The Idol of Mombasa

by Annamaria Alfieri

  Miriam, the Swahili maid who had come to them with this rented cottage, served a second round of tea and withdrew. Justin buttered a third piece of toast and looked across the table, fully expecting Vera, forthright as she was, to resume the argument that had ended with her in tears the night before.

  “I understand that the Protectorate needs more men for the police force. But is there really no one but you?” she said, as if the discourse had not been interrupted by hours of sleep and delightful early-morning lovemaking. “Why can’t they bring over more of the men who are living posh lives in India?” At least her tone was a bit more subdued with the light of day.

  “As I have tried to explain, my darling, there are others coming along, but most of them know nothing of Africa. And the force is dreadfully understaffed. My service will not go on forever. Just a tour of a year or fourteen months. They won’t keep a chap here in Mombasa for longer than that.”

  She sighed. “That’s another thing. If you must continue, why does it have to be in crowded, smelly Mombasa? Why can’t you go back to Nairobi, or to Naivasha, where I can be close to Father, and we can have the chance of a healthy life?”

  “You read the district superintendent’s letter,” he explained, holding his patience by a thread. “How this is a particularly delicate time here because of the Grand Mufti’s visit. How critical it is to have proper leadership on the force.”

  Her eyes told him she remained unconvinced. He supposed he ought to be grateful that she had not reminded him of her grandmother’s very generous wedding gift. Some wives might bring up the money as a way of demanding their own way. Even if she did not say it, he suspected she was thinking of it.

  His father had taken a similar stance. Stop this policing nonsense, was how his father had put it. Not proper for the likes of you. Really, my boy. Justin had not responded. No argument would have convinced him; the Earl of Bilbrough never strayed from opinions appropriate to a man of his rank.

  In a way his father was right. But he was not yet ready to leave the police force. Vera’s granny’s money would still be there in a year or two. For now he wanted to earn his own way, support his wife himself. British law certainly gave him the right to all she possessed, including that sizable gift. But Vera would not go along so easily. She had not grown up in some stuffy Scottish parlor. With one foot in each of two worlds, she had absorbed neither the British mores of womanly behavior nor the customs of her African playmates. She was neither a docile Kikuyu wife nor a compliant British matron. She rebelled against rules on both sides. He sometimes feared that one day he would lose his tolerance of her unconventionality. But then he would think about the two of them alone together on safari, united in the glory of their surroundings, their souls fed by the majesty of the wilderness, watching the sunset, and knowing she would be in his arms, both of them feeling the wonder of love in the surpassing beauty of the African night. His love and desire for her and for Africa overwhelmed his doubts.

  He had his own misgivings. All his life he had chafed at the shackles of his prim and proper upbringing—having to be friends with “the right” people, regardless of how boring he found them, how odious he thought many of their opinions and much of their behavior were. Having to stifle his own ideas. Never telling his father the Earl that he was wrong and the servant he had just chastised was right. He felt suffocated.

  Life with Vera in Africa would never go stale. He was certain of that. Still, he wanted some time to establish himself as the head of his family. She was not the sort of girl to automatically follow tradition and let her husband make all the decisions. He must keep calm and convince her that, for a little while longer, he needed to do his duty.

  “They need an experienced man right here and now,” he said gently. “There are only six European officers in this entire province. The other three hundred policemen are all Asiatics or Africans. That is why the district superintendent sent that note on board before we even disembarked. We must have everything under control during the Grand Mufti’s visit. Untoward incidents involving Arabs have stirred up considerable trouble in other places in the Empire in the past. The Administration has the King’s African Rifles on standby, but they don’t want to make a show of force unless it becomes necessary. The Arabs called Mombasa the Island of War before we came here. We don’t want it to turn back into that.”

  Vera wished she might press her point, but she wanted peace between them even more. “I miss my father so much.” The words slipped out of her. She saw immediately that he took it as a last-ditch appeal. A woman’s form of insistence. She could take it back, she supposed. And she had merely told him the truth.

  Justin bit his lip. She knew full well that the Administration of British East Africa moved men about, from the healthy, airy highlands to posts in malaria-ridden places like Mombasa and the shores of Lake Victoria and Lake Nyasa.

  She was picking little bits off a crust of toast and dropping them onto her plate. When she looked up, her dark eyes were bright with unshed tears. She was not a girl who wept easily, intense as her feelings might be. She glanced into his eyes. “I am not weeping to get my way.”

  “I know that,” he said gently, and reached out his hand and took hers.

  Try as she might, she knew he would not relent. Justin’s wanting to stay a policeman stemmed from more than his sense of duty. His fierce allegiance to his job was borne out of his sense of justice. His desire to find the truth.

  She had to admit that he did his work very well, served justice better than most English policemen. The Justin she had seen during his investigation of her uncle’s murder had proved to her that he was the man she wanted above all others. The way he had set his jaw and refused to yield to the district commissioner’s demand for a quick, but unjust solution. He had pressed ahead, coming back often to her father’s Mission. She had watched for him, cresting the hill on his stallion, with his askari lieutenant on a pony. How many times had she seen him, striding across the compound with that serious, determined expression, trying so hard to defend the falsely accused Kikuyu medicine man. His goodness had shone out of him in those sad, sad days. Their love had blossomed against that terrible backdrop.

  She reached across the table and touched his arm, his strong arm that enfolded her. “You feel you must, don’t you?”

  “Do you want to go to the Mission and stay with your father while I take care of my duty?”

  She took in her breath in shock. “Never.” She could not imagine having to spend a whole day, much less months at a time so far from his embrace. “Perhaps we can entice Father to—”

  At that moment, Miriam came out on the veranda. “A messenger boy brought this, Bwana,” she said, and handed Justin a telegram. She curtsied and quickly returned inside amid the clatter of the bracelets on her wrists and ankles.

  He opened the orange envelope. “It’s from your father. But it’s addressed to me.”

  Her breath stopped. It was bad news. If not, he would have written an ordinary letter and addressed it to her. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair. “Read it!”

  The thin paper crinkled as he unfolded it and read aloud: “Robert Morley needs help in a police matter. Stop. Please give assistance. Stop. Letter to follow. Stop.” He gave her a quizzical look. “Who is Robert Morley?”

  She let out an exasperated sigh. “A Methodist missionary,” she said. “Very dramatic, but he and Father have been quite close. They worked together in the Anti-Slavery Society.”

  “Do you have any idea what this might be about?”

  Vera shook her head.

  Whatever it was, Justin was happy to have a favor for her father as yet another excuse for Assistant District Superintendent Tolliver to report for duty.

  ***

  While Justin and Vera Tolliver were reading the telegram concerning the Reverend Robert Morley, Morley and his sister, Katharine, were also at the breakfast table, at the Methodist Mission. Katharine had announced her intention to walk to the native vege
table market next to the floating bridge between Nyali and the island of Mombasa.

  Robert moved from the table to his little desk in the corner, took some coins from a drawer, and handed them to her for her shopping. “I will go straight over to the town by ferry,” Morley said. “I have business to conduct with the Mission Society.”

  Katharine tied the coins into the corner of her handkerchief and thrust them deep into the pocket of her skirt. She sensed he was not telling her the truth, but she could never make such an accusation. Robert was a holy man. She could never question his goodness.

  He did not seem to notice her momentary silence. Katharine pursed her lips. “I hope you are not going to go to Majidi. I do not trust him. He will hurt you.”

  “I assure you that I am not going to him. I have the law and the Lord on my side in the matter of his slave. It would be useless to appeal to him again. I have something entirely different to take care of.” He lifted his eyebrows and gave her an arch stare, as if he were challenging her to question him further.

  She looked down at the bare wooden floor, knowing he would take it as an act of submission, but also knowing that the action hid her doubts. There had been a time when nothing he did ever raised her suspicions.

  When she looked up, he was smiling approvingly. “Take Joseph with you to the market, and keep him busy while I am gone. We don’t want him wandering off into danger.”

  Katharine smiled back at him by way of assent. She fetched her favorite hat from the sideboard, the blue one that Robert did not entirely approve of. “I will keep Joseph in my sight.”

  They parted company at their front door, he making for the ferry to Mombasa and she to find Joseph among the Mission boys.

  Joseph was not there. The others said he was still asleep. She was impatient to get her marketing over with before the hottest part of the day, so rather than wait, she instructed them to keep Joseph with them until she returned. She set off on the path toward the market, which took her through the dense forest of mangroves that grew in the salty swampland along the coast. Three-quarters of the way there, she stopped in shock. In the dim light of the early sun filtering through the foliage, the body of Joseph Gautura blocked her way.

  Katharine gasped. Joseph’s throat had been slashed. The flesh of his legs had been disturbed by an animal. She turned away, lost her breakfast at the foot of a thick tree trunk, and then she ran, stumbling over roots and vines, back to the Mission, wanting no one but her brother.

  But of course he had already left. Frantic, she returned to the Mission boys. She found them sitting on the packed earth between the thatched roundel huts, eating a thick pap from wooden bowls with their long, graceful fingers. They leapt to their feet as she approached.

  “Joseph has been—” She stopped, not willing to say the word murdered. “I found his body on the path.” The inner vision of it turned her stomach again.

  They stared at her in disbelief, frozen like four brown statues.

  “He is dead.”

  They looked at the ground then, much as she often lowered her eyes before Robert.

  “What do you know about this?”

  They sputtered and spoke all at once, fell silent, and at last one confessed that they had known Joseph was missing but had been afraid to make trouble for him by telling her the truth. She sent them, one to find her brother at the Mission Society; one to look for him in the souk—in case he had been fibbing about where he was going; and one—with a spear—to guard Joseph’s body and keep the animals off it. She dispatched the last man to the police station next to the market near the bridge to fetch the police.

  She could not settle her mind. Niggling suspicions and fears nagged her. Could Robert be guilty of any part in this? She recalled his argument with Majidi in this room just yesterday. Robert’s angry voice sounded in her mind, threatening Majidi—Over my dead body. Sometimes she hated that loud, certain way her brother expressed his opinions. Majidi’s voice had been hardly above a cold whisper when he returned the threat. Yours or his. Robert would never have hurt Joseph. But what if he had now gone to the souk, where Majidi—surrounded by men loyal to him—could destroy Robert. Her thoughts swam with possibilities, each uglier than the last.

  She was still pacing when one of the boys returned an hour later and told her the police had arrived at the body and taken over the situation.

  Half an hour later, the boys she had sent after her brother returned, having failed to find him. She resumed her pacing. She uttered the name that had been ringing in her mind the whole while: “Majidi.” He must be the one who had slain poor Joseph. She wished with all her heart to see the trader punished with the swift justice of an angel’s sword. She tried to pray for Robert’s safety, but she could not. All she could think about was that she wanted that disgusting slave owner Majidi dead.

  3

  At nearly that same moment, in the bar of the Mombasa Club, Justin Tolliver was downing a large glass of quinine water only weakly flavored with gin. He shuddered a bit at its sour taste. Unlike some of his fellow British pioneers, Tolliver was not one to overdo alcohol so early in the day, but the hot, sticky climate of the coast made Mombasa one of the Protectorate’s worst breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and quinine was a European’s only defense. At any rate, his glass did not contain enough of the hard stuff to drown his disappointment.

  He had come to the club looking for healthful exercise, but the members apparently played energetic sports only very occasionally. Too much foul heat during daylight and too many insects in the early and late hours, they claimed. When he asked the members how a chap was to stay fit, they looked away, as if his question was foolish and they were too polite to tell him so.

  He understood full well what they were about. These were, he was certain, mostly officials in the Protectorate Administration who had come here from service in India and brought with them the ironclad pomposity of the Raj. European men chose their social companions based on rank and salary, a hierarchy more rigid than the Hindu caste system. On this, his first visit, he had not introduced himself as a policeman. But the European community in British East Africa was so small and closely knit, so fond of gossip that everyone seemed to know everything about everyone. In Nairobi, the members had wanted him for their club teams and so they had tolerated the second son of an earl who had had the stupidity to become a policeman. His prowess at sport had overruled their snobbery. If the men here in Mombasa did not take cricket and polo seriously, they would have no reason to want his company. And who were these tin gods? The sons of shopkeepers at best. Their self-satisfaction made him sick.

  He put down his empty glass with a thump and said good-bye to the only person who had given him the time of day, a portly man with a drooping mustache—the one who had spoken to Tolliver and Vera on the ship, during the ceremony welcoming the Grand Mufti. Carl Hastings was his name. He had gone home to London for a respite from the heat and was now back here complaining bitterly about the climate. Evidently, he made a living hunting ivory.

  Tolliver exited the club, telling himself without any real conviction that he had more reason to act the snob than the king’s arrogant administrators in this backwater. By ordinary standards he was their superior in grace, education, and birth. Yet he was more open-minded than any of them. Why should he care for their opinions merely because they had worked their way up a tedious bureaucratic ladder and were now paid a higher salary than he?

  He strode back in the direction of Ras Serani Point and the beach cottage. Since he had to pass near police headquarters on the way, he decided to take a moment to present himself to his district superintendent. D.S. Hugh Egerton was the son of a secretary in the Foreign Office and might have better manners than those toffee-nosed dolts at the club. But perhaps not. Egerton had after all moved here recently from service in Bombay.

  Though the walk to headquarters was less than half a mile, it meant leaving the open area around the club and entering the narrow streets typical of the tow
n, where the damp heat pressed in. Growing ever more uncomfortable, Justin wondered if the men at the club might be correct. Mombasa was showing itself as not the sort of place where a man could exercise out of doors. A too-palpable reason to regret accepting this post. The playing fields had always been where he felt most at home, where he excelled for what he could do and not for who his father was, where he did not have to worry about committing social faux pas. The rules were clear and reasonable and he could be impressive and the hero of the day. And even if he failed to help his team to victory, there would always be another match and another opportunity.

  He emerged into a quaint square, where the sea breezes blew away his nostalgia for the cricket pitch. The smell of the salt air called to mind his father’s history books and his own boyhood dreams of adventure. He imagined that this place now smelled much the same as it had to da Gama aboard the Portuguese carrack São Gabriel when the great explorer entered Mombasa harbor, the first European to come to this place. This was a reason to be here. This had been a place of adventure for centuries. Whatever else Mombasa was, this was the sort of place that, as a child, he had always longed to be.

  The look of the police headquarters further lifted his spirits. It seemed to have been built to impress, and it did. While the structures all around it were ramshackle wood-and-iron affairs, some with only palm thatch for roofs, the police unit was headquartered in a whitewashed stucco edifice with four two-story Ionic columns across the front and a red tile roof. Compared to the Greek temples he and Vera had visited during their honeymoon in Sicily, it was less than splendid, but in this landscape, its classic air lent importance to the service the police force rendered to the nation. Regardless of what those twits in the club might think, Tolliver knew they would shout for help from him and his fellow officers whenever they felt themselves in the slightest danger.