Kwei Quartey - Gold of Our Fathers

She could be useful to the case, he thought as they traded their contact information. Very useful. There was also something exciting about her, like a bright strand of gold in a length of fabric one can’t resist touching.

It had taken three hours for Bao Liu’s corpse to be picked up and transported to the mortuary at KATH. Wei was in custody at the Dunkwa Police Station, at first loudly protesting and then falling silent and brooding.

Dawson’s search of the site where Bao had been discovered had turned up no traces of blood, and besides, the area had been trampled with a thousand footprints of meddling onlookers. None of the galamsey boys who had reportedly found the body were around to be questioned, and no one knew where they were-or no one admitted to it.

Dawson and Obeng went into town to look for a Chinese interpreter to help question Wei. They split up and began popping into gold-selling and -buying stores on either side of the street. Dawson first tried the shop he’d seen earlier-Ofin Gold Trading Company. In a small room, he found an impeccably turned out Ghanaian in a white linen shirt sitting at his desk weighing a lump of gold on a digital scale. The Chinese man who had brought it in waited anxiously for the verdict: the weight, the trading price, and how much cash he was going to get.

“Fourteen point one six grams,” the Ghanaian man said. “Which is almost half an ounce, or twenty blades.”

Dawson had never heard of a “blade,” but obviously forty blades equaled an ounce.

“Four hundred dollars,” the Ghanaian man said.

“Eh?” the Chinese man said, looking put out.

“Four hundred.”

“You pay me six hundred dollar.”

The Ghanaian smiled. “Six! I don’t think so, my friend. The gold is not pure. Sorry.”

The Chinese man looked at the buyer and back to the gold, undecided. “No,” he said finally, shaking his head. “Today you no good.”

He took his gold nugget back and left. The Ghanaian man shrugged and laughed. “He won’t get a better price anywhere else,” he said to Dawson, as if he had been in on the conversation from the start.

“How much is gold going for at the moment?” Dawson asked.

“Almost thirteen hundred dollars per ounce,” the man replied. “Are you buying or selling?”

“Neither.” He showed his badge. “Detective Chief Inspector Dawson, CID.”

“George Danquah,” the man said, rising to shake hands. He was clean-shaven, neat, and was wearing a subtle fragrance. “Please, have a seat.”

Dawson took the stool on the other side of the table. “I’m investigating the death of a Chinese man at a mining site.”

“Is Bao Liu the dead man you are speaking of?”

“Yes. You knew him?”

“Like I know the other Chinese miners,” Danquah said with something of a smirk. “They come and they go. I do business with them, but I have no interest in them personally.”

“What was Mr. Liu like?”

George pulled a face, as if he had smelled something bad. “Unpleasant, always losing his temper, shouting, calling people stupid.” Raising his voice, he launched into a singsong, mocking imitation of Chinese, which Dawson admitted sounded quite authentic. It probably wouldn’t to a Chinese speaker, of course.

“But for sure,” George added, “he knew how to mine for gold and he brought me good material.”

“Do you know anyone who might have wanted to kill him?” Dawson asked.

“Not specifically. I do know that he wasn’t consistent about paying his galamsey boys at the end of the day. So they might have resented him for that. I’m just speculating.”

“Explain that-paying the boys at the end of the day.”

George nodded. “The miners wash the gold ore they dig up all day long, and any gold that falls out is mixed with mercury to form an amalgam. After that, they burn the mercury off and the gold is left behind.”

“And that’s what they bring to you?”

“Or we go to the site and pay them on the spot,” George said. “Whichever way, it’s something of a gentleman’s agreement that you as a boss make sure you pay your boys for the day’s yield.”

“Did you go to his site often?”

“Often enough.”

“What about last night?”

“No. I have not been there in a while, and I’m not sure when he was last here. Wait, let me ask my wife… Efua!”

Said Efua appeared. She was solid and endowed in several areas. Dawson thought of a baobab tree.

“That Mr. Liu, the Chinaman,” George said to her, speaking in Twi, “did he come in this week?”

She shook her head. “No. The week before.”

“Thank you.” George turned back to Dawson. “There you have it, Mr. Dawson. Or what was it-Inspector, anaa ?”

Dawson waved it away. “It doesn’t matter. ‘Mister’ is okay. One other thing: Mr. Liu’s brother, Wei-do you know anything about him?”

George turned the corners of his lips down. “He was always in the background, very quiet the one or two times I saw him here in the shop-always looking at his phone. So no, I don’t know much about him.”

“We have him at the police station and we need to ask him some questions. Do you know a Chinese person who can help us with that?”

George thought for a moment. “There’s this one guy named Mr. Leonard Huang who has a hardware store in the Sofo Line area of Kumasi. I trust him. He’s been here for years and speaks quite good English. The only problem might be that he won’t want to come down here all the way from Kumasi.” He picked up his mobile from the table. “Let me see if I can get him for you.”

While George was dialing, Dawson looked around the store. A number of plaques and framed documents on the wall made it evident that the store and its business were licensed and certified by the PMMC-Precious Minerals Marketing Company, the government’s trader in gold, diamonds, and precious stones.

George had apparently gotten through to Leonard and from this side of the conversation, it seemed to Dawson that George was having a tough time persuading him to act as a translator.

“Oh, no, no, Leonard,” he was saying in reassuring tones. “You won’t get involved at all. You will be a neutral translator for Inspector Dawson to help him obtain some information. Can you do it for me, please?” George looked over at Dawson after a moment’s pause in the negotiations. “He will do it. What time?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Leonard-how quickly can you be at the police station? One hour? Okay, that will be very good. Thank you very much, my friend.” George ended the call and smiled at Dawson. “Done. We are very lucky that he happens to be in Dunkwa right now.”

“I appreciate it, Mr. Danquah.”

“No problem. He was trying to get out of it by saying he speaks a different kind of Chinese from Mr. Liu, but I know that’s not true. He’s forgotten I’ve seen the two of them conversing before.”

“There’s more than one kind of Chinese?” Dawson asked, feeling ignorant.

George shrugged. “So I’m told. Mandarin and, em… another one I forget.” He called out again. “Efua, what are those different China languages? Mandarin and what again?”

“Cantonese,” she supplied.

“Yeah, that’s the one.” George winked at Dawson. “That woman is a walking encyclopedia. That’s why I married her.”

Busty and brainy, Dawson thought. “One other thing, Mr. Danquah, what is your view of the illegal Chinese miners?”

“Ah,” he sighed, leaning back again. “This is complicated.” He snatched a piece of scratch paper and drew two circles on it. “The Chinese are here in this circle, and we the Ghanaians are here in the other. Where the circles intersect is where we trade in some fashion, or work together and so on. Other times, it is a clash of cultures. Did you hear about the shooting at Aniamoa several months ago?”