"I'm not really hungry," she said. "Though I suppose I should be. Chinese? Maybe Greek."
"Sounds good. I feel like Italian myself," he said.
So he ate his Sbarro and she her Opa, and they talked about her new apartment and its view of the city. Her father's gaze drifted upward to the skylight above them, and suddenly a grin appeared.
"I found it," he said. He'd been looking down, that was the problem.
She looked up, saw it too. A golden starburst around the skylight, right above the food court. Not fire,
sun.
Someone had gone to a lot of trouble incorporating the four elements into a shopping mall's layout. The evidence of something more.
"No snow, though," Laura laughed. "I always thought that was the fifth element, at least in these parts."
He thought about this. "Snow. That would be water plus air, minus sun to make it cold." Then, still glowing from their treasure hunt, "We got 'em all."
She wanted to say, "Not we, you." But instead she smiled and said, "We sure did."
CHAPTER 22
A young man in a silk shirt, sipping spiced tea as he scrolls through messages in a cyber cafe. This is FestacTown on the Lagos mainland.
A village within a city. A maze of streets folding in on themselves, with alleyways leading into lanes, lanes leading into dead-end turnarounds. You were always backtracking in Festac Town.
Inside the cafe: rows of computer screens. Hunched shoulders and cigarettes. A ceiling fan that rattled. The traffic outside: car horns and over-revved engines, broken mufflers.
The young man in the silk shirt had found Laura's father online through a forum used by retired schoolteachers, and had stalked him through cyberspace for weeks. And though the young man had other prospects he was even now kneading like clay—a business owner from Tallahassee, a pastor from County Wicklow—it was the retired schoolteacher, a plodding soul from the looks of it, posting comments on woodworking sites and online forums, and then commenting on the comments to his comments, posting his grandchildren's photos and giving tips on awls and the best way to solder a seam, who the young man now turned his gaze upon.
"I am a chimney sweep." This is what Henry would often declare.
"If I kiss you, will that bring me luck?" was Helen's response.
"Luck for me," he would say. "Not so sure about you."
I am a chimney sweep.
Henry had said it laughingly at first, and then with less good cheer as the months piled up. "A sweeper of chimneys. A purveyor of buggy whips. I make the finest whalebone corsets. I deliver milk bottles to your doorstep. I am a doctor who makes house calls."
As a high school shop teacher (ret.), he'd spent the better part of a lifetime acquiring skills that were no longer in demand. "Does anyone even teach shop anymore?" he'd asked his wife. "Outside of specialized vocational schools and such?" The skills he'd honed and had tried to impart to others were now considered "trades," not foundational knowledge.
"Oh, stop your moping," said Helen. Henry always took things too deeply. "You think shop is a dying art? Try Home Ec. There was a time when being a well-rounded homemaker was a point of pride. Now? Bread making, baking, sewing, they're just hobbies."
"Is that what we've come to? Hobbyists?"
"My grandmother used to pull her own wool and spin her own yarn. I wouldn't even know how. And I don't see you out working on our windmill and waterwheel, dear."
But that was exactly his point. Henry Curtis could take apart a carburetor and put it back together blindfolded, fully oiled and with the idle deftly set. But no one was making carburetors anymore; they didn't matter. His wife had excellent penmanship, but penmanship didn't matter either. Soldering irons and box socials. Carburetors and pie crusts.
"We're fading away," he said.
"Nonsense," she replied.
"We're disappearing, Helen. We're dissolving by degree and we don't even realize. In the morning, when I'm shaving, I'm surprised I can't see through my own reflection."
He'd always had morose tendencies; Laura got that from him.
But since his retirement, the melancholy had only gotten worse. So one night, as the Disappearing Man poked about in the kitchen, looking for items that hadn't moved in twenty years, and before he could yell out "Helen, where's the she'd put down her magazine and called to him. "Henry," she said. "Let's run away together. Somewhere warm."
Having a project cheered Henry up. He went online, plugged in a few search terms—and was overwhelmed by the options available. So he turned to his Facebook friends instead. They in turn suggested "asking his community," so he'd posted a query on a forum set up for retired teachers. WIFE AND I ARE THINKING ABOUT TAKING AN EXTENDED VACATION. MAYBE A CRUISE. ANY SUGGESTIONS?
"Alaska was lovely. " "The fjords of Norway. Definitely!! I can send you a link. "
I WAS THINKING SOMEWHERE WARM.
"Have you considered Africa?"
NEVER BEEN. WOULD LOVE TO GO. BUT I'M WORRIED ABOUT PIRATES HA HA.
"Your children would love Africa. "
MAYBE THE GRANDKIDS.
"You have grandchildren? How fortunate! Are they old enough for a safari?"
THEY'RE ONLY FOUR AND A HALF. TWINS. HELEN (THAT'S
MY WIFE) WANTS TO TAKE THEM TO DISNEY WORLD BEFORE THEY GET TOO OLD TO ENJOY IT. BUT I FIGURE I'M THE ONE TOO OLD HA HA.
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
