Alhaji Lami arrives 4
429 Words
Then she moved. She went to the study, where Alhaji Lami kept his documents, his telephone, his connections to the world beyond this house. She knew his patterns, his absences, his confidence that she would never intrude. She found the telephone directory, copied a number she had memorized but never used, returned everything to its place.
That night, after Alhaji Lami performed his Tuesday duty with the distraction of a man whose mind was elsewhere, she waited until he slept. Then she rose, dressed in the darkness, and slipped from the house through the kitchen door she had left unlocked.
The railway depot was closed at this hour, but she knew where Sam lived, a room above a mechanic's shop where he slept on a mattress on the floor. She had never been there, had never risked this exposure, but Alhaji Suleiman's visit had changed the mathematics of risk. The known danger had become greater than the unknown.
She woke him with her hand on his mouth, preventing the cry that would have brought the mechanic, the neighbors, the police. His eyes found her in the darkness, recognized her, filled with questions she had no time to answer.
"We are discovered," she whispered. "Not completely. Not yet. But soon. A man who knows, who watches, who waits for me to fail."
Sam sat up, fully awake, the sleep falling from him like water. "Who?"
"Alhaji Suleiman. A business associate of my husband. He sees the children. He sees what they are. He offers silence in exchange for... I do not know what. Cooperation. Acknowledgment. Some power over me that he has not yet named."
Sam's hands found hers in the darkness. They were rough, scarred, the hands of a laborer, but they were warm and they were his and they were the only solid thing in her world.
"We run," he said. "Tonight. Now. We take the children, we find transport, we leave Kaduna before morning."
"And go where? With what? Three children, one a nursing infant, no money, no plan, no destination where we would not be found?"
"Then we fight. We confront your husband, we tell him the truth, we..."
"We die." She said it flatly, without drama, because it was simply true. "He would kill you. He would kill the children, to erase the shame. He would send me somewhere I could not survive. This is not a story with that ending, Sam. Not yet. Not while we have other choices."
"What choices? What can we do against this man who knows, who watches, who waits?"
- Writer
