The sunlight on the sidewalk outside the Nairobi airport was brilliant. Barbara was showing the taxi driver how to weight down one end of the skis with a knapsack so they could stick out of the trunk without falling. Many people stood around very interested in this problem of transporting skis by taxi.
Trembling, Fletch crossed the sidewalk directly to the taxi. He sat on the backseat. He rolled down the window. He sucked warm, dry air into his lungs.
Bending, Barbara looked through the back door of the taxi at him. “Fare to the Norfolk Hotel should be about one hundred and seventy shillings. I exchanged a hundred-dollar bill for local currency, inside, at the bank window.” Adjusting to the light inside the taxi, her eyes narrowed. “What’s the matter with you? What happened?”
“Get in, please.”
She sat on the backseat. “Can’t take a little jet lag?”
“Close the door, please.”
“Do I look as badly as you do? Fletch, what’s the matter?”
Speaking softly, he said, “I just saw someone get murdered. Stabbed to death. Blood.” He tried to rub the brilliant sunlight out of his eyes. “Blood everywhere.”
“My God! You’re serious!” She sat closer to him on the seat. “Everywhere where?”
“Men’s room.”
She, too, spoke softly. “What do you mean, you saw a murder? My God, this is terrible.”
At the back of the car, the driver was trying to arrange the trunk lid so it would not fly up and bounce as they went along the road.
Eyes closed, facedown, Fletch pressed his fingers against his forehead and cheekbones. “When I went into the men’s room, a guy was standing at the basin washing his hands. I went into a cabinet. While I was sitting there, another guy came in. They began shouting at each other. Below the cabinet door I saw their feet get excited, do this crazy dance. There was a loud shout from one of them, agony, distress.” Barbara put her arm over Fletch’s shoulder. “I came out as quickly as I could. The second man, the man I hadn’t seen before, was slumped in a corner, dead. There was blood everywhere, coming from just below his ribs. There was a bloody hand streak on the wall. His eyes were open, staring at the door. The water was still running in the basin. In the basin was a knife. The water in the basin was red.”
“You’re sure he was dead?”
“He wasn’t blinking.”
“My God, Fletch. What are we going to do?” She looked through her closed window to the airport terminal.
“I don’t know. What can we do?”
“What have you done so far?”
“I’ve thrown up.”
“You look it.”
“Into one of the other basins. I cleaned up after myself.”
“Nice boy.” She took one of his hands in hers. “Do you think anyone else knows about this yet?”
Fletch looked through the window at the people standing on the sidewalk. “No one seems very excited.”
“We must tell someone.” Her hand went for the door handle.
“Wait a minute.” He took her hand. “Let’s think a minute.”
“What good is thinking going to do? Something terrible has happened. Somebody got murdered. You saw it. We have to tell someone.”
“Barbara, just wait a minute.”
“Can you identify the murderer? The first man in the men’s room?”
“Yes.”
“What did he look like?”
“Middle-aged. Slim. Thinning, sandy hair. Pencil moustache. Khaki clothes. Safari jacket.”
“What were they arguing about?”
“I couldn’t tell. Foreign language. Portuguese, I think.”
“Fletch, we have to tell someone.”
“Barbara, you’re not thinking.”
“What’s to think about? You saw a murder.”
“We’ve just arrived in Kenya. We don’t know how things are here. Because of the skis, the ski clothes, we made clowns of ourselves coming through customs.”
“Come on. That was funny.”
“Yeah. And the press will report we were not acting normally going through customs. We seemed confused.”
“I am confused.”
“I know. I’ve written reports like that. Barbara, we attracted the attention of the two gun-carrying soldiers.”
“True.”
“What are we doing in Kenya?”
“What are we doing in Kenya with skis?”
“We’re here to meet my father. Prove it. There’s this washed-out letter inviting us. It’s illegible! We’re not on very solid ground here.”
“You’re just reporting a murder.”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with a murder. This isn’t California. We’ve just arrived in a foreign country. We don’t know what it’s like here. I go into a men’s room. There’s someone in there alive. I come out and report there is someone else in the men’s room who is dead? And you expect people to believe I had nothing to do with it? Come on, Barbara. What would you think? I didn’t come halfway around the world to be taken off immediately in handcuffs and leg irons to the local police warehouse.”
“Did anyone notice you go into the men’s room?”
“How do I know?”
“Or come out?”
“Barbara …”
“You’re right. Until a better suspect comes along, you’re the best the police would have.”
“Just an airport incident.”
“You have no evidence that there was another guy, a third guy, in the men’s room?”
“Nothing but my word. And that’s the word of a guy who has just arrived on the equator carrying skis and ski clothes, waving an illegible invitation from a man whom the courts in California declared dead years ago.”
“Shaky ground.”
“Without a leg to stand on.”
“Fletch, we have been moving pretty fast here.”
“Yeah. Lots of fun. Until something goes wrong.”
Annoyed, Barbara looked through the window at the terminal again. “Why didn’t your father meet us at the airport? He’s a pilot. He has to know where the airport is!”
Fletch didn’t say anything. He exhaled slowly.
“Your breath smells like an old cat’s,” Barbara said. “Do you still feel sick?”
“Good thing British Air didn’t give us much breakfast.”
The driver passed by Fletch’s window.
“Barbara, don’t say anything about this the driver can hear.”
Barbara sighed. “Your decision.”
Before starting the engine, the driver turned around in the front seat and looked at Fletch. “Jambo.”
“Habari,” Fletch breathed.
The driver’s forehead wrinkled. “Mzuri sana.”
“My husband’s sick,” Barbara said. “Must be something he ate.”
For the first time, Fletch heard the two-note song, B flat, F: “Sorry.”
In a land where people, even a broad-shouldered taxi driver, sang so sweetly, so gently, their simple courtesies, “Oh, I see. Sorry,” how could Fletch possibly have seen what he just saw? A clean, public lavatory turned into a blood-splattered, blood-streaked, blood-puddled room of horror in less time than it took for him to relieve himself. Like seeing a snake come out of a hen’s egg. Again, Fletch rubbed his eyes with his fists. The man sat in a pool of blood, spraddle-legged on the floor in the corner of the room, his neck twisted, his eyes staring unblinking at the door, blood everywhere below his rib cage.
“Damn!” Barbara expostulated. “Your father didn’t come to meet us at the airport.”
Softly, Fletch said, “I guess he didn’t.”
As the taxi pulled away from the curb it passed a group of people packing into a van. From behind the van walked quickly the first man Fletch had seen in the men’s room, thinning combed hair, pencil moustache: the murderer. He carried his safari jacket rolled up in his hand. Small sections of his khaki trousers were dark brown, wet.
Fletch said, “Hey, wait a minute.”
The taxi slowed. The driver looked at Fletch through the rearview mirror.
Barbara asked, “Are you going to be sick?”
The man, the murderer, had his hand on the door handle of a parked car. He was looking around.
Fletch did feel sick again.
“Go ahead,” Barbara said to the driver. “He’ll be all right.”
The taxi proceeded through the gate. The moment had passed.
Barbara took Fletch’s hand onto her lap. “You going to be all right?”
“I’ll be all right. Just a shock. The last thing I expected to see.”
“It was the last thing someone did see.” She squeezed his hand. “Welcome to Africa.”
“What in hell are we doing here?”
“When you arrive at a ski lodge in Colorado you’re handed a cup of hot chocolate.”
“Somehow,” Fletch said, “I don’t think this welcoming was arranged by the Kenyan Tourist Bureau.”
“No,” Barbara said. “But I would have expected your father to be here. He arranged the tickets. He knew when we were arriving. Altogether, it would have been a help having him here.”
Again, Fletch exhaled, heavily.
Slowly, on the drive into Nairobi from the airport Fletch became more alert to his surroundings.
The taxi went at a sedate pace. Worriedly, the driver kept glancing in the rearview mirror. As they went along, the trunk lid bounced higher and higher.
The snow skis sticking out of the trunk of a taxi driving into Nairobi, Kenya, attracted a lot of attention. Other drivers smiled at them, blew their horns, waved at what appeared to be a joke or, at least, something funny. People on the sidewalks pointed. A few people seemed to know, or were able to figure out, what they were. Others just found two blue fangs sticking out the back of a flapping Mercedes funny enough.
As they began to go around a rotary, Fletch saw, on his left, a children’s playground. Everywhere in the playground were oversize traffic signs, STOP, RAILROAD CROSSING, WAIT, WALK, CAUTION.
Fletch said, “People here like their kids.”
Barbara frowned at him. “People everywhere like their kids.”
“I’ve never seen an urban park dedicated to teaching kids traffic signs before.”
The car slowed before making a U-turn to pull up at the front door of the Norfolk Hotel.
“Oh, no,” Barbara said.
“Oh, no, what? It’s beautiful.”
The hotel looked like a Tudor hunting lodge in tropical sunlight. In front, a deep, covered veranda, a bar/restaurant, ran half the length of the building.
“Look at all those people.”
“So what?”
“Oh, nothing,” Barbara said. “I don’t mind pulling up in front of all those people, getting out of the car with a ghostly young man who clearly has been sick all over himself, putting my snow skis on my shoulder, and walking into a tropical hotel. Why should I mind?”
“Okay.” Fletch started to get out of the taxi. “Stay here. I’ll send you out a poached egg.”
“Either we’re going to end up in a Kenyan jail,” Barbara said, following him, “or an asylum for the insane.”
“Pay the driver, Barbara. You’ve got the money.”
“I’ll tip him,” Barbara said, “asking him to forgive us and forget us.”
In fact, the big doorman took the skis out of the trunk, brought them into the lobby, and stood them up against the wall as if this were something he did hourly.
A few people on the veranda looked up and nodded at Fletch and Barbara.
In the people’s eyes was little more than mild curiosity.