Ннеди Окорафор - Lagos Noir

Yet something troubled Sergeant Gorewa. In fact, many things troubled him. How could a man escape the bullets from the war in his own country only to be killed by a knife in a strange land? Next, he recalled something that the woman had said about the dead man — that he had a big mouth. She had then elaborated to suggest that the dead man was a boastful person, and added that it was the guy’s mouth that got him killed. He wondered about the woman’s choice of words too: the man had been killed by a knife, from another man’s hand, and yet his mouth must share the blame for his death.

Sergeant Gorewa also wondered if he really wanted to find out if the man had been telling the truth about his walking stick. His instinct told him that the man had been lying, but he really loved the idea of a walking stick made out of diamonds.

The schoolchildren looked out for the man drinking beer and dancing for a couple of days, but he did not appear. They did not miss him; it was no big loss. They had many other games to occupy their time. They walked, ran, and kicked up sand. They picked up stones and decided they were going to throw them at the agama lizards.

Murtala Muhammed International Airport

Dougal was hot and he was afraid. He had been warned about this, the heat. He’d shrugged it off at the time. Everybody knows Africa is hot. It is Africa, after all. But when he stepped out of the British Airways jet and onto the ramp and he inhaled the hot air, it felt like he was drowning standing up. He was instantly wet under the armpits and around the neck. He wished to sweet Jesus he could just take off the white jacket. Heck, other than a couple of men in suits — and they were black — he was the only one not dressed for the tropics. Underneath, his Marks & Spencer cotton shirt was already showing patches of sweat.

It was not too late; he could take off the darn jacket. A patch of blue had blossomed out from the bottom of the chest pocket. Sudoku. He had forgotten to replace the cap when he’d folded the complimentary copy of the Guardian away and put the ballpoint pen into the pocket. Then he’d made it worse when he asked the stewardess for water. He had dipped the surprisingly large and thick napkin from the meal pack in water and tried to dab the ink away. The stain taunted his OCD. It was cruel that he had to keep the jacket on.

He could turn back and refuse to leave the aircraft, but instead he continued walking along the dusty blue carpet of the ramp, Nigerians brushing past him with their bulging hand luggage and their unapologetic impatience.

He had never been to Africa. Nigeria seemed the wrong place to start. He followed occasional signs and the throng that had overtaken him, and eventually arrived at the immigration booths where he was told by a man not in uniform to join a different queue. The foreign passports queue. And it was just as long as the impossibly long one he’d been on. There couldn’t have been this many people on the flight. Thirty sweltering minutes later, he walked through baggage claim and out into the arrivals lounge of Murtala Muhammed International Airport. He was truly in Lagos. What the hell was he doing?

He stayed in the lounge, surrounded by Nigerians who paid him no notice and men and women in different uniforms — some armed, some not — and he looked out of the floor-to-ceiling glass panes at the waiting crowd staring back into the lounge. He could see the heat outside rising off the top of cars that pulled up to collect passengers. Still, it was not too late.

It was eight in the morning but he was sweating like he was in a sauna. It felt like he was the only one suffering in the choking heat. The other passengers from his flight seemed fine, naturally. He found a tall, free-standing air-conditioning unit whirling out air from dirty vents and stood in front of it. He watched the vents with suspicion. He imagined he could smell the dust. He even tasted it in the back of his throat. Or it could just be the smell of Lagos itself. A police officer was seated on a stool next to the refrigerator-sized machine, the barrel of a Kalashnikov resting on his crotch, his head bent to a noisy game he was playing on his phone. He had no epaulets on his shoulders. He could be any rank in any force.

“Do you need a taxi, sir?”

Dougal swung around. A girl with a brown face that glistened as much as her glossy red lipstick was standing next to him. He shook his head. She didn’t leave; she just stood there staring at him. He looked outside, conscious of where she stood and where his bag lay on the ground.

In the sun, amongst the crowd of people on the other side of the road, a man was holding up a large card with his name written on it: Dougal McManaman . It wasn’t too late. Yet.

“We have air-conditioned cars for hire,” the girl said.

“No thanks, I’m fine.”

By the time Dougal peered back out the window, the card with his name on it was gone and a mosaic of brown faces, each of them looking the same as any other, stared his way. He panicked. Then the card went up again. The man holding it up had only taken a second to mop sweat from his forehead. Dougal did the same with the sleeve of his white jacket and saw the blue ink stain on the pocket as he did so. He just wished he could take the darn thing off. He was cooking under it. The stain was testing the limits of his self-restraint. He looked at it again, even though he didn’t want to, and again it made his skin crawl.

The man outside did not look like a chief. He couldn’t be Chief Ernest Abraham Okonkwo II, who spoke with an American accent, invited Dougal to Nigeria, paid for the first-class ticket, and reserved the presidential suite at the Sheraton Hotel. This new man was young, glancing about constantly — like he was on the lookout — and was wearing a brown costume that was faded at the shoulders.

Dougal tried again for a signal on his phone. He’d had no luck when the jet was on the runway. The mobile still had his UK SIM card. The network had assured him his roaming had been sorted. He did stress, several times, that he was traveling to Nigeria. Maybe he’d upset the customer support lad. Maybe the Indian chap in some call center in Bangalore was punishing him. He switched the phone off and on as Betsy always did when she thought something was wrong with her own phone. Around him, other people were using their phones. Phones worked in Nigeria. He held the phone up — nothing.

Betsy had warned him not to come. She told him to call the police. She went on the Internet and printed out dozens of stories about Nigerian fraudsters — 419, they call them. But Dougal had shared the news with Matthew, Betsy’s brother, who had been the best man at their wedding. Matthew had looked up Okonkwo & Associates and the lawyer’s website seemed legit. They were even on Wikipedia. Matthew showed all these to Betsy, but she said she knew Dougal would be kidnapped.

Okonkwo, who had strangely insisted on being called Chief Ernest, promised to be at the airport in Lagos. The chief swore by his mother that he would route his private jet via Lagos first thing in the morning, before leaving for Monaco, so he could be there when the plane from England arrived. But it wasn’t the chief holding up the name card now, it couldn’t be. And there was no way to contact him to ask if it was safe to go with this stranger outside.

“Are you waiting for a taxi?”

Dougal had been aware of the man who’d come to stand next to him in front of the hopeless air conditioner. He’d even shifted a little to the side so the man could also get some dusty, coolish air. The slender, bespectacled man had placed his briefcase on the floor between them. Dougal remembered him from the flight. They had shared the first-class cabin with just two other passengers: a black girl who looked too young to be traveling alone, and a slightly stooped white man who wore a dark suit and kept asking for more champagne. He was also standing by the glass pane now, the stooped white man, within earshot, looking out for his driver, perhaps, or maybe he was a sheep, instinctively sticking close to the one person who looked like him. They were about the same height. One could even say they looked alike. Somewhat.