Making Wolf, page 19
“Hello?”
“Speak.”
“We need to talk. I went to the PCA camp…”
There was blinding, retina-shattering sunlight dazzling me and heating me up so that I wanted to take off my shirt but didn’t because of the gun in my waistband.
It was so hot that I could hardly breathe.
I bought three sachets of iced-water and broke them over my head one after the other. The market gate was sticky, sweaty, and crowded. A murder of the most motivated traders on the planet pressed against me, tried to sell me items. The most outrageous was a Barack Obama dildo, for which the seller could be jailed (Alcacia has draconian obscenity laws).
Area boys postured at me. I postured back.
Just outside the gate there were four piles of books and a five-cent-per-copy sign. There were very few bookshops in Alcacia. Pupils bought their text books from the market. These were usually bad photocopies of originals, bound and sold at one-hundredth the normal price. Plus, most of the books sold were the King James Bible and the complete works of William Shakespeare, which our education minister described as the backbone of Alcacian education. It had been so for almost two centuries, and, as a result, every adult in the country had a rudimentary knowledge of the Tragedies and Comedies and Sonnets. This gave Alcacians a tendency to the occasional quotation or the intermittent use of an archaic English word or phrase.
Commotion. A Toyota honked its way through the crowd at two miles per hour. There was, officially, a road in front of the market gate, but nobody ever used it. Except Churchill. Old women moved their stalls, cursing his family line with exotic poxes.
I was embarrassed to get in the car.
Chapter Twenty-two
The drive home took an hour because I had to keep describing the way, and, to be fair to Church, my descriptions were below par. Church was good-natured about it, at least to me. He cursed many other road users.
He thought I was lucky to live in England and told me so. “Those white women, what are they like? I’ve heard they can be wild.”
“Some of them are,” I said. “But it isn’t that simple. You can’t just walk into a party and assume. You have to wait, watch reactions. You see white faces, most of them are okay, but some of them are racist. You can’t tell. So you wait. You don’t know for sure the people who are just casually xenophobic and humor you by talking to you. Attempt to take it further and they freeze you out.”
“Seriously?”
“Understand, they don’t mean any harm. They just…I don’t know, at times, when you use words of more than three syllables, they look at you like you’re a performing monkey, with surprise and amusement. They think you’re clever. Like that Carter book.”
“Who?”
“Stephen L. Carter. He wrote a book called The Emperor of Ocean Park. Black law professor in America. He wrote a complex—”
“Man, all I wanted to know is how those English women are.”
“They’re wild, Churchill. Wild.”
“I knew it,” he said, without irony.
There was no parking on the street. The local government had decided to regrade the surface, and all the cars were either in driveways or garages. We parked two streets away from the flat in front of a general store whose owner erupted at us.
We walked back.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding,” said Church.
“It would appear so.”
“And this belongs to your lady friend.”
“As far as I can tell.”
I unlocked the stairwell.
“And this is that girl who drove that Mercedes the other day? The hooker?”
“She’s not a hooker.”
“I hope not. Nasty, nasty pestilence in these parts, aburo.”
We went up the stairs. I led. It was dark on account of having no windows. Light bulb must have blown or burnt out. Except…
“The front door is ajar,” I said. I started hurrying up the remaining stairs. “Nana?”
I called out, but the apartment was a mess. Inside, there was a guy wearing denims, holding my folders, and sporting dreadlocks. He looked as surprised as I felt.
A yammering began in my brain, telling me to draw and use the gun at my waistband. Before I could act on it, Church pushed me down and to the left, then he leapt over my legs with a grace that belied his shape and the size of his belly. The man dropped the papers and engaged Church.
My neighbor and his two wives were angry again, quarreling, sounds coming at me from the open window.
Church punched the rasta twice, a right hook and a left upper cut—two cracks that made me wince. The rasta kneed Church and kicked him on the side of the head, then spun the other leg into Church’s side. Church fell down but grabbed a chair leg and hit the rasta with it around the ankles. He continued to hit the rasta on the legs from his position on the ground. He rose while the rasta tried to evade the blows. The rasta backed down for a step, and then came forward in a flurry of punches that Church took on his forearms, which he held up in a boxer’s stance. The rasta was ferocious, relentless. Church feinted, then hit out with a straight left that landed on the rasta’s chin, dead center, dazing him, making him cry out in a female voice.
The rasta was a woman.
One of my neighbor’s wives screamed, said she was returning to her father’s house if this is how she was to be treated.
Church was bleeding from the mouth and nose, but the rasta looked more unsteady and punchy. I had my gun out, but they kept circling each other, stepping over overturned furniture and broken pottery. Church dropped the chair leg.
“Church, get out of the way.”
He spat blood and sputum. “Stay out of this. It does not concern you.”
He jabbed at the rasta, easy for him given his simian reach. Each jab hit home. The rasta cried out with each impact in her all-too-obvious feminine voice. Her denim jacket fell open in parts, and her stagger was more visible. Church closed in on her. They scuffled, and Church exhaled sharply.
“You sneaky bitch,” he said. There was blood on his left side, which he held with his right hand. No blood seeped through his fingers. “Ifa teju mo mi ki’n laya.” Which was a prayer to Ifa for courage.
The rasta held a short blade in her hand.
There was finally some distance between them, and I aimed. “I’m going to shoot.”
“If you fire that gun I will hit you so hard that your neighbors will think there’s been an earthquake.”
Church picked up the chair leg again and swung it, missed, took a knife scratch on his arm, ignored it, and smashed his elbow into the rasta’s temple. She went down, limp and heavy.
Church followed, slumping down beside her. He knelt and hammered her head repeatedly with the chair leg until the only movement from the rasta was convulsive twitching of her limbs and the transmitted shocks from being hit.
Church roared, and smiled. Bloodstained teeth. The rasta was supine on the floor, head bleeding, making random, useless arm movements. Church flipped her over. She was not quite dead. He picked her knife off the floor and cut a hole in the seat of her jeans. Then he took his own trousers off, revealing a massive erection.
“Church, what are you—?”
“Shut up. Nkan t’agba lagba fi n’je eko, abe ewe l’owa.”
I still don’t know what that means.
He spat into the hole he had made and took a handful of her bloodstained locks to steady himself and began to rape her, roaring with each thrust.
I pointed the gun at him weakly, but he closed his eyes and shivered violently. By this time, the rasta was still and blood no longer pumped from her head wounds.
Church rolled on to the floor, breathing heavily, laughing, penis dribbling semen on to his pubic hair.
“That was the most disgusting thing I have ever witnessed,” I said.
“Which part? The part where I saved your life? Again?” said Church.
He was showering. Blood oozed from the wound in his side. He did not seem to be in pain.
“You sexually assaulted a corpse,” I said. The mirror of the bathroom steamed up rapidly.
“That’s not entirely accurate, but would it have been better if she was alive?”
“Church—”
“Make yourself useful and search her,” he said. “Hey, can you get gonorrhea from a dying cunt?”
The rasta had twenty-five dollars and sixty-eight cents in cash, a bus ticket from 1975 to God knows where, two spent shells, a packet of gum half-full, a smoke grenade, and a cell phone.
I wiped the phone clean of blood and checked the recently dialed numbers.
I hit redial.
“Hello? Ikem, where the hell are you?” said the voice of Abayomi Abayomi.
I rigged up the television. There was a crack across the screen, but apparently plasma TVs can still run with cracks. There was a third-rate werewolf movie showing. American. With lots of stylish gunfire, dark-haired women with piercings. Shit, really.
“I have some people coming to take out the garbage,” said Church. He poured vodka on his wound.
“You should probably pour that over your genitals,” I said.
“Funny.”
I sat on the righted sofa and watched lycanthropes.
“Do you know her?” I asked.
“Nope.”
A long-haired man transformed into a werewolf. It appeared painful, and he screamed for longer than it seemed possible, considering the size of human lungs. He grew in size. I hate it when that happens in films. Where does the mass come from? Where were the laws of physics when it came to making wolf?
“That woman killed Pa Busi, you know,” I said.
“So I guess you solved the case.” Church took a swig of vodka. “And I’m a national hero for executing her.” He smiled, crossed his legs on a broken stool, and watched fang and claw rip a SWAT team to pieces.
“I haven’t solved anything,” I said.
“People’s Christian Army shooter,” said Church. “That’s solved enough for me.”
“What did she want with me? In my flat?”
“She wanted your files on Pa Busi,” he said, pointing to the folders the rasta was holding when we came in. “And it’s not your flat.”
People were coming up the stairs.
“That would be people with sharp implements and miles of plastic wrapping to dispose of our assassin.”
Except when the door opened, three men and one woman came in.
The woman was Nana.
Chapter Twenty-three
“Her name was Ikem Okafor,” Abayomi Abayomi said. “She was an assassin and, yes, she did work for us.”
“You guys killed Pa Busi,” I said.
“No, we did not. There was no such mandate. Just let me finish what I have to say.”
“Go on.” I twirled the Epoch canister in my left hand, holding the phone in the right. A mournful wind rattled the shutters on Aunt Blossom’s sitting room windows. It had been three days since the murder/rape of Ikem Okafor.
“You realize, Weston, that this means you should move up the Epoch time table.”
“How so? Your assassin was revealed in the presence of a high-ranking Front member. My guess is that they’re putting that information into the public domain as we speak. You can’t use Nana as far as leverage is concerned because—heh—Nana’s turned up.”
“How about these two words: remote detonator. You like them?”
“Interesting words.” I dropped Epoch. It bounced and rolled to a stop about a foot away.
“I thought you might find them interesting.”
“Tell me about Miss Okafor.”
“It’s Mrs. Okafor, actually. Husband deceased. She was about forty years old.”
“About?”
“Birth records lost. The Liberation Front burned down her village years ago, killed her parents and family. She was used as a sex slave in the camp. In those days we had frequent skirmishes, gained and lost ground, killed some of theirs, lost some of ours.”
“I notice, Abayomi, that your legal detachment is missing from our last few talks.”
“We took Ikem’s village when she was twenty. She volunteered to work for us. Although we held that ground for fourteen days, when we pulled back, she came with us.”
“You seem passionate when talking about this war now. Involved. Engaged. I would go as far as to say invested.”
“At first she did what all the captured girls did, namely cooking, cleaning, running the domestic engineering side of things. There was sex, of course, but it was at least semi-consensual.”
“I don’t think you’ve been totally honest with me. I don’t think you are being honest with me now.”
“Nobody remembers much about her before what I’m about to tell you. You already know she was as ugly as Satan’s armpit. She was also completely lacking in the curve department, looked like a man.”
“Are you ignoring me?”
“Men going to war will fuck anything with a wet hairy hole, though. She was with a new recruit one night, and he took his rifle with him to her quarters. He fell asleep as you do. She got up to take a shower. Just as she went to the well our boys brought in a batch of prisoners, one of whom Ikem recognized as her rapist.”
“I wonder why this sudden surge of emotion.”
“Pay attention. This is important. Ikem calmly walked back into her room, picked up the rifle lying next to her lover who was still comatose. She had never fired any kind of firearm up to this point. She walked outside, took aim from what onlookers said was about twenty feet away, and shot. Took the top off her target’s skull with the first burst, split a banana tree behind him as well, but it survived. Sadly, he did not.”
“Understandable.”
“You need to imagine the shot. The target was moving and surrounded by agitated revolutionaries. It’s confusion at such times in the camp. Lots of shouting and tumult.”
“Rowdiness.”
“Yes. And through this a woman who had never handled an AK picked her target with no collateral damage except for a vegetable cluster. That’s beyond amazing.”
“A gift. An affinity for the gun.” He ignored my mocking tone.
“She almost got herself killed because of the abundant enthusiastic soldiers swiveling on her. We thought it was a fluke.”
“Beginner’s luck.”
“Yes. Except she was tested. Mastered any gun or rifle our Chinese instructor threw at her in record time. Up to ninety percent of the time she’d hit dead center. I’m exaggerating, but only a little.”
I had seen evidence of her accuracy in the bus terminus, and she must have been good to make the Pa Busi shot from a palm tree.
“I believe you, but only with respect to Ikem’s accuracy. My previous suspicions remain intact.”
“The Russian advisors just about had an orgasm when she demonstrated her skill. She was fast-tracked for as much training as possible. She ate it all up. Ikem Okafor loved weapons, hated the Front, and had no regard for human life, hers or anyone else’s. She was also nigh invisible. Quiet. The exact opposite of a showboat. She cared about nothing other than when it came to the Front. She killed dozens, maybe hundreds. I don’t know. Not privy to all of it. She worked best in a semi-autonomous way. We used her as a gun. We pointed her in the general direction of an enemy and said ‘kill.’ Let her loose in a jungle, and the enemy will be pissing their pants in twelve hours, wondering who would be shot next.”
“Who pointed her at Pa Busi?”
“Nobody. She pointed herself.”
“Bullshit.”
“Believe what you want. When I first heard of his death I thought it was a mistake. Land mine. But I also knew that she was in the area at the time. Since her death, I’ve searched her things. She had a diary. She did not like the peace process and wanted things to return to the way they were.”
“Attrition. Internecine aggression. Hostility. Kill, kill, kill.”
“Instead of standing down as ordered, she jump-started the war. Or so she thought.”
“And the land mine?”
“Coincidence.”
“…”
“Look, you can read the diary, access her room if you want. I can arrange it.”
“You’re too kind.”
“Weston, this makes it all the more important that you deliver Epoch soon. The front will be—”
“Relax. I have an appointment with El Jefe in two days. I’ll take your engine of war then.”
“Good to know. Weston, I—”
“What do you know about Nana Hastruup?”
“Everything. What do you need to know?”
“How did the affiliation with the Liberation Front start?”
“At university. She got kicked out for ‘fomenting unrest,’ which is the administrations term for headstrong communist radical.”
“Wait. She told me she left university voluntarily. There was a randy professor who wanted blowjobs for grades or something.”
“Weston, I have a carbon copy of the letter. She was rusticated. She and a few others set fire to the campus zoo and released all the animals.”
Which just made sense. Was everything she told me a lie?
“What else?” I asked.
“She wrote a few self-published pamphlets about her beliefs. Brilliant, but strident. She seemed angry that when the colonial powers were here they created a bureaucracy headed by privileged whites but that, after independence, Africans did not dismantle the structure, which led to all kinds of corruption. The inequity continues to this day and, according to her, needs to be brought crashing down in the fireball of revolution. Maybe four people read the pamphlet. One of them was obviously from the Front because they approached her for propaganda work. In the Red Summer she wrote the sheet that dissected the suicide bombing phenomenon and exposed it for the rubbish it was. You heard of that? 2002?”
“I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know the details.”
“A new school of thought. The brains behind the People’s Christian Army decided to borrow a page from Islamic fanatics and blow themselves up. A whole doctrine was dreamed up to justify this, and susceptible young fools streamed into marketplaces and cinemas and political rallies just to blow themselves up. Her essay on the topic is credited with ending the phenomenon. Fucking sharp mind, no argument about that anywhere.”
