Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  I had the file folder on my lap and I gave it to him quickly. “Look, Daddy,” I said. “What do these numbers mean? Nothing matters except that you tell me what’s happening now. That way we can find our way out.”

  My father’s face was smooth, making me fear he might leave us again, so I tried to speak firmly. “Tell me now, Daddy, and try to be clear.”

  Detective Mubia leaned forward.

  “I was never a crooked man,” my father said. “I never took a bribe and I never stood still for poachers. I was the guardian of the elephants, all during those years.”

  “I know you were, Daddy,” I said, “but what do the numbers signify?”

  I knew I was pushing too hard when my father turned around in his seat, looking at the office door. Detective Mubia, however, helped me by reaching over and putting a thin finger on the first number on page one. “What does this one mean?” he asked. “Only this one, nothing more.”

  The number was 8773-3-1-21 1ka and my father hardly glanced at it before saying, “That was our first shipment. Eight July 1973.”

  “What does the second three mean?” Detective Mubia asked.

  “That’s the number,” said my father. “That first time there were only three.”

  I hated to interrupt, but asked the question anyway. “Three what, Daddy? Three tusks? Does it mean you smuggled only three tusks that time?”

  To impeach my father so readily and in front of the others was exactly what, at breakfast, I had told myself I wouldn’t do, but that was what he was saying, wasn’t it, that he and Jules had been smuggling ivory out of the country for over a year by that time?

  My father was quiet for a moment but then he said, “Yes, three tusks,” and when Detective Mubia asked him about the number one he said that it meant England. Three tusks were shipped from Kenya to England on the eighth of July, last year.

  I was sick at heart but made him say that what remained was a flight number and an airline. And after we understood that, their rudimentary code was so easy to break that it made me even madder. Any fool could figure it out. Dr Zir very smartly took my father back into the other room, and Detective Mubia and I pored over the lists, failing to understand almost nothing, and discovering that my husband and father, no doubt in connection with the man who had come to my house with Kamau, had smuggled nearly one thousand elephant tusks out of Kenya, all on commercial airlines, to a half dozen cities around the world. By cross-checking the lists with another that we found in the coffee files we discovered that the tusks had left the country in burlap bags of beans. One sip and you will know. And the date of the last entry was a month before the date of Jules’s death, or only a fortnight before I saw him sitting in that Loita Street room.

  I was seething with anger, furious with both men, but since Jules was already dead, it was my father that I wanted to kill. And he was in the other room, with the doped-up Dr Zir, having another cup of coffee, sitting among the stacks of cold toast and the dried-out eggs.

  “What a couple of bastards,” I told Detective Mubia. “What consummate shits both those men are!”

  The detective’s face got stiff at the language I used, and for a moment I was mad at him, too. Everyone was cryptic, even this odd man. But though I have said I was furious with my father, that was wrong. Furious is hot, and what I felt was cold at its heart, something solid, like a cancer unveiled in a routine exam, and the fact that he volunteered the information, an act that I had thought would save us, meant nothing. This is why I had let my father stay out all night long, without once going into the coffee to call his name. My analogy with the watch battery had been right! Think of it, both of the men in my life weren’t what they had appeared to be. And it was too late for me to deal with it in any redeeming way at all.

  My father and Dr Zir were waiting in the living room. My father was sitting on the couch where Detective Mubia had slept, and Dr Zir was pacing back and forth past the open front door. My father had his hand up, and when I came in he began talking right away. “It isn’t what you think, Nora, Julius and I weren’t really smuggling elephant tusks. It was all a joke, don’t you see. It only got a little out of hand.”

  I still had the file with me so I opened it again and pointed at the final entry. “Don’t lie, Dad,” I said. “I saw him. In a house on Loita Street. There were tusks all around him on the fucking floor.”

  Jules had taught me the power of such adjectives as “fucking,” but I had never used them in my father’s presence before. All he could manage to say, however, was “Why didn’t you tell me?” and that made me shout.

  “Don’t be such a coward, Dad! Who’s the man behind Julius’s murder? Who kept you out all night? Who came here yesterday with Kamau, all dressed up in his London suit? I want the bastard’s name!”

  If my father had answered stupidly again I might have struck him, but my fury seemed to bring him back to life. His adrenaline was up too, giving him an odd kind of lucidity.

  “Did he threaten you?” he wanted to know.

  “He was businesslike,” I answered. “What is his name?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and then he said, “If Kamau was with him, it was probably Mr Smith.”

  “Mr Smith? He was Kenyan, Daddy, he was Kikuyu, I’m sure.”

  My father didn’t answer that but Detective Mubia said, “You are right, he is Kikuyu. Mr Smith is the awful name. When his activities put him on the criminal side he is called Smith because it creates a distance from his family and because his crimes are often committed abroad.”

  “That’s him,” said my father. “He’s the devil responsible for everything, the rat. It wasn’t Julius and it wasn’t me. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “He says he wants his property back. He’s giving me a week. After the week is up I think he’ll try to harm us.” This time I spoke slowly, using my coldest voice, but I couldn’t make it last.

  “I’m going outside now, Daddy,” I said. “And I want you and Dr Zir to get ready to travel back to town. When we get to Nairobi we’ll iron everything out and get you back to England, where you belong.”

  I thanked Detective Mubia for what he had done, for bringing Jules’s arm, macabre as it was, but particularly for sticking around to help, and for finally telling me that the voice on the tape recorder was that of a known criminal man. And after that I went out to the Land Rover and collected the wooden box. It was bigger than Jules’s arm, twice as wide and nearly half again as long.

  We had left two shovels out overnight, so when I got to the grave I put the box down on top of it and began to dig again, a short distance away. I think I intended to dig this second hole so that it would do justice to the first, but as I began to sweat I let my anger rise again. I had loved Julius Grant better than he had loved me, that was the truth of the matter, though I would never have believed it when he was alive. When he was alive I would have bet my whole life on the proposition of Julius Grant’s love. When he was alive I knew that he would not forsake me, that betrayal was impossible, that he would always be by my side. I had been fierce in my love, I was its defender and protector. And now I was discovering the hollowness of what I’d been protecting, too late to do anything but bury my husband.

  I wept as I dug, and slowly, instead of digging well, I began to dig a grave that went straight down, a grave that was narrow and deep and that echoed Dr Zir’s joke of the night before. I dug the grave as deep as I could, and as I pulled the shovel out, dry soil flying away, I let my anger boil until soon I was stabbing the earth, plunging that shovel into the heart of it, exhausting myself. I tried four or five times for a last good stab, a last bit of earth lifted from that hole, but finally I collapsed onto the ground, too tired to dig anymore, too tired to feel anything at all.

  I stayed that way for a time, numbed by everything, but work on the farm had accustomed me to recover quickly from physical exhaustion, and I got my wind back sooner than I wanted to. I opened my eyes and looked along the ground. As it happen
ed, I was facing the edge of the hill, and as it happened also, I could see the body of that lethargic snake again, that unhungry python, the sight of which yesterday’s digging was preventing from being a surprise.

  I sat up slowly, raising myself to my knees and then, with the help of my shovel, all the way to my feet again. I raised my shovel, at first, I think, to clean up the edges of the hole, to make it better, but with my regained wind my anger came back, and I suddenly turned the shovel around, aimed it at that other grave, and let it come slamming down on the top of the wooden box, easily splitting its lid and exposing Jules’s arm.

  I was appalled at what I had done, but not enough to keep my shovel from hitting the box twice again, one time coming in from the left side, next time coming in from the right. This box was padded, built to withstand temperature variations, maybe, but it couldn’t withstand my shovel, and by the time I was done, Jules’s arm had rolled free of the box and was lying next to the freshly dug grave, palm down, fingers curled over the edge of the hole, as if they’d just finished the digging themselves. It was bizarre, and what made me angrier still was that Jules’s wedding ring was there, his fingers fat around it, as if yeast had been used in the embalming, making them rise.

  “God damn you, Julius Grant,” I said. This was no automatic expletive like the one I’d used in the house with my dad, but a genuine heartfelt curse. I wanted God to damn him, to send him down through the hole where his arm was already headed and to let him burn in hell.

  Insanity sometimes comes in momentary doses, I had learned from observing my father’s wandering mind, and what I did next was along those hereditary lines. I picked up Jules’s arm at the place where his bicep had previously been, and I held it above my head like a hatchet. Then I walked the twenty paces or so over to the lip of the hill and swung his arm down, letting his fat fingers slap that sleeping snake. The snake moved in the grass, turning its head and tail both at the same time, as if it were about to twist around whatever it was that was bothering its middle. The snake’s head was the same size as Jules’s hand, and when it opened its mouth and reached back, I introduced the two of them by casting Jules’s whole arm in the snake’s direction and then leaping out of the way. The snake struck then, catching Jules’s arm above the wrist, and rising up high enough into the air to look for an instant like a cross marking the spot of Jules’s grave, like those shadows in the dust on the dormitory wall. And then the snake was down and gone. Not quickly, the way a smaller snake would go, but not slowly either. It slipped over the edge of the hill and down toward the Great Rift Valley with my husband’s arm. I could see it going, but I didn’t follow it with anything but my eyes.

  I was spent by the time I returned to the house. My father was still actively contrite and waiting on the porch with his travelling clothes on. Dr Zir and Detective Mubia had locked all my windows and had shut down the generator and closed the door to the workers’ dormitory. The detective offered to take one of them back to town in his car, but both men said they would go with me in the Land Rover.

  I watched the detective leave, knowing I’d see him again, knowing now that he had a great deal more to tell. In Narok I stopped at the petrol station and asked the proprietor to hire security guards on my behalf, stationing them strategically around my farm, twenty-four hours a day. It was a service that the proprietor had performed for us before.

  That’s it, the beginning of my story, told with as much skill as I can muster. Maybe it’s been a long beginning, but it hasn’t been a bit longer than it needed to be, considering that it relates not only the events that led to the loss of my husband but those that led to my loss of innocence and the beginning of my interest in revenge as well.

  In the next part of the story you’ll find a slightly altered me, one with a clear purpose and a definite agenda in mind. That’s what coming of age will do to you, it will make you sober, it will make you think and grow, it will make you plan.

  If you don’t believe me, turn the page.

  Act Two

  8

  The House on Loita Street

  We rode back into Nairobi in utter silence, the two old men together in the back seat, three hours with no one speaking, me speeding over potholes, banging into some of them as if I wanted to break the Land Rover’s tyres. When we got to Lower Kabete Road I dropped Dr Zir at the top of his drive, not even saying good-bye.

  The security guard opened the gate to my father’s house, and only after I’d driven through and parked down under the avocado tree did I notice that my father was asleep in the back seat, slumped over into the space that Dr Zir had occupied a moment before. His mouth was open wider than Julius Grant’s had been, and with the engine off, I could hear the troubled rasping of his breath.

  I got out of the car and slammed the door, but since my father still didn’t wake up, I left him there, opening the door again only to push the window a little aside so he’d have fresh air.

  At first to be back inside my father’s house was a relief. I washed my face and arms, removing the dirt of the road, and then I sat at the piano in the living room, letting the fingers of my right hand remember the first four measures of the Mozart sonata that Mr Smith had recorded on our farm, a perfect melodic line used in perfidy, to introduce a further madness into my life. I thought, What is it about living that makes it so impossible to keep the lines straight, to keep order and intimacy among humankind? I had been a happy child, quick and easy under the avocado boughs and at home among the animals of the African plain. I’d had a thirsty intellect from the very start, with the unfettered energy to let it drink. At home I was everyone’s joy, and at school I was at the centre still, though of a wider world, with friends gathered around. By the time I went away to Oxford I was not only terrific at learning, but I could speak Swahili perfectly, and decent French as well. At Oxford I was owlishly aware of the world of books and short with those who weren’t. I gave myself away there, first in the name of Karl Marx—I hate to say so but it’s true—and twice more after that, once in honour of Dylan Thomas, as you may already have guessed, and twice again for Keats and Shelley, in a kind of photo finish. That made four men in my life, plus one more, all before returning to London to visit my still-sane father and to meet my truest love. And now my truest love was gone, dead because of some stupid plan, and I was alone, and I could only think, What’s a woman’s life but a series of encounters such as these? Is there any real work for a woman to do, any real life for her to live, if she is thirty-one and still naive and already widowed and alone? What is there for her to do if she has lived her life, thus far, in juxtaposition to the lives of all these unreliable men?

  My father stayed in the Land Rover until sundown, and when I heard him coming through the front door of the house, I went out the side, circling around and getting into the Land Rover again. While he’d been sleeping I’d slept too, a little, and then I’d bathed and found clean clothes to wear. It was my intention to go out and discover as much as I could on my own before questioning my father again. Since the housekeeper was off, I left food in the kitchen, and I knew that soon Dr Zir would come, renewing the habit he’d formed, over years of being my father’s neighbour and friend, of walking through the valley and coming in to drink a glass of port and play a game of chess.

  But whatever my intention, as I drove out the gate and down Lower Kabete Road toward Westlands and town, I had no clear idea what I would actually do. I’d left food for my father but I hadn’t eaten myself, so at Westlands I searched around a little bit, trying to find a bakery or a restaurant that would serve me something at such an odd time of day. I used to know this part of town well, but it had changed over the years, and I hadn’t paid attention to the changes. There had been a restaurant and I had known where it was, but now it was gone, and the other restaurants I passed were either not open yet or were in some other way wrong—too expensive or presenting the wrong kind of food or impossible to enter alone. I circled the area twice, then gave up and drove downt
own the back way, toward the National Museum, down the Parklands Sports Club Road.

  Now I was driving alone through the only part of Nairobi I had ever lived in as an adult. I saw the building where I’d had my flat, and when I passed the sports club where I had exercised my young girl’s body playing squash and running around, I nearly turned in, to experience myself as I had once been. Could I walk as a single woman across the club’s creaking wooden floor? Could I do that? Though I tried, I couldn’t even summon the faces of those I’d played squash with in that other life of mine, but could I walk in there now, renewing my membership to eat a solitary meal on the patio or in the darkest corner of the club’s main bar?

  It was already eight o’clock and I was still hungry when it suddenly came to me what I was doing and where I would go. On the streets of East African cities a strange quiet takes over in the early hours of the night, that’s what Jules always used to say. Restaurants and bars and nightclubs dot the towns, of course, but the actual streets are nearly deserted. I’ve seen it in Harare and Mbabane and Addis and Dar. Nairobi’s no exception, and as I drove into the main part of town I could see that all over the business district, even on the streets around the big hotels, things were by and large calm. I cruised the length of Kenyatta Avenue, then turned in front of the New Stanley and doubled back to park beside the bar of the Six Eighty Hotel, the one I thought Jules was headed for on that fateful night, and only a short walk from Loita Street. I was going back to the scene of the crime, the place where I had first understood that there was anything amiss at all.

  I got out and locked the Land Rover’s doors, but I had two things inside it that I didn’t want stolen—that automatic pistol, which was lodged up in the springs under the driver’s seat, and the file I had found in our office on the farm—so I asked the bar’s security guard to watch the car while I was gone. After that I took a direct little road that led up beside the central post office, crossing Kenyatta Avenue in the dark.