Nairobi Heat (6 page)

‘You got us into this,’ a voice inside me was yelling as I looked around desperately, trying to figure out how we were going to get out of the mess I had managed to dump us in. Then it came to me. I suddenly realised that we could see the thugs a lot better than they could see us – we had our backs to the road, which meant that each time a car came past its headlights dazzled them. I looked across at O as the next car whizzed by, then I looked back at the men. O nodded that he understood and immediately I started yelling all sorts of motherfuckers at them. They were amused for a few seconds, and then they shouted something at O, training their guns on the girl and me. They couldn’t shoot O without killing their man, but they could kill us both easily. A second or so later another car came by and O shot the rapist.

Unless you’re well trained, the sound of a gunshot will make you freeze. A seasoned thug will react just like a cop and shoot back instinctively, but these young men were clearly not in that category. They froze for a half-second, maybe even less, shocked by the sound of the gun and the sight of their friend’s blood, illuminated by the headlights, spraying into the sky.

As the rapist lurched forward I turned and pushed Janet
down so that we both fell to the earth. I rolled once, and while still on the ground I aimed for a split second and fired, aimed again and fired again. Two of the young men flailed in the air before going down. O hadn’t missed either, and only their leader managed to get a couple of rounds off, his bullets kicking around us harmlessly, before O dropped him too.

The shooting over, we secured the scene. Three of the thugs had been fatally wounded but the leader was still alive. He started to say something, making pleading gestures, but O shot him twice – once in the heart and once in the head.

I walked a few feet from the bodies, bent over and threw up, my fear, shock and disgust adding to the thick stench of humanity in Mathare.

After the shootout O had called his station and within minutes a car arrived to pick us up. I had fully expected that we would be interrogated by the CID equivalent of internal affairs as soon as we got back to the station, then we would have to fill out mountains of paperwork before being sent to a review board and hauled to a psych consult, but I was wrong.

‘You are in good shape, the criminals are dead and the young woman is still alive. Be off, gentlemen,’ the Director of Investigations, a rather young-looking man, had said to us. It was almost as if we had never been to Mathare and left five young men dead.

After our debriefing we took Janet to Kenyatta National Hospital and stayed with her while they ran all sorts of tests. We had been expecting the worst, but when the doctor finally walked out of Janet’s room her face told a different story.
‘Thank God, the semen does not have traces of HIV. She will be okay,’ she said.

Relieved, we walked into Janet’s room to find her in tears. She was dressed in a hospital gown and O’s jacket – her school uniform, socks and shoes in the metal trashcan in the corner. O walked over to her and hugged her. We both knew that her ordeal was only really just beginning, but there was nothing more we could do for her. There were psychiatrists in Nairobi, but she would never be able to afford them. Her only choice was to return to school as if nothing had happened.

‘Where do you go to school?’ O asked her.

She went to Loreto Convent, Msongari.

‘Isn’t that a boarding school?’

‘I am on bursary,’ she answered.

It turned out that Janet’s mother had died in the Rwandan genocide, and she lived with her father in Mathare – she walked home every day as her scholarship didn’t cover her boarding fees.

O went out and returned moments later with a dress and slippers – ‘From one of the nurses,’ he explained. Then, together, we left the hospital and went to a nearby café. We were starving, and in spite of our various traumas we ate like we hadn’t seen a meal in a week. Afterwards, we took Janet to her school, where O explained what had happened to a stern-looking black sister in a habit and wimple. Janet had two more years to go and was a bright girl, she told us. She would see to it that she was allowed to board.

We drove back to Eastleigh Estate without much conversation. It was late in the evening, almost midnight by the time we arrived at O’s place and his wife had already gone
to bed. He walked me to my room and stood in the doorway as I plopped onto the bed, feeling weightless and empty.

‘We traded five lives for one,’ I said to him, thinking of my conversation with Joshua.

I didn’t mean anything by it. The words just came out of my mouth. What choice did we have? I could not pretend that I couldn’t hear Janet’s screams. We couldn’t have let the thugs kill us either. But still, it was five lives for one. Once I decided to help Janet, I had set the wheels in motion – people were going to die.

‘Better the bad guys than the good guys, I suppose,’ I added.

‘Ishmael, me and you, we are not good people. We have done some good and some bad … But Janet is a good person and she survived. That cannot be a bad thing,’ O said as he pulled the door shut.

A few minutes later I heard the shower start running, and, exhausted, I drifted off to sleep.

I was a bird – flying, dipping in and out of clouds – then suddenly I became a huge plane carrying white tourists, then I was rushing into a kitchen because something was burning only to find a canister of tear gas in the oven. I looked away, to see if I could find my wife, and when I looked back the canister became a birthday cake, and my wife and I were each cutting a piece. But when I was just about to take a bite, I saw that instead of a cake, it was a human heart – still beating even with us holding pieces of it that looked like cake. I tried to warn my wife but she couldn’t hear me. I had lost my voice. She took a bite and the whole heart quivered …

I woke up at five am and decided to take a walk. Outside, the morning air was crisp and slightly stale. In the light of the sun, yellowish through the mist, Eastleigh looked peaceful and even the piles of garbage along the tarmacked streets looked somehow beautiful. A few blocks past O’s house, I saw little children in clean blue-and-white uniforms closing a metal gate behind them. They were yawning and I couldn’t help smiling. I said hello to them, but they looked at me suspiciously. I continued on.

Close to a shopping centre, I saw old Somali women putting up their makeshift stalls, bales of fresh mangoes, bananas and khat waiting to be displayed. At the bus station, bus and matatu drivers were readying their vehicles for a busy morning. Loud music – a confused mix of different rap songs – was playing above the roar of backfiring engines. I walked on.

At a kiosk, I bought some tea and a chapatti. I sat on a bench blowing the hot chai steam into the air to cool it down. Nobody paid me any attention – this early in the morning people were busy minding their own stories.

I thought back to how, once, in New Jersey investigating one thing or another, I was talking to this old man and it came out that he had never been to New York. New York, a thirty-minute train ride from Newark! ‘I have no reason to go to New York,’ he’d said with a shrug. Then it had seemed odd, that not even curiosity would get him onto that train, but now, somehow, I understood. If you have everything you need where you are, why go somewhere else? That was how I felt about being in Africa. Until the dead white girl had shown up on Joshua’s doorstep, I had never had a reason to come to
Africa. And so I hadn’t.

A little pickup truck with
Daily Nation
written all over it slowed down briefly and a man in the back threw a plastic covered bundle in the general direction of the door to the kiosk. It landed in a puddle of filth. The owner cursed, came out with a knife and opened it up. I watched him idly arranging the newspapers on his makeshift stand, adding cigarettes and Wrigley’s gum to the display. But just when I was about to go back to my tea and thoughts, the headline caught my eye:
The Case of the Dead White Girl: American Detective in Kenya
.

Immediately, I went to pick up the newspaper, but the man asked for money first. I rummaged through my wallet but I had spent the last of my Kenyan shillings on the chai and chapatti and smallest bill I could find was a ten. I gave it to him, wondering whether he would accept it. He held it up in the air, looked at it for a few seconds. ‘American money … very good,’ he finally said approvingly and pushed the newspaper into my hand.

My anxiety grew as I began to read the lead story. It was all there: how the girl had been found, how she had no identity, her photograph (the headshot of her lifeless body in full colour), my name, everything except my photograph. But even that was surely only a matter of time. This was going to change things, and for the worse I suspected. I needed to talk with the Chief.

I gulped down my tea and made to leave, but the kiosk owner grabbed my arm and pressed into my hand a small plastic bag full of chapattis, bread and sodas. He waved the ten dollar bill and pointed to the bag. I had bought the stuff. I smiled, touched, and shook my head, thrusting the plastic
bag back into his hands. I didn’t have time to argue. I had to get back to O’s.

‘Look, man, this is the break we have been waiting for,’ O said, beside himself with excitement. Unlike in the United States most Kenyans read the paper, and if they don’t, they listen to the radio, so O figured that something was bound to come up.

I had tried calling the Chief but I couldn’t get through – I didn’t have enough airtime. O suggested that I text the Chief and ask him to call me back. I was sceptical, but it worked fine because a few minutes later the phone rang.

‘Chief, I’m staring at the local paper, where are my two weeks?’ I asked, stressing each word.

‘Too much pressure … Everyone wanted to know where we are with the case. We have nothing here, and I had to throw them something. What the hell could I do? I told them you had left for Africa, that we were onto something big …’ He paused and I knew that he was waiting for me to tell him we had something.

‘Chief, I only just got here …’ I started.

‘Listen, you’ve got one week,’ the Chief said, interrupting me. ‘You’d better have something in a week, otherwise we’re dead in the water … Don’t let us down, Ishmael.’

I started to protest, but he had already hung up.

I went back to the kitchen to find O making breakfast – the exact same breakfast as the day before. ‘I perfect one meal a year, so for a year that is all I cook, no deviations, no nothing, the same exact thing each time until I get it right,’ he said
when he saw the look on my face. ‘I have been working on this masterpiece since January …’

I laughed at the idea – it made sense. ‘What do we do now?’ I asked as I poured myself some coffee.

O produced a joint from behind his ear. ‘We smoke, then we eat a
motherfucking
omelette,’ he said, trying to sound like he was from the hood.

‘You have a way with words, my friend, you know that? You scared those motherfuckers with your motherfuckers last night. I did not know you spoke black American.’ He laughed in delight.