Nina, the Bandit Queen

by Joey Slinger

  “We are dealing with a top-drawer organization, Kevin,” Mbunzu agreed. “I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the Agency weren’t too far below the surface of this. It’s something we would be wise to bear in mind.”

  The district where this Ms. K. Beach person lived reminded them of parts of Greater Lagos where bad things could easily happen to you even if you were minding your own business. From the looks of SuEz, they assumed that warlords and their armies must be raping and looting out in the countryside, and this had caused farm workers and the residents of remote villages to move into the city, and especially into parts of it where they could survive when they didn’t have any money. The biggest difference was that the places like that over here had apparently been built by somebody who had tools.

  A number of times they observed her on the sidewalk chatting with the resident of the house at the end of the row hers was in, a black man who had three children but no wives at all, as far as Kevin and Ridgeway could see. Sometimes they saw him coming and going in a cape that appeared to have been made out of a shower curtain with a leopard-skin pattern that somewhat strangely, Kevin thought, reminded Ridgeway of home. Any doubts they had about Krystal being the go-between vanished when they realized that every time they snuck around keeping her under surveillance, they saw two white men sneaking around doing the same thing. These must either be Agency operatives who wanted to make sure she came to no harm and didn’t pull a doublecross, or they had got wind of the deal she was involved in between the White House and the Nigerians and were looking for ways to get some of the ingots for themselves.

  Thoroughly satisfied that the gold connection was in their sights, the colonels decided it was time to quit commuting from the motel they’d been staying in near the airport, but they didn’t want to move right into the middle of SuEz, because everywhere they went people stared at them. Even the two white men with the T-shirts that didn’t quite cover their bellies would turn and stare at Kevin and Ridgeway in ways that felt quite alarming. And no matter where they lurked on the Beach woman’s street, a throng of laughing, foul-mouthed little girls always gathered, trying to reach their dirty little hands into the strangers’ pockets.

  “Perhaps it is some cultural thing,” Ridgeway said. “Something we do so naturally we are not even aware of it, yet it draws attention in this country.”

  “One thing that occurs to me,” Kevin said, “is that no one apart from yourself is leading a goat on a rope.” He couldn’t quite keep the edge out of his voice.

  For a second Ridgeway looked hurt, then he began to laugh. “Haw, haw. Your sense of humour, old sport. Ripping as always.” But another reason for moving into town was that they frequently had difficulty getting a taxi with a driver who would let them bring the goat. That morning they’d been left standing outside their motel three times by cabs that sped away, the drivers cursing in Arabic about how newcomers to this country were getting stupider and stupider.

  Kevin seethed at this, but silently, as he’d been silently seething ever since the afternoon Ridgeway had gone for a walk and returned to their room leading the goat. He kept silent because he was worried. Had the job become too much for his great colleague and friend? Had culture shock turned his brain to orange marmalade?

  Ridgeway actually went dewy around the eyes when Kevin reacted with a baffled, “I say, I say.” He’d described coming across what he’d taken for a livestock market in a parking lot surrounded by shops a few roads over. Seeing the goat, he found himself recalling visits to his grandfather’s place in the green hills when he’d been a boy. His grandfather kept goats, and the sight of this one filled Ridgeway with longing for, in Kevin’s condensed version, the familial home of memory.

  He had asked to buy it. “The proprietor told me, however, that this was not a market, but something called a petting zoo —”

  “A what?” Kevin said.

  “— but we fell to haggling.”

  “Haggling?”

  “Pardon, old love?” Ridgeway was dreamily scratching the goat between its nubbin horns.

  “How much did you pay?”

  “Two thousand dollars.”

  “Two thousand dollars?”

  “Cash. Of course, you would have known that.”

  “For a —” Kevin struggled to regain control. A professional crisis might be brewing here. The team’s fate may be threatened. “For a goat?”

  Ridgeway admired his acquisition. “An excellent one, as you can see.”

  Kevin couldn’t, not even slightly. He was a city boy and always had been. So was Ridgeway, as far as he’d known. It was extremely odd, was it not, for a city boy to be homesick for something his closest friend and colleague had never heard him refer to? All right, perhaps he had mentioned his grandfather’s village. But this stinking, forsaken, flybitten … He began wondering exactly how much, when push came to shove, he was going to be able to depend on a professional partner he used to consider perfectly normal. Perhaps this strange obsession would pass. Perhaps it was some sort of jet lag. A great deal of money needed to be found and spirited away. The slightest uncertainty could be fatal.

  They rented an apartment in a tower at The Intersection from a man they thought had been asleep on the floor in the corner of the lobby, but who hobbled over when they looked as if they were getting nervous about all the whores and drug dealers working there. “If you’s don’t need a key right this minute, you’s can move in right now,” the man said. For an extra fifty dollars he dragged in a bunch of furniture.

  “You’s want shit?” he said as he was leaving.

  “I beg your pardon?” Kevin said. It wasn’t until the man mimed sticking a needle in his arm that they caught on. They shook their heads.

  “How about pussy?”

  Kevin and Ridgeway eyed each other blankly.

  “Nah.” The man shrugged and stuffed the money for the first month’s rent down the front of his pants. “I guess with that goat you’s don’t need pussy.”

  They stared speechlessly as he went out the door and slammed it, and they were still staring speechlessly when it crashed down flat on the floor and two men, one carrying an assault rifle, stormed in and explained that they lived next door and wanted their fuckin’ furniture back. After Kevin and Ridgeway had carried it into the other apartment, the man with the automatic weapon followed them back into theirs and shot out all the windows. “You watch your asses,” the man said, walking out over the door that still lay where it had fallen.

  It took them a long while to get to sleep that night. They didn’t feel secure, since they hadn’t been able to do anything but prop the door against the frame, and the goat kept up a plaintive bleating. Ridgeway said he’d heard of animals becoming restless when a tsunami was about to strike. Kevin said if that was the case, they should at least be grateful for being on the twenty-fourth floor.

  A horrendous boom split the night, scaring them so shitless that if they never fell asleep anywhere again for the rest of their lives, they would have known why. They only realized it was the unhinged door crashing flat for a second time when somebody blinded them with a flashlight. “What you motherfuckers doing in my place?” he said.

  They stuttered something about not knowing it was anybody’s place. About how they’d just rented it that afternoon.

  “No motherfuckers rent my motherfuckin’ place from nobody but me,” he replied.

  They described the man they’d given their rent money to. “Never heard of a motherfucker like that,” he said. “I’m the motherfucker you motherfuckin’ pay. And right now is when you motherfuckin’ pay me, or —” he stopped. He shone his flashlight around. “What happened to my motherfuckin’ windows?”

  Kevin and Ridgeway promised to replace them. They said there had been a misunderstanding with the next-door neighbours. They promised to pay the man his rent too, but first they had to cash a money order at the bank.

  “Motherfuckers expect me to believe that?”

  They swore
on their mothers’ graves they wouldn’t cheat him.

  There was another explosion. The goat fell over. Lowering his pistol, the man ran his light up and down its twitching body. “Just a motherfuckin’ reminder,” he said. “You bring me that money by ten tomorrow morning.”

  Something in Ridgeway snapped. It had been building up, but watching somebody shoot his goat pushed him over the limit. He rushed at the man, hollering. In the darkness, Kevin could hear thumping and grunting. The grunting grew louder. Two more shots were fired. Then, barely visible against the black sky, and with a grunt that was almost a shriek, the man heaved Ridgeway’s body through one of the blasted-out windows twenty-four floors above the ground.

  “Ten o’clock.” The man was gasping. “Don’t motherfuckin’ forget.” His footsteps boomed as he strode across the door and into the lightless hall.

  Kevin couldn’t tell what was making him shake so violently, horror or grief, but he didn’t stick around to find out. He didn’t even take time to breathe before he was in the corridor himself, skittering toward the fire stairs, praying that the homicidal maniac had gone the other way. By first light he was huddled in Nina’s cellar, still shaking. Nobody in the neighbourhood knew he was there, but because he’d been keeping an eye on Krystal Beach, SuEz was the only part of town he was familiar with. And with most of the back wall of the house gone, the cellar offered the most obvious hole to hide in. Besides, his mission didn’t end just because of the death in the line of duty of Colonel J. Ridgeway Mbunzu, his dear and respected partner. Dear because one of Kevin’s wives was one of Ridgeway’s sisters. And respected because Ridgeway’s wives had been so beautiful that Kevin was screwing two of them when he and Ridgeway ended up getting sent over here on assignment. It hadn’t been easy for him to cheat on his friend. Not with the two of them working together most of every day, and drinking together most of every night, after which they would cruise the whore districts to take advantage of the action they got on the house all over the place thanks to making sure the taxes on the madams didn’t amount to more than a small pile of monkey shit.

  But could one man alone take on this Ms. K. Beach, even if he did happen to be a very good man? Should he perhaps go back to Nigeria and regain his strength by offering his sympathies and comfort to Ridgeway’s widows? Would the Finance Ministry take his return as an admission of defeat and send a team of the younger men who would have become the most-feared colonels since he and Ridgeway left? If he stayed, though, and if he could pull it off, wouldn’t his share of the gold be twice as much as the half he would have gotten if he and Ridgeway had been forced to split the whole thing before faking their deaths and going into extremely luxurious seclusion?

  He concentrated really hard on how he might accomplish this, because when he didn’t concentrate really hard, he would start noticing the smell in the cellar, which made him feel like vomiting. When that happened, he asked himself what it was about the New World that was such a big attraction. No wonder the African people they brought out had to be chained down in the boats.

  Eighteen

  Somewhere there was 1.18 million dollars that, if she could find it, she could use to help fix the swimming pool. Then she could get on with her life.

  Nina laughed every time somebody said that, but after awhile the laughter in her tank started running low and she didn’t bother any more. She did wonder what the people who said it had in mind. Did they mean she could get back to doing whatever she’d been doing before the whole business of the school pool and the bank robbing and the ice cream trucks and blowing up Ed Oataway’s car and her brother getting murdered came along? If that’s what they meant, she wondered what it was they thought she’d been doing. If people thought getting on with her life meant she’d been heading somewhere with it, or that it had been going somewhere and she was on board, riding along, that wasn’t how it worked. Her life had started when it started and then stayed right there. She got older, she got married, she had children, or once the other way around, but nothing changed. Did they think all this swimming pool and stuff was a distraction? That because of it she’d had her thumb in her bum and as soon as it was over she could put the pedal to the floor again?

  It wasn’t like there weren’t distractions before this. Things always came along that weren’t exactly ordinary, and some of them weren’t welcome, either. D.S. getting the shit kicked out of him at work wasn’t ever welcome. Did it count as a distraction? It happened so often that if it distracted you, the next thing you knew you’d be distracted every time one of the girls told her sisters to go fuck themselves. You’d be distracted by everything. You’d be distracted to death.

  She had a hard time thinking of D.S. getting the shit kicked out of him as a part of her life she wanted to get on with, or that she’d want to if she had any choice in the matter. And if she did get on with it, or didn’t, what difference would it have made? His job would have brought in a fair bit of money if he could have done it without getting the shit kicked out of him. But he couldn’t. It was like he had some kind of gift for it, and for it not to happen would require cutting off some part of himself that made him what he was. Lady couldn’t quite see what Nina meant by this until Merlina explained how it would be the same for Guinevere if she had to get rid of her falsies. She would no longer exist. But Lady said Merly wouldn’t exist if she didn’t have such stupid ideas. And Nina told them this was a perfect example of what happened when anybody tried to discuss real issues in their family, although it was probably bound to be like that considering D.S.’s influence. If he was going to have a gift, it was going to be a stupid one.

  It seemed kind of strange that Total kept hiring him as a greeter, since just about everybody who knew him wished he would go away and leave them alone. They felt like that even when he wasn’t around. Even his daughters did, although he’d never done anything awful to them or threatened them in any way. Nina wasn’t surprised. It was the way you’d expect kids to react when their father was completely irritating, and when he was around they couldn’t avoid realizing it.

  For instance, if he spilled something, he’d say to whichever of the girls was handy that if she wiped it up he’d take everybody on a holiday to France. He promised them this whenever they cleared up whatever kind of mess he’d made, but instead of it becoming a joke, it only got more irritating because, say, for a class project, one of them had to colour the part of the map that was France blue, and she didn’t know where France was. If she asked D.S., he’d point to where it was, and she’d colour it, but when she got to school it would turn out that the country he’d told her to colour blue was Greece or someplace. And when she got upset with him, it would turn out that he didn’t really know where France was. Worse than that, he knew he hadn’t known when she first asked him. That hadn’t stopped him, though, because he would never let on that there was anything he didn’t know. When she pointed out its actual location, he said, “I thought you just meant where it was roughly.”

  Or when they got on him for never saying “Excuse me” after he burped or farted and he started making it into a D.S. kind of joke. He’d shout “Excuse me!” and they would look up because they didn’t know what he needed to be excused for. “For what?” they’d say. And he’d shout, “Nothing!” He did this three or four times a day for years until it got so they didn’t even notice him shouting “Excuse me!” That didn’t stop him, though. He’d start yelling, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” until one of them would say, not having thought what she was doing through completely, “What, for God’s sake?” And he’d shout, “Nothing!”

  Nobody could understand why every time he got well enough to go back to work, Total would assign him to be a greeter again. Sometimes all he’d do was say, “Welcome to Total,” and a customer would punch him in the eye. But he always acted like nothing happened. “It has to do with how the customer is always right,” he told his daughters. “It is the Total philosophy.” He was extremely proud to be associated with a company that had a phil
osophy and wondered if his family wouldn’t do better if they had one, too. Merlina said the only one she could think of was “Gwinny is a twat,” but he said she was too young to understand the difference between a philosophy and whatever it was she’d suggested. Merly said it didn’t matter, it was the only thing she truly believed.

  Ed Oataway’s opinion was that no matter who the people were, or where it happened, everybody who met D.S. got so irritated they wanted to kick the shit out of him. It was no more complicated than that. It got to the point where D.S. came to regard anybody who didn’t actually kick the shit out of him as his friend. Ed said this was the problem he had for not having given in to the urge to do it in the first place.

  As far as Nina could see, getting on with her life wasn’t something that counted for much. “Trying to get through today so I can try to get through tomorrow,” she said to Merlina, “does that sound like I was getting on with my life?” She enjoyed fiddling around with hard questions like this, but she didn’t have much time to chew on them when she had to spend all her time rushing around trying to survive. “Maybe helping you girls survive was a life, but was it a life for you, too?”

  Then she gave her head a shake. “Being a welfare queen has a lot less going for it than a lot of people think,” she said. When Merly asked if that would maybe suit them as a family philosophy, it made Nina laugh.