Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “Come in, Vera.” Her voice was tired and resigned.

  Vera turned the knob and opened the door silently as if she were playing the thief. Her mother lay on the bed fully clothed except for her boots, which stood side by side on the rag carpet beside the iron bedstead. Her father insisted that they always wear boots, frightened as he was of snakebites. It made no difference to him that the natives walked about barefoot and in Vera’s memory none of them had been bitten.

  Her mother stretched out a hand to her and moved over to make room for Vera to sit beside her on the bed. This in itself made Vera suspicious and anxious. The death of her uncle, her mother’s only sibling, seemed to have softened her heart in a way Vera would have thought impossible.

  Vera sat and took her mother’s hand. Her angular face was ashen and her eyes puffy from her tears. “This is awful,” Vera said.

  Her mother squeezed her hand, let it go, and reached for a balled-up linen handkerchief that lay beside her on the damask bedspread. She patted her eyes and her nose. “I heard Captain Tolliver’s voice. They have gone to see Josiah, I suppose.” She sobbed and bit her lip, but the tears flowed anyway.

  Vera twined her fingers in between her mother’s. “Oh, Mama, I am so sorry. Shouldn’t we try to send for Otis?” No one and nothing cheered her mother as much as the presence of Otis. Accustomed to her mother’s strength and the depth of her habitual reserve, Vera found it intolerable, seeing her like this.

  “I told you already, Vera, and you know as well as I that tracking him in that vast wilderness is neigh on to impossible. They have two days’ head start. Kibene is our best tracker, and he has gone with them. Richard Newland said he and Berkeley Cole intend to end up at Berkeley’s farm on the Naro Moru. There is absolutely no way to know what route they will take through all that trackless open space. We will send word to Cole’s farm that they must bring Otis home forthwith. There is no need to break the news to him before he returns.”

  * * *

  A.D.S. Tolliver followed Clement McIntosh toward the stone-built hospital on the other side of the mission compound. They mounted two steps, crossed the flagstone veranda, and entered through a heavy door carved with native symbols. Tolliver removed his pith helmet and placed it under his arm as he entered. The walls of the interior were whitewashed and the rooms impeccably clean. A nursing sister approached them immediately and greeted them with a Scots burr so thick Tolliver could barely make out what she was saying. He nodded gravely to her, and she led them down a corridor lined with waist-high wainscoting. Though the exterior of the building was typical of such a place in the Protectorate, the interior was arranged very like any hospital in Tolliver’s native Yorkshire. The sister closed her eyes and bowed her head as she opened the door and let them into a small room where Dr. Josiah Pennyman’s body lay under a sheet on the table where he used to perform operations.

  As Tolliver approached the corpse, McIntosh drew back the sheet. The dead doctor’s hair was the exact rich brown color of Vera’s, which gave Tolliver a start. He concentrated on his work. In the seven months that Tolliver had been in British East Africa he had never had occasion to visit the doctor and had seen him only in large crowds at Nairobi Club dances and at sporting events. In life, from afar, the doctor’s statuesque form and countenance had confirmed his reputation of enormous appeal. His face, though a bit roundish, had pleasant regular features, a bright complexion, a quick, handsome smile, a hardy laugh. Here, even in death, there was a gentleness about the face of the corpse that made it easy to see why he had been so well liked, even loved.

  Clement McIntosh woke Tolliver from his reverie with a touch on his arm. “Do you want to see the wound?”

  “Yes.”

  It took all their strength and the nursing sister’s assistance to keep the inert body from falling on the operating room floor while they turned it. A gash about three or four inches wide traversed the man’s spine just below the shoulder blades. The wound was clean, the flesh inside it white.

  McIntosh’s open hand indicated the nurse. “Sister and I washed him once we brought him here,” he said.

  The woman in white pursed her lips and nodded but did not speak.

  “I’ll want to see the place where you found him,” Tolliver said.

  “I will show you.” McIntosh started for the door.

  Tolliver held up his hand. “In a moment.” He turned to the nurse. “I suppose the spear pierced his heart and that is what killed him.”

  The woman’s rigid face darkened; her lips pursed again. “We could not say that with any certainty. The spear most likely severed the spinal cord. That might have been enough to kill him. A qualified doctor performing an autopsy would be able to determine that but—” She glanced back at the dead man. “But we no longer have such a person here.”

  “I don’t suppose it much matters,” Tolliver said. “One way or another the spear killed him. How long do you suppose he had been dead when they found him?”

  “Again, it would be difficult to be certain. But his clothing was quite damp. It did not rain in the night, so the wet must have come from dew. I would imagine that he was lying there most of the night. A few hours at least.”

  Tolliver studied her. She was sturdy and no nonsense, as one would expect of a Scottish woman who volunteered to work in an African mission hospital. But there was also a spark of intelligence and pride in her eyes. She merited his confidence, which her denials of certitude belied.

  He extended his hand to her. “Thank you very much, Nurse—”

  “Nurse Freemantle,” she said. Her handshake was firm but very brief.

  “If you think of anything else that might be helpful, please let me know.”

  The look she gave him was almost a smile.

  Tolliver followed the missionary to the door. As they left, he saw the nurse covering the dead man with the white sheet, an act of gentleness not all nursing sisters spared for the living.

  Tolliver signaled to Kwai Libazo, who was waiting in the shade of an acacia tree near the horses. He would need Libazo to translate as he questioned the Kikuyu who had found the body. McIntosh led them across the center of the compound and into the flowering coffee fields that sloped gently down to the river. Here and there, natives, mostly women, worked with hoes. The plants stretched far to their left and right. The myriad blossoms were as white as clouds and gave off a bittersweet fragrance. Tolliver had read somewhere that a death by arsenic gave off a bitter almond smell. But that could have no relevance here. McIntosh stopped in a spot that seemed undistinguished from any other in the expansive plantation and pointed to the ground. “Just there,” he said.

  The reddishness of the earth was the color of all the ground thereabouts—not a sign of blood. Tolliver examined it carefully. It held no clues.

  “It has been well cleaned,” McIntosh said.

  Tolliver could not help but frown. If he had been Sherlock Holmes, the fictional detective whose stories had been all the rage in England since Tolliver was a babe in arms, he would have cursed this statement and gone back to his apartment to work out his anger playing the violin, except that in his case it would be a cello.

  “The Kikuyu despise and fear death,” a lovely voice from behind Tolliver said. He turned to see Vera’s grave face. She was standing beside Libazo and looked up to him, seemingly for confirmation. The native policeman might have been carved out of wood for all his expression altered.

  The girl shrugged and went on. “They burn down a hut if someone dies inside it. They will not touch a dead body. My father and Joe Morley had to move my uncle to the operating room.” She spoke the words without distaste or judgment, straightforwardly, as no proper English girl ever would have.

  “Joe Morley?” Tolliver asked.

  “The manager of the plantation,” the missionary explained.

  Libazo looked down. Tolliver saw in his eyes that it was costing him some effort to maintain his lack of expression.

  “My workers woul
d have refused to come into the fields where a dead body was found,” the Reverend McIntosh said. “Morley had to call in Gichinga Mbura to cleanse the area. At this time of year the weeds want to turn the field wild again. And it is hard enough to get the workers to give us enough time to keep nature at bay.”

  “Who is this Gichinga Mbura?” Tolliver asked. The very mention of the name had set the muscles in Libazo’s jaw working.

  “The local witch doctor,” McIntosh said, his voice ever more apologetic. “Much as I regret it, I sometimes have no choice but to give the local religion, if you can call it that, its due. Otherwise nothing would get done on the farm and the mission cannot survive without the income from the coffee. The faithful of Scotland cannot be expected to support hundreds and hundreds all over Africa.”

  “Libazo,” Tolliver said, “go into the Kikuyu village and find this Mbura. Perhaps he noticed something while he was doing his spells that might help us?”

  Libazo stared at Tolliver as if he expected him to explode. “B’wana, the medicine man—”

  Tolliver held up his hand. “How many times do I have to tell you to call me ‘sir.’ Now please just do as I have asked. Go and find Mbura and bring him to me.” Tolliver turned back to the missionary. “Reverend McIntosh, where is the spear? I would like to look at it.”

  “I put it in my study with the hunting rifles and shotguns, for safekeeping. I thought you would want to confiscate it. It will be evidence, no?”

  “Certainly.” Tolliver’s voice was deep and resonant. Vera loved the sound of it, with its barest hint of Yorkshire. He had got that from his nanny, she imagined. She shook her head in a vain attempt to dislodge her thoughts. She would either have to give up dreaming of him or to make herself into the kind of girl he would think attractive. Neither course seemed at all possible at this moment.

  He turned and led the way up toward the house.

  Vera tramped through the fields following her father and Tolliver in a state of complete confusion. Ever since she last saw Tolliver at the Nairobi Club dance, whenever she enjoyed something, she had imagined how much it would enhance her joy to have him with her enjoying it, too. Once the coffee came into blossom a week ago, she had fantasized about walking with him among all this beauty—the tall clouds sailing in the blue sky, the blossoms in matching white profusion, their heady perfume, the lightness of the air above. She wanted Tolliver to know this place at its most beautiful. Anyone with a human soul would find a thrill in this. She knew from the way he had spoken to her at the club dances that the wonder of British East Africa had surprised him. Until this morning, whenever she thought of him that was how she thought, of the places she wanted to take him, of the native crafts she wanted to show him. There were stories her Kikuyu nanny had told her, splendid vistas— Oh, what was the use? Now he would look at her only as the niece of a murder victim. Happiness for him would never attach itself to her. And if he could read her thoughts now, he would think her horrid for dwelling on such a subject when her uncle lay dead.

  With her head lowered, she nearly walked right into his back as they approached the veranda of the house.

  In spite of her confusion of feelings, Vera could not help going with him into her father’s study. He stood aside and let her enter first. Her father took the long spear, which stood in the corner, and brought it to Tolliver. Its one-piece head of iron had a leaf-shaped blade and cylindrical base into which the long wooden shaft was fitted. The point of the blade shone brightly; it had been cleansed of any blood from the stabbing.

  Tolliver stood it next to him and glanced up at the tip. “A bit taller than I. Six feet and four inches I would say.”

  Vera’s father nodded. “The blade was in his back up to about there.” He pointed to a spot on about two inches from the top.

  Tolliver glanced at Vera. His round blue eyes held concern and something else that might have been disapproval of her. Ladies were supposed to faint if they heard such things. “I have seen a Kikuyu kill a warthog with a spear,” she said as if to defend herself. “And a Maasai kill a lion with one very like that.” If anything, his look of disapproval deepened.

  She turned away, went to the window. “Your man is returning with Gichinga Mbura.” She did not bother to tell him that Mbura was gesticulating wildly and that the black policeman in the red fez was having to push the medicine man along the path with a hand at the middle of his back.

  * * *

  Kwai Libazo knew he had no choice but to deliver the medicine man to A.D.S. Tolliver. He was unsure if the rules also required him to reveal what he had just learned: that Mbura hated the Scottish doctor with a passion most Kikuyu reserved for their worst enemy—the Maasai.

  When Libazo had arrived at the medicine man’s hut, the villagers had stood mute and suspicious, as was their wont with him ever since the British government had hired him to be a policeman. Not that he had ever been completely accepted by the Kikuyu, his mother’s tribe, or by the Maasai, his father’s. He had asked both his father’s and his mother’s brothers to include him in the circumcision ceremony of their respective tribes. Becoming a full-fledged man in either would have freed him from the limbo in which he had lived his life. But neither group would accept him. Once he turned fifteen and it was clear he would never get his wish from either tribe, he had confronted his mother. Why had she lain with an enemy of her people to make him? Why had she brought into the world a son who had no place in it? She had looked up into his face and walked away from his anger and his pain.

  One of the old men who sat around in his mother’s village watching the women do the farmwork had suggested that his mother might have been raped during a Maasai raid to steal goats and cattle. The old grandfather had told him to ask his father. But his father was dead—eaten by a lion. And his father’s brother denied it, and said the old man was just trying to get Kwai to hate his own father. He had never gotten the truth about why he had been born.

  Kwai pushed the medicine man forward as if he had a right to command the second-most powerful man in his mother’s tribe, after the chief, Kinanjui. “Your tribesman Kamante told me that you have been cursing the white doctor, that you have said he deserved to die because he was trying to steal the Kikuyus’ spirits for his god.”

  Gichinga Mbura contorted his torso to shrug off Libazo’s hand on his back. His skin still bore the remains of the red mud and white ash with which he had painted himself for the ritual cleansing of the coffee field. “That dwarf Kamante is a twisted monster. No one follows his words. What does he know of the power of Small-knife-no-spear?”

  Libazo kept his face in neutral though the Scottish doctor’s nickname made him want to smile. His mother’s people did this: They gave names to the white settlers that described something about them, usually a physical attribute or an article of clothing, derogatory if they disliked the person, complimentary if they found the person pleasing. Libazo had briefly worked for the red-haired Berkeley Cole and called him Sunset-shines-on-head.

  Libazo pressed harder on the medicine man’s back. “Move faster.”

  Gichinga twisted away from Libazo’s hand again and began to walk very fast. “You give the white man’s orders, but you are not a white man. You are not a Kikuyu. You are not a Maasai. You are not as much of man even as Kamante.”

  Kwai Libazo’s Maasai father’s height and strength gave him an advantage over the smaller, slighter Kikuyu. Libazo now grabbed Mbura by his upper arm and held him fast. “You would be better to think how you will answer B’wana Tolliver’s questions.”

  “You would be better to think why you take the side of your B’wana against your own people.”

  Libazo did not remind Gichinga that he was just after saying that Kwai Libazo did not belong to those people. He decided at that moment that he would tell A.D.S. Tolliver about Mbura’s threats against the British doctor.

  * * *

  Justin Tolliver had seen an African witch doctor only once, in full regalia, during a ceremony to gr
eet the former American president Teddy Roosevelt, who had come to the Protectorate to hunt and to explore. That was almost two years ago on a brief visit with a schoolmate and fellow army officer, Granville Stokes. They had come from South Africa to transport polo ponies and see the new British territory. The memory brought back powerful images. Tolliver suppressed a wave of desire that wanted to wash over him. He and Gran had met two women at a polo match. They had stayed with them for two months. Lillian, Lady Gresham, had introduced him around as her nephew. In private she had called him Candy. She had nearly consumed him. Almost old enough to be his mother but slender and lively, with skin soft and warm, the heady air of the African highlands and the scent of her French perfume, his first real affair. Barely past his twenty-first year, he had spent that leave lost in a stupor of sex and whiskey. Until she ran away south with a German, and he went back to Johannesburg to grow out of his infatuation. And he did. He now thought of her as debauched, rather than delicious. Except sometimes in the night. When the urge came over him to make love and that lecherous woman seemed the ideal partner.

  He shook off those thoughts and stood beside Vera McIntosh on the veranda, waiting for Libazo to cross the mission compound with the witch doctor in tow. Clement McIntosh had left them and gone to see how his wife was faring in her grief.

  Tolliver tried not to think of what it would be to lift Vera’s body and kiss her mouth and find out what she was like without that silly split skirt and boyish khaki shirt. She was not a predatory woman looking for nothing but pleasure. Neither was she a prim and proper English girl who would faint at the slightest provocation. Somehow, at this second, that made her more desirable than any woman he had ever known.

  Libazo let go of Mbura’s arm as they approached. Tolliver stepped forward and with Libazo translating asked the native to describe exactly what he had removed from the site where the body was found and if there had been anything left behind that might help them discover who had killed the doctor.