He must have driven out there and waited—and waited.
In many ways, he was waiting there still.
Hi. Henry here. Please tell Miss Sandra that I will be at the airport on Friday to meet her when she arrives, just to make sure she gets to the right office and is given full protection as a political refugee. Don't worry, I won't let her be deported.
—Thank you sir and God bless! You are a good man.
"The final block is fear," said Detective Saul.
"They use your fears against you," Rhodes explained. "There's rarely any reason to send someone out in person to threaten you, though. It's mostly self-inflicted."
The final block is fear.
In the weeks that followed, and throughout the events that ensued, Laura would remember those words. And she would ask herself: What if you denied fear its foothold? What if you refused to be afraid?
A final flurry of emails, fragments of messages hurled back and forth:
Do you love your wife?
—Of course I do.
Then shut up and don't cause problems. Do you understand? We are mafia. We will find you & we will kill! you. We will leave your life in tatters.
—You already have.
You will die. We know where you live. We will burn your house to the ground.
—What about the girl?
No response.
—What about the girl?
No response.
CHAPTER 46
At the Katsina roundabout in Kaduna city, a massive tanker truck was parked like a beached ship, sides labelled in a hand-painted flourish: "Dreams Abound." Sweat-sheened truck drivers and longdistance bus passengers stranded for the night had shoved their way in under the awnings of the niotor-park cafes, crowded their way along wooden benches, called out their orders across oilcloth countertops.
The girl stood outside, watched plate after plate of food-is-ready fare being dished out. Just 150 naira would have bought her a space along that counter. One hundred and fifty naira: it might as well have been a million.
She hung back at the edge of the motor-park perimeter while evening fell. Shed scouted a few possibilities, spots where the men were louder and drunker than most and would, she hoped, sleep more deeply as well. Inside a cement culvert, she lay down atop discarded cardboard and waited for the laughter to end.
Too hungry to sleep, she counted out the hours. One by one the pockets of celebratory gatherings went silent, and she crawled out under the blue cast of a swollen moon. Not a cloud in the sky for cover.
Women who are with child should not travel after dark.
But the night was not dark, and this was not travel.
Leaving her jerry can hidden in the culvert, she moved along the side of a sewage ditch, peering over it for any sign of roving boys or drunken men. Finally, with a deep breath, she left her cover and followed a path up and into the hyenas' den. A few flickers of flame echoed dimly inside the corroded oil barrels where the truck drivers had formed encampments, their vehicles packed in tightly on all sides as the men slumbered on mats. She heard heavy snores, crept closer.
She was hoping for the usual discarded
suya
sticks and mango rinds; she found much, much more.
Indeed, it was such a heart-catching sight she had to take a moment to calm herself. An entire flank of lamb, the meat heavy on the bone, was skewered above a firepit, the flesh charred and grown cold, glazed in its own grease. Bodies lay all around, but the hunger urged her on, deeper into the encampment. She stepped carefully, threaded her way among the sleeping bodies and piles of rubbish. Three or four steps and she would reach it.
This isn't theft
, she told herself. If she didn't take the meat, a stray dog or waddling rat surely would...
She took one hesitant step, then another.
But the world was not entirely asleep. Someone else was awake and watching her. And as she moved toward the fire pit, a figure took shape in front of her, stepped forward.
A smile emerged from the darkness. "What do we have here?" it asked.
CHAPTER 47
The sea had pushed the river back on itself, with the swirling saline blues curling into the darker greens of the Niger Delta. Tidal waters, deep among the creeks and mangrove swamps.
Just as smoothly, the sea had withdrawn, leaving sleek flats and rivulets flopping with mudskippers. The men moved quickly, stabbing and sorting as the first pelts of rain hit. They were tossing their catch into cross-hatched baskets slung over their shoulders, leaving the leftovers for the children to gather later. Men with backs bent, wet more from condensation than from sweat.
Some had staked out the backflow of estuarial waters with raffia fishing traps, straining the current for prawns. "Fewer than ever," they complained, to cries of agreement. "Fewer than ever, but enough still, Wonyinghi willing!," quickly amended to "Christ willing!"
The miracle of the fish and the loaves played out in more paltry terms that day: hundreds of croaker fish had arrived belly-up from the oil creeks farther inland, sheathed in crude and already rotting.
The boy was nine or ten, maybe more, maybe less; his parents hadn't kept track as diligently as they might, preferring to count out a life by the number of floods lived through rather than one's circuits around the sun. However one kept tally, though, he was still the eldest of the children, and he carried his rank with a firm but fair demeanour. That day, he'd led the little ones along the trail that ran from the back of the village, behind the church, all the way to the lagoon. They'd marched behind him in single file, arranging themselves naturally by height like waterfowl crossing a sandbar, plastic pails and enamel basins held one-handed on heads. Bellies in proud posture. Singsong voices, laughter.
Hardwood canoes were tethered together in the lagoon below, stranded temporarily on tidal mud. The few pirogues that did sport outdoor motors had them tilted up, their propellers useless at low tide.
With nets and fishing traps, the men moved through. Who knew but they might find a shark marooned in wet silt; it happened now and then, causing a riot of excitement and a circle kill. No sharks today, though. Only smaller fish and the fecund smell of the nearby mangrove marshes.
On those occasions when the tide rolled in a giant catfish, further nets would be thrown. Clusters of minnow-sized fish that flitted behind would escape, slipping free on the shallowest of trickles. And though these little fish weren't the offspring of the catfish, the boy's father saw patterns in this, too. "It is a parent's job to give its life for its children," he said.
From the path above the lagoon, the boy held up his hand, and the procession of children came to a halt. "Aren't ready for us," he said. The men would shout when it was time for the children to come running to gather any loose fish still flopping about. They'd have to hurry then before the tide snatched them back.
"We'll wait here," said the boy. "Beside the cannon."
The children lowered the basins from their heads, awaited further instructions. Even entangled as it was with netted vines, the cannon stood out as a local landmark. Cast in iron, the letters
HRH Victoria Rex
were raised along one side, like a welt on skin.
The cannon marked the high point of the path—or what little high point there was. On its outcrop of rock, it still claimed a vantage point on the lagoon; the men below were caught in an ancient line of fire.
It had been trying to rain all day, and the overcast skies now finally collapsed. But the downpour didn't last. The rain soon turned to mist and the mist to steam, and still the men hadn't called.
The children had waited it out under large leaves, and when the worst of the rain had ended and the older boy said, "Okay then, go play," they broke formation instantly, squealing. The boys played at battle in the flattened clearing beside the cannon, wrestling in arm-lock posture, rolling each other into the wet earth. The girls played other games, hopping on one foot on matted grass as they sang precision phrases, trying to maintain balance and rhythm as long as possible, laughing when they stumbled, laughing when they didn't.
Beyond the cannon was the British graveyard, and as the little ones played, the older boy let himself drift toward it.
The names of the dead rolled off his tongue:
Manning Henderson, Esq. Richard Belshaw, Royal Gunner. Captain Reginald Louchland. For God and King. For Queen and Countrye.
He could read the tombstones because they were in English—and though there might be some areas where they spoke only their local Ijaw dialect, out here amid the mahogany and mangroves of the outer creeks, English was their shared language. How else to speak to the Igbo traders or Yoruba priests? How else to cut across dialects of Ijaw so thick they were almost separate languages in themselves? English had been spoken in the Delta longer than this entity they called "Nigeria" had existed. The Ijaw of the Niger Delta had fought for the English king and against him, had mastered his language, had hosted his missionaries—had martyred more than a few. The king's language was taught in school, was used in the markets and at home, with conversations flowing from Ijaw to English and back again as easily as water might pour from one gourd to another. They spoke it properly as well, in low rich tones, with every word, every syllable, given equal weight, equal importance. Nothing like those reedy nasal inflections coming over the radio. Pale BBC voices, sickly and thin.
English had taken root in the muddy waters of the Delta as surely as the mangroves had. The language was theirs as much as it was anyone's, even if most children, and many adults, had never even seen an
oyibo,
as the Igbo traders called them.
The main evidence of
oyibos
in the outer Delta lay in the graves they'd left behind. The bones of the lesser dead were marked with simple wooden crosses that had long ago toppled and lay now in wet decay; you could mark their shapes in the moss that grew, green on green. But most were made of stone, hidden among the iroko trees, overgrown and blackened with mould. The boy was walking among English bones, past stone monuments to HRM's Royal Navy—
Gloria Filiorum Patres
—with the headstones of the Royal Niger Company alongside the older granite of the United Africa Company.
In Service to Greater Glory, 1895.
That was the year the British had fired on Brass Island. The boy's teacher had told them this, in among lessons on English grammar and Ijaw laws and the memorizing of multiplication tables. The English had rained down iron like an angry god it was said, had killed the Brass Islanders by the score for the sin of insolence. But the English had also lost lives that day. Their teacher had smiled when he told them that part of the story. "They die as easily as anyone," he'd said.
The English hadn't even taken the bodies home with them, but had abandoned them here instead. An awful insult to the English
duwoi-you
who were left behind, the boy thought. Without proper rites performed in your own village, how could you ever find rest?
You would be afflicted forever with wayward longings. Perhaps that was why the English had placed such large stones on top of the graves, to keep the souls underneath pinned down.
The other children, bored with their battles and chanted songs, had followed the older boy into the graveyard, curious and afraid in equal measure. Hed been dream-walking among the graves and had barely noticed the others tiptoeing in, but now—
something.
The forest beyond the graves... moved.
The wind? Or maybe he imagined it. The worlds of the
oje,
objects and the everyday, and that of
teme,
the spirits in between, were hard to distinguish at times. They got tangled up like vines, and it could be difficult to say where one started and the other ended.
The boy kept his breathing shallow, watched the forest. Waited.
The forest moved again.
And then—with a crash and a curse, wide leaves were flung apart and a figure emerged. A tall man with pink boiled skin, dressed in mud-splattered beige, strode into the clearing, followed by two men with normal skin. These two seemed nervous, and when they spotted the children they said something that was neither English nor Ijaw, and the boy knew why they were on edge. They weren't Ijaw, they were Igbo, far from the comfort of their own people.
The pink-faced man seemed oblivious, though. He paced out his steps, then slung a long bundle of wood from his shoulder and let the pieces fall into place, forming a three-legged stand onto which he screwed a small spyglass. He had rolled-up sleeves, buttoned back, and his forearms were fuzzed with light-coloured hair and freckled with spots. He peered through his spyglass with eyes as washed-out as he was.
