I cleared my throat. ‘I want,’ I said, and my deposit disappeared into her brassiere. Ma’Calico seemed as tough as the fabric she was named after. She was as broad as the bole of an iroko—and just as intransigent. She made her change from the cash register of a bosom that seemed designed for commerce rather than that alien concatenation of lust and paediatric nourishment. She radiated confidence, and she gloved it with an arrogance that stemmed not just from the fact that she was the monopoly supplier of short-time and long-term beds for twenty kilometres in every direction but from the certainty that, were you the kickboxing and kung fu champion of all Nigeria, she was ready for you.
She sneered—and at that point, it seemed a biological impossibility that she was the mother of the slip of a woman whose strangled laughter was still gurgling from the front of the yard—and said, ‘And if you touch my daughter, I kill you.’
‘I don’t do feckless girls, either,’ I told her horse, long after she was gone.
MAJOR BELINJA
Lagos | 15th March, 2005
They met up in Lagos, at a private guest house in old Ikoyi. The house was an intricately gabled structure set in the rear half of a mandarin garden. From outside, nothing about the house distinguished it from neighbouring properties. Major Belinja’s car nosed through the leafy driveway and came to a halt beyond the carport. The muted birdcalls from an aviary filtered down to the four soldiers in mufti.
They had spent their years at the Defence Academy jousting for the top position. In their military careers, their rivalry had not diminished, although now it was overcast by a pall of disillusionment. They were in the wrong decade, in the wrong century to be soldiers. Lamikan, for instance, had graduated with the best degree the Defence Academy had awarded in its twenty-nine-year history. He was still thirty-five, but at his age in the ’60s Yakubu Gowon had already been head of state for several years.
They were in their prime, but the year was 2005 and the environment was no longer amenable to military governments. After the calamities of the Babangida and Abacha regimes, Nigerians were not going to cry out for military interventions, no matter what a hash civilians made of things. And they were making such a hash of things! There was a surliness in the young military, a sense of loss that only Belinja seemed to have escaped. Although he was the most junior in rank among them, he had become the most powerful, for he was a major in military intelligence. In a realm where titles were irrelevant, he had created—and controlled—the most subversive information database in Nigerian history. Even his bosses feared him, and he would have been redeployed long before but for fears—not wholly unfounded—that his most critical data were stored on private servers, and sacking him would be a licence to fully privatise the resource.
The hallway of the guest house was similarly unexceptional. Belinja hung back from the door and disappeared into a side entrance. Tanko, Ofo, and Lamikan looked warily around as they entered the high-ceilinged lounge. A buffet table was laid out for a small feast, and a Japanese chef brought a platter of skewered meat, which he set down to complete the tempting collage of dishes. He fiddled with a tabletop heater and then disappeared discreetly, without acknowledging the presence of the soldiers.
Belinja reappeared before his colleagues had a chance to get uncomfortable. He approached the cocktail table. ‘Gentlemen, food is served.’
‘And this is the meeting that will change my life?’ asked Ofo as Belinja began to fill a saucer with food.
‘You can start by changing your waistline.’ Belinja’s joke sounded forced, but alongside the logic of the buffet, it did get the others to join him at the table.
‘Who owns this place?’ Tanko asked as he poured himself a glass of iced zobo.
‘I do,’ said a voice from behind him. They turned around for their first sight of Penaka Lee. He was a wisp of a man, only marginally taller than Belinja, but his handshake, when it came, was almost as firm as his gaze. ‘Sorry I couldn’t receive you at the door. I spend most of my time on the phone.’ He was grinning, accentuating his vaguely Asiatic features.
Belinja performed the introductions, but when it was all over Tanko continued to hold Penaka’s hand. ‘I usually don’t like to eat the food of someone I don’t know.’
‘Nigerians have peculiar customs,’ agreed Penaka Lee, tapping a finger on Tanko’s chest. He seemed comfortable with his hand in the other man’s grasp and steered Tanko easily to the drinks cabinet, where the soldier finally surrendered it.
‘It’s a sensible custom,’ said Lamikan. ‘Otherwise, you might finish a meal only to find that you can’t afford it.’
Penaka Lee bowed marginally from behind the cabinet. He lined up some flutes. ‘You have my assurances that this meal is completely free.’ He raised a bottle of champagne and, when he got some nods, began to pour. He passed a glass to Lamikan. ‘I hear you are a champion squash player. What’s your next target? The world championships?’
‘My competition days are over; I’m thirty-five.’
‘Really? You’ve got young genes! Will you stay on in the force—after your commission?’
Lamikan’s eyes narrowed. He glanced at Belinja. ‘I don’t discuss my military career publicly.’
Belinja laughed uneasily, but Penaka’s half smile did not waver. Ofo asked softly, into the strained silence, ‘Who is Penaka Lee?’
The half smile broadened, and Penaka continued without any embarrassment. ‘That can be a complicated question. This morning, for instance, I was reviewing my property holdings. I hold . . . quite a few assets in bricks and mortar.’
‘I’d say that makes you a landlord,’ said Tanko.
‘And you’d be wrong,’ replied Penaka. He selected a glass of champagne, turned, and headed for the room at the end of the lounge. The men took their drinks and followed, Belinja bringing up the rear. They entered a larger room, furnished like a gallery. A visually overpowering skyscape filled one wall. It was an oil painting, but it didn’t seem that way at all—it seemed more like they had stepped into a room cut into a mountainside and now looked out onto a sky of incredible intensity and vividness. Penaka chuckled as he heard the intakes of breath behind him. He turned and was not disappointed by what he observed. For several seconds there was no sound in the room as the soldiers drank in the spectacle. The first dimension of its wonder was the size: the canvas was stretched over the entire wall. Then there was the sheer detail of it: one could stand close enough to inspect the feathers of the soaring kites, or stand as far back as possible, to experience the breadth of such a limitless horizon in what was, after all, a room. And then there was the magic of the colours, jumping the gap from beauty into masterpiece.
‘I see you like Open Heavens,’ said Penaka. ‘If I told you I owned a couple of paintings in Nigeria it would have been just a statistic, but if I showed you one such as this, you’d feel it through your pores, won’t you? It would no longer be a matter of a number on an inventory. It becomes a matter of superlatives, of scale.’ He sipped delicately. ‘My friends, I am a collector.’
‘You collect paintings?’ asked Ofo, stroking the rough finish of the oil on the canvas, giving the other man another cause for laughter.
‘Paintings!’ snorted Penaka. ‘These are toys—houses, boats, aircraft—these are all hobbies. We—the club I lead—collect countries; that’s my real profession.’
There was polite silence in the room. ‘Countries?’ said Tanko eventually. ‘Are we talking South Pacific island countries here? Hundred miles by hundred? Ten thousand population?’
Penaka managed to look insulted without letting his smile slip. ‘This is not a joke, please; this is business. I’m not talking about holiday islands. I’m talking about real countries here. Argentina-Nigeria-size countries.’