Black Star Nairobi (8 page)

“You have some more work to do,” O said to me. We stepped outside and he called to one of the taxi guys. “Go home!” he said.

I walked over to the taxi gliding on air, like MC Hammer.

But when I got home, I remembered that Muddy had a performance the following evening and so I slipped in next to her, leaving the rings in my shirt pocket. There was no way I was
going to wake her up to propose now. Her response would be simple. “What the fuck? If I was going to marry you tonight, I would marry you tomorrow too.”

I passed out.

The following day, O and I started rattling the bushes. We went from tourist hotel to tourist hotel, from one cold trail to another, until at last we made our way to Limuru Country Club. It was a golf club that pretty much functioned like an upper-class Broadway’s. Under the guise of playing golf and protected by the privacy of a clubhouse, everything from land grabs to hostile takeovers was discussed here. The potbellied black and white men in white polo shirts and golf gloves went back to their businesses a little bit richer every day.

As we were about to sit down, a burly Kenyan man approached us, feigned a jab and a right hook in my direction, and I pretended to be knocked out and slunk into my seat.

The man’s name was Nyiks, short for Wanyika. A former boxer, he had almost held the national title back in the day. He and I had fought for real once, when he had called me a
mzungu
and I had just lost it. I won, but only because he was out of shape then—a victim of too much
nyama choma
. With some persuasion from O, he had helped us with the case of the missing white girl, and we had done each other a few solids, as we called favors. We had slowly become friends before we lost contact. After the fight he started hitting the gym again, and now he resembled George Foreman: big, a bit comical but strong and fit enough for anyone not to want to mess with him, unless they were in it for the long haul.

He was at the club to buy and sell American dollars to
tourists and wealthy Kenyans. It was illegal, of course, but legality could be easily bought—and so he operated freely, so freely that he had set up shop in one of spa rooms. He even had regular business hours, 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

After we explained what we were looking for and made it clear that there was enough cash to go around, he agreed to ask around the club and call us as soon as he knew something. It was past seven when we left him to go see Muddy’s performance.

The crowd at the Carnivore was an odd mixture of people. There were tourists tearing into crocodile meat and God knows what else—someone had once told me that for $500 a plate you got lion meat. The Kenyan elite in evening gowns and three-piece suits were dutifully sticking to the
nyama choma
and cocktails. The urban youth, trying to be hip in baseball caps and 49ers jackets, but broke as hell, were slowly sipping their Tuskers, trying to make a single beer last the night.

They were all here to see Muddy. As she walked onto the expansive stage, the lights came on, revealing a shirtless muscled conga player. Muddy was dressed casually, a sleeveless white shirt, jeans, and sandals. She had let her dreads let down—set them free, she would say—so that they came to the small of her back. The drummer did a solo, eliciting thunderous sounds from the congas before cascading into a low constant trickle of beats.

Muddy started.

“Here is the problem of being a witness, it never happens to your confessor, a witness is to be pitied, to be patted on her shoulder, warnings become post-traumatic stress disorders, a cry of pain, remembrances of the past. So, I stand here to warn, but you will pity me, pat me on my shoulder, share in my tears but
you will believe they are not yours, and you are not me. Deep down you will believe that I deserved it, it was because of something I might have done, or not done, and where I didn’t, you will and where I did, you will show restraint. Listen! There is no such thing as a trickle of blood, each drop today is a flood tomorrow …” and she went on and on until I thought she was losing the crowd. No one wanted to be told that tomorrow floods would come, especially when it had never happened. But she bravely continued until murmurs of open disapproval became grunts and yells of
Kenya Juu! Kenya Juu!

“You can yell ‘Kenya Up’ standing on top of God knows what all you want. But someday soon, please remember my words,” she said and silence reigned once again. She let the silence sit there as the drummer increased his tempo until the sound became terror—and then they both left the stage. There was polite applause, and then the conversations and the eating of exotic meat continued.

Muddy didn’t want to stay at the Carnivore and make a night of it, and so a slightly tipsy Mary invited us over. We liked to dissect, or rather listen to Muddy dissect, her performance the following morning over a long, lazy late breakfast.

O and I had had too many Tuskers and Mary wouldn’t let either of us drive. She hiked up her long teacher’s skirt, hopped into the driver’s seat, and sped us home through the Nairobi night. We stopped at a gas station, got a case of Tuskers, and drank late into the night, discussing Muddy’s performance, listening to music, and talking about things that had nothing to do with politics or the case. Just like in the old days when we were getting to know each other, we talked about past loves, hopes for the future, told funny stories, and just enjoyed being with each other.

They had found us and I was pleading with Jamal. I was praying to him, in the name of our past friendship and all we had been through together, to let Muddy and Mary live.

I could tell that whether they lived or died was not on him. It depended on the four white men who had quietly and methodically handcuffed our hands to the chairs at the dining table using those humane cuffs that I too had often used back in Madison. Both Muddy and Mary were gagged. Muddy was looking around her, calmly and dangerously, while Mary was screaming and struggling against her cuffs.

Tall, dignified, charismatic, and violent when I first met him, Jamal was now fat enough to appear short—he resembled a mid-level Kenyan politician. He had saved Muddy, O, and me from certain death sometime back. En route to Jomo Kenyatta Airport on what we later called the Highway of Death, he had warned us of an ambush. Without him risking his life to engage one of the cars, we would have been outgunned, outnumbered, and dead.

But to a man like Jamal the past had no business being in the present. We might as well have been strangers. Blood to him was like water, neutral. To his credit, he never pretended to be anything he wasn’t.

The four white men were casually dressed in various shades
of khaki so that they looked every bit the tourist. They had that American carelessness of dress that suggests casual power. Their T-shirts were an amalgamation of African tourist stops—Mount Kilimanjaro, Serengeti National Park, Sahara Desert, and Tsavo National Park.

Tall, with his hair cropped to hide the fact that he was balding in the front and back, Sahara had the kind of fitness that middle age ravages—but even though he was losing the battle of the bulge, it wasn’t for lack of going to the gym. His glasses magnified his small, intelligent eyes. He looked more like a hip anthropologist on vacation, or an Episcopalian priest trying to dress down.

Serengeti and Tsavo were the musclemen, tall, hard, with a military look. Kilimanjaro was huge, with the appearance of a lazy football player. His snow-capped head, from which long, stringy hair ran, cast a shadow over his eyes. It was clear that he was the go- to guy for all things painful—he did the heavy lifting. In contrast to Jamal, they all had a certain kindness to them that I could not describe—like they did things out of necessity, as opposed to Jamal, who did them by choice. They were much younger than him, probably in their late thirties.

The one wearing the Sahara T-shirt was in charge. Not that he was shouting orders; he asked for and suggested everything politely.

“Can you please handcuff him?” “The door needs some attention.” “And Mary, stop struggling so much, it only makes the cuffs tighter.” “Could someone please make sure that there is nothing on the stove?”

The other three men didn’t jump at his suggestions as if their lives depended on it, they listened first, and sometimes they even asked a follow-up question—like it was a learning moment.

“The stove—why?” Kilimanjaro had asked, for example.

“A very good question—the principle of an operation like this is the appearance of normality. Something burns, the fire alarm goes off, or neighbors smell smoke and come knocking. What was a contained situation becomes …” Sahara explained.

“I see,” Kilimanjaro said, interrupting him and nodding in agreement.

“Contain the situation, control all you can, and the rest …” Sahara said, his voice trailing off.

“The rest is out of your hands,” Kilimanjaro finished.

The white men had semi-automatics I had never seen before—the latest offerings from our fine American firearms industry, I could tell. Only Jamal had an AK-47—the African cigarette—an apt name because in some parts of the continent, the AK, like cigarettes, functioned as money, a medium of exchange.

Jamal had caught us off-guard. We were used to bad things being done only at night—daylight, at least the morning, was supposed to be the time when the good and bad guys got some sleep, or caught up with their loved ones, or prepared for war later, at night. In “Nairobbery,” we woke up, unlocked the heavily barred doors and windows to let some fresh air in, and tried to remember a time when night did not turn your home into a prison. Morning was life itself, a reminder that you had survived the night.

How could we have expected four white men and a former friend to walk in unannounced and take us hostage in the fucking morning? It was well known that O was a cop. The neighbors who might have seen them coming through the single entrance to the building would have thought they were friends of O. So the men had literally walked right in to find Muddy
and Mary sitting at the dining table, drinking chai and eating bread.

The men must have been monitoring our movements. They would have seen O leave to go see his sick mother in the hospital, followed by me on my way to Westland Gym to run on their worn-down treadmills. I never went running in Nairobi; it was just plain dangerous, with the dust, the fumes, and the driving. Whenever too much beer found me crashed at O’s, I preferred to sweat out the Tuskers at the gym.

Coming back, the closed curtains only gave me slight pause—I knew Mary never slept past eight, and she liked her apartment sunny and bright. I figured she might have decided to sleep in this once. Blindly, I walked into the trap Sahara and his men had carefully laid for us. I didn’t even have time to draw my weapon.

Jamal wanted to find out when O was coming back and so he untied Mary’s gag. He didn’t need to tell her not to scream.

“He went to the hospital. To see his mother, she has been ill,” Mary answered truthfully.

It wasn’t going to be a long visit. I didn’t know why, but things were always tense between O and his mother. He’d be back any minute now, but Mary cleverly said that she didn’t know how long he would be.

“Guestimate, as the Americans like to say. When can we expect his esteemed company?” Jamal asked.

“Midday, he said he would be back to make lunch,” Mary answered. Jamal put the gag back on her.

“Could be later … much later. O loves his African Time, or for the benefit of Ishmael, Colored People Time?” Jamal laughed, but the white men smiled politely.

“If you can give us what we want, we’ll be out of your hair
in a jiffy,” he added. Jamal and his Americanisms were amusing sometimes, but when he was pointing a gun at you, they were just plain cruel.

“You know O will come after you for this,” I said to him.

“All the more reason for us to have a friendly and bloodless chat. No?” Jamal said in return.

The white men hadn’t spoken a word to us. They were busy securing the room—disconnecting telephone and Internet lines, making sure the door was locked, and turning on the hallway lights. In the semidarkness of the dining room, O would be seen easily, without him being able to see us or his attackers in the shadows.

They pointed two reading lamps at us as Jamal dragged his gout-ridden body over to where I was seated.

“What the fuck do you want?” I asked him.

Jamal looked at the older white man, who stepped out of the shadows into the light.

“I guess that’s my cue. Please, call me Sahara. That over there is Tsavo, Kilimanjaro to his right, and to his left, Serengeti,” he said. Their tourist T-shirts; they were like masks, extensions of the wearer’s identity.

“Forgive the names—we know Africa is more than its wildlife. Africa is not a country—as CNN might have you believe. Also, do excuse our mutual friend here for being so dramatic. What Jamal is trying to explain is that there are two options. We walk out and everyone lives. Or all of you die. I am quite afraid that this is indeed one of those situations where there are no in-between solutions,” Sahara explained kindly. He paused for a few seconds before continuing.

“In the interest of efficiency and time, allow me to explain how we plan to proceed. We want some information. If we don’t
get it, we shall kill Mary first. And if we kill her, then we might as well kill both of you and O because if we let you live, you and the fellows at the CID will come after us … call it the domino effect, for lack of a better word. However, if you save Mary by telling me what I want to know, all that will have been lost is a bit of information. Surely, that cannot make us mortal enemies,” Sahara said, placing his hand gently on my shoulder.

“Ishmael, I abhor the idea of torture. I tell you this because you are a man who has seen enough to understand what I’m saying here … what the options are. I would rather we came to an intellectual understanding of just how total and unforgiving the consequences will be,” he added.

His reasoning, as odd as it was, made sense. A few years back, Jamal had seen Muddy shoot an unarmed man in cold blood for betraying her, and he knew her history with the Rwandan Patriotic Front. There was no threatening her, unless Sahara and his men could conjure up more terror than the genocide had. Jamal would have shared this with Sahara. They could threaten to kill Muddy with the hope that I would talk—except for one thing. If they killed Muddy, then I would have no incentive to talk.