PRAISE FOR MUKOMA WA NGUGI’S
NAIROBI HEAT
“An engaging insider’s view of the cultural divide between Americans and Africans.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Once [Ishmael] arrives in Africa, the entire scene bursts forth in riotous color; every detail, view, scent, and character leaps off the page.”
—LOS ANGELES EXAMINER
“A clever peek at life on both sides of the divide … [Ngugi] makes great use of his considerable talents for description and plot.”
—THE GLOBE AND MAIL (TORONTO)
“Thrilling.”
—MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE (TORONTO)
“Ngugi’s ability to weave a complex narrative, which connects crime and racial tensions in the U.S. to an in-depth knowledge of Kenya and its nuances, to Rwanda and its genocide past within this African crime thriller, is nothing but the work of a genius craftsman and wordsmith.”
—NEW AFRICAN MAGAZINE
“Nairobi Heat’s biggest triumph is the way it forces us to reexamine accepted narratives and received truths.”
—MAIL & GUARDIAN (SOUTH AFRICA)
“Nairobi Heat rises above being just great ‘international noir’ … Ngugi took it one step further and explored that murky world and motives of international charities, foundations, and religious zealots, and how the rest of the world pays for their conscience.”
—BLOGCRITICS.ORG
“From the evocative title of the first chapter to the last line, readers are forced to grapple with the touchy subjects of race, class, and the sometimes relative concept of justice.”
—CHIMURENGA
(SOUTH AFRICA)
“What I picked up as simply a fix for my nasty armchair traveler habit quickly became a riveting read. Not so much for plot points and twistaroos but for its decision to take on an interesting topic: race … But remember: if you can’t stand the heat, get out of Nairobi.”
—PULP300
“A hardboiled novel that I could easily imagine as a Hollywood movie, though with considerably more moral complexity than most movies manage … Compelling.”
—CRIMINAL ELEMENT
“A fast-paced thriller … in which the narrator finds himself in many a seedy situation, and the plot’s driven by a cynical view of the corruption of international NGOs … Mukoma Wa Ngugi is an excellent writer.”
—A STRIPED ARMCHAIR
“[A] welcome discovery.”
—MYSTERYPLACES.NET
MELVILLE INTERNATIONAL CRIME
BLACK STAR NAIROBI
Copyright © 2013 by Mukoma Wa Ngugi
First Melville House Printing: June 2013
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT
mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse
eISBN: 978-1-61219-211-6
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
v3.1
For my wife, Maureen Burke,
and my daughter, Nyambura Eileen Wa Mukoma
(for her eighteenth birthday in 2028)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: Gathering Clouds
Chapter 2: Anchoring Hope
Chapter 3: Fissures and Breakthroughs
Chapter 4: Coming Unhinged
Chapter 5: Meeting Helen
Chapter 6: Mourning Mary
Chapter 7: And Then it Rained
Chapter 8: Burying Mary
Chapter 9: Between Tijuana and A Hard Place
Chapter 10: The Proposal
Chapter 11: The Border Crossed US
Chapter 12: Back in the U.S. of A.
Chapter 13: Old Friends
Chapter 14: Finding Sahara
Chapter 15: Killing for O
Chapter 16: Amos’s Father
Chapter 17: Jesus on Steroids
Chapter 18: Finding Sahara
Chapter 19: And then it Rained
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
GATHERING CLOUDS
A day before the explosion at the Norfolk Hotel, O and I stood in the middle of the infamous Ngong Forest, looking at the body of what had once been a suit-wearing tall black man. Devoured by the wild animals of Ngong, the man’s corpse looked more like an animal carcass. This was the worst kind of death—the victim barely resembled a human being.
It was around midday but it might as well have been midnight, with us canvassing for clues in the light of a full moon—the canopy of the ancient trees let in an annoying in-between light, too low to see well in, yet too bright for flashlights.
O said it first.
“This man has many secrets to tell.” He pointed at the man’s face—the half smile left on it suggested to me triumph at being discovered.
That was the point of Ngong Forest—a corpse left there sent a message.
In the United States, there’s the Nevada desert—and football stadiums, if you count Jimmy Hoffa. In Kenya, if someone with enough credibility told you that he or she was going to send you to Ngong, you had better back down unless you could get them there first.
I hadn’t been in Kenya that long, but I could rattle off names: J. M. Kariuki, a radical of this or that, tortured to death, his body discovered by a herd boy. Robert Ouko, a well-groomed politician who had allegedly committed suicide in Ngong: first, he maimed himself, and then, when he didn’t bleed to death, he set himself on fire before finally shooting himself in the head. Witnesses for the prosecution and defense all died mysteriously, including the herd boy who, again, had found the body.
It was always a herd boy, venturing into the depths of the forest, who found the dead body. In our instance, he happened to have a cell phone and so we were able to get to the body in a matter of hours.
O and I should have just walked away. Add the detail that the disciplined grouping of the two shots, one through where the heart should have been and the other in the head, suggested a trained and efficient killer, and we should have run.
Had it been any other day last year, we would have. Since O and I set up what we had cleverly named the Black Star Agency three years ago, we had been working the strangest of cases: from missing penises—easy to solve with a sharp knee to the groin—to cheating spouses to rigged local council elections.
We were barely breaking even. It was only because O had never quit working for the CID that we were able to pilfer a missing-persons case here and a murder there, so we managed to stay afloat. Therefore, when Yusuf Hassan, the CID chief, threw the body at us, it was a favor. The CID would pick up the tab as well as pay me a consultancy fee.
More than just being flat broke, you could say we were like boxers who, having slugged through predictable wins, were ready to finally fight a worthy opponent. We were ready for a case like the one that nearly broke us, our first case together—the case of the dead white girl found on the porch of an African professor back in Madison, Wisconsin. Now, I’m not saying finding a missing penis is a waste of time, but sometimes, you just want to do what you do at your best, at its most challenging—not for show, but just because you are that damn good. We were hungering for real work … and some cash.
“Whoever killed him took the casings,” O said, pointing at their absence around the body.
We carefully pulled open the shredded jacket that was still wet from bodily fluids and rainwater. There were some clawed-through American dollars, a few euros, and Kenyan shillings, but no identification. His pants pockets w
ere empty. The suit had no label. He could have been anybody. This much I knew, though: to deserve the brutality of Ngong Forest, our guy had to be somebody.
“We might never figure out who he is,” I said, pointing to the barely fleshed bones that had been his hands. DNA was useful only with a large criminal database—Kenya’s was in its infancy, and unless we were extremely lucky, there would be no match. And dental records? Forget about it. We just had to hope that the body would yield some secrets.
There was nothing more to do but get the body to the pathologist. We didn’t have any body bags and the Administrative Police, or APs as we called them for short, had to carefully roll him onto a woolen blanket.
“Ishmael, you cannot come to Ngong Forest and not smoke a joint,” O announced, looking up at the sun filtering in like moonlight.
“We’re here—might as well enjoy the solitude,” he added and lit up.
O hadn’t changed much over the years—he still wore the same leather jacket, even on the hottest of Nairobi days. Though he was now in his early forties, he hadn’t put on weight. His thin frame made him look taller than he actually was. His eyes were always bloodshot from sleepless nights and too much weed. Whenever we were in a dangerous situation, a smile that seemed to suggest he knew something the other guy did not played on his lips. It had taken me a while to figure it out—he had no limits, he could maim, torture, and kill if that was what the situation required. It was just work for him. He had seen and caused enough death to come to terms with his own mortality. Most criminals are ready to kill but not to die—when fuckers met O, he had the advantage.
It was this capacity for duality, almost like a split personality, that ultimately made him dangerous. The good guy worked in the world of nine-to-five; he was happily married and always came home at the earliest possible moment. However, when we entered the world of thieves and murderers, he fit right in and he followed their rules as often as he made and broke them. There were advantages to working with a man like O—he never lost perspective, so much so that he often seemed cold. As long as you were on the same side, you were safe. I had once admired that but lately I had begun to fear what would happen if one day whatever held his duality in place came unhinged—and I happened to be standing on the other side.
“This place, it reminds me how lucky I am—just to be alive, to be walking out of here,” he said.
“Any excuse to smoke up?” I said, not believing a single word.
He laughed. “No, Ishmael, any excuse to celebrate life,” and he blew the dark marijuana smoke into the forest.
It was a long mile or so to the road and, as O sank deeper into his joint, I sank deeper into my mind, listening to the forest. There are several kinds of quiet: one kind is where everything around you is quiet, another is where everything around you is in rhythm and you are not—like the quiet that comes with white noise. The quiet in Ngong Forest was the noisy kind. We were no more or less loud than the wind forcing its way through the trees, or the laughing hyenas, roaring leopards, and God knows what else; we humans just happened to be making a different sound. The sound of tearing clothes caught in the bushes, well-padded shoes rubbing and pulling against the forest undergrowth, the curse that followed bare skin catching on something thorny. It was as if we were singing out of tune in a loud band. That feeling of being all too human made me want to get the fuck out of Ngong Forest.
We finally reached the road that cut across the forest. The other two APs we had left behind to make sure ghosts and criminals didn’t steal the police cars couldn’t hide their relief at seeing us. They enthusiastically helped roll the body in another blanket, heaved it into the back of their pick-up, and left for the pathologist.
Naturally, O and I went to Broadway’s Tavern to discuss the case over some Tusker beer and roast goat. It was how we did our best thinking.
Broadway’s Tavern, located between the slum of Kangemi and rich Mountain View Estate, had become our favorite joint over the last few years. It was an odd bar even on the best of days. Here, thieves, politicians, prostitutes, and cops made peace for the sake of beer and roast goat. It was a place where all those involved in criminal enterprises, be they the good or the bad guys, met. It was an informal trading house for information, where police and robbers exchanged tips—useful transactions, but ultimately self-serving. In matters of life and death, it was good for enemies to keep at least one door open—cops’ lives had been saved, as well as the lives of some criminals.
Civilians were not welcome—and I suppose no one without a connection to the underworld would have wanted to come in anyway. The bar was really just one huge room, with chairs made out of thin bamboo, and wooden tables, a jukebox, and a long counter. If you circled outside to the back of the building, you would find an open-air kitchen that made only nyama choma and ugali, the latter a dish I ate every now and then to remember grits back home.
There were standards to uphold, though: wife-beaters, rapists, murderers, and petty criminals knew to keep away from Broadway’s. In fact, more than once, someone at the bar had informed on some petty crook who had mistakenly sought sympathy from the classier professional criminals.
The bar made sense in another way, too, because the difference between Kenyan police and Kenyan criminals is that they just happen to be on opposite sides of the law. O, for one, could have just as easily been a criminal as a cop—and the longer I stayed in Kenya, the more I suspected the same of myself. There was no begrudging the others for the road they’d chosen. In the end, Broadway’s was a testament to the fact that we cops had accepted that crime would always exist. And we’d decided to make peace with the kind of criminal that had some professional decorum.
We walked into the bar just as the five o’clock news was coming on. It had taken me months to adjust to how seriously Kenyans take the news hour. All bar TVs change their channels to one of the news stations—regardless of whether there is a replay of a European cup football game on. It was like common prayer, only in this case it provided fodder for beer talk.
As in the U.S., news presenters in Kenya were household names—this evening, Catherine Kasavuli, the Katie Couric of Kenya, was on. MC Hammer immediately yelled that he wanted to marry her. Dressed in the real Hammer’s signature golden yellow pants, and with graying but dyed-red punkish hair, this MC Hammer was the jester in this court of police and robbers. He knew everyone and a bit of everything. MC Hammer was like a clown wearing a mask.
Senator Obama dominated the news, as he had since he declared his candidacy back in February—this time, it was about allegations that he was a Kenyan citizen and not an American. “Like being Kenyan is a crime,” MC Hammer scoffed.
O and I had been driving back to town from somewhere. I turned on the radio and there it was. Barack Hussein Obama had declared his candidacy. We’d gotten back to Nairobi to find everyone honking, some people waving Obama posters, others selling T-shirts and coffee mugs. Much later, an Obama beer called the Senator would be born, though the knowledgeable suggested it was more of the same—regular Tusker in an Obama beer can.
“Eh, Ishmael, how do you feel?” O had asked. “One of your own as the president of the U.S.A.?”
I had always thought of Obama as black like me. Black people in the U.S. had been at the center of it all—the building of the country, inventions, science, sports—yet somehow we had remained on the sidelines. To be in the White House, finally? And yet, there was something else I could not articulate: I didn’t feel like he could truly speak for me. But I guess the moment was bigger than any of us. Bill Clinton as the first black president? It was time to get rid of blackface presidents. I wanted Obama to win.
“How the fuck does racism survive this?” I asked O.
“You’ll be surprised—we have had only black presidents and look at Africa, look at how divided …” he said, turning his head to see my reaction.
“But enjoy it, it is going to be quite something,” O said more kindly, when I didn’t say anything.
As if on cue, the Kenyan president had got on the radio to say that the following day would be a public holiday. That was a good move; the whole country was going to be hungover tomorrow anyway.
For a moment, I had felt homesick. The strong but tired rhythm of small Madison, Wisconsin, where I had grown up; my parents and their pretense to wealth; beautiful Mo, the Pulitzer-winning journalist I had loved, but who saw me only as a black cop; the United States and its racisms of class and color. In that moment, I missed the career I had left behind. I missed my other life, my parallel life, the life I was supposed to live, the one that didn’t involve being in love with a woman like Muddy, or having a partner like O—the life with a pension ahead of me, and if I did not make it that far, at least my own would be taken care of. I even missed the euphemism “died in the line of duty.” Only for a moment, though, because the life I had chosen was here, in this country.
News about the upcoming Kenyan presidential elections followed—the usual name-calling—so-and-so was corrupt, a tribalist, and worst of all, it seemed, a politician. There was one piece of news that piqued our interest: large caches of machetes—made in China, like everything else everywhere—had been found at the port in Mombasa. It was not clear for whom they were intended, or for what purposes—the customs police were investigating.
“I have something to say,” MC Hammer said, standing up and fanning his bright gold pants as soon as the news went to commercials. “Kenyans taking over the world. Machetes from China. To those who might have bad intentions—just remember. You can’t touch this,” he said and started dancing. The whole bar shook with laughter.
“Nothing to worry about,” a man holding on to a Tusker bottle drunkenly chimed in. “We like to kill a little during election time—but we don’t have the stomach for Rwanda. This will pass. A little bloodletting to bless the democracy … A Chinese machete? My noggin is like a fortress—impenetrable.” Encouraged by the laughter, he stood up, chugged the rest of the beer, and broke the Tusker bottle on his head.
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