Chapter 1: Untitled

Friday, 11: 37 a.m.

Breeeeeeeeeep… breeeeeeeeep… breeeeeeep… breeeee…

I glance at my cell phone. ‘UNKNOWN NUMBER’ flashes on the screen.

I pick it up and put it to my ear. “Hello?”     

I can hear background noises, outdoor sounds: car horns blaring; dogs barking in the distance; angry blasts of a revving truck exhaust.

Misdial? I exhale, about to take the phone from my ear.

“Stay.” The male voice is low, insidious.

“What? Hello...?”

“Stay on line.”

I pause for a beat. “Haruna,” I say, “Haruna, man is it you?”

“No. Not Haruna.”

Another pause. “Who is this? Who do you wish to speak to?”

“To you...”

“Who is this?”

“Who do you think?”

I heave a deep sigh. “This is customer relationship desk of the Marina branch of Broadview Bank. How can I help you, sir?”

A low chuckle sounds. “I don’t need customer relations.”

“Okay then, who do you wish to speak to, sir?”

“I want… you.”

I break the connection, a bit peeved. Prank call. I turn back to the cascade of papers on my desk; loan application forms needing review before end of day. It’s going to be a long…

Beeeeeeeeep… breeeeeeep… bree…

“Hello?”

“You should have better phone manners.”

 “Oga look,” I hiss, “I think you have a wrong number, okay?”

“No. No I don’t.”

“What?”

“This is exactly the number I want.”

“You’re sure?”

“Very sure. You are Steven Arume. Your only sister’s name is Janet and your mother’s maiden name is Okeke. You have a slight limp in your right leg from the car accident that killed your father sixteen years ago—the one you survived because you were wearing your seatbelt in the back seat like a good twelve-year old son, and he wasn’t. You have a fat—pardon me—chubby girlfriend named Bibiola, Bibi for short, and on some weekends you both like to enjoy efo-riro and wheat swallow at Madam Itoro’s Buka along Anthonia street.”

My eyes narrow. “Who… who the hell is this?” I lisp, a slight tremble betraying the conceit of my tone.

The speaker’s voice is chock full of calm glee. “You know, they say people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones…”

“Abeg, to hell with you…”

“Cut this call, and I promise you in the next few minutes someone will enter Bibi’s boutique shop, lock the door, drag her to the changing room and then rape her. After that, they’ll use a sharp knife and slice her throat like a Sallah ram.”

I stop breathing. My bladder feels suddenly full. Jesus. “What the hell…? Who is this?”

Icicles hang from every word: “A friend. You just don’t know it yet.”

Two seconds pass in silence. Within it my heart rate amps up, grows erratic. “What…what do you want from me?”

“An apology, first of all.”

“Apology? For…what?”

“For your stupid arrogance…!” Abrupt and near-hysterical, the sudden bellowing causes my chest to throb painfully. “For being rude to someone going out of his way to prevent something bad from happening to you! For behaving like a typical Lagos boy who thinks he knows anything, when he actually knows nothing! Fuck…!!”

A sibilant hiss penetrates my burning ear, followed by a loud sigh.

The line goes dead.

My chest warms from the pound of muscle fluttering beneath the skin. My mouth hangs open. I’m entirely unaware that I’m breathing hard—hyperventilating in fact.

Bree…

I snatch the phone up. “Hello!” I croak.

“I’m sorry, I got a bit carried away. Where were we? Yes. You asked what I wanted. But you see, it’s not about what I want; it’s actually about what someone else wants, and what they want is you, dead. They want your fat girlfriend slaughtered, your other family members wiped if they get in the way. By that I mean your sick mother currently staying with you both at your Yaba flat. They don’t want to negotiate, they don’t want your money, they don’t care if you call the police or not…”

My mouth is instantly, monumentally, parched. I swallow several times, but nothing moistens my throat. “Why… why are you saying this? Have I done something to offend—?”

“Offend me? How could you? You don’t even know me. We have never met before.” I sense the smirk behind the tone now—triumph laced with impishness. “To hell with me, eh? Well fuck you too.”

I’m breathing heavily, eyes rapidly blinking. This doesn’t seem like a prank call anymore. I want nothing more than to get off the line, but I’m immobilized, transfixed by the hard, flat voice.

“Okay, I’m… oh, my God, I’m very sorry I said that. Listen, I…”

“No, you listen. Let me talk. Let me… you know something? Despite what I just called you, I love this city—I mean this place called Lagos. Jokes apart, I really, really do love this crazy town. The city of so many…possibilities, you understand? For instance, can you guess how many people die here—and by die, I mean, are deliberately killed, wiped from life—on a daily basis? How many of such cases have remained unresolved to this day? Take a guess.”

“I don’t know,” My throat has grown so constricted, it barely permits my squeak.

“Fucking guess!”

“Ten, ah… twenty?”

“Guess again.”

I feel drenched in a sudden wave of anguish, confusion and dislocation. I remain still, unmoving. My senses, honed to hyper-awareness by my agitation, enables me to observe my surroundings with excruciating clarity.

In the bright of a somnolent mid-morning, the expanse of banking hall is almost deserted. Sunlight streaming through rows of tinted windows casts an ethereal glow on the random objects on my desk.

As none from my division is important enough to warrant a private office, the wide space is demarcated by cubicles which constitute our individual workspaces, and my desk is one among eight others of the bank’s Funds Transfer/Overdraft unit. Down the hall to my left, nearer to the main entrance and visible above the frosted glass partitions of his cubicle, is the gaunt, hunched over figure of Mr. Hillary Folorunsho—Folly—the only other person in my office section. Deeply engrossed drafting a loan request analysis form, he hasn’t looked up once since my phone exchange began.

“Steve?”

“Thirty…? Forty? How the hell should I know?” My voice has become a low and arid squawk, ugly even to my own ears.

I grip my phone tighter, aware of the sudden clamminess of my palm has placed it in danger of slipping, of falling to the tiled floor and smashing to a thousand pieces as…

Rough laughter fills my ear. “Yes, my brother. You are so right. How the hell could anybody know? Lagos, sweet populous bitch that she is, is a city with one of the world’s highest numbers of unrecorded and unsolved murders, rapes, abductions and suicides, not to mention petty theft and fraud. That you can believe. I am in the business.”

I yam in de bizness…

Irrationally, disconcertedly, I focus on the indistinct accent, trying to place it as if that mattered in the least.

“Anyhow,” he continues, “back to our main point. The reason I know that these people want you dead is because I’m the one holding the paper.”

“The pay… the what?”

“Don’t be daft. The contract; the job. It’s mine. I have it.” A weary sigh comes across. “Let me simplify for you: I. Have. Been. Paid. To. Kill you—and members of your family, if need be.”

My belly roils, then deflates. My eyes flutter in a series of rapid blinks, and I have to use both hands to hold the phone pressed to my heated ear. “Are you…are you…mad?”

“It’s what I do for a living. My job. My hustle.” His tone is calm, perfectly reasonable.

“You mean you… you… you, you’re… you’re…”

“A professional killer for hire, yes.”

I stop breathing. For a long moment a thousand unrelated thoughts collide with one another inside the seething cauldron of my mind.

With my next breath something clicks, followed by a sudden, deep sense of relief. Of course. It’s a shakedown. Of course. A cheap ‘419’ play.

Been there, done that, of course.

It comes so fast, makes so much sense that—emboldened out of the blue—I actually laugh out loud. Down the quiet hall Folly lifts his bald, pendulous head at the sound, blinks at me once or twice, before ducking down to face his desk. The typical, furtive act reminds me so much of a frog in a scummy pond coming up for air that I giggle a moment or two longer.

When I speak again, my voice is bright, almost facetious. “Let me guess—you’ve accepted Jesus as your lord and personal saviour and so you want to renounce that sinful life. Now all you want is for me to send you money so that you can reveal my enemies and also to enable you turn your life around and spread the good word.”

Silence. There is low, steady breathing on the other end.

I cut off the call. Toss the phone onto my desk with an air of crass finality, as I settle back into my chair. I’m still shaky, but… so there.

The next phone to ring is my official desk phone. On hearing the characteristic electronic chirrup, I look over at the number on the digital display. No number. Same conman? For a moment I consider letting it ring out, but then pick up. No harm drawing the farce out a little longer—it was his stupid dime, after all.

“I’m not going to get upset.” The voice is low and level. Conversational. “I promised myself I wouldn’t do that again so I don’t end up making the same mistakes I did before. Tell me something, do you know where I am right now?”

“Who cares about…?”

“Laugh at me again, and I’ll personally head over to where Bibi your woman is standing right now. In a few minutes she will have stopped breathing permanently. In case you think I’m playing, I can tell you right now that the red yoga pants she wearing today are really tight on her bum-bum. You remember what she wore when she left your flat this morning, right? You should have said something.”

I cough. It is a low sound, choking retch, devoid of meaning but indicating my sudden consternation.

“I use a special knife for this type of contract, you know. Bought it in Balogun market from one of those wandering Aboki selling them in plastic buckets. It’s a sha-a-a-r-p bastard, lemme tell you. You know, I’ve often wondered about that—about the threat of radical extremism hanging over us all since those northern maniacs started their religious rampage, yet we still let these bagas sell tools for slaughter openly on our streets. I’m sending something to your Samsung.”

For what feels like the thirtieth time in the past ten minutes, I feel my mind go partially numb. It’s like the grey matter in my skull has somehow been mixed with cement. The quick-drying variety.

Exactly five seconds later a low chime announces the arrival of an image on my mobile phone. I pick it up from the table and access it. It is a clear, wide-angle video—framed by a curved, slim wood handled knife perfectly placed in the foreground while keeping clear sight of the other subjects beyond it.

My fiancée Bibi is that subject. She’s wearing the same brazen off white and red ensemble I’d complimented her on this very morning as she joined me at the breakfast table. She’s talking with another woman, older and dressed in a colourful Ankara gown as they both stand inside her boutique, close enough to the display window to be clearly visible.

The shop’s sign: ‘Wanted Things’ emblazoned across it in gold upraised letters, gleams in the sun, and her pretty, rounded face is grinning as she gives her customer what she calls ‘full-service attention’.

My eyes focus on the knife perched in the foreground like sign of destruction by being stuck into the sill of a wound down car window. A slender fingertip, skin a lighter shade than mine, shows at the bottom right side.

The voice continues coming from the other phone receiver as I stare at the photo. Despite feeling like a lightning bolt has just struck my head; despite the feeling like all my leg muscles have turned to spaghetti, I put it to my ear.

“…Alone in the shop when this customer goes away, you know? It would be the simplest thing to walk over and do what I want to her.”

He’s lying. Has to be. This is fake. Theresa, Bibi’s shop assistant spends more time there than she does. My fiancée enjoyed the promotions aspect of running a boutique and would rather spend the day driving around Lagos soliciting prospective customers than stay inside all day. It was the main secret to her success—the kind of commitment that made me invest significantly in the place despite knowing next to nothing about all things fashion related.

“Listen to me, you this asshole,” My voice is hoarse and I feel beads of sweat pop out under the buzz of hair on my head. “Dis ya scam no go work. I no come Eko just yesterday. Go…go and try your shit out with somebody else, you hear? I’m giving you ten seconds to clear out of that place or you will regret it!”

Tone brisk, businesslike: “Hmn. As I was saying, when that person finally leaves, I will be free to walk in and pose like another customer. Or maybe I won’t even wait—wiping them both will be easy enough. The question is, how long do you think it will take to overpower her and then slice her throat?”

I cancel the call. Scramble feverishly to dial Bibi’s number.

It’s busy. I wait a while, but she doesn’t pick up.

I then dial Theresa’s line and find it is switched off.

I look around the office. At the far side of the hall the Branch Manager’s office is shut, as it has been since my resumption this morning. I recall that Mrs. Okoye has been having series of review meetings with a team of external auditors.

What the hell does one do in this situation? Call the police? The local vigilante groups? The damn Joint Task Force? My breath quickens. Terror deadens my lower extremities. What move won’t put my fiancée in mortal danger?

My mobile phone rings again—shrill, insistent, and mocking. A call to madness.

I sit down and stare at it until it rings out. I then reach over and mute the ring tone—I don’t know why, only being propelled by the need to do something on a half-disbelieving impulse. The non-walk-in customer interface division has been mostly deserted for the late morning and early afternoon. A renewed deposit fund drive order from Head Office that has forced even the most indolent of the marketing staff out in the field trying to meet impossible quotas. I am only indoors due to the reports I have been drafted to review and collate for the BM because of her scheduled meetings.

A new notification pops up while I am staring at the phone screen. I pick it up slowly, as if it were a live rattlesnake, slide it into view.

It’s another video, an image of a dark, bundled object against the background of what looks like a bare tiled floor. I scroll down and a magnified version of the same image comes into view. The eyes are unmistakable, even opened wide and staring at the picture-taker.

Theresa. She is wrapped with some slightly shiny material, so tightly bound with thick electrical wires she resembles some twisted version of an Egyptian mummy. A small part of my subconscious—morbidly black as it can sometimes be—wonders if she’s realized how bush meat on a spit feels just before the roast commences. The rest of my mind fills with sick, rapidly expanding horror.

My land line trills, and I pick up after the first three rings. My hand is shaking, sweat-slick; my stomach is hot and churning.

“Behold, a man of wrath stirs up strife, and one given to anger causes much transgression. Proverbs 29, verse 22.”

I can barely speak. “What?”

“I meditate on those words whenever I think I may lose my temper. There is why your woman has been alone in the shop since today. She’s been blowing hot and cold I can tell you, but it can’t be helped—dear, hardworking sister Theresa is indisposed at the moment, as you can clearly see.”