"Tell me, Winston. Do you believe in God?"
"I do."
"At the seminary in Old Calabar, we were taught that God sees everything. Do you believe such things?"
"I do, yes."
"Do you want to end your days in Kirikiri Prison? Do you want me to end my days in Kirikiri?"
"No, sir."
The Oga leaned into the circle of light, and when he spoke he did so with great deliberation, putting equal emphasis on every word, every syllable. "We who traffic in falsehoods must put a premium on the truth. I will ask you this only once, and you will answer truthfully. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir, I do."
"Winston, where is the money?"
"It was—it was a trap, sir. A fiendish trap. No money."
"No money? Or did you pocket it?"
"No, sir. She's connected to the EFCC. She—she knows my name."
"Does she know my name?"
Quickly. "No."
"Come closer, I want to look in your eyes."
Winston did as he was he told, and Ironsi-Egobia leaned toward him in the way someone might for a kiss. "If you lie, Winston, I will know. So I ask you again. Does she know anything about me?"
Winston shook his head, mute with fear.
Ironsi-Egobia nodded, pressed a handkerchief to his mouth.
He held back a cough, held it till his eyes began to water. "Tunde," he said at last.
Winston hadn't realized Tunde was there till the man stepped out from the corner. A thin figure, almost feline. A shadowman.
"Yes, bruddah guyman?"
"Go now and fetch me the Ijaw boy."
CHAPTER 105
It rained every night it seemed, even though it was supposed to be Lagos's dry season. Scalding heat during the day, then sticky and wet come evening.
With the rains, the sewage in the gutters rose and mixed with rubbish to create a diarrhea-grey sludge. Cholera waters, people said. "Wait till the monsoons," she was warned. "The streets of Iwaya will swim."
The neighbourhoods of the city spilled one into the next; she and Nnamdi were caught on the mainland somewhere between Tatala and Iwaya.
"The monsoons," the other women warned, eyes on her belly.
Dysentery. Typhoid. Malarial fevers. "It's the dying season for children."
But there were children everywhere, lugging heavy pails, running errands, playing games. If the street was thick with sewage, it was also thick with children.
It had taken them twelve hours in a crowded bus across washboard roads to get from Warri to Lagos. They'd had to find a way past Port Harcourt, and it had cost them. They spent most of Nnamdi's savings just to get out of the Delta; what the police hadn't taken, the army had, and they'd arrived with only what Amina had managed to hide under her robes, wrapped tight to her belly. No market stall with living quarters waiting for them, no mechanics guild for Nnamdi to join. They hadn't even made it across the bridge to Lagos Island. Nnamdi was disheartened, but Amina remained unbowed. She could see the future—their future.
Like a sword raised. Sunlight on silver.
Lagos itself was a marketplace, a crossroads of caravans and kingdoms, and in among the swirl of colours, among the Yoruba blues and Igbo reds, she knew there was room enough for indigos and other savannah dyes. She would find a way in to the markets of Lagos Island, and she would bring Nnamdi with her, sunlight on silver.
Ironsi-Egobia's swampy-eyed associate, Tunde, had found a place for them in a cement-block building patched over with cardboard and corrugated metal. They shared a room with two other families: twelve people, sleeping in shifts with only a tattered curtain dividing genders, a communal latrine out back, a wash basin and kerosene stove in the hallway, an alleyway for washing clothes.
Laundry was draped like banners from window to window. And everywhere: the footfall of children running, flip-flops slapping air.
The latrine sluiced into an open gutter that was crossed with planks. It ran just outside their window, and the smell of it kept her awake at night, with Nnamdi lying on the other side of the curtain, breathing softly. Sometimes she would hear him stir, would hear him wake and tiptoe outside to sleep on the stoop to escape the smothering air within. He'd been warned about the city's malarial mosquitoes, but they had only the one sleeping net, and he had given that to Amina. "The baby needs it more than I," he'd said.
Even with the cesspool slumber and crowded quarters, Amina counted them among the lucky. They had a roof, a kitchen, a place to sleep. They weren't under plastic tarps amid smouldering rubbish, they weren't picking through refuse for food. She even had a chair, where she could sit and rest her back while wringing the washing.
On Amina and Nnamdi's street was a small shrine to the Yoruba god Lyamapo, deity of the womanly arts—including the art of childbirth. The other women in her building had urged Amina to pray at the shrine or at least lower her eyes when she passed, and though Amina demurred, out of fidelity to her own faith, Lyamapo watched over her nonetheless: a goddess reclining, children at her feet and three sets of arms reaching out, offering up the Three Essences of a Woman's Life: advice, blessings, and regret. Sometimes Amina thought about the French hostage, the woman they'd discovered on the boat trip to Nnamdi's village, wondered if she was still out there, lost in the Delta, begging for water. Wondered if an oyibo god was watching out for her as well.
The people on their street moved aside for Amina. At first she thought it might be her belly, so round and taut, barely contained by her wraparound gowns. Then she thought it might be the story etched on her face. But as she passed, she would hear whispers of
"area faddah," which could only mean Ironsi-Egobia.
Tunde had told Nnamdi that their benefactor had begun his ascent right here, in the mainland slums of Iwaya, before crossing the bridge and staking his claim on Lagos Island. Even the hoodlums who swept through, bullying families and shaking coins from the wretched and the wounded, gave a wide berth to the building Nnamdi and Amina were in.
No work for Nnamdi, still no word from Ironsi-Egobia.
Nnamdi couldn't afford mechanic's tools to set himself up as a freelance footwalker, shilling his services in go-slows and off-ramps.
He could do nothing except wait on his cousin's word.
It was Tunde who drove Amina out to the hotel that first day.
She watched the airplanes coming in low across the skyline on the drive up, saw the hotel in the distance. It looked partly like a palace, partly like a hospital. A fountain out front, spilling water. A lobby so large it trapped echoes. And batauris everywhere, what Nnamdi referred to as oyibos. The place was infested with them, faces pink and bloated.
The air in the hotel was as cold as ice water. Amina marvelled at it while Tunde and another man haggled over her worth.
She couldn't speak their language, but she knew the man was complaining about the size of her belly. It took some time to find a uniform that fit her, and the one they gave her was so large the hem had to be taken up. Amina never came in through the lobby again after that, entering instead through the staff door, frisked by security every time she left.
Tunde drove her in only that first day. After that, she made the long walk to Makoko Road every morning to climb into a danfo headed to Ikeja. A forty-minute ride, longer if she got caught in a go-slow.
On Amina's first full day of work, the woman in charge of housekeeping took one look at her belly and put her on toilet-and-mirror duty. This was actually a gruff piece of kindness on the woman's part, sparing Amina the heavier work details. Instead of flipping mattresses, she would wheel a bucket and mop down the hallways, with Windex and spray bottles holstered beside, ahead of the larger linen carts and the Hoover maids that followed. "Don't want de baby poppin' out early. Would have to put her to moppin' floors too!" said her supervisor with a large laugh.
The hallways in the hotel smelled of medicine, and the beds were as tall as tables. (She couldn't imagine sleeping so high up without feeling dizzy.
) She was taught to knock before swiping her card to let herself in. Still-life arrangements of other people's lives: neckties hanging from chair backs, emptied bottles lined up on the dressers, tangled bedsheets as though a battle had taken place.
The a/c in the rooms made her forehead ache—"You will get used to it," Nnamdi warned, "I did"—and her pay went directly to Ironsi-Egobia; she never saw a single time sheet or work stub.
Management had set Amina up with a hotel bank account—all employees had one—but what little money she was able to deposit came in the form of tips left behind by departing oyibos. Loose bills tossed aside like lint from a pocket, they were gathered and tallied, divvied up and carefully allotted by the housekeeping staff at the end of each shift. Barely enough to feed herself, let alone Nnamdi—or the baby inside her that was pushing ever outward, impatient to arrive. A headstrong child, she knew that already.
Headstrong and hungry.
Amina worked in advance of the other cleanup crews, and, by God's grace, fortune would sometimes smile: a half-eaten sandwich, consumed quickly, or a neglected side salad; a tip of two fifty-naira bills, where one would do. She would extract one of the bills and pocket it quietly, but she never touched the American dollars or British pound coins, on the chance that security would find them on her when she left at the end of her shift and inform housekeeping that she'd been skimming. It wasn't stealing, she told herself; the guests never said who the tips were meant for.
First in, first fed, as the saying went. And anyway, security checks weren't looking for naira; they were looking for silverware and
oyibo wallets.
Amina was saving up these small windfalls so that she could pay for a midwife when the time came. She'd already spoken to several prospective women on her street and had amassed almost enough for the fee. She was stockpiling water as well, bringing a plastic bottle in to work every day and filling it with tap water before she left. The water smelled of bleach, and she couldn't drink it unless it was boiled with pepper as a soup. But Nnamdi wasn't as picky, and would take a bottle of hotel water with him when he left in the mornings.
A mechanic without tools, Nnamdi hadn't spoken with his cousin protector since that first day in Lagos. When he'd broached, with Tunde, the possibility of a small advance so that he could buy the equipment he needed, to be repaid with interest, of course, the man had flown into a rage. "Ingrate! He has given roof to you, is that not enough? Go now and scavenge a livelihood from the lagoon. You're Delta born, should be used to that."
And so, after seeing Amina off, Nnamdi would make the long walk through labyrinthine streets, through the Hausa quarters and the Igbo, past the prostitutes' town and forgers' alley. Down to the water's edge in the slums of Makoko, a city built on stilts.
Constructed piecemeal from scrap wood and tin, the shacks were perched above the black and brackish waters of Lagos Lagoon downstream from the main sewage feed. Makoko teemed with activity, was ripe with life. Replace untreated sewage with raw crude, and he might have been back home, in the Delta.
A few kobo in coins gave Nnamdi the use of a flat-bottomed pirogue for a day. The first boat had leaked so badly he'd turned it around and come back. "You are trying to kill me," he shouted to the man he'd rented it from as he slid the vessel back into its makeshift berth. "And you aren't even married to me!" The man had laughed and, charmed by Nnamdi's smile, had relented, giving the young Ijaw the use of a better boat and a longer pole.
Nnamdi would punt his way along the tidal mudflats near the sewage outlets and the runoff points, dreaming of stashed coins and lost earrings, finding none.
Past the sawdust sludge of the Ebute Metta timber yards was a dumping ground where mountains of rubbish collapsed in on themselves, tumbling at times into the lagoon. Feral children had staked out the high ground, scavenging for copper wire and brass fittings, for tin and rubber, anything that might be sold to the scrap dealers, and every new truckload of rubbish brought swarms of pickers rushing forward. Nnamdi had watched the struggle from the pirogue and soon learned that he could come in from the water instead, pole right up to the edge and sift through what had already been sifted. Very little was left. A flattened can here, a broken-strapped rubber flip-flop there: they lay on the bottom of his pirogue like a paltry days catch of fish. Nnamdi's eyes would drift up to the long line of cars snaking across the Third Mainland Bridge, sunlight flaring on their windshields.
On the other side of the lagoon, high-rise buildings rose up, hazy in the distance. Lagos Island. Would he and Amina ever get to the other side of that bridge? Had they come so far to fall just short?
Nnamdi had been casting stones, looking for messages. But the
orumo and the owumo hadn't followed him to Lagos. Their voices had been lost somewhere between There and Here.
The few naira Nnamdi made from scavenging scrap hardly paid for the canoe, and as the days went on he found it harder and harder to make the walk to the water's edge. He would prepare Amina a breakfast of corn porridge and fried plantain, perhaps boil her a bowl of Nescafe, and then see her on her way, deeply ashamed to be living off her tips.
At night, when Amina's legs were throbbing and her back was aching, Nnamdi would reach a hand through, under the curtain, would rub her belly and sing softly. Ijaw lullabies to calm the child inside her. "I have so many stories saved up," he would say. "So many stories to gift you with. You must be strong so you can hear them." And he would whisper the Story of the Girl Who Married a Ghost and the Boy Who Fell in Love with the Moon.
Amina had seen the feral children from the windows of the
danfo minibuses as she passed, pauper kings atop fetid mountains.
She felt her own child trying to escape, turning this way and that, pushing against the walls of her body. This was the future she feared: to have walked so far only to contribute another child to the pile.
And so, when Ironsi-Egobia finally sent for Nnamdi, Amina was elated. She would remember that, how happy she'd been when Tunde had arrived and told Nnamdi to come with him. How beautifully Nnamdi had smiled when he turned and looked back at her.
CHAPTER 106
"Do you have the money?"
"Understand," Winston said with a pleading sincerity. "I am putting my life in jeopardy just by meeting with you."
Laura stared at him. "Do you have the money or not?"
They were sitting in the hallway outside the hotel swimming pool.
Winston hadn't wanted to meet in the main lobby, hadn't wanted anyone at the front desk to see him. So Laura had chosen this busy nook instead. Guests flitted past in bathrobes as the cleaning staff wheeled their carts up and down patterned carpets.
"Please, miss," he said. "Listen to reason. For your own safety and mine, it's best you give up on this mad quest. Go home, madam. If you don't, I fear that someone may die."
"Well," she said. "It won't be me."
A tight smile. "You can see into the fixture, then? You can glimpse what is coming?"
"Listen, I'm not leaving this hotel until I get the money. If you wanted to kill me, you missed your chance."
"I do not wish to kill anyone, miss. But I can no longer protect you."
"Protect me? I'm not asking for your protection. I'm asking for my money. Now. Do you have it or not?"
"Miss, please—"
She started to get up.
"Wait, wait. Yes. I do."
He passed her the satchel that was sitting beside him. She opened it, riffled through, not bothering to count it. "It's in naira.
And it's not enough. I asked for American currency."
"It's all I have! Everything. I was at the bank all morning. I cashed everything I had. There was no time to convert."
"It's not enough." It didn't really matter how much he'd brought; it would not have been enough, would never be enough.
"Wait, wait." He slid a thick manila envelope from his inside pocket. "This was what I was going to live on."
She leaned in, smiled with
all her teeth. "Asked your parents to sell their plasma TV, did you? The one my dad helped buy?" And then: "Still. Not. Enough."
"But miss—"
"Open your wallet. I want to see how much you have."
She took it all. A thick sheaf of naira. She even claimed the kobo coins that were worth only a fraction of a cent. Only when he offered his St. Christopher medal, his Rolex watch, and his Ray-Bans did she feel she had reached the bottom.
"You can keep the watch and the sunglasses." She considered taking the medallion. "And you can keep that as well. Wait here. I'm going to the business centre to see what the exchange rate is."