Nairobi Heat
Page 17
I drove the Mercedes past the cab. It looked like I was simply looking for a place to turn around and the guy in the cab didn’t make much of it. Why would he? I rolled down my window and slowed down when I came by him a second time. He was about to roll down his window when he recognised me and went for his gun. I shot him twice through his window.
Unscrewing the silencer I climbed out of the car and walked up the path to Joshua’s house. I saw a flash and then a minute or so later Jim was closing the door behind him, tucking his gun into the small of his back. He saw me and stopped, trying to figure out what was going on. Then he started to smile nervously.
‘Your gun, Jim, don’t put it away,’ I advised him as I raised mine.
He realised that if he went for his gun I was going to shoot him, so he raised his hands and went down on his knees on the porch. He might as well have taken his chances because I wasn’t going to let him live. I shot him twice in the chest – the gunshots resounding loudly in the quiet neighbourhood. They would call the cops. I wanted them to.
I stepped over Jim’s body and reached for the door handle, but as my hand met the cool metal I felt something tear into my shoulder, the force of it flinging me against the closed door. I whirled around to see Jim struggling to take aim again, but he was too weak to move fast enough. I shot him three times before he somehow managed to roll off the porch.
The bullet had lodged in my shoulder. I was just plain lucky, and in spite of the blood flowing furiously down my back I knew I would live. Opening the door, I staggered into the house. Joshua lay on the floor, still conscious but bleeding heavily. He had a bullet wound in his stomach, but most of the blood was from his femoral artery. Jim had wounded him, and then the bastard had cut his thigh open so that he could bleed to death. I couldn’t have planned it better.
‘You kill me … you become monster,’ he gasped. ‘Call ambulance, I leave country … never come back.’
‘It’s too late, Joshua,’ I said to him, looking down at him as his life literally flew out of him.
‘Then make me die,’ he implored as he took a deep breath, trying to hold on to life.
I pulled up a stool, making sure his blood would not flow to where I was and sat down. ‘Tell me, Joshua Hakizimana, how does it feel to know that in a few minutes you will be dead?’ I asked him.
I finally understood O. Only what you do when you meet the Joshuas of this earth matters. Everything else – what you could have done, what some prosecutor or attorney says – is details.
Joshua tried to say something, but he was almost gone and I could see the panic in his eyes. He took a few deep breaths and tried to speak again but to no avail. Finally, he tried to write something with his blood, but there was too much on the floor and he only succeeded in swirling it around. He managed a small smile, half dangerous, half humorous, only his eyes had already lost their light. Then he lost consciousness and died.
As I stood up I almost slipped and fell. I looked down to find that the blood flowing from my shoulder had made a thin stream to Joshua’s large pool of blood. I suppose that when I had thought that he was trying to write something he had in fact been mixing up our blood, trying to say that we had become one.
I walked outside. A small crowd was already forming. Someone had called in the shooting and I could hear sirens getting closer and closer. Soon the place was swarming with cops and I was surprised by how much I didn’t feel like one of them. The Chief arrived and I explained what had happened: I had dropped in earlier in the day to see Joshua and he had told me that he was leaving the country. I had promised to give him a ride and was surprised to find a cab outside when I came to pick him up. Recognising the driver I had asked him to get out of the cab, but he had raised his weapon. I had had no choice. On the porch I had shot Jim as he was going for his gun. By the time I had made it to Joshua he was dead.
‘Tell me something, Ishmael,’ the Chief said in exasperation. ‘Why did you need the Benz? You planned this whole thing didn’t you?’
‘Chief, I wanted to get him to the airport in style, him being a big shot and all,’ I replied.
The Chief knew that I knew that it didn’t matter what story I told. The KKK leader had killed Joshua, the vindicated hero, and I had shot him. Racial politics made it such that no one would ask questions. Rich white folk and rednecks do not get along. They never have. Over the years I had learned that Maple Bluff whites were as scared of white trash as they were of black gang-bangers. The death of Jim would be of no consequence, although the irony was that Jim had killed Joshua believing he was protecting a race that had long given up on his kind.
The Chief suddenly grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the rest of the men. ‘Ishmael, can I ask you something?’
‘Sure, Chief,’ I said, slightly alarmed.
‘How was it?’
‘How was what, Chief?’ I knew what he was asking, but I wasn’t going to give it to him easy. I had nearly died over there.
‘How was Africa? How was it for you?’
‘Well, Chief, Africa is just Africa … just like the US is the US. I could have died there, but then again I could have died here. I found love there, I think. But I had it here, once,’ I answered.
He looked at me and cleared his throat. ‘Who cares about that shit, man. I mean, how was it for you in Africa?’
‘Africa is the people, Chief,’ I said, trying to answer him. ‘But you gotta go see the people for yourself … sit down, talk, eat, fight and love with them.’
Then the adrenalin was gone and suddenly the pain was almost unbearable.
‘Let the boys take you to hospital …’ the Chief said with a chuckle, reaching out to hold me up before I lost consciousness. ‘Take some time off, find a wife, do something.’
It was finally over and for the first time in a long time I felt content. It was as if I had left myself and gone somewhere and had only just returned.
Two weeks or so later I was lying on the couch in my apartment when my cell rang. It was O. I was glad to hear from him – my shoulder had yet to heal and I had spent the last few days locked up in my apartment depressed as hell, the feeling of euphoria I had experienced that day outside Joshua’s house had not lasted long. Two days earlier I had been to the grocery store, to stock up, and had left feeling disgusted. I had wanted to throw up – the chicken, so full of chemicals that it looked white, the giant oranges and bananas, all the fat motherfuckers and their motherfucking fat little bastards crying at the counter for candy that would rot their teeth. ‘Africa is the people, so the US must be the people,’ I found myself muttering over and over.
The following day was a Sunday and with nothing better to do I had pulled myself out of bed and made it to church. On my way there it had started raining. The mid-morning sun had been quite hot and when the rain had hit the pavements and tarred roads the air had suddenly been filled with dust and a light wetness. Then, for just a second, I had not been entirely sure where I was – back in Madison or in Eastleigh.
In the church, surrounded by folk I had known all my life, I had felt a warmth returning that had been lost to me since that night when I first stared down at Macy Jane Admanzah’s body. But it was when the choir’s guitarist had started to play the opening chords of Amazing Grace that I had finally felt something stir in my heart. He had played two verses solo, using a metal slide, and unlike Muddy’s guitarist, who had run the slide across the frets so that the sound was rough, the choir’s guitarist let the slide linger on a note – so that it hung in the air. And when the choir had finally joined in the sopranos had sung above the guitar, the tenors along with it and the bass underneath, each competing with each other and yet in harmony, the sound rising and rising until the whole church stood as one; some singing, some crying, some dancing. This was where I belonged, I realised as I looked around me. I needed to live my life in an intense place, a crucible. But then the service had ended and whatever had stirred – a feeling of belonging, of being embraced by voices w
hose register was an intense thirst for life – had died away.
‘Look, man,’ O said. ‘I was just sitting here watching the old Ali-Foreman fight. Man, Ali was the business. Listen, I had a revelation. In life, you are either an Ali or a Foreman. People remember Ali as Ali. They remember Foreman as the funny old guy who fought Ali. You have to decide. Africa will make you Ali, America a Foreman …’
‘What the fuck are you trying to say, O?’ I asked, interrupting him.
‘Private detectives … let us set up shop. We shall be the first international private eyes, you and I …’
I remained silent.
‘Imagine all the assholes we can bring down …’ he said, trying to convince me. ‘For a hefty fee, of course.’
I started weighing up his offer as soon as he hung up. The truth of it was that in the US, if I tried hard enough, Mo and I would perhaps finally end up together and maybe make a good life for ourselves – kids, grandkids, et cetera. But I wanted more. I had seen some of the world and looked into an abyss so dark and cruel that I could never forget it. In Africa I could live out my contradictions, or at least my contradictions would be reconciled by the extremes of life there.
I looked at my little study full of files about dead people. I felt like I was in a stranger’s apartment. Yes, I lived there – I recognised the wooden table, the clothes and photographs on the walls – but everything was from my past, there was nothing from the present. Perhaps I too had become something in need of solving. I had to move. It made sense. I could belong anywhere. I would choose Africa. There I had hated and loved like nowhere else.
There was Muddy and O. There was Janet. There were things to do there. I wasn’t superfluous. I was useful and needed. What more could I have wished for? Why not see what happened?
I called the Chief, told him I was done and hung up on him before he tried talking me into staying. I wanted to live at one hundred degrees centigrade – all or nothing all of the time – and maybe do some good while at it.
Think me crazy, but I left the US at the height of my career for another beginning in that same Africa I had left.
MUKOMA WA NGUGI was born in Illinois but raised in Kenya. The son of world-renowned African writer and Nobel finalist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, his own poetry and fiction has been short-listed for the Caine Prize for African writing in 2009, and for the 2010 Penguin Prize for African Writing. He lives in Stamford, Connecticut.
MELVILLE INTERNATIONAL CRIME
Kismet
Jakob Arjouni
978-1-935554-23-3
Happy Birthday, Turk!
Jakob Arjouni
978-1-935554-20-2
More Beer
Jakob Arjouni
978-1-935554-43-1
One Man, One Murder
Jakob Arjouni
978-1-935554-54-7
The Craigslist Murders
Brenda Cullerton
978-1-61219-019-8
Death and the Penguin
Andrey Kurkov
978-1-935554-55-4
Penguin Lost
Andrey Kurkov
978-1-935554-56-1
The Case of the General’s Thumb
Andrey Kurkov
978-1-61219-060-0
Nairobi Heat
Mukoma Wa Ngugi
978-1-935554-64-6
Cut Throat Dog
Joshua Sobol
978-1-935554-21-9
Brenner and God
Wolf Haas
978-1-61219-113-3
He Died with His Eyes Open
Derek Raymond
978-1-935554-57-8
The Devil’s Home on Leave
Derek Raymond
978-1-935554-58-5
How the Dead Live
Derek Raymond
978-1-935554-59-2
I Was Dora Suarez
Derek Raymond
978-1-935554-60-8
Dead Man Upright
Derek Raymond
978-1-61219-062-4
The Angst-Ridden Executive
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
978-1-61219-038-9
Murder in the Central Committee
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
978-1-61219-036-5
The Buenos Aires Quintet
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
978-1-61219-034-1
Off Side
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
978-1-61219-115-7
Southern Seas
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
978-1-61219-117-1