Wife of the Gods

by Kwei Quartey

  “Do you have anything else?” he asked Nunana.

  “No, sir. Please, I beg you, don’t tell him—”

  “That you told me about the bracelet? I won’t.”

  She was shaking. He touched her shoulder. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Dawson went looking for Constable Gyamfi while praying he would not bump into Inspector Fiti. He sidled up to the front entrance of the station and briefly put his head around the door to see who was inside. Bubo was leaning against the counter picking his nails, but Gyamfi wasn’t there. Dawson circled around the side and ducked down below Fiti’s office window. He peeped in from one corner. Gyamfi was standing up talking to the inspector, who was seated with his back toward the window.

  Gyamfi spotted him, and Dawson quickly pressed an index finger to his lips. The constable acknowledged him without giving him away, and Dawson went to the rear of the building.

  Gyamfi joined him about five minutes later.

  “Dawson, how are you?” he said. “What’s happening?”

  “I need your help. Here is the situation. I’ve just found out it may have been Togbe Adzima who stole Gladys’s bracelet.”

  Gyamfi raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Is that so?”

  “After Gladys’s death, someone in Bedome found it in Adzima’s room. What we don’t know is whether he killed Gladys and then took it off her wrist or whether he just took the bracelet after she had been killed by someone else.”

  “Yes, I understand. What do you want me to do?”

  “I can’t interrogate Togbe anymore. We hate each other so much now, and he’s afraid of me. You’re more charming than I, so I want you to work on him. There are two things: how he got the bracelet, and where he went on the evening before Gladys’s body was found. I have a witness who says he went to Ketanu with a friend, but we need to find out if that’s accurate—who is the friend, was he with the friend all the time, could he have doubled back and accosted Gladys, and so on. You get what I mean?”

  “Of course, Dawson. I’m on it.”

  “Thank you. One other thing—the bracelet looks something like this.” He showed Nunana’s drawing to the constable. “It’s silver.”

  Gyamfi studied it a moment. “All right. I have a half day off, and I can go and see Togbe after I leave here in the afternoon.”

  He and Dawson slapped hands. As they parted, Dawson briefly watched Gyamfi walking away with a long, rolling lope. He liked Gyamfi. He was the kind of partner Dawson would like alongside himself at CID.

  It was past eleven o’clock in the morning, and a dense crowd of funeral spectators and mourners had collected at the Mensahs’ home. Dawson parked away from the house, closer to Elizabeth’s dress shop.

  A dancing and drumming troupe was performing in a courtyard at the side of the house. The collective driving beat of the sogo, kidi, and atsimevu drums was irresistible. A young woman came out and began dancing the Agbadza, her arms rotating rhythmically from her shoulders while her torso swung back and forth in opposing motion. Another two women soon joined, and then a man. They kicked up red dust with their steps.

  Dawson saw someone handing out beer to several men at the back of the crowd. Freeloaders. They would be thoroughly drunk by early afternoon.

  For the short funeral service, a seating area under a canopy had been set up in front of the Mensahs’ house. There was a long line of people waiting to get inside to view Gladys’s body. Dawson wormed his way to the front and went in. It was packed with people in a sea of black and dark brown mourning cloth. It was oppressive, and Dawson was bothered by the tight space. Gladys lay in state in the front room. The men stood back, but several women were wailing loudly over her casket while the procession of viewers slowly wound its way past her body. In the midst of all this was a videographer filming everything, and a few people were snapping photos of Gladys’s body with their mobile phones and digital cameras, which Dawson found quite bizarre.

  A woman in red and black had worked herself into quite a state, sweat pouring off her as if she had been in a rain shower. She was weeping and moving frenetically around the casket like a roaming insect.

  “Why have you left us?” she shouted hoarsely, gesticulating at Gladys’s body. “What will we do now?”

  Dawson wondered for a moment if she was a professional mourner. Families sometimes hired these, but he doubted the Mensahs would do that.

  Gladys had been dressed in iridescent blue and her casket supplied with items she might need for her journey to the other side: makeup, perfume, jewelry, and a large roll of yellow and white fabric embellished with Adinkra symbols. In case she needed a change of outfit, Dawson supposed.

  Everyone who entered the room was obligated to pay their respects to Kofi and Dorcas Mensah and the extended family. There was no way for Dawson to avoid it. He had no idea who 99 percent of these people were, but he had to shake hands with every single one of them. After a while he stopped counting.

  He stood near Gladys’s casket for a moment. She had been heavily made up, and Dawson felt disturbed by that. A dead body at a crime scene or in the morgue meant something to him, but a decorated corpse in a casket left him cold. Gladys’s body was a shell. The whole person was gone, and no amount of makeup could bring her back. Feeling suffocated by the atmosphere, Dawson went outside to watch the dancing.

  A new set of dancers was performing to distorted music blaring from a pair of speakers.

  “Did you get some refreshments?”

  He turned at the voice. “Hello, Elizabeth. No, I didn’t have anything to drink.”

  She was dressed in a beautiful burgundy wax print with black velvet trim. She raised her voice above the din and beckoned to a boy a few meters away.

  “Would you like some beer?” she asked Dawson.

  “No thanks. How about some Malta?”

  “Go and bring a bottle of Malta for him,” Elizabeth commanded the boy.

  He obediently ran off.

  She smiled at Dawson. “Are you all right? I saw you in the wake room, and you seemed uncomfortable.”

  “I don’t do well at these kinds of things.”

  “Sometimes it gets too much,” she acknowledged. “But traditions die hard.”

  “Do you believe in all of it? Putting things in the casket, for instance?”

  “It’s symbolic, that’s all. It means we care about her even to the point of her leaving us. Providing her with the things she liked.”

  Something suddenly occurred to Dawson. “The cloth in the casket with the little Adinkra symbols—is that the yellow version of the blue one she was wearing?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Elizabeth said. “She loved that pattern, Inspector Dawson. She had a yellow, a blue, and a red. We didn’t want to put the blue one with her, so we chose the yellow because it’s so nice and bright.”

  The boy came back with a bottle of half-chilled Malta, and Dawson thanked him. He took a couple of swigs.

  “Elizabeth, I want you to do something for me,” Dawson said, raising his voice above the noise. “Can we go over there where it’s quieter?”

  They walked a distance until the music was less intense.

  “That’s better,” Dawson said. “I’m going to show you a diagram someone drew of what might be Gladys’s missing bracelet. Tell me if you think it looks like hers. Take your time. Don’t hurry to any conclusion.”

  He took Nunana’s diagram from his pocket and gave it to Elizabeth. While she looked at it, he downed some more Malta, Heaven’s elixir.

  “It had two rows of silver loops the way it’s drawn here,” Elizabeth said, tapping the paper with a manicured index finger. “It could be it. Who did this? Where did you get it?”

  “I can’t say right now,” Dawson answered evenly. “Tell me this, if I stole a bracelet like this and I wanted to sell it quickly, where would I go?”

  “The best place would be to one of the jewelry traders at the Ho market.”

  “Would they buy one like this
?”

  Elizabeth nodded vigorously. “By all means, because the traders know how to shine it up and then sell it at a profit.”

  “How many jewelry traders come to the Ho market?”

  “Lots of them. I know a few. I can take you there after the funeral is over.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I have to go now,” Elizabeth said. “They’re going to close the casket, and then the service will start. Would you like to come?”

  “I’ll be all right here, thank you.”

  After some time the casket was brought out. Dawson watched the service from a distance. It was performed in both English and Ewe, using a microphone so people could listen if they weren’t in the seating area. It was hot even under the canopy, and people were fanning themselves somewhat uselessly with the funeral program. Older men wore the traditional style mourning cloth, while the young could not be bothered and dressed in shirts and slacks, some quite casually.

  The service lasted forty-five minutes and went like clockwork. Finally, the pallbearers raised the coffin and a chorus of women began to sing and clap. An elderly woman with bare shoulders led the procession, pouring libation along the way. They would walk a short distance through Ketanu to the hearse that would take the coffin to the cemetery.

  Dawson realized they were heading in the direction of his car, so he hurried to the Corolla and backed it well out of the way beside Elizabeth’s shop. He leaned against the trunk and watched as the long line of black-clad marchers moved forward like a giant millipede.

  Just before the pallbearers passed the shop, the coffin seemed to veer off course. It was as though a magnet was attracting it, but then Dawson realized that two or more of the pallbearers were deliberately pulling the coffin to one side. He couldn’t understand what was going on. Some of the men lost their balance, and the coffin tilted and pitched. Cries of alarm went up: Don’t drop the coffin!

  An older man stumbled and screamed, “What are you doing? Heh! What are you doing?”

  Several funeral attendees ran in to help steady the coffin as a pushing and pulling match began. Members of the crowd began to shout and jeer, but then another cry gradually became prominent as a collective chant.

  “Witch, witch, witch!”

  As the coffin got closer to the shop, a fistfight broke out between two men. Elizabeth appeared, yelling at the pallbearers to get back on course, and several people jumped in front of her and began to scream the word in her face. She looked shocked and backed away. Witch! spread through the crowd like a firestorm.

  Charles and three other men came to Elizabeth’s side to protect her. The coffin had swung and swayed back to its route. Dawson realized what had just happened. When a casket was drawn “mysteriously” toward a particular house, it was said that the person most associated with the dwelling had caused the death of the deceased through witchcraft. In other words, someone was trying to frame Elizabeth. It was an ugly, nasty turn to a funeral that had otherwise been proceeding smoothly. Who could have arranged this stunt?

  The disruption died down, and the procession got back to normal. Elizabeth, not one to be intimidated, returned, head high, to her position near the front. About a minute later, a boy of about thirteen ran up to her and whispered in her ear. She was obviously puzzled as the boy pointed backward at something, and Dawson could see he was asking her to come with him in that direction.

  She followed him and disappeared between her shop and the building next to it. Dawson circled around and looked down the length of the space between the rear of the buildings and the bush.

  Elizabeth appeared with the boy, and waiting to meet her were a half dozen young men with sticks. Elizabeth turned to run. They pounced on her like a pack of hyenas and clawed her down. She held out her hand defensively as they began to club her.

  Dawson opened the trunk of the car and got the cricket bat out. As he ran toward the melee, Elizabeth was trying to get up, but the youths struck her down again.

  “Witch! Witch!”

  “Beat her, beat her!”

  She screamed as blows rained down. For a moment she got to her knees, but a strike to her head flipped her over sideways.

  As Dawson got there, two of the youths shot away, but the others turned to fight. The first to come at Dawson got the cricket bat forehand and went down. The second got it backhand to the side of his head and a second strike square in the face.

  Dawson moved forward to take care of another two, but they dropped their sticks and escaped.

  “Elizabeth.” He knelt down next to her. “Are you all right?”

  He lifted her head, and she groaned. A gash in her forehead was spurting blood. Her right forearm was bent, obviously broken as she had tried to defend herself.

  Dawson ripped the bottom of his shirt and folded the length of cloth to press it firmly against Elizabeth’s forehead.

  “Can you hear me?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Hold on, all right?”

  One of the youths was out cold; the other was groaning and attempting to get up. Dawson wasn’t worried.

  Charles and four other men came running. They knelt down beside Elizabeth.

  “I’m okay,” she said, but her face was creased with pain. Her forearm had rapidly swollen to the size of Dawson’s leg.

  “She has to get to the hospital,” he said.

  “Take her to Isaac Kutu,” someone suggested.

  “No!” Dawson shouted angrily. He was sick of this. “You take her to the VRA Hospital now.”

  Charles looked at him and nodded.

  “Run and get the van,” he said to the youngest man there. “Tell the driver to be quick.”

  DAWSON’S TWO PRISONERS COULD not have been much older than eighteen. Both of them quickly came to, and Dawson was able to question them. Someone in town by the name of Dzigbodi had paid them off to beat Elizabeth “because she’s a witch.”

  “You are such stupid boys,” Dawson told them. “Get up.”

  He cuffed them to each other and got them up, pushing them in front of him to the car. He opened the trunk. “Get in.” “What?”

  “You heard me. Get in before I knock your heads off.” They struggled in, one uncomfortably on top of the other, and Dawson slammed the trunk shut.

  When he got to the police station, Constables Gyamfi and Bubo were there but not Inspector Fiti.

  “What happened?” Gyamfi asked in surprise as Dawson came in with the two disheveled youths.

  “Book them,” Dawson said. “Assault, battery, conspiracy to murder, attempted murder.”

  He gave a quick version of the story. Gyamfi listened attentively, but Bubo avoided making any eye contact with Dawson.

  “We’ll take care of them, Inspector, sir,” Gyamfi said, shooting a disparaging look at the two boys.

  “I’ll write my report in a minute,” Dawson said. “Can I see Samuel?”

  “Yes, no problem.”

  Dawson went down the two-stair drop to the jail.

  “Samuel?”

  The young man had fashioned a rope from his shirt and was hanging from the bars of the jail window, his toes about an inch from the ground. His head was slung forward, and the bucket was on its side on the floor along with the excrement it had contained.

  “Gyamfi!” Dawson screamed. “Gyamfi! The keys, bring the keys!”

  The constable came quickly. He saw Samuel hanging and gasped. “Oh, no.”

  The key rattled against the lock, and it seemed too long before Gyamfi got the door open.

  “Hold him up, hold him up,” Dawson said.

  Gyamfi lifted Samuel’s legs, and Dawson flicked open the blade of his Swiss Army knife and cut above the knot.

  Live, please live.

  They got him down. His body was limp, his neck had been stretched, and his face was swollen with engorged blood.

  Bubo came down with the two new prisoners just as Dawson tried blowing a breath into Samuel’s mouth. He pumped on Sa
muel’s chest and gave another breath. He had forgotten the correct number for each action, but he performed the sequence just the same and repeated the cycle for he didn’t know how long and until he was pouring with sweat.

  He thought he heard someone say, “Dawson, stop,” and then a hand squeezed his shoulder.

  “Dawson, you can’t do anything more.”

  It was Gyamfi talking. Dawson looked up at him and then down at Samuel.

  He was dead. It was all over.

  Dawson jumped up with fists clenched and cried out in the purest anguish. He hurled himself against the wall and then crumpled to the floor with his head in his hands. He didn’t make another sound.

  “Inspector,” Gyamfi whispered, touching his arm. “Inspector Dawson, it wasn’t your fault, hear? You couldn’t have done anything wrong.”

  DAWSON TOOK THE NEWS to the Boatengs. This was an ordeal he had to go through. He blamed himself for Samuel’s death, and he wanted the family’s pain to be his punishment. He wanted them to whip him with their fury and lash him with words that cut like barbed wire raked across the skin.

  But it didn’t happen that way. Mrs. Boateng let out a single shriek of shock and collapsed. Mr. Boateng supported her, and she pressed her face into his chest and began to utter a high-pitched keen like a lost kitten crying for its mother. And all the children in the house stood and watched with big, round eyes.

  Mr. Boateng said nothing. He stared unseeing at a point on the wall. He may have seemed without emotion, but Dawson saw where all the pain was. It was deep in those sad, bloodshot eyes.

  “I’ll be outside if you need me,” Dawson said quietly.

  He stood in front of the crumpled house and watched people going about their daily business. He wished he could start over again. He wished he could have forced Inspector Fiti to free Samuel for lack of evidence.

  Instead, what had he, Darko Dawson, done so far? Arrested the wrong man, antagonized the local police, beaten up a few people, and lost an innocent boy to suicide.

  He turned as Boateng’s soft voice invited him back in. “Do you want to drink some water?”