Children of the Street Page 11

  “Hey, small boy, how are you?” Tedamm said with contempt. He took a mock swing at Ebenezer, who brought up his fists defensively in front of his face.

  As usual, Tedamm’s boys, Antwi and Ofosu, were following him around like stray dogs hoping for scraps. They had no minds of their own. They did whatever he told them.

  “What were you doing shoeshining on my corner today?” Tedamm asked Ebenezer.

  “It’s not your corner.”

  “It was mine long before you came to Accra from your village.”

  “You weren’t at that corner when I came to Accra.”

  “It’s still my corner.”

  Ebenezer shook his head. “No.”

  “You think you’re tough? I can pick you up by your head and break your neck in two.”

  His boys smirked.

  Ebenezer started to leave, but Tedamm stepped in his way. “Get off my street corner. You hear me?”

  “Try and stop me if you like,” Ebenezer said.

  Tedamm and his boys watched him as he went past. Ebenezer set his jaw. Now it was war. Him against Tedamm.

  Ebenezer’s home base was on the front veranda of the Prince Line Travel Agency on Knutsford Avenue. Every evening, street kids moved in as businesses closed for the day. Ebenezer shared his base with four good friends. They loved one another like brothers and had nicknamed themselves the Brooklyn Gang.

  Besides Ebenezer, three of the boys were already back for the night. He slapped their palms in greeting and sat down next to tiny Mawusi, who was listening to music on a radio not much bigger than his hand. All of them had pitched in to buy the radio. They guarded it with their lives.

  It was Mosquito, the fifth in the group, who was missing. Ebenezer asked where he was. Issa, a truck pusher and the official leader of the group, didn’t know. Issa was almost eighteen, getting to be an “old man” now.

  They talked and ate, sharing one small bowl of rice. That was all there was. They knew how to pace themselves so that they ate equal portions. No one cheated. They left some for Mosquito.

  “Eben, you’re first watchman tonight,” Issa told him.

  Every night it was the same routine. They took three equal shifts to keep watch over one another until daybreak. You couldn’t just happily go to sleep without someone keeping guard. That was exactly how Eben had allowed his shoeshine box to be stolen.

  The four stretched out on the bare pavement. Mosquito would pick out his own spot when he arrived. Eben stayed seated for a while to rest his feet, but then he got up to pace back and forth so he could stay awake. He wondered where Mosquito was.

  Eben needed to relieve himself. He would make it quick, even though the chance was small that someone would come along and attack the sleeping boys while he was away for only a few minutes. With a few strips of newspaper in his pocket, Eben trotted to the end of Knutsford Avenue, where it dead-ended at a chain-link fence on Kojo Thompson Road. Next to the fence was a broken-down bola truck that hadn’t been moved in more than a year, its rear loader collecting garbage that was going nowhere. Eben slipped behind the vehicle, pulled down his pants, and crouched.

  When he was done, he threw the soiled newspaper in the truck.

  “Ssss!”

  Eben turned to see who was hissing at him to attract his attention. He saw someone standing in the shadows at the opposite corner of the street.

  Mosquito limped back to the base. He had hurt his ankle today while running after a tro-tro as it pulled into the Novotel Lorry Park. One had to fight to be the first to offer to carry passengers’ luggage for a fee. Mosquito was hungry and exhausted. He was looking forward to seeing his mates, having something to eat, and getting some sleep.

  Issa started awake as Mosquito touched his shoulder. He sat up quickly.

  “Where Eben dey?” Mosquito asked.

  “I don’t know,” Issa said, voice thick with sleep. “He was on guard. Maybe he went to the toilet.”

  Mosquito walked to the end of the street to check near the bola truck.

  “Eben,” he called out softly. There was no answer. He went around the other side of the truck. Eben wasn’t there. Mosquito returned to Issa, who was propped up on one elbow waiting.

  “He no dey?”

  “No,” Mosquito replied. It was almost ten-thirty, ninety minutes into Eben’s shift from nine to midnight.

  Mawusi stirred. “What wrong?” he mumbled.

  “Where Eben dey?” Issa asked him.

  “I don’ know,” he muttered and went back to sleep.

  “Maybe he pass to the other side,” Issa said to Mosquito.

  They started off in the other direction, toward Kwame Nkrumah Avenue and the UTC building. It was pitch black, but they could make out the shadows of scores of street kids sleeping along the sidewalk.

  “You hurt your foot?” Issa asked, noticing Mosquito’s limp.

  “Yah.”

  At Station Road, they went in opposite directions, calling out Eben’s name. They searched Kinbu Road, then Tudu, going up as far as the Cocoa Marketing Board (CMB) building. Eben was nowhere to be found.

  20

  Tuesday morning, Accra woke up to a light drizzle. Dawson rose at 5:00 A.M. just so he could avoid the worst of traffic. At 5:30, when the neighborhood cocks began to crow like clockwork, he left the house and walked along Nim Tree to the main road, where he flagged down a cab. He arrived at CID by 6:00 and felt pleased with himself.

  Barely an hour later, he got a call from Chikata and had to head right back into the rush-hour traffic he had wanted to avoid.

  On Kwatei Kojo Street in Jamestown, a ditch-digging project had been going on for months. Every time it rained and the ditch was flooded, progress ground to a halt. The workers, who had been digging without the aid of heavy machinery, had arrived early Tuesday morning to empty the flooded channel. As they did that, they came across a dead body.

  Chikata had roped off Kwatei Kojo at each end. The resulting diversion was causing traffic backups on the surrounding roads, including High Street. Furious drivers leaned on their horns while a traffic policeman tried to redirect them.

  The CSU hadn’t arrived yet. Dawson and Chikata looked down at the body. Its head was completely submerged in the mud, and only part of its left side was visible, with the left hand sticking up like a rigid wave good-bye.

  “Who found the body?” Dawson asked.

  “They did,” Chikata said, nodding toward a group of five men with pickaxes, shovels, and buckets. “They were about to start digging the channel out when they saw it. One of them called Joy FM, who broadcast the report on the Super Morning Show. I heard it before I left the house and stopped here on the way to CID.”

  The country’s reputed emergency numbers 1-9-1 and 1-9-2 could be so unreliable that it was sometimes more effective to call a radio station, which would then broadcast the emergency in the hope that the appropriate personnel were listening.

  “Well done, Chikata,” Dawson said quietly.

  He saw the sergeant glance at him with pleasant surprise that he had just earned praise, and Dawson realized guiltily that he seldom gave it.

  “Here comes CSU,” Chikata said.

  The CSU vehicle skidded on the wet road to a stop. The crew got out, led by Deputy Superintendent Bright, the indomitable boss of the team.

  “Morning, morning,” he greeted Chikata and Dawson cheerily.

  “Morning, sir.”

  Bright peered into the ditch. “Interesting,” he said. “Seems we’re always in the mud these days.”

  After quite some discussion, Bright and his men got down in the ditch and began to maneuver the corpse onto a sheet of tarpaulin.

  “Hold on!” Bright said suddenly. “Wait. There’s something wrong.”

  His assistants stood back, muddy, wet, and breathing heavily from their exertions.

  “What’s the matter?” Dawson asked.

  “Is this the front of him or the back?” Bright said, staring at the body.


  “What are you talking about?” Chikata asked.

  “His face is facing upward,” Bright said, “but …”

  “He’s on his belly,” Dawson finished.

  “Ewurade,” Chikata muttered.

  “His head is on backward,” Bright said.

  In the morgue, Dr. Biney shook his head in disbelief. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  The boy was lying on his belly, yet he was faceup. He was about sixteen. His wiry physique told of years of hard manual labor.

  “There’s a stab wound to the lowest one-third of the right thorax,” Biney said. “This squared-off mark here is from the hilt of the knife, which means it was plunged deep. See these bruises around it? A bit tough to make out, but I call them satellite bruises. What do they tell us? They show the assailant rocked the knife around to inflict maximum damage. On internal examination, I think we’ll find a collapsed lung and possibly a damaged diaphragm and lacerated liver.”

  “Is that the probable cause of death,” Dawson asked, “or is it the broken neck?”

  “Hard to say. If there was any life left in him after the stab wound, breaking his cervical spine made certain he was finished off. Or vice versa, for that matter. A violent death, for sure.”

  “By knife,” Dawson said. “Like Musa.”

  “Are you connecting the two murders?”

  “Speculating.”

  The murdered boy didn’t have Musa’s repulsive putrefaction, but the sight of a broken neck caused Dawson to cringe just as much, or even more. It shifted his thoughts to his brother, Cairo, rendered paraplegic at the age of thirteen. Mama had sent him to the corner kiosk to buy a tin of sardines. As he started across the street, she remembered one other item and called out to Cairo, who turned at her voice. He never saw the oncoming car, which hit him hard. He went up over the roof and down the back, severing his spinal cord. One moment he was the athlete of the family, who could outdribble anyone at soccer, the next he was a paraplegic totally dependent on the care of others.

  “You’ll want to look at the victim’s belongings,” Biney said, bringing Dawson abruptly back to the present. Moving to the counter by the sink, he showed Dawson the boy’s clothes: a pair of brown trousers, a greenish shirt with only one button, and athletic shoes worn down beyond the sole.

  “And there’s this,” Biney said. “It’s still drying off, but I think it could be very useful to you.”

  He showed Dawson a business card, crumpled, moist, and soiled by mud, but still legible.

  STREET CHILDREN OF ACCRA REFUGE (SCOAR)

  Genevieve Kusi, Director

  No. 2 Goodwill Road, Accra New Town

  There was a phone number as well, which Dawson entered in his mobile. On the reverse side of the card, written several times in a halting scrawl, crossed out, and rewritten, as though the inscriber had been trying to perfect his signature, was the name Ebenezer.

  21

  SCOAR was in a slate-colored, two-story building. At the ground-floor reception, Dawson was asked to have a seat while waiting for Mrs. Kusi. Although the area had open windows on both sides, no air was moving through. The afternoon was as thick and warm as soup. Adult supervisors and kids of all ages went back and forth and in and out. The long bulletin board on the opposite wall carried community announcements, notices of job opportunities, and photos of smiling young men and women who had made it to the mainstream as seamstresses, carpenters, or wood carvers. A poster said:

  Refuge Room Hours: 0800–1700. NO SMOKING,

  DRINKING, FIGHTING, OR STEALING

  “Inspector Dawson?”

  He turned at the sound of her voice, and his breath caught. She was only an inch shorter than he was, which made her tall for a woman. In her early thirties, she was beautifully dressed in sleek black slacks and a white silk blouse that clung possessively to her succulent breasts. Her skin was flawless molten dark chocolate. She had smooth, impossibly aligned braids and little or no makeup.

  He stood up.

  “Good morning,” she said, smiling. Brilliant teeth. “I’m Genevieve Kusi.”

  They shook hands. Hers was soft and slim, nails short but manicured. Dawson’s eyes begged to drop to her neck and below.

  “Welcome to SCOAR,” she said. “Please, come this way.”

  They went a short way down the hall to her office. Genevieve offered Dawson water, which he gladly accepted. It was a small but immaculate room. He noticed two small speakers above the door, facing her desk.

  She sat opposite him in one of the three chairs in the room. He caught sight of her painted nails on perfect toes and tore his eyes away.

  “So, how can I help you, Inspector?” Her voice was rich and warm.

  “A young man was found dead in Jamestown this morning,” Dawson said. “There was a business card on his body bearing your name, so I thought you might know him.”

  He handed her a photograph of the boy—just the face.

  Her hand shot to her mouth in shock. “Oh, my goodness. That’s Ebenezer Sarpong.” She looked up. “You say he’s dead? How? What happened to him?”

  “He was murdered some time last night or early this morning.”

  “Murdered.” She gasped. “My God.”

  “Did he work here?”

  “No, he was a street kid—a shoeshine boy. He hung around with a group of boys who called themselves the Brooklyn Gang. Ebenezer came to the center once or twice a week. At first it was just to get some rest in the Refuge Room, but recently he had joined our computer classes.” She shook her head. “This is the kind of nightmare we dread.”

  “How so?”

  “We provide a refuge for homeless children here at SCOAR during the day, but we are closed in the evening. That means they’re all on their own at night. There are thieves out there and fights over territory, possessions, and girls. We always fear that something like this might happen.”

  “I noticed you have all ages of children here, from babies up to late teens. Where are they all from?”

  “From the more than sixty thousand homeless street children of Accra. Some of them travel from all parts of Ghana to find work here. There are also kids who make a conscious decision to leave their homes right here in Accra to live on the street—perhaps because of abuse. And then there are the children born on the street. We call them Second Generation.”

  “Sixty thousand,” Dawson echoed. “And how many kids do you deal with here?”

  “We have an average of about a hundred and twenty. A drop in the sea, I know. The problem is far bigger than we are.”

  “Was Ebenezer from Accra?”

  “A village in the Western Region, I believe.”

  “Is there anyone who might have wanted to kill him? Maybe a turf rival?”

  “I don’t personally know of anyone, but we should talk to Patience, my main fieldworker. She knows so many of the street children. I’m not sure if she’s here right now—she may be out in the field.”

  Genevieve put her head round the doorway and asked a teenage boy to find out where Patience was.

  “Yes, madam,” he said, scampering off.

  A few minutes later, a plump, bespectacled woman appeared. Her face was round, open, and accepting. Dawson liked her at once.

  “Come in, Patience,” Genevieve said. “I’m glad you’re here. This is Detective Inspector Dawson. There’s some bad news.”

  Dawson shook hands with Patience. She pulled a chair over from the corner.

  “What’s happened?” she asked. Her voice was sweet and clear.

  “I’m sorry to tell you that we found Ebenezer Sarpong murdered this morning,” Dawson said.

  Patience jumped back in her chair as if prodded with a naked electric wire. “Oh, Ewurade, no. Where?”

  “Jamestown.”

  Patience’s face showed her anguish. “He was one of our most promising youngsters. Learning to read and write through our computer program—” She stopped as her voice caught and her eyes moistened. “I don
’t even want to know how he was murdered. All I hope is that he didn’t suffer.”

  “Inspector Dawson was wondering if Ebenezer had any rivals who might have wanted to harm him,” Genevieve said.

  “At least one,” Patience said. “A young man called Tedamm. Basically the town bully among the kids, older and stronger than most of them. Over the years he’s maneuvered himself into a position of power. One of the things he does is make children pay him a percentage of their earnings in return for his getting them a job on the streets.”

  “A one-time fee?” Dawson asked.

  “Oh, no, Inspector. Every week or every month.”

  Dawson raised his eyebrows. “That could be profitable.”

  “And woe betide you if you don’t pay what you supposedly owe. Tedamm hurts people. There aren’t many boys who can stand up to him.”

  “He had a feud with Ebenezer?”

  “Ebenezer led a crew of shoeshine boys in Lartebiokorshie. Tedamm claimed they were on his turf. Ebenezer wasn’t intimidated, though. He was plucky.”

  “Is Tedamm capable of murder?” Dawson asked.

  Patience’s big eyes were direct. “In the world of homelessness, poverty, and desperation, you fight for survival, and there are no polite limits to the fight.”

  “I need to talk to Tedamm,” Dawson said.

  Patience exchanged a quick glance with Genevieve. “You can join me when I go out in the field in a little while, Inspector. We can ask around for him.”

  “Thank you. I would like to do that.” He sat forward slightly. “About two weeks ago, a dead young man was found in Korle Lagoon.”

  “I remember the newspaper article,” Patience said. “He was a truck pusher.”

  “Correct. His name was Musa Zakari. Is that familiar?”

  “Not to me.”

  She looked at her boss, who shook her head. “Nor me. But just to be sure, we should check with Socrate Tagoe, our webmaster and photographer. He might know.”

  22

  Dawson had imagined that Socrate would be thin and owlish. He was wrong. Standing around five-ten, Socrate probably weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. His office was too small for him, a laptop, a desktop, a printer-fax, piles of paper-stuffed folders, and boxes of CDs and DVDs.