Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

  She turned and walked before him to the desk between the lounge and the dining room, where guests saw to their tab. Though Lucy Buxton had invited him, Tolliver stepped forward to pay the bill.

  “You have been Lord Delamere’s guests,” the desk clerk said.

  Tolliver was about to feel guilty and obligated over that when Lucy smirked and said, “Well, it’s about time.” She turned and kissed him quickly on the mouth. “I hope one day, you’ll change your mind,” she whispered and slipped away to the powder room. Tolliver went to the gents, gave up an unconscionable amount of water, and loosened his belt a notch. In the mirror, he felt as if he was seeing a stranger.

  He went out toward the men-only bar. He needed coffee almost as badly as he needed to escape Lucy Buxton’s sad desperation. After downing two strong coffees in rapid succession, he took his hat from the hatcheck boy and made his way out to the street. The sun was still high and hot as blazes, bearing down with a vengeance on the facade of the Carlton Lounge. The street was empty.

  Tolliver was crossing onto the shady side and formulating a plan to change into his uniform and go to the jail to question Gichinga Mbura, when, without warning, he fell into a dead faint and collapsed facedown in the middle of the road.

  8.

  “Malaria, I imagine,” D.C. Cranford was saying to Clement McIntosh two days later. They were sitting on McIntosh’s veranda, facing the marvelous view. “One of the town doctors is seeing to him. He’s keeping to his room. No point in moving him here.” He gestured toward the mission hospital building, that had for nearly a week now been without a doctor to run it. “And you know how beastly malaria is? Could take him a while to be up on his feet again. But I wanted to assure you that the matter of your brother-in-law’s death, though it will have to be somewhat postponed, will be seen to. That savage will taste British justice.”

  Vera was making a show of playing the dutiful daughter, serving the tea and cakes because it gave her a chance to listen in on her father’s conversation with the district commissioner.

  “I hope it is not malaria,” her father said. “It can turn to black water fever all too easily. I will pray for Tolliver. And for Gichinga Mbura, too. That poor savage does not know the evil of his ways.”

  “Quite right,” Cranford said. “But that mustn’t stop us doing away with him for killing the good doctor. Have to be made an example of, these bloody barbarians.” He glanced at Vera, as if in the hopes that she had not heard him fairly bellow out a rude word. Cranford was, to Vera, the worst kind of Englishman: entirely certain of every opinion he held, however misguided, and inclined to express them in a voice like a trumpet.

  She bit into a buttered muffin. It was as good as the muffins in her grandmother’s house in Glasgow. And no butter in Scotland could compare with that of the mission’s cows.

  The D.C. kept on with his opinions. “Rum business, this delay, but Tolliver is right about one thing. Those lily livers in the home office will have us laid out in lavender if we give you and your family satisfaction before we have turned over every stone looking for anyone else we might accuse. I am afraid I have to let the idealistic young policeman play out his hand. Be unwise to stir up London over this.”

  He pressed on the arms of his wicker chair, which squealed and creaked as he hoisted himself into a standing position. He took a gold watch out of his vest pocket. “Must be off. Catching the train back to Nairobi. Eleven twenty. Can’t stand the roads in the buggy. About killed my kidneys on the way out here. I’ll send it back empty. Anything or anyone you want to send back to town in it, just say. Glad to put it at your disposal.”

  “No, thank you,” her father was in the course of saying, when Vera chimed in.

  “I wonder, Father, if I might take District Commissioner Cranford up on his offer and go into Nairobi with Nurse Freemantle. Perhaps she can be helpful to Captain Tolliver.” She looked down at her teacup, hoping that she seemed like a demure Scottish girl, not like a woman desperate to see for herself how ill Tolliver was.

  “Capital idea,” Cranford said, before her father had the chance to respond. “I’ll have the boy drive you back here after tea. Still enough moonlight. He will get back to town with the rig with no trouble tonight.”

  “Very well,” her father said, rather belatedly.

  Vera rose from her chair, trying not to flutter about.

  Cranford looked at his watch again. “I’ll get the boy to run me down to the station at Athi River. He will come back for you.” He shook hands with her father and started across the lawn without further ceremony.

  * * *

  The cello and the music stand in the corner distracted Vera McIntosh from her trepidation about entering Justin Tolliver’s room. All her reasons to feel anxious about this encounter were still there, but those thoughts were completely overwhelmed by her surprise that Tolliver played music. It was the only possible conclusion one could draw from the presence of the instrument and the sheet music. This was the last thing Vera wanted to know about the man she already found irresistible, whose interest in her seemed to wax and wane for reasons she could not fathom. Those swings in his attentions made her enthrallment stronger: pushing her by turns from hope to despair, enflaming her desire and her resolve to captivate him one moment and then, the next, dousing her hopes and threatening to break her heart. Now she would have to add to her fantasies pictures of him at the cello and her at the piano.

  Nurse Freemantle, prim in her white uniform and blue cape, cleared her throat. Tolliver’s manservant closed the door and went to stand in the corner. Vera began to introduce the man in the bed to the nurse.

  “We have met,” Tolliver said; his voice was weak, his skin pale. He was sitting up, resting against white pillows, covered up to his waist with a thick linen sheet. He wore a blue and white striped nightshirt, open at the collar, revealing hair on his chest the same dark blond color as that on his head.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Vera said. “At the hospital. I remember now.” She took a couple of tentative steps forward. “I hope you will forgive the intrusion, Captain Tolliver, but my father and I thought perhaps Nurse Freemantle might be helpful. She served in the Boer War. She has a great deal of experience in African diseases.”

  He smiled faintly. She saw how little energy he had. If Gichinga Mbura could see him, he would be sure his curse was working. What he said next all but confirmed her fears. “At first, the doctor thought it was malaria, but now he is not sure. He seems perplexed about what it could be. I have been taking my quinine.” He blushed a bit at the last sentence, as if there were some shame connected with the taking of quinine. Vera looked away from his eyes, afraid he would see how much she cared for him.

  Nurse Freemantle went to the bed and felt his forehead, as if his flushed face was a signal of fever, which of course it must be. “Quinine does not always work,” she said. “May I take your pulse?” She took him by the wrist before he had a chance to respond. She reached under his chin and lifted his face to hers. “Show me your tongue.”

  The tongue he showed was pink but pale down the center.

  Nurse Freemantle’s efficient hands palpated his neck under his jaw. Not for the first time in her life, Vera thought it would be romantic to become a nurse.

  “No sign of infection in the glands. Have you had the sweats?”

  “No,” he said, his voice a bit livelier, as if the nurse touching him had made him feel better. “That was why the doctor began to doubt malaria.”

  “It is not malaria. Definitely not,” Nurse Freemantle said.

  The skin on Vera’s shoulders prickled. She did not want to believe it was Gichinga Mbura’s curse that had made him ill. She had never believed in those things. Even Wangari, who was baptized only a few years ago, now laughed at people who feared the medicine man. Except when they believed the curse. She and Wangari both understood that there was some way that a victim’s belief in a curse gave it power. But Justin Tolliver could not believe in a curse that
he had no idea had been placed on him.

  “When exactly did you collapse?” the nurse asked.

  “When I woke up, I could not at first remember what had happened. They told me it was Sunday afternoon about three-thirty. Just this morning, it all started to come back to me.”

  “Sunday was an unusually hot day for this altitude. Tell me what you did during that day, before you collapsed.”

  Tolliver pulled his sheet up over his shoulders and blushed again. Something told Vera he was not going to tell the whole truth. She kept her eyes away from his.

  “I went to luncheon at the Carlton. I fell in the street as I was leaving.” He sounded like a man pleading innocent to a crime he had committed.

  “Start at the beginning of the day.” Nurse Freemantle was giving him no quarter. She was frequently like this, seemed to be looking for what her patient had done wrong to bring disease upon himself.

  “I went to the Gymkhana Club in the morning and played tennis.” Now, he was a frightened boy, defending himself against his nanny’s suspicions.

  “Was it a long and difficult match?”

  “Look here,” he said. They were the words Vera wanted to say. She felt a terrible urge to defend him, too, against Nurse Freemantle’s prying. She was suddenly more afraid of finding out something that would dash her hopes of him than she was of Gichinga Mbura’s curse.

  “Well, then, if you will not be forthcoming, let me guess.” Nurse Fremantle’s examining hands had gone to her hips. She quickly folded them in front of her, but her voice remained impatient. “Your tennis match was a particularly strenuous one. You sweated quite profusely during the match, but not for the rest of the day, despite the intemperate heat. Without any rest in between, you changed after your match and went to luncheon where you ate quite heavily and consumed quite a bit of alcohol—more than you are used to—and almost no water. You also may have drunk more coffee than you are used to. You felt light-headed and may have attributed it to the drink. You collapsed without other warning.”

  He laughed then. “You sound like Sherlock Holmes in a story in The Strand Magazine.”

  Now Nurse Freemantle smiled triumphantly. “Then I am correct.” It was not a question.

  Tolliver pulled his arms out from under the sheet and sat up straighter against his pillows. “You are. And I am happy to know you have discovered what is ailing me. What exactly is it?”

  “Completely obvious actually,” she said, still not quite approving of him. “Though we are very near the equator here, cases of heat stroke are not that frequent in Nairobi, as we are over a mile above sea level. Given your age and how fit you are, you would have had to do absolutely everything wrong on a particularly hot day to have managed it. But evidently you did.” She looked at the manservant who still stood unmoving in the corner. “See to it that your master drinks a great deal of water. I will deliver some salt pills to the desk at the front door shortly after I leave. He must take one with every gallon of water he drinks for the rest of today and all of tomorrow.”

  She turned back to Tolliver. “You are lucky that your case is not a very bad one. You have regained your memory quickly. Some people do not for many, many months. An older man or one not so strong might never have recovered. I trust you have learned your lesson.”

  Despite the scolding he was taking, Tolliver looked positively gleeful. “I have. I have.”

  “You must stay in bed until Thursday. Eat sparingly for the rest of today—just broth.” She gave his manservant a look that was half commanding, half conspiratorial. “After that you should keep your diet and your exercise light for a few days. And you may have one glass of wine per day, but no strong spirits until Saturday at the earliest. No coffee or tea for the rest of the next week. Alcohol and coffee and tea are diuretics—make you lose water. They are mainly what got you into trouble in the first place. The altitude seems to contribute to the water loss somehow, even for persons who seem otherwise to be well acclimated.” She gave a curt bow of her head, as if to put an exclamation point on her instructions.

  “Thank you very much, Nurse Freemantle,” Tolliver said with a broad, handsome smile, properly chastened, but obviously sincerely grateful. “It’s a wonder to me the doctor did not better understand the problem.”

  The nurse folded her arms across her chest again. “The British-trained doctors are okay as far as injuries are concerned. But it takes one a while to understand how English people react to conditions in Africa.” She straightened the cape that had been part of her uniform in the South African war.

  Vera had watched the proceedings with relief, keeping quiet for fear of revealing the intensity of her feelings.

  Nurse Freemantle walked toward the door. “I think, Miss McIntosh,” she said, “that you can put aside your worries about that disgusting witch doctor and his silly curse.”

  Vera was mortified by Freemantle’s revelation of her fears.

  “Curse?” Tolliver asked. “What curse?”

  9.

  Out of bed at last, on the following Thursday, Justin Tolliver shaved carefully, put on his uniform for the first time in too many days, and went to work. He went through the charge room and straight to the cells, taking Kwai Libazo with him to interrogate the prisoner. No matter how many times he told himself that the savage witch doctor’s curse meant nothing to his investigation, he could not banish the thought of it. He asked himself what the detective Sherlock Holmes, a thoroughly logical man, would say, and laughed at himself for comparing his thoughts to those of a fictional character.

  When he came face to face with his native prisoner, he found the man arrogant in the extreme. The Somali askaris had forced him to wash off the markings on his face and body. But rather than subduing him, that seemed to have heightened his pride. “You must translate everything,” Tolliver told Kwai Libazo. “None of your editing of what he says.”

  Libazo stood at attention the entire time. He never let Mbura go on for very long before he interrupted and translated for Tolliver.

  Still, at the end of the interview, Tolliver came away unsure that Libazo had followed his instructions. Worse yet, he was more convinced than ever that Mbura might be innocent. That aside, Tolliver realized he intensely disliked Mbura. It was a new emotion to him. He had been in the Protectorate for nearly half a year now. He had visited it for several months, once before, but in all that time, he had not felt any strong emotion, one way or another, toward any native. As a whole, he found the Africans interesting, had been a bit discomfited by their nakedness at first, was sometimes amused by their naïve ways, but he had never held any real admiration or intense dislike regarding any single native person.

  Mbura had repeated his curse; Libazo had translated faithfully enough to tell Tolliver that. Tolliver blamed himself for reacting at all to silly savage superstitions. He wanted to be rid of the witch doctor’s laughter and wagging, too-pink tongue. But that was not a reason to hang him. Certainly, there was the death penalty if Mbura had actually murdered the Scottish doctor, but no one, under English law, would be hanged for making mumbo jumbo and putting a curse on a man. Tolliver was, after all, a man who had dragged the witch doctor off to jail for a crime he may not have committed. And Tolliver was also a member of the group that had, for all intents and purposes, invaded Mbura’s territory.

  Tolliver realized that, when it came to his opinion of the British presence in East Africa, he had just had a thought that was more normal for Vera McIntosh than it ought to be for a policeman.

  The only way to appease the livid D.C. Cranford was to close the case as soon as possible. Cranford had the power to make Tolliver’s life here intolerable. If Justin did not want to be forced back to England, he had to end his investigation without further delay. Therefore, his next step must be to turn his full attention to the only other suspect in the crime: Kirk Buxton.

  Tolliver’s spirits drooped at that thought. Such a line of inquiry would take him back into the path of Lucy—a woman far too at
tractive, overly willing, and whom, deep in his heart, he pitied. And pity was dangerous—too tender a feeling by half.

  A much more pleasant line of attack at the moment was a detour, but it might prove productive. He would take Lord Delamere up on his offer of information. There was a seriousness in the way Delamere had spoken on Sunday that hinted he knew something important that might guide Tolliver to the truth.

  Kwai Libazo was standing at Tolliver’s desk in the middle of the police station offering a large glass of water. He was in cahoots with Ndege to drown his superior officer. Tolliver took the glass, drank it down, and set off to find Delamere. As he expected, he discovered the social doyen of the settlers in the first place he looked—the bar at the Nairobi Club— reading The Leader and sipping a cup of tea.

  “Do sit down.” Delamere indicated the brown leather club chair opposite his own. “Will you have one?” Delamere asked, pointing to his cup.

  Much as Tolliver longed for tea, he was mindful of Nurse Freemantle’s interdiction. “Thank you, no. Nothing for me. I wondered if you would mind—”

  Delamere raised a hand to signal an approaching waiter. “Bring Captain Tolliver a glass and a pitcher of water,” he ordered. Evidently everyone in the town knew the exact nature of Justin Tolliver’s ailment and its recommended treatment. If he drank all the pitchers of water being forced on him wherever he went, he would surely end by spending most of the day in the loo.

  Delamere folded his newspaper and slipped it under his chair. “I’m glad of the chance to chat,” he said. “We haven’t had a proper opportunity to get to know one another. You came here under unusual circumstances for a man like yourself. How is it that you are in the line of work you are?”