Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  “Possible, but terror is irrational. Best to start with the usual suspects and keep widening the net if need be,” Paul said, trying to sound less sure than before.

  Though I thought O was right, Paul’s reasoning made sense—it was how we would approach a bank robbery—start with what you know. O let it go and Jason didn’t say anything.

  “We need access to any records that might have survived,” I said.

  “Anything you need,” Paul assured us.

  But they had nothing yet. Paul asked us to check back with him in a day or two. They would get our guy’s fingerprints, or try at least, and his DNA. If they found something sooner he would give us a call.

  “And what’s your theory?” Jason asked, looking at O and me.

  “We have to work our way back—if our man was part of the group that did this, there has to be a trace of him somewhere,” O explained.

  “Ah, naturally,” Jason said. “What I meant was—why would an American bomb a hotel in Nairobi?”

  “At this point, no idea—all we have are his balls,” I said, and held up the two ball bearings to lighten the mood. We had what we came for—cooperation—it was time for O and me to move on.

  Jason burst out laughing and the others turned to look at what we were doing. He laughed so hard that he had to be propped up by Paul, who smiled in irritation as he tried to shut him up. A photograph of them, and there, would easily sink a career—“Diplomat and CIA Section Chief Laugh at Bomb Site!”

  “My friends, I’m all tied up here but you and I, we shall share a brewskyfast soon,” Jason said, still convulsing with laughter as we walked away.

  “That guy was as high as a kite—I can tell weed laughter from a mile away,” O said. “I mean, he could have been smoking up at home before being called in.”

  The Norfolk bombing in 1981, the U.S. Embassy in 1997, and the second Norfolk bombing in 2007. That was only three bomb explosions in almost thirty years. It’s not like Jason went to bed every night thinking he needed to be sober in case a bomb went off.

  Americans like to think of their overseas operatives as serious people who are guided by their sacred duty to democracy, who, in imminent danger, take extreme precautions. In reality, they were getting high and trying to get laid like everybody else. I started laughing at the absurdity of it all.

  Humor in Africa, laughter in Kenya—you just had to be able to laugh—because some things were just funny, like a high CIA bureau chief at a bomb site.

  “I don’t need to tell you this—this shit is way over our heads, terrorists, bombs, a black American in Ngong …” O said more seriously.

  I agreed. We had no business here. But we had been called in and shown a dead body. We had no choice but to work the case and try to keep our heads above water. We needed the money and a way out of the minutiae of wading through other people’s dirt to solve the petty cases we’d been getting. We needed this case more than it needed us.

  I was going to work the murder—everything else was going to be background music, no matter how loud it got.

  Yusuf Hassan, O’s half-time boss, as O started calling him after we set up our private practice, had gone back to his office before we could speak to him. So we drove to the Special Branch headquarters to see him.

  Hassan was an ex-military man. Tall and in his sixties, with an ill-fitting suit on a body used to standing and sitting straight, Hassan had been called in from the military to combat crime. He didn’t believe in “innocent until proven guilty.” In fact, he didn’t believe in ascertaining guilt. Suspicion, and only poor young men from the slums were suspicious, meant a bullet to the head. Kenyans loved him for it—he was a man of action and that’s what counted.

  I didn’t like him, but if it weren’t for him throwing O and me cases every now and then, our agency would have gone belly-up. And he had never asked me about my immigration status. I didn’t hate Hassan’s methods because I was American—it was because I was a black American. Before I was a cop, I knew being black, poor, and urban meant you were the scapegoat that no one cared about. After I became a cop, the stink of racist policing rubbed off on me and some family members called me a sell-out to my face. To see so many killed in Kenya without even the semblance of a court of law reminded me of what middle-class America, white or black, wished upon on the poor black male.

  Everyone was happy with Hassan, the tough man from the coast—that’s how a newspaper headline had described him. Or as a popular comedian put it: If you don’t wanna float, stay away from the man from the coast.

  O liked to point out that that I, too, had done some questionable things in the course of trying to survive in the Kenyan underbelly.

  It was true, I had done some things in order to stay alive that would not stand up in front of an overpaid “Jesus is my savior but I am rich” human rights commission, but I didn’t have innocent blood on my hands. For me it was always in self-defense or in the defense of someone else. I had come to know I was good with violence the same way a boxer realizes he is good with his hands—in and outside the ring I was aware of the rules, and whenever possible I followed them.

  “This Hassan of yours,” I said to O, trying to sound Kenyan. “He has already shown a love for the gun. When the election results are announced and his guy doesn’t win, what do you think he will do?”

  “He walks away—Hassan is a believer in hierarchy and order. He walks away unless asked to stay on. He is old-school,” O replied.

  “And between the people and government—who will he choose?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  “Hassan will always choose the government. Look, man, elections are not our business—our business is this fucking case, and Hassan will give us what we want. We better find out who killed our guy before the elections—all this other shit will just get in the way,” O said.

  He was right—all these side questions had nothing to do with our dead guy. We had taken the case, we had to work with Hassan. It didn’t mean we had to trust or even like him.

  We walked into his office on the top floor of the six-story CID building. His office was always dark except for his desk lamp. He emerged from its light to guide us to leather seats that faced his desk. The office was already big, but its emptiness made it look even larger. I briefed him on where we were.

  “The truth is we have nothing. We have an American who has been dead for a number of days. We believe he was involved with the Norfolk bombers, who are most probably foreigners … but he just might as well be a guy who stumbled onto something he shouldn’t have …” I concluded.

  “Talk to the Americans. They like to think they know more than the natives. I suspect that this once they might actually be right,” Hassan suggested.

  “The Americans seem pretty sure it’s Al Qaeda, with a little help from your neighbors,” I said. I wanted his response.

  “Two things. The terrorists are not Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, or Somali,” he said emphatically.

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked. O glanced at me.

  “Because we are always one step behind these dogs … always one step behind. We know the time they are going to strike, but not the day. Sometimes we know the day but not the place. There is always something—a noise. But this … we had no clue we were dancing. You see? Nothing, not a sound … in an economy of handshakes, we would have heard something. The people behind this are new, very good, and using different channels. We should be afraid of them—no one should be able to do such a bad thing so quietly. That is why I am inclined to go with your theory,” Hassan answered.

  He leaned back, then forward, and started looking at his files, which I was sure contained nothing useful. I almost felt sad for him—here was a man who at any moment could be a hero or a criminal depending on who took office after the elections.

  “Follow the dead man. Just work your case,” he advised. Or warned. It was hard to tell.

  “I like having the truth, I like answers. Not for their own sake, or for a greater tru
th, but because then I can do my job better,” he added. “I need to know who the man is, and why he was killed.”

  “What was the second thing?” O asked him.

  “What?” Hassan echoed back.

  “You said there were two things, what was the second thing?” O asked again.

  Hassan looked irritated for a moment—like he had changed his mind about telling us. Perhaps we had said something we shouldn’t have.

  “Be very careful—if we could not see these people coming, neither will you. This is an enemy without a face, a name, and a history,” Hassan warned us. “There is no way of knowing where this will take us.”

  “Mzee, what is going on? These rumors about machetes, are they true?” O asked plainly. Mzee means many things. It means “an elder,” but colloquially it was used to show temporary deference to someone with more authority than you, regardless of age—like when we used to say “Boss” in the U.S. But “Boss” wasn’t the same thing as “Sir,” and “Mzee” wasn’t the same thing as “Bwana.” You could say “Mzee” to a bartender or a bus driver.

  “You know, we picked up two shipments … some might have slipped through,” he answered, waiting for the obvious follow-up question.

  “Where were they going?” I asked.

  “The guy who came to pick them up—he knew nothing. He was just supposed to drop them off at this empty hut in the Rift Valley,” Hassan said. “We just have to keep watching. This is Kenya—a little blood to bless the winner. But, hey, we have nothing to worry about, we have the guns,” he added with a smile.

  There were just too many things going on. The Kenyan police were already spread thin by crime and corruption. Now the bomb explosion, with presidential elections just round the corner. Something had to give.

  Someone drops a cigarette butt in a California forest and it fizzles out. But sometimes the rains are late, and the ground is dry. And it happens to be windy. That cigarette butt might as well have been thrown into a powder keg. What people like Hassan were refusing to consider was that a little blood-letting, with all these other things going on, could turn into a flood, as Muddy put it.

  Hassan stood up and walked us to the door.

  “Mzee, who really called us in? And why?” O asked. Maybe that was the second thing.

  “I did, O, I thought you said your agency needed a bone to chew on,” Hassan answered.

  “We need meat, not bones,” I said, to their laughter.

  “It worked out, didn’t it? It makes our government happy that a Kenyan is involved, and it gives the U.S. investigators eyes and ears on the ground,” he said, echoing Jason and Paul. “Besides, you can work quietly, especially if that body is American—a lot of people will not want what you find out to be known. Be safe.”

  I had never understood this side of Hassan—he seemed genuinely concerned about us, yet he was a murderer.

  “So we can count on you,” O said to him, but it was more of a question.

  “To a point—you can count on me to a point—my hands—see the strings?” Hassan lifted up his hands and laughed. At least he was honest.

  “Let’s close this case. Bring it on home to me,” he said, looking directly at me.

  CHAPTER 3

  FISSURES AND BREAKTHROUGHS

  O and I drove to the American Embassy pretty much in silence. We always drove in silence. It was one of those things that would make a stranger doubt our friendship. When we were in a bar, in his house, or at Muddy’s, we always had plenty to talk about. There was something about being in a car that called for silence. It had taken me a long time to figure it out, and then I had realized that we never drove to happy places, to weddings, for example. Like men going to war, our silence, at least mine, was meditation.

  He slipped in a Kenny Rogers cassette. The rest of the country had moved on to music that sounded like it was being piped through tubes and sung by singers with stuffed noses, but O loved his country music and he loved his cassettes—and the whole process of it getting chewed up and him having to carefully rewind the loose tape.

  I, who had grown up in the not-so-mean streets of Madison, Wisconsin, had come to appreciate Kenny Rogers—the storyteller, O called him. So with Kenny Rogers blaring in the old squeaky speakers of O’s Land Rover, we drove to the U.S. Embassy out in the suburbs of Nairobi. It made sense that they would move the embassy to a suburb, easier to protect and, for terrorists, too boring to bomb.

  We zigzagged around huge cement barriers meant to slow down a speeding truck bomb before getting to the gate. Once inside and past the security station where we disarmed we were led up the stairs and into Jason’s office. It was like an executive’s—large, with dark mahogany furniture—and in the corner, some leather sofas and a coffee table. Like something from a catalogue, complete with a quill pen laid out next to an ink pen.

  “In Kenya, here we are, in the midst of elections—and what happens—a fucking bomb—but the elections go on. And in the States—a Kenyan is president … almost president. All roads lead to Nairobi,” he said cheerfully, as we shook hands with him and with Paul.

  “Glad you decided to stop by—as you can imagine we are very busy, so let’s make this snappy,” he added, as we sat down on the leather couches.

  “Have you found anything?” O asked them.

  “Just so we are clear. The bombing is ours, we have the resources. And the body in Ngong is yours … as long as we want it that way,” Paul threatened.

  “So you said,” O replied.

  “We followed the body, it led us here,” I said to Paul.

  “I want to hear you say it,” Paul said, looking at me.

  “Say what?”

  “That you understand, that you will report directly to Jason and me,” Paul said.

  “I understand,” I said, looking Paul in the eyes, and when he seemed relieved, I added, “I understand that you need us just as much as we need you.”

  “Everyone take a chill pill, okay? We can share the smoking gun, at least the smoke,” Jason said to ease the tension.

  “The partial fingerprints, DNA, dental records … any hits?” I asked.

  “Nothing yet, it will take some time, especially if your man knew what he was doing. We have nothing—the hotel guests, nothing special about them, nothing from the security tapes, and we have gone back six months,” Jason explained.

  “And our bomb guys have nothing conclusive but it looks like Al Qaeda. They have claimed responsibility. We are working that angle, unless we learn otherwise. We are going after them in Somalia. We are at war with them. We are going to take them out once and for all,” Paul added angrily.

  “It doesn’t matter to you whether it was them or not?” I asked him.

  “Guys, does it matter to you whether a bank robber robbed a particular bank or not? A bank robber is a bank robber even when not robbing banks, the same as you are always cops,” Paul argued.

  “They are trying to kill us—so we go after them. If they aren’t guilty of this, they are guilty of other things. But we are working on the theory that there is a second group out there, sympathetic, maybe independent or working closely,” Jason said. Paul started to say something but decided against it.

  Jason excused himself to make a call. Soon after, a suit in dark glasses brought in a box and Jason took us through its contents. There were DVDs with zipped files from the last four years, a logbook listing entering and departing cars and their reason for visiting. And there was another disc with the Norfolk’s financial transactions on it. It was going to take us a long time to go through everything. It was all about the details.

  “What time is it?” Jason asked Paul.

  “Four-ten p.m.,” Paul answered.

  “Wrong, Paul. You are dead wrong. Tusker time,” Jason said as he tapped a wooden panel on the wall, reached in, and came out with four cold Tuskers.

  “I am curious, Ishmael, Obama—do you think he can win?” Jason asked me.

  “I’m not sure—but he has my vote
,” I answered.

  “What is it that the Kenyans liked to say? That the United States will see a Luo president before Kenya does?” Jason asked O. This was a constant joke—there had yet to be a Luo president in spite of them being the second-largest ethnic group.

  O smiled.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” he said.

  “I don’t think he’ll win. Race matters more than anything else … like tribe here, only without the machetes …” Jason said, bringing his hand to the table and laughing as he stopped his Tusker from toppling over.

  “I have my money on Obama. You just needed to look at where his money is from, old white ladies sending in crumpled five-dollar bills,” Paul said. “What we should be worried about is what’s going to happen here. Things are going to get pretty hot.”

  “That I agree with,” Jason pronounced, placing his hand on O’s shoulder.

  I picked up the box full of potential evidence.

  “You know, a fellow cop back in the United States, he used to say that the only difference between an accountant and a detective is that one wears a gun. The search for details, that will be us crunching numbers,” I said, thinking about the mind-numbing work ahead.

  “There is another difference,” O interjected. “The accountant gets paid more.”

  We left Jason almost dying with laughter and went to the security office to retrieve our weapons and phones. As soon as I turned mine on it buzzed with a text from Jason. He wanted to meet at Broadway’s the following evening—8:00 p.m. That the CIA chief in Kenya was sure he could have a confidential meeting in a public space added another detail to the bar. I showed O the text.

  “Jason and Paul have two different agendas—for now, we trust neither, until we know more,” O said, and I agreed.

  Usually we took work to the bar instead of home. But we needed a computer and Internet access so we did the next best thing and stopped at a gas station, bought some beer, and went to O’s. O and Mary had moved from the chaotic and sometimes dangerous Eastleigh to a high-rise apartment in the more peaceful Parklands. It was a high-rise apartment in name only—often there was no running water and they had to pay the night watchman, who doubled as the handyman, to carry gallons of water from the communal tap up the five flights. Just as often, there was no electricity. While Mary would have preferred that they buy a house, the apartment was close enough to Kangemi Primary School, where she taught, to make its temporariness well worth it.