Black Star Nairobi (3 page)

When O and I walked in, Kamau was sitting in a corner on a bar stool, as if he were watching a performance. The lights were off, except for the one that shone on the remains of the dead man. Kamau hopped off the stool and turned on the lights, but he might as well have done us a favor and left them off. I thought BQ’s lab was bad. In Kamau’s lab, bags of ice were laid on top of the bodies to preserve them, and so the floors were covered in this murky mixture of lukewarm water and human fluids.

He called us into his office, which looked like a supervisor’s at a manufacturing plant: on the same floor, the only thing that separated it from the lab was a few hurriedly assembled low white-painted pieces of wood with windows stuck into them. At least it was dry ground. He raised his hands up in the air like a priest about to bless both of us.

“The moment I saw that body, I knew it. I knew he was trying to tell me something. Speak and I will listen, I said to the man,” he said. “But you, ask and you will receive,” he added, pointing at O.

“What do you have?” O asked.

“Your man is black,” he announced.

“Shit, Kamau, of course he’s black,” I said.

“Hold it, open your ears and you will hear—I did not say he is Kenyan or African. I said he was black.” He was barely able to contain his excitement, but he waited until O asked him to explain.

“Height, six-two. His clothing, at least what is left of it, appears to be American. But all that is like saying water is wet. I found this in his mouth.” He placed two small capsule halves on the desk and brought out a magnifying glass from his back pocket. We peered over his shoulder as he pointed out indentations on the capsule, using a toothpick.

“Some lettering is gone,” he explained. “But this eventually spells hydroxyurea.”

“Okay, what’s that?” I asked.

Kamau straightened up.

“Hydroxyurea,” he said, as if addressing a class of primary school students, “is a drug used to treat sickle cell disease. Sickle cell can be a trait or a disease—mostly, black people have it. This type of cell is good for malaria prevention—think of it as nature’s immunization. But let’s say you were kidnapped from the hottest malaria-infested interior of Africa and exported to non-malaria zones. It becomes a disease—not lethal, but in some cases painful enough to require a doctor’s attention—I mean real pain—like you’ve been nailed to a cross.”

“Sickle cell—never heard of it,” O said.

“Why would you? If you think you are well, the disease doesn’t matter,” Kamau said.

I didn’t know anything about hydroxyurea, but I knew about sickle cell. My ex-wife and I were tested for it before we got married. She wouldn’t bring a child into this world with sickle cell, she had said. Had someone told me that the next time I’d
hear about sickle cell, it would be from a crazy pathologist, as a clue in a Kenyan murder case, I would have had
them
tested, for drugs. But here I was, happily thinking that at least my ex-wife had taught me something useful.

“Sickle cell, one in ten black people are carriers. A carrier marries a carrier—they get a baby with the trait, chances are. Only problem with your theory, Kamau—our guy could be from anywhere two black people marry. He could be British—shit, man, we weren’t all sold in America. Spain? Brazil? Cuba? How do you know he isn’t Kenyan?” I asked, unable to mask my irritation.

“Come on, Ishmael, how many Kenyans do you know that take any kind of medication? And don’t you think Haitians, Jamaicans, and what have you have enough on their plates without worrying about sickle cell?” Kamau responded.

He was right. Of all the diseases killing people in Kenya, sickle cell would be like a migraine: take a Panadol pill and go to bed.

“And you know what that means if I’m right?” Kamau said, pointing to O and me. “It means his death was a …” he lowered his voice, “a surprise. Who stops to take medication when they know their life is in danger?”

“I think Kamau is on to something. Two clean shots—this is not murder Kenyan-style. Now that I think about it, the last clean political murder was in 1969—a trade unionist,” O reasoned.

“Murder Kenyan-style? Remember what they did to Ouko? Tortured, burnt, and shot? My friends, this man is as American as apple pie,” Kamau said with a silly laugh, poking me in the ribs.

“Okay. I can grant that he isn’t Kenyan. Could even be African-American. But let’s look at this the other way round. How
does a black American end up dead in the middle of Ngong Forest?” I asked, not expecting an answer.

“How did you come up with this hydroxyurea stuff anyway?” O asked Kamau, genuinely intrigued.

“My second bible,” he said, pointing at a thick yellowing book on his desk. “That and Google. My friends, I know this is thin, but sickle cell, an execution in Ngong, the clothes—but hey, you are the detectives—you have a hypothesis, go forth and produce.”

We turned to leave.

“One last thing,” he said, laughing hard. “Remember, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

“What else you got, Kamau?” O asked him.

“I found this in his stomach.” Kamau took a shiny silver ball bearing from his pocket.

“What is that?” I asked.

“This was his secret—this is what he wanted found. It’s a riddle I can’t unravel,” he said. “But I can tell you this, there is someone out there with a plan, and he won’t be too happy if you mess it up.”

He could not have timed it better. Right at that moment, we heard a loud explosion. The floor beneath us shook. Then, a deep silence.

“And that, my friends, that is the sound of the plan,” Kamau said into the silence. We rushed outside to see a huge fireball rise up in the air.

A bomb had exploded somewhere in Nairobi.

I was certain about one thing—our guy had something to do with the explosion. For someone to want our guy this dead, it had to be for an important reason, and my gut told me we had just heard it.

All the people we needed to see would be at the bomb site; we might as well go see what kind of clues we could pick up. That, and curiosity, had us driving toward the city center without saying goodbye to Kamau.

O called Hassan’s cell. After several tries, he reached him. The Norfolk Hotel had just been bombed and he was on his way there.

I hadn’t felt American for a long time. In fact, I hadn’t wanted to. A black man from the U.S., I liked getting lost in the sea of blackness in Kenya, rather than standing out in a sea of whiteness in Madison, Wisconsin. But the idea that a fellow American, a black man like me, could be shot and his body left in the middle of Ngong Forest to be devoured by hyenas stirred up an anger in me that I knew was dangerous. In the U.S., we died in all sorts of ways, but never like this.

My phone rang as we drove toward the explosion. It was Muddy; someone had texted her to tell her that Nairobi was under attack. I told her what I knew—it was just the Norfolk, not the whole city.

O’s phone rang—Mary had felt the explosion at the apartment and she wanted to make sure he was okay. It was the first time I had ever known her to call O to check on him and that gave me a bad feeling.

My mind went back to when we had first seen our guy, with his half-smile magnified by the dulled sunlight and the loud silence of the forest. The body in Ngong—it reminded me of English 101,
Antigone
—the king leaves a rebel’s body to be devoured by wild beasts … it didn’t end well for everyone involved. I just knew there was no coming back from this one—whatever it was.

Chaos. Barely two hours after the Norfolk Hotel bombing that had so far left ten Americans, five Europeans, and fifty-one Kenyans dead, the Kenyan Special Branch, CIA, and U.S. Embassy folk—ringed by onlookers and TV reporters with their bright lights—were milling about the bomb site. Car horns were going off randomly, and small fires puttered along until a gust of wind made them flare up, only to be put out by a solitary fire engine that, in true Kenyan fashion, had more men operating it than necessary. There was danger still.

The power company had shut the electricity off—there had been power cuts that morning anyway, though they never touched tourist locations. But a generator trapped somewhere in the rubble kept surging, powering still-attached air conditioners, hairdryers and—this I could not help thinking in spite of the seriousness of the situation—all sorts of sex toys.

The chaos was why we were there. There had to be a connection between the bombing and our man. And maybe we could talk to Hassan and the people from the U.S. Embassy while we were at it. We decided to take advantage of the situation and canvass the site for ourselves. No one had stopped us, anyway, not even to ask us for ID. I guess we looked like we belonged.

The wounded were being rushed to the hospital and the
dead to the city mortuary. There were pieces of flesh and bones here and there, some recognizably human, others so torn apart that they looked like something you would see at the back of a slaughterhouse. The scents of blood, oil, water, and dust mixed with the whispery tangy smell of whatever explosive had been used to make the bomb, a smell that stung the back of your throat. Seeing the destruction in the late morning light drove the cruelty of the terror home. There were aged police dogs, given to the Kenyans by the Americans after the last bombing, sniffing in the rubble, looking for survivors. There would be occasional yells of hope from the policemen guiding them, followed by the overmanned fire truck finally pouring water on the area. And then deflated sighs as it turned out to be nothing.

There were questions of jurisdiction, arguments back and forth. Americans had died, so the U.S. government had a right to conduct its investigations, but it had happened on Kenyan soil and the majority of the dead were Kenyans. Eventually it boiled down to the fact that the Kenyans didn’t have the technology to deal with this kind of thing.

The final shots were going to be called by those controlling the purse strings. Back in Wisconsin, when I worked on the force, the Chief would bury some cases. Pursuing justice for one case would mean that there would be no funding to buy bulletproof vests, or our union would suddenly find itself in the red. It was the same all over.

Hassan was arguing about jurisdiction with a short American man who I didn’t know and Paul, the U.S. Embassy spokesperson. Paul looked like the stereotypical Aryan male—tall, blond, and square-jawed. Over the years we had had a few encounters, nothing major or memorable, Fourth of July celebrations at the embassy, someone needing a visa, and so on—but I had never
grown to like him for reasons that, if I was honest, would amount to nothing more than the way he looked.

“Ishmael—I hope they won’t take our body from us,” O said, as we stared at the crater created by the bomb—it appeared to be about a hundred feet wide.

“The man was killed here—they need locals—they need people like us who know the back roads,” I guessed.

“You mean the black roads?” O asked.

As I looked at the devastation, I was getting increasingly angry. There was something about the American dead that made the bombing feel personal. A part of me felt violated. I wanted to help with the bomb investigation and find the motherfuckers who were responsible. But O and I weren’t bomb experts. We would follow the body. It was what we were good at. Eventually all the threads were bound to connect.

O was cool—like he had seen everything and very little surprised him. And perhaps in this case it was true.

“It was much worse in 1998,” he was telling me as we worked our way around what could only be called a crime scene, for lack of a better word.

“In 1998, it was twelve Americans, all of them with names, against about two hundred nameless Kenyans—collateral damage,” he said with a wave of his hand. “You know, when two elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.”

O rarely used proverbs unless he was high and feeling lazy, and I did a double take to make sure he wasn’t still stoned.

“Hey! Hey! Look at this,” O said, pointing at something in the rubble. I leaned in. It was a ball bearing. I saw many more strewn around the site, now that we were looking. I compared it with the one that Kamau had found in our guy’s stomach. I didn’t have to be a bomb expert to know they matched.

We had something we could use. Beyond Kamau’s hypothesis—this was concrete. It was time to go look for Paul and Hassan.

Just when we were about to make our way past what had been the patio, I heard it. The look on my face stopped O, and we tried to make out a sound underneath the sirens and the bulldozers and the jackhammers tearing into debris. It was a faint tapping. O rushed away to get help and I started to tap back, walking toward the sound carefully so as not to upset the delicately balanced debris. The tapping got louder, louder, and more urgent until I was almost standing over it. I started digging madly with my bare hands.

A night watchman, a large man in his fifties still dressed in his heavy raincoat and hat in spite of the heat from the morning sun and the flaring fires, waddled over and started tearing away at the debris with me.

“I am Detective Ishmael. See anything suspicious? Late-night deliveries? Anything out of the ordinary?” I asked him between heaves of heavy debris.

“No, night like every night—everything goes smoothly—then—boom!” he answered. I really had to learn Kiswahili. I had been saying that for years now, but always working with O had made things easier. I understood everyday conversation—asking for directions, ordering food—just enough to borrow water, O always said. Before long, between us and the sound, we came to a large slab over what seemed to be a foundation wall.

“Were you the only one working tonight?” I asked him.

“Nothing happening at night—so, my friends, the other watchmen deciding to go inside—to kitchen to eat,” he tried to answer but he could not continue. I gathered that they were all dead or seriously wounded.

“This bomb—I do not know how it get inside. We sweep cars—since five years ago, we sweep cars for bomb,” he added. I didn’t take that seriously—this was Kenya, where $200 bought you a murder and $20,000 a small massacre. At the right price and in the right hands a bomb could be placed anywhere.