Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  “This is what we know so far—our guy is most probably a black American. His death is somehow related to the bomb. We know there are another four white men involved,” I said, to start us off on our new partnership. Jason looked puzzled and so I explained what we had found in the security videos.

  “I can’t believe our guys missed that,” he said, seeming genuinely surprised.

  “No one would have thought of going back that far into the records. It’s like 9/11 and the planes, now we know it happens, but on September tenth it would have seemed crazy,” O said. “But you missed something else—the boiler repairman. Why?” O looked directly at Jason.

  “Was he involved?” Jason asked.

  “No, but still …” O said.

  “This is what I am telling you,” Jason said. “This is something we have never seen before. And I have seen many things.”

  He ordered another round of Tuskers.

  O handed him printout images of the five men, explaining the sequence of events as we understood them.

  “I can’t put any of my guys on this. Not yet. To get past Paul and my bosses back in Washington, we need to find out who these men are—we need something concrete,” Jason said as he looked at them.

  We agreed—we would start rattling the bushes and see what leaped out.

  “You know, I remember you guys from the case of the dead white girl,” Jason said, as some nyama choma arrived with his round of Tuskers. “That case, it should be in every training manual. I’m glad we’re going to work together.”

  “Can I ask you something, Jason?” I said.

  “Shoot … I mean ask,” he said, laughing and pointing at my Glock. At last we were relaxing.

  “Is Paul really convinced that it’s Al Qaeda and affiliates?”

  “Paul—I have worked with him now for a number of years … his heart is in the right place. We both want the same thing for our country. Like two lovers fighting over a woman, you don’t want to cut her in half,” he answered, laughing.

  We all knew I was asking whether Paul could be trusted, whether Jason thought he might be involved, and he had answered. He was saying we should stay away from him. Jason stood up to go smoke with O, and I sat around drinking my beer, wondering what was coming next—knowing whatever it was, I was going to be unprepared. There was one thing I could do, though, propose to Muddy. No matter what happened afterward, I would have that one moment to hold on to.

  “What brings us to fucking Africa?” Jason was asking. They were back from their session. It was a continuation of a conversation they had been having outside.

  “I was an undergrad—somewhere in there, study abroad in Tanzania—some remote village, teaching English for a summer in return for Kiswahili lessons—don’t ask me why now, I didn’t learn shit. Most of my time was spent explaining America. I wasn’t just a U. S. student, I was an ambassador. There were so many misunderstandings. And I thought, this is what I want to do—I want to be of service—I was doing it anyway, I was good at it, and I loved it, so why not make a career out of it. The bomb, the deaths, this fucking bar, all this shit takes me back to that moment when I believed,” Jason said and looked at us expectantly.

  “A religious moment? Saul becomes Paul becomes CIA?” O half-asked, laughing at his own high joke.

  “Hell, yeah, it was a moment, all right. And you, O, why become a sheriff in the Wild West? For the pay?” Jason asked.

  “You really want to know?” O responded, leaning forward. “Coz of a motherfucking tree … that’s what I’ve boiled it down to. The worst storm in the history of Kisumu—and I decide to step outside. I’m about nine years old, and I decide to step outside and play, go up to my tree house and see how it’s doing. I’m doing well, no one misses me in the house—so I keep going and I’m up in the tree house, which really is just a few boards and cloth for a window—something I had seen in a Famous Five or some shit like that.” He reached for his Tusker and, holding up one hand in the air, chugged what was left of it before continuing.

  “And then the storm worsens. Clotheslines are snapping and I can see the telephone and electric posts that pass close to our house coming down, trees snapping, debris flying—but the tree I was holding on to—a gust of wind would come and it would sway with it, get this close to the ground, its branches would ebb and flow, harder and harder until I thought they were going to break and take me down with them—but the tree would always sway and pull back up straight. Then there’d be a gust and it would dip so close to the ground again and there is me hanging on, knowing that my life was this tree. Anyway, no matter how close to the ground it came, it never gave me up or its other branches. That’s why I became a cop—I think anyway,” he finished, sounding almost sad. O was still high but it was a beautiful story that had Jason whistling in amazement. Now it was my turn to share.

  “You’re going to laugh at this—I became a cop to do good. Simple and naïve, but that’s it,” I said, under the influence of the by now numerous beers. “You know, I used to be a Boy Scout and I would think, if only I had a gun. So there you have it.”

  “There’s gotta be more …” Jason said as he and O laughed to the point of tears. There was more, like wanting to serve my people, but I didn’t feel like getting into it.

  We’d run out of things to talk about and Jason, well toasted, decided to drive home.

  “His was a good story—but we can’t trust him,” O said to me, after Jason had left.

  “Yeah, I know. I figure for now we are fellow travelers but at some point he will want to take a different road … and it might not be very good for us. We just need to know when,” I answered.

  Suddenly I felt tired and wanted to go home. Long days were ahead. But I didn’t stand up to leave. I sat there peeling the wet Tusker label from the bottle with the word “home” playing over and over again in my head.

  Home—was I home here? Home, was home where I had come from? But if I went back far enough, wouldn’t home be here? Where was here? Kenya, Senegal, Nigeria? Home! Home was Mpande, his wife and daughter surviving a bomb blast in a strange country, home was them tapping away, arguing back and forth in a dark and chaotic basement, trying not to wake their baby up. Home was us standing out there trying to find a way of bringing them home aboveground. Home was the chorus of barely equipped firemen using everything they had, even their own bodies, to make sure that Mpande and his family made it home.

  I was going to propose tonight. It suddenly seemed silly that I had waited this long. I stood up.

  “Tonight, I will ask Muddy to marry me,” I said to O.

  “About time—man, you guys …” He stopped and laughed. “Do you even have a ring?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered, and sat back down. “Muddy—you know her, she won’t care—she’ll actually think I’m being frivolous if I have a ring.”

  “So you tell yourself,” O said, sobering me up. He called to MC Hammer, who back-slid over to us.

  “This man here, he needs a ring—he wants to ask his woman to marry him,” O said to him.

  “Two minutes,” Hammer said and dashed off.

  Soon he was back. He asked me for my hand, laughing at his own joke, and placed a bunch of beaded rings into my palm.

  “Ten, one for each finger,” he said with a smile. They were cheap beaded Maasai rings, but right about then, they were the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

  I went for my wallet, but he stopped me.

  “On me, my friend—for your work today,” he said.

  “You have some more work to do,” O said to me. We stepped outside and he called to one of the taxi guys. “Go home!” he said.

  I walked over to the taxi gliding on air, like MC Hammer.

  But when I got home, I remembered that Muddy had a performance the following evening and so I slipped in next to her, leaving the rings in my shirt pocket. There was no way I was going to wake her up to propose now. Her response would be simple. “What the fuck? If I was going to
marry you tonight, I would marry you tomorrow too.”

  I passed out.

  The following day, O and I started rattling the bushes. We went from tourist hotel to tourist hotel, from one cold trail to another, until at last we made our way to Limuru Country Club. It was a golf club that pretty much functioned like an upper-class Broadway’s. Under the guise of playing golf and protected by the privacy of a clubhouse, everything from land grabs to hostile takeovers was discussed here. The potbellied black and white men in white polo shirts and golf gloves went back to their businesses a little bit richer every day.

  As we were about to sit down, a burly Kenyan man approached us, feigned a jab and a right hook in my direction, and I pretended to be knocked out and slunk into my seat.

  The man’s name was Nyiks, short for Wanyika. A former boxer, he had almost held the national title back in the day. He and I had fought for real once, when he had called me a mzungu and I had just lost it. I won, but only because he was out of shape then—a victim of too much nyama choma. With some persuasion from O, he had helped us with the case of the missing white girl, and we had done each other a few solids, as we called favors. We had slowly become friends before we lost contact. After the fight he started hitting the gym again, and now he resembled George Foreman: big, a bit comical but strong and fit enough for anyone not to want to mess with him, unless they were in it for the long haul.

  He was at the club to buy and sell American dollars to tourists and wealthy Kenyans. It was illegal, of course, but legality could be easily bought—and so he operated freely, so freely that he had set up shop in one of spa rooms. He even had regular business hours, 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

  After we explained what we were looking for and made it clear that there was enough cash to go around, he agreed to ask around the club and call us as soon as he knew something. It was past seven when we left him to go see Muddy’s performance.

  The crowd at the Carnivore was an odd mixture of people. There were tourists tearing into crocodile meat and God knows what else—someone had once told me that for $500 a plate you got lion meat. The Kenyan elite in evening gowns and three-piece suits were dutifully sticking to the nyama choma and cocktails. The urban youth, trying to be hip in baseball caps and 49ers jackets, but broke as hell, were slowly sipping their Tuskers, trying to make a single beer last the night.

  They were all here to see Muddy. As she walked onto the expansive stage, the lights came on, revealing a shirtless muscled conga player. Muddy was dressed casually, a sleeveless white shirt, jeans, and sandals. She had let her dreads let down—set them free, she would say—so that they came to the small of her back. The drummer did a solo, eliciting thunderous sounds from the congas before cascading into a low constant trickle of beats.

  Muddy started.

  “Here is the problem of being a witness, it never happens to your confessor, a witness is to be pitied, to be patted on her shoulder, warnings become post-traumatic stress disorders, a cry of pain, remembrances of the past. So, I stand here to warn, but you will pity me, pat me on my shoulder, share in my tears but you will believe they are not yours, and you are not me. Deep down you will believe that I deserved it, it was because of something I might have done, or not done, and where I didn’t, you will and where I did, you will show restraint. Listen! There is no such thing as a trickle of blood, each drop today is a flood tomorrow …” and she went on and on until I thought she was losing the crowd. No one wanted to be told that tomorrow floods would come, especially when it had never happened. But she bravely continued until murmurs of open disapproval became grunts and yells of Kenya Juu! Kenya Juu!

  “You can yell ‘Kenya Up’ standing on top of God knows what all you want. But someday soon, please remember my words,” she said and silence reigned once again. She let the silence sit there as the drummer increased his tempo until the sound became terror—and then they both left the stage. There was polite applause, and then the conversations and the eating of exotic meat continued.

  Muddy didn’t want to stay at the Carnivore and make a night of it, and so a slightly tipsy Mary invited us over. We liked to dissect, or rather listen to Muddy dissect, her performance the following morning over a long, lazy late breakfast.

  O and I had had too many Tuskers and Mary wouldn’t let either of us drive. She hiked up her long teacher’s skirt, hopped into the driver’s seat, and sped us home through the Nairobi night. We stopped at a gas station, got a case of Tuskers, and drank late into the night, discussing Muddy’s performance, listening to music, and talking about things that had nothing to do with politics or the case. Just like in the old days when we were getting to know each other, we talked about past loves, hopes for the future, told funny stories, and just enjoyed being with each other.

  CHAPTER 4

  COMING UNHINGED

  They had found us and I was pleading with Jamal. I was praying to him, in the name of our past friendship and all we had been through together, to let Muddy and Mary live.

  I could tell that whether they lived or died was not on him. It depended on the four white men who had quietly and methodically handcuffed our hands to the chairs at the dining table using those humane cuffs that I too had often used back in Madison. Both Muddy and Mary were gagged. Muddy was looking around her, calmly and dangerously, while Mary was screaming and struggling against her cuffs.

  Tall, dignified, charismatic, and violent when I first met him, Jamal was now fat enough to appear short—he resembled a mid-level Kenyan politician. He had saved Muddy, O, and me from certain death sometime back. En route to Jomo Kenyatta Airport on what we later called the Highway of Death, he had warned us of an ambush. Without him risking his life to engage one of the cars, we would have been outgunned, outnumbered, and dead.

  But to a man like Jamal the past had no business being in the present. We might as well have been strangers. Blood to him was like water, neutral. To his credit, he never pretended to be anything he wasn’t.

  The four white men were casually dressed in various shades of khaki so that they looked every bit the tourist. They had that American carelessness of dress that suggests casual power. Their T-shirts were an amalgamation of African tourist stops—Mount Kilimanjaro, Serengeti National Park, Sahara Desert, and Tsavo National Park.

  Tall, with his hair cropped to hide the fact that he was balding in the front and back, Sahara had the kind of fitness that middle age ravages—but even though he was losing the battle of the bulge, it wasn’t for lack of going to the gym. His glasses magnified his small, intelligent eyes. He looked more like a hip anthropologist on vacation, or an Episcopalian priest trying to dress down.

  Serengeti and Tsavo were the musclemen, tall, hard, with a military look. Kilimanjaro was huge, with the appearance of a lazy football player. His snow-capped head, from which long, stringy hair ran, cast a shadow over his eyes. It was clear that he was the go- to guy for all things painful—he did the heavy lifting. In contrast to Jamal, they all had a certain kindness to them that I could not describe—like they did things out of necessity, as opposed to Jamal, who did them by choice. They were much younger than him, probably in their late thirties.

  The one wearing the Sahara T-shirt was in charge. Not that he was shouting orders; he asked for and suggested everything politely.

  “Can you please handcuff him?” “The door needs some attention.” “And Mary, stop struggling so much, it only makes the cuffs tighter.” “Could someone please make sure that there is nothing on the stove?”

  The other three men didn’t jump at his suggestions as if their lives depended on it, they listened first, and sometimes they even asked a follow-up question—like it was a learning moment.

  “The stove—why?” Kilimanjaro had asked, for example.

  “A very good question—the principle of an operation like this is the appearance of normality. Something burns, the fire alarm goes off, or neighbors smell smoke and come knocking. What was a contained situation becomes …” Sahara explained
.

  “I see,” Kilimanjaro said, interrupting him and nodding in agreement.

  “Contain the situation, control all you can, and the rest …” Sahara said, his voice trailing off.

  “The rest is out of your hands,” Kilimanjaro finished.

  The white men had semi-automatics I had never seen before—the latest offerings from our fine American firearms industry, I could tell. Only Jamal had an AK-47—the African cigarette—an apt name because in some parts of the continent, the AK, like cigarettes, functioned as money, a medium of exchange.

  Jamal had caught us off-guard. We were used to bad things being done only at night—daylight, at least the morning, was supposed to be the time when the good and bad guys got some sleep, or caught up with their loved ones, or prepared for war later, at night. In “Nairobbery,” we woke up, unlocked the heavily barred doors and windows to let some fresh air in, and tried to remember a time when night did not turn your home into a prison. Morning was life itself, a reminder that you had survived the night.

  How could we have expected four white men and a former friend to walk in unannounced and take us hostage in the fucking morning? It was well known that O was a cop. The neighbors who might have seen them coming through the single entrance to the building would have thought they were friends of O. So the men had literally walked right in to find Muddy and Mary sitting at the dining table, drinking chai and eating bread.

  The men must have been monitoring our movements. They would have seen O leave to go see his sick mother in the hospital, followed by me on my way to Westland Gym to run on their worn-down treadmills. I never went running in Nairobi; it was just plain dangerous, with the dust, the fumes, and the driving. Whenever too much beer found me crashed at O’s, I preferred to sweat out the Tuskers at the gym.

  Coming back, the closed curtains only gave me slight pause—I knew Mary never slept past eight, and she liked her apartment sunny and bright. I figured she might have decided to sleep in this once. Blindly, I walked into the trap Sahara and his men had carefully laid for us. I didn’t even have time to draw my weapon.