Ahmed's Revenge

by Richard Wiley

  Nairobi Hospital had several large car parks, with signs pointing to outpatient and emergency rooms. I hadn’t told Ralph my reason for wanting to go to the hospital, but since there were no signs for the mortuary, I had Ralph stop at admissions and park his van under the shade of an old and sloping flame tree, next to the helicopter pad and directly below the ward where Jules had been. As I looked up, I could see the wide ledge, the easy footing that someone walking on it might have. Of three windows, I knew one had to have been Jules’s. All three were open now, with white curtains flicking out into the warm Nairobi air.

  “Julius died there,” I said, pointing up, but Ralph looked down. “Are we visiting a memory, then,” he asked, “or are we simply passing time?”

  We were in the hospital’s outer hallway before I told Ralph why I’d needed to come, that these days I feared I was connected to everything, even, perhaps, to the previous night’s death at the Norfolk. “Maybe it’s pointless,” I said, “but someone told me recently to leave no stone unturned. Just a quick look, down where they keep the bodies, and then we’ll go have our lunch, I promise.”

  I thought Ralph might be reluctant to search out the mortuary, but he was nothing of the kind. Rather, he went over and asked the admissions nurse how to get there.

  Maybe mortuaries are always in basements, but this one was a long way down, and once we were on the stairs it was I who had trouble going on. I thought of Jules’s body passing this way. Though, of course, there was a lift, I imagined rigor-mortised corpses taking these sharp turns, exhausted orderlies at each end. At the bottom I was as much out of breath as I might have been had I been going up, and when Ralph opened a heavy door I nearly decided to retreat, to catch my breath while climbing the stairs.

  We were in the hospital’s lowest basement. There were labs and changing rooms and hospital workers milling about. And there were living patients too, lined up in the hallway in front of the laboratory doors, coloured tags on the backs of their wheelchairs or pinned to the sleeves of their gowns.

  Ralph asked an attendant to point out the mortuary, and as we went that way we found that the crowd quickly thinned, that activity was pretty much limited to the area by the stairway door. The wall paint, at no spot in the hospital anything but drab, was all but missing down here, and though the hall was properly lit, it was poorly cared for. This was an area of defeat, I realised; if the business of hospitals was saving lives, here the business had failed.

  The mortuary had double doors with heavy glass windows, both scratched and dirty, impossible to see through. One could easily imagine a stretcher knocking the doors quickly open, though the patient on the stretcher wouldn’t care about speed.

  We were surprised to find that the mortuary was empty. That is, I had expected a worker or two, but there was no one standing up to meet us, no one asking what we wanted in such a cold and quiet place.

  The chamber we were in appeared to be an anteroom. There was a desk in it, and on top of the desk a clipboard with a list of names, perhaps twenty in all. Each name was followed by a notation—dates and scribbles, often with a doctor’s signature at the end. There were several sheets of paper below the top one, and on impulse I flipped back a few and soon found Dr Zir’s name next to an unreadable version of “Julius Grant.” As I looked closely, in fact, I could see that they’d called him James, and that made me mad.

  Ralph took the clipboard from my hand. “Let’s clear up the matter of last night’s murder, if that’s what we came for, and get out of here,” he said. He turned back to the first page and found the man in question immediately, third entry from the bottom, under the heading “Unknown male.”

  He was listed as D-2 on the clipboard’s location index, but when we turned to face the mortuary, even Ralph became hesitant. To venture farther seemed an intrusion, a formal violation of the rules. Still, there were doors leading out of the anteroom and since they were marked A through F, I walked over to door D and opened it up. And even though a cold dead breath came out to meet us, Ralph and I both walked inside.

  “There has got to be a light switch,” said Ralph.

  We knew we were in a refrigerator, but until Ralph found the switch and we let the door swing closed, the thought stayed with me that what we might find lying about in this room would be tusks, that we were still in Mr Smith’s domain.

  There was only one bare bulb, but it was so powerful that both of us at first put our hands up to our eyes. There weren’t drawers in this room, as I’d imagined there’d be, but freewheeling stretchers, just like the ones they used in the upstairs wards. There were five of them, with large numerical placards pinned to the sheets covering the corpse on each one.

  “It’s D-2,” I whispered, and Ralph nodded, walked over to the D-2 stretcher, and pulled the sheet back right away. What we saw there was the face and upper body of a very young woman, her mouth a grimace, her breasts round and hard.

  “They must have marked them wrong,” said Ralph. He was looking at the breasts and he touched, for an instant, this young girl’s upper arm. “She is not a crazy man,” he said.

  Although the stretchers had been marked wrong, the good condition of this young girl gave me courage rather than taking my courage away. And since there were only five stretchers, I felt sure we’d be able to find the man by looking under each sheet in turn. He would have a wild look, the muscles of his face frozen at the moment he screamed through the Norfolk Hotel, scaring all the patrons in the bar.

  Ralph and I went to the next table and he pulled the sheet back on number five, an old man of about my father’s age. This man didn’t look human. His face seemed made of burlap as thick as one of our coffee bags, and his chest was so caved in that its encompassing skin appeared to rest on his spine. Seeing the young woman had been easier, and after covering this old man up again we paused. There were three more bodies. “Let’s try number four,” I said.

  “This one really might be him,” Ralph said, and by that I understood that it was my turn to take the sheet away. The sheet was cold and as soon as I touched it the D-4 placard fell to the floor. Ralph was behind me when I pulled the sheet away, so I couldn’t see his reaction, but I immediately knew that this was the man we sought. His hair wasn’t long and he didn’t have the slightest vestige of a mad look on his face, none of the disconnected wildness that life on the city streets always seemed to give, but this was our man just the same. His mouth was wide and his eyes were open. In his upper chest we could see three bloodless wounds, deep slits that looked like places for coins and did not bring bread knives to mind. Seeing him made me feel so bad. I could remember the stacks of letters in his room, the picture of his family, and the way I had taken his panga away.

  “It’s him,” I told Ralph. “His name was Kamau.”

  Room D had been quiet, but as I spoke a compressor came on and a cold breath touched the backs of our necks, an icy wind from a grate above. I covered Kamau again, and picked up his placard from the floor, and pinned it carefully to the sheet over his chest. I couldn’t remember whether I had told Ralph that I was sure Kamau was the one who had finally taken Jules’s life away, sneaking back into his hospital room, and I don’t even know whether I have written that the last time I saw Kamau, the time he stood in my living room with my husband’s rifle over his shoulder and Mr Smith by his side, he had a strange hopeless look in his eyes, but that is what I remember now. While all those words had come from Mr Smith’s mouth, Kamau’s face had contained only sorrow and resignation, as if he were about to drown.

  When we left room D there was still no one in the anteroom, but as we made our way through the mortuary doors and up the hall, passing all those labs again, we found Detective Mubia sitting on a bench. Like rags on a statue, his red suit conformed to his thinker’s pose.

  “It was who I thought it would be,” I told him. “Kamau, our foreman. The man you never met at the farm.”

  “I saw you entering the stairway,” Detective Mubia said. “I came along
only this far.”

  The detective stood and followed us into an adjacent lift, which opened conveniently to take us up. There were several doctors in the lift, men of Dr Zir’s era, older and stooped and bald. Next to the starched whiteness of their jackets and the bright black polish of their shoes, Detective Mubia looked even worse than he had on the bench below. He had the look Kamau was supposed to have had the night before.

  By the time we got to Ralph’s van it was a quarter past one. Because Ralph had parked under a tree, the van’s cab wasn’t hot, but he opened the doors anyway, then sat inside while the detective tried to tell me what had happened at the Norfolk after I’d gone. He said he had remained at our table to finish his tea, had just, in fact, received more hot water for a second cup, when Mr Smith appeared. Mr Smith demanded to know what I’d said, who the woman with me had been, and how much money we’d offered the detective to come into this thing on our side.

  “How much did Mr Smith offer you in turn?” I interrupted to ask. It was a crass kind of question and maybe it was unfair, but my decision by then was to assume the worst in everyone.

  Detective Mubia’s body had been slumped on that bench in the basement, and he had followed us into the lift in an abject and defeated way, but when he heard my words he filled up again, remembering his natural dignity and expanding into his suit, which made it look better.

  “If I am connected to any mortal man outside of my policeman’s call,” he said, “it is to N’chele, from whose good seed the evil man has come. The father helped me when I fell on difficult times, but he never asked more than that I monitor the activities of his son, that I tell him of those activities in order that he might correct them before I needed to tell my superiors in the law. So that is what I have done.”

  “Yes, and I’ll wager you never told your superiors in the law,” I said.

  I had liked Detective Mubia from the beginning, but he was the kind of African man for whom I usually had no affinity. His demeanour was too serious, his beliefs too literal, his view of the world too dull. And now, after my second harsh comment, his eyes flashed, even while the anger within them turned the volume of his voice down low.

  “Everything in this world is not clear,” he said evenly. “I have been a detective of police for eleven years. My salary is small and it does not grow to meet the increased prices of our goods. I house my family in two rooms at the edge of town. I have six children and must pay their school fees every term and buy their school uniforms and the other necessities of our daily life. When another Kikuyu man says he will see that those school fees are paid if only I allow him the chance to exorcise the devil from his own son, do you think it is God’s will that I tell that other Kikuyu man no? Who will make judgements such as those? Maybe he is God’s vehicle, God’s messenger sent to keep my children strong.”

  Detective Mubia had controlled his anger as he spoke—by the end it showed only in the muscles of his jaw. But if what he said was true, if he was not on Smith’s payroll but was instead on Mr N’chele’s, helping him keep his son in line, then Detective Mubia knew everything. He knew of Jules’s long involvement with Mr Smith and he knew of my father’s, and he knew what it was that Jules had stolen and hidden away. If what he said was true, in fact, then his value to me was far greater than I imagined before. I softened my own voice and put my hand on his arm.

  “How did Kamau present himself last night? And where did the bread knife come from? How did he get killed?”

  Detective Mubia spoke as if what he said were memorised. “They bring bread knives right to the tables in that hotel. They bring an entire loaf of bread and let the customers carve it up themselves!” He seemed furious with the hotel’s policy, but he continued. “Kamau had come there to speak with Mr Smith, to petition him for money so that he could leave Nairobi, go to his village or somewhere. When Mr Smith dismissed Kamau, he found the bread knife on the table next to us and used it to try to cut some of Mr Smith’s evil away.”

  “But if Kamau had the bread knife, then why is Smith uninjured and Kamau dead? The reverse would be a better outcome, if you ask me.”

  “It is because I did not have my police revolver to calm him down,” the detective said. “My police revolver is under repair, so I stood and splashed my tea in Kamau’s face, just as my training told me I should do. I then turned his arm inward and pushed it back from whence it came. I am skilled at disarming, but he puffed his chest out to meet the bread knife and the bread knife went inside. Your foreman killed himself, I think, but the devil gave him the use of my hands. And now I am disgraced. When my superior came, Smith told the story differently, and from this morning I am suspended, without the return of my revolver or the benefit of my pay.”

  I looked at Ralph to see what he was thinking, but his face was hollow, his hands on the steering wheel, his eyes staring down.

  “We are going into town now,” I told the detective. “Thank you for taking the trouble to find me here. I appreciate knowing the details, the truth of my foreman’s death.”

  “Now I am suspended without my pay,” the detective repeated. “My revolver is repaired but I cannot retrieve it from the shop.”

  “But surely Mr N’chele…He has been your benefactor before.”

  I might have gone stupidly on, but a new look on Detective Mubia’s face stopped me. Three times now my words had told him how little I understood, how slightly I perceived his dilemma or his mind. Indeed, he spent such a long time staring at me that I thought he would leave without speaking again, but finally he said softly, “Like the school fees of my children, my debt to Mr N’chele has been paid in full. Now it is only Mr Smith whom I must find. Your foreman killed himself using my hands, and I must do battle with the devil for the salvation of my soul.”

  He pointed at the faded side of his red Toyota, which was parked nearby. “As you engage yourself in defeating him,” he said, “I will be around.”

  Detective Mubia walked away when I got into Ralph’s van, and as soon as he could, Ralph put the van in gear and quickly drove down the hospital hill. As usual, I wanted to speak about what we’d just heard, I wanted to go over everything one more time out loud, but Ralph’s face was closed, nearly as troubled as Detective Mubia’s had been. He drove well enough, but everything about him demanded quiet, and with quiet all around, I finally began to think a little bit more clearly. Detective Mubia was a rigid Christian man. He wasn’t a social believer, his sect was not of the charismatic, Sunday drumming, kind. I remembered his comment when I had asked him if he was a believer before—“It is better to believe and know you are mistaken, than to disbelieve and know you are correct,” he had said, but such an answer, with its syntactical appeal and tricky intellectual charm, was not the product of his heart, I knew that now. Detective Mubia was not casual, he had no cynicism, he had no nonchalance. And now he was in a state of pure mortification, as surely as if he were wrapped with barbed wire underneath his shirt; he was not only denied his pistol and his pay, but he was out of favour with his God. I could see it now. At Mr Smith’s table and under Mr Smith’s evil sky, Detective Mubia had lent my foreman his hands and guided that bread knife not only into Kamau’s wayward heart, but also into his own.

  13

  The Page-Six Man

  Because traffic was light, we got to the restaurant quickly, about fifteen minutes before we were to meet Miro. Ralph parked his van behind another one just like it, but with a different logo on the side. Ralph had been perfectly happy rummaging around inside the mortuary, but now he was morose. The detective had upset him, and I thought that was strange.

  Inside the restaurant there were empty tables everywhere, but when a waiter greeted us, Ralph told him that we wanted to sit upstairs, in a section that was normally closed during the day.

  “Mama is up there alone,” the waiter said, but Ralph insisted, and we climbed a winding metal staircase and chose a table across the room from the large Italian woman who owned the place. We had to take the c
hairs down off the table-tops to sit up there. When the woman heard us she welcomed Ralph, waving a big arm and calling out his name. Ralph said hello, but he still had a bad look on his face and when we ordered coffees he finally spoke his mind. “Sometimes we do stupid things for reasons we cannot fathom,” he said, “neither at the time we do them nor afterward, when we try to reflect.”

  I thought he was talking about me, that he’d been thinking about my behaviour with Detective Mubia all this time, but Ralph took a piece of folded paper from the inside pocket of his safari jacket and put it on the table between us.

  “I think I intended to bring this back to you all along,” he said. “I know I did. I imagined myself showing up with it some night at your home.”

  “What is it?” I brightly asked. “What have you got there?”

  With Kamau dead and Detective Mubia suspended from his job, I didn’t want a melancholy Ralph on my hands, so I used my most cheerful voice. As I touched the edge of the paper, however, my hand and my voice turned cold.

  “It is page number six,” Ralph said. “The important missing part of your husband’s letter. After we left the circle of singers I found it hung up on a thorn.”

  I took the paper from the table and opened it, but I couldn’t concentrate on the words. If Ralph had found the missing page of Jules’s letter, why hadn’t he given it back to me at the time? I remembered his being helpful, searching everywhere, running around. The motivations of men were peculiar, to be sure, but this didn’t make sense at all.

  Ralph shook his head. “It was a horrible impulse and most unexpected,” he said. “All I know is that it had something to do with our school days, with the way you were then, and with your not recognising me when we happened to meet. Seeing you reminded me of how much I disliked those years, and it occurred to me how little you’d changed. I was invisible to you then, so I guess I thought I’d make your letter disappear now.”