Nairobi Heat

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  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.

  ‘You got us into this,’ a voice inside me was yelling as I looked around desperately, trying to figure out how we were going to get out of the mess I had managed to dump us in. Then it came to me. I suddenly realised that we could see the thugs a lot better than they could see us – we had our backs to the road, which meant that each time a car came past its headlights dazzled them. I looked across at O as the next car whizzed by, then I looked back at the men. O nodded that he understood and immediately I started yelling all sorts of motherfuckers at them. They were amused for a few seconds, and then they shouted something at O, training their guns on the girl and me. They couldn’t shoot O without killing their man, but they could kill us both easily. A second or so later another car came by and O shot the rapist.

  Unless you’re well trained, the sound of a gunshot will make you freeze. A seasoned thug will react just like a cop and shoot back instinctively, but these young men were clearly not in that category. They froze for a half-second, maybe even less, shocked by the sound of the gun and the sight of their friend’s blood, illuminated by the headlights, spraying into the sky.

  As the rapist lurched forward I turned and pushed Janet down so that we both fell to the earth. I rolled once, and while still on the ground I aimed for a split second and fired, aimed again and fired again. Two of the young men flailed in the air before going down. O hadn’t missed either, and only their leader managed to get a couple of rounds off, his bullets kicking around us harmlessly, before O dropped him too.

  The shooting over, we secured the scene. Three of the thugs had been fatally wounded but the leader was still alive. He started to say something, making pleading gestures, but O shot him twice – once in the heart and once in the head.

  I walked a few feet from the bodies, bent over and threw up, my fear, shock and disgust adding to the thick stench of humanity in Mathare.

  After the shootout O had called his station and within minutes a car arrived to pick us up. I had fully expected that we would be interrogated by the CID equivalent of internal affairs as soon as we got back to the station, then we would have to fill out mountains of paperwork before being sent to a review board and hauled to a psych consult, but I was wrong.

  ‘You are in good shape, the criminals are dead and the young woman is still alive. Be off, gentlemen,’ the Director of Investigations, a rather young-looking man, had said to us. It was almost as if we had never been to Mathare and left five young men dead.

  After our debriefing we took Janet to Kenyatta National Hospital and stayed with her while they ran all sorts of tests. We had been expecting the worst, but when the doctor finally walked out of Janet’s room her face told a different story. ‘Thank God, the semen does not have traces of HIV. She will be okay,’ she said.

  Relieved, we walked into Janet’s room to find her in tears. She was dressed in a hospital gown and O’s jacket – her school uniform, socks and shoes in the metal trashcan in the corner. O walked over to her and hugged her. We both knew that her ordeal was only really just beginning, but there was nothing more we could do for her. There were psychiatrists in Nairobi, but she would never be able to affo
rd them. Her only choice was to return to school as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Where do you go to school?’ O asked her.

  She went to Loreto Convent, Msongari.

  ‘Isn’t that a boarding school?’

  ‘I am on bursary,’ she answered.

  It turned out that Janet’s mother had died in the Rwandan genocide, and she lived with her father in Mathare – she walked home every day as her scholarship didn’t cover her boarding fees.

  O went out and returned moments later with a dress and slippers – ‘From one of the nurses,’ he explained. Then, together, we left the hospital and went to a nearby café. We were starving, and in spite of our various traumas we ate like we hadn’t seen a meal in a week. Afterwards, we took Janet to her school, where O explained what had happened to a stern-looking black sister in a habit and wimple. Janet had two more years to go and was a bright girl, she told us. She would see to it that she was allowed to board.

  We drove back to Eastleigh Estate without much conversation. It was late in the evening, almost midnight by the time we arrived at O’s place and his wife had already gone to bed. He walked me to my room and stood in the doorway as I plopped onto the bed, feeling weightless and empty.

  ‘We traded five lives for one,’ I said to him, thinking of my conversation with Joshua.

  I didn’t mean anything by it. The words just came out of my mouth. What choice did we have? I could not pretend that I couldn’t hear Janet’s screams. We couldn’t have let the thugs kill us either. But still, it was five lives for one. Once I decided to help Janet, I had set the wheels in motion – people were going to die.

  ‘Better the bad guys than the good guys, I suppose,’ I added.

  ‘Ishmael, me and you, we are not good people. We have done some good and some bad … But Janet is a good person and she survived. That cannot be a bad thing,’ O said as he pulled the door shut.

  A few minutes later I heard the shower start running, and, exhausted, I drifted off to sleep.

  I was a bird – flying, dipping in and out of clouds – then suddenly I became a huge plane carrying white tourists, then I was rushing into a kitchen because something was burning only to find a canister of tear gas in the oven. I looked away, to see if I could find my wife, and when I looked back the canister became a birthday cake, and my wife and I were each cutting a piece. But when I was just about to take a bite, I saw that instead of a cake, it was a human heart – still beating even with us holding pieces of it that looked like cake. I tried to warn my wife but she couldn’t hear me. I had lost my voice. She took a bite and the whole heart quivered …

  I woke up at five am and decided to take a walk. Outside, the morning air was crisp and slightly stale. In the light of the sun, yellowish through the mist, Eastleigh looked peaceful and even the piles of garbage along the tarmacked streets looked somehow beautiful. A few blocks past O’s house, I saw little children in clean blue-and-white uniforms closing a metal gate behind them. They were yawning and I couldn’t help smiling. I said hello to them, but they looked at me suspiciously. I continued on.

  Close to a shopping centre, I saw old Somali women putting up their makeshift stalls, bales of fresh mangoes, bananas and khat waiting to be displayed. At the bus station, bus and matatu drivers were readying their vehicles for a busy morning. Loud music – a confused mix of different rap songs – was playing above the roar of backfiring engines. I walked on.

  At a kiosk, I bought some tea and a chapatti. I sat on a bench blowing the hot chai steam into the air to cool it down. Nobody paid me any attention – this early in the morning people were busy minding their own stories.

  I thought back to how, once, in New Jersey investigating one thing or another, I was talking to this old man and it came out that he had never been to New York. New York, a thirty-minute train ride from Newark! ‘I have no reason to go to New York,’ he’d said with a shrug. Then it had seemed odd, that not even curiosity would get him onto that train, but now, somehow, I understood. If you have everything you need where you are, why go somewhere else? That was how I felt about being in Africa. Until the dead white girl had shown up on Joshua’s doorstep, I had never had a reason to come to Africa. And so I hadn’t.

  A little pickup truck with Daily Nation written all over it slowed down briefly and a man in the back threw a plastic covered bundle in the general direction of the door to the kiosk. It landed in a puddle of filth. The owner cursed, came out with a knife and opened it up. I watched him idly arranging the newspapers on his makeshift stand, adding cigarettes and Wrigley’s gum to the display. But just when I was about to go back to my tea and thoughts, the headline caught my eye: The Case of the Dead White Girl: American Detective in Kenya.

  Immediately, I went to pick up the newspaper, but the man asked for money first. I rummaged through my wallet but I had spent the last of my Kenyan shillings on the chai and chapatti and smallest bill I could find was a ten. I gave it to him, wondering whether he would accept it. He held it up in the air, looked at it for a few seconds. ‘American money … very good,’ he finally said approvingly and pushed the newspaper into my hand.

  My anxiety grew as I began to read the lead story. It was all there: how the girl had been found, how she had no identity, her photograph (the headshot of her lifeless body in full colour), my name, everything except my photograph. But even that was surely only a matter of time. This was going to change things, and for the worse I suspected. I needed to talk with the Chief.

  I gulped down my tea and made to leave, but the kiosk owner grabbed my arm and pressed into my hand a small plastic bag full of chapattis, bread and sodas. He waved the ten dollar bill and pointed to the bag. I had bought the stuff. I smiled, touched, and shook my head, thrusting the plastic bag back into his hands. I didn’t have time to argue. I had to get back to O’s.

  ‘Look, man, this is the break we have been waiting for,’ O said, beside himself with excitement. Unlike in the United States most Kenyans read the paper, and if they don’t, they listen to the radio, so O figured that something was bound to come up.

  I had tried calling the Chief but I couldn’t get through – I didn’t have enough airtime. O suggested that I text the Chief and ask him to call me back. I was sceptical, but it worked fine because a few minutes later the phone rang.

  ‘Chief, I’m staring at the local paper, where are my two weeks?’ I asked, stressing each word.

  ‘Too much pressure … Everyone wanted to know where we are with the case. We have nothing here, and I had to throw them something. What the hell could I do? I told them you had left for Africa, that we were onto something big …’ He paused and I knew that he was waiting for me to tell him we had something.

  ‘Chief, I only just got here …’ I started.

  ‘Listen, you’ve got one week,’ the Chief said, interrupting me. ‘You’d better have something in a week, otherwise we’re dead in the water … Don’t let us down, Ishmael.’

  I started to protest, but he had already hung up.

  I went back to the kitchen to find O making breakfast – the exact same breakfast as the day before. ‘I perfect one meal a year, so for a year that is all I cook, no deviations, no nothing, the same exact thing each time until I get it right,’ he said when he saw the look on my face. ‘I have been working on this masterpiece since January …’

  I laughed at the idea – it made sense. ‘What do we do now?’ I asked as I poured myself some coffee.

  O produced a joint from behind his ear. ‘We smoke, then we eat a motherfucking omelette,’ he said, trying to sound like he was from the hood.

  ‘You have a way with words, my friend, you know that? You scared those motherfuckers with your motherfuckers last night. I did not know you spoke black American.’ He laughed in delight.

  O slipped in and out of Americanisms easily – Americanisms that had filtered into Kenyan culture through movies and music videos. And he did it fluidly because he wasn’t self-conscious about it. I, on the o
ther hand, brought up by black middle-class parents, had been trained from an early age to disdain colloquialisms – Ebonics was forbidden. That was a long time ago, but rightly or wrongly I was brought up believing that to make it in the United States black people had to speak proper American English. The change in my diction had obviously surprised O.

  After breakfast – just as good as the previous day’s – I went to the bathroom for a shower. I waited for the water to run hot, but I was out of luck – a cold shower again. Back in my room I put on jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt and grabbed a light jacket which would easily hide my gun when I put it on.

  As soon as I walked back into the kitchen, O pulled out a deck of cards. The only game we both knew was Crazy Eights – a rather childish game, but there was nothing more to do except wait. We played one long hand and then gave up.

  Every cop hates down time. It’s the worst. It feels like the rest of the world knows something you don’t, and everything that is not related to the case feels like an interruption, but there is nothing to do except wait. O was a talker, so we sat around shooting the breeze for a while, trying to keep our minds off the waiting game.

  ‘Your wife, tell me about your wife,’ he finally said.

  What the hell, I thought, it was as good a time as any to get into the personal stuff. ‘Childhood sweetheart. We grew into each other … Know what I mean? Broke up several times, but kept coming back for more. So, we got married,’ I said, trying to sound flippant.

  ‘And then you grew apart?’ O asked.