She pressed the mute button and extended the appliance in my direction.

‘Kings,’ she whispered as an extra precaution, ‘it’s Ben’s Port Harcourt Refinery mugu.’

Ben was one of our office cleaners. As well as those of us in the CIA, everybody else – the otimkpu, gatemen, drivers, cleaners, cook, receptionist, the boys who lived in Cash Daddy’s house – was entitled to compose their own letters and blast them out to whomever they pleased. Like Cash Daddy always said, there were more than enough mugus to go round. But as soon as contact was established and it looked like money was on the way, whoever had initiated the correspondence was supposed to let me know. Only I and Protocol Officer had keys to the cabinet where we stored the letterheaded sheets, death certificates, bank statements, call-to-bar certificates, proof of funds, money orders, cheques, and any other documents that might be required to prove the authenticity of a transaction. Only I and Protocol Officer could make the phone call to authorise our Western Union official to look the other way.

Some weeks ago, Ben had sent out letters claiming that he was the head of a committee that tendered for and recently completed some construction work on the Port Harcourt Refinery. The project, he stated, was purposely over-inflated by $40 million and he needed help to smuggle the money out of Nigeria. All the recipient had to do was to claim that his business had been awarded the $40 million contract and provide a bank account detail for the transaction. For that, he would keep twenty-five per cent for himself – as long as he transferred the remaining seventy-five per cent to Ben’s bank account. This mugu had agreed and was told to fax his business details so that his business could be registered in Nigeria. He had sent the $6,000 required for the process last week.

The Corporate Affairs Commission registration documents had been faxed back to him yesterday. I took in a deep breath as I grabbed the receiver from Buchi.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said after letting out the air from my lungs, ‘This is Mr Odiegwu on the line. How may I help you?’

‘Hello,’ the Englander replied. ‘I have a document here that shows my business has been registered with the Nigerian Corporate Affairs Commission, and I just wanted to confirm my registration details.’

Naturally, he had rung the number on the CAC letterheaded sheet.

‘May I have the registration number, please?’

He read it out slowly, careful not to miss any slashes or hyphens. I repeated after him without making record anywhere. What he did not know was that the registration certificate had been faxed from this same office. Dibia, our document expert, was quite good. All the logos and stamps on the documents he supplied were authentic, and so were the signatures.

‘Could you please hold on while I go through our records?’

While waiting for a plausible length of time to elapse, I admired the Atilogwu acrobatic dancers on the wall calendar in front of me. I had seen their energetic and entertaining dance on television several times before. Their uniforms were remarkably colourful.

‘Is that Mr Del B. Trotter?’ I asked at last.

He confirmed his name eagerly.

‘Yes, we have the documents here,’ I said. ‘The registration was processed on the 12th.’

I could almost hear the splashes of the grin that swam out onto his face. After all, every Homo sapiens – whether Englander or Burkinabe – had the natural right to grin over the prospect of colliding with $10 million for doing almost nothing.

‘Thanks for your kind assistance,’ he said.

I returned the phone to Buchi and made a mental note of the fact that I would still need to speak with this same mugu soon. If Ben successfully convinced him to send another $9,000 for the contract documents to be drawn up, Mr Trotter would probably want to ring the Port Harcourt Refinery office to make some further enquiries.

The clicking of gum and the talking resumed. I was about to return to my screen when Wizard let out a high-pitched cry.

‘My lollipop is awake o! My lollipop is awake!’

All of us recognised this as our daily call to amusement. We rushed over to Wizard’s desk. The words he typed onto the screen sent everybody quaking with laughter.

‘Oh lollipop,’ he had written, ‘am really scared, hun. Am really scared that I ain’t gonna see you again no more, my darl. These people are really threatening me. You know how wild these Africans can be.’

My laughter became the loudest of all.

Wizard had been conducting several online relationships with randy foreigners he met in chatrooms. His romance with this particular American had been going on for six weeks. When their loooove blossomed to the point where the man proposed to ‘Suzie’ that she travel from East Windsor, New Jersey to visit him in Salt Lake City, Utah or vice versa, she informed him that she was just on her way to Nigeria on a business trip. She was a make-up artist, you see, and had an offer to transform girls strutting down the catwalk for an AIDS charity in Lagos. She had arrived in Lagos two days before, and had her American passport stolen in a taxi. Now, she had no way of cashing her traveller’s cheques and the proprietor of the hotel was threatening arrest.

‘Oh babe,’ the man replied, ‘what you gonna do now? Ain’t there no way of taking it to the police?’

‘Sugar pie, all they gonna want is bribes,’ Wizard replied. ‘Hun, I’m gonna really need your help right now. I wanna see if you can show me that you really love me and that what we share is real. Can you do me a real big favour?’

Wizard must have been watching a lot of American movies. His gonna-wanna American-speak was quite fluent.

‘Sure, babe,’ the man wrote. ‘Anything I can do to help.’

‘Honeybunch, I wanna send the traveller’s cheques to you to pay into your bank account. Can you do that and send me the cash?’

Wizard broke off typing and turned quickly to us. ‘How much should I write? Is $2,000 OK?’

‘That’s too small,’ Ogbonna said. ‘Double it.’

‘Yes, double it,’ we concurred.

Wizard resumed.

‘What I’ve got in cheques is about $4,000. Honey, I gotta have some help real quick. Can you be the one to help me out here?’

Suzie went on to explain to her beau that the cheques would arrive within three days; she would send them by DHL. He should deposit the cheques as soon as he received them, and then send her the cash by Western Union. Since her own passport had been stolen, she would send him the name of one of her colleagues at the charity event so that he could send the Western Union in the colleague’s name. The lover boy, swept away by the current of true love, wasted no time in responding.

‘Anything for you, sweetie. I ain’t got that much in my cheque account right now but I could get some from my credit card and replace once I’ve cashed the cheques.’

All of us screamed the special scream. Wizard had made a hit.

It would take about eight days for the bank to process the documents, before the man realised that the cheques that had been paid into his account were fakes. I looked in a corner of the chat box and saw the photograph of the bearded, voluminous Caucasian. Then I looked in Wizard’s own box and saw the photograph of the trim, buxom blond who had no resemblance whatsoever to the V-shaped eighteen-year-old clicking away at the keyboard. My heart went out to the lonely man, but Wizard was untroubled.

‘Thanks honeysuckle,’ he wrote. ‘I knew I could really count on you. Please get it done ASAP cos I ain’t got nothing left on me no more.’

‘Sure, Suz,’ the man replied. ‘By the way, babe, you gotta take good care of yourself and watch out, OK? Maybe I should’ve warned you when you said you were going. I saw on CNN sometime that the folks in Nigeria are real dangerous.’

‘No problem, love,’ Wizard replied. ‘I’ve learnt my lesson and I’m gonna take real good care of myself from now.’