419

by Will Ferguson

  "Sometimes they try to rally your sense of optimism."

  Mr. Curtis, God is on our side. You cannot abandon us now.

  Think of the girl, will you throw her to the fates?

  "Sometimes they speak of justice, sometimes of despair."

  If you walk away now Mr. Curtis, Miss Sandra will have no alternative but to commit suicide, because I will not be able to protect her and she will most certainly not be able to withstand the demands applied from those nefarious souls who are circling even now, attracted by the scent of blood.

  "Of course," said the older detective, "it's never the scammer who commits suicide." He regretted saying this even before the words had left his mouth, but the family seemed so numb by that point they hardly noticed.

  SUBJECT: You have destroyed me!

  RECEIVED: December 1, 11:59 PM

  Mr. Curtis, I can no longer hide my outrage at you! You refuse to pay the final $US 20,000.00 needed to clear the money through customs, even though as you well know this is utterly the last payment required.

  You are leaving me abandoned and betrayed. I have mortgaged my business, have gone into debt and sold my family possessions and heirlooms. I will lose everything because of you! I have covered the bulk of these costs and only $US 20,000.00 is needed on the receiving end. This is all that stands between me and abject destruction. Why did I ever trust you?

  I have attached the records of my mortgage and the necessary bank payments—payments you were supposed to make! Payments I made on your behalf!

  Why are you being so half-hearted in these matters, when millions of dollars and Miss Sandra's future happiness are at stake!!

  With disgust at your dishonesty,

  William Awele, Executor to the Estate of Dr. Atta, late Director of the Contract Award Committee for the NNPC

  "There's always one ‘last payment,"' said Rhodes. "They accuse the victim of being deceitful and two-faced. They attack, harass.

  They're incredibly persistent."

  "And if the victim threatens to expose them?" Laura asked.

  "Oh," said Saul with a smile. "They're ready for that."

  SUBJECT: Your threats mean nothing! NOTHING!!

  RECEIVED: December 7, 11:32 PM

  Are you such a fool as that Mr. Curtis? You dare threaten me??

  You want to contact the police, do so! At this stage, I'm thinking about contacting them myself. You understand, this is illegal, what you have been doing. Trying to smuggle money out of another country. You are an accomplice to a crime, Mr. Curtis. You are a thief of Africa, and you will be paid in imprisonment!

  Go to the police and they will arrest you. How will your wife and children feel then? How will you explain this to Helen, to your grandchildren?

  Send the money or face the consequences.

  William Awelle

  "Finally, when it becomes clear that there is no more money to squeeze from the victim, the scammer suddenly throws him a lifeline," said Saul. "They offer to resolve everything in one swoop—to repay the victim his entire costs in a single move. They essentially use the victim as a cheque-cashing service. They send him a sizable cashiers cheque. Or a bank draft or corporate cheque, even a money order, it doesn't matter. They tell the victim to cash the cheque, keep half—which is usually more than the expenses the victim has coughed up—and then send the rest to another account."

  "This is what happened with your father," explained Rhodes, looking at Laura.

  "The cheque arrives. The victim deposits it. The cheque clears, so everything seems good. The victim has recouped his losses and is happy to forward the remainder to another account. But people misunderstand what ‘clearing a cheque' means. The fact that a cheque has been cleared doesn't mean it's legitimate. Your local branch isn't an expert in forged documents. A bank will allow a cheque to go through based on its client's credit rating—your father's was impeccable—their many years as a valued customer, and so on. A bank can clear any cheque if they're confident they can recoup the funds should something go wrong."

  "Your father was a client of some thirty years' standing," said Rhodes. "He owned his own home and had opened a line of credit against its value. The house acted as a guarantor against the sum."

  "Let me guess," said Warren wearily. "The cheque bounced."

  "That's one way of putting it. It was a forgery."

  "Surely, for Christ's sake, the bank is liable."

  "Bank tellers aren't fraud investigators," said Rhodes. "The cheque would have worked its way through the system to a central clearing house, would have been flagged and then have worked its way back. It can take several weeks before a phony cheque is caught, even after it's been cleared. And to put it bluntly, it was your father who committed the crime, not the bank. Unknowingly, but still. Your father," she said, "passed a forged note. He attempted to defraud his bank."

  Good news! A fully certified cheque is on its way. You will recoup your entire loss, even while we await the final transfer. Deduct what is owed and return the rest. This is a way to get funds to Miss Sandra without the CBN getting their clutches upon it. Everyone wins! You will be repaid in full and Miss Sandra will be saved from a hopeless future!

  "The bank will recover most of what it lost through the foreclosure and sale of your father's property—"

  "My parents property," said Laura, anger flaring.

  Her mother put a hand on Laura's arm, said in the same soothing voice her daughter had heard so often as a child, "It's fine, dear."

  "Why didn't Dad just declare bankruptcy and be done with it?" asked Warren.

  "He could've," said Rhodes. "But the end result would have been the same. Your parents would still have lost the house. The savings would still be gone. And your father would still have faced a criminal investigation into the forged cheque."

  "Sometimes," said Saul, "when it's all over, the con men contact the victim again, this time claiming to be investigators from Interpol, or from the EFCC, Nigeria's Anti-Fraud Unit, intent on helping the victim track down the crooks and recover his money.

  For a fee, of course. "

  It was like watching a car crash in slow motion.

  —Egberifa.

  "There was," said Detective Saul, sliding a final sheet of paper across the table, "one last payment. It was on your father's credit card. The card itself was maxed out, but the payment went through.

  The transaction occurred just a few days before the—accident."

  "An airplane ticket," said Rhodes.

  This straightened Laura's posture. "Dad was going to Nigeria?"

  "It wasn't a ticket to Nigeria. From. It was in the name of one Sandra Atta."

  "She was coming here?" said Laura. "I thought she didn't exist."

  "She doesn't. The ticket was never used. Someone cashed it, kept the money."

  And the figure in the shadows, the one her father had called in a complaint about? "There was no one outside my parents' window, was there?" Laura asked.

  "We didn't see anyone, no."

  She should have felt relieved, but all she felt was sad. That these faceless criminals had been able to reach deep into her dad's mind and conjure up demons... On the day the flight arrived, her dad must have driven out there, to the airport. He must have driven out there and waited—and waited. In many ways, he was waiting there still.

  Hi. Henry here. Please tell Miss Sandra that I will be at the airport on Friday to meet her when she arrives, just to make sure she gets to the right office and is given full protection as a political refugee. Don't worry, I won't let her be deported.

  —Thank you sir and God bless! You are a good man.

  "The final block is fear," said Detective Saul.

  "They use your fears against you," Rhodes explained. "There's rarely any reason to send someone out in person to threaten you, though. It's mostly self-inflicted."

  The final block is fear. In the weeks that followed, and throughout the events that ensued, Laura would remember those words. And she
would ask herself: What if you denied fear its foothold? What if you refused to be afraid?

  A final flurry of emails, fragments of messages hurled back and forth:

  Do you love your wife?

  —Of course I do.

  Then shut up and don't cause problems. Do you understand? We are mafia. We will find you & we will kill! you. We will leave your life in tatters.

  —You already have.

  You will die. We know where you live. We will burn your house to the ground.

  —What about the girl?

  No response.

  —What about the girl?

  No response.

  CHAPTER 46

  At the Katsina roundabout in Kaduna city, a massive tanker truck was parked like a beached ship, sides labelled in a hand-painted flourish: "Dreams Abound." Sweat-sheened truck drivers and longdistance bus passengers stranded for the night had shoved their way in under the awnings of the niotor-park cafes, crowded their way along wooden benches, called out their orders across oilcloth countertops.

  The girl stood outside, watched plate after plate of food-is-ready fare being dished out. Just 150 naira would have bought her a space along that counter. One hundred and fifty naira: it might as well have been a million.

  She hung back at the edge of the motor-park perimeter while evening fell. Shed scouted a few possibilities, spots where the men were louder and drunker than most and would, she hoped, sleep more deeply as well. Inside a cement culvert, she lay down atop discarded cardboard and waited for the laughter to end.

  Too hungry to sleep, she counted out the hours. One by one the pockets of celebratory gatherings went silent, and she crawled out under the blue cast of a swollen moon. Not a cloud in the sky for cover. Women who are with child should not travel after dark. But the night was not dark, and this was not travel.

  Leaving her jerry can hidden in the culvert, she moved along the side of a sewage ditch, peering over it for any sign of roving boys or drunken men. Finally, with a deep breath, she left her cover and followed a path up and into the hyenas' den. A few flickers of flame echoed dimly inside the corroded oil barrels where the truck drivers had formed encampments, their vehicles packed in tightly on all sides as the men slumbered on mats. She heard heavy snores, crept closer.

  She was hoping for the usual discarded suya sticks and mango rinds; she found much, much more.

  Indeed, it was such a heart-catching sight she had to take a moment to calm herself. An entire flank of lamb, the meat heavy on the bone, was skewered above a firepit, the flesh charred and grown cold, glazed in its own grease. Bodies lay all around, but the hunger urged her on, deeper into the encampment. She stepped carefully, threaded her way among the sleeping bodies and piles of rubbish. Three or four steps and she would reach it. This isn't theft, she told herself. If she didn't take the meat, a stray dog or waddling rat surely would...

  She took one hesitant step, then another.

  But the world was not entirely asleep. Someone else was awake and watching her. And as she moved toward the fire pit, a figure took shape in front of her, stepped forward.

  A smile emerged from the darkness. "What do we have here?" it asked.

  CHAPTER 47

  The sea had pushed the river back on itself, with the swirling saline blues curling into the darker greens of the Niger Delta. Tidal waters, deep among the creeks and mangrove swamps.

  Just as smoothly, the sea had withdrawn, leaving sleek flats and rivulets flopping with mudskippers. The men moved quickly, stabbing and sorting as the first pelts of rain hit. They were tossing their catch into cross-hatched baskets slung over their shoulders, leaving the leftovers for the children to gather later. Men with backs bent, wet more from condensation than from sweat.

  Some had staked out the backflow of estuarial waters with raffia fishing traps, straining the current for prawns. "Fewer than ever," they complained, to cries of agreement. "Fewer than ever, but enough still, Wonyinghi willing!," quickly amended to "Christ willing!"

  The miracle of the fish and the loaves played out in more paltry terms that day: hundreds of croaker fish had arrived belly-up from the oil creeks farther inland, sheathed in crude and already rotting.

  The boy was nine or ten, maybe more, maybe less; his parents hadn't kept track as diligently as they might, preferring to count out a life by the number of floods lived through rather than one's circuits around the sun. However one kept tally, though, he was still the eldest of the children, and he carried his rank with a firm but fair demeanour. That day, he'd led the little ones along the trail that ran from the back of the village, behind the church, all the way to the lagoon. They'd marched behind him in single file, arranging themselves naturally by height like waterfowl crossing a sandbar, plastic pails and enamel basins held one-handed on heads. Bellies in proud posture. Singsong voices, laughter.

  Hardwood canoes were tethered together in the lagoon below, stranded temporarily on tidal mud. The few pirogues that did sport outdoor motors had them tilted up, their propellers useless at low tide.

  With nets and fishing traps, the men moved through. Who knew but they might find a shark marooned in wet silt; it happened now and then, causing a riot of excitement and a circle kill. No sharks today, though. Only smaller fish and the fecund smell of the nearby mangrove marshes.

  On those occasions when the tide rolled in a giant catfish, further nets would be thrown. Clusters of minnow-sized fish that flitted behind would escape, slipping free on the shallowest of trickles. And though these little fish weren't the offspring of the catfish, the boy's father saw patterns in this, too. "It is a parent's job to give its life for its children," he said.

  From the path above the lagoon, the boy held up his hand, and the procession of children came to a halt. "Aren't ready for us," he said. The men would shout when it was time for the children to come running to gather any loose fish still flopping about. They'd have to hurry then before the tide snatched them back.

  "We'll wait here," said the boy. "Beside the cannon."

  The children lowered the basins from their heads, awaited further instructions. Even entangled as it was with netted vines, the cannon stood out as a local landmark. Cast in iron, the letters

  HRH Victoria Rex were raised along one side, like a welt on skin.

  The cannon marked the high point of the path—or what little high point there was. On its outcrop of rock, it still claimed a vantage point on the lagoon; the men below were caught in an ancient line of fire.

  It had been trying to rain all day, and the overcast skies now finally collapsed. But the downpour didn't last. The rain soon turned to mist and the mist to steam, and still the men hadn't called.

  The children had waited it out under large leaves, and when the worst of the rain had ended and the older boy said, "Okay then, go play," they broke formation instantly, squealing. The boys played at battle in the flattened clearing beside the cannon, wrestling in arm-lock posture, rolling each other into the wet earth. The girls played other games, hopping on one foot on matted grass as they sang precision phrases, trying to maintain balance and rhythm as long as possible, laughing when they stumbled, laughing when they didn't.

  Beyond the cannon was the British graveyard, and as the little ones played, the older boy let himself drift toward it.

  The names of the dead rolled off his tongue: Manning Henderson, Esq. Richard Belshaw, Royal Gunner. Captain Reginald Louchland. For God and King. For Queen and Countrye.

  He could read the tombstones because they were in English—and though there might be some areas where they spoke only their local Ijaw dialect, out here amid the mahogany and mangroves of the outer creeks, English was their shared language. How else to speak to the Igbo traders or Yoruba priests? How else to cut across dialects of Ijaw so thick they were almost separate languages in themselves? English had been spoken in the Delta longer than this entity they called "Nigeria" had existed. The Ijaw of the Niger Delta had fought for the English king and against him, had mast
ered his language, had hosted his missionaries—had martyred more than a few. The king's language was taught in school, was used in the markets and at home, with conversations flowing from Ijaw to English and back again as easily as water might pour from one gourd to another. They spoke it properly as well, in low rich tones, with every word, every syllable, given equal weight, equal importance. Nothing like those reedy nasal inflections coming over the radio. Pale BBC voices, sickly and thin.

  English had taken root in the muddy waters of the Delta as surely as the mangroves had. The language was theirs as much as it was anyone's, even if most children, and many adults, had never even seen an oyibo, as the Igbo traders called them.