Cas got up and put his winter coat on. “Where you going?” Gordon asked.

“Balcony,” Cas said. “Gotta have a smoke.”

FOURTEEN

January 21, Accra, Ghana

The tro-tro’s final stop was Tudu Station. As Emma and fifteen-or-so other passengers got off, she took a breath, relieved to have left the crammed minivan, only to cough from a lungful of tro-tro exhaust.

Tudu Road, part of old town Accra, was all industry and commerce: warehouses, loading docks, banks, electronics stores, and sidewalk stalls. Emma passed a man haggling with a merchant in front of a tower of cheap, China-made toys. Near Zenith Bank, she sidestepped a menacing motorcycle circumventing traffic by riding on the verge. Ghanaian pedestrians have eyes in the sides and the backs of their heads.

She turned west, walking into the midafternoon sun. At the double-laned Nkrumah Avenue, Emma waited for a break in the traffic to run across to the old Cocoa Marketing Board building people called Cocobod. It had been impressive in its day, but was no match now for the modern, glossy, glass high-rises dotting Accra’s new and growing skyline: a showy kind of development while many old societal values remained the same as in the forgoing centuries.

Meters down from Cocobod, Emma entered the slum of the same name. You wouldn’t want to be found dead there, but you could. It was its own small city with crime packed within its walls like a cancerous brain slowly swelling inside its skull—fights with broken-bottle shards, knifings, rapes, and sometimes murders. Most of these took place at night, so Emma was watchful but not afraid. For safety, though, she kept her folded jackknife in the right front pocket of her jeans, as she did whenever she went to a hazardous area of town, and there were quite a few of those. No man attempting to assault her would escape with anything less than a slashed face or a punctured throat. Her father had shown Emma how to fight off a man—just as he had done with Commissioner Andoh—and how to use a knife effectively for her protection.

Emma didn’t like coming to this part of town, but to see her stepbrother Bruno, she had no choice. He had lived—thrived, really—in Cocobod for years. Each time she visited him, she hoped Bruno had decided to turn his life around. Even before he was a teenager, he had been prone to truancy and mischief. Daddy couldn’t stand Bruno. He threw the boy out of the house and into the jaws of Accra’s streets where Bruno learned to steal, rob, swindle, fight, and use drugs. Now twenty-two, he had had more than his share of trouble with the law.

While Daddy regarded Bruno as a “bad seed,” Emma had never hated her stepbrother and he had always loved her as his sister. He was physically powerful and could even be dangerous, but toward her he was as sweet as honey straight from the hive.

Just like everyone else going to and fro, Emma negotiated the unpaved, meandering, narrow pathways between illegally and badly constructed wooden shacks. If a blaze broke out now and burned most of the place down, it wouldn’t be the first time. The stench of a choked sewage gutter blended with the delicious aroma of tatale being fried somewhere. Emma realized, again, that she had barely eaten the whole day.