16

All Chief Ebenezer Amadi could see were the nipples and the brown breasts that ballooned out of focus behind them. The girl on top of him dug her fingers into his fat hairy chest, ground her groin against his, and asked him to say her name. He tried to remember what it was but another pair of breasts appeared over his head, dangling close to his lips, and he forgot the name all over again.

The second girl took his earlobes between her fingers and rolled them the way his mother used to, and then she placed her lip-gloss-wet lips on his ear and whispered, ‘Say my name.’ He tried to remember but his phone was ringing and he had to answer it. He feared that if he didn’t say their names, the one would stop playing with his ears and the other would cross her leg over his belly and roll away.

The ringing phone was vibrating on the mahogany bedside table, making a knocking noise that made it impossible to think. Soon, it would rattle its way to the edge, fall off, and break into pieces on the marble floor, and the person calling, whose call he had to take, would get upset.

He woke to the phone still ringing. He sighed, reached for it on the table, felt a body, and remembered the two girls he had met at Bacchus, whose names he did not know, who now lay on either side of him, and who had inspired the interrupted dream. He folded back the duvet from his naked body and began to shiver. The phone continued to ring as he considered where exactly he’d left the remote control for the air-conditioner.

He leaned over the girl on his left side and enjoyed the warmth of her body. Once the call was over, he would play out the dream with both of them, then, after a glass of Hennessey and a Viagra, he would do it all over again until they had to leave at five a.m.

He didn’t check the caller display – it could only be one person; a man whose voice he knew but whose face he had never seen. The Voice would probably ask him if everything was OK and he would say yes and that would be it. After the call, he would wake the girls who had spanked each other, called him Daddy, and sniffed cocaine from his belly-button.

‘Hello.’ His spare hand found a breast and started fondling it. The girl stirred and searched for the duvet.

‘We have a problem.’

The Voice always went straight to the point, just like the first time they spoke many years ago when the Chief was not yet a chief and had a different name.

‘What kind of problem?’ His hand found its way down to the girl’s thighs. He tried to push her legs apart.

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘The man we used the last time, the one who calls himself Catch-Fire, he’s been talking.’

He took his hand away from the girl and climbed over her to get out of bed. His toes curled as his feet landed on the cold marble tiles. He walked into the adjoining room, fat deposits wobbling under the folds of his skin with every step.

‘Is he talking to the police?’

‘No, not the police, but they’ll soon hear something. He’s a risk. You need to take care of him.’

‘OK.’

He first spoke with The Voice during Christmas in 1989. He’d been a tenant of Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison back then, awaiting trial over a robbery. His gang, the police alleged, conspired to rob one Emanuel Ofoeze of Onipanu, Lagos. The victim was in possession of a large sum of money he had withdrawn from the bank earlier in the day. The cash was for the payment of salaries at Omo-Boy Sawmill Ltd. in Maryland where he was chief supervisor. When the gang broke into his house at around midnight, the late Mr. Ofoeze refused, under pain of gratuitous torture, to reveal where he had hidden the money. The gang proceeded to axe off each of the victim’s fingers. After his toes, they gouged out his eyes, and sliced off his ears. His tongue was the last to go, before he died, the police said in their report.

A tip-off led to a member of the gang and subsequently to the mastermind of the operation who had inflicted the devilish wounds observed on the victim – one Okafor Bright Chikezie, an apprentice sawmill operator where the dead man worked.

The other suspects confessed in return for life sentences, but the boy they called Bright insisted on his innocence, telling the police a counter story of how some boys approached him to take part in robbing the site supervisor. When he refused, the conspirators threatened his life. He spoke to his pastor and together they went to meet the supervisor to warn him and to pray. The man didn’t take enough precautions and the criminals, now convinced that it was Bright who had exposed them, were determined to rope him in. Bright provided an address for the pastor and the man confirmed his story.

The case of Okafor Bright Chikezie lingered in the classification of ‘awaiting-trial,’ a concept used by the Nigerian police when they don’t want to let a suspect go to court or go free. It was while he was in a cell shared with twenty-four other inmates, that the chief jailer had him brought to his office, fed him rice and stew with meat for the first time in the three years, and given him the green phone on his table to talk to ‘someone who could help him.’

How The Voice got all his information was still a mystery, but he was told from the first day not to ask questions. He was already thinking of the best way to make Catch-Fire disappear. A plan began to form; it involved a prostitute and a bottle of chloroform he kept in a drawer in his room.

‘Tonight,’ The Voice said.

‘Tonight?’

He looked at his wrist and remembered he had left his watch on the bedside table. He made a mental note to slip the Rolex back on before falling asleep again next to the girls. It was too early in the morning to make arrangements with the girl he had in mind. He would have to do it himself.

‘It’s almost morning.’

‘It has to be done immediately. It may already be too late.’

‘Consider it done.’

‘Call me when it’s over.’

‘OK.’

The Voice ended the call. Amadi walked to the window and drew the curtains. Moonlight threw shadows behind him. He looked out onto his compound. The heart-shaped swimming pool shimmered in the moon’s glow.

He had built his mansion in just three months. When you have money, you can throw a picture in front of an architect and say, ‘Build me this house, I want to move in when I get back from America,’ and it will be done. You can buy the latest Mercedes every year, then send your family on holidays to Switzerland to hide your money in safe accounts and give you space to do the things with pretty young girls that you could only dream of doing when you were a struggling hustler on the streets of Lagos.

When he first came to the city as a boy, he spent afternoons under the sun, peddling handkerchiefs in traffic jams, and in the nights he dug up the potholes that caused the traffic jams – him and many like him living day to day like scavenging animals. No matter how much money he made, or how many chieftaincy titles he bought, he still saw his old self in the street-kids that surrounded his car in traffic jams. Beggars and pedlars who pushed their wares and begging hands in front of his windscreen, left dirty palm prints on his window, and wouldn’t give up until the traffic started moving. He used to be one of them, but now he was on the other side of the rolled-up window, and in the owner’s seat of a big car. He would do anything to remain on this side of the divide.

He pictured Catch-Fire nodding as he gave instructions the same way The Voice ordered him. This was not the first time he had to do something about someone who threatened to send him back to hell. Nor was it the first time a promising new recruit would screw up and become a risk.

He glanced into his room and sighed. The things he planned to do with the girls would have to wait. There was business to attend to. Catch-Fire had to die, and anyone who the stupid boy had spoken to had to die as well, God willing, before dawn.