Static Hour

The Favour

He knocked on her door the next morning, and he looked, for the first time since she'd met him, like a man who had not slept.

There was a shadow under his left eye that hadn't been there on the balcony. His shirt was the same plain black as before, but creased now, slept in or not slept in at all, she couldn't tell which. He held a bundle wrapped in grey cloth against his chest, both arms around it, the way a person might carry something breakable, or something they were afraid of dropping in front of witnesses.

"I need a favor," he said, without preamble, without good morning, as though the conversation had already been running in his head before she opened the door and he was only now letting her hear the middle of it.

Adaeze stood in the doorway in yesterday's T-shirt, hair tied back badly, and found she wasn't as surprised to see him as she should have been. Some part of her had been waiting since the knock through the wall last night, since the silence that followed it, since she'd lain awake past two trying to decide whether she'd imagined the whole thing.

"You look like someone chased you," she said.

"Someone did." He said it simply, the way another person might say it rained.

"Can I put this in your apartment? One night. I'll come for it tomorrow."

She looked at the bundle. It didn't look dangerous. It looked like laundry, badly wrapped, corners of grey cloth folded in on themselves. But she thought of Ikoyi, of compromised, of the door on his side of the wall opening to someone he clearly hadn't wanted early.

"What is it?"

"Safer if you don't know."

"That's not an answer."

Something shifted in his face, not quite a smile, but a loosening, like a man recalculating an opponent he'd underestimated. "No," he agreed. "It isn't."

She should have said no. She turned the thought over even as she stepped back from the door, even as she watched him cross her threshold with the careful, economical steps of someone used to not touching things he didn't have to touch. He set the bundle on her kitchen counter, gentle as a mother laying down a sleeping child, and for a moment his hand stayed flat against the cloth, as though reluctant to let go of the weight of it.

"Thank you," he said, straightening. Up close, in daylight, he was worse for her composure, not better. The tired eyes made him look human in a way the balcony hadn't allowed.

"You're not going to tell me anything," she said. It wasn't a question anymore.

"Not today." He was already moving toward the door, already becoming again the unhurried, unreadable man from the gantry rail. At the threshold he paused, looked back at her with an expression she couldn't name, something between apology and warning.

"Don't open it," he said, and then he was gone, footsteps quiet on the stairwell, gone the way he did everything, without excess, without waste.

She stood in her kitchen for a long time after the door clicked shut, looking at the bundle on her counter like it might start speaking if

she waited long enough.

She made tea. She drank it slowly, standing at the window, watching Yaba wake up beneath her — the run of danfo buses, a boy selling recharge cards at the junction, the ordinary churn of a city that had no idea what was sitting wrapped in cloth four floors up. She told herself she was not going to look. She believed it the way she believed most things she told herself in the last twenty-four hours, which was to say: for about eleven minutes.

The cloth was tied with a simple knot, not locked, not sealed, as though he hadn't imagined anyone foolish enough to open it once he'd said not to. Her fingers found the knot before her mind had finished arguing with itself.

She peeled back one corner. Just one. Enough to see.

Bronze, dark with age, cool-looking even through the photograph of it her eyes were taking rather than the object itself, because she did not let herself unwrap it further. A face. A crown of raised beads circling a high forehead, eyes narrow and ancient and staring at nothing, the unmistakable weight of something that belonged in a museum, or had once, or should.

She had spent three years of university standing in front of pieces like this in textbooks, in the one careful field trip her class had taken to the National Museum before funding cuts ended the program. She knew what she was looking at the way she knew her own name.

A Benin bronze. Not a replica. Not a student's careful forgery for a thesis project.

The real thing.

Her hand was still on the cloth, her breath gone thin and fast in her chest, when her phone began to ring on the counter beside it, and the name on the screen was not her mother's, was not a friend's, was a name she recognized with a lurch of pure cold dread.

Mrs. Balogun Gallery Director.

Calling her, for the first time since she'd been hired, at nine in the morning on a day she wasn't scheduled to work.