Karen comes to the door as The Hustler suddenly remembers his dead brother

“Maikorrr Safala,” Karen Li slurred when I opened the door. “Sap-lice?”

For sure it was a surprise seeing the 29-year-old daughter of the Chinese mall mogul Zhang Dong at my door, a fortnight after I had fled Lamu in the dead of dawn, jumping from a hotel wall and landing on the back of an ass.

And by that I mean an actual mule!

Later, after I had learned that Karen had cleared my 36K bill there, I was embarrassed – and in all honesty, never expected her to speak to me again.

But here she was, having PIN-tracked me to the front door of my apartment.

The other surprise was her ‘China’ accent – she hadn’t had it during our time on the island, doing those LIVE shopping sessions for her dad’s Gang Dong Mall.

It was like those lasses from Muranga who go to the USA for a few weeks, and come back with an American whang! But then when they get excited and forget – and here comes a statement like “A swear when a was in Mazzuli (Missouri), a tell ya we drunk so mash tekira …”

In short, ulevi clearly re-ignited the Chinku twang in the girl from Zhuhai.

Karen Li’s tequilas, wherever she had come from (Soro Glano) had clearly told her to act on the electric tension that had buzzed between us on those hot nights in Lamu.

“May I come in?” Karen Li asked me, trying to look sober and sound composed.

I threw a look over my shoulder and suddenly noticed how dirty my flat was.

Caught in the terrible thrall of Coastal malaria, I had not had the strength to tidy up.

Socks, T-shirts and even underwear on the sofa, filthy plates (one with fish bone leftover) in the kitchenette because of the modern open plan of the apartment, papers all over the place (with scribbled plans of potential hustles), in short, all those things that most women loathe about bachelor pads.

Reflexively, I shook my head, and Li’s already narrow eyes became slits as she took me in, in my dressing robe, with my face and chest glistening with perspiration from the malarial fever that was taking my hitherto strong body down, like a town being overrun by an invading army of malevolent clowns.

Not that my condition was remotely funny, but you may find what happened next amusing. As some wit once quipped: ‘Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.’

“You are doing ding-dong in there with another lady, Safala, that is why you lee fuse for me to come in!” It was a statement, not a question.

“I have malaria,” I said.

“I don’t care if her name is Mariah!” Karen Li screamed at me, still standing just outside my front door, but already beginning to retreat. “Good Lord, you are such a moran!”

Why was this crazy pretty lady praising my ‘badminton’ skills, albeit incorrectly at this moment?

It would only be later, shivering under my duvet, that I would figure out that Karen Li had meant ‘moron.’

I didn’t smile as I normally would have because going from fever, I was now having chills as well as serious cold sweats as my suffering body tried to get rid of disease.

The powerful malarial drugs I was taking were now kicking in with all the side effects – nausea, me feeling dizzy even as I made trips to my bedroom loo to release loose watery stools, then returning weak and dehydrated to bed.

And the dreadful dreams – my mind recreating the accident scene where my parents had perished (coming from shags) when I was 21 and my kid bro Ken, 18.

Ken’s own demise came nine years later when he was working as a money courier for some company (having flopped his KCSE as our folks died a week to the examination) when a gunman shot him point blank in the head, then fled with the million shillings that Ken was ferrying in a backpack he was carrying to the bank.

It later turned out, after the gunman was caught and interrogated, that it was a colleague of Ken’s called Patrick that had hired the assassin to steal the money on the understanding that they would split it nusu/nusu, half a million each.

That colleague, the 27-year-old lad called Pat, later pleaded guilty in court saying: “I just told Kim (the killer) to steal the backpack from my friend Ken, not to kill him!”

For showing remorse, and ratting on Kim (who had ratted on him), Pato had been given a 15-year manslaughter sentence, instead of the life sentence that Kim got.

That ‘my friend Ken’ had bothered me so much, I had actually visited Pato in Kamiti, a year into the sentence that will see him walking free again by 2032 AD.

“You say he was your friend,” I said to Pato, “But Ken Safara was my only bro. We were just two of us, Pato, and Ken had so much to live for. So why did you hire that psycho who murdered my bro?”

Pato had looked at me with blank eyes.

“If Ken hadn’t resisted, Kim hange-mshoot! It was ujinga for him to resist over a mere million that wasn’t even his, bwana.”
“Yet it was okay for you to send your friend Ken to his death, for you to get a mere 500K?”

Pato had looked at me, his remorseless eyes with the gauzy gaze of a dead cod fish

“Pesa haijui marafiki.”

[email protected]