Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  O holstered his .45.

  I explained to Jason and Paul all that had transpired, from the visit to Limuru Country Club to Sahara to the maps. We agreed that Jason’s task was to find out who Sahara worked for. He had three dead guys to start with. Our job was to keep digging and follow up on the maps we had found. Absolutely nothing was to be said to anyone. It was going to be the four of us against a powerful phantom. I didn’t mention the laptop.

  “But first, I have to bury my wife. I am going to take her home,” O said as he started to walk away.

  We parted ways just in time—the news teams had finally made their way. As they scrambled to the scene, the snipers melted out of sight—back into the world of ghost stories and the folklore about the American military presence in Kenya.

  “Your mother, O, how is she?” I asked him nervously as we went back to his apartment.

  “Diabetes—it’s just diabetes … best fucking news all day,” he answered.

  CHAPTER 5

  MEETING HELEN

  “The laptop, we have to get it to someone who knows about computers,” I said to O, though I hated to be thinking about the case right now.

  It was evening but he suggested calling Kamau and asking for a recommendation. We needed someone like him, able to improvise in situations that seemed impossible. I called Kamau and explained what had happened and what we needed. He said he would call me back in five minutes, but he called back in less than two and gave me an address.

  “Who am I going to see?” I asked him.

  “Helen, she is the best. Just remember that,” he responded.

  I knocked on the neighbor’s door and asked him if the rope ladder was still up. I wanted to avoid the vultures circling down below in the courtyard. As I slid down the ladder it all hit me. At the bottom I sat staring into the rose bushes in the lessening daylight, crying.

  I finally composed myself, made it quietly to O’s Land Rover, and drove to the address in Kileleshwa, a formerly upscale neighborhood in Nairobi that had lost its standing only because more “posh”—as the Kenyans put it—estates had been built.

  At the gate, the guard asked me who I had come to see, and he guided me to the servant quarters. I knocked, waited, knocked again, and then she answered the door.

  “MacBook. Here,” she said, pointing to her palm. I gave her the laptop.

  “Come in. Strip naked,” she ordered.

  I laughed and said no.

  “Do you want my help or not?”

  “I’m not a male prostitute—in any case, I would rather I was paid in cash, not in kind,” I said. I was glad to be talking to someone who was not weighed down by the tragedy of Mary’s murder.

  “You are all bloody—I’m not going to let you in like this. What the fuck, man? Get your mind out of the gutter,” she said, opening and lifting up her hands so that the MacBook looked like it would fall any second. “You need to shower—and you need a change of clothes.”

  She went into another room and came back with a towel.

  “You would rather stand by the door than get naked? Are we in fucking kindergarten? Get on with it. Look, I’ll get naked just to show you it’s no big deal.”

  She took off her shorts and, when she got to her underwear, I quickly undressed, piling my clothes on the floor and leaving my Glock on top. She gave me the towel and directed me to the shower.

  “Are you going to shower with that?” she asked when she saw me eyeing my Glock. I picked it up and put it on a little side table by the door.

  “The water will be cold—this is the servant quarters,” she warned.

  The thing is, she was beautiful—beautiful in a strange way, I thought to myself as I took a cold shower. She was the opposite of Muddy, shorter, stockier, and with a short afro. Her teeth were oddly spaced out and her forehead seemed to recede into her hairline. But she was beautiful. I got out of the shower and wrapped myself in a towel. She pointed to the couch and I looked back at her in surprise.

  “Humor me,” she said. “It’s all I have.”

  Shit! She had laid out a long yellow dress for me to wear. I had to laugh. Why not? It’s not like she would just have men’s clothing lying around for a tall American detective to put on. I wiggled into it. It felt cozy and, in spite of myself, I liked how it hugged my hips.

  “I am clean and I am dressed,” I announced.

  “This laptop, tell me everything about the owner,” she said as she put a cup of hot tea in front of me.

  “Why?” I said to her. “All I know about him is that I’d like to kill him.”

  “This computer has some heavy shit around it. There are two things about security, any kind of security. Either it is built around the owner, or the owner adapts it to his or her personality. Do you see what I’m saying?” She didn’t wait for me to answer, or rather ask her what she meant.

  “The bottom line is there are no objective security systems. At the end of the day, Mr. Detective, no matter how sophisticated a system is, it’s only as good as the user. So what I am saying to you is this—if I know the user, then I have the human aspect of the security system. If I do not get to know the user, there is no way I am breaking anything. This is something they don’t teach you in hack school—you hack a personality, not code—assuming of course you are good to begin with,” she explained patiently. “Had you ever heard of me before today, Mr. Detective?”

  “No, I haven’t,” I answered.

  “I’d like to keep it that way—no triggering some shit somewhere that comes down on me. So start talking!” she commanded.

  She was weird but she made sense. Even the cold shower made sense—why should she be polite and let me in all bloody? And being naked—what was the big deal anyway? To get to Sahara, I had to tell her everything about the case. It felt good to sit there and talk through it as she took notes.

  “This Sahara of yours, what kind of man is he?” she asked. “How would you describe him?”

  “Patient, knowledgeable, confident, cruel, controlling, and efficient … the kind of man who prides himself on making the least amount of wasted moves,” I answered, realizing that it sounded like I admired him.

  “Age?” she asked.

  “About sixty, fit but losing the battle.”

  “Hairline?”

  “Balding and grey, a well-trimmed goatee. There was something professorial about him.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asked, looking up from her notetaking. I couldn’t quite say why.

  “Let’s try another route, Mr. Detective—what kind of fucking language did he use?” she asked.

  “Simple language—he wanted me to understand—and he was that way with his men. It wasn’t perverse—he genuinely wanted me to understand him. At times, it was like he was speaking to a student about to flunk a final exam,” I said, starting to see some sort of logic in her questions.

  It was like a police sketch artist with an eyewitness, you corral in the details—a nose, a chin, eyes—until you have a whole face. Now that I was on this side of it, I understood what it meant to assume that a witness knows more than they think they know.

  “What was he wearing when you met?” she asked. I described the clothing he and his men had been wearing.

  “The outfit—it sounds like he should have been in a suit or corduroys, not a safari shirt,” she said.

  “Yeah, he apologized for that—said that he knew Africa wasn’t just wild animals or something like that,” I explained.

  “What were his exact words?” she asked, suddenly looking up.

  “ ‘Africa is not a country,’ ” I answered, thinking that these were the kind of questions we should ask witnesses, questions that tried to get to the essence of the suspect and not just the color of his clothes.

  Helen clapped her hands together in excitement.

  “I love that. I love the fucker! I think I have him!” she exclaimed.

  She stood up and, placing her hand on my shoulder, she guided me out.

&n
bsp; “Detective, don’t forget your gun,” she said as I got to the door. I piled it on top of my bloody clothes, hiked up my dress, and walked to the Land Rover.

  At the gate the guard looked into the car and laughed, saying, “A man goes in, a woman comes out.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Looking good, sister!” he yelled as I drove off.

  O was just finishing patching up the broken patio windows when I walked in. He looked at me in my bright yellow dress, my Glock resting peacefully on top of my pile of clothes.

  “How did it go?” he asked, as if this was something that happened every day.

  As soon as I was done explaining, it was time to leave for Kisumu to make Mary’s burial arrangements—I had no idea what to expect but I knew I just needed to be there for my friend.

  “My mother, she can’t see you like this. You need some makeup,” he said with a serious look of concern on his face before he broke into laughter. I had some clothes in O’s guest bedroom and I changed back into a man.

  Muddy hadn’t come back from picking up Janet. I called and she said she was sitting with Janet in her dorm room, talking, so we left for Kisumu without her.

  CHAPTER 6

  MOURNING MARY

  I didn’t speak the Luo language but I could tell that something was going terribly wrong. When O and I arrived in Kisumu the night following Mary’s death and walked through the door, his mother, an old dark-skinned woman, eyes with bits of unseeing grey, had hobbled to him. They spoke for a little while and she let out the most gut-wrenching wail I had ever heard. She did it three times and soon the compound was alive with elders. Some of them were crying. Others were trying to comfort O, who stood stoically, like a man waiting for an answer. This went on for a while. Tea was prepared; bread sliced into triangles and spread with jam and butter—a snack I had come to associate with weddings—was passed around. Then O spoke for a long time.

  I watched without understanding his impassioned plea. I had never seen him speak in front of people, and with his tall frame, piercing red eyes, and a voice that at different times sounded cajoling, pleading, and proud, he had a commanding presence. When he was done, the elders huddled in the corner. O came and sat by me and we watched them whisper animatedly among themselves. I couldn’t bring myself to ask O what was happening—this wasn’t one of our cases.

  “I’m glad your mother is feeling better” was all I could say to him.

  “She came back from the hosi this morning,” O said, falling into Nairobi slang.

  Finally his mother, her hands and voice shaking, tears in her eyes, said something to O. He stood up, said something angrily, gesturing at everyone, and took off. Everything had happened so fast. His mother tried to say something to me but I couldn’t understand. An elderly man came over to me and translated it into English.

  “She says she loves her son, that in death she forgives Mary. However, her hands are tied. The clan has spoken. She has to do what her people want. In time he will see it was the right thing to do,” he said.

  “What do you mean? Mary won’t be buried here?” I asked him in disbelief.

  “Should our people simply lie down and be trampled upon like weeds?” he asked as he started to guide me out.

  “Is that you or the mother saying that stupid shit? That is her son, out there in pain because her daughter-in-law was shot in the head,” I said to him. I was confused and angry.

  “The people have spoken, we now have one voice,” he said and smiled gently at me, as if I were a child and would understand someday.

  He placed his hand on my shoulder. I wanted to hit him.

  “Fuck off,” I said to him, and he let go. I turned to look at O’s mother; she cast her eyes down and started sobbing as the elders enveloped her.

  “Tell Odhiambo we are sorry,” the old man said to me when I got to the door.

  I found O lying back on a reclined passenger seat. We had an eight-hour drive ahead of us and I was not looking forward to it.

  “All this time wasted … we could have been working,” he said, more to himself than to me. I started the car without saying a word.

  “They won’t let me bury my wife,” O said, looking straight ahead after we’d been driving for an hour or so in silence. “I bought that piece of land, and built that house for my mother, and they will not let me bury my dead wife.” He sounded like he was a bit amused by the ridiculousness of it all, as if he couldn’t believe it.

  “Why? Isn’t that the custom?” I asked.

  He helped me piece together the reason why. Mary was a Kikuyu and O, a Luo. Living in Nairobi, isolated from their fellow ethnic groups, it had never been an issue—as far as I could tell. In fact, until it was time to bury her, I, as an outsider, couldn’t tell they were from different ethnic groups. They spoke to each other in English but I had always assumed that it was for my benefit. I suppose it’s the difference between interracial marriages in New York and in some backwater Midwestern town.

  The elections were tomorrow and the resulting tensions had only heightened ethnocentrism. The president, a Kikuyu, was being opposed by a Luo—it seemed as if Mary’s death had fallen along the same ethnic demarcations. O’s family didn’t want to bury a Kikuyu woman. Would Mary’s family want to bury a woman married to a Luo? I couldn’t ask O. I passed on his mother’s message to him. Now it made sense. Weeds, I knew that term in the context of Rwanda—Muddy, a Tutsi, had been called a “weed.” In the Kenyan context, the Luos and Kikuyus saw each other as weeds.

  “You and me, Ishmael, we come from a different world—we have us on one side and criminals on the other—and what matters is getting the criminal even when ethnicity and race run interference. You know what I mean? That’s where we draw the line. In my mother’s world, one’s ethnicity matters more than life and death itself. She is my wife. I am her son. She is her daughter. But not today—today, ethnicity is god,” O lamented.

  O’s marriage had added another dimension to his duality—to his ability to be violent and cruel when in the cruel and violent world of our investigations, and to be loving without residual feelings of guilt when in the loving world of Mary. That balance had collapsed. Now the duality that allowed him to be a Luo married to a Kikuyu had also collapsed under the pressure of the day’s ethnic politics—and it was costing him his home and a burial place for his wife.

  I could see a bit of it. When I took Muddy—an African refugee who did spoken word—to the U.S. to meet my parents, how would their black middle-class sensibilities take it? I was supposed to marry up—that’s what they had liked about my ex-wife and her corporate-ladder climbing. When I said I wanted to become a cop, it was not so much that they hated the profession, though it made them uneasy; it was because it was beneath us. So their son who was a cop working in Kenya was marrying a Rwandan refugee who did spoken word? They would have something to say about that.

  “What did you tell your mother … the clan?” I asked him.

  “I told her that I loved my wife and that they might as well have killed me too. I asked her how I could bury my wife elsewhere and still call this place home? How can I come back here? How do I forgive that? And how do I live with myself after costing Mary her life? I asked her all those questions and you know what she told me? She said she understands my pain but this was no longer just about a man and his wife, but about what our people want,” he explained, anger carrying each word.

  “O, she seemed genuinely in pain,” I said to him.

  “Pain without action is useless to me,” he replied tensely.

  “Hey, I don’t know a lot, but this much I know. You cannot blame yourself for Mary’s death,” I said, not even sure if I believed that myself.

  O laughed a laugh that was somewhere between incredulity and anger. The kind of laugh that told me that if we hadn’t been friends, his response would’ve been more forceful.

  “Jesus, Ishmael, what the fuck? If she hadn’t been married to me, she wouldn’t be dead. It’s th
at simple. I am responsible for her death. And so are you. And so is Sahara. We will all have to pay somehow. It’s just the way it is now,” he said, pushing himself against the passenger seat as if trying to still himself.

  I felt like shit for having said what I said. I had to agree that he was right. The fact was that without him, without us rattling the bushes, Mary would still be alive. We hadn’t killed her—yet we had. Even after we found out why she had died and brought those responsible to some form of justice, we would still be responsible for her death.

  The bottom line was that I could not imagine what he was going through. I had never lost anyone close to me—I had lost cop friends, but I’m talking about someone I truly loved, who I saw every day, who I lived and fought with. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to have that gone—what the first morning after, and then the next and the next … what that emptiness was like.

  We were now close to Nakuru, and I was about to joke about going to Lake Nakuru to see flamingoes, when we turned a corner and found ourselves in front of a group of young men armed with rocks, bows and arrows, and machetes that I guessed to be part of the Chinese machete shipment seized earlier in Mombasa. They were chanting “Down with Kibaki! Up with Raila!” Some of them were still in their school uniforms, while others, nicely dressed, appeared to have joined the crowd after work. It looked more like a celebration than a war party. We slowed down and drove through them, until they suddenly stopped moving and we had to stop as well or run them over.

  I rolled down my window. I could smell alcohol on their breath. They said something to us. I looked over at O.

  “They want to know what we are—which ethnicity,” O translated.

  “American,” I said, finding the whole thing a bit amusing—fucking bows and arrows?

  “Kipande?” Now, that I knew meant “ID.” O showed them his badge and they sobered up for a minute. O asked them something.

  “We are Kalenjin, warriors … like Rambo,” one of them replied and laughed, pointing at me.