Suya for the Warden

Chuks did not make suya. Everybody knew Chuks did not make suya. He bought suya, from a man near the market, and ate it in secret, and denied it in public.

"The Warden would like some suya," the man in black said again, as if repetition might make it Chuks's specialty.

So Chuks made suya. He had watched the market man often enough. He cut the beef thin, pounded the groundnuts with pepper and ginger and a little stock cube, threaded the meat onto sticks and grilled it over the coal pot until the edges went dark and the whole street smelled like a festival. He wrapped it in newspaper with sliced onions and tomatoes, the way it should be done, and carried it to No. 1145 himself.

The Prizm sign was already glowing purple. A bouncer at the gate looked at Chuks, at the apron, at the newspaper parcel, and seemed to decide that none of it was a threat.

Inside, a woman in a sharp black dress met him at the door. "Welcome to Prizm," she said. "I'm Natasha. Need anything in here, you ask me first." She looked at the parcel. "And that, I assume, is for the back booth."

"For the Warden."

"Everything is for the Warden." She said it with no expression at all, which Chuks thought was its own kind of expression. She walked him across the ground floor, past the empty stage where the sound crew was setting up for Joe-Izzy's show, to a booth in the far corner with a good view of every door.

The office

Chief Lazarus Ekanem, whom everyone called the Warden and whom his staff were required to, sat in the booth in white linen with gold rings on four fingers and a fly-whisk resting on the table like a pet.

"My son!" he said, as if Chuks were a long-lost relative and not a man he had walked past every day for years. "Sit. Sit."

He unwrapped the suya, took a piece, chewed, closed his eyes. He chewed for a long time.

"The Bible says, taste and see that the Lord is good," he said finally. "The prison rulebook says, every meal must be inspected. I have done both, and I find the Lord is good and so is this." He opened his eyes. "You did not make this before."

"No, sir."

"You made it tonight because I asked. That is a quality I value."

He told Chuks what he wanted. Prizm's VIP nights were growing. Important guests, men from the ports, men with contracts, men who knew men, and important guests must eat. Small chops, those party snacks of spring rolls and puff-puff, which is fried sweet dough, and little skewers. Pepper soup in the artist's lounge. Suya on the roof. Three nights a week, everything Chuks could cook.

"₦150,000 a night," the Warden said. "Three nights. You can count?"

Chuks could count. He had been counting for years, in a biscuit tin, at night. ₦450,000 a week. In five weeks, give or take, MAMA'S SPOON would have a sign, a room, five benches and a ceiling fan. By Christmas he could be cooking under his own roof.

"There will be small favors, of course," said the Warden, waving the whisk as if the favors were flies. "Nothing. Nothing at all."

"What kind of favors, sir?"

"Your pot hears more than my ledger, my son. Soldiers eat with you. Police eat with you. Everyone talks with their mouth full. Which officer is short of money this month. Who is eating with whom. You hear things. Sometimes you will tell me what you hear." He took another piece of suya. "And sometimes a cooler will go out with your food, to a car at the gate. It is food. You do not need to open it."

"Food," said Chuks.

"Probably." The Warden smiled. "And bring your friend. The London one. A man with an accent like that must have friends abroad. I would like to meet him. Properly."

Chuks thought of AJ handing back the shotgun, stock first. He thought of the tin.

"Let me think, sir," he said.

The fly-whisk paused. Then the Warden laughed, a big, warm, generous laugh, the kind that fills a room and does not leave space for anything else. "Think! Of course. A cook must taste before he serves." He leaned in. "But think quickly, my son. Suya does not wait, and neither do I."

The walk back

The gatehouse was still lit when Chuks walked back that way, the long way, because he needed the air. Mallam Garba, whom everyone called Sarge, was behind his window shop with the radio on, among the biscuits and the painkillers and the mosquito coils, doing a crossword with a pencil he had sharpened with a knife.

"Chuks," Sarge said, without looking up. "You smell of suya. You do not make suya."

"Tonight I did."

Sarge put the pencil down. He had been a soldier for a long time, and before that a boy from Kano, and he looked at Chuks the way he looked at the weather. "For him."

It was not a question. Chuks nodded.

"I knew that man thirty years ago," Sarge said. "Soldiers and warders drank at the same canteen near Kirikiri. He always bought the first round." He picked up the pencil again. "He also always knew who drank it."

"He's offering good money."

"It is always good money," said Sarge. "Planning ahead kept me alive in the army. Plan ahead, Chuks. Plan as far as the bill." He filled in a word. "And keep that London boy out of his booth."

Back on June 12 Street, the coal pot had gone to embers. Mama Bisola was locking the kitchen at Mama Shola's. She looked at him across the street for a long moment, at his empty hands and his face, and for once said nothing at all, not even "salt."

AJ was on the bench at Iloro House, eating the leftover rice straight from the pot, which was against every rule Chuks had.

"What did he want?" AJ asked. "The big man with the whisk."

Chuks sat down beside him. The bench creaked. Over the rooftops, Joe-Izzy's first song of the night came rolling out of Prizm, and the crowd roared, and the purple light lay over the street like a promise somebody else had made.

"Suya," said Chuks.

It was true. It was just not all of it.

Later, after AJ had gone in, he took the tin out from under his bed and counted. ₦163,500. He unfolded the plan and read the sums again, the sums he knew by heart. He thought of MAMA'S SPOON over a door, his mama's name in a city that had never once said it. He thought of a cooler going out to a car at the gate, and of not opening it.

He folded the paper. He put it back in the tin. He did not put the tin away.

He sat on the edge of the bed with it in his lap for a long time, listening to the music, doing the sums one more time, as if this time they might come out different.