Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  “Yes, I don’t want to die, help me,” the man said. Sahara hung up without another word. The man dialed 911 and after he gave them the address, I took the phone back from him. We didn’t need him giving the cops more information over the phone before we were in the clear.

  O and Muddy didn’t find anything. The wallets from the bodyguards contained no IDs. We didn’t have a forensics team, or unlimited time to go through the crime scene. We were nineteenth-century detectives operating in the twenty-first. It was time to go the Oakland offices of IDESC.

  We couldn’t take the van. Now that things had heated up, Sahara most probably would have alerted his connections in Homeland Security, and they in turn would have alerted local cops. I took the car keys from one of Sahara’s men. Soon enough we were driving off in a massive Hummer.

  We needed to do three things, and fast: get to the IDESC offices, find out if Peter had betrayed us and get him to tell us where Sahara was, and then get the hell out of the U.S. To do that we needed to get back to Michael’s, where, in the labyrinth of illegal immigrants, we would be safe. But first IDESC—there would be answers there. We were almost home, yet everything was still in the balance.

  “How did you know?” I asked O.

  “I didn’t,” O said from the backseat. “The thing was, Peter told Sahara we were from Ghana, and the food on the table was Ghanaian. But then the man said something about Kenyans. He was just making small talk, trying to make us comfortable. If he’d kept his mouth shut, they would have had us,” he explained, as if talking us through a game of chess.

  “You saved our lives back there. We were walking into a fucking firing squad,” Muddy said, looking back at O.

  “I’m sorry, guys, I was kinda slow—I didn’t see it coming,” I said, feeling the weight of having done nothing. It occurred to me that my edge was gone since I’d come back home. I had to pick it up a notch. If Muddy hadn’t jumped in, O would have been shot by the third bodyguard.

  At what point did Sahara know it was us? Did the men following us from the airport know who we were, or were they really after Julio? Or if we’d been betrayed, was it by Jason or Paul? The point was, we didn’t know—we had no ears listening through any walls anywhere. We could only react—and hope we reacted fast enough to finally take the initiative from Sahara.

  I had to think and act like the under-resourced criminal that I was in real terms. I knew this system better than O and Muddy. I had to be more resourceful.

  As soon as we hit Broadway Avenue, we heard a loud explosion—and right away we saw smoke billowing above the city lights. We knew it had to be the IDESC office going up in smoke. Muddy looked at me. A black Jaguar was coming toward us. It looked familiar, even in the shimmery near-dark.

  Nearing the Hummer, it slowed down and the driver started to roll down the window. It was him: he had recognized the Hummer—but a second later, he realized that it wasn’t one of his bodyguards driving it.

  “Sahara!” I shouted. There wasn’t enough time for me to reach my Glock and roll down the window, so I spun the unwieldy Hummer into the Jaguar. The Jaguar nimbly veered away, so that I could only nip its back, and it roared off. I turned around and sped after it. O and Muddy rolled down their windows and fired at the retreating Jaguar, shattering the rear window. It was much faster than the Hummer—the distance between us increased as it tore through the streets, and the Hummer threatened to roll over with each sharp corner we took. Somewhere up ahead, the Jaguar turned into a side street and just like that, Sahara was gone.

  And as soon as we slowed down, a black cop flagged us down. This much I knew—he was going to call the plates in before he approached us. Then he’d ask me for my driver’s license: a good fake that could pass most of the time, but not when we were driving an expensive car registered to someone else. There was no easy way out.

  I put the Hummer in reverse and stepped on it. Through my rearview mirror, I could see shock all over the cop’s face as he fumbled and tried to get out of the way. The Hummer started to climb up the front of the cruiser and I stopped. O jumped out, Glock in hand, aimed at the cop. Muddy also jumped out, weapon drawn.

  The cop raised his hands without us asking. I pulled his door open and secured his sidearm, then smashed in the surveillance camera and radio, and took his cell phone. I handcuffed him and led him to the Hummer. He was shaking with fear, but he was trying to be brave. I stuck him between O and Muddy, who keep their guns trained on him as we drove through the dark streets.

  A few blocks away, I saw a closed car-wash station. We got him out of the car and half-dragged him into the car wash. I handcuffed him to one of the rails as he pleaded for his life.

  “What are we going to do with him?” O asked. I didn’t answer. I took out my Glock and signaled for he and Muddy to leave us alone.

  “I have three children …” the cop started to say.

  “Listen, brother, things are not what they seem,” I said, pointing in the direction of Muddy and O. “I gotta make them believe.”

  “You don’t have to do this, brother. Hey, man, I too get angry and want to bomb some shit—just walk, walk away, I won’t tell anybody,” he pleaded.

  Now I knew. An APB was out on us. The cop had flagged us down because, at some point in the evening, Sahara had called in his last card.

  “Brother, you have to trust me. I am undercover—I’m trying to bring down a terrorist cell,” I said.

  He yelled in fear as I raised my gun to his head. I fired two shots into the wall.

  “They’ll find you in the morning,” I said to his confused silence. It was probably going to be sooner, but by then we’d be harder to find.

  I ran back to the Hummer and found O and Muddy looking surprised.

  “I didn’t kill him—told him I was UC,” I said, managing a laugh that was more of a grunt. “The confusion will buy us time.”

  The cop would believe me—and more important, he would appear convincing to those who were hunting us. He would believe that Muddy and O were the terrorists, and at worst, because he had encountered us and lived to write his report, that I had a conscience, or at best, that I was who I said I was: an undercover agent. Doubt that bought me that split second between “kill,” “wound,” or “handcuff” might come in handy.

  Where was Sahara? He had taken a suitcase and laptop, and he was on his way somewhere—and I was sure that he was the one who’d firebombed the IDESC office. He didn’t have an office anymore, and he couldn’t go back home—not with one of his men in the hospital, probably telling the cops all he knew. It hit me then—he was going back to Kenya. He seemed like a man who had cut his losses. In the same way that, in the U.S., we could emerge from and disappear into the immigrant community, in Kenya he had camouflage in the tourist hotels and networks. In any case, we could no longer, without significant risk, stay in the U.S. It was time for us to go back too.

  We came to a dance club that was open, drove past it, and parked the Hummer a few blocks away. We wiped it down. We couldn’t fully cover our tracks, but we could put some time between the authorities and us. To get back into Mexico, we just needed to be an hour or so ahead of everyone else. We took a cab from the club to Peter’s.

  The main door to Peter’s apartment complex was propped open. As we walked up the stairs, we heard loud Malian blues music. When we got to his door, we drew our weapons. It wasn’t locked and we could hear voices talking above the music. I pushed the door open slowly, and smoke from weed billowed out into the passageway. Peter was having a fucking party. When he saw us, he ran over and pulled us into the kitchen in excitement.

  “Am I free? Tell me I’m free …” he said, looking from Muddy to O to me.

  “He escaped. He knew—someone warned him,” I told him.

  Peter sank slowly to the floor.

  “Shit, then he knows I set him up … I am fucking dead,” he said, life literally draining out of him.

  Sahara hadn’t killed Peter because Peter had sold us out
—that was one possibility. The other was that once Sahara had figured out who we really were, then we became the principals. Only after killing us would he go after Peter, and then only if there was something he would gain from it. He was that pragmatic. His mission was more important than killing Peter.

  Looking at Peter slunk to the floor, high and disappointed, I felt that there was no way he was the one who had betrayed us. If he was pretending, then, on the strength of such a convincing act alone, he deserved to live. That left Hassan, Jason, or someone working closely with Jason. Like Paul. It had to be Jason or Paul. That would have to wait until we got back to Kenya.

  “Any idea where he might have gone?” I asked him.

  “No, but one of the guests in the car talked about them going to Kenya,” Peter answered.

  “We need to talk to them, maybe to one of the guests staying at the Hilton,” I told Peter.

  “Two of them wanted to see some girls. Like I was a pimp,” he said.

  But in Sahara’s eyes, Peter, whether deserving of death or not, was compromised. We couldn’t use him to get to the guests. We had to find another way of getting into the Hilton and grabbing one of them. We could call in a bomb threat. Or we could set off the fire alarm. But both plans meant that the place would be swarming with cops and firemen. There was only one way—we had to get into the Hilton quietly and talk to one of them there. It was the riskiest but the least expected move.

  CHAPTER 15

  KILLING FOR O

  Close to midnight, three Africans—two men and a woman, dressed in business attire—walked into the Hilton. They were laughing like they’d been out having a good time, and the woman had her high heels in her right hand and her left hand linked through the elbow of one of the men.

  “Packages for Room 312?” O asked at the desk. The clerk typed something into his computer.

  “Sorry, Mr. Kimani. No package has come in yet, but a Mr. Henderson left you a message a few minutes ago, saying it’ll get here in the morning,” he informed us.

  That message was from Peter. It was to establish an identity for O, and at the same time tell us whether Martin Kimani was still in town. We had bet that, at this late hour, the clerk would just take the message rather than wake up the guest.

  “And they say things are slow in Africa,” Muddy said as we started to walk toward the elevators.

  “Shit—excuse my language … hey, guys, wait a minute. I can’t seem to find my room key,” O said, as he rummaged through his wallet. The clerk looked at O’s wallet, and for a second, it looked like he was going to ask him for his ID.

  “Nice try, but you’re not sleeping in my room,” Muddy said to O. “Maybe his?” She pointed at me and laughed along with the clerk.

  “It happens, sir,” the clerk said to O, as he gave him another key card.

  It was that simple. Anyone watching us walking into Mr. Kimani’s room would have thought we were going in for a drink before splitting up. We were learning fast. A few weeks ago, we would have flashed a badge; now we had just pulled a con.

  Kimani, dead asleep, didn’t hear us enter. O gently shook him awake, as Muddy turned on the TV and I turned on the lights. Kimani looked around to make sure he was still in the Hilton—and before he could scream, O put a gun to his head.

  There was a near-empty bottle of champagne on the night-stand; next to it, an empty glass and a bucket, in which an ice pick floated among thin pieces of ice. I poured some champagne into the glass and he gulped it down fast.

  “You know who we are?” O asked.

  “Yes, I know who you are,” he replied, his eyes angrily darting from O to me and Muddy.

  Kimani had one of those faces that you immediately identified with—dignified. He was what I thought an African looked like before I went to Kenya—the Africans in the movies—wise, tall, slightly balding, with a well-trimmed goatee and, of course, the eyeglasses that he had reached for and was now adjusting. We’d chosen him because he was black and African, and we could pass for him—we certainly didn’t look Norwegian or English.

  “But do you know who I really am?” he asked in return.

  “Why don’t you tell us,” Muddy said to him carelessly.

  He glared at her and I knew she was on to something. If there was one thing this guy wasn’t used to, it was women talking to him as if they were equals.

  “My name is Martin Kimani …” he said and went on to list all his credentials.

  O whistled.

  “Walk out of here now and I promise you a safe return to Kenya,” he said, now that we were sufficiently impressed.

  “But how well do you know me?” O asked him, now smiling. If I were Kimani, I would have chosen my next words very carefully, but he didn’t know that the tables had turned. Maybe in Kenya, before the bomb explosion and Mary’s death, Kimani could “senior” and “superior” his way out of a meeting with O. Used to exerting power from the shadows, he thought that he could use raw power and money to buy us out. But not in a Hilton Hotel in California, where O didn’t really exist, and not after Mary’s death.

  “I’m sorry about your wife. She need not die in vain. You can do some good. A scholarship in her name at Kangemi Primary School—all the way to university, a job guaranteed at the end,” he said, sounding so genuine that I had no doubt he meant it. He was part of that old generation whose word meant everything. And so, when they were wrong, people like Mary died.

  “Whatever you want I can offer ten times over. You walk out now—and in five years, you are the police commissioner. If you want to retire, how about a twenty-acre farm anywhere in the country? Perhaps you’d like a hotel in Mombasa?” he continued.

  Muddy, as if understanding what was going to happen next, turned up the volume on the TV and Kimani lost a bit of his composure.

  O stepped away from him.

  “Take off your pajamas,” he said, in a tone that sounded more like a suggestion than a command.

  “I will most certainly not, I am old enough to be your father,” Kimani said defiantly. “And not in front of a woman young enough to be my daughter,” he added, pointing at Muddy, who merely shrugged.

  This is what it boiled down to. Kimani had information we needed—and we had his life in our hands, and between the two was his dignity. And not just dignity but that inviolable bond that holds societies together—that even in great adversity is upheld. This wasn’t just a Kenyan thing; in each society there are some things that are worse than death. For Kimani, it was for an elder of social standing to strip naked in front of a young woman.

  O walked up to him and suddenly swung the butt end of his Glock so that it caught Kimani in the mouth and broke two of his front teeth, splitting his lips open. O picked up the ice pick.

  “I’m going to ram this into your gums. You will scream in pain and then I will ram it into your throat to shut you up. Then we move on to the motherfucker in Room 318. Do you understand me?” O asked him, with that same smile still on his face. A smile that said he would rather Kimani gave us nothing, so he could do it.

  Kimani took off his clothes and O marched him to the bathroom and pushed him onto the toilet seat. Shivering even though it was warm, he’d lost the dignity he had exuded a moment before. Now he was just a scared, naked old man.

  “Now, tell us everything,” O said, and Kimani, as if relieved to confess things he had kept bottled up, started talking through his two broken teeth, his split lips, and the blood that kept dripping onto the marble bathroom floor.

  “Outcome! That is what we control,” he began. If it weren’t for the circumstances, it would have sounded like he was about to give a PowerPoint presentation.

  “We look at a situation and we decide what the bottom line is. God wants people to reform, to be good. The Devil wants them to be evil. We don’t care whether they are good or bad; we just draw the line at extreme good or extreme evil. Hitler and Gandhi, revolutionaries and terrorists, Mother Teresa and Pinochet—all of them are the same to us—wher
e we find them, we execute them … can I have some aspirin?” he asked as he winced in pain.

  I went to his desk, found two Tylenol tablets, and gave them to him. He looked at me, defeated—I must have had the same type of look on my face a few seconds before Mary was shot.

  “Who is we?” Muddy asked him. He looked at O, as if asking for permission to answer, and O nodded yes.

  “I would like to get dressed … I assure you of my full cooperation. Let’s talk—like men,” he said, trying to reclaim his dignity and eyeing Muddy.

  Muddy went to the closet and came back with underwear, a suit, and a tie.

  He took the clothes, dressed, and washed the blood off his face. He adjusted his tie and tugged at his shirt cuffs. The suit really did make the man: he was back to being the commanding elderly African.

  “Please, gentlemen and lady—shall we talk in the sitting room over a drink or two?” he asked. I suppose that even we were taken by surprise by the transformation and wanted to see where he would take this, so we said yes and followed him out of the bathroom. He went the mini-bar and came out with three small Johnnie Walker bottles.

  “You know how you can tell a man who has never poured a drink? He pours the whiskey before the ice,” he said.

  “What is IDESC?” I asked him, and he looked at me as if trying to judge how much I knew.

  “Look at the most powerful men in the world. Think about them. The photos you know of them, the stories about them—there is always a shadow, the figure of an unnamed man in the background. What if the shadow was the actual man and the man the shadow? Did you ever think of that? That is the illusion of power. What we—the managers, the assistant directors, the press secretaries—discovered was that we wielded the real power. Directors come and go—who remains? The assistant director. The manager comes and goes; the assistant manager stays …”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? You’re telling us that a bunch of middle managers are blowing up hotels?” I interrupted him.

  “You are not listening to me. Do you know the term ‘institutional memory’?” he asked.