She got up and dug around in her things, finding a small pair of scissors in her first aid kit.

He snipped a little from the back, where the hair was longer. “Thank you, my love.”

SEVEN

January 6, Accra, Ghana

Emma Djan was no good at sleeping. She lifted her head in the darkness and looked at her phone: 2:54 a.m., the worst possible time to be awake. She made the best of it, rising to make some milky tea with a chunk of sweet bread to go with it.

At five, she took a shower to refresh herself and reverse the oppressing warmth of the night. The rainy season, which brought cooler weather, would not be for several months. Until then, Emma would need these bracing morning showers, pathetic as they were because of insufficient water pressure. The Ghana Water Company gave preference to the foreign embassies, upscale hotels, and posh areas of the city like Airport Residential and Trasacco Valley. Emma’s part of town, Madina, didn’t make the list.

Apart from the slow-running water, the bathroom was adequate at best but frequently less than. Overall, her lodgings were scanty, with the kitchen and sitting room practically one space and the bedroom not much more than a cubbyhole. And yet the rent took easily three-quarters of Emma’s salary, first because housing in Accra, Ghana’s capital, was exorbitant at any level, rich or poor, and second because as a constable in the Ghana Police Service, or GPS, Emma didn’t earn much.

The measly compensation from the GPS would always be the way it was. You had to accept it and live. That Ghanaian police officers were constantly looking for a handout from the citizenry wasn’t even a secret anymore. Cops’ paltry salary was both a reason and excuse for greed, need, and corruption. Everyone, from the lowly constable to the exalted police commissioner, was guilty, and they knew the public knew.

Emma checked her reflection in the mirror, making sure her conservative gray skirt and cream blouse were spotless and impeccably pressed. She felt she was too skinny. Her problem, as friends and family pointed out without relent, was that she “never ate anything.” Not quite true, but she did often skip meals without noticing.

She left the house, walking quickly along the unpaved and uneven sidewalk. This time of the morning, already warm and humid, the streets were full of children in their uniforms hurrying to school and workers rushing to get to work on time. Accra’s traffic could foil them yet.

At the Kaneshie lorry park, tro-tro drivers and their assistants, called “mates,” competed ferociously for passengers. Hustling potential riders, they yelled out their final destinations in an iconic singsong voice. Emma found her tro-tro and squeezed past other passengers to a tattered seat with ratty foam and exposed springs. When the mate had packed the vehicle as full as physically possible, he signaled the driver with a bang on the roof and the journey started. The minivan, like almost all other tro-tros, was in an advanced state of disrepair—no maintenance whatsoever, Emma imagined. Essentially, she and the eighteen-or-so other riders had just agreed to a high risk of death or mutilation going from point A to B.