Nairobi Heat Read Online Free PDF

Joshua was in the middle of it.
    ‘All that was last week,’ I told O. ‘I had to plead with the Chief to give me two weeks. After two weeks I told him that he could throw me to the wolves if I didn’t have something for him. No one besides you, your Chief and my Chief knows I’m here. If the press in the United States finds out that the lead investigator is chasing ghosts in Africa, it’s off with our heads. So, O, that’s how come I’m sitting with you here drinking Tusker beer and eating
nyama choma
instead of solving my case.’
    ‘Damn, Ishmael!’ O whistled through his teeth. ‘What a story, what a story. So you are here because of a single telephone call? The suspect and the victim are back in your country and you are here? And you do not even know who called your ass?’
    I couldn’t help laughing with him at the absurdity of the situation.
    ‘It is crazy but somehow it makes sense,’ O finally said. ‘But tonight we drink, eat and make merry for tomorrow we die … Cheers!’
    And suddenly, for the night, we were just two cops working a case that was bigger than us, sharing one, two, many beers. Sometimes it’s good to take a day off so that you can start the next day with fresh eyes.
    It had taken about two hours to fill O in. Soon after I had finished my story a man walked into the bar carrying a guitar. He and the bartender yelled back and forth for a while. He had been supposed to come at ten, O explained, for ‘one man guitar’. I was very tired, ready for sleep, but I didn’t want to leave before hearing some music.
    As the man finally made his way to the stage I noticed that I was breathing hard and that my hands had balled themselves into fists. I felt incredibly anxious, as if my life depended on the music that this man would play – it was as if I was on the verge of a panic attack. Then, without any introduction or fanfare, the man looked straight at me and said in halting English, ‘This, for my black brother. Remember black brother, tip bartender and I well.’
    His small speech over he started tapping the guitar with his hands so that the sound came at the tail of his laughter. He sounded like a one-man drum machine. And then he stopped, so that the silence in the bar almost became a song – the soft mutterings of the drunks, the hot wind blowing through the doorway, the sound of teeth tearing meat from bones and the clatter of glasses and bottles. I felt like I was being lifted out of myself, but before I was completely gone sounds that were half blues and half something else brought me back. Hishands were a blur, his feet furiously tapping dust high into the air as the yellowish light from the kerosene lamp bathed him in a golden glow.
    The bartender walked over and stood in front of the guitar player. She started moving slowly – so slowly that she seemed to be pulling against the furious rhythm, a tug of war that she was slowly losing so that her hips and arms flailed faster and faster until it looked like she was being jerked around by the music. Then, just when it started looking painful, the guitar slowed down to a familiar blues melody – one note at a time, one tap at a time. It was the guitar pulling her back to earth as she slowly gyrated to the ground. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the song ended and the bartender clapped her hands and went back to the bar as if nothing had happened.
    I started choking, having hardly breathed throughout the performance, but O seemed not to have noticed anything. I felt exhausted. I had been to a place within myself that I didn’t know existed, a place that was beautiful and terrifying. The music had briefly awoken something in me – a rage or a healing. It was as if I had taken a hit of acid. Perhaps the beers and long plane ride, the jet lag and the exhaustion of the last few days had come to a head.
    ‘Buy him a Tusker,’ O said as he pushed a five hundred shilling note into my hand, ‘if you liked the music, that