The Idol of Mombasa

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “He is in uniform.”

  Tolliver looked about him. There was no one else. “He will have to do. Carl Hastings is about to leave my office. I will keep him a few more minutes. Get your brother and send him outside and tell him to follow Hastings. I want to know where he goes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And send a runner to Fort Jesus. I am going to go there in an hour. I will want to interrogate the bookseller from the souk and his nephew, but separately.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  When Tolliver got back to his office, Hastings was standing, looking at his watch, and tapping his foot. Tolliver found his overwrought sense of personal dignity ludicrous. He was a nobody, really, and yet he seemed to think he had the right to judge others, to demand a regal level of respect, and then he had the gall to think he could put on a sham act as the cooperative citizen and get away with it. Tolliver did not want to think the man guilty just because he disliked him, but Hastings’s snobbish attitude made it difficult to be fair.

  “Thank you for waiting,” Tolliver said. “I appreciate your cooperation. Do you have any plans to go off hunting in the next few days?” Tolliver tried his best to sound only mildly curious. He had a lifetime of training in how to be polite to people who did not really deserve it, but he had never been as good at it as his mother thought he should be. The haughty look he got from Hastings proved he had been unsuccessful again.

  “I am free, white, and English,” Hastings said, actually putting his nose in the air. “I will do as I please.”

  “Certainly,” Tolliver answered. “You may go,” he added, pretending that he could keep Hastings if he wanted to. Not that he could. Not without evidence. He feared the man would disappear from Mombasa before the facts emerged.

  13

  The little Swahili boy who approached Vera’s front gate had a confident, worldly-wise look about him, far in excess of what one would expect in a child so young. Vera was standing in the front garden, trying to decide exactly how far away from the front corner of the bungalow she wanted to plant a frangipani sapling. To her amazement, the boy came through the gate without asking permission, marched up to her, and, with a graceful flourish, but without a word presented her with an envelope. Her name and the address of the bungalow were written on it in Justin’s gentlemanlike hand.

  “Thank you, boy,” she said. “What is your name?”

  “Haki,” the boy said, standing at attention. “I work for the police.”

  What a charming child. She asked him to wait while she went inside and brought out a coin for him. When she returned he took the coin, saluted, and ran off.

  The contents of the note disturbed her. Poor Katharine must be beside herself to be betraying her brother in such a way. How could she march into the police with such a demand unless she was positive of his guilt? Perhaps not even then, except to save the life of an innocent. Justin was convinced of Morley’s innocence. Did Katharine know something that Justin did not?

  She gave the gardeners their orders, pointing to a spot she feared would turn out to be too close to the house, but not caring since she would not live there long enough to see the tree fully grown. She sped inside, changed as quickly as she could, and made her way with all due dispatch to the Mission, worrying along the way that Katharine would not be there when she arrived, or that Robert would be with her and want to know what they had to discuss. Suppose she were forced to reveal to Katharine her brother’s peccadilloes. Justin had not told her the whole truth, but it was very easy to guess at it. Katharine was exactly that prudish type of woman who would be shocked at the very thought of anyone having sex with anyone.

  The oppressive heat along the way made it nearly impossible for Vera to gather her thoughts. As she approached, she was happy to see Katharine alone, sitting on the veranda with a book.

  As Vera crossed the lawn, formulating her greeting, suddenly her head swam. The sun seemed to grow brighter. She reached out, but there was nothing to grasp. All went blank.

  ***

  Kwai Libazo’s inquiries about Juba Osi all pointed in one direction. The only likely place to find Gautura’s tribesman was in the native sector on the outskirts of the town center near the Kilindini Harbour.

  By midmorning Libazo was making his way uphill, past the Gymkhana Club and the small European cemetery. At the top was a sprawling open-air market full of noisy traders. The buyers were largely Swahili women, many wearing veils. They refused to acknowledge, much less speak to the tall, exotic-looking askari stranger who spoke Swahili with an up-country accent.

  No one seemed to want to tell him anything, and he was beginning to think he should come back without his uniform. He stopped to buy some biltong and a beer, to give himself an excuse to speak to the seller. He chose an elderly one. The toothless woman, who evidently could not eat the chewy product she sold, looked him up and down and called him “handsome polisi.” He gave her his best smile, told her that her beer and the biltong were excellent. He continued to converse with her while he ate and drank.

  “Everybody comes to my stand,” she told him.

  “I am sure that is true. Your products are very tasty.”

  “I have not seen you here before.”

  “I have not been here before, but I will be sure to come back when I need a snack.”

  “I will give you a discount.”

  He smiled again. “I came here because I have some news to bring to someone who lives in this part of the town, but I cannot find him.”

  The woman denied knowing Juba Osi, but she left him to “guard” her stand while she went and asked if her friends nearby knew where Juba Osi lived.

  ***

  Carl Hastings left the police station and made directly for the native quarter. He had not spent the past two years in this godforsaken town without learning his way around. When Tolliver had ordered his askari to find Juba Osi, his tone of voice told Hastings that none of them had the faintest idea where to look. Hastings, therefore, felt sure he would get to Gautura’s kinsman first. Though he sorely wanted a gin and quinine, he could not chance Osi being found and taken into custody before his trap was shut for good.

  As it was, Hastings was forced to part with five rupees before anyone would tell him where to find the bloody little son of a whore.

  ***

  Tolliver entered the prison in the old Portuguese citadel with an excitement brought on from his sense of its history. There were many structures in his native Yorkshire that were older than this place’s three hundred years, but the site recalled the imaginary battles in the books he had read as a boy, which had given rise to his fascination with the exotic, the long-ago and the faraway. On rainy days in his father’s library he had pored over old texts and maps that smelled of dust and adventure. He shook his head and smiled to himself. Sometimes he still felt like a little boy inside.

  When he got to the interrogation room, a massive native policeman stood guard over the bookseller’s nephew—the man who had been arrested for threatening the Grand Mufti and had then escaped from the courthouse. Tolliver questioned him for a good half hour, but in the end, he failed to get any information about Majidi from the young man. All he would tell Tolliver was that he must get the facts from his uncle. Tolliver hid his frustration and had the huge askari take away the boy and bring him the bookseller.

  The uncle was a small, slight man with a surprisingly round belly that protruded from the front of his long midnight-blue gown so that the buttons gaped and threatened to pop off. It was the kind of garment one would see only on a Catholic priest in England. There, it would be black, but this one was a midnight shade of blue. The man’s face and long black beard were cleaner than Tolliver could have imagined he could keep them while in prison. Tolliver feigned an inability to speak Swahili and interrogated him through the interpreter. He understood quite well what was being said, but the ruse gave him a better opportunity to observe the prisoner objectively.

  “The general belief
in the Arab community is that you are the owner of the brothel across the way from your bookstall in the bazaar. Do you own that place?”

  “Since coming to this prison, I have heard that Khalid Majidi is dead. Is this true?”

  “I am here to ask the questions; you are here to answer them.”

  “If Majidi is truly dead, I will answer your questions. If he lives, I will not.”

  Tolliver relented. In this case, he would rather have the answers willingly than try to extract the information by intimidation. “He is quite dead.”

  The man sized up Tolliver for a second, seeming to assess the truth of the information. He took in a deep breath. “The brothel across from my bookstore employs Somali women who are from Muslim families. It is a disgrace what they are doing there. I would not want to have anything to do with such a disgrace.”

  “Then how is it that your name is attached to the operation, and why is it that your nephew threatened the Grand Mufti when he condemned that brothel and called for it to be closed?”

  “Majidi held a great deal over my head and over my family. He knew some things about us that would cause the Shari’a court to take away all we had—our possessions and our good name. There are people who would want to kill us if our history were revealed. In exchange for his keeping our secret, he forced me to pretend that I was the man behind the brothel. And he was the one who insisted that my nephew silence the Grand Mufti. He said if the Grand Mufti’s words made the police close his brothel, he would punish me by revealing my secret.”

  “It makes no sense. Why would you go along with pretending that you owned a brothel to save your reputation?”

  He gave Tolliver a world-weary look, as if only a child would need an explanation. “There are secrets and there are secrets, Mr. Policeman. I could never have allowed Majidi to reveal what he held over me.”

  “Even if it meant participating in the assassination of such an important figure in your religion?”

  “The Grand Mufti is a Sunni; we are Shi’a.”

  Tolliver had a vague notion that there were sects of Islam, but he had no idea of their meaning, much less their origin. “How can that be a reason to kill a man?”

  The bookseller laughed so bitterly that it was almost impossible to call the sound he made an expression of mirth. “Have not the English Protestants and Catholics been killing one another for centuries?” He took his hands out of his lap and folded them on the table in front of him. “My nephew was sent to intimidate the Grand Mufti, not actually to kill him.”

  “You are going to have to tell me—” Tolliver started to say. But his eyes focused on the man’s hands. They were very small, like a woman’s really. His fingerprints might appear too small to be thought a man’s. Like the ones on the murder weapon. This man was bound to Majidi in some terrible way. He certainly had motive enough to kill the person who was forcing him to do heinous things against his will.

  Tolliver was about to stand up and order his fingerprints to be taken, but then he realized that at the moment Majidi was murdered, this man had been locked up in prison.

  He had begun to formulate his next question when a painfully bright flash of insight stopped his thoughts and his breath. Those small fingerprints on the murder weapon were likely a woman’s. He and Egerton had both dismissed that without ever logically considering it. And yet the person who found Majidi’s body was a woman… And one who quickly disappeared from the scene. Katharine Morley. She, who had now demanded that her brother be arrested for the crime. Inconceivable as it seemed, that pinched maiden lady might actually have taken the man’s life. And Vera was on her way to visit a woman who could very well be a murderer.

  “Lock him up again!” he called out to the guard, springing to his feet and out the door.

  He had sent Libazo on a search of the dead slave’s tribesman. There was no one about whom he knew or could trust. There was nothing for it. In the heat of the day, completely on his own, he ran with unholy speed toward the Mission.

  14

  Kwai Libazo became confused as he followed the biltong seller’s directions to the dwelling of Juba Osi. Like every tribal village Libazo had ever visited, Mombasa’s native town was a helter-skelter arrangement of huts and shacks. Everywhere about, chickens scratched the red dirt and children raised a joyful racket. He was looking for a roundel with a corrugated roof near a tall palm, but there were three such places in the direction the woman had indicated. He approached two girls dressed in English fabrics wound tightly around their bodies. One was sitting in the doorway of a hut that looked as if it were held together with coconut rope. The other stood behind her, fixing the seated girl’s hair. When he asked for Juba Osi, neither of them spoke but they both pointed to the same hut.

  As soon as he looked that way, Libazo was taken aback and put on his guard. At that moment, a tall, portly white man, in typical Englishman’s clothing, a man he had only just seen at headquarters, was standing in front of Juba’s doorway speaking to someone just inside the door. Kwai moved slowly toward him, trying his best not to draw the man’s attention. He was almost upon him when he saw another askari, one he did not know, peering out at the Englishman from behind a nearby hut. The other askari looked startled when he noticed Kwai.

  Kwai instantly signaled to him, pointing to himself and drawing an arc with his fingers to show he would come around behind the building, and then raising his palm to signal the other policeman to go back into hiding.

  ***

  Carl Hastings faced Juba Osi in his doorway and realized he had to proceed with care. The man, who greatly resembled his tribesman Joseph Gautura, was holding a large knife with which he had been fashioning a bowl out of some sort of wood. Osi was broad-shouldered and though shorter than Hastings, gave the impression of being very much stronger. Hastings had a pistol under his jacket, but drawing it here in broad daylight must be a last resort. The first thing he needed to do was to find out if this was the blighter who had written the letter. Then it would just be a matter of luring him to a place where he could safely shoot him and leave him to rot.

  Without entering the hut, he greeted the man and said that he needed to employ a native who could write English, that he needed such a person for his business.

  All he got for his trouble was an answer in Swahili that Osi did not have any English. Hastings did not believe him, of course. The bastard must somehow have divined that Hastings was the recipient of Joseph Gautura’s letter. These natives were sometimes not as stupid as they looked.

  Hastings switched to Swahili and tried a different tack. “Still, I can use a strong man like yourself.”

  “For what sort of work, Bwana?”

  Hastings was casting about for what to say next when a voice from behind him said in Swahili, “Are you Juba Osi?” in a very commanding tone.

  Osi looked terrified, and Hastings spun around to see two black policemen approaching—one of them tall and looking as strong as a gorilla. He was, Hastings was sure, the very man Tolliver had sent to look for Juba Osi. “Good afternoon, Colonel,” the ape said in English to Hastings.

  “What do you want?” Hastings blurted out in his own best commanding tone. There was no way he would be able to spirit Osi away now without a scene, and if they got the savage back to headquarters, he would squeal whatever he knew like a sewer rat.

  In desperation, Hastings was trying to figure out how much of a bribe he could offer these two to let him deal with Osi when the tall one said, “Juba Osi, we are here to arrest you for the murder of Joseph Gautura.”

  Osi screamed and began to prattle on at such a rate that Hastings could make no sense of it, except that the blackie was declaring his innocence.

  Tolliver’s tall, overconfident sergeant handcuffed Osi nonetheless. “If you are not guilty, you will be freed,” the sergeant declared. Osi continued to plead and shout.

  Then the uppity askari had the temerity to ask what Hastings’s business was with Juba Osi. “None of your goddamned conc
ern!” Hastings spat out in his face. “Watch your manners, you stupid savage, or I will have your head.”

  Hastings marched off shoulders squared, determined, confident. But his brain seethed with fear, with a compulsion to run. He had to find that ball-less Ismail al Dimu and get some money out of him. He would pretend to be carrying on with the hunting expedition they had planned with Majidi. But then he would go overland—into Ethiopia, or Egypt. He did not know what he would do after that, but he would have to be far away now that the authorities would learn what Juba Osi undoubtedly knew.

  15

  Justin Tolliver arrived at the Mission grounds out of breath and soaked with sweat. Getting to Vera was his only thought. Much as he wanted to be angry at her for involving herself where she did not belong, every fiber of his being knew that if he lost her, he himself would be lost. And he was the one who had sent her here! As he crossed the lawn, he shooed a troop of baboons out of his way and called for Vera.

  Robert Morley came rushing out of the schoolroom to the left of the house and met Tolliver as he arrived at the veranda.

  “Where is my wife?” Tolliver demanded.

  “She is lying down. My sister is attending to her. I am sure she will be fine.”

  “What do you mean? What has happened to her?”

  “She has had a fainting spell is all. Happens all the time to women in this heat.”

  “Vera is not the sort of woman who faints. Bring me to her immediately!”

  Morley looked surprised. “Really, I am sure it is nothing. We insisted she lie down in an excess of caution.”

  “My God, man…” Tolliver could not stand it for another second. He rushed through the door and shouted Vera’s name.

  Morley followed him. “Now, see here…”

  Tolliver ignored the missionary and made immediately for the hallway that seemed as if it must lead to the bedrooms. The sister was standing at one of the doorways and turned a disapproving face to Tolliver. “She was sleeping, but you have wakened her. Why are you shouting?” She sounded like a schoolteacher scolding a bad boy.