Black Star Nairobi (16 page)

Yet I could not but think that we were at war with people who just a few days ago had been civilians. Here, in Kisumu, in Nairobi, and in the Rift Valley, Luos, Kalenjins, and Kikuyus were killing each other in the name of the fat motherfuckers who were now discussing the future of the country in the comfort of the KICC.

We got to the roadblock and O slowed down like he was going to stop. The young men started approaching and O stepped on the gas. They recognized the Land Rover roaring toward
them and they scattered in all directions. A little farther down the road, we jumped out and waited for them to come at us. They stayed hidden—they had understood our message, that we were ready to die if they were.

Funerals in a time of war are lonely affairs. For Mary’s burial, the only people in attendance were O, Mumbi, Janet, Muddy, and Joe Sherry. Joe Sherry, so called because of his love for sherry, had dated Mary before O, and I gathered that it was Mumbi who had called him. He owned a bar close to Limuru called the Red Nova that we went to once in a while. The bond between them must have remained strong if he had risked his life to come here, but then again, as a Kikuyu, he would have had an easier time at the Limuru roadblocks.

With all things being equal, her students and fellow teachers would have been there. Mary’s relatives and O’s would have been there as well—and she would have been buried in Kisumu. As it was, six people buried a life that had touched so many.

O was dressed in black corduroy pants, a dress shirt, a tie, and his ubiquitous safari boots and black leather jacket. The rest of us were dressed as cleanly as we could manage. Muddy and Janet had picked out Mary’s burial outfit: black shoes, a slab of a green dress that we used to joke was her school uniform, and a cowry necklace that brought out the beauty she was always trying to hide from her students—but she looked every bit the schoolteacher that she had been.

O was stoic, except for his shaking hands as he threw the first fistful of soil onto her coffin and a painful wince at the drumming sound it made. He came back to where I was standing and put his hand on my shoulder as if to console me.

As she edged closer to the grave, Mumbi said she had something to say about her daughter.

“I know we have to be fast because our times will not allow for a long farewell, but I have already buried a husband in silence. I will tell you a story. When Mary was very small, our culture did not allow her to sit with men as they slaughtered a goat and drank
muratina
—the traditional brew. When she asked why, her father told her it was because she was not a man.

“ ‘What is the difference between a man and a woman?’ my daughter asked.

“ ‘Men wear trousers and women don’t,’ Ngatia answered, thinking that was the end of it as Mary walked back to the house. A few minutes later, she walked out wearing, or rather being worn by, her father’s best pair of pants.

“ ‘I am a man now,’ Mary said when she made it back to us. Defeated, the men had to let her stay. My daughter never let difference stop her from becoming what she wanted and marrying the man she wanted. In her own gentle constant way, she was better than all of us. As her mother I failed her,” Mumbi concluded, and broke into tears.

Janet was crying. I was worried about her. I looked at her, her youth shining through the greyness of the funeral, the ethnic war, and the Norfolk bombing. What was going to happen to her without Mary?

She had survived worse, but as I was slowly learning, it wasn’t just a question of surviving the worst—it’s easy to survive when you have nothing to lose since life itself is the victory. The hard part is when you discover that there is a lot to live for, and it keeps being taken away from you, trying and losing, hoping and losing, loving and losing. O followed my gaze and he gripped my shoulder tighter.

As I picked up a handful of soil to throw over Mary’s coffin, I had two thoughts—one was that I was sublimating my own pain by worrying about others, and the second was that I had to keep O alive for the sake of Janet. How I would keep him alive and from what, I didn’t know.

Joe Sherry left by himself—he was safer that way—and the rest of us, including Mumbi, drove back to O’s. When we could, we would take Mumbi back and help her rebuild, but in the meantime she could stay at Muddy’s for as long as she needed. For now, we wanted everyone together—this little family of people who otherwise might have been strangers, brought together by love and violence. What was that saying? A family that eats together stays together? I smiled at the strangeness of my thoughts.

“A family that suffers together stays together,” I said aloud, and we laughed.

An hour or so after we got back to O’s, Jason showed up unannounced. It was a relief to see him. It meant movement on the case. We introduced him to Muddy, Janet, and Mumbi.

“I’ve heard so much about you,” he said to Muddy.

“From whom? Or should I say, from what file?” I asked him.

We talked about the crisis in the country and I briefed him on all that had transpired with Helen. That brought us back to the case.

“Two things …” He paused. “Can I talk freely?” he asked suddenly. Before we could answer, he continued.

“Kenya is no longer safe for you—not for a while, anyway. There are some people asking about you. The only reason they haven’t found you is the chaos—and they’re afraid of getting
caught in one of those roadblocks …” he said, smiling as if to suggest that at least the violence was good for something.

“You, how did you get here?” O asked him.

“I know what they don’t—a white man in a car with diplomatic plates is safe. Fucking mercenaries are fucking cowards. You know why? Because they want to live to spend the money,” he said.

“How do you know they are mercenaries?” Muddy asked.

“Because they are not mine—and no one knows who they are … independent contractors—call them by whatever name,” Jason answered.

“We can bait them, let’s grab them—they can tell us who they’re working for,” O said, excited by the prospect.

“They won’t know much, Sahara won’t risk it,” Jason said.

“Then what exactly have you done for us? We have given you a lot more than you bring to the table. Hey, do you have leads on the fuckers who killed my wife? You have everything, DNA, prints. What is it that you do, exactly? Could you be more useless?” O said angrily.

“I can give you the official line and send you after some low-key Al Qaeda operatives somewhere. Or I can tell you the truth as I know it—I don’t know shit, no one knows who these guys are, and no one wants to find out. They are American, I agree with you. But Paul wants to believe they are Americans who have been turned by the terrorists—like that fucking kid, the American Taliban, John Walker. So he’ll keep going after Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, anything with Muslim blood in it,” he explained.

“We have to find Sahara. It’s the only way out—he is the key,” I said.

“That’s why I’m here,” Jason said. “I don’t think he’s in the
country. I think he’s back in the U.S. He’s safest there. Even if he isn’t, our best chance of finding out who that fucker is lies in the United States.”

“Well, then, get some of your men on it,” Muddy said.

“I can’t, like I said, all hands are on Al Qaeda,” Jason said, sounding a bit like his old self. “But hey, what if there was a way we could find him quietly?”

We looked intrigued.

“The United States—you have to go to the U.S.… Only way we are going to see this thing through. You have to go back to the beginning—he got those four young men from somewhere in the U.S., they were trained somewhere, there is a trail somewhere in the U.S., and you have to find it,” he said, trying not to appear too excited.

He waited as we processed, or rather laughed through, what he had just said.

“We are on all sorts of lists. How the fuck do we get in?” I asked him.

“I have one word for you—Mexico,” he said, lifting his hands up to highlight the name as if it were on a billboard. “You want this solved, you want justice or revenge, you go in through Mexico. Besides, the safest place for you right now is with Uncle Sam—no one will think of looking for you there.”

“So we get to Mexico and then what? We can’t fly into the U.S.,” I said. “You gotta do better than that, Jason.”

Before Jason could answer, Muddy jumped in.

“Jason, you’re good. We sneak in like refugees, illegally,” Muddy said with a laugh. I could tell she liked the idea.

“Muddy’s right. You have to sneak in. Mexico is another Kenya; the dollar goes a long way there,” he said. I looked at him, expecting him to laugh, but he was serious.

“Mexico? What about Canada? We can fly into Canada. Nobody watches the Canadian border,” I argued, finding it incredible that we were even taking his suggestion seriously.

“No. Canada is too risky,” Jason said emphatically. “If you get flagged, you can’t bribe your way through the airport. Shit, think about it—black people driving into the U.S. through the Canadian border? You will be profiled. In Mexico, the dollar is the law …”

“I’ll be damned if I’m going to sneak back into my own motherfucking country,” I interrupted, angry because I knew it was the only way. We had one lead—if we could call it that—and that was the University of California. We just had to start there. We had to find Sahara.

“Mexico … it has to be Mexico—been thinking about it, tried other options, only Mexico works,” Jason went on, as if trying to convince himself as well. “There are other logistical calculations. I have a person I trust in Mexico,” he added as he opened his briefcase.

“Why? I mean, what do you get out of this?” O asked Jason.

“I told you before, I can’t protect my country without the whole truth; like a doctor, you can’t treat a disease you don’t understand. I get the truth and you get justice—and we can do both quietly. It has to be done quietly. Quiet is the only way we get out of this one,” he answered.

From the briefcase, Jason produced three Kenyan passports, one for O and the other two for Muddy and me. I opened mine to find an old passport photo, blurry yet recognizably me. My name was no longer Ishmael Fofona—it was James Mwangi. I leaned over and looked at O’s. His name was Patrick Onyango.

“Look, Muddy, they will need you … a beautiful woman
creates an aura of goodwill,” Jason explained as he handed Muddy a passport.

Muddy laughed when she saw her name.

“Jane Mwangi, your trophy illegal immigrant wife,” she said to me. I liked that—the wife part—but I was also thinking that it made it all the more difficult to propose with my ten beaded rings. It would look like I was doing it because the idea had been introduced into my head by Jason.

Jason gave us three Social Security cards clearly stamped “eligible for work,” three large envelopes containing airline tickets to Mexico City, fake driver’s licenses, and ten thousand dollars each. Operating on a cash basis meant no credit cards and no paper trail.

For what was going to be a long journey, the travel plan itself was simple enough. We would fly into Mexico City, where Jason’s contact would meet us. His contact would take us to Tijuana and get us across the border and eventually into San Francisco and Oakland. From there we would be on our own.

O’s cousin Michael, who lived in Oakland, could shelter us for a few days. O would tell him we were coming to the U.S. to look for work. He might suspect something when he saw that an American was with O, but he wouldn’t ask questions. They had known each other since they were little kids and they had the kind of trust that had been tested over the years.

Jason was right, we were going to be safer in the U.S. No government agency would think of searching for us in the great underground immigrant networks, and if they did, where would they start? Who would they send inside without them sticking out like a white man in an African village?

“Just don’t get pulled over or arrested for anything,” Jason warned us, as if following my thoughts.

How we were going to work a case where Sahara’s fascination with the University of California was the main lead, and work it as illegal immigrants, I had no idea. In reality we had more than that—we had photos, fingerprints, and DNA from the three dead white men. We knew our guy from Ngong Forest had a sickle cell trait for which he was taking medication. We knew what Sahara looked like, and that he was not done, and we had a laptop that Helen was hacking.

Janet was going to be safe at the university and Mumbi would stay with relatives in Nairobi.

Mary was gone. We had buried her. Her father was dead. Unpredictable violence was erupting all over the country.

It was going to be a relief to board that plane to Mexico.

Mexico. We were on our way to Mexico. For fuck’s sake, how was it that in just the span of a few years I was returning to my own country as an illegal immigrant? Yet after everything I had seen in the last few days, a black American detective sneaking into the U.S. through Mexico shouldn’t have raised any eyebrows.

Leaving the U.S. the first time around to settle in Kenya hadn’t been easy, but Muddy was there and I simply had to go back to her. I recalled the first time I had seen her on stage, doing spoken word with a serious sensuality that commanded respect as much as it did admiration. There was always more to Muddy. I knew it from the moment we met. Yet, even for love, leaving all you have known and all you could ever become, all you had in fact hoped to become, is not easy. I had to leave friends behind, I had just been promoted, and I did often wonder whether as an only child I had betrayed my parents.

In other ways, it was easy to leave. In Kenya, my skin was like everyone else’s, I was part of the majority. Not that I was an insider: the accent, my “Americaness,” was apparent to those I interacted with and I had come to accept it as part of me. What I had refused to accept was being called
mzungu
—it was a fighting word, like a white man calling me a nigger.

To be away from home—to live as an immigrant among people who were black like me—would there ever come a time when home could be anywhere we wanted it to be? I had chosen
Kenya—would there ever come a time when Kenya or any other place would choose me? Truly embrace me as one of its own?