‘How much?’ I asked, reaching for my wallet and taking out two thousand Kenyan shillings.
He pulled back as if I was trying to hand him a dirty rag. ‘American dollars! You are a rich mzungu, a rich man like you …’
I didn’t let him finish the sentence – I was very tired of the mzungu shit, it was liked being called a nigger over and over again, and the word nigger is always a fighting word. I hit him hard in the face and followed with a left jab to his throat. Then I picked up his glass of water and smashed it over his head, pushing him off his stool, which I picked up and broke over his back. With big fat men, I’ve learned my lesson: don’t fight fair and always draw first blood, it takes the fight out of them. Well, sometimes, because instead of going down and staying down this man roared in anger, and getting to his feet he lifted me up into the air and slammed me against the wall. He pulled back for a body slam, but I sidestepped and punched him twice in the stomach, then as he reached out to get a hold of me, I poked him hard in the eyes. Then, as he bellowed in pain, I hit him with a hard right cross, the blow that finally put him down.
I looked over at O. He was looking at the bartender with a slight smile on his face, but the bartender had obviously decided that his job description didn’t include leaping to his boss’s defence. O swivelled around on his bar stool, turning his attention to the fat man and me. I pointed to the two thousand shillings on the floor, and O slid off his bar stool and picked them up. Then, pulling himself back to his feet, he put the money down on the counter. ‘Take this and get lost,’ he said to the bartender.
The bartender looked confused.
‘How much do you make in a month?’ O asked, pressing the bloody notes into the man’s hands.
‘About seven thousand,’ the bartender answered.
‘Well then, go on, open the till and tell me how much is there,’ O said lazily.
The bartender jerked it open and counted out about three thousand shillings in notes.
‘That makes five thousand. Fat man, what have you got in your wallet?’ O asked him.
He had six thousand, which O also handed over to the bartender.
‘And take some liquor with you,’ O told him. ‘The expensive shit.’
The fat man groaned as the bartender retrieved a bottle of Jameson and one of Chivas Regal from the display case above the bar.
When the bartender finally left, we locked the door behind him and helped the fat man to his feet and onto one of the bar stools. Then O went behind the counter, found a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and served each of us a shot.
‘We need to talk,’ he said, placing the bottle on the counter. ‘Drink that.’
The fat man downed the shot and O poured him another.
‘The girl in the photo …’ the fat man started to say.
‘No, no, no, wait, don’t you have something to say to my friend first?’
‘I am sorry.’
‘Sorry for what?’ O asked him.
‘Sorry for calling you a white man,’ the fat man said, looking down into his glass of whiskey.
‘Very well, continue …’ O said.
‘The girl in the photo, yes, I know her. She used to work here … Fucking ungrateful refugees. She was beautiful, brought in a lot of customers.’ He picked a bar rag off the counter and tried to clean some of his blood off his suit. ‘Then, one day, this white man came in. I don’t know what they talked about, but she just took off her apron and left with him. Next thing I know she is a big thing over at Club 680.’
‘What is her name?’ I asked.
‘We called her Madeline. Can’t say if it was real or not. With refugees, you never know.’
‘Have you ever seen this man?’ I showed him Joshua’s photograph.
He looked at it for a while. ‘Everyone knows Joshua, but that was years ago. A hero, but we did not know it then, nobody knew until much later. He was quiet, only spoke to Madeline …’
‘Were they fucking?’
‘I don’t know. She was a strange girl …’
The connections, very hazy still, were slowly coming to the surface. Samuel had placed Joshua in Kenya for me, but he had told us that their meetings had been purely business related. Now I had placed both Samuel and Joshua here, in this bar, and I had a lead on someone who might have known him well – someone who certainly knew Samuel Alexander well. I still had no idea who the white girl was. To find that out, I first had to find out who Joshua really was, and to do that I had to find Madeline and learn more about Samuel.
‘Is that you?’ O suddenly asked in disbelief. He was pointing at a photograph of a boxer hitting a punching bag, youth and muscles still glowing down at us from up on the wall.
‘I used to be a boxer,’ the fat man said out of nowhere, without looking up from his whiskey. ‘I used to be really good.’
‘Yes, yes, I remember you now,’ O said with genuine excitement, ‘you knocked out Peter “Dynamite” Odhiambo. What the hell happened to you?’
‘Nyama choma and beer,’ the fat man replied as if he was reminiscing with old friends. ‘Back then I could have taken both of you … easy.’
‘Even the best lose eventually,’ I offered, suddenly feeling sorry for him – for what we had done to him in such a short time, for breaking him so easily. ‘Besides, I did not fight fair.’
‘Yeah, is not that the truth,’ the fat man said. ‘Tomorrow it might be you.’ He laughed before grimacing in pain.
Our conversation over, we left him there – bleeding into his counter, drinking straight from the bottle – and made our way to Club 680.
There was no mistaking Madeline. She was up on a small stage, behind her a dreadlocked guitarist. People were clapping wildly. She waved them quiet as we took our seats at the bar, then turned so as to face the back of the stage. ‘Enough with the political shit,’ she whispered into the microphone.
I thought she was introducing a song, but before long I realised that this was a spoken word performance.
Silence descended as the guitarist took off his wedding ring and replaced it with a glass guitar slide. He tested the sound, so that for a moment the whole bar, dimly lit save for the stage, was filled with a bluesy sound. And then, starting to speak in slow rap, she joined the guitarist: ‘My hair has roots all over the earth, like the roots of an old, old, old baobab, tapping and traversing the whole earth.’
Turning sideways, she leaned back as she undid the wrap around her head so that long thin dreadlocks unfurled, almost touching the ground, completing her arc.
‘And my skin, this old raggedy skin thing …’ The crowd laughed and even I smiled because her dark skin, glistening from oil or sweat or both, was so smooth that it looked soft to the touch and anything but ragged.
‘This old skin is the same skin my great-grandmother wore to sleep and to the garden, this is the skin that she wore when in battle. Don’t be fooled by its softness, in peace it’s for pleasure, but it quickly grows scales when it’s time for war.’ She caressed the length of first one arm and then the other, back and forth, back and forth until her skin seemed to radiate her blackness. Then, as she raised her hands up high with her fists clenched, the guitarist hit some violent chords, making his instrument sound like machine-gun fire and missiles.
‘And these breasts, these breasts can feed a child and bring a grown man to tears in the same evening.’ The crowd laughed approvingly – she was tall, about my height, and slender, but when she thrust her chest forward the T-shirt she wore to her midriff hugged her breasts tightly.
‘And my hands, they are rough from play and lifting machetes. They can undress you, or they can peel my covers away.’ She lifted her T-shirt up until we could see the beginning of her breasts.
‘And my mouth can curse or love, speak hope or pain, but when you are good to me, let’s just say my tongue wraps around things easily.’ She raised her hands high in the air and ground her hips.
‘And this, this is not a treasure to be beheld from afar, when
you come closer, when you come closer you will see that it will lead your tongue to my pleasure.’ Her hand followed the small chain that hung from a sparkling belly button ring down into her jeans. And then she broke into an easy laughter as if to remind the audience it was a performance after all.
‘What the hell!’ I heard O exclaim as the lights came up and everyone stood to give Madeline a standing ovation. It was an odd mixture of people, now that I could see them – elite Kenyans, refugees and expatriates. It reminded me of the mixture of people we had encountered in Mathare, only this was the other end of the scale.
After bowing first to the guitarist and then to the crowd Madeline made her way to the bar where men and their wives clamoured to shake her hand and buy her drinks. A few minutes later she was rescued from her fans by a gentleman who led her away to a table near the stage. O and I ordered drinks and kept watch, waiting for an opening, but it wasn’t until an hour or so later that she stood up and walked to the bathroom. When she re-emerged I stood to intercept her, but instead of heading back to her table she came over to the bar.
‘You are that detective? The American?’ she asked after I had introduced myself and told her that we’d like to ask her a few questions. ‘You want to know about Joshua?’
She did not betray any emotion beyond curiosity. I on the other hand was perspiring like an acne-ridden teenager out on a mercy date. Finally, having untied my tongue, I confirmed her suspicions but added there was another matter we also needed to talk about.
‘Can it wait?’ she asked.
And somehow, in the face of her request, the urgency of the whole case receded into the background. ‘Yes, of course, I can wait,’ I stammered.
Her drink came and, still looking at us, she leaned over the bar and whispered something to the bartender. Then she leaned in further over the counter and kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘Call me Muddy, it’s short for Madeline,’ she called over her shoulder to me as she turned away and walked back to her table.
‘On her fans, gentlemen. They buy her more than she can drink,’ the bartender explained a few minutes later as he placed six Tuskers in front of us.
‘Now, that is what I like to hear,’ O said.
A few minutes later the guitarist came and joined us. He was very young, in his early twenties, and still had the swagger and bravado of youth. He sat next to me and took one of the beers without saying anything. ‘Muddy said I could,’ he explained when I looked at him.
I had to laugh. We were like three little pigs at the trough – and her feeding us.
‘You can jam, man. How long have you been playing for her?’ I asked the guitarist after he had taken a long pull on the Tusker he had liberated.
‘One year. She is good to me. You know? I came here from Rwanda, but I was very young. She is good to me …’ he said reflectively.
‘You married?’ O asked, pointing at his ring.
‘No, this just for show … Makes it look serious when I take it off and put on the slide; replacing the wife with the guitar. That kinda symbolism works great for the crowd,’ he said with a sly smile.
‘Ever seen her with this man?’ I asked, showing him the photo of Samuel Alexander that had been in the locket.
He laughed. ‘She does not go with white men.’
‘Perhaps you don’t know her that well,’ O said.
In the photograph in the locket her hair had been long and curly – her dreadlocks must have taken some time to grow.
‘Have you ever met B.B. King?’ the guitarist suddenly asked enthusiastically, changing the subject.
He looked disappointed when I told him I hadn’t. ‘But I saw Michael Jackson in concert once,’ I added.
He shrugged. Michael no longer had the currency he used to.
We sat around without talking much. The bartender kept our trough full of beer, and O and the guitarist became visibly drunk. At some point I asked the guitarist why everyone called her Muddy, but he said he did not know. ‘Could be something to do with Muddy Waters,’ he said a minute or so later and started to hum ‘Catfish Blues’. I joined him and before long we were all wailing away, out of tune, especially O, who didn’t even know the song but sang anyway.
If you had told me a mere two weeks earlier that I would soon find myself in a bar in Africa singing ‘Catfish Blues’ with a schizoid detective called O and a blues guitarist from Rwanda, waiting on one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, I would have told you straight out that you were crazy, but here I was.
Eventually, the bartender signalled to Muddy that he was closing up and she left her table and walked over to where we were still drinking. ‘If you want to talk you have to drive me home,’ she said.
O handed me the keys to the Land Rover. As he did so, the guitarist stood up to come with us, but Muddy told him to stay with O and make sure he got home all right. She didn’t have a purse or anything. I suppose she was all she needed. And before long, my date and I were on our way to her place.
Muddy lived out in Limuru, thirty minutes or so outside of Nairobi, and as I drove her slender hand would, every now and then, point in this direction or that, guiding me first out of the city and then deep into the countryside. I was ready for whatever was ahead of me. Or more precisely, I didn’t care what was ahead of me. My heart was beating fast; my mind full of stupid questions to ask her: ‘Where are you from?’, ‘What music do you listen to?’, ‘What do your parents do?’, ‘What are your favourite colours?’. But in reality I knew that the get-to-know-you-questions from my teenage years wouldn’t work, and as we drove deeper into the night I began to realise just how little actual dating I had really done.
Muddy punched in the knobs on the old radio and found a station that was playing country music. There aren’t many things in this life that are certain, but that’s one of them – a country music station anywhere in the world. Strangely, I didn’t mind.
‘Muddy … why do they call you Muddy?’ I asked her.
Nobody wears safety belts in Africa, and she had her feet up on the dashboard, leaning towards me and humming along to Kenny Rogers as he sang a duet about not falling in love with dreamers.
‘They call me Muddy, because the men I know would rather drink muddy waters,’ she finally answered with a sigh, signalling with her hand that we should make a left off the main road onto a gravel track.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked her as the Land Rover’s wheels hit the dirt road, creating a monotonous grinding noise that jarred heavily against the calm of country music – I’m not much of a blues man but drinking muddy waters didn’t sound pleasant.
Instead of answering she asked me to slow down as we were approaching her gate, which a watchman opened as soon as she leaned her head outside the car window. She pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from her pocket and threw it at him as we crawled past.
Does everybody in this country live like a prisoner? I wondered as two huge Alsatian guard dogs came careering around the corner of the small house that now stood in front of us, barking furiously. It was as if the wealthy, the middle class, the farmers, the poor and even the criminals were all imprisoned in their own little worlds.
Climbing down from the Land Rover, Muddy calmed the dogs down before sending them back to the watchman. When he had them under control I opened my door and stepped out into her yard, watching as she unlocked security door after security door until finally we were inside her place and she turned on the lights.
The first thing that struck me was how simple everything was. The wooden furniture was spaced out in the sitting room so that it looked more like a low-class barroom. But she’d made it work, brightening the room up with paintings of little stick figures and wooden carvings. Her place reminded me of Joshua’s in a strange way – even though, unlike Joshua’s, it was clear that she lived there.
Muddy invited me into the kitchen – again very spare – and opened a cabinet that contained several bottles of expensive liquor. ‘You know moonshine?’ she as
ked me.
I nodded.
‘Try this,’ she said, reaching behind the glass bottles and producing a plastic container, ‘it’s African moonshine.’
She poured me a shot of clear liquid, and I grabbed it, ready to down it. ‘You’d better sip it,’ she advised, and as soon as it touched my tongue I knew why – it was almost pure alcohol.
‘What is it called?’ I asked her.
‘Changaa,’ she said.
Then, leaving me to my thoughts, Muddy went to change. She returned from the bathroom in what looked to me a like a dress-sized dashiki. Her dreads were down, so that when she sat at the kitchen counter, one hand cupped under her chin and the other shifting her shot glass back and forth, they dangled in front of her. She looked up at me – her eyes burrowing into mine – and I looked down at my hands. Cupping the shot glass they looked huge, and suddenly I felt like I was back at the airport all over again – all too aware of my excessive size and bulk.
Muddy stretched out her arm next to mine. I had never imagined myself to be anything other than black, but I was clearly lighter than her. ‘You must be poisoned by the blood of both,’ she said.
I didn’t say anything.
‘ “I who am poisoned with the blood of both, where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” It’s a poem by Derek Walcott.’
‘I’ve never heard of him,’ I responded.
‘Detectives don’t really think too much, do they?’ she asked with a snicker.
I moved my arm away from hers. I was hurt and hated myself for feeling wounded. I had no illusions about who was in charge here. The simple truth was that she could have poured gasoline on me, struck a match and I would have stayed to see what happened. But nevertheless I had to try and get some of my questions answered. I took out the photo of Samuel Alexander we had found in the locket in the bath and placed it before her.
‘Madeline … Do you know him?’
‘Call me Muddy.’
‘Okay, Muddy, do you know him?’
‘Yes, he was my lover.’
‘How long ago?’
‘A couple of years …’
Nairobi Heat Page 8
