Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

“Or Terminator,” another one said. O shook his head. They waved us through. Luos were okay and Americans were most welcome.

  “What if we had been Kikuyu?” I asked him, feeling unsettled by the whole thing.

  “A few insults, your mother this, your mother that, a few slaps … that’s it—they are just kids,” O replied.

  “You keep saying that,” I said to him.

  “And you keep being American—it comes in handy, you know … goodwill …” he retorted.

  There was something I had to tell him—my fuck-up with Sahara—how if I had shot the driver, Sahara would have been dead or ours. He listened and was silent for a while.

  “It’s okay, Ishmael, but let me tell you something—understand that this world, our world is not what it was two weeks ago—you cannot order it to some moral code,” he said.

  “They opened the door, Ishmael—they opened the fucking door—and you know what? We never really had a choice but to enter their hell. And I am not talking about some simple revenge shit and what it requires, I am talking about justice. You have seen what they are capable of. To get Sahara, to get justice, we have to use their fucked-up moral code. Either that or we walk away … Right now!” He banged his hand on the dashboard.

  “You let Jamal walk … why?” I asked him.

  “Jamal—where is the justice in killing him? When it came down to it, he tried, even if it was to save himself. We owed him our lives from way back when. That debt has been paid,” he said.

  “Did you know your gun was empty?” I asked.

  “Did I know my gun was empty?” he repeated my question without answering.

  My friend was hurting—his wife was dead, his family had abandoned him when he needed them the most, denied him the kind of closure that comes with being held close by family as he grieved. I vowed to myself to be there with him when he walked through the door that Sahara had opened.

  Wanting to lose myself in the case, I was dreading going back into O’s apartment, but as we neared his door, we could hear laughter. We went in to find Janet and Muddy going through Mary’s clothes. Janet was holding up a mini-skirt and boots, an outfit that was so unlike Mary that I too couldn’t help laughing.

  Janet rushed to O and started crying. Muddy stood up and I walked to her. We held each other and my world felt real again. Then she patted me on the shoulder, went to Janet, and guided her back to the pile of belongings.

  O rolled a joint and sat with them among piles of Mary’s books and clothes. I opened a bottle of whiskey and sat down too. With a joint passing between O and Muddy, and a bottle between Janet and me, we mourned.

  O took us back to their early days when they had just started dating—a cop and a schoolteacher, who happened to be Luo and Kikuyu—“as if we didn’t have enough differences.”

  When they first met, he hadn’t even made detective yet. He was a constable called to her school because someone had broken in and made off with grounds maintenance equipment, wheelbarrows, shears, and the like. He saw her as she was walking to lunch. He tried to get himself invited along. She said no. He kept coming back to her school and questioning potential witnesses until she said yes.

  “That case of the missing wheelbarrow has never been solved to this day,” he declared to our laughter. “But the case of lonely hearts was.”

  Muddy suggested finishing the exams Mary had been grading, but the math was too difficult for us. We didn’t stop to think about whether we were doing the right thing when we passed all her students—Janet was going to take Mary’s last gift to her students in the morning.

  We couldn’t get ourselves to cook. There was a twenty-four-hour Kenchic around the corner and I rushed there to get some chicken and chips. When I came back, it was to find Kenny Rogers blaring throughout the apartment, his raspy country voice belting out the almost soulful “She Believes in Me.”

  Neighbors knocked on the door and I opened it, thinking they had come to complain, but it was to join us. Seeing there wouldn’t be enough food, they went back to their kitchens and came with whatever leftovers they had. On the sitting room floor where just hours before Mary had lain dead, all sorts of dishes were laid out—ugali, fish, chapattis, boiled maize and beans, cabbage and eggs and a curry of one thing or another, fermented milk and porridge—you name it. It was as if all of Kenya’s ethnicities were represented in the dishes.

  “Hey, Muddy, I missed your performance,” Janet yelled, to drown out the calls for “The Gambler” to be rewound.

  Muddy stood up a bit unsteadily and let her dreads hang out. That got the attention of the mourners-turned-party revelers.

  “A song, a painting, a poem, a word is a story. So let me tell you a story, a story about …” She seemed lost, and smiled, as if inviting us to tell her what the story should be. She continued after the pause.

  “Let me tell you a story about a word—one word that is as old as the very earth we walk on, a word that crosses boundaries, that swims underneath the currents of culture, a word that is a language, a word that is the language. Let me tell you a story about the word ‘love.’ When love was born, love was living. This love that was newborn and old, an old woman, this love decided to walk the earth. And young love said to older love, or was it the other way round? Love said to love, Love is birth, Love is living and Love is death, Love is gentle, Love is fierce, Love is violent, Love is living and Love is death, Love is God and Love is the Devil, and Love forgets more than it remembers, but tonight, this morning that is still a night …”

  She took a few deep breaths that cut through our quietness.

  “Love is the vehicle that drove us here, Love is Mary, Love is O, and Love is us. I love you, O.”

  No one said anything and for that one moment, I felt love like it was a human being walking among us, a physical thing, something that I could touch. That was not the poem she had performed at the Carnivore, not even close. It was something new.

  Then there was the sound of a rewinding cassette, a few miscues to the beginning of “The Gambler,” and we went back to singing along. As the party continued, some of the neighbors went to the kitchen, found food containers, and packed away the now twice leftover food into O’s fridge. Dishes were cleaned, and the floor cleared of bottles and mopped. It didn’t matter that most of the neighbors hardly spoke to each other, that they were from different ethnicities, or that they had to go to work the following day—they kept O company till six in the morning, talking and laughing about things peculiarly Kenyan, peppering me with questions about America and Muddy about Rwanda, and occasionally all of us sang along to a Kenny Rogers song.

  Finally, everyone was gone and we were left sprawled on the sitting room floor. It was time to start staring at our reality.

  “Next move?” I asked O in the haze of the smoke.

  “Kikuyu land, tomorrow we go to Kikuyu country.” Then he looked at Janet. “And you back to uni.”

  Janet reached for his hand. He handed the joint back to Muddy and cupped Janet’s hand with both of his.

  “Who’s going to take care of you without me here?” Janet asked him.

  “Not you, Janet … Mary would kill me if I let you interrupt your studies—especially with your math skills,” O teased before choking up.

  “You are the star still shining in my world, Janet. Your life is ahead of you, we are your past,” he said, wiping tears away from his eyes.

  I looked away so that I wouldn’t cry. Muddy sighed and laid her head on my lap, her dreadlocks sprawling onto the floor.

  We turned on the 7:00 a.m. news. The counting of the electoral votes was still going on, with a live update of the tally—it looked like Kenya would be swearing in a Luo president.

  “Two for two soon,” O said, referring to Obama. “See, I told you there was nothing to worry about—the most peaceful election of all time.”

  “Tell that to a powder keg,” Muddy muttered.

  We were still a unit of some sort. I wanted to believe that we still worked. W
e needed to sleep.

  I had barely closed my eyes when my cell rang. It was Helen and she had something for me. I could tell she was excited.

  “I’m here to return the dress,” I said to the watchman, to preempt more jokes from him.

  “Go on, Miss,” he said without skipping a beat. I found the door open so I knocked as I walked in. I called out Helen’s name but she didn’t answer. Her office door was closed. I knocked again, still no answer, so I pushed the door open. She had her headphones on, swaying to whatever she was listening to, and I let out a sigh of relief.

  Her office didn’t look like a hacker’s—there were only two computers sitting on a desk in an otherwise empty room.

  “The servers aren’t here … and I’m not telling,” she said, smiling at my surprise. “I know, I know, you want to get on with it.”

  She went on. “Your guy, I knew it—he is an anthropologist or historian of some sort. He studied at UC–Berkeley—most probably some African-related shit, and he loves watching American football and basketball games. He reads a lot of African stuff—archaeology—old stuff. And that’s not all,” she said, seeing the look of disappointment on my face. “See this?”

  She showed me videos of some scouting missions Sahara had gone on with his men. Each one of them began with footage of the entrance to a location and the security—in each place, their Range Rover was all but waved through—then the front desk, and soon enough, the lower rooms. They had done their homework before settling for the Norfolk.

  “This is plenty already—how did you get in?” I asked.

  “My profile of Sahara. An old white man who probably taught at a university, efficient, a person who values simplicity. In spite of the security protecting his laptop, he found a way of circumventing it. He didn’t grow up using computers, he’s a pen-and-paper person. You know how back in the day people hid safes behind paintings? Pretty much the same here—he hid things behind other things. He hid them where you would never think of looking unless you knew him,” she explained. “Let me put it this way, if I hadn’t gotten a sense of the old fuck, it would have taken me months to try and break into folders that had nothing in them,” she said, looking at me to see if I understood.

  “It was that simple?” I asked her.

  “You know the difference between simple and simplicity? Think of a child’s poem—simple, but try to write one yourself and you realize it’s simplicity masked as simple. But hey, I’m not offended,” she answered, half smiling, half scowling. “One other thing, though. There is an encrypted file—that will take some time, but I think I can break it open. That’s the file you want, because it was important enough for Mr. Arthritis to follow protocol with it.”

  “Can you make a copy of the file? I’m thinking I can also have the guys at the embassy look at it,” I said. “More hands on it the better, we need to move fast—these guys are already a year ahead.”

  “No, too risky … You would have to take the whole thing to them,” she said, pointing at the computer. “Or the hard drive …”

  “Then I will leave it in your capable hands,” I said, trusting she would find a way.

  “I don’t have the most sophisticated equipment in the world, I have to improvise … unless you offer to buy me the expensive shit I need … but probably not on your salary—Kamau told me this was a personal favor,” she said.

  “Not on my salary. But Sahara can afford it,” I said, as I gave the several thousand dollars I’d taken from Sahara’s driver to a surprised Helen.

  “I’ll call, don’t call me,” she yelled. I rushed back to O’s with a DVD of the footage of Sahara and his men scouting locations.

  O and I went through the scouting tapes carefully. They corresponded with the locations marked on the maps that I had retrieved from the Range Rover. It was time to call Hassan and Jason—we needed more manpower and equipment to check out all the locations. We had a lot on our plate as it was with Mary’s funeral.

  We started out our meeting with Jason and Hassan chitchatting about the elections. The elections had thus far gone well enough; no violence and no major irregularities were being reported. Raila was still pulling ahead of Kibaki. Hassan had deployed uniformed police to likely trouble spots, but he was confident that by the end of the following day we would have a new president without violence. The predicted blood-letting had not happened.

  We moved on to the case. They weren’t happy that we had kept the laptop from them.

  “I don’t like this—we agreed—full disclosure,” Jason said.

  “What did you think? That some Americans with high security clearances would storm into O’s house and kill his wife and all would be well?” I asked Jason.

  “Only a person working with Sahara would know we had it. We wanted to see if someone would come asking,” O lied. It worked to quiet any protests.

  “So?” Hassan asked.

  “No, but it’s only been a few days,” O answered.

  I explained about the map locations and showed them the DVD footage.

  “Your computer guy broke his security?” a surprised Jason asked. I didn’t correct him on gender; the less he knew about Helen, the better.

  “Yeah, only he could have done that. Weird little guy—terrorists and hackers have the same look—haughty, haunted, and hunted. But hey, we need a game plan—we need to check out all these places as fast as we can. We need help, good help. We can’t do it by ourselves—we have to bury O’s wife,” I reminded them.

  The Al Qaeda charade was using up a lot of resources, but Jason and Hassan promised to free up some people to check out the locations in the DVD. They were going to divvy up the work, but we would start things off by checking Kenyatta International Conference Center (KICC) on our way to Limuru. Since the Electoral Commission’s command center was at the KICC, it was all the more urgent. Jason made a call and arranged for some bomb experts from the embassy to meet us there.

  “Jason, the terrorist list—anything yet?” O asked him as we left. “Anything we should worry about?”

  “Nothing. I have your backs,” Jason answered. “If anyone makes a move on you, I will run serious interference and let you know.”

  The KICC brings to mind one word—“hubris.” Not because the place didn’t have a function: it was where national and international conferences were held, where the wedding parties of the rich and famous were catered, and where, often enough, foreign diplomats met. It’s just that the place was built to immortalize Kenya’s first president. Inside, there was a tall statue of the late Kenyatta, and whereas in real life he was an old man, stooped and decrepit, the statue was pure magnificence—eleven or so feet of gleaming gold.

  “Chop off a toe and you can build a home,” O joked.

  With Jason’s man, O and I followed the path Sahara and his men had taken through the building, down to the basement. We found nothing—there were no traces of any explosives, no hollow sounds, and no newer shades of cement or painting. We even went over repair records from the last two years—nothing. They could very well have planted a bomb in one of the rooms but it seemed unlikely. Sahara would have been going for maximum effect. But we decided to split up anyway, and check the lobby and also the first floor. Nothing.

  We were off to Limuru to ask Mary’s parents to take their daughter back. O’s people had said their piece. If Mary’s people agreed with O’s and denied her a burial place, she would effectively be an orphan.

  I called Muddy to let her know we were on our way to Limuru. She lived close to Mary’s parents, so she suggested we pick her up, and afterwards we could sleep over at her place. It was a good plan, except that Muddy was so tired that she passed out in the backseat of the Land Rover. I should have been sleeping, too, but so should have O, who was driving.

  “Is this usual?” I asked him.

  “Is what usual?” he asked in return.

  “You didn’t let me finish,” I countered, but it was more that I was wondering how to ask the question. �
�Is it usual that ethnic hatred doesn’t dissolve after death? I mean, shouldn’t death bring people together, if only to bury their loved one?” I asked, fumbling into coherence. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that all the bad things happening were in preparation for a major catastrophic event.

  “Look, wasn’t it illegal in the U.S.—on pain of death, on pain of lynching—to fuck a white woman?” he asked angrily. “You’re going to have your black president, I know, but it’s too early to start lecturing.”

  “What the fuck, man, look around you—bomb explosions, elections, machetes, and Mary, we have to beg for fucking six feet of dirt to bury her?” I said.

  “Welcome to Kenya—Karibu Kenya,” he said. In all the time I had known him, he had never talked to me like I was a tourist.

  “This hakuna matata shit you Kenyans have going—it’s going to blow up in your faces,” I replied in kind.

  O was silent.

  “A few days ago, at Muddy’s performance, I knew what to expect, I knew Mary would be there the next day, and the next—the only thing I had to fear was the pain of leaving her in grief. Today, I don’t know tomorrow anymore. Let us bury Mary. This shit will figure itself out,” he finally said.

  “Did you ever think of having children?” I asked, deciding to let it go. It wasn’t like there was anything we could do about Kenyan politics. And now that I had ten rings for Muddy, kids suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

  “Yes, but there was always tomorrow. You cannot love, truly love, unless you believe you will always have tomorrow—otherwise your life together is a wish, a regret. Yes—we wanted children,” he answered.

  “Hey, when are you going to do it?” O asked, meaning the proposal.

  “The …” I was looking for a code word for the beaded rings in case Muddy was just closing her eyes. “I couldn’t throw ten rings into a hat … our lives, everything is upside down,” I said.

  O lit a joint and rolled down his window, the cold Limuru air jolting me into full alertness.

  “That is the worst code I have ever heard,” he said, his chest heaving in and out in silent laughter. “You love the woman, propose. Even if bullets are flying around you, get on your knees and ask. You cannot live thinking that tomorrow you are going to die, or that you’ll lose the one you love … Life … life … would be just too much work.”