Children of the Street Read online

  PRAISE FOR Wife of the Gods

  “[A]n absolute gem of a first novel and the sort of book that will delight not only hard-core mystery fans, but also those who visit the genre only casually in search of an occasional literary entertainment … Wife of the Gods is not simply an extraordinarily well-crafted mystery; it’s also an extremely well-structured and deftly written novel.… [Quartey] has a remarkable ability to credibly evoke the simultaneity of the modern and deeply traditional worlds in which so many of that continent’s people coexist.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Like The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency suspense novels? You’ll love Wife of the Gods.” —Essence

  “Wife of the Gods is a lush and well-written tale of murder most foul, set in an alien landscape, but laced with many of the same motivations and alibis you might expect to find much closer to home.” —BookPage

  “Already garnering unusual critical acclaim for a debut novel, Quartey’s remarkable characters give the reader a worthy whodunit.” —Ebony

  “Move over Alexander McCall Smith. Ghana has joined Botswana on the map of mystery.… [This] newcomer is most welcome.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Crisp, engrossing…[Quartey] renders a compelling cast of characters inhabiting a world precariously perched between old and new. Fans of McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency will relish the opportunity to discover yet another intriguing area of Africa.” —Booklist (starred)

  “[A] winning debut … Dawson is a wonderful creation, a man as rich with contradictions as the Ghana Quartey so delightfully evokes.… Readers will be eager for the next installment in what one hopes will be a long series.” —Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY KWEI QUARTEY

  Wife of the Gods

  Children of the Street is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Random House Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2011 by Kwei J. Quartey

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Quartey, Kwei J.

  Children of the street: a novel / Kwei Quartey.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60411-2

  1. Police—Ghana—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.

  3. Ghana—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3617.U37C47 2011

  813′.6—dc22

  2010026476

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  Cover images: Jason R. Warren/iStockphoto (children), Alan Tobey/iStockphoto (border)

  v3.1

  To all those who dare to care

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part Three

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Prologue

  A day shy of his seventeenth birthday, Musa was a boy with the survival instincts of a grown man. Blood sprang from the stab wound in his back, but he did not die instantly. As his life drained, Musa had a running vision, like a video, of his short life. Life in his small hometown of Gurungu had been a depressing, losing battle as his family tried to grow millet in the unforgivable desert conditions of northern Ghana. It was what had pushed him to his seven-day trek to Ghana’s capital city of smooth motorways and impenetrable traffic jams.

  Penniless and lonely, Musa hadn’t known a soul in Accra. With no education, no family connections, and no skills, he could hope for only a few jobs. He could be a street vendor, a luggage porter at a lorry park, a shoeshine boy, or a truck pusher—one of those guys who roams Accra with carts picking up metal scraps to take to the junkyards. He earned much less than a cedi a day.

  Up before dawn, Musa never rested until after nightfall, laying his head down on city pavements, at storefronts, and around marketplaces. He had only wanted his life to get better. He had sworn that, after working in Accra for a year, he would go back to Gurungu with new clothes and some money for his mother.

  As Musa’s eyelids fluttered closed, he must have wondered if this was what his father had meant when he had shaken a warning finger in Musa’s face. If you go to Accra, you will become nothing but a street child, and you will pay a terrible price for it.

  1

  The call had come in on a Sunday morning in June.

  “For this one,” Detective Sergeant Chikata had said, “I think they will need us.”

  On his Honda motorbike, Detective Inspector Darko Dawson sped by industrial buildings along Ring Road West. The dead body was near the Korle Lagoon. Dawson made it there in fifteen minutes. Even if his eyes had been shut, the pervasive, foul smell of the lagoon would have announced to him that he had arrived.

  He turned onto Abossey Okai Road, which formed two bridges, the first of them over the refuse-choked Odaw River, which flowed into the lagoon. Agbogbloshie Market on Dawson’s left and Kokomba Market on his right teemed with Sunday shoppers and hawkers trying to sell everything from bananas to sea crabs.

  At the second bridge, over a much smaller channel of tarry, polluted water, there were umbrella-shaded market vendors, pedestrians, trucks, and cars mixed together in organized chaos. Dawson parked and locked his bike. Sprawling onto the riverbanks, a crowd of onlookers overflowed both ends of the bridge. Standing at over six feet, Dawson could see above most people’s heads. Detective Sergeant Chikata and a uniformed man Dawson didn’t know were about a hundred meters up on the south bank of the channel. Framed apocalyptically against dense black smoke billowing from somewhere upstream, Deputy Superintendent Bright and three members of his crime scene team, all in masks, gloves, and galoshes, were moving about knee-deep in the foul mire.

  Dawson skirted the mass of the crow
d and made his way onto the bank. It was carpeted with litter, much of it plastic bottles discarded without a second’s thought after the contained water had been drunk. The rest of the junk included boxes, tin cans, abandoned clothing, trash bags, pieces of machinery, old tires, coconut husks, and unidentifiable bits of metal and plastic detritus. There was also the kind of human waste Dawson definitely did not want his shoes to touch, some of it exposed, some of it in “flying toilets”—tossed black plastic bags with excrement inside.

  The impossibly good-looking Detective Sergeant Chikata, Dawson’s junior in rank in the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) Homicide Division, looked up as Dawson approached.

  “Morning, Dawson.”

  “Morning, Chikata.”

  “Body of a dead male spotted in there this morning.”

  “How did we get notified?”

  Chikata introduced the bulky, flinty-eyed man next to him. “This is Inspector Agyekum. He was the Korle Bu station officer this morning.”

  Agyekum was Detective Inspector Dawson’s rank equivalent, but as a general inspector he wore the standard, heavy, sweltering dark blue uniform of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) in contrast to CID’s plainclothesmen.

  “Morning, Inspector.” Dawson shook hands, finishing with the customary mutual finger snap.

  “I was starting my shift when a small boy came into the station,” Agyekum took up. “That’s him there with Constable Gyamfi.” He pointed his chin farther along the bank where a police constable stood over a boy of about eight sitting on the ground with his head down and his arms folded tightly across his skinny body.

  “Many people saw the body,” Agyekum continued, “but because they fear the police, they just kept quiet. But the boy took it upon himself to run over to the Korle Bu station to report it.”

  “He’s a brave young man,” Dawson said, looking over at the boy with approval. “And then?”

  “Constable Gyamfi took the report in the station and brought it to me,” Agyekum said, “then the two of us returned with the boy. When I saw the body there, I decided to call the Crime Scene Unit.”

  “Very good,” Dawson said. “Thank you.”

  Dawson knew Police Constable Gyamfi from a previous case a year ago. He waved at the constable, who smiled and half waved, half saluted in return.

  “Mr. Bright says he’s quite sure it’s a homicide,” Chikata said.

  “Then it probably is,” Dawson said.

  Deputy Superintendent Bright, a trained serologist, was head of the CSU team. His hunches were seldom wrong.

  Dawson moved a little closer to the water, which was the color of tar and almost the same consistency. He winced at its relentless stench, but people living within smelling distance were used to it, or maybe just ignored it.

  Bright and his two crime scene guys squelched around looking for an unlikely clue. There was so much garbage it would be a miracle if they found anything useful. Only Bright’s relentless thoroughness and commitment to excellence had deemed the search necessary. Others might have simply reeled the corpse in without bothering.

  The garbage partially camouflaged the dead body, which was facedown. On casual glance, it could have been mistaken for a big clump of rubbish, and undoubtedly had been.

  With glop sucking at his galoshes, Deputy Superintendent Bright joined Dawson and the other two men.

  “Morning, Dawson.” His voice sounded like the bass notes of a bassoon. “Please excuse my appearance and odor.”

  “Good morning, sir. I admire you for going in there.”

  Bright looked down at his soiled outfit with a grimace. “These are the last of our hazardous materials garb, so fortunately or not, I won’t be doing this again for a while.”

  “Any findings, sir?” Dawson asked.

  “Besides the body? Nothing. Still suspect foul play, however. I know a dumped corpse when I see one. And this one is in terrible shape.”

  “When are you bringing it in?”

  “We’re almost ready for that now.”

  “Can you wait a few minutes? I don’t want the boy to see that.”

  “No problem, Dawson.”

  “Thank you, sir. It’s good to have you around.” Dawson turned and trotted up the bank.

  2

  The boy was still with Police Constable Gyamfi, who was in his mid-twenties but looked so young he could have gone undercover as a high school student. As Dawson approached, Gyamfi’s face lit up with a smile of strong, white teeth—the kind that could snap the top off a beer bottle.

  “Morning, Gyamfi,” Dawson said as they clasped hands. “How are you? It’s nice to see you again.”

  “Yes, sir, and you too.”

  “How’re the wife and new daughter?”

  “Very well, sir, thank you, sir.”

  “Good, I’m glad.”

  Gyamfi was a recent import from the rural town of Ketanu in the Volta Region. With Dawson’s help and persistence, he had been transferred to the police force in Accra, not an easy achievement in the GPS. He was a good man with great integrity and promise.

  Dawson looked down at the boy, who didn’t return the look. He wore torn cutoff jeans, a soiled black-and-white muscle shirt that was too big for him, and slippers that were falling apart on his dusty feet. He was staring at a point on the ground in front of him. Dawson knelt down.

  “How are you? I’m Darko. What’s your name?”

  The boy’s eyes flitted up and away. “Sly.”

  Dawson held out his hand. Sly shook it after a second’s consideration.

  “Thank you for what you did,” Dawson said. “You were brave to go to the police station. Do you know that?”

  Sly nodded tautly. Dawson lifted his face with a touch to his chin.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not going to do anything to you. I only want to be your friend.”

  Sly nodded again. Dawson stood and reached for the boy’s hand, pulling him up. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “Okay.”

  “While we’re gone,” Dawson said to Gyamfi, “I want you to talk to these people in the crowd. We need to know if anyone saw anything this morning or last night in connection with the body. We need names, and we need a way to get back in touch with them. That might be hard around here, but do your best.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And always remember faces, Gyamfi. Try to make your mind a camera. You never know who you might run into later on.”

  Dawson turned away with Sly and steered him around the pack of spectators. As he and the boy walked past, every head turned to watch them. Dawson took a quick but good look at all the faces, practicing what he had just preached to his constable. In reality, the chance was remote that they would get usable information from anyone. Watching policemen at work was okay, talking to them was not.

  Dawson and Sly were now walking along the curve of the Odaw River’s east bank toward the shacks of the slum in the distance.

  “How old are you, Sly?”

  “Nine.”

  “From northern Ghana?”

  “Upper West Region.”

  Dawson had made an educated guess. Most of Agbogbloshie’s residents came from northern Ghana.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Here in Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  It was the bitter, ironic nickname for Agbogbloshie, Accra’s most notorious slum. Drugs, prostitution, rape, forty thousand squatters, and practically every year a new but unsuccessful government plan to relocate them.

  Dawson and Sly walked the beaten path through mounds of trash containing the ubiquitous plastic bags and bottles, carcasses of old TVs, trashed scanners, mobile phones, air conditioners, refrigerators, fax machines, microwaves, dead computer monitors and defunct CPUs. To their left was a mountain of electronic waste piled higher than Dawson’s head.

  “What were you doing this morning when you saw that dead man in the water?” he asked Sly.

  “Bur
ning cables.”

  That was what caused the dense black smoke all along the banks of the Odaw. The boys burned TV and computer cables to get at the copper wires, which they sold locally for fifty pesewas per kilo, or about eighteen cents per pound.

  Ahead was a line of teenage boys that made Dawson think of an assembly line, only this was disassembly. The first boy was breaking open the back of an old TV monitor using a rock. The second was degreasing some cables with a solvent. Farther along still, a cable-burning session was beginning. Five boys of ages ten to fifteen were crowded around a mass of prepped cables. All from northern Ghana, they addressed Sly in rapid-fire Hausa. Although Dawson wasn’t fluent in the language, it was obvious they were asking who he was. Sly’s response seemed to satisfy them because they nodded and smiled.

  “I tell them you’re my friend,” Sly explained.

  “Where did you learn English?” Dawson asked.

  “I was schooling at my hometown before my father told me to come to Accra with my uncle.”

  “Are you continuing school here?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “My uncle says he won’t send me to school. He just wants me to sell copper and make money.”

  Dawson said nothing to that, for now anyway.

  The Hausa boys used insulation foam as kindling and a cigarette lighter to start the burn. Poking the cables with sticks brought the needed rush of oxygen and created a miniature inferno with a blast of deadly black smoke. Even though he was upwind from it, Dawson caught a good whiff and backed away slightly, thinking of the toxicity of the fumes. With his foot, he flipped over a piece of plastic from a computer monitor and found a label that read SCHOOL DISTRICT OF PHILADELPHIA. Junked, unusable equipment that the rich countries passed off as charitable donations ended up right here in Agbogbloshie.