Nairobi Heat (11 page)

‘Don’t you ever just smoke in peace?’ I said, raising my hands up into the air.

‘I am a philosopher by nature, you know,’ O replied. ‘So, tell me.’

‘Look, O, I can’t say I know. How does it feel? When I am by myself I don’t feel black. I mean, how do you define yourself? What would you say you are?’

‘A Luo,’ O answered.

‘So, are you a Luo when you are by yourself or only when you are with non-Luos?’ I asked him.

‘But there are things that I do when I am by myself that only a Luo would do,’ he replied.

‘But do you wake up, look at yourself in the mirror, and say to yourself that the Luo looks tired this morning? I mean, I don’t go to bed black or wake up black. I don’t look at myself in the mirror and say I am black. Black is what white folk see. You’d better ask them.’

‘What do you think they would say?’ O asked, unwilling to give up his line of questioning.

‘How the fuck am I supposed to know, do I look white to you?’

‘Shit, man, take it easy, man. I just wanted to know,’ he said defensively. ‘Allow me, kind sir, to ask you another one.’

‘Go ahead, but it had better not be a question I can’t answer.’

‘How do you feel being here? I mean, here in Kenya … as a black man from America?’

Now that was a tough question.

‘Look, man, I like to keep it simple,’ I began. ‘I like you, but I like your wife better. I like the food and the beer, but I detest Mathare and whatever it is that keeps people there. I hate your city, with its skyscrapers that are trying to reach the white man’s kingdom, and I sure as hell hate your justice system. How do I feel? I want to find my killer and bring him to justice … that’s all.’

O kept quiet for a while. ‘I like your answer,’ he finally said and broke into laughter. ‘Very, very philosophical.’

After brunch, O and I got ready to hit the town. Hoping not to attract attention, O was wearing a suit jacket, a black polo neck, brown pants and brown dress shoes. In the US he might have stood out, but in Nairobi he blended in with the middle class seamlessly. I, on the other hand, was dressed in a black suit and a white T-shirt, and though I was sure I would still stand out I didn’t feel as excessively American as I had a few days earlier. Perhaps, I thought, it had all been in my
head.

As we walked towards the Land Rover O threw the keys to me. ‘You drive,’ he said. ‘I think this time I am too high, for real.’

In the US everyone complains about the traffic in New York, but in Nairobi it’s anarchy. There was only one thing to do and that was to use the siren. With it blaring O directed me around traffic circles and down one-way streets until we made it to the city centre.

Once there we had a decision to make. Did we look for the girl in high-, middle-, or low-class joints? Judging from her photograph and what we knew about Samuel Alexander, a well-to-do expatriate, we figured they either patronised really high-class places or the kind of dives that would have given them an ‘authentic’ African experience. There was nothing in-between about the woman – either Samuel Alexander had found her as she was or he had picked her up in the gutter somewhere and cleaned her up. We decided to start with the hole in the walls – we could scare people into talking more easily there than in the upper-class joints.

We took a matatu to the bottom end of River Road – from here we would work our way upwards. ‘River Road is a dangerous part of town. This was where the famous Mr Henderson was gunned down,’ O narrated as we climbed out of the matatu.

O told me that Henderson had been a British colonial officer who had become head of the CID after independence. He was so mean that even the most hardened criminals feared him. A giant of a man, he was the only cop who could walk alone in River Road and no one would as much as look him in
the eye. Well, what had worked well in colonial times didn’t work so well after twenty years of independence. ‘By then even the criminals were nationalists,’ O said with a laugh. ‘They wanted to be hunted down by black cops.’

So, a notorious bank robber by the name of Koitalel followed Henderson to River Road, called him by his name, so that he turned around, and shot him twice in the chest with a shotgun. ‘For good measure,’ O said.

But Henderson didn’t die right away, so Koitalel went over and introduced himself, and Henderson, ever the soldier, begged that he finish him off quick. Koitalel obliged, using Henderson’s colonial-era pistol. Everyone in River Road saw it happen, but no one dared to call the police, giving Koitalel plenty of time to make his escape. By the time the police were informed of what had happened Koitalel was nowhere to be found, and somehow, despite a protracted manhunt, he managed to slip through the net. Nobody knows what became of him, though some say he went for plastic surgery and became a politician – a rumour that O told me had at one time been banned. ‘My theory is that he was one of those thugs disciplined enough to stop after he had made enough,’ O said. ‘He’s probably somewhere in Uganda even as we speak.’

‘You sound like you admired the fucker,’ I said when he was done.

‘I hated Henderson. But I would have given anything to be the one to hunt Koitalel down. Those were the days when cops and thugs made each other heroes. Now it’s mostly just idiots: car thieves and rapists,’ he answered. ‘But your Joshua, he might turn out to be one of the great ones, better even than your Random Killer.’

We were now at Government Road and there was just one bar left. Someone had parked a new bright green BMW outside, but the joint itself was a dingy little place with Camel Lights posters plastered all over the place and a pool table without any felt. We sat at the counter and waited for the bartender to come over. When he finally acknowledged us O showed him the photograph, and he pointed to the corner of the counter. ‘Talk to the bossman, I have not been here a very long time,’ he said in heavily accented English.

By then my eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to make out the massive man sitting at the corner of the bar. Dressed in a green suit, he was reading the paper and sipping occasionally at a glass of water. That explains the green BMW outside, I thought to myself. He obviously liked to match his car.

Leaving O at the counter I walked over to the man, greeted him and showed him the photograph. He looked at it, then at me and finally went back to reading his paper.

‘Ever seen her around?’ I asked him.

‘What do you think?’ he growled.

‘Just trying to find her,’ I explained, trying to keep my cool.

‘No, never seen her,’ he answered.

I thanked him and started walking away. ‘Hey, listen … Don’t be hasty. Information here is not free,’ he called out after me.

‘How much?’ I asked, reaching for my wallet and taking out two thousand Kenyan shillings.

He pulled back as if I was trying to hand him a dirty rag. ‘American dollars! You are a rich
mzungu
, a rich man like
you …’

I didn’t let him finish the sentence – I was very tired of the
mzungu
shit, it was liked being called a nigger over and over again, and the word nigger is always a fighting word. I hit him hard in the face and followed with a left jab to his throat. Then I picked up his glass of water and smashed it over his head, pushing him off his stool, which I picked up and broke over his back. With big fat men, I’ve learned my lesson: don’t fight fair and always draw first blood, it takes the fight out of them. Well, sometimes, because instead of going down and staying down this man roared in anger, and getting to his feet he lifted me up into the air and slammed me against the wall. He pulled back for a body slam, but I sidestepped and punched him twice in the stomach, then as he reached out to get a hold of me, I poked him hard in the eyes. Then, as he bellowed in pain, I hit him with a hard right cross, the blow that finally put him down.

I looked over at O. He was looking at the bartender with a slight smile on his face, but the bartender had obviously decided that his job description didn’t include leaping to his boss’s defence. O swivelled around on his bar stool, turning his attention to the fat man and me. I pointed to the two thousand shillings on the floor, and O slid off his bar stool and picked them up. Then, pulling himself back to his feet, he put the money down on the counter. ‘Take this and get lost,’ he said to the bartender.

The bartender looked confused.

‘How much do you make in a month?’ O asked, pressing the bloody notes into the man’s hands.

‘About seven thousand,’ the bartender answered.

‘Well then, go on, open the till and tell me how much is there,’ O said lazily.

The bartender jerked it open and counted out about three thousand shillings in notes.

‘That makes five thousand. Fat man, what have you got in your wallet?’ O asked him.

He had six thousand, which O also handed over to the bartender.

‘And take some liquor with you,’ O told him. ‘The expensive shit.’

The fat man groaned as the bartender retrieved a bottle of Jameson and one of Chivas Regal from the display case above the bar.

When the bartender finally left, we locked the door behind him and helped the fat man to his feet and onto one of the bar stools. Then O went behind the counter, found a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and served each of us a shot.

‘We need to talk,’ he said, placing the bottle on the counter. ‘Drink that.’

The fat man downed the shot and O poured him another.

‘The girl in the photo …’ the fat man started to say.

‘No, no, no, wait, don’t you have something to say to my friend first?’

‘I am sorry.’

‘Sorry for what?’ O asked him.

‘Sorry for calling you a white man,’ the fat man said, looking down into his glass of whiskey.

‘Very well, continue …’ O said.

‘The girl in the photo, yes, I know her. She used to work here … Fucking ungrateful refugees. She was beautiful,
brought in a lot of customers.’ He picked a bar rag off the counter and tried to clean some of his blood off his suit. ‘Then, one day, this white man came in. I don’t know what they talked about, but she just took off her apron and left with him. Next thing I know she is a big thing over at Club 680.’

‘What is her name?’ I asked.

‘We called her Madeline. Can’t say if it was real or not. With refugees, you never know.’

‘Have you ever seen this man?’ I showed him Joshua’s photograph.

He looked at it for a while. ‘Everyone knows Joshua, but that was years ago. A hero, but we did not know it then, nobody knew until much later. He was quiet, only spoke to Madeline …’

‘Were they fucking?’

‘I don’t know. She was a strange girl …’

The connections, very hazy still, were slowly coming to the surface. Samuel had placed Joshua in Kenya for me, but he had told us that their meetings had been purely business related. Now I had placed both Samuel and Joshua here, in this bar, and I had a lead on someone who might have known him well – someone who certainly knew Samuel Alexander well. I still had no idea who the white girl was. To find that out, I first had to find out who Joshua really was, and to do that I had to find Madeline and learn more about Samuel.

‘Is that you?’ O suddenly asked in disbelief. He was pointing at a photograph of a boxer hitting a punching bag, youth and muscles still glowing down at us from up on the wall.

‘I used to be a boxer,’ the fat man said out of nowhere,
without looking up from his whiskey. ‘I used to be really good.’

‘Yes, yes, I remember you now,’ O said with genuine excitement, ‘you knocked out Peter “Dynamite” Odhiambo. What the hell happened to you?’

‘Nyama choma
and beer,’ the fat man replied as if he was reminiscing with old friends. ‘Back then I could have taken both of you … easy.’

‘Even the best lose eventually,’ I offered, suddenly feeling sorry for him – for what we had done to him in such a short time, for breaking him so easily. ‘Besides, I did not fight fair.’

‘Yeah, is not that the truth,’ the fat man said. ‘Tomorrow it might be you.’ He laughed before grimacing in pain.

Our conversation over, we left him there – bleeding into his counter, drinking straight from the bottle – and made our way to Club 680.

There was no mistaking Madeline. She was up on a small stage, behind her a dreadlocked guitarist. People were clapping wildly. She waved them quiet as we took our seats at the bar, then turned so as to face the back of the stage. ‘Enough with the political shit,’ she whispered into the microphone.