“Did you read this page?” I asked. “Did you learn anything from what it said?” Since there was nobody but the owner in the upper part of the restaurant, I let myself go, this time allowing anger to push my voice up high. Men were bastards, every one. He had kept a page of the letter because it occurred to him how little I’d changed? I was furious with him, but Ralph answered normally, as if I’d asked my questions in a civil way.
“I did read it,” he said. “It was after reading it, and after listening to the detective back there, that I knew I had to give it back now.”
The white border of page six seemed to swell a little when Ralph spoke, so I picked it up and read what it said, while trying to calm down.
…terrible dupes we had been. I don’t know where he got the know-how or how he made everything seem so authentic that night, but I discovered only recently that the tusks we’d been smuggling all these months were real. Think of it, Nora, your father and I have been doing what we detested in others, laughing about it and making money. Your father sold the things all over Europe, Nora, at least he did before he had his stroke, and I shipped them out so confidently and so well! And all the time this man was buying tusks off poachers or poaching himself, amazed at what fools, what easy marks we had been.
I feel terrible about everything, Nora, and too ashamed to express it except in this poor way. When I confronted the man, asking him why he needed to involve us in such a scheme, he laughed in my face, said it was a mere byproduct of his real work, and that he’d done it to get even with your dad. He beat us, Nora, took us both so easily in, but I did do something about it, and aside from confessing my stupidity and guilt, I’m writing you now to let you know what I’ve done. He sometimes kept his tusk supply in an unlikely building, right here in town. I’ve had easy access to that building for months now, and one recent day I stole the centerpiece to everything he was about, the eye of his storm, and I buried the bounty out on our farm. Now here’s the key, told, Nora dear, so that only you will understand. It might seem silly to do it like this, but I really can’t come up with a safer way.
Under our bed
yes, under hot covers,
where the sweet smell of sex
draws the sharp claws of others.
Do you get it, Nora? I hope you do.
That was all, and since I didn’t have the rest of the letter with me in order to place it properly in context, I folded it again and tucked it away. And when I looked at Ralph I not only understood why he’d felt he had to return the page, but a little about why he’d taken it. Something to do with our school days, Ralph had said. Though Julius Grant was gone, two kinds of men had come a little bit into focus for me that day. Ralph and Detective Mubia, two kinds of men that I’d never understood before.
“My God, Ralph,” I said, “this is all so bloody crazy. What am I supposed to do now?”
“First of all, do you get it?” he asked. “Do you understand what your husband’s riddle means?”
I did, without the slightest doubt, and I was about to say so, but right then we heard someone rattling up the metal stairs and in a second Miro came in, grimacing and twisting her mouth and asking why in the world we weren’t eating down below.
“This is Ralph N’deru,” I told her. “You know, Ralph Bunche Road. It was his idea, he likes it up here.”
She and Ralph shook hands and Miro sat down. It turned out they had met before too, and while they were remembering when and where, I took a moment to try to think clearly for a second time that day.
My husband and father had been dealing in real tusks, not acrylic ones, and when Jules discovered how easily and thoroughly he’d been tricked, he took something from Mr Smith and hid it on our farm. Mr Smith hired Kamau, a man who’d worked for us for years, to get that something back, and Kamau proceeded to shoot Jules and then go into his hospital room and smother him with a pillow. When Mr Smith punished him for the mistakes he had made, Kamau followed Mr Smith to the Norfolk Hotel and was himself then killed, stabbed through the heart with a bread knife, wielded by his own hands and those of Detective Mubia, whose skill in self-defence had cost him his peace of mind and his job. And now here was Ralph, the fellow for whom Miro had said I should look out, giving me back a page of my husband’s letter that he had kept for deep-seated reasons of his own. And on top of all that, though I did understand the poem that was on page six, though I did know where Mr Smith’s stolen property was, I still didn’t know what it was. I only knew that I had to go and get it, and that I had to give it back to the unspeakable man if I ever wanted this ordeal to end. I also knew that I couldn’t give it back if I wanted to honour my husband’s dying words.
Miro and Ralph were ordering their lunch by the time I looked up. Miro, who set up this luncheon with her own odd phone call, didn’t seem miffed that Ralph was there, nor did she appear to be in any hurry to say whatever it was that had made her call. Ralph, on the other hand, was relieved and had come completely back to himself. And since they both seemed content with small talk, I went along. If it weren’t for small talk, after all, how would I ever find time to pause?
The woman who owned the restaurant delivered our food herself, kissing Ralph when she put it down. Her English was cooked in a thick Italian sauce, but she told us that Ralph was the only man in town for whom her second floor was never closed. A few years back Ralph had taken this woman’s mother, visiting from Italy, on a wonderful safari, and since that time she’d been forced to think of him as family. And family always ate upstairs.
I had no memory of ordering anything, but the food that came was good, and by the time we finished eating, Ralph had told Miro about the murder and about everything that had happened at the hospital, leaving out only the part about my husband’s letter’s sixth page. His tone was serious and quiet, full of respect for the complicated situation and a desire to continue to help. When the owner came back with more coffee and our bill, Ralph excused himself for a moment, insisting that the lunch was on him, and when he was gone Miro was all business again. “I thought you’d be alone,” she said. “It doesn’t seem so ominous now, but look at this, look at what that waiter gave me last night.”
It seemed to me that the pain of Jules’s death and the difficulty of my present life was unveiling itself in a series of letters and notes and coincidental meetings. This time, however, not only was the little square of paper unimpressive, compared with the solid sheet of Jules’s good bond, but its message was paltry too. It was clumsy and snide, calculated only to upset Miro. “The woman you are with is a dangerous woman,” the note said. “She has violated one of Kenya’s sacred laws.”
I laughed and handed the note back, saying only, “Awkward phrasing.”
“But listen,” said Miro, “I know your heart is broken, but you better try to remember whatever it is you know about African men. Don’t be frivolous, don’t be flip, and above all don’t assume that in the end you’ll win. Awkward phrasing or not I almost took this thing seriously. I nearly believed it, I worried about it all night long.”
“Well, if you almost took it seriously, then he almost achieved his goal,” I said. “He wants me to remain alone in this. If I build up a circle of friends, he worries that I’ll find the strength to go on.” I then somehow told her about Ralph’s returning page six. I also said that the three holes in Kamau’s body looked like slots for coins.
Miro touched my arm and said, “My dear, Nora, you’re not listening to me. Be careful of this man. You have lived here all your life, I know, but you’re a white girl who has floated around on the cream, and he is fighting you in purely African ways. You think you have a foot in both worlds, but maybe you do not. Remember this, there is no nuance in the things he says, no double entendre, no sarcasm, and no underneath side. He has taken away your husband and killed your foreman and ruined your detective’s career, and though Ralph seems very nice, what is he doing but playing like a schoolboy? Go back, my dear, to your childhood, remember what you know of
this place and this man. Otherwise you will not beat him at his game.”
Ralph came back just then and said, “I have to go. I pick up my tourists at four.”
When we stood to leave I told them both about the wake, but I was looking only at Miro. “You have to come,” I said. “I need you there. Otherwise I really will be alone.”
Opening night at the opera was Friday, but Miro said her Saturday performance wasn’t until eight o’clock. She promised she would come to the wake and after that, when Ralph went over to say good-bye to the owner, Miro and I wound our way down the stairs. “Let me catch a taxi,” she said, and just as Ralph appeared her cab pulled away from the curb.
When we got into his van I already knew what I would ask Ralph, and I wondered whether or not he would be surprised.
“I want to go with you today,” I said. “I want you to drop me at my farm.”
“I’ve got three British tourists,” he said.
If he had only three tourists, there would be plenty of room in the van, so I wasn’t sure whether he was agreeing to take me or not.
“Surely your tourists would like to see a farm,” I said. “Or, if you must, just drop me off in Narok and I’ll catch a ride the rest of the way up the hill. When I’m finished doing what I have to do I will bring our lorry back to town.”
It was clear that Ralph didn’t want me along. Since he’d taken part of Jules’s letter, however, it was impossible for him to say no. So what he said instead was “I leave at four. What are you going to do with your car?”
The Trattoria was only a few minutes from the Norfolk, and since Ralph’s safari office was in Westlands, I asked him to drop me at the car and told him I’d be at his office, ready to go, before his customers arrived.
“I’m picking them up at the Hilton,” said Ralph.
I had got out of the van and was looking back inside. “I won’t cause you any trouble, Ralph,” I said.
When he left I didn’t waste time watching his van depart. I jumped into the Land Rover and drove away fast, before it was properly warm. Down Kijabe Street I went and into the roundabout that led me up by the museum and onto the sports-club road.
And though it must have been there all along, I didn’t see Detective Mubia’s faded red station wagon in my rear-view mirror until I was out of Westlands, almost home.
14
Michael, The Lion-Hearted
I had told Ralph I would meet him at his office, but in the end I asked my father to drop me at the Hilton Hotel instead. I told him only that I wouldn’t be home for a while. “No, Dad, not for dinner,” I said, “but in a day or two, in plenty of time for Julius’s wake.” I said I was going on a short safari, that what I really needed now was some time alone.
I bought some safari clothes in one of the shops off the hotel lobby and changed in the lavatory. I bought the clothes so that I’d look as touristy as possible, so that I wouldn’t look like myself sitting beside Ralph in his Wildebeest Road van. I had the .380 with me, but since the safari clothes weren’t bulky enough to hide it, I bought a loosely woven sisal bag too, wrapped the pistol in my old clothing, and stuffed it all in that.
The Hilton was a hotel I knew well, so I went to a room on the mezzanine to wait for four o’clock to arrive. This room served as a lounge for hotel guests, as well as for Nairobi residents who had special memberships, but even though I didn’t belong, I managed to talk my way past the room’s attendant and sit down in one of the wide and smooth-armed chairs. There was a writing desk next to my chair and a fanned-out selection of cheap plastic pens. I knew about this room because Jules used to come here sometimes—he actually did have a membership—and as I sat there it came to me that it might have been here that he wrote his seven-page letter of revelations. He used to come here to drink brandy and sit and think things out. Such behaviour was in Jules’s nature, but it isn’t in mine. I’m not the kind of person who would take out a membership in a private lounge, yet Jules, who loved the farm more than I did, liked this kind of thing inordinately well. He was a loner but a joiner too. He was a believer in the fraternity of man, yet he didn’t enter into easy confidences with others. He was a man of action, a man of movement and hard work. He was knowable in an instant, as I’d found out in London, yet on the other hand he was not knowable at all. He had loved me deeply, I still absolutely believe it to be true, but his feeling was in some ways quite a shallow one.
I moved to the little wicker-backed chair in front of the writing desk and rifled around looking for the kind of good stationery Jules had used. In the drawer there were hotel postcards and pamphlets advertising various safari companies. I searched among them for mention of Wildebeest Road, but there was none. Ralph’s was a word-of-mouth safari company and I hoped the word was spreading around.
I took out a piece of cheap stationery with the hotel’s emblem at its top and wrote my name with one of the plastic pens. I wrote it this way: Nora Hennessey Grant, going over it several times so that it would be bold. Under my name I put the number one and to the right of the number one I wrote “My Farm.” After that I squeezed in the words “Last Will and Testament,” in tiny letters, just below my name, and then I scratched out the “and Testament” part.
I had no idea I was going to write such a thing—I was just doodling, passing the time—and I had no desire to list other numbers past the number one. Our farm was now “my farm,” and it was the only thing I could think of as actually being part and parcel of me. I had some small amount of money, Kenyan shillings in a bank nearby and a few pound notes up in London, but what did those things have to do with me, how were they connected with my will as I had displayed it during my time alive? And was my will, my own true will, really represented by the words “My Farm” on the paper in front of me? It had been Jules’s farm more than it had been mine, it had been his idea to grow coffee and live there, and now that it was mine alone, I didn’t know what to do with it. Could I run it by myself? Did I even want to? And to whom could I bequeath such a thing? Who on earth would care, now that Jules was gone, to have a bit of what I, too, had worked so hard to make, to remember me by?
I left the paper where it was and went back downstairs quickly, with the sudden fear that Ralph had already arrived. The narrow street in front of the Hilton was always packed with safari vans, and when I went out to look for Ralph’s I fit right in, in the new clothing that I wore. The German and Japanese tourists were dressed as I was, and the British and Americans were too, though in less flamboyant ways. Because it was already late in the day, most of the vans were returning. Everywhere I could hear expressions of joy over Kenya’s beauty, the names of various animals peppering the air. No matter where I looked, however, I couldn’t find Ralph, and I was beginning to think he’d left without me when I saw three people emerge from the hotel’s front door. Where everyone else was wearing khaki or green, these three wore white. I heard one of them mention Ralph’s company’s name and I walked right up to them.
“Wildebeest Road,” I said. “Nora Hennessey, at your service. Ralph N’deru will be right along.”
“Who?” said the older man, but the woman smiled. “We’re the Cooleys,” she told me. “I am Dorothea and he is John. That one is my brother, Michael.”
It was John Cooley who’d spoken first, but Michael who came forward and shook my hand. I liked Michael right away, and I liked his sister, too. She had self-possession in her posture and her voice, the thing I had lost, somehow. She was pretty, in a big sort of way, and meeting her brought my spirits up. It was only John Cooley toward whom I felt a little cool. He had a small mustache that made him look stern.
Ralph’s van didn’t show up until four-fifteen. I was surprised at his tardiness—I’d have guessed he would be a strict keeper of time—but when he jumped out of the van, full of apologies, I realised that he was late because he’d waited at his Westlands office for me, while I had inexplicably come to the hotel. Since the Cooleys were travelling light, we were on the road in abo
ut two minutes, and as we headed out of town I tried to make things up to Ralph by telling odd bits of local history and trying to act as if tour guiding were as much a part of my makeup as the outlandish garb. It was only when I happened to say our first stop would be my farm, however, that the three of them perked up.
“You’ve got a farm?” Michael said. “How nice. I’ve got a farm, too.”
“We were both raised on it,” said Dorothea, “but John and I live in London now.”
Ralph had said earlier that they were camping near Cottar’s, and that he didn’t have reservations for them until tomorrow night, so I decided that offering to let them stay at the farm would be a good idea. It might help make up for the trouble I’d caused Ralph, and it would solve my problem of having to spend my first night back there alone.
“Would you like to see my place?” I asked. “Would you like to stop over? It’s right on the way and there’s no extra charge.”
Michael and Dorothea both said they thought that would be great, and though I should have asked him first, Ralph seemed to think it was okay too, so by the time we got to the escarpment, to that little Italian prisoner-of-war church where I’d stopped with my dad, only John retained any of the dour mood that had been set by the late start. Ralph pointed down at the Great Rift Valley and talked about the origins of man, about the recent discoveries that had been made. He was clever and interesting, very much on stage. When a group of baboons leapt up on the escarpment wall and Ralph pointed out details of their hierarchy, we could immediately see it in the way the baboons stood around. When he spoke of anthropological matters Ralph sounded like an absolute professional, and by the time he began to talk about the behaviour of the other animals they would see, even John thawed out. I had no idea Ralph would be that good. Before we knew it we were at the outskirts of Narok and I was telling him where to look for the road to our farm.
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