Nairobi Heat (9 page)

‘Give me the money Lord Thompson paid you,’ I said to the man.

He hesitated, looked at O and then with his free hand he reached into his pocket and took out a wad of notes. I walked to the bartender and gave him the money.

Outside, in the street, the crowd from the bar – white and black, rich and poor – had formed itself into an angry mob, and as we emerged they started spitting and yelling at the man. We stood for a while and watched as he tried to carry the body of the woman through the throng, but it wasn’t long before they descended on him – punching and kicking. It was hard to believe this was the same crowd that was dancing just a few minutes ago. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity,
he and the body he was carrying fell to the ground. Only then did O shoot several times into the air, and in the relative calm that followed tell the crowd to let the man go. By then the young man was sobbing, his legs trembling, but somehow he once again managed to pick up his accomplice, get her body over his shoulder and stagger off into the night.

We got into O’s Land Rover as the crowd filed back into the bar – with us gone it was no longer a crime scene.

‘Why did you let him go?’ I asked O.

‘If we’d taken him with us we’d have to babysit him,’ he replied curtly. ‘And anyway, you had already pissed all over him …’ He laughed and started up the Land Rover.

Without asking, I knew we were going to pay Lord Thompson a visit. The old fuck had tried to kill us and now we needed to find out why. He was the link we had been looking for.

‘All of this is just a game to him,’ O explained as he turned back onto the main road. ‘He could have had us back at the farm. It would have been easy enough. But, no, he has to send us on some wild goose chase to some bar …’

I couldn’t argue with that, it seemed to be well within the old man’s character, so instead I asked O what his deal was with Lord Thompson. It was time for a fuller explanation.

‘The first guy he killed was a poacher,’ O started. ‘Thompson hunted him. I mean he tracked him down like an animal and shot him. The Africans out on the farm told me. But in the end he was not even booked.’ He paused. ‘Poachers do not get much sympathy from me, but you don’t kill a man for killing an animal, I don’t care how beautiful it looks. Take him to prison, but do not kill him. The other guy he killed was
a game warden. He was out on Thompson’s property looking for poachers. Again Lord Thompson tracked him down and afterwards claimed that he mistook him for a poacher. But that’s very unlikely. The guy was in a bright green game warden’s uniform. But he got away with it again: white skin and wealth equals impunity.’

‘Ain’t that the truth everywhere,’ I said to him.

‘And there are other rumours I could never get to the bottom of: rapes and disappearances. That farm is his kingdom,’ O said.

I was suddenly very curious. O had told me that he had become a cop because he didn’t make it into the one and only university in Kenya, but in light of what I had seen of him his answer seemed flippant. What had made him so irresolute in his definition of good and evil? And where did his screwed-up sense of crime and punishment come from? I asked him, and well, he had a story to match my Random Killer story.

‘Well, let’s see …? A few years back a rich guy, his wife and two young children were murdered. Shot. With the rich shits it is almost always about money and rarely about sex. So, we followed the money and it led us straight to his business partner. Amos Kamau, that is the partner’s name, wanted to make all the money. It was not like their car import business was going bankrupt. It was not even a criminal enterprise, where the rules of the jungle might apply. They were a legit car import company that was doing well, making them both rich, but Amos just wanted everything for himself. So, we arrested him, but within a week we were ordered to release him, and just like that he was out. Everyone now knew he was a killer, no doubt, but he was out, bribed his way out. He
wanted to make a point, so he asked that I drive him home. On the way I asked him whether he really did it. And he said yes. Why, I asked him. Guess what the little shit said? “Because I could get away with it.” Today he is chairing fund-raisers for politicians, giving money to poor children and generally living it up. His crime has been forgotten because of his good deeds.

‘A few weeks later, a poor man found a thousand shillings, just like that. He went home, fetched his wife and two kids and took them for
nyama choma
and ice cream. They had a good time. But when they got home, he killed them all. The neighbours called us. We got there to find him sitting outside his hut, his panga still wet with blood. No resistance from him. As I drove him to the station I asked him why he did it. He said he had been working all his life, waiting for a break. After thirty years, his only lucky break had been the thousand shillings. He had killed his family to spare them the hardships of the kind of life he was able to provide for them. So, I told him that his story would make sense only if he had killed himself as well, or at least tried to kill himself, but with him alive it looked like plain murder. I turned to look at him and he leaned closer and said: “But I am not mad.” It was not denial; his actions were those of a sane man who had come to the end of his road … He was hanged soon after,’ O said. ‘And the rich guy? What does he get in the end? Everything.

‘So, after that I started believing in justice I could see. We live in anarchy; life is cheap and the rich and the criminals can buy a whole lot of it. Meantime, someone has to be on the side of justice. Janet … That young man would have been out of jail the following day for five hundred shillings, and he would
have found her. Maybe what I do matters, maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know.’ O stopped as if suddenly feeling self-conscious as his musings became scattered. ‘Ah, O the philosopher, the modern Socrates,’ he added with a laugh.

His story made sense and it didn’t, just like my Random Killer story – at some point it broke down. But intuitively it made sense. Or perhaps we all have an ink-blot case – the case that we use to justify every fucked-up thing we do.

‘Well, let’s go arrest the fucker,’ I said to O. ‘He can’t get away with it this time.’

At the gate we found two black guards warming themselves by a fire. It was two thirty am. O rolled his window down and showed them his badge, then he got out of the car. He spoke to them in Kiswahili for a few minutes, to explain the situation, I gathered. The guards didn’t say anything. They simply lifted the gate and we drove in. It didn’t surprise me – Lord Thompson wasn’t worth their lives, and rather than engage us it was simply easier to let us through. Thompson’s whiteness had long been a shield only because the black people around him held it up. And in return? Humiliation and murder were his stock-in-trades. It could have been revenge for the murders, or for his owning so much land while they owned nothing, or for mocking them by imitating what he thought the essence of African life to be, but the end result was the same – our being allowed into the house without as much as a single alarm going off.

This time we did not have to ring the bell – the guards had called ahead to their colleagues by the big oak doors and
they stood open. When we got to Thompson’s bedroom, his two mercenaries were standing by the doors smoking. They hadn’t been informed of our arrival and we shot them as they fumbled for their AK-47s. They didn’t stand a chance.

As we made sure the mercenaries were really dead we heard screaming coming from inside Lord Thompson’s room. O threw open the bedroom door, but the gunshots must have registered as part of a nightmare, because although the old man was tossing and turning in his bed when we walked in, he was quite obviously fast asleep.

We turned the lights on, then woke him up. It took him a moment to adjust to the light before he yelled for his mercenaries. We waited for him to realise they weren’t coming to his rescue.

‘They are dead. It’s just you, O and me,’ I explained.

Dressed in his striped pyjamas, in his mahogany bed surrounded by squalor he looked truly comical.

‘Njoroge!’ he yelled for his help.

A few seconds later Njoroge sauntered in. He looked over at us and at the old man. ‘Sir, what seems to be the problem?’ he asked, but Lord Thompson didn’t understand him, he just looked at us with confusion.

‘Sir, everything seems to be in order,’ Njoroge continued calmly. ‘Have a good night.’ And with that he closed the door behind him. It was as if he had been practising those exact words his entire life.

Terror registered on the old man’s face. Betrayed by his black help, the nightmare that his whiteness had protected him from was standing before him.

‘You know why we are here?’ I asked him.

‘They failed, they failed, they failed,’ he chanted as if he needed to hear himself say it before he knew it was true.

‘Was it Joshua who asked you to do this?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. It was a white man. He asked me to help … said it was important,’ he answered.

‘And will you kindly tell us who this white man is?’ O asked as if Lord Thompson was a little kid.

‘His name is Samuel Alexander. He works for …’

‘The Refugee Centre,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘And why did he ask you to have us killed?’

‘I do not know. Samuel said that you and O were trying to bring him down. I did not ask anything more.’

It didn’t make any sense. The old man was wealthy and protected and no one was forcing him to help Samuel.

‘Why did you do it?’ I couldn’t stop myself from asking.

‘I don’t know, Ishmael. I don’t know … Because he asked,’ he answered. ‘Who knows why we really do anything.’

The poor fool, he couldn’t see it. He had done it to preserve an old order of race and class – because a fellow white man had asked him. And because he could. The same reason why he had killed before.

‘Listen, you are of no concern to me,’ I said. From the corner of my eye I could see O was getting impatient. ‘Give me something useful. What do you know about Joshua or the girl?’

‘Nothing about your girl. But I have heard things about Joshua …’

‘What things?’

‘That he can be cruel … In public he is all smiles, but he has a mean streak, yelling and threatening people when he
does not get his way,’ the old man answered despairingly, only too aware of how useless his information was.

‘You really don’t know anything else, do you?’ O asked the old man.

‘The Refugee Centre, it’s run by the Never Again Foundation,’ Lord Thompson stammered. ‘To get to the truth, get to the Never Again Foundation.’

‘That we know. Try again, old man,’ I said, hoping he had more information – something conclusive – even though I knew he did not.

‘I told you this day would come,’ O said to him almost absent-mindedly.

‘I have lived for a long time,’ the old man replied, ‘but if you are going to kill me, at least let me die with some dignity.’

O didn’t say anything, so the old man looked at me, but I averted my eyes.

‘Let me die like a man!’ he shouted.

I was torn. I wanted to stop O, but Lord Thompson had two murders to answer for, and if things had gone his way, we would have been dead as well.

Walking over to a large chest, Lord Thompson removed a leopard skin, a beaded whisk and a large, regal-looking hat made out of lion-hide. Then, taking off his pyjamas, he put on his African best – finishing the effect by tying a number of brightly coloured amulets around his ankles. Finally, he stood up straight, and took a deep breath as if preparing for his death, but at the last minute his courage failed him.

‘Listen, Ishmael, I might know something …’ he said. ‘Okay? Okay? Let me think.’ He didn’t even pause. ‘Some African wisdom for you, eh, Ishmael?’ He gestured to me
as one would to a person with whom one had something in common – as if we had some secret partnership that excluded O. ‘To catch ants, you use honey. You use honey to catch ants, you use cunning to …’

He didn’t finish the sentence because O shot him once through the head. Then, taking a lighter from his pocket, he struck a flame and threw it onto the bed which soon caught fire. There was a fury and logic in him I was beginning to understand – maybe because I was becoming like him. O had drawn a line between what he considered his world and the outside world. The good people – his wife, Janet, the dead white girl – existed in the outside world. When he was in that world, he was visiting and he behaved accordingly. He did not carry his bad dreams and conscience into it. But sometimes those from his world went to the outside world and did terrible things. And when he came across them, or they crossed back into his world, there were no rules, and there was no law. There was a duality to him that was so complete that he moved between the two worlds seamlessly.

‘Come on, Ishmael, we have to go,’ O said gently as smoke started to fill the room. ‘He was supposed to have died a long time ago.’

But even as O turned to leave I fell to my knees and threw up. Having narrowly escaped being killed twice in the three short days I had been in Nairobi, I had wondered whether I was becoming blasé about the taking of a human life, but obviously a little piece of my conscience was still alive and well in this fucked-up place. I understood that in O’s world justice was long overdue, but that didn’t stop me from pitying the old man – there was something pitiable in him and perhaps, for
that reason alone, we should have let him live.