He went up at once, to get it over with. He stood outside the bedroom door and was tempted to listen to their murmured conversation, to hear what they were saying about him. That made him so frightened of himself that he knocked hastily and went in.
Anna was in the double bed. She looked small and vulnerable. Liz was standing beside her, and turned to stare at him, her eyes utterly unwelcoming. 'Look, I have to go away,' he said.
'Yes, I think you better had.'
She managed to make him sound both outcast and unreasonable to be leaving. He couldn't argue, he could tell her anything except that he was going back to Nigeria. He closed the door with a gentleness that made him want to weep. It wasn't Liz's attitude that sent him to the phone to find out how soon he could leave for Nigeria, it was the way Anna had hidden behind her mother as soon as he'd entered the room.
Twenty
Isaac Banjo was a tall Yoruba in a spotless white linen suit. His eyes were warm and sympathetic, his handshake felt like a promise of friendship and help, and Alan had to be content with that while Isaac deflected the touts who were clamouring to carry Alan's bags or And him a taxi and led him out of the airport, through the uproar of passengers squabbling with bored airline clerks and with one another. Alan was glad to be organized so efficiently, not least because it put off the time when he would have to talk.
Isaac stowed the bags in the boot of his dusty car and gave Alan an encouraging look, and then there was no talking once he manoeuvred onto the road to Lagos. Misshapen buses bounced over the potholes, battered taxis dodged through the traffic, their wing mirrors turned end up to give their drivers more room to scrape by, and that was all there was until Lagos closed in. Then they were hours in the go-slow, the city's daily eighteen-hour traffic jam. Today was an even day of the week, when only cars with even-numbered plates were allowed onto the island, yet the go-slow seemed even more sluggish. Hawkers came to the windows of the car with Swiss watches and Japanese radios, customs road blocks further on held up the traffic. By the time the car crossed the bridge to Ikeja, it was growing dark.
Isaac's house had a view of the lagoon between the larger houses. He drove his dilapidated odd-numbered car out of the garage so that it would be available tomorrow. Still they couldn't talk, for Isaac's plump motherly wife had made them a stew and insisted they get it inside them at once, his two bright-eyed daughters wanted to show Alan their schoolwork afterward and pleaded with him to read them a story in bed. He did, though he felt close to weeping. That Isaac trusted him with his daughters seemed to give him back too much of himself too soon, too painfully.
When at last they were alone in Isaac's study, which contained books in so many languages Alan gave up counting, he asked the question which had been building up inside him ever since they'd met. 'Just why do you feel so responsible for me?'
'Because of what happened to Marlowe.' Isaac handed him an imported whisky and poured one for himself. 'I saw what the talisman did to him. He wasn't always as you saw him, as he became. I don't know of a father who was more loving. I think there's no doubt that he killed himself in order to save his daughter from him.'
'After he'd taken me for a fool and given me the claw.'
'For a long time he believed he couldn't get rid of it. He must have been so drunk at the party that he gave it to you on impulse.'
'It didn't look much like a sudden decision to me.'
Isaac gazed sadly at him. 'You're right,' he said, forsaking the Yoruba deviousness. 'He must have been looking for an opportunity. I'd told him that if the talisman was preying so much on his mind, he ought to get rid of it however he could. You see why I must help you.'
Alan couldn't hate him. He almost wished he could, so as to have a tangible enemy. 'Did he know you had a daughter?' Isaac said. 'I can't believe he would have given it to you if he had thought so.'
Alan remembered Marlowe's complaint that he had to bring his family with him to Nigeria – remembered saying that he hadn't got that problem. At last he saw what all that had meant. 'No, I don't think he did,' he admitted, touched that Isaac was anxious only to defend his dead friend, not Isaac himself.
'Then I am more to blame. If you shit in the road,' he said, quoting a Yoruba proverb, 'you'll find flies when you come back.' He stood up abruptly. 'I managed to persuade the police to let me copy what's left of his notes. They may help you understand.'
That seemed unlikely, since they consisted of a few grey photocopied pages of charred fragments from notebooks. 'He burned everything else,' Isaac said, 'but I can tell you more.'
Alan wasn't sure if he wanted to know more once he had read the first fragment. '1946 police reports: victims waylaid in evening on path back from market or farm. Spikes driven into neck. Heart and lungs always taken. All flesh removed from severed heads to prevent identification, yet Leopard Men often killed before witnesses – seemed to think themselves magically invulnerable…' These must be later notes, the handwriting had degenerated so much. Had Marlowe been trying to regain control of himself by listing facts? They didn't seem the kind of thing that would have helped his mind.
The handwriting on the next sheet was more precise, though the notes read like speculation. '… cannibalism as a source of magical power: Gilles de Rais was said to have eaten children. Sierra Leone Weekly News 4th April 1891 notes similarities of Jack the Ripper mutilations to those of Leopard Men. Was Ripper a magician who ceased his activities when he'd achieved his aim?'
Alan was seeking an answer, not more questions, and certainly not this description of the ritual of one group of Leopard Men: 'Girl was sent along crooked footpath. High bush either side, creepers covered any opening. Leopard Men lay in wait. Sometimes made animal sounds before they sprang.' He imagined the claw biting into flesh, and almost tore the page in turning it. 'Eisler in Hibbert Journal takes Leopard Men to be survival of primitive practice of hunting in packs. Men learned from beasts of prey, ran down prey and surrounded it, devoured it alive. Animal sounds meant to recall this? Sound of snuffling???'
Alan couldn't understand the three question marks -bad style, that was all – and the notes were growing less coherent, less objective, and even less meaningful to him.
'Witchcraft a stage through which all races pass. Attempt to regain lost powers of primitive? Every race capable of reaching back to THE SAME primitive powers. We all came from Africa…' THE SAME was underlined three times, so emphatically that the pen had torn the paper. He felt bewildered and irritable, he was beginning to wonder what he was doing here at all. 'Sound of snuffling,' he said jeeringly, despairingly.
'Yes, I can explain that.' Isaac's voice was gentle. 'You should know the legends of the Leopard Men.'
'Quite a few, are there?' Alan snapped, and felt ashamed. 'I'm sorry. You must think me very ungrateful. I do appreciate your letting me come here, looking after me like this. It's just that all that's happened…'
His voice was trembling, he couldn't go on. Isaac grasped his hand while he closed his eyes and took deep shuddering breaths. Eventually Alan was able to say 'Tell me what you were going to tell me.'
'There are two legends you should know.' He seemed to be debating with himself which to tell first. Eventually he said 'The origin of the Leopard cult is itself a legend.'
The tone of his voice made it clear that legend was a kind of truth. 'Marlowe believed they were trying to reach back to powers they felt man had lost when he ceased to hunt in packs.'
Alan found himself staring at the last fragment: 'Every race capable of reaching back…' He wasn't sure that he wanted to know. 'Reach back how?' he said.
'The oldest version David traced was that a Ju-ju man had the first claw made by an artisan whom he then killed. It isn't clear if that was to prevent the secrets of the making from being revealed or to blood the claw. In any case, it seems that the powers he invoked were too strong for him. There's a suggestion in the legend that he encouraged the cult to be formed in the hope that it would dissipate the hold the c
law had over him. Presumably it didn't, because he ran with the Leopard Men even when he was too old to hunt. He had to be fed every time they made their kill.
The legend says he cannot die. He is doomed to wait to be fed every time the talisman makes a kill.'
'Which talisman?'
'The one Marlowe gave you.'
Night pressed against the windows, black and moist as the earth Alan could smell. It felt almost like being buried alive, though he couid hear some animal snarling in the distance. 'You're saying that was the original?'
'So he believed.'
'But how could a piece of metal do all this?'
'Do you believe things have souls? We believe everything has. The talisman has an evil soul.' As Alan looked skeptical, Isaac went on, 'David came to believe that the originator of the talisman would try to influence whoever held it to use it. The legend says that he would appear in the form of a naked man covered with the blood of all his feasts.'
Alan felt as if he was on the edge of a precipice of belief where nothing was familiar, yet everything was. 'What can I do?' he cried.
'That is the other legend. It must be as true for you as David thought it would be for him.'
His voice was grave. 'Tell me the worst,' Alan said.
'Simply this. There is a legend told throughout Africa that the last Leopard Man will come from a far land and destroy the power of the claw.'
Alan couldn't quite shrug that off, as all his Englishness demanded he should; it was as though he had already known. 'That's all?'
'Not at all. David traced variations as far as Kenya. They must have been among the papers he destroyed, but he told me most of them, I think. All the legends say that he will confront the giver of the claw and take his power to destroy it for ever. Once they come face to face in the jungle the legend will tell itself.'
Alan thought of his dream of the jungle, of the scrawny feral figure that rose to meet him. 'My God,' he said, shuddering less with terror than with realization, and then he thought he perceived a flaw. 'Why wasn't it Marlowe? Why didn't it work for him?'
'Because he was no longer capable of doing what had to be done by the time he found out what it was.' Isaac gave him a long sympathetic look. 'You have one great advantage. You've put an ocean between yourself and your child.'
So that was why he'd insisted that Alan come to Nigeria to learn what he must do. If this was reassurance it was appalling, and yet it made Alan so furious with himself he could hardly sit still. 'What am I supposed to do?' he demanded.
'Most versions say that the giver of the claw must die in order for the power to be consumed. David was convinced that meant the giver must be killed.' He sat forward and looked ready to clasp Alan's hands. 'Whatever happens, I shall be with you. You won't have to do this by yourself.'
Alan blurted out his question in order to deal with his flood of emotion: gratitude, fury with himself, anticipatory fear. 'Why are you doing all this for me?'
'Because of what I wished upon you.' He held up one pink palm as Alan made to speak. 'No matter that I didn't realize I was doing so. I want to help destroy what destroyed my friend David Marlowe.'
Alan reached out impulsively and grasped Isaac's hands. 'We will. By God, we will.'
'Now we must try to retrace David's steps,' Isaac said, 'to the man who gave him the claw.'
Twenty-one
They seemed to have been trudging through the shanty town for hours, peering out from beneath their umbrellas as they picked their way through the narrow makeshift random lanes, when Isaac halted suddenly. Rain shrilled on the corrugated tin roofs and awnings, water rushed down the open sewer channel which cut through the mud of the lane, and he had to shout to be heard. 'You ought to know this,' he said, and took Alan's hand. 'It may help.'
For a moment Alan thought he was going to give him a charm. But Isaac was shaking his hand, running a second finger across Alan's palm as he did so, and rolling his eyes. Here they were, standing in the maze of rickety shacks and propped-up shelters of tin and cloth, ankle-deep in the sucking mud and shaking hands like freemasons, blocking the way of three women with sodden cartons balanced on their heads. Beyond the shacks, palm trees nodded in the rain. Alan wondered if both he and Isaac were mad. But Isaac leaned his head close to Alan's beneath the umbrellas while the women grumbled past. 'That is the secret sign of the Leopard Men,' he said.
One handshake and the Leopard Men would take him for one of them, Alan thought sardonically – at least, if he hadn't died of pneumonia by then. Warm mud squeezed between his toes as he stumbled after Isaac, shoes in one hand, umbrella in the other. Each leaning shelter seemed more ramshackle than the last. An overpowering smell of marijuana drifted through the rain. He didn't blame them for smoking, whoever they were. How on earth could people live like this? They had crowded onto Lagos Island from the farms, lured by the big city, only to be cleared onto the mainland. It was their choice to live here, and
God knows, he had worries enough of his own – but then he saw the child. She was gazing out of a shelter through a gap in the hanging canvas that served as a front door, which was so sodden that it was impossible to see what colour it had originally been. She was brushing away flies automatically, as a horse flicks its tail, and gazing at him with great brown eyes. She couldn't have been more than eight years old. All at once he felt his eyes moisten and he was unable to move.
'Nearly there,' Isaac said, then he saw where Alan was looking. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'We'll have you back with your family if it's within my power.'
Isaac obviously assumed that he was just homesick and yearning for his own child. Nevertheless, as they squelched onward, Alan heard the child coughing, dryly and painfully, and his own muddy discomfort suddenly seemed shamefully trivial, especially now that Isaac seemed to feel the need to state a limit on how much he could help.
Just then Isaac stepped delicately aside into yet another lane of mud, and halted almost at once. 'Ah, I thought I'd come the right way,' he said. 'Here we are.'
At least the building in front of which he'd halted had four walls and a front door, though the door had obviously been made for a larger frame. The window-panes were cellophane, billowing in the downpour. 'Perhaps it will be best if you wait while I speak to them,' Isaac said, and stepped onto the plank which served as a bridge across the overflowing channel.
Before Isaac pounded on the front door, Alan saw a black smudge peer out through cellophane. Isaac knocked several times and eventually the door was opened by a large woman in a dress and matching head-dress, bright as parrots. Alan could see that she recognized Isaac from when Marlowe had brought him along to translate. Was that why she stood in his way and wouldn't let him inside?
Finally, after a prolonged discussion, a man appeared in the doorway and gestured Isaac within. Alan watched the door being heaved back into place, and then he waited in the rain, with the water and waste streaming past his feet. He stared dully into the channel, watching the edges crumble.
Suddenly the door of the house laboured open, and Isaac stood there. 'All right,' he said, with a grimace that meant it had been a struggle. Alan strode across the plank, which bowed in the middle until it was touching the miniature flood, its ends sinking in the mud and threatening to make him slip – 'and into the house. One step inside, and he halted, dismayed.
There was only one room, and it was full of children and basins and crippled furniture. He had to peer, because the room was dim with steaming clothes, spread over ropes strung between the walls. Basins were everywhere, catching drips from the roof, ringing like beggars' cups – one dud coin after another. The few chairs looked as if they had been rescued from a dump and repaired with bent nails. At the foot of the large lumpy bed stood several wooden boxes containing scraps of blankets. For pets, Alan thought – but how could there be room for animals? With a shock he realized that the boxes served as beds for some of the children. All the children, five of them, were staring at him.
He couldn'
t meet their eyes. He felt accused, as though it was Anna who was staring. So he'd thought he could write about Nigeria on the basis of a tourist's visit, had he? He felt utterly fake. If he ever returned home, he would tear his Nigerian plot to bits. But the children's father blocked his view and stretched out his upturned hand.
Alan pulled out a wad of brown ten-naira notes. Ten, twenty, thirty, fifty – divide by two and you had pounds. Thirty pounds, forty, and the hand was still outstretched. By the time it closed on the notes, Alan felt he had paid a good deal, but wasn't Anna's safety worth infinitely more? The man was stuffing the notes into a Coca-Cola bottle, which already looked almost full. Perhaps in time he'd be able to buy his family's way out of all this. Alan hoped so.
He screwed the cap into the bottle and dragged the bed aside, then he lifted a floorboard and hid the bottle in the mud beneath the floor. Still frowning, he beckoned Alan and Isaac to follow him out of the house. One of the children scampered after them, but he gestured her back, shouting, 'I told you to stay away from him.'
He led them around the house to the back, walking with exaggerated dignity, ignoring the mud and the downpour, even though his outsize multicoloured shirt immediately grew darker with rain. Behind the house was a hut like a large privy, fashioned out of corrugated metal. There were a few footprints in the mud outside the door, but not many. The man wrenched back the bolt, and Alan saw the old man who was shut in there, lying on a camp bed.
He oughtn't to be shocked. If it weren't for the Nigerian respect for the family, the old man would probably be dead. The frowning man could hardly be blamed for locking his father away from the grandchildren, under the circumstances – and anyway he was housing him as close to the family as he possibly could. At least the hut looked watertight, and the old man had a flashlight by the bed and a couple of basins for washing and relieving himself. Alan forced himself to step into the hut, to see exactly what a Leopard Man looked like.
The Claw Page 14