Nairobi Heat

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘You, my friend, are threatening a well-balanced money making machine. You can say I am the Never Again Foundation, but I am legion.’ He smiled. ‘Behind me are many.’

  ‘So you killed Macy Jane Admanzah?’

  ‘Not me specifically. I am just the invisible partner.

  Puppets must have their puppeteers, no?’

  The puppets – Joshua, Samuel and Jamal?

  ‘Now, I am afraid we are even,’ he said, standing up and straightening his jacket.

  ‘Joshua, it was him … he killed her,’ I said in desperation.

  ‘All you need to know is that it was the Foundation,’ he said. ‘We believe collective work makes for collective success.’

  ‘What happens to Joshua?’

  ‘Balance is about to be restored. We all live happily ever after. Naturally, he lives longer than me … but what the hell!’ He said it like he was cracking a joke at a dinner party about a younger colleague.

  ‘Wait, wait … What happens to O and Muddy?’ I asked him.

  ‘They die, Ishmael. They die as soon as I make my way over there. Even Jamal, who humours me so. Too greedy for his own good.’

  Jamal had been so wrong. The Foundation was everything. The Refugee Centre thought it was in charge, but it was the Foundation that ran everything. Jamal was truly the junior partner. In this maze, he was as lost as I was.

  ‘You don’t have to kill them and you know it,’ I said, even though I knew it was hopeless.

  ‘Of course I don’t … I don’t have to do anything. In fact, I could even let you go as long as I destroyed the evidence,’ Chocbanc explained patiently. ‘But you see, Ishmael, we have to learn from our mistakes. Had Joshua finished what he started years ago we wouldn’t be here. The past would be precisely that, the past.’

  As he stood to leave Chocbanc looked down at my hands, then, reaching into his pocket, he produced an expensive-looking pocket watch. I stared at it, unsure of what was happening, until he opened the back of the watch and I saw that it contained a small compartment of cocaine. ‘No need to die in pain, Ishmael,’ he said as he poured some of it on to my fingers. ‘Even we from the underworld, we must say no to cruel and unusual punishments.’ He looked around at his men and they nodded in approval.

  ‘My fingernails, I just cleaned them today,’ I said out of nowhere, looking down at my bloody hand as my mind flashed back to the fat man in the green suit that O and I had humiliated back in his bar in Nairobi. His tone when he had told us that he had been a boxer had been that of a man speaking of another life. I was not the same man who had cleaned his dirty fingernails less than an hour earlier. That man was alive, vital, looking forward to solving the biggest case of his career.

  The men broke out laughing, just as we had at the bartender. Even Chocbanc seemed genuinely amused, smiling at me one last time before he turned and left me to his men.

  It was simple. I was fucked. Cutting me loose from the chair, the Foundation men bound my hands behind my back. They weren’t going to kill me in the apartment. It made sense. They would make it look like I had never made it to my apartment, and with all evidence of what I had uncovered gone and no body, uncertainty would eventually eat the whole thing away. I had no idea where they would take me, but this much I did know: the apartment building was my terrain and I had to make my move soon because once we stepped outside and I was shoved into a car trunk my life was over.

  One of the men went ahead to check that the stairwell and parking lot were clear, then, after two or three minutes had passed, the remaining two started to walk me out – one in front and the other behind; their guns drawn. The stairway that spiralled down to the bottom of my apartment building started at my door. I knew that was my only opening. And then I understood that somehow I had been way ahead of myself – it was not without reason that I had mentioned that I had just cleaned my fingernails.

  ‘Watch out for my fingernails, fellas,’ I said as they led me to the door.

  They broke out laughing again, and in that moment, while they were off their guard, I hurled my whole body against the man leading me out. I couldn’t have timed it more perfectly. He had just stepped out of the door and my body weight was enough to throw him into the flimsy rail at the top of the stairs. For a second he hung there, half over the rail, scrambling to get his footing, and then it broke. Stumbling forward, I would have followed him screaming into the abyss, but the guy behind me instinctively pulled me back. Using that momentum I pushed him hard against the door frame, knocking the wind out of him. Then I ran for dear life, all the while trying to undo my hands.

  By the time the rope gave in and my hands were free I was on the second floor. Always do the unexpected. That’s what I had learned from O. The motherfucker upstairs would expect me to run for the door and out into the street looking for help, but instead I gently pulled a fire axe from the wall and waited for him to come down the stairs. I waited until the moment he was about to see me then I let him have it. He hadn’t hit the ground before I had his gun in my hand.

  Rushing outside I found Chocbanc and the other Foundation man in the parking lot. I shot the Foundation man first, twice. As he slumped to the ground, Chocbanc raised his hands and started to try to talk me down.

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ I yelled at him.

  He hesitated and I waited for two or three seconds, knowing that he had told me all he knew – confessed all his sins to a dying man.

  ‘I killed the girl,’ he said.

  He started to say something else, but I shot him once in the head. All I needed now was Joshua, and I was going to go after him, nothing else mattered.

  In Maple Bluff I rang Joshua’s doorbell, feeling like destiny itself. Despite the fact that it was close to three am he opened it moments later. Just like the first time I had met him he was fully dressed – suit, shoes and everything – and even stranger than this was the wide smile that was plastered across his face, it was as if I was a friend he had been expecting for a long time.

  Joshua led me to the spacious kitchen at the back of the house where he proceeded to open a bottle of wine, pouring two glasses and offering me one of them. A week earlier, when it had still been fun and games, I would have been happy enough, but there was no way I was going to drink his wine, especially when he himself had poured it.

  ‘I see Ishmael quickly learn terrible ways of my people … Mistrust even when one means no harm,’ he said, moving to the fridge and coming back with two Tuskers, one of which he opened and placed on the table in front of me.

  I didn’t say anything. Instead I lifted the Tusker to my lips and took a gulp – it tasted good and for a second I was back in Africa, at The Hilton Hotel bar, getting drunk with O.

  ‘I have a question for you, Joshua,’ I finally said, taking out the gun I had taken from the Foundation man back at my apartment block. ‘Do you want to die tonight?’

  He didn’t seem startled. In fact, it was as if he hadn’t heard what I had said.

  I unscrewed the silencer and placed it on the table, well within my reach. ‘In that case, let’s talk,’ I said.

  His face was hard, but I knew he wanted to talk, he wouldn’t have opened the door if it were otherwise.

  ‘You think you know, but you don’t know,’ he finally said. ‘Yes, I wanted you killed for what you know about me. But you also my friend, even in Africa you remain my friend.’

  I simply stared back at him. I knew what he was thinking, if only he could get past me or convince me of his innocence he would be home free. ‘What do you mean?’ I eventually asked him.

  He sighed tiredly. ‘The Foundation … very powerful. I am pawn in the chess set. They make me hero, okay? I make them money and they pay me. A good relationship only … only they decide to get rid of me because of that girl. And what better way than to use her against me? Then you become my friend.’ He paused to study my face. ‘When the Foundation come after me,’ he explained, ‘en
emy of my enemy become friend.’

  I smiled at him and took another swig of Tusker.

  ‘All the other things they say I did, yes I did,’ Joshua continued, trying desperately to explain himself. ‘Yes, I hated them. But now I grow. I go to Kenya and see Kikuyu and Luo live together. I come to America and see black and white live together. I grow. But what I know then? Look, Ishmael, life was simple. I teach them, I live with them, but what they do for me? They take best jobs, fuck my women and take my best land …’

  ‘I don’t care about all that other shit,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘I only care about Macy Jane Admanzah.’

  ‘Macy, I did not touch. Her family, fucking missionaries … Her family, I order kill. Ten years later she is in my doorway … dead. The Foundation want me out of image. She go to them, looking for me, they panic and decide to get rid of me and her both. They bring her here and kill her. Money … all about the money.’

  It took Joshua almost an hour to explain everything. The Admanzahs, as I knew, had been missionaries in Rwanda. According to him they were racists who had been running an underground railroad for those escaping genocide – ‘They treat them like little children,’ he told me, ‘even old men and women.’ He hadn’t known that their church was an underground railroad until some of the people he had helped had told him about it, suggesting that if they joined hands they could save many more lives. Joshua was of course using the school as a cover to lure more innocents out of hiding and he wasn’t keen on competition, so he had ordered fifteen or so of his killers to descend on the Admanzah family – killing them all, or so he had thought.

  After the genocide everything was so confused that no one had come forward to accuse Joshua of killing the Admanzahs or of using his school as a false beacon. And in Kenya he was welcomed as a hero by those he had actually helped to escape the genocide – they had no idea that he had saved them only to lure more people to their deaths. Then the Never Again Foundation had arrived on the scene and Samuel Alexander had found out about Joshua and recruited him to be their poster boy. When Samuel had found out the truth Joshua didn’t say, but he must have known by the time Mary Karuhimbi and the Kokomat women came to him. By then of course the conscience of the world was bleeding millions of dollars into the Foundation and Samuel had the finances to pay them off. Luckily, they had jumped at the money and Joshua’s secret had remained just that.

  In fact, everything had gone well again until an of-age Macy Jane Admanzah had decided to seek justice for her family and expose Joshua for what he really was. Naturally her first port of call had been the Refugee Centre in Nairobi, and it was there that Samuel Alexander had told her that Joshua was now based in the United States. Joshua then claimed that Samuel had paid for Macy Jane’s ticket to the US, telling her that he wanted to help her confront Joshua and expose him, even promising to help take him to the International Criminal Court.

  What Samuel had discovered, Joshua claimed, was that he could do two things at the same time – get rid of Joshua, who was costing the Foundation quite a bit of money, and get rid of Macy Jane by killing her and tying the murder to Joshua. Of course this would mean the end of the Foundation, but it wouldn’t take Samuel long to find another golden boy and set up a new foundation as long as he still had control of the Refugee Centre. Joshua only figured this out later. He had no idea his world was about to collapse until he came home and found Macy Jane dead on his porch. I knew Samuel had been scheming money from his partners and that the Refugee Centre and the Foundation were in financial trouble, two more reasons for getting rid of Joshua and starting over.

  Why had Samuel Alexander committed suicide?

  He was a weak man, Joshua replied with contempt. He didn’t have the stomach for what he had created, especially after he had ordered Macy Jane Admanzah’s murder and instead of Joshua taking the fall I had flown to Nairobi to look for answers. Again this made sense to me. The suicide note was addressed to Joshua – something Joshua could not have known. Samuel was apologising to Joshua for destroying what they had created together.

  Why couldn’t Joshua, once incriminated, become a whistle-blower?

  I knew the answers even before he gave them. His life. He would not have lived to tell his story. And his past. He had thought he could still protect his secret.

  ‘But why not get rid of the body? Why leave it where you found it?’ I asked him.

  When he came home and found her there he had had to think fast. From the state of her body he could tell that she hadn’t been dead for long and he knew that whoever had left her body would call the police as soon as they were in the clear. In the space of a few minutes he had found her purse, gone through her pockets and removed the African jewellery she had been wearing. He had then put everything into a plastic bag and stuffed it into his bedroom toilet. Finally, he had called the police.

  I picked up my cellphone and called the station to find out if he was telling the truth about the calls. For a detective, a suspect’s guilt or innocence can lie in a single detail. Sometimes it is simply the kind of detail that the suspect would have no knowledge of unless they had been in a certain place at a certain time that somehow validates his or her side of the story. Sometimes it is something that somehow resolves a contradiction or answers a question that has undermined all possible theories. For Joshua the question had always been why he would leave the body outside his own door when he would have had time to dispose of it if he had wanted to – no one would have traced Macy Jane to him had we found her in some dumpster somewhere.

  A few minutes later my cell rang. Joshua wasn’t lying about the calls – there were two: one from his cellphone and another from a phone booth just outside Maple Bluff. The cop on duty played me both calls. The first caller was clearly an American, most probably a Caucasian male. He told the operator that he had just witnessed a murder and he gave Joshua’s address, before hanging up. The other call, just two minutes later, was from Joshua. He was reporting finding a dead girl on his porch. The operator asked him to take the girl’s pulse and make sure she was still breathing, but Joshua was way ahead of him. ‘No, I try bring her back,’ he said, ‘but she dead.’

  The more I thought about what Joshua was telling me the more sense it made. He knew he was being set up and that the killer would have called the cops, so he knew that he did not have enough time to get rid of the body. All he could do was strip it of anything that could help us identify Macy Jane. With his past safely hidden in Africa, he had been sure he could outrun it. He had not counted on my being sent to Kenya.

  The two calls were a small detail that had gotten lost early on in what had been a chaotic and sensational case. There were still a lot more questions to be answered but Joshua’s story explained who had killed Macy Jane Admanzah and why. It also explained why I had thought he was guilty of something right from the beginning – he had been trying to hide something from me, but it was his past. He was guilty of many terrible things, but at that moment I was sure that he had not killed Macy Jane Admanzah.

  Finishing my Tusker, I picked up my piece and stood to take my leave of the man that only an hour earlier I had been ready to kill. What was going to happen to Joshua? Were we going to punish him for a crime he did not commit? Would we let him go free despite his role in the genocide? Maybe there would be enough evidence to bring him to trial for crimes against humanity. I didn’t know. There were the Kokomat women, and there would surely be others. I wanted to talk it over with the Chief, file my report and let the powers that be decide.

  ‘Ishmael, I am bad man,’ Joshua said as I moved towards the door. ‘I know, you know. I do unspeakable things. But, Ishmael, I do not kill that girl.’

  Suddenly I wondered why his being innocent of Macy Jane Admanzah’s murder was so important to him. He surely knew his past was about to be revealed and that his life would be destroyed once people knew what he had really done during the genocide.

  ‘I do not know, Ishmael,’ he said sadly when I asked him ab
out it. ‘Maybe I change. Maybe I change, and I desire truth be known.’

  As I drove back to my apartment complex, where I knew I would find the Chief, I couldn’t help thinking about the Admanzahs. For some people they were racists. For others they were true Christians. Some would think of them as bleeding-heart liberals. While others would say that they were simply misguided. But here is a question for you: what makes a husband and wife uproot their family from the US, from a farm that is doing well, from a school a bit conservative but nevertheless a school that offers hope to their children, and take them to Africa?

  I had seen many Admanzahs in Allied Drive. In Allied Drive white folk were always trying to save black folk, trying to get them off drugs and out of gangs. Forget the white trash and the rednecks; well-to-do white people wanted to save black folk. So perhaps the Admanzahs enjoyed playing Jesus to Africans. But did they deserve to die for it? What life had they taken? On the contrary, they had saved lives.

  When I finally made it to the Chief he was predictably furious – the violence had come to America, to a small town called Madison in Wisconsin, and he had four bodies to deal with, three of them white.

  ‘Have you gone crazy? You have opened us up wide to get fucked,’ he yelled as he dragged me out of the car. ‘You are coming with me to the station right now.’

  ‘Am I under arrest?’

  ‘How the fuck am I supposed to know?’ he asked as he pushed me into his car. ‘I know nothing …’

  Back at the station I explained everything as best I could. The Chief had calmed down during the drive and by the time I had finished my story he looked almost happy. We finally had the answers we had been looking for.

  ‘We have Macy Jane’s killers, it looks like, but Joshua, he gets away with everything?’ the Chief said. It was more of a statement than a question. ‘Feed the story to the dogs,’ he instructed.

  That was exactly what I had planned to do. I checked into a motel, called Mo and updated her. For the first time since I’d known her she offered to come over and make sure I was okay, but I told her I was fine. I drifted off with the receiver still in my hand, thoughts of Muddy swimming through my mind.