Black Star Nairobi (27 page)

Kimani was still on my conscience—O, Muddy, and I had yet to talk about it—not even after we got back to Michael’s for a sleepless night. And now that Mo was with us, on our mission to see Amos’s father, it gave us more time to bury what had happened with silence.

For all the barbed wire wrapped around sharp metal stakes on the concrete walls, there was no gate and so we just walked in. We didn’t attract any curiosity; our look of desperation ensured that we fit right into this hard world of poverty, drugs, violence,
and most of all hopelessness. That was the difference between the projects and Julio’s slum—hopelessness. In Julio’s slum, there was still fight left in the residents.

There was a black cop, alert and ready to prove himself, doing his beat. He glared at us and smacked his lips, daring us to make one wrong move. It wasn’t because he recognized us from anywhere; it’s just what you’re supposed to do when you make eye contact in the projects—you convey violence. I looked back at him casually, because to look away would suggest that we were doing something wrong. With his nightstick, he pointed to the door. He had to have the last word and that was okay by us.

We walked up steps that smelled of stale urine. Eventually we got to the apartment and I knocked. An old man, dressed in faded, blue-striped pajamas in spite of the time of day, opened the door without even looking through the dusty peephole. He was holding a bottle of Hennessey in one hand and a joint in the other. He waved us in.

“Sir, ain’t you gonna ask who we are?” I asked him, trying to sound like I still belonged.

He looked at us and laughed.

“You planning on telling—ain’t yah?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, just shrugged his shoulders, and so we walked in. He cleared an old black leather couch for us and asked us to sit down.

I introduced myself, then O and Muddy, giving him our real names and professions. I explained that Mo was a reporter from the
Madison Times
and she was writing a story about the case we were working on.

“That’s a name you got on you there, son. But you ain’t from Africa …” he said to me after I was done.

“I’m from Madison, Wisconsin,” I said.

“What is a country boy doing living all the way up in Africa?”

I explained as best and as fast as I could.

“Now, what I can do for you?” he asked. He passed the bottle and the weed over to me. I took a small sip and passed both to O. For a moment, I was young again and back in Madison with my boys, being all tough in an empty Wal-Mart parking lot, drinking and smoking cigarettes.

“Sir, I’m afraid I might have some bad news,” I said.

“Of course you do, son, of course you do. Why else would you ‘sir’ me? Out with it … time is no longer on my side,” he said, tapping at his wrist.

“You have a son by the name of Amos Apara?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s my boy,” he said, standing up and walking to the mantel. He took down a photograph and gave it to me. It was a photo of Amos at KICC, posing with the magnificent Jomo Kenyatta statue.

“He got bit by the Africa bug, just like you—you dig? And Africa has taken his life. I know coz, you see, son, my wife, she saw it before she passed on a year ago. She tells me … don’t wait for our boy, he ain’t coming back.” He motioned to us to walk with him.

We followed him to Amos’s room—the only room that didn’t have the stale smell of whiskey and weed in it. It was clean and recently painted. There were even fresh flowers beside a well-made bunk bed.

We looked at him in confusion. If he knew his son was dead, what was all this?

“No graveyard for my boy, this is where I come,” he answered our unasked question. “At least with my wife and our girl, I have some place I can go talk to ’em.” He excused himself and left the room.

Hanging on the wall, there were photos, arranged chronologically, of Amos in various countries. The last ones were all from Kenya and they had something in common. Counting the one downstairs where he was standing in front of the Kenyatta statue, they were all taken at the sites IDESC had been scouting. Was he trying to tell his parents, and now us, something? Or was it because his tourist sensibilities kicked in every so often? We had, after all, scoured the sites from top to bottom and found nothing. But it seemed like something bad was going to happen in all these places. We just had to find out what, and how far along Sahara was with his plans.

Mo called to us. She was taking a photograph of a short handwritten letter from Amos to his parents, dated four years ago. Muddy started reading it aloud.

“Popsicle and Momsicle,”
the letter started, and in spite of the solemnity of the “graveyard room,” we had to laugh.

It made sense in the context of what Kimani had told us … they wanted to prevent political disasters before they happened. We still didn’t have a clear picture … until we spoke with Mpande and Sahara we wouldn’t know exactly what was going on. But that they were on some kind of preemptive agenda gone bad was clear.

Next to the letter, there was a cryptic postcard, posted a few days before the bombing:
“Resigning. Coming home soon. Almost done!”

He had drawn an arrow pointing to the face of the postcard. On the front of the card there was an ostrich burying its head in the sand. Amos had died fighting Sahara and his men, after he stopped pretending that he didn’t know what was going on.

Amos’s father walked back into the room, dressed in a heavily decorated Vietnam War–era soldier’s uniform. He holstered a pistol before standing at attention, then falling back at ease.

“Now, in this room, tell me what happened to my only son,” he said. He could sense from the moment we walked in that we were here to confirm what he already knew. He had been in mourning for so long that he could afford to delay the moment of truly knowing until he was ready. I explained all we knew, with Muddy and O filling in bits here and there. All the while, he was listening, sometimes asking a question, other times just nodding.

“I want to shed blood for my son, not my tears. I want the men you say did this,” he said, his voice heavy, trembling in anger and determination.

“You cannot come back with us,” Muddy said gently. “But I promise you we will get the men who killed him. But first bury your son … properly.”

“No, let him rest in Kenya—his ancestors are from Africa. He is home. I want blood—you have names. Give them to me,” he half-pleaded and half-commanded.

I started to say no, but he walked over to O.

“Your wife, my son …” he said fiercely.

O asked me for my phone and copied the names and addresses of the five IDESC men residing in California onto a piece of paper.

“I’ve been holding my peace too long—what good is it? Peace fed my family to the dogs—picked off one by one by thugs, police, and by life itself—don’t make the same mistake,” he said as Muddy looked at me.

“We’re leaving for Kenya. You are on your own, old man,” I said, not sure why I was angry with him.

“Ain’t that the truth, son … ain’t that the truth,” he said, reminding me of Mary’s mother.

“It’s suicide—you get one or two—then what? Let us do our jobs?” I said, half-heartedly trying to talk him out of it.

What did it matter anyway? We were never going to get them all. The most Mo’s story would do was embarrass them into resigning—they would regroup. Their brand of evil—patient, cold, methodical, and impersonal—would survive anything human. They would be at it until we won or they were all killed off, every last one of them.

“My boy, he thought history was more important than family—and he wanted to change the world—things he saw down in South Africa, things I seen in Georgia …” he began, as if giving the eulogy that he had been practicing for years. Like mourners in a funeral, we had to let him finish, no matter how long it took.

I wanted to pull the old man to the side and talk to him—I wanted to tell him just how exhausted I was, how for days I hadn’t slept more than a few hours. And then he would ask why, and I would say that the life I had been living and the one that I wanted to live were pulling me apart. I would point at Muddy and say “because I love her” and say “there is O, my best friend and best man.” I would tell him that was real but so was all the wrong behind us. And what did I want him to say? If he were a wasted old man at Broadway’s, what would he say? That you
cannot live two lives? I silently promised myself that if Muddy and I survived Sahara and his madness, I would take her to meet my parents. It had been years since I had felt that I was a son with responsibilities to those who called me “son.” If a father’s duty didn’t end, even after the death of his son, how could mine to my parents, who were still living?

I still had the Glock and the extra clips from the cop back in Berkeley. I placed the one I had used to kill Martin Kimani on the table.

“Look, old man, that is the gun I used to kill one of the men responsible for your son’s death. If you ain’t planning on coming back, take it,” I said.

He took it.

“A one-way ticket to hell,” he said absentmindedly, as he removed his World War–something pistol from his holster and replaced it with the Glock, which fit awkwardly.

Muddy pulled me away and took his hand, then hugged him. “Kill as many of them as you can,” she said. I imagined that he had held on to life just long enough for us to walk through that door and make his revenge mission possible, to kill one enemy for all the other wrongs that had been done to him and those he loved.

“This shit is getting way too crazy—I can’t be a part of it,” Mo said, looking angrily at me. She was right, I should have kept her at a protective distance, but I had been in Kenya too long.

“We’re a long way from Wisconsin. You can walk away, go to the police, or you can stay with the old man and hear his whole story,” I said to her.

“Think of yourself as embedded—a covert front line,” Muddy said humorously.

The old man took Mo’s hand and led her toward the kitchen.

“I got a lot speaking to do. I got another bottle of something sweet stashed somewhere,” he said.

“Shit, old man, I might as well drink my damn career down the drain,” Mo said as she followed him.

If Christ had rejected the idea of a messiah, the trappings and cultishness, and yet believed he was the messiah—that would be Sahara. He worked well with others; he hated anything that got in the way of the mission. He was efficient, ruthless, but always for a reason. Imagine Jesus with all that power, now imagine if all he had was the clarity of his mission—that was Sahara. It didn’t stop others from believing in him—and doubting him: that was the paradox. The more he shunned the messiah complex, the more people believed in him. But Amos had doubted, and he had died.

O and I shook Amos’s father’s hand, and the three of us left, knowing one thing: it was going to get messier.

We left two thousand dollars on Michael’s kitchen table with a note—
For your Tuskers
. We walked to a supermarket and hailed a cab. It was a Mexican driver, and Julio negotiated the price for what was going to be a long ride. They came to an agreement, we napped as the cab traveled down the length of California, and after the driver dropped us off a few miles from the border house, one of Julio’s men picked us up. Not long after that, we crawled through the tunnel back into Mexico and made our way straight to the airport. There were no surprises. I guessed we had drained Sahara enough so that soon it would be just him and us.

With our adrenaline always pumping, we had been running on very little sleep. We were a mess, and so the two connecting flights were a blessing. When the Kenyan Airways flight attendant finally announced that we were about to land, we woke up still tired, but rested and determined.

When we arrived at the immigration kiosk and the official, dressed in a faded blue cardigan, took us to his superior’s office after glancing at our passports, we weren’t worried. It meant that Hassan had come through for us. In the office, the man gave us a large duffel bag. O smiled as he pulled his trusty .45 from the bag. I retrieved my Glock and Muddy an AK-47 and an overcoat under which she was to hide it. Then we put on bulletproof vests and took some extra ammo. There were also cell phones and SIM cards in the bag, and I called Helen as the supervisor walked us through customs to where O’s Land Rover was parked—gassed, serviced, and ready to go. Helen had good news: she was about to break through the encryption.

We entered the country, which was still trying to claw its way out of hell, as quietly as we had left it. On the whole, things had calmed down, except for some riots, which seemed liked a wedding celebration compared to the violence from just a few days ago. Reconciliation was looking possible, and the
government and the opposition party had started talks about sharing power.

What this meant was that, with enough care, we could move around and work on our case, which now hinged on finding Mpande and Sahara. It meant that, without the threat of a mob descending on us by surprise, we now stood a fighting chance against anybody trying to collect brownie points by killing us for our supposed terrorist affiliations. We had the terrain—the odds were almost even—and with O and Muddy by my side, I’d say the odds had even tipped in my general direction.

We couldn’t go to O’s or to Muddy’s. We were too recognizable to slip quietly back into our old lives. Broadway’s was out as a safe haven—that was a place you went to when all bad and good things were equal, not when you were a cop in trouble. The delicate balance could not accommodate weakness. Our best bet was to find a discreet bar and some lodging in Kiambu. The Red Nova, the bar Joe Sherry ran, was close enough to Limuru, in case we needed to get to Muddy’s, and to Nairobi. Even though Joe Sherry had dated Mary long ago, they had maintained the kind of friendship that was strong enough not to need constant upkeep through birthday cards and the like—the kind where even though you might not see each other for years, the trust remains. Rare enough friendships—like Mo’s and mine. Joe Sherry and Mary had had that kind of friendship, and now we needed his help.