Nairobi Heat (14 page)

‘What are we doing here?’

‘That is not the question. The question is why are you still alive? No, don’t answer. It is simple: you are alive because you still have a purpose. God kept you alive for a reason …’

I started laughing.

‘Did I say something funny?’ he asked.

‘You a priest?’

‘No, Detective Ishmael, but I do believe that God kept you alive to return balance to our world,’ he said cryptically.

Only one person had addressed me this way and that was the person whose call had brought me to Africa. He had my attention.

‘Yes,’ he answered my unspoken question. ‘I made the call as per Mr Alexander’s instructions. It seems that you were becoming a thorn in our side, as you Americans say, and you were to be invited here so that we could kill you.’

‘You were supposed to get me out of the way?’

‘Yes, but that is beside the point now. Things have shifted …’

He paused to light a cigarette. I stared at him, trying to catch his face, but his hands were cupped around the light and I could only make out a receding hairline that was flecked with grey.

‘Detective, allow me to come to the point … Do you know how much guilt is worth nowadays?’

I shook my head.

‘Say there is a genocide in which a million or so people die while the world watches. And say that the country in which
this genocide happens ends up owning the guilt of that world, because it stood by and did nothing. How much do you think that guilt is worth?’

‘Do you always speak in riddles? Just get to the point!’ I said in frustration.

‘Yes, it would have been a shame to kill a man who knows so little,’ he said. ‘All right, say you are a savvy businessman who realises that there is money to be made out of this guilt … a lot of money. Say you have a white face, but you find a black man, a hero who helps you tap into the community of refugees from this country that owns the guilt of the world, and you start a Refugee Centre. Say you then start a foundation called Never Again to tap into this guilt all over the world.’ He paused. ‘Am I making any sense yet?’

Some things had begun to fall into place, although a lot more was still out of focus. This man was some sort of middleman in a corrupt corporation fronted by the Refugee Centre and the Never Again Foundation, with Samuel as the acceptable white face and noble Joshua the stirrer of that guilt. Together they had preyed on the world’s conscience ever since the genocide.

‘Did Joshua do the things they say he did?’ I asked.

‘Having met a few people who owe their lives to him, including that beautiful young woman you left Club 680 with last night, I believe so. When he was offered money and fame for his good deeds, he felt entitled to them. It was Samuel who found Joshua. But who really knows? Truth can be stranger than fiction, no?’

‘Did Joshua kill the white girl?’

‘You could say Mr Alexander and I were partners,
Detective Ishmael. But naturally, being black, I was the junior partner, so I do not know these things. What I do know is that there are three forces here at work: the Refugee Centre, the Never Again Foundation and Joshua. Perhaps if you shake these apple trees, as you Americans say, something will fall off.’ He laughed. ‘And before you ask, no, I had never seen her before.’

‘How big is this thing?’

‘If I told you, Detective Ishmael, you would not believe me.’ His cellphone glowed in the dark as he dialled a number. A few seconds later a gorilla of a man – the same one who had hit me over the head earlier, no doubt – walked in with a briefcase which he handed to Jamal. ‘Untie him,’ Jamal ordered.

The giant approached wordlessly, producing a long shiny knife from a sheath along his forearm as soon as he stepped into the light. For a moment I felt panic as he walked around to stand behind me. Then I felt a tug and my hands and legs were suddenly free, the pain intense as the blood flowed back into my limbs.

As the giant left, he turned on the lights. Not in a million years would I have expected that Abu Jamal and I had already met – and only a few hours earlier too. I felt foolish and alarmed at the same time, and I broke into a short weird laugh, making a sound I had never made before me in my life – a sound of complete and utter surprise, mixed in with genuine mirth, fear, indignation and embarrassment. The man sitting before me was Samuel Alexander’s manservant. The elderly man whom O had insulted on the night of Samuel’s suicide.

‘Nothing is what it seems, that is the truth,’ he said as if he
and I were sitting together, watching a secret being unveiled. ‘It is okay to take a moment … you smoke?’

Without waiting for my reply he lit a cigarette for me. I noticed my hands were unsteady as I reached for it. It was not that I was afraid for my life, I was scared of what I did not know – everything had become a surprise.

‘I think we just might come to an understanding,’ Jamal added. He opened the briefcase that the giant had left behind and handed me a hefty folder. ‘My gift to you, Detective Ishmael. All you need to know.’

I opened it and quickly glanced at the papers – it contained letters, documents from the Refugee Centre and a logbook with hundreds of names in it.

I looked up at him, alarmed. ‘Did you kill Samuel?’ I asked him.

‘No, I had gone to retrieve these documents. You gentlemen interrupted me.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘I needed a moment to think. As you might be aware, things around here are changing very fast,’ he explained. ‘And you, I had to decide what to do about you now that Samuel was gone. Surely that was understandable.’ He said it like it was something I ought to have figured out for myself.

‘So what do you get in the end?’ I asked.

‘I want to be the last man standing. Consciences will continue to bleed money and it is time we did some good with it. I am rich. It is time for phase two: legacy building. But have no illusions, Detective Ishmael, I will put you down if needs be.’

‘And the Foundation? You want a piece of it?’

‘The Refugee Centre is the foundation of the Foundation,’ he laughed at his own joke. ‘Whoever controls the Centre controls the suffering, and whoever controls the suffering controls the guilt … See what I am getting at?’

‘This shit, I have to tell you that this shit is way above my pay grade,’ I told him. ‘I just want to find out who killed the girl.’

He laughed again and then, with a smile, he stretched out his hand and we shook as if we were concluding a big deal.

‘Some might think you a simple man, but I think you are a man of singular determination,’ he said. ‘Like a bulldog, as you Americans say. It’s a shame I couldn’t help you with that, but every little thing counts.’

‘Tell me, Jamal, did you kill Samuel?’ I asked him again, looking him straight in the face.

‘And make it look like a suicide?’ He paused. ‘No. I liked Samuel … as much as one can like a fellow criminal.’

‘So why did he commit suicide?’

‘This is not easy work that we do, Detective Ishmael. If you are not careful it catches up to you. We all come to this work from somewhere. And we live in some very dark places. I am sorry I cannot be of more help than that,’ he said apologetically, turning to leave.

I watched as Jamal made his way towards the door. Before he stepped outside he opened the briefcase and placed it gently on the floor, then he was gone.

As soon as I was able to stand I walked over to the briefcase. Inside I found my weapon, fully loaded, and my wallet, badge, cell and car keys. Opening the door I realised that I was in the middle of a meat market – which explained the smell. There
were rows and rows of meat stalls interrupted only by small bars. For Kenyans, this was
nyama choma
heaven. I picked a stall randomly and used their phone to call O and tell him where I was and what had happened.

After I had finished filling O in – and told him where I had left the Land Rover – I ordered two kilos of
nyama choma
and two Tuskers – one for myself and one for O when he arrived. Then, with trembling hands, I opened the folder, sipped my Tusker and started going through the documents.

How much can a guilty conscience be worth? Millions, it would seem. The logbook was a record of donations coming in and money going out. There was money coming in from all sorts of organisations – the United Nations, The World Bank – and from all sorts of governments as well, from Britain to Syria. The Ford, Rockefeller, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations had also given money, along with Hollywood types and sports stars. Anybody and everybody with money was in the game. This was the world trying to clear its conscience, and to do that it was prepared to pay close to seventy million dollars a year.

I turned to the recipients’ page and it became clearer how the whole thing worked. Let’s say Shell has ten million dollars due in taxes. Under normal circumstances Shell could give that money to charily – thus not paying the tax and at the same time creating publicity and goodwill for itself. But what was happening was that Shell would give the ten million to the Never Again Foundation, which in turn kicked six million back to the Shell board, keeping four million for itself. The
six million went into the private accounts of the board and the four million to Samuel Alexander and his subordinates. It was such a neat cycle, that each year generated so many millions for CEOs and wealthy philanthropists, that it might as well have been legal. The rich had found a way of giving back to themselves.

And the money from the non-corrupt, from those who gave because they wanted to educate a child orphaned by the genocide, these little donations also amounted to millions – and the money generated was not going to the refugees. On paper, this money was buying cars and houses for the Refugee Centre, but it was surely going into buying favours, keeping politicians silent and into private bank accounts. There was no way any of this money was making it to the refugees I had seen in Mathare.

There were some African names on the payroll that didn’t make sense to me, so I turned to the letters and e-mails as I waited for O. They were from all over the world. To clean up the millions the Never Again Foundation and the Refugee Centre had to have little offices wherever there were Rwandan refugees to be found. And in some of those places their representatives had made deals that for whatever reason had gone bad. Some of the e-mails were from these representatives, demanding money and threatening to go public if it wasn’t forthcoming. There were also e-mails from several CEOs, asking for their cut. These were politely written but the threat behind them was unmistakable – one ended with the line, ‘hospitality begets hospitality’. There was also one cold e-mail from Joshua to Samuel reminding him there was honour amongst thieves and that ‘the five
hundred thousand’ was long overdue. Had Samuel Alexander been scheming the other schemers?

Whatever was going on, one thing was clear, the Refugee Centre and the Never Again Foundation had spread themselves too thin. Collapse was almost inevitable. Was this why Samuel had committed suicide and left an apology for Joshua? Was Jamal hoping that with Samuel now dead and Joshua exposed, and in a US jail, he could resuscitate the Refugee Centre and use it for his own ends? And what did any of this have to do with the white girl? Had she simply stumbled onto something she shouldn’t have?

‘I have been looking all over for you, and you have been eating
nyama choma?
’ O asked incredulously, pulling up a chair and grabbing a Tusker off the counter.

I showed him the bump on the back of my head and filled him in on the fine details I hadn’t told him over the phone – including our visit to Janet and the real identity of Samuel’s man Friday.

‘Shit, I knew something wasn’t quite right with that old man, he couldn’t hide his dignity,’ O said, trying to justify his misjudgement.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him, pushing the logbook across the bar towards him. ‘This is more important … Take a look at this.’

‘What you have here is our death sentence,’ O said as he looked at the names on the recipients’ page. ‘This is our Minister for Internal Security, this is a Member of Parliament …’ And he went on as he scrolled down the list of names.

‘That means we have to move fast,’ I said.

‘What do you suggest?’ O asked.

It was time to blow this whole thing open. My logic was very simple: it doesn’t matter how good you are, stay in a gunfight long enough and eventually you will get shot. We couldn’t keep outrunning death. We had to give those involved something else to think about.

‘We have to hit them where it hurts the most,’ I told O, trying to feel hopeful. ‘We go after their reputations. If we can get the story out there it will get us some protection.’

We left for O’s office where I called the Chief, explained the situation, and faxed the papers to him.

‘Oh, boy, don’t I miss black-on-black crime,’ the Chief said when he rang back twenty minutes later. ‘Listen, Ishmael, if this is what takes us down, then so be it. But you have to make it count. I am with you, but all you have here are some documents from some shady African crime figure. We are up against power itself … you understand me?’ He paused. ‘We need to tie all this shit to the white girl. You want to bring these guys down? Connect them to the white girl … she has one angry ghost.’