Xiao seemed unusually eager to make a deal to find Bracket more water for his pool at a fair price. “Slow week,” he explained. “Slow week.”
That piece of negotiating done, they headed to the police station, Bracket glancing over occasionally to see if Max was still upset with him. He couldn’t tell if Max’s mind was on his son or on their argument.
He found Detective Idriss at his desk, combing over a newspaper. He was wearing a blood-orange Hausa cap embroidered with an image of a race car. He sported a matching orange, full-length kaftani that was tight around the ankles. Bracket had at first found reading a newspaper trite or even nostalgic when he’d arrived in Kano, because like most people before the Flare he was used to pulling news off the Web, which would be updated by the second. Now he enjoyed the look of the ink on the paper, the finality of the conclusions affixed to the page. Naijaweb was crawling with malnews, fake news articles created to entice you to buy something frivolous or that could infect your device with spyware. Entire crime syndicates had profited from malnews.
“Sit,” Detective Idriss said.
Bracket sat, as the detective finished reading the article before him.
“Ah, Mr. Kwesi Bracket.”
“Yes. I’ve come to get my passport, Detective.”
Idriss fished about in his desk and plopped the passport in front of Bracket. “There. You have it now. Is that all?”
Bracket pointed to Max. “He needs his too.”
Idriss held Max’s national ID in his hand. “You’re not registered to operate a business here in Kano.”
“No,” Max said.
“Then what services do you provide for this man?”
Max appeared to be weighing whether to turn on the charm for Detective Idriss, but didn’t say anything.
“He’s a friend of mine, Detective,” Bracket said, thinking: I doubt Max would call me that right now.
Idriss might have held out for a bribe if Bracket wasn’t there, and the detective slowly handed the ID back to Max, making a show of it, as if he were doing him a favor.
In the back of the station, Bracket heard a high-pitched shriek and then coughing, or perhaps whimpering. The detective did not seem to notice.
“There’s something else you should know, Detective. A few weeks ago we were attacked by something in our lodgings.”
“I’m not allowed to conduct an investigation on your base without a formal invitation. Even if I discovered a crime, I couldn’t detain anyone. You should refer the matter to your security to investigate it properly.”
“I did, and they did nothing useful. This is beyond their abilities. They’re not capable of handling a complex investigation like you are.”
“I see.” Idriss smiled, flattered. “Well, who else was with you? Mr. Obinna here?”
“No, it was a colleague of mine. The intruder came into my quarters looking for something. Only, it wasn’t normal. Not human, I mean. It had a presence—a kind of shifting space—with electric skin. I think it was looking for this.” Bracket showed him a photo of the artifact on his Geckofone.
The detective peered through his glasses dangling on the tip of his nose.
“What is it?”
“It’s an artifact. We found it in the ground.”
“You didn’t bring it with you?”
“No.”
The artifact was still safe in the engine-testing lab with Seeta, who had been slammed, like everyone else, with preparation for the test launch. Besides, Bracket didn’t want Detective Idriss to pester her, not after the way he had treated Max. No one seemed to rise above his suspicion.
“I’m not an expert on these matters,” Idriss said. “I suggest you try the department of archaeology at Bayero University.” Bracket made a note of it as he put the Geckofone in his pocket. “This person that you say attacked you. Did he have red eyes, light skin?”
“Red eyes? Like an albino?”
“Yes, we’re investigating some child abductions. We’ve been tracking reports of an albino man who people claim has been stealing children.”
“You mean kidnapping them?”
“No, there is no claim for ransom.”
“But an albino—”
“Is often more than they first appear. They are held in deep suspicion in this part of the country. People trade their body parts for medicine, believing that they are imbued with magical powers.”
Bracket reasoned through it, trying to understand why albinos were feared, yet killed for their body parts. “Do you think that an albino could have taken Abdul?”
“It’s possible, of course. But so far only children have been disappearing, and we rarely find any evidence like you did. It wouldn’t fit the pattern.”
“Well, I didn’t see any red eyes. I’m not sure what it was, exactly. I didn’t get an image of it.”
Idriss sat back in his chair, pensive. “Well, as I said, I’m not allowed to come near your rockets. It’s quite strange to me, because I went to the site many times as a child when my father used to work for Bendix Corporation.”
The name struck Bracket like a spoonful of hot pepper soup. The name on the old machine! The one in the old building where Abdul Haruna had disappeared in the pool of blood.
“You mean your father worked for the chocolate company?”
For once, Idriss softened a little. “Chocolates, no. What gave you that idea?”
“Bendix makes chocolates. They’re popular in Europe.”
“No.” He smiled, trying to contain a laugh. “Those are Bendicks, with a ck, not an x. Bendix Field Engineering Corporation was the contractor for the flight tracking project here in Kano. Chocolates.” He looked at Max. “He said chocolates!” He put his hand over his mouth and gave a laugh that was almost a snort. He called over another officer and explained it to him, and he guffawed much more loudly.
“All right, my mistake,” Bracket said.
“Chocolates! I mean, Mr. Bracket.”
“Enough already.”
“Okay, all right, I’ll tell you.”
Idriss explained that the project was part of NASA’s Mercury Space Flight Network, which tracked the orbit of John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. The Kano station shortened the communications blackout period as Glenn’s capsule hurtled across the Atlantic. Idriss’s father had been one of about twenty-five locals hired to staff the facility, who had all received training in advanced telemetry and computers. NASA chose Kano because it was free of light and signal pollution, and the emir at the time found the site made for poor pastureland. Nothing grew there.
“The Americans shut it down after Glenn’s first flight. They never explained why. One day my father was contributing to the space age and the next day they said they couldn’t use the tracking station anymore. He was devastated. There was no local use for the skills my father acquired except for the military. To give you an idea, people still used camels to get around in those days. My father worked on radar tracking for the Nigerian Air Force during the Biafran War. It bothered him until he died. He joined Bendix to support peaceful space exploration, and instead he ended up aiming ballistic missiles at his own countrymen.”
“They didn’t take everything,” Bracket corrected. “I saw a Bendix machine in one of the old buildings on the site.”
“I’m sure it’s worthless, Mr. Bracket. I have met many expatriates, and I have noticed that their eyes often play tricks on them. I’ve seen men go mad when they have strayed too long from their homelands. As a man of science, I suggest you trust in that instead.”
“Sound advice,” Bracket said, confused by the detective’s logic. He had just asked him about albinos as if they were warlocks. Now he was telling him to trust in science. Bracket rose to leave, tucking his passport into his back pocket. “Did you ever find out who the bomber was?”
“All we know is that she was from Borno State. Poor, fifteen years old, and pregnant.”
“Pregnant?”
“We collected
what body parts we could after the explosion, and we found a fetus among her remains.”
Bracket’s first thought was Where—where did they find the macabre thing? Then he wanted to know how many months pregnant she was. Was it big? Little? A boy or a girl? Did it have features? Who had collected it? Who had disposed of it?
“We suspect she volunteered,” Idriss went on, “with full knowledge that she was pregnant. Likely to protect someone else in her family. The Wodaabe woman you described may have been trying to stop her. We’re not sure why.”
“You mean you didn’t find her either?”
“She hasn’t been seen again. But one witness said the explosion did not touch her.”
“That’s impossible. She was right next to the girl when she blew herself up.”
“Could be. But then so were you, and you survived.” He tapped on the newspaper. “They’ll be coming again. I don’t know when, but I suspect soon. I admire Nurudeen Bello for gaining the world’s respect. But Mr. Bello focuses too much on what is happening in the sky above us, and he seems to have missed what is happening on the ground. The Senate is deadlocked and still has not voted to send the armed forces here. Look.”
Bracket saw an image of a bearded man pointing accusingly at another legislator. The caption read: Senator Kidibe accuses space program of cost overruns.
“A shipment of AR-15 rifles was captured near Maiduguri,” Idriss added, tapping the paper again. “Yes, I expect the Jarumi will be back in Kano very soon. Now I’d like to show you something, Mr. Bracket. Mr. Obinna will have to wait outside.”
“He comes too,” Bracket said, thinking he might be belaboring the point.
“It’s okay, oyibo. I’ll wait in the truck.”
“Fine.”
Idriss set down his newspaper and led Bracket through a long hallway to the rear of the station. They passed a door where Bracket heard a resigned whimper and someone speaking angrily in Pidgin. The detective fumbled with his keys before turning the lock, then entered a code on a keypad. It was a large, windowless room about six meters wide. Two dozen rifles lined the walls in a locked cage. Behind that, something was inside.
“Is that a hawk?” Bracket said.
The bird was hooded, but he could see from the sharp-edged beak that it was a raptor.
“It’s a snake eagle.”
“What do you use it for?”
“The Jarumi have trained eagles to intercept surveillance drones. We captured this one and we’re waiting for the military to come pick it up. We think that if they tag it, the bird will fly back to their hideout. But no one from the Nigerian Armed Forces has come yet. And as I said, I don’t think they’ll be coming soon.”
“What do you feed it?”
“It seems to like raw goat meat. Creates quite a mess.”
He continued the tour, pointing out body armor in another cage.
“We keep the ammunition in a separate vault so that intruders will need separate access to use the guns—that is, if they don’t already have ammunition. This presents problems for us, of course, if we need to mobilize our men quickly.” He stopped at a cage filled with what looked like cans of Coca-Cola and a large kettle drum.
“These cans are all filled with explosives that we confiscated over the past weeks. That kettle drum is large enough to destroy this police station. Fortunately, we apprehended the assailant. We are now questioning him.” In pronouncing the word questioning, the detective looked Bracket straight in the eye, a challenge of sorts to ask more. “Come, have a look.”
“I don’t think I can help with that.”
“Come on, he’s right over here.” Idriss locked the armory behind him and slid aside a peephole on the door where Bracket had earlier heard the whimpering. “Don’t worry, he won’t be able to see you.”
Inside he could make out two police officers, a man and a woman, sitting in front of a suspect. The boy couldn’t have been more than seventeen. His mouth had been wedged open by a kind of brace, like headgear from an orthodontist. He had tribal scarification marks on his cheeks. On the table was what looked like an entire case of Coca-Cola. One of the interrogators used a straw to suck up some Coke, plugged it with her finger, and then dribbled the Coke over the man’s teeth. He groaned and tried to gag it back up.
“You’re force-feeding him.”
“Not exactly. We’re giving him what he deserves, the very weapon with which he tried to kill us. But instead of explosives hidden in the can, we use Coca-Cola itself. After a few days of this treatment his teeth begin to rot, exposing the root. Most farmers have good teeth because they don’t eat sugar. He is evidently from the city—lots of cavities. It is quite painful for him.”
On cue, the interrogator plugged another straw and sprinkled more soda over the boy’s teeth again. He screeched.
“I’ve seen enough,” Bracket declared.
“Do you want to talk to him? Ask him what his plans are? He seems to know quite a bit about the spaceport.”
“No, I don’t. You should stop this.”
“Good choice. He is not very educated. He does not speak Kanuri very well or Hausa either. His Pidgin is not intelligible. He can barely read. But he seems to have been taught complex chemistry as a bomb maker, a contradiction we often find among the Jarumi.” He slid the peephole shut again. “Don’t worry. Boys like him will not come for the spaceport first. They’ll come here where the guns are.”
“You’re going to let that boy live?” Bracket said.
“If we set him free, he’ll be killed because the Jarumi will think he is a spy.”
“What about a trial?”
“Anything is possible.”
Max drove him back to Ibrahim Musa’s compound to reunite with the movie production team. When he arrived, Musa was serving the entourage a sumptuous meal at the behest of his wives, and Baba was reclining with his belly shifted to the side after having stuffed himself with food. The producer too looked contented and mirthful, and was telling loud, ribald stories about other film shoots, to the delight of Musa’s wives. Even Musa appeared to have loosened up, enjoying the moment.
Good, Bracket thought, let them play. We need their fantasies, their make-believe personalities. Out there, monsters rile you in the night. Fifteen-year-old pregnant girls blow themselves up. Let them imagine a better future, let them tell bright stories where we sail among the stars and they are the passengers, and we are the pilots.
CHAPTER 15
Never leave your Geckofone unattended. That was usually easy advice for Bracket to follow as its tactile, almost rubbery skin warmed to his fingerprints and eagerly lapped up his biometric data. But when he returned to Naijapool he became distracted by the delivery of the Chinese trader Xiao’s water tankers, which were already reversing into the pool facility one by one to empty their cargo, some twenty of them in all.
His Geckofone had disappeared by the time he came back to his desk—it wasn’t sitting on the power cells where he’d left it to charge and it wasn’t perched on the ceiling near the overhead lighting. He called out to the device but it didn’t respond. Under his desk he found the thin husk of the external battery, with the edges burned black. This was bad. Someone had been in here.
He opened the small freezer in the refrigerator and pulled out a frozen cup of miya yakwa, a mix of beef, onions, peanuts, and collard greens cooked in palm oil. He threw this in a microwave until it was steaming hot before chewing it down. Eventually, the particles from his breath salted the air and he spied a subtle movement near a pencil case near his hand. The Geckofone turned off its camouflage and slid before him. It was blinking with a red error message.
Attempted intrusion. Partition. 6% memory loss. Emergency code 465664.
A Digital Security guard arrived as Bracket was trying to make sense of the message, having been hailed automatically by the device.
“Malfunction, sir?” the officer said, picking up the Geckofone.
“Worse than that.”
Her face had the soft symmetry of an attractive woman, with inviting dark brown eyes, and she had a slender, androgynous torso. She moved with a feminine air and was wearing a light perfume. First time he’d seen a transgender woman in Kano. She seemed to be about Sybil’s age. The name on her badge read INI.
She examined the Geckofone for a minute. “This looks like a powerful attack,” she concluded, handing it back to him. “Did you find the battery?”
Bracket fished the charred husk from under his desk. “I think it’s an electrical shortage.”
“Your G-fone ejected it. It must have overloaded the circuit intentionally. Smart.”
At this the Geckofone began blaring out a warning signal and tried to scramble out of Bracket’s pocket. He held it in place, calming it with his fingerprint signature.
“Hang on,” the officer said, using her own Geckofone, a more powerful, rooted version of his own device with more controls. “I think the adversary is still here.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere close by.” She crouched down to look under the desk.
“What are we looking for?”
She held up the battery and pulled off a kind of furry hook from the surface. “This looks like a fang.”
“Snake?”
“No, a spider.”
Bracket felt his skin tingle. He had never liked spiders. Snakes he could marvel at in their streamlined, reductive elegance. Spiders were all spindly legs and neurotic movements. “You don’t think it escaped?”
“Oh no, it’s very close to us.” The officer removed a wand from her hip belt. “I can neutralize it with this Taser.”
“What should I do?”
“Keep looking. Just don’t touch it—they’re deadly.”
They checked under his chair and the desk but didn’t find anything, Bracket trying hard not to cower behind her. She courageously lifted up papers and moved aside a tiny coffee table. Nothing.
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