A Christmas Story of Anagrams

'Tis charms that brought three charmists to Nazareth that cold night. Led by a star which one of them mischarts, the three sirs match pace to the stable of christ's ma, bearing gifts unplanned.

A stable richly blessed with timber fetters and a roof of hay houses the infant. Rich masts of Jewish kilt gilds the babe's cot; spot-lit in soft light reverently shone by the moon.

So beautiful the picture was, it would stir chasm between the hardest heart and the stiffest head and split both in schism. Rat, goat, wisemen, cattle, ram, schists of hay...(this crams the haloed stall) around where the heavenly angel sits. March in O king of peace. Christmas has come to stay

N.B
Only minds tuned fine can find all the anagrams of the word CHRISTMAS in the Christmas story above. There are 11 of them.

OSUNDOLIRE IFELANWA OLADAPO

Of Masks and Hoods

There was a masked ball in Venice on a certain holiday.
People came in hoods and masks of all finery.
We danced and spun and drank, till stupor
rose in the air and caused us to pour
Wine into imaginary cups and laugh to words unjoked.

It was a merry day; that day. And I learnt a merry tale.
It was told to me by a drunk as we drank our ale.
‘It worrs of a certn ball ich was eld of late
'ere a king had drank so much as to auction his mate…’
Though his words slurred I heard him clearly for also drunk was i

‘The king had opend the biddin with an ounce of gold flakes...
'An’ hands and hats had gone up to raise the stakes
Till the prize landed in the hands of the last to ask:
A million pounds of gold from a bidding mask'
The merriment continued till dawn and each went his merry way.

The winning bidder did wake the next morning,
And saw his wife beside him, yawning.
‘How was the ball?’ asked the wife rubbing her eyes.
‘I was too drunk to know ‘cept I won a prize,
I borrowed a million pounds to win and was too drunk to keep’

The wife kept mute; for that night, she had masked as king,
she had gone with the auctioneer with which she had a fling,
and they had both plotted to play a prank:
of which none ever has surpassed in rank.
A prank only behind masks was deemed possible

To cut off the in-between;
that morning, the king woke without a queen;
The queen woke in a stable having slept with a stranger.
Venice lost its entire savings: The town lender,
having lent it to someone he could not recognize.

Our lives are a tale of pretence as of the bidding:
where we wear Masks and hoods to keep our true selves hidden.
But masks and hood breeds nothing but trouble
Making the king a fool and the pauper heir to the royal stubble
So ended the tale of two drunks on a night in Venice.

The story of a Miracle

George Miller sat back in the orphanage cradling the littlest of the boys in his arms looking at the pale moon through his windows. The moon had greyed everything in the orphanage as there was not light in the great room where they all gathered to pray every night before he tucked them all to bed.
There were ten of the boys and Isaiah, the one he was cradling tonight was the youngest and smallest of them all. Tonight Isaiah was sick, not for illness or anything but for wont of food. The famine had raged across the village and had squeezed the orphanage of all it had and tonight she was claiming to take away one of his own.

He looked at the little boy in his arms and the large eyes and slender frame looked back and whispered fraily.
'Poppa when are we goin' 'tu-yit'?

A large tear plopped from George's eyes and broke on the small one's forehead. George had never lied to the boys before, He was devout as any Christian would be but tonight he had to keep hope alive for the boys in the room who all sat in different corners staring at him, and particularly, isaiah whose frame he could feel withering in his arms.

He had told them God would be bringing food and like children will they had had no reason to doubt him.

The first fruits of his tears ran into a steady harvest as he cried tears he could not utter or reveal in the grey darkness of the room.

'Please God, he prayed, send us food'

Anthony Reed could not sleep. He kept tossing and turning in his bed. He just could not figure out why. Was it the ale? or was it the fact that his wife had left him barely a week ago without any indication of where she was going?

All sorts of ideas ran through his head but he could not place it. So he got up, slapped on a shirt and strode into the night, walking casually into his barn and in the dark, saddling the horse he first set his eyes upon. Abbey, groaned a bit as the reins tore into his sleeping hide. 'where was the master off to tonight he would have asked had Anthony been Ballam.

Anthony kicked the horse's side and rode it off with an echoing clatter into the grey of the night, hoping to ride out the frustrations he could feel but could not explain as he saddled top speed toward the dying village that was about to sleep the sleep of hunger.

The famine that year had been the worst in his twenty seven years of existence and had it not been that he had planted more grains than potatoes, he would have also been in most of the villagers shoes. He thought about the incidence and the mistake that had made him plant more grains and he could not help but feel a hand of providence in tweaking fate in his favor as unreligious as he was.

He had not ridden for long when he passed the orphanage. Usually he would hear the noises of the little kids at play or the chiding of good ol miller but tonight, it was like the orphanage had died.
No light shone from its rickety casement nor happy voice from the interior of the lonley hut. looking back, he slowed the horse to a halt and turned back, allowing the horse to walk at it will as he thought for a moment.

Maybe it was the famine? Then he remembered that he had gone to trade a sack of corn in the market earlier that day and had not sold it all for he had planned to sell in such quantities as would make him rich whilst not exhausiting his store no matter how long the famine lasted.

As he was thinking, the horse can to a stop outside the door of the orphanage. Anthony wondered if he should go back home, when he realized that he had not unstrapped what was left of the sack from the horse. Tied to the side of the saddle was the remainder as he had left it that afternoon. climbing down quickly, he unstrapped the parcel and dropped it in a heap at the door of the orphange and rode away into the yawning darkness beyond the grey.

George Miller heard the horse clatter, come to a halt, then a pause, a gradual trot, a thud and a quick gallop that faded out almost as soon as it'd started. He did not know what to make of it. He had not been one to recieve visitors at such odd hours. Especially one that rode in in the night and rode away so quickly. The children were scared and the older ones had ran to him from the nooks and crannies of the room where they all perched. They huddled closer to him and Isaiah on the rocking chair in which he cradled the child.

They all waited for what seemed a long time to see if there would be any more sounds but none came. The night beyond thier rickety casement had returned to its unassuming calmness.

Then Isaiah the feeble one spoke with a wan smile on his face, in a little more lively tone than he had all night. 'God must have brought the food'.

George Miller broke into uncontrollable tears to the chagrin of the children. He had never broken down in thier presence before. Not even when his helper and wife, who mothered all the children with her own had taken ill and died. He had simply explained to the children that she had gone to wait in heaven for them all. But tonight, the grief was much more than he could conceal. How Miller cried!

Slowly, Will, the oldest of the children walked to the door and inched it open out of curiousity. George did not notice in his bowed grief as the boy opened the door even wider pulling in the sack Anthony Reed had left at thier doorpost.

Putting his hands into the bag and scoopingup a handful of corn, he shouted.
'Poppa, Poppa, Isaiah is right. God has brought the food!'

George Miller raised his head in fear. Fear for what? He did not know. But as he saw the grains slide continously from Will's hands into the sack and the now happy throng of children running to the door to see the manna, his resolve fell apart and he cried hopelessly. Like the day he was born: Like he had never done before.

Anthony Reed got home that night knowing why he had not been able to sleep and for the first time in a long while he slept like he would on his dying day.

OIO

Wildlife

It is the season of the hot months in the Serengeti when the parched throats of animals run their brains amock: both predator and prey suppressed by the master predator; The drought.

In the undergrowth is Chilolo studying the wizened frame of a once-graceful gazelle grazing on dust;

Chilolo had remained in this crouching position for a while: considering his options before the chase. This, because in the time of drought, every chase must be worth the while knowing that energy is scarce.
After a while of considering his options, Chilolo sprang from the thicket and gave feeble chase. The gazelle could hardly start off before Chilolo caught it in the jugular and dragged it off to a shelter.
'Sniff, struggle, feeble-wiggle' - it did a feeble jiggle before gasping its last.
Teeth still in jugular, the blood oozed into Chilolo's dry throat quenching his blood thirst and temporarily satisfying the thirst that arose from the pseudo-chase he had given.

Four jackals standing by watching Chilolo drag away the now-lifeless body of the gazelle sprang after the leopard, trailing in their scraggy hide, which had further been worsened by drought induced alopecia. Chilolo glanced off his side-eyes as he noticed the pack. Quickly doubling his leap, he expended non-existent energy until he could run no more. Sadly taking a chunk or two, he ran off before the jackals closed in.
On getting to the carcass, the jackals howled 'HOO-HOO' in 'jackalous' happiness and settled down to meat when the roar of the lion caught them mid-chow. Scurrying off like ferrets the jackals ran off in mock-cry boo-ing, 'BOO-HOO' as they ran.

The lion arrived the scene in stately manner, flexed its tawny hide- stretched thin to reveal rib lines and started to tear the dispossesed body of Chilolo's gazelle: Chilolo and all the other jackals spitefully watching the scene.

Chilolo sat in a corner of the wild, under the scattered shade of a wilting tree: the tear-lines of a leopards eternal cry running down his face and his bulging sides billowing fast to recover wasted energy. He watched as the lion devoured his catch and as he sat there in the wild in the heat of that Serengeti drought, he asked the same question many of us have asked forever,

WHO EATS THE LION?

Dominoes

The mountain plains of the Plateau held the clouds to ransom and invited such cold rarely found in the tropics. Even though the sun shone high above, a cold breeze still blew over the face of the plains and swished tufts of shallow grass rooted in the scanty savannah that dotted the mountain sides.
Bare chest and laying flat on his back, the man lay on the cold rock in absolute silence. He did not see the Seeker but the Seeker saw him. He had watched the man since the day of his birth and the time was now.

Two continents away, a half way round the world was the reason for the Seeker’s mission: A little girl about seven years of age on a hospital bed- white and balding; neither from age nor curse but from the gnawing of cancer within and the war of chemicals without. She was so frail, she resembled death. Her skin was whiter than her Caucasian complexion and dark patches encircled her hollow eyes casting shadows that were not.

The seeker adjusted his scope and looked at the plan again even though he did not need to as he had it all in his memory. Everything about him moved to the song of the wind but his eye kept still and kept watch: The focus of his attention- the unmoving man.

The man lay there staring at the calm blues skies but he did not see it. Neither did he feel the cold nor the hardness of the rock against his head. His mind was on one thing: the bottle in his pocket. It was a lethal mix that held the end for him and now felt uncomfortably warm on the sides of his thighs.
Suicide, they said was evil and so he had believed. But now, here, on this rock, he had concluded that neither good nor evil existed. Contemplating suicide had been the biggest hurdle for him but he had crossed the line now, there was no going back.

One year earlier in a place far drawn from the cold mountain, a woman had met a little girl in a cancer awareness conference and had been moved by the sight of the frail child speaking of finality and hope as was the purview of one dying- the aged; but no! Not a child. What struck her the most was the happiness in the little girl who was about her last daughter’s age; she had that wan but true smile that indeed was rare.
After the conference she had approached the girl and her parents and over a period of three months they had written a book. Meeting that little girl had changed her life.
Now sitting at her reading table, dimly lit by a dusty lamp, she held the book in her hands looking at the familiar words spoken by a child and written by her. She flipped to the picture page and unconsciously started to cry. Smiling back at her from the centre page was the face of the dying girl. She was wearing the pink frock she loved to wear but which had started to hang loosely on her fading frame.
When she met the girl at the conference about a year ago, the doctors said the girl had just about a year to live. That meant her time was nearing now. The woman cried again; for herself, for the unfairness of fate and the eventual wilting of a flower that never will have the chance to blossom. She wanted to scream out loud but the inhibitions of impersonality restrained her from doing so.

Two days before the present, a school boy with unkempt hair and rumpled uniform detached from his little group of friends on their way home. The war in his mid-regions had reached an unbearable stage and he could not hold his bowels anymore. So running for the nearest thicket he could find (where presently the Seeker stood) he hurriedly yanked off his shorts, squatted and let his bowels loose just quick enough to prevent the watery stool from pouring in his pants.
‘Ah!’, he let off a sigh of contentment before beginning to rationalize his action. He had nothing to clean up with!
He looked around with darting eyes before realizing he had some books in his back pack which he had dropped beside the now buzzing fecal broth in the grass. Diving into his bag, he searched for the first book his blindly groping hands could find.
He had brought it out before realizing it was the book he had earlier stolen from the school library- the one he had hidden in his shirt on his way out. Opening it hurriedly, he tore off the first page he saw; it was a glossy page in centre spread with pictures. Arching his back for clearance, he wiped his backside with the page unsettling some buzzing flies in the process. The gloss did not do well in its role as tissue paper so he had to tear off three more matt pages till he was satisfied.
Feeling better, he made to put the book back in his bag when he noticed the picture on the cover. It was a funny girl with missing teeth and no hair. He thought she looked ugly; like his naughty younger sister who just lost her teeth too.
HOPE was written boldly on the cover.
‘H-O-P-E’, he spelt it out to himself before putting the book back into his back and running off to join his friends, screaming their names from a distance.

The Seeker stood still and made the wind to sail the rumpled page stained with dried faeces, nimbly in the air till it stopped at the feet of the unmoving man.

The man saw something fly out of the skies and land at his feet but he didn’t bother to look. Lying still for a little longer, he took a deep breath, sat up and proceeded to remove the bottle from his pocket. Then the pictures on the stained glossy page caught his eye.
Bottle in one hand, he picked up the sheet with the other. On the picture page, though rumpled and stained, were pictures with captions beneath and he started to read them, one after another. It was the story of a seven year old girl. Cancer…awaiting death…her bald head…with daddy and mommy…her smile.
Her smile;
He could not take his mind off ‘Her smile’.
Why?
Why did she have to die?
What did she do to deserve such?
But why?
Why did she smile?
What was it that made her happy?

Then all of a sudden he started to cry. Such tears as would well hot in ones nose and blind the eyes to sight: And he started to wail, screaming and shouting into the distance.
He wailed.
His life…his sorrows…losing everything….
But ‘Her smile’….
Then he shouted out loud and smashed the bottle in his hands on the cold rock crying for as long as time stood still. He had never cried like that before and possibly never would.

The Seeker folded the plan and stood by the girl’s bed side. Her weak frame madly ravaged by chemotherapy but her smile never diminishing. She looked up and when she saw the Seeker, she smiled again and in that same breath, closed her eyes forever; her mission done. The Seeker did not need to see the flat line. As he left the ward, he saw on a shelf in the pediatric ward, a stack of dominoes. He smiled at how much humans resembled them; one on another, their destinies forever intertwined.

Writers' Block

Writers’ block is the dormitory mid-way between the dining halls and the water taps. It was not that the dormitory was exactly midway in distance but because the bells for food rang at the same time as the taps were turned on, we usually had one of two options: to eat or to fetch.

To eat was to boycott the taps where our inspiration flowed.
To fetch was to forget food upon which our survival depended.
Such dilemma we all encountered in the Writers’ block were we called home.

I had my mattress besides the door not far from the many others that inhabited the same room as I did and every time I looked out of the windows one way I saw what I did not see the other way. They were pictures that besieged my mind in the rushes of water and jingling of bells: Bells of wants cloaked in necessity and the rushing of waters seemingly to no end.

When the bells rang, some of us would leave the writers’ block with our bowl in our hands, our pens in our pockets and leave our books behind on our mattresses and run in the direction of self-fulfilment. While some others would run for water even though their bellies echo forth in hollowness speaking belches through their mouths. Yet one over the other possessed no supremacy of thought or desire- only the future stood to judge us all whether or not for food or water we had gone.

The jingling in my head and the echoes and pangs chimes as the bells ring for I am in no less of a quandary as I think of the future and an audience unborn
Of the present: and my gifts untorn,
And I look to the pages of my book forlorn,
knowing I won’t remain here for long.

Midnight at noon

The news of the eclipse approached with foreboding.
Everyone had heard so much of it but no one had ever witnessed it. This year, the weather people had said it would pass through the town and the townfolk had heard numerous explanations on what it would be like. Some said it was going to be dark for three days and a lot of people would die because a curse had been pronounced on the town; others said it was the government's way of shielding the many problems of the society by instilling fear into people; others said after the eclipse, the devil will be released to earth and the world would come to an end- the last reason seemed to be the popular feeling about the early hours of the morning when the eclipse was scheduled to take place.

‘A brief period of darkness in the middle of the day about noon. There is nothing to worry about’, the weather people had said. In thier words, ‘It was only a shy moon trying to shield the eyes of her lover from the heat of the sun’s passion’.

As much as everyone tried to solve the mystery in thier heads, most people in the town just could not fathom it. So everyone waited and watched to see for themselves how it would all play out; trying hard to maintain status quo as they went about thier daily business; thier collective minds tuned to mid-day. The anticipation in the town was so high, it grazed the surface of the sky where the event was scheduled to occur later that day and people stood in respective clusters each with thier own interpretation of the mystery yet to unfold.

The beer parlors were crowded with ‘drinkards’ hoping to drink thier last beer lest it be the end of the world and they might not have another chance to drink again. 'Ha ha ha!', rained ribald laughter from the beer parlor as they joked to words which normally would not sound funny.
The church stalls were filled with ‘Prayers’ hoping the period of darkness that would cover the earth in that little moment would not loosen the devil from his bounds in the pit of hell and spare him the window of opportunity to be cast back to earth again.
‘Shantabrakata takakaka rekekekke bushma!’ rained mystery tongues from the church stalls, spilling onto the fields filled with children running helter-skelter looking at the skies and singing childhood songs. Songs that once one became an adult, started to reek of folly but in the prime of childhood, meant the whole world.

‘Sun, Sun close your eyes’
‘Run, run, the moon has come’
‘Tunbo, tunbo gbaskelebe’
‘Jasi gutter- push!’

Hawkers everywhere screamed thier wares too; and even dogs, joined the fray, barking in anticipation and chasing themselves about as they too waited for the eclipse. Whether from reading the actions of the entropic people about them or from the inner intuition of animals, no one could say; but all in all, both dog and man, everyone in the town, in anticipation of one same event, ran around in circles, looked up and waited.

In all this commotion however, some slept off at home unconcerned. If it was the end of the world who cared? It was even the better for them. Wasn’t there too much suffering already?

In a face-me-i-face-you bungalow somewhere in the town, in one of the stale rooms banked on either side of a long corridor sat one of the last set of people that did not care much about the excitement that abound without. His mind was on the inner clock that ticked towards noon when the loan shark would send his boys to collect the money he owed. He had been about to leave his room the day before when one of the ‘boys’ had approached him to give him the message, delivering it with a solid slap that boiled water in his ears.

‘Tomoro! He said through lips cracked from crack,
‘Tomoro we go come collet de money!

In another side of town leaning on the balcony of her aged husband’s house, revealing firm cleavage, was a young woman whose body craved for the fleeting window of passion the eclipse would grant her to make out with the houseboy with whom she had discovered an unholy acquintance. As her mind raced through the narrow escape escapades they had had in times past, her juices flowed in anticipation of his rough probing fingers.
She moaned softly to herself, lost in the moment hoping the darkness would come all too soon as she watched the heat of the sun; in denial of the death that stood to befall it later in midday.

With each shortening shadow the fetters cast on the earthen floor, the man’s mind turmoil-turned spat out more spleen. Why had he done this to himself? 49, 17, 15 was sure banker- at least that was what he had been told. How could the numbers not have won?
Now he was in hot soup; one in a boiling cauldron at that. ‘Jaguar’ was going to skin him alive.
Having borrowed a hefty sum from the area father to put into the pools, he immediately knew his life was over when he got to the tally office to find out none of his lucky numbers had been listed in the winning for the week. Having thought through his narrow options, he had decided to leave; but how he would evade the watching eyes of Jaguars goons had remained a mystery until God had blessed him with the news of the eclipse. His only prayer was that the darkness would last longer, if it did not have the courage to last forever.

As the aged man shuffled onto the balcony with his bottle-thick lenses sitting on the rims of his nose and his front teeth open from starring through the bottom half of the glasses the young woman’s heart beat faster. She had not expected the tortoise to live this long. When she chose to marry him, he had looked like a ghost ready to be severed from the leash of mortality. But five years down the line, even though he looked ghostlier, the old man did not seem in a hurry to leave. At first she had kept her restraint but with time, her underutilsed body started to yearn for more than the aged man could offer and like the miracle they said would happen by mid-day, the omnipresent old man had cast a huge shadow over her freedom and her youth, dimming her to just another decoration in the house. He never allowed her to work, shop, cook; and unfortunately did not have the energy to keep her company in bed or in discussions of her age owing to the generation gap between them.

Like the waning sun, she watched the man settle in his low chair and remove his glasses to clean them. She crossed over gently into the living room and headed for the kitchen as soon as she heard the dull thud of the glasses case on the side stool. She knew for sure that the unspectacled old man only felt her presence but did not see her; without those bottle lenses he was as blind as a bat.
‘Akpan!’, she shouted in feigned dryness that smelt wetness beneath.
‘Akpan!’, will you come to the kitchen straight away? What kind of mess have you made of this kitchen?

The heat of the overhead sun had started to dissipate as the ambience of the town dimmed in a forced evening of spheres at war. The eclipse was near.

With each degree of dimming, the entropy about the town increased; making the people look like sizzling bubbles in boiling water colliding against each other.

‘Prayers’ nodded thier heads faster, swinging it from side to side while singing songs of deliverance to keep the devil at bay. ‘Drinkards’ ordered more beer and stood to dance to the music supplied by a set of cracked speakers in one corner of the bar: they didnt hear it anyway, they just danced. Children played around and everyone began to wear the sun shades and look up to the greying skies (the rays of the eclipse alone can blind you- everyone had heard) as they watched the premature night in its grand entrance.

The man quickly packed all his belongings- about two shirts; as the shadows lengthened into the aging noon. He knew somewhere out there, the goons of Jaguar would be watching. About a minute walk from his house was a motorcyclist with whom he had made arrangements a night before to make his escape.

‘Akpan!’ can’t you ever do anything right? The young woman screamed from the kitchen, shouting for the benefit of the listening old man as she hit the Calabar cook hard enough on the rump as to suggest a slap on the face.
Kpa! the slap clapped as flesh hit flesh.
Akpan, grabbing her buttocks with both hands, dragged her towards him, and responded in like manner,
‘Ah! Madam, Werin i do now?’

The darkness was growing deeper now and the ‘Shantabrakata’ of the ‘Prayers’ grew louder with the ensuing noise of anticipation and excitement.
Slowly, the man crept out of his house: like the shadow of the moon creeping deeper upon the face of the earth- shielding the earth from the heat; the woman and her lover (mid-heat) from the blind eyes on the balcony; and the man, from the prying eyes of his creditors. The last crescent sliver of light disappeared into the night like an oversharpened sickle and the motorcycle’s headlamp blinked twice urging the man to walk faster in the dark.

Akpan’s hands found the hasps of his madam’s bra in the dark as he un-cupped the young wife’s breasts allowing only goosebumps to cover them. Digging his way savagely into the crescent cups, he didn’t need the light to find his way deep between his madam’s thighs, teasing out a moan that had to remain suppressed in guilt- lending more heat to the writhing bodies burning on the cooker top.
His hands moved faster as the darkness peaked in her gloom digging deep into the dark void that shrouded the earth.

Outside, the noise continued.

Cameras clicked here and there in brief flashes and sightseers brought out all manner of gadgets to capture the occassion. Campers in 'Aso-Ebi' that no one could notice in the darkness sat on their bonnets; Drummers in tactile discussions with unseen drums beat on their hides- pulling the ropes taut or loose to speak languages, from drum to drum spoken, but understood by men.

In all, the glory of the eclipse kept every watcher in awe, amazed at the mysteries which stood farther than the horizon of thier imagination. And as all things that are not understood, myriads of people seized the opportunity to make a show of it.
Self appointed priests pronounced prophecies; Juju men raised thier fowls to the sky, spinning them dizzy- thier heads to be torn off when the sun ‘came back’; Politicians made speeches on loudspeakers; and ‘Shantabrakata’ increased in tempo as the much awaited event passed letting the light back in on the darkness shrouded town.

Like all great expectations of mankind, the eclipse was forever lost in that single moment; leaving the light sneaking back in like it never left, the man fleeing back-route like he’d never left, and breasts, sore from sucking couched back in thier lace-strained hasps like they never left.

Abundance

Every time I see the fruit trees, I marvel at what they did to us. It is not something I will be able to say in a few words so I will tell you the story as it once was, as it is now and I hope, as it would be long after we are gone.

As it was at that time, we had only a few rich people in our community. They rode big cars that blew dust in our faces when they sped past and we hated them. Not for the dust they powdered us with during the dry harmattans but the contrast they were in our community of very poor people. We hated them as much as we hated the sun that scorched our balding heads and the hunger that ravaged our bodies.

We were a very angry people and daily we cursed the hunger, cursed the sun and cursed the rich people and their trail of dust as they sped through our homes. Our entire lives was an episode of hate, mostly for the People on the hill (for that was what we called those few rich people) who lived in big houses beyond the hills. They wore big Agbadas that required fifteen yards of clothing to sew while we barely had enough clothe to cover our nakedness; we never saw their faces and they never saw ours and no matter how hard we tried, we never found a way to become one of them. With time, the young men in our community started to plot ways of taking from them. They singled out their houses and began to steal from them. Gangs of young men started to mount raids and terrorize the People on the hill and unfortunately, because we believed that their wealth was responsible for our ill luck, we did not see robbing them as evil. It was ‘just taking from the rich to give to the poor’. So every time one of them was robbed successfully, we held feasts down in the community and praised evil as if it was good.

With time, the rich men raised their fences and mounted guards and they began to shoot our young men in the head if ever they came a mile close to the Reserved Areas where they lived. Many ambitious young men died in those days and it was only a matter of time before their lonely guns started to turn on us. They began to rob us- forgetting that we were like them and chaos began to breed in worm-like duplicity among us, growing a new head everywhere we cut it. As such we conducted our daily affairs in fear and the rich few were not left out of our fears too. They stayed within their high fences- prisoners in their own homes. And when they came out, they came out in black cars and police escorts and sped like crazy, prisoners in Black Marias- pouring more dust on our ashen skin and taking it back to where we all started.

Then began to grow the fruit trees

At first, they grew in little buds propagated by the parish priest of the local church where the poor worshiped. It was first a little orange tree with strongly scented green leaves that began to take on the scent of holiness; because every time one thought of church or God or anything in that realm, the scent of oranges filled your subconscious mind and you could smell it anywhere you were. That orange tree was the first of the fruit trees that blossomed and that strong scent was the beginning of it all. With time more trees were planted; mangoes, papayas, almonds and guava trees, pineapple heads and tomatoes and the air around the parish church began to feel like heaven. In rain it smelled like orange groves and tomato fields and in hamarttan it took on the scent of mangoes and almonds. Soon enough, the church barn filled out and became the watering hole for the community for we all ate there when the various fruits were in season and indeed it drew us to Christ and the mock cross at the entrance to its wooden gates.

Children would play among the boughs and adults would discuss under the shades, love birds would pick the leaves as they talked of things of love while birds nested at its top picked worms from its branches to feed their young. With time, we could not all fit in into the church yard so everyone started to plant little fruit trees of various kinds as would fit in into their compounds taking buds and twigs from the parish church ‘from whence shone the light’ as the parish priest would say. And whenever the cars sped past in the harmattan, we did not feel the dust as badly as we used to because the fruit trees prevented the dispersion. Not long after we started to plant in our yards, our trees started to fruit and whenever it fruited, we had more than enough to eat. We would watch mangoes ripen and fall because we had taken our fill and needed no more. Birds would eat after we did and lizards would eat after the birds did and ants would eat after the lizards did, and worms would finish it off. There was food enough for all.

Soon enough, we totally forgot about the grievances we held against the People on the hill, their high fences, parading guards and their speeding cars. We totally forgot about the scorching sun and the dust as it had become a thing of the past. Before long, the People on the hill left the enclosures of their high fences to buy our fruits and we began to have some money in our pockets though little it was. Soon our young men began to scorn at thievery for it had become a thing of disgrace. Soon every inch of our community was covered in those fruit trees and a lot more crops than we began with. And then all of a sudden it did not matter so much that some were rich and some were poor for in all, our food became our wealth and we all had abundance of it.

Those fruit trees that had changed our community are still there for you to see today and if you pass by the parish church anytime, you’d still see the boughs spreading wider each year even though the soul of the parish priest that cultivated them had long departed. You would see people smiling as they walk and you will see the cars and the houses on the hill- a reminder of the old days, for the houses had not changed much neither had the people within them.

OIO
On abundance and how it changes a people.

The crucifixion of Plumbtifex Rantimus

'Ran-timus, Ran-timus, Ran-timus'
The crowd shouted in an increasing tempo that pulsed into the tense air of the open floor of the Forum.
There had never been a gathering like this before- not even when Pointus Pilate was made king of Rome and Judea.

Humanity spanned from the thresholds to the outer extremities of the Forum, spilling over to the sides of Beth-lehem (the house of bread) up to the house of Jethro the recluse, king of hermits. Atop the podium where Pointus sat was a man, lean of frame, balding and bleeding from every pore. He was 'Plumbtifex Rantimus- the Son of no one' for he adjudged himself the progeny of the earth and the heavens. I strained to catch his face over the headscape that spanned from beneath my lenses to beyond the reach of focus. Even though I did not see him clearly, I felt his pain; like the first time I had encountered him.

It had been on the eve of the Passover. A man had entered into the synagogue to speak upon the altar of Moses where our old laws lay. That young man had been Plumbtifex Rantimus. Never had I seen anyone speak or write with so much passion and pain. Vitriol flowed from his ink’s end that day in the synagogue, telling of the injustice of the sanhendrin, the romanticism of Pilate we all mistook for truth and the plight of the Proles who filled the synagogues every week but never found the salvation they sought. The Sanhendrin had tried to cut him short and the people had reacted more violently than never before in Jerusalem. That day I felt his pain in a different way: not like now that I gaze upon his blood-smeared face listening to the chants of the same Proles he had fought for, screaming in syllabic duets of 'Ran-timus, Ran-timus', filling the open vastness of the Forum.

As I struggled to move closer to the dense pack of humanity to catch a better glimpse of a man I respected, Pontius rose to the podium and waved the noise away to the west- the destination of a dying sun.
‘Fellow citizens he spoke deep and clear and it carried far. I bring before thee Rantimus the priest of Proles, the son of no man’
‘No- roared the crowd in one voice so loud it unsat the heavens and poured rain from unclouded skies- We know him not!’
I kept mute for I knew him and I knew what he stood for. I kept mute for my voice could not submerge the will of the People. I watched on. I was bitter but I did not speak, I just watched on.

Pilate waited for the slight drizzle to quench the aggression of the Proles but little did the little droplets do to douse the fury. After a while, he waved his arms of power again and the crowd fell silent even though the rains did not cease.

‘Now that you claim not to know him, of what use is he? Shall I deliver him unto you to be judged by your own laws?
‘No!’ roared the crowd in one response.
‘Crucify him! Crucify him!'
‘So shall it be then’, responded Pilate.
‘You shall have your wish’.

When I heard the uproar that commenced upon the edict, my heart cried in the falling rain for the man on the podium who had spent his life fighting the fight of the Proles and now found his reward in death at their behest. I began to recount the many scrolls he produced from the parchment of reeds, the ones he read in the synagogue, which he carried everywhere with him. I thought of profound thoughts that he had discussed in the agora, I thought of his chants of ‘Peace and Equality’ and I thought upon the time men once followed him calling him the ‘Priest of Proles, sent to set us free’.

As the soldiers led him off the podium in whips of thorns and goads of brambles, I held myself closer for the tingling sensation of fear and anticipation had begun again in my armpits. The rain of whips from the distance felt unreal for I only saw it but did not hear it. As a club landed on his back and he fell to the ground, I could look no further for both tears and rain had clouded my eyes. I sorrowed that one of them- the voices; had been killed again; killed by the very people he had fought for.

The crowd flowed in turbid torrents towards Gethsemane and I followed them- not from compulsion but because the crowd just carried me in the flow just the same way they submerged my will in the forum.
I heard the voices of dissension all around me as we flowed on.
‘Rantimus is a sham. He has deceived us’
‘Did he not say Pilate is evil?’
‘Has Pilate not given us bread? What does Rantimus do but speak in the synagogue? What does he give?

‘H-O-P-E! I wanted to scream but lest I be labeled a disciple, I denied him in my silence. I did not know why the Proles failed to see than in numbers they were more than Pilates’ men and that they held the reigns to his fear.
‘Reigns to his fear’ those were Plumbitfexes own words. It was the way he described the power of the Proles.

The rain had waned now and the muddied earth threshed by our many feet had begun to mash into a consistent paste. Water flowed in gentle silence along the troughs in the mills, beneath the rooves in the ducts and in rivulets through the seams of our cloaks. Mine weighed heavily on my shoulders- a mockery of what the weight of the cross will be. Gethsemane the hill of death stood afar off with crosses like sticks dotting its bleak landscape of eternal silence. As we flowed, I longed for an escape because I did not want to see the death of Rantimus neither did I want to be with the crowd. As soon as I saw the mouth of an alley open into a cluster of kibbutz away from the tide, I squeezed off into the 'easy-way' shutting the voices of Proles behind me asking why I was not man enough to see the execution.

‘Maybe he is one of his disciples’, I heard one say as I proceeded down the alley, away from the exodus.

The alleys were silent and my feet made a clatter on the stone paving that sounded inordinately loud. Everywhere seemed like Gethsemane- a place of silence where life had deserted. I could hear the fetters swinging lazily in the after-rain winds and doves squawking in the high turrets where they built their nests. At the end of the alley, the paved path forked into four tributaries about which homesteads clustered in chaotic massing. I took the third tributary and a right turn. Beth Araba’s yard should be to the left, just ahead. I kept walking, doubling my strides to reach home but by the time I reached the end of the turning, the unfamiliar walls of an alien kibbutz greeted my welcome. It was not Beth Araba’s yard and the dirty brown awning over the entrance did not seem familiar at all. I had missed my way. Turning around to catch the sights of anything familiar, I spun around twice before I gave up. I had to find my way back. The crucifixion must be getting to me.

The noise felt nearer as I made my way back trying to re-trace my steps. I then chanced upon a narrow route through a bank of food vendor shops long-locked as they seemed, and walked until the route terminated at a wall. Turning again, back towards the food vendor stalls, a throng of people seemingly from nowhere squeezed into the intersecting alley and carried me off in the flow again. There seemed to be a rush about their demeanor as if they were in a hurry to see something. I struggled to break away but it was an exercise in futility- this time the flow spewed me out into the open among a gang of Roman soldiers.

Not more than a dozen cubits from me was the man I was running from.
Plumbtifex Rantimus, bearing his cross and sheltering a hail of whips as they struggled to claim his hide for their sating.

As I started to turn from the gory sight, he looked up and I caught his eye.
It was a moment lost in time as one eye looked to another, one 'unblighted', the other bloodied shut. A still suspense like life conserved in amber. Not words, nor voices, nor rant could describe the thoughts that streamed from one eye to another. Then a whipped cracked on Rantimus’ head and broke the swollen eye in a gush of blood. I merely stood still watching Rantimus lose his balance and the cross fall, tumbling down into the crowd and causing commotion. As I tried to push my way through the stampede, the cross came to a stop at my feet bearing blood stain and sweat. Fallen, across where I stood was a dying Rantimus too weak to stand.

‘Pick it up! I heard one of the soldiers say.
‘At least he claims to be your priest. Pick it up and help your savior.’
I bent down to heave the cross on my shoulders. It was heavy as lead and sent pain down my shoulder blades but the pain did not count. I was still perplexed at how Chance had sought me out.
As I rose to mid-height with the weight of the cross, a certain kind of peace washed through me knowing my sins would be forgiven now that I shared in his pain.

OIO

On lines

We never used to be friends.
This was how it all started.

November, 1884: The palace of the imperial chancellor of Germany, Berlin

Lord Forester stood over the map at the centre of the table placing both palms down on the shiny surface of polished oak. His eyes traced the Nile in its path as it ran a wavy line from the top right corner of the map down south. He had heard of the Nile as a child and seeing the scrawny line on the map made him reflect on the many tales and rich history behind it. He looked closely at the map for the third time. His decisions would go a long way in furthering the interest of Britain in the division of the dark continent- Africa.

Around him were delegates from France, Belgium, Portugal and even the United states that had started off as a colony too. They had allotted lots to each of the countries and Britain had elected to go first in taking up their piece as an additional acquisition to the areas they had already laid claims to.
In order to differentiate ownership, each of the colonial nations had commissioned new maps of their colonies to be drawn and had fitted it together, partitioning the remainder of the continent that had not been laid claim to, using lines as arbitrary as spoken words ‘unthought’.

Those unclaimed divisions were given numbers or named in different ways by the representative of each of the Conquistadors that surrounded the map, like a group of lions cornering their prey and closing in.

Finally, making up his mind, Lord Forester drew two faint lines on the map – one running from the North away from the Red sea and the other coming up from the south. Their intersection he believed, he could make into a confluence city for trade and British incursion into the other cities that France and Belgium had already established. The presence of the Red Sea east of the city would also be a major advantage, he thought. Bordering it on the west was vast territories yet uninhabited. Forestia he would name it- after himself.

Enclosed within the four lines that denoted Foresters’ Forestia, far away in Africa, were two villages Bugubanshi and Ithacai. Four centuries of strife and bitterness between the two tribes, once bound by Foresters four lines became a marriage divorced before the union. Only if Forester had known before he drew those lines that not in this life or in the life to come would the Bugubanshi and the Ithacai speak as one.

... because they had never been friends.

OIO
(Characters and the cities Forestia, Bugubanshi and Ithacai are fictitious)
Story inspired by the book: The state of Africa

HOMO HERBALIST (Part IV till THE END)

I woke up blurry eyed, with a pulsating headache that seemed to come from deep inside my brain. The first person I saw was my husband and the bouquet of flowers by our bedside.
It must have been a dream.
I wondered how long I had been sleeping that made my body ache so badly.

As I made to sit up, a searing pain in my back, down to my pelvis forced me back on the bed. I groaned loudly as my husband, who had not seen me wake, ran to my side, a lot of concern on his face.
Forced to lie on my back, I looked about the unfamiliar room and realised that it was a hospital and the bouquet of flowers (which indeed were the ones in our bedroom) must have been put there by my husband. Absent memories on blank pages flipped through my mind longing to be filled. I tried to remember why I was here; what had happened?
But the pictures that ran through my mind were blurry and the hue had gone from them.

I closed my eyes forcing back the memories as they swirled; our arrival in a small house...fighting...scattered candles...sleeping dogs...with burning eyes.
Yes they had burning eyes!
...laboured breaths...Doris...the darkness and the far away voice of the....
The herbalist!

‘Doris!!!’ I started to scream
‘D-O-R-I-S!’

My screaming brought a troop of nurses running into the hospital ward room where I lay, my husband still trying to calm me down. The more I remembered the experience, the more the hatred for Doris burned.

‘Doris’ I kept screaming as I felt the hands of the nurses hold me down to the bed and a pin prick sting my arm. As the nurses held me down, I started to fight frantically.

No, I screamed! I didn’t want to be held down again.
‘Doris’, I made to shout but the words only left my mouth in a slur this time. I remembered clearly, Doris’ name was the last thing I called before sleeping the first time. I was afraid to sleep again. I forced my eyelids to stay open but the drug had started to have its way.
I don’t want to sleep! I kept thinking to myself, I don’t want to bath again....

The last person I saw as I fell asleep was my husband, who stared sadly at me from behind the nurses- he must have thought I was going insane.

When next I woke up, the room was dark and the white ceiling looked grey in the darkness. I could hear snores beside me drowning out the chirping of the crickets outside.
Was I still at the hospital? Was I safe?

Looking at the faint outline of the snoring mass that slept on the chair beside me, I felt better my husband was here- only him snored that way. As I looked at him sleeping innocently, and I remembered the ruse that led to my rape, I started to cry silently. Why did it have to happen to me? only if I had listened to my intuition. But what had happened after I lost the strength to fight the herbalist? I strained to search those lost pages again but the only images that came to my mind was the bobbing face of a stranger in the dark. I don’t know for how long I cried or sat up thinking but later, I got exhausted and fell asleep.
The morning after, I was discharged.

As my husband drove home in silence, I felt an uncustomary distance between us as he simply stared ahead, barely looking at me. I could not help wondering what had happened and what he knew. I wanted to ask him but I feared to. The only person I could ask was Doris, who was the mastermind behind the rape and she had disappeared- switching off her phones, totally unreachable. Unfortunately even if I found her at the moment, I would kill her before I inquired about what had happened. I felt so debased, I felt so alone.
When we got home, I found the car I had taken to Doris' house parked in the driveway, I wondered where my clothes were.

Emeka prepared a meal of oats for me. Not being one to bottle up for long, spoke for the first time since we left the hospital.

“You know if you had told me, I could have taken you to the fertility doctor in the morning rather than you running over to Doris.”
“And what were you thinking of, trying to kill yourself?”
“If this had not happened, so I would not have found out?”
“I just want you to know that I care about you so much and I need a child as much as you do. But running off with Doris to a God-knows-who fertility doctor or trying to commit suicide, is not my idea of sticking together to solve our common problems”

I could not say a word.

Had Doris told my husband we were planning to go to a fertility doctor?
What else had she told him?
“Doris told you all that?” I asked my husband.

“Why wouldn’t she tell me”, he raised his voice,
“Why wouldn’t she tell me, when you wouldn’t”
“The poison you took almost killed you, you know?”
“What if it had? Do you know what I went through watching you sleep for almost two days? Praying you won’t die?”

I just looked on, trying to figure it all out.
Doris must have called my husband after the incident at the herbalist’s to tell him I had tried to kill myself. She must have brought up a story about both of us going to see a fertility doctor together. There were a lot of blanks in the jigsaw but I could only imagine the picture. As the torrent of words flowed from my husband’s angered ego, I was the more, grieved and made up my mind about how this was going to end.

I was going to find Doris and I was going to kill her.

After nursing the thought for a day, I had gone to Doris’ house (again without my husband’s knowledge) with a kitchen knife in my handbag- to kill her.

Looking back in hindsight now, I would say fortunately, I had not met her at home that day. The gates to her apartment were locked and there did not seem to be a soul in the house. She still was not picking her phone, her shop at the plaza was locked and no one seemed to know her whereabouts. Still bitter, I thought up other ways to find her but I promised I would not stop looking.

As for the herbalist, I was not sure what I would do to get my vengeance. If I brought the police into it, my husband would eventually find out and would start asking questions I would not be able to answer. The weight of the injustice felt like a yoke, but my anger was not as much directed towards the herbalist as it was towards the one who called herself my friend.

Apart from my yearning for vengeance, I worried about the attendant issues of unprotected sex with the herbalist.

I had heard stories of women who contracted the HIV virus after being raped by robbers or other perverse men. I prayed hard that I would not turn out to be a victim of such as I found a clinic in a nondescript neighborhood on my way back home where I took the various tests for syphilis, gonorrhoea and the other members of the STD family. The doctor asked me to come back for the test results the following day but I asked him to contact me when the test results were ready. We had agreed on the wordings of an SMS text so that even if my husband accidentally stumbled upon it, it would not raise any eyebrows.
Aunty am in skl Pls call me

I left the clinic having the same feeling I had the night before leaving my house for the cleansing bath though unlike then, I was clear what I had to do. For both our good, I had to keep my husband in the dark till I sorted things out. The more I thought about myself as the victim of an unfortunate rape, the more bitter I became knowing I had to deal with it alone.

As I got back home later in the day with a kitchen knife in my handbag and the number of a Doctor saved as LITTLE NEPHEW on my phone, I met my husband sitting on the couch waiting for me.

In eight years, of a childless marriage, we had barely fought. As I watched him, in a singlet and boxer shorts, I knew there was trouble.

“Where are you coming from?” He asked, neither smiling nor frowning.
“I went to see a friend”
“Who? Doris?”
“Yes” I answered, speaking the truth.
“Why?”
“Because I had not seen her since the accident”
“Did I not ask you not to leave the house until you had fully recovered?”
“I am fine” I told him.
“What is your problem? What happened to you? Are we now at a stage when you will blatantly refuse to do what I ask you to do?”
He had stood up now, advancing towards me.
“What is your problem!” he was shouting now.

I covered my head with my arms. My husband had never beaten me before but I was not sure anymore what and what he could not do. We had gradually started becoming strangers. As he moved closer, he grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me violently looking into my eyes.
“Answer me!”
I just started to cry as the memories of a loving husband flooded in before Doris and her herbalist split us apart.
As I started to cry, he stopped and then started to cry too. We both stood there like children, crying until we could cry no more. Then he took me in his arms and for the first time since the ordeal had begun, we made love in a way we had not in long time. I slept in his arms that night not having a nightmare for the first time in days.

The morning after, things returned to normal (as though it could).

I still carried hatred in my heart for Doris but the fire of vengeance, even though still burned, did not burn as strong as it used to. I still tried calling her, even using other numbers but she could not be reached.
The memories of the herbalist still lingered but did not stay as long as it used to.
I received a text from my LITTLE NEPHEW who told me everything was fine.

As such, everything returned to normal until the day Doris showed up at my door steps.

It was that same day that the vomiting started.

When I saw the figure of Doris through the glass in the doorway, I simply stood there immobile, confused and angry.

At the time when I was looking to kill Doris. I had strove to find her but after the reconciliation with my husband, I had pushed her to a distant number two on my priority list as I worked at mending the fences the unfortunate event had broken in my home.
Now standing there seeing her walk willingly into my home again, the memories rushed back and re-awakened the burning hatred in me that had begun to glow like dying embers. Unfortunately, the hatred I felt on seeing Doris in my doorway had an element of fear in it- a feeling that her presence had brought evil into my home again.

"Out!" I screamed.
"O-U-T"

"I won't stay for long", Doris answered, unnaturally calm.
"I know you won't believe me but you'd have to. I am not behind all that happened and I will tell you the truth if you allow me"
"Why I have come is that there's is a problem. The herbalist took some pictures of you and he sent me some of those pictures this morning requesting for money if we wanted him to destroy it. He has insisted that if we as much as tell anyone about it, he would know and he will make the pictures public."
"I am sorry I got you into all this ..."

Blind rage is the phrase that comes to my mind when I remember what happened before Doris finished her sentence.
I felt faint and bile surged to my throat,

by the time I came back to my senses there were smithereens of shattered glass everywhere, our front door of glass panels left a jagged outline where the glass infills used to be, three fingernails on my right hand were torn and blood flowed freely from the hand on the tiled floor. Doris stood in a corner far away from me, her hair torn and claw marks on her face. I remember seeing my reflection in the vanity by the dining set that day and realizing that I had become an animal.

My gateman just stood in the doorway, I had never seen him so scared.

"Get out of my house"
I was screaming as I tried to catch my breath.

She did not say a word. she just left, dropping a brown envelope she had brought with her on the floor of our living room. I did not ask her to take it. I knew it contained pictures I did not want to see.

How I hated Doris.

The headache in my head and the pains all over my body, particularly my bleeding hands, started to register its presence. I walked dizzily to where Doris had stood and picked up the envelope with my other hand. I shut my eyes hoping all of it would disappear. The presence of the photopaper beneath the brown flaps scared me and my imagination concocted images that were absent within it.

The gateman was still in the doorway staring at me.

"Get out!" I screamed.

He was too scared to run at first, then he scampered like a dog to the safety of the gate house where he lived.

I tried, but could not get myself to look at those pictures and till date I never saw them. I took them to the kitchen lit a match under it and burnt it all- throwing the ashes as far from my house as I could.

My husband had come in that night and I had lied to him, yet again, that I injured myself at the glass door when I slumped on my way in.
Emeka didn't buy it and he kept asking the gateman to tell him what happened. The gateman could not either. That day I lost him, because he never talked like he used to anymore.

I remember him dragging me into the car and speeding like crazy to the hospital. Only if I had been a better liar maybe I would have kept my husband and kept the secret better. Within minutes of our arrival at the hospital, the doctor had run in boisterously to congratulate us on the baby. Emeka had only stared in amazement.

"You are pregnant?" I remember him asking.
"You are pregnant and you won't tell me?"

I just looked on, focused on a little space just before his eyes. I could not afford to look at him.

"You should be happy" the doctor had said. It is a miracle.


12 years later
Anytime I look at Elizabeth, like I am doing at the moment, I wonder what kind of future she would have to have had such a past.

She was born months after the incident. On a hot night, without her father to welcome her into this world. She was not born in a ward like most babies but in my father's house, delivered by my mother.
She resembled me, almost to a fault- and for that I was grateful because I dreaded seeing the face of that herbalist again.

Emeka was away while Elizabeth was born and when he came back he was happy. Not with me, but the little one whom he cuddled and carried everywhere with him. Ada he chose to call her, not Elizabeth like my parents had named her. Our home became a silent game of two camps where little Elizabeth or Ada, was the ball. We passed her to each other, rarely speaking to ourselves.
We had both grown a little but Emeka had changed a lot. He never smiled like he used to, except when he was with his friends and even when he spoke to me, he adopted a formal, almost official tone like our marriage had just become one of the many contracts he handled. I wondered if he had another wife but I could only wonder, as I might never know.

I had also changed too. I now wrote for a living, writing short stories and freelance pieces for whoever cared to read them. I very much longed to write of the herbalist; but the story, I knew, would never be told.

A week after the hospital experience, while pondering on whether I would tell my husband or pay the herbalist, Doris had sent me a message- The last one I ever got from her.
'The herbalist died yesterday' she wrote.
'He was murdered in his sleep'

I remember being suprised reading that text even though I was relieved. I was suprised because the use of the word 'Murder' sent a strange message as I read it on my phone that day. It almost felt like someone had killed the herbalist and that that murderer had been Doris, even though I could not say whether she was capable of doing such or not. Unfortunately, I might never know; just like Emeka might never say whether our daughter, the one he loved so much, was his or not.

I looked from my p.c to my daughters sleeping posture on the couch in the sitting room. She had left on the television and I had muted it to concentrate on finishing my latest story. The pictures ran soundlessly across the screen glowing and dimming at erratic intervals. Above the television set was an artistic impression of a well, one Emeka had brought with him on one of his many travels.

As I looked at the well again, I remember a favourite saying of my mother.

"A woman's heart is a deep well of secrets. A well so deep, from which no one can draw" she would say.

I smiled at the thoughts of secrets and at the sight of a sleeping girl and the sounds of a silent home and shook my head because I saw the truth in those words.

THE END, I managed to write to my newest story before logging off the computer and switching of the lone bulb in the dining, throwing the room into a darkness that flickered and glowed with the scenes from the silent tele.

OIO

HOMO HERBALIST

I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do but my friend Doris was certain it was.

“You’ve been barren for 8 years now and you have tried everything to no avail. Isn’t an unsure decision a better option than no decision at all?”

I was not sure of how my husband would take it. I knew men didn’t take kindly to such, particularly a free thinker like my husband. But men being what who they were did not care so much, even about critical issues as this.

“Don’t worry; it is until your husband knows how much you have put into this that he will appreciate how dearly you want this child. Moreover the man is not a juju man. He is just a herbalist”.
I tried thinking of the differences between juju man and herbalist but it all seemed like one person to me- the red garbed scary man we saw in home movies who usually perpetuated evil acts and ended up dying by Holy Ghost fire or nemesis. My mind was very disturbed. Doris’ compelling insistence had won eventually and she’d come to pick me from work after I had feigned a fainting spell during lunch.

“The weekday is the best time to go so you don’t have to lie to your husband- he would not find out anyway”

“Doris!” As if she knew what husbands were? She was my best friend; we were both thirty-six and the longest relationship I had a recollection of her having barely lasted six months. Now here she was teaching me about what husbands wanted. I sat in her car, thinking as she drove: all the years of Sunday school, absolute faith in God, sermons of heaven and hell and fiery reprisals started to haunt me. As it pulled me in all directions, I remained still- he is just a herbalist I found myself saying self reassuringly. He is not a juju man.

We eventually arrived the place and against a certain compelling inner will, I walked behind Doris (albeit apprehensively) into the small bungalow tucked in-between a failed bank building that had been shut down and a barber’s shack. No 37 hung unsuspectingly askew from the number panel. We took two steps down into along corridor, turned a right and stopped at a door.

For your spiritual healing powder,
Love rings, money power,
Woman-follow-me,
Contact Papa Shingo.
Herbalist power, no evil. 07028336104

I squinted my eyes to read the sticker on the door.

Before us stood a clean shaven middle aged man, naked to the torso wearing only shorts- with an entanglement of chest hair that looked like termites clinging to a mound. I averted my gaze quickly from his chest to catch his eyes but I noticed his eyes dipped slightly below my crucifix pendant. As he welcomed Doris who apparently was no stranger to him, I shifted uncomfortably.

“Can we sit? Your spiritual highness.”
“Oh yes, sit, I dey come”

Doris motioned me into one of the cushion chairs in the small sitting room where we were ushered into. I sat nimbly on the edge of one of the chairs waiting for a moment to express my discomfort to Doris but she had chosen to sit opposite me across the centre table, denying me the opportunity of a side whisper. The man came back in with a bowl of leaves and some other objects I could not identify and gave it to me to whisper into the bowl what my problems were. All the while he did not take his eyes away from my cleavage. As I spoke into the bowl, I looked up more than once to catch his lewd gaze. I finally gave the bowl back to him after mumbling inanities into the weird salad bowl.

“I’m done sir”“Sir? It is your spiritual highness my daughter”
“Your spiritual highness”

I looked at the man who would only be a few years older than us.
My daughter? I sat closer to the edge of my chair, disgust beating hard against my chest.After receiving the bowl, he sat on a chair that looked like a throne and closed his eyes as he sang an esoterically worded song that screeched at high octaves with a constantly recurring word- Shumba. After the freak show, he opened his eyes and looked into my eyes for the first time that afternoon.
“My daughter you are looking for child?”
“You will baff”“Hmm! you will baff”

I strained my ears to hear him.

“Your problem is spiritual one and we will use spiritual soap to wash it away. You will come on Friday at 12 night-vigil to baff. After the baff all the problem will disappear. You will get a child”

I saw Doris nodding her head at his every stressed consonant giving me that I-told-you-he-was-powerful look. As he finished, we all paused: I, bewildered and Doris reverently listening, apparently lost. Doris finally broke the silence.

“Ok your spiritual highness, she will come on Friday. Here is something we brought”
As Doris put her hand in her purse, the man motioned her not to worry.

“Just bring her, Friday. She will baff? Hmm we will baff her and she will get a child”

I did not speak a word to Doris on my way back home. Even though she spoke of how the man had cured his current wife (the third) of 10 years barrenness and eventually ended up marrying her. As I held on to my husband (maybe a bit too tightly later that night) I had a dream where a large lizard with saliva drooping from it mouth kept looking at my naked body and shouting,

"You will baff”

Part II

I woke the morning after I had the dream, with a pang of guilt of not telling my husband about seeing the herbalist. My husband and I were great friends; during the phase of poke nosing in-laws he had stood by me but how would I tell him I was going to have a spiritual bath at midnight in a herbalist’s house? I went through the motions that morning and on more than one occasion, my husband asked if something was wrong.

“Nothing dear”, I lied. “It’s just the mood”

Judging from his expression after I told him, I knew he saw through the lie but just didn’t bother questioning me any further. As I looked at him uncover the lie with barely any expression, I realized how difficult it would be for me to keep something of this nature secret from him for so long. The day passed very slowly because I did not want Friday to come. I still was not sure what I would do. A part of me, that sensed insincerity in the herbalist held back, but a part of me; the one that wanted a child so badly, nudged me on, coupled with Doris’ unending calls all day.
At my desk in the office, the memory of the man’s ogling eyes and the salivating lizard kept assailing my imagination and one sentence kept on persistently through the memories.

“You will baff”

“He’s not a herbalist”, I found myself saying out loud unconsciously, drawing a suspecting gaze from my desk-mate at work who spun round to give me that ‘are-you-okay?’ look.

Friday morning eventually arrived, even though unwelcome. Doris’, sensing my vacillation from the last discussion we had, had arrived my house early enough to make my husband suspicious. After she left, he asked why she had come so early and I lied again. This time, though, I don’t think he saw through it.

“She just lost a relative and needed to see me”, I told him. He muttered his condolences and made a note to call her. Far drawn from that, Doris had indeed come to encourage me; those were her words “...encourage you to take a step of faith”.

“Faith?” When I was not certain what I believed anymore.The plan was that I would tell my husband that I wanted to sleep over at Doris’ house to lend some support through her supposed bereavement and we would go to Papa Shingo’s house later in the night to take the cleansing bath. I saw the rationale in the plan and how it carried through from what I had told my husband about her early morning visit, but beneath it all, I felt like a betrayer. Though like Doris had said, it wasn’t everything he told me either so a few secrets won’t change anything. But I knew it would. ‘I would be doing this for us’, I kept saying to reassure myself as the day wore on, and the side of me that wanted to give it a try tarried more in the realms of thought than the side that did not. Even with all this, I did not know how I would face up to him to tell him I would not be sleeping at home tonight.

As the evening drew nearer, the tension I felt heightened and I could not engage myself in anything but wander around the house logging the seconds, almost shying from the genuine smile of my husband as he smiled at me from our eight year old wedding photograph.

At about 9p.m. my husband called to tell me he would be sleeping over at a friend’s house because it would be too late to return back home after work. After I hung up, myriads of thoughts barraged me regarding the call I had just received. It was strange in a way that fate had taken my husband out of the way in order to make me go for the cleansing bath without having to tell him anything at all. Yet, something felt out of place with my husband calling to say he would not be sleeping at home. He was a much organised man and usually had his plans laid out. If he had told me earlier I would not have felt the uneasiness I felt now. Still holding the phone in my hands, I had no cause to doubt him but I had no cause not to either. But was it not the same thing I was planning to tell him? Wouldn’t it have been a lie? I was only going for a cleansing bath, and he was only going for a meeting too.

I shut my ears to keep the voices out of my head. It was Doris’ call that saved my sanity.

“Hello, you should be here by now. Is your husband not going to allow you? Should I call to ask him?”
“Don’t bother Doris. I am just about leaving”.

I looked for a last time at the now lonely house, at the still furniture and blank spaces that was once filled with the lives of two people who were so close. Tonight, we felt so apart. Easing out of the driveway, I made my way to Doris’ house.

PART III

At about a half past eleven later that night, we arrived at the same quiet house. It was totally dark from the eternal outage that prevailed in this part of town. This time sleeping dogs with half open eyes that glowed, reflecting the light from our phones, slept along the narrow corridor we had gone through a few days earlier. We side-stepped to avoid them as Doris led me to the door that bore the inscription of Papa Shingo’s abilities. Before she knocked, the door opened. It was almost as if something- maybe the spirits, had notified the herbalist of our approach. A faint glow emerged from the open door and lit up the doorway in the darkness.

“Ah welcome! So you have decided to baff ehn!”
“Hmm, you will baff. And you will have child, less go”

He led the way into the same sitting room we had been ushered into the last time. Tonight it was lit by candlelight from a lot of coloured candles placed haphazardly on the floor leading from the entrance door. The herbalist himself was ceremoniously dressed in a red wrapper he knotted beneath his shoulders like women did and a head tie of the same material that had cowries sewn in.

He turned round almost abruptly at the centre of the room issuing a command in my direction. “Doris! wait here!” This time he looked more into my eyes, even though I thought I saw a fleeting sneer flicker across his face like the dancing candles that illuminated the space tonight.

“You follow me!” he beckoned to me leading me along a narrow corridor which was also lit by meandering candles by the side of the walls. I reluctantly followed, ashamed of myself, furious at my husband even though I did not know why, and tired of my predicament. The herbalist stopped at a heavy black door that opened into a shower stall lit by a lone candle. I looked around the corridor and the line of candles that ran the length. There were many doors on either side of the corridor and I wondered where his three wives were; as the last time we came too, there didn’t seem to be any other person in the house. I stepped gingerly into the shower stall my frame shivering in the dark from a far-drawn fear I could not define.

“Oya don’t just stand there? Take off your clothes” he ordered, shutting the door behind me and standing in the doorway staring hard at me.
“Abi you wan baff with clothe, Take am off”

I had never stripped before any other man except my husband and it fell awkward doing so in the presence of the herbalist. Doris had told me however, that he would only need to bathe my head and arms so I had brought a wrapper with me which I removed from by bag and tied around my chest before proceeding to discretely disrobe in front of the stranger. I still held my bag as I took off the items of clothing one after another; stuffing them in the burglar proof of the window on whose sill the candle burnt and dripped wax.
“Oya, Oya!”, he hurried me up.
“We are not small pikin”

I thought I saw him change to a salivating lizard as he spoke those words. After I had taken off my blouse and the jeans trousers I wore, he dragged a bucket filled with what seemed like dark coloured water from a corner of the shower stall, and proceeded to scoop the liquid with a bowl he picked from a pedestal beside the bucket. In the bowl was a sponge of raffia husks and a darkish thing that I believed was soap. At that moment I wished I had not come and I insitnctively blurted out,
“I am not bathing again!” (maybe a bit too loud).
“I am not bathing again. I want to go home”

“Haaa-Haaa!” the herbalist laughed; a raucous laughter that made me afraid. That kind of fear that boded evil.
“You no fit change your mind now”
“We have prepare the water and you must baff”.

My thudding heart seemed to echo in the now claustrophobic space.

“No, I don’t want to bathe anymore”, I screamed. At that moment, I pulled my clothes from the burglar proof and started to walk towards the herbalist who was still in the way. The man did not move his ground. He only bent down to scoop some of the water from the bucket as if what I had said had gone unheard.

“I said I don’t want to ....”

The liquid splashed all across my face, my hair, into my eyes and in my nose and I started to choke on the sour tasting water, coughing loudly and flailing my arms, knocking out the candle in the process.

“Dori...” I started to scream as the man pressed his palm hard against my mouth and ripped off the wrapper I had on with his free hand. The hot fumes of adrenaline rose from my nostrils and clouded my eyes.I started to fight frantically, as he struggled to pour some more of the sour tasting liquid in my mouth. I clawed and bit, screaming at the intervals that his strong hands afforded me.“Doris!” I shouted but the liquid I had swallowed was starting to have a weakening effect on me. Here I was naked, except for my underwear, struggling with a stranger in the middle of the night. I started to feel his hardness against my body as I struggled in the dark. I could feel his hands all over my body while the other wrenched tightly against my mouth hurting me badly.

Slowly my fighting arms started to wane and the resistance I put up gradually wore out. I could only feel now- there was not much else I could do.

“Doris”, I thought,
"My husband".
As I thought of my husband, I started to cry. The motions were hasty and hurting, totally devoid of feeling and all I heard from the herbalist who was running out of breath before I fell asleep was,

“You want child abi?”
“Hmm, you will baff today”

OIO

Tales from the Horizon

Tales from the Horizon
The client waited on the forger watching him ply his trade. It was a delicate experiment and he could not help but admire the precision with which the forger worked.
After what seemed like hours of waiting on end, the job was completed and the forger gave the check one last sweeping look: the kind of look a great artist would give a painting before giving it away, before handing it over to the waiting client.
The other man collected the check scanned it with his eyes, asked if it would not be recognized by the bank.
The forger did not reply. He only smiled and answered with a question, ‘which of them is the original?’
The client looked at the check and compared it with another one which the forger had now produced. They both looked the same to him.
Weigh both in his hands and in his mind, he finally gave up.
‘Then I think its good enough’, he said handing over an envelope to forger who revealed its contents to be naira notes in a bundle. Leafing through the pack and confirming its contents, both men shook and went their separate ways and the story began.
The Horizon bank grazed the marina horizon with its twin towers, putting the inhabitants of the west side of the street in an eclipse of its majestic heights. The bank was one of the banks that had scaled the reconsolidation with ease and as expected by everyone had braced the tape unscathed. After having won the loyalty of millions of customers over a period of sixty five years, the bank had come to stay as the bank of the people and nothing encapsulated the whole ideal of the bank more than its architectural masterpiece of a head office: the twin towers or the ‘H’ as it was fondly called by its throng of numerous admirers.

The ‘H’ was a magnificent piece of art: two hexagonal-plan towers of chrome and glass connected mid-section at the thirteenth floor by a suspension bridge. Though an afterthought, the reason for the introduction of the bridge on the thirteenth floor had been both rational and superstitious. Rational in that the twenty six storey towers had its mid-section at that floor and it provided equal access up or down: and superstitious in that the architect considered the thirteenth floor to be ill luck, hence the reason for the designer’s decision to make it the bridge floor. Both towers had been isolated at the inception because the bank had planned to use just one of them for the bank’s operations while the other was supposed to be leased to property developers on the marina water front. However, the plan changed with the increased size of the bank and the need to create space for more departments and the ever increasing number of employees housed within the headquarters. One tower housed the financial operations, the archives, the corporate banking department and the treasury departments of the bank while the other tower housed the executive and management offices, human resource management, the foreign exchange unit and the computer brain that ensured the smooth interfacing of all the banks’ three hundred or more branches scattered round the globe. All other departments were interspersed between both towers where space deemed them fit.

Though an architectural afterthought, the addition of the bridge had redefined the building and had serendipitously reinforced the brand name of the bank: the letter ‘H’.


2:02 – 2:30
(2:07 – 2:30)
It was a few minutes past two and the Lagos skyline, unchanging, had begun dimming to the hue of the impending rain. People scurried to and fro like rats in the Lagos rat race, to the consternation of the on looking ‘H’.

Mustapha Ganiyu neither felt the dimming tone of the incoming rain nor the hustle and bustle of the teeming crowd outside. He had joined the bank as an operative hand and had been in the banking system for a little over three years. Over that period he had seen a lot of people come and go; both customers and his kaleidoscope of colleagues. He had also risen through the ranks in his own rights. From operative hand, he had been promoted to professional trainee (PT) level one and level two and his present level was the cash manager of the branch housed within the H-towers.
The controlled clement micro climate of the bank was all a mirage to him. Sun or rain outside, it was always the same weather inside the marble and glass structure. It was never summer or spring but always white winter; winter supplied by the central cooling system that ran full time on one of the four massive diesel generators housed behind the building and the white lights, from concealed fluorescent lights that feebly imitated perpetual daylight within the building.
Comfortable padded chairs, oil paintings, freshly cut flowers and tapestries lent the desired ambience to the banks interiors and at a glance it looked like a big sitting room in a rather palatial residence rather than a bank.

Horizon bank unlike all its other contemporaries did not look like other conventional banks. It was a concept the MD/CEO of the bank, Hajara Sherrif had introduced into the banking system; thus revolutionizing the look and feel of the banking environment. She had conceptualized the idea of replacing the queue manager, marble slabs and waiting chairs with an open floor arrangement of easy sitting-room-like cushion chairs, low waiting tables, potted plants, flower vases and paintings hanging all over the interiors. This new brand she named the ‘cash café’ and like wild fire the cafés sprang all over the nation and caught people in its conflagration.
with over 300 cash cafés dotting the globe and a large cluster of those dots within the Lagos, Abuja and Portharcourt metropolis, the Horizon bank cash cafes had earned the alias ‘the sitting room bank’.

Its was in the marina cash café, opposite an irate customer that Mustapha Ganiyu sat thinking about slapping the customer but carefully concealing his intentions behind a smile and an empathic ‘sorry sir’ from time to time while enduring the customers pelting remarks (at least ‘the customer is everything’ was the credo he was supposed to live by). The bank had taught him to create two personas for himself: The work persona and his true persona. That way he could deal with the everyday exigencies of work without bringing his emotions to play (a price which would have costed him his job anyway).

After almost an eternity of bootlicking, he finally discharged the customer and strolled back to his office for the first time noticing the changing weather through the narrow slits of the cash café’s aluminum framed exterior. He instinctively took a furtive glance at the wall clock that graced the towering foyer of the Horizon and realized that it was just eleven minutes past two. Frustrated, he heaved a sigh and scanned the interiors of the café once again to see that all was going well before taking a leave for his office (or on the contrary, his cell). He called it a cell because even the layout suggested the same. A small box, glass and aluminum framed wall on two sides and brown marble on the other two with an aerial view of the cash café’s main sitting hall. It might have looked like a conventional bank office had it not been for the psychological dimensions the office held for Mustapha. He had always loathed it in there but the paycheck had kept him glued to his seat and dedicated to the service of the bank all through the years.

He watched the operatives moving in and out of the back office where the vault was housed, carrying bundles of cash and transporting it to and from the rightful owners. He instinctively looked at the wall clock again and noticed that the minute hand had only moved a step since the last time he looked at it. Though he had spent over three years in the bank, he still had not outgrown the nagging desire for 5’o clock (the closing hours of the bank). Ignoring the frustration, he took the brief flight of stairs that led to his cell, opened the door, shut it carefully behind him and crumbled like a sack of potatoes on his executive seat. Three more hours he thought and this bloody day will be over again.
The impending rain outside continued to loom over the ‘Horizon’ and the entropy of passer-bys increased as they bumped into one another, trying to find a safe haven before the rains made its promise sure. A little down the streets, about three blocks from the banks towers, in a make-shift shed, a prominent marina food seller grudgingly admitted waiting drivers and some passer-bys seeking shade from the coming rain among who was a bare foot diminutive man in his late thirties with thick bushy moustache and bushy eye brows to match who milled with the crowd and watched the ‘Horizon’ keenly.
He was dark in complexion and was the archetypal ‘Cele’ clergy man with his balding pate and the flowing white soutane he wore replete with a huge cross hanging around his neck and a bible held firmly in his left hand. Wrinkles played out interesting patterns on his face and a closer look at his face revealed a man who once had been of fairer complexion but had been sun burnt to dusky brown.

Aderopo was a man of little words; he barely spoke and this made it difficult for his friends and even his enemies to know what was going on behind the bushy eyebrows and his prematurely aging face. In his former life, he had been the talkative type, easily becoming the soul of any gathering but after the cruel blows life had dealt with him, he found solace in quietude and silent observation of the ways of man. He had had it rough; though fate had smiled on him for a while.
Having started out as a street hawker in the bowels of the core Lagos streets, he had moved on from odd job to odd job running the whole gamut till a brief respite of prosperity (which unfortunately never lasted too long) cut through his predicament.
Until yesterday, he had been a driver with one of the shipping firms on the Apapa waterfront. His life had been hard and this had made his hands harder. Aderopo looked at his thick, stubby and gnarled fingers and heaved a sigh of desperation, frustration, anxiety and relief all mixed in that one sigh. If he played his cards right today, his entire generation would owe him a debt of gratitude for turning their fortunes around. He took a quick glance at the dog-eared bible in his hands and felt a cold tingle run from the tip of his knobby fingers spread all over his body. As before, it was anxiety and fear. ‘What if things went wrong?’ he thought. What if he was caught? What if…? There was an unending combination of ‘what ifs?’ in his squat head until the rumble of a distant thunder woke him from his reverie and put a stop to the infinite alternatives brewing behind the bushy brows. Not minding his thawing conscience or the warm feel of the bare earth on his bare foot he resolutely sealed his fate to the task ahead. Aderopo watched as the first trickle of rain streamed down the side of the wooden braces of the make-shift shed spattering softly on the littered ground beneath. He inched a little closer to all other inhabitants of his temporary home (taking care to inch his soutane up to prevent the splattering mud from soiling it). Scanning the faces of all of them, he saw the picture of a group of odd sorts hurdled together in the ‘buka’ space. As odd as the family picture looked for the moment, they were all bonded by oneness of purpose, which was shelter from rain; a need as basic as any need of man could be.

Some were seated while most others just filled in the space between the wooden benches and the rugged tables. Any other remainder space was occupied by houseflies (also bonded by the same purpose) that completed the picture of the family tree in this temporary home of them all. The flies buzzed around the waiting crowd making momentary stops on the remnants in the scattered plates strewn over the table and seriously hampering the progress of some unfortunate customers who were still eating. Aderopo looked at them all but he did not see anyone or anything at all. His mind was set on the tall building that stood adjacent with its chrome and glass glistening in the pounding rain and its shadowy recesses deepening in the half dying ambience around it.

His destiny converged at this one point: Here and now.

He looked at the building and saw people taking cover in the expansive porch that stood at the entrance: a fibre glass covered porch with a larger than life ‘H’ hanging almost in suspended animation above the fibre glass roofing. The security personnel at the gate were trying to maintain order among the brewing crowd at the entrance as the rain continued its downpour. In the split second between Aderopo’s thought and the vision in his eyes, a man broke away from the cluster at the ‘buka’ shade and made a dash for the bank’s entrance. Obviously, the man had been weighing the options and had decided to make a last minute decision to run for it in the pouring rain. Aderopo watched the man in his flight, fighting the pelting drops as he ran. Unfortunately when he got to the gate of the premises, he was turned back because the spacious porch was already filled to bursting and the security personnel were trying to control the inflow into the building. Dejectedly, he watched the man run back into their shed: thoroughly soaked. This caused little furor and some laughter because having left, the crowd had expanded to fill the man’s space and his already dripping clothes did not fit well into the desperate crowd who were avoiding getting wet.

The rain splattered and poured and lightning lit the sky in staggered flashes occasionally while an unusual calm settled over the erstwhile maddening landscape of the Lagos streets. Aderopo bid his time looking from time to time at the dog-eared bible in his hands and shifting his weight from right heel to left heel and back. Again, the tingling sensation crept up his spine but his face betrayed none of the storm of emotions raging within him in tandem with the sloshing waters beneath the many feet of the waiting crowd. He had never really been a religious person. The religious garb and the costume had all been a part of the ruse to lend some reverence and authenticity to clergy figure.
He had first been apprehensive to wear the cele attire more out of sheer fear of the unknown than the penance for sacrilege because he was not a believer in any kind of religion. If God existed, he always thought, there should not be so much suffering as the kind he saw people undergo each day. However, if he was sure of one thing, it was that somehow someway he knew he would pay for the sacrilege he was about committing with the holy attire though how he could not fathom. But all that did not bother him for now. All was on his mind was the next few hours and the rest of his life if all went well.

As a little kid growing in the Mushin corridors, Aderopo had never had the inkling as to what his life would eventually turn out to be. He was born one of the eight children of his mother and had really never known his other siblings per se. Two had died in infancy and the little Aderopo had been whisked off to the village for the better part of his childhood. He had loved it there and his most memorable moments could be traced to the confines of the mud hut that served as his grand parents’ abode in the village. ‘Deropo they fondly called him and take care of him in their little way they did. Though they were far from wealthy, Aderopo did not know what wealth was nor did he see any rich people. All he knew was that in the village, it was all one big family. People took care of other peoples’ children and the little they got from the nearby farms ensured the subsistence of the clan. He remembered his little group of friends in the village and all the fun they used to have, idling around all day and waiting for the cooking supper, usually their second meal for the day.
All these however, changed with the sudden demise of both his grandparents from an illness and his forced exile back to Lagos. His mother really had never wanted him and his father had never come up in any discussion. In fact for a long time, till he grew into young adulthood, the idea of ‘Father’ was alien to him. It was back in Lagos that the real Aderopo was born. He had been left to fend for himself on arrival and for the first time in his life saw the great disparity between the rich and the poor against the backdrop of the inhuman city that cared less for its inhabitants.

Looking over at the parking lot of the ‘Horizon’ in the pouring rain, Aderopo ran over numerous cars parked in the lot with his eyes and poignant memories struck harsh chords within him.

He remembered well, very well in fact, the first few years he had spent in Lagos then as a youngster. Days were long and nights short. He had worked many jobs and had spent himself trying to make ends meet until hope ran out of him and just at that moment, Fortune intervened.
He had been made head driver of a small fleet of transport buses that ran the Onitsha/Lagos route and having worked dedicatedly for over six years for his employer the good man had discharged Aderopo with a gift of the bus he had driven for those six grueling years on the road. It had been a dream come true for the bewildered Aderopo and he had invested all he had into creating a fortune from that one bus.

Aderopo shook his head poignantly at the thought of that one bus, the ‘Eda-o-laropin’ that had been the toast of the roads in its time. Aderopo had burnished it bright green, aptly naming it ‘Eda-o-laropin’ (meaning: never underestimate man) and had printed the alias in bright yellow on the side panel. No driver on the Onitsha/Lagos axis could claim ignorance of not knowing the ‘Eda-o-laropin’ or its gregarious driver. Within four years, he had grown the ‘Eda-o-laropin’, the bus of fortune, into three smaller intra-city shuttle buses and money had been coming in from all over for him. He had hired two other drivers and life had sailed on smoothly for a while: But the handsome gifts that life lends us are often the one that ends us, a wise man once said.
The money he made had brought with it more problems than he could handle. Aderopo remembered the many women and the bouts of alcohol and as he had done over the last four years of his life, he estimated the amount of money that had gone down in those glory days: endless nights of binging, endless throngs of faceless women, infinite list of ‘friends’ and all had gone down like it never was. It was one thing to never have been rich but it was another to be a ‘has-been’, Aderopo had seen the two extremes of life and subtly under his frosted breadth, he swore that if today would pass, he would never make the same mistakes again.

2:25 – 2:30 – 3:00
By now, the rains had started waning in its downpour and the face of the sky was taking back its usual tone at this time of day. Water puddles formed everywhere and little streams coursed their way down the road finding their destinations in the already full side drainages. Aderopo watched the little group that had formed under the ‘buka’ space disband and each go their separate ways. He waited for a while watching the trickle for a while and putting finishing touches to the plan in his head. He then brought out the dog-eared bible one more time, this time extracting from its centre page, somewhere in the book of psalms, a check leaf with the ‘H’ hologram embossed on its right hand corner. Written in neat cursive on the face of the check was the name, ‘Amire Olufunto’ in black ink.
2: 30
The den looked like a sty. Chairs were upturned, clothes strewn everywhere, books ‘de-shelved’ and scattered pieces of papers littered the little space. The dull ambience of the dying rain had further darkened the interior space of the den (a lone windowed room) and reduced visibility drastically. The bony young man paced the length of the room like a severed spirit: the frown on his face further distorting his gaunt features. Disregarding the disarray he muttered non-intelligible words under his breadth as he searched the pockets of a pair of brown linen trousers for the umpteenth time; this time, cursing loudly at an imaginary figure in a far recess on the other side of the room. He knew that the check was not in the pockets of the linen trousers but reason had fled him at this moment. He was indeed desperate. How could he have been so careless? How could he, a grown up man, at this age be… ‘Oh God!’ he swore loudly again flinging the pair of trousers he was still holding in his hands into another end of the topsy-turvy. And as if in response to his anguish the subsiding rain outside let out a syncopated series of lightning claps and a low-key rumble.

He tried to replay ‘yesterday’ in his head but the finer details of thought kept eluding him.

After leaving the BDS headquarters, he had taken an *okada back home. He remembered stopping once at the street entrance to make two calls: one to his friend’s uncle and the other to the accountant who expedited action in paying the check. ‘What in the heavens could have happened?’ he thought again as he tried finding any loophole in the seeming seamless yesterday he had conjured up in his strained mind. Just yesterday he had been overwhelmed with exceeding joy and today the grey wash of despair had drowned his joys. He still felt the weight of the check as the receptionist signed it off to him. Up until that moment everything had been a miracle to him.

Amire Olufunto was an artist of some sort and in his own little way had made quite a name for himself in the university where he spent his leisure hours making customized greeting cards for his many student clients. His earnings however had only sufficed on subsistence until three months ago when unexpectedly things changed.
He had accidentally stumbled upon one of his friends in school, who also had patronized him on certain occasions and the friend had en passant hinted that her uncle was looking for a graphic artist for a reason unknown to her. Curiosity had taken the better of ‘Amaya’ as Olufunto was wont to be called by his friends and he had indicated his interest in the offer. His friend almost grudgingly decided to organize a meeting and the hands of fate had spun quickly after then.

Amaya remembered meeting the man, ‘Otunba Badmus’ for the first time. He remembered the expansive, ancient but beautiful office and his ‘Liliputty’ feeling at the mere sight of the splendor he beheld. ‘If he had known’, he remembered thinking that day, he would not have opted to make a fool of himself. But the meeting had turned out differently, far from his expectations. The man had seemed to take a liking to him from the onset and they had even discussed more things at variance to the reason why he came. That fateful day, he had walked out of Otunba’s plush office with ten chips added to his shoulder, an inch added to his height and a contract to make calendars and Christmas cards for BDS oil servicing company added to his career.

How could life at this crucial point of his life and career decide to place such a cruel joke on him? He tried going over the mess with his eyes again but knew that if the check was anywhere at all, it was not in his scattered apartment. Finally deciding to sit down, he tried tabulating his options. He had to call Otunba first to notify him of the stolen check and he had to go back to the call centre from which he had made those two calls, to rule out the possibility of the check’s disappearance at the call centre. He slipped on a white Tee, which he had branded himself with an inscription ‘Pounds foolish, Penis wise’ Aids is real on the front, and the big red ribbon of the HIV campaign behind; and dug out his slippers from underneath the scattered pile of clothes in the den and then picked up a worn pocket diary and walked out into the crisp but cold open air.

He had not been fully aware of the extent of the rain in his confused state of mind till the cold gust of air hit him. He heard the slosh of rushing waters and the sounds of children coming out to play and saw that the gutters had overfilled their banks and had spilled some of its grime into the compound. Amaya gingerly crossed the slime in a funny dance as he watched some men poke the gutters with metal pipes trying to ease the flow. He noticed the difference between the straining men and the children playing freely. If he had been in a proper state of mind he would have let his artistic mind roam in making a mental note of the optimism of youth against the backdrop of the harsh realities of life that awaited them. But this afternoon held no room for such deliberations. Even He could only glimpse the harsh realities that would befall him if the wrong hands got hold of the check before he found it. He doubled his pace up the street noticing, to his chagrin that the call centre operator had closed early because of the rains. ‘Oh God!’, he cursed, even if he had forgotten the check at the call center he would not have any means of getting to know till the morrow. He quickly scanned the familiar environment looking for another call centre operator who had braved the rain and sure he did find.
Nasif the one eyed operator sure as day would be there rain or shine. Amaya crossed the muddy road without bothering to look right or left; not that any car bothered to pass through the streets anyway. The roads had been a major point of concern all the years and all efforts to get the town planning authorities to upgrade the road had proved abortive. It had become so bad that deep gullies that at one time been considered an aberration was now the main feature of every five metre mark on the road. Amaya fumbled for his worn diary as he drew up close to the one eyed freak.

Nasif, he learnt, had been born with one eye open and one eye closed and all his life, the shy eye had never dared to open. Except for the shy eye and a few other features, he shared a lot of common features with Amaya. The very first time he saw Nasif, Amaya remembered noticing a sort of semblance and he remembered appreciating the circumstance of birth. What if he had been Nasif? What if he too had been born that way? A lot of questions had arisen in his mind but nothing had bothered Amaya more than the optimism he saw the ‘Cyclop’ always radiating. Nasif was a happy man despite his condition. Nothing seemed to put him down and he never seemed to be bothered at all. The whole community had come to see him as a source of hope as most people would say, ‘If Nasif wey dem born with one eye no worry, wetin be my own?’* Amaya appreciated Nasif’s optimism more today in his state of dangerously low emotional ebb. He watched the lone eye light up as he approached,

‘Oga, oga’, the cyclop mouthed in dissonance with his twitching eye.
‘How day now?’
‘Fine jo, Nasif’, Amaya answered in what was supposed to be an equally optimistic tone.

Flipping through his pocket diary, Amaya absentmindedly gestured for a phone not in use and Nasif handed it over gleefully before asking,
‘Which network you wan call sef?’, ‘that one wey dey ya hand no be for all network o.
‘Na the other one wey dey with that oga over there be all network’.
Amaya followed the direction of his pointing finger and his gaze rested on one of the roughnecks of the area, aliased Japaul talking loudly over the phone.

‘I say I see am for mama Ada place’….
’no worry I go show you wen we generally collide’….
’Why now? I no fit chop that thing alone na!’….
’No worry we go share am’….

2:45
Amaya strained his ears to eavesdrop on the conversation. Wasn’t mama Ada the other call centre operator on the street, the one Amaya had stopped at to make calls on his way home yesterday evening?
What could the roughneck, Japaul, have found that he could not chop alone and he had to share with his other roughneck friend on the other end of the line? The more he thought about the possibilities of the check being in the possession of someone like Japaul, the stranger it felt that maybe luck had led him to this place at this particular time. Amaya shifted his weight on to the sole of the other foot and waited for Japaul to end his conversation. He strained to hear the concluding bit of the conversation but by now Japaul had code-switched to ‘waffi’, a local variation of the conventional pidgin English that could easily pass for Japanese. This made Amaya even more suspicious. Was there something going on he was not supposed to be aware of?
The conversation finally ended with loud ‘waffarian’ salutations from both ends. Even Amaya could hear the shouting of the other party from the receiver. Japaul disconnected the line and handed it over to the waiting Nasif who checked the duration of Japaul’s call before handing it over to Amaya.
For a while Amaya just stared at the phone and furtively at the heavily scarred Japaul. He considered waiting for Japaul to leave and calling the last dialed number back but he quickly dismissed the idea. There was no way in the world he could mimick Japaul’s voice in order to extract the information he desired to extract. He decided to delay his decision until Japaul left, all the while still holding the phone.

After some minutes of haggling with Nasif on whether or not Japaul wanted to pay or not, he finally settled his bill with the piteous looking operator and walked off into the mud. Amaya watched Japaul leave and all of a sudden noticed him look back for a split second before turning right off the street into one of their many dens. Amaya was caught unawares by the stare and almost toppled back on Nasif’s counter. At this point he was certain of who the culprit was and he knew what next to do.
‘Everything dey okay? the operator asked opening his one eye into a full empathic but scary stare.
‘No problem’, replied Amaya, who by now was flipping busily through the pages of the worn diary till he saw what he was looking for. He used his index finger tip to trace out the faint number scrawled in his own handwriting and started punching off on the keypad of the operator’s mobile phone as the keypad tones formed a sing-song rhythm of their own. After dialing the number, Amaya waited for four rings as the unmistakable baritone of Otunba came on the line.
‘Hello, who is this, can I help you?’, the other man responded.
‘Hello sir, good afternoon sir. It is me Amire Olufunto, the guy who designed the calendars sir.’, Amaya responded with a nuance of trembling in his voice: he was not prepared to say what he wanted to say but anyhow he knew that he had to.

‘Oh I see, how are you? Thanks for the wonderful job’, replied Otunba.
‘Yes sir’, answered Amaya, reluctantly continuing.
‘Sorry sir, it is about the check sir, I- er- something happened and –em-‘
Otunba listened from the other end not knowing what to make of the stammering young man.

Hadn’t the boy called him just yesterday confirming receipt of the check?
Or ‘was the accountant playing funny games again?

‘Go straight to the point young man, how can I help you?, I have other things to do than waiting at the phone all day.’
Amaya responded, trying to summon up courage.
‘Sir, it’s about the check: I-er-‘at this point the impatient Otunba barked down the receiver at the other end.
‘If you won’t stop perambulating you might have to come and see me in my office later.’
‘No sir, no sir’. What happened is that-was that on my way from your office yesterday after receiving the check, it was stolen from me and I am sure it is someone in my neighbourhood who is in possession of the check. I overheard him talking about it to someone else on the phone today sir.

Otunba remained silent for a while trying to muster his thoughts. If there was something he had hated from when he was barely five years of age it was baby sitting. He loved it when people, including him, could take responsibility for their actions. How could a young man like Funto misplace his life earnings so carelessly? And what exactly did the young man expect him to do? Write him another check? Or come all the way from his office to ‘my neighbourhood’ with him in search of the missing check? Even he Otunba Badmus would flinch at the thought of losing a check for over three hundred thousand naira.

Amaya listened to the silence at the other end. If Otunba had lashed out on him it would have been better than this silence. There was a way silence unseated Amaya. His mother had been the master when it came to using silence as a weapon to disarm her belligerent son when he was in his teens. Amaya could not hold on any longer.
‘Please sir, please I know that you are really angry but there was nothing I could do, I don’t even know how this Japaul of a guy got to get hold of the check. Immediately I left the office I took a bike and came straight home, when I got home I…
‘Hold on, hold on young man’ came the reply from the other end.
‘Have you reported this to the police?’
‘No sir’, Amaya replied.
‘Then I think we should start from there. Immediately after this call, make sure you report to the police’.

You have worked hard for this and you deserve your reward. Make a report to the police and let me know later in the day, what steps they have taken to recover it. Is that ok? I will try to get a message across to my bank and stop the check for payment in due course.’
‘Thank you sir, I will go there immediately I leave here. I will call you again sir. Thank you very much sir. I am very sorry for all the inconvenience’
‘Not to worry’, replied Badmus
‘Thank you sir’, Amaya mouthed in the receiver as the other end clicked off.

The emotions he felt now was an odd mix of happiness and joy: a paradoxical mix to say the least. He felt relieved that the man, Otunba had not taken umbrage at his wanton carelessness and he also felt elated that his more prosperous benefactor could empathize with his situation. On the contrary however, he felt a wash of sadness through his body at the whole episode. He was not a careless person, of that he was sure. He also did not want to entertain the thought of Japaul reaping the fruit of his sweat.

He had to do something and he had to do it fast. Almost unconsciously he hailed down a passing motorcyclist who was meandering his way down the muddy potholed road.
‘Station!’ he shouted, gesturing in the direction of the police station nearest to their street.

‘Oga, oga!’, shouted Nasif, ‘You never give me my phone o. Even my money sef’
Amaya looked at the mobile phone in his hands and realized he had forgotten about the one-eyed Nasif in his desperation to quickly get to the police station. He apologized profusely and retrieved from his shorts some change to pay off his bill, doubling his steps to catch up with the motorcyclist who, having not found a suitable parking space on the gullied road had eased the motorbike for quite a distance before coming to a halt.
2:45
Otunba Badmus dropped the phone beside two others on his mahogany and oak desk and swiveled his chair round so as to face the expansive glass panel behind him that gave a scenic vista of the Lagos metropolis. The rain had left a network of veins on the glass where the rivulets of running water had coursed and Badmus made a mental note to contact the managers of the building for general cleaning and maintenance, not that it was his job to do that but Otunba’s leadership style was that most times he ended up doing the job for his subordinates because they rarely satisfied him. His wife had told him one day he’ll die doing someone else’s job but who cared he thought, ‘we all had to die someday’.

He swiveled round again to glance at the beautifully designed calendar above the mantel piece opposite his desk and looked back down at the cluster of phones that stood like a group of aliens in the middle of the well aligned heap of files on his neatly arranged desk. His mind was on so many things at the moment and the issue of a missing check was the least of his problems. But he liked the young man and envied his illustriousness and he had also exploited the young man’s talents to his advantage as it would have cost him more to use experienced hands. Putting all this together, he would rather stretch himself a bit than discourage the young man so he added to his already long mental notes a reminder to call the bank.

The pressure of the job these days was getting its fair share of Badmuses life. He remembered earlier on in his career: he had always thought that when he took over leadership position at the firm, he would take things at his leisure and travel round the world visiting exotic places and living his life to the fullest. Illusions of youth he thought as he sat in a comfortable chair in the corner office of one of the largest indigenous oil servicing companies in the country. He knew more than to believe in the hackneyed expression that the higher one went the cooler it became. The game at this level was a tight fit. Every second and every decision counted. It could make or mar the business. If his late father had taken it cooler as he went higher, the business would have gone under and it would have been a lot hotter for them all. His mind drifted back to the ancient interiors of the office. He had decided to leave the furnishing just as his late father had left it. Though quaint, every item in the office elicited a memory of some sort. Even ten years after his departed father had been laid to rest; God rest his soul, the taste and time that had been invested into furnishing the office at that time had paid off. Everything was unique and beautiful. From the timeless Turkish rug that graced the floor to the wood paneled walls to the ornate ceiling everything had the Badmus touch in it. His favorite piece however, was the grandfather clock sitting in the corner flanked by two settee-like chairs, ticking away idly counting out the vain hours of man.
His father had fallen in love with the beauty on one of his travels and had not rested until it came to rest in his office. Where it held a significant dimension for Otunba Badmus, however, was that the day he was born was the day the grandfather clock arrived and it had never stopped working since then. His friends had often made a joke about the nursery rhyme of the grandfather clock that stopped never to work again at the death of a certain old man, warning him that once the clock stopped he’d better write a will. Otunba smiled at the thought of the possibility of both their destinies intertwined as the reverend tower of polished pine and swinging brass tick-tocked on, oblivious of its ardent admirer. Then the ‘next-year’ calendar hung above the mantel piece caught his attention again. Oh! He thought, he had almost forgotten about the young artist and the story about the missing check. He picked up one of the phones in the odd cluster and dialed the horizon bank officer that managed the company’s account. He waited for the answer at the other end but did not get one. He dialed again and still the same dull ringing but no answer. On the third dial he gave up. Almost immediately, the desk phone rang and his secretary notified him of a meeting he had earlier scheduled for 2:45 with the trade organization of the firm who had been having on-going talks with the management (or rather with Otunba) pertaining to an increase in wages. ‘Back to work!’, he thought as he scribbled in neat cursive on a piece of paper. ‘ayo/horizon- missing check’ so as not to forget.
Looking up at the corner grand father clock, he found out that he still had some five minutes to kill so he picked up a stack of folders on the mahogany desk and begun to sort them out one after the other, separating them into two rough piles on the neatly arranged desk. One he marked ‘urgent’, the other he marked ‘pending’. After going through this ritual movement, he proceeded to attend to the ‘urgent’ stack taking each file and going through its contents with rapt attention making small notes where he had to. As he was getting into the rhythm of the job, the secretary rang again to tell him that the trade representatives where already on their way to the conference room two floors beneath. Otunba put a marker mid-way between the topmost file where he had stopped and idled a while before strolling up to the ornately carved mirror beside the grandfather clock studying himself in the mirror.
He loved to be waited for.
It always bestowed a certain feeling of importance on him when he entered into a meeting and everyone there was waiting for him. He smiled to himself as he adjusted his customary bowtie with puckered dots and brushed his receding hairline back. He noticed the streaks of grey in his balding pate and he saw in the mirror, an image of his father in himself. Instinctively he looked at the reflected image of the old man’s picture at the centre of an ego-wall opposite the grandfather clock wall face. Plaques and awards over the years surrounded the picture and it gave a semblance of a shrine dedicated to the devoted founder of the BDS (Badmus’ Direct Servicing). Otunba was a replica of his father in looks and disposition. Stout, neat, bow-tied and balding, he had been the old man’s favorite and the old man on his dying bed had bequeathed the company to his doppelgänger. That had been ten years ago and a lot had happened since then. He had pressing matters to attend to at the moment and he knew that the trade workers would already be seated awaiting his arrival. Otunba gave one last sweeping look at the office, closed the door behind him and gave specific orders to his secretary not to be disturbed by anyone at all during the course of the trade meeting. Crossing the expansive outer office into the central lobby, he nodded a greeting in the direction of some of the firm’s employees who straightened up and jointly chorused what sounded like ‘Good afternoon sir’ as he approached them in the lift lobby. He eased himself into his personal lift cage, preened his bow tie once more in the reflections of the mirrored interior of the lift and psychologically prepared his mind for the talks ahead as he rode the lift down to the conference floor.
2:50 – 2:55
Aduroja Ayokunle is a relationship officer per excellence.
He managed some of the biggest accounts in the Horizon and over the years, with many of the bank’s awards in tow, he had earned his respect in the hushed conversations and open discussions of all staff within the horizon network. As he rode the lift down from the bridge floor of the horizon to his office on the eighth he pondered over the meeting he had just concluded with some top members of the horizon management and his heart jittered slightly. If only he could pull this off, his career at the bank would become a legend.

He had stumbled on a chance meeting with some rich Greek merchants who had just come into the country to extend their shipping line into African frontiers and immediately he had cashed in on the prospect of opening a credit line for them in the Horizon. Coincidentally, the name of the shipping line had been ‘The Horizon-west shipping company’ and Aduroja Ayokunle had not lost the opportunity of drawing diagonals to connect the dots for the excited Greeks. They had been amused and he had gone straight to the crux of the matter telling them of the immense benefit their double entente would offer to both sides. He had succeeded in exacting a written commitment from them and the purpose of his meeting with top executive today was to discuss the modalities of the bilateral agreement between both parties with the aim of starting a financial relationship. Everything was left to the ratification of the executives now. But Aduroja Ayokunle was certain that with the way he packaged it, no board of directors could resist the offer. This was what he was good at.

Aduroja Ayokunle was every employer’s dream. He was dedicated, almost to a fault and he treated the Horizon like he owned it. Every time a face-off ensued between management and the employees he was usually the mediator; because as much as he could forge the cause of his fellow colleagues, he could also empathize with the management and this helped to create room for negotiations between both parties that usually ended well. His role as mediator in one or two situations had quickly brought him to the limelight and made him ally to both sides. However, it was not his role as mediator cum negotiator in the bank that had earned double ‘A’ his respect. It was his sincere love for banking, his adept skills at selling and his perseverance at preserving relationships with the people or corporations whose accounts he managed. He had won over to the bank some of the biggest accounts the bank warehoused and his skills at keeping after-office-hours relationships with his customers had been so good that his wife of four years was the daughter of one of his customers with whom he had been very close. Yet, as close as he might be to his customers and his colleagues, Ayokunle was a man of excellence. He would never compromise sound judgment for anything. His co-workers and customers knew him not to be equivocal. If Ayokunle said it, then he would do it: and if by chance he could not deliver as promised, even you would reason with him on why he could not and you would definitely see it his way. His banking career had started off as a fluke and more often than not, when he read his life backwards, Ayokunle believed that providence had had a hand in putting him where he was today.
He had studied engineering at the university and had put in for a career in engineering. After applying to two firms and not getting any response, he eventually got a job with an oil servicing firm, BDS oils, as a contract staff. He had worked there for only a brief period of one year but the chief executive, Otunba Adesoji Badmus, had had cause to commend him on his excellent performance even in that short period. Excellence at anything he did had always been his hallmark.

Shortly before the expiration of the contract agreement, double ‘A’ had had cause to follow a friend to an interview conducted by the ‘Horizon’ and he had waited in one of these same lobbies he had now become very familiar with for his friend to finish. While waiting, a bank staff had approached him to ask him if he also came for the test and he had politely responded that he didn’t. As fate would have it, one more slot was free as one of the short listed candidates for the test had not showed up for the test and the bank staff who, co-incidentally, was the test supervisor from the human resource development department had encouraged him to write the test and come later with his credentials. It had all seemed funny to double ‘A’ because a career in banking was the last thing on his mind. However, because of his aptitude for learning and his attitude to challenges he decided to take on the exam. Not with a goal of getting employed but more from a desire to show that he could sit for a test totally unprepared and still manage to pass.
The test had gone well and his friend had been surprised that double ‘A’ had written the test with them. Time passed and he had almost forgotten about the whole adventure when the Horizon bank recruitment department notified him of his brilliant performance in the tests and asked him if he could be scheduled for an interview. Co-incidentally the banks offer came as the contract stint he was doing with BDS oils was winding down. Only if BDS had retained him, he wouldn’t have been where he was today. But somehow at that time, the firm was overstaffed and didn’t need his services. He went for the corresponding series of interviews and ended up as a bank executive as a trainee in accounts management. Ironically though, his friend had never passed the first stage of the interview.
Double ‘A’ had apprenticised under a senior account manager and had quickly learnt the ropes. The first step he took after his one year internship period was approach Otunba Adesoji, his former boss with an offer of managing the accounts of BDS. Otunba Adesoji had laughed it off in his antiquated office as a joke and had not taken double ‘A’ seriously. Double ‘A’ however had requested that Otunba introduce him to some of his other friends in the business and Otunba had obliged him almost reluctantly.
Contrary to all expectations, double ‘A’ had a natural bent for understanding businesses and creating business solutions through the banks products. The first few businesses he handled had blown out of proportions to become mega businesses in a space of two years. Double ‘A’ had structured some winning credit portfolios from which the coffers of both the bank and his customers cum Otunba’s friends had both swelled in the aftermath. Not until Otunba heard this did he decide to entrust the wealth of three generations into the hands of his one time contract employee. And that singular decision had had such ripple effect that neither BDS nor Horizon had expected the profit deluge that came in its wake. BDS had grown from its modest closet operations and had successfully floated its stock in one of the most successful initial public offering the oil servicing industry had ever witnessed and that became the prologue to double A’s success story in the bank which kept rising higher unlike the lift he was riding in at present which was taking him down to the eighth floor.

His mind roamed ever so slightly as he stole a glance at his reflection in the left wall of the lift’s polished steel sides; He wasn’t bad looking at all he concluded almost narcissistically catching the reflection of a rather busty bank executive who had her eyes on a handsome executive who stood to double A’s right all the while in the lift cage. She was standing behind him and he could feel her breadth slightly and a whiff of the cologne she wore. Luckily for Double A, she had been so preoccupied with the ‘look-look’ business that she had not noticed him observe her in the reflection. Double A’s smile coyly at the thought of ‘knocking her off’, a slang he had coined for his many ‘sexcapades’. If there was one vice that he knew would ruin him, it was women. He never drank nor smoked but all he lost in the other two dimensions, he gained in the last. He had earned a reputation as a Casanova of some sort among his friends and the news had filtered into the many ‘toilet and lobby conversations’ of the ladies in the bank. This reputation and his popularity in the bank had made a killer combination that made him irresistible to the women.
However, his mind was on bigger fish for now, he didn’t have the time to kill on ‘knocking off’ but he would remember to make contact and keep it in the cooler for another day.

3:00
As the lift came to a halt on the sixth floor, the occupants of the tiny recess poured out into the lift lobby en masse and trickled off in different directions like little mecury pellets and double A intentionally but making it seem accidental, collided with the busty operative.
‘Ouch! She reacted, not expecting the collision and double A went straight for the kill not sparing her the time to think.
‘I am very sorry’, he responded apologetically, holding the rather bemused lady on both shoulders feeling her bra hasps from beneath the cotton shirt and looking her over to see if she was hurt but in actuality ‘taking stock’ of the goods.
‘Hope I didn’t hurt you’. He spoke caringly, taking his hands off her shoulders now
‘I am sorry I had a lot on my mind’.
Peering closer at her name tag and the strain beneath the fitted shirt he delivered his coup de grace.
‘Sandra, am I right? You can call me ‘Double A’
The lady flushed a bit at the name, obviously recognizing the name of the Horizon champion most of them had heard about but had never seen.
‘Don’t worry’, she replied aloofly. ‘I am not hurt but maybe you should be a bit more careful next time’
Double A, responded apologetically, as they both walked their separate ways. He had her details by now: The department she worked in was on the left wing of the sixth floor. When the time came he would set up another ‘accidental’ meeting and seal the deal. He strode the length of the floor nodding and mouthing greetings in the directions of his fellow colleagues, took the rear stairs two floors up, two steps at a time to his office on the eighth floor. Finally settling down at his desk, he brought out from his diary the conclusion of the meeting he had had with the executive and filed the document safely in a file tagged ‘New accounts’. Still consulting the open page of his worn diary, he checked out the remaining items on his ‘to-do’ list for the day and noticed that he had to call his wife. He then realized the reason why he had felt strangely uncomfortable after leaving the meeting. He had felt an incompleteness about him but could not place his finger on what was missing. Not until now did he realize that he had locked up his mobile phone in his drawer on his way to the meeting.

After an embarrassing encounter with the MD/ CEO, Hajara Sherrif (OFR), where the alarm of his mobile phone had gone off despite the fact that he had switched it off, he knew better than to take a mobile phone with him on a serious meeting switched off or not.

He unlocked the first drawer and brought out the palm size gadget. He often referred to it as gadget because of the range of things he could do on this little wonder. Scrolling through the phone he realized he had almost twelve missed calls and he proceeded to see who and who had called while he was away.
His younger brother’s number had taken almost half of the missed calls and double A dismissed it knowing full well that the spoilt brat had exhausted his resources yet again. Further down, the name Otunba Badmus made him sit up. Three missed call from Otunba meant business. He temporarily dismissed the idea of calling his wife as he dialed the link on the missed calls list to get in touch with his biggest customer. The phone rang as double A listened angrily to the automated female voice of the voice mail service. He sighed and disconnected the line. He searched on his phone for the secretary’s mobile number and dialed. The familiar birdy voice of the secretary came on line obviously excited. She said Otunba was at a meeting and had given express instructions not to be disturbed but that they should both talk about more important things ‘jare’.
Double A had ensured strict compliance in following the first rule of marketing: Winning over the prospects’ secretary. And he had won this one over totally. He had flirted coyly with the beautiful but naïve secretary every time he paid Otunba a visit during the period he was trying to convince him to allow Horizon bank for BDS. Unfortunately for Double A, the girl had taken it all for real both bait and line and he had decided to keep up the act. If not for a personal credo not to mix business with pleasure, he would have ‘knocked her off’ over and over again but he barely refrained himself from doing so. And more so, he didn’t want any complications in his interactions with his ‘A’ grade customers. Double A thought otherwise about dropping a message for Otunba, he would rather see him in person. He thanked the lady secretary promising to drop by to check her later in the afternoon, throwing in the last line for effect. Apparently the line hit home as the excited secretary made him promise to bring her something when coming and started out on how she had missed him and so on. At the other end Double A kept up the act until he could wriggle free of the emotional clasps and found a way of bailing out on the call. He scrolled through the other numbers on the missed call list instantly brushing the thoughts of the secretary off his mind but he did not identify any other of the missed calls. It must have been his brother trying to make calls from a pay phone he concluded. He would respond to the little chap later but for now, he would have to get to BDS before the close of day as what would make Otunba call him thrice meant serious business. Clearing off his table he realized he still had not called his wife. He would find time later he thought. Though he made it a habit to call his wife everyday and give her the affection she required, he did not feel any love for the woman or any other woman at all. As far as he was concerned they were all the same. What kept him dedicated to his wife despite his numerous flings ironically was more of a personal decision to keep his home and also as a business responsibility he felt he owed his father-in-law who also doubled as one of his top five customers.
Feeling for his car keys and carefully slipping his mobile into the inner pocket of his suit Double A locked the drawers and double checked for any idle piece of paper before exiting the office bound for the BDS towers about five blocks away. Seven floors beneath, in the expansive reception of the Horizon, a bare-foot balding man sticking out of the crowd like a sore thumb, attired in a white soutane slightly damp at the frills but still spotting white, entered into the banking hall with a bible in his hand and only one thing on his mind.
3:00Mustapha Ganiyu peeped from his spy-hole of an office a half floor above cash café’s waiting room and observed that there was a crowd gathering in the Horizon. The after-rain-rush coupled with the before-closing-hours rush was maddening and also straining for the limited operatives meant to service the customers; considering the service delivery promise of the Horizon bank to attend to any customer within the space of five minutes. Mustapha stood from his desk, closed his copy of ‘The one-minute perception’ (a book, supplied by the management, which all the horizon staff had been mandated to read) and slid into his comfortable jacket proceeding to lend a helping hand in the café beneath. Not that he loved to read or bothered to read at all. It was just that any staff could be called upon on meeting days to give a brief talk on one of the chapters and so everyone tried to be prepared as no one knew where next the fingers would point. He swiped some loose sheets of paper to one side of his cluttered desk and made a feeble attempt to restore some order to the chaos in the little cubicle, then locked it up and eased himself gently down the steel stairs into the crowded café.
Having worked at the marina café for a little over one year, he knew a large percentage of the regular customers and had even had cause at one point or the other to relate with some of them after office hours. As he stepped into the expansive waiting room, some of the familiar faces waved to him to get his attention and he strode across the room in their direction taking care to avoid the easy chairs, potted plants, glass tables and waiting customers that took up a substantial part of the interiors. He greeted the waiting customers as he traversed the hall and directed the indoor security personnel to usher out those who no longer had business within the café so as to reduce the crowd. Walking up close he exchanged greetings with the regulars and asked how he could be of assistance. After a few minutes he had all their financial instruments in his possession and proceeded to distribute them to the operatives who had their cubicles at the back office and who did the bulk of the cash transaction processing. He however noticed an uncommon face: a clergy man standing between the waiting chairs not having an idea of what or where to proceed to. Mustapha assumed him to be one of the new customers who were not used to the mode of operations at the Horizon judging him from the confused look on his face.


‘Hello sir, can I be of any assistance to you’? He asked mechanically.
‘Yes’. The man answered.
‘I wan catch ‘sheck’? He grunted in scattered Pidgin English.
Having concluded he was either an illiterate or semi-literate professor of the Cele creed, Mustapha switched to his Hausa variation of Pidgin English so as to make himself understood.
‘Wey the check? He asked the man, who took out a neat check leaf from the middle of a worn bible and gave it to him.
‘You get any identity card with you?’
‘Yes, Oga’ the man replied and also extracted from the centre page of the holy book a relatively new national driver’s license as his means of identification. Mustapha scanned for the essentials and verified that the man’s name as indicated on the Identity card was the same as the name of the payee written on the check. He however did not fail to notice the neat cursive in which the check had been written. Taking a look at the familiar signature and the account name he confirmed his guess to be right. The writing could only belong to Otunba Badmus of BDS oils. Otunba was one of their most favorite customers. He rarely came to the bank but whenever Otunba had cause to come to the bank, all the staff knew it would ‘rain’ that day as he never left without doling out money to the operatives that attended to him.
Pointing to a green easy chair in the corner, whose former occupant had just been paid and was about leaving, Mustapha asked the reverend gentleman to please sit as he would be attended to in no time. Judging from the man’s dressing and his appearance Mustapha concluded he should be one a pastor in one of these white garment churches purported to be frequented by some of these Lagos ‘Big men’. Even his boss who for a long time had been rumored to be a major funder of one of these holy empires had confirmed Mustapha’s suspicion one day when he had sent down a personal check through Mustapha to be paid into the accounts of one of the cherubim or celestial orders. Mustapha was unclear which one now but he remembered having marveled at the amount his boss had been parting with in the name of tithes.

As a Muslim, he often marveled at the scams that were perpetrated in the name of new-age religion. He observed miracles on television and could not help but snide at the circus he saw. What however irked him the most was the gullibility of some of those he considered the intelligentsia of the society and the professed leaders of industry. He had often argued his points over and over with his colleagues up to the point of being labeled an atheist, at which point he resorted to keeping his opinions to himself.
Taking a look at the amount written on the check, he just shook his head as if the figure confirmed his inner musing. Why would anyone pay so much to these obvious charlatans when stark poverty stared us all in the face day in day out anywhere one looked? Why would God reserve the right to disbursement of His own funds to certain people on earth? He could not hide his feelings at the thought of this huge scam. What was his problem anyway? If anybody was wise enough to make enough money for himself, he should be wise enough to know who to spend it for.
He however did not fail to admit to himself jokingly that the man bore a semblance to Otunba Badmus with his balding pate and his stout appearance.

Armed with the BDS check in addition to the several checks and slips he had earlier collected from the other customers, he crossed the waiting hall, smiling at his private joke and went in through a jalousie door set in aluminum and glass partitioning to the back office where the processing of the transactions took place. The frenetic activity taking place in the back office closely imitated termite activity in a busy mound.
The posting operatives, who logged the transactions on the computers where smashing away at the keyboards as the collecting operatives, who collected the instruments from the customers dumped more and more of financial instruments on the posting desks and carted more and more cash away. Mustapha remembered his own days as a posting operative and could easily empathize with the operatives. Most of the posting operatives had their sleeves rolled up, both men and women; and had long since traded their office shoes for more comfortable pairs of slippers. The pancaked and rouged faces of the women had lost its sheen and the countenance of the men had dimmed proportionally to the work stress. Totally oblivious to the soft music that streamed in from the concealed speakers in the ceiling, the bottom-deck operatives fed in the coal that ran the great financial turbines of the Horizon.
Mustapha scanned the room for the operative with the lowest pile of financial instruments and on sighting one, dumped the instruments and the identity cards in his possession with an operative about three tables from the partition and instructed another collecting operative to make sure that as soon as the transactions were consummated he should pay the recipients and remember to return their identity cards.
He bided his time in the back office a while, watching the collecting operatives coming in and going out of the perpetually swinging jalousie while at the same time observing the crowd condition in the waiting hall through the one-way glass partition. The crowd was gradually thinning now and the indoor security personnel were doing an excellent job of ensuring smooth flow of customers in and out of the café.

Aderopo was not comfortable at all in the padded cushion easy chair and air conditioned interiors but he kept his face straight and maintained his pious look. He unconsciously rubbed the gold cross around his neck from time to time like a lucky charm while keeping an eye out for the man that collected his check and the forged drivers license he presented expecting to see him arrive with the money. Perching on the edge of the chair, his eyes fixed on the jalousie, he watched operative after operative go back and forth yet identifying none of them as the man that had attended to him. To Aderopo, each second counted like a minute as he kept time with the tick-tock of the large clock in the reception. He tried to calm down but the tempest within him raged too fiercely as it did at the point of extreme pleasure or fear. His palms sweated slightly, moistening the paperback bible he held tightly in his left hand and warming the metallic cross he gripped in his right as slight beads of sweat started to form on his brow. His bladder which had earlier feigned calm also begun to nag too.
Aderopo felt the last pang of guilt even hard men like him still felt at the point of doing wrong; more like the last thoughts of an unshriven dying man. Maybe he should not have taken this decision? What if he was caught today? What if he became rich beyond his dreams? A torrent of the dialectics of right or wrong barraged him on both sides; his conscience on one and Reason on the other side as the preceding events that led up to the present moment played itself out in his mind.

Amire Olufunto! Amire Olufunto! The collecting operative called out into the expansive waiting hall, reading from the check leaf in his hand while carrying in his other hand a neat package of the money he was delivering to the beneficiary. After about eight times of calling out the payee’s name and no one responded, the collecting operative went back into the back office to inform Mustapha Ganiyu that the beneficiary was not within the premises. With the train of thoughts in his mind and his eyes fixed on the jalousie, Aderopo failed to realize that his name had been called.
3:17

His thoughts trailed to how the twists of fate had led his steps to this particular place and he could not help but conclude that somewhere beyond the wildest imaginations of man there was a grand design for every intention, every thought and every decision which not only existed in isolation but was closely linked to the lives of others around them.
Pt 2
Aderopo parked his truck for the day at the drivers’ dock and handed over the truck keys to the janitor at the shed like he did every working day; signing off at the register and proceeding to the locker room to change into his own clothes. Initially the shipping firm had allowed the drivers to come in their own white shirts and black trousers but after a hard time in trying to define what the color White really looked like, the management had decided to purchase the work clothes themselves and maintain it rather than make it laissez-faire.
He hung his white shirt in the drawer and slammed it shut revealing the bold number 45 that was grilled in white on the grey locker.
Anytime he saw the number 45 he would lapse into pity at the thought of his life. His bus had had the same number and ironically just a few months before he resumed work at the shipping firm he had celebrated, though poor and alone, his 45th birthday. The number really had encapsulated the worst of his existence and nothing more.
Locking the grill and putting the keys away on the key rings that stood at the entrance of the locker room he looked back into the locker lined walled enclosure of the space and at the other different drivers in different stages of undress: some chatting while others just undressed in silence taking mental stock of their lives at least as Aderopo thought. He was about shutting the door to head back home when he heard the question that altered his destiny and dictated the series of events that now played in his head in rewind.

Someone in the changing room had been telling a story of how one of his friends had stumbled upon someone who had a fraud check to cash and had asked whether He, was interested in doing the job. He said he had laughed the person away and told him that the closest he could come to crime was siphoning off some fuel from the company bus he drove and re-selling it. ‘Anything apart from that, me I no dey o’, the man had said, opening his two palms upwards in front of him as he and two other co-drivers who were his audience burst into raucous laughter echoing off the ‘lockered’ walls of the changing room.
‘Abi you wan do am make I introduce you to the person?’, he had asked his two friends on a serious note. Both of whom just resumed the laughter, in a higher gear.
Aderopo had held the door ajar for what seemed an eternity: the drone of the talking trio sounding somewhere behind his thoughts. He had seen seriousness cross the story teller’s face when he asked the question and he had noticed that both his friends cum audience had not taken it seriously.
Though he was not one to commit crime at any serious level, Aderopo found himself, still holding the door, thinking seriously about it. His eyes, lost in thought trailed again to the number 45 on his locker and many thoughts he could not isolate sloshed about his confused mind.

‘Oga, abeg commot for road I wan pass’, said a driver who had been waiting behind Aderopo waiting for him to make up his mind on whether he wanted to leave or come back into the locker room. Not until then did Aderopo come back to the present.
He waived the thought off his mind and mouthed some apologies to the other driver in the doorway before taking his leave for the staff canteen that was housed in a make-shift container shed a stone throw from the drivers changing room. He was not a thief

‘You are not a thief’, his grandmother said to him holding his two tiny arms in her own strong ones and forcing him to open his mouth by pressing his cheeks hard on both sides, making him involuntarily spit out the piece of meat he had stolen from her pot, which he had been caught chewing.

Aderopo was 7 years old and had been caught red handed at the clay pot of soup in the backyard kitchen where his grandmother fed him and the rest of the adopted children that lived in her house. He was the smallest of the children and had been his grandmothers favourite. She always doted on him and loved to tickle him in the ribs until tears streamed out of his eyes in laugther. But that very day she had caught him with the meat in his mouth, even Aderopo had felt terribly bad. Though a child, he understood or at least could feel what betrayal of trust meant and that day he knew he had betrayed the love the old woman had for him.

He spat the half chewed piece of meat into her hands and frowned his face, resolute at the beating that he was certain would follow. Unexpectedly, his grandmother had not even lifted her hands at all. She led him into the dark, earthen interior of the hut where they all slept and sat him down on the raffia mat where the children often sat to listen to her stories when it rained outside.
Then she repeated again in the native language. ‘Deropo, you are not a thief’
‘I can beat you now for stealing this piece of meat and I am sure you will cry and promise me never to do it again. I can even tell your grandfather when he comes back from the farm and only God knows what he would do to you; but I won’t. Do you know why I won’t? Because you are not a thief ‘Deropo’, you are a good boy and I know you will always be.

He could remember all this vividly as an older man because as a child it became a turning point in his life. Even when he ran the gutters with other rough necks in the terrible corridors of Lagos, he never stole because whenever he considered it, the look on the old woman’s face as it emerged from the shadows of the hut and every word she said that day would come to his mind and he would even say it out loud to himself.
‘Deropo, o o kin sole’, you are no thief
And the thought came now and again as he sat to eat his first meal for the day in the canteen. Only if he had known that his appetite would forsake him, he would not have bothered wasting his meager funds on the Eba he loved so much which at the moment tasted like wood bark.

He stirred the soup for a while not knowing what to do with it when the man who had been talking in the locker room walked in alone without his two friends. Aderopo’s heartbeat skipped and started a race only rivaled by the pace of the village athletes he enjoyed watching in the communal playgrounds when he was younger.

The man walked to the food seller’s stand that stood at a soot blackened corner of the container and made his order. As he was about to sit and wait for the food vendor to bring his food, Aderopo stood up and walked to one of the six benches in the container where the man was planning to sit and sat opposite him. A bit startled, the man stood and looked quizzically at Deropo before sitting down, all the while not saying anything.

‘I go do it’ Aderopo blurted out.
‘wetin you wan do?’ asked the man quizzically.
‘So you sabe talk. I thinks say you be deaf and dum before o?’
(this an allusion to the fact that Aderopo all times kept to himself in the driver’s shed. he never talked to anyone and neither had friends nor enemies in the group)

Aderopo ignored the snide remark and continued.
‘I hear wetin you tuk for inside wardrobe today. The one for the sheck wey you talk say your person want catch. I go do am. I fit do am’
The man cocked his head to one side first with an unnoticeable smile on his face which gradually faded into seriousness again. Just the same fleeting impression Aderopo had noticed on his face in the locker room. The only difference was just that this time the impression lasted longer and the two men just looked at each other for what felt like a long time before the man talked again.
‘Madam wey my food?’
Deropo could not understand why the man ignored him or why the man chose to alter the course of the discussion he was trying to start but he just kept looking at the man who kept looking back to. It seemed from a distance like a telepathic war going on between both parties. Something like what the magicians that performed at the ogun festivals would do until one just dropped dead.
But neither dropped dead
The man asked Aderopo if he was sure he could do it and upon affirmation requested that he finish his food before they went to meet the person who had the check in his custody.

Every other thing from that point smudged in one big blurry picture. Aderopo and the man had boarded an okada at the company gate and had met the man at a mechanic yard off one of the major Apapa streets. They had gone straight to business and the man had set out the rules of engagement for which each of the parties will be bound. However before any discussion he had insisted that the newcomer, which was Aderopo, swear never to let anyone in on the discussion and never to fail to deliver his side of the bargain, which if he did would leave him tongue tied after which he would lapse into an epileptic fit which would end his life.
Aderopo agreed and the man brought out a calabash of what looked like blood and flesh and made him swear, telling him some incantations to recite while he swore. He then laid it all out on the table.

Aderopo was meant to go to the bank under the guise of a cleric to cash the check and take the money to a place they would describe to him. On delivery his share would be a set out portion of the value of the check. He will be provided with the costume needed for the operation and the means of identity with which he would be identified in the bank. They had given him a bible and a cassock: a soutane of the cele design, and a gold cross.

Later that evening, for the first time in his life Aderopo felt lost. He had sworn to go ahead with the operation yet sitting on his pad that night he could not sleep. He had never been involved in serious crime before and in his hurried decision earlier that afternoon he had not considered the odds at all. Now in the solitude of his thoughts and quietude of the small room, the reality and gravity of the situation seemed larger than life.
He had become a criminal even though the act had not been committed.
He looked at the pile of clothes in the center of the moonlit room, the bible and the gold plated cross that slumped lazily over the pile and he felt a pang of guilt and shame as the face of his grandmother crossed his mind again.
‘Deropo, o o kin sole’
3:00
PART II
Waiting area filled to bursting, human stench pungently strong, noise at its most vulgar, Amaya entered into the police station at about a ten minutes to three.
The din in the room was deafening. He had never been in a police station before but even so, he had not expected anything as rowdy as this. Standing in the choked waiting lobby in the middle of about fifty screaming persons, Amaya couldn’t help but watch in dismay. He noticed that most of the noise was coming from a particular woman in one corner of the waiting area. She was restrained by two huge men and two policemen were trying to drag her free from their grasp. She was screaming at the top of her voice,
‘Asawo, Asawo’
at the two police officers as the huge men tried to calm her down while fending off the two policemen who looked hell bent on taking her into their custody. Even the prisoners behind bars in the visible make shift cells adjacent to the waiting lobby were not left out of the ‘fun’ as from time to time, they would inject innuendoes and drown it in raucous laughter. The remaining people in the police station lobby, mostly women in small clusters, either seemed to be supporting the irate woman, gossiping or watching the unfolding drama like Amaya, who just stood there trying to make sense of the fray. All eyes focused on the ‘banshee’ and her two appendage arms fending off the irate policemen.
Piecing the story together from all he sides, Amaya learnt that the woman was a prostitute, who engaged the services of her clients at a brothel nearby and the two huge men were her brothers. The policemen had arrested her on a raid that afternoon and her brothers had come with her to prevent her from being locked up. From her screams, the woman claimed to have been giving the policemen money on earlier raids but insisted that she had had it up to the throat and was not willing to part with her hard earned money anymore. The struggling policemen argued loudly claiming they had never collected money from her before. After a torrent of abuses she would interject
‘Asawo!’
clapping at the faces of the two policemen who would resume their quest earnestly at stowing her away. Amaya noticed that there were other prostitutes in the lobby in different stages of nudity who were also protesting the undue extortion by the law enforcement agents. Amaya, confused, scouted around for someone he could report his case to and saw a rather young officer behind the counter who also stood there watching, as confused as Amaya was.
‘Officer’, Amaya approached the boy shouting at the top of his voice to be heard.
‘Officer, please where can I place a report?
Noticing that the boy did not pay any attention to him, he inched closer and rapped loudly on the wooden counter dividing them.
‘Office…. er!’
Before he could complete the word, the boy barked down from behind the desk bringing out a pale looking baton with a large part of the black paint coating haven peeled off.
‘I talk say I no hear you?’,
if you take that your dirty hand touch this counter again, I go arrest you and carry you throway for one of these rooms wey dey here. (This he gesticulated with his baton waving it in the direction of the howling inmates straining from behind bars to watch the show)
Amaya, caught off guard by the response, withdrew his hands quickly, only to notice that the policeman had gone back to observing the one-woman act.
Amaya stood there confused not knowing how to get the boy officer’s attention without offending him. After a while, contemplating his options, the officer looked in his direction as if he had an inkling to the war being waged in Amaya’s head.
‘Wetin you talk say be your problem?’ He shouted, as the noise level in the room reduced unexpectedly making majority of the people in the room turn in their direction.
‘Oga, I beg’, Amaya continued in lower key, to the now embarrassed officer, ‘I misplaced a check yesterday and I suspect it is with someone that lives in my area’
‘So, wetin you wan make I do now? Make we come arrest am?’
The still embarrassed policeman asked bringing out a sheet of letter head paper with the Nigerian Police Force logo emblazoned at the top of the sheet.
‘You go write statement and then you go take us go the place to arrest the man, but for that one, you go pay o!’

Amaya, unsure of what he heard asked reflexively, ‘Pay?’
The noise in the little lobby had reduced by now as the woman had finally been pacified. Obviously overwhelmed by the extortion claims of the woman and the strong solidarity of the other prostitutes, the two policemen were finally ceding ground. Some of the higher rank policemen who were earlier trying to restore some order now proceeded back to their various offices to resume normal duties. One of the officers who was obviously higher in rank came by the counter desk as the young officer straightened up and gave a quick salute.
‘Shon, sir!’
‘Who is this man and what does he want?’ asked the older officer in clipped tones.
‘Oga he say he loss check and he wan come make we go arrest the suspect, I don give am statement form make e fill’
Turning to Amaya, he asked,
‘Have you filled the statement form?
‘Amaya, still unsure of whether he had heard ‘Pay’ or not, was about to ask the bespectacled elder officer why he had to pay, when he caught a glimpse of the younger officer behind the older officer making an eye as if to say ‘please don’t ask!’
Amaya understood the drill now. It was not characteristic for the police to collect any money. The young officer had unilaterally made the decision to ask for money and was going to be in serious trouble if found out. Amaya considered it split second and felt it made more sense to make a friend out of the rouge officer than an enemy so he just let it go and answered ‘No.’ to the older officer’s question

‘Alright, write a statement explaining the events that transpired between you and the suspect.’
‘If there is no substantial evidence tendered before us I hope you know we will not be able to make any arrest’ the older man intoned.
He put in words the events of the day before and the Phone call conversation he overheard in a statement to the police.
After he was through with the statement he handed it to the older officer and waited as the man’s large eyes magnified through the glasses lens made pendulous swings across the face of the neat writing on the documents

‘I am sorry but overhearing a conversation is not sufficient proof by which an arrest can be made. What we can do for you is make an investigation into the matter since we now have the details of the suspect you claimed stole your check. However, I can not guarantee you that we will be not able to round it up as quickly as you might expect so in the meantime I will suggest that you do a police report on the missing check and present it quickly to the bank so as to stop payment and also apprehend whoever shows up to cash it.’
Amaya wanted to insist that at least the officers follow him back to accost Japaul but he knew that his position was a weak one: At least he appreciated that the officer had been empathic.
‘Get him a report form and stop looking like an idiot’, the older officer barked at the gaping young man in black standing a half step behind him
Quickly the young man produced another piece of paper from under the counter desk and proceeded to show Amaya how to go about filling the report requisition form.

Amaya picked up the pen offered him by the younger officer and proceeded to fill in the form. When he got to CHECK DETAILS he found out that he had not made a copy of the check upon receipt and so he didn’t have any information apart from the fact that he guessed the account name will be BDS or something like that. Asking the younger police officer on what he should write since he didn’t have the required information, the man told him to skip as many portions as he could not remember or that he didn’t know and fill the rest.
After completing a rather sparsely completed form, he handed it back to the younger officer who looked through it and handed it over to the higher ranking officer. After looking through the form, the superior officer called another officer who had earlier been a key actor in resolving the prostitute’s revolution and asked him to prepare the report.
At about a quarter past three, Amaya walked out of the police station with much appreciation from the superior officer but not feeling any better than he walked in.
Flagging down a cab, he called the bus stop closest to the Marina Horizon
3:15
After waiting over an hour in traffic, Amaya looked at the long line of cars in front of him and knew that taking the cab had been a wrong decision. He wondered when he would get to the towers whose topmost floors he could now see in a distance from the smoked enclosure of the cab. The boot of the vehicle had not been locked properly and the exhaust fumes had found its way back into the cab causing irritations and a stinging sensation to the eyes of the six passengers in the vehicle. The only person that seemed to be oblivious of the smell or the discomfort was the driver who lashed out and cursed as he cut in and out of any little space left to maneuver in the gridlock. Amaya could not help feeling sorry for a baby strapped behind the heavily bleached mother who was crying continuously, obviously from the discomfort he felt. After futile attempts at pacifying the nagging child, the mother proceeded to give the little thing a beating, hitting him hard three or four times on the rump from behind as the infant yelled the more. Worsening the case, the renewed scream of the child increased the discomfort Amaya felt in the already too-tight metal box of a cab.
Amaya studied the shabby interiors of the cab and wondered why such contraptions still remained on the roads as the transportation vehicle of choice. Maybe there was no choice at all. Maybe it was just a matter of convenience. On the windscreen of the vehicle were various colors of felt tip marker inscriptions which looked like abstract codes and trellised patterns of cracks spreading from more than two positions seriously reducing the visibility of the driver. Even Amaya who was wedged directly behind the driver’s seat seemed not to see anything through the vein of cracks and area boys’ inscriptions that traversed the windscreen. At the epicenter of the cracks, the driver had pasted stickers to prevent further faults. One of the stickers was an inscription of the NURTW while the other one read: _covered_blood_Jesus. Amaya filled in the fading blanks and shook his head at the joke. Even Jesus would not enter this kind of vehicle not to talk of insuring it.
The cab creaked and groaned every inch it moved in the standstill.
Amaya sneaked a peek at the watch of one of the two passengers who sat in front and concluded he had to do something otherwise he would not meet up with the bank before closing time.
Forfeiting the fare he had paid, he exited the cab in the middle of the ‘go-slow’, narrowly missing an okada man who otherwise would have been fatally wounded by the swing of the door as he opened it. The curses of the ‘okada’ man and his exhaust fumes trailed off in the distance as Amaya hailed down another bike urging the rider, a shabby looking juvenile (certainly Hausa from his looks), to do his best to get to the bank before closing time. He could not help feeling sorry for the crying infant in the vehicle who was being indoctrinated into the harshness of city existence from infancy and whose crying he could see but could no longer hear as the bike boy sped off through the middle of the gridlock.

Double A strolled into the BDS office headquarters at a few minutes past three with a little gift pack in his hands and a smile.
After he had left the Horizon, he had noticed the long line of vehicles stuck in traffic on the opposite lane on which the BDS office was situated and he had logically dismissed the thought of taking the marketing car choosing to walk instead. In hindsight he had appreciated the walk in the clear air as it had refreshed him after the endless hours of breathing in the Air-conditioned oxygen inside the Horizon and also had given him cause to remember to get something on the way for his crush at BDS.
Greeting the guards at the entrance, Double A noticed that they were not the regular faces he usually saw. He asked after one or two of the old timers and he learnt that they had resigned. That had also been the same story he encountered when a totally new officer unknown to him had shown up at the bank with confirmation letters and it had caused a bit of a confusion. The rapid turnover of staff at the BDS these days was unbecoming. Not that it left a negative impression on the BDS balance sheet which was most important to him, but somehow Double A felt a need to discuss it with Otunba as banker and friend once they could both come around to talking about it. He crossed over into the lift lobby and rode one of the lifts quietly to Otunba’s floor with two men and one woman all corporately dressed. He knew they were bank executives judging from their lapel pins and he knew they were marketers judging from their folders and proud countenance. He sneered mischievously at the thought of the other marketers trying to get their share of the BDS empire. It was a constant struggle for relevance for him. If only he had not been Double A, he might have been threatened but even Otunba would know better than entrusting his life into the hands of any other marketer of any other bank at all. ‘Pride, pride,’ he thought jokingly ‘If you wont blow your own trumpet who else will?’
The lift rode quietly along side three others that serviced the BDS building but unlike the other three, this one only conveyed one person: the most important person in the building. Otunba tried to gather his thoughts on the short meeting he had had with the labor union. It had always been the same story since his inauguration as the manager of the BDS empire. He had been called many names, many of which had filtered into his keen ears and it had all been centered on the pittance the staff claimed he paid them.
‘How could he blame them? Was it not the new money flaunting oil servicing firms that gave his staff cause to call him ‘Otunba Badboss’? Not with the mega salaries the latter paid to keep their staff loyal. In his father’s time, how much had been staff remuneration relative to revenue? People were getting lazier by the day! All they bothered about was the size of the paycheck not even the job at hand to be done or how much they contributed to the collective success of the company. Materialism and vanity have taken over all moral ideals and all everyone talked about was money, money, money. Gone were the days of honor in labor’…. His thoughts trailed to the sincere and angry look on the faces of the members of the labor union and he could not help feeling manipulative about the whole situation.

He had been quiet as the spokesmen for the labor union presented his position virulently on behalf of the staff and all he could think about was the deceptiveness and the extreme greed of man. Just yesterday the same man had dined with him at a select low key restaurant for privacy sake and had given Otunba a blueprint of the unions’ plans: a barter Otunba repaid with a mere one hundred thousand naira check. Only if the gullible sheep of a union could see their leader at that moment, they probably would have hung the Judas to a stake and picked his skin clean off his bones. What thrilled Otunba the most at the meeting was how ignorantly oblivious the rest of the staff were and how much faith they had put into this one man. ‘Anyway it was an advantage for him’ he thought. If there was any lesson he had learnt from his shrewd father, it was to identify the lead sheep early and cull it, playing on its greed, before it starts calling the shepherd to order. He knew what he had to do. As soon as tempers calmed he would release a red herring for a salary upgrade and proceed to fire the point men he considered a risk on the basis of not being productive. After then he would hire experienced set of staff from other companies lured by the herring and they would start the whole round all over again.
Poor people! He thought as the lift slowed down and jerked characteristically to a halt leading the bald man into his aging reception.

On sighting Otunba, the three men and lady stood up on impulse and jointly chorused greetings. Otunba responded politely offering a handshake to the smiling group before putting his arms around ‘Wonder boy’, as he was fond of calling Double A, leading him into his office but making sure to tell his somewhat excited secretary to take care of the other visitors while they waited.
‘Wonder boy’, ki ni gbogbo nkan? Otunba code switched to the Yoruba tongue he preferred to use when he was with friends.
‘Mo wa sir!’ replied Double A with a hint of respect in his voice.
‘I tried calling you today, ibo lo gbe phone e si?’, asked Otunba, patting him on the back and waving him to a couch in the sitting area beside the grandfather clock as a took his favorite divan seat.
‘That is why I came sir, I saw your missed calls and I was wondering why you called three times. Sorry I was at a meeting at that time and by the time ti mo ma a fi pe yin pada, your phone was switched off and secretary yin nipe e fee ki anybody disturb yin’

Hissing, Otunba replied settling down into his chair, ‘Ma da awon Labor union lohun, I was at a meeting with them. Everyday ni won ma n bere wage increase, awon alainisese gbogbo.’
‘Anyway’, continued Otunba, ‘I called you to help me stop a check I issued out yesterday, the boy, the payee just reported it missing so mo ni ki won to cash e jo bami stop e. Omo yen ti se wahala ju ki won gbe owo yen lo. Woo! ohun lo se calendar to wa ni ori shelf yen, he gestured toward the mantelpiece showing Double A the next-year calendar with a flowery design and BDS beautifully woven into the lacy design.
‘Se e mo check number yen, amount ati oruko eni ti e fe san owo yen fun?’, Double A asked bringing out his phone and scrolling to an ‘H’ icon, the Horizon enabled mobile solution that allowed him to access the bank’s system from his mobile phone.
‘Je kin bi accountant.’ Otunba replied as he stood up, crossed over to his desk, picked up one of the phones in the bigger cluster which now included the files he had earlier been working on, and dialed the company accountant. After a brief discussion he returned the chrome phone to the little heap beside the files on his table.

‘Check number is 15179’
‘Amount, 300,000’
‘Payee, Amire Olufunto’
Otunba ‘baritoned’ to ‘Wonder boy’, who was busy scrolling through his phone.

‘Soo gbo sa’, asked Otunba as Double A did not show any sign of having heard what he had said.
‘Oh sorry sir, mo n key in awon details yen lori phone mi ni. The bank staff will get it immediately it is sent.
‘O ga o’, Otunba responded marveling at the technology and how outdated he was gradually becoming. Soon he presumed machines will be replacing human beings.


After keying in the details of the missing check into the required spaces on the module from his phone, Double A hit the ‘Send’ button and settled down to discussing the issue of the rapid staff turnover at BDS with his former boss and favorite customer.
At exactly seventeen minutes past three, two phones beeped in the Horizon Marina cash café; one belonging to the sit-in customer service staff who was away from her desk, and the other to the white garment clergy man who seemed to be waiting too long for his money.

Aderopo dug deep into his white robes and tried to extract the beeping phone which had got entangled somewhere in the side pockets of the soutane. His impatience almost made him characteristically curse out loud when he couldn’t wrest the phone from the soutane. Eventually, he dug out the phone on the fourth beep and read the message. It was short and straight to the point.
Leave the bank. Now!
Goose pimples burst out under the robes and the heart behind the frozen Jesus on the cross of gold raced like a chariot army. For about a minute, Aderopo sat motionless, as pale as a ghost in the bustle of activity within the horizon. He was confused and his head banged from a virtual headache he had not felt a minute ago. How could he leave after having come this far? What was keeping the stupid bank official all the while? Hadn’t the man whom he had met at the mechanic shed assured him that even the commissioner of police would not have detected the identity card as a fake? He looked from the jalousie to the opening and closing security doors at the entrance and knew this was going to be a hard moment for him. It was a critical moment of decision. Should he follow the directions in the message or call the bluff?

Mustapha watched the man of God through the one way glass nervously. He had heard the operative call the name repeatedly yet there was not a flicker of recognition on the robed man’s face. Infact he had been staring in the direction of the operative as she announced the name yet not responding in that way anyone would upon hearing their name. He noticed the obvious displeasure on the man’s face at being kept waiting for so long and flipped the check over in his hands looking for any tell tale signs to indicate that the check was a fraud. As far as he could observe, the check was real. But what kind of man would not answer to his name he asked himself the umpteenth time. He peeped through the glass again to notice any tell tale signs of fidgeting often exhibited by fraudsters but he didn’t notice anything except that the ‘holy man’ was constantly looking at the back office door anytime any of the operatives came in or out. And that in itself was not cause for concern as that was what other customers did too, especially those who had not been paid. But ‘what kind of man forgets his name?’
He knew Otunba’s account mandate off hand and he saw no reason to seek a confirmation as the amount on the check was below the confirmation mandate on the account for BDS oils. He could tell Otunba’s signature merely by sight and as far as he was concerned, the signature was perfect. Yet something in him held back. In his dilemma he called up the account details for BDS oils, using the computer outlet of one of the posting operatives and confirmed what he was already sure about.
He could not understand.
Picking up the phone he dialed the eighth floor where the account officers for the banks prime accounts were ‘officed’ and he asked to speak with Double A who everyone knew managed the some of the most successful accounts in the bank. The central operator for the floor informed him that Double A had just stepped out of the office not long ago and she could not tell where in the building he was. As he was about completing the call, as furor arose in the horizon café just beyond the one-way glass.




The white garmented man had exhausted his store of patience and had stood up in the café shouting and asking for whoever had collected his check.
‘Which kind bank be dis sef?’ the man was shouting at the top of his voice. ‘I have dey here since morning and person just collect my sheck and go like that. ‘Tell am make e comot’, this he said pointing in the direction of the jalousie, ‘and give me my money or give me my check make I dey go. The shouting started so suddenly and unexpectedly that some of the customers who sat beside the green easy chair from which the man of God sat jumped up startled. The indoor security personnel and the sit-in customer service operative, who was about settling down to her desk, rose as if on cue to attend to the irate man and rescue the situation before it got out of hand.
Even Mustapha from behind the one-way was caught unawares by the outburst as he watched the squat man stomp about the cafe barefoot with the security man and the customer service officer in tow trying to calm him down.

Stomping around and raising hell in the cash cafe, Aderopo kept up the act till he saw the man who had collected his check make for the little gathering that had begun to grow around him. He noticed that all eyes were on him but he cared about nothing now except the money that lay beyond those glass walls and the possibility of it changing his life forever.
By now the appeasing parties had risen to four with the recent addition of Mustapha Ganiyu, making five. On seeing the cash officer, the security personnel and the customer service officer relaxed a bit ceding responsibility to Mustapha as two other regular customers of the bank struggled to keep the ‘pastor’ from venting his wrath.
To ease the atmosphere and buy back some form of sanity, Mustapha tried to calm the man down and escort him to his office but this proved abortive: Aderopo merely hissed pschew!.. and shook his head, clenching his free fist and folding his arms up with the bible across his chest.
Mustapha still confused in his mind did not know what to do. he knew that by all indications the man was not going to get off easily and also he knew he was bound to pay the man as all the requirements for a third party transaction had been met by the man. How then could he say that his being uncomfortable about the bearer was his reason for not paying. He kept turning the possibilities in his mind and for the first time that day the yoke of responsibility weighed heavily on his shoulders. If it was the time when he had not been promoted to the spy hole on the mezzanine he would have just been one of the onlookers from behind the one way glass and would have been having fun with the other operatives and easing the tension of the day but the ball was in his court now and play it he had to.
Taking a final moment of decision he decided to err on the side of caution as they had been taught to do in cases of doubt.
‘Oga, I am afraid we go return your check. Take it back to the person who has given it to you and tell him that we returned it’

The psychological atmosphere of the bank dimmed slightly as the ranting Aderopo was caught off guard with this announcement. For a while the robed man wore a quizzical expression on his face as if he was contemplating making a counter decision. As the seconds wore on, the silence in the café toned down to almost a whisper. Mustapha looked round to see the reason for the sudden calm and even the dazed Aderopo turned around to see what the cause for quiet was. The operatives and scampered beyond the jalousie and even the customer service officer who was busy observing the little drama between Mustapha and the robed man had smoothened her skirts and adopted the most professional look she could at the sight of him.
Striding down the central stairway into the reception towards the duo of Aderopo and Mustapha was the manager of the marina café in a bespoke grey jacket and patent leather shoes that reflected the glint of the ceiling lights above.

Dele McGregor was a man that looked like his name; Sophisticated and rich. He commanded a level of respect only few people commanded and he was the kind of person who walked into a gathering and stole the soul of that gathering without saying a word. He usually wore his hair slightly higher than most people and had a clean shave unrivalled among all the men in the Horizon. Rumor had it that his charms had once taken him to the top office and he had once had a fling with Hajara herself, whom most people heard but never saw. Whether true or apocryphal no one could say but however one saw it, Dele McGregor was a strongly attractive personality and that force had come with him to the café, mid discussion between Aderopo and the robed clergy man.
‘Good day sir’, Dele greeted the reverend gentleman with a beaming smile turning his attention to Mustapha, ‘What is the issue Mustapha?’
‘Oh nothing sir, its just a little challenge we are having’
‘What kind of challenge be that wey I don dey wait since morning. Tell yor oga since when you don collect my check from me. Tell am!’
‘Don’t worry pastor. Please wait just a little more I will see to it that you are well attended to’. Dele said, pulling out the green chair in which Aderopo had earlier been sitting for him to sit again.
‘I no sit, na my money I want’

‘Mustapha, can I see you in your office immediately?’ Dele said turning his attention to the cash officer.

The onlooking operatives who had been observing the scenario quickly wore the ‘busy’ garb as Dele Mcgregor led Mustapha to the spyhole office on the mezzanine.
Aderopo watched the suited executives walk up the stairs. He could not help thinking about how stupid his decision had been. Yet he had traded his life for this. It was either he walked out of the horizon with the money or he was arrested. He had come too far to go back. Neither the voice of reason nor the text on his phone, which felt heavier now in his soutane would deter him. This was the last gateway to success. He was not going to let it slide.

Mustapha closed the door gently after Dele Mcgregor and quickly did an emergency but inefficient re-organization of the cluttered office, pulling a chair for his boss to sit. Dele looked with utter disgust at the sty and ignored the chair and looked with disdain at Mustapha while trying to gather his thoughts.

‘What is this place Mustapha?’
‘Do you have any idea of the impact this disorganization can have on customer perception? And you call yourself the senior operative here?’
‘Is this how you run your life? Topsy-turvy and jumbled up? I think I will have to give you a query. That seems to be the only thing that makes people sit up around here. Why are you creating a jamboree in the café? What is the issue with the clergy man?
Dele switched the conversation in one breath.
‘The unnerved Mustapha not knowing either to answer the question first or beg his boss not to make his promise sure stuttered a bit but finally spluttering out the words while still trying to maintain his composure.
‘It’s about the check the pastor has presented. I am not comfortable with giving it value
Sir, he answered’.
At least you will tell me a reason for that?
‘yes, yes..yes sir, its that we actually called the man’s name for a while and the man was looking at….
‘who is the ‘we’?
‘Sorry sir, the paying operative who had his cash ready kept calling the man’s name in the cafe and it was as if the man could not recognize his own name. I was watching everything from the back office.
‘Are the details of the check ok? Has it been confirmed?-if it requires confirmation. Have you done the scanning to ensure it is a genuine check he has presented?
‘yes sir’
‘so why are you acting unprofessionally about this. The reason why the bank has put in all these checks is so that disorganized operatives like you will not whimsically decide or decide not to pay our esteemed customers when they come to redeem their funds. Let me see the check?
Almost forgetting that he had not handed the check back to the clergy man, Mustapha had begun to walk out of the office when he tried to open the door and realized the check was still in his right hand. Dele Mcgregor, who had side stepped to create some room for the little maneuver in the small space left in the office just shook his head at the confusion that had been appointed chief operative in the bank.

‘This is the check sir’

Dele collected the financial instrument and did a quick scan turning the leaf over twice before looking at the particulars on the check. When he realized the check was for BDS he asked if Mustapha had got in touch with Double A. Mustapha said he had not as he could not reach the account officer but however he iterated that the mandate did not require confirmation of any kind.
So why are you unnecessarily delaying the customer then. If everything is ok and his identification is valid then go ahead and pay him and stop delaying service promised to our customers.

In addition if I come to this office again and I see this mess I will not only give you a query, I will write a letter to the human resource department and make sure they put on stricter measures to make you more organized
‘Sorry sir was all Mustapha could mouth before the manager left his office.
Turning towards the door, Dele Mcgregor handed over the check to the nearest operative he could find and instructed him to pay the robed clergy man.


Mustapha was still fuming when he retreated to his office. Why exactly he could not tell but he was sure that it had everything to do with what Dele Mcgregor said and his intention to ensure that the query gets to the human resource department.

Aderopo finally got value for his financial instrument after waiting for over an hour at the café. He packed the currency neatly in the horizon carrier bag and made his way to the revolving doors with his white robe flowing behind him. Little did he realize that he had forgotten the holy bible in the bank.

Amaya disembarked from the bike after a rather arduous journey through the smoke and the sweat and alighted at the horizon bus stop walking the last block briskly. He still held the police report which he had procured at the police station and his diary felt heavier in his pocket.
At the entrance to the marina café he noticed that a group of people were on queue at the revolving doors waiting for those inside to come out of the café. He bid his time and as it got to his turn he noticed that a clergy man carrying the cash carrier bag of the bank was trying to pass through the revolving door but his flowing soutane had got caught in the revolving door and this delayed his line from moving. He shifted his weight unconsciously from heel to heel as he watched the little scenario of the guards at the entrance trying to wrest the garments from the doors. He found little solace in the fact that at least he was now in the bank’s premises. Even if they closed shop now, they will still admit everyone in the compound into the café.
Finally the guards wrested the garment free and the doors opened. Amaya sidestepped for the man of God who seemed to be in a hurry to leave the claustrophobic interiors of the security doors. He stepped into the cylindrical interior of the doors and looked back subconsciously at the barefoot man who splattered off into the wet streets. The monotonous tone that emanated from the concealed speakers in the space above the doors started up as he came in and subconsciously Amaya hummed along till the whirring sound that signified the opening of the doors accompanied by the cold gust of the wintry interiors of the café admitted him into the marina. The first thing he checked was the big clock in the reception and he heaved a sigh of relief. He still had 10 minutes to deadline. He briskly proceeded to the customer service section and waited behind two other who were almost leaving.
After a minute or two, the somewhat pleased customers thanked the customer service personnel for her time and brushed past Amaya laughing. Deep inside Amaya prayed he’d feel the same way too after he might have presented his case. Offering Amaya one of the easy chairs in the customer service portion of the Big sitting room, the pretty operative smirked a hidden smile at him before asking him how she could be of help.
Amaya at first was confused, not understanding the furtive gesture, until he realized that she was only amused at the ‘Penis wise, pounds foolish’ inscription on his Tee. He was not in the best of moods today; on other days he would have tried to initiate conversation with the inscription but not today.

‘Please I am here to report the case of a missing check which I believe was stolen from me by someone in my area. I have reported the case to the police and they issued this report to me…’
this he said spreading out the neatly folded letterhead paper that bore the logo of the Nigerian police force. ‘
…they said I should bring this copy to the bank as evidence of report and also as a document to prevent the thief from getting any value for the check.

Amaya explained the events of the missing check and summarized all the efforts that had been made to find it to no avail. He still strongly insisted that he was sure that the suspect was pretty much someone that lived around his vicinity but the police would not make an arrest without a more tangible evidence.
Looking through the report, the service operative noticed the name on the report and felt a strange sense of familiarity about the name. she read it out loud. AMIRE OLUFUNTO.
Amaya answered and sat up hoping to hear the regular comment that why would a man bear a woman’s name?

‘have we met before?’ The service personnel asked him while turning to her computer terminal to check in the particulars of the police report and scan the document to the account manager of the account from which the check was meant to be cashed.
‘Your name sounds very familiar’
‘I…er...don’t know whether we’ve met or not? What university did you attend?’ amaya responded unprepared
‘I didn’t school here in Nigeria’
‘oh then it is not in school’
‘Sorry do you have a photocopy of the check here?’ she asked changing the subject upon realizing that the police report did not include the necessary details of the missing check. ‘I need to input the details of the check and send it to the manager of the account the check is being drawn against’
‘I told them at the station that I did not have a photocopy and also didn’t have the particulars of the check but they said I could leave it blank’
‘Look! He pointed to the account name he had written on the report, ‘I am sure it is BDS or something. The company is just up the street. Maybe I should quickly go and ask the accountant if you will still allow me in by the time I come back.’
He looked back at the clock and at the thinning crowd in the café. The day was over already.
‘Ok that is fine then, quickly get to BDS and ask them for the particulars of the check, I will instruct the security personnel to allow you in but if you come back anytime after 6pm I’m afraid they would not let you in so I suggest you quickly do that now. Let me make a copy of the report and give you back the original.’
After returning from the copy machine that whirred quietly in one corner of the customer service zone tracing a path of green light on the grey marble walls beside it as it produced the copies, she handed the report to Amaya who quickly ran for the security door hoping to make time.
‘Hmm….’ sighed the service operative as she looked at the big hand on the huge H clock idle pass the number 10 on the minutes circle. The day was over but her day had just started. She had scores of account details to key into the H database for the new accounts that were opened that day and she had to update and crosscheck the materials that was sent from the check issuing department and the electronic cards service department and ensure that there was no mix up or loss of these vital documents and moreover, the Horizon end of year was around the corner and she could not just imagine how she would complete all the pending documentation on account opening before that period. ‘hmmm….’ She sighed again, this time taking a closer look at the photocopy of the police report, AMIRE OLUFUNTO!

Still not being able to figure out where or how she came to know the guy she placed the photocopy of the document on the bureau beside one of the potted plants on the service desk and saw the beeping light of the ‘ALERT’, a new technological gizmo that the banks IT department had developed to help send messages from the H-mobile application on staff phones to any department or branch within the bank’s network. They had just deployed it only last week and she had not got accustomed to using it yet. Many times she actually forgot its presence. If not for the uncharacteristic shrill beep sound it gives out signifying a new message or an alert to the marina café service desk. On one particular occasion the beep had startled her and jolted her so much it amused the customers who were waiting to be attended to by her.
Apart from the fact that she was not a fan of techno developments, the rate at which the IT department rolled out these gizmos, one hardly cut the teeth on using one of them before a new version or a totally new one was launched and deployed. Coupled with this, was the oftentimes long and boring training the staff were usually forced to attend most times during their cherished weekends to learn the use of these ‘necessary evils’.
Punching the read button, the messages reeled out on the screen of the ‘ALERT’: there were 29 of them. She scrolled through rapidly to read some of the messages that earlier had been sent on the bank intranet.

The bank was planning to go on another public offer to raise 1 trillion from the capital market and enjoined staff to be prepared for the ‘Big one’

Staff who had not completed their updates with the human resources were reminded of the deadline

Foreign exchange department and the IT department had launched yet another product to customize the present Automated tellers to pay and receive dollar deposits

CAUTION messages indicated that….
Wait!

There was the name again. AMIRE OLUFUNTO!
The customer service personnel picked up the ALERT unaware she had done so and looked closely at the message again and at the copy of the police report still lying on the desk beside the faint rectangular outline left on the bureau in the space of the absent ALERT:

From: Ayokunle Aduroja
To: Marina café service desk
Message: Do not honor Check number: 15179
Amount: 300,000
Payee: AMIRE OLUFUNTO
Time sent: 15:14pm, thur. nov. 15, 2008


Goose pimple bust out in rosebud freckles all over her fair skin, now she knew where the name came from. The clergy man who had created a scene in the café a while ago: that was his name, AMIRE OLUFUNTO.
She remembered because the paying operative who happened to be her friend had expressed his fears at paying the check when the payee had earlier not responded. But after being instructed by Mustapha he had absolved himself of all responsibilities regarding the transaction and had gone ahead to pay knowing that when push came to shove, he would pass the buck to the superior operative.
Quickly she put the ALERT down and tried putting her thoughts together. If the whole thing turned out to be a fraud (from all indications at present) the blame will be put on her for not inputting the message in the BDS account module thus warning any operative anywhere in the bank’s network to desist from paying.
What if she inputted the ALERT message now and claimed it was the posting operative who was negligent in discharging his or her duties. She thought twice about putting her good friend in trouble but hell! She still had to save her head first.
Looking at the last line of the alert message again, she realized that inputting the meassage now was a stupid idea. All computer iterations came with a time trail and when the audits’ forensic department starts investigation, that will be their first reference point.

All of a sudden the joys she had earlier entertained of tidying up her job and closing for the day paled away in the lurid reality of the moment.
A fraud had been committed and had been committed on her watch.
Sitting up, she called up the transactions for the day on the BDS account module and surely there it was. The very last transaction:

AMIRE OLUFUNTO
CHECK NO: 00015179
AMOUNT: 1,300,000

But it didn’t tally.
She picked up the ALERT and read out the details once again, it read 300,000. Quickly cross referencing it with the photocopy of the police report the young man had brought in earlier, she re-affirmed her suspicion. The police report also read 300,000. What then could have happened?
Probably the culprit had taken possession of the check and changed the check details from 300,000 to 1.3 million. Shaken but desperately trying to mask her discomposure
She decided to take the next step in fraud detection.
The last of the customers had trickled out and the erstwhile entropy in the interiors of the café had ceased. Only the din of the hidden fluorescent lights and the solemn whirring of the computer terminals with the muffled chit chat of operatives in the back office and the movement of the roving cleaners in the café signified that the once busy hall was still alive. The comfort chairs stood sat quietly, starkly in contrast with the pale marble walls in their shades of primary and secondary (colors yellow excluded). The potted plants which had started wilting was either being watered or replaced by the roving cleaners and the floors were being given one last mopping before closing for the day. The big H clock ticked on with disregard for the silent passerbys beneath its lone eye high up in the horizon reception.

Beyond the jalousie that separated back office from the calm reception, madness reigned. Posting operatives were clattering away determinedly at the computer terminals hoping to post pending transactions to enable them leave in time for their respective homes: homes which some of them still had to brace another hour or two of traffic hold ups before getting to. Collecting operatives whose jobs at the end of the day was to provide the posting operatives with the data of all transactions for the day in order to balance the books also clattered away at the casting machines tallying up the payments and receipts as the posting operatives logged them.
Every where was a mess: cash wrappers, carrier bags, rubber bands littered the floor and ink impressions from the numerous stamps used in the course of the transactions stained the marble work tops. The excess money left in the back office was being counted and packed into bundles waiting to be carted back into the bank vault as cash counters traveled to and from the vault taking the cash with them. The stereo music from the concealed speakers in the ceiling continued to compete for the aural attention of the operatives as they spoke across the room louder each time to be heard.

Mustapha sat quietly in his office oblivious of the typical rowdiness of the close of day presently going on in the back office. He sat at his computer, his office now in a bit of feigned order, replying the query Dele McGregor had sent to his office mailbox. Fortunately for him, the manager had only made it a warning rather than a proper query and thus had not notified either the human resource department as he had promised to do. At least Mustapha was grateful for that. He look at the Big H clock which didn’t seem so big now that he was at eye level with it, and hoped the posting operatives would tidy up on time and save them time to leave early. Another day had gone and this time tomorrow the routine would continue. Different faces everyday but the job remained the same.
Still trying to find the appropriate words to reply the query, the door to the cubby hole office opened and the customer service personnel asked to come in.
Mustapha a bit surprised asked her to take her seat while he tried to end a difficult phrase he had been battling with shortly before she came in.
He was a bit surprised because ever since he had made advances at the UK trained operative and she had bluntly turned him down and thereafter they really never saw eye to eye. Anytime she needed anything she would rather call than come to his office. Whatever must have brought her today was something serious. He idled a bit at the computer trying to play turf-superiority at least make her wait a bit since this was his territory.
‘Mustapha please I don’t know if what you are doing will be more important than what I am about to tell you right now. She finally blurted out after some minutes of her not seeming to get any attention from the cash officer.
‘There has been a fraud!’
At the mention of fraud, Mustapha, mid-word in his typing, looked up and cocked his head to one side as if to say, pardon? But did not say anything.
However, the lady got the message and repeated.
‘There has been a fraud on BDS. Remember that clergy man that was here today that made so much noise?’
‘Here’…laying out the photocopy of the police report on Mustapha’s table…
‘a young guy brought this shortly before the close of work today and asked to report the case of a missing check. I also got a message from Double A on the ALERT with the check details matching that on the police report except for the fact that the police report did not indicate the check number but the payee and the account name are the same except for the amount’.
‘The clergy man’s transaction was 1.3 million but the amount reported was 300,000. Maybe we should take a look at the copy of the check made by the collecting operative. The culprit could have tampered with the details and changed the particulars of the amount payable.’

Mustapha just sat there staring while the customer service personnel continued her monologue. He was totally lost as to what was happening at present. What kind of nonsense was all this. His gut feeling told him something was wrong. Oh God! What kind of a day was this? Why couldn’t everything just be normal as every day was supposed to be. all day it had been one issue or the other coupled with the rain and the stupid weather. Oh! What kind of rubbish is this?
‘It might feel bad but I want you to realize that finding the solution is the next thing and not blaming the cause’
Not realizing he was mouthing his thoughts, Mustapha hit hard on the desk wanting to vent out pent up rage, startling the lady in the process.
‘ouch………..’
‘oh I am sorry I didn’t mean to hit you’
Holding his head with the cup of both palms he tried to figure out the next step to take when he realized that he didn’t have the full capture of the situation as he had not been listening.
‘Please go over it again and please let me see the police report’
The startled lady inching a bit further from the desk gave a summary of all that had transpired as Mustapha listened patiently. After getting a rough picture of the situation Mustapha called up the transaction on the computer terminal in his office and verified the facts of the transaction of the clergy man. He then made a call to the posting operative who processed it and asked him/her to make a copy of the particular BDS transaction and report to his office with immediate effect.
Mustapha and the service personnel sat quietly in the small office like a psychic and the subject telepathically conversing but saying nothing. After a few minutes that stretched out like hours, Mustapha was about picking up the phone to harangue the posting operative when he/she came in with a copy of the check that had earlier been processed.
Mustapha, the operative and the ill at ease customer service personnel huddled around the photocopy to detect the tell tale signs of doctoring but the clear writing on the face of the check did not reveal that anything had been tampered with. Written clearly and boldly across the face of the check was
Pay or order AMIRE OLUFUNTO the sum of 1,300,000
And he looked at the strangely familiar face of the priest on the faint copy of the national driver’s license and he felt bile rise in his throat. Yet the name on the license tallied with the name in whose favor the check was drawn.
How then did this happen? The check was genuine and untampered with but the amount payable differed from that reported missing.
The other observers, the service personnel and the other operative looked as surprised as Mustapha was at the perfect forgery that stood, a lone spectacle, the focus of them all.
At his wit’s end, Mustapha concluded that the reasonable way out of it was to call the account officer and notify him of the fraud case. Hopefully he could buy some time and also seek the account officer’s opinion on how best they should treat the case.
He dismissed the service personnel and the operative telling them to keep it hush pending the time when the case will be properly defined at least if not resolved.
Discharging them from his office he proceeded to place a call to Double A.
First rule of fraud detection: ‘Report to all concerned, concealing equals abetting’

Picking up the receiver and waiting for the dialing tone, he looked all around the office, oblivious of the time. Had it been a normal day he would have been downstairs in the back office now trying to hurry up the operatives and balance the cash in the vault before closing. But as it was, that was not priority on his mind at the moment. If the audit department got in on the case without the marina personnel resolving it in-house before close of work, it would spell doom for Mustapha who would be held responsible. As much as it was Dele Mc gregor who instructed him to pay, he had made the silly mistake of not requesting that Dele sign off on the check instructing him to do so. But how could he have done that? It was not so much of his fault that at the point when his boss was insisting on the payment, Mustapha had had to psychologically contend with getting a query. Not until the posting operative who finally paid the check insisted that Mustapha should sign off authorizing him to do so, did he realize that he also should have done the same for his superior. The banking system was a strange one. It was never about what was being said. It was always about what was being written. So many things coursed through the entangled undergrowth of his present state of mind, total dismissal from the job a recurring theme but Mustapha chose to take one step at a time. At the moment, what was important was finding the culprit if he could still be found.
The phone signified that the other end of the line was busy and as such Mustapha could not get through to double A.
While he was waiting, he flipped the photocopy of the check over and over again in his hands trying to look for any give away signs but could not find any. The culprit had been wise enough to leave all traces of him out of the identification. It bore no phone numbers and merely taking a second look at the name of the estate which the address of the bearer of the drivers’ license indicated, he could tell that it was phony. He had grown up in Surulere and he was so sure there was no Majeja close there.
His eyes roamed over the empty reception beneath and the empty chairs that now stood out on the floor like doll house furniture from above and he notice something he had not seen earlier.
Still on the chair inhabited by the culprit was the worn bible he had brought with him into the banking hall. Mustapha remembered that the purported man of God had retrieved the check from the bible before handing it over to him earlier that afternoon.
Ignoring the busy tone on the receiver he ran quickly downstairs to retrieve the bible.

The customer service personnel who was still at her seat trying to focus her mind on the job at hand while another sector of her brain struggled to analyse what their lot would be if the fraud was not detected, stood up as Mustapha bounded into the reception scaling the stairs in threes.

Ignoring her, or better said, not considering her presence of any importance, Mustapha ran to the chair, picked up the bible and ran back upstairs hoping it will reveal something of its earlier possessor. Flipping through the pages from the introduction through the first few books of the holy book he found nothing of interest except underlined texts of the bible and various shades of markers highlighting various portions of the holy book. He envisaged that the owner would have been a very religious person but was very uncertain if the bald headed clergy man in the marina café that afternoon had been the owner.
Flipping the pages over till he got to the last page of the concordance, the bible revealed nothing of interest. Frustrated he closed the book and placed it face down on the table and was about to pick up the phone again when he caught a faint reflection of ink on the black leather cover of the bible enhanced by the light from the ceiling fittings above. Holding the bible closer to the light and tilting it slightly he read the writing on the cover.

Concealed in black ink on the back flap of the worn leather bound bible was an eleven digit number, a phone number.
Aderopo shut the doors and bolted it tightly, haunted by the daemons of guilt. He wondered why last week he would have felt comfortable to even leave the doors open while he went to sleep. Not that anyone who considered to steal from his side of town; or to say the least, from his house, would have been making a right decision. There was no need to. Yet the presence of the carrier bag he had carefully concealed in a used cardbox carton behind a limp threadbare mattress that slouched on one of the mud walls changed the temperature of the room and gave him cause for suspicion by the second. After pacing the floor for a while, he dragged the carton out from underneath the mattress and placed it in the middle of the dark room again starring at it with cautious interest like it was a box of snakes stolen from a charmer. Just yesterday, he had been standing in this same position and what had been at the center of the room then was a neatly folded soutane, a black bible and a gold cro….ss?
He looked at the rumpled heap of the soutane on the polythene bag in which he had concealed it after leaving the bank and he knew at a glance that the bible was missing.
Where was the bible?

He searched quickly through the heap lifting the soutane and dusting it so that everything hidden in its folds would fall off. To confirm his worst fears, only the dull thud of the fake gold cross hitting the earth greeted his gesture. The bible was nowhere in the pile of cotton and tawdry gold.
He tried to remember where he had left the bible.
Could he have left it in the bank?
If he had done so, that would have been really stupid of him.
Thinking again, he remembered that there was no name on the bible and also he had not put any personal effects into it to facilitate a trace. As far as he was concerned, it did not pose any serious threat.




Sighing a bit of relief, he finally decided to proceed with the carton box.
He opened the box and spilled out its content on the earthen floor of the dank interior of the room ogling it greedily as if it didn’t not belong to him (not that it really did anyway)
‘Money had a way of changing everything’, he thought mid-sigh.

He had been instructed to bring the cash over to a broken down danfo bus that from the description, was meant to be parked in the CMS bus stop later that night. He had been given the plate numbers of the car and also the color and other identifying features that would make him easily recognize it.
However, on leaving the Horizon cash café, his first instinct was to go directly home and that he had done. It was on his way home that a myriad of thoughts started assailing him on whether or not he should make the remittance and he actually started considering ways of sidetracking his benefactors.
Somehow he knew that the same thoughts were running through their minds too. What else did they need him for after collecting the money from him?
In a deserted place like the CMS bus stop that he was directed to, he could be brutally murdered and all the money taken off him. What would remain of him probably will be a decapitated body featured in a SHOCKING headline on the front page of the dailies the following day. The mere thought of that made him shudder.

At least he had proof on his phone. The text had come in mid-transaction at the bank requesting him to leave the bank immediately. What if he had not taken the rash decision he took earlier, the money might still not have left the coffers of the bank. He could tell them that he had not had the opportunity of collecting the check before leaving the bank as the text had directed but as the thoughts came also came the gory picture of shorn flesh and blood in a calabash. What if the oath they all had taken was true? What if it was not a sham? ‘Nothing would happen!’ He thought. It was all a joke.

He sat over the money pile looking at the various denominations of naira notes heaped on the earthen floor in front of him before packing it back into the carton box and concealing it where it had been before: behind the limp mattress that stood in a corner. He would wait till the morning and decide on what he wanted to do.
Looking out at the graying skies he knew he had a long time to wait till dawn. On a normal day he would have left the neighborhood for the outer marina fringe where night life would probably be starting off. Not that he had any money to enjoy the night life but his dexterity at the game of draughts had won him a name and many a free drink in the many hangouts where he wasted his evenings. Tonight however, there was going to be none of that. His destiny was chained to the hidden cash till he could find somewhere safe to hide it and find his way out of Lagos before the scary man came looking for him.
He sat for a long time staring in the direction of his future thinking of everything and nothing in particular but just bidding his time hoping good will come.

A little distance afar off, astride his motorcycle, a young man stood waiting for the customary nocturnal exodus of the inhabitants to drain the population in the area so he could make his move.
Mustapha looked at the number again unsure of whether he had seen something or not and right there in front of him there was actually an eleven digit number which obviously from the layout was a phone number to someone somewhere.
Quickly he typed the phone number on his keypad and started to dial. At the first ring he thought otherwise and quickly terminated the call.
Why was he calling the number?
If someone picked it on the other end what would he have to say?
He looked at the number again not knowing whether to feel happy or sad that as much as the number could be the key to unraveling the fraud, it could also be a wild goose trail. He needed to make a decision on the next step and he needed to make that carefully.
He could either call Dele Mcgregor or let him in on the case or he could try to reach double A again to inform him and probably get advice on what the next best step should be. His fears however were that relationship officers were never empathic with their colleagues when it came to fraud cases. Usually they would scream murder louder than the account holders themselves just to save their own hides.
If double A acted that way, then he, Mustapha would be alone in this because after the standoff and the warning letter he got from Dele Mcgregor earlier that day, he was certain that he would find no ally in his manager. Coupled with this was the fact that anytime from now, the manager would come down to the café to ask why the vault had not been closed for the day and what everyone was still doing.
After considering the Devil and the deep blue sea for a minute or two, he decided to go with the devil, Mustapha made a call to the manager of the Marina cash café on the intercom line letting him know why they might probably not close the vault early that evening.

The reaction he got was most unexpected and strange.

His boss, contrary to his thoughts, listened carefully to the brief summary of the fraud case and after a brief minute indicated that he would be down on the banking floor shortly to see what could be done to resolve the case if it was still within their powers to.

Flipping over the desecrated holy book, which he now held like a curse in his hands he starred at the number again. Beyond those numbers seemed to lay the answers; he just was not sure what answers he would get. He called the number yet again, this time not saying anything as the voice on the other end of the receiver requested to know who he was. He just waited for a brief moment waiting as if to pick up the identity of the person behind the mask of the space that separated them till he heard the click that signified the closure of another door of opportunity that might possibly lead to his acquittal. He looked at the only link leading the bastard who even had the audacity to defraud in the name of the Most High Allah.

Putting the phone down he paused to think of possible ways of finding out the identity of the number. He could give one of his friends who worked with the service provider a call he thought, before brushing the thought aside as he realized that that particular friend of his had left the employ of that organisation. He could ask the friend then to give him another contact within the organisation he thought. Not giving it much thought he proceeded to do so
The slow swinging noise of the door to his tree-house office made him pause as Dele Mcgregor stepped in; dapper as usual but with a sincere look of concern on his face. On seeing the manager, Mustapha rose quickly, displacing the position of the bible on the table with this gesture.
Dele ignored his clumsiness and sat on the chair he had refused earlier in the day. Requesting the cash officer to recall the transaction and tell the story as it happened. Carefully he listened through the entire monologue as Mustapha, normally not a stammerer, stammered out some of the lines of the story till he got to the mobile number link hidden in the leather binding of the worn bible.
Dele had followed the story slowly; twisting his eyes this way and nodding his head that way to show that he followed the tale. However, on hearing that there was a link and that it was an active one, he had reacted by jolting up in his seat and quickly asked to see the bible which had adopted an awkward position on the table already, half open, upturned, with the pages buckling under the weight of the spine. Mustapha handed it over and pointed out the camouflage. Being far sighted and not having his glasses on, Dele requested that Mustapha write down the number on a Post-it complimentary notepad of the Horizon that stood half exhausted on the table. Mustapha quickly scribbled out the number offhand unaware that he had memorized it, and handed it over to his the manager. Later proceeding to double check tilting the bible in the familiar angle that reflected the numbers.
‘Have you told Double A, about this?’, he questioned, transferring the number on the Post-it to his phone. ‘He should be in the know.’
‘I have not sir. I thought to call you first’
‘I guess I will call him then, and then I can ask my friends in telecommunications to do a trace on the number and located the address of whoever owns it. BDS means a lot more to us than not safeguarding his money. Mustapha nodded in agreement.

On getting through to Double A, Dele Mcgregor carefully spelt out the details of the fraud using the information that Mustapha had supplied and he had concluded the call by dictating the mobile number: the clue left by the fraudster out loud for Double A. After a brief pause and what Mustapha considered an affirmation of getting the number right from the other end, Dele hung up.
Mustapha could not help but respect the man. As much as the man had the charisma, Mustapha saw only a few people have, he could not help but appreciate the tact and the way the manager used his words to achieve what ever he wanted achieved. Mustapha remembered the way they would often make fun of the manager and imitate his accent in the vault area before the man would come in. ‘Words are life, he remembered his English teacher in school say. ‘Words are life’!
He eased up after the call feeling a sense of temporary relief knowing that Dele Mcgregor was on his side on this war.

The next call the manager made was to someone else who, judging from the one-sided response he heard, had promised to call back as soon as he had information on the number. Another call was made to a high ranking customer of the Horizon who was in the police force. To be on the safe side though, Dele McGregor gave as little detail as he possibly could and made sure he didn’t mention anything to give away the nature of the fraud as news had a way of leaking out from within the police system and there couldn’t be a worse dent on a bank’s reputation than a fraud incidence.

Covering the bases, at least the bit they could, Dele instructed Mustapha to go ahead and close up for the day. There was not much else they could do but wait.


Double sighed deeply four times in the reception lobby not knowing what next to do. He had excused himself earlier to go to the convenience and the call had come in on his way out of Badmuses office. He had quickly collected a piece of paper from the receptionist and taken down the phone number dictated to him by Mcgregor. All the while he had not been thinking about it. He just could not figure out why today of all days would go awry. He tried to contain his confusion looking again at the piece of paper still in his hands and staring at the ominous numbers that stood out like a stain on the white sheet.
It was not like this was the first account he was managing that would attract fraud. Because he managed some of the biggest accounts in the coffers of the bank, his accounts had more propensity to attract fraudsters than others and that it did.
He remembered the Alh. Baba case where a well orchestrated syndicate in collaboration with the produce merchant’s youngest wife had made transfers of over 40 million naira over a period of 3 months the poor man was away to Saudi Arabia.
The insider in the case, who was logging in the transaction details had used the knowledge of the banks internal workings to the syndicate’s advantage. Not until he got greedy and started transferring some part of it to his own personal account did the carefully planned fraud fall apart at the seam, although a lot of the funds had been lost in-situ and double A’s prized head had been served on a platter to the due diligence committee. All his achievements and accolades had barely saved him in those grueling months of suspension and rigorous interviews.

It was the closest he had come to being fired. The only thing that saved him as always was that he had always been responsive on the due diligence checklist.
Take today for instance, had he not sent in the ALERT, the fingers would have been pointing in his direction.

Now he stood in the expansive lobby not knowing what to do.
Should he notify Otunba immediately or allow some room to find out whether the problem could be solved without his getting to know about it? Not only did fraud cases hit a dent into the banks books, it also hit a dent into customers’ trust in the ability of the bank to keep their money safe. The former could be written off as debt but the latter could not be written off from the minds of the customers. On the contrary, he had to be careful with how he dealt with it. If he did not bring it to the notice of Otunba quickly, he might be sanctioned for deliberately holding on to information, if on the other hand he was too hasty to break the new to the client and the case was resolved in house before it got out of hand, he would also be sanctioned for not having explored the possibilities of solving the problem before making it known to the client. However you turned, the management always had a way of making you look guilty. His mind trailed back to the ‘normal’ days when all he had to do was tidy up and go to the club with the boys.
He would have loved to just hang out with the boys tonight before going home to his wife whom he had totally forgotten to call all day, but that would not happen. He had to find a way of getting back to work to see if there was still anyway of rectifying the situation. Unfortunately, the adhoc meeting Otunba had organized out of respect for double A’s opinion was as a result of the brief discussion they had had earlier on the issue of impermanence of staff at the BDS. and the lack of loyalty the staff had for the organisation. He could not leave the meeting until a positive conclusion was reached.
The secretary noticing the confusion in his demeanor was about to leave her seat to meet him in the reception lobby, but the look on double A’s face and the gesture of raising his palms up at her kept her glued to the desk: a quizzical, confused, piteous look on her face.
Double A walked back in to Otunba’s office after he had made a decision to tell Otunba about the case but assure him that they had everything under control. At least with that, he would be erring on the side of caution and also would be able to ask to leave BDS for the bank.
Looking up at the clock which was getting closer to the hour of 7, he realized how much of time he spent outside his home and for a brief moment a fleeting scent of jealousy assuaged his senses. Not that he had a great marriage but what if his wife was finding company elsewhere as she had never complained for once at his late homecoming or his night out with the boys. The question hung limply for a second as his mind brought him back to the reality of the present. He had to get out of here first and then he would look into that later.

Not bothering to look in the direction of the secretary who was still brooding at Double A’s rebuff, he crossed back into the quaint office: the characteristic smell of the space rushing out to meet him as he opened the door.
Paper was strewn all over the table as it had been when he left the room and the accountant, a mousy woman with a pout, who formerly, was sitting opposite the divan was now standing beside the grandfather clock, her arms folded in front of her receiving instructions from her boss.
The trio made a funny picture but the picture played out perfectly for double A because it signified the end of the meeting. At least he would not have to start discussing the issue of the fraud until he had all the information that would be necessary and that would not happen until he got back to the bank a few blocks away.

‘Ah! You are back! There is something interesting I need you to see here’, boomed Otunba from the divan shuffling a sheaf of papers in his hands until he got to the one he was looking for and then pointed out something to Double A.
Walking briskly back to his space beside the older man on the ornate divan, he sat: trying to wear a mask of concern for whatever Otunba was saying though the old mans baritone rarely penetrated his jumbled up mind. The number that had been dictated to him was still on the screen as he gently placed the phone beside on of Otunba’s more stylish ones. Curiously he picked it up again and dialed the number. Neither knowing what to expect nor what to say but to satisfy his curiosity and at least be sure that the line was not a dead link.

What happened next shocked Double A beyond reasoning. The phone had hardly begun to ring than the contact name came up on his screen. Before he could open his mouth in disbelief, the shrill ringtone from the BDS accountant’s phone pierced the silence in the room.

He continued to stare at the accountant upon realizing that her number was the clue the fraudster had left behind. Neither she nor Otunba understood what was going on as he kept staring on in disbelief.
Otunba broke the silence after a while asking what was wrong. All double A could say was nothing as he kept staring at the number on the phone and at the face of the woman. Not until that moment did the aphorism, ‘never judge a book by its cover’ make any serious sense to Double A. He didn’t have the whole story yet but he didn’t want to believe this woman: this woman? would be involved in any kind of fraud at all.
After regaining his consciousness, he requested that Otunba ask the accountant to sit as there was something wrong and he had told the story as narrated to him by Mcgregor. As he started the story he noticed, or did he not notice (he wasn’t so sure) a change in the countenance of the accountant as the tale tapered towards an end they both knew. Reading her face as he told the story, he thought he noticed her features freeze into a resolute stare as he mentioned to Otunba that the number behind the bible turned out to be the accountant’s number.

Otunba could not grasp the ending.
It was not possible. He asked Ayo (not entertaining the latitude to call him wonder boy as he was wont to) to repeat the ending again before turning to his accountant and asking in the native dialect.
‘Is this true?’
‘Yes’ she simply answered not batting an eyelid or wavering in expression.
The shock nearly knocked the bald man over from the divan where he had now adopted an unfamiliar position perching on the edge. For a while he just looked into the eyes of the BDS accountant: employer and staff staring at each other saying volumes that could never be recorded in words.
Then like a long thought question he asked in a voice that could never have been Otunba’s
‘Why?’
Her face still resolute she did not bother to answer the question she just stared into the space slightly above the shine of Otunba’s bald pate looking into the wall straight ahead. This so infuriated Otunba Badmus that he jumped from his seat and proceeded to vent his wrath on the small woman who just sat there staring. Had it not been Double A who stood quickly to prevent any further casualty, Otunba’s unbridled wrath could have further compounded the issue.

After simmering for a while, Otunba placed a call to the Area G police station that covered the area and briefly told them to send a car and two policemen as there was a ‘criminal’ that had been caught in the company. Being one of the benefactors of the Area G police station and also a friend of the DPO, the police had arrived in record time to cater to his need and judging from the number of squad cars that responded to the call had been over prepared for the situation. Rather disappointed at seeing the harmless lady they nonetheless frisked her roughly and bundled her into the idling police van and sped off into the night; exhaust fumes trailing their exit.
Otunba and Double A followed closely behind in the mad dash characteristic of police cars and waited at the police station as the woman gave her statement on the occurrence of the fraud and also the contacts of the other faces behind the mask.

Hundreds of miles away lay the sick patient on a hospital bed. She looked a picture of perfect health and except for the drips that fed into her tender flesh, the green uniform she was wearing and the nurses that milled around her bedside, she would have passed for one of the visitors to the general hospital. In her late 30’s the patient just looked up into the clean white decking that covered the entire ward. The light had left her eyes and there was no hope in them anymore. It reminded one of the look in a shell shocked soldier’s eyes not minding the war around but just waiting to be hit. She slept there just waiting like some of the other people in the ward; waiting to die. Her case had been diagnosed as a form of cancer that had developed into a fairly large malignant tumor in her brain. She had felt dizzy on a few occasions and at a point had gone on fainting spells which caused a lot of concern for her family especially her twin sister who was an exact copy of her. She had been urged to go for a check up and on diagnosis had realized she was contending with far more than she could ever have thought.
She did not know which scared her the most. The thought of a sudden death caused by the cancerous swelling she carried around like a headgear or a gradual paralysis and even possibly madness induced by the slow growth of the tumor into certain areas of her brain. The doctors had told her the cold facts of her case and had hinted a probability of survival if a surgical action was taken. Though they claimed it was only a slim chance, it had brought her some hope.
That had been three months ago and nothing had changed except the faces of the doctors and nurses that attended to her and the rising figures of the hospital bill she incurred living in in the hospital. At a point she had given up and asked to go home as she didn’t feel any difference in her life except for the giddy feeling and dizziness which now came at more regular intervals. How she wished she had not come for the tests at all. How she wished she had just lived her life on and one day dropped dead. There was something about knowing that death was sure. Against popular belief that it will encourage the sufferer to make his or her peace with the creator, it elicited such bouts of hate towards a being supposedly the creator who will allow this to happen to one person while allowing others go scott free.
Anytime she saw healthy people or happy people laughing and seemingly enjoying life, she loathed them with such hate, it smelled in her breath. On one occasion a group of medical students had come over with their resident lecturer to discuss her case right there in her presence while at the same time making snide remarks at each other and making it look like class as usual. She had stared into space in hate for as long as she remembered and had snapped. It was a brief moment of outrage she had no record of in her memory but she knew it would have been very bad because she woke up chained to the bed and even after she had been certified not insane, all the doctors and nurses had moved about her bed cautiously taking care not to prick the unhealed scars of her wounded soul.
The only thing that kept her on the bed and had not driven her to such extremes as suicide or total apathy was the support she got from her twin sister who out of nothing had ensured that the hospital bills were paid and had been rallying round for raising the 5 million needed for the surgery.
Only two of them had been born to their parents and they were as identical as the word could be. not only were they identical twins, they were friends and it was the friendship and encouragement that still kept her on till the moment.

At the onset she had come in and out of hospitals thinking the situation would improve. She had trailed the religious line by seeking help in numerous places including shrines where she normally would not have visited. But desperation they say is enemy to reason. All she wanted was that one place and that one thing that will give her miracle but she never got it. instead she had spent all she had going from pillar to post thinking she could circumvent the medical route and here she was now, hopeless, broke and dying. Their parents had not been able to help out much because even they struggled to survive on the pittance pensions they collected in erratic pockets from the pensions office.
Upon hearing that the operation will cost N5 million, she had lapsed into despair knowing it would have been better to hear a death knell than the N5 million bill they were given by the hospital. Had the surgery been not so complicated and had they not needed to fly in a consultant from outside the country the bills would not have been so high the central medical director had told her.
But in all these her sister had gone miles farther than she thought was possible. She had appealed on the media, taken her story to churches and other organisation as would listen and had rallied round to raise funds. Though the fund raising had gone poorly because talk was easier than walk for the people who showed pity at her plight, they had still managed to raise N1.8 million but the hospital had requested that until a down payment of 3 million was made they could not commence with the operation. In all this her sister had remained optimistic telling her to hang on. The high point had come a week before when her twin had mentioned that someone was willing to give them a lot of money and that they should both hope it came through. If it did, then she would have a chance of survival. She had cried on her sister’s shoulder till her head hurt. Never in her life had she felt so loved. As she cried that day she remembered all the petty fights they had had as little children and the many times she would tell her twin she didn’t need her. Thinking about this made her cry more for with the ordeal she had gone through she was sure nobody on earth loved her more.
Tears streamed down her face as a gentle shower started outside the windows of the hospital. The steady pattering was all the ending she needed to the deep story of her life the tears had written on her face; as she fell asleep in a deep peaceful sleep.
PART THREE
NIGHT
Amaya walked the last stretch of the street in semi darkness.
Except for the full moon and the flickering shadows cast by the oil lamps of the side street traders, the whole street would have been in pitch darkness. The night had descended so fast that it had almost feigned an eclipse in its bid to take over from the day. Amaya guessed it was as a result of the rains that had fallen earlier and although his geography results back in school was not much to talk about, Amaya still remembered that at some time of the year days were expected to be shorter and nights longer. He guessed they were in one of those months when that happened too. (please indicate solstice or the time with longer nights shorter days and correct date on the ALERT). Scanning the familiar environment, he looked over at mama Ada’s phone-call shed wishing that by a stroke of luck it would be opened and he could rule it out of the possibilities of where the missing check was: or on a more optimistic note; find it there. Though he could only see the moonlit outline of the shed the door to the plywood shed was as firmly locked as it had been in the morning when he left the streets.
He picked out the faces of a few neighbors sitting out under the almond trees that banked mama Ada’s shed. These were people who he only knew by house description and nothing else. Unlike the smaller community he came, where everyone knew every other person in the community, Amaya observed that people cared less about other people around them in the Lagos and did not make any effort to conceal it. Initially it had felt awkward during the first few months he moved into the neighborhood but with time, the ‘Lagosness’ of everything else numbed it’s way into his consciousness and seared it to the core. Time: he thought sadly, everything was a matter of time. Even the best of people had a way of being changed by the city.
It was also surprising how relative time could be. Yesterday had been such a long day in his life and today had barely begun than it ended. He scanned the area, past the derelict buildings, past the shed shops and flickers of burning oil lamps letting out their characteristic black smoke, past the silhouette of the droves and the darkened background of the skyline of the Lagos metropolis. He knew somewhere out there was his check, beyond his reach and he felt helpless again.

Only for the reassurance of the BDS accountant whom he had seen earlier, he would have felt a lot worse than he was feeling at the present. After he had left the bank, he had gone back to BDS to explain the case of the missing check and had requested for the check details in order to furnish the service personnel with the information required to place a trace on the missing check. The accountant had allayed his fears telling him that he was sure the check had not been cashed since all notifications of transactions on all the BDS accounts came directly to the accountant’s desk and he had not received any of those notifications that day. The accountant had told him to go back home and put his mind at rest saying that all necessary information on the missing check will be passed on to the bank through the account officer to ensure adequate awareness just in case anyone came to request value for the check in any of the horizon cafes.
Feeling more comfortable and not in any mood to go back to the one room he called home. He had proceeded to a female friends house about 2 bus stops to his neighbourhood and had spent the better part of the evening there just killing time and making sure it was late before he got home.
Remembering the young lady at the bank, he felt a faint wisp of recognition blow over his mind again. It was as if they had met before yet he could not really place where or when. He brought back the picture in his mind and tweaked it over and over trying to find a link but the picture kept looming in and out of recognition not taking any distinct form. Putting his mind off after a little while, he crossed the foot wide gutter that bypassed his apartment and the dozen others on the streets. The water in it was still as murky as it had been in the morning though it had resided a bit and no longer spilled over onto the screeded floor compound of the common dwelling he shared with a score of other tenants. Looking once again at the slime and reflexly looking up at the moonlit sky, he hoped it would not rain again before dawn.

He continued past the children who were playing out in the courtyard, their long shadows dancing eerily in the moon’s rays and the flames of the lone lantern that lit the verandah leading to the rooming apartment. He greeted the elders, some the parents of the playing children, who sat in the enclave of the verandah listening to a favorite program on the local radio and religiously co-anchoring the program alongside the familiar voice of the presenter. Feeling along the walls of the long corridor that separated the individual rooms in the face-me-I-face-you apartment, he counted the doors till he got to his, at least the one he expected to be his and traced the lock, closing his eyes to enhance his tactile abilities. Letting himself in in the dark after what seemed like an eternity of locating the right key, he stumbled over something in the dark. Cursing out loud in the local dialect, he remembered the state in which he had left the room. Crossing the mess nimbly he avoided as much encumbrances as he could see in the dark and felt his way to the window sill, tracing the dust that had gathered on the sill till he found what he was looking for: A matchbox.
Lighting it, he felt the warmth of the illumination spread from the lone match to the whole room making the mess in the room appear larger than life in the reflected shadows. Leading with the already half burnt match he looked for a candle on the window sill but only found a mound of wax that looked gray in the light of the dying match, a vestige of a burnt out candle he had forgotten to put out the night before. Putting out the match which had burnt too close to his fingers already, he lit another one and crossed over to the drawer where he kept unlit candles, cutleries and foodstuff.
Pulling out the first drawer, he rummaged through the contents but did not find what he was looking for. Starting to get frustrated at the dying flicker of the second match, he pulled out the second drawer, not bothering to shut the first.

For a minute he just stood there in frozen animation looking at the missing check as the dying flicker from the lone match danced across its face. Not until the burning sensation from the tip of his fingers reached his brain did he realize that the match had burnt out and had even begun to burn his fingers.

Throwing the smoldering match away quickly, he struggled to light another one in the now seemingly mysterious darkness, spilling the contents of the matchbox in the process.
Feeling for the stray matchsticks, he found one and lit it to confirm his fears. Sitting there in the plywood enclave of the drawer oblivious of all that had transpired in the course of the day was a Horizon bank check and neatly written across its face was AMIRE OLUFUNTO.


Double A sat in the comfort of his well furnished but dimly lit sitting room flicking through the stations not knowing what exactly to watch. The flashes from the telly pulsated into a heartbeat for the space as it flickered on and off casting an eerie glow on the white walls.
He had come home very late that night The whole day had been like a movie: a movie in which he was not just spectator but actor, directed by forces beyond his imagination and played out on the screen of his glasses (establish that double a wore glasses). It had made such an impression on him that as much as he wasn’t a talker at home, he had gone to great lengths to narrate the ordeal he had gone through to his wife (who uncharacteristically was waiting for him when he got back). Strangely enough, it had felt good for him, being able to come home and have someone waiting for him whom he could talk to and say exactly what was going on in his mind. He remembered the look on his wife’s face as she listened to every word he said. Soaking it all up like a wet sponge.
They had not had that kind of conversation in a long time and sitting together at the kitchen work top earlier that night talking to his stranger-wife, discussing the turn out of events, had made him feel good.

After searching in vain for the one station that suited his mood out of the over 150 channels on the cable TV, Double A switched off the TV and ran his mind over all that happened for the umpteenth time.

The story itself had been the part Double A had looked forward to hearing. He had seen and heard many fraud cases and he could broadly classify them into two. Well planned fraud and badly planned fraud. Usually for the badly planned fraud, the culprits never left the bank with the money before being caught. However had it not being for the number that gave the BDS accountant and her assistants away they would have made away with funds and the fraud would have been termed a well planned fraud.
Double A could not help but marvel at the fraud plan.
If there was something he was always interested in knowing in every fraud case, it was the fraud plan. This was the flowchart procedure the syndicate usually adopted to bringing the thought of fraud to reality. For well planned frauds, it was as precise as clockwork and had all the contingencies accounted for. The only part that usually foiled even the best of frauds and probably can never be fully accounted for was the human factor. And that usually posed the biggest challenge to the most sophisticated of fraud plans.
Reading the fraud plan for Double A was like reading the mind of a woman from her actions. It was always a learning opportunity.
After the woman had given her statement, he had requested that the police allow him access to the document so as to be able to establish the fraud plan which will be prepared and submitted to the Horizon bank internal audit department and they had obliged him, though will much reservation and much more leverage from Otunba who duly introduced Double A as his son and account manager for BDS.

From the statement given under oath, the fraud had been initiated by the accountant and executed by two other people. One was known by the accountant, the other was not. The unidentified party was the one who had gone to cash the money and who she claimed was still in possession of the money.
She claimed that she had issued a check in favor of the benefactor, one AMIRE OLUFUNTO for 300,000 but had overlaid the whole check leaf with a transparent film coating which was not visible to the naked eye. She claimed the other party, whose name she simply gave as ife, had been the one who was responsible for the coating. From her understanding, the film coating had been removed carefully by heating the check and brushing off the (note let the scabs on the check be in the precedence mustapha) displaced film coating with the pen markings which had not been impressed on the check leaf. The only part of the film coating that had been spared had been the signature portion. The check was then re-written to the tune of 1.3 million as that was the amount closest to the confirmation mandate of 1.5 million while not getting too suspiciously close to that amount. After the ‘perfect’ alteration of the original check, a cloned version of the 300,000 check was then issued out to the benefactor: a check that had it been presented at the bank might have probably been discovered. The accountant failed to supply any information on the second party in the case claiming that he was introduced to her by a former employee of BDS whom she had contacted. She gave the identity of the employee and claimed that was all she knew about the fraud case.
There was something that looked dicey in the whole case. It seemed truly the accountant had not been aware of the other faces behind the crime because the police had tried toturing her to extract the information but had not yielded any results. How then could she have masterminded a fraud that she would not have safeguarded her interests in the event of one of the unknown faces defaulting
Otunba had not hesitated to call up the human resource manager immediately he was notified of the ex-employee who had participated in the fraud. Not long after the call had been made had the human resource manager provided the contacts of the suspect employee. The police had not wasted time in hounding out the employee who was caught at a drinking palor that night.
Upon interrogation and series of truth extracting rituals, the employee had finally confessed that he had been the middle man on the job as well as the second party. However on the whereabouts of the money he claimed that the third party who was at the bank to collect it had not abided by the plan and had defaulted in bringing the money to the place earlier agreed. However he mentioned that the man who had introduced him to the third party that cashed the check worked in the same place where he worked but he too did not know the whereabouts. When questioned about how he could be stupid enough to let an unknown third party be the final recipient of the cash, he said he was certain the money would come back to them as they had put in metaphysical help in guarding the money.
It all sounded like a home made film to Double A who stood watching all the drama that had emanated from the actions of the most unexpected person you will imagine.
After the interrogation, Double A had excused himself to go home and Otunba who by now was grateful things had not turned out worse had been happy to let him.
The BDS accountant sat alone in solitary confinement that night; her head in her palms and her face as hard as it had been all day. She had no regrets for any action she had taken. The only regret she had was that she had allowed the charlatans who handled the execution end of the bargain mess things up for her. Her most terrible regret was the bible. She had been given the bible by a friend and she had diligently read it until things started going wrong and she started questioning the existence of God. If God was there why would He not answer their prayers and restore her sisters health. After a total lapse one day, she had put the bible at the end of the shelf where she wouldn’t touch it later until she started to get the costume together and she realized she still had a bible on her shelf. She had brought it down, dusted it and searched its every page for any clues that could still lead to her but had not found. So confidently she had handed over the bible to her co-conspirator on the case to complete the costume for their executor.
It was strange how she had become a criminal overnight.

She had had it all totally planned out with her cousin who confirmedly was a crook and had been the black sheep of the family. What the executor would wear, how the check would be cloned, where it would be cloned…. Her cousin had provided the finer details of the fraud and they had both looked over the details until they were sure that no one would smell a rat a hundred kilometers away.
It had been somewhat condescending for her to request the help of her cousin whom they had all blacklisted and had openly showed it but whether the latter cared or not, he did not show it. they had both worked dedicatedly together and it had almost come through.
If not for the number! She couldn’t remember when she wrote it but it did not matter any more now. The mistake had been made and it had costed her dearly.

If she had been told just last week that today she would be sitting here in the prison cell as a criminal she would never have believed it. She had been a good woman all her life, putting in her very best into work but it had not fared well for her. BDS had broken her resolve to lead a peaceful honest life. The company had squeezed her and sifted her off all that remained of her career and in return had paid a pittance. Not that she was forced to work there but where else would she find another job to support her family and ailing relative at her age? She remembered her sister and the pain they had both gone through in the last two years. Only if Otunba had been able to lend her a helping hand and given her some form of welfare to take care of her bedridden twin, she would not be here today. She would not even have considered fraud as an option. As much as this motive did not excuse her actions she did not concede to the fact that what she did was wrong. Deep within her she knew she was good and she was only doing this for a good cause.
She remembered the fear which had come with the thought the very first time it occurred to her that she could swindle her boss off the cost of the surgical procedure which her sister had been scheduled for over and over again since they always could not muster the initial payment the hospital was demanding. She remembered how the pleasure tinged fear which had initially plagued her had thawed into gradual resolve that finally led to the act. It was only a matter of stretching past the yield point. Every honest man is a potential thief.

She looked around the lonely cell and the sheer thought of the loss of freedom scared her. The cell was a rough 15 foot wall of block work making the room look like a Neolithic cathedral. It’s ceiling was covered in tattered rags and what seemed like a cobweb atrium. The only items in the tall room were a bed that stood like a cast away in the middle of the room and a cup of water that had been left on the floor during the questioning by one of the interrogators; he had probably forgotten it there.

The walls were unrendered and smeared with something that looked like grease, lending the space it a grim appearance and reinforcing the foreboding feeling of doom that hung in the voluminous void overhead like the rags that hung from the ceiling.
She walked over to the floor where the cup was placed and picked it up, sloshing the water around a bit as if searching for germs with her naked eye. She wondered if it was safe to drink it or maybe it had been poisoned. Looking around the cell again and the bleak future that now was ahead of her, she realized she would have been more grateful had the water been poisoned. As she tried to pick the cup up she noticed a hand writing scrawled beside the cup, it was quite illegible further worsened by the lone dull bulb high up in the ceiling that struggled feebly with the stygian gloom in the room so she moved closer to the barred windows of the space to read it in the moonlight. It read, ‘you will soon die………kaka!
She was not Kaka but she felt a prick of foreboding at the message from beyond. Maybe she would soon die. Maybe not. What if her sister died too? Would they have a chance to meet at the other side? Taking her mind off the message on the cup, she put the cup to her lips and caught her reflection in the dancing ripples of the water in the cup. She tilted the cup a little more so that the angle of the moon would properly align with her face and see the clearest reflection she could get. What she saw in the reflection staring back at her was a stranger. It was not human. It had a hard face with furrows beginning to form on the brows and dead set eyes that seemed to pierce the darkness of the background in the reflection. She looked at the reflection again and for the first time that night, for the first time since her phone had rang that evening, she cried. She wailed as the dam of false hardiness broke welcoming the deluge that followed as ablution for her lost soul.
The hot tears burnt grooves through her cheeks as she wailed.

She cried not because of the self condemnation of guilt or the thought of punishment but because not until now did it occur to her that she had traded her soul and she might never be able to buy it back.

She remembered her sister on the hospital bed and kept crying the more, letting the mucus run freely from her nose. Oh God she prayed for the first time in a long time. Let things better, oh God please help me.

If you don’t stop shouting there, it is not only God that will help you. My kondo go help join sef’, shouted a policeman from outside whom she could not see but could hear his muffled voice through the grim walls that held her freedom in their hollow cores.

She did not care for whatever would come from beyond the walls. She just kept crying until there was no more water in her eyes. There was still water in the cup but she did not feel like drinking any more. Whether it was poison or not; she did not care. Not that it mattered. Her soul had been washed clean with the tears and she felt a moment of peace like the earth would after cold rains chase away a hot afternoon.
She sat on the edge of the steel bed rocking to a steady unheard rhythm from within, still holding the aluminum cup in both palms and looking at the free moon on the other side of the iron bars wondering whether her cousin had made it or not.
The moon created a grotesques silhouette of the motorcycle and the lone young man who had been sitting astride the machine for over an hour now checking out the unfamiliar environment.

The evening crowd was gradually coming out of their burrows to scavenge for the night.
The area, ‘Enuma’ street nicknamed Sepe bus stop after the cheap locally brewed liquor that provided the pastime for the men in the area was known for its teeming population who worked the nearby fishing industry at night and slept during the afternoons. When the city was leaving for work in the morning, the inhabitant were sleeping. While when the city was coming in at night their day was only about starting. The reverse direction of lifestyle in the area reflected in the reverse direction of activities that was peculiar to the neighbourhood. The men spent the afternoon drinking and chasing other men’s wives while the women spent the afternoons gossiping or attending to other businesses they could manage to engage in to augment the feeding of the nagging bellies of their families and oftentimes the drinking debts of their husbands. A lot of the women also got involved in the brewing business particularly those who had their husbands back them up in the position of collector to coax and oftentimes force and collect debts from the most famous drinkers cum debtors in the area.
The night had fallen now and one by one the itinerant inhabitants had begun pouring out of their houses onto the streets, unto the highways in the direction of the agro fisheries industries, a few kilometers from the area. Some of them greeted familiarly as they left their shack while others just walked on in silence oblivious to the idle chatter. To one unfamiliar with this way of life, it will seem like a large religious gathering was happening in a neighbouring neighbourhood or maybe something terrible had happened to necessitate a mass evacuation of the area.
Watching from his position on the bike and ignoring the many workers who hailed him down as a commercial motorcyclist, he noticed that the door to the man’s shack remained closed and it didn’t seem like anyone was keen on leaving tonight. So he unwrapped the small satchel that he had tied to the back of his motorcycle and held it in his hands carefully concealing it in the baggy sleeves of his shirt but holding the projected part of it tightly in his fists.
After assessing that the crowd in the neighbourhood had thinned out enough he walked briskly to the row of shacks that was Aderopo’s home. He had followed the man for over a day right from when he left the drivers shed of the Apapa Company.
His mandate had been simple: to keep an eye on his first target and ensure that whatever contact he made with anyone was closely monitored and reported. He had done this diligently and had received orders from his benefactor on what next to do at each point. He had not hesitated to inform his benefactor of a meeting that had been held in the mechanic shed that belonged to his target. His benefactor had then told him to study the faces of the men and wait around the Horizon for anyone he recognized from the meeting or anyone at all who showed up with a flowing white garment and a bible. He was then instructed to follow the white garment and ensure he took possession of what he left the bank with.
He had been waiting at a certain open buka slightly opposite the Horizon when one of the men from the meeting held a day earlier at the mechanic’s workshop had appeared and stood beside him as they both hid from the rain. He just smiled at the thought of the fact that you never know who is watching you and looked around at the thought of this to see if anyone was tailing him too. He had waited for the man to come out, followed the man to the shack on his motorcycle and waited till now.
He felt the cold feel of the instrument on his palms as he walked through the staggered shacks that were stilted on refuse. He had to watch his feet as he found his way through the garbage to the house he had earlier been watching from afar off.
He was unsure of who his target was but he preferred to err on the side of caution than daring. He suspected the target was armed and probably not the only person in the shack. Though he had not seen anyone go into the shack all day except his target, he did not want to take any chances.
He moved slowly and cautiously through the dirt till he got close enough to listen in on the conversation, if any was going on, in the quiet shack that stood the lone focus of his stoned eyes.
After waiting for about a quarter of an hour and not getting any aural information from the shack, he proceeded slowly till he got to the door of the shack. The door was locked and it had not definable windows. He inched a bit closer when all of a sudden he heard a loud retching noise come from within the enclosure and then a thud on the floor. The thud was followed by guttural noises and a struggle and then silence. Just as it used to be.
The young man stepped back, his fingers tightening around the cold metal handle of the content of the satchel up his sleeves as he drew it slowly in preparation for the unexpected.
He waited but nothing followed the retching noise except the scurry of some of the gutter rats that came to rummage beneath the stilted legs of the shack and some of the other dwellers of the slum who were still making their exodus.
Night had fallen and visibility had reduced to only what was visible in the moonlight.

After idling another minute or two, he knew he had to make a move or else he would stay there all night not knowing what went on behind the walls of the shack. Taking in a final decision making breath, the young man stepped up to the door and barged his way in swinging the weapon wildly and ducking to one corner as he quickly adjusted his irises to the darkness to size up potential danger.
What he saw next was both horrifying and scary. The body of the man who earlier on he had seen go into the shack was splayed in a wild angle against one end of the wall partly lit by the incoming wall of moonlight that came in through the broken door making the picture appear more eerie. Blood gushed out of his eyes and other extremities that permitted this outflow and his neck was twisted sideways as if his neck had been broken after the carnage. The nauseating smell of fresh blood struggled with the stench outside and he could make out some dark-red patches on the wall that he was sure was blood. It was as if a ritualistic killing had gone on in the room. but how could that kind of killing take place in a shack he had watched all day? Was that possible? Even if it was, the amount of blood and damage he saw to the man’s body could not have been done by one person. uncharacteristically again was the setting of the room. Not much had been displaced in the struggle which he had heard outside and the struggle had not lasted so long as to explain the extent of carnage he witnessed in the room.
He had not seen anyone go into the shack neither had he seen anyone go out. Even if the killers had been waiting for their target inside the shack, where were they now? He looked around to see if he could make out anything that resembled a rear door but could not find one. Not that he hoped he will because shacks never afforded the luxury of a rear door. He felt his way around the walls to see if there had been any means of escape for the mystery killers. His hands rubbed against something sticky in the process and he confirmed his assumption of the dark patches on the wall to be blood stains in grey light. Slumped against one angle of the wall was a mattress and beside it close to the centre of the small space which now looked smaller with the space taken up by the splayed body of the man, was a small heap of clothes. He proceeded to move the mattress to reveal any form of breach in the wooden walls of the shack. He found no breach. All he found was a cardboard box partly opened, also blood stained.
He inched closer to the box to find out its content was the money the man had cashed in the bank earlier in the day. He made to carry the box but thought otherwise.

What if there was something strange about the money that warranted an unexplainable ritualistic-type killing of the man who now sat in the corner looking into a strange angle of oblivion through blood shot eyes. Not one to believe in the metaphysical, his sense told him something was awry and even though he did not believe in God, he trusted a hundred percent in his sense. It never lied.
Leaving everything as it was, he quietly stepped over the dark heap of clothing in the centre of the room and made his way out of the broken door breaking the wall of light and taking one last look at the inside of the shack which was all dark except for the penumbra of light around his silhouette on the wall.
Epilogue
The whereabouts of Aderopo and the money were never found by the police.

Aderopo’s body was discovered the following afternoon by a little child who kept screaming till the neighbourhood joined in. upon finding the money in the bloodied shack a famous witch doctor who lived in the shacks was consulted and he claimed it was the gods who killed Aderopo. His remains were evacuated and the money was used to appease the gods.

The BDS accountant was not tried for two years but was remanded in custody of the police.

Horizon bank refunded the lost funds, charging twenty-five percent of the loss on the cafe managed by Dele McGregor.

After series of interviews and cross interrogation by the internal control and audit Department, Mustapha Ganiyu was found guilty for not insisting on a counter signature from his boss and he was suspended for one month without pay.

Double A resumed work as usual with the Horizon, rendered the Horizon’s apologies to Otunba Badmus and went to deliver the refund check himself.

Otunba Badmus remained his same old self, never letting the wage level rise enough to inspire loyalty in his employees. He however put more rein on his accounting and ensured that all transactions for BDS were carried out with as less paper as possible. Though difficult for him to understand, he subscribed to a whole lot of e-solutions designed by the Horizon for its numerous customers.

The Horizon bank continued to be a going concern and its proud towers continued to be the focus of many quiet observers who kept forging new methods of penetrating her and taking the ultimate prize: MONEY