The Idol of Mombasa

by Annamaria Alfieri

Morley sputtered. “We said we would not try to convert the Mohammedans. But that does not mean they can be a law unto themselves.”

  Tolliver put a hand on his shoulder, as if he were the older and wiser of the two. He spoke sotto voce, hoping to encourage Morley to do the same. “We cannot start a holy war over this, sir. Please try to understand that the Protectorate is just that—a Protectorate.” He lowered his voice even more. “We are here by the leave of the Sultan of Zanzibar. Surely you can see that means we must tread a fine line, especially while the Grand Mufti is on the scene.”

  Morley sighed deeply and seemed to collect himself. He was clearly still distressed, but he finally found the sense to lower his voice. “That has nothing to do with protecting God’s innocents from those who would buy and sell them.” His eyes took on a defeated cast, but that did not stop him from stomping down the stairs while muttering, “Oh, yes, I have heard it all before. We have the Germans to our south who are encroaching on our rights. We have to keep the Sultan on our side. All that rubbish that has nothing to do with what is happening here and now.” When he reached the bottom he looked up at Tolliver and Egerton above him on the steps. His expression was defiant. “It is clear to me that I will get no support from the police. But I will not accept this situation. I shall just have to take matters into my own hands.” He looked for all the world as if he would burst into tears, but he merely jammed on his hat and swept through the door to the street.

  Egerton shrugged a gesture of disbelief at Morley’s stubbornness. “I expect he is going to cause trouble for you with your father-in-law.”

  Tolliver mounted the few steps between them. “I hope that is all he does.”

  “Well, in the meanwhile, we have much more pressing matters to deal with. From the look of satisfaction on your face when you arrived, I take it you have caught that rascal with the cash box.”

  Tolliver kept a triumphant smile at bay and told Egerton about capturing the escapee and arresting the bookseller.

  “Excellent,” Egerton said with relief. “I will take over with them. You will need to see to two other matters. The Arabs are complaining about the English lads getting into their cups and staging raucous downhill trolley races. They are disturbing the peace at the palace where the Grand Mufti is staying. And on top of that, the Liwali feels that we must, especially at this moment, blot out the disgrace of those Somali girls prostituting themselves in the bazaar. We are going to have to arrest them.”

  Tolliver could not help but stare in disbelief. The man could not be serious. “I am sorry, sir, but these matters seem petty to me. With the threat to the Grand Mufti, shouldn’t we be making sure there are no others planning the same? I know I can be helpful there.” He bit back an urge to point out that Egerton had let his prisoner escape, and Tolliver had recaptured him.

  Egerton shook his head. “That’s as may be, Tolliver, but these other issues also deserve our attention. They have to do with our esteemed visitor’s comfort. The noise should be easy enough to take care of for the next few weeks. Post some askaris at the top of the hill and enforce some sort of speed limit on the trolleys. And the scandal of those Somali girls is not a minor thing. They were raised as Mohammedans. What they are doing in the bazaar is not at all a minor thing from the Grand Mufti’s viewpoint. I have known girls like them to be beheaded by their own fathers in Persia and Egypt. We have to show we can control matters here to the Sultan’s liking.”

  “I see,” Tolliver said evenly, and not able to resist, added, “In the meanwhile, who will interrogate the bookseller and the man who escaped the courthouse this morning?”

  “I will,” Egerton said with perfect finality.

  ***

  In the dark of the following midnight a tall Englishman with a drooping mustache and a self-important air entered the bazaar. Anyone of any race or creed who might have noticed him would have assumed that he was going to have himself serviced by the girls in the silk shop opposite the bookseller’s. But Carl Hastings did not make his way to the rear of the market. Instead, after a quick glance around, he rapped two slow beats and three quick beats on the door of Majidi, the ivory trader. He paused ten seconds and repeated the signal. Behind its windows, the shop was dark, but the door swung open immediately. After Hastings entered, it closed without a sound.

  Not until Majidi parted the heavy drapery that led to the back did Hastings find enough light to follow his host.

  The rear office was lit only by a small paraffin lamp that sat on Majidi’s safe on the floor in the corner. The dim atmosphere suited Hastings, who was determined not to show his apprehension. Any show of weakness would doom his efforts with Majidi.

  The Arab took a seat behind a large, elaborately carved ebony desk piled high with ledgers. Without asking, he poured two glasses of whiskey and handed one to Hastings.

  They sipped their drinks in silence for a few moments, each waiting for the other to offer an opening gambit.

  Hastings weakened first. “I hear the slave is dead.” He might have said more or asked questions, but he had to tread carefully. The more Majidi thought he knew, the more chips he would have to play in this game.

  Majidi grunted but was not otherwise forthcoming.

  Hastings held his peace until he had emptied his glass, after which he could not stand the silence. “The missionary is raising a great noise.”

  With his habitual precise hand movements, Majidi reached for the crystal decanter and recharged their drinks. His long fingernails made little clicking noises against the glass, which along with the almost feminine delicacy of the Arab’s gestures always disgusted Hastings. As did his perfect confidence when he spoke. “The British will pay him no heed. They know I have a lot of allies. If I want to stir up trouble for them all I have to do is complain that they are trying to impose their law here, even when it goes against the Shari’a.”

  Hastings squirmed in his chair. The depth and breadth of Majidi’s power was not a comfort to him. What the trader held over Hastings was far too dangerous. If their activities were discovered, an Arab could wriggle out of what hung over them both, but Hastings could not, and Majidi knew it. As an Englishman Hastings was liable to rot in jail forever if their crime were discovered.

  Hastings squeezed his glass with both hands and leaned forward. “I think, under the circumstances, that I need to leave off hunting for the time being.” He was whispering, though he did not know why.

  “I think the opposite,” Majidi said. “A trip to the hinterlands to hunt ivory could be very helpful to us at this time, and the distraction of the Grand Mufti’s visit is the right circumstance for our venture to continue.”

  “How will we proceed without Joseph?”

  “I have a substitute on his way from Zanzibar. And I have a buyer ready.”

  Hastings drained his glass and rose. The whiskey had not warmed or comforted him. “Very well, then, I will get ready to hunt. Our terms will be the same?”

  “I had thought to be more generous with you,” Majidi said. “Sixty-forty instead of seventy-thirty.”

  The concession surprised and puzzled Hastings. The Arab was not one to give if he did not have to.

  “You are surprised at my generosity,” Majidi said. “Do not be. You are my best procurer. Without you, my latest expedition did not meet my buyers’ needs. You know as well as I that since you British came into the territory, it has been nearly impossible for anyone but a Brit to make any headway. Your countrymen issue ivory permits only to their own kind. All the elephant hunters are Europeans now. You are the one I know well enough to trust. I want to deal with you.”

  Hastings heard the message beneath Majidi’s words. He wanted to work with Hastings because he could not as easily control anyone else he might bring into his business. And the canny trader knew better than to squeeze a man too hard. The extra ten percent would relieve Hastings of some of his money troubles, but it was not enough to free him completely. The Arab was a clever bastard, but a bastard nonethele
ss.

  As Majidi rose, Hastings shook his hand to seal the deal. “When does your new majordomo arrive?”

  “He is on his way by dhow. If the winds are good, he should be here in two days.”

  “I had better get busy with the planning then. I will come tomorrow with a list of what I will require by way of men and supplies.”

  Later, in his room at the club, Hastings’s fingers froze while undoing his shirt buttons. A chill flashed on the skin of his back. That canny old thief expected him to be grateful for the extra ten percent. But he never gave a gift without expecting something in return. What price would he extract? And what danger would it bring?

  6

  The following morning, Tolliver and Vera awoke amid half-unpacked cartons. At breakfast, Vera talked of her plan to get her garden project under way as if there were nothing else on her mind. Katharine Morley had told her of an Englishman who had had a somewhat troubled past, but was an excellent gardener. Vera said she would seek him out and then go to the market just across the bridge from Robert Morley’s mission, where, evidently, the best plants were on offer. She went on about hibiscus flowers, jasmine vines, and how fast a poinciana might grow in this climate. She felt vaguely guilty to be purposely misleading Justin about her intentions. She knew he would be burned up if he found her out. But what did he expect her to do? In public, he expressed admiration for her spunk whenever other British people raised their eyebrows at something she blurted out. But then in private, gently, with his arms around her, he admonished her to try to act more conventional. If he could have it both ways, why couldn’t she?

  So as not to make herself a complete liar, Vera did go to the Public Garden in Treasury Square and she spoke briefly to Frederick Dingle, who readily admitted problems in his past with alcohol and passing bad checks. He told her he had had even become a Mohammedan at one point to try to lose his drinking habit, but that it had not helped. He was, even now, serving a prison sentence and was let out only during the day so that he could keep the Public Gardens and do whatever other landscaping work he could find. Every day at dusk he had to return to his cell. This was the story she had heard, along with universal admiration for the work he did. To be convinced of his gardening abilities, Vera needed only to look about at the beauty of the tropical flowers display and to hear Dingle wax poetic about passionflowers and how attractive and useful were Cape tree tomatoes. He certainly seemed every bit the master gardener Katharine had said he was. And his demeanor was that of a timid but amiable man, certainly not that of a hardened criminal.

  Vera made an appointment with him to begin work at the bungalow the following morning. Done! She had set her conscience to rest about what she had told Justin she would be doing. Now for a rickshaw to the mainland bridge and on to the mission.

  When she arrived, she found the Reverend Morley much as he had always been on his visits with her father—focused only on the rightness of his own opinions about slavery. She agreed with him there, but he repeated himself to an irksome degree. She had always wished she could adopt her father’s patience and feel admiration for his fellow missionary. But did he have to boom out his points as if he were speaking before Parliament?

  She did her best to hear out him and his sister on the subject of Joseph Gautura’s death and the part Majidi must have played in it. One message came through clearly: he would never let the matter drop until the murderer had been apprehended. And Vera was glad of that. Justin, she was sure, would disagree, focused as he was on investigating possible other threats to the Grand Mufti. He had spoken last evening of little else. If anyone was going to help the Morleys as her father had asked, it would have to be her.

  By the time she left the mission, she had convinced herself that her father would want her to do anything she could to help his friend. A niggling doubt, though, deep in her conscience, told her that her father would want nothing of the sort, especially if it meant bringing herself in contact with the likes of Majidi. She shooed the feeling away as if it were a harmless lizard in the garden and, upon leaving the Mission, made her way immediately toward Mr. Majidi’s place of business in the souk.

  The Arab quarter of Mombasa had always fascinated her. The narrow streets were flanked with ancient houses whose front doors of thick wood were carved with geometric patterns and studded with brass nail heads the size of shillings. Balconies on the second stories overhung the street, some separated overhead by no more than a few feet. When she and her brother, Otis, were twelve and six, walking here with their parents, they had imagined an adventure tale where a hero leapt across the space to escape pursuing pirates.

  Embedded in the cobblestones were tracks along which, every few minutes, Swahili men propelled privately owned trolley cars and fought for right of way with a melee of traders, shoppers, and servants. The shouts for precedence raised a dreadful din. The trolley boys usually won.

  Khalid Majidi’s place of business was, as Katharine Morley had described it, very easy to find—just inside the wide entrance to the covered market, beyond a stall that displayed a rainbow of beautifully embroidered silk shoes and directly across from a large concern that sold dried fruits, nuts, and spices.

  Vera paused in the aisle, unsure of how to approach the man whom Robert Morley so despised and whom she was sure was a murderer. She told herself she was perfectly safe. Even if Majidi had done away with his former slave, he did not know Vera from Eve and would have no cause to harm her. Her plan was to tell him she was looking for furnishings for her new home and to pretend he might supply her, but when she arrived at his shop window, she saw it contained only ornate marble boxes and vases inlaid with silver and ivory for which she had no use and which looked frightfully expensive. Perhaps she could ask him about carpets. Sooner or later, all Europeans came to the bazaar looking for carpets.

  She paused in front of the bins of dried fruits and nuts across from Majidi’s door. The fruit seller’s boy, a handsome young Arab in the ubiquitous long white kanzu and a white skullcap, approached Vera. His thick lashes would have been the envy of any girl of any race that Vera had ever known. He put his hands together in front of his face and bowed. “Lady, would you like to buy some of our delicious dried apricots? Would you, lady? They are the best in the souk.” He called her “lady” in English, but otherwise he spoke in Swahili, the lingua franca of this polyglot city. Vera’s command of the language was halting since she had spoken mostly Kikuyu and English in Nairobi and environs. She decided to practice her Swahili by speaking to the boy for a few minutes before she tackled a conversation with the ivory dealer.

  Seeing her interest, the boy took a wide pewter spoon and deftly scooped up a single dried apricot and offered it to her. She drew nearer and took it. It was sweet and tangy and delicious.

  “Good, yes, lady?” The boy smiled. His teeth were as perfect as his eyes and his hair. He was about fifteen. Nearly the age her brother was now. Vera’s heart wobbled. It was so painful to think that Otis, wherever he was, had had a birthday since she last saw him, his first away from her. He had run away in the aftermath of their uncle’s murder, thinking that he was taking the blame. She was sure he did not know what had transpired after he left. No more than she knew where he had gone. And her father and Justin had said it was best to leave those matters alone. Her heart ached to see him, to know how he was getting on. And she feared she never would.

  She could not suppress the pain inside, but she forced herself to turn to the boy and smile. She asked for a small amount of apricots and some currants, which she would make into scones to surprise Justin at their first tea in the bungalow. Then she pointed across the corridor to Majidi’s sign. “Does that shop sell carpets?” she asked the boy as he was spooning her purchases onto squares of tan paper and twisting up the ends.

  His soft eyes turned angry. “The man who owns that shop is not a good person.” His voice was suddenly a harsh whisper.

  Vera leaned toward him and whispered too. “Why do you say he is not a good p
erson?”

  The boy glanced over his shoulder toward a blue-black curtain that separated the display of fruits and nuts from the back of the stall. He leaned closer. “He does not obey the teachings of the holy Koran.”

  “Taimur,” a man’s deep voice called sharply from behind the curtain. He spoke then in Arabic, which Vera did not understand at all. But it was clear from the tone and the frightened look on the boy’s face that he was taking a scolding. Before the man finished speaking, he emerged from behind the curtain. He was short and slight, hardly taller than Vera, dressed in the same blue-black as the curtain, had a long black-and-gray beard, and eyes as hard as the boy’s were soft. He went on berating the boy for so long that Vera wished she could run away. Instead, she took out her change purse and pointed to her purchases.

  “My grandson and I have just been to hear the Grand Mufti speak about how a truly devout man must act in worshipping the true god,” the old man said to Vera in Swahili. “My grandson has taken an important lesson today in true devotion to Allah. You are hearing the result of how moved he has been by the Grand Mufti’s words.” He took the packets and weighed them. The grandfather asked the boy a question in Arabic and then gave her the price of fifty pices.

  “He seems a very nice boy,” Vera said. She glanced over her shoulder at Majidi’s shop. “I was asking him about the man who owns that shop.”

  “We are Shi’a,” the grandfather said. He wrinkled his nose at the door across the aisle as if he smelled corruption emanating from it. “He is a Sunni.” From his expression, he might have said, We are human beings. He is a reptile.

  “I am afraid I don’t know the difference.”

  The old man scowled. “Think of it as like the rift between the Papists and the Protestants in your own country,” he said. “We consider him as the English consider the Papists. Hateful.”

  It surprised Vera that the old man knew of such religious conflict so far from his own country. “I see,” she said, and then wondered whether the Swahili words she had used had actually meant not only that she understood, but that she also agreed. Flustered and wanting to stop the conversation, she counted out her coins and took her small purchases.