When Trouble Sleeps

by Leye Adenle

  ‘The room has been paid for by the liaison office. Check your records.’

  ‘But sir, checkout time is twelve, sir.’

  ‘Yes. I did not check out before twelve, so that makes two nights. Paid for.’

  ‘Sir, you checked in the day before.’

  ‘Yes. Late last night.’ He slammed the invoice on her desk.

  The girl leaned in closer to inspect the figures. She struck some keys on her computer and took her time to read what was displayed on the screen, comparing it with the sheet of paper.

  ‘No, sir. I mean ….’

  Ojo snatched the invoice from her and glared at it.

  A short man in a black suit, white shirt and a kente tie appeared beside Ojo.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ he said. ‘My name is Magnanimous. I am the concierge. What seems to be the problem?’

  Ojo looked at his watch. At the date display.

  ‘Are you OK, sir?’ Magnanimous said.

  ‘I have been here for two days?’ Ojo said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Magnanimous said.

  ‘Two days.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have been in the suite for close to forty-eight hours?’

  ‘That is correct. What is the problem?’

  ‘I thought…’

  ‘What, sir?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing. Do you accept dollars?’

  Ojo paid his bill and hurried out to the car park. As he approached his maroon Mercedes, he strained to see if his driver was inside. He would have been waiting for two whole days.

  The driver, a short, thin man in his fifties, ran up to Ojo.

  ‘Oga,’ he said.

  ‘Where were you?’ Ojo asked.

  ‘I was talking to some people there,’ the man said, pointing. ‘We are discussing the plane that crash.’

  ‘Plane crash? What plane crash?’

  ‘Oga, you never hear? One plane like that crash into Chief Adio Douglas house today-o,’ the man said. ‘Less than two hours now. They say he was inside it. They say it is opposition.’

  ‘Douglas? He was in the house?’

  ‘He was in the plane.’

  ‘OK. Wait. You are confusing me. Douglas was in the plane that crashed? What does his house have to do with it?’

  ‘The plane crash into his house.’

  Silence.

  ‘Oga, that is how it happen. He is inside the plane and the plane crash into his house.’

  ‘Who was flying it?’

  ‘Oga, how will I know?’

  Ojo was silent as he dwelt on the unbelievable information. He grabbed his phone before remembering that the SIM card was broken. The girl. Iyabo. Fuck. What did she do to him? Why?

  ‘Anyway,’ Ojo said to the driver. ‘Where did you sleep?’

  ‘Me? Inside the car.’

  ‘When you didn’t see me, why didn’t you come and look for me?’

  ‘Oga, me I do not know your room, now.’

  ‘And you couldn’t call me?’

  ‘No credit on my phone.’

  ‘So, if something had happened to me, you would just stay out here forever?’

  ‘Me I know that you are OK, sir.’

  ‘You knew I was OK? How?’

  ‘Madam phone me.’

  ‘Madam? Matilda called?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday like that kind 5 o’clock.’

  ‘AM or PM?’

  ‘Early morning. She say that I shoul’ call her when we leave the hotel.’

  ‘How did she know we were at the hotel?’

  ‘Maybe you tell her, sir.’

  ‘You are mad. Did you tell her?’

  ‘No o.’

  ‘So how did she know?’

  ‘I don’t know o.’

  ‘She didn’t ask you?’

  ‘No. She said that when we leave, I shoul’ call her.’

  ‘What exactly did she say? And what did you say?’

  ‘Oga, I have told you. She said, ‘Abiodun, when you are leaving the hotel, call me and give the phone to your oga.’’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I told her I don’t have credit.’

  8

  Three black Toyota SUVs with blacked-out windows turned off Coker Road, tyres screeching, onto Ilaka Street in Mushin, close to Ikeja. The cars stopped in front of a single-storey house with a white fence topped with glistening barbed wire and plastered with two different posters showing the face of the same clean-shaven, gap-toothed, smiling man with a raised fist. On one of the posters he was in a white agbada and an abeti aja cap, in the other he wore a grey suit and nothing to hide his bald head. Above both portraits were the words ‘Dr. Adeniyi Hope Babalola’, and below them, ‘Hope for Lagos’, followed by details of his party. Two police officers standing in front of the black gates swung their rifles forward and held them ready as they watched the cars.

  The first SUV was still moving when a tall albino man with translucent, short hair jumped out of the back and onto the road. He was dressed in a grey safari suit and brown leather shoes. On his left wrist, a gold Rolex Daytona; in his right hand, a two-way radio. It was dark, but he wore sunshades. He marched round the front of the car. The police officers opened the gates and he entered, ignoring the three Alsatian dogs that ran forward growling and barking.

  He tried the handle on the front door, then he banged his fist on the bulletproof panel. Moments later it opened.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked.

  The shirtless young man in the doorway stepped aside.

  The gubernatorial candidate was standing in the middle of the staircase in a purple jalabiya, his hand on the banister, body turned sideways with his legs on separate steps as if ready to retreat. ‘Yellowman, what are you doing here?’ Babalola said. He sounded as scared as he looked.

  ‘We have to leave now,’ Yellowman said.

  The shirtless man looked at Babalola.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Babalola asked.

  ‘To Prince.’

  ‘OK. Let me change.’

  ‘There is no time. We have to leave now.’

  9

  ‘We are coming from the hospital,’ Chief Ojo said from the back of the Mercedes as Abiodun drove towards his house in Chevron Estate.

  He had to have a good explanation for his more-than-one-day absence, but without his phone with which to co-opt an accomplice for an alibi, and without knowledge of how his wife knew he’d been at the hotel, he had been unable to come up with a lie that sounded half-convincing, even to him. He was in some sort of robbery; they took his phone – it would be easier to explain a stolen phone than a broken SIM card. He remembered the missing memory card and his heart skipped a beat.

  He fetched his phone and put it in the seat pocket in front of him. He ended up in the hospital, but without any money to pay the bill… He fetched his wallet and the money he had on him and tucked them in the seat pocket… they wouldn’t let him leave the hospital because he didn’t have any money and… No. Matilda knew he was at the hotel.

  He was attacked. Armed robbers. It was a sophisticated robbery. He was just leaving from a meeting with an important diplomat when they accosted him on the corridor. At the hotel. Men – they had to be men. They were dressed smartly in business suits. They pointed a gun at him and took him into a room – they had a key card and they took his phone and money and tied him up. No. They sprayed something in his face that rendered him unconscious. At least that bit was true – he had been unconscious.

  He looked up. His eyelids retracted as the realisation hit him. That was it. That was what really happened. He was drugged by the girl.

  Matilda was seeing off a neighbour when Ojo’s car pulled into his compound. Ojo greeted the woman from two houses away and had almost made it to the door when Matilda said, ‘Come here.’

  With Abiodun, the driver, standing there, and the neighbour not quite four metres away on the other side of the gate, Matilda held her
phone to Ojo’s face and said, ‘Look at yourself.’

  Ojo felt sick in his stomach. On his wife’s phone was a photograph of a man asleep. It looked like him. It was him. He had never seen himself asleep before. A naked girl was on top of him. From the angle of the picture and the position of her hand, she, the naked girl, had taken the picture. Her face was out of shot, but her bare breasts were pressed against his chest. He went to take the phone from his wife, to get a better look, but Matilda held it away.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ she said and she slipped the phone through the neck of her blouse into her bra. ‘I don’t want to hear anything. You have disgraced yourself for the last time. My father wants to see you right away.’

  ‘Matilda…’

  She put up her hand to shut him up. She brushed past him and went into the house, leaving him standing with Abiodun.

  ‘Madam has vexed o,’ the driver said.

  Ojo slapped him just as Matilda slammed the front door shut.

  ‘Take me to Baba’s house,’ Ojo said and he climbed into the back seat of the Mercedes.

  How did she get the picture? Did she also have the memory card? Had she seen what was on it? That would be very bad. Very, very bad. Maybe it was a setup – by the girl, Iyabo. He groaned. What had Matilda told Otunba Oluawo, the Lion of Yoruba land? She was his only daughter. Otunba, a senator in the second republic and a recurring decimal in all administrations since then, both military and civilian, was a man to fear. Even at eighty he was still handpicking senators and ministers and firing governors at will. He was not called the godfather of godfathers for nothing. A young politician once made the mistake of referring to the ageing politician as a relic of colonial times. The gentleman was a senator then. Otunba called to ask who his godfather was. The senator told a reporter about the private phone call and boasted of how he had replied that he had no godfathers. He went on the record, in print, to denounce the ‘manipulative, selfish Nigerian concept of godfatherism that allows ageing gangsters, for want of a better description, to place unconstitutional quid-pro-quo burdens on people they manoeuvre into office.’ He declared that he was not going to be one of those young men who fall prey to ‘the greed of such unscrupulous dinosaurs whose interference in the political system has held Nigeria back.’

  Two days later the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission – EFCC – invited the man for a meeting, detained him for four days, and when his lawyer took to the papers to lament the unconstitutional treatment of his client, the EFCC filed corruption charges just as the man’s party disowned him and the president stopped taking his calls.

  Now, Otunba had asked to see Ojo on the same day his daughter showed Ojo a picture of himself in bed with a girl. She had reported him to daddy.

  Even though Ojo was Otunba’s only son-in-law, Ojo was not part of the inner circle. He was a husband, not a son. This was what Matilda’s eldest brother told him when he mentioned his ambition to run for the House of Representatives and asked how best to seek the old man’s help. And so it had always been; Ojo was married to the only daughter of one of the most powerful politicians in the country, if not the most powerful, but the matrimony did not translate to direct manna; he still had to work for his money. He used his father-in-law’s name to gain access to certain corridors of power where the doorkeepers were important enough to influence the awarding or quick processing of government contracts. All that, it now seemed, was about to come to an end. And God knows what the brothers would also do after the father had had his piece of flesh. And what if they got to see what was on the memory card? He felt sick again.

  10

  In a room in a white mansion on Banana Island, in pitch darkness and near total silence, a man shouted, ‘Nobody move!’

  A dog barked outside in the distance. Inside in the room, somebody coughed, cleared their throat, and coughed again. A phone began to buzz and then stopped. Outside, a generator roared before a metallic lid closed with a clank, reducing the noise to little more than a murmur. Seconds later the lights in the room came on and the air conditioner hummed back to life and its vents resumed their slow oscillations.

  ‘You can continue now,’ Prince Ambrose Adepoju said.

  It was a large parlour with eight two-seater sofas arranged in a square. Men in native outfits were seated and other men in casual clothes stood behind the sofas. In the middle, on the Persian rug, two men in white kaftans sat in front of three large Ghana-must-go bags so full with bundles of naira notes they could not be zipped shut. Another man knelt by the money while a fourth, similarly dressed, sat with his legs to one side of an open briefcase that had neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills in it. By his side he had a stack of more dollars and he picked out another bundle from the briefcase, held it in his left hand, licked the thumb of his right, and with his fingers, began counting the money. He went through the wad in less than twenty seconds, placed it on the stash by his leg, and went for another bundle.

  Ambrose was sat leaning forward on a sofa directly in front of the man by the briefcase, keeping his eyes on the counting through thick-rimmed glasses with lenses that made his eyeballs look twice their size. He was in his sixties. He had a large grey untameable beard and his Afro grew out around a gleaming bald patch in the middle of his head. He puffed incessantly on a pipe clamped between his in-turned lips and with the fingers of his right hand, he counted the blue coral beads of the bracelet round his left wrist.

  The double doors to the room opened. Ambrose looked over the rims of his glasses as Yellowman and Dr. Adeniyi Hope Babalola walked in. Babalola, the party’s candidate, looked around at the men, the ones on the floor, the bags of naira notes, and the briefcase of dollar bills. His uncertain eyes settled on Ambrose. Nobody spoke.

  The man on the floor counting the money picked the last bundle of dollars from the briefcase and flicked through the notes in seconds. He placed the rest of the money by his side and straightened his back.

  ‘Is it all there?’ Ambrose asked the black market money changer.

  ‘Yes. You want to count?’ the Hausa man asked, gesturing to the bags of naira.

  ‘No. You may leave. Same time tomorrow, come with double the amount. Only big notes.’

  The money changer and his colleagues shared the dollars amongst themselves, hid the money under their clothes, and left, leaving behind the bags of naira they had brought.

  Ambrose stood up from his chair. He was a little over five feet tall. The other men stood also. He walked to Babalola and Yellowman.

  ‘What is this?’ Babalola asked.

  ‘An emergency party meeting. Haven’t you heard what happened?’

  ‘Did we have anything to do with it?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘But what’s all this money for? Where is it from?’

  ‘Mobilisation. You don’t need to know where it’s from.’

  ‘With all due respect, when I agreed to run, I made it clear that it would have to be a clean campaign. What do we need mobilisation for? Who are we mobilising?’

  ‘Everything has changed, my boy. For one, you need protection. They are saying you killed your opponent. You are staying with me from now on. Come with me.’

  They walked out of the room into an adjoining parlour also full of party members, then into an unlit corridor with a window overlooking the front of the compound. The curtains were open, allowing moonlight to pour in through the glass.

  ‘Before tonight,’ Ambrose said, ‘I had more chance of becoming the next president of America than you had of winning the election. You know it too. You are a divorcee. We have never elected a divorcee in Lagos. And you are from abroad. An outsider. But still I said I would support you. You know why? Because I have a vision.’

  Yellowman walked behind them.

  ‘You were just not eligible. You were not right enough or popular enough to rig the election for you. Yes, you heard me. I agreed that it would be a clean campaign, no rigging, because there was no point. No matter ho
w much we spent, you were just not well known enough.’ He stopped in the middle of the dark corridor, in front the window.

  ‘You see, rigging is a necessity. If you don’t rig, your opponent would still rig, so you have to rig just to counter their own rigging, and in the end, one person wins and the other goes to court to challenge the outcome of the election.’

  ‘But you can only rig an election if the candidate is popular in the first place. Or at least more popular than the opponent. If you won against Douglas, may his soul rest in peace, the amount of people that would riot would be enough to convince any judge to declare a rerun without even looking at the evidence. You just wouldn’t stand a chance. The plan was that by the next election you would have become a known name. We would have had to rig even if you were the people’s popular choice. Do you think the opposition will just sit down and watch you get all the votes? They will do something, so we also have to do something, so that at the end of the day, their ojoro and our ojoro will cancel each other out and the real votes of the people would count. That is how democracy works.

  ‘But all that has changed. Now we have a real chance at this thing. You can really be the next Governor of Lagos State.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘I know so. This close to the election, they won’t have time for primaries. They have to announce a candidate very soon.’

  ‘Alhaji Hassan?’

  ‘No. Douglas beat him in the primaries. It won’t be somebody who already competed and lost in the party primaries. They have to choose someone new; someone who can claim the votes that would have gone to Douglas. Someone close to him. Someone popular.’

  11

  Abiodun pulled up behind a row of cars in front of Peace Lodge, Otunba Oluawo’s mansion in Osborne Foreshore estate, in Ikoyi. The fence of the property extended the length of the street. There were cars on both sides of the road. Ojo suspected that it had something to do with the crashed plane – Otunba was the trump card behind the man’s party. That the old man could spare the time to see Ojo during such a crisis increased Ojo’s apprehension. Perhaps he would reveal Ojo and his daughter’s divorce in front of all his political associates, thus ensuring Ojo became a total pariah.