Settle Us

Officer Sola had held his phone so long that his hand had shaped itself around it, the way a riverbed shapes itself around a stone. Officer Tunde leaned. He leaned on the gate post, the plastic table, the barrier pole, the police car, and once, memorably, on a goat that had wandered in from the waiting area, which did not stay leaned on for long.

Together they held the inside of the north gate of the Abraham Adesyan Estate. Behind them, the estate. In front of them, a barrier, a canopy, a bench, and Lagos, which wanted in or out at all hours. Around them, depending on the shift: Jide, who was grumpy; Bola, who thought he was funny; and Dami, who was always eating or about to be.

The figure was born on a Tuesday.

Chuks had brought the new man up June 12 Street to look at the gate, the way you show a guest the view. The new man was thin and bruised and carried himself like someone who had been somewhere hard and was not going to tell you about it. His shoes were London shoes, black and pointed, and they had been very good shoes once. Now they had the dust of half of Lagos on them and were shining underneath anyway, out of pure pride.

"This is AJ," Chuks said. "He's staying at Iloro House. He's back from London."

"London," said AJ himself, in an accent so south London it practically came with its own drizzle. "What does it take to get through this gate, then? Officially."

Sola looked at the shoes. He looked at the one bag that Chuks said was everything the man owned. He looked at his phone, which offered no help. And then, for reasons he could never afterward explain, he said:

"London? This one did not come from London. Look at those shoes. This one came across the desert. From Libya."

AJ opened his mouth.

"On foot," Sola said.

Tunde, leaning on the barrier, became interested. "And the army," he said slowly, "the army was chasing him. They searched the dunes while he found the bus."

"I've never been to Libya," AJ said.

"That is exactly what a man who came from Libya would say," said Sola, and Bola laughed so hard he had to sit down.

That was how the rumor started. It would never stop. By the end of the month AJ had, in the gate police's telling, crossed the Sahara twice, outrun a camel, sold guns by the suitcase (Tunde's detail; AJ said the only thing he had sold was his patience), and been offered a wife by a desert king, whom he refused because her father's goats were thin. AJ played along because there was nothing else to do with it. "The desert took plenty," he would say. "These shoes are doing their best."

But first, on that Tuesday, there was the matter of the price.

"How much," AJ repeated, "to open the gate?"

Sola and Tunde looked at each other. It was a look with a whole conference inside it. They turned their backs on AJ and Chuks, put their heads together over Sola's phone, and opened the calculator.

"My landlord," Sola murmured. In Lagos a landlord can ask for a year's rent, or two, all at once and in advance, and Sola's had just asked for two. "Nine hundred thousand."

"My daughter's school fees. Next term and the one after. Five hundred."

"My phone screen." Sola held it up. A crack ran across it like a road on a map. "Forty."

"My mother's knee," said Tunde. "The doctor says it needs a procedure. She says it needs prayer. Prayer is cheaper, but I'll put three hundred."

Dami, from behind them, with his mouth full: "Lunch."

"Lunch for how long?"

"Since when have I stopped being hungry?"

They put lunch down as a hundred. Sola added something "for road," which is what Lagos calls the little extra that greases every journey. Tunde added something for inflation. Bola, wiping his eyes, suggested adding something because the man was from London, and London people have money, everyone knows that. Sola pressed equals. The number on the cracked screen was unpleasant and lumpy. Tunde, who had a sense of occasion, rounded it up.

They turned around.

"Two million, five hundred thousand naira," Sola announced. "₦2,500,000. Then the gate opens."

It was a number designed to end the conversation. Any sensible man would laugh, call them thieves, and walk back down the street. Chuks, in fact, did laugh. Sola was already reaching for the next joke.

AJ did not laugh. He looked at the gate for a long moment. Then he said, "Fine."

The officers stared at him.

"Fine," AJ said again. "I haven't got it. But I'll get it. Little by little."

This was a disaster. Nobody had planned for yes. If the man had argued, they could have come down. If he had begged, they could have felt generous. But he had agreed, with his chin up, and now the number was a law and they had to live under it the same as he did. Tunde put his hand on the barrier and leaned with real heaviness.

"Little by little is fine," Sola heard himself say. "Settle us." Settle is the gentle Lagos word for paying somebody off.

The first payment came a week later: ₦1,000, in sweaty notes, ball-boy money from the bush. Sola wrote it in the notes app on his phone under a heading he labelled DESERT TRAVELER. The next was ₦5,000. AJ handed it over with a straight face and said, "I'm putting you in my will," and Tunde had to turn away.

They were not proud of it, exactly. They were not ashamed of it either. A month's salary at that gate would not cover the landlord's first year, and every officer on the line was carrying somebody: a mother, a child, a cousin at university, a church building fund. Dozie from Room 6 had once offered to settle the whole gate at once in BreakCoin, his own cryptocurrency, and they had laughed him all the way back to the veranda. AJ, at least, paid in naira.

And there was something else, which none of them would say aloud. Every time AJ came up to the barrier with another small bundle, he looked a little stronger. His shoulders came back. The bruise faded. He said thank you when they gave him his total, which was ridiculous, and they found themselves telling him the number a little more kindly than they meant to.

"That gate stays shut until the full amount is paid," Tunde said one evening, out of habit.

"I know," said AJ. "I'll get there."

He walked off toward the south footpath, toward the bush, where the football was starting. Sola watched him go.

"He'll go and borrow the bush boys' shotgun next," Sola said. "Shoot their bottles. Chase their balls."

"Let him," said Tunde. "Oga Radio will keep him straight."

Sola looked down at his phone. DESERT TRAVELER. ₦6,000 paid. ₦2,494,000 remaining. It would take the man years.

The strange thing was how much he wanted to see him do it.