Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe [90]
“Do your peoplé have a proverb about a man looking for something inside the bag of a man looking for something?”
Emmanuel laughed in his turn and said no they didn’t… but wait… they did have something that resembled it: about digging a new hole to get sand to fill an old one.
“He is something else,” said Chris to his friend. And he did not trouble the young man again about his reasons.
Emmanuel was also a fugitive wanted by the police. But being of only middling importance in police estimation he was not given the VIP treatment of having his wait-and-take picture on television. A troublesome Students Union official was nothing new to the Kangan police, and they were not about to make a song and dance about him.
“Now I want to tell you the real reason I came to you,” said Emmanuel later in the day.
“I see,” said Chris. “Actually the one you gave in the morning was good enough for me. What is it this time?”
“Well, this time it is because the security people are so daft they will look for me everywhere except where you are.”
“There you go again underrating the state security. Very dangerous, you know. Better to overrate your enemy than to underrate him. OK, look at this matter of the fatal gunshot. Anyone who can come up with that kind of thing can’t be a complete fool.”
“I don’t believe they came up with it, sir. Pure accident, that’s all.”
Emmanuel’s low opinion of the army and police was matched only by his dismal estimate of Kangan journalists. Between the two he would give a slight edge in fact to the security officers. And fortunately for him the incredible ease with which he had planted the story of Chris’s escape to London in the National Gazette came in handy as indisputable proof. He, Chris and their host had such a laugh when the news appeared; and Chris had to admit, shamefacedly as a former Editor of the Gazette, that the affair put the journalistic profession in Kangan in a very poor light indeed.
“Of course it would not have happened under your editorship or Ikem’s,” said Emmanuel in a tone that was not entirely free of certain impish ambiguity.
“Thank you, Emmanuel. Such gallantry.”
“No, I mean every word, sir.” And it seemed, this time, he did.
But Chris had some difficulty getting the matter off his mind. Long after the merriment over Emmanuel’s brilliant success had subsided he kept repeating to himself: “One telephone call! From a senior Customs Officer who for obvious reasons would rather not reveal his identity! Unbelievable!”
Chris’s disguise for his first hop was nothing as fanciful as Emmanuel’s priest’s cassock. He wore Braimoh’s everyday clothes and cap to match, and a few smudges of pot-black on his face and neck and arms to tone down a complexion too radiant for his new clothes or pretended calling as a retail dealer in small motor-car parts. The one-week growth of beard he had nurtured just in case, was discarded as not too great a success, especially when his host suggested, half-seriously, that the Reverend Father’s beard in Emmanuel’s rather more successful fiction might have the result of drawing police attention instinctively to people’s chins for some days to come.
Braimoh had two passengers in the back seat of his old cab when he arrived to pick up Chris for the critical journey to the north of the city. His estimate was eight or nine odd security roadblocks to cross. Chris said good afternoon to the two strangers behind and took the front seat beside the driver. Before driving away Braimoh reached into the untidy junk in his glove-box and brought out three kolanuts and offered them to Chris.
“Make you de chew am for road. Anybody wey see you de knack am so go think say you never chop breakfast.”
The two men behind laughed rather a lot at this and Chris not being sure whether they were people who laughed much ordinarily or hid malice behind laughter cast a questioning glance at Braimoh, even as he reached for the gift.
“Dem two na my people. No worry.”
Chris took the proffered kolanuts,