FIVE

January 5, Accra, Ghana

That night, Nii went to The Republic off Oxford Street. It was a loud bar and club with a DJ who spun hiplife and hip hop. When the place was packed, which was always, patrons spilled out onto the street. The waiters sped about between tables serving up mixed drinks and yam fries. The crowd was a mix of Ghanaians and people from all over the world. White American girls loved coming here to get some black-man penis. The Americans always acted all cool but if you watched them carefully you could see their eyes eating up tall, young Ghanaian guys like vultures devouring carrion.

Nii spotted three white women sharing space with a few other people at a table next to the small dance area. One woman was on the chunky side, and the second was thin with almost no breasts. But it was the third woman who held Nii’s attention. She was pretty, on the dark side of blonde with hair cascading to her shoulders. A lot of hair.

Nii approached them, switching on his charm and Americanizing his accent and pronunciation. Reese was the pretty one, and Nii concentrated his attention on her. He used some of the American expressions and idioms he’d learned from Susan Hadley.

Reese seemed to be responding to his flirtations, but after a while, Nii noticed the other two were being obstructive, especially the chunky one, Sheila, who kept sending him disparaging looks. She seemed to be trying to “protect” Reese, or else she was just plain jealous. He couldn’t even get Reese’s number because of that fucking Sheila. All the same, he did give Reese the number to his two mobiles.

Abruptly, Sheila signaled to the others it was time to go, and Nii had a bad feeling she wanted to get the other two away from him. Why? He put it down to prejudice. When they left him with an empty, “Nice meeting you,” he felt rejected and then angry. Reese gave him a glance back as they left, and he prayed she would text him when she had a moment alone.

He got home relatively early—just after midnight—and went to bed feeling annoyed and anxious. What was the next step to getting to sleep with a white girl and getting a snippet of her hair? To no avail, he checked his phone again for a text from Reese.

He slept until past ten in the morning, waking up to a phone alert. His heart leapt at the thought it might be Reese, but it wasn’t. Even better, it was Susan Hadley who was in town at the Golden Tulip Hotel and wanted to see him.