Amaka’s room at Bogobiri House smelled familiar: old books, potpourri, and oil paintings. She closed her eyes and inhaled. The AC had been left on – by the night manager after she enquired about a vacant room, she imagined. Original paintings hung from all the walls, just like another room she had once stayed in at the hotel.
A metre-square Ndidi Emefiele hung above a carved mahogany desk. The greyscale painting was the side profile of a woman with a huge Afro, her head tilted upwards, with lines of shadow cast by Venetian blinds crossing her features at an angle. Amaka stared at the painting.
She had asked the night manager for some paper and a pen and he had pulled some A4 sheets from the printer behind the check-in desk, written down the Wi-Fi code for her, and handed her his own pen and the paper. She placed the items on the desk beneath the tranquil woman, then went in search of a socket for the phone charger.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, her phone plugged into a socket that had been used for the TV, she checked if she had received any text messages. None. It was late. The messages would have come in earlier. She thought of messages that would have been sent to the old number. She shook the creeping angst away. Now, she could only hope that those who needed her would get the new number.
She connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi, logged on to her email and searched. Satisfied that she had what she needed, she stood up and began shedding her clothes as she walked towards the bathroom.
Fifteen minutes later she returned from her shower wrapped in the hotel housecoat, sat in the chair at the desk beneath the painting, and picked up the pen.
In the centre of a sheet she wrote the name Malik and circled it. Around the circle she began writing other names and drawing lines from them to Malik.
‘Ojo.’ The relationship between him and Malik was at the centre of everything: The Harem. But Ojo would have to have figured out that she was the girl who seduced him at Soul Lounge. She said her name was Iyabo, and she’d agreed to spend the night with him in his hotel suite. He would have also had to deduce the reason she drugged him, went through his phone, and sent a picture to his wife. He would have had to realise it was because of what he and Malik did to Florentine.
‘Gabriel.’ Her childhood friend and the first person she phoned after Malik called and threatened her. As kids, Irene, his tall, slim, red-haired English mother, would sometimes pick the two of them up from school and Amaka would spend the afternoon playing at his house before Irene took her home later. It was only as an adult that Amaka realised that those days were planned by her parents who wanted precious time alone.
Amaka had been on her way to his house in Ikeja to drop off her car before leaving the country when she drove into the mob at Oshodi Market. The girl. The scenes from the market played back in her mind. She shook her head. Not now.
Just the other day she asked Gabriel if he knew Malik. Gabriel made his living selling expensive properties to wealthy Nigerians, he knew everyone worth knowing in Lagos; and those he did not know, he’d know someone who did. But when she asked if he knew any person called Malik, he insisted on knowing why she was asking, before telling her anything. In the end he didn’t give her anything she could work with, instead warning her that there were dangerous people in Lagos she shouldn’t be messing with. She drew a line connecting the two names.
‘Florentine.’ The girl that kind-hearted strangers had brought to Amaka’s office, bruised, bleeding, and broken, beaten to within half an inch of her life. They had found her walking like a zombie along an express road, naked and unresponsive. She had barely survived the brutal battering from Ojo. Her luck was that when she passed out during the viscious attack, Ojo and Malik thought she was dead and they dumped her on the road. The bastards. Amaka drew a line connecting her to Malik.
She looked up and stared at the woman in the Ndidi Emefiele painting. She added Naomi to the list and drew a line connecting the former beauty queen to Malik. She looked up again, then added a last thought: ‘Someone else.’
She got up, walked to the window, pen in hand, drew the curtain, and stared out. She returned to the desk and next to Gabriel’s name, wrote: ‘Doesn’t know which Malik I’m looking for.’ Beneath that she wrote: ‘Won’t put me at risk.’ Then she crossed him out, tapped the pen on Naomi’s name, making tiny dots on the paper. Against her name she wrote, ‘Too scared,’ then crossed her out. She tapped the pen on Florentine’s name, got up, and paced the room, then returning to the desk she wrote: ‘Said Malik hadn’t paid her.’ The pen hovered over Florentine. She added: ‘Might have tried to get her money back.’ She looked up at the ceiling, then she retraced the line connecting Florentine to Malik and wrote down the girl’s phone number beside it. Her phone, charging in the corner, beeped twice: a message from a number she didn’t recognise. It contained a car registration number and a name, ‘Debo.’
She opened the email app, found a message she’d sent to herself, opened the attached Microsoft Excel document, then searched for the car registration number and composed a reply: ‘Safe. But be careful. Might try to slip off the condom.’
She fell back onto the mattress and spread her hands over the sheets. It worked. The girls had the new number. And she could use a phone until she got a new laptop.
The phone began to ring but the rule was simple: messages only. Sometimes a new girl would call instead and Amaka would reply with a message explaining the rule. Only a handful of the girls who relied on her for the information she provided knew who she was and she wanted to keep it that way. She recognised the number, sat up and answered. ‘Hi Funke.’
Amaka had memorised the phone number of the young girl who helped her lure Ojo into a honey trap: she always memorised important numbers.
‘Aunty, where are you?’ Funke whispered.
‘I’m at a hotel. What’s wrong? Where are you?’
‘After you left the club, we came to a party in Banana Island. Aunty, some Lebanese men here are saying that he’s going to be the next Governor of Lagos State.’
‘Who?’
‘Ojo. They said they’ve chosen him to replace Douglas. Aunty, I’m afraid. What if he finds out what we did?’