Stillness.
Ajany’s knees shake. She reaches for the chair. Her ear aches. The world looks foggy now.
“Would you?”
Ajany’s shoulders droop.
“We can go to the station now. I’ll say we have a witness, a person of interest who has details about a criminal who has been impersonating policemen with a view to committing heinous crimes. Come with me.”
“N-no.”
“No what?” Petrus asks.
“I d-don’t want to make an official statement.” Her nose is bleeding. She shields her face. Ebb and flow of shame: humiliated by this hideous solitude. “He must have had dreams.…” Her voice is tiny.
“Who?”
Silence.
Petrus wipes his forehead. “We all do … at some point.”
Petrus had turned up seven minutes after the ambush against Odidi had been sprung and an unnecessary gun battle had reached its end. He had watched Odidi struggle to get up. Then the media had shown up, as did the Officer Commanding Police Division, reciting from an unchanging script. When the show was over, Petrus had pulled rank and taken charge of Odidi’s body.
He had spoken to the young man, lying with blood-streaming eyes half open, limbs twitching, and mouth open: “I’ve looked for you, boy.”
The boy had attempted a laugh.
“I’m here,” Petrus had said.
The boy’s look had scorched Petrus’s soul and punctured an inner sac of buried tears. “Go to sleep,” he had told him, had called him “son,” and had come close to praying right there.
Afterward, when he stood up, Petrus’s first thought was to make the corpse disappear and spare Nyipir Oganda the news of his son’s death.
He had escorted the body to the mortuary and had it tagged, Unknown African Male. Petrus had then wandered into a downtown bar behind River Road where accordions played mugithi tunes, rising and falling, while gibbering patrons took on the character of shadows.
Later.
A gargantuan brown-box 1970s television had sputtered the signature tune for the 7:00 p.m. news bulletin while he studied the beer froth. A protuberant nose had appeared, a most stupendous organ, which collapsed on a pockmarked face, darkened to blue by bad lighting. With eyes bulging, a chunky neck popped out of the gray khaki uniform of the state’s potbellied police spokesman. Gloveless, he cradled a rifle, fondled a bullet; sleight of hand revealed the black.45 that had served such occasions for more than twenty years.
The spokesman’s blurring and piercing words, displacing consonants with microtones unheard of before or since — he had left no vowel unturned. “Our mboys”—the man had pounced upon phrases, made an adjustment—“our ’eroic mboys accosted a notolious, viorent gang.…”
The image on the screen. A green Toyota Prado, banged up by bullets, windscreen shattered, bloodstains on the driver’s seat. A commentator’s hysterical voice-over: “The victim, a prominent businessman who owns an engineering firm, is recovering from bullet wounds to his neck at a private hospital in Nairobi.”
“Our mboys …” attempted the police spokesman.
Petrus, the drinking man, had glimpsed the distorted shape of a man leaning against a white saloon on television, and then spilled his beer when he recognized himself. Petrus had stared at the image of tarmac, two AK-47s, rounds of ammunition, and two pistols on the scene and listened to the OCPD’s tale: “These climinals moved with the plecision of rocusts. They swarmed their targets.” A swarming gesture. The image cut to blue socks on the soles of Odidi’s feet. Showed a stained white tight-fitting T-shirt. Blood pooled, and there was the shoelessness of a big man’s muscular body.
An open palm, the slow curling of fingers inward.
It had been so many years since Petrus had cried. This is how we lose the country, one child at a time. Two hours before dawn, breathing off the bliss of several downed Tuskers, a normally hypervigilant security man walked in an unnaturally straight line. All the way to the top of Kirinyaga Street, he howled in off-key, an unlit cigarette clinging to the insides of his mouth: Hasira za nini wee bwana … wataka kuniua bure baba … sina makosa, wee bwana.… What’s this rage? Why kill me for nothing? I’m not at fault, man.
He had thought, All my life I’ve been enforcing silence by chopping off noisy human parts. His face was distorted by a rictus of self-mockery. A mere class prefect, fwakni, in a derelict school where every headmaster is a murderous pickpocket.
Even as Petrus leaned over the ramparts of the bridge over the Nairobi River and dropped a pistol and broken phone into the murky waters, he improvised: Petrus is not at fault, bwana.… Voice fades to silence. The braying of a distant, late arriving city-bound train. Petrus walks. He steps over a creature pressed like black cardboard into the road, and for a moment remembers Nairobi’s extinct hedgehogs — why they had not survived the city’s infested sprawling.
Three hours later, bleary-eyed and raspy-voiced, Petrus retrieved Ali Dida Hada’s personal mobile number from one of his four phones.
“Rotting on the job,” Petrus had accused him when he answered. “Where were you?” he asked. “The boy died last night — where were you?” He hiccupped.
Ali Dida Hada asked, “Who?”
“Oganda, who else?” slurred Petrus.
Ali Dida Hada had not spoken for about a minute. Then he swallowed audibly. After that, he had switched off his phone.
Ajany memorizes the details she would need to carve Petrus’s profile into black-ice stone. She would pound in jagged craters to reveal ravenous eyes of fathomless reach. Black holes.
Petrus senses her gaze probing his mind. Refuge in an image. “I’ll keep this.” Petrus folds Odidi’s poster and tucks it back into his coat. This is a dense land, he thinks, its memories a deluge that crave atonement. Petrus blinks himself alert. Now he is going mad.
A weary “Go home, Ms. Ajany, leave us alone. Go to your Brazil, today, tomorrow, but go away, please.”
Heavy exiting footsteps. At the reception, Petrus points at Jos with a snappy “Kijana!” Young man! On impulse, he bares his teeth: “Wee!”
Everything on Jos’s desk drops to the floor.
Petrus grins.
People!
He is sniggering when he unlocks his car door.
A pause. From his shirt pocket, he tugs at a small black notebook with a red pencil tucked inside. He chooses a blank page and carefully tears out a piece. He sketches something in. “Kijana!” he bellows in the direction of Jos, who dashes to him in a half-crouch.
He has gone, but Petrus’s shadow is a trap. Cold sensations crowd Ajany. Fear is a presence, Bernardo had hurled at her one night. “It penetrates beauty to deform it.” He had sung, “Eu quero que sejas bela”—I want you to be beautiful. Now a vile cord, woven out of writhing shadows, wraps itself around her neck. Bile throttles even the not many words she can speak. She is motionless in her chair.