Black Star Nairobi

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  “Two things …” He paused. “Can I talk freely?” he asked suddenly. Before we could answer, he continued.

  “Kenya is no longer safe for you—not for a while, anyway. There are some people asking about you. The only reason they haven’t found you is the chaos—and they’re afraid of getting caught in one of those roadblocks …” he said, smiling as if to suggest that at least the violence was good for something.

  “You, how did you get here?” O asked him.

  “I know what they don’t—a white man in a car with diplomatic plates is safe. Fucking mercenaries are fucking cowards. You know why? Because they want to live to spend the money,” he said.

  “How do you know they are mercenaries?” Muddy asked.

  “Because they are not mine—and no one knows who they are … independent contractors—call them by whatever name,” Jason answered.

  “We can bait them, let’s grab them—they can tell us who they’re working for,” O said, excited by the prospect.

  “They won’t know much, Sahara won’t risk it,” Jason said.

  “Then what exactly have you done for us? We have given you a lot more than you bring to the table. Hey, do you have leads on the fuckers who killed my wife? You have everything, DNA, prints. What is it that you do, exactly? Could you be more useless?” O said angrily.

  “I can give you the official line and send you after some low-key Al Qaeda operatives somewhere. Or I can tell you the truth as I know it—I don’t know shit, no one knows who these guys are, and no one wants to find out. They are American, I agree with you. But Paul wants to believe they are Americans who have been turned by the terrorists—like that fucking kid, the American Taliban, John Walker. So he’ll keep going after Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, anything with Muslim blood in it,” he explained.

  “We have to find Sahara. It’s the only way out—he is the key,” I said.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Jason said. “I don’t think he’s in the country. I think he’s back in the U.S. He’s safest there. Even if he isn’t, our best chance of finding out who that fucker is lies in the United States.”

  “Well, then, get some of your men on it,” Muddy said.

  “I can’t, like I said, all hands are on Al Qaeda,” Jason said, sounding a bit like his old self. “But hey, what if there was a way we could find him quietly?”

  We looked intrigued.

  “The United States—you have to go to the U.S.… Only way we are going to see this thing through. You have to go back to the beginning—he got those four young men from somewhere in the U.S., they were trained somewhere, there is a trail somewhere in the U.S., and you have to find it,” he said, trying not to appear too excited.

  He waited as we processed, or rather laughed through, what he had just said.

  “We are on all sorts of lists. How the fuck do we get in?” I asked him.

  “I have one word for you—Mexico,” he said, lifting his hands up to highlight the name as if it were on a billboard. “You want this solved, you want justice or revenge, you go in through Mexico. Besides, the safest place for you right now is with Uncle Sam—no one will think of looking for you there.”

  “So we get to Mexico and then what? We can’t fly into the U.S.,” I said. “You gotta do better than that, Jason.”

  Before Jason could answer, Muddy jumped in.

  “Jason, you’re good. We sneak in like refugees, illegally,” Muddy said with a laugh. I could tell she liked the idea.

  “Muddy’s right. You have to sneak in. Mexico is another Kenya; the dollar goes a long way there,” he said. I looked at him, expecting him to laugh, but he was serious.

  “Mexico? What about Canada? We can fly into Canada. Nobody watches the Canadian border,” I argued, finding it incredible that we were even taking his suggestion seriously.

  “No. Canada is too risky,” Jason said emphatically. “If you get flagged, you can’t bribe your way through the airport. Shit, think about it—black people driving into the U.S. through the Canadian border? You will be profiled. In Mexico, the dollar is the law …”

  “I’ll be damned if I’m going to sneak back into my own motherfucking country,” I interrupted, angry because I knew it was the only way. We had one lead—if we could call it that—and that was the University of California. We just had to start there. We had to find Sahara.

  “Mexico … it has to be Mexico—been thinking about it, tried other options, only Mexico works,” Jason went on, as if trying to convince himself as well. “There are other logistical calculations. I have a person I trust in Mexico,” he added as he opened his briefcase.

  “Why? I mean, what do you get out of this?” O asked Jason.

  “I told you before, I can’t protect my country without the whole truth; like a doctor, you can’t treat a disease you don’t understand. I get the truth and you get justice—and we can do both quietly. It has to be done quietly. Quiet is the only way we get out of this one,” he answered.

  From the briefcase, Jason produced three Kenyan passports, one for O and the other two for Muddy and me. I opened mine to find an old passport photo, blurry yet recognizably me. My name was no longer Ishmael Fofona—it was James Mwangi. I leaned over and looked at O’s. His name was Patrick Onyango.

  “Look, Muddy, they will need you … a beautiful woman creates an aura of goodwill,” Jason explained as he handed Muddy a passport.

  Muddy laughed when she saw her name.

  “Jane Mwangi, your trophy illegal immigrant wife,” she said to me. I liked that—the wife part—but I was also thinking that it made it all the more difficult to propose with my ten beaded rings. It would look like I was doing it because the idea had been introduced into my head by Jason.

  Jason gave us three Social Security cards clearly stamped “eligible for work,” three large envelopes containing airline tickets to Mexico City, fake driver’s licenses, and ten thousand dollars each. Operating on a cash basis meant no credit cards and no paper trail.

  For what was going to be a long journey, the travel plan itself was simple enough. We would fly into Mexico City, where Jason’s contact would meet us. His contact would take us to Tijuana and get us across the border and eventually into San Francisco and Oakland. From there we would be on our own.

  O’s cousin Michael, who lived in Oakland, could shelter us for a few days. O would tell him we were coming to the U.S. to look for work. He might suspect something when he saw that an American was with O, but he wouldn’t ask questions. They had known each other since they were little kids and they had the kind of trust that had been tested over the years.

  Jason was right, we were going to be safer in the U.S. No government agency would think of searching for us in the great underground immigrant networks, and if they did, where would they start? Who would they send inside without them sticking out like a white man in an African village?

  “Just don’t get pulled over or arrested for anything,” Jason warned us, as if following my thoughts.

  How we were going to work a case where Sahara’s fascination with the University of California was the main lead, and work it as illegal immigrants, I had no idea. In reality we had more than that—we had photos, fingerprints, and DNA from the three dead white men. We knew our guy from Ngong Forest had a sickle cell trait for which he was taking medication. We knew what Sahara looked like, and that he was not done, and we had a laptop that Helen was hacking.

  Janet was going to be safe at the university and Mumbi would stay with relatives in Nairobi.

  Mary was gone. We had buried her. Her father was dead. Unpredictable violence was erupting all over the country.

  It was going to be a relief to board that plane to Mexico.

  CHAPTER 9

  BETWEEN TIJUANA AND A HARD PLACE

  Mexico. We were on our way to Mexico. For fuck’s sake, how was it that in just the span of a few years I was returning to my own country as an illegal immigrant? Yet after everything I had seen in the last few days, a black A
merican detective sneaking into the U.S. through Mexico shouldn’t have raised any eyebrows.

  Leaving the U.S. the first time around to settle in Kenya hadn’t been easy, but Muddy was there and I simply had to go back to her. I recalled the first time I had seen her on stage, doing spoken word with a serious sensuality that commanded respect as much as it did admiration. There was always more to Muddy. I knew it from the moment we met. Yet, even for love, leaving all you have known and all you could ever become, all you had in fact hoped to become, is not easy. I had to leave friends behind, I had just been promoted, and I did often wonder whether as an only child I had betrayed my parents.

  In other ways, it was easy to leave. In Kenya, my skin was like everyone else’s, I was part of the majority. Not that I was an insider: the accent, my “Americaness,” was apparent to those I interacted with and I had come to accept it as part of me. What I had refused to accept was being called mzungu—it was a fighting word, like a white man calling me a nigger.

  To be away from home—to live as an immigrant among people who were black like me—would there ever come a time when home could be anywhere we wanted it to be? I had chosen Kenya—would there ever come a time when Kenya or any other place would choose me? Truly embrace me as one of its own?

  I had to learn Kiswahili. Yes, most Kenyans wanted to practice their English, a sort of rap English, with an American, but still, O, Muddy, Janet, or even anyone at Broadway’s Tavern—they could all have been my teachers. But there was a part of me that resisted, that made me want to never fully belong, and I had begun to suspect that, deep down, I wanted it that way—there was a part of me that wanted to remain American. The dreams I enjoyed most were those in which I was eating heart attack food—meat lover’s pizza from Domino’s or the properly named Kill Me Quick Double Cheese and Bacon Hamburger at the Paradise Bar in good old Madison, Wisconsin.

  I was sure about one thing though—I was excited that I would be home, back in the U.S. California and Wisconsin were worlds apart, but it was still home. If we solved the case, maybe I would take Muddy to Madison to meet my parents! Shit, maybe I would get to propose in Madison, by Lake Mendota.

  “You planning on coming back with us?” Muddy, sitting between us, asked O, who was looking out pensively into the clouds.

  “Of course, where else would I go?” O answered.

  “No, I mean … are you planning on surviving the case?”

  “Do I look suicidal to you?” O asked defensively.

  Muddy cast a glance my way, but I pretended I wasn’t listening.

  “You might fool Ishmael, but not me, O. I know that look!”

  “What look?” he asked.

  “The look of a man or a woman who is not planning on coming back. I know that look from men and women … even children who had lost everything. In Rwanda, they held their AK-47s and marched forward, never looked back and never stopped. They kept walking, fighting, until a bullet stopped them. And for the unlucky ones, the war ended,” Muddy said, flipping through the in-flight magazine, trying to be nonchalant.

  “Just because that’s what you did doesn’t mean that’s what I will do,” O said.

  Muddy didn’t take the bait.

  “At some point you … you have to think things through—see yourself in the light of day and the truth that surrounds you. I did not close my eyes when I was being raped and tortured. I certainly did not close them when I was killing …” she responded.

  “Sounds like the beginning of one of your poems,” I said to her.

  “Fuck off, fake husband,” she said as she put her head on my shoulder and promptly dozed off.

  O and Muddy, sometimes they spoke in a different register—a language that, even though it was in English, I could never fully grasp. At an intellectual level I knew what she was telling him—plan to stay alive, and don’t be too gung-ho about seeking revenge or turning this into a suicide mission. I knew this because I was worrying about the same thing, but when it came from Muddy it felt like she was speaking to O on another level, and, gruff as he was, her words would have communicated something to him that I myself could not say.

  O finished his drink, leaned against the window, and went to sleep. I was exhausted as well—too exhausted to sleep. Flipping through the in-flight magazine’s guide to Mexico, I was envious of the people who ate at the glossy, luxurious restaurants, shopped in the malls, visited the museums, and took romantic walks on the beaches. I took consolation in the thought that just like I had seen a side of Kenya the tourists would never see, so would I experience Mexico, through its underbelly.

  O was clearly having a nightmare. I didn’t wake him up; this was the most sleep he had gotten since Mary’s death. I lifted two blankets from the floor, careful not to wake Muddy either, tore into the plastic with my teeth, and covered us both. She nestled deeper into my shoulder. Not long after, I too was off to sleep.

  James and Jane Mwangi and Patrick Onyango had no trouble getting through airport security with their tourist visas. There were no double glances and checks—compared to what we would have undergone at a U.S. airport, we were practically waved into Mexico. To be fair, not that many Africans are trying to enter Mexico illegally.

  The first thing we saw on reaching the gate was our false names hoisted high up in the air above a sea of placards. We cut through the crowd and found a tall, skinny, fit man dressed in blue jeans, beat-up old sneakers, and a black dress shirt. He appeared to be in his fifties, and had I seen him on a Mombasa beach, I would have thought him Swahili—he was black, lighter than me, but with coppery skin. His short afro was neatly combed. His eyes conveyed the kind of humor I had come to associate with Kenyans, as well as relief that we had made it.

  “You must be the black gringo,” he said to me, and then turned to Muddy. “And you, you have the look of a flower, truly a rose among thorns,” and he pointed at O and me.

  “Naturally, a man gravitates toward beauty,” he said as he took her hand and squeezed it, letting out a delighted laugh.

  The Muddy I knew would have delivered some kind of retort or, in some instances, with drunken fools, a backhand slap, but now she smiled almost shyly.

  “And you, my friend—we are not neighbors, like with this black gringo—but we come from the same place—mother Africa. All of us,” he said to O, placing his hand over his heart and making the sign of the cross.

  The mythical Africa that everyone, even Africans, craves … I had yet to see it, I thought to myself.

  “Me, my name is Julio—and I am at your service,” he announced. “I will provide you with a ride from Mexico to the United States of America.” And he made a gesture indicating a bumpy ride.

  “Of all the places I have ever wanted to go … Mexico was not one of them. Not even in my wildest dreams,” O said, breaking into laughter. “But here we are.”

  “Órale! It’s good, then. Let’s hit the potholes. My friend,” Julio said, turning to O, “you will find many, many, many similarities between our fine country and yours.”

  We got to Julio’s car—a Mercedes-Benz that looked like it was being held together by rusty coat hangers. He opened the trunk and we threw in our carry-on luggage. A surprise was waiting for us—on the outside, the car was a beat-up old Mercedes. Inside, it was brand-new—still had that brand-new smell—and it had gadgets I hadn’t seen before, like an iPod Touch that plugged into the car’s music system.

  Julio laughed as he looked at our surprised faces.

  “In my line of work, appearances deceive, two faces—always,” he said.

  “And what line of work might that be?” Muddy asked him.

  “In Mexico, a man must have many hands in many pockets. I have as many lines of work as there are pockets. Many hands like an Indian god,” Julio answered. I noticed that he kept looking at the rearview mirror. We all looked back too, but didn’t see anything.

  “We cross the border tonight?” O asked him.

  “No, my friends—you get to see more
of Mexico. Two days’ time. Jason called me too late, I have to plan. If we rush … mistakes in Mexico are very expensive,” he said.

  Two days of waiting was going to feel like a long time, but I for one did not see a need to protest. We needed to rest, regroup, and do some hard thinking.

  “How do you know Jason?” I asked.

  “My friends, it looks like my deception did not work very well,” he told us. We looked behind us again and saw a black SUV gaining on us. My question was lost to the moment.

  “Enemy or friend—best not to find out.” Julio stepped on the gas and the Mercedes lurched forward, picking up speed, and the SUV became smaller and smaller as the distance between us grew.

  Suddenly, he veered into a dirt road, stopped, and ran to the trunk. He called us over and we found him removing our luggage. Just when we were about to protest, he lifted the mat. His trunk had a false bottom and all around his spare tire were guns—Glocks, two M-16s, the universal AK-47s, and something I had never seen in the trunk of a car before, grenades. He motioned to us to choose our weapons—O and Muddy armed themselves with AKs while I reached for a Glock. We could see dust rising as the SUV picked up our trail. We piled back in and roared off.

  “Ambush,” I shouted over the noise. No one heard me, so I yelled again, “Ambush them.”

  “In Mexico, everyone you want to kill has bulletproof windows,” Julio said.

  “Do you?” Muddy asked him. He smiled.

  “Of course. But they’re no good when they’re open,” he said as he rolled up his window. We followed his cue and double-checked that all the windows were rolled up tight.

  The SUV was now a few hundred feet behind us. They opened fire. The bullets rained on the rear window, leaving small pockmarks. They let out another burst that skirted all around us.

  “The tires, they are trying to get the tires,” Julio shouted.

  Then out of nowhere a gate appeared—and someone opened it before we hit it. The SUV came to a screeching halt, furiously backed away, and drove off.