Ahmed's Revenge (8 page)

“Mr Minister of Wildlife, Retired,” the voice said. “We have been steadfast, we have kept our part of the bargain without fail. Now you must keep yours.”

My poor father had taken his fingers from his ears and was looking through the light as if his time had come.

“What do you want?” he asked weakly. “Who is speaking to me? Who is there?” Then I did throw the switch, so that darkness and silence came back to us.

“Listen, Daddy,” I whispered, “I think it's a recording. I think that voice is on a tape along with the Mozart.”

I was pretty sure I was right, since we didn't have a microphone and since the voice had been amplified at the same level as the turned-down music. Also, Jules often used to complain that his speakers no longer had much clarity, and I could hear Jules's complaint in the reproduced quality of the sound.

“You wait here,” I said. “I'll go see.”

There was a bench behind the dormitory. I thought I knew that if anyone was intent on injuring us they would have done so when we arrived, but nonetheless I took a moment to pull the bench into a nearby thicket and place my father on it there. In the dark he was impossible to see. He stayed quiet when I told him to, and he didn't try to get up and follow me when I walked away.

Because our generator had failed many times before, I knew better than anyone how to approach our house in the dark. The house had many windows but only two doors, and if there were people inside, I was sure they'd be watching the doors. I was fit from all those years of working hard, so I chose an obscure window, one that let me fall silently to the floor of our bedroom cupboard. Once inside I couldn't see at all, but I could tell that things had been disrupted there too. I opened the door leading to our bedroom and quietly entered. Everything was completely black. Sometimes the evening sky lit this room pretty well, through the bigger window that was now on my left, but in the hours just after sunset, a time when Jules and I often went to bed, the room was usually dark. I opened the door to the main part of the house as quietly as I could, and then I waited a full minute, counting the actual seconds, before walking into the hall.

I could see at a glance that I wasn't alone. A man stood in the pale moonlight that pushed itself through the open front door. He was so intently watching the landscape before him that he hadn't heard me at all. I knew where Jules kept his guns, but everything was turned over in the living room too, and, frankly, I had been so sure that I'd find the house empty, so sure that the voice we'd heard had been a recorded one, that I hadn't thought what I would do if the opposite turned out to be true.

I could see our kitchen and the hallway leading to our office and the small guest bedroom that we had. I could also see a soapstone vase turned over on the coffee table between the man and me. If you know soapstone, then you know that though it's heavy, it's more fragile than glass, and I was surprised that this one hadn't broken when it fell over. It was a tall vase, meant for a single flower or two, and was shaped like a policeman's billy club. I picked it up, silently inching toward the man.

Clouds had reduced the moonlight by the time I got to him, but there was still enough of it, thank God, to save me from making a big mistake. The intruder was Detective Mubia. I recognized his posture and the altered hue of his suit even as I raised my weapon, but it took me a moment to change the course of the soapstone vase so that it came rushing past his ear rather than crashing down on the top of his head.

“Holy Mother in heaven! Jesus save me now!” said the detective. He had his police revolver in his hand but he used it only to shield himself, its barrel pointing up at the ceiling. Though I had clearly frightened him, he spoke softly and was quickly calm again. “I didn't hear you come,” he said.

“Who did this?” I asked him. “Who wrecked my house?”

The detective pointed the tip of his pistol at Jules's tape recorder, out on the porch and facing the grounds. “It is a voice I think I know,” he said. “If we could listen to it one more time perhaps I could be sure.”

When I told him where I'd left my dad, the detective volunteered to bring him inside. He stepped off the front porch in an unstealthy way and walked toward the workers' dormitory. His pace was unhurried but I kept my eyes on him until he'd walked into the darkness behind the building. And just as I turned to survey the damage again, he threw the generator switch and the lights came back on. I went around quickly turning most of them off, to make me less visible and to lower the generator's load, and while I was doing so the detective returned alone.

“Would your father have walked away?” he asked. “Does he know the area well? Is there someplace else he would have gone?”

The detective tried to speak lightly, but he wasn't a naturally casual man. He had lifted me out of the dust and helped to give me strength with his words before, but he couldn't do it a second time, so instead he brought my husband's stereo speakers back inside the living room and rewound the tape. When he turned it on again, this is what we heard: “Mr Minister of Wildlife, Retired. We have been steadfast, we have kept our part of the bargain without fail. Now you must keep yours. We demand that you meet with us privately in order to give us the details of your plan.”

That was all, and there wasn't any Mozart at the end. I got the feeling that the intruders had wanted to say more on the tape, that they'd intended more, but that we had interrupted them by our arrival at the farm. I also knew what I had done. Though I hadn't even heard the demand they had made, I had immediately acquiesced to it, putting my father on that bench the way I had. But for a time I could barely register the fact that he was gone.

“Do you have firearms in the house?” Detective Mubia asked. “Are your husband's rifles still here?”

I was sure they would not be, but when I went into our office to look I discovered that the office was intact, that nothing in there had been turned over or moved. I'd been right, then, in my assumption—we had arrived when these men were in the middle of their search. Jules's second hunting rifle was on the wall, and it was loaded. The first rifle, the one Kamau had shot Jules with, was not in the office, and I couldn't remember what had happened to it on the night of the attack. In the desk drawer I found our .380 automatic pistol, plus an eight-shot clip and a box of bullets. Jules's filing cabinet was locked against the wall and his photographs hung above it in an un-crooked way.

I called the detective, asking him to come in and see for himself, and when he didn't respond, I took the automatic pistol from its drawer and the rifle down from its place on the wall. I unloaded the rifle and pushed it down under Jules's desk, putting its cartridges in my pocket. After that I shoved the pistol clip home.

I was about to call again, but the image of myself, as vulnerable in our office as my poor father had been on that bench outside, made me listen and wait awhile. When I finally stepped into the hall again, however, the .380 ready, I could see the police detective right away. He was sitting on our couch, his own revolver still in his hand. He seemed to be staring out the front door.

“Detective?” I whispered.

He didn't look toward me as I came down the hall, but pretty soon he said, “My specialty is city crime, city crime is what I know, and it is my great misfortune that I also know the voice on your tape recorder too well. I do not agree that a city crime and a country crime should be connected in this way. A city policeman should never allow circumstances to bring him out of town. It would be best for a city policeman if he were to leave country crime alone.”

He was quite oddly miserable, sorry instead of glad that he recognized the voice. And something about his sorrow kept me from asking him right away who the voice belonged to. It also seemed to be keeping me from worrying about my father. When I told him that our office was untouched, however, he immediately revived, just as I had on the ground outside.

“So number one is that we interrupted these heinous men in their crime and number two is we seem to have given them your father without even knowing that is what they desired.”

“Yes,” I said, “and number three is they've taken my father away. Do you think they'll hurt him? You don't, do you? He is too old for this. He's just arrived from England and he's too tired.”

The detective nodded, but instead of answering my question he said, “Number four is as follows: Your enemy is clever and he knows that you are vulnerable because sooner or later you must dig your husband's grave.”

That didn't seem like number four to me, and I said so. “I think that if he had wanted to harm us he could have done it earlier, when we arrived. He only wants my father, who's involved in everything somehow. He tried to say as much earlier, he tried to tell me about it at the church, but I wouldn't listen.”

The detective looked at me with an expression on his face that I couldn't read, but finally he asked, “What bad business could your father have had with such a dangerous man? What bad business did this man previously have with your husband, Julius Grant?”

“What man?” I asked, exasperated. “What do you know about it? Please, tell me what you think is going on?”

While I waited for the detective's response I wondered again whether or not I should tell him what I knew. Should I say I'd seen Jules in the house on Loita Street that night? So far as I could tell, Detective Mubia hadn't yet connected any of this with poaching, and I myself hadn't in the slightest degree yet come to terms with the new probability that my father was involved. But should I tell him everything, or should I not? It seemed that rather than answering my questions, he was looking at me strangely, as if waiting for me to decide.

“It is late and we are tired,” he finally said. “If we search for your father now we will not find him, and if we dig your husband's grave we will be filthy and exhausted by the time we are done.”

He was once again pragmatic and calm. No matter what danger my father was in, there was nothing I could do about it now, he was telling me, and I surprised myself again by admitting that it was true. I told him I would set my alarm for five, giving us time enough to dig Jules's grave with the morning light, time enough to wash ourselves before Dr Zir and the helicopter arrived.

I didn't ask again about the man whose voice he knew and Detective Mubia didn't offer to tell me his name. He only nodded one more time and said, “The unfortunate Minister of Wildlife, Retired.”

After that, though the house was still turned over, I found towels for the detective and then went into the bedroom I had always shared with Jules, to latch the window I'd come through and to lie down. And in a little while, when I thought I heard the detective go into the bathroom and then come out again, I opened my door and saw him sitting on our front porch in the rocking chair that Jules had always loved. The front porch light was off, but the detective had found the switch and reilluminated our pond. He was rocking softly, his pistol out of sight, his eyes on a small giraffe that was standing at the water's far edge. Across the pond from the giraffe I could see the skin and bones of that elephant calf, and beside it, to the left-hand side, I could see the cool bright eyes of something else, some other animal hiding there. The entire picture, the living animals and the dead one and the expanse of land leading from them to the detective in our rocking chair, made me imagine my husband asleep on the ground, a lion gazing down at him with calm and curious eyes.

Why was I so horrible about my father, who was too old to stay out all night long and who had been showing signs of increased senility ever since his arrival the day before? Why was I so unfeeling, so unkind? Detective Mubia had told me that looking for my father in the dark would be futile, but it wasn't like me to take my way of thinking from another person, from a recently met and out-of-place man.

As I lay on my bed I at first decided that I had acted that way because I had not yet found the grief and pain that had wanted to visit me when Jules died, that maybe some part of me hadn't been satisfied with my performance outside on the ground, and I was making worry over my father wait in line. I loved my husband, and I had always believed I loved my father too, but nesting with the misery I was keeping at bay were two queer and unexpected birds. The first one I've mentioned before: At Jules's death something in me began looking to the future with a sense of renewed possibility, a lightness in my broken heart that was brutalizing me nearly as much as losing Jules was. The second queer bird was this: With my father's disappearance, though his fate was far less sealed than Jules's, I was filled with such unfocused malaise that in my heart of hearts I didn't seem to care what happened to him at all.

I'd switched on my bedside lamp and was playing with my wristwatch while thinking about my dad. There had been a small mystery with my watch over the last three weeks or so. It would run fine all day but would stop every night at twenty minutes to twelve. Since Jules and I were always asleep by then, we never actually saw it stop, but we'd check it in the morning. The watch never stopped at twenty minutes to noon, it would only stop at night.

I was fingering the watch and asking myself why it stopped, and also what my father could have done to bring out such ambivalence in a daughter who'd never been ambivalent before, when suddenly answers to both questions came clear. My watch was stopping because its battery was low. It had enough power to move the hands around, but every twenty-four hours it had to turn the date as well, and it didn't have enough power for that. And when I understood the watch,
because
I understood the watch, I thought I understood my attitude toward my father too. During all of my life, when things were going fine, I had a full battery, enough power in me to love my father while never thinking critically about him at all. But as soon as I heard the voice on that tape, as soon as things went wrong, I couldn't do it anymore. I had lost my power, my resources were just too low.