So he repeated the lie he had used to encourage the coward Paul Fisher: “You still need me. For the transfer.” He raised his hands and tickled the air with his fingers. “My prints.”
But nothing changed in Kwambai’s face.
“Take it out, then,” said Sam.
“What?”
“The gun. Take it out and do what you have to do. I personally don’t think you can. Not here in your own house. Not with your own hands. And how would you explain it to Nabil? He wants me. Like you, he wants the money. He-” Sam stopped himself because he recognized that he was rambling. Panic was starting to overcome him.
Dutifully, though, Kwambai removed a revolver from his pocket and placed it on the table, pointing it at Sam much the way Sam had pointed the Beretta at Paul Fisher. Unlike the Beretta, this was an old gun, a World War II model Colt.45. Kwambai’s eyes were red around the edges. “I like you, Sam. I really do.”
“But not that much.”
“No,” Kwambai said as he lifted the pistol and shot three times before he could think through what he was doing.
BENJAMIN
Benjamin had lived most of his life making snap decisions and only afterward deciding whether or not they’d been correct. Intuition had been his primary guide. Even the occasional services he performed for the Americans and the Brits had begun that way. So all afternoon, as he tracked down a friend who would be willing to drive Paul Fisher to the border, he had wrestled with it, weighing Fisher’s life against the comforts of his family. If the Americans cut him off, George would probably not get to football camp this year; Elinah’s confirmation party would be more modest than planned; and Murugi, his long-suffering yet intractable wife, would start questioning the shift in the monthly budget. Was one stranger’s life worth it?
It wasn’t until the trip back to the hotel in his friend’s Toyota pickup that he really convinced himself that he’d done right. We’re all employed by someone, he told himself philosophically, but in the end it’s self-employment that motivates us. The sentence charmed him, provoking a mysterious, proud smile on his lips, and that only made it more disappointing when he arrived at the hotel and learned that it had all been for nothing.
His first clue was Chief Japhet Obure in the lobby, talking with the hotel manager and the bartender. The local police chief rolled his eyes at the sight of Benjamin. “Kidnapped American, and then you appear, Ben. Why am I not surprised?”
“You know me, Japhi. I can smell scandal a mile away.”
Benjamin’s disappointment was breathtakingly vast, bigger than he would have imagined. He hadn’t known Paul Fisher. Had he liked him? Not really. He had liked Sam, but not the feeble man who affected coldness to overcome an obvious cowardice. And it wasn’t as if Paul Fisher had been an innocent; none of the connected Americans who wandered into his country were. But his disappearance hurt just the same.
“Looks like he hadn’t even unpacked,” Japhet said once they were both in his room.
Benjamin, by the door, watched the chief touch the wrinkled bedspread and the dusty bedside table. But what the chief didn’t notice was the empty space, just beside the luggage stand, where the briefcase had been. As Japhet opened closets and drawers, Benjamin watched over his shoulder, but the all-important case wasn’t there. Why hadn’t Benjamin taken it with him when he’d left?
He knew the answer, but it was so banal as to be embarrassing. He, like anyone, didn’t want to run around town carrying a bomb.
Once everything had been brushed for prints, a long line of witnesses interviewed, and darkness had fallen, Chief Obure invited him out for a drink. Benjamin called Murugi and told her he’d be late. “Because of the kidnapped American?” It was already making the news.
By nine he and Japhet were sitting at a sidewalk café, drinking cold bottles of Tusker and eyeing a trio of twelve-year-old boys across the road sucking on plastic bags of glue.
“Breaks my heart to see that,” said Japhet.
“Then you should be dead sixty times over by now,” Benjamin answered as his cell phone rang a monotone sound. Simultaneously, Japhet’s played a recent disco hit.
A house northeast of the city, not so far from the United Nations compound in Runda Estate, had been demolished by an explosion. Benjamin knew the house, and back when Daniel Kwambai had still been in the government’s favor he’d even visited it. Still, the fact that the bomb had ended up in one of Kwambai’s houses was a surprise.
“Time for a field trip,” Japhet said when they’d both hung up.
It took them forty minutes to reach Runda Estate and head farther north, where they followed the tower of smoke down to the inferno on the hill. The firefighters had left to collect more water, and Pili, one of Benjamin’s assistants, was standing in the long front yard, staring at the flames. He was soaked through with sweat.
“The explosion came from inside. That’s what the fire chief says.”
“What else would they expect?” asked Japhet.
Since his boss didn’t reply, Pili said, “Car bomb.”
“Right, right.”
Both Pili and Japhet watched as Benjamin approached the burning house on his own. He stopped where the temperature rose dramatically, then began to perspire visibly, his shirt blackening down the center and spreading outward.
From behind, he heard Japhet’s voice: “What’re you thinking, Ben?”
“Just that it’s beautiful,” he answered, because that was true. Flames did not sit still. They buckled and wove and snapped and rose so that you could never hold their true form. Perhaps they had no true form. Wood popped and something deep inside the inferno exploded.
“Do you know what’s going on here, Ben?”
The wailing fire truck was returning, full of water. Farther out, headlights moved down the long road toward them. That would be absolutely everyone-government representatives, religious leaders, the Americans, the United Nations, the press.
He took Japhet’s arm and walked him toward his car. “Come on. I’ll buy you a drink wherever you like.”
“A rare and wonderful offer,” Japhet said. “You steal something?”
“I’ve earned every cent I have,” he answered, twirling keys around his finger. “I just feel like forgetting.”
“This?”
“If I forget it, maybe it’ll just go away,” Benjamin said, smiling pleasantly as he got in and started the car. In no time at all, they had passed the incoming traffic and made it over the hills and back into the city. It was as if the burning house had never been. Despite the sweltering heat, Benjamin had even stopped sweating.
Otto Penzler
