It was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. They removed her breasts? ‘What the fuck?’ I didn’t realise I’d shouted it till everyone stopped to look at me.
‘They removed her breast. Just now. Outside,’ Waidi said. Surely he’d heard it wrong, whatever that girl told him. I looked for her and instead I saw petrified faces all around.
‘They did what?’
He held one hand cupped under an imaginary boob and did a slicing motion with the other. ‘They cut off her breasts,’ he said.
‘Who cut off her breasts?’
‘Ritual killers.’
‘Ritual who?’
‘Killers. They removed her breast for juju, black magic. It is those politicians. It is because of elections. They are doing juju to win election.’ He wrapped his arms round his body and hunched his shoulders upwards, burying his neck.
‘They’re out there?’ I said.
‘No. They just dumped the body and ran away.’
I fetched my phone and realised my hands were shaking. I pulled out a cigarette, lit it in a hurry and burnt the tip of my finger. Then, staring at my brand new phone with a Nigerian SIM card in it, I wondered who to call.
The morning I checked into Eko hotel, Magnanimous had, with a knowing smile, given me his card and said to call if I needed anything. I pressed the home button and realised I’d meant to store his information but never got around to it. I searched every pocket on me – twice, even though I could picture the card on the bedside table in my hotel room.
The only number I’d stored was for a bloke called Ade, a stringer my company hired to be my fixer in Lagos. So far, he’d sent two text messages to say he was held up in Abuja, the capital, and every time I called him his phone just rang forever and he didn’t return the call. I tried again all the same. It rang once then I got a busy tone. Then the phone was switched off.
‘Fuck.’
‘Yes,’ Waidi said.
I looked up from the phone. He was staring at me and nodding emphatically. He looked so serious that I almost didn’t recognise him from before when he’d been so blasé.
‘Every time there is election we find dead bodies everywhere,’ he said. ‘They will remove the eyes, the tongue, even the private parts. Sometimes even they will shave the hair of the private part. Every election period, that is how it happens.’
The faster he spoke the poorer his grammar became and I had to struggle to make out what he was saying. ‘This has happened before?’
‘Yes,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘They will take the parts they need and dump the body anywhere. Every election period like now.’
‘Hold on. They dumped a body and fled?’
‘Yes. That is why all these people ran inside.’ He waved at the packed bar.
‘The security outside have called police. When they come they will arrest everybody they see.’
That explained the sudden influx. The taxi driver who picked me from the airport in Lagos described them as underpaid, ill-trained, semi-illiterates who used the authority of their uniforms to extort the citizens. He swore that some of them even rented their guns and uniforms to armed robbers. This I found very unsettling. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for these people around me, who appeared to be as scared of their police as they were of killers. Then, still staring at his befuddled face, adrenalin rushed into my veins and I almost cried out. This time it wasn’t fear; the journalist in me had just kicked in. I made for the door.
‘Where are you going?’ Waidi said. He ran alongside me on his side of the long counter. ‘If you go outside, they will arrest you o.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘I’m a journalist,’ and I instantly heard how stupid I sounded. I pushed past the bouncers, who had made it to the door but were understandably more concerned with not letting more people in than stopping those who wanted to leave.
I inhaled warm air as I stepped out of the bar. It was maybe midnight, but the heat was impressive, shocking you in an instant as though you’d walked into a sauna. My armpits went from dry to wet.
Earlier when I arrived, I had pushed through young boys selling cigarettes, cigars, sweets, even condoms, and girls in miniskirts who called me darling. They were all gone now. An unnerving silence had replaced the hustle and the hustlers. Other than the smell of exhaust fumes, dust, and other indiscernible odours mixed together into a faint ever-present reminder of pollution, every other thing about the night had changed.
A small crowd had gathered on the other side of the road. That was where the news was. I’d left my camera at the hotel. If indeed there were a mutilated dead body there, I would have to use the camera on my phone. I was thinking: Breaking news. Not that the audience back home cared much about the plight of ordinary people in Africa, but a ritual killing captured on video a few minutes after the incident was bound to be worth something.
Ronald would chew his pen lid off when he learned of my scoop. He was first to be offered the job and the minute Nigeria was mentioned I wished I’d been picked instead. Then Ronald moaned about his allergies, complained about his sensitive belly, and reminded everyone of his easily burnt skin. It wasn’t the first time I would put myself forward for an assignment but thus far I had not been entrusted with anything more serious than picking the bar for the Christmas party. The real jobs were reserved for the real journalists. Ronald would hate my guts.
A man who had seen enough walked away from the crowd shaking his head. I caught him by the arm. ‘What happened?’
He stopped and looked at the people standing by the gutter. He was old, easily in his late seventies. He was gaunt and wrinkled, but still standing upright. He had the same sort of ill-fitting khaki uniform I’d seen on the guards at the hotel. His creased face looked close to tears.
‘They jus’ kill the girl now-now and dump her body for gutter,’ he said, his voice quaking with emotion. It didn’t seem right to point a camera in his face but I was going to capture everything I could. I pressed the record button on my phone.
‘They call the girl into their moto and before anybody knows anything, they slam the door and drive away. It was one of her friends that raised alarm. She was shouting “kidnappers, kidnappers,” so I run here to see what happen. One boy selling cigarette find the body for inside gutter. Jus’ like that, they slaughter her and take her breast.’
He spat as if he could taste the vileness of it.
None of what he said made sense, and it wasn’t because of his pidgin English. I just couldn’t believe any of it had happened on the kerb outside the bar. But then, this was Lagos: a city of armed robbers, assassinations and now, it seemed, ‘ritualists’ had to be added to the list.
‘You saw everything?’
‘Yes. I am the security for that house.’ He pointed to a three-storey building on the other side of the road. ‘I see everything from my post. The moto jus’ park dia. Nobody commot. The girl go meet dem and they open door for am. I don’t think she last twenty minutes before they kill am and run away.’
‘What kind of car?’
‘Big car.’
He spat again and started walking away to the building he guarded, all the while talking, but this time only to himself.
I turned back to the crowd looking down into the gutter shaking their heads. Flashes from camera-phones intermittently illuminated the ground beneath them. There was something awful down there.
I covered the distance, got shoulder to shoulder with them and then I saw it too.