Making Wolf (8 page)

“Easy. A-minus.”

“So sure?”

“Yes. Done it many times before.” She dropped her bags on the floor, and urgently started unbuttoning her blouse. “Now, come over here and fuck me.”

“I’ve been thinking about communication,” said Nana.

I was seated on the floor of the dining room, against the wall, knees drawn up but parted. Nana was between my legs, back to me, resting her head on my arms which were around her. I grunted, signaling her to continue.

“They say most of our communication is nonverbal, right? People bandy statistics about that range from seventy to ninety percent. I’d like to know how they conducted the studies that yielded those results—”

“You’re drifting.”

“Yes. I am. Are we in a hurry?”

I kissed her hair.

“That’s what I thought. So, anyway, if most of the communication is nonverbal, then certain actions have to be considered the height of communication.”

“Such as?”

“Murder. Sex. Hugging. Spitting. Defenestration. Anything…at crisis point. Critical mass action…” She leapt up and rummaged through her bag until she had a pencil and notepad, then wrote furiously, frowning but completely immersed in the moment. Her backside jiggled softly and she bit her lower lip and dogs fought outside the window and I loved her.

“How is it that you’re this intelligent, yet you keep failing the exam you went for?”

“I have never failed an exam,” said Nana.

“But you said—”

“I said I’d taken it many times, not that I’d ever failed it.”

“You know it’s strange,” I said. “I could have sworn this conversation started out in Yoruba. Now it’s in gibberish.”

“Weston does sarcasm!” She stopped writing and came back to me. “I take examinations for people in the universities. And some of the polytechnics. For money.”

“You impersonate students in exams?”

“Also for theses, essays and miscellaneous assignments, yes.”

“Does it pay well?”

“You have no idea. I’ve been living off this for a while.”

“What courses do you specialize in?”

“Anything at all.”

“Examples?”

“History, literature, physics, advanced math, philosophy, you name it, I’ve done it. I’ve done Premed twice.” She twisted around and looked into my eyes. “I know everything. I have a third eye, and it sees all.”

She did know everything; she always had.

“You have no ethical problems with that?”

“Do you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It’s Alcacia, Weston. It’s survival.”

“I know. I’ve just never thought about it.”

“It’s hard work. I have a lot of raw information in my head, and I can tell you about the October Revolution or the Treaty of Utrecht, or recite all the monologues of
King Lear
, but the difficult bit is toning it down, tailoring it to the academic level of the clients. I have to make it look hard. I have to add errors of grammar and syntax. It’s exhausting.” She turned back and continued jotting on the pad.

“Do you ever miss the lack of recognition?”

“In what sense?”

“You’re doing a lot of academic work here, but others get the glory. You’re a ghost writer. Wouldn’t you rather have your own name on an essay or book or…I don’t know, win some prizes or the like? Isn’t this a kind of half-life?”

“The last time I cared about shit like that was my first year of university. I started what I thought would be the first of many degrees. For my term paper I wrote an eight-thousand word essay titled “I, Rastafari” which was an examination of the sociocultural effects of the black African Diaspora on the adopted identity of the individual on the Caribbean Islands. It was brilliant. My professor said it was years ahead of what someone of my experience should be writing. He said I’d easily graduate with a first class. And then he stood up from behind his desk, dropped his trousers, and asked me to fellate him.”

“What?”

“Don’t be shocked, Weston. It’s really quite rampant, and nobody bats an eyelid at these things anymore. Even crusty old academics have to get obo somehow. I never liked formal education anyhow. Too prescriptive; too restrictive.”

Nana had always complained about school when we were young. She read more than anyone I have known before or since, but nothing relevant to school work. When we first met she was reading an astrophysics textbook that she barely understood. She was twelve. I was thirteen and completely fucked up from my family being torn to bits and my mother’s recent death. I was the new boy at school since I had just moved to Aunt Blossom’s house. I remember sitting by myself at lunch for weeks. One day she came, sat next to me holding a book that strained her forearm muscles, and nudged me. “Are you retarded?” she asked. “People say you’re retarded is why you don’t talk to anyone.”

And that is how we began to talk.

Evening.

The unholy ball of fire in the sky had retreated enough to the west that I didn’t feel scorched, sweaty, or scared. Brave, pioneer mosquitoes had started buzzing about, albeit slowly. Nana had made some eba, and we ate on the veranda.

“It can be done,” said Nana. “Just takes cash.”

“I have cash.”

“Okay, but then there are still delays. You can’t just walk into the ministry and ask for a private detective license. There are forms to be filled, procedures to be performed, clearances to be cleared. You must be stamped, triplicated, filed. You must lose your head and get angry at least once. You must experience the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy must experience you.”

“Can’t I bypass that with more cash?”

“Maybe a whole lot of it, more than your sponsors are willing to pay. It’s better if you know someone.”

The soup was spinach, tomato paste, red peppers, red onions, palm oil, and stock fish (which was sold dry and was so hard you had to cut it with a saw before cooking softened it). I licked my fingers and asked for the washing bowl. When I had cleaned and dried my hands, I phoned Abayomi Abayomi.

“Akara Ogun!” he said into the phone. “How goes the demon slaying? Still feeling lucky?”

I watched Nana clear the dishes. “Very much so. Listen, d’you know anyone up at the ministry of justice?” I explained the problem. He gave me a name but could not talk much afterwards, so we exchanged pleasantries and he was gone.

Nana said, “Do you want to see something cool?”

It was a full moon.

Dogs howled at it, took a break, then howled some more. People came out on raffia mats, deck chairs, and carved stools. Children ran around the central wood-fed fire, squealing their delight and roasting wild mushrooms on unsanitary sticks. Wasps, sand flies, stick insects, confused termites, and other arthropods flew into the flames and burned bright for one shining moment before dying. The mosquitoes cannily reserved their attentions for the human beings around the flame. Chickens roosted on rooftops or low branches of surrounding trees. Sheep clustered together, warily observing everything, chewing regurgitated grass.

An old man told stories of ijapa, the tortoise, considered the most cunning of animals in Yoruba folklore, but often unlucky in his schemes. He wore a soft fila on his head and sat serenely on a black stool, his voice a soft monotone that threatened to send me to sleep. He was skinny, asthenic to the point of being painful to look at, and his face was riddled with wrinkles. Despite the obvious contours, it was impossible to tell his mood as he kept a bland, neutral expression. I wondered how old he was. Life in Alcacia was such that a person could age before his time. His stories were familiar and comforting to the audience. There were no surprise endings; many of his sentences were completed by others and garnished with laughter from all. Nana and I stood at the edge of the people listening to him. Children sat crosslegged on the floor, adults knelt or stood.

I whispered to Nana. “This is nice and quaint. It warms my heart several times over. But I don’t see—”

“Shh. Just wait till the end.”

The old man finished with a tale of Anansi tricking a whole village into staying awake all night by telling them the moon was actually the sun, only very pale and sick. By this time many of the children were asleep, and mothers woke or lifted them away. As the listeners dispersed, Nana and I approached.

“Papa,” said Nana. “Might we see?”

He nodded.

“Put some money in his hand,” Nana said to me. I gave him ten dollars, still wondering what I was paying for.

The old man took off the fila and leaned toward us, showing his bald head.

But that wasn’t it. He was not bald; his crown was one big sheet of scar tissue. There was white hair in what looked like a Bishop’s fringe around the scarred area, but otherwise there was an unnatural smoothness broken only by the wrinkles at the margins.

“Accident,” I asked.

“No,” said Nana, who had obviously seen it before. “No, this man was scalped.”

“Where? How?”

“Papa, tell us your story, please,” said Nana. To me she said, “Give him more money.”

He first took water from a canteen beside his stool, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and exhaled. He had no teeth to speak of, just gums and a glistening tongue. This close, I could see every blood vessel crawling over the whites of his eyes. He began to speak in Yoruba with the same unaffected monotone with which he delivered the moonlight tales.

“I was fifteen years old, an apprentice roof mender, working with my father. The village prospered in those days…after a fashion. The Po-tu-gii developed it because of the gold mine that had served us for centuries. Usually, only about a dozen of them stood around with their guns and slaves, carting the gold to the coast. They were so selfish that they even made slaves shower so that the gold dust would not benefit the families who had lost the right arm of a son. Is that not evil? Does not the Book say ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn?’”

“It does, Papa,” said Nana.

“One day the village was invaded by marauders, the Por-tu-gii were slaughtered and all the gold stolen. A few of the young women were taken, but they left the villagers alone mostly. The slaves were allowed to escape, and they scattered into the forest and neighboring encampments. After seven days new Por-tu-gii arrived, and they scourged us all for allowing it to happen. For the dead white men, they scalped every tenth male in the tribe, as evidence of retribution. They would have killed us all, but they needed the slaves.”

“And you survived this?” I asked.

He looked at me with sad eyes and said, “‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’”

We were mostly silent on the way home, Nana and I. She drove and I thought of the things I heard.

“What a lonely man he must have been,” I said.

“Lonely?”

“Yes, with the scar and all…”

“You’re kidding, right? He’s outlived two wives and has tons of children and grandchildren. He’s thought to be marked by the gods for survival, and people want a piece of that. It’s like the mark of Cain: nobody will kill him, no disease afflicts him. Plus, he makes a lot of money from tourists showing off his absent scalp. I mean, he’s sweet, and it’s a shame what happened to the village men eighty-odd years ago, but the fucking Portuguese did him a favor.”

My phone rang. It was Church, and I didn’t quite feel like speaking to him or explaining why I wasn’t at the hotel. I sent the call to voicemail and powered the phone down.

The Ministry of Justice was situated in an ugly building that seemed to have been designed with the sole purpose of making supplicants feel unwelcome. Each layer of security required a swipe card and created delays for visitors. I finally arrived in a waiting room where I was to see a man called George Elemo, Abayomi’s man in the ministry. The room was antiseptic, white, and surveilled by a rude camera on the exact center of the ceiling, one of those black hemidomes that looked like the eye of God. I hated not knowing who was looking at me or recording my image, but living in London, the city with the most cameras per person in the world and spiritual inspiration of Big Brother, I was used to it. Orwell was right.

Elemo came in and sat next to me without saying a word. He was a slight, fair-skinned man who wore delicate glasses and looked nervous. This was misleading because he was all confidence when he began to speak.

“Payment,” he said.

I paid him two hundred American dollars, which he counted.

“Documents.” He gave me a bundle of papers.

I checked. It had a license drenched in grandiloquent language, the bottom line of which was that I could operate within the borders of Alcacia as a private operative. It had an identification badge. It had the name and number of a police liaison officer.

“If, in the process of an investigation, you uncover a crime, you are obliged to report it. Should the police require information from you about a case my advice to you is give it to them. Otherwise, your annual renewal will not happen.”

“I see.”

“If anyone asks you, it took two months to get your license.”

“But I’ve only been in country for a few days.”

“Irrelevant. You asked a friend to apply for you because you are such a forward-thinking individual.”

Did Mr. Terse just crack a joke?

“That’s it. Go. I don’t want to be seen with you.”

I pointed to the camera.

“I switched it off beforehand. Goodbye, Mr. Kogi. I don’t want to see you again.”

While waiting for a taxi I called Church.

“Where have you been? I thought you’d been taken again,” he said.

“No, I left the hotel, but I’m fine. Listen: do you have the details on the mortician who spruced up Pa Busi?”

“Yeah. Hold on.” There was a short delay. ‘Here. His name is Olaf Johansson. He’s back in America. Here’s the number…”

I wrote it down and hung up on Church just as he was constructing questions about my whereabouts. I wanted him off balance for a while.

A taxi arrived and I got in. It had two amazingly life-like plastic testicles dangling from the rearview mirror.

“Where to, Oga?” said the driver.

“Charter.”

“Okay, charter. Where to?”