Black Star Nairobi (6 page)

“It doesn’t matter to you whether it was them or not?” I asked him.

“Guys, does it matter to you whether a bank robber robbed a particular bank or not? A bank robber is a bank robber even when not robbing banks, the same as you are always cops,” Paul argued.

“They are trying to kill us—so we go after them. If they aren’t guilty of this, they are guilty of other things. But we are working on the theory that there is a second group out there, sympathetic, maybe independent or working closely,” Jason said. Paul started to say something but decided against it.

Jason excused himself to make a call. Soon after, a suit in dark glasses brought in a box and Jason took us through its contents. There were DVDs with zipped files from the last four years, a logbook listing entering and departing cars and their reason for visiting. And there was another disc with the Norfolk’s financial transactions on it. It was going to take us a long time to go through everything. It was all about the details.

“What time is it?” Jason asked Paul.

“Four-ten p.m.,” Paul answered.

“Wrong, Paul. You are dead wrong. Tusker time,” Jason said as he tapped a wooden panel on the wall, reached in, and came out with four cold Tuskers.

“I am curious, Ishmael, Obama—do you think he can win?” Jason asked me.

“I’m not sure—but he has my vote,” I answered.

“What is it that the Kenyans liked to say? That the United States will see a Luo president before Kenya does?” Jason asked O. This was a constant joke—there had yet to be a Luo president in spite of them being the second-largest ethnic group.

O smiled.

“I guess we’ll find out,” he said.

“I don’t think he’ll win. Race matters more than anything else … like tribe here, only without the machetes …” Jason said, bringing his hand to the table and laughing as he stopped his Tusker from toppling over.

“I have my money on Obama. You just needed to look at where his money is from, old white ladies sending in crumpled five-dollar bills,” Paul said. “What we should be worried about is what’s going to happen here. Things are going to get pretty hot.”

“That I agree with,” Jason pronounced, placing his hand on O’s shoulder.

I picked up the box full of potential evidence.

“You know, a fellow cop back in the United States, he used to say that the only difference between an accountant and a detective is that one wears a gun. The search for details, that will be us crunching numbers,” I said, thinking about the mind-numbing work ahead.

“There is another difference,” O interjected. “The accountant gets paid more.”

We left Jason almost dying with laughter and went to the security office to retrieve our weapons and phones. As soon as I turned mine on it buzzed with a text from Jason. He wanted to meet at Broadway’s the following evening—8:00 p.m. That the
CIA chief in Kenya was sure he could have a confidential meeting in a public space added another detail to the bar. I showed O the text.

“Jason and Paul have two different agendas—for now, we trust neither, until we know more,” O said, and I agreed.

Usually we took work to the bar instead of home. But we needed a computer and Internet access so we did the next best thing and stopped at a gas station, bought some beer, and went to O’s. O and Mary had moved from the chaotic and sometimes dangerous Eastleigh to a high-rise apartment in the more peaceful Parklands. It was a high-rise apartment in name only—often there was no running water and they had to pay the night watchman, who doubled as the handyman, to carry gallons of water from the communal tap up the five flights. Just as often, there was no electricity. While Mary would have preferred that they buy a house, the apartment was close enough to Kangemi Primary School, where she taught, to make its temporariness well worth it.

Mary was correcting—or rather “marking,” I had come to learn it was called—exams. She said a quick hello and informed O that dinner was in the fridge, then moved from the sitting room into her office.

“When you’re done, I need help … with my afro,” she called from her office before locking the door.

Her afro, only an inch or so last year, now rivaled that of Angela Davis when she topped the FBI’s most wanted list back in the 1960s. Mary liked O to braid it into knots before going to bed, and it was always worth a laugh or two to sit and watch one of the toughest detectives in this part of the continent braiding his wife’s hair as he chatted away about nothing.

We hadn’t eaten and we ploughed through the
ugali
and
matumbo
collard greens as we went through the security discs.

“How would I get a bomb into the Norfolk?” O asked himself. “What would be the perfect cover? One that would allow you to go in and out without any questions asked?”

“Construction … anything that gives you access to the hotel for a long period of time … Anything that makes it necessary for you to bring heavy equipment in and out,” I said, seeing where O was going.

There were a few vans going through the gate in the videos but they left within a few minutes. In the logbook, their reasons for visiting were listed as food and beer deliveries. Finally, we found something: a week before the explosion one of the logbooks revealed a repairman whose reason for visiting was listed as “Fixing Hotel Boiler”—the company’s name was Ngotho Repair-It-All. We found the number, and a sleepy guard, thinking we were customers, gave us directions to follow in the morning.

It was close to midnight by the time we made it to the shop down on River Road. O showed the guard his badge and asked him where the owner, Ngotho, lived. Clearly, the guard was bored and needed a break, because he hopped into the Land Rover with us. It didn’t take us long to get to Banana Town and, after weaving in and out of poorly paved roads, we came to a wooden gate secured with heavy-duty chains and padlocks.

“You could just burn the gate,” I said to O.

“Or saw through it,” O said in turn.

We rapped on the chains, and big Alsatian dogs leaped up and down—we could see their flashing teeth in the glare of the Land Rover headlights. Someone called to them from inside, asking what we wanted. O explained that we were detectives and the owner laughed.

“I’ve heard that one before,” he yelled in English through the grated doorframe. We held up our badges above the gate, but he couldn’t make them out from that distance.

The watchman yelled something at his boss in Kikuyu.

“But you could be holding a gun to his head,” he yelled back.

“And I could burn down your gate, shoot your dogs, and come in,” O shouted back at him.

“The phone number of your station—the desk number, give it to me.”

O gave him the number and looked at me as if to say it was a good thing he was still working for Hassan and moonlighting for our agency.

“What are your names?” he yelled after a few seconds. O gave him his name and, after a few seconds, he emerged and locked his dogs up.

“You can’t be careful enough these days,” he said as he opened the gate and revealed a short, stocky old man. By this time, it was obvious to me that he had nothing to hide. For one, were he involved in something as heavy as the bombing he would not be home, and if he were home, he would not have answered, and if he did—it would be to try to bribe us.

“We are investigating the Norfolk bombing … an aspect of it, anyway. Have you been there lately?” I asked him.

“Well, I was there a few days ago, the manager is a good friend and throws work my way, otherwise a job at the Norfolk would never come to a man like me. But I didn’t do any work on the boiler—I ran some diagnostics … oh God!” he exclaimed as the possibility came to him.

“Are you telling me, all that damage, all those deaths—a boiler did that?” he said with his hand over his mouth. “No, that’s not possible—that level of damage …”

“What was wrong with the boiler?” O asked him.

“Old … it needed a new pressure valve. I told them that they needed a new boiler immediately. They said they would order one from the United States and get it shipped in. I guess it’s still on its way,” he said, trying not to smile at his joke.

“Did you see anything suspicious?” I asked.

“No, nothing around the boiler,” he answered.

“Has anyone else come to see you? Americans?” I asked. He looked alarmed. The stories about the U.S.’s extraordinary renditions, when told with a Kenyan flair for lurid details, would alarm even the bravest of us.

“No, no one else has come to see me,” he answered.

“You have nothing to worry about,” I reassured him.

Ngotho really was a working stiff and he looked genuinely unhappy that he wouldn’t be completing the job—he needed the cash, something I understood. We had to go back and continue looking. We left the guard with Ngotho for what we were sure was going to be a long conversation about abandoning his post.

This was detective work—detail after detail, some leading somewhere, others nowhere, but I had come to learn that there were no wasted details. At least you ruled out something when you were wrong. We had ruled out Ngotho—and without it costing us anything. Because, in Kenya, the truth costs. A Kenyan reporter for CNN had been fired because he was bribing witnesses. But how else was he going to get the truth?

“It’s a little bit odd that no one else has visited Ngotho,” I said to O.

“And we’re all looking at the same evidence … someone knew it was a waste of time,” O agreed.

We needed to dig deeper and more carefully into the records—tedious—but it was what it was.

“Shit—I forgot my wife’s hair,” O said suddenly.

Before I could start laughing, I remembered I hadn’t called Muddy.

We went back to O’s and continued sifting through the records. Besides Ngotho, no one had done any work in the basement for at least a year, unless there was deleted or missing footage—but the days and hours were in sequence. There were no suspicious-looking deliveries, or any that ended up with a truck in the basement.

Soon, Mary woke up and started getting ready to go to work. We had worked through the night.

“No laughing,” she said sleepily as she walked by us to go to the bathroom. Her huge afro had been matted into a huge mohawk.

“Razor sharp,” I said to her, now that I was high with fatigue.

Mary made herself a scrambled egg and a cup of coffee, kissed O goodbye, and then she was off to teach. This much I had come to know—love and deserving love do not go together, love has nothing to do with being worthy. At least not in my case, and certainly not in O’s.

“Let’s keep digging back. You go through the security discs, and I’ll go through the logbooks,” I said.

The farther we went back, the more it seemed like our strategy wasn’t working. No one plants a bomb months before its due date—it was against all logic. But we had nothing else to do and so we kept at it.

Finally, after a whole fucking day, something at last. Five men getting out of a van in the basement of the hotel. I couldn’t make out their faces but clearly four of them were white and one
was black. The date was September 14, 2006, about a year before the bombing.

O flipped through the logbook to the same date. There. We finally had it: “Reason for Visit. Fix crack in basement.” The company name listed was Golden Bears Co.

“What kind of a name is that?” O asked.

It sounded familiar. I knew it from somewhere. Then it hit me.

“It’s the name of a university football team—Berkeley … California,” I said.

“Someone has a sense of humor,” O said with an excited laugh. “I can bet you there isn’t a single company by that name in Kenya. That alone … the guys at the gate should have been suspicious.”

“Not surprising they were let through—four white men,” I answered.

O knew what I meant—there was a high premium on whiteness in Kenya. Even criminals who were busy terrorizing their black brethren left the
wazungu
free to roam the country—one could argue it was a service to Kenya, the tourist money benefited everyone. The four white men would have had the run of the place just because they were white.

I rewound the video to the moment where we could see the van pulling in and one of the guards walking around it with a mirror, looking for explosives underneath.

In the video, he walks to the back, looks at what is presumably equipment, and then waves them on through. The van goes into the underground parking lot. The men get out and the driver reverses and parks facing the ramp. One can see the men appearing and disappearing in the outer edges without actually being able to see what is going on. So simple: rather than mess with
the security camera by pulling complicated stunts, they give the guards in the security room a full view of nothing important.

They worked out of sight for six hours before leaving. When they pulled out, we saw a space covered over with a plastic sheet. They came back a second day. When they left again, the floor appeared freshly cemented.

We had something, but not quite. Why plant the bomb a year in advance? We went through Kenyan history looking for why October 28 might be important—nothing. Searched through the major American holidays, still nothing. There was nothing special about that day. There was nothing special about the guests. It had to be a planned random attack, I said to O.

“A planned random attack? Have you been smoking?” was his response. I couldn’t have agreed more.

But still, we finally had something to work with. It was nothing in the world of lawyers and judges, but in our world, it was something.

It was time to go meet Jason.

We arrived at Broadway’s just in time for the seven o’clock news. Wanuna Sophia was reporting that Al Qaeda had claimed responsibility for the Norfolk bombing. She showed a clip of a masked man promising all sorts of hell to come. Then the commercials came on—and the bar came alive with conversation. Even for criminals, love of Kenya had no moral borders. The outrage in the bar was sincere.

I had once asked O how Broadway’s had come about. He couldn’t say for sure. It had opened sometime in the 1950s at the height of the Mau Mau guerrilla war for independence. It was rumored that the bar owner was a nationalist who knew both
Dedan Kimathi and the man in charge of tracking him down, Ian Henderson. He got them to meet to discuss how to stop the killing of civilians by both sides—the Mau Mau kept their end of the bargain, while the British continued with their mass detentions and killings.
It is the lion and not the hunter telling its story
, O had said with a laugh. Henderson couldn’t change British policy after all. But they had also talked about many other things—the toll of warfare on them and on their families—and fantasized about world peace.