‘There’s nothing to resolve,’ I replied coolly. ‘I can sponsor Godfrey and give him whatever he needs. But if you want your son to remain alive, he’d better stay in Umuahia with you. Maybe that will help tighten some of the screws that have gone loose in his head.’
‘Jesus is Lord!’ Aunty Dimma exclaimed.
Ha.
‘Jesus is Lord. Education is gold. God will provide. You people should continue living in your dream world.’
Aunty Dimma glanced at my mother again. My mother stood up and leaned forward with one hand on her waist and the other pointing at me.
‘Look at how you’re talking. See who’s talking about loose screws in the head. What about you?’
I still had some left over of yesterday’s oomph. I jumped up from my chair, slammed my fists in the air and stared her in the face.
‘I’m tired of all this rubbish! I’m tired! Whether you people appreciate it or not, I’ve been making all these sacrifices for the family. It’s because of you. And all I get is insults and derogatory remarks.’
Charity had reappeared. She was watching from the bottom of the stairs.
‘It’s not for us you’re doing it,’ my mother spat through clenched teeth. ‘I told you long time ago that I don’t want any of your dirty money. If your father were alive, none of this would have happened. Your father is there turning in his grave and wondering how his son, his own flesh and blood, can be living this sort of despicable life. This is not the way we brought you up. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a disgrace to your father’s memory.’
‘Let him keep turning in his grave,’ I said. ‘That’s why he died a poor man. If he had done what other people were doing instead of sitting there and idealising, he would still be alive today.’
Aunty Dimma covered her mouth with her hand and allowed her eyes to do the exclaiming instead. My mother became a column of ice and focused her frozen eyeballs on my face. Gradually, she thawed. Then, rushed over and landed two slaps on my right cheek.
‘Kingsley,’ she said, with tears rising in her eyes, ‘your father and I did not raise you to be a conman. You hear me? Enough is enough. You have to stop this 419. If not, I will never mention your name again as my son. As far as I’m concerned, you no longer exist.’
She sniffed. The tears had now overflowed the banks and were creeping far out to shore.
‘Since this your fast money has given you the guts to talk about your father in this manner, then you might as well just forget about me. Until you stop this 419, I will never, ever set foot in your house again. And I don’t want you to come and visit me. If you ever see me here in your house again, that is the day I will drop dead. You had better not think for one second that I’m joking. I mean every single word I’m saying.’
She grabbed her handbag and stormed out. Even the sound of Charity’s sobbing was drowned out by her footsteps.
‘Kingsley,’ Aunty Dimma said. ‘Don’t allow the devil to use you to wreak havoc in this family! Don’t allow—’
‘You people should learn to be realistic,’ I cut in gruffly, recalling Cash Daddy’s long-time-ago imitation of how rich people behaved and spoke. ‘This has nothing to do with the devil.’
‘That’s what you think! Even the devil was not always the devil. God made Lucifer then Lucifer turned himself into the devil. You might not know it, but money is turning you into a devil. You’d better stop yourself before—’
‘I don’t want to hear any more of this rubbish. Aunty Dimma, I’ve tolerated your tongue enough. All this talk . . . Does it put food on the table? Does it pay school fees? Me, I don’t believe in film tricks, I believe in real, live action.’
Whatever else she wanted to say got stuck inside her throat. She looked on in disbelief while I stormed past her and headed for the stairs.
For the first time in the history of womankind, Aunty Dimma’s tongue appeared tied.
I sat on my bed and swept the room with my eyes. My Rolexes and Movados on the dresser, my five bunches of car keys on the bedside stool, my Persian rug, my six pillows, my rows of shoes by the split-unit air conditioner - a mere fraction of what I had in my closet. None of this was worth losing my mother for. And, truth be told, I would have loved to have Merit in my life.
Nevertheless, I could not face poverty again. Never again. My best bet was Cash Daddy’s suggestion. Once I took up his job offer at the Ministry of Works and Transport, my mother - and Merit - would definitely be appeased. So what if it was just a façade?
I noticed that my cellular screen was flashing. I grabbed it from the edge of my pillow and saw the five missed calls. All were from Cash Daddy’s number. I rang back immediately.
‘Kings, they got him, they got him,’ Protocol Officer said over and over again.
‘Got whom?’
‘Kings, Cash Daddy is dead.’
Then he started sobbing, making the sort of noises you should hope never to hear from a grown man.
Forty-five
At first, nobody was sure how it happened. Early on Sunday morning, the Indian girls had suddenly started screaming and scampered out of the room. Nobody had understood what they were saying. The security personnel had rushed in. Cash Daddy was lying stark naked on his belly with white foam gathering at the corners of his mouth and blood dripping from his rectum.
Protocol Officer was summoned. Cash Daddy was rushed to a private hospital. Shortly after, the next democratically elected executive governor of Abia State was pronounced dead. Death by poisonous substance.
For starters, the Indian girls were arrested and carted off to the police station. But after hours of questioning, the officers of the Criminal Investigative Division were unable to get any sensible information out of them. One of the smarter policemen then came up with an idea. Mr Patel, the CEO of Aba Calcutta Plastics Industry, was invited to interpret.
The girls said that everything had gone very well till Saturday evening. But after his nightly snack of fried meat and wine, curiously, Cash Daddy had declined all their offers of amusement, stumbled into bed, and fallen asleep. In the morning, they prepared themselves for his body rub - one of his favourite daybreak pleasures. They tickled him. Cash Daddy did not stir. They shook him. He still did no stir. Then, one of them climbed onto his back. She noticed the foam at the corner of his lips and screamed. The other two also saw it and joined in.
The police thanked Mr Patel for his services but still held onto the girls.
Next, all the staff of the hotel restaurant - both waiters and chefs - were rounded up and also taken to the police station. Each of them proclaimed undying love for their dead master; they all swore that their hands were clean. The police tried different methods to get a confession, all without success.
Eventually, Protocol Officer suggested investigating all the staff’s bank accounts. An unexplainable two hundred thousand naira was sitting snugly in the Diamond Bank account of one chef. The Indian prostitutes were released, the other staff were released, the chef kept swearing that he had received the money from a 419 deal. But when a quarter of his back had turned raw and red, the man finally confessed that someone had paid him to poison Cash Daddy’s 404 meat. He insisted it was two men whom he had met only once. He could not give any further information about them, not even when the rest of his back was raw and red.
If Cash Daddy had lived to see the drama in the days following his death, he would have been very proud of himself.
The Association of Pepper and Tomato Sellers, Aba Branch, took to the streets in angry protest. Not wanting to be left out, the street touts joined in. Their placard carrying, ‘Death to the murderers!’ chanting, and wanton looting lasted for three whole days, grinding all commercial activity in Aba to a halt. The mayhem made it into the nine o’clock news headlines. The entire nation of Nigeria was forced to take note.
Newspaper and soft-sell headlines screamed in anger. Politicians of timbre and calibre - Uwajimogwu included - granted press briefings to publicly condemn the senseless killing of yet another one of Nigeria’s great politicians. The president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was not left out of the tirade.
‘Enough is enough!’ he declared. ‘It is time for God to punish whoever these assassins are! They shall never cease to entertain sorrow in their homes, they shall never know peace, their grief shall be passed on from generation to generation of their families.’
The inspector general of police went on national television and made a golden pledge to the nation.
‘Whoever is behind this dastardly act will soon be unmasked!’ he promised.
As proof that he meant it - this time - he had invited the British Metropolitan Police into the investigation.
‘Not because our police officers are not capable of handling it,’ he explained, ‘but right now, we lack the required forensic facilities for the successful investigation of these assassination cases.’
Journalists and opinion-editorials immediately went berserk.
‘Why not invite the whole British government to come run the rest of Nigeria?’ some asked. ‘Then maybe we would have electricity, running water, good hospitals, and our highways would cease to be death traps.’
‘The rampant assassinations are the fault of the electorate,’ some others said. ‘They are the ones who reward the assassins by victory in the polls.’
Yet others cautioned the public about automatically assuming that all assassinations were political; some could actually have been in-house engineered.
Protocol Officer did not buy that talk. When he turned up suddenly at my house a few days after the murder, he told me exactly what was on his mind.
‘I’m sure it’s Uwajimogwu,’ he insisted. ‘Everybody else loved Cash Daddy. There’s no one else it can be.’
That opinion was shared by the majority of people in Abia State. The rioters had even razed Uwajimogu’s campaign office headquarters in Aba. With Cash Daddy’s relocation to the other world, he was the new flag bearer of the NAP gubernatorial ticket, certain to become the next democratically elected governor of Abia State.
Mrs Boniface Mbamalu had come all the way from Lagos to take her position as widow in Cash Daddy’s living room. Each morning, she appeared wearing a different black designer dress and a different pair of designer shades. With his fresh complexion, his gentlemanly clothes and English manners, her opara sat by her side. So far, eleven condolence registers had been filled. Still, the dignitaries continued pouring in.
‘I can’t believe Cash Daddy has gone like that,’ Protocol Officer continued. ‘Just like that. Every morning I wake up and expect him to ring my phone. I spend the whole day waiting for him to ring.’
I also was still finding it hard to believe. Cash Daddy was one of those people who seemed as if they were born never to die. Even after Protocol Officer’s phone call, I had to see for myself. I jumped into my car and accelerated all the way to the mortuary and saw him lying with his name - complete with nickname - tagged to his big toe. His face was contorted and pallid. I clutched my head, stumbled out of the cold room, and collapsed in the hall.
To think that I had heard the last Igbo proverb and that I would never again have to shield my ears from his thunderous ‘Speak to me!’ How could Cash Daddy be dead? The man who had taken me under his wing. The man who had given me a new life. The man who had given me an opportunity to prove myself when everybody else kept turning me down. I had not just lost an uncle and a boss, I had lost a father.
And Cash Daddy would have been good for Abia State. After all was said and done, my uncle loved his people. He might have pocketed a billion or two in the process, but in the long run, our lot would have been better. We would have had better roads. We would have had running water. We would have had a public officer who could not bear to watch his brothers and sisters in distress. Abia had just lost the best governor we could ever have had. I wailed even louder.
Eventually, an elderly man who could have been a morgue attendant or a fellow-mourner or a ghost, tapped my shoulders firmly.
‘Be a man,’ he said sternly. ‘It’s enough. Be a man and dry your tears.’
He waited beside me until I wiped my eyes and got up. I realised that I was barefooted, in boxer shorts and T-shirt.
I did not feel like going home. I drove to the office and was startled. There were two giant black padlocks on the main gates and on the front door.
Could it be the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission who had barricaded our office? Could it be the FBI? Had our friends in the police abandoned us so quickly after Cash Daddy’s death? With panic, I rang Protocol Officer.
‘I’m the one that locked it,’ he said, in a teary but firm tone. ‘I don’t want anybody to tamper with any of Cash Daddy’s things. Nobody should go inside. ’
Amazing that he could function so effectively even at a time like this. He must have dashed out to lock the office immediately after learning of his master’s death. But then, no one could blame me for having been paranoid. First Azuka, then Cash Daddy. Who knew where the lightning was planning to strike next?
Perhaps, we were being punished for all the mugus. I pushed away the thought. The only offences I had committed were against the people I loved. I replayed my misbehaviour towards Godfrey and my mother. I was consumed with shame. Truly, I was becoming a devil.
Nay, I was a devil.
Back at home, I rang Merit.
‘Merit is busy,’ her brother said calmly.
She was still busy the fifth time I rang.
I got dressed, drove to her house and waited outside, hoping to see someone whom I could send inside to call her. To my relief, after about two hours, the gates opened and her skinny brother appeared. He was dressed casually in singlet, jeans and bathroom slippers, as if he was just taking a stroll.