by Kwei Quartey
At that moment, Dawson could have really used Chikata so he could split the next important investigation steps: talking to Chuck Granger, and going to look for Yaw Okoh, the man who, according to Kudzo, had once threatened to kill Bao Liu in revenge for Liu’s allegedly murdering Yaw’s brother Amos by dumping him into a water-filled mining pit.
Which one should Dawson do first? He thought he would tackle Yaw today, and Granger early in the coming week.
His phone rang, and seeing it was his wife, he decided to make an effort to be nicer than he had been during the prickly last call.
“Hi, love,” he said cheerily.
“Hi, sweetie,” she said, more matter-of-factly. “Okay, I think we have this set up so things will go well from now on. Mama called Uncle Joe and put pressure on him. He promises to meet with the contractor at the house tonight, and then Mama will go up to Kumasi tomorrow to reinforce.”
The plan had been for Christine and the boys to make the big move from Accra the following weekend. Knowing how things went where building contractors were concerned, Dawson could almost guarantee that the guesthouse would not be ready for his wife and kids. In any case, they would have to vacate the Accra house imminently to give way to the new set of renters who were waiting to get in with a one-year lease.
As much as he told himself to take a more positive outlook, Dawson remained relentlessly pessimistic as he got into the Corolla and headed to Dunkwa.
It was later than Dawson had wanted it to be by the time they got there. The sun was making plans to retire for the day, and heavy rain clouds were moving in.
He had no idea where to look for Yaw Okoh, but he thought The Lord Is My Shepherd Chop Bar ahead was a good start. If Yaw wasn’t there, someone might know where to find him. He pulled over and alighted.
The chop bar was bigger than Dawson had imagined, and hip-life music with the almost mandatory auto-tune vocals was blaring. Men and women—mostly men—sat talking and drinking at bare wooden tables painted blue. In fact, everything was painted blue.
Dawson greeted a group of five guys at one table and, raising his voice above the music, asked if they knew Yaw Okoh.
“Which Yaw Okoh?”
Fair question. “The one whose brother Amos died,” Dawson said promptly, because that was the most likely tidbit to get to the right person.
The men looked at each other knowingly.
“Yes, I know where he and his family live,” one of them said.
Rather than get directions that were likely to be confusing or simply wrong, Dawson asked the man if he would please come with him to show him the way. He looked reluctant, but Dawson told him he would dash him enough money to buy another beer, which, if his pungent breath and heavy-lidded eyes were any testimony, he did not need. He nodded, drained his glass, and got up unsteadily to follow Dawson out to the car.
The drunkard gave him slurred instructions where to go, at one point nodding off to sleep, only to be jerked awake by Dawson barking, “Hey! Chaley, wake up!” When they got to the destination, the drunkard pointed to the putative house. Dawson gave him a couple cedis, and the intoxicated man lurched away somewhere—possibly to another drinking spot.
Dawson walked to the house. On the veranda, a woman around his age was doing an expensive hair weave on another woman whose bare shoulders were so soft and smooth Dawson could almost taste them.
“Mema mo aha,” Dawson greeted them, using the most courteous of forms for “good afternoon.”
“Yaa nua,” they replied in kind.
“Is this the house of Yaw Okoh?”
“Yes.” The hairstylist looked at him. “Who are you?”
“My name is Darko Dawson.”
She finished one cycle of a weave. “Please wait here. I will call him to come.”
“Thank you.”
She went into the house, pausing to leave her slippers on the veranda before entering in her bare feet.
Smoothie looked at Dawson. “Darko. Are you from Accra?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“The way you speak, I can tell you’re not from here.”
“Oh,” he said, marveling at the clarity of her skin. “Is that bad?”
“No, not at all. I like it.” She laughed, raking him from head to toe. “Dunkwa is boring. I like Accra men.”
Something told Dawson she had claws he shouldn’t get anywhere close to.
The hairstylist returned.
“Please,” she said, shooting a knowing glance at Smoothie, who kept her gaze down, “Yaw is not in, but his father and mother are there. You can go inside.”
“Thank you very much.”
He took off his shoes before entering. Showing respect went a long way to getting answers. Light and ventilation were almost nonexistent inside the house. Mr. and Mrs. Okoh were seated on a haggard sofa in an otherwise bare sitting room. He greeted them and shook hands with the lady first. The man was dressed in traditional cloth slung over one shoulder, the woman in a more ordinary skirt and blouse. He smelled smoke on her and guessed that she had been cooking at a wood stove. She was small, in her late forties, and unlike Smoothie outside, had one of the worst cases of relaxer-fried hair Dawson had ever seen.
Mr. Okoh called out to someone to bring a chair, and a kid of about ten in a ragged shirt appeared like magic from nowhere with a rickety blue plastic one. These must be all made in China, Dawson thought with sudden insight into the ubiquity of the plastic chairs in Ghana.
“You say you are?” Mr. Okoh asked, squinting at him in the poor light.
“Darko Dawson. I am from Criminal Investigations Department, Accra. I am looking into the death of the Chinese man Bao Liu. You have heard about it?”
Mr. Okoh sat up straight while his wife sent him an anxious look.
“Yes, please,” the man said warily. “But we have nothing to do with it.”
“Of course you do not, Owura Okoh,” Dawson said respectfully. “But I understand that he—the Chinese man—caused the death of your son Amos.”
Mr. Okoh looked away, his jaw clenching rhythmically. It was a long time before he spoke again. “Yes,” he said simply.
Dawson nodded and waited another few moments. “Please, I want to find out what happened,” he asked softly. “How did Mr. Liu cause your son’s death?”
Mr. Okoh was looking down at his hands, which were twisting around each other. “Amos worked with me,” he began. “We farmed corn, oil palm, and cassava. We used to have a big farm, but once those Chinese people came, they spoiled most of it with the excavators.”
“Excuse me,” Dawson interrupted as politely as he could, “how is it that they came and spoiled your land? Did you know that was going to happen?”
Okoh shook his head. “One day, they just arrived and started clearing all the trees away.”
“Who gave them permission to do that?”
Okoh looked up. “The Chinese people come with their money and they pay the chief for land that they want.”
It was the answer Dawson had feared, and could be the reason why Nana Akrofi had spoken so glowingly of the Chinese. “Did the chief tell you that they had paid him for the land?”
“No.” Okoh practically snorted. “If you are living here in Dunkwa and you don’t know that the Chinese people are paying the chief for land to look for gold, then something is wrong with you.”
Theoretically, Dawson thought, the chief could sell off pieces of the land under his chiefdom, but he was also supposed to look after the well-being of his citizens. If what Mr. Okoh was saying was true, and unfortunately Dawson believed it was, then Nana Akrofi was a callous, greedy man who was looking out for himself alone, all too common a story in Ghana, Dawson felt.
“When they came and excavated almost all the farmland,” Okoh continued, “we were left with only a small amount, and now, because
the way is now blocked by the mining pits, we have to pass the pits first before going to the farm. During last rainy season, the rains were very heavy. It even flooded Dunkwa, and at one place, the dividing wall between two pits fell down and the pits came together.”
Okoh was demonstrating with his hands, and Dawson got a good picture in his mind.
“So,” Okoh went on, “because there was no more dividing wall to pass to the farm when the two pits became one, some of the Chinese people built a bridge from ropes so that you can walk across. The floor of the bridge, they made it with wood, and then the sides are of rope. That bridge . . .” Okoh stopped, shaking his head.
“It isn’t strong?” Dawson prompted.
“Oh, it’s very strong,” he replied, “but when you are walking on it, you have to be careful because it bounces up and down and swings back and forth.”
“I see.”
“And one day, Amos’s girlfriend Comfort was going to the farm, and that Chinese man Bao was there, and he started to talk to her. He knows how to speak Twi, so he told her she was beautiful, and he wanted to give her some gold, and she laughed and said okay. By that time, Amos was coming from the farm, and he saw Bao conversing with Comfort, and he became very angry and shouted at Bao, telling him to leave Comfort alone. Then Bao too, he told Amos to clear out from his land. His land.”
Dawson saw Mr. Okoh’s anger rising like a wave gathering strength at sea.
“And Amos told Bao, what are you saying? You, a man from this faraway China coming here to steal the gold that has belonged to our fathers since time began, and now you are calling it your land? You are a fool!”
Even “fool” did not seem to carry the full weight of the fury that Amos must have been feeling at that moment.
“Who told you the story of what happened?” Dawson asked Okoh.
“Comfort, and many other people. Ask anyone who was there, Mr. Dawson. So many people were there, and they will tell you the same story.”
Mrs. Okoh was looking directly at Dawson, nodding slowly. “Ampa.” It’s true.
“Then Comfort told Amos not to mind Bao,” Okoh continued, “and that he should come back to the house because the rain was coming again. Then she went on the bridge first to walk in front of him, because he always told her in case she stumbled. When they got to the end of the bridge, Bao started to hoot at Amos from the other side of the pit. He used bad words in Twi. You know, these Chinese people, when they come here, they learn the bad words in our language and use them against us.”
“Please, Owura Okoh,” Dawson said, “what did he say?”
“An insult about Amos’s mother.” Okoh shook his head. “I can’t repeat it.”
Dawson knew the one. It meant, your mother’s vagina. It was the most odious offense of all—so abhorrent that its utterance could well result in one’s being beaten to a pulp. Maybe Bao Liu didn’t know how terrible an insult it was, but then maybe he did. Either way, Dawson was forming a picture of the Chinese man as a vulgar, malicious brute. Assuming Owura Okoh’s account was true.
Mrs. Okoh’s eyes had become swollen and red with grief, pain, and perhaps fury was there as well.
“Then Amos,” Okoh said, his voice cracking, “he turned back and told Bao he was going to kill him for what he had said. Amos was holding a cutlass, and when Bao saw him coming back, he held the rope of the bridge and started to push and pull it to make it tip. And when it tipped, Amos . . . Amos . . .”
Okoh gulped for air, and Dawson felt his own chest twist inside like a wet towel being wrung out.
“Amos fell inside the pit,” Okoh forged on. “The pit is very deep. The mud is thick. You can’t even swim inside. He was shouting for help, but no one could help him. There was no rope to pull him, no pole that was long enough. One man, he tried to drive the excavator down to the water so that Amos could hold onto the bucket, but the excavator too, it was too heavy and was about to fall in the water.”
Mrs. Okoh was sweeping away tears that were streaming down her face faster than the Ofin River, but she didn’t make much noise—just desperate, glottal sounds, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.
Dawson could say nothing for several minutes. The anguish of these two was unbearable. He thought of the unthinkable for a fleeting moment—Hosiah or Sly drowning in a deep pit of muddy water as treacherous as quicksand—and he shuddered.
“And that man,” Mr. Okoh whispered, “that Chinese man Bao, when the police came to question him, he lied to them and told them Amos slipped. And he paid them to leave him alone.”
Dawson’s blood raced hot through his head. This was the kind of thing that made him crazy. “He paid whom?” he asked fiercely.
“I don’t know,” Okoh said with a shrug. “Do you think I was there? They don’t do these things where everyone can see them, they do them hidden in some secret place.”
Dawson nodded. He had hoped that Mr. Okoh would have details, but that was too much to expect. People with no influence are not privy to influential transactions.
“Mr. and Mrs. Okoh,” Dawson said, “I am very sorry.”
He stood up to shake their hands once more, this time in sympathy. He couldn’t think of anything more to do. They smiled wanly at him, and he knew they appreciated the gesture, because in such affairs, gestures often mean more than material things.
Dawson sat down again and asked the Okohs to describe exactly where the tragedy had occurred. From what he gathered from their somewhat confused directions, the site was on the opposite side of the shack where Wei had carried his brother Bao.
Asking Mr. Okoh to establish his alibi might sound accusatory, Dawson knew, but it was a risk he had to take. “Please,” he said respectfully, “early Friday morning when Bao Liu was killed, where were you?”
Okoh didn’t appear to object to the question. “Maybe you don’t know what life is like for us poor farmers, Mr. Dawson,” he said. “We have to wake up very early every single morning to go to the farm. If the sun beats you there, you are too late.”
“Do you and your wife normally go to farm together?” Dawson asked.
Okoh nodded. “Yes, and sometimes my nephew John—before he goes to school in the morning.”
“The boy who brought the chair for me?” Dawson asked.
“Yes.”
Dawson wanted to check the veracity of the alibi with John, but not in front of his uncle. He would find a way later.
“Please, Mr. and Mrs. Okoh,” Dawson said, “if you will permit me, I want to ask you about Amos’s younger brother, Yaw.”
Now the man leaned back on the sofa, eyes to the ceiling, and said nothing.
“Mr. Dawson,” the woman said softly, “he has not been the same since Amos’s death. He loved his brother more than he loves me or his father.”
“I would like to talk to him,” Dawson said gently. “Is he around?”
She looked up as a shadow passed across the doorway, and there stood a sculpture of muscular perfection—a man of about twenty-eight, shirtless and constructed of granite and stone. He had a scar across his top lip that made it appear jagged. He looked at them, his expression as empty as a reservoir in a savanna drought, and then he turned and walked away.
“That is Yaw,” Mrs. Okoh said softly and sadly.
“Will he speak to me?” Dawson asked.
She shook her head. “He cannot, Mr. Dawson.”
He didn’t understand what she meant. “He is not allowed to?”
“He cannot speak,” she repeated, this time more emphatically. “He has been completely mute since Amos died two months ago.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dawson was puzzled. “Why has he not spoken?”
“His heart has been wounded,” Owura Okoh said. “He loved his brother more than anyone.”
Mrs. Okoh stood up, wringing her hands in
a beseeching gesture. “Please, Mr. Dawson, talk to him. Tell him to unlock his tongue and forsake us no longer. Please.”
Dawson stood up quickly. “I will be back.”
Outside on the veranda, Smoothie was admiring her completed hairdo in a hand mirror.
“Did you see which way Yaw Okoh went?” Dawson asked them.
Smoothie made a face and rolled her eyes, but her hairdresser pointed to their left. Dawson ran in that direction, kicking up red dust as he looked right and left for a sign of Yaw. People stared at him in curiosity. Everyone could tell he wasn’t from around there, and now they wondered what his excitement was about.
Getting closer to a fringe of the forest, Dawson stopped to address two young men sitting idly on a half-finished wall of an even less finished house.
“Did you see Yaw Okoh pass here?” he asked.
They looked at him languidly. “Who?”
“Yaw Okoh. Tall man, very strong?”
They shrugged and shook their heads, clearly not the slightest bit interested.
Dawson retraced his steps, looking for an alternative route that Yaw might have taken. Although he seemed to have magically disappeared, it was simply more likely that he had gone another way and Dawson had rushed right by. Undoubtedly, Yaw knew the town inside out.
He walked back to the Okohs’ house. It would have been nice to be returning with a somber but now vocal Yaw ready to sit down and once again talk to his parents, but nothing was ever that simple.
Dawson looked up at the darkening sky, and a mob of dark rain clouds glared back. A wind was beginning to kick up dust. Just a few hundred meters before the Okohs’ house, Dawson saw John and four other boys about his age were trying to squeeze in as much soccer as possible ahead of the approaching downpour.
Dawson watched them for a minute, and then called out, “John!”
The boy turned and saw him, hesitated, and then trotted up.
“I like how you play,” Dawson said, smiling. “You dribble very well.”
