Black Star Nairobi (11 page)

Hassan pointed at the paramedics.

“Can they?” he asked O, who nodded yes. They picked up Mary first, then the rest of the bodies, and filed out the door.

“Hassan, can I talk to your men?” Jason asked. Hassan agreed, and O and I stepped outside with Jason and Paul.

“I understand this is a bad time … a very bad time. We,” Jason drew a circle to include O and me, “must always stop to take care of our dead and protect our own, but I have to insist, and I implore you, to tell me what happened. I want each word, each detail that comes to mind—accents, scents, anything. Our friendship works to the extent that I know everything.” Jason reached up to place his hand on O’s shoulder.

“Listen, Jason—one of the guys, the main guy, showed me a terrorist watch list and O, Muddy, and I were on it. How about we talk about that?” I said.

O looked at me—we hadn’t had time to talk about what had gone down before Jason arrived.

Paul indicated that we should walk down the courtyard, away from other ears. He left us standing next to the tree in the middle of the courtyard, walked to a Pajero with embassy license plates, and came back with a briefcase.

He opened it and handed a file to O and me. We flipped through it in amazement. Sahara had shown us the very same parallel lives.

This much I knew, we were only a few steps away from having drones firing missiles at our cars, or even worse, some might say, ending up in a torture chamber in Kenya, Yemen, or the U.S. Guilt or innocence didn’t matter—only being on the list mattered.

“How did you get that?” I asked Paul.

“An alert was sent to us this morning,” he answered.

“Can we get off the list?” I asked.

“The short answer is no. Even if I called in your innocence, the response would be ‘better safe than sorry.’ It will take hard
evidence to get you off that list, if it’s even possible. The only way out is to get the people behind this and bring them to justice,” Paul said. “O, I’m sorry you have to hear this after your loss.”

“Who is powerful enough to get our names on that list?” O asked, looking at Jason.

“Any mid-level government employee. Suspicion alone—neighbor calling in neighbor—we had some people in Guantánamo because some motherfucker wanted their piece of land. The question is, who is powerful enough to whip up this sort of evidence in a short time and get it noticed enough to land you prominent spots on the list? I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” he answered.

It worked for us that they should not try to clear our names at this point. If we played along, then at least any action to be taken against us would go through them. Innocence at this stage was no defense. We would make a good news story—Muddy, the beautiful but wounded cold bitch; O, a disgruntled marijuana addict who loved violence for its own sake; and me, the American who never really felt at home in the U.S. and who had betrayed all those who loved him for the warm bosom of jihadists. Sahara had done well for himself and his handlers.

I looked at O. He was smiling. O leaned in closer to Jason, looked him in the eye, and then looked down into his jacket. I followed his gaze and saw his old rusty .45 pointed at Jason’s gut. Jason’s eyes widened for a second and then slowly wound down. I looked around, looked again, and, in the late afternoon sun, high up on the rooftops, I could make out the snipers in position. Some of the windows above O’s apartment were opening slowly.

“Jason, mark my words. I am not dying until I kill them all. If you and Paul are involved in my wife’s death …” His voice trailed off.

“The guys who killed your wife, I want them as bad as you,” Jason said, trying to be still.

“Hey, look, O, I know you are not a fucking terrorist,” Paul said. “We have to work together—we have no choice. We have to work the different angles.”

“You haven’t given up on the Al Qaeda shit?” O asked him as he poked his gun harder into Jason’s gut, making him gasp for air.

“No, not officially—a bomb explodes in Nairobi killing ten Americans—some processes kick in,” he said. “But I’m here to help. I didn’t like what I saw up there.” He sounded genuinely pained.

O holstered his .45.

I explained to Jason and Paul all that had transpired, from the visit to Limuru Country Club to Sahara to the maps. We agreed that Jason’s task was to find out who Sahara worked for. He had three dead guys to start with. Our job was to keep digging and follow up on the maps we had found. Absolutely nothing was to be said to anyone. It was going to be the four of us against a powerful phantom. I didn’t mention the laptop.

“But first, I have to bury my wife. I am going to take her home,” O said as he started to walk away.

We parted ways just in time—the news teams had finally made their way. As they scrambled to the scene, the snipers melted out of sight—back into the world of ghost stories and the folklore about the American military presence in Kenya.

“Your mother, O, how is she?” I asked him nervously as we went back to his apartment.

“Diabetes—it’s just diabetes … best fucking news all day,” he answered.

“The laptop, we have to get it to someone who knows about computers,” I said to O, though I hated to be thinking about the case right now.

It was evening but he suggested calling Kamau and asking for a recommendation. We needed someone like him, able to improvise in situations that seemed impossible. I called Kamau and explained what had happened and what we needed. He said he would call me back in five minutes, but he called back in less than two and gave me an address.

“Who am I going to see?” I asked him.

“Helen, she is the best. Just remember that,” he responded.

I knocked on the neighbor’s door and asked him if the rope ladder was still up. I wanted to avoid the vultures circling down below in the courtyard. As I slid down the ladder it all hit me. At the bottom I sat staring into the rose bushes in the lessening daylight, crying.

I finally composed myself, made it quietly to O’s Land Rover, and drove to the address in Kileleshwa, a formerly upscale neighborhood in Nairobi that had lost its standing only because more “posh”—as the Kenyans put it—estates had been built.

At the gate, the guard asked me who I had come to see, and
he guided me to the servant quarters. I knocked, waited, knocked again, and then she answered the door.

“MacBook. Here,” she said, pointing to her palm. I gave her the laptop.

“Come in. Strip naked,” she ordered.

I laughed and said no.

“Do you want my help or not?”

“I’m not a male prostitute—in any case, I would rather I was paid in cash, not in kind,” I said. I was glad to be talking to someone who was not weighed down by the tragedy of Mary’s murder.

“You are all bloody—I’m not going to let you in like this. What the fuck, man? Get your mind out of the gutter,” she said, opening and lifting up her hands so that the MacBook looked like it would fall any second. “You need to shower—and you need a change of clothes.”

She went into another room and came back with a towel.

“You would rather stand by the door than get naked? Are we in fucking kindergarten? Get on with it. Look, I’ll get naked just to show you it’s no big deal.”

She took off her shorts and, when she got to her underwear, I quickly undressed, piling my clothes on the floor and leaving my Glock on top. She gave me the towel and directed me to the shower.

“Are you going to shower with that?” she asked when she saw me eyeing my Glock. I picked it up and put it on a little side table by the door.

“The water will be cold—this is the servant quarters,” she warned.

The thing is, she was beautiful—beautiful in a strange way, I thought to myself as I took a cold shower. She was the opposite
of Muddy, shorter, stockier, and with a short afro. Her teeth were oddly spaced out and her forehead seemed to recede into her hairline. But she was beautiful. I got out of the shower and wrapped myself in a towel. She pointed to the couch and I looked back at her in surprise.

“Humor me,” she said. “It’s all I have.”

Shit! She had laid out a long yellow dress for me to wear. I had to laugh. Why not? It’s not like she would just have men’s clothing lying around for a tall American detective to put on. I wiggled into it. It felt cozy and, in spite of myself, I liked how it hugged my hips.

“I am clean and I am dressed,” I announced.

“This laptop, tell me everything about the owner,” she said as she put a cup of hot tea in front of me.

“Why?” I said to her. “All I know about him is that I’d like to kill him.”

“This computer has some heavy shit around it. There are two things about security, any kind of security. Either it is built around the owner, or the owner adapts it to his or her personality. Do you see what I’m saying?” She didn’t wait for me to answer, or rather ask her what she meant.

“The bottom line is there are no objective security systems. At the end of the day, Mr. Detective, no matter how sophisticated a system is, it’s only as good as the user. So what I am saying to you is this—if I know the user, then I have the human aspect of the security system. If I do not get to know the user, there is no way I am breaking anything. This is something they don’t teach you in hack school—you hack a personality, not code—assuming of course you are good to begin with,” she explained patiently. “Had you ever heard of me before today, Mr. Detective?”

“No, I haven’t,” I answered.

“I’d like to keep it that way—no triggering some shit somewhere that comes down on me. So start talking!” she commanded.

She was weird but she made sense. Even the cold shower made sense—why should she be polite and let me in all bloody? And being naked—what was the big deal anyway? To get to Sahara, I had to tell her everything about the case. It felt good to sit there and talk through it as she took notes.

“This Sahara of yours, what kind of man is he?” she asked. “How would you describe him?”

“Patient, knowledgeable, confident, cruel, controlling, and efficient … the kind of man who prides himself on making the least amount of wasted moves,” I answered, realizing that it sounded like I admired him.

“Age?” she asked.

“About sixty, fit but losing the battle.”

“Hairline?”

“Balding and grey, a well-trimmed goatee. There was something professorial about him.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, looking up from her notetaking. I couldn’t quite say why.

“Let’s try another route, Mr. Detective—what kind of fucking language did he use?” she asked.

“Simple language—he wanted me to understand—and he was that way with his men. It wasn’t perverse—he genuinely wanted me to understand him. At times, it was like he was speaking to a student about to flunk a final exam,” I said, starting to see some sort of logic in her questions.

It was like a police sketch artist with an eyewitness, you corral in the details—a nose, a chin, eyes—until you have a whole face. Now that I was on this side of it, I understood what it meant to assume that a witness knows more than they think they know.

“What was he wearing when you met?” she asked. I described the clothing he and his men had been wearing.

“The outfit—it sounds like he should have been in a suit or corduroys, not a safari shirt,” she said.

“Yeah, he apologized for that—said that he knew Africa wasn’t just wild animals or something like that,” I explained.

“What were his exact words?” she asked, suddenly looking up.

“ ‘Africa is not a country,’ ” I answered, thinking that these were the kind of questions we should ask witnesses, questions that tried to get to the essence of the suspect and not just the color of his clothes.

Helen clapped her hands together in excitement.

“I love that. I love the fucker! I think I have him!” she exclaimed.

She stood up and, placing her hand on my shoulder, she guided me out.

“Detective, don’t forget your gun,” she said as I got to the door. I piled it on top of my bloody clothes, hiked up my dress, and walked to the Land Rover.

At the gate the guard looked into the car and laughed, saying, “A man goes in, a woman comes out.”

I didn’t respond.

“Looking good, sister!” he yelled as I drove off.

O was just finishing patching up the broken patio windows when I walked in. He looked at me in my bright yellow dress, my Glock resting peacefully on top of my pile of clothes.

“How did it go?” he asked, as if this was something that happened every day.

As soon as I was done explaining, it was time to leave for Kisumu to make Mary’s burial arrangements—I had no idea what to expect but I knew I just needed to be there for my friend.

“My mother, she can’t see you like this. You need some makeup,” he said with a serious look of concern on his face before he broke into laughter. I had some clothes in O’s guest bedroom and I changed back into a man.

Muddy hadn’t come back from picking up Janet. I called and she said she was sitting with Janet in her dorm room, talking, so we left for Kisumu without her.

I didn’t speak the Luo language but I could tell that something was going terribly wrong. When O and I arrived in Kisumu the night following Mary’s death and walked through the door, his mother, an old dark-skinned woman, eyes with bits of unseeing grey, had hobbled to him. They spoke for a little while and she let out the most gut-wrenching wail I had ever heard. She did it three times and soon the compound was alive with elders. Some of them were crying. Others were trying to comfort O, who stood stoically, like a man waiting for an answer. This went on for a while. Tea was prepared; bread sliced into triangles and spread with jam and butter—a snack I had come to associate with weddings—was passed around. Then O spoke for a long time.

I watched without understanding his impassioned plea. I had never seen him speak in front of people, and with his tall frame, piercing red eyes, and a voice that at different times sounded cajoling, pleading, and proud, he had a commanding presence. When he was done, the elders huddled in the corner. O came and sat by me and we watched them whisper animatedly among themselves. I couldn’t bring myself to ask O what was happening—this wasn’t one of our cases.