The Idol of Mombasa

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “We are here to ask you some questions,” Tolliver said to the older of the two.

  Leylo bowed. “My sister wants to tell you what she knows,” she said. Her stance was stiff, as if she were trying to be brave, but her voice shook. “I think that she is going to be killed if she speaks the truth to you. I think I will be killed too, even if I do not speak the truth to you. The people who don’t want you to know the truth are dangerous to us. They know where we come from. They have warned us that if we give testimony, they will tell our father where to find us. He will send our brothers to kill us for what we have been doing here.”

  Libazo further astonished Tolliver by protesting, “But you were brought here against your will. Why would your father punish you, and not the men who stole you and brought you to this place?”

  “It is the way of our people,” Aurala said. “The only way the men of our family can restore their honor after what we have done is to kill us.” It was impossible to know if she herself believed in that code of honor. It was only clear that she knew it was inescapable.

  “Unbelievable!” The word slipped out of Libazo’s mouth.

  It made no more sense to Tolliver than it did to Libazo. “No one saw us come in,” Tolliver said. “Take us in the back and talk to us out of sight. We will do everything we can to keep it a secret that you have given evidence.”

  When Leylo moved toward the room draped in green, Aurala objected and parted the red curtains farther on. “In here is better,” she said. She was still holding Libazo by the hand. They sat side by side on the bed. Leylo drew a chair forward from the corner of the room for Tolliver. She refused to sit.

  “Someone has reported,” Tolliver said, “that the man behind this—this operation, is—ah, was Khalid Majidi. But I have also been told that it was the bookseller across the way, the one whose nephew threatened the Grand Mufti, that he is the real owner. Please tell me which of these is the truth.”

  Leylo Sagal fidgeted but did not answer.

  “Majidi is dead,” Aurala said, looking sharply at her sister.

  “You must speak if you can,” Leylo answered. “I am too afraid.” She went into the corner and kept her back to them.

  Tolliver knew that he should insist on her giving her own statement, but he could not bring himself to force such a thing from a woman so terrified.

  She was moving slowly toward the opening in the drapery.

  “You may go for now if you promise to wait outside,” Tolliver said.

  “I will not go far from my sister,” Leylo answered quietly.

  Tolliver nodded his assent.

  Aurala looked after her with the look of child being abandoned by its mother. Her hand tightened on Libazo’s; he covered it with his other hand. Tolliver thought how his sergeant had been in Mombasa for such a short time, and wondered what could have passed between the two of them in so short a time to endear them so profoundly to each other. But being a man in love himself, Tolliver was sure he knew.

  “How old are you?” He had no idea why that was the first question that dropped from his lips.

  “I am fifteen,” she said. She straightened her back as if to make herself taller, older.

  “Please tell me what you know about the question of the bookseller and Majidi.”

  “The bookseller tries to be known as the owner of us,” she said. Her eyes were downcast as if she were pleading guilty to a crime, or confessing her sins to a priest. “But it was always Majidi who came to take the money. He came through the back door. No one came through there but him. To get the money.” She raised her eyes to Justin. “We had no choice but to do what he said.” Tears ran down her cheeks.

  “How many work here?”

  “More usually, but only four now.”

  “Where do the girls go when they leave here?”

  “The bookseller says that they are taken away to have babies, or because they have become sick.”

  Libazo’s neck and jaw visibly stiffened, but he did not speak. He is afraid for her, Tolliver thought. And for himself.

  “How long have you been wor—how long have you been at this place?” Tolliver asked her, hoping to relieve Kwai’s concern.

  A sad, knowing smile flitted across her face. “For four months. I am well. I am not sick. My sister was very careful which customers…who she sent me to.”

  “What do you think will happen to you now?”

  “We do not know,” Aurala said. “We have not known what to do. Before, we had the bookseller watching us. And Majidi coming to collect the money and giving us food. When the bookseller went to prison, Majidi told us he was having us watched by someone we would not see until we tried to do something wrong. Then we would die. After Majidi died, no one came. We kept some of the money, but only enough to eat. We put the rest of it in Majidi’s box, the way we always have.”

  “Can we not—” Libazo started to ask a question, but Tolliver held up his hand to stop him.

  “Please go and bring your sister to me,” Justin said, trying his best to hide his sympathy for the girl. He watched her walk out. Her gait was very alluring but seemed unintentionally so, only the natural motion of her limbs. Men like him were meant to despise girls like her. But men like him also made love—not that one could call it that—with them. He understood lust. But he did not understand lusting after a woman whom one also despised.

  The speed with which she and her sister returned could only have meant that Leylo had been standing just outside in the corridor.

  Tolliver stood up with his legs apart, taking his most authoritative pose. He hated to intimidate the poor woman, but she had too many reasons to hide the truth. “Who has been in charge here since Majidi was killed?” he demanded of Leylo.

  “I don’t know. We have carried on as before. No one has come to take the money. And no one has brought us food. I have used some of the money I collected to buy us food.”

  “The rest of the money?”

  “It is in the locked money box. Where I put it for Majidi.”

  “Show it to me.”

  “It is in the room near the back door. The other girls are sleeping in there now.”

  “Bring it to me then.”

  “It is attached to the wall and locked. Only Majidi has—um, had the key. We put all the money we receive in there. That was what he told us we must do. He said he would kill us if we did not put every rupee in that box.”

  “How would he have known if you kept some back?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But he seemed to. He counted it and if it was not enough, he always knew. He would always say, ‘There should be thirty rupees and there are only twenty-seven.’ If he was wrong, he would not accept it. He always blamed us. And punished us. Even if we had done nothing wrong.”

  Tolliver remembered all the ledgers in Majidi’s office. If he had kept careful records, it would not be difficult for him to predict the number of customers and, therefore, the amount that should have come in on any given day.

  Tolliver relaxed his pose. “Do you want to continue here?” He directed this only to Leylo. He did not want to ask Aurala the question that Libazo alone should ask her.

  “We have nowhere else to go. No one would take us in.”

  “I will get Majidi’s keys and open the box,” Tolliver said. “The money in it will belong to you and the others. If you carry on here, will you have enough to live on?”

  “If we keep it all for ourselves?” It was a notion that seemed to fill her with wonder.

  “Yes, of course,” Tolliver said.

  “We will be rich,” she said.

  Libazo was looking from him to Aurala and back again.

  Tolliver drew out his watch. “I will wait for you outside for two minutes,” Tolliver said to his sergeant. “I have to meet Hastings at headquarters.” He went out and left Kwai with Aurala. If the poor blighter was in love with the girl, how could it hurt anyone if he had a minute to talk to her?

  ***

&nbs
p; After his encounter with A.D.S. Tolliver in the billiard room at the club, Carl Hastings had spent the rest of the evening, and into the wee hours of the morning, trying to figure out what Tolliver might know and why the policeman wanted to speak to him about the murder of Majidi. Of course, the young prig might suspect he was the killer. Which was absurd. The British gossip mill seemed not to know the slightest thing about, nor care about who might have slain the ivory dealer. Not any of our concern if one wog wants to kill another was the typical response.

  Still, the young A.D.S. seemed to have something up his sleeve, though how could he know anything substantive about Hastings’s dealings with Majidi? With Joseph and Majidi dead, the only living person who knew the details of Majidi’s operation and Hastings’s part in it was the eunuch Ismail al Dimu, and there was no reason in hell for him to go reporting anything to the police.

  Then, just as Hastings was falling asleep, he sat bolt upright and nearly shouted. That letter he had received from the now-dead slave had been in English! How could he have forgotten this? There was enough information in the letter to make a person suspicious. The secrets you and I share about Majidi and the work you and he do together, it had said. Even if Joseph had told his scribe nothing more than that, it was enough to cast mistrust on the man to whom the letter was addressed: Mr. Carl Hastings, who slept not a wink the rest of the night.

  The following morning he sweated his way to meet the policeman. His mind reeled over the impossibility of ever finding out who had helped Joseph write that letter. By the time he arrived at the police headquarters, he was fit for nothing but a change of clothes and downing an entire bottle of whiskey.

  As it happened, he saw Tolliver striding toward the fake Greek building from the other direction. Sanctimonious, he looked. Filled up with himself. They said he was the son of an earl. Well, this country was full of them—second sons of this or that. Acting as if they owned everything. Which in large part they did. But most of them were doing nothing at all useful. This one was walking along deep in conversation with that nigger constable he seemed always to have at his side.

  Hastings hailed the young snot as if he were a friend and held the door with a smile. “After you, Mr. Tolliver,” he said.

  Ever the gentleman, Tolliver deferred to Hastings.

  Hastings entered and then to his surprise and delight, overheard Tolliver and his sergeant give the one piece of information he most needed. Tolliver turned to his blackie and said, “Have you found Gautura’s friend whom you were looking for, the one we heard about from the missionary?”

  “Juba Osi?” the askari asked. “No, sir. I can go now and continue to look. I’ll take a couple of the boys with me, if you can spare me.”

  Hastings was sure he had the answer to the question that had been burning him—the name of Gautura’s letter writer, served up to him on a silver platter. Being a slave, Joseph Gautura was unlikely to have other confidants besides this kinsman. Juba Osi was very likely the person he had gone to when he needed help. What a stroke of luck. That dolt Tolliver had no idea how helpful he was being. Bully for me, Hastings thought. Bully for me.

  “Bring Osi here, if you find him,” Tolliver ordered.

  “Not if, sir, but when,” the arrogant little shit said before he marched back out the door.

  “I will call for you in a moment,” Tolliver said to Hastings, indicating a bench where the man could wait. He mounted the stairs two at a time.

  Hastings sat in his sweat-dampened clothing and stewed. How much longer would he have to wait? He had to find this Juba Osi quickly and do away with him before the native squad got hold of him. He doubted they could find the sod quicker than he. All he had to do was convince the sweet young A.D.S. to let him go. And quickly.

  ***

  Tolliver learned two astonishing things when he reached his desk to prepare for his interrogation of Carl Hastings.

  Two sealed envelopes awaited him, both with Tolliver scrawled on them in Egerton’s commanding hand.

  In the first was a report written on paper headed: The Protectorate of British East Africa, Office of the Treasurer. It gave the totals of the cash confiscated from the safe in Khalid Majidi’s shop: 7,173 rupees in paper money, 4,360 pounds sterling in bills, and also coins of various nations equivalent to another 415 rupees. The report was signed by Deputy Treasurer Michael Linane.

  A quick calculation told Tolliver that the pound notes alone amounted to a bit more than seventeen years’ worth of his current salary. It was a sultan’s ransom. Impossible to imagine where the ivory trader had come up with such an amount. Most perplexing of all: the person who had killed him had left it behind. Incomprehensible.

  It took Tolliver a moment to catch his breath and open the other envelope. A note inside informed him that Miss Katharine Morley, the sister of the Reverend Robert Morley, had come to see Egerton and demanded that he arrest her brother for the murder of Khalid Majidi.

  Once he recovered from this second jolt, he wrote a note to Vera, telling her what Katharine Morley had done and asking her to go to visit the woman and try to calm her. Writing to Vera eased his own tension. He put the note in an envelope and took it to the desk in the entry hall. “That boy who hangs about with Sergeant Libazo,” he said to the Indian clerk at the desk. “I saw him outside a few moments ago. Please take this to him and ask him to deliver it to my wife forthwith. The direction is on the envelope, but the child probably cannot read. Be sure he knows the way. And give him this.” He handed the clerk a generous coin.

  Tolliver then collected Hastings from the bench and took him up to his office. The man seemed entirely too happy to be invited to give a statement. Men brought in for questioning were ordinarily made nervous or were put out by the very idea. Tolliver recalled how testy Hastings had become at having to wait for the Grand Mufti to disembark before he could go ashore. Yet he had waited here nearly twenty minutes in perfect good cheer.

  Tolliver decided that the English ivory hunter was only acting the part of a man going on a picnic.

  ***

  Hastings smiled broadly as he followed Tolliver up the stairs. He was determined to show the sanctimonious puppy what a model of an educated Englishman he was dealing with. He knew Tolliver’s type. He had suffered them on three continents. All swollen with their own superiority and sense of privilege. They became extremely annoyed when circumstances forced them to earn their own coin.

  Hastings smiled, took a seat, hoped to be offered a cup of tea, and smiled all the more once he was denied that courtesy.

  Without preamble, Tolliver folded his hands in front of him and said, “I understand you had an intense dislike for Khalid Majidi and might have had reason to do him harm.”

  Hastings sputtered, shocked by the audacity of the statement. It took him six too many deep breaths to be able to say anything coherent, especially under the impertinent inspector’s steady blue gaze. He thought only of telling Tolliver he was out of his mind. When he finally had enough air in his lungs, he managed a laugh. “Where would you have gotten such an idea?”

  Tolliver relaxed his posture. “Suppose you begin by telling me what your relationship was with Majidi.” He picked up a pen from the desk as if it were a weapon he could wield. It was.

  “I hunt ivory. I sold my takings to Majidi. We had a business relationship.”

  Tolliver’s blue eyes seemed to be calculating, as if measuring Hastings for a suit, or a coffin. “Where do you hunt your ivory?”

  His voice was chatty, as if he were asking a casual question, but it made Hastings’s guts tremble. What exactly did this upstart know? How much of the truth had his informant, whoever he was, given him? If they had not yet found Juba Osi, who could the squealing pig be? The truth fell out of Hastings’s mouth despite himself. “I hunt up in the Mau Forest.”

  “I was up in that area last year,” Tolliver said, as if they were trading stories at the bar at the club. “I was tracking a murderer.”

  Hastings got ahold
of himself. “Did you catch him, I hope?” Two could play this game.

  “In a manner of speaking. Did you come to Africa to hunt professionally?” The questions had turned much too friendly. Tolliver either knew more than he was revealing, or he was fishing with suppositions as bait.

  “Not at all. You have probably already heard. I went belly-up trying to grow flax, didn’t I? It must be all over the gossip mill.”

  “I had heard something to that effect,” Tolliver admitted, “but I am a policeman. I have to deal in facts, not rumors.”

  Happy that he had reduced Tolliver to mouthing platitudes, Hastings made a move to finish this charade. He needed to get out of this building quickly so he could silence Gautura’s scribe once and for all.

  He gave Tolliver his most charming smile. “So you can see, my boy, that I was forced by circumstances to take up ivory hunting, since I had no capital at all. Majidi provided me with an outlet for the ivory I took. Why would I harm the man who gave me the means to my paltry living?”

  “Wait here for a moment,” Tolliver said, and walked out of the office.

  Waiting was an affront that Hastings could not bear. But he did not know if he could actually get away if he tried to leave immediately. He drew out the watch at the end of the chain that stretched across his belly. He would give the young snotty-nose four minutes.

  ***

  Tolliver walked as nonchalantly as he could out of the room and took his time closing the door behind him. Then he sped down the stairs to the desk, wishing he had Kwai nearby and then relieved to find Abrik Singh on duty. “Who do you have here who is trustworthy and bright?”

  Abrik blinked at him for a moment and then said, “My brother is upstairs delivering the dispatches.”

  “Is he canny enough to follow a man without being detected?”