the market opens.”
More afraid of what Auntie Muni might do to her than the police, Asana turned her phone around, the light searing her eyes. 3:57 a.m. The market opened at six, but proprietors would start arriving by five.
“The AMA inspectors will be here,” she reminded Limah. The Accra Metropolitan Assembly often dispatched officials for surprise sanitation checks, but it being National Sanitation Day, they would be in the market in numbers. “And no telling when the Munhwɛ people will start coming. We have to do it now.”
“We could take him to the hospital.”
“Do you have 150,000 for a taxi to Korle Bu?” Asana sucked her teeth. “He’s already dead. Start cleaning up. I’m going to find us some help to clear the body.”
* * *
Muni accidentally kicked a short stack of plastic buckets as she turned the corner on the path to her stall.
“Who left these here?” she asked the small girl sweeping in front of the first shop in the row. Even though it wasn’t her stall, the AMA inspectors would use such infractions to threaten to fine the owner—a pretext for negotiating lesser levies that would bypass the city’s coffers for their own pockets. Where the inspectors started, they would linger. “Clear them now.”
“Yes, Auntie Muni.”
In front of her stall, Muni parted her bag’s leather-band-and-gold-link handles to rummage for her keys. She dug past her phone, her face-powder compact, blotting papers, a handkerchief, a Munhwɛ TV flyer, P.K chewing gum wrappers, and magazine perfume strips she collected, always on the hunt for a new scent. Finally, she found her wallet, pulling out the keys that dangled from the ring attached to the zipper.
Muni tugged at the padlock and latched the heavy spinach-green metal door to the loop that moored it to the cement wall. She sniffed compulsively, as she did every morning. To her surprise, her shop smelled good. Fresh even.
Her kayayo and tenant Asana did a good job cleaning the stall, but there was a smell about the girl that always lingered. None of Muni’s customers had yet complained about an unpleasant musk, and most of her lace was sheathed in plastic, but she worried nonetheless that the girl’s raw odor would pique a sensitive nose like hers or seep into her stock.
This morning, though, the place had a lemony antiseptic smell to it. The shelves looked neater too.
Tank u, ma dear. Outdid urself. D shop is luking gr8, she texted Asana, using the shorthand her son, Abdul, messaged her with.
Abdul and his sister would be coming soon to help her man the shop. She had seen on the Munhwɛ TV flyer that the area MP and his wife, Alice, were planning to welcome Ahmed Razak to the market. Alice had become something of a friend during her husband’s campaign, meeting regularly with the market shopkeepers to rally their support. Even after his win, Alice always dropped by Muni’s stall and picked up a few yards of lace when she was at Mal’ Atta. Muni looked forward to showing her the new pieces that had come in.
Abdul and Mariama were supposed to be at the market by seven a.m., but Asana and the other girls were to report before six to account for yesterday’s sales and refill their pans with the supplies they’d be selling. She unlocked the stall’s back door, which led to her small storeroom and the deep freezer inside. She switched on the generator.
The power supply had been out for two straight half days, but the cakes of frosty ice in the freezer had kept the water cold enough. The same couldn’t be said for the ice cream and frozen yogurt. She felt the plastic sachets of FanIce and FanYogo mixed in with the small water packets and frowned at their mushiness.
As Muni walked away, she noticed a plastic soap bottle on the floor. Instead of the syrupy green Fairy liquid the label advertised, there was a watery yellow solution inside. It was too pale to be urine, she decided, tentatively raising it to her nose. The pungent odor of ammonia and lemons induced her gag reflex. This was the scent that had greeted her when she opened her stall. She recognized it now as the cleaning fluid the market butchers used to disinfect meat, and the oddly pleasing fragrance that clung to Ibrahim. She arched her eyeliner-traced eyebrows and blinked away tears as she jumped to conclusions. Of course Ibrahim would want to be with someone his own age, she told herself. Aside from the way she smelled, Asana was a pretty girl.
“Auntie Muni?” The little girl who had been sweeping interrupted her thoughts.
“Yes, my dear?” She put the bottle down, covering her hurt with a smile.
“I have removed the buckets.”
But what if it was Mr. Selifu? Muni asked herself, blooming with hope that Asana’s visitor had been Ibrahim’s boss instead. Resolving to ask Asana point-blank if she had broken their agreement by bringing a man into her stall, Muni dug in her bag and gave the girl the five-pesewa coin she was angling for. She followed the child out to see if Asana or any of her other kayayei were coming. The market would be open in twenty minutes.
Morning light was diluting the sky, and now, as far down the row as Muni could see, small girls were sweeping. The sound of the dried-reed brooms swiping rock-studded earth and cement was almost orchestral, accompanied by the creaks of traders dragging wood tables and benches into arrangement, and shopkeepers freeing heavy metal doors from their locks. The shrill of a loudspeaker suddenly disrupted this market symphony—a prelude to the more guttural beats of transaction that would come when the shops opened.
“Testing,” a man’s voice announced, his breath heavy in the distant microphone. “Munhwɛ TV test.”
Muni pulled her handbag open to retrieve the Munhwɛ flyer. A sinewy young man with a dimpled grin had pressed it into her hand yesterday, on her way to the fifty-pesewa toilets.
“There’s still time to enter, madam,” he had said.
She looked up at him, noting his Munhwɛ TV T-shirt.
“Am I your size?” she flirted, reading the title of the show.
“Fat-ulous,” he answered.
Muni had giggled at his unblinking recitation of Ahmed Razak’s catchphrase.
“You should enter and try for the car.”
She winked at him. “I have cars already.”
The Munhwɛ boy had reminded her of Ibrahim, rangy and brimming with the muscular energy of youth. Now, she tucked the flyer back in her bag, feeling fresh pain at the prospect of her lover having been in her stall, with Asana.
* * *
“My guy never show?”
Ken shook his head at his supervisor.
“Those Mal’ Atta girls have Charles under a spell. What kind of chook go for four hours?” Sergeant Duah joked about Charles’s longer-than-usual absence.
The two men were moving the pair of metal barricades that made up their checkpoint on the neighborhood border between Tesano and Abeka. They leaned them against a tree off the road along with the plastic chairs they—really Ken—had been keeping watch in all night.
Ken suppressed a growl. He didn’t care what kind of sex Charles was having, or why he was traveling twenty minutes by road to
