Black Star Nairobi Read Online Free Page B

for one case would mean that there would be no funding to buy bulletproof vests, or our union would suddenly find itself in the red. It was the same all over.
    Hassan was arguing about jurisdiction with a short American man who I didn’t know and Paul, the U.S. Embassy spokesperson. Paul looked like the stereotypical Aryan male—tall, blond, and square-jawed. Over the years we had had a few encounters, nothing major or memorable, Fourth of July celebrations at the embassy, someone needing a visa, and so on—but I had nevergrown to like him for reasons that, if I was honest, would amount to nothing more than the way he looked.
    “Ishmael—I hope they won’t take our body from us,” O said, as we stared at the crater created by the bomb—it appeared to be about a hundred feet wide.
    “The man was killed here—they need locals—they need people like us who know the back roads,” I guessed.
    “You mean the black roads?” O asked.
    As I looked at the devastation, I was getting increasingly angry. There was something about the American dead that made the bombing feel personal. A part of me felt violated. I wanted to help with the bomb investigation and find the motherfuckers who were responsible. But O and I weren’t bomb experts. We would follow the body. It was what we were good at. Eventually all the threads were bound to connect.
    O was cool—like he had seen everything and very little surprised him. And perhaps in this case it was true.
    “It was much worse in 1998,” he was telling me as we worked our way around what could only be called a crime scene, for lack of a better word.
    “In 1998, it was twelve Americans, all of them with names, against about two hundred nameless Kenyans—collateral damage,” he said with a wave of his hand. “You know, when two elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.”
    O rarely used proverbs unless he was high and feeling lazy, and I did a double take to make sure he wasn’t still stoned.
    “Hey! Hey! Look at this,” O said, pointing at something in the rubble. I leaned in. It was a ball bearing. I saw many more strewn around the site, now that we were looking. I compared it with the one that Kamau had found in our guy’s stomach. I didn’t have to be a bomb expert to know they matched.
    We had something we could use. Beyond Kamau’s hypothesis—this was concrete. It was time to go look for Paul and Hassan.
    Just when we were about to make our way past what had been the patio, I heard it. The look on my face stopped O, and we tried to make out a sound underneath the sirens and the bulldozers and the jackhammers tearing into debris. It was a faint tapping. O rushed away to get help and I started to tap back, walking toward the sound carefully so as not to upset the delicately balanced debris. The tapping got louder, louder, and more urgent until I was almost standing over it. I started digging madly with my bare hands.
    A night watchman, a large man in his fifties still dressed in his heavy raincoat and hat in spite of the heat from the morning sun and the flaring fires, waddled over and started tearing away at the debris with me.
    “I am Detective Ishmael. See anything suspicious? Late-night deliveries? Anything out of the ordinary?” I asked him between heaves of heavy debris.
    “No, night like every night—everything goes smoothly—then—boom!” he answered. I really had to learn Kiswahili. I had been saying that for years now, but always working with O had made things easier. I understood everyday conversation—asking for directions, ordering food—just enough to borrow water, O always said. Before long, between us and the sound, we came to a large slab over what seemed to be a foundation wall.
    “Were you the only one working tonight?” I asked him.
    “Nothing happening at night—so, my friends, the other watchmen deciding to go inside—to kitchen to eat,” he tried to answer but he could not continue. I gathered that they were all dead or