God's hand at work. She remembered the beauty of it, the clarity.
She belonged in a market; she was born of trade. Perhaps she might find an arthritic market lady who needed a sweeper, a stacker? Perhaps she might work her way up, minding stalls for the wealthier market ladies while they went about their errands. It was a wisp of a dream, like trying to catch wind in your hand, and she knew it. With no money to purchase a spot, no kinship ties or connections with the guilds that ran the markets, all she had was desperation and sincerity. And that would never be enough.
CHAPTER 37
"Can you feel?"
She could.
"Embossed. First rate."
Laura ran her fingertips lightly across the letterhead.
She was in Meeting Room 2B at the Economic Crime Unit offices in the city's northeast.
Officer Brisebois was there, as was Laura's brother, her mother, and a pair of detectives: an older man, who introduced himself as Detective David Saul, and a younger woman named Detective Rhodes. Just Rhodes. No first name, apparently. The detectives didn't wear uniforms, but they might as well have: both were dressed in dark jackets and white shirts with starched collars.
Ice water in a pitcher. Cubes clinking on every pour. A wide table. Several thick folders. Flowers in the corner, petals too pink and leaves too green for this room. There was a window directly behind Laura, but the sunlight didn't reach the plants. They must be artificial; that's why they looked so healthy. Laura's dad had often joked that if anyone could kill an artificial plant, she could.
Behind the detectives, on the wall facing Laura, was a framed photograph: a black-and-white image of tree branches against a grey sky. An odd counterpoint to the plastic greenery in the corner.
The female detective was speaking.
"The only defence we really have with these types of fraud,"
Detective Rhodes said, "is education."
The detective was petite, fine featured, confident. She had a no-nonsense wedding band on her heart finger, would have chosen it for its durability, no doubt, thought Laura. The older detective—stone-cut face, close-cropped hair—wore no wedding band.
Instead: a pale line where one used to be. Sergeant Brisebois had the same pale absence. Did they get together, Brisebois and this older version of himself? Compare tan lines, commiserate over beer about the decisions they'd made, the regrets they gathered?
"These are just some of the samples our department has gathered over the years."
Detective Saul passed a stack of pages across to Warren, who studied them as if they were ciphers in a puzzle he might yet solve.
When no key revealed itself, Warren muttered and handed them off to his mother, who barely looked at them.
"Some are quite amateurish," said the younger detective.
"Laughable, even, but a good many are almost, well, works of art."
The documents piled up in front of Laura. The headings on them were at once very specific and oddly vague: a Fund Management Agreement Form issued by the Central Bank of Nigeria; an International Remittance Voucher; invoices for expenses.
"Let's see," said Detective Rhodes as she passed the next batch over. "We've got a Certificate of Registration. Various tax receipts. A Foreign Exchange Application, signed and stamped. A demand for an overdue payment to the Nigerian Economic Recovery Fund."
On it went.
Bank processing invoices. Official contracts from the Niger Delta Development Commission. Various "Letters of Intent," affidavits, court orders, banking forms. All duly signed, duly sealed. There were elaborate Anti-Money Laundering Clearance
Certificates replete with flags and baroque borders, and equally elaborate Anti-Terrorism Certificates ("Under the Terms of the Revised National Security Anti-Terrorism Decree 25, Section B").
Each with a heavy
APPROVED
stamped across it.
"That last item is purportedly from Interpol," Detective Rhodes explained. "We have several of them, actually. This one here was issued—what does it say—‘with the cooperation of the International Monetary Fund, certifying that the funds in question have no connections to any known terrorist organization.'"
"Interpol?" said Warren. "Tell me you've contacted them."
"We haven't."
"Why not?"
"Because there's no such thing as an Anti-Terrorism Certificate."
Laura's attention drifted back to the black-and-white photograph on the wall behind the detectives. The branches on the tree began to move. Only a faint tremble at first, so soft she almost missed it. Then a sway, a shift, and she turned around, startled, to check the window behind her. She saw the same branches outside.
It wasn't a photograph on the wall opposite her; it was a reflection.
She looked at the branches moving on glass.
"Is that a mirror?" she demanded, her voice sharper than she'd intended. "Who's behind there? Is someone watching?"
This stopped the conversation in mid-syllable. The older detective turned, not sure at first what Laura was referring to. "No, there's no one back there."
But Laura wasn't appeased. "Is this some sort of—secret interrogation? Are we being watched?"
"Ma'am," said Rhodes. "There's no one on the other side.
That's just a window onto a hallway. We don't interrogate, we
interview.
And that's not what this is. Frankly, we're here today because your brother has been badgering us. Lodging complaints, saying we aren't doing enough to catch the culprits who swindled your father.
He wanted to see ‘the evidence.' Well, here it is."
"Jesus, Laura," Warren whispered. "Relax."
"You're telling
me
to relax? You? Of all people?"
"Laura, dear." This was their mother. "Let them do their job.
No one's watching. It's just a window."
"It looks like a mirror."
The detectives continued handing documents across the table, but Brisebois kept his eyes on Laura, watched the tension and anxiety draw the edges of her mouth tight—until, quietly, he slipped out of his seat and walked around behind the family to the main window. He closed the blinds. And as he did, the reflection across from Laura disappeared. The glass changed from mirror to window. A hallway emerged on the other side, empty.
They were right; there was no one watching. There was no one on the other side.
CHAPTER 38
The market in Zaria's Old City had been a terminus of the trans-
Sahara trade route, and even now a few camels loped by with knock knees on tethered strides. Spices and grains in every shade, lumpy roots and medicinal herbs, groundnuts and millet heaped atop woven display trays with umbrellas opened above to protect the wares from the worst of the sun. This was where she belonged.
Women moved through, heads balancing overstuffed baskets of produce, coarse gunny sacks of woven jute—both the women and their cargo bulging with sustenance and commerce. The girl envied the wealth of the market ladies, the confident sway of their hips.
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?
