Making Wolf (10 page)

“It’s Nana,” she said. “I, who have loved you. I, who have washed your face with water and blood. Be calm, Akande, my soul speaks to yours.”

I was amazed that she could remember. Akande was my oriki, which is a kind of poem each Yoruba has that speaks directly to his or her spirit or soul. Mothers use them to quieten squalling babies.

“You still know that?” I said.

She nodded, stroking my face. “What’s our destination?”

“Arodan.”

Arodan used to be a village in the south-west of Alcacia, about an hour’s drive from Ede, with population about ten, fifteen thousand. This was before I was born, but the stories were still circulating when I was knee high. In 1963 something happened there, and it just dried up, nigh overnight. All the inhabitants disappeared. Some of the buildings showed slight structural damage, but otherwise it was all intact. It had featured in an episode of
Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World
in 1981. There was still no explanation for it that didn’t involve alien abduction or Roswell-style secret government experiments.

When proposals came for an asylum to be built in 1970, Arodan was the natural choice, and paradoxically a town sprang up around the asylum as a kind of support system for the families of those who worked there. Arodan lived again.

“Once upon a time, there was a witch in my village, a very wicked one, and she died. Natural causes. Most unfair. For days afterwards travelers reported seeing her at the intersection of footpaths where she would beat them up and drink some of their blood. The elders finally ordered the young men of the village to exhume her body, chop it into little pieces, and scatter them over a wide area for the birds of the air and the beasts of the field to eat. After that, the sightings stopped,” said Nana.

“Okay,” I said. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m just saying: strange things happen.”

“Like whole villages disappearing without a trace.”

“Yes.”

“You know it’s entirely possible that the real culprit saw the desecration of the witch’s body and decided to stop.”

“Yes, it’s possible, and even probable, but nobody’s going to believe that, Weston.”

Journeys in Alcacia were all the same. I had never noticed this when I was young. You left a conurbation and experienced hypnotic green sameness for a time, and then you got to the next human settlement. With Arodan the difference was in the ruins of the old village. The buildings were there, falling apart, deserted. Even forest fauna left it alone. I stared as we drove past, a touristy sign proclaiming it as Old Arodan. The houses reminded me of sun-bleached skulls. None of them had roofs, and any color had long since succumbed to the elements. One hut stood away from the rest.

“A hermit,” said Nana, when I asked her. “Or a witch. Or a leper. Or a man enamored of
Walden
, which he read while on scholarship to America. Or a lunatic.”

The Arodan Asylum was massive and built along the lines of similar Victorian-era establishments. About a mile to the place, the road straightened and turned to gray-blue gravel. The walls of the asylum loomed, and I estimated the drive would take a few minutes.

“Prepare your engines of war,” said Nana.

“We’re not here to make war. We’re here to solicit for information. I plan to be obnoxious.”

“Oh, fun. Can I be obnoxious too?”

“As long as you do it in the car park. You’re not coming in with me.”

“Weston—”

“I don’t want anyone to see or remember you,” I said, and she became quiet. I needed to get the courage to drive on Alcacian roads in order to keep her out of my business. I sometimes thought of what would have happened if she had been with me on that taxi ride and shivered.

The walls of the asylum were like twelve, thirteen feet with impressive barbed wire decorations. We drove through a kind of free-standing horseshoe arch before reaching the gate where two men smoked and casually waved us along. They probably thought if we had driven this far we must have had legitimate business in the asylum.

We parked. Nana started reading Julian Jaynes and possibly sulking (it was unclear to me if she could sulk) while I kissed her cheek and left the parking lot.

“Are you going to be okay?” I asked without turning around.

“I have knowledge,” she said. “I have been studying so much that knowledge is dripping from my very pores. I have wisdom breath. I have erudition-meme-bomb farts. My gonads are pulsing with education. I have datavision and information-snot. Yes, I am going to be okay.”

My girlfriend. Strange beyond belief.

No CCTV cameras, no warnings absolving the organization of blame should the car be broken into. A few other cars parked in no particular order. I suppressed a brief impulse to turn back and bring Nana along. I opened large mahogany doors and “California Dreaming” hit me. The Mamas and the Papas. Just hearing the song made me think of the sun, blonde Californians on a beach, hippies, weed, bongs, flower power, and, strangely, Bruce Lee.

There was a short walk to the counter. There was no sign of the mentally ill, just a woman with cornrows behind a counter ticking boxes on a tete sheet. Tete was a primitive form of gambling where people placed minor bets on sporting events and mailed in their answers, although there were tete halls scattered all over the poorer districts. I thought that religion might only be one of the masses’ opiums. Opiates. Whatever the plural might be.

She looked up at me, frowned briefly, then brightened up. ‘Eka ‘san, O. Can I help?”

I returned the greeting in Yoruba and told her who I was, flashing the badge like it meant something and allowing her to fondle it, and to extract the fifty dollars folded within. “I need to see a patient called Afolabi Akinrinde. I also want photocopies of all his psychiatric records. I need this right now.”

“Records are confidential, Oga.”

“So am I. My job requires me to be confidential. Do you want to see how confidential I can be?” I showed her confidentiality in the form of an extra fifty dollars.

She put down her tete and I saw that her badge identified her as Bola, Reception Assistant. She narrowed her eyes. “You’re a Holloway Baby, aren’t you?”

“I don’t like to talk about it.”

“I do. The whole topic fascinates me. There was a documentary on it a year ago where they gathered all the living Holloway Babies under one roof.”

I remembered that. I did not know how they found out my address, but they sent me stuff. Invitation, first class air ticket, five hundred dollars non-refundable expenses. All to participate in a freak show. I returned it all.

“Do you like talking about menstruation to total strangers? Not the general science of it but your own periods, the kind of tampons you use, the accidents that lead to the staining of your favorite jeans. Do you?”

She shook her head and looked at me with distaste.

“I do. The whole topic fascinates me. D’you know, if three or more women live in the same building their periods synchronize?”

After that she fell silent and went through a database on the screen in front of her. She twisted her mouth and poked a little finger into her right nostril while she worked. Must not shake that hand.

“What do you prefer to do first? See the patient or the documents?”

The documents would probably provide context and help me understand Afolabi better, and I told Bola this. She took me to a reading room devoid of any personal touch whatsoever. Desk, seat, telephone, filing cabinet, all polished metal except the phone. The walls were white and bore not even a calendar. There was no window, and light came from fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. They hummed like lightsabers in
Star Wars
films. Presently, Bola came in with several files.

“When you’re done, pick up the receiver. You don’t have to say anything.”

She left. I started to read.

The earliest file folders did not identify Afolabi by name. There was a number: 56232. Every page had the seal of the Federal Government, indicating the need for secrecy. The censorship and medical jargon conspired against my full comprehension of the first few folders. I could tell that Afolabi sustained serious injuries during the assassination, injuries from which he was not expected to survive. The family had already been notified of his death during what was thought to be a terminal coma. Afolabi did not die. Ten days after the event, he started breathing spontaneously. In a month he was opening his eyes and attempting speech. Within six months he was ambulant, though violently psychotic. It was determined that Afolabi could not live independently because of associated brain damage. When his physical wounds healed, the government dispatched him to Arodan.

There was no mention of Pa Busi in the files. There were allusions to Afolabi’s military background, especially on the risk assessment forms surrounding his violent outbursts. In his first few weeks of stay, he hospitalized seven nurses despite being narcotized with bucketloads of very serious chemicals. He appeared to go through alternating periods of quiescence and excitement. Later assessments held the opinion that he might not be psychotic at all but had just sustained damage to his frontal lobe, whatever that meant.

There were no transcripts of analysis; there was no analysis. The documents did not help much. I had to see the man himself.

Afolabi Akinrinde had transmogrified into a mountain of soft fat.

From his file I already knew he was over six feet and in his youth had won kickboxing trophies. The man before me could barely breathe, and did so in intermittent wheezes and with all the drama of an Olympic weightlifting event. His hair was short, head looking almost shaven. His eyes were pits because of the fat of his cheeks. He drooled saliva constantly from open lips and, at intervals, the nurse who watched over him would dab a cloth across his mouth. He had large scars around the head and face that I thought probably came from the explosion and surgery. The tunic of his pajamas held wet food stains and ballooned out over his gut, which was the largest I had ever seen. He was rounder than the Michelin man and each movement made him look like a fluid-filled sac rather than a being of flesh, blood, and bone. He stank of excrement and fermented sweat. His left hand shook, and he would reach across his double-wide chest with his right hand to still it at times.

His nurse, a Nigerian man with a hostile face, stared at me like I had disturbed an interesting and no doubt sexual dream to which he would like to return.

“Mr. Akinrinde,” I said. I was seated across from him, two feet separating us.

He did not respond.

“Mr. Akinrinde, my name is Weston Kogi, and I’m a detective. Can you hear me?”

“He can hear you,” said the nurse.

“I’m talking to Mr. Akinrinde,” I said. ‘Please let him respond.” And shut the fuck up. An interesting side note: I understood briefly why guns should not be made available to people. I felt a strong urge to pull out my firearm and shoot the nurse in the face.

“I would like to talk about Pa Busi,” I said.

He looked at me then, the whites of his eyes barely visible within the dark comma-shaped pits of his fat face, and it was like being gazed upon by a Buddha, but without the serenity or mirth. I had registered on his consciousness, but he still wasn’t talking.

“Do you remember anything about the day he was killed?”

Akinrinde took a deep breath and exhaled blowhole fashion, aerosolizing saliva in the process. He frowned, facial muscles straining to shift the adipose. He opened his mouth, and a cough came out. He put his fist to his chest, burped, and tried again. “I have tried everything, and only nothing works.”

Droplets of spit flew from his mouth forming minute cold spots on my face. I resisted the urge to wipe them away. “Could you try to remember what happened?”

“I do remember. Nothing works.”

I looked at the nurse, but he only shrugged.

“The contingent consisted of four agents,” Akinrinde said in a crisp, clear voice that surprised both me and the nurse. “Idris Wallace, Antoine Adebowale, Junior Alao, and myself. Idris was a special agent, and we were instructed to follow his lead.

“We bivouacked in the Imperial Hotel, six hundred yards from the subject’s residence the evening before. Adebowale and I did several sweeps of the surrounding streets while Alao familiarized himself with the vehicle we would be using. At oh-eight hundred hours the next day, we relieved the night detail, which consisted of one agent.” He stopped to swallow spit. It occurred to me that he thought this was a debriefing.

“There was no heightened security? No alert about threats against his life?”

“Negative. The four agents were because of his negotiations with the rebel factions. He planned to make a journey into territory that was considered hostile. At oh-nine hundred hours the subject entered the vehicle, and we set off.”

“Destination?” I was taking notes at a demonic speed.

“The People’s Christian Army camp. It was a relatively low risk time. There was no active conflict, and most combatants respected the ceasefire. Intelligence suggested that it was a safe period. There was no chatter, and we were not expected. The journey was uneventful except for the subject insisting on stopping for akara at thirteen thirty-two hours.”

My mouth watered as I remembered my own experience of the savory snack. “Thirteen thirty-two exactly? Not thirty-one or thirty-four.”

“Thirteen thirty-two. I checked.”

“I see. Did Pa Busi…the subject, did he seem tense? Fearful?”

“Negative. He was calm, cheerful, looking forward to engaging the rebel leadership in dialogue. He started a discussion with Wallace, but the rest of us remained silent as per protocol.”

“What did they discuss?”

“Philosophy. Marcus Aurelius’
The Meditations
. Bertrand Russell. Others whom I cannot remember.”

“Was it a heated discussion?”

“Negative. There was a lot of laughter. Special Agent Wallace was diplomatic and obsequious.”

Which he seemed not to approve of. I wondered what else he thought of Wallace.

“Had you known Special Agent Wallace for long?”