Voice of America (16 page)

A new sergeant was taking over from the one who had been at the desk when Paiko was arrested. Paiko watched the new sergeant’s face closely and smiled. He liked what he saw. The new sergeant had an overflowing belly, which was a good sign; he was likely to be a bribe taker.

“Don’t worry, you’ll soon be released—I am sure my colleague who is taking over from me will be the one to release you,” the departing sergeant said to Paiko.

Paiko smiled nervously and said nothing. He was not too worried; this was a police post and not a fully fledged station. He suspected that no hardened criminals were in the cell, and the only smell that came from the cell was a faint odor of old urine. He was happy, however, that he was not in the cell.

The new sergeant cleared his throat, spat into a dusty corner of the room, and turned to Paiko.

“What is your offense, my friend?” Without pausing, he asked the same question in a different way. “What offense did you commit, mister?”

Paiko became worried; he thought the departed sergeant had briefed the new one on his case. He had seen them put their heads together while looking in his direction. Paiko summoned up some courage and smiled at the sergeant.

“I did not commit any offense, sir. I was arrested in a raid on Jolly Hotel,” Paiko said.

“Then why do you say that you have committed no offense? Your being caught in a raid on a brothel is an offense—or do you want to lawyer me?” the sergeant asked, peering at Paiko
through restless, bloodshot eyes. From where Paiko sat, he could smell the
ogogoro
vapors emitted by the sergeant.

“Oh, no, not at all, sir, I’m not trying to lawyer you at all, sir,” Paiko said.

“Anyway, your case is a small matter; you will soon be released,” the sergeant said, and began to read a sheaf of dogeared soccer pools betting coupons.

Just then, the station radio came alive. The sergeant threw the frayed sheaf of coupons aside and snatched the radio. He saluted smartly, his huge belly jiggling like a water gourd.

“All correct, sah. I am the sergeant on duty, sah. What do you say? … An armed robbery along Ikorodu Road, a commissioner’s official car snatched? Ah, that is very serious, sah.”

Paiko watched as the sergeant began to twitch nervously, all the time scratching his large buttocks through his torn uniform, patched in three places.

“No problem, sah, we have enough of them here, you can come and pick them up with the Land Rover, there is no vehicle in our post. It is a small post, but we can provide you the men you need for the parade, no problem at all, sah.”

The sergeant was suddenly transformed into a shouting, barking, wild-eyed creature.

“All of you criminals in the cell, form a line and start coming out of the cell with your hands raised in the air. If you try any monkey tricks with me, I will shoot you right away, and your family can come and collect your body in the mortuary.”

He opened the door of the cell with a bunch of keys he picked up from a wooden board nailed to the wall. The men shambled out; there were six of them, all looking confused and bewildered. All the while Paiko had been sitting behind the counter,
he had had no suspicion that the cell held such tough-looking men. The sergeant turned to Paiko and barked, “What are you doing there? Join the line—in fact you should be the first person in the line—and raise your hands in the air, or you will chop bullet right now.”

“Ah, sir, I am not a criminal—you told me my case is simple, I told you I was arrested at Jolly Hotel,” Paiko stammered.

The sergeant walked toward Paiko and gave him a slap across the face. Paiko blinked and blinked again, trying to dispel flashing stars.

“Now fall into the line before I waste you,” the sergeant said. Paiko stumbled, his feet unsteady and his hands raised in the air like the other men.

An old police Land Rover arrived, and the sergeant led the men outside. An inspector with three broad tribal marks across both sides of his face jumped out, and the sergeant saluted him smartly.

“Are these the robbers?” he asked.

“Yes, sah, they are the armed robbers I told you about, sah.”

“Why are they wearing all these clothes?”

“Sir, they were dressed like this when we arrested them at the scene of the crime, sah.”

“You all, take off your trousers and your shirts, all of you, take them off quickly,” the inspector said to Paiko and the rest of the men. Paiko was of a mind to tell the inspector that he was not an armed robber, but he changed his mind and decided to bide his time. The men removed their clothes and stood in their underwear, which was in various colors, sizes, and different states of disrepair. The sergeant commanded them to jump into the back of the Land Rover. He sensed some hesitation on their
part. Pulling out a pistol, he raised it and shot into the air. Paiko threw himself into the back of the Land Rover, banging his head against the hard metal. As the smell of petrol filled his nose in the pitch-blackness of the vehicle, he began to cry like a baby. The vehicle pulled out of the station, and they were on their way to Area F, the state headquarters of the police command.

The men in the vehicle soon found their voices and began to talk in whispers.

“Where are they taking us to, sef?” a voice in the darkness asked.

“To Area F, now, their headquarters.”

“Ah, Area F, is a bad place I tell you, that is one place I do not want to go to again. That is where they have the worst torture chamber in the whole of this country.”

“But why are they taking us there?” another voice asked.

Paiko cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. He was listening to his own voice as the words came out, almost as if the words were not his; his mouth felt like an instrument that was separate from the rest of him.

“I heard the sergeant on the radio; he said some armed robbers snatched the official vehicle of a commissioner and that they needed to make a quick arrest. It was not long after he spoke on the radio that the inspector came.”

“Ah, that means they are going to parade us as the armed robbers that snatched the commissioner’s car. They told us to remove our clothes, so we’ll look like the real robbers. We are even lucky that they did not shoot some of us in the leg—sometimes they do that to convince the public that the robbers were trying to escape or that it was a serious gun battle,” a voice filled with experience said in the darkness.

“Area F torture chamber is the worst except for the Alag-bon Close torture chamber at Force CID.” The voice saying this seemed to be getting a lot of satisfaction from telling his tale.

“In Area F, they have large hooks in the ceiling. They tie the hands and legs of suspects like roast chickens. They hang them upside down and use heavy batons and
koboko
whips to wallop them all over their bodies and convince them to confess. If a person is proving stubborn and does not want to confess, they invite a popular sergeant there, his name is Sergeant Torture, and by the time he’s done with you, you’ll confess both the crimes you committed and the one you didn’t,” the same man said, chuckling to himself.

Paiko began to wonder why the man was doing this. He felt a warm trickle of sweat running down the crack to his anus. The same man cleared his throat and continued.

“Sergeant Torture will hold a suspect’s penis in his hand and insert a rusty sharp bicycle spoke into it; sometimes if he does not want you to suffer too much he will use a sharp broomstick, ah, that place
na waya,”
the speaker concluded.

The police Land Rover pulled into Area F. Before the vehicle could come to a proper stop, the inspector jumped out, and as the vehicle stopped, it was surrounded by men holding guns raised into the air. Some of them were wearing khaki shorts and black singlets and berets; others wore no shirts at all and were carelessly swinging their guns from side to side.

Area F had a peeling milky fence around it. Outside the fence hawkers held dripping plastic bags of sachet water for sale; a few hawked dead-looking loaves of bread and fried buns. After the vehicle stopped in the compound, Paiko and the other detainees were marched into the police station.

“You can take their statements later; these are dangerous criminals. They robbed the commissioner of his car. I am taking them straight into the cell,” the inspector who brought Paiko and the others said to the corporal at the desk. He ordered Paiko and the other men to form a single line. With their arms raised they were marched into the cell.

The cell was a small room with a single lightbulb hanging very far away on the cement-decked ceiling; the floor was dark and grimy from urine, tears, sweat, and feces. Paiko could not see his way as he walked into the cell and stepped on someone lying on the floor.

“Who goes there, human beings or animals?” a raucous voice barked.

Paiko stepped gingerly away. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the cell, he began to see that at least three rings of men had formed circles. A tiny window on the far reaches of the wall, covered with three dark, rusty iron bars, was the only means through which air came into the cell. The heat was like that which emanated from the oven of a bakery. In one corner of the cell was a small pit latrine out of which thick vapors and a horrible stench emanated. The space around the pit latrine was cleared for the newcomers. The man who Paiko had stepped on was bleeding from a bullet wound; another man knelt beside him and was massaging a strong-smelling Chinese balm into the still fresh wound.

The same voice that had asked the question when the newcomers came in asked again, in a tone that was getting angrier, “Who goes there, human beings or animals?”

“Animals,” answered the man who had been talking about the torture chambers on the ride down to Area F. The other voices answered, “Humans.”

The man cleared his throat and laughed out loud. His laughter was clearly without humor, and as he laughed, the other people in the cell laughed along with him, except for the newcomers.

“I am the president of this cell, and I am known as Presido. This is Jungle Republic. There are no human beings here in Jungle Republic, we are all animals. The only people who are human beings are those living in the outside world—those of us in this inside world are all animals,
abi
my people no be true I talk?” he asked.

“True talk, Presido,” the voices chorused.

“Just as you have your president and commander in chief in the outside world, I am the president and commander in chief in this Jungle Republic, even,
sef,
I have more powers than the president of this country, because if I want any one of you to die this very minute it will happen, no trial, no judge,
fiam,
like that you are dead.”

“Up Presido!” the voices around the cell chorused. As Presido spoke, someone fanned him with a square piece of cardboard.

“Now, all of you line up according to your height and tell us why you should be admitted into this Jungle Republic,” Presido said. The man who was behind Paiko nudged Paiko and whispered into his right ear; Paiko could smell the man’s sour breath amid the general stench of the cell, an admixture of old cigarettes, marijuana, local gin, and decaying teeth.

“Tell them that you are a notorious armed robber, that you have led many operations and killed many people; they will fear you and give you an important position here in the cell,” the man whispered. Paiko thought about this and shook his head. Something told him not to heed the man’s advice. What he did
not know was that the police sometimes locked up one of their own in the cell along with the criminals to help them gather information about robbers.

The man who had spoken to Paiko was the first to speak. He cleared his throat and launched forth boastfully.

“My name is Robert, but I am popularly known as Bob Risky. In the daytime I am a motor park tout at Iddo, but at night I am a robber. I have been robbing and killing since I was expelled from Mushin Grammar School in the second form for smoking and selling marijuana. There is no operation that is too risky for me to undertake—that is how I earned my nickname, Risky. I have been detained in almost all the police stations in Lagos, including Isokoko, Panti, Alagbon, Bar Beach, and even the old station on Malu Road. I was drinking in my girlfriend’s beer parlor when the police raided the place and arrested me. They found a locally made pistol in my pocket, and some wraps of marijuana. When they are tired, they will release me. I have no other profession than armed robbery, and as we say, once a robber, always a robber.” As Bob Risky finished his introduction, there was loud applause. Even Presido appeared to be impressed.

“You are one of us, and you are qualified to be a member of this republic. From today I make you the assistant provost of this republic. Your job is to maintain peace and law and order here and make sure that everybody stays in his position,” Presido said. A cheer went up once again, and everyone in the cell hailed the new assistant provost.

Many people rose up to speak and talked about themselves and all their achievements in the world of armed robbery. One of them sang a song that he said a musician had composed in his honor. When it came to Paiko’s turn, he became jittery. He
opened his mouth to speak, but he only croaked. He swallowed the little saliva in his mouth and started again.

“My name is Paiko. I was drinking at Jolly Hotel while waiting for my girlfriend Sweet to finish entertaining a customer so we could go home together when the police raided the place and took me to Iloro police post. They told me my case was a simple one and that I would soon be released, but after some time the sergeant spoke with an inspector who told him that some people had robbed a commissioner of his car and that they needed people to parade as the robbers, and they put me in their Land Rover and brought me here,” Paiko said and swallowed again.

“Ehheeen, so tell us the whole truth and nothing but the truth—were you drinking and waiting for your girlfriend Sweet after you returned from a robbery operation? Is she the one that helps you to hide your Luger? Tell us the truth and nothing but the truth,” Presido said again, and the other voices in the cell echoed after him, “The truth and nothing but the truth.”