Making Wolf, page 9
“I want the disability allowance,” said Aaron. “For that you can have this box.”
“What’s in the box?”
“Proof of what I will tell you after you pay me for it.”
“The money was for Idris. If he’s dead—”
“Mr. Kogi, let me be plain with you. I know you are not here peddling a disability allowance. If that were the case you would have found someone to impersonate him and split the money. I don’t even believe your real name is Kogi. Now, all I’m asking is some money for me and my boys in exchange for information on my cousin. Surely, this is fair?” His upper incisors were cracked, and I wondered how it was that they didn’t cut his tongue when he spoke in his gradual Yoruba.
“One hundred dollars. If I like what you have, another hundred afterwards.”
“No, sir. Two hundred now, two hundred afterwards, whether you like it or not. But you will like what I have to say, sure banker.” He cracked a rare smile. One of the boys scratched his own belly, showing such indolence that I wondered if there wasn’t something wrong with him, neurologically.
I counted off the bills and handed them to him. He carefully verified the amount then slowly put the cash in his pocket. He gave me the box and began to speak.
“Idris was my cousin on my father’s side, first cousin, brothers like. He was the most successful member of our clan and, as a result, the one we all went to. When he went into law enforcement, everybody derided him, and his mother wondered—”
“Mr. Wallace, I don’t want a biography. I want to know what happened to him.”
“Yes, well, he and I were close. I came from our village in Okun to live with him in Ede when he got that government job. He was always paranoid. He would check locks and alarms and telephone me several times a day to make sure I hadn’t broken any of his many security rules or noticed anything out of the ordinary. I would tell him that the Good Book says, Unless the Lord watches the house—”
“—the watchmen watch in vain,” I completed. Psalm 127. Until that moment I didn’t even know I remembered the Bible verse.
“Yes. Idris did not derive comfort from that. He said I was a superstitious bush man and spouted blasphemies about our Lord.”
“He was a philosopher, I have heard.”
Aaron shrugged. “He had read some books. He broke his mother’s heart when he stopped attending church. She prayed for him every day and begged me to help him.”
I nodded. Deep interior Alcacians understand apostasy as long as it involves taking up another religion like Islam or even Hinduism. What fills most of them with terror is the idea of living without any religion. How could one live without any obeisance to the spirit world, however rudimentary?
“How was he on the days leading up to the explosion?”
“He was his usual self. He gave me advice since I was looking for a job at the time. There were a couple of days leading up to the assassination that he spent away from home. I got the impression that he had found a woman.”
“Why would you say that?”
“I’m not sure.” He thought for a minute. “Perfume. He started spraying perfume and bought a designer white shirt, rather than the regulation one they are meant to wear under their regulation suit. He checked the crease of his trousers.”
“Did you know who he was seeing?”
“No.”
“Did you ever see anyone he was seeing?”
“No, his job did not allow him a lot of time for dating. Irregular hours.”
“Even doctors date, Mr. Wallace, and they have irregular hours.”
“I’m just giving you the reason he gave me. His mother was worried that he was getting old without children.”
“What happened on the day of the assassination?”
“I heard about it in the news like everybody else, but I was detained for a week and interrogated because of how close I was to Idris. I was treated well compared to some. It was three months before I next saw him.”
“What was he like?”
“Scared. He became even more paranoid than before, especially after the official story came out that Pa Busi’s entire retinue had perished in the explosion. He rarely left the house and spent the day at the windows looking out of the blinds with binoculars and making notes of his observations. He bought animal traps which he placed around the entrances to the house. I had to be careful if I wanted to urinate at night. He rifled through my things everyday, looking for evidence of my betrayal. Once, I woke up with a gun to my head and him screaming at me to confess.”
“Confess what?”
“To working for some agency that was out to kill him, that was monitoring him. He was crazy. I wanted to pack up and go back to the village, but I had a mission in the city to get a good job and bring over my wife and children. I couldn’t just leave. He threatened to torture me to get at “the truth.” He spent a lot of time calling a number but being frustrated because nobody picked up the phone. He made me swear that if anything happened to him I would burn all his property. This went on for months.”
“How did he die?”
“Suicide. I went to work one day, came back in the evening, and he had shot himself in the face.”
“I see.”
“It’s not that simple. He had stockpiled weapons over those months. At night he would be beside the window with an array of loaded guns, grenades, and spare ammunition laid out on the ledge, ready for action. He did not want to die, Mr. Kogi. There was no suicide note, this from a man who wrote obsessively into his notebook. The house was in an awful mess as well. All the animal traps were sprung. It was…unusual.”
“You think he was killed, and it was made to look like a suicide?”
“I don’t know. I do know that after he died I feared for my life as well, but only for a short time. As you can see, I am still here and so are my boys. The elders say, as the crab walks so does its children.”
“True talk, true talk.”
“The secret police came and “sterilized” the scene after his death. It did not get into the papers. I was warned about discussing the matter, and I never did until I got your phone call.”
The box contained papers, photos, a mobile phone, and other random bits.
“How goes your job?”
“I lost the job, but my wife found one that pays enough, so I stay and look after the children.”
“That’s very modern of you,” I said.
“Hardly. I have no choice. And I think she’s sleeping with her boss.” He looked sadder than before and I looked away.
I paid him the balance and left with all that remained of Idris Wallace.
The next day I was up early, like four a.m., and at the desk going over my notes. Apart from the occasional crickets, there was silence. The air was muggy but not unbearable since the sun was not out yet. The air carried a residual odor from cooking, but I could not place it.
Nana was crying in the room. Three times we tried to make love, and three times I went soft inside her. I was aroused to start with, but the moment I began thrusting, thoughts of the assassination crowded into my head and I lost touch with her. She thought I was growing tired of her and that I was preparing to leave.
“In your mind you’re already gone. Your body is simply following your thoughts.”
“I’m just tired,” I said.
“Yes, you are. Tired of me.”
Nana was smarter than I; I could not ever play word games with her and win, so I got up and worked on my case.
The case was taking on interesting proportions. No longer did I consider it a chore. I started paying more attention to Nana’s thesis on Pa Busi. Afolabi’s testimony, hell, Afolabi’s existence spelled conspiracy, and Idris’ experience confirmed it.
The car slowed down, fell into a ditch.
One high-powered rifle shot.
One handgun report from close quarters.
One explosion.
They wanted to be sure.
Whoever “they” were. Elements within the government? Why? As a political force, Pa Busi was spent. He would never be running for president because an election just wouldn’t happen in his non-senile lifetime. The rebels? Pa Busi dying at either of their hands led to the current problem. Both the Front and the Christian Army needed legitimacy, and good public relations was a part of that. Assassination of a well-liked statesman was not good public relations. That was why they were paying me money to blame each other.
Mistaken identity? A random sniper who saw a shiny four-by-four and decided to take pot shots? That combined with an accidental discharge from the secret service, and a land mine going off. Right. Accidental assassination, simultaneous manslaughter with incidental mass detonation. Happens all the time.
There were a few things to follow up from the strange case of Idris Wallace. I needed to get the telephone numbers off Idris’ mobile phone. Who was he trying to reach? What had scared him so much? And his death: suicide or homicide? Did he fire the shot inside the jeep? Was that why he was increasingly paranoid? I wanted to speak to someone in the secret police about the cause of death.
I’d seen the so-called survivors, or rather, one survivor and one ghost. I needed to see the scene. I’d have to contact Churchill and get him to drive me.
I stretched, got up and massaged my temples. They were moist—I had started sweating. The cock crowed and I began my day.
When I stood near the window I saw a man standing in the street. Using the parked cars as reference, I’d say he was rather short with a shaved head and wearing a plain blue shirt hanging loose with the sleeves rolled up. He slouched away when he saw me.
I checked the gun clip.
Paranoia. It’s addictive, more so than any street drug with a bonus feature of being free.
Nana went off to work without speaking to me. The emotional backwash almost drove me to drink.
Nana had taken the car. I wasn’t going to take a taxi so I caught a danfo. A danfo is usually a Volkswagen or Nissan bus with all the factory-installed seats taken out. Except for the driver and two passengers seats. Danfo were classier and more expensive than bolekaja. Almost every danfo was painted yellow and on the side of the driver’s door, in black, was “driver and 2 passengers.” Wooden benches are used to replace the seats and bolted down inside the buses, increasing the capacity to twenty-five, the trade-off being poor ventilation. You paid cash. There were no tickets. There were no bus stops per se; just arbitrary patches of street or tarmac where people had agreed to congregate over the years. The conductor, who was invariably a minor and poorly dressed, would rattle off a list of idiosyncratic virtual bus stops with names like Anthony, Hoseni, Shuush (church), Town Planning, John Holt, Costain, Ede Central, and so on.
You had to know the name of your stop, which was fine if you had grown up and lived in Alcacia all your adult life. I had to learn the hard way to answer “Owa, o!’ at my bus stops.
I met Church at Town Planning, which was nowhere near any draughtsman or bureaucrat. The sun blazed with a whiteness that seared my eyes. I had forgotten my sunglasses in the emotional maelstrom of my fight with Nana. Churchill was wearing a red suit with a white, open-collar shirt. He had crocodile-skin shoes.
“Church.”
“Yeah, yeah, my brother.”
“I thought we were going to the interior?”
“We are.”
“You’re dressed like we’re off to a party.”
“Relax, aburo. All will become clear.” He patted me on the shoulder paternally, then stood facing the road.
We watched the cars go by in silence for seven minutes (I checked).
“This is all very relaxing, Church, but what are we waiting for?” I asked.
“That.” Church pointed to a slow-moving column of black cars with hazard lights blinking; a funeral procession. Obligatory dust cloud trailing the last car.
Only the first vehicle was a hearse. The others were converted family cars overflowing with grieving friends and family. Many of the women were wailing. As they passed us doing like fifteen or twenty, Church started to run in their direction. I did what he did. The last car was an old Citroen saloon, and it slowed for us. It was empty save for the driver. Church got in the passenger seat, and I was in the back.
“Ire, o,” said the driver. Goodness, it meant. A form of greeting.
“Weston, meet Dami. Dami’s a grave digger. Dami, Weston. Old boy. From school.”
“Bawo ni?” asked Dami. How’re things?
“O nlo,” I said. It goes, it goes.
“Who’s the client?” asked Church. He lit a cigarette and leaned his elbow out of the window.
“Malcolm Jaiyesinmi-Ojo. He dreamt he was eating at a banquet in his village. Dead the next morning. Not a mark on him.”
“Just so I’m clear: Jaiyesinmi-Ojo is dead because he ate in a dream? That’s the cause of death?” I asked.
Church and Dami looked at each other briefly and burst out laughing. “He’s been away,” said Church, as if that explained my ignorance. Dami had lost the tip of his right index finger somewhere.
“Aburo, there are two things you don’t want to do in your dreams. One of them is to eat food,” said Church.
“The other one is to fuck,” said Dami, seriously.
“True talk,” said Church.
“I’ll have to bow to your experience in the matter,” I said.
They laughed. Dami nodded. “A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness, or so our elders say.”
I had forgotten the proverb thing. Yoruba people love proverbs and the appearance of wisdom gained by using a proverb in speech. And attributing the wisdom to Our Elders so that in addition to being wise the speaker is also considered humble. It was tiring.
I said to Church, “Why do we need to attend the funeral of Matthew Jaiyesinmi-Ojo?”
“Malcolm,” said Dami, wagging a finger.
“Malcolm,” I said. “So, why?”
Church turned and smiled at me, toothy and lupine. “Funerals are lucky for you and I, aren’t they?”
After the ceremony the friends and family of the departed departed, and it was left to Dami to fill up the grave. All through the service and the caterwauling, Church smoked and told me about a fellow rebel called D’Jango. Legendary. Fierce “warrior” according to Church. D’Jango took his name from a cowboy film.
“Django. Franco Nero. 1966. It was on TV a lot when we were young. You remember it?”
“Vaguely,” I said.
“D’Jango went at government troops with a hard-on, and I mean that literally, bro. The bobo went into battle stark naked with his dick and his gun pointed at the enemy. Scariest thing I’ve ever had to behold.”
“I just knew the conversation would get to penises sooner or later,” I said.
“He said it was what the medicine man told him to do. Said as long as he didn’t put clothes on, bullets would not find him. It worked.”
Dami was sweating, even though the sun was making its way down, time being about five in the afternoon. He had stripped down to his shorts, and rivulets of sweat trickled down his muscles. He had almost finished. The hole in the ground was filled, and the cement work was all but done. It felt odd not helping out, Church chain-smoking and me just hanging about. A few times my phone vibrated in my pocket, but I ignored it, knowing it was Nana and that she would misunderstand my reasons for not answering.
“What happened to him? D’Jango?” I asked Church, since he was not answering any questions about our purported trip to the bush.
Church waved his cigarette in circles, terrorizing the swarm of gnats that had gathered around him. “Ambushed by government troops, captured, tortured. He could be dead, languishing in a gulag or rotting in a hole somewhere in the bush. Anything is possible.”
Dami was taking Polaroids of the completed tombstone and gravesite, slowly walking around to get shots from various angles. When he finished, he arranged his tools carefully on the ground and said, “Wait till nightfall before you start anything. I mean it, Churchill; I don’t want to hear any stories. I like this job.”
Church brought out a bottle of Gordon’s Gin, unscrewed the cap, and poured the clear liquid over the new gravestone. “Ile’n tile.” The dead belong to the ground. He handed Dami a wad of cash, and I felt for my own money belt. It was reassuringly snug. Exit Dami.
Church drank the gin and passed me the bottle. He asked for it back when I had taken two long swallows. The gin went down like sulphur. I would bet that it was local gin in the bottle and not Gordon’s. I told Church so.
“Of course it isn’t Gordon’s. Do you know how much it costs to buy the original? No, this is bottled somewhere off Atakunmosa by a friend of mine. Sells them to me half-price.” He glanced about and picked up the pickaxe. “Time to start work.”
“Work doing what?”
“Resurrection.”
Grave robbing was a new low for me. Church, I could tell, had done this before.
A bus arrived to pick us up. Church phoned for one like a general calling for an air strike. He still refused to answer any of my questions. I didn’t answer any of my phone calls from Nana. The driver of the bus said nothing, but he did wrap the corpse in tarpaulin before helping us lift it on to the bus. Church seemed to be in a good mood, and I wanted to kill him. But I owed him my life. Of course, my life wouldn’t have been in danger in the first place if he hadn’t put me in harm’s way. I decided to check my voicemails to distract from the lolling of the sheet-wrapped body.
Meep: “Hey, loverboy. Sorry about the hormonal blah blah this morning. I’ll make it up to you, okay? Call me back.”
Meep: “I just got fired from a job. It stings a bit, you know. Not still angry, are you?”
Meep: “Oh, never mind. Sulk then.”
Our next stop was a strip of dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Church called it Black Market. There were women hanging around and men floating by in various automobiles. The women were of all shapes and sizes. They were painted like masquerade performers and bared as much flesh as they could. Nobody cared about cellulite.
