by Carl Hancock
Downstairs, Rebecca was surrounded as soon as she made her way into the restaurant. Tom was not ignored. He was amazed at how many people had heard about his kidnap and wanted to get the story from the inside. Later, as he looked out from his window at the traffic and the streets still thronging in the middle of the night, he was pleased at the thought that he was no alien in this amazing place, no more so than scores of those passing below at that very minute. The fear, the self-pity was gone. He looked forward to the new dawn and the adventures it would bring.
The days that followed fell into a loose pattern. The concert was the fixed climax. Tom could not break the built-in habit of early rising, hours before breakfast was due, but, while there was still darkness up beyond the ceiling of street-lights he took to the pavements for gentle jogs. Mama Dorcas had insisted on rigging up a comfortable sling to hold his left arm in place.
Broadway was his route and his target for his fourth week was Columbus Circle and the south-west entrance to Central Park. The middle part of the day was spent outdoors which on Sunday meant a group visit to a Baptist church close to the East River for a high old time on hymns with a swing and red hot talking, open confessions, testimonies and dynamic, heavenly blasts from the lips of the handsome, black pastor who delivered his apocalyptic message with challenging and emotional language.
The two people connected to the group who opted out of the Sunday sessions were Henry and Rikki Fender. Tom got to know Rikki quite well. He was the odd one out in the band. He, too, had been to public school in England, courtesy of fees paid by his father to supplement the money from a choral scholarship at St Paul’s. He knew the city better than the rest of the group, and on their leisurely meanderings around Midtown, the young men exchanged brief life stories.
‘I’m lucky Toni took me on. He can’t find a lot of stuff for a violinist.’
‘Violinist?’
‘Don’t sound too shocked! I’m pretty damn good. Went to music school and all that. So far no luck with the big orchestras. No experience! So I’m trying a few things. Ever heard of a French guy, Stephanne Grapelli? I suppose not, coming from Kenya and all that. I was born in Nairobi Hospital. Probably I’m more African than you are, Thomas. Jazz, you like jazz? Old Stephanne wowed them in Paris for years.’
Rikki hesitated briefly. ‘Tell you something. Henry knew about Stephanne. Says he saw him play in the old Hot Club. I meant to check that out. Listen, watch that guy. He’s more slippery than a green mamba on ice. He tried it on with Mary. Mary, the boss’s daughter, for god sakes. Tell Rebecca and still keep an eye open. And don’t worry about me. I don’t go for the ladies.’
‘Rikki, I thought Rebecca told me you were playing for her tonight, just the two of you on stage.’
‘Hell and damnation! You’re right. Some Gershwin number. My big chance and I’ve blown it.’
‘No, no. Let’s get back. It took a bit of time but we found it. I knew we would.’
‘Found?’
‘That music you were looking for. That’s why we came out, isn’t it? Bring your violin to my room. Rebecca’ll be there. Private rehearsal. I’ll tell Toni what happened.’
‘Thomas, they haven’t got a Mafia in Kenya these days by any chance?’
The days ran down until they were almost halfway to home time. The concerts played to big numbers every night. ‘African band surprise hit at the Flamingo’. ‘Toni Wajiru finds new black diamond’. Newspaper music critics were bowled over. Harry was trying to push Toni to persuade Rebecca to stay on.
The Kisumu bar was crowded. Tom and the four mamas had just returned from their longest outing yet, an hour’s ride into Connecticut from Grand Central. The coffee and ice-cream ritual was about to get under way when two portly men entered and crossed towards Tom.
‘Mr Thomas McCall?’ Tom nodded as they took out their badges. ‘I’m Lieutenant Murray and this is Officer Flanagan. We’d like to have a few words with you in private, if possible in your room. There are one or two things we need to check over. Probably routine.’
‘What’s this probably?’ A smiling Monica had been transformed into a hard-faced, aggressive fireball. ‘Why can’t we talk here? We’re all friends. We have no secrets. This young man is new to the country.’
‘Madam, your concern for Mr McCall does you credit. Now butt out and let me get on with my job. Mr McCall, if you please!’ The lieutenant did not try to hide his impatience. He raised his hand to ward off more protests from the ladies and in seconds Tom was leading the policemen out of the room when Ruth called out unashamedly, ‘You cops take care! That boy’s got a wounded arm!’
The four ladies decided that something strong was called for to give that coffee an extra kick. They might have some serious thinking to get on with.
Upstairs the policemen were polite but firm. The lieutenant sat in the armchair opposite Tom while his colleague stood by the door. A few inquiries soon settled personal details.
‘Mr McCall, I understand that there is quite a lot of illegal drug-taking in your country. Homemade stuff. Ever heard of “bhang”?’
‘Heard of it, yes.’
‘Ever try it?’
‘Never.’
‘Or any other substances?’
‘No.’
The policemen exchanged glances before the lieutenant continued. ‘Mr McCall, perhaps you are aware that we have a serious drug problem here in the United States. The stuff comes from all over, South America and East Asia mainly. We’re finding more and more smuggling linked to Africa, East Africa. That’s where you come from.’
‘Yes, but what are you getting at?’
‘We’ve received a tip-off that you have been involved in this … business.’
‘Ridiculous … This can’t be happening. There’s been a big mistake. Tip-off! Crazy.’
‘What if I tell you that in this very room there is a consignment of high-grade cocaine? You’ve come to the right place. Easy market. High rollers. Only …’ The lieutenant’s tone changed to impatient and threatening. ‘Mr Thomas McCall of Naivasha, Kenya, I’m going to read you your rights and Officer Flanagan here is going to search this room — with your permission, of course.’
Tom’s eyes were closed as he nodded his consent. They remained closed until he heard a drawer being pulled back. When they did open, the lieutenant sniggered as he saw the anger in them and the pent-up fury in his body language. Before either of them could speak, Officer Flanagan announced coolly, ‘Would you take look at this, Lieutenant? Found it under some shirts.’
The lieutenant took the package that was wrapped neatly in white paper. Like his colleague he was now wearing a light pair of gloves. He tried it for weight. ‘Ten, twelve pounds, Flanagan?’
‘Thereabouts, I’d say.’
‘Sir!’ the lieutenant barked, ‘you are coming with us down to precinct headquarters where our forensic officers will open your package …’
‘That’s the point. It is not my package. Not, not!’
‘That’s what they all say. Will open your package and test it. Or, listen carefully, we could call those officers up here with all their equipment and they can do the business in this room. Now that’s going to upset your friends and the management …’
‘Okay, okay, I’ll come.’
An hour later Tom was seated on the side of a hard bed of the precinct holding cell. As he awaited the arrival of Toni and a lawyer, he was calm but far from confident that his nightmare would soon be over.
A party of four was standing outside the cell. Rebecca was distressed, smiling through tears and holding the hand of Monica who was tight-lipped, watching every movement of the duty officer, daring him to step out of line, her line. She felt compelled to say something just to let him know that she was there and not on his side.
‘Listen. I was born and brought up in Kenya — you’ve never heard of it — and I know policemen. No one in Kenya trusts a cop!’
As he moved to unlock the cell, the sergeant turned to Moni
ca. ‘Madam, I’m sorry I don’t know your name, but I do know Kenya. I’ve visited and I think you may be right about your … law people. Only two allowed inside, the lawyer and one other.’
The lawyer was tall and looked keen, but to Tom’s eyes, surely not long out of school. Toni was enthusiastic and it showed in his introduction. ‘Tom, this is David Ngong, hot-shot lawyer, trained in Columbia Uni, in this very city, but as Kenyan as any of us. He’ll get us out of this jam in quick time.’
During the session inside the cell, supervised by the sergeant, Rebecca and Monica moved out of sight but not out of hearing. David was brisk and direct and made extensive notes. Tom was relieved that he believed his story.
‘The case is straightforward with one, quite serious, problem. Find the person or persons behind this stitch-up. NYPD can keep you in for forty-eight hours then they must charge you or release you. No bail. You might skip the country. Don’t worry, we’ll be very busy out there.’
Rebecca was allowed five minutes with Tom, supervised and separated from him by the cold, thick bars of the cell.
‘Thomas, who could have done such a thing?’
They squeezed hands and put their faces close. ‘Get back!’ The barked instruction jolted Rebecca into letting his hands go. Tom reached out to grasp them.
‘Listen, ‘Becca. We’re going to be strong. Please, make sure that none of this gets back home.’
‘Can we ask them to take us to the airport? We could promise that we will never come back to this country.’
‘They don’t work like that. David understands what to do. Trust him. Help him all you can.’
The long silences when they simply stood and looked at each other ate into their precious minutes. Another barked instruction, ‘Time!’ and the brief meeting was over.
‘I’ll come back later,’ were her last words as she was hustled away.
‘Sing tonight, Rebecca!’ He knew that there would be no more visits until this issue was resolved, one way or another.
He drew his feet up onto the bed. For the moment he stayed away from trying to force his brain to work on the whys, the whos and the hows. Against a background of traffic noise from the street below, the sound of American voices interrupted by the ring of telephones from close by, his mind drifted off. He remembered his brief spell in Nairobi Hospital, the tedium of lying idle while around him others were engaged in their everyday tasks. Then, at least he had a degree of control over his life, and he managed to talk himself into a few hours pretended freedom.
Every half hour someone came to check that he was still around, sometimes bringing food and drink. His best companion was his imagination, so he spent much of his time with eyes closed, being in places and with people that made him feel warm and relaxed. He drifted in and out of sleep and waited.
It was mid-morning when his lawyer reappeared, offering hope but not much substance to back it up. The interview was winding up when they heard the sound of a loud commotion coming from the main office. Almost at once Tom registered a familiar voice dominating exchanges. Monica was out there and she was making some demand on the duty officer.
‘You get your general or whatever you call the boss ‘round here and tell him that Monica Mgoya is here with big new evidence. When he sees it, he’s going to let that boy you got in there out double quick.’
David put his papers away and hurried off to investigate. The noise subsided to routine levels and for twenty minutes Tom sat, alert on the edge of the bed.
An hour later Tom was seated back in the Kisumu Room at the Flamingo, and Monica’s voice was asking him excitedly, ‘Now then, Mr McCall, what was it that you were ordering when those two men came in and interrupted us?’
Harry raised his arm and called out, ‘For the next hour, drinks are on the house!’
In the ensuing noise and confusion, Tom gradually learned the story of how he had been cleared of the charges against him. The narrative was not straightforward because so many wanted a part in its telling.
It turned out that Henry was the culprit, at least he was the one who was now occupying the cell in which he himself had just spent a full day. Tipped off by a porter who had seen Henry carrying something in a towel into Tom’s room and explaining on coming out that he had been delivering a pair of shoes that had just been cleaned. Four powerful ladies decided to take a risk. They tricked Henry into joining them in Rebecca’s changing room at the theatre and locked the door on him.
‘There weren’t no rocks in there where that worm could hide,’ Ruth enthused.
Dorcas put it another way. ‘Worm, sure, a big one like some slippery, cunning cobra. He wasn’t going to give us the truth till he saw we were ready to beat it out of him.’
‘Until Martha pulled that gun from her handbag!’ Monica could hardly get the words out for tears of laughter. ‘Ain’t never seen a white man change colour so fast. He was ready to confess to anything. ‘Course, the gun had no bullets! Anyways, we sat with him until he wrote down every last word and signed at the bottom.’
Ruth added, ‘We were the witnesses.’
Monica wound the story up. ‘The boss captain down at the jail checked his fingerprints. They were on the parcel. There was another set there, too. Henry said he got the stuff from somebody else. Showed us the ten thousand he was paid.’
Tom and Rebecca exchanged glances. Harry proposed a toast. ‘To Thomas, Rebecca and our lady detectives!’
‘Somebody else!’ The police had found that the second set of fingerprints on the wrapping paper around the parcel did not show up, not on police records anywhere in the country. The Englishman was their best hope for finding out who they belonged to. A plea bargain would persuade him, especially when he discovered the alternative would include a very long spell in the company of some hard men who would love this boy’s colour and his accent.
* * *
Julius Rubai was preparing for a night out when the call came through. The message was brief.
‘The kid will squeal. Get out and fast!’
In ten minutes he was on his way to the airport, ready to take the first flight east. With his ready cash he had a choice and went for the Air France to Charles de Gaulle over the American Airways to Heathrow on the remote off-chance that some smart New York lieutenant managed to organise a welcoming party for him in London. He would be safer in Paris.
He stared blankly at the credits unfolding on the screen in front of him. In his half doze he saw Rebecca’s naked body from the back, that unblemished coffee coloured skin, the hair brushing the nape of her neck, one leg slightly raised like some frisky young filly, tingling, ready for him. He shuddered and shook the image from his mind.
Henry was the weakness. Julius had taken a risk and it had gone wrong. So the chance meeting with Henry in that bar had not been so lucky, after all. The lieutenant would have cost a lot more, but he would have delivered and whitey McCall would have been out of the way for a long time.
When he got back home his plan was to drive up to one of the farms in the north-west and put in some heavy work. That would impress Dad. There were one or two girls he hadn’t looked up for a while. He had never failed with them. So far he had not made either of them pregnant, but if it happened this time, he had half a dozen ways worked out. to deal with that. If it turned out to be a girl, he’d thought about handing her over to his mother to bring up. By the time he boarded the KLM flight for Nairobi, his confidence was soaring.
* * *
The party in the Kisumu Room had ended by lunchtime. Toni called for a short rehearsal at three. After that he hoped that everyone would take a rest and let the emotional charge that had built up lie dormant until they could release it on stage in the evening show.
When Tom and Rebecca met in her room, she was exhausted. He sat by her as she lay on the bed with her eyes closed. He hoped that she would snatch a nap. She was putting all of herself into her performance and for the last couple of days there had been the worry about the danger he was i
n. She had been baffled.
His diagnosis of her distress was only partly accurate. She was not getting proper rest but standing out in front of an audience energised her. When she came off stage the last thing she wanted was to find a quiet corner and lie down. The night before she had spent a long time sitting by her window looking southwards towards the concrete canyons lit up by a million dots of light. She wondered if Tom was asleep, if he could sleep at all. There were other things.
Guilt. She was fourteen when she first became conscious of that troublesome emotion inside her. She was in the dormitory of Santa Maria on the night the school had returned after the long Christmas break. Martha and Jane were not going to have this chance, this privilege. They would stay in Naivasha School with fifty or more kids in a class with hardly any books. They would be lucky to meet a teacher who cared for them. And there she was in that smart Nairobi school with American kids, British, Australian, learning French and Spanish, taking singing lessons. In the silence after lights out, she lay in bed thinking up good reasons why she should leave. In the morning she spoke about it to Mother Superior who politely called her an ungrateful wretch and shocked her back on the rails.
Bursts of discomfort frequently upset those long stretches when she was gliding along enjoying the life of the young lady in that sheltered, elite academy. Now it was a February night in a cold city in a warm, spacious room where she could lift the receiver and call up a sumptuous meal at any hour of the day. Over to her right she could see the outline of half a dozen dresses she had bought but not needed. She shed a tear for the red dress she had bought in the matumba in Naivasha town. And what was the Lord God playing at? Why that voice that she was told was a special gift? Within months she would be the wife of the only man she had ever loved. Why could she not simply be ecstatic with happiness at her good fortune?
Toni had told her how much money she would earn by the end of her month in the Flamingo. It was a ridiculous sum, many times the amount her Mama would earn in her whole life. Oh God forgive me for coming to this crazy country. Perhaps I will never be myself again!
