Read Online Ahmed's Revenge by Richard Wiley - Free Book Online Page B

insist upon?
    â€œAll right,” I said, forcing my voice to remain even. “What the hell is happening? Who would do this? What’s the meaning of it? What nurse would think to send a dead man’s wife his missing arm?”
    The detective didn’t want to answer. He searched his pockets and looked at the ground as if he had dropped something, and when I turned from him, rigid of eyes and mouth, I felt the weight in the box shift, a quick imbalance that let me know the arm was loose in there, its fingers rapping on the walls.
    I faced him again. “You better speak,” I said. “You better tell me now.” But Detective Mubia shook his head and said only, “I didn’t want to bring it but she placed it in my car.”
    I stepped away then, quick and angry. Maybe my sense of propriety was entirely gone, but didn’t sending the arm have more of the feeling of a taunt than an apology? Wouldn’t anyone think so? As I carried the box over to the Land Rover I felt such an alteration in the air that it was all I could do to keep from flinging the damned thing away, from smashing the box on the oily ground.
    The detective had walked with me, but when I looked at him again all I could find in his face was the absolute fact that he was glad the box was gone.
    I put the box in the back of the Land Rover, wedging it behind the jack and covering it with one of the remaining coffee bags. After that I called my father. And without further comment I told Detective Mubia to follow us up the Narok-Nakuru road to our turnoff and our farm. We were less than an hour away, but it seemed to me that the trip had taken days, and there’d be no time to do anything when we got there, since darkness was less than an hour away as well.
    We arrived at the farm at six-thirty, with enough daylight left for us to see that the place had been ransacked, that the house and its nearby coffee fields had been torn apart, the latter by mourning elephants, maybe, but the former, without any question at all, by men. We parked in front of the workers’ dormitory; those doors too were open wide, and all our farmhands were gone.
    This was too much, the last straw, and though I had my father beside me, the detective in the car behind, I embarrassed and surprised myself by falling out of the Land Rover, going down on all fours, and crying out loud on the ground. Now I became the abject weeper that I’d wanted to be all along, a woman whose losses came to her at once, a woman whose control was gone. My husband was dead, his body given back to me in hideous parts, my farm was in ruin, my life undone. This is how I’d wanted to act in that hospital room—it was there that I wanted this torment, not now, not in front of the empty dormitory with Detective Mubia walking over from his car.
    I tried getting up but could only rise far enough to place my cheek against the Land Rover. I was mortified and wretched and alone, and I would have stayed there if Detective Mubia hadn’t knelt down beside me, taken hold of my hand, and helped me to stand. “You have informed me that the helicopter comes in the morning,” he said, “and without your workers we must dig this grave ourselves. Show me the spot, I will begin right now.”
    Since there’s a complicated mythology, a taboo of sorts, about Kenyans and graves, it was an extraordinary thing for him to have said, and it did the trick of bringing me around. “There’s a place on a ridge over there,” I told him, pointing, still weeping but keeping my filthy face down. “We call it the orchard. There are shovels in a shed at the orchard’s near side.”
    â€œDo you have a generator?” the detective asked. “If you do, let’s turn it on.”
    Enough light had already drained out of the sky so that the generator would soon be necessary even to see the house. “I’ll take care of it and then I’ll come