Children of the Street (2 page)

1

The call had come in on a Sunday morning in June.

“For this one,” Detective Sergeant Chikata had said, “I think they will need us.”

On his Honda motorbike, Detective Inspector Darko Dawson sped by industrial buildings along Ring Road West. The dead body was near the Korle Lagoon. Dawson made it there in fifteen minutes. Even if his eyes had been shut, the pervasive, foul smell of the lagoon would have announced to him that he had arrived.

He turned onto Abossey Okai Road, which formed two bridges, the first of them over the refuse-choked Odaw River, which flowed into the lagoon. Agbogbloshie Market on Dawson’s left and Kokomba Market on his right teemed with Sunday shoppers and hawkers trying to sell everything from bananas to sea crabs.

At the second bridge, over a much smaller channel of tarry, polluted water, there were umbrella-shaded market vendors, pedestrians, trucks, and cars mixed together in organized chaos. Dawson parked and locked his bike. Sprawling onto the riverbanks, a crowd of onlookers overflowed both ends of the bridge. Standing at over six feet, Dawson could see above most people’s heads. Detective Sergeant Chikata and a uniformed man Dawson didn’t know were about a hundred meters up on the south bank of the channel. Framed apocalyptically against dense black smoke billowing from somewhere upstream, Deputy Superintendent Bright and three members of his crime scene team, all in masks, gloves, and galoshes, were moving about knee-deep in the foul mire.

Dawson skirted the mass of the crowd and made his way onto the bank. It was carpeted with litter, much of it plastic bottles discarded without a second’s thought after the contained water had been drunk. The rest of the junk included boxes, tin cans, abandoned clothing, trash bags, pieces of machinery, old tires, coconut husks, and unidentifiable bits of metal and plastic detritus. There was also the kind of human waste Dawson definitely did not want his shoes to touch, some of it exposed, some of it in “flying toilets”—tossed black plastic bags with excrement inside.

The impossibly good-looking Detective Sergeant Chikata, Dawson’s junior in rank in the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) Homicide Division, looked up as Dawson approached.

“Morning, Dawson.”

“Morning, Chikata.”

“Body of a dead male spotted in there this morning.”

“How did we get notified?”

Chikata introduced the bulky, flinty-eyed man next to him. “This is Inspector Agyekum. He was the Korle Bu station officer this morning.”

Agyekum was Detective Inspector Dawson’s rank equivalent, but as a general inspector he wore the standard, heavy, sweltering dark blue uniform of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) in contrast to CID’s plainclothesmen.

“Morning, Inspector.” Dawson shook hands, finishing with the customary mutual finger snap.

“I was starting my shift when a small boy came into the station,” Agyekum took up. “That’s him there with Constable Gyamfi.” He pointed his chin farther along the bank where a police constable stood over a boy of about eight sitting on the ground with his head down and his arms folded tightly across his skinny body.

“Many people saw the body,” Agyekum continued, “but because they fear the police, they just kept quiet. But the boy took it upon himself to run over to the Korle Bu station to report it.”

“He’s a brave young man,” Dawson said, looking over at the boy with approval. “And then?”

“Constable Gyamfi took the report in the station and brought it to me,” Agyekum said, “then the two of us returned with the boy. When I saw the body there, I decided to call the Crime Scene Unit.”

“Very good,” Dawson said. “Thank you.”

Dawson knew Police Constable Gyamfi from a previous case a year ago. He waved at the constable, who smiled and half waved, half saluted in return.

“Mr. Bright says he’s quite sure it’s a homicide,” Chikata said.

“Then it probably is,” Dawson said.

Deputy Superintendent Bright, a trained serologist, was head of the CSU team. His hunches were seldom wrong.

Dawson moved a little closer to the water, which was the color of tar and almost the same consistency. He winced at its relentless stench, but people living within smelling distance were used to it, or maybe just ignored it.

Bright and his two crime scene guys squelched around looking for an unlikely clue. There was so much garbage it would be a miracle if they found anything useful. Only Bright’s relentless thoroughness and commitment to excellence had deemed the search necessary. Others might have simply reeled the corpse in without bothering.

The garbage partially camouflaged the dead body, which was facedown. On casual glance, it could have been mistaken for a big clump of rubbish, and undoubtedly had been.

With glop sucking at his galoshes, Deputy Superintendent Bright joined Dawson and the other two men.

“Morning, Dawson.” His voice sounded like the bass notes of a bassoon. “Please excuse my appearance and odor.”

“Good morning, sir. I admire you for going in there.”

Bright looked down at his soiled outfit with a grimace. “These are the last of our hazardous materials garb, so fortunately or not, I won’t be doing this again for a while.”

“Any findings, sir?” Dawson asked.

“Besides the body? Nothing. Still suspect foul play, however. I know a dumped corpse when I see one. And this one is in terrible shape.”

“When are you bringing it in?”

“We’re almost ready for that now.”

“Can you wait a few minutes? I don’t want the boy to see that.”

“No problem, Dawson.”

“Thank you, sir. It’s good to have you around.” Dawson turned and trotted up the bank.

2

The boy was still with Police Constable Gyamfi, who was in his mid-twenties but looked so young he could have gone undercover as a high school student. As Dawson approached, Gyamfi’s face lit up with a smile of strong, white teeth—the kind that could snap the top off a beer bottle.

“Morning, Gyamfi,” Dawson said as they clasped hands. “How are you? It’s nice to see you again.”

“Yes, sir, and you too.”

“How’re the wife and new daughter?”

“Very well, sir, thank you, sir.”

“Good, I’m glad.”

Gyamfi was a recent import from the rural town of Ketanu in the Volta Region. With Dawson’s help and persistence, he had been transferred to the police force in Accra, not an easy achievement in the GPS. He was a good man with great integrity and promise.

Dawson looked down at the boy, who didn’t return the look. He wore torn cutoff jeans, a soiled black-and-white muscle shirt that was too big for him, and slippers that were falling apart on his dusty feet. He was staring at a point on the ground in front of him. Dawson knelt down.

“How are you? I’m Darko. What’s your name?”

The boy’s eyes flitted up and away. “Sly.”

Dawson held out his hand. Sly shook it after a second’s consideration.

“Thank you for what you did,” Dawson said. “You were brave to go to the police station. Do you know that?”

Sly nodded tautly. Dawson lifted his face with a touch to his chin.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to do anything to you. I only want to be your friend.”

Sly nodded again. Dawson stood and reached for the boy’s hand, pulling him up. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Okay.”

“While we’re gone,” Dawson said to Gyamfi, “I want you to talk to these people in the crowd. We need to know if anyone saw anything this morning or last night in connection with the body. We need names, and we need a way to get back in touch with them. That might be hard around here, but do your best.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And always remember faces, Gyamfi. Try to make your mind a camera. You never know who you might run into later on.”

Dawson turned away with Sly and steered him around the pack of spectators. As he and the boy walked past, every head turned to watch them. Dawson took a quick but good look at all the faces, practicing what he had just preached to his constable. In reality, the chance was remote that they would get usable information from anyone. Watching policemen at work was okay, talking to them was not.

Dawson and Sly were now walking along the curve of the Odaw River’s east bank toward the shacks of the slum in the distance.

“How old are you, Sly?”

“Nine.”

“From northern Ghana?”

“Upper West Region.”

Dawson had made an educated guess. Most of Agbogbloshie’s residents came from northern Ghana.

“Where do you live?”

“Here in Sodom and Gomorrah.”

It was the bitter, ironic nickname for Agbogbloshie, Accra’s most notorious slum. Drugs, prostitution, rape, forty thousand squatters, and practically every year a new but unsuccessful government plan to relocate them.

Dawson and Sly walked the beaten path through mounds of trash containing the ubiquitous plastic bags and bottles, carcasses of old TVs, trashed scanners, mobile phones, air conditioners, refrigerators, fax machines, microwaves, dead computer monitors and defunct CPUs. To their left was a mountain of electronic waste piled higher than Dawson’s head.

“What were you doing this morning when you saw that dead man in the water?” he asked Sly.

“Burning cables.”

That was what caused the dense black smoke all along the banks of the Odaw. The boys burned TV and computer cables to get at the copper wires, which they sold locally for fifty
pesewas
per kilo, or about eighteen cents per pound.

Ahead was a line of teenage boys that made Dawson think of an assembly line, only this was disassembly. The first boy was breaking open the back of an old TV monitor using a rock. The second was degreasing some cables with a solvent. Farther along still, a cable-burning session was beginning. Five boys of ages ten to fifteen were crowded around a mass of prepped cables. All from northern Ghana, they addressed Sly in rapid-fire Hausa. Although Dawson wasn’t fluent in the language, it was obvious they were asking who he was. Sly’s response seemed to satisfy them because they nodded and smiled.

“I tell them you’re my friend,” Sly explained.

“Where did you learn English?” Dawson asked.

“I was schooling at my hometown before my father told me to come to Accra with my uncle.”

“Are you continuing school here?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“My uncle says he won’t send me to school. He just wants me to sell copper and make money.”

Dawson said nothing to that, for now anyway.

The Hausa boys used insulation foam as kindling and a cigarette lighter to start the burn. Poking the cables with sticks brought the needed rush of oxygen and created a miniature inferno with a blast of deadly black smoke. Even though he was upwind from it, Dawson caught a good whiff and backed away slightly, thinking of the toxicity of the fumes. With his foot, he flipped over a piece of plastic from a computer monitor and found a label that read
SCHOOL DISTRICT OF PHILADELPHIA
. Junked, unusable equipment that the rich countries passed off as charitable donations ended up right here in Agbogbloshie.

“Ask them if any of them saw the dead person back there or heard anything about it,” Dawson said to Sly.

The boy obliged. His friends, intent on their task, replied briefly.

“They didn’t see anything,” Sly said. “They haven’t heard anything.”

Dawson nodded. He hadn’t expected much more than that. Fact was, if the dead person wasn’t a friend of theirs or otherwise important, it just wasn’t of that much interest to them.
Someone died. So what?

“Let’s go,” Dawson said to Sly. A little farther along he put his hand on the boy’s head like he was palming a soccer ball. “Burning that stuff is dangerous. There’s poison in the smoke and you’re breathing it inside your body. You understand?”

Sly nodded, but uncertainly. Dawson wasn’t sure he really did get it. He ruffled his companion’s short, wiry hair. “You’re a good boy, Sly. Is your uncle at home?”

Sly was hesitant about something.

“You don’t like your uncle?” Darko asked.

“Yes, I like him,” Sly said.

But the changed tone of his voice, broken up like a bleat, told Dawson he wasn’t telling the truth.

“Don’t be afraid,” Dawson said. “I only want to talk to him.”

Roaming the open land bordered by the Ring Road on the west and the edge of the Odaw River on the east were a few grazing horses and a herd of placid, foraging cows, brought all the way from the northern territories by migrants who had lived as nomads. It was a bizarre mixing of rural lifestyle with the urban slum.
Only in Accra
, Dawson thought. Only in Accra.

D
eep within Agbogbloshie, Sly walked with easy assurance, as if floating over the rocky ground. He skipped nonchalantly across gutters filled to overflowing with garbage encased in opaque, grayish black glop. He ducked under laundry hung out to dry on clotheslines crisscrossing like railway tracks. He took narrow, abruptly swerving passages between rows of rickety homes constructed of wood that just begged for a conflagration.

Life went on here with the same inevitability it does anywhere else. People worked and traded, children played, women got their nails done, men had their hair cut, and a group of shirtless teenage boys watched soccer on a communal TV.

Here and there, Dawson caught a whiff of marijuana, or “wee,” as it was popularly known. From his nasal passages, it went like a blast to a pleasure spot inside his brain. He felt that tug of desire that told him he had not yet conquered his vice.
Five months completely clean
. One day at a time.

People asked Sly who his companion was. He gave the same answer every time. “He’s Darko, my friend.” It was best that way. They didn’t take to policemen. If casual queries about the corpse in the lagoon yielded little to no useful information, it was still more than Dawson would get if people knew he was a detective.

They passed a small mosque that stood out as one of the few brick buildings in Agbogbloshie. A man inside was prostrate on his prayer mat.

“There is my house,” Sly said, slowing down and pointing. “Where those boys are playing.”

Four teenagers were kicking and heading a soccer ball back and forth to one another without allowing it to touch the ground. A man sat in front of a windowless, eight-foot-square wooden shack raised off the ground on short stilts.

“Is that your uncle?” Dawson asked.

“Yes.”

Sly’s uncle saw them approaching. For a moment he didn’t move, but he finally rose to his feet as they came closer. He was frowning—the puzzled kind of frown—and then he looked wary.

“Good morning?” He was average height with squinting eyes. His hair was graying at the temples and retreating from his dome forehead. He had tribal marks on both cheeks.

“Good morning, sir. My name is Darko Dawson.”

“Yessah. I’m Gamel.” His voice was like gravel.

Behind him, the door of his living quarters was ajar, and Dawson caught a glimpse of a thin foam floor mattress as holey as Swiss cheese.

“Have he do someting wrong?” Gamel asked, gesturing at Sly.

“No,” Dawson said. “This morning he reported a dead body to the police.”

“A dead body?”

Suddenly angry, Gamel began scolding Sly in Hausa. Without warning, he lunged at the boy, but Dawson blocked his move.

“Hold on, my friend,” he said. “Come with me and let’s talk. Sly, wait here for us.”

Dawson and Gamel ducked into a tight space between his shack and the next. It reeked of urine. The two men stood barely six inches apart.

“What is your problem with Sly?” Dawson asked.

“I tell him say, if you talk to policeman you go bring plenty trouble for house. But the boy never listen.”

“He did the right thing,” Dawson said.

Gamel grew wary as realization dawned. “You are policeman?”

“Yes.”

The whites of Gamel’s eyes flashed like those of a shying horse. He took a confined step back.

“Relax,” Dawson said, “I’m not accusing you of anything.”

Gamel breathed again.

“Does Sly go to school?” Dawson asked.

Gamel hesitated. “No, sah.”

“Why not?”

“I tell him say go to school, sah. He no like.”

“How old are you, Gamel?” Dawson snapped.

“Forty-two, sah.”

“How old is Sly?”

“Nine.”

“Who do you think should be making sure he gets to school?”

Gamel looked away without answering.

“Is he even registered to attend school?” Dawson demanded.

“No, sah,” Gamel said heavily.

“Okay, listen to me,” Dawson said. “Sly should be in school. My wife is a teacher. Maybe we can help Sly register in a public school. We’ll come back and see you in a few days.”

Gamel nodded. “Yessah. Thank you.”

“One other thing,” Dawson added, moving in close. He put his hand on the other man’s oily neck and brought his thumb around to rest on the larynx.

“If you beat the boy, I will hear about it and you’ll be sorry you did it. You understand?”

Gamel nodded stiffly. “Yes, sah.”

Dawson kept his hand on Gamel’s neck for a moment longer before releasing him. “Good.”

D
awson hurried back across the littered wasteland to the crime scene. Bright and his men were rolling the body onto a board rigged with a long rope at one edge. They returned to the bank and grabbed hold of the rope tug-o’-war style. With Bright chanting, “One, two, three,
pull!
” they brought the body out of the muck and onto the bank.

For a moment, Dawson and the others stood staring at the corpse. It was hideously inflated with gases of putrefaction and coated with a patina of glistening lagoon slime. The face was puffed up three times normal, the chest and belly balloon-like. The smell was dizzying. Dawson choked and swallowed down nausea rising in his throat like a fountain.

Gritting his teeth, he crouched by the body, determined not to throw up. The person had no shoes, his clothes were blackened and soiled—a T-shirt, long shorts that guys in Accra wore—nothing out of the ordinary. Difficult to say how old he was, and so far, there was no indication of what exactly had killed him.

Dawson stood up, feeling ill. He looked at Bright. “Anything else, sir?”

Bright shook his head. “If you are done, we will transport the body to the Police Hospital Mortuary.”