by Toni Kan
‘How is your son?’ Abel asked Ada as they made the turn from Adekunle onto Third Mainland Bridge.
‘Fine. His name is Zeal.’
‘Zeal. Soni gave his son an English name?’ Soni had rebelled against his name, Sunderland, changing it to Soni the moment he could.
‘Zeal is not an English name. It is short for Zealinjo. Flee from evil.’
‘Oh, sorry about that,’ Abel said recalling at that moment that Soni had actually sent him a text with all the names and had even asked him to propose one. ‘Do you think he knows what is going on? The fact that his father is missing?’
‘Not really. You know your brother used to travel a lot. But I’m sure he can feel that this trip is different. I don’t think Zeal is too young to realise that this trip has lasted a bit too long.’
‘Thank God for innocence,’ Abel said. ‘What are the police saying?’
‘They say they are investigating.’ Abel thought she heard her voice break. ‘I haven’t given them any money in the past few days and I think they are slacking.’
‘What did they do when they were not slacking?’ he asked, without meaning to. ‘Don’t mind me. I tend to voice my thoughts.’
‘You also tend to write them out,’ she said, looking at him.
‘Ada, you look more beautiful when you are angry.’ He laughed and tried to change the topic, but she kept staring at him with a face that mirrored her rage. ‘We have had this conversation before,’ he said finally.
‘Yes, and we were interrupted when Soni walked in. You think every girl you meet in a club is a prostitute?’
‘I never said that.’
‘But you implied it. My parents are both lecturers, like you. PhD holders. My two siblings are medical doctors. You don’t know me,’ she said with feeling.
‘I agree and I am sorry. That letter was meant for my brother.’ His eyes went from her face to the road. It was a Sunday afternoon and traffic was light. Still, he didn’t want her taking her eyes off the road for too long.
She sighed as she turned off the bridge. They drove in silence for the rest of the trip from Dolphin Estate into Osborne, past Kingsway Road, on to Falomo, down to Ozumba Mbadiwe and the new toll plaza, all the way to the magnificent mansion Soni had erected just off Admiralty Way in Lekki Phase 1.
‘You should stay in his room. My nanny is in your room.’
‘My room?’
‘Yes, your room. Soni made it especially for you but I brought her up when your brother went missing. I needed company here in the family wing,’ she said pushing a door open.
The room was large and done up in white and black. It had a masculine feel; a man cave. Abel could see Soni in every detail, right down to the cursive above the headboard: 9 inches is here!
The marauding dick had finally found a home.
‘You are sure you are OK with this?’ Abel asked turning to look at her.
‘Well, there is a connecting door to my room. I am OK so long as you keep it locked. If you keep the key in the lock, I can’t open it from my end. So it’s OK.’
‘Thank you.’ He sat on the bed.
‘You are welcome. His clothes are in the closet. You guys wear the same size. You may need them because you will be meeting important people.’
‘And my clothes won’t be good enough,’ Abel said before he realised what he was saying.
‘I don’t mean it that way, but Soni is always giving away his clothes. I would prefer they went to family.’
‘I’m family?’ Abel began before he caught himself mid-sentence. ‘Cool.’
She opened her mouth as if to speak, thought better of it, and made for the door. But then she stopped mid-stride, her hand on the doorknob, and began to speak, her back turned to him.
‘We need money to eat and pay drivers, house helps and other domestic staff, as well as staff in the office. They haven’t been paid for the last month. I will call Santos. He will take you around. He used to follow Soni around. He knows everyone and has been helping draw up names and leads for the police. He will come in tomorrow morning. I will give you all the cheque books and account numbers. But first you have to see the lawyer to help you sort out issues at the probate registry.’
‘OK.’ Abel suddenly felt overwhelmed by it all. Two days earlier he was just a lecturer eking out a precarious existence in a hovel in Asaba. Now he was in a mansion in Lagos, wondering what had shifted in the foundation of things.
‘Bring Zeal,’ he said. ‘Let me play with my son.’
‘My son,’ she said and walked out.
WAIT AND SEE
Santos came early the next morning. He used to ride around shotgun with Soni because, as Abel got to learn, his brother never trusted anyone enough to drive him. That was why, on the day he disappeared, they found his car in a ditch in Shomolu, the engine running, the speakers blaring Fela.
Abel remembered Santos as Ikechukwu, a snotty-nosed kid who loved biscuits and used to spend his holidays with them. He was a cousin of sorts who had lost his mother at an early age and ended up being passed around a cast of uncles and aunts. They called him Ten Biscuits because once, while on holiday at their house, he had gone begging for biscuits from a neighbour who ran a small supermarket. Two silly boys who lived down the road had told Ikechukwu that they would give him ten biscuits if he allowed them to smear a hot Chinese balm on his eyes. Ikechukwu agreed. His screams had alerted the neighbours, who rushed out to administer first aid.
After his eyes had been washed clean and he could identify the boys, they discovered that Ikechukwu had been clutching the sodden biscuits in his palm, all the while.
‘Ten Biscuits!’ Abel yelled as Santos sauntered into the living room where he was watching CNN.
‘Bros, easy o,’ he whispered in Abel’s ear as they hugged. ‘My name is now Santos o.’
‘Santos, Santos,’ he said as their embrace broke.
‘Welcome, bros. You have been suffering in Asaba when your brother is a king in Lagos,’ he said in Igbo.
‘I have come to my brother’s kingdom,’ Abel countered, and they both laughed.
‘Welcome bros. Where are you going today? Iyawo say we get many places to go today,’ Santos said, switching to pidgin.
Abel told him he needed to go to the lawyer, then to the bank to see whether he could free up the account and get some money. That was paramount.
‘No yawa,’ Santos said. ‘Bros Sabato has plenty accounts but I will take you to the banks where there is plenty money.’
Sorting out the legal issues took days and by the sixth, Abel was tired and broke and frustrated. According to the bank, Soni was missing, not dead, so it was difficult to invoke the power of next of kin.
So, back and forth to the lawyers Abel went. An affidavit was sworn, documents were provided, letters were written, but at the end of the day it was Santos who came up with a bit of peculiar Lagos wisdom that helped them make headway.
‘Bros, I no sure say this your court matter go work o,’ Santos told him as they left the lawyer’s office that morning. ‘Sabato is still missing so e go hard. Let’s go to one of the bank managers I know and offer him something. He will let us have some money to run things until we sort out the court wahala.’
The bank manager was a smallish, fair-skinned man in a well-cut suit. His fingers were manicured and coated with transparent nail polish. His shoes gleamed and he had the air of someone who liked to look good; the kind of person who bought his clothes based on what models were wearing in the glossy spreads of GQ or Vogue.
But the moment he spoke, Abel saw it all fall away. He had a thick accent that Abel immediately placed as Bendel, the old name for what used to be Delta and Edo states. It was the thick residual accent of a boy who grew up in the village before fate thrust him into Lagos.
As he spoke Abel looked at his hands again, at the fingers he kept clasping and unclasping. They were peasant’s fingers masked with a patina of gentility. They were the hands of a man who had grown
up on a farm and who, having escaped, would do everything to never go back.
Abel knew people like him. He met them first at the university. They would arrive as bush and timid as they came, but by the second semester they would be affecting an annoying American accent. Their voices, with the fake accent and half-realised drawl, always reminded him of someone with body odour, the kind that remains long after the person has left the room.
‘So, you want some money and you don’t wanna wait for the legal processes to be completed, is that what you are saying?’ he asked, his beady eyes flipping from Abel to Santos.
‘Basically, yes,’ Abel answered.
‘That’s not legal, you know. We could all get into trouble.’
‘Bros, na help we need,’ Santos butted in, all solicitous and Lagos-like. It was something Abel would come to recognise: a tone of voice and posture that said, dude, I know I am begging but you can’t say no.
‘Help us and my bros here go also make sure say something drop. We know say Sabato has a huge sum in your bank. The last statement you sent showed say he has one hundred and thirty-two million naira here, abi?’
The bank manager smiled as if impressed. Abel was impressed that Santos had that figure.
‘So, imagine say you give us ten million. My bros here go drop one point five million for you; that’s a cool 15 per cent. So, anytime we need money, we will show and it’s the same arrangement all over,’ Santos told him, switching fluidly from pidgin to English.
‘Una no fit make am 25 per cent?’ the bank manager asked, all pretences at Americanese gone. His small eyes shone with greed. ‘I gotta sort out other people,’ he added when he caught the look on Abel’s face.
‘Bros, Sabato get plenty money for different banks. If you don’t accept our 15 per cent we will go to another bank,’ Santos told him without frills, his gaze level with the bank manager’s.
Silence stretched the moment for a few seconds before the bank manager cracked a smile and stretched out his hand.
‘Kai, dis bros you harsh,’ he said regressing to his origins. ‘Give me a few days to sort this out. I will give you a call once it’s ready. You have a card?’
Abel shook his head and wrote down his phone number on a bright pink sticky-note pad on the manager’s table.
‘Thanks guys,’ the bank manager said as he opened the door to his office. ‘I will give you a call.’
In the car Abel turned to look at Santos.
‘Bros, corruption is another name for Lagos,’ Santos said before Abel could find the words he was looking for. ‘Nobody come Lagos to count bridge. You help me, I help you – everyone happy. The guy is taking serious risk and we are paying for the risk. But look am well; we get money to run things, e get something for him wahala. Everybody is happy.’
‘If I had gone alone, I would never have known how to do that,’ Abel said, still amazed at how easily Santos had pushed forward with the proposal.
‘No shame for Lagos, o. If you shame hunger go kill you, bros. That’s one thing I learn from Bros Sabato and that manager: no dey play with him cut. Na deal man be dat.’
‘You knew him before now?’ Abel asked.
‘Yes o. Sabato is a special customer and he told me this funny gist about the manager.’ Santos switched from pidgin to Igbo like a crazy driver veering from lane to lane.
The story was about Soni and an old friend, someone with whom he had done a job. When the money was paid, it was routed through the same bank manager, although he was just the head of operations at a small branch at the time. It wasn’t much – a mere three million naira – but it was a lot back then because Soni and his friend were just starting out.
The manager had packed the cash into two Ghana-must-go bags, and spread out on the table was three hundred thousand naira, which he believed was his cut – a cool 10 per cent.
But there was trouble brewing: getting greedy, Soni’s friend had called ahead and persuaded the bank manager not to split the remaining two million seven hundred thousand equally. So, when they arrived, Soni’s bag had one million two hundred, while the other guy’s had one million five hundred thousand naira.
‘Bros, you should have seen the fight,’ Santos said, getting into the story as if he had been there. ‘Sabato didn’t waste any time in attacking his friend. There was blood everywhere by the time mobile policemen came in to break them up. It was the mobile policemen who saved the day. They almost sacked the guy but Sabato said he was happy how the guy quickly shared out the money equally and asked them to leave. So, when money came bros made sure he remained loyal to the bank manager. That’s why I said we should come and see him. I know he likes money and he and Sabato go back a long way
—
Soni’s office was in Apapa, off Creek Road and close to the wharf. He had a staff of about twelve. Abel addressed them later that morning in the tastefully furnished conference room. Though he was a lecturer and quite used to speaking, it felt strange sitting there with men and women seated around the table, some as old as his parents, hanging on to his every word.
It felt surreal as he signed cheques running into millions to cover admin costs and pay salaries for all staff members when his own salary was nothing to write home about. It all needed getting used to but there was no time to adjust. He was diving headlong into things.
Back at home, he was surprised to find that they needed close to a quarter of a million naira to keep the house running.
‘Soni gives me two hundred thousand as a monthly housekeeping allowance,’ Ada told him when he expressed shock. Abel was too ashamed to tell her that that was close to his salary for three months.
It was a strange feeling having all that money and being in control of it. Stranger still was being able to spend hundreds of thousands in one day and not wake up in the middle of the night terrified that you had done something stupid to imperil yourself.
With money, he could also rev up the search for his missing brother and take it farther than Ada had. After all, that was the main reason why he was in Lagos.
‘I know somebody for Area C,’ Santos told him one morning.
‘But the case na for Panti,’ Abel told him.
‘I know bros, but police is police and it’s the same language they all speak.’
A stranger in Lagos, Abel was beginning to relax about letting Santos steer him around, even though he had a niggling feeling that Santos wasn’t doing it just to be helpful. Abel sensed that there was something else at play, but he pushed the thought aside, putting it down to the fact that Lagos was beginning to make him paranoid.
The Area C police station was a charred ruin. At the entrance to the station, two burnt motorcycles sat like gargoyles in front of a medieval cathedral while burnt vehicles littered the station grounds like fallen soldiers. Inside, Abel and Santos met two bored-looking policemen; a fat one and a thin one.
Abel was actually surprised to find a thin policeman who was not a rookie. He always thought of Nigerian policemen as corpulent and shifty-eyed men in dirty uniforms trying to ensnare you.
The fat one was dressed in a white buba and sokoto and kept nodding off as they made enquiries. Santos couldn’t find the phone number of the officer they had come to see so they decided to wait for him.
‘Inspector Agboola will soon come in. I think he is IPO on a case that went to court today. I have sent him a text,’ the fat guy told them and immediately nodded off.
Abel sat on the tall stool they had been offered as Santos told him the story of how the station came to be the charred ruin it was. It had been razed by soldiers following an altercation with policemen who had arrested and detained a soldier for a minor traffic offence. The angry soldiers had taken the station hostage, freed their colleague and torched the building.
‘This place was like a war zone that day. Soldiers, their head is not correct o.’
A woman selling gala and coke passed by and Abel, who had left home without breakfast, waved her over. Santos declined. Abel o
rdered for himself and the two policemen. He stared, amazed, at how the fat guy could chew and snore at the same time.
‘Why do you want to see Inspector Agboola,’ the thin guy asked with his mouth full. The drink and sausage rolls had made him amiable.
‘My brother is missing. They found his car in a ditch with music on, but he was gone. It’s almost a month now.’
‘What kind of car was he driving?’
‘A Jaguar.’
‘That’s not a small car. What does he do for a living?’
‘Business,’ Santos piped up. He didn’t want Abel providing the wrong answer.
‘Business, eh?’ the policeman said, looking at Santos. ‘Well, that’s what usually happens to businessmen in this Lagos. That’s what happens to Lagos Big Boys.’
He raised his Coke to his lips, took a long sip, swished it around his mouth and swallowed loudly.
‘This kind of case can be difficult to solve,’ he continued. ‘If he had gone missing after boarding a commercial bus, we would say One Chance or kidnappers or we can attribute it to some talismanic occurrence. But when a man goes missing from his luxury car, hmmm, water don pass garri.’
‘He must be dead,’ the fat policeman said and Abel jumped, startled by his deep voice. ‘Or has there been a ransom demand?’
‘No,’ Abel said. ‘No demands.’
‘No demands, hmmm. That means that it is not a kidnap and if it is not a kidnap that means that the people who took him knew why they took him; to take him out of the picture. Abi, your brother and madam dey get problems? You think the man has run away from his troublesome wife?’
‘No. They don’t have issues like that,’ Santos said.
‘Like how then?’ the thin guy asked.
‘They usually have normal husband and wife issues, that’s all,’ Santos offered quickly. ‘My bros like babes and babes can cause trouble at home.’ With policemen, you didn’t give open-ended answers; they were always pouncing on what one left unsaid.
‘If you drive a Jaguar, babes won’t be your problem,’ the fat guy said. Abel was impressed. Even though he had been nodding off he had managed to soak everything in. ‘Anyway, if you ask me I will say it will be a miracle for your brother to be found. Businessmen pile up two things in this Lagos: money and enemies. This looks like his enemies got him. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s wait and see what Panti people come up with.’ He stopped to pick up his ringing phone. ‘Inspector, OK, OK. I will tell them. No wahala.’
