The Missing American

by Kwei Quartey

“Please, have a seat,” Kafui invited her visitors, taking hers after them.

  A girl about eight years old materialized with a tray of three sachets of water that she offered to the guests.

  While it would have been rude for Labram to launch immediately into the purpose of the visit, neither was it Kafui’s place to ask. The social hierarchy was sharply defined: Labram was her employer and a lot older than she was. So, the first five minutes were spent in pleasantries punctuated by some gaps of silence not considered awkward in any way.

  It wasn’t until Labram had drained his water sachet that he began telling Kafui why they were there to see her. “Do you remember end of last March a certain American man came to stay at the house?” he asked.

  Kafui cast her mind back. “Please, do you mean Mr. Gordon?”

  “Yes, that’s him,” Labram said.

  “Oh, very nice man,” Kafui said with that easy smile. “He was the only oburoni who would greet me and talk to me when I went to clean.”

  It seemed to Emma that everyone—or almost everyone—had liked Mr. Tilson.

  “And you remember you went to the house the morning he left,” Labram said.

  Kafui nodded. “Yes please. Ten in the morning, I was there. By that time, he had already gone back to Accra.”

  “Kafui,” Sowah joined in, “did you notice anything different about the room compared to how you see it normally?”

  She considered the question, apparently puzzled by it. “No please.” Then, she sent Labram a worried look. “Please, is something wrong with how I cleaned the room?”

  “Not at all, Kafui,” he said. “You are not in trouble. I will let Mr. Sowah explain.”

  Sowah took it up. “Kafui, before you got to the cottage that morning to do your cleaning, the driver came to collect Mr. Gordon around seven o’clock. But Mr. Gordon had disappeared.”

  Kafui raised her eyebrows. “Disappeared? How, disappeared, please?”

  “He has been missing since that time,” Sowah said. “No one has located him or been able to reach him on the phone. It seems something happened to him overnight.”

  Kafui brought her hand up to her lips. “Oh!”

  “Did you ever see Mr. Gordon here in Atimpoku?” Sowah asked.

  She shook her head. “No please.”

  “What about while he was staying at the cottage?” Emma came in. “Did you notice anyone come to see him there?”

  Again, Kafui’s reply was in the negative.

  “Do you know Kweku Ponsu, the fetish priest?” Sowah asked.

  “Yes please,” Kafui said. “Well, I know about him.”

  “We understand Mr. Gordon wanted to visit Mr. Ponsu,” Sowah said. “Did you see them together anywhere? Maybe between here and Akosombo, or by the river?”

  Kafui shook her head, appearing regretful she hadn’t provided any help so far. “Please, maybe he has gone back to his country,” she suggested tentatively.

  “No,” Emma said. “Even his son has come to Ghana because Mr. Tilson has not returned home.”

  Kafui looked distressed. “But what could have happened to him?”

  Labram said, “We are worried someone went to the house and took Mr. Tilson away somewhere.”

  It was at that instant that Kafui’s expression changed abruptly. Apparently, something had struck her with the force of lightning.

  “What’s wrong?” Labram asked.

  Eyes down, Kafui pressed her fingers to her lips as one gripped by a sudden dreadful thought. “I saw something.”

  “You saw something?” Sowah asked. “How do you mean?”

  “Early that morning around two o’clock,” Kafui began explaining, “Yao wouldn’t sleep, so I took him for a walk to the roadside. While we were there, I saw an SUV turn onto the Adome Bridge. When it reached about halfway, it stopped, and I saw two men get out. They opened the boot and dragged out something in a long sack. The way they were carrying it, I could see it was heavy. It even looked like it could be somebody inside. They took it to the side of the bridge and threw it over into the river.”

  Emma felt chills down her back.

  “About how big was the sack?” Sowah asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Kafui said. “Maybe from there . . . to there.” She pointed out two spots on the wall about two meters apart—the length of a fairly tall person.

  “You’re sure it was the same morning that you went to clean the house?” Sowah asked. “The same morning Mr. Tilson disappeared?”

  “Yes please,” Kafui said without hesitation. “I remember it was a Friday and it was also Yao’s birthday. I was planning to go to market the next day. On Thursday, Mr. Labram called me to tell me I should come the next day to do a good cleaning for the next guest after Mr. Gordon.”

  Emma exchanged a glance with Sowah. Was this their first real break?

  “Why did you think maybe there was someone in the sack?” Emma asked Kafui.

  Kafui’s eyes misted. “I saw it move.”

  For several moments, no one said a word. Kafui began to sniff and dab her eyes with a handkerchief. Clearly, she was feeling overwhelmed. Emma went to her side and dropped to her knees. “Are you okay?”

  “I pray it will not be the white man,” Kafui said, her voice shaking. She had just voiced what everyone in the small group was thinking.

  FORTY-TWO

  Nii Kwei had his audience of six sakawa boys, including Bruno, in the palm of his hand as he demonstrated brand new software and hardware. The former had been downloaded and the latter was fresh off the plane, brought in by a friend from the US, and paid for online with a hacked credit card account used on Amazon Prime.

  “This one,” he explained to his attentive colleagues, “they call it Face2Face. It’s a kind of real time facial reenactment software.”

  “Ei!” the youngest boy, Timi-Timi, exclaimed. “Nii, you are killing us oo!”

  “Yeah, chaley,” another said, “your words are too big. Come down small for us, please.”

  Nii grinned at their joshing but got serious quickly. “Okay, shut up and listen. You already know how we use fake technology for Skyping. We download a video from YouTube and convert it to media file with ClipConverter or KeepVid.”

  They bunched together behind him, watching his laptop screen. “We go take as an example this one I already have of a beautiful Ghanaian woman I used for that American guy, Mr. Gordon. Now, formerly I exported the file to ManyCam, and on Skype I use ManyCam as my fake camera instead of the real one. Do you get it?”

  The students nodded.

  “Then when I’m Skyping with the American guy,” Nii continued, “he go see the video of this woman, but I can’t make the woman really converse with him, and sometimes her expression no match what the man is saying. So, maybe she dey smile when he hasn’t said anything funny. That’s why we tell the guy that the laptop make old, the microphone is broken, and the network make slow, so because of that we can only text the conversation.”

  “And some of them go suspect it’s not real,” Bruno added. “That’s how we lose them.”

  “Correct,” Nii said. “Now, what if we can make the woman smile, laugh, and converse with the guy in real time?”

  “Not possible,” Timi-Timi said, looking at Nii as if he were crazy.

  “Just wait, okay? I’m coming. Now, instead of exporting our media file to ManyCam, we open Face2Face and import the file of the beautiful lady. Once we do that, we play the clip for about three minutes so that the software can learn all her facial expressions—her smile and all that stuff.”

  While that was proceeding, Nii moved to the nearby table where the Face2Face camera sat. He turned it on, adjusted some settings, and returned to his laptop. “Now we go to Skype. Instead of the real laptop camera, we click on Face2Face as our fake camera. Okay, now you see the video of the woman.�
�

  Nii returned to the Face2Face camera and sat in front of it, tilting it so that it captured his face within a frame on the screen. “Bruno, you will be the American guy, okay? I’m going to call you and you get online.”

  “Okay,” Bruno said.

  The call came through and once the connection was established, the image of the lovely Ghanaian woman appeared on the laptop’s screen.

  “Hello, my dear,” Bruno said in a brave attempt at an American accent.

  Nii smiled broadly and batted his eyelashes, and so, correspondingly, did the beautiful lady on Bruno’s phone. But through the magic of the software, it was her smile, not Nii’s, and it looked natural.

  “I’m fine, my dear,” Nii said, and with the tiniest delay, the lady on the laptop uttered the same words. Bruno jumped away; his jaw dropped. “Ei! Is it juju?”

  “Don’t be afraid, my darling,” the woman said, parroting Nii.

  For a moment, the boys stared at this piece of wizardry in stunned silence and then pandemonium erupted. They screamed and jumped around as if Ghana had just won the World Cup.

  “Wait, wait!” Bruno said to Nii in wild excitement. “Let me try, can I try?”

  Nii let him, and then each of the boys after him. Each time, the woman on the laptop responded. It was truly magical.

  Later, Bruno accompanied Nii in his Range Rover to the spacious home he shared with two other sakawa boys and they ate kenkey and fish with shito.

  “Chaley, Face2Face will change everything,” Bruno said. “Money will flow.”

  Nii nodded, eating with relish. “It will be good, paa.”

  “How did you find out about that Face2Face?”

  “My friend in the States told me about it.”

  “Ah, okay.”

  They ate quietly for a moment, savoring the excellent quality of the kenkey.

  “So, what about the American guy, Mr. Gordon?” Bruno said. “Tell me about that.”

  “I made plenty money from him,” Nii said. “He seems to be a very nice man. In fact, I even started to like him.”

  “Is that so? But still you were taking his money.”

  Nii shrugged. “That’s how it is. A nice mugu is the best mugu.”

  “It’s true,” Bruno agreed.

  “Do you know he came to Ghana?” Nii said.

  “Who? Gordon?”

  “Yes. To look for the woman.” Nii found that funny and giggled. The first day he arrived in Ghana, he tried to call me and so I blocked him and changed my SIM card.”

  “You should have answered the call and told him you were the lady’s brother and that he should meet you at some place,” Bruno said. “Then, from there, you rob him all his money and cell phone and everything.”

  Nii frowned. “No, because you never know he might bring police with him to trap you. Somebody you are dealing with online you should never meet in person, you get me. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Okay.” Bruno broke off a chunk of kenkey with his fingers and scooped up a healthy amount of shito. “So, this Mr. Gordon, did he return to States?”

  Nii shook his head. “I heard he has gone missing and his son has come to town from aburokyire to look for him.”

  “Really,” Bruno said. “What has happened to the man?”

  “I don’t know, my brodda.”

  “Maybe someone has butchered him with cutlass and buried him,” Bruno suggested.

  “Maybe,” Nii said.

  “Could you do that to someone?”

  Nii looked up from the dish. “Do what?”

  “Kill someone,” Bruno said.

  Nii frowned. “It depends on the situation. What about you?”

  “If I have to kill somebody—like I’m protecting my family or something like that, I will do it.”

  “Yeah,” Nii agreed.

  “Do you know I killed Kweku Ponsu’s crocodile?” Bruno said.

  “Heh!” Nii exclaimed in disbelief. “Don’t lie.”

  “It’s true. Kweku said because of that, I will be closer to meeting Godfather.”

  Nii regarded him with new respect. “Then you have tried, paa,” he said. “You will be blessed. As for that crocodile, I will just urinate on myself if I face it.”

  The two laughed till they were weak.

  FORTY-THREE

  Sowah, Emma, and Labram conferenced while Kafui went to change Yao’s diaper.

  “What Kafui related is ominous,” Sowah said. “A large sack with something or someone heavy in it dumped into the river on the night Mr. Tilson disappeared? I don’t believe much in coincidences. I’ll talk to DCOP Laryea to see if we can get some divers to search the riverbed around the Adome Bridge. But before that, I want Kafui to take us to the spot she thinks the SUV stopped along the bridge. Emma, please ask her if she can come with us.”

  Kafui agreed. With Yao securely on her back again, she led the other three as she retraced her steps that night.

  “I came to here,” she said, as they arrived alongside the green-painted Adome Hotel. A few meters away was the small roundabout with its three exit points south to Accra, north to Akosombo, and east across the bridge. Now the area was bustling with cars, tro-tros, trucks, and people, but of course the night Kafui had been there, the environment would have been quiet and still.

  “I was standing here with Yao trying to make him sleep,” Kafui continued. “Then, from the Akosombo side came the SUV driving fast.”

  “Can you say the type of SUV?” Emma asked, while thinking how they all looked pretty much the same to her.

  “Not at all,” Kafui said with regret. “I didn’t have time to see it well.”

  “No problem,” Sowah said. “Go on.”

  “Then it went onto the bridge about halfway,” Kafui said, pointing.

  “Okay then,” Sowah said. “Let’s go there.”

  They took the south-facing walkway—the righthand side of the bridge. The Adome—Ghana’s only suspension bridge—dips slightly and then rebounds in response to traffic, particularly heavy-laden eighteen-wheeled vehicles.

  About halfway to the other end of the bridge, Kafui stopped. “It was around here.”

  They looked down at the grayish-blue water. Rain clouds were gathering behind and above them, covering the sun and making the river look darker and more threatening. Still, fishermen were out plying the river.

  “Makes sense to dump a body at this point I suppose,” Sowah said, looking from bank to bank. “The water will be deepest at the center of the bridge, not so, Mr. Labram?”

  “Yes, sir. At this point it’s twenty to twenty-five feet.”

  “Plenty of water to drown in,” Sowah commented.

  “Yes, but what kills is the impact of the body with the water,” Labram said. “It’s ninety to a hundred feet from here to the river’s surface. Only a miracle would save you.”

  Emma shuddered.

  “I’d like to see Kafui reenact what she saw,” Sowah said. “We might pick up something that wasn’t apparent in her narrative.”

  Kafui obliged. The most notable part of her performance was the awkwardness involved in lifting the sack over the top of the railing, which showed that the weight of the contents was substantial.

  “How far do you think a body would float downstream from here since third April?” Sowah asked.

  “Not as far as you might think,” Labram replied. “For a couple of reasons. One, the body or the sack containing it might snag on rocks on the riverbed. Two, you see those islands dotted all over the river? They aren’t true islands at all. They are actually aquatic weeds.”

  “Weeds!” Sowah exclaimed in surprise.

  “Yes,” Labram said. “They cluster together all over the river in thick, impenetrable clumps and present great challenges to the fishing livelihood. The point is, a resurfacin
g body could easily become trapped and concealed in one of those masses of vegetation. Third is the issue of nets.”

  “Nets?” Emma asked.

  “You might have noticed plastic bottles floating on the surface and thought they were trash,” Labram said. “Actually, they mark the spot where fishermen have left their nets to trap fish over a period, like overnight. When they come back for the catch, they know which one is which.”

  “Aha,” Sowah said. “Simple but ingenious. So, at some point, the body could conceivably get trapped in a net.”

  “Correct,” Labram said. “That’s why I recommend we talk to the fishermen and ask them to be on the lookout. Anything unusual, report to the police and get in touch with you. Which reminds me also, we should pay a visit to the Akosombo police as well. They took my statement when Mr. Tilson disappeared and it’s a good idea for you to make friends with them. You never know when you might need their help.”

  Sowah agreed. Ghanaians made a big deal of “greeting” the local authorities, whether that be the police or the traditional chief of a district. “That is a great idea—thank you. But I think before we do that, we should pay Kweku Ponsu a visit.” He looked at Labram. “Do you know where he lives?”

  “Most people do,” Labram said. “His house is at the top of one of the hillsides, so you can’t miss it.”

  Kafui asked to be excused as she needed to get back.

  “Of course,” Sowah said. “Thank you for everything, Kafui.”

  He slipped her a few cedis, which brought a big smile to her face before she hurried away and left the other three to continue to Ponsu. They walked uphill between houses. Grazing goats and chickens in their path moved out of the way. The fragrant, reddish soil was soft from a recent rain shower and it appeared another was about to unleash itself.

  Labram labored somewhat from the upward climb, no doubt thankful when they reached a path oriented in a different direction and much less steep. From this vantage point, they had almost a bird’s eye view of Atimpoku all the way down to the river.

  As they walked, Sowah looked at Emma. “I’m glad you were there for Kafui,” he said. “You established a good rapport with her, and I saw her look at you with admiration a couple of times.”