Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  “Walk away—leave. I only want him,” I shouted to the driver. He hesitated—I fired once more. He stepped out and stood facing me, hands up in the air.

  Mary’s face, still looking alive except for the blood soaking into her afro, flashed through my mind and I wanted to shoot him. O would have shot him—but that wasn’t me. I wanted Sahara.

  “Your shirt,” I shouted.

  He pulled up his shirt.

  “Take it off,” I ordered. “Your pants and shoes, everything, and walk away.”

  He hesitated. I knew he knew I did not have to let him live. He got undressed. Soon, a nude white body was streaking, weaving in and out of the traffic as people threw whatever garbage they could find at him.

  I ordered Sahara to come out of the vehicle with his hands raised. Instead, he let out a wild burst of AK fire. I didn’t take his bait and fire back. What I held in my hand was a semi-auto Glock, a newer model than my usual, which gave me confidence that there had to be at least ten rounds left. I could wait him out. I could hear police sirens but it might as well have been a practical joke—in this traffic, they weren’t going to get to me in anything less than thirty minutes.

  “Do you want to die?” I shouted at him. “You will bleed out!”

  He didn’t answer but I saw the Rover shift from side to side. He was getting ready to come at me again.

  Then I heard it—the slow whine of a scooter. It came into view to reveal a naked white guy riding it, whizzing his way through the traffic. Sahara knelt, facing me, so that he was resting the AK on top of the backseat. I should have killed the fucking driver. The scooter stopped in front of the Range Rover. The driver kept a steady barrage of AK fire coming my way and within seconds, a weak, bleeding Sahara had dragged himself onto the scooter. Sitting facing backwards and leaning into the driver, he kept firing wildly in my direction.

  I emptied out the Glock after them, as they buzzed and zigzagged through the traffic. Then they were gone. I should have shot the driver in cold blood. But I couldn’t help thinking that the spectacle of a naked white guy on a scooter in thick Nairobi traffic was worth keeping him alive.

  I walked over to the Rover. The good news was that they hadn’t been able to carry anything with them. I took the pants the guy had left behind and tied the legs into knots—there was a money belt and I stuffed it in there, after I took out a nice wad of clean $500 bills. There had to be at least $10,000 in there but there was no time to count. There were a bunch of things in the glove box and I took them all: maps, pencils, penlights, and finally, Sahara’s briefcase.

  Back home there are crime scenes. This is not to say they aren’t tampered with and evidence isn’t planted, but at least there is such a thing as a crime scene with clear perimeters. But here, anything I left behind or missed, there would be no second chances to recover. In the time it would take the cops to get here, the car would be stripped, if not altogether stolen. That reminded me to tear the pocket from the man’s shirt and dip it into the small pools of blood on the backseat. If nothing else, I would have Sahara’s DNA.

  With the danger gone, the crowd had surged closer, some getting into their cars and others into the matatus. The sirens weaved in and out of the traffic, and when they were just a few cars away, they turned into another street. We weren’t the only ones in crisis. I rushed back to O’s.

  I found O holding his old .45 to Jamal’s head. Jamal must have understood that the moment O burst in, he was as good as dead and no redemptive act was going to save him. To kill a man like O, one needed a well-calibrated plot where nothing went wrong. The moment they lost the element of surprise, the advantage was no longer theirs. Perhaps if he had saved Mary, then O might have spared him.

  I shouted to O to stop. I shouted that he had helped, that Muddy would be dead without him. He looked at me; tears were welling in his bright red eyes. He looked back at Mary, and then at Muddy, who was now holding her. He turned away, walked to one of the windows, and looked out. Jamal sighed in relief.

  “Jamal, can you tell us anything useful?” I asked him.

  “They were very secretive, I was on a need-to-know basis, as you Americans say.” He smiled sadly. “I did once hear Sahara saying over the phone that in a game of chess you capture the king and kill the queen.”

  In Kenya, who were the king and the queen? In the U.S., could Obama be the king and Michelle the queen? Or George and Laura? It didn’t make sense at all and I told Jamal as much. The tables had turned—his knowing too little to appear to be hiding something was going to condemn him to death.

  “Why, Jamal? Why help them, then turn against them?” Muddy asked him.

  He looked over at Mary.

  “Nothing I say now can save my life. Nothing matters,” he said.

  “Try me,” Muddy said.

  “If they had killed all of you, it would have been me next—I was not one of them,” Jamal answered. At least he didn’t try to bullshit us by saying he had felt a change of heart—it was self-preservation.

  “If you know something more, this is the time to give it up. You are not the ‘worthy cause’ type. Don’t start now,” O said to him quietly.

  “I want to pray. Let me pray—let me pray something not all jumbled up,” he said as he took off his black leather jacket and hung it on the only dining room chair still standing.

  Maybe if I had brought Sahara back with me, dead or alive, I could have argued for Jamal’s life.

  “How did you connect with them?” I asked him.

  “A money launderer—he was looking for them—he came to me,” Jamal answered. Nyiks, as he promised, had asked around, and word gotten to Jamal. Jamal then sold us out for a fee. It was that simple.

  “Do you even know their real names?” I followed up.

  “No.” He paused.

  “But I know how to die,” he said to the silence. “Who no know, go know.” He took a deep breath. It was a popular quote from a Fela Kuti song.

  O asked Jamal to stand up and he placed his gun over Jamal’s heart. Jamal’s eyes went vacant. O pulled the trigger. His gun clicked—it was empty. Jamal stood there waiting as O reloaded while Muddy and I watched, transfixed.

  “Jamal, just go—walk out now,” O whispered. Jamal was shaking and crying. He grabbed his jacket, put it on, and, out of habit, straightened it out and left.

  I could tell Muddy was as confused as I was by the way she was looking at O, who was now kneeling beside Mary, cradling her body in his arms.

  He let out a wail. Muddy knelt down and held him. They rocked back and forth. O’s wailing was getting quieter and quieter, as if he were calling back the rage into him. Then he was still, very quiet, the kind of quiet between a lightning strike and thunder. He stood up and pulled Muddy to her feet.

  “We have to bury my wife,” he said to us.

  Sahara and his handlers, whoever they were, didn’t know what had just happened. They had unhinged O. The duality in which evil and good were compartmentalized in him was over. O had once told me that we were good men who did bad things. Mary had been all that kept him in our side of the world.

  I didn’t know why O had let Jamal live, but this much I knew, O was going to kill Sahara or die trying. I held on to my secret, knowing there was no way of telling it—that if I’d shot the driver, we would have captured Sahara, and if we had him, we would have some answers and O could have his vengeance. I had made the wrong call trying to define myself against my friend. Then again, don’t we work with who we are? I wrestled back and forth … silently.

  Mary, even though she was dead, was still bleeding from her head wound. O went to the bathroom, returned with some bandages, and carefully wrapped them around Mary’s head. I remembered him weaving her hair as he chatted away. I felt a dull knife tear into my chest and I knew that I too would go to places I had never been, to bring Sahara to justice.

  Some people completely break down in a crisis while others take command of the situation. O was the latter—from the moment h
e pulled Muddy to her feet, he took charge. It was his way of coping, and, whether it was good or bad for him, or for us, it made things easier. In any case, had Muddy or I taken charge, we would still have been coming to him for instructions—we had never lost a loved one in Kenya.

  I looked on as Muddy drew open the curtains, letting in the afternoon light and air, which took some sting out of the gunpowder, death, and pain in the room. O had called Hassan, and he was on his way with more cops and ambulances. I called Jason—three of the four white men from the security tapes were dead—we needed him here.

  O motioned to the trousers filled with stuff and I piled everything on the table. He pointed at the laptop. I turned it on and as we waited, I zipped open the moneybelt—there was nothing in it but money. The laptop naturally asked for a password—we knew enough not to mess with it. I took out the battery and, when O asked me why, I said it was so that no one else could access it remotely.

  We agreed to keep the laptop to ourselves, and I went into Mary’s office and left it on her worktable—best hidden in plain sight. I told O that Sahara had escaped through the next-door apartment and we both went in to look, hoping for some clues. We heard some muffled sounds coming from the bedroom and found O’s neighbor gagged and handcuffed to the bedframe.

  We set him free and he explained what had happened. He was drinking at a bar close to where O lived when the African and the four white men came in. They started talking to him and buying rounds. When they stepped outside for a cigarette at about 10:00 p.m., one of the men jammed a gun into his belly and told him they needed his place for a few hours. They gave him a hundred dollars and then forced him to let them in.

  We hadn’t heard anything because we had been at Muddy’s performance. He pointed at the dresser. I opened the top drawer to find the hundred dollars. If he had known what was going to happen, his asking price would have been much higher—enough to get out of town.

  He asked what was going on; he had heard the gunfire and commotion. O told him to stay indoors and handed him back the hundred dollars.

  When we got back to O’s apartment, we found Muddy looking at the maps I’d taken from Sahara’s Range Rover—she pointed to one of them, where tourist landmarks had been circled. The Jomo Kenyatta Conference Center, Nairobi National Museum, Fort Jesus in Mombasa, built by the Portuguese in the 1500s, Tree Tops Hotel, where in 1952 the then–Princess Elizabeth had learned that her father had died and she would be queen, and many others. We would have to visit all these places and figure out why they were of interest to Sahara and Company—and more importantly, what they had planted in them.

  “Janet!” Muddy suddenly yelled. Janet, could they go after her too? Jamal knew about her, but I suspected he would have kept her hidden from Sahara and his crew. His pride and fucked-up code would not have allowed him to drag a promising young student, a survivor, an innocent girl whose only crime was being saved by O and me, into this mess. Also, Sahara didn’t appear to me to be the kind of a man who would go after Janet for revenge—he was too calculating for that.

  All the same, there was no harm in checking to make sure she was okay. Nothing was predictable anymore—not with Mary lying dead on the floor.

  What would become of Janet without her surrogate mother, the person she trusted, feared, and loved the most? She had found herself a home—now it would be as if its warmth was gone and just the shell remained. She was doing well, finally she had managed to put her life back on track—and the law degree she had decided to pursue was within grasp—but sometimes all it takes is one traumatic experience to bring others rushing back in. O simply had to find a way of stepping up and becoming the father that, by default, Mary had made him.

  Muddy asked O for the keys to the Land Rover, tucked one of the Glocks from the dead men into the small of her back, and stuffed extra clips into her pockets. As she rushed out, Hassan walked in, flanked by plainclothesmen dressed in tweed jackets and other forms of ill-fitting and hot-weather-unfriendly attire.

  He looked around, whistling after each dead white man. A bomb explosion a few days before and now three dead white Americans—his job was on the line, with Nairobi not only looking ungovernable but outright unlivable.

  He knelt by Mary’s body and, for just a second, he was no longer the calm, dangerous manager of violence; this was just too close to home. He turned to O.

  “Whatever you need … we’ll do whatever needs to be done,” was all he said. All of us, including the tweed jackets in the room, knew what he meant. It was one thing if I had died, or O—but this was just too much. The balance, the divide, the pretense that our work would not come home with us—call it what you like—it had to be protected. Otherwise, why should the good guys care? If it became open season on spouses, it would be children, relatives, friends next—a civil war, with cops on one side and robbers on the other, and those that we cared for in the middle. This line had to be protected at all costs.

  Paramedics, armed with first-responder equipment so archaic that it looked downright dangerous, rushed in to triage. Hassan waved them away and they lined up against the walls as if mounting an honor guard.

  There were some American dead—no one was going to get bagged before the Americans said so. Mercifully, Jason and Paul arrived.

  “I am very sorry,” Jason said to O, as he went and held Mary’s hand for a second.

  “Are these the guys?” Paul asked.

  “What do you think, Paul?” I said angrily. He called out to someone in the hallway and the suit from the embassy came and fingerprinted the dead. The rest, the DNA samples and dental impressions, would be taken at Kamau’s. The suit picked up the two remaining Glocks still on the floor.

  “That’s all?” he asked. I just shrugged, thinking to myself, Welcome to a Kenyan crime scene, motherfucker.

  Hassan pointed at the paramedics.

  “Can they?” he asked O, who nodded yes. They picked up Mary first, then the rest of the bodies, and filed out the door.

  “Hassan, can I talk to your men?” Jason asked. Hassan agreed, and O and I stepped outside with Jason and Paul.

  “I understand this is a bad time … a very bad time. We,” Jason drew a circle to include O and me, “must always stop to take care of our dead and protect our own, but I have to insist, and I implore you, to tell me what happened. I want each word, each detail that comes to mind—accents, scents, anything. Our friendship works to the extent that I know everything.” Jason reached up to place his hand on O’s shoulder.

  “Listen, Jason—one of the guys, the main guy, showed me a terrorist watch list and O, Muddy, and I were on it. How about we talk about that?” I said.

  O looked at me—we hadn’t had time to talk about what had gone down before Jason arrived.

  Paul indicated that we should walk down the courtyard, away from other ears. He left us standing next to the tree in the middle of the courtyard, walked to a Pajero with embassy license plates, and came back with a briefcase.

  He opened it and handed a file to O and me. We flipped through it in amazement. Sahara had shown us the very same parallel lives.

  This much I knew, we were only a few steps away from having drones firing missiles at our cars, or even worse, some might say, ending up in a torture chamber in Kenya, Yemen, or the U.S. Guilt or innocence didn’t matter—only being on the list mattered.

  “How did you get that?” I asked Paul.

  “An alert was sent to us this morning,” he answered.

  “Can we get off the list?” I asked.

  “The short answer is no. Even if I called in your innocence, the response would be ‘better safe than sorry.’ It will take hard evidence to get you off that list, if it’s even possible. The only way out is to get the people behind this and bring them to justice,” Paul said. “O, I’m sorry you have to hear this after your loss.”

  “Who is powerful enough to get our names on that list?” O asked, looking at Jason.

  “Any mid-level government employee
. Suspicion alone—neighbor calling in neighbor—we had some people in Guantánamo because some motherfucker wanted their piece of land. The question is, who is powerful enough to whip up this sort of evidence in a short time and get it noticed enough to land you prominent spots on the list? I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” he answered.

  It worked for us that they should not try to clear our names at this point. If we played along, then at least any action to be taken against us would go through them. Innocence at this stage was no defense. We would make a good news story—Muddy, the beautiful but wounded cold bitch; O, a disgruntled marijuana addict who loved violence for its own sake; and me, the American who never really felt at home in the U.S. and who had betrayed all those who loved him for the warm bosom of jihadists. Sahara had done well for himself and his handlers.

  I looked at O. He was smiling. O leaned in closer to Jason, looked him in the eye, and then looked down into his jacket. I followed his gaze and saw his old rusty .45 pointed at Jason’s gut. Jason’s eyes widened for a second and then slowly wound down. I looked around, looked again, and, in the late afternoon sun, high up on the rooftops, I could make out the snipers in position. Some of the windows above O’s apartment were opening slowly.

  “Jason, mark my words. I am not dying until I kill them all. If you and Paul are involved in my wife’s death …” His voice trailed off.

  “The guys who killed your wife, I want them as bad as you,” Jason said, trying to be still.

  “Hey, look, O, I know you are not a fucking terrorist,” Paul said. “We have to work together—we have no choice. We have to work the different angles.”

  “You haven’t given up on the Al Qaeda shit?” O asked him as he poked his gun harder into Jason’s gut, making him gasp for air.

  “No, not officially—a bomb explodes in Nairobi killing ten Americans—some processes kick in,” he said. “But I’m here to help. I didn’t like what I saw up there.” He sounded genuinely pained.