Children of the Street

by Kwei Quartey

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out. You have a good view of the lagoon from here. Was anyone here early Sunday morning?”

  Cuthbert shook his head. “Not at all, sir. We close the station down Saturday evening around six, lock the gates, and open up again Monday morning. Sundays are sacred.”

  “Church wins every time,” Dawson commented.

  “Oh, yes.” Cuthbert smiled. “Have you ever visited our plant before, Mr. Dawson?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  Cuthbert stood up. “Then come along. I’m happy to show you around. We’ll go to the pump station first.”

  After they had been in the air-conditioned office, the heat outside hit them like a cricket bat. They walked across the parking area down east of the second building and around the corner. The whir of the pump and the powerful swish of water got louder, and the sewage smell became stronger. Cuthbert led the way to the base of the pump. Towering above them in a brick housing was a huge, spinning piece of machinery that looked like a giant corkscrew.

  “It’s called an Archimedes’ screw,” Cuthbert told Dawson, raising his voice above the din. “It may not seem that its turning action could pump water up, but it does—at a good two cubic meters per second from the base to the top of the tower.”

  They climbed a platform beyond the pump for a panoramic view of the surroundings.

  “Where was the boy found?” Cuthbert asked.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Dawson said, frowning. “I was on the Agbogbloshie side of the canal yesterday. Everything looks different from this angle.”

  “Let me help you get your bearings, then, sir.” Cuthbert looked south. “The outlet of the lagoon to the sea underneath the Winneba Bridge is over there—where you just came from. That’s a mangrove island you see in the middle of the lagoon.”

  He turned the opposite direction now.

  “The Odaw River comes from several miles north. Once it crosses Abossey Okai Road, it becomes Korle Canal, which is the only portion we can see from here because of the way it curves out of sight. Agbogbloshie, where you were yesterday, is on the opposite bank from us.”

  Dawson gazed across at the landscape of trash and wooden shacks seen through the haze of smoke from the burning copper wire.

  “Some people don’t even realize we have a river in Accra,” Cuthbert continued. “At any rate, the poor Odaw has become part of Accra’s open sewer. Garbage, human waste, domestic waste, factory waste—you name it, they dump it, and after it’s accumulated all that nastiness, it arrives here.”

  “Not pretty,” Dawson said. “There must be, what, millions of plastic water bottles and water bags in there.”

  “Not to mention toxic waste and chemicals. We have two excavators to take out as much of the solid waste as possible as it arrives, but it’s tough to keep up.”

  “What’s that dam that goes from this side to the other bank?” Dawson asked, indicating the broad, partitioned concrete wall spanning the canal.

  “That’s the interceptor. It stops solids from getting into the lagoon. It also has twenty flap gates to regulate water levels during flood season.”

  In front of the interceptor, a boom lay across the breadth of the lagoon to help trap floating material. At the boom, the garbage was so dense it looked like a solid mass. Egrets, light enough to stand on it, pecked around for morsels. What food could they possibly find in there?

  “Now, look carefully, Inspector, sir,” Cuthbert said. “Slightly upstream from the interceptor, you can make out the Agbogbloshie Canal as it joins the Korle Canal. It’s difficult to spot because it’s so much smaller than the Korle Canal.”

  “I see it now,” Dawson said. “And that’s where the body was found.”

  “Aha. Now you’ve got your bearings.”

  Because the Agbogbloshie Canal was upstream from the interceptor, Dawson now saw that the dead body could not have got there if it had been dumped in the sea or even the lagoon. Even if an extremely high tide had washed the corpse in, the interceptor would have done exactly that: intercepted the body before it got to the Agbogbloshie Canal. Which brought up the next logical question.

  “Could the body have floated down the Odaw River into the Korle Canal and then the Agbogbloshie Canal?” Dawson asked.

  “I doubt it, sir,” Cuthbert said, shaking his head. “More likely it would have ended up at the boom with all the rest of the floating debris. Maybe, just maybe, that could happen if there was an extreme flood situation, but that hasn’t occurred recently.”

  “So the body had to have been dumped right where it was found.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dawson turned and gazed as far as he could see down the lagoon. “It could be a beautiful place. But then there’s that.” He gestured toward Agbogbloshie. “Seriously, Mr. Plange, what are we going to do about it?”

  “The government is moving all these squatters out.”

  Dawson was incredulous. “Moving them out? To where?”

  “To a place outside of the city. Everything. The yam market, the timber market, everything going.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  Cuthbert looked intently at Dawson. “I understand your skepticism, Inspector, and I’ve heard it a lot. Many people say to me, ‘Aren’t you just wasting your time dredging this place when trash is being dumped faster than you can remove it?’ But my answer is, Can we really afford not to try? One day in the future when I’m old and gray, I’ll come down here and look at the beautiful, clear water of the lagoon where people are fishing, swimming, and sailing, and I’ll feel thankful and proud that we never gave up.”

  6

  The sky opened up that evening and dumped a torrent on the city. Just in time, Dawson cleared out the channels he had constructed to divert rainwater from the house.

  With the first jagged flash of lightning, electric power went out on Dawson’s block and in the entire area between Awudome Circle and Kaneshie Market. It was lantern time. Dawson and Christine had decided to have kenkey with fish, the latter prepared by Christine without salt because of Hosiah’s dietary restrictions. They went traditional, using their fingers to eat from one large common bowl. It was a social and intimate way to take a meal, even more fitting by lantern light.

  “This is all it takes to make me happy,” Dawson said between mouthfuls. “Kenkey and fish. And Malta.”

  “The way you love kenkey, you’d think you were a Ga,” Christine said.

  The Ga, Accra’s original people, had a legendary love of kenkey, but Dawson was half Ewe and half Fante. Nevertheless, he was fluent in Ga, as well as Ewe, Fante, and Twi, which took care of most of the lower half of Ghana. He had only a rudimentary knowledge of Hausa, one of the major languages spoken in the north.

  As they talked, Dawson was putting up a cheerful front, but a lump formed in his throat every time Edith’s words from earlier that day came back to him. I’m so sorry. They turned it down.

  When was he going to tell Christine? Tonight?

  Hosiah let out a cheer as the lights suddenly came back on. While Christine washed dishes, Dawson took him to have his bath in preparation for bed.

  As Dawson was toweling him dry, Hosiah asked, “Daddy, if the hole in my heart gets bigger and bigger, will I stop growing?”

  “No, that won’t stop you from growing.”

  “I want to be big and tall like you.”

  “You will. Probably even taller.”

  He was thrilled. “Really?”

  “Mm-hm. Your ears dry?”

  Hosiah checked. “Yes.”

  “No little tadpoles inside?”

  Hosiah cackled as he went to brush his teeth. I want to be big and tall like you. What if he never made it? Dawson turned away, pretending to fuss with the towels. His forehead was furrowed and his lips tight as he gulped his emotions down.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, champ?” Dawson’s voice wobbled just a bit.

  “Do yo
u catch a lot of bad people?”

  “I try to.” He came to the boy’s side. “Don’t forget your back teeth.”

  Hosiah said something unintelligible through toothpaste foam.

  “Finish brushing first,” Dawson said.

  When Hosiah was toothpaste free, he asked his question again. “What happens to the bad people when you catch them?”

  “We send them to jail for a while, and then one day they go before a judge and he decides if they were really bad and need to go to prison.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come on. Story time.”

  On the way to the bedroom, Hosiah asked, “How come when I’m bad I don’t get a judge too?”

  “You know why?”

  “Why?”

  Dawson suddenly swept Hosiah up onto one shoulder, and the boy shrieked with laughter.

  “You know why?”

  “Why?” Hosiah shouted.

  “Because I’m the judge too.”

  Dawson delivered him to bed in a giggling bundle. Hosiah cuddled against him as he read, for probably the one thousandth time, an Ananse the Spider story.

  “Was that good?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Lights out. Mammy will come up in a minute.”

  He kissed Hosiah twice.

  In their own bedroom as they got ready to turn in, Dawson asked Christine, “Can we go to Agbogbloshie together tomorrow afternoon to see what we can do about getting Sly into school?”

  “Sure, if you like.” She got into bed. “Oh, wait a minute. I have to pick Hosiah up early from school. They have a half day.”

  “What about your friend? She can’t take him for the afternoon?”

  “No, she’s busy.” Hesitation. “The only alternative is for Mama to watch Hosiah till we get back.”

  Dawson got into bed as well but didn’t respond.

  “Dark,” she pleaded. “You can’t punish her anymore.”

  Almost a year ago, Dawson’s mother-in-law, Gifty, had taken Hosiah to see a traditional healer to “cure” the boy’s heart ailment. She had done this without the consent of either Dawson or Christine. In the process of the healer’s “cleansing ritual,” Hosiah was accidentally struck on the head, opening a gash in his scalp. Dawson had never forgiven Gifty.

  “Look,” he said, “it’s not as if she hasn’t been able to see Hosiah at all.”

  “But that’s strictly my taking him over to visit her together. You don’t want me to leave him there alone with her. You know she loves having him for the day. This is killing her.”

  Dawson blew his breath out. “All right,” he said resignedly, “maybe I’m being too hard on her. You can drop Hosiah off at her house tomorrow.”

  “And from now on she can babysit him when needed?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Christine gave him a big kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, sweetheart. She’s going to be thrilled.”

  Like a lightning bolt, a thought flashed through Dawson’s mind and made him cringe. What if my mother-in-law outlives Hosiah?

  “What’s the matter?” Christine asked him at once. “What was that look?”

  He brought her closer.

  “Dark, what’s wrong?”

  “Edith called me today,” he said.

  “I see.” Christine became very still. “So they turned the petition down.”

  Dawson nodded.

  They both stayed silent for some time.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked, sounding empty.

  “It’s not the end of the road,” Dawson said. “There’s always something around the corner.”

  Christine sat up, suddenly angry. “We’re not going to sit around and let our son die.” Her voice cracked. “This stupid government that does nothing but steal our money. They think we’re going to let him die just because of them?”

  She jumped out of bed, eyes blazing.

  “Christine—”

  “Idiot bureaucrats at the hospital with no soul,” she said, her voice trembling. “Just because of them?”

  Dawson scrambled up himself and hurried around to her side of the bed.

  “And yes,” she continued in fury, “that incompetent Ghana Police Service you work for. Do they want us to let him die?”

  She began to weep, her lacerated cries wrenched from her throat. Dawson put his arms around her, but she struggled to pull away. He held her firmly and wouldn’t let go.

  “I’m with you, Christine,” he said. “You have to remember that. I’m with you. And I won’t let you or Hosiah down. Ever.”

  At last her body relaxed and molded into his, and she cried until her energy was spent.

  7

  After the overnight rain, the roads were in no condition for Dawson’s motorbike, so he took a cab to work. The commute was a nightmare. Several intersections and whole segments of streets were flooded, a reflection of the sorry state of Accra’s drainage system. Traffic was at a standstill in every direction. Taxi drivers, including Dawson’s, were being their usual aggressive selves, which didn’t help people’s tempers any.

  His phone rang.

  “Morning, Wisdom.”

  “Good morning, Inspector. Where are you?”

  “Stuck at Nkrumah Circle.”

  Wisdom grunted. “Best of luck. I spoke to Yves last night. He says he’ll do it for us.”

  “Okay. When do you need the photo?”

  “Today. Can you send me a high-quality scan?”

  “Scan! We hardly have any computers at CID and you’re talking about scanners?”

  “The whole CID, not a single scanner? I don’t believe it.”

  “Since it troubles you so much, why not buy one for us?”

  Wisdom chortled.

  “I can photocopy it for you,” Dawson said. “That’s the best I can do.”

  “Why can’t I get the original?”

  “Release an original photo to you from police files? I don’t think so, my friend.”

  “Okay, okay. So where can I pick up the copy?”

  “I’m going to Agbogbloshie later today. I can meet you on the way there, say in front of the Ghana Customs building. I’ll call you before I leave.”

  Chikata was even later to work than Dawson was.

  “Ah, this Accra flooding,” he said with disgust as he sat down next to his boss at a worn, pockmarked desk. “Anyway, good morning, Dawson.”

  “Morning, Chikata.”

  They shared a large, open office with nine other detectives ranging in rank from constable to inspector. When Dawson got to be chief inspector, he would move to a more exclusive room somewhere. For now, this old and bare room on the seventh floor of the CID building was the home base Dawson and his colleagues loved to hate. The air-conditioning consisted of louvered windows, which on one side of the room provided a view of the car park below and on the opposite side opened to the outside corridor.

  The noisy office was as busy as an ant colony. Some detectives were taking reports from witnesses or crime victims. Others streamed in and out through the always open door. There was also a good deal of aimless chatter that all the investigators had learned to tune out as they conducted interviews.

  “Any leads from yesterday in Agbogbloshie?” Dawson asked.

  Chikata shook his head. “I took two constables with me. We spread out and asked as many people as we could, about a hundred and fifty in total. But nothing.”

  “A hundred and fifty? Not bad. And no one knew of a missing young man of the description you gave?”

  “No one was even interested.”

  “Maybe people will care more when we circulate a forensic artist’s sketch.”

  Chikata was surprised. “Since when do we have a forensic artist?”

  “We don’t, but Wisdom Asamoah found one for me.”

  Chikata pulled a face. “That nosy guy.”

  “Ah, but it’s the same nosiness as ours,” Dawson said with a shrug, “and as long as we’re getting something out
of it, I don’t care.”

  Around four, Dawson flagged a taxi down to make the trip to Agbogbloshie via his meeting place with Wisdom at the customs building. He called Wisdom to let him know he was on his way. The taxi crawled along Independence Avenue while captive traffic was swamped by hawkers trying to peddle plantain chips, apples, world maps, DVDs, books, tools, belts, and even three bewildered little puppies. While the taxi was stationary, Dawson beckoned to a vendor and bought a bag of iced water—the same item responsible for much of the scourge in the Korle Lagoon.

  Dawson’s phone rang. The caller ID said DARAMANI. He hesitated before answering. Daramani, who came from arid northern Ghana, had been a petty thief and marijuana dealer Dawson had arrested years ago. He was considerably rehabilitated now, holding down a job and not stealing.

  When Dawson had first raided Daramani’s place in Nima, he had found a marijuana stash of exceptional quality. Possession and use was illegal in Ghana. It also happened to be Dawson’s Achilles’ heel. He disliked alcohol, but wee was almost impossible for him to resist. Standing in Daramani’s ragged living quarters, Dawson was the arsonist in a tinderbox or the child molester in a nursery school. He did what he should never have done and took some of the marijuana for himself.

  For a while after Daramani had served time, he became an informant of sorts. That was the ostensible reason that Dawson kept in touch with the thief, but the marijuana was the real attraction.

  “Hello, Daramani,” he said into the phone.

  “Ei, Dawson, why you no visit me these days?”

  “You know why.”

  “Because of the wee?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to smell it or even be anywhere near it.”

  “Ao, Dawson, my brodda,” Daramani said regretfully. “So no more?”

  “No more. I’ve given it up.”

  “I see. Anyway, how are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “And your wife and your boy?”

  “They’re fine too. You still have your job in Maamobi?”

  “Yes, but life make too hard for Ghana nowadays.”