Authors: Wanjiku wa Ngugi

The Fall of Saints (26 page)

BOOK: The Fall of Saints

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“Zack, you coward,” I said, hoping to get him out of his hiding place. “You hide behind women’s skirts.”

I heard some sounds, and before I could shoot, I saw Zack run out of the room. I ran after him. I couldn’t see properly in the dark and caught only glimpses of his shadow. He was running toward his car. Then it hit me: He must have a weapon in the car. My goal now was to get him before he got the gun. Then bright lights shone on Zack. Jane had turned her high beams on him. He paused. I shot at his car. He fumbled for his keys. I shot again.

I walked up to Zack. He knew he was cornered. He knew as well as I did that I would shoot him should he open the car door.

He turned around. “If you kill me, Mugure, you will never see Kobi again.”

“You don’t know that. I signed a pact with Wangeci.”

“Shooting an unarmed man, Mugure? Now, now, now.”

“I brought a lawyer with me. And a sharpshooter. If I miss, she won’t,” I said, referring to Magda. I was a couple of feet from him with the gun pointing at his head. Suddenly, I heard sirens and saw flashing lights, and I lost my concentration. Zack seized the opportunity and jumped toward me. I started shooting and kept shooting. He fell on me, sending me to the ground, blood spattering all over me, everywhere.

“Sister, sister,” I heard Ben whisper as he helped me up.

I
don’t know why, but as I prepared to see my father, the words of Saint Paulina kept coming back to me: “It’s difficult to know what goes on in the heart of a man.” The questions persisted: Who was Brian? How could he have deceived everybody all the way to the Vatican?

It turned out, as I learned from Ben at a gathering in Jane’s house—with Ben, Johnston, Betty, Philomena, Grace, and Magda—that Brian’s real name was Stanley William. He had so many aliases that even this was not certain. He was a computer crook who worked for anyone who would hire him and was on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

The real Father Brian was a God-fearing soul from Brazil, who on his very first visit to New York, happened to be at the World Trade Center on 9/11. He’d been planning to relocate to Kenya. Stanley William stole his identity, his name, his history, and vanished from New York.

Even Ben, with all his police experience, was baffled by the coincidence of two crooks with the most aliases working together. The question was, did they even know each other? Ironically, they met at Shamrock, Zack the master brain and Brian the master doer and actor.

“Brian works covertly, Zack overtly,” explained Ben. “Brian stays in one spot and knows the environment; Zack travels under different aliases in Zimbabwe, Finland, Sweden, all over Eastern Europe. Brian is a crook who enjoys deception like one enjoys a work of art. Zack is driven by a warped view of the world and has neo-Nazi connections. Palmer and Edwards was a legal umbrella for many other enterprises, including Alaska, under which there were other, minor operations. He tried to lure Okigbo and Okigbo into the scheme, but Okgibo reported his advances to us. David helped us connect the dots in exchange for indemnity.”

The document that he and Brian had drawn up was a manifesto and a vision of horror. It envisioned orphanage plantations to harvest human organs; human cloning factories in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, all clothed in the idea of a universal good. What had been going on in Kenya was just the beginning.

“And, Mugure,” Johnston broke in, “I looked at the document again—at your insistence, I must say. All the horror stared at me afresh. Brian’s evil genius lay in projecting the vision to Paulina and her Alternative Clinics. You might say it saves us from a moral dilemma.”

“But why were they fighting for the original document?” I asked, still baffled.

“Ego,” Ben explained. “Pretty much the way children fight over things. ‘I got it first’ type of thing.”

I asked how the moral dilemma was solved for those who had escaped the judgment of the gun. Ben said that Brian would be extradited to the US. Melinda and Reverend Susan were arrested that very night. Susan was released at the insistence of Maxwell Kaguta, the minister of faith and religion, who claimed that she was an innocent victim of foreign mega-televangelists envious of her success. A victim of racism. Melinda was declared a persona non grata and somehow got herself on a flight back to the States.

“Interesting that both crooks clothed their evil with morality and legality,” said Ben.

His comment reminded me of the debate between Wainaina and the philosopher at NYU years back about a universal ethical imperative. Was there an inner imperative that made humans clothe evil with holiness, or was it the universality of the simple statement that the road to hell is paved with good intentions? And yet for every Zack or Brian or Susan, there is a Sister Paulina, a Wainaina, a Jane, or a Betty who has learned to fight evil in their ways. I would like to cling to those moments, short-lived at times, longer at others, when good seems triumphant over evil. For me and, I suspect, the others, that moment was the reunion of Betty with her child. It was only appropriate that mother and child were the center around which the celebration at Jane’s house revolved.

Questions remained, so many, but mostly about me—why I could not see what was in front of me. How could I have been so wrong in some of my judgments: Mark, for one. Melinda had painted him as the devil. His temporary disappearance was a visit to Mexico. He had never visited Kenya, and the suggestion of the Kasla agency had come from Melinda, its director, alongside the Rhino Man.

Joe was another. I had called him the previous night to offer my apologies. His late business call to some of his genuine business associates had sent me into paranoia. In speaking about calming her, he’d been referring to a client who was threatening hell because her mortgage had not come through in time. Joe had the good heart to play down how he had felt. He laughed at the absurdity of the chase: his complete puzzlement at my speeding up every time his car approached mine; and how his every gesture of peace was met with murderous rebuff. All would be forgiven, he said, if . . . But he knew my answer, he said, laughing again and thanking me for apprising him of the situation. “Oh, my friend Zack,” he said, sighing.

I thought of Joe still describing Zack as his friend. Did he mean it? Who was I to judge history and others’ actions in absolutes of evil and good? I had gotten Kobi through a crime committed by another. I had enjoyed money gained from unspeakable crimes. My education had been paid for, all the way from primary to university, by a father who would not see me and whose only moral instruction was for me not to fall into the hands of white boys. Melinda was black. Sam was white. Sam’s dad, as conservative as they came, had taught me to defend myself. I had to admit that life is not always black or white, and when we get to read the blurred lines in between, life takes on another meaning.

I decided not to seek my father. I no longer wanted to confront him. I had Kobi to live for; he needed me now more than ever. My only problem was how I would explain to him the absence of a father in a manner that would satisfy without attendant trauma; and without creating a need to undertake endless missions about his roots or identify with a father seen through the romantic vision of loss and distance.

I did feel the need to visit my mother’s grave before undertaking the one journey and the one encounter I dreaded most but which I knew I had to face: Wangeci’s mother, now Kobi’s grandmother. My mother, even in her grave, would give me the support I most needed. The certainty was founded on reason. Every time I visited my mother’s grave, I felt a calm.
Gikuyu
people think of death as sleep, and for them, spirits mean the sleeping ones
, ngoma,
spirits. It gave me comfort to think of my mother as sleeping in peace but somehow able to hear me. These last few weeks, I had thought of her spirit as the mystery gardener who would not leave her precious herbs unattended.

It was a shock, almost—really, a disappointment—when I found the gardener in the flesh. I stood at the gate looking at him. I did not feel like communing with my mother in the presence of a stranger. But he sensed me watching him, and he walked over. “Yes, miss?”

“Oh, I was just admiring the garden, the herbs. Have you been working here for a long time?”

“No, no,” he said, “the owner used to do it himself. He would come in his car, work on it, and then leave. Now he can’t, so he gives me the flowers, or rather, he sends the driver to give me the flowers to lay on the gravesite. Diabetes is horrible. Not all the money GG had could save him from getting his leg amputated.”

I had more questions but didn’t ask. Complicated, really complicated. It was best that I leave. I just could not take any more. George Gata. The gardener was my father. I walked away without another word.

• • •

My next stop was Tigoni. It was important that I tell Wangeci’s grandmother in my own words that the criminals had been arrested. I was surprised to find the small walk-in gate open. I wondered if I should ring the doorbell anyway. Just then I saw Wangeci’s mother coming toward the gate. She was soon joined by Mwihaki and another woman I assumed was Mwihaki’s mother. They came close to the gate before veering away. They were taking a stroll in the yard.

Why complicate their lives further? I didn’t even know how I would tell her that the person who had ruined her daughter’s life and eventually taken it away was also my husband, and that I was the beneficiary of Wangeci’s loss.

Slowly, I turned my back to the gate and walked to the car. I told the taxi driver to stop by Tigoni Dam, where Wangeci’s body had been dumped. I stood there, staring at the waters; my lips were trembling. I emerged from the dam a little stronger, a little calmer, clinging to the image of our last embrace. I wished that Wainaina had taken that picture. But did it matter?

Wangeci and I were forever joined by ties of motherhood to Kobi, whom we both loved.

T
he next day I flew to the US and went straight back to Sam’s house in Ohio to reunite with Kobi and Rosie, as well as thank Sam and his father. Kobi and I ran toward each other. We embraced tightly, tightly. He seemed to have grown. Sam and Rosie were holding hands, with huge grins. I guessed Ohio was a romantic place after all. I called Mark who kept repeating, “I don’t believe this,” as I explained how his name had been misused. I felt I owed that to him now that Zack was dead.

I was still in Ohio when I received a text from Jane: She and Wainaina were expecting . . .

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my literary agent, Gloria Loomis, for taking on the novel, and for making the business of getting published a smooth one. To Malaika Adero of Atria Books, a big thank-you for believing in the novel. I am really grateful to Henry Chakava for his creative suggestions; thanks to maitu Njeeri wa Ngũgĩ for detailed comments on the early draft; my father, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, for the creative writing discussions/lessons and for being a fierce critic of the characters; to Sami Sallinen for the loving support and for poring over several drafts of the novel; to the children, Alem and Nyambura; to my siblings and fellow writers Tee, Kimunya, Ngina, Nducu, Mukoma, Njoki, Bjorn, Mumbi, and Thiong’o for reading drafts of the novel, sometimes twice, sometimes more, but most especially for the “nuggets”; to my nieces and nephews Nyambura (N2), Nyambura (N3), Biko, Miring’u, Chris, and June; to my friend Dorina Owindi for being there during the process of writing; to my friend Peter Kuria and the HAFF family; to my great friends Amkelwa Mbekeni and Liz Ndegwa for keeping it real—lots of love and light!

About the Author

Wanjikũ wa Ngũgĩ is a writer and director of the Helsinki African Film Festival (HAFF) in Finland. She is also a member of the editorial board of
Matatu: Journal for African Literature and Culture and Society
, and was a columnist for the Finnish development magazine
Maailman Kuvalehti,
writing about political and cultural issues. She has also been a jury member of the CinemAfrica Film Festival, Sweden, in 2012–2013. Her work has been published in the
Herald
(Zimbabwe), the
Daily Nation
and
Business Daily
,
Pambazuka News
,
and
Chimurenga
, among others.