Madrid, March 2011. Photo by Matthew Asprey.

Madrid, March 2011. Photo by Matthew Asprey.

Barcelona, March 2011. Photo by Matthew Asprey.

Barcelona, March 2011. Photo by Matthew Asprey.

Honourable Mentions

Crime

Best of the best

Honourable Mentions

Ned Bennett (now living in London) told me the story of his 1973 trip to Lagos and meeting with Salif Moumouni…

Sure, Matthew, I’ll tell you what I remember about Salif Moumouni, there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long while, that bleeding thief. I was all of twenty-nine when I was promoted second unit director on The Embakasi Protocol. At the time I rubbed my hands and thought – here’s your chance, in’it, sunshine? Just don’t fuck it up.

Well, I did fuck it up.

That not-very-good film was shot in Nairobi, but there was a little prologue set among the tankers of Apapa, the busy port of Lagos. The producer couldn’t spare the expense of flying Michael Caine (lovely bloke) to Nigeria, a set at Pinewood would suffice for his Lagos scenes, but they needed some exteriors. I had three days to get the coverage and get back to Kenya. It was a shoestring mission, just me and a doddering cameraman from Lowestoft who’d fought in the Great War.

We jetted across the dark continent with six cans of raw 35mm stock, a Panavision camera, and various equipment in cargo. Lagos was hot and sticky, a cesspool of lepers and smouldering garbage and the stinking haze of open sewers. This wasn’t so long after the Civil War, you know. We were taken with our precious cargo in a van to a luxury hotel in Apapa. Now, that was a little better – colour telly, air conditioning, swimming pool. The old cameraman decided to snooze away the rest of the afternoon in his room. I changed into my swimming costume and took a dip in the hotel pool. Later, while I was smoking a fag by the poolside, who comes along but our contact, Mr Salif Moumouni. Apparently as a kid he’d worked running errands for John Huston on location in Chad, and our producer’s brother-in-law had recommended him – see, it really wasn’t my fault! Salif was originally from Dhaba, some stinking African hellhole you’ve never heard of. You had to see this chap’s get-up to believe it: purple scarf, mottled blue silk shirt, very scuffed Dingo boots, and tight green slacks. Salif was an Elvis Presley fan and wore his hair in a fuzzy sweaty pompadour. He was skinny and rather pretty. He said he would be happy to assist me tomorrow with the shoot, he knew the port of Lagos very well, knew all the best angles. I bet you do, I winked. Salif smiled shyly, and since all the while he couldn’t take his eyes off the bulge in my swimmers, I invited him up to my room. We took a bottle of Seagram’s V.O. with us.

So that sweaty afternoon I had this fellow six ways from Sunday in air-conditioned comfort. This was long before we knew about HIV and AIDS, of course. By the end I was knackered, flaccid as a dead fish and wanting a bit of kip, but Salif wanted to tell me about making movies. He had directed a 16mm movie starring himself in his native land, he said. He wanted to be the movie-star Elvis of the Republic of Dhaba. He sang me a song or two and wasn’t too bad. We went downstairs for a steak and to listen to a highlife band. I refused to let Salif stay the night in my room, though, said I needed my beauty sleep.

The next morning at dawn we loaded a rented Bedford truck with the camera equipment and the film cans and proceeded to a location Salif said was truly panoramic, perfect for the scene. Salif drove the truck and asked permission to play an Elvis Presley 8-track called I Got Lucky he’d bought that week at the market (he didn’t own a player). So we bounced along the road listening to Elvis. Meanwhile the doddering cameraman lay in the backseat reading the Daily Times of Nigeria. It was a hot-thick-rasp-in-the-lungs-plus-sun-stroke sort of a slippery morning. At some point I realised we were heading down a barren stretch of highway. I didn’t know where the bloody hell we were. What happened to the port and the panoramic view? Salif claimed he was lost. And then a Ford truck pulled up alongside us. The driver waved us off the road. Salif immediately obeyed him despite my order that he hit the accelerator. Next thing we knew four blacks with handkerchiefs covering their faces were pointing kitchen knives at us. Well, that’s the end of me, I thought – a highway robbery in bleeding West Africa. But they didn’t kill us. They transferred the camera equipment and raw stock from our truck to theirs, punctured our tyres, and buggered off up the highway.

Eventually we got back to Apapa, a long walk through the slums. I wired the producer from the hotel with the bad news. Salif said he would personally report the incident to the police and see what could be done. I wanted to go along with him, but he said he knew the right and proper way to deal with the cops, who were totally corrupt, of course. So Salif trotted off and I never saw the fucker again.

I left Nigeria with nothing to show for it but cholera. I reckon this incident explains why the supposedly impoverished Dhaban film movement began shooting features in 35mm with a Panavision camera from late ‘73.

Ruark wakes four minutes past noon at the Kythera Motel in Canberra. He gets out of bed stinking of the duplicitous woman. Sunlight is breaking through the threadbare curtains. Something went very wrong last night. He feels like shit. And he has to wait for a verdict.

Rock Hudson is on the colour TV in McMillan & Wife. The theme music is Vegas brass, Hollywood strings, some sort of electronic organ. The credits show in lurid colour the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, cable cars, the Fairmont Hotel, Haight-Ashbury. The San Francisco Ruark knows is North Beach, Keystone Korner, late nights at the San Remo Hotel, a vacation years ago.

Ruark uses the ceramic electric jug to make tea. Except for the colour TV the Kythera Motel has not been renovated. Everything has decayed: the lime green porcelain toilet and sink and shower-stall-cum-bath are rust-stained and chipped, the mosaic of small orange floor tiles marred by cracks, the orange bedspread thin, the nylon chocolate brown carpet frayed. Fourteen years ago he stayed here with Lucy, just after they were married, both attending the ’66 conference, both about to be posted to Senegal in time for the World Festival of Negro Arts. The Kythera Motel had just opened and the paint was still drying. A cameraman was shooting promotional photos out on Northbourne Avenue. He asked the guests to pose on their balconies, but Ruark and Lucy didn’t go for that kind of thing.

Now Ruark is back in Australia to present a progress report to the latest conference. Lucy has stayed in Dakar to look after her troubled Senegalese friend Nafissa, heavily pregnant and without a husband. Ruark flew into Sydney alone. Driving on the Hume Highway he’d taken a detour to check their house on the outskirts of Campbelltown. They’d never lived there, the house had always been anonymously tenanted, the mortgage was now paid off, and they were earning an income from the rent. Whenever he was back in Australia, rare these days, Ruark drove by. The whole neighbourhood had grown, theirs the first house on the street in ‘74, now surrounded by quarter-acre lots, and just across the highway an entirely new Housing Commission suburb named Radburn, a twisting centipede of cul-de-sacs with communal front lawns, a bizarre Modernist street layout, all the residents on welfare. Ruark drove along the streets and noted the abandoned shopping trolleys, the piles of plastic rubbish, the pregnant young girls, the thirteen-year-old boys sniffing glue in the shadeless parks. If Lucy could see this.

The conference had been dull except for the African woman named Oseye, a representative from Nigeria, or so she said. They’d shared a bottle of chablis at the dinner and arranged to reunite later at the Kythera. She’d left Ruark’s bed and his room sometime after midnight. He couldn’t remember exactly. After she was gone he dozed in a restless guilt, surprised by the way things had gone. I finally cheat on my wife with a beautiful black woman, he thought, after fourteen years desiring it every day in West Africa, and I do it in Canberra of all places?

Then at three o’clock two Australian officials in rough brown suits knocked at the door. Their words tumbled out as Ruark tried to shake off his grogginess: an incredible indiscretion, a suspicious woman we’ve been following, associations with the Dhaban dictator Omar Kolo, paranoia and torture, the secret war on Senegal’s borders. What do I know about that? Ruark said, I have no intimacy or influence with President Senghor or anybody else in the Senegalese government, I’m an aid worker, a teacher. Why would this woman want to approach me? All we did was talk about Afrobeat music and come back here to have sex. The officials seemed to have believed Ruark, or maybe that was just an act. You may be too compromised to go safely back to Dakar now, they said, this could be the end of your career abroad. And my marriage, Ruark said, if my wife finds out. They told him to remain in the motel and await the decision.

Now Ruark showers, eats a cold piece of chicken, and watches a bit of a Lana Turner movie on Capital 7. It’s so boring he walks down to the reception to rent one of those VCR machines and a movie on videocassette. The long-haired guy at the desk has a box of tapes supplied by his brother in Sydney where they have four TV stations (Canberra has just two). My brother even cuts the ads out, the desk clerk says. I have plenty of AO-Modified movies if you’re in the mood for something spicy. Ruark shrugs and selects Two Mules for Sister Sara, although he saw it years before. And on the reception desk he sees the motel’s dated souvenir postcard, a photograph of the building which goes back to the sixties, to the very occasion he and Lucy were guests. Ruark has never seen the finished photograph. He takes the postcard and goes back to his room.

He connects the VCR cables to the TV, puts in the cassette, fast-forwards through a long-winded introduction by a guy called Bill Collins, and as the titles play over the Mexican desert he looks at the postcard showing the Kythera Motel back in ‘66. There are several guests visible on the front-facing balconies or just behind their curtains. Ruark and Lucy were staying on the top floor at the end of the row of rooms. Their balcony is empty. In the darkness beyond the open curtains they were probably lying in bed.

And then Ruark begins to tremble. In the lower left hand corner of the photograph there are three suited men and a woman. They stand on the path at the rear of the motel. The tallest man is facing the camera and he is unmistakably Jacob De Vries, whom Ruark was not to meet until a party in Dakar in the early seventies. A chance meeting, he’d always thought, that led to a brief and ultimately unpleasant acquaintance, nothing more than a few drinks by the pool at the Hotel Teranga. De Vries was ostensibly an official with a pan-African trade organisation. He was arrested in Dakar in 1974 and accused of spying on anti-apartheid movements for South Africa. But why the fuck is he at the Kythera Motel in Canberra all the way back in 1966?

There is a sharp knock at Ruark’s door. The verdict.

At five o’clock on Blvd Arago Georges meets Ines and Peter. They all embrace, faire la bise, Ines hugging like a spider around George’s waist, she’s skinner than last winter, their sweaty secret nights in Grenoble. Has she told Peter about that? No, he still acts collegial with Georges, old pals. They sit at a table outside a restaurant near the walls of Le Santé. People have abandoned the other tables, left cigarette butts in coffee cups. Georges sweeps black cake crumbs and ants off the table with his rolled-up Libé and asks the sloe-eyed waitress for three bottles of beer. The girl looks half-Arab, lazy and sexy, she slightly resembles Shada, the girl Georges screws Mondays in Belleville. He doesn’t say that aloud to the Germans, of course.

Peter says there will be rain before dark. Georges wants to eat a hamburger but will settle for a cigarette. He pours his beer into a glass. Ines doesn’t bother with a glass, there are more important things to do. She empties her handbag on the table: passport, cheap notebooks, hotel receipts, crushed Kleenex, leaky pens, clip-on sunglasses, box of matches, diaphragm case, a paperback novel (König Salomons Ängste by Emile Ajar), Olympus microcassette recorder and six caseless microcassettes.

Peter laughs, swigs his beer, says Ines’ mood is foul after seven hours in the air without food. She doesn’t smile or laugh or do anything to contradict Peter, she wants to talk with Georges about Deles, they’ve just fled that dreadful place, she has notes to type up tonight and dispatch to Die Zeit in Hamburg by fax. She wants to interview Jean Bouchard who lived in Deles for years and directed Naïveté starring Nafissa N’Diaye. Bouchard is dead, says Georges, he killed himself last November, same day as Jean Eustache. Repose en paix. Romain Gary is a suicide, too. Everybody is dying.

Peter takes out his Leica R4, there are two or three frames unexposed, the prior twenty-two were shot on bloody streets in West Africa, it’ll be tomorrow’s front page, so let me finish off the roll and get it to the lab. He lines up a shot of Georges and Ines. Georges smiles for the camera. Oh, fucking hell, says Ines, forget memorialising this moment, there’s too much to discuss. The shutter button is jammed, says Peter, wait a second. And Georges laughs and puts a cigarette between his lips, lights a match from the box on the table, ignites the tobacco and starts to inhale. Ines is saying Omar Kolo is dead, the son is now in power, and we don’t know what this means for the people of Dhaba. Georges shakes the match but it’s reluctant to be extinguished. Ines turns to Peter and says stop that at once as Peter clicks.