Nairobi Heat

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  ‘It could be Jamal setting us up,’ I suggested.

  ‘No, he would not have announced himself. Let’s play it out,’ O countered.

  I suggested we leave Muddy behind but she wouldn’t hear of it. If they were following us then they probably knew we were going to the airport, she argued. And they would know we knew something was up if we left her in the middle of nowhere.

  While we decided what to do we filled the tank and O rummaged through the trunk until, from beneath the spare wheel, he produced a vest. He gave it to Muddy who expertly strapped it over her sweater. Earlier, while I was busy packing, I had given my vest to O to replace his ruined one – I was leaving for the US and I hadn’t thought I’d need it again.

  ‘Ah, the king and queen have to the protected,’ O joked, slapping his hand against my vest and laughing at the situation.

  I couldn’t very well take my vest back. Besides, I literally owed him my life – twice.

  After thirty minutes or so back on the road the same two cars were behind us again. They must have pulled over somewhere and waited for us.

  ‘My friends, let us not wait for the fat lady to sing, eh,’ Jamal said when he called again. ‘Would you rather have a Range Rover or a Peugeot?’ Somewhere along the way he had changed cars and he was now tailing us in a black Mercedes-Benz.

  As far as I was concerned we were screwed either way. I asked O what he thought. We were in an old Land Rover and would never outrun the Range Rover, he confirmed. But even though the smaller car was much faster than us we could probably bully it off the road.

  ‘And we will be firing down on it,’ Muddy added.

  ‘Peugeot,’ I said to Jamal, feeling a familiar tightness coming over my chest.

  ‘Follow my lead then,’ Jamal said. ‘And, my friend, good luck.’

  Things are different when you have more than your own life to lose, and not just any life but that of someone you care about deeply. I found myself silently praying for Muddy’s safety. I reached out for her hand.

  ‘I am not a little girl, you fucking idiot,’ she said fiercely, pushing my hand away. ‘Give me a weapon.’

  Fuck it, she’s right, I thought. Chances were that she had seen more violence than either O or I ever would.

  ‘Now I really like her,’ O said to no one in particular as he reached underneath his seat and produced a 9mm that I immediately recognised as belonging to one of the hoodlums from Mathare.

  Muddy removed the magazine, checked it and slapped it back in, then she took the safety off and casually advised me to do the same. Sound advice for no sooner had I prepared my weapon than we heard a loud bang followed by AK-47 fire. Jamal had pounced, and we looked back to see him and his bodyguards firing into the Range Rover. Immediately the Peugeot lurched forward and hurtled towards us, expertly weaving past the cars separating us.

  I hate the moments before the action, but once it starts I am okay, I can think and act fast – sometimes. I fired through the back window so that it shattered, spraying the Peugeot with glass, then I fired again, making two neat holes through their windscreen, but despite my best efforts it stayed on our tail as we dodged in and out of traffic.

  Muddy shouted for me to cover her, and I emptied my Glock into the Peugeot as she slipped through the divider into the back of the Land Rover. The Peugeot veered dangerously across the road to try and avoid the hail of bullets, but as soon as Muddy had pulled up the spare tyre to use as cover the driver steadied the car, sped up and moved alongside us. AK-47 fire tore into the Land Rover as one of the men in the back tried to shoot the tyres on the driver’s side. It wasn’t long before they gave way to the rims, pulling the Land Rover into the Peugeot and driving them off the road. O tried to keep going, but we all knew that there was no way we were going to make it – the Peugeot was back on the road and rapidly gaining on us.

  With nothing left to lose O sped up and just at the moment when it looked like he was going to lose control, he spun the Land Rover so that it stopped with its length blocking the road. Jumping out, we took cover behind it: Muddy on one side and me on the other, with O behind the body of the Land Rover. The Peugeot stopped. If they stepped out of the car, to make it four against three, we stood a chance. Instead it revved up before furiously shooting forward, gaining speed as it approached us. They were going to ram the Land Rover, forcing us to scatter into the open. We fired rapidly at the Peugeot but it doggedly sped towards us.

  As I quickly reloaded I saw Muddy step out from behind the Land Rover, take one step forward, so that her right foot was slightly in front of her left, and lower the 9mm. I panicked, thinking she was trying to sacrifice herself to give O and me a chance, but then I saw her lift the weapon again and take aim. She stood very still for what seemed like an eternity – the bullets striking the ground around her – then, finally, I saw her hand kick up. Inside the Peugeot the driver’s head snapped backwards and the car immediately went into a slide, ramming into the Land Rover. I dived out of the way, rolling to my knees, but even as I did so I saw Muddy flying backwards into the air. She had been hit.

  I crept towards the car that was now a mixture of mangled metal, broken glass and blood. Both the driver and the front passenger were dead, but the white and black gunmen in the back seat were both still alive. I shot the white gunman because he was closest to me and as far as I could tell the least badly injured. Immediately, the black gunman started yelling at me not to kill him, but I wasn’t planning to – I needed some information. I ordered him out of the car, and, yelling in pain, he tried to comply before he fell heavily to the ground. Instinct told me that he was pretending, but I still started to rush around the car, diving to the ground at the last minute – if he had a weapon I knew he would be aiming high. He tried to adjust but he was too slow. I fired once, hitting him in the stomach, and he slammed against the car.

  It was as I was getting up to finish him off that I realised that he looked vaguely familiar. He must have picked up on my reaction because he reached up weakly and removed the Rasta hat. His dreadlocks unravelled. It was the musician; Muddy’s guitarist. I was seized by rage, and I started to squeeze the trigger, but then I heard Muddy’s voice shouting at me to stop.

  When I got to her Muddy was on her knees, doubled over in pain by the side of the road. It was a good thing she had been wearing O’s vest, otherwise she would almost certainly not have made it. It was also a good thing she had talked me out of leaving her back at the service station, I thought as I helped her to her feet, otherwise O and I would definitely not have made it. O! Looking around I saw that he was also getting slowly getting to his feet.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Muddy asked the guitarist as soon as we made it back to the Peugeot. ‘Who sent you? It’s too late … just speak.’

  ‘Joshua. It was Joshua,’ the musician sobbed. ‘Why are you trying to destroy him? Only the American was supposed to die.’

  He must have been very stupid or have thought we were – AK-47s are not for targeted assassinations, and it was obvious to everyone that Muddy, O and I were all supposed to die.

  ‘How did they know where to find us?’ I asked, then suddenly remembered having met him earlier that morning at the gate to Muddy’s house.

  ‘I told him … I trusted him,’ Muddy said, looking down at him.

  The guitarist looked away, wiping the sweat from his face with a bloodied hand.

  ‘Either you or him, Muddy. We put him in jail and he will be back on the streets in no time,’ O said to Muddy as he hobbled up to us. It was as if he was giving a golfing partner a tip. ‘End it now.’

  ‘It was just for the money. Let me go, you have to let me go,’ the guitarist pleaded with us even as he struggled for breath. ‘I have a life … songs … I have many songs. Muddy, please, tell them, I have many songs.’

  ‘You had no business being here,’ Muddy told him coldly. ‘I trusted you like no one else in my life.’

  ‘How do you know it was Joshua?’ I asked him.

/>   ‘Look, look at this … I will testify.’ He handed me a bloody MoneyGram receipt from his shirt pocket. It was for one hundred thousand Kenyan shillings. The sender’s name was Joshua Hakizimana and the money had been sent from Chicago, a mere two-and-half hour drive from Madison. But what would that prove? Chicago was a big city and no one in those kinds of cheque-cashing places ever asked for ID. The money could have come from anyone – the musician had nothing.

  ‘Do you know anything about the girl?’ I asked him, hoping for his own sake that he had something tangible. My rage had dissipated, but Muddy’s anger was palpable.

  ‘Look, man, you can get him with that, can’t you?’ the guitarist asked, half in hope and half in doubt. ‘I swear you can get him with that. His bank account, you can trace it … That is a lot of money, isn’t it?’

  Looking over at Muddy I shook my head, wanting to ask her to let him go but not knowing how to begin. ‘You were willing to kill us for two thousand dollars, that is all this means,’ I said sadly, rolling up the MoneyGram receipt into a little ball and throwing it back at him.

  As if in response Muddy lifted her 9mm and pointed it at the guitarist’s head. Trembling, he put his hands together as if he wanted to say a prayer, then, as Muddy hesitated, he started to sing softly. ‘Well, I wish I was a catfish, swimmin’ in an oh, deep, blue sea,’ he sang, looking first at O and then at me. ‘I would have all you good-lookin’ women fishin’, fishin’ after …’

  But just as I thought something would give, or that we would at least see something worth saving in the guitarist or in ourselves, Muddy shot him in the head. She did not even let him finish the verse.

  Surely we could have let him live – threatened him with death if we ever saw him again, whatever. I sank to the ground and covered my face in my hands, tired and hopeless. People had just died and there was no reason why we were alive other than the fact that we had more experience and better training than the four we had just killed. I lifted up my face, expecting to find a different woman in front of me than the Muddy I knew. I expected to find her transformed into something ugly, a cold killer with cold eyes, but she was still the same beautiful woman and I still loved her. Nothing made sense.

  A few minutes later Jamal’s black Mercedes limped up to the wreckage, the giant and another of his men dead in the back seat.

  ‘Really nice to see you again, old man,’ O said to Jamal, breaking off from searching the bodies in the Peugeot for identification.

  ‘I have no doubt about that, my brother,’ Jamal said, climbing out of the battered Benz.

  ‘Do you know who sent them?’ I asked him, gesturing towards the three dead white men. Dressed in expensive business suits, they were clearly American, but I already knew that we would find nothing on them to tie them to Joshua or the Foundation. But where else could they have come from?

  ‘Them white boys, they are Foundation men, straight from the US,’ Jamal confirmed.

  ‘Joshua or the Foundation?’ O asked him.

  ‘I have no idea. We are in the middle of a civil war right now, and they could have been sent by anyone, but they are Foundation men …’

  ‘How did you know?’ I asked.

  ‘The guitarist was their contact,’ Jamal said, cocking his head as the sound of police sirens came to us from further down the road. ‘He came to me thinking I was with them. He just couldn’t keep from singing.’ He laughed at his own witticism and hopped back into his wrecked Mercedes. ‘Travel well, my friend,’ he told me as he started the engine.

  ‘I hope to God I never run into that asshole again,’ O said as Jamal drove away. ‘He scares me.’

  What O didn’t say was that we both knew Jamal would collect on the debt we owed him, and when that day came we would have to pay – he had just saved our lives.

  Back at O’s place – after a brief visit to the station and another short session with the Director of Investigations – O and Muddy decided between them that it would be best if I left through Uganda. It was obvious that the Foundation would do everything in its power to prevent me getting to the airport – we had been lucky once, but we might not be so lucky again. The plan was simple enough. We would hire a car, drive all night and most of the next day before stopping at a village called Butere, which was close to the Ugandan border. Muddy had a friend who lived there. She hadn’t seen her in years, but was sure we would be welcome. At the village, we would get some rest, then closer to my flight time we would slip across the border under cover of darkness.

  We drove, taking turns every two hours. Sometimes I fell into a deep dreamless sleep and woke to find either O or Muddy smoking up a storm. At other times, as O drove, Muddy would slip into the back and we would make out or rest against each other. And at other times I drove, feeling as if in returning to the US I was leaving myself behind. It was almost as if the America I was going to seemed to slip further and further away the closer we got to the border.

  There was a lot of time to think, and I found my mind returning again and again to what had happened on the road to the airport only a few hours earlier. I had killed based on the calculation that it was better to take one man alive than two. On top of that I had calculated that the less injured man was more of a threat and less likely to talk. Based on these calculations, calculations that I would never have thought myself capable of before I came to Africa, I had shot the white gunman. If I had waited less than two minutes Muddy would have come, and in another three O, and in ten Jamal. Not that this would have saved the guitarist or the white gunman – they certainly would not have survived O and Muddy. My calculations were wrong, but it did not matter because either way I looked at it the two men would still have died.

  As the sun rose I tried to put these thoughts to the back of my mind and concentrate instead on the beauty of the unfolding landscape. Back home in the US nature has been compromised – chemicals poured into the earth and animals so that everything is big and colourless – but in Kenya it is still full. This isn’t some kind of romanticised American shit, like the wise old African who speaks in proverbs and parables, but an honest reaction to the fact that I could still see the soil through the grass, that mud ran along even the best of the roads, that I could look at a cow and know that’s where my nyama choma came from. Life wasn’t yet sanitised, it was still as it should be – in tandem with science, but not at the expense of human hands digging into the soil. If I ever came back to Kenya it would be to buy a small farm. Perhaps having found so much ugliness, and having contributed to its creation, I was projecting my hunger for something positive to take back with me on the landscape. A shrink would say that. To which I would say, where’s the harm in that?

  We had been driving for almost twenty-four hours, stopping only for petrol. Finally, about ninety or so kilometres from the border, we came to Butere. The village was very poor, but in contrast to the poverty I had seen in Mathare it was a paradise. There were no UNICEF children running around and the village was meticulously clean – the bare ground still bearing the marks of sisal brooms. Even the bar we walked past maintained a poor dignity.

  There was music playing somewhere close by, so we followed it until we came upon a soccer field where a makeshift tent had been erected – it was clear that a wedding was just about to take place. We asked around for Muddy’s friend, but no one knew for sure where she was. Even though we were strangers, we were invited to stay for the wedding and we gladly and hungrily agreed.

  The wedding ceremony started with a number of smartly dressed little girls and boys walking through the crowd to the makeshift dais, singing a hymn in Kiswahili as they threw handfuls of petals to the ground. They were followed by the wedding party, the groom, dressed in what was clearly a much-worn tuxedo a few sizes too big for him, and finally the bride, dressed in a white gown browned at the edges by the dust. The bride and groom kept looking at each other and breaking into giggles, so much so that the ceremony seemed to be keeping them apart rather than joining them together. The
priest was long-winded, but eventually he pronounced them man and wife – though I could only guess, with Muddy too tired to interpret, from the kiss and the clapping.

  A reception followed, and after eating a large plate of delicious beef stew with rice I decided to walk around a bit. I hadn’t been alone for a long while, and we had been cooped up in the car together for what felt like forever. There really wasn’t much to see, but it felt good to just walk around.

  On the other side of the soccer field I found an old man trying to hold down a goat for slaughtering. He was surrounded by a group of young men and they were chatting and laughing loudly, but as soon as the old man saw me he called out. I didn’t understand a word he said, but it was clear that they needed an extra hand. I went over and held the goat’s foreleg as he expertly tilted the animal’s head so that it was pressed on the ground, plunged the knife into its throat, and then slit it. The goat tried to kick, but we were firmly holding it to the ground, and I watched indifferently as death slowly overcame it.

  The old man started skinning the goat expertly, but when he was almost done he suddenly stopped and handed me the knife, pointing to the final piece of skin that was attached to the carcass. The knife was sharp and it wasn’t too difficult to cut away the last of the skin and lift it off the goat – though the young men applauded me like I had just performed some kind of magic trick. Then the old man took my hand and gently guided it so that I disembowelled the goat. I pulled back as soon as the smell from the stomach hit my nostrils – a warm and sticky smell – but laughed when I realised that it wasn’t a bad smell. Taking back his knife, the old man then took out the stomach and pointed me to where there was a basin of water. I understood that this was my next job, and taking the stomach from him I went to the basin and started washing out the contents.

  Thirty minutes later I returned with the clean stomach and was met by the familiar smell of nyama choma. The old man laughed when I showed him the stomach. He gestured until I realised what he was saying – it was too clean and some of the taste would be gone. He walked to the fire, cut a small piece off one of the hunks of roasting meat and, after tossing it back and forth to cool it a little, put it into my hand. It was simply the best piece of food I’ve ever had.