Indigo (14 page)

When he asked Louis, Louis insisted that his brother lived around the spot where the monkeys were, and he said he wanted to find his brother so that they could ask for help.

“Good idea,” said Parker, but Louis immediately got confused and began scanning the decrepit landscape, trying to recognize a doorway or a path, something that would lead them to that brother of his.

“Louis, what is your brother's name?” Jerry asked. “Why not ask someone for him by using his name?”

“My brodder name be Smart,” said Louis. “Everyone know him down here. De door to Smart's own place be green; I remember it well.”

Pamela and Louis walked off, asking shopkeepers if they knew Smart, but Jerry soon became so agitated that he took Nurudeen and Parker and started down a nearby pathway of his own. This was not a commercial path, and it didn't look like it led to where the monkeys were, but here, after they'd gone some distance, doors did begin to appear, and some of them were green. These doors were lined up so close together, though, that it was difficult to imagine that they led anywhere. It was more like a door store than any kind of entrance.

“Let's go back,” said Nurudeen.

Jerry didn't want to go any farther either, but the anxiety he felt at being late was terrible, and it propelled him up to a dozen shirtless men, a few heavy women listening to a radio.

“Do any of you know the monkeys?” Jerry asked. “They should be around here someplace.”

The men stayed quiet, but one of the market women smiled at him. “Say again, please,” she said.

“The monkeys,” said Jerry, but Parker took over. “If it please, madam, where go dem monkey seller? We go fin' quick fo' meet wid one anodder masta.”

“Oh,” said the woman. “Down 'roun dat way, den straight on to de other side.”

Jerry had no idea what the woman had said but Parker asked, “Maybe de man Smart be close at hand? He behin' one green door, call de finance man. We be travelin' wid his own good brodder, Louis.”

When Parker mentioned Smart the others in the crowd watched him. “What you wan' wid Smart?” the woman asked.

“Wan' make de introduction,” said Parker. “Wan' talk small wid 'im, das all.”

Maybe nobody wanted to say so, but it was clear to Jerry that they all knew Smart. And when the heavy woman took Parker's wrist and turned with him, everyone followed along. “Back here,” she said, and in a minute they were standing in front of one of the doors they'd passed before. It was a tall, surreal door. It was green, but it made them hesitate.

“Who de brodder o Smart?” asked the woman, and when she said it Nurudeen ran off to bring the others quickly back.

“Here,” said Jerry. “It's Louis. He's the one.”

Louis smiled. “What?” he said. “Did I not say de door be green? Hello, madam, hello everybody. I am Louis. Smart young brodder by de same daddy. Only de mama not de same.”

Louis was proud, but Jerry could not imagine that he had ever been to his brother's place before. The people greeted him, though, and soon the heavy woman was pounding on the door, producing a deep echo. While they waited Jerry held the newspapers tightly under his arm. He was beginning to believe that it might be days before such a current paper made its way down here. The market wasn't such a bad meeting place after all.

Pamela stood behind Nurudeen, resting her hands on his shoulders. “It's nearly twelve,” she said. “I fear we're late again.” But for the longest time the woman's pounding produced only the echo. Louis's pride in bringing the outside world to his brother was making him as impatient as Jerry. When the green door finally opened, however, they all stood still. The person opening it was a boy.

“Smart's asleep,” he said.

Beyond him there was only darkness, as if the boy stood in no space at all. Louis, however, jumped forward. “Elwood, my frien'. How do you do?”

Jerry felt that all of this might go on forever, but apparently the noise had brought Smart too, for another man stepped out of nowhere, coming up behind Elwood and moving him aside.

“May I help you?” he asked.

Smart looked at Louis with slow recognition and Jerry thought that if he was Louis's brother it was certainly a loosely knit family. Smart was at least fifty, probably older, and he gave the impression of being a man of calm intelligence. Louis, on the other hand, bounced around in front of him like a marionette until the man held a hand up.

“Howdy, Louis,” he said. “Long time no see.”

“Yes, brodder!” Louis said. “How do you do?”

Though everything was fascinating, Jerry couldn't stand any more family reunion and he said, “Excuse me, but we need to know where the monkeys are, and we need to know now.”

Without the proper background the question was absurd and Smart laughed. “A fine question,” he said. “I believe the urban sprawl has wiped them out. Try looking a little more deeply into the bush.”

With that he appeared to be about to turn back into the darkness but Pamela stopped him. “We mean the monkeys in the cages,” she said. “We have an urgent meeting that was to take place there.”

“Ah,” said Smart. He looked at Pamela keenly and then he said, “Very well, step inside.”

Once the green door was closed, the visitors could see a sheet-metal hallway veering sharply to the left and down. There was light, of a sort, coming up from the end of the hallway and Smart walked toward it without speaking, letting them follow along. Jerry was so amazed at the place that he momentarily forgot the urgency of his mission and the lateness of his arrival to fulfill it. He was behind the green door walking deeply into some kind of den. Surely those other doors could not all have been real.

When they got to the end of the hallway they entered a room where kerosene lamps made the metal sides of things look soft.

“We've built this place between two green doors,” said Smart. “The monkeys are outside the other one.”

The room where they stood was not the room in which Smart had been sleeping. In its far corner was another hallway, but along the nearest wall were several doors of ordinary size. Jerry rather hoped that Smart would say something about how he had managed to carve a metal house into the middle of the marketplace, but Smart led them across the oddly angled room and up the other hallway, a two-minute walk to the next outside door.

“The monkeys are just here,” he said, “you can't miss them.”

“Oh brodder, thank you,” said Louis, and Jerry, too, shook the man's hand.

When they stepped through this green door, however, they weren't standing on another path but in the back of some kind of shop, in a room all a-clutter with machine parts. They had to walk through the shop in order to get outside, and when Jerry looked back he saw that the shop's front was made of canvas. A wooden sign sewn to it read, “S
MART'S APPLIANCES, REFRIGERATORS AND WASHERS FOR SALE
.”

At the spot where they stood the market was quite different, extremely busy, but in a vague way familiar to Jerry. He was sure it was to this spot that he'd come on the U.S. Embassy tour. Here men were pedaling through the crowds with boxes of audiotapes on their bikes; here, too, directly across from Smart's was a tribal doctor, a medicine man, sunk down on his stool but surrounded by vials and smoke; and here, just to their left, were the monkeys, most of them looking at Jerry as if upset with him for being so late.

“I don't see Lee,” Jerry said.

“I know the face of his contac' man,” said Parker. “Lemme walk a bit. Maybe he will see me in de crowd.”

Parker took off, so Jerry and Pamela and Louis and Nurudeen stood near the monkeys and waited. These monkeys were forlorn things, more pitiful than the parrots had been. In some cases their cages were so small that they looked wrapped in the wire. Some of them were bleeding and all of them had a dull cast about their eyes.

Nurudeen was upset by what he saw and Jerry wanted to ask whether the monkeys were sold as pets or as food, but when he looked at Pamela all she said was, “I haven't been down here since I was a girl.”

Jerry could not believe that Lee wouldn't wait, however late he might be. It was Lee's job to see him safely out of the country, not to ensure that he was always on time. But when Parker came back he was alone. “I don' know,” he said, “but Lee's no fool. Maybe he's sittin' tight somehow.”

The monkey section took up more space than Jerry thought it would, and when Parker spoke Jerry got the idea that he should walk around the monkeys too, letting himself be seen. Pamela went with him.

Opposite the monkeys there was seafood for sale; in the nearest stall the long thin body of a shark stretched out in the dirt. It was a seven-foot hammerhead and the cold dryness of it brought Jerry back to the absurdity and danger of the situation he was in.

They circled the monkeys twice, but they were approached by no one suggesting Lee. “Goddamn him,” Jerry said. When he spoke it was a whisper, but it drew the attention of the nearest monkey, a frail little thing slumped at the bottom of his cage.

They waited longer, of course, hoping to meet someone who would tell them what they should do, but finally Louis said, “Only Smart can help us now.” Jerry would have stayed until the sun went down, but Pamela coaxed him away, having him look past the hopeless monkeys, through the forest of wires to where the dead hammerhead shark still lay. “It's too late,” she said. “We've arrived too late once again.”

Jerry saw a piece of newspaper stuck between the monkey cages and he pulled it out. It said December 4. He looked at his watch to confirm that today was in fact the twenty-fourth, the day before Christmas. Maybe they would have to go to Smart for help but he believed that, for a time, at least, he could come back outside whenever he liked, walking around the monkeys with impunity, hoping to find someone who knew how to get to Ghana, someone, even, who represented Lee Logar and who was willing to take him there.

Smart wasn't a Smith-Jones, and Louis wasn't either. But Smart's Appliances had been around since before Nigerian independence, and Smart once believed that the ultra-British quality of such a name would endear him to the colonizers and make his business a success. During those years all he'd wanted was to sell refrigerators and washing machines, to make a living off the people who ran things.

But the appliance business had not succeeded, and by the mid-1960s Smart expanded, first into musical instruments, later into the publishing of small pamphlets and books, the poetry and essays of Nigerians whose work could not find favor elsewhere. Thus the walls of Smart's house were made of metal stripped from old appliances, the vents from the bodies of accordions and the reamed-out throats of clarinets, and the seams and scars covered with the pages of works he had published but not sold, Hausa poetry and ageless fables from Ibo land.

For a time Smart's publishing efforts had garnered him a quiet sort of fame; for a time this odd house had served as a meeting place for artists and intellectuals of all sorts. In recent years, however, that had all died down. The natural audience for his efforts had been the common man, and the common man, these days, not only had no money for such things, but seemed to have a shrinking inclination for them as well.

When Jerry and the others stepped back into the appliance shop and opened, once again, that second green door, Parker said, “If there is a phone we could ring up this Lee, tell 'im to come one more time.”

But Jerry, when he saw that he was standing in a room carved from old refrigerator parts, had no more patience for any of that. The question of whether Parker was really working for Lee or not could be answered by whether or not Jerry would be allowed to walk back up the other hallway, back out to Pamela's car, and have~ Louis drive him to the U.S. Embassy where he would stay. He had decided he would do that, but when he mentioned it, Pamela said, “That only works for political crimes,” and thus he had to stop and think again.

Pamela sat next to Jerry on an enamel bench, while Louis began opening the side doors, looking for Smart. “Hello, brodder,” he called. “Oh Smart, come out now, we need you here.”

There were three doors along the wall and Louis didn't find his brother until he'd opened the third. When Smart did come out, Elwood, his young steward, came with him.

“Bring morning chop,” Smart told the boy, “don' waste time,” and when Elwood left, Smart listened while Louis explained what was going on and why they were back in his living room in this uninvited way. When he had finished Smart looked at Jerry. “What do you want from me?” he asked. “Help leaving the country or help clearing your name while you stay?”

It was a pivotal question and one Jerry could have answered better if he knew where he stood with these folks, but in the end he decided to answer honestly. “Help leaving the country, I think,” he said, “or getting in touch with my contact man again. I will try to clear my name from Ghana or the U.S.A.”

Smart laughed and shook his head. “Name clearing can't often take place in absentia,” he said.

Smart was a thick-shouldered man, physically a lot like Sunday and Lawrence Biko. His dark-framed glasses were like Sunday's too, and his laugh was as explosive. But Jerry didn't want the unsolicited opinion and he said, “If you were in my place you would stay, I suppose.”

He hadn't wanted to sound confrontational, but he let it stand, and Smart, instead of replying in kind, spoke softly. “It is not your place to worry about Nigeria,” he said, “of course I understand that.”

Elwood came back with the food, white bread and sticks of suya meat, and while they were eating Smart spoke again. “I have been to America and I have been to England,” he said. “I was a student in England, but in America I traveled about, seeing the places where Africans live. Would you like to hear about it?”