Making Wolf (21 page)

The king was in the dim cabin. Akpala music played from the transistor radio in his right hand. I hadn’t seen a transistor since 1986.

The King of Boys wore a crown to receive us. The crown was jewelled with marbles—children’s marbles. It was a band of tin, beaten together from old Burma Shave containers. His head was completely bald, shining from within the rim of his crown. He had a black tailcoat on, and he looked like an impoverished Fred Astaire. He wore white gloves, dirty ones. His shoes were holed, filthy, but courtly. He wore no socks. He did wear a necklace of cowries. A flaky, scaly dark lesion decorated the skin of his neck. I wondered if he had AIDS.

“Kabiyesi,” said Church, but he did not prostrate himself. I followed his lead.

The king had no attendants, but a young, sullen house slave fanned him. The boy had a unibrow and wore only dirty white Y-front underpants.

“A man called stone,” said the King.

“A stone bearing gifts,” said Church. He gave the king a brown paper bag. The king tore it open, counted fresh bills.

“This is good,” said the king.

“And none of your beggar subjects died in the fires,” said Church.

“You are all my subjects,” said the king. “You just don’t know it. Take some fish on your way out.”

We, Church and I, waited outside my father’s office. For Taiwo.

“Why are we paying off the beggar king?” I asked.

“For popularity,” said Church. “We wanted to send a message with the fire, but, if one beggar had died, the whole plan could backfire, no pun. Beggars live in the market, and they listen to their king. He told them to stay out on the night of the fire. We paid him a lot of money to keep them out. Everybody happy.”

“So yours is a revolution by bribery.”

“My friend, Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar were two of the greatest achievers of the Roman Empire. Both used bribery extensively.”

“We went to school together, Church. I read Suetonius, too.”

“Then don’t make stupid comments. In the entire world Alcacia is only lower than Pakistan and Nigeria on the corruption league tables, and that’s probably because they bribed the researchers. Bribery is oil. It makes things go easy. Like the money you carry around on that belt.”

“That’s not a bribe.”

“I’m sure you really believe that.”

“There’s Taiwo. Getting into the Hyundai.”

“Groovy. Let’s boogie.”

This was the second abduction I had ever participated in.

It went smoothly.

Back in the RA now.

Same flat.

More people. Henchmen. Minions. Outsourced area boys. Revolutionaries.

Mr. Taiwo was hogtied, and we all stood around him. He did not look afraid.

Church said, “Ask.”

I stepped forward.

“Mr. Taiwo, where is Nana?”

Silence.

“I know you know who she is. You gave her a message for me the other day.”

Nothing.

“Where have you taken her?”

No reaction.

Church stepped forward. He looked intently at Taiwo, cocked his head, squatted.

“I know your type,” said Church. “You’ve seen war and suffering. Old school style with sarin gas and anthrax canisters. White phosphorus. Defiled churches. Am I right? I bet you’ve even tortured a few in your time. It’s in your eyes. The way you don’t take any of this personal. You’re afraid, but you know the rules of the game. We have to hurt you first, in a minor but painful way. A cruel way. We do that so you know we’re serious. In a cruel but non-lethal way, you understand. This is all almost comforting to you because it’s expected, familiar. It’s the drill.” He drew his dagger. Flecks of pawpaw clung to the hilt and dropped off as Church began to wave it about in front of Taiwo’s face, as if deciding what to cut.

I knew he would cut nothing.

I drew my gun and cocked it, flicked the safety.

I aimed it at Taiwo’s head.

“Fuck this Dr Evil bullshit. Tell me where she is or I’ll blow—”

“What is wrong with you?” asked Churchill in a low, dangerous tone. “Holster that weapon.”

Taiwo began to smile.

I replaced the gun in the ankle holster.

Church stood up, disgusted. He shoved me, and I took a step back to regain my balance. I slipped on the pawpaw seeds and fell flat on my back.

There was a loud bang and searing pain down my right foot. Then wetness. Church pinned me down, knelt on my leg, and carefully removed the gun. He switched the safety back on. Then he took off my shoe and sock and looked at my leg. The outer edge had a small chunk gouged out, but it was not a major injury. It hurt in a terrific, maddening way.

“You’re kind of an idiot,” said Church.

“It’s been said of me.”

“Church!” said one of the minions.

“Oh, shit. Sege, waka, motherfuck!” said Church, and when he moved I saw what he saw.

Blood oozing from a smoking wound in Taiwo’s neck.

Sightless eyes.

The skies opened and it rained for four days. I spent the time eating chocolate cake and watching reruns of
Mission:Impossible
and
Hawaii 5-0
on a pirate television station out of Nigeria. Oh, and there was a good documentary about Kwame Nkrumah. I did not leave the flat.

Nana did not call or turn up. The flip side was that I received no ransom demands and my telephone sweep of the local hospitals still yielded nothing. I even called the police, but they had nothing for me. I did not file a missing persons report. I was confused and tried to push the whole thing away. I felt it strange that her landline did not go off once in all that time. Nobody telephoning with an assignment or to complain.

I could feel my muscles atrophy each day, but no way was I going out in the quagmire that Ede turned into when it rained. I had food and water. I had a TV, and a VHS/DVD player. I had cable. I had books. I could outlast any meteorological obstacle that fate threw at me.

In those rainy days I had a very few flashbacks of Taiwo’s death. Not that I was feeling hard, or anything. I just could not bear the thought that I had killed someone. I pretty much forced myself not to think of it, but that never worked.

Church cursed me pretty much constantly for twenty minutes. All the while he bandaged my foot. When he had finished, I tried to speak but this just set him off again. So I kept my mouth shut.

I was worried about leaving the bullet inside Taiwo. It had passed through my foot first before embedding in his neck. My DNA and fingerprints were on it. Post-CSI world and all that. I needn’t have worried. The team Church brought were old hands. They chopped Taiwo into many parts, and the deformed bullet dropped from his neck stump.

I did not ask any questions. Might have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that they treated me with a grudging respect after the death. As if I had joined a club. Even Churchill’s bitching was half-hearted.

I had killed a man.

Fine, it was accidental and clumsy, but I was still a murderer now. Or, at the very least, a man-slaughterer. I also helped get rid of the body by waiting after dark and burying the parts in twelve separate quicklimed shallow graves. We washed the flat’s floor thoroughly with water from the well. Then we doused the whole flat in bleach. The strong odor drove us all out of the property at four in the morning.

I had killed a man and perverted the course of justice. Conspired with people I didn’t even know, not to mention trust.

It was a good thing I wasn’t a drinker.

I did not mourn Taiwo the way I did the man I had seen killed in the PLF camp on the day after Auntie Blossom’s funeral. I felt nothing apart from apathy. It would probably hit me later. It was not because Taiwo was a prick, which he surely was. It was more Weston Kogi getting used to real-life violence. Inured. Unaffected.

Not unaffected.

In the four days I stayed home, I had two disturbing dreams. In the first I was back at my secondary school, though fully grown. All the other students were grown up, too. One or two had fallen to car accidents or illnesses over the years, and they were represented by rotting zombi. It looked like a macabre adult education scene. Then I went looking for Nana, who was in the class next door. The teacher did not mind. Nana was there in a revealing black one-piece swimsuit. Her breasts wobbled with each word she said.

“Why are you wearing that?” I asked.

“Go get me a uniform,” she said.

I went downstairs to the student shop, but a mulatto lunatic ran toward me. He wore a torn straitjacket and pyjama bottoms. I started to run, but he chased me up an embankment. I punched him a few times, but this only slowed him down. Then a larger, white-skinned lunatic appeared, similarly dressed, and they both pummelled me until I woke up soaked in sweat. That was from an afternoon nap, and I was so shaken that I drank two tumblers of vodka neat. I fear the insane. Lynn, my sister, has always criticized me for this. I know she has a point, but I can’t help it.

The second dream was familiar to me. It was the market scene that I had dreamt of before. The empty market. Tosin’s head was gone, but Simon, my deceased brother, sat on the chopping board and Taiwo lay beside him. He bore all the cuts with which we divided him along with the bullet hole.

“Death by a thousand cuts,” said Simon.

Taiwo tried to speak but only gasps and grunts came out.

“That’s because you shot him in the neck. He can’t draw breath properly, and you need breath to be able to talk. No breath, no sound.”

I looked at the sky. “The vultures will come soon.”

“Not for this one,” said Simon. “This one you killed. He stays. There are consequences.”

“And you? I didn’t kill you.”

Simon smelled of urine or ammonia. I don’t remember which.

“Me? I am just a random element of delight.”

And with that he curled into a fetal position and sucked his thumb.

I woke, but without terror. Just vague disquiet.

On day five I decided to go into town. I needed a barber to control my hair. I had an impending Afro. This is what happens when you kill people. I could not bear to take the gun, not just yet. Could not even touch it. I also left the money belt and took only enough for transport, food, and a haircut. I left my phone because I didn’t want to speak to anyone. I walked past a mirror and had a vague impression of a thin, bearded vagrant. I didn’t care. I thought I should have done the dishes in case Nana returned while I was away. Women like it when you do the dishes. You don’t even have to do them particularly well. I missed her. The whole thing left me discombobulated, and I desperately needed direction.

I walked for half an hour before I was able to hail a taxi. I thought everyone on the street knew and was staring at me. There were no posters posted or helicopters overhead. I relaxed a bit. The traffic into town crawled along. A town crier warned of an oro procession for the next three nights. Oro was a masquerade that women were not allowed to see. They looked and sounded trouser-soiling scary. This might have been because they only came out at night and the sound came from a device that looked like a clacker and was akin to catgut being stretched.

I let the taxi cruise along the main street until I found a barbershop that I liked purely in an aesthetic way. Which means it looked western, like a barbershop in America would look. I was starting to miss being home in London. I wanted Cumberland sausages. Not that you couldn’t get them in Alcacia, but a balance of trade problem meant you had to exchange them for large amounts of cash.

The interior of the barbershop was bright with reflected light and images everywhere since all the walls had mirrors. I had at least five reflections. It wasn’t large—about ten by twenty feet with three barber seats, only one of which was occupied by a customer. Another man, whom I presumed to be the barber, welcomed me and pointed to a bench with his clippers, after which he resumed trimming the hair of the customer. The music of Mighty Sparrow boomed from speakers that I could not pinpoint, and the place smelled of various hair products and aftershave. I sat down and waited. The wall opposite the entrance had a counter along its entire length on which there were trimmers, clipper guides, neck dusters, hair combs, brushes, straight razors, a mercury thermometer, bottles of hair dye, shampoo and cologne, battery-powered nose trimmers, tweezers, lather brushes, shears of different sizes, and a device that looked like a spray-gun for paint, but probably was not. On the far wall, there were hair cloths with their clips on hooks and towels. Lower down there were two sinks and shampoo bowls, clean too. The opposite side of the room had a single wall-mounted hair dryer. The walls had posters of Evander Holyfield victorious and an almanac showing the types of hairstyles the barber could be expected to duplicate. There was a certificate of cleanliness from the city, a framed photo of the barber with someone famous in Alcacia, but unknown to me, and a plaque listing the prices for services from a simple beard trim to a treatment called a Royale.

“What’s a Royale?” I asked in Yoruba.

“It’s full service, sir. Shampoo, haircut, shave, basic manicure, hair dye if necessary, scalp massage, and stimulating conversation.”

“All that is why you charge a premium for it?”

“The stimulating conversation is free, sir.”

I laughed. ‘What is your name?”

“Dayo, sir.”

“Dayo, there’s no need to call me ‘sir.’” We were about the same age.

“My oga insists that I call all customers this way, sir.”

I tuned out again, flipped through the available magazines, which were old
Ebony
editions featuring actors and musicians whose stars had long dimmed in the celebrity firmament. When Dayo had finished with the customer, he called me to sit. I opted for a Royale, and it was soothing with the bonus effect of making me look good. I went for a clean shave, taking off the moustache I had cultivated while in Alcacia, and a crew cut. Dayo found four gray hairs in my beard. I didn’t know how to feel about that.

I didn’t have time to think about it. A black car pulled up outside the barber shop, and two suited men in sunglasses came out. They entered the shop, and Dayo backed away. It wasn’t the bulge of weapons under their jackets. It was the bearing, the impression of petty power that they wore. Life and death power. My sweet, secret police.