9

‘We are coming from the hospital,’ Chief Ojo said from the back of the Mercedes as Abiodun drove towards his house in Chevron Estate.

He had to have a good explanation for his more-than-one-day absence, but without his phone with which to co-opt an accomplice for an alibi, and without knowledge of how his wife knew he’d been at the hotel, he had been unable to come up with a lie that sounded half-convincing, even to him. He was in some sort of robbery; they took his phone – it would be easier to explain a stolen phone than a broken SIM card. He remembered the missing memory card and his heart skipped a beat.

He fetched his phone and put it in the seat pocket in front of him. He ended up in the hospital, but without any money to pay the bill… He fetched his wallet and the money he had on him and tucked them in the seat pocket… they wouldn’t let him leave the hospital because he didn’t have any money and… No. Matilda knew he was at the hotel.

He was attacked. Armed robbers. It was a sophisticated robbery. He was just leaving from a meeting with an important diplomat when they accosted him on the corridor. At the hotel. Men – they had to be men. They were dressed smartly in business suits. They pointed a gun at him and took him into a room – they had a key card and they took his phone and money and tied him up. No. They sprayed something in his face that rendered him unconscious. At least that bit was true – he had been unconscious.

He looked up. His eyelids retracted as the realisation hit him. That was it. That was what really happened. He was drugged by the girl.

Matilda was seeing off a neighbour when Ojo’s car pulled into his compound. Ojo greeted the woman from two houses away and had almost made it to the door when Matilda said, ‘Come here.’

With Abiodun, the driver, standing there, and the neighbour not quite four metres away on the other side of the gate, Matilda held her phone to Ojo’s face and said, ‘Look at yourself.’

Ojo felt sick in his stomach. On his wife’s phone was a photograph of a man asleep. It looked like him. It was him. He had never seen himself asleep before. A naked girl was on top of him. From the angle of the picture and the position of her hand, she, the naked girl, had taken the picture. Her face was out of shot, but her bare breasts were pressed against his chest. He went to take the phone from his wife, to get a better look, but Matilda held it away.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ she said and she slipped the phone through the neck of her blouse into her bra. ‘I don’t want to hear anything. You have disgraced yourself for the last time. My father wants to see you right away.’

‘Matilda…’

She put up her hand to shut him up. She brushed past him and went into the house, leaving him standing with Abiodun.

‘Madam has vexed o,’ the driver said.

Ojo slapped him just as Matilda slammed the front door shut.

‘Take me to Baba’s house,’ Ojo said and he climbed into the back seat of the Mercedes.

How did she get the picture? Did she also have the memory card? Had she seen what was on it? That would be very bad. Very, very bad. Maybe it was a setup – by the girl, Iyabo. He groaned. What had Matilda told Otunba Oluawo, the Lion of Yoruba land? She was his only daughter. Otunba, a senator in the second republic and a recurring decimal in all administrations since then, both military and civilian, was a man to fear. Even at eighty he was still handpicking senators and ministers and firing governors at will. He was not called the godfather of godfathers for nothing. A young politician once made the mistake of referring to the ageing politician as a relic of colonial times. The gentleman was a senator then. Otunba called to ask who his godfather was. The senator told a reporter about the private phone call and boasted of how he had replied that he had no godfathers. He went on the record, in print, to denounce the ‘manipulative, selfish Nigerian concept of godfatherism that allows ageing gangsters, for want of a better description, to place unconstitutional quid-pro-quo burdens on people they manoeuvre into office.’ He declared that he was not going to be one of those young men who fall prey to ‘the greed of such unscrupulous dinosaurs whose interference in the political system has held Nigeria back.’

Two days later the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission – EFCC – invited the man for a meeting, detained him for four days, and when his lawyer took to the papers to lament the unconstitutional treatment of his client, the EFCC filed corruption charges just as the man’s party disowned him and the president stopped taking his calls.

Now, Otunba had asked to see Ojo on the same day his daughter showed Ojo a picture of himself in bed with a girl. She had reported him to daddy.

Even though Ojo was Otunba’s only son-in-law, Ojo was not part of the inner circle. He was a husband, not a son. This was what Matilda’s eldest brother told him when he mentioned his ambition to run for the House of Representatives and asked how best to seek the old man’s help. And so it had always been; Ojo was married to the only daughter of one of the most powerful politicians in the country, if not the most powerful, but the matrimony did not translate to direct manna; he still had to work for his money. He used his father-in-law’s name to gain access to certain corridors of power where the doorkeepers were important enough to influence the awarding or quick processing of government contracts. All that, it now seemed, was about to come to an end. And God knows what the brothers would also do after the father had had his piece of flesh. And what if they got to see what was on the memory card? He felt sick again.