“Education, but I haven’t really—”
“All the way to America to train as a teacher? You could do it right here, and it would not cost me so damn much.”
For the sake of my mother, I looked away again to avoid saying something rude.
“America is a very expensive place,” he was saying. “Two of my daughters are studying there. I tell you what. I will offer you the same deal. I will pay for your tuition and upkeep for four years. After that, you are on your own. Do you understand?”
I wanted to ask him about those daughters, my siblings, their names, their ages, and where they studied. They must be older, so did I have younger sisters? Brothers? Where? Did they have the same birthmark? Then I remembered my mother’s plea to remain polite and simply said thank you.
At the door, with the check for my ticket in my hands, I glanced over my shoulder, but he had already gone back to reading the pile of papers on his desk. His voice reached me outside: “Watch out for those white boys. They like beautiful African women.”
My mother died in an accident two years after I left Kenya—she was hit by a tow truck on the road outside her house. The good man was my only parent, and until now I had not made any efforts to get in touch with him, let alone get to know him. It was ironic that I was flying home to tell him that I had a white boy for a husband.
Only I did not know which face of Zack’s whiteness I would present: the loving owner of a bellyful of laughter, a senior attorney at Edward and Palmer, or a secretive lying lawyer living under the shadow of my suspicions and that of a mysterious gunman.
12
When I finally found myself outside the Jomo Kenyatta airport after a grueling fifteen-hour review of my life, I stopped, closed my eyes, and took in the sweet smell of home. The breeze. The freshness.
Wainaina walked toward me, his smile sending out a sunny embrace. “The man with a body to die for,” I said as I hugged him, to remove any lingering embarrassment about my outburst at New York University years ago.
“Yours is no less killing,” he said. “Good to see you, Mugure. You haven’t changed.”
“Neither have you. Nairobi, perhaps.”
“The skyline, yes, otherwise not much. I have been sitting in traffic for two hours.”
I was about to say it was like that when I was here for my honeymoon when I recalled that we never actually came to Nairobi. The extension of our honeymoon from Estonia to Kenya had been my idea. Zack had thought Estonia was enough, especially since I had taken to the old town so intensely, but I insisted out of a sense of equity and pride. Zack had told me that he’d never been to Kenya, and I thought of it as my contribution to the honeymoon bliss. With the help of my friend Jane, I picked out the best resorts in Malindi and Mombasa, with their amazing views of the endlessly blue waters of the Indian Ocean. I also planned trips to Maasai Mara and to the Treetops Hotel in Nyeri, but a week before we were to leave, Zack got an urgent message requesting his return to New York.
“I avoided Narobi traffic by confining my honeymoon to the coast,” I said. “I missed you, though.”
“You mean you avoided me?”
“I did not want my flame to dim when set against you,” I said.
“His name?”
“Zack Sivonen. And you? Are you hooked up with somebody, or should I divorce Zack?”
“Still a bachelor. But no divorcée for me.”
I loved our banter. It assumed a friendly familiarity but also a respectful distance. He took my suitcase, and we walked to a nearby taxi. I gave Jane’s home address to the driver. As we drove farther on Mombasa Road, the vehicles moved at a snail’s pace all the way to James Gichuru Road. Peddlers welcomed the traffic; they walked beside the cars, trying to sell their wares, pens, watches, cell phones, calling cards, newspapers, anything they could hold in their hands.
Bright-colored public minibuses tried to overcome the jam by driving on the shoulder, sending scores of cyclists and pedestrians scampering for safety on the side of the road or right into the thorny, spiny shrub around apartment blocks.
“The speed limit is generally viewed as the government’s conspiracy to slow down their business,” Wainaina said. “Matatu drivers ignore it all the time. Even the traffic lights are taken as decoration.”
I was going to stay with Jane. She had offered me her place, saying she would be offended if I stayed in a hotel. “Your husband refused to let you come here on your honeymoon,” she had joked on the phone. “Time for girl talk, you and I, without sons and husbands.”
Jane had never married and did not want any children, and over time, her relatives and friends alike had come to terms with the fact. She had held her views on children and marriage for as long as I could remember, even in high school. Knowing her as a rabble-rouser who was involved in every student crisis, I would not have seen her getting into law school, let alone graduating with honors from Harvard.
And now here she was, one of the most successful attorneys in Kenya, working with Lawson, Anderson, and Wilson. It was one of the oldest firms in the country, founded in the early years of the colony. Before and up to independence, it was solely European, but after, while retaining the same name and reputation, it had taken in African and Asian partners. The owners had wanted the firm known by its initials, LAW, but they were satisfied with the more popular initials SOL, for Sons of Law. She still volunteered her services at the Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA). She took her work seriously but played hard on weekends, so I would not be an intrusion. At least so I hoped.
She came out of her Lavington house to welcome us to her place.
“Meet the man with a body to die for,” I announced, introducing Wainaina.
“Or a body to live for,” Jane said, casting a wicked glint at me.
I knew what it meant. “I am happily married, and he just told me he’s not interested in a divorcée. Jane has always been a troublemaker, you know,” I told Wainaina, then quickly explained, to Jane’s raucous laughter, how the phrase came to be.
“She made all the women in New York avoid me. Nobody wanted to die,” Wainaina said. He looked shy or embarrassed as he stretched his hand out to Jane. It turned out they knew each other by name, she as the sharp-tongued lawyer from SOL, and he as the nationally known investigative journalist with the Daily Star. “He’s the shining star of the newspaper world,” Jane said, to which Wainaina responded with appreciative modesty: “Thank you, I’ll take it coming from you.”
A warm shower and a change of clothes made me feel fresh and relaxed. Soon we were tearing into baked chicken served with soup and peas, corn, and mashed potatoes. The food brought back happy memories.
“I’m here for a week,” I told them. “I want to do in seven days what I have not done all my life.”
I talked in detail about what I had experienced in the past few weeks. Hopefully, I said, my pursuers would lose the trail. They sat there, transfixed.
“So where would you like to start?” Jane asked me.
“I really don’t know. Obviously, with my father. A daughter with a thousand questions and a father with a thousand secrets. Suppose we start with those matters where I most need your help? I want to find the local adoption agency and sort out the contradictory information about Kobi. If we can do that this afternoon, then tomorrow I can visit with my father. The Mafia connection will be made clear by what we find about the links between Nairobi and New York.”
“That’s a good starting point. After all, your problems began with your visit to that Kasla place,” Jane said.
“By the way,” Wainaina interjected, “I was able to get some more information about the agencies that didn’t respond to your messages. The one in Westlands is owned by a woman by the name of Maryanne Stanley. She’s Kenyan, but I suppose the name Stanley sounds more professional. I don’t know why people do these things; I am happy with Wainaina. But she�
�s a really nice person. Her agency only deals with orphaned children; they don’t work directly with any particular agency outside the country. It was closed down for renovation, but it’s back in business. That leaves us with Three Ms. As I told you, I found their logo interesting.”
“Who owns it?” I asked.
“I’m coming to that. First the name. Three Ms: Miwani Miracle Ministries. The logo is just a graphic representation of the Swahili word Miwani, or glasses, hence vision. Clever, isn’t it?”
“An interesting evolution. Ever since I lost the case of the Alternative Clinics—” Jane began.
“Oh, you are the Jane of the alternative clinics,” Wainaina interrupted. “The Daily Star covered the case, but they called you Mr. Kagendo. The guy who captioned it was given a verbal thrashing by the editor. That’s how I came to be in charge of copyediting as well.”
“You mean you have to thank me for your promotion,” Jane said.
“You might say so.”
“I want my cut, then.”
“You mean a pound of flesh?” I asked. I could not help it. The Merchant of Venice was one of the Shakespeare plays staged at Msongari in my time, and I thought Jane played Portia to my Shylock.
“ ‘The quality of mercy is never strained,’ ” Wainaina said, casting a glance at Jane.
“ ‘It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath; it’s twice blest,’ ” Jane said, and looked at me.
“ ‘It blesseth him that gives and him that takes,’ ” I intoned, not to be outdone.
We were beside ourselves with laughter. Bantering had quickly become our way.
“Come to think of it, your interest in law may have started with your playing the amateur lawyer,” I said to Jane.
“Probably. Jokes aside,” Jane continued, “losing the case dampened my spirits. But I believe this 3M business may have started under the name the Real Alternative Clinics. Almost like— I would not call it gloating, but definitely piggybacking on the earlier name, or the loss of it.”
The affair seemed to have impacted my friend profoundly, but I did not want to lose the trail. “So who owns Three Ms?”
“Susan, I think, a reverend.”
“The one Susan?” Jane asked.
“Susan, Her Holy Reverend, or officially Her Holiness, but she uses the titles interchangeably. Jane, you must know her?” Wainaina said.
“I don’t, but which Kenyan does not know of her?” Jane said.
Her Holy Reverend, the leader and founder of Miwani Miracle Ministries and founder and owner of Three Ms, aka the Real Alternative Clinics, emerged as a boisterous, robust, slightly overweight, and charismatic woman and skilled orator.
“You have to give it to her,” said Jane. “That is, if we are talking about the same Susan. Her meteoric rise to the top echelon in the society, with connections to every center of power, from Parliament to the army, police, and political parties, is astounding by any standards. At national events, she is often called upon to bless the nation.”
“The more data I gathered about her,” Wainaina resumed his narrative, “the more I found myself admiring her. My research gave me a little window into her character and dynamic personality . . .”
She was brilliant enough to have been admitted to the prestigious Alliance High School, but her father could not afford the tuition. She landed a job as a filing clerk in the Ministry of Education, but with six brothers and sisters who all relied on her meager salary, she found life pretty difficult, and it was then, in the depth of misery and sorrow, that she had her first call from Jesus. She became a devout Christian. Those who recalled her days as a youth member of the Ngarariga church said she was an extremely resourceful organizer of fund-raising events.
It was then, so the story goes, that she introduced the idea of a church-run raffle for the benefit of the poorer congregation. The winner would earn two plane tickets to Mombasa. Susan chaired a small committee that handled the raffle tickets. She involved the whole congregation in prayer that the ticket should go to the chosen one. When it turned out that the chosen one was one of her brothers, some irate congregates objected and accused her of naked nepotism. Deeply upset that they should question the mysterious ways of God, Susan quit the church and went into the wilderness. For a year nobody knew her whereabouts. Then she emerged from wherever she had been, literally in rags, with scratches on her arms that she claimed came from wrestling with satanic cactus thorns in the wilderness. She told a harrowing, heart-wrenching story of how, in the depths of her tribulations, sorrow, and despair, the Lord visited her in the form of a bird and said: “Susan, rise, follow me, and I shall make you fishers of men.” A born-again Christian, she founded her own church under a tree in Limuru and told the story of her call over and over again, asking the congregation, “Have you ever heard a bird speak?” The Holy Spirit assumed the body of a bird and spoke to her.
Within a few years she had moved from a tree to a rented classroom and then her own church building, where she led the hymn: “Count your blessings, count them one by one, and you will see what the Lord has done for you.” They flocked to her church to count their blessings, making sure they brought their tithes. Miwani became the fastest-growing church in the country, and its branches could be found in most cities across the country. In honor of the tree under which her church was founded, every branch planted a tree, which was blessed by Reverend Susan.
“How did she acquire the title ‘Her Holiness’?” I asked, fascinated.
“That’s another story,” Wainaina said. “If you go to her church, as I had to do several times, the first thing you will notice is the mixture of Roman Catholic and High Anglican rituals, a far cry from the puritanism of the beginnings, when her church was characterized by bareness, simplicity. Wherever she goes—and there came a time when she started traveling beyond our borders—she would add another ritual and claim it had been revealed to her by God. This is what she did when she returned from some Eastern European countries, Estonia or Latvia, and brought rituals of the Orthodox Church. Her church now is a Kenyan version of the Santería in Cuba. And each time she comes back from her travels, she makes incredible claims: It was after she returned from the East that she proclaimed she was responsible for the fall of godless communism. Never mind that her visit was several years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet system . . . You asked me how she became Her Holiness. Susan visited the US, and when she came back, she said she had met a Black Angel.”
“Literally?” Jane asked.
“Literally. At least so her followers believe. Sometimes they talk of a choir of black angels. And when they talk about it, they burst into song, a call-and-response version of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see
Coming for to carry me home
A band of angels coming after me
Coming for to carry me home.
“Her followers believe she did not fly back to the country in a regular plane. A band of angels carried her shoulder-high all the way from America across the Atlantic to Africa—”
“What’s wrong, Mugure?” Jane and Wainaina asked in unison.
It was nothing, really. It was the audacity of the coincidence. I told them about the three incidents involving encounters with a Susan-type woman: Estonia, with Zack; and Melinda, in New York.
“Religion has become the fastest-growing industry in the country,” Jane added.
“I don’t blame her. All over the world, religion means money. The Vatican, after all, is richer than many countries in the world,” said Wainaina.
“But you must give Susan some credit,” chimed in Jane. “She is quite shrewd. Hundreds of businesses are owned by her or linked to her. Beauty salons, dry cleaners, makeshift small hotels, import/export, anything. She does not thrive by faith alone.”
“Yes,
but she puts faith in every business,” said Wainaina. “Remember the name of her church: Miwani Miracle Ministries. She believes in angels and miracles, and hers are not abstract. You might think, for instance, that the curios in her shops are ordinary. No, no. She has breathed into them the breath of the black angel.”
“Curios? How do you mean?” I asked, the name ringing a thousand bells in my mind.
“Yes, she owns curio shops all over. Apparently, they have tried to export abroad, directly or with partners, but not everybody in Europe and the US is as gullible as we Kenyans when it comes to faith. Her followers believe that those giraffes and elephants and Maasai warriors can transmit the breath of angels to the owner.”
I told them about the Rhino Man of the Manhattan curio shop.
“Reverend Susan is an interesting character,” Jane said, “but I doubt she would let herself get involved in murky business. Why would she do in the dark what she can do for profit in the light?”
“Yes, she profits by the light,” Wainaina said. “There is the Festival of Rags, for instance.”
“Festival of Rags?” I said, more as a statement than a question. Melinda had mentioned it at the end of her season at Shamrock, the same night we were confronted by the suited gunman.
“That’s right. Starting from nothing, her church grew; her own blessings grew; her money multiplied; her garments became increasingly expensive. She founded the festival to celebrate her rise from rags to riches and remind her followers of the humble beginnings. This year’s star performer is a woman advertised as having the voice of an angel. There are a few posters in town to that effect,” Wainaina said.
“Her name is Melinda,” I said. “She’s my friend. She does possess a golden voice. She isn’t aware yet that I am in Kenya.”
I did not know if Melinda and Zack were in touch, but I didn’t want her to leak my presence in the country. Ciru Mbai and I had agreed that should Zack or anybody else call about me, she would act as if Kobi and I were her guests in Cape Town. I had said the same to Sam and the folk in Ohio: To every inquiry, South Africa was the answer.
The Fall of Saints Page 10