‘Hello,’ a soft voice said, close by, and Joe started, dropping the Zippo lighter he was in the process of picking up a half-inch above the table. He looked up. She looked back at him. The window was behind her, and behind the glass the sunlight was passing through the rain, and for a moment the raindrops seemed like thousands of miniature prisms hovering in the air. ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ he said. He glanced at the half-open door. The girl smiled. ‘You looked thoughtful,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’ She had long brown hair and was quite petite, with eyes that were slightly almond-shaped, and though she was clearly European, she looked more like an Asian girl in her build. She looked like a girl who would always have a problem buying the right-size clothes in Europe, and no problem at all here. There were fine lines at the corners of her eyes when she smiled, and he wondered if they were from laughing or crying, though he didn’t know why. He said, ‘Can I help you?’
‘You are a detective?’ She didn’t sit down and he didn’t offer her a seat. She seemed comfortable standing there, while rain and sun clashed behind her. He wondered what her accent was. He said, ‘I –’ and shrugged, his hands encompassing the bare office, the silence of the rain. Then he said, ‘What is it you want?’
She came closer then, standing against the edge of the desk, looking at him. She seemed to study him, as if there were more behind his question than he understood. Her hand fell down to the surface of the desk, resting on the paperback that lay there, and she turned. Her fingers felt the book’s spine and cover, and she picked it up, taking a step back from the desk, her back still to the window. She opened the book and leafed through the yellowing pages.
‘The Hilltop Hotel stands on Ngiriama Road in downtown Nairobi,’ she said, reading. He realised she had no problem pronouncing the road name correctly. ‘On the busy street outside are shoe-shiners and scratch-card stands and taxi-drivers —‘
‘No, that’s wrong,’ Joe said.
‘No?’ She looked taken aback, for some reason.
‘I think there is a pause there, not an “and”,’ he said. It reminded him of something, as if he had once known someone to do this, to substitute words for punctuation when reading a book out loud. Someone who liked to read out books; it made him uncomfortable. ‘It’s just a pulp novel,’ he said, feeling defensive. ‘It helps pass the time.’ He didn’t know why he was apologising, or trying to justify himself to her. The girl closed the book and laid it back down on the desk, doing it carefully, as if handling a valuable object. ‘Do you think so?’ she said. He didn’t know what to answer her. He remained silent. She remained standing. They looked at each other and he wondered what she saw. Her fingers were quite long and thin. Her ears were a little pointy. At last, she said, ‘I want you to find him,’ and her fingers caressed the book; he couldn’t put a name to the look she had in her eyes then; he thought she looked lost, and sad, and a little vulnerable.
‘Find who?’
‘Mike Longshott,’ she said, and Joe’s surprise became a laugh that exploded out of him without warning.
‘The guy who writes this stuff?’
‘Yes,’ she said, patiently. Behind her the rain was petering off. Her voice seemed to be growing quieter, as if she were standing farther away than she was. Joe went to pick up the book and his fingers touched hers. He looked up, suddenly without words. She was bending down, her hair falling around her face, only a small gap of air separating them now, and she moved her hand over his, and there was something terribly intimate, intimate and familiar about it. Then she straightened up, and her hand left his, and she shook her head and gathered her hair behind her shoulders. ‘Expense is not an issue,’ she said, and she reached into a pocket and brought a slim, square object out and put it on the table.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘It’s a credit card.’
He looked at it, shook his head, let it pass. Instead he said, ‘How will I contact you?’
She smiled, and again he noticed the fine lines around her eyes and wondered.
‘You won’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll find you.’
He picked up the card. It was matte-black, with no writing on it, merely a long string of numbers. ‘But w –’ he said, looking up, and saw that, just like that, she was gone. Behind the window the rain had finally stopped, and the sun shone down through the breaking clouds.
— second bomb —
The second bomb exploded four hundred and fifteen miles away, in the compound of the former Israeli embassy to Tanzania, which had since been taken over by the American diplomatic mission. Tropical heat lay over the asphalt road and the low stone buildings. In the fish market, flies already hovered above the corpses of karambesi, yellow-fin tuna and wahoo. In the sea-shell market beyond, hundreds of exoskeletons of critters in the phylum Mollusca lay on tables, shining a multitude of colours in the sunlight.
The American embassy was located on 36 Laibon Road, Dar es Salaam. It consisted of a three-storey Chancery originally built for the Israelis, and a four-storey annex added later by the Americans. The threat of political violence in Dar es Salaam had been classified as Low. That was later revised.
Ahmed the German drove the bomb truck. He spent the night before in House 213 in the Ilala. District of Dar es Salaam. He was blond and blue-eyed. The truck was a Nissan Atlas. He stopped the truck at Uhuru Street and his passenger, K.K. Mohamed, climbed out, returning to the safe house to pray, as the German drove on to the embassy compound.
Blocking the way to the compound was a water tanker. The driver, a Tanzanian, was called Yusufu Ndange. He was the father of six children. It was 10:30am. Perhaps unable to penetrate into the compound, perhaps aware of the pressure of time, Ahmed the German pressed the detonator at that time. He was less than eleven meters from the embassy wall.
The water tanker absorbed much of the blast. It was lifted three stories in the air and came to rest against the Chancery building. Yusufu Ndange died instantly. So did the five local guards who were on duty that day. The remains of the assistant of the tanker driver, who was seen by witnesses shortly before the blast, were never found. The ceiling collapsed at the American ambassador’s residence, but no one was home at the time. Five African students standing nearby also died. In total, the attack claimed eleven lives; Ahmed the German made twelve.
K.K. Mohamed abandoned the safe house and boarded a flight to Cape Town. The flight time was four hours and thirty five minutes. When he landed, he took a deep breath of the cool, winter air, and went to find a phone box.
an otherworldly map,
like the surface of the moon
——
Joe laid down the paperback face-down on his desk, its pages open and touching the unvarnished surface of the desk like a palm print. There were many questions, but he did not feel like asking them. He opened the drawer and extracted the bottle of Red Label. He stared at it, shaking the bottle just to see the amber liquid slosh inside. There was a question: did he want a drink?
He contemplated the bottle for a moment longer, then unscrewed the cap and drank from the bottle. The whisky burned his stomach. He screwed the cap back on and put the bottle back in the drawer, shutting it. He stared at the book.
He picked up the credit card and examined it, then put it back down. How did he even go about using it? None of it seemed right. He picked up the book again and turned to the copyright page. The publisher was called Medusa Press. It had a Paris address. The copyright notice was for Medusa Press. There was no mention of Mike Longshott. It was unlikely to be the man’s real name in any case. No one could really be called Mike Longshott. He stood up and went to his bookshelf and scanned the spines. He had two more Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante books, and he took them off the shelf now and returned to his desk. He checked the copyright pages, and they were identical. Medusa Press, Paris, and the address was merely a post office box, not a street address. He lit another cigarette and wondered why that was, and how he should go about finding out more, and then there was a loud bang from downstairs and someone cursed, volubly, in English, and Joe smiled. Alfred had evidently surfaced and was in the process of opening his bookshop.