Accra Noir Page 2

  “You don’t rent this stall.”

  When Limah realized it was Charles who had ambushed her, she had already sunk all but the hilt of her knife into the flesh under his chevrons. With his strong arm, he yanked her by her headscarf. Limah felt the scallop-edged polyester slip past her shoulders as her heart made an uneven rhythm of her breath.

  “I saw you last week, and the week before. You switch places with the one who rents it.”

  Watching Charles pull the knife out of his arm with a pained gurgle, she felt exhausted by her lie. In the beginning, she had hoped their relationship could progress beyond these market nights, but now she realized she had just been deceiving herself.

  Blood spurted from his bicep, surprising them both. “I want the money I’ve been giving you these last four months. Every pesewa.”

  Quickly, she inserted the key and yanked the padlock open, pulling him inside. The flame gyrated with the oxygen the opened door brought in.

  Limah went for the Dettol behind the counter. The bottle held just a splash. She dragged down one of the many pieces of lace packed on the shelf that lined the wall, tore it free from its plastic casing, and soaked a corner of it with the antiseptic. The chemical stench filled the stall.

  Charles whimpered as he struggled to unbutton his shirt. His right sleeve was now dripping rivulets of blood. Limah handed him the Dettol-soaked lace with shaking hands and watched him hurl it across the stall. The wick flickered dangerously.

  “I have to go to hospital,” he said with the weary sobriety of a child forced to admit misbehavior.

  His blood was everywhere. All over his hands. On his trousers. Fat drops on his boots. Smears on Limah’s T-shirt and the scarf that had been on her head. The cracked tile floor, a poor man’s mosaic, was slippery with it.

  “Help me up!” Charles barked.

  Limah was a petite girl, slim and slight. The flame watched her futile attempts to hoist him. “Help me help you up!” she ordered finally, both of them alarmed when he couldn’t. Then he slumped, his weight pinning her to the ground. She wriggled out from under him, her foot knocking the wick in the process.

  She gasped at the sudden blackness and the silence that followed, only her breath and heartbeat in her ears.

  * * *

  “Limah!” Asana whispered sharply. Ah! Limah knew she had to be out before Auntie Muni came. She tapped the metal door insistently, pulling out her phone.

  “The number you have dialed has been switched off,” reported the British woman who had won the contract to voice all such messages. “Please try again later.”

  It was almost four a.m. In an hour, Auntie Muni would be at the market or close.

  “Limah!”

  Banging now, Asana wondered with mounting anxiety whether her friend had forgotten to drop off the key before heading to collect her son. She only had one and had given it to Limah.

  Asana sank to the cement incline that rose into the stall. Seething, she rehearsed the curses she would hurl at Limah, and the cluelessness she would perform if Auntie Muni came to meet her locked out.

  She rented the stall from Auntie Muni for thirty thousand a week. She only had use of it at night, to sleep in when the market closed. As part of their rental agreement, Asana cleaned the stall before she left in the morning, had her bath at the market shower, and then returned to sell Special Ice water for Auntie Muni, getting five pesewas for every thirty-pesewa sachet she sold, on top of the 2,500 a day Auntie Muni paid her.

  The arrangement was a luxury Asana worked hard to keep so she wouldn’t have to return to sleeping outside, praying away rain, armed robbers, and rapists. The ten thousand she took from Limah each week enabled her to save some of the roughly 200,000 (twenty cedis in the new money) she earned weekly selling for Auntie Muni. She planned to buy her own Special Ice carton and bring her junior sister from their uncle’s farm in Yendi to sell for her until she could one day own a market stall.

  But every week, Limah did something to risk Auntie Muni finding out that Asana let her use the stall to sleep with her police officer. She always seemed to forget something—a scarf, a still-smoking mosquito coil, a condom wrapper—and she always left later than their agreed upon four a.m., giving Asana little time to clean up after her. This week, she had not only told Limah to leave at three, but made an excuse not to watch Adama, hoping Limah would finish early to pick him up. Asana regretted this now, realizing she had no guarantee Limah would come straight back to her.

  Ready to pound the metal door again, she heard a rustle coming from inside. Her pocket vibrated. She hissed Limah’s name into her phone. “Open for me.”

  Asana listened for the metallic slide of the unlocking door and pushed her way in. Her eyes adjusting to the darkness, she turned toward the sound of two distinct ragged breaths, suddenly afraid she had entered a trap.

  “Limah? Gom beni?” she asked in their native Dagbani, hoping the rapist or armed robber who might be holding her friend hostage couldn’t understand.

  “I am fine.” Limah’s voice shook.

  “Why are you in the dark?” Asana’s eyes still adjusting, she moved toward Limah’s voice and tripped. Scrimmaging to her elbows, Asana turned to see what had made her fall. It hadn’t been Limah’s selling pan or some other discarded object. Whatever it was had the mass of an animal. A big one. Like one of the cows the men in Yendi used to pool money to buy and kill for Eid. She pulled herself up, yanking her phone from her pocket.

  “Charles,” Limah explained as Asana directed the device’s light to the body.

  Asana gasped. There was a lifeless police officer in Auntie Muni’s stall, and there was blood. She put her hands on her head.

  “I thought he was an attacker.”

  Asana nodded understanding. There wasn’t a female among them who didn’t know the fear that came with night. Whether guarding the wares they sold in the storage sheds, or asleep on the roadside just outside Mal’ Atta, they lived with the paranoia of attacks past and recent. Even those who could pay to sleep in padlocked market stalls were vulnerable to armed robbers and rapists who knew they might be inside, easily overpowered.

  “We have to get him out of here before Auntie Muni comes.”

  “He’s too heavy.” Limah’s voice was thin with despair. “We should call the police.”

  “And tell them what? You thought your married officer was an attacker so you killed him?” Asana turned her phone’s light on Limah. Her friend sat defeated, the swatch of fabric she had earlier worn wrapped around her hair now draped around her shoulders and streaked with blood, the balding circle of scalp she was so self-conscious about, exposed. “A police officer is dead. It will be your word—a kayayo—against his family’s desire to bury him honorably, his wife’s embarrassment, and his fellow officers’ fear of crackdown when it’s discovered he was with you instead of at his checkpoint. No. We have to remove him and clean this place before the market opens.”

  More afraid of what Auntie Muni might do to her than the police, Asana turned her phone around, the light searing her eyes. 3:57 a.m. The market opened at six, but proprietors would start arriving by five.

  “The AMA inspectors will be here,” she reminded Limah. The Accra Metropolitan Assembly often dispatched officials for surprise sanitation checks, but it being National Sanitation Day, they would be in the market in numbers. “And no telling when the Munhwɛ people will start coming. We have to do it now.”

  “We could take him to the hospital.”

  “Do you have 150,000 for a taxi to Korle Bu?” Asana sucked her teeth. “He’s already dead. Start cleaning up. I’m going to find us some help to clear the body.”

  * * *

  Muni accidentally kicked a short stack of plastic buckets as she turned the corner on the path to her stall.

  “Who left these here?” she asked the small girl sweeping in front of the first shop in the row. Even though it wasn’t her stall, the AMA inspectors would use such infractions to threaten to fine th
e owner—a pretext for negotiating lesser levies that would bypass the city’s coffers for their own pockets. Where the inspectors started, they would linger. “Clear them now.”

  “Yes, Auntie Muni.”

  In front of her stall, Muni parted her bag’s leather-band-and-gold-link handles to rummage for her keys. She dug past her phone, her face-powder compact, blotting papers, a handkerchief, a Munhwɛ TV flyer, P.K chewing gum wrappers, and magazine perfume strips she collected, always on the hunt for a new scent. Finally, she found her wallet, pulling out the keys that dangled from the ring attached to the zipper.

  Muni tugged at the padlock and latched the heavy spinach-green metal door to the loop that moored it to the cement wall. She sniffed compulsively, as she did every morning. To her surprise, her shop smelled good. Fresh even.

  Her kayayo and tenant Asana did a good job cleaning the stall, but there was a smell about the girl that always lingered. None of Muni’s customers had yet complained about an unpleasant musk, and most of her lace was sheathed in plastic, but she worried nonetheless that the girl’s raw odor would pique a sensitive nose like hers or seep into her stock.

  This morning, though, the place had a lemony antiseptic smell to it. The shelves looked neater too.

  Tank u, ma dear. Outdid urself. D shop is luking gr8, she texted Asana, using the shorthand her son, Abdul, messaged her with.

  Abdul and his sister would be coming soon to help her man the shop. She had seen on the Munhwɛ TV flyer that the area MP and his wife, Alice, were planning to welcome Ahmed Razak to the market. Alice had become something of a friend during her husband’s campaign, meeting regularly with the market shopkeepers to rally their support. Even after his win, Alice always dropped by Muni’s stall and picked up a few yards of lace when she was at Mal’ Atta. Muni looked forward to showing her the new pieces that had come in.

  Abdul and Mariama were supposed to be at the market by seven a.m., but Asana and the other girls were to report before six to account for yesterday’s sales and refill their pans with the supplies they’d be selling. She unlocked the stall’s back door, which led to her small storeroom and the deep freezer inside. She switched on the generator.

  The power supply had been out for two straight half days, but the cakes of frosty ice in the freezer had kept the water cold enough. The same couldn’t be said for the ice cream and frozen yogurt. She felt the plastic sachets of FanIce and FanYogo mixed in with the small water packets and frowned at their mushiness.

  As Muni walked away, she noticed a plastic soap bottle on the floor. Instead of the syrupy green Fairy liquid the label advertised, there was a watery yellow solution inside. It was too pale to be urine, she decided, tentatively raising it to her nose. The pungent odor of ammonia and lemons induced her gag reflex. This was the scent that had greeted her when she opened her stall. She recognized it now as the cleaning fluid the market butchers used to disinfect meat, and the oddly pleasing fragrance that clung to Ibrahim. She arched her eyeliner-traced eyebrows and blinked away tears as she jumped to conclusions. Of course Ibrahim would want to be with someone his own age, she told herself. Aside from the way she smelled, Asana was a pretty girl.

  “Auntie Muni?” The little girl who had been sweeping interrupted her thoughts.

  “Yes, my dear?” She put the bottle down, covering her hurt with a smile.

  “I have removed the buckets.”

  But what if it was Mr. Selifu? Muni asked herself, blooming with hope that Asana’s visitor had been Ibrahim’s boss instead. Resolving to ask Asana point-blank if she had broken their agreement by bringing a man into her stall, Muni dug in her bag and gave the girl the five-pesewa coin she was angling for. She followed the child out to see if Asana or any of her other kayayei were coming. The market would be open in twenty minutes.

  Morning light was diluting the sky, and now, as far down the row as Muni could see, small girls were sweeping. The sound of the dried-reed brooms swiping rock-studded earth and cement was almost orchestral, accompanied by the creaks of traders dragging wood tables and benches into arrangement, and shopkeepers freeing heavy metal doors from their locks. The shrill of a loudspeaker suddenly disrupted this market symphony—a prelude to the more guttural beats of transaction that would come when the shops opened.

  “Testing,” a man’s voice announced, his breath heavy in the distant microphone. “Munhwɛ TV test.”

  Muni pulled her handbag open to retrieve the Munhwɛ flyer. A sinewy young man with a dimpled grin had pressed it into her hand yesterday, on her way to the fifty-pesewa toilets.

  “There’s still time to enter, madam,” he had said.

  She looked up at him, noting his Munhwɛ TV T-shirt.

  “Am I your size?” she flirted, reading the title of the show.

  “Fat-ulous,” he answered.

  Muni had giggled at his unblinking recitation of Ahmed Razak’s catchphrase.

  “You should enter and try for the car.”

  She winked at him. “I have cars already.”

  The Munhwɛ boy had reminded her of Ibrahim, rangy and brimming with the muscular energy of youth. Now, she tucked the flyer back in her bag, feeling fresh pain at the prospect of her lover having been in her stall, with Asana.

  * * *

  “My guy never show?”

  Ken shook his head at his supervisor.

  “Those Mal’ Atta girls have Charles under a spell. What kind of chook go for four hours?” Sergeant Duah joked about Charles’s longer-than-usual absence.

  The two men were moving the pair of metal barricades that made up their checkpoint on the neighborhood border between Tesano and Abeka. They leaned them against a tree off the road along with the plastic chairs they—really Ken—had been keeping watch in all night.

  Ken suppressed a growl. He didn’t care what kind of sex Charles was having, or why he was traveling twenty minutes by road to have it when there were girls much closer to home. He was sick of doing Charles’s job and Sergeant Duah’s too.

  Both men exploited Ken’s freshman rank, one of them usually disappearing for hours from whatever checkpoint they were assigned, or cutting him out of whatever “something small” they coaxed from midnight drivers.

  How he longed to report them. But he knew retaliation would be swift. The old guard viewed any attempt at reform by younger officers as a “breach of discipline.”

  There were forty-four breaches listed in the Ghana Police Service handbook, but only two were consistently punished. The first: “Disobedience of a lawful order given him by his senior in rank, whether verbally or in writing, or by authorized signal on parade.” The second: “Communicating to any unauthorized person matters connected with the Service without permission from the Senior Police Officer under whom he serves.”

  Ken was not so naive that he hadn’t expected some form of hazing on the job. His uncle, now a chief inspector, had prepared him with tales of his first-year constable days. But even if he hadn’t, Ken knew his people. Ghanaians acquired power three ways: money, position, and age. And when they had it, they wielded it with a hammer’s blunt force.

  Fitting his helmet over his head, he seated himself behind Duah on the senior officer’s motorcycle. Taking advantage of the relatively open, pre–rush hour Nsawam Road, Duah zipped to their Munhwɛ assignment at Mal’ Atta Market.

  When they arrived, Duah stayed on the bike. “I’m coming, eh.”

  With gritted teeth, Ken watched Duah rev away, reminding himself that when the new class of academy graduates entered, he would move up a rung. He had received high commendations from his senior officers, and his uncle was friendly with the inspector general of police. He had hope that he would be considered for early promotion. Advancing from constable to lance corporal would mean a little more power and a little less abuse.

  He yawned, wiping away a tear of exhaustion as he strode past the sign announcing Mallam Atta Market. Located in Kokomlemle, the central Accra neighborhood built in the early 1950s to accommod
ate the city’s population spike, Mal’ Atta served 1,800 customers daily, including workers in the now mostly commercial district and residents in neighboring New Town. From fresh vegetables to hair-braiding services, one could find almost anything among the stalls and stands spread across the market’s 57,499 square yards. Stepping over a slim gutter, Ken braced himself as he passed through the entry partition between Mal’ Atta’s cement walls.

  When Ken was a child, his mother sold cloth in Kumasi’s Kejetia market. Growing up, he’d felt claustrophobic in the stadium-size crush laureled as West Africa’s largest open-air bazaar. His childhood had been populated by men wielding crates and sacks filled with everything from water sachets to ground millet, and women stationed behind tables topped with pyramids of tomatoes, student math sets, or pans brimming with all manner of powdered condiments—all incessantly haggling.

  When he reached his teens, and his mother made him roam the market for customers, balancing folded fabric stacks on his head, his aversion to market hustle hardened. He couldn’t remember a happier day than when his uncle offered to pay his way through the police academy. Now, as he followed the traffic ambling toward the blaring Munhwɛ TV speakers, he resented his first-year rank all the more.

  Mal’ Atta attacked with a slew of sensory assaults. While the morning sun overexposed Vodafone-red and MTN-yellow umbrellas, massive wooden sheds roofed with corrugated-iron sheets made shadowy figures of those transacting inside. Between the sheds and umbrellas, the narrow paths were choked. Suppliers squeezed through, carting boxes or plastic containers. Preachers outfitted with microphones and portable speakers admonished anyone within earshot. Itinerant chickens avoided children free from their caretakers’ backs who were chasing each other in dusty circles, urinating, or shitting within spitting distance of guardians skinning oranges or hacking sugarcane stalks. Patrons punctuated the chaos, rushing, dawdling, picking, poking, bargaining.

  Threading through it all: the kayayei.