Prizm

He bought No. 1145 with his gratuity, the lump sum the service pays out at retirement, and with money from friends. He always called them friends. They called it something else, privately, but they had owed him for years, and he had a way of reminding a man of a debt from 1996 so warmly that the man found himself reaching for his checkbook just to make the warmth stop.

The house had been somebody's dream that ran out of cement. A big ground-floor hall with no doors. A pool deck with a pool that had never seen water, only frogs. A rooftop that had been meant as a garden and had become, through neglect, a kind of jungle. The Warden walked through it in his white linen with a builder trotting behind him, and pointed his fly-whisk at things, and the things happened.

The hall got a stage, a sound system and a long bar. The pool got water and lights under the water. The roof got real plants, fairy lights and cushioned chairs facing the port cranes. At the back, behind the stage, he built an artist's lounge and a backstage area, because, he said, a serious house must have a serious show.

And on the ground floor, in the corner farthest from the door, he built the back booth: a horseshoe of padded leather around a heavy table, half hidden by a carved wooden screen. He called it his office. Nobody else was allowed to call it anything.

The naming took one afternoon.

The sign-maker came from Ajegunle with a notebook and paint on his fingers. "What is the name, Chief?"

"Prizm," said the Warden. "With a Z."

"Like prism? The glass thing?"

"Exactly like the glass thing. My son, listen." He sat the sign-maker down and gave him a cold malt, because a man should be comfortable when he receives wisdom. "A prism takes plain light and makes it colors. A prison takes colorful people and makes them plain." He spread his hands, and the rings flashed. "I have done both."

The sign-maker wrote that down, though nobody had asked him to, and later told it to everyone he met, which was exactly what the Warden had intended.

"And the color, Chief?"

"Purple," said the Warden. "The color of chiefs and bishops."

So the sign went up in long purple letters, and every night when it came on, it turned the bottom of the sky the color of a bruise, and you could see it from the gate and from the bush and, people swore, from the watchtowers of the prison across the road. The Warden liked to think so. He liked to think the old place could see him.

Then came security, which was the part he enjoyed most.

First, his boys in black: young men in black T-shirts and black trousers, with earpieces that may or may not have been connected to anything. They walked beside his car with their hands folded. They stood at corners. They looked at you as though they had been told your name.

Second, two retired warders he had known for thirty years and trusted, as far as he trusted anyone: Pa Effiong, who never smiled, and Mr. Adeyemi, who never sat down. They did not wear black. They did not need to. They had a way of standing in a doorway that made the doorway feel smaller.

Third, his friends in uniform. On party nights a cooler of cold stout found its way to the officers at the main gate, and certain brown envelopes followed. The Warden called this "taking care of people." He took care of a great many people. He kept a careful count.

"Plenty security," he would say, patting the table. "In this house, nothing happens that I do not know."

What he needed next was someone to run the floor.

He interviewed six people. The first five listened to him talk for twenty minutes about discipline, the Book of Proverbs and his years in the stores, and agreed with everything. He did not hire them.

The sixth was Natasha.

She sat across the heavy table in the back booth with her hands folded and let him talk for twenty minutes too. Then she asked three questions.

"Who is in charge of the floor?"

"You would be, my daughter."

"Who pays the staff, and when?"

He named a figure and a day. She named a better figure and a sooner day. He laughed and agreed.

"And what happens in this booth?"

The Warden smiled. "Nothing that concerns the floor."

"Then the floor is mine," said Natasha. "Look sharp, keep it classy, and no wahala on my floor." Wahala: trouble. "Not from the guests. Not from your boys. Not from you."

The Warden had been told no very rarely in his life, and almost never across his own table. He found, to his surprise, that he liked it. He hired her on the spot. He told everyone afterward that she was "his" hostess. She was not his anything. She ran the ground floor like a ship, greeted every guest at the door ("Need anything in here, you ask me first"), and kept her own counsel, and the one place on the floor she never walked was the back booth.

The last piece was the show.

It was Natasha who made the call to the artist's management, by the book, with a proper contract and a proper rider and proper hours: the singer Joe-Izzy, every night, nine p.m. to one a.m. Lagos time. Joe-Izzy came, played, and went back to the artist's lounge, and had nothing to do with anything else in the building. That was in the contract too. Natasha had made sure.

The Warden took the credit for all of it.

"I booked Joe-Izzy," he would tell the back booth, every night, when the first song came through the wall and the floor roared. "Every night. Nine to one. You know any other house in this city that can say that?" Then he would lean back, and tap his rings on the table, and wait for someone to tell him no.

Nobody did. That was what the booth was for.