“These are no ordinary carvings,” he said.
Did I detect a Jamaican accent? For some reason, it reminded of the dreadlocked man who had followed me in the park, trying to sell me a joint. Or . . . the voice . . . No, I didn’t want to go there. Telephones distorted voices.
“Why?” I asked, to create a friendly mood for conversation.
“They have healing powers. The giraffes. Good for the mantel. Spread peace to all in the house. See their long necks? They see far. Into the future. Can I help you?”
“I am not sure, I have not come to buy carvings,” I said almost apologetically. “I am looking for an adoption agency that used to be, well, here?”
“Oh, I am sorry, I can’t help you there,” he said, looking at me intently. “As you can see, this is a curio store,” he added, gesturing with his hands.
“Would you know where or what happened to the agency?”
“No idea. Sorry I can’t help you.”
“Yesterday the building was padlocked.”
“Stock-taking. But if you’re not interested in our sculptures, it should not concern you when and why we close.”
“How long have you been open?” I asked him. “As a curio center, I mean?”
“Woman, are you some kind of police?” he asked rather aggressively. “Look, if you are not buying anything . . .” For some reason, he donned the mask of the charging rhino and made as if to charge me.
“No no, sorry for asking, very rude of me, thanks for your help,” I said, retreating quickly.
“No trouble, ma’am,” he growled through the mask.
Right before I crossed the street, I looked back. The man, with the rhino mask in his hand, was standing at the door, watching me. I waved, not knowing exactly why, and then got into my car and drove off. But the image of the man in a rhino mask stayed in my mind for a long time. In the image, the rhino mask had replaced the human head. The Rhino Man, he became in my mind.
• • •
I called Melinda and told her I had to see her. In no time, I was at her place in West Orange, New Jersey. The four-bedroom Melinda Palace, as she liked to call it, complete with a swimming pool, was off the main street but not visible from the road, because it was surrounded by trees. I threw my orange kikoi, which I used as a scarf, on the couch and delved right into the reason for my visit.
“Are you crazy?” Melinda asked, alarmed. “Why put your life in danger?”
“Couldn’t help it. As it turns out, it’s only a curio shop,” I said. “Aren’t you a little bit curious that I found it open so soon after we found it closed?”
“That’s why it alarms me. How could an adoption agency turn out to be a curio shop in the course of a few weeks? And who talked to Zack? Who faxed him those papers?”
“My questions exactly. The adoption must exist someplace. Did you find anything in cyberspace? An online existence of Kasla?”
“No,” she said. “I have tried all sorts of search engines, but nothing like that comes up. I will keep trying. But tell you what: Why don’t you ask Zack? Talk it over with him candidly. If I were still married to Mark, I would also probe.”
“Don’t let it worry you. I have decided to quit this nonsense.”
“Good.”
“Unless Ben comes up with something substantial.”
“Ben?” she asked.
“Oh, a police officer I knew as a student.”
“You went to see the police?” she asked, sounding surprised.
“Yes, I did. In a personal way. I didn’t want to alarm Zack with speculation.”
“Oh, Mugure, aren’t you taking this too far? Why bring the police into it?”
“I just told you. I went to see Ben as a friend.”
“Perhaps I should put it more bluntly,” Melinda said. “You don’t know who else the police may be working for. The best of them give tips to newspapers and get paid for it. The Murdoch virus. I am not saying that Ben is like that. But I don’t trust the police.”
“Noted,” I said. “But please, Melinda, this is between us, okay?”
“You know you can trust me.”
Of course, I thought as I rushed to the car. I had to race back in time to collect Kobi from school—a challenge, given the New York traffic—but I was lucky and managed to beat the afternoon rush. Melinda was right: I had to talk to Zack candidly, minus the bit about Ben.
During dinner, Zack asked after my day, as usual.
“It was okay,” I said in a noncommittal tone.
“What did you do?”
“Well, I just . . . you know, the usual, with the girls, shopping, Kobi . . . that kind of thing. And you? How was your day?” I asked, trying to change the focus.
This would have been a good opening for the conversation I really wanted to have, but I waited until Kobi had gone to bed, when we were sitting in the living room. Zack made us glasses of gin and tonic. He beat me to the questions. “Someone said they saw you in Manhattan?”
I almost jumped out of my seat. “Manhattan, why, yes, I was looking for Tiffany’s. That diamond necklace I have been threatening to buy. I couldn’t find the branch I wanted and ended up lost in some deserted area. I will try again tomorrow.”
“It’s dangerous out there, you know,” he said. “You really have to use your GPS and even then confine yourself to the city center. I am not so sure venturing into perilous areas is a good idea.”
My frustrations welled up inside me, and something snapped. “Why are you giving me a lecture about safety?” I said. “I know my way well enough around the city. I was a student at CCNY for four years, remember?”
He stood up, came behind me, and put loving hands on my shoulders. “I am sorry, Mugure,” he said, kissing my ear. “I’ve been out of sorts lately. I’m under too much pressure at work. I got really unsettled about the agency closing down. I just can’t trace them. It’s like they never existed.”
“But, Zack, you talked to somebody. And that somebody sent you some material with wrong dates and names. You should be telling me how an adoption agency turns out to be a curio shop,” I said, no longer disguising the fact that I was not taking him at his word.
“Curios?” he said, a little puzzled.
I told him that I had been to the premises.
“One cannot tell in these days of the Internet,” he said. “Virtual offices. Outsourcing. Sometimes you get calls about products and services here in America, then you discover the call came from India. Cheaper that way.”
In the back of my mind, I was hearing echoes of Melinda’s words about virtual reality. “Melinda has looked into it. Kasla does not exist online,” I told him.
“Please don’t let it concern you. I will get to the bottom of this.”
“Should we worry about it?” I asked him, more as a statement than a question.
He went back to his seat. “Legally, we have nothing to worry about. I did everything by the book. But you get to wondering, you know . . .”
I decided to tell him about Mark, my suspicions more or less confirmed by Melinda, and urged him to be extra-careful with his friends. I hoped that would make it easier for him to talk to me about his friendship with Mark or what he truly knew about Kobi’s adoption.
“I am sorry to have added to your worries,” I found myself saying, but no sooner did I let out the words than another thought crept in. Who had told Zack about my Manhattan trip? There were only three people who knew: Melinda, Ben, and the Rhino Man. Ben had used the same words that Zack had used. The Rhino Man had looked hard at me; he had probably read my license number and traced it to me or Zack. Could Mark have seen and talked to Zack as his way of doing to my relationship what he thought I had done to his relationship with Melinda? Countless possibilities.
“Zack, who told you I was in Manhattan?”
“David,”
he said without hesitation.
• • •
I decided to quit playing amateur detective. It was not as if there had been any crime. It was foolish of me to persist in pointless obstinacy, unraveling a past that posed no threats to the present. Why should I disrupt my family stability to satisfy nothing? Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
Two days later, while I was sitting in my car waiting for Kobi to finish a soccer match and feeling good about my new resolve, my cell phone rang. It was Ben.
“Ben, how kind of you to check on me. How are you?” I said. “I must apologize for the other day. I am not sure what I was thinking. The good news is that I have decided to drop the whole matter. It’s silly.”
“That’s very wise, Mugure,” Ben said after a pause. “Well, then, I suppose the information I have is not necessary.”
“What, wait, did you find something?” I said.
“It’s not much, but sometime last year, the Kasla agency was under investigation for some unusual adoption procedures. No charges were filed. Police did not have enough evidence to prosecute. The agency folded up on its own. Your questions are not enough of a basis for us to reopen the file. Unless you—or someone else—were to come up with new evidence of a crime. But the fact that it was under investigation establishes that it did exist sometime in the past. I just wanted to let you that you were not chasing a ghost, exactly.”
“Thank you, Ben. The information is interesting, but like you, I have closed the file.”
“Don’t you want to know the law firm that represented them?”
Ignorance is bliss, I told myself again, though there was no harm in knowing.“Who?” I asked.
“Edward and Palmer.”
“What?” I shouted, pulling the phone from my ear to look at it. The tension in my cheeks tightened. Just then I saw Kobi running toward me. “Ben, I have to go. I will be in touch,” I said, and hung up.
Kobi got in the car, excited by the goal he had scored. He took a ball we had bought him for home practice and hugged it. I tried to force a smile. I drove home, fighting to focus on Kobi’s happiness and not the shock of Ben’s revelation.
A few seconds later, the phone rang again. I pulled over to answer it.
That call would haunt me, follow me even in the Nairobi streets, sometimes wake me in the unexpected hours. I would recall my near certainty that it was Detective Underwood calling me again, perhaps to add to what he had told me. I would see and hear myself asking: “Hey, got more details?” The muffled noise and shallow breathing would come back, the questions ending with the threat, uttered so simply: “You are asking too many questions,” almost like a warning from a friend. I would see myself arriving home, cold with fear, numerous questions popping up in my mind from nowhere.
They folded into one: Should I tell Zack? It was a question that I should not have had to ask, but the information that Ben had given me deepened my indecision: Tell Zack about the threat, or confront him about the links between his law firm and the mysterious Kasla agency?
• • •
I woke up the next morning tired and worried. Chaotic thoughts and images swirled in my mind; why did they want me to stop asking questions? It wasn’t as if I had been all over the city, accosting each and every person I met. I went over any contact of whom I had asked questions recently or in the past. The voice was male. That ruled out Melinda. I was sure I would have recognized Joe’s voice. The only other question was to the Rhino Man, and I didn’t know how he would have gotten my number. Could Ben be playing games with me, disguising his voice or getting a fellow officer to do his dirty work? Messing with my mind? Who else might have an interest in toying with me? Mark. He had wagged a warning finger at me. He had recommended Kasla . . .
Kasla was at the center of my problems. Where was this ghostly agency that received telephone calls, faxed papers, and then retreated to the silence of the dead? And yet it did exist once, as Ben had confirmed: It had given us Kobi, and it had sought and received representation from Edward and Palmer. I had to crack the mystery. I did not tell Zack, but the resolution to handle the threats all by myself and at the same time steady my nerves was easier said than done.
Even Rosie noticed that I was out of sorts. I thought of telling her the whole story, but then I felt uncomfortable dragging her into my increasingly troubled domestic life. It was as if she read my thoughts and beat me to it. I was in the garden when she came over and said after a few nothings: “My sister, I don’t know what is worrying you. Please forgive me for saying it, but I don’t like these white people around you. Me, I keep all white folk at arm’s length. Is there anything I can do to lift your burden? Do you want to talk to your African sister?” I thanked her and told her all was well. Then I became suspicious; she had taken the same line as Ben on white people. I thought of asking her if she knew him or talked to him, then changed my mind.
I went back inside the house. A shot of vodka helped me relax a little and follow some threads of thought. Ben had told me they could reopen the Kasla file only if there were evidence of a crime. An unrecorded telephone threat was not a provable crime. The ghostly existence of an adoption agency was not a crime. But what if I could somehow procure the letters, briefs, emails, any correspondence between Edward and Palmer and the Kasla agency? I wished I could engage some clever hackers to break into the law files and retrieve the information I needed. Melinda had the reputation of being a master at computers, and she fancied herself an expert in cyber warfare, but I didn’t think it wise to ask her. I could break into Zack’s home office, but what if there was nothing there? What I needed was some basic facts with which to confront my husband and extract more information.
Mark kept on coming to mind. He must know Kasla. He had talked about business links to Africa, Kenya, oh yes, that night at the wedding. Without Melinda, there was no way of getting to him.
And then an idea dawned on me. My mother used to tell me the longest road was usually the shortest. I needed to locate the Kenya adoption agency with which Kasla had partnered. The partner agency in Kenya would lead me back to America.
6
Jane Kagendo came to mind. She had not come to our wedding because she’d been involved in a case involving alternative clinics. She was not at her desk when I phoned, but after ten minutes, she returned the call. I explained my situation. She had not heard of Kasla in Kenya or, for that matter, in New York, or any such partnership. Could she get me a list of all the registered adoption clinics in the country? I asked.
“I thought I was done with clinics, adoptive or otherwise, after my legal battles over Alternative Clinics,” she said.
“Please, Jane, I just want adoption agencies,” I said, a little embarrassed that I knew so little about her battles. The text she had sent us did not contain details about the case.
A day later, she emailed me a list of six registered agencies. Most were church-based, a few government- or quasi-government-managed. I called them all. Two agencies did not answer, but the other four said they had never heard of Kasla. The matter needed further investigation by someone on the ground. I felt uneasy at the thought of taking Jane from her serious work to pursue a whim. Then Wainaina came to mind.
I was in my last year at CCNY when I met him at an NYU lecture on technology, philosophy, and the new media by a famous Harvard professor; it was part of a summer workshop on globalization and the social media. In his arguments for a universal ethical imperative, the professor quoted Immanuel Kant, first in German and then in English: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” I did not understand the jargon, and I suspect I was not alone, but we all were completely mesmerized by his sonorous delivery.
Amid the respectful silence, a young man raised his hand. There was total silence when I whispered to the woman next to me: “He has a body to die for.” The man with the cordless mi
ke happened to be passing it and must have had it on, because my comment was caught by a live mike. Laughter broke out. I felt like disappearing in a hole. I tried to laugh along with everybody else to hide my embarrassment. The young man was not flustered.
“The only problem, sir, is that you seem to assume the universal ethical imperative resides in the West, a white platonic model to be copied or mimicked by Africa and Asia,” he said, and sat down amid murmuring.
Though the professor was expecting a question that sought his wisdom and not a comment that questioned his assumptions, he maintained his calm. The young man’s courage impressed me, and after the lecture, I sought him. Sponsored by his newspaper, he had come from Kenya just for the summer workshop. We exchanged phone numbers, and I called him a few times, but our communication gradually dwindled to zero.
I called the Daily Star, the paper that had sent him, and luckily, I got him. “The man with a body to die for,” I started by way of introduction. He laughed and remembered me, expressing regret that we had communicated so little. He was just finishing up an article on an investigation, but he promised to get right back to me.
When he did, I went straight to the point, but like Jane, he had never heard of Kasla. I asked if he could find out about the two agencies who had not answered my calls. I gave him the names. He did not ask many questions.
Two days later, Wainaina called me. “Well, one of the agencies has been closed for a few years now. The other is a children’s homeless shelter that doubles as an adoption agency, Three Ms. Their logo is a pair of eyeglasses.”
The Fall of Saints Page 5