Across the airport suburb of Ikeja, across Lagos, across southern Nigeria and West Africa, women were hurrying about in their Sunday best, tying up their elaborate head scarves, pirouetting into wraparound skirts, draping their shoulder shawls just so. Men were donning dress shirts and Sunday jackets. Little boys were buttoning up their vests, and girls were adjusting ribbons and satiny bows as the church bells beckoned like songbirds.
The voicemail messages from Winston had piled up during the night. So many she'd been forced to unplug the phone again.
She listened to them now in bed, the messages by turn plaintive, indignant, angry, hurt. "My life is in danger. Do you understand?
You have caused all sorts of consternation. They have killed the boy. They will kill me too. You must help me. I need to get out of Nigeria. Only you can save me. It is in your hands. You have taken my money, please don't claim my life as well. Miss, I beg you."
Message after message. Variations on a theme.
She let the voicemail play on while she showered. When she got out of the stall, the bathroom mirror had clouded over with steam.
The Sheraton Hotel? I know the concierge.
He did this. He killed the boy with the beautiful smile,
not me.
Laura chose the
DELETE ALL
option on the hotel voicemail—and in doing so, saved Winston's life, though she would never know this. Later, when they came to check her voicemail for messages and clues, they would find none.
Laura peered through the peephole with its fish-eye view of the world, listened at the door, took a breath, and then stepped out quickly into the hallway, hurrying toward the elevators.
A cleaning woman, tremendously pregnant, was pushing a cart toward her. Their eyes met as they passed. She looked...
familiar
to Laura. As though they had met somewhere, long ago. Had been separated at some point.
The cleaning lady stopped, cried out at Lauras back. "For why?"
Laura turned around, looked up and down the hall; there was no one else there. "Sorry?"
The cleaning lady came toward her, anger and sadness in every step. "For why?"
"I'm sorry, I don't—oh my God, who did that to you?"
Laura was speaking about the scars on Amina's face. Amina said, "It was for you to die. Not him."
The
batauri
woman, eyes so pale, skin the colour of boiled lamb, hair the colour of drought, was startled—and confused—by Amina's tears.
"It was you, woman," said Amina. "It was you did this. The boy, coming in your room. The boy, he let you live." She pointed to her chest. "He was mine. And he is died. For why?"
In the turmoil of that moment, Laura never heard the elevator doors open, never noticed the lone man who stepped out or the polished shoes that were now striding toward her.
It was the concierge. "Madam, we were worried about you."
He shooed away the cleaning girl as though she were a stray cat, then turned to Laura. "You weren't answering your phone, so I came to check on you, to make sure everything was all right."
"I'm—I'm fine, thank you." She looked down the hallway.
The pregnant girl with the scars on her face had disappeared. Had she been a hallucination? "I was on my way down. To see you, in fact."
He smiled, but not with his eyes. "Well, then," he said. "Why don't we ride down together?"
He escorted her to the elevators, held out a hand for her to enter. Pressed the button for
LOBBY.
The doors closed them in.
"Will madam be extending her stay?"
The lights on the panel were counting down the floors.
"No, I'll be leaving today. I'll be back to check out and gather my bags. I'll need a taxi to the airport."
"Of course, madam. I will make the necessary arrangements.
What time shall I say?"
"Um, one? One o'clock."
"Certainly, madam."
The door opened onto the lobby, and he held a hand across the door to keep it from closing. "One o'clock, madam. I will make sure a driver and a car are waiting for you."
CHAPTER 121
One o'clock.
Tunde watched his reflection in the smoky grey of the hotel's glass doors. His reflection parted every time the doors opened, every time a gaggle of
oyibo
businessmen elbowed their way through in a swirl of air-conditioned mist. Tunde had started as a taxi driver, several lifetimes ago, driving a battered Peugeot 504 on Akala Road, but he'd never worn a uniform and had never driven a sedan this sleek. Until now. He smiled at himself—at the chauffeur's cap and jacket, the creased trousers—smiled as his reflection disappeared, then reappeared, with every exit, every entrance.
The area boys were waiting too, under the airport flyover, and better armed than usual. Hatchets and chains, mainly.
Wait for
the signal.
Ironsi-Egobia was in his office, phone on table, waiting for word from the concierge. Winston was pacing back and forth in his apartment, waiting for a call from Miss Scarlet. They were all of them waiting. But the lady had vanished. Miss Scarlet was gone.
As the doorman waved a crumpled yellow taxi over, she'd told him she needed to pop out for a bit, would return to the hotel soon to check out. But when she climbed inside, she'd leaned up to the driver and said, "I've changed my mind. Take me to the airport instead."
As the clock ticked past one, then started the slow sweep toward two, the concierge began to worry. He eventually sent the cleaning girl in to check.
Amina entered on a knock and a soft "Hello?"
The room was still. The curtains were drawn and the windows were closed. A lamp was standing in a pool of light. Bedcovers, twisted into a fitful knot. A carry-on bag, open on the desk, rolled items of clothing beside it. Underwear and stockings. A compact mirror.
The bathroom door was closed.
Amina could hear the fan running, could see light below the door. She called out again, her voice sounding unnaturally loud.
Tried the handle. Locked.
The housekeeping staff could open locked bathroom doors if they had to; it was easy. A simple push with a metal pin, and the door would pop open. Amina popped the lock, hesitated. She knocked again, pushed the door inward.
No one.
Amina turned off the fan, stepped inside, was startled momentarily by her own reflection in the mirror. On the bathroom counter: a toothbrush leaning in a glass, a half-rolled tube of toothpaste, bottled water, scattered items. A hairbrush with filaments of gold, faintly visible. Just wisps, really, barely there.
A bathing suit was hung over the shower rod, and the shower curtain was drawn. Amina pulled it aside, heart tightening in her chest. The bathtub—was empty. The room was empty. The
oyibo
woman was gone.
The concierge was waiting in the hall, hands clasped behind his back, face clenched.
"Well?"
"She is gone away."
"No luggage?"
"Luggage, yes. The woman, no."
The concierge stormed in, rifled through Laura's belongings. Everything was there. Everything except: passport, cellphone, ticket, woman. He rushed out, pushing past Amina, hurrying to the elevators, shoes hitting the carpet. But by then it was too late.
Far.
Too.
Late.
CHAPTER 122
WestAir Flight 702 dropped through the overcast, down to a city of sandstone and steel. Cold rains and winter grey. Laura stared through the drizzle at that strange place called home.
—Nothing to declare?
—
Nothing.
Back at Murtala Muhammed Airport, before she lined up at security, she'd thought about stopping by the EFCC office to see Inspector Ribadu, to tell him "I have seen lions and I have seen hyenas, I have seen hunters and I have seen crocodiles. And I never left Lagos." But she knew their conversation would only lead to questions, and those questions would lead to more questions, and she needed to remain invisible.
Only when the airplane had lifted off from the tarmac in Lagos did she fully exhale. And as the plane banked toward the sea, she sent a song back to the city below. It was a song shed heard on the radio during her ride through the city:
"419, play the game; 419, all the same."
And threading through it, a question: "Who is the
mugu
now?"
In the taxi to the airport, she had slid the creased photograph from her skirt pocket, had methodically ripped it up. "Do you have somewhere I can throw this?" she'd asked the driver. "Certainly," he said, and he'd taken her fistful of tatters and reached his arm out the window, letting the pieces fall from his fingers. She gasped and turned, watched her father cartwheel away.
A three-hour layover in London, then a long flight across a wide ocean. And now Laura, falling through the overcast. Rain on the window and a long line of brake lights far below, moving down Deerfoot Trail, going home. She stared out the window until her breath fogged the plastic and the runway came up to meet her.
CHAPTER 123
When Laura first arrived back at her apartment, she walked through it turning on lights. It felt as though she'd been gone much longer than she had. She undressed, stood in the shower a long while, eyes closed. Changed and then went down to the food court for supper. But when she got there, she felt addled and distracted, couldn't choose between Greek or Korean, Chinese or Thai, and she retreated to her apartment instead, locked herself in.
The yogurt in her fridge was still fresh; it was as though she'd never left.
No one even knew I was gone.
Emails in her inbox. Queries from publishers mostly. A follow-up to
Mavericks of the Sky.
And the messages she'd sent to herself from Lagos: images of Winston's mom and dad waving at the camera, of Winston scowling. She hadn't thought to take a single photo of the city itself.
Laura tried to focus on her work, but was having trouble concentrating. She took the C-Train to 7th Avenue, a bus to Springbank, walked down to her brother's cul-de-sac.
Warren was out, but their mom was there.
"I got Dad's money back," Laura said. "Not all of it. Some. As much as I could."
They were sitting at the card table in her brother's basement, across from the furnace room.
Her mother barely seemed to notice what she'd said.
"Tea?"
"The bank in Nigeria finally released it." Should she tell her mother that she'd been to Africa and back? It barely seemed real even to Laura. "There was a lot of paperwork involved. I didn't get enough money to buy back the house, not entirely. But it's enough to stop the foreclosure. Maybe we can use it to make a lump-sum payment against the debt, start paying back the rest slowly."
Her mother poured Red Rose into china cups that Laura recognized from her childhood. Those burnt orange mugs that were standard issue in all 1970s bungalows.
"You know," her mother said after a long pause. "I never really liked that house. It needs a lot of work. The roof needs to be reshingled. The boiler needs replacing. And without your father, it feels a little empty. We were talking about selling it anyway, finding something smaller. I've settled in here now. I can hear the footsteps upstairs and know I'm not alone. But I can be alone when I want to, oh, you know, talk to Henry. The twins come charging down every day to say hello." She smiled, then confided, "They tire me out. It's wonderful when they come down, just as wonderful when they leave. Milk for your tea?"
"But—the money. I don't think you understand what I went through to get it."
"You keep it. It's what your father would have wanted. Warren is fine, and I need so little. You have it."
"But, Mom, it's not my money."
"The tea," her mother said. "Before it gets cold."
CHAPTER 124
Cold tea and fever dreams.
Laura felt as though she were lost in her own bedding, tangled and suffocating, and she woke to find herself marinating in sweat, sheets clammy, the pillow as damp as her hair. Her head ached from neck to temple, but she couldn't rally the strength required to get to the medicine cabinet and swallow any pain-numbing tablets. She lay there instead, felt the bed shift below her, tilting one way then another as sunlight slowly filled the room.
When she finally did stagger to the bathroom to wash down some Advil, she immediately threw it up, and she spent the rest of the day bent over the toilet, feeling as though her stomach was being turned inside out like a Safeway bag. The fever came in waves, the shivers turning to spasms, the spasms knocking her to her knees every time she tried to stand.
A thin face in the mirror. Fever dreams, strange visions. Flamingos lifting off, flames in a forest. Her father, cartwheeling away.
The emails started soon after. Threatening, begging, cajoling, insistent. She wasn't sure how he'd tracked down her address, but when she tried blocking him, he simply slipped back in with a new identity. When she was finally strong enough to stand, she hobbled down to the IT Computer Centre near the food court, asked if it was possible to block an entire country, or even an entire continent.
She wanted to ask if they could block memories as well.
"Easier for you to change your address," they said.
She did that, but he found her anyway.
"YOU HAVE PUT MY LIFE IN DANGER!!!
You have
RUINED
me!"
And then: "Sponsor me. Get me out of here. I will repay you tenfold. A hundredfold. I would be a great asset to your nation. I am hard-working. I have ambitions. Bring me over, I won't disappoint. It is only paperwork that stands between me and my dreams."
