FIFTY-FOUR

May 25

Mid-morning Monday, Sowah burst out of his office and came to Emma’s desk. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ve located Sana Sana and he’s willing to meet.”

Emma jumped up and followed the boss out of the building. His gout had cleared up and he was walking faster than Emma had ever seen.

“How did you find him?” she asked.

“Not by phone,” Sowah said. “I used a network of street contacts who worked through the weekend.”

“Outstanding, sir.” She got into the passenger seat of his nice but modest Kia. Sowah simply wasn’t a flashy kind of man. “Where do we meet him?”

“Somewhere around Circle,” Sowah said, “but I don’t know the exact location. Once we get there, we’ll park, I’ll call his guy, and he’ll take us to another location. Sana doesn’t meet or live in one place all the time. He’s constantly on the move.”

“What a life,” Emma said, shaking her head. “I don’t know how he does it.”

“Nor I,” Sowah said. “How was your weekend?”

“Fine, sir,” she said, not planning on talking about her date. “In fact, it was special.”

She related the story about Kojo’s newly discovered talent. “He’s never liked paper and pencil, or even crayons. But because he’s so drawn to anything with a screen, I suppose the tablet liberated his gift, in a way.”

“Perhaps so,” Sowah said. “You seem to love working with the children.”

Emma smiled. “It’s sometimes a lot of frustration, but the small rewards make it worth it. Like Kojo.”

“I imagine he teaches you a lot about being patient.”

Emma nodded. “He does. And gives me practice in peering inside someone’s mind.”

“That’s why you’ll make a good detective.”

“Thank you, sir.”

They parked near Ernest’s Chemists on the northeast side of Nkrumah Circle and Sowah made the call, telling the guy on the other end where they were. He showed up after five minutes, a lanky man of about nineteen wearing ratty slide slippers. He didn’t say much except “Morning,” and they followed him off the beaten track into a deeply set huddle of residential shacks built on treacherous terrain. Walking down ever-narrowing passages, they came to a small, vomit-green house. Outside the door was a security man with a mass of knotted muscles. He patted Emma and Sowah down before holding the door open to let them in. They entered a musty, semi-dark room where it took a few seconds for their vision to accommodate.

“Good morning, Mr. Sowah.”

At first, they didn’t see where the voice came from, but then they realized that Sana Sana was sitting in a corner dressed in black.

“Morning, Sana,” Sowah said, stepping forward to shake hands. “It’s a while since we’ve spoken. This is my assistant, Emma Djan.”

“You are welcome.”

Sana was not wearing his iconic cap with a concealing curtain of beads attached to the visor. Instead, he had donned a lifelike human mask. He gestured toward two guest chairs in front of him. Sowah and Emma sat.

“I’m sorry it’s been difficult to get hold of me,” Sana said. “I’ve been away for a few days.”

“No problem,” Sowah said. “You are a very busy man.”

“How can I help you, sir?”

“We are trying to find out what has happened to an American gone missing in Ghana, one Gordon Tilson. He came to Ghana on the fifteenth of February and was in touch with people back home in the States up until the third of April, at which point he disappeared and has not been heard from since. His son, Derek, arrived in Ghana at the beginning of May and is now our client. As you can imagine, he is desperate to find his father.”

Sana nodded. “Naturally.”

“We’re consulting you because you have your ear to the ground and know a lot about what’s going on in the country at any one time. We’re curious if you have any information—no matter how small—about Mr. Tilson, and his disappearance.”

Sana paused before his response. “It’s very interesting that you come here today because I have also been very interested in what has been the fate of Mr. Tilson. I had heard that he had disappeared and that the police were investigating, and the reason why it has been of interest to me is that Mr. Tilson came to see me.”

Neither Sowah nor Emma could hide their surprise. “He did?” Sowah exclaimed.

“Yes, sir. He contacted me via Facebook Messenger and told me he had read a lot about me and my reporting on Internet fraud and sakawa boys. Now, I don’t respond to everyone who messages me, but his situation interested me because I’ve been working to collect enough cases in which defrauded individuals come from abroad to confront the people who have ripped them off. There aren’t many of them. Okay, so, that’s one aspect of what I’m doing. The second is what I call the Big One. That is to name, shame, and jail high officials in the police force and elsewhere in the government who are secretly aiding and abetting sakawa boys to continue in this illegal, money-making enterprise.

“So, clearly, we had a common interest, Tilson and I, and we agreed to meet somewhere around the fifth of March, I think it was. But before that, I spoke to Tilson on the phone and advised him to move out of the Kempinski Hotel.”

“Ah,” Emma said. “We wondered who it was. Why did you advise him as such?”

“Kempinski is a high-visibility place with extraordinary security in place. I call it a political hotel. Unless you’re a harmless tourist, I wouldn’t recommend a journalist, detective, or any kind of investigator stay there. I suspect in some cases the rooms are bugged. But that’s just me.”

“Interesting,” Sowah said.

“Yes. So, at the time we met,” Sana continued, “I had expected Gordon to be concerned mostly with catching the person or persons who had tricked him, and he had already gone to the police about it. What surprised me was he asked if he could help me in my goal to name, shame, and jail the sakawa big wigs, as I call them.”

“What role did he want to play?” Sowah said. “I mean, what could he do?”

“That’s exactly the point. He was overeager—like a sprinter off the starting block too soon. I have a method of working and I use my own people. I didn’t want a co-investigator, I only wanted to know what had happened to Mr. Tilson and take it from there. He said he had a possible contact who could give him access to top-ranking officials in the police service. I told him, if you start at the top, you have nowhere to go from there. Start at the bottom and work your way up. For example, I told him about Kweku Ponsu, the fetish priest, who has contact with both sakawa boys and powerful people. No one will admit it, but MPs, commanders, commissioners, and CEOs alike go to Ponsu for spiritual guidance to make money, get promotions, destroy political opponents, and so on. Ponsu has a foot in one world and the other foot in another. He is the kind of player we want to engage and court, but it’s a slow process.”

Sowah exchanged a glance with Emma. “Now we know how Mr. Tilson found out about Ponsu. What was his response to your recommendations about Kweku Ponsu?”

“Something to the effect that he wanted to work as fast as possible,” Sana said. “That he didn’t want to stay in Ghana ‘forever.’ Americans are very impatient, you know. They always want to do things fast. So, when they come to Ghana, they don’t understand why things take so long.”

“Were you aware Mr. Tilson went to see Ponsu at Atimpoku?” Sowah asked.

“Not at the time, but I learned about it later. I don’t like to engage in ‘I told you so,’ but I had advised Mr. Tilson to stay away from Ponsu. After that, I never spoke to him or heard from him again.”

“We now know from the driver, who took Mr. Tilson up to Atimpoku, that Tilson had an ugly verbal altercation with Ponsu,” Sowah said.

Sana said, “I don’t doubt it.”

“What do you think has happened to Mr. Tilson?”

Sana shook his head slowly. “I doubt he’s still alive.”

“Murdered?”

“Look, if he was in a car crash or something of that nature, we would know by now. So, the question at hand now is who murdered him and where is he? Buried somewhere? Thrown over a cliff? I don’t know.”

“How about thrown over a bridge?” Sowah said. “We have an eyewitness who saw something that looked like a body being dumped over the Adome Bridge into the Volta on the night of Gordon’s disappearance.”

“Really.” Sana leaned back in his chair, discomposure showing even with his mask hiding his expression. “Oh. That’s not good at all. Have you informed the police?”

“This morning I spoke to DCOP Laryea about possibly getting some divers to search the river, but things move at a snail’s pace at CID and I don’t expect anything to happen soon in that regard. Meanwhile, Emma has asked some local fishermen to keep a lookout while they’re on the river.”

“Good,” Sana said.

“I’m curious, Mr. Sana,” Sowah said, “have the police ever spoken to you about Tilson?”

“No, they haven’t,” Sana said. “Like you, they probably didn’t know of any connection between the two of us. Besides, on this issue they might want to avoid me like the plague if they’re the ones responsible for Tilson’s death.”

Sowah looked startled. “What do you mean?”

“Consider it. If indeed there are top police personnel involved in these scams, and I’m positive there are, and Mr. Tilson went to Ponsu asking probing questions about some of these same high-level cops that Ponsu is regularly in touch with, that sets up a potentially dangerous situation for Tilson. I don’t need to tell you that one messes with high authority at one’s peril, and one should leave it to the professionals.”

“Do you have a specific person or persons in mind?” Sowah asked.

“No one definite yet,” Sana said. “But I’m working on it.”

Sowah looked at Emma. “Did you have any questions? Anything I missed?”

She leaned toward him and said in a low voice, “His whereabouts.”

Sowah nodded, stood up, and stretched out his hand to Sana. “We will take our leave, now. Thank you very much for your time. This has been very informative. Just one more thing—”

“On the third of April,” Sana interrupted, “I was in the States doing some TED talks. There are some recent YouTube videos of me with a verifiable date. Is that what you wanted?”

“It is,” Sowah said. “Thank you, sir.”