Half an hour later, I was done with waiting, and decided to go to bathroom before joining O at the bar. Standing up, I finished what was left of my Tusker. I had long ago learned the hard way never to leave half of anything out in the open when working a case. Once, when I had just made detective, I was on a petty drugs case. Well, the fucker I was following slipped a heavy laxative in my coffee. Of course, I lost him and spent a whole day in the bathroom, burning ass and all. Finally, a uniform arrested him for drunk driving, but it had taken a long time to live it down.
I was thinking about that and how this thankless job is not without its humorous moments as I peed, half smiling to myself when the door opened. It was the young man from the jukebox. He nodded drunkenly. I continued taking my piss. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw a blur of movement. I turned, pissing all over the place – on him and the walls – as I barely managed to stop him burying a knife in my neck.
When faced with a knife you will get injured, it’s just a question of where and how badly. The main thing is to protect your wrists and vital organs. Everything else is fair game. Luckily the man was quite a bit shorter than me, and after his initial attack I managed to grab him in a way that meant he could only jab the knife ineffectually into my shoulder.
Unable to reach for my gun, I finally pushed the knife above us, stepped in and kneed him in the stomach. He doubled over, and holding his right hand up with my left I gave him an uppercut so that his head snapped backwards, then I brought his hand down behind his back so that he spun around. But even as the knife clattered to the floor I heard two gunshots above the music in the bar and the sound of screaming.
Seconds later the woman the young man had been dancing with walked in with what looked like a .32 in her hand. She had shot O. I was now alone.
I couldn’t let the young man go. I had to use him as a shield while reaching for my gun. She yelled something to him in Kiswahili and he ducked down, moving to the left. I felt a bullet whizz just past my right shoulder. Then he suddenly leapt away from me, stumbling into the urinal, leaving me exposed. I threw myself to the ground as I went for my gun, but I already knew it was too late.
She’s got the drop on me, I thought as I saw her narrow her eyes as she took aim. And, worse, my dick is hanging out of my pants. There was just time for the image of the dead white girl to flash through my mind one last time before the young woman’s gun went off.
For a moment I thought I was hit, but it was just the shock of landing hard on the floor. I looked up at her in surprise as her gun clattered to the floor and she sank to the ground with a look of incomprehension on her face – a thin trickle of blood running down her dress and onto her legs. Then I saw O standing behind her, bracing himself against the bathroom wall, a smoking gun in his hand.
The man contemplated us – calculating his choices I suppose – but it was all over; he had played out his hand.
I stood up and zipped up my pants. ‘Who sent you?’ I asked the man.
‘You, you mzungu tourist, we want money,’ he screamed back, trying to wipe my piss and whatever else was in the urinal out of his eyes.
‘Motherfucker, you call me a white man one more time and I’ll shoot you right here,’ I answered him. I was really tired of the mzungu shit.
O carefully unbuttoned his jacket and shirt. I could see two bullets lodged neatly in his vest, over his heart. ‘She called my name, I turned and she shot me,’ he said, grimacing in pain. Even with a vest, you still get quite a knock and he would be lucky if he hadn’t broken a rib. He staggered over and stood over the young man, his gun trained on him.
‘I tell you who sent me, you let me go,’ the young man said. It was half a statement, half a question.
‘Who sent you?’ I asked him.
‘Tell us what we want to know and you live,’ O offered.
‘I tell you, I go?’ he asked with disbelief.
‘To prison you dumb piece of shit,’ I shouted at him.
‘No deal …’ He put his hand over his mouth to show he wasn’t willing to talk.
‘Pick her up!’ O ordered him.
The young man hesitated and O shot at the wall just above his head.
‘Pick her up and put her on your shoulder,’ O shouted.
The young man scrambled to his feet, grabbed the dead woman by the waist and with some trouble hoisted her to his shoulder.
‘You tell us what we want to know and we let you carry your dead. You are a soldier … Tell us who gave the order,’ O said gently, with the kind of patronising understanding that an officer might use when questioning an enemy soldier. I had never heard him speak like that before, but to my surprise it worked.
‘Lord Thompson …’ the man said, his legs beginning to tremble with the effort of keeping the woman slung over his shoulder. ‘We do works for him all the time. He call, we go to his place. He pay, we work.’
‘Did he tell you why?’ I asked him.
‘No, no, no … He use code: “Cut weed from garden”. He pay, we do. No questions,’ he said, his eyes darting from my face to O’s as he wondered which one of us had the power to let him go.
‘You can go,’ O finally said, holstering his gun.
The man stumbled out of the bathroom and we followed – by now his back was covered in the woman’s blood and he left a trail of it in his wake. The bar was empty. Only the bartender remained.
‘Give me the money Lord Thompson paid you,’ I said to the man.
He hesitated, looked at O and then with his free hand he reached into his pocket and took out a wad of notes. I walked to the bartender and gave him the money.
Outside, in the street, the crowd from the bar – white and black, rich and poor – had formed itself into an angry mob, and as we emerged they started spitting and yelling at the man. We stood for a while and watched as he tried to carry the body of the woman through the throng, but it wasn’t long before they descended on him – punching and kicking. It was hard to believe this was the same crowd that was dancing just a few minutes ago. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he and the body he was carrying fell to the ground. Only then did O shoot several times into the air, and in the relative calm that followed tell the crowd to let the man go. By then the young man was sobbing, his legs trembling, but somehow he once again managed to pick up his accomplice, get her body over his shoulder and stagger off into the night.
We got into O’s Land Rover as the crowd filed back into the bar – with us gone it was no longer a crime scene.
‘Why did you let him go?’ I asked O.
‘If we’d taken him with us we’d have to babysit him,’ he replied curtly. ‘And anyway, you had already pissed all over him …’ He laughed and started up the Land Rover.
Without asking, I knew we were going to pay Lord Thompson a visit. The old fuck had tried to kill us and now we needed to find out why. He was the link we had been looking for.
‘All of this is just a game to him,’ O explained as he turned back onto the main road. ‘He could have had us back at the farm. It would have been easy enough. But, no, he has to send us on some wild goose chase to some bar …’
I couldn’t argue with that, it seemed to be well within the old man’s character, so instead I asked O what his deal was with Lord Thompson. It was time for a fuller explanation.
‘The first guy he killed was a poacher,’ O started. ‘Thompson hunted him. I mean he tracked him down like an animal and shot him. The Africans out on the farm told me. But in the end he was not even booked.’ He paused. ‘Poachers do not get much sympathy from me, but you don’t kill a man for killing an animal, I don’t care how beautiful it looks. Take him to prison, but do not kill him. The other guy he killed was a game warden. He was out on Thompson’s property looking for poachers. Again Lord Thompson tracked him down and afterwards claimed that he mistook him for a poacher. But that’s very unlikely. The guy was in a bright green game warden’s uniform. But he got away with it again: white skin and wealth equals
impunity.’
‘Ain’t that the truth everywhere,’ I said to him.
‘And there are other rumours I could never get to the bottom of: rapes and disappearances. That farm is his kingdom,’ O said.
I was suddenly very curious. O had told me that he had become a cop because he didn’t make it into the one and only university in Kenya, but in light of what I had seen of him his answer seemed flippant. What had made him so irresolute in his definition of good and evil? And where did his screwed-up sense of crime and punishment come from? I asked him, and well, he had a story to match my Random Killer story.
‘Well, let’s see …? A few years back a rich guy, his wife and two young children were murdered. Shot. With the rich shits it is almost always about money and rarely about sex. So, we followed the money and it led us straight to his business partner. Amos Kamau, that is the partner’s name, wanted to make all the money. It was not like their car import business was going bankrupt. It was not even a criminal enterprise, where the rules of the jungle might apply. They were a legit car import company that was doing well, making them both rich, but Amos just wanted everything for himself. So, we arrested him, but within a week we were ordered to release him, and just like that he was out. Everyone now knew he was a killer, no doubt, but he was out, bribed his way out. He wanted to make a point, so he asked that I drive him home. On the way I asked him whether he really did it. And he said yes. Why, I asked him. Guess what the little shit said? “Because I could get away with it.” Today he is chairing fund-raisers for politicians, giving money to poor children and generally living it up. His crime has been forgotten because of his good deeds.
‘A few weeks later, a poor man found a thousand shillings, just like that. He went home, fetched his wife and two kids and took them for nyama choma and ice cream. They had a good time. But when they got home, he killed them all. The neighbours called us. We got there to find him sitting outside his hut, his panga still wet with blood. No resistance from him. As I drove him to the station I asked him why he did it. He said he had been working all his life, waiting for a break. After thirty years, his only lucky break had been the thousand shillings. He had killed his family to spare them the hardships of the kind of life he was able to provide for them. So, I told him that his story would make sense only if he had killed himself as well, or at least tried to kill himself, but with him alive it looked like plain murder. I turned to look at him and he leaned closer and said: “But I am not mad.” It was not denial; his actions were those of a sane man who had come to the end of his road … He was hanged soon after,’ O said. ‘And the rich guy? What does he get in the end? Everything.
‘So, after that I started believing in justice I could see. We live in anarchy; life is cheap and the rich and the criminals can buy a whole lot of it. Meantime, someone has to be on the side of justice. Janet … That young man would have been out of jail the following day for five hundred shillings, and he would have found her. Maybe what I do matters, maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know.’ O stopped as if suddenly feeling self-conscious as his musings became scattered. ‘Ah, O the philosopher, the modern Socrates,’ he added with a laugh.
His story made sense and it didn’t, just like my Random Killer story – at some point it broke down. But intuitively it made sense. Or perhaps we all have an ink-blot case – the case that we use to justify every fucked-up thing we do.
‘Well, let’s go arrest the fucker,’ I said to O. ‘He can’t get away with it this time.’
At the gate we found two black guards warming themselves by a fire. It was two thirty am. O rolled his window down and showed them his badge, then he got out of the car. He spoke to them in Kiswahili for a few minutes, to explain the situation, I gathered. The guards didn’t say anything. They simply lifted the gate and we drove in. It didn’t surprise me – Lord Thompson wasn’t worth their lives, and rather than engage us it was simply easier to let us through. Thompson’s whiteness had long been a shield only because the black people around him held it up. And in return? Humiliation and murder were his stock-in-trades. It could have been revenge for the murders, or for his owning so much land while they owned nothing, or for mocking them by imitating what he thought the essence of African life to be, but the end result was the same – our being allowed into the house without as much as a single alarm going off.
This time we did not have to ring the bell – the guards had called ahead to their colleagues by the big oak doors and they stood open. When we got to Thompson’s bedroom, his two mercenaries were standing by the doors smoking. They hadn’t been informed of our arrival and we shot them as they fumbled for their AK-47s. They didn’t stand a chance.
As we made sure the mercenaries were really dead we heard screaming coming from inside Lord Thompson’s room. O threw open the bedroom door, but the gunshots must have registered as part of a nightmare, because although the old man was tossing and turning in his bed when we walked in, he was quite obviously fast asleep.
We turned the lights on, then woke him up. It took him a moment to adjust to the light before he yelled for his mercenaries. We waited for him to realise they weren’t coming to his rescue.
‘They are dead. It’s just you, O and me,’ I explained.
Dressed in his striped pyjamas, in his mahogany bed surrounded by squalor he looked truly comical.
‘Njoroge!’ he yelled for his help.
A few seconds later Njoroge sauntered in. He looked over at us and at the old man. ‘Sir, what seems to be the problem?’ he asked, but Lord Thompson didn’t understand him, he just looked at us with confusion.
‘Sir, everything seems to be in order,’ Njoroge continued calmly. ‘Have a good night.’ And with that he closed the door behind him. It was as if he had been practising those exact words his entire life.
Terror registered on the old man’s face. Betrayed by his black help, the nightmare that his whiteness had protected him from was standing before him.
‘You know why we are here?’ I asked him.
‘They failed, they failed, they failed,’ he chanted as if he needed to hear himself say it before he knew it was true.
‘Was it Joshua who asked you to do this?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. It was a white man. He asked me to help … said it was important,’ he answered.
‘And will you kindly tell us who this white man is?’ O asked as if Lord Thompson was a little kid.
‘His name is Samuel Alexander. He works for …’
‘The Refugee Centre,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘And why did he ask you to have us killed?’
‘I do not know. Samuel said that you and O were trying to bring him down. I did not ask anything more.’
It didn’t make any sense. The old man was wealthy and protected and no one was forcing him to help Samuel.
‘Why did you do it?’ I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
‘I don’t know, Ishmael. I don’t know … Because he asked,’ he answered. ‘Who knows why we really do anything.’
The poor fool, he couldn’t see it. He had done it to preserve an old order of race and class – because a fellow white man had asked him. And because he could. The same reason why he had killed before.
‘Listen, you are of no concern to me,’ I said. From the corner of my eye I could see O was getting impatient. ‘Give me something useful. What do you know about Joshua or the girl?’
‘Nothing about your girl. But I have heard things about Joshua …’
‘What things?’
‘That he can be cruel … In public he is all smiles, but he has a mean streak, yelling and threatening people when he does not get his way,’ the old man answered despairingly, only too aware of how useless his information was.
‘You really don’t know anything else, do you?’ O asked the old man.
‘The Refugee Centre, it’s run by the Never Again Foundation,’ Lord Thompson stammered. ‘To get to the truth, get to the Never Again Foundation.’
‘That w
e know. Try again, old man,’ I said, hoping he had more information – something conclusive – even though I knew he did not.
‘I told you this day would come,’ O said to him almost absent-mindedly.
‘I have lived for a long time,’ the old man replied, ‘but if you are going to kill me, at least let me die with some dignity.’
O didn’t say anything, so the old man looked at me, but I averted my eyes.
‘Let me die like a man!’ he shouted.
I was torn. I wanted to stop O, but Lord Thompson had two murders to answer for, and if things had gone his way, we would have been dead as well.
Walking over to a large chest, Lord Thompson removed a leopard skin, a beaded whisk and a large, regal-looking hat made out of lion-hide. Then, taking off his pyjamas, he put on his African best – finishing the effect by tying a number of brightly coloured amulets around his ankles. Finally, he stood up straight, and took a deep breath as if preparing for his death, but at the last minute his courage failed him.
‘Listen, Ishmael, I might know something …’ he said. ‘Okay? Okay? Let me think.’ He didn’t even pause. ‘Some African wisdom for you, eh, Ishmael?’ He gestured to me as one would to a person with whom one had something in common – as if we had some secret partnership that excluded O. ‘To catch ants, you use honey. You use honey to catch ants, you use cunning to …’
He didn’t finish the sentence because O shot him once through the head. Then, taking a lighter from his pocket, he struck a flame and threw it onto the bed which soon caught fire. There was a fury and logic in him I was beginning to understand – maybe because I was becoming like him. O had drawn a line between what he considered his world and the outside world. The good people – his wife, Janet, the dead white girl – existed in the outside world. When he was in that world, he was visiting and he behaved accordingly. He did not carry his bad dreams and conscience into it. But sometimes those from his world went to the outside world and did terrible things. And when he came across them, or they crossed back into his world, there were no rules, and there was no law. There was a duality to him that was so complete that he moved between the two worlds seamlessly.
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