Black Star Nairobi (13 page)

Finally, everyone was gone and we were left sprawled on the sitting room floor. It was time to start staring at our reality.

“Next move?” I asked O in the haze of the smoke.

“Kikuyu land, tomorrow we go to Kikuyu country.” Then he looked at Janet. “And you back to uni.”

Janet reached for his hand. He handed the joint back to Muddy and cupped Janet’s hand with both of his.

“Who’s going to take care of you without me here?” Janet asked him.

“Not you, Janet … Mary would kill me if I let you interrupt your studies—especially with your math skills,” O teased before choking up.

“You are the star still shining in my world, Janet. Your life is ahead of you, we are your past,” he said, wiping tears away from his eyes.

I looked away so that I wouldn’t cry. Muddy sighed and laid her head on my lap, her dreadlocks sprawling onto the floor.

We turned on the 7:00 a.m. news. The counting of the electoral votes was still going on, with a live update of the tally—it looked like Kenya would be swearing in a Luo president.

“Two for two soon,” O said, referring to Obama. “See, I told you there was nothing to worry about—the most peaceful election of all time.”

“Tell that to a powder keg,” Muddy muttered.

We were still a unit of some sort. I wanted to believe that we still worked. We needed to sleep.

I had barely closed my eyes when my cell rang. It was Helen and she had something for me. I could tell she was excited.

“I’m here to return the dress,” I said to the watchman, to preempt more jokes from him.

“Go on, Miss,” he said without skipping a beat. I found the door open so I knocked as I walked in. I called out Helen’s name but she didn’t answer. Her office door was closed. I knocked again, still no answer, so I pushed the door open. She had her headphones on, swaying to whatever she was listening to, and I let out a sigh of relief.

Her office didn’t look like a hacker’s—there were only two computers sitting on a desk in an otherwise empty room.

“The servers aren’t here … and I’m not telling,” she said, smiling at my surprise. “I know, I know, you want to get on with it.”

She went on. “Your guy, I knew it—he is an anthropologist or historian of some sort. He studied at UC–Berkeley—most probably some African-related shit, and he loves watching American football and basketball games. He reads a lot of African
stuff—archaeology—old stuff. And that’s not all,” she said, seeing the look of disappointment on my face. “See this?”

She showed me videos of some scouting missions Sahara had gone on with his men. Each one of them began with footage of the entrance to a location and the security—in each place, their Range Rover was all but waved through—then the front desk, and soon enough, the lower rooms. They had done their homework before settling for the Norfolk.

“This is plenty already—how did you get in?” I asked.

“My profile of Sahara. An old white man who probably taught at a university, efficient, a person who values simplicity. In spite of the security protecting his laptop, he found a way of circumventing it. He didn’t grow up using computers, he’s a pen-and-paper person. You know how back in the day people hid safes behind paintings? Pretty much the same here—he hid things behind other things. He hid them where you would never think of looking unless you knew him,” she explained. “Let me put it this way, if I hadn’t gotten a sense of the old fuck, it would have taken me months to try and break into folders that had nothing in them,” she said, looking at me to see if I understood.

“It was that simple?” I asked her.

“You know the difference between simple and simplicity? Think of a child’s poem—simple, but try to write one yourself and you realize it’s simplicity masked as simple. But hey, I’m not offended,” she answered, half smiling, half scowling. “One other thing, though. There is an encrypted file—that will take some time, but I think I can break it open. That’s the file you want, because it was important enough for Mr. Arthritis to follow protocol with it.”

“Can you make a copy of the file? I’m thinking I can also have the guys at the embassy look at it,” I said. “More hands on
it the better, we need to move fast—these guys are already a year ahead.”

“No, too risky … You would have to take the whole thing to them,” she said, pointing at the computer. “Or the hard drive …”

“Then I will leave it in your capable hands,” I said, trusting she would find a way.

“I don’t have the most sophisticated equipment in the world, I have to improvise … unless you offer to buy me the expensive shit I need … but probably not on your salary—Kamau told me this was a personal favor,” she said.

“Not on my salary. But Sahara can afford it,” I said, as I gave the several thousand dollars I’d taken from Sahara’s driver to a surprised Helen.

“I’ll call, don’t call me,” she yelled. I rushed back to O’s with a DVD of the footage of Sahara and his men scouting locations.

O and I went through the scouting tapes carefully. They corresponded with the locations marked on the maps that I had retrieved from the Range Rover. It was time to call Hassan and Jason—we needed more manpower and equipment to check out all the locations. We had a lot on our plate as it was with Mary’s funeral.

We started out our meeting with Jason and Hassan chitchatting about the elections. The elections had thus far gone well enough; no violence and no major irregularities were being reported. Raila was still pulling ahead of Kibaki. Hassan had deployed uniformed police to likely trouble spots, but he was
confident that by the end of the following day we would have a new president without violence. The predicted blood-letting had not happened.

We moved on to the case. They weren’t happy that we had kept the laptop from them.

“I don’t like this—we agreed—full disclosure,” Jason said.

“What did you think? That some Americans with high security clearances would storm into O’s house and kill his wife and all would be well?” I asked Jason.

“Only a person working with Sahara would know we had it. We wanted to see if someone would come asking,” O lied. It worked to quiet any protests.

“So?” Hassan asked.

“No, but it’s only been a few days,” O answered.

I explained about the map locations and showed them the DVD footage.

“Your computer guy broke his security?” a surprised Jason asked. I didn’t correct him on gender; the less he knew about Helen, the better.

“Yeah, only he could have done that. Weird little guy—terrorists and hackers have the same look—haughty, haunted, and hunted. But hey, we need a game plan—we need to check out all these places as fast as we can. We need help, good help. We can’t do it by ourselves—we have to bury O’s wife,” I reminded them.

The Al Qaeda charade was using up a lot of resources, but Jason and Hassan promised to free up some people to check out the locations in the DVD. They were going to divvy up the work, but we would start things off by checking Kenyatta International Conference Center (KICC) on our way to Limuru. Since the
Electoral Commission’s command center was at the KICC, it was all the more urgent. Jason made a call and arranged for some bomb experts from the embassy to meet us there.

“Jason, the terrorist list—anything yet?” O asked him as we left. “Anything we should worry about?”

“Nothing. I have your backs,” Jason answered. “If anyone makes a move on you, I will run serious interference and let you know.”

The KICC brings to mind one word—“hubris.” Not because the place didn’t have a function: it was where national and international conferences were held, where the wedding parties of the rich and famous were catered, and where, often enough, foreign diplomats met. It’s just that the place was built to immortalize Kenya’s first president. Inside, there was a tall statue of the late Kenyatta, and whereas in real life he was an old man, stooped and decrepit, the statue was pure magnificence—eleven or so feet of gleaming gold.

“Chop off a toe and you can build a home,” O joked.

With Jason’s man, O and I followed the path Sahara and his men had taken through the building, down to the basement. We found nothing—there were no traces of any explosives, no hollow sounds, and no newer shades of cement or painting. We even went over repair records from the last two years—nothing. They could very well have planted a bomb in one of the rooms but it seemed unlikely. Sahara would have been going for maximum effect. But we decided to split up anyway, and check the lobby and also the first floor. Nothing.

We were off to Limuru to ask Mary’s parents to take their daughter back. O’s people had said their piece. If Mary’s people
agreed with O’s and denied her a burial place, she would effectively be an orphan.

I called Muddy to let her know we were on our way to Limuru. She lived close to Mary’s parents, so she suggested we pick her up, and afterwards we could sleep over at her place. It was a good plan, except that Muddy was so tired that she passed out in the backseat of the Land Rover. I should have been sleeping, too, but so should have O, who was driving.

“Is this usual?” I asked him.

“Is what usual?” he asked in return.

“You didn’t let me finish,” I countered, but it was more that I was wondering how to ask the question. “Is it usual that ethnic hatred doesn’t dissolve after death? I mean, shouldn’t death bring people together, if only to bury their loved one?” I asked, fumbling into coherence. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that all the bad things happening were in preparation for a major catastrophic event.

“Look, wasn’t it illegal in the U.S.—on pain of death, on pain of lynching—to fuck a white woman?” he asked angrily. “You’re going to have your black president, I know, but it’s too early to start lecturing.”

“What the fuck, man, look around you—bomb explosions, elections, machetes, and Mary, we have to beg for fucking six feet of dirt to bury her?” I said.

“Welcome to Kenya—
Karibu Kenya
,” he said. In all the time I had known him, he had never talked to me like I was a tourist.

“This
hakuna matata
shit you Kenyans have going—it’s going to blow up in your faces,” I replied in kind.

O was silent.

“A few days ago, at Muddy’s performance, I knew what to expect, I knew Mary would be there the next day, and the next—the only thing I had to fear was the pain of leaving her in grief. Today, I don’t know tomorrow anymore. Let us bury Mary. This shit will figure itself out,” he finally said.

“Did you ever think of having children?” I asked, deciding to let it go. It wasn’t like there was anything we could do about Kenyan politics. And now that I had ten rings for Muddy, kids suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

“Yes, but there was always tomorrow. You cannot love, truly love, unless you believe you will always have tomorrow—otherwise your life together is a wish, a regret. Yes—we wanted children,” he answered.

“Hey, when are you going to do it?” O asked, meaning the proposal.

“The …” I was looking for a code word for the beaded rings in case Muddy was just closing her eyes. “I couldn’t throw ten rings into a hat … our lives, everything is upside down,” I said.

O lit a joint and rolled down his window, the cold Limuru air jolting me into full alertness.

“That is the worst code I have ever heard,” he said, his chest heaving in and out in silent laughter. “You love the woman, propose. Even if bullets are flying around you, get on your knees and ask. You cannot live thinking that tomorrow you are going to die, or that you’ll lose the one you love … Life … life … would be just too much work.”

We turned on the radio just as Kibaki was being announced the winner. Raila had been leading. Kibaki’s last-minute surge was suspicious, to say the least.

“You better wake Muddy up. Shit, Ishmael, this is really bad,”
O said as he stopped the car and tried calling the headquarters. No answer. He tried Hassan, still nothing.

I woke Muddy up and explained what had happened.

“In Rwanda it took the suspicious presidential plane crash, in Kenya this is it, last-minute rigging,” she said, her voice betraying an anxiety I had never heard before.

O handed her the joint—she took a few puffs and threw it out the window.

We were about thirty minutes away from Mary’s parents’ house. We decided to continue. We figured it would take a day or two before the violence spiraled into sleepy Limuru—and we just might have enough time to bury Mary.

The makeshift roadblock and the ten or so young men armed with machetes, knives, stones, flashlights, and kerosene lamps running toward us took us by surprise. We tried to reverse, but behind us another roadblock had been hastily erected. The Land Rover could take most terrains—but we were surrounded by trees.

We had been overrun by events. Now it was a question of basic survival.

O jumped out of the car, went to the trunk, came back with two AKs, and handed one to Muddy. Muddy and I stepped out, leaving the engine running and the lights on.

I had faced death many times before, I had even walked into a KKK camp alone, but this was different. If they got to us, O, a Luo, would be killed on the spot. For Muddy, unable to pass because she spoke Kikuyu with a Kinyarwanda accent, and me, who could barely ask for water to save my life, it could go either way.

We were armed with new guns, and they had machetes and old guns that looked like hunting muskets, but there were three of us and they were at least twenty, counting the ones manning the roadblock they had erected behind us. If some of them were ready to die, they would get us.

But we had an advantage. I reached into the Land Rover and
turned the lights to high beam, blinding the young men coming toward us—an old trick that made them approach cautiously.

There was still the matter of those edging closer and closer from behind, the glowing red taillights acting as a beacon.

O sent out a growl from his AK into the air—and everybody stood where they were. Muddy hopped back into the Land Rover, crawled all the way to the rear, and opened the door so that with her AK she had us covered.