Making Wolf (5 page)

“Nana—”

“Let’s talk about Enoch Olubusi. Why do you need to know about him? Quickly, now. I want to make love some more before you go.”

I looked down at my limp phallus. “I’ll need a minute or two. Besides, my muscles are aching.”

“You can just lie back and think of England,” she said. She reached over me to take what was left of my drink. Her heavy breasts swung over my face.

“I met with the Liberation Front of Alcacia today, with their leader, Comrade Ali. He told me Enoch Olubusi was murdered, most likely by agents of the People’s Christian Army. He hired me to prove it.”

Nana sat up. “Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“I don’t even know where to start. How did you meet Ali? Why you? Do you have connections that I don’t know about?”

I explained about Church and being drugged. Nana let loose a string of exotic swear words.

“You’re an idiot,” she said at length.

“I know.”

“And you have no skills of crime detection whatsoever?”

“I did start a criminology course at the Open University in 2004, but it was boring so I quit after the first term.”

“What do you actually do for a living?”

“I’m a security guard for a supermarket. But I’m trying to get into the police. I’ve been invited for the interview. Once.”

Nana looked inwards for a while. “The good news is you’re not going back to London today. They’ll have someone at the airport, and there would have been a spotter at the hotel, which means they may have followed us. The mixed news is that you will either solve the crime and live or not solve the crime and be killed. Do you have your ticket on you?”

I rooted through my clothes and handed her the confirmation slip and passport. She ripped up the confirmation slip into tiny bits and threw them into the air like confetti.

“Hey!”

“If they followed us they know about me. If you go, they might come after me, Weston. I don’t want that to happen because I like being alive. I’ll hold on to your passport.” She started getting dressed.

“I thought you wanted to make love again?”

“That was when I thought you were leaving today. Let’s just focus on keeping you alive for the time being.”

“Enoch Olubusi is…was the nearest thing to a saint this country has ever produced,” said Nana. “In 1993 he was the main contender against Desmond Tutu for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

She had that same introspective expression on her face, as if she were a cyborg accessing files in her memory banks. We walked along the shore, with the sun at our backs and our shadows going before us like prophets. Nana occasionally picked up a shell or a bit of metal that she told me came from Nigerian commercial air crashes. Interesting objects fetched good money at the markets. A dead person’s passport could be used again. A piece of fuselage could be converted into a charm for imperviousness by the Ogun priests since the metal was already “dead.” Body parts were rare since sharks and fish usually made short work of them, but a bone picked clean, especially a skull, was priceless.

“He was born in 1936 in Kinshasa of all places. Leopoldville it was called back then. He was only there for a few months after birth, then his parents moved back to Ede when Alcacians were expelled. By all accounts his family was dirt poor. He spoke many times of the wretchedness of his early years.

“We don’t know much about his toddler period but he did go to St. Bartholomew School for Boys on a scholarship from a no-name primary school. You have to understand that his father was only numerate enough to calculate the oguro tab in the local bar and his mother could not read or write. This made it highly improbable that Enoch was the best student ever to come out of St. Barts, including the colonial children. His old school mates say he was quiet, unassuming, and helpful. Almost everyone asked said he was helpful. Nobody remembers seeing him study.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked. “I mean, it seems to be more detailed than what one reads in the Sunday supplement.”

“I read his authorized biography two years ago. Bland style, utterly dull but fact heavy. Verified sources, reliable.”

“I’m sure it was riveting, Nana, but I don’t need all of this. I just want to know why anyone would kill him.”

She threw up her hands. “They wouldn’t. He was universally loved. Didn’t you see his funeral on CNN?”

“I don’t watch a lot of television.”

“Considering the mess you’re in right now, it might be prudent to start.”

“Hmm! Oga, sa! You move fast, o!” said Church. He was sitting on the steps of the hotel, waiting. His eyes were on Nana’s Benz as it pulled away.

“That’s just the power of Sterling, my brother. She’s a professional.” I didn’t look back or wave, and I was dying to see if Nana was playing along. “Have you been waiting long?”

“I’ve been checking out girls, looking at their asses. Just before you arrived a hefty one passed, rolling like two footballs in a skirt.” Church stood up feigning joint pains, as if he was an old man, weary. He held a satchel. “You know, I thought you might have tried to leave. I have some boys at the airport.”

“Why would I leave?”

“You had your passport taken out of the hotel safe.”

Everyone knew more about my business than I did. Church probably bribed or intimidated the reception clerk. Or threatened to kill one or two extended family members in horrible ways.

“I just felt better with it on me, on my person.” I changed the subject. “What’s in the bag?”

“Items you will need. Let’s go up. We have much to discuss, and you have to change your clothes. Right now you look like the kind of person who catches his own food.”

It didn’t take long to change into casuals. Church just spoke and systematically emptied the mini-bar. The first thing he brought out of the satchel was a gun. It was angular and black and cruel; it belonged nowhere near the hands of an often intoxicated psychopath like Church.

“You know how to use this?”

I shook my head.

“You’re a police officer!”

“In the UK regular police don’t carry firearms. We have armed response units who kill armed criminals for us. Sometimes they even kill unarmed civilians, but that’s beside the point.”

“Well. Olopa. This is Alcacia. We bear arms here. The woman selling roasted corn has a child on her back and a gun in her wrapper. Here.” He handed it to me and showed me the parts. “Handle, safety catch, slide, sight, muzzle. Remember: you point the muzzle
away
from you.”

“Yes, Church, I have seen the movies.”

“Be serious. You’d be surprised at the number of young revolutionaries who blow their own heads off looking down the barrel. Awon odoyo. This is the ammo. A clip. Twenty-three bullets before you slot it in here.”

He shunted the rectangular clip into the hollow space in the handle, and it made a click when it rammed home.

“Now pull back the slide. What you hear is one of the bullets going into the chamber. If you pull the clip out, that bullet still remains in the chamber unless you pull the slide like so.” He raked the slide back again, and a bullet flew out of the side of the gun. “Now it is truly unloaded. Now you try. Reload, rack back the slide, and unload.”

I did it a few times till he was satisfied, then he handed me an efficient-looking ankle holster with a Velcro flap.

“There is only one cast-iron rule when you have to work with guns,” said Church. “Treat every gun as if it is loaded. There is no such thing as an unloaded gun. Say it.”

“No such thing as an unloaded gun. Got it.”

Next he gave me ten thousand American dollars in crisp fifty dollar notes.

“Church, what—?”

“Don’t worry, that’s not your fee. This is just expenses. Holding money.”

They planned to pay me. I mean, of course they planned to pay me. What was I thinking? “I don’t have anywhere to store…” I trailed off when he handed me a matte-black money belt. “I’m Batman. No, I’m James Bond and you’re fucking Q or R or whatever that guy’s name was.”

He rooted in the bag and came up with a manila package. This was a side of Church I had never seen—focused, tight, methodical. “Let’s talk about murder. First of all, Comrade Ali wants you to be absolutely clear on one thing: the LFA did not do this deed. I personally saw him swear on a bull horn about it.”

In Alcacia, and indeed much of Yorubaland, a bull horn was used as a sacred object on which oaths were sworn in front of witnesses. My mother swore on one a long time ago, when I was twelve. A horn, or iwo, would be consecrated first and filled with charms by the babalawo after which it could be used for oaths or malediction. We Yoruba love curses; we discipline our children with them.

These days though, even orisha, the gods, are for sale. I knew it and Church knew it; but he’d been asked to deliver a message, and he would do just that no matter how much he doubted the veracity. He was also telling me to play along, out of respect for his leader.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me how Enoch Olubusi died.”

I admit I said it in a somewhat flippant tone, and I did this because I thought it was all tongue-in-cheek, which is why I was completely flabbergasted by what happened next: Churchill started crying. Tears. From Church. Sociopathic Church.

“Hey, I’m sorry if I—”

“Weston, what you are doing is important. Pa Busi was everything to us all. We loved him. He shook my hand during the preliminary peace talks. He shook my hand. And somebody…” He handed me a photograph from the package.

In the foreground there was a body, and the background showed the aftermath of a blast with blackened, tortured metal from a dead jeep, charnel house body parts, ruptured earth, and scattered firearms. Between the jeep and the body was bloody, disturbed sand, like the person had crawled away before dying.

This person was the mortal remains of Enoch Olubusi.

I only knew this by the markings on the photo. Arrows pointed to the bodies (and parts) identifying each. In the shot there were white flags stuck into them with what I presumed to be their names. Olubusi had burned, and there was a terrible grimace on his face, half of which had parted company from the skull. His whole body was flexed, and none of his clothing remained. This was not a good death.

“Jesu.”

Church nodded. He blew out smoke, and I didn’t even remember him lighting up.

“Do we have autopsy reports, forensics on the jeep—”

“Mo ro pe epe nja e,” Church said. “You’re like this idiot child sometimes, you know that?”

I exhaled, back-pedaled. “What do we have?”

“There was no autopsy. The priority was given to the mortician who was shipped in from the States so that Pa Busi could look vaguely like himself, although to me at close quarters his skin looked like that of an Action Man figure. That jeep is long since compacted and melted down.” He brought out a map of Alcacia. It was shaped like a sperm whale in the West African map, tiny, squeezed between Nigeria and Cameroon. The mouth end of the whale would be taking a drink from the Atlantic. The east was controlled by the LFA, the west by the People’s Christian Army and other minor players, including the federal government, controlled the rest. Pa Busi was killed in neutral territory.

“Where is he buried?”

“Ede. I can take you there.”

“Do we have the name of the mortician?”

“I can find out.” He dropped the packet on the bed. “I have other details that you might find useful in here. There’s a mobile phone, and I took the liberty of punching in my number. If you need to go anywhere, do anything, I’m your partner.” He went to the door.

“Thanks, Church.”

“See you tomorrow.”

I had planned to go through what he left for me, but I must have been more tired than I realized because I sat on the bed and dropped off.

Two a.m.

My eyes were open, but I didn’t know how long I had been awake or what woke me. Everything in the room was as I left it. My left ankle had gone to sleep because of the holster I had strapped on. I got up, cleared the bed, then went to piss. Each time I thought of the situation I was in, I got a jolt of fear that quickened my heart.

There were other ways of looking at it: I had a beautiful girlfriend, I was back in the home country, and I had a job where ten thousand dollars was expenses. This was not comforting. I started to think of escape. I had money and a gun. I could bribe my way out. I constructed this elaborate mental image of me getting a car, driving on the left side of the road to Nana’s house, speeding away with her in the passenger’s seat reloading my gun for me. Two helicopters crisscrossed the air about us, and a sniper kept missing because of my fancy driving. Only one mile to the border. Nana grabbed the wheel, and I twisted and shot upwards, hitting the gas tanks of the choppers, leaving them in balls of flame, two bullets left, two border guards screaming at us to stop, Nigeria just minutes away. I shot them both in their necks and—

There was someone at the door.

Whoever it was had a key because I saw the light on the lock go red then green. The light came on, and three armed men rushed in, shouting at me in Yoruba, heads covered in imperfect, home-made masks. The three of them stood there, rifles trained on me, looking all the more frightening because of the improvised masks they wore.

“Weston Kogi?”

I nodded.

“Come with us,” said the nearest.

“I have a gun,” I said.

The heavyset one cocked his rifle. “So do we.”

“No, I mean, I’m telling you that I have a gun so that you don’t get surprised when you find it. If you’re surprised you might shoot me.” I pointed to my holster and waited on the bed while they removed it and searched me. When it became clear that I was cooperating they became casual. They pointed their guns at the ceiling, and we strolled out of the hotel. The clerk at the desk didn’t even look up when we walked by. I found it difficult to decide if this was more or less frightening.

We drove all night.

I was in the back seat between two of them, while one drove us. By the time the sun emerged, one of my kidnappers was snoring loudly to my left. They had taken off the masks. I thought it was reasonable to assume these were not Liberation Front foot soldiers. These actions did not seem consistent with Church’s plan for me. It was the most polite abduction I had ever been involved with, and, in the short time I had spent in Alcacia, I was fast becoming an expert.