Joe Gores: Glass Tiger

‘What’s the charge, Jehovah?’

‘Ah... poaching rhinocerous horn, sah.’

‘I see.’ He almost did. Someone in Nairobi must have been waiting for any excuse. ‘Shauri ya Mungu, Jehovah?’

‘Ndio.’ Muthengi, embarrassed by his own betrayal, nodded solemnly. ‘Yes. It is indeed God’s affair, sah.’

Morengaru had drifted up silently through the tourists, unnoticed by anyone save Thorne, carrying his shotgun. To Morengaru, killing men was nothing. Thorne pecked two hooked fingers toward his own eyes, then turned his hand to peck the same fingers toward Morengaru’s eyes.

‘Tatuona tena,’ he said, low-voiced. ‘Uso kwa uso.’

We shall see each other again. Face to face.

Morengaru nodded solemnly and faded away, still unseen. But Muthengi, thinking Thorne was speaking to him, took it as a challenge. His moment of embarrassment turned to anger.

‘Cuff him,’ he said brusquely to his rangers.

Thorne put his hands behind his back to feel the cold bite of steel around his wrists, not for the first time.

‘We will go to Manyani to meet the plane,’ Muthengi said.

‘Thirty miles of bad road,’ said Thorne. When he looked over at Stanley Livingston, he realized the camp manager had been privy to the bust, but had told him nothing. So Thorne added to him, ‘Keep my Land-Rover here until I come back. Give the keys to Morengaru — and send my things home to Mum.’

Livingston colored and went quickly into the office and slammed the door. Thorne could read his mind: bloody Africa.

In Nairobi hours later, Muthengi and the other two stooges delivered Thorne to the dark and deserted-looking sandstone-block Department of Justice building on Jomo Kenyatta Boulevard. They climbed three flights of stairs past uniformed guards to an open door spilling light across the hallway.

A lone black man, light-skinned for a Kenyan, was sitting on one of the hard benches outside the enclosed receptionist’s area. He did not turn his head to look at them as they passed. The hairs on the nape of Thorne’s neck rose. Muthengi knocked on the door to the magistrate’s inner office.

‘Come.’

Arthur Kemoli, a Luhya from up around Kakamega way, had a single official-looking document squared upon his desk. The lamp laddered harsh shadows up his underlit features. He was Thorne’s age, wearing heavy-rimmed glasses, his tight-curled black hair cropped close against his skull.

During Thorne’s brief stint as a Kenya Wildlife Service ranger, he had caught Kemoli’s son trying to smuggle out protected bushbabies. Instead of busting him, Thorne cuffed him around the ears and kicked him loose. Kemoli, not satisfied with such banal punishment, took a club to the bare soles of his son’s feet. The boy had been unable to walk for three weeks.

‘Why is this man cuffed?’ Kemoli demanded.

‘He is a dangerous prisoner, sah,’ said Muthengi piously.

Kemoli gestured. The cuffs were unlocked. Thorne rubbed his wrists. Kemoli’s hand made a shooing motion.

‘Outside, the three of you. And shut the door behind you.’

The three stooges departed, hesitantly. When they were gone, Kemoli came around the desk for an embrace, solemn-faced.

Thorne paraphrased, ‘“All animals are equal. Some are just more equal than others”.’

‘You remembered!’ Kemoli exclaimed with real pleasure.

As a student at Kakamega Boys Secondary School, Kemoli had read Orwell’s Animal Farm and had loved Squealer, the pig who ran the place. He took the name as his own, and until entering politics was known as Squealer Kemoli.

Thorne sat down across from him. His wrists were raw from the shackles. Kemoli shoved the document around with his ballpoint pen. There was regret on his face.

‘Do you know the Swahili proverb about the elephants?’

‘When two elephants fight, it is the grass that is hurt.’

‘Just so. This is an order for your immediate deportation. You are the grass. One elephant is our quite new Kenyan government after four decades of corrupt rule by KANU under Arap Moi, which was preceded by another decade of corrupt rule by KANU under Jomo Kenyatta. The other elephant—’

‘Is the American in your anteroom. He’s too light-skinned for an African and he is used to waiting. A U.S. cop or federal agent. The hairs on the back of my neck tell me he’s no friend.’

Kemoli nodded and sighed. ‘Indeed not. Since all of the embassy bombings and threats of embassy bombings, your country has been a very large bull elephant in East Africa. They request, we agree. They demand, we comply. They demanded.’

‘Sign the bloody thing, Arthur. If they’d wanted me dead, I’d have been persuaded to jump out of the plane on the flight from Manyani. Somebody wants me to do something nasty for them.’

Terrill Hatfield drove the Kenyan government Land-Rover himself, the two rangers in the back with the muzzles of their rifles screwed into Thorne’s neck. Thorne got a last look at Nairobi Game Park by moonlight. Leopards and hyenas from the park sometimes wandered adjacent housing developments at night.

Hatfield searched him totally before shoving him up the stairway into the interior of the Gulfstream. In three of the nine leather club chairs were armed men dressed in suits. Not Secret Service. Not Marines. They almost stunk of Agency, but not quite. Most likely FBI, operating illegally overseas.

‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ asked Thorne.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Hatfield explained. ‘You’re getting a free ride in a thirty-eight-million-buck plane. Be grateful.’

With no book to read, he feigned sleep during the flight from Nairobi west across Africa. Wondered why the guy who had grabbed him was so hostile. It seemed a lot more than just keeping Thorne down, but he couldn’t worry about that now.

After the fueling stop in Dakar, he sat upright during the crossing of the Atlantic to D.C. He had just killed two men; he knew from bitter experience that if he slept his nightmare of seven years before would return. Just as well. Something truly rotten was brewing. He had to prepare his refusals for it.

It was sometime in the wee hours when the jet landed on a secluded corner of Reagan National across the Potomac from D.C. An icy rain was falling as they left the jet for the waiting unmarked government van. Where were the cherry blossoms?

Thorne was dressed in khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt of fabric as thin as his blood after his years in the tropics. But as they crossed the Key Bridge, he was damned if he would shiver, or let his teeth chatter, or ask for a coat.

At the northeast guard booth, he caught just a glimpse of spot-lit lawns and the unmistakable white, pillared building just beyond. The uniformed officer inside the booth activated a switch to raise the car-blocking iron beams in front of the van, and lower them behind. Around behind the White House, they went down a narrow ramp with high concrete walls on either side. The van stopped, they got out into the drizzle.

A steel-armored door opened, a guard in uniform, one of the fifty-man detachment of Secret Service agents who worked three eight-hour shifts 24/7, checked their credentials. He kept his light in Thorne’s eyes the whole time because Thorne didn’t have any credentials.

Hatfield and yet another uniform took Thorne down a long basement corridor to a chamber with another steel door. They went in, Hatfield shut the door in the Secret Service agent’s face. It was a carpeted, windowless room with doors in all four walls, a conference table and eight chairs and a portable sideboard. There was the low hum of hidden air-conditioners.

Three men were staring at Thorne as if he were a bug on a pin. Two of them were young — twenty-five, twenty-six, one darkly good-looking, like Montgomery Clift before the bad times, the second chubby, friendly-looking, nondescript. The third man was burly, chomping an expensive cigar, exuding power. Small hard eyes dominated a meaty face Thorne recognized from BBC telecasts in Kenya.