Just when the prisoners around me began to stir, the cell door opened again.
A wiry guard stood at the threshold. He reminded me of a very tall grasshopper. “Cross! Alexander!” he yelled at the top of his voice. “Cross! Over here! Now!”
It was a struggle to look halfway able-bodied as I slowly rose to my feet. I focused on the pain of my chest hairs being pulled out where they had fused with the dried blood in my shirt. It was just instinct, but it got me up on rubbery legs and across the floor.
Then I followed the guard into the corridor. He turned right, and when I saw the dead end ahead of us, I let go of any thoughts I’d had about getting out of the prison.
Maybe ever.
“I am an American policeman,” I said, starting up my story again. “I’m here investigating a murder.”
And then it struck me – was that why I was in this prison?
Chapter 41
THIS DEFINITELY WAS hell. We passed several foreboding, metal doors like the one to my cell. I wondered how many prisoners were kept here, and how many of them were Americans. Most of the guards spoke some English, which made me suspect that I wasn’t the only American here.
The last door on the ward was the only one without a lock. An old office chair sat in front of it, its seat nearly rusted through.
“Inside,” barked the guard. “Quickly now, go ahead, Detective.”
When I went to move the chair out of the way, he shoved it into my hands. Just as well. It was something to sit on besides the floor, and I didn’t feel much like standing right now.
Once I was in, he closed the door and, from the sound of it, walked away.
This room was similar to the holding cell except that it was maybe half the size and empty. The cement floor and stone walls were streaked dark, which was probably where the putrefying smell came from.
There was no latrine here. Possibly because the whole area had been a latrine at one time.
I looked back at the gray metal door again. Given that there was no lock, was it more foolish to try to get out of here than to just sit and wait for whatever might come next?
Probably not, but I couldn’t be sure about it, could I?
I was halfway to my feet when I heard footsteps again.
I sat back down. The door opened and two police officers came in wearing black uniforms instead of prison-guard blue. My stomach told me it was a bad trade-off.
So did the hard, pissed-off look on the guards’ faces.
“Cross? Alexander?” one barked.
“Could I have some water?” I asked. There was nothing on earth that I wanted more. I could barely speak now.
One officer, in mirror shades, glanced over at the other, who shook his head no.
“What am I charged with?” I asked.
“Stupid question,” said Mirror Shades.
To demonstrate, the second cop walked up and drove his fist into my stomach. My wind was gone, even before I hit the floor like a dry sack.
“Get him up!”
Mirror Shades hoisted me easily, then put his powerful arms around my shoulders from behind. When the next punch came, he kept me from falling over, and also made sure my body absorbed the full impact. I vomited immediately, a little surprised there was anything to bring up.
“I have money,” I said, trying what had worked before in this country, back at Immigration.
The lead cop was huge – as tall as Sampson, with a flopping Idi Amin belly. He looked down the slope of his body right into my eyes. “Let’s see what you have.”
“Not here,” I said. Flaherty, my CIA contact, had supposedly set up a money fund for me in a Lagos bank, which at this point was the equivalent of a million miles away. “But I can get it–”
The lead cop crashed his elbow into my jaw. Then came another wrecking ball of a punch to my chest. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe.
He stepped back and waved Mirror Shades out of the way. With an agility I wouldn’t have guessed at, the large, fat man kicked high with one boot and caught me square in the chest again. All the air remaining went out of me. I felt as if I’d just been crushed.
I heard, rather than saw, the two guards leave the room. That was it. They left me lying on the floor; no interrogation, no demands, no explanations.
No hope?
Chapter 42
BACK IN THE holding cell, I was given a bowl of cassava and a cup of water, only a few ounces, though. I bolted the water but found I couldn’t eat the cassava, which is an important vegetable throughout Africa. My throat closed when I tried to swallow solid food.
A young prisoner hovered nearby and was staring at me. With my back to the wall, I whispered barely loud enough for him to hear, “You want it?” I held out the bowl.
“We hail the cassava, the great cassava,” he wheezed as he took the bowl. “It’s from a famous poem we learn in school.”
He scrabbled over and sat next to me, both of us watching the door for guards.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Sunday, sir.”
He couldn’t have been more than twenty, if that. His clothes were dirty but seemed middle-class to me, and he had a three-stripe tribal scar on each cheek.
“Here, Sunday. You’d better not be seen talking to me, though.”
“Oh, fuck them,” he said. “What can they do – throw me in a prison cell?”
He ate the cassava quickly, looking around like he expected someone to take it away from him. Or to rush in and beat him.
“How long have you been here?” I asked when he had finished eating.
“I come here ten days ago. Maybe it’s eleven now. Everyone here is new prisoner, waiting for processing.”
This was news.
“Processing? To where?”
“To the maximum-security unit. Somewhere in the country. Or maybe it will be worse. We don’t know. Maybe we all goin’ to a big ditch.”
“How long does it take? The processing. Whatever happens here?”
He looked at the floor and shrugged. “Maybe ten days. Unless you have egunje.”
“Egunje?”
“Dash. Money for the guards. Or maybe someone knows you’re here?” I shook my head no on both counts. “Then you have big wahala, sir. Same as me. You don’t exist. Shhhh. Guard is coming.”
Chapter 43
WHEN THE GUARDS woke me on the third morning, they had to drag me to my feet. I wasn’t going with them willingly. Not to my own execution. My chest still ached from the beating the day before. And my nose felt seriously infected.
This time, it was a left turn out of the cell. I didn’t know if that meant good news or that the bad news had just gotten a lot worse.
I followed the human grasshopper down a steep, stone stairwell, through another corridor, and around several more turns that had me thinking I never would have gotten out of this place on my own.
We finally came outside into an enclosed quad. It was just a wide expanse of sun-bleached earth with a few tufts of weeds and a ten-foot-high fence topped with ribbons of barbed wire. If this was the exercise yard, it was a sad excuse for one.
Anyway, I could barely see anything in the bright light. And it was hot, at least a hundred degrees, give or take ten or twenty.
The guard didn’t stop until he got to the high razor-wire-topped gate on the far side.
A locked door was opened to a passage through a building, through another door, then a gate, and to what looked like a parking area in the distance.
I asked Grasshopper Man what was going on. He didn’t answer. He just opened the door and let me through.