“Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”
—David Banner from The Incredible Hulk television series
A Sad Farewell with Pepper
NNAMDI DIDN’T WANT to look at his father’s body in the casket, so he looked at the side of his mother’s face instead. He sat beside her, his relatives all around him. He wanted to hold his mother’s hand, but he didn’t dare. Her black head wrap was perched on her head, all sharp starched angles. Auntie Ugochi, his mother’s sister, had helped her put it on. If it weren’t for Auntie Ugochi, his mother would have stayed in bed, sobbing.
Nnamdi’s eyes fell on his mother’s gold earrings. She only wore these on special occasions. Nnamdi figured the burial of his father was special enough. He stared at his mother now and she didn’t notice. Her face was a terrible mess. Her dark brown eyes were red and puffy, her black mascara was running down her cheeks, and her nose was wet with tears and snot. The handkerchief someone had given her was soaked through with tears.
“My husband. Ewo, ewo, ewo,” she kept whispering as she gazed at the body of Nnamdi’s father. He was yards away, lying in an open ebony casket under the black tent next to the high-reaching palm tree that grew beside the house. He was dressed in his impeccable police chief uniform, the same type of uniform he’d been wearing on the night he died. Except this one didn’t have three holes in the chest and back. The murder of Nnamdi’s father exactly two weeks ago was still unsolved.
The sun was especially harsh today, and even under the tent, it was sweltering hot. The humid heat blew as a wave of grief pressed down on Nnamdi’s shoulders. He ran his hand over his freshly trimmed rough hair and turned from his mother to look somewhere else. For a while, he watched the women with the drums perform their burial dance before him. They wore matching blue dresses and cowry shells that clicked on their ankles. As they danced, they kicked up dust. The band had a guitar and bass player, a flutist, and three more drummers, and they played a variety of songs from highlife to traditional. Normally, Nnamdi would have enjoyed the music.
Suddenly, all the dancers missed their rhythm. The drummers lost their beat. The guitarist’s fingers slipped. And the flutists missed their notes. All Nnamdi’s relatives, family, friends, acquaintances—the two hundred people sitting on benches, standing, and crying in the large spacious compound—all looked toward the entranceway on the left side. Auntie Ugochi leaned toward his mother’s ear and Nnamdi heard her mutter, “This man has no shame.”
His mother snatched Nnamdi’s hand and squeezed hard. “Keep playing, keep dancing!” she barked at the musicians and dancers. A drummer beat out a floundering rhythm and the dancers moved distractedly.
Nnamdi didn’t want to look. He knew who he’d see. “Never shy away from conflict,” his father had once told him. “Look it in the eye and deal with it.” And his mother had stood behind his father and added, “Courage, my son. Your father means you should have courage but be smart about it.”
So Nnamdi turned to look. He saw a procession of ten fashionably dressed, gold- and diamond-wearing, attention-usurping women and men filing into the compound. Nnamdi tried to stand up straight with his chin up, as his father would have. But instead, fear made him slump in his seat and barely lift his head.
Nnamdi remembered his father angrily talking about these individuals. “Everyone knows who they are, but people are too afraid to confront them. If anything, people treat them like Nollywood movie stars.” These were the most prominent criminals in Kaleria.
That regal old woman wearing the red abada textile clothing had to be Mama Go-Slow. His father was right: indeed, she did “walk like a buffalo,” and her expensive outfit was thrown off balance by her signature wide, blocky black shoes. The man in the suit that was too big for his skinny frame must be Never Die, the thief who had been shot by police many times but remained alive. Nnamdi was also sure he spotted Bad Market and Three Days’ Journey, too. All of them were strutting like celebrities on the red carpet, when they were actually unwanted guests at the chief of police’s burial service.
Leading this procession was an expensively dressed man who was even shorter than Nnamdi. Nnamdi’s stomach dropped and his hands grew cold. The man looked more like a movie star than any of the others. He was handsome and carried himself like he expected the world to bow at his feet.
This was the very man most, including Nnamdi, believed was responsible for his father’s murder: the Chief of Chiefs. If he hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger, he’d certainly paid and ordered someone to do it. The problem was there was no proof, no gun registration, no witnesses, no confessions, nothing. It was as if a ghost had shot his father and then fled back to the spirit world to laugh about it.
But truth outshone evidence and Nnamdi knew. Everyone knew. And though he’d never seen the Chief of Chiefs with his own eyes, he was sure this was him right now. Waltzing into his father’s funeral with the confidence of a ghost. Nnamdi pressed against his mother as she squeezed his hand harder. The Chief of Chiefs was the smallest grown man Nnamdi had ever seen, but he knew that this guy was the biggest crime lord in all of Kaleria, maybe even in all of Southeastern Nigeria. Kaleria was a small suburb of Owerri, so this didn’t make the Chief of Chiefs anywhere as infamous as the greatest crime lords in the mega-city of Lagos. However, the Chief of Chiefs certainly dined with and had the ear of those big Lagos men.
There were so many crazy rumors about the guy. Some said that he owned huge homes on every continent, all bought with his dirty money. That he was so filthy rich that he bathed with soap made from crushed pink diamonds. That he was so successful in his criminal activity because he was the descendant of a demon and Mami Wata, the water goddess. And that at night he slept with earplugs in his ears because the sound of the stars twinkling kept him up. Nnamdi didn’t believe any of this, but that didn’t make the man any less creepy.
Nnamdi’s father had been a good chief of police. Many times, the wives and mothers of people who his father had helped came to his house bearing gifts. Nnamdi would eavesdrop from the kitchen as these women thanked his father, while his mother brought iced tea or orange Fanta to drink. “Thank you, sir,” one of the women sobbed. Thieves had once gutted her house when she was on vacation. Angry and disgusted, Nnamdi’s father had personally investigated and pursued the case, and then he and a team of officers apprehended the thieves. “These stupid thieves are so cruel; you have the brave heart of a lion.” The next day, the story was all over Kaleria’s popular newsletter, the Kaleria Sun, and Nnamdi had gone to school so proud that day.
Nnamdi’s father refused all bribes and his efforts were starting to result in a decrease in petty crime in Kaleria. He’d just turned his efforts toward the Chief of Chiefs, the apex of the town’s crime. His father came home one evening, so excited. He’d talked about a big meeting he’d called at the department. He’d drawn charts on the dry-erase board as officers threw out ideas, and the department put together a great plan that would target each of the Chief of Chiefs’ main cohorts while diplomatically approaching the Chief of Chiefs.