SS Glasgow Castle

He parked across from the Total station, the station that seemed to be the main focal point of town activity. I sat sweating in the cab while he went off and returned, some ten minutes later, with my new driver: dreadlocks, shades, Bob Marley T-shirt, black plastic jeans, cowboy boots, and an extremely long, curved fingernail on the little finger of the left hand. The clawed cowboy was introduced as not only the driver but also the owner of a cab headed for Abidjan. He was willing to take me there.

I followed him to his 504 where I took a seat in the back alongside a nervous young man in a polyester suit and tie. The front pa.s.senger seat was occupied by a corpulent gentleman in an ankle-length embroidered white robe; a small round cap clung precariously to the side of his head. No one spoke English and everyone stopped speaking French to me when it became obvious I misunderstood the simplest questions.
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After a short, silent wait the cowboy slid into the driver"s seat whistling something cheerful and we set off. I felt so relieved when I could no longer see Boundoukou through the back window that I literally blacked out. I slept practically all the way to Abidjan. I remember being shaken awake by the white-robed gentleman at a pit stop and muttering "non, non" is response to repeated use of the word "toilette".

We hit Abidjan just after nightfall - I had been dazedly half-awake for the preceding few minutes, and the first high-rises jolted me fully awake. I prevailed on the driver to deposit me right in front of the hotel (no mean feat, considering I didn"t know French and had paid him in advance). The admirals on door duty didn"t pounce on me and there weren"t any police squads hanging around in order to arrest Oscar Hansen, the international criminal. I was tense when approaching the reception and asking for my room key, but everything went smoothly - everything was so normal. A few minutes later I was back in my old room, room ten eleven. It really felt like home.

Of course, on the way there I did consider the possibility of renting out a room in some discreet out-of-the way hotel - after all if anyone was looking for me, a single phone call would establish I had a current reservation at the Hotel Ivoire. But I was sure that given my knowledge of French, my appearance, and general state of mind any attempt to secure a hotel room elsewhere would invite comment and attention, leading to suspicion regardless of my legal and media status in Ivory Coast. And also, thanks to Kross"s arrangement with the friendly hotel manager, I didn"t have to pay anything. I had a sock full of diamonds but I was short of cash. It didn"t even cross my mind to try and peddle a stone on my own- I was convinced that was one sure way of getting into trouble.

And so, I did exactly what Kross had instructed me to do. I left a message for Raymond Best at the hotel"s Air Afrique office, and waited.

The waiting turned out to be a full time job, because I allowed myself to get paranoid. Three people dead! I wondered if one of the corpses belonged to Kross. I didn"t stir from my room apart from a couple of brief, purposeful outings downstairs where I nervously scanned the newspapers at an international newsagent"s. They had a Ghanaian newspaper called the Daily Graphic. It didn"t contain any stories about white mercenaries on a crime spree, or related subjects.

I did venture just once outside the hotel. This was to dispose of the military clothes. Habit forced me to look for a garbage container, and I wandered around, increasingly hot and bothered, without finding any for a couple of hours. I returned to the hotel grounds in a very bad mood, but couldn"t bring myself to admit defeat and return to my room with the plastic bag containing the clothes still clutched in my hand. So I walked around the hotel a little and lo and behold, I came across a a garbage container. It stood next to the service entrance to one of the hotel restaurants. I dumped the bag into it and returned to my room thinking that once again, I"d spent hours looking for something that was right under my nose all the time.

I had very little money left - I was determined to save one $100 traveler"s check for later, and use my trail-leaving credit card only in a final emergency. I ate all meals in my room, with charges applied automatically to the room number. Happily, the mini-bar was replenished daily with fresh miniature bottles of liquor from all around the world.

To be honest, I was on the sauce throughout my waking hours. It was very hard, sitting in that hotel room and waiting for Raymond like a lost kid waits for parents at the shopping mall. I wasn"t expecting Kross to show up and he didn"t. Whenever I thought about him, I always re-experienced the feeling I"d had when talking to him for the last time: the spooky conviction that I"ll never see him again. By the end of my second day at the hotel I knew this applied to Mireille, too.

Raymond Best showed up on the third day. The telephone rang towards the end of another long, anxious afternoon and I wondered who the h.e.l.l could be calling me. Kross? No, he would simply show up in my room after he"d reconnoitered the hotel for plainclothes police or secret service or whoever waiting to arrest him. By the time I picked up the receiver, I was pretty convinced the call was from a police inspector inviting me for a question and answer session in his office. When I heard a voice say "Ici Raymond" I became almost incoherent with joy. He heard it all right, and when he showed up in my room a few minutes later there was an amused glitter in the hard black eyes, and the pinched mouth was stretched in a smile.

"Where"s Kross?" he asked. I told him I didn"t know. I told him we"d run into some difficulties and had to split up. That Kross had instructed me to seek him, Raymond, out and talk to him. He said:

"So. I"m here now and you"re talking to me. What can I do for you?" It was fairly clear he"d already decided there wasn"t much; he didn"t trust me.

"Kross said to tell you something." He waited, eyebrow raised. "He said to tell you that Giselle was right."

The eyebrow was lowered; the way he was looking at me changed. He kneaded his chin with his fingers - I noticed he wore a wedding band, and wondered if Giselle was his wife. Raymond sighed, looked at the ceiling, sighed again, and looked at me. Then he said:

"Okay. Show me what you"ve got." I did. The contents of the sock made him knead his chin for quite a while. Eventually he said:

"All right. I can take care of everything, including selling this for you. It"s not going to be easy and it will put me to a lot of trouble. Ten percent."

Ten percent! I"d been afraid he"d want half.

"Okay," I said right away. That relaxed him; he stopped kneading his chin.

He pocketed the precious sock and had a drink with me while he issued instructions. I was to board the plane as planned, but disembark in Paris ("get your ticket rewritten at the airline office downstairs. Ask for Marlena, and tell her I sent you.") There was a newly inst.i.tuted temporary visa requirement for Canadians visiting France, but Raymond was sure I could obtain one at the airport.

"It"s something very recent, and many people don"t know," Raymond told me. "If there"s a problem, give them my name as reference. I spend a lot of time at this f.u.c.king airport. They all know me."

Following my arrival in Paris, I was to wait for Raymond at a place of his choice: the Pension Savarini, which was family-owned and discreet and inexpensive and had a good cook (Raymond stressed the last point). He promised to be in touch the very next day following arrival in Paris: then we"d drive to Brugges, in Belgium. He knew someone up there who would not only buy the diamonds, but also a.s.sist in the setting up of a respectable paper trail for the money.

"It"s very important to have good clean money," Raymond told me, wiping his mouth with the back of his finger after a final sip of Pernod. "Dirty money means you"re a dirty man."

I nodded agreement. I agreed with everything he said that afternoon. I only asked one question, whether I needed a visa for Belgium too. Raymond grimaced and waved a dismissive hand.

"I"m not sure, but if you need one, we"ll get it at the border," he told me. "I deal with those guys all the time in my job. I know how they think, and how to handle them. Don"t worry about it."

He left, taking the diamonds with him, and I spent the rest of the day worrying about it.

I worried needlessly. Everything went exactly like Raymond said it would: Raymond knew best.

However, I still didn"t know that when I woke up the next day. I was worried I would be leaving the hotel without paying or seeing the hotel"s manager. Kross had said he"d fixed things with him, but Kross could be dead.

Naturally I also had the recurring thought that at the last possible moment, just as I was about to board the plane, someone would ask me to step aside, and complications would ensue. But it didn"t happen.

I felt great relief when I was seating myself in the plane. Eight hours later I arrived in France.