Nigerians in Space Page 11

  He found a laminated three-ringed binder on a coffee table that contained instructions about using the alarm system and avoiding baboons, several trail maps from the Mountain Club of South Africa, and some menus from various restaurants in the beach town below. The home was a vacation rental, he realized. Dayo and Tinuke could sleep comfortably here and they could stop spending their cash at the pompous colonial hotel. Once again, Bello had chosen wisely.

  He moved into the kitchen. It had a small electric range and a half-dozen copper pots hung from the ceiling. On the far side by the door to the back yard, he saw a small bedroom for a domestic servant. Dayo would sleep comfortably in there. It might be nice for Wale to have some privacy with Tinuke, he thought, awaken that passion they’d shared in the Basel hotel.

  The home felt a little musty but when he pulled aside a curtain, he could see a pleasant view of the bay. The first bedroom was on the smaller side and contained two twin beds. Hardly romantic. He moved towards the master bedroom. And froze.

  A body lay upon the ground, face down. A black woman in a business suit. Blood had coagulated beneath the head and white powder was everywhere, covering the floor. The sheets on the bed were ruffled and torn, and a pillow had a long gash in it.

  Wale dropped to his knees, his hand on his mouth.

  Not again, he thought. Not again.

  He approached the body slowly, avoiding the powder on the floor. The woman’s hair was clean and intricately woven, as if she’d recently braided it. He mustered the courage to turn the body over. It was heavy, already stiff and unwieldy from rigor mortis. He didn’t recognize the face. She had wide eyes and a forehead that sloped sharply. He could see an entry wound in the shoulder and another in the forehead—between the eyes, which lay open. He searched her pockets but couldn’t find anything. Someone had been through here already. Someone had also taken the time to sprinkle lime over the body to dampen the stench.

  He remembered the chocolate-skinned burglar with yellowed eyes who had attacked him in Stockholm. The man could be slinking in through the front door at this very moment, preparing to shoot Wale with the same dispassion.

  A low whinny of a sound could be heard outside the house, like a soft cry coming from the waves below. He ran to the front window. He could see a car following the road that ran along the shore, its yellow siren winking in the bright midday sun. It didn’t look like a police car. He watched it drive past onrushing cars, hoping it would bypass the neighborhood or head to a fire, anything but come here. The car turned and began laboring up the hill.

  He searched through the closet, tossing aside clothes and old junk from the vacation cottage. He didn’t so much see the doll as smell it. It was a rich scent that carried him back to his youth in Nigeria, earthy and pungent. He picked up the cloth-wrapped object and unraveled it. Inside, he found a fine statuette adorned with camwood powder and blue indigo. There were two inlaid blue glass beads along the torso, miniature breasts on the chest, and the forehead had been carved to a point. The eyes were oversized and almond shaped, with a sharp nose and full lips. He stuffed the doll into his agbada.

  He hurried to the front door, then decided it would be dangerous to leave through the neighborhood and exited through the rear instead. A high stone wall protected against the crumbling bluffs behind the house. He scrambled up it and plunged through the coastal fynbos, which scraped his skin and tore at his agbada. Then he crouched low and watched as the car climbed the final distance to the home. He could barely read the sign on the vehicle: RNB Armed Response. The guard stepped out of the car and rang the doorbell a few times before keying in the security code to the front gate. He circled around the home until he saw the rear door, which Wale had stupidly left wide open. Next to the guard, Wale spied something out of the place on the ground next to the barbecue grill. His kufi.

  Damn it, Wale thought. I never should have worn the thing. The hat must have fallen from his head when he fled.

  But the guard didn’t seem to have noticed it. He said a few words into a walkie-talkie before drawing his gun. Then he entered shouting “Armed Response!”

  Wale scrambled down the rear wall to the house, afraid the guard might come out at any moment. He picked up the kufi and climbed back up the wall. As he reached the top, he heard the guard cry out from deep within the home.

  He’s discovered the body, he thought.

  Wale climbed higher behind the house now, ducking beneath bushes until he reached a single dirt track. He pushed along it, trying to remain low. His green agbada blended well with the lush green plants that ringed the mountain and the chilly sea wind whipped through the cloth. He followed the trail for a few hundred meters, snaking above the homes as it veered towards Lion’s Head. Now he climbed slowly, looking back towards the house from time to time. He could already see a trail of police cars sirening up the hill. He stayed close to the silvertrees and the thick coastal scrub, keeping out of sight.

  From a cloud of fog, a lone paraglider sailed a few feet above him and began the slow drift down to the beach. The trail began to switch back until it intersected with a much wider track like a fire road. Here, a white man jogged past him with a wave of the hand and a young coloured couple high-stepped up the hill with a docile looking Rottweiler huffing on a leash. He began walking down a trail that wound around the hill towards the street as casually as he could.

  His mind raced to understand what had happened. He knew it must have been the same attacker as in Stockholm. He recognized the signs: a bullet to the body followed by another between the eyes for security. The dead woman must have been a scientist, but he’d never seen her before. And the killer had left the body in the room, not even bothering to conceal anything other than the stench from the corpse. He must have been planning to come back, or worse, to wait for another victim and strike again, picking off the scientists one by one as they arrived from Nigeria to the Fallback. But where was Bello? Why hadn’t he warned Wale or Femi or any of them for that matter? On the eve of his project, he had disappeared, as if abandoning them. But why? Had he been killed too?

  He removed the ibeji doll from his pocket. Ibeji meant ‘twin’ in Yoruba. A family that gave birth to a set of twins and lost one through illness would hire a sculptor to carve a simplified likeness of the child, to placate the deceased child and protect the family. Sometimes the surviving twin would carry the doll around, or the mother might dance with it. He recalled a cousin in Lagos dressing his ibeji in simple clothes, spooning bits of gari into its wooden mouth, a ritual that he’d found wasteful. An ibeji was not something you left behind on vacation but something you treasured and carried with you for your entire life. The wood had also been recently bathed in the herbs, which meant that someone had possessed it a short time ago. It might belong to the victim or the killer. He would need to find out more about it.

  He also knew it wasn’t a coincidence that the armed response had arrived right when he entered the house. Either the killer had been watching or Wale had inadvertently set off the alarm. It didn’t matter, because the guard had already discovered the body. At least that meant no other scientist would be callous enough to enter the Fallback when the place was surrounded by police.

  The dirt road finally ended near a small ranger hut. He could see car guards wearing fluorescent pinnies and a few taxis idling on the cliffs that overlooked the smog of the City Bowl.

  He found Tinuke in a bathrobe reclining by the indoor pool with cucumbers on her eyelids and her face coated in a lime green paste. An attendant was filing her toenails and massaging her calves. Dayo was splashing around in the kiddie pool, watched by a bemused, plump black woman. He would run out of the pool, giggling, and then leap into the water while flapping his floaties. There were a few toys in the pool, which he would grab and toss into the air and squirt.

  The sense of loss wracked Wale’s body worse than any bullets. It was over. Brain Gain was finished, even with the ibeji doll. He couldn’t keep doing this to his family and he had
nothing else left to give. No career, no home. If he returned to Houston he’d go to jail. Nigeria would be too dangerous without Bello’s protection and anyway he’d botched the visa on his own passport and couldn’t go there.

  Bello shot an arrow into the sky, Tinuke had said, and covered his head with a mortar bowl.

  I should have built Dayo a pool in Houston, he thought. Then none of this would have happened.

  He counted out their assets in his mind. He would have about forty-five thousand dollars in cash left after they checked out of the hotel, less any extravagances. Tinuke might have fifty thousand or maybe a hundred thousand. She could return to Houston and sell the home; then, if Bello’s money came through, they would have another three hundred thousand from his signing bonus. That was a hefty sum. If they lay low for a while, they could live comfortably. Buy a condo on an island somewhere. Some place cheap, where people didn’t ask questions.

  Tinuke was sitting erect now. The attendant had removed the cucumbers and washed the paste from her face and she looked radiant, the model of a diplomat’s wife. She smiled at him expectantly. He walked over slowly as the attendant blew air upon her toenails.

  “Is he outside?” she asked.

  He looked away. Shook his head. His voice seemed to come from the middle of his throat, clammy and adolescent. “He wasn’t there.”

  Tinuke stood up instantly.

  “It’s too early to walk on them,” the attendant said.

  She sat back down. “But you found the house?”

  “Yes, it’s there. I went inside and—Bello’s not coming.”

  “Not coming?”

  “No.”

  The glow in her face began to fade and for a moment, Wale saw the deepest sadness in her eyes, as if she truly knew his pain. And he thought, maybe she’ll stand by me. Maybe we can do this together.

  Except she set her jaw, not even angry, not even upset, just not there at all.

  “You always looked good in an agbada, Wale. I wanted to see you wear it in Nigeria.”

  “We’ll go together?”

  “No, we’re leaving tomorrow. Dayo and I will go back to Houston. I’ll send you the papers to sign.”

  “What papers?”

  “What other kind of papers are there?”

  “You don’t understand. I went to the house and—”

  “—I don’t want to know, Wale. What’s more, I don’t care. We’re leaving. Pay the woman.”

  He slipped the attendant a twenty, then another to keep her quiet. Tinuke headed towards the changing room, shaking her head. Frowning.

  He slumped into the reclining chair in the humidity of the indoor pool. He saw his boy dash around the kiddie pool one more time, ecstatic in the water. The mere sight of the child brought him joy, allowed him to breathe again.

  She won’t take him too, he thought. If she takes him, she takes my whole life.

  He ran over to Dayo, who leapt into his arms.

  “Papa!”

  “Remember peekaboo, Dayo?”

  Dayo covered his face with his palms, then opened them. “Peekaboo!”

  “That’s right, Dayo. We’re going to play a big game of peekaboo now. You and I together. Want to play?”

  “Peekaboo!”

  Then he was running from the pool house and along the red carpet of the lobby and whistling madly for a taxi, Dayo giggling all the while at the prospect of a new adventure.

  Book II

  Our children play a game called leapfrog. One child leaps over the next and lands in front with a bright new perspective. It is our turn to leapfrog the North. Our dependence must evolve into independence. Oil has ruined us, smeared our Deltas with smog, poisoned our creeks and marshes, lined the pockets of the few. For us to leap, we must find another source, clean of the blood of our ancestors. It is not more oil that we need. Not gold, not diamonds. We can’t swap blood for blood. What we need are minds.

  —Nurudeen Bello, Special Adjunct to the Minister of the Environment

  The Abalone of Obz

  Present day

  South Africa

  Thursday Malaysius arrived in Cape Town forty minutes late. He’d hitchhiked to the Mowbray taxi rank and, not having any money, he’d had to walk a kilometer to Observatory with the cooler on his balding head. The cooler was wrapped in a garbage bag so no one knew what was inside but that didn’t make it any lighter. With the abalone and the sea water, it must have weighed fifty kilos. He passed a car wash and a friendly autoelectrician pointed him towards Lower Main Road.

  Rumors about the wild girls at Observatory had drifted down to Hermanus for years, so Thursday was disappointed with the paint-chipped arcades that covered the sidewalks. The stores seemed dilapidated compared to the polished tourist traps of Old Hermanus. He passed a biker bar, an internet café, and an upholstery shop with expensive polyester couches in the window. He didn’t see any sex orgies or hot kinners flashing their breasts as Brother Leon had told him. The few people he saw were white-collar types wearing neckties.

  Seventy-eight Lower Main should have been right next to a Chinese restaurant, but the next house was sixty-three. Across the street was forty-two. He couldn’t decide whether to knock on the door of the Chinese restaurant or send Ip an SMS and sat there sweating with the cooler on his head for a minute or two. The restaurant appeared to be closed, and he was about to go across the street when there was a sound of bells. The door creaked open.

  “You late.”

  “I ran out of taxi money.”

  “Where Leon?”

  “He’s sick.”

  “You bring them?”

  “The work? Yeah. Are you Ip?”

  “Shut up.”

  “No problem, my broer. Only asking.”

  He followed the scowling pitbull of a man through some tables with plastic table cloths set with soy and hot pepper sauces. Thursday hadn’t eaten all morning so his stomach growled with the scent of oil-battered food in the air. They walked to the back of the restaurant and passed through some strips of clear plastic leading to a refrigerator about six paces deep and four wide. Shrink-wrapped egg noodles and filets of fish were stacked beside a shaker of monosodium glutamate and long red cuts of meat. A gallon-sized dispenser of duck sauce sat on the shelf. The man pulled aside a drape to reveal another door, indicating for Thursday to go in first.

  Thursday hesitated because it was a much smaller room than the first dining area, but he had walked so far into the restaurant that it was too late to back out now. If something happened no one would hear him here. He had to do it. For Brother Leon.

  Inside he found Timothy Ip frowning over a newspaper, which he immediately shook out and folded up. He had silky black hair and an angular Cantonese face, with sharp jaw lines that began behind his ears. There were a couple of pock marks on his cheeks but with his lavender Ralph Lauren button-down he gave off an air of cleanliness. He seemed very limber, as if he could hop out of his chair and perform push-ups at any moment.

  “Please sit,” he said.

  Thursday set the cooler on the desk and sat. There was a Chinese restaurant in Hermanus and you ordered by number. Other than that Thursday had never talked to a man from China. The two Chinese men chattered in their language and he had no sense of the meaning. Whatever they were saying, they seemed to be direct about it. He spied a poster of the martial artist Jet Li behind Ip’s head.

  “Easter Island Attack,” he said. “One of the best fight scenes ever, bru. The blindfolded duel was so lekker.”

  “Shut up,” the bodyguard said.

  Thursday crossed his legs. Then he uncrossed them.

  “Where’s Leon?” Ip asked. He didn’t sound very Chinese when he spoke English.

  “He’s sick.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Jones.” Thursday had decided to change his name in case of trouble.

  “That your first name?”

  “No, it’s Hampton Jones.”

  “Hampton, izzit?” />
  “Yeah.”

  “Smoke, Hampton?”

  Ip tapped a cigarette out of a pack of Stuyvesants.

  “Not around the perlies. But I’ll take one.”

  He took two.

  “So, tell me about Leon.”

  Ip had a nice smile and a casual way about him that made Thursday feel relaxed. He had expected it to be more difficult after all he’d heard about the Chinese Triads and smuggling. But the trip had given him time to work out a story as well.

  “Leon got sick the other night. So I had to do the diving. We came up big but he’s got the flu.”

  “And he couldn’t drive you.”

  “No.”

  “Because he’s got my car, you know, Hampton. It’s under my name.”

  Thursday hadn’t expected that. “What car?”

  “A Mercedes. Champagne E class. Didn’t he tell you about it?”

  Leon had told Thursday that it was his own car, and Thursday had believed him because he felt down on his luck at the time. But Leon always told a tall tale or two, so Thursday figured there was nothing to get upset about. “I can’t drive.”

  “Why didn’t you go to one of my runners? I don’t like this. I don’t like people coming to me without a good reason. Do you have a good reason?”

  Thursday had prepared for this question too.

  “I didn’t want to get cut up by a Nigerian.”

  Ip said some Chinese to his bodyguard, who tensed. “That incident was exaggerated, Hampton. It was a simple misunderstanding. We haven’t had a problem with the Nigerians since then.”

  But Thursday felt emboldened by the lack of conviction in Ip’s voice. “These perlies are too good to be dried. I’ve got a hundred, and they’re all fresh.”