Ahmed's Revenge (21 page)

“It was who I thought it would be,” I told him. “Kamau, our foreman. The man you never met at the farm.”

“I saw you entering the stairway,” Detective Mubia said. “I came along only this far.”

The detective stood and followed us into an adjacent lift, which opened conveniently to take us up. There were several doctors in the lift, men of Dr Zir's era, older and stooped and bald. Next to the starched whiteness of their jackets and the bright black polish of their shoes, Detective Mubia looked even worse than he had on the bench below. He had the look Kamau was supposed to have had the night before.

By the time we got to Ralph's van it was a quarter past one. Because Ralph had parked under a tree, the van's cab wasn't hot, but he opened the doors anyway, then sat inside while the detective tried to tell me what had happened at the Norfolk after I'd gone. He said he had remained at our table to finish his tea, had just, in fact, received more hot water for a second cup, when Mr Smith appeared. Mr Smith demanded to know what I'd said, who the woman with me had been, and how much money we'd offered the detective to come into this thing on our side.

“How much did Mr Smith offer you in turn?” I interrupted to ask. It was a crass kind of question and maybe it was unfair, but my decision by then was to assume the worst in everyone.

Detective Mubia's body had been slumped on that bench in the basement, and he had followed us into the lift in an abject and defeated way, but when he heard my words he filled up again, remembering his natural dignity and expanding into his suit, which made it look better.

“If I am connected to any mortal man outside of my policeman's call,” he said, “it is to N'chele, from whose good seed the evil man has come. The father helped me when I fell on difficult times, but he never asked more than that I monitor the activities of his son, that I tell him of those activities in order that he might correct them before I needed to tell my superiors in the law. So that is what I have done.”

“Yes, and I'll wager you never told your superiors in the law,” I said.

I had liked Detective Mubia from the beginning, but he was the kind of African man for whom I usually had no affinity. His demeanour was too serious, his beliefs too literal, his view of the world too dull. And now, after my second harsh comment, his eyes flashed, even while the anger within them turned the volume of his voice down low.

“Everything in this world is not clear,” he said evenly. “I have been a detective of police for eleven years. My salary is small and it does not grow to meet the increased prices of our goods. I house my family in two rooms at the edge of town. I have six children and must pay their school fees every term and buy their school uniforms and the other necessities of our daily life. When another Kikuyu man says he will see that those school fees are paid if only I allow him the chance to exorcise the devil from his own son, do you think it is God's will that I tell that other Kikuyu man no? Who will make judgements such as those? Maybe he is God's vehicle, God's messenger sent to keep my children strong.”

Detective Mubia had controlled his anger as he spoke—by the end it showed only in the muscles of his jaw. But if what he said was true, if he was not on Smith's payroll but was instead on Mr N'chele's, helping him keep his son in line, then Detective Mubia knew everything. He knew of Jules's long involvement with Mr Smith and he knew of my father's, and he knew what it was that Jules had stolen and hidden away. If what he said was true, in fact, then his value to me was far greater than I imagined before. I softened my own voice and put my hand on his arm.

“How did Kamau present himself last night? And where did the bread knife come from? How did he get killed?”

Detective Mubia spoke as if what he said were memorised. “They bring bread knives right to the tables in that hotel. They bring an entire loaf of bread and let the customers carve it up themselves!” He seemed furious with the hotel's policy, but he continued. “Kamau had come there to speak with Mr Smith, to petition him for money so that he could leave Nairobi, go to his village or somewhere. When Mr Smith dismissed Kamau, he found the bread knife on the table next to us and used it to try to cut some of Mr Smith's evil away.”

“But if Kamau had the bread knife, then why is Smith uninjured and Kamau dead? The reverse would be a better outcome, if you ask me.”

“It is because I did not have my police revolver to calm him down,” the detective said. “My police revolver is under repair, so I stood and splashed my tea in Kamau's face, just as my training told me I should do. I then turned his arm inward and pushed it back from whence it came. I am skilled at disarming, but he puffed his chest out to meet the bread knife and the bread knife went inside. Your foreman killed himself, I think, but the devil gave him the use of my hands. And now I am disgraced. When my superior came, Smith told the story differently, and from this morning I am suspended, without the return of my revolver or the benefit of my pay.”

I looked at Ralph to see what he was thinking, but his face was hollow, his hands on the steering wheel, his eyes staring down.

“We are going into town now,” I told the detective. “Thank you for taking the trouble to find me here. I appreciate knowing the details, the truth of my foreman's death.”

“Now I am suspended without my pay,” the detective repeated. “My revolver is repaired but I cannot retrieve it from the shop.”

“But surely Mr N'chele…He has been your benefactor before.”

I might have gone stupidly on, but a new look on Detective Mubia's face stopped me. Three times now my words had told him how little I understood, how slightly I perceived his dilemma or his mind. Indeed, he spent such a long time staring at me that I thought he would leave without speaking again, but finally he said softly, “Like the school fees of my children, my debt to Mr N'chele has been paid in full. Now it is only Mr Smith whom I must find. Your foreman killed himself using my hands, and I must do battle with the devil for the salvation of my soul.”

He pointed at the faded side of his red Toyota, which was parked nearby. “As you engage yourself in defeating him,” he said, “I will be around.”

Detective Mubia walked away when I got into Ralph's van, and as soon as he could, Ralph put the van in gear and quickly drove down the hospital hill. As usual, I wanted to speak about what we'd just heard, I wanted to go over everything one more time out loud, but Ralph's face was closed, nearly as troubled as Detective Mubia's had been. He drove well enough, but everything about him demanded quiet, and with quiet all around, I finally began to think a little bit more clearly. Detective Mubia was a rigid Christian man. He wasn't a social believer, his sect was not of the charismatic, Sunday drumming, kind. I remembered his comment when I had asked him if he was a believer before—“It is better to believe and know you are mistaken, than to disbelieve and know you are correct,” he had said, but such an answer, with its syntactical appeal and tricky intellectual charm, was not the product of his heart, I knew that now. Detective Mubia was not casual, he had no cynicism, he had no nonchalance. And now he was in a state of pure mortification, as surely as if he were wrapped with barbed wire underneath his shirt; he was not only denied his pistol and his pay, but he was out of favour with his God. I could see it now. At Mr Smith's table and under Mr Smith's evil sky, Detective Mubia had lent my foreman his hands and guided that bread knife not only into Kamau's wayward heart, but also into his own.

Because traffic was light, we got to the restaurant quickly, about fifteen minutes before we were to meet Miro. Ralph parked his van behind another one just like it, but with a different logo on the side. Ralph had been perfectly happy rummaging around inside the mortuary, but now he was morose. The detective had upset him, and I thought that was strange.

Inside the restaurant there were empty tables everywhere, but when a waiter greeted us, Ralph told him that we wanted to sit upstairs, in a section that was normally closed during the day.

“Mama is up there alone,” the waiter said, but Ralph insisted, and we climbed a winding metal staircase and chose a table across the room from the large Italian woman who owned the place. We had to take the chairs down off the table-tops to sit up there. When the woman heard us she welcomed Ralph, waving a big arm and calling out his name. Ralph said hello, but he still had a bad look on his face and when we ordered coffees he finally spoke his mind. “Sometimes we do stupid things for reasons we cannot fathom,” he said, “neither at the time we do them nor afterward, when we try to reflect.”

I thought he was talking about me, that he'd been thinking about my behaviour with Detective Mubia all this time, but Ralph took a piece of folded paper from the inside pocket of his safari jacket and put it on the table between us.

“I think I intended to bring this back to you all along,” he said. “I know I did. I imagined myself showing up with it some night at your home.”

“What is it?” I brightly asked. “What have you got there?”

With Kamau dead and Detective Mubia suspended from his job, I didn't want a melancholy Ralph on my hands, so I used my most cheerful voice. As I touched the edge of the paper, however, my hand and my voice turned cold.

“It is page number six,” Ralph said. “The important missing part of your husband's letter. After we left the circle of singers I found it hung up on a thorn.”

I took the paper from the table and opened it, but I couldn't concentrate on the words. If Ralph had found the missing page of Jules's letter, why hadn't he given it back to me at the time? I remembered his being helpful, searching everywhere, running around. The motivations of men were peculiar, to be sure, but this didn't make sense at all.

Ralph shook his head. “It was a horrible impulse and most unexpected,” he said. “All I know is that it had something to do with our school days, with the way you were then, and with your not recognising me when we happened to meet. Seeing you reminded me of how much I disliked those years, and it occurred to me how little you'd changed. I was invisible to you then, so I guess I thought I'd make your letter disappear now.”

“Did you read this page?” I asked. “Did you learn anything from what it said?” Since there was nobody but the owner in the upper part of the restaurant, I let myself go, this time allowing anger to push my voice up high. Men were bastards, every one. He had kept a page of the letter because it occurred to him how little I'd changed? I was furious with him, but Ralph answered normally, as if I'd asked my questions in a civil way.

“I did read it,” he said. “It was after reading it, and after listening to the detective back there, that I knew I had to give it back now.”

The white border of page six seemed to swell a little when Ralph spoke, so I picked it up and read what it said, while trying to calm down.

…terrible dupes we had been. I don't know where he got the know-how or how he made everything seem so authentic that night, but I discovered only recently that the tusks we'd been smuggling all these months were real. Think of it, Nora, your father and I have been doing what we detested in others, laughing about it and making money. Your father sold the things all over Europe, Nora, at least he did before he had his stroke, and I shipped them out so confidently and so well! And all the time this man was buying tusks off poachers or poaching himself, amazed at what fools, what easy marks we had been.

I feel terrible about everything, Nora, and too ashamed to express it except in this poor way. When I confronted the man, asking him why he needed to involve us in such a scheme, he laughed in my face, said it was a mere byproduct of his real work, and that he'd done it to get even with your dad. He beat us, Nora, took us both so easily in, but I did do something about it, and aside from confessing my stupidity and guilt, I'm writing you now to let you know what I've done. He sometimes kept his tusk supply in an unlikely building, right here in town. I've had easy access to that building for months now, and one recent day I stole the centerpiece to everything he was about, the eye of his storm, and I buried the bounty out on our farm. Now here's the key, told, Nora dear, so that only you will understand. It might seem silly to do it like this, but I really can't come up with a safer way.

Do you get it, Nora? I hope you do.

That was all, and since I didn't have the rest of the letter with me in order to place it properly in context, I folded it again and tucked it away. And when I looked at Ralph I not only understood why he'd felt he had to return the page, but a little about why he'd taken it. Something to do with our school days, Ralph had said. Though Julius Grant was gone, two kinds of men had come a little bit into focus for me that day. Ralph and Detective Mubia, two kinds of men that I'd never understood before.

“My God, Ralph,” I said, “this is all so bloody crazy. What am I supposed to do now?”

“First of all, do you get it?” he asked. “Do you understand what your husband's riddle means?”

I did, without the slightest doubt, and I was about to say so, but right then we heard someone rattling up the metal stairs and in a second Miro came in, grimacing and twisting her mouth and asking why in the world we weren't eating down below.

“This is Ralph N'deru,” I told her. “You know, Ralph Bunche Road. It was his idea, he likes it up here.”

She and Ralph shook hands and Miro sat down. It turned out they had met before too, and while they were remembering when and where, I took a moment to try to think clearly for a second time that day.