Nnamdi's mother.
CHAPTER 81
Scambaiting. This is what her brother was involved in. It was a neologism Laura hadn't encountered before.
"Payback," he explained. "For Dad."
They were at her brother's house in Springbank, and Warren was scrolling through website pages like a proud parent. Hed been eating Pringles as he typed, and the keyboard was sprinkled with crumbs.
"See? That one's mine," he said. "They posted it yesterday."
Winter had trapped Warren's kids inside. They thundered past, bickering on the fly. A muted television flickered, vying for attention: reality show contestants eating bugs, preparing sombre
"tribal councils." Somewhere below, down in the basement, in her flannel nightgown no doubt, was Laura's mom. The prisoner of Springbank.
Laura drifted back to the one-sided discourse Warren so often mistook for conversation. He was explaining the concept of scambaiting to her. "There's a whole community of us," he said.
"Like-minded people who are fighting back. We police the net, set up traps. The easiest way is to register dummy email addresses, turn off the spam filters, and wait. When these 419 weasels come calling, we take the bait. Instead of hitting
DELETE,
we reply. It's fuckin' hilarious."
Three-Stooges hilarious?
Fingers-to-the-eye funny?
Or celebrity-eating-a-bug funny? She remembered the prank calls Warren used to orchestrate as a teenager, before caller ID ruined that particular art form. "Ma'am, congratulations! You've just won CKUA's Chicken on the Run cash prize of
one hundred dollars!
All you have to do is cluck like a chicken for the next ten minutes..."
Warren had opened his inbox and was grinning. "Y'see. Here's another one, just came in.
Dear Sir, I am the son of an exiled Nigerian diplomat.
.. The trick is to answer with the most outlandish stories you can come up with, drag it out, waste their time, and then post the entire thing online. One scambaiter convinced the con men that he was a dying Belgian aristocrat, who was just... about to... send the money... when—
croak!"
Another 419 con man had been lured into a lengthy email exchange with a certain F. Flintstone of Bedrock, USA, "a town right out of history," who kept trying to pay with clams. Real clams. Another set of messages had been sent by one Captain Kirk, who agreed to send cash only on the condition that the people contacting him joined Starfleet Academy and sent signed affidavits that they weren't secret agents of the Romulan Empire.
"These morons actually printed off the forms, signed them, and sent them back," Warren chortled, "so Kirk kept making more and more demands. Handed it over to an associate named Lieutenant Worf, who started sending them letters written in Klingon. Some scambaiters have even convinced the con artists to send
them
money. Really! They'll say, ‘I can help, but first you must demonstrate your sincerity by making a small donation of a hundred dollars to the Church of the Holy Turnip.'"
"They don't Google the names?" Laura asked. "Find out who Fred Flintstone and Captain Kirk really are?"
"Too greedy," he said with a snicker.
Greed versus cunning. Cunning wins.
Where had she heard that?
It came to her like a whisper from another room.
"They want it so bad," Warren explained, "that they never realize they're being played for fools—until it's too late. Then they go ballistic, start showering you with death threats and profanity. It doesn't matter. It still ends with us laughing at them, putting everything up on the web for the world to see. Here—check this out."
He opened a new window, clicked on a bookmarked page. A scambaiter from England had posted photos of a broken refrigerator that he'd carted up and sent COD to a con man in Nigeria, who had paid the exorbitant shipping fees expecting—-well, who knows? Gold, maybe. Certainly not a broken refrigerator. His angry response was laced with creative invective.
"Even better are the scambaiters who email the con artists to say, ‘I'll be there Monday. Meet me at the airport! Wear a yellow hat with yellow shoes and yellow socks,'" Warren said. "One scam-baiter got a Nigerian con man to fly to Amsterdam and had him waiting in front of a webcam outside a department store, standing around for hours like a moron. And if the con man emails back, demanding to know what's going on, the scambaiter responds by getting even angrier. ‘Where the hell were you? I waited and waited!' Sometimes they'll send the con men to Western Union, and when the dupes email to say the money didn't go through, the baiter over here will fire back, ‘Well, someone signed for it! Who the hell has been cashing my money orders!' Which sends them off on another goose chase. If we re lucky, they'll start fighting among themselves, accusing their partners of ripping them off."
Warren had moved on to another scambaiter site and clicked on the archives. "They call this the trophy room, where we post our latest conquests," he told Laura.
Photographs of young African men, some smiling, some not, some holding turnips on their heads or with their hands in a Benny Hill salute, some dressed in a bra and panties ("as a sign of your sincerity"), others holding up handwritten signs that read
MY
BOXERS ARE HOME OF THE WHOPPER
or
I SHOT JR!!
or
BEAM ME UP
SCOTTY! NO SIGN OF INTELLIGENT LIFE HERE.
One man was holding a sign, purportedly in Swedish, that read:
IMAB
IGDO
OFUS!
Another had written out what he thought was the name of an international banking cartel:
I.M.A. Liberty Organization Savings Export Revenue
Warren was laughing out loud by this point. "Fuckin' hilarious!" Laura, however, felt a queasy sense of—not sadness, exactly. Something conflicted, the flutter of something trying to escape. Warren scrolled down: rows and rows of photographs, each one stamped
OWNED!
She'd seen photographs like that before. In history books.
Warren kept opening new windows, cluttering his computer screen with their overlapping views. "Wait, wait," he said as she got up to leave. "Here's one I think you'll like. It made me think of you."
Dear Chief Ogun,
Delightful to hear from you old chap! I remember my days in the Colonial Office of the Sudan quite well.
I was working with Professor Plum, who was studying the aphrodisiacal effects of zebra hoofs on the wives of British bureaucrats. I daresay Mrs. Peacock's husband eventually murdered Professor Plum. In the library. With a candlestick.
Sincerely,
Colonel Mustard, OBE
PS: I have copied your request to my assistant, Miss Scarlet, at Corporate Living Unified Executives (C.L.U.E.) who handles these sorts of money matters.
"Hooves," Laura said. "Not hoofs."
"What?"
"I'm going downstairs to see Mom."
"Wait. Check it out. Another rube has just joined the Church of the Holy Turnip."
On the muted TV screen across from them, the contestants had moved on to live worms and Laura had tired of Warren's game.
Just as she was about to leave, though, she caught a glimpse of a message on Warren's computer screen that began
"Complements of the season
—" It stopped her, cold.
"Click on that one," she said.
The rest of the message popped up. A reply to Colonel Mustard from Chief Ogun. And there it was:
complements.
A common enough error, but still...
"Can I get copies?" she asked. "Of these emails. And the others?
Can you print them off for me?"
"Which ones?"
"All."
"That's a hundred pages, at least."
"And the emails Dad got," she said. "I'll need those too."
CHAPTER 82
"She can't stay here."
"She has nowhere to go."
"She can't stay here."
They were talking about her, whispering in Ijaw so she couldn't understand them. But she did. She knew what they were discussing, could hear it in the tension of his mother's voice, in the pauses between the words.
"You were always a dreamer. You never had any sense. What were you thinking, bringing her here? She can't stay."
"She has nowhere else to go."
Amina was lying on a mat with her back turned, pretending to sleep. Nnamdi had lit a mosquito coil for her, and she watched the thin smoke of it uncurl. Outside, heavy rains were coming down, rattling the roof. A small lizard scampered up the wall, its orange head trailing a fluid blue body.
They were talking about her.
"She can't stay here. She has to go."
CHAPTER 83
The entire village had turned out to welcome Nnamdi home with cheers and laughter, drums and dancing.
"The prodigal son returns!" someone shouted. "Amen!" came the reply.
Women were waving palm fronds, men were beating out rhythms. Amina's senses began to spin. The Ijaw drums were so... relentless, never stopping, never catching their breath, so unlike the lonely strings of the
goje
or the winds of the
kakaki
flutes, so unlike the music of the Sahel. The Fulani in the north were drummers too, but they never reached the hammer-on-anvil nature of the Ijaw.
The rhythms of the Fulani drums were born of pounding millet, of women gathered around a hollowed mortar, turning music into food and food into music. These Ijaw drums were different: they were blood and fire, rain and thunder; they were the human heart after heavy work.
Nnamdi joined in the dancers, leading one procession, following another. The dancers of the Sahel stepped as softly as a sigh, moving on the melody, not to the tempo, each step sliding forward, graceful, almost gentle. Here, the dancers were driven—propelled—by a muscular sense of purpose, movements that shouted out, men and women together, bent at the waist, feet rising and falling, arms carving patterns in the air with precise, slice-like gestures, the laughter almost an instrument of its own.
Amina felt faint. She had been standing too long. Nnamdi emerged from the joyous melee that was swirling around her, said,
"Come away, you should lie down."
"But—is for you, this dance."
"Let's find a mat for you to lie on. There will be lots of time to dance later."
CHAPTER 84
"She can't stay here. Look at her face, look at those tattoos."
"Not tattoos. Scars. And we must show her hospitality. Life demands it. We are Ijaw, and she is our guest."
"She speaks English like a simpleton."
"She speaks more languages than we do. She speaks French."
"She can't stay here."
CHAPTER 85
Amina ventured out the following day, while Nnamdi was sleeping and his mother was away at the market.
Across from Nnamdi's home, a large iroko tree spread its shade in a central clearing, a communal living room of sorts. A sheet of corrugated metal provided shelter for a billiard table, and amid the click and clack of balls, men sat about on plastic chairs drinking the Fanta and ginger beer that Nnamdi's mother sold from her assortment of refrigerators. Amina tried to slip by unnoticed.
On the other side of the yard, a generator hummed. Old men and young children were crowded around the village's television set, watching the Super Eagles out-finesse yet another upstart collection of players. Aminas appearance broke the spell, though, and they stared at her as she passed—not in hostility, but not in friendship, either. It was more a puzzled curiosity, as though they were looking at an unusual bird and trying to identify it.
A lane led to another clearing, where oil barrels lay scattered about. Some had been upended and were being used as workstations by women to clean fish or wash vegetables. Other barrels had been rigged with plastic sheets and funnels to catch rainwater.
A hairdresser was plaiting a woman's hair in a doorway, and Amina hurried past, eyes down. The weight of their gaze followed her, though, and she began to walk faster.
The pathways between homes were muddy and crusted with shards of shells; it was as though the earth were embedded with diamonds. Corrugated rooftops, scaled in reds and greens, rust and moss, crowded in at sharp angles, the houses built this way and that, so close at times they almost touched. Open-ditch latrines.
Swaybacked verandas.
Windows without shutters, doorways without doors, and not a single privacy wall of any kind. Children and adults, men and women, intermingling with bare limbs and easy laughter. In a place like this, their lives must spill into one another's laps. No secrets. It wasn't possible. She felt the panic rising anew.
Past the football pitch, flattened grass framed by forest, she reached the farm fields at the edge of the village: small plots of land carved from the overgrowth, with the jungle pressing in from every side. Women were moving through, bending at the waist, slashing from the wrist, swinging machetes, clearing grass. Amina felt trapped. No horizon. No way to watch for the dust of hoofprints approaching. No dust at all. Only mud—and a wall of forest.
She'd slipped free of Nnamdi's home to scout a possible escape route, a place to run to if she had to. But now she'd come up against an oppressive backdrop of jungle, the green of it breathing in her face. The rolling rains of the night before had drawn earthy aromas from the soil.
When you pour water on a fire,
she thought. That was how the Delta smelled. Wet charcoal, water-drowned, but still warm. Always warm.
