Black Star Nairobi Read Free Page B

peppers—all from Muddy’s garden—that he had yet to chop up. His phone rang.
    It was the pathologist on the line. He had something for us. We weren’t expecting anything useful. In the U.S., we used to say, “no body, no conviction,” but in Kenya finding a body in Ngong Forest meant that you had just another piece of evidence that was as important as the powerful wanted it to be.
    “To be continued … We gotta go,” O said to Muddy. When high he liked to sound cool, like a rapper. It no longer irritated me. After all, pop black America was everywhere in Kenya, from the hip-hop Kiswahili rappers to teenagers in the streets of Nairobi looking like poor gangsters straight from Camden, New Jersey.
    I kissed Muddy goodbye and followed O out.
    Peter Kamau reminded me a lot of Bill Quella, the Madison Police Department’s coroner back home. BQ was Southern, from the eye of the South, he liked to say, and he loved Southernexpressions—he had once described a victim as being as full of blood as a tick. Peter Kamau used a lot of proverbs and riddles and wise sayings that invariably made sense only in his workplace. “Better dead than never” was his favorite.
    Kamau and BQ were both tall and thin, and they smoked noisily, smacking their lips as they moved cigarettes from one end of their mouths to the other. It was my guess that this line of work called for certain personality traits, one of them being a love for expressions. Kamau, though, unlike BQ, was a hardcore Christian who prayed for each body that found its way to his table.
    When O and I walked in, Kamau was sitting in a corner on a bar stool, as if he were watching a performance. The lights were off, except for the one that shone on the remains of the dead man. Kamau hopped off the stool and turned on the lights, but he might as well have done us a favor and left them off. I thought BQ’s lab was bad. In Kamau’s lab, bags of ice were laid on top of the bodies to preserve them, and so the floors were covered in this murky mixture of lukewarm water and human fluids.
    He called us into his office, which looked like a supervisor’s at a manufacturing plant: on the same floor, the only thing that separated it from the lab was a few hurriedly assembled low white-painted pieces of wood with windows stuck into them. At least it was dry ground. He raised his hands up in the air like a priest about to bless both of us.
    “The moment I saw that body, I knew it. I knew he was trying to tell me something. Speak and I will listen, I said to the man,” he said. “But you, ask and you will receive,” he added, pointing at O.
    “What do you have?” O asked.
    “Your man is black,” he announced.
    “Shit, Kamau, of course he’s black,” I said.
    “Hold it, open your ears and you will hear—I did not say he is Kenyan or African. I said he was black.” He was barely able to contain his excitement, but he waited until O asked him to explain.
    “Height, six-two. His clothing, at least what is left of it, appears to be American. But all that is like saying water is wet. I found this in his mouth.” He placed two small capsule halves on the desk and brought out a magnifying glass from his back pocket. We peered over his shoulder as he pointed out indentations on the capsule, using a toothpick.
    “Some lettering is gone,” he explained. “But this eventually spells hydroxyurea.”
    “Okay, what’s that?” I asked.
    Kamau straightened up.
    “Hydroxyurea,” he said, as if addressing a class of primary school students, “is a drug used to treat sickle cell disease. Sickle cell can be a trait or a disease—mostly, black people have it. This type of cell is good for malaria prevention—think of it as nature’s immunization. But let’s say you were kidnapped from the hottest malaria-infested interior of Africa and exported to non-malaria zones. It becomes a disease—not lethal, but in some cases painful enough to require a doctor’s attention—I mean real