‘That’s it. I don’t know how it is being a cop around here, but back in the States being black and a cop has some … complications. She said she couldn’t stand my being a cop. The truth is our paths drifted further and further apart. By the time she was getting her MBA, I was getting my badge; she went corporate, I went to the streets. You know what I mean? My street life didn’t jive with her ambitions … Finally, I think she just stopped loving me. Perhaps we never stood a chance from the beginning.’
Did I miss her? Hell yeah, and the more she couldn’t stand me the more I wanted her. The more life in the streets took stuff out of me, the more I needed her. ‘ “You want to consume me!” Those were her last words to me,’ I said to O.
It takes a long time to be fair to your ex. I had thought it had been long enough, but the bitterness with which I had spoken suggested otherwise.
‘Listen, man,’ O said, sounding stoned, ‘I know just what you mean. Last night I wanted to consume my wife …’ He paused. ‘What a beautiful word: consume.’ He let the word roll off his tongue a few more times.
‘I think, at the end of it all, my wife hated me, and that was one of the hardest things to accept,’ I continued, feeling that now I had started my confession I had to get it all out in the open. ‘I couldn’t reconcile myself to the fact that over the years she developed a basic contempt for me and found my work petty. “A simple man after simple truths,” she liked to say at the end of every argument.’ I paused and looked up into O’s bloodshot eyes. ‘I knew things were coming to an end when she started giving me this look. I had never seen it before, and I can’t really describe it, but it contained a fucked-up mix of contempt, resentment, self-loathing and love. I mean, she would bite her lip and look deep into my eyes as if she was trying to tell me something telepathically … It was creepy.’
‘Shit, man, you should have just asked her what she was trying to tell you,’ O said.
‘Yeah, I suppose, but I was going through my own shit: at work, with my parents. I was growing up. I didn’t know how to ask. Do you know what I mean?’
O gave me that blank look of his. ‘No, I do not know what you mean. You gotta ask … Always ask,’ he said with conviction and took a deep drag on his joint.
‘I’ll get them to put that on your tombstone,’ I said. ‘Detective O: always ask.’
‘And what does she do now?’
‘She works for Shell … Runs their business offices in New York. Good for her, I guess.’
‘You have to appreciate this here irony,’ O said, trying his American accent again. ‘Look, man, Shell is busy fucking Africa and she thinks you are the bad guy ’cos you are a black cop? See what I mean?’ He had this look of satisfaction on his face, like he had just relieved me of a great burden. He was high. I wasn’t.
‘Jesus, O! This shit is too heavy for breakfast. Let’s save it for a drunken night,’ I said, standing up and starting to pace up and down. ‘Fucking down time! We need something to do. I’m going crazy.’
‘My wife and I, we have rules, man,’ O said, looking contemplative. ‘I come home and have to be a husband, no matter what. I have to leave my work right at that door. Maria says, “I don’t treat you like a kid, so don’t treat me like a criminal.” Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I can still tell her about my day and some of the shit that goes down, but I can’t break dishes and throw things around. I’m not allowed to take it out on her. It might seem strange to you, but shit works, man …’
Did my ex and I have such rules, even unspoken ones? In true American spirit we wanted everything examined, laid out on the table and talked about – family time, we called it. But surely a marriage has to have a dark basement that no one goes to – where some things are thrown and left to rot because they are toxic? Maybe what my wife and I had needed were secrets?
‘Why did you decide to become a cop?’ I asked O, changing tack. Everyone wants to know why people are who they are – and more so with cops. The question really is: What made you dumb enough to risk your life for a head full of bad dreams, a failed marriage and no pay?
‘There was only one university in the whole country back in the day. I didn’t get in. It was either this, join the army or become a criminal,’ O said, sounding as if everyone in Kenya had faced the same choices.
Why had I become a cop? I had talked about it often enough to have a prepared answer – wanting to do some good – but the actual reasons were more complex. I had gone to college, graduated with a useless degree that I could only have turned into a living by getting my PhD and becoming a professor … But the boredom! I did not want to become a drone, reciting the same lectures from ten years earlier about the US Constitution – although that’s exactly what my parents wanted for me.
My father worked as an accountant and my mother taught at a community college. I was an only child, and on their combined salaries we had lived well. I didn’t join the force because it was the only way to get out of poverty. I was a rebel. I didn’t want to become part of the black middle class with aspirations of whiteness – piano lessons and debutante balls. I had seen that world and didn’t like it one little bit, so I had opted out and become a cop. So, even though my ex-wife thought I was a traitor to my race, to my mind I was more of myself than I would ever have been being black on someone else’s terms. A paradox, but then what in life isn’t?
‘I didn’t want to join the black middle class,’ I answered O. ‘It’s true, I’m not out there fighting the man, but I do something,’ I added.
‘That’s ’cos you are the man,’ O said and laughed.
Just as I was about to call O a choice word, his phone started ringing. He grinned from ear to ear. We both knew this was the call. It had to be.
‘This had better not be my lovely wife,’ he said as he answered. I was beside myself with curiosity, but O’s face told me only that it was bad news – his jaw tense. ‘Shit, he wants to talk to you,’ he finally said, handing the phone over to me.
‘O and I go a long way back. Tell him Lord Thompson wants to see you. Young man, I promise not to waste your time,’ an old voice said before the line went dead.
‘This cannot be good,’ O said as he put out his joint and dabbed his eyes with cold water, ‘but we have to go. Shit, I will have to do the dishes later.’
Down time hadn’t been too bad, all things considered – it was still only one pm.
LORD THOMPSON
We drove away from Nairobi and headed into the farmlands. Outside of the city the roads were just as bad – if not worse – and just as in Nairobi the hawkers crowded around us at each massive pothole trying to sell us cigarettes, roasted corn and newspapers that screamed The Case of the Dead White Girl: American Detective in Kenya.
‘Imagine this,’ O said, trying to explain what Lord Thompson was like, ‘what if a white slave owner convinced himself he was a slave and then tried to live like one?’
‘You mean he became an abolitionist?’ I asked.
‘No, everything remains the same except that he actually lives like a slave,’ he said as if I was missing the most obvious point in the world.
‘He becomes a slave by choice?’
O finally gave up. ‘No, man. You know what, let’s just get there,’ he said, the frustration in his voice plain. ‘You have to see this shit for yourself. Then you will understand.’
After an hour of driving the road turned abruptly into a bumpy dirt track and almost immediately the landscape also changed. Where, before, the vegetation had been a thick luscious green, here, long dry grass that looked ready for a fire was interspersed with short dusty thickets of thirsty looking trees.
Thirty or so minutes later we turned off the main road onto another, smaller dirt track and not long after that the scenery changed once again. After the desolation we had just driven through I wasn’t prepared for the plush oasis that suddenly surrounded me. The trees were green, the vegetation once again lush and the well-maintained road lined with rose bushes, their red bl
ooms in stark contrast to the white stones that were spaced out between them. Even more incredible was that the road continued for close to three miles.
‘Camouflage …’ O muttered to himself. ‘This is how they hide. You would never think to look for them here.’
‘Who?’
‘The rich whites,’ O answered. ‘They prefer to remain invisible, so they create islands like this one.’
‘Why?’
‘History, man, history. It’s the deal. After colonialism, they were supposed to remain invisible, and we were supposed to forget what they did,’ O said bitterly. ‘So they hide out in places like this.’
I didn’t quite understand what he meant and didn’t have time to ask – we had arrived at the gate.
After O had shown his badge to the guards on the gate we were allowed to make our way along the final few hundred metres of what was now a tarmacked road to emerge in front of what was undoubtedly the most gratuitously sized house I had ever seen – it wasn’t a house, it was a presidential palace. How could a man who lived like a slave live in a house like this? O had been right: I had to see for myself.
Having parked O’s battered Land Rover on the expanse of gravel in front of the house we made our way up the red-carpeted stairs, many of them, until we got to the enormous front door. Once there O pulled a rope which rang what sounded like a giant bell somewhere deep inside the house, and moments later two Africans dressed in white shirts and shorts rolled back the huge oak doors.
We were led through spacious, elegant rooms – the kind I had only seen in catalogues (not even Maple Bluff compared) – before, finally, we came to a room that had two white guards in front it – AK-47s, full battle regalia, you name it.
‘South African mercenaries,’ O whispered.
They looked every bit the cliché: muscled, bearded and tattooed – they could have been cardboard cut-outs. I hated them on sight.
O reached into his shoulder holster and gave them his piece. I followed suit, and satisfied that we had been relieved of our weapons they opened the huge door to a darkened room. The first thing that hit me was the smell. The room reeked of human decay: of unwashed feet, rotting teeth and death – BQ’s morgue smelled like a wedding party compared to the stench that filled the room. But before I could say anything O had already stepped forward into the gloom and there was nothing I could do but follow.
As the mercenaries closed the doors behind us, and the little light it had provided was snuffed out, darkness reclaimed the room. I heard shuffling feet and curtains being drawn, then more shuffling and more curtains opening until the room was filled with late-afternoon sunlight. Then, from the sudden blaze of light, a sickly, balding, Gandhi-like figure wrapped in a dirty white sheet emerged, poured some water into a beaten-up pot and placed it on the wood burner that sat incongruously in the middle of the dilapidated room. Now this is some weird shit, I thought. At last I could see what O had been trying to tell me earlier – Lord Thompson lived like an African, or more precisely he lived the stereotype of the African. The slave-master lived like a slave but in his mansion. He had converted his bedroom into slave quarters.
The water in the pot came to a boil almost immediately, and I watched as Lord Thompson threw in some tea leaves and sugar from two huge sacks next to the stove. A couple of minutes later he reached into a churn next to the wood burner and came out with a cup of milk that he added to the pot.
‘Fresh from the farm,’ he cried out to us as he stirred the pot a couple of times before lifting it from the fire and placing it on the dirty cement with his bare hands, flicking his fingers in the air to cool them down. ‘Some tea, gentlemen?’ he asked.
Lord Thompson poured his tea into two huge tin cups before producing a loaf of bread, which he promptly tore into three pieces using his bare hands – old, spotted and dirty. We had been standing all along, but once he had finished with his tea and bread, he waved us towards a number of three-legged stools arranged around the wood burner.
Once we had seated ourselves, and Lord Thompson had handed O and me our tea and bread, he sat down next to me, reached into his overalls and produced a pair of eyeglasses, to get a better look at me, he said.
‘When I heard there was an American policeman on our bit of the earth, I thought, why not invite him over?’ Lord Thompson began. ‘As my people say: He who does not leave his home thinks his mother is the best cook. I wanted you to taste my cooking before you return to your mother’s.’ His accent was very much like O’s, but I could detect an English accent under the African one. ‘I was expecting a white man,’ he continued. ‘But you, you surprise me.’
I hadn’t thought that someone reading about me in the paper wouldn’t be able to tell from my name that I wasn’t white. I didn’t ask him why it mattered – perhaps it was a calculated slight.
‘And I must thank you for your hospitality,’ I said as I tore into the bread and took a sip of tea. The tea was amazing! Who knew tea could taste like this? Fuck my coffee back in that dingy little café in Madison, I thought. I was moving on.
Lord Thompson surprised me because he wanted to know how the US economy was faring. He talked about the dollar in the world market and declared that the enemy of the United States was not Japan, which was buying America up, but China, which was buying up the treasury.
‘So, Ishmael.’ It took forever before the question left his mouth, but when it came it took me by surprise. ‘Ishmael, where is your white whale? You have a white whale, don’t you?’ he asked in his half-African, half-British accent.
‘I was named after my great, great-grandfather, Ishmael Fofona,’ I replied coldly. ‘I know who I am.’
‘This Ishmael Fofona … He must have been an African prince. You carry yourself rather well,’ he said, seemingly genuinely unaware of the condescension in his words.
‘And the white whale, it was Ahab not Ishmael …’ I began, but then paused, realising that there was no point in antagonising the old man. We needed him more than he needed us. ‘But, yes, I do have my own white whale …’ I finished lamely.
‘To kill or be killed by,’ Lord Thompson said pointedly, looking at O. ‘The devil will get us all in the end. Is that not so, O?’
‘Just tell us why you called,’ O said, putting a hard edge into his voice.
‘Me and O here, we go way back,’ Lord Thompson continued, ignoring O’s question. ‘Have you not told him? Come on now, Detective Odhiambo, that is not the way to treat your brother.’ The amused contempt in the word brother was unmistakable.
O was silent.
‘Ah, my dear brother …’ Lord Thompson said, turning to me. ‘So, he did not tell you, did he?’ He paused as if gathering himself. ‘Twice I have been acquitted,’ he finally continued. ‘One was self-defence. The other was purely accidental. I have the great fortune of African justice working in my favour, and O does not like it. Isn’t that so, O?’ he asked, still looking at me.
I turned to look at O, expecting some response, but he didn’t say anything – he simply smiled, like he knew something Lord Thompson did not.
‘O here thought I shot them like dogs,’ the old man continued. ‘But I was in front of a white judge and he acquitted me. That may not seem like much to you, but whites in this country hate me. Look around you. Whatever I am, I am African. My DNA is from my white parents, my skin is white, but my soul is African. I would never kill one of us,’ he said with conviction.
O just kept smiling to himself.
‘Enough of this,’ Lord Thompson said, perhaps sensing that O wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of an argument. ‘Ishmael, I will give you what you came for. Go to the Timbuktu Bar in Eastleigh. There you will find another guide. What you seek is in Africa. One dot connects the next. And as my people say: Only the traveller knows the road.’ Having finished his speech he rang a little bell and the doors opened.
As I followed O out of Lord Thompson’s room I wondered at the way I felt. I couldn’t remember anyone eliciting
so much anger and hatred from me in one meeting before. I wanted to hit him so bad, break a bone or two and force him to see the world he had created around him for what it really was – a lie. Perhaps it wasn’t all about him? Perhaps it was about my relationship to white folk back in the US, but whatever it was it was powerful. And to claim that he was African? What the fuck was that all about? I was beginning to hate actively, I realised as O and I retrieved our weapons from the mercenaries, and I didn’t like it. Facts and truth get lost in hate.
Making our way back to Eastleigh in the Land Rover, we talked about our next move and Lord Thompson’s motives. This much we knew: the old man had more information than he had given us. But we also knew that we were finally on to something. There was nothing more we could do except play along until he had revealed his hand. We had to be cautious. Mistakes, hesitations, miscalculations – no more of that, we had to be at our best.
We got to Timbuktu Bar around eight pm. I entered first. The place was empty save for the bartender and a butcher in a bloody apron – probably fresh from slaughtering what would soon become the evening’s nyama choma. It wasn’t an upscale place, but unlike The Hilton Hotel bar it did have a cement floor, an iron roof and jukebox. There was nothing to do except wait, so I asked for a Tusker and sat in a booth. O came in a few minutes later, sat at the counter farthest from the entrance and ordered a Tusker as well.
After a little while people started trickling into the bar and the jukebox came to life, blaring Lingala song after Lingala song – the music all sounded the same, with an annoyingly high-pitched guitar solo at the end of each song. By midnight the place was almost packed. It was an odd mixture of people – different races and classes. The well-to-do folk – some white, some black – were drinking liquor while the rest of us sipped our Tuskers. Couples slipped in and out of the bathroom. Sometimes money changed hands – for drugs or sex, I assumed.
Two hours later I was getting a little tipsy, and was at the point where I was thinking I should just join O at the counter and make a night of it – none of the people in the bar had looked in any way suspicious or sent a look of recognition my way. But just at that moment, a young couple started arguing loudly in Kiswahili by the jukebox, presumably over what to play. People looked on and laughed in amusement. Finally, the couple found a song, Bob Marley’s ‘Is This Love’, a staple from my college days, and before long they were dancing and kissing to whistles and cheers from the tipsy crowd. O made eye contact to ask what I thought of them. I shook my head and he turned back to his beer.
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