Nairobi Heat

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  His accent was heavier than it had been when we had first met. Just how much wine had he had? I wondered as the cop, a bit winded by the stairs, returned with a bottle. Joshua took it and expertly knocked the neck against the edge of the table so that it broke off cleanly, then he poured himself a full glass.

  ‘And my guest?’ he asked the cop, who went to the kitchen and came back with another wine glass. ‘Good day when whites serve blacks, no?’ he said with a mean laugh as the cop, red in the face, returned.

  As Joshua poured me a full glass I decided that I would follow his lead, treading carefully. He was drunk, not stupid. He needed to talk. I would listen.

  ‘Ishmael, you know what it mean to die?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘It mean nothing. Nothing unless you live. Paradox. Survivor like me know death. You ever kill, Ishmael?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered truthfully. But this was Madison – so not often. And the few times that I had shot anyone, I had ended up throwing up. I had come to understand it was to purge myself. Not that I slept any better for it. ‘And you, Joshua, have you ever taken a life?’ I asked him.

  ‘Genocide, no game.’ He wagged a long finger from side to side. ‘No hide and seek, no police and robbers. I … I traded lives, Ishmael. Now tell no lie, eh? You ever save one life, two life, three life, hundred of life, more than a thousand life?’ He looked at me and laughed.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘When you deal big, you trade big. You read me? I big hero, no?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘A million dead. You compare that to thousand I save. I trade losing hand, no?’

  ‘Look, man, we do what we can. You were only one man. Without you it would have been a million plus one thousand. We do what we can. I do what I can. The girl is dead, but I would rather have saved her than catch the killer,’ I said earnestly.

  ‘You speak like friend to me. But no, man, you trade small; a life here, a life there. When you trade big, you lose big. No winner.’ He paused and looked at me, and for a moment his eyes were sober. ‘Detective Ishmael, why you here?’

  I thought I could see an opening. ‘Why was there a dead white girl outside your house?’ I asked.

  ‘We are here. Me and you. Man to man. Ask what you want, no? Tomorrow, who remember?’ I heard the cop in the room shuffle his feet uncomfortably.

  ‘Did you kill the girl?’ I asked, my heart racing. Any confession he gave would be thrown out of court – the suspect was shit-faced – but at least I would know, and once I knew I could work my way backwards.

  ‘Wrong question. Start from beginning,’ he said with laugher in his voice, as if he could sense my desperation.

  It was too late to do anything else, so I went on the offensive. ‘Look here, Joshua, you might be some sort of hero, but in this country they won’t think twice about taking your life for the girl’s,’ I said, trying to sound sincere. ‘You’re a nigger here, like me or the guy they shot forty-one times in New York.’

  ‘Your shield no protect you,’ he said. ‘I hear what happen in New York.’

  It still made me angry to think about it. Damn it, a black undercover agent shot dead by two white cops in New York. How does one explain that?

  ‘But, still, I never meet her,’ Joshua continued. ‘Why kill somebody I never meet?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Ishmael, let me tell you something. You say me and you niggers, but you do not know what you say. You want African and you to be nigger? You desire brotherhood of pain?’ he asked, his voice full of concern.

  ‘What are you talking about, Joshua?’ I asked him.

  ‘I show you what I mean,’ he announced, standing up and suddenly stomping his naked foot onto the broken neck of the wine bottle. He trembled in pain, then, reaching down, he pulled the neck from his foot. Blood gushed out, and he threw the bloody shard towards me.

  ‘You desire brotherhood of pain …? Now you do it,’ he yelled.

  I stared back at him calmly. This was a test of will. I knew playing along would not earn his respect but neither would walking away.

  ‘Now that was foolish,’ I finally said.

  ‘Ishmael! Your turn!’ he commanded.

  ‘If you want to torture me, play me some of that African music,’ I said as calmly as I could and reached out to pour myself some more wine from the neckless bottle.

  Joshua smiled. ‘I like you, Ishmael’, he said.

  Hobbling over to his entertainment centre, trailing blood across the floor, Joshua pulled out a turntable and put on some reggae. ‘Alpha Blondie,’ he explained.

  I didn’t wait for the first song to end before I chugged my wine. ‘No ambulances, too much press out there, just get your kit,’ I instructed the pillar of a cop as I got to the door.

  ‘And another bottle,’ Joshua yelled above the music.

  Walking down his driveway to my car I thought there were two possibilities. Either Joshua was lying and he had killed the girl or he really didn’t know her and she was a message, a conversation between him and God knew whom. But I was convinced that he was part of the puzzle, if not the solution.

  I made it back home in time for some late night TV As I sat in my lounge I wondered what it means for an African to meet an African American. Joshua was the first African I had really interacted with. Sad to say, but that was the truth – most come to Madison for school and leave as soon as they’re done. And those who stay are looking for the American dream – and part of achieving that is staying away from us.

  Well, Joshua was my suspect. In another world, where the girl didn’t exist, we probably wouldn’t have met – me a struggling black cop and he an African hero. No point thinking about it, I told myself as I opened a cold Bud.

  I was just about to open my second can of beer when my cellphone rang. ‘Is this Detective Ishmael?’ a voice with a heavy accent asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s me,’ I answered and quickly looked for the caller’s number. Unknown. It must have been an international number.

  ‘If you want the truth, you must go to its source. The truth is in the past. Come to Nairobi.’ And with that the person on the other end of the line hung up.

  Almost immediately the phone rang again. ‘Who is this?’ I asked hurriedly.

  ‘I see you got the call.’ It was Mo. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He wants me to go Africa.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Africa, goddamn it, fucking Africa …’ I said, getting angry with Mo for no good reason.

  ‘You gotta go,’ she said. ‘Babe, you have to.’

  I wanted to see her. I asked if I could come over but she said no.

  ‘Keep ’em coming, all right, baby?’ she said and then she hung up.

  I opened my beer. I finally had a lead. But what the hell? Who wanted to chase this thing all the way back to Africa? Where would I even start? But thinking back over the last two days, the call was only confirming what I had known instinctively: that, somehow, Joshua was in the middle of it.

  ‘All that was last week,’ I told O. ‘I had to plead with the Chief to give me two weeks. After two weeks I told him that he could throw me to the wolves if I didn’t have something for him. No one besides you, your Chief and my Chief knows I’m here. If the press in the United States finds out that the lead investigator is chasing ghosts in Africa, it’s off with our heads. So, O, that’s how come I’m sitting with you here drinking Tusker beer and eating nyama choma instead of solving my case.’

  ‘Damn, Ishmael!’ O whistled through his teeth. ‘What a story, what a story. So you are here because of a single telephone call? The suspect and the victim are back in your country and you are here? And you do not even know who called your ass?’

  I couldn’t help laughing with him at the absurdity of the situation.

  ‘It is crazy but somehow it makes sense,’ O finally said. ‘But tonight we drink, eat and make merry for tomorrow we die … Cheers!’

  And suddenly, for the
night, we were just two cops working a case that was bigger than us, sharing one, two, many beers. Sometimes it’s good to take a day off so that you can start the next day with fresh eyes.

  It had taken about two hours to fill O in. Soon after I had finished my story a man walked into the bar carrying a guitar. He and the bartender yelled back and forth for a while. He had been supposed to come at ten, O explained, for ‘one man guitar’. I was very tired, ready for sleep, but I didn’t want to leave before hearing some music.

  As the man finally made his way to the stage I noticed that I was breathing hard and that my hands had balled themselves into fists. I felt incredibly anxious, as if my life depended on the music that this man would play – it was as if I was on the verge of a panic attack. Then, without any introduction or fanfare, the man looked straight at me and said in halting English, ‘This, for my black brother. Remember black brother, tip bartender and I well.’

  His small speech over he started tapping the guitar with his hands so that the sound came at the tail of his laughter. He sounded like a one-man drum machine. And then he stopped, so that the silence in the bar almost became a song – the soft mutterings of the drunks, the hot wind blowing through the doorway, the sound of teeth tearing meat from bones and the clatter of glasses and bottles. I felt like I was being lifted out of myself, but before I was completely gone sounds that were half blues and half something else brought me back. His hands were a blur, his feet furiously tapping dust high into the air as the yellowish light from the kerosene lamp bathed him in a golden glow.

  The bartender walked over and stood in front of the guitar player. She started moving slowly – so slowly that she seemed to be pulling against the furious rhythm, a tug of war that she was slowly losing so that her hips and arms flailed faster and faster until it looked like she was being jerked around by the music. Then, just when it started looking painful, the guitar slowed down to a familiar blues melody – one note at a time, one tap at a time. It was the guitar pulling her back to earth as she slowly gyrated to the ground. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the song ended and the bartender clapped her hands and went back to the bar as if nothing had happened.

  I started choking, having hardly breathed throughout the performance, but O seemed not to have noticed anything. I felt exhausted. I had been to a place within myself that I didn’t know existed, a place that was beautiful and terrifying. The music had briefly awoken something in me – a rage or a healing. It was as if I had taken a hit of acid. Perhaps the beers and long plane ride, the jet lag and the exhaustion of the last few days had come to a head.

  ‘Buy him a Tusker,’ O said as he pushed a five hundred shilling note into my hand, ‘if you liked the music, that is.’

  ‘I’ll pay you back when I change some money,’ I said, but he simply waved me on drunkenly.

  ‘Tonight no need for a hotel. Just crash at my place.’ He took a photograph out of his wallet. ‘Detective Ishmael, meet my wife,’ he announced.

  It was a rough photograph and I couldn’t make out her features beyond a small Afro. ‘She’s beautiful,’ I said.

  I waved the bartender over and gave her the money, gesturing a beer for her and the guitarist. ‘Ten Tuskers?’ she asked, lifting up ten fingers.

  I laughed. ‘Why not?’

  As we were leaving, she was piling the bottles at the guitarist’s feet. ‘Goodbye, my black brother,’ the guitarist said, with a deep laugh, nodding his head back and forth to the music he was playing.

  I waved. ‘Goodbye, black brother,’ I repeated.

  Neither a tourist nor a visitor, but a detective in search of the truth – and not just any detective, a black American detective – I knew I was about to enter Africa’s underbelly. If lucky, I would see some beauty as well. But as we left The Hilton Hotel bar I knew I was not going to see Africa like some tourist staring at animals through a pair of binoculars.

  WHERE DREAMS COME TO DIE

  We got to O’s place really late. He lived in Eastleigh Estate, which he described as a lower-middle class Nairobi suburb. Lit by the Land Rover’s headlights the houses all looked the same – narrow, two-storey dwellings with chain-link fences and fierce-looking dogs – and with all the twists and turns, it felt like we were tunnelling through a maze. Eventually we arrived at his house, where he showed me to an empty room. Within minutes I was fast asleep.

  O shook me awake just before dawn. After a cold shower I walked into the kitchen to find his wife sitting at the table grading hand-written papers – O hadn’t told me she was a high school teacher. Of medium height, and a little bit on the stocky side, she was wearing a long black-and-white polka-dotted dress and sported a huge Afro. She reminded me of photos I had seen of black women in the 1960s – the radical feminists with a fist always up in the air. She had a gap between her two front teeth, the only flaw in an otherwise perfect smile.

  ‘My name is Maria, Odhiambo’s wife,’ she said, pointing to O, who was busy making breakfast.

  I introduced myself and watched as she gathered her papers together, finished her cup of tea and kissed O goodbye.

  O was quite a chef – his omelette was superb. ‘It is because you Americans use frozen ingredients. Here it is straight from the garden,’ he said when I complimented him. Then he smiled. ‘And my wife cannot cook. She tries but she is not gifted that way.’

  ‘You are a rare breed, my friend,’ I said, much to his delight. ‘A black male feminist detective chef.’

  He took a joint from his shirt pocket. ‘Now I am a black male feminist detective chef with a joint,’ he said as he lit up.

  I don’t smoke weed, not because I’m a cop, it’s just that it gives me the giggles – hours of ridiculous, uncontrollable laughter – and I would rather not look stupid.

  ‘Today we will rattle the bushes,’ O said after I had declined a drag on his joint.

  He and I both knew that if the man who had told me to come to Nairobi was serious all we had to do was show up in the right places, make our presence known, and he would find us.

  The first bush we rattled was the Rwandan Consulate. The consulate was in Muthaiga Estate, where the houses were so huge that I felt like I was back in Maple Bluff. Nothing. Of course they knew Joshua. Without people like him there would be no Rwanda. Could he have been involved in any criminal activities? No, of course not. Enemies? Yes. Could they be more specific? It could be anyone.

  We went next to the Refugee Centre in Nairobi CBD, the charitable arm of the Never Again Foundation. The office was on the top floor with a magnificent view over the whole city. As we waited for the Director to see us I let my eyes wander out to the horizon, watching as the buildings got smaller and smaller and the smokestacks rose higher and higher above them.

  After a fifteen-minute wait, we were let in to see the Director, Samuel Alexander, a white American dressed in a T-shirt and faded blue jeans. His office looked like some kind of African museum – from the artwork to the thick jungle plants – but he seemed very happy to see a fellow American, and for a few minutes he spoke about the things that he missed the most: McDonald’s, fifty-two TV channels with nothing on them, high-speed Internet and the roads. ‘By God, do I miss the roads,’ he cried. ‘The roads here are shit.’ He had a point there, I concurred.

  ‘So, gentlemen, what can I do for you?’ Samuel Alexander finally asked.

  I explained we were looking for information on Joshua – anything that might help us with an investigation we were conducting.

  ‘About that white girl?’ he asked. ‘Courtesy of CNN International,’ he added, seeing the look on my face.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered.

  ‘The man is a fucking hero,’ he said, stressing the word. He then asked us to go with him to a conference room and there we found several large posters of Joshua hanging on the wall covered with slogans like You can be a hero too – give and I saved hundreds – so can you. There were some brochures on the desk that also had his face on them. Joshua was their p
oster boy – his face helped them raise money, Samuel explained. It was Samuel who had recruited Joshua shortly after the genocide to help with raising money for the Refugee Centre. But that was the extent of their relationship.

  ‘Did you meet him here, in Nairobi?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes, several times. I gotta tell you though, Joshua is a gentle African … He would never harm anyone,’ he answered.

  Finally, I asked Samuel Alexander if he knew of any Rwandan refugees or genocide survivors that we could talk to, but he told me that it would be a privacy breach to give us such information.

  As we took the lift back down to the ground floor I was happy that we had at least placed Joshua in Nairobi. Beyond that we had nothing, but it didn’t matter, we were rattling the bushes.

  Later, as we ate a lunch of fried chicken and fries, O told me that he had an idea of where we could find some Rwandan refugees. He suggested we leave his Land Rover in the city – in his car we would be easily made – and take public transport to a place called Mathare.

  After we were done eating, O flagged down a small rainbow-coloured Nissan matatu that had Tupac’s ‘Dear Mama’ playing at full volume. We got off in Mathare – a slum area – and stood on the side of the tarmac road, trying to decide which of the muddy footpaths that wove in and out of the endless rows of shacks we should take. It was as if I had stepped into one of those infomercials with the stream of skeletal children, too used to the flies crawling over their faces to shoo them away. And the smell – it was a surprise. In spite of the open sewers and the thousands of barely clothed sweating bodies milling around us it wasn’t a bad smell. Yes, it had several layers to it – sex, shit, cheap perfume, bad breath, booze, weed, sickness – but the sum of these parts wasn’t bad, and though it settled in my throat like thick smoke, it didn’t make me cough.