On the riverside of promise (17 page)

“Sometimes, some do. But I can be very
persuasive. Plus, the Nigerian Navy is more or less, a common joke
around these parts,” he said and shook his head wildly.

Ethan drew on his cigarette slowly and
asked:

“You’re saying this is easy? Is that why you
don’t even bother with a canvas or some camouflage?”

“A canvas would draw even more attention. If
I do meet a boat on the river, then they’ll probably think I’m just
running a shipment for the Army. The river is so plentiful, see?
Fishermen fish, and I haul,” the Swede replied, waving his arms
about.

“How much does this pay then?” asked Ethan
with a frown on his brow.

“Are you looking to get into the business?
Because I’d hate the competition,” replied the burly man, laughing
heartily to himself.

“Not really, no. I’m kind of into the
business myself, but I’m not a middleman.”

“Ah. Mercenary then?” he asked with a
smile.

“Slightly different. Though I can’t be sure
there’s a real difference,” replied Ethan with a somewhat weary
look.

“Royal Marine!” the Swede exclaimed, pointing
wildly with a finger.

“For God’s sake, is it that bloody obvious?”
asked Ethan slightly irritated. The swede leaned toward him and
said, nodding with his head once so often:

“The knife. You seem calm but your body is
tense. You keep an eye all the time. One hand on the cigarette, one
near the knife. Edgy but cool. Not regular British Army. I can
tell. They are-”

Nicole then appeared from the small galley
below and said in a flat, tired voice, “He’s full of shit. I told
him who you are,” and then she sat down on the deck, crossing her
legs before adding “Must be going bored out of his mind.”

“I’m just trying to make your friend here
feel at ease,” the Swede said throwing his hands in the air, acting
the insulted part. Ethan drew a last whiff and threw his cigarette
in the water before asking with smoke coming out of his mouth and
nose:

“We could have come straight to this guy, why
did we-”

Nicole interjected with a suddenly
conversational tone:

“We needed to check with Adu first. We didn’t
know whether the Swede would even have a delivery today. See, Adu
and the Swede are partners, so to speak,” she said with a gleaming
smile and fluttered her eyes only for Ethan to see, before she
threw her head backwards to gaze at the still faint stars in the
sky.

His face sat in a frown for a moment or so,
before looking sideways at Nicole and then back again at the Swede
who was looking upwards and bobbing his head slightly as if
counting in his head. He checked his wristwatch; it was almost ten
o’clock.

“Twenty, twenty-five thousand pounds. Give or
take,” said the Swede suddenly. Ethan did not have to act surprised
or impressed when he said:

“Bloody hell. Where do they get that kind of
money?”

“That,” the Swede said waving a hand
dismissively, “is not my concern.”

“I mean, how do they get hold of that kind of
exchange. The exchange rate is ridiculous, not to mention the
exorbitant inflation.”

“Well, I’m not an expert, but the French
economy isn’t that bad.”

“The who?” said Ethan with genuine puzzlement
even though there was nothing wrong with his hearing.

“Your friend isn’t exactly up to date on this
war, is he?” said the Swede to Nicole who simply shrugged.

“I thought that… Never mind. I’m tired. I
really am. Let’s not have this kind of discussion right now. I’d
rather listen to the radio,” said Ethan in a very natural way.

“There’s one down below. I am the host, I’ll
go get it.”

Not a moment after the Swede went below,
Nicole quickly turned her head and shot Ethan a look that
overflowed with a raging intention for murder. She hissed, rather
than said:

“Moron.”

Ethan replied calmly, almost
nonchalantly:

“I won’t stab this one, don’t worry.”

Her nostrils flared with anger instinctively
and right before she could retort, the Swede came back up, with the
radio in hand. He tuned the dial first and then turned it on.
Intense brass sounds and pompous drums came from the small speaker,
while the Swede seemed instantly gratified judging from the grin on
his face. Ethan asked him then:

“Could you tune that to the BBC?”

“You don’t like Wagner?” the Swede asked in
disbelief.

“I thought only the Germans had this craze
about Wagner,” said Ethan with a shrug.

“I thought he was Austrian,” replied the
Swede, looking puzzled.

“Never mind that. `Top of the Pops' is on
now,” said Ethan with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.

“`Top of the Pops'? Seriously? You want to
listen to that, now? Here?” said Nicole.

“It won’t hurt or anything, will it? I’m a
big fan of the Stones.”

The Swede shrugged and turned the dial, while
the selector remained on the AM setting. Through a flurry of white
noise and incoherent sounds, a clear voice could be heard from the
speaker albeit with some static but nevertheless with surprisingly
good reception:

“…so until they’re ready, let’s listen to
their latest single to hit the record stores, `Hey Jude’!”

A loud applause was heard and the announcer’s
voice was cut crisply, while the clapping faded away and soon the
voice of Paul McCartney came softly through.

Ethan’s brow became a deep furrow. He flexed
his hands and looked at Nicole with a calm, steady gaze. She felt
his stare upon her after a moment and looked at him with a
quizzical expression. He shook his head slightly and simply
said:

“I just hate the Beatles,” after which
suddenly and least expected, the young boy at the helm smiled
brightly and sang along, “…naa, na na na naaa, hey Jude…”

* * *

Sometime into the night, they had traveled
further down the river, mostly thanks to the stream rather than the
tiny motor. Nicole had been sleeping soundly for a few hours. But
Ethan could not, now that he knew Nicole had been lying to him.
What was worse, he couldn’t read the truth between her lies. She
was an excellent shot and she was well-connected around these
parts. Her agenda though still remained conspicuously well-hidden.
Was she simply working for herself, like the Swede? But to what
end? Did she really want to find Andy as much as he did? Thoughts
like these - and some even worse - tugged at his mind like ropes,
bogging him down in a spiral with no real answers, no clear
exit.

He felt it was dangerous to stick close to
Nicole. But she had saved him more than once so far. Whatever her
methods and her real purpose, maybe she had put all that aside for
Andy’s sake. Maybe she’d explain later, maybe she had as much
trouble trusting him as he did her. Andy was all that mattered and
he hoped that soon he’d meet the corpse of some other unlucky
bastard, not Andy’s. Nicole couldn’t really be trusted, but he had
to admit to himself that she had gotten them this far. Andy was all
that mattered, and that was what would keep him focused. That, and
keeping a wary eye on her.

The warmth of the night earlier had given its
place to a fresh, wet breeze that helped him stay awake despite the
small hours. The Swede had helped with some sort of home-made vodka
and stories about making even more money when the war would finally
end: in the poor light the single lamp offered them, he’d shown him
sketches and graphs about cables and telecommunications, satellites
and whatnot, stuff that Ethan barely acknowledged they existed.
Their little discussion was interrupted by the boy who spat out a
glob of some sort of local chewing tobacco variety and said
something in what must have been a local Igbo dialect.

He caught their attention and turning to
look, they saw a flare lazily falling down, fading away with a
trail of smoke behind it. Then another one shot up in the opposite
direction further down from the east bank and they could almost see
a small band of armed men waiting on a sandy patch of dirt.

“That’s them, two flares, first over the
river, the second over land,” said the Swede, eagerly telling the
boy in what sounded like very bad Igbo to cut the engine. As the
boy complied, he went to the helm and let the stream carry them
slowly towards the lowered east bank.

“And the best part is, I don’t have to
off-load anything. They do all the work,” he said and pointed at
the small group of men who were now holding a few lit lanterns and
waving a torchlight to pin-point their location. The more they
approached, the clearer it became not all of them were really men.
Most were actually the same age the Swede’s helmsman was and some
looked shorter, skinnier and every bit younger than the boy.

“They sent the boys to do a boy’s work, no?”
said the Swede smiling thinly before shaking Nicole's shoulder
gently and waking her up. In a heartbeat or two she was up, and
after a couple of deep breaths and a stretch could have fooled
anyone that she had slept for almost half a day. Ethan then asked
the Swede, while Nicole bent slightly over the rim of the boat and
splashed some water on her face:

“And they’ll take us to Owerri?”

“I wouldn’t know about that, but there’s a
good chance. I can’t think of a reason they won’t. For a price, of
course.”

“I kind of left almost everything back at the
hotel in Onitsha. We are kind of short on cash.”

“Even a fiver is worth a month’s food down
here. You’ll pass off as a rich man in Biafra,” the Swede replied
and Nicole added after a cough:

“There’s always other ways to pay, food and
drugs being the highest in demand. And then there are the
services.”

“Services? Can’t think there’s much office
space in demand right now.”

“Are you really that thick or is this your
first war behind the trenches? Prostitution. Very commonplace.”

“I thought the Biafrans are hitting that
pretty hard.”

“If you mean hard-ons, that’s true,” the
Swede said with a sly grin that almost made him look rather slimy
all of the sudden.

They felt the boat settle on the wet sand
with ease and the boy jumped outside holding a flimsy, worn rope
that filled the role of a mooring line of sorts. One of the boys
wearing fatigues from the waist down, seemingly accustomed to the
process, found a nearby mangrove and tied the rope around it. Then
a man barked a couple of orders and the boys laid down their
weapons and formed a sort of ant-line, carefully treading up to the
boat where two of them had already began unloading the cargo.

The man in charge wore a full set of fatigues
and even sported a red beret. When Ethan and Nicole jumped off the
boat, he immediately asked them, making sure with a wave of his
hand that a couple of rifles were already aiming at them:

“Who dem they now?” to which the Swede
replied casually:

“Looking to get into Owerri. Looking for a
Red Cross man. I’ve done business with her. Him, I’ve just
met.”

“Ask the Red Cross, then,” the man said with
a face that signified hostility.

“The Red Cross lost a caravan. Would you know
anything about that?”

“Do I look like the Red Cross, Englishman?”
said the man with a sudden, wide grin, barely able to hold a
laugh.

“Alright, we just want you to get us to
Owerri.”

“What dem for?” asked the man, crossing his
arms.

“We need to take a look at a corpse,” said
Nicole rather bluntly, almost angrily.

The man shrugged and nodded, before adding in
a quite plain fashion:

“Heard stranger things.”

He then shouted a few words that must have
been names, because two boys settled down a crate they were
carrying and came over to him. A short deliberation later, and
after he had pointed at Ethan and Nicole quite fervently, they
picked up their weapons and motioned with an awkward, mixed
expression of confusion, fear and faked bravado to follow them. The
man asked Ethan then:

“Rolex? Tag?”

“No, but it’s eighteen karat gold anyway,”
Ethan replied and unfastened it from his wrist, passing it over to
the man and giving him an unpleasant look that seemed to go
completely unnoticed. The man weighed the clock in his hand first
and then asked Ethan with a rather serious tone:

“And her?”

“What do you mean? If this doesn’t seem
enough, then-”

“I don’t want her money,” he said and licked
his lips provocatively. Nicole shook her head, while the Swede gave
his flask of vodka a swig, giggled and snorted.

“Now, wait a minute!” said Ethan in what
sounded like a poor attempt at passing for the guy with all the men
and the guns. He was about to reach for his ankle knife when Nicole
burst into laughter and said in-between:

“I mean, where’s that vaunted, sense of
humor, huh? Jesus, Ethan, you take everything too seriously.”

The man nodded and extended his hand in what
seemed a genuine gesture, motioning the boys to lower their guns as
well.