Making Wolf (14 page)

The wharf was more like a market or bazaar than anything else. As I walked I could see ships in the distance—or at least their radar masts. A mass of people crawled all over like ants on a corpse. Steel containers were everywhere, and customs officials milled about like a sprawling immune system. To a one they were fat—full of the bribes from innumerable smugglers. Cranes and carriers, lorries, area boys, and sellers. Unsavory types cracked open unclaimed containers and sold the contents at low prices to opportunistic punters. Items were sold at less than cost or given away as extras on a larger purchase.

A man blew gently into a crudely-made flute, playing Miles Davis. I stopped to listen and gave him a dollar. His happiness at the reward lifted my spirits a little.

Brief and brutal fights broke out every hour or so, brutal because of the monetary stakes, brief because of the coldly efficient clubs and nightsticks of the customs officials. Commerce must continue at all costs. The rights or emotions of puny humans like me meant nothing. Customs jobs were at a premium. They were monomaniacal in their pursuit of bribes because they had a quota to feed back to their bosses, who in turn had to feed their own bosses. Anything that clogged that flow was dealt with swiftly.

The ground was tarred but looked muddy because of dirt accumulated over the years. Molue and bolekaja brought in increasing numbers of people yet took very few away. At the waterline I saw a corpse buffeted by waves, rhythmically hitting the hull of a ship as if knocking to enter. It was the loneliest corpse in the world. There was mild gas bloating, but what I found most scary was that nobody did anything about it.

I walked past a fish stall where gutted sturgeon was on careless display. A meaty woman worked separating fish heads from bodies and intermittently hurled abuse at a boy who knelt beside her sniveling. Around his neck hung a placard that read: OLE, which meant “thief.” I mused idly—could a child ever truly steal from a parent?

I was hot, sweaty, and feeling sorry for myself. I wanted to extract my gun and fire it into the air, scare the people out of their mindless transactionalism.

There were no taxis but a whole fleet of okada serviced the wharf. Okada were commercial motorcycles. Great for maneuvring through traffic and getting to places in a hurry. Of course they were unsafe. They were unregulated and untaxed (unless you count the bribes), and most of the drivers were unlicensed. Cheap. Dangerous. Irresistible. There were no official stats, but everyone knew someone who had experienced an accident. I had been in an accident before. I was not injured seriously, but I didn’t get on a motorbike for six years afterwards. It was simple: exhilaration followed by loud noise, weightlessness, vertigo, and then pain. Motorbike loses contest with Mercedes 200. The “pilot” cracked his skull and had to be carried to a hospital. Good times.

I hailed the nearest okada.

When your earliest memory is being on a motorcycle, holding on to your nanny’s boyfriend’s torso for dear life, moving at what seemed at that age to be light speed, you always approach such vehicles with joyfulness and childlike wonder. A little regression never hurt anyone. Well, maybe it did, but not this time. People fly out of your way when you’re on a motorcycle with a mad pilot. Mine looked like the fucking Red Baron, if the Red Baron were a short Fulani man wearing a World War One pilot helmet, goggles, and sporting three days of gray unshaven glory. He had a way of looking into the wind that involved opening his eyes, squinting in spite of goggles, opening his mouth so that the wind made his lips quiver, but keeping his teeth well clenched. A few globs of saliva always broke free of the mouth and sprayed the passenger. He barely spoke English, and his body odor could kill any number of forest animals, but I had to grab hold of him. Otherwise, I would have had a short flight. I wanted a long productive flight, but, even asking the Baron to just wander about, I found myself in Ede’s richer quarter. I told him to slow down. It took six attempts to get the message into his illiterate brain.

The houses were beautiful, palatial, and quiet. No stalls or shops in evidence. This was the anti-commerce district. The streets were paved, even, and clean. There were no real gutters, which meant decent sewerage. No poles bearing electric cables, which meant underground wiring. Gatehouses, which meant guards, which meant money to spare. Most of the guards were useless, of course. They were Hausa or Fulani men armed with charms or bows and arrows or clubs or just their big dangling dicks. Their job was to deter the unwashed rather than offer serious opposition to intruders. There were no cars parked on the streets. The nice Audis and Beamers were inside the sometimes electrified fences.

Here lived the Four-One-Nine warlords and the former military rulers and the big smugglers and the drug lords and minor ex-presidents of forgotten African republics who took too much money and ran. Interpol knew where some of these people lived, but as an organization it had no idea how to operate in a country like Alcacia. When I was young, one night I was told by a few friends that the police would be coming to arrest one of our neighbors the very next day. Nobody on my street went to school that day. We all camped outside in deck chairs sucking on lollipops, wearing cowboy hats while waiting for the police to arrive. Before noon four black Range Rovers with tinted windows rolled up and serious-looking men in black suits with guns rushed out and broke their way in. Tumult. Shouting. Gunshots. The result? None dead, none arrested, frustrated Interpol agents milling about. The house was empty and I heard it was so denuded of property that even the light fixtures had been removed and the naked wires taped over.

Foreigners. They know nothing. How can anything be kept secret? How can any Alcacian cooperate fully with international authorities when we still blame any western nation for colonization? Sure, we’d grass our criminals, but then we’d warn them that they’d been grassed because ultimately it was always an us-versus-them situation where white people were involved.

The real rich, by which I mean the legitimately wealthy, the genuine old money and the Alcacian version of aristocracy, well, they could not afford to live in the quarters anymore. Many families were given the bullet treatment in the many wars and terrorist rebel attacks, while others ran away. A few persisted, living in large, decaying family properties with no furniture or valuables. They hung on like the tough fleck of goat meat that you can’t loose from between your teeth after a heavy meal.

There was a cloud lifting from my mind as I admired the swimming pools. Something about the street, something I had read in the case files Church gave me…

“Stop!” I yelled.

“What?” asked the pilot.

“Stop the vehicle now!”

I paid an indeterminate amount to the pilot and ignored his response, which was lost in the smoky whine of his engine at any rate. When he had gone, the street seemed quiet. Many of the houses bore no number, but the name had leaped out at me. This was Tunji Braithwaite Street. I knew it because Pa Busi’s widow lived there. I just did not know which number. I walked around a bit, up the street first, then down. Not a soul to be encountered, not a car to be seen. No noises. Or perhaps the noise was well contained. Oh, to be rich. I looked at my striped shirt—still relatively presentable. The trousers had a sheen of dust around the cuffs but still looked pressed. Nothing could be done about the shoes. I had walked in mud, and caked mud on leather requires a special kind of attention. Fuck it. I hammered on the nearest gate.

It was scarlet and made of steel and about ten feet high. A slot slid back to reveal a rectangular opening, and a guard looked out at me.

“Uh, hu?” he said. The kind of grunt that meant, “what do you want?”

“Olubusi,” I said.

“Four houses down, opposite side of the road. Green roof.”

I thanked him and set off.

Four houses down in London is nothing, five minutes’ walk at the most, and that’s if you’re stopping to admire the finish of the roofs. Four palatial houses take longer, especially in the noon sun. The Olubusis’ gate was made of bars rather than sheets of metal, so as soon as I stood outside it, a uniformed man came out of the gatehouse.

“May I help you?”

Educated guards, uniforms with logos, politeness. I was impressed.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Olubusi,” I said.

“Is she expecting you?” His eyes dropped meaningfully to my clothes and back to my face.

“Give her this.” I handed over my ID. “Tell her I won’t take much of her time.”

“Perhaps you’d like to come back another time. She is not at home. I will tell her you called.”

Standard bullshit. “Perhaps I’ll wait for her to return.”

“Alas she has traveled. It will take sometime.”

“I have time, and it is important.”

I toyed with the idea of a bribe, but discarded it. This kind of person took the job seriously and would need a magnificent amount of money for corrupting. He stared at me for some minutes.

I smiled.

“Wait here.”

I did.

A hawk glided overhead and the cowboy song “Old Turkey Buzzard” played briefly in my mind. The movie was
McKenna’s Gold
, I think. I remembered it from my childhood.

The guard disappeared into the gatehouse. I imagined him telephoning the staff at the main house asking Mrs. Olubusi if she was accepting callers, especially ones dressed like they lived in a tip. Presently, I heard a beep and a mechanical click, after which the gate opened and the guard waved me in from his cubby hole.

I sat in an armchair with a cold glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and ice shavings in my hand. Piano music drifted toward me from somewhere in the house, but not the professional kind. More like someone was taking lessons. There was a television affixed to the wall, a flatscreen. On it two Asian men stalked each other in a ring, kicking and punching. A commercial break told me it was Thai kickboxing. The volume was turned low (maybe because of the piano practice?), which robbed the images of some of their savagery. One of the walls had shots of Pa Busi, one with Olusegun Obasanjo, two-time president of Nigeria. A few photo opportunities were with major and minor diplomats, the Spice Girls, Wesley Snipes, Miriam Makeba, people like that. In life he appeared benevolent, his demeanor more priest than high-powered politician. He rarely smiled for any of the photos. His wife was not in any of them.

I set my drink down on a coaster and got up to get a closer look at the wall.

“Would you like me to talk you through it?” a voice said behind me.

So this was Diane Olubusi.

It’s difficult to describe meeting her. It was as if she was so slight that reality parted to let her exist, but only barely. She was fair-skinned, slender with a long neck and slightly prominent forehead. But that was wrong. She could not be reduced to body parts. Her skin shone, glowed with an inner light that was attractive. I had never been in the presence of such a woman in my life. Her photographs did no justice to the actuality of her. My mouth was not moist enough to form words.

She gave the impression of lightness. She was the opposite of having the weight of the world on her shoulders. Given a strong wind, she might take off. She stood in a doorway the way a doe would stand. She smelled like fresh leaves, like a gardener pulled new leaves from a shrub, crumpled them, and danced through the air. Her hair was pulled back and clasped at the crown of her head, then the rest of her hair tumbled carelessly down her back. It was not black, but dark brown—either treated or evidence of mixed heritage, which would better explain her European looks.

I became aware that too much time had lapsed.

“Mrs. Olubusi?”

“Yes.” She sat down on one of the chairs, crossing the weightless legs. “And you must be Weston Kogi, a private investigator.”

“Yes, Ma’m.”

“Please. I daresay we are about the same age. Are you related to the owner of Kogi Imports?”

“My father.”

“Aderele is your father? Odd. I cannot see the resemblance and his wife seemed a little young to be your mother.”

“That woman is the second Mrs. Kogi.”

“Oh, hang on. I know this.” She leaned forward in her seat—I obviously held new interest. “Your mother died, did she not?”

“I really do not wish to speak about it.” I sat down opposite her. “Please.”

“Bad memories? Such a long time ago.”

“I’d just rather not.”

She shrugged, the most elegant shoulder movement I had ever seen. “I have met your father. He attended one of my fundraisers. I forget the wife’s name. A bit passive.”

I did not like the direction of the conversation or the fact that she knew my father.

“That’s…I mean, I’m here to talk about your husband,” I said.

“That hardly seems fair. You wish to talk about an intimate family member of mine, deceased, God bless his soul, yet you do not want to talk about an intimate family member of your own, also deceased, God bless her soul. You see the problem I have with that?”

Where the hell was my spit? It felt like I had walked into a trap—I wanted to run away.

“Tell me about your mother.” She settled back into her chair.

“I—”

“I am bored, Weston Kogi. I do lofty things all day and meet lofty people in high places. All I am asking is that you amuse me for a short time by telling me about yourself.”

This is how I told a complete stranger about my mother.

“To understand my mother’s death you need to know about the Royal Holloway Infirmary scandal of 1972. Are you familiar with it?”

“Vaguely, but tell me like you would a stranger.”

“From 1969 to 1971, a gynecologist called Olurombi Roy, apropos of nothing, began to systematically abuse his patients. Sexually. Any woman who came in for a consultation was given an internal, a vaginal exam. He would deposit some semen in them by means of a syringe while the victim would be none the wiser.”

“His semen?”

“His semen. It’s estimated that he impregnated hundreds this way. Nobody knows the exact number, and nobody really wants to know. The resulting offspring were known as Holloway Babies.”