Moses Isegawa - Snakepit

At long last Sister emerged and announced that she had been trying to call Bat’s friend in London. A politician with an unpronounceable name.

“What is he going to do? He is in London, and we are here trapped in the mire,” Mafuta said irritably, getting more and more wound up and drawing looks of disapproval from the formidable Mrs. Kalanda. He had heard of the fellow, another Cambridge product. Amin has little respect for such foreigners and rightly so, Mafuta thought with some relief. He had jerked them around like dolls on a string on many occasions. This one too seemed destined for the same treatment, if he had the time to invest in the venture.

“Every possible avenue has to be explored,” Mr. Kalanda said diplomatically. He knew that the two in-laws did not get along; he did not want to make things worse.

“Right,” Mafuta said grudgingly, redundancy biting at him.

It was agreed that if there were no new developments in the next few days, they would have to start searching dumping sites.

“Are we going to wade in the ooze and turn the remains over ourselves?” Mafuta said, feeling sick and beginning to enjoy his position as outsider, asking the hard questions or at least making his hosts think, or explain things which did not need much explanation.

“There are people paid to do that. They know all the places. They are called surgeons,” Mrs. Kalanda explained, using a superior tone, as if talking to a wayward child.

“Let us hire one and get going,” Mafuta said, using the same tone and noticing that Mrs. Kalanda was more worked up about the disappearance than even his wife.

“We have to wait for Tayari and Babit to join us,” Sister explained to no one in particular, tears appearing in her eyes and voice.

Mafuta’s opinion of the city was not improved by the nightly shooting sprees. They would begin with single shots, as if somebody were alerting his comrades to get ready to party, and deteriorate into rapid volleys coming from all directions. The hours after midnight were the worst; it felt like a fire was raging over the city, and houses and people were exploding. The mind wandered to war, past and future. It stumbled onto the armed robbers who had terrorized the city at the end of the sixties, before the army put them down. It stumbled on all kinds of real and imaginary situations in which the gun was used to victimize unarmed people.

The strange thing was that in the morning nothing was heard of the shooting. Nobody talked about it. They talked about the weather, the fluctuating prices, inflation, but never about guns. It felt like a conspiracy. It was as if the shooting took place inside his head and was only heard by his drugged ears. His wife wasn’t too bothered by it. It was as if she expected drunken or frustrated soldiers to behave that way. The arrival of Bat’s brother did not alleviate Mafuta’s tension. The young man spoke only when spoken to, preferring to maintain silence or go for long walks by himself.

Mafuta’s burden lightened when he accompanied his wife to see Victoria and her child to get any information she might have. He was struck by the woman’s beauty, but he felt there was something hard and dangerous about her. She expressed much grief, but there was something superficial, overdone about it. Is it simply that she has too much energy or is there something wrong with her? Mafuta asked himself as he watched her, irked by the fact that it was rich or powerful men like his in-law who played around with such women. He had expected a spurned woman to be cool, restrained, dignified in her loss. Victoria, on the other hand, looked like a house on fire, barely holding back its zeal to consume itself. Maybe the bastard has a way of bringing hardness, insanity, out of people, Mafuta thought. Victoria’s child kept walking about, pulling things, going off to play, and coming back to interrupt conversation. He wondered what his child would look like.

“I have done my best,” Victoria reported, wiping tears from her eyes. “Friends in high places refused to talk.”

“What friends?” Sister asked eagerly.

“I know some people in high office, you know,” she said almost casually.

“Ministers?” Mafuta said suddenly, attempting to escape neglect.

“A minister, yes. And people who know people. They all don’t know where he is.” Wiping tears clumsily, she cut a scatter-brained figure, quite different from her usual collected self.

“I have been to three different astrologers. They all say different things. I don’t know what to think and what to believe.”

“Do you have enough money to live on?” Sister asked with concern.

“I have a job. I can look after myself. It is love I am without. I love him so much. I miss him,” she said tearfully.

Mafuta was not impressed. A swinger like her had to know better than to get trapped in love. He had seen many of her kind, hard-drinking, night-clubbing types Amin had put out of miniskirts and business. They were good for a night, but a nightmare to live with. Victoria’s house could do with more cleaning. A peek in her inner rooms had revealed chaos: clothes all over the bed, the child’s playthings all over the floor. Could the bastard have let her go because of her carelessness? Or did she make too many sexual demands? Mafuta remembered his princess, how she used to ride him, and how he had felt good about it in the beginning. Wouldn’t be a bad idea if this woman had ridden the bastard like a donkey, he thought, and almost broke out laughing.

“I don’t know much about this woman, but I believe she was a mistake in my brother’s life,” Sister said as they drove away, Victoria waving from the courtyard.

“Why do you say that?” Mafuta said in an almost playful voice, again enjoying being in opposition.

“She calls Babit and threatens her. She openly confesses to seeing astrologers. She claims to be still deeply in love with a man who threw her out long ago.”

“Everybody is using the good offices of astrologers, but because of hypocrisy nobody owns up to it. Your family slaughtered a bull for omens to be read, didn’t they? Such a beautiful woman would hate being replaced. Maybe it made her go over.”

“Somebody has to investigate her.”

“Your brother should have done that before investigating her nakedness,” Mafuta observed, hardly able to hide his glee.

“I am serious.”

“She didn’t make him disappear, did she? Surely not even she could do that.”

“I am not saying that. I used to like her. But women who threaten other women are dangerous. They either believe in evil magic, or physical violence. And those tears. .”

“Rarely do women admit defeat at the hands of rivals, except for my princess, who cleaned out my house in retaliation before going off and allowing you in. Most women would rather destroy their rivals. Gone are the days when polygamy was a respected institution and rivals had to be tolerated. Nowadays, it is every woman for herself and the Devil for them all.”

“Don’t remind me of your princess.”

“Don’t worry. Let us concentrate on finding your brother. He will sort out his mess afterwards.”

“Yes, you are talking sense.”

VICTORIA HAD BEEN on the trail sounding out people on Bat’s disappearance, but to no avail. General Bazooka had warned everybody not to talk to the “widow,” as he called her, and at best to stop her at the gate. Thus doors kept getting slammed in her face. Former colleagues looked the other way when they saw her. She had been to the headquarters of different security agencies and received the same disheartening treatment. In her desperation she had tried the astrologers. Two omens had been bad, one good. They had robbed her of much of her hope. Her life had started to look futile. If it hadn’t been for her daughter, she would have gone out of her mind.