An Old Acquaintance

On party nights the estate changed its clothes.

By seven the waiting area outside the main gate was full of people in shirts that had been ironed twice. Somebody's speaker was arguing with somebody else's. A police car parked under the canopy played the radio with its doors open, and the smell of suya, spiced grilled beef on sticks, drifted from a seller's smoking tray and made every officer on the line turn his head at once, like sunflowers.

Sarge sold more water on party nights than in the rest of the week together. He kept the window open late, the blue book closed. Party nights were cash only. He had learned that the hard way, in his first month, from a man who had promised to pay "after the show" and had apparently gone to live inside the show forever.

At a quarter past eight the convoy came.

You heard it before you saw it: not a siren, nothing so official, just three heavy engines in low gear and a horn pattern that said clear the road, I am important. Three black vehicles, windows dark. Young men in black T-shirts walked beside the first one with their hands folded in front of them, the way men walk when they have seen it done in films.

Niyi, who was grumpy with the whole world, stopped being grumpy for exactly as long as it took to wave the convoy through.

The middle vehicle did not go through. It stopped at Sarge's window.

The back window slid down. The man inside wore white linen and gold rings on four fingers, and he held a fly-whisk, a horsetail on a carved handle, the kind traditional big men carry, which he did not need because the car was air-conditioned. His face had widened over the years, and his voice had too.

"Garba!" he cried. "Sergeant Garba! My son, you are still alive?"

Sarge was at least five years older than him. He let it pass.

"Lazarus," he said.

A small pause happened in the car. Behind the man, one of the boys in black shifted his weight.

"Warden," the man corrected, smiling with all his teeth. "Everybody calls me Warden now. Even my staff. On my insistence." He laughed. "Chief Lazarus Ekanem. You have seen my place? No. 1145. Prizm. The purple sign. I named it myself." He leaned toward the window. "For old times, my brother, give me one of those sausage rolls. On the house."

Sarge took a sausage roll from the shelf and laid it on the counter.

"Three hundred naira," he said.

The Warden laughed again, louder, as if this were the best joke of the evening. Then he snapped two fingers, and one of the boys in black paid, with a crisp note, and did not wait for change. The window slid up. The convoy rolled on down June 12 Street toward the purple light, and the boys in black walked after it, and from somewhere a cooler of cold stout appeared beside the gate officers' table as if it had grown there.

Sarge put the change in a separate tin. He did not want it mixing with the rest.

He remembered the canteen very clearly. It had stood on a dusty corner not far from the prison wall, thirty-five years ago, a zinc roof and a television on a shelf, owned by a woman everyone called Mama Pot. Young soldiers drank there on one side and young warders from Kirikiri on the other, and when the football was on, the sides forgot themselves and shouted at the same referee.

Lazarus Ekanem had been the loudest of the young warders and the most generous. He bought rounds. He bought rounds so often that it took Garba a full year to notice that the money for the rounds always seemed to come, somehow, from the man sitting next to Lazarus. He ran a savings club for the regulars, an esusu, where everyone puts a little in each month and takes turns collecting the whole pot. When it came to a quiet corporal's turn, the corporal who was saving to marry, the box was lighter than it should have been. Lazarus explained it with a verse from Proverbs, and with such feeling that two men cried. Nobody could prove anything. The corporal got married a year late.

Garba had never joined the club. He had watched. Lazarus had known that he watched, and had always called him "my son" even then, with a little edge on it, the way you pat a dog you are not sure about.

The worst thing, Sarge thought now, was not the money. It was that Lazarus remembered everything anyone owed him, to the last bottle, and nothing that he owed anyone else.

It was nearly nine when AJ came up to the window, sweating from the walk back from the bush, with dust on his shoes and ₦1,000 in his pocket that he had earned chasing balls for the footballers. He bought a sachet of water and paid for it, and looked pleased to be paying.

"Saw the cars," he said. "Who's the big man?"

Sarge did not answer at once. He watched the street. Down at No. 1145 the purple sign pulsed. On the radio, the evening's show was starting, Joe-Izzy's voice rising over the bass, the crowd at Prizm answering him.

"He owns the club," Sarge said. "They call him the Warden. He worked thirty-one years in that prison across the road, and he came out of it believing the whole world is a smaller prison and he is still in charge of the keys."

"You know him?"

"I knew him. When we were both young and thin." Sarge tapped the counter once, the way he used to tap a clipboard before inspection. "Listen to me, AJ. Not because I am old. Because I was there."

AJ, to his credit, listened.

"That man never gives you a drink. He lends it to you, and he remembers the price. If he calls you 'my son,' check your pockets. If he offers you a small job, there is no such thing as a small job. And if he says you owe him nothing" — Sarge almost smiled — "then you already owe him something, and he has started counting."

AJ laughed, but it came out thinner than he meant. "Why would a man like that care about me? I've got one bag and a debt to the gate police."

"You have a London accent," Sarge said. "To a man like that, a London accent sounds like a door to somewhere."

AJ went off toward Iloro House, drinking his water, and Sarge watched him all the way to the veranda.

Then he looked back at the gate. One of the Warden's boys in black had stayed behind. He was standing with Niyi beside the stout cooler, asking a question. Niyi shrugged and pointed down June 12 Street, toward the bench outside Iloro House, where a thin young man with a London accent had just sat down.

The boy in black nodded, took out his phone, and typed something.

Sarge opened the blue book, turned to a clean page, and for the first time in a long while wrote a note that was not about money.