Kahawa

56

It was with the next group of cars that the first man went over. He’d made an error of judgment, that’s all; it was a simple mistake and therefore hilarious. “Ai! Ai!” the others all shouted in shocked delight, and crowded to the edge of the cliff to watch their comrade drop.

“Jee-sus!” Lew cried, but he couldn’t take it seriously either, and stared down the cliff face as though it was some silent two-reeler comedy he were watching instead of the death of a man. The cars fell, the man stood on the last roof gaping upward, and the last thing he saw in this world was three dozen men laughing at him. Then the cars hit the bay, the water boiled over full of slashing strips and shards of wood, and when the surface settled there was nothing on it at all.

The men at the cliff edge laughed till they staggered; they held their sides from laughing; they mimed for one another the round-eyed round-mouthed look of astonishment on that fellow’s face when he’d scrambled to the end of the fourth car’s roof only to find nothing beyond it but a widening carpet of air. But Lew lost the comedy of the thing the instant it was over, and when he turned and saw the expression on Isaac’s face he was sorry he’d ever been amused at all. Stepping quickly from the edge, he strode over to solemn Isaac and said, “It’s getting out of control.”

He’d made such a comment only because he wanted Isaac to think he was a responsible individual and not one of the people laughing, but Isaac shook his head and corrected him. “No, it’s been out of control. This will calm them for a while.”

The workmen were drifting back from the cliff, undoubtedly remembering it was beer time, but they still mugged and mimed and expressed their pleasure at the unanticipated spectacle. Watching them, Lew said, “Are you sure?”

“They’ll have an hour to think about it,” Isaac said as Young Mr. Balim strolled over to join them. “Next time they’ll remember, and they’ll all be a little more careful.”

“I thought,” Young Mr. Balim said rather tentatively, “I might go up to the road, relieve the man on watch there.”

Isaac frowned. “Why?”

“Because he’s probably asleep.” Young Mr. Balim smiled wistfully. “Also, I don’t think I like the entertainment here.”

Lew said, “Isaac says it won’t happen again.”

“Well, there’s a great lesson in it,” Young Mr. Balim said, “which I don’t need repeated.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s it’s dangerous to play hero,” Young Mr. Balim said, “if you aren’t one.”

The echo of his earlier braggadocio remark to Frank made Lew uncomfortable, which made him aggressive. “How do you know?” he demanded. “How do you know if you’re a hero?”

Young Mr. Balim shrugged. “You survive,” he said.

Isaac had been both right and wrong about what would happen next. When the sixth group of freight cars was dropped off the cliff, the men were much more careful; barely half rode the cars, and those who did were much brisker about jumping to the ground. Nevertheless, a man died.

Lew didn’t ride this time, but stayed on the ground as a good example. It had become evening, already dark under the trees, with bars and tunnels of pink light angling down through the open spaces. Lew watched the empty cars against the pink sky, rolling away, and when he saw the motionless man on the last roof, he cried, “Not again!”

But it was again. The man was short and chunky, with very heavy shoulders, who before this had been noticeable only because he was one of the very few workmen who wore a hat; a kind of tattered baseball cap, with no team designation. Now he stood on the freight-car roof, facing the cliff, both hands pressed to his heart as if he were a character in a Victorian novel, and leaned forward slightly, as though impatient to be gone.

There was no laughter. A few voices tried to raise a cheer, but it didn’t take, and in silence everybody watched the madman ride his freight car down through the empty pink air, never changing his posture, not even when his hat blew off. And when the great black mouth of the water opened for him, showing its white-foam teeth, a general sigh went up, quickly dissipating in the trees.

The men were silent as they turned away, their faces inward-looking, and though everybody was fairly full of beer there was none of the usual roughhousing during the break before returning to work. Friends of the departed man explained that he had been unhappy in love; when this word reached Lew he said, “Shit, so am I! That’s no reason!”

Isaac was the one who’d told him. Spreading his hands, he said, “It seemed like a reason to him.”

Lew left for the lake with the next group of trucks, taking with him the engineer and fireman they’d hijacked with the train. Those two, having sworn they wouldn’t try to escape, had much earlier been given their parole and had sort of been hanging around ever since, drinking beer with the boys and generally having a good old time. However, when they saw Lew make preparations to depart, they both came over and said they would like please to come along to Kenya. Lew shook his head at them. “What for? You aren’t in trouble. When we’re gone, you just go back and tell the truth.”

“Well, mister,” the fireman said, “sometimes in Uganda the truth is not so important.”

“It was our train,” the engineer said. “They might be very angry, and they would want someone to blame, and perhaps they would blame us.”

“We like Kenya,” the fireman said. “It’s a very much better country completely.”

“I have cousins there,” the engineer said. “You say that? ‘Cousins’?”

“Sure.”

“We used to like very much when the railway went to Kenya,” the fireman said. “We still have friends on the railway there.”

“We get jobs,” the engineer said, “and tell everybody the story about this train.”

“They will buy us beer,” the fireman said, and laughed.

“We will never have to buy our own beer again ever completely,” the engineer said, and they both laughed.

“Then climb into the truck,” Lew told them, and went over to tell Isaac he was off, adding, “When you leave, don’t forget Young Mr. Balim up by the road.”

“Oh, I won’t.” Isaac smiled in the near-darkness. “Can you imagine returning to Mr. Balim without his son?”

“No,” Lew said, and left.

He probably should have stayed, but he just didn’t want to anymore. The fun was going out of it. Night was falling, the lugging of coffee sacks was merely manual labor, the repetition of falling freight cars (with or without human sacrifices) had begun to pall, and he kept being given uncomfortable things to think about. First, that his idea of himself as hero might merely be self-aggrandizement; and second, that he didn’t love Ellen enough to jump off a cliff because of her. It was enough to bring anybody down.

ELLEN’S ROAD said the sign on the way out. “Shit,” said Lew.

57

Young Mr. Balim had been made very uneasy by the falling men. He himself was a man who had never known firm ground beneath his feet, so these reminders of how easily he too could drop away and cease to exist, never to matter again, never having mattered in the first place, troubled him and gave him a nervous sensitivity to his own frailty, surrounded by dangers. He tramped back and forth at the level crossing where the access road humped over the track, trying in the physical movements to reassure himself of his own reality, but the thud of his feet sounded hollow in the night, his determined movements the empty gesture of a substanceless shadow.

For who was he anyway but a half-solid ghost, with little more existence than the insects that whined and buzzed around him? He was a ghost of the British imperial era, which had brought both his grandfathers from India to work on this very railroad, leaving behind both the railroad and the men, like a half loaf of bread and a shopping list abandoned on the kitchen counter after the family has moved. Beyond that he was a ghost of Uganda; in this nation of his birth he was under a death sentence for the simple crime of having lived. And he was the ghost of his father’s dream of security and continuity, there was no security, and this age was the enemy of continuity. Every man stands on the freight-car roof. We fall and fall, our feet planted on the solid surface, and the only question is how long before we hit.

Lights. It was fully dark now, and lights were suddenly winking at him through the trees from farther up the hill. At first he thought it was lanterns carried by people clambering their way through the undergrowth, but as they came closer he realized they were headlights. Some sort of vehicle was jouncing very slowly down the access road.

Who? The headlights were yellow, as though the battery were poor, but it could still be police; or Army. Particularly considering those trucks Isaac had borrowed.

As the yellow light touched him, Young Mr. Balim slid away from the level crossing into the tangle of trees and brush just downhill from the track. Nothing showed behind those slow-moving bouncing headlights. A faintly coughing engine could be indistinctly heard. Crouched down low, Young Mr. Balim watched and waited as the headlights reached the crossing, angled upward for the hump… and stopped.

Young Mr. Balim waited, staring. The yellow lights gleamed dimly on the upper branches of trees and the engine continued its weak cough, but nothing at all happened. The vehicle refused to move.

The wait was interminable. From feeling himself an almost incorporeal ghost, Young Mr. Balim now found himself too real by half; his crouched position was becoming distinctly uncomfortable, with shooting pains in his knees and calves, a growing ache in his neck, a heavy muscular cramp spreading across his back. When he could stand it no more, when he was certain ten minutes had gone by—ninety seconds had passed—he shifted position, but then immediately moved again, brush crackling around him.

Why had his father permitted him to come along on this expedition? Mazar Balim was supposed to be the strong one, so much stronger and more self-assured than his son; why had he allowed Bathar to browbeat him into giving way? And what was Bathar’s own nonsense of derring-do, of wresting some wonderful new fantasy life from the jaws of danger? He had come here as though to an initiation, a long-delayed ritual of manhood, never thinking he might fail and fall and not have mattered. Those two men who had gone over the cliff; neither of them had known their stories would end like that when they left Kenya yesterday.

He could wait no longer. He had to move, take the chance, go see for himself what was happening up there. Maybe after all it was nothing more than a couple using this abandoned road for a lover’s lane.

Still, do couples on lovers’ lanes keep their headlights burning? With great caution Young Mr. Balim worked his way through the brush, flitted quickly across the track at a point ten feet east of the crossing, and paused again amid the hedges on the other side.

From this angle, behind and to the left of the vehicle, he could see it silhouetted against the yellow light. It was an old small pickup truck, battered and dark. He couldn’t make out who was in the cab.

Slowly, slowly, inching forward, he stalked the truck. The frail cough of the engine reassured him, suggesting there was no great strength here to contend against. In a last little nearly silent dash he reached the left rear corner of the truck and paused, his hand on the fender, feeling it vibrate from the wheezing engine.

Faint light reflected back from the tree branches. In that illumination, as he was about to move forward along the side of the truck, Young Mr. Balim saw a person lying on his side in the open truckbed. Asleep? Curious, he leaned down closer, saw the black face and the white clerical collar, smelled the caked blood before seeing it all over the man’s head, recognized that he was looking at a corpse, heard a faint sound behind himself, spun round in terror, and saw the swinging tire iron for less than a second before it smashed into the side of his skull.

58

Chase tossed the tire iron away onto the ground, stepped over the fallen sentry, and went forward to switch off the truck’s engine and lights; they had finished their work. Then, while his eyes grew used to the dark, he went back to the sentry, searched him, and was both surprised and annoyed to find the man had no weapons.

What sort of operation was Frank running here? An unarmed sentry was a real snag in Chase’s plans. He himself had been stripped of weapons back at the Rwanda border, and of course the minister, former owner of this truck, had not been carrying any guns. Chase’s primary purpose in luring this fellow forward had been to rearm himself at the sentry’s expense.

All right; it wasn’t the end of the world. Chase looked up at the velvet-gray sky, down at the black undergrowth. His eyes had adjusted as much as they would. Leaving the truck, he stepped over the level crossing, moving slowly, his body still very stiff from his time as a captive.

There were no more sentries posted. Chase moved down the old road in the dark, senses alert, reaching out with eyes and ears into the forest. He felt the change underfoot when he reached that part of the road which had just recently been mashed down by heavy trucks; reversing himself, he found the side road and moved slowly along it, hearing a confusion of faint noises ahead.

He almost walked directly into the side of the engine shed, not seeing it under the roof of tree branches. Circling, he saw vague illumination ahead, and took a moment to figure out what it was.

Of the coffee train, it appeared that only four freight cars were left, standing in a patient row on the old tracks like cows waiting to be milked. Or already being milked; a large Army truck was backed up against the side loading door of each. Kerosene lanterns in the cars gave illumination and tarpaulins thrown over the narrow space between freight-car roof and truck top guarded against that illumination’s being spotted from the air. Hollowly echoing sounds came out to Chase in the still night: feet tramping back and forth, mutters of conversation, thuds of coffee sacks being dropped into place.

A weapon, Chase thought. I have to have a weapon.

The truck cabs were empty. He searched them, but the glove compartments, the map racks, the underseat spaces were all devoid of guns. Frank will be armed, Chase told himself. I’d better have a gun in my hand when I meet him.

A man jumped from one of the freight cars, feet thumping the ground. He walked a bit away from the trucks, then stopped to relieve himself. Chase waited till he was done, then came up behind him, gripped his head and neck between his forearms, and whispered in his ear in Swahili, “If you make a sound, I shall break your neck.”

The man’s body tensed, but with fear rather than intended action. He froze there, his hands out as though he were falling forward, and Chase whispered, “Where is Frank Lanigan?”

“Gone—” The man faltered, his voice scratchy and hoarse. “Gone to the lake.” He spoke with a soft Luo accent.

“The lake. What about Brady?”

“I don’t—Who?”

Chase gave him a little squeeze, for being stupid. “The other white man!”

“The lake!”

“Quiet!”

“Gone to—You hurt my neck.”

“I can do worse,” Chase told him. “Both white men gone to the lake?” That didn’t seem sensible.

“Yes.”

“Who’s in charge?”

“Mr. Otera.”

Otera. Balim’s office manager. A picture came into Chase’s mind of Otera putting on the Army uniform in that Jinja attorney’s office. Not a difficult opponent. “Where is he?”

“The farthest wagon.”

“Who else is with him?”

“People working.” The man sounded surprised at the question.

“Bosses,” Chase explained, again squeezing the man’s neck. “What other bosses?”

“None here. Young Mr. Balim up by the road.”

So that had been Balim’s son up there, crashing around in the woods. Smiling, Chase said, “Thank you,” broke the man’s neck, and went over to the farthest freight car, where he stood in the darkness beside the truck and called, in imitation of that man’s Luo accent, “Mr. Otera!”

He had to call the name twice before Otera appeared, pushing aside the hanging end of tarpaulin, squinting, unable to see much in the dark after the lantern light. “Yes?”

“Something for you to see, Mr. Otera.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, you must come see, sir.”

Reluctantly, ungracefully, Otera clambered down out of the freight car and came forward. He was wearing the shirt and trousers of the Army uniform, but not the jacket. “What is it? I don’t see any—Oh!”

Chase lunged forward, left hand closing around Otera’s neck, right hand grabbing his shirtfront and yanking him in close. “Not a sound!” he whispered, reverting back to English. “You’d be dead in one flick.” His sudden movement had fired up inside his body all those pains that had been so slowly subsiding, none of which showed on his face.

Otera gaped at him, wide-eyed above Chase’s clenching hand. “Chase!” he whispered in blank astonishment.

“Where’s your uniform? The jacket.”

“It’s over—” Otera started, gesturing toward the engine shed, then too late tried to call the gesture back.

“That’s right,” Chase said, smiling at him. Sure of his man, he switched his grip from throat to upper arm, and pulled Otera along toward the shed. “There was a nice Sam Browne belt with that uniform, and a nice holster, and a nice pistol.”

“Chase—” Otera said, but then couldn’t seem to think of anything more to say, as he was propelled through the darkness.

Amiably enough, Chase said, “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead by now. I’ve been through a lot today, and I’ll be more comfortable when I’m armed.”

Otera, with a new worry, said, “Are they after you?”

“Not here. Don’t worry,” Chase told him in utter sincerity, “I won’t spoil this operation. Not for anything.”

The jacket and belt lay on the remaining mound of old rails, on the far side of the shed. Chase, to give warmth and support to his battered body, slipped the coat on, pleased that it was a bit snug. He cinched the belt tight, then snapped open the holster flap and slid the pistol out into his hand. Strength flowed from the cold metal. Otera’s herbivore eyes watched him in the dark. Holding the pistol casually at his side, Chase said, “Let’s go back.” At Otera’s sigh of long-held breath, Chase laughed. “I said I wouldn’t kill you.”

As they walked back, Chase said, “How much more is there to do?”

“These are the last trucks.”

“Good. We can ride down to the lake together.”

There was a bit more light near the trucks, and in it Otera frowned at Chase in bewilderment and dislike. “If you’re in trouble,” he said, “if all you want is to come with us to Kenya, you didn’t have to attack me, and arm yourself, and all this business.”

“We all have our methods, Watson,” Chase said. He made a shooing gesture with the hand holding the revolver. “Go along, go along.”

Otera turned away, and Chase went to rest himself in the nearest truck cab. But the map light didn’t work, so he went on to the next, where the small narrow glow under the dashboard permitted him to study the weapon with which he’d armed himself.

It was a good one, though old. An English semiautomatic revolver, a Webley-Fosbery chambered in .455 caliber, it was one of the few pistols ever made which used the recoil of the last shot to cock the hammer and rotate the cylinder for the next. It couldn’t be fired as rapidly as a full automatic, but it had a solid reliable heft to it.

Holding the gun down under the map light, Chase broke open the cylinder and looked in. For a moment he just gazed in silence, then he laughed at the joke. There wasn’t a bullet in it.

59

Balim rode in the back of the Mercedes with the government man called Charles Obuong. The other one, Godfrey Magon, rode up front with the chauffeur; between them, out beyond the windshield, Balim could see if he wished the rural roads of Nyanza province, illuminated by the powerful white headlights of the Mercedes; what he could not see, unfortunately, was into the minds of Charles Obuong and Godfrey Magon.

Their manner with him was unfailingly polite and friendly though with the inevitable edge of power and mockery. And they had been quite open, freely repeating to him what they already knew of the smuggling, which was a lot. And even beyond what they knew, they also modestly claimed to have been of logistical help along the way. It was their office, they said, which had expedited the permissions and development-fund loans for the Port Victoria hotel. They had assisted Isaac in his purchase of false identity papers. They had even made lumber available when in the ordinary course of events he might still be waiting for the planks they’d used in making the rafts. They had in effect been Balim’s partners all along, and they didn’t even seem to mind it very much that their “investigator” had apparently been murdered by someone connected with Balim.

Was all this true? But if it were not true, how would they know so many details, and how did it happen that the assemblage of matériel had been so unusually smooth and effortless?

And if it was indeed the truth, including their claim of a plot to resteal the coffee “with violence,” then all that mattered now was that Bathar was in danger. Bathar, the only son of Mazar Balim.

Which was why Balim had immediately and sincerely offered his fullest cooperation, telling Magon and Obuong what little they hadn’t already known, which was mostly the timetable: when the coffee would be hijacked, when it would be brought to Port Victoria. “It’s happening right now,” Balim had told them, and they’d been pleased at the news; a good dinner had been given Balim at a local hotel at their expense, and when they’d come out afterward the Mercedes and the truckload of soldiers were already waiting. And now they were running through the night over the washboard roads, the Mercedes in the lead, the truck following in their dust.

The Nzoia ferry did not run at night. They had to take the wider sweep through Sio, through tiny villages without electricity, down long dirt roads hemmed in by fresh growth after the long rains. Riding along in silence beside Obuong, Balim had leisure in which to grow used to his worry about Bathar, and to think about more mundane items, such as what these two government men were really up to. Was it all as selfless and official as it appeared? How unlikely.

Treading with care, Balim began his exploration into the question of motive as indirectly as possible. Breaking the long silence, “Uganda,” he said to Obuong, “has been a troublesome neighbor for years.”

“Oh, very troublesome,” Obuong agreed. Smiling, he said, “That’s why we were so pleased at your initiative.”

“Yes, you called me a patriot.”

Obuong found that amusing. “I did?”

“Yes, when we first met in my office.” Balim made himself as small and round and inoffensive and harmless as possible. “I knew you meant it ironically,” he said, the slightest hint of self-pity in his voice.

Politeness barely covering the mockery, Obuong said, “I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings.”

“Not at all.” Balim sighed, accepting the calumnies of this world on his bowed shoulders. “But it did make me wonder.” he went on, “what you thought our motive was in taking this coffee.”

“Money,” Obuong said, promptly and simply and emphatically.

“Only money?”

“Please don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Balim,” Obuong said. “I am not myself anti-Asian. Some of my best friends in Nairobi are Asian.”

Balim nodded, accepting these bona fides.

“But I don’t think it’s unfair to say,” Obuong went on, “that it is well known that patriotism is not an emotion known to Asians. Their interests—perfectly legitimate interests—lie elsewhere. Money, merchandising. Art. Learning. At times, religion. And they are very good family people.”

“Patriotism,” Balim gently pointed out, “is the love of one’s country. Unrequited love of one’s country is a passion difficult to maintain.”

“There have undoubtedly been injustices committed against the Asians,” Obuong said, in the manner of a person utterly uninterested in discussing such injustices. “But please let me reassure you. If profit was a consideration at all—in addition to the love you bear your adopted country, of course—you still have something to look forward to. Not as much, of course.”

“Of course,” Balim said.

“There will be various taxes to be paid, import duties and so on. Due to your… patriotism… I should think certain normal fines and seizures of goods would be waived in this case.”

“Good of you,” Balim murmured.

“Then, of course, the Jhosis have really far too small a plantation to handle all that coffee. We can make arrangements for particular other growers who could assist.”

“I see,” Balim said. He was smiling. The familiar whiff of corruption, so long missing from his relationship with these two, was at last a comforting presence in his nostrils. Politics, trade, graft, and the general opposition to Idi Amin; all had come together to make this unlikely partnership.

“Almost there,” Godfrey Magon said from the front seat, and Balim looked out past him at the sharply defined world snared in their headlights.

At night Port Victoria ceased almost entirely to exist. One or two lights flickered deep in the interior of the shops around the grassy market square, but the little stucco-faced houses lining the dirt road down the long, steep slopes to the lake were black and silent, humped together in the darkness like natural growths, unpopulated hillocks.

At the bottom of the hill, near the shoreline, was the unfinished hotel. The two men Frank had left here to guard the building supplies were tending a smoky orange fire in a large oil drum. “A beacon,” Godfrey Magon pointed out, “to guide our heroes home.”

60

Isaac drove the first truck, with Chase in the passenger seat beside him fondling the pistol. Their headlights were taped down to mere slits, producing something not much stronger than candlelight, a faint amber glow barely bright enough to distinguish the road from the surrounding woods. Only the lead truck used headlights at all, each of the other three navigating by the red taillights of the truck ahead.

From time to time Chase tried to make small talk—“What are you going to do with all the money?” “Do you like your new life as a swashbuckler?” “What ministry were you with in Uganda?”—but Isaac refused to answer. He hated this creature beside him; he had to grip tightly to the steering wheel to keep himself from a useless suicidal attack against the man.

Bathar. Painful scenes played in his head, of himself telling Mr. Balim that Bathar was dead; and of course he must be the one to break the news. Frank lacked the sensitivity, and all the rest were strangers.

That’s why he has the gun, Isaac thought, why he wasn’t calm until he had a gun in his hand. It’s because his viciousness makes him hurt people, he can’t stop hurting people, and he needs protection against the rage and hatred he inspires.

The gun had been prominent in Chase’s hand when Isaac had come over to the truck cab, back at the depot, to say, “All loaded. I just have to send someone up to get Young Mr. Balim.”

“No need for that,” Chase had answered, sitting in the cab, smiling at him in that lazy-cat way of his. “I already met him on the way down.”

Isaac had stared, unwilling to believe. “What did you—?”

“You don’t have to worry about him anymore,” Chase had said, stroking the gun. “Get in, let’s go.”

For the next hour Isaac could think about that, all the way down the long road to the lake. Fresh pale scars winked from the tree branches, mementos of earlier trucks. The close-lying darkness to either side seemed peopled, teeming with watchful silent life; but none of it so dangerous or so evil as Chase.

It seemed to Isaac finally that they must have crossed into some other plane of reality where there was no lake, no farther terminus at all; there was nothing but the road and a permanent condition in which he drove endlessly through unrelieved darkness with this self-satisfied monster at his side. But then he saw a figure in the dimness ahead, standing between the ruts, and recognized that shambling posture immediately as belonging to no one else but Charlie. Of course it was; Charlie stood grinning, a long shaggy piece of sugar-cane sticking out of his mouth like a financier’s cigar.

Charlie waved for Isaac to follow, then scampered on ahead, a manic figure, some ramshackle wood sprite with no redeeming social qualities. The previous trucks, empty and dark, were pulled barely off the road on both sides, leaving a narrow high-walled alley for Isaac to negotiate.

Chase said, “Why, it’s a major operation.”

It was. In near-darkness two trucks were being unloaded onto two rafts. The swarming lines of men, with their heavy sacks of coffee, looked like agitated ants forced to move their nest. Isaac braked to a stop, cutting the engine, and in the sudden silence he could hear beneath the muted sounds of the loading a disturbed plash of water against the rafts.

Frank strode up from the edge of the unseen lake, looking big and mean and bad-tempered; his boss expression. Lew followed, glancing quickly this way and that, looking for rips in the fabric. Sounding wistful, Chase said, “I could hit them both from here.”

Isaac turned to look at the man, who was gazing through the windshield, smiling faintly. If he lifts the gun, Isaac thought, I’ll stop him. I’ll kill him if I can.

Chase met Isaac’s eyes. Seeming both surprised and amused, he said, “I’m not going to, Otera.” He made that shooing gesture with the gun. “Climb out. I’ll follow you.”

Isaac opened the door and clambered down to the ground. Chase followed through the same opening, so Isaac moved a few steps away. Frank, before coming up to them, was already calling out orders: “Get your men down to the lake, Isaac, let’s finish this, it’s too fucking dark to work.”

“He has a gun,” Isaac said quietly, and stepped farther away to the side as Chase shut the truck door and revealed himself, smiling in the faint light, holding the gun casually but prominently at his side.

Then it got very quiet inside their little circle. Below, on planks over the roiled mud of the shore, the workmen continued to load the rafts. Above, in the narrow corridor between the empty trucks, the men who’d just ridden down from the depot were jumping out onto the ground, demonic in the red glow of the taillights as they stretched their stiff muscles and made quiet conversation together. Here around the lead truck there was silence, with Chase beside the door in his torn trousers and the uniform coat and belt, the pistol gleaming in his hand. Isaac stood away from him to the side, Frank farther away toward the lake, Lew just beyond Frank. Charlie watched in childlike interest at the periphery of the light.

“Surprise,” Chase said.

Frank said, “What’s this all about?”

Lew took a step to his left, but with sudden harshness Chase gestured with the gun, saying, “Don’t go anywhere, friend.”

Frank, already angry, said, “Chase, what are you fucking around at?”

“A little trouble at the office,” Chase told him, his good humor returning. “I had to leave.”

Isaac said. “He killed Bathar.”

Frank stared at Isaac, as though blaming the messenger. “He did what?”

“I hit him with a tire iron,” Chase said, as though it were an unimportant detail. “He might be dead, he might be alive. What difference does it make?”

Speaking to Isaac as though Chase weren’t there, Frank said, “Did you see it?”

“No. Bathar was on watch, up by the crossing. This man wouldn’t let me send anyone for him.”

Frank thought about it, then came to a conclusion. “Okay,” he said, and walked toward Chase.

Chase had been lounging at his ease, shoulder against the shut truck door, but now he stood up straight, flashing the gun again, saying, “Frank, take it easy.”

Slogging forward, workmanlike, Frank said, “How many times can you pop me with that little thing? I’ll still take your fucking head off.” Behind him, Lew had also started forward, moving to Frank’s right. Isaac watched, openmouthed. He wanted to yell, to make them stop, but he couldn’t think what the words would be. And Chase seemed just as astonished. “Frank!” he shouted. “Don’t make me do it!” But Frank just walked forward, at the end reaching out for Chase’s head.

Which was when Chase reversed the gun and tried to use the butt as a club. But Frank held his forearm, twisted the gun out of his hand, and tossed it dismissively to Lew. Then he started hitting.

Chase was big, but Frank was bigger, and he now went at Chase the way he drove the Land-Rover, the way he pushed his employees, the way he did everything in life, wading straight in.

“He’s alive!” Chase cried, arms up to defend himself. “It’s true, it’s true, he’s alive!”

But Frank didn’t hear, or didn’t care, or didn’t believe. His elbows pumped out and back and up and down, his thick head was thrust out, his feet were planted like oak trees, and rather than box his way past Chase’s defensive arms he pounded his way through them, crowding Chase against the side of the truck and hitting his arms and shoulders till they grew too battered and weary to lift anymore, then going to work on the man’s torso instead, pausing once with his big palm against Chase’s chest, saying, “I’m saving your head for dessert,” then pounding his torso some more. The workmen who’d just come down from the depot gathered around to watch and admire.

“Frank,” Lew said. He spoke quietly enough, but something odd in his tone attracted Frank’s attention, and he at once stopped, took a step back, and as Chase sagged down onto the truck’s running board Frank turned and said, “What’s up?”

Lew had come over to stand near Isaac, who saw that he was holding the gun open so Frank could see the cylinder. Isaac saw it, too, as Lew said, “It’s empty, Frank.”

Frank gave an angry bark of laughter, as though saying it didn’t matter, but when he turned back to Chase he no longer seemed so determined to beat him to death. “So, you simple bastard,” he said. “You’ve got nothing in your pecker at all.”

Chase didn’t speak. His breath was short and ragged and loud; he hugged himself as though afraid he might be broken somewhere inside. He stared at the ground at Frank’s feet, waiting for whatever would happen next.

Lew handed the pistol to Isaac and walked forward. While Isaac held the broken-open thing in both hands, not knowing what to do with it, surprised by the weight of it, Lew stopped beside Frank and said, “Chase. Talk to me about Young Mr. Balim.”

“I hit him.” His voice was flat and weary and uninflected.

“Where? With what?”

“Side of the head. Tire iron.”

Isaac walked over to join them, the gun in his palms like a gift. Lew continued his catechism. “Check his pulse afterward?”

“No.”

“Do anything else to him?”

“Searched him.”

“Do you think he’s alive, or do you think he’s dead?”

Chase lifted his weary head, showing a flash of his old arrogance and contempt. “I didn’t think about it. I didn’t care.”

Isaac said, “Why wouldn’t you let me send people to get him?”

“What difference does it make?” Chase, who had suffered the beating in stoic silence, seemed pushed beyond endurance by the interrogation. “You’re all dead, anyway,” he said.

Frank jumped on that. “Who says? What’s going on, Chase?”

But Chase lowered his head, his expression obstinate. Whatever he had meant, it was clear he would not explain any further. Frank glanced toward the lake, then back at Chase. “You got a double cross in mind? That would be your style, wouldn’t it, you son of a bitch. I told Balim about you.”

Isaac said, “And now we’ll have to tell him about Bathar.”

Lew said, “Frank, I’ll go up and get him.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Frank said.

“It’s not stupid. What if he’s alive? He isn’t ready for Uganda, Frank, believe me. Think about it; they find him, they find the depot, they start to twist him.”

“He’ll talk,” Frank said.

But Lew brushed that aside. “He’ll talk the first ten seconds. But they won’t stop, Frank. I know these bastards now. Chase! If Young Mr. Balim’s still alive, and your pals find him, what then?”

Chase didn’t lift his head. “They’ll play him for a month,” he said tonelessly.

“If ever there was a mouse in the land of cats,” Lew said, “it’s Young Mr. Balim.”

“Wait a minute,” Frank said, and turned to bellow, “Charlie!”

“Right here,” said Charlie, who was.

“Take seven or eight guys,” Frank told him, gesturing at Chase, “and tie this fellow up with a lot of rope. I don’t want him comfortable, see what I mean?”

“Oh, sure,” Charlie said, grinning.

“And put a gag in his mouth. A dirty gag. Use your shirt.”

Charlie giggled, and called in Swahili to the men standing around, several of whom came forward in anticipatory pleasure. Meanwhile, Frank turned back to Lew and Isaac, saying, “Come on over here.”

They walked a bit away, farther from the light, where Frank frowned at Lew, shook his head, and said, “You’re talking about two hours, up and back. Minimum. We’ll be out of here in less than an hour. And if Chase really is up to something, we can’t hang around. In fact, we can’t hang around, anyway.”

Isaac said, “Frank, think of Mr. Balim.”

“I am thinking of Mr. Balim. I’m thinking of every fucking body.”

“I won’t come back,” Lew said. “Listen, Frank, whether he’s alive or dead I’ll get back a different route.”

“There are no different routes,” Frank told him. “We stole their fucking coffee crop, remember? They’ll have that border shut like a nunnery in the Hundred Years’ War.”

“Ellen,” Lew said.

Nobody understood him. Isaac, thinking Lew had forgotten in the press of the moment, said, “Lew, Ellen isn’t with us anymore.”

“Sure she is,” Lew said. “She’s at Entebbe.”

Isaac gaped at him, too astonished to speak. Frank said it for them both: “Entebbe? You’re gonna escape from Uganda through Entebbe?”

“I wouldn’t be the first,” Lew said, grinning. “Frank, get a message to her. You can do it, you’re her former employer back in Nairobi. The message is, an old friend of hers from Alaska, a guy named Val Dietz, he’s in Africa passing through, he says he’ll be in Entebbe sometime the next twenty-four hours, he sure hopes he can stop by and say hello, buy her a drink.”

Isaac, feeling very uncomfortable, said, “Lew, you shouldn’t be the one to do this.”

“I’m the only one who can,” Lew said.

His expression sour, Frank said, “Still the fucking hero, huh?”

“Always and forever, Frank.” Lew was already backing away, grinning, in a hurry to be off. “Remember the message.”

Isaac said, “Val Dietz, from Alaska.”

Frank said, “Where’d that name come from?”

“She’ll understand it.” Pointing at Isaac, Lew said, “Twenty-four hours.”

“I’ll remember,” Isaac promised.

Lew turned and trotted away toward the empty trucks. Watching him, Frank muttered, “Ellen’s gonna blame me.”

61

He couldn’t believe the pain in his head. It wasn’t fair to hurt like this; no matter how much he’d had to drink, no matter how late he’d stayed up, it just wasn’t fair. If the head was going to explode, why didn’t it go ahead and explode and be done with it? Why go on torturing him, hurting so much he couldn’t even get comfortable, the mattress was so hard and lumpy and—

Mattress? Lord, Lord, he wasn’t even in bed, he was on the ground somewhere, he’d never made it home, he even had all his clothes on, his shoes—

Tentatively he opened one eye, saw nothing, and felt increased pain in his skull. Lifting a slow-moving shaking hand, he rested the palm consolingly against his throbbing brow, and the horror he touched there made him shriek! He sat bolt-upright, and stared in blank terror at the blackness all around him.

“My God. My God.” He had no idea Who exactly his God was, only that in moments of distress he felt the presence of some potentially benign Figure gazing placidly and with some amused interest over the rim of Heaven and down upon poor little foolish Bathar.

Blood. Caked blood and torn flesh and a great throbbing pounding bruise. And blackness all around; nothing discernible except just beside him this dark small truck. Truck. Corpse in it. Yellow lights, engine coughing, noise behind him, turn, incredibly fast flash of metal.

Remembering everything—God, are you watching? I’m in Uganda, God—Bathar used the truck to drag himself to his feet. His nerves were all unstrung; he could barely stand; his stomach was roiled; stars and planets spun and imploded in the periphery of his vision. He leaned on the little pickup truck, gasping, waiting for the symptoms to go away, and they didn’t even let up.

But he couldn’t stay here. He had to get back to the depot, warn them. “There’s a crazy person out here; he hits without warning, for no reason at all. Just a crazy person.”

But was he? And who was he? And why do such a terrible thing?

Bathar pushed himself away from the support of the truck, not because he was ready to stand on his own but because he was driven by a sense of urgency. He had to report to Isaac right away, tell him what had happened.

He tottered over the level crossing, struggling to regain control of his legs, and thought he was doing well enough until he came down to the rocky, uneven, root-hampered roadway, where he promptly fell, breaking his fall painfully with his forearms. He rested awhile on the cool damp ground, but then again made it to his feet and proceeded in a wary half-crouch, hands splayed out to the sides.

He did fine until, just before Ellen’s Road, he fell over the moped. Frank had ridden it up here at the very beginning, to get the first truck, and the thing had been shoved out of the way after that, its usefulness finished. When Bathar fell over it, he got a handlebar in the stomach that winded him and forced him to lie quietly on the ground for another little space of time. Then, sighing, hoping God was watching and admiring these strenuous efforts, he made it to his feet once more, found Ellen’s Road, worked his way slowly in to the depot, and everybody was gone. Nothing was left but the last four freight cars, stripped of their cargo.

How could that be? How long had he been unconscious? He stared upward at the sky but saw no indications of dawn. Why had no one come looking for him? And where were they all?

Gone. They left Uganda. Left Uganda.

“Oh, my,” Bathar murmured, his own voice a comforting friend in this unpopulated blackness. “Oh, God, am I in trouble.”

Hurry after them? But how long had they been gone? He’d left his watch at home—ah, the lovely mahogany dresser in his lovely dark cozy comfortable room at home—his watch at home on the dresser top with his wallet, his little gold bracelet, his gold money clip, all his civilized fripperies, because he’d been going off on an adventure. An adventure!

The rest of them—Isaac and Frank and Lew and all of them—they surely must be out on the lake by now, safely away from Uganda. It had taken him so long to get down here from the level crossing, and they’d already been gone when he’d started or he would have heard and seen the trucks. Long gone. Marooning him, all alone, in this evil place.

He couldn’t think why they would have done it, but at the moment he didn’t even much care. Later—if there was a later—he would give himself over to rage and paranoia and self-pity, but at the moment he was too nervous for that. He had to move, he had to keep in motion or he would break down completely. Terrified, knowing or believing that his very mind was at risk, that if he stopped moving he would have a nervous breakdown and just sit under some tree somewhere gibbering until they came to take him away, knowing or believing that movement was at least therapy if not otherwise useful, he turned about and tottered away from the depot, back out Ellen’s Road.

He found the moped by falling over it again, but this time he switched on its headlight, and the sudden appearance of the world out of blank nothingness was comforting.

Which way? He looked up and down the access road. Down was the lake, but how could they still be there? It would be a dangerous waste of time; he’d simply have to turn around and come back the twenty miles—with who knew how much gas left—and back again past the depot, which by then the Ugandan authorities might very well have found.

The other way? Up at the head of the access road was the main highway; east on that highway was the Kenyan border. People slipped across that border all the time.

Bathar mounted the moped, started the sputtering nasal engine, took a deep breath to calm his nerves, gripped the handlebars to keep his hands from shaking, and drove slowly and waveringly away, uphill.

62

Every person who came into the office, every report that was made, every caller on the telephone, only made Amin’s rage deeper and more implacable. His big body in the heavy chair behind the desk became increasingly still as the afternoon blended into night, his shoulders sloping, his weight pressed solidly onto the chair, his Army-booted feet planted squarely on the floor. Only his hands and eyes moved, the eyes shifting left and right like gun turrets in search of enemies, his hands touching and investigating one another, the blind fingers of his right hand studying the fingers of his left.

The train was gone; that was the long and short of it. Coffee worth three million pounds U.K. had been stolen, and the whole train carrying it had been stolen, and no one could find the slightest trace of it or hint as to where it had gone.

There were theories, naturally, hundreds of theories. The frightened men around Amin spurted theories as if they were Sten guns jammed in firing position; they laid down barrages of theories as covering fire to hide their lack of facts.

There was the theory that perhaps the thieves had also stolen the wagon ferry from Jinja terminal, the large ferry that carried railway cars across the lake to Mwanza in Tanzania, but apart from the fact that the wagon ferry could carry no more than eight cars—and the missing train, apart from its locomotive, had contained thirty-three cars—there was also the fact that the ferry hadn’t been stolen but was still in service.

There was also the theory that the train had actually gone through the Jinja yards after all, with the collusion of the railway employees, and had been diverted onto the northbound branch line toward Mbulamuti. But the entire eighty-some miles of the Mbulamuti branch, with all its spurs, had been searched on the ground and by air to no effect. And the Jinja yardmaster and stationmaster had been tortured for several hours without once changing their stories.

In an alternate theory, the train had never turned west at Tororo at all, but had been spirited across the border there into Kenya. However, extensive questioning with torture of railway employees at Tororo had turned up nothing, nor had torture changed the story of the Iganga stationmaster, who continued to swear that the coffee train had gone through Iganga heading west and had not returned.

All the helicopters of the antismuggling patrol had been brought in from their quadrants over the lake to roam the air instead over the railway line, without finding a thing. The Ugandan Air Force had scrambled, and jets had flashed and swooped here and there through the sky, to no effect. With the arrival of full night, all air activity was stopped, as being pointless.

The people who came into Amin’s presence to tell him all these things were very reluctant to enter the room and even more reluctant to say what they had to say. But Amin was too angry at the missing train to pay attention to fear in the eyes and voices of his underlings. (He was used to a certain amount of that, anyway.) He asked the occasional question in his slow heavy voice, he made the occasional contemptuous dismissal of this or that crackpot theory, but for the most part he merely sat there like the Minotaur in its maze, waiting for food. In this case, the food would be the people responsible for the missing train.

And the missing Chase. Ali Kekka had failed on that, even on that very simple task; bring Chase back to Kampala. He had disappeared again, he and the train.

On one item everyone including Amin was in accord: the train had to be someplace. But that didn’t help much. On the other hand, it did mean they would go on searching; sooner or later the train—and the explanation for its disappearance—would have to be found. It was impossible that the mystery would remain unsolved.

Which brought up a potentially hopeful road of inquiry. The railway was relatively modern, the Nile bridge at Jinja not having been completed until 1931; a mere forty-six years ago. Surely there were men still alive who had worked on that part of the road, and who would remember if there had ever been a previous line, or a no-longer-used branch, or anything at all off the main track that could have accommodated the train. A search was under way for such ex-employees, hampered by the fact that record maintenance had not been a high priority in Uganda in recent years.

Night fell, but Amin did not move. Sandwiches and beer were brought him, which he ate at the desk, masticating slowly, rolling his jaws as though chewing the arms and heads of the guilty parties. The phone rang as he was finishing, and it was an Air Force colonel at Entebbe reporting that all aircraft were now down for the night but would be serviced and refueled and ready to take off again at dawn. A man from the Uganda Coffee Commission came reluctantly into the office, stood quivering before the desk, and reported that the cargo-plane crews waiting at Entebbe and Sir Denis Lambsmith of the International Coffee Board had all been told that the coffee train had broken down east of Jinja but was being repaired now and would arrive at Kampala sometime tomorrow.

Amin looked at the man. “We got to find it first,” he said.

The Coffee Commission man was a reader, a bit better educated than the soldiers Amin preferred around himself. He said, “We must remember what the great English detective Sherlock Holmes, advises. ‘Eliminate the impossible,’ he always said, ‘and whatever is left, however improbable, is the answer.’”

“Sherlock Holmes, huh?” Amin brooded at the Coffee Commission man, not quite annoyed enough to have him tortured and killed. “Eliminate the impossible, huh?” Holding up his left hand, fingers spread, he ticked off the points. “A train can’t go without tracks. A train is too big to hide. A train can’t disappear. The train disappeared. There’s your impossibles.” He pointed a finger like a battering ram at the unfortunate Coffee Commission man. “Now you tell me,” Amin said. “Tell me now. What do we got left?”

63

The ten rafts moved out of Macdonald Bay in a long straggling line, slow and unwieldy, their motors straining and groaning against the weight. Each raft, twenty feet square, was loaded twelve feet high, the coffee sacks covered with the gray tarpaulins, four or five men riding on top of each. Frank stood atop the lead raft, with Chase trussed up to one side and Charlie jabbering away with two other Bantu boys back by the steering stick.

It was a dark night, the quarter-moon giving very little illumination. Looking back, Frank could barely make out the next two rafts in the line, wallowing along on the placid lake like waterlogged suitcases from some wrecked liner. It had taken three hours to come here from Port Victoria, but it would be more like six hours going back.

From time to time Chase kicked up a fuss, apparently having something he very much wanted to say, but every time he thrashed around and made those growling noises behind the filthy gag, either Frank or Charlie cuffed him into silence again. However, Frank had continued to brood about that earlier hint of Chase’s, the suggestion that he’d double-crossed them in some way that could mean trouble ahead, so after they’d come out of the bay and completed the long slow broad turn from south to east around Bwagwe Point, Frank stomped over the tarpaulin-covered sacks to where Chase was lying, all wound around with rope like a fly being saved by a spider for a meal later on. Hunkering down beside the man, rapping a knuckle on his temple to get his attention, Frank said, “I’m gonna take that gag off now. You got something to say, say it. But don’t do any shouting or I’ll make you sorry.”

Chase nodded, eager and anxious. He was already trying to say something, behind the gag. “Wait a minute,” Frank told him while he struggled with Charlie’s knot. Then, when he finally got the gag off, all Chase could do at first was cough and spit and clear his throat. Frank waited, and at last Chase said hoarsely, “Will you make a deal?”

“With you?” Frank laughed without humor.

“If we don’t deal,” Chase insisted, lying there, twisting his head to look up at Frank, “you’re certainly dead, and I’m probably dead.”

“Tell me about it, Chase,” Frank said. “What did you cook up for us?”

“Do we deal?” Urgently, pressing hard, limbs straining against the ropes, Chase said, “There’s money in it, Frank, there’s plenty of money in it. We can both retire.”

“Tell me your story.”

But still Chase hesitated. “Will you deal? Will you come in with me? Can I trust you?”

Frank laughed at him. “Look where you are,” he said. “If I want, I can just roll you off the edge here. Plop, you’re all gone. Baron Chase gone forever. Fish food. You want to deal? Tell me the story or shut your face.”

Chase thought about it for a while, obviously unhappy. The side of his face looked raw where it had rubbed against the tarpaulin. Taking a deep breath, shaking his head, he said, “I’ve got to, Frank. You’re my only hope.”

“Tough,” Frank commented.

“I sold the coffee,” Chase said.

Frank frowned., “Sold it? This coffee? Who to?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Chase said. “A man in Switzerland. You’ve never heard of him.”

“Why would he buy coffee from you, Chase?”

Chase rested his head against the lumpy tarpaulin. Sounding more tired, he said, “He’s part of the combine buying the coffee. Buying it originally. I told him I had knowledge the coffee wouldn’t make it out of the country, he and his people were going to lose out. But I might be able to find him some other coffee. The price has gone up, anyway; he can charge the Brazilians more for it if it isn’t the same coffee anymore. He cuts his losses and I—we—make a very nice profit.”

“He went for this?”

“He told me, if his coffee disappeared, if I had substitute coffee, we had a deal.”

“Another convent child,” Frank said. “What’s your arrangement?”

“I deliver to his people in Dar.”

Dar es Salaam, capital of Tanzania, was a major port on the Indian Ocean, second only to Mombasa in tonnage of cargo. But it was more than a thousand miles from here. Frank said, “How do you get it there?”

“By train from Mwanza.”

Mwanza. Just as Kisumu was Kenya’s principal port on the lake, Mwanza was Tanzania’s, down at the southern tip, the extreme far end of the lake, well over two hundred miles away. Frank said, “These rafts can’t make it to Mwanza.”

“I know that.” Again Chase hesitated, making it clear that now he was coming to the crunch. Inching cautiously into it, he said, “There’s an Asian called Hassanali.”

“I’ve heard of him,” Frank agreed. “These are his engines. He had some police trouble.”

“I arranged his police trouble,” Chase said, not without pride.

“Why?”

“He owns a cargo ship called the Angel; it operates out of Kisumu.”

“I know the Angel,” Frank said. “Huge motherfuckin ship for this lake, but we don’t use him. He’s a crook, worse than the railway. But why make trouble for Hassanali?”

“He wouldn’t deal, but captain Usoga, who runs the Angel, he would.”

Frank looked forward at the empty lake. It was very dark out there, except for the tiny glints of moonlight on wavelets. “You’ve got the Angel out there in front of us,” Frank said. “To hijack us.”

“Yes.”

“They’ll have armed men aboard,” Frank said, turning to look back toward the other rafts. “They’ll just steam by and pick us off.”

“Not if we deal,” Chase said. “Not if I call out to Captain Usoga, tell him who I am. He needs me alive to get his money.”

Frank studied the trussed-up man with some surprise, almost with admiration. “You’re a pirate, Chase,” he said. “Do you know that? You’re a goddam pirate.”

Chase had no comment.

“All right.” Frank brooded, looking forward. “Where do they figure to hit us?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re a liar, but it doesn’t matter. I know. The only sensible place is the narrows between Matale Point and Sigulu Island.”

“Frank!” Chase said, struggling against his ropes. “You can’t outrun them! Frank, you’re not just killing yourself, you’re killing me!”

“Be quiet now,” Frank told him. “I’m thinking.”

Standing, Frank pondered a minute, then turned away and headed toward Charlie and the others back by the steering stick. Chase called something after him, which Frank ignored. Reaching the three Bantu, he said, “Charlie, old son, I’m gonna take you into my confidence.”

“Oh, nice!” Charlie said. Moonlight reflected from his bright eyes and white teeth and wet chin.

“D’ja ever hear of pirates, Charlie?”

“Oh, yes,” Charlie said. “Even so, in the cinema. Swing on ropes. Swords.”

“You got it. And that’s what’s out in front of us. Except no swords. Guns.”

Charlie looked around at their raft. He was a quick study. “Bad completely,” he said.

“I figure,” Frank told him, “they’re waiting for us off Sigulu Island. Where it’s narrow there, between the island and the shore.”

“Oh, sure,” Charlie said, happy in agreement. “Ambush. Very good.”

“Good for them, not good for us.” Gesturing at the other two Bantu, who were watching and listening and not picking up one English word in ten, Frank said, “Can either of these boys swim?”

“Oh, excellently. They’re Luo, all Luo swim.”

The Bantu smiled when they heard their tribe’s name. Frank smiled back at them, then said, “Charlie, I want one of them to swim back to the next raft. and then to the one after that, and the one after that, and all the way to the last one, where Isaac is. Okay?”

“Much swimming,” Charlie suggested.

“Then he treads water,” Frank said impatiently, “he waits for the raft to catch up. Every raft, he gives them the message. There’s pirates ahead, we should pull up closer together, we’re going around the other side of Sigulu Island.”

“Much longer way,” Charlie pointed out.

“Can’t be helped. Tell him.”

So Charlie picked one of the Bantu and started to tell him the story in that goddam Swahili. While he was still at it, Chase started calling and yelling. “Tell it to him right, so he remembers,” Frank warned the jabbering Charlie, and stomped across the coffee sacks to kick Chase in the head. “Speak when you’re spoken to,” he said.

64

By the light of his pencil flash, Lew studied the dead minister in the bed of the pickup truck. He’d been hit very hard on the head, more than once, and had bled considerably in his transit to a better world. Smears of blood on the metal suggested the assault had probably taken place elsewhere, then the body was thrown in the back and driven here.

Lew turned in a slow circle, playing the narrow beam of light on the road, the tracks, the surrounding trees and undergrowth. There was simply no sign of Young Mr. Balim. Either he was alive and had gone away, or he was dead and some animal had taken the body for dinner. But if the latter, wouldn’t there be drag marks, some indication? There was nothing; only the rattletrap old black pickup parked just shy of the tracks, facing downhill, driver’s door open, and in its bed a dead man in clerical garb.

Driver’s door open, but no interior light showing. Lew went over to the cab, sat sideways in the driver’s seat, found the small bulb in its translucent plastic pocket, and clipped it back in its socket. Weak light gleamed. Lew unclipped the bulb again and stood beside the open door.

He saw now the way Chase had done it. Drive down the access road, stop here; Young Mr. Balim would be down there across the tracks, unable to see anything past the headlights. Then, leaving those lights on as a lure, Chase had slipped out of the pickup—no interior light to give him away—and waited for Young Mr. Balim to come investigate. There should be some sign of it.

Lew bent low to the ground, moving the light in small slow arcs, starting beside the open door and working his way toward the back. It was just beside the rear wheel that he found the bloodstain, still soft to the touch. There wasn’t much of it, and the ground nearby didn’t seem particularly disturbed. Alive, then.

Straightening, he flicked off the pencil flash and waited for his eyes to readjust to darkness, his left hand resting on the pickup’s rusty side panel. Young Mr. Balim had regained consciousness and had wandered off. Where? Though the keys were in the pickup, he hadn’t taken it, neither to chase down to the lake after the rest of them nor to flee in the opposite direction. Had he wandered off and then passed out again?

In addition to everything else, Lew was beginning to feel the weight of time. It was nearly ten o’clock; the train had been hijacked nine hours ago. Sooner or later the Ugandan authorities must find this old depot, on some ancient map or mentioned in some old annual report. Maintenance Depot Number 4—Iganga. When they learned of its existence they would come here in strength, and they wouldn’t wait for daylight to do it.

“If I were Bathar,” Lew muttered to himself, aloud in the darkness, “what would I do?”

Go to the depot. Then run, taking the pickup. But he hadn’t taken the pickup.

Still, the depot would be first. Maybe that’s where he passed out again, or where he just sat down in a funk and abandoned hope.

Lew had left the Army truck just below the level crossing. Now he went back to it, swung aboard, started the engine, switched on the lights, and backed down as far as Ellen’s Road. Then he angled around, turning the wheel as energetically as Frank at his worst, and drove in.

But Bathar wasn’t there. The four last freight cars stood patiently on the spur track, waiting to be the major item of evidence in the coming investigation. Empty beer bottles littered the landscape as though all the softball teams in Chicago had come here together for a picnic. Small animals scuttled away from the light, disturbed from picking through the leftover bits of food. When Lew shut off the engine and stood out on the running board to listen, he could hear the water at the bottom of the cliff gnawing at the rocky shore of Thruston Bay. “Bathar!” he called, four times, once in each cardinal direction, but there was no answer.

Driving back out Ellen’s Road, he went more slowly, studying the undergrowth to left and right. At the access road he stopped again and called Bathar’s name, then turned uphill and went back up to the railway line.

“He’s gone, that’s all.” Wandering in the woods, or trying to make it across Uganda to the border on foot, or unconscious somewhere not far from here, or after all dead.

Lew put Young Mr. Balim out of his mind. He had wasted his time coming back here, had accomplished nothing but to strand himself. Having jumped over the cliff, it was now time to figure out how not to fall.

Young Mr. Balim had chosen not to take the pickup, but Lew would prefer it to the Army truck, which at the moment might call too much attention to itself. Leaving its headlights on to operate by, he crossed the tracks on foot, opened the pickup’s hood, and smeared his face and hands with black engine grease. Then he dragged the dead man out onto the ground and rolled him away from the road, cleaning the grease from his palms on the back of the man’s coat.

The pickup’s engine was reluctant to awaken; it kept coughing and going back to sleep, like a drunk in a doorway. But Lew was patient with it, like a Salvation Army girl, and at last the coughs became continuous, the engine came completely awake, and when Lew let out the clutch, it actually went to work.

He turned around on the level crossing, then headed uphill to the main road, the springless wheels bouncing and pounding on the washboard surface. At the verge of route A109, two lanes of empty silent blacktop in the darkness, he hesitated for just a second.

This was where they’d grabbed him, right here. The memory of the State Research Bureau returned, strong and vivid, every stench, every evil sight of it. He couldn’t go back there; he dared not go back there. They would remember him as clearly as he remembered them, and he knew this time what they would do. They would begin by damaging one or both of his legs, to keep him from going anywhere. They might also remove some of his fingers or possibly just cut off both his hands. Then they’d be ready to begin.

His body ached in anticipation. His wrists burned, feeling the blade. “Damn Bathar,” he muttered.

No. It’s damn Chase, or possibly damn everybody. Or just damn himself for volunteering, for not being able to ignore the image of Mr. Balim hearing the news. It was to avoid being there when Mr. Balim was told that had made him come back into the horror.

“I could be on the raft,” he muttered, “halfway home.” He fought the floor-shift lever into first gear, let out the clutch, and drove out onto A109, turning left, west, toward Jinja and Kampala. “Halfway home,” he repeated.

65

“Rest,” Isaac said.

The dripping man, exhausted, nodded and let his body sag back onto the tarpaulin-covered coffee sacks, while Isaac walked back to the man working the steering stick to tell him the change in direction. The other two men on this raft squatted beside the weary messenger, staring at him with wide eyes. Pirates!

Isaac didn’t use that melodramatic word. “We’re changing our route,” he told the steersman. “There may be a ship by Matale Point meaning to steal the coffee from us. So we’ll go around the other side of Sigulu.”

“Much longer,” the steersman said.

“But safer,” Isaac told him. “If that ship is really there.”

The steersman was truculent. “You should have given us all guns,” he said.

“Oh, it’s better if we don’t have to fight. Try to keep up close to the raft ahead.”

“We should have guns out here,” the steersman insisted.

“Nothing to do about that now,” Isaac told him, and went away forward, not wanting any more of that conversation. Nor did he intend to be baited into repeating Lew’s reasons for not arming these amateurs. He himself was an amateur, and he had no doubt but that Lew had been right.

The messenger still sprawled on his back, gazing up at the quarter-moon, his chest heaving. Over the last hour he had nine times dived into the water, swum from one raft to the next, clambered up the twelve-foot wall of sacks, and repeated Frank Lanigan’s message; then, after a brief rest, he had dived again. By the fifth time he had become very tired, and others had offered to carry the message the rest of the way, but he had refused. Like most of the men, he lived in fear of Frank Lanigan—which Frank, who knew only Charlie’s cheekiness, would have been astonished and a bit abashed to know—and he was the one to whom Frank Lanigan had entrusted this commission. He would delegate it to no one, but would finish the job himself. He had, too, though he’d come close to drowning on the final two laps, and was now so worn he couldn’t even return Isaac’s encouraging smile.

“Sigulu,” said one of the other men, and pointed ahead and to the left.

Isaac squinted but couldn’t yet see it. Despite the quarter-moon, despite the almost cloudless sky filled with high small white pinpricks of stars, it was a very dark night, the lake a deep black velvet, its softness obscuring all outlines. The coast of Uganda had disappeared behind them almost the instant they’d quitted Macdonald Bay, and ever since they might just as well have been in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or traveling on some fuzzy black cloud between the planets.

The man who had pointed at Sigulu Island said, “Are there really pirates, Mr. Otera?”

“Well, there are certainly thieves in this world,” Isaac said, smiling, trying to make a joke of it to reassure the man. “We just stole a train. When you do that sort of thing on the water, they call you a pirate.”

The other man said, “You can’t steal a train on the water.”

The first man gave him a pitying look. “How can a person be so stupid?” he asked.

A wheezing sound distracted them all. It was the messenger, too exhausted to laugh, laughing. That made the others laugh, and when they’d stopped they were all friends again. “I see the island now,” Isaac said.

It was a low shape ahead of them. The next raft forward was already angling to the right to go around the island’s blunt end. By day, you would be able to see the coasts of both Uganda and Kenya from here, but now nothing was visible but that furry back humped up out of the water.

Isaac went aft to sit near the steersman and watch Sigulu Island move slowly past. The island was a good ten miles long, and at their current rate would probably be there on the left for nearly an hour.

Half an hour after they’d first spotted Sigulu Island, the steersman said in a strangely hushed voice, “Mr. Otera.”

“Yes?”

“There’s something behind us, Mr. Otera.”

A chill ran down Isaac’s spine. At first he didn’t even think of the pirates. Being out here alone on the water, emptiness all about, and then the odd wording of the steersman—“There’s something behind us”—made Isaac think first of ghosts, or lake monsters, supernatural and incomprehensible. But when he turned about, the hairs rising up on the nape of his neck, that black shape he saw bearing down on them, running without lights, cutting a harsh white V of foam through the water, was nothing otherworldly at all, except in name. It was the Angel, tired of waiting, seeking them in the open water of the lake. And finding them.

The Angel, originally named Kikuyu, had been built under commission to the Marine Services Division of the Kenya & Uganda Railway in 1925, and until the Victoria was finished in 1959 she was the largest ship on the lake. Two hundred thirty-seven feet long, with a beam of thirty-seven feet, she had a cargo capacity of eleven hundred tons. But she possessed almost no passenger space, and the railway found her wastefully large, so in 1963 they sold her to a private company. She had had four owners and three names by now and was showing signs of her final decline: rust, persistent leaks, rotted hoses, and uncertain engines. But she was still big, and when traveling empty she was still fast, and she came steaming onto the rafts like Juggernaut, high-sided, black, inexorable.

“Down!” Isaac screamed. “The pirates!” And he flattened himself face down on the tarpaulin.

White light bathed him: a searchlight from the ship’s prow. Not looking up, Isaac folded his hands over his head, crushed his nose down into the rough gray canvas, and prayed for invisibility.

The stuttering sound was so diminished by the great emptiness of the lake that he didn’t at first realize it was a machine gun, strafing them. Screams mingled with the stutter, and the flat crack of rifle fire joined in.

They’re not giving us a chance! Isaac thought, as though they were all playing some game with rules. Terrified, believing himself already dead, he pressed lower and lower onto the lumpy sacks of coffee beans. A wasp stung the back of his left leg, and he whimpered into the canvas.

The machine gunner had a problem. He was firing down on the rafts from a greater height, and was under orders to avoid shooting up the cargo as much as possible. The men who lay flat made extremely difficult targets, but those who sat up or paused to shout or ran to the edge to jump were simple hits. Those who actually did jump overboard were picked off in the water by the riflemen, guided by the smaller spotlights.

When the white glare flicked away from Isaac he lifted his staring eyes and saw the Angel already passing the next raft, pinning it in the beam of the searchlights, the guns chattering and cracking.

On this raft, the steersman and one passenger were simply gone, leaving Isaac and the messenger and one other man. Isaac scrambled to them on all fours, crying, “Are you hurt? Are you hurt?”

Neither had been hit, though both were as panicky as Isaac himself, who had a three-inch gash burned in the fat of his upper leg. Teeth chattering, the messenger said, “What do we do? They’ll come back!”

“Swim to Sigulu,” Isaac said. “It’s our only chance.”

Shocked, the other man said, “Sigulu is in Uganda! Mr. Otera, tomorrow—!”

“God help us then,” Isaac said. “But if we stay here now, they’ll kill us sure.”

The messenger cried, “Look! Look!”

The Angel, hurrying past the third raft, was suddenly veering off, no longer shooting, steering toward the open lake. Beyond her was a confusion of movement, other lights, the crackle of other guns. While Isaac stared, trying to sort out what he was seeing, there came the authoritative phoom of a small naval gun, a flash of muzzle fire, and a great spout of water burst up beside the turning Angel.

“More pirates!” the messenger screamed, and dropped to his knees. “Oh, Mother Mary! Oh, Mother Mary, gaze upon your little child!”

The naval gun barked again, this time the waterspout springing up behind the Angel. Isaac could see more clearly now, and could make out that two ships were in pursuit of the pirates. Small lean fast cutters, they were painted white and festooned with lights. First one fired its gun, then the other.

The fourth shot caught the Angel high on her port side, behind the bridge. Smoke at once billowed up, as though it had been preexisting, imprisoned inside there, and an instant later orange flames peeked through the new breach in the hull.

The two pursuing ships flanked the Angel, repeatedly firing, closing the distance, the guns achieving a practice-range accuracy. Holes and smoke and flame transformed the Angel into a writhing stage set of disaster on the placid lake. Twisting figures showed against the orange flames as they fell or leaped into the water.

While one of the white ships remained close to the Angel, continuing while she died to harry her with shot, the other veered away in a great sweeping circle that brought it at last behind the line of rafts. As it came forward, Isaac saw the flag whipping at its fantail: three horizontal stripes, black and red and green, separated by narrow white bands, and with crossed spears and a Masai shield in the center. The flag of Kenya. The Kenyan Navy. “We’ve been rescued,” Isaac whispered. His breath was a painful rasp in his throat.

The rescuers slowed beside the raft, bathing it with their own searchlight. “Smugglers,” said a bullhorned voice. “You are under arrest. You will proceed with us to landfall at Port Victoria.”

“Thank you, Mother Mary,” the messenger said.

But the other man was indignant. As the Navy ship went on to deliver its message to the other rafts he glared after it, hands on hips. “This is Uganda territory!” he announced. “They can’t arrest us!”

“You must tell them that,” Isaac said, “after we are very safe.”

66

Patricia’s small house on Nakasero Hill was, like Patricia herself, neat and modern and beautifully adorned, and yet impersonal. But Patricia felt herself to be no longer impersonal—Denis had made that change in her—so she could move from this house, which she had loved, without regret.

She had never brought Denis here before, possibly because of an unconscious fear that the house would reveal too much about her true self, but now it was merely a discarded shell, the cocoon of her former person. When she brought him here now, the intent was to be self-revelatory, to show him the emptiness he had filled, the reason for her gratitude.

And also, of course, this was to have been their last night in Kampala. The plan had been that Denis would finish his business with the coffee shipment out of Entebbe sometime today, they would spend tonight here in Patricia’s house, and tomorrow they would fly away forever. But now that the train had broken down there was a very annoying delay; of no longer than one day, certainly, but annoying nevertheless.

Patricia had planned the menu and the evening with great care. Her cook was a Ugandan woman who had spent years in the employ of a wealthy Ugandan Asian family. Those people had taken her with them on their frequent vacations to Europe and had sent her to various cooking courses in France and Switzerland. She was now a culinary artist of sensitivity and skill, who cast a knowing yet still loving eye over the raw materials available to her in Uganda, adapting her sophisticated knowledge to the local fare.

She and Patricia had planned tonight’s dinner together, through the cook’s tears. (She was staying behind in Uganda, with her family; Patricia had given her a farewell bonus that had made her heart stop for just a second. They were truly fond of one another.)

The cook, as her final act in Patricia’s employ, served the meal. Patricia and Denis sat in the small dining room beside the window looking out onto her garden, which was illuminated by small amber spotlights hidden under the eaves; smiling, Patricia said, “This is who we are now.”

Denis poured the gentle Pouilly-Fuissé, and they toasted themselves. Then dinner began, with African avocados, plump and sweet and buttery, with a crayfish filling. The same wine took them through a course of grilled lakefish, the tastes delicate and evanescent, hiding in the firm nonoily meat.

The main course was a lamb curry with many sweet and spicy condiments, and lentils, and string beans as small and thin as a cat’s whiskers, and to go with it a clear Château Montrose Médoc. Dessert was various fruits—mangoes, different kinds of melon, passion fruit, pineapple—with a homemade sorbet, and accompanied by a light dry Zeltinger Moselle.

They lingered for hours over the meal, now alone in the house, and at its end they made love, gently and without urgency.

Later, they went through the house selecting what Patricia would take with her and what leave behind. There were small objects, beautiful in themselves, which she no longer wanted because of the circumstances of their acquisition. She found herself explaining these rejections, and they became a kind of autobiography and confession, an emptying out of the past. Denis stood with her, holding the small things in his hands, listening to her stories, accepting them, erasing them from existence, giving her absolution with his nod and his smile.

The knock at the door, shortly before midnight, was only a minor annoyance and interruption—a servant returning for some forgotten possession, something like that—until Patricia opened it and the four State Research Bureau men came in, angry-looking with their beetle-browed glares, foolish but menacing in their nylon shirts and platform shoes and flare-bottomed pants. “Patricia Kamin,” one of them said.

“You know me,” Patricia answered, and they did. And she knew all four of them, if only by sight. And although she didn’t understand yet what the trouble was, she knew at once it was very serious.

But her first fear was for Denis, who came into the living room holding in his hand a piece of ivory carved to the shape of a rose, with a bit of stem and two very sharp thorns. “May we help you?” he asked, looking coldly at the four men, doing that British thing of showing anger by becoming very correct and polite.

The men ignored him. One of them said to Patricia, “You come with us.”

“She most certainly will not,” Denis said, stepping boldly forward. “Just what do you—”

“Denis!” She was terrified for him; he clearly didn’t understand the thinness of this ice. “Don’t, Denis.”

“I know about this country, Patricia,” he told her. “I’m certainly not going to let you go off with these—”

Two of the men approached to take her arms. Then it moved very quickly. Denis, saying something else, tried to intervene; the man who had spoken to her reached out to push Denis away; Denis lifted the hand with the ivory carving in it; the man grabbed the carving out of his hand, then cried out and dropped it on the floor; he stared in horror at the blood dots in his palm where the thorns had stabbed him. “Poison!” he cried. “You poisoned me!”

“No!” Patricia screamed, and would have thrown herself between them but the other two men gripped her arms tightly; and the man who thought he was poisoned pulled a small pistol from his hip pocket and shot Denis three times in the face.

They then spent five minutes there, twisting Patricia’s arms and pulling her hair to make her tell them the name of the poison and its antidote. “No poison,” she kept saying over and over, not caring what they did or what happened. Whenever they released her head she looked again at poor Denis sprawled on the floor. He had never believed how bad they were. He had never been willing to know just how bad human beings can be, and the unwillingness had finally killed him.

After five minutes, when the man with the cuts realized he was feeling no symptoms, he gave up the idea that he’d been poisoned. “Bring her along,” he said. “That man. Making fun of me.” He went over to kick the body to relieve his feelings, then followed Patricia and the others out of the house.

67

When the two government officials took the radio equipment out of the trunk of the Mercedes and set it up on the car’s hood, Balim was at first baffled. They’d already brought a truckload of soldiers with them to Port Victoria, these same soldiers now sprawled at their ease over the grassy slope between the hotel and the shore; who was left for these so-very-civil civil servants to get in touch with?

Someone. Godfrey Magon picked up the microphone and called a lot of letters and numbers into it, over and over, with maddening patience and to no effect at all, till abruptly the radio spoke in a snarling voice so distorted by static and a poor speaker system that Balim couldn’t understand a word of what was said. Apparently, though, Godfrey Magon could; he replied in rapid sentences, quick questions that were answered with the same loud brusque incomprehensibility. Finally satisfied, Magon put down the microphone, lit a cigar, and leaned against the Mercedes’s fender to gaze with benign self-complacence at the dark lake.

Meanwhile, Charles Obuong was admiring the hotel in the flickering light of the smoky oil-drum fire. “Good workmanship,” he told Balim. “I’m glad to see you took it seriously and not merely as a diversion.”

“I’m a businessman,” Balim answered. That was a point he wanted in the forefront of Obuong’s mind. He missed Isaac acutely; this was precisely the sort of person Isaac always handled.

“You are a very good businessman,” Obuong said. “I don’t doubt that, not at all.” Nodding at the unfinished hotel, he said, “Do you know what I foresee for this place?”

Balim foresaw nothing further than a sale at a modest profit to some retired Britisher or German who desired, on a small nest egg, to play African innkeeper. “I am eager to know,” he said.

“Here in Kenya,” Obuong began, in the style of a cocktail-party bore with a set piece to deliver, “we are creating a traditional civilization. That is, a civilization based on a growing middle class. Not socialism, not Tanzania’s collective farms”—said with some disdain—“nor the feudal states of most of black Africa, with their widening gulf between the rich few and the poor many. No; here in Kenya we are replicating, in less than a hundred years, the entire history of Europe.”

“Interesting,” Balim said politely.

Obuong smiled at him in the firelight. “More than interesting for you, Mr. Balim. Vital for you. The Asian must accommodate himself to Kenya if he wishes to survive here. So he must know what Kenya is, and what it is not.”

Balim said, “Mr. Obuong, can it be that you are friendly in spirit toward me?”

Obuong’s smile almost became a laugh, but then was replaced by earnestness. “Your former land,” he said, “is a very unhappy one. If the same sort of thing were to happen here, I personally would live in fear all the minutes of my life. I would be exposed because of my governmental position, and my success, and my education. A contented middle-class Kenya is necessary to my peace of mind.”

Admiringly Balim said, “Very few people, of any rank or color, have thought it through quite that clearly.”

“Whatever my personal opinions may be,” Obuong said, “and I will admit to you privately that I have my ambivalences, nevertheless I know that a Kenyan middle class must be heterogeneous. We need the Asian shopkeepers; we need the white farmers; we even need the Arabs from the coast.”

Smiling, Balim said, “Even?”

“Some of my ambivalence,” Obuong said, and shrugged. “I can get along with all sorts, if I must, to have a peaceful and comfortable life. Which brings me back, Mr. Balim, to this fine hotel of yours.”

“Ah, yes, my hotel.”

“Our tourist industry is still supported almost completely by the northern whites,” Obuong said, “but, as you know, those people will never come here.”

“One can hope,” Balim murmured.

“An intelligent businessman does not live on hope. We both know, Mr. Balim, this will never be a place for foreign whites to visit, despite the lake, the harbor, the potential. But what of our own middle class, eh? On my holiday, shall I go to Treetops to be stared at by the Swedes and Americans as though I were one of the exotic animals at the water hole? Where is my tourist spot, Mr. Balim?”

“Very interesting,” Balim said, this time meaning it.

“The growing middle class,” Obuong said, nodding at the hotel. “That’s the hope of the future for your hotel, Mr. Balim, as it is my personal hope for my personal future. Do not sell the hotel when this is all over. Do not throw it away.” Lowering his voice, turning his shoulder against his partner, Magon, over by the car, he said, “We can talk again, a little later. A few months from now.”

In Balim’s mind the flower opened. A partnership with Obuong, government influence, links to the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, improved roads, subsidiary businesses… I must buy a great deal more land here, Balim thought, knowing that Obuong was thinking the same thing. But I must buy through fronts, natives, not with the name Balim attached. Isaac can—

“Look!”

It was Magon. When Balim turned, Magon was standing beside the Mercedes, pointing out at the lake. “Ah, now,” Obuong said, awed, below his breath.

Far out on the lake, flames were leaping up, smoky and orange; an imitation of their oil-drum fire on a massive scale. “Bathar!” Balim called, and ran heavily down to the water’s edge, where he stood staring at the oblong bowl of flame against the black night. Sounds of guns and explosions came faintly over the water.

Obuong had immediately shouted something at Magon, who grabbed up the microphone and called into it, his voice merely excited. Obuong, meanwhile, came down to stand beside Balim and say, “Your son is with them?”

“Yes.”

“I’m surprised. I hadn’t thought—”

The abruptness with which Obuong cut off the sentence made Balim turn to give him a bitter smile. “You hadn’t thought Asians took their own risks, did their own dirty work. He wouldn’t be there if it were up to me. Bathar is already heterogeneous, part of your middle class. Shopkeepers know better than to look for adventure.”

“That’s no raft burning,” Obuong said, “it’s a ship. Come along; we’ll find out what’s happening.”

They went over together to the Mercedes, where the radio was responding to Magon’s questions. But Balim still found the radio voice unintelligible and was grateful when Magon translated: “A ship attacked the rafts. We have interceded.”

“In whose waters?” Obuong wanted to know.

Balim had his own more urgent question. While Magon relayed Obuong’s query through the radio, Balim said, “Who has interceded?”

“We have,” Obuong said. “The Navy. We put two patrol boats out there to make sure nothing went wrong.” With a limpid smile, he added, “Such as the rafts deciding to make for a different landfall.”

Magon said, “They’re in Ugandan waters, but there was no choice. It’s the Angel, out of Kisumu. It was firing on the rafts.”

Balim touched the cool flank of the Mercedes for support. I’m a businessman, I shouldn’t be involved in these things, nor should Bathar. Let him go to London. There, the middle class has won.

The radio continued to snarl, and Magon continued to translate: “They have attacked the Angel and sunk her.”

The distant sounds of firing still continued. Obuong, sounding angry, said, “She isn’t sunk, we can see her burning.”

“She’s as good as sunk,” Magon said. “There were no survivors.” He shrugged with the microphone. “Let them play.”

Obuong, grim-faced, caught Balim looking at him and managed a small smile. “I hate disorder,” he said. “Excessive force. I am no friend of chaos.”

“But chaos has many friends in Africa, still,” Balim said, looking out at the burning ship.

68

Pistol in his right hand, Lew slipped into the dim church, which was lit only by three candles on the altar at the far end. Three old women dressed in white knelt in front pews, praying. A young man in a black cassock and large round eyeglasses crossed the altar and disappeared through a low door at the side. The silence of the church was accented by the sibilant whispers of the praying women.

Driving through Bugembe in the old pickup truck, just a few miles before Jinja, seeing the town’s name on the road sign, Lew had remembered Bishop Michael Kibudu from the dreadful holding cell in the State Research Bureau. Evangelical Baptist Mission; he’d spoken with pride of his church in Bugembe. But that had been only a passing memory, unimportant until Lew had driven into Jinja and had seen the police check at the bridge.

He must cross the Nile to get to Entebbe. If one bridge at Jinja was blocked, the other would also be. The next nearest bridge was forty miles north at Mbulamuti, and why wouldn’t that also be blocked? A white face blackened with grease would not get him through a police check; that was why he had turned around and come back to Bugembe. There was nowhere else to go for help.

He felt terribly exposed as he walked down the center aisle to the altar, right hand holding the pistol under his shirt, but none of the women looked up from their exhortations. Stepping over the rail, Lew went through the low door into a small sacristy, whose wooden walls were covered with hung vestments. The young clergyman was at a rolltop desk in the corner, copying numbers from a hymnal by the light of a kerosene lamp. He lifted his head to stare at Lew, his eyes startled behind the large glasses. “It’s all right,” Lew told him, fast and low, as he closed the door. “I’m a friend of Bishop Kibudu.”

The clergyman got to his feet. His manner, though frightened, was alert and suspicious. “You know the bishop? May I ask from where?”

“The State Research Bureau. We were in a cell there together.”

Astonishment replaced apprehension. “You’re the white man? The bishop was certain you had died. We remember you in our prayers.”

“Not a bad idea,” Lew said.

“The bishop will be delighted,” the clergyman said, clasping his hands together in front of himself like a much older man.

It was Lew’s turn to be astonished. “He’s alive?” He brought his hand out empty from under his shirt.

“Oh, yes, our bishop has come back to us. Are the police after you?”

Lew grinned. “The police, the Army; you name it.”

“Wait here,” the clergyman said, and went out through a door in the opposite wall.

It was only after the clergyman had gone that it occurred to Lew that he’d taken the man on faith, with no particular reason to do so. Why would Kibudu be alive? Why wouldn’t this curate, or whatever he was, to save his own skin, be calling the police right now? I should have gone with him, Lew thought, his hand reaching again for the comfort of the pistol under his shirt.

But it actually was Bishop Kibudu who next came in through that door, beaming from ear to ear, rolling forward, arms outstretched for a bear hug, crying, “God is wonderful, God is good! You have lifted my spirits!”

“And you mine,” Lew said, grinning back, permitting himself to be crushed in the bishop’s surprisingly strong embrace. Then they stood at arm’s length to study each other, and Lew was happy to see that only a few small scars around the bishop’s eyes remained as visible reminders of his time at the State Research Bureau. Cleaned up, horn-rim glasses perched on his broad nose, he looked more a scholar than a bishop, and not at all like a broken victim in a foul dungeon.

He himself, he knew, was not that presentable. The bishop laughed at his appearance, saying, “That’s not much of a disguise, that dirt on your face.”

“I’ve been driving; I didn’t want anyone to notice a white face going by. Bishop, how did you get out of there?”

“An attorney in Jinja named Byagwa,” the bishop said. “Sometimes he can help in religious cases. Fortunately, mine was one of the problems in which his persistence finally bore fruit. But what of you?”

The young clergyman had also come in and shut the door, and now stood smiling to one side, hands clasped in front of himself. Lew said, “A friend of mine in Kenya managed to get through to somebody in the government here. They convinced the Research Bureau it was all a mistake.”

“You were very fortunate indeed,” the bishop said blandly. “Oh, by the way,” he said, gesturing at the young priest, “this is my assistant, Father Njuguna.”

Lew and Father Njuguna smiled and nodded at one another. Bishop Kibudu watched Lew’s face, his manner still smiling and friendly. “Your popping up again,” he said, “suggests that you weren’t entirely candid with me last time.”

“I don’t think I will be this time either,” Lew admitted, and shrugged. “I’m involved in a little something. Nothing you could endorse, but you wouldn’t oppose it, either. We’re giving Idi Amin one in the eye, in a small way. Not an important way, but every little bit helps.”

“It has been said,” the bishop commented, “that you can tell a man by the quality of his enemies. That’s all I need to know about you.”

“Thank you.”

“You need help. I hope it’s something within my grasp to do.”

“I’m trying to get out of the country,” Lew said, and grinned again, adding, “For obvious reasons.”

The bishop nodded.

“I have a way out,” Lew went on, “if I can get to Entebbe. But the Nile bridge is blocked. If I can get across it, I’ll be all right.”

“Is that all?” the bishop asked. “You simply want to get across the Nile?”

“Yes, please.”

“Nothing could be simpler,” the bishop said. “Come along.”

In the church basement, by the light of another kerosene lantern, the bishop showed Lew his coffin. “You will be very comfortable in it, I assure you,” he said.

“I don’t particularly want to be comfortable in it,” Lew told him.

Earnest young Father Njuguna said, in complete seriousness, “You’ll be the first to use it.”

Lew laughed. “That’s good to know. Just so I’m not the last.”

Bishop Kibudu said, “We shall paint your face and hands with colors that would make a grown man faint, suggestive of various terrible diseases. We shall put a little piece of very strong cheese in the coffin with you. I myself will drive our hearse, and Father Njuguna will drive your own vehicle. In no time at all, you will be on the other side of the Nile.” Grinning like Mr. Pickwick, he made a clerical joke: “That’s not the Jordan, mind you. The Nile.”

Lew said, “Bishop, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

“But it’s nothing,” the bishop protested. “It’s so very little a thing, a brief drive to Jinja and back. Are you sure there’s nothing more we can do? Drive you on to Entebbe?”

“No, no, I’ll be fine once I’m across that bridge. I don’t want to make fresh trouble for you.”

“Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” the bishop quoted. “And never more so than in Uganda. May your path be easy from here on.”

“Thank you.”

“And may you,” the bishop said, “find no employment for that pistol under your shirt.”

69

Landing being such a delicate operation, Frank handled it himself, running the raft aground with such violence that the man standing at the front of the pile of sacks fell off into the shallow water and sat up muddy and sputtering. “Shit,” Frank commented, pulled the rope that shut down the outboard motors, and looked at Port Victoria.

It had become practically a metropolis. An Army truck to one side apparently contained a generator, to feed a pair of floodlights in which the smoky oil-drum fire looked neurotic and useless. Kenyan Army troops lolled on the ground at their ease, an official Mercedes-Benz was parked in the center of things, a pair of government civil-service types waited with their fat-cat smiles firmly in place, and here came Mr. Balim down to the water’s edge, calling across, “Frank! Where’s Bathar?”

“Shit,” Frank said again. “Be right there!” he called, then turned to Charlie, saying, “You might as well untie Chase now. He isn’t going anywhere.” And to Chase he said, “I’m now going to have a talk with Balim Senior. Any message, you son of a bitch?”

But Chase had nothing to say. He looked toward the lights and people in expressionless silence.

Frank climbed down the wall of sacks, waded through the shallow water to the shore, and said, “Mr. Balim, Lew went back to get him.”

Shock made Balim look like a round-headed hand puppet. “Back? Back where?”

“Your old pal Chase joined the party.” Frank was aware of the civil-service types coming this way, and hurried through his story. “He bushwacked Young—your son, up at the depot. Knocked him out and left him there. Lew volunteered to go back and get him.”

“In Uganda? They’re both in Uganda?” Balim stared across the water as though he could see them. “How will they—? What will they do?”

“Get to Ellen at Entebbe. That’s Lew’s idea.” As the government men arrived, Frank said, “Lew’s very good, Mr. Balim. He’ll get out. But to help him, I’ve got to get to a phone as soon as I can.”

One of the government men, blandly smiling, said, “Is there a problem?”

“Nothing serious,” Frank told him. “Listen, I just got here, I’m kind of confused. Okay if I talk to my boss privately a minute?”

One of them started to frown, but the other one smiled and said, “But of course. You’d be Mr. Lanigan? Take all the time you need, Mr. Lanigan.”

While the government men went back over to the Mercedes, talking quietly together, and the second raft bunked quietly ashore beside the first, Frank led Balim upslope and off to one side, saying, “Fill me in. What’s going on here?”

“The Kenyan government knew what we were doing,” Balim told him. “They could have stopped us, but they let it happen for their own reasons.”

“They don’t like Amin, either.”

“That would be one of the reasons, I suppose.” Balim glanced away toward the lake, clearly still distracted by thoughts of his son; but then he called himself back, saying, “There’s also money. Less for us, some for those fellows and their friends.”

“Very cute,” Frank said. “We do all the heavy work, they get all the gravy.”

“The very definition of a government,” Balim suggested. “Who were those people attacking you out there?”

“More hanky-panky from Chase. He set us up to be hijacked.”

“I should never have done business with that man,” Balim said. “And please don’t say ‘I told you so.’”

“I’m biting my tongue.”

Balim frowned. “But what’s he doing now?”

Frank turned to look over at the Mercedes, where Chase, looking like the beachcomber in a Maugham story, was in confidential conversation with the two government men, both of whom seemed quite interested. Frank said, “Selling some widows and orphans, I suppose.”

Quietly Balim murmured, “Frank. If Bathar does not come back, would you do me a great service? Would you kill that Baron Chase?”

“My pleasure,” Frank said. “I don’t know why I never did it before.”

70

There were no telephones in the transient aircrews’ quarters at Entebbe. When the word came just before midnight that there was a phone call for her in the lobby, Ellen was seated on her bed reading an Agatha Christie, and was not yet far enough into it to realize she’d read it before. She frowned at the knock on the door, calling out, “What is it?”

“Telephone, missus.” It was the night floorman, who insisted for some reason on calling Ellen “missus.”

Telephone? Unless it was somebody from Coast Global to say they were washing the whole operation—which was not a bad idea—Ellen couldn’t think who might call her here. “Be right out,” she answered, reluctantly put down the paperback, and slipped into her shoes.

The coffee train, of course, had not arrived. The official story was that the train had broken down the other side of Jinja, which was even possibly the truth, but Ellen in her secret smiling heart knew they’d pulled it off. Lew and Frank and all of them, they’d really done it; they’d slipped into Uganda, knocked off that blessed train, and skinned back out again with all that coffee. More power to them. Tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever she finally got out of Uganda, she might make a phone call of her own, a nice circumspect call of congratulations on a job well done.

In the meantime, her own job wasn’t getting done at all. There were confusions about payment, there were conflicting orders as to whether or not the other coffee that actually had arrived via truck from west-central Uganda should be loaded onto the planes, and nobody seemed to know who was in charge or what was supposed to happen. Three of the planes had been loaded, not including Ellen’s, and two of them had taken off, the pilot of one saying to Ellen before departure, “If they won’t pay us, we’ll sell their coffee ourselves.” Anarchy was becoming the rule of the day. Perhaps the Ugandans had also figured that out, because the third full plane was barred from taking off, and the other five members of the fleet continued to stand empty.

The phones were across from the check-in desk, in small booths with windowed doors. “Number three,” the night clerk said, and Ellen went into booth number three, picked up the receiver, and said, “Hello?”

The first voice she heard belonged to a male operator, who wanted to know if she was absolutely and for certain no-fooling Ellen Gillespie. Once she’d convinced him she was, there followed a silence so long she was about to give up and return to Agatha Christie, when all at once Frank’s voice came roaring into her ear: “—from a hole in the ground!”

“Frank?” She believed it, but she didn’t believe it. “Frank, is that you?”

“Ellen? By Christ, have I got through at last?”

She thought, He’s going to say something awful about Lew. “Frank? What’s going on?”

“Lemme give you the message quick,” he said, “before these assholes fuck up again. An old pal of yours from Alaska was just in town, looking for you.”

That made no sense, no sense at all. “Who?”

“Fella named Val, uh, dammit, Val—”

Then she got it. “Deez?”

“Dietz! That’s it, Val Dietz.”

“What did old Val have to say for himself?” Ellen asked, wondering why Lew would use such a roundabout way to get in touch with her. Did he think she was mad at him or something?

“He’s gone on to Uganda now,” Frank said, being as casual as a fanfare of trumpets.

“Uganda? He’s here?”

“Right. He says he hopes to get to Entebbe sometime in the next twenty-four hours, maybe he can buy you a drink.”

“I’d—” She gripped the receiver with both hands, turning her back on the glass door. “I’d be delighted. I hope he shows up.”

“Oh, he’s a reliable fellow,” Frank said. “Nice to talk with you, Ellen.”

“You, too, Frank.”

She hung up, but stayed in the booth half a minute until she had her emotions and her facial expressions under control. The coffee had been stolen. Frank was apparently okay. Lew was still in Uganda. He was trying to make his way here. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, and took a deep breath, and went out of the booth to the lobby, where she saw the night clerk avidly watching something going on outside.

The view out the glass front doors was across an empty parking lot toward the main terminal building. Signs just before the parking lot pointed toward the botanical garden and zoo down on the lakeshore. In the parking lot, under a floodlight on a tall pole, four black men were wrestling with a white man.

Lew! she thought, but as she stepped closer to the lobby doors she recognized the white man as the middle-aged American pilot named Mike. He ran Uganda Skytours; he had brought her here just the other day. Yes, and he’d brought Lew back to Kisumu that time.

And now they were beating him very severely, those four garishly dressed men. Ellen turned to see if the night clerk were phoning the police, but he had turned away and was busily filing a lot of small cards in a metal drawer. She faced front again, to see two black Toyotas pull up to the struggling man, and realized she was watching the secret police make an arrest. The men, with Mike, all piled into the two cars and were driven rapidly away.

Ellen went over to the desk. “You saw that,” she said.

“Oh, you don’t want to see things in Uganda,” he told her, not looking up from his filing. “No, no, nothing to see around here.”

Ellen shook her head. “But… why did they do it? He isn’t anything bad, he’s just a pilot.”

He sneaked her a quick look. “You know him?”

“He flew me here.”

The night clerk studied his filing. “Many young pilots back,” he said, as though he weren’t talking to her at all. “Air Force pilots, come home, thrown out of America.” Slamming the little file drawer in a satisfied manner, he nodded and said, “Uganda Skytours. New owner for that plane tomorrow. Good night.” And he went through into the inner office, shutting the door behind himself.

71

Patricia, crammed into the backseat of the Toyota between two of her captors, slowly rose through the warm comfortable gelatin layers of shock toward the knife-edge pain of reality. Reluctantly she drifted up to that spinning, hopeless, fast-moving world in which she no longer wanted to struggle to stay alive.

But the habit of life, the habit of struggle, was too ingrained. Despite herself, the external world’s signals were still being received; she became aware that they were not on their way to the State Research Bureau but were traveling east instead on Jinja Road. Why was that? She didn’t want to ask the question, she didn’t want to have to think, but her mind insisted, it kept turning the problem over, and even offered a theoretical solution: Whoever did this doesn’t want me where I can reach my friends. They’re taking me to Jinja Barracks.

A vision of men came unbidden into her mind, a room filled with men all smiling at her in a horrible way. They cared nothing about her wit, her elegance; they coveted her beauty only to mangle and destroy it. In the vision they moved closer.

The future was unbearable, but so was the past. Memory plucked at her, the memory of Denis falling dead, taking away with him into that nothingness the brightest and happiest future she had ever known. Leaving her with this instead: abasement, degradation, horror, and at long last death.

The men in the car were talking about her, laughing and telling one another what the soldiers at Jinja Barracks would do to her. Of course she had the strength to hate, but what good was that? There would be no revenge, no escape. She was now nothing but a trinket for boys to play with and break. Let me die, she asked herself, pleading with that active brain to stop its fussing, turn itself off, rescue her the only way that was left.

Could I try to escape, so they’d shoot and kill me?

The man on her right roughly stroked her thigh. “We ought to take some of this ourselves,” he said. “Before they mess it up at Jinja.”

The driver laughed, agreeing. “She won’t look so good tomorrow.”

“Stop somewhere,” the man on her right said, gripping her leg.

“When we’re out of the city,” the driver said.

Let me die. Please.

72

They did open the coffin. Lew hadn’t believed they would, but they did. They took one look at him, and one whiff of him, and slammed the lid so hard it bounced. He heard them jabbering away out there at Bishop Kibudu, and then came the solid thunk of the hearse’s side door being slammed. Lew breathed a sigh of relief, forgetting about the cheese, and then had to hold his breath till the nausea became less acute.

It had been too nice a dinner to throw up, particularly while flat on one’s back in a coffin at a police checkpoint on the Nile. Lew swallowed, and held his breath again, and counted slowly in his mind. When I get to five hundred, he promised himself, I’ll surrender to the police.

The dinner had been at Bishop Kibudu’s insistence. He simply wouldn’t permit Lew to cross his path like this without a celebration. Father Njuguna was sent out into the lanes and byways of Bugembe, returning with a couple-dozen parishioners, evenly divided between men and women, and many of them carrying something for the feast. Chicken three different ways, two sorts of stew, a rice and vegetable dish that seemed both Oriental and wonderful, other vegetables, fruits, even some local cheese.

Cheese. The same sort with which he now shared this stuffy box, but several years younger.

The celebration had taken place in the church basement, near Lew’s coffin. A lot of beer had been brought along, but he drank sparingly of that. The beer he’d downed all day at the depot had mostly worn off by now, which was just as well.

All in all, it was a very nice celebration, even if rather hurried. Hymns were sung, other rescues and deliverances from Ugandan officialdom were recounted, and one of the men present gave a progress report on the new church, which was not actually a church at all but a small concrete-block storehouse behind a furniture factory. Idi Amin’s religious persecutions had reached the level where it was dangerous to attend Christian services, so this church here, of which Bishop Kibudu was so proud, would remain at least for now a symbolic empty shell; within the month the bishop and his congregation would have transferred to their new secret quarters at the furniture factory. “There are many secret churches now,” one of the few English-speaking parishioners explained to Lew. “It is the only way, in Uganda, we can keep in touch with God.”

After the meal and the singing, Lew was fitted for his coffin. His legs and torso were wrapped around in a white sheet, and then three of the men lifted him up and laid him ever so gently on the pink quilting; which turned out to be a lot thinner than it looked and which was tacked onto extremely hard and uncomfortable wood. (The customary occupant, of course, wouldn’t be expected to complain.)

Four or five of the women then set about painting his face and hands, using lipsticks and soot from the kerosene lanterns and leftover sauce from one of the chicken dishes and various other things he didn’t want described too clearly. They all had a wonderful time with the project, laughing and telling each other jokes in Swahili, clapping their hands at particularly grotesque accomplishments, and generally having great fun at his expense.

Somebody offered to find a mirror so Lew could see the transformation for himself, but he said no. He could see what his hands looked like, which was precisely like the hands in the final painting of Dorian Gray in that old movie, and that was enough for him. “I’ll have to live with this face the rest of my life,” he told them. “I don’t want too many scary memories associated with it.”

At the end, the bishop gave Lew two items: a two-foot-long stick, for propping up the coffin lid so he could get air on the journey, and a small lumpy package wrapped in aluminum foil. “That’s the cheese,” the bishop said, handing it to him as though it were radioactive. “Don’t open it before we get there.” A horridness seemed to hover around the little package, a tiny but virulent little demon, perhaps the assistant devil in charge of all the world’s tooth decay. Lew put it down gently on the quilt beside his left hip, propped the lid open with the stick, folded his hands, and was carried in his coffin up the stairs from the basement and out to the waiting hearse, a battered old vehicle of the same vintage as his pickup, and lacking glass in its back window.

Hushed good-byes were combined with hushed giggles, and the last he saw of Bishop Kibudu’s flock, the men were waving and the women were blowing kisses and they were all laughing. The bishop drove, Father Njuguna presumably followed in the pickup—in what strange ways it had gone from minister to minister—and soon they had left Bugembe behind.

The partition between the driver’s compartment and the business space contained a sliding panel, which the bishop left open, but there seemed very little to say beyond Lew’s expressions of gratitude and the bishop’s assurances that it was nothing at all. “You have a wonderful congregation,” Lew said.

“Magnificent people. They keep me going.”

Lew suspected it was the other way around, but he didn’t say so.

The little foil-wrapped package was making its presence felt; or smelt. The bottom of the bottommost cistern in Calcutta; an elephant graveyard on a hot day; the interior of a freezer after a three-week power failure; those were some of the images that came into Lew’s mind as the hints and tendrils came into his nose, and the damn thing wasn’t even open yet.

“This is Jinja,” the bishop said. “Not much longer now.”

“I’m set.” Though he wasn’t, really; it suddenly occurred to him that the winding sheet effectively separated him from the pistol under his shirt. Had that been deliberate on the bishop’s part? Well, if things went wrong up ahead, a pistol wouldn’t help much anyway.

“Bridge ahead,” the bishop announced. “Open the package now, and close your lid.”

“Right.”

Lew opened the package, and his nostrils slammed shut. His hair curled, his lungs became corrugated, his tongue died, his teeth shriveled and went back up into his gums. The skin under his eyes turned to leather. His ears fell off.

Close the lid? With himself in here with that? Turning his head away, hoping in vain for fresh air, Lew gulped in a full breath, tucked the reeking package in against his left leg under a fold of the winding sheet, removed the propping stick and slid it under his right leg, closed his eyes like a proper dead person, and lowered the lid.

Yug.

Then, after an eternity, they opened the lid, which gave him at least a memory of fresh air, but with great alacrity they slammed it shut again, and down inside there Lew began counting. At five hundred he would turn himself in… .

Two forty-seven… two forty-eight… The hearse started slowly to move, but Lew continued to count, and had reached two sixty-one when the bishop’s voice came faintly through the lid: “All right, now.”

“Nggaaaaaahhh!” Lew flung back the lid, sat up, grabbed the little package, and hurled it through the glassless rear window.

Laughing, the bishop said, “If any pedestrian saw you sit up like that, he must have fainted.”

“The cheese’ll bring him around,” Lew said unsympathetically.

Farewells were said in the darkness behind a closed general store in Njery, the first little town on the west side of the Nile, less than two miles from the bridge. Fortunately, it seemed that the winding cloth had absorbed most of the cheese odor; unfortunately, it was the only thing he could use to wipe the death mask from his face. “I explained you were a plague victim,” the bishop said, while Lew cleaned himself up. “And that we’d had to wait two weeks for official permission to bury you.”

Father Njuguna, standing to one side, smiling, hands clasped before him, said, “The life of an adventurer must be a very interesting one.”

“I don’t know,” Lew said. “Not if traveling with that dead cheese was a high point.” Then he shook hands with both men, thanked them again for their help, and asked them to repeat his thanks to their parishioners. The bishop said, “May God bring us together again, under less exciting circumstances.”

“Amen.” Lew held the bishop’s hand in both of his. “I’d say ‘God bless you,’ but why would He take my word for it? Besides, it’s clear He already has. May Uganda get healthy enough to deserve you. Good-bye.”

On the outskirts of Kampala, a golf course lay beside the road on the right. Lew, driving properly in the left lane, the time well after midnight, the road very sparsely dotted with other traffic and completely free of pedestrians, glanced across at the golf course, the smooth curling fairways, the triangular flags limp on their poles at the greens, the swimming pool-shaped sand traps, and it surprised him to realize that of course there must be people in Kampala who used that golf course, who came out in the sunlight, well fed, well dressed, blessed with leisure time and money, and spent a pleasant afternoon knocking the little white ball around the course. In any society, no matter how repressive, how terrible, how awful the things done, there are always those people who remain untouched, who live their comfortable easy lives in the middle of horror and death, as though absolutely nothing untoward is going on.

Lew was startled from his reverie by an astonishing sight in his headlights: across the way, a black Toyota was stopped at the verge, headlights off but running lights on. Several men—three or four men—were wrestling with a slender attractive well-dressed girl; all were African. Seeing Lew’s lights, they grabbed the girl up bodily and ran away with her, out onto the golf course.

It wasn’t his business. He couldn’t even be sure who were the good guys and who the bad. He had troubles enough of his own. He yanked the pickup across the road, trying to find those running figures in his dim headlights, failed, and finally slammed to a stop in front of their car.

A Toyota. License plate starting with UVS. In his lights the men had been garishly dressed. They and their car were exactly like the men and the car when he’d been arrested.

Lew slapped off the pickup’s lights, jumped out onto the ground, unlimbered the pistol from under his shirt, and trotted off into the darkness.

It was easy to follow them; the girl was screaming bloody murder. The rolling land in this blackness was a little tricky underfoot, but he didn’t have a lot of fighting girl to contend with and could make better time than they could.

Had they heard him coming, or could they see him against the dim light from the roadway? One of them was suddenly standing in front of him, looking very severe, absolutely secure in his power and authority, barking something in Swahili that was probably along the lines of mind-your-own-business.

Hardly slackening stride, Lew lifted his gun hand in a fascist salute. The man stared, following the pistol upward, and Lew kicked him in the crotch, then gun-butted him on the back of the head as he doubled over. One down.

They had stopped up ahead, on one of the greens. Lew trotted forward; the girl screamed; there came the sound of repeated slapping. “Let her go!” he yelled, and fired a shot in the air.

Astonishment. Silence. Even the girl was silent, but when he came closer he could see her alone on the green near the flag, on her knees; struggling groggily to rise, she only fell over.

Lew reached her, went down on one knee, and said, “Miss? Do you speak English?”

“I don’t speak anything anymore,” she answered, gasping, face down on the cropped grass, voice bitter.

“I’ve got wheels over there. Can you—”

A shot rang out. Lew dropped flat beside her. “They don’t give up easy,” he said.

“Get away from here,” she told him. Her face, when she turned toward him, was beautiful, but ravaged by strain. “Don’t buy trouble, don’t—”

“Hush,” he told her. “Let me listen.”

“They’ll kill you. They’ll kill you right here.”

“Hush!”

She hushed. He lifted his head to listen, looking left and right. Just beside them, the flag lazily moving in a slight breeze read 16. Looking at it, he laughed out loud.

A pair of shots were fired, apparently at the sound of his laughter. The girl stared at him as though he were crazy. “That’s what I’ve been needing,” he explained, gesturing at the flag.

She shook her head. Apparently she didn’t know whether she was more afraid of the Research Bureau men or of her rescuer. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“The flag. All through this deal something’s been missing, and that’s it. Now I know what I’m fighting for. Green sixteen.”

She worked hard at being cool, but her voice trembled. “Mister,” she said, “terrible things have happened to me tonight. Don’t make fun.”

Out there in the darkness, voices shouted to one another. “I’m sorry,” Lew said. “I’ve been under a certain amount of pressure myself. Now, those boys may attack. Or they may just try to stay between us and the road. On the other hand, I want to get behind them so I can finish them off, because their vehicle is a lot better than mine. Do you know why I’m telling you this?”

“No.”

“Because I’m going to need your help. I can see you’re bright and quick-witted, so even though you’ve been through a lot, it would help if you could avoid hysteria.”

She was considerably calmer already. “I thought you were the hysteric,” she said.

“That’s just my outgoing personality. Now, what you do, you lie here and talk to me. Can you do deep voices?”

Sounding like a girl foghorn, she said, “Like this?”

“Use it sparingly. See, I’m going out there and deal with those fellows, and in the meantime you stay here and hold a conversation.”

“So they’ll think you’re still here. I get it.”

“Right. See you soon.”

He started away, but she said, “Wait a minute! What if they come here?”

“Holler.”

“Oh. Sure.”

Lew crawled down over the edge of the green onto the shaggier grass of the fairway. Another shot sounded from out there, followed by an angry yell from another direction. Lew wriggled rapidly along the ground on elbows and belly and knees, while behind him the girl said, “If you don’t mind a question, how long ago did you escape from the mental home?” Foghorn voice: “Just today.” Own voice: “And is it true you’ve been running President Amin’s foreign policy all these years?” Foghorn voice: “No, he does that himself.”

The men up ahead were arguing. Without knowing the language, Lew could still guess that one faction wanted to rush the sixteenth green right now, while the other faction wanted to wait until dawn, or possibly send for reinforcements, or whatever.

They were undisciplined and poorly trained. They kept jumping up and moving around, shouting to one another, silhouetting themselves against the running lights of their own car in the background. Lew crawled around their right flank, came up behind his first choice, took his knife out of its sheath in his boot, waited till the man finished yelling a sentence about something or other, and then put him away. A search revealed two handguns but no car keys.

On his way to number two, Lew came across the fellow he’d hit at the beginning, who was just sitting up, rubbing his head, and thinking about taking part. Lew dispatched him and crawled on.

The next man was even more active than the first, probably more nervous. In the distant blackness the girl continued her inane conversation. Lew approached his man, knife in right hand and pistol in left. The fellow turned, saw him, and at once attacked, shrieking and swinging his pistol barrel at Lew’s head.

Lew stepped inside the swing, drove the knife up and across, and stepped out of the way to let the man fall. Then he went on to the last one, who was calling questions, getting no answers, and becoming too nervous.

Far too nervous. Before Lew could reach him, he made a dash for the car. Discarding the knife, Lew dropped to prone position on the fairway, arms stretched out in front of himself, left hand palm up on the stubby grass, pistol butt cradled in that palm, right hand holding the grip, finger squeezing back gently on the trigger as he sighted on those Toyota lights. Sooner or later, his man would cross them.

He did. Lew fired twice, and the man dropped.

He was tough to find in the dark, but it was worth the search, since he was the one with the keys. Pocketing them, putting the pistol away in his hip pocket and the wiped-clean knife back into his boot, Lew permitted the girl’s voice to lead him back to the sixteenth green. As he neared her, he said, “It’s okay, we’re alone now.”

She gasped, clutching her throat, then made out who it was and said, “They’re gone? They ran away?”

“They’re dead.”

“Thank you,” she said. She was suddenly fierce. “Thank you thank you thank you. I hope you made them hurt a lot.”

Worried, he knelt beside her, touching her shoulder, feeling her vibrate like an overstrained machine. “Take it easy,” he said. “They’re gone now. It’s over.”

“They killed the man I was going to marry.”

“I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

She folded herself against him, becoming less tense. Was she going to cry? No. “I can’t tell you,” she said, breath warm through his shirt against his chest. “I’m back from the dead, from the worse-than-dead. They were taking me to Jinja Barracks.”

“Through green sixteen?”

“They wanted me for themselves first. They wanted me while I was still fresh.”

“Oh. Yes, I suppose so.”

She lifted her head, and when her cheek brushed his jaw he was surprised to feel dampness. So there had been a tear—two at the most. This was no Amarda. “You saved me,” she whispered.

“Triple A is here to help.”

“Don’t joke,” she murmured, her lips moving lightly against his.

Not again. “Miss—”

“Patricia,” she said and kissed him, and he couldn’t not hold her, he had to be aware how alive she was, how good she felt.

This is impossible, he thought. This is ridiculous. I’m on my way back to Ellen, there’s dead bodies around here like lawn statues, this can’t be happening.

But it was. After earthquakes people fall into one another’s arms; after ship sinkings, disastrous fires, pitched battles, the survivors reach for one another; after the dragon is slain, the damsel rewards the knight; after the danger, life surges.

She lowered her head to his shoulder. “I know it’s awful,” she whispered, then looked up again, half erotic and half defiant. “I can’t help it. Terrible things happened, I don’t know how I can feel this way, but I do. I was in Hell, there was no hope, and now I’m back, and I need something warm and friendly inside me.”

“I’m Lew.” he said.

73

“You understand, Mr. Chase,” said the smarter one, Obuong, “we can make no commitment now. There will still have to be a very close investigation.”

Chase understood a lot more than that. “I welcome an investigation,” he said, smiling his self-confidence. “All I hope for is the opportunity to be of service, to prove my worth to the government and people of Kenya.”

They stood in a close triumvirate beside the Mercedes, Chase and Charles Obuong and Godfrey Magon. Along the shore four rafts were now moored, their eighty feet of width using up all the available coastline space. The fifth and sixth rafts were even now being lashed to the lakeward edges of the first and second by a squad of soldiers. The remaining soldiers continued to sprawl on the ground, accompanied by a growing number of Balim’s bewildered workmen, who didn’t yet know if they were under arrest. Frank had been given permission to go off in a truck to the general store to make his important phone call, and Balim himself paced nervously back and forth in front of his unfinished hotel, gazing out at the lake, even though he knew his son wasn’t out there.

As for Chase, he had snatched—he was even now snatching—victory from the jaws of defeat. The most incredible day of his life this had been, ranging all over southern Uganda and now to Kenya, twice captured and in presumably hopeless circumstances, twice surviving to land on his feet. His Mercedes was gone, with the wealth hidden in its door panels. The Angel had failed in its mission about as thoroughly as it was possible to fail. Chase had been bound, beaten, pissed on, insulted, robbed, and betrayed; and yet at the end he would finish on top.

And why not? How could these tame bureaucrats resist a man who’d spent his life playing such minor officials as though they were toy drums? He spoke to them with assurance, insinuatingly, letting them know he shared with them the bureaucrat’s outlook and language. Also, he was a modestly famous man in East Africa; he had accompanied Amin here and there as a high-level official, he had been photographed with popes and presidents and prime ministers. Past troubles in another land had no importance here. It was true that Obuong and Magon were seeing him now in an unfortunate state, but his name and manner and background simply had to override his dirty face and torn clothes. They were minor civil servants, and he was the sort to whom they had learned in infancy to bend the knee; how could they hold back against him?

Without actually acknowledging any connection between himself and the Angel’s attempted piracy, he had led them to realize that if he’d been prepared to take charge of so much coffee he surely already had a customer for it. A customer at a good price, who would not be fussy about documentation.

He could bring these people together with Grossbarger. In fact, he would be delighted to.

They would also be delighted, of course, since their own shares would be proportionately higher, though Obuong did demur briefly, wondering about Balim, mentioning his name in an indecisive way. But Chase shrugged that off, saying, “The Asian? I’m not sure where he fits into this, if at all. He never owned the coffee. In fact, he’s never even had physical possession of it.”

“Still,” Obuong said, “still, Mr. Chase, one does feel a certain moral obligation.”

Meaning that to cut Balim out completely might have repercussions, might give Balim no reason not to make trouble. “If you want to be generous,” Chase said, admiring Obuong’s nobility with his smile, “I suppose some sort of emolument could be given to the Asian, to cover his expenses and so on. What should we call it? A finder’s free?”

Magon laughed, but Obuong gave the phrase serious consideration. “Perhaps tax credits on other transactions would be a better way to do it,” he suggested. “It would associate him not so clearly with this coffee.”

“Very good,” Chase said, and all at once realized it wasn’t the missing son that Balim was thinking about while staring out over the lake, it was Isaac Otera. Balim had to know he was being squeezed out of the deal, that it was happening here and now, but what could he do about it? He didn’t dare challenge Chase directly, not an Asian challenge a white man like Chase in this black country, no matter what Chase might or might not have done to him in the past. Frank Lanigan would be useless in a situation like this. Otera, Balim’s antibureaucrat, was the only one who might have been able to join this conversation and salvage something for his employer beyond a few vague tax credits. But Frank in his wisdom had placed Otera on the last raft; it would be half an hour at least before that raft reached shore, and by then it would be far too late.

In fact, the best thing for Chase to do at this moment, to cement the new alliance, was to leave these two alone to plot against him. Such plotting would of course presuppose the existence of the alliance, which would confirm it in their minds. He was confident there was little they could think of to do that would harm him. Also, his moving away now—opening the field, as it were, to Balim and Otera—would merely serve to underline his self-assurance. “I know you have other things to do,” he said. “I’ve taken up too much of your time.”

“No, no,” Obuong said, “you’ve been very helpful.”

“I hoped I could be. And tomorrow, after I’ve cleaned up, rested, had a good wash in a hotel, I’m sure we’ll all want to talk again.”

Obuong smiled. “We surely will,” he said.

Chase strolled away. Behind him, Magon excitedly began in Swahili, “He’s in no position to—”

There wasn’t even any necessity to eavesdrop, though it was nice to reflect that here he was in a new nation where all his secrets were intact.

There was a thick-trunked tree over near the smoldering oil-drum fire; Chase walked over there, sat down, and made himself more or less comfortable with his back against the tree, where he could look out over the lake and watch the rafts slowly arrive. Beside the Mercedes, Obuong and Magon murmured passionately together.

All that coffee, Chase thought, looking at the great wall of sacks, eighty feet long and twelve feet high. All in all, he was rather pleased at what he had wrought. All that coffee. All that money.

It’s pleasant to be a winner.

74

“I’m going for a walk,” Ellen replied, three different times. First she replied it to the night clerk, as she passed once more through the lobby. “Very late at night,” he suggested. “Insomnia,” she explained, and pushed through the glass doors to the outside world before he could say anything more.

Twenty minutes later, she replied it to the guard down by the planes parked beside the taxiway, who challenged her with a great deal of suspicion and perhaps even fright, though he was the one clutching the submachine gun. “No walk by planes,” he insisted, staring at her round-eyed. Pointing past him, she said, “Don’t be silly, I fly that plane. I can certainly walk around it.” He became uncertain, but clung to sureties: “No fly tonight.” She agreed: “No fly tonight. Walk tonight.” Then, hoping she looked a lot cooler than she felt, she simply stepped around him and went for a stroll among the planes, and he gave her no more trouble.

Not quite an hour after that, she replied it to the pleasant overweight girl who ran the empty coffee shop. “You be careful,” the girl told her, “and don’t go far away.” “No, I won’t,” Ellen promised, fortified by her two cups of coffee, and went back out.

The late-night air was as humid as ever, but with a chill in it off the lake. Turning the collar of her Burberry up, putting her hands in the pockets, Ellen strolled along through pockets of light and shadow, moving this time toward the main entrance from the highway.

The problem was, Frank had said twenty-four hours and that was just nonsense. If Lew was going to make it here at all, it would have to be before daylight; after that, a lone wanted white man wouldn’t be able to move an inch without discovery. And tomorrow night would be too late; Ellen couldn’t possibly refuse to leave with her plane.

So it was tonight that Lew had to get here, and the main questions were: How would he arrive, and how would he make contact? Poor Agatha Christie had had no hope of attracting Ellen’s attention after that phone call; she’d tried to read, but her eyes failed to focus on the page. And when she came to the conclusion there would be no way for Lew to signal her in this room—the night clerk received and listened to all calls coming into this building—she put the Christie down, shrugged into her Burberry, and went out to answer three times the question, “Where are you going?”

The two extremes of her walk were the main entrance and the runways. If Lew came boldly in via the main road, as she fully expected him to do, they would meet right here along the road and could make their plans. If his presence in Uganda were known, if he were being hunted, he might choose a less visible route, in which case he would surely head for the planes, and she would meet him there.

In the meantime, the wait was equal parts tension and boredom. Entebbe, which was perhaps the most underutilized commercial airport in the world by day, became an absolute desert of inactivity by night. The coffee shop was kept open very late, as though in deliberate defiance of reality, and here and there a slow-moving janitor cleaned, and the occasional soldier or sentry passed, but that was it. And for all Ellen knew, she would walk back and forth in this empty airport another six or seven hours, until well after sunup; for all she knew, she would walk here uselessly. Lew might not appear at all.

What would she do if daylight came, and no Lew? Thoughts of borrowing a car; but to drive where? She had no idea where he was, what had happened to strand him when the others left, what condition he was in. Either he had some sort of vehicle or he would certainly steal one. Either the Ugandan authorities were searching for him or they didn’t know he was in their territory. Either—

He’s a soldier, she reminded herself. He’s trained to survive in bad situations. He even trains others. He’ll get here.

At the traffic circle—the road signs, inspired by Uganda’s British former owners, called it a roundabout, a word Ellen thought very well described the night she was having—she turned about and strolled slowly again toward the low stucco-faced buildings of the airport. The few sharp lights and the low pale flat-roofed buildings made her think of prisons or prisoner-of-war camps.

A car came purring toward her from the roundabout. She glanced back, hoping against hope, stepping off the blacktop onto the packed-dirt verge, and when the black car slowed she had a moment of absolute assurance, was already smiling when she saw it wasn’t Lew at the wheel after all but a woman. A very attractive black woman, under thirty, quite elegant. If it weren’t for the strain lines around her eyes and mouth, she would be absolutely beautiful. But she wasn’t Lew.

Idly, Ellen wondered what such a person could possibly want at this airport at this hour. Surely she wasn’t the graveyard-shift countergirl in the coffee shop. There were no passenger planes scheduled, either in or out. Could she be a hooker? If so, for whom?

The car having stopped beside her, the woman smiled out her open window, saying, “Excuse me. Could you direct me to the transient aircrews’ quarters?”

“Of course,” Ellen said, and did so, pointing, and the woman thanked her and drove off, the black car humming to itself, in no apparent hurry.

So she was a hooker, summoned by one of the pilots. Ellen was surprised, not because this looked like a “good girl” or anything like that, but because as a hooker she would be far more expensive than most pilots would be willing to pay.

Ellen walked. Ahead, the car’s brakelights flashed on, and it came to an abrupt stop. Then the white backup lights gleamed, and the car backed hurriedly toward her, whining, weaving from side to side. Now what?

Again the car halted beside her. Ellen looked in, frowning, and behind the beautiful black woman, up from the floor in back, reared the smiling, sheepish face of Lew. Ellen stared from his smile to the woman’s—very knowing eyes, that woman had—and back at Lew. “I might have known,” she said.

Wishing her flight bag were full of rocks, Ellen flung it out her room window at Lew’s head, twelve feet below. He caught it, the bastard, waved to her, and scampered away into the darkness. I really ought to leave him here, she thought. The man’s incorrigible.

At the same time, she was trying to be fair. In the car, in a dark corner of a parking lot, they had described everything to her—well, perhaps everything—and it wasn’t his fault that Patricia Kamin had needed rescuing just as he was driving by. Nevertheless, she rebelled at the inevitability of it, and was annoyed by the knowledge that Lew Brady would always find some beautiful woman who needed to be rescued, whether from the hopelessness of life like Amarda or from physical assault like Patricia. The calls for help would just keep coming, and one thing you could say for Lew: he would always get it up.

Well, he never rescued me, she thought as she left her room and headed for the lobby, and she was surprised at how comforting she found that idea. It was true. She had often wanted him, but she had never needed him, and that made a difference. There was some comfort at least in the reflection that their relationship was a break with tradition.

In fact, come to think of it, she was the one rescuing him. Take that, Lew Brady.

The night clerk was astonished by her. “Out again? You need your sleep.”

“I’m a copilot,” Ellen told him. “I’ll sleep tomorrow in the plane.”

He laughed politely, and out she went, turning once more toward the parked planes.

It was very hard this time to maintain a strolling pace. She reached the taxiway, and her old friend the insecure guard passed by, and she gave him a big smile. He was getting used to her; he actually flickered a frightened smile of his own in response. She moved on, ambling, hands in pockets, smelling the night air fragrant from the exotic specimens in the botanical garden, and when she reached the Uganda Skytours plane there was no one at all in sight.

Poor Mike. He had known it was coming, some sort of bad ending was coming, but he was tied to his property. The authorities would have let him and his wife leave Uganda at any time, but not with the plane. He could fly the plane out, but not with his wife aboard. He had tried to keep everything, hoping for the best, and in the end he had lost it all, including himself. But how do you know for certain that moment when your way of life has become a sinking ship that must be abandoned? Jews in Hitler’s Germany; intellectuals in Stalin’s Russia; Christians in Amin’s Uganda. People were imprisoned most securely by who they had chosen to become.

Ellen unclipped the three mooring ropes, and opened the Cessna’s only door, on its left side. Climbing up into the pilot’s seat, leaving the door ajar, she touched the controls in the dark, reacquainting herself with a breed of plane she hadn’t flown in about three years.

How long would it take the engines to turn over? Ellen remembered Mike’s boast—“I keep her gassed up and ready to go”—as though the plane were a lucky talisman, as though his attentions to it were a kind of offertory to the gods to guarantee his safety. Would that attitude have included careful engine maintenance? It would be ignominious to be caught on the ground here by her friend the nervous guard as she fruitlessly ground the starter, over and over.

It would be worse than ignominious. Much worse.

Were Lew and his doxy in position yet? (Ellen didn’t feel like being fair. On the other hand, Lew’s reason for being here in the first place was certainly a credit to him. Already safe, he’d come back in a vain attempt to find the missing Bathar, not wanting to have to face Mr. Balim without the boy. Poor Mr. Balim. And poor Bathar, come to that. And very noble and heroic of Lew, which Ellen found very irritating to have to admit.)

She sat there, touching the controls, until she realized she was merely stalling, she was reluctant to make that step beyond the point of no return. All right; taking a deep breath, she punched her thumb to the left starter.

Good Mike. That engine turned over at once, and a few seconds later so did the right. Easing off on the ground brake, she rolled forward onto the taxiway, swung left, and trundled rapidly toward the nearest north-south runway. Tonight’s breeze was slight and fitful, but its general trend was from the lake, south of here.

They were supposed to be waiting in the bushes along the right side here, near the chain link fence. Her engines would already have alerted whatever sentries were nearby; she flicked on her landing lights, and in the white glare she saw Lew running over the coarse grass from the shrubbery, Ellen’s flight bag clutched in his right hand, pulling Patricia Kamin along with his left. They’re holding hands; isn’t that nice.

They had to run across the taxiway in front of the plane to get to the door. Ellen stopped, moved to the right into the other seat, and folded down the pilot’s seatback so they could climb aboard. They’d both have to ride in back, which Ellen didn’t much care for, but the only way to get Lew into the front seat beside her would be to deplane, let him board, then clamber back in herself, which would take too long.

The woman came in first, out of breath but smiling, gasping, “Thank you.”

“Please don’t mention it,” Ellen said. “I’ll get the door, Lew.”

“Right.” He stopped his contortions, trying to board the plane and shut the door behind himself at the same time, cleared her seat, and thumped into the other space in back. Ellen flipped the seat up, got again behind the wheel, and accelerated.

“They’re shooting at us back there,” Lew said conversationally. “I can see the flashes.”

Why did I have to meet this man? Shoulders hunched, Ellen steered the plane to the beginning of the runway, braked hard, turned hard, and accelerated before she was really set. The earphones hanging from a hook in front of her squawked away, but she paid no attention. Glancing to her left, she saw headlights—two pairs of headlights—racing toward her across the grass, bouncing on the uneven terrain.

Leaning forward near her head, his voice a bit more urgent, Lew said, “They’re trying to cut us off, Ellen.”

“I see them.”

The plane had its own speed, its own system, its own way of doing things. She must simply roll forward, accelerating, watch the tarmac flash by under her wheels, and wait for the plane to be ready to lift.

A British-style jeep was over there on the grass to her left, running at a very long angle to the plane, almost parallel but not quite, as though the driver intended to meet them just this side of infinity. Quick bright spots of light from the interior of the jeep must be the flashes Lew had been talking about; they’re shooting at us!

It was hard to hold the wheel steady, hard not to pull back too soon or too much. A botched takeoff, leaving them on the ground with too little runway left, would be the end. They would get no second chance.

Patricia Kamin said something Ellen didn’t catch, her voice uneven with tension. Good, Ellen thought, she’s more scared than I am. “No,” Lew answered her, “I think they’re probably shooting at the wheels. It’s what I’d do.”

The plane lifted fractionally; its tires still ran on the tarmac but carried less weight. “Come on,” Ellen whispered, remembering how far Mike had had to run this plane to get it airborne. “Come on, come on.”

The wheels, still spinning, lost contact with the ground. Turning lazily, they skimmed along just above the surface of the runway, two fat black doughnuts riding so low a two-by-four couldn’t have been slipped in beneath them. Ellen, every muscle tense in her arms and chest and neck and back, drew the wheel minutely toward herself, and the plane, though still looking at the ground, inched higher into the air.

The end of the runway was ahead. The jeep, having lost the race, veered sharply to get onto the runway and chase from behind. The plane nosed up, like a sleepy horse finished with its oats; it seemed to see the sky, to take a sudden interest, at last to understand. Wings out, nose rising, tail canted at a jaunty angle, the plane soared up over the end of the runway, over the scrub, over the muddy coast, over water glinting with shattered reflections of the quarter-moon.

Ellen switched off every light except the small green ones illuminating the control panel. She’d never flown in such darkness before. The altitude meter read three hundred feet; angling downward, she banked sharply to the left.

Lew said, “Ellen? You’re going back?”

“I can’t get any control-tower guidance,” she told him. “They’re sure to scramble other planes after us. Out over the lake we’d simply get lost, so I’m going down on the deck so their radar can’t see me, find that highway that goes to Kenya, and run along beside it.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Lew said. “That’s terrific.”

“Thank you.”

He was leaning forward again, his right hand on her right shoulder. Sincerity dripping from his voice, he said, “I really appreciate this, Ellen. I want you to know that.”

She shrugged, bouncing his hand off. “I’d do it for anybody,” she said. She was really very angry.

75

Charlie waited for Mguu to do it, but Mguu just stomped around in his usual style, being angry and accomplishing nothing. Charlie waited for Isaac to order somebody to do it, or for Mr. Balim to hire somebody to do it, but Isaac was spending all his time in fruitless frustrating conversation with the two slippery government men from Nairobi, while Mr. Balim remained seated on the chair of concrete blocks and planks that Charlie had made for him, sighing and gazing unhappily out at the lake.

Mr. Balim was sad about his son. Wasn’t that reason enough to do it?

This Baron Chase from Uganda was a very bad man. He sat there against that dead tree, smiling, happy about himself, but he was a very bad man who had done many bad things. He was the one who had sent the ship to murder them and rob from them. And now he was stealing the coffee again, with the help of those government men from Nairobi.

But that wasn’t the reason. The reason was that this man Chase had robbed Mr. Balim of his son. He had made Mr. Balim unhappy in a way that no robbery of money or power could do. He had stolen the light from Mr. Balim’s eyes. Charlie could see it, if none of the others could; and Charlie loved Mr. Balim above all human beings; and that was why.

He walked over to where Baron Chase was seated, and bent over him as though solicitously, in a posture he knew Chase would like to see. “Sir?” he said.

Chase glanced up with casual recognition. “Yes?”

“Look,” Charlie said, and withdrew from his sleeve the long narrow extremely sharp blade. As Chase opened his mouth, his hands beginning to move, Charlie inserted the blade between the man’s ribs and pressed it home, directly through the heart.

It hit Chase like a drug. First there came the rush, the jolt, the shock; his eyes bulged, his neck muscles tensed, his hands curved like talons, his feet kicked out. Then the drug took hold; his eyes lost their luster, his mouth sagged open, his hands lay peacefully at his sides. The drug was death.

Charlie watched the death rise like mist, until it covered Chase to the eyes, and above the eyes. Then he drew out the blade and slipped it back under his sleeve. The heart was not beating, so there was almost no blood. Charlie strolled away into the darkness behind the floodlights.

76

Lew wished Patricia wouldn’t persist in holding his hand. He understood she was only doing it because she was frightened; he was certain Ellen couldn’t see it; and under the circumstances he wasn’t likely to become aroused by it; still, he wished she wouldn’t do it.

He also wished Ellen would get over her mad. But more than anything else, he wished he’d been able to find Bathar. (Since the poor guy was probably dead by now, or soon would be, he deserved his own name, not that dismissive Young Mr. Balim.)

“Here they come again,” Ellen said.

Patricia squeezed Lew’s hand even tighter as he said, “Where?”

“Ten o’clock high.”

Leaning forward, ducking low so he could look up past Ellen’s left ear, Lew was just in time to watch the two jets flash across the black sky from left to right, blazing with noise and light and speed and their own significance. For the last fifteen minutes these two had been skating back and forth up there, like kids who didn’t realize they were late for supper. At first Lew had been convinced they would spot the Cessna with no trouble and would simply shell them into abrupt oblivion—the golden-red instant fireball would be beautiful against the night sky, too bad he wouldn’t be around to see it—but as the jets kept flashing back and forth, nervous hunting dogs who had lost the scent, he realized their very speed and power worked against them. A poky little Cessna, running without lights, skimming the treetops just south of the A109, was beneath the range of their vision.

Which didn’t mean they couldn’t get lucky. Ellen was doing her best to avoid all ground lights, but the jets’ angle of view constantly changed; if one of those pilots looked in just the right place at just the right time, and if he saw a little black object pass between himself and some streetlamp or lit-up house, he’d be on them in a second.

“I wish they’d give up,” Ellen said, echoing Lew’s own thoughts.

“They don’t dare,” Patricia said. “Amin would slice them to pieces. They’ll stay up until we’re found or they run out of gas.”

“I’d rather you lied to me,” Ellen said.

“I’d prefer it myself,” Patricia answered, and squeezed Lew’s hand again, this time suggestively.

Uh-oh. Lew had been on enough cliff edges for one day. Gently but firmly, he removed his hand and grasped his other elbow with it. So she put her hand on his thigh.

Ellen said, “Do you see them?”

“What, the jets? No.”

“Not out this side,” Patricia said.

“I’ve got to cross the road,” Ellen explained. “Jinja’s up ahead, I don’t want to go over the lake, they’d be able to spot us there against the water.”

“They’re not around,” Lew assured her. He didn’t mention, because of course both women already knew, that the jets tended to arrive very fast, without advance warning.

“Now or never,” Ellen said. She’d already been barely a hundred feet in the air, and now she banked sharply to the left and dropped even lower. Lew could see a kerosene-lit living room through a curtainless window in a roadside house as they flitted by. The man reading a book on the sofa was just lifting his head at the engine noise; then they were past.

Jinja had seemed quite dark when he had driven through it, first in the pickup and then in the coffin, but from the sky it was a blaze of light; particularly if you were trying to avoid light. Ellen kept angling farther and farther north, and then to complicate matters Jinja Airport was dead ahead, so she had to turn westward again, back toward Kampala, flying low over the little villages, dirt roads, small isolated lights.

“There they are!” Patricia cried, her hand convulsively clutching Lew’s thigh. “Over on the—Over there!” She was making herself angry and panicky by being unable to describe simply and quickly where the jets were. “To the right! Up!”

“Three o’clock high,” Lew said, ducking down to look for them out Patricia’s window. Realizing he was putting his head in her lap, he immediately sat up again.

“I hate this,” Ellen said. She throttled back, and Lew felt that roller-coaster feeling in his stomach when the Cessna slowed and dropped another twenty feet.

“Oh, my God,” Patricia said, and simply came over and wrapped her arms around Lew and his seat back both. He had no choice but to hold her.

Ellen said, “How tall do the trees grow around here, Miss Kamin?”

“Patricia. Call me Patricia.”

“All ri—Where are you?” Because of course Patricia’s voice had come from directly behind Ellen, where Lew was supposed to be sitting.

Patricia clung to Lew, staring around. “Are they gone?”

“Yes,” Ellen said. “Lew?”

“Here,” said Lew.

Returning to her own side of the plane, Patricia said, “I’m sorry. They just scare me, I can’t help it. I don’t know about trees, but I think they must grow taller than this.”

“After Jinja we’ll be all right,” Lew said. “There aren’t any more big towns till Tororo, right at the border.”

“I can hardly wait,” Ellen commented, swinging the Cessna around through the north to an easterly direction again.

Patricia gave Lew a shaky smile, her face mysterious in the faint green light from the instrument panel, her dark skin gleaming with a sensually metallic look, as though she were the alien beauty in a science-fiction movie. “I am sorry,” she said. “I’m under control now.”

In the Toyota, on the way to Entebbe, he had told her what he and Ellen were to each other, so he knew she now meant she wouldn’t make any more trouble. “It’s all right,” he assured her. “We’re all a little tense.”

“There’s the Nile,” Ellen said.

“So just relax,” Lew continued, patting Patricia’s hand, “and listen to our tour guide.”

“Oh, shut up,” Ellen said, but she sounded a bit less bad-tempered.

Brightly lighted Jinja lay away to their right. Ahead, to the east, the darkness seemed unbroken, but there would be plenty of lights to greet them along the way.

For fifteen minutes they droned eastward, Jinja dropping away behind, the A109 angling north to meet them, the little towns passing with their dim half-hidden lights. Their only route to safety, just as though they were an earthbound automobile, was that narrow line of highway down there. Anyone going to Kenya tonight, by air or by land, would follow that road.

As they hummed along, dark in the dark sky, Lew explained to Patricia the clock method for describing where one had seen another plane in the sky, and once they saw far above them the light and flame trails of a multi-engine jet streaming northward above the planet, but that sighting of the two fighter jets while Ellen had been skirting Jinja Airport remained their last appearance. “Maybe,” Lew said, voicing a thought he’d been silent about for five minutes, “maybe their search area only extends as far east as Jinja.”

“I was thinking that,” Ellen told him. “I was afraid to say it.”

“So was I. Let’s see if I brought us bad luck.”

But another five minutes went by without the jets’ return, and finally they did all begin to relax and to believe they would get away with it. They were past Iganga, past Bugiri, over a hundred miles from Entebbe, with less than forty miles to the Kenyan border. Ellen, increasingly confident that they were alone in this part of the sky, was flying much closer to the highway, an unlit faintly paler ribbon across the black chest of the world. An occasional car appeared down there, moving at less than half their hundred twenty miles an hour.

“That looks like the flashes,” Patricia said.

Lew, his long day ending, had been half-asleep. He sat up, blinking. “What?”

“The flashes, when they were shooting at us at the airport,” Patricia explained. “That looks like the same thing. What would make that?”

She was pointing out her window, down toward the road. Leaning over, his arm against her breast, he looked down and at first saw only an automobile, a Peugeot, speeding along down there, traveling east as they were. They were already ahead of it, and pulling away. But then he saw the flashes at the side windows and said, “They’re shooting, that’s why.”

But what were they shooting at? Ahead of the Peugeot, visible in its headlights, being steadily overtaken, was someone on a small motorcycle, a narrow figure hunched over the handlebars, about to be shot or run down, his motorcycle or moped slower than the—

Moped. Lew stared. “That’s Bathar!”

“What?” Ellen dipped the right wing for a better look, dumping Lew more firmly into Patricia’s lap. “My God!” Ellen cried, “they’re killing him!”

“Jesus! Bathar!” Lew picked himself out of Patricia’s lap and held onto the back of Ellen’s seat. “I completely forgot that goddam moped!”

Ellen was swinging left, away from the road. She said, “Lew, do you have a gun?”

“Of course.”

“The window flap by my elbow here. It opens. But not yet, wait’ll I throttle back.”

Ellen’s left turn segued into a long arc to the right, finishing with her over the road, facing the other way, the Peugeot and moped just ahead, rushing toward them. She throttled back, dropping low, the wheels no more than twenty feet above the road. Lew, arm sticking out the top-hinged window flap, fired three shots as they and the car passed one another, but to no effect. “No good,” he said. “I can’t see, I can’t aim. Run parallel, let me broadside them.”

“They’ve stopped,” Patricia said, looking back.

So they had, apparently startled by the sudden appearance of a plane shooting at them. But as Ellen swung around for another attack, they started up again, tearing down the highway. “Good,” Ellen said. “The faster they go, the easier it’ll be to pace them.”

They came in on the car’s right, flying low, Ellen slowing to match the car’s ninety miles an hour. This time she held the flap up and out with her elbow while Lew crouched against her seat back, holding the pistol in a two-handed grip, bracing it by pressing his knuckles against the door panel just under the window, the barrel sticking out through the opening. The driver was on this side, clearly visible, staring at the plane, his eyes huge white circles in his dark face, making a toy target. A passenger in the seat behind him was firing wildly in the general direction of the plane.

Lew’s first shot went nowhere in particular, but his second made that target face disappear, like something in a shooting gallery. The car slued and careened, turned sharply right, went over on its side, rolled completely over twice, and landed bone-jarringly on its wheels, smoking. Ellen lifted them higher, and looking back Lew saw the first flames, and two men staggering out onto the pavement.

Ahead, Bathar and the moped still ran, not looking back, not slackening pace. Ellen accelerated to overtake him, while Patricia said, “Who is that?”

“A friend of ours. My employer’s son. We thought he was dead.”

“He almost was.”

They flew over the speeding Bathar, then Ellen brought the Cessna down onto the highway for a very bumpy and scary landing, the fuselage fishtailing the whole time. Once they’d stopped, Ellen opened the door, leaned out, looked back, and said, “Where is he?”

Lew went through the contortions necessary to get past Ellen’s seatback and stick his head out the doorway. The road back there was dark and empty. “He’s hiding,” Lew said. “He’s hiding from us. Let me out, I’ll go get him.”

“We can’t stay here forever,” Ellen pointed out, climbing down so he could get out. “Sooner or later, there’ll be traffic.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Taking a few steps back behind the plane, Lew cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Bathar!” No response. He yelled it again, then muttered something, and went jogging away down the middle of the road. He counted fifty paces, then stopped and yelled, “God damn it, BATHAR!”

A distant unbelieving voice said, “What?”

“Bathar, it’s Lew! Come on!”

A shadow separated itself from the roadside darkness some distance away. “Lew? Honest to God?”

“No, I’m lying. Come on, Bathar!” Lew gestured mightily for Bathar to come on, then turned and jogged back toward the plane.

Behind him, the moped sounded its nasal sputter. It rapidly approached, passed the jogging Lew, and as he reached the plane, Bathar was off the moped and embracing Ellen with great vigor. “Say, there,” Lew said.

Bathar, grinning from ear to ear, released Ellen, then immediately grabbed her again and kissed her smiling mouth. Then he truly did release her, turned, and enthusiastically shook Lew’s hand in both of his, saying, “I can’t believe it. I thought this was a dead Paki, Lew, I really thought that, I really did.”

“Let’s get in the plane,” Ellen said.

“Right,” Lew said. He started forward, but Ellen put up a hand to stop him, saying, “Oh, no, you don’t. You ride up front with me.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Get in, Bathar. Step there, and there.”

“Very good.” Bathar hoisted himself up, climbed into the plane, and was heard to say, “Well, hello.”

Patricia’s grin sounded clearly in her voice: “Hello, yourself.”

Lew went next, working his way over to the front passenger seat, and then Ellen climbed aboard and at once started them rolling down the potholed road.

“By golly, here comes a car,” Lew said, seeing the headlights appear around a curve far ahead.

“I hope he has sense enough to get out of the way.” Ellen switched on the Cessna’s landing lights so the oncoming driver would at least know what was out in front of him.

He wasn’t a particularly intelligent driver. First he flashed his high beams; whether requesting this airplane to get out of his way or objecting to the brightness of its single forward floodlight, it was impossible to guess. Then he just kept coming, for the longest while. In the backseat, Bathar and Patricia were oblivious, engaged in mutual introductions. “Ellen,” Lew said, “what if he doesn’t stop?”

“Guess,” Ellen said.

But the clown finally did stop, and in fact he steered himself off the road, which was just as well, because the Cessna needed more road before it could struggle back into the air. The verge dipped down here, which was also good; the Cessna’s speeding left wing swept by just over the roof of the car while its driver gaped idiotically at them. Sometime later, they became airborne at last, and Ellen switched off all the lights. Then Bathar told them his story.

“I was trying to get to the border, but I had to hide every time a car came along. I was still groggy, and once when I was hiding I just fell asleep. Then I woke up and started again, and people came out of a little hotel by the road and saw me and chased me. Because I’m an Asian, I guess.”

Lew swiveled around to grin at him, saying, “Well, did you have fun?”

“I guess I did, really,” Bathar said, “so long as I survived.”

“And will you go to London now?”

“Oh, absolutely. In all the bad moments, I kept telling myself, ‘There’s London at the end of this.’”

Patricia said, “You’re going to London?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“I thought I might go back there, too,” she said. “I have cousins in Fulham.”

“A nice neighborhood, Fulham,” Bathar suggested. “Near to Chelsea and all. I used to live in Bayswater with the other wogs, but I didn’t much like it.”

“My cousins could put you up,” Patricia offered, “until you find your own place.”

“Why, thank you. Would they be putting you up, too?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Until I find my own place.”

The conversation in the backseat continued, Patricia and Bathar not at all hiding their mutual pleasure of discovery. In front, Ellen silently drove. Unbuttoning his shirt, Lew pulled out the long triangular pennant, dark green with the orange numbers on it, that he’d been wearing wrapped around his chest. 16.

Looking at him, Ellen said, “What’s that?”

“My flag. My guidon, standard, pennant. I’ll have to get it a new pole.”

“What’s it for?”

“It came from the golf course where Patricia was having that trouble.”

“So it’s a souvenir.”

“Well, no. Not exactly.” Holding the flag up, studying it in the dim control-panel light, he said, “At first, when I saw it, I thought it was a good joke. That’s why I took it. But now I think it really is my flag.”

“Because you’ll be forever sixteen?”

“Maybe so,” he said, grinning at her. “But for another reason, too. I’ve been in so many armies, fought so many times under so many different flags. This time there wasn’t a flag at all, there were no noble ideals, there wasn’t even a cause beyond money. But I bet I did more good today, more real good in the world, than I’ve ever done in my life before.” He waved the flag. “I’m going to keep this to remind me not to get too serious about other people’s flags.”

“You mean you won’t hire out as a merc anymore?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what I could do instead.” He shrugged. “Grow up, maybe, though I’d rather not. I’ll have to think about it. What about you? Still going back to the States?”

She gave a little sigh and shook her head, as though in long-suffering irritation. “Oh, I suppose not,” she said. “You get in too much trouble when I’m not around. Besides, I’d like to see what kind of knight you’ll be, following that flag.”

Lew smiled, reaching out to touch her shoulder. “I’ll be good,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.