The young man in the silk shirt wiped his neck with a folded handkerchief. Lagos never let you forget Lagos, that was the problem. Even with the tea and the rattling fan to cool him, the gummy heat outside had found him.
A dull-eyed laggard two computers down asked the room,
"How do you spell inheritance? My spellcheck doesn't know."
"You spelled it so bad even the dictionary don't know it? Dis is shameful!" There was scattered laughter across the room, and someone else shouted back, "Took two weeks for him just to find the dollar sign!"
More laughter. Winston sighed. Sipped his tea. Lemon spiced with ginger. Somewhere in the cafe, a radio was humming a song to itself:
Oyibo, I'm asking you,Who is dey mugu now?Who is dey mastah?
The din and ding of traffic outside. The smell of suya beef and warm beer. The cyber cafes in Festac Town were as numerous as suya stands and street hawkers. It was a long journey from the young man's apartment, hours spent daily on danfo minibuses or, when the go-slows knotted the streets beyond loosening, clutching the back of an okada motorcycle taxi driver. A long journey, taken daily. A necessary journey nonetheless, for the streets of Festac Town were lined with shops offering internet satellite services or, when the seats in those were snatched up, the less dependable NITEL Network.
NITEL was a national service, and thus the cafes that operated on it were obliged to post "Wayo Man Be Gone!" notices on their walls. Some were more specific still: "No email extractors!" or "No mass mailings." But this was a mere formality, and Winston had never known any owner to prowl the rows of yahoo boys to try to protect some oyibo grand-mama on the other side of the world from trickery. As long as you slipped a few naira to the cafe operators, you could scroll through the internet unmolested.
Today Winston sat in front of a screen at the Cyber Hunt Net Trakker Cafe. The internet fees were higher here, but they came with endless cups of minerals and tea (not free of course; nothing was ever free in Lagos), with windows that opened onto the street and ceiling fans that swirled above, creating at least the illusion of a breeze. He'd sweltered in enough cinder-block cyber ovens just to save a few kobo to appreciate the influx of air, however muggy, that the traffic wafted in.
Winston had started his one-man enterprise with the simple purchase of some email extractor software. He'd begun by running random surnames through a search engine, hitting SELECT ALL, and then dumping the entire haul into the software, which then separated the email addresses from the rest of the text. Cut and paste these addresses into the bcc line of any web-based email, add a standard format letter—"Dear Sir/Madam, I am the son of an exiled Nigerian diplomat... "—include a separate email address for them to reply to, and you were set. It was science, not an art. Winston knew that. The more messages you sent, the higher the odds of netting a response. This was brute mathematics at play.
A hard-working lad could send hundreds, even thousands of emails over the course of a single day. Could send them until his account was shut down by the server, with the inevitable message:
WARNING! You have reached your sending limit. You'd then wait for responses to trickle in over the next few days, sent to the email address included in the message. (You didn't want them simply hitting REPLY because the original address was going to crash.)
Those who replied, even if only to say "you've got the wrong guy," would receive a personalized message. But it was hard fishing nonetheless; a nibble so rarely turned into a bite.
Winston had realized early on that what these bulk mailings offered in sheer quantity they lacked in quality. It was disheartening to send out tens of thousands of pleas and receive only silence or automated messages in response. It was as though the world itself were ignoring you. Either people were becoming more astute, or spam filters were becoming more effective. Human folly being limitless, Winston suspected it was the filters more than any sudden increase in critical thought that was causing the problem. Spam filters were like ocean-going trawlers, dragging the sea floor with nets, swamping the boats and tangling the lines of independent fishermen who were, after all, only trying to earn a living.
You don't hunt prey with fistfuls of sand. You can't catch a cat by banging a drum. Winston knew this—and yet there they were: rows of bent backs wreathed in smoke, the yahoo boys throwing out mass-message formats into cyberspace. Carpet bombing, they called it. A truly inefficient use of time, he thought.
Winston was different. He'd abandoned the ploy of email extractors and mass bombardments and now spent more time up front, right at the start, sussing out targets, focusing his forays. Nor did he employ the intentionally crude, ungrammatical sentences, the almost laughable misspellings that telegraphed "Here is a rube with millions of dollars, easy pickings." These "formats," as they were known, targeted stupid greed, people who snickered even as they schemed to steal from who they thought were gullible
Nigerians. Winston was looking for intelligent greed or, at the very least, thoughtful greed. His approach was more... refined. That was the word he was looking for. Not for him the mass-mailing of blind formats. His was a surgical strike, not the indiscriminate firings of a machine gun.
More than anything, Winston considered himself a student of humanity, someone committed to his craft, constantly revising his pitch, sharpening his search tools. He employed business directories. Annual reports. Online brochures. News articles. Even that old standby, the online Yellow Pages. You select your targets, fine-tune your format, make your move. Facebook requests and a few follow-up queries, and Winston could put together an accurate enough profile—age, political affiliations, church membership, niche interests—to slip inside the boundaries of trust, to cash in on a misguided sense of "community." "As a fellow Presbyterian . . . " "As someone who also admires the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle . . . " "As an avid follower of your wedding bloopers blog..."
"Dear Sir! I must say, your online essay on the songbirds of South Carolina captivated me. It has long been a dream of mine too to spot a gild-headed blue finch in the w i l d . . . "
A great deal of preparation went into this, but once the targets were snared, they remained snared. And once hooked, it became a matter of playing them, of reeling in the line, overcoming their initial resistance, giving them slack at certain times, pulling taut at others. A city boy born and bred, Winston understood nonetheless that while some fish could be caught in billowing nets and others on baited barbs, some required spearing, outright and quickly. He didn't fish with line and hook, of course, but with words, with wonder. In this, the game was more like storytelling than blood sport. There were times when Winston felt as though he were a dream merchant or a movie producer, a scriptwriter, with the mugu on the other end cast as a character in a story, one staged solely for his benefit.
Or hers.
Female mugus were rare, but it happened. Hadn't a Hong Kong widow been bilked out of millions? A magnificent scam that made headlines only when those mealy-marrowed souls at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission managed to track down the masterminds behind it and—instead of doing the decent thing and accepting a bribe—prosecuted them! They even returned the money to the old woman. Such fools! It saddened Winston's heart, the waste of it, all the hard work that must have gone into it, undone by meddling EFCC do-gooders who had no appreciation of the business he was in.
Hunter. Fisherman. Entrepreneur. Nollywood director. Winston saw himself as many things, but not as a criminal. Criminals lacked finesse. Criminals bashed people on the back of their skulls and looted wallets, rummaged through purses. Criminals murdered, but guymen seduced. Winston didn't take the mugus money; they gave it to him, eyes clouded by greed, dazzled by dollars. And when they give you their money, it doesn't count as stealing.
Occasionally, Winston would be warned away from a chat site or an online forum, would see a posting on a bulletin board reading
"I am here ooooooo" or "Mugu guyman keep off!" which told him someone else had staked out the site. It might
be a fellow two chairs down from him for all he knew, but the protocol was to back off just the same—though guymen did occasionally get caught up in an online tussle over a particularly plump prize. A "mugu war," as they called it. Winston avoided these as well. They were counterproductive and only distracted from the task at hand: to snare, spear, snatch, and squeeze the mugu, the fool, dry.
Sometimes Winston would find a CV posted online, with street addresses and phone numbers given. That was especially useful when it came time to cut the mugu loose, to threaten their lives, family, et cetera. These exchanges usually ended in blubbering pleas from the mugu: "O, you have ruined me," "O, you have tricked me." Sometimes the blubbering turned into legal threats—more an annoyance than anything worth fretting over—and this was where a home address proved a boon. Attaching a simple Google Maps photo of the mugus house to a note saying "We know where you live" was usually enough to shut down such nonsense. And even then there was little danger of any real legal action; it was more akin to swatting aside a fly. A minor annoyance at most, all those angry/ sad/rebuffed/baffled emails cluttering one's inbox.
The real danger lay here in Lagos, in the sudden swoops of EFCC officers seeking to "rehabilitate" Nigeria's reputation.
Interfering with hard-working 419ers, staging publicity-stunt raids and mass arrests. Winston had been caught in one such sweep—that was why he now moved from cyber cafe to cyber cafe, avoiding overnight stays and always scouting the quickest exit.
He started out as a yahoo boy, taking advantage of the cheaper prices to remain at the cafes overnight, long after the CLOSED sign had been turned and the door bolted. He'd never cared for the crude company of the other overnighters, though. The low laughs, the desperation disguised as camaraderie, the eye-stinging haze of cigarettes—Was he the only man in Lagos who didn't smoke?—the constant dull-witted banter, the tiresome obsession with the female form. Winston wasn't staying up all night to share lurid tales of sexual conquest, real or imagined; he had business to conduct, and the rambling discussions the other yahoo boys had about the best way to 419 a girl from Victoria Island into your bed was a taxing waste of energy. Winston had bigger plans than that.
He was no mere wayo man, a trickster, a huckster, a carnival conjurer. He was a true guyman, living by his wits, outsmarting the odds. This was what he told himself to buoy his spirits when he felt adrift.
There were times he thought he should make more of an effort to chum around with the yahoo boys, exchanging tips, sharing advice. He'd purchased his first formats from a yahoo boy, after all, a lengthy plea from the widow of General Abacha, almost comically inept in its structure and internal inconsistencies, but a start nonetheless. And after two hundred tries, it had paid off: a small payout from an engineering student in Edinburgh, only a few thousand pounds but enough to keep him going.
It seemed so long ago now. Winston waved for another cup of tea. The yahoo boys drank minerals and beer, but Winston was cut from a different cloth. Lemon spiced with ginger.
He forced a sigh back into his throat, scrolled again through the profiles he was compiling.
A city of millions, built on a swamp, on a series of stepping stones, on islands thick with humidity. The worst place to construct a metropolis, but that was Lagos. It defied common sense. Winston dreamed of streamlined cities, where action could follow plan smoothly and without the endless layers of dash and deceit that Lagos demanded. The yahoo boys were impatient—that was their problem. That was the city's problem, too; Lagos was always hurrying, always getting in its own way. The place needed less hustle, more strategy. There was so much energy expended daily over the most mundane of details—getting a haircut, paying a bill. Every transaction had to be wrestled to the ground, it seemed, every point of view debated in endless mind-maddening detail.
These were the things that drained one's energy, dissipated one's profits. If only this energy could be better directed. If we could walk in step, we could take over the world.
But of course, the very strength of Lagos was that it didn't walk in step. Winston knew this; the city's weaknesses were also its wellspring.
We fall to earth like raindrops. Why did I have to fall here?
Winston dreamed of taking Nigeria's greatest innovation, the 419 scheme, to the next level, in Europe or the U.K., in New York or London. Not in sputters and sparks, with the usual street-gang syndicates and expat bone-breakers hired in America and Europe to shake down troublesome mugus—but something better, something bigger, something more sophisticated. It would be 419 on a corporate level, with managers and CEOs operating within the law, not outside it. It would be 419 painted on a larger canvas.
Even the best of the Lagos guymen had only scratched the skin; there was so much more to tap into. And yet... here he was, lost in Lagos, holed up in Festac Town, pecking out ridiculous messages to ridiculous mugus, dreaming—as always—of something more.
It would only ever be a dream. That was the tragedy of it. The raid that had nabbed him on Victoria Island had also tangled up his future. He'd been given a suspended sentence, was even now on probationary orders. With his passport suspended, he'd missed his sister's graduation from university in England, had been forced to make contrived excuses to his parents. The truth was, he was marked like Cain and would never be allowed to leave Nigeria. No visa, no hope of escape. The suspension would eventually be lifted, or so he hoped, but the damage had been done. He now had a criminal record, and the only way out was to smuggle himself into another country like a common refugee—which killed any chance of his building 419 on a truly international scale.
Perhaps he could land a sponsor, someone who wasn't related to him, someone who could act as his guarantor. Maybe he would meet a beautiful oyibo woman and charm her into marrying him?
He laughed at this in spite of himself.
And so, there he sits, in Festac Town, typing fairy tales:
Sir, I apologize with unreserved hindsight for intruding on your life. I was looking for Henry Curtis, graduate of Athabasca University, retired from the noble profession of teachering, a member in Good Standing of the Amateur Woodworking Society of Hounsfield Heights, subscriber of the Briar Hill community newspaper, husband of Helen, grandfather of twins...
CHAPTER 23
Laura remembered something else her father had once said to her, years before.
It may have been at Christmas, maybe Thanksgiving. There was a fireplace and warmth, and he was looking past her when he said it. "Do you know what I fear?"
Home for the holidays. Her second year away? Maybe her third.
The details were fuzzy, but not the feeling. Nutmeg in eggnog. The pop of wood knots in a fire. But no Christmas tree. Thanksgiving then? Snow outside. Had it snowed early that year?
Her mom had been at a school meeting and Warren was out, so it was just the two of them, with nothing much to say, happy just to sit and sip.
During one lull, he'd asked her the question, "Do you know what I fear?"
She didn't.
"As a parent? My fear is that when we die, we'll have to watch all those moments in our lives when we were short-tempered with our children, all the times they needed our love and we didn't give it, all those times we were distracted or in a bad mood, all the times we were angry or impatient."
"Dad," she said. "You were never angry. I don't think you ever raised your voice."
"Oh, there were times," he said. "You've just forgotten. Times when I brushed you or Warren aside instead of asking how your day was, those times I didn't listen to your stories. My fear is, when the time comes, I'll have to watch all those moments again. That they'll make us watch them before we can get into Heaven." He looked at her. "I'm sorry, Laura."
"There's nothing to be sorry about."
"But I am."
"Sorry? For what?"
"Just sorry. Sorry for the things I should have done, might have done, but didn't."
She should have said it then: You were a good dad. You always did
your best. She should have said it, but didn't. She let the moment lapse into silence instead, let the silence pass into smoke.
CHAPTER 24
My dearest Henry,
As perhaps you have been made awares, my childhood protector, Victor Okechukwu, has entered the hospital. I'm afraid his cancer has taken a turn for the worst. As his life dims he repeats your name and worries only about your commitment to this matter. Once Mr. Okechukwu's life has passed—as surely it must, I will have no one. I ask only for your assistance. I beg you on bended knees and with tears in my eyes.
Darkness and danger press in from every side. Until such moment as I am rescued,
I remain as ever, yours truly,
Miss Sandra
A grin from the boy in the silk shirt as he clicked-and-dragged an image of a Nollywood starlet with almond eyes and a tattered dress
(in the role of a destitute daughter from a Lagos melodrama) and inserted it into his email. That a famed Nigerian movie star would pitch her woes to a distant oyibo, how could one not grin at such a thing?