Another vehicle soon arrived at the scene—a police car, siren wailing. Three homicide detectives jumped out and crossed briskly to the spot where the corpse lay. Their dark glasses gave their faces an impersonal appearance.
One of the detectives began to interview Lanky, scribbling notes as the lifeguard gave long answers to short questions. Without interrupting his writing the officer shouted orders at the other two detectives. They ran hither and thither, now clicking their cameras, now throwing tapes down to take measurements. The crowd observed these rituals from a safe distance.
In repeating his story to the detective Lanky smuggled in details he had not mentioned in earlier tellings, constantly pointing to Bukuru. The madman maintained a posture of detached indifference, his eyes fixed on nothingness.
I knew the detectives’ exertions had about an equal chance of leading them to the root of the mystery or ending in vain, another unsolved death, assigned a bureaucratic number and filed away somewhere, to gather dust, soon forgotten. At last, done with their measurements and with questioning Lanky, the detectives approached Bukuru.
“Good morning,” the most senior detective said to him.
Bukuru neither spoke nor blinked.
“I said, good morning,” the detective repeated.
Bukuru cast a glance at the three of them; a wordless acknowledgement, but nothing more.
“What’s your name?” the detective asked.
“I have no name,” said Bukuru.
“What do you call yourself?” persisted another officer.
“Nothing. I don’t have that need.”
“What do your friends call you?” asked another detective.
“Oh, friends.” He raised his head as if in thought. “Different things. Depends.”
“Say one. One name,” the detective goaded.
“That’s between my friends and me,” said Bukuru.
“Names shouldn’t be a secret,” said the chief detective.
“Mine are not secret to my friends.”
“We’re officers of the state,” the chief detective announced in a grave tone. “That’s why we ask. In the name of the state.”
“Good. The state is not one of my friends.”
“You should regard us as friends. My name is John Lati.” The chief detective extended his hand; when Bukuru ignored it he nodded to one of his colleagues.
“Douglas Okoro,” said the second detective.
“Abdul Musa,” said the third.
Bukuru refused their outstretched hands.
“Let’s leave names aside, then,” said John Lati. “What do you know about the drowned woman?”
“I tried to save her.”
“Yes?”
“But I failed.”
“Was she in some kind of trouble?” asked Lati.
“She had been raped.”
Okoro asked, “Did you see who raped her?”
“Yes, I saw them. From a distance.”
“You mean there were more than one?”
“Yes.”
The detectives looked tensely about them. Seeming for the first time to notice the presence of eavesdroppers, they drew Bukuru out of earshot.
The dead woman was carried into the ambulance. The siren’s wail came on again as the vehicle drove away. When the sound subsided Lati wagged his finger at Bukuru, who stood arms folded, mouth clasped shut. Okoro produced a pair of handcuffs. Bukuru offered up his hands.
As Bukuru was led to the detectives’ car many spectators drew their cameras and clicked away while others spattered him with questions.
“Are you cooperating with the police?”
“Is it true you’re Mammy Water’s lover?”
“Did you cheat on Mammy Water?”
“Did Mammy Water kill the woman?”
“Are you a madman?”
“Is Bukuru your true name?”
He walked on, answering no one, and was soon sandwiched between Lati and Okoro in the back of the police car. The siren came alive, then the car sped away, driven by Musa, in the direction of the police headquarters in Moloney in the heart of Langa.
The siren’s wail became faint, then faded away into the distance. In its wake the familiar sounds of the beach returned. The waves rumbled. Men and women giggled and talked excitedly and played tag games. Children enacted water fights, threw sand at mock fiends and foes, and waded into the waves. Observing the gaiety, I could not detect any sense that, moments before, a corpse had lain on the sands.
Seized by a desire to leave the scene, I made for the bus terminal—a noisy, smelly, bustling place—and boarded a bus for Moloney. The bus was a patchwork of scrap metal, the rusty welding burst apart at too many seams, exposing sharp edges. Inside, the bus was choked with passengers. Like most of them I stood, my right hand clasping a bar above my head. The bar was smooth and slippery with sweat, but it served to keep me stable when the bus lurched.
During the journey the bus grew hot. Then a rowdy contest for the passengers’ attention developed between a travelling medicine salesman and an itinerant preacher. The salesman’s wares included an antibiotic dubbed “No more sufferhead” made by “India’s medical wizards,” able to cure “bad spirit and witchcraft, eczema, craw-craw, gonorrhea, syphilis, AIDS, watery sperm and dead penis.” It sold briskly. The preacher tried to keep pace, undeterred by a passenger’s joke about his “rainy mouth.”
After a while, my mind detached itself from my surroundings, then focused on the bizarre challenge of this, my first assignment as a reporter. My editor’s words resonated in my thoughts.
“New Year’s Day is bad for news,” the news editor had said in his soft, slow manner. “Even criminals tend to take the day off. But the business of informing our readers must go on. If we have to squeeze news out of stone, so be it.”
Pausing, he had furrowed his brows. His face wore the look of a man weighed down by all the sorrowful news he had spent thirty-three of his fifty-four years bringing to readers.
“Here’s what I want you to do,” he continued. “Get out to B. Beach early tomorrow. Interview a sizeable number of people. Get a sense of their reactions to this latest farce. Find out how they plan to cope with life under our perpetual leader. Give me your findings by 7 p.m.—in a sharply written feature of no more than one thousand five hundred words.”
I understood that the farce in question was the announcement, to be made on New Year’s Day, that, with immediate effect, General Isa Palat Bello would assume the title of Life-President of the Federal Republic of Madia. The farce had little to do with the new title, which was superfluous enough, there being nobody in the country who seriously expected His Excellency, after a brutal reign of twenty years, to hand over power to any force less ultimate and compelling than death itself. The ghastly joke lay in the regime’s claim that 99.5 percent of Madians had voted affirmatively in a referendum, thus compelling Bello to confer the title upon himself.
At police headquarters the female press officer smiled broadly when I introduced myself.
“We have a fantastic scoop for you,” she said. “Our men just solved one of our most important cases.” Then she pulled a press release from a file and handed me a one-page statement marked stop press!!
Crack homicide detectives from the Madia police headquarters this morning arrested a suspect in the death by drowning of an unidentified woman at B. Beach. The suspect, who refused to give his name and whose age has not been determined, is of no fixed address. He confessed to investigators that he was the last person to see the deceased alive.
The suspect may also be responsible for the recent spate of rapes and murders at several city beaches. All the victims are believed to be prostitutes. Investigators believe that the suspect lured his victims to a beach, then raped and killed them.
The investigation will continue in order to gather more evidence. The police encourage anybody who may have any relevant information to contact the nearest police station.
“I can’t believe this,” I said, oblivious of the officer’s presence.
“What?” she asked
“I have one or two questions about this release.”
At once her manner changed. “I’m not authorized to answer any press questions.”
“But . . .”
“Sorry. I can’t talk to you.” She disappeared into an inner office. The door clanged shut after her.
After writing the first sentence, I sat staring at the keyboard, my fingers cold with inertia. The story seemed too large and unwieldy to be pinned down. Search as I might, I could find no words with which to achieve a reporter’s distance. My mind swirled with images: the dead woman’s improbable smile, Lanky’s myth-making, the detectives’ vigor, Bukuru’s calm. A phrase from the news release reverberated in my head: All the victims are believed to be prostitutes. Prostitutes. The noun was strangely potent and familiar. It reminded me of the word orphan. The word illegitimate. It reminded me of my own past.
“How’s the story coming out?” The news editor’s voice gave me a jolt.
“I have it all in my head.”
“Type it out. You’re paid to be a reporter, not a memory chip.”
I threw my head down and began to write.
Waking up after a sleepless night, I jogged to a newsstand for the morning papers. Bukuru’s arrest was the second most prominent story in all of them. In keeping with the law, the front pages were devoted to His Excellency’s New Year’s broadcast.
His Excellency proclaims self president for life. Releases 120 political prisoners as a gesture of his statesmanship and generosity. Wishes Madians to know that he is still the sun, rising and setting with unfailing regularity. That he steadily sees all the traitors; all the patriots, too. All saboteurs and colluders with imperialist agents working to undermine the Madian nation will be fished out and thoroughly dealt with. All patriots will be rewarded. His Excellency predicts that 1988 will be a year of plenty for all. His Excellency guarantees a bountiful harvest this year.
Ten years ago, to mark the tenth anniversary of his rule, a decree was promulgated which made it an offense for any editor to use a story whose length or prominence upstaged a presidential pronouncement or deed. The offense was punishable according to the discretion of a special tribunal by a minimum of five years in jail.
No editor trifled with the decree. Not since three years ago when one of their number paid a stiff price for breaching the law. A public housing unit in Port Harcourt had caved in during the night, killing twenty-nine people in their sleep, among them a family of five. Moved by the enormity of the tragedy, the editor of a regional newspaper had used the story in the forbidden fashion: he had made its headlines bolder than a report of His Excellency’s opening speech to a conference of farmers. The reckless editor was duly arraigned before the News Use Miscellaneous Tribunal. The tribunal’s military chairman, a small headed giant named Brigadier Tipa Panizi, spent an hour shouting imprecations at the hapless editor before imposing a sentence of six years’ hard labor.
My story appeared on the Chronicle’s second page. I read it with the haste of a bureaucrat skimming an official document. Then I turned to the other newspapers.
The government-owned Sentinel published a report headlined “Serial Murder Case Solved!” There were two photographs: one of Lanky, bare-bodied and smiling, the other of Lieutenant John Lati, spare and sad-faced. Bukuru’s impending arraignment, wrote the paper, would create a precedent, being the first time “somebody who may be a madman will stand trial for culpable rape and homicide.” Then it boasted that “the law in Madia is truly no respecter of persons—not even the crazy.”