Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  Mary was correcting—or rather “marking,” I had come to learn it was called—exams. She said a quick hello and informed O that dinner was in the fridge, then moved from the sitting room into her office.

  “When you’re done, I need help … with my afro,” she called from her office before locking the door.

  Her afro, only an inch or so last year, now rivaled that of Angela Davis when she topped the FBI’s most wanted list back in the 1960s. Mary liked O to braid it into knots before going to bed, and it was always worth a laugh or two to sit and watch one of the toughest detectives in this part of the continent braiding his wife’s hair as he chatted away about nothing.

  We hadn’t eaten and we ploughed through the ugali and matumbo collard greens as we went through the security discs.

  “How would I get a bomb into the Norfolk?” O asked himself. “What would be the perfect cover? One that would allow you to go in and out without any questions asked?”

  “Construction … anything that gives you access to the hotel for a long period of time … Anything that makes it necessary for you to bring heavy equipment in and out,” I said, seeing where O was going.

  There were a few vans going through the gate in the videos but they left within a few minutes. In the logbook, their reasons for visiting were listed as food and beer deliveries. Finally, we found something: a week before the explosion one of the logbooks revealed a repairman whose reason for visiting was listed as “Fixing Hotel Boiler”—the company’s name was Ngotho Repair-It-All. We found the number, and a sleepy guard, thinking we were customers, gave us directions to follow in the morning.

  It was close to midnight by the time we made it to the shop down on River Road. O showed the guard his badge and asked him where the owner, Ngotho, lived. Clearly, the guard was bored and needed a break, because he hopped into the Land Rover with us. It didn’t take us long to get to Banana Town and, after weaving in and out of poorly paved roads, we came to a wooden gate secured with heavy-duty chains and padlocks.

  “You could just burn the gate,” I said to O.

  “Or saw through it,” O said in turn.

  We rapped on the chains, and big Alsatian dogs leaped up and down—we could see their flashing teeth in the glare of the Land Rover headlights. Someone called to them from inside, asking what we wanted. O explained that we were detectives and the owner laughed.

  “I’ve heard that one before,” he yelled in English through the grated doorframe. We held up our badges above the gate, but he couldn’t make them out from that distance.

  The watchman yelled something at his boss in Kikuyu.

  “But you could be holding a gun to his head,” he yelled back.

  “And I could burn down your gate, shoot your dogs, and come in,” O shouted back at him.

  “The phone number of your station—the desk number, give it to me.”

  O gave him the number and looked at me as if to say it was a good thing he was still working for Hassan and moonlighting for our agency.

  “What are your names?” he yelled after a few seconds. O gave him his name and, after a few seconds, he emerged and locked his dogs up.

  “You can’t be careful enough these days,” he said as he opened the gate and revealed a short, stocky old man. By this time, it was obvious to me that he had nothing to hide. For one, were he involved in something as heavy as the bombing he would not be home, and if he were home, he would not have answered, and if he did—it would be to try to bribe us.

  “We are investigating the Norfolk bombing … an aspect of it, anyway. Have you been there lately?” I asked him.

  “Well, I was there a few days ago, the manager is a good friend and throws work my way, otherwise a job at the Norfolk would never come to a man like me. But I didn’t do any work on the boiler—I ran some diagnostics … oh God!” he exclaimed as the possibility came to him.

  “Are you telling me, all that damage, all those deaths—a boiler did that?” he said with his hand over his mouth. “No, that’s not possible—that level of damage …”

  “What was wrong with the boiler?” O asked him.

  “Old … it needed a new pressure valve. I told them that they needed a new boiler immediately. They said they would order one from the United States and get it shipped in. I guess it’s still on its way,” he said, trying not to smile at his joke.

  “Did you see anything suspicious?” I asked.

  “No, nothing around the boiler,” he answered.

  “Has anyone else come to see you? Americans?” I asked. He looked alarmed. The stories about the U.S.’s extraordinary renditions, when told with a Kenyan flair for lurid details, would alarm even the bravest of us.

  “No, no one else has come to see me,” he answered.

  “You have nothing to worry about,” I reassured him.

  Ngotho really was a working stiff and he looked genuinely unhappy that he wouldn’t be completing the job—he needed the cash, something I understood. We had to go back and continue looking. We left the guard with Ngotho for what we were sure was going to be a long conversation about abandoning his post.

  This was detective work—detail after detail, some leading somewhere, others nowhere, but I had come to learn that there were no wasted details. At least you ruled out something when you were wrong. We had ruled out Ngotho—and without it costing us anything. Because, in Kenya, the truth costs. A Kenyan reporter for CNN had been fired because he was bribing witnesses. But how else was he going to get the truth?

  “It’s a little bit odd that no one else has visited Ngotho,” I said to O.

  “And we’re all looking at the same evidence … someone knew it was a waste of time,” O agreed.

  We needed to dig deeper and more carefully into the records—tedious—but it was what it was.

  “Shit—I forgot my wife’s hair,” O said suddenly.

  Before I could start laughing, I remembered I hadn’t called Muddy.

  We went back to O’s and continued sifting through the records. Besides Ngotho, no one had done any work in the basement for at least a year, unless there was deleted or missing footage—but the days and hours were in sequence. There were no suspicious-looking deliveries, or any that ended up with a truck in the basement.

  Soon, Mary woke up and started getting ready to go to work. We had worked through the night.

  “No laughing,” she said sleepily as she walked by us to go to the bathroom. Her huge afro had been matted into a huge mohawk.

  “Razor sharp,” I said to her, now that I was high with fatigue.

  Mary made herself a scrambled egg and a cup of coffee, kissed O goodbye, and then she was off to teach. This much I had come to know—love and deserving love do not go together, love has nothing to do with being worthy. At least not in my case, and certainly not in O’s.

  “Let’s keep digging back. You go through the security discs, and I’ll go through the logbooks,” I said.

  The farther we went back, the more it seemed like our strategy wasn’t working. No one plants a bomb months before its due date—it was against all logic. But we had nothing else to do and so we kept at it.

  Finally, after a whole fucking day, something at last. Five men getting out of a van in the basement of the hotel. I couldn’t make out their faces but clearly four of them were white and one was black. The date was September 14, 2006, about a year before the bombing.

  O flipped through the logbook to the same date. There. We finally had it: “Reason for Visit. Fix crack in basement.” The company name listed was Golden Bears Co.

  “What kind of a name is that?” O asked.

  It sounded familiar. I knew it from somewhere. Then it hit me.

  “It’s the name of a university football team—Berkeley … California,” I said.

  “Someone has a sense of humor,” O said with an excited laugh. “I can bet you there isn’t a single company by that name in Kenya. That alone … the guys at the gate should have been suspicious.”

&
nbsp; “Not surprising they were let through—four white men,” I answered.

  O knew what I meant—there was a high premium on whiteness in Kenya. Even criminals who were busy terrorizing their black brethren left the wazungu free to roam the country—one could argue it was a service to Kenya, the tourist money benefited everyone. The four white men would have had the run of the place just because they were white.

  I rewound the video to the moment where we could see the van pulling in and one of the guards walking around it with a mirror, looking for explosives underneath.

  In the video, he walks to the back, looks at what is presumably equipment, and then waves them on through. The van goes into the underground parking lot. The men get out and the driver reverses and parks facing the ramp. One can see the men appearing and disappearing in the outer edges without actually being able to see what is going on. So simple: rather than mess with the security camera by pulling complicated stunts, they give the guards in the security room a full view of nothing important.

  They worked out of sight for six hours before leaving. When they pulled out, we saw a space covered over with a plastic sheet. They came back a second day. When they left again, the floor appeared freshly cemented.

  We had something, but not quite. Why plant the bomb a year in advance? We went through Kenyan history looking for why October 28 might be important—nothing. Searched through the major American holidays, still nothing. There was nothing special about that day. There was nothing special about the guests. It had to be a planned random attack, I said to O.

  “A planned random attack? Have you been smoking?” was his response. I couldn’t have agreed more.

  But still, we finally had something to work with. It was nothing in the world of lawyers and judges, but in our world, it was something.

  It was time to go meet Jason.

  We arrived at Broadway’s just in time for the seven o’clock news. Wanuna Sophia was reporting that Al Qaeda had claimed responsibility for the Norfolk bombing. She showed a clip of a masked man promising all sorts of hell to come. Then the commercials came on—and the bar came alive with conversation. Even for criminals, love of Kenya had no moral borders. The outrage in the bar was sincere.

  I had once asked O how Broadway’s had come about. He couldn’t say for sure. It had opened sometime in the 1950s at the height of the Mau Mau guerrilla war for independence. It was rumored that the bar owner was a nationalist who knew both Dedan Kimathi and the man in charge of tracking him down, Ian Henderson. He got them to meet to discuss how to stop the killing of civilians by both sides—the Mau Mau kept their end of the bargain, while the British continued with their mass detentions and killings. It is the lion and not the hunter telling its story, O had said with a laugh. Henderson couldn’t change British policy after all. But they had also talked about many other things—the toll of warfare on them and on their families—and fantasized about world peace.

  Eventually they started meeting for the sake of meeting—you know—they became each other’s shrink. At parting, each would go their way. Henderson eventually captured Kimathi but he never used the information he gathered from their meetings against him. In fact, O said, Henderson, sensing British defeat and Kenya’s coming independence, had pleaded with the British not to hang Kimathi. I knew that the bare facts of the story were true but the substance—there was no way of telling. What I did know was that throughout history principled enemies had created safe spaces to meet—their destinies were shared, after all.

  “Who better to understand you than the motherfucker trying to kill you?” O had reasoned, by that time nicely high.

  On the news, the Kenyan presidential candidates were calling for justice and blaming the government for the security lapse. Bush, after promising help to the Kenyan government, made tough statements about defeating terror.

  The miracle at the Norfolk was the last item. As the story unfolded, the whole bar stood up, the beers on the tables orphaned for the moment. KBC had pulled out all the stops—a two-minute background story about me, the American with the sharp hearing of a wolf, who only a few years ago had solved a major mystery. There was O, the local principled cop who made things happen. There were shots in slow motion of the survivors coming out of the debris and the exploding cars shown from different angles. There was a shot of Mpande, Nomsa, and Nothando—a camera zooming in to show the still sleeping baby, and the firemen hugging the rescued family. There I was again, the American who called Kenya home, shaking hands with Mpande before he hopped onto the ambulance. There was a final shot of the night watchman yelling “I save love and faith” and the wild applause in the bar joined the pandemonium breaking out on the TV.

  Shit, even I, in spite of having been there, clapped along. Cases of beer were ordered, nyama choma on cutting boards was passed around, and the night turned into a celebration. O walked back in to find a party—cops and robbers eating and drinking to the lives saved.

  Jason walked in just as the news ended. There was a bit of silence when he came through the door—his whiteness had broken the magic spell, and we all returned to our tables and continued with whatever we had been doing before the news.

  I waited for him to get a beer.

  “Straight up! Why are we here?” I asked him.

  “Because only you can do what needs to be done. This is your city—I’ve been told you have an extensive network—you can use it,” Jason answered.

  “What I mean is, why the secrecy? Where is Paul?” I asked. We needed to get the most glaring question out of the way.

  “It’s simple, really, in a complicated kinda way. I don’t think this was an Al Qaeda job. The official line is that it is Al Qaeda … but just because they claimed the bomb was theirs doesn’t make it so. They take credit for shit they haven’t done all the time. Think about it—you are a terrorist organization; you explode a bomb in the middle of Nairobi, killing ten Americans …” Jason was saying.

  “It’s funny how you Americans never count the African dead …” O interrupted.

  “Okay, and fifty Kenyans, but it’s not you they want to kill …” Jason said, trying to correct himself.

  “Death is death …” O said plainly.

  “Let’s not get sidetracked,” I intervened, trying to get the conversation going. O looked at me but kept his peace.

  “What I’m saying is, if you’re Al Qaeda you would try and maximize casualties, you would do it when the hotel is packed. We have spoken to dozens of witnesses, contacted all past hotel guests from the last month—and we have turned up nothing. This is not them—bombing a hotel after bringing down the Twin Towers? These fuckers don’t know how to downgrade. I know these guys, you have to see their rationality—like good businessmen, they want to build on past successes—and now they go back to bombing hotels in third world countries after striking at the very heart of the empire? And there was no chatter. This is too much outside our radar to be Al Qaeda,” Jason said, echoing Hassan earlier. “And then there is your guy … I think an American crew pulled the job.”

  “You said that we would work the body and you’d work the bomb,” O reminded him.

  “That hasn’t changed … You stay with the dead American. If he leads you to the bomb, and I believe he will, then you come to me and we bust this thing wide open,” Jason answered.

  “That still doesn’t answer the question of why Paul isn’t here,” I said.

  “We are on the same side—you and I. We need facts—that is how we stay safe and keep people safe. We need the facts before the spin, otherwise people, my people, die. I need the truth before it gets to the politicians and ambassadors. This is what makes us who we are—no illusions, we want the truth first. If you manipulate a lie, the truth will come back to bite you in the ass. Paul’s job is to spin the lie if the facts are as ugly as he is,” Jason explained, almost breaking into laughter.

  “Mine is to find the facts about who is doing what, and how and why, so that we are protected from the blindn
ess that comes with spinning. Paul and I, we’re on the same side, but our jobs are very different. I need to know the truth in order to do my job. He needs a good media day,” he continued, after holding himself together. Maybe Jason laughed to mask tension. I had seen it before.

  He had a point. You have the people on the ground looking into something and you have the spinners. The spinners want things to look neat and categorical, and therefore they must have answers. The people on the ground want facts. As cops, if we are to solve the case, we can’t spin things—yes, we assume, we follow our gut, but when a fact contradicts that feeling, you follow the fact. I could see Jason and Paul having different priorities—one wanted facts, the other wanted what would sell well.

  “So you’re saying we get to the truth of what happened, make sure you know it all, and then you do as you please?” O asked. “That would mean I’d be working for you guys. That will never happen.”

  The CIA was not well liked here: the secret renditions, Guantánamo—it was no longer the schoolboys’ fantasy job from back in the day.

  “This is a case about Kenya as much as it is about the United States. You keep what is useful to you, to your country—and I do the same,” Jason replied.

  He started to say something else, but O raised his hand to keep him quiet. We waited for a tense moment as O thought it through.

  “When the time comes, just remember I said my piece,” O finally said, and shrugged. He wasn’t threatening Jason; he was just telling him where he stood. It was up to Jason to do as he pleased with that knowledge.