THE GOLDEN BOY

Chapter One The champagne came out at midnight, which was early for Femi Adebayor. He stood at the edge of the penthouse terrace, twenty-nine floors above Victoria Island, watching the lagoon throw back the lights of the city like it was trying to impress him. It wasn't. Nothing impressed him anymore. That was the problem, though he wouldn't have called it a problem. He would have called it taste. "Femi! Femi, come and see this." Tunde was waving a magnum of Dom Pérignon over his head like a trophy, and behind him three girls in outfits that cost more than the drivers downstairs made in a month were laughing at something that probably wasn't funny. The penthouse belonged to a shipping heir who owed Femi's father money and therefore owed Femi deference. It was always like this. Somebody's terrace, somebody's bottle, somebody's debt to the Adebayor name cashed in for one more night of noise. "I've seen champagne before, Tunde." "Not like this you haven't." Tunde popped it anyway. Foam sprayed over the railing and vanished into the dark, twenty-nine floors down, gone before it hit anything. Femi watched it go and felt nothing in particular, which was, these days, the most honest feeling he had. He was twenty-six years old. He had a jaw people described as "cut" in a way that suggested a compliment, a smile that had gotten him out of three suspensions at his London business school, and a diploma that everyone in the room knew he hadn't earned so much as been issued. His father called him "the last one" the way other men said the runt, and Femi had spent a long time not minding that, because minding things was for people who had something to prove. He hadn't always been like this. That was the part nobody at these parties knew, or cared to. There had been a boy, once, who read encyclopedias for fun and beat his brothers at chess before he was old enough to understand why that made them hate him a little. That boy had a mother who called him her small genius and meant it. She had died when he was ten, quickly, the way a candle goes out when someone simply stops paying attention to it, and the boy who read encyclopedias had gone with her, replaced by degrees, by someone who preferred bottles to books because bottles didn't ask anything of him. His phone buzzed against the marble railing. Papa. He let it ring itself out. "Your father again?" This was Ada, draped somewhere to his left, her voice pitched for an audience. "You should answer. Rich men do not like to be kept waiting, even by their sons. Especially by their sons." "He'll survive." Femi picked up the magnum himself this time and drank straight from the neck, because it was the kind of thing that made Tunde laugh and made Ada roll her eyes in the specific way that meant she'd tell this story for weeks. He was, if nothing else, generous with material. Someone put music on louder. Someone else produced a deck of cards and a stack of naira thick enough to make the girls stop laughing and start paying attention. Femi didn't play. He rarely did, these nights — he preferred to stand a little apart, glass in hand, watching the party the way a landlord watches tenants, benevolent and unbothered, aware that none of it would survive contact with morning. He drove home at four a.m. in the G-Wagon, windows down, Wizkid loud enough to rattle the side mirrors, taking the curve onto Ozumba Mbadiwe faster than the road wanted him to. Lagos at that hour belonged to him in the specific, temporary way that expensive things belong to people who have never had to work for them — completely, and not at all. A police checkpoint waved him through without a second look. They knew the car. They knew the plates. They knew, in the way that everyone in this city eventually knew, exactly whose son was behind the wheel, and whose son was therefore untouchable. He did not think about his mother that night, or told himself he didn't, which in his experience amounted to the same thing. Adebayor Senior's office occupied the top two floors of a glass tower in Ikoyi that had his name etched into the lobby floor in letters big enough to trip over. Femi had been summoned there exactly four times in his adult life: once for his brother's wedding logistics, once for a will reading that turned out to be a rehearsal, once when he'd wrapped a Ferrari around a barrier on the Third Mainland Bridge and needed the story to disappear, and now. His father did not look up from his desk when Femi walked in. He was reading something on a tablet, his glasses pushed low on his nose, and the silence in the room had weight to it, the particular density of a man deciding exactly how angry to allow himself to be. "Sit." Femi sat. The chair was too low, a detail he suspected was not an accident. "You know I bought Renewa Microfinance eleven months ago." It wasn't a question, so Femi didn't answer it as one. "Small platform. Good bones. The kind of thing that becomes something, if it's handled by someone who understands that becoming something takes attention." He set the tablet down, finally, and looked at his last son with an expression Femi had seen turned on business partners who were about to be ruined. "I gave it to you." "I know, Papa." "Do you." Adebayor Senior said it flatly, no rise in his voice at all, which was somehow worse than shouting. "Because from where I sit, Femi, it looks like I handed a company to a boy who thought a company was a party favor. Six months. Six months, and the board is telling me the client accounts are in freefall, that you missed the last four Thursday reviews, that the only reason the doors are still open is because two assistant managers who I do not pay enough have been doing your job for you in a back office while you drink champagne on strangers' balconies." Femi opened his mouth. Nothing useful arrived to fill it. "I have watched you for twenty-six years," his father continued, "waiting for the boy your mother used to talk about. The one who read the encyclopedia at the dinner table until I had to take it away from him. I kept waiting. I am tired of waiting." He picked the tablet back up, which was somehow the most final gesture in the room. "There will be a board meeting Thursday. You will not enjoy it." The board meeting did not go the way anyone in the room, least of all Femi, expected — which is to say, it went exactly as badly as it had to. The numbers were worse read aloud than they had been on paper. A director Femi vaguely recognized from a Christmas party read out a client attrition figure that made his father's jaw tighten in a way Femi had only seen once before, the week his mother died. Someone mentioned the word "insolvency" as a possibility rather than a certainty, which in a boardroom is its own kind of verdict. Femi sat through forty minutes of his own failure being itemized by people who had built things with their hands while he built nothing but a reputation for being late. His father did not raise his voice once. That was how Femi knew it was over. "You will resign your position at Renewa this afternoon," Adebayor Senior said, once the room had emptied and it was only the two of them and the low hum of the air conditioning. "Effective immediately." "Papa—" "I am not finished." His father's hands were flat on the table, very still. "Your accounts are frozen as of tomorrow morning. The cars — all of them — will be collected from the house by Friday. You will vacate the Lekki apartment by month's end; it is in the company's name and the company can no longer afford your taste in real estate. And you will no longer use the name Adebayor in any professional capacity, effective today, because I will not have what is left of this family's reputation spent on a boy who cannot be trusted to run a lemonade stand." The words landed slowly, each one a door closing somewhere Femi couldn't see yet but would soon come to know very well. "Where am I supposed to go?" For the first time that day, something moved behind his father's eyes — not softness, exactly, but its distant, calculating cousin. "I have a friend. Logistics company, out past Apapa. Small. Unglamorous. He owes me a favor and he needs a junior operations hand, and I have told him he will get one, under a different name, with no explanation of who you are or where you came from." He stood, buttoning his jacket, already turning toward a stack of papers on the credenza, already a man with other business to attend to. "What name?" Femi asked, and hated how small his voice came out. His father paused. And then — this was the part Femi would replay for weeks afterward, unable to decide whether it was the cruelest thing the old man had ever done to him or, in its own bitter way, the most honest — Adebayor Senior almost smiled. "Wasiu," he said. "Wasiu Kalu." Femi blinked. "Wasiu?" "It is a good name. Common. Forgettable, which is what you need to be right now." His father slid a folder across the desk — new documents already prepared, Femi would realize later, prepared before the meeting even started, which told him everything about how long this decision had actually taken. "You should be grateful. I nearly had the lawyers draw up 'Ikenna Egbin.' Do you know what egbin means, Femi?" Femi did know. Everyone from Lagos to London knew. Egbin was the Yoruba word for waste — rubbish, the thing swept off a kitchen floor and thrown into the gutter. His father let the silence sit there just long enough for the insult to land fully, the way a good tailor lets a suit settle on the shoulders before pointing out the fit. "I decided that was too honest," his father continued, almost pleasant now, the way a man is pleasant only once he has already won. "Wasiu will do. It even suits you, if you think about it. One who is wide, who takes up much room." He tapped the folder once with two fingers. "You have certainly always done that." It took Femi a moment to understand he was being mocked in two languages at once — that his father had built him a joke with the precision of a man who built companies, layered and durable, one that would keep being funny to exactly one person in the room for a long time after Femi had stopped laughing, if he'd ever started. Wasiu. Wide. Taking up room without earning it. He could already hear it in his father's mouth at some future Christmas, dropped like a stone into a quiet room: how is Wasiu doing these days. A joke with his own name as the punchline, delivered so gently it might almost be mistaken for a father's tenderness, if you didn't know the man, if you hadn't spent twenty-six years learning exactly how he sharpened his disappointments before he handed them over. "Kalu is your mother's cousin's name," his father added, more quietly now, and for one unbearable second Femi thought there might be something almost like mercy folded into that detail — a small, buried kindness inside the humiliation, a name borrowed from the one part of his family that had never disappointed anyone.