City of Saints & Thieves

by Natalie C. Anderson

He nods and goes on, “And so when she got in touch, I asked her about it, and she . . . convinced me. Don’t . . .” He puts up a hand to stop me. “Just trust me. She wasn’t able to meet me and it wasn’t her fault. What happened to me wasn’t her fault. Men came for her that night, just like they came for me. You told me as much yourself.”

  It’s true. In the back of my brain I see a lick of fire as high as the trees. I press my knuckles into my eyes, trying to make the image go away. I can’t think about that right now. I come back to the same question. “So why would she then come here to Greyhill, if he sent the men after you and her?”

  “How or why your mother eventually ended up working for Mr. Greyhill—that I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. But I’m sure whatever she did was for a good reason. She must have felt like she had to, and that it would be the best way to keep you safe. Your mother was . . . well, she was like you. Tough, but good.” The corners of Donatien’s eyes pinch. “Why so many questions today, Tina? Is something going on? You seem out of sorts.”

  I stare at him, then let my gaze stretch out to the water, thinking of my plans for the Greyhill family. “You don’t know me. I’m not that good.”

  He opens his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. “Look,” I say, swallowing down whatever emotion is trying to force its way out, “I just want to know for sure that he killed her. That’s all.”

  Donatien heaves a deep breath. He rotates his beer on the table, leaving damp rings. He must be thinking the same thing I am, that my mother really screwed up when it came to where she thought we would be safe.

  “Greyhill did it, Tina. If I’m sure of anything, it’s that. She reached out to me, said she wanted to talk about him, and then she ended up dead. No one had more to lose from her talking than him.”

  I know all this already. But I find myself saying, “I need proof.”

  “And how are you going to . . .” He frowns, and then I see it in his eyes, something clicking into place. “Oh my God. That kid. I knew he looked familiar. Is that . . . ?” His eyes widen with fear.

  “Don’t worry about him,” I say.

  Donatien leans forward and grabs my arm. “Is that Michael Greyhill?” he asks in a rough whisper. “Tina, why are you with him? What are you doing?”

  “I said don’t worry about it.”

  I start to stand, but Donatien keeps a grip on me. “You can’t mess around with these people, Tina,” he hisses. “They go for blood. Think of your mother. Whatever you’re up to with him, you have to stop, now.”

  I yank my arm out of his. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Donatien,” I say, “I really do. But I am thinking about my mother.”

  “Tina—”

  “I have to go,” I say. “I’ll be in touch.”

  I turn and slip away before he can rise to his feet and stop me.

  EIGHTEEN

  When I turned seven, I went to school. Not with Michael—he went somewhere that cost a small fortune every term—but it was a decent school close to the Ring. I’m sure Mr. G paid my fees. A bus picked me up from the corner near the Greyhills’ home in the morning and dropped me back every day. The teachers were smart and kind. I learned to read and count and sing the Kenyan national anthem. We colored with real crayons and played kickball in the grass. It was all very pleasant, and I was lucky.

  I hated it.

  I hated leaving Mama. I hated leaving Kiki. Every day I would try to fake being sick, or hide, and every day Mama would march me out into the world in my uncomfortable shoes and scratchy uniform, unmoved by the crocodile tears running down my chin. You’re too big for this, she’d say with fire in her eyes. We waited on the corner for the bus, Kiki on her hip, her telling me I was fortunate to go to such a school. Did I know how many children wanted to go to school and couldn’t? And my school had music class. A swimming pool. I took gymnastics in the afternoons. Gymnastics!

  Kiki was only one year old and she didn’t know why going to school made me pout, but her lip would quiver along with mine and this would frustrate Mama even more. Don’t cry! You’re going to make your sister cry and I don’t have time!

  Then when Kiki turned two, she was old enough to go with me. There was a nursery school attached to mine. She had to go, Mama said. There was no discussing it. But the first day Mama tried to put her on the bus with me, Kiki pitched a fit. She wailed. Screamed like she was being murdered. She didn’t want to leave Mama. I got into my seat on the bus and saw the driver look at the three of us, then his watch. And Mama tried to shush Kiki and put her in an empty seat, but it wasn’t working. Kiki bucked and squirmed and howled. I looked on, not knowing what to do. I mean, I didn’t blame Kiki. I didn’t want to go to the stupid school with their stupid songs and jump rope either. I wanted to play in the Greyhills’ garden. I wanted to climb the strangler fig. I’d stay out of the way. Both of us would. I was about to open my big mouth and say so.

  But then I saw Mama’s face. I was too little to understand exactly what she was thinking, but somehow I knew to shut up. She looked like she was at the edge of something very high, looking down. Somehow I knew that Kiki had to go with me. I knew that if Mama went back into the Greyhills’ with Kiki still clinging to her skirt, she would be in trouble. Maybe Mrs. G had put her foot down. Maybe Mama’s place—and ours along with it—was in doubt. Maybe getting us out of sight, at least for a little while, was some sort of deal Mama had struck. Of course, I didn’t understand any of that then; all I knew was that the look on her face made me feel ashamed. Mama needed me to stop acting like a baby.

  “I’ll take her,” I said, and held out my arms for my sister. “Come here, Kiki, let me tell you how much fun it is at school.”

  And Kiki went quiet, and sniffed, and looked with her big amber eyes from me to Mama. “Schoo?”

  I plastered a big smile on my face. “It’s so great! The teachers are really nice, and there are swings and a slide and snack time! Come sit with me!”

  “Nak time?”

  She let Mama put her in the same seat with me while the other kids on the bus watched and the driver drummed his fingers on the steering wheel impatiently. She was so little that her feet stuck straight out. I buckled a single belt around us.

  “You’re going to make so many friends,” I told her. She would. People loved Kiki, with her sunny smile and fat cheeks. Most people, anyway.

  “I’ll be right here when you get back,” Mama said before the bus driver closed the door. She stood on the side of the road and watched us go. She was already in her maid’s uniform, ready for work. Her chin was up. She stood on solid ground. She waved good-bye.

  • • •

  “You can drop me off here,” I tell Michael.

  We’ve come to the intersection of Dagoretti and Timau Roads, where a new shopping plaza called Paradise Island is going in. Cars and pedestrians bully and press around one another, everyone trying to get somewhere else. I’ve said barely a word since getting back on the bike, even though Michael has been pestering me the entire ride. I’ve just been running Donatien’s words through my head: Greyhill did it . . . If I’m sure of anything, it’s that.

  But he doesn’t know, does he? Not for sure. And neither do I. Mr. G is in a dirty business. He and Mama were close. Maybe it’s like Michael said, and Mama heard something she shouldn’t have about one of his business partners. Maybe Mr. G even told her about one of them. What if she was going to tell Donatien information that would have incriminated someone else too? How could I find out who that might be? Did we look at all the surveillance footage from the day of her murder, who went in and out? Maybe someone else besides Gicanda and Abdirahman came there, someone Mr. G and Mwika didn’t mention to the police. I make a mental note to look at the footage in the police file again.

  “Drop you off? Not part of the plan, Tina.”

  I drag myself out of my thoughts. “Stop!”
>
  We’re about five blocks from my roof, as close as I’m comfortable letting Michael get. He continues through the intersection.

  “Pull over. I need to meet with my business partner.”

  Michael slows and turns down a quieter street. He stops the bike on the dirt shoulder of the road in front of a well-groomed apartment complex and takes his helmet off. “Our deal was that I go with you. We’re supposed to be doing this investigation together.”

  I pull my helmet off too. “Are you still mad about being sent from the table? Because I told you I’d explain everything later—”

  “The deal is that we work together. You don’t get to run off.”

  “I have to meet my partner; he’s waiting on me. It doesn’t have anything to do with ‘the investigation,’” I say, air quoting.

  “I’m still coming with you.”

  I try a different approach. “Don’t you want to get home? I thought you were grounded. And that you have to do homework or something.”

  “I’m not going back without you.”

  “I’m not taking you with me.”

  “I’m not really asking.”

  As we sit there glowering at each other, I weigh jumping off and running away. I could do it, easy, and just show back up at the Greyhills’ later. But then I risk Michael chasing me, and I’m seriously not in the mood. If I miss Boyboy, I’ll have to wait for another cryptic message to get a date with him, and we don’t have that kind of time.

  But then I get an idea. “Fine,” I huff. “Go that way.”

  I direct him through the streets, away from the bustle. We’ve left Old Town and are on the edge of what might one day become a suburb. For now it’s just street after street of unfinished gray apartment buildings. Some are covered in scaffolding, crawling with workers like ants, but most have stagnated somewhere in between, top floors gaping open with rebar and concrete. Their owners will come back every once in a while when the money is there and build another floor, polepole. Slowly, slowly. My building hasn’t been touched in years. It’s perfect.

  “Down there,” I say. It’s the gated entrance to the building’s underground car park. I hop off and look down the street to make sure no one is around. The last thing I need is someone seeing a fancy motorcycle disappearing in here. I pull aside a sheet of metal on the rusted gate and Michael squeezes the bike through. I lead him into the dark center of the garage and tell him to park. The sudden silence after he shuts off the engine is almost deafening. I hurry us to a door signposted, HATARI! DANGER! and unlock the combination padlock keeping it closed.

  There’s just enough light filtering into the garage to see, but inside the maintenance room it’s completely dark. I know my way by touch, but I hear Michael bang into a pile of scaffolding. I pick up the thing I need before reaching back and finding his arm, leading him by the wrist through the maze to the opposite side. I open the door and sunlight filters down on us, weak and dusty.

  Michael follows me into the small concrete room and looks up. We’re actually in a long shaft where a service elevator was supposed to go.

  “Okay,” I say, “here’s the deal: Since I’m feeling generous, I’m not going to make you hang out in the dark car park.”

  “What are you . . .”

  But he’s way too slow for me. I’ve already ratcheted one side of the handcuffs I picked up in the maintenance room to his wrist while we were walking. Now I swiftly attach the other side to a stout pole.

  Michael’s eyes go wide. “You can’t do that!”

  “I think I just did,” I say. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in ten minutes. I’m not going to leave you here for hours and hours, like you left me.”

  “Are these from the panic room? How did you . . . ?”

  “One of my practice pairs,” I say. “I keep a few stashed around.”

  “You’re just leaving me here?”

  “I’m not going far. I’ll be right up there.” Michael starts to protest, but I say, “I’m not running away; there’s nowhere for me to go.”

  Michael looks around. “I’m going to start yelling,” he says. “This is some sort of secret hideout place, right? You didn’t want anyone seeing me go in.”

  I narrow my eyes. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Why not? You leave me here and I’m going to shout my head off. Try me. I’m tired of this, Tina.” He takes a deep breath and opens his mouth.

  “Wait!” I look around, knowing how his voice will echo in here. “Fine! Look, I just need a few minutes first to talk to Boyboy in private. Can you give me that?”

  “Your friend’s name is Boyboy?”

  “Business partner.”

  Michael gives me an appraising look, like he’s not the one in handcuffs. “Five minutes.”

  “Ten.”

  “And then you’ll toss down the key to these cuffs?”

  “Then I’ll come down and we can get you home.”

  “Nope, I want to meet this Boyboy kid.” He waits. “I’ve got a really good set of lungs, Tina. Want to hear?”

  “Okay, okay! I’ll throw it.”

  Michael looks at his watch. “Ten minutes, then I start yelling to raise the dead.”

  “You’re such a pain in the ass,” I tell him.

  Michael looks like he almost wants to smile. “So how do you get up?”

  The walls are damp and covered in greenish slime, but there is just enough rebar sticking out from the concrete to climb. I grab a piece above my head.

  “Do I have to do everything for you? Figure it out,” I say, and pull myself level with the first of ten floors.

  • • •

  Boyboy jumps when I pop up through the top of the elevator shaft.

  “Did you get it all?” I ask before I’m even done pulling myself out.

  “Good Lord, Tina, I know your mama taught you enough manners to holler hodi.” He glares at me over his computer screen. “You trying to give me a heart attack?”

  The blissfully normal sight of him sitting there makes me smile, in spite of everything that’s happening. “I don’t think you have to announce yourself in your own home, Boyboy. So, did you?”

  Boyboy doesn’t move from the safari chair he’s slouched in. It’s my only furniture, other than the beat-up mattress in the corner. I guess you could say I don’t do a lot of entertaining. I’d taken a liking to the chair, though, and stole it off the porch of a fancy mzungu restaurant where they serve tourists ostrich and crocodile. I stifle my annoyance that Boyboy has claimed it, like he always does when he comes over, and pull up a cinder block.

  Boyboy’s fingers haven’t stopped flittering over his laptop keys, even as he grumbles, “Where’s pretty boy? I thought you two were supposed to be playing house.”

  “Downstairs. He’s waiting in the pit. He, um . . . wants to meet you. Did anything transmit?”

  “You brought him to the Batcave? Are you crazy?” Boyboy looks me up and down. “And what are you wearing?”

  I feel heat creep into my cheeks and smooth down the green blouse automatically. I resist pointing out that Boyboy is wearing a yellow kitenge jumpsuit with a flying-toaster motif, platform shoes, and a head wrap. I’m sure he’d look right at home on a Lagos catwalk, but between his eye-catching outfit and the motorcycle, my secret hideout is looking less secret by the minute.

  “Focus, Boyboy! What did you get off his hard drive?”

  “Don’t shout.” Boyboy winces. “I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, and I’m running entirely on caffeine. I may go Hulk on you and toss you off the building.”

  I lean back to get a better look at him. “You haven’t slept?”

  Boyboy takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “Your Goonda buddies have had me working all night. I just left a couple of hours ago.”

  Guilt jabs at me. Boyboy is already in way
deeper than he’s ever been on one of my jobs. “Bug Eye was supposed to let you go home.”

  “Yeah, well, he did. It just took him a while,” Boyboy grumbles. He drains the contents of one of the energy drinks he’s got open at his side.

  I don’t want to ask, but I bet Boyboy’s mom freaked out when he didn’t come home for two days. I’ll get an earful the next time I see her. Honestly, though, she treats him like he’s five, not fifteen. She’s not crazy about me, but on the other hand Boyboy brings home more money from our jobs than she can ever make selling tea on the corner. Five kids—that’s a lot of mouths to feed, especially for a single refugee mom. Plus there’s the protection being a friend of the Goondas gives them.

  Boyboy puts his glasses back on. “Bug Eye wanted to see what we were able to get off Greyhill’s hard drive. Which wasn’t easy with Ketchup running his mouth nonstop. When he wasn’t cracking on me, he was bitching about you staying at the Greyhills’. He thinks you’re selling them out.”

  “He needs to worry about his own stupid self. I’m not double-crossing the Goondas. I don’t have a death wish. They didn’t follow you here, did they?”

  “I don’t think so. I tried to mix up my route.”

  “So . . . what were we able to get?”

  “Only about fifteen percent of the hard-drive memory.”

  I curse elaborately and look over my shoulder at the elevator shaft opening. I lower my voice, even though I’m pretty sure there’s no way Michael can hear us. “I’m going to have to go back in Greyhill’s office and transmit again, aren’t I?”

  “If you want everything, yeah.”

  I rub my hand over my head, thinking. “Look,” I say in a whisper. “Michael thinks we got it all—enough to ruin his dad, anyway. That’s how I was able to make a deal with him to get out of that cell. He thinks I won’t release the dirt if he can prove his dad didn’t kill my mother.”

  Boyboy blinks at me. “What? Why would you agree to that? Greyhill killed your mom; you’ve always said so.”

  Another glance over my shoulder, and then I come in close. “I know, I know. But listen. There was a video, Boyboy. Mr. Greyhill had a camera in his office that recorded everything the night she died.”