When Trouble Sleeps

by Leye Adenle

  ‘That is blackmail.’

  ‘Yes, it is. But is it not better than taking you to a shrine to swear an oath?’

  ‘Prince, this is not what I signed up for.’

  ‘No, it is not. But everything has changed now. You will become Governor of Lagos State, and guns and blackmail are all part of the machinery that will get you there.’

  Another vehicle pulled up behind the gate and honked.

  15

  Amaka took a long drag on her cigarette, threw it to the concrete floor and ground it under her shoe. She searched and found a white button on the left side of the door and pressed it. A dull ding-dong sounded behind the door. Her head was level with the peephole. She moved away. She pressed the bell again, checked her watch, then turned around and looked over the sixth-floor balcony at the low-rise and high-rise buildings of 1004 Estate, home to 1004 households that had locked their doors and bedded down for the night. She looked down. Her Bora was just one of the hundreds of cars under the lamps of the car park. From the other side of the door she could hear footsteps approaching. Someone flicked a switch. Amaka looked down and away from the peephole.

  ‘Who is that?’ came a woman’s voice from behind the door.

  ‘Me,’ Amaka said.

  ‘Who?’

  Amaka tried to disguise her voice. ‘Me, babes.’ Moments passed then she heard a key in the lock, followed bolts sliding.

  The, slim, bespectacled young woman in the doorway wore a white silk housecoat that showed the curves of her breasts and her nipples beneath. Amaka looked up from the woman’s cleavage to the confused face behind thick-rimmed glasses. The woman began to mouth ‘Shit’ and moved to shut the door. Amaka wedged her feet in to stop it shutting. ‘Naomi, please, I just want to talk,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Naomi said. She kept her weight on the door.

  ‘I need your help,’ Amaka said.

  ‘Go away. I already told you, I don’t have anything to say to you. Go away or I’ll call the police.’

  ‘Call the police.’

  Both women kept pushing against the door in a tense and unsteady impasse. A warm breeze blew down the corridor outside, wrapping around Amaka’s ankles. A lone vehicle sped away in the distance on Ozumba Mbadiwe.

  ‘I will shout thief,’ the girl said.

  ‘Malik is looking for me,’ Amaka said. ‘Someone told him about me; that I’m looking for him. Now he’s looking for me.’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’

  ‘I know it wasn’t you, but I need your help. Please, Naomi, let me come in.’

  ‘Just go away. After what you did, why should I help you?’

  ‘I’m sorry about everything. Please let me in.’

  ‘I don’t believe you and I don’t care. I already told you, I am not saying anything to you. You’re going to get me in trouble.’

  ‘He’s going to kill me.’

  Moments passed. The door opened and Amaka looked up at Naomi’s heart-shaped face. Her thick and shaped eyebrows seemed to follow the curve of her prominent cheekbones. Her skin was smooth and shiny. Her large breasts were firm. Amaka had once described them to a male friend and he had asked her if she wanted to fuck the girl. Naomi slowly raised her hands to the housecoat, pulled the white silk over her breasts and stepped aside.

  Amaka walked into the cool parlour. The walls of the duplex flat were white. White Venetian blinds hung over the windows. A white cowhide rug was spread over the white marble floor between two white sofas. In the largest of the many large white picture frames on the wall, Naomi was one of two girls standing, smiling, holding bouquets of flowers on either side of a seated woman with a tiara and a sash that said Miss Nigeria. Naomi’s sash said 1st Runner-up.

  Amaka and Naomi sat opposite one another and stared in silence, both of them recovering from their struggle with the door.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Naomi asked.

  Amaka looked down at herself. Her clothes were rough and stained and only God knew what her hair was doing. ‘I was robbed. I need your help. I need to find The Harem.’

  ‘I already told you, I can’t help you. Nobody knows how to get there. And besides, why would I help you?’

  ‘Do you still work there?’

  Naomi looked away.

  ‘I know he pays you well, but you cannot keep doing this forever. What’s your exit plan? You have a degree in economics, you’re intelligent, you’re beautiful…’

  Naomi put her hand up. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before. Will you give me a job?’

  ‘Naomi, what happened to Florentine can happen to you too.’

  ‘I didn’t even know the girl till you brought her here.’

  ‘But she recognised you at the house and you saw what Ojo did to her there. She showed you the pictures on her phone. Right here, on this sofa. She showed you the pictures. Remember? The way he beat her. Almost killed her.’

  Naomi clasped her hands between her knees and began to rock back and forth.

  ‘Ojo meant to kill her,’ Amaka continued. ‘He almost did. He thought he had. And when he thought she was dead, Malik helped him dump her body on the road.’

  ‘Maybe she stole from him.’

  ‘That gives him permission to beat her up like that? To try to kill her?’

  ‘I’ve already told you, I can’t help you. I can’t do anything. You’ll get me into trouble.’

  ‘Naomi, they tried to kill her, Ojo and Malik, and now they know I’m after them. I have to find The Harem. I’ll protect you. I promise.’

  ‘How? Look, I really don’t know what you think I can do for you. First, you threaten to tell everyone that I’m a prostitute…’

  ‘I only said it to make you talk. I would never have done it.’

  ‘You called me a prostitute, a sex slave. Then you said I was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.’

  ‘I regret saying those things. I only said them because I was desperate to find The Harem.’

  ‘Then you started following me all over Lagos.’

  ‘I tailed you because I was hoping you would lead me to the house.’

  ‘But I told you, the girl also told you, no one knows the way there. We meet at a guesthouse where they pick us up. And it’s a different guesthouse every time and you don’t even know where it’s going to be until it’s time for you to go. And yet you were tailing me all over Lagos. What if they found out? He would have thought I was working with you.’

  Amaka hunched forward. ‘Naomi, the last time we spoke you told me you wouldn’t be doing this if you had a better option. I’m offering you one now. Help me find The Harem and you’ll never have to do what you do ever again. I’ll get you a job with my father. Abroad. He’s an ambassador. I already spoke to him.’

  ‘Your father is an ambassador?’

  ‘Yes. I told him you’re one of my workers at the charity and I want to help you start a career in the foreign service.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘No I’m not. I’m his only child. He’ll do anything for me. I’ll call him and you can talk to him yourself. I protected Florentine, didn’t I? I’ll protect you too.’

  They sat in silence. Naomi alternated between looking at Amaka and looking past her into space. She rocked back and forth on the sofa, twiddling her thumbs.

  ‘How would we even find the place?’ Naomi said. ‘They will know someone is following us. I told you, the place is somewhere in the forest. For the last twenty minutes of the journey there are no other cars.’

  ‘You can use your phone. You just have to send me a message with your GPS location when you are there. I can show you how to do it.’

  ‘I know how to do it. But it won’t work. They take our phones before they take us there and they only give them back when we return.’

  ‘You can sneak it in.’

  ‘They search us.’

  ‘You can put it inside you.’

  ‘Inside, how?’

  ‘You know, inside.�
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  The women looked at each other. Naomi closed her eyes and began to shake her head. ‘No.’ She stood up, still shaking her head, and began to pace between the two sofas. ‘No, no, no,’ she repeated. ‘Look, I already told you, I cannot help you. I do not want to have anything to do with this. Please, you have to leave now. And please, don’t come here again. Leave me alone. Don’t come back. Ever.’

  ‘You saw those pictures on Florentine’s phone,’ Amaka said as she stood up. ‘Think about that. It could be you one day. And one more thing; I will find The Harem, with or without you. And when I do, it would be better for you if you had helped me. I hope you understand. The offer with my father won’t last forever.’

  A white Range Rover Sport stopped on the drive in 1004 Estate. The brake lights of a Bora had come on in a row of parked cars. The man in the Range Rover adjusted the AC, selected a jazz track on the car stereo, and waited for the other car to pull out. His headlights caught the driver’s face. It was a woman. She put her hand up to protect her eyes. As she reversed, the rear of her car came close to the front of his SUV before she engaged the forward gear and drove off. He watched as she turned along the row of parked cars, then when he couldn’t make out her features any longer, he pulled into the space she had vacated.

  He left the engine running and pressed the phone icon on the central console, scrolled through his phone book till he found ‘Naomi Sexy’. As the call rang through the car’s sixteen speakers, he leaned forward to look in the mirror. A light-complexioned face with a trimmed beard looked back at him in the darkness. He dusted a red speck off the shoulder of his black top, straightened the pen in his breast pocket, and sat back. He tapped his manicured fingers rhythmically on the steering wheel.

  A female voice answered: ‘Hello.’

  ‘Are you ready? I’m downstairs,’ he said.

  ‘Give me five minutes,’ Naomi said.

  ‘Hurry up. I have to stop at Osborne Estate on the way.’

  ‘OK. I won’t be long.’

  ‘Hey, who is the chick that drives a silver Bora in your building?’

  ‘In my building?’

  ‘Yes. She just drove away now. Dark, braids, pretty face.’

  ‘What was she wearing?’

  ‘A cream top, I think. You know her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Silver Bora. She was parked right in front of your building.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone that owns a Bora. I’m coming down now.’

  Naomi placed the phone on her dressing table. Her hands were shaking. He saw her; he saw Amaka leaving 1004 but he didn’t recognise her. He didn’t know what she looked like, thank God. What if he’d realised it was her? Coming from her flat?

  She placed her still-shaking hands on her knees and looked in the mirror. She had not had time to do her make-up since Amaka left. She removed her glasses and placed them down next to her contact lenses case; she picked it up, but rather than place the tiny lenses onto her eyeballs, she stared at her now out-of-focus reflection: Naomi, Miss Nigeria Runner-up.

  The first time someone called her Naomi was in Queen’s School in Ibadan. It was the literary and debating day, when they got to invite boys to the girls-only secondary school. She had fixed her hair like the supermodel Naomi Campbell’s, and in place of her glasses, she had used a pair of disposable contact lenses her mum bought on vacation in London. A senior saw her and said she looked just like Campbell. Everyone agreed. She eventually saw it as well and it became her look – at least she decided it would be once she entered university. In the meantime the glasses returned, the Brazilian hair attachment came off, but the name stuck: Naomi. At first it was just a nickname and everyone knew her real name, Mayowa Idowu, but once she gained admission to study Economics at the University of Lagos and she began to introduce herself as Naomi, it became the only name most knew her by.

  Outside the school uniform and regulation hairstyles of secondary school, her looks got her even more attention. Not only was she free to fix Brazilian and Peruvian hair just like the supermodel’s, she could wear make-up, copying the images in Vogue and other magazines. She could also wear heels, and there was no senior to report her to anyone for wiggling her bum – mimicking the way she thought the real Naomi Campbell walked all the time in real life.

  Then her friends convinced her to apply for the Miss Nigeria contest and without thinking she wrote down Naomi as her first name on the registration forms. But the organisers wanted identification. She explained how the name was not her real name and they understood, and they asked her to register again using her real name, but she wanted to keep her new name, so she applied for a quickie passport, paid a bribe, and it became official: First name Mayowa. Surname Idowu. Other names: Naomi.

  She did not win. Her five-foot-nine frame and Naomi Campbell looks lost out to a five-foot-four, bleached-skinned, can’t-speak-a-grammatically-correct-sentence Miss Lagos State – who was not even from Lagos. Everyone knew why Naomi lost, but when she heard it from her mother as well, it sounded more like an accusation than an explanation: ‘Mayowa did not sleep with the judges.’ Everyone knew it; the flabby-armed, dim-witted girl who won did so by sleeping with someone. Maybe not the judges, maybe not even the organisers. Maybe someone in the senate in Abuja, a boss who called the boss of the pageant and told him, ‘My babe must be the winner.’ Everyone knew Naomi should have won. But she didn’t, and after a very short while, everyone knew who Miss Nigeria was, and no one remembered the runner-up.

  A friend was keen to take Naomi to a juju man. The friend said that the juju man would place a curse on the winner to befall her with a scandal that would lose her the crown, or an illness that would end in death, so that Naomi would be given what was rightfully hers. But Naomi did not come from that kind of background. They did not do juju in her family. Her mum was a civil servant who travelled the world attending training courses paid for by the government. Her father, likewise. The children went to good schools and spoke good English. The family lived in their official residence – a three-bedroom duplex in 1004, before the government sold the estate and the developers who bought it cheap turned the hitherto civil servant accommodation into expensive luxury homes.

  The family moved out of Lagos, Naomi stayed behind for University. She entered the pageant and lost, but she had come so close, and for the weeks before and the weeks after, she had lived the world of beauty and luxury and pampering and wealth and had loved it. And one day, knowing fully well what it was, she accepted an invitation to a party in VI for visiting state governors and there she met Malik.

  Was Florentine just like her? Was she also from a decent home? Did she also have good prospects? Could she also have done something different with her life than sucking off rich, fat men old enough to be her father?

  Naomi could see the pictures on Florentine’s phone that day the girl showed them to her. The bruises. The burst-open lips. The eyes swollen shut. It could have been her.

  She pushed the edges of her nightgown off her shoulders and it fell over the stool. As she stood, she picked up her phone from the table, clicked the screen to check for messages, then held down the power button. She wetted her fingers, put them to the lips of her vagina and rubbed. She looked down at the dressing table. Her eyes settled on a tub of Vaseline. She turned and went to the bedside table, opened the drawer and returned to the mirror holding her phone in one hand and a tube of K-Y jelly and a condom in the other.

  16

  Amaka turned onto Oyinkan Abayomi Drive and her headlights illuminated a police van parked across the road. Two police officers armed with assault rifles shielded their eyes. She dipped the lights and waited for them to walk up to her car.

  ‘Good evening, madam,’ the officer by her window said. ‘The road is blocked.’

  ‘My name is Amaka Mbadiwe. I live here. Ambassador Mbadiwe’s residence.’

  ‘Can I see your identification?’

  ‘Identification. My handbag was stolen today. The guard
s can identify me.’

  ‘I see. We are not allowing any vehicles in or out till tomorrow.’

  ‘Can I leave my car here and walk? I just want to pick up some stuff.’

  ‘Madam, we are not allowing anybody to pass.’

  Amaka pulled up in front of Bogobiri House on Maitama Sule Street. The road was dark as there were no streetlights. Cables from electricity and telephone poles criss-crossed above. Generators rumbled behind fences. The gate of the boutique hotel was shut. She left the car running and got out to knock. A sleepy night guard peered through the iron poles of the gate. After Amaka asked about accommodation, he excused himself to fetch the night manager.

  ‘Do you have any rooms available tonight?’ Amaka asked the young man who looked like he’d been woken from sleep.

  The guard began to open the gates at the night manager’s bidding but Amaka stopped them. ‘I just want to know if you have a room available,’ she said.

  ‘Yes ma, we do.’

  ‘How much is it?’

  ‘Twenty-eight thousand, ma.’

  ‘OK. I’ll be back.’

  Amaka got into her car while the employees watched from the poles of the gate.

  Amaka slowed down to turn onto Sanusi Fafunwa Street. As she did, a woman in a tight, black miniskirt and tube top, standing alone at the top of the road, tried to wave her down. On Sanusi Fafunwa Amaka drove past more women, standing alone or in twos, beckoning motorists looking to buy sex.

  She came to a stretch with cars parked on both sides of the road. Here, in front of clubs, bars, casinos, and late-night shawarma spots, the women were concentrated and shared the road with hawkers of cigarettes, sweets, and condoms, and beggars soliciting only from the male customers going in or coming out of the many establishments.

  Amaka pulled into an empty spot. A woman in bum-shorts and a studded bra squeezed between the Bora and the adjacent Range Rover and only turned back when she saw that it was a woman at the wheel.