The man held out his half-empty bottle of 33 Export. They shook their heads. They were hungry, and beer would only make them feel even more famished. They wanted 7UP. They could imagine its cold, filtered sweetness flowing down their throats into their bellies. Was it his offer of beer that made them angry? Seemingly from nowhere, a certain cruelty crept into them, and they picked up stones and began throwing them violently at the man. He stopped dancing and yelled when a rock came close to hitting him. He clutched the beer to his chest, cradling it as if saving the bottle was more important. The woman who owned the drinking shack ran out with a broom and chased after the children until they fled. “Useless children!” she yelled after them.
The next day on their way home from school, the boys were looking forward to another interlude at the bar — they liked the entertainment — but the man with the drink was not there. As they stood outside the shack looking for him, the woman who ran the bar came out. That was when she realized that something unusual had happened: the man who would usually be on his third bottle of 33 Export lager was not there.
Where was he? Why was he not at her bar drinking? Was he at another bar?
No, hers was the man’s favorite bar in the camp. He could not have risked leaving the camp and going into town to drink. The owners of the bars in town were not Liberians, and they did not like the Liberian refugees, even though they liked their money and their girls.
The man was not at her bar drinking today because he was dead.
Dead men do not drink 33 Export lager.
Sergeant Joseph Gorewa was sitting at his desk in the Isokoko police station in Agege, trying his best to think. This was an impossible task, considering that the police station was right beside the ever-noisy Agege Market and also opposite the railway tracks. There was a saying that if you could not find something at Agege Market, you wouldn’t be able to find it anywhere in Lagos. If there was ever a break in the constant din from the market, it would be interrupted by the shrill whistle of an approaching locomotive train, belching smoke, with passengers perched like locusts on every part of it.
Joseph Gorewa had many things on his mind. At this moment, though, he was thinking about the act of thinking. He wondered how it was possible that as soon as one thought exited his mind, another followed. How was it that the mind could have all these thoughts and not burst?
But one thought was persistently crowding out the rest: how could he make his pay last beyond two weeks? No matter how much he tried, he could never make his take-home pay last to the end of the month. He was thinking that there must be some way to be more frugal. Perhaps he could stop making calls and start only sending messages because they cost less. He had tried it once, but each time he sent his wife a text message she would text him back saying, Call me now. Perhaps this was a strategy he needed to try again.
At that moment his phone rang. It was his boss; the DPO. Joe Gorewa stood up and saluted as he took the call. He could never take a call from his boss while seated. No matter how much he planned to, on every occasion he would find his legs forcing themselves upright and his hand shooting out in a salute.
“There has been a homicide at the Refugee Resettlement Center by the Agric bus stop. You must go there immediately. These are refugees, so there are going to be all kinds of people interested in this case. I’ll need you to move really quickly on this one, Gorewa,” his DPO said.
Gorewa saluted again and walked outside to find an okada taxi to take him to the refugee camp. He would have to pay with his own money and then fill out paperwork for reimbursement, which would take months of snaking through the system before he got it. Still, he was excited. He was always excited at the news of a homicide. He liked to get to the bottom of things, and he would get to the bottom of this one.
The refugee camp used to be a government-owned dairy and corn farm from the colonial days. At some point the dairy farm closed and the corn farm soon became overgrown with grass. The mechanical equipment could be found peeking out of the wild grass. Yet the workers still went and received their salaries at the end of the month. They came in the morning, congregated under a tree where they ate rice and noodles and smoked cigarettes, and then they went home.
When war broke out in Liberia, the government, in desperate search for a place to house the fleeing refugees, suddenly remembered the old farmyard and sent the refugees to live there. They had tried their best to make it into a little Liberia. They played Liberian music, and had little shacks that sold Liberian foods. Some of them left the camp for the day to work in the city and came back at night — mostly women and a few tired old men and children. It was to this camp that the man who we met earlier drinking a bottle of 33 Export arrived one evening, holding a black walking stick. No sooner had he arrived than he made his importance known: he was no ordinary refugee; he was the personal assistant to a warlord. He claimed that the walking stick he carried at all times was no ordinary stick, but was made out of diamonds. It had once belonged to Samuel Doe, but the warlord who was his boss had confiscated it when Doe was captured. He was keeping the diamond walking stick safe for the warlord, who was still fighting in Liberia.
This was an impressive thing; an amazing story. No one in the camp had that kind of closeness to warlords, power, and diamonds. The man who drank 33 Export became the most respected man there.
Sergeant Gorewa went immediately to the chairman of the camp. He knew the chairman from a couple of months back when he was investigating the sale of marijuana. When they had talked, the chairman had convinced him that this was no big deal and that he was in charge of the camp.
The chairman took Sergeant Gorewa to the small shack where the dead man had lived and died. It was constructed from rusted roofing sheets. The stiff body lay in one corner, where it was attracting flies in large numbers because of the small space and the heat. There was a deep stab wound on the neck. Whoever had stabbed the man knew how to wield a knife. No man could survive that kind of wound, Gorewa mused.
The chairman disclosed that the only thing taken from the room was the black walking stick.
“What black walking stick?” Sergeant Gorewa asked.
“The man always had a black walking stick with him,” the chairman explained. “He said he used to be the next-in-command and personal assistant to one of the warlords, and that the walking stick was made from diamonds. He was holding onto it for his boss, and when he received the order he would sell the diamonds and be rich.”
“Was the stick actually made of diamonds?” Gorewa inquired.
“Between you and me and my God, I do not know whether he was telling the truth. But he sure used that stick to get the girls, and he always had money to drink. You should go ask the woman who runs the bar over there — she might have more answers than I do. He spent practically all his days there.”
The woman who owned the bar was dark, plump, and talkative. She said the dead man was a great customer and had a sweet tongue. She gestured to a lizard on the rusted roof of the bar, saying that the dead man could convince the lizard to get off the roof, come sit at the table, and buy him a bottle of 33 Export. She added that he was also a great debtor, and brought out a blue ledger to show Sergeant Gorewa how much the dead man owed.
“What about the walking stick?” Gorewa prompted.
The woman replied that everyone in the camp knew about the walking stick; that the trouble was that the man had gone to a bar in Agege and had boasted about it. This had probably fallen on the ears of the wrong people, and they had come to the camp, stabbed the man to death, and made away with the walking stick.