He passed the roiling fireball where women in sunhats, faces running with sweat, laid out racks of cassava root to dry. Beyond the fire, the path rose. It was a landscape altered, the way things are in dreams. A bare knuckle of rock. The cannon, with its iron now corroded, as though it had been soaked in acid. And Nnamdi thought,
What a sad fate after so many years spent guarding a ghost empire.
The English graves beyond were no longer hidden in the undergrowth; the burning rains had stripped that away, and the blackened headstones stood exposed, looking corroded as well. It was only a matter of time before the stones would break and the
duwoi-you
below would finally slip free.
Beyond the graves, the ground was sodden with oil leaking from a feeder pipe. It trickled down all the way to the mudflats of the lagoon below.
"She cannot stay here. "
But where else could she go?
A crash and a yelp, and an oil barrel suddenly appeared, cresting the hill and bouncing down, rolling across mud and yellow grass. It came to a rest at Nnamdi's feet and was followed a moment later by a swirl of curses, English mixed with Ijaw, and a stampede of young men following.
"Ah! You stopped it!" They shouted this with great relief, giving Nnamdi credit for what dwindling momentum and thick mud had actually accomplished.
They were boys from Nnamdi's village, slightly younger than he was, and they recognized him as the storyteller's son.
"Noao!"
Their eyes were veined in red and their skin was a sickly shade of pale.
Nnamdi looked down at the runaway barrel. "You've been tapping oil," he said.
They shook their heads. "Not oil, gas. Before it reaches the flare-off." They gestured to the balled fire rising behind Nnamdi.
"Gas?" he said. "Natural gas?"
They nodded.
"You can't tap natural gas," he said. "It will kill you."
They laughed, answered in Ijaw. "We can, and we are."
Nnamdi looked again at the barrel, stepped away.
"Relax, bruddah. This one's empty. It had a leak. We are bringin' it back to fix."
"Gas, not oil." Nnamdi shook his head. "How?"
The leader of the boys tapped a finger to his temple. "Ijaw ingenuity," he said, and laughed.
They'd first tried splitting open one of the feeder pipelines, hoping to create an oil spill. The oil companies had improved their sensor systems, making it easier for them to detect a sudden drop in pressure. They were now able to quickly redirect the flow, which greatly reduced the amount that could be siphoned off. But the boys from the village figured that the Shell Men would still have to pay compensation for a spill. Or, even better, hire them to clean it up. You couldn't really clean it, not in among the mangroves. But you could skim the surface oil and collect your pay. Unfortunately, the oil companies refused to send in a crew, suspecting a trap aimed at snatching more workers for ransom. So the line had been left to leak. This was the spill Nnamdi had walked through earlier, the one that was now draining into the lagoon.
"Is a shame," the boys said. "Cleanup is good work. So we decided to go wit' natural gas instead. Gas lines are plastic, easier to tap because nobody expects it. We usin' the same drills we used for palm trees—remember? Remember your first palm tree, Nnamdi?"
"I do."
"That was a long time ago, wasn't it, Nnamdi? We were children then."
"We were."
"We thought we were men."
"We did."
The natural gas line ran below the water, feeding the flare. "We dived under, drilled a hole," the other boy explained. "The gas, it foams up soon as it's tapped. So we dived again, clamped on a hose—that was the tricky part. We ran the hose up onto land, attached a valve, and now it's easy. Like turnin' a tap on and off. We can fill anything that has a tight seal. Cooking tins, bottles, jars. Is not pure, but if we leave it sit a few days, it turns into kerosene.
Problem is, it takes a lot of gas to make a little kerosene. We started thinkin', why not fill up oil barrels instead? So that's what we do, fillin' them up, then soldering them shut. Have to move quickly before it leaks out."
Nnamdi wasn't sure he'd heard right. "You solder them?"
"We do."
"But don't they—"
"Blow up? Yes, sometimes. You remember Samuel and Goodluck? The brothers? They burned up, both. A cousin with them, he lived, but better he died, I think. Eyelids burned off. Skin too. The brothers, they were loading a barrel and it slipped, scraped against the side of a boat, hit a spark. Enough fumes in de air to do it. Could see the explosion as far as Olobiri, is what I heard."
One of the boys was wavering on his feet. His eyes were milky and unfocused. It reminded Nnamdi of the glassy gaze of the Egbesu boys, but without the bravado or the gin.
"The hardest part is protecting your line from other boys. We have to stand guard twenty-four hours. Take turns, work it in shifts.
But dey fumes is always leaking, from the hose or from the valve.
So you inhale a lot of it. Gives you headaches."
Nnamdi looked at his sickly friends, grown wan and thin. "You have to stop," he said. "The gas will make you ill. It will poison you."
"It already has, Nnamdi." And then, in Ijaw: "It was our bad fortune, wasn't it, Nnamdi? To sit on top of wealth that others wanted. Why do you think the gods punished us like that? Cursed us with oil. Why?"
"I don't know."
"Do you suppose the oil is tainted by the souls of the Igbo and others that we captured? Do you suppose it's the blood of those, come back to haunt us?"
"If that was the case, my friend, the oil would make the
oyibos
ill as well."
"I think it has, Nnamdi."
Somewhere in the overcast, a helicopter was choppering through. The boys turned, looked toward the sound of it; it was a long time fading.
"Something's coming," they said.
CHAPTER 88
When Nnamdi returned, his mother was patting out yam-and-cassava cakes and passing them to Amina to salt.
"And what have the gods been sayin'?" his mother asked.
Amina took the cakes out to the yard to place them over coals.
Nnamdi looked at his mother. "Tell me that you want her to stay. Tell me she is a guest, tell me she is welcome in our home. Tell me that, and we will go."
"She
is
a guest," his mother said. "But she cannot stay."
"Where, then? Don't say Portako. Portako is in turmoil."
"Not Portako. Lagos."
"Lagos? Among the Yoruba?"
"It's a big city, Lagos, with other cities mixed in. Ijaw and Igbo.
Even Hausa. You have a cousin in Lagos. You can stay wit' him.
He's a very important businessman. He will take care of you." She cleaned her hands, wrote it out on a scrap of paper. "Here. He was never given a proper Ijaw name, but he is relations still, and he will help you."
On the paper was a phone number, and below it a name:
IRONSI-EGOBIA.
CHAPTER 89
She began by compiling a style sheet.
Complements of the season.
A small mistake, and not uncommon, but it provided the thinnest of threads on which to pull, the way a tapestry might unravel. Or a sweater.
Laura first went through the emails her father had received from Nigeria, highlighting quirks of spelling and noting specific semantic tics. She was operating on the assumption that the various people who'd contacted her father—the dying lawyer, the desperate orphan, the crooked banker, the mafia thug—were one and the same.
The list grew and grew:
teachering
safekeep
(instead of safekeeping—i.e., "we will deposit the money for safekeep")
We're in this in the all together.
vouchsafe
(or is this a common term in Nigeria?)
modalities
(unusual word choice, used here incorrectly?
Check.)
we begged him to silence
points asunder
I am contacting you on_______'s behest,
(instead of
"behalf")
I can not stand and see
(instead of "stand to see")
on bended knees
(rather than "on bended knee")
in a pickle
(common expression in Nigeria?)
by waking hours
with much sincerity
(as a closing salutation)
caps on "Foreign"
(though inconsistently applied)
discretely
(instead of "discreetly")
use of "in [possessive pronoun] entirety"
(e.g., "he failed in his entirety," "the plan was arranged in its entirety by him")
God daughter
made awares
a turn for the worst
(instead of "worse")
Time is urgent.
it has defiled all forms of medical treatment
(may be a one-off typo)
Author often begins an aside with an em-dash but
then ends it with a comma
(e.g., "Once Mr.
Okechukwu's life has passed—as surely it must, I will have no one.")
we are mafia
(also: "I am mafia")
we will find you and we will kill! you
(internal use of exclamation marks)
you're
(as possessive)
and of course:
complement
(instead of compliment, but not vice versa)
Laura then turned to the emails her brother had printed off, starting with those from Chief Ogun. At first she was disappointed; there seemed to be no stylistic correlation between them and the emails sent to her father. But that soon shifted, and she realized: There's more than one person involved. At a certain point, they'd passed Colonel Mustard on to someone else.
Was that someone else the same person who'd hounded her father and stolen her parents' money? The style sheets lined up almost perfectly; there were far too many points in common for it to be a coincidence. Laura began going through emails sent to other scambaiters. Each con artist, once you got past their cut-and-paste opening gambits, had their own eccentricities of style, their own pet errors. And when she came across one email from a supposedly love-struck swain to a scambaiter in California, Laura felt a rush of adrenalin: "Madame, we must focus on the money, even tho your compliments have set my passions on fire."
Madam with an "e," compliments with an "i." A different person entirely.
The longer any string of correspondence goes on, Laura knew, the harder it is to mask your identity. Hide behind fake names and online anonymity all you want, she thought; your true self is still there, waiting to be revealed.
In her corner apartment, high above the mall, Laura Curtis began to type:
Dear Chief Ogun,
I'm contacting you today regarding Colonel Mustard and his somewhat incoherent response to your initial business proposition. I'm afraid Colonel Mustard is getting quite old, and his mind is not as sharp as it once it was.
Please disregard any future emails from the Colonel.
Instead, you may deal directly with me.
Sincerely,
She hesitated, only for a heartbeat, then entered:
Miss Scarlet
CHAPTER 90
Nnamdi waited patiently for the coughing to stop. Amina, beside him, hands folded over her belly, eyes down, pretended not to notice the smell of rotting fruit, sweet and sickly, that seemed to be emanating from the esteemed gentleman in front of them.
"Cousins, then," said Mr. Ironsi-Egobia, voice weak. He folded his handkerchief to cover the stain, looked at his visitors with watery eyes, the whites gone yellow.
Nnamdi smiled at him, beamed really. "Cousins, sir."
They'd spent the last twenty minutes tracing the lineages and peripheral family connections that might allow Nnamdi to claim the catchall of "cousin." It had been like trying to trace a route through the Delta between far-flung communities at dusk, but they had done it, on a line that eventually led from Nnamdi's mother's village to a distant aunt and then back to the Catholic orphanage in Old Calabar.
Ironsi-Egobia reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, cream-coloured linen, freshly pressed but already crumpled, and retrieved a billfold.
He shows up here, stinking of the Delta, dragging some pregnant girl with him, making eye contact with me as though he were my equal.
