Eddie Signwriter

by Adam Schwartzman

  Ibrahim Momo was sitting at a desk, reading the paper. He looked up. He didn’t seem surprised. He looked like somebody not easy to surprise.

  “Good day,” Ibrahim Momo said into the silence.

  Festus Ankrah said, “Good day to you.”

  Ibrahim Momo smiled. In a voice that was not unfriendly he asked, “Do I know you?”

  “No,” Festus Ankrah said, “you know my nephew. He painted the sign out here on your shop.”

  “Ah. Yeeesss,” Ibrahim Momo replied. “So. I am pleased den to meet wit you. I beg siddon.”

  The accent was unmistakable. The pidgin phrases stuck out from his English like sharp rocks in shallow water.

  Festus Ankrah sat down.

  Ibrahim Momo waved his hand, as if to say: You are welcome all the same.

  Festus Ankrah said, “I am hoping you can tell me where he is.”

  “How I suppose know?” Ibrahim Momo replied.

  Festus Ankrah said, “I have done my homework.”

  He noticed that Ibrahim Momo’s fingernails, though not long, were manicured. He was very well turned out. Generous collar. Shirt all starched. Gold hanging down to the second buttonhole. He was dressed for the night in the middle of the day.

  “I see,” Ibrahim Momo said. “But dis is confidential. You understand. I no fit disappoint my clients.”

  “I understand,” Festus Ankrah said.

  He took out a twenty-dollar bill and put it on the table.

  Ibrahim Momo’s eyebrows turned down.

  Festus Ankrah said, “I am not asking you to talk to me. But perhaps you can tell my friend there.”

  “Eeeeh. But I don’t tink dat poor ting will ever talk to me o,” Ibrahim Momo said.

  Festus Ankrah put a second bill on the first—this time a hundred dollars.

  Ibrahim Momo sighed. He pocketed the bills. He said, “I liked dat boy. You only had to ask.”

  “So now I’m asking. Where did he go?”

  “Tsk tsk,” Ibrahim Momo said, shaking his head. “Where he go? He go Dakar now.”

  “Why Dakar?”

  “To get to Paris.”

  “How?”

  “On his own. My people waitin’ for him in Dakar. From then on I’d like to tell you but no know. He journeyed by aeroplane. He flew. Dat’s all.”

  Festus Ankrah reached for his wallet.

  “No,” Ibrahim Momo said, raising his hand, “stop dat now. You tink I don’t have enough of dat ting myself?” And before he could receive an answer, “I no know precisely who he went wit. Nobody knows anybody else. Dat’s how it is.”

  “Do you know if he got to Paris?”

  “I no sure.”

  “Could you find out if you wanted to?”

  “E go hard.”

  “Could I find out if I wanted to?”

  “Everyting is possible if a person tries well well.”

  “All right,” Festus Ankrah said, making his mind up immediately, and he told Ibrahim Momo that he too now needed to go to Dakar and Paris. “Can you arrange this?”

  “It wouldn’t be my firs’ time,” Ibrahim Momo said, shrugging. But he could see immediately that Festus Ankrah was not a humorous man.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Whenever you can,” Festus Ankrah said.

  “All right. I will organize.”

  Festus Ankrah took a calling card from his jacket and put it down on the table. He said, “Contact me here when you have a proposal. My friends”—patting his jacket—“will take care of it.”

  “I’m tired of your friends,” Ibrahim Momo replied—it seemed—sadly, and put the card into his desk drawer without looking at it. “You can tell dis boy of yours he can pay me wit paint when he come back. Business is good. Business going to be good a long time.”

  FESTUS ANKRAH received two personal calls in the weeks before he closed up his house and left town. Both visits took place early in the evening, just after supper. The first visit was only a few days after his trip to Afram Street. He had not expected Ibrahim Momo’s people to call so soon, and so was caught by surprise when he saw through the mosquito mesh of the front door somebody he did not know standing on his balcony.

  The man on whom Festus Ankrah opened the door was neatly dressed, in a checked shirt with a bow tie, and smelled of soap and looked like a seminary student.

  Festus Ankrah invited him in.

  He offered the man some Star beer, which he’d been drinking alone at his dining room table. The man said he didn’t drink. They sat down together at the table.

  Festus Ankrah took out a cigarette.

  He gave the man some water and a straw.

  Ibrahim Momo had done some research, the man said, the results of which he related to Festus Ankrah.

  Festus Ankrah let the man finish. Then he said, “It’s not very much.” It was the name of a hotel in Dakar and a number of possible contacts.

  No, it wasn’t very much, the man agreed politely, but it was what it was, and did Festus Ankrah require any further services of Mr. Momo?

  Festus Ankrah told the man that he did.

  The man asked for two photos, Festus Ankrah’s passport, and a thousand dollars.

  Festus Ankrah told him the dollars would take a little time.

  The man nodded. He said he would take the photos and the passport now. Festus Ankrah should have the money at delivery.

  Festus Ankrah left the man in the dining room and went into his bedroom. He retrieved his passport from where he kept it, under a floorboard in the doorway between his bedroom and the hall, along with cash, some gems, a few photos and a small Russian-made pistol he’d once bought off an army captain in less stable times.

  He and the man went round the corner to the pharmacy to get the pictures taken. The man waited on a bench on the balcony outside, in the orange light cast by the mosquito lamp above the pharmacy door.

  Inside Festus Ankrah sat on a chair with a broken back, against a sheet hung up against the back wall.

  The flash of the camera left two white squares over his sight.

  He and the man stood outside on the verandah while the pictures were developed. Across the bar was a hotel. There were some guests gathered around a table on a tiled patio, whose voices drifted over. They seemed to be talking about, at the same time, a female judge who had been murdered some years before and the cost of a guided tour to the forts along Cape Coast.

  Festus Ankrah and the man listened without comment.

  The pharmacist came out, shaking the photographic paper to make the colour set. There were six identical photos on the paper, three by two, like a slab of chocolate. The pharmacist handed the photos to Festus Ankrah.

  “Give them to him,” Festus Ankrah said to the pharmacist, gesturing to the man with his head.

  The pharmacist gave the man Festus Ankrah’s photos and went back into his shop. Festus Ankrah and the man shook hands on the street. The man told Festus Ankrah he would be contacted in time. Then the two went their separate ways.

  The next day Festus Ankrah sold a small piece of property of his in Nima, and called in a few outstanding debts. It was a lot more cash than he needed for the passport, and the month or so of travel that he reckoned would be necessary, but he was too old to travel as rough as he had as a younger man. Nor was he sure he could predict anymore what the price of information would be once he reached Europe.

  At the same time he began to put his affairs in order for a protracted absence. He organized for a friend to run his business, another to move into his house at a day’s notice.

  Then he waited.

  The second visit, also unannounced, was at more or less the same time in the evening as the first, two weeks later—not an unreasonable length of time in which to obtain the necessary papers, Festus Ankrah judged.

  It was a different man this time, which Festus Ankrah saw immediately from the shape through the mesh when the knock came. Festus Ankrah opened the door to a tall elderly man with spectacles and a s
mall bag in his hand.

  “Good evening, Mr. Ankrah,” the man said before Festus Ankrah could address him.

  “Good evening,” Festus Ankrah said, then turned into the room, adding over his shoulder, “Please sit”—he gestured towards the table—“I will be a moment.”

  When Festus Ankrah came down from his room with the envelope of cash, the man was seated at the table, his hands folded neatly over themselves on the tabletop.

  He had a dignified face. Not a face for this business.

  Festus Ankrah sat down opposite the old man and pushed the envelope across the table. The man calmly picked up the envelope, lifted the unsealed flap, and looked inside.

  Festus Ankrah said, “Fifty times twenty U.S. dollar bills. Count it.”

  The man’s top lip slipped beneath the bottom, the corner of his mouth turned down.

  “Hmm,” he said, impressed.

  Then he smiled.

  He said, “If I were really smart I would take this money and never come back.”

  He slid the envelope back across the table to Festus Ankrah.

  He said, “Regrettably, I think this is for somebody else.”

  Festus Ankrah leaned over the table, retrieved his envelope and pocketed it in a single motion. He smiled back. Who then did he have the pleasure of addressing at his dining room table?

  The elderly man said, “My name is Dr. Kwaku Wilkins-Adofo.”

  Festus Ankrah waited. He did not know the name.

  “I am a friend of John Bediako,” the doctor said.

  Festus Ankrah raised his eyebrows in enquiry, although already he had begun to suspect, from the elegance of the Twi that the visitor spoke, and the man’s old-fashioned dignity.

  “I am glad to have caught you before your travels,” the doctor said.

  Festus Ankrah said, “What makes you think I am going somewhere?” realizing as he did that he sounded like a caught-out school-child.

  The doctor smiled in a way that Festus Ankrah believed was intended to put him at ease. No doubt it had many before him.

  He said, “Mr. Bediako told me.”

  “What makes him think it?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” Festus Ankrah said.

  “It is not a mystery,” the doctor said. “Mr. Bediako expected you would. In addition, the father of an ex-student of Mr. Bediako, Simon Dankwa, with whom Mr. Bediako has recently been in contact, confirmed it to Mr. Bediako.”

  “So what does my old friend the teacher want?” Festus Ankrah asked.

  The doctor stopped smiling. In reality it pained him to smile. He had not been in the mood to smile since his old friend had called him to a dinner that past weekend, and told him what he was now about to tell Mr. Ankrah.

  The doctor said, “He wants me to tell you a story.”

  “Another story,” Festus Ankrah said wearily, determined to show as little interest as possible. “Why?”

  “Because he knows what you’ll do with it.”

  Festus Ankrah shrugged. He said, “What is this story?”

  “Mr. Bediako wants me to tell you how Nana Oforiwaa died.”

  “Everyone knows this already,” Festus Ankrah said.

  “No,” the doctor said gravely.

  And when Festus Ankrah did not respond, and the doctor knew he had Festus Ankrah’s attention, he said, “Everyone remembers the heat, and then the rain,” and with these words began to recount the story of the last day of Nana Oforiwaa’s life, just as he’d started it so many years ago on that starry night on the grounds of the Methodist church, when he stood before the people gathered there, and told it as then the story was known.

  PARIS

  It WAS EARLY in summer when Kwasi Dankwa arrived in Paris. His trip had been long and tiring, and at times dangerous, and he was grateful to be put in touch with a countryman of his, with whom he shared a room above a covered arcade near the Boulevard de Strasbourg.

  His countryman’s name was Denis Owusu. Within a month Denis was able to organize him papers, and then a job, washing dishes in the underground kitchen of the Restaurant Paros, just south of the river, near the Cathedral. He worked five days a week in that kitchen, and two night shifts that ended at three in the morning. On a hard day he’d sometimes spend over fifteen hours standing at the sinks, which were down a series of narrow stairs at the back of the restaurant, his hands in hot water and the sound of frying oil at his back.

  A set of windows at the top of the wall above the basins was the only opening through which fresh air could enter. Particles of grease tanned the glass a light brown, and the angle of the sill limited his view to a strip no higher than a few centimeters, through which he could see the ankles of passing pedestrians.

  Out front, the boss, a small man named Nikos, would shave sandwich grec from a pillar of meat turning on the spit. Nikos brought a cowbell from Greece and hung it from the beams above the restaurant door. It made a hollow tonking sound when he struck it, which he did when nobody was looking his way or reading his menus, and he’d grin at the curious faces turned towards him and sharpen the blade of his long knife against his file with special vigour.

  Nikos didn’t like Arabs. He didn’t like any immigrants, but he trusted Africans. At least he trusted them enough to employ them in his restaurant, although only sans papiers—since it made them easier to get rid of if trouble came up.

  The evenings he had off he spent mainly in the streets of the quarter where he lived, and which left a very strong impression on him: the decrepit passages colonized by cheap restaurants, the Indian music clicking like rickety trains, the brass and tin candelabras and the drapes crawling with tattered, twisted patterns of snakes and amoebas.

  Taking a drink at a terrace on the street he would watch the world passing by: a man with trays of sweets laid out like bright baubles and seeds; a man in a track suit, folding his baguette in half; a clochard sitting on the pavement cleaning his toes; a girl in a shawl running across the street shouting; a smiling bald white man with his half-caste child; a black woman with a mass of blonde locks, jumpy as Marilyn Monroe.

  He would see the off-duty concierge walking by, shouting “Bonsoir tout le monde” on his way to his house, his blue coat brilliant with golden snakes, and shot through with a row of shining buttons. The brothers on the step in front of the steel wall-length shutters would slap hands. People would wave at the clochard, drinking on a step, and the clochard would tinkle his fingers in greeting.

  Everything seemed to him to be thrown together: bars on a bay window, a warehouse of plastic rolls appearing through an open lobby; house, factory, house, house, warehouse; a fish shop with its slippery chunks of stinking meat and the wet sticky ribbons of squid’s legs; a sign, a lamp, a neon light, and the hairdressing shops all the way down from Château d’Eau, with their shelves of wigs, black, red, yellow, and their window fronts packed with people being styled and shorn, the floors swept round the clock, of ringlets and splinters of hair, while the hum of electric shears seeped onto the street like the sound of unsafe electricity.

  This, for five months, was his home. The company that Denis kept became his company. A large loose group of them inhabited the quartier, all of them West and North Africans, all of them clandestin. Their precarious circumstances quickly bound people together. It was a close community, but also it allowed for anonymity. Nobody knew who he was—his family, his district, his country, his home language. He could be who he wanted to be.

  The freedom made him dizzy. He went to a different part of the city every Sunday and walked. He went to the districts—as he named them in his head—of clocks, of churches and palaces, the district of cemeteries, the district of film houses, clothes, street markets, inside-out buildings. He deciphered the maze of the metro, spending hours traveling round and round, surfacing here and there—sometimes randomly—to see what awaited above.

  It was true he put himself at risk this way. On Denis’s advice he tried halfheartedly, and more out
of deference to Denis than out of any real concern of his own, to pass as a tourist. He bought a sweater emblazoned with the letters of an American university, and a camera that he draped round his neck, and he made sure to stop frequently in public squares to consult a large guidebook with an ostentatious cover, as the busy crowds passed around him, even when he knew where he was. But in truth he had no fear. Without knowing why, he felt invincible and immune to chance, and proud—of having followed this journey to its end, of having taken the risks necessary to have what he now did, of his independence, his daring—even his cruelty.

  Mostly he succeeded in not thinking about the past, and what he’d done to free himself from his old life. But in quieter moments he would sense the old currents still inside him, beneath the surface of his thoughts. And when he was tired, or resting, he would feel their pull again, and his thoughts drawing back to his flight, and all the actions that preceded that action; and if he was at work and it was the end of the day, he would often get away to a particular church on the edge of the tourist district, that was dark and damp like a cave, with a small mouth facing away from the sun. It had a pillar in the nave, against which he would sit, on which the flutes curved round in a spiral and then spread out into the vaulted roof like a stretching canopy. Often he sat there looking up at the ceiling, and he felt that he was inside the great chest of a whale, surrounded by its ribs. When he stared long enough, and grew dizzy, the roof would begin to breathe, and sometimes in this state he’d fall asleep and wake in the morning as the windows were catching alight with wheels of fire, and he’d be able to walk out of that place and continue almost as if nothing had happened.

  Closest to him, among the group inhabiting the quartier, was a tall Guinean, who they sometimes called Monsieur l’Ingénieur, though in Paris he was no longer an engineer, but checked people through at Monoprix, and repaired and sold old electronic equipment on the side. He first met Mamadou—the engineer’s true name—on a Sunday evening in the back of a small café a number of them frequented, on the side street off the main boulevard. It was called Le Refuge de l’Ouest, and didn’t attract much attention from anyone who didn’t know it. He had been about to sit at a table outside, when he saw the group crowding a table near the rotisserie, playing woaley. The noise of their laughter and conversation drowned out the pinball machines that lined the wall. He decided to sit inside instead.