Blood Is Dirt by Robert Wilson

the faintest shuffling remained.
    A frog offered a tentative croak. He got a couple of replies. Insects rubbed themselves up to full volume and somebody brought in a whole percussion section of football rattles, whistles, maracas and castanets.
    A man, no more than two metres from my head, sighed and moved off.
    The ground released me with the reluctance of setting concrete. A body check revealed that I hadn’t been shot. I was lying at the bottom of a two-foot-thick tree which should have my face imprint on its bark even now.
    The lights remained shut down in the clearing. There was a small fire going where some silhouettes passed the time with each other. A truck double-declutched in the distance. I moved towards the noise and found the track and the ditch at the side of it. I remembered the camera. I was in no mood or state for heroism. The camera would have to stay lost.
    The break in the forest where Bagado and I had first hit the road appeared and I went back in there but it was too dark. I sat down to wait for first light and propped my head up on a bolster of terrifying dreams which left me raw and jangling and asking for my mother.
    By 6.30 a.m. I’d found the car with Bagado screwed up and tossed in the back. I lifted the boot and poked him. He came to, speaking Yiddish, and crawled out of the car and sat on the tail.
    â€˜I was worried,’ he said, with a yawn wide enough to show me he hadn’t had any breakfast. ‘I was very worried.’
    â€˜You should have seen it from my angle.’
    â€˜Judging by your face I imagine it was somewhat sharp.’
    â€˜Big and blunt. I ran into a tree.’
    â€˜Best thing you could have done. This terrain isn’t built for men your size.’
    â€˜I lost the camera.’
    â€˜But you’re here. That’s the thing.’
    â€˜What happened to you?’
    â€˜I have a very strong sense of direction,’ he said, ‘and good eyes. I managed to hold on to one of the sample bottles.’
    We ate the stale sweet pink bread and corned beef. I washed it down with a single slug whisky to two slugs water. The gout was subdued, not used to such contemptuous treatment. We drove back to Meko and straight out across the border to debrief Gerhard’s people in Kétou. They repaired my face. We had lunch, slept and drove back to Porto Novo.
    We gave our report to Gerhard, who arranged for the contaminated water to be packaged in sample bottles and addressed it to a laboratory in Berlin. He paid us. We took the parcel to the DHL office in Cotonou and went back to the office. There were two messages on the answering machine.
    The first was Colonel Adjeokuta from the 419 squad in Lagos. Bagado called him back and caught him leaving the office. I listened in on a separate earpiece. All he could give us on Chemiclean was what he’d found in his file. A single copy of a letter sent through to him anonymously with the receiver’s address blacked out. The postmark on the letter was the City of London. From the opening paragraph it was clear that the company that Chemiclean had mailed were specialists in the transportation of hazardous cargoes and Chemiclean were touting for business. They said they had a large tract of land in the Western State of Nigeria, close to the Benin border, where they had built a concrete bunker. They were offering this as storage space for pretreated toxic waste and inquiring of the company if they knew anybody in need of that kind of service. The colonel’s team were working on getting the name of the addressee of the letter and would be back in touch later.
    â€˜Why didn’t you tell him what we’d just found in the Western State of Nigeria close to the Benin border?’ I asked.
    â€˜My instinct told me to wait.’
    â€˜Your instinct told you that your friend the colonel is in the army and those boys sealing off Akata village were army too?’
    â€˜It could be very complicated