Easy Motion Tourist

by Leye Adenle

  Amaka shook my hand and shook it again. She placed her hand on my shoulder and pulled me away from his face. I relaxed the fist I’d formed and I left with her.

  As we stepped out of the station, police officers watching us, the interior of a black Volkswagen Jetta lit up and its tail lights flashed. She hurried to the car, opened the door for me, got into the driver’s seat, fired up the engine, and did a two point turn faster than I’d ever seen one done. Then she charged at the uneven ground and turned onto Ahmadu Bello without checking that the road was clear. The engine wailed. I didn’t realise we’d been driving up the wrong way until at the turning by the infamous glass building she pulled across onto the other side. She looked in the rear-view mirror as if she expected us to be followed.

  Nothing made sense. Was I a free man now? I studied her side profile. She was concentrating on our getaway. Who was she? Who sent her to get me? Where was she taking me?

  ‘Did Ade send you?’ Maybe my absentee minder had tried to contact me at the hotel, found that I was missing, and launched a manhunt that somehow led to Inspector Ibrahim’s police station.

  ‘Yes.’

  She answered too quickly.

  ‘Ade from the British High Commission?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A chill crept over my skin.

  ‘Stop the car.’ I got ready to open the door and jump out.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. Stop the fucking car.’ I undid my seat belt and turned to her in a provocative manner. I would wrestle her for whatever weapon she had hidden under her skirt.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are not from Ade. He didn’t send you. Stop the fucking car or else.’ She was working with Inspector Ibrahim. They were kidnapping me after all.

  ‘Or else what? You want to go back there? You just witnessed a policeman murder a detainee. You really want to go back there?’

  She was right. But, who the hell was she? ‘Stop the car or tell me who you are.’ I felt slightly ashamed that I was ready to pounce and fight her if I had to.

  ‘My name is Amaka. I work for a charity that works with prostitutes. One of the girls I work with told me that a foreign journalist was arrested outside Ronnie’s. I came to get you out.’

  It sounded rehearsed. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll explain everything later. First, we have to get to your hotel and check you into another room.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I lied to Ibrahim to get you out. He’ll soon figure out that I tricked him and he’ll come looking for you.’

  I wasn’t convinced but she was driving towards Eko Hotel. Once there, I would call the British High Commission and be on the next flight out of Nigeria.

  15

  A black Toyota Land Cruiser rolled down Falomo Bridge and turned at the roundabout onto Awolowo Road. Knockout – a five-foot tall man whose dark leathery skin was stretched by his prominent chin and cheekbones – was driving. He had not found the controls to adjust the seat so he perched on the edge, his toes just grazing the pedals, and he watched out for police checkpoints.

  Go-Slow, who at seven-foot tall dwarfed his companion, was kneeling backwards in the passenger seat. His feet, crossed, touched the windscreen and his back pressed into the ceiling. He was cleaning blood off the rear seats and the windows and the headrest. It was everywhere. He found a box of tissues on the dashboard and spread blood over the beige leather upholstery until the perfumed sheets broke into useless red clumps. He looked at the blood gathered under his nails and cursed. The night before, his wife had spent an hour giving him a manicure while he watched Arsenal being thrashed. She was right about Knockout: he would get them into trouble one day.

  ‘How far?’ Knockout said.

  ‘Just drive.’

  Maybe he should strangle the fool himself and set the car on fire with his little body in it. He wanted them to ditch the car but the moron wouldn’t listen. They had killed before, but what they just did was wrong and it was all because of that conversation they’d had a week ago with Catch-Fire.

  When they learned that the bus stop pickpocket was spending dollar bills at beer parlours on Lagos Island, they remembered the money he owed them. They found his new home and he settled his debt in hundred dollar bills. He boasted of his new business that involved juju and human sacrifice and said he’d graduated beyond their ranks. Knockout spent a week ranting about Catch-Fire.

  They’d met earlier that day at CMS and walked to Dolphin Estate where Knockout stood at the foot of a bridge, holding up a strip of mobile phone recharge cards, while Go-Slow hid with their guns in a nearby bush. A woman in a Land Cruiser stopped to buy recharge cards and Go-Slow got into the seat next to her. They threw her shoes into the bush, searched her handbag for her address, and said they would come for her if she went to the police.

  They changed the number plates and drove to Sanusi Fafunwa because Knockout wanted to take a girl home. Before they parked, a woman was walking towards them, adjusting her red miniskirt, and rearranging her breasts inside her tight bra. She leaned into the window to haggle.

  ‘Two K,’ Knockout said.

  ‘Five,’ she said.

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Is it both of you?’

  ‘No. Just me.’

  ‘OK.’

  She got into the back, shut the door, and pulled out a rusty revolver from her clutch bag.

  ‘Bastards. Drive.’

  Her gang were waiting round the corner by the Law School. She waved the gun from one hoodlum to the other, wondering why they just stared at her. Then she gently placed the revolver on the seat and slowly raised her hands, unable to dodge this way or that way from the barrels of both their guns pointed at her belly.

  Knockout jumped over his seat and started hitting her on the head with her own weapon. She shouted for help and Go-Slow put his big palm over her face, wrapped his other hand around her neck, and twisted.

  Cars drove by and girls walked past but the tinted glass hid what was going on inside. Go-Slow unfolded his arms and her body slumped onto the seat.

  Her shirt had torn and her breasts were exposed. Knockout’s face lit up. He pulled out a jack-knife from his knee-length boot and flicked the blade out in a move he had been practicing in front of his mirror. He tore off the rest of the girl’s shirt and brought his dagger down on her chest in a massive blow that punctured through flesh and bone. He wriggled the blade free and went at it again. Go-Slow, with the unblinking interest of someone stoned, watched, thinking that his partner might have snorted too much cocaine before they met. When Knockout held the girl’s warm heart in his hand, he expected him to take a bite from it but instead he said, ‘Let’s go and find that morafucker, Catch-Fire.’

  The light of an electric torch flickered ahead. Knockout tapped his partner’s leg and shifted his foot from the accelerator to the brake. Go-Slow turned and saw the checkpoint. He sat back in his seat and cleaned his hands with the last tissue from the box. It was no use. He wiped them on the bottom of his trousers then rolled up his sleeves and checked for spots of blood on his shirt.

  The police had stopped a yellow Hummer ahead. A hand with a clenched fist reached out of the car’s window. A policeman took whatever was in it, put it into his own pocket and waved the Hummer on.

  Knockout inched forward. He stopped between two worn tyres set on both sides of the road. The kerosene lamps that balanced on them had run out of fuel. He looked at Go-Slow’s shirt. He had taken off his own and noted with relief that blood had not seeped into the black vest underneath. He pulled the vest over the pistol in his belt then he pressed the button to roll down the tinted window.

  An albino officer with transparent bristles on his cheeks peered into the car through the little gap Knockout had made. He pointed his torch at the driver’s face and Knockout held up his hand.

  ‘Ol’ boy, don’t shine that thing in my face,’ Knockout said.

  The policeman withdrew his torch. The car was new and it was big, so
the occupants could be men who would make trouble for him. He wanted to take a closer look at the driver’s face. He knew what big men look like and the man who had told him to take his torch away did not look like a big man. But in Ikoyi, anybody could be somebody. He placed his palm on the driver’s door and turned to search for his boss.

  The higher-ranking officer was standing on the sidewalk, leaning on a Kalashnikov he used as a walking stick, watching his men work. The Hummer had yielded only fifty naira so he had sworn at the young constable who spoke to the driver, called him the ‘bastard son of a prostitute witch,’ and commanded his officers to make sure the jeep dropped ‘something big’. He told them: ‘Make sure you check their fire extinguisher and blow it. If it is liquid type, it is illegal. Check their c-caution if the face don scratch. Check their spare tyre – poke it, if it is too soft. If they have laptop, ask for the receipt. If you find any file or any documents inside the car, ask them for release note wey dem take carry am commot office.’

  The boss looked at the driver of the four-by-four.

  ‘What is the problem?’ Knockout said.

  The policeman was waiting for his superior officer to nod or shake his head. ‘Oga, no problem, just take am easy.’

  ‘Are you mad? You are telling me to take it easy? You must be a fool.’

  The officer took his hand from the car and stood almost at attention. He cast a glance back at his boss, who looked away.

  ‘Sorry sir,’ he said and waved them on.

  When the checkpoint was out of sight, Go-Slow used the sides of his palms to scrape blood off the rear seats – it was everywhere. They had been lucky this time but there would be more checkpoints on the mainland and the police there wouldn’t be afraid of drivers with big cars. His eyes fell on Knockout’s discarded shirt in the rear footwell and he reached for it.

  16

  All Chief Ebenezer Amadi could see were the nipples and the brown breasts that ballooned out of focus behind them. The girl on top of him dug her fingers into his fat hairy chest, ground her groin against his, and asked him to say her name. He tried to remember what it was but another pair of breasts appeared over his head, dangling close to his lips, and he forgot the name all over again.

  The second girl took his earlobes between her fingers and rolled them the way his mother used to, and then she placed her lip-gloss-wet lips on his ear and whispered, ‘Say my name.’ He tried to remember but his phone was ringing and he had to answer it. He feared that if he didn’t say their names, the one would stop playing with his ears and the other would cross her leg over his belly and roll away.

  The ringing phone was vibrating on the mahogany bedside table, making a knocking noise that made it impossible to think. Soon, it would rattle its way to the edge, fall off, and break into pieces on the marble floor, and the person calling, whose call he had to take, would get upset.

  He woke to the phone still ringing. He sighed, reached for it on the table, felt a body, and remembered the two girls he had met at Bacchus, whose names he did not know, who now lay on either side of him, and who had inspired the interrupted dream. He folded back the duvet from his naked body and began to shiver. The phone continued to ring as he considered where exactly he’d left the remote control for the air-conditioner.

  He leaned over the girl on his left side and enjoyed the warmth of her body. Once the call was over, he would play out the dream with both of them, then, after a glass of Hennessey and a Viagra, he would do it all over again until they had to leave at five a.m.

  He didn’t check the caller display – it could only be one person; a man whose voice he knew but whose face he had never seen. The Voice would probably ask him if everything was OK and he would say yes and that would be it. After the call, he would wake the girls who had spanked each other, called him Daddy, and sniffed cocaine from his belly-button.

  ‘Hello.’ His spare hand found a breast and started fondling it. The girl stirred and searched for the duvet.

  ‘We have a problem.’

  The Voice always went straight to the point, just like the first time they spoke many years ago when the Chief was not yet a chief and had a different name.

  ‘What kind of problem?’ His hand found its way down to the girl’s thighs. He tried to push her legs apart.

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The man we used the last time, the one who calls himself Catch-Fire, he’s been talking.’

  He took his hand away from the girl and climbed over her to get out of bed. His toes curled as his feet landed on the cold marble tiles. He walked into the adjoining room, fat deposits wobbling under the folds of his skin with every step.

  ‘Is he talking to the police?’

  ‘No, not the police, but they’ll soon hear something. He’s a risk. You need to take care of him.’

  ‘OK.’

  He first spoke with The Voice during Christmas in 1989. He’d been a tenant of Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison back then, awaiting trial over a robbery. His gang, the police alleged, conspired to rob one Emanuel Ofoeze of Onipanu, Lagos. The victim was in possession of a large sum of money he had withdrawn from the bank earlier in the day. The cash was for the payment of salaries at Omo-Boy Sawmill Ltd. in Maryland where he was chief supervisor. When the gang broke into his house at around midnight, the late Mr. Ofoeze refused, under pain of gratuitous torture, to reveal where he had hidden the money. The gang proceeded to axe off each of the victim’s fingers. After his toes, they gouged out his eyes, and sliced off his ears. His tongue was the last to go, before he died, the police said in their report.

  A tip-off led to a member of the gang and subsequently to the mastermind of the operation who had inflicted the devilish wounds observed on the victim – one Okafor Bright Chikezie, an apprentice sawmill operator where the dead man worked.

  The other suspects confessed in return for life sentences, but the boy they called Bright insisted on his innocence, telling the police a counter story of how some boys approached him to take part in robbing the site supervisor. When he refused, the conspirators threatened his life. He spoke to his pastor and together they went to meet the supervisor to warn him and to pray. The man didn’t take enough precautions and the criminals, now convinced that it was Bright who had exposed them, were determined to rope him in. Bright provided an address for the pastor and the man confirmed his story.

  The case of Okafor Bright Chikezie lingered in the classification of ‘awaiting-trial,’ a concept used by the Nigerian police when they don’t want to let a suspect go to court or go free. It was while he was in a cell shared with twenty-four other inmates, that the chief jailer had him brought to his office, fed him rice and stew with meat for the first time in the three years, and given him the green phone on his table to talk to ‘someone who could help him.’

  How The Voice got all his information was still a mystery, but he was told from the first day not to ask questions. He was already thinking of the best way to make Catch-Fire disappear. A plan began to form; it involved a prostitute and a bottle of chloroform he kept in a drawer in his room.

  ‘Tonight,’ The Voice said.

  ‘Tonight?’

  He looked at his wrist and remembered he had left his watch on the bedside table. He made a mental note to slip the Rolex back on before falling asleep again next to the girls. It was too early in the morning to make arrangements with the girl he had in mind. He would have to do it himself.

  ‘It’s almost morning.’

  ‘It has to be done immediately. It may already be too late.’

  ‘Consider it done.’

  ‘Call me when it’s over.’

  ‘OK.’

  The Voice ended the call. Amadi walked to the window and drew the curtains. Moonlight threw shadows behind him. He looked out onto his compound. The heart-shaped swimming pool shimmered in the moon’s glow.

  He had built his mansion in just three months. When you have money, you can throw a picture in front of a
n architect and say, ‘Build me this house, I want to move in when I get back from America,’ and it will be done. You can buy the latest Mercedes every year, then send your family on holidays to Switzerland to hide your money in safe accounts and give you space to do the things with pretty young girls that you could only dream of doing when you were a struggling hustler on the streets of Lagos.

  When he first came to the city as a boy, he spent afternoons under the sun, peddling handkerchiefs in traffic jams, and in the nights he dug up the potholes that caused the traffic jams – him and many like him living day to day like scavenging animals. No matter how much money he made, or how many chieftaincy titles he bought, he still saw his old self in the street-kids that surrounded his car in traffic jams. Beggars and pedlars who pushed their wares and begging hands in front of his windscreen, left dirty palm prints on his window, and wouldn’t give up until the traffic started moving. He used to be one of them, but now he was on the other side of the rolled-up window, and in the owner’s seat of a big car. He would do anything to remain on this side of the divide.

  He pictured Catch-Fire nodding as he gave instructions the same way The Voice ordered him. This was not the first time he had to do something about someone who threatened to send him back to hell. Nor was it the first time a promising new recruit would screw up and become a risk.

  He glanced into his room and sighed. The things he planned to do with the girls would have to wait. There was business to attend to. Catch-Fire had to die, and anyone who the stupid boy had spoken to had to die as well, God willing, before dawn.

  17

  He went back to his room and picked up his neatly folded clothes from the seat of an armchair. He dressed in the darkness, then he looked at the girls sleeping with their backs to each other. He opened a chest of drawers and found a Bible under rows of folded socks. Within its pages was an envelope that contained fine white powder. As he left, he quietly closed the door and turned the key to lock it.