He practised a strange form of magendo. Haran did collect Ethiopic scripture cases, with suitable inducements inside. He would receive the donation and beg to be excused a moment while he compared the case with his large, probably unparalleled collection. If he returned with the reliquary saying that he regretted that he was already in possession of one similar, you knew that for unspecified reasons your petition had failed. If he returned empty-handed and told you your donation was a grace to his collection, you knew that you had become a client of his posse. Either way, the cash inducement inside would be gone.
‘It is really a question of whether he likes you or not,’ Faraway said. The taxi swept past the huddled mounds of Nairobi’s street-sleepers, piled in doorways, wrapped in cardboard and tattered blankets and laid out like victims of a small holocaust along the sidewalks. ‘And he will like you. He likes beautiful, intelligent women. Women like him. I do not know why, given what happened to him.’
‘And you just have to tell me, don’t you?’
‘It was the khat,’ Faraway said, ignoring Gaby. ‘Everyone knows that bad things can happen if you chew too much, but we never thought it would be anything like that. It began back in Kisumu when he was just starting out. He used the khat leaves to help him concentrate: he was working with up to five simultaneous screens of information. No one had ever seen anyone chew that much khat. People used to warn him that no good would come of it, and staying up, staring at screens day and night. They were right.
‘He was smitten with a plague of orgasms.’
The taxi abruptly veered where there was no pothole. The driver had a sudden coughing fit. Gaby caught sight of his astonished eyes in the rearview mirror.
‘He could not help it. At home, at work, on the bus, out with friends, anywhere, any time: bam! An orgasm. Thirty, forty a day. The doctors had never seen anything like it. They had all kinds of explanations, but everyone knew it was too much khat. But in case you think that this is the greatest thing that could happen to a man, something terrible happened. After three months at forty orgasms a day, they suddenly stopped. Just like that. Gone! Since that day, he has never had another. Not in five years. He cannot even get it hard any more. Complete impotence. The doctors are as baffled as they were by the plague of orgasms. But I think that it is because every man has a certain number of orgasms in him, like bullets in a gun, and he can either fire them like a hunting rifle, at one target at a time, or spray them around like a machine gun. Haran used up his lifetime of orgasms in one big go.
‘And you, you no good damn rude boy!’ Faraway leaned forward and poked the driver in the shoulder. ‘Stop listening to the conversations of your betters and drive this heap of rust. That is what we are paying you for, not to see your ugly face grinning away in the mirror.’
Gaby McAslan wished Faraway had not told her that story. It would make everything so much harder, having to deal with a man who had been cursed with a plague of orgasms.
‘What is this Cascade Club anyway?’ she asked.
‘You will find out soon,’ Faraway said. ‘We are here.’
It betrayed no secrets from the outside: a big off-street retail block fronted by an Asian supermarket, a CD store and a haberdasher’s. Blue neon waterfalls framed a door from which a bouncer in an ankle-length leather coat and the biggest Afro haircut Gaby had ever seen scrutinized the street. There was no name, no flashing sign, just the tumbling neon waterfalls. The doorman stopped two middle-aged white men in fashionable hacking jackets, riding breeches and boots.
‘Boys’ night Thursday and Sunday,’ Gaby heard him say. He and Faraway traded fives and bantered in Swahili. Gaby wrapped the black lace shawl she had brought for the cool of the morning more tightly around the scripture box. Faraway slipped the doorman a fistful of shillings and ushered Gaby up the steep stairs behind the door.
‘Faraway, am I imagining it, or can I actually hear a waterfall?’
Faraway grinned his irresistible grin and opened the zebra-skin door at the top of the stairs.
The Cascade Club was built on two levels. The upper level where the bar, dance floor and tables were situated was a wide balcony that extended all around the hollow interior of the retail block. Patrons were crowded three deep at the bar. All the tables were occupied. The clientele was almost exclusively female. Barboys in gold lamé pouches, boots and bow ties moved dextrously between bar and kitchens. There was a lot of champagne being drunk. Some of the boys had cash poked down the fronts of their posing pouches. They smiled a little too hard.
The biggest crowd had gathered around the balcony rails, looking down into the lower section. It was down there, in the pit of the Cascade Club, that the action was to be found.
Floodlights gleamed from the pristine white tiles on floor and walls. The cages were black iron with dramatic chrome spikes. Some of the men inside were white. One was Native American. All had big muscles, no body hair and were naked. They clung to the spiked bars and arched their backs and shook out their long hair and pretended to be in that hybrid state of ecstasy and despair pornographers think is the pinnacle of sex as the high-pressure hoses played over them. Some ran from one wall of their cages to the other, like wild animals. Some crouched on all fours, trying to hide away from the water. Some rattled the bars and roared back at the roaring jets. Some were bound hand and foot in a variety of dramatic bondage devices.
Behind the splash-guards the women shrieked and laughed as they swung the hoses across the caged models. One of the men had had an erection; three different women targeted it with their jets. Every so often a stream of water would slacken and collapse. Then the woman behind the triggers would hunt in her purse for more tokens and if she had none, reluctantly hand over her weapon to the woman waiting behind the spray barrier while she hurried to the change booth with her credit card. Some of the women were soaked through, expensive cocktail dresses clinging to their bodies, hairstyles plastered flat, earrings dripping. They laughed hysterically.
Faraway joined a fascinated Gaby at the rail. He had brought piña coladas. ‘Compliments of the management,’ he said. ‘There are automatic cut-outs on the hoses to stop them trying to shoot up on to the balcony. They can do what they like to the boys, or each other.’
‘I can see why Haran bought into this place,’ Gaby said, sipping her thick, semeny cocktail and thinking Freudian thoughts about water jets and a man who had used up a lifetime of orgasms in three months.
Wails of disappointment rose from the tiled pit. The hoses were all failing at once. No quantity of tokens would restart them. Muscular scene-shifters in wet-suits with the tops pulled down and tied around the waist unshackled the cages from the floor bolts and carried them away on wheeled pallets. The big white floodlights went out. A single pinspot lit the pit. In it stood a smiling black man in a naval uniform. Loud music started. The man in the naval uniform began to dance to it. Yelling, the women leaped to their hoses. In one instant he was drenched, but he was still smiling. Piece by piece, he stripped. Water dripped from his oiled pectorals. Gaby hoped the water was not too cold, amazed at the profligacy. Even the resourceful Mrs Kivebulaya had to ration showers in thirsty Nairobi and pray that the rains would be early.
A tall man in flares, a blue denim safari jacket and a floppy cap came across the crowded bar to the rail.
‘If you will please follow me, the Sheriff will see you now.’
He led Gaby and Faraway through a door marked private in English and Swahili. Gaby clung to her Ethiopic scripture case like it was her own soul. The m’tekni’s platform soles clumped on the steep stairs. Do not laugh at these people, Gaby reminded herself. They dress like a classic episode of Kojak, but they run the corridors of the Pentagon and no one sees them, they play Find the Lady with the European Central Bank. They do not hesitate to kill to protect what is theirs. There is a top-range smartgun slung crosswise for a fast pull under that denim safari jacket.