Plenty Security

The Warden believed in security the way other men believe in the weather: it was simply there, all around him, and it was on his side.

He counted it on Sunday morning, sitting on the rooftop garden at Prizm in his church agbada, a great flowing robe of stiff blue cloth, with his tea going cold beside him and the port cranes standing in the haze to the east. He counted it the way he used to count blankets. His boys in black: eleven, if you included the one who was always late. Pa Effiong, who never smiled. Mr. Adeyemi, who never sat. His friends in uniform at the main gate, who drank his stout and took his envelopes and waved his car through with real respect. And across the road, the long wall of the prison he had served for thirty-one years, which he still thought of, privately, as an old friend standing behind him with its arms folded.

Plenty security. A man with plenty security does not need to worry.

On the table in front of him lay a brown envelope. Unopened. Returned.

He did not like looking at it. He looked at it anyway.

It was not the money. The money was nothing; he had given away more in a night on fried meat. It was what the policewoman had said, which his boy had repeated word for word, because the Warden had made him: If I take his envelope tonight, tomorrow he will want my gate. And then the joke about her gate being the only thing in Lagos that did what she told it, and Dapo laughing.

Dapo had laughed. The Warden had added Dapo to the ledger.

If it had only been the envelope, he could have called it one stubborn woman and forgotten it. But it had not only been the envelope.

Earlier that same week, he had made what he considered a very generous offer to the community clinic at No. 5, the free one on the ground floor where the nurses and doctors saw anybody who came. He had offered to donate a big new generator, so the clinic would never lose power at eight when the electricity went. All he had asked in return was that the generator housing be painted purple, with PRIZM on the side in tasteful letters, and a small plaque: Donated by Chief Lazarus Ekanem, Warden.

The answer had come back through the medical student who helped out downstairs when she was not at the teaching hospital. Funke, her name was. She had come out to the clinic gate in her scrubs, tired from a long shift, and said to his boy, politely and very clearly:

"Please thank the Chief, but the clinic is free. We would like to keep it free of names too."

Two no's in one week. In thirty-one years he could not remember hearing two in a month.

The Warden sipped his cold tea and made a face at it. He did not believe, not for one moment, that his security had a crack in it. But he understood, the way a man understands a dripping tap in the night, that a street which has started saying no to you will say it again, louder, unless you remind it who keeps the keys. And the best reminder, he had always found, was not a threat. Threats were noisy. The best reminder was a person: somebody visible, somebody the whole street knew, who said yes to the Warden every time.

He needed somebody new. Somebody who owed.

He clapped twice. The boy who had carried the envelope came up the rooftop stairs at a trot.

"The gate," the Warden said. "What are they saying down there? Not about me. About everybody else."

The boy had a good memory. It was why the Warden kept him. He reported the gate police's gossip, the gisting, as the officers called it, in order: who had come in, who had been sent to the bench, whose landlord was squeezing, which officer had a new phone. Then, as an afterthought:

"And the desert traveler."

"The what?"

"It's a joke they have, Warden. Officer Sola started it. There is a young man staying at Iloro House. Room 3. Back from London not long ago. He talks like a London man, proper London. The police tell everybody he came across the desert from Libya, but that's just their joke. He owes the gate. They told him ₦2,500,000 to open it, and he said yes. He pays them little by little. A thousand here. Five thousand there. From chasing balls at the football in the bush."

The Warden put down his cup.

"He said yes," he repeated, "to two and a half million naira."

"Yes, Warden."

"And he is paying it."

"Every week."

The Warden laughed, a big, warm, delighted laugh that sent two pigeons off the roof garden railing. A London accent. To the Warden, a London accent meant a door: connections abroad, people who knew people, phones that rang in other countries. And a debt, a real one, worn openly, like a coat. And pride, enough to say yes to a price meant as a joke, and to keep paying it.

A man like that, the Warden thought, was a man who kept his word. A man who kept his word was the most useful kind of man there was, once you had his word.

"What is his name?"

"They call him AJ."

"Who are his people here?"

"The big cook, Chuks. The old soldier at the gate window, Sarge, looks out for him." The boy hesitated. "The night you stopped at the window, Warden, Sarge was watching me after. When I asked about the boy."

"Garba." The Warden waved his fly-whisk, dismissing an old soldier and thirty-five years with one flick. "Garba was always watching. Watching has never paid for anything."

He stood. Down on June 12 Street the church crowd was gathering in its Sunday colors, and the Afternoon Store had its shutter half up, and somewhere a radio was playing. Down at No. 3, on the bench on the veranda of Iloro House, a thin young man was sitting with his elbows on his knees, looking at nothing in particular. The Warden could not have picked him out from the roof. He felt as though he could.

"Not yet," he said. "Let him settle in. Let him hear the music. Find out what he likes. Find out what he owes, and to whom, all of it. Then bring him to my table."

"And then, Warden?"

The Warden picked up the returned envelope, turned it over once in his ringed fingers, and slid it into the pocket of his agbada.

"Then," he said, "he will run a small errand for me. Nothing serious." He smiled at the street below, his street, his smaller prison. "For a start."