Making Wolf (24 page)

I wrote in my journal for four hours getting it up to date in as much detail as I could. It was difficult, my concentration was shot. I’d be writing one sentence, and my mind would drift to the virus in my possession.

I was still contracted to find Pa Busi’s murderers, but the thin veneer of righteous indignation from the PDF was gone. LFA firebombed Ede Market, and the PCA wanted to unleash a plague. The two factions were or soon would be at war again. Not cold war, but an all-out shooting war. The assassination was falling into the background. But. Diane had fucked Abayomi Abayomi and probably Idris Wallace. I thought of that and her sweat mixed with mine and sixteen million dollars. I wondered, felt jealous, wondered some more. Aaron Wallace mentioned Idris had a lover and that the same lover stopped calling after Pa Busi died. Idris had the strange paranoia before his death. Diane’s cunt was all over this. Was she just an opportunistic sexual predator or was there a design in all this?

I had to look at the photos I got from Diane’s house, see if there was anything interesting. I had to speak to the insurance people.

All of which was bullshit. I had to get out of the country is what I had to do. Take Nana and run. Except to do that I’d have to deliver the virus to the LFA headquarters. I may have killed Taiwo, but I did not consider myself a murderer. I wasn’t going to do it, no matter what. Death on that level makes one think of one’s immortal soul. And I didn’t even believe in the soul.

I could always just say I delivered it and say it was a dud.

Or go without Nana. Again.

No way.

Later I showered, dressed, and went out to eat.

It was a mistake to eat out. Most of the eating joints played loud music. I was in a place called China. Juju music was their weapon of choice. Two of the server girls were having a drag-out altercation right on the “shop floor.” I ate rice and beans with beef stew. Sections of oxtail were placed on the mound of rice, and I worked my way through them.

The food was tasty and plentiful—it made up for the noise. One of the fish-wife servers came to clear my dishes, and I asked for a beer.

China was a worker’s eatery, and it was lunch hour. The seats were arranged so that everyone could see everyone else. Workers were on their own or in groups of two to five. Loud conversations. Business lunches. Arguments over one pop star’s superiority over another. Politics. Loud mobile phone conversations, one-sided monologues that were not monologues.

The entrance was to my back. So I was surprised when a white man came to rest by my side.

“Howdy,” he said. “Weston, my ol’ buddy, my old pal.”

I drank my beer. “Who are you?”

“Cal Steinhurst.” He offered a moist hand, which I ignored.

“State your business, Cal Steinhurst.” He knew my name, so he must have had a specific reason for being beside me. I wasn’t even surprised at this kind of thing anymore.

“I like that. Straight to business. I wish everyone in Alcacia was like that. Make transactions a lot easier.”

“Get to the point or go sit at the empty table yonder.”

“Be calm.”

“What the fuck do you want, Cal Steinfuck?” I dropped my hand to my lap and shifted it to the handle of the gun in my waistband. Cal’s eyes flicked there and back up to my face.

“I’m the unofficial representative of a foreign government.”

“What does ‘unofficial’ mean?”

“It means I don’t have a desk at the embassy, but I’d be evacuated in the event of a major crisis. I perform various advisory duties.”

Deliberate vagueness. He either was or wanted to be seen as a member of the intelligence community.

“What agency do you work for?”

“Nice try. Listen. I’m here to offer advice. Friendly advice for now.”

“Friendly.”

“Yes.”

“And what’s the advice?”

“Go home, Weston. Alcacia does not want you anymore.”

“Thank you for your advice. Now, piss off.”

“Fearless. I like that. I like you, Weston.”

“See, I don’t even know you and I hate you. ¿Hable usted ingles? Fuck off. I do not want what you’re selling.”

One of the girls dropped a bowl of sliced guava, and Cal picked one. His fingernails were clean, but bitten. I was sure they bled from time to time. Index and thumb were ink-stained. No rings. The cuff of his right hand was blackened, but not the left. Plaid shirt. Not usual for a white man to wear long sleeves at this time of day in Alcacia. Tanned, but not burnt. Cal had been here a while. Hairy. Light brown. Five o’clock shadow, but otherwise good haircut. Not as fine as mine. Not military.

The ink did not come off on the guava.

“I like you,” he repeated. “Not a trace of fear, even given the apocalyptic fuckers you are fucking with. I’ll bet you went through idagba soke before going to London. You did, didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t get a sponsor,” I said, defensively.

“I know. Father declined, as I recall. But you still did the ritual, didn’t you?”

Idagba soke is the coming-of-age ritual for ethnic Yoruba males in Alcacia. Yoruba elsewhere do not have this. It takes thirteen weeks and begins in June, in the thirteenth year of a boy’s life, starting the day after the first rains. It’s a good time since the planting would have finished and harvest would be far away.

A boy’s father is the usual sponsor. He brings the boy to the hall of the warrior class in the wrestling ring along with the other prepubescents. Six warriors take them into the rain forest with nothing but machetes and their dangling foreskins. In the first twenty-four hours finding an animal skin for clothing is of paramount importance. By the end of the thirteen weeks, the boy learns to fight, hunt, to kill, and generally survive.

On the last day the boy emerges as a man ready to be called into battle by the tribe should the need arise. The occasion is marked by ritual circumcision and scarification of the neck in a manner that symbolizes a cut throat, meaning the warrior does not fear death since he has already died.

My Idagba soke was long ago. I fear death now.

“My aunt vouched for me,” I said.

“Yes. And all the other little nigger boys made fun of you, didn’t they?” He reached for the guava bowl but I slapped his hand away. I saw a red welt form.

“You don’t need to bait me; I already hate you.”

“The nigger thing? Relax, Weston. It’s reflex. I’m not prejudiced. I will ask you to reconsider my advice.”

“And I will tell you once more to fuck off. What does it matter to you?”

Cal spread out his hands. “There are forces at play here, son. Tectonic plates that are shifting, and they will crush you because you choose to surf the fault line.”

I clutched his groin and he grunted, squirmed. I tightened my fist. “This is Africa. We have a single continental plate. There are no fault lines, there are no shifts and there is no surfing.”

I left him there, paid for my food, tipped the girls and mimed spitting at Cal’s feet.

He mimed tipping a hat to me.

“CIA?” asked Church.

“Or allied. What is the CIA looking into me for?”

“The PCA is more Whore of Babylon than Lamb of God, aburo. They’re in bed with everybody from the People’s Republic of China to Havana. They’re versatile that way.”

“What do the Americans want?”

“Who knows? He could be printing propaganda for them—hence the ink-or he could be building roads. This guy Cal has been in position since the Reagan administration. The Yanks are just hedging their bets as usual. They want to be sure neither the Front or the PCA can act as fertile ground for al-Qaeda indoctrination, and that should either one of us achieve primacy, Uncle Sam would have a well-heeled foot in the door. They are monitoring all sides. You, my friend, are a wild card. They don’t like wild cards.”

“He called us niggers.”

“He didn’t mean anything by it. He’s probably not racist. But he probably is a pro. I should know. The ‘advisors’ who trained me were ex-CIA among other things. They say that kind of thing, but save your fucking life in a heartbeat. Have you found your woman?”

“No.”

“I have some time to kill. Let’s look for clues.”

“I’ll call you back. I have one other matter to take care of.”

“I’ll meet you at the market gate.”

“Okay.”

I dialled the number. It rang once, then silence.

“Hello?”

“Speak.”

“We need to talk. I went to the PCA camp…”

There was blinding, retina-shattering sunlight dazzling me and heating me up so that I wanted to take off my shirt but didn’t because of the gun in my waistband.

It was so hot that I could hardly breathe.

I bought three sachets of iced-water and broke them over my head one after the other. The market gate was sticky, sweaty, and crowded. A murder of the most motivated traders on the planet pressed against me, tried to sell me items. The most outrageous was a Barack Obama dildo, for which the seller could be jailed (Alcacia has draconian obscenity laws).

Area boys postured at me. I postured back.

Just outside the gate there were four piles of books and a five-cent-per-copy sign. There were very few bookshops in Alcacia. Pupils bought their text books from the market. These were usually bad photocopies of originals, bound and sold at one-hundredth the normal price. Plus, most of the books sold were the King James Bible and the complete works of William Shakespeare, which our education minister described as the backbone of Alcacian education. It had been so for almost two centuries, and, as a result, every adult in the country had a rudimentary knowledge of the
Tragedies
and
Comedies
and
Sonnets
. This gave Alcacians a tendency to the occasional quotation or the intermittent use of an archaic English word or phrase.

Commotion. A Toyota honked its way through the crowd at two miles per hour. There was, officially, a road in front of the market gate, but nobody ever used it. Except Churchill. Old women moved their stalls, cursing his family line with exotic poxes.

I was embarrassed to get in the car.

The drive home took an hour because I had to keep describing the way, and, to be fair to Church, my descriptions were below par. Church was good-natured about it, at least to me. He cursed many other road users.

He thought I was lucky to live in England and told me so. “Those white women, what are they like? I’ve heard they can be wild.”

“Some of them are,” I said. “But it isn’t that simple. You can’t just walk into a party and assume. You have to wait, watch reactions. You see white faces, most of them are okay, but some of them are racist. You can’t tell. So you wait. You don’t know for sure the people who are just casually xenophobic and humor you by talking to you. Attempt to take it further and they freeze you out.”

“Seriously?”

“Understand, they don’t mean any harm. They just…I don’t know, at times, when you use words of more than three syllables, they look at you like you’re a performing monkey, with surprise and amusement. They think you’re clever. Like that Carter book.”

“Who?”

“Stephen L. Carter. He wrote a book called
The Emperor of Ocean Park
. Black law professor in America. He wrote a complex—”

“Man, all I wanted to know is how those English women are.”

“They’re wild, Churchill. Wild.”

“I knew it,” he said, without irony.

There was no parking on the street. The local government had decided to regrade the surface, and all the cars were either in driveways or garages. We parked two streets away from the flat in front of a general store whose owner erupted at us.

We walked back.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding,” said Church.

“It would appear so.”

“And this belongs to your lady friend.”

“As far as I can tell.”

I unlocked the stairwell.

“And this is that girl who drove that Mercedes the other day? The hooker?”

“She’s not a hooker.”

“I hope not. Nasty, nasty pestilence in these parts, aburo.”

We went up the stairs. I led. It was dark on account of having no windows. Light bulb must have blown or burnt out. Except…

“The front door is ajar,” I said. I started hurrying up the remaining stairs. “Nana?”

I called out, but the apartment was a mess. Inside, there was a guy wearing denims, holding my folders, and sporting dreadlocks. He looked as surprised as I felt.

A yammering began in my brain, telling me to draw and use the gun at my waistband. Before I could act on it, Church pushed me down and to the left, then he leapt over my legs with a grace that belied his shape and the size of his belly. The man dropped the papers and engaged Church.

My neighbor and his two wives were angry again, quarreling, sounds coming at me from the open window.

Church punched the rasta twice, a right hook and a left upper cut—two cracks that made me wince. The rasta kneed Church and kicked him on the side of the head, then spun the other leg into Church’s side. Church fell down but grabbed a chair leg and hit the rasta with it around the ankles. He continued to hit the rasta on the legs from his position on the ground. He rose while the rasta tried to evade the blows. The rasta backed down for a step, and then came forward in a flurry of punches that Church took on his forearms, which he held up in a boxer’s stance. The rasta was ferocious, relentless. Church feinted, then hit out with a straight left that landed on the rasta’s chin, dead center, dazing him, making him cry out in a female voice.

The rasta was a woman.

One of my neighbor’s wives screamed, said she was returning to her father’s house if this is how she was to be treated.

Church was bleeding from the mouth and nose, but the rasta looked more unsteady and punchy. I had my gun out, but they kept circling each other, stepping over overturned furniture and broken pottery. Church dropped the chair leg.

“Church, get out of the way.”

He spat blood and sputum. “Stay out of this. It does not concern you.”

He jabbed at the rasta, easy for him given his simian reach. Each jab hit home. The rasta cried out with each impact in her all-too-obvious feminine voice. Her denim jacket fell open in parts, and her stagger was more visible. Church closed in on her. They scuffled, and Church exhaled sharply.