Ahmed's Revenge (20 page)

The Norfolk is a beautiful hotel, my favourite, even though when Jules and I came to town we mostly stayed at others. We could, of course, have stayed at my father's house, but Jules liked hotels. He had a kind of obsession about making love in strange rooms, the opposite of his lack of desire when sleeping under the stars, so we had stayed once in the Six Eighty, once at the Milimani and the Boulevard and the Fairmont, and even one time at the Hilton.

The hairdresser's was tucked away in the back, and when I went inside the matron greeted me warmly, as if I'd been there the week before. There were no other customers in the place just then, so she and her assistants called me immediately into the back room to wash my hair. When Jules and I came in from the farm this was usually my first stop. I loved the smell of the place and I liked looking through the hairdo books, at the strangely beautiful women. Their photos reminded me of the animals that we'd see at our pond. There was a catlike litheness to them, the lines of their jaws were predatory, their hair set like that of the ardent queen in my father's chess set, pulled back in leonine tightness, or with strands of it swooping about their eyes. My father had been right in telling me that I ought to wait until Saturday to have my hair done, and it occurred to me that I might come back again, not only on Saturday, but on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday too. I would turn my hair perfect in daily installments as I stepped away from shock and grief, as I prepared to take up normal life again.

These were calming thoughts and I clung to them, but when the ladies tipped me back over the shampooing tub my idyll was interrupted by the matron's chatty voice. “Did you hear about the trouble last night? I don't know about Nairobi anymore. Even the Norfolk's not immune.”

“What trouble?” I asked. Since I was looking up at the woman from the odd angle of the shampoo sink, what I saw was the soft underside of her chin and the weird movement of her lips, like an upside-down sting ray washed up on the shore.

My hair was heavy and I could feel the assistant's fingers dancing over my scalp.

“It was ever so late,” said the matron. “Almost all of the customers were gone, but a man got killed in our bar last night, stabbed through the heart with a bread knife. He was a crazy man, a street beggar who had somehow got inside.”

When my shampooing was done and they sat me up again I felt light, as if the dirt washed from my hair had pulled the blinders from my eyes.

“Who killed him?” I asked. “What was the dead man's name?”

They led me from one chair to another without speaking. When I was sitting down again, the matron shrugged, “Who knows the names of wild men off the street?”

Since I wasn't having a perm I let the setting and combing go on with as little conversation as possible. I had to try to think clearly now. I had been in the Norfolk last night. Upon leaving I had seen Mr Smith sitting in my chair, and if this killing had anything to do with him, as I knew it must, then I also knew I had to get help, I couldn't go on alone anymore. I hadn't allowed myself to believe it before, but Mr Smith might harm me, he could easily do it, and he might also harm my father.

The shop door had opened a few times and the matron was greeting newcomers. “Did you hear about the trouble last night?” I heard her say.

When they were finished with me I paid them quickly, glad I didn't know any of the other women in the waiting room. I'd been in there for an hour, but two hours remained before I had to meet Miro. I went out through the hotel foyer, past the magazine stand, and when I passed the bar I could see that lunch was in full swing, with most of the tables taken and all the waiters hurriedly walking by. I tried to see if last night's table was occupied, but I tried too hard and the maître d' came over and asked me if I wanted to sit down.

“I'm looking for someone,” I said, and then I asked, “Did something bad happen here last night?”

The maître d' nodded solemnly. “Alas,” he said, “even we are not immune.”

“Who let the man in?” I asked. “And where did they take him when they took him away?”

The maître d' looked at me a little keenly but answered my question. “He came in by himself, off the street and out of control. He attacked one of our customers and made the others run. When they took him away he was dead, so he went to the Nairobi Hospital mortuary, I suppose.”

I had more questions, but the maître d' looked over my shoulder. “Do you need a table, sir?” he asked, and when I turned around I found Ralph standing there. Ralph wasn't wearing his business suit this time but his Wildebeest Road safari uniform, tan khaki pants with a short-sleeved jacket. The Wildebeest Road logo was on his breast pocket. He looked smart.

“Are you working today?” I asked. “Are you heading out of town?”

“As a matter of fact I am,” said Ralph. “Cottar's Camp and the Mara.”

“When are you coming back?” I guess I still had Jules's wake on my mind. I hoped that Ralph would be in town by the weekend, that I could mention the wake to him and he'd say he would come.

“Thursday night or Friday morning,” he said. “The first and last nights we're camping, so I'm not sure how long they will want to stay out.”

Because we were both standing in the maître d's queue, Ralph offered to buy me lunch, and I found myself making a counter-offer. “Come with me for a little while instead,” I said. “I need help, Ralph. I will buy you lunch at Trattoria later.”

“I am hungry now,” Ralph said, but it was clear that he was coming along. I told him I had my car, but his Wildebeest Road van was parked right out in front, and when we got in, Ralph asked where I wanted to go.

“Nairobi Hospital,” I said.

Ralph shook his head, but, maybe out of respect for the recently widowed, he didn't ask questions. He just put the van in gear, telling me he had to pick up his tourists at the Hilton Hotel at four.

Nairobi Hospital had several large car parks, with signs pointing to outpatient and emergency rooms. I hadn't told Ralph my reason for wanting to go to the hospital, but since there were no signs for the mortuary, I had Ralph stop at admissions and park his van under the shade of an old and sloping flame tree, next to the helicopter pad and directly below the ward where Jules had been. As I looked up, I could see the wide ledge, the easy footing that someone walking on it might have. Of three windows, I knew one had to have been Jules's. All three were open now, with white curtains flicking out into the warm Nairobi air.

“Julius died there,” I said, pointing up, but Ralph looked down. “Are we visiting a memory, then,” he asked, “or are we simply passing time?”

We were in the hospital's outer hallway before I told Ralph why I'd needed to come, that these days I feared I was connected to everything, even, perhaps, to the previous night's death at the Norfolk. “Maybe it's pointless,” I said, “but someone told me recently to leave no stone unturned. Just a quick look, down where they keep the bodies, and then we'll go have our lunch, I promise.”

I thought Ralph might be reluctant to search out the mortuary, but he was nothing of the kind. Rather, he went over and asked the admissions nurse how to get there.

Maybe mortuaries are always in basements, but this one was a long way down, and once we were on the stairs it was I who had trouble going on. I thought of Jules's body passing this way. Though, of course, there was a lift, I imagined rigor-mortised corpses taking these sharp turns, exhausted orderlies at each end. At the bottom I was as much out of breath as I might have been had I been going up, and when Ralph opened a heavy door I nearly decided to retreat, to catch my breath while climbing the stairs.

We were in the hospital's lowest basement. There were labs and changing rooms and hospital workers milling about. And there were living patients too, lined up in the hallway in front of the laboratory doors, coloured tags on the backs of their wheelchairs or pinned to the sleeves of their gowns.

Ralph asked an attendant to point out the mortuary, and as we went that way we found that the crowd quickly thinned, that activity was pretty much limited to the area by the stairway door. The wall paint, at no spot in the hospital anything but drab, was all but missing down here, and though the hall was properly lit, it was poorly cared for. This was an area of defeat, I realised; if the business of hospitals was saving lives, here the business had failed.

The mortuary had double doors with heavy glass windows, both scratched and dirty, impossible to see through. One could easily imagine a stretcher knocking the doors quickly open, though the patient on the stretcher wouldn't care about speed.

We were surprised to find that the mortuary was empty. That is, I had expected a worker or two, but there was no one standing up to meet us, no one asking what we wanted in such a cold and quiet place.

The chamber we were in appeared to be an anteroom. There was a desk in it, and on top of the desk a clipboard with a list of names, perhaps twenty in all. Each name was followed by a notation—dates and scribbles, often with a doctor's signature at the end. There were several sheets of paper below the top one, and on impulse I flipped back a few and soon found Dr Zir's name next to an unreadable version of “Julius Grant.” As I looked closely, in fact, I could see that they'd called him James, and that made me mad.

Ralph took the clipboard from my hand. “Let's clear up the matter of last night's murder, if that's what we came for, and get out of here,” he said. He turned back to the first page and found the man in question immediately, third entry from the bottom, under the heading “Unknown male.”

He was listed as D-2 on the clipboard's location index, but when we turned to face the mortuary, even Ralph became hesitant. To venture farther seemed an intrusion, a formal violation of the rules. Still, there were doors leading out of the anteroom and since they were marked A through F, I walked over to door D and opened it up. And even though a cold dead breath came out to meet us, Ralph and I both walked inside.

“There has got to be a light switch,” said Ralph.

We knew we were in a refrigerator, but until Ralph found the switch and we let the door swing closed, the thought stayed with me that what we might find lying about in this room would be tusks, that we were still in Mr Smith's domain.

There was only one bare bulb, but it was so powerful that both of us at first put our hands up to our eyes. There weren't drawers in this room, as I'd imagined there'd be, but freewheeling stretchers, just like the ones they used in the upstairs wards. There were five of them, with large numerical placards pinned to the sheets covering the corpse on each one.

“It's D-2,” I whispered, and Ralph nodded, walked over to the D-2 stretcher, and pulled the sheet back right away. What we saw there was the face and upper body of a very young woman, her mouth a grimace, her breasts round and hard.

“They must have marked them wrong,” said Ralph. He was looking at the breasts and he touched, for an instant, this young girl's upper arm. “She is not a crazy man,” he said.

Although the stretchers had been marked wrong, the good condition of this young girl gave me courage rather than taking my courage away. And since there were only five stretchers, I felt sure we'd be able to find the man by looking under each sheet in turn. He would have a wild look, the muscles of his face frozen at the moment he screamed through the Norfolk Hotel, scaring all the patrons in the bar.

Ralph and I went to the next table and he pulled the sheet back on number five, an old man of about my father's age. This man didn't look human. His face seemed made of burlap as thick as one of our coffee bags, and his chest was so caved in that its encompassing skin appeared to rest on his spine. Seeing the young woman had been easier, and after covering this old man up again we paused. There were three more bodies. “Let's try number four,” I said.

“This one really might be him,” Ralph said, and by that I understood that it was my turn to take the sheet away. The sheet was cold and as soon as I touched it the D-4 placard fell to the floor. Ralph was behind me when I pulled the sheet away, so I couldn't see his reaction, but I immediately knew that this was the man we sought. His hair wasn't long and he didn't have the slightest vestige of a mad look on his face, none of the disconnected wildness that life on the city streets always seemed to give, but this was our man just the same. His mouth was wide and his eyes were open. In his upper chest we could see three bloodless wounds, deep slits that looked like places for coins and did not bring bread knives to mind. Seeing him made me feel so bad. I could remember the stacks of letters in his room, the picture of his family, and the way I had taken his
panga
away.

“It's him,” I told Ralph. “His name was Kamau.”

Room D had been quiet, but as I spoke a compressor came on and a cold breath touched the backs of our necks, an icy wind from a grate above. I covered Kamau again, and picked up his placard from the floor, and pinned it carefully to the sheet over his chest. I couldn't remember whether I had told Ralph that I was sure Kamau was the one who had finally taken Jules's life away, sneaking back into his hospital room, and I don't even know whether I have written that the last time I saw Kamau, the time he stood in my living room with my husband's rifle over his shoulder and Mr Smith by his side, he had a strange hopeless look in his eyes, but that is what I remember now. While all those words had come from Mr Smith's mouth, Kamau's face had contained only sorrow and resignation, as if he were about to drown.

When we left room D there was still no one in the anteroom, but as we made our way through the mortuary doors and up the hall, passing all those labs again, we found Detective Mubia sitting on a bench. Like rags on a statue, his red suit conformed to his thinker's pose.