Wife of the Gods (30 page)

“What happened?” Gyamfi asked in surprise as Dawson came in with
the two disheveled youths.

“Book them,” Dawson said. “Assault, battery, conspiracy to
murder, attempted murder.”

He gave a quick version of the story. Gyamfi listened
attentively, but Bubo avoided making any eye contact with
Dawson.

“We’ll take care of them, Inspector, sir,” Gyamfi said, shooting
a disparaging look at the two boys.

“I’ll write my report in a minute,” Dawson said. “Can I see
Samuel?”

“Yes, no problem.”

Dawson went down the two-stair drop to the jail.

“Samuel?”

The young man had fashioned a rope from his shirt and was
hanging from the bars of the jail window, his toes about an inch
from the ground. His head was slung forward, and the bucket was on
its side on the floor along with the excrement it had
contained.

“Gyamfi!” Dawson screamed. “
Gyamfi!
The keys,
bring
the keys
!”

The constable came quickly. He saw Samuel hanging and gasped.
“Oh,
no
.”

The key rattled against the lock, and it seemed too long before
Gyamfi got the door open.

“Hold him up, hold him up,” Dawson said.

Gyamfi lifted Samuel’s legs, and Dawson flicked open the blade
of his Swiss Army knife and cut above the knot.

Live, please live
.

They got him down. His body was limp, his neck had been
stretched, and his face was swollen with engorged blood.

Bubo came down with the two new prisoners just as Dawson tried
blowing a breath into Samuel’s mouth. He pumped on Samuel’s chest
and gave another breath. He had forgotten the correct number for
each action, but he performed the sequence just the same and
repeated the cycle for he didn’t know how long and until he was
pouring with sweat.

He thought he heard someone say, “Dawson, stop,” and then a hand
squeezed his shoulder.

“Dawson, you can’t do anything more.”

It was Gyamfi talking. Dawson looked up at him and then down at
Samuel.

He was dead. It was all over.

Dawson jumped up with fists clenched and cried out in the purest
anguish. He hurled himself against the wall and then crumpled to
the floor with his head in his hands. He didn’t make another
sound.

“Inspector,” Gyamfi whispered, touching his arm. “Inspector
Dawson, it wasn’t your fault, hear? You couldn’t have done anything
wrong.”

∨
Wife of the Gods
∧

D
awson took the news
to the Boatengs. This was an ordeal he had to go through. He blamed
himself for Samuel’s death, and he wanted the family’s pain to be
his punishment. He wanted them to whip him with their fury and lash
him with words that cut like barbed wire raked across the skin.

But it didn’t happen that way. Mrs. Boateng let out a single
shriek of shock and collapsed. Mr. Boateng supported her, and she
pressed her face into his chest and began to utter a high-pitched
keen like a lost kitten crying for its mother. And all the children
in the house stood and watched with big, round eyes.

Mr. Boateng said nothing. He stared unseeing at a point on the
wall. He may have seemed without emotion, but Dawson saw where all
the pain was. It was deep in those sad, bloodshot eyes.

“I’ll be outside if you need me,” Dawson said quietly.

He stood in front of the crumpled house and watched people going
about their daily business. He wished he could start over again. He
wished he could have forced Inspector Fiti to free Samuel for lack
of evidence.

Instead, what had he, Darko Dawson, done so far? Arrested the
wrong man, antagonized the local police, beaten up a few people,
and lost an innocent boy to suicide.

He turned as Boateng’s soft voice invited him back in. “Do you
want to drink some water?”

“No, thank you, Mr. Boateng.”
I don’t deserve water
.

Dawson sat with them in silence for a long time until Samuel’s
father asked him if he would tell them the whole story.

♦

He left them late that night. By then he knew for certain Samuel
had not murdered Gladys Mensah. He had been a troubled boy,
vulnerable even while trying to make a show of toughness. The time
he had stolen a packet of chewing gum at the market, it had been on
a dare from his friends. That was when he had been hanging around
with the wrong crowd, but that had become history. Samuel had
shunned them and expressed his intention to go back to school. He
had had a strong love for animals, particularly dogs, often
sacrificing his meals to feed a stray.

♦

Dawson didn’t sleep. He sat outside the house and smoked until
he was higher than a soaring eagle. The smoke from the marijuana
kept the mosquitoes away. He became quite numb to pain, although
not completely dead to it. At some point he thought he felt tears
running down his face, but he couldn’t be sure. He kept seeing
Samuel hanging from the jail window, and he cringed and cried out
each time the image hit him like the strike of a puff adder.

He had no idea what time it was until the cocks began to crow
back and forth like echoes as light came quickly to the dark
sky.

In the distance Dawson saw smoke rising from the forest. More
illegal fires. But it was a little different from the time he had
asked Inspector Fiti about it. This smoke was white rather than
black or gray, and there appeared to be a pattern to the puffs as
they went up. It took him a little while to get it. One puff, two
puffs, two puffs, one. Dawson laughed a marijuana giggle. It seemed
unreasonably comical that smoke should rise this way. Look, there
it was again. One puff, two puffs, two puffs, one.

Now it seemed stupid and not at all amusing. Dawson went back
inside the house floating on air. He wanted to ring Christine, and
then he didn’t, and then he did again. He debated. Normally he
would have turned to her in this kind of situation, but he couldn’t
call her in his marijuana-suffused condition. She would
immediately
detect he was high, and that would quench any
sympathy she might have for him. Christine loved her husband, but
she did not like him on drugs.

Call Armah
. That’s what he should do. Armah could help
him through this.

Dawson looked around for his mobile, forgetting where he had put
it. After a few minutes, he found it in his pocket.

His call went through.

“Hello?” It was a woman’s voice – Armah’s wife, Maude.

“Hello,” Dawson stammered. “Is this…is Armah there, please? May
I speak to him?”

He was shocked at the sound of his own voice. He might as well
have been talking through a mouthful of cotton balls.

“Who is calling?” Maude asked after a second’s hesitation.

Dawson was about to say his name, but he lost his nerve. It
would be embarrassing and insulting to Armah, a man Dawson revered,
to talk to him from out of this mind-altered miasma. Dawson was
about as lucid right now as Ketanu mud.

He ended the call and flung the phone across the room, cursing
fluently in Ewe. He needed a shower.

He suddenly remembered Elizabeth and wondered if she was okay.
He would have to visit her later on, he thought.

He fell asleep upright in the straight-backed chair. It had
always mystified Christine how he could do that. He started awake
at the sound of a car pulling up. He looked out the window. Chikata
was alighting from a Corolla, and directly behind him Chief
Superintendent Lartey was getting out of a shiny black BMW marked
CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS DEPARTMENT
.

My God. Lartey was
here?
This was serious. Dawson’s heart
sank like a lead nugget. There couldn’t be a worse time. He opened
the door wide before they could knock. It was past eight in the
morning, and the day was already buzzing with people shopping and
running errands.

“Dawson,” Lartey said.

“At your service, sir. Come in. Hello, D.S. Chikata.”

Lartey looked quickly around and then back at Dawson. “Is
something wrong with you? Are you drunk?”

“No, sir, I’m not.”

Lartey sniffed. “Is that marijuana I smell?”

“No, sir, just some strong cigarettes.”

“Since when do you smoke?”

“I do sometimes.”

Lartey grunted. “You look horrible.”

He took a seat. Chikata remained standing, scrutinizing Dawson
but trying not to be too obvious about it.

“What are you staring at?” Dawson said to him sullenly.

“Sit down, Dawson,” Lartey said sharply.

He did.

“What’s going on with you in this place?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“I’ve received more complaints about you in the past few days
than I have had about any other detective in several years. Is it
true you insulted Inspector Fiti by calling him a bush
policeman?”

“He was having a prisoner beaten up, sir. That prisoner is now
dead.”

“As a result of the alleged beating?”

“Indirectly, yes, I would say so. And it’s not alleged, sir. It
did happen. I witnessed it.”

“Have you filed a report?”

“I was about to, sir.”

“At the same time it appears you’ve been doing your own share of
beating up, doesn’t it? You assaulted Augustus Ayitey, a respected
herbalist, and put him in jail for supposedly hurting your boy when
he went for treatment. Which is a conflict of interest. The correct
procedure would be to file a report as a citizen and let someone
else in the department handle it. Seems to me you were just looking
for an excuse to take revenge on Mr. Ayitey, isn’t that right?”

Dawson didn’t answer. Quite frankly, he was too tired and too
high to care that much.

“You also managed to falsely accuse a Ghana Health Service
official of murder and throw him into jail.”

“I made a mistake – ”

“Wait, I’m not finished.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“You also beat up the fetish priest at Bedome. So my question
is, What is wrong with you? Why are you so out of control?”

Dawson dropped his face into his palms. His head was
throbbing.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said finally.

“Is it drugs?”

“No, sir.”

Lartey grunted. “You’re only sabotaging your own progress,
Dawson. It’s folly, and it is giving my department a very, very bad
name. That’s what I detest most. I hate it. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir, I believe so.”

“The reason I’ve brought D.S. Chikata here is to have him take
over the case. I’m suspending you. Three weeks’ suspension without
pay, and then you face the Disciplinary Board.”

“Sir, wait, please. Please, I have to solve this. I promise I’ll
be on my best behavior – ”

“Pack up your things and get out, Dawson. Chikata is moving
in.”

∨
Wife of the Gods
∧

I
saac Kutu had been
preparing a potion for a woman who had come to see him for her weak
blood. It was still warm as he poured it into the bottle she had
brought with her.

“Wait for it to get cool,” he instructed her, “and drink half of
the bottle today. Tomorrow you drink the rest.”

She thanked him profusely and went away happy. For payment, she
had left him two live chickens.

Isaac joined Tomefa in the courtyard, where she was cooking goat
stew on the firewood stove. He sat on the stool and watched her
quietly. She was a very good wife, he often reminded himself –
faithful, hardworking, and fertile. She had borne seven children,
and lost two, so now there were five and that was just fine. It was
funny that he didn’t love Tomefa. He
liked
her well enough.
In fact he could go as far as to say he was fond of her, but it
wasn’t love. His father, Boniface, had arranged Isaac’s marriage to
her, yes, but couldn’t love sometimes grow like a planted seed? He
assumed it could, but with Tomefa, it hadn’t. Take Osewa by
contrast. Even after all these years, whenever he saw her, he felt
something in his chest, like a surge of joy, warm and wet. Why was
it so? It was such a marvelous thing. And he would never give Osewa
any kind of command the way he would Tomefa. There was no need for
that. He and Osewa flowed together like two streams converging to
form a single river.

Isaac got up and went to stand at the entrance of the compound,
leaning against the side contemplatively. Some ten minutes later,
he saw puffs of white smoke rising over the forest. One, two, two,
one. He didn’t know why he even bothered to count. He knew when he
was being signaled.

“Tomefa,” he called back, “I’ll be back soon.”

She nodded obediently.

He walked quickly. Off the footpath to Ketanu, he made his way
into the bush and found Osewa harvesting plantain. The quenched
fire was off to the side.

“Aren’t you afraid?” he said, half jokingly.

“Afraid of what?” she asked, pulling over a nice bunch of the
plantains she had just cut down with her cutlass.

“This is where Gladys Mensah was killed.”

Osewa stopped. “Here? I thought it was the other plantain grove
where they found her.”

“No. Right here.”

She shrugged. “There’s no reason her spirit would be angry with
me. Anyway, my juju protects me just in case.”

“Yes,” he said, desiring her. “Come here.”

He took her hand and led her deep into the forest to where he
had built another of their love shelters. Intimacy in the forest
was all right with the gods provided it took place under a roof of
some kind.

He sought her thighs hungrily, marveling at how tight and moist
she still was after all these years. Her walls milked him quickly
to climax.

They rested for a while, and then she said, “I have to get back
soon.”

He nodded drowsily. “Me too.”

“Did you hear Samuel Mensah killed himself?” she asked.