Ahmed's Revenge (11 page)

As I was coming out of the farthest room I heard Detective Mubia calling me from the porch. “Mama,” he said, “the gentlemen have prepared our meal.” I tried to call him into the dormitory, to show him what I'd found, but when he didn't come I took the
panga
and stepped outside again, the blade flashing in the morning light. I told the detective about Kamau's room and then about the visit I had had nearly twenty-four hours before, from Kamau and his new boss, that hateful man in the business suit. I told him that the man had mentioned him, going so far as to call him a fool.

“That is the man whose voice I know,” the detective said. “I knew it yesterday, but I could not speak his name. It is a city name, an unspeakable name, and one he has taken to make his own father angry.”

Yesterday when I asked Detective Mubia to tell me what he knew he had ignored me, but I felt sure he'd tell me everything now. When I asked him, however, he would only say, “Come, let us go inside and eat. The key to everything is not out here.”

There was a sense of forced heartiness at breakfast. My father was expansive, uninterested in talking about his night with the bandits but wanting to tell stories of the old days, about the Tsavo game reserve and the years when he was a warden there. The rest of us listened politely. Detective Mubia, who hadn't heard the stories before, really did seem engaged, and since I couldn't get the detective to tell me anything, I found myself trying to gain some sense of what was going on now by what my father said about the past.

“Daddy's real love was elephants, as you no doubt gathered from his book,” I said. “He had a dedicated concern for their well-being, he always tried to keep them out of harm's way.”

It was a blatant comment, but no matter how I hinted, I couldn't move my father to mention poaching, nor could I make Detective Mubia say that other man's name. So when Dr Zir started to clear the table, I stared into my father's sallow eyes. If he knew what was going on, I wanted him to tell me now, but I was also strangely reluctant to ask. It seemed oddly necessary that my father volunteer the information, that the words come freely without my insisting on them. It was as if only that could save the relationship between us once the truth was known. I sat a little farther back and looked at the detective too. The answers I wanted were brewing inside both these men, but they wouldn't come out until the brewing was done.

I'd intended to use the time after breakfast to go out and bury Jules's arm, but we all somehow went back into the office instead. The office was small, intended by the original owner to be another bedroom, I think, and since Jules and I often used it together, there were two desks in there. There was a couch under the window, and Dr Zir and Detective Mubia sat on that. My father stayed in the hallway outside. I opened the file cabinet next to the desk, pulling both drawers all the way out.

“Julius was fastidious,” I said. “If he has anything written down, anything that will help us, it will be here.”

I bent over the drawer and began looking through the files. Everything before me seemed to start with the letter C There were notes on coffee sales, notes on wages paid and owed, receipts from a dozen Nairobi businesses for supplies, and lists of orders made.

I slammed the first drawer shut and began taking files out of the second, but this drawer contained coffee files too, and where the files ended, Jules's collection of maps began. Jules had been a superb and enthusiastic cartographer, it was his hobby, and so we had hand-made maps for much of the country, everywhere we had ever gone. Jules's maps were drawn with such detail that they always included the smallest roads. I pulled out the first map, of the Samburu region to the north and of the Rendille area around Marsabit. Jules often drew animals on his maps, small depictions of the game that was there, and at Marsabit he had drawn a wonderful likeness of Ahmed, the government-protected tusker who was always in the news these days. “Look,” I told the two men, “Jules was an artist. See what he could draw.”

I had begun to cry again, they could hear it in my voice, but neither man said anything. Detective Mubia was examining the frayed front of his lapel, and when I looked at Dr Zir he went out of the office and came back with his doctor's bag. “Let me give you something, Nora dear,” he said. “Something mild will help to get you through the rest of today, something for tomorrow too.”

Dr Zir's watery eyes were shining at me. He held a pill box, no doubt containing sedatives, which would let me understand my father better if I took them, but I grabbed the doctor's hand and firmly pushed the pill box away. He had a glass of water with him, and he surprised me by shrugging and taking a pill himself, quickly washing it down. And after that we all felt calm.

I was putting Jules's map back in the file cabinet when another file, behind where the maps were, drew my attention. It was an ordinary manila folder with a clipped-on label. “Elephants of Tsavo and Other Lands” is what the label said.

“Hold on. What's this?”

“Elephants of Tsavo,” Dr Zir read. “How nice. He's managed to remember his father-in-law.”

Inside the file were three thin sheets of paper, each with lists of numbers on them. There was nothing about elephants in the file, and there were no hints as to what the numbers meant. Everything was in Jules's hand, but other than that, nothing meant a thing to me. I showed the file to Detective Mubia, but he couldn't make anything of it either. Dr Zir was starting to stare at us with my father's unfocused eyes when my father himself appeared at the door.

“That would be our code,” he calmly said. “No one knows it but Julius and me.”

Detective Mubia got up and my father sat down, taking the three sheets of paper from my hand. “We were in very deep, Nora,” he said, “over our heads by a mile.”

I had the file folder on my lap and I gave it to him quickly. “Look, Daddy,” I said. “What do these numbers mean? Nothing matters except that you tell me what's happening now. That way we can find our way out.”

My father's face was smooth, making me fear he might leave us again, so I tried to speak firmly. “Tell me now, Daddy, and try to be clear.”

Detective Mubia leaned forward.

“I was never a crooked man,” my father said. “I never took a bribe and I never stood still for poachers. I was the guardian of the elephants, all during those years.”

“I know you were, Daddy,” I said, “but what do the numbers signify?”

I knew I was pushing too hard when my father turned around in his seat, looking at the office door. Detective Mubia, however, helped me by reaching over and putting a thin finger on the first number on page one. “What does this one mean?” he asked. “Only this one, nothing more.”

The number was 8773-3-1-21 1ka and my father hardly glanced at it before saying, “That was our first shipment. Eight July 1973.”

“What does the second three mean?” Detective Mubia asked.

“That's the number,” said my father. “That first time there were only three.”

I hated to interrupt, but asked the question anyway. “Three what, Daddy? Three tusks? Does it mean you smuggled only three tusks that time?”

To impeach my father so readily and in front of the others was exactly what, at breakfast, I had told myself I wouldn't do, but that was what he was saying, wasn't it, that he and Jules had been smuggling ivory out of the country for over a year by that time?

My father was quiet for a moment but then he said, “Yes, three tusks,” and when Detective Mubia asked him about the number one he said that it meant England. Three tusks were shipped from Kenya to England on the eighth of July, last year.

I was sick at heart but made him say that what remained was a flight number and an airline. And after we understood that, their rudimentary code was so easy to break that it made me even madder. Any fool could figure it out. Dr Zir very smartly took my father back into the other room, and Detective Mubia and I pored over the lists, failing to understand almost nothing, and discovering that my husband and father, no doubt in connection with the man who had come to my house with Kamau, had smuggled nearly one thousand elephant tusks out of Kenya, all on commercial airlines, to a half dozen cities around the world. By cross-checking the lists with another that we found in the coffee files we discovered that the tusks had left the country in burlap bags of beans.
One sip and you will know
. And the date of the last entry was a month before the date of Jules's death, or only a fortnight before I saw him sitting in that Loita Street room.

I was seething with anger, furious with both men, but since Jules was already dead, it was my father that I wanted to kill. And he was in the other room, with the doped-up Dr Zir, having another cup of coffee, sitting among the stacks of cold toast and the dried-out eggs.

“What a couple of bastards,” I told Detective Mubia. “What consummate shits both those men are!”

The detective's face got stiff at the language I used, and for a moment I was mad at him, too. Everyone was cryptic, even this odd man. But though I have said I was furious with my father, that was wrong. Furious is hot, and what I felt was cold at its heart, something solid, like a cancer unveiled in a routine exam, and the fact that he volunteered the information, an act that I had thought would save us, meant nothing. This is why I had let my father stay out all night long, without once going into the coffee to call his name. My analogy with the watch battery had been right! Think of it, both of the men in my life weren't what they had appeared to be. And it was too late for me to deal with it in any redeeming way at all.

My father and Dr Zir were waiting in the living room. My father was sitting on the couch where Detective Mubia had slept, and Dr Zir was pacing back and forth past the open front door. My father had his hand up, and when I came in he began talking right away. “It isn't what you think, Nora, Julius and I weren't really smuggling elephant tusks. It was all a joke, don't you see. It only got a little out of hand.”

I still had the file with me so I opened it again and pointed at the final entry. “Don't lie, Dad,” I said. “I saw him. In a house on Loita Street. There were tusks all around him on the fucking floor.”

Jules had taught me the power of such adjectives as “fucking,” but I had never used them in my father's presence before. All he could manage to say, however, was “Why didn't you tell me?” and that made me shout.

“Don't be such a coward, Dad! Who's the man behind Julius's murder? Who kept you out all night? Who came here yesterday with Kamau, all dressed up in his London suit? I want the bastard's name!”

If my father had answered stupidly again I might have struck him, but my fury seemed to bring him back to life. His adrenaline was up too, giving him an odd kind of lucidity.

“Did he threaten you?” he wanted to know.

“He was businesslike,” I answered. “What is his name?”

“I don't know,” he said, and then he said, “If Kamau was with him, it was probably Mr Smith.”

“Mr Smith? He was Kenyan, Daddy, he was Kikuyu, I'm sure.”

My father didn't answer that but Detective Mubia said, “You are right, he is Kikuyu. Mr Smith is the awful name. When his activities put him on the criminal side he is called Smith because it creates a distance from his family and because his crimes are often committed abroad.”

“That's him,” said my father. “He's the devil responsible for everything, the rat. It wasn't Julius and it wasn't me. We didn't do anything wrong.”

“He says he wants his property back. He's giving me a week. After the week is up I think he'll try to harm us.” This time I spoke slowly, using my coldest voice, but I couldn't make it last.

“I'm going outside now, Daddy,” I said. “And I want you and Dr Zir to get ready to travel back to town. When we get to Nairobi we'll iron everything out and get you back to England, where you belong.”

I thanked Detective Mubia for what he had done, for bringing Jules's arm, macabre as it was, but particularly for sticking around to help, and for finally telling me that the voice on the tape recorder was that of a known criminal man. And after that I went out to the Land Rover and collected the wooden box. It was bigger than Jules's arm, twice as wide and nearly half again as long.

We had left two shovels out overnight, so when I got to the grave I put the box down on top of it and began to dig again, a short distance away. I think I intended to dig this second hole so that it would do justice to the first, but as I began to sweat I let my anger rise again. I had loved Julius Grant better than he had loved me, that was the truth of the matter, though I would never have believed it when he was alive. When he was alive I would have bet my whole life on the proposition of Julius Grant's love. When he was alive I knew that he would not forsake me, that betrayal was impossible, that he would always be by my side. I had been fierce in my love, I was its defender and protector. And now I was discovering the hollowness of what I'd been protecting, too late to do anything but bury my husband.

I wept as I dug, and slowly, instead of digging well, I began to dig a grave that went straight down, a grave that was narrow and deep and that echoed Dr Zir's joke of the night before. I dug the grave as deep as I could, and as I pulled the shovel out, dry soil flying away, I let my anger boil until soon I was stabbing the earth, plunging that shovel into the heart of it, exhausting myself. I tried four or five times for a last good stab, a last bit of earth lifted from that hole, but finally I collapsed onto the ground, too tired to dig anymore, too tired to feel anything at all.

I stayed that way for a time, numbed by everything, but work on the farm had accustomed me to recover quickly from physical exhaustion, and I got my wind back sooner than I wanted to. I opened my eyes and looked along the ground. As it happened, I was facing the edge of the hill, and as it happened also, I could see the body of that lethargic snake again, that unhungry python, the sight of which yesterday's digging was preventing from being a surprise.