Outside, my hired horse switched its tail, raising a plume of flies attached to the ulcer on its rump. An old generator sulked nearby, tethered to the tent by its cable. I looked around the mud flats skirting the creekline, searching reeds and mangroves for something out of place. Everything seemed strange and out of place: a boat berthed on mud, a jeep loaded with merchandise on a narrow beach served only by footpaths. The harmattan frisked the trees and the horse’s mane. The wind was shiver-cold, but inside me, a low-grade fever boiled.
Adevo’s text message that morning had just one word: Badu. Every now and again someone chose my number from the bylines on Palaver’s pages to send some bit of news or another, but this was the working journalist’s dream scoop: information about the most hunted man in Nigeria. I had called immediately.
‘Badu?’ I had asked.
‘How are you?’ came the guarded voice. ‘Is about that your Pitani man . . . Is Korba Adevo here . . .’
‘My name is Zanda,’ I had said nervously. ‘Listen, my paper can pay . . . private interview . . . just me, you, and nobody else . . . how much do you want?’
There was a long pause.
‘Look, I’m serious here, just talk! How much?’
‘Four hundred?’
I had taken his directions and driven the few hundred kilometres from Abuja to Kreektown, but the lips of the smuggler were now sealed for good. The disappointment of losing a Badu lead was physical, almost as strong as the shock of walking into a dead man’s tent. Now, my very presence in that isolated hermitage was a bad idea. The hands that had made the corpse could not be far away.
I turned to the elderly horse. I had hired it from a hotelier who also ran three donkeys in neighbouring Kreektown. All I wanted to do just then was recover my deposit for the animal and return to my desk at Palaver before their Roving Eye columnist—or the money in his possession—was missed . . .
Yet I was a journalist. Even though I could never print the story, the camera in my backpack craved a glance at the scene now imprinted on my mind forever. Reluctantly I pulled it out and raised the tent flap once again. I suppose my crisis started here with that failure of memory, that moment when I turned around to find something worse than amnesia’s blank canvas, to find instead the present contradicting the immediate past: there was a warning snarl from the dog, and from the man, a ragged snore that ended in a yawn. ‘God deliver me!’ he said, in the rusty voice I remembered from the phone conversation. He looked at his wrist. ‘Is that the time?’
I tried to keep my balance. ‘You were . . . you are . . .’
‘Adevo,’ he yawned. He picked up his pristine peak cap. A joint popped and two fists strained in different directions as he stretched himself awake, large eyeballs standing out of a heavy-featured face. ‘And you must be . . . Zanda?’ He impregnated my name with a significance that eluded me.
‘Yes.’
‘No camera, please.’ He sucked his teeth irritably. As my knees gave way and I fell into a cane chair, he said, ‘Tired, eh? You shouldn’t have walked; I thought I mentioned Ma’Calico’s donkeys.’
‘I hired her horse.’ I glanced furtively about me.
He chuckled wickedly. ‘That dead bag of bones? I swear to God, you are going to have to carry her back to Kreektown, you will see.’
There was no one else in the tent, dead or alive . . . It was just Adevo, with not a spot of blood on his old-fashioned agbada. ‘You have the eyes of a thief,’ he observed, with professional interest.
It was just another hallucination, then. The last major episode I remembered was so far back in my childhood I’d begun to think I had outgrown the plague. The worst thing about hallucinations was how they messed with your reflexes: back in Kreektown Primary, a snake once slithered out of my locker and I had not moved a muscle, while my classmates had broken ankles and furniture on their way to the door. They thought I was pretty brave, but I’d only thought the snake a hallucination—and I’d learned the hard way what happened to people who saw strange things. All I wanted was to see what everyone else saw—not the animals that leapt out of walls to animate my science classes. Or the dreams that continued when I was wide awake.
A woman began to laugh, and I started, but it was only a customised ring tone. He glanced at the culprit in the bank of phones on his armrest and looked away. ‘Okay,’ he said impatiently, ‘what do you want to do about Pitani? His noise is getting too much! You said you want private interview, not so? This is me here.’
‘What noise are we talking about?’
I realised that the thumb he was rubbing against an index finger was a gesture for my attention. I half rose, the better to unwind the money belt from my waist, then sat back again. My publisher, Patrick Suenu, had reluctantly paid up for the promised Badu scoop, even though I had kept my lead and his location secret. My tenure at Palaver was pretty shaky just then, but a Badu scoop was easily the biggest story in the decades since Dele Giwa’s murder. If I had it in hand, I could sell it for an oba’s ransom, and he knew it.
‘You’re a bit yellow,’ observed Adevo in what was probably his attempt at light conversation.
I let that go and pulled out the wads of currency. My heartbeat had slowly returned to normal, but my fingers were still shaking, so I handed over the money without counting. Adevo took them on trust as well, making them disappear into various pockets on his garment. He replaced the peak cap on his head, pulling its two flaps low over his ears. There was a beatific smile on the face he turned to me. ‘Correct man,’ he said. ‘Oya, you have one hour. Time is money.’
The financial transaction concentrated my mind.
Two weeks earlier, Badu had arrived on the national scene when he kidnapped Justice Omakasa, carried out a mock trial, and executed him vigilante-style. The video of the judge confessing to bribes from Trevi and a host of other litigants had ignited a firestorm on the Internet. The TV networks had it on an endless loop. A police manhunt for Badu was under way, but the judge’s salacious confessions had turned public sympathy in favour of Badu, even as face-saving investigations against people outed by the confession foot-dragged their way through the system.
Then, a couple of days before, Charles Pitani, the inspector general of police, had also been kidnapped. The audacious abduction of Nigeria’s most senior policeman had all the hallmarks of Badu’s first strike, and an intensive security dragnet was under way. Yet Badu had gained such cult status that a Pitani video was feverishly awaited.
Those were the stakes I was playing for, deep in creek country.
Four hundred thousand naira was a lot of money, but not for a Badu story. The police had announced a ten-million-naira reward for information leading to the vigilante’s capture. That was a powerful suggestion that the man before me was a charlatan—except that Badu was now a folk hero. Anyone who gave him up to the police had to be careful not to be lynched.
Badu had sent out his first video for free. I was more than happy to pay for the second. Perhaps he was becoming more of a media-savvy vigilante, using his contacts to sell news to sympathetic journalists to fund his operations.
I hoped I was sitting before one such contact.
I switched on my Dictaphone, rose partway, and put it on the arm of Adevo’s chair. I sat back down and chewed on a nervous fingernail. ‘Tell me about yourself.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, pocketing my Dictaphone. ‘Is it me you want to talk about, or Pitani?’
I hesitated. There was no