The sound of a single gunshot froze the whole market, bodies tense, waiting for a second report. Nothing pierced the silence and soon everyone resumed tearing into their nyama choma and Tuskers.
I asked Muddy, who by now was holding a gun under the flimsy plastic table, to stay with Janet, and I ran after the sound, thinking it was far from over—and that O had been shot. A few hundred feet from the bathroom, I saw Paul, bleeding, gun in hand, staggering away. I followed him carefully. He got into his Pajero and drove ten or so feet before releasing the clutch so that the engine stalled.
I yelled at him to step out of the vehicle. He put up his hands through the driver’s window for a few seconds before they came flopping down. I edged closer to the car. He managed to open the door halfway and fell out into the dust and mud. He reached for my hand, I edged closer to him and took it. His body went into spasms and then he died.
Some young men in the crowd yelled at me and moved in closer. Their leader had what appeared to be a homemade pistol. They wanted the car. I holstered my Glock and turned to look at them, wanting to find relief, for it all to end.
“Are you crazy? He is the American, the one who works with O,” someone warned them. They stepped back. I came to my senses.
“If you take the car, then he is yours,” I said, pointing at Paul’s body.
“Thank you, sir,” their leader said as they bundled Paul into the car. If O had killed him, at least for now it would appear to be a random car-jacking gone bad. Paul was dirty enough that no one was going to dig deep to find whoever had killed him.
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” the same person who had warned the mob about O asked me as he stepped out of the crowd. I noticed the golden MC Hammer pants.
“Did she agree to marry you?” MC Hammer asked.
I smiled and hugged him.
I walked back to our table to find everyone except Janet tipsier and higher. Jason had arrived and he was passing O a joint to light. O laughed and passed it on to me. For the first time in many years, I lit up. It had to be O who had killed Paul, but then again it could have been Jason.
“Paul? What was the point?” I asked O. He didn’t answer or show any surprise. He pointed to the nyama choma guy standing at our table with a kettle of warm water and soap. We each washed our hands. No one asked me why my hands were bloody.
“And you, Jason? Did you kill Paul?” I asked him. Janet, Muddy, and O continued on talking and drying their hands.
“Paul? Why? No,” he said casually, in a tone that suggested his denial was for protocol purposes only.
“We know all about you and Julio,” I said. He looked serious for a moment.
“I know you do. Yet, here we are having brewskylunch,” he said, laughing.
“What the fuck, motherfuckers—we police!” O said suddenly, slapping his knee and passing me the joint.
“Shiznit, motherfuckers—we CIA,” Jason said, mimicking O.
It was the funniest thing I had heard in a long time, and in spite of myself, I broke into high laughter that, in its wake, left me with some clarity. I doubted. I no longer believed that we were serving justice, because the price was justice itself. I had nowhere to go.
A guy was walking by with a nyatiti. Muddy waved him over and asked him to play something. She stood up on the wobbly table and balanced herself. The people around us stopped tearing into their meat to look at the beautiful tall woman. As the nyatiti picked up speed, the market became quieter and the outer rings strained to hear the music.
A man selling conga drums laid his load by her feet, pulled one from his pile of wares, and joined both of them. Muddy was syncopating her cadence so that the words and her voice became an instrument—so that it was no longer her words that mattered but her voice. It went on like that, merchant after merchant of different instruments coming to join in until we had a fucking orchestra of voices and African instruments. And in the middle of them, Muddy, arms raised, palms curled inward, her voice rising up and down like a bird gliding over a stormy ocean.
I thought I had heard it all—but not the sound of a voice, a tongue, the sound of Muddy’s voice wrapped around the four-stringed nyatiti that had now taken the lead, improvising above the rest of the instruments. The music, the single notes held together by Muddy’s voice were like a hand guiding me through a nightmare. I wanted to pray.
I listened closely—there was a clash of instruments and voices. But there was also some tense harmony in there—like a dinner with quarreling lovers. There was a tug of war but the more each of them pulled, the more it brought them closer. They were fighting but not to destroy each other, they were fighting to build—their fighting, their calling out to each other, their competing, it was all to build something they felt we could all use. Something they were offering, for us to take, or leave behind. And once we took it with us, this rage that was love, this violence that claimed to build, what was to become of it? Would it not justify a machete or a Glock? But the musicians were building.
I, on the other hand, did not build. Mary had died and to bury her we had killed many more, and to get Sahara for killing Amos, we had killed many more again. It struck me—I was part of the problem. I was just several rungs above the Saharas of this world. So were O and my wife-to-be, Muddy.
I listened closely to the voices, the drums, and the strings. The refrain was asking a simple question, over and over again.
Why?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A writer needs a community of readers and critics. I have been lucky to have two such communities. A family full of readers and writers who love wielding the red pen—Ngugi, Njeri, Tee, Kimunya, Nducu, Ngina, Wanjiku, Njoki, Bjorn, Mumbi, and Thiong’o. Thanks to you, I have concluded coming from a family of writers is, for better or worse, like being in a creative writing workshop for life. And a community of the diverse bloggers (Eve from Striped Armchair and Robert Carraher from the Dirty Lowdown immediately come to mind) who read, commented, and lovingly savaged Nairobi Heat. I hope you will find Black Star Nairobi equally compelling but without some of the issues you took umbrage with (or at the very least a new set). You are my most honest readers.
Also thanks to my publishers, Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians at Melville House, for their belief in the continuing adventures of Ishmael, O, and Muddy and to my editor, Sal Robinson, for edits that turned out to be a conversation about the novel.
Finally, thanks to my agents, Gloria Loomis and Julia Masnik over at Loomis and Watkins agency, for fending for me as well as giving me useful feedback on the novel.
MUKOMA WA NGUGI is the author of Nairobi Heat, which introduces the detectives Ishmael and O. His fiction has been short-listed for the 2009 Caine Prize and the 2010 Penguin Prize for African Writing. His columns have appeared in The Guardian, International Herald Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, and he has been a guest on Democracy Now, Al Jazeera, and the BBC World Service. His essays and poetry have been included in a number of anthologies, as well as in his own poetry collection, Hurling Words at Consciousness. Ngugi was born in 1971 in Evanston, Illinois, the son of the world-renowned African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and grew up in Kenya before returning to the United States for his undergraduate and graduate education. He is currently a professor of English at Cornell University.
READ THE FIRST BOOK IN THE SERIES
In Madison, Wisconsin, when a body is found on the doorstep of an African peace activist who saved hundreds of people from the Rwandan genocide, local cop Ishmael Fofona is summoned to investigate. But then he gets a mysterious phone call: “If you want the truth, you must go to its source. The truth is in the past. Come to Nairobi.” It’s the beginning of a journey that will change Ishmael’s life forever, to a place still reeling from the aftereffects of the genocide around its borders, where big-oil money rules, where the cops shoot first and ask questions later—a place, in short, where knowing the truth about history can get you killed.
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Black Star Nairobi Page 24