Ahmed's Revenge (28 page)

Ralph believed that this crime could only have been committed by Mr Smith, so I didn't correct him. I don't think I ever thought that the snake had eaten Jules's arm, since I knew that pythons liked living things, but as I stared at it, at my husband's humerus and the two twisting bones of his forearm, at the intricate carpals of his wrist and the no-longer-fat fingers of his hand, I began to realise how saturated my mind had been with images of that arm departing, of that wriggling Christian symbol, of the horrible thing I'd done. It had been my own greatest sin, casting that arm away, and now our farm was giving it back to me, clean as the coffin full of contraband. I'd seen dozens of kills and hundreds of kill sites, but I don't remember ever seeing one where the bones were left attached. Yet here was the missing part of my husband, with not even a finger gone. Despite all else that had happened, so far as I was concerned this was singular evidence of order and wonder in the world. I bent down and touched the arm, and then I picked it up. And though the wedding ring now had a hugely unnecessary circumference, it got hung up on a knuckle bone and stayed on.

“An animal must have eaten what was left of his flesh,” I said, “something small and solitary, without others to feed.”

“What will you do with it?” Ralph asked. “Where are you taking it now?”

I was moving carefully and didn't want to speak. The arm had been returned to me whole, but I wasn't at all confident it would stay that way, so I only whispered, “Please, Ralph, go into the house. Find something to put it in. Hurry.”

Ralph left right away, visibly glad to have a practical job to do, and when I got to the excavated box I sat down on it, laying Jules's arm across the folds of my skirt. His humerus was up against my right hip bone, the back of his hand resting on my left knee, his fingers curled toward the sky. I could hear Ralph looking through the house and I wanted to call out where the empty boxes were, but I feared if I did so, all of Jules's bones would fall from my lap, detaching themselves and landing with such randomness that I'd never be able to put them back together again. Finding Jules's arm had been shocking, but I hadn't been fearful when picking it up. Now, however, it was impossibly difficult to touch that wedding ring, to unhook it from the knuckle where it still was wedged.

“I am your wife, Julius,” I said out loud. “Should I leave that ring with you or take it as my own?”

The nearby birds seemed to stop singing when I spoke, and when next I looked down at the arm in my lap I saw that my right hand was reaching over and taking the wedding ring away, with no fanfare and no decisive thought. I put the ring on my own ring finger, where it surrounded my own wedding ring and settled down.

Ralph took a long time, but when he finally came back he had a wooden box with him, a well-made affair that had once held four bottles of good French wine and still had the coat of arms of the winery embossed on its side. The wine had been a gift from Jules on our first wedding anniversary, but because we'd been immersed in the work of the farm at the time we had put the wine away and hadn't remembered it until our first orchard fire, when first we worried the animals with our outlandish ways. The box was perfect. It contained the original straw that had padded the wine, and it was wide enough and long enough to contain my husband's arm.

Ralph saw the arm across my lap. He saw the transferred ring and said, “I am sorry I took so long.”

The box was nailed shut, but its lid came off easily under the even pressure of Ralph's hands. And when he held it out to me I lifted Jules's fingers from my knee, moving the whole thing to the waiting straw. It was a grand feeling, like lifting a scar from my soul, but all I could think to say was “Now at least I'll have something to display at his wake on Saturday. When our friends and neighbours come, now they can pay tribute to his arm.”

After the box was closed I apologised to Ralph for my self-absorption. “Will you continue helping me?” I asked. “Will you take the crowbar and force the lid off this larger box as well?”

Ralph said he was glad to have work to do, so I got up and put the small box, the only true coffin left in my domain, over on a bit of clean ground. I think I expected a long moment of exertion, as the lid to the contraband box tried to keep itself down, but in fact this lid behaved much like the one on the wine box. Its nails screeched a moment; then they gave way with so little work that I imagined Ralph could have opened it, also, with his hands. As soon as the lid was loose Ralph let it fall to the other side, down into the hole from which it came.

What I expected was dozens of tusks, a cornucopia, an obscene array, but what I got was harder to deal with than Jules's arm had been. There were just two tusks in the box, longer than the bed of my lorry, old and scarred and impossibly grand, with the circumference, at their thickest spot, of a young elephant's leg. These were the largest and most glorious tusks I had ever seen. They were unmatchable, the tusks of a lifetime, and my first thought, once I could think at all, was that there was nothing in the box to pad them, no straw, as in the wine box, and no proper velvet cushions to signify their beauty and their worth.

I leaned against the box but for the longest time I couldn't make myself understand. I tried to remember Jules's letter, which Mr Smith had taken away. In the letter Jules said that what he wanted to do was hurt the man who had most hurt him, and if these tusks belonged to Mr Smith, then he had certainly done that, though in Mr Smith's father's kitchen I had seen fourscore smaller tusks with my own sharp eyes.

I put my hand inside the box and touched the tusk nearest me, and finally I saw that these giant wonders had not been buried alone. Sitting between the tusks, in the oval enclosure made by their natural bend, was the skeletal construction of a small and perfect elephant, a model eight inches high. It was like something one might use in an anatomy class or an expensive gift that a wealthy parent might buy for her child, and it had a single tusk coming out of the right side of its small skull. The tiny elephant's tusk was the same colour as the two mammoth ones that surrounded it, with identical markings that made it look old, and as I looked at it I felt my heart go upside-down. In the left pocket of my skirt my hand touched the missing piece that would make the puzzle whole, my talisman all these days, the crutch I'd leaned upon in such a wide variety of ways.

“These are Ahmed's tusks,” I said.

I walked around to the far side of the box and took my own tusk from its warm and lonely bed. There was a cavity in the left side of the tiny elephant's skull, and when I pushed my own tusk into it, the fit was fine, with no resistance and no room to spare. It was like putting a key into a lock, I suppose, for as I placed it there, another door opened inside me and understanding finally flooded in. Mr Smith had stolen Ahmed's tusks and replaced them with acrylic models he had made, that had been his intention all along. It was the theft of a lifetime, a grand and dazzling plan, but Detective Mubia had found out about it and immediately told his dad—that was the detective's second job, after all. And just when Mr N'chele's outrage was at its height, just when he'd demanded that his son return the tusks or he himself would go to the law, Jules had stolen them. It was an unproven deduction, perhaps, but I knew in my bones that I was right.

I don't know how long I stood there, but even when I heard the lorry engine cough and realised that Ralph was bringing it a few feet closer, I couldn't take my eyes away. My own tusk seemed happy now, absurd as that may sound, and I noticed that the chipped side of its tip, that flattened part that had worked for me so well, was mirrored perfectly by the huge tusk that rested at my side.

Ralph got out of the lorry and fixed the hoisting arm in place and dropped the lorry's rear gate. And when he got to the box, when he looked in and once again saw the off-white expanse and the decades' worth of scars, his face grew soft.

“How beautiful they are,” he said. “How great he must have been when he was alive.”

“Do they look real to you, Ralph?” I asked. “Do they look manufactured at all?”

“Oh, they are real,” he said. “Can you imagine the strength it must have taken to carry them around? These are teeth, Nora, do you understand that? Incisors on the rampage, that's what they are. Ahmed was Africa's glory, Africa's past retold.”

“Let's load them as they are,” I said, “box and all. Let's put them on the lorry and take them back to town.”

It was nearly two o'clock when I said that and by the time the work was done it was four. Ralph and I didn't speak again as I locked up the house and fixed things around the farm. We didn't speak until after we had passed through Narok, until after we had stopped at the petrol station to hire some more guards, until we were on the road again and noticed that there was trouble ahead, that there was a police vehicle waving at everyone and telling them to pull over to the side. This wasn't a tactic of Mr Smith's, as I feared at first, but a bad accident. It was a surprise, therefore, and a small pleasure to realise that when the policemen saw us they waved us through. They removed their hats and were quiet, taking a moment to ignore those dying around them, in order to salute in honour of someone who had died before.

The National Museum, where Miro's father worked as an assistant curator, had been closed for the past two months, but there were always long queues at the ticket windows. Ahmed the Elephant had recently died and the people interested in buying tickets to see his tusks and skeletal remains were legion. Schoolchildren would be coming by the busload, office workers in Nairobi would be given time off, and village leaders from as far away as Lake Victoria wrote, asking whether entrance fees could be waived for the children of the poor. All this was in anticipation of the exhibition's opening, which was still a few days away.

Without question the most remarkable public event of the year was the death of Ahmed, who'd been under twenty-four-hour guard during the entire first half of the decade. The guards had been posted by presidential decree as a protection against poachers, a situation that allowed Ahmed to die of natural causes—at a game reserve in Marsabit, way up north—but that greatly restricted his freedom and his movement. If Ahmed's tusks were Africa's glory, as Ralph had said, then there was irony in the last four years of Ahmed's life. He had been a prisoner of his own grandeur and his age, just like the continent. And a second irony was that although his life had been protected, people weren't prepared for his death. Ahmed's carcass was left in the sun too long, and when he was finally brought to a taxidermist in Nairobi he was peppered with scavenger bites, and the initial stages of rot had set in. His hide was beyond saving but the taxidermist prepared him for exhibit anyway, building a skeletal elephant ten feet high, with his stunning tusks swooping toward the ground. It was an exhibit that Jules and I had looked forward to. We read about it in the papers and told each other that once the crowds died down we'd go.

And now, as Ralph and I worked our way into Nairobi after dark, I understood that we had seen a part of the exhibition without paying our fees. Mr Smith must have broken into the taxidermist's and switched the tusks, and that, of course, meant that what Ahmed himself now wore, what the schoolchildren and lunchtime visitors and village elders would soon line up to see, were Mr Smith's acrylic replicas, the coup of his entire criminal life, his extraordinary and mammoth duplicity.

To steal Ahmed's tusks was everything to Mr Smith, I saw that now. He didn't care about making smaller tusks or fooling the tusk-buying world—that had been a product of the chance he'd seen to punish my dad. Those were prototypes, the tusks Jules and my father had been shown, and my little tusk, the one I'd been transferring from pocket to belt, my little phallic partner during this endless week and a half, was the smallest one. It was an almost perfect plan. The value of Ahmed's authentic tusks, to an Arab king or among rich North Americans or Japanese, was incalculable, for they were the purest representation of the capitalist collector's rallying call: one of a kind. They were the largest and most famous elephant tusks in the world, and they had taken sixty-five years to grow.

How furious Jules must have been when he discovered the truth, how he must have raged! Now that I understood the enormity and sophistication of Mr Smith's plan, now that I could believe completely in Jules's surprise, I could also finally believe what he said in his letter, that he hadn't told me because he'd been embarrassed beyond speech of any kind, able to focus only on the idea of turning things around. And the real truth must have come to him very late, at just about the time I saw him in Mr N'chele's kitchen that night.

I guess I felt some relief at knowing everything, but what should I do now? What could I do with Ahmed's actual tusks, and how was I to deal Mr Smith a final blow?

I offered to drop Ralph at his office, but he said he'd see me safely home. And on impulse, when I got to Dr Zir's gate, I turned in there. Who knew, Mr Smith might be in my father's drive right now, waiting to hijack my leverage away.

Dr Zir's lights were on but he didn't open the door when I sounded my horn, so I knew that my father was there with him, that chess had prevented Dr Zir's hospitable nature from bringing him outside. Dr Zir's dogs greeted us, barking and jumping up as we got out of the lorry, but Ralph had the wine box in his hands, and when the two dogs sniffed it they immediately settled down.

“My father's house is up there,” I told Ralph. “It's a brief walk through the valley, a short drive up the road.”

When we got to Dr Zir's door I said, “Open it.” I was speaking under my breath, to a vision of the slow-moving doctor inside, but Ralph thought I was talking to him and reached for the latch, stepping back again as the door swung wide. Dr Zir's house was larger than my dad's, but we could see the two men right away, in the middle of the living room, seated at the chess-board and staring down.