Petals of Blood (57 page)

Everything worked according to plan until the last day. Chui was the first to arrive. She put him in a room, talked to him a little, and then excused herself to make supper, and carefully locked the door after her. She went into the kitchen and started cutting meat into small bits. She cut enough for four, put it into a sufuria. Mzigo was the second to arrive and she put him in yet another room, talked to him a little and then excused herself to go to the kitchen. Cooking and the kitchen became the most important link in the drama and she was beginning to enjoy it. To the question why she could not let the girls cook, she would tell each the same story: this was a special evening for him and her. Otherwise it would not be difficult to entertain them: Chui liked to be listened to as he talked of South Africa, England and America. He also liked casually dropping names
of other big men. ‘The other day, talking to so and so . . .’ or ‘the other day, having goat meat at so and so’s . . . I tell you, if a bomb had been dropped all the Kenya élite would have gone.’ He liked it most when one showed constant amazement at the places he had been to, and if one showed a little jealousy at all the English girls he had slept with. Mzigo liked talking about cars in a deprecating manner as if the car, and especially a Mercedes, was the greatest evil in the world. He liked it best when one praised cars in proportion to his running them down. Kimeria liked to be made a little jealous and then he would try to woo her back by promising gifts. He also occasionally talked about parties with other big men: and at all his parties, people bought only rounds of whole bottles of champagne or whisky. ‘You know, the big ones that cost nearly a hundred shillings each’, as if it was the size of bottles bought and the cost that made the parties worthwhile. She now waited impatiently for Kimeria. And she found her heart beating suddenly, fearing that something would go wrong. She again thought about her life, wondering if it would have been different without her early encounter with Kimeria. Her thoughts shifted to her father: suppose her father had been like her grandfather, would things have been different? This and that, this and that, and it was the picture of her grandfather that now stood vivid in her mind as Kimeria knocked at the door. She opened for him: he breezed in, ready to be loved. She still held the panga she had been using in cutting the thick vegetables . . . He smiled at her . . . and she showed him to his room. It was when she was going to see if Abdulla had come that she suddenly saw flames and smoke and she screamed, screamed for help before fainting on the ground.

That in the main was what she told Inspector Godfrey. And it was true. What she did not tell him, what she would never tell anyone now that she was still alive and the evidence had been burnt, was that it was she who had killed Kimeria . . . struck him dead with the panga she had been holding.

5 ~ ‘Tell me, Mr Munira . . . you knew Chui well,’ said Inspector Godfrey. He was very relaxed. The boredom and cynicism on his face had gone. The eyes were playful, lit by genuine curiosity.

‘I have already told you that he and I were in the same school. We were expelled around – I think it was in 1946 – because it was the year of the age-group called Cugini/Mburaki.’

‘That means black market?’

‘Yes. Because it was after the war and things were in severe shortage. It was during these years that Karugo, the driver, became famous. He used to transport goods and maize from the settled area to the African Reserves and no police car could catch him.’

‘That’s why they say: Tura na Cia Karugo?’

‘Yes.’

‘Very interesting.’

‘Today the same thing would be called Magendo . . . But this time in ivory and rubies, maize and charcoal. Only that no policeman would chase some of the culprits.’

‘Ha! ha! ha! Mr Munira, you seem to know a little bit about your culture. But I believe that your parents were Christians?’

‘Yes.’

‘And your brothers are all well off. One is now a big man in an oil company, not so?’

‘Yes.’

‘And your father is still – he is a big landlord?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was the relationship between you and your parents? Cordial?’

‘Strained, I should say.’

‘How would you describe yourself? A failure? The odd man, the black sheep of an otherwise white family?’

‘There is no failure for those born anew in Christ. This world is not my home.’

‘Quite right. But tell me . . . did you meet Chui again after your little adventure in Siriana?’

‘No . . . not really.’

Munira stopped and thought for a few minutes. Then he laughed as if amused by sudden inward reflection.

‘No. Actually . . . you see, I saw him several times in Ilmorog. I thought of introducing myself. But I didn’t, or rather I kept on putting off the decision. Then one day I did so. It was funny. It was during
the opening of Ilmorog Golf Club. We teachers were also invited. This time I went straight to him. At first he could not remember me. I told him about Chui, the football player. I called him Joe Louis – Shakespeare. He burst into laughter. He felt his huge stomach with one hand, glass of champagne in the other. “How are you, my friend? Ha! Ha! I suppose today they would have called me Muhammad Ali or Bruce Lee, or Pele. So you became a teacher? Like myself? That Fraudsham . . . did you attend his funeral?” We talked a little bit about the Ironmongers, Fraudsham, and Siriana in our time. “Schoolboys . . . these days . . . not at all like we used to be,” he said. He asked me what I was drinking. Why didn’t I Theng’a Theng’a with Theng’eta? Did I not know the modern algebra – P was equal to 3 Ts? “New maths,” he said and laughed, slapping me on the shoulder with his free hand. That day I did not want to drink and I said ginger ale. “Come, come, wine is a good familiar creature if it be used well,” he said encouragingly and slapped me hard on the shoulder. I still stuck to my ginger ale and quoted back. “O thou invisible spirit of wine, If thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil.” “So you remember Mr Billy Shakespeare,” he said, and laughed again. An argument developed. Was ginger ale really an ale (Alcohol Livens Everybody) or was it a Fanta (Foolish Teachers Never Take Alcohol)? He said that it could have an alcoholic effect, depending on who was taking it. He told a story how once at a party in his place at Blue Hills, a lady did get drunk on ginger ales. She went to the door and screamed and fainted and later claimed that she had seen a ghost . . .’

‘I see. Very interesting. And Kimeria? Did you know him?’

‘No . . . not very well . . . Except that he had ruined Wanja’s life and betrayed Karega’s brother.’

‘And Karega . . . did he ever talk in a way that might suggest – eeh?’

‘What?’

‘Bitterness. Or how he was going to bring about his new world? Could he have thought of hastening its coming?’

‘I’ve told you how it was that I didn’t believe in man’s—’

He stopped. The officer was looking at him in a strange manner. Inspector Godfrey suddenly changed his tone . . . he was not any longer the bemused onlooker.

‘Mr Munira . . . what were you doing on Ilmorog Hill on the Sunday morning after the arson?’

Munira looked at the officer. He read everything in his eyes.

‘So you know?’ he asked quietly.

‘Yes, Mr Munira . . . The rulers of every world have their laws, their policemen, and their judges and . . . and the law’s executioners . . . not so? I am afraid, Mr Munira, that I am only a policeman of this world. And I’ll now formally charge you with burning Wanja’s house and causing the deaths of three men. I may warn you that anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. Tell me: why did you do it?’

‘I – I wanted to save Karega,’ Munira said.

Munira had been so convinced that this world was wrong, was a mistake, that he wanted all his friends to see this and escape in time. That was why he had pestered Karega so much. In the end this had become an obsession. He followed Wanja; he followed Abdulla; he followed Karega. But it was Karega in whom he was most interested. It was as if he had a doubt in his mind which could only be erased by Karega’s conversion. But it was sheer coincidence that on the crucial Friday he saw the shadow of Karega. He had followed him. He saw him enter Wanja’s hut. ‘So they have been meeting in secret,’ it suddenly dawned on him. ‘So they have been seeing one another in the hut!’ He waited in the dark, thinking hard. He recalled his first arrival in Ilmorog: he remembered how Wanja had shaken his world, the world he had created around himself. He recalled and relived his involvement with her and his later sliding into sloth and drinking, and she looking so desirable like the fruit in the old garden. From nowhere, a voice spoke to him: She is Jezebel, Karega will never escape from her embrace of evil. In the dark, the message was clear: Karega had to be saved from her. He would otherwise descend the very same steps that Munira had himself descended and from which he had been saved by the return of Karega and Lillian. Save him . . . save him, the voice insisted. Munira knew that he would obey the voice. Christ, after all, had beaten the traders who had been spoiling God’s temple. What was important was not just passive obedience to the law but
active obedience to the universal law of God. It was a tremendous revelation. He saw Karega move out. He wondered if he should act tonight and how he should act. He was going to follow Karega when again he saw Abdulla come and also go into the hut. ‘Even he . . .’ Munira thought and moved away.

For a whole week he prayed that God would show him the way. He bought petrol on the Saturday evening . . . He walked to Wanja’s place. It was not he, Munira. He was doing this only in active obedience to the law. It was enjoined on him to burn down the whorehouse – which mocked God’s work on earth. He poured petrol on all the doors and lit it up. He walked away toward Ilmorog Hill. He stood on the hill and watched the whorehouse burn, the tongues of flame from the four corners forming petals of blood, making a twilight of the dark sky. He, Munira, had willed and acted, and he felt, as he knelt down to pray, that he was no longer an outsider, for he had finally affirmed his oneness with the Law.

1 ~ Inspector Godfrey sat by the window of a first-class coach and watched the fields roll away: neat man-controlled beauty of coffee and tea plantations on hillsides and valleys and ridges. His mind was not wholly on the undulating landscape between Ruwa-ini and Nairobi, but was still in New Ilmorog. He should now have been experiencing that inner satisfaction he always had felt whenever he put a crime jigsaw puzzle together: but instead he felt an inner discomfort, a slight irritability. He was a little surprised at himself because this kind of unease was hopelessly out of character with the equanimity with which he was wont to view the flow of social and political events. Not that he was interested in the likes of Karega. For such destroyers of order he had no feelings. Inspector Godfrey, a self-made man, for his formal education had not taken him beyond Form 2 and yet see where he was, the heights he had reached through study, application and through an instinctive fear of stirring the bottom of a pool, had been brought up to believe in the sanctity of private property. The system of private ownership, of means of production, exchange and distribution, was for him synonymous with the natural order of things like the sun, the moon and the stars which seemed fixed and permanent in the firmament. Anybody who interfered with that ordained fixity and permanence of things was himself unnatural and deserved no mercy: was he not inviting chaos such as would occur if some foolish astronaut/cosmonaut should go and push the sun or the moon from its place? People like Karega with their radical trade unionism and communism threatened the very structure of capitalism: as such they were worse than murderers. Inspector Godfrey always felt a certain protective relationship to this society. It did not matter that for him,
all these years, he had acquired very little. Still he felt a lordly proprietorial air to the structure: was the police not the force that guaranteed that stability which alone made possible the unhindered accumulation of wealth? Everybody, even those millionaires that had ganged together under Kamwene Cultural Organization, really owed their position to the force. The police force was truly the maker of modern Kenya, he had always felt. The Karegas and their like should really be deported to Tanzania and China!

But it was people like Munira who really disturbed him. How could Munira have repudiated his father’s immense property? Could property, wealth, status, religion, plus education not hold a family together? What else could a man want? Inspector Godfrey decided that it was religious fanaticism! Yet from his own experience in the police force, such fanaticism was normally found among the poor. Human beings: they could never be satisfied!

And yet there was a way in which Munira was right. This system of capitalism and capitalistic democracy needed moral purity if it was going to survive. The skeletons that he himself had come across in the New Ilmorog could not very well come under the label of moral purity. Of course he had seen similar or near similar things in Nairobi, Mombasa, Malindi, Watamu and other places but he had never before given it much thought because, at least so he supposed now, he had never before come across a Munira who was prepared to murder in the name of moral purity. And it was not Wanja’s
Sunshine Lodge
that Inspector Godfrey was thinking about. It was, for instance, the Utamaduni Cultural Tourist Centre at Ilmorog. Ostensibly it was there to entertain watalii from USA, Japan, West Germany, and other parts of Western Europe. But this only camouflaged other more sinister activities: smuggling of gemstones and ivory plus animal and even human skins. It was a centre for the plunder of the country’s natural and human assets. Women, young girls, were being recruited to satisfy any watalii’s physical whims. The more promising ones, those who seemed to acquire an air of sophistication with a smattering of English and German were lured to Europe as slave whores from Africa! Inspector Godfrey was in no doubt that this lucrative trade in Black Ivory was done with the knowledge of Nderi wa Riera, the MP
for the area, for did he not own the centre? He was in partnership with the proprietor, the man from West Germany. Black Ivory for Export: First-rate Foreign Exchange Earner: but couldn’t we do without it, Inspector Godfrey thought, recalling the storm that had burst out when years before a similar trafficking in young flesh had been discovered at Watamu Bay? Maybe he would talk to his superiors about this: maybe he would give them the separate report that he had made. But then remembering how many VIP’s might be connected with such an Utalii Utamaduni Centre, he desisted. He would keep the report and the knowledge to himself. It might come in useful should he ever be called upon to put together another criminal jigsaw puzzle. He was a crime detective not the leader of a moral vice squad! Tourism was after all one of the biggest industries in the country and there was nothing good that did not carry with it a few negative things. His duty as a policeman was to help maintain stability, law and order, upon which depended the successful growth of all the industries and foreign investments. He chuckled to himself. He felt better. How silly of him to have let himself be drawn into moral questions of how and why! Was he growing weak with old age? He settled back in the carriage and his mind dwelt on the more comfortable formal questions of his investigation of the murder by arson of Kimeria, Chui and Mzigo. Wanja, Munira, Abdulla and even Karega passed through his mind . . . as the train took him nearer and nearer the city of which New Ilmorog was only a tiny, tiny imitation . . .