Christopher Goffard - You Will See Fire

It’s easy to imagine that the priest sat on his bed and prayed, clutching that note. It’s possible that he brooded, too, on his young Masai catechist, who slept down the hall from him. To many of the priest’s colleagues and acquaintances, why he permitted Kantai’s presence was a mystery. He was widely believed to be a spy for Sunkuli, and he had confessed to burning houses for the police. The priest had repeatedly defended Kantai, had once even smashed a table in rage when his name was impugned.

By this point, however, there were signs that he had begun to distrust Kantai himself. His housekeeper, Maria, told him that Kantai had let Sunkuli’s men into the parish house, into the priest’s room—the place where he allowed no one, the place where he kept his papers.

The priest had asked a Kenyan friend, Can Francis hurt me?

The friend had responded with a Swahili proverb: Kikulacho kimo nguoni mwako Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. .

It meant: The bug that bites one’s back is carried in what one wears.

IN THE THIRD week of August, the rains came and the grass greened, and from his veranda he watched the cows dance.

One of his catechists, Lucas, handed him an envelope.

A letter for you, Father.

The priest opened it. It had been hand-delivered all the way from Nairobi, passed between church assistants. It was a summons from an authority he could not refuse—Giovanni Tonucci, the papal nuncio, the Pope’s representative in Kenya. The priest was to report to him immediately. The matter was apparently urgent, though unspecified.

Kaiser was certain what the meeting would entail. He would be thanked for his years of service in Kenya, and told to return to the United States to take an extended rest. It would mean, he was sure, his departure from the country for good. He would have to obey. Thirty-six years, and now it was over.

What he did in the days that followed would invite the most exacting scrutiny, his actions weighed and analyzed and puzzled over, his phrases parsed, word by word, and subjected to dramatically different readings. After the summons, his mood changed. He wept at Mass. He asked for prayers. He grabbed his duffel bag, then climbed into his truck with his ax and his rosary beads and his Bible and his neck brace and his shotgun, disappearing down the red-dirt road on the half-day trip to Nairobi.

THE LAWYER’S PHONE started ringing early that morning. They’ve killed Kaiser. He was at home in Ngong, on the outskirts of Nairobi. He felt a chill spread between his shoulder blades. The first details to reach him were vague, secondhand, filtered through a network of informants whose voices were tight with panic. It was August 24, 2000, four days after Kaiser’s departure from his parish house, and his body had been found in a weedy ditch that morning in Naivasha, about forty miles outside the capital. Nobody could determine what had brought him there. People were saying that his head had been blown apart, that his own shotgun lay nearby.

Charles Mbuthi Gathenji Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. was fifty-one, a man of stocky build and medium height. He had a thin mustache, thinning gray-black hair, and sharp cheekbones. He possessed an air of wary circumspection informed by decades on the wrong side of a police state. His eyes were deep-set and heavy-lidded, and his thin, rimless glasses contributed an aura of scholarly gravity, an impression reinforced by his careful, formal English, his accent thickly Kenyan and punctuated with phrases like “It is quite in order.”

He did not deviate from his daily routine on this day. He put on his suit, picked up his leather briefcase, and steered his Mitsubishi Pajero into the cacophony of the capital’s morning gridlock. He had an appearance at the High Court and some appointments at his office. But the sense of prickly unease that had never entirely left him these past few years was very close now. They’ve killed Kaiser. In recent weeks, under the employ of the Catholic Church, the lawyer had been preoccupied by a case that felt eerily similar—the slaying of an Irish monk named Larry Timmons. The monk, not nearly as well known as Kaiser, had accused a Rift Valley policeman of demanding bribes, and one night the cop had shown up at the mission house—in response to a robbery—and shot him to death. A terrible accident, authorities said, but after all, it had been so dark. Now, three years after the shooting, Gathenji was arguing to bring murder charges against the cop; they were in the thick of a protracted inquest, and his witnesses were slowly dismantling the official narrative.

When Gathenji returned home that evening he turned on the television news and got a glimpse of the scene where Kaiser had been found. There was the priest’s body, with its fringe of white hair, supine in the weeds, clad in light gray slacks, black leather shoes, and a leather jacket. There was his Toyota pickup aslant in a drainage culvert, with a twisted right front wheel. There was the interior of the dirty cab, with the priest’s rosary beads hanging from the steering wheel and the sharp edge of his ax visible under some clutter. There were the dark-suited plainclothesmen and black-hatted officers milling around the truck in the sharp country sunshine. There was the shotgun—wrapped, ineptly and incompletely, in police plastic. There was the large crowd of onlookers massed on a nearby berm, mothers standing with arms crossed and children sitting at their feet in the brownish red dirt, all watching wordlessly and immobile as statuary. There was the sky as it had been that morning, pale blue and clear beyond the towering, slender-branched fever trees, and the road already alive with zooming buses as the body was wrapped and loaded into the back of an official Land Rover.

For the last five years, their lives had been closely linked, the lawyer’s and the priest’s. Kaiser would materialize at Gathenji’s office unannounced, always on a crusade, always in dusty shoes. To call ahead of time would have increased the possibility of being followed. He’d bring in people from his parish who needed legal help. He’d scribble notes on newspapers or whatever was on hand. He’d seek advice on how to build cases against government men, and how to get supplies to refugees displaced by violence.

If the Church remained one of the few institutions in Kenya that had raised its voice against the government, it did so mostly in a carefully hedged and muted way. As a corporate body, it preached reconciliation but rarely went further. The American priest had been an exception: He’d named names, and looked for every opportunity to do it again.