Season of Crimson Blossoms (19 page)

‘What assignment?'

‘Very important, you understand. Very important.'

He sat with his radio pressed to his ear, watching the entrance to the hotel across the street. He had seen her go in four hours before; had seen the boy go in before her. They were minutes apart. Fifteen minutes apart.

Mallam Haruna had even wandered into the hotel premises but unsure what he should be looking for or where, afraid of being harassed by hotel security, he had withdrawn and returned to his spot under his friend Mallam Balarabe's parasol.

He had noticed Balarabe's growing coldness since he took to
spending most of the day under the old parasol staring grouchily across the street. They had run out of conversation, it would seem, especially as Mallam Haruna had not been forthcoming. Yet he would linger, long past Asr prayers.

But since he first saw her leaving the hotel five days earlier, he wanted to be sure. And then, today, when he saw Reza arrive ahead of her, he knew he was on to something.

It was twenty minutes past five when he saw her emerge through the gate. He stood up. And just as abruptly sat down again.

Balarabe turned to him. ‘
Lafiya,
Mallam Haruna?'

‘Yes, I am fine.'

He watched Binta flag down a motorcycle taxi and climb onto the pillion. He watched the bike zoom away into the side street that led to her home.

He waited and some fifteen minutes later he saw Reza emerge and look up and down the street before he turned left and walked towards the market at the crowded junction.

Reza paced the wide living room, his footsteps echoing in the emptiness. It disturbed him, this emptiness. Gattuso, leaning on the window ledge cracking his knuckles, twisting his neck and punching his palm, could feel Reza's unease. And his anger.

Dogo and Joe came in and stood, one on each side of the door. They too sensed the anger; now swelling almost to a rage.

‘What have you done with her?' Gattuso barked.

‘Nothing, nothing,' Joe held up his arms by the side of his face. ‘We just put her in the room.'

When Reza walked up to Joe and stared into his eyes – eyes glazed by inebriation – he could smell the gin on his breath, even though Joe had turned his face away.

Reza slapped the wall beside him. It trembled. Joe cringed.

‘You useless drunk! You had to go fuck it up. You fucking let the guy go, mamafucker!'

‘Reza, Dogo was supposed to cover the guy. You should ask him what happened.'

‘Shut your dirty mouth!' Dogo bellowed.

‘You shut your mouth!' Gattuso's voice resonated off the bare walls.

In the silence, Reza ground his teeth and finally, when he could
bear it no longer, he punched Joe in the stomach and kicked him as he cowered. ‘I should never have brought a useless drunk like you on this job. I will kill you and dump you in the gorge, I swear.'

When Reza reached for the gun in his jacket, Gattuso and Dogo jumped in and restrained him.

‘Please, Reza,' Gattuso looked into his eyes.

Reza eyed their hands on his arms and slowly they let go of him. They remained standing close by, with pleading eyes. Joe sprawled on the terrazzo, looking up to see which way his fate would swing. It occurred to him then to say something. ‘I will find him. I will get him.'

Contempt exploded in Reza's eyes. When he kicked Joe in the face, there was a crunching sound and he was sure he had knocked out a tooth. He felt pain rippling from his shin upwards.

He walked to the other window and stood staring out at the star-speckled heavens. It was supposed to be a simple mission – wait for the target, the one Moses had pointed out, in the car park of the garden, and then take him. When the young man had come out with a girl after an evening of revelry, and unlocked his car, they had jumped them, armed with chloroform-drenched hankies. The girl had been easy. Gattuso had held her and covered her nose until she grew numb in his arms. But Joe had been tipsy and couldn't hold down the target. The young man had struggled, pushed Joe aside and taken off. Reza had raised the gun, the one he had got from Moses – something the senator had contributed to the mission — but hesitated. He was not a man of guns but of steel, and a gunshot would have attracted unwanted attention. So he had watched their target bolt, watched their assignment crumble before it had even begun. And so they had bundled the girl into the waiting car and sped off.

He wished he could disappear into the shadows, into the night. But he had to explain what happened so he pulled out his phone and dialled. There was no answer. He dialled again and then finally shoved the phone back in his pocket. Two minutes later, his phone rang. He pulled it out, looked at the screen, then at the boys behind him. Joe was still sitting on the floor where Reza had left him, nursing his bruised jaw. Gattuso seemed to
be contemplating the possibility of crushing his own skull with his thumbs and forefingers.

Reza put the phone to his ear. ‘Hello, sir.'

‘Yes.' Moses, the senator's PA, sounded crisp, business-like. ‘Did you get him?'

Reza hesitated. ‘No.'

‘No?'

‘No. He got away. But we got his girlfriend, you understand.'

‘What girlfriend?'

‘The one he was with.'

‘Who gives a damn about her? Your instruction was to get the guy. What the hell happened?'

‘It's a long story. He got away and we couldn't shoot him. But we got the girl. We can get him.'

‘You have bungled this job big time. Oga will be very disappointed. Let the girl go. Nobody needs her. And get the hell out of the house. Bloody amateurs!' The line went dead.

Reza stood grinding his teeth. Finally, he walked across the room, and up the arching staircase.

The girl was in the last room on the balcony, the one in the corner, the one that might host guests when the house was eventually completed. There were three doors before that – all of them sturdy, ornate, with strips of plastic still clinging to them. The green of the doors stood out against the bare, unpainted walls. His footfall sounded off the terrazzo, echoing the emptiness of the large building. He unlocked the door and went in.

The drugged girl was lying on the red and blue plastic mat where she had been dumped, her decency saved by the jeans beneath her knee-length kaftan.

Reza stood a foot away from her and saw the darkened vein that ran diagonally across her forehead. It stood out on her smooth skin, as did the red sore on the back of her left hand where a mosquito had bitten her. She looked so fragile it would be easy to kill her. A bullet in the back of her head. A pillow over her face. Her neck might snap if he clamped his hands around her throat. He could even have her overdose on chloroform.

He marvelled at her hair, silky, unbraided, almost jet black. On her right hand, thrown carelessly beside her head, a ring gleamed.
He knelt down beside her and the opulence of her perfume assailed him as he rolled the ring around her delicate finger. Real gold. He took a handful of her lustrous hair and ran his fingers through it, savouring its softness and the smell of luxuriant hair oil. He could not recall what Binta's hair smelt like but he was certain it did not smell this good.

Back in the living room, he saw the boys huddled over the girl's things scattered on the floor; her empty, expensive-looking purse lying close by. He checked to ensure that her Blackberry and iPhone were switched off. An elegant bottle of perfume caught Reza's eyes.
Caron Poivre.
It had to have been expensive. He could perceive it subtly exuding from the girl. There also were exotic hand and face creams in little tubes, a wallet with money, some naira and pounds sterling. In her wallet Reza also found her ATM cards, a student ID and a driver's licence from which he read her details: Leila Sarki, born March 16, 1988. He studied her face in the passport photograph. Even though she looked hassled in the photo, it was clear she was a very beautiful woman.

He threw the cards down amongst the scattered items on the floor. ‘Put her things together. We are letting her go.'

Dogo looked up. ‘What about the money?'

‘Did I not give you your advance?' But then his eyes rested on the girl's wallet. ‘Well, it doesn't look like we are going to get any balance from this, we might as well take what we can.'

Reza counted out some naira notes and handed them to Gattuso and then Dogo. He threw the rest carelessly over Joe's head. He shoved the pounds into his own pocket.

Gattuso knocked his knuckles together. ‘So, we are just going to let her go like that?'

‘Yes. The job has been bungled.'

‘But—' He continued knocking his fists together until Reza prompted him. ‘She looks like she is the daughter of someone important; we could pull a deal over her.'

Dogo clicked his thumb and forefinger. ‘Yes! Thank you, brother; you just said what was on my mind. Ask her people to pay, or we kill her
kawai
!'

Reza thought for a while. ‘Then we would have to move her to
San Siro. The boss provided this place for his job. Since it would no longer be his job then we'd have to move her.'

Joe looked up at the baroque designs on the high POP ceiling; the blossom at the centre, with a couple of naked wires sticking out of it, fascinated him the most. He imagined a chandelier would dangle from it when the work was completed and he could almost see the thousand lights dancing in his eyes. ‘What mamafucker built this house, mehn?'

‘Fucking cool, right?' Dogo smiled and nodded. ‘I want to be a don someday and own a house like this, man. Imagine dying in a grand place like this.'

‘In your fucking dreams, man.' Joe's laughter was a staccato, guttural explosion. ‘You will die in a goddam chicken coop.'

Dogo, too, laughed up to the ceiling and sat on the floor. He reached into his pocket for a cigarette and a lighter. ‘Goddam chicken coop, man.' He lit up with unsteady hands and wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. ‘Goddam chicken coop.'

Reza's phone chimed amidst the contrived laughter of Dogo and Joe that resonated off the unpainted walls. He held up his hand for silence.

‘What have you done with the girl?' It was Moses.

‘We let her go.'

‘Goddamn it, you idiot.'

Reza smiled. He really hated this Moses. ‘
Wata rana zan ci ubanka, ka gane ko?
' And he knew he would enjoy plunging his dagger just beside that tie he always wore.

Moses chuckled mirthlessly. ‘Well, go and bring her back. Your new instruction is to hold on to her.'

‘Well, you asked me to let her go.'

‘Find her.' The line went dead.

The cat with the white-tipped tail came late that night, long after Mallam Haruna had switched off his radio and finished his analysis of the day's news. It sat on the fence, between the loops of the razor wire and watched the couple; the woman with
a bored countenance, the man more unsure of himself than he had ever been.

Binta had noted Mallam Haruna's unease right from when he offered to stand guard over her and wave away the midges tormenting her with the tail of his kaftan. He had backed down immediately when he saw the shocked expression on her face. Then he had spent five minutes trying to tell her how important it was for a man to protect the woman he loved from ‘all enemies'.

That was how he got talking about scorpions and how he had been stung three times in the past. He punctuated his gory tale of feverish nights fighting off the venom with little nervous chortles.

Then he had attempted to mount his cap on her head, right on top of her hijab. It was so unheralded that she had wanted to flee.

‘Is there something wrong with you this evening?'

‘Oh no, not at all. Just wondering what you would look like with my cap on you.'

She gaped at him, as if she had somehow contrived to see through his skull and discovered that his cranium was packed full of semi-deflated balloons.

He seemed oblivious to her stare. ‘You know I am the best cap washerman in this corner of the world,
wallahi
.'

He went into a fractured narrative about how he had learned how to wash caps in Maiduguri when he had been an almajiri and how he had married his first wife as
ladan noma.

Binta's mind drifted. She wondered what she could do to get rid of Hureira since her husband had refused to come for her. She contemplated several possibilities, none of them practical, and concluded that other than escorting Hureira back to her own house, she had no choice but to accept that her daughter might end up permanently stationed in Fa'iza's room, while her matrimonial home in Jos collected the harmattan dust.

When her mind wandered back, Mallam Haruna was talking about his third or fourth son making a living driving a white man around Port Harcourt, and how he had been in an accident and now limped like a three-legged dog.

She felt his hand on her shoulder, a light slap at first and then the hand slid down just a bit.

‘Mosquito,' he grinned.

The cat meowed, almost half-heartedly. It used its front paw to wipe its head, took several steps and then bounded off the fence, into Mama Efe's side of the wall.

Mallam Haruna launched into yet another disjointed narrative on how best to deal with the pestilence of mosquitoes using dried orange rinds sprinkled on embers. Then he reached out and slapped another mosquito on her back and yet again, his hand tarried.

She regarded him with a frown. ‘Mallam Haruna,
yaya dai
?'

‘Nothing, nothing,' he laughed, uneasily. ‘Perhaps we could meet somewhere else.'

‘What for?'

‘Well,' he lowered his voice, ‘well, we could just go somewhere else, you know, just get to know each other better.'

‘What do you mean?'

He was unsettled by the bluntness of her tone. ‘Well, you know, I was just saying we could go somewhere private, you know—'

‘What for?'

He turned on his radio and fiddled with the knob, sweeping past stations.

She said nothing, only watched him search for a discernible voice in the sea of static. He switched the radio off just as suddenly as he had turned it on.

‘So, what do you say?'

‘To what?'

‘You know, what I said, about going somewhere.'

‘What do you have to say that you can't say here?'

‘Well, we could go to Mr Biggs, or Mama Cass or La Crème, one of these fancy places, you know.'