Black Star Nairobi (21 page)

“Welcome to the United States of America. You are now officially illegal immigrants,” he said to us.

“Come … let us get you something to eat and then you can bathe,” the old woman said to us, as if we were children, not fiercely armed and dirty strangers. She led us to her sitting room, which was immaculately clean, and I noticed that we were tracking dirt all over the place.

“Don’t worry, labor is cheap over here—someone will clean up after you,” she said, laughing. She handed us towels and blue
overalls to wear, leaving us to decide who was going to shower first.

After we cleaned up, Julio called us together for what appeared to be a drug meeting. He went to another room and came back with three phones and a bunch of SIM cards.

“Change them every other day! Don’t use only cash—that will make some people suspicious. Here are some prepaid credit cards. Buy new ones in poor neighborhoods—use fake names. Your weapons are like Samson’s hair, your strength and weakness—if you are arrested with them, you are fucked. You could go in Gandhi-like. But to find clean unmarked guns is hard work, so take what you have,” he said.

“Operate like this is the 1960s—that is the only way to defeat your more sophisticated enemy. They have the satellites, you will have only what you can see; they will have their sophisticated weapons, you will have only what you can point and shoot; they will have their computer networks, their international connections, the Internet will be at their beck and call, you will have word of mouth. In other words, my friends, stay as you are, operate as if you are still in Africa,” Julio drilled us, and then laughed. I laughed along, too: it was the best damn speech anyone could give three fish out of water.

It was time to leave for Oakland. We stepped outside the house into a hot, glaring sun and climbed into a blue van with
NINJA CAR CLEANERS
on it—the logo was a picture of Mr. Clean dressed like a ninja. We were off.

I was in the U.S.—that much I knew objectively. I was a U.S. citizen and this was my country, but I didn’t feel like I was home. At the same time, with the election coming up, I couldn’t have picked a more exciting time to come home, in spite of the ugliness we had left behind in Kenya and in a Mexican desert.

I was home, but home was largely unrecognizable—San Francisco wasn’t Madison, by far. For one, late November in Madison was bitter cold and snow-covered. In San Francisco, the night was cool, all right, but it felt more like a nice Wisconsin spring.

Yet, at the same time, it was home. American English! I had never thought of language as anything other than words, but to be surrounded by it after so long, to wallow in it, to understand everything around me—it was as if a long-dulled sense had awoken. Even when I couldn’t make out a whole conversation or even a single sentence in the noise of people and machinery, there was a sense of familiarity, of being home.

And this din was American. The hum of noise was mine—the Caterpillars and jackhammers working through a darkness lit by large floodlights, loud people walking down the street, all the smells of different cuisines from cheap and expensive restaurants, the smell of perfume coming from well-dressed men and women going to the bars and clubs. Yes, this wasn’t Madison, but it smelled and sounded like home.

When I worked undercover as a cop, there were times I felt desolate and lonely—it was like living parallel lives, trapped in one body. But even then I always knew that a single phone call could change all that—I had a whole police force behind me, which meant that, at the bottom of it all, I had a government
behind me. This felt different—I didn’t have a single lifeline. Yes, I could ask for favors from people I trusted like Mo, my journalist friend in Madison, but even they could only do so much for me.

Now I felt like my cover was too complete—a single arrest and I would be tried as an enemy combatant. I was a man without a country at home. On the other hand, it wasn’t so bad: I had O and Muddy here with me and we were all working this case together.

From the door of his house in Oakland, Michael sleepily beckoned us in. Where O was tall and lean, Michael, though just as tall, seemed to fill the doorway. Shaved bald and wearing a big smile and a thick blue bathrobe that barely covered his belly, he looked every bit the consummate Kenyan middle manager. He let us in, mumbling something about having to be at work in the morning—he worked at a nursing home. He pointed to the fridge, two couches, and a bunch of sleeping bags in the sitting room, and went back to sleep.

“How did he know that we would be five and not three?” I asked O. O hadn’t told him we were coming with Julio and the teacher.

“He didn’t, he just assumed we would be many,” O answered.

“I find that to be very curious. Why?” Julio asked, joining me in my suspicions.

“It’s an African thing,” Muddy said.

“You motherfuckers better chill out and enjoy your African hospitality,” O explained lightly. I didn’t need convincing and I went to the fridge. It was full of barely cold food—fish,
nyama choma
, collard greens, and
ugali
. The long road had made us ravenously hungry and I didn’t bother looking for plates or spoons, I just laid out the food on the low coffee table in its big aluminum
trays. There were some Tuskers in the fridge too. I passed them around and as we ate, we discussed our next move.

“Are you in any hurry to get back?” Muddy asked Julio and the teacher. “I mean, surely your thriving business can survive a few days without you? Then we can enjoy the sights.”

“What are you asking?” Julio said.

“We could use your help—your Ninja Cleaners gives us a good cover. Two of us have never been to the U.S. before, two of us are cops used to doing things with the law on their side, the simple way. Look, Julio, we need you, we need you to help us stay underground,” Muddy said.

“If you stay, I stay. Then we go back together,” the teacher said to Julio.

“Let me make a call,” Julio said and stepped outside. We waited, sipping tiredly on our beers until he returned.

“Jason, he like that I stay and watch over you,” he said with a smile on his face.

“What did you really say to him?” I asked him.

“Let us say that you, my friends, are good for business. You were right, my dear rose,” he said, turning to Muddy. “From here I can run my business.”

Sometimes I doubted whether without Muddy we would ever get anything done. She was right—we needed Julio around.

There was one other piece of business to take care of: the teacher. We needed to know what he would do. We had saved his life, and he had proven himself. Now it was a question of whether he trusted us enough to let us continue with our work without him raising the alarm.

“I have nowhere to go except back to Mexico. To live here in
America … is death to me. My former life is dead, what life will I be born to? I am police—that is all I know to do. Julio, help me get the bastard who sold me out … It is the only way I can go back in,” he said. “Once I’m back in, you and I, we know each other well now.”

He did have options: he could stay in the United States illegally, he could go to the DEA and offer his services and knowledge, he could go into the drug business himself—many police and military personnel had—but he was right. Each option was like death. He had only one choice, and that was to go reclaim his life. It all depended on just how badly Julio still wanted to ruin or kill him.

Julio was silent for a minute.

“I will help you, but remember your life is mine,” he said. The teacher, looking depressed, nodded in agreement.

This was our life, shifting alliances and allegiances, and we hoped with each shift that somehow the world, even as it remained the same crooked, crime-filled place it had always been, had changed for the better. With the teacher back in the force, a corrupt chief would be out. And the teacher had already been compromised by Julio. For him, the teacher, alive and back inside the police force, was worth more than dead and buried somewhere in a Mexican desert on their return trip.

Julio would get to turn him after all. With at least two things resolved, we inflated five of the seven air mattresses—it was true that Michael had just assumed there would be many of us and had prepared all the beds that he had.

While O was in the kitchen looking for omelette ingredients, I turned on Michael’s computer—he had the Kenyan
Daily
Nation
as his homepage. Muddy leaned over my shoulder and we skimmed through the front page. The violence had intensified, but there were two positive developments. The idea that Obama should make a unity visit to Kenya was being floated—it’d be good for his campaign if he brought peace to a country while still just a candidate, and if anyone could, it was him. The United Nations was also sending in a former UN chief to broker peace and the Elders were planning to visit.

This was the first time I’d heard of the Elders. I looked it up on the Internet—it was an organization composed of the world’s most influential retirees—Mandela, Clinton, Bishop Tutu, Jimmy Carter, and others who still believed in doing some good, though I couldn’t help wondering cynically what they could do now that they couldn’t do when they’d held their powerful offices. Nevertheless, the idea that the world was a village and yet needed global leaders was interesting.

I guessed Obama’s visit wouldn’t happen at the height of the violence—too dangerous, physically and politically. And after the Norfolk bombing, with Sahara still on the loose, it would be foolhardy for the U.S. Embassy in Kenya to allow such a visit. We had to find Sahara—without him, everyone was holding on to only a small piece of the puzzle.

The United States had launched a drone missile attack into Somalia, killing some operatives from Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, or another organization. Of course, the real culprits were still at large, because they were going after the wrong guys. It was time to really question whether Paul was just a hapless diplomat who went along with the powers that be, or whether he was actively part of the disinformation detracting from the Sahara mission.

I had the feeling that the case was getting away from us, that
we didn’t have the skills or the power to solve it, that we were being sucked into the eye of a hurricane.

Julio and the teacher were still sleeping, but they woke up as soon as O walked back into the sitting room with a big pan half-covered by a massive omelette. He had put in anything he could find in Michael’s fridge—beans,
ugali
, fish, beef, and even fries—but it was damn good.

Over breakfast, we discussed the best thing to do. We had to make it to the university and see what we could find out there. Muddy, O, and I would go to Berkeley while Julio and the teacher remained behind to buy car-washing supplies and Ninja Car Washers uniforms—to turn our shell of a cover into actual immigrant jobs.

Helen, our “African Hacker,” as I had taken to calling her, had decided from her profile that Sahara not only had a connection to the University of California, Berkeley, but that he had probably taught there—something to do with Africa. Muddy and I took a cab to the university and marched straight to the African Studies Department. We were going to present ourselves as a black couple, African and African-American, interested in the program.

“Can we learn more about what it is you do here?” we asked a beautiful white woman with thick blond dreadlocks and dressed in African clothing.

“My Kiswahili name is Amina,” she said as she shook our hands. “It means ‘feel safe.’ But you can also call me by my American name, Leslie,” she added with a self-conscious laugh when we said nothing.

“Pardon me, I was just admiring your dress,” Muddy said. She introduced us using our cover names.

“You must be Kikuyu … your name suggests so,” Amina said to me pleasantly.

“No, I’m actually from here … the United States, I mean. My parents gave me that name,” I said.

“Oh, I understand … black power,” she concluded, and then paused. “Oh my God, where is my hospitality? May I offer you some tea?”

“Thank you, Amina, tea would be lovely,” Muddy said. I was dying with laughter at this proper-sounding Muddy.

Amina made a call to the office and dashed off with a coffee pot. The assistant director, a tall, stocky white man with flaming red hair, came out and led us to his office. It reminded me of many of the offices of expatriates that I had visited in Kenya—there were the drums and clothes, and long shelves of books that displayed his knowledge.

There were also the usual Maasai photographs: one of him surrounded by Africans, a scholarly face among a sea of smiling black faces, another in which he was wearing a beaded crown, next to him a slaughtered bull with its bright thick red blood streaking through sandy earth. He smiled when he saw me looking at the photograph.

“They made me an honorary chief … called me the red chief on account of my hair,” he said. “I used to be a vegetarian until that,” he added, pointing at the bull. “How could I live on grass like the animal, they asked? I had no answer.”

I gave him our Kikuyu names.

“Chief … my husband and I, we feel we need to know more about Africa. I am an African and he is from here, but we need to know more so we can …” Muddy started to say.

“Let me guess,” the white African Chief interrupted her. “You are from … wait, wait, don’t tell me, you’re from Rwanda,” he said, almost jumping up and down in his chair.

“Yes, my, how could you tell?” Muddy asked, sounding genuinely surprised except that from her tone I could tell she was putting on an act.

“I have an excellent ear for African accents. Were you there? Did you really see it? Sad times … Did you lose someone? Why do you have a Kikuyu name?” he asked her.

Muddy didn’t answer.

“Excuse me, I get carried away when I meet people like you—survivors—it takes courage and strength. You are the reason I am what I am. I should not have asked. What can I do for you?” he said apologetically.

We explained that we had met a professor from the department, probably retired, but we had lost his contact information. He had had a profound effect on us, he had told us about the program, and we had promised to look him up when we came to campus. He went by the name of Sahara—his African name. At which point the Chief said that it happened all the time, friends of Africa took African names.