“Come in.”
It was Ahmed’s father.
“Good evening. I hope you’re settling down well?”
“Yes, we are, thank you. It’s more than anything we were expecting.”
“You looked after my son. There’s a pool if any of you are interested in swimming. My wife and I don’t use it anymore but we keep it clean.”
Where did this man with his trimmed greying goatee think they would have learned to swim? Who could afford swimming lessons and the paraphernalia of goggles and floating armbands?
“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”
“We were just reading from the Bible.”
“Well, I should leave you to it,” Mr. Bakare said, but he lingered at the door.
“You can join us,” Chike said.
“We’re Muslims, a little lapsed but not enough to attend a Bible study. My wife will be wondering where I am. I told her I’d only be here briefly. I need to lock up.” He stepped out and stepped in again. “But if you want to come up to the main building sometimes. We don’t get many visitors under sixty. Which one of you was it that met Chief Sandayọ?”
“We all did,” Fineboy said.
“That interview was an extraordinary thing. He was a little too flashy in his dressing, not really what you expect of an education minister, but the man has guts. Did you watch it?”
“In a way,” Chike said.
“I’ve never really liked the First Lady but I wouldn’t dream of taking her on. Although I suppose I am taking her on by having you here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Chike opened the book to read again but he had lost the thread; the magic of leading them to an unknown conclusion had vanished. The three men on their crosses would die, certainly. One would rise, arguably. The story would go on, meandering through acts and epistles from apostles, stopping finally at Armageddon, world’s end.
“When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, ‘It is finished’: and he bowed his head and gave up the ghost.”
“That’s not a nice place to end,” Isoken said. “Read a few verses down.”
“You all know how the story ends.”
“Wetin happen? He no die again?”
“No, he died. Then he came alive.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was a miracle,” Fineboy said.
Except they had read of the abundant miracles in John, of water transforming and bread multiplying, of footsteps on water, the lame walking, the deaf hearing, the blind seeing. This death on a hill in Jerusalem was nothing like that. Unremarkable: with two others dying in the exact same manner. And yet, seismic.
“We’ll get to that part tomorrow.”
65
“SO SOME BRITISH POP star with a Nigerian name mentions Rẹmi and suddenly he’s a cause?” Ahmed said to Farida over the phone.
“Look, are you coming into the studio or not?”
“He stole that money. Don’t believe any rubbish about taking it to fix schools.”
“Are you changing your story? Do you have any evidence, a new statement or something like that?”
“Of course I don’t.”
“Then we can’t use it.”
“Just for a moment take off your journalist scarf and allow me to be disappointed that it is Rẹmi and not those principals who are going to be the star of this story.”
“Those principals.”
“What about them?”
“You keep calling them ‘those principals.’ What are their names?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then how do you expect anyone else to?”
“I wasn’t the one who interviewed them. It was the BBC. It’s your responsibility.”
“Look, Ahmed, I am not the BBC. I am just a very overworked and underpaid journalist who is supposed to be at a parents’ evening tonight but instead is phoning up people to join in a panel discussion about the situation in Nigeria.”
“You should have told me.”
“About what? The panel? That’s what I’m trying to explain.”
“No, the parents’ evening.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I could have gone and taken notes for you so you wouldn’t have to miss it.”
“You’re not their father, Ahmed. He’s in Enfield with a new wife and a new son and no space in his life for his two daughters. And sometimes—”
“Yes? Sometimes.”
“Sometimes I wake up in the night and I think I still love him. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”
CHIEF SANDAYỌ DID NOT know what an overnight sensation he had become. He did not know that “Sandayo Nigeria” was the third most popular search on Google after “Ola and Sandayo” and “Ola and Nigerian politician” or that his name had been mentioned in secret cables in fourteen different languages or that men and women with deep consciences were pasting his face onto cardboard squares and preparing to march on Whitehall and Washington with his smiling press photo. All he saw of these converging global forces was that his roommate was ejected and his camp bed replaced by a sturdy wooden frame with a thick mattress.
Apart from these minor conveniences, he was still very obviously in prison. Lunch was dilute egusi, breakfast stale bread, and dinner not to be depended on.
He had lost count of how long he had been in this room. Legally, he could not remain in custody without charge for more than forty-eight hours, but he knew of people who had slept in cells for months.
Still, they had not charged him. Someone outside must be championing his cause. Perhaps Ahmed or the BBC was putting pressure on the government to release him. His hope of the first few days had grown to a frenzied expectancy. Each time the rusted key grated into the lock and his orderly turned the handle, he felt his heart lurch forwards.
Today, the orderly knocked before he entered.
“Afternoon, sir. I’ve brought a fan for you.”
“About time. Put it over there, next to the window. Not there, are you blind? I said next to, not in front of.”
He lay down when the orderly left and stared at the calendar on the wall. He almost missed his flatulent roommate, a drug dealer, it had turned out. He had no visitors. Not Chike and the others, despite what he had done for them. Not his son, safely in America. Not the loose reel of acquaintances he had made in Abuja. Certainly not his half siblings.
He was one of twenty-four children. His father had married eight women. His mother, a sickly sixth wife, neither favored nor beautiful, nor clever, nor scheming, had died when he was nine, leaving him to fend for himself, fighting for the very air he breathed. His stepmother Iya Bọsẹ used to say of him, “Don’t give Rẹmi any advantage. Once you let him in at the gate, he will take over your house.”
Where was the advantage to be pressed here? He could not command his release. Nor would this orderly have the power to return his phones. He would start by ordering lunch: jollof rice and chicken with a cold bottle of malt.
66
THERE WAS A PAINTING Chike remembered from Sunday school, a great white throne with sheep and goats on either side, Judgment Day as simple as the sorting of livestock, the whole world split into wool and hair. The sheep had fed the hungry, clothed the naked, cared for the sick, and visited the imprisoned. The goats were too busy eating junk to be of use to humanity.
He remembered that parable when he thought of Sandayọ in jail alone. The Chief had given his freedom for theirs, the messianic story subverted and turned on its head, a thief, like the ones who had hung on either side of the cross, claiming to be the main act. Or perhaps he had misjudged the man, the whole of Sandayọ, greater than the scanty parts he knew of him.
He should visit the Chief. He would visit the Chief. He had grown slothful in the Bakare mansion. He had never known this complete leave-taking of work and responsibility, his rumpled sheets straightened daily by another hand, meals served hot or cold, as you liked it. He thought of where they wo
uld go when this holiday was over. He did not want to return to the crossroads, to live again in their fringe life with no bank account, no passport, no identity. He was prepared for the job market this time. He could change his name and create a past of documents and certificates, with a string of false recommendations vouching for his work ethic. Or he could be pragmatic and ask Ahmed to find him work, the Bakare name pushing him to the front of the queue.
He read most days, sitting by the window that looked over the garden, a pristine and sterile Eden, lawn clipped, gravel raked, petals floating briefly on the air like bright feathers, swept up soon after they fell to the grass. Yẹmi and Fineboy still went into Lagos, the mansion’s walls not high enough to block out the city’s pull. Isoken took literally Mr. Bakare’s injunction to visit the big house and spent most of her time in their library.
Oma’s efforts to help out in the kitchen had been rebuffed and now she, too, read magazines carted off from the Bakare coffee table. They talked often these days, eating their lunches together, walking in the garden at dusk, parting chastely at night after the group reading. It was an old-fashioned courtship, rigorous and slow in its advances, each increment to be cherished. Who knew when they would have this tranquillity again?
He wanted for nothing, except news of the world outside this hermetically sealed compound, where electricity burned twenty-four hours like the sun. The TVs in their rooms showed grey static when switched on, the lines dancing to their own music. Mr. Bakare had come to apologize.
“We never connected them to the DSTv. We did up this place for Ahmed, you know. He was working in a bank in the UK. Big bank. And when he said he wanted to move back to Lagos, my wife suggested we renovate because we’re close to the financial district. Just to help him settle down at first. We knew he’d want his space but rent is not cheap in this area and if you live far the traffic is horrendous. But he didn’t want to live with us and he didn’t want to work in a bank. My son the newspaperman. I suppose you know more about that than me.”
The elder Bakare was a lonely man. There was a rift between him and his son, a fault in the family geology. Sandayọ had a son too, waiting somewhere in America for news of his father, sitting by the phone in settings Chike could not imagine. He would visit the Chief soon.
67
THE RELEASE OF CHIEF Sandayọ and the principals came in parenthesis in the world media. An earthquake in Indonesia, with buildings leveled and dams burst open, made footage of a reduced Sandayọ walking out of a prison seem rather tame. He had spent only twenty-seven days inside, nothing close to the incarceration on Robben Island.
He had hoped that Chike or one of the others would be waiting but perhaps it was still too dangerous to associate with him. Once they sighted him, the local pressmen ran to meet him, dragging their equipment along. He spoke into the bush of microphones that sprouted around his mouth.
No, he had not been tortured. Yes, the food was terrible. Indeed, a victory for democracy. Undoubtedly, the struggle would continue. Certainly, corruption must die. He did not know what he was saying by the end. Only that he felt drunk on his words and the small crowd that gathered felt it, too.
“Solidarity forever,” they sang as he stepped into the car that would take him to his home in Ikire. The car had been provided by the Norwegian embassy, a blue Peugeot with a young, clean-shaven driver behind the wheel. They reached traffic on the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway forty-five minutes into their journey. The slow jolting forward made him sick. A siren and a few armed police would have cleared a way through this seemingly unforceable jam but a Peugeot, without even the mystery of tinted glass, must make its way slowly down the road like everyone else.
He lay down on the backseat. He was looking forward to resting in Ikire, not as a fugitive but as a townsman free to walk about. The town had changed a lot since his childhood. They had gone everywhere on foot then, bicycles a rarity, cars an event. A metallic wash of modernity had come over the place now. Tinny motorcycles zipped along the dirt roads and a faltering electricity flickered on and off. Some things had not changed. The town was still famous for its plantain, fried when rotten into black, sticky balls. Funkẹ had craved dodo ikire when she was pregnant, the round lumps dancing through her dreams, sex symbols of a gourmand. He would drive at dangerous speeds to bring back the dish, heaped into a cooler and still warm.
And then when Gbenga was born, as a family, they had driven down to Ikire and walked around the plot of land on which he would build his country seat, a mansion to which his sons would bring their wives and children. He would preside over this large family each Christmas, the patriarch Sandayọ. Empty dreams. Gbenga did not come home and Funkẹ had no more children. Gbenga’s exit had damaged her womb. His siblings would grow for a few months and then come tumbling out of that hostile organ, small as teaspoons, or large as grapefruit. It did not matter. They would not reach full term. Then the hocus-pocus of abiku and spirit children and curses that pushed his wife into a world without lipstick and red wine, a world of fasting and penance. She had been so beautiful on their wedding night, tipsy and scared but determined, gripping him with her thighs, pinning him between her legs.
“What are you waiting for? Push it in.”
He missed all the Funkẹs. The bride, the mother, the raving evangelist. He would stay in Ikire for a week, long enough to arrange a new passport. The old one had been seized on entrance into the prison, along with his phones. The phones had been returned. The passport had gone missing.
His life did not feel in danger, yet for a moment, standing at the desk and demanding his passport, he wondered if he should have taken the Norwegian ambassador’s offer of asylum in the embassy premises until he was ready to travel. It would have meant looking overly beholden to a foreign power, a way of thinking he must get used to now.
His phones had been ringing since he left the prison. His ex- assistant had called to say two generals wanted to meet with him; a former president wanted to congratulate him; a godfather wished to discuss his future. He was a new tool, an unknown entity in the political space.
“Tell them you don’t know where I am.”
“Where are you, sir?”
“You just don’t worry about that. If anyone asks for me, take a message. I’ll be available in a week.”
His son in America must have heard of the release, because he, too, had called. Sandayọ let the call ring out. He was not in the mood for Gbenga and his American solicitousness. From Chike, not even a text. Perhaps the group had already dispersed.
He did not know when he slept. He woke to the sound of banging. It was dark and they were parked on a road that wasn’t the expressway. He saw a hand flattening itself repeatedly against the window, the palm broad and white, the thin glass shaking on each impact.
“What is the meaning of this? Keep driving.”
“Get down from the car,” the driver said. It was the first time he had spoken throughout their journey.
“I will do no such thing.”
The locks clicked but he held on to the handle, struggling with the stranger outside. He was not strong enough. They pulled the door open and dragged him to the ground. The earth was cool and moist on his face. It had rained recently, lightly enough to wet the soil without turning it to mud. In Ikire the farmers would be watching their crops, counting down to the harvest. The grass rustled with wind and small creatures, hurrying through the undergrowth. “Help!” he shouted as the first blow fell on his back. The Peugeot drove off, its back lights growing smaller and smaller, dwindling stars in a dark night.
68
“THEY KILLED HIM.”
“Who?” Chike said to Ahmed’s father, who was standing in his doorway and clutching his forehead.
“I didn’t know this kind of thing was still happening. Good Lord. Are we living under Abacha?”
“Who?”
“Your friend. The minister. Sandayọ, whatever his name is. They found him in the bush this morning. Beheaded.”
>
It would fall to Chike to tell the others. These were his first thoughts. That the Yoruba did not announce death directly. That he did not know what the custom was in Edo and that he would break the news to Oma in Igbo.
“They’re sure it’s him?”
“Yes. It’s been confirmed. It’s on TV now. My wife and I, we watched for a while then I thought I should come and tell you.”
“I want to see it for myself, please.”
“Yes, of course.”
They moved slowly, their feet crunching the stones of the gravel walkway that led to the Bakare mansion.
“My wife wants us to leave the country tomorrow. She doesn’t think we’re safe.”
“Are you?” Chike asked.
“Before today I would have said yes, of course, but now I’m not so sure. This kind of thing hasn’t happened in years. In years.”
“We’ll be leaving too, then.”
“No. Even if we go, you must stay. For the young girl’s sake. What’s that her name again?”
“Isoken.”
“Isoken. Yes. A beautiful Bini name. I wanted my wife to see her, to see if she would notice the resemblance between her and our daughter who passed. You believe in the afterlife? This Sandayọ, would he make paradise or heaven or whatever?”
“I don’t know.”
Inside the house Mrs. Bakare was dressed as if already in mourning, a black kaftan shrouding her to her feet, a rebellious gold embroidery running along the hem.
“Good evening, madam,” Chike said, standing with his hands behind his back. She nodded and turned away.
“Please sit down,” Ahmed’s father said. “His son should be on soon. They announced it before I came to call you.”
Chief Sandayọ’s son, even in grief, was evidently sophisticated, speaking in a soft American accent that broke down into tears on air. His father would not have lost composure so, Chike thought as he watched Sandayọ Junior wipe his eyes and then cover his face, his shoulders shaking.
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