The Idol of Mombasa

by Annamaria Alfieri

  For today, at least, the askari corps showed nothing of the underlying strife. They stood at attention, saluted crisply, and marched in precise formation. Libazo took his place with the ranks of sergeants in the second row—taller than most of the others.

  Egerton introduced A.D.S. Tolliver to the gathering and walked with him as they inspected the troop. Once Egerton had dismissed the men, he and Tolliver rode together in a trolley back to headquarters. Tolliver took the opportunity to question the D.S. on what his first official assignment would be. “I imagine, sir, that you will want me to delve immediately into that threat to the Grand Mufti.”

  “Not at all, I’m afraid,” Egerton answered. “District Commissioner Hobson-Jones insists that I handle that personally.”

  Disappointed, Tolliver thought to press the point. He wanted to play a role, though more out of curiosity and for the challenge to his skills than any desire to protect the Egyptian clergyman. But he did not yet know Egerton well enough to pressure him. “Yes, sir,” he said instead. “I can imagine why.”

  “I will be taking that threatening blackguard before the magistrate straightaway. I will need you to come to the courthouse as well. It seems someone has stolen the cash box from the fines collector. Talk to the desk sergeant at headquarters. He knows the basics of that investigation so far.”

  As best he could, Tolliver hid his pique at being offered such a petty assignment, but he could not stop his jaw from clenching.

  5

  Until Kwai arrived that morning, he had known the city only from descriptions given by fellow tribesmen over the years. His first impression of his fellow askaris was not positive. As they dispersed on the parade ground, if they spoke to him at all, they did so with an attitude of superiority. Many, of course, were Hindus and Sikhs, who always thought themselves better than any black man. His African comrades might have skin a similar color to Kwai’s, but here at the coast they were almost all Somalis, Akamba, and Wanyamwezis, each quite snobbish in his own way. The English treated all the African tribesmen as if they were interchangeable, but there had been fierce rivalries in this country long, long before the British or even the Arabs arrived. In Kwai’s own birthplace near Nairobi, the Kikuyu and the Maasai had been bitter enemies for hundreds of years. And he was half from one tribe and half from the other, trusted by neither and, if he admitted it to himself, trusting neither. How then could he trust the people in this place or expect them to trust him?

  The only person in the town that he had faith in, aside from himself, was the only person he knew—A.D.S. Tolliver.

  Just now, Kwai was following Tolliver through crowded, narrow streets to the law court building. Unlike the broad streets of Nairobi, where you could turn an oxcart around, these felt far too cramped and close. “Are we going to prosecute a criminal, sir?” he asked of Tolliver.

  Tolliver allowed himself the faintest smile at Libazo’s use of we. Askaris ordinarily acted as if they were pieces of equipment, since that was the way their officers used them, but Libazo had reason to think of himself as a cohort, not only because of the way he had performed his duties in Nairobi, but also because of the way Tolliver acted toward him. Tolliver was happy to treat Libazo like the man he was. Truth be told, except for Vera herself, the native policeman was the closest thing to a true friend Tolliver had in British East Africa.

  “No, Sergeant,” Tolliver answered. “Strange as it may seem, someone has stolen the cashier’s box from the courthouse.”

  Libazo gasped. He could not imagine a thief so bold.

  “It’s insane, I know,” Tolliver said. “Evidently, there has been a rash of burglaries in the town. There is hardly a European household that has not been broken into.”

  They had investigated many thefts in Nairobi. There, Libazo understood many things about who in the town would be likely suspects. Here, he had no idea. Other pedestrians along this stone-paved street were as foreign to him as white people had been in the up-country. More foreign, actually, since these people seemed completely exotic, while in the highlands everything was familiar. He had grown up at a time when an increasing number of white settlers were arriving every year. He could not remember when he saw his first Englishman. The British missionaries had been in Africa, he was sure, from the time he was born. Here in the port city, he saw varieties of people he had not imagined existed: some with dark skin and light eyes, some as dark as he, but with perfectly straight hair, wearing rich garments and jewels on their fingers.

  “This is very grand, isn’t it?” Tolliver was speaking of the court building, not of the robes of the men walking up the steps in front of them.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Unlike most of the other structures they had passed this morning, this one did not look as if it were so old it might fall down. It sat isolated on a lawn, newly built completely of stone with a red tile roof.

  As they were mounting the long staircase to the entrance, Tolliver stopped. “Something tells me,” he said, “that you should wait here. If you see anyone run out the door, follow him. When you catch him, wrestle him to the ground and sit on him until I reach you.”

  “Do you think the thief is still inside?” The building was huge, larger than Government House in Nairobi, until now the largest Libazo had ever seen. There must be many places inside where a man could hide, but it seemed unlikely to Libazo that a man who had stolen money from the judges would stay in the courthouse with his booty.

  Libazo saluted and took up a post at the top of the steps. Tolliver went under the arched gallery, grasped the polished brass handle, and disappeared inside the heavy door of carved mango wood.

  Libazo stood stock-still as he had been trained to do while on guard duty, not seeming to notice the people who came and went. They were from every group who inhabited the port, and Libazo took note of everything about them. He did not know words to describe the things that the Arab men wore, of cloth that looked like flowering hillsides after the long rains. He had seen people so decked out only in books—in pictures of olden-days kings and queens of England. He thought it very strange that men so arrayed entered the court with daggers in their sashes. In Nairobi, weapons were never allowed in the court building.

  From his vantage point atop the long flight of stairs, he looked out over the street in front of the building. The first thing he had noticed about Mombasa was still the strangest of all: the way it smelled. Up near Nairobi, where he had lived all of his twenty-five years, there were many smells—stewing meat and pumpkin, the crops, smoke from the cook fires, the dung of the animals, and nowadays the sooty smell of the train engine. What he loved most there were the scents of the herbs of the forest, the trees, the earthy smell of the land after the rains. Just recalling them made him long to be back where his nose was at home. Here the air was redolent with strange, often unpleasant cooking spices, the rotten odor of too many people in too much heat, and the salt-laden breezes that he wished would wash away all the stinks. He wanted to know what the sea would smell like if he were alone with it.

  Despite the strangeness of the place, he was glad to be back again with A.D.S. Tolliver, doing the work that had become the most important thing in his life. He had not had his own place in the world until he became a policeman. He had been rejected by both his mother’s and his father’s tribes. Tolliver’s sense of justice was the first thing he had found that captured his heart. He had always been an outsider, a man who had no purpose on earth until he learned, working with Bwana Tolliver, to find and bring to justice men who did bad things. No Maasai who killed a lion with a spear could have been prouder than Kwai had been the first time he saved a person’s life by stopping a man who wanted to kill.

  A loud shout from inside the building stopped his reverie. All at once, the door swung open and through it burst two men. Kwai reached out and grabbed the first one. The second, who wore the same long white linen kanzu as nearly every male in the city, knocked into them both and sent them sprawling on the steps. Kwai hung on to t
he shirt of the man he had grasped, who twisted and shouted, kicked and swore. The other man, who wore a round orange cap, jumped down the last five steps in one leap and ran off.

  “Not him!” Tolliver shouted as he came through the door. “The other one. With the orange cap. After him, man. He is going toward the bazaar.”

  Libazo leapt up and, leaving his original captive behind, sailed off the steps and took after the escapee, whom he could see only intermittently ahead of him. One glance over his shoulder told him that Tolliver was not bothering to keep up.

  The man Libazo pursued dashed between a hurtling trolley and a donkey cart. Kwai vaulted over a fruit seller’s stand, upsetting a display of melons, nearly lost his footing by stepping on one, and followed his quarry through the entrance to the bazaar.

  He could see over the heads of most of the people blocking the aisle in front of him. The orange cap was turning to the right. Kwai pushed through while shouting, “Stop that running man!” He had no idea if the people thronging the aisle understood English or had any respect at all for a black policeman.

  When Kwai turned the corner, he saw that the man he had been pursuing must have entered what was a narrow cul-de-sac that dead-ended about twenty feet from him, deep enough for only one shop on each side. There was no sign of any man.

  Standing before a gaudy display of fabrics in front of the shop on the right was a beautiful girl wrapped in red cloth and smiling enchantingly. Her head was not shaved, like a Kikuyu or Maasai girl’s; instead her hair was plaited into tiny braids, wound with red cords.

  Kwai slid to a halt on his government-issue sandals and demanded to know if she had seen the man who had just come around the corner at a run. Kwai spoke as best he could in Swahili, a language he had barely any occasion to practice in the highlands.

  She was taller than any of the Kikuyu girls he had dallied with. As tall as the stoic, aloof Maasai girls, who had never appealed to him. This girl’s warm smile spread and brightened her lovely eyes. “You are a policeman, but I have never seen you before.” She said it as if it made him the most interesting man she had ever met.

  “I am a sergeant of the British East African Police,” he said wishing but unable to make his voice appropriately stern. The girls he had lain with were often quite naked when he first saw them, as tribal women usually were. Their lack of clothing was nothing to remark upon. They covered themselves around English people, but not when they were alone with their own. This girl’s torso and legs were completely wrapped in cloth, and her head was draped with a filmy shawl that exactly matched the fabric wound around her body. Covered, she attracted him the more because she was clothed. This was a shock to him.

  She giggled, but she did not seem silly. There was a dignity about her, an ease and confidence he had never seen in a girl so young.

  He wanted nothing more than to talk to her, to find any excuse to keep looking at her. But he had a culprit to find. He stiffened his back. “I demand to know if you saw a man.”

  Her smile faded, and she looked right into his eyes. What he saw in hers was both a glimmer of fear and a plea, as if she were asking him to take her meaning, though she had not spoken. Her glance flickered in the direction of the bookshop to her left.

  He understood. Someone was watching them. She wanted to help him, but without giving herself away. “I shall have to search both shops, since you refuse to help me,” he said in a voice loud enough to be heard by whomever she feared. “I will start with this bookseller.” He turned in the direction of the store her eyes had indicated. As soon as he did, he realized that in his effort to protect her from anyone knowing she had helped him, he had also very likely warned the person inside the shop that he was about to enter.

  He grasped the handle, and when the door swung open a bell tinkled. He found himself face-to-face with a dour-looking, paunchy man who had a long black beard and wore tiny spectacles. He was nearly a foot shorter and twenty years older than the man Kwai had chased through the streets. Kwai looked about. There were leather-bound books occupying every possible square inch of the small shop. The place smelled of dust and body odor. A heavy brown drapery covered a doorway that led to the back.

  “Is there anyone here besides you?” Kwai demanded.

  The man looked at him, puzzled and confused. “I do not understand you.”

  Kwai realized that he had spoken badly in his rusty Swahili. He repeated what he had said slowly and then added, “I am looking for a man. The man who came in here just now.”

  “There is no man,” the bookseller said.

  Kwai drew near and towered over him. The smell of sweat was not coming from the bookseller. He pushed aside the brown drape. A woman completely swathed in blue, her face veiled, only her eyes showing, squatted on a low chair in a corner.

  She turned away and looked down at the floor. She might have fooled Kwai, except for the stink that could have come only from a man who had been running through the hot streets; the dirty foot in a man’s sandal that stuck out from the hem of “her” garment; and the orange cap just visible under the chair.

  Kwai grabbed the man’s arm, dragged him up, and pulled away the veil. He wrestled the stinking offender in women’s garb through the door into the corridor. The bookseller was shouting in a language Kwai had never heard before.

  The girl in red was gone. But as soon as Kwai emerged with his prisoner, Tolliver rounded the corner, closely followed by a Sikh in a uniform identical to Kwai’s.

  “Excellent man!” Tolliver said to Kwai.

  “Is this the one who stole the cash box from the courthouse?” Kwai asked. “He was not carrying anything when I chased him to this place.”

  “No,” Tolliver answered. “He was there because Sergeant Abrik Singh here and D.S. Egerton were bringing him up on charges. He has made a threat against the Grand Mufti. He escaped while waiting for the magistrate to charge him.”

  Kwai explained where and how he had found the man.

  “Sergeant,” Tolliver said to Singh, “take him into custody. Libazo and I will bring in the shopkeeper.” He turned to Kwai. “I’ll go inside and apprehend the other one. I don’t know what he has to do with the case, but he was harboring a would-be assassin. You keep guard here.” He strode into the shop, where the paunchy bookseller was jiggling a string of beads and looking decidedly overwhelmed.

  While the formidable Abrik Singh fixed handcuffs on the prisoner, Kwai held the man by the shoulders. He nodded in the direction of the fabric store. “What do you know about that place?” he asked Singh.

  Abrik’s black eyes sparkled, and he smiled broadly. “That,” he said, “is the most famous brothel in Mombasa.”

  ***

  Justin Tolliver waited while the bookseller locked up his shop. Then he and Kwai Libazo marched the Arab to Fort Jesus, which held the prison. The man mumbled in Arabic and nervously fingered a circlet of beads the entire way, but answered Justin’s questions neither in English nor in Swahili.

  “This is a sensitive situation,” Tolliver told Libazo. He knew Egerton had to be the one to bring the thug who made the threat to justice. The bookseller was obviously an accomplice. “Lock him up for the time being while I confer with the D.S. on exactly how he wants to handle this.”

  But before Tolliver reached Egerton’s office in police headquarters, he was accosted on the stairs by Robert Morley. The missionary trumpeted a joyous greeting at Tolliver as soon as he spotted him. “My boy, my boy. You are the very man I have been waiting to see. A chap in a turban told me that you were making an arrest in the bazaar. I wanted to thank you for taking that assassin into custody.”

  Tolliver blinked, shocked that Morley knew so much about the arrest he had just made. “The bookseller? His nephew?” he asked in disbelief. “What do you know about him?”

  “Bookseller? I know nothing of a bookseller.” Morley seemed no less confused than Tolliver. “He sells ivory. And people, I warrant.”

  “Who?”

  “Majidi
!” Morley was indignant now and louder than ever. “Majidi. He has killed Joseph. Surely you have heard that Joseph Gautura was murdered at the edge of the Mission grounds. Majidi had threatened to do just that, right to my face. And now he has made good on that threat. Men from the police force came and took away the body.”

  “That’s not my investigation to pursue,” Tolliver said, his heart sinking. A wave of annoyance quickly followed by a wave of guilt stopped him from saying more. He had promised Vera’s father nothing, but he did not want to disappoint that kind man, damn it. Clarence McIntosh had suffered enough losses over the past year. Justin had decided to stay in Mombasa. It was the right thing for him to be doing now. But he was also aware that by settling here for the next year, he was depriving his father-in-law—who was warmer and kinder to him than his own father had ever been—of the company of the daughter he loved. For what solace it would give, he wanted with all his heart to fulfill the Reverend McIntosh’s wishes. But, much as he ached at having to admit it, a threat against the Grand Mufti had to take precedence at this moment.

  Morley took advantage of the silence to bellow, “ ‘Thus says the Lord: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed.’ Jeremiah 22:3. ‘When justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.’ Proverbs 21:15.”

  Before the missionary was able to catch his breath to go on, D.S. Egerton appeared at the top of the steps. “What in God’s name is all this noise about? A chap can’t think.”

  “Nothing! Nothing in God’s name! God evidently has nothing to do with this place.” Morley had not lowered his voice one decibel. “I came here to demand justice. You must arrest that murderer Majidi.”

  Egerton’s expression hardened. “Mr. Morley, sir. I will thank you to lower your voice. You may be the Lord’s servant, but have a care you don’t destroy our hearing.”