Black Star Nairobi (7 page)

Eventually they started meeting for the sake of meeting—you know—they became each other’s shrink. At parting, each would go their way. Henderson eventually captured Kimathi but he never used the information he gathered from their meetings against him. In fact, O said, Henderson, sensing British defeat and Kenya’s coming independence, had pleaded with the British not to hang Kimathi. I knew that the bare facts of the story were true but the substance—there was no way of telling. What I did know was that throughout history principled enemies had created safe spaces to meet—their destinies were shared, after all.

“Who better to understand you than the motherfucker trying to kill you?” O had reasoned, by that time nicely high.

On the news, the Kenyan presidential candidates were calling for justice and blaming the government for the security lapse. Bush, after promising help to the Kenyan government, made tough statements about defeating terror.

The miracle at the Norfolk was the last item. As the story unfolded, the whole bar stood up, the beers on the tables orphaned for the moment. KBC had pulled out all the stops—a two-minute background story about me, the American with the sharp hearing of a wolf, who only a few years ago had solved a major mystery. There was O, the local principled cop who
made things happen. There were shots in slow motion of the survivors coming out of the debris and the exploding cars shown from different angles. There was a shot of Mpande, Nomsa, and Nothando—a camera zooming in to show the still sleeping baby, and the firemen hugging the rescued family. There I was again, the American who called Kenya home, shaking hands with Mpande before he hopped onto the ambulance. There was a final shot of the night watchman yelling “I save love and faith” and the wild applause in the bar joined the pandemonium breaking out on the TV.

Shit, even I, in spite of having been there, clapped along. Cases of beer were ordered,
nyama choma
on cutting boards was passed around, and the night turned into a celebration. O walked back in to find a party—cops and robbers eating and drinking to the lives saved.

Jason walked in just as the news ended. There was a bit of silence when he came through the door—his whiteness had broken the magic spell, and we all returned to our tables and continued with whatever we had been doing before the news.

I waited for him to get a beer.

“Straight up! Why are we here?” I asked him.

“Because only you can do what needs to be done. This is your city—I’ve been told you have an extensive network—you can use it,” Jason answered.

“What I mean is, why the secrecy? Where is Paul?” I asked. We needed to get the most glaring question out of the way.

“It’s simple, really, in a complicated kinda way. I don’t think this was an Al Qaeda job. The official line is that it is Al Qaeda … but just because they claimed the bomb was theirs doesn’t make
it so. They take credit for shit they haven’t done all the time. Think about it—you are a terrorist organization; you explode a bomb in the middle of Nairobi, killing ten Americans …” Jason was saying.

“It’s funny how you Americans never count the African dead …” O interrupted.

“Okay, and fifty Kenyans, but it’s not you they want to kill …” Jason said, trying to correct himself.

“Death is death …” O said plainly.

“Let’s not get sidetracked,” I intervened, trying to get the conversation going. O looked at me but kept his peace.

“What I’m saying is, if you’re Al Qaeda you would try and maximize casualties, you would do it when the hotel is packed. We have spoken to dozens of witnesses, contacted all past hotel guests from the last month—and we have turned up nothing. This is not them—bombing a hotel after bringing down the Twin Towers? These fuckers don’t know how to downgrade. I know these guys, you have to see their rationality—like good businessmen, they want to build on past successes—and now they go back to bombing hotels in third world countries after striking at the very heart of the empire? And there was no chatter. This is too much outside our radar to be Al Qaeda,” Jason said, echoing Hassan earlier. “And then there is your guy … I think an American crew pulled the job.”

“You said that we would work the body and you’d work the bomb,” O reminded him.

“That hasn’t changed … You stay with the dead American. If he leads you to the bomb, and I believe he will, then you come to me and we bust this thing wide open,” Jason answered.

“That still doesn’t answer the question of why Paul isn’t here,” I said.

“We are on the same side—you and I. We need facts—that is how we stay safe and keep people safe. We need the facts before the spin, otherwise people, my people, die. I need the truth before it gets to the politicians and ambassadors. This is what makes us who we are—no illusions, we want the truth first. If you manipulate a lie, the truth will come back to bite you in the ass. Paul’s job is to spin the lie if the facts are as ugly as he is,” Jason explained, almost breaking into laughter.

“Mine is to find the facts about who is doing what, and how and why, so that we are protected from the blindness that comes with spinning. Paul and I, we’re on the same side, but our jobs are very different. I need to know the truth in order to do my job. He needs a good media day,” he continued, after holding himself together. Maybe Jason laughed to mask tension. I had seen it before.

He had a point. You have the people on the ground looking into something and you have the spinners. The spinners want things to look neat and categorical, and therefore they must have answers. The people on the ground want facts. As cops, if we are to solve the case, we can’t spin things—yes, we assume, we follow our gut, but when a fact contradicts that feeling, you follow the fact. I could see Jason and Paul having different priorities—one wanted facts, the other wanted what would sell well.

“So you’re saying we get to the truth of what happened, make sure you know it all, and then you do as you please?” O asked. “That would mean I’d be working for you guys. That will never happen.”

The CIA was not well liked here: the secret renditions, Guantánamo—it was no longer the schoolboys’ fantasy job from back in the day.

“This is a case about Kenya as much as it is about the United
States. You keep what is useful to you, to your country—and I do the same,” Jason replied.

He started to say something else, but O raised his hand to keep him quiet. We waited for a tense moment as O thought it through.

“When the time comes, just remember I said my piece,” O finally said, and shrugged. He wasn’t threatening Jason; he was just telling him where he stood. It was up to Jason to do as he pleased with that knowledge.

“This is what we know so far—our guy is most probably a black American. His death is somehow related to the bomb. We know there are another four white men involved,” I said, to start us off on our new partnership. Jason looked puzzled and so I explained what we had found in the security videos.

“I can’t believe our guys missed that,” he said, seeming genuinely surprised.

“No one would have thought of going back that far into the records. It’s like 9/11 and the planes, now we know it happens, but on September tenth it would have seemed crazy,” O said. “But you missed something else—the boiler repairman. Why?” O looked directly at Jason.

“Was he involved?” Jason asked.

“No, but still …” O said.

“This is what I am telling you,” Jason said. “This is something we have never seen before. And I have seen many things.”

He ordered another round of Tuskers.

O handed him printout images of the five men, explaining the sequence of events as we understood them.

“I can’t put any of my guys on this. Not yet. To get past Paul and my bosses back in Washington, we need to find out who
these men are—we need something concrete,” Jason said as he looked at them.

We agreed—we would start rattling the bushes and see what leaped out.

“You know, I remember you guys from the case of the dead white girl,” Jason said, as some
nyama choma
arrived with his round of Tuskers. “That case, it should be in every training manual. I’m glad we’re going to work together.”

“Can I ask you something, Jason?” I said.

“Shoot … I mean ask,” he said, laughing and pointing at my Glock. At last we were relaxing.

“Is Paul really convinced that it’s Al Qaeda and affiliates?”

“Paul—I have worked with him now for a number of years … his heart is in the right place. We both want the same thing for our country. Like two lovers fighting over a woman, you don’t want to cut her in half,” he answered, laughing.

We all knew I was asking whether Paul could be trusted, whether Jason thought he might be involved, and he had answered. He was saying we should stay away from him. Jason stood up to go smoke with O, and I sat around drinking my beer, wondering what was coming next—knowing whatever it was, I was going to be unprepared. There was one thing I could do, though, propose to Muddy. No matter what happened afterward, I would have that one moment to hold on to.

“What brings us to fucking Africa?” Jason was asking. They were back from their session. It was a continuation of a conversation they had been having outside.

“I was an undergrad—somewhere in there, study abroad in Tanzania—some remote village, teaching English for a summer in return for Kiswahili lessons—don’t ask me why now, I didn’t
learn shit. Most of my time was spent explaining America. I wasn’t just a U. S. student, I was an ambassador. There were so many misunderstandings. And I thought, this is what I want to do—I want to be of service—I was doing it anyway, I was good at it, and I loved it, so why not make a career out of it. The bomb, the deaths, this fucking bar, all this shit takes me back to that moment when I believed,” Jason said and looked at us expectantly.

“A religious moment? Saul becomes Paul becomes CIA?” O half-asked, laughing at his own high joke.

“Hell, yeah, it was a moment, all right. And you, O, why become a sheriff in the Wild West? For the pay?” Jason asked.

“You really want to know?” O responded, leaning forward. “Coz of a motherfucking tree … that’s what I’ve boiled it down to. The worst storm in the history of Kisumu—and I decide to step outside. I’m about nine years old, and I decide to step outside and play, go up to my tree house and see how it’s doing. I’m doing well, no one misses me in the house—so I keep going and I’m up in the tree house, which really is just a few boards and cloth for a window—something I had seen in a Famous Five or some shit like that.” He reached for his Tusker and, holding up one hand in the air, chugged what was left of it before continuing.

“And then the storm worsens. Clotheslines are snapping and I can see the telephone and electric posts that pass close to our house coming down, trees snapping, debris flying—but the tree I was holding on to—a gust of wind would come and it would sway with it, get this close to the ground, its branches would ebb and flow, harder and harder until I thought they were going to break and take me down with them—but the tree would always sway and pull back up straight. Then there’d be a gust and it would dip so close to the ground again and there is me
hanging on, knowing that my life was this tree. Anyway, no matter how close to the ground it came, it never gave me up or its other branches. That’s why I became a cop—I think anyway,” he finished, sounding almost sad. O was still high but it was a beautiful story that had Jason whistling in amazement. Now it was my turn to share.

“You’re going to laugh at this—I became a cop to do good. Simple and naïve, but that’s it,” I said, under the influence of the by now numerous beers. “You know, I used to be a Boy Scout and I would think, if only I had a gun. So there you have it.”

“There’s gotta be more …” Jason said as he and O laughed to the point of tears. There
was
more, like wanting to serve my people, but I didn’t feel like getting into it.

We’d run out of things to talk about and Jason, well toasted, decided to drive home.

“His was a good story—but we can’t trust him,” O said to me, after Jason had left.

“Yeah, I know. I figure for now we are fellow travelers but at some point he will want to take a different road … and it might not be very good for us. We just need to know when,” I answered.

Suddenly I felt tired and wanted to go home. Long days were ahead. But I didn’t stand up to leave. I sat there peeling the wet Tusker label from the bottle with the word “home” playing over and over again in my head.

Home—was I home here? Home, was home where I had come from? But if I went back far enough, wouldn’t home be here? Where was here? Kenya, Senegal, Nigeria? Home! Home was Mpande, his wife and daughter surviving a bomb blast in a strange country, home was them tapping away, arguing back and
forth in a dark and chaotic basement, trying not to wake their baby up. Home was us standing out there trying to find a way of bringing them home aboveground. Home was the chorus of barely equipped firemen using everything they had, even their own bodies, to make sure that Mpande and his family made it home.

I was going to propose tonight. It suddenly seemed silly that I had waited this long. I stood up.

“Tonight, I will ask Muddy to marry me,” I said to O.

“About time—man, you guys …” He stopped and laughed. “Do you even have a ring?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, and sat back down. “Muddy—you know her, she won’t care—she’ll actually think I’m being frivolous if I have a ring.”

“So you tell yourself,” O said, sobering me up. He called to MC Hammer, who back-slid over to us.

“This man here, he needs a ring—he wants to ask his woman to marry him,” O said to him.

“Two minutes,” Hammer said and dashed off.

Soon he was back. He asked me for my hand, laughing at his own joke, and placed a bunch of beaded rings into my palm.

“Ten, one for each finger,” he said with a smile. They were cheap beaded Maasai rings, but right about then, they were the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

I went for my wallet, but he stopped me.

“On me, my friend—for your work today,” he said.