The phone rang and rang.
The motorcycle taxi boy. She'd told him where she was staying.
Winston must have overheard.
When she finally picked up—
"You are dead! Do you understand, madam? Dead! You have written your own obituary."
It was Winston.
"We are mafia! We will ruin you, we will leave your life in tatters! You will die in Lagos!"
"Tell your mom and dad I said hi."
She hung up. Took a deep breath. The phone rang again almost immediately, and this time she was ready.
"Winston. Listen. When you scream like that, it's hard to understand what you're saying. You seem upset."
"Fuck you, madam!
Fuck you!
We will find you, and we will kill you!"
"You've already found me. But—more to the point, Fve found you. I have the emails you sent my father, a record of the money transfers. I know who you are, Winston. I know where you live, I know your sister's name, I know where she goes to university. I know where your parents live. Fve got their phone number. I have everything I need. So. Shall I hang up and call the EFCC? They will destroy you, Winston. They will destroy your life, they will destroy your family. They will seize your assets, they will freeze your bank account, they will confiscate your passport. Your parents will probably lose their home. They will certainly lose their son. Are you listening now, Winston?"
A long silence passed between them. When he spoke, his voice sounded distant, hollow. "Your father was not my fault."
"My father was nothing
but
your fault."
"What is it you want then?"
"I want a bear with Rumpelstiltskin glasses. I want a stucco bungalow with wood panelling in the living room and orange shag carpets in the den. I want my father back. I want a snow globe Mountie and a ticket to the All-Seeing Oracle. I want a piggy bank shaped like a cowboy. I want postcards for my Nana." She was reaching back through time now, was wiping the smirk off the face of a teenage boy at the Stampede midway.
"I don't under—I can't..."
"Then give me back the money you stole. "
"I don't have it."
"Bullshit. Bring the money to the Ambassador Hotel tomorrow morning. The banks are open on Saturday. I checked. Do that, and I will leave. I will fly home, and you will never see me again. Do that, and I won't have you arrested. Your parents can keep their garden and their plasma TV, and they won't have to visit their son in prison."
She dropped the receiver into its cradle, followed the cord back with her hand, unplugged it from the wall.
The car tumbled through darkness, end over e n d . . .
In the hum of a silent room, Laura Curtis stood at the window, looked out through her own reflection. Airplanes were landing and escaping, lights blinking. An air traffic control tower stood silhouetted against the night sky, the searchlight on top turning and turning.
CHAPTER 104
Winston waited for the coughing to stop.
Begin with the assumption that he knows everything, that he already knows the answer to every question he asks.
The coughing trailed off into rattling breaths, a final wheeze. At first, Winston had suspected that the constant hacking and facial sweat were more a manifestation of suppressed rage than an actual affliction, but blood on a handkerchief, the whites of the eyes gone jaundiced—could even rage do that?
Ironsi-Egobia looked up at Winston. "And?" he asked.
Fear was a worm in the heart, a tremor in the chest, a flutter in the bone. "There were... complications."
"Complications? Is that what you're calling it?" Ironsi-Egobia leaned back from his desk, and as he did, his face fell into the umbra of shadow beyond the overhead lamp. He became a voice.
"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
