, but the man did anyway. And before Upton could even ask about a hotel, the car stopped in front of a rather faded, two-story building with a neon palm tree and a sign that, if all the lights had worked, would have read Hôtel le Noix.
“Just like the café in the book,” Upton said to the driver, who smiled at him blankly.
The man behind the reception desk had the biggest smile Upton had ever seen. “Bonjour,” he began. “My name is Omar Touré, descendant of the famous warrior Samory Touré.” He paused, then looked behind Upton expectantly. “Room for … one?” It sounded like a question he didn’t ask very often.
Upton nodded, thinking that maybe the Noix, like Prang Hotel, lacked clientele. The similarity made him immediately feel at home.
“For the … night?” Omar Touré asked.
“Well, of course,” Upton declared, adding, “What kind of place is this anyhow?”
Upton got his answer only after he reached his room and heard two couples in quick succession use the room adjacent to his. When a third couple took up their positions before the hour was up, he put on his clothes and went down to a bar called Les Palms and ordered a Mamba beer from Omar Touré.
Carefully resting his notepad on the fake palm-trunk table in front of him, Upton began writing a few lines that had been knocking around in his head ever since he’d gotten off the airplane and had smelt chocolate on the humid night air. The coincidence bode well. He’d hardly arrived in La Cité and he had already discovered a new product.
Candy not Swiss but tropical, he composed. How’s that for topical?
Upton wrote a ditty for every item he believed might interest head office as a potential export. The product went in the front of what he called his Export Notepad, the ditties in the back. Initially, he’d written the rhymes to serve as a kind of commercial hors d’oeuvres. He couldn’t just send off a note saying, ‘How about lacquer sandals?’ or ‘Any interest in traditional wood beds?’ He had to work up Magna Exchange’s appetite. And while none of the exports had worked so far, he’d developed a real taste for these compositions. He’d even mentioned the possibility of a writing career to Solomon Magna, although his father hadn’t taken the suggestion well. Upton could still remember his exact words: “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
No one entered Les Palms while Upton paged through his Export Notepad, reading old verses and touching up a word here and there. After several Mambas, he was exhausted enough to sleep through any activity in the room next-door to his. As he got ready to leave the bar, three large men came into the bar looking windblown and worn out, as if they’d just completed a very long journey by motorbike. Upton didn’t pay much attention to the men, except to notice that they wore big mustaches and carried rifles.
“Hunters,” he thought, “just like Hercules.”
He was sure that the trio’s arrival had to be a good omen.
* * *
The Tiger Deal: Six Days
Solomon Magna was agitated, which you could tell from the way he was drumming his stubby fingers on the cherry wood desk.
“You know why I really sent him to Africa?”
Goodleigh knew why, but he waited to hear Solomon Magna tell him all over again. That’s what the man wanted.
“Because he’s useless. He’s too fucking sensitive. Just like his mother, damn bitch.”
The memory of his second wife, Melanie, always brought a sour taste to Solomon Magna’s mouth, even though she was dead. It also sent a cold shiver down his spine, as if he was revisiting the place where she had died in what had come to be widely known as “a terrible skiing accident.”
Solomon Magna knew better. He also knew that if it hadn’t happened, she would have divorced him and taken away half of his company. Instead, Solomon Magna got to keep everything, including, he was sorry to say, Upton.
The stubby-fingered man raised his voice. “The one place I can be sure that he won’t be able to embarrass me is in Africa.”
“Yes, sir,” Goodleigh replied, not really listening but thinking instead about his own mother. In the same way memories of Melanie brought the worst out in Solomon Magna, memories of Ethel Goodleigh did exactly the opposite to her son.
Ethel had worked hard to put him through university, doing night duty in a hospital ever since his father had died – and that was something Goodleigh would never forget.
“In twelve months, what has he sent me?” the Chairman carried on. “Carvings I don’t want, masks that have ‘Made in Taiwan’ stickers stuck on them. And that’s the good stuff.”
Solomon Magna drummed his fingers some more, then reached for a half-chomped cigar.
“So how long do we have?”
“Six days,” Goodleigh answered, his mother now a memory. A memory with a very bright halo. A memory he would be talking to very shortly.
* * *
A Malian’s Secret
She snored heavily, and Upton watched her. It was two in the morning and he wanted her to leave, but he couldn’t risk waking her up. Who knew what her reaction would be? Every time he was on the verge of rousing her, he thought about Thursday, the slaughtered chicken, and the decapitated woman on the front page of The Guinea Times, and then he’d decide that it would be safer to listen to the woman gurgle for the rest of the night.
On arriving at his door earlier, she announced that Omar Touré had sent her. Upton had told Omar that he was looking for a woman, so here she was.
“No,” Upton replied, “I told him the woman I’m looking for works with animals. And she could possibly be French.”
“I am French,” the black woman replied indignantly. “I am from Mali. You like me?”
She was quite attractive, Upton had to admit, with breasts that were like Pretty Thing’s. Without undressing him, she started playing with herself on the bed, and Upton soon found himself quite excited. Then he thought of Solomon Magna’s words, The mouth, boy. Use the mouth, and immediately he wanted her to leave.
Not long after that she’d fallen asleep. Lying with her legs wide open, it was almost as if she was inviting Upton to look at her cunt, which, he couldn’t help notice, had been cut in the same way Gracie the Nigerian’s had. The thought of a woman having her genitals cut out always made Upton feel sick, although Bigelow had tried to put the whole thing in perspective for him.
“Snow big deal,” he’d said. “Sides, you don’t use their cunts anyway, wot.”
Now that he had the chance, Upton moved in closer to the wound. The dark skin around the Malian’s vagina had been shaved and there was a scar running along the left rim. The skin was rough, bumpy and inhuman, almost elephantlike. He was tempted to touch it, but the woman suddenly gave a loud snore, kicked out a leg that cuffed him in the shoulder, and then rolled over onto her stomach. Upton, holding his shoulder, kept his distance for the rest of the night.
When the Malian left the next morning, Upton fell back into bed, hoping to get the sleep he hadn’t had because of her loud breathing. Just as he was dozing off, though, he heard a sharp knock at the door. He opened it and was surprised to see the woman had returned.
“Oh, please,” Upton said, scared she might come in again. “You’ve already done enough.”
The woman held a postcard in her hand.
“It was on your door, cherie,” she said, then left.
The postcard was of an animal Upton didn’t recognize but which was described on the opposite side as a hylochoerus meinertzhageni, or, in English, a giant forest hog. Underneath was written, Meet me at the Motel du Soleil at midday.
Suddenly wide awake, Upton was thinking of how at last he’d discover more about the mysterious woman from Prang Hotel. He read aloud the signature at the bottom of the card, a name that was starting to roll off of his tongue like good poetry.
Ella Bazaar.
* * *
The Bureau for Exports
Upton saw a wicker settee, then he composed a rhyme: Comfortable and sane/Amidst African cane. A moment later, for some whiskey-bottled peanuts, he scribbled down in his Export Notepad, Snacks in glass/My, what class.
Driving along the Corniche Giscard d’Estaing, he passed mile after mile of stalls set up on the roadside to sell merchandise, or, rather, what he thought of as Potential Exports. They were just like the stalls around Tetteh Ouarshie Circle in The Capital, only more chaotic, more French. He kept peering at them so intently that at times he almost veered off the road. The sight of all the goods reminded him of the other reason, besides tracking down Ella Bazaar and Mister Sulahman’s pet, why he was in La Cité – to find a product that Magna Exchange would approve of. If he didn’t, it would be Aden for him.
When Upton first arrived in Africa, he’d tried not exporting goods but importing them. That had lasted a very short time, however, or at least until what had since become known as The Perfume Affair.
Jocelyn had sent him a shipment marked AID FROM THE U.N. but which was, in fact, phony eau de cologne from Manila. She’d also warned him that the scent had a shelf life of sixty days before turning into something that smelt like diseased horse piss.
No sooner had the cargo arrived in The Capital when someone in The Office of Imports demanded that Upton either deliver documents both of them knew didn’t exist or buy him a secondhand Toyota. The official was wearing the standard uniform – brown shirt, brown pants, official stripes of some sort, and that single article of clothing Upton would soon come to hate most of all, sunglasses.
Unused to the ways of The Capital, Upton stood firm. He had a strong hunch that the official would give in. Bigelow had told him that there was a shipload of Korean tractors waiting in the harbor that very same week. And with agricultural vehicles offering more lucrative pickings than perfume, Upton counted on The Office needing every inch of quayside space it could get. Upton was sure that if he held out, the perfume would be cleared.
He couldn’t have been more wrong. The bottles of scent remained untouched – except for one crate that was smashed when three tons of machinery from Seoul fell on top of it, the contents gradually transforming into rancid urine. Magna Exchange deducted the loss from Upton’s salary, although Jocelyn still got her commission and the customs official got his Toyota from a more cooperative trader from Lebanon. The next time Upton saw him, he was wearing a pair of gold-rimmed Guccis.
“It’s your face,” Jocelyn sneered at Upton when he called her about The Perfume Affair. “You’re too pious-looking.”
Whenever Upton asked Bigelow what he thought about Jocelyn’s assessment, the older man laughed.
“Snot your face,” he said. “Iss their sex.”
The men in The Office, Bigelow explained – and there only seemed to be male employees whenever Upton went there – were always balancing their horniness and their incomes.
“I spect one’s too big,” he concluded, “while the other stew small.”
A bribe’s size, therefore, bore a close relationship to the day of the week it was. The closer it got to the weekend, when all the men in The Office would be competing for girlfriends, the more severe the extortion would be.
“Foove got stuff cummin inta port or ta Gran Innapenance,” Bigelow added, “jus spray snot Friday.”
Bigelow then helped himself to a bottle from a case of whiskey Upton was going to use at The Office later that day.
“What’s the option then?” Upton asked.
“Essports. Snow question bouddit …”
Bigelow couldn’t get the cap off the bottle, so Upton helped him.
“Really?”
“Course. Everyone stryinga bring stuff inna country. Radjos, cars, cement, guns. Slike the colonial days backwards. But essports…” He sipped his drink and savored the taste for a few moments. “Seasier, wot. Fact, I can’t member when someone inna Bureau lass asked for summin more spensive than a paira Levis.”
‘The Bureau’ was what they all called The Bureau for Exports.
“Havven you ever noticed?”
“What?” Upton asked.
“Snow one inna Bureau ever wears sunglasses.”
The lack of eyewear was reason enough for Upton to prefer The Bureau to The Office, although there was one problem that did remain, and it wasn’t insignificant – actually finding something to export. Magna Exchange got rubber from Indonesia, cacao and coffee from South America, and everything else from Taiwan and China. Anything Upton suggested, they seemed to already have or not want. Which was why, for several months now, Solomon Magna had been hanging the threat of a transfer to an undesirable Middle Eastern branch office over Upton’s head.
“Find me something decent,” the Chairman said, his tone becoming reverential. “Something Magnaficent. Something … Magnafrican. Or it’s Aden, my boy.”
Upton had searched The Capital for a decent export, but he’d come up emptyhanded. What he’d found in La Cité so far – chocolate, cane furniture, peanuts in a whiskey bottle – they were all good, but deep down Upton knew that they were neither Magnaficent nor Magnafrican.
Instinctively, Upton cast a quick glance at the old vellum-covered book lying on the passenger seat next to him, the diary from Prang Hotel. Perhaps that might lead him to something the Chairman would want, an item they’d traded fifty years ago but which people had forgotten about. Hercules had mentioned a huge cache of ivory sunken somewhere in Palm Deux. Ivory wasn’t a new product for Magna Exchange, but Solomon Magna was always on the lookout for more. At least he wouldn’t turn it down.
Not that Upton was crazy about the idea of selling ivory – it was something Dee from A.P.E. never would have approved of – but he rationalized it this way: the animals on Palm Deux had been dead for a long time. That made it a little easier to do. And he knew it would keep the Chairman off his back for a while. So whenever Upton read anything in the diary about the hiding place of the elephant tusks, he made a point of taking out his pencil and circling it.
* * *
A Second Trio
The three men driving the Quatre L station wagon on the coastal road out of La Cité no longer wore their mustaches. They passed the turnoff to the Motel du Soleil, looked back at it, then turned to each other quizzically. A half hour later, when the car ahead of them made a U-turn, they did likewise.
“Doesn’t look like his brother,” the first one said.
“Doesn’t look like his father,” the second one added.
The third one, the cleverest, paused before he spoke.
“Doesn’t look like he knows where he’s going, either.”
* * *
A Curious Event at the Beach
Upton missed the Motel du Soleil turnoff because he’d spied a stall selling lampshades made of coconut grass. He’d taken his eyes off the road for a few seconds to write in his Export Notepad.
Need a light?/Try a nut by night.
After he had turned around and found the side road and swerved onto it, he drove through row upon row of palms, bumping over what seemed like several decades’ worth of coconut shells. At the end of the road he pulled up at a gate, on the other side of which stood a large guard in sunglasses. Upton checked his wallet to see how much money he had for bribes, but as he got closer he saw that the man posed little threat.
By now Upton was such an expert on sunglasses, and, more importantly, on which brands posed a bigger threat – say a pair of sleek, anatomically designed Michel Kleins with an ultralight frame versus a pair of anti-scratch Aviatrixes with self-adjusting nose pads and ear stems – he knew the gate guard would be a pushover. His shades were cheap Made in China imitations.
No sooner had Upton walked through the gate than he stopped in his tracks and squinted at something ahead of him. Between the palms, ever so briefly, he spied a woman wearing a nice smile – and nothing else. He couldn’t believe it. She was naked! And then he saw the sign that explained what was going on. The Motel du Soleil was a nudist resort.
Upton walked forward slowly, finally reaching what looked like the front office, a shack made of reeds that was so flimsy, it could have been erected in an hour or two. In one corner was a lone table, on top of which lay an old copy of Le Monde Nu.
“Is Ella Bazaar here?” he asked, suddenly anxious at the thought of going into the resort.
A flat-chested girl behind the counter told him that he would have to take off his clothes to find out, then pointed to a doorway with a sign above it marked Hommes. After getting undressed, he came out, holding his Export Notepad above his head to provide some shade, the diary in front of his crotch.
As he looked for a place to sit down, he hardly noticed the people around him. Only after he’d fallen gratefully into an empty deckchair, the diary still covering his groin, did he dare to look around.
Nearby him stood a big black man who, besides guarding the little patch of beach in front of the resort, was staring at Upton threateningly. Otherwise there were perhaps a dozen people, most of them women, all lying on their stomachs and so totally motionless that they could have been plastic mannequins tossed on the beach as props.
The only woman Upton could see the front of was very pretty and young, and she was hanging onto an Arab who from a distance looked just like someone he’d once seen at Prang Hotel. But it was hard to tell with his clothes gone. Besides the Arab there were only three other men, who sat together in a far corner wearing sombreros that shaded their faces. Upton envied their big chests.
“Hello,” a voice said behind Upton, and he started. When he turned around, he saw a woman who’d been wearing a tight T-shirt the first time they’d met at Prang. But now she wasn’t. She had breasts that looked almost as nice in clothes as out of them, and there was hardly any hair between her legs. Upton couldn’t help noticing this because her crotch was at the same level as his nose. He didn’t know what to say.
“Uh … Ella Bazaar?”
“I’m glad you could come,” she said.
The sight of her naked excited him and yet made him shift uncomfortably in his deckchair. For some inexplicable reason, he wanted to give her something to cover herself with.
“I thought Prang would be the last time I saw you,” he said.
“Yet here we are.”
Upton tried to concentrate.
“What’s this all about, anyway?” he asked. “All this mystery. And you rushing away from Prang. And Mister Sulahman’s …”
She interrupted him.
“Later,” she said. “You swim?”
Ella Bazaar turned her very tight bottom on Upton and walked down the beach toward the water. He hesitated only a moment before he put the two books, the Export Notepad and the diary, under his deckchair and ran toward the sea. Only when he’d caught up with her did he realize what he’d unmasked by removing the diary from his groin.
Covering up the hardness with his hands, he quickly dashed into the water, forgetting that what the Gulf of Guinea lacks in action above the surface, it more than compensates for below. In no time at all, Upton was sucked under the surface.
His first thought as he was being tossed around, strangely enough, was about Hercules’s diary. He thought of the native workers who had been sucked into the canal and minced up underwater by Cachet’s machines. Would he end up the same way? He then thought about Hercules himself. Until that moment, Upton had believed that they were very similar, in age, in the way they’d come to Africa to work for some greater ideal, Hercules to clear up a plantation, Upton to find exports. But now, as he swallowed mouthful after mouthful of salty brown water, he saw how wrong he was. The Frenchman had been successful – hunting, planting trees, building canals, doing manly things – and Upton hadn’t. He couldn’t even find a simple export for Magna Exchange before drowning in the Gulf of Guinea. So much for discovering something worthy to be Magnafrican. So much for being Magnaficent.
Suddenly something grabbed Upton. He thought it might be a shark, but it was too toothless, too smooth. Strong but smooth. It went around his neck like a big snake, pushing his head to the surface so that he could breathe. He felt a body, a naked body, under him, the person’s legs kicking evenly and firmly, like a lifesaver’s. The voice was reassuring. It could have been Dee. Or was it his mother?
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m here.”
Two things happened in quick succession after that. Upton once again felt himself growing hard, and then he passed out.
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