After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  “They attacked Maiduguri last week, and my sources expect they’ll be coming to Kano soon. If you see any Jarumi coming, run, Mr. Bracket. They don’t negotiate. If they catch you, they will rob you and they’ll rape your women. If you have nothing of value, they’ll kill you because you obstruct their way. There’s only one way to survive, Mr. Bracket.”

  “What is that?”

  “If you yourself are worth something. Then they won’t kill you. They’ll kidnap you for ransom.”

  Bracket thought about this as Musa’s wife scrawled slowly on the paper, the trader giving her commands. What conditions did the trader mean when he said they were the same as before? Musa had three wives, an enormous house with a pool, and a prosperous business. Would he give up a wife to make another man happy? Give up some profit to improve conditions for a stranger? Bracket had rarely seen a man do that willingly. And when he did so it was usually the tax collector who forced him.

  “One more thing, Mr. Musa. Do you ever trade old artifacts? Like historical pieces?”

  “I stay away from them. It’s not worth the trouble. The emir will claim them, and if he does not want them, the state will take them. The emir holds as much authority here as the governor. It’s best not to cause trouble with them.”

  So what Josephine said was true. The emir held enough power to shut down the spaceport if he learned of an artifact. Musa seemed to go to great lengths to avoid causing trouble with anyone, and his approach must have worked, judging from the opulence of his household.

  Once the contract was completed, the trader’s second wife wheeled over the cowrie imprinter, a cart containing forty parallel GPUs that could connect to Naijaweb and link it to the cowrie blockchain by a networked high-altitude drone. Cowries were nickel-sized white shells that looked like folded gnocchi pasta and had been traded all over Africa for centuries before European conquest. After the Flare, they had made a resurgence in a different and more powerful form. Musa’s wife poured a sack of unmarked cowrie shells into a funnel like that on a coffee grinder. Each unique shell was naturally grown by a gastropod mollusk in the Persian Gulf before being harvested, making it impossible to fake them. The machine quickly stamped a substrate into the interior of each cowrie shell, and then laser cut the unique keys from the conversion from Bracket’s account. The cowries were now embedded into the substrate of each shell. They would later be sorted into random groupings chosen by Ibrahim, so that they would be valid only when in proximity to one another. When you used a cowrie, the other cowries immediately knew and adjusted their collective value. This lessened the chance of theft. Cowries could be reused an infinite number of times because the substrate could simply be superheated and then imprinted with a new key. Only the owner knew which cowries were of value, so they could be worn openly like those on the trader’s wife.

  Bracket grew alarmed when he saw a fee hidden in the ledger. “That’s not a straight conversion.”

  “I have waived it. We charge the fee when converting from cowries back to Naira. The fee goes to the Emir of Kano. He uses it to support the emirate by maintaining the marketplace and roads, repairing mosques, or giving alms to the poor. It’s how we discourage financiers from taking money out of the local economy.”

  Ibrahim committed to delivering the cable the following morning after prayer, but something about the deal with the groundnuts, and the man’s disturbing warnings about the Jarumi, made Bracket feel like an ignoramus who had signed away his own future. Nothing came easily to him in Nigeria. For that, he could blame the Flare.

  What once was, is no more.

  Before Bracket stood to leave, he had one more question for Musa that he didn’t want Max overhearing. They spoke after his fixer left the compound, and then Bracket continued on his way.

  Three short steps led to the entrance of the police station, a flat-roofed structure that was longer than its width. Thick iron bars crisscrossed the windows, and the pink paint flecked off into the dirt. Bracket hopped out of the truck and tried to enter through the front door, but an officer drew a pistol.

  “You must clear the area!” he shouted. “This is off-limits!”

  “Take it easy,” Bracket said.

  This only infuriated the officer more. “This area is off-limits! Leave here now!”

  Max yelled something from the truck, arguing confidently as the pistol waved in Bracket’s face, and soon the officer was laughing for some reason—most likely, Bracket suspected, at his own expense—and gave him a friendly pat-down before waving him through, while Max stayed behind in the pickup. Inside the station, it was all frantic motion, cops rushing through with machine guns and desk clerks fielding calls on the emergency circuit.

  Bracket finally tracked down Idriss, the detective whom Musa had described as a competent and principled man with a talent for discretion, exactly what he needed. Idriss had a long, thin caramel face, with a body that didn’t seem to match it: stocky arms and legs and a round belly. His horn-rimmed glasses were poised to fall off the tip of his nose.

  “We have no time today,” he said, tilting his head back to peer through the glasses. “Come back tomorrow.”

  “Musa said you would give me a moment. As a favor.”

  A Hummingfone was perched on the detective’s shoulder. It was the preferred device for detectives, because its propellers and ability to hover allowed it to efficiently snap high-quality images of crime scenes. The device briefly took off to flutter about Bracket’s pocket before landing on the detective’s shoulder again. The detective lifted an eyebrow.

  “So you’re from the spaceport,” Idriss commented.

  “How did you know that?” Bracket asked.

  Idriss tapped the little drone with a finger: “It found your G-fone in your pocket. Normally it can download your identification but the spaceport G-fones are well protected.”

  “I found something that I wanted to ask you about,” Bracket said.

  “Ah, what’s that?”

  “A humble discovery,” he said. These were the words that Musa had told him.

  The detective stood, the two men shook hands, and Bracket took the opportunity to slip him a piece of paper with Musa’s personal stamp. The detective glanced at the paper: “Go ahead, then.”

  Bracket handed the detective the bag with the bloody shirtsleeve inside.

  “We found this at the spaceport,” he said. “I suspect it’s blood.”

  Detective Idriss looked inside the plastic bag, frowning. “Blood? You don’t know?”

  Bracket kept his mouth shut, trying to get a read of the man. He became afraid that Idriss was going to draw this out and make it difficult for him.

  “I’d like to know if you could have it analyzed,” Bracket said.

  “All right, give me your key.”

  Bracket set his Geckofone down, and the Hummingfone hovered over it, setting down for a moment on the G-fone’s back as they exchanged their encrypted keys through the G-fone’s tongue and the Hummingfone’s beak.

  “This may be connected,” Bracket explained, “to a missing spaceport worker called Abdul Haruna.”

  “So you do know whose blood it is?”

  “No, it’s just a guess. In fact, I suspect it isn’t. But he’s disappeared, and I thought you might let us know if he turns up again.”

  “That’s quite a guess, Mr. Bracket. Do you have any personal effects for Mr. Haruna where we could find some DNA?”

  Bracket shook his head.

  “Any reason why you haven’t reported this to your own internal security? You’ve got your own laboratories there.”

  “And we’ve got a lot of people who are better off not knowing about it.”

  “Like Nurudeen Bello?” Idriss asked.

  Bracket tried to conceal his surprise. He wasn’t so much concerned about Bello as Idriss seemingly knowing about the goings-on at the spaceport.

  “Everyone knows Bello’s there, Mr. Bracket. There’s no sense in pretending. He talks about his spacep
ort all over Naijaweb.”

  “Bello has nothing to do with any of this. Look, it’s a sensitive time for the mission. We’re getting close to launch, and we need someone discreet to look into this. Op-Sec is not known for that. Musa said you were the guy I should talk to.”

  An officer ran up to the detective and spoke to him in Hausa. Idriss turned to Bracket and said, “Okay, fine. Another day. Today is not good. I’ll call you.”

  On the way out the door, Bracket caught Idriss tossing the plastic bag under his desk, where it landed beside a garbage can and piles of manila folders. Bracket hoped he had done the right thing. To be sure, it was a risk, and he had no idea what Musa’s message had told the man, since it was written in cursive Arabic, which his G-fone hadn’t been able to translate.

  They hit another traffic jam—or ‘go-slow’ as they called it Pidgin—leaving the city, this one outside the soccer stadium, where a stream of bright yellow-and-green jerseys engulfed the truck. The Kano Pillars, the local team, had evidently won, and faces appeared in the truck’s windows, chanting victoriously.

  “I can also call you Yankee,” Max volunteered suddenly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Instead of oyibo. I know you don’t like it. I can call you Yankee. It has the same meaning.”

  Bracket sighed and slumped down as they approached yet another checkpoint, where the police were aggressively inspecting each car now, tossing baggage and suitcases in the road. The soccer celebration continued behind them, while a few cars ahead of them, the police officers seemed to be frustrated with searching the instruments of a drum troupe, who responded by pounding on their drums even louder, irritating everyone enough to begin honking through the dust.

  “You don’t need to be offended by the term,” Max said. “Yankee is for all Americans.”

  “That’s what people say about oyibo.”

  “Yes, but oyibo means ‘white man.’”

  “I get it. I’m light skinned. You’re not the first person to notice that.”

  A guard gestured for them to climb out of the pickup, waving away Max’s bribe with annoyance as he rifled through the glove compartment, ordered them to lift up the seats, and stooped down to look at the undercarriage of the pickup. Finally, he motioned them forward, but Max had nowhere to go, because the car in front of them was stopped, flanked by two police officers.

  “Your problem,” Max picked up, as though there had been no interruption, “is that you take offense easily. Most Americans do.”

  “You’re not offending me, you’re offending four hundred years of exclusion and oppression.”

  “What were you excluded from?”

  “Opportunities. Families. Love. Pride.”

  “Does that not happen to everybody?”

  “I don’t think everyone was beaten, whipped, and lynched. I had relatives strung up from trees, ancestors who were drowned in rivers as babies.”

  Max tsked as the policemen angrily berated a teenage girl who appeared to be refusing to get out of the car in front of them. “That’s over now, isn’t it? If you still have all this exclusion and this suffering, then why am I working for you?”

  Bracket’s gaze shifted to a tall woman who walked right past his window, her hoop earrings shimmering in the late-afternoon sun. He tracked her until she melted slowly into the crowd, entranced by her features. One of the Wodaabe women they’d seen earlier. Up close, he realized now how young she looked, barely out of her teens, if he had to guess. “How about this, Max: I don’t want you to call me either of those things. First of all, I’m a Rangers fan, not a Yankees fan. And I don’t like baseball if I’m being honest. My family’s from Boston, so I’m no Yankee.” He knew all of that was wasted on Max, but he said it anyway.

  Max shrugged: “What should I call you?”

  Ahead of them, the cops were trying to yank open the driver’s side door, which the girl in the car would pull shut again.

  “Call me what it says on my name tag: Kwesi.”

  “Kwesi is an Ashanti name. You’re not from Ghana.”

  “It’s my name.”

  One of the police officers was reaching inside the car, and they heard the girl yell fiercely. Bracket stiffened as the cop recoiled from the car window, a look of horror crossing his face as he held up his hand. The flesh was oddly bright white on his dark skin, before the blood began to drip. His palm had been slashed straight through with a knife.

  The young woman was now getting out of the car. She was grasping for something dangling from her dress. It had a red tag on it. Now Bracket saw the Wodaabe woman breaking through the crowd, running toward the girl, singing something in the wind, an old song borrowed from another time, that lilted and leapt in Bracket’s memory, and the cops were raising their guns. The girl screamed out as she pulled the red tag, and all Bracket had time to do was close his eyes.

  CHAPTER 7

  During the day, Balewa would lead the women in collecting medicines in the scrubland outside Kano, relying on the knowledge she’d learned from her husband before he was murdered. Sometimes she would encounter goatherds in the open plains and ask them for help.

  “Have you seen any leaves veined with white and green?” she might ask.

  “About a two-hour walk from here,” one would reply.

  The boys, and they were always boys, had a keen eye for the flora of the Sahel, since their herds survived on it. They were entrusted by their parents to watch over the goats so their families could tend to shops in the city, and they spoke a different dialect of Fulfulde from having grown up in Kano. Still, she trusted them more than she trusted the other townspeople, who looked down upon nomads like Balewa as backward simpletons from a bygone era.

  Balewa’s husband had been the lead scout for her Wodaabe subclan before his death, and whenever he would ride his camel searching for watering holes, he would collect herbs along the way. He’d return with his pack full of medicines and a boyish smile on his face, as if he’d found a new and exciting treasure. He thought he kept the herbs safely sealed away from Balewa’s prying eyes, but she would notice certain things. Here, a chip of badaadi bark would poke out of his satchel. There, the pointed tip of a gajaali leaf. After two years of marriage, she had figured out some of the remedies and had been able to identify the plants by sight as she walked alongside her donkey during the clan’s migrations. She never told her husband, of course, because medicines were gathered by men and it might have wounded his pride. And she knew how much he loved his secrets. Now he was long dead, and Balewa herself was far away from home.

  When she gathered enough herbs with the four other women outside Kano, she would prepare the medicines by boiling root bark or chopping leaves into a fine dust, and together they would journey into the city to lay down their mats in the marketplace. They could earn enough money to buy food after a couple of days of busy selling, their remedies treating everything from colds and indigestion to warts and eczema. The richer residents in the city preferred to go to a modern doctor, but others sought out the more affordable traditional remedies, which had been developed over generations of grazing the wilderness of the Sahel. Balewa could not always find the herbs she needed for each medicine, yet her customers were so desperate, she found, that they would buy whatever she dropped in her packets of newspaper—especially the men. They would return to buy more, believing that the herbs had cured them of their impotence. She felt no guilt at this deception. After her husband’s death, she had vowed that she would save her honesty only for women. Men would get what they deserved.

  One day, while assembling a packet for a woman to cure her dyspepsia, Balewa started to hear whispers in the market stalls, and a word that seemed to touch everyone’s lips: Jarumi. She eavesdropped on the merchants to find out what she could—you could learn a lot, she discovered, by having a sharp ear in the city.

  Jarumi, went the refrain. The Jarumi are coming.

  The police officers too increased their visits to the area
, and she was able to learn from their conversations that they expected the militants to arrive soon. The news frightened the other women but sent a thrill through Balewa’s heart, that she could finally stop running and do something.

  “We can stop them this time,” Balewa announced to the others while she was organizing her herbs on her mat. The five women were seated around their medicines in the marketplace, waiting for customers.

  “How?” one of the other women responded.

  “We’ve got nothing to stop them with,” another added.

  “We’ve got the stones,” Balewa insisted.

  “You can’t control the stones,” Durel, the eldest, argued. “None of us can, Balewa. We have to wait until we’re stronger.”

  Few people understood their Wodaabe dialect, so the women could speak candidly without worrying about eavesdropping.

  “I can control them,” Balewa said. “Yesterday I surrounded Abir with a stone, didn’t I, Abir?”

  “She did,” Abir admitted.

  “That was when you were safe, Balewa,” Durel retorted. “You won’t be able to do it again when the Jarumi are shooting guns at you.”

  “I won’t be afraid.”

  “That’s easy to say now, Balewa, but you won’t be so clearheaded when they attack.”

  “Let them come,” Balewa said defiantly, wondering if she believed her own words.

  “No,” Durel declared. “We won’t confront them. We’ll go home instead. Do you all agree with me?”

  “Yes,” the others said. They didn’t mean their real home, the swath of green pastures and watering holes their clan used to follow from Niger into Nigeria and Benin. She meant their new home, and it was hardly a home at all, a dark, foreboding place where the women did not like to sleep.

  Since Balewa, at twenty, was the youngest among them, she had to defer to the judgment of the others, at least in their presence, but it did not stop her from continuing to eavesdrop in the marketplace. She paid close attention to the peddlers of charred goat meat, lithium batteries, indigo-blue and green cloth wrappers, boiled cashew nuts, painted calabashes, mobile phone chargers, and woven mats. She determined that the Jarumi were expected to arrive very soon, although no one knew how they would travel to the city or what shape their attack would take. The police stepped up their inspections at the market, which mostly involved hassling sellers when it suited them, often demanding bribes in return for protection.