The Idol of Mombasa

by Annamaria Alfieri

  The Idol ofMombasa

  Annamaria Alfieri

  FELONY & MAYHEM PRESS • NEW YORK

  For Barbara Fass Leavy, Ph.D.,

  precious friend, literary scholar,

  and lover of crime fiction

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to:

  Adrienne Rosado, my agent, whose belief in my work keeps me going.

  Maggie Topkis, my publisher and editor; and Julia Musha; both of Felony & Mayhem Press, who have given Tolliver, Vera and Kwai a new home.

  Stanley Trollip, who shares my love of Africa and helps me to get it right.

  Kannan Srinavasan, my fellow writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library, who graciously pointed me at period books in English by Islamic scholars. Any errors in that regard are mine, not his or theirs.

  My tribal brothers and sisters of the New York Chapter of Mystery Writers of America and my blogmates at Murder Is Everywhere—writers whose mutual support brings joy into what is essentially a lonely process.

  The caring, affectionate people who take care of David and make possible the peace of mind it takes for me to do my job.

  The staff of the New York Public Library. Without its splendid collection, I could not write the books I do. SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY!

  Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image.

  The Bible (Exodus 20:4)

  Yet some men take idols beside God, and love them as with love due to God.

  The Quran (Surah 2:165)

  The Sultan’s sovereignty (on the Kenyan coastal strip)…led to slavery dying out more slowly than elsewhere, for the status of slavery was legal within the Sultan’s dominions, whereas in the rest of the Kenya Protectorate, it was forbidden by law.

  J. Spencer Trimingham

  Islam in East Africa

  On the Indian Ocean

  Off the East African Coast

  Early January

  1912

  Prologue

  As always, the dhow approached Malindi harbor under cover of darkness on the night of the new moon. A tall African man stood in the bow of the boat. He wore a kanzu—a man’s long gown, ubiquitous on this coast, but not in the traditional white. His was midnight blue, so that with his dark skin and dark garb, he—like this boat and its crew—was nearly invisible in the African night. Being seen would mean prison. Death.

  Miraculously, the Zanzibari at the tiller found their way on the inky sea. He followed the stars, he said, and the ocean currents, feeling them through his scrotum as he sat upon the deck.

  The tall man in the bow found pleasure in being on the water. It was cool and smelled clean—unlike the sweltering streets of Mombasa with its sweaty throngs of hurrying men. These sorties were dangerous. Required constant vigilance. But these missions also gave him satisfactions that little else offered. On this boat, he stood in the place of his master. He could command these men, even the captain. He craved this sense of power.

  But he would also be the man to die if something went wrong.

  As they neared the port, he easily recognized its old Portuguese pillars and dockside warehouses, silhouetted against a million stars. With the sail lowered and the boat powered only by the oarsmen, they approached the reef that separated the harbor from the open ocean. Phosphorescence in the breaking waves showed them the gap where they could make safe entry.

  Once through, it was a simple matter of steering to a spot between signal torches stuck in the sand just north of the docks. A pair flickered to the left of their destination, and about fifteen yards farther to their right, a group of three.

  The surf was blessedly calm tonight. The Arab captain of the boat lowered the anchor. “As fast as you can,” he said in a harsh whisper. “I’ll put the small boat out to ferry the children.”

  The man in the dark kanzu answered only, “Yes.” He hated being told every time what he had known for years. It was his decision how fast or how slowly they would go. He was more than a slave. He was the Master’s overseer. And the boat’s captain knew that. Still that Arab always pretended his word ruled.

  The overseer reached into a canvas bag at his feet and took out a saber in its scabbard. Holding the weapon over his head, he put his backside on the gunwale, thrust his legs over the side, and slid waist deep into the water. Its chill struck his privates. No matter if he knew it was coming, it still shocked. He waded ashore and then strode with difficulty across the sand toward the trees, his bare feet sinking in; it was slow going.

  There should be, he had been told, eighty-six people hiding a few yards away. Over the past two months the captive men among them had carried twenty-two elephant tusks from the base of Mount Kenya to the shore of the Indian Ocean. Tusks that the porters would load onto the ship.

  Now that they had reached the sea, they too would become cargo on the Arab ship bound for the slave market in Muscat.

  This was the master’s secret. And no one must know.

  The British, only lately arrived in this part of the world, had made slavery illegal. His master had laughed at the folly of such a rule. The change in the law had, as the master had predicted, only pushed up the profits to be made.

  The overseer-slave, his kanzu still dripping seawater, approached the trees. He strapped on the sword and put his hand on its hilt. What price, he wondered, might he himself bring today, knowing what he knew, capable as he was?

  He drew the sword and knocked it against the trunk of a mangrove. Two beats. Then a pause. Then three. He counted to ten. And repeated the signal.

  A rustling in the undergrowth brought the ivory caravan’s captain to his side. “I have only sixty-one. Thirty-one died along the way,” he said quietly, without preamble. “The usual number from disease and snakebites. But the rest became rebellious. I had to kill six who tried to run off. To make an example of them.” He was attempting to excuse the dreadful performance of his duty. Excuses to a slave, to be repeated to his master.

  Such defenses were useless. “The master will be angry whatever your reasons for delivering so few.”

  The caravan captain swore in Arabic. “Yes, and he will be even angrier that almost all who perished of illness were girls and young boys.” His voice had turned bitter. “Almost all who survived are grown men.”

  “You needed them to carry the ivory.”

  “You know as well as I do that buyers don’t want grown men. We won’t be able to sell this many. We will have to kill the ones who don’t find a buyer. And your master will take the difference in profit out of my pay.”

  At least you get pay, the man with the sword thought, slipping it back into its scabbard. “We must move now.”

  “Malo,” the captain said in a sharp, whispered command.

  Suddenly the area not two feet away was alive with movement. “Push them onto the beach,” the caravan captain ordered to his assistants, unseen in darkness.

  The porters began to move. Once they were out on the beach, the elephant tusks they carried on their shoulders appeared ghostly in the starlight. The men themselves were all but invisible. Only metallic noises gave away their location. They were bound together in groups of six, with rings around their necks joined by a length of chain. That clanking meant fear to the man in the kanzu. He had heard
it for the first time as a child holding his father’s hand during the long, miserable trek from his pleasant birthplace in the highlands to the edge of the ocean and a lifetime of servitude.

  It was the only sound any of the people made. The porters—slaves he should call them—had certainly been warned that their throats would be cut if they tried to call for help. They followed the caravan captain’s barely visible white turban, moving toward the edge of the water.

  Again with sword drawn, the overseer recrossed the sand at the rear of the column. The caravan captain’s assistants were fanned out a few steps before him on either side. As the most valuable cargo, the young women and children were kept at the head of the group, so they could board first. In the old days before the British had taken charge of this part of the Sultan’s territory, it had been the ivory that went first. But since the British had forced the Sultan to outlaw slavery, the prices for people had gone higher and higher. The young because of their scarcity and the pleasurable uses to which they could be put, fetched the highest prices of all.

  As always, a few of the assistants had to carry the children to the small boat waiting to ferry them to the dhow. The women went docilely behind them at first but balked in terror at entering the water. They struggled. Calm as the surf was tonight, they had never seen it before. One of them started to scream. The entire column froze. If she raised enough of a ruckus, the policemen from boma down the beach would be on them. Then there would be hell to pay.

  More women began to wail. The assistants pushed forward to help their fellows muffle them with hands across their mouths.

  The man with the sword hung back. He could not do this again—forcing people into boats. He had done it so many times before. It should have been easy by now. But each time it hurt him more. He was turning them into him. Not a man, but a possession. To be whipped until they bled. To be violated for the pleasure of whoever owned them. Or whoever their masters gave permission to use them. As he had been used.

  And when they grew too old to be wanted in such a way, they would be relegated to whatever work their masters wanted of them. The boys might be castrated and used to guard the harems. Or slain to avoid the expense of feeding them.

  The overseer feared for himself. If the police came and caught him. If he failed in his duty. He had grown to be a trusted servant, to enjoy privileges and powers beyond those of an ordinary slave. To command these men as if he were the master. To plan, to deal with any emergency that came up. To use his mind and cleverness, to enjoy his master’s cohorts’ admiration for his ideas. These things he was allowed, provided he served as if willing. But he had no will to do this, the taking of others into a life like his. Not again.

  Suddenly, while the captain’s assistants were struggling to get the terrified women into the boat, one of the chained men before him grunted and whispered a word in their language. And they turned and ran—six bound together—north toward the dark place under the trees. He stood and listened to the clanking of their chains receding.

  “After them, you fool,” the caravan captain spat out. He was holding two of the girls, trying to impel them into the water toward the waiting boat.

  Reluctantly, the man gripped his sword and pursued the runaways.

  They were only a few steps ahead of him. He could have reached them. He could hear them breathing. And the chains clanking.

  Stop them, his master’s voice called in his head.

  Kill one, he thought, and the others will not be able to move with speed. They will be easily recaptured.

  Run, run with them, the inner voice he could not silence said. Go and be free. Be what you cannot remember ever having been.

  The caravan captain was approaching behind him. “Stop them. Stop them,” he said in a guttural whisper. “This noise will raise the guard.”

  The man with the sword caught one of the chained porters around the neck. The captive struggled. The others all started to resist, beating the overseer on the head and back. If he used his sword, he would have them all.

  The captain was closer. “You will die for this, you stinking savages.”

  The man stopped fighting them. “Go quickly,” he whispered. “Go free.”

  The instant he was loose from them, he sliced a searing cut into his left shoulder, dropped the sword, fell down, and cried out in agony.

  The six disappeared into the trees.

  By the time the caravan captain reached him, the clanking of the chains had stopped. The wounded man writhed in real pain, the sand stinging the wound.

  Why had he not gone with them? He should have gone with them.

  Mombasa

  British East Africa

  Late January

  1912

  1

  From the deck of the Union-Castle steamship Galacian, the sight of Mombasa brought tears to Vera Tolliver’s eyes.

  Her husband, Justin, who stood beside her with his arm across her shoulders, drew her to him. “I can see how moved you are by its beauty.” He offered it as a statement of fact, not imagining that she wept for any other reason. “So am I,” he said with all his heart. “So am I.”

  She nodded, took the handkerchief he offered, and used it to suppress a sob. Truth be told, seeing the East African island port city brought her pain. Mombasa’s panorama was certainly splendid seen from the sea and shining in the morning sun—as vividly green as any English county in June, but with tall palms jutting above flowering flame trees and mimosas, enormous baobabs towering over whitewashed buildings with red roofs.

  But Vera was all but blind to the beauty. The last time she had looked upon this bustling, exotic city from the water, her parents had been standing on the dock to greet her, her father waving his straw clergyman’s hat, her mother—the proper missionary’s wife—standing decorously at his side. That was six years ago. Returning from a visit to her granny in Glasgow, fourteen-year-old Vera had been holding her younger brother’s hand as their ship neared land. The moment her mother had caught sight of them, she smiled and waved.

  On this occasion, no one watched for Vera from the shore. Her father had not come to the port to meet her and her husband. He had remained up-country, at the Scottish Mission just south of Nairobi, where the demands of his work made it impossible to travel here to meet them as they returned from their honeymoon. At least that was what his last letter had said. As for her mother and brother—well, her mother was no more, and Otis had disappeared last year in the aftermath of their uncle’s death, leaving Vera and her father with only each other.

  She put her arm around Justin’s waist. He had been there through it all, had investigated her uncle’s murder, had protected her and her family as best he could. And since then, his love had repaired her heart after all that sorrow. He was her family now. The trip they had just taken—all the best parts of it, the days in Italy and Yorkshire—had proven to her that she was no longer alone. Her soul and her body knew in him all she longed for.

  She had become infatuated with Justin when she first met him and danced with him at the Nairobi Club socials. In retrospect, that girlish attraction felt juvenile. The more she knew him, the more she admired his character. Oh, she was still moved by the golden brown of his hair, his bright eyes, the beautiful shape of his mouth. She had despaired that he would ever do more than dance with her. She had longed for him despite her certain knowledge that he was too perfect ever to take an interest in a missionary girl with unpolished manners and a habit of blurting out embarrassing opinions. But he did. Well, not always. Sometimes their differences came between them. But he admired her enough to press all that aside and be her husband. And it thrilled her to be his wife.

  Still, images of her past haunted her: her uncle lying dead in a coffee field with a spear in his back; her lost mother and brother. She longed now to see her father. She craved the reassuring clasp of his hand, the understanding of their shared grief, no longer spoken of, but present nonetheless.

  The hubbub of the port drew her attenti
on. To their right, men wearing white mechanics uniforms were ferrying American motorcars down the ramp from a tramp steamer. Emblazoned across the men’s backs were the words Mombasa Motor Garage in bold black lettering large enough for her to see twenty yards away. Vera and Justin had seen such machines, Model T Fords they were called, in London and Rome. She had found their speed thrilling. Justin had complained about their fumes and worried they would foul the African countryside.

  The crowd waiting on the deck to disembark pressed forward, but then, before the gangway was lowered from their own ship, a great noise arose from the vessel docked just to their left. Onshore, a military band, augmented with native drummers, struck up a tune Vera did not recognize.

  “Oh, look,” Justin exclaimed, “someone of note is arriving on that Deutsche Ost-Afrika boat. I believe that is District Commissioner Hobson-Jones and District Superintendent of Police Egerton waiting near that bandstand to greet him, whoever he is.” A white canvas marquee had been erected in front of the corrugated iron shed that housed the Customs Office. Justin recognized Egerton only by his uniform, but in a few days he would be reporting to the D.S. as his assistant district superintendent. There would be a row with Vera about that. Tolliver had been an A.D.S. when he and Vera fell in love, but during their honeymoon she began to express a hope that he would leave the police force. Try as he might, he could never get Vera to properly explain why she felt so strongly about it. All she would say was that deep in inside her something told her it was wrong for him to be a police man.

  She was not alone in that opinion. Many in the British Protectorate looked askance at the likes of Justin Tolliver—the son of an earl—serving as a police officer. The aristocrats, who made up most of the settler population, regarded such work as “not really the done thing, my dear.” To them, an assistant district superintendent barely rated above a butler or a shopkeeper. But Tolliver had been a second son, with too little capital to develop a farm, even at the low price for which one could be bought in British East Africa.