TWENTY-SEVEN

April 18

Emma had been apprehensive she might feel the sting of male supremacy from her five male coworkers, but Yemo Sowah set the tone in which gender didn’t determine status: only experience, knowledge, and hard work. In any case, Sowah protected her from any bad treatment whatsoever. Nailed to the wall was a code of conduct that included respect, kindness, patience, honesty, willingness to be corrected, and taking responsibility for one’s mistakes.

Barring emergencies, Sowah held a briefing every morning at eight for updates on old cases and assignments of new. He started Emma off with a standard background check on a man a branch of Zenith Bank was interested in hiring.

The Sowah Agency had a Toyota sedan for office use, and if needed, Sowah’s Kia SUV. This ratio of vehicles to investigators was a thousand times better than that of the Ghana Police Service. Sowah more or less promptly reimbursed his investigators’ out-of-pocket travel expenses if they didn’t have an official vehicle available.

Seven forty-five Monday morning, Emma got down from the tro-tro at her stop on Paradise Street two blocks from work. She stopped a paperboy and got the Daily Graphic and The Ghanaian Chronicle, the latter the more radical and outspoken of the two, the former still the best-selling paper in the country. She glanced at its front page as she walked the last few meters to work, looked again, and froze in place. The headline, war on sakawa accompanied a picture of a group of disgraced young men.

“Oh, no,” Emma whispered. “Bruno.”

He was the second from the left, scowling at the camera in defiance.

Emma began to read the article through, but she didn’t want to be a second late to work, so she hurried the last few steps to the staff room and sat down to read it there. The raid was part of President J.K. Bannerman’s ambitious and sweeping initiative to cut out Ghana’s cancer of fraud and corruption. Clearly, he was enlisting the help of the papers and other media to get the word out. This group of sakawa boys had been taken to Dansoman Police Station to be charged and jailed.

As Emma dived into the Chronicle’s piece, the other investigators straggled in. She smiled and greeted them cordially, but inside she was thinking about Bruno and was furious. This was exactly what she had been warning him about: stay out of trouble, get a legit job.

Emma wasn’t the only one who had seen the item on the raid. Jojo, the youngest of the other investigators, was reading a copy of the Ghanaian Times, which had also front-paged the news. “Catch five or six of these worthless guys and you say you’re fighting the evil of sakawa,” he said in disdain.

It wasn’t until six that evening that Emma was able to get to Dansoman Police Station. It was a two-story building painted in the GPS’s signature yellow and blue. A miscellaneous crowd hung around the front. Emma went to the small charge office, where the desk sergeant was a cordial but businesslike woman. “Yes, we have Bruno Asare here,” she said, checking her logbook in response to Emma’s inquiry. “You want to see him?”