Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle Read Free Book Online

adjusted himself through the folds of his white outfit. She told him that her only regret was that Debby could not join them, but if tonight went well, there would be other chances to do it with the other girl.
    She turned her attention to her glass of champagne and lifted it to her mouth. Her plan was working. It had to.
    He looked around for a waiter.
    ‘Only one condition,’ she said. ‘You must not treat me like a prostitute. You must not offer me any money. If you do, you will never see me again.’
    He reached for his drink. His fingers were shaking.
    ‘You are not a prostitute.’
    He downed his glass of champagne.
    ‘Good. I expect that you are married and you have a wife at home?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘So we can’t go back to your place. I stay with friends so you can’t come back to mine.’
    ‘I’m staying at a hotel tonight.’
    ‘Which one?’
    ‘Eko Hotel, I’m staying in the presidential suite.’
    He watched to see her reaction. She was neither impressed nor surprised. She already knew where he was staying that night, and she knew that the suite had originally been booked for a Congolese diplomat he knew and had arranged to meet. The man’s itinerary had changed at the last minute and Chief Ojo had asked what plans the diplomat had for the already paid-for hotel suite.
    ‘Nobody can know about this,’ she said.
    ‘Nobody will know.’

9
    Our ride was a single-cab pickup truck. Its cargo bed had been rigged with a metal bench welded onto the floor. Policemen climbed in from the sides not bothering with the tailgate. I sat in front between the boss and his driver, a dark fellow who responded ‘yesha’ to everything. The smell of stale sweat radiated from him. Thankfully, the windows were down.
    I thought ‘Bakare’ was the word for slow down, or watch out, or fuck, or something like that, until the senior officer shouted ‘Sergeant Bakare’ when we were about to clip the rear of a motorcycle ferrying three souls and a black goat slung over the neck of the rearmost passenger.
    Bakare swerved with a second to spare. I’d already seen the collision in my mind. I was still pressing down on my non-existent brake when he took his hand off the steering wheel, stretched it out of the window, and spread his fingers at the startled biker zigzagging to regain balance. This apparent rude gesture earned him another ‘Bakare.’ He grinned, floored the throttle, and my body shot back into the hard seat. There were no seatbelts. He attacked a bend without slowing down. Why was he in a hurry?
    Perhaps to take my mind – or his – off Bakare, the man who arrested me began to talk. ‘Do you watch EastEnders?’ he asked.
    Of all the things, why that? Did he once live in England? Wasthat where he got his slight London accent? Was he reminiscing? Was it a test? I told him I didn’t, and for the first time I wished that I, like eight million other zombies, followed the damn soap.
    But maybe it wasn’t a test. Maybe he really wanted to talk about it, because when he looked at me, I swear, I caught a hint of regret on his face. He switched topics. I don’t recall what to but I do remember that was when Bakare used his brakes – only after the front wheels had gone over a speed bump – then he down-shifted while the truck was still bouncing, and I looked in the mirror to check on the men in the back. That was the moment when a terrifying thought crept into my mind.
    You see, when my head hit the roof, and my body rolled into Bakare, and his elbow – without releasing his grip on the steering wheel – shoved me away, I remembered with horror the story a Scotsman I met in the queue at the Nigerian High Commission in London had told me. He’d once lived in Nigeria; he still had a business there: tyres. He made friends with the family of a Nigerian professor of mathematics at MIT. The professor flew home to go to his village to bury his mother and he got snatched from the funeral procession, midway between