Making Wolf (20 page)

Think.

Shit.

Think.

I didn’t know any of her friends or where she went for fun except that village with the scalped old storyteller. I knew she sometimes took catering jobs, but I couldn’t well scour through Ede stopping at each party to examine the servers. I didn’t know who to ask.

I rummaged through the cupboards and bookshelves until I found a rudimentary street map for Ede. This was a yellowed book with pages warped and filthy with thumbprints. I circled all the hospitals and then made an expensive call to directory enquiries.

“Operator.”

“Hello. I’d like the telephone numbers of the following hospitals and health centers please…”

An hour later I had been through all the casualty departments of all the hospitals on the map. None of them had a Nana Hastruup in attendance. Three had young women matching her description, but further probing ruled them out. Dead end.

I dialed for a taxi, but hung up when I realized I had no idea where the storyteller’s village was.

Rising panic, mixed with guilt over Diane.

Think.

I called my father’s office. His P.A. put me through to Mr. Taiwo.

“Hello,” he said. His voice was the sound of a cement mixer. Here was a person who always meant business.

“Good evening, Mr. Taiwo.”

“Weston. How are you?”

“We thank God; we thank God. How is the family?” Did he even have a family?

“Everybody is fine. Do you hear from your sister?”

This verbal perambulation continued for a minute and a half. The Yoruba love to meander before getting to the crux of the matter, the koko oro. There is no getting around it, especially if there is an age gradient to consider.

“Mr. Taiwo, I wanted to ask my dad something.”

“He is busy. What is it you want to know?”

“It’s a father-son conversation.”

“Haba, Weston. You know he does not like that paternity business.”

Mr. Taiwo’s voice lacked variation or cadence. He was like a Vulcan from
Star Trek
except twenty times uglier and scarier.

“Very well,” I said. “Can you tell me how to contact the Hastruup family?”

“Hastruup? Who are they?”

Difficult to tell if he intended this to be irony or he seriously expected me to believe he did not remember or know them even though he had been to Nana just a few days earlier. My heart went into red alert.

“They lived next to us, next to Aunty Blossom’s house when I was young.”

“Blossom. She was crazy, wasn’t she?”

“She was not.” Easy. Tread fucking carefully.

“Either way. I do not know how to reach the…what did you call them?”

“The Hastruups.”

“The Hastruups. Yes. I do not know how to reach them.”

“Can you ask—”

“And neither does Chief Kogi.”

“Okay. Well. Thank you.”

“I will tell chief you called.”

He hung up.

Maybe my father and Mr. Taiwo had a thing to do with Nana’s disappearance. Shit, I did not think the old goat hated me that much. In fact, I didn’t think he hated me at all. I should not have been more than a minor embarrassment. Strictly speaking, a Holloway child is not evidence of a cuckold, but Yoruba men do not see it that way. In fact, the Yoruba went to extreme lengths to avoid even the appearance of it. There is a fetish charm called magun, which means “do not mount” supplied by the babalawo. It comes in the form of a single strand of raffia or broom thistle. It is laid across the threshold of the main entrance of the matrimonial home, and the wife unknowingly steps over it. If she should be unfaithful after this, the man involved would crow like a cock three times and then die.

I wondered where Nana was, what she was doing, if she was even alive.

The man downstairs was arguing with his wife again. I closed the window.

I laid my head on the table for a minute, but it lasted all night, and the dawn chorus woke me.

Every muscle in my neck and upper back ached like I had run a marathon. I staggered to the bathroom and spat in the sink. In the mirror was a man with stubble and bleary, unrested eyes, in desperate need of a haircut. I groomed myself quickly, although the barber would have to wait. I had a missed call from Abayomi Abayomi. No voicemail. I watched a toothpaste commercial featuring western-looking Alcacians with jet-black weaves and fair skin. Aspire to this, they said.

I took a taxi to Auntie Blossom’s house.

Since the funeral the house had been empty, or so I was told by the gateman who was himself leaving in a week’s time. The windows were shut, some boarded over. The porch was leaf-strewn, lonely. The weeds in the compound were tall, green, and healthy. It didn’t take long in a moist, tropical environment. It all had to do with death. Once the owner of a house died, Alcacians would often shun the house. It was assumed that the spirit of the owner lived on in the grounds and in the walls. New occupants would have to spiritually cleanse the place or suffer torment. Cleansings were expensive. I did not go in, not because I feared poltergeists but because my business was with one of Aunty Blossom’s neighbors.

To the left was a two-story house, dazzling white, over which a water tower presided. This was where the Hastruups lived, Nana’s parents. A skinny Fulani groundsman swept the driveway lazily with a raffia-broom.

Nana’s dad was in a cane chair watching me approach. He was dressed in a three-piece suit in spite of the heat. Bespoke, at that. He was cool, though, not a drop of sweat in sight. He seemed entirely composed of his two piercing eyes. No whites noticeable. I do not remember if he blinked.

When I was a few feet from him, I prostrated myself in greeting. Proper traditional greeting required males to be fully pronated on the ground. With time and westernization, this has been abbreviated to different approximations. Bending at the waist and touching the floor with both hands, touching the floor with the right hand (never the left) or just bowing had all become acceptable alternatives. The traditional method was reserved for royalty, extremely old people, and supplication. It was a bit more complex than that. At times people of the city would make fun of attempts to be traditional, regardless of circumstances. I didn’t even know I remembered how until I saw him seated there with gravitas.

“Is that Elias?” he asked.

“No, sir; it’s Weston. Weston Kogi. I was Auntie Blossom’s child.”

On his left side was a stool which bore a tall glass of water, a pair of clear-glass spectacles, and an empty CD case. A CD player was on the ground, but no music issued forth.

“Stand up, my son. How is your father?” He sipped water and offered his hand, which I shook after brushing off the dust. We made our way through the customary greetings, although to me he seemed restrained.

“Sir, I was just wondering, where is Nana?” I said. “I am only in town for a short time.”

“Nana moved out, my son. Imagine that. An unmarried woman, too. Her mother hides information from me, but I know she has a boyfriend or man friend, or whatever you people call it these days. Nana has a boyfriend, not her mother. I would not want you to get the wrong impression. I can get you her number.”

“When was she last home?”

“I don’t know. It has been a while. She sends me money from time to time, pays for my
Newsweek
subscription. Her mother knows more.”

“Could I speak to Mummy?”

“No. She is in the village for a funeral and won’t be back for a month. You know how emotional these women can get.”

Nana’s father was an autodidact. You could see where she got her smarts from. When we were children he would hijack me off the street and inflict learning on me. Herodotus or the Heimlich maneuvre, he didn’t care which. He dropped out of secondary school age fourteen but did not tell his parents. At sixteen he took the bar exam and passed and took the Alcacian Law Association to court for preventing him from working as a lawyer. And won.

“Weston, don’t waste your time. She seems quite taken by whomever this boyfriend is.”

He said this in a kindly voice, not realizing that I was the man in question. I did not correct him. He waffled on about something, but I was no longer listening. I waited a polite interval and left.

If her parents did not know where she was, then I had hit a dead end.

But I had an idea.

Diane called, but I let it go to voicemail. I was not interested.

I met Church at a flat in the Reservation Area.

The Reservation Area was not what it said on the tin. Intended as a large tract of land where greenery would flourish along with wild fauna under government protection, it now served as a location for military strongmen to reward sycophants by granting them Leave to Build, which was a kind of indulgence for the sin of defiling virgin land. There was precious little green left, and that existed as wall paint. Because building there was illegal in the strictest sense, there was no real planning in this district, resulting in streets with open sewers on both sides and complete urban disorganization.

Crime and cholera flourished.

The flat was unfurnished. Church sat on a severed tree trunk in the lounge peeling a pawpaw with a dagger.

“Ore, I’m not entirely sure what you need from me,” he said. He held the pawpaw in his left hand and pared the last bit of skin off, revealing the yellow flesh.

“I need to find my girlfriend.”

“Yes, I heard that. When did you get a girlfriend?”

“Well…”

“Never mind. Not my business.” He sliced into the ovoid fruit, cut it into nine segments, and emptied the sticky black seeds on to the floor beside him. He did not seem to mind that I had nowhere to sit. “So, who is this Taiwo person?”

“He works for my father.”

Church handed me a slice of pawpaw and started to eat one. His face was, for once, in deep contemplation. I ate what he offered, though I was put off by his dirty fingernails or the lack of water for washing the fruit.

“I don’t understand you,” he said, “but I’ll help you if you’ll go with me on an errand.”

“Hold it. Hold it one minute.”

“Relax. It’s nothing like that business with D’Jango. This is just a delivery.”

I sighed. “Where are we going this time?”

“We have to go and see the King of Boys.”

The King of Boys has existed in Ede since 1959, but his history goes back further than that. In ancient times there were no beggars in Alcacia or whatever Yoruba settlement preceded the modern nation. There were poor people, but they were always catered to because a percentage of all profits from the barter of goods went to the poor. The fetish offerings were deliberately directed toward cooking large quantities of food for the poor, a tradition called sah’rah. Begging was never really necessary. With the invasion of Christianity from the south and Islam from the north, things changed. A beggar class emerged due in part to the selfishness induced by the colonialist society and a misunderstanding of scripture—Islam on the giving of alms and Christianity where Jesus said the poor would always be with us.

In Alcacia beggars were part of a network of intercommunicating clans of homeless wretches. In 1959 Adeomi Obaleye declared himself Adeomi the first, King of Boys, because King of Beggars did not strike the right tone.

There were those who said Obaleye suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and that was an acceptable explanation as any. However, since his time, there had always been a King of Boys.

Church and I took okada to Imu Egbere, a coastal fishing community to the south of Ede. The land was swampy, with footpaths constructed of wood and mounted on struts. The okada motorcyclists rode their bikes skillfully (or recklessly, from my point of view) on the path, and I expected to drop into the blue-green mud any minute, a hair-raising fucking journey. This didn’t seem to bother the pilots. Church was impassive, chilled.

The King of Boys was on a fishing boat—what was it with me and boats? The okada dropped us right at the jetty, and we passed from one decrepit fishing vessel to another on unsafe gangplanks. I do not have good sea legs but Church went on like he was born in a mangrove swamp.

The fishermen were a docile lot and barely noticed us walk across. This was the expected way to get around. There was no smell of fish, even though it was overpowering at the jetty. The king’s boat was the same as the others. Wiry men went through the motions of fishing, of salting fish, of sorting fresh-water bottom feeders and other fauna from sardines, mackerel, and sturgeon. There was other marine life that I could not identify.