What the Dead Leave Behind

The old man had been dead for six days before anyone told Amara.

This was not unusual. Chief Emeka Oduya had been conducting his affairs in secrecy for so long that secrecy had become the default mode of everyone around him — his staff, his lawyers, his four wives, his eleven acknowledged children, and the unknown number of people who existed in the penumbra of his life, connected to him by money or blood or the particular kind of loyalty that is indistinguishable from fear.

What was unusual was the nature of the call.

It came from a firm she did not know — not the Oduya family's regular solicitors, a Lagos firm so established that their letterhead was practically a historical document, but a smaller outfit in Kano, a city she had visited twice in her life and associated with dust and heat and a kind of wealth that was older and quieter and more certain of itself than Lagos wealth.

“Miss Amara Okafor?”

“Speaking.”

“My name is Garba. Yusuf Garba, of Garba and Associates, Kano. I am calling on behalf of the estate of Chief Emeka Olusegun Oduya, who passed on the fourteenth of this month. You have been named in his will.”

A pause. She let it sit.

“I don't know Chief Oduya,” she said carefully.

“He knew you,” said Mr. Garba. “Or rather, he knew of you. You were recommended by a colleague of yours, and the Chief was particular about these things.”

“What things?”

“He required a lawyer who was not already employed by any member of his family. Specifically, he required someone with no existing relationship with the estate.”

She understood immediately. The Oduya family was one of the largest in Nigeria — oil, real estate, banking, a manufacturing arm that made things she used every day without knowing who owned the factory. A patriarch of that scale, dying, would leave behind not just wealth but a war. He had wanted a neutral party.

“What am I named to do?” she asked.

“To receive,” said Mr. Garba. “And to deliver. The specifics are in the will. I am calling to ask if you will come to Kano.”

She was in Lagos, in her apartment, in the particular stillness of a Tuesday morning before the city got loud. She was wearing the Chanel Gabrielle she put on when she needed to think — bright, clean, the floral clarity of a woman who had decided to be present.

Bright and clean — the floral clarity of a woman who had decided to be present. It was the perfume she wore when a case required her full self, not a professional performance of it.

“When?” she asked.

“As soon as possible,” said Mr. Garba. “The family has already been notified. They are waiting.”

She thought about the word waiting. The Oduya family. Waiting. She tried to imagine it and could not.

“I'll be there Thursday,” she said.

She did her research on the flight.

Chief Emeka Olusegun Oduya. Born 1948 in Onitsha. Built his first business — a trading company — at twenty-two. By thirty he was in oil. By forty he was in everything. Died at seventy-six in his Kano residence, having spent the last decade living primarily in the north, away from Lagos where most of his business interests were headquartered and where, according to sources she was finding increasingly fascinating, most of his family drama was concentrated.

Four wives. Eleven acknowledged children. The will, Mr. Garba had told her, contained one provision that had not been disclosed to the family. That provision involved her.

She closed her laptop somewhere over the middle of the country and looked at the darkening sky and thought about old men and their secrets and the things they chose to do with them when they were no longer alive to protect them.