‘We would not ask you for that much,’ said a flat-nosed, very black man who had not spoken before. ‘Five hundred shillings would be a good start. It would get him and his family to Mombasa.’
Gaby stopped on the street. The eight men stopped with her and stood in a circle around her. They felt very big, very close. She knew, they knew, it was a scam. But nobody said so.
‘I don’t have that much,’ she lied, twitching her toes in her left boot.
‘That does not matter,’ said Flat Nose. ‘You have traveller’s cheques?’
‘No,’ she lied again. ‘Not on me. Back at the hotel.’
‘A credit card, then. You are a journalist, you will have a credit card. You can get money out of a cash machine. There is one not far. We will take you to it.’
There is a fatal passivity in being conned, Gaby realized. You know it is happening, yet you go along with it, you play it to the end, because it is the only way to make it stop. They know you will pay them their five hundred shillings to be free of them and they will go back to their street corner and tell the same tale to the next mark who comes along asking the way to Tom M’boya Street. It would not have been so bad if they had simply cut the straps of her bag and roared off on a moped. That would have been an opportunity seen and taken in an instant; there would have been nothing personal about it, not like this slow, drawing out of your trust and then gang-raping it.
There was a dispenser she could use. As they had said, it was not far. She fumbled her card out of her bag. A white man in Chinos and a faded denim shirt was coming down the street. She did not want him to see the final sting. He was looking at her. He adjusted her course toward her. He was smiling at her. Beaming.
‘Honey! There you are!’
The stranger swept her off her feet and kissed her hard on the mouth.
‘When you didn’t turn up, I came looking. I know how easy it is to get lost in this town.’ He had an American accent. He seized Gaby’s hand and drew her away from the hustlers. ‘Excuse me, guys, hope you don’t mind, it’s just we’re running a little late.’
He did not let go of Gaby’s hand until they were around two corners.
‘Jesus. Whoever you are, thank you.’
‘Was it the Rwandan refugee story?’ the American asked. He was averagely tall, averagely built, averagely handsome. His accent was averagely mid-Western. But his eyes had the same blue twinkle that had made Paul Newman Gaby’s first true love, and that redeemed all the averages into superlatives.
Gaby could still taste his kiss.
‘It was the student-on-the-run-from-the-government story. How did you know?’
‘They got me too. Fresh off the plane and they scammed me for a hundred dollars. I was so ashamed I couldn’t admit it to anyone for a month.’
Gaby shuddered as if they had laid hands on her body. She could understand such shame.
‘All I did was ask the way the Tom M’boya Street. I reckoned they looked safer than the boys in funny outfits.’
‘Like something from an old blaxploitation movie?’ Gaby nodded. ‘Should have asked them. They’re watekni; they might have flirted a bit but they wouldn’t have tried to fleece you. The Sheriffs insist on good manners in their posse members.’
‘Watekni?’
‘Semi-legal hacker gangs. Information brokers. Cyberpunk caste. They take Shaft as role model, but they’re sound enough. Tom M’boya Street.’ They had walked a hundred metres and two right turns. Gaby could see the intersection where she had been picked up by the hustlers. It was less than half a block away.
‘Where abouts?’ asked the American.
‘Right here.’ They were at the door of SkyNet News. She put her card back in her bag and found her identity pass. When she looked up, the American in the Chinos and denim shirt had vanished as utterly as if he had never existed. Paul Newman as angel?
She did not even know his name.
Gaby McAslan fastened her identity to her shirt and trotted up the steps. She was only ten minutes late.
6
Videodiary entry: March 20 2008
Pan around a very large room filled with desks, workstations and people. The camera is stopped down for interior fluorescents: the windows blaze with light. If there was such a thing as smell-o-vision, there would be a strong aroma of coffee. Over the high level of ambient noise, Gaby McAslan’s voice can be heard.
Well, this is it, Pa. Top of the world. Well, seventh floor, SkyNet News Nairobi, English Language section. Germans are next to the window, Scandinavians are back against the wall, which is kind of glum but satisfies their national characteristic. That glassed in office-ette is where Great White Chief T.P. Costello presides over us all. He’s supposed to be lovable and hugable and everyone’s big daddy: can’t say I’ve found that yet. Maybe he’s still pissed at me for being late on my first day, but professional instincts tell me it’s something more, though I don’t know what I’ve done to offend him.
The camera moves to a tall, dark-haired white man in his middle years. He is thin, his face is all planes and angles, his hair is suspiciously less grey than it should be, but it may be due to the personal energy that shines out of him even when he is sitting on a desk drinking coffee. He is smartly dressed. On the window ledge behind him is a row of unattractive trophies and awards. He notices Gaby surreptitiously videoing him, visibly straightens, smartens and waggles his fingers: hello camera.
This man of course needs no introduction, being the one and only Jake Aarons, SkyNet’s chief East Africa correspondent and darling of a million late-evening news special reports. Please note that, video-evidence to the contrary, he does in fact exist from the waist down. Apparently there is a cute little Somali boy who can personally testify to this same fact, but one shouldn’t repeat office bitchery. Sexual peccadilloes aside, he gets the angles on the news that no one else gets: no one, however seems to get angles on him, which I suspect is how he likes it. Something of a man of mystery, our Jake, despite – or is it because of? – his very public persona. OK, Jake, you can stop posing for the camera now.
An olive-skinned woman in her late thirty somethings is leaning over a researcher’s desk. Her hair is Latin black, as are her eyes. There is something predatory in the way she dominates the researcher’s space. She is expensively and smartly dressed, too expensively and smartly for Nairobi. She wears perhaps too much silver.
Abigail Santini. On-line features editrix, and my boss. She does not like me. That’s all right, because I don’t like her, and it’s always refreshing to be mutual about these things. At least I have good reasons not to like her. One: she insists on being called ‘Abby’ and there is not room in this office for two names ending in ‘aby’. Two: she enjoys the power of executive authority with none of the creative responsibilities of those she lords it over. Three: she looks good, and damn well knows it, and has Mediterranean features that tan beautifully and never freckle, burn and then peel, and has a classic aquiline nose of the type that built the glory that was Rome and not the snub thing of a race whose idea of civilization was stealing each other’s cattle. Now you can see why I don’t like her. What I can’t understand is why she shouldn’t like me.
The eye of the lens comes to rest on two black men at a video editing suite drinking coffee. One is small, wiry, bearded; he is sitting on a chair. The other is so extraordinarily tall you can tell it even though he is sitting on the edge of the desk. It is quite obvious that they are of different tribes, different races, and are the closest of friends. The tall one sees Gaby’s lens on him and waggles his tongue and makes a phallic gesture with his fist.