The house was small, but no one suggested that anyone go out to the dormitory to sleep. My father and Dr Zir slept together in the little guest room that the detective had used before, and Detective Mubia, who spent most of the night watching animals from the porch, took charge of the living-room couch.
In the morning I was awakened by the sounds of breakfast being made, and when I dressed and came out of my room I saw that both my father and Dr Zir were wearing aprons and cracking eggs into a big bowl. They’d cracked a dozen eggs for the four of us, and there was a raft of crisp bacon already on the kitchen table, a stack of toast so high that I thought it would surely fall over. I could see that Detective Mubia was still on the living-room couch, his red suit still on his body, his shoes beside him on the floor.
My father and Dr Zir had been arguing about the eggs, but when I came out they turned and presented a unified smile. Detective Mubia moved his feet out of sight, then came up standing, slipping into his shoes and pressing down the sides of his suit as he walked across the floor.
“Did our leopard appear?” I asked. “Did you see him last night?”
“He came like a ghost,” the detective said. “He had a pure white front and a tail that bobbed in back of him as if it was held up by a wire.”
I didn’t remember cleaning up very well, but my kitchen looked orderly again, and I asked Dr Zir how long they’d been awake.
“With the sun, dear,” he said, “with the cock’s crow, but quiet as mice until just now.”
It was hard to guess from his appearance that Dr Zir was a medical man. He had a naturally sympathetic face, but otherwise he was ugly. He had small eyes with dark circles under them, and a big nose, a narrow mouth, and a weak jaw. He had incongruous features but they somehow worked to form a congruous whole.
“After breakfast we need to settle down and discover a few things,” I said. I was speaking to my father, but he was putting plates on the table and didn’t hear, so I went into the office and looked at the desk and files, all of them still locked and undisturbed. Through the window I could see the Land Rover, and when I remembered that another burial duty remained, I went back through the living room and walked outside, past the car and onto the porch of the workers’ dormitory. This building was larger than our house and contained eight rooms, four to each side of a single hallway. It was a dreary place, dark at any time of day, but since we never had more than eight regular farmhands, it was decent housing, usually one person to a room. There was a shower in the building and a toilet out back. Some of our workers did occasionally bring their families to live with them in these rooms, but for the most part they lived alone. We paid them well, and when we needed extra pickers we hired them from the pool of men and women who were always available, down at the petrol station in Narok.
The first room to the right of the main dormitory door was Kamau’s. It was dreadful to realize that Kamau had been working against us for who knows how long, that he no doubt shot Jules on purpose that night. When I tried the door to his room I assumed it would be locked, but it swung open quickly, startling me.
“Hello,” I said.
Kamau’s room hadn’t been cleaned out. His bed still had blankets on it, and his table, which he’d placed below the room’s only window, held a stack of letters, Nairobi postmarks on most of them, the rest from western Kenya. The letters appeared to be personal. The one I opened was written in Kiswahili and asked Kamau for money, saying that the money should come more regularly, as it always had before. Kamau had his responsibilities, the letter said, and he wasn’t meeting them. It was a stern letter, unfriendly and unsigned, and written in what I took to be a woman’s hand.
I put the letter back in its envelope and was about to open another when the gleaming edge of Kamau’s panga caught my eye. This panga was Kamau’s baton, his swagger stick; he was never without it when he walked around the farm. It had a well-cared-for blade, and I remembered that Jules used to tease him by saying that though Kamau’s panga was the best and the sharpest on our land, no one had ever seen it do any work. It struck me as strange, then, even under circumstances such as these, that Kamau would go off and leave the panga behind. I checked his closet and his trunk, but besides the letters and the panga, his clothing and other personal possessions were gone. There was a small photograph of a woman and three children hanging next to the panga from a nail on the wall.
I took the panga down, ran my thumb lightly across its blade, and kept it with me when I stepped back out of Kamau’s room. I was as sure as I could be that none of our other workers were involved with Kamau, for as I checked their rooms I noticed that they had been vacated in a much more orderly way. Even their crucifixes were gone from the walls, leaving shadows of crosses in the permanent dust. It was as if they had been ordered out but had been given time to pack. Kamau’s room, on the other hand, contained the disorder of a man who was lost, the disorder of hasty flight and chaos.
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.
I sat up slowly, raising myself to my knees and then, with the help of my shovel, all the way to my feet again. I raised my shovel, at first, I think, to clean up the edges of the hole, to make it better, but with my regained wind my anger came back, and I suddenly turned the shovel around, aimed it at that other grave, and let it come slamming down on the top of the wooden box, easily splitting its lid and exposing Jules’s arm.
I was appalled at what I had done, but not enough to keep my shovel from hitting the box twice again, one time coming in from the left side, next time coming in from the right. This box was padded, built to withstand temperature variations, maybe, but it couldn’t withstand my shovel, and by the time I was done, Jules’s arm had rolled free of the box and was lying next to the freshly dug grave, palm down, fingers curled over the edge of the hole, as if they’d just finished the digging themselves. It was bizarre, and what made me angrier still was that Jules’s wedding ring was there, his fingers fat around it, as if yeast had been used in the embalming, making them rise.
“God damn you, Julius Grant,” I said. This was no automatic expletive like the one I’d used in the house with my dad, but a genuine heartfelt curse. I wanted God to damn him, to send him down through the hole where his arm was already headed and to let him burn in hell.
Insanity sometimes comes in momentary doses, I had learned from observing my father’s wandering mind, and what I did next was along those hereditary lines. I picked up Jules’s arm at the place where his bicep had previously been, and I held it above my head like a hatchet. Then I walked the twenty paces or so over to the lip of the hill and swung his arm down, letting his fat fingers slap that sleeping snake. The snake moved in the grass, turning its head and tail both at the same time, as if it were about to twist around whatever it was that was bothering its middle. The snake’s head was the same size as Jules’s hand, and when it opened its mouth and reached back, I introduced the two of them by casting Jules’s whole arm in the snake’s direction and then leaping out of the way. The snake struck then, catching Jules’s arm above the wrist, and rising up high enough into the air to look for an instant like a cross marking the spot of Jules’s grave, like those shadows in the dust on the dormitory wall. And then the snake was down and gone. Not quickly, the way a smaller snake would go, but not slowly either. It slipped over the edge of the hill and down toward the Great Rift Valley with my husband’s arm. I could see it going, but I didn’t follow it with anything but my eyes.
I was spent by the time I returned to the house. My father was still actively contrite and waiting on the porch with his travelling clothes on. Dr Zir and Detective Mubia had locked all my windows and had shut down the generator and closed the door to the workers’ dormitory. The detective offered to take one of them back to town in his car, but both men said they would go with me in the Land Rover.
I watched the detective leave, knowing I’d see him again, knowing now that he had a great deal more to tell. In Narok I stopped at the petrol station and asked the proprietor to hire security guards on my behalf, stationing them strategically around my farm, twenty-four hours a day. It was a service that the proprietor had performed for us before.
That’s it, the beginning of my story, told with as much skill as I can muster. Maybe it’s been a long beginning, but it hasn’t been a bit longer than it needed to be, considering that it relates not only the events that led to the loss of my husband but those that led to my loss of innocence and the beginning of my interest in revenge as well.
In the next part of the story you’ll find a slightly altered me, one with a clear purpose and a definite agenda in mind. That’s what coming of age will do to you, it will make you sober, it will make you think and grow, it will make you plan.
If you don’t believe me, turn the page.