The Big Killing by Robert Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

concrete office block. The sun, already high, was hot and the surface of the red earth in the compound was drying into crushed chillies. Steam hugged the surfaces of large crimson puddles. In a clearing amongst the crowd stood a group of dejected Africans and a large Lebanese in a white robe which was stained red at the bottom. A grey-haired African in a white shirt and lime-green trousers stood next to him. The local witch doctor, they said.
    The witch doctor had come to find out who was thieving money from the Lebanese. He told the first man to kneel and, detaching a bag from his belt, poured a mound of sand in front of the kneeling man who leaned forward over it. He looped a cotton noose over the man's head and poked the loose hanging strand into the mound of sand. He asked him in his own language if he had stolen the money and the man with quivering thighs said that he hadn't. There was a pause. Nothing happened. The noose was removed and the man joined the crowd.
    The witch doctor repeated the ritual with the others who all passed. The Lebanese was perplexed until somebody suggested the accountant and he perked up. The cry went up and a moment later the small, fine-featured accountant came down the steps of the office building weighed down by his own dignity and an array of pens and a wafer of a calculator in the breast pocket of his shirt. The crowd instantly disliked him.
    He refused to submit to the black magic and was rewarded with a low grunt from the crowd. The Lebanese told him there would be no job for him unless he did. The accountant knelt before the mound of sand. The crowd thickened. The witch doctor looped the thread over the man's head and asked him the question. The denial was on the way out of the man's throat when it was strangled by the cotton noose which seemed to have been pulled taut by an unseen hand. It bit into his neck, jerked his head down, popped his eyes and forced his tongue out till the stalk showed at his teeth. The crowd surged and the accountant erupted above their heads flailing, the pens and the calculator already gone from his breast pocket, his shirt torn open and his trousers already down his thighs. Moses pushed me out of the compound.
    'They go beat him now,' he said.
    It was midday by the time I'd returned the car and checked into the Novotel whose main entrance backed on to the busy Avenue Général de Gaulle, where you could buy hi-fi, hardware and haberdashery during the day but only whores at night. I sent Moses out to buy a blank VHS tape which, after the car expenses, took me down to the last few thousand CFA I had.
    Martin Fall had booked me into room 205 on the second floor which the management changed to 307 on the third because an agronomist convention had taken the whole of the second. I asked at reception if they had any private video viewing and recording facilities and the girl said she would set something up for me. I took my bags up to the room and called B.B.; he wasn't there. I left a message with his maid that I was in the Novotel.
    I came back down with Fat Paul's package. Moses appeared with the blank tape. I told him to get lost for half an hour. I was taken to a small conference room where a TV and two VCRs had been set up next to a whiteboard and an overhead projector. I broke the seal on the envelope and slotted the original and blank tape into the two machines and played and recorded at the same time.
    There was some snow and then the film's title appeared and, in case you couldn't read, a lazy, Afro-American dude's voice told you what it was: 'Once you tasted chocolate...' and I realized that this wasn't the film that the Metis was expecting to have to kill for. I watched it all the same, in case Fat Paul's 'business secret' was thrown in there somewhere. It was a tawdry tale, shot on a low-budget set, of a white, heavily wigged and made-up housewife who, having waved her husband goodbye, is immediately visited by two large black plumbers with tool