21

The sky was brightening and cocks were crowing in the slum beyond the station, but Ibrahim was at his desk, waiting for the police commissioner’s next call, wondering what he would give as an update, and fighting the urge to send an officer to buy a packet of cigarettes.

If he hadn’t called the commissioner in the first place, to boast about capturing the Iron Benders gang, the man would probably have continued sleeping and missed that damn report on CNN. The commissioner had also asked how it happened. Ibrahim started to explain how his boys had been out on patrol but the commissioner cut in with ‘How did you let this get on the news?’ As if Ibrahim could arrest every journalist in Lagos.

A local report would have been bad enough. Pompous reporters would have asked rude questions, used long words, and blamed everything in the country on police corruption. Their real gripe would have been where the crime happened: Victoria Island, one of the few enclaves of relative safety in the city – an illusion that those who lived on the Island, and those who aspired to, guarded religiously.

But it had gone international, and no doubt, the same way Nigerians are always ready to take issue with any foreigner who dares to insult their country, everyone who had a platform from which they could make noise would be fuming and raging at CNN’s ‘unfair’ portrayal of Nigeria. And he, Ibrahim, would be the grass under which two elephants battle; not because a murder was committed on his watch, but because he was the policeman meant to make sure that such things, when they do occur, do not tarnish the precious image of the island of the rich.

There was also the body in the cell. Taking care of the carjacked woman was easy. She thanked him when he told her that all she had to do was sign a statement that he had written for her. In few words it said she was carjacked near CMS, she walked to the station to report the crime, she recognised one of her assailants in the cell and the suspect became violent and tried to escape. The woman signed the statement and he tore up the one she had originally written. A police car took her home.

Amaka, on the other hand, would not be so easy to gag – if that was even possible. Ibrahim’s predecessor briefed him on her: ‘Be careful with that one. She’ll give you a lot of problems.’ He called her a ‘frustrated lesbian’ and the charity organisation she worked for, ‘a club for prostitutes.’

When she first turned up at the station and said that a girl was raped while in detention there, Ibrahim called his predecessor and asked what to do. The man laughed and told him to find a lawyer.

She walked into his office as if she was his boss. She introduced herself as the girl’s lawyer. He wanted to warn her that he knew all about her, but when she shook his hand and beamed that beautiful smile, he forgot she was the enemy.

She was not the man-hating witch he’d expected. She appeared to be intelligent and she acted politely. She didn’t want to take the police to court; she just wanted the officer in question to pay the girl he had arrested in front of Y-Not. She agreed that it could hardly be called rape, as the woman offered sex for her freedom. But, she argued, since the girl shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place – for soliciting, which couldn’t be proved – she shouldn’t have had to bribe anyone to regain that freedom. The way she saw it, the officer owed her client for services rendered, or the Nigerian police had to answer a case of forced imprisonment and rape.

She impressed him with the way she made her case, though he tried not to show it. She was blackmailing him to make a police officer pay a prostitute – too many crimes to list. But she was dangling before him a court case that made her offer seem gracious.

Unlike his predecessor, he understood her. Here was a woman who used her knowledge, her charm, and anything at her disposal, to look after other women. She was like Mother Theresa to those girls.

Several times, he asked for her number but she always turned him down. It had become a friendly game they played each time they met. If he were single, she would be the perfect wife for him. But why would such a sophisticated girl want to marry a common policeman? They would never have met, and even if they had, they would never have been friends. Yet, her line of work made her a constant visitor to his station and they were now friends, even if not close.

Why did she have to come that night? Why didn’t she stay in his office when he told her too? She’d taken the British journalist to the Minister of Information. What happened in the cell would probably be discussed. What was she doing with the bloody minister, anyway? Maybe powerful men were her thing? Perhaps for all her charity work and seeking justice for all womankind, she was just like every other female. Maybe that was why she had never allowed them to talk seriously about seeing each other outside the station. Maybe he just wasn’t rich enough. Either that or she really was a lesbian.

He picked up the phone: ‘Musa, come here.’

‘This is not Musa, sir. This is Oyebanji.’

‘Where is Musa?’

‘He has handed over to me, sir.’

‘Call him now. Tell him to come back.’ He slammed the receiver down. If he couldn’t go home, nobody could. He thought for a moment then he picked up the phone again. ‘Tell Musa to go to the Sheraton. The Minister of Information is staying there. I want to know when he leaves and who is with him when he does.’

Five minutes later, Oyebanji called back. ‘Sir, Musa is not answering his phone, sir.’

‘What? OK. Ask Femi and… whoever is there, to come to my office now.’

In a room at the back of the station, four shirtless officers, sweating and exhausted, fists sore, were interrogating a member of the Iron Benders gang.

Hot-Temper stepped in front of the body of the boy who was hanging head-down from a broken ceiling fan to which his feet were tied using a watering hose.

‘Ol’ boy, you want to die for nothing?’

The boy’s body swayed, dripping sweat and blood into a pool on the ground.

‘We already have information that one of the cars you snatched was the same one that you and your boys used to dump the girl that you killed. The madam you snatched the car from has come to report in this station tonight. Just tell us who sent you and we’ll let you go.’

The boy did not respond. Hot-Temper sucker-punched his belly. He coughed blood and saliva.

‘Bring the ring boiler.’

An officer who had been leaning against the wall unplugged the apparatus in his hand. It had a plastic handle with a power cord on one end, and the two ends of a thin metallic tube on the other. The tube, which was about the thickness of a pen, extended five inches from the handle and looped four times to form a coil at its furthest point. Through swollen eyes, the boy saw the glowing red coils dangling before his face. His body twisted like a snake held up by its tail.

‘Remove his trousers,’ Hot-Temper commanded.

The policemen gripped the boy. With the tips of his thumb and index finger, Hot-Temper held the boy’s penis and inserted it into the hot coil. The boy’s scream reverberated through the building and the smell of burning flesh wafted through the room. He howled and writhed like a snared animal until his energy was spent and then he whimpered like a dog.

Hot-Temper yanked the coil away, and with it, sizzling, seared skin.

‘Look at what you are making me do to you for nothing. I don’t want to punish a young boy like you. I know that other people sent you. Just tell me their names and all this will end. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I will put your blucos back into this thing and plug it until you fry like suya.’

The boy recalled the blood oath he swore when he joined the gang. He remembered the walk through a bush path. He smelt the wet soil. He felt the tickle of tall blades of grass brushing against his arms, leaving dew on his skin. All around him there was nothing but beautiful, open green land. He was standing in a clearing before the oiled wooden figures and bloody plucked feathers of the shrine. He tasted the dry blandness of his own blood mixed with the blood of the others as he sipped from the clay pot that sucked his tongue. He remembered the witch doctor’s warning: ‘You have vowed to keep each other’s secrets secret. Whoever breaks the promise made upon this ground shall be swallowed by the ground.’ He saw the decaying bodies of those who had sworn at the same shrine and went on to break their promises. They were left to rot unburied, scattered like refuse around the shrine, playthings of the gods. If he spoke now and broke the oath, he would die and he would become one of those shameful corpses whose souls would roam this earth as ghosts unable to find their way home. He would die.

Hot-Temper opened Inspector Ibrahim’s door without knocking.

‘Sir, we have a name, sir.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, sir, Chucks.’

‘Chucks? The same Chucks?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Ibrahim leaned back in his chair. He had seen it happen all too often; a small-time crook gets ambitious and forces the police to come after him in spite of the bribes he has paid in the past. Chucks had been a reliable snitch who told on any criminal encroaching upon his operation. His scam was selling impounded motorcycles that he bought illegally from officers of the state’s traffic task force and passed on as imported second-hand goods. So, he had graduated to stolen vehicles?

‘Oga, let me take some boys and go and bring him, bulldog style.’

Ibrahim thought about it. It was almost five in the morning. Matori, where Chucks lived, would have long woken up. If they tried to grab him bulldog style like Hot-Temper suggested, without a warrant, they could provoke a riot. It had happened before. Officers sent to get someone were barricaded by spare parts traders and Area boys. They didn’t allow the men to leave until they gave up on the armed robbery suspect they had gone to fetch. Besides, he could update the police commissioner with news of a suspect, and have another update later when they had the man. Why waste the two good updates on one? There was only one thing to do: wait until night when Matori would be quiet.

‘Who else knows?’

‘Knows what, sir?’

‘About Chucks?’

‘Just me and the officers interrogating the boy.’

‘Good. Don’t mention it to anyone. I want to see all of you now.’

In a notepad on his desk he wrote ‘Operation Bulldog.’ He drew two lines under the words and added ‘The siege on Matori.’