Nairobi Heat (4 page)

As the second day came to an end I still had nothing, not even her name. It’s not that we hadn’t tried everything. By that evening her clothes, her nail polish, her stomach contents – you name it – had gone through forensics. We had even managed to trace the trash from Maple Bluff to the dumping grounds and rummaged through it. And we still had nothing that would narrow her down from the millions of young women who shop in malls and occasionally eat a slice of pepperoni pizza.

At eight o’clock that evening with nothing more to do, I decided to pay Joshua a visit. He was under heavy police protection, and I had to show my badge several times before finally knocking on his door. There was a uniform inside and he let me in, but to my surprise, I didn’t find the same Joshua I had met just two nights earlier.

‘I survived! I will not die here!’ He was pacing up and down in his silk pyjamas, clearly agitated, in his hand a nearly empty bottle of red wine. He looked much thinner and much taller. ‘Never again,’ he said. ‘Never again.’

He must have known that the MBPD cops were there to protect him from being lynched – he wasn’t under arrest – but it didn’t seem to matter to him. He had gone somewhere inside his own head, somewhere where what was happening around him made a different kind of sense, and when he looked at me it was without any sign of recognition. In fact, it was only once he had emptied the bottle of wine, and sent the cop to the wine cellar with the order ‘Any year will do’, that he looked at me like he knew who I was. ‘Sit,’ he commanded. I sat. ‘We shall drink any year, all year and celebrate America, eh?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘You, I answer all your question with no warrant, eh? Why did you send police to search my home?’ But before I could answer he said, to no one in particular, ‘But I understand. You similar, like all of them … You only follow order, no?’

His accent was heavier than it had been when we had first met. Just how much wine had he had? I wondered as the cop, a bit winded by the stairs, returned with a bottle. Joshua took it and expertly knocked the neck against the edge of the table so that it broke off cleanly, then he poured himself a full glass.

‘And my guest?’ he asked the cop, who went to the kitchen and came back with another wine glass. ‘Good day when whites serve blacks, no?’ he said with a mean laugh as the cop, red in the face, returned.

As Joshua poured me a full glass I decided that I would follow his lead, treading carefully. He was drunk, not stupid. He needed to talk. I would listen.

‘Ishmael, you know what it mean to die?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘It mean nothing. Nothing unless you live. Paradox. Survivor like me know death. You ever kill, Ishmael?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered truthfully. But this was Madison – so not often. And the few times that I had shot anyone, I had ended up throwing up. I had come to understand it was to purge myself. Not that I slept any better for it. ‘And you, Joshua, have you ever taken a life?’ I asked him.

‘Genocide, no game.’ He wagged a long finger from side to side. ‘No hide and seek, no police and robbers. I … I traded lives, Ishmael. Now tell no lie, eh? You ever save one life, two life, three life, hundred of life, more than a thousand life?’ He looked at me and laughed.

‘No,’ I said.

‘When you deal big, you trade big. You read me? I big hero, no?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘A million dead. You compare that to thousand I save. I trade losing hand, no?’

‘Look, man, we do what we can. You were only one man. Without you it would have been a million plus one thousand.
We do what we can. I do what I can. The girl is dead, but I would rather have saved her than catch the killer,’ I said earnestly.

‘You speak like friend to me. But no, man, you trade small; a life here, a life there. When you trade big, you lose big. No winner.’ He paused and looked at me, and for a moment his eyes were sober. ‘Detective Ishmael, why you here?’

I thought I could see an opening. ‘Why was there a dead white girl outside your house?’ I asked.

‘We are here. Me and you. Man to man. Ask what you want, no? Tomorrow, who remember?’ I heard the cop in the room shuffle his feet uncomfortably.

‘Did you kill the girl?’ I asked, my heart racing. Any confession he gave would be thrown out of court – the suspect was shit-faced – but at least I would know, and once I knew I could work my way backwards.

‘Wrong question. Start from beginning,’ he said with laugher in his voice, as if he could sense my desperation.

It was too late to do anything else, so I went on the offensive. ‘Look here, Joshua, you might be some sort of hero, but in this country they won’t think twice about taking your life for the girl’s,’ I said, trying to sound sincere. ‘You’re a nigger here, like me or the guy they shot forty-one times in New York.’

‘Your shield no protect you,’ he said. ‘I hear what happen in New York.’

It still made me angry to think about it. Damn it, a black undercover agent shot dead by two white cops in New York. How does one explain that?

‘But, still, I never meet her,’ Joshua continued. ‘Why kill
somebody I never meet?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Ishmael, let me tell you something. You say me and you niggers, but you do not know what you say. You want African and you to be nigger? You desire brotherhood of pain?’ he asked, his voice full of concern.

‘What are you talking about, Joshua?’ I asked him.

‘I show you what I mean,’ he announced, standing up and suddenly stomping his naked foot onto the broken neck of the wine bottle. He trembled in pain, then, reaching down, he pulled the neck from his foot. Blood gushed out, and he threw the bloody shard towards me.

‘You desire brotherhood of pain …? Now you do it,’ he yelled.

I stared back at him calmly. This was a test of will. I knew playing along would not earn his respect but neither would walking away.

‘Now that was foolish,’ I finally said.

‘Ishmael! Your turn!’ he commanded.

‘If you want to torture me, play me some of that African music,’ I said as calmly as I could and reached out to pour myself some more wine from the neckless bottle.

Joshua smiled. ‘I like you, Ishmael’, he said.

Hobbling over to his entertainment centre, trailing blood across the floor, Joshua pulled out a turntable and put on some reggae. ‘Alpha Blondie,’ he explained.

I didn’t wait for the first song to end before I chugged my wine. ‘No ambulances, too much press out there, just get your kit,’ I instructed the pillar of a cop as I got to the door.

‘And another bottle,’ Joshua yelled above the music.

Walking down his driveway to my car I thought there were two possibilities. Either Joshua was lying and he had killed the girl or he really didn’t know her and she was a message, a conversation between him and God knew whom. But I was convinced that he was part of the puzzle, if not the solution.

I made it back home in time for some late night TV As I sat in my lounge I wondered what it means for an African to meet an African American. Joshua was the first African I had really interacted with. Sad to say, but that was the truth – most come to Madison for school and leave as soon as they’re done. And those who stay are looking for the American dream – and part of achieving that is staying away from us.

Well, Joshua was my suspect. In another world, where the girl didn’t exist, we probably wouldn’t have met – me a struggling black cop and he an African hero. No point thinking about it, I told myself as I opened a cold Bud.

I was just about to open my second can of beer when my cellphone rang. ‘Is this Detective Ishmael?’ a voice with a heavy accent asked.

‘Yes, that’s me,’ I answered and quickly looked for the caller’s number.
Unknown
. It must have been an international number.

‘If you want the truth, you must go to its source. The truth is in the past. Come to Nairobi.’ And with that the person on the other end of the line hung up.

Almost immediately the phone rang again. ‘Who is this?’ I asked hurriedly.

‘I see you got the call.’ It was Mo. ‘What did he want?’

‘He wants me to go Africa.’

‘Where?’

‘Africa, goddamn it, fucking Africa …’ I said, getting angry with Mo for no good reason.

‘You gotta go,’ she said. ‘Babe, you have to.’

I wanted to see her. I asked if I could come over but she said no.

‘Keep ’em coming, all right, baby?’ she said and then she hung up.

I opened my beer. I finally had a lead. But what the hell? Who wanted to chase this thing all the way back to Africa? Where would I even start? But thinking back over the last two days, the call was only confirming what I had known instinctively: that, somehow, Joshua was in the middle of it.

‘All that was last week,’ I told O. ‘I had to plead with the Chief to give me two weeks. After two weeks I told him that he could throw me to the wolves if I didn’t have something for him. No one besides you, your Chief and my Chief knows I’m here. If the press in the United States finds out that the lead investigator is chasing ghosts in Africa, it’s off with our heads. So, O, that’s how come I’m sitting with you here drinking Tusker beer and eating
nyama choma
instead of solving my case.’

‘Damn, Ishmael!’ O whistled through his teeth. ‘What a story, what a story. So you are here because of a single telephone call? The suspect and the victim are back in your country and you are here? And you do not even know who called your ass?’

I couldn’t help laughing with him at the absurdity of the situation.

‘It is crazy but somehow it makes sense,’ O finally said. ‘But tonight we drink, eat and make merry for tomorrow we die … Cheers!’

And suddenly, for the night, we were just two cops working a case that was bigger than us, sharing one, two, many beers. Sometimes it’s good to take a day off so that you can start the next day with fresh eyes.

It had taken about two hours to fill O in. Soon after I had finished my story a man walked into the bar carrying a guitar. He and the bartender yelled back and forth for a while. He had been supposed to come at ten, O explained, for ‘one man guitar’. I was very tired, ready for sleep, but I didn’t want to leave before hearing some music.

As the man finally made his way to the stage I noticed that I was breathing hard and that my hands had balled themselves into fists. I felt incredibly anxious, as if my life depended on the music that this man would play – it was as if I was on the verge of a panic attack. Then, without any introduction or fanfare, the man looked straight at me and said in halting English, ‘This, for my black brother. Remember black brother, tip bartender and I well.’

His small speech over he started tapping the guitar with his hands so that the sound came at the tail of his laughter. He sounded like a one-man drum machine. And then he stopped, so that the silence in the bar almost became a song – the soft mutterings of the drunks, the hot wind blowing through the doorway, the sound of teeth tearing meat from bones and the clatter of glasses and bottles. I felt like I was being lifted out of myself, but before I was completely gone sounds that were half blues and half something else brought me back. His
hands were a blur, his feet furiously tapping dust high into the air as the yellowish light from the kerosene lamp bathed him in a golden glow.