Gold of Our Fathers - страница 15

Daniel Armah, who lived in Kumasi, was Dawson’s mentor. He was the man who, as a CID detective some twenty-five years ago, had done his utmost to find out how and why Darko’s mother had mysteriously disappeared when Darko was a mere ten years old. Armah had not succeeded in his quest, but the care and doggedness he had shown had inspired Darko.

Through his teen years and into early adulthood as Dawson began training as an officer in the Ghana Police Service, the two men had remained steadfast friends. Reaching back into the long years of his experience as a detective, Armah always had wisdom and insight to share whenever Dawson discussed a case with him. Armah held a special place in Dawson’s heart. He had taught Darko about determination and tenacity of purpose, and provided to him the role model and father figure that Darko’s own father was not.

Dawson tried Armah’s number several times. It rang, but no one picked up.

•••

Dunkwa, another mining town, was one-fifth the size of Obuasi. It stood practically on the banks of the Ofin River, hence its full name, Dunkwa-on-Ofin. Dawson had never been there, but he knew it was one of the major destinations of thousands of illegal Chinese miners flocking into Ghana to get at its gold. Dawson wasn’t exactly sure how the whole phenomenon had even started, but a lot of them had subsequently been kicked out of the country, while many remained on the run or in hiding. Dawson thought of it in a funny way: thousands of Chinese people concealed in Ashanti forests like hidden colonies of ants waiting for the anteaters to lose interest and wander away. And then they’d come right back. He didn’t know every detail of howthe Chinese came back so successfully, but he knew the general mechanism: bribery and corruption. It got you everywhere in Ghana.

The road into Dunkwa was appalling. Unpaved and deeply rutted, vehicles swerved around the worst of the potholes and depressions in a kind of strange dance. Deep puddles of rainwater from the previous night and mud as thick as corn dough made the going very difficult. Only SUVs could proceed at a reasonable speed. The rest, like Dawson’s taxi, had to slow to a crawl at times.

Finally, at the crest of a hill, they saw the town ahead of them, and to the left, a segment of the Ofin River along with a large tract of land scoured bare and churned into hills and valleys of grayish-yellow soil.

Kofi looked over for a second and followed Dawson’s gaze, then back to the roadway shaking his head. “These China people,” he said in disgust. “Look what they have done to the land with their excavators.”

Look what we’ve let them do, Dawson thought.

Dunkwa was nothing spectacular by way of buildings or roads, and Dawson had not expected it to be. In most of the lower half of Ghana, certain fairly similar characteristics could be anticipated in towns of a certain size. It was only as one traveled into the arid north that architecture radically changed.

Dawson saw square brick homes with the standard corrugated tin roofs, unpaved streets and houses in random arrangement. Worn away at the sides to a strip in the middle, the main road through town was flanked on the sides by wide trash-strewn gutters, and then by chop bars, small vegetable stands. But then he had to admit that Dunkwa had a little twist to its otherwise unsurprising appearance: gold-buying stores. Lots of them.

“Ofin Gold Trading Company,” Dawson read out from one of the signs.

“Many places here to buy and sell gold,” Kofi said, in Twi this time. He turned off the main road and proceeded slowly through a narrow lane between several small buildings. He pointed. “See the line on the houses? That’s when the town flooded.”

Dawson at first didn’t understand what Kofi meant, but then he saw a faint brown border at the base of each building, the watermark of a notorious flooding of Dunkwa last year when torrents swelled the Ofin River beyond its banks.

“The police station is just here,” Kofi said, making a final left turn and pulling to a stop in front of the small building painted GPS-signature yellow and blue, or sometimes white and blue.