Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  The Visitor Hotel made the most sense to all of us. A few hundred meters from KICC, it was close enough to see who was going in and coming out. He could detonate the bomb and watch the collapse, and it was a tourist hotel so his presence wouldn’t raise eyebrows. I called Hassan to see if he had anyone close to the hotel, but all the cops and detectives were dealing with the remaining pockets of violence.

  We stepped out of the Land Rover, checked our weapons, and put on our vests. I called Jason and explained what was up. He said that he and some of his people would be at the KICC in a few minutes. With the danger so immediate, he could now divert resources from the Al Qaeda manhunt.

  Nairobi traffic! Unlike in the U.S., where cops have the run of the road and where, on the highways, the shoulders are reserved for them, in Kenya there are no shoulders to speak of. Everyone drove where they could, so that even the bare muddy paths that pedestrians used were full of cars. We weaved in and out of traffic slowly, knocking a car out of the way here and there, pleading for a truck to let us through, until we got to within a mile or so the Visitor Hotel and could make a run for it. There were five minutes on the clock before the conference was supposed to start by the time we got to the hotel.

  We rushed into the lobby with our weapons drawn. The two or three tourists who hadn’t listened to the travel advisories from their respective countries scampered out of the lounge. O quickly described Sahara: ordinarily, finding him would have taken a long time, but with only a few guests, further narrowed down by ones who might have insisted on having a room that looked in the direction of the KICC, he was easy to find.

  He was on the twentieth floor. There was no way we were going to make it. I called Jason to see if he had gotten to the KICC, but he was stuck in traffic, together with his team.

  Any minute now, the bomb would go off. We made it to his door one minute past zero hour and I started to wonder if we’d had it all wrong.

  Muddy sprayed the door with her AK-47, and O and I burst through. Jim Delaware, the man we knew as Sahara, reached for his gun as he spun around from the window. O fired two disciplined shots into his chest and the cell phone he had been clutching fell to the floor. Sahara sank to the ground—dead, I thought, until he coughed and tore into his shirt to reveal a bulletproof vest. O had aimed for the heart, the grouping not more than an inch apart.

  “Your name!” O demanded.

  “You know who I am,” Sahara answered.

  “Where are the rest of the bombs?” I asked, my Glock still trained on him.

  He gestured painfully toward the KICC as he eyed the TV. I looked too. The politicians from the various political parties were just arriving—they were expecting the prime minister and president in fifteen minutes. They were running late. Had they been on time, we would have gotten to Sahara, but it would have been too late, his plan would have been in play.

  “Fucking African time,” he said as he coughed again.

  “Good thing the fuckers are not really trying for peace,” Muddy said.

  Sahara’s chest heaved up and down rapidly. I knew something about him that he didn’t know about himself; he had never been the one on the other side of power and he didn’t know why he was afraid. Now he was all alone, staring into the eyes of the man whose wife he had murdered.

  Seeing O standing over Sahara reminded me of seeing him standing in his apartment, Mary’s blood still dripping from his hands, his eyes alive, burning, looking hungry. I felt chills. Sahara wasn’t going to survive this encounter and he knew it—like Kimani at the Hilton.

  “I have a request—man to man—soldier to soldier,” he said to O. O smiled and signaled for him to continue.

  “I am going to reach into my back pocket,” he said.

  “It’s too late,” O said, as Sahara produced a checkbook. Sahara asked me for a wet cloth and I went to the hotel bathroom and ran a towel under the faucet for him. He wiped his hands, now sweating profusely from fear and pain. He asked me for a pen and I gave him one from the hotel desk. He calmed himself down by taking a few shallow breaths in quick succession.

  “Have to get the signature right,” he said to us as he finished writing two checks.

  I found two envelopes for him to address. He addressed one of the checks to Amos’s father and the other to his favorite football team, ten thousand and some loose change each.

  “It’s all I have,” he said, as he read the look on my face.

  It was true all along—that thing I had seen in them before they killed Mary. These guys weren’t mercenaries; they weren’t in it for money or glory—for the power, yes, but without personal gain. O’s summation was right—Jesus on steroids.

  “Amos … All his people are dead,” I told him. There was no forgiveness for him to buy.

  “Yes, his father … I heard the news. I thought the mother …” he said, as he wrote another check. It was to the Peace Corps.

  “Capture the king and kill the queen—what did you mean by that?” I asked.

  He looked puzzled.

  “Something Jamal overheard you say,” I clarified. He smiled, as if the thought crossing his mind gave him some comfort.

  “My nephew, he is learning to play chess. Some things are as they seem,” he said. This was the guy who, just a few weeks ago, had set off the bomb in the Norfolk and killed O’s wife? And tried to plunge a country already at war into a leaderless nightmare?

  “Why?” I asked him, wanting to understand.

  “You don’t know what you are doing. I forgive you for that. If you could open your eyes for a minute, if you could see what I see, you would be helping me create new men and women, a new country, one that is not tied to the past. A society past the point of singularity, a people so far into a new and better future that there would be no going back,” he answered, waiting for the inevitable question—what the fuck are you talking about?

  “Point of singularity, that peaceful place where the laws of the past no longer affect the present. Call it a clean slate, a new beginning. Genesis … only there is no God. Only man. And only man can give man a new beginning—we are our own saviors. What is it that Obama likes to say? We are the ones we have been waiting for. That waiting, for Kenya, it can end today, if you just let me … if you look outside yourselves … this is your moment,” he said, sounding like a general about to lead a charge.

  “Do you hear yourself? Why you and not somebody else?” Muddy asked him. She had been quiet, observing all along—perhaps wondering what made Sahara possible.

  “You see, that is the problem, if I had cancer, I would be asking why me and not someone else. Well, damn it, why not me? Why not me to bring in the new day? Why not you? Or O? Or Ishmael? Why not all of us?” Sahara asked, looking at each of us. “I am not a megalomaniac, or a savior. I just happen to have taken responsibility for the world I live in. My conscience is clean. Can you say the same?”

  I could see it; if I had been younger and had just witnessed the brutality of apartheid South Africa, like Amos and the other young men, I would have joined him.

  “I am going to kill you now. This is not for my wife—she would want me to forgive, not to kill in her name. But you have no place in this world. There is no place here for men like you,” O said without emotion, raising his gun to Sahara’s head.

  I had seen O kill people without so much as second-guessing himself, and all the talking he was doing now—Sahara must have got to him somehow.

  “Let the bomb go off, damn it, let the country be born again. Let the bomb go off, these people need …” Sahara pleaded.

  O shot him once in the head.

  I was surprised, even though I wasn’t expecting any other outcome. It was just that I hadn’t expected Sahara to die so easily.

  O picked up the phone, pointed to the SEND button, and looked at Muddy and me. I felt a fresh rush of adrenaline.

  “Blow them up—they are the fucking problem. We let them die and the country can piece itself together,” I said, thinking back to th
e young men at the roadblock, dying and killing for the men meeting at the KICC, chauffeur-driven from their safe houses in Runda.

  “O, we can do a lot of good all at once. More corruption, more famines because maize has been sold off, more and more of everything. Let’s end it here. We let them die …” Muddy said.

  “Over one thousand people dead because of these motherfuckers …” O said, his thumb hovering over the SEND button.

  It was like we had just entered a world where anything was possible, where instead of solving a murder here and there, we could impact forty-two million lives with the simple push of a button. We had gone insane and entered a universe of calculation and logic.

  “Let them all die … this country will be better off without them. In Rwanda, I would have killed for an opportunity like this—we could have ended it all. Let them all die. Nobody wins by letting them live. Everyone loses—let’s end it now, once and for all. Not for a new beginning, just a chance, a breathing space, a chance to grow something real,” Muddy argued.

  “What if we’re wrong? What if all that could go wrong goes wrong?” I asked Muddy, wanting her to give me a compelling reason as to why the motherfuckers should die.

  “Then one million people die, like in Rwanda,” she answered without hesitation.

  I looked at O.

  “Let’s do it,” I said with a trembling voice as I went to stand by the window, where I could see the last of the VIPs being ushered in. “Look, we have Sahara, we can blame him, say we got here a second too late.”

  “Jesus, so this is what power feels like. So this is what it feels like to be a general,” O said to himself, as if in a trance. Everything was moving slowly now—as if time itself was waiting for us to make a decision. He looked at Sahara, dead and still bleeding on the floor.

  “We let these bad people die and he wins. Let’s vote—and this time we count the votes right,” O said, finally piercing through the madness that was consuming us.

  Ultimately, power, like any force, simply existed. For Sahara, power was becoming a force of nature, rare, ruthless, and to the point. I wasn’t like Sahara and the rest of IDESC—I didn’t want to be a force of nature. I didn’t want to impact forty-two million lives for better or worse all at once—I just wanted to see justice for Amos and Mary. All this other shit was way beyond me—I could live with that. IDESC was going to reconstitute itself. If Mpande was telling the truth, the organization existed in the memories of those involved. They would find another body, another organization. But for now, we had done our little bit.

  “It’s messy, very messy, but it’s over—we walk away,” I said.

  “This, what we have here, this moment, we shall never have it ever again. You both know I am right,” Muddy said as she sat down and put her AK on the floor.

  “Muddy, it’s two against one,” O concluded, after looking at me to make sure Muddy hadn’t changed my mind.

  “You are a bunch of pussies,” Muddy said, and she stood up and forcefully shoved me in the chest. She too had come to her senses—we had all broken out of the trance.

  We didn’t know what to do with the cell phone detonator, so we took it down in the elevator with us. We made it to the lobby as Jason rushed in. O gave him the phone. Jason hit SEND and covered his ears.

  “Just wanted to make sure my boys did the job right,” he said, laughing, pointing at our faces.

  Sahara had claimed that there was only one bomb. But that map I had retrieved from the Range Rover, the map with all the landmarks … I was sure that there were bombs in every location, designed specifically for each place. Jason and his team had their work cut out for them.

  I gave the envelopes from Sahara to the hotel manager.

  “Make sure you use DHL,” I said to him.

  The manager hesitated for a minute.

  “Who is going to pay?” he asked.

  O found his wallet and gave the man a hundred dollars from the money Jason had given us to use in the U.S.

  O and I didn’t ask each other why it mattered, because we knew, as much as we wouldn’t admit it, that someday it could be him or me asking someone with a gun to our heads for a last favor.

  “I need to seriously get high,” O said as we walked out of the hotel. The Nairobi sun was treacherous, but it felt welcome.

  “Maybe now you guys can actually do some good?” Muddy said, as she pointed to a mob gathering around a young man who they were accusing of being a thief.

  We went over and broke up the crowd, and the young man ran off.

  Then we sat on the pavement and laughed for a long time. I didn’t know why I was laughing. Perhaps it was at the idea of letting a conference center full of thug politicians live to kill thousands tomorrow, only to save a pickpocket.

  CHAPTER 19

  AND THEN IT RAINED

  O, Paul, Muddy, Jason, and I were sitting with Hassan in his office, talking about Mo’s story, which had broken the day after Amos’s father was killed by the remaining IDESC members. There had been immediate questions about her sources, how much prior information she had, since she seemed to know so much about the case. The thing about Mo, though, was that the more you came after her, the harder she pushed back. She was an investigative journalist on assignment—she would never reveal her sources. But she did have some questions of her own: Why were two respected detectives on the terrorist watch list? Why was the U.S. government bombing the hell out of Somalia when the perpetrators of the Norfolk bombing were Americans? Mo had thrown the closing salvo out to the public and it was best to let it lie there—anyone who claimed it would have to own it. And, sure enough, just as mysteriously as our names had appeared on the list, they were removed.

  As we expected, nothing came out of her story: no grand juries, no evocative pronouncements from a barely formed Kenyan unity government about foreigners planting bombs, no major speeches by Obama on the importance of international law. It was all going to be as it had been before, a cat-and-bomb game between the U.S. and Al Qaeda. Thanks to us, the official story ran, an international Al Qaeda wing had been brought to justice.

  There was nothing more to be done for now, except to go find some beer and good nyama choma.

  I was the last at the door when Hassan seemed to remember something and called me back.

  “By the way, not that it matters now, but a guy from Mexico—the teacher?—has been calling for you,” he said. He gave me a number and pointed to his office desk phone.

  “Teacher, Ishmael here,” I said as soon as he picked up.

  “Listen, my friend, things have changed here. My jefe is gone—a lot of cleaning, you know. And hidden under the carpet was something of interest: your friend Jason, he and Julio have been trafficking drugs into your country. Then those drugs are shipped all over Africa,” he said.

  “You’re sure about this, teacher?” I asked, knowing there had to be some truth to it.

  “This is for saving my life—and now I risk it to tell you this. If Julio finds out, I am dead. Yes, I am sure,” he said.

  This nightmare would never end. It would keep going and going, taking more lives until we all were dead.

  “Ishmael, are you still there?” the teacher asked.

  “Yes, just thinking … does this shit ever end?” I asked him.

  “No, my friend, not as long as there are human beings. It is our nature to eat and produce shit. I wish you all the best. And pass my greetings to Muddy and O,” he said, as we both laughed at the much-needed joke.

  By the time I caught up with them, Muddy, O, Paul, and Jason had settled on going straight to Kariokor for the nyama choma and Tuskers. Paul and Jason would drive there together. And O, Muddy, and I would pick up Janet from the university for some “normal” time.

  As soon as we got in the Land Rover, I told Muddy and O about my conversation with the teacher. It seemed both Jason and Paul were dirty, but for different reasons. Jason had every incentive to see IDESC out of the democracy business. The threat of ana
rchy in Nairobi would have turned Nairobi into a CIA and Interpol hub; it would have meant closely watched ports, airports, and borders—bad for business. Paul, on the other hand, wanted to put pressure on Al Qaeda and not on IDESC. But what would he gain from an IDESC-run Kenya, unless he too was a believer?

  I made a call to Mpande.

  “You owe me,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “One question—and we’re even. Jason or Paul?”

  “Paul,” he said. “Paul is one of us.” He hung up.

  We now knew what we knew, but did it really matter? What were we going to do? Kill the U.S. Embassy spokesperson because he fed information to Sahara and his army? And kill Jason because he wanted to stop terrorists from entering Kenya so that he could traffic drugs? Kill Paul for Mary’s death? If we went after Jason and Paul, why stop there and not go after the surviving IDESC members like Mpande?

  “We have to stop somewhere,” I said to Muddy and O. They didn’t respond. As we waited for Janet, I looked at all the young people walking about, laughing, others holding hands, and some too young to look so serious. Janet skipped to the Land Rover, hopped in, and we drove off to the market to wait for Jason and Paul.

  At the market, I drifted off, staring into the Nairobi sun, wondering what my parents would think of being grandparents. Muddy had once told me that if you can still dream, then you are still alive. It was dreaming that had kept her alive in Rwanda. I let myself soak in the sun, the stale smell of old malt beer that turned the naked ground muddy, the humming voices, the hot sticky touch of Muddy’s hand on mine as she talked and laughed, Janet’s college-girl giggles, and O’s voice, sounding rambling and relaxed now.

  “You know what they call cocaine in Nairobi?” O was asking us. “Unga ya wazungu … the white people’s maize flour,” he said, laughing.

  People were milling all around us and you could have sworn the whole of Nairobi had descended on the market.

  The Tuskers, for an extra shilling, were extra chilled, and O ordered a round. He looked at the time and said he needed the bathroom and we made fun of him, saying that he was getting old and peed by the hour. He wandered off and I leaned back into the chair, watching Muddy and Janet talk animatedly about campus life and boys.