Twisted Times: Son of Man (Twisted Times Trilogy Book 1) (8 page)

His friends saw him through when Grace left. He almost lost hope, but in the middle of nowhere he saw how friends could be of help. They gave him his life back.

For the umpteenth time Job remembered the events of that fateful day with resentment. It was his friends who introduced Grace to him. He fell in love, forever he said, with her. He did everything to have Grace, and it was barely three months after their meeting when they tied the knot. It was the wedding of the year – and the
Bridal Wedding Show
of the decade.

The bliss of marriage faded even before the honeymoon ended. He had businesses to do. She too had her businesses. They were always travelling, no time to start a family. He to the US, South Africa, the Middle East, and all other countries where his businesses took him to; her to Dubai, Pakistan, China, and all places that guaranteed her perpetual gallivanting.

It was in one of those days when they bumped in to each other at the Amsterdam airport – unexpected yet pleasant surprise. He was glad to see her. He never made it to even shaking her hand, though. He wanted to hug her, give her the kiss of the decade when another man occupied the space by her side. The events of that day never left him – the hurt, the betrayal, the disappointment.

More was waiting for him when he got back home. He had no employees, and no business premises. All had been reduced to cinders – courtesy of Grace as he came to know later. It was Edna who told him what Grace exactly did with her Nigerian lover –
Oga
had used juju on Grace. Though Edna stood by Job those dismal days, he never trusted women again.

From the blue, Samson Ndolo from Kitui promised to raise him up to walk on the stormy sea. The two forged a business relationship, and became inseparable friends. Job got his life back, but trod more carefully. Within three years he was far much ahead from a single wholesale and retail trader. Sam saw to it, talked to his friends. Job always did what Sam and his friends told him to do, what they advised him to do. He never questioned them, nor stood one single time to prove a point; he trusted only them and no one else. His was a story of from grace to grass to grace. He owned several chain stores and supermarkets, Naiville Holdings.

Events of the previous month at the airport flashbulbed on Job’s mind mixed with the grotesque images of Grace – the hurt, the betrayal, the disappointment. He couldn’t help thinking that somebody close to him was behind the mess he was in.

Somebody was setting him up. Somebody wanted him down.

The air around was full of people’s whispers promulgated by the press. The press knew of the shipment that Sam had told him about. His friends could, and would, not allow the press to publish their conjecture, and they could not afford an investigation. They needed a diversion. Job ran the scenario in his mind and saw the whole plan. At the moment the news were full of him and Edna. A businessman and his secretary arrested at the airport and detained for drug trafficking.

But Job had crucial information that could sell like hot cake, and set him free – he knew what was happening at the heart of drug trafficking, knew the elusive, ghostly drug lords; the origin and point of sale, and how the narcotics left the country. All what he had to do was to seek a meeting with the new kid on the block of the Kenya Police, the celebrated incorruptible Kenya Police’s Anti-Narcotics Unit boss or NACADA. Then he would be enrolled on the WITSEC. Witness Security would then give him a new faceless life. Then the drug trafficking bubble would be burst.

After their arrest at JKIA, Job paid an insurmountable amount of money to bail Edna and him out while police carried out their investigation. He could not help thinking that he was being sacrificed.

Just then, the day’s dailies were delivered. It was on the front page of the two dailies;
Kenyans sentenced to death over drugs in China.

Drugs again.

He hated the mention of the word leave alone reading about it. Since the airport incidence he tried as much as possible not to know more about drugs, but out of curiosity he read the story.

Grace was amongst those to face the hangman’s noose in China.

Samson’s house was a well-cared-for mansion on a three-acre piece of land in Muthaiga, Nairobi. Exotic trees surrounded the compound rendering the place an obstructed view from passers-by. His house was the rendezvous for his secret business meetings. Only few people came to this house. He was very strict with his territoriality. He would instruct the guards that he had P.E. and he should not be disturbed. Private Evening meant that unless one had an official invitation could not enter his compound.

This day, in a small cosy room a group of seven men and a woman met. Everything discussed never left the sound-proof room – they had sworn each other to secrecy.

But from a reliable source something was leaked out of the room by someone amongst them that they had something to do with the recent death of the minister for finance, and something else that would shock the country was coming up at the coast. Somebody had spoken to the press…

The press already knew.

It was one of them, or someone closer. The question was, who?

That’s why they were meeting.

2003;

The fallen children of darkness, that’s what we were. Vampires. Ghosts only heard in the darkness of the night whistling by the unlucky few.

At night we would go to rob the dead of their last signs of love and affection from their families, their last possessions in their transience. It was almost a year now since I joined the Mavis gang and I was changed. The inborn human fear of the places we visited at night to steal coffins was long gone. To us it was a waste of resources for caskets costing hundreds of thousands going to waste in the polluted soils of this world.

We used to work in cahoots with the right people – coffin merchants, morgue attendants, and undertakers. They were very reliable, and after a successful business they always got a tip. All we had to do was trail the hearse, mourn the dead with the bereaved yet be conducting reconnaissance, earmark the exact place of the grave and leave with everyone else whether it was at a public cemetery or private home.

At night we would go back to pay a visit to the dead, retrieve the coffin and leave. However, even though our conscience had long died and decomposed, there were some things I saw being done I strongly repulsed – necrophilia.  I could not imagine how a dead woman, no matter how beautiful and sensuous she was even in death, could arouse me. But it happened. Some of the gang members had sex with the corpses, as though on dictate by evil powers to perform the macabre acts for initiation into the occult world of money. I wondered how he could tumescent, force himself inside the frozen pudenda and enjoy the act, even ejaculate inside
.

We would take the coffin to a certain coffin dealer in town who would pay well depending on the condition of the casket. He would then make necessary modifications and resell it. Unless we had more clients the same coffin could be sold and resold even seven times.

For a year now I had navigated through the murky waters of university life. My secret life gave me what I wanted – money, women, and booze.

Then came the time we expanded our business.

The guru and mastermind, Urbanas the philosopher and thinker, boss of the underground, always came up with business policies and strategies. We graduated to highway robbers, but it was just a cover. We were to be used as a ragtag militia of someone whom up to date is still unknown, a mystery. Urbanas never went into the details, he said the less we knew the better. We had to devise ways on how to execute our missions on the highways, without blowbacks. It was fine with us so long as we got paid.

The best thing was that Terry never knew about me, or so I believed.

Terry and I had a purely platonic relationship. As I was her brother she did not hesitate to warn me against activities profane, epicurean, unbridled hedonism and sex, drugs and whatever else she felt would endanger my life. I did not try to argue with her or show her in the slightest that I was a totally opposite side of the whole quirk of fate. I was
a mask, a beautiful mask.
I did not want to hurt her she who thought that I was living under her auspices.

I had an array of lovers Kate topping the list. At the university I had Trizzer, a third year student of accounts, and the other two were working whom we met only when they called for the regular oiling of joints.

A Strictly No-Strings-Attached sex relationship, the other was a lecturer. I wondered how many young men she had lured to her web and trapped with her charm. But this I must give her – she scooped the gold in bedmington.

The last of them was a banker working with a leading bank, an MBA,
married but available.
She never knew of the spinster lecturer, Trizzer and Kate. The good thing about this whole thing was that there was a stipend. But I had to break up with Trizzer. According to her she had observed me over a long period of time and found out that I could not keep away from the skirts, and my hands couldn’t get off titties.

“For God’s sake, AIDS is real!” She screamed. Well, she was better off without me, for her own sake. That was it – I did not argue. I let go of her
.
I never loved her anyway, not after knowing that she was a member of a secret sex cult that claimed to be at service to only the Nairobi’s rich men. They used to meet their clients at secret sex dens where everybody was anonymous, hawk her goods for not less than 50K a night, sometimes per hour. Rumour had it that they were dealing in order to have the porn off-the-planet orgasms that made them scream their heads off for as long as their clients wanted to toy with them. Hushed grapevine had it that it was a ritual sex group for some devil worship sect frequented mostly by politicians. What about AIDS is real to her? Furthermore, she thought that I had a soft spot for Terry.

From time to time Kate used to visit me at the university. She was studying CPA courses at the Kenya College of Accountancy and she lived nearby, Zimmerman, after convincing her father that it was cheaper, and convenient, to live near the college instead of commuting every day from home. We met occasionally and during one of those visits she told me that it were better that we never see each other again.

“Why Kate? You know I love you.”

“We just have to.”

“Tell me, Kate. What’s wrong?”

“I will tell you in the morning,” and with that she climbed on top of me and started making love to me. Was it love really? In the morning she did not say much only that she did not want to hurt me. She would never hurt me.

“But you’d if you just go without…”

“I feel that I need some time alone. I just need to think over what I want. We need time to breathe.”

“I see…” I said, but I did not see anything. I was planning on how to get myself another girlfriend already. I did not argue. Wasn’t I cheating on her after all?

As I saw her off later on she told me to check my mails. Of late I had not been the
infomania
who used to be. But that day I did check. Peggy Edison, my online lover, had sent me so many messages; the Los Angeles girl claimed that she loved me more than anything else in the world.

Kate’s message was an E-card from
www.lovingyou.com
. I read it with the images of the previous night coming back to me. It was a poem by one Terry Malcolm that had been dedicated to his girlfriend Florence Merab Muthoni. I was damn sure that Terry Malcolm was a Kenyan.

                           
Better Never Again

                            With mist-foggy eyes did she look at me
                            Lips quivering; eyes wide shut kissed me,
                            Perfunctory than never before kissed me.
                            Full of tension did she jerkily release me.
                            I had an anticipatory stare of "I love you"
                            Words she said always after such kissing.
                            Then she spoke what I was sure would be
                            Words I never thought were in her diction.
                            Still rooted to where we had stood kissing
                            Her bullet-voice hit me long after she's gone
                            Ricocheting and reverberating deep inside
                            That "better never again" see each other;

                            What a romantic goodbye?
 

Below the poem was what Kate wanted to tell me; words that hit me like the bullet that hit Terry Malcolm in the poem ricocheting and reverberating deep inside:
I aborted our baby.