Ahmed's Revenge (25 page)

“Ouch! Christ!” said Michael, and John shouted with him, jumping aside.

Mr Smith tried to pretend that he hadn't ordered the burning; he yelled at the poacher and the poacher threw the cigarette away, and in a second Michael's arms were tied again and the poacher made John jump down. Mr Smith held page six of Jules's letter up in front of John's face. “Read this,” he said. “Read it so the lady can refresh her memory and tell me what it means.”

John rubbed his wrists some more. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and cleared his throat. We all understood he didn't want to, but in the end there was nothing for him to do but to read the pitiful poem.

“Is he talking about your bedroom?” Mr Smith quietly asked. “Is he talking about passion here? Must I tear your house apart to find what I want?”

If I said yes it would buy us a world of time, but it would also destroy my house, and when he found nothing he would be furious. And since the two poachers on the lorry, at least, wanted to cause us pain, keeping Mr smith engaged was the only hope we had.

“I haven't given it much thought,” I told him, “but no, Julius would never hide anything in the house. He was an outside man.”

“Where, then?” asked Mr Smith.

I told John to read the poem again while I put on a thinker's pose, as if I were finally paying close enough attention to worry things out. I stood there, chin fisted, my other arm laid across my middle, and said, “Maybe he means the New Stanley Hotel. We used to stay there once in a while. When we were feeling romantic and wanted to get away from the farm. My husband loved the New Stanley Hotel—maybe he means he has left your property there.”

But this time I went too far and Mr Smith barked, “I don't care about your mischief, I want my property back! Tell me where it is and stop the rest! I'm not one you should trifle with, Mrs Nora Grant, this is not the good old days. My patience is as thin as that fool detective's ridiculous coat.”

John was so frightened by Mr Smith's raised voice that he actually began to read the poem again.

“No need for that,” I said. “I know it by heart.”

“Do you understand it or do you not?” said Mr Smith. “I am asking for the final time.”

“I do not,” I said. “I realise that my husband thought he was making it easy for me and difficult for everyone else, but I'm notoriously thick where puzzles are concerned. You can ask anyone.”

If we were playing poker I wouldn't last a minute with a strategy of this kind, but I didn't know what other strategy to use. I was lost, and Mr Smith smiled down at me, calling my bluff immediately.

“Very well,” he said. He looked at his poachers and this time he spoke in Swahili. “Burn the house,” he told them. “We will find my property in the rubble.”

“Wait,” I said. “There's nothing you want inside.”

Mr Smith held up a hand, stopping the poachers, who'd already started to walk away. “If you know that's so, then you know it from your husband's poem. And if you know where my property is not, then you must know where it is, too. That is deductive reasoning. Didn't we both learn that in school?”

“It's outside,” I said. “As I have told you, I know it because my husband was an outside man, but I know it also because of the poem's last line, the one about the sharp claws of others. Once when we were sleeping out here we drew the interest of some lions and had a bit of a close call. He must have buried your property, as you call it, at the spot where that event occurred.”

“Good,” said Mr Smith. “Show me the place. Find it for me and I'll be on my way.”

“But you see, my husband was the romantic in the family, not me. It was in his nature to remember such things but it isn't in mine. That's the truth. I do know that it was around here somewhere, but I don't know the exact spot. We slept outside often, but so far as I can recall, we never settled down twice in the same place.”

Three of those still remaining in the lorry, Ralph and Dorothea and Michael, seemed to be trying to affect disinterested looks, as if other business was occupying their minds, but Detective Mubia, over the past few minutes, had been taking up a progressively more aggressive pose, getting our attention by staring down at Mr Smith and growling, making a gurgling sound deep in his throat. When Mr Smith noticed it he spoke in Kikuyu again, and in a split second all four of them were pushed out of the lorry, left to land on their feet or not, but without the use of their hands.

“If what you say is true, you will give us the general area and we will look everywhere,” said Mr Smith, ignoring the falling bodies and turning back to me. “We will all take shovels and search for places where the ground is no longer hard.”

Michael and Detective Mubia came down off the lorry pretty well, feet-first, and rolled away, but because Ralph and Dorothea were still tied together they had no way of turning in the air and therefore landed hard. It wasn't a great distance from the lorry bed to the ground, but Dorothea's right side took the brunt of the fall. She shouted and then turned pale. Ralph was wiggling around to try to get his weight off her.

John and I both ran over to them. “Give me a knife,” I yelled. “Quickly! Can't you see she is injured?”

I couldn't see Dorothea's face, but she was so quiet now that I thought she might have passed out.

Mr Smith only stared at us, but when I stood again, he finally did take a knife from his pocket, flipping it my way. “I don't need this,” he said. “Cut them all loose.”

The ropes were easiest to reach by Ralph's arm, and since the knife was sharp I got the job done in a second or two, but Dorothea didn't move, even when we turned her onto her back.

“Get some water,” said John. “Dorothea's pain threshold is low.”

“I'm going into the house,” I told Mr Smith. “We need to bring this lady around right now.”

When Mr Smith nodded I left quickly, got to the house without a guard, and rummaged around in my kitchen. I put cold water in a bottle and took ice from the freezer compartment of my fridge. I got a washcloth from the bathroom, and a bottle of aspirin from above the sink. Before I went back outside I tried to think what weapon I might find, but in the end I only grabbed our first-aid kit and ran. Dorothea was sitting up when I got there. Michael was beside her and John was at her back.

“Her bones are brittle,” he told us. “That arm's been broken before.”

Maybe that was true, but when I knelt by Dorothea and looked at her arm, it seemed to form a straight-enough line, and there wasn't much swelling. I gave her water and made her take four or five aspirin tablets, and then I found an elastic bandage in the first-aid kit and wrapped the arm, tying it off at her elbow.

“Can you think straight, Dorothea?” I asked. “Do you understand what's going on?”

Mr Smith had surprised me by letting me go into the house alone, surprised me more by waiting patiently since my return, but now he seemed to have had enough. When he spoke to his men in Kikuyu again, three of them pulled Detective Mubia and Ralph and Michael away from Dorothea and John and me, pushing them up toward the orchard.

“Enough of this playing, Mrs Grant,” Mr. Smith said. “I want you to help me right now.” Dorothea was standing by then, so John and I supported her as we followed the others.

Until that moment everything I'd thought and everything I'd said, however muddled, had been with the intention of doing what Jules had asked me to do in his letter, namely, to seek a modicum of revenge, to avoid giving the property back. But by the time we reached the edge of the orchard I had pretty much decided to resign the fight. Someone else would surely be injured if I didn't; someone might even be killed. I would simply have to honour my husband's memory later, and in some other way. Michael, however, turned and spoke before I could, surprising us all.

“This is a graveyard,” he told Mr Smith. “It's a cemetery. If you dig here you'll find nothing but human bones.”

He spoke in a strong, loud, English voice, evoking what he assumed to be a universal respect for the dead, and Mr Smith blinked.

“There are no markers here,” he hissed. “British graveyards have markers. They have headstones and fences surrounding the graves.”

Michael resolutely pointed at the stump where the lion's heart had sat the night before. There wasn't a trace of it now, no hint of the leaves on which it had rested, not even a bloodstain on the dried-out wood, but Michael forged ahead, keeping his finger pointed out and his voice strong.

“What do you call that?” he asked. It was such a wild and wayward question, such a hopeless ploy, that it caused Mr Smith to pause again. In a minute, though, he stopped looking to any of us for guidance and ordered Michael's hands retied.

“Dig where the ground is soft,” he quietly told his men.

Since our farm was big, my first mistake had been letting Mr Smith come in this direction at all. I could have taken him out into the coffee or past the pond in the direction of the Mara plains or down toward the main Narok-Nakuru road. As it was, however, I had told a near truth, and now his horrid men were strewn across the orchard, poking the ground. If they got near Jules's grave, if they started digging him up again, I'd have to stop them, wouldn't I? Isn't that what Jules would have me do, stop the interruption of his eternal sleep at the price of his revenge?

“There is soft dirt over here,” said Michael. He had walked away from Jules's grave and was standing near the site of our campfire, pushing at the earth with his heel, hands behind his back.

Michael's gesture was brave, and he had inadvertently moved close to the spot that Jules had mentioned in his poem. All I had to do was nod, all I had to tell them was to dig right there and it would all be over. But just then Detective Mubia took over Michael's job. He twisted free from the poachers who held him, and tried to run away. Mr Smith's men caught him in a minute, and when they brought him back Mr Smith got mad. It seemed to me that Michael had done far more to anger him, but when Detective Mubia defied him, Mr Smith ordered one of his men to light Jules's always-ready fire.

“I've had enough of you,” he hissed. “You followed me everywhere, you are my father's spy. Let me hear you say something truthful, let me hear you speak like a man. I'm going to stop asking this woman and find out if you know where my property lies.”

Mr Smith had his men push the rest of us down on the ground and told two of them to walk Detective Mubia closer to the growing fire. “Don't you sometimes use this place for roasting pigs and goats?” he asked me. “Don't you sometimes cook your meals outside?”

Things were getting more serious and the detective made them worse by nearly freeing himself one more time. “Babylon is fallen!” he shouted. “Let its ruler be gone!” Mr Smith's men had been pushing him back, but his words made them loosen their grips. The detective was quick on his feet and for the moment, though one of the poachers had hold of his jacket, he wasn't getting very much closer to the fire.

“Why don't you get a stake?” shouted Michael. “Why don't you get a big boiling pot like in all the old African cartoons?”

Detective Mubia was still struggling, but Michael's question was wild enough to make Mr Smith look up, giving me one last chance to intervene.

“Mr Smith, this is a question between Kenyans,” I said. “We shouldn't air our grievances in public, in front of strangers from abroad. Can't we settle this alone?”

That stopped him. His men had just caught Detective Mubia firmly again, but he immediately ordered them to stop marching him toward the fire.

“You think of yourself as Kenyan?” he asked, his voice quiet and containing true surprise. “Are you telling me that we are Kenyans, you and I, and should settle this matter alone?”

Because I had spoken unambiguously I nearly made another flippant remark, but Mr Smith was so incredulous that I stopped myself. Miro had told me there was no sarcasm in the man, that the things he said had no underside. But as I sat there, only nodding, Mr Smith seemed to grow demented before my eyes. He puffed hot breath into the morning and cursed and ran his fingers through his short and dusty hair.

“How dare you tell me that? You are a hybrid, a mongrel combination that has nothing to do with Kenya!” He was shouting now. “You are the daughter of a disgusting English bully, of a mother like these tourists I have scattered around. You are not Kenyan! Never say that again! You are a grotes-querie, not Kenyan at all!”

Mr Smith had pretty calmly put up with all the nonsense of the past half hour, but now he was wild, his mouth trembling and his hands slicing the air. He came over and stood above me, his right fist clenched and his voice breaking in a way that suddenly made me remember playing with him all those years ago. I could see us in front of his father's house, a white child and a black one, eyeing each other and not playing well.

Though he had told them not to, Mr Smith's men held Detective Mubia directly in front of the raging fire. The hot air was licking us all, so I had to be extremely careful now.

“Please let him go,” I said quietly. “What you are doing is barbaric.”

But once again my words were a bad miscalculation. Mr Smith was still so aghast at my claiming to be Kenyan that his face had taken on an ugly purple hue, and when I spoke this time, he shrieked at me, all restraint gone.

“Barbaric! You are calling me barbaric? I am not barbaric, you are barbaric! Barbaric is your very family name!”

His screaming was blood in the water, exciting his sharklike men. One of them pulled a
panga
from his belt and another picked up a stone. I believed they would kill us, and all of my efforts, everything I'd chosen to do or say, seemed to bring them closer to it. Miro had been right again. I thought I had a foot in both worlds, but I didn't have a foot anywhere.