Kachani stayed in the bathroom, transfixed to the spot. He cursed himself for being so stupid. He had allowed his dislike of the Church to cloud his judgment. For all his claims to Chundira of not making up his mind, he had been convinced the archbishop couldn’t have done it. And the gun — there was no excuse for that oversight. In the bucket, of all places. He walked up to it and pushed it forward with his foot. It rolled. He looked down at the parallel wheel marks, cutting across the grimy floor like railway tracks. He stared at them intently. There was something that bothered him but he couldn’t pinpoint what it was.
From outside he heard a wild cheer. As much as he disliked the man, he had to recognize the archbishop’s finesse. Resigning from the clergy so dramatically opened his way to running for president perfectly. Archbishop Mpocha was definitely a master of spectacle. He was probably holding the gun up to the crowd right now, like a holy relic. The image of the gun flashed in Kachani’s mind and then he looked at the tracks left by the bucket again. “Of course,” he muttered, and rushed out of the bathroom.
Thirty minutes later, he was knocking on the door of an apartment in Ndirande. A little boy of about five or six answered the door. He had a curly mat of black hair and large oval eyes.
“Is your father home?”
The boy welcomed Kachani into a small, single-roomed apartment. Arthur Ntaso was reclined on a sofa listening to the radio. He got up and flicked the radio off.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Kachani said. “I forgot to ask a few things this morning.”
Ntaso pointed at the radio. “It’s over.”
Kachani continued as though he hadn’t heard. “You said you were mopping upstairs when you heard the gunshot and you ran downstairs immediately. Why, in your extreme hurry, did you carry the bucket and mop with you? There is no way you could roll the bucket down the stairs anyway. You must have used the elevator.”
Ntaso opened his mouth, and then hesitated. He turned to his son. “Go play back there,” he said, and the little boy ran out onto the balcony.
When the boy was gone, Kachani added, “The gun Ebeso was killed with was gold-plated. I didn’t get to examine it, but I’d be willing to bet it had lions engraved on its barrel. You killed him.”
“No, no, no,” Ntaso replied, shaking his head vigorously. “I didn’t kill him.” He paused and considered whether or not to continue. Finally, he shrugged and sat back down on the sofa. “I found Ebeso in his study. I thought he was asleep, but when I came closer I realized he was dead. He had died naturally. Like that, so easily, after all the people he had killed.” He pointed at a framed picture on the wall in which he was standing next to a woman. “Miriam died in prison for encouraging her students at the high school to commit treasonous acts. All she did was help some students write letters to Amnesty International, and for that she died alone after God only knows what had been done to her. And Ebeso died peacefully in his sleep. I was so angry. At least if he had been killed by a rival or suffered in some way it would have been bearable. Standing there, I got the idea of how to humiliate him. I could make sure I was the only one who ever knew how he had died. I loaded him onto the bucket and wheeled him to the elevator. I took him down to the toilet and—”
“Shot him in the chest with his own gun,” Kachani finished. “Why didn’t you just come forward and say you had killed him?”
“Who would believe that I, a cleaner, had killed him? They would ask too many questions and maybe find out how he had really died.”
“But now the archbishop is taking the credit.”
“I’m the one who told him where the gun was.”
“What?!”
“When I found out he was claiming to have killed Ebeso I realised he would make it perfect. If people thought Ebeso had been killed by a man of God, the message would be clear.”
Kachani could not find anything to say in response. He had totally misjudged Arthur Ntaso. “Don’t you wish people could know what you did?”
“A bit,” admitted the cleaner. “But this is the best way, and if I ever feel bad, I have these.” He reached under his shirt and pulled out a selection of gold and silver stars. They were the medals for valor Ebeso had awarded himself. “I took them from his body. I’ll give you one if you keep quiet about what I did.”
“No need,” replied Kachani. “You deserve them.”
“Well then, maybe I can ask you to stay and eat with us. We are about to have dinner.”
“Thank you,” Kachani said.
Sometime later, Kachani was sitting at the dinner table with Arthur and his son Bidwe. Dinner was just cobs of maize and boiled cabbage. Not much of a meal, but Kachani looked at Bidwe. The boy had plump cheeks and a strong body. His clothes were faded to the point that Kachani couldn’t make out the words printed on his shirt, but they were clean and ironed. Arthur clearly did what he could to be a good father. Kachani’s eyes were drawn to the photograph Ntaso had pointed to earlier. How many other families were incomplete because of Ebeso? But then Kachani remembered the portraits of Ebeso in his palace. And of all the other portraits Ebeso had insisted grace the walls of every bank, school, and store in Malawi. In a few days they would all be torn down, defaced, and burnt. In a few years, none of those portraits would be remembered, but no one would ever forget the image of Ebeso’s corpse on the toilet.
“Thank you,” Kachani said to Arthur, taking a bite out of a cob. He could not remember maize tasting quite as good as it did at that moment.
Copyright © 2005 by Daliso Chaponda.
Vampire
by Joseph Monninger
A mystery novelist, memoirist, and professor of English, New Hampshire’s Joseph Monninger occasionally pens an offbeat short story as well; we’ve published three of his tales prior to this one. His memoirs Home Waters and A Barn in New England: Making a Home on Three Acres have both been highly praised. He is currently on sabbatical from Plymouth State University; we hope he’s using the time to write more in our genre.
The vampire’s house stood on a small knob of New Hampshire granite. Pine bushes pressed against the house and ate the paint. The bushes needed clipping and the house needed scraping. The house also needed a pound or two of nails to hang the shutters back in place, to put the soffits right, to hang the numbers of the address over the front door again. The steps to the front porch had cracked. Frost had found the cracks and widened them. A drainpipe on the south side of the house had come free and dangled against the clapboards, bumping in the afternoon breeze. The empty pipe matched the beat of a tire swing, hung from an oak branch that swayed enough to twist the support chain. November had stripped the oak and a scarecrow’s worth of leaves had collected in the belly of the tire. The rest had made a leafy mat along the front weed patch.