Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

  The other settlers might admire Finch Hatton a great deal. But Tolliver could only resent his annoying attentions to Vera McIntosh and found nothing much to like in the man.

  If the morning’s tennis match had been a struggle for supremacy in that regard, Finch Hatton would have won the territory. Tolliver had played with all his heart and strength, to deuce and back to game point, over and over, winning and losing game after long game, set after set. In the end he lost the match.

  He reached for the lime tonic water on his shaving stand and patted some on his face after all. Lucy Buxton was beginning to seem more and more like the antidote to being crossed at every turn.

  Tolliver left the barracks and turned right, slightly uphill and onto Government Road toward the Carlton Lounge. The day was bright and the early afternoon sun had burned off the cool of the morning. The street was thronged with Hindu traders and Africans carrying small purchases. The heat was gathering like an army on the attack.

  In front of the Indian and Swahili shops that lined the street, poles and cables lay along the green verges between the red dirt walkway and the red dirt road. A sign declared works being done by the Nairobi Electric Lighting and Power Company, which was wiring the town. But the Hindu workers who strung the cables were nowhere in sight on a Sunday, when work stopped no matter what the workers’ religion. Except for himself and two or three other settlers, also making their way under the eucalyptus trees to luncheon, the hot back street was deserted.

  The entryway of the lounge provided a welcome cool. The dark wood-paneled bar was full of European men—government functionaries, bankers, businessmen. At the back of the building in the main dining room, some tables were already filled with women in daytime frocks, light and summery as any group of women in England might look on the finest day of June. Their escorts, like Tolliver, wore tan or white linen, but in too many layers to give them any relief from the weather.

  To Justin’s dismay, though it was fifteen minutes before the appointed time, Lucy Buxton had already arrived and taken a table. She stood up and called to him from near the doors that opened onto the patio. Her gauzy dress clung to her curves. The distress of the other day was gone from her lovely face. When she raised her hands to wave to him, her breasts rose, too, and Tolliver imagined them bared. He was in terrible trouble of forgetting himself.

  “I’ve ordered you a gin and quinine water,” she said without further greeting. She sat, and he took the chair opposite hers. There was quite enough enthusiasm in her eyes. She did not need to smell his cologne water just yet.

  “I must say you look just as fetching in a linen lounge suit as you do in your khaki uniform,” she said.

  He should have complimented her on her ensemble, but he blushed instead and stared down at the green glass tumbler that stood at the place next to her. She picked it up and handed it to him. Her hands were lovely. “Go on. Drink it. It will do you good. Must take our quinine.” She raised her own glass to him and drank. He did, too. Despite its reputed medicinal purpose, the drink was mostly gin. Now he was in danger of getting drunk as well as letting himself be seduced.

  This meeting can serve as part of my investigation into the murder of Josiah Pennyman, he thought. But he knew full well what a sham of an idea that was. It would take a lot more gin before he would be able to fool himself into believing that. No matter what the demands of his work, he would not have the audacity to bring up a former illicit liaison with this lady who was trying to seduce him. Especially one whose offer he was so sorely tempted to accept. He warned himself to hide how willing he might be. He took another gulp of his drink.

  When he looked across the table and into her round blue eyes, she lowered her voice and said the last thing he expected. “I fancy that you think my dolt of a husband killed Josiah Pennyman in a fit of jealousy.”

  He sputtered and nearly choked.

  She leaned toward him. He could see halfway down the front of her dress. “Well, if that is what you think, you are wrong. Kirk wouldn’t. He doesn’t have enough fire in him to get that worked up about anything.” She considered her statement and then said, “Well, not about sex with me anyway.” She drained her glass and smiled beguilingly. “About money, perhaps.”

  Tolliver realized that he had not spoken since he arrived. He still could not. What with her breasts, the sparkle in her eyes, and the shocking things she was saying, he could not put a coherent sentence together.

  She waved her empty glass at a passing waiter dressed in a dark jacket, white pantaloons, and snow-white turban. He bowed and took away the glass. “The same again, please Binder. And for my friend as well.”

  “Well, darling,” she said once the waiter had gone away, “my husband is not much use to me, as a woman, if you know what I mean.” She leaned over the table again and made a gesture with the fingers of both hands toward her torso. “You don’t think I should allow all this to go to waste, do you?”

  Tolliver might have said no, but he finished his drink instead. If the glass had contained any quinine water, he couldn’t taste it. And gin, though it might be known to make quinine tolerable, could not ward off malaria all on its own. It was, however, sure to make him drunk if he continued to consume it in such quantities on an empty stomach. He reached for the menu that lay on the table between them. “Perhaps we should order something,” he suggested.

  She smiled indulgently. “Yes,” she said. “Men your age are always hungry, aren’t they? Must keep up your strength.” She hiked her chair forward. Tolliver felt her toes trying to crawl under his left trouser leg, and he wondered how many drinks she had drunk before he arrived. He looked at her, and she actually batted her eyelashes at him. Perhaps it was the alcohol she was using to drown her grief over the loss of her lover, but she portrayed the picture of a music hall comedienne’s farcical seductress. Suddenly any temptation he felt from her evaporated.

  He shifted his entire attention to the bill of fare, which was precisely the menu he would have expected to find on offer at a dining establishment in Cambridge or Surrey—roast beef, roasted chicken, lamb stew, all one hundred percent English.

  When Binder returned with the drinks, Tolliver ordered the chicken, to avoid the Yorkshire pudding, which came with the roast beef. This far from home it would never please a true Yorkshireman like him.

  “The same,” she said, handing the menu to the waiter. “And a bottle of claret,” she added. Her toes seemed to be trying unsuccessfully to pull down his sock, which reached to his knee. There was a pleading look in her eye of such intense desperation and pending disappointment that he could not look at her.

  He was saved when a flurry of activity at the doorway to the dining room distracted them and Lord and Lady Delamere entered. They approached the table. Delamere’s words from two nights ago at the club rang in Tolliver’s memory—“Why the devil are you doing that in here?” The toes were removed from Justin Tolliver’s leg.

  “Oh, jolly,” Lady Delamere said. “You won’t mind if we join you.”

  Tolliver rose to his feet. “Not at all,” he said, trying to sound like a man who knew how to keep his composure. “We have just this moment ordered.”

  “The chicken, I hope,” Delamere said.

  “Oh, Hugh,” Augusta Delamere said, “must you be such a creature of habit?” She took a seat, and she and Lucy Buxton immediately put their heads together and began to discuss how exhausting it was finding and having to break in new servants. Once the Delameres had ordered, everyone who passed the table stopped to talk to Lord Delamere—about the fine rains that year, about land speculation, and yesterday’s polo match. One of them also brought up “the dreadful business of that barbarian murdering poor Josiah Pennyman.”

  Lord Delamere gave an all but imperceptible shake of his head and quick, surreptitious gesture of his thumb in the direction of Lucy, who was still deep in conversation with his wife. The passerby raised his eyebrows, coughed, and beat a quick retreat.

  The waiters appe
ared with their plates, and Binder poured the wine. The conversation at the table quieted while they began to eat. Lucy sipped wine more than she picked at her food.

  “Lovely claret this,” Lady Delamere said.

  “So it is.” Delamere lifted his glass and admired the color of the wine. “Must tell Berkeley to lay in a few cases for us. Great connoisseur, my brother-in-law.” He directed his last sentence at Justin Tolliver. Lady Delamere gave her husband an arch look.

  Tolliver, who was trying to drink as little wine as possible after the two double gins, then remembered what that warning look was about. In that dreadful argument between Kirk Buxton and Lucy, Buxton had intimated that Lucy had also been involved with Lady Delamere’s brother, Berkeley Cole. Could Cole, a bachelor and one of the best-liked members of the Protectorate’s social set, have been jealous enough to commit murder when his lover took up with the handsomer Scottish doctor?

  Justin looked across at the lovely Lucy, who had been staring into her wineglass. She raised her glance to his. Her eyes were filled with pain that had not been there before anyone mentioned Josiah Pennyman and Berkeley Cole.

  * * *

  The noon meal was already over at the missionary’s house south of the town. There, Vera McIntosh followed Njui through the back of the house. The houseboy had come to tell her that Constable Kwai Libazo had asked for her at the back door. “I do not think, Msabu, that he is here on business. He is not wearing his uniform.”

  Vera could not imagine what, besides the business of her uncle’s death, could bring the African policeman to her door. When she went out, Libazo was standing at attention in the kitchen yard with Wangari at his side. The stance made him look strange, as did the European man’s jacket he wore over his typical Kikuyu shuka. He wore sandals, which in her life Vera had never seen on an ordinary tribesman’s feet. From the looks of him, she had surmised that he was not a full-blooded Kikuyu. There was something Maasai about him, too. And in that getup he was neither purely a tribesman nor a policeman. Wangari bowed, said nothing, and went away.

  “Hello, Constable Libazo,” Vera said as if he had been properly introduced to her. Native workers were never introduced to Europeans. Most settlers acted as if they were invisible, or machines, but not people.

  “I would like to speak to you, Msabu, if it would not trouble you too much. I am sorry to interrupt your time. I need to— I have some—” Vera wasn’t sure if it was the fact that he was uncomfortable speaking English or the unusual fact of his calling on her that made his speech so hesitant.

  “I will speak with you,” she said in Kikuyu and smiled at him. She wished she could invite him to sit on the veranda, to take a cup of tea with her. At moments like this, she felt neither fish nor flesh herself. She could sit down and eat and drink with any white person no matter how intimidating or unsympathetic to her, but she could never invite a native to a comfortable conversation. It just wasn’t done, her mother told her. Yet she felt much more comfortable with the tribespeople, who, after all, had been her only playmates growing up. She would much rather sit on her veranda with Kwai Libazo than with Lady Delamere or Mrs. D.C. Cranford. European women spent more time looking disapprovingly at her fingernails than at her face, which was probably equally dirty anyway. She glanced at the windows of the house. Neither her mother nor her father was looking out at her. “Come with me,” she said.

  She walked between the house and the mission office to a tree that stood on a little knoll between the woods and the house workers’ huts. It was one of those days when the light was remarkably beautiful—silver, not the usual golden yellow. The blue sky was streaked with long wisps of clouds and the banana plants in the workers’ shamba, the stone hospital, the river at the bottom of the coffee plantation all seemed to glow and shimmer. “Sit with me here, Kwai Libazo,” she said. She took a place in the shade of the tree on the log that Joe Morley, the plantation manager, had placed there for her, so she could come here to sit and read or sketch. Libazo sat on the ground before her with his back to the loveliness of the view. “What is it that you have come to talk to me about?” she asked.

  Libazo crossed his legs and put his elbows on his knees. He was tall and powerfully built and though she sat up on the log, his face was just about even with hers. “I have a fear about Gichinga Mbura,” he said. He reached out and pulled up a blade of grass. He glanced into her face and looked away. His English was quite good. Whoever the missionary was that had taught him had done a very good job of it. Most natives who could, usually spoke English to settlers, even to those who could, like her, speak their native tongue. She thought it was a point of pride with him. That he liked to show how well he did it.

  She respected his choice. “You fear that Gichinga Mbura is being wrongly accused?” It was what Tolliver had said he also thought.

  “Perhaps he is not guilty. But that is not what I came to speak to you about. When we went to arrest him yesterday, he was in a trance.”

  It was what the medicine men did when they were communicating with the spirits—good and bad. “Did he speak in the trance?”

  “I knew you would know why this is bad,” Libazo said. “Yes. He put a curse on Justin Tolliver.” He crushed the blade of grass between his fingers and flicked the remains of it away.

  A shiver went up Vera’s back despite the denial that rose to her lips. “Those curses work only if the victim believes in them. I doubt very much that Captain Tolliver would believe in Gichinga Mbura’s magic.”

  “I did not tell Captain Tolliver.” The way Libazo said it, Vera saw that he had not translated the curse because he wanted to protect Tolliver from it.

  “So, then he is safe,” she said.

  “I hope so, Msabu,” Libazo said. “When I was taking Gichinga Mbura into town to the jail, I told him that his words did not reach Tolliver’s ears. I wanted to tell him that his curse was useless, but he laughed and said it did not matter if Tolliver heard the curse, that when he threw some powder into the fire, he saw shock in Tolliver’s eyes. That was the curse entering into Tolliver’s heart. It frightened me, because I, too, saw the shock in Tolliver.” He hung his head and pulled another blade of grass.

  “You respect Captain Tolliver?” It was half a question, half a statement. Vera did not know why she cared what this relative stranger thought of Tolliver. How could that matter to her? But it did matter, and she wanted to know. “Tell me what you see in him?”

  Libazo shifted his position so that he was no longer facing her, but looking away in the direction of the banana plants behind the workers’ huts. “He does not understand Africa,” he said, “but his heart is good.” He looked sidelong, right into her eyes. “His heart is very good.”

  For whatever reason, Vera found Libazo’s pronouncement disturbing. A British policeman would have to be very good indeed to elicit such a compliment. The last time Tolliver was here he had acted cool and distant—all business. She did not want her heart to leap upon hearing what a good man he was. She stood up. The constable jumped to his feet, like a proper English gentleman.

  “Please, Constable Libazo, do not tell Captain Tolliver of Gichinga Mbura’s curse.” She did not think it at all likely that Tolliver would put any store by what he would undoubtedly call mumbo jumbo, but she had seen the medicine man’s curses work. She wanted to make sure Tolliver would not be Mbura’s victim. Not knowing he had been cursed could not hurt Tolliver, but there was the slightest chance that if he did know of it, the spell could work against him. Vera did not want to leave that to fate.

  * * *

  If Vera could have seen the intimate way Lucy Buxton slipped into the chair next to Tolliver after the Delameres left the luncheon table, and the way she put her lovely white hand on his knee beneath the tablecloth, she might have thought twice about preserving him from the medicine man’s curse.

  Before leaving the table Lord Delamere had surprised Tolliver by whispering that he would be glad to discuss the matter of the Pennyman murder investig
ation any time Tolliver would like. Delamere then followed his wife and most of the other Sunday luncheon diners as they drifted out the French doors to take chairs on the shaded patio and under the trees on the lawn beyond, where they drank coffee and continued with their chat about the prospects of harvesting minerals from Lake Magadi or complaints about the vagaries of rule from the government in London, which they invariably referred to as “home.”

  To Lucy’s consternation, even after all he had drunk, Tolliver was still sober enough to resist the spell the lovely lady in the gauzy frock was attempting to cast. She rose from the table with a languid air.

  He stood quickly, and were the truth known, felt quite lightheaded with the sudden motion. That surprised him. Granted he had not indulged to this extent in a long while, but even as a lad at Cambridge, he was able to hold his alcohol better than this. He had drunk two gins, but that shouldn’t have been enough to have this effect. He must have drunk more of the claret than he imagined, and all that food he had eaten had not been enough to absorb it.

  “I am sorry, Mrs. Buxton,” he said. “I have very much enjoyed this luncheon, but I do have urgent official matters to attend to.”

  Lucy studied him for a moment and then bowed awkwardly almost as if she were trying to curtsy. “It is Sunday, Mr. Tolliver,” she said with surprising sobriety, “and you are wearing a linen lounge suit. What ‘official business’ could be calling you away?”

  “Begging your pardon, but I have a prisoner—” He cut himself off, remembering just in time to avoid bringing up a murder that seemed to have all but broken her heart, and that might have been the result of her affair with the dead man. “Enforcing the law must happen every day. It does not take the Lord’s day off.” He sounded like a prig, and he knew it.