The Night of the Cobra - Chapter 3

Chapter 3

They sat in a restaurant by the sea. A gentle breeze shook the Christmas lights strung around the thatched roof even now in August.

“Do you enjoy living in West Africa?” he asked.

Nina toyed with her pasta. “I think so. It can be pretty tough sometimes – everything just seems to take longer, to be more complicated, then there are the bugs and the illnesses, the heat.” She sighed, then quickly laughed.

“Sorry, that sounds very negative. There are lots of positive things as well, and it beats living in the Cheshire countryside.”

Shaun nodded.

“I bet. I’m from near Bath myself but I haven’t lived at home since I was 18 and went to Cuba for a year to check out the Revolution,” he said, laughing at himself. “I liked Cuba but now I think capitalist Paris is not so bad either.”

Nina sighed again, filled with nostalgia.

“That’s where Tim and I got married. Just off the Champs-Elysees. Five years ago.”

She fell silent for a moment, remembering that laughter-filled day, the photos in the park, Tim’s hesitant, sheepish grin at the altar, the smile that had fixed itself to her face all day. She pulled herself back to Freetown.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“Now I live in the 18th arrondissement, you know, not far from the Sacre Coeur,” Shaun said, pouring more of the acidic red wine into their glasses.

“When I was married, I lived in the 5th – but I thought that was a bit bourgeois for a bachelor pad.”

Nina held her tongue. She was curious to hear more about this sketched-out failed marriage but she did not want to presume too much intimacy from a mere five-hour acquaintance despite the ease she felt with Shaun.

She liked the way his eyes crinkled, his delicately sly humour. She noticed the way he tucked his longish hair behind his ears as he talked. She noticed herself noticing his long lashes and blushed in the half-light.

She chided herself silently. Why should she feel the need to blush? It was silly. There was no doubt the tall photographer had touched a chord. He was the type of man she liked. Articulate, sure of himself, ready to talk but assured enough to listen. Easy humour and a fast tongue.

Those were many of the things that drew her initially to Tim, when they met at a press conference in the Kleber conference centre in Paris on a dank March morning all those years ago.

She had rushed in, afraid of being late after a nightmare rush-hour taxi ride and a final 10 minute sprint through the driving rain. The press conference had not yet started but the high room with its gaudy chandelier was almost full of discomfortingly dry-looking journalists.

Sliding past the displeased looking flaks, she found a seat near the back. Tim looked up briefly from plopping batteries into his tape recorder and grinned a hello. Then, he was working for one of the smaller news agencies as a political correspondent.

He wore Lennon glasses, had a beaky nose and friendly blue eyes under tightly cut brown curly hair. The glasses made him look older than he was.

They had chatted easily while waiting for the press conference to start. He had just arrived in Paris from Rome, where he had spent two years working for a financial trade magazine. She laughed when he poked fun at his former job. He was surprisingly eloquent in describing how much he loved Rome.

She started seeing him at work events a lot, and then one evening, he turned up in the crowded, standing-room-only bar that she favoured in the narrow streets of the Marais quarter. As they chatted their friends slowly drifted away, leaving them slumped on the leather banquette in a fug of cigarette smoke, their heads bent together over the beer bottles as they traded piecemeal information under the deafening music.

Later, they went to her apartment. By 6 am, they had drunk and talked themselves sober. Tim seemed suddenly awkward as night lifted, his languid slouching on the sofa suggesting ease but maybe not attraction. She was confused and offered him the spare room for a pre-work nap.

They smoked one last cigarette and then, without speaking, he followed her back to her room. In bed, they fell wordlessly upon each other with an urgency that belied the hours of unsure verbal foreplay.

From that wordless coming together, their relationship had grown. She, who tended towards the neurotic, found comfort in Tim’s calm. His was a measured life where events and people could be controlled or at least reined in. She admired his professional integrity, and they spent long hours in a tiny bar near the seedy Les Halles shopping mall, hunched over a mosaic table debating ethics and news judgment and solving the world’s problems between kisses and secret foot rubs.

Although not one for showy displays of emotion, Tim quickly told her he loved her – SMS-ing the words to her phone one night at 1 am after she had left him on a street corner waiting for a taxi.

Soon after, they moved in together, choosing an apartment in the 11th, close to the Pere Lachaise cemetery. They spent Sunday afternoons strolling over the sun-dappled cobblestones past the tidy rows of tombs. They always stopped by Jim Morrison’s simple grave to check the latest tributes left by still-mourning fans.

Tim also often left a bouquet of flowers on the black iron railings around Chopin’s tomb – he used to play piano at school and said Chopin’s music was the only thing that made the torment bearable.

Nina felt cocooned from the world during those love-filled days. She felt so lucky to have found her soulmate. She and Tim had both played the field, and taken some body blows, but now they were being rewarded for their patience.

When she put it like that to Tim, he laughed and called her a closet romantic, but one cold night that winter, after they had been skating at the Tuileries, he asked her to marry him. When they collapsed laughing on benches to stare at stars made faint by the lights of the festive, dressed-up city, he slipped the ring onto her semi-numb finger and she started to cry.

“Where is your husband now?” Shaun asked.

She started telling him about the hunger in Mauritania, the risk of famine, but felt strangely disloyal to be even discussing Tim. She wondered why.

The question tossed around on the froth of her chatter as she described farmers forced to bring their families to refugee camps after another rainless season and Tim’s struggle to make sure aid reached remote outposts.

Later, as they paid the ridiculously small bill, and Shaun made a joke about the paint-stripper wine, the answer pierced her laughter. She was very attracted to Shaun.

She covered her shock by ferreting in her bag for a few Leones to leave as a tip. Of course, she had fancied men other than Tim before this. She was married but she still appreciated a neatly sculpted mouth on a strong face, a tall spare frame, a mane of untamed chestnut hair over a pair of dark eyes.

Since her marriage, she had always been content to admire from afar, but this time she knew it was different, more dangerous. Shaun had touched something that reached deeper than ground-level lust.

As she followed him out of the restaurant, she realised she did not want to say goodbye yet.

They decided to walk the short distance back to the hotel. The road was potholed and she stumbled several times. She had to stop herself from reaching out to grab Shaun’s arm. Physical contact seemed like the most natural thing in the world with this easy stranger but she felt she could not allow it.

“That was lovely. Thanks so much for taking me under your wing,” he said, smiling down at her. “So what are you doing tomorrow then?”

“Tomorrow is a bit of a boring day, I’m afraid. Talking heads,” Nina laughed, a little too loudly. “I’ve got an interview with the government minister in charge of youth and a few other dignitaries. To talk about the challenge of rehabilitating the kids.”

“And what are you going to do for photographs,” he asked.

“I was originally due to be coming on this trip with a French guy who freelances for The Chronicle, but he got malaria at the last moment,” Nina said. “He’ll probably come next week and since my deadline is not for another two weeks that suits me fine. He’s very good and he’s pretty sure he’ll be fine by then. It’s not his first bout of malaria.”

They were nearly at the hotel now. From a darkened alley, foot-tapping zouglou music blared from an unseen party. Along the roadside, huddled figures danced eerily in the faint light from tiny oil lamps set up on rickety stalls heaped with cigarettes, cheap palm wine and peanuts.

“I’m just going to buy some cigarettes,” Nina said, slipping her rucksack down onto one arm. She found a grubby note and took the packet from the trader, a dark form but for the glistening whites of his eyes.

As they walked on, Nina lit a cigarette and offered the packet to Shaun. The lighter caught the tip of Shaun’s cigarette and in the new intensity of black left after the spark, it happened.

A dark form hurtled into Nina, winding her and knocking her off her feet. Unseen hands grabbed her purse out of her hand and tried to yank the rucksack off her shoulders but her fall had caught the bag under her.

“The bag. Give the bag,” a voice barked.

She thought she caught a glint of steel slicing the air above her but the road was so dark here she could not be sure.

“They have knives, Nina,” she heard Shaun say, his voice choked. “Give them the bag.”

She lifted herself up slightly and again the hands yanked at her bag. This time she wriggled out of its clasp.

Now that her eyes were adjusting again, she could see Shaun kneeling on the ground nearby, his head tilted as one man held the point of a kitchen knife to his neck.

The other man turned from Nina to rummage through Shaun’s pockets. She crouched on the ground too terrified to react.

Then they were gone and Shaun was helping her up, lifting her trembling hands in his own.

“Are you alright?” His voice was heavy with fear and shock but his hands were comforting on hers.

“Yes, I think so. And you? They didn’t cut you did they?”

“I don’t think so.” He held the lighter under his chin and she checked. One bright spot of red blood marked where the knife had nicked the skin but that was all.

“I think you’ll survive,” she said, relief making her flippant. He rewarded her trembling joke with a smile.

“Let’s go. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I can’t wait to get inside the hotel.”

He grabbed her arm and together they stumbled towards the lights of the hotel car park. They did not speak again until they got inside. Nina’s mind was frozen but her body enjoyed the feel of Shaun’s arm under her’s, the smell of him, the slight jolt as his hips swayed into hers.

Deliberately she refused to attach thought to the sensations. There would be time enough for that later, and in any case, what was she to think.

“I need a drink now,” Shaun muttered as they crossed the lobby, the bright lights making them wince. Nina felt disorientated.

Here among the fake marble walls and glass chandeliers, the dark treachery of the road outside seemed alien, almost unimaginable. Shaun marched her through to the lounge where an off-key singer in a tight, white dress was crooning jazz favourites to the mostly empty flowery armchairs.

“Two whiskeys”.

She was happy to let him order. She fell back into the chair, lit a cigarette and finally brought her eyes back to her companion.

He was shaking his head morosely.

“I just can’t believe it. How stupid. I’ve only just arrived and already I’m a tourist statistic.” He grimaced.

“How do you think I feel?” Nina said. “I’m supposed to know the region, to be aware of the dangers. You must have distracted me,” she said coyly, intensely aware that she was suddenly flirting.

The whiskey arrived and she gulped eagerly.

“What did they get?” she asked in a steadier voice.

“Oh the usual. It’s pretty banal all round,” Shaun said. “My phone, my wallet, some leones and about 100 dollars.”

She grimaced. “They got my phone too, and my purse but luckily I left most of my papers and accreditations in the room.”

“Me too,” said Shaun. “Small mercies. Plus they didn’t hurt us so I suppose that’s a blessing.”

“I think they were pretty young although I didn’t really get a look at them,” Nina said, remembering the shock of the initial thud that sent her sprawling into the road.

“I suppose there is no point in involving the police?” Shaun queried. Nina rolled her eyes. “Oh well, nothing for it but to go to bed and brood on our misfortune then.”

He slammed back the last finger of whiskey. In the lift, she felt slightly woozy from the swift drink and the shock. Her brain was numb and she couldn’t think how to say goodnight.

She wanted….she wished….but now the lift doors were opening and he was getting out, two floors below her. She smiled faintly, afraid to say anything.

“Thanks for dinner,” he smiled. He leant towards here, she stiffened, half-hoping but afraid.

Then slowly, he ran his finger down her cheek, just brushing along the side of her hair.

“You’re a lovely woman. Goodnight.”

He was gone.