The Idol of Mombasa

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “Robert Morley—” Vera began as if she had read his mind, which sometimes she seemed all too able to do.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have seen him.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Yes, certainly. He is a bit overwrought about his own concerns. But he strikes me as that type—prone to becoming overly emotional.”

  “I think that tendency may run in his family,” she said. “But come walk with me. It is so lovely and cool here, and I have something to tell you.”

  They left their shoes on the veranda and made their way along the damp sand between the mangroves to their left and the sea to their right.

  Vera had a great deal she wanted to say, but she held back. She could tell that Justin also had something to get off his chest. She decided it would be politic to let him speak first. Better to catch him in an elevated mood before she brought up the question of finding the murderer of the runaway slave. But then, when he explained the disturbing rationale for the Protectorate’s allowing the beast of slavery to have its tail here along the coast, she burst out against it.

  “That’s ridiculous! Ludicrous! Appalling!”

  This was the Vera who got on his nerves. Sometimes, in situations like this, she seemed to have no ability whatsoever to modulate her own emotions. Or to see the other side of the question. He had no doubt that she would have behaved exactly the same way if Egerton had been present for this discussion.

  He took a deep breath of sea air and held his temper. Bitter experience had taught him that strongly asserting his authority would not turn her into a compliantly proper British wife.

  With effort, he held her hand gently and asked her sweetly, “Please hear me out.”

  “I am sorry,” she said, after a pause. “I want to be a better wife. I really do. I hate it when I disappoint you.”

  He had always known how she would be. He knew other men would have rejected her because of this fire in her. He had not. He had married her despite it. In fact, no matter how he disliked it at this moment, he knew he had married her because of it.

  She twined her fingers into his on her shoulder and held her tongue while he explained about the tail of slavery.

  “So you see, my darling,” he said at last. “Egerton is not going to let me do anything about Robert Morley’s runaway slave. I am an assistant superintendent, dearest, with the emphasis on assistant. I do not choose my own assignments.”

  Her arm around his waist tensed. He expected another angry outburst, but she said nothing. He willed his own tension to dissipate.

  “Morley will have to try and keep the slave with him until the concern over the Grand Mufti’s visit blows over.”

  She stopped in her tracks. “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Katharine Morley was here,” she said. “The slave Joseph Gautura has been murdered.”

  He looked down at her in disbelief. “Why did you not tell me immediately?”

  “You said you had seen Robert Morley. I thought you knew.”

  “I did see him. Just about an hour ago,” Justin said. He went back in his mind to the interview with Morley. He was absolutely certain that the missionary could not have then known that Joseph Gautura was dead. Nothing about his behavior would have made sense if he had been talking about a dead man.

  Vera stopped and looked up at his face. “His sister was here at that time. She was quite alarmed as she couldn’t find her brother. She had looked for him in the places where she expected him to be, at the Mission Society office, the souk.”

  “Well, evidently while she was looking for him in those places, he was at police headquarters with Egerton and me.” It was the only plausible explanation.

  “I can see,” Vera said, “given what you have told me, that you will not be able to do much for Mr. Morley now, but there is one thing I would like you to do.”

  He steeled himself for an annoyance. But none came.

  She gave him a serious, nearly pleading look. “Would you make sure that Robert Morley arrived safely at home?”

  It seemed a trivial request. “I doubt anything could have happened to him, darling.”

  “That is precisely what I told his sister, but she seems a very nervous sort. She hurried back to the Mission to see if he had gone home. But I would feel better about the whole affair if you would make sure he is safe.”

  “Certainly. I will send one of the boys to check. But is this all you want me to do? I do not believe you are accepting the D.S.’s dictum so readily.”

  Vera put her arms around his neck, kissed his soft lips. “Don’t worry, dearest. I am plucky, but I am not so foolish as to involve myself in something I know so little about.”

  He was not at all convinced. He did not trust the speed of her compliance. But he said nothing more.

  ***

  Once the shadows had begun to lengthen and the day to cool, Vera and Justin Tolliver set out for MacDonald Terrace to have a look at the police-issue bungalow they would occupy during Justin’s tour of duty. They met District Superintendent Egerton at police headquarters. “I’ll accompany you. I am going that way,” he said. “There is another confounded ceremony being conducted by the Grand Mufti. The inauguration of a new mosque at the top of the street. We had to burn down the old one last year, because of an outbreak of plague. It was a very touchy thing. At least the Sultan is paying for the party, not His Majesty’s government. The Liwali will be holding forth.” He then took great pains to explain that the Liwali was the official who made sure Britain paid over the tribute due to the Sultan of Zanzibar. “And takes whatever else he can get for himself into the bargain,” Egerton added with a wrinkle of his elegant nose.

  Tolliver listened politely to the discourse, though he and Vera already knew all that Egerton was telling them. Vera, despite her habitual forthrightness, managed to hold her tongue and avoid reminding the D.S. that she had been born in East Africa and most likely knew a great deal more about it than he, who had only lately arrived from service in India.

  Leaving police headquarters, they crossed the road and started uphill. Vera found it hard to keep up with the strides of her tall companions, especially since she could not stop herself turning every once in a while to gaze with delight at the ever-widening vista of the sea or to pause and admire the exotic carvings on the lintel of a doorway, or the grace of a passing Somali woman.

  The air carried an undercurrent of spice. Mombasa was more an Arab than an African city, the kind of place where one expected to see Aladdin walking along, carrying his lamp. It had been this way for eons. Egyptians, Phoenicians, even the Chinese had traded on this coast. But Vera had seen it change, during her mere twenty years, from a city dominated by Persians and Ottomans with Swahili servants to one with many Indian settlers and a minority of British newcomers mixed in.

  Up in the highlands around Nairobi where she was born and had grown up, the English Administration allowed only Europeans to take land. Many Indians had been imported to build the railroad. Once it was completed, if they wanted to stay, they had little choice but to plunk down here in the port, which everyone said developed new aspects every month. To Vera, its exotic inhabitants and their ways had always made it strange. Until now, she had readily accepted her parents’ judgment that it was a smelly and dirty place. But in the past two days, she had begun to see its glamor. It intrigued her. And this afternoon, she was seeing it at its most glittering.

  The cobbled street around them was thronged with stately Arab gentlemen, each in a long white gown of spotless linen and sporting a bright-colored, close-fitting turban. Their leather sandals flapped against the stone paving with a rhythmic beat. For today’s special occasion they wore waistcoats and over them, open robes of splendid brocade. They looked more like displays of luxurious fabric than like serious members of the town’s elite. One slender man passing by, almost as tall as Justin, was resplendent in midnight-blue silk embroidered with silver and gold. Vera wished she had had a dress o
f such cloth to wear to the Christmas ball at Castle Howard in Yorkshire last month. None of Lord and Lady Carlisle’s guests would have intimidated her in the least had she been arrayed in the likes of that.

  “These chaps must all be going to the ceremony,” Egerton said. “The district commissioner has asked me to be there to show the colors. I don’t see what I can do other than smile. The whole speech will be in Arabic, I imagine. Won’t understand a word of what they’re saying, will I?”

  Justin smiled broadly. “It’s hard to believe any of them make any sense out of it,” he said. “It goes by so quickly. They wiggle their tongues more in a few sentences than an Englishman would in a month.”

  Egerton laughed.

  “I think I will try to learn to speak some Arabic while I am here,” Vera said. She hated it when her countrymen made out any language but their own to be gibberish.

  They both looked at her as if she had announced her intention to become the next Grand Mufti.

  Egerton harrumphed. He drew a small bunch of keys out of his pocket and pointed across the road to a tiny bungalow. It was a charmless one-story box of stucco, whitewashed, with mud-brown trim around the windows and a typical corrugated-iron roof that would make the interior oven-like. It sat behind a sagging white trellis fence overgrown with tangled vines. A couple of tall coconut palms rose just behind it. A narrow flagstone path led to a little porch and the front door. The garden was covered in weeds. “That’s it, I’m afraid.” He handed the keys to Justin and looked at Vera, as if he were afraid she would burst into tears at the sight of the bedraggled yard. The building was not fit to house the groundskeepers at Tilbury Grange, Justin’s family’s estate, which they had just visited in Yorkshire. At her granny’s mansion in Glasgow, they would have used it as garden shed.

  She saw the apprehension in Egerton’s eyes and smiled it away. “It has potential,” she said. “It will be lovely once I have put some effort into it. Making it so will give me something to do.” Of course she did not reveal that before taking on anything else, she would have to complete her family’s obligation to Robert and Katharine Morley.

  Egerton breathed an audible sigh of relief. He was a bachelor. It tickled Vera to imagine him so intimidated by the possible displeasure of a young woman who barely came up to his chin.

  He turned to Justin. “I am very happy to have you with us, Tolliver. In times like these, England expects that every man will do his duty.”

  At that moment, a police sergeant in a turban came running up the hill. “District Superintendent, sir,” he said. “You must come quickly. We have arrested a man who was carrying a knife, sir.”

  “Every man jack in this city is carrying a knife and most have swords as well,” Egerton said.

  “Yes, sir, but this man was heard to say that he wanted to use his knife on the Grand Mufti.”

  Vera looked at Justin. As she expected, he was immediately on the alert, looking at Egerton, ready to leap into action. “Shall I come with you, sir?” he asked.

  “No.” Egerton gestured at the crowd of resplendent Arabs mounting the hill. “You follow that lot and keep close to the Grand Mufti. I’ll see to this blighter making threats.”

  Vera took the keys from a crestfallen Justin. Clearly he would have preferred to go after the miscreant. Egerton was already jogging down the hill with the Sikh sergeant.

  “I must,” Justin said, an apology in his glance.

  “Go ahead. Please be careful.” She watched him in his white uniform, head and shoulders above most of the men in brocade who swarmed up toward the mosque.

  Vera let herself in and looked over the gloomy bungalow where she and Justin were meant to live for the next year. She convinced herself that the garden at least could be made beautiful. And besides, she couldn’t worry about this now, with Robert and Katharine Morley’s troubles weighing on her mind. Rather than bother now about this sad excuse for a home, before sundown she took a rickshaw back to the lovely beach cottage on Ras Serani Point.

  When he returned home later that night, Justin brought Vera good news. He had sent one of the askaris to Morley’s mission. The man had found the reverend safely at home. This made for the loving night Justin had desired.

  ***

  The next morning Vera was full of plans for making the cottage a comfortable home and arranging the lovely things they had brought back from Scotland and Yorkshire. She rhapsodized about having her piano and his cello and being able to play duets as they so often had at his parents’ home and on board the ship.

  After she explained her plans to Justin, they left the cottage together and parted company at the intersection of Vasco da Gama Road and the Ndia Kuu. Vera was on her way to find workers to help them move. She hoped also to find skilled men who could freshen the paint on the bungalow and start in on rescuing the garden from weedy oblivion.

  For his part, intent on being at the station to greet Kwai Libazo, Justin marched off along the gravel road to the railway terminal, grateful that the down train arrived early in the morning, making this walk invigorating, rather than what it would be in a couple of hours: a sticky trek through damp heat that seemed to want to kill a chap.

  The way to the station was thronged with white-robed Arabs, Swahilis, Goans—every description of man who inhabited the town. Some sported a red fez, others a turban, each carrying something to ship on the train once it started its journey back toward Lake Victoria. Carts were piled high with cartons that purported to contain sewing machines, lighting fixtures wired for electricity, carpenters’ tools, and, according to the label on one, the very latest in women’s fashion hats. A mule-drawn cart was laden with about a dozen brand-new bicycles, and an elegant Somali man in a silk vest and sash pushed along a perambulator full of small bundles wrapped in brown paper. Coming in the other direction were three native women naked to the waist carrying water jugs on their heads and jangling along with a clatter of bracelets audible even in this din. Mombasa was an intriguing paradox. Some of its women were half naked; others were so completely covered that not even their eyes were visible.

  Justin wove through the crowd; the platform was no less crowded than the road had been, but he was tall enough to see over the crush of people and parcels. As soon as the train arrived and the compartment doors opened, he spotted Libazo descending from the third-class car. The two men moved toward each other as swiftly as the throng allowed. Tolliver accepted his lieutenant’s salute and, contrary to the practice of European policemen with their askaris, shook Libazo by the hand.

  From the very beginning of Tolliver’s service on the police force just over a year ago, he had worked side by side with this brave and canny half-Maasai, half-Kikuyu. In a sense, Libazo had saved Tolliver’s life during an incident in a bar in Nairobi. In all their work together, Libazo had proved intelligent as an investigator as well as swift in physical action. They had developed such a rapport that Tolliver could not imagine doing his work efficiently and effectively without Libazo at his right hand.

  They were very alike in stature, both tall, with broad shoulders and strong physiques, though Kwai Libazo was more lithe than sturdy. In coloration they could not have been more different. Tolliver was blond, blue-eyed, with a pale, rosy complexion that his own sister had envied aloud to a maddening degree. Libazo was mahogany brown; his head, under his red fez, was shaved as both his Maasai and his Kikuyu ancestors had shaved theirs since the Iron Age. Libazo was, as ever, spiffy and tidy, his black puttees perfectly wound on his legs, his khaki twill uniform clean and looking neatly pressed though he had been on the train for nearly twenty-four hours.

  Libazo saluted a second time. “Sergeant Kwai Libazo reporting for duty, sir,” he said, with an emphasis on his rank and a twinkle in his eye: he had not lost the pleasure of presenting himself with a title he had never hoped to achieve. He had earned it, and Tolliver was proud of having helped him secure it.

  Libazo shouldered a rucksack that must have held all his worldly possessions.
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  “You’ll get settled in your barracks before evening,” Tolliver said. “For now we must go off to the gymkhana. A contingent of native policemen will be on parade to welcome me to Mombasa.”

  “And to welcome me too, Bwana?”

  “I doubt you will be joking for long, Sergeant,” Tolliver said in feigned stern voice. “Mombasa is not the young town we had in Nairobi. It has been here long enough to become truly decadent.”

  By the afternoon, that remark would prove to have been more accurate than he could have imagined.

  For now, they made their way directly to the parade ground in an open area on the outskirts of the city, near the campground of the 4th King’s African Rifles.

  The policemen of the city’s contingent were lined up in perfectly straight rows—members of several different tribes, all looking very smart in uniform, a sight better than the ragtag getups one saw in the more remote areas up-country. Quite a few sported navy-blue turbans, indicating that they were Sikhs from India, who were prized for their bravery, loyalty, and intelligence. Tolliver glanced at Kwai’s reaction to them. As usual, for all Libazo’s expression changed, he might have been made of stone.

  It occurred to Tolliver that many of the constables, imported from India to build the Protectorate’s police rank and file quickly and efficiently, would look down upon his preferred lieutenant. True, the boys from the Raj had the advantage of knowing the laws, which had also been imported from the Indian Colonial Code, but he would always choose Libazo, who had proven himself on a personal level. The bothersome thing was that the Indians would very likely snub Kwai as they did all Africans. And the Africans had their own bitter rivalries, which the British Administration encouraged, saying that they must not be allowed to get too chummy, a code Tolliver knew was based on the possibility that one day the Administration might have to use one tribe against another. There was a time when Tolliver might have agreed with that approach, but a year in love with Vera had persuaded him that it might be better for all concerned if the tribal people were encouraged toward teamwork rather than enmity.