Her laughter was stirring in its nakedness—the way she laughed with everything she had. One knee found the ground, and then she was hanging onto the door handle, which was itself hanging on to the door by precarious screws.
Briefly I wondered whether to catch her before the screws gave.
Then the doorway filled up with the bored patrons of Ma’Calico’s bar, their bulbous glasses in their fists.
‘Wha’s that?’
‘Wha’s that?’
‘He . . . doesn’t . . . do . . . prostitutes . . . See as he dirty! Which prostitute go touch am so?’
I led the horse into the backyard, away from the ensuing bray of laughter. As I tethered it, Ma’Calico strode into the yard with my deposit in her hand. I took a deep breath and exhaled. Kaska gai muga chamu ga choke. I was bemused. It was many years since I had begun to think in English, and here was a Menai idiom dropping unbidden into my mind. Had to be the proximity to the village. Beyond the low fence, my car sat patiently, beside a tyreless, rust-encrusted DAF truck that wasn’t going anywhere either. Ma’Calico stopped three metres from me. She sniffed and blinked rapidly. She did not share her patrons’ amusement.
‘My daughter says you called her prostitute.’
My jaw dropped, and I was genuinely shocked, both at the lack of resemblance between the two women and at my own recklessness. ‘Your daughter? . . . but I didn’t know . . . I mean, I never . . .’
‘This is hotel, not brothel.’
‘I know, I know,’ I said earnestly.
‘And Amana is a graduate. And a senior DRCD civil servant.’
‘I . . . I know. I . . . I’m sorry.’
‘What she said,’ she enunciated carefully, as though she addressed a retard, ‘was that you smell. We have nice hotel here where you can sleep and baf before you go. Is three thousand naira for room-and-baf. You stain my bed sheet, is another five hundred naira. Do you want or not?’
I cleared my throat. ‘I want,’ I said, and my deposit disappeared into her brassiere. Ma’Calico seemed as tough as the fabric she was named after. She was as broad as the bole of an iroko—and just as intransigent. She made her change from the cash register of a bosom that seemed designed for commerce rather than that alien concatenation of lust and paediatric nourishment. She radiated confidence, and she gloved it with an arrogance that stemmed not just from the fact that she was the monopoly supplier of short-time and long-term beds for twenty kilometres in every direction but from the certainty that, were you the kickboxing and kung fu champion of all Nigeria, she was ready for you.
She sneered—and at that point, it seemed a biological impossibility that she was the mother of the slip of a woman whose strangled laughter was still gurgling from the front of the yard—and said, ‘And if you touch my daughter, I kill you.’
‘I don’t do feckless girls, either,’ I told her horse, long after she was gone.
MAJOR BELINJA
Lagos | 15th March, 2005
They met up in Lagos, at a private guest house in old Ikoyi. The house was an intricately gabled structure set in the rear half of a mandarin garden. From outside, nothing about the house distinguished it from neighbouring properties. Major Belinja’s car nosed through the leafy driveway and came to a halt beyond the carport. The muted birdcalls from an aviary filtered down to the four soldiers in mufti.
They had spent their years at the Defence Academy jousting for the top position. In their military careers, their rivalry had not diminished, although now it was overcast by a pall of disillusionment. They were in the wrong decade, in the wrong century to be soldiers. Lamikan, for instance, had graduated with the best degree the Defence Academy had awarded in its twenty-nine-year history. He was still thirty-five, but at his age in the ’60s Yakubu Gowon had already been head of state for several years.
They were in their prime, but the year was 2005 and the environment was no longer amenable to military governments. After the calamities of the Babangida and Abacha regimes, Nigerians were not going to cry out for military interventions, no matter what a hash civilians made of things. And they were making such a hash of things! There was a surliness in the young military, a sense of loss that only Belinja seemed to have escaped. Although he was the most junior in rank among them, he had become the most powerful, for he was a major in military intelligence. In a realm where titles were irrelevant, he had created—and controlled—the most subversive information database in Nigerian history. Even his bosses feared him, and he would have been redeployed long before but for fears—not wholly unfounded—that his most critical data were stored on private servers, and sacking him would be a licence to fully privatise the resource.
The hallway of the guest house was similarly unexceptional. Belinja hung back from the door and disappeared into a side entrance. Tanko, Ofo, and Lamikan looked warily around as they entered the high-ceilinged lounge. A buffet table was laid out for a small feast, and a Japanese chef brought a platter of skewered meat, which he set down to complete the tempting collage of dishes. He fiddled with a tabletop heater and then disappeared discreetly, without acknowledging the presence of the soldiers.
Belinja reappeared before his colleagues had a chance to get uncomfortable. He approached the cocktail table. ‘Gentlemen, food is served.’
‘And this is the meeting that will change my life?’ asked Ofo as Belinja began to fill a saucer with food.
‘You can start by changing your waistline.’ Belinja’s joke sounded forced, but alongside the logic of the buffet, it did get the others to join him at the table.
‘Who owns this place?’ Tanko asked as he poured himself a glass of iced zobo.
‘I do,’ said a voice from behind him. They turned around for their first sight of Penaka Lee. He was a wisp of a man, only marginally taller than Belinja, but his handshake, when it came, was almost as firm as his gaze. ‘Sorry I couldn’t receive you at the door. I spend most of my time on the phone.’ He was grinning, accentuating his vaguely Asiatic features.
Belinja performed the introductions, but when it was all over Tanko continued to hold Penaka’s hand. ‘I usually don’t like to eat the food of someone I don’t know.’
‘Nigerians have peculiar customs,’ agreed Penaka Lee, tapping a finger on Tanko’s chest. He seemed comfortable with his hand in the other man’s grasp and steered Tanko easily to the drinks cabinet, where the soldier finally surrendered it.
‘It’s a sensible custom,’ said Lamikan. ‘Otherwise, you might finish a meal only to find that you can’t afford it.’
Penaka Lee bowed marginally from behind the cabinet. He lined up some flutes. ‘You have my assurances that this meal is completely free.’ He raised a bottle of champagne and, when he got some nods, began to pour. He passed a glass to Lamikan. ‘I hear you are a champion squash player. What’s your next target? The world championships?’
‘My competition days are over; I’m thirty-five.’
‘Really? You’ve got young genes! Will you stay on in the force—after your commission?’
Lamikan’s eyes narrowed. He
