As usual, it was not enough for me. I needed far more and, under the circumstances, it seemed reasonable. “What’s he done for Christ’s sake?”
“No need to know, dear fellow. Just do your job. Check him out, just for the record so to speak. Ask the questions. Make sure you swat up on your artillery and pharmaceuticals. Impress him – though not too much, if you get my gist.
“You know, old chap, you’ve done this sort of thing before. But think Africa. Think jungle. Think the dire consequences of widespread mud hut terrorism. Think sweat and grime. Think Mau Mau. Think about the famine and mass starvation that might follow an unauthorised coup. Just think you’re doing your Queen and Country proud, old chap.”
“But the man’s well known – famous in fact.” I said with my usual utter naivety.
“Infamous old chap. Think infamous.”
“But what’s he done?” I repeated, knowing all too well what my persistence would do.
Donaldson finally lost his patience and I heard him say, “Ffffff,” beneath his breath as he turned away.
The humour was gone, replaced with his usual bristling anger and impatience. The rustling sound from inside his pockets increased but then stopped altogether and the hand emerged. He turned back, pointing to his nose and the voice became more intense. “Frank will get the job done, not you. You just line it all up, understood?”
“Exactly what job? What does Frank have to do? Does Frank know more than me?” I asked.
Donaldson’s impatience went up another grade. He stepped forward and leaned on the desk, his face just a foot away, spittle on his fat lips, his voice a hiss.
How I hated that bastard’s face. Even after all these years. I remember his red face and his lips glistening with spit.
“Frank knows where he is best off. He just does his job. You could learn a thing or two from Frank. There’s serious money at stake here………”
He stopped as if realising he’d just made a mistake. “……Not to say lives of course.”
I stood my ground, facing him, nose to nose and pushed him further, picking up on his mistake of mentioning money. “Money? What money? Does Frank get any for whatever it is he’ll do? Do I get any? Anyway, Frank is a friend of mine. He’s no friend of yours.”
Jack coughed and moved closer to the door but Donaldson stood up and walked around behind me and then back to the window. His black silhouette stood there for a moment and then he exploded.
It was as if something had finally burst inside the man. As if this particular case was giving him all sorts of private headaches. He tried his usual tack of suggesting it was orders from above.
“For fuck’s sake, man. If there was an option, we’d take it. The man’s a security risk. The FBI, SASF, the French, they’re all starting to take notes. He’s a fucking liability. He’s an international embarrassment. He’s been messing around in his dandy fashion with everyone from Gadaffi to Lumumba and from Ian Smith and Jomo Kenyatta to Nkomo.
“He’s a bloody fool but too close to you-know-who to get officially chopped. What’s more, we know he’s started taking money in the form of commissions. He seems to think it’s a perk. And he’s so bloody naïve he’s started spouting on about it rather too openly and doesn’t understand that if he’s not careful he’ll get it in the neck from someone sooner or later anyway.”
Donaldson went quieter for a second, breathing deeply, as though trying to summon some patience from somewhere and perhaps also thinking he’d said far too much already. With his back to me he stared down into the traffic jam below.
My own mind was still full of questions and what Donaldson had already said still wasn’t enough for me. The word assassination had not been used but it was perfectly clear to me that I was being asked to take a part in some sort of plot worthy of Guy Fawkes. What exactly was Frank being asked to do?
Did governments really keep departments to do jobs like this? Did actions like this involve other countries? America? France? Were things like this done with their tacit approval or was this a purely British problem? Why not just sack the man, I thought, or was a simple sacking impossible due to knock on effects elsewhere? I had no idea. After all, I was only a simple, small businessman.
Then, of course, I remembered I had already witnessed one assassination.
I was there when David Reynolds was removed for reasons I didn’t understand. Unlike this new target, Reynolds was virtually anonymous but, by imitating him, I had become deeply involved in his death. Was Donaldson ordering me to help in another disappearance?
I looked behind me at Jack but he merely glanced away and grabbed the door handle as if he’d need to escape. Then Donaldson turned to face me and I heard my own dreadful thoughts spoken aloud.
“I heard you’ve already done it once, old chap. So, you’re bloody used to it.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.
“I heard you were the only one there when that poor chap Reynolds got it in the neck. Remember? God knows what went on there. But I heard you had him shot and then stole his passport.” He then turned away again.
Behind me, Jack did something more with the door handle and exited. The door clicked shut and I was alone with Donaldson.
“You fucking bastard,” I said and I leaned over his desk, knocking his phone and went for him but he seemed to anticipate it and moved just out of my reach. I was already half way across the desk and about to jump onto it as the phone fell with its bell ringing to the floor. Donaldson took another stride back to the window, turned to face me, put his hand into his jacket pocket. It came out holding a handgun.
He pointed it straight at my head.
“Calm it, Ollie. Believe me I won’t hesitate to use this fucking thing and David Reynolds will die for the second time.”
I stopped half on and half off of the desk, but there was only one thing on my mind.
Sarah.
What the hell had I got involved with?
I retreated from the desk staring at the gun and Donaldson’s red face. A big lump of white spit had settled on his lower lip. My whole body was trembling with anger and fear.
And it was as though Donaldson was reading my thoughts yet again.
“And if Reynolds gets shot, no one will know about it, Ollie, because he’s already dead and doesn’t really exist. As for fucking Ollie Thomas, it’ll be assumed he’s just flown off somewhere to fuck his African bitch and hide.”
Neither Thomas’s Disease nor my most vivid of nightmares allow me to remember what I did or said after that. I think I felt just as I do now – a total numbness.
Sarah was the most important thing to me and the only way was to continue until I could, one day, find a way out.
But I still remember Donaldson’s final words: “So, better sooner than later, old chap. You’re going there anyway on your own bloody business, aren’t you? There’s nothing to it. All you have to do is to introduce the pansy to Frank. Now fuck off. Get out of here.”
Donaldson knew I had no reason to go to Nigeria for my own business. Not just at that moment in time.
I left to find Jack standing nervously at the top of the stairs. Behind the closed door, I heard Donaldson laughing.
I went home in a deep sweat to break the news to Sarah that I was going to Nigeria for a week or so looking for a few new agents.
Instead, I found myself up to my neck in a sordid plot, which I did not understand. But, as usual, once involved, however marginally, there was always a risk of implications if things went wrong. It became another case that Donaldson would remind me of regularly over the coming years. There is no doubt about it. I had become his shield. He was putting me between himself and any future implications.
The man’s normal demeanour was one of a scowling, bitter but uncompromising man and rare attempts at laughter which normally only accompanied a lecherous leer towards a woman’s breast followed by a coarse joke which only he would laugh at. He rarely, if ever, laughed normally. The laugh from behind that closed door was one I will never forget. It was as though he had cracked a joke. But Donaldson’s jokes were not meant to be funny but to intimidate.
To this day, I remember Donaldson’s laugh as like a ravenous hyena or one on heat calling for a mate. I once saw this in a David Attenborough film but far more often I saw it in nightmares. In those nightmares, it was a flea-bitten animal with yellowing teeth, a sloping back and Donaldson’s face. It would stand, head lowered, sniffing around a carcass that was my own body left half eaten by African lions.
In my sleep, I would cover my ears and try to deafen the noise of Donaldson’s laugh.
But Donaldson’s allusion to African women had also got me worried as, until then, I thought this particular experience was a secret only between Angie and me. Sarah and I had, gradually, worked around my quiet, guilty patch and things were back to normal. But it was at that point that I decided Sarah knew something about Angie.
Somehow, Donaldson had fed a snippet of something into a chain of Chinese whispers. There really was no end to the bastard’s list of ways to ruin others by scattering distrust.
I really have no wish even to recall Angie nowadays but she still comes back as though, forty years later, her own life, unlike my own, has stood still.
But Thomas’s Disease means that my dreams know no boundaries and, as I have explained before, I am regularly haunted by ghosts, people long since thought to be dead, known to be dead or at least irrelevant. They seem to return as though deliberately trying to remind me of the parts of my past that I have no wish to recall.
In my mind, Angie still looks and sounds the same. She still has the same, husky, deep voice that reminds me pathetically of holiday brochures, of hot, white, sand and coconut palms that lean towards a flat blue sea. These days, I have to force myself to realize that even Angie would be in her seventies by now. Perhaps she is dead.
Perhaps, she has young grandchildren who go to school in Lagos in navy blue shorts and white shirts carrying old-fashioned, brown leather satchels over their shoulders. Grandchildren who laugh and play and run and kick empty coconuts or Coca Cola cans with bare feet and who smile wide smiles at the world through perfect white teeth that they have inherited from their sensuous grandma.
Perhaps they still laugh because, like all children, they had not yet learned what life holds in store.
And, after my brief involvement, I also dream that perhaps they aren’t even black.
Perhaps they are only light brown or even piebald. Perhaps their grandma, Angie, has already died, of old age. Perhaps she died with secrets intact or died whilst being tortured to release her secrets.
Most likely, dreams tell me, Donaldson knew far more than me. Perhaps Donaldson even knew about illegitimate children and where they were.
So, do you now see the nightmare scenario that can arise through being a sufferer of acute Thomas’s Disease and having too much time for thinking and dreaming and drinking?
But there is so little time left. I am an old man and I’m writing this just in case something happens to me.
Fortunately, I have already got a good way through this statement but it is far from complete. There is far more to tell and explain and my fingers and hand are hurting although my typing speed has vastly improved.
Not only that but I’ve got a headache and my chest is hurting.
It was heartburn, I think.
It says nothing on the pack of Rennies about stomach acid being caused by whisky. My head still hurts a little but the brain inside is brilliantly clear. In fact, my brain is far clearer now than before the drink. My brain is as good now as it was sixty years ago and other parts of me that you might imagine are completely defunct also work. Just dreaming about Angie proves that point.
It’s when I stand before a full-length mirror, that I see the problem.
For that is when I see a naked old man with poor muscle tone and a smooth, white stomach that restricts the vision of what hangs beneath. There are wrinkles in places where wrinkles should never be. My joints look misshapen and many of them crack and squeak like un-oiled hinges. Hands and wrists that were once permanently tanned and liberally scattered with dark and manly hair are now bare, blue veined and blotched with melanin. My nails are brittle, broken and yellow and athlete’s foot is rife. I have knees that sometimes give out under strain and hurt for an hour or more if I kneel to mop the floor. I have a backbone that sometimes feels as if it might snap and I have such poor hearing in one ear, that my neck seems permanently bent on the downwind side.
After I’ve finished this section, I’m going to the opticians for new glasses. But I have no faith in their abilities to improve sight. It is their pseudo clinical attitudes and fancy instruments that suggest highly honed medical skills but which are just a clever prop for sharp commercial practices.
“Would you like to try these on, Mr Thomas?”
“How much are they?”
“Two hundred pounds but you get your usual over pensioner’s discount.”
“No thanks. I only want to see through them, not look like Elton John. I’ll leave it for now, thanks.”
My hair used to be thick and black and held in place by Brylcream and combed into neat partings either on the right or left side depending whether I was Ollie Thomas or Reynolds. Now there isn’t much left to cut but I dislike visiting barbers who scratch across the thin skin of my skull with sharp combs. I used to get my hair cut in Cairo but now cut it myself although my fingers have lost much of their precision, especially when they’re cold.
I recently tried to pick up a coin that I dropped on the floor in the off license but felt like an elderly Calcutta beggar, desperately gathering scattered coins. And all the time my eyes, far from concentrating on the location of the coin, were trying to see how many people were watching.
The worse thing is if my neighbour, Fred Carrington, sees me because he smirks.
My eyes run, constantly. Saline flows down my cheeks if I venture out in the cold wind and is guaranteed to find the only unblocked duct in my body. It runs into my nose forcing me to stop to wipe both red eyes and nose like a sobbing boy. And I often drop my stick at the same time. I know the blasted thing is going to slide off my arm before it slides. So then comes the dilemma of whether to concentrate on the mucus or the stick.
When I eventually get to meet my maker, I hope it’s not a cold day and the Lord greets me with tears and a running nose. But let me introduce you to Frank, Olga and another Lord.
I blame myself for telling Donaldson about my friend Frank Marshall in Nigeria.
Frank was already caught up in quicksand before I knew him but as soon as Donaldson heard about him, the quicksand became like deep shit.
In some respects, Frank was well suited to Donaldson’s style in that he certainly didn’t run his business on a strong set of ethical principles even though he was supposed to be in pharmaceuticals.
Frank managed a run-down business from an asbestos-roofed building in Ikeja employing a small team of ladies in faded, green overalls who poured thick red cough mixture from big drums into small bottles, stuck labels on the bottles and put the bottles into boxes. Frank also made money from deals he negotiated for international pharmaceutical companies.
Frank was a commission agent of the old school. He was the underpaid, dishevelled, sweaty, expatriate side of overpaid pin-striped, eau de Cologne corporate life.
He was there for those who sat in plush, oak-panelled boardrooms with Chinese carpets in Basle, Paris and London.
He was there for those who could then claim legitimately that he was solely responsible for the manner in which the orders they accepted were obtained. Bribery, you see, is subcontracted out even more often than murder.
In short, Frank ensured that many of the pharmaceuticals selected for importation by the Ministry of Health into Nigeria were not for the well-being of the nation’s poor and sick but for the well-being of the officials who ran the Health Ministry and the directors and shareholders of corporate Switzerland and America. But to stay on the right side of what little law was upheld, he was a mere manager of the business.
Frank was a fixer.
The company chairman, to whom he owed so little, was an ex Minister who had once been in charge of the Nigerian Ministry of Health. It was the ex-Minister who did the travelling to London, Basle and New York, wearing his Saville Row suits, staying at the Nigerian Embassy and lunching with the manager of the New Nigeria Bank in Cannon Street.
Meanwhile, poor Frank stayed entirely in Lagos with occasional trips to exotic spots like Kano, Port Harcourt and Ibadan. He had ventured as far as Ouagadougou once and had been to Accra several times.
So, Frank’s international business career had not materialized in quite the way he had foreseen when he had first arrived in Lagos with his bag of samples as an immature young export salesman. But, his appointed role as occasional escort or agent for people he thought represented Her Majesty’s Government had given him a sense of importance, however false and however short lived.
Frank’s English wife had taken one look at Lagos and left him many years before to return to Maidstone. So, Frank lived with a very dark woman who wore a very recognizable and ornate headscarf like a turban. She spoke an extremely rare, native dialect, a little French and even less English. But it didn’t seem to bother either of them as they communicated mostly through grunts and sign language. Sex is, after all, a fairly similar exercise wherever you go.
She had come from a place we once called Upper Volta and Frank had imported her into Nigeria in exchange for a few crates of cough mixture when he went on a visit to Ouagadougou.
Frank called her Olga as if she was a blonde Russian but this was far from the case. I suspect that Olga was actually the closest Frank could manipulate his tongue to say her real name, which stretched to many long syllables and included strange clicking noises unknown to anyone outside Olga’s village.
Olga acted as wife and maid and they lived an exotic tropical existence in a fortified concrete villa with a corrugated roof and surrounded by rolls of barbed wire, several grubby Alsatian dogs and an ageing Nigerian ex policeman with a pistol tucked in his belt.
Frank spent the mornings in his factory overseeing quality control and production schedules. He then lunched at the Red Lantern Chinese Restaurant, where he had developed a remarkable resistance to no end of gastric complaints and then spent his evenings at a notorious den of sophistication in Ikeja where he concluded his business deals if he could stay awake long enough.
And just to remind you or to connect things up, it was at one of these high society gatherings at the Pink Coconut, where I met Angie.
On that trip, my first sight of Frank was as he pushed his way through the crowds of jostling, sweating, humanity. As always, he was wearing his stained safari suit, sandals and grey socks. He was shouting, cursing and waving a rolled newspaper but his arrival had been very timely because the hot and stressed Immigration Officer sat at his high desk in his unnecessarily thick uniform and rows of medals, had been questioning everyone’s right to enter Nigeria.
And until Frank arrived it looked as though there might be difficulties with my right to enter the country. My vaccination certificate for Yellow Fever was not in order and this was vital for compliance with the sophisticated bureaucracy of Nigerian Health and Immigration Policy. But Frank’s newspaper had done the trick, containing as it did several crumpled Naira notes tucked inside. I remember him tapping the Immigration Officer on the shoulder.
“Here, General, whatever you bloody title is, catch up with the news. Have a looksy at the sports page. Lagos Loonies beat the Kano Crappers. It’s all there. It’ll make your eyes smart.”
Frank often spoke so fast that it did not matter what he said or to whom he said it or whether or not English was their first language. And I have never seen Frank in anything except the same, grubby, beige safari suit. He had long hair in an untidy Beatle style that seemed totally out of place in Nigeria. He had a red, sweaty, sun burned face and, on that occasion, a burning cigarette was cleverly tucked between the same fingers that held the newspaper. His blue eyes had taken on a permanent sparkle from too many evenings in rooms filled with ganja smoke or other narcotics.
But, payment received, my passport was duly stamped. It was shoved towards the edge of the desk for me to collect and Frank’s General disappeared behind his high desk to conceal the newspaper and its contents beneath his chair. Frank had grinned, grabbed my bags and shouted at me to follow.
“Come on. Don’t lose me, for Christ’s sake. Let’s get out of this fucking hell hole.”
Despite his recent appointment of working for the Crown via Donaldson, Frank was not known for his sophisticated use of Queen’s English. Frank’s company car, too, was also less than sophisticated. It was a rusting Peugeot with sagging seats, the body parts held together by layers of dried, red mud.
Frank only had two real friends.
One was Olga and the other was sat waiting in the car with the engine running.
Frank’s driver, Smart, was a young, athletic Nigerian who, if opportunities for fulfilment had been available, looked as if he should have tried professional boxing or athletics. Smart was not smart but he was very reliable. He would do anything Frank asked and would drive for hours without a break, even sitting in the car in the hot sun whilst Frank refreshed himself in the shade of banana trees at roadside beer houses.
“So! Ollie!” Frank shouted above the general melee. “Got a cable to say you’d be coming.”
We clambered into the car and Smart drove off into the traffic.
“Where are you staying, Ollie?”
“Airport Hotel.”
“Luxury. Must be on good expenses.”
The Airport Hotel had never struck me as luxurious but I let it pass. Fried eggs were the only breakfast at the Airport Hotel. Sometimes they were the only lunch and the only dinner. It was never boiled eggs and never poached eggs. It was only ever fried eggs. I had queried it one morning. “Sorry sah. No water.” It was the obvious explanation and I should have known, after all I’d cleaned my teeth in beer earlier.
“How are you doing, Ollie? Business good?”
“Yes. Can’t grumble. Dodging and diving, bit of this and a bit of that, you know.”
I would often speak like that to start with although it depended on the person I was with. Frank was a suitable person for this particular style and I needed to create the early impression that, today, I was not in the business of bothering about too much legitimacy. Frank needed to know that anything would interest me if I had a chance to make a quick buck. And if this meant a bit of under the counter stuff to get around stuffy government regulations that got in the way of healthy international trade, frankly I couldn’t have cared a fig.
This was often true I have to admit. It was a vital necessity to keep my agenda flexible in case something cropped up. But behind whatever façade I created and whatever impression you might get I was, in fact, a complete professional in international trading and export. There weren’t many like me then and probably even less nowadays.
“Pharmaceuticals interest you this time?” Frank was doing his own prying into my motives for being there.
“Always,” I said.
“To ship home or ship elsewhere?”
The number of pharmaceutical wholesalers in England who would have risked their reputation bringing in medicines that had passed through Frank’s factory was going to be limited. But Frank was prying and the questions were already sufficient proof that he was going on what Jack must have told him because Jack and I had discussed pharmaceuticals as a ploy before I left. It was unlikely however that Frank knew anything about Donaldson – yet. Such was the manner in which the man operated.
I was dropped at the Airport Hotel and I thanked Frank for meeting me, told him I had another meeting early the following morning in Lagos and suggested we meet for lunch. With that, Frank’s red mud plastered Peugeot drove off in a cloud of blue smoke with Smart at the wheel.
I had fried eggs, rice and beer for my dinner that night. But next morning, after an uncomfortable night spent scratching in a bug infested bed that smelled of stale sweat, I took a taxi to a much plusher residence in downtown Lagos for my meeting with the spoilt English heir to half of the Scottish Highlands. My job was to use bullshit to introduce him to Frank Marshall.
This distinguished fellow held an Oxford degree in Ancient Greek but his business training had probably been limited to reading “Teach Yourself International Trade”. It didn’t matter. Unlike most of us, the man’s upbringing meant he was automatically destined for the House of Lords and a type of diplomatic immunity wherever he went or whatever he did. He had risen through family connections to a role as a sort of government advisor on African affairs although, at the time, Africa was not regarded as a Foreign Office or a Defence Ministry priority. His only knowledge of Africa appeared to have been as a boy of six living with his parents for a year in Nairobi.
Not content with the thought of one day inheriting a Scottish Castle, the odd commission paid into a Swiss account was starting to take on the innocent legitimacy of normal, day to day expenses to top up his income and he was becoming a liability for diplomatic progress on many fronts. He had started out as a spoiled child. Now, on the frail excuse that Her Majesty’s diplomats, unlike small businessmen, needed refreshing after seven-day stints visiting the Third World, he was being spoiled by attending too many cocktail parties, staying at too many hotels on Park Lane and eating at too many places like the Ritz at the expense of others. He was in fact thought to be becoming, or already was, a risk to national security.
Having been mistakenly employed by the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence he was known to have acquired information that was strictly confidential and, also since the age of six, he had been well known for being unable to keep secrets for very long.
He would go to Nairobi, Khartoum and Cairo and then back to London for his refreshment and then find an excuse to go to places like Addis Ababa, staying, of course, at The Hilton Hotel. It is strange I had never met him before, but his itinerary and mine had never coincided and, anyway, his choice of hotel would not have been the same as mine.
On arriving at his temporary Lagos residence, I was sure I could smell smoked bacon and toast being cooked. It turned out to be a small, private hotel or guest house built in the colonial style and so a full English breakfast would have been quite normal.
Surrounded by a high, concrete wall with metal spikes along the top, it hid amongst a small clump of high coconut palms. But the garden was a sea of red mud because it was morning and dark, thunderclouds had only just finished depositing an inch of rain in the space of half an hour.
When I arrived, the hotel’s gardener was sweeping flood water full of floating debris, but his toils were in vain. A foot of water had already breached the front steps and a gritty, red stream was running into the open plan reception area where someone else was sweeping it out of a rear door.
But I knew what to do. I took my shoes off, folded my trousers to my knees and put my briefcase on my head as a shelter from the water still dripping off the palm trees. Suitably attired, I waded towards the building and up to the long wooden reception desk. Above me was a high ceiling with a huge, creaking, wooden fan that slowly turned, hitting the top branches of a tamed coconut palm growing from a clay pot. The muddy, red water ran across the scratched marble floor between low wicker chairs placed against dull, unpolished wooden coffee tables showing round stains of tea and coffee spilt from cups.
It was steamy and hot but, despite the conditions, a waiter hovered with a tray and an off-white cloth draped across his arm ready to serve coffee to a few white guests sat in mud stained suits. A white woman in a light chiffon dress and a wide brimmed hat sat with her long legs crossed, nearest to the clay pot and with a cigarette in a long holder held between her thumb and first finger. Her feet, fortunately, were on a dry part of the floor, proof that the floor itself was uneven.
I had met her once before at the Embassy, the wife of a diplomat but I couldn’t remember exactly who she was. She was not the Ambassador ’s wife, I felt sure, but she was the sort of longer-term resident to be expected in a place like this. The equally unsuitably dressed receptionist, sweating in his black suit and bow tie seemed to be expecting me.
“Yessah. Mr Thomas, is it? You are expected. The Lord is waiting for you sah.”
I have never forgotten that greeting. Ever since then I have wanted my entry into heaven, whenever it came, to be announced like that. The pity is that I never told anyone, not even Sarah.
The Lord was not slow in appearing but I have always hoped that the real Lord, if we met, would avoid the visual image that this one created.
Donaldson’s latest assignment minced towards me with his hand outstretched like a peacock on a catwalk and I could not help wondering how someo