Nairobi Heat (7 page)

O slipped in and out of Americanisms easily – Americanisms that had filtered into Kenyan culture through movies and music videos. And he did it fluidly because he wasn’t self-conscious about it. I, on the other hand, brought up by black middle-class parents, had been trained from an early age to disdain colloquialisms – Ebonics was forbidden. That was a long time ago, but rightly or wrongly I was brought up believing that to make it in the United States black people had to speak proper American English. The change in my diction had obviously surprised O.

After breakfast – just as good as the previous day’s – I went to the bathroom for a shower. I waited for the water to run hot, but I was out of luck – a cold shower again. Back in my room I put on jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt and grabbed a light jacket which would easily hide my gun when I put it on.

As soon as I walked back into the kitchen, O pulled out a deck of cards. The only game we both knew was Crazy Eights – a rather childish game, but there was nothing more to do except wait. We played one long hand and then gave up.

Every cop hates down time. It’s the worst. It feels like the rest of the world knows something you don’t, and everything that is not related to the case feels like an interruption, but there is nothing to do except wait. O was a talker, so we sat around shooting the breeze for a while, trying to keep our minds off the waiting game.

‘Your wife, tell me about your wife,’ he finally said.

What the hell, I thought, it was as good a time as any to get into the personal stuff. ‘Childhood sweetheart. We grew into each other … Know what I mean? Broke up several times, but kept coming back for more. So, we got married,’ I said, trying to sound flippant.

‘And then you grew apart?’ O asked.

‘That’s it. I don’t know how it is being a cop around here, but back in the States being black and a cop has some … complications. She said she couldn’t stand my being a cop. The truth is our paths drifted further and further apart. By the time she was getting her MBA, I was getting my badge; she went corporate, I went to the streets. You know what I mean? My street life didn’t jive with her ambitions … Finally, I think she just stopped loving me. Perhaps we never stood a chance from the beginning.’

Did I miss her? Hell yeah, and the more she couldn’t stand me the more I wanted her. The more life in the streets took stuff out of me, the more I needed her. ‘ “You want to consume me!” Those were her last words to me,’ I said to O.

It takes a long time to be fair to your ex. I had thought it had been long enough, but the bitterness with which I had spoken suggested otherwise.

‘Listen, man,’ O said, sounding stoned, ‘I know just what
you mean. Last night I wanted to consume my wife …’ He paused. ‘What a beautiful word: consume.’ He let the word roll off his tongue a few more times.

‘I think, at the end of it all, my wife hated me, and that was one of the hardest things to accept,’ I continued, feeling that now I had started my confession I had to get it all out in the open. ‘I couldn’t reconcile myself to the fact that over the years she developed a basic contempt for me and found my work petty. “A simple man after simple truths,” she liked to say at the end of every argument.’ I paused and looked up into O’s bloodshot eyes. ‘I knew things were coming to an end when she started giving me this look. I had never seen it before, and I can’t really describe it, but it contained a fucked-up mix of contempt, resentment, self-loathing and love. I mean, she would bite her lip and look deep into my eyes as if she was trying to tell me something telepathically … It was creepy.’

‘Shit, man, you should have just asked her what she was trying to tell you,’ O said.

‘Yeah, I suppose, but I was going through my own shit: at work, with my parents. I was growing up. I didn’t know how to ask. Do you know what I mean?’

O gave me that blank look of his. ‘No, I do not know what you mean. You gotta ask … Always ask,’ he said with conviction and took a deep drag on his joint.

‘I’ll get them to put that on your tombstone,’ I said. ‘Detective O: always ask.’

‘And what does she do now?’

‘She works for Shell … Runs their business offices in New York. Good for her, I guess.’

‘You have to appreciate this here irony,’ O said, trying his American accent again. ‘Look, man, Shell is busy fucking Africa and she thinks you are the bad guy ’cos you are a black cop? See what I mean?’ He had this look of satisfaction on his face, like he had just relieved me of a great burden. He was high. I wasn’t.

‘Jesus, O! This shit is too heavy for breakfast. Let’s save it for a drunken night,’ I said, standing up and starting to pace up and down. ‘Fucking down time! We need something to do. I’m going crazy.’

‘My wife and I, we have rules, man,’ O said, looking contemplative. ‘I come home and have to be a husband, no matter what. I have to leave my work right at that door. Maria says, “I don’t treat you like a kid, so don’t treat me like a criminal.” Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I can still tell her about my day and some of the shit that goes down, but I can’t break dishes and throw things around. I’m not allowed to take it out on her. It might seem strange to you, but shit works, man …’

Did my ex and I have such rules, even unspoken ones? In true American spirit we wanted everything examined, laid out on the table and talked about – family time, we called it. But surely a marriage has to have a dark basement that no one goes to – where some things are thrown and left to rot because they are toxic? Maybe what my wife and I had needed were secrets?

‘Why did you decide to become a cop?’ I asked O, changing tack. Everyone wants to know why people are who they are – and more so with cops. The question really is: What made you dumb enough to risk your life for a head full
of bad dreams, a failed marriage and no pay?

‘There was only one university in the whole country back in the day. I didn’t get in. It was either this, join the army or become a criminal,’ O said, sounding as if everyone in Kenya had faced the same choices.

Why had I become a cop? I had talked about it often enough to have a prepared answer – wanting to do some good – but the actual reasons were more complex. I had gone to college, graduated with a useless degree that I could only have turned into a living by getting my PhD and becoming a professor … But the boredom! I did not want to become a drone, reciting the same lectures from ten years earlier about the US Constitution – although that’s exactly what my parents wanted for me.

My father worked as an accountant and my mother taught at a community college. I was an only child, and on their combined salaries we had lived well. I didn’t join the force because it was the only way to get out of poverty. I was a rebel. I didn’t want to become part of the black middle class with aspirations of whiteness – piano lessons and debutante balls. I had seen that world and didn’t like it one little bit, so I had opted out and become a cop. So, even though my ex-wife thought I was a traitor to my race, to my mind I was more of myself than I would ever have been being black on someone else’s terms. A paradox, but then what in life isn’t?

‘I didn’t want to join the black middle class,’ I answered O. ‘It’s true, I’m not out there fighting the man, but I do something,’ I added.

‘That’s ’cos you are the man,’ O said and laughed.

Just as I was about to call O a choice word, his phone
started ringing. He grinned from ear to ear. We both knew this was the call. It had to be.

‘This had better not be my lovely wife,’ he said as he answered. I was beside myself with curiosity, but O’s face told me only that it was bad news – his jaw tense. ‘Shit, he wants to talk to you,’ he finally said, handing the phone over to me.

‘O and I go a long way back. Tell him Lord Thompson wants to see you. Young man, I promise not to waste your time,’ an old voice said before the line went dead.

‘This cannot be good,’ O said as he put out his joint and dabbed his eyes with cold water, ‘but we have to go. Shit, I will have to do the dishes later.’

Down time hadn’t been too bad, all things considered – it was still only one pm.

We drove away from Nairobi and headed into the farmlands. Outside of the city the roads were just as bad – if not worse – and just as in Nairobi the hawkers crowded around us at each massive pothole trying to sell us cigarettes, roasted corn and newspapers that screamed
The Case of the Dead White Girl: American Detective in Kenya
.

‘Imagine this,’ O said, trying to explain what Lord Thompson was like, ‘what if a white slave owner convinced himself he was a slave and then tried to live like one?’

‘You mean he became an abolitionist?’ I asked.

‘No, everything remains the same except that he actually lives like a slave,’ he said as if I was missing the most obvious point in the world.

‘He becomes a slave by choice?’

O finally gave up. ‘No, man. You know what, let’s just get there,’ he said, the frustration in his voice plain. ‘You have to see this shit for yourself. Then you will understand.’

After an hour of driving the road turned abruptly into a bumpy dirt track and almost immediately the landscape
also changed. Where, before, the vegetation had been a thick luscious green, here, long dry grass that looked ready for a fire was interspersed with short dusty thickets of thirsty looking trees.

Thirty or so minutes later we turned off the main road onto another, smaller dirt track and not long after that the scenery changed once again. After the desolation we had just driven through I wasn’t prepared for the plush oasis that suddenly surrounded me. The trees were green, the vegetation once again lush and the well-maintained road lined with rose bushes, their red blooms in stark contrast to the white stones that were spaced out between them. Even more incredible was that the road continued for close to three miles.

‘Camouflage …’ O muttered to himself. ‘This is how they hide. You would never think to look for them here.’

‘Who?’

‘The rich whites,’ O answered. ‘They prefer to remain invisible, so they create islands like this one.’

‘Why?’

‘History, man, history. It’s the deal. After colonialism, they were supposed to remain invisible, and we were supposed to forget what they did,’ O said bitterly. ‘So they hide out in places like this.’

I didn’t quite understand what he meant and didn’t have time to ask – we had arrived at the gate.

After O had shown his badge to the guards on the gate we were allowed to make our way along the final few hundred metres of what was now a tarmacked road to emerge in front of what was undoubtedly the most gratuitously sized house I had ever seen – it wasn’t a house, it was a presidential palace.
How could a man who lived like a slave live in a house like this? O had been right: I had to see for myself.

Having parked O’s battered Land Rover on the expanse of gravel in front of the house we made our way up the red-carpeted stairs, many of them, until we got to the enormous front door. Once there O pulled a rope which rang what sounded like a giant bell somewhere deep inside the house, and moments later two Africans dressed in white shirts and shorts rolled back the huge oak doors.

We were led through spacious, elegant rooms – the kind I had only seen in catalogues (not even Maple Bluff compared) – before, finally, we came to a room that had two white guards in front it – AK-47s, full battle regalia, you name it.

‘South African mercenaries,’ O whispered.

They looked every bit the cliché: muscled, bearded and tattooed – they could have been cardboard cut-outs. I hated them on sight.

O reached into his shoulder holster and gave them his piece. I followed suit, and satisfied that we had been relieved of our weapons they opened the huge door to a darkened room. The first thing that hit me was the smell. The room reeked of human decay: of unwashed feet, rotting teeth and death – BQ’s morgue smelled like a wedding party compared to the stench that filled the room. But before I could say anything O had already stepped forward into the gloom and there was nothing I could do but follow.

As the mercenaries closed the doors behind us, and the little light it had provided was snuffed out, darkness reclaimed the room. I heard shuffling feet and curtains being drawn, then more shuffling and more curtains opening until
the room was filled with late-afternoon sunlight. Then, from the sudden blaze of light, a sickly, balding, Gandhi-like figure wrapped in a dirty white sheet emerged, poured some water into a beaten-up pot and placed it on the wood burner that sat incongruously in the middle of the dilapidated room. Now this is some weird shit, I thought. At last I could see what O had been trying to tell me earlier – Lord Thompson lived like an African, or more precisely he lived the stereotype of the African. The slave-master lived like a slave but in his mansion. He had converted his bedroom into slave quarters.

The water in the pot came to a boil almost immediately, and I watched as Lord Thompson threw in some tea leaves and sugar from two huge sacks next to the stove. A couple of minutes later he reached into a churn next to the wood burner and came out with a cup of milk that he added to the pot.