Gold of Our Fathers - [28]

As they got to Dunkwa, Dawson made one stop to buy an obligatory bottle of schnapps for the chief, whose name was Nana Akrofi. Showing up empty-handed was a no-no. His palace was at the top of an incline along a paved road eaten away at its edges and hugged by worn houses with corrugated tin roofs. At the roadside, an old man in a green shirt dozed off with his back against the wall of a building as he shared space with two other people on that typically Ghanaian item of furniture-the long wooden bench.

The color of the chief’s brick house had been corrupted by accumulated layers of the ocher village dust, but the small veranda where a young man asked Dawson and Obeng to take a seat while he went into the house to get the chief was painted an uneven pink. They could smell palm nut soup cooking from somewhere in the back, and a baby was crying.

When Nana Akrofi emerged, he turned out to be younger than Dawson had imagined. He wasn’t dressed in resplendent traditional garb either, but rather in a pair of tan khaki slacks and an orange T-shirt with rutgers universitywritten on the front in blue.

Akrofi shook hands with them, right to left, and then sat down in a white plastic chair. Times must be hard, Dawson thought, because the chief was without a linguist or spokesman. Or it could be this young guy was the “acting” chief and had dispensed with that old formality. Traditional life was changing.

Neither Dawson nor Obeng spoke out of turn. The chief had to start first, and with a fairly predictable script. After a pause in which he leaned forward slightly, he cleared his throat. “Eh-heh. Who are you?”

Dawson let Obeng speak first on their behalf. In this case, police hierarchy was subordinate to the sergeant’s roots in the Ashanti Region. Speaking in Twi, he introduced himself, beginning with the deferential “Mepa wo kyew,” and then introduced Dawson. Then it was time to present the schnapps, which the chief gracefully accepted.

“So,” he said, “what is your mission here today?”

“Please, Nana,” Obeng continued, “a certain Chinese man died yesterday morning at one of the mines around Dunkwa and my boss here, Chief Inspector Dawson, and I are investigating what happened.”

“Yes, I know about it,” Akrofi said, looking directly at Dawson now. “If I can help you in your investigation, I will.”

“Thank you, Nana,” Dawson said. “The Chinese man’s name is Bao Liu. He was the boss of some galamsey boys who found him buried in the soil yesterday morning. We need to talk to those boys, but they have all disappeared.”

“Are they in trouble?” the chief asked.

“I don’t think so,” Dawson said truthfully, “but without speaking with them, the investigation is incomplete because they are the first witnesses.”

Akrofi appeared satisfied with that and nodded. “I know the one called Kudzo Gablah. He’s from the Volta Region. I understand he left Dunkwa this morning and went to one of the mines at Aniamoa.”

Dawson glanced at Obeng. That was the sergeant’s home village. Connections like that were always good.

“Mepa wo kyew,” Dawson said to the chief, “you say Kudzo went to Aniamoa. Is it because he was trying to avoid the police?”

Akrofi smiled slightly. “I don’t know. Maybe you need to ask him.”

Dawson nodded. “We will do so. Thank you, Nana.”

“You are welcome.”

It might have been the end to a short meeting, but Dawson was curious about other things, and now that he had given the chief his schnapps, he felt licensed to ask Akrofi if he had known Bao Liu or his brother Wei.

“I was not the chief here when Bao first came to Dunkwa three years ago,” Akrofi replied, “but one time they came to pay their respects to me.”

Dawson wondered if they had brought the chief some gold along with the schnapps. “Did you hear of any problems between the Lius and the farmers working in the area of the mine?” he asked.

Akrofi shook his head. “No problems at all.”

But Dawson’s left palm began to itch as if a caterpillar was walking across it, and he knew the chief wasn’t being truthful. “Mepa wo kyew,Nana,” he said, still very deferentially, “if you don’t mind my asking, how have the Chinese people been received in Dunkwa?”

Akrofi reflectively rubbed his hands back and forth over the tops of his thighs.

“Well, you see,” he began, “the China people have helped us a lot. They have provided the youth with employment where before there was no work. You know, these young guys don’t want to work on the farms planting cocoa and all that. They want quick money. Cocoa is too slow. Look at how many years it takes for one cocoa tree to start bearing fruit. So this gold mining, it is very good for our boys. It keeps them out of trouble, prevents them from engaging in robbery and theft and all those things.”

“Medaase, Nana,” Dawson said, nodding to show acknowledgment of and respect for Akrofi’s observations, but in fact he was slowly working up to the most troublesome aspect of the Chinese occupation.

“In addition,” the chief continued, “they constructed two boreholes for us because the Ofin River has been polluted by AngloGold Ashanti mining. So we can now have a good water supply.”