DOLLARS FROM LIBERIA (2)

 

With that Mma Tom left the akara business to her eldest daughter, got into the Land Rover which turned around and drove them to her compound down the road.

As the police vehicle cruised into her compound, Mma Tom noticed a lanky stranger waiting there already and as the Land Rover stopped, he walked from behind to meet them. They all quietly moved onto the veranda of the mud house with a corrugated iron roof with a long bench which the first three men and Mma Tom sat on. The new man opted to go further and perch on a table at an angle to the bench, leaning on an adjacent wall.

‘If I may ask,’ Tom’s master said, ‘you said you’ve not seen your son?’

‘E tay I no see am,’ she replied in heavily accented pidgin. Looking like she would have a problem expressing herself, she said every other word in her mother tongue which the brother and the policeman who understood helped interpret for the other two who didn’t.

After the tirade and wild gestures, the man perching on the table stood up and walked to the shed for goats across the yard by the hedge. The six goats, suspiciously gazing at the stranger, attempted to flee but were restrained by the ropes on their necks. The police officer dipped his hand inside the bale of leaves and grass and brought out a big colourful synthetic bag popularly called ‘Ghana must go’. (The bag got that tag during the retaliatory mass expulsion of Ghanaians from the country in the ‘80s as they were widely seen carting away their belongings in them.)

He strode back and placed it before Mma Tom, then unzipped it and what everyone saw was a bulging leather suitcase.

Tom’s master exclaimed: ‘That’s the very bag that I’m looking for!’

‘What’s the name of that your little daughter that came into the house some minutes ago?’ the lanky man asked.

While Mma Tom played deaf and dumb, the force men decided to swiftly search the place. One went into the rooms and the other behind the house. The one searching the rooms returned with a pair of jeans and sneakers and the other with the little girl.

‘Who asked you to put this bag under the leaves?’ the lanky man asked. The young girl twirled her hands and looked down at her toes which she wriggled on the floor.

Bro Ukut shouted at her to speak and tell the truth. Nervously, the young girl pointed a finger at her mother.

‘And whose clothes are these?’ Bro Ukut fiercely asked.

‘Tom,’ the young girl replied with a quiver.

As Tom wasn’t seen, Mma Tom was taken away for further interrogation. Rumours were being peddled by other villagers of what actually had happened.

The gist was that Tom was given a job by his uncle, Bro Ukut, to serve a big man who later left the country to work in Liberia. On his return, he brought back large luggage and in one bag were jewels and millions of dollars. But with the hush-hush surrounding the case, where Mma Tom, Tom himself and the stepfather were picked up and hurriedly released from police custody, there was something fishy about the entire police operation. The theft looked either petty (not such huge sums as people heard) or the original source of the valuables was questionable. People never tired of eavesdropping to unearth the whole truth.

It was some long months after Tom returned from police custody that he went really livid one morning, waving an exercise book and opening it to show the expectant neighbours and passers-by how his stepfather had short-changed him. Truthfully, his master went to Liberia and when he returned to the country with the large baggage, he took the risk to abscond with the suitcase he noticed held money and jewels. At the Ojuelegba bus terminal where he intended to board a bus back home, a tout noticed his appearance, took him aside and told him the suitcase was too posh to be in his possession and enquired from Tom what the true situation was. Speaking the same language, he had opened up. The smart tout told him it was risky waiting in the bus station for if the police were contacted, that would be their first port of call.

The tout took Tom to where he bought the large synthetic bag and put the suitcase in and they loitered in some out-of-the-way joint till the early hours of the morning which he took Tom to a point they could board a media van taking the day’s newspapers to the eastern part of the country. As the tout told him, Tom discovered it was a safer means of leaving the metropolis with their contraband – the police rarely searched such vehicles with their innocuous goods and the driver thought he was helping some poor young fellows but was glad to make his extra bucks. That was how Tom got back to his mother’s place with his stolen suitcase.

(READ 'DOLLARS FROM LIBERIA {1}')

(READ 'DOLLARS FROM LIBERIA {3}')