Straw Dogs

By Bolaji Olatunde

Olatundes lively imagination and wicked sense of humour maintain suspense and keep the plotline from tiring in this international, supernatural, semi-farcical thriller. Kirkus Reviews



Shola Dina, son of a wealthy Nigerian socialite, is forced to flee from Nigeria to New York after the Abacha regime assassinates his father and threatens his life. As an migr in New York, he struggles to make ends meet. In May 1998, while employed as a waiter at an upscale restaurant, he has a chance encounter with Carol Moore, a notable Hollywood director, who casts him as a lead in her new movie.


Things take an unexpected turn when Moore is murdered in her apartment midway into the movie production after she stumbles upon a telltale video recording of a covert plot to break into the White House to harm President Bill Clinton. Shola is implicated in her murder. The break in is sponsored by the Rose flower Committee, a secret Chinese hard-line communist organization which was founded during Chinas Cultural Revolution by Madame Mao and a young Chinese army officer, Tung Yuk-Kai, who had become a major general by 1998.


Two weeks before China Summit II in June 1998, a Chinese secret agent contracted to execute the break in accidentally plunges to his death from the presidential bedroom of the White House. The Committee feeds American intelligence evidence linking Chinas President, Jiang Zemin, with the botched break in. Intensive investigations are quietly launched separately by the American and Chinese governments. Desperate to cover its tracks, the Rose flower Committee attempts its most daring mission a poison gas attack on a state dinner held in honour of Clinton in Beijing, a dinner scheduled to have Chinas top leaders in attendance.


Straw Dogs is an account of the events surrounding the break in and the bomb plot. The novel has a cast of celebrities, disgruntled angels, secret service agents and members of the American Autosexual Society (AAS), an organisation which defends the rights of autosexuals; autosexual is a term which refers to an individual whose sexual preference is masturbation. The interactions of these odd characters results in a tale that is comic, action-packed and full of suspense.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456776077

Bolaji Olatunde

Bolaji Olatunde is the author of several plays and short stories, including “Requirem for Daniel Fregebo” which was especially commended by judges in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s International Play Writing Competition, 2009 Season. He was born in Nigeria about three decades ago where he had most of his education. He has a degree in accounting from the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, Nigeria. He currently lives and works in Abuja.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Sunday, January 13, 2007. Johannesburg. 12:45 a.m.

The sharp electronic shriek of my bedside telephone roused me out of the light sleep which had taken over me as I lay alone in bed reading In an Uncertain World co-written by Robert Rubin, the former American Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration between 1995 and 1999, and Jacob Weisburg. I was reading Rubin’s analysis of the Asian economic crisis that began in Thailand in the summer of 1997 and its subsequent spread to other financial centres around the world because of the interdependence of international markets, as Rubin put it, when I unconsciously surrendered myself to the very welcome slumber which had eluded me for some hours. Drowsily, I reached over to the phone and lifted the receiver.

Hello, I grunted drunkenly to whoever was at the other end of the connection.

Hello. Am I speaking with Mr. Graham Philips? asked an unfamiliar, black-sounding male voice. After my time in the Republic of South Africa, making such distinctions between a black or white South African voice becomes a simple matter of reflex.

You are? I replied, disgruntled at having been woken up from my much needed sleep. As the chief executive of my own stock broking firm, it had been a rather taxing week, which was no different from any other week. I wanted to spend the weekend recharging my batteries, not for taking phone calls in the middle of the night from strangers. This fellow had to have some good reason for the call or I would let him have a piece of my mind. What can I do for you at this hour? I asked.

I am totally sorry to disturb you at this time of the day, he replied and I sensed that he must have been smiling on the other side. Lucky for him it was not a video call. I felt that familiar tightness of my facial muscles, a normal indication of my annoyance and irritation, tightness brought about by a deep frown which usually scared the hell out of my office staff. I am Dr. Steven Mdululi from Johannesburg Central Hospital and I’m afraid there’s been an emergency that may concern you.

How do you mean? I asked, all of my facial torsion adjusting quickly to take up a different formation.

We admitted someone in our emergency ward and he had your business card in his wallet. I believe he works for your company, he replied.

What’s his name? I asked, barely managing to keep my voice under control. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up straight.

Wole Martins, replied Dr. Mdululi. He was brought in here about forty minutes ago. His house was burgled by armed men and to cut the long story short, he suffered severe gunshot wounds. South Africa’s high crime wave had blown closer home yet again.

How serious are his wounds? I asked needlessly. If he was in the emergency ward, it had to be very serious.

Pretty bad, sir.

Do you think he’ll make it? I asked with such extreme pessimism that I felt was too harsh and detached.

We don’t know for sure, but I must say the odds are heavily stacked against him at this point. He’s in a delicate situation. He’s been mostly unconscious, although he came out of it once.

Listen, Doc, I live out here in Sandton. You know how dangerous it could be for me to come over to your hospital. Do you think I really have to be there? I could take the risk. Wole’s one of my most valuable staff.

That would be unnecessary. We’ll try our best for him.

Please, whatever it takes to keep him alive, just do it. My company and I will spare no expense. Dr. Mdululi promised his best before he ended the call. I lay back in bed.

Wole Martins, the Nigerian alumnus of New York University joined my firm Holocene Securities in February of 2002. Over the years, he had proven himself to be a dependable, dynamic, hardworking young man. Wole was one of my investment analysts. He had an uncanny ability when it came to appraising correctly the South African business climate—his accurate predictions on stock and derivatives appreciation or depreciation was always uncannily accurate. He was good-looking with an endearing, if not overpowering cockiness about him that bowled over his colleagues and our clients. He was often the most sought after staff clients wanted to see for financial advice. Holocene Securities has a staff number of thirty, does extremely good business and has, I am not ashamed to say it, made me a moderately wealthy man. You are not alone. My wife also thinks it is a rather odd business name.

When we had an opening at Holocene in January 2002, Wole was one of the many who applied for the job. He was shortlisted. I personally conducted the interview; I always want to ensure that my company hires the best—if such decisions are left to those who have no idea how much sweat went into building the company, they would choose college friendships over the survival of the company and end up hiring mediocre employees. Wole’s confidence, his self-assuredness came through during that session and that bought me over. He told me that prior to our meeting, he worked for almost three years with a reputable South African bank. He made no bones about his Nigerian background. Like most other people who lived in South Africa, I had heard many unflattering stories about Nigerians; they were fraudsters, drug dealers, confidence tricksters, name it. Before I decided to add him to my staff, I took the precautionary measure of checking out his background. First, I checked with the investment bank he said he was leaving to join us. They were full of praise for his work and attitude to work, betraying sentiments that they were rather sad to see him go despite the several pay increase offers they had offered to help him change his mind about leaving. During that interview, I asked him why he was leaving the bank. He replied that the bank had failed to provide him with significant challenges.

What makes you think a relatively smaller firm like ours will provide you with such challenges, as you put it? I asked.

Holocene Securities is growing, and fast for that matter. Growing up is always full of challenges. Working in that bank gave me a regimented, and I dare say, rather boring lifestyle… too much security. I was in a comfort zone that didn’t bring out the best in me. Although you may not be aware of it, sir, but you are well known out there in financial circles for giving your employees tremendous creative freedom. I instinctively feel that I belong here, he replied.

If you don’t mind my asking, what was your basic remuneration at the bank? I asked him. He told me. You realise you’ll be getting slightly less here. As you succinctly put it, we are still growing and may not be able to pay you as much as your previous employer.

I understand that, sir, but pay wasn’t the only factor I considered when I decided that this job is the best available for me.

I had my secretary confirm his credentials. She got in touch with New York University and everything checked out. There was confirmation that he graduated with honours from NYU’s business school in 1998. After that, I hesitated no further about bringing him on board as one of Holocene’s investment analysts.

Although Wole was an easy-going, hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy, he remained something of an enigma among his colleagues. One always got the feeling there was more to this young man than he seemed to be. He gave off an air of one who was above it all—the demands of work, the cut-throat rivalry among the investment analysts who were often at each other’s throats to secure or hijack portfolios of wealthier clients—nothing seemed to faze him. Like I pointed out, he had a knack, a mysterious talent for on point stock growth or decline predictions that impressed and baffled me because among the brokers at Holocene, he was the only one who never got it wrong, and I do mean that literally. I found myself turning to him from time to time for advice regarding particularly knotty investment decisions of my own. Clients were also drawn to him by that positive magnetism that he exuded and which shone through his bright brown eyes; eyes that seemed to have seen it all, and his wide, friendly grin which almost never left his face.

He often tossed friendly jokes at everyone. He amused us at the office with funny anecdotes about life in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital, and his growing up there. My favourite Wole story is one about his older sister, then in her teens, successfully selling a ‘brain-cleaning fluid’ to the security guard of the family house. The ‘brain-cleaning fluid’ was supposed to make the security guard’s brain think up money—making schemes that would bring him great wealth, and also to purge that organ of the restraining thoughts that held him back from being more of a financial achiever. According to Wole, his sister conned the gullible guard into parting with a substantial part of his small wage for a fluid she swore her father used regularly—it was the secret of his successful businesses.

Whatever happened to him thereafter? I asked him as I chuckled when he told me the tale in my office on a dreary Friday afternoon some months after he joined Holocene—all was quiet at the business ‘war front’ at the time as the week drew quickly to an end.

Oh, he’s still our security guard, he replied with a deadpan expression that had me laughing even harder than before.

Is he any richer now? I asked him as a deep belly laugh began to rise from my diaphragm. He shook his head with mock sympathy. I let out perhaps the deepest and most sincere laugh the walls of my office had ever heard. Your sister… what does she do now? I managed to ask him in between laughs.

She’s now a medical doctor back home in Lagos, he replied with a smile of fondness for his older sibling, a far-away look on his face.

I would like to meet her someday, I said. When I did meet her, I was surprised to find her rather ordinary, perhaps mellowed over the years by the demands of motherhood that she now bore. Well, the circumstances of our meeting were not particularly conducive to hilarity or such antics.

Wole told me he left Nigeria out of boredom.

I have this adventurous… free spirit that just wouldn’t let me settle in Nigeria. My family is well-off. I could live well in any part of Nigeria but I knew early in my life that the country was not the place for me to live my life. If I used my family’s connections, I am sure I would have done well for myself in Nigeria if I wanted to but I found the air stifling. I was too eager to… I just felt like I needed to get out into the world and make a way for myself, he said, looking me straight in the eye with great sincerity. Do you understand what I mean?

I understood exactly what he meant. At that moment, I could almost hear the bond between us click into place because I had just identified a kindred spirit in respect of wanting to make a way for myself. When I was in my teens growing up in my native Glasgow, Scotland, I also felt a similar restlessness that would not be cured by anything other than an exploration of the world outside the UK. I knew even in my formative years that Britain would not be my home. In my gap year before I went to Oxford University, I travelled unaccompanied through most of continental Europe, causing my father, a clergyman with the Anglican Church, and mother, a school teacher, considerable worry over their only child. I simply could not sit in one place. In my years at Oxford, I spent my holidays in France and Germany, supporting myself by giving English coaching lessons. I had a flair for languages and in little time, I learnt French and German. I was more than relieved to graduate from Oxford in 1987. I almost did not because I was becoming restless again and almost gave up on the whole education thing. Happily, good sense prevailed in the end and the degree in business administration I earned has opened several doors for me in my many travels around the world—one of the advantages of going to a big name school.

Subsequently, I worked in Switzerland for two years, a year and a half in Singapore, three in Sweden, four in Hong Kong. I managed to amass some capital along the way to start a business of my own and I am rather sorry to say that I left in my wake a string of broken hearts. The idea of plucking a lady from one location to another seemed unbearable for the adventurous young man I was at the time—like the cliché goes, I liked to travel light.

While I was on holiday in 1992, I visited South Africa and was completely blown away by the awesome beauty of its country side and cities. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison only two years before, after twenty-seven years behind bars for fighting apartheid, a system which was at this time being systematically dismantled. The majority black population was beginning to enjoy greater freedoms but they were unhappy with the slow pace of reforms after decades of apartheid. Although there was widespread political violence in the country, there was still a high level of optimism that the coming changes would present a plethora of opportunities for investment. The Afrikaners were understandably apprehensive that the black majority would exact revenge for the oppression inflicted on them during the apartheid era. The Afrikaner Volksfront, a right-wing white party, was making vehement calls for an autonomous white homeland, refusing to contemplate coexistence with blacks. My keen love for risk made me uproot myself from Hong Kong to Johannesburg, having bought repeated assurances from the leadership of Mandela’s African National Congress that no white would be victimized or as it was better phrased later—South Africa would become a rainbow nation with space for everyone of every hue. With an incredible, if not somewhat foolish, sense of timing, I, a white Scotsman, settled in Johannesburg at a time when many were fleeing from the country and set up Holocene which started off initially with five staff, three whites and two blacks. Patricia Suzman, born and bred in Jo’burg, fresh from Cape Town University and the woman I would marry three years later, was one of those pioneer staff.

Fortunately, Mandela and the ANC leadership lived up to their promise that no white South African would be victimized. Guiltless, by ANC standards? They were pragmatic enough to see that apartheid had left blacks economically disenfranchised, rendered virtually impotent. The Afrikaners had all the wealth and means of wealth creation, the factors of production. The ANC knew that the only pragmatic way to help blacks was to engage the white business community, much against the stance of the younger elements within the ANC, and other blacks for that matter, who wanted revenge for all the years of brutal political suppression and economic deprivation.

Mandela’s efforts bore fruits. White-owned businesses were urged to take on black workers, not as minor labourers, but in executive positions. Holocene was one of the first businesses at the time to follow the trend of employing black executives and this placed us in a position to win some of the few black stock owners available at the time. By 1999, Holocene had become sizeable, operating from an office opposite the fifty-storey Carlton Centre in central Johannesburg.

After the democratic elections in 1994, crime kicked its way big time into downtown Johannesburg, bringing with it the whole works; carjacking, rapes, murders, armed robbery, name it. All around our office, businesses started getting robbed on a daily basis. The homicide rate in the country shot up and hovered between ten and fifteen thousand murders a year as the economically disadvantaged, uneducated blacks began to forcefully pinch from all and sundry, irrespective of race—at the risk of sounding morbid, we began to have ‘rainbow morgues’. The crime rate grew so alarmingly that a good number of businesses began to move out of central Johannesburg to Sandton, a principally white suburb which is much safer. Even the Johannesburg Stock Exchange which began operating in the centre of the city in 1887 considered moving. Holocene Securities did not move until June 2000 when its offices were raided in broad daylight by a gang of masked armed men who stole our cell phones, wrist watches and cash. Thereafter, we joined the pilgrimage to Sandton where I already lived with my wife.

My wife’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Suzman were incensed by the armed robbery of Holocene’s offices. They sympathized and apologized profusely to me ‘on behalf of their country’ and they were sorry that I received such a raw deal from a country I had chosen to help. If one replaced country with blacks, one would get a more accurate picture of what they were talking about. Mr. Suzman was a retired policeman. He was a tough, leathery-skinned character whose active working days were set deep in the 1960s and ‘70s when the violent suppression of the anti-apartheid movement was in its element. To put it lightly, he did not hold the black population in very high esteem and I always saw the blood in his eyes when he wished for the good-old days when everyone knew their place in the scheme of things. His wife held similar views and they did not fail to make their positions known whenever the subject came up. Of course this was done when there was no black person around; my white South African friends were wont to do that.

The Voortrekkers would be turning in their graves if they could see the nonsense that is going on in this country now, remarked Mr. Suzman on the weekend following the incident.

My wife and I had just hosted the Suzman’s to dinner at our house in Sandton on that Saturday evening. The Voortrekkers were the pioneer Afrikaners who forcefully claimed portions of the land from the Zulus at the battle of Blood River in 1838. I exchanged quick looks with my wife—we knew what was coming.

The country is going to the dogs, and I mean that literally, continued the old man, his wrinkled face knotted further by a cruel smirk. I exchanged quick looks with Patricia who was holding Brian, our five year old son, in her arms. I was thankful that Constance, our devoted black house maid was out of earshot; she left our house about an hour before to go visit some relative or the other and catch up on her family affairs, shortly before we settled in our living room. I hoped Brian was not lapping up any of such racist sentiments from his maternal Granddad but I should not have worried because he was fast asleep. I did not even try to tell Mr. Suzman that I worked with black people and had no problems whatsoever with them, but anyone in my shoes knows that you do not want to cross swords with your father-in-law, if it can be helped. Anyway, what can one say to change the mind of a man deeply imbued with racist tendencies and ideas that had taken root there for generations?

De Klerk stupidly gave it all away to them, said Mrs. Suzman. Fredrick de Klerk, president of South Africa who presided over the reluctant dismantling of apartheid. ‘Them’ was said with palpable disgust. Now see what they’ve done to the country. Look at central Johannesburg. They have turned it into a bush African street with street vendors and hawkers littering the streets with the trash those people eat. It’s so dirty these days, you wouldn’t recognize it if you lived in this city when I was a young girl. It was beautiful back then!

Ma, I work with black people and they are not all as bad as you make them out to be, said Patricia as she adjusted Brian carefully to a better position. They are like anyone else and are capable of running the country well… if given the chance. She had spent several years bottling her true feelings about anything for fear of contradicting her short-tempered, domineering father; this was an opportunity to put her foot down, a most inauspicious one if she had asked me.

What? exclaimed her father incredulously. He stared disbelievingly at his daughter, apparently very surprised that she would dare to hold a view contrary to his. I do not blame him for being astonished. Patricia is not usually very assertive but when she decides to be that, it comes most unexpectedly and forcefully too. Look around the godforsaken continent of Africa. Can you show me one country in black Africa where the black man has successfully run any country into prosperity? Not two, Patricia, just one!

I heard that argument before from other Afrikaner friends, so had Patricia—both of us had no answer to that.

Sit back, relax and watch Thabo Mbeki and his boys run the country aground while they loot the treasury… and they pay no attention to the crime situation. It’s sad, sad, sad, Mr. Suzman shook his head. In our days, we knew just how to keep the black man in his proper place. Believe me… it was never near a white man. The Afrikaner Volksfront was right, we should have got a white homeland for ourselves, he concluded hoarsely with frightening finality.

Rumours were rife about corruption and widespread underhand deals among the political elite, rumours that would taint Vice-President Jacob Zuma years later. I should add that Mr. Suzman’s extreme views did not alter until he died in 2004 of natural causes.

We got chilling reminders of the late Mr. Suzman’s words in the years to come. Patricia has two older brothers who were robbed five times in two years between them. The older of the Suzman sons, Edward, still has a bullet lodged in his left shoulder—his trophy from a robbery at his home. This is aside the fact that his wife who happened to be in her late forties at the time was raped before his very eyes while he bled from his wound. The three criminals were never caught as usual, but they were black. The couple took it stoically. The matriarch of the family was told about the robbery but not the rape because her children were not too eager to have her join her husband from the shock and grief that kind of news would have caused her. She made an uncannily intuitive comment when she learnt about that particular robbery.

These blacks are animals. I saw on the television the other day a report that four men raped a three year old girl, one of them her father. Can you imagine that?! They all had AIDS and thought they would be cured by sleeping with a young virgin! Now, if a man could do that to his own daughter, what could he do to a complete stranger? Your father, God bless his soul, was right all along, you must remember that, she told her daughter when she visited us. She may well learn about the rape here.

When the crime wave eventually touched my own family, Patricia did not take it so stoically; it dragged her to the end of her tether. Pregnant with our second child in September 2005, she was driving home in her Mercedes after an afternoon out shopping with Brian when a minibus blocked her path and spilled a band of carjackers. She very nearly had to watch her son shot to death before her eyes. One of the carjackers, some stupid, trigger-happy fellow, had aimed a bullet at her head but she ducked just in time. They had stopped so abruptly in front of her; she had not braked fast enough in the robber’s opinion. He probably thought she was trying to get away when she was much too confused to do anything at that moment. The bullet missed her but it buried itself in the passenger seat beside her—a few centimetres above Brian’s head. The idiots took away her car with all of the purchases in it, leaving the distraught mother and excited child by the curb. Again, the criminals got away clean. Unsurprisingly, they were never found.

Patricia was terribly distressed after that and was in tears for days. She let it be known to all who would listen that she could not continue to live in this new South Africa; she had to get out as soon as she could. After a few tense days, she took my advice and left for Glasgow for what we assumed was going to be a short stay that would cure her of what I privately thought was Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. My old parents were only too glad to have her stay for as long as possible. Anyone would get bored with two weeks of living with two geriatrics whose only hobby was rehashing ancient tales from their ‘sedate youth’, especially a metropolitan lady like Pat. (Sorry, Mum, Dad, you know I love you both, but that really is the way it is!) In the following weeks, we successfully hunted for a home in London where Pat lived at the time of Wole’s attack. She has not returned to South Africa ever since and I was obliged to shuttle between the UK and Johannesburg.

That is the boring, long and winding story of how I came to be alone in my bed in Johannesburg on the night Wole was shot.

Immediately it was dawn, I drove to Dr. Mdululi’s hospital as fast as the speed limits permitted, occasionally breaking the limit, if the truth must be told. When I got there, I was shown to Mdululi’s small, bare office by a hearty black nurse. I found that Mdululi was a young black man, just as I expected. He was tall, chubby-faced and had a gentle attitude about him. His eyes were slightly bloodshot, surely from having had little sleep, if any at all.

Your man’s a very strong character, he began to tell me how Wole became his patient as we settled in two of the three chairs in his office.

Wole was brought in by two of his neighbours; he was bleeding profusely and terribly weakened. His flat, which was situated some kilometres outside Hillbrow, was broken into by—surprise, surprise!—armed black burglars who were infected with the growing, previously latent feeling of xenophobia directed at black African immigrants who had come into South Africa and made good at the expense of indigent black South Africans. Wole was one of those immigrants. As a reluctant host of the robbers, he cooperated with them, handing over all that they demanded such as money, mobile phone; then they emptied their guns into him after they informed him of his offence—coming into the country and stealing the jobs that were meant for them. They made away with their loot and left him to die. In the end, he was done in by his accent which gave him away as a foreigner. As anyone who’s familiar with the South African accents should know, it is usually a dead giveaway when one does not have it. A number of immigrants from neighbouring Southern African countries had been brutally murdered at about the same time for the same senseless reason.

The pathos of the situation is that Hillbrow was Johannesburg’s first mixed neighbourhood made up of blacks and whites. In other words, it was supposed to be home to all but the crime rate there was terrible; it was even regarded by many as perhaps the city’s most dangerous neighbourhood. At the office, we often cautioned Wole to move out of the area and each time he told us that he did not exactly live in Hillbrow, but a few good kilometres outside it. He was safe where he was as far as he was concerned, this said with his usual cockiness.

With ten bullet wounds, Wole managed to claw his way out of his house to that of his nearest neighbours. They were a married couple who were already awake and worried they would be robbed but much to their surprise and relief, they were left alone. They had braved the risks involved in driving on the city streets at that time of the night and taken him to the hospital.

Where are they now? I asked Dr. Mdululi.

In the waiting room, he replied. I remembered passing by a nondescript, young, black couple sitting by themselves in the chairs in the large waiting room. They’ve shown admirable concern. He probably would have been dead by now if they hadn’t been bold and acted fast enough.

Can I see him now?

Nothing will come out of it for now, I’m sorry to say. He’s still unconscious.

Someone knocked at the door. It was the hearty nurse. She reminded him of the patient in ward three. Mdululi rose from his chair on the other side of the only table in the room and he started to leave the room.

Please excuse me… I may be back in a while, he said with some weariness. He halted suddenly at the door and he reached into one of the pockets of his white coat. Oh, I nearly forgot… He asked me to give you this when he came around briefly during the early hours. The man’s just too eager to go on, I’ve seen nothing like it before. He took out a small key and held it in his palm for me to see. He walked back to where I was seating and he put it in my hand. He said to give it to no one but you… in case, as he put it, he didn’t make it.

I looked at the little key in my hand and returned my gaze to the doctor.

Why? I asked genuinely puzzled.

He says the key opens one of the drawers in his bedroom. In that drawer, you should find—he says—an important document. You are not to see it until you get confirmation of his death. I suppose it’s something like a will. Don’t know, he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. He said his life was now in your hands… something cryptic like that.

I wonder what he means by that, I asked with deepening puzzlement.

Sincerely, I’ve no idea. He failed to elaborate… He slipped back into unconsciousness shortly after he came to and gave me that. I hate to sound pessimistic, but I hope you understand that I may just have fulfilled your man’s last wish, he said pensively. I nodded solemnly.

What was he trying to shield from me until his death? I slipped the little key into my pocket, wondering what it was all about. I had no idea at the time the wonder it would unlock in the coming days.

What about his bills? I asked getting down to the basics.

That will be presented to you in due course. The good couple outside took care of some of it already, I believe.

I would like to be kept informed if anything important crops up. I would still like to see him though. I wanted to see the quality of care he was getting.

Dr. Mdululi left me in the company of a Coloured nurse who led me wordlessly to Wole’s room. He lay peacefully in his bed and all would have seemed normal if there was no oxygen mask on his face, or no complicated network of machines surrounding him and monitoring his condition. Convinced that he was in competent hands, I felt there was no need for me to hang around the place any longer than I had to. The place was beginning to fill me with the familiar dread hospitals have always done to me for most of my life.

This dread stems from an incident that occurred when I was but a little boy. With my parents, I had gone to see my ailing maternal Grandma who had been on admission at a hospital for weeks. My mother had seen her on the day before that fateful day, like she had been doing for the last three weeks and assured all—Dad, myself and the neighbours who loved her dearly for Grandma’s lovely spirit—just as she had been assured by the doctor that her mother was well on her way to recovery; that she would soon be back home with us once again. Right before our eyes on that Sunday afternoon, Grandma who was chatting happily with us, albeit tiredly, suddenly fell silent and her neck bent gently to an unlikely angle. Unknown to me and my innocent soul, she was gone. I was seven at the time and had no idea what had happened even when I saw my mother scream and collapse in hysterics into my father’s arms. I was quickly led away by an observant nurse who saw me staring wondrously at Grandma and my mother whom I had never seen in tears before.

For days thereafter, I would have nightmare after nightmare about that afternoon, scenarios in the fashion of a hideous, hooded man snatching Grandma from us while Ma, Pa and I chase after him or a clan of mean-looking men coming after me to take me to Grandma. I knew that I had to flee from them, but I knew not why. I came away with the impression that hospitals were places where sadness and sorrow resided. It is so deeply ingrained that I literally shudder when I walk into a hospital. The nightmares disappeared with time, but not without implanting in me a deep dislike, or better still, a slight phobia for hospitals.

I found Wole’s neighbours, Charles and Linda Sithole. I introduced myself but they already knew my connection to Wole. They had been told by Mdululi to expect me. I immediately reimbursed them for their expenses which they would not accept at first but they did eventually, with some reluctance. I thanked them for all that they had done. They expressed regret for the whole situation.

Such a nice and friendly person, Linda said sadly.

He didn’t seem like a man who would hurt anyone, her husband concurred. We have been neighbours for more than five years. He caused no one any trouble.

We’ll be praying for him, said Linda.

That seems to be the much we can do for him. He seems to be in competent hands, I said.

They started to leave the hospital. I remembered the little key in my pocket.

He was supposed to prepare an important contract document for me over the weekend and hand it over to me on Monday. He told me on the phone last night that he was through with it. I will try to get it from his house. Wednesday’s the deadline for tenders… you see, it’s very urgent that I find it. It’s more than likely to be in his house, I told them with as helpless a tone as I could manage, trying to look truthful too. They bought it without question. Charles said the doctor had mentioned something like that. Linda’s face suddenly assumed a look of panic.

His house must have been unlocked all night. We were so terrified and worried for his life, we forgot to lock his doors, she said.

Let’s hope no one has tampered with your documents, said her husband. Mr. Phillips, we are on our way home. Please feel free to join us. We’d be honoured to have you.

I needed no further prompting. Driving my own car, I followed closely behind them. In all the years that he had worked for me, I had never been to Wole’s house, having had no cause to do so until now—sad how we have no time for some of the simplest things until we are forced to do them by unwelcome exigencies. Now I had to depend on the couple driving in their Toyota Starlet ahead of me.

Wole’s house was a detached bungalow. The robbers made away with his six month old BMW. His porch was a rather grisly sight—there was blood all the way from there into his tastefully furnished living room. The furniture was just as neat and crisp as the suits that he wore to the office on a daily basis. The Sitholes stood indecisively in his living room while I searched for his bedroom, which was in itself not a difficult task because the other two rooms were more or less empty.

His room was thoroughly dishevelled, obviously the fallout of the events of previous night. I refused to believe that my normally prim staff would live in such a disorganized dwelling. I saw a small bureau a few metres away from the bed. I took out the small key Mdululi gave me and inserted it in turn into the keyholes of each of the four drawers. It opened the last one.

I pulled the drawer open. There was a large, blood-stained Manila envelope with an open flap in it. I took it out and upturned it. A large, brown leather-bound diary fell out. It was also blood-stained. I assumed immediately that he hid the package in the drawer after he was shot so it would not get into unwanted hands. I opened the diary and recognized Wole’s distinctive scrawl, the only untidy thing about him as far as I knew. I replaced the diary in the envelope and went out of the bedroom.

When I came to the sitting room, I found the Sitholes sitting uncomfortably in the only couch in the room.

The police are on their way to this place, Charles informed me. I just phoned them. It seems you’ve found what you’re looking for, he said, indicating the bloodied envelope. I nodded.

I’ll keep it in my car right now. My memory sometimes plays nasty tricks on me these days… The perils of age, I guess. I said with a slightly rueful smile. The couple smiled and followed me outside. I threw the envelope in the back of the car but thought the better of it seconds after. I squeezed it into the glove compartment after a little struggle: The diary was that big. I hoped neither the car nor the envelope would be stolen before I got home.

Charles and Linda invited me into their home. I accepted. Linda’s younger sister lived with them and was tending to their only child and daughter. They served me tea while we waited for the police. Shortly after, two black officers turned up and went through Wole’s house rather perfunctorily in my opinion. They admitted they thought they were dealing with an out-and-out robbery. They promised they would do their best to catch the robbers as they were leaving twenty minutes later, after promises that they would be back with a larger contingent later in the day for a more thorough inspection of the crime scene. They knew what we knew—no one who robbed Wole would be caught anytime soon, if ever.

In little time, I made my own exit, glad that the Sitholes did not mention the envelope to the policemen. The Sitholes and I made mutual promises to keep each other abreast of new developments. We will return to the hospital as soon as we can, they told me. I’ll do the same, I told them. It must have seemed very much in order to them that they thought it was nothing out of the ordinary. All through the police presence, I hoped the diary contained nothing untoward.

While I drove home, I wondered what was in the diary that Wole forbade me from seeing until I got confirmation of his death. I got home in one piece. Constance was already there, busy keeping the place in order and asking if there was something wrong, because I rarely left the house so early. I assured her that all was well, except for my Wole. She expressed sorrow at the whole affair. Wole had been to our house a couple of times when I threw parties for my staff at my house. She liked him.

I settled in to the lovely breakfast that only Constance could prepare. While I ate, I took out the diary and glanced at it. Against my better judgment, I began to read it with a growing sense of astonishment. What I read left me so captivated that I wasted little time in ensconcing myself in my study so I could read it undisturbed.

I present in the following pages the most bizarre and unlikely tale that I have ever come across, either before or after that cool, quiet Sunday. I have personally transcribed the diary. The following chapters are the verbatim accounts of Wole himself. At my insistence, the diary has been left unedited by the publisher so as to preserve the peculiarities and freshness of his expression of his experiences.

CHAPTER ONE

November 22, 1997.

I stared at the ceiling of my very dimly lit room—the outside lighting of the building provided the little illumination—with, I am sure, the usual blank, post coital expression which I discovered long before that cool Saturday morning that I always seemed to have on my face after indulging in marital privileges pre-maritally or better still, fornicating if you will. This little observation of mine was made when I was seventeen years old and precisely after my fourth or fifth ‘behind closed doors encounter’ with a ripe female. Which was it, fourth or fifth? Can anyone really remember the numbers of those things accurately? Curious to find out if the fact of the act was written on my face immediately I was done with knowing her in the biblical sense of the word, I held a hand mirror to my face to see what it really looked like at that moment. The mirror revealed that I could just have finished saying a solemn prayer or finished reading a philosophical book. I still remember the perplexed look on the face of my lust interest on that occasion as she watched me hold a mirror to my face after we had just indulged in about five minutes of coarse copulation while we were still fully dressed. Our teen apparels clung to our bodies because of the resultant sweating brought about by our activity. Our being fully clothed could be accounted for by our all too conscious awareness of the time honoured, uncanny ability of parents to walk in on children at their most errant moments, a gift possessed in abundance by my parents, Chief and Mrs. Dina whose Lagos home played host to our ‘rough and tumble’ and who were at the time next door visiting the girl’s parents.

Six years and several ‘rough and tumble’ encounters later, I shifted my gaze from the ceiling of my room in Mariere Hall, my hostel on the campus of the University of Lagos, and stared down at the rumpled hair on the crown of the female head that was resting on my chest. I quivered slightly as I was tickled by the air that she, Susan, emitted from her small nostrils; it was air that gently caressed my right nipple.

Taking the very beautiful ‘Sister Susan’ to bed had been a rather difficult task—a record five weeks which was rather too long for me. Girls in school gave sex so easily in those days of the reign of Nigeria’s then military head of state, General Sani Abacha when poverty lived among us and made its presence felt like never before—some of them did so for as little as a small plate of rice—no joke—and boys like me from better off homes, we took advantage of the situation. It was a struggle for many to complete their degrees; it was no surprise that a large number failed or dropped out due to financial difficulties. Anyone who made it out of the school with their degrees in those days deserves a medal for that single achievement.

After buying her sundry gifts that she turned down, Susan refused to climb down from her NO to premarital sex stance and into the warmth of my waiting, ravenous arms. Poverty had the effect of making my countrymen more religious than they have probably ever been. Perhaps it has the same effect on societies around the world; when you want to wish away the mess around your feet, the mess in which you are rooted, you look upwards away from that mess. It was at this time the Pentecostals really began to win converts at a furious pace.

Acting on a whim one day, I bought Susan a leather-bound Bible with her name beautifully inscribed on it by an art student pal of mine. When I gave her the said Bible, I swore most insincerely that I loved her. I do not know what it was about that act that made her capitulate but after that, she did. A few days later, our ‘first time’ happened after a great deal of cajoling and begging. For someone who claimed ‘holiness’ as ‘heathens’ like me termed her initial prudishness, she proved herself to be more than an ardent lover. The enthusiasm that she brought to lovemaking was astounding, considering her initial stubbornness. Her noisy howling and uninhibited hand movements on my anatomy belied the fact that she was a staunch member of the ‘Radicals for Christ’ (not to be confused with a similar body in the United States), a campus Christian fellowship which was well known for the ultraconservative brand of the Christian faith that it advocated. Well, she did keep some of that prudishness that first time in the sense that she insisted on having the lights turned off, no lights at all, no matter how dim. Need I say the curtains had to be drawn too? I did not mind after that though. She became another character in the dark. I had anticipated we would get down to the basics ‘Adam and Eve’ style; you know the word associated with itinerant pastors. I was genuinely tongue-tied and pleasantly surprised when she turned me over and, well, you know! I suspected Susan had a pre-sisterhood history which I was going to find out in due course. Although she was just in her second year in UNILAG as the University of Lagos is popularly called, it was clear after our first ‘rough and tumble’ session that she was a top contender for a chair at ‘UNISEX’, if anyone decided it was worth it to start a university for that subject.

In spite of her zeal when it came to the nitty-gritty of our, by this time, three-week romance, I found her remarkably dull and uninspiring. Several jokes and statements of mine which I considered humorously irreverent, many of which elicited deep belly laughs from her predecessors and friends of mine always seemed to have quite the opposite effect on her. After I made such remarks, she would go on to lecture—no, nag would be a better word—me about the carnal disposition of my person and my assured place in the everlasting lake of fire if I continued to refuse to perish the thoughts of such, in her words, ‘satanic jokes’ before they took form in my mind. Two evenings before this fateful November day, we had a disagreement over one of such comments. She came into my room wearing a cheap, mild perfume and a badly constructed red skirt suit that set off her light complexion but hid only too well her abundant, curvaceous protuberances. I never saw her nude except in the dark but… yep… there is only so much the darkness can hide. I am fortunate in that I have good hands and an equally good brain for measuring dimensions. She looked very tired and she sat beside me in my bed immediately she came into my hostel room.

I don’t like perfumes, I told her after we exchanged greetings.

But why? she asked somewhat disappointedly. Perhaps she made the effort to buy a new perfume just to impress me. I remember she always wore one that was slightly less okay.

They hide a woman’s true smell. For example, there’s nothing as sexy as a girl’s natural smell. For example, the smell of a girl’s armpits ten of fifteen minutes after a bath, I am told, is a true erection stimulant, I replied as I laughed and pinched her gently. Well, I was not told—I knew because one of my ex-girlfriends before Susan appeared in the picture would never have sex without first taking her bath, irrespective of the hour of the day. I was only half-kidding about the perfumes. There are some exceptionally good smelling perfumes, ninety-five percent of the rest I just cannot seem to stand.

A frown formed and deepened with frightening intensity on her face, distorting its cute, round form.

It’s even more exciting than the smell of ‘down below’, I concluded with mock seriousness. There, I may have gaffed because I had never smelt Susan’s ‘down below’—with her, it was strictly straight to business and she did not approve of any ‘nosing’ about. Like I said earlier, she was a mix of nun and a loose maid.

Must you always say such dumb things? she asked me querulously. If God had not spoken to me and told me that we will be married in the future, I wouldn’t even want to be around you and your unclean mind.

Life is much more fun with what you call an unclean mind, I said trying to wear her down before she got on her high horse and rode over me.

That’s the devil’s philosophy.

Feeling unappreciated and trying hard to contain my irritation. I allowed such remarks pass before; I was not going to do so this time. I looked her straight in the eye.

You didn’t say that those times we enjoyed ourselves on this very bed, I said to her as I patted the platform on which we sat. She avoided my eye and looked at the floor in embarrassment.

That was different, she said lamely.

How different? Look, stop judging people and more importantly, stop judging me. No matter what you think, you are just a hypocrite like everyone around you. Just relax and enjoy life. In case you don’t know it, you have just one to live.

Her face knotted angrily with a combination of fury and humiliation. She picked up her bag, stormed out of the room blindly and so fast that she left her notebooks behind.

On the evening of November 21, I went in search of her. I did my best to apologise and make amends. I have been told many times to keep it cordial with women—they are the most vindictive of organisms alive. After doing the customary pleading and metaphorical crawling on my knees in her own hostel room, one thing led to another and we ended up in my room where we met Segun, an engineering student and my roommate, preparing for a test. He promptly and conveniently made himself scarce. After a few hours of chatting generally, Susan and I found ourselves marauding Sin Island once again, my bed was our pirate ship but not before some serious begging for another taste of the pie. Susan was always insistent that I keep everything between us secret. I think I have done that very well. But then again, what good is a secret that is not shared with the world?

I turned slightly to look at my small wall clock. It was sometime after three a.m. Suddenly, Susan stirred vigorously and recoiled from me as if in shock. She began to cry hysterically. ‘What now?’ I asked in exasperation within me.

Lord, what have I done? she said in between her sobs. I promised him that this would never happen again. Shola, we have done wrong in the eyes of the Lord again." She got out of the bed and wrapped my bed sheets around her body. She turned on the room light, got on her knees, with an imploring look on her face that was directed at me. To humour her, and myself perhaps, I did the same. She began to pray whisperingly for the two of us.

Dear God, give us the strength to keep us together even as we resist the wiles of the devil to indulge in the sin of fornication. Bind me and Shola together and fulfil your promise of making him my husband, the bone of my bone, the flesh of my flesh, she said. I groaned inwardly.

The girl, I thought, would stop short of nothing including emotional blackmail to entrap Shola Dina my humble self, the son of a wealthy socialite who was running the final lap of his final year as an accounting student. My prospects, just like that of any Nigerian accountant at the time, were considered bright by all and sundry. Accountants handled money, mostly other people’s money anyway, and were naively expected to be rich or extremely comfortable at least—no one was ready to give a thought as whether such wealth was obtained by hook or crook. Many girls were ready to do anything to marry an accountant; an accountant was considered to be a real catch. From her self-appointed role as my ‘future wife’, I could see that Susan had very little idea of how little she figured in my own future plans. With my eyes closed in supplication, I prayed and hoped I would be able to get her out of my life by the end of the week without any unnecessary drama.

Later in the day, I found myself on the way to my father’s house in Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Lagos. I was attracted there by some irresistible pull I could not explain. The last time I went there, I left under very acrimonious circumstances and had sworn never to go there again. At the gates of UNILAG’s Akoka campus, I joined the jostling, pushing and shoving for a seat in one of the commercial minibuses popularly known as ‘danfo’, Lagos’s answer to the matatu. A jostle for a seat in a ‘danfo’ can be a very unpleasant, if not nasty affair. You could get your pocket picked by individuals, mostly male, who wait around bus stops exactly for a business opportunity like that. If you are female, you could be groped by a male (several males if you are unlucky) who are always on the lookout for openings like that. You could get your manhood ‘stolen’ by numerous voodoo specialists who are said to use the stolen penises for money-making rituals. The mechanics of stealing phalluses is not something explicable because I personally know no one who has had their manhood stolen—all I know is what I have been told.

The struggle for a bus was one which I had long become inured to since my father refused to let me take one of his four personal cars to school because it would make me ‘lazy’ and prevent me from concentrating on my studies, in his opinion.

I didn’t even have a bicycle when I was a university student and that gave me the focus, the zeal to succeed, to strive hard to get to a position where I could afford to buy myself a bicycle and even more, he said when I requested for a car.

One more word about Nigerian bus stops. They are places where you will find any infirmity under Heaven. There you will find the mentally insane wearing dirty, worn rags and in various states of undress, that is if they are not completely undressed. A large number of toddlers get their first glimpse of a completely naked woman at Nigerian bus stops—I know I did. You are also likely to find men with scrotums so large that they drag on the floor when they walk; those who have one or more limbs missing; individuals who were born without tongues or those who lost theirs during one misadventure or the other such as an armed robbery in which they played the roles of robbers and were separated from that organ for ever by an angry mob, when they were not killed as mobs are wont to do; some without eyes come into that situation for similar reasons. All of these people have one thing in common—they are there to beg mostly to satisfy their basic needs. Many are also there to raise funds for medical treatments which they cannot afford. I have yet to come across anyone with two heads but then again, I have not travelled so much, not travelled far and wide in Nigeria because I spent all of my years in Lagos, with rare forays into Abuja and some other urban areas.

The nightmarish ride through the seemingly ever static Lagos morning traffic and the suffocating heat in the mobile metal coffin that is the ‘danfo’ did little to make the journey pleasurable. As the bus rolled along the streets of Lagos, I saw at the seedier parts of the city several citizens stooped over uncovered drainages, discreetly, some not so discreetly, emptying their bowels into them. I also saw men who stood erect over these same open sewers, brandishing their equally erect phalluses while they emptied their bladders in the full view of the general public. That is the dilemma of the African—you are reduced to an animal with or without your consent. Only an African knows how this really feels and never really seems to mind much because we do nothing to change the situation. Needless to say, the housing provided in their shelters, if they had one, did not include sanitary facilities because an overwhelming majority of Lagos landlords in the slums are greedy Shylocks who are only interested in collecting exploitative rents by any means necessary and they, being as intensely religious and trusting of God like most other Nigerians, believed that He would come down someday soon to plunge a toilet into a convenient spot in their decrepit buildings—they did not have to do anything about it

After a few minutes into the bus ride, I was enveloped by a welcome calmness and solitude despite the rowdiness in and around the bus—this was chaos caused by the usual exchange of insults between and among drivers, conductors and passengers and also the blaring of car and motorcycle horns. Thoughts of how far I had come in my short life wafted through my mind, my growing up in Lagos, my childhood escapades and pranks. My mother always told me that I was special, that the circumstances in which I was born were also special, although on the circumstance of my conception she failed to elaborate and I did not inquire either. I have long come to suspect that my conception must have been caused by what happened on one of those rare nights when my often inebriated father came home sober, not reeking of alcohol as he always did when I was a kid and in the mood to perform his reproductive functions