by Leye Adenle
Two police officers meant two cars. They were expecting more girls: three would ride in the back of Malik’s Range Rover with tinted windows; an officer would ride in front to make sure the car was not stopped at police checkpoints; in the back, the girls would be blindfolded. The first time, Naomi had been scared. She had trembled throughout the two-hour journey as she tried to build up the courage to snatch the blindfold off, open the door even with the car in motion, and jump out to safety. Fear had kept her glued to the seat till the car stopped moving, and doors opened, and she waited for the juju man who would strike her neck with a shimmering machete and use her head, dripping blood from the neck, in a money ritual. But that hadn’t happened and instead she had been received by Sisi, Malik’s business partner, and shown round the mansion in the middle of a forest. Two years on, and dozens of such late-night rides, Naomi, like other girls, was used to falling asleep till it was time for the blindfold to come off.
The doorbell rang and a maid went to welcome more guests. Dimeji, Malik’s boy who recruited girls for The Harem from Unilag where he was a student, walked in ahead of two girls Naomi did not recognise. The new girls clutched their overnight bags against their bodies and looked about like fowl suspicious of new surroundings. It was their first time.
Dimeji joined Malik on the sofa where Malik was writing a message on his phone. They did a fist bump, then the younger man sat next to his boss and picked up the wand that was on the cushion between them. Malik looked at him and looked back at the text he was composing. Naomi watched. In no time Dimeji had figured out the device and was beeping his watch, his phone, his belt buckle.
It was time to leave. The police officers, fed and watered, reclaimed their rifles from the floor by the dining table, then stood, tummies bloated, behind Malik as he addressed the girls. Dimeji stood to the side with the handle of the wand in one hand, and the tip of the device resting in his other palm.
‘You, you, and you, you’re going with him,’ Malik said. He had pointed at Naomi along with the two regulars. They would ride in Dimeji’s car. ‘You know the drill. Phones.’ He held out his hand.
A girl stood up and handed over her phone. Another finished typing a message and sent it as she rose from the chair. She switched off the device just before she handed it to Malik who handed it to Dimeji. Naomi faked searching her duffel bag for her phone, then the too-tight pockets of her bum shorts.
‘I think I left mine in the flat,’ she said as she got up and continued placing her hands on non-existent pockets on her tube top and looking about on her seat.
Dimeji was sweeping the wand over the two girls who had handed over their phones. Beep. Bangles. Beep. Keys.
Malik looked into Naomi’s eyes. His face showed nothing. She felt she had to say something.
‘Maybe it’s in your car,’ she said.
He brought out his phone, dialled and placed the mobile to his ear, his eyes on Naomi.
Naomi tried to remember if she switched off the phone before putting it inside herself.
‘It’s switched off,’ Malik said. ‘We’ll check in the car.
The other girls had walked out of the building ahead of her while Dimeji waited for her with the wand. She picked up her bag from the chair, and as she walked past Dimeji he held out his hand to stop her. Looking irritated, she raised her hand to deflect his.
‘If you come near me, you pervert…’ she said.
Dimeji looked at Malik. Malik wasn’t watching them. Naomi continued out of the door, her heart pounding.
20
Amaka’s room at Bogobiri House smelled familiar: old books, potpourri, and oil paintings. She closed her eyes and inhaled. The AC had been left on – by the night manager after she enquired about a vacant room, she imagined. Original paintings hung from all the walls, just like another room she had once stayed in at the hotel.
A metre-square Ndidi Emefiele hung above a carved mahogany desk. The greyscale painting was the side profile of a woman with a huge Afro, her head tilted upwards, with lines of shadow cast by Venetian blinds crossing her features at an angle. Amaka stared at the painting.
She had asked the night manager for some paper and a pen and he had pulled some A4 sheets from the printer behind the check-in desk, written down the Wi-Fi code for her, and handed her his own pen and the paper. She placed the items on the desk beneath the tranquil woman, then went in search of a socket for the phone charger.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, her phone plugged into a socket that had been used for the TV, she checked if she had received any text messages. None. It was late. The messages would have come in earlier. She thought of messages that would have been sent to the old number. She shook the creeping angst away. Now, she could only hope that those who needed her would get the new number.
She connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi, logged on to her email and searched. Satisfied that she had what she needed, she stood up and began shedding her clothes as she walked towards the bathroom.
Fifteen minutes later she returned from her shower wrapped in the hotel housecoat, sat in the chair at the desk beneath the painting, and picked up the pen.
In the centre of a sheet she wrote the name Malik and circled it. Around the circle she began writing other names and drawing lines from them to Malik.
‘Ojo.’ The relationship between him and Malik was at the centre of everything: The Harem. But Ojo would have to have figured out that she was the girl who seduced him at Soul Lounge. She said her name was Iyabo, and she’d agreed to spend the night with him in his hotel suite. He would have also had to deduce the reason she drugged him, went through his phone, and sent a picture to his wife. He would have had to realise it was because of what he and Malik did to Florentine.
‘Gabriel.’ Her childhood friend and the first person she phoned after Malik called and threatened her. As kids, Irene, his tall, slim, red-haired English mother, would sometimes pick the two of them up from school and Amaka would spend the afternoon playing at his house before Irene took her home later. It was only as an adult that Amaka realised that those days were planned by her parents who wanted precious time alone.
Amaka had been on her way to his house in Ikeja to drop off her car before leaving the country when she drove into the mob at Oshodi Market. The girl. The scenes from the market played back in her mind. She shook her head. Not now.
Just the other day she asked Gabriel if he knew Malik. Gabriel made his living selling expensive properties to wealthy Nigerians, he knew everyone worth knowing in Lagos; and those he did not know, he’d know someone who did. But when she asked if he knew any person called Malik, he insisted on knowing why she was asking, before telling her anything. In the end he didn’t give her anything she could work with, instead warning her that there were dangerous people in Lagos she shouldn’t be messing with. She drew a line connecting the two names.
‘Florentine.’ The girl that kind-hearted strangers had brought to Amaka’s office, bruised, bleeding, and broken, beaten to within half an inch of her life. They had found her walking like a zombie along an express road, naked and unresponsive. She had barely survived the brutal battering from Ojo. Her luck was that when she passed out during the viscious attack, Ojo and Malik thought she was dead and they dumped her on the road. The bastards. Amaka drew a line connecting her to Malik.
She looked up and stared at the woman in the Ndidi Emefiele painting. She added Naomi to the list and drew a line connecting the former beauty queen to Malik. She looked up again, then added a last thought: ‘Someone else.’
She got up, walked to the window, pen in hand, drew the curtain, and stared out. She returned to the desk and next to Gabriel’s name, wrote: ‘Doesn’t know which Malik I’m looking for.’ Beneath that she wrote: ‘Won’t put me at risk.’ Then she crossed him out, tapped the pen on Naomi’s name, making tiny dots on the paper. Against her name she wrote, ‘Too scared,’ then crossed her out. She tapped the pen on Florentine’s name, got up, and paced the room, then returning to
the desk she wrote: ‘Said Malik hadn’t paid her.’ The pen hovered over Florentine. She added: ‘Might have tried to get her money back.’ She looked up at the ceiling, then she retraced the line connecting Florentine to Malik and wrote down the girl’s phone number beside it. Her phone, charging in the corner, beeped twice: a message from a number she didn’t recognise. It contained a car registration number and a name, ‘Debo.’
She opened the email app, found a message she’d sent to herself, opened the attached Microsoft Excel document, then searched for the car registration number and composed a reply: ‘Safe. But be careful. Might try to slip off the condom.’
She fell back onto the mattress and spread her hands over the sheets. It worked. The girls had the new number. And she could use a phone until she got a new laptop.
The phone began to ring but the rule was simple: messages only. Sometimes a new girl would call instead and Amaka would reply with a message explaining the rule. Only a handful of the girls who relied on her for the information she provided knew who she was and she wanted to keep it that way. She recognised the number, sat up and answered. ‘Hi Funke.’
Amaka had memorised the phone number of the young girl who helped her lure Ojo into a honey trap: she always memorised important numbers.
‘Aunty, where are you?’ Funke whispered.
‘I’m at a hotel. What’s wrong? Where are you?’
‘After you left the club, we came to a party in Banana Island. Aunty, some Lebanese men here are saying that he’s going to be the next Governor of Lagos State.’
‘Who?’
‘Ojo. They said they’ve chosen him to replace Douglas. Aunty, I’m afraid. What if he finds out what we did?’
21
Dimeji made a sucking sound as he took a long drag. He held in the smoke and passed the joint to the police officer in the passenger seat next to him. All four windows were wound up, the music was loud, the AC turned on high, and he was driving fast.
Blindfolded, Naomi kept track of the sudden decelerations and the periods where the car slowed – something she used to do during the first few times she made the trip. Perhaps today she would know when they were on the express and she’d count the number of turns till they got there. If only she could hear the sounds outside, especially when they were stuck in traffic. Bus conductors calling out for passengers would help to plot a mental map. Once when she was riding with Malik, who also played music, but not as loud, she’d heard a conductor shouting ‘Oworonshoki’ but she couldn’t be sure what direction they were travelling. Perhaps that was the purpose of the loud music: to make it even harder to tell where they were being taken. Malik had explained from the beginning, ‘The Harem is a secret. You cannot talk about it to anyone. For your own safety it is better you do not know how to get there.’ He never explained why it was dangerous for the girls to know the way. At first Naomi imagined it had something to do with deniability. Then when she thought more about it, she concluded, with a cold shiver, that he was alluding to the authorities finding out the place existed, an embassy of Sodom and Gomorrah in the forest of Nigeria, getting their hands on a list of the girls who ‘worked there’, and torturing them one by one for directions. But that was dangerous for him, not her, not the other girls. And at that point, many months ago, when there was a gaping inconsistency between what he said and what he might have meant, she stopped dwelling on it because to do so would be to admit the threat to her life he had made.
Marijuana smoke thinned in the cooled air. Dimeji was taking a break before lighting the next one. Naomi finally filled her lungs. She would feel the effect of the drug no matter how much she tried to avoid inhaling, but he wouldn’t light another until they arrived. She was in the middle of the two girls. One of them was snoring; the other rested her head on Naomi’s shoulder minutes after they left Ikeja. Naomi would have also slept, only to be woken up by a lack of motion, the absence of the engine sound and of loud music when they arrived. But she stayed awake, fought the fug clouding her mind, and struggled to concentrate on the journey and the phone inside of her, and on suppressing the need to pee.
As the weed began to take effect, she thought of what would happen if she forgot what was inside her and a client discovered it, thrusting his penis into her. Was that what happened to Florentine? Did a client bruise his dick on a phone she’d hidden in her pussy? Did Amaka make her do it? Is that why they tried to kill her? What was she thinking? She had to get rid of the phone as soon as they got to The Harem. It was safer for her not to know how they got there.
Keeping her thighs together and walking sideways, Naomi began to go up the stairs, one foot joining the other on one step; clench, then repeat. Malik was at the bottom with the new girls, watching her and about to stop her, she thought. But he didn’t. Midway, she stopped and looked at him. He was looking at her. She fought the haze; reminded herself that she was high. She had to be careful. She had to concentrate. She was being paranoid. She suddenly remembered that she still had the phone in her. How did she forget about it over just a step? The weed. Fuck.
‘Yes,’ she said. She heard her own voice as if it had been played back to her. Why did she have to shout it? He was looking at her, waiting for an explanation. Did he just ask how she was, or was it something else? Did he mention the way she was walking? Did he actually say anything?
‘Dimeji was smoking again, abi?’
‘Yes.’ The haze lifted, giving her a window of clarity, but she knew it wouldn’t last. ‘I really need to wee.’
The lucidity was gone; no recollection of making it to the top of the stairs. She was sitting on a toilet bowl, bent forward, her shorts gathered around her ankles, her fingers deep inside her, trying to get higher up still. She couldn’t feel it – the knot of the condom in which she had inserted the phone. She leaned her back onto the cistern and raised her bum above the toilet bowl, but rather than give her a deeper reach, the position caused her nails to scratch her. She was sweating. How long had she been in there? She was squatting on the floor in front of the toilet bowl. When did she get off the bowl? She pushed. The tips of her fingers touched it. She pinched the end of the condom and pulled.
A knock on the door was followed by a voice. Sisi. ‘What are you doing in there?’
‘I’m coming,’ Naomi said. The knock, Sisi’s voice, her own words, the sound of crickets outside the open window of the bathroom, all were sharp and crisp. The room brightened as well. Her thoughts cleared. She had the phone in her hand. Slimy and dangerous.
‘You’re not in this room today,’ Sisi said from behind the door. ‘I need it for some new girls.’
Naomi looked at the lock on the door then stood up, careful not to make any sound. Holding the phone, still safely protected in a knotted condom, she looked around. She had two options: stand on the edge of the bathtub, reach out the window and throw, or flush it down toilet. She pictured the compound and what lay below. She slid off her shoes and quietly placed them on the floor, and she climbed. The fence was too far from the building and too high. She weighed the phone in her hand and climbed back down.
Sisi knocked again, ‘Naomi, did you hear me? I need this room for some new girls.’
‘I’m coming,’ Naomi said.
She listened. She hadn’t heard Sisi walking away. Naomi gently placed the phone on top of the lid of the cistern, then, just as carefully, she lifted the ceramic top and slowly placed it across the toilet seat. She picked up the phone and put her hand into the cold water, dodging the parts of the flushing mechanism as she did so. After she replaced the lid, she tore off some toilet paper and wiped the top where she had placed the phone. She flushed and looked about the floor. Her panties and shorts were entwined next to a clothes basket.
22
Amaka was one of three guests at the small bar area of Bogobiri House that also served as the lobby and the restaurant. She had a bowl of fruit salad and a mug of coffee and was sitting facing the door so she saw Gabriel when he walked in. It was 7.45am. H
e must have driven fast. He had on a pair of worn, rumpled, khaki shorts and a light blue polo shirt that also needed ironing. Even with his bathroom slippers, his stubble, and his curly, greying hair, he still drew looks from the other women knife-and-forking their way through their continental breakfasts. Amaka was used to the effect that his light, mixed-race skin had on women. He often joked that she was only ‘immune to his juju’ because they’d known each other since when they used to run around in diapers.
He sat opposite Amaka and placed a brown envelope on the table. ‘Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?’ he said.
She sipped her coffee and looked at him above the rim. ‘Good morning to you too,’ she said.
‘Amaka, you almost drove me mad with worry. You say someone threatened you, then end the call, and when I try to call you back your phone is off. I called the Commissioner of Police, you know?’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Really. I was worried. He called me back five minutes later. You were at a police inspector’s house?’
‘He told you that?’
‘Yes. He said you tried to stop a lynching at Oshodi. What were you thinking? They could have killed you too, Amaka. He said the inspector rescued you. Inspector…’
‘Ibrahim. And he did not rescue me.’
‘Yeah, Ibrahim. I called the chap. I spoke to him.’
‘You did?’
‘Yeah. He said you left his place in the middle of the night. Amaka, what the hell is going on?’
‘Is that the money?’
‘Yes.’ He slid the envelope over to her. ‘What are you up to, Amaka?’
‘Just taking care of stuff I should have taken care of sooner.’
‘You are scaring me. Why is this Malik looking for you? Why were you looking for him in the first place? And who the hell is he, anyway?’