Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  The first time I saw the building, on the night I followed Jules around, I had approached it from the Market Street side, and it was harder than I expected it would be to find again now. And once I did find it, it looked less dilapidated, far less like a poacher’s den. It had shingled sides, not the flaking brown paint that I’d have sworn it had before, and its front-room windows were large. All in all, in fact, it wasn’t a place that had the guarded appearance that I’d seen with my foolish, wifely eyes, but, rather, one that seemed open and fine. It still had the residential aura that I’d felt before, and I still thought that was odd, on a street that otherwise contained businesses and vacant lots. There was no security guard in front, and there was no fence, but though it was well past business hours, the windows of the place were lit, as if reading lamps were on.

  I had no idea what I was going to do at this place now. Could I follow the inclination I’d had on the only other night I had been here, nearly a month before? Could I knock on the door and ask whoever answered, not whether Jules could come out and play, but why they’d had to see him dead? Since my father and Detective Mubia wouldn’t tell me, could I see if some stranger might?

  I looked at my watch. It was already later than I wanted it to be, nearly eight-thirty on a never-ending day, but I stepped onto the porch of the house and tried to look through the small windows that fanned across the upper portion of the door. I had to stand on tiptoes, and the glass was bevelled, obscuring my view and fracturing the internal light, but I could see there was a man standing there. He wasn’t looking at me but seemed to be cleaning something, rubbing a cloth against an object that he held in his hands. I stepped back a foot or two and knocked firmly on the door.

  “Hodi?” I called. “Is anyone home?”

  I could see from the way the shadows moved on the glass that the man on the inside was standing against it now, but he didn’t answer my call.

  “I have business here,” I said, “a question to ask of the owner or the resident, whichever the case may be.”

  I’d been sure that the man was standing still, listening from the other side of the door, but suddenly I saw his face, peering out at me from the lower and larger window to my left.

  “Mr N’chele is not at home,” the man said. “He is never here at this time of night. He is at the New Florida Nightclub, taking his evening meal.”

  “What?” I asked. “What did you say?” I had heard the man’s words perfectly well, but I had no idea how else I could reply. My God, was this Mr N’chele’s house? Mr N’chele was a famous man whom I had met once or twice as a girl. He’d been in the papers every day at the time of Kenya’s independence a dozen years before. He was a fervent nationalist and a political candidate back then, but I hadn’t heard his name in years. I guess I had supposed that he was dead. But if this was Mr N’chele’s house, whatever my husband had been doing here became an even larger question than it had been before.

  After the servant told me what street the New Florida Nightclub was on, I thanked him and stepped off the porch again, walking quickly away. The New Florida was nearby; it was the nightclub I’d seen above the petrol station on my original walk down here. But how could I approach a man like Mr N’chele in a bar? What could I possibly say?

  I went back toward the end of the block again and was soon out of sight of the house. Walking straight would take me to my father’s Land Rover and home, but the New Florida Nightclub was to my left and I somehow turned that way, not exactly deciding to go into the bar, but only intending to walk for a while, to amble forlornly along. And it was just then, just after I made my turn, that a kind of dizziness set in, a vertigo that made me put my hand against the nearest wall. I could already see the top of the New Florida Nightclub, but the street where I stood quite suddenly seemed changed, familiar to me, but in the oddest of ways. I felt as I had at that petrol station in Narok when I finally understood that what the hospital box contained was Jules’s severed arm. The building I leaned against, which I’d barely noticed before, became one that I recognized from years and years ago. When I stood away from it, putting my hands to my head to rub my eyes, I could see the building as it had been, with a different coat of paint on it, with a newer and stronger look. And its juxtaposition with Mr N’chele’s place, whence I’d just come, made me see everything else on the street as it had been when I was a child as well.

  I went up to the front door and looked at the listing of businesses that currently rented space there. There were dentists and doctors and trading companies of various kinds, but there were also several names that I immediately remembered from when I was a child, from a time when I had to look up at the listing that I now looked down upon.

  It was a profound and troubling moment. I was on Market Street, as I had been scores of times during my adult life, but this time I had entered it with an altered perspective, from the Loita Street side, having just heard Mr N’chele’s name for the first time in a decade, and with my mind searching everywhere, open to a range of possibilities concerning Jules.

  I had known Market Street intimately as a child, but during recent years I hadn’t once remembered that this was where my father’s offices had been. With my child’s perspective unexpectedly returned, however, I was not only able to remember precisely how the street had looked back then, but I was beginning to remember something else as well. I closed my eyes and touched the building one more time, and the scene that came into my mind was this: I was holding on to my father’s hand. We had walked out of this building, back the way I’d just come. It was a clear day and I was skipping to keep up with my dad. When we got to Loita Street we turned right, stopping at the door of the place I had just walked away from now. What I am saying is that I had been to Mr N’chele’s house with my father, so very many years before.

  The New Florida Nightclub was accessible only by climbing up several switch-back flights of stairs. I must have stayed outside on Market Street a long time, for when I entered the nightclub it was nearly ten, and the place was packed. The area around the two bars was filled with young Kenyan girls standing three deep and dressed to kill. A small orchestra played in the club, and I was beginning to remember that there were dancers and other acts too, that this was a nightclub with an entire floor show. A few tables in the room were free-standing, but there were many more booths, crescent-shaped things with slick black vinyl coverings and too much stuffing in their seats. These booths were elevated and somehow more prestigious than the tables, so I scanned them for Mr N’chele, hoping to recognise him in the crowd.

  All of the booths were occupied, but a waiter soon found me a small table at the edge of the dance floor, and I sat down and ordered a drink. I then tried to look into each of the booths in turn, taking my time. Some were occupied by tourists, either alone or with Kenyan guides. All of the booths together formed a larger half-moon around the room, and in the booth that was precisely in the middle, staring into the mid-distance the way my father always did, I found the man I was looking for. He was old and thin. He wasn’t alone in the booth—two young men sat at its outer sides—but he was clearly alone in his evening, vaguely scanning the bar and taking an occasional bite from the food on his plate.

  I found a note-pad in my bag. The paper wasn’t plain, as I would have preferred, but was pale pink and had a cute slogan across its top: Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary. The words were highlighted by pencil-thin drawings of vegetables, suitable, perhaps, for a little girl to own, but pretty odd for me to be using under the circumstances at hand. I looked at the note-paper for a while, but since my only immediate alternative was to write my message on a cocktail napkin, I drew a dark line through the vegetables, and wrote the following note below it:

  Dear Mr N’chele:

  My name is Nora Hennessey Grant, daughter of Nathan Hennessey and widow of Julius Grant. Do you remember me? I believe we met nearly twenty years ago when my father had his offices on Market Street nearby.

  I read the note over and was not very ha
ppy with it. I should have written only, “My name is Nora Hennessey Grant. May I have a moment of your time?” The recent revelations, the things I had discovered while walking over here from his house, were far too new for me to be writing them down. Instead of starting over, however, I simply added, “May I have a moment of your time?” at the bottom, signed the note, and had a passing waiter take it away.

  The orchestra had started to play and my drink had come when the waiter returned with Mr N’chele’s reply. “Of course I remember you, Nora,” it said. “When you are free, come, let us chat about days gone by.”

  Mr N’chele’s note was written on the back of my own, in an equally informal hand. People were on the dance floor, but I could nevertheless see Mr N’chele rather better now that my eyes had adjusted to the room’s dim light. He was younger than my father but had a bald head, balanced on top of a neck no thicker at its middle than my husband’s abused arm. His head even seemed to shake a little because of the difficulty that neck was having in holding it up.

  I had expected someone healthier, I’d expected vitality, a certain aggressive posture that I could oppose, but I’d already stood up and I was approaching Mr N’chele’s table too quickly for any kind of tension to build. When Mr N’chele saw me coming he tried to slide out of the booth so that he too would be standing up when I arrived. “Miss Nora Hennessey Grant,” he said. He was slightly out of breath but he extended his hand, letting it sway in the air until I caught it and shook it, calming it down.

  “I have come to ask some questions about my husband,” I said. I wanted to be direct, to ask my questions and then go home, but I’d spoken too soon, for Mr N’chele was sliding back into his booth again, and my comment was swallowed by the noise.

  Once he was seated he told me to sit on his left side. His two young men tried to sit down beside us, hemming us in, but he ordered them away, telling them to wait at the bar.

  Mr N’chele’s table seemed to have its own waiter, and when the man came over, Mr N’chele ordered a steak dinner for me, one just like his own. After that he looked at me and said, “Nora Hennessey Grant. Tell me how we can settle things down.”

  Mr N’chele spoke to the point, which was what I wanted, but his head was shaking so much that the words seemed to lurch out of his mouth. I was sure that this wasn’t the man I had seen leaving my husband alone in his kitchen that night.

  “Nathan Hennessey is your father,” he said. Now his head stopped shaking and his words had an apologetic tone, as if he were telling me something that was horrible to know.

  “Yes,” I said. “My father moved to London several years ago but he’s here now, in Nairobi. He returned for the funeral of my husband, who was recently killed.”

  I was careful to speak without accusation in my voice, but my words had struck home. I could see Mr N’chele thinking things out, the picture of my father replaced by one of my dead husband in his mind’s eye. I watched him for a long time, completely calm, and finally I began to see something else moving in to cloud his face.

  “Really,” he said, “a lady should not be coming out so very soon after her husband has died. What possessed you to come here? This is a nightclub, my dear. You should be staying home, remembering your husband and preparing yourself for your difficult time.”

  There was a moment just then when I realised I was probably strong enough to take this man’s neck in my hands and twist until his head fell permanently down to one side, but soon after that I began to smile. How absurd it had all so quickly become. Here I was confronting the man who might be responsible for Jules’s death, who might actually have ordered him killed, and he was scolding me over a failure of decorum, a social impropriety.

  Mr N’chele didn’t like my smile, but though his face got tight again, the shaking of his head was still controlled. The steak he had ordered for me had come on a trolley and the waiter was standing a little back, waiting to set it down.

  “Do you know Mr Smith?” I asked. “Is someone by that name working for you?”

  I had stopped smiling and had kept my pleasant tone, so Mr N’chele relented a little too. This time he looked at me and sighed.

  “His name is not Smith,” he said. “Please don’t call him that. His name is N’chele. I have asked him to stop using that ridiculous and offensive name a hundred times, but he continues to let it stand. Really, that name represents the trouble I have had with him over the years, ever since he was a child.”

  The room seemed very still. “Mr Smith is your son?” I slowly asked. As my mouth came open, Mr N’chele regained his previous calm.

  “But it will not help you to ask the father about the business of the son,” he said. “In your note you remembered accompanying your father to my home all those years ago, but do you also remember that my son was your playmate during that time? Do you understand that my son’s introduction to your father was something he never forgot?”

  “Did you ever meet Julius Grant?” I asked. “Did you ever see my husband, who has died?”

  I was beginning to believe that Mr N’chele wanted to tell a truth of some kind. Of course he couldn’t know that I’d seen Jules sitting among the tusks at his kitchen table that awful night. He probably hadn’t even been at home.

  “I knew his face when I saw it,” Mr N’chele said, “but I only saw it once or twice.” His voice grew soft and he dropped his eyes to the plate that the waiter had placed before me. “Eat your steak,” he said, “it might get cold.” And then he said, “Your husband didn’t know it but he interfered wrongly, he kept my son from doing right.”

  Something seemed to happen between us then. I wanted to ask him to explain but I knew I couldn’t force it, so for a few minutes Mr N’chele ate his steak and I ate mine. We ate slowly, chewing each piece and passing the salt between us and sharing a salad that had come. A sense of community was forming, and when Mr N’chele spoke again he was careful and kind.

  “But I am so sorry,” he said. “About your husband’s demise. It is unforgivable of me not to have said so by now. It was not you but mention of your father that caused my insensitive nature to come out. Now, however, let us talk about this awful business at hand. Let us try to stop it if we can.”

  I moved a little closer to him on the seat. “Tell me what they were doing,” I asked quietly. “Were my husband and father in league with your son to smuggle ivory out of the country? Is that what it was?”

  Since I had that cryptic list of flights and destinations in my car, and since my father had told me so, I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear another confirmation of it, affirmation coming from this man’s mouth.

  “Absolutely not,” he said.

  “But I have evidence,” I let him know.

  Right away I worried that I had said too much. However truthful he seemed to want to be, it wasn’t through his son’s kitchen window but through his own that I had seen Jules among the contraband. Mr N’chele went right on. “I have not seen much of my son since all this began,” he said. “In recent years, in fact, we have been estranged. But they were not smuggling ivory, of course they were not. I have my spies. There are many activities that I might wink at, but my son knows where I will draw the line. I was trying to draw it, don’t you see, when your husband got involved.”

  I knew he was lying, he had to be, but the mood we’d established was so conspiratorial that I asked another question anyway. “If they were not smuggling ivory, then what were they doing that was so much against the law?”

  “Nothing whatsoever,” Mr N’chele said. “In this case everything they did was legal. On that you have my word.”

  Though I had sparred well enough thus far, I certainly wasn’t gaining much ground. If I spoke pointedly, this man danced away, and if I seemed unsure, he came back slowly, like my partner in a minuet. Should I go ahead and say it all? Should I tell him that I’d seen my husband standing in his house, hefting a beer bottle among the phallic disarray? Should I tell him that his son had kidnappe
d my father and threatened me in my own home? Mr N’chele was lying to me now, so what did I have to lose by speaking out?

  But all I did was look at him silently. Was it also possible that he simply didn’t know, that his blindness as a father was equal to mine as a wife?

  “Maybe I’m mistaken,” I said, “but if so, then what business did they have together, my husband and your son?”

  It was Mr N’chele’s turn to give me a long look then. Finally, however, he seemed to decide. “My son’s business, such as it was, was with your father. He wanted to trick your father, to cause him pain. It was a bad idea, it was too complicated, and it came far too late in the day, but your husband’s involvement was accidental. He was brought in by your father in order to give him a hand.”

  I think Mr N’chele wanted me to ask what my father had done, why his son wanted to cause him pain, but I had something else in mind.

  “Our foreman shot my husband in the back,” I said, “using his own rifle. He was trying to shoot a lion but he shot my husband instead. Our foreman was working for your son.”

  “That man will not be found anywhere for a good long while,” Mr N’chele said, “and I doubt if he will ever visit your farm again.” He spoke as if it was Kamau’s welfare I was worried about, but I kept my neutral tone.

  “As a matter of fact I did see him there,” I let him know. “He came back only yesterday. He was with your son when he paid a visit to my father and me.”

  Even as I spoke I was deciding against saying more, but just that much made Mr N’chele sigh. He reached across the table and took my right hand in both of his own. I was still holding my steak knife but he encompassed that too, touching its serrated edge with his thumb.

  “They were dealing in plastics, my dear,” he said, “not ivory. More precisely, I guess, it’s acrylics. My son learned the technique in London in a dental laboratory where they make false teeth. Perhaps it was not an absolutely honest plan, but it was not criminal under Kenyan law, and it certainly should not have ended this way, but your husband’s injuries were accidental, surely you know that is true. No one could have planned such a death as he had.”