Making Wolf (13 page)

We slowed down, stopped.

We were at the gates of a guarded compound. It was similar to Arodan, except that there were armed guards and a tower with searchlights. Affectionately called Bangkok. A prison.

“Wait,” said Church, unnecessarily. He walked up to one of the guards—a fat policeman who was apparently expecting him. Money changed hands and the gates opened, guards waving us in. Church joined us inside the parking area. The guard stood a few yards away.

“Lilliana, you stay here. Weston, bring the body.” For the first time Church seemed tense, nervous even.

“I can’t. Not by myself,” I said.

Lilliana giggled.

Church took the head end while I carried the legs. The fat cop led us into one of the main buildings. We met a few people on the way, but they looked in different directions as if some cloud protected us from their gaze. We stopped at Cell Block H, by which time my muscles were rigid with fatigue.

The cells had thick metal doors, the kind that absorb sound when you strike them. There was a small rectangular slot at eye-level with a slider to open it. The fat cop drew back the slider.

“Step the fuck away from the door,” he said. To Church he muttered, “The fool has a habit of leaning against the eye slot so that all you can see is his diseased yellow eye. I’ve had to poke it once or twice myself.” Fat Cop punctuated his sentence with a fart, which immediately filled the corridor space with a sulphurous smell. He opened the cell door. A wiry, bearded man in prison blues stood in the exact middle of the room.

“Be quick,” said Fat Cop.

The man in the cell stripped off quickly, with an urgency that seemed more frantic because of the silence. Church and I stripped Jaiyesinmi-Ojo.

“I got you a nice suit, Nine,” said Church.

It was difficult getting the clothes off a dead weight. It was even more difficult dressing one up in prison clothes. We dragged the body into the cell.

“Habeas corpus,” said Church to Fat Cop. “You may have the body.”

Fat Cop rolled the corpse over so that it was prone. After which, he steadied it with his foot and fired a pistol into the back of its head. Then he placed the revolver in the right hand of the twice-dead corpse.

“How the hell is he supposed to have shot himself there?” I asked.

“It worked for Andreas Baader,” said Church. “Come on. I want to show Nine his other present.”

In the back of the van, Nine was fucking Lilliana on the bench opposite me while I tried not to look.

Church explained that Nine was D’Jango. When the government agents arrested him, they didn’t realize who they had. D’Jango had taken the identity of a lesser rebel known as Nine.

“He will take us where we need to go, like a guide,” Church said.

D’Jango-Nine climaxed loudly.

“Tomorrow,” Church said.

Nana hugged me for a long time. You’d think I just told her about a routine day at the office instead of a mad odyssey with a hooker, a corpse, and an insane rebel.

“I lost my job,” she said.

“I know. You said so in your message. Which one?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

Later, as we made love, an image of the skinny whore being banged against the tree came unbidden to my mind. I saw her eyes open, focused on me, and I ejaculated immediately, violently. Nana stroked my head as if I were her child, and I slept.

“Your father wants to see you,” said Nana.

“That’s impossible,” I said, then thought I might have been too hasty in answering. “Sorry, I didn’t catch your meaning. Are you saying that in a general sense, subconsciously, in a moral way, he must want to see me? He needs to see me as one needs to eat food but is too stubborn to realize it?”

It was raining, and a Korean film was on the bedroom TV. There were no subtitles, and Nana did not speak Korean. We were having fun imposing our own meaning on the words and actions. Nana was lying across my chest.

“No, I’m saying he sent one of his guys to the campus yesterday to search for me in order to give a message to you, the message being that he wants to see you pronto.”

“How did he know you would know where to find me?”

“I have no idea. I didn’t ask.”

“The guy he sent…tall guy, shaven head, prominent occiput?”

“That’s the one.”

“That’s Bolaji Taiwo. You should know him. God, he must be really old by now, like in his fifties or sixties.”

“He did seem a bit old for messenger work. I thought there was something familiar about him, but I was distracted.”

Bolaji Taiwo, or Mister Taiwo as he insisted we call him from when we were kids, was my fathers main go-to guy and had been for the last twenty-five or so years. He was a real in-betweener, a dangerous interstitial guy. Nobody but my dad knew what his job description was or how much he got paid, but if I had to guess, I’d say he was a kind of family fixer. My sister and I hated him because he was intimately involved in putting my mother out after the whole kidney business with my brother. He was brutish, muscular, and primitive-looking, with greater prognathism than most and longer arms. Apelike, in short, but nobody would tell him that to his face. I once heard my dad saying Mister Taiwo was the last survivor of a long line of abiku, which could mean anything from dead siblings to sickle cell disease.

In the Korean film a sad child was explaining a deep and soulful poem to a clueless adult. The child might have been a ghost. At least that’s what it seemed like to me. Nana yawned and stretched. Her stale morning breath reached me.

“Must be serious for him to send Mister Taiwo,” I said, casually. In spite of this, my belly seemed to go heavy like it was full of pebbles instead of viscera.

‘He flogged me once, you know,” she said.

“Really? Mister Taiwo?”

“No, silly. Your dad.”

“What did you do?”

“I think I was nine or eight. One afternoon I was chasing a butterfly across our compound—’

“I remember you used to love doing that. You had this weird collection with labels and all that.”

“Yes, well, I was chasing a butterfly and became very single-minded about it, so much so that I crossed over into your compound without even registering climbing over the fence. I just wanted the butterfly. By this time I was filthy from all the running. What happened is I bumped into your father. To me he seemed like a giant, a very ill-tempered one. One wearing white lace. White lace that now had a Nana-inflicted dirt stain on the front. He was furious. I remember his face contorted slowly, and his big belly rose and fell with the heavy breathing. He looked like an anti-Buddha.

“Then he grabbed my wrist, lifted me off the ground by my left arm, and spanked my tushy with the other. The pain was so much that I wet myself, and he dropped me in disgust.”

“Yes,” I said. “Sounds like him. Didn’t your parents do anything? I mean, it wasn’t even his house. He was probably visiting Aunt Blossom.”

She twisted her head toward me and stared. The movement unsettled me, because it was as if her neck had been bent into an abnormal angle and the look came across as cadaverous. After what I felt was too long an interval she turned back and said, “I didn’t tell them.”

We watched the film in silence after that, and I could not shake the feeling that I had missed something in her look, something I was meant to know, and that she was disappointed that I didn’t.

I fell asleep and woke up with Nana gone and my phone ringing. The TV was off but the bedding beside me was warm. So it could not have been long since Nana got up. I hunted my phone with my head in a haze. The ringtone was a part of a Nina Simone song that I had been fond of, but was finding it tiresome these days since I heard it so often. The phone was tangled in the sheets, and it stopped ringing the moment I picked it up. Number withheld. A few seconds later it beeped with the voicemail notification.

“Good afternoon, sir. I hope this is the voicemail of Mr. Weston Kogi. Mr. Weston Kogi who is the private detective. I wish to engage your services. You see, my husband is missing. I wish for you to find him. I can pay a lot of money for this. Please call me back. Thank you.”

What?

Her voice sounded mellifluous, even though the English was halting second-language stuff. How the hell was I supposed to call her back without her name or number? How did she get my number or even know that I was a private detective. I was barely detecting anything, plus I hadn’t advertised. I should have paid more attention and worried more about the answers to those questions, but there was too much on my mind at that time.

My father’s office was a grandiose affair. He had a ‘70s Bond-villain desk: six feet wide, polished glass top resting on a mahogany base. The entire wall behind the desk was taken up by a window that overlooked the bay. It did not open, and the room was ventilated by air conditioner. Knowing my father, he liked the window because it placed visitors at a disadvantage by allowing the brilliant sunshine to dazzle them. There were blinds, but he only drew them for VIPs.

I was not considered a VIP.

Not that I cared. I had sunglasses on my face and refused to take them off.

On the walls were extravagant reproductions of Caravaggio. Art in Alcacia was a tricky thing. There were talented artists to be sure, even accomplished painters. The problem was that generations of middle-class children were exposed to imperialist education, and they grew up with money in their pockets and a taste for the work of classic masters. The bulk of oil painters in Alcacia spent more of their time copying Sandro Botticelli than creating original work.

My father grunted when he saw me. He pointed to the seat. I remained standing.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Is that how you greet your father?” he snapped, as if I were twelve.

“Oh, you’re my father now?”

He glared.

“Fine. Good afternoon, Father. I hope you’re well. How is the family? The wife? The children? The dog? All well? Grand. What the hell do you want?”

“Why are you hostile?”

“Do you actually want me to answer that?”

“I understand you are associating with the rebel faction.”

“And?”

“Your grandfather would…” He sucked his teeth and said something under his breath.

I pushed my sunglasses down the bridge of my nose and peered over the top of the lenses. “I notice you said ‘grandfather.’”

“Slip of the tongue.”

“Slip of something—”

“You listen to me. You may be a Holloway bastard, but you still bear my name and people associate you with me. I’ve come to terms with the idea that I can’t stop you or your sister from using the Kogi name.”

“What’s your point?”

“This…affiliation with these insurgents and their heretical ideas, this thing of yours could affect my business, might even get me arrested. Our family could be ruined.”

“‘Our’ family?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. I don’t. My family is my sister and me.”

“Weston—”

“Mo gbo, mo ya. That’s what you said at Aunty Blossom’s funeral.” I got up. “If that’s all you have to say—”

“Sit down.”

He still had enough command in his voice and I had enough residual fear that I obeyed. He opened a drawer and extracted an envelope that he tossed to me. There were two glossy black-and-white photographs of two men in dark suits. The photos were grainy and taken from above. Security camera footage. They had identical close-cropped haircuts.

“Friends of yours?” I asked.

“They came here to ask questions about you. I had the stills taken from the reception feed.”

“Who are they?”

“They had state security IDs, but I don’t remember their names. They refused to sign in. Whatever you are doing is generating attention from the wrong quarters. I know how state security works. They shoot first and then investigate. If you see them run the other way.”

“You sound like someone out of a movie. And why should you care, anyway?”

“Because I am a businessman, and I cannot do business from a cell in one of the many gulags owned and scattered around by our beloved government. I don’t care about you. I know the whole business with Holloway wasn’t your fault—”

“Don’t. Don’t ever.” I got up and left. I didn’t close the door. He had always hated that.

Outside, there was a minor disturbance as four cyclists rode slowly in tandem on the main road, causing a grievous tailback that snaked west in an unending line of automobiles. They must have been area boys, otherwise someone would have lent them brutal wisdom by now. As I watched, a bolekaja rumbled from the opposite direction and mowed into the riders, launching them into short-lived orbit. It was nearly comical. I looked for a taxi as one of them bled onto the tarmac.

Bothersome that the secret police were interested in me. Scary. I had heard tales. I called Nana, but there was no response. There was a missed call from Church, but I didn’t want to talk to him yet. A mad prophet whispered to me desperate analyses of three chapters of the book of Jeremiah. His breath intimated at several rotting teeth and dying gums. Partly to get away from this, I walked along the bay to the wharf. The sky was now cloudless. The sun bleached color out of everything. The air was still. Sweat was my cologne. I took some shade near a buka and phoned Abayomi Abayomi, then hung up. I didn’t want to talk to him either. Seeing my father always put me in a bad mood.