419

  The rebels had cut their motor, and Nnamdi heard something small and afraid whimpering from below the other boat's tarpaulin.

  "That?" said the boy from Bonny Island when he saw Nnamdi's expression. "Just this."

  The boy pulled back the covering, and below was a woman, hair-plastered with sweat, eyes terrified. An oyibo in khaki clothes.

  They hadn't bothered to bind her wrists. In a swamp like this, where could she possibly run?

  "All the oil companies, all is under lockdown. Armed guards everywhere. So we raided a French facility, next creek over. Aid workers, is what they said—when they was dying. Workin' for oil either way. The men she was with, all died in de tussle. Found her hidin' under a bed. A handsome ransom for dis one, I think."

  Amina looked at the pale creature, the frightened batauri cowering at the feet of her captors, saw herself in those washed-out eyes.

  The boy from Bonny laughed. "I see you caught a woman of ya own. I would trade wit' you, but I thinkin' ours is worth a lot more."

  Nnamdi forced a smile. "So be, so be. Not worth much, mine.

  Cost more to feed than to keep."

  The pale woman looked at Amina. "De I'eau," she whispered.

  "S'il vous plait. De I'eau. "

  Amina handed her canteen across—the boys in the speedboat didn't seem to care—and the pale woman drank down the Portako tap water, gulping hard as Amina watched. After a minute, the men pulled the canteen away, tossed it back to Amina.

  The woman kept her eyes on Amina as the men talked large and laughed loud. "Aidez-moi, ''she whispered.

  "Je ne peux pas," Amina whispered back.

  "De femme à femme. Aidez-moi." She was holding back a sob.

  "De femme à femme. ""Je ne peux pas . . . "

  The men in the speedboat were demanding payment from the Ogoni pilot, a fee for the privilege of passing through their territory. "Coke, we want coke." At first Nnamdi thought they were demanding drugs, but no. They were eyeing the goods visible under the tarp. They were thirsty. "Give us Coke."

  "Fanta?" Nnamdi asked, pulling back the covering. One of the Egbesu boys stepped aboard to claim it. "Wait," said Nnamdi.

  "The ones below are colder." He shifted a crate and dragged out a lower box, and with this simple gesture he unknowingly saved their lives: his, the girl's, the pilot's.

  "A good man," they said, pressing the cold bottles against their temples.

  The Egbesu boys started their motor up, and the two boats slipped apart like reflections separating. Amina and the batauri woman stared into each other as the distance between them grew.

  The Himar moved again across the murky waters of the Delta.

  Nnamdi stayed silent. Finally, without looking at Amina, he said,

  "There was nothing I could do. I couldn't help her."

  "I know."

  "I couldn't."

  I know.

  In the gathering dark, they rounded a final bend in the creek to the sound of drums. The Ogoni pilot called to Nnamdi, but Nnamdi didn't know what it meant either. "Maybe a camp of some sort. It wasn't there before," he said.

  Long white banners fluttered from tree branches like cotton bandages unrolled. Chanting and drums. And in a clearing, bodies painted with chalk, dancing in a grim gin-stoked frenzy, arms jerking, guns waving in the air. A round went off, and then another.

  Amina felt the fear of a hundred days flood in. Is this where it ends? Am I taking this boat to my own death?

  "What madness is this?" the pilot whispered, slowing down to glide past, hoping not to be seen.

  "Not madness," said Nnamdi. "Egbesu. The Ijaw God of War.

  They have been inoculated, you see."

  "Inoculated?"

  "When you join Egbesu, bullets cannot harm you. They pass through your body like you are made of smoke. You can drink any poison, battery acid even, and not die. You are invincible."

  "And if you do die?" the Ogoni demanded. "What then?"

  "It means you have done something wrong, broken some commandment. If you die or are injured, the gods did not fail you.

  You failed the gods."

  "And what are their gods telling them?"

  "To fight. To drive the oyibo and the oil companies from the Delta. To make this an Ijaw state. To fight."

  For the first time, the Ogoni pilot and the girl from the Sahel looked at each other.

  "This... is not good," said Nnamdi. "It means the time of talking has passed." There would be no more ultimatums, no more proclamations or press-conference manifestos. There would only be war.

  Beyond the Egbesu camp, a familiar landscape of mangroves and small-scale cassava farms emerged. Houses floated past on shore, lit by coal oil and the occasional chest-rattling generator.

  Everything was backlit by the orange glow of gas flares.

  "My village!" Nnamdi cried, pointing ahead, urging the boat on. "That tree—that tree there?" He was pointing to a trunk that formed a wide curve over the water. "I swung from that tree as a child. And that—you see, up the hill? Below the cross? Two lights close together? That is my father's house. Where I grew up."

  Lights were blazing along the piers, bare bulbs dangling on extension cords. A city built on stilts. That's how it looked to Amina. Not a village, a city. A renewed wave of panic overtook her.

  "You said—you said seven hundred people."

  "Yes," Nnamdi said. "That's my village, in front. That, over there—" He pointed to the sprawling shantytown behind.

  Makeshift lean-tos and cast-off hovels. Huts made from mud instead of cement. Thatched roofs instead of tin. "That is not my village. That is the other side of the creek. Those are people from other villages that have been destroyed. Or abandoned. They come across at night sometimes, cause many kinds of mischief. But where we are going—that is my home."

  To Amina, the demarcation seemed to exist primarily in Nnamdi's imagination; the two communities spilled into each other with only the faintest trickle of water between. She could see a church steeple above the crowded homes, the cross perfectly silhouetted by the gas flare beyond. A hand-painted sign near the shore read WELCOME TO NEW JERUSALEM.

  The Himar bumped up against a broken-backed jetty, its hull scraping over submerged mangrove roots. Nnamdi and the pilot hopped off, pulled the boat in. "The oil company built this jetty; the rebels used it, the army destroyed it. But we can still land a boat here. We are good at landing boats."

  As Nnamdi and the pilot unloaded the crates, word spread quickly, and a crowd of well-wishers came hurrying down, cheering Nnamdi's return.

  Bare-bellied children scrambled near. "My cousins," he explained. They were holding up a rope on a stick. Not a rope. A snake—a cobra, impaled and dangling, dead. They were laughing, giggling, clamouring for attention, and Nnamdi congratulated them on their catch.

  More faces, more forearm-to-forearm clasps, more people pushing in. Everyone seemed to be a cousin, or the cousin of a cousin. "And mine is a small family," he told Amina.

  As the last of the boxes were unloaded, and as volunteers began lugging them up to Nnamdi's house, a murmur ran through and the crowds parted. A woman in flowing robes, regal in deportment, rich in laughter, came striding out.

  Nnamdi's mother.

  CHAPTER 81

  Scambaiting. This is what her brother was involved in. It was a neologism Laura hadn't encountered before.

  "Payback," he explained. "For Dad."

  They were at her brother's house in Springbank, and Warren was scrolling through website pages like a proud parent. Hed been eating Pringles as he typed, and the keyboard was sprinkled with crumbs.

  "See? That one's mine," he said. "They posted it yesterday."

  Winter had trapped Warren's kids inside. They thundered past, bickering on the fly. A muted television flickered, vying for attention: reality show contestants eating bugs, preparing sombre

  "tribal councils." Somewhere below, down in the basement, in her flannel nightgown no doubt, was Laura'
s mom. The prisoner of Springbank.

  Laura drifted back to the one-sided discourse Warren so often mistook for conversation. He was explaining the concept of scambaiting to her. "There's a whole community of us," he said.

  "Like-minded people who are fighting back. We police the net, set up traps. The easiest way is to register dummy email addresses, turn off the spam filters, and wait. When these 419 weasels come calling, we take the bait. Instead of hitting DELETE, we reply. It's fuckin' hilarious."

  Three-Stooges hilarious?

  Fingers-to-the-eye funny?

  Or celebrity-eating-a-bug funny? She remembered the prank calls Warren used to orchestrate as a teenager, before caller ID ruined that particular art form. "Ma'am, congratulations! You've just won CKUA's Chicken on the Run cash prize of one hundred dollars! All you have to do is cluck like a chicken for the next ten minutes..."

  Warren had opened his inbox and was grinning. "Y'see. Here's another one, just came in. Dear Sir, I am the son of an exiled Nigerian diplomat... The trick is to answer with the most outlandish stories you can come up with, drag it out, waste their time, and then post the entire thing online. One scambaiter convinced the con men that he was a dying Belgian aristocrat, who was just... about to... send the money... when—croak!"

  Another 419 con man had been lured into a lengthy email exchange with a certain F. Flintstone of Bedrock, USA, "a town right out of history," who kept trying to pay with clams. Real clams. Another set of messages had been sent by one Captain Kirk, who agreed to send cash only on the condition that the people contacting him joined Starfleet Academy and sent signed affidavits that they weren't secret agents of the Romulan Empire.

  "These morons actually printed off the forms, signed them, and sent them back," Warren chortled, "so Kirk kept making more and more demands. Handed it over to an associate named Lieutenant Worf, who started sending them letters written in Klingon. Some scambaiters have even convinced the con artists to send them money. Really! They'll say, ‘I can help, but first you must demonstrate your sincerity by making a small donation of a hundred dollars to the Church of the Holy Turnip.'"

  "They don't Google the names?" Laura asked. "Find out who Fred Flintstone and Captain Kirk really are?"

  "Too greedy," he said with a snicker.

  Greed versus cunning. Cunning wins. Where had she heard that?

  It came to her like a whisper from another room.

  "They want it so bad," Warren explained, "that they never realize they're being played for fools—until it's too late. Then they go ballistic, start showering you with death threats and profanity. It doesn't matter. It still ends with us laughing at them, putting everything up on the web for the world to see. Here—check this out."

  He opened a new window, clicked on a bookmarked page. A scambaiter from England had posted photos of a broken refrigerator that he'd carted up and sent COD to a con man in Nigeria, who had paid the exorbitant shipping fees expecting—-well, who knows? Gold, maybe. Certainly not a broken refrigerator. His angry response was laced with creative invective.

  "Even better are the scambaiters who email the con artists to say, ‘I'll be there Monday. Meet me at the airport! Wear a yellow hat with yellow shoes and yellow socks,'" Warren said. "One scam-baiter got a Nigerian con man to fly to Amsterdam and had him waiting in front of a webcam outside a department store, standing around for hours like a moron. And if the con man emails back, demanding to know what's going on, the scambaiter responds by getting even angrier. ‘Where the hell were you? I waited and waited!' Sometimes they'll send the con men to Western Union, and when the dupes email to say the money didn't go through, the baiter over here will fire back, ‘Well, someone signed for it! Who the hell has been cashing my money orders!' Which sends them off on another goose chase. If we re lucky, they'll start fighting among themselves, accusing their partners of ripping them off."

  Warren had moved on to another scambaiter site and clicked on the archives. "They call this the trophy room, where we post our latest conquests," he told Laura.

  Photographs of young African men, some smiling, some not, some holding turnips on their heads or with their hands in a Benny Hill salute, some dressed in a bra and panties ("as a sign of your sincerity"), others holding up handwritten signs that read MY

  BOXERS ARE HOME OF THE WHOPPER or I SHOT JR!! or BEAM ME UP

  SCOTTY! NO SIGN OF INTELLIGENT LIFE HERE.

  One man was holding a sign, purportedly in Swedish, that read:

  IMAB

  IGDO

  OFUS!

  Another had written out what he thought was the name of an international banking cartel:

  I.M.A. Liberty Organization Savings Export Revenue

  Warren was laughing out loud by this point. "Fuckin' hilarious!" Laura, however, felt a queasy sense of—not sadness, exactly. Something conflicted, the flutter of something trying to escape. Warren scrolled down: rows and rows of photographs, each one stamped OWNED! She'd seen photographs like that before. In history books.

  Warren kept opening new windows, cluttering his computer screen with their overlapping views. "Wait, wait," he said as she got up to leave. "Here's one I think you'll like. It made me think of you."

  Dear Chief Ogun,

  Delightful to hear from you old chap! I remember my days in the Colonial Office of the Sudan quite well.

  I was working with Professor Plum, who was studying the aphrodisiacal effects of zebra hoofs on the wives of British bureaucrats. I daresay Mrs. Peacock's husband eventually murdered Professor Plum. In the library. With a candlestick.

  Sincerely,

  Colonel Mustard, OBE

  PS: I have copied your request to my assistant, Miss Scarlet, at Corporate Living Unified Executives (C.L.U.E.) who handles these sorts of money matters.

  "Hooves," Laura said. "Not hoofs."

  "What?"

  "I'm going downstairs to see Mom."

  "Wait. Check it out. Another rube has just joined the Church of the Holy Turnip."

  On the muted TV screen across from them, the contestants had moved on to live worms and Laura had tired of Warren's game.

  Just as she was about to leave, though, she caught a glimpse of a message on Warren's computer screen that began "Complements of the season—" It stopped her, cold.

  "Click on that one," she said.

  The rest of the message popped up. A reply to Colonel Mustard from Chief Ogun. And there it was: complements. A common enough error, but still...

  "Can I get copies?" she asked. "Of these emails. And the others?

  Can you print them off for me?"

  "Which ones?"

  "All."

  "That's a hundred pages, at least."

  "And the emails Dad got," she said. "I'll need those too."

  CHAPTER 82

  "She can't stay here."

  "She has nowhere to go."

  "She can't stay here."

  They were talking about her, whispering in Ijaw so she couldn't understand them. But she did. She knew what they were discussing, could hear it in the tension of his mother's voice, in the pauses between the words.

  "You were always a dreamer. You never had any sense. What were you thinking, bringing her here? She can't stay."

  "She has nowhere else to go."

  Amina was lying on a mat with her back turned, pretending to sleep. Nnamdi had lit a mosquito coil for her, and she watched the thin smoke of it uncurl. Outside, heavy rains were coming down, rattling the roof. A small lizard scampered up the wall, its orange head trailing a fluid blue body.

  They were talking about her.

  "She can't stay here. She has to go."

  CHAPTER 83

  The entire village had turned out to welcome Nnamdi home with cheers and laughter, drums and dancing.

  "The prodigal son returns!" someone shouted. "Amen!" came the reply.

  Women were waving palm fronds, men were beating out rhythms. Amina's senses began to spin. The Ijaw drums were so... relentless, never
stopping, never catching their breath, so unlike the lonely strings of the goje or the winds of the kakaki flutes, so unlike the music of the Sahel. The Fulani in the north were drummers too, but they never reached the hammer-on-anvil nature of the Ijaw.