Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

  Tolliver could not see how he could respond without criticizing his superior, so he redirected the course of the conversation. “Why is it that you are not convinced of Mbura’s guilt, sir?”

  “First of all, I agree with what Vera said about the spear. She knows whereof she speaks when it comes to the native way of life. She not only understands their style of thinking, but she sympathizes with it on many points.”

  “I have noticed that, sir.” Tolliver did not always find her opinions acceptable, much less admirable, but he was not about to say that to her father. “What else?”

  “Well, many of our fellow subjects of the king think that the natives are simple or even stupid. I do not think that at all the case. My experience with them tells me that they are canny and actually quite good at understanding where their best interests lie. I have known Gichinga Mbura since I built this mission, nearly twenty years ago. He is certainly capable of hating my brother-in-law with all his soul. I believe he did despise him.”

  “But not kill him.”

  “Mbura’s quarrel with Josiah, if you can call it that, was over who was seen as the more powerful by the natives hereabouts. Josiah was the kind of man who attracted admiration. His cures, of course, worked much better than Mbura’s. Quite a number of Kikuyu came to the hospital to be treated, and at Josiah’s urging stayed to be baptized. Also…” McIntosh paused. His eyes said he was reluctant to go on.

  Tolliver waited.

  “You see, my lad, my brother-in-law was a very confident man, sometimes overly so. He made it a point to ridicule Mbura’s spells and potions. He made sport of him right to his face. Some of the other natives laughed at Mbura with Josiah.”

  “You are making it sound as if Mbura had every reason to kill him.”

  “Yes, I understand that, but first of all, it is a very grave thing for one of these natives to take a settler’s life. Mbura did not seem the sort of man who would ever cross that line.”

  “Not even if he lost all control?”

  McIntosh took off his hat for a moment and scratched the tuft of red hair on his balding pate. “That is another fallacy about the natives—that they are a bundle of unbridled emotions. I have never seen that in them, especially not the men. They are as controlled in their emotions as any Englishman, if not more so. And second, Mbura was very open in his resentment of Josiah. He made no secret at all of that. He may have wanted him dead, but he would not have killed him, especially not that way. He was sly enough to know that he would be suspected. If he planned to murder Josiah, he would have hidden his true feelings.”

  “The fact that it was a Maasai spear? Could he have done it and been sly enough to use a rival tribe’s spear to throw suspicion away from himself?”

  “Perhaps,” McIntosh said, but he shook his head at the same time, as if he did not believe his own word. “Mbura has faith in his own spells and curses. If he wanted to destroy Josiah, he would have tried to prove his power by doing it with a spell, not with a spear.”

  Tolliver gazed out upon the plains on the other side of the river. A herd of zebra mixed in with wildebeests had come out of the woods and were grazing on the grasses. He wanted to ask more details about the dead doctor’s sexual exploits, but he did not know how to bring that up without blushing crimson. “Mrs. McIntosh spoke of Kirk Buxton. Is there anyone else who would have had a reason to kill him? Perhaps someone who had nothing to do with his—um—personal habits? Could it have been a Maasai, for instance? Do you think one of them could have had a reason?”

  “I thought about that, too, in the sleepless nights I have just spent. Could Josiah have treated a patient who did not fare well? Such a situation might have aroused hatred against him, especially by a Maasai. But the Maasai do not come to the hospital. They have been moved away from this area, as a way of keeping down the tribal rivalries and maintaining the peace. No…”

  McIntosh paused again. He, too, looked out at the scene before them. The sun had shifted just enough that the trees that spotted the plain were beginning to cast shadows toward the east. “I do not want to speak ill of the dead,” he said at length.

  “In my work, sir, we must speak of the dead so frequently that it would be impossible to obey that maxim.” Tolliver stood very still and waited. This was the sort of moment that often led to information that could be most valuable in solving a crime. Despite his upbringing, he was getting used to making other people uncomfortable.

  McIntosh sighed and looked at Tolliver. “Josiah Pennyman was a fine doctor. He was a man who brought many souls to Christ by bringing them to baptism. But he was not a worshipful man. Nor a very good one.” He paused and pursed his lips.

  Tolliver kept his face neutral and his eyes on the scene in the distance.

  The missionary lowered his head. “Josiah’s god was not my god. His god was himself. He was completely self-indulgent when it came to his sexual appetite. He—”

  “I don’t hear much of that sort of gossip,” Tolliver said quietly and then held his breath.

  “Mrs. Buxton was the latest in a long line of his conquests, if you can call them that. It was his lack of self-control that forced him to come here in the first place. In a sense he was too good a doctor for this backwater. You know he took his training with the best doctors in Edinburgh. His patients were from the top echelon of Scottish society. He treated one of the princes when the royal family was at Balmoral. There was talk of his going to London to care for the royal family there. Then, his behavior became known—that he was taking advantage of his position to seduce the young women of the families he cared for. There was hardly a house that he visited where he did not use his— He had to leave the country or be put in the dock. He came here to retrench.”

  McIntosh’s voice had become more and more strangled. When Tolliver turned to look at him, there were tears in his blue eyes. He looked back toward the house. Tolliver continued to face the view. The grazing animals were disappearing back into the woods.

  McIntosh got control of himself. “The Scottish Mission Society thought they were doing us a great favor by sending us such a skilled physician. We could not refuse him without revealing to them why. Blanche could not bring herself to do that. I prayed Josiah would have learned to overcome his venal self. God is stronger than the devil. But He does not always reveal Himself to us in that way.”

  Tolliver glanced into the missionary’s eyes. “I am sorry to say, sir, that in my line of work, I almost never see that side of God.”

  “I watched him like a hawk with Vera,” McIntosh said. He was looking at the ground again now, kicking at a clump of weeds like a schoolboy who’d been reprimanded. “Her mother and I both did.”

  Apprehension pricked the back of Tolliver’s neck, but he gave no voice to the question in his mind.

  McIntosh squared his shoulders and gave Justin a brief smile. “No, lad. No. He did not touch her. We can thank our merciful God for that at least.”

  Tolliver wondered if Vera’s safety didn’t have more to do with her parents’ watchfulness than with the mercy of some faraway deity. “Do you know which of the settler women he was involved with, besides Lucy Buxton, that is?”

  “No other that I know of. When it was going on, I tried not to think about it. Mrs. Buxton came to see him too often, supposedly about some ailment—trumped up if you ask me. That woman looks the picture of health.” He kicked at the weed again. “But I must say she looked a good deal better when she came out of the hospital than when she went in.” His face took on an embarrassed look, half grimace, half grin. It was the kind of thing men might joke about among themselves, but not under these circumstances.

  “But there were others?”

  “Not that came to the hospital here to see him as often as Lucy Buxton. But he was out all night quite a bit. Can’t see how he could go on with his work considering how little he seemed to rest. But he did, somehow.”

  “He didn’t keep a room at the club.” It was a statement, not a question.


  McIntosh shook his head and turned to glance back at the house.

  Vera was coming toward them. She wore what all the women here wore in the daytime—a double terai, a double-thick dark brown felt hat, gabardine breeches that looked two sizes too big covered by a sort of khaki kilt, a loose tan shirt, and heavy boots. All that cloth was meant to protect them from sunstroke. Tall, statuesque, fair women like Lillian Gresham and Lucy Buxton managed to look vital and strong in such clothing. Vera looked like a lovely girl playing Julia in a local version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, dressing up in boy’s clothing to follow her love. Tolliver could not understand why he would desire such a person. But he did. Far too much.

  She took her father’s hand and stood next to him holding it. “Papa, you look done in.”

  “That I am, lass. I think I will go and have a lie down.”

  They stood and watched him walk up the slight slope toward the house. His carriage was the picture of a soldier leaving a dreadful defeat.

  “Would you come to the veranda and have something to eat and drink?” Vera asked.

  “Finch Hatton?”

  “He’s gone.” Her voice was perfectly neutral.

  “Then, yes,” Tolliver said, aware that his tone of voice had revealed more than he wanted but relieved he was not blushing.

  * * *

  Back in town that evening, Tolliver checked on Gichinga Mbura in his cell at the police station and then went to report to Cranford, who, true to form, insisted that the case was solved and that they could proceed to try and then as quickly as possible execute the culprit. Tolliver managed to convince him that they needed to follow protocol and procedure in order to satisfy the home authorities. The last thing Cranford, or the governor of the Protectorate for that matter, wanted to do was run afoul of their overseers in the colonial administration in London, whom officials on the ground in Africa considered bleeding hearts and a thorn in the side of the king’s hardworking empire builders.

  While Tolliver was changing for dinner, a boy arrived at the barracks, asking for him. Ndege went to the door and brought back a blue envelope. The script that said “A.D.S. Justin Tolliver” was decidedly feminine. He tore it open, wondering what Vera would be trying to tell him. Instead he read, “Meet me at the Carlton Lounge tomorrow for luncheon.” It was signed “Lucy.”

  Tolliver shoved the note into the pocket of his jacket and dropped his hands so Ndege could tie his tie.

  7.

  The next day, a Sunday, Kwai Libazo dressed as he would to visit his mother, in a Kikuyu’s traditional dark orange cloth shuka, but he sported a tan linen jacket over it and instead of bare feet, wore the leather sandals that were part of his police uniform. He thought he looked quite handsome.

  But he was not going to visit his mother’s village. Instead of taking the train one stop north from Nairobi to Kikuyu, he spent his half a rupee to go one stop south to Athi River. From that station, it would be just a three-and-a-half-mile walk on the red dirt road to the Scottish Mission and its neighboring tribal village. As it turned out, one of the mission boys driving an oxcart gave him a ride, and he arrived at the mission workers’ village half an hour sooner than he would otherwise have expected.

  He spoke to Kamante and to Gichinga Mbura’s brothers, and to the old women of the clan that lived there. The men told him, as expected, what they wanted him to believe. The old mothers, who knew everything, said very little to him at all except to remind him that he worked for the British. One of them laughed a gleeful cackle. “Who will speak to you now, Kwai Libazo? You were not born a fish. You were not born a chicken. But at least you were born an African. But now you have given yourself to the British for wages. So now you are not black and you are not white. No one will talk to you.”

  Libazo knew another person who did not really belong to any group: Vera McIntosh was the person he must speak to because she was nearly as much of a stranger in the world as he. She was born here so she was not a settler, but not an African either. He could tell by the way she looked at the British people that she did not feel herself to be one of them. After her uncle’s funeral, he had watched from under a tree at the edge of the lawn and seen how the settlers had spoken to her with false expressions on their faces, as if they expected her to say the wrong thing and were bracing themselves not to show their disapproval. She could not read what they were thinking and did not know how to play with them. Looking from far away was often the best way to see the reality of a place.

  He left the Kikuyu village and went first to Wangari—who had been Vera McIntosh’s second mother—to secure an introduction to the lady. He took the path from the Kikuyu village to the huts where the house staff lived, behind the hospital building. He found Wangari tending her sweet potato plants in the shamba.

  She was a handsome woman, still lithe; she seemed very much younger than Vera’s actual mother. She was the third wife of a prosperous man, who had sold many, many daughters and now had many goats and cattle to show for it. When Kwai greeted her, she gave him a puzzled look at first, but then seemed to understand what he wanted. She led him to the open ground in front of her hut and offered him water in a pottery cup. He took it and they sat on the ground in the shade of tall trees at the edge of the forest.

  “You are a constable now, Kwai Libazo.” She spoke in Kikuyu, but she used the British word to describe his work, since there was no such word in the native tongue.

  “Yes, nyina.” As a mark of respect, he addressed her with the Kikuyu word for another person’s mother.

  “Being a policeman must be hard work for you.”

  “Yes, it is very hard.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “You, too, work for the white man.” A white man would consider his answer rude, he thought. He was beginning to learn how many ways of answering a question the British thought to be rude. But the African people knew many ways to answer a question, or to avoid answering it. They thought it rude to answer when the response would be hurtful.

  Wangari smiled. She did not think him rude. “I took care of his children. I came to nurse Miss Vera when my first child died. My son Kibene shared my milk with her brother. She still comes to me when she is troubled.”

  “She is very troubled now.”

  She paused a moment and nodded, but not in complete agreement, he could see.

  “It is her brother, I have come to ask about,” he said. “He is not here. There is no talk of him.”

  “No,” she said, matter-of-factly. “He went away on a shooting safari two days before the doctor died. Kibene went with him. They rode to Too-many-hats’ farm.” Too-many-hats was the nickname the local people had for Richard Newland, because of his habit of changing his hat several times a day. “The safari party left from there.” She nodded her head toward the end of the path that led to the field-workers’ village. “Some of the local men have also gone as porters and gun bearers.”

  “Ah, I see,” Libazo said. “The district commissioner believes Gichinga Mbura killed the white doctor. Do you think that, too?”

  “Gichinga hated the doctor because the doctor laughed at his dances and called his spells mumbo jumbo.” She said the English words with which the British belittled tribal ways.

  “Do you think the English doctor was right? That the medicine man has no real medicine?”

  “Scottish,” she said and grinned. “They prefer to be called by their own tribal names. You know that they have tribes, too, like us.”

  He nodded. “Some tribesmen become angry because the settlers think their English tribe is the best in the world. But all people think their own tribe is the best.”

  Wangari raised her eyebrows, but she smiled at him. He repeated his question about Mbura’s powers. This time he wanted the kind of answer a European would expect. She eyed him, not entirely trusting why he asked to know this. He sipped his water and waited.

  “I am a Christian now.” She was not going to make it easy.

  He
just sat and waited, looking into the empty cup and bearing the silence.

  Finally she sighed and gave in. “I believe the doctor cured the hurts of the body better than Gichinga Mbura. But I think our medicine man does more for the hurts of the spirit.”

  It was not what Libazo expected to hear. “Medicine men can hurt people’s spirits, too.” He had seen strong, healthy Kikuyu and Maasai wither and die because they believed they were cursed by a medicine man.

  “You are right, Constable,” she said. She made it a point to address him by his title and not his name, but her voice was gentle, her eyes sympathetic, as if she knew that he had been hurt in his spirit by a curse against a child who was not Kikuyu and not Maasai.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “hard work is what a man needs most.” And he asked her to take him to speak to her white daughter.

  * * *

  Justin Tolliver shook his head at his own reflection. He had shaved carefully, brushed his dark blond hair till it stayed slicked back and in place and looked almost brown. He reached for the bottle of lime tonic on the shelf above his circular shaving mirror but thought better of using cologne this day and withdrew it. It was the sort of thing a man would put on his face if he wanted to kiss the girl he was about to meet.

  He had spent the morning playing tennis and distracted by thoughts of Vera McIntosh, and also of Lucy Buxton. The celibate life he had led since coming to British East Africa in the fall of the previous year was playing on his nerves. He would not risk catching a disease from an easy woman. Such ailments were all too prevalent here. But his body still had its desires. And, in physique, Lucy was too like Lillian Gresham, who had provided such delectable pleasures in his past days in Nairobi.

  Lillian had also been another man’s wife. Justin knew that many of his fellow soldiers much preferred the carefree satisfactions of taking their pleasure wherever they found it. He had reined in his libido and not only because he feared venereal disease. He wanted deeper satisfaction, lovemaking that meant more than momentary release. The match he had played that morning reminded him of how far from certain he was ever to find such a love. His tennis opponent that morning had been Denys Finch Hatton. The match had been fierce. They should have been making friends, given their common love of sport, but their rivalry over Vera reigned paramount in Tolliver’s mind.