….Continues from last week

This week, we continue the serialisation of “Esprit de Corps,” the second story from Ogaga Ifowodo’s work-in-progress entitled The Hostage. We began the series with  “The Treasonable Parrot,” his fiction debut featured in the AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction, edited by E. C. Osondu and William Pierce, published in volume 72 of the magazine in 2010.

IGP Arase

Ifowodo, a lawyer, is an award-winning poet, columnist and activist. At the heart of the work-in-progress is the title story, a novella. The stories are set in Nigeria’s recent history of dictatorship as experienced by characters privately and in unsavoury social encounters caused by the relentless logic of the radical curtailment of freedom. Keep a date with Saturday Vanguard!

He knew that ogogoro, eighty per cent proof local gin, and Indian hemp, needed “to boost morale,” especially on night duty, were almost always in the patrol van and the men might be drunk or “high” on any given night. What if he ran into such a crew in an evil hour? The thought was not to be dismissed, as he knew from experience.

Yet he would sooner die than allow himself to be extorted. And so, although the odds of his dying of “accidental discharge” at a checkpoint were remote, he always prayed that those three magical words would never lose their potency.

As Corpo Giwa pulled out of the checkpoint, the jingle came on again. Armed robber not be spirit o, na human being like you and me . . .  and he remembered the day he would never forget. After two years of pursuing the vicious Axe Gang without netting a single one of “those Lucifers with Lugers” as he called them, even he had begun to entertain doubts.

While not yet gone over to the side of those colleagues of his who had no doubt whatsoever that a human being with the right juju could transform into a spirit, he was no longer able to mock them. After all, he had “a practical belief” in juju, as just about everyone he knew in the force, a belief that cut across faith, creed and rank, fed by the hazards of the job.

He had not thought twice about visiting a babalawo recommended by his commanding officer for “gun-shot insurance.” And even now, he still couldn’t tell if he owed his life to that insurance or plain good luck. But that was where he drew the line.

After two frustrating and dangerous years of pursuing the Axe Gang, an anonymous tip had proved dead right. He recalled the words scrawled with a blunt pencil by a laboured hand on a ruled sheet: “If yu wont to kach Axe Gang, go twomoro nite 2 oclok to Palm Groove motell, Shangisha. Go strait to challet from entrans rite wit carshoe tree in front.”

Although the gang carried guns, very deadly ones like AK-47s and Uzis, they never left a victim, dead or alive, without an axe wound. The Axe Gang robbed and maimed and murdered with a demonic fury. When the trail got too close they laid low for some time, only to reappear and blazon a tale surpassing their last in goriness. But the police had made some progress.

Three of its members had so far been shot dead and the two captured alive tortured till it was useless to kick in their ribs, break their shin bones with a hammer, burn their fingers with a cigarette lighter, insert hot copper wires in their genitals, lower them into the lagoon upside down from ropes tied to their feet from the Third Mainland Bridge in the dead of night, or devise any other advanced interrogation method to loosen their tongues. And then came the tip.

Cornered at last, the gang went down fighting and in the shootout Corpo Giwa had the distinction of killing Red Axe, their leader. But Red Axe had made his mark with an automatic that shattered Corpo Giwa’s left leg. Overnight, he became a national hero.

Rich survivors of the gang’s mayhem who had lived in terror for two years vied for the chance to bear the cost of flying him anywhere in the world where his shattered leg could be put together again. He had been flown to Germany, to a military hospital in Dresden where, it was said, the uncanny secrets of putting together the limbs of soldiers which had been so fragmented during World War II that the pieces had to be picked up and sent after them in surgical bags had been carefully preserved.

He returned three months later to a brief period of peace followed by an even more fearsome siege. Desperate for a way to inspire his men and give the city some hope, the Inspector-General had come down from Abuja to personally present Corporal Giwa with his active duty disability reward.

And to announce a new “no-nonsense anti-robbery squad” code-named Operation Fire-for-Fire, OFF. Off with armed robbers. He warned robbers to quit the path of violent crime “before it was too late.” Then he added, “Always remember, armed robbers are human beings who live among us; they are not spirits.”

The Inspector-General had also decorated Corpo Giwa with his new rank of Inspector, after which he was honourably discharged from the force. He had been due for promotion the last five years of his service and had finally earned it at the price of a leg. Well, better late than never.

In any case, he preferred to be called Corpo. He had insisted on that when he attained the rank of Corporal in order to distinguish it from “Couple,” the corrupted pronunciation handed down by the illiterate pioneers of the force from colonial times when it was known as the West African Legion. And it had become his nickname, so that when he attained the rank of Sergeant no one took notice. It hadn’t bothered him the least and, anyway, Corpo sounded like the name of a tough movie star.

Corpo Giwa’s leg had healed very well and soon he was able to walk without crutches, and then to drive. With his reward, he had bought his cab. But the new wave of terror washed Lagos anew with crippling dread.

The helplessness of the city was spelled by the name Timmy the Spirit bestowed on the reigning king of robbers, Timothy Anenih. Corpo Giwa’s reminiscences were temporarily halted when his passengers who had been so quiet all along he thought they had fallen into a drunken sleep or drifted into a private heaven—they looked like the type that lived on Indian hemp—began an animated conversation about the harm armed robbers were doing to Lagos night-life.

“Musicians down on their luck,” he thought, and wondered if they would be able to pay the fare, if he had made a mistake stopping to pick them up, and at night for that matter. It was getting darker and the traffic snarling into a tighter knot as commuters seethed in steamy vehicles.

By now Corpo Giwa had passed two more checkpoints and each time he had needed only to say the magic words esprit de corps to be waved through. The dashboard clock gave the time as half past eight. He had spent over an hour snailing through the gridlock traffic of Ogba and he wasn’t half-way to his destination yet. He decided that after dropping off his passengers, he would head straight home.

No, he did not fear the roads, and was still very much a policeman, but he was above all else a practical man. The mood of the Lagos cops had soured considerably since Anenih came to double the terror of the Axe gang days by targeting police officers.

Besides, he really did not wish to get into an argument with his seventy-year-old mother who had finally agreed to move in with him and his small family of four but who wanted him home at twilight every day. A retired headmistress, she deserved the credit that he always claimed for the substitution of “spirit” for “stranger” in the crime-busting jingle of the police.

Corpo Giwa had been one of the officers selected to preview the jingle and he never lost the opportunity to bring conversation to the point where he could boast of his role in “composing” it. “Armed robber not be stranger o,” went the original line, but the trial audience had unanimously agreed that “spirit” drove home the point with greater force than “stranger.”

As more and more robberies began to occur in the less affluent parts of Lagos, Corpo Giwa had begged his mother to move in with him but she had insisted on living alone long after her youngest child married and left the house.

She would concede only to have the ten-year-old daughter of a distant relative sent to her for education in exchange for cleaning, running errands and “another human voice in the house.” Then there was a fatal attack on Iya Resi, the rice trader at the far end of the street in their low-cost government housing estate usually spared robber anxiety.

Shaken, the old woman had asked her son what the police was doing to let poor people sleep at night. At first she had been sympathetic as only a mother could be towards an officer of a police force plainly failing in its duty while her son recited a long list of problems hindering their efforts.