by Leye Adenle
He watched. She pulled her white thong down her thighs to her knees then down to her ankles. She reached down and stepped out of the underwear. She gathered it in a fist, took his hand, and squeezed her knickers into his palm.
‘Those are my favourite ones. I got them from Agent Provocateur in London and I want them back. Go to your hotel and wait for me.’
11
Bakare criss-crossed his hands over the steering wheel as we approached another bend. I braced and held my breath. The van was balanced just on two tyres as we rolled onto a narrow muddy road. There were no pavements. A wall covered in overlapping posters stood on the left while the right side was a row of deserted market stalls. He slowed down now because the terrain wouldn’t let him speed. Up ahead, the headlights briefly illuminated what at first seemed to be nothing but blackness but turned out to be blocks of flats standing in eerie silence like a ghost town. Clothes hung from laundry lines strung across grey balconies.
He turned hard, braked harder, and figures appeared in the beam. I jumped when a head materialised in the window to my right. The door opened and my captor climbed out. I quickly followed him, preferring to be close by. Now that the wind was not blasting my face, I began to sweat at a terrific rate. We were surrounded by officers who seemed drawn to us. I was the only one sweating. Everyone else just had faces that glistened as if a coat of Vaseline had been applied to them.
Policemen jumped out from the back of our van and more cars screeched to a halt next to us. We had come to a rundown bungalow with a single light bulb illuminating its front porch. A signboard to its right said BAR BEACH POLICE STATION.
Officers dashed into the station or to our vehicle and stiffened to do chopping, sharp salutes at the man by my side. He was indeed the boss. I stayed close to him as he spoke to his men who kept casting glances at me. He turned to walk into the building and I followed, and behind us, a dozen other men. He fired off instructions in a local language and several people darted to carry them out.
Inside, the station was crowded, hot, and choking with the stench of body odour. A concrete counter divided the front room into a waiting area and a ‘police’ area. The wall behind the counter had three framed pictures hanging from strings that extended to nail hooks. The middle one was the President. I did not recognise the other two. The upper parts of the walls were blue, the lower parts and the counter were green. A foot-thick yellow line separated the two colours.
There were girls everywhere: tall, short, slim, plump. All dressed up and made up, all looking upset. Some sat behind the worn counter on a row of low wooden benches; some were standing with their arms folded across their bodies. Some leaned against the walls of a dark corridor that surely led to some darker horrors within. Those not frowning with upturned noses were pleading frantically, others, sensually, with police officers who appeared to enjoy the attention. Others were making calls on their mobile phones, or sending text messages. There were lots of them, and more were arriving, escorted in by men holding AK-47s battle-ready and absolutely unnecessarily. It looked like a whorehouse filled with disgruntled staff and unyielding pimps.
With a wave of his hand, the boss got someone to take me down the frightening corridor through the throngs of women. They stretched out their arms and called me ‘customer’. One was determined to get my attention. ‘Johnny, it’s me, Rose,’ she kept repeating, until the officer threatened her with a slap gesture and she recoiled into the line of girls. I wondered if, like me, she found it difficult to tell foreign faces apart and she had mistaken me for a white boy she knew, whose name was Johnny. Then it hit me, the meaning of ‘customer’. I was a John. It made sense, there in a rowdy noisy ‘joint’, surrounded by desperate hookers.
I was led to a room that smelt of dust. It had a single two-foot-square window with dirty glass louvres that looked like they had never been opened. Iron bars set about one foot apart protected it: enough gap for a slender man like me to squeeze through. The door was a flimsy plywood ensemble that was coming loose at its hinges and had lost most of its bottom bits to decay. It was even hotter in there; I was drawing in more dust than air into my lungs. I heard and saw the mosquitoes that flew straight at me. There was no chair, no bed, nothing.
‘Wait here,’ the officer said, and while I did, I had the time and solitude to evaluate my situation. I concluded that I was well and truly fucked. The Nigerian police had arrested me, my phone had been seized, I had lied to the police about my employer, and nobody who cared about me knew where I was.
Someone had told me that in Nigeria, there’s nothing a bribe cannot fix. I calculated how much money I had on me. At the hotel, I’d changed fifty pounds into naira at the rate of two hundred and fifty naira to a pound. I also had an extra hundred pounds in twenties hidden in my socks. I wondered how it would go down. Do I make an offer first? Would I be told how much to pay? Was there a going rate for this sort of thing? Was it going to be a negotiation? I desperately wanted my phone back. Would that cost me extra?
If I got the phone back, who would I call? Sure, my boss could bark all day long in the office in Old Street, but what could he do for me now? I had listened to him scream at people on the phone, even watched him reduce colleagues to tears, but somehow, I didn’t think his bullying would move the folk here. Nah. As bad ideas go, calling the Walrus – that’s what we called him – would be the worst.
I could call Mel. At least she was half Nigerian. But then again, what could she do from her flat in Maida Vale? She didn’t even speak a Nigerian language. Then there was Ade, my fixer, a man who had proven to be as reliable as a campaigning politician. He was meant to have picked me up from the airport, but just before the last boarding call for the Virgin Atlantic flight from Heathrow, he called to apologise and explain that he would be in Abuja on some official assignment. Thankfully, he arranged a car to collect me and deposit me at the hotel. He promised to see me in the morning once he got back from Ghana. It was only later while watching an air hostess point out the exits that I realised his gaffe.
There was no one to turn to, so I waited and counted the mosquitoes I killed while the blood they sucked stained my palms.
The door flung open and a plain clothes officer stood in its frame. That was when I realised it hadn’t been locked. He grunted something, which I understood to mean he wanted me to follow him. He led the way deeper into the dark belly of the building and the mosquitoes followed, not done with the blood of a foreigner. He stopped, and in the darkness, I bumped into him. We were in front of the last door on the corridor. He knocked softly, almost cautiously, three times, and waited. Cool air wrapped around my ankles and slipped up my trousers. It came from under the door where there was a slither of light.
I didn’t hear anyone respond but my escort opened the door, stuck his face into the crack, and barely audibly said, ‘He’s here, sir.’
‘Bring him in,’ someone said from the inside. It was the voice of the boss.
Sweat on my forehead turned icy as I stepped into his office.
‘Sit down, please, Mr Collins,’ he said. He was behind a cluttered table, elbows on wood, perusing some open files in front of him.
As I sat, I spotted a name plaque on the desk: INSPECTOR IBRAHIM. Now we knew each other’s names.
‘What a night, eh?’ he said.
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say to that – or if I was expected to say anything, but in my mind I agreed: what a screwed up night.
‘You must wish you were back home right now.’
This time he smiled and it felt OK to respond. I nodded.
‘Well, we also want to get you back home quickly. We just need to clear up a few things.’
I wondered if by home he meant England.
‘Where are you staying?’
‘Eko Hotel.’
‘Yes? Nice hotel. I’ve stayed there myself. So, what are you doing in Nigeria?’
Good question. Why was I here? It was a bullshit assignment, to be honest, not the
sort of thing I had in mind when I changed careers. We could have hired a local stringer; that was Ronald’s first attempt to get out of it. But then the Walrus wouldn’t have been able to let it slip at his club that he had a team in Nigeria covering the election – ‘the team’ comprising a grand total of me.
The initial excitement of getting the job had waned before I collected my visa at the Nigeria High Commission – the Walrus might soon have milked the bragging rights and then the trip would no longer be ‘workable’. I didn’t start getting excited again until I was strapped into my economy class seat, being instructed to ‘switch off all electronic devices’. Then it was suddenly all too real, and the suppressed thrill burst out in one unrestrained moment marked by an unconscious smile that I caught in my reflection in the aircraft window. After that I was sober – enough to question myself.
I was going to Nigeria, a country sufficiently dangerous to warrant a Foreign Office travel warning and I was going in election season when political parties would be at war. And I’d asked for the job. When I was showing off my Nigerian visa in the office, Jen, my best buddy at work, took one look at my passport and asked, ‘Are you going because of Mel?’ We had drinks later that evening, and we talked about the Mel situation. I was being honest when I told her yes, I wanted to go to Nigeria because of Mel, but not in the way she thought. It was over. I had accepted that. But I felt I knew the country like one knows an old relative, and there was nothing wrong with taking the opportunity to go there.
There was another reason that also had to do with Mel, but I didn’t tell Jen because she wouldn’t have understood. Early, when we started dating, Mel asked how many countries I’d been to. I counted fourteen. ‘Only Europe,’ she said and she looked at me with a deadpan stare, as if she’d just discovered something significant about me. I asked her how many countries she’d been to: four continents and fifty-two countries. A month later she was going to Cambodia and she asked if I’d come. When she returned she didn’t talk about the trip and I knew that at some point she had concluded that I wasn’t ‘that kind of person.’ That would have been fine, only that a week later, at her friend’s retrospective at the Barbican, an art professor we met there asked if we’d be able to come to a new exhibition he was curating in Cairo and Mel said ‘I’ll come.’ In the cab back to her flat I asked why she’d assumed I wouldn’t go and she said, ‘But you never leave Europe.’
Well, damn her. Here I was in Africa. And as I contemplated the policeman’s question, I realised I’d already started blaming her for the mess I was in.
‘I’m here to cover the elections,’ I said.
‘Are you married?’
‘No. But I have a girlfriend. She’s half Nigerian.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ Maybe I could get him onside. Melissa was doing her bit.
‘You met her here, in Nigeria?’
‘No. England.’
‘Oh, I see. You said she’s half Nigerian.’
‘Yes. Her mother is Irish. White.’
‘So, she’s half-caste.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You said her mother is white.’
‘Yes. She’s mixed.’
‘What is her name?’
‘Melissa Iyiola.’
‘Iyiola,’ he said, using the correct pronunciation, I guess. I’d said it the way Mel says it, which was surely the wrong way.
‘You said you work for the BBC?’
‘Yes.’
He pulled a laptop from a drawer and set it upon his desk.
‘So, if I Google your name I’ll be able to confirm this?’
He plugged a wireless dongle into his laptop and started working the keyboard.
‘We just need to match your face to your name, then we can take your statement, and then we can let you go,’ he said. ‘By the way, is your profile on the BBC website?’
Noise from the corridor made him look up from the screen. It sounded like a fight had broken out. He stopped to listen, then as quickly, he continued to prod the Internet.
‘W, w, w, dot, b, b, c, dot, co, dot, UK,’ he read out as he typed. ‘So, where would I find you on here, Mr Collins?’
I was still trying to decide whether to continue lying or to come clean. The noise from the corridor grew louder until it was possible to make out words. There were shouts of ‘congratulations’ and ‘fire for fire,’ and loud slaps. He looked up again.
Whoever knocked did not wait to be invited in. The door flew open and men in uniforms that looked more military than police poured in. There wasn’t enough space for all of them so some stayed outside in the corridor. They were shaking hands and slapping one another on the back. Their automatic weapons dangled from straps slung over their shoulders; extra magazines bulged from pouches on their belts. They looked tough and dangerous.
The shortest of them, still a considerably tall fellow at that, shared the good news with Inspector Ibrahim who had risen from his desk. ‘Fire-for-Fire has done it again, sir,’ the man said. ‘We have rounded up every member of the Iron Benders gang. No casualties, two fatalities.’
12
Inspector Ibrahim yelled and I jumped in my chair. Maybe it had something to do with the ‘two fatalities.’ What the heck did that mean, ‘No casualties, two fatalities’? But then he grabbed the officer’s hand and shook it like he wanted to tear it off. It was good news. So good, that the inspector called someone on his mobile to share the news: ‘Sir, we have just captured the Iron Benders… Sorry sir. I didn’t check the time… The Iron Benders… Yes, sir. No, sir, those ones are from Benin Republic. Iron Benders, sir. They used to be iron benders. They worked at a mechanic’s yard in Ajegunle.’
It turned out that the Iron Benders gang was a group of novice robbers who compensated for their inexperience with violence. Their speciality was carjacking. In the few months since they took up their new trade, they had become the most wanted robbers in two states. They shot and killed for no reason, raped and tortured for sport. Ibrahim told the person on the phone a story of how they once relieved an elderly pastor of his S Class Merc. They made the terrified man of God pray for them and bless them, before shooting him in the leg and asking him to pray for a miracle that would instantly heal the bullet wound. They left him bleeding on the road and sped off in his car. A few kilometres into their getaway, the car stopped. It had an anti-theft immobiliser. They set it ablaze, snatched another car, and went back to find the pastor – to teach him a lesson for deceiving them. The pastor barely survived the beating. They told him they only spared his life so that his congregation would buy him a new car, which they would in turn return to collect. They were a bunch of disillusioned, disaffected, drug-crazed, violent gangsters.
The gang had been on a crime spree that night. They had snatched several cars, probably to order, and then driven their loot in a high-speed convoy, picking up more cars on the way, heading out of Lagos. The men of Fire-for-Fire were out on their nightly patrol and the gang drove into them. The gunfight that followed saw motorists abandoning their cars to flee on foot. In the end, two of the criminals fell and the rest were arrested.
Ibrahim asked for details and shook hands with the officers. He wanted to know who fired the fatal shots: it was Sergeant Hot-Temper, as usual.
Hot-Temper, a lanky fellow with deep lacerations that spread from the corners of his mouth to his cheekbones, was standing straight, arms folded across his chest, grinning toothily through glazed eyes.
Ibrahim slapped a loud handshake onto his palm.
‘Hot-Temper, why didn’t you waste all the bastards?’
‘Oga, my bullets finished. Before I reload, they don surrender.’
The men burst into laughter.
This man, this Sergeant Hot-Temper, who stood less than a metre from me, had just come back from ending two lives. I shouldn’t be here.
A short man with a tiny face like a squirrel’s eased his way into the room. He tried to catch his boss’s attention amidst the taller,
harder looking combatants. He waited until the inspector noticed him and beckoned. I listened to their conversation while pretending to admire the plaques on the wall.
Squirrel-face told his boss that a woman had trekked barefoot to the station and asked to see the officer in charge. Her car had just been snatched. She ‘spoke well’ and looked like a ‘big woman,’ so the constable thought it wise to inform his boss rather than ask her any further questions.
‘Where is she?’
‘She is at the counter, sir.’
‘Has she written a statement?’
‘No, sir.’
‘OK. Ask her to write her statement and when she finishes, bring her here.’ He turned to me. ‘Mr Collins, as you can see, we are very busy here tonight.’ I nodded. More than one of the terrifying-to-look-at officers had given me the once-over. I really didn’t want him drawing attention to me right then.
‘What you witnessed tonight, at the club, I advise you to forget. These things happen in our country, but even worse things happen in yours, we see it on TV all the time. My boys will take you back to your hotel and you will forget everything that happened tonight. Understand?’ I nodded.
‘As you can see, we the police are doing all we can to get rid of the miscreants in our society. What you witnessed tonight will not go unpunished. The life expectancy of armed robbers in this country is less than thirty. We will catch the culprits, and when we do, we will bring them to justice. You do not need to worry about it. This is a local problem and we will deal with it locally. Understand?’ I nodded. ‘Just forget everything, OK?’
I’d been so busy dealing with my own predicament that I had actually forgotten about the girl in the gutter. I wanted to believe that this man would do something about it. That he would find the bastard who did that to her and turn Sergeant Hot-Temper loose on him. I suddenly felt a strange sense of responsibility for the girl.