Making Wolf (12 page)

One high-powered rifle shot.

One handgun report from close quarters.

One explosion.

They wanted to be sure.

Whoever “they” were. Elements within the government? Why? As a political force, Pa Busi was spent. He would never be running for president because an election just wouldn’t happen in his non-senile lifetime. The rebels? Pa Busi dying at either of their hands led to the current problem. Both the Front and the Christian Army needed legitimacy, and good public relations was a part of that. Assassination of a well-liked statesman was not good public relations. That was why they were paying me money to blame each other.

Mistaken identity? A random sniper who saw a shiny four-by-four and decided to take pot shots? That combined with an accidental discharge from the secret service, and a land mine going off. Right. Accidental assassination, simultaneous manslaughter with incidental mass detonation. Happens all the time.

There were a few things to follow up from the strange case of Idris Wallace. I needed to get the telephone numbers off Idris’ mobile phone. Who was he trying to reach? What had scared him so much? And his death: suicide or homicide? Did he fire the shot inside the jeep? Was that why he was increasingly paranoid? I wanted to speak to someone in the secret police about the cause of death.

I’d seen the so-called survivors, or rather, one survivor and one ghost. I needed to see the scene. I’d have to contact Churchill and get him to drive me.

I stretched, got up and massaged my temples. They were moist—I had started sweating. The cock crowed and I began my day.

When I stood near the window I saw a man standing in the street. Using the parked cars as reference, I’d say he was rather short with a shaved head and wearing a plain blue shirt hanging loose with the sleeves rolled up. He slouched away when he saw me.

I checked the gun clip.

Paranoia. It’s addictive, more so than any street drug with a bonus feature of being free.

Nana went off to work without speaking to me. The emotional backwash almost drove me to drink.

Nana had taken the car. I wasn’t going to take a taxi so I caught a danfo
.
A danfo is usually a Volkswagen or Nissan bus with all the factory-installed seats taken out. Except for the driver and two passengers seats. Danfo were classier and more expensive than bolekaja. Almost every danfo was painted yellow and on the side of the driver’s door, in black, was “driver and 2 passengers.” Wooden benches are used to replace the seats and bolted down inside the buses, increasing the capacity to twenty-five, the trade-off being poor ventilation. You paid cash. There were no tickets. There were no bus stops per se; just arbitrary patches of street or tarmac where people had agreed to congregate over the years. The conductor, who was invariably a minor and poorly dressed, would rattle off a list of idiosyncratic virtual bus stops with names like Anthony, Hoseni, Shuush (church), Town Planning, John Holt, Costain, Ede Central, and so on.

You had to know the name of your stop, which was fine if you had grown up and lived in Alcacia all your adult life. I had to learn the hard way to answer
“
Owa,
o!
’ at my bus stops.

I met Church at Town Planning, which was nowhere near any draughtsman or bureaucrat. The sun blazed with a whiteness that seared my eyes. I had forgotten my sunglasses in the emotional maelstrom of my fight with Nana. Churchill was wearing a red suit with a white, open-collar shirt. He had crocodile-skin shoes.

“Church.”

“Yeah, yeah, my brother.”

“I thought we were going to the interior?”

“We are.”

“You’re dressed like we’re off to a party.”

“Relax, aburo. All will become clear.” He patted me on the shoulder paternally, then stood facing the road.

We watched the cars go by in silence for seven minutes (I checked).

“This is all very relaxing, Church, but what are we waiting for?” I asked.

“That.” Church pointed to a slow-moving column of black cars with hazard lights blinking; a funeral procession. Obligatory dust cloud trailing the last car.

Only the first vehicle was a hearse. The others were converted family cars overflowing with grieving friends and family. Many of the women were wailing. As they passed us doing like fifteen or twenty, Church started to run in their direction. I did what he did. The last car was an old Citroen saloon, and it slowed for us. It was empty save for the driver. Church got in the passenger seat, and I was in the back.

“
Ire, o,” said the driver. Goodness, it meant. A form of greeting.

“Weston, meet Dami. Dami’s a grave digger. Dami, Weston. Old boy. From school.”

“
Bawo ni?” asked Dami. How’re things?

“
O nlo,” I said. It goes, it goes.

“Who’s the client?” asked Church. He lit a cigarette and leaned his elbow out of the window.

“Malcolm Jaiyesinmi-Ojo. He dreamt he was eating at a banquet in his village. Dead the next morning. Not a mark on him.”

“Just so I’m clear: Jaiyesinmi-Ojo is dead because he ate in a dream? That’s the cause of death?” I asked.

Church and Dami looked at each other briefly and burst out laughing. “He’s been away,” said Church, as if that explained my ignorance. Dami had lost the tip of his right index finger somewhere.

“Aburo, there are two things you don’t want to do in your dreams. One of them is to eat food,” said Church.

“The other one is to fuck,” said Dami, seriously.

“True talk,” said Church.

“I’ll have to bow to your experience in the matter,” I said.

They laughed. Dami nodded. “A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness, or so our elders say.”

I had forgotten the proverb thing. Yoruba people love proverbs and the appearance of wisdom gained by using a proverb in speech. And attributing the wisdom to Our Elders so that in addition to being wise the speaker is also considered humble. It was tiring.

I said to Church, “Why do we need to attend the funeral of Matthew Jaiyesinmi-Ojo?”

“Malcolm,” said Dami, wagging a finger.

“Malcolm,” I said. “So, why?”

Church turned and smiled at me, toothy and lupine. “Funerals are lucky for you and I, aren’t they?”

After the ceremony the friends and family of the departed departed, and it was left to Dami to fill up the grave. All through the service and the caterwauling, Church smoked and told me about a fellow rebel called D’Jango. Legendary. Fierce “warrior” according to Church. D’Jango took his name from a cowboy film.

“
Django
. Franco Nero. 1966. It was on TV a lot when we were young. You remember it?”

“Vaguely,” I said.

“D’Jango went at government troops with a hard-on, and I mean that literally, bro. The bobo went into battle stark naked with his dick and his gun pointed at the enemy. Scariest thing I’ve ever had to behold.”

“I just knew the conversation would get to penises sooner or later,” I said.

“He said it was what the medicine man told him to do. Said as long as he didn’t put clothes on, bullets would not find him. It worked.”

Dami was sweating, even though the sun was making its way down, time being about five in the afternoon. He had stripped down to his shorts, and rivulets of sweat trickled down his muscles. He had almost finished. The hole in the ground was filled, and the cement work was all but done. It felt odd not helping out, Church chain-smoking and me just hanging about. A few times my phone vibrated in my pocket, but I ignored it, knowing it was Nana and that she would misunderstand my reasons for not answering.

“What happened to him? D’Jango?” I asked Church, since he was not answering any questions about our purported trip to the bush.

Church waved his cigarette in circles, terrorizing the swarm of gnats that had gathered around him. “Ambushed by government troops, captured, tortured. He could be dead, languishing in a gulag or rotting in a hole somewhere in the bush. Anything is possible.”

Dami was taking Polaroids of the completed tombstone and gravesite, slowly walking around to get shots from various angles. When he finished, he arranged his tools carefully on the ground and said, “Wait till nightfall before you start anything. I mean it, Churchill; I don’t want to hear any stories. I like this job.”

Church brought out a bottle of Gordon’s Gin, unscrewed the cap, and poured the clear liquid over the new gravestone. “Ile’n tile.” The dead belong to the ground. He handed Dami a wad of cash, and I felt for my own money belt. It was reassuringly snug. Exit Dami.

Church drank the gin and passed me the bottle. He asked for it back when I had taken two long swallows. The gin went down like sulphur. I would bet that it was local gin in the bottle and not Gordon’s. I told Church so.

“Of course it isn’t Gordon’s. Do you know how much it costs to buy the original? No, this is bottled somewhere off Atakunmosa by a friend of mine. Sells them to me half-price.” He glanced about and picked up the pickaxe. “Time to start work.”

“Work doing what?”

“Resurrection.”

Grave robbing was a new low for me. Church, I could tell, had done this before.

A bus arrived to pick us up. Church phoned for one like a general calling for an air strike. He still refused to answer any of my questions. I didn’t answer any of my phone calls from Nana. The driver of the bus said nothing, but he did wrap the corpse in tarpaulin before helping us lift it on to the bus. Church seemed to be in a good mood, and I wanted to kill him. But I owed him my life. Of course, my life wouldn’t have been in danger in the first place if he hadn’t put me in harm’s way. I decided to check my voicemails to distract from the lolling of the sheet-wrapped body.

Meep: “Hey, loverboy. Sorry about the hormonal blah blah this morning. I’ll make it up to you, okay? Call me back.”

Meep: “I just got fired from a job. It stings a bit, you know. Not still angry, are you?”

Meep: “Oh, never mind. Sulk then.”

Our next stop was a strip of dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Church called it Black Market. There were women hanging around and men floating by in various automobiles. The women were of all shapes and sizes. They were painted like masquerade performers and bared as much flesh as they could. Nobody cared about cellulite.

“Prostitutes,” I said.

“To be sure,” said Church.

A mixed-race whore appeared in the headlights. She had short spiky hair that reminded me of the hide of a cactus.

Meep: “Call me back.”

“That one’s name is Lilliana Oil. Not like Popeye’s bitch. Proper oil,” said Church. “Stop the vehicle.”

The light revealed a tattoo of a blade on the side of Lillian’s neck.

Meep: “I had a dream last night. I was walking through this Nigerian market. All sorts of things were on sale—gari, yam flour, cassava, spinach, okra, pepper, etc.—but the stalls were empty. Fully stocked, but empty. I walked through, not taking anything, but wanting to run into people because I needed to buy some stuff. In the meat section the cutlets were all there, along with the electric saws and the machetes, but there were no butchers. The poultry baskets were in place, but the chickens and turkeys were dead. While I stood among the offal, four vultures descended on me, one even started to tug at my flesh. I looked at them in turn and said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Don’t you know I’m an initiate?” They scattered like I had thrown stones at them, and, when I turned back to the market, it was full of people, and I woke up. Call me back.”

The driver offered me gum, and I accepted. Church went out and talked to Lilliana, cajoling her toward the van. Off to the left, a man coupled furiously with a skinny whore who could not have been older than thirteen. He held her up against a tree and pumped away. Her eyes were open, and it looked like she was staring at me. That couldn’t be true because it was dark in the van. She looked dead, like the man was fucking a cadaver.

I looked away.

Church opened the back of the van and Lilliana giggled in, followed by a cloud of cheap perfume that almost choked me. That made me, her, and the corpse of Matthew Jaiyesinmi-Ojo in the back.

“Take me to Bangkok,” said Church to the driver. “At once.”

We narrowly missed crushing a buxom girl in a painted-on purple dress with knee-high black felt boots. The irony was that regular girls on Alcacia streets dressed like that too. Hooker chic.

Meep: “I’m contemplating Zsa Zsa Gabor, thinking of the social milieu that led to her thinking it was acceptable behavior to slap a black cop. Too much hash-hish or simply an inevitable effect of the Hollywood studio system?”

The night swallowed us progressively. The whore had gone silent since Church broke a vial of amyl nitrate under her nose.
What the fuck am I doing here? Why am I with these people?
I could feel myself becoming immune to what was happening and, like Nana pointed out, losing my own values.

We thundered through some checkpoints. Indignant police officers yelled after us most times. One took a pot shot that zinged past us. Church became incandescent and fired his revolver in the general direction of the
gorodom
over and over, even though the driver kept saying we were out of range. The noise woke the whore from her chemical stupor, and she started giggling again.