Passageways twisted back on themselves, a maze that seemed to shift even as you entered. Gap-toothed smiles, low chuckles.
Ongoing feuds played out as she passed—market women hectoring the air between competing stalls, hand gestures flying every which way. Arguments were entertainment. Crowds quickly formed, and no one noticed as she slipped past.
There were Fulani saddles and leather harnesses studded with silver. The tables were swaybacked with goods. Millet and guinea corn. Mounds of yams, piled high, and pyramids of Benue oranges.
Cassette players and tinny music. Grand displays of rubber flip-flops, racks of plastic sunglasses. Such abundance.
She walked across rickety slats, above sluicing drains that flowed with offal and runoff. Chophouse stalls lined the walk. Butcher blocks, splattered with blood and speckled with flies. Skewers of roasting grasshoppers hand-turned by sweat-dripping young boys.
She passed racks of kilishi drying in the sun, the meat crusted with red pepper and delectable just to look at. She fought her way past
fate vendors selling soups thick with couscous. Women stirred bubbling pots of efo elegusi—she could taste the bitter greens and melon seeds in the steam—and firepits simmered with semovita and pepper soup. She felt light-headed with hunger, ached for even a mouthful of amala.
Beyond the food stalls, in an open square, a band of acrobats were balancing on machete blades. Hand on jerry can, she pushed her way into the crowd. Where acrobats gathered, coins were tossed, and where coins were tossed, coins were lost. Contortionists vied for applause: young men standing with one leg thrown over their shoulders as casually as a scarf, while they just as casually ate great mouthfuls of fire and then spewed the flames above the crowd.
Cymbals added an urgency to the proceedings. She turned her gaze from the spectacle, eyed the crowds instead.
And there, in among the sandalled feet, a crumpled bill, fallen loose. Twenty naira at least. Perhaps if she pretended to stumble, dropped the jerry can from her head, used it as a cover to bend down, reach out...
Was that stealing, or scavenging? She looked at her right hand, imagined it gone.
And in that moment, she realized she was being watched.
She glanced back, saw one of the emir's guards suddenly near at hand: scarlet turban, sun-seared features. He was looking at her looking at the crumpled money on the ground, and he now moved toward her. The dust of invisibility she'd worked so hard to pull around her had suddenly blown aside like harmattan sand. She turned to push away, heard the guard call out and turned back, choking on her fear. But when she met his gaze, his yellowed eyes were not enraged. Instead, they cast down at the naira. He nudged the crumpled bill toward her with his foot and said, in a heavy Zamfara accent, "You've dropped something."
It would normally be considered rude, moving an item with your feet, but here in this crowd, at this moment, it was anything but. He knew and she knew. He nodded for her to go ahead and take it, and she lowered herself into a half-kneeling stance, snatched the money up, whispered "Na gode," and disappeared into the crowd.
She huddled in a doorway, pulled the other soiled bills from her folded pocket, flattened them out in her palm. Even with the coins she'd gathered outside the mosque, it was not enough for a full meal.
But it would be enough for an egg and maybe a small bowl of fura da nono, yogurt mixed with millet, mixed with ginger. A woman at the stall scooped some out for her, waited for her to finish so she could collect the bowl. It tasted like the savannah after a rain. Yogurt for the child, millet for the walking, ginger for the courage.
And just when she thought she might yet make it, might stay in Zaria and work her way into a lower position at one of the market stalls, she heard a voice across from her. Male, asking her, "Bede? Kanuri?"
A toothless man wrapped in Sahel layers was addressing her, grinning wide, trying to read her scars.
Scars tell a story. They always do, and he gestured with his chin to her patterned skin. "Dukawa? Dakakari? Aregwa?"
His guesses were getting closer, were narrowing in on her, and she fled.
"Adarawa? Tuareg?" he called out. His voice became lost to street noise, but the shock of it echoed through her rib cage.
CHAPTER 39
The Zaria dye pits lay beyond the market, near the edge of town.
Here, rolls of cloth were soaked for days in a rich sludge of ash and indigo, the liquid fermenting to create a blue so dark it was almost black. Here, too, were the scarlet dye pits of the emir's guards, and the knotted patterns they called "Widow's Eye" and "Star in the Sky."
Royal colours were being brewed that day, crimsons that seemed to bleed from the fabric and auburns so warm they tasted of honey.
She looked at her tattered robes, once a rich indigo themselves, looked at her wrists, thin and emptied of silver, felt the despair well up inside her again.
You. Must. Keep. Walking.
She filled her jerry can with water and left the city with a weight of dread upon her. Zaria was the farthest south she had ever been.
Every step now would be a blind step off a tall wall.
She followed the road out of the city as the hills and scrubland opened up before her. Distant plateaus now rose in the distance; she was leaving the Sahel behind with every step.
She felt as though she had always been walking, had been born walking.
CHAPTER 40
Laura Curtis, adrift in Room 2B, her mother and brother beside her. Detective Saul opened another folder and passed across yet another stack of papers.
"These are some of the actual documents your father received; our Tech Unit recovered them from the cached files on his hard drive. Your father had tried to delete them in the days just before his accident. He thought he'd cleared the memory, but—Here.
Your father would have signed and scanned these forms, and then emailed them back to Nigeria as attachments."
Warren studied these pages with the same single-minded focus.
"Look," he said. "Right here. This one's from Professor Kassory at the University of Lagos, Department of African Spirituality. And this one was sent by Joseph Sule, Senior Manager of the Credit Department in Abuja. How hard can it be to find these guys?
Here's one on the letterhead of the Central Bank of Nigeria, signed by the head of the International Remittance Department himself.
Look!"
"The Central Bank of Nigeria doesn't have an International Remittance Department," said Saul. "That's not what a central bank does. A central bank sets monetary policy; it doesn't chase down lost inheritances or charge fees to move money out of the country. These are counterfeits, every one of them. Counterfeits with forged signatures."
Laura caught that, the distinction between "counterfeit" and
"forged." Counterfeit: a false item or document. Forgery: something altered to resemble an authentic item. A signature would be forged.
Plastic flowers would be counterfeit. Her father had been caught up not in a counterfeit world but in a forged reality, one that had been altered to appear as something else.
It was a nuance lost on her brother. "I don't know," he said.
"These don't look like forgeries."
"Actually, they do. Counterfeit documents are often more elaborate and more official-looking than the real thing. A real document doesn't need to impress you with its authenticity; a counterfeit does." Detective Saul leaned in. "I doubt many people, Nigerians included, have ever seen an official document from the Central Bank or know what the letterhead of the Office of the Niger Delta Petroleum Commission looks like. Or if such an office even exists. An Anti-Terrorist Clearance Certificate? Anti-money laundering paperwork issued by the UN? Pure invention."
"The fees and documents," said Detective Rhodes, "are really only limited by the con man's imagination."
Warren turned a sour gaze on his mother. "You didn't know about any of this? You didn't happen to notice that, oh, Dad was receiving documents from the Central
Bank of Nigeria?"
Rhodes answered for her. "Your father's credit card statements showed regular payments to Mailboxes & More. They have a store down in Sunnyside."
"I stopped by," said Officer Brisebois. "It's not far from my place, really. I couldn't open Mr. Curtis's mailbox without a warrant, of course, but the lady behind the counter told me not to bother. The box was empty." Then, to Laura's mother, "You wouldn't have any idea what your husband might have done with the original documents? The hard copies."
"The barbecue," she said.
"Pardon?"
"The barbecue. He made a fire a night or two before the—the accident. I hadn't thought much of it at the time, but... he fired it up, even though the yard was full of snow. Said it was good to light it now and again, keep it from getting cobwebby." She looked at Laura, eyes wet. "I should have known something was wrong. We hadn't used that barbecue in years."
"But even without the originals, we've got a shitload of evidence right here," said Warren. "Messages sent back and forth between Dad and these criminals. Names, email addresses, phone numbers, the works."
Detective Rhodes spoke to Warren slowly, as if addressing a particularly slow-witted child. "They use free web-based email accounts, send out mass mailings—so many that they eventually get shut down. Now, it's true that our Tech Unit can sometimes and with great difficulty trace them back to a specific IP address.
But even then, the messages might bounce across a dozen different countries first. All we can really say is that the emails your father received were probably sent from Lagos city, in Nigeria."
"I set up Dad's email account," said Warren. "His spam filter was on."
"The people behind these cons can get around spam filters.
They prowl the internet constantly; it's what they do. They search classified ads, hang out in chat rooms, scroll through online directories. It's not that difficult to pull an email address out of the air.
Spam filters stop a lot of it. But they don't catch everything."
"Okay, okay, I get it," said Warren. "The internet is anonymous, we know that. But look." He held up a sheaf of their dad's emails. "We've got lists of phone numbers as well. Surely you can trace the numbers or something, find out who was making those calls."
"We do have phone numbers," said Rhodes. "And no doubt your father sincerely believed he was speaking with high-placed bank managers and government ministers in high offices. But the area codes tell a different story."
Saul took it from there. "Nigeria is like the Wild West. The odds of finding anyone based on a phone number are almost nil."
He slid the phone records over. "You see? The numbers all start with an eighty. In Nigeria, area codes that begin with eighty are for mobile phones, usually pay-as-you-go. You purchase minutes with no ID required, no background checks, no paper trail. The numbers, and the phones themselves, are more or less disposable.
They're used and then discarded. Untraceable."
"Okay, okay," said Warren. "The phones may be disposable, but not the money. My dad sent more than two hundred grand out of the country. What about that? Someone had to sign for those payments. Someone had to deposit them into their account. If we find those accounts, we can freeze the money, maybe get some of it back."
"I'm afraid that's not possible," said Saul.
"Why the hell not?"
"Most of the money in this type of scam is paid by bank draft or wire transfer, usually using Western Union or MoneyGram.
The funds can be sent to one office, then picked up at another.
Anywhere in the world, really. Again, there's no paper trail, no background checks, no bank account numbers, no vetting process.
Postal money orders, wire transfers, online payments: it's like sending cash."
"You might as well be stuffing an envelope with unmarked bills," said Rhodes.
"Police in Nigeria would have to nab a scammer at an actual agent's office," the older detective explained, "just as he was in the act of picking up cash with false ID in hand, and even then...
What? We don't have an extradition treaty with Nigeria. Even if we did, the people who collect the payments are usually low-ranking mules. And I imagine the police in Nigeria have more pressing matters to deal with than staking out the local MoneyGram to protect foreigners like ourselves from ourselves. It's the nature of 419."
Laura looked up, attention piqued as always by a new term.
"Four one nine?"
"That's what they call these scams. The name comes from the section in the Nigerian Criminal Code that deals with obtaining money or goods under false pretenses. Any kind of fraud, really. It's entered the lexicon over there." Laura's renewed interest encouraged Saul. "Nigerians have a wry sense of humour," he said. "Four one nine now refers to any sort of ruse or swindle. A boy who tries to hide his report card from his dad will be accused of trying to
‘419' him. Girls who have a boyfriend on the side are said to be
‘419ing' the fellow. They've got pop songs over there that celebrate the wiles of the 4l9ers. Some of the more flamboyantly successful of these scammers have been elevated to folk hero status. But don't be fooled: 419 is a business. It brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It's bigger than Nigeria; it's as old as sin. As old as desire. These 419ers, they prey on people's dreams. Average loss in a 419 scam is somewhere to the tune of $250,000—often more. The going rate for dreams, apparently."
"They're laughing at us," said Warren. "I can hear the fuckers now, living large on Dad's money. I tell you, if I find these assholes..."
"Not a smart idea," Saul replied. "The 419 business is intimately intertwined with more violent crimes. Narcotics, human trafficking, bank robberies, you name it. The syndicates that run the heroin trade in Nigeria often have their fingers in 419 as well.
And 419 can be just as lucrative, but with less mess."
"You seem to know an awful lot about Nigeria," said Warren.
"I do."
Laura looked at the detective. "You've been there, haven't you?"
"I have."
"Lagos?"
He nodded.
"What was it like?"
"It was like looking into the future."
"That bad?"
He nodded.
"Here," he said. "Let me show you something." He produced a Google Maps version of West Africa. "Nigeria's here, at the bottom of the bulge. The Niger River runs through it, empties into the Atlantic Ocean at the Niger Delta. The Delta is a huge area, home to one of the richest petroleum fields in the world. It's also one of the most dangerous places on earth. The militants and local warlords in the Delta have declared war on the oil companies. You might have heard about it in the news."
They hadn't.
"Masked men," Saul went on, "in speedboats, attacking pipelines and oil wells, blowing up offshore oil platforms. The militants have been kidnapping and killing foreign workers with an unsettling ease as well. And not just workers. Any foreigner is considered fair game. In fact, oil, kidnappings, and 419 fraud are Nigeria's three biggest growth industries, and they often overlap.
The Niger Delta fuels Nigeria's economy."
Literally, Laura thought.
"Lagos is over here." The detective ran his finger back along the coast. "Not in the Delta, but on the same coast. The city was named by the Portuguese. Means swamp or pond water or something. This entire stretch of shore used to be known as the
Slave Coast. It was dangerous even then. The early explorers wrote warnings on their maps: ‘Many go in, few come out.' If you were to show up today, start poking around, asking questions, odds are you'd end up in Lagos Lagoon with a surprised look on your face.
For anyone thinking of making the trip to Nigeria to recoup their losses, my advice is simple: don't."
Laura now understood the significance of the empty hallway on the other side of the glass. The detectives were telling the truth.
No one was watching. Why? Because there would be no m
ore investigation, no follow-up. They've already put Dad to rest. They're just walking us through the why of it.
She looked at the older detective, said, "The money's gone, isn't it?"
He nodded.
The money. And her father too. "You're not going to arrest anybody, are you?"
"We'll forward what we have to the RCMP and they'll log the information, but—honestly? There's not much more we can do."
Officer Brisebois had been studying Laura's face. When he spoke his voice was soft. "No one," he said, "is going to be arrested."