Nairobi Heat (5 page)

The bartender walked over and stood in front of the guitar player. She started moving slowly – so slowly that she seemed to be pulling against the furious rhythm, a tug of war that she was slowly losing so that her hips and arms flailed faster and faster until it looked like she was being jerked around by the music. Then, just when it started looking painful, the guitar slowed down to a familiar blues melody – one note at a time, one tap at a time. It was the guitar pulling her back to earth as she slowly gyrated to the ground. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the song ended and the bartender clapped her hands and went back to the bar as if nothing had happened.

I started choking, having hardly breathed throughout the performance, but O seemed not to have noticed anything. I felt exhausted. I had been to a place within myself that I didn’t know existed, a place that was beautiful and terrifying. The music had briefly awoken something in me – a rage or a healing. It was as if I had taken a hit of acid. Perhaps the beers and long plane ride, the jet lag and the exhaustion of the last few days had come to a head.

‘Buy him a Tusker,’ O said as he pushed a five hundred shilling note into my hand, ‘if you liked the music, that is.’

‘I’ll pay you back when I change some money,’ I said, but he simply waved me on drunkenly.

‘Tonight no need for a hotel. Just crash at my place.’ He took a photograph out of his wallet. ‘Detective Ishmael, meet my wife,’ he announced.

It was a rough photograph and I couldn’t make out her
features beyond a small Afro. ‘She’s beautiful,’ I said.

I waved the bartender over and gave her the money, gesturing a beer for her and the guitarist. ‘Ten Tuskers?’ she asked, lifting up ten fingers.

I laughed. ‘Why not?’

As we were leaving, she was piling the bottles at the guitarist’s feet. ‘Goodbye, my black brother,’ the guitarist said, with a deep laugh, nodding his head back and forth to the music he was playing.

I waved. ‘Goodbye, black brother,’ I repeated.

Neither a tourist nor a visitor, but a detective in search of the truth – and not just any detective, a black American detective – I knew I was about to enter Africa’s underbelly. If lucky, I would see some beauty as well. But as we left The Hilton Hotel bar I knew I was not going to see Africa like some tourist staring at animals through a pair of binoculars.

We got to O’s place really late. He lived in Eastleigh Estate, which he described as a lower-middle class Nairobi suburb. Lit by the Land Rover’s headlights the houses all looked the same – narrow, two-storey dwellings with chain-link fences and fierce-looking dogs – and with all the twists and turns, it felt like we were tunnelling through a maze. Eventually we arrived at his house, where he showed me to an empty room. Within minutes I was fast asleep.

O shook me awake just before dawn. After a cold shower I walked into the kitchen to find his wife sitting at the table grading hand-written papers – O hadn’t told me she was a high school teacher. Of medium height, and a little bit on the stocky side, she was wearing a long black-and-white polka-dotted dress and sported a huge Afro. She reminded me of photos I had seen of black women in the 1960s – the radical feminists with a fist always up in the air. She had a gap between her two front teeth, the only flaw in an otherwise perfect smile.

‘My name is Maria, Odhiambo’s wife,’ she said, pointing
to O, who was busy making breakfast.

I introduced myself and watched as she gathered her papers together, finished her cup of tea and kissed O goodbye.

O was quite a chef – his omelette was superb. ‘It is because you Americans use frozen ingredients. Here it is straight from the garden,’ he said when I complimented him. Then he smiled. ‘And my wife cannot cook. She tries but she is not gifted that way.’

‘You are a rare breed, my friend,’ I said, much to his delight. ‘A black male feminist detective chef.’

He took a joint from his shirt pocket. ‘Now I am a black male feminist detective chef with a joint,’ he said as he lit up.

I don’t smoke weed, not because I’m a cop, it’s just that it gives me the giggles – hours of ridiculous, uncontrollable laughter – and I would rather not look stupid.

‘Today we will rattle the bushes,’ O said after I had declined a drag on his joint.

He and I both knew that if the man who had told me to come to Nairobi was serious all we had to do was show up in the right places, make our presence known, and he would find us.

The first bush we rattled was the Rwandan Consulate. The consulate was in Muthaiga Estate, where the houses were so huge that I felt like I was back in Maple Bluff. Nothing. Of course they knew Joshua. Without people like him there would be no Rwanda. Could he have been involved in any criminal activities? No, of course not. Enemies? Yes. Could they be more specific? It could be anyone.

We went next to the Refugee Centre in Nairobi CBD, the charitable arm of the Never Again Foundation. The office was
on the top floor with a magnificent view over the whole city. As we waited for the Director to see us I let my eyes wander out to the horizon, watching as the buildings got smaller and smaller and the smokestacks rose higher and higher above them.

After a fifteen-minute wait, we were let in to see the Director, Samuel Alexander, a white American dressed in a T-shirt and faded blue jeans. His office looked like some kind of African museum – from the artwork to the thick jungle plants – but he seemed very happy to see a fellow American, and for a few minutes he spoke about the things that he missed the most: McDonald’s, fifty-two TV channels with nothing on them, high-speed Internet and the roads. ‘By God, do I miss the roads,’ he cried. ‘The roads here are shit.’ He had a point there, I concurred.

‘So, gentlemen, what can I do for you?’ Samuel Alexander finally asked.

I explained we were looking for information on Joshua – anything that might help us with an investigation we were conducting.

‘About that white girl?’ he asked. ‘Courtesy of CNN International,’ he added, seeing the look on my face.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘The man is a
fucking
hero,’ he said, stressing the word. He then asked us to go with him to a conference room and there we found several large posters of Joshua hanging on the wall covered with slogans like
You can be a hero too – give
and
I saved hundreds – so can you
. There were some brochures on the desk that also had his face on them. Joshua was their poster boy – his face helped them raise money, Samuel explained. It was
Samuel who had recruited Joshua shortly after the genocide to help with raising money for the Refugee Centre. But that was the extent of their relationship.

‘Did you meet him here, in Nairobi?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, several times. I gotta tell you though, Joshua is a gentle African … He would never harm anyone,’ he answered.

Finally, I asked Samuel Alexander if he knew of any Rwandan refugees or genocide survivors that we could talk to, but he told me that it would be a privacy breach to give us such information.

As we took the lift back down to the ground floor I was happy that we had at least placed Joshua in Nairobi. Beyond that we had nothing, but it didn’t matter, we were rattling the bushes.

Later, as we ate a lunch of fried chicken and fries, O told me that he had an idea of where we could find some Rwandan refugees. He suggested we leave his Land Rover in the city – in his car we would be easily made – and take public transport to a place called Mathare.

After we were done eating, O flagged down a small rainbow-coloured Nissan matatu that had Tupac’s ‘Dear Mama’ playing at full volume. We got off in Mathare – a slum area – and stood on the side of the tarmac road, trying to decide which of the muddy footpaths that wove in and out of the endless rows of shacks we should take. It was as if I had stepped into one of those infomercials with the stream of skeletal children, too used to the flies crawling over their faces to shoo them away. And the smell – it was a surprise. In spite of the open sewers and the thousands of barely clothed
sweating bodies milling around us it wasn’t a bad smell. Yes, it had several layers to it – sex, shit, cheap perfume, bad breath, booze, weed, sickness – but the sum of these parts wasn’t bad, and though it settled in my throat like thick smoke, it didn’t make me cough.

O explained that Mathare was sectioned off into various ethnicities – you had the Luo, Kikuyu and Kamba sections. And then you had the refugee section, itself sectioned off according to nationality – Sudanese, Ugandan, Congolese, et cetera. This was a land of suffering, an inverted Tower of Babel that descended into hell instead of rising to heaven.

We made our rounds – O, with his spare frame and bloodshot eyes, almost fitting in; me, with my American baby fat, sticking out – until we found the Rwandan section. ‘We are from the Refugee Centre and would like to talk to you,’ O would say as he knocked on one of the poles that held up the piece of sackcloth that the residents used as a door. Then we would show Joshua’s photograph to the occupants, but everyone we asked just looked back at us and said they didn’t know him.

After three hours of house-to-house I was starving. O spotted some small boys roasting maize over a fire, went over and negotiated for two full cobs. Used to American corn, I took a huge bite only to find it so hard I thought my front teeth would break. One of the boys laughed, took the cob from me and showed me how to shell it, holding it with his left hand and picking at it with his right. He said something to me in Kiswahili.

‘He is saying this is tax,’ O translated as the boy threw the pieces he had shelled up in the air in quick succession, leaning
back, mouth open so that they landed on his tongue. Then he handed my cob back and we were off, leaving him and his friends beside themselves with laughter.

Peeling one kernel at a time it took me what seemed like forever to finish my snack, but finish it I did. However, as I threw the empty cob away I heard a woman screaming from somewhere nearby. I looked around, but everybody was going on about his or her business as if deaf to the sound. For a moment I thought I was hearing things.

‘Follow me, Ishmael,’ O said urgently, moving in the opposite direction to the noise. ‘Remember where you are,’ he warned.

I took a step after O and the woman screamed; another step, another scream. I felt like she could see me abandoning her and I couldn’t stand it. Turning, I started walking back towards the screams, then broke into a full run with my gun drawn, people jumping out of my way.

Guided by her voice, I ran until I was outside one of the shacks. Pulling back the cloth that hung across the door, I made out the shape of a man, with his pants rolled to his knees, lying on top of the screaming girl. I walked in quietly, letting the curtain fall back into place, and stuck my gun to the man’s head. He must have thought it was a friend playing a joke on him because he said something in Kiswahili, laughed and made as if to continue with the rape. ‘Motherfucker,’ I said as I slid the safety off.

He stopped immediately and rolled off the girl, trying desperately to pull up his pants and put up his hands at the same time. O came in, and without asking any questions knocked the man to the ground and handcuffed him. Meanwhile the
girl, in a white-and-red school uniform, had rolled down her skirt and was desperately trying to button her torn blouse. ‘Are you learning English in school?’ I asked her.

She nodded.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Janet,’ she whispered.

‘Okay, Janet, I promise we’ll get you out of here,’ I said, trying to sound gentle, surprised at how calm I was.

O hadn’t said a word but I could tell he was furious. Then he seemed to make up his mind about something and sprang into action. He handed Janet his jacket, walked to the makeshift door and looked outside. Moving back into the shack he stuck a dirty sock in the man’s mouth, pulled him to his feet and, holding him by the seat of his pants, gun held to the back of his head, he pushed him outside. Janet and I followed, my Glock held firmly in front of me.

A crowd had formed outside, but it parted to let us through. We didn’t know where we were, so O asked the girl, and she pointed us in the direction we needed to go. With Janet guiding us it wasn’t long before we saw headlights rushing past on the road up ahead, but just when I thought we were in the clear, I heard someone yell something behind us in Kiswahili. It sounded like a command, and we turned around to see four young men dressed like they had just popped out of a rap video, only instead of fistfuls of dollars their hands held AK-47s and they were aiming them at us. It was then that I understood what I had done. It was as if my partner and I had gone to Allied Drive without backup, arrested a gang leader, and then tried to walk him out on foot.

I pushed Janet behind me as a thin trickle of cold sweat
ran down my neck. It was simple, we were going to die here, I thought as I pointed the Glock in the general direction of the young men.

O was standing with the rapist in front of him, holding his gun to the back of his head. He said something to the men and they hissed back at us. If we let the rapist go they would kill us anyway. I asked O to tell them we would trade their friend if they let the girl go. Nothing doing.