“Kay!” Nwankwo shouted out loud.

A message had just appeared on the screen before him. It was the old code that he had used back there in the past:

From: k35HYT@gmail.com
To: londonsubwaystreet@gmail.com
Subject: Egbe bere

 

I await the signal. K.

The people around him raised their heads briefly when Nwankwo shouted, and then returned to their silent communion with their screens. For several days he had been coming back to this Parisian Internet café, charmingly called “Brave New World”. He had been watching for news, for any sign from the network of coded messages that circulated among the rebels in the Delta, any indication that Tadjou had given the memory stick to the uncle, and that the uncle had handed it on to Kay. For days he had come out empty-handed, thinking that he should have known that Brave New World would be the most useless of places, and that once again everything was fucked.

And now Kay, that ace who could crack any password and cover any traces, had finally responded. He must still have been hiding in one of the containers in the port of Lagos, where he lived with a friend, two tables and three laptops linking him to the world outside. Nwankwo replied, thrilled:

From: londonsubwaystreet@gmail.com
To: k35HYT@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Egbe bere

 

Ugo bere
9th October
N.

He then remained seated there, his eyes gleaming behind his heavy spectacles, unable to leave this Brave New World.

 

Uche, you’re going to see something now, this is high technology at work! You remember little Kay, we arrested him three years ago…

 

They had done a swoop on the back room of some business premises in Lagos; their mission had been to discover the roots of Nigerian spam as it was known, a new kind of virus that had spread through the mailboxes of millions of Western computers. It began with an appeal for help from a widow of an officer, doctor or lawyer; she needed help to withdraw a huge sum of money, promising a commission – all you needed to do as a preliminary was to supply your bank details. Of course it ended badly for anybody fool enough to respond: they had their account emptied. A lot of Americans had been suckered in this way. An African offering money – it made such a change from Africans asking for money! Of all the fraudsters arrested that day, Kay was by far the youngest and cleverest. Nwankwo and Uche had saved him from going to prison, in exchange for information, and he had become a useful ally. Now, hidden in the port, he worked on his own account and in cahoots with the opposition, and probably with the smuggling fraternity as well. He changed his container every month – he was like a cat prowling the dark corners of the docks.

Nwankwo, sitting in the Brave New World, could hear the hooting of the ships’ sirens as they entered the port, the creaking of badly oiled cranes and hooks, the containers as they were unloaded, with a crash of sheet metal, and then piled up to wait, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for ever. There were fifty thousand containers heaped up, each needing twenty signatures and twenty different bribes before they were allowed through the customs. He could hear it all, they were sounds he would never forget, always carried inside his head. He felt jubilant at the thought that his revenge was being planned in that faraway and uncontrollable hellhole, where everything finished up, riches and rubbish, millionaires and the pirates in their pay. And there, in a rusting metal cube buried deep in the terminal of No. 2 Quay, Apapa in Badagry Creek, in the midst of thousands of other abandoned containers, in the boiling heat of filthy, pillaged, rubbish-strewn Africa, there, at the fingertips of a friendly little street urchin, was the detonator that would blow everything sky-high. It was a good feeling.

Another message appeared on the screen:

From: k35HYT@gmail.com
To: londonsubwaystreet@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Re: Egbe bere

 

@uche
K.

Kay had just given the detonator a Twitter name – it would be called Uche.

Once he was back in the street, Nwankwo couldn’t help watching all the people around him. They were getting on with their lives, walking, bicycling, running, kissing each other, exercising the dog, arguing over trifles. He wanted to tell them all that a small guided missile was about to make the headlines, and that it would be arriving from Africa, that miserable continent where the inhabitants, long long ago, had believed that the first white men they saw were spirits, to be feared and respected. Nwankwo, so well brought up and respectable, was nonetheless almost drunk with anger. He was alone now with only Uche for company, and there was nothing more for him to do; but, like the worm in the middle of the fruit, he was close to his target.

He felt calmer the next day, sitting by the window on the TGV. He was leaving Paris after his three solitary days there. He closed his eyes, thinking about his son, who had fulfilled his mission, about his little girls and Ezima who were about to go and join him, about Lira and the strange night he had spent with her, about her extraordinarily direct way of speaking – he could never have talked like that, women just had this gift for seizing life as it came. He thought about his mother, travelling by train with her to visit the family when he was little. It had been a huge event, like going into space, for a child who had only known stony paths until then. That train had wound through a threatening landscape, peopled in his child’s imagination, and perhaps in reality too, by ferocious wild beasts and moving spirits; at every station along the way his heart had beaten louder, echoed, it seemed, by the puffing of the train.

Eventually Nwankwo opened his eyes to see the French plains sailing past; the train ran like a well-oiled conveyor belt. Forests here were no more than thickets, and the only reminder of darker forces were the few grey church towers inhabited by an exhausted deity. There were too many comforting certainties in this landscape. Don’t you agree, Uche?

 

THE SUN TSAR AT VERSAILLES

 

Le Canard enchaîné, 5th October

 

The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles has been closed to the public! In three days time, Sergei Louchsky will be holding his fortieth birthday party there. “Dom Pérignon champagne, caviar, 110 waiters for 48 tables, 14 chefs, 500 ‘medallion’ chairs specially made for the occasion, 8,000 roses for the2 table settings and, for the floral decorations, 16,000 lilies of the valley with 7,600 water vases to hold them” – no expense has been spared. And one might add that the 500 guests are not just anyone, starting with the President himself, who declared on television a few days ago: “I will not let the State go bankrupt. This cannot go on. We must seek out growth wherever we can find it, in the Northern Caucasus if necessary.” The Caucasus is coming to him this week, but he’ll soon be rambling northwards.