Doing Dangerously Well (14 page)

“Oh really?” Kolo interlaced his fingers across his round belly. “So what do you want to be?”

“A politician.”

Her father almost swallowed his toothpick. “Don!” he shouted. “Go and play with your friends!”

The child scurried off, carrying her anatomically impressive doll with her, leaving the doll’s executive briefcase and pink SUV by Kolo’s feet.

“So, Ogbe,” Ikene rebounded quickly, “how’s life?” His long, curved fingernails scratched white lines onto his skin.

“Good, very good.” Kolo quickly checked himself. “Lucky to be alive.”

“Oh God. This country will kill us all.” Ikene snapped his fingers for some more Fanta orange with ice. “How can I run my businesses without banks, transportation, personnel? Even the newspapers—”

“The newspapers have to run,” Kolo interjected. “It’s very important that they continue to run.” He attempted to recuperate from such a rash outburst. “Tell me what else you need, my friend. I’m sure this has taken a toll on your finances. News can wait.”

Ikene turned an eye to Kolo—a vulture surveying the landscape. He stood up—perhaps the only Nigerian with hunched shoulders—and hooked his long fingers under Kolo’s arm. They glided towards the veranda.

“You do me a great favour.” Ikene could sniff out a plot years before it had hatched. He had followed the trail of Kolo’s
bold imaginings and had found his breakfast there. “Is there anything I can do in return?”

“I feel it is my role, as a public servant,” Kolo sounded nonchalant, “to ensure that the people remain calm. They must be informed of the steps the government is taking to secure their future.”

“What if I sent a reporter to follow you over the next few months? Would we find this,” Ikene paused, claws digging into Kolo’s arm, “newsworthy?” Ikene’s eyes were fixated on the centre of Kolo’s dark pupils.

“I should think so,” Kolo said cautiously, knowing full well that in exchange for coverage essential to raising his profile he would be followed day and night by Ikene’s spy. “And, of course, you realize General Abucha is deploying troops in Kainji.”

“Yes, we will need a bit of, em, financial assistance.” Ikene smiled, revealing a row of long teeth. “But it will be a privilege to provide coverage of both you and the general. May I make a suggestion? Perhaps you could start with a letter to the editor. Then it would be natural for us to follow your activities.”

“I’ll write one tonight.”

Kolo left with a shiver. The “inducements” Ikene expected would only increase over time. Although one of his dearest friends, Kolo disliked the man intensely. He patted his pockets. Surely he had not left his antacid at home?

His chauffeur drove Kolo through empty streets to his Lagos home, the car’s gentle suspension rocking him into a light trance.

For the average citizen, there was no petrol for transportation; the city had ground to a halt. Litter decomposed on the roadsides and people drifted as if in a dream, dazed and without purpose. Thrown across the skies, a veil of neon brown haze turned day into permanent dusk, erasing all colour. Even
through the air conditioning, Kolo could hear the screams and wails of those who had lost more than everything—their history, their heritage, their people. He asked Innocent to put on some classical music and lay back in his seat, closing his eyes, shutting out the nightmare.

At home he settled down in a comfortable chair and started to compose his letter. He dipped into a box of specially imported Quality Street chocolate and, for inspiration, selected a rosy strawberry cream—his favourite.

He sucked loudly on his chocolate, adding an orange crème to the mélange.

He immediately crossed out “God.” Too explosive in a country with an Islamic north and a Christian south. His fat digits dived into the box for some nut centres.

Kolo shook his hand, swearing under his breath. It ached from writing. He looked at it with concern, twisted it to the left and right. Did it look swollen? Yes, it did. It most certainly did. And it was aching. What could it be? Could it be cancer? Could he have cancer of the wrist? He reached for his high-potency multivitamins. Holding his pen at a new angle, one that made
his elbow stick out across the entire width of the desk, Kolo continued writing.

He sat back and admired his words. “This is pure poetry,” he said out loud. He envisaged his text under glass in a museum. The vision pleased him greatly.

One voice could have saved a million lives.

He scratched out the latter half of the sentence; the initial count had been lower-he would stick with that.

Perfect. Another letter in which forgiveness had been sought but little blame assumed. And the implication that duties can be resumed locked right there into the heart of the text. Beautiful.

The next day, Kolo started on a northbound reconnaissance by military plane while Innocent struggled past potholes and flooded roads in Kolo’s Mercedes, the passenger seats and trunk full of gasoline canisters. The car had to be ferried over raging rivers on makeshift bamboo rafts while a journalist followed on an aging scooter. All three met at a small airport. Kolo hopped into his car to visit a number of downstream villages, his mind
filled not only with political strategy but also with future commercial ventures that would affect the region. Once again, he drew on his prodigious acting skills to garner local support, sobbing at stories too horrific to pay attention to.

While the general’s name had become unaccountably sullied by the press, associated with brutal acts of violence against an already devastated people, a more diplomatic, soothing Kolo quickly seized upon this unfortunate fact to increase his popularity. He travelled widely, spreading his word like the harmattan’s dust.

At the peak of Kolo’s unassailable self-confidence, the white Mercedes stopped in a small town to meet with the chief. Although plagued by contaminated water, villages had fared better in the disaster than larger settlements, having little need for electricity, petrol or oil.

Kolo’s reporter followed him as they trekked through the mud. The retainers pointed at the hut in which the chief sat.

“Where is the door?” Kolo asked in alarm.

“There, sir.” The chief’s retainer indicated a low opening barely large enough to crawl through.

“What? You can’t expect me to go through there.” Kolo’s aversion to germs competed with his horror at any form of debasement. He had no intention of entering on his knees, in submission to a mere village chief. “I’m not going in there!” he shouted, his chin a-tremble.

“Yes, sir,” an aide said. “But if you want to see the chief, he’s sitting inside.”

Kolo understood. There were few ways in which the village could protest recent events. In order to win a greater victory, Kolo had to submit to this defeat. But he had no intention of going down without a fight. “Innocent!” he called. “Handkerchiefs. Antiseptic.”

His driver saluted, charged off and ran back with six newly ironed white linen handkerchiefs and a bottle of antiseptic.

“Lay them on the ground through there.” Kolo pointed at the hole.

Innocent glowered at him until Kolo raised the back of his hand in threat. He heard the discreet click of a camera and dismissed the reporter with harsh words. Innocent started laying the handkerchiefs on the ground, crawling through the hole.

“Go in backwards,” Kolo demanded.

The driver gaped at him, stunned at his employer’s audacity, then turned around in the dust and backed into the chief’s hut, bottom first, laying the handkerchiefs sequentially in a neat row. The first sight to greet the chief would therefore be the buttocks of the driver of the minister for natural resources.

The driver remained kneeling inside while Kolo dropped his rotund figure to its knees and crawled in over the handkerchiefs. As Kolo appeared, a photographer within the hut took a series of quick snapshots of the minister kneeling before the chief. The chief beamed in approval.

“Ah! Minister Kolo. A privilege to see you. Welcome. Please no formalities-I beg you to stand up.”

Kolo stood, his face a picture of serenity as small atoms of rage exploded in every cell of his being. “The privilege is mine. I am so grateful, sir,” he shook muddy hands with the chief, “for this opportunity.” He then opened the bottle of antiseptic and splashed it liberally over his hands, wiping them on another handkerchief and ostentatiously handing the debris to the chief’s aide.

A quiet smile played on the chief’s lips-the smile of a snake in a henhouse.

“I have come,” Kolo pronounced, “to listen, not to talk.”

“Please sit down,” the chief said. He smiled again.

“As I was saying,” Kolo repeated, disconcerted by the chief’s enigmatic behaviour, “I have come to listen, not to talk.”

“Oh, I see!” The chief’s eyes twinkled. “What would you like to listen to?”

Kolo shifted in discomfort. The smell of antiseptic was overpowering. “I have come to consult with you. You are a wise man. In order to move forward, I have to assess where we currently lie.”

“In case the ministry has not informed you, we currently lie with one million dead. Are you not aware of this, sir?”

“Yes, yes, of course, Chief. Of course. However, I need your assistance to move forward from this terrible tragedy.”

“You are a great man,” the chief said with a pleasant demeanour. “You do not need our help. We are only a village.”

Kolo understood what the chief wanted. “Is there any help you need from me?”

“Of course,” the chief smiled. “And for many years we have been asking for it.”

Silence again.

“How much?”

The chief smiled gently. “Minister, I am sure you are not offering me a bribe—you who so strongly oppose corruption!” The chief flicked some flies away with a cow-tail whip.

One of the flies landed on Kolo’s cheek. He shooed it away with his hand, irate, uncomfortable.

“How is your father?” the chief asked after a while.

“He’s fine. Still very active.” Kolo cheered up at this question—he was proud of his father, a former minister of finance.

“Your wife? Your children?”

Kolo stiffened. This question had plagued him throughout his adult life, and it was one for which he could find no “political” response.

They waited. He could not escape an answer. “I have neither.”

Those in the room stared at him as if he had sprouted a crocodile’s tail.

“That is a great pity.” The chief stared at Kolo, flicking the flies. “And your mother?”

Kolo sucked in his breath. No one ever mentioned his mother; few had ever seen her. Kolo could hardly believe the insolence of this uneducated, inconsequential scrap of bush meat. “Better,” he answered, warily.

“Such a pity about your mother,” the chief said, studying Kolo’s shrinking frame.

How did the chief know anything about this most hidden of family secrets? “Do you know my family, sir?” Kolo asked in a voice and manner more of a child than a man.

“Yes, of course. Victoria is from our village. Do you remember her?”

Kolo’s eyes widened, like those of a child seeing a ghost. Victoria had been serving as nanny in his father’s household on the day when the flame in Kolo’s life had been extinguished. “Yes, I remember her.” Kolo trembled. He began to pick his nails. He wanted to leave, to be released from memory’s shackles, yet something about the chief kept him rooted to his seat. “Is she here?”

“Yes, she’s still here,” the chief answered. “Do you want to see her?”

“No,” Kolo replied quickly, panic in his voice. “However,” he remembered his manners, “please give her my good wishes.”

“That is very kind,” the chief smiled.

Kolo left the hut feeling sick, weary, depressed, and with an increasingly desperate hunger for power.

In low spirits, he spent the next few hours on the flight south ruminating. He could picture the face of his beloved twin
brother, smiling, at play. He remembered the moment that changed his life, as he and his twin played tag near the swimming pool on a sunny day, with the sweet smell of the mango tree mingling with the water’s stiff chlorine. Kolo pushed his brother from behind, his brother looked back at him with a smile—he could remember the smile—eyes bright with laughter. Then a sequence of random instants of which Kolo had little memory, a series of frozen moments ending in a face distorted by terror. The piercing scream at its highest pitch as his soul’s double tumbled into the water.

The brothers had not been encouraged to learn to swim, as a witch doctor had warned their father that this would bring misfortune.

The sight of his brother, his mirror image, struggling for air, screaming and panicking, had been etched on Kolo’s mind for its eternity.

He remembered his father pulling the body from the water, looking at Kolo in fear, in disbelief. He recalled his mother shrieking as his father gave her the news. She screamed for four days. After that, every time he tried to enter her room, Victoria would gently lead him away, promising him food or toys. He tried to peek in at his mother through her window, but the curtains were always drawn. Eventually, Victoria stopped taking care of him in order to take care of his mother, and he lost the last gentle touch of his childhood. He never saw his mother again.

He thought again of Victoria. Despite her tender care, after the accident he had the impression that she despised him, a feeling that had grown stronger with every passing day. Her furtive glances in his direction implied blame. But how had she managed to escape all condemnation? Where had she been during this tragedy? Was it not her job to watch over them?