Their eyes burrowed into mine, six eyes pretending to seek the truth. The voices I had collected over the many years of solitude crowded my head. They filled me with suspicion and distrust. Then one voice echoed clearly across space and time. “Remember,” it warned, “a story never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth’s debt to a story.”
My grandmother had first spoken those words to me, days after we buried my father. A shame I did not understand her then, for I would not today be in this tragic puzzle that becomes messier the harder I try to disentangle its knots.
The trouble began the moment I told the detectives I knew who raped the dead woman. Okoro fished out his notebook and held a pen to it with eager readiness.
“She was raped, you said,” he said. “How did you know that?”
He began to scribble even before I spoke.
I spoke without reluctance. I narrated the vivid details of the two-hour assault, the woman’s screams that had started just after 4 a.m., the male voices that tried to hush her up, the kicking and slapping that, finally, silenced her. I told the detectives how the men gathered themselves and went away, leaving the woman behind. How, a short while later, I searched for her through the dawn mist, following her sounds until I discovered where she lay. I told them about her low disgusted groans, her deathly panting. Then how, as I knelt beside her and spoke, she panicked.
“How were you able to determine the time of the assault?” Okoro asked.
“The bell at St. Gregory’s. It had just rung four times before I heard the screams. It rang six times just as her attackers were leaving.”
“You said earlier that you attempted to save her. How did she come to drown?”
“She panicked when she heard my voice. Then she bolted up and ran into the waves, shrieking all the way.”
“And what was she saying as she ran?”
“I couldn’t catch her exact words, but she seemed to be pleading and cursing at the same time.”
“Can you tell with certainty how many men raped her?” Lati asked.
“Not exactly. It was too dark when it all started. But the street lights illuminated the figures as they left. I certainly counted as many as six men. There may have been more, I can’t be certain. The mist was quite thick and I was at a distance. They left in a truck.”
“What kind?”
“A military truck.”
A shocked consternation came over the detectives’ faces. “What does that mean?” Musa snapped.
“The men were soldiers,” I said. “Members of the vice task force. They wore military fatigues.”
“What madness!” Lati blurted out.
“What are you suggesting?” Musa asked.
“The rapists were soldiers,” I said. “As I told you, men of the vice task force.”
“You can’t accuse soldiers falsely!” Lati said sternly.
“You can be shot dead for that!” chimed Okoro.
In as defiant a tone as I could muster, I asked, “Are you saying that the rapists were not soldiers? I saw them. And it was not the first time they raped women here. I even talked to one of their victims. Tay Tay is her name.”
The detectives glowered at me. Suddenly, Lati gave a laugh that was more a menacing flash of his teeth.
“Let me tell you something, my friend. We are not here to joke around with you. This is New Year’s Day. I would rather be at home with my wife and kids. Or with friends eating and drinking. Instead, I am at work because a woman is dead. Death is our business and we don’t joke with it. You just admitted you were the last person to see the woman alive. That’s a serious issue. If I were you, I would not be joking around. Or making ludicrous statements.”
“Let me restate the point,” I said. “The men who assaulted this woman were soldiers. I saw their uniforms and their truck. Last night was not the first time they raped women here. As I said, I actually . . .”
“Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you!” growled Okoro. He took a step towards me, as though ready to strike me. I cast him a quick look and said, “Isa Palat Bello is also a rapist and murderer.” The detectives shook with nervous rage.
“Who are you talking about?” asked Okoro.
“The Head of State. He raped a woman I knew. Her name was Iyese. Later he killed her. She, too, was a prostitute.”
Lati’s hand went to the gun secured on his waist. For a moment, my body stiffened. Then it relaxed again, ready for anything. Lati looked about him. The crowd’s presence seemed to irritate him. Slowly, he unclenched his fist.
“You cannot besmirch His Excellency’s name. We can summarily execute you. Enough of your nonsense. We’re here to do a very serious investigation. Would you describe the drowning as suicide?”
“No. She probably thought I was one of the soldiers who raped her.”
“Did you know the deceased by name?”
“No.”
“Did the deceased know your name?”
“No, she was a total stranger.”
“Describe for us in full how she died.”
“I have already told you. It began with a scream. Then she ran into the waves.”
“She ran,” echoed Musa. “Would you say you chased her?”
“Only to save her. I stopped when I realized she was too scared to be saved.”
“Would you say you aided her death?” he asked.
“No. The soldiers did.”
“Did you hinder it?”
“Her death?”
“Yes.”
“How could I? There wasn’t much I could do. I tried to save her. And now I’m helping you to discover what happened to her. That’s all I can do.”
“I wish to inform you that you’re a suspect in this death. In the name of the state I demand your name.” A hardness had crept into John Lati’s voice and face.
I said, “Secret. Exile. Bubble. Void. I have many names.”
“Book him as Mr. X,” Lati ordered his subordinates.
“That’s used only for unidentified male corpses,” Musa reminded him.
“Do as I ask you!” Lati thundered. His anger was now on the surface, thick.
“Okoro.”
“Yes sir?”
“Handcuff the suspect.”
“Yes sir!”
Okoro approached with metal manacles. I then offered up my hands. The handcuffs clanged shut around my wrists. Their steely iciness made me wince.
Until I found myself in an unmarked police car, handcuffed, I had never really examined the disheveled life I led as an exile. Indeed, as my years on B. Beach stretched out, it had come to seem as if the most important detour in my life had taken place in a vast vacuum, outside the regimen of time and space.
The stink of my body filled the car, repellent even to my nostrils. I remembered a favorite saying of my grandmother’s: “The odor that makes a man want to run away from himself carries death.”
The detectives drew up their noses, their lips zipped tight. Gazing at the manacles around my wrists, I suppressed the urge to laugh. What use was there in startling the detectives with the cry of a soul that, looking inward, saw much that was rotten and dead? Would they make sense of the journey that had taken me from the editorial board of a newspaper to their car? Was there a way in the world, or a language, to make them understand that my body had not always given off this repugnant smell?
The voice of my grandmother seemed to rise from deep within me. It again urged me to open up to the detectives, to unburden everything to them. Everything about my past and my present, about Iyese and Tay Tay and the common thread that linked them. Speak to them, her voice persuaded, about the shrieks that rent the air night after night. But they won’t listen, I argued back to this voice. Even so, the voice insisted, describe everything in a way that will defeat their doubts.
Five detectives joined Lati’s team at the interrogation unit, a wide, high-ceilinged room, bare save for a circle of seats round an uncushioned swivel stool that was fixed to the concrete floor. I was made to sit on this stool. The eight officers formed a ring around me, like a pack of famished hyenas entrapping a prey.
“We want nothing but the truth,” one of them said as the interrogation began. It was a high-pitched male voice, from behind me. “No beating about the bush. No rigmaroles. Now, how did you get the woman to the beach?”
I swung around on the chair, but saw, not one, but three stony faces.
“I didn’t get her to the beach. The soldiers did.”
“Did she come on her own?” the same voice asked. This time I saw him, a dark big man.
“Soldiers brought her to the beach.”
“What do you have against prostitutes?” asked the only female interrogator. I spun around and faced her. Her lipstick was liquid and deep-red. It gave the impression of a mouth dripping blood.
“Nothing.”
“So why did you rape and kill them?”
“I didn’t rape anybody. The members of the vice task force did.”
“You were caught red-handed. If you confess, you make things easier.”
“Nobody caught me at anything. I’ve tried to help your investigators with the truth.”
For three hours they took turns asking the same questions, until an awful pain throbbed in my unsupported lower back. Fissuring, this pain moved in two directions: one branch of it crept down my legs, the other spread upwards to my shoulders.
My neck was knotted into a taut hardness. I sat still, tracking the geography of the pain.
One interrogator cleared his throat.
“How many times did you rape her?” It was Musa. Desperately I began to retell the whole story, but this time my narrative was incoherent, jumping and tumbling in time and space.
Suddenly Mr. Lati shouted, “Stop the crap!” I stuttered and stopped. “We are not here to listen to your petty fancies. All we want to know is how you raped and killed the woman!”
His small obdurate eyes bored into me, the eyes of a man who would only see things one way.
I made a last appeal to be believed. “I’m telling you the truth. I really want to help.”
He hissed disgustedly. “This nonsense has made me hungry. Let’s take a lunch break.”
The eight interrogators rose and filed out of the room.
“We know an easy way to get the facts out of you,” said the woman when the session resumed. “So, it’s up to you.”
My back seethed with pain. My body already felt like a thing less alive than slowly dying and the suggestion of torture reached me only in a distant, abstract way.
“What do you expect of me?”
“The truth,” answered one of the interrogators.
“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” I said.
The futile seesaw continued for the next two hours. Then Lati said, “That’s it for today. He’s one of those who want to be tortured, but he can’t stand much. Let’s just give him the mosquito treatment.”
Two big-bodied guards marched into the room. They took hold of my arms and dragged me to a cell at the back of the headquarters. The cell was dim and dank, its air warm with unflushed feces. As I entered, cockroaches scurried and disappeared under the mattress. A swarm of mosquitoes detached themselves from the walls and advanced on me like soldiers closing in on an unarmed target.
Night fell in that cell long before it did outside. In the deep darkness the mosquitoes attacked me in waves. I swatted at them until my arms became numb. Furtive roaches found my unshod feet. As they scampered away, I brought my heels down and squished them. Pup! pup! came the sound of their stomachs popping open, reaming out their entrails.
In the morning a police officer brought my breakfast. In the dim light as he opened the door, I saw a busy line of ants feasting heartily on the lifeless roaches. The mosquitoes had withdrawn to their perches on the walls, their bodies bloated. When I squashed them they squirted my own dark-red blood. The litter of dead things took away my appetite. Eventually the cell door was opened again. Two guards came in.
“You’re wanted for interrogation,” one of them said.
They hoisted me up and propelled me out into the light. The ensuing interrogation was a relief from the smell of my cell, from the repulsive intimacy of roaches, bedbugs and mosquitoes. With each session the tension sharpened. My inquisitors were desperate for something other than the truth. Dismay was written on their faces. Their speech became snappy.
“Apparently you don’t realize just how serious your situation is,” one of the officers sneered at the end of a grueling session. “Perhaps you should read what the papers have to say about your case.”
He thrust a copy of the government-run Sentinel at me. Back in my dim cell, I pored over it. I was not surprised to see that even though another prostitute had been attacked since my arrest, a guilty verdict against me was presented as a foregone conclusion.
“Well,” the officer began at my next interrogation, “did the newspaper persuade you of the need to tell the truth?”
“I have been telling the truth all along,” was all that I could say.
After the fourth day they announced that they had had enough of my “lack of cooperation.” I was returned to my cell and left there, day and night, for forty-eight hours, until two guards came and took me away to the interrogation center. A lone man waited there, a pair of glasses balanced on the end of his nose.
“Dr. Mara,” he said cryptically after I sat down. “A psychiatrist.”
He removed his glasses and began to fiddle with them, his eyes fixed on me. Then he took out a white handkerchief and began to polish the glasses, bringing to the act deliberate poise and indifference.
“Is it a good thing to rape women?” he began, as if addressing a moral question to himself.
“No,” I answered.
“How about killing? Is it excusable to kill?”
“No.”
“Would you consider a serial rapist a bad person?”
“Yes.”
“Always?”
“Yes.”
“Would it make a difference to you if such a person raped prostitutes?”
“No.”
“If you somehow raped a woman, would you see yourself as a bad person?”
“I didn’t rape any woman.”
“But just for the sake of argument, let’s say . . .”
I interrupted: “I won’t let you say a falsehood for the sake of argument.”
He slipped his glasses on and threw his head back, glancing up to the ceiling. He asked, “Do you always obtain a woman’s consent prior to having sex with her?”
“Sex has not been a part of my life for a long time.”
“But do you recall ever having sex with a woman without obtaining her unambiguous consent?”
“What’s the purpose of the question?”
“I’m a psychiatrist,” he said.
“I know that. But what do you think I am?”
“I haven’t found out yet.”
“And you never will.”
He smiled the smile of a man too self-assured to let my anger touch him. Then he asked, “Could we talk about the woman who died on the beach on New Year’s Day?”
In a dry tone I said, “Yes.”
W
In all, Dr. Mara interviewed me over three days. On the second day I decided to test the possibility of winning his attention—not as a scientist, but as a human being. So I began to tell him about Tay Tay, the prostitute I had spoken to after she and two of her friends had been raped. For a moment he appeared to be engaged by the story. Then he lifted his hand, compelling me to stop.
“I am interested only in the questions I raise myself,” he said. “Let’s keep it that way, if you don’t mind.”
After that he grew more and more remote, in what was clearly to him an impersonal search for a truth supported by evidence.
Like a pre-programmed machine, he rattled on, each of his unanswered questions followed by the briefest pause, then the next question.
In the end, despite my refusal to budge, he said, in a tone that revealed no frustration, “That’s all the questions I have. Thank you.” As he left the room even his steps were measured, as if scientific precision had permeated every facet of his life.
The anger aroused in me by those sessions was still fresh as I cross-examined Dr. Mara in court. I wanted to pummel him with questions that would force him to drop his mask of scientific objectivity and expose his human face, or what was left of it. I warmed with joy when he began to sweat on the stand and could have cried out in exultation when he dropped his files.