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  Father Matthew and Mrs. Steele looked through the papers. Mrs. Steele signed her name many times. I watched her, ate pizza, and drank Fanta Orange. I wondered what Mrs. Steele wanted with me. Mrs. Steele, like all people—like me—was not what she seemed; her face was a mask. She had painted strength on the outside, but what lay beneath was delicate. I was not sure which Mrs. Steele I belonged to. For now, either was fine; both faces were beautiful, and both bought pizza.

  Mrs. Steele’s nose was large for the shape of her face; it stuck out too far, but it was narrow. Her skin was the same color as potato flesh. Her eyelashes were long and curled upward, and there were spots of black makeup on them. As she talked to Father Matthew, I stared at her eyes. She said, “Bingo, I am sorry that Father Matthew and I have all this paperwork to finish. We’ll talk much more later, I promise.” Her voice was like her eyes: strong outside, sad beneath.

  When they were done, Father Matthew put the papers back in his businessman case and closed it. He coughed before he spoke. “Mrs. Steele, just one last thing.” He coughed again. “The adoption fee”—cough—“for St. Michael’s.” The priest’s face was as white as the tablecloth. “As you can see, Mrs. Steele, we have such an urgent need of these funds.”

  Mrs. Steele said, “Of course, Father Matthew. Let me just call my lawyer in the States and make sure the funds have been wired.”

  The priest’s thin lips formed the threat of a smile. “Oh yes, that would be the Mr. Scott Goerlmann I have been corresponding with. I have found him to be most efficient.”

  Mrs. Steele laughed. “He should be for what he charges.”

  Father Matthew made a sound like a laugh. Lawyer charges seemed to be a good joke. Mrs. Steele pressed numbers on her mobile. “Scott,” she said. “Scott, I am here with Father Matthew in Nairobi. I want to make sure that the wire transfer to St. Michael’s goes through today.” She listened and then said to Father Matthew, “He says the funds will reach your account later today.”

  The priest smiled. “God bless you, Mrs. Steele. Please recall, Mrs. Steele, that the St. Michael’s adoption fee is thirty thousand U.S. dollars. Rest assured that the funds are put to good use.”

  Mrs. Steele smiled. “Scott, did you hear that? Thirty thousand?”

  “Fook,” I said aloud. I could not stop myself. There were 146 other boys at St. Michael’s. At thirty thousand per soul, they were worth almost four and a half million dollars. If I sold all the lost children in Kibera, I would be rich forever.

  After the priest left, the air was easier to breathe. Mrs. Steele turned to me and said, “Bingo, do you want another Fanta?”

  I actually did want a Fanta, but I said, “No. I’z good, ya.”

  This time, when she looked at me, her smile was soft. “Bingo, are you all right?”

  “Ya, Mrs. Steele, ma’am,” I said.

  “You must stop calling me that,” Mrs. Steele said. She was not annoyed, though.

  I looked at her. In her eyes I saw different grasses of many greens. Some were bright and others were dark. Different grasses move differently; in a breeze, long grasses bend more than short ones. I saw flashes of red where birds landed, and heard odd sounds. Life whorled inside Mrs. Steele. But where there is light, there is shade. I looked close at the grass, each blade as light as it was dark. It was that darkness that I could not pull myself away from, because me and Mrs. Steele shared it.

  I said, “Ma’am, what shall I call you’z, then?”

  Mrs. Steele lifted her carefully drawn eyebrows. She said, “Well, I can’t have you call me Mother or Mom, because of your mother’s terrible murder in your village.” I was caught out for a second, but quick, I remembered the story I told at my interview. I changed my face from confused to sad. She put her left hand on mine and patted it a few times. “Bingo,” she said. “Why don’t you just call me Colette?”

  I looked into Mrs. Steele’s eyes and saw a bright field of grass lit in brilliant sun.

  Chapter 23.

  The Spider

  The door slammed shut, Mrs. Steele left, and I was in Room 349 alone. I had been in hundreds of hotel rooms, but this was special. It was mine. There was a television, gold on the walls, and a maroon bed. The bathroom had a toilet you could sit on, and a giant cattle trough and two sinks. By each sink there was soap, a plastic razor, a comb, and three bottles of liquid. Everything was lined up perfectly.

  I reached over the sink and stared at my face in the mirror. It was oval; my eyes were clear brown, and my eyebrows thick. I have nine cuts on my face: three across my forehead and three down each cheek. Senior Father cut them there at my mask ceremony when I was ten. A full planting season before the ceremony, Senior Father and me had traveled for nine days to the Carver. The Carver took three days to cut my mask. When the Carver was done, he gave Senior Father my mask wrapped in a skin. I did not see it until the ceremony.

  At the ceremony, Senior Father held me. The Diviner threw the sixteen beans and cast Ifa to see the shape of my future. People drank, drummed, and danced. Herbs were burned on the fire and the Diviner unwrapped my mask. The mask was dark wood and oval, just larger than my face. The Carver had cut nine lines into the wood, three across the forehead and three down each cheek. The wood cuts were painted pale blue. I breathed smoke from the fire, and Senior Father used the ceremony knife to cut my mask onto my face—the same nine lines—three across the forehead and three down each cheek. My skin opened on the blade and blood dripped down my face, nine streams let from the river of my soul. Senior Father said to me, “All men wear a mask,” and kissed my mouth. “Bingo, now you are man,” he said. Man lay upon me where Boy had been before.

  Now Man, I was destined for America. “All men wear a mask,” I mumbled to my face in the bathroom mirror. I washed my face with cold clean water from the sink and went into the bedroom. I jumped up and down on the bed and tried to touch the ceiling. After ten minutes, I was tired and turned on the television. There were afternoon soaps, a film, and news. No porn. I switched off the TV. I opened the glass doors and stepped onto a platform above Kenyatta Avenue. I could hear the hammers, honks, and the hustle of afternoon traffic. I looked down at the men in work clothes, the women dressed in bright colors, the beggars with blankets on their heads, and the scammers on the hunt for tourists. I felt like God. I looked down at them and thought, What a load of hustlers.

  When I went back into the room, I heard slow pounds on the door. I hoped it was Mrs. Steele. I opened the door, but it was the old caretaker from St. Michael’s. The caretaker’s skin was crumpled. He had his white clay pipe in his mouth, but no smoke came out. He held a red suitcase, his fingers thick and spotted with white paint. He said to the air above my head, “I have your case.” He had on brown work-worn shoes and walked as if the ground did not matter. The caretaker’s breath still smelled of honey. I guessed he sucked sweets to hide drink, the way my father used to. The old man puffed on his smokeless pipe, put the case on the bed, and left.

  A few minutes later, I opened the door to check that he was gone; there was something about him that did not fit. It was as if the air he breathed was different from mine. But the suitcase was mine! Before I had left St. Michael’s, Big Breasted Brunette had helped me pack it. I unzipped the bag and opened it. Inside were clothes and my Bible from St. Michael’s, with “Bingo” written on the inside. I had tied string around the book just in case it fell open. But before I could touch anything a spider the size of a fist crawled out of the case. I jumped back and grabbed the Bible to try to smash it, but the spider was too fast. It crawled across the sheets, and in a second it was on the floor and under the bed. I pulled off the string and opened my Bible; my three bags of white were still there.

  I now owned four sets of new clothes, a red suitcase, three bags of white, and a Bible with its inside cut out. The spider Kenya could keep.

  Chapter 24.

  Bingo and Mrs. Steele Have Dinner

  I switched on the television again and went through all si
xteen channels. In the end, I watched a soap called Bloodlust. It was shot in Lagos, about an innocent country girl who comes to the city. She marries an ordinary office worker, but a rich drug dealer wearing a white suit and a large gold cross seduces her. He gives her money and hooker clothes. Her workingman husband discovers her cheating and throws her out onto the street. The country girl moves in with the drug dealer.

  Later, the girl, the drug dealer, and his friends are at a party when the police raid the house and the girl ends up in prison. Her hooker clothes get ripped up and her makeup spreads over her face. The girl’s mother comes to the city from the village to beg the workingman husband to get her out of prison and take her back. The husband says no and tells the mother what the daughter did. “She is filth, she is sinful,” he says. The mother screams and cries, but the workingman husband will not listen. The mother goes back to the village without her daughter and misses her. That is the evil of missing. When you miss someone, you think all the time about how you should have got it right the first time, so you would not have to miss them.

  It was not a rubbish soap, except that they had the price of white too high.

  As the program finished, the telephone by the bed rang. It was Mrs. Steele. “Hi, Bingo,” she said. “It’s Colette. I was wondering if you’re hungry?”

  It was only a few hours after lunch, but I am always hungry. “A bit,” I said.

  “When you’re ready, why don’t you come down the corridor—I’m in the Tate Suite—and we’ll go and get an early dinner.

  I put on some of my new clothes: black pants and a light blue shirt. I was about to go right away but stopped; I didn’t want Mrs. Steele to think I missed her too much. I watched TV for a half hour more and then went down the corridor. The sign on the door read TATE SUITE in black letters on a gold plate. The sign looked worth lipping. I knocked, and Mrs. Steele opened the door.

  If Room 349 at the Livingstone was heaven, the Tate Suite was the book from which heaven was ripped, and Mrs. Steele was heaven’s queen. Her hair hung loose to her shoulders. She wore a brown African-print dress, a gold chain, and leather sandals. It looked as if everything came from the Maasai Market, though I was sure she had paid tourist price. The room smelled of her perfume. If smells can be opposites, her perfume smelled the opposite of Kibera. We went down to the same place where we’d had lunch. This time the green tables were covered with white cloth and there were fewer people. Five o’clock was early for dinner in Nairobi.

  “I’ll have a Bloody Mary,” Mrs. Steele told the waitress, and then she turned to me. “Bingo, what would you like?”

  I said to the waitress, “Give me a Blood Mary, ya.”

  Mrs. Steele laughed. “He’ll have a Blood Mary, but hold the vodka.”

  The girl looked confused. “But, ma’am,” she said, “a Bloody Mary without vodka is—”

  Mrs. Steele interrupted. “I know,” she said. “A Virgin Mary.”

  I enjoyed the comedy. I had probably been in more bars than Mrs. Steele and knew what a Bloody Mary was, with or without vodka. “Just bring me a Tusker,” I said. The waitress left, and I was alone with Mrs. Steele.

  Mrs. Steele pretended to read the menu. I did, too, but when the blanket of silence became too heavy I asked Mrs. Steele, “Why you do this?”

  She knew what I meant, but she asked, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you come to St. Michael’s, pay monay, and take me to America.”

  She sighed, but before she could speak the drinks arrived. She lifted her glass and I lifted the cold bottle. “L’chayim,” she said. I did not understand. “That’s Jewish for ‘long life,’ ” she explained.

  I looked at her. “Jewish?”

  She laughed. “No, I’m Catholic, like Father Matthew. But everyone in America says l’chayim. It’s complicated,” she added.

  How can anyone make drinking complicated? I replied, “Rathima andu atene.”

  We tortured each other’s drink words, laughed, and drank. Her eyes were lighter than they were at lunch. “Colette,” I said slowly, “why you’z wan’ me in America?”

  Mrs. Steele sipped before she spoke. “Bingo, it’s complicated,” she finally said. I wondered if everything was complicated with Mrs. Steele. She went on, “It is several things. First, while I was married, Mr. Steele never wanted to have a child in the house. Children are not his thing.” She paused and said something in her head. The green of her eyes turned darker, as if she had walked from a sunny field into a night forest. She waved her hand like a traffic policeman saying, “Move on.” “But, really, it was when I went to a fund-raiser in Chicago and heard Father Matthew speak that I realized I could do so much by helping one child. If so many kids need homes, I could make it one less. Imagine if everyone did that. There would not be any children left alone.”

  I thought, also, there would not be any Mrs. Steeles left alone.

  But Mrs. Steele was not finished. “Lastly,” she said, her bright green eyes flashing, “I met you.”

  I sputtered on the beer and swallowed hard. “I’z glad,” I said back.

  Mrs. Steele leaned across the small table and kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were cold and tight. They were different from Deborah’s. She laughed. “Here,” she said, and wiped her lipstick off my cheek with her napkin.

  The next few hours were filled with starts, fits, tumbles, hesitations, misunderstandings, deceptions (by both of us), and long silences. Mrs. Steele learned that I could read and write. I told her about the School of Benevolent Innocence I went to when I was little. Mrs. Steele said, “So what do you think American school will be like?” I had seen a porn film set in an American school where the students and teachers were naked all the time, but I knew that could not be completely real. In a TV program I had seen about American high school, all the pupils sang, smiled, and danced all day. American school was different from the school in Kibera. American school looked more fun, without too much time wasted on learning. “Good,” I said.

  Pause. We both pretended to study our menus.

  “Bingo, after all of those terrible killings you told me about when I met you at the orphanage, do you have any other family?”

  I told her that I had no one.

  She asked, “How about friends? What do you do for fun?”

  I told her that my friend was called George, that I liked soup, beer, and hookers, and that in America I wanted to be rich, have a Ford FISO, and to be an art dealer. “Like you,” I said.

  She asked me about St. Michael’s. All I said was “It waz good.” I did not tell Mrs. Steele about Sadist Sister Margaret or Father Matthew’s special confirmation classes. I did not tell her about Father Matthew’s business or about the four million dollars he had in his small yellow notebook.

  Then I asked her what I wanted to know. “Colette, why’z you so rich?”

  Mrs. Steele laughed and sipped her Bloody Mary. “Well, actually it is Mr. Steele who is the super-rich one. He’s a major art dealer in America. He has two galleries in Memphis, a large gallery in Manhattan, and a half share of a major gallery in Los Angeles.” Her eyes darkened. “I personally only own two small galleries in Chicago, where I live, but that’s only been recently. Mainly, I am an appraiser.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I work out whether paintings are real and help figure out how much money they’re worth.”

  “How much one of tha paintin’s cost?”

  She said, “Well, Bingo, it mainly depends on who the artist is.”

  “What’s tha most monay for a paintin’ eva?”

  She smiled. “Well, last month I sold a Braque for two million and a Chagall oil for four million. A few years ago, before money was tight, we sold a Blue Picasso for ten million.”

  I almost choked. “Dollar?”

  She nodded. “Yes, Bingo, dollars.”

  “Fook.”

  Her perfectly painted eyebrows frowned for a breath. She leaned forward. “Bingo, what is incredible
is that I can sell a canvas by a famous name for a million dollars and, frankly, the work is trash. Just because a famous artist paints a piece does not make it great art. Just like people, art can be masked in layers of nonsense. Anyone can wear fancy clothes, but it tells you nothing of true worth. Bingo, just like a person lies, so can art.”

  She sounded like a preacher and Art was her religion. To me, a million dollars was a million dollars.

  I said, “How much a Thomas Hunsa worth?”

  Mrs. Steele laughed. That annoyed me. “I am sorry, Bingo,” she said. “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Thomas Hunsa is a big artis’. He tha Masta,” I said. “He used to sell to tourists. He don’ sell no more when tha bastard American dealas scam him.”

  I caught myself—I had not meant to insult Mrs. Steele. But she smiled. “Bingo, that is not how I operate. Not all Americans are out to rip people off.”

  We drank and I thought about how Mrs. Steele sold rubbish art for a million dollars.

  In the end, we drank enough so that words did not matter. Mrs. Steele was an excellent drinker; we had four more rounds of Bloody Marys and Tuskers. It was good, just her and me. She asked me more about Kibera and life there. I told her about how people gang together and help each other out. I told her about how people share, and that the people are proud. I told her that people in Kibera are good.

  I did not tell her about the stabbings, knifings, and shootings—sometimes just for an old television. I did not tell her about the beatings, burnings, and rapes. I did not tell her that there are no toilets, tablecloths, napkins, or towels. I did not tell her that Wolf was my boss, Dog a psycho-killer, and that Slo-George was a fat retard. I did not tell her that for fun I threw stones at a lunatic who lived on top of a pile of garbage. I did not tell her that the runs I did were white; I told her that I was on the Kibera Athletic Team. I did not tell her that I ended up at St. Michael’s because I saw Boss Jonni and two hookers get killed by Wolf. I did not tell her that I had stolen Boss Jonni’s businessman case full of money, and I did not tell her where I’d hidden it. I did not tell her any of this, because it did not help me.