Thirty-One Years

"For thirty-one years," the Warden liked to say, "I held the keys of Kirikiri."

He said it in the back booth at Prizm, usually around eleven at night, when the bass from the stage had settled into a warm thump you felt in your teeth and there was a fresh audience around his table. He said it with his rings on the tablecloth and his fly-whisk, a horsetail on a carved handle, resting across his knee like a sceptre. He said it as if the keys were still in his pocket, and as if Kirikiri prison, whose long wall ran just across the road from the Abraham Adesyan Estate, were a kingdom he had stepped down from out of modesty.

"Thirty-one years. The hardest men in Lagos. They would look at me" — here he narrowed his eyes, to show how — "and they would remember their manners. Ask anybody."

Nobody asked anybody. That was the beauty of it.

The truth was quieter, and he had arranged his whole life so that nobody would hear it over the music.

Lazarus Ekanem had joined the prison service as a young man from a small town down the coast, with one good shirt and a voice too big for it. He had served thirty-one years, that part was true. But the service, like every service, runs on quiet people, and Lazarus had never been quiet. The men who actually kept the place steady were the ones nobody wrote songs about: the officers who knew every name on their wing and did their rounds on time and went home tired. Lazarus spent most of his years in the stores and the records office, counting blankets and soap and uniforms, and he was very good at it. He was punctual. He was loud at ceremonies. He led the staff choir for nineteen years and gave a forty-minute speech at every colleague's send-off, including one for a man who had only been transferred across town. He rose slowly, by long service, and near the end he was senior enough to have a desk with a glass top. He polished the glass himself.

What the stores taught him, it turned out, was a gift. He could remember everything. How many blankets went out in March. Which officer had borrowed whose bicycle in 1998 and returned it with a flat tire. Who owed whom ₦200 from a funeral contribution. He carried the whole staff quarters in his head like a ledger, every small debt in its column, and he discovered that a man who remembers what people owe is a man people are careful around.

He liked people being careful around him. He liked it more than money. Almost.

Then came retirement, and the gold watch.

The gold watch was real. He would hold out his wrist so you could see it catch the purple light. "Presented," he would say, and let the word hang there, so you imagined a stage and a minister and applause. In fact the staff choir had bought it, by a collection, each member putting in what they could, and the back had been engraved TO BRO. LAZARUS, WITH LOVE FROM THE CHOIR. He had since had the back polished so many times that the engraving was nearly gone. He did not want it gone. He wanted it faint. It was, if you thought about it, the most honest thing about him: a true gift, from people who had liked him, that he had worn down into a legend.

The keys were something else.

At his own send-off party, in a hired hall with jollof rice and a live band, Lazarus had stood up to give his speech (fifty-two minutes, a personal record) with a huge ring of keys on his belt, and every time he made a point he had shaken it. By the end of the night, the story was already moving through the hall in whispers: he kept a copy of every key. By the end of the month people in three neighborhoods had heard it.

The keys on that ring opened his house, his car, the padlock on his generator, his late mother's tin trunk, a bicycle lock for a bicycle stolen in 2004, and about a dozen doors he could no longer identify. He never corrected the rumor. A man who corrects a rumor about himself, he reasoned, is a man who does not understand what a rumor is for.

The other thing he took with him, the year he retired, was a title. His hometown made him a chief the same year he paid for the new church roof, and from then on he was Chief Lazarus Ekanem on every invitation card, and "Warden" to everyone else, on his insistence. He even made his household staff say it. "Good morning, Warden." "Your tea, Warden." He found it restful.

And then there was 11:45.

On his last day, he had walked out through the staff gate for the final time, into the heat and the horns and the container trucks on the port road, and he had looked at his watch. Not the gold one; that came the following week. His old steel one, with the cracked strap.

It said 11:45.

He had stood there on the pavement and decided that this was the minute he had stopped serving and started being served.

A few weeks later, driving through the estate across the road to visit a man who owed him a favor, he saw a half-finished building on June 12 Street. The street's houses ran from one to eight. This one, for reasons nobody in the estate has ever been able to explain, had a number painted on its gatepost in old blue paint: 1145.

He told the driver to stop.

He got out and stood in front of that gatepost for a long time, with his fly-whisk, in the sun. People passing thought he was praying. Perhaps he was.

"The Lord," he told the back booth, years later, "kept my minute for me."

Across the street, at the window by the gate, an old soldier named Garba, known to everyone as Sarge, has a different theory about the number. He says it is probably a sign-writer who had a long night. But nobody asked Sarge, and the Warden had already decided to buy the house.