aid, running to him in the slightly offbalance manner of toddlers. She was fresh from her evening bath, wearing her flowered pajamas and smelling sweetly of baby lotion. “Buch-buch! Daddy’s Buch!” He swung her up, kissed her, nuzzled her neck, and, because it always made her laugh, pretended to throw her down on the floor.
“Will you bathe or just change?” Kosi asked, following him upstairs, where she had laid out a blue caftan on his bed. He would have preferred a dress shirt or a simpler caftan instead of this, with its overly decorative embroidery, which Kosi had bought for an outrageous sum from one of those new pretentious fashion designers on The Island. But he would wear it to please her.
“I’ll just change,” he said.
“How was work?” she asked, in the vague, pleasant way that she always asked. He told her he was thinking about the new block of flats he had just completed in Parkview. He hoped Shell would rent it because the oil companies were always the best renters, never complaining about abrupt hikes, paying easily in American dollars so that nobody had to deal with the fluctuating naira.
“Don’t worry,” she said, and touched his shoulder. “God will bring Shell. We will be okay, darling.”
The flats were in fact already rented by an oil company, but he sometimes told her senseless lies such as this, because a part of him hoped she would ask a question or challenge him, though he knew she would not, because all she wanted was to make sure the conditions of their life remained the same, and how he made that happen she left entirely to him.
CHIEF’S PARTY WOULD bore him, as usual, but he went because he went to all of Chief’s parties, and each time he parked in front of Chief’s large compound, he remembered the first time he had come there, with his cousin Nneoma. He was newly back from England, had been in Lagos for only a week, but Nneoma was already grumbling about how he could not just lie around in her flat reading and moping.
“Ahn ahn! O gini? Are you the first person to have this problem? You have to get up and hustle. Everybody is hustling, Lagos is about hustling,” Nneoma said. She had thick-palmed, capable hands and many business interests; she traveled to Dubai to buy gold, to China to buy women’s clothing, and lately, she had become a distributor for a frozen chicken company. “I would have said you should come and help me in my business, but no, you are too soft, you speak too much English. I need somebody with gra-gra,” she said.
Obinze was still reeling from what had happened to him in England, still insulated in layers of his own self-pity, and to hear Nneoma’s dismissive question—“Are you the first person to have this problem?”—upset him. She had no idea, this cousin who had grown up in the village, who looked at the world with stark and insensitive eyes. But slowly, he realized she was right; he was not the first and he would not be the last. He began applying for jobs listed in newspapers, but nobody called him for an interview, and his friends from school, who were now working at banks and mobile phone companies, began to avoid him, worried that he would thrust yet another CV into their hands.
One day, Nneoma said, “I know this very rich man, Chief. The man chased and chased me, eh, but I refused. He has a serious problem with women, and he can give somebody AIDS. But you know these men, the one woman that says no to them is the one that they don’t forget. So from time to time, he will call me and sometimes I go and greet him. He even helped me with capital to start over my business after those children of Satan stole my money last year. He still thinks that one day I will agree for him. Ha, o di egwu, for where? I will take you to him. Once he is in a good mood, the man can be very generous. He knows everybody in this country. Maybe he will give us a note for a managing director somewhere.”
A steward let them in; Chief was sitting on a gilded chair that looked like a throne, sipping cognac and surrounded by guests. He sprang up, a smallish man, high-spirited and ebullient. “Nneoma! Is this you? So you remember me today!” he said. He hugged Nneoma, moved back to look boldly at her hips outlined in her fitted skirt, her long weave falling to her shoulders. “You want to give me heart attack, eh?”
“How can I give you heart attack? What will I do without you?” Nneoma said playfully.
“You know what to do,” Chief said, and his guests laughed, three guffawing, knowing men.
“Chief, this is my cousin, Obinze. His mother is my father’s sister, the professor,” Nneoma said. “She is the one that paid my school fees from beginning to end. If not for her, I don’t know where I would be today.”
“Wonderful, wonderful!” Chief said, looking at Obinze as though he was somehow responsible for this generosity.
“Good evening, sir,” Obinze said. It surprised him that Chief was something of a fop, with his air of fussy grooming: nails manicured and shiny, black velvet slippers at his feet, a diamond cross around his neck. He had expected a larger man and a rougher exterior.
“Sit down. What can I offer you?”
Big Men and Big Women, Obinze would later learn, did not talk to people, they instead talked at people, and that evening Chief had talked and talked, pontificating about politics, while his guests crowed, “Exactly! You are correct, Chief! Thank you!” They were wearing the uniform of the Lagos youngish and wealthyish—leather slippers, jeans and open-neck tight shirts, all with familiar designer logos—but there was, in their manner, the plowing eagerness of men in need.
After his guests left, Chief turned to Nneoma. “Do you know that song ‘No One Knows Tomorrow’?” Then he proceeded to sing the song with childish gusto. No one knows tomorrow! To-mor-row! No one knows tomorrow! Another generous splash of cognac in his glass. “That is the one principle that this country is based on. The major principle. No one knows tomorrow. Remember those big bankers during Abacha’s government? They thought they owned this country, and the next thing they knew, they were in prison. Look at that pauper who could not pay his rent before, then Babangida gave him an oil well, and now he has a private jet!” Chief spoke with a triumphant tone, mundane observations delivered as grand discoveries, while Nneoma listened and smiled and agreed. Her animation was exaggerated, as though a bigger smile and a quicker laugh, each ego-burnish shinier than the last, would ensure that Chief would help them. Obinze was amused by how obvious it seemed, how frank she was in her flirtations. But Chief merely gave them a case of red wine as a gift, and said vaguely to Obinze, “Come and see me next week.”
Obinze visited Chief the next week and then the next; Nneoma told him to just keep hanging around until Chief did something for him. Chief’s steward always served fresh pepper soup, deeply flavorful pieces of fish in a broth that made Obinze’s nose run, cleared his head, and somehow unclogged the future and filled him with hope, so that he sat contentedly, listening to Chief and his guests. They fascinated him, the unsubtle cowering of the almost rich in the presence of the rich, and the rich in the presence of the very rich; to have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money. Obinze felt repulsion and longing; he pitied them, but he also imagined being like them. One day, Chief drank more cognac than usual, and talked haphazardly about people stabbing you in the back and small boys growing tails and ungrateful fools suddenly thinking they were sharp. Obinze was not sure what exactly had happened, but somebody had upset Chief, a gap had opened, and as soon as they were alone, he said, “Chief, if there is something I can help you do, please tell me. You can depend on me.” His own words surprised him. He had stepped out of himself. He was high on pepper soup. This was what it meant to hustle. He was in Lagos and he had to hustle.
Chief looked at him, a long, shrewd look. “We need more people like you in this country. People from good families, with good home training. You are a gentleman, I see it in your eyes. And your mother is a professor. It is not easy.”
Obinze half smiled, to seem humble in the face of this odd praise.
“You are hungry and honest, that is very rare in this country. Is that not so?” Chief asked.
“Yes,” Obinze said, even though he was not sure whether he was agreeing about his ha
ving this quality or about the rarity of this quality. But it did not matter, because Chief sounded certain.
“Everybody is hungry in this country, even the rich men are hungry, but nobody is honest.”
Obinze nodded, and Chief gave him another long look, before silently turning back to his cognac. On his next visit, Chief was his usual garrulous self.
“I was Babangida’s friend. I was Abacha’s friend. Now that the military has gone, Obasanjo is my friend,” he said. “Do you know why? Is it because I am stupid?”
“Of course not, Chief,” Obinze said.
“They said the National Farm Support Corporation is bankrupt and they’re going to privatize it. Do you know this? No. How do I know this? Because I have friends. By the time you know it, I would have taken a position and I would have benefited from the arbitrage. That is our free market!” Chief laughed. “The corporation was set up in the sixties and it owns property everywhere. The houses are all rotten and termites are eating the roofs. But they are selling them. I’m going to buy seven properties for five million each. You know what they are listed for in the books? One million. You know what the real worth is? Fifty million.” Chief paused to stare at one of his ringing cell phones—four were placed on the table next to him—and then ignored it and leaned back on the sofa. “I need somebody to front this deal.”