Jouma signalled to one of the uniformed officers, a burly man who had once played prop forward for the police rugby team in Nairobi. He grabbed the boy and slung him under his arm as easily as if he was a side of pork.
‘Take him outside,’ Jouma said, as he picked up the case and followed the two officers and the squealing, kicking boy back along the dimly lit tunnel. A wide-eyed crowd quickly gathered as the four of them emerged into the daylight.
‘This young man says that policemen have no power,’ Jouma announced, gesturing at the squirming boy. ‘He says that because he can read and write he has somehow achieved greatness. And at such a tender age.’
Jouma turned and yanked up the boy’s robe so that his skinny backside was exposed. There was a gasp of horror from the crowd.
‘When I was at school,’ Jouma continued, ‘the likes of Steven Kisauni were regarded as bullies and braggarts, and my teacher, Mr Yalanu - a most wise and venerable man - had a simple but effective way of dealing with them.’
Without further ado, Jouma picked up a stick from the ground and administered six sharp blows to the boy’s buttocks. When he had finished, Steven Kisauni was snivelling and his backside was criss-crossed with a pattern of ugly red welts.
‘Never forget who really has the power, boy,’ Jouma hissed into his ear. ‘I shall be keeping a very close eye on you in the future.’
Chapter Forty-Eight
Patrick Noonan did not need much encouragement to make himself at home on Yellowfin. It was just as well he had restocked the beer coolers, Jake reflected, because at the rate the American was working his way through the boat’s supply of Tuskers they’d have been empty an hour ago.
‘Tell Patrick what you and Harry call tourists,’ Martha said.
‘Jesus, Martha.’
Patrick leaned forward in the fighting chair. ‘Tell me, Jake. I’m all ears.’
Martha rescued him. ‘He calls them “Ernies”. Because the doughboys all think they’re Ernest Hemingway.’
Patrick laughed, exposing his perfect teeth. ‘Ernies. That’s nice, Jake.’
The way he said it made it sound like the lamest joke ever. Jake smiled weakly and went through to the cabin to get some more beer. He returned in time to see Patrick attempting to plant a kiss on Martha’s mouth. She turned her face away from him self-consciously. It was symptomatic of the way she’d been acting ever since he had turned up unannounced in his fancy powerboat. Jake was surprised. He had been expecting her to be pleased to see him; instead, from the moment Patrick had stepped on board Yellowfin, Jake had been given the distinct impression that Martha viewed her New York lover boy as an unwelcome interloper.
He could not deny that it pleased him.
‘That’s a nice boat, Patrick,’ he said, stepping out into the cockpit, and nodded at the Sonic that was now roped hard to Yellowfin’s port side.
‘You think so?’ Patrick threw up his hands. ‘I don’t know about boats. But I asked the guy at the hotel for the fastest one he had. Figured I’d need it if I was ever going to catch you guys.’
‘I still don’t understand how you knew where I was,’ Martha said.
Patrick shrugged. ‘The guy at the hotel said you went to Malindi. I went to Malindi and asked around. Trust me, honey, everybody remembered you. Especially the little guy in the booking hut. I think he had a thing for you. And he’s not the only one.’
Again he leaned across to kiss her, only for her to pull away.
‘You did well to find us,’ Jake said, handing him another beer. ‘It’s a big ocean.’
Patrick nodded enthusiastically. ‘You would not believe the tracker system they’ve fitted in that boat, man. It’s like something from NASA. You just input the specs of the boat you’re looking for and it gives you a read-out of every match in a hundred miles. It led me to you guys pretty much first time.’
‘Neat toy.’
‘I’ll be recommending it to all my Ernie buddies, Jake.’ There was a split-second when Patrick’s eager smile seemed to harden, then it was gone. The American leaned back in the chair and stretched like a cat.
‘You know, honey, I could get used to this. The speedboat is all very well, but we should think about maybe hiring one of these tubs when we go to Biscayne in the fall.’ He yawned contentedly. ‘Sitting here sure chills you out after the eighteen-hour flight from hell. You flown First Class lately, Jake? Man, standards have slipped.’
‘I told you not to come here,’ Martha said.
Jake detected a harshness to her voice that he had not heard before. He thought about what she had said about people in New York colliding with each other, and wondered if maybe Patrick had just shot out of her orbit.
‘I was worried about you, baby,’ Patrick said. He lifted his sunglasses and winked at Jake. ‘She’s pleased to see me now, Jake, but any minute she’s going to remember her cat.’
‘Chico!’ she exclaimed. ‘What have you done with him, Patrick?’
Again the easy laughter. ‘Don’t panic. Mrs Leibnitz is cat-sitting. She’s not cheap, but she can be trusted.’
Patrick unbuttoned his linen shirt to reveal an expanse of sculpted torso.
‘Martha told me about what happened yesterday, Jake. I guess I owe you a debt of gratitude.’
‘It was one of those things,’ Jake said.
‘Do the cops know who these guys were?’
‘They were just a couple of assholes,’ Martha said. ‘This kind of thing happens all the time. And it sure as hell happens in New York.’
‘Jeez, and I always thought Kenya was the safest country in Africa. Is that right, Jake? These guys were high on some local rocket fuel?’
‘I guess so,’ Jake said.
He hoped that would be an end to it, but Patrick said, ‘You were up there with some cop from Mombasa, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why?’
‘He needed a lift.’
Patrick smiled indulgently. ‘I mean, why was the cop there?’
‘Something to do with Dennis’s disappearance,’ Jake said cautiously, uncertain what Martha had told him. ‘He didn’t go into it.’
Patrick nodded, apparently satisfied. He finished his beer and tossed the bottle overboard. ‘Could you get me another of those, honey?’ he said.
‘Sure.’
Martha padded into the cabin.
‘One question, Jake,’ he said when she was out of earshot. The sociable demeanour had evaporated. ‘Why are you bullshitting me?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Patrick.’
‘This jungle juice and methanol crap. These guys were firing Uzis. What’s going on?’
‘I really don’t know, Patrick. I’m just a guy who drives a fishing boat for a living.’
Patrick looked at him. Then abruptly the American smiled. ‘Sure, Jake,’ he said. ‘I understand. ’
He stood up as Martha returned and walked across to the starboard outrigger.
‘When I was a kid I kind of had a thing for Hemingway. The Old Man and The Sea. Guess that makes me an Ernie for real, huh? You think I could catch me a big fish, Jake? A marlin, maybe?’
‘You could try. But some people fish for a lifetime without ever catching one.’
‘Yeah - well, I kind of feel lucky today. Let’s try, shall we?’
‘Come on, Patrick—’ Martha said.
‘Dammit, Martha, I want to catch a big fish,’ Patrick snapped, and Martha visibly flinched. ‘Sorry,’ he said with a smile. ‘Like I say - I’m feeling a little stressed out.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
Jouma lived with his wife Winifred in an apartment overlooking the Makupa Causeway on the north-west side of Mombasa island. The apartment packed a kitchen, sitting room and bedroom into a space that was barely larger than his office at police headquarters - yet his wife somehow managed to make it seem almost spacious. The furniture was spartan but homely, and the entire place was kept scrupulously clean.
Winifred Joum
a was even smaller than her husband. She had to stand on tiptoe to stir the large metal pot on the stove in the corner of the kitchen, and the ladle she used to transfer the pungent meat and potato stew on to two plates was almost as big as her head. The first spicy mouthful, however, reinforced the detective’s belief that his wife was the finest cook in Kenya.
They said little while they ate. In more than thirty years of marriage, Winifred had never once been interested in police business. Presently, she cleared away the dishes and went into the bedroom to do the ironing.
Jouma went into the sitting room and placed Omu’s case on the floor. The combination lock was still intact, although somebody had already tried to break into it by smashing it with a blunt instrument. Jouma picked the lock and opened the lid. Inside were some papers, neatly bundled with string and inserted into loose unmarked files. Beneath them was a large oxblood ledger. He removed all the items and placed them carefully to one side. Now all that remained in the case were a dozen or so evenly stacked piles of US dollar bills in denominations of one hundred, and a thick book of bearer bonds. As he counted the cash, Jouma whistled with amazement. It amounted to sixty thousand dollars, which was more money than Jouma had ever believed possible to see in one place. He calculated that, together with the bearer bonds, Omu had been carrying more than a million dollars in his case. The figure was breathtaking, but Jouma knew it represented but a fraction of what Michael Kili’s criminal empire was worth.
He looked at the money and then he looked at the four walls of his five thousand-shilling-a-month flat. In the tiny bedroom Winifred was singing, her voice just audible above the noise of the traffic streaming relentlessly across the causeway to the Changamwe peninsula and onwards to Nairobi. A million dollars. How easy it would be simply to pocket the bills and disappear. With a million dollars they could go anywhere in the world, live what was left of their lives in luxury.
But no. Money was not the answer. It was never the answer.
He thought about Nyami. Shivering and weeping, his sergeant had presented a pitiful sight in the cells, and the beating he had received was truly shocking. But what had sickened Jouma most of all was that the brutality was not a symbol of self-righteous outrage among honest police officers towards a Judas in their ranks - that he could have understood - but a purely cosmetic, cynical attempt to deflect guilt away from the guilty.
Jouma had always known there was corruption in Mombasa, but it was only as he analysed Jacob Omu’s fastidiously maintained book-keeping that he realised its full extent. The documents detailed both regular and one-off payments made by Omu not only to police officers, but also to officials in virtually every sector and level of civic administration. With few exceptions, and on a sliding scale depending on their importance, Omu was systematically paying off anyone with influence in the coastal province, anyone with information, anyone who could turn a blind eye to Michael Kili’s illegal activities.
The backhanders to Nyami barely registered on this scale; occasional pocket money compared to the healthy salaries others were claiming from Kili’s crime empire. Compared to them, the amounts his sergeant had pocketed were so negligible as to make him almost innocent of corruption. In theory, of course, he was as guilty as the rest of them, and he deserved to be punished like the rest of them. Yet Jouma kept thinking back to the moment in Kili’s office when Omu had produced the knife, and the tortured expression on Nyami’s dumb face as the terrible consequence of his naive duplicity was suddenly made apparent to him.
It was this that had convinced Jouma that his sergeant would be of more use out of his cell than in it. He would certainly live longer.
Three hours earlier, as Jacob Omu’s body was being transported the short distance from his deathbed to Christie’s white-tiled morgue, Jouma had freed Nyami. Babbling incoherently, it was clear his sergeant still expected to die, even when Jouma shoved him into the rear footwell of the Panda and drove him to Winifred’s sister’s flat in Mkomani district on the north shore. As a safehouse, it was hardly ideal, but it was the one place he could be sure Nyami would not be found in a hurry. As his sister-in-law tended Nyami’s wounds, Jouma drove to Kilindini and picked up the sergeant’s wife from their one-bedroom flat near the docks. Confused and tearful, Jemima Nyami had no idea what was happening or why. But that would be for her battered and bloodied husband to explain. One way or another, Nyami had a great deal of explaining to do.
After replacing the cash and the ledger in the attaché case, Jouma closed the lid. In the bathroom Winifred was performing her ablutions in readiness for bed. But Jouma would not be sleeping that night. There was much more reading ahead of him. Much to be learned. And none of it, he suspected, would be pleasant.
Chapter Fifty
They made love that night, but there was something mechanical about it as if her mind was elsewhere.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
Patrick rolled away. ‘What is it, baby? Was it something I said?’
A warm sea breeze billowed the curtains and a shaft of pure white moonlight was cast across the bed.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m just tired.’
He held her until her breathing became as regular and heavy as the waves crashing against the sea wall beyond the window. Then, gently so as not to wake her, he pulled the sheets up around her bare shoulders and eased out of bed. He dressed quickly in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and then, after making sure she had not stirred, he opened the door and slipped out into the night.
When he had gone, Martha opened her eyes and stared at the shadows playing on the wall next to the bed. What the hell is wrong with you? she asked herself. Ever since Patrick had arrived, she had felt irritated with him being around, embarrassed almost by his dick-swinging behaviour. On the boat with Jake he’d been like some overgrown frat boy trying to show off with his beer-drinking exploits and with the macho game-fishing routine. I’ve got a bigger GPS tracker than you. Yet it perplexed her, because in New York Patrick’s childishness was what appealed to her most. It was a buffer between her and the superbitch world she had created for herself. So why was it different now? What had changed?
She knew one thing for certain. As they’d made love, she’d stared at the ceiling and waited for him to come so that the ordeal would be at an end.
On the other side of the hotel complex, Conrad Getty’s ulcer was drowning in Scotch. He had not slept now for two days. Not since Viljoen’s pet mobster, Kili, had decided to solve the Dennis Bentley problem in his own breathtakingly idiotic fashion. Viljoen seemed confident that everything was under control, but then he was just a pig-ignorant psychopath with ideas above his station. He always had been, ever since they’d met in boot camp back in 1969.
It wasn’t Viljoen who dealt with Whitestone. It wasn’t Viljoen whose head would be on the block if Whitestone found out what had been going on.
Whitestone. Even the very thought of the name sent another spasm of agony through his ruined stomach lining.
Getty had never seen Whitestone in the flesh. He had never even heard his voice. They communicated solely via cryptic emails. And maybe that was the problem. Like the bogeyman, he preyed on the hotel owner’s imagination, twisting it into all sorts of fevered shapes, haunting his dreams and his waking hours and leaving him shaking and sweating with terror. Not for the first time, Getty wondered how the hell he had allowed himself to get involved in all this shit. The Kapok Hotel wasn’t the biggest bed and breakfast establishment in Mombasa, nor was it the best; but it was serviceable and clean, and it had reasonably steady year-round custom. With a little time and effort, it could have been built up into something far more impressive. By now, it might even have been competing with some of the ritzier hotels in the city. He could have been respectable. He could have been legitimate, for Christ’s sake!
But no - that wasn’t the Conrad Getty way, was it? The Conrad Getty way was to get rich quick without so much as a second thought for the consequences. And when the opportu
nity had come along, he’d jumped straight in with both size twelves.
Viljoen! To think his fortunes would end up being so inextricably linked with that animal. Thirty years ago, Getty would have laughed in the face of anyone who suggested something so preposterous. But then thirty years ago he was Captain Getty of the South African Defence Force, and Viljoen was a conscripted street thug with little else to commend him other than an almost psychotic hatred of the coloured majority.
In the years that followed, all they’d had in common was that they had both profited out of apartheid and had been well and truly shafted when it collapsed. Viljoen had stayed in the military and made sergeant, but his uncompromising attitude to the blacks had been incompatible with the new regime and he had been booted out. Getty, meanwhile, watched in equally impotent fury as his lucrative post-military career as an orange trader in Bloemfontein was destroyed by labour reforms and the sudden political correctness of his main business contacts in Europe and the US, who no longer thought it prudent to deal with someone associated with the apartheid regime.
It still seemed incredible to him that, after all he had given to his country, he should be forced to flee it like a refugee, his reputation and his Krugerrands virtually worthless in the world beyond its borders. And to Kenya of all places! A place whose corrupt wretchedness was living proof of the black man’s inability to govern himself. Kenyatta? Nothing more than a Mau Mau terrorist. Arap Moi? A pocket-lining crook. And on it went. From the comfort of the Marlin Bay’s residents-only bar, he had watched Kenya tear itself apart with self-righteous pleasure. As far as he was concerned, the election of December 2007 and the bloodbath that followed merely reinforced what he’d been telling everyone for years.
But beggars could not be choosers, and upon his arrival in Kenya all those years ago Getty was savvy enough to recognise the potential of a country blessed with seven-hundred square miles of inland game reserve and three hundred miles of coastline. So he invested what little money he had in the Kapok and waited for boom time. And while he waited he started drinking heavily, almost as heavily as he gambled, and it wasn’t long before the only way to pay his debts was to sell up.
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