'Kings, with all the school you went, you still don't know anything. These oyibo people are different from us. Don't think America and Europe are like Nigeria where people suffer anyhow. Over there, their governments know how to take good care of them. They don't know anything about suffering.'

He leaned closer.

'Do you know that as you are right now - thank God you already have a job - but if you were a young man without a job abroad, the government will be giving you money every week? Can you imagine that? So you could even decide never to work again and just be collecting free money. They'll even give you a house.'

I was not pacified. He must have seen it on my face.

'OK,' he continued. 'You, you went to school. Did they not teach you about slave trade?'

'They did.'

'Who were the people behind it? And all the things they stole from Africa, have they paid us back?'

'But Cash Daddy, can you imagine what will happen when her . . . ,' I knew about husbands and boyfriends and sugar daddies, but the word 'partner' was alien to my vocabulary, '. . . when her man finds out? At least let's leave her with the one we've eaten so far and try and-'

'Kings, sometimes I get very worried about you. Your attitude is not money-friendly at all. If you continue talking like this, soon, whenever money sees you coming into a room, it will just jump out through the window.'

He had glared for a while, then shrugged, as if finally willing to concede.

'OK. Since you don't appreciate this opportunity God has given you to abolish poverty from your family once and for all, continue worrying about one oyibo woman in America. Be there worrying about her and leave off your own sister and your mother.'

Cash Daddy was right. Not being able to take care of my family was the real sin. Gradually, I had learnt to take my mind off the mugus and focus on the things that really mattered. Thanks to me, my family was now as safe as a tortoise under its shell. My mother could finally stop picking pennies from her shop and start enjoying the rest of her life. My brothers and sister could focus completely on their studies without worrying about fees.

Mirabelle had her problems, I had mine.

Suddenly, I heard a mouth-watering sound. My head snapped up from the computer screen. In this business, the ringing of a phone - whether cellular or land - was the sound of music. It was also a call for order. Buchi, who was sitting at the desk with the five phones and the fax machines, removed chewing gum from her mouth, pasted it onto her wrist with her tongue, then clapped her hands quickly to catch everybody's attention.

'Shhhhhhh!' she shouted.

All talking ceased.

There were five of us who shared this room that Cash Daddy had called the Central Intelligence Agency. The receptionist, the menial staff, the dark-suited otimkpu whose main duty was to herald the arrival of their master and to make sure his presence was well-noticed, all stayed in the outer office. Buchi received all incoming calls before passing them on. At different points in time, depending on who was calling, she could say she was speaking from the Federal Ministry of Finance, the Nigerian National Petroleum Cooperation, the Central Bank of Nigeria . . . Now, after ensuring that the noise in the office had reduced to a more conducive level, she cleared her throat and lifted the receiver.

'Good morning. May I help you?' she asked in a clear, professional voice.

Buchi was a graduate of Mass Communication from the Abia State University, Uturu.

'Yes,' she said. 'Yes,' she said again.

While listening, she nodded and scribbled diligently in a jotter. Buchi took her job quite seriously.

'All right if you could just hold on for one second, please, I'll pass you on to the person in charge of that department.'

She pressed the mute button and extended the appliance in my direction.

'Kings,' she whispered as an extra precaution, 'it's Ben's Port Harcourt Refinery mugu.'

Ben was one of our office cleaners. As well as those of us in the CIA, everybody else - the otimkpu, gatemen, drivers, cleaners, cook, receptionist, the boys who lived in Cash Daddy's house - was entitled to compose their own letters and blast them out to whomever they pleased. Like Cash Daddy always said, there were more than enough mugus to go round. But as soon as contact was established and it looked like money was on the way, whoever had initiated the correspondence was supposed to let me know. Only I and Protocol Officer had keys to the cabinet where we stored the letterheaded sheets, death certificates, bank statements, call-to-bar certificates, proof of funds, money orders, cheques, and any other documents that might be required to prove the authenticity of a transaction. Only I and Protocol Officer could make the phone call to authorise our Western Union official to look the other way.

Some weeks ago, Ben had sent out letters claiming that he was the head of a committee that tendered for and recently completed some construction work on the Port Harcourt Refinery. The project, he stated, was purposely over-inflated by $40 million and he needed help to smuggle the money out of Nigeria. All the recipient had to do was to claim that his business had been awarded the $40 million contract and provide a bank account detail for the transaction. For that, he would keep twenty-five per cent for himself - as long as he transferred the remaining seventy-five per cent to Ben's bank account. This mugu had agreed and was told to fax his business details so that his business could be registered in Nigeria. He had sent the $6,000 required for the process last week.

The Corporate Affairs Commission registration documents had been faxed back to him yesterday. I took in a deep breath as I grabbed the receiver from Buchi.

'Good afternoon,' I said after letting out the air from my lungs, 'This is Mr Odiegwu on the line. How may I help you?'

'Hello,' the Englander replied. 'I have a document here that shows my business has been registered with the Nigerian Corporate Affairs Commission, and I just wanted to confirm my registration details.'

Naturally, he had rung the number on the CAC letterheaded sheet.

'May I have the registration number, please?'

He read it out slowly, careful not to miss any slashes or hyphens. I repeated after him without making record anywhere. What he did not know was that the registration certificate had been faxed from this same office. Dibia, our document expert, was quite good. All the logos and stamps on the documents he supplied were authentic, and so were the signatures.

'Could you please hold on while I go through our records?'

While waiting for a plausible length of time to elapse, I admired the Atilogwu acrobatic dancers on the wall calendar in front of me. I had seen their energetic and entertaining dance on television several times before. Their uniforms were remarkably colourful.

'Is that Mr Del B. Trotter?' I asked at last.

He confirmed his name eagerly.

'Yes, we have the documents here,' I said. 'The registration was processed on the 12th.'

I could almost hear the splashes of the grin that swam out onto his face. After all, every Homo sapiens - whether Englander or Burkinabe - had the natural right to grin over the prospect of colliding with $10 million for doing almost nothing.

'Thanks for your kind assistance,' he said.

I returned the phone to Buchi and made a mental note of the fact that I would still need to speak with this same mugu soon. If Ben successfully convinced him to send another $9,000 for the contract documents to be drawn up, Mr Trotter would probably want to ring the Port Harcourt Refinery office to make some further enquiries.

The clicking of gum and the talking resumed. I was about to return to my screen when Wizard let out a high-pitched cry.

'My lollipop is awake o! My lollipop is awake!'

All of us recognised this as our daily call to amusement. We rushed over to Wizard's desk. The words he typed onto the screen sent everybody quaking with laughter.

'Oh lollipop,' he had written, 'am really scared, hun. Am really scared that I ain't gonna see you again no more, my darl. These people are really threatening me. You know how wild these Africans can be.'

My laughter became the loudest of all.

Wizard had been conducting several online relationships with randy foreigners he met in chatrooms. His romance with this particular American had been going on for six weeks. When their loooove blossomed to the point where the man proposed to 'Suzie' that she travel from East Windsor, New Jersey to visit him in Salt Lake City, Utah or vice versa, she informed him that she was just on her way to Nigeria on a business trip. She was a make-up artist, you see, and had an offer to transform girls strutting down the catwalk for an AIDS charity in Lagos. She had arrived in Lagos two days before, and had her American passport stolen in a taxi. Now, she had no way of cashing her traveller's cheques and the proprietor of the hotel was threatening arrest.

'Oh babe,' the man replied, 'what you gonna do now? Ain't there no way of taking it to the police?'

'Sugar pie, all they gonna want is bribes,' Wizard replied. 'Hun, I'm gonna really need your help right now. I wanna see if you can show me that you really love me and that what we share is real. Can you do me a real big favour?'

Wizard must have been watching a lot of American movies. His gonna-wanna American-speak was quite fluent.

'Sure, babe,' the man wrote. 'Anything I can do to help.'

'Honeybunch, I wanna send the traveller's cheques to you to pay into your bank account. Can you do that and send me the cash?'

Wizard broke off typing and turned quickly to us. 'How much should I write? Is $2,000 OK?'

'That's too small,' Ogbonna said. 'Double it.'

'Yes, double it,' we concurred.

Wizard resumed.

'What I've got in cheques is about $4,000. Honey, I gotta have some help real quick. Can you be the one to help me out here?'

Suzie went on to explain to her beau that the cheques would arrive within three days; she would send them by DHL. He should deposit the cheques as soon as he received them, and then send her the cash by Western Union. Since her own passport had been stolen, she would send him the name of one of her colleagues at the charity event so that he could send the Western Union in the colleague's name. The lover boy, swept away by the current of true love, wasted no time in responding.

'Anything for you, sweetie. I ain't got that much in my cheque account right now but I could get some from my credit card and replace once I've cashed the cheques.'

All of us screamed the special scream. Wizard had made a hit.

It would take about eight days for the bank to process the documents, before the man realised that the cheques that had been paid into his account were fakes. I looked in a corner of the chat box and saw the photograph of the bearded, voluminous Caucasian. Then I looked in Wizard's own box and saw the photograph of the trim, buxom blond who had no resemblance whatsoever to the V-shaped eighteen-year-old clicking away at the keyboard. My heart went out to the lonely man, but Wizard was untroubled.

'Thanks honeysuckle,' he wrote. 'I knew I could really count on you. Please get it done ASAP cos I ain't got nothing left on me no more.'

'Sure, Suz,' the man replied. 'By the way, babe, you gotta take good care of yourself and watch out, OK? Maybe I should've warned you when you said you were going. I saw on CNN sometime that the folks in Nigeria are real dangerous.'

'No problem, love,' Wizard replied. 'I've learnt my lesson and I'm gonna take real good care of myself from now.'

'I love you babe,' the man wrote. 'I really can't wait to meet you.'

'Me, too,' Wizard replied. 'I promise we're gonna have a swell time and you're not gonna wanna let me go.'

Wizard wrote something vulgar. The man replied with something equally vulgar. Wizard topped it with something much more vulgar which Azuka had suggested, and then added one or two more unprintable things that he was going to do to the man when they met.

'By the way, hun,' the man added, 'while you're out there, you'd better watch out for diseases, especially HIV. I hear almost all of them over there have got it.'

All of us standing round the screen stopped giggling. In the ensuing silence, I could almost hear the whisperings of our National Pledge.

I pledge to Nigeria my country I pledge to Nigeria my country To be faithful, loyal and honest To serve Nigeria with all my strength To defend her unity And uphold her honour and glory So help me God Wizard seemed to have heard it as well. The faint voice of patriotism must have ministered to the young Nigerian.

'It's not like that in Nigeria,' he replied. 'It's in South Africa that they've got it so bad.'

'Is it? Anyway, you still be careful. All them places are all the same thing to me.'

Suddenly, I stopped feeling sorry for the mugu and remembered something I had to do. I went back to my desk, clicked the Send icon, and wished my urgent email Godspeed.

Twenty-one

This business of being a man of means had taken me quite a while to get used to. Sometimes, I even forgot that my circumstances had changed. I was about to pass out on the floor the day my first cellular phone bill arrived, when I remembered that I could afford to pay it. I was storming my way out of an Aba 'Big Boys' shop in protest at the obese price tags, when I remembered that I had nothing to quarrel about, went back in and bought my Swatch wristwatch. My mother was also having a hard time getting used to the better life.

She had been delighted the day I visited home with the cooking gas and the wrappers and the rice, she told me how much I reminded her of my father when I brought a variety of McVitie's biscuits and Just Juice for my siblings, but when I presented her with a bundle of oven fresh notes, her feelings took on a different shape.

'Kings,' she asked with fear, 'how did you get all this money?'

'Mummy, I told you I've been doing some work for Uncle Boniface. This is from my salary.'

'What sort of work do you do?'

I had told her before.

'I help out at his office. I take phone calls. I run small errands. I help him organise his business meetings . . .'

'So how much is this salary he gives you for running errands?'

'Well, it varies,' I shrugged. 'It's all done on a commission basis.'

'Commission - on errands?'

I fumbled with my shoelaces, pretending I had not heard.

My mother continued staring at the bundle in her lap without touching it, as if she expected the cash to rise up on its two feet and bite. She was about to ask another question when I laid firm hold of her Achilles' heel and twisted.

'Don't worry, Mummy. I know how much you miss having Daddy around, but I'm your opara and I'm really going to take care of you. Very soon I'll get my own house and all of you can come and be spending time with me.'

My mother smiled. For the first time since the money took up residence in her lap, she invited it into her fingers for a proper welcome. My dear mother had probably never handled so many notes at any one time in her entire life. Her smile grew very fat.

'But make sure you keep looking for a proper job,' she said. 'You know this work for Boniface is only temporary.'

'Mummy, don't worry. I'll keep looking.'

'OK, come let me bless you.'

I knelt on the floor in front of her. She placed her right palm on the centre of my head. Legend had it that her own father had done the same thing when she brought him an envelope containing half of her very first salary. The other half had paid obeisance to her husband.

'You will have good children who will take care of you in your old age,' she began.

'Amen,' I replied.

'You will find a good wife.'

'Amen.'

'Evil men and evil women will never come near you.'