Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  Detective Mubia pointed at the box. “They insisted I bring it to you. I want you to take it out of my car, take it away now.”

  I was still confused, but when I picked up the box Detective Mubia stood back and said, “Don’t open it here.”

  The box had Nairobi Hospital’s logo on its side, and suddenly I did understand. That young nurse, the girl on whom I’d laid such blame, had sent me Jules’s severed left arm, the only part of him that had died early enough for the rest of him to mourn! Good Mother of God, what a morbid remembrance! What kind of gift was this for a young nurse to insist upon?

  “All right,” I said, forcing my voice to remain even. “What the hell is happening? Who would do this? What’s the meaning of it? What nurse would think to send a dead man’s wife his missing arm?”

  The detective didn’t want to answer. He searched his pockets and looked at the ground as if he had dropped something, and when I turned from him, rigid of eyes and mouth, I felt the weight in the box shift, a quick imbalance that let me know the arm was loose in there, its fingers rapping on the walls.

  I faced him again. “You better speak,” I said. “You better tell me now.” But Detective Mubia shook his head and said only, “I didn’t want to bring it but she placed it in my car.”

  I stepped away then, quick and angry. Maybe my sense of propriety was entirely gone, but didn’t sending the arm have more of the feeling of a taunt than an apology? Wouldn’t anyone think so? As I carried the box over to the Land Rover I felt such an alteration in the air that it was all I could do to keep from flinging the damned thing away, from smashing the box on the oily ground.

  The detective had walked with me, but when I looked at him again all I could find in his face was the absolute fact that he was glad the box was gone.

  I put the box in the back of the Land Rover, wedging it behind the jack and covering it with one of the remaining coffee bags. After that I called my father. And without further comment I told Detective Mubia to follow us up the Narok-Nakuru road to our turnoff and our farm. We were less than an hour away, but it seemed to me that the trip had taken days, and there’d be no time to do anything when we got there, since darkness was less than an hour away as well.

  We arrived at the farm at six-thirty, with enough daylight left for us to see that the place had been ransacked, that the house and its nearby coffee fields had been torn apart, the latter by mourning elephants, maybe, but the former, without any question at all, by men. We parked in front of the workers’ dormitory; those doors too were open wide, and all our farmhands were gone.

  This was too much, the last straw, and though I had my father beside me, the detective in the car behind, I embarrassed and surprised myself by falling out of the Land Rover, going down on all fours, and crying out loud on the ground. Now I became the abject weeper that I’d wanted to be all along, a woman whose losses came to her at once, a woman whose control was gone. My husband was dead, his body given back to me in hideous parts, my farm was in ruin, my life undone. This is how I’d wanted to act in that hospital room—it was there that I wanted this torment, not now, not in front of the empty dormitory with Detective Mubia walking over from his car.

  I tried getting up but could only rise far enough to place my cheek against the Land Rover. I was mortified and wretched and alone, and I would have stayed there if Detective Mubia hadn’t knelt down beside me, taken hold of my hand, and helped me to stand. “You have informed me that the helicopter comes in the morning,” he said, “and without your workers we must dig this grave ourselves. Show me the spot, I will begin right now.”

  Since there’s a complicated mythology, a taboo of sorts, about Kenyans and graves, it was an extraordinary thing for him to have said, and it did the trick of bringing me around. “There’s a place on a ridge over there,” I told him, pointing, still weeping but keeping my filthy face down. “We call it the orchard. There are shovels in a shed at the orchard’s near side.”

  “Do you have a generator?” the detective asked. “If you do, let’s turn it on.”

  Enough light had already drained out of the sky so that the generator would soon be necessary even to see the house. “I’ll take care of it and then I’ll come out to mark the spot,” I told him. As I spoke I could feel my voice growing stronger, an improving posture wriggling up my spine.

  “There are paraffin camp lanterns in that shed too, and there is extra paraffin in a can. Fill the lanterns and light them all—while we’re digging they will keep the animals away.”

  Our generator was behind the workers’ dormitory, so I got up and marched that way. And since my father decided to come with me, I asked him to hold the torch that I’d taken from the Land Rover’s glove box. Even though it was darker behind the dormitory than it was in front, I was able to start the generator quickly, pushing all its levers into neutral in the weak torchlight.

  While the generator was warming up my father swung the light, and I saw that even back behind the dormitory things had been disturbed while I was gone. Oil barrels had been wrenched out from against the building’s wall, one of them turned on its side, its cap removed, and oil spilt everywhere. I pulled the hose from the turned-over barrel and placed it in one of the standing ones. If the intruders had smashed the lights, then having a working generator wouldn’t mean much, so without waiting any longer I threw the switch that took it out of neutral, quickly supplying power to our house, the dormitory, and the pond. To my surprise the generator immediately bogged down with the size of its load. Not only had they not broken any lights, but every light we had was on.

  I was about to tell my father that we should forget digging Jules’s grave, that we should find Detective Mubia and regroup inside the house, when a sudden blast of sound filled the air, stopping me cold. It was music, I think, but it was incredibly loud. My father put his hands over his ears and shouted, but just as I reached to throw the switch, which would cut off everything and pitch us into darkness once more, the volume went down and I understood that I was hearing a Mozart piano sonata, a favourite of Jules’s and mine and something from our record collection inside.

  I was once again about to cast us into darkness, very worried now and sure that there were people in my house, when the music stopped and a human voice took its place.

  “Mr Minister of Wildlife, Retired,” the voice said. “We have been steadfast, we have kept our part of the bargain without fail. Now you must keep yours.”

  My poor father had taken his fingers from his ears and was looking through the light as if his time had come.

  “What do you want?” he asked weakly. “Who is speaking to me? Who is there?” Then I did throw the switch, so that darkness and silence came back to us.

  “Listen, Daddy,” I whispered, “I think it’s a recording. I think that voice is on a tape along with the Mozart.”

  I was pretty sure I was right, since we didn’t have a microphone and since the voice had been amplified at the same level as the turned-down music. Also, Jules often used to complain that his speakers no longer had much clarity, and I could hear Jules’s complaint in the reproduced quality of the sound.

  “You wait here,” I said. “I’ll go see.”

  There was a bench behind the dormitory. I thought I knew that if anyone was intent on injuring us they would have done so when we arrived, but nonetheless I took a moment to pull the bench into a nearby thicket and place my father on it there. In the dark he was impossible to see. He stayed quiet when I told him to, and he didn’t try to get up and follow me when I walked away.

  Because our generator had failed many times before, I knew better than anyone how to approach our house in the dark. The house had many windows but only two doors, and if there were people inside, I was sure they’d be watching the doors. I was fit from all those years of working hard, so I chose an obscure window, one that let me fall silently to the floor of our bedroom cupboard. Once inside I couldn’t see at all, but I could tell that things had been disrupted there
too. I opened the door leading to our bedroom and quietly entered. Everything was completely black. Sometimes the evening sky lit this room pretty well, through the bigger window that was now on my left, but in the hours just after sunset, a time when Jules and I often went to bed, the room was usually dark. I opened the door to the main part of the house as quietly as I could, and then I waited a full minute, counting the actual seconds, before walking into the hall.

  I could see at a glance that I wasn’t alone. A man stood in the pale moonlight that pushed itself through the open front door. He was so intently watching the landscape before him that he hadn’t heard me at all. I knew where Jules kept his guns, but everything was turned over in the living room too, and, frankly, I had been so sure that I’d find the house empty, so sure that the voice we’d heard had been a recorded one, that I hadn’t thought what I would do if the opposite turned out to be true.

  I could see our kitchen and the hallway leading to our office and the small guest bedroom that we had. I could also see a soapstone vase turned over on the coffee table between the man and me. If you know soapstone, then you know that though it’s heavy, it’s more fragile than glass, and I was surprised that this one hadn’t broken when it fell over. It was a tall vase, meant for a single flower or two, and was shaped like a policeman’s billy club. I picked it up, silently inching toward the man.

  Clouds had reduced the moonlight by the time I got to him, but there was still enough of it, thank God, to save me from making a big mistake. The intruder was Detective Mubia. I recognized his posture and the altered hue of his suit even as I raised my weapon, but it took me a moment to change the course of the soapstone vase so that it came rushing past his ear rather than crashing down on the top of his head.

  “Holy Mother in heaven! Jesus save me now!” said the detective. He had his police revolver in his hand but he used it only to shield himself, its barrel pointing up at the ceiling. Though I had clearly frightened him, he spoke softly and was quickly calm again. “I didn’t hear you come,” he said.

  “Who did this?” I asked him. “Who wrecked my house?”

  The detective pointed the tip of his pistol at Jules’s tape recorder, out on the porch and facing the grounds. “It is a voice I think I know,” he said. “If we could listen to it one more time perhaps I could be sure.”

  When I told him where I’d left my dad, the detective volunteered to bring him inside. He stepped off the front porch in an unstealthy way and walked toward the workers’ dormitory. His pace was unhurried but I kept my eyes on him until he’d walked into the darkness behind the building. And just as I turned to survey the damage again, he threw the generator switch and the lights came back on. I went around quickly turning most of them off, to make me less visible and to lower the generator’s load, and while I was doing so the detective returned alone.

  “Would your father have walked away?” he asked. “Does he know the area well? Is there someplace else he would have gone?”

  The detective tried to speak lightly, but he wasn’t a naturally casual man. He had lifted me out of the dust and helped to give me strength with his words before, but he couldn’t do it a second time, so instead he brought my husband’s stereo speakers back inside the living room and rewound the tape. When he turned it on again, this is what we heard: “Mr Minister of Wildlife, Retired. We have been steadfast, we have kept our part of the bargain without fail. Now you must keep yours. We demand that you meet with us privately in order to give us the details of your plan.”

  That was all, and there wasn’t any Mozart at the end. I got the feeling that the intruders had wanted to say more on the tape, that they’d intended more, but that we had interrupted them by our arrival at the farm. I also knew what I had done. Though I hadn’t even heard the demand they had made, I had immediately acquiesced to it, putting my father on that bench the way I had. But for a time I could barely register the fact that he was gone.

  “Do you have firearms in the house?” Detective Mubia asked. “Are your husband’s rifles still here?”

  I was sure they would not be, but when I went into our office to look I discovered that the office was intact, that nothing in there had been turned over or moved. I’d been right, then, in my assumption—we had arrived when these men were in the middle of their search. Jules’s second hunting rifle was on the wall, and it was loaded. The first rifle, the one Kamau had shot Jules with, was not in the office, and I couldn’t remember what had happened to it on the night of the attack. In the desk drawer I found our .380 automatic pistol, plus an eight-shot clip and a box of bullets. Jules’s filing cabinet was locked against the wall and his photographs hung above it in an un-crooked way.

  I called the detective, asking him to come in and see for himself, and when he didn’t respond, I took the automatic pistol from its drawer and the rifle down from its place on the wall. I unloaded the rifle and pushed it down under Jules’s desk, putting its cartridges in my pocket. After that I shoved the pistol clip home.

  I was about to call again, but the image of myself, as vulnerable in our office as my poor father had been on that bench outside, made me listen and wait awhile. When I finally stepped into the hall again, however, the .380 ready, I could see the police detective right away. He was sitting on our couch, his own revolver still in his hand. He seemed to be staring out the front door.

  “Detective?” I whispered.

  He didn’t look toward me as I came down the hall, but pretty soon he said, “My specialty is city crime, city crime is what I know, and it is my great misfortune that I also know the voice on your tape recorder too well. I do not agree that a city crime and a country crime should be connected in this way. A city policeman should never allow circumstances to bring him out of town. It would be best for a city policeman if he were to leave country crime alone.”

  He was quite oddly miserable, sorry instead of glad that he recognized the voice. And something about his sorrow kept me from asking him right away who the voice belonged to. It also seemed to be keeping me from worrying about my father. When I told him that our office was untouched, however, he immediately revived, just as I had on the ground outside.

  “So number one is that we interrupted these heinous men in their crime and number two is we seem to have given them your father without even knowing that is what they desired.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and number three is they’ve taken my father away. Do you think they’ll hurt him? You don’t, do you? He is too old for this. He’s just arrived from England and he’s too tired.”

  The detective nodded, but instead of answering my question he said, “Number four is as follows: Your enemy is clever and he knows that you are vulnerable because sooner or later you must dig your husband’s grave.”

  That didn’t seem like number four to me, and I said so. “I think that if he had wanted to harm us he could have done it earlier, when we arrived. He only wants my father, who’s involved in everything somehow. He tried to say as much earlier, he tried to tell me about it at the church, but I wouldn’t listen.”

  The detective looked at me with an expression on his face that I couldn’t read, but finally he asked, “What bad business could your father have had with such a dangerous man? What bad business did this man previously have with your husband, Julius Grant?”

  “What man?” I asked, exasperated. “What do you know about it? Please, tell me what you think is going on?”

  While I waited for the detective’s response I wondered again whether or not I should tell him what I knew. Should I say I’d seen Jules in the house on Loita Street that night? So far as I could tell, Detective Mubia hadn’t yet connected any of this with poaching, and I myself hadn’t in the slightest degree yet come to terms with the new probability that my father was involved. But should I tell him everything, or should I not? It seemed that rather than answering my questions, he was looking at me strangely, as if waiting for me to decide.

  “It is late and we are tired,” he finally sai
d. “If we search for your father now we will not find him, and if we dig your husband’s grave we will be filthy and exhausted by the time we are done.”

  He was once again pragmatic and calm. No matter what danger my father was in, there was nothing I could do about it now, he was telling me, and I surprised myself again by admitting that it was true. I told him I would set my alarm for five, giving us time enough to dig Jules’s grave with the morning light, time enough to wash ourselves before Dr Zir and the helicopter arrived.

  I didn’t ask again about the man whose voice he knew and Detective Mubia didn’t offer to tell me his name. He only nodded one more time and said, “The unfortunate Minister of Wildlife, Retired.”

  After that, though the house was still turned over, I found towels for the detective and then went into the bedroom I had always shared with Jules, to latch the window I’d come through and to lie down. And in a little while, when I thought I heard the detective go into the bathroom and then come out again, I opened my door and saw him sitting on our front porch in the rocking chair that Jules had always loved. The front porch light was off, but the detective had found the switch and reilluminated our pond. He was rocking softly, his pistol out of sight, his eyes on a small giraffe that was standing at the water’s far edge. Across the pond from the giraffe I could see the skin and bones of that elephant calf, and beside it, to the left-hand side, I could see the cool bright eyes of something else, some other animal hiding there. The entire picture, the living animals and the dead one and the expanse of land leading from them to the detective in our rocking chair, made me imagine my husband asleep on the ground, a lion gazing down at him with calm and curious eyes.