Kahawa

1

Lew Brady picked up the two-hundred-thirty-pound man, turned him over like a sack of potatoes, and flipped him onto the mattress. The other two attackers stood around blinking, openmouthed, not moving forward. “What’s the matter with you birds?” Lew demanded. He grabbed one by his unzipped leather jacket, spun him, yanked the jacket shoulders so the garment came halfway down the man’s arms to hold him like a straitjacket, then shoved him into the other guy. They stumbled together, tripped over the edge of the mattress, and fell on the two-hundred-thirty-pound man.

Lew stood with hands on hips, frowning down at the muddle of men. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you clowns should just join the union.”

One of the other men in the room said, “Mr. Brady, that’s not fair. You’re trained, and we’re not.”

“Training you idiots is what it’s all about.”

The three men on the mattress were beginning to take out their frustrations on one another, with fists and elbows. “Hold it, there, hold it.” Lew leaned down to pull them apart, “I’ll tell you when to fight.”

They straggled to their feet, and Lew herded them over with the rest of the class: sixteen brawny adult males, all standing around looking sheepish and sullen, like a football team at the end of a winless season. “Line up,” Lew told them. “Face the mirror.”

This large top-floor space in a ramshackle low office building on the outskirts of Valdez, Alaska, was intended to be a rehearsal hall. Several ballet classes met here, as did a Yoga society. One long wall was mirrored. A piano stood in one corner and a cluster of folding chairs in another. Half a dozen ratty mattresses were scattered on the floor. Wide windows gave a view of the used-car lot across the way.

During Lew’s first four months up here in Valdez, while he was learning to pronounce it “Val—deez” like a native, it had seemed there were no jobs at all here for a man of his profession. But then he’d met Alan Kampolska, who owned a small local trucking operation and was being harassed by union “organizers” attracted by the pipeline construction. Kampolska’s drivers were big and tough, but they didn’t know how to handle themselves against goon squads.

Which was where Lew came in, with his experience as a Green Beret and a mercenary in Africa. Kampolska had offered to hire him to teach his boys how to conduct the war against the union thugs. Lew, bored and frustrated, had agreed. But it was slow hard work, not at all like training recruits in an army.

The main problem was mental attitude. In most self-defense classes it’s the instructor’s job to build self-confidence by a long string of small victories; but these guys were brawlers and sluggers, men who could handle themselves in tough situations, and the problem was they were suddenly facing an enemy too mean and too organized for them. Their reaction was a kind of aggrieved bewilderment, a belief that they were already defeated. So Lew had switched from the orthodox method of ego boosting to an unorthodox program of kicking the shit out of them. If he couldn’t build them up to self-confidence, maybe he could knock them down to self-respect. (And he was also, of course, working off some of his own irritable frustration.)

Now, with the sixteen in a glum row facing the mirror, Lew marched back and forth like the top sergeant he had frequently been. “Look at yourselves,” he ordered. “You’re a crowd of big, tough, no-nonsense sons of bitches, you look like you could hunt bear with a baseball bat, but you walk in here and all of a sudden you’re a goddam bunch of ballet dancers.”

The man who’d complained before complained again. “You’re a trained professional, that’s why.”

Lew shook his head. “Tell me the truth,” he said, making it a general question. “You want to throw in the towel, just give up and join the union?”

“No,” they said. “Shit, no,” some of them said. “Fuck the union,” some others said.

Which was good spirit, but not quite good enough. Lew sighed, and went over to stand directly in front of the complainer, a tall and rangy white man named Bill, who sported several tattoos and a straw cowboy hat. Looking him in the eye, Lew said, “Bill, if we met in a bar and got into an argument, what would you do?”

Bill had the sullen look of a man who expects to be hurting in a few seconds. “Throw a punch at you, I guess,” he muttered.

“And what would I do?”

“Grab my fist, twist it around behind my back, and run me into the wall.”

“You’ve seen me do that.”

“I sure have,” Bill said. The others all chuckled. They loved to see one another get thrown around.

Lew said, “Bill, can you see in your mind that move I make?”

“Sure I can. I dream it.”

“Then do it.”

Bill massively frowned. “I dunno. I—”

“I’m giving you more warning,” Lew told him, “than you’ll get on the street. I am about to throw a punch. You’ll either do the move, or you will become punched in the face.”

“Jesus,” Bill said, and Lew punched him in the face. Bill sat down on the floor, everybody laughed, and Lew sighed.

He turned to another of the men, but what he would have said was drowned out by the sudden roar of a low-flying plane skimming past, barely above the building roof. Everybody in the room instinctively ducked his head and hunched his shoulders until the roar faded. Then Lew saw his students exchange an amused and knowing glance, and he shook his head.

As they all knew, he was living with a pilot named Ellen Gillespie, who worked for the pipeline construction company. She always buzzed him on her return flight so he could drive out to the airport and pick her up.

Which made it seem like he was pussy-whipped or something—that’s what these clowns were grinning about—but it wasn’t like that at all. Ellen was Grade A; they fit together terrifically; everything was or should be fine. Would be fine if he would line up a real job somewhere.

Okay. The plane’s roar had faded, and he had another few minutes before leaving for the airport. Standing close to his next victim, a very broad-shouldered black man named Woody, Lew said, “Okay, Woody. You know the move?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” There was a gleam in Woody’s eye; he was really going to try for it this time. Lew hoped the man would succeed, to give the entire class a lift. He also hoped the wall he was run into wouldn’t be the one with the mirror.

“You’re about to get punched,” he said, reared back his fist, and felt a sharp pain in his shin. “Ow,” he said, his concentration broken, and Woody punched him smartly in the eye. Then Lew threw his own punch; Woody plucked his fist out of the air, spun him, twisted his arm up his back, and ran him into the side wall.

Suddenly older and a lot more tired, Lew picked himself off the floor as his students yelled and cheered and clapped Woody on the back. The son of a bitch had kicked him in the shin!

When the celebrations and congratulations at last died down, Lew said, “There. That’s what I’m talking about. Woody, you’re the first guy here to figure it out. The rest of you guys think it over, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He stood ramrod-stiff while his class trailed out, chatting and chuckling and offering to buy Woody any number of beers. Then, alone at last, he permitted himself to groan and to rub the various parts that hurt.

“Something,” he muttered, massaging himself and limping over to his outer clothing on one of the folding chairs. “Something else,” he mumbled into the musky wool of a sweater he was pulling over his head. “Something has to happen.”

2

Baron Chase, a man so steeped in his own villainy that the evidences of his evil now only amused him, paced the hotel-room floor like a pirate captain on his quarterdeck. “I am talking,” he said, “about stealing a train.”

“You must forgive my English,” Mazar Balim requested. He spoke better English than most men of any nationality. “You are suggesting the holding up of a train? Pursuant to its robbery?” A well-off merchant of fifty-three, he sat on the bed, round body and short legs, like Humpty Dumpty, blinking up at Chase.

“I am suggesting stealing a train,” Baron Chase said, smiling around his cigar, “pursuant to its rape.” Secure in his power, giving Balim a moment to think, he paused in his pacing to look out the narrow slatted window with its view of the alley leading to Standard Street, where a rag-dressed woman now walked in the bright sunlight, balancing on her head a rusted five-gallon drum filled with bits of wood and metal.

In taking this modest room in the rear of the New Stanley Hotel, away from the conversational chatter of the Thorntree Café and the traffic noise of Kimathi Street, Chase had registered as James Martin, U.S. citizen, of Akron, Ohio, representing the Monogram Bicycle Tire Company of that city, and furnishing a passport, American Express card, and other documents in support of this identity. However, he dared not meet with Balim in either the first-floor cocktail lounge or the outdoor café, as “James Martin” would normally have done, but was forced to discuss the scheme with him here in this claustrophobic room, with its one comfortable armchair that Chase scorned, while Balim sat like a fat obedient boy on the edge of the bed, watching with round-eyed patience.

There are several first-rate hotels in Nairobi, but none of the others would have done. The Hilton and the Intercontinental cater to the package tourists, mostly American but also European, while the Norfolk caters to Britons in whom the spirit of the Raj still lives, as well as to those Scandinavians and Germans who like to pretend they’re English. In the bars and restaurants of those hotels the customers’ faces are all white. Only in the New Stanley, the businessman’s hotel, the politicians’ and journalists’ hotel, are the customers—and their visitors—a mixture of white and black and Asian.

But even here Chase had to be wary. There was too much danger, in any public place, of his being recognized by a reporter or a civil servant as not James Martin of the bicycle tires at all but Baron Chase, of Canadian birth but now of Ugandan citizenship, an official in the government of Uganda and special adviser to Idi Amin himself. His presence here in Nairobi, in discussion with an ex-Ugandan Asian businessman, would be bound to cause questions; and if the questions were to reach the ears of Amin, it would be too late for answers.

“Where is this train?”

Turning from the window, withdrawing from his mouth the cigar he’d brought from Kampala, Chase allowed himself to look both surprised and amused. “Where is it? Don’t you want to know what it carries?”

“Not necessarily,” Balim said. “I am a businessman, Mr. Chase, which is a very small and cautious form of thief. I am prepared to remain small and cautious the rest of my days. I had enough of drama in ’seventy-two.”

Five years before, in 1972, Amin had driven from Uganda the sixty thousand native-born residents and citizens of Asian heritage, forcing them to leave behind all their holdings and personal possessions except for cash to the equivalent of one hundred dollars U.S. Balim had been among those deported; because his mercantile trade had previously expanded into Kenya, he had been luckier than most.

“That was before my time,” Chase said. “I had nothing to do with that.”

Balim shrugged. “You would have,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I was in Angola in ’seventy-two,” Chase said. “Working for one faction or another.”

“Or even two at a time,” Balim suggested.

“It carries coffee,” Chase said. His grayish pocked cheeks grew gaunt when he drew on the cigar. “Current market value, about three million pounds U.K.”

“Six million dollars.” Balim nodded. “A train full of coffee. The border between Uganda and Kenya is closed.”

“Of course.”

“This is Ugandan coffee.”

“There will be an airlift,” Chase told him, “operating out of Entebbe. It’s being laid on by a British-Swiss consortium, selling our coffee to the Brazilians to make up for their shortfall.”

“My knowledge of the world does not extend to South America,” Balim said. “I apologize for that. Why would Brazil have a shortfall in coffee?”

“Frost hit the crop.”

Balim sighed. “God’s diarrhea falls with equal justice everywhere.”

“The train will cross the northern uplands,” Chase told him, “stopping at each plantation to pick up the crop. By the time it reaches Tororo it’ll be full. Then it travels the main line west to Entebbe.”

Balim patted his soft palms against his round knees. His eyes were bright as he looked at Chase. He said, “And somewhere along this line, between Tororo and Entebbe, something happens.”

“The train never reaches Jinja,” Chase said.

“Ah, Jinja.” For a moment, Balim looked nostalgic. “A lovely town, Jinja. A friend of mine once had a weekend farm near there. Fruit trees. Gone now, I expect. What happens to this train before it reaches Jinja?”

“You steal it.”

“Ho-ho,” Balim said, laughing only with his mouth. “I do not, Mr. Chase. No, no, Mazar Balim is not a cowboy or a commando.”

“Mazar Balim,” Chase told him, “is a leader of men. You have employees.”

“Clerks. Accountants. Drivers. Warehousemen.”

“Frank Lanigan.”

Balim stopped, frowning, gazing past Chase toward the narrow open window. Street noises came faintly. Finally he said, “Frank Lanigan did not discuss this with you.”

Chase had returned the cigar to the corner of his mouth, and now he smiled around it, showing yellowed teeth. “You sound very sure of yourself. You believe Frank Lanigan wouldn’t talk to me without reporting it to you?”

“Frank wouldn’t willingly talk to you at all,” Balim said. “Frank doesn’t like you.”

A little puff of cigar smoke obscured Chase’s face; when the haze dissipated, he was calm and smiling. “Frank would like to steal a train.”

Balim nodded his agreement. “There is that about him,” he said. “A certain boyishness.”

“I’ve known Frank for twenty years,” Chase said. “Since Katanga. He’s stupid, but he gets the job done.”

“But what is your interest in this particular job, this train theft?”

Chase smiled. “Money.”

“Doesn’t Idi Amin pay you well?”

“Very well. In Ugandan shillings, very few of which I can get out of the country.”

“Ah.”

“I’ll tell you frankly, Mr. Balim,” Chase said, with the intensity of a man who speaks frankly very seldom, “Idi Amin is running out his string.”

Balim showed surprise. “Who is there to overthrow him?”

“The world,” Chase said. “When you kill an archbishop, the righteous shall rise up and smite you.”

Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum had only recently been murdered. Balim said, “You don’t think that will blow over?”

“There’s too much to blow over,” Chase said. “He’s getting crazier. He could even turn on me one of these days.”

“An uncomfortable position.”

“I’m forty-nine,” Chase said. “When I signed on with Tshombe in Katanga, I was a kid in my twenties. My joints were never stiff, I could go without sleep for days, and no matter how many people died around me I knew I was immortal.”

“Visions of retirement,” Balim said with a sly smile. “The rose garden. Even the memoirs, perhaps?”

“I want more out of all this than memories,” Chase said, an underground savagery surfacing for an instant. “I’ve been in this fucking continent half my life. I want to take something away with me when I go.”

Balim shifted slightly on the bed, as though he found Chase’s nakedness socially discomfiting. “I can see,” he said, in deliberately businesslike and uninflected tones, “that I am the correct man for you to approach.”

“That’s right.” Balim’s calm had restored Chase’s own equilibrium. He said, “I’m in a position to set the thing up. You have the merchant contacts in Kenya to move the coffee back into legitimate channels. You can finance Frank Lanigan in pulling the caper. You can arrange to bank my share for me in Switzerland. And you have a motive even stronger than money for getting involved.”

Balim’s surprise this time was certainly genuine. “I have? A motive stronger than money? What could this possibly be?”

“Revenge,” Chase told him. “Most of those coffee plantations used to belong to your brother Asians.”

“Who stole them from the departing whites in nineteen sixty-two,” Balim pointed out.

Chase gestured irritably with the cigar; white ash fell on the rug. “The point is,” he said, “Amin stole them in ’seventy-two, when he kicked you people out. It’s Amin’s personal money. You can kick him one up the ass.”

“Well, well.” Balim rose from the bed, adjusting his neat round trousers. “You realize I can’t give you an answer immediately.”

“The train runs in three months.”

“You give me much to think about,” Balim said. “Including the idea that you find me sufficiently trustworthy to bank your profits for you.”

Chase removed the cigar from his teeth, so that his smile looked like the grin of a wolf. “You don’t travel light, my friend,” he said. “You’re a man of homes and shops and warehouses. You know very well, if you double-crossed me, how easy it would be for me to find you.”

“I see,” Balim said. “Spoken by a man who believes revenge is more important than money. I do see. We shall talk again, quite soon.”

3

Frank Lanigan steered the Land-Rover down Highway A1 toward Kisumu and home. A heavy-jawed, big-boned, ham-handed man of forty-two, Frank drove as though the vehicle were a reluctant mule, shoving the gearshift this way and that, pounding the pedals with his booted feet, mauling the steering wheel, grunting every time the potholed roadway bounced him in the air to thud him down again onto the springless bucket seat. The Land-Rover’s roof had, over the last eighty miles of bad road, mashed his wide-brimmed campaign hat down over his eyebrows and against his ears, adding a headache to all his other body aches and general dirtiness and disrepair. Kisumu couldn’t arrive any too soon.

Frank had been away for three days up at Eldoret, where the provincial inspector for the Department of Weights and Measures was refusing to stay bribed. It was Frank Lanigan’s least favorite type of occupation, that; give him a fight, a war, even a ditch to dig—he’d choose any of them over diplomacy. And particularly diplomacy with a greedy minor official.

In the passenger seat, the scruffy black called Charlie hung on with one hand, bounced around like a paddleball at the end of a string, smiled vaguely, chewed sugarcane, and spat on the floor between his feet. And sometimes on his feet. “Spit out the window, man!” Frank yelled.

“Dust,” Charlie explained with perfect equanimity. Frank wasn’t sure whether he’d never seen Charlie stoned or never seen him straight; all he knew for sure was he wished he’d never seen him at all. Charlie was a dirty, irresponsible, smelly, untrustworthy son of a bitch. Unlike the Luo, the local tribe in this part of Kenya, a serious and hardworking (if somewhat simple) people, Charlie was a bright tricky Kikuyu from the Mau Range, the tribe that had made Mau Mau famous. A Britisher, Sir Gerald Portal, had said it best back in 1893: “The only way in which to deal with Kikuyu people, whether singly or in masses, was to shoot at sight.”

It was too late to shoot Charlie at sight; Frank had been sighting him for nearly three years now, and familiarity had bred a kind of uneasy truce between them, in which neither made any effort to hide his disdain for the other.

And in fact Charlie did have his uses. Mr. Balim had instructed Frank to bring the little bastard along to Eldoret as interpreter and general assistant, and as usual Mr. Balim had been right. It was Charlie, snuffling around among the local wananchi, who’d found the source of the provincial inspector’s instability: a woman, of course, reckless and greedy and discontent. And it was Charlie who last night had gone to the woman and threatened her with a knife, promising it would not kill her. This morning the inspector had abruptly seen the light, and now Frank could come back to Kisumu, report to Mr. Balim, and then go home, have a wash, have a White Cap beer (or maybe two), have a steak on his own screened patio, bed down with a couple of the maids for company, and ease the aches and knots out of his system.

There was a level railway crossing right at the city line, and damn if the barrier didn’t come down, red lights idiotically blinking, just as Frank reached the rotten thing. He squealed the vehicle to a stop, then sat perspiring in the sunlight while the dust of his passage leisurely overtook him. Charlie negligently spat down his own shirt-front. “Christ give me strength,” Frank said.

Stopping beyond the tracks, facing this way, chrome glittering painfully, was a gleaming dark-blue Mercedes-Benz 300 sedan, the vehicle of choice of the native-born winners in this part of the world. The chauffeur, capped and jacketed in black, half his face hidden behind huge dark sunglasses, sat stolid and unmoving at the wheel, dreaming perhaps of his own Mercedes and chauffeur farther down the road of the future. Behind him, the passenger or passengers were obscured in darkness; possibly a government official, or a successful contractor with government connections, or an even more successful smuggler, or an elaborately coiffed woman belonging to one of the above. (Given that many of the central African tribal names featured the formal “Wa” plural prefix—Wakamba, Wa-Kwavi, Wateita, Wa-Nyika, even Wa-Kikuyu—and given these winners’ invariable symbol of triumph in the Mercedes-Benz, the natives used an ironic tribal name for these detribalized successes: the Wa-Benzi. It was a deadly insult to call a Wa-Benzi that to his face. Not that he’d attack you with a knife or his fists; no, he’d wait and destroy you later, in some indirect white man’s way.)

The train, when it at last appeared, was a freight, very slow-moving, pulled by a Garratt steam locomotive. Beyond the trundling freight cars, Kisumu hunkered in the hot sun, a seedy, sand-colored, low-lying commercial town, as ugly and as functional as a prison outhouse, a scruffy equatorial port like dozens of others around the world’s waist, except that instead of facing an ocean it faced a lake, Victoria, the world’s second largest, the size of Scotland, the source of the Nile, girdled by Uganda and Kenya and Tanzania. Serviced by the railroad from the east and by any number of freight boats from the west, Kisumu was the conduit for an awful lot of wealth, absolutely none of which showed.

As the rusty green caboose at last slid by, and the barriers began to lift, Charlie abruptly uncoiled himself out of his seat and out of the Land-Rover, saying, “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye?” Frank watched with chronic irritation as Charlie sauntered away southward along the tracks, taking his own unfathomable direction. His shirt had once been white. His trousers, baggy-assed and too big in the waist and cut off now just below the knee, had once been black and probably the property of some up-country missionary or mortician. His legs, splaying out when he walked, looked as though they were full of doorknobs. “The thing I’d like to know,” Frank said aloud—he’d been talking to himself for several years now, and as yet had found no cause to disagree nor end the conversation—“is why, if he wasn’t going across the track, he sat in this bloody car for ten minutes until the train went by.”

There was no answer. There was never an answer with Charlie. Frank shook his head, and the car behind him honked in impatience as the Mercedes-Benz came by. In the backseat were two Wa-Benzi, serious self-important men in suits and ties, discussing white papers in an ecru manila envelope. Frank wrestled the Land-Rover’s gearshift into first, stomped the accelerator, and jolted across the railroad track.

The heart of Mr. Balim’s enterprises, now that his holdings in Kampala and Luzira had been confiscated by Idi Amin, was a pair of long, low, rambling, concrete-block, stucco-faced buildings on Kisiani Street. They contained storefronts, offices, and warehouse space, as well as a broad yard area in the rear, and one and a half of them were colored a faded patchy blue, using paint Mr. Balim had once brokered but not been paid for. The paint had run out, leaving the right side and rear of one of the buildings the normal Kisumu color of pale sun-washed tan.

Fighting the wheel with both hands and both knees, Frank steered the Land-Rover through a tight turn into the narrow driveway between the two buildings. The side walls bore the scars of his earlier moments of impatience, but this time as it happened he hit nothing, and continued on to slam the vehicle into its normal parking space by the electrified fence at the rear of the property.

Walking toward the right-hand building, the one containing the offices, Frank passed two overall-clad employees hunkered by a rusty outboard motor, pointing at it with oilcans and screwdrivers and muttering together in Luo. Off to the left, another employee enthusiastically changed a truck tire with the assistance of a sledgehammer. Another pair of employees sprawled at their ease against the rear wall, awaiting the emergency best suited to their talents. Frank tried to spit into the sand to express his feelings about all these people, but his mouth was too dry; he contented himself with a disgusted look and went on inside.

Isaac Otera, at his desk in Balim’s outer office, also looked disgusted, and was speaking with weary patience to somebody on the phone. “We have a policy about that,” he said, obviously not for the first time. “We do not pay for goods we have never seen.” Frank, with a small wave, started to walk on through to Balim’s office, but Isaac waggled his hand in negative fashion while he kept explaining to the phone.

No? Frank looked at the closed door; was Balim in there with someone else? He couldn’t ask Isaac until the phone call was done, so he went out again to the soft-drink machine in the hall and bought two 7UPs. One he poured on his head; the other he drank. Then he went back and sat on the bench opposite Isaac and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand; it tickled after the 7UP.

Isaac must be dealing with somebody in the government; otherwise, he wouldn’t be putting up with it this long. But that was all right; being patient with government officials was what Isaac had been born for.

Like Balim himself, Isaac Otera was a refugee Ugandan. A member of the Langi tribe from the northern part of the country, he had been well educated at Makerere University and had started in government service with the Uganda Land Commission some twelve years ago, at the age of twenty-two. He was a natural Wa-Benzi, a tall and handsome, intelligent and educated man with a respectful liking for Northern culture, and in a rational world he would still be what he had been three years ago: some sort of assistant undersecretary somewhere in the bureaucracy, not yet the possessor of a Mercedes, but at least owning a Ford Cortina.

But Idi Amin’s Uganda was the reverse of a rational world. The Langi were one of the two tribes Amin hated most, and against whom he had assembled death lists thousands of names long. Three years ago, driving homeward toward Kampala one evening after an unexpectedly long conference in Jinja, Isaac had had a blowout in the Ford Cortina. With some difficulty he had found a garageman to help him with the repairs, and a phone to call home to tell his wife and two daughters that he’d be late. He hadn’t been alarmed when there was no answer, since phone service was chancy at best and he’d assumed their phone was out of order. When finally he’d reached home, three hours late, the lights were all on but the house was apparently empty. Isaac had walked through the rooms, calling their names, until he’d seen the smear of blood on the basement doorknob. It had not been possible for him to touch that doorknob, to open the door and see what lay behind it. Taking what money he could find, and two sweaters, he had gone out into the fields behind the house and waited. Sometime after midnight two cars had stopped outside and several men had emerged to enter the house through both the front and rear doors. After a while, a lot of shooting had sounded from in there: machine-gun fire and pistol shots. Several of the lamps were shot out. Then the men had driven away again, leaving the remaining lights burning, and Isaac had crept off, making his way to the house of a friend, who had driven him before dawn to Tororo and the Kenyan border.

Now Isaac was Mazar Balim’s inside man, just as Frank was his outside man. While Frank dealt with bribery and thievery and occasional rough stuff from thugs who saw profit in intimidating an Asian merchant, Isaac talked to bureaucrats from the government and the railway and the airline, he conferred with the representatives of American and European companies offering goods for sale, he dealt with taxes and tariffs and import restrictions. Set a bureaucrat to catch a bureaucrat; old Balim knew what he was doing, every time.

The phone conversation never actually ended; as with most such dealings, it merely faded away into vague suggestions and possibilities. As usual, Isaac outwaited his opponent, and there was just a glint of combative triumph in his eye when at last he cradled the receiver and said, “You’re dusty.”

“I stink,” Frank said accurately, and gestured at the door. “Who’s in there with the boss?”

“No one. Mr. Balim isn’t here.”

“Not here?” Frank got restlessly to his feet, hitching his belt around his sweat-soaked waist. “Where is he?”

“Flew to Nairobi this morning. I expect him—”

The door opened and an employee stuck his black head in and said something fast to Isaac, who spoke equally quickly back. The employee disappeared, and Isaac said to Frank, “He’s coming in now.”

“Is that what he said?” It rankled with Frank that after a hundred years of hanging out with Englishmen these natives were still determined to talk Swahili. It wasn’t as though Swahili were their native tongue; they all had tribal languages, hundreds of them throughout eastern and central Africa. Swahili wasn’t even a proper language at all, when you stopped to think about it. The very word Swahili came from the Arabic word Sawahil, meaning “coast.” When the Arabs had founded their trading cities at Zanzibar and Mombasa and elsewhere on the east African coast in the seventh century, and intermarried with the several Bantu tribes they’d found living there, this bastard tongue had emerged, using Bantu syntax and a combination of tribal and Arabic vocabularies. The Arab slave caravans had carried this African Yiddish a thousand miles westward across the continent in their bloody man-harvests, so that even today when a Nandi, for instance, wanted to converse with an Acholi, it was always in that damn Swahili.

Frank had been kicking around Africa for nearly twenty years, ever since Katanga, and he had made it a point of honor to resist learning Swahili. He knew enough to take himself successfully through a parade ground or a battle—“More ammunition here,” “Keep your fucking head down,” “Whose foot is that?”—but no more. Let the Bantus learn damn English, like civilized people.

Mazar Balim came in, looking rumpled but not upset. “The road from the airport continues to deteriorate,” he said. “Soon we shall not be able to ship light bulbs.”

“Or beer,” said Isaac.

Frank, unable to repress his curiosity, said, “How was Nairobi?”

“Very excited about itself. Isaac, anything of import?”

“Nothing that can’t wait.”

“Good. Frank, come in. You look very dusty; have you been home?”

“Not yet.”

Frank followed Balim into a small, crowded but comfortable room in which the windows were all blocked by filing cabinets, except the one tumorous with an air conditioner, which Balim turned on at once. “Our friend in Eldoret is our friend again, I presume,” he said, edging through the clutter to sit in the old wooden swivel chair behind the desk. The two scarves thrown over the chair were so threadbare they had virtually no color left.

Shutting the office door, dropping like an abandoned novel into the brown vinyl chair facing the desk, Frank said, “All fixed,” and went on to give an account of the fixing that was totally unfair to Charlie. At the end of which, Balim nodded and said, “That’s good. I knew you and Charlie would handle it.”

“Mm,” Frank said.

“There is another matter,” Balim said. “What do you think of coffee smuggling out of Uganda?”

“Profitable.” The 7UP in his hair, drying in the air conditioner’s draft, was making his head itch. “Dangerous,” he went on. “Not a long-term business.”

“Agreed.” Balim smiled as though a bright pupil had once again showed his promise. “But as an extremely profitable one-time operation, what then?”

“Depends on the circumstances. You’ve got something, huh?”

“Depends on the circumstances,” Balim said. “I would like you to study the situation.”

“Sure.”

Balim touched papers on his desk, not as though he were looking for anything in particular but more as though to reassure himself as to his identity and strength. “This task,” he said, “will undoubtedly consume very much of your time.”

“For how long?”

“Three months, perhaps longer. Would you know someone you could hire, on a temporary basis, to take over some of your duties?”

“A merc?”

“A white man, yes.” Obviously enjoying the irony of the phrase, Balim added heavily, “An old African hand.”

“There aren’t that many wars going on right now,” Frank said. “I’ll call around, come up with somebody.”

“Somebody you trust.”

“Come on,” Frank said, grinning. “Think again.”

“I do beg your pardon.” Balim performed his own kind of grin. “I meant, of course, someone you know how much you can trust.”

“Can do.”

As Frank got to his feet, stretching out the tightnesses in his joints, scratching the 7UP crystals on his head, Balim said, “You might be interested in who has brought us this opportunity.”

“Someone I know?”

“An old friend.” Then Balim corrected himself, raising one finger.

“No, I’m in error again. An old acquaintance.”

“Who?”

“Baron Chase.”

Frank stopped scratching, the itchy 7UP forgotten. “That son of a bitch? You want to deal with Baron Chase?”

“That’s why,” Balim said, “I’ll be wanting your undivided attention in the days ahead.”

“You’ll need more than me,” Frank told him. “You’ll need a special angel from God. Chase would melt his grandmother down for the silver in her hair.”

“I do believe you,” Balim said, shrugging, “but I am driven by my poor merchant’s greed. He has offered us a railroad train, a freight train, a complete train filled with very valuable coffee. I want that coffee, and so I must deal with Baron Chase. But only with you, Frank, always at my side.” Balim smiled, waggling a finger. “Which is why it is so important,” he said, “that you find just the right person to be your assistant. Choose carefully, Frank.”

4

Out at Valdez International Airport, Lew Brady sat in a five-year-old Chevrolet Impala and felt the heater’s dry air destroy the interior of his nose while he watched Ellen Gillespie taxi the Cherokee to its pad. Although it was nearly April, Lew still thought of the climate as wintry. “I’m freezing to death here,” he muttered. “These Alaskans are crazy.”

It didn’t help when Ellen came out of the plane in Khaki slacks and a short-sleeved lavender blouse. She came smiling and waving across the stubby new grass, a tall and slender woman with short dark-blond hair and a long angular face that combined beauty with efficiency in a way that left Lew helpless with desire.

Ellen was twenty-eight, daughter of a commercial pilot who’d taught her to fly when she was still in her teens. She was licensed for multiengine jets, but she didn’t want to spend years apprenticing as navigator and engineer, and her youth and sex limited her to jobs for which she was overqualified: commuter services in Florida, skywriting in California, even dragging a sunburn-treatment message through the blue summer haze over Fire Island.

She’d been on that last stint when they’d met. Lew, after six and a half years on the African continent, involved in wars from Chad in the north to Angola in the south, Ethiopia in the east to Biafra in the west, had suddenly run out of Dark Continent conflicts and had accepted a job offer half the world away, in the Caribbean, training anti-insurgency forces on one of the smaller islands there.

The most sensible travel route had been via Amsterdam and New York, and it was in New York that he’d been intercepted by a message: his employer government had just been overthrown, before he could arrive and train anybody to defend it.

Out of work again, Lew had gotten in touch with a pilot he’d known in Africa, a man now working for a commuter airline between New York City and the Hamptons, operating out of Flushing Airport in Queens. At that airport, Lew had first seen this beautiful woman pilot, back from her day’s sunburn chores, and he had been immediately hooked.

Her manner at the start was cool but friendly. Gradually she became less cool, and then more friendly, and finally Lew moved in with her for the rest of that summer. And in the fall, when Ellen was offered the job here in Alaska, they’d agreed he would come along.

“Hello, lover,” she said now as she slid into the car and kissed his lips; comfortably, not passionately. Then, as he put the car in gear, she switched off the heater and opened her window. He’d known she would do that. “Spring,” she said, with marked satisfaction.

He steered in a long curve toward the gate in the chain link fence. “Nice flight?”

“So-so.” She looked out her open window, elbow resting on the sill, short nails tap-tapping the plastic of the door. She was often like this after flying, a little nervous, vibrant, edgy, hyperactive. He had learned with disappointment that it was a bad time sexually; she was distracted by the sky. She said, “The same trees get boring, eventually.”

“Nothing to deliver?” Her primary job was to carry papers, blueprints, instructions up to the field offices where the pipeline was being laid; sometimes there was a reply, and they’d detour past the construction company’s Valdez office to drop it off.

But not today. “No, we can go home.”

The guard at the airport was an old friend by now; he waved at Lew, who waved back.

Ellen said, “How’s the class?”

“Improving, finally.”

“I thought so. You’re starting a nice shiner. What else did you do today?”

“Made some calls. Talked to some people.”

“Any luck?”

“Dim possibilities. Not really.”

They were passing a construction site; yellow earthmovers crawled on a churned-up corner lot behind a sign featuring a future bank. Ellen looked at it, then said, “Remember what you said when we came up here?”

He did. “‘There must be plenty of work,’” he quoted, “‘for an able-bodied man in Alaska.’”

“You’re making yourself old, Lew,” she told him. “Sitting around, waiting. Playing with truck drivers. You aren’t a house pet.”

“I could operate a bulldozer,” he said, voice flat, not as though he were making a serious suggestion. “I could tend bar. Repossess automobiles. Drive a truck for the pipeline.”

“Lew,” she said gently, “Alaska isn’t going to war.”

“Somebody is.”

The phone was ringing when they parked beside the trailer they called home. “Jesus!” Lew cried, and ran. He pounded into the bedroom, to their only phone, shedding clothes, already certain, and when Ellen came in a minute later he was grinning so broadly he looked as though he meant to eat the phone. “Frank,” he was saying, as a believer who sees a vision might say, “It’s the Mother of God.”

Ellen sat on the bed and Lew paced, jamming the receiver against his ear and mouth, holding the cradle in his other hand. “God, yes, Frank,” he said. He barely understood Frank’s words, didn’t at all understand what job he was being offered, and couldn’t have cared less. Frank Lanigan—good old Frank Lanigan, from Angola and Portuguese Guinea and Ethiopia—Frank Lanigan was offering him a job, a piece of work. In Africa.

Then he noticed Ellen sitting there, and he interrupted Frank to say, “One thing. There’s one thing.”

“What’s that?” The voice came thousands of miles to sound clear and uninflected in Lew’s ear.

“I’ve sort of doubled up with somebody else,” Lew said. “A pilot. You got work for both of us?”

“A pilot? Lew, I don’t think so. This isn’t the kind of job—”

“She travels with me,” Lew insisted. “I’m sorry, Frank, but that’s the way it is.” And he waved the phone cradle at Ellen, to wipe away her troubled expression, to reassure her it would be all right.

“Lew, I could ask some—Did you say she?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh. That makes it different. She gotta be a pilot?”

Exultation made Lew savage. “Hold it,” he said, and cupped the mouthpiece while saying to Ellen, “It doesn’t have to be pilot, does it? It could be any job for an able-bodied woman, right?”

She laughed, calling him a bastard. He grinned at the phone and said, “Sorry, Frank. It has to be pilot.”

“We’ll work something out,” Frank said.

They spent a few more minutes discussing the transportation details, while Lew grinned without interruption at Ellen seated on the bed. Then he said good-bye and slapped together the halves of the phone. “Don’t get up,” he said.

5

Ellen’s first sight of Frank Lanigan, in the main waiting room at Wilson Airport, in Nairobi, reminded her just why it was she found Lew Brady so precious. Lanigan was like most of the men Ellen had met in these outlandish global crannies: hairy, sweaty, an overgrown boy, a blunt roughneck with an inflated opinion of his own courage and prowess. Lew, living in the same world, was stronger and braver than any of them, and he didn’t know it. How could she help but treasure him?

Proudly Lew made the introductions, as though he’d invented each of them especially for the pleasure of the other. Frank Lanigan took Ellen’s hand in his hammy fist and leaned toward her a connoisseur’s smile, saying, “Lew always could pick ’em.”

Already I’m a them, Ellen thought. “Nice to meet you,” she said, with her boring-party smile. Cold bitch, said Frank Lanigan’s eyes, behind the welcoming heartiness. That’s right, her eyes said back as she withdrew her hand from his, and her smile could have iced an entire bucket of daiquiris.

Frank looked away from it at the two battered flight bags beside them on the floor, saying, “This all your luggage?”

“We travel light,” Lew told him.

“A woman who travels light,” Frank said. “Will wonders never cease?”

Oh, you bastard, Ellen thought. She watched with some amusement as Frank tried to figure out which bag was hers—so he could carry it, of course, the eager overgrown Boy Scout approach—then grabbed one at random. The right one, as it happened. Lew picked up his own bag and Frank said, “This way,” adding to Ellen as they started off, “We’re putting you right to work.”

“Oh, yes?”

Ellen had been so doubtful about this whole deal that she hadn’t actually quit her job in Alaska, but had merely asked for and received two weeks off without pay. If the African adventure came out badly, she could always turn right around and go back. She still rated the normal courtesy airline discount for flights and hotels, so she wasn’t risking much in coming all this way with only the vaguest promise of a job once she got here. But now perhaps the job was real?

“You’re our pilot,” Frank told her over his shoulder as he led the way toward the exit, shoving aside the dozens of raggedy-dressed black men offering taxis. “No taxi!” he bellowed, and pushed through the door into the blinding sunlight of Africa.

Lew had been only one of the reasons Ellen had agreed to this iffy voyage. Africa was the other. She had worked in both North and South America as well as in Southeast Asia, she had seen Japan and parts of Europe as a tourist, but the entire African continent was new to her. She was fascinated by the thought of it, a fascination only slightly dampened by the cholera and yellow-fever and typhus shots they’d had to take before departure, and the supply of malaria pills they were supposed to take—one every Tuesday—not only during their entire stay in Africa but for two full months thereafter. It was beginning to seem that Africa was not only as exotic but also as hospitable to the human race as Mercury or Jupiter.

Her first ground-level view was disappointing. Flat dry scruffy fields under a huge baking sun. The taxis, small and rusty but with gleaming windows, were clustered helter-skelter near the terminal exit, drivers and hangers-on sitting on the fenders and hoods. The airport buildings, low and hot-looking, reminded her of smaller islands in the Caribbean.

“This way,” Frank shouted. Swinging Ellen’s flight bag at an importuning cabman, he marched off around the side of the building.

Ellen glanced at Lew, to see him smiling and beaming and gawking around as though he thought he was home. He loves this awful place, she thought, and her heart sank.

There was a brief business of showing documents at a gate in a chain link fence, and then they started off across the scrubby ground toward a double row of tied-down planes to one side of the main east-west runway.

Ellen walked close beside Lew, saying to him too softly for Frank to hear, “Does he expect me to fly something?”

“Beats me,” Lew said. “Maybe so.”

In the last sixty hours, they had flown by commercial airliner from Alaska to Seattle, and from there to New York, where they’d had a three-hour layover before the overnight Alitalia flight to Rome. In Rome they’d taken a hotel room near the airport for the day, followed by the final overnight flight to Nairobi, arriving at eight in the morning. They had crossed thirteen time zones and had spent twenty-three hours in the air. And now was Ellen expected to fly a plane she’d never operated before over land she’d never seen before in a country and a continent and with an air-traffic system that were all new to her?

She considered saying something to Lew, but hesitated. She hesitated, as she hated to admit to herself, partly because she was afraid any objection would be treated as special pleading, but it was also because she wanted to see just what Frank Lanigan had in mind.

“We’re here ahead of the rains,” Lew said.

She looked skyward, seeing only a few scattered high thin clouds. “Rains?”

“They’re due the end of March.” He grinned and said, “First drought, then flood.”

“There are better systems.”

They were about halfway to the planes when Frank, up ahead, suddenly let out a roar of rage, dropped Ellen’s bag onto the brown grass, and raced heavily away like an aroused bull toward a twin-engine Fairchild painted white with orange trim. Unlike the others parked here, it was not tied down. Lew and Ellen looked at one another, shrugged, and kept on walking. Ellen picked up her bag on the way.

Meantime, Frank was roughly yanking somebody out of the Fairchild, so roughly that the man tumbled onto the ground, landing on his shoulder and rolling forward under the wing. Frank ran around the length of the wing, like a dog playing a game, and reached the man again as he pulled himself to his feet between the port engine and the fuselage.

By this time, Ellen and Lew were close enough to hear what Frank was yelling. “What are you doing in that plane? I said to clear out of here!”

The man mumbled something, and Frank raised a threatening hand. “You got your money! That’s all you get!” Watching, Ellen thought Frank was putting on the anger, that he was much more in control of himself than he pretended.

“It’s only my gear,” the man said, in a north-of-England accent. He was thin, perhaps forty, moustached, with blotchy red skin and heavy bags under watery eyes. He had been drinking, and had shaved himself recently but erratically. His voice contained a whining he was obviously trying his best to conceal. “I only took what was mine,” he said.

Ellen and Lew had arrived at the plane. Lew said, “Frank? A problem?”

“Watch this bird,” Frank told him, “while I see what he was up to.”

“Personal possessions!” the man cried, as Frank went away around the wing again, apparently unwilling to risk his dignity by stooping low and scuttling under it.

Ellen, looking at the man, was surprised when he suddenly met her gaze and his expression turned sarcastic, his weak mouth trying for a sardonic smile. “So you’re the pilot,” he said, with heavy emphasis. “Frank’s new tramp.”

Lew dropped his flight bag, moved his left foot forward, and hit the man in the face with a straight overhand right. The man staggered back, his head banging the fuselage, and fell to the ground, not unconscious but stunned.

“Lew!” Ellen said.

He turned to her, saw the anger in her eyes, and immediately stepped back, embarrassed, opening his hands out of their fists. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not awake.”

Twice in their early days together, Lew had hit men under the mistaken impression he was defending her, reacting to provocation as he thought she would want him to react. Since he remained permanently unaware that the patronizing assumptions of a Frank Lanigan were a thousand times more offensive than any angry name-calling, he was hardly the protector of choice, even if she felt the need for such a medieval thing. She’d thought that argument had been resolved months ago, but now she saw that, if you got Lew Brady tired enough, jet-lagged enough, disoriented enough, the old incorrect basic responses were still alive and well and living in the middle of his wooden head. “I’ll fight my own battles, Lew,” she said.

“I know. I know. I’m sorry.”

The man had struggled to his feet, patting his nose and mouth with the back of his hand as though dabbing for blood. “Oh, you’ll have a good time,” he said to Ellen, his anger undiminished. “Yes, you will.”

“You aren’t hurt,” she told him.

He put his hand down at his side, almost standing at a kind of attention, apparently remembering the dignity he’d earlier been striving for. “I can tell your kind,” he said. “You’re as bad as they are. You can all rot in hell together.”

Frank had come back around the wing, this time carrying a clearglass pint whisky bottle, about a third full. Extending it to the man, he said, “Here’s your personal possessions.”

The man snatched the bottle, tucking it inside his shirt. “Thanks for nothing,” he said, and strode swiftly away toward the airport gate, walking with unnatural rigidity, to prove to them his sobriety in case they were watching.

Lew said, “What was that all about?”

“Didn’t recognize him, did you?” Frank said. “Timmins. Flew cargo when we worked for the Front. Angola.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Lew said. “What’s his problem now?”

“He was our pilot.” Frank grinned at Ellen. “You’re taking his place.”

Ellen looked after the departing stick figure. “That’s why he was so upset?”

“Still surprised, that’s all,” Frank said, and shrugged. “Let’s stow your goods.” He took Ellen’s flight bag from her hand.

Ellen said, “Surprise? Why surprise?”

Frank led the way around the wing once more and toward the cargo door aft on the fuselage. “I just fired him about twenty minutes ago.”

“Twenty minutes!”

He paused in unlocking the cargo door to grin at her. “I wanted him to fly me and the plane down here, didn’t I?”

Ellen looked again after the previous pilot, but he had gone through the gate and disappeared. “Not much notice,” she said. “And no severance pay either, I suppose.”

“I can see you’ve got a soft heart,” Frank said. “But don’t worry about Roger, he shouldn’t be a pilot anymore at all.”

“He drinks too much,” she suggested.

“He drinks at the wrong time.” Frank slammed the cargo door and moved forward to open the passenger door and tilt the front seat forward. “I’ll ride in the front to show the way. Lew, you get in back.”

“Right.”

While Lew climbed aboard, Frank gave Ellen a quizzical grin, saying, “I hope you know how to fly this thing.”

“At least I don’t drink,” she told him. “Not at the wrong time.”

Frank laughed, clipped the front seat into place, and climbed up into the copilot’s seat. Ellen followed, and took a moment to familiarize herself with the instrument layout. She had never in fact flown this exact model before, but it wasn’t much more complicated than getting behind the wheel of a strange automobile.

Frank said, “We’ve filed a flight plan to Kisumu. Charts oughta be in your door pocket there.”

“In a minute.” She found the control checklist in the pocket and studied it, then pulled half a dozen aerial charts from the pocket. They were old and flimsy, marked here and there with a variety of pens and pencils in several colors, and most of them were starting to tear at the fold lines. She found Nairobi on one, and asked, “Which way do we head?”

“West-northwest.”

“To Kisumu, you said?”

That was on the next chart westward. Very high ground, the Mau Escarpment, nosed down into the direct line between Nairobi and Kisumu, but by heading directly west she could skirt the southern edge of the mountains. There was a small airfield shown at Ewaso Ngiro, eighty miles out, another at Mara River, forty miles farther on. From there she would turn north-northwest, passing between the airports at Kisii and Kericho as the land sloped gradually downward toward the shores of Lake Victoria, three hundred miles away. The airport at Kisumu, at the inmost point of Winam Gulf, was, surprisingly, marked for international flights. But of course the countries here were so small that international travel meant something very different from what it did in the States. Again she was reminded of the Caribbean.

Frank said, “Everything okay?”

“Just fine.” Unclipping the earphones from the stick, she put them on and spoke to the control tower. Meantime, Lew leaned forward in his seat to start a conversation with Frank. Catching a word here and there, Ellen understood they were gossiping about old friends: where are they now, what have you heard from So-and-So. Except that with men it wasn’t called gossip.

She started the port and then the starboard engine, ran through the items on the checklist, and rolled out of the line of parked planes toward the asphalt taxiway. The wind was fairly strong and out of the west, so she drove to the east end of the runway, waited while a British Airways VC-10 took off and a Kenya Air DC-9 landed, checked again with the tower, then lifted into the air.

She loved it. This part she always loved: the lifting, the soaring, the sudden diminution of the Earth slowly turning beneath her. The plane responded well, and already her hands and eyes moved automatically among the switches and indicators. Sliding the right earphone back onto her hair so she could hear conversation in the plane while still listening to the radio through her left ear, she settled more comfortably in the seat and watched the brown land slowly unroll beneath her.

“That’s the new airport,” Frank said, yelling over the engine drone, pointing ahead and to the left. “Supposed to be done next year.” He grinned at her. “Guess its name.”

She looked down at the white-and-tan construction scars, seeing that the new airport would be something like three times the size of the old one. “Its name?”

“Jomo Kenyatta!” Frank shouted. “President of the country! Heap big chief!” Laughing, he gestured upward with his thumb, as though the president of the country were in Heaven, or seated on some fishbone cloud.

Lew leaned forward, his forearms on Ellen’s and Frank’s seat backs, his head just visible between them. He said, “Tell me more about the job, Frank. Guerrillas, is it?”

“Kind of.” Frank seemed still amused by Jomo Kenyatta. “In a kind of a way it’s guerrillas.”

“Going in against Uganda?”

“It’s a raid,” Frank said.

“Just one raid?”

“Ah, but what a raid.” Frank’s big happy manly smile encompassed them both. “We’re taking a train, Lew. We’re putting the arm on a whole train.”

“A train? Not a passenger train.”

“No no no,” Frank said, waving his arms around in a negative gesture too large for the confined space inside the plane.

“Hostages,” Lew said, shaking his head. “I don’t like that kind of thing.”

“Don’t worry, Lew,” Frank told him. “This is clean as anything. You’ll love it.”

“A goods train,” Lew suggested. “Weapons.”

“Coffee,” Frank said.

Glancing over at Frank, Ellen suddenly understood that something was wrong. Lew hadn’t been hired for the job he had expected. It was something entirely different.

She saw that Lew had also guessed that, and was trying not to know it. His forearms rested on the seat backs; his curled hands hung down between the seats; his face was stretched forward above his hands. Now, gently cuffing himself on the bottom of the jaw with his half-clenched fist, an unconscious nervous gesture, he said, “Coffee, Frank? I don’t get it.”

“Six million dollars,” Frank told him. “A huge motherfucking coffee train. Oh,” he said to Ellen. “Excuse me.”

“Blow it out your ass,” she said, looking downward toward the ground.

Lew said, “Frank, what’s going on? Is this a Ugandan guerrilla operation, or what is it?”

“It’s a little different,” Frank said. “Our bunch isn’t exactly guerrillas.”

“But Amin,” Lew said. “There’s got to be anti-Amin forces somewhere.”

“Down in Tanzania. Nyerere keeps ’em in cakes and cookies, but they’re mostly all fucked up.”

Ellen glanced at Frank and found him grinning at her. He winked with the eye Lew couldn’t see.

Lew was saying, “In that case, who are we?”

“A couple white boys working for some people gonna steal six million dollars from Idi Amin.”

“It’s his personal coffee?”

“Everything in that fucking country is his personal property.”

The tower was directing Ellen farther north, away from east-west air traffic. The usual urban sprawl spread out below her: Nairobi, capital of Kenya, business center of East Africa. The slums were bright colored and crowded, while richer homes lazed on the hillsides amid greenery. A railway line crossed their path, north to south, glinting in the sun like an ornamental chain. Frank said, “There’s your railway now. Eighth fucking wonder of the world.”

Ellen said, “Why does it shine like that?”

“The ties aren’t wood. They’re steel.”

“Steel?”

“Seventy pounds apiece, two thousand per mile, seven hundred miles from the coast of Kampala.” He reeled this off with apparent satisfaction, as though he’d personally carried and placed every steel tie himself.

Ellen said, “But why steel?”

“They tried wooden ties,” Frank told her. “The British, when they built the line around the turn of the century. But the ants ate them, and the natives stole them for firewood. So they used steel. Indian coolies did the work, and sometimes in the sun the steel ties burned the skin off their hands.”

The glittering chain had fallen behind them, and now the tower permitted Ellen to steer southwestward to her intended route over the Kedong Valley. She said, “You seem to know a lot about it.”

“I learn things,” he said. “I don’t just sit around pulling my pecker all day.”

Lew said quietly, “Frank, talk to Ellen the way you talk to me.”

Frank gave him a surprised look, as though he hadn’t expected a challenge from this quarter. Ellen considered the situation and decided the assistance fell within the range of the acceptable, so she said nothing but merely concentrated on her flying.

After a moment, Frank nodded at Ellen and said to Lew less aggressively, “We’ll get used to each other.”

“Sure you will,” Lew said.

“I’m a reader,” Frank explained, talking now directly to Ellen. “I like history.”

The tone of voice meant he was trying to make amends. Ellen cooperated. “African history?”

“Mostly. I like to read about the fuckups of those who came before me. It’s nice to know I’m not the first damn fool to run around this continent.”

Ellen smiled, surprising herself. “I can see how it might help.”

“Every day in every way.” He shifted, making himself more comfortable, then went on in a more casual, storytelling style. “Those coolies worked their asses off,” he said. “Lions ate them, mosquitoes gave them malaria, drought robbed them of food and water, floods tore out the tracks they’d just put down, they caught dysentery and yaws and diseases they never heard of before, native tribes hit them with clubs and spears and poison darts, their British overseers objected to their sex lives, and every once in a while when conditions were really muddy a locomotive would fall on them. But they kept going, for almost ten years, and they built the fucking railroad. And do you know what it was all for?”

“No, I don’t,” Ellen said.

“To keep Uganda in the British imperial sphere of influence.” Frank grinned. “How’s that for a joke?”

On the ground at Kisumu, a ragamuffin black man whom Frank called Charlie tied the plane down while Frank went away to make a phone call. Ellen and Lew stood near the plane, watching Charlie, who appeared to be drunk or stoned but who in his slow and distracted manner was nevertheless doing the job right, and Ellen said, “Do you want to turn around?”

Lew frowned at her, about to become irritable. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t like this.”

“I don’t even know what it is yet.”

“You know it isn’t what you expected.”

“Let’s wait and see. Frank’s a good man.” But he couldn’t keep the doubt out of his voice.

Frank came rolling back toward them, with a strong but loose-jointed gait, as though all the screws and dowels in his body needed tightening. “We’ll just drop in and see Mr. Balim,” he said, “then I’ll take you to your house.”

“Fine,” Lew said.

Frank turned and shouted, “Aren’t you finished, you stupid bastard?”

“Slow,” Charlie said, slurring the word.

“I know you’re slow. Pick up these bags and come along.”

Frank led the way, followed by Ellen and Lew, with Charlie bringing up the rear, carrying both bags. Ellen looked back at him, and Charlie smiled at her, drooling down his chin. Ellen faced front again.

Their immediate destination was a tall and filthy Land-Rover with a patched canvas top. The yellow license plate with black numbers was dented in three or four places, as though somebody had been using it for target practice, like signs on country roads in the States. While Charlie heaved the luggage into the storage well in the rear, Frank said, “You two ride in back. Charlie’s turned this front seat into an outhouse.”

Lew and Ellen clambered into the vehicle, and the instant she touched the hard and uncomfortable seat a wave of exhaustion poured over her so severe that she thought for a second she might be sick. Instead, her eyes watered and she yawned hugely, bending forward, her brow touching the top of the front seat.

Lew said, “Ellen? You okay?”

“Just tired.” The heaviness of the humid air pressed in on her.

“Won’t be much longer.”

“Good.”

Adrenaline and curiosity had kept her alert and active this long, through the endless traveling from Alaska, and then the three-hour piloting job from Nairobi, but all at once it was catching up with her. She yawned again, behind her cupped hands, so hugely her jaw hinges ached.

Charlie and Frank took their places in front. As Frank started the rackety engine, Lew said, “Frank, we’re both kind of tired.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Frank promised. “We’ll stop in for one word with Mr. Balim—he just wants to say hello, shake your hand—then I’ll drive you right to the house.”

The Land-Rover jounced forward. Ellen watched Frank’s shoulders and back moving in great effortful bunched thrusts, the way the man in the carnival wrestles with the alligator. They bounced and skidded away from the airport and out onto a narrow blacktop road cluttered with huge slow-moving trucks. Frank slalomed among them.

Lew said, “Frank, tell me about Balim.”

“Asian. Born and raised in Uganda, thrown out. Merchant. Probably rich, I don’t know. I work for him.”

“Doing what?”

“Twist arms, break heads, kick asses.”

Charlie giggled.

Lew said, “Balim isn’t political?”

Frank laughed. “Balim thinks politics is a dirty word.”

“Do you?”

Frank grinned over his shoulder, then looked out at the road again. “I think it’s a funny word, Lew. Since when did you get political?”

Lew jounced around in the backseat, gnawing his thumb knuckle, looking worried. “I’ve always been on somebody’s side,” he muttered, but not loudly enough for Frank to hear.

Charlie turned, smiled beatifically at them both, and said, “Can you tell me why it is that politics makes strange bedfellows? Can you tell me what it is, ‘strange bedfellows’?”

Surprised, Ellen said, “You speak very good English!”

He beamed at her. “So do you,” he said.

Mr. Balim said, “Did you like my plane?”

“Very much.” Ellen was surprised at how quickly she was warming to this little round man.

He had been waiting for them in front of what was apparently his place of business, a low long scruffy building of an oddly washed out blue, as though it had been here for a thousand years. Seeing him, Frank had yelled, “There he is right there!” and made a violent U-turn in the teeth of oncoming buses and motorcycles. Charlie had chittered something happy-sounding, like a toucan, but when Frank skewed to a halt, Charlie had at once slithered out of sight, as though he were a stowaway.

And the little round man with the round head, the large soft brown eyes, the hesitant smile, the delicate plump, hands, had introduced himself, bowing from the waist. “Mazar Balim. So happy to make your acquaintance.”

Now, introductions over, the plane mentioned and admired, Balim said, “You must both be very tired from your journey, though I must say you don’t look it. Frank, how do your friends look so fresh after such a trek?”

“Fever,” Frank suggested.

“Very possibly so. Go home,” he told them, smiling. “Rest. Eat. Sleep. Make love. Do not see me again until you are wasting away from boredom.”

Lew said, “There’s an order I won’t have any trouble following. Nice to meet you.”

“And you. Both of you.”

Ellen tried to say something polite, but a yawn overtook her. Balim laughed, and when the yawn was finished, so did Ellen. She waved to him, unwilling to try to speak again, and allowed Lew to lead her back into the Land-Rover.

The five-minute drive was a blur. She had no real sense of her surroundings, and was aware only that they stopped in front of a small low house of tan stucco. Inside, she had a sense of hard surfaces and cheap furniture and primary colors. Frank, talking heartily, carried their flight bags in and showed them the bedroom and went away, slamming the front door. “No more,” Ellen said, and pulled off her clothing as she approached the bed, and lost consciousness as she was drawing back the sheet.

It was dark. Ellen came awake slowly, out of confused dreams and heavy sleep. She was perspiring; the sheets and pillowcase were wet. She turned in the too-soft bed, grunting, and felt the hard, angular body of Lew beside her, slick with sweat. She knew him wonderfully well, in darkness or in light. She ran her hand down his hot damp belly, felt the wet tangle of hair, felt his cock half-erect.

“Mp,” he said when she touched him, and moved in a way that said he wasn’t completely asleep. She grasped his cock and as it rose from slumber he reached awkwardly for her, his questing hand bumping into her nipple. He clutched her breast, and his foul-breathed mouth invaded hers. “Oh, God,” she tried to say, but it was muffled by his tongue.

Through the contortions she held on to his cock. She loved it, she filled her mouth with it and then she filled her cunt with it. They were so wet that, as they fucked, their stomachs made suction noises, poppings and fartings that eventually made Lew mutter, “Shit. Enough of this.” He grabbed her leg and turned her over without losing contact. Knees and shoulders and cheek on the bed, holding her breasts with both hands, she opened her mouth and gasped into the pillow as he pounded her from behind. Another orgasm. “Who’s counting,” she mumbled into the pillow, and ground her ass backward into his belly.

“What?”

“Shut up and fuck!”

“Oh, you smart cunt.” He slapped the right cheek of her ass, which did nothing for her but make her mad.

“Just fuck!” she yelled, and reached back to slap his thigh just as hard.

“Damn damn damn damndamndamn damn KEE-RIST !”

But then they couldn’t find tissues or towels or anything at all. Rolling around on the swampy bed in the humid night, his come tickling her legs, she said, “Where in God’s name are we?”

“Africa,” he said.

“Jesus Christ.” she said.

6

It was Sir Denis Lambsmith’s first visit to Kampala. He faced it with the same thrill of anticipatory horror with which at the age of six he would greet the arrival of the magician at a friend’s birthday party: Can he really do magic? Will he choose me to hold the hat, the birdcage, the scarlet scarf? Will something dreadful happen, at last, this time?

There was almost no passenger air traffic in and out of Uganda anymore, but Entebbe International Airport was maintained as though for the imminent arrival of thousands, perhaps millions, of tourists. Waiting areas and rest rooms were kept immaculately clean. The duty-free shop stood uselessly open; the stout girl on duty listlessly took the quiz in a two-month-old copy of the British Cosmopolitan. Next door the gift shop was also open, tended by an arthritic old man who slept with his cheek pressed against the cash register. Behind him, colonies of insects had taken up housekeeping in the stuffed lions and giraffes.

Mr. Onorga, the Uganda Coffee Commission man, met Sir Denis at immigration and led him out to a waiting chauffeur-driven black Mercedes. Riding in the backseat with Sir Denis, Onorga seemed glum, distracted, like a man with family worries. Conversation was limited to weather and scenery. Sir Denis, a tall white-haired man of sixty-one, with the stoop-shouldered quasi-humble stance of the British aristocrat, was bursting with questions about Idi Amin—Is he really as dreadful as they say? As imposing? As brutal? Will he choose me?—but of course politesse forbade such curiosity, without at least some opening indication from the host that gossip was in order. But Mr. Onorga’s gloom blanketed all.

Daringly, Sir Denis did offer one opening himself, when Mr. Onorga asked, “How is Brazil?”

“Improving,” Sir Denis said. “We rather think the worst excesses may be over. Changes of government are trying times; still, life settles into its wonted way soon enough.”

Which was an opening Mr. Onorga could have driven an Army truck through, had he desired; but he merely nodded, gloomy in his satisfaction, and asked if Sir Denis had ever been to the United States.

“Several times,” Sir Denis said, irked, and looked out the car window at a poverty-stricken city: ragged people, boarded-up shop-fronts, shriveled-leg polio victims scuttling across the crumbling sidewalks on their hands and rumps. Among them, the few healthy and well-dressed people seemed to be written in italics. Many of these latter were dressed in the same odd style as the driver of their car: wide-leg trousers, flashy cheap shirts, shoes with built-up heels, very dark sunglasses. When one of these came along, the other pedestrians seemed to make a point of getting out of his way.

Much more beautiful was the Nile Mansions Hotel, a sprawling luxury establishment built on the same grounds as the International Conference Center. A short and skinny bellboy took the luggage, as Mr. Onorga conducted Sir Denis across the lobby to register.

Some electricity in the air, some awareness that everyone else’s awareness was directed to a certain spot, caused Sir Denis to look away to the side, toward a long, cool-looking cocktail lounge flanked by a bar. The dozen or so people in there were sitting very still, speaking fitfully to one another, as Mr. Onorga had spoken in the car. And at the far end of the lounge, at a table by himself, sat a massive man in an ill-fitting gray safari suit, who was gazing with heavy eyes toward the lobby. His hand was closed negligently around a glass, and as Sir Denis watched, he lifted the glass and drank. Immediately, the other customers in the lounge also drank, hurriedly, gratefully. The glasses returned to the tables, and the massive man’s eyes shifted, not seeming to focus on anything in particular.

It’s Idi Amin! Sir Denis blinked in astonishment and apprehension, while a most irrelevant memory surfaced in his brain. Back in the 1940s, during the war, he had been seconded for nearly two years to the U.S. Navy, in Washington, D.C., in connection with the transatlantic convoys running the U-boat blockade. His family had been with him, and one Christmastime he had taken his daughter, Anne, then three, to see Santa Claus at Garfinckel’s. That stout figure, all red and white, had been the center of attention on his throne at the end of the room, exuding a benign—and of course inaccurate—aura of power: the power to give, to answer prayers, to provide happiness. Here in Uganda, was this not the other side of the same coin, this heavy figure all black and gray?

Anne, Sir Denis remembered, had been afraid of Santa Claus, had cried and refused to approach him. She had had her Christmas presents, anyway.

Formalities at the registration desk were brief. And why not? He was, after all, Sir Denis Lambsmith of the International Coffee Board, here to complete negotiations for the sale and shipment of a very large portion of Uganda’s next coffee crop to the Brazilians. As such, he represented a strong—perhaps an overwhelming—figure of importance in the Ugandan economy. Reminding himself of this, trying to ignore the weight of those heavy eyes on his shoulder and arm, Sir Denis signed the registration card, accepted the three messages waiting for him, gravely shook hands with Mr. Onorga, as gravely thanked him for his courtesy and kindness, and followed the bellboy toward his room.

The three messages were from: Captain Baron Chase, signing himself “Deputy Chief of Protocol,” welcoming Sir Denis to Uganda and inviting him to a reception with President for Life Idi Amin Dada in the president’s suite, 202, at five this afternoon; from his daughter, Anne, now thirty-eight and married to a banker in the City, asking him, should he return through London on his way back to Brazil, to call her and to bring her an African woven rush bag; and from Carlo Velhez, of the Brazilian Coffee Institute, saying he was in Room 417.

Having unpacked and showered and made shorthand notations about the day thus far in his diary—seventeen volumes of this dull stuffy material in crabbed private code were now stored in London and Sussex and São Paulo—Sir Denis phoned Velhez and invited him to the room for a pre-reception conference.

Whisky and safe water were already in the room. Sir Denis downed a short neat whisky, and had the glass washed and dried and back on the tray atop the dresser before the small economical rapping at the door introduced the small economical person of Carlo Velhez, a tiny dapper man incongruously kitted out with a great flowering bandit’s moustache. In Brazil, Sir Denis and Velhez were matter-of-fact with one another, not close socially or personally, indifferent to one another’s presence or absence; here, in the usual manner of travelers meeting far from home, they were nearly brothers, reacting with honest pleasure to the encounter.

“Come in, come in.”

“You’re looking well.”

“Pleasant flight?”

“Odd place, this.”

They then sat down with light whisky-and-waters to discuss the purpose of their being here, speaking together in Portuguese, which infuriated the State Research Bureau men in their basement listening post.

“There is some question of money,” Velhez said.

“But the price was determined last month.”

Velhez nodded, manicured fingers toying with his alarming moustache. “Nevertheless,” he said, “the price continues to rise in the commodity markets.”

Outrage at human inconstancy had long since faded in Sir Denis to pragmatic weariness; one dealt with the human race not as it should be but as it was. Still, he pointed out the obvious: “The agreed-on price is the agreed-on price. If the market went down, would the Ugandans expect to receive less?”

“They have been given that argument,” Velhez said drily. “But in fact I think this is only a negotiating step.”

Sir Denis observed the pale liquid in the bottom of his glass. “Of course. They don’t want more money, they want something else. Some change in the shipping arrangements?”

“No. We—that is, the consortium—are still to provide eight planes to transship the coffee to the steamers at Djibouti.” Velhez smiled sadly beneath the moustache. “What they want is a larger percentage in advance.”

“How much?”

“One third.”

Looking and feeling astonished, Sir Denis said, “Twelve million dollars? In advance?”

“I have it from Baron Chase himself,” Velhez said. “That’s what they’ll want, and they won’t back down from it. In fact, they’d prefer the suggestion to come from us.”

“Baron Chase. Captain Baron Chase.” Sir Denis crossed the room to pick up his messages from the bedside table. “Deputy Chief of Protocol,” he read, and looked at Velhez. “Who is this chap?”

“Canadian. Working—”

“A white man?”

The Velhez moustache quivered in amusement. “Exactly so. He may have taken up Ugandan citizenship.”

“Captain,” Sir Denis repeated. “Captain of what?”

“Apparently, Amin wanted him to call himself General,” Velhez explained, “but Chase has a finer sense of the ridiculous than Amin, and they compromised at Captain.”

“What does he do? Is he important?”

Velhez shrugged. “With one-man rule, it’s hard to say who is or is not important. But Amin has two or three of these whites to advise him, to smooth the way for him internationally, to act for him where his own Nubians would make a botch of things. Chase is ubiquitous.”

“I must have a word with him, then,” Sir Denis said. “One third in advance. What if, after all, the rains come inopportunely and ruin the crop? What if this government falls? Governments have been known to fall.”

“So has rain,” Velhez agreed. “So has frost, as we both well know.”

Sir Denis frowned. “Has Bogotá been informed?” He was referring to the Bogotá Group, the OPEC of coffee, a combine of eight Western Hemisphere producers: Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala. They had approved the original deal.

But Velhez merely shrugged, saying, “It doesn’t concern them, so long as the final price doesn’t change.”

“Well, I don’t believe,” Sir Denis said slowly, “that Emil Grossbarger will stand for it.”

At that, Velhez looked doubly worried, as well he might. Although the actual coffee sale was being conducted between governments—sold by the official Uganda Coffee Commission and bought by the quasi-governmental Brazilian Coffee Institute—there was an inevitable middleman, in this case a venture capital group from London and Zurich headed by a Swiss named Emil Grossbarger. The shipping of the coffee, its delivery to the Brazilians’ customers, and the collection and disbursement of moneys, would be in the charge of this private consortium, which had both the capital and the clout in the international financial community to guarantee delivery and honesty. If the Grossbarger group were to bow out now, if Brazil had to start all over and negotiate for coffee elsewhere to fulfill its commitments, the price would certainly be higher, the availability of sufficient product would be very much in doubt, and Brazil might well find itself going into the next coffee season with its new crop already committed to past debts. “Don’t you think,” Velhez asked, unable to hide his anxiety, “you could talk to Grossbarger? Persuade him?”

“I’m not certain it would be honorable to make the attempt,” Sir Denis said somewhat primly. “Grossbarger came to the ICB because we are known to be neutral in such matters.”

The ICB, the International Coffee Board, was a London-based organization supported by the coffee industry and endorsed by the governments of both the producer and the consumer nations, with the task of dispassionately overseeing the international coffee trade. Sir Denis, an expert with the ICB for the last seventeen years, a man who moved massive shipments of coffee around the world in a great endless obscure game of Go, and whose special relationship was with the Bogotá Group and particularly the Brazilian Coffee Institute, had at Emil Grossbarger’s personal request handled the negotiations among the various parties to the current sale. So far he had done the work in London or São Paulo, but now that the pact was about to be signed he had come here to Kampala for the final formalities.

Where an immediate snag had appeared. The agreement, as Sir Denis very well remembered, was for an initial payment of one tenth, or approximately three and a half million dollars U.S., of which the Brazilians and the Grossbarger group would each put up hall. Now, at the last minute, this down payment was to be very nearly quadrupled. After pausing to give himself and Velhez another pair of drinks—and allow Velhez to recapture his composure—Sir Denis said, “Emil Grossbarger is simply not a man to toy with.”

“I’m sure,” Velhez said, “something can be done. There’s certainly goodwill on all sides.”

“One third?”

“Uganda, I understand, has foreign-exchange problems.” Velhez tried to shrug away Uganda’s political mess. “The closing of borders and so on. One can understand their position.”

“I have difficulty,” Sir Denis said, “understanding the position of any principal who reneges on an already completed negotiation.”

Looking more and more worried, Velhez said, “But you’ll speak with them?”

Knowing he meant the consortium, Sir Denis said, “They aren’t politicians, Carlo, they’re businessmen. They’ve already committed themselves to an initial outlay of well over one and a half million U.S. dollars. Not counting the cost of transport, warehousing and all the rest.”

“But you’ll speak with them.”

Sir Denis sighed. His practiced mind had already reached the compromise that all parties would be able to live with. The task now was to get them all to accept it. Laying the groundwork, he said, “Carlo, you know I’ll do my best.”

“Something can be worked out,” Velhez said, as though uttering a prayer.

“To be frank with you,” Sir Denis said, not being at all frank, “I think it very unlikely Grossbarger will move at all.”

Startled, almost angry, Velhez cried, “The profit remains the same!”

“But the initial risk increases. There are other investments these same men can make, severally or together. Also, there’s the loss of income from the additional capital being tied up.”

“I realize that.” Velhez blew in agitation through his bandit moustache. “But we’ve come this far.”

“It’s possible,” Sir Denis said, noticing how suddenly alert Velhez became, “that I’ll be able to bring them up a bit. But certainly not to fifty percent of the new demand. Not to six million dollars.”

“Perhaps forty-five, forty—”

“No, Carlo. These people are going to be very angry when I talk to them, and neither you nor I can blame them.”

“Of course,” Velhez said. “But it’s not our fault. Surely they’ll understand that.”

“I doubt they’ll much care whose fault it is,” Sir Denis pointed out. “I am willing, Carlo, to urge the Grossbarger group to increase their advance payment to two million U.S.”

“Two! Out of twelve!”

“If I were to ask for more,” Sir Denis said, “they’d hand me my hat at once. I’m not at all sure but what they’ll do so, anyway. However, we can but try.”

“Two million,” Velhez repeated, his expression dazed. “Ten million from us.”

“What I’ll also do,” Sir Denis went on, “is have a word with the chaps here. Captain Chase, or whoever it might be. Perhaps we can bring them down a bit.”

“I don’t know about that,” Velhez said. The wind was well and truly out of his sails; even his moustache sagged.

“Well, we’ll speak with them,” Sir Denis said. “We may have a beneficial effect. And what I’ll suggest to you now, just between ourselves—”

Velhez sat up. “Yes? Yes?”

“When I speak to our friends in London and Zurich,” Sir Denis told him, “I won’t talk in terms of percentages. I’ll put the idea of raising their ante to two million in the best possible light, and with luck they’ll agree. Then, whatever concession you and I can obtain from the people here will benefit exclusively your share of the obligation.”

Sir Denis Lambsmith’s great talent lay not in finding brilliant solutions to knotty problems but in finding brilliant ways to describe and present the messy pedestrian solutions that were usually the best of a bad lot of options. Velhez, having five minutes ago believed that his new liability was to be a mere six million, now became happy and relieved to hear that whatever relief from ten million he could wangle for himself he wouldn’t have to share with his partners. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “It’s possible, I suppose, possible we could talk them down to a quarter rather than a third. In that case, with two million from our other friends, our own cost would be no more than seven million.”

“Let’s not be premature,” Sir Denis warned. “There are still many people to be brought on board.”

“You’re right.” Velhez stood in a sudden hurry, moustache aquiver. “I must phone São Paulo.”

“I have some telephoning of my own,” Sir Denis said, also rising. “I’ll see you at the reception.”

“At the reception,” Velhez replied. “Good luck to us both.”

Suite 202 was guarded by sloppy-looking soldiers in British-style uniforms and berets. Inside, in a room awkwardly combining traditional English and modern Danish furniture with Arab carpets and wall hangings, there was a fairly large and motley crowd. The white faces belonged mostly to businessmen, British or American, German or Scandinavian, plus a sprinkling of diplomats from those foreign embassies still open in Kampala: Arab, mainly, but also the French and a few others. The blacks present were of three sorts: slender cold-faced men in military uniform; male and female civil-service types in suits and party frocks, providing the underlay of cocktail-party chit-chat; and beetle-browed, angry-eyed men in safari suits or loud shirts, many wearing large dark sunglasses, most of them standing with side-thrust hip and one arm reaching behind their backs to clutch the other elbow. It was a childlike posture, but it made Sir Denis think of evil children, as though the hand gripping the elbow were a last restraint from some thoroughly vicious act.

Sir Denis was later arriving than he’d wanted to be, having been held on the phone for quite some time, principally with the consortium’s de facto leader in Zurich, Emil Grossbarger. Still, he assumed his hosts were bugging his telephone and would understand why he was late.

As he entered the large central room of the suite—the party seemed to flow also into rooms to left and right—Carlo Velhez approached with a tall and somewhat heavyset white man. Both were carrying drinks. Carlo’s expression was hectic, his frantic eyes almost distracting attention from his luxurious moustache, while the other man had a lidded look, like a snake on a sunny rock. Baron Chase, Sir Denis told himself.

“Sir Denis Lambsmith,” Carlo Velhez said in his thickly accented English, his voice quivering with suppressed emotion, “may I present Captain Baron Chase.”

“Delighted,” they both said, and Sir Denis extended his hand, which Baron Chase took but did not return. Instead, continuing to hold Sir Denis’s hand, Chase said, “We must get you a drink.”

“Thank you, I—”

Still gripping him by the hand—an experience Sir Denis found horrible—Chase turned half away, lifting his free arm in a signal. “Can’t have our guest of honor without a glass in his hand.” In his speech, Chase affected a jaded homosexual style that he probably thought of as upper-class. His accent was homogenized midlantic.

A servant—short, skinny, young, apprehensive, foul-smelling—pressed rapidly through the crowd to Chase’s side. Sir Denis, while ordering a gin-and-tonic, was not at all surprised to see the man who had been his driver from the airport standing against the wall with two similarly dressed fellows, all frowning and glowering alike. Like the Tontons Macoute in Haiti, the “secret” police in this country were blatant about their existence.

At last, a drink having been ordered, Chase permitted Sir Denis to reclaim his hand, saying, “Your friend Carlo has been telling me his troubles, and I’ve been telling him mine.”

Meaning that Carlo had not managed to whittle down the new demand; thus Carlo’s frantic expression. Sir Denis amiably said, “I did hear something about an attempt to reopen the negotiation.”

“Oh, really?” Chase frowned in apparent puzzlement. “On what basis?”

“Perhaps I was mistaken,” Sir Denis said. “Something about a larger payment in advance.”

“Oh, the restructuring!” Chase laughed, shaking his head. “That’s not a—Here’s your drink.”

“Thank you.”

The foul-smelling boy went away. Sir Denis sipped gin with a hint of tonic and too much lemon. Chase said, “There’s no renegotiation, Sir Denis. May I call you Sir Denis?”

“Of course.” And why not? Sir Denis would know he was being spoken to with formal correctness, and the Canadian would believe they were on an informal footing; another diplomatic triumph.

“A restructuring of the payment schedule, Sir Denis,” said Chase, relishing his new formal informality, “is hardly a renegotiation. But that’s not your concern. Do come along and meet the president.”

A coldness ran up Sir Denis’s spine, to become a thrill of dread raising the hairs on the back of his neck. He restrained a shiver, saying, “I’d be delighted.”

“We’ll talk later,” Carlo said to Sir Denis, his expression that of a man too polite to mention that he was drowning.

Holding Sir Denis gently but persistently by the elbow—could this man never keep his hands to himself?—Baron Chase steered him past conversations in several languages and through the connecting door to the next room on the right, where a dozen or so people stood in the awkward poses of bad statuary, facing the family group which dominated the center of the room.

The sudden need to laugh only intensified Sir Denis’s dread. Idi Amin wore a camouflage uniform, several sizes too small, the meandering swaths of greens and browns stretched tight across his huge torso and thick thighs, so that at first glance he looked like an aerial photograph of rolling countryside, emphasized by the bulging jacket pockets just below the putative waist. The string of medals on his chest—so many they overlapped, like magazines on a coffee table—might be the region’s principal town. But what to make of that brooding mammoth black olive of a head, with its wide dissatisfied mouth and heavy disbelieving eyes?

To Amin’s right stood a young and beautiful light-complected black woman, very tall and slender, in some sort of native costume involving many yards of wrapped colorful cloth. Her hair, in the local style of the very rich, had been braided and twisted into arches and figure eights rising a foot from her head like a modern sculpture in wrought iron. The young woman was very happy, smiling as though she believed this to be her own birthday party.

Flanking the adults were two children, each a kind of echo. The little girl beside the young woman—probably six or seven years of age—had a simpler and more traditional hairdo but wore a similar costume. The boy of about ten, pressing shyly against Amin’s left leg, wore an exact replica of his father’s camouflage uniform. Both children were beautiful, with large brown eyes and solemn expressions.

The guiding hand on his elbow forgotten, Sir Denis allowed Chase to pilot him across the room. All else disappeared, and Sir Denis watched those black eyes watch him approach.

“President Amin Dada,” Baron Chase said, releasing the elbow at last, “may I present Sir Denis Lambsmith?”

A broad smile bisected Amin’s face. Sir Denis, having expected any smile from this creature to be ferocious, was astonished at how boyish Idi Amin could look, despite his size, his ugliness, his reputation. Shaking Sir Denis’s hand in his own big but gentle paw, Amin said, “Foreign exchange,” and laughed.

“Delighted to meet you, Your Excellency,” Sir Denis said.

“Foreign exchange,” Idi Amin said again, as though the phrase were Sir Denis’s name, or a password, or a joke known only to them. Then he laughed some more, and patted Sir Denis’s shoulder, and turned away to signal to one of the nonentities at the side.

The man who hustled forward was neat but shabby, intelligent looking but worried, tall but bent with anxiety, unquestionably Negroid but with an aquiline nose and pointed chin. Circling behind Amin and the woman and the two children, this fellow took up a position beyond the little boy—who was gazing with perfect solemn curiosity up at Sir Denis—and apparently awaited instructions.

Which came rapidly, in a quick rattle of words from Amin. The language was breathy and sharp-toned, with clicks and glottal stops and frequent harsh joinings. Swahili. The new man listened, nodding, and when Amin had stopped he turned to Sir Denis and said, “The President for Life says he is most happy to have you here in our beautiful country. He hopes you will take the opportunity while you are here to travel about and see some of our most famous scenery. And he is glad that you will take the interest in us to help us with our problem with foreign exchange.”

Sir Denis listened to all this in some astonishment, then said directly to Amin, “Your Excellency, it was my understanding that you speak English.”

The translator was about to render this into Swahili, but Amin answered it first, in that language. The translator told Sir Denis, “The President for Life says he has some very poor English, good only for the barracks ground. With a person as important as yourself, the President for Life considers it necessary that the language is, umm—”

“Pre-zeis,” said Idi Amin.

The translator blinked and swallowed, as though he’d been threatened. “That the language is precise,” he said.

“But surely,” Sir Denis said, again speaking directly to Amin, “this is a social situation. None of us will try for hard bargaining here, I hope.”

Amin smiled again, this time the look having something of that ferocity Sir Denis had been anticipating. Another rattle of Swahili, like hail on a tin roof, was translated: “All the bargaining is over. The President for Life is happy that the Brazilians and the International Coffee Board have found Ugandan coffee tasteful.” More Swahili, then: “And the price of our tasteful coffee acceptable.”

“The coffee and the price are both excellent,” said Sir Denis, essaying a small smile in the direction of Amin.

More Swahili: “The President for Life is happy that the Brazilians and your own, um, leaders are—”

“Print-zi-pals,” said Idi Amin.

“Your own principals,” the translator hurriedly said, “are agreeable to the very small and modest advance payment of one third.”

“I had not believed,” Sir Denis said carefully, “that the discussion on that point was finished.”

“All finished!” Amin said, laughing out loud, thumping his palm in satisfaction against his stomach, making a single muffled drumbeat. Other people in the room, who could not have heard the conversation, nor have understood it if they’d heard it, found a reason to laugh. Amin reverted to Swahili, and the translator delivered the translation: “We are here now, in great friendship and joy, to sign many papers.”

One of the more useful tools of diplomacy was the tactful display of annoyance. Speaking now to the translator, Sir Denis said, “Would you tell the President for Life how happy I am that this problem has been resolved? I wasn’t before this aware of its resolution.”

Idi Amin laughed again and spoke in Swahili. The translator looked very unhappy and remained silent. Idi Amin lowered an eye to glance at him. The translator said to Sir Denis, “The President for Life says, his cock is bigger than yours.”

“Oh,” said Sir Denis, at a loss for the first time in his adult life. “Well, yes, I see. Perhaps so.”

“Foreign exchange,” Idi Amin said, and leaned forward in the friendliest way to pat Sir Denis’s arm. “Very happy,” Idi Amin said.

Sir Denis, in the hot humiliating fire storm the world had now become, once more felt Baron Chase’s hand on his elbow. With one final statement to Amin, he allowed himself to be led away.

Afterward, in his hotel room, writing up his notes of the meeting, he couldn’t remember for the life of him what that last thing had been that he had said to Idi Amin. Somehow, he doubted it had been adequate.

7

That morning Mazar Balim closeted himself in his office with Isaac Otera for an hour to discuss various details of business. Isaac had brought to Balim’s commercial affairs a bureaucratic love of files and paperwork it had never known before. At first Balim had been made uneasy by this massive tidying, and had complained, “Isaac, when some government eventually hangs me, they will use all these papers of yours as their only evidence.” But eventually he’d grown used to it, and now he was even pleased at how thoroughly his business was known by this nonmember of his family, this non-Asian, this in fact black Ugandan.

They were interrupted at one point by Frank, who was told by Balim through Isaac to wait. Then they continued, one careful neatly labeled manila folder at a time, until all lake and railroad shipping, all warehousing, all sales and purchases, all payments and collections, had been taken under consideration and discussed. Then at last Balim smiled his round shy winning lovely (completely deceitful) smile and said, “Thank you, Isaac. Would you tell Frank to come in?”

“A moment, sir,” Isaac said, surprisingly enough. Instead of rising, he continued to sit on the wooden chair beside the desk, knees together, all the manila folders in a neat stack on his lap. “May I speak?” he asked.

“Of course,” Balim said, his smile turning politely quizzical.

“You have not discussed with me this new operation,” Isaac said.

Balim nodded agreement, his face showing nothing.

“You have not asked me to open a file, to check anyone’s references, to do a cost estimate, to arrange warehousing, transportation—”

“Yes, yes,” Balim said. “The point is taken.”

“In sum,” Isaac said, with his own small functionary’s smile, “it is to be presumed that I know nothing about the operation at all.”

“I would never presume that, Isaac.”

“If I understand the situation correctly,” Isaac went on, “the centerpiece of the operation will be the theft of a large amount of coffee inside Uganda and its smuggling into Kenya.”

“I take it,” Balim said, “that your source of information is Charlie.”

Isaac ignored that. He said, “I appreciate your delicacy in not involving me in an illegal and quite probably violent act. You have naturally taken it for granted that, since I am an active Christian, and since my background is in government affairs, I would prefer to have nothing to do with such an activity.”

“You do me honor by the suggestion,” Balim said.

“However,” Isaac told him, gently yet firmly, “in some ways this operation is similar to any complex business undertaking. There will be partners and employees—the two Americans who arrived yesterday, for instance—who must be vetted and their positions made clear. There will be questions of transportation, perhaps of lodging. Sooner or later the coffee itself must reenter normal business channels, and must do so armed with appropriate paperwork.”

Balim watched him, bright-eyed, and softly said, “Are you volunteering, Isaac?”

“One cannot, of course, volunteer for what is already one’s job.” The tiny smile again came and went. “But there is another point to consider.”

Balim waited, nodding slightly, hands folded on his plump lap.

“I still have contacts within Uganda,” Isaac said. A sudden harshness always came into his voice when he spoke of his native land, the only indication of the complexity of the emotions he forced himself to conceal. “The economy is collapsing,” he went on. “It might be fair to say it has already collapsed. The expulsion of the Asians had a lot to do with that, of course—”

“Then there is justice, after all,” Balim murmured.

“But there’s also,” Isaac said, “the financial ignorance of Amin and his Nubians. They’re doing worse than living on capital; they’re living on the bank itself.”

“Nicely put.”

“Coffee is their life preserver.” Isaac leaned forward, his stifled agitation causing him to ruffle the folders on his lap, so they were no longer perfectly aligned. “The people starve, but Amin buys whisky and cars and new uniforms, and coffee pays for it.”

“No doubt.”

“I am not a hero,” Isaac said, the tension fading from his face. He sat back, realigned the folders, seemed to sigh through all his body. “I am not the lone man with a rifle,” he said, looking down at his dark hands on the pale folders, “who slips across the border and hunts down the tyrant. To avenge his—his family.”

“Isaac,” Balim said softly, leaning forward as though he might touch Isaac’s hand.

“I am a bureaucrat,” Isaac said, not looking up. “I am a paper shuffler.”

“Isaac, you are a man. Every man has his purpose.”

Now Isaac did look up. The eyes in his dark face were always a bit red around the pupils, but now they were more so. “Every sack of coffee that is stolen from Amin,” he said, “shortens his time. The more coffee is stolen and smuggled out of the country, the sooner he’ll run out of money to keep his Nubians drunk and himself in new medals. I hope that train carries every coffee bean from the entire crop.”

“May God hear your words,” Balim said, gently smiling.

“You’ll need me,” Isaac told him. “Not, of course, to hold up the train.”

“Of course.”

“Shall I open a file?”

“Yes.”

“What shall I label it?”

Balim thought. “‘Coffee Break,’” he said. “Tell Frank to come in now.”

Isaac smiled and got to his feet. At the door, holding the stack of manila folders, he turned back and said, “Thank you, Mr. Balim.”

“Thank you, Isaac.”

Isaac went out and Frank came in, boots thudding the floor, khaki whipcord trousers rustling, pressed cotton shirt neatly buttoned and sleeves rolled up to his biceps. “’Morning, Mr. Balim,” he said, and dropped backward into the armchair.

“My first impression of your friends,” Balim said, “was a good one.”

“I wanted to talk about that,” Frank said. “About the way we handle Lew Brady.”

“Handle?”

“He wasn’t the first fella I called,” Frank said. “To tell the truth, he wasn’t even the tenth.”

“Oh, no?”

Frank scratched his head with a rasping sound. “I don’t know what’s happening to everybody. People I know, they’re all dead or disappeared or retired. Retired—can you figure that?”

“People get older,” Balim suggested.

“Those guys? Dan Davis? Rusty Kirsch? Bruno Mannfelder?” Shaking his head, Frank said, “More and more, they’re all getting like Roger Timmins.”

The reference to their previous pilot made Balim’s eyebrows rise. He said, “How did Mr. Timmins take it?”

“Badly. Complained. Anyway, the point is, I finally got Lew, and at least he isn’t over the hill or gone to drink or retired or dead.”

“But?”

“But we gotta handle him,” Frank said. “The thing is, Lew’s what you call an idealist.”

“Oh, yes?”

“He don’t think he is,” Frank explained. “He thinks he’s a mercenary, like anybody else. But when the chips are down, he likes the idea he’s doing some good in this world.”

“I see.”

“So when you talk to him,” Frank suggested, “try to push the political side a little bit, see what I mean? How what we’re really doing is give Amin one in the eye. He’ll go for that.”

“Ah,” said Balim. His smile turned sadly downward. “I’ll tell you the best thing, Frank. You have your friend Lew talk to Isaac.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Absolutely,” Balim said. It was the saddest smile in the world. “Every man has his purpose.”

8

In London, Sir Denis stayed at the Inn On the Park, which actually stood a short block away from Hyde Park, though it was true that, while eating breakfast by the window in his high-floor room, he could look over the tops of the intervening buildings to see the broad green vista of the park, with the Serpentine, the equestrians along Rotten Row, the short fat Arab women in their black shrouds of cheap cloth and their black plastic domino masks, and the stripped corpselike mammoth logs of the ancient elms stricken by blight and cut down in a panicky effort to save the remaining healthy trees.

After breakfast, Sir Denis walked through the Grosvenor domain, past the American Embassy at Grosvenor Square, and over to the Coffee Board headquarters on Warren Street, just south of Oxford Street. The two men he met there were named Bennett and Cleveland, and the discussion centered on the character and prospects of Idi Amin.

“You’ve seen him,” Bennett said. “What’s your reading?”

“An erratic man,” Sir Denis said. “I don’t doubt he could be dangerous.”

“He has already been dangerous,” Cleveland said drily.

Bennett said, “Did you talk much while you were there with a chap named Onorga?”

“From the Uganda Coffee Commission,” Sir Denis said. “Yes, he met me at the airport. A dour fellow.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Nothing. He barely opened his mouth.”

Bennett and Cleveland looked meaningfully at one another. Cleveland said, “Puts paid to Onorga, if you ask me.”

Sir Denis frowned from one to the other, then concentrated on Bennett, the more serious of the two. “What’s wrong?”

“Onorga was our man on the scene.”

Sir Denis was astonished. “But he didn’t say a word!”

“Afraid to,” Cleveland suggested. “Knew they were onto him.”

Sir Denis said, “Why do you think there’s trouble?”

“He hasn’t radioed,” Bennett said, “since you left Kampala.”

Sir Denis knew that somewhere within this building was assembled a highly complex and expensive communications system, but he had never concerned himself with its function. It was true that coffee was grown on almost every continent and consumed in every nation, and it was also true that a vast amount of money changed hands over coffee. (Last year the United States alone had paid over two and a half billion dollars for the coffee it had imported.)

The International Coffee Board controlled not the product itself but its movement through the commodity markets in the financial centers of the world. Sir Denis was a part of the overt expression of that control. He had always been aware that a covert section also existed, but he preferred to know little or nothing about it and to believe that under normal circumstances it was neither needed nor employed.

But here it was, and gloomy little Mr. Onorga was a part of it. Sir Denis said, “You think he was fired?”

“We think he’s dead,” Bennett said.

“If he’s lucky,” Cleveland added.

“Dead?”

Sir Denis kept waiting for them to laugh, to say they’d been pulling his leg. But Bennett merely shrugged and said, “He was a spy, if you like.”

“An industrial spy, then, at the very worst,” Sir Denis said, finding himself becoming indignant. “And not even that, if he was merely reporting to the Board. You don’t kill a man for a thing like that.”

“We don’t,” Cleveland agreed. “Idi Amin does.”

“Have there been inquiries?”

“When the archbishop was murdered two months ago,” Bennett said, “there were any number of inquiries. There are still inquiries. The archbishop was rather a more important man—”

“Prominent,” corrected Cleveland.

“It’s all the same,” Bennett told him, and turned back to Sir Denis. “The answers to the inquiries about the archbishop have been almost flippant in their disregard for facts. If we were to inquire after Onorga, they’d merely laugh at us.”

“Poor devil,” Sir Denis said. “No wonder he seemed so morose. There’s no objection, I hope, to my asking after him myself on my return down there? Merely in a friendly way, asking after the fellow I’d met the last time.”

“You may do,” Cleveland said, “if you’re that keen to waste your time.”

Bennett said, “Our problem at the moment is, we do need very much to recruit someone else.”

“Not easy,” Cleveland added, “under the circumstance.”

“Nor kind to the recruit, either,” Sir Denis pointed out. “Always assuming you’re successful.”

“If anyone does take on the job—” Bennett started, and Cleveland interpolated, “—which is unlikely.”

Bennett nodded at him, faintly showing impatience. “Of course,” he said. “But if someone does agree to have a go, he won’t be ignorant of the danger.”

Cleveland laughed. “Hardly,” he said.

Bennett leaned closer to Sir Denis. “Did you meet anyone else there? Anyone who might be useful?”

“I met very few of the locals. Principally Onorga, in fact.”

Cleveland said, “When you go back, you might just keep an eye out.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Given a head of government as unstable as Idi Amin,” Bennett said, “we would feel very much more content had we a listening post on the ground.”

“I can see that,” Sir Denis said. “I’ll do what I can.”

For the rest of the meeting they discussed the changed circumstances of the sale, now that Uganda was demanding a third down rather than a tenth. The Brazilians were suffering but would find the money, and Sir Denis could report that the Grossbarger group had accepted with fairly good grace their own small increase in the required front money.

“In fact,” Sir Denis said, “I’m having lunch with Emil Grossbarger today.”

“He’s in London?”

“Just for a few days, apparently. So far, he doesn’t seem particularly worried about the deal.”

“Perhaps,” Cleveland said, “he doesn’t yet understand the situation.”

Emil Grossbarger was a large heavy shambling man of nearly eighty, with long unkempt white hair and big-knuckled hands. Arthritis and old age had conspired against him, so that now he had to move with the aid of a walker, but when seated he looked as powerful as he had always been, his meaty shoulders and barrel chest forming the proper base for his large outthrust head. He had a long pointed nose, deep-set pale-blue eyes that glared through unobtrusive gold-rimmed glasses, and a broad sensuous mouth that mirrored his emotions with fluid constant movement, now laughing, now frowning, now snarling as though to bite.

They would lunch together at the club they shared, the Special Services, just behind Harrods. The club was open to present and past members of the intelligence services of the NATO countries and their immediate families. Sir Denis, during his Washington stint in World War II, had been a spy for British Intelligence, learning as much as he could about the discrepancies between what the United States told its allies it meant to do and what it actually meant to do. In the same war, Emil Grossbarger had been of fairly high rank in German Military Intelligence, until he became one of the few plotters in the July 1944 attack on Hitler to escape with his life. He’d made it to Switzerland just ahead of the Gestapo, had become a Swiss citizen shortly after the war, had gone to work for a Swiss bank in its security department—counterintelligence, actually, protecting the identities of depositors—and had soon become a financial force himself. Today he could command almost unlimited funds for whatever prospects attracted his attention.

The Special Services was the only club in the world to which both Sir Denis Lambsmith and Emil Grossbarger were likely to belong. The club’s NATO referent meant that both sides of World War II were unusually well represented among the members present at any one time in the small but neat orange-brick building on Herbert Crescent. The conversations that took place over sole and hock in this dining room, between former enemies, would have raised eyebrows among those who still believe the history of the world is the struggle between good and evil.

Grossbarger had brought a guest with him, a shrunken old man with whom he had been speaking in German before Sir Denis arrived, apologizing for being late. The walk had taken a bit longer than he’d expected.

“Sink nossing of it,” Grossbarger ordered him. “All my valks take longer zan expected. Ziss is Reinhard Neudorf, Sir Denis Lambsmitt.”

Shaking hands, seating himself at the table, unconsciously patting the snowy linen, Sir Denis said, “Neudorf? The name seems familiar.”

“I was naughty during the war,” the old man said, with an unrepentant sly smile. His English was much better than Grossbarger’s, and he used it in an insinuating way, as though he could be much more unholy in this tongue than in his native German.

“Nuremberg,” Sir Denis suggested, the memory very hazy.

“They sentenced me to eight years in prison.”

“He served sree,” Grossbarger said, his mobile mouth laughing. “Zey needed him, so zey released him.”

“I am an engineer,” Neudorf said. “I build very good dams, with or without bodies.”

“An excellent engineer,” Grossbarger insisted, and leaned forward in mock confidentiality to add, “Ve vere just discussing ze Fourth Reich.”

“Very soon,” Neudorf explained, deadpan, “National Socialism will accomplish its long-awaited return.”

“Heil whoever,” agreed Grossbarger, “und march. Ze swastika on ze rise!”

“However,” Neudorf said with a faint shrug, “the time never seems quite perfect.”

“Ve have very many brilliant soldiers, all around ze world, merely awaiting ze call.” Grossbarger’s eyes flashed; his mouth gobbled at the comedy.

“Unfortunately, at any given moment,” Neudorf said, “most of them are in hospital.”

“And ze rest,” Grossbarger added in satisfaction, fondly patting the walker that stood beside his chair like a misplaced bit of tubular balcony railing, “are like me.”

“But we haven’t abandoned hope,” Neudorf explained. “For what could be more terrifying and undefeatable than a dedicated band of crippled old men with a dream?”

Grossbarger laughed so loudly and enthusiastically he nearly toppled off his chair, and had to clutch at the walker for support. Neudorf watched him, smiling faintly, then shook his head and said to Sir Denis, “Please excuse me for one moment.”

“Certainly.”

Sir Denis watched Neudorf move away from the table. Apparently he had recently lost a great deal of weight. His clothing hung tentlike on him, and the two main tendons in the back of his neck stood out like iron rods holding up his head.

Grossbarger had finished laughing, and now he leaned forward again, much more seriously, to say, “I hope you vere not offended.”

“Not at all,” Sir Denis said, though he wasn’t sure whether the joke had been offensive or not.

“He is dying,” Grossbarger explained, waving a big gnarled hand after Neudorf. “He likes zese jokes, so I indulge him. And I let it continue in front of you because you are a man of ze world.”

An intended compliment, then. Responding to it indirectly, Sir Denis said, “Years ago, in the United States, I was told a bit of American slang. ‘The elevens are up.’ In fact, the American Navy officer who told it to me was referring to President Roosevelt at the time.”

“Ze eleffens are up?”

“The tendons at the back of the neck,” Sir Denis explained. “When they stand out like that, the man is dying.”

Grossbarger looked thoughtful, his mouth chewing the information. “A more cold-blooded phrase zan I would have antizipated from zat nation,” he decided, then shrugged it away. “However, ze characteristic of Reinhard’s illness is such zat he vill frequently be leaving us to enter ze toilet. Ve can discuss business matters during zose intervals.” Turning to the hovering waiter, he said, “I hope you vill not be offended if I do not choose one of your no doubt excellent English vines. But I vould prefer a Moselle, ze Bernkasteler Doktor. You know ze one I mean.”

The waiter acknowledged that he did. He distributed the Xeroxed sheets of today’s menu and left. Grossbarger shook his head at Sir Denis, saying, “One of ze few dry Moselles left. Zey add too much sugar now. For ze American taste, I am afraid. Ze export market.” Fatalistically, he shrugged.

“I find myself more and more moving to the Italians,” Sir Denis agreed. “Though we have some surprisingly good wines in South America, mostly from Argentina.”

With another burst of laughter, Grossbarger slapped the table and cried, “Grown by our co-conspirators, of course! I must tell Neudorf!”

“He’s returning.”

Grossbarger tapped the side of his nose. “Business later.”

The next time Neudorf left was between the quiche and the sole. Sir Denis immediately described his experiences in Kampala, and Grossbarger listened intently, asking one or two quick questions. He seemed untroubled by the increased down payment. At the finish he said, “Ze nub of ze ting is Amin himself, of course. I vould like to understand him better.”

Sir Denis astonished himself by answering, “He said the most extraordinary thing to me.” Until this moment, he had believed he would never tell that to anyone, but somehow the anecdote belonged to Emil Grossbarger and Sir Denis found himself obediently delivering it, like a dog bringing his master the morning paper.

Grossbarger at once understood that this was the gravy. Eyes quickening, mouth moving, he said, “Oh, yes. Vat did he say?”

“I had allowed my irritation to show. Because of the sudden change in the terms. And he said, through his translator, ‘My cock is bigger than yours.’”

Grossbarger roared with laughter, punching his chair arms with his big fists, ignoring the diners who glanced reprovingly from other tables. “Oh, my goodness!” he cried. “Oh, how awful zat must have been for you!”

“It was, rather.”

“I sink I love ziss fellow,” Grossbarger said, nodding, his mind working inside the joke.

“Whom do you love?” Neudorf asked, returning, lowering himself with obvious pain into his chair.

“Idi Amin,” Grossbarger told him.

“Ah, yes, the madman of Kampala.” Neudorf turned his sly gaze to Sir Denis, saying, “We’re thinking of declaring him an Aryan. There are one or two problems, of course.”

The sole arrived then, and Sir Denis was amused at how naturally the waiter rested his tray on Grossbarger’s walker. Discussion slowed while the food was eaten, but midway through, Neudorf had to leave again and Grossbarger said, “You met a man named Baron Chase?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Describe him.”

“Canadian. Ugandan citizenship, I believe. A nasty piece of work, I suspect. Very close to Amin.”

“He has been in touch viss me.” Grossbarger watched the last of the second bottle of Moselle poured by the waiter into the three glasses, then went on, “Indirectly. He suggests zat ve might make a deal. I do not know vat he can possibly have in mind, but ven you return you vill contact him on my behalf.”

Technically, Sir Denis could only represent the International Coffee Board in this transaction, but since the Board’s only purpose was to assure a reasonable level of honesty and consistency in these large-scale coffee deals, it was not at all unusual for one side or the other to employ him at some particularly delicate stage of the operation. He possessed four qualities unlikely to be found anywhere else: he was knowledgeable, trustworthy, dispassionate, and discreet.

“I’ll be happy to,” he said. “Is it a bribe, do you think? To assure a smoothness of the flow?”

But Grossbarger shook his head, poking at his remaining fish. “It doesn’t have zat feeling. Ve are already paying chai to a number of minor officials zere. Zat’s vat zey call it in east Africa, you know.”

“Chai?”

“It is Swahili for ‘tea.’ I had my research people look it up.”

“A bribe is tea,” Sir Denis said, frowning. “I don’t follow the derivation.”

“Ven you vant somesing from ze government,” Grossbarger explained, “you invite ze official concerned to join you in ze shop across ze street from ze government building for a cup of tea vile you discuss ze situation.”

“Chai,” Neudorf said, seating himself again at the table. “You two are planning a bribe. There’ll be none of that in the Fourth Reich.”

Grossbarger raised his glass in cheerful mockery. “To ze honest and simple Aryan,” he said. “And to ze blitzkrieg of ze dreaming old men.”

9

The shower stall was a concrete-block closet painted a blurry pink, with a mildewed white plastic curtain and a gray cement floor featuring the rusty beauty spot of the drain. Light oozed fitfully through a fixed Lucite panel in the ceiling. The water, which came from a concrete cistern on the roof and was heated by the sun, was a lukewarm trickle in which Lew found it almost impossible to rinse. Elephant Soap was the brand, and it lathered wonderfully, which was a pity.

He finally gave up, stepped out to the other part of the bathroom, and finished with a cloth dipped in the cold water of the sink. Then, shaved and clean and shivering, he padded wet and naked to the kitchen, where he found Ellen, dressed in tan slacks and a Chorus Line T-shirt, drinking bottled Coke with a small dapper young Asian in a Mondrian silk shirt. The Asian stood, smiling at Lew’s nakedness, his black-olive eyes dancing with mischief. He said, “And you will be Lew Brady.”

“I not only will be,” Lew said, shaking water drops off his fingertips in case this was someone he should shake hands with, “I already am.”

“Coke?” asked Ellen, also amused. “This is Mr. Balim’s son.”

“Bathar Balim, at your service.” He was a few years younger than Lew, and he bowed to emphasize the difference. “I am here with the car,” he said.

“Yes,” Lew told Ellen, then said to Bathar Balim, “I’m not quite ready.”

“No hurry.”

The refrigerator was small and very rusty, both within and without. Ellen took a Coke from it—it seemed to be filled to capacity with nothing but bottles of Coca-Cola and White Cap beer—opened it, and handed it to Lew, who pointed at the elaborate watch on Bathar’s slender wrist, saying, “Could you tell me the time? Our watches stopped.”

“Seven minutes past one. Do you need the date?”

“No, thanks.” And not the barometric pressure, either. Lew carried the Coke and the information to the bedroom, where he set his own watch and put on his clothes.

They had awakened several times, separately or together, in the filtered daylight of the bedroom, but none of the attempts at consciousness had taken until at last Ellen had pounded his hip with her fist, crying out, “We have to get up!”

So they’d gotten up. In the kitchen—small, cheaply outfitted, with a light-green tile floor—there had been a note on the Formica-and-chrome table: “Lew. Phone 40126 when you’re ready. Frank.”

The phone had eventually been found in the living room—rickety red Danish sofa, massive Victorian armchair, a white-elephant sale of mismatched tables and lamps—and when Lew had dialed the number, a crisp male voice had answered in Swahili.

“Frank Lanigan,” Lew said.

“Mr. Brady?”

“Yes.”

“This is Isaac Otera, Mr. Balim’s assistant.”

“Hello.”

“Shall I send a car for you now?”

“Give us half an hour.”

“Of course.”

But half an hour hadn’t been quite long enough, not with the soap problem in the shower. Dressed, Lew filled his pockets: wallet, Zippo lighter, three-inch spring-action knife, sunglasses, leather folder containing passport and driver’s licenses and inoculation record and (false) Interpol membership card, Swiss Army knife, ball-point pen, pocket flashlight with a twenty-dollar bill wrapped around the two triple-A batteries. Finishing the Coke, he walked back to the kitchen, where Ellen was laughing warmly at something Bathar Balim had said. The Asian turned his smiling bland face when Lew entered. “All ready?”

“All ready.”

Lew put the empty bottle on the table, but Ellen at once picked it up, saying, “Bathar says this is our house now.” The small garbage can had a foot pedal–operated lid, which squeaked when she opened it to throw the bottle away.

“Home sweet home,” Bathar said, smiling at Lew.

Lew bared his teeth back. “I’ll have to put up my hunting prints,” he said.

Outside the house, the humid heat was a surprise. A white haze veiled the sky but did nothing to cut the glare of the sun. The house, a low yellow pillbox on a dirt street lined with similar structures, was surrounded by hard-baked dry earth in which only a few sawtooth weeds could grow. This section wasn’t a neighborhood but an encampment; there was no sense anywhere that anyone thought of this place as home. The two tiny black children playing with toy airplanes in the dirt several houses away seemed to be merely idling away the time until the moving van should arrive.

The car was a white Nissan safari van, rather cleaner than Frank’s Land-Rover. Ellen rode beside Bathar, Lew behind her. Bathar was as fast a driver as Frank, but much smoother. He seemed to be saying, If anyone could lead a camel through the eye of a needle, it would be me. Lew kept track of the turnings, surprised that his mind contained absolutely no memory of the initial drive here with Frank.

At Balim’s blue headquarters, Bathar smiled at Ellen and said, “Nice to meet you both.”

“You, too,” said Lew.

Smiling, Bathar drove away, as Frank came out the front door, grinning like a Derby winner and saying, “Had your beauty sleep?”

Lew was feeling generally irritable. Trying for the light touch, he said, “Don’t we look it?”

“She does. Come on inside.”

Inside was a cluttered warehouse, piled with cartons, crates, mounds of machinery parts. Because the windows were so dirty and the stacks of goods so messily high, the light was very dim, which gave a first false impression that it must be cooler here than in the glare outside. In fact, it was just as humid and possibly more hot and certainly stuffier. A few blacks, seated on the floor, playing some sort of card game, moved with the slow economy appropriate to the climate.

But not Frank. He strode through it all as though the place were in the Arctic. “The offices are back here.”

Frank opened the door and led them into another world, a much more European or American world, with neat office furniture, a Kenya Railways calendar on the wall beside a color photograph of President Jomo Kenyatta, and a crisply proper black man at the desk wearing a dark-gray suit, white shirt, narrow light-gray tie.

Frank made the introductions: “Isaac Otera, Ellen Gillespie, Lew Brady.”

“We met on the phone,” Lew said, shaking the man’s hand.

Isaac Otera looked puzzled for just a second, then vaguely disapproving. “I have never heard that locution before,” he said pedantically. “Is it an Americanism?”

Surprised, Lew said, “I guess it is.”

Frank said, “Isaac’ll fill you in. Ellen, come along.”

“Where?” Lew immediately asked, and just as immediately regretted it. He avoided Ellen’s eyes.

“To talk with her boss,” Frank said. To Ellen he said, “You’ll like it in here. Air conditioning.”

Frank and Ellen disappeared through the inner doorway, and Isaac gestured to the wooden chair beside his desk. “Sit down.”

Lew sat, and Isaac opened his lower-right-hand desk drawer, taking from it a camera—a Cavalier SLR II, made in East Germany—putting it on the desk, saying, “Frank says you are familiar with cameras.”

“I can take a picture. I don’t win prizes.”

“Good.” From the same drawer came a white legal-size envelope. Isaac shook its contents out onto the desktop: a set of keys, several papers. Pushing the items one at a time toward Lew, he said, “There’s a yellow Honda Civic parked in the back, rented from Hertz. Keys, rental contract. You have an international driver’s license?”

“Sure.”

“Good. This is your confirmed reservation for three nights starting tonight at the International Hotel in Kampala.”

“I’m going to Kampala?”

“No.”

From the drawer Isaac now took a road map and opened it to the section he wanted, then placed it on the desk in front of Lew. It was a map of Kenya, but the left quarter—the part Isaac was showing him—also included some of Lake Victoria and some of Uganda and even, at the lower left corner, some of Tanzania. Kenya’s share of the lake frontage was very minor indeed.

“We are here,” Isaac said, touching with his square-nailed fingertip the farthest eastern point on the lake. Not even the lake itself, but an extension from it called Winam Gulf.

Reading the name Kisumu below the fingertip, Lew nodded and said, “Okay.”

The finger moved up across the top of the lake. “Jinja,” Isaac said.

“Wait a second.”

Lew leaned over the map to familiarize himself with at least the basic layout. From Kisumu it was probably seventy to eighty miles north along the shore to the Uganda border at the northeast corner of the lake. Then, turning west and running along the northern coast of the lake, it was perhaps another seventy miles to Jinja, which Isaac had started to point at, and fifty miles beyond that to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, on the shore at the very farthest left extreme of the map. “Okay,” Lew said.

Isaac’s finger again touched Jinja. “Until nineteen thirty-one,” he said, “the railway from the coast terminated here. Then the bridge was built over the Nile.”

Surprised, Lew said, “The Nile?”

“This is the Nile.” Isaac’s finger slid along a slender blue line snaking northward from Jinja, flanked by the red lines of highways, the yellow lines of minor roads, the black lines of railways. “This is where it starts from the lake.”

“The source of the Nile.” Lew found himself grinning. In his years in Africa he’d been all around this territory, but never exactly here. And while he didn’t have Frank’s love of history, he was at least aware of the search for the source of the Nile as having been the great Quest of the nineteenth century, civilized man’s last major trek into the unknown before the turn to space. Explorer after explorer had died or returned broken with disease in the effort to trace the Nile to its source. And now it was merely a spot on a map, called Jinja, with a railroad.

Apparently Isaac was following Lew’s train of thought. Drily he said, “We always knew where it was.”

“You probably should have kept the secret.”

“We tried to.” But pedantry took over again, and Isaac went back to his earlier, humorless manner, saying, “In any event, when the railway crossed the Nile in nineteen thirty-one, it made obsolete some equipment that had been used there earlier when Jinja was the end of the line. Some of that equipment is still in existence. We have a report on it, but so far we have no photos or reliable eyewitnesses.”

“A report? From somebody in Uganda?”

Isaac frowned. He placed his palm on the map, fingers splayed, and looked earnestly at Lew. “Forgive me if I am blunt, Mr. Brady,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“I am not a thief,” Isaac said. “Nor is Mr. Balim. If the purpose of this exercise were to steal cotton from Tanzania or copper from Zaire, I would have nothing to do with it.”

Lew watched him carefully. “What is it, then?”

“A blow against Idi Amin.” A sudden grating quality rasped in Isaac’s voice as he spoke the name, and a hardness came into his face, as though he combined in himself both the flint and the steel.

Lew smiled, suddenly feeling at home. Appearances had been wrong. This man wasn’t an office clerk, he was a partisan!

Misunderstanding the smile, Isaac said, “Not everyone is motivated merely by money.”

“Oh, I know,” Lew agreed. “Believe me, I know that. Frank just led me to—”

“Frank does what he does for his own reasons.”

“He led me to believe those were everybody’s reasons.”

Isaac shrugged. “He can’t be expected to describe what he doesn’t understand.”

“True.”

“But what about you? I’d assumed you were like Frank.”

“I can always make a living,” Lew told him. “I’d rather do something interesting.”

Isaac gave him a long scrutiny. Lew sat unmoving under that gaze, at attention, like a dog being patted by his master’s friend. Finally Isaac smiled and said, “I’m surprised Frank had the wit to select you.” Unfolding a piece of poor-quality, thick typewriter paper and handing it over, he said, “Read this.”

Lew looked at words printed with ball-point pen in a large and somewhat naive hand. Without introduction, without signature, it read:

Lew finished, nodded, and put the sheet of paper on the desk. “That’s the report from inside Uganda.”

“Part of it. Do read it again—I’d rather you didn’t take it with you.”

Smiling at all the implications in that, Lew obediently picked the paper up and read it again.

He was partway through the third reading when the inner door opened and Ellen and Frank came out, Ellen laughing at something. “I certainly won’t,” she said to whoever was still inside—presumably Balim—and came toward Lew, bright-eyed, cheerful, saying, “Hi. How you doing?”

“Going for a ride in a car-car,” he told her. “How about you?”

“Going for a ride in a plane-plane.”

“Up up and away,” Frank said, with his carnivore’s grin.

“Have fun,” Lew told them. The smile made his jaw ache.

They left, and Isaac said mildly, “You’re wrinkling that paper.”

The sun was bright on the hood of the little yellow car. Lew drove slowly, squinting behind his sunglasses, keeping an eye on the odometer. Eleven kilometers since the turnoff at Iganga, and counting.

The trip so far had been uneventful. He’d started from Kisumu at two-thirty, after lunch with Isaac Otera, during which Isaac had told him several Idi Amin horror stories, including (with some reluctance) the details of his own flight from the country. It was clear to Lew by now that Frank was merely being his usual cynical self when he’d claimed this was no more than a simple civilian robbery. Balim and Otera were both Ugandan exiles, driven from their homes by Amin. Otera was in fact a former government official. What was being planned here was every bit as political as an IRA bank robbery in Belfast.

It had taken nearly two hours on the truck-choked main road to reach the border at Busia. Most of the other traffic had turned off before then, however, and his was the only car visible in either direction when he reached the border, which was officially closed. But the closure primarily affected goods shipments and the nationals of the two countries involved; white tourists with money to spend were not turned away.

Once in Uganda, with the road almost completely to himself, he had taken barely more than an hour to reach Iganga, and eleven kilometers beyond. The afternoon sun was very high and hot in the sky ahead. The fields and forests all around had the brown, attenuated, thinned-out look that all of Africa gets just before the long rains.

Twelve kilometers; this was where Isaac had said the old road would be. Slowing to a crawl, Lew studied the verge beside him. Being in a former British colony, he was driving on the left, in a car with the steering wheel on the right, so he had to look across the shiny hood at the brown grass, the faded weeds, the drooping brush and trees.

Yes? A spot, wide enough for a truck to pass through, where there were no trees. Lew stopped and looked out the left-side window. The cleared swath was plain, though heavily overgrown. It had the vaguely cathedral look of all untended paths dimmed by overarching trees. This was the place.

Before turning, Lew glanced in the rearview mirror: nothing. He looked ahead and saw the glint of sunlight on chrome far away. He shifted back into Park, prepared to wait for the car to pass. Taking a map out from the under-dash compartment to explain why he’d stopped, he opened it and studied the lines and the names.

The car approached swiftly, then more slowly, and Lew had just registered the fact that it was not one car but two—identical new and shiny black Toyotas—when they both abruptly swerved toward him across the road.

He thought they meant to crash him, and ducked instinctively away, but the one Toyota shuddered to a stop directly in front while the other passed close on his right and angled to a stop, filling the rearview mirror.

“Oh, I am a goddam fool,” Lew said aloud, and dropped the map. He could drive neither forward nor back. Even if he managed the tight turn into the old abandoned road, it would lead nowhere, and the Honda Civic wouldn’t take him far along it. And there was no point in getting out to run.

Men were piling out of both Toyotas. They wore extremely dark sunglasses, garish shirts, bell-bottom slacks, platform shoes. Spreading out, they approached the car.

10

Ellen liked Mazar Balim more and more. Unlike his son, unlike Frank Lanigan, unlike most of the men she’d met, he wasn’t interested in going to bed with her. But at the same time he clearly did like her, and she was happy to respond to that.

The meeting went this way: Frank said, “Ellen, come along,” and Lew said, “Where?” and Frank said, “To talk with her boss,” and Ellen knew that Lew would sooner or later drive her into a serious reaction against that sort of thing. Seeing Lew avoid her eyes, she knew he knew it, too. And she went into the next office with Frank.

Mazar Balim rose from behind his cluttered desk, in his small, cluttered, air-conditioned office. “Ah, Miss Gillespie,” he said. “Do sit in that chair. It receives the benefit of the cool air without the draft.”

“Thank you,” she said, and sat in the minimal but comfortable green vinyl-covered chair directly in front of the desk, aware of Frank’s dropping backward as though he’d been shot into the battered armchair against the wall.

Balim said, “It is a wonderful thing to me that I have been born in an age where a woman may be beautiful without shame and at the same time useful without shame. You have flown many planes in many strange parts of the world.”

“But never before in Africa,” she said, still smiling at the baroque compliment.

Balim waved his hand. “The air is the same. And now that you are here, let me admit to you boldly that you have been summoned somewhat under false pretenses.”

The smile curdled on Ellen’s lips. She had feared this from the beginning, that the so-called job would turn out to be merely a placebo to satisfy Lew’s demands, that Lew was the only one they really wanted or needed here. And yet the plane did exist, and there had been a previous pilot whom she’d replaced.

“The long rains,” Balim said, “will begin any day now. They tend to be very heavy and almost continuous. Most of the time for the next two months it will not be practical for you to fly my plane.”

“I see.”

“So we must work you very hard from now till the rains begin,” Balim said, with his sweet smile. “And then again we shall work you very hard when the rains come to an end.”

“I’ve flown in bad weather,” Ellen pointed out. “Alaska isn’t sunny all the time.”

Balim smiled. “Still,” he said, “I think you will find our long rains impressive, and you shall fly in them only when absolutely necessary. Now, as to where you shall fly, and for what purpose, let me assure you that I am a much more important and powerful man than I seem.” This was said with such a self-deprecatory grin that Ellen didn’t feel the need for a polite contradiction. Balim went on. “My merchant interests extend across Kenya so far as Mombasa, and also into Tanzania, and from time to time require my personal attention. Frequently I must go to Nairobi or Dar es Salaam or Tanga or even Lindi to deal with customs officials or traders or perhaps customers. Also Frank often must deal with problems at a great remove from here. Finally, there are at times small and delicate shipments which require special handling.”

“He means ivory,” Frank said, grinning, in the periphery of Ellen’s vision.

“I was about to mention ivory,” Balim said, looking faintly nettled. “There is no longer any overt trade in ivory in Kenya,” he explained. “Concerns of a humanitarian and conservationist nature have brought an end to the slaughter of elephants, which we all can only applaud.”

“Mama Ngina,” Frank said, laughing, as though he were deliberately teasing his employer.

“It is true,” Balim said (Ellen couldn’t tell now if he was annoyed or amused), “that the sale of art objects previously made of ivory from elephants slaughtered in the unenlightened days of yesteryear has also been banned, and that whatever ivory the government can find has been impounded, and that rumors have drawn a connection between Mama Ngina and the warehouses in which these confiscated treasures are stored.”

Ellen said, “Who is Mama Ngina?”

“Forgive me,” Balim said. “I forget that my part of the world is a mere unimportant corner. Mama Ngina is the first lady of Kenya. The wife of Jomo Kenyatta.”

Ellen said, “It’s illegal to own ivory in Kenya?”

“It is illegal to own it for a commercial purpose,” Balim told her. “Or to sell it.”

“You want me to deliver ivory for you?”

“Oh, my dear lady, no!” Balim seemed truly shocked at the idea. “I would never offer to place you in such jeopardy. And certainly not at the salary I am paying you.”

Ellen laughed despite herself. “I was thinking the same thing.” She was to be paid seven hundred dollars a week plus expenses; six hundred of it to be deposited directly into her bank in San Francisco.

“You are a pilot,” Balim insisted. “You are not responsible for what your passengers may be carrying on their persons. Nor, if your passengers experience legal difficulty, will that difficulty extend to yourself.”

“You’re sure of that.”

“I guarantee it.”

“It’s all right, Ellen,” Frank said, as though he and she were old comrades and she would know she could trust his word. “This whole ivory scam stinks so much the government wants it kept just as quiet as we do. If I’m stopped, and I’ve got a little ivory statue in my ditty bag, all they’ll do is confiscate it and tell me don’t do it again.”

“With a Kenyan national,” Balim said drily, “there might be a bit more difficulty. But not with whites.”

“Besides,” Frank said, “there isn’t that much ivory to trade any more.”

“Unfortunately,” Balim agreed. “In fact, the goods you will transport are much more likely to be mundane matters indeed. Medicine, for instance, or industrial diamonds, or merely great thick clumps of documents.”

“I’m used to all of those,” Ellen said. “When do I start?”

Frank said, “Today.”

“Good. Where am I going?”

“Today’s a little different,” Frank said. “Today we’ll just take a joyride. Do a little sightseeing.”

“Where?”

“Uganda,” Frank said.

“I’ll just stop by my place for the cameras,” Frank said. He had thrown a couple of filthy blankets over the filthy passenger seat so Ellen could sit there, saying, “If Charlie were an American Indian, his name would be Running Sore.”

Ellen laughed, but said nothing, and looked with envy at the little yellow car that Frank had pointed out as Lew’s transportation for today.

He started the engine, and she watched the exertions with which he forced the Land-Rover to do his bidding. Did all things for him require that much effort?

Frank’s place was a neat stucco cottage on the fringe of town. A low openwork concrete wall bordered the property and was nearly obscured by a profusion of flowers. “Beautiful,” Ellen said.

“It’s a great country for flowers,” Frank agreed.

Getting out of the Land-Rover, Ellen walked along the front wall, looking at the colors. “That’s a delphinium. Is that jasmine?” She pointed to a thorny bush with hard-looking leaves and starfish-shaped white flowers.

Frank had walked along behind her. “No,” he said. “But it smells like it. In Swahili it’s mtanda-mboo. You can make a pretty good jelly out of the fruit. See that one?” He was pointing at a tall knobby shrub with clusters of dry-looking orangy-yellow flowers. “In Swahili it’s utupa. A very tricky plant. You can get a tough poison out of the leaves, and the antidote for it out of the roots.”

“Really?”

“Honest injun. The Masai use little doses of the poison for a laxative. The Luo dip the flowers in water—that makes it holy water—and sprinkle it around the house to keep off the evil spirits. Come on in; we just sprinkled this place yesterday.”

Whitewashed rocks neatly flanked the packed-earth walk to the front door. “Bibi!” Frank yelled, opening the stained wood door. “Eddah!”

The entrance led directly into a wide shallow front room, filled with cool-looking sunlight. Ellen looked around at bare white plaster walls, stone floor, heavy rustic furniture, everything extremely neat and tidy, two vases at opposite ends of the room filled with a mixture of the flowers from out front.

A short giggling black girl in her twenties entered from the rear, swathed in the native style in bright-colored cloth. Her hair was done up in more cloth in a tall gaudy knob on her head, looking like a model of the Guggenheim Museum covered with graffiti. “Eddah gone,” she told Frank, nodding and giggling as though it were a great satisfactory joke. “Gone store.”

“Bibi, Ellen,” Frank said offhandedly, and told Bibi, “Make sandwiches. Beer. Picnic.”

The idea delighted her. Her teeth were large and crooked and very white; her eyes were filled with laughter; she kept nodding and nodding her whole body as though each moment of life increased her ecstasy. “Okay yes,” she said. “Double-quick.”

“Good sandwiches, now,” Frank warned her, and held out his big hand in a threat to spank. “Good thick sandwiches.”

“Yes, yes,” she assured him, laughing at the idea that she could do anything less than totally please him. Patting the air, laughing, throwing some of her laughter and quick sparkling glances in Ellen’s direction, she hurried from the room.

“Come take a look at the place,” Frank said.

This of course was the seduction scene. Knowing there wouldn’t be calm between them until Frank had been allowed to do his mating dance, Ellen said, “Sure,” and went with him to see the place.

It was some sort of adolescent clubhouse dream: the counselor’s hut in the Boy Scout camp, plus pinups. The entire house was neat and sparkling, which was clearly not Frank’s style, but within the tidiness he had made his presence felt.

The kitchen, in which merry Bibi sawed away at bread with a serrated knife, was modern and tended heavily to brushed chrome. The dishware was all orange plastic, and one cabinet shelf was filled with jars of dry roasted peanuts. A small white plastic radio quietly played reggae-sounding music, as though for its own enjoyment. Visible through an aluminum screen door was a small kitchen garden, and beyond it, a wire enclosure containing chickens.

Frank opened the refrigerator, which was of course full of beer, and took out two bottles, but Ellen said, “Too early for me; I just got up. Besides, I’m supposed to fly. You don’t want me to drink at the wrong time, remember?”

“You win,” he said, grinning, meaning that round but not the fight. “Seven-Up or Coke?”

“Coke.”

The hall, which had a few attractive unframed batik pieces on the walls, led one way to the maid’s quarters and the other to Frank’s bedroom, which was dominated by a king-size bed covered with a scarlet spread, on which a medium-size brownish dog of no particular breed lolled at his content. “Goddamit, George,” Frank yelled, “get the fuck off that bed!”

George, midway between boredom and cowed sullenness, slowly rose, yawned, stepped down to the floor, and slunk from the room. Ellen said, “Washington?”

“Patton.”

“Of course,” she said, laughing at him. So the second round was his.

There were Playmate centerfolds on the white walls, of course, plus a poster of two ducks screwing in midair over the caption “Fly United.” The female demurely smiled, while the male showed a devilish leer. That must be the way they want to see themselves, she thought. And the way they want to see us. “Which way do your windows face?”

Windows were in two walls, lightly curtained. Pointing, Frank said, “East and north.”

“So you get the morning sun.”

“But not too much.”

Rush rugs partly covered the gleaming floor. There was no closet, but in a large old armoire hung his bush jackets and trousers, all laundered to a fare-thee-well. The small bathroom, seen through a partly open door, was less attractive than the rest but had been so thickly painted with white enamel and so determinedly scrubbed so often that it too managed a look of Spartan simplicity and dignity. An air conditioner, not turned on, was built into the wall below one of the north-facing windows. “Do you use that much?”

“Only when I work up a sweat.”

Wrong technique. That was for girls you met in bars. “The house seems nice and cool without it,” she said, nicely and coolly.

“It’s the thick walls. Are you Lew’s exclusive property?”

She laughed, in pleasure and surprise. “Very good!” she said, and actually clapped her hands together when she turned to congratulate him. “That puts me on the defensive!”

He found it impossible to hide his annoyance; maybe he wasn’t even trying. “I just want to know how to behave,” he said. “If Lew owns you, that’s it.”

Something happened now that wasn’t his fault, though it was hard not to hold him responsible, anyway. As so often in a situation like this, without any overt threat from the man, she was reminded of her comparative physical frailty. If he wanted, right now, he could knock her out, he could strangle her, he in fact and in truth could do whatever he wanted with her. She would struggle, of course, but eventually he would win.

Sometime ago she had learned various self-defense measures, just because of the recurrent moments like this, but she doubted they would be much of a surprise to somebody like Frank. So she stood in this room saying no to him, and she would go on saying no to him, but in a far corner of her brain she was afraid of him; she knew it was ultimately his choice whether or not he took her no for an answer.

Neither her expression nor her intentions changed, but in the back of her mind the fear lived, sending out little tendrils through her thoughts like the red lines from a gangrenous wound. “You know who owns me, Frank,” she said, trying neither to show the fear nor to blame him for it. “I own me, the way you own this house. And if I ever decide to give you a tour, I’ll let you know.”

Frank laughed, visibly relaxing. Had she been in danger? “That’s okay, then,” he said. “I’ll be around. And I’ll remind you every once in a while.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said.

She did have a beer after all, with the sandwiches, in the plane, flying over Lake Victoria. The sandwiches, on thick slices of darkish white bread, were like housed salads, the basic ham or chicken engulfed in pepper slices, pieces of cheese, lettuce, tomato, very thin radish slices, bits of herbs. It was messy eating, juice and tomato shreds falling into the paper napkins on their laps, the plane caring for itself in the easy updrafts over the lake. The White Cap beer was pleasantly sharp, dangerously gassy, the perfect accompaniment.

While they ate, Frank told her odd bits from his reading of African history. “The Baganda,” he said, “they’re the main tribe in Uganda, they were the most civilized blacks in Africa before the white men came. They had a king, called the kabaka, and a court, and a whole civilized social structure. But they were already crazy.”

“In what way?”

“When the first Englishman arrived—his name was Speke—he met with a kabaka called Mutesa, and gave him gifts, the way the white men always did. Give you some cloth and beads and shit, and then take your country.”

Ellen laughed, her mouth full of sandwich.

“Anyway,” Frank said, “Speke showed Mutesa the first firearms he ever saw in his life. Mutesa had him shoot some cows. Then Speke gave Mutesa a carbine, and Mutesa—he was on his throne, in court—he gave the carbine to a page and told him to go outside and shoot somebody and let him know how it worked.”

Ellen stared. “You’re making this up.”

Shaking his head, Frank said, “The page went out, Speke heard a bang, the page came back and said it worked just fine, the fellow was lying out there dead.”

Ellen kept trying to read hoax in Frank’s face, but it simply wasn’t there. She said, “But who did he kill?”

“Nobody knows. It didn’t matter. Listen, if you don’t believe me, you look it up. Speke wrote about it in a book. Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.”

“That’s the most awful thing I ever heard.”

“They haven’t changed much since,” Frank said in gloomy satisfaction.

Finished with lunch, Ellen circled low over the lake while Frank dropped the paper bag of their garbage. Then she turned north, toward the lowering dark coast of Uganda.

Flying along, relaxed from the beer and from the successful conclusion of the bedroom scene, she said, “You worked it this way on purpose, didn’t you? Separating Lew and me.”

“Sure,” he said, comfortable and self-assured. “But we really do need both. The man on the ground to look up close at what’s there. And the aerial surveillance to know what the enemy will be able to see when the time comes.”

The enemy. Despite himself, Frank couldn’t help but view this as a military maneuver. Ellen smiled to herself and flew northward while, beside her, Frank studied the charts. “There’s Dagusi Island,” he said, pointing ahead and slightly to the right. “Stay to the right of it; we’ll go over Macdonald Bay. That’s where the road ends.”

Uganda sloped sharply upward from the lake, heavily forested, unlike the brown scrubland along the Kenyan coast. Macdonald Bay was an irregularly shaped pocket of restless water, glinting and glistening.

Frank had dragged up from the rear seats the khaki canvas bag with his cameras, one of which he selected, screwing a lens on. “The road should be somewhere along the left shore,” he said. “It won’t be much; it hasn’t been used for years.”

“Is that it?”

A faint scar of brown scratched westward from the water’s edge, disappearing almost at once into the trees. “Good eyes,” Frank said, looking through the camera’s viewfinder. “Get down on the deck, let’s take a—”

A jet buzzed them, crossing their route from left to right, going very fast. It was all so sudden and so close that Ellen automatically pulled up, then had to retrim, while the afterimage cleared in her brain. A fighter, with camouflage paint. “What was that?”

“MiG,” Frank said, sounding grim but not yet scared. He held the cameras in his lap. “Ugandan Air Force.”

“What’s he doing?” She craned forward to look all over the sky but couldn’t see him.

“Well, we’re in his airspace. Coming back at three-o’clock level.”

Once again the jet whooshed by, this time more slowly, arcing lazily away at the last instant as Frank gave a big hearty wave and smile out his window. In addition to its registration numbers, the plane had a symbol on the side of the fuselage: a flag shape divided diagonally from bottom left to top right. The upper triangle was green, the lower an orangy-red.

“He’s making me nervous,” Ellen said. “I’m going back over the lake.”

But halfway through her turn, the jet appeared again, sailing by. It was so much faster than they were—and couldn’t slow to their speed without risking burnout—that it was hard to get a clear picture, but she had the impression the pilot had waved this time on the way by. For confirmation, the jet waggled its wings once it was out in front, then lifted into the sky, hurrying away, due west.

“He says we’re okay,” Frank said. “Just tourists flying around.”

“I was afraid we were the ones he was supposed to shoot to see if his guns worked.”

Frank laughed, and Ellen completed the three-hundred-sixty-degree turn, coming in over Macdonald Bay again, this time much lower. The scar was now clearly a road, but it still disappeared under the thick dark-green trees.

“Head northwest,” Frank said, taking pictures.

Below them, the forest was impenetrable, nothing but the thick-leafed branches. Frank lowered the camera. “Thruston Bay over there,” he said, pointing ahead and to the left. “The turntable should be between us and it.”

Traveling very slowly, just clearing the treetops, she turned toward Thruston Bay. “Wait,” she said, throttling back, then had to rev up.

“What was it?”

“I thought I saw something shine.”

They were over the bay. Ellen made a tight turn in the sky and headed back over the trees. Frank said, “When you get where you saw it, turn left.”

That would be inland, away from the lake. “Right.”

She saw no glint this time, was not in fact absolutely sure where she’d seen it before. When she felt she must be past it, she turned left, and very soon they crossed a railway: a single pair of tracks and the gleaming line of metal sleepers.

“We’ve gone too far,” Frank said. “The turntable’s between the railroad and the lake.”

Ellen started another turn, the sweep taking them over the highway just north of the track. Down there, three cars were stopped in an odd relationship, like a chinese ideogram: two black cars at angles to a yellow car between them. A group of men stood in the middle of the road around a lone man.

Ellen stared. “The car—that’s Lew!”

“Holy shit,” Frank said.

One of the men hit the man in the middle with an object of some kind, a stick or pipe or gun barrel. The man fell, and two of the men kicked him, and he curled up like a leech when salt is poured on it.

Frantic, staring around at the unforgiving forest, Ellen cried, “Where can we land? Where can we land?”

“Are you crazy? This is Uganda! Get back to Kisumu, fast!”

Two of the men had looked up, were pointing at the plane. One hurried toward a black car; to radio someone?

Ellen accelerated into the turn, climbing higher into the empty comfortless sky. “We’ll get to Balim,” Frank was saying. “He’ll know what to do.” He’d undone his seat belt to turn and put the camera bag on the backseat.

Bracing herself, Ellen abruptly pulled back on the stick, and the plane dropped fifty feet like a stone before she accelerated again. She’d been ready for it, but Frank hadn’t. He was thrown violently up against the metal top and flung just as violently down again. “Jesus!” he yelled, scrabbling for something to hold on to. “Watch it!”

“I am watching it, Frank,” she said, and her tone of voice made him stare at her in sudden alarm. The airspeed indicator kept climbing. Not looking at him, she said, “You sent Lew over there today so you could fuck me.”

“It should have been safe!” He was hurriedly trying to get his seat belt snapped. “I told you, we needed both—”

This time she sideslipped, cracking his head smartly against his side window. He yelled, and she said, “Don’t argue with me, Frank. I could kill you up here, and you don’t dare touch me because I’m the pilot. You want another taste?”

“No! Jesus Christ,” he said, trying to hold his head and at the same time brace himself for any conceivable shift in speed and direction. “What’s it for?”

“I want Lew back,” she told him. “And I want you to know how serious I am, Frank.”

“Don’t do it again!”

She didn’t. “I want him back.”

“You’ll get him,” Frank promised, grim and sullen and abashed. “You’ll get him. And welcome to him.”

11

Like Rome, Kampala is built on seven hills, and is in fact named after one of them, Kampala meaning “Hill of the Impala,” that graceful harmless antelope of the long curved horns, a peaceful herbivore. Another of these hills is called Nakasero, and on its crest sat the Presidential Lodge, one of many residences the restless, discontented Amin maintained throughout Uganda. In rustic luxury, the Lodge nestled amid mango and gum trees, bougainvillea vines, frangipani, and hibiscus. By day the sweet-smelling groves rang with the laughter of Idi Amin’s children; he had at least twenty-five, by five wives.

Down the hill, farther down the hill, within sight of the windows of the Lodge, was a large lovely open park, a green, four hundred yards wide. On one side of it stood All Saints Church, the See of Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum, who had been murdered personally by Idi Amin on February 17, 1977. Opposite stood the French Embassy and, next to that, a three-story pink building surrounded by barbed wire. This was the State Research Bureau, in an office of which Amin had shot the archbishop in the face, then had phoned one of his useful white men to say, “I’ve lost my temper. I’ve shot the archbishop. Do something.”

Lew was semiconscious, in the trunk of one of the Toyotas, when the two cars drove in at the front gate of the State Research Bureau. He felt fevered, delirious, but was conscious enough to know he was in the worst trouble of his life. He didn’t know, and wouldn’t have been cheered to hear, that someone had once said of the State Research Bureau at Nakasero, “When you go in there, the question is not when or if you will come out. The only question left is when the pain will stop.”

They opened the trunk of the Toyota and pulled him out by his ankles and elbows and hair, letting him fall to the ground and then kicking him for his clumsiness, yelling, “Up! Get up!” in Nubian dialect. Lew curled into a ball, protecting his head and torso, his back shielded by the Toyota, until they stopped kicking him and grabbed his arms to jerk him to his feet. Swimmingly in the glare of the sunlight he saw the green beyond the barbed wire, and what appeared to be the mirage of a cathedral far away. Parked next to the barbed wire, one side dented, was a bus in which, two months ago, a group of hospital nurses had been coming back to Kampala after a dance at Makerere University; State Research Bureau men had stopped it, driven it here, and beat and raped the nurses through the night, releasing them in the morning. There had been no retribution.

Lew was hustled into the building, where a harsh-looking man in Army uniform sat at a reception desk. A Colt .45 was on the desk, easy to his right hand. Lew, blinking, trying to rid his eyes and mind of fuzziness and spots of deadness, looked at that automatic on the desk and licked his puffy lips, tasting blood. But even if he were fully conscious, with all his coordination, grabbing for that gun would be a very stupid move.

“Name?”

“Lew—” He coughed and cleared his throat and tried again. “Lewis Brady.”

He saw the man write it down in a long ledger, the dark parody of a hotel register. The book was thick, the open page in the middle, a dozen names already listed before Lew’s. Reading upside down, blinking and blinking, Lew saw that there were two headings at the top of the page: NAME and CHARGE. Under CHARGE, after his name, he watched the Army man write “Not specified.” Almost all the other entries on the page said the same thing.

“Valuables.”

He gave them everything, but they wanted more than everything and made that clear by hitting him on the sides and the back of the head with gun butts. They wanted his shoes and belt, and when he turned them over he was taken up a flight of stairs to a long wide corridor and told to sit there on a wooden bench. All but two of the men went away, the remaining pair leaning against the opposite wall, frowning at Lew with great intensity, as though their hostility were the only thing they clearly understood.

The half hour on the bench was a very good time; if it was supposed to be a psychological ploy to increase his nervousness, it had quite the opposite effect. Lew began to think again, to recover a bit from the beatings, and to observe the area around himself. He was in a long bare corridor lined with office doors, perhaps a third of them open. From within one office toward the far end came the halting sound of amateurish typing. At intervals along the walls were large notices: SILENCE. Here and there between the demands for silence were hung framed printed slogans and sayings; the one Lew could read said NO WISDOM IS GREATER THAN KINDNESS. THOSE WHO BUILD THEIR SUCCESS ON OTHERS MISFORTUNES ARE NEVER SUCCESSFUL. It was signed “Mjr Farouk Minawa.”

The least encouraging thing about the corridor was the thick blood-stains along the wall above the bench, just at the height of Lew’s head. Clearly, it was a habit here to beat the heads of seated prisoners against the concrete walls. An abrupt and messy death. Or possibly merely a fractured skull and irreparable brain damage. Lew sat braced to defend himself should either of those men across the way decide to play the game on him; even though he knew resistance was hopeless.

A strange thing about the two men guarding him: the nail on the little finger of each hand was over an inch long, curved and sharp and yellowish-gray, like the talon of a hawk.

After thirty minutes, two new men appeared from down the corridor and said to Lew, “Come with us.” Lew got to his feet, his former guards went away, and he walked between these new men down the corridor to the end and into a large office marked HEAD OF TECHNICAL OPERATIONS, where a thick-faced uniformed man sat at a large table piled with an assortment of junk.

This was Major Farouk Minawa, commander of the State Research Bureau and author of the homilies framed in the corridor. It was Minawa, a Nubian Muslim, who along with the Ugandan Chief of Protocol, Captain Nasur Ondoga, on July 5, 1976, at nine in the morning, went to Mulago Hospital, yanked Mrs. Dora Bloch (the only unrescued Israeli hostage) from her bed, dragged her screaming down three flights of stairs while staff and patients stood by in helpless shock, threw her into a car, drove her twenty miles from Kampala on the road toward Jinja, pulled her from the car, shot her by the roadside, and tried unsuccessfully to burn the body. (The white hair didn’t burn, and was the first clue to her identity.)

There were also three other Research Bureau men in the room, in their uniforms of bright shirts, platform shoes, bell-bottom trousers, dark sunglasses. One of these sprawled on a sofa to one side, drinking a bottle of soda. There were two other sofas, both empty, while the other two Research Bureau men prowled the room like big cats in a zoo. The two who had brought Lew in walked over to one of the empty sofas and sat side by side there, casually, crossing their legs, looking around, as though waiting for a bus. Everyone in the room but Minawa had the long nail extending from the little finger of each hand.

Minawa pointed at the carpeted floor in front of Lew. “Sit down.”

“On the floor?”

“Sit down!” Minawa fairly bounced in his chair with his sudden rage.

Sensing movement behind him from one of the roving men, Lew dropped quickly to the floor, bringing his knees up, folding his arms around them. Minawa glared across his messy desk, but when he next spoke, his voice was once more calm. “What did the CIA order you to do in Uganda?”

“The CIA?” In his bewilderment, Lew had one millisecond of joy, in which this would turn out to be somebody’s error and he would simply be released with apologies; but the fantasy didn’t last.

There were rifles, pistols, automatic guns stacked and stuffed under the sofas. One of the seated men took out a knife and studied the blade with great concentration.

“The CIA! The CIA!” Minawa pounded the tabletop. “You think we’re stupid here? You think we’re niggers?”

“I have nothing to do with the CIA,” Lew said.

“You are an American.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Your name is Lewis Brady.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Call me ‘sir’!”

“Yes, sir, my name is Lewis Brady.” To have refused the demand would have invited another beating. It wasn’t fear that kept Lew from wanting another beating, but the knowledge that he would need to be in the best possible physical and emotional shape for whatever came next; there would clearly be beatings enough without his requesting extra portions.

“In nineteen seventy-four,” Minawa said, referring to a sheet of paper on the table before him, “you were assigned by the CIA to the repressive government of Ethiopia.”

“No, sir,” Lew said. “Ethiopia hired me as an instructor. That had nothing to do with the CIA or any—”

“In nineteen seventy-five,” Minawa interrupted, “the CIA transferred you to the Angolan National Union. You won’t deny that was a CIA operation.”

“If it was,” Lew said, “I didn’t know it.”

The man lying on the sofa said, “You think you’ll kill us, but we can see you.”

“We have lists,” Minawa said. “When you crossed the border, we looked at the list.”

“What list would I be on?”

One of the roaming men, behind Lew at that moment, kicked him painfully in the ribs. “You will call the major ‘sir.’”

“I beg your pardon.” The kick made breathing difficult, but Lew tried not to show that. These creatures were more beasts than men, and would be attracted to weakness or fear. He said, “Sir, would you tell me what list my name was on?”

“Mercenaries,” Minawa said, “that our friends have identified as CIA.”

“What friends? Sir.”

“Our friends!” Minawa’s sudden displays of rage were metronomic, seeming to arise at specified intervals regardless of provocation.

“We have many friends,” the man on the sofa said. “And you have no friends at all.”

“The holy rebels of Chad learned the truth about you,” Minawa said, “and that was when you fled to Ethiopia.”

“Chad?” Briefly Lew had been involved in a rebellion in Chad, back in 1974, but why would—? And then it came clear. “Holy rebels” indeed; that was the rebellion financed by Libya. And wasn’t Colonel Gaddafi of Libya very tight with Idi Amin? “Libya,” Lew said.

They didn’t like it that he had seen through their mystery. The man on the sofa looked up at the ceiling as though no longer taking part in the conversation, and Minawa busily moved things around on his messy table, glowering and moving his lips.

Lew said, “Major, I can only assure you I have never been an employee of the CIA in my life.”

Still gazing at the ceiling, the man on the sofa said, as though reasonably explaining some simple concept to a dull child, “We will kill you before you can kill us. We have to protect ourselves; that is justice.”

“I am a tourist,” Lew said. “I have hotel reser—”

Minawa pounded his palm flat against the table top. “You are not a tourist! You are a mercenary soldier, a provocateur, an agent of the CIA!”

“No, sir, I’m—”

“If you lie,” Minawa said, pointing a blunt finger, “it will go very badly for you. We already know everything. You will write a paper. You will write what the CIA told you to do in Kampala. You will write the names of the people you were supposed to contact in Uganda.”

“Sir, I can only tell you this is a mistake. I have no—”

“You refuse to write the paper?”

There was nothing to say. Lew looked at the angry thick face of Major Minawa until one of the prowling men came over and stood in front of him, blocking Minawa from sight. The man calmly rapped his knuckles hard on top of Lew’s head. Lew winced but made no other move. The man rapped again, harder, and when Lew still showed no reaction he became enraged and pounded his fist down onto Lew’s head the way Minawa had just a moment ago pounded the table top. Pain jolted through Lew’s head, spread behind his eyes, swelled in all the muscles of his neck. If the man did that again, he would surely cause damage. Lew unclenched his hands from around his knees, preparing to kick, but Minawa said something in Nubian and the other man made a disgusted sound, slapped Lew across the face in a halfhearted way, and moved to the side.

Minawa said, “You will write the paper.”

“I would if I could, Major,” Lew told him, “but there’s nothing for me to say.”

The man on the sofa said, “Kalasi?”

“No,” said Minawa. “Not yet.” To Lew he said, “Stand up.” Lew did so, and Minawa said, “Come over here. Open your pants. Put your cock on the table.”

Lew stared at him. “Do what?”

Both prowling men now rushed over to hit and kick at him until he did as he’d been ordered. He stood there, humiliated, in pain, trousers open and penis a tiny helpless fish on the edge of the table, and he felt a fear very unlike the fear of death.

Minawa picked up a rusty—no, bloodstained—bayonet from the clutter on the table. He tapped it gently on the table near Lew’s shrinking member. He said, “You will write the paper.”

“Major,” Lew said, his mouth and throat completely dry, “Major, I’d write anything you wanted me to write. You know that. But if you say put down names of contacts in Uganda, I’ll have to make them up. There are no contacts in Uganda.”

Everyone in the room waited to see if Minawa would become angry. Minawa himself seemed to wait with the same sense of suspense. Finally he nodded and put down the bayonet and said, “The names are more important. You’ll give them to me later. You think you won’t, but you will.”

Laughing softly, the man on the sofa said, “You’ll tell us the thousand names of God. You’ll beg us to listen.”

“Close your trousers,” Minawa said, expressing contempt, as though Lew had been guilty of a social breach. Then he spoke in Nubian.

The two men who’d brought Lew in here got up from the sofa, one of them gesturing for Lew to go to the door. Lew turned, and found the man who’d hit him on the head standing there, blocking his way. Smiling at him, the man lifted his hand and extended his pinky with the long fingernail toward Lew’s left eye. The tip of the nail nearly touched the eyeball. Lew looked at him, unblinking, thinking, If you put that in my eye, I’ll rip your Adam’s apple out before they can stop me.

The man’s smile faltered, as though he found himself less funny than he’d expected. Or as if he’d seen something he didn’t like in Lew’s expression. He lowered the hand and spoke in Nubian past Lew to Minawa. They all laughed, which gave the man back his self-confidence; grinning, he stepped to one side and gestured elaborately for Lew to exit.

There was singing some distance ahead, a hymn being sung by many voices. Lew and his guards descended several flights of stairs, down into the earth under the State Research Bureau building, and the ragged but determined chorus of male voices grew steadily louder. The melody was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” but the words were Swahili.

Sunlight was far away now, the corridors and stairwells lit by harsh fluorescents too widely separated, so that the areas of glare led to pockets of shadow. The floors and walls were stained as though rivers of blood had flowed through here, and afterward had been imperfectly cleaned. Under Lew’s shoeless feet the steps were cold.

And then they reached a closed metal door with a ventilator opening near the top; it was from behind there that the singing came.

A soldier with a machine pistol had been sitting on a wooden stool beside the door. Lew’s escort spoke to him, and he stood, putting the machine pistol on the stool while he unlocked the door. At the sounds of the unlocking the singing within faded away into an expectant, perhaps horrified, silence.

The soldier pulled open the door, and a most incredible stench poured out, with the force of a physical punch to the stomach. A compound of rot, of human feces, of blood, of filthy unwashed bodies and filthy clothing, of urine and spoilage and death and fear. Lew stepped back against the opposite wall, appalled, and his two escorts laughed at him.

At first the interior was merely a sort of writhing darkness, the mouth and throat of some hideous monster exhaling that stench, but then the soldier hit a light switch beside the doorway and a fluorescent ceiling light came on in there, and the look of the place was even worse than the smell.

When the Yugoslavs had constructed this building for the Ugandan government, they’d included a tunnel leading from its basement to Amin’s Lodge, so he would have an escape route if ever he were besieged on his hilltop, and so he could in privacy come from the Lodge to the State Research Bureau to participate in the torture and murder here. (He liked, while wearing a gas mask, to club people to death with the butts of two pistols.) But the tunnel had turned out not to be the most practical route between the buildings, so the Lodge end had been sealed off and now the tunnel was used as a kind of holding pen for Research Bureau victims.

The tunnel was six feet high and five feet wide, and full of men. They were all black; some were half-naked; some wore rags and the torn remnants of clothing; all were barefoot. There were over a hundred in there, sitting or crouching on the floor, their backs against the wall, receding into the semidarkness beyond the fluorescent’s reach. Many of them were bloodstained, many had fresh wounds on their heads or chests or arms, and all of them blinked and moved in the sudden light, slack-jawed and moronic-looking.

A man near the door chattered in a fast panicky Swahili at the soldier, while pointing at someone or something farther back in the tunnel—perhaps the rusty trash barrel in the middle of the floor there.

No, it was about one of the other prisoners. The soldier replied, and there was a brief discussion, during which Lew adjusted his mind to this horror and gave his guards no more reason to laugh. Then two of the men in there stood up, picked up another man by the ankles and arms and, crouching under the low ceiling, carried him out and laid him on the floor in the corridor. He was dead. At some time recently, the hinge of his jaw had been broken and left unattended; the jagged-edged protrusion of white bone, blood-smeared, just under his ear, was as vivid as a scream against his black skin.

Lew was pushed forward. He crossed the threshold and stood there under the fluorescent, looking at the astonishment on all those faces as they stared back: a white man, in their Hell. Then the door clanged shut and the light went out.

In the dark he could hear them murmuring around him. The smell in here was violent in its intensity, and made more so by the darkness; it made him want to vomit, but at the same time was so thoroughly foul that it dried his mouth and throat and made vomiting impossible.

Lew wasn’t quite sure what to do—if he took a step, he’d probably walk on somebody—but then a hand touched his shin and a voice low to his right said, “Sit here. There’s room.”

Lew crouched, touched bodies, touched the cold rough wall where they had moved over to give him space. He sat, put his back against the wall, started to stretch his legs, and bumped them into someone else. “Sorry.”

“Put your legs over mine,” said the man across the way. “Later, we’ll reverse.”

“Thank you.”

The man beside him, the one who had touched his shin and spoken to him, now said, “Have courage, brother. God will watch over you.”

There was some dim light from the ventilator slot in the door. By its light, Lew could see that the man was portly, gray-bearded, probably the wrong side of fifty. He wore a torn white shirt and black trousers, and he had recent cuts around his eyes and on the bridge of his nose, as though he’d been hit while wearing glasses. He said, “I am Bishop Michael Kibudu.”

“Lew Brady. Bishop?”

“Of the Evangelical Baptist Mission. My church is in Bugembe.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Two months. I don’t believe there has ever been a white man in here before. Not in here. Would it be improper for me to ask what unlucky chance brought you to this place?”

“They got it into their heads I’m connected with the CIA.”

“Ah. They accused the archbishop of being in the employ of the CIA.”

“The one they killed? Is this some kind of religious persecution or something?”

Bishop Kibudu smiled, a sweet sad incongruous expression. “Something like that,” he said. “May I ask, are you saved?”

Had that particular question ever been asked in more ridiculous circumstances? “I don’t think so,” said Lew.

12

Frank took a swallow of 7UP, then carefully poured gin into the bottle and gently swirled it. He tasted again, nodded in satisfaction, and carried the bottle into Balim’s office, where Balim himself was on the phone, while to one side Isaac Otera and Bathar (who was known to everyone except his father as Young Mr. Balim) looked worried and useless as they watched Ellen pace back and forth in front of the desk, her expression full of storm clouds. “Here,” Frank said, and extended the bottle.

She glared at him, at his hand, at the 7UP. “What’s this?”

“Got gin in it. Calm you down.”

“I don’t want to calm down, you prick,” she said, and turned away to glare instead at Balim, talking slowly and insinuatingly and gently into the telephone.

Frank threw a mutinous look at the back of her head and downed the spiked 7UP himself. She was going too far, that’s all, and his sense of guilt was finally giving way to anger. They were doing what they could, weren’t they?

Drawing the conversation to a close, Balim extravagantly thanked the person he’d been talking to and with apparent reluctance hung up. He said to Ellen, “Now we must wait, the most difficult part of all.”

“It’s been hours.” Even Frank could see it was only her anger that kept her from falling apart; still, she shouldn’t go on calling him names in front of everybody.

“Patience is our only friend, at this point,” Balim said.

“He could already be dead.”

“Please,” Balim said, rising heavily from behind the desk, “put that much out of your mind. I have been told that a shipment of black Toyotas was received from Japan in Uganda within the last year, all consigned to the government. So these are not kidnappers or bandits.” He had come around the desk while talking, and now he tenderly touched Ellen’s forearm with his fingertips, as a faith healer might, as though to encourage a flow of his own strength and assurance into her. “They have taken Lew into custody, that is all.”

“But we don’t know what they’ll do to him.”

Frank said, “They’ll question him. It’s some kind of mix-up; they think he’s somebody else. They could even figure it out for themselves and let him go.” He didn’t himself quite believe any of this.

Ellen gave him a look of utter contempt, but at least she didn’t call him a prick. She said to Balim, “I want to call the American Embassy.”

Not again, Frank thought, we’ve been through all that. But Balim was patience itself. He said, “Ellen, I know my concern for our friend pales beside yours, but believe me, my concern is real, and if the American Embassy could help us I would phone them first. First.”

“Of course they’ll help. He’s an American citizen.”

“The American Embassy in Uganda is closed. Shall an American chargé d’affaires in Nairobi phone the French Embassy in Kampala and ask a chargé d’affaires there to make what would surely be a routine inquiry for a wandering American believed to be in Ugandan custody?”

“Why not?”

“Who is this American? the Ugandan authorities would ask themselves. Who is he that diplomats ask after him? And soon they will learn he has a long career as a mercenary soldier in Africa.”

“The same with the American Embassy in Nairobi,” Frank said, “not to mention the Kenyan government. What’s our connection with this guy Brady? What are we all up to? See what I mean?”

Even as he finished his statement, Frank saw by the warning looks from the others that he’d made some sort of tactical error, but he didn’t know what it was until Ellen turned to glare at him, saying, “So that’s the point, is it? This deal you’re all in on. We’ll try everything we can to get Lew back, just so it doesn’t endanger the deal.”

Fortunately for Frank, Balim himself answered, saying, “Ellen, no, certainly not! Frank made his point badly, but his intention was a good one, I assure you.”

Frank didn’t much care for Balim’s talking about him that way, even just as a psychological ploy with Ellen; nor did he care at all for Ellen’s sneer of contempt when she said to Balim, “A good intention, from Frank?”

Isaac Otera suddenly said, “You call it a deal. Maybe it is.”

Everybody turned in astonishment to look at Isaac, who wore the tight-clenched expression of the public speaker struck by stage fright but determined to go on. Blinking, hands closed into fists at his side, he said, “Maybe it’s something else. But whatever it is, if it comes out that Lew is in Uganda to help set up a coffee-smuggling operation, you’ll never see him again.”

“That’s right,” Balim said.

With a huge smile, feeling a great weight lift off his chest, Frank pointed at Isaac and said, “That’s what I meant! That’s the whole thing!”

Isaac took a hesitant step toward Ellen, saying, “The truth is, even though Lew was arrested because of some mistake, he has something to hide. Whatever we do to rescue him, we mustn’t risk giving away his secret.”

“Good God,” Ellen said faintly.

Balim said, “I am attempting now to get in touch with a gentleman high up in the Ugandan government. It may take—”

“Father, dear Father,” Young Mr. Balim said, “tell her the whole truth. She deserves it.”

Frank glowered, thinking, He’s after her, the slimy little wog, but the elder Balim nodded, accepting his son’s reproof. “The habit of secrecy,” he said, “is at times too strong in me. Ellen, our associate inside Uganda in the coffee transaction is a white man named Baron Chase, who is very high up in the government there. One of Amin’s most trusted assistants.”

“A white man?”

“Frank has known him for years.”

“A snake in the grass,” Frank said.

“But even a snake in the grass,” Young Mr. Balim said, smiling comfortably at Frank, “can have its uses.”

“I bet it can,” Frank told him.

Balim Senior said to Ellen, “I can’t call Baron Chase directly. What I have done is send messages to him through two separate intermediaries, that he should get in touch with me at once, on a matter of the utmost urgency. Those two gentlemen are both now on their way to Uganda. If one of them experiences difficulty—”

“Or cold feet,” said Young Mr. Balim.

“I think more highly of my friends than does my son,” Balim said, giving Ellen a rueful smile. (Frank saw that she faintly responded to the smile; Balim could do anything, when he set his mind to it.) “Still,” Balim added, “if for any reason one of my couriers fails, the other must surely succeed. Then Baron Chase will phone me, I will explain the problem, and he will arrange for Lew’s release.”

Still clearly dubious, Ellen said, “You make it sound almost easy.”

“It almost is. You go home now,” Balim said, patting Ellen’s shoulder, “and I’ll call—”

“No,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

“Ellen, I promise I’ll call you the minute—”

“Where should I go?” she demanded, astonishing Frank by suddenly flaring up at Balim. “Back to that little house by myself? Or to your guest room, or Frank’s living room? I’m better here.”

“But if the call comes late at night, when I’m at home?”

She looked at the telephone on his desk. “Wouldn’t it be the same number there?”

Balim laughed, again patting her shoulder, saying, “You win.”

“If the phone rings, I’ll pick up, but I won’t speak. I’ll just listen. No matter what he says, I won’t say a word.”

“I believe you,” Balim said. “You can stay.”

The pail contained two sandwiches that Bibi had made, four bottles of White Cap beer, two glasses, napkins, a small bag of homemade cookies. Frank looked in the pail, smiled, and was pleased. Putting its top on, he smacked the giggling Bibi on the rump and carried the pail out to the Land-Rover.

It was nearly eleven at night. The streetlights of Kisumu are dim and widely spaced. There isn’t much by way of nightlife, not out on the streets. Frank kicked the Land-Rover past houses that were mostly dark, or with a wan light showing pink through cloth-covered windows, and parked at last in front of Balim’s buildings. Two of the guards—ramshackle ragged men for whom hard hats and Sam Browne belts served as uniforms—lounged near the door on upturned wooden boxes; they made some small effort to look alert when Frank appeared, but didn’t go so far as to stand. The other guards would be around back, from where the possibility of theft was naturally greater.

The dog that patrolled inside this building at night was named Hakma. A big barrel-chested unamiable brute, he had once been described by Frank as half German shepherd and half gorilla. “Yeah, Hakma, hello, you know who I am, you fucking beast,” Frank said, standing still just within the door while the dog—much more conscientious than the human guards—sniffed his body first, and only then, having recognized the pass-smell, turned his attention to the good aromas from the pail. “That’s not for you, fucker,” Frank said, pushed the dog away, and headed for the offices.

The door between Isaac’s and Balim’s offices was ajar. The light was on in there, and voices sounded. Massively frowning, holding the pail up in front of himself with both hands on the handle as if it were an offering, Frank tiptoed across the dim outer room and looked through the doorway.

The kid! Son of a bitch bastard, it was Young Punk Balim in there with Ellen, grinning like the rat he was, telling stories, chuckling away. A wicker picnic basket was on the floor; a small gaily printed cloth now covered a third of Balim’s desk, and on it were plates and stemmed glasses. What were they eating? Cold chicken, cheese, fruit. Gritting his teeth, Frank watched the rotten bastard pick up a bottle of white wine to refill their glasses. “It may be my provincial background,” he was saying, oily punk, “but I have always found theater in the West End somehow too slick. Did you have that sense?”

“I know what you mean,” Ellen said. She was completely at her ease. Frank wanted to go in there and make her feel guilty, ask her how she could just picnic like this with Lew in God knows what trouble. Of course, he’d have to hide his own pail of sandwiches.

Reluctantly, in utter silence, he retraced his steps, shutting Isaac’s outer door behind himself and calling Hakma several uncomplimentary names on the way out.

It would be a loss of face in front of Bibi and Eddah to return this soon, and with the picnic uneaten. Feeling badly used, Frank drove southeast out of town and found a place to park where he could look out over the moonlit gulf. Forty miles away, too far to see from here, Winam Gulf opened into Lake Victoria, itself two hundred miles wide and two hundred fifty miles long. In all that vast expanse, with the moon shining down and the calm water rippling like a purring cat, there was not one place where Frank Lanigan would not feel unhappy.

“If that’s her taste—” he muttered, and opened the pail. He ate both sandwiches, drank two of the bottles of beer, skipped the cookies one by one across the calm water, drove home to the darkened house, kicked George off the bed, and slept like a log.

13

It was a beautiful young black woman in a bright-colored print dress who met Sir Denis Lambsmith this time at the strangely empty Entebbe Airport. Her dark-cinnamon skin glowed with innocent health, but there was something seductive in her broad smile and the eager glisten of her eyes. “I’m delighted to meet you, Sir Denis,” she said, shaking his hand, her own hand small and slender and firm. “I am Patricia Kamin, of the Ministry of Development.”

Sir Denis, despite the fact that he was immediately taken by this attractive young woman, couldn’t resist the temptation to ask, “What’s happened to Mr. Onorga?”

She looked prettily confused for a second; then the sunny sexy smile broke out once more and she said, “Oh, the man from the Coffee Commission! I believe he was transferred. You’re in my hands now.”

“Then I’m delighted,” Sir Denis said, smiling down upon her from his greater height and age and sex and race.

“You have your luggage? The car is this way.”

It was a black Toyota, which Patricia Kamin drove herself. No secret police this time; how pleasant. Beside her in the front seat, Sir Denis took pleasure in the movement of her knees and her sleek legs as she angled the car out of the empty parking lot and around the sweeping circle to the main road. All airports in former British possessions are toy versions of Heathrow, no matter how redundant the roundabouts.

“How is London?” she asked, once they were on the road, toward Kampala.

“Drizzly.”

She laughed, a musical sound, and said, “Still full of foreigners?”

He looked at her, surprised, not quite sure how to answer, not at all sure who she thought she was. “Foreigners?”

“When I was there over Christmas, the city was full of Norwegians and Danes and Frenchmen and I don’t know who all.”

“Oh, yes. Shopping.”

“That’s it,” she agreed. “You couldn’t get near Harrods. I did my shopping on Oxford Street.”

“I imagine that was also full.”

“It was. I’ll never understand international finance,” she said, flashing him another smile. “I met the nicest Swede, and he kept explaining to me over and over how he was saving money by coming all the way to London to do his Christmas shopping, but it simply never made sense. And the hotel he was in! A shower really big enough for two!”

Sir Denis drove himself from sexual thoughts with pompous statements. “I think we’ll find normality returning,” he said, “once the North Sea oil starts to flow.”

“No more of those headlines? ‘Pound Soars,’ ‘Pound Plummets’? That’s all the papers said, every day I was there. You could get positively giddy.”

“Newspapers,” Sir Denis said, with a wry smile and shake of the head.

“Did you ever hear,” she asked him, “the description of who reads which London papers?”

“No, I don’t believe I have.”

Frowning ahead at the road, her expression that of an earnest student, she said, “The Times is read by the people who run the country, the Observer by the people who think they run the country, the Guardian by the people who think they ought to run the country, the Express by the people who think the country ought to be run the way it used to be run, the Telegraph by the people who think it still is, and the Sun is read by people who don’t care who runs the country, just so she has big tits.”

His heightened sexual awareness at her use of that ultimate word almost—but not quite—overpowered Sir Denis’s polite response: the chuckle, the nod, and, “Very good. Very accurate.”

“I have cousins in Fulham,” she said. “They keep me up-to-date.”

So they chatted, and Sir Denis learned that Patricia Kamin had been for a while an attaché at the Ugandan Embassy in London, that her cousins had left Uganda at independence in 1962, and that she herself seemed unusually sophisticated on the question of national allegiance. Sir Denis at one point asked, “You don’t find it… difficult to work with the current government?”

She shrugged. “Why? At bottom, all governments are the same bureaucracy. If you learn how to do an acceptable job while letting your boss take all the credit, you can work for any government in the world.”

He laughed again, and saw that they were driving up a wooded hill, though still in the middle of the city. “Where are we going?”

“The Presidential Lodge. Since this is a more informal occasion than last time, President Amin wants you to be his guest in his home.”

That should have been flattering; but instead was frightening. Trying to hide his real fear with the display of a false trepidation, Sir Denis said, “I hardly think I deserve such an honor.”

“British modesty,” she said, quite openly laughing at him. “The rest of the world will never get the hang of it.”

“Not at all modest,” he said modestly, unable to keep from a modest simper.

Her own simper was downright suggestive. “I bet you have no reason to be modest at all,” she said.

His room was spacious and bright, but erratically furnished with too many contrasting items; Europe, Africa, and Arabia clashed in the pictures and tapestries and ornate mirrors, in the unusually tall kingsize bed covered with a gaudy cotton throw, in the wooden rocking chair painted a refreshingly straightforward white, in the cheap-looking frosted-glass light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. Heavy dark-green draperies were open at one end of the room, revealing glass sliding doors and a small concrete-railed terrace, on which stood two chrome-and-plastic lawn chairs.

Showered, changed, fortified with a whisky from his flask washed down with water from the bottle on the dresser, Sir Denis stepped out onto the terrace and looked at the hillside before him, dappled with bright swaths of color over pockets of darkness, alive with the late-afternoon songs of birds. Below, through the foliage, he could see the green, the church, the tall pink building. Idly, he wondered what that was.

Something made him turn, and the sight of a person in his room, through the glass doors, startled him so thoroughly that he grasped the concrete rail for support. But then, heart still pounding, he recognized the man as Baron Chase, and the expression on his face as a smile. Sir Denis made as though to reenter the room, but Chase came forward, gesturing to him to stay where he was.

Sir Denis had earlier pulled the glass door almost completely closed behind himself. Now Chase slid it open, stepped out onto the terrace, and said, “Forgive me, Sir Denis, I hope I didn’t startle you.”

“Not at all.”

“I knocked, but I’m afraid you couldn’t hear me out here.”

“Not to worry.”

Chase slid the door shut. “I’ve learned since our last meeting,” he said, as though casually, “we have a mutual friend.”

“Oh?”

“Emil,” Chase said, with a faint knowing smile.

Sir Denis had been so appalled at the idea that he and a man like Chase could have acquaintances—hardly friends—in common that it took him several embarrassing seconds to realize Chase meant Emil Grossbarger, who at lunch in London had said Chase wanted to make some sort of obscure deal. Then, even more embarrassingly, in his surprise he started to blurt the name out: “Emil Gross—!”

“Yes,” Chase said, so quickly and with such intensity and such a sudden feral glare that Sir Denis blinked and clamped his teeth shut. That had been a look at the real Baron Chase.

Who immediately dove out of sight again, like a submarine. His surface placid, Chase gazed out over the hillside, saying, “A beautiful city, Kampala. Probably the loveliest in the empire. What Saigon was for the French.”

“It’s fortunate in its setting.”

“If in nothing else,” Chase said wryly.

“I was wondering,” Sir Denis said. “What’s that pink building down there?”

“State Research Bureau,” Chase said, without inflection.

“What’s that?”

“Statistical section. You know, red tape.”

“Ah. Red tape in a pink building, how appropriate.”

“Isn’t it? Care for a walk on the grounds?”

Having understood—though belatedly—that Chase had spoken so indirectly about Emil Grossbarger because he expected that even on this terrace the bugging equipment might still pick up their words, Sir Denis now further understood that a walk on the grounds was the way to avoid eaves-droppers, so he immediately said, “Delighted.”

“Good. Come along, then.”

There were paths among the twisted branches, the great glossy leaves, the brazenly colorful and sweet-smelling flowers. Chase and Sir Denis strolled along, incongruously once or twice passing soldiers in field uniform and armed with machine pistols, for whom, apparently, the color of their skins was bona fide enough. Sir Denis waited for Chase to mention Emil Grossbarger, but for a long time the man merely chatted inconsequential things: air travel, the climate in London and in Uganda, the current trade problems between Uganda and Kenya. Knowing that Sir Denis now domiciled permanently in São Paulo, Chase also questioned him rather closely about Brazil, explaining he was thinking about various parts of the world in which he might “retire.” “Parts of the world other than Africa,” he said at one point, with his characteristic self-mocking smile.

Having already played the fool once today, on the terrace, Sir Denis refused to bring up the topic of Emil Grossbarger himself. His companion apart, the walk on the hillside was extremely pleasant, in this area too wild to be a park but too tame to be jungle. From time to time the pink building downslope was visible through the branches and blooms, its windows sparkling in the sun. The air was soft-scented and delicious, the light clear without glare, the rich earth underfoot padded with the mulch of centuries. The pink building formed a fanciful backdrop to a lovely soothing setting.

Chase said, “I understand you’ve met Patricia Kamin.”

“What? Oh, yes, she drove me in from the airport.”

“A bright girl,” Chase said. “Very good at her job, I believe.”

“I was impressed by her.”

“One of your liberated women, I understand,” Chase went on. “Sexually, if you know what I mean.”

Feigning mere polite interest, heart suddenly beating, the memory of Patricia’s mention of the Swede and the hotel shower suddenly engorged in his head, Sir Denis said, “Oh, really?”

“I’m told she’s quite the bedroom acrobat. I wouldn’t know, myself.”

“You surprise me,” Sir Denis said, heartily hating him.

“I don’t shit where I eat.”

The crudity of the phrase, mixing with the overstimulation of the subject matter, shut Sir Denis down completely, gave him no response at all, and made him unready for Chase’s abrupt change of subject:

“Grossbarger says you’ll talk for him.”

“Well—Yes, I suppose so.”

“You work a lot of sides of the street, eh?”

Sir Denis wanted to slap that knowing smile right off Chase’s mouth. “Not at all,” he said.

“You work for the Coffee Board, you negotiate with the Brazilians for the benefit of Grossbarger and with Grossbarger for the benefit of the Brazilians, you negotiate with us for both of them, and now you’re the go-between on a private arrangement between Grossbarger and me. I call that more than one side of the street.”

“I don’t,” Sir Denis said with utmost stiffness. “I have no personal stake in this matter at all.”

“You aren’t here for your health,” Chase snapped. He seemed angry, that subterranean violence threatening to surface again, as though Sir Denis in insisting on his own legitimacy somehow threatened that of Chase.

Sir Denis explained, “I am here representing the International Coffee Board. I am their employee, and they are the only ones who will pay me any money as a result of this transaction.”

“My, our skirts are clean.”

“I don’t know about yours,” Sir Denis said, “but mine certainly are.” And he was fully aware just how ludicrous it was to engage in this sort of silly contretemps in the middle of this lush flower-filled tame jungle, surrounded by birdsong, watched over by the sun-glinting windows of the pink building.

But perhaps the argument was over. Sir Denis’s last protestation might have done the trick; Chase now looked at him in a brooding way, as though considering the possible truth of what he’d been told. Tentatively, he said, “You transmit bribes.”

“Of course I do.” Sir Denis added, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if, before this transaction is done, I’ll be transmitting you a bribe.”

Chase ignored that deliberate insult; when involved in contemplation of his own advantage, Chase was clearly capable of ignoring any and all extraneous provocations. He said, “If your skirts are so clean—”

“Oh, come,” Sir Denis said, truly weary of this line of argument. “Just because a lot of naive American congressmen can’t accommodate themselves to the reality of this world doesn’t mean I have to be lectured on bribery by the likes of you.”

“American—” Chase seemed honestly bewildered by the reference, then abruptly laughed and said, “Oh, the Lockheed business. Yes, I catch your drift.”

“I would not bribe you to kill a man,” Sir Denis said, “that goes without saying. Nor to commit armed robbery.”

“Pity,” Chase murmured.

“But there are many parts of the world,” Sir Denis went on, “and I believe this is one of them, where the individuals in the pipeline must be given separate acknowledgment of their existence and importance.”

“Oh, well said!” cried Chase, laughing out loud, obviously delighted, holding no grudges at all.

Trying to get the discussion back on a rational and emotion-free track, Sir Denis said, “Emil Grossbarger suggested to me that it wasn’t a bribe you were after.”

“He did, did he? What did he suggest I was after?”

“He didn’t know.”

The two men strolled along the winding paths, the soft earth humped with the twisted dark shapes of exposed roots. There was barbed wire around the pink building; how odd.

Sir Denis kept expecting Chase to continue, to say what it was he wanted from Emil Grossbarger, but Chase had all at once fallen into a kind of blue funk. Sir Denis glanced from time to time at the man’s profile, but he remained deep in thought. From the unusual gauntness of his face, he was sucking on or biting his cheeks.

At last, at a junction of two paths, Chase said, “Well, I suppose we ought to go back. Dinner won’t be long.”

“But—Emil Grossbarger?”

Chase gave him a blank, meaningless smile. “We’ll talk again later,” he said.

The Presidential Lodge was a magpie’s nest, a pack rat’s lair. It was as though Idi Amin were on the mailing list of every gimcrack mail-order supply house in the world. Two wall barometers in one room. Fine Arab tapestries shared wall space with prints of ducks in flight. The furniture was of all styles, all gradations of taste, and there was far too much of it. A large avocado-colored refrigerator stood absurdly in a corner of the formal dining room; from time to time a white-coated waiter brought from it for the assembled guests beer or ice water or white wine.

Idi Amin sat at the head of the table, smiling, expansive, heavy, seeming to be performing some African touring company version of Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

In addition to Sir Denis, at Amin’s right hand, there were nearly a dozen other guests, including Patricia Kamin diagonally across the way, Baron Chase toward the other end of the table, and at Amin’s left the wife Sir Denis had not exactly met the last time he’d been in Uganda. Nor did he exactly meet her this time; though she smiled politely at him when they all went in to dinner, Amin never did introduce her.

The others present included a very nervous middle-aged American white couple, owners of a small air-charter service based at Entebbe and apparently dependent now for their livelihood not on the long-gone tourists but on the scraps from the government table. There was also another of Amin’s white advisers, an Englishman named Bob Astles with a brushy moustache and a hearty beefeater manner; he was apparently a bit closer to the Amin ear than was Baron Chase; at least he was at dinner, being just beyond the unnamed wife and just before Patricia Kamin.

To Sir Denis’s right was a German woman, Hilda Becker, who represented the German manufacturer that had recently delivered several new diesel engines to Kenya Railways; apparently Amin was negotiating with her for similar diesels for Uganda Railways, which unlike the rest of the rail lines of Africa was still run almost exclusively by steam.

Sir Denis would have liked to talk with the German woman, but Amin monopolized him throughout dinner. Gone was the nonsense of translated Swahili; Amin spoke a good and colloquial English, though with quite a pronounced accent: “But the Brazilians will be happy,” for instance, came out “But-a dah Brah-zilians will-ah be hop-pee.” In that slow heavy voice from deep within that barrel chest, with the words forming one by one like bricks and linked by extra syllables, there was an impression of great power, surprisingly lightened by Amin’s laugh and his clear appreciation of the ridiculous. It was as though Henry Kissinger at his most ponderous had been crossed with Muhammad Ali at his most butterfly-and-bee.

Unfortunately, the ponderous side was much more evident than the playful. Sir Denis, to his astonishment, midway through the meal found himself the one-man audience to an Idi Amin lecture on hygiene. “Dis-ah continent,” Amin told him, leaning toward him, lifting one finger from the table to emphasize the point, “dis-ah continent is not ah good place to be dirty. No, is not. You got-ah dah”—and he held thumb and forefinger close together to emphasize their smallness—“bugs. Not like-ah Europe. It’s a cold-ah country, you see. Europe is a cold-ah country. Not-ah so good for dah bugs.” Then he laughed, the hearty boom, and said, “Not-ah so good for dah people, needer.”

Sir Denis might have responded to that, with some dinner-table jest, but Amin became at once serious again, and the lecture swept on, undiminished. “But-ah in Africa, you got-ah to be very careful about how clean-ah you are. You got-ah to look under dah fingernails”—he pointed at his own horny square amber nails on his thick-fingered brown-skinned hand—“you got-ah to look in your hair”—he tapped a middle finger against his great coconut skull—“and you got-ah to look very careful at-ah your private parts.” This time he pointed at Sir Denis.

“Actually,” Sir Denis said, determined to waylay the conversation and take it off to some more pleasant clime, “even in Europe—”

“And-ah your clodes,” Amin told him. “Your under-ah-clodes and-ah your shoes and-ah all-ah your clodes. It’s-ah very important for-ah dah African to keep-ah himself clean. Dis is-ah why when dah European come, dey brought-ah dah epidemic.”

“Yes, I take your point,” Sir Denis said, speaking much more quickly than normal, “but I don’t think—”

“Now-ah dah Nile,” Amin said, leaning closer, as though about to impart an extremely important secret, known to few, “dah Nile is very dangerous for-ah dah water. Also dah crocodile”—here he interrupted himself to chuckle, but swooped back to the lecture before Sir Denis could make use of the opportunity—“but more-ah dan even dah crocodile you got-ah dah microbe. You know-ah dah microbe?”

“Yes, of course, I—”

“It can make-ah you very sick,” Amin said. “In-ah dah stomach, and out-ah dah ass.”

It went on like that.

After dinner, in a rustic unfinished-looking room—rather like the lounge in a small unsuccessful family hotel in the mountains—there was entertainment. Amin, showing another side of his personality, stood by the Ping-Pong table and described with vast enjoyment an epic game of table tennis between himself and a young Ugandan Air Force colonel. Amin mimed the great sweeping forehands and intricate little sneaky shots, his mobile face ranging from comic triumph to comic despair. He gave a running commentary—a quite funny running commentary—mixed with quotes from himself and from the colonel. He imitated the colonel as a very upright, very British, very old-school-tie sort of young chap, and he imitated himself as a clumsy but game bear. At the end, when all hope seemed lost, the bear delivered a series of massive backhand smashes—“A high-drogen bomb! Boom!” Amin cried, and lashed his arm around as though to demolish the wall—and the bear won.

Sir Denis was surprised to find himself laughing, along with the rest of the guests. The man could truly be quite funny, quite charming and personable. The only reminder that this wasn’t the total Amin was the fact that the American couple with the government-dependent airline laughed much too loudly and too long, and twice they even led applause. The odor of their panic was a subtle but effective antidote to Amin’s playful charm.

After the recitative, music. A band dressed irrelevantly in Mexican-style outfits—sombreros, small bullfighter jackets, black trousers with intricate silver designs down the seams—stood at one end of the room with horns and guitars and played tinkly popular music accompanied by the rattling of a lot of gourds.

Amin started the dancing, his first partner being Patricia Kamin and the second his wife. Sir Denis watched Patricia, small and graceful in the arms of big lumbering Amin, and then he looked away.

There was a bar at the opposite end of the room. Sir Denis went there and asked for a brandy. They had none, so he took gin-and-tonic, and was turning away when Baron Chase came over, saying, “Wait for me. Beer,” he told the barman, accepted it, and strolled with Sir Denis down the side of the room.

The obedient American couple were now dancing, awkwardly, their elbows sticking out. Bob Astles danced with the German woman. Chase said quietly, “If I heard you right this afternoon, you’re a neutral.”

They were moving closer to the band, and it was hard to hear Chase over the trumpet and saxophones, which was undoubtedly the man’s idea. Sticking close to him, Sir Denis said, “I’m not sure I take your meaning.”

“You have no stake in this,” Chase said. “You don’t have opinions. You just do what you’re told.”

“I suppose that’s a fair description.”

“You don’t carry tales.”

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage. I don’t understand the statement.” Amin was dancing now with his wife; Patricia was at the bar.

“I mean,” Chase said, frowning at the trumpet player, “if you found out the Brazilians were cheating Grossbarger, just as a for instance, you wouldn’t squeal to Grossbarger. You’re neutral.”

“Oh, I see.” Sir Denis thought hard about that. “I’m not sure that’s right,” he said. “Morally neutral? I wouldn’t want to do anything to destroy a fair and equitable negotiation, but if one party were engaged in fraud, wouldn’t it be my obligation to bring that into the open?”

Chase suddenly smiled, as though that were the answer he’d been waiting for, all along. “Fine,” he said. “We’re all safe with you, our secrets are safe, our prospects are safe, as long as we’re all good boys.”

“An odd way to look at it.”

“Oh, very good!” Chase cried, but now he meant something else. He was looking across the room, and now he started to applaud. So did the American couple. The band hurriedly finished their number.

Amin was coming forward, grinning and nodding, carrying in one hand a small accordionlike instrument. A band member dragged over a folding chair from the side wall. Amin nodded his thanks, sat down in front of the band facing the audience, and called out, “Now you goin tah hear sometin! Now you goin tah dance!” He thumped out the rhythm with his right foot and started to play a bouncy little tune. Raggedly at first, but then more professionally, the band gave him accompaniment.

Patricia was standing beside Sir Denis; tapping his arm, she said, “Care to dance?”

“I’d love to. I am a bit rusty.”

“We’ll lubricate you.”

He put his glass on a side table next to hers, and they joined most of the other guests in the middle of the floor. He wasn’t quite sure whether he was doing a waltz or a polka or a foxtrot, but it didn’t seem to matter; high spirits had taken over, and from an extremely unpromising beginning, an actual party was coming to life. Also, it was delicious to feel the slender athletic body of Patricia Kamin in his arms.

Amin played two tunes, then played both of them again, then stopped. Patricia smiled at Sir Denis, told him how well he danced, said she would love to squire him to a dance someday in London, and when Amin stopped playing she said, “It must be very lonely for you, spending so much time far from home.”

He didn’t have a home, not since the death of Alicia, but that didn’t seem the right topic for conversation at the moment, so he merely said, “Well, I have my work. I do enjoy that.”

“Still. They gave you the pretty room, didn’t they? The one with the great big bed?”

“That’s right.”

“I get lonely, too, sometimes,” she said, astonishing him. “If I get lonely later tonight, may I come see you?”

“But of course,” he said, flabbergasted.

“Till then.” Her smile, so warm and friendly and yet at the same time so loose and seductive, beamed on him like a golden light. She touched the tip of his chin and left the room, picking up her drink on the way by.

I’m sixty-one, Sir Denis thought, but he was only astonished by his luck; he didn’t doubt the luck.

Across the room, Amin was showing the American wife how to play his musical instrument, which he called a melodeon. Her husband was displaying so much fear and humiliation that Sir Denis couldn’t bear to look at him.

Baron Chase came over, and clearly he had at last made some sort of decision. “I have something for you to tell our mutual friend,” he said, again speaking under the party sounds: the melodeon and Amin’s booming voice and the slightly hysterical laughter.

“Of course,” Sir Denis said.

“Tell him,” Chase said, “that I am very interested in making a personal business deal with him, one that’s very much in his interest.”

“Certainly.”

“However,” Chase said, and was interrupted by a white-coated servant. Chase gave the man an irritable frown, but stepped away to listen to him. Sir Denis couldn’t hear what the servant said, but he heard Chase say, “Now? What could be so urgent at this time of night?”

The servant obviously pleaded ignorance, but with a further explanation, to which Chase replied testily, “Then he can go right back to Kenya.”

The servant waited, unsure whether he was to stay or go, or what message he was to deliver. Chase was very annoyed, but also fatalistic; at last he sighed and said, “All right, if I must.” Turning back to Sir Denis, he said, “Tell our friend I can’t discuss the details with neutrals. He must send me somebody of his own.” Then he was gone.

Lights gleamed in the windows of the pink building. Sir Denis, on the point of closing the green draperies over the glass wall facing the terrace, looked down through the tame jungle and saw the office lights on, and was amused: the bureaucrats of the State Research Bureau never sleep. He closed the drapes.

He was wearing a maroon silk robe, one of his oldest possessions. He had left the party almost immediately after Patricia, had showered in the small rusty bathroom adjoining this room, and now he was waiting, jagged with anticipation.

He waited more than an hour. After two failed attempts at putting down tonight’s activities for his journal, he merely paced the room, fretting, his mind full of worries. Would she actually come? Had he been right in thinking the invitation a sexual one? Would he be able to perform acceptably?

The knock on the door was so gentle he barely heard it. Then he stood for several seconds, merely staring at the door. Don’t be a fool, he told himself, and corrected it at once: Don’t be an old fool. You’re sixty-one, you are rich in years and wisdom and the things of this world. There is nothing vital at stake in this room tonight, nothing for you to be afraid of. At the very worst, you’ll make a fool of yourself in the eyes—and perhaps the arms—of a woman young enough to be your granddaughter, and if that does happen, you won’t be the first sixty-one-year-old ever to be in that position.

There. Feeling better, more secure, even laughing at himself a bit, Sir Denis finally opened the door.

She was dressed as she had been at the party, which made him instantly believe he’d misunderstood the whole thing, but even as he was trying to phrase the apology for his own informal garb, she smiled that lascivious smile and said, “Oh, I love this room. And I love that big bed.” And he knew it was all right.

Closing the door, turning the switch to lock it, he said, “I’m delighted you’re here.”

“So am I.” Putting down the small bottle of wine she’d brought, she put her hands on both sides of his head, drew his face down to hers, and kissed his mouth.

Over the years, Sir Denis had read in books or heard in stories about women who were tigresses in bed, but he had never known one from personal experience.

A tigress can be a frightening thing, even when she is loving you. Patricia, long tawny body, strong breasts, supple legs, ravenous belly, was the tigress, and he was the veldt on which she prowled, insatiable, hungry, demanding.

He had never in his life tasted a woman’s genitals, but she would not be denied. Against his mouth she ground herself, insisting on his tongue and his teeth, pulling his hair, while his nose filled with her juices and he found himself laughing into that mask of bone and flesh. He wanted to do more; he wanted to do things he’d never heard of. And he did.

When his climax came he was spread-eagled on his back on the huge bed, she straddling him, her hard hands pressing his bony shoulders down, her sleek belly pumping as he lunged upward into her, crying out, gasping, craving that wonderful warm grotto, cave painting with his semen on its yielding walls.

He thought then that he was finished, and had nearly fallen asleep when she came out of the bathroom to insist they shower together. The tigress still prowled.

In the warm water she soaped his body, then arched and preened and laughed as he soaped hers. They tickled and played and she rubbed against him, but when he saw her smile change again to that intense look he said, “Oh, my dear, I’m not as young as I used to be. I couldn’t possibly do that again tonight.”

“Oh, yes, you could,” she said.

She dried his body with the rough-textured towels, pinkening his flesh and making him wince away, saying, “Gently. Gently.”

“Not gently,” she said.

Still, for a long time he remained unready, no matter how she crawled on him on the bed, how she engulfed him. She had to no effect taken him into her mouth, and he was about to apologize once more and suggest they sleep for now, start over in the morning, when all at once she shoved a finger deep into his rectum. “Ow!” he yelled, shocked and hurt, and she pulled it halfway out and rammed it in again.

It hurt! He tried to arch away from it, but that merely pushed him against her mouth, the tongue and teeth and lips working on him like busy mice at a sack of grain, and suddenly it seemed as though a steel rod were running painfully through his body from the tip of that probing finger directly into his cock. It stirred, it swelled, it stood, aching and vibrating but absolutely solid, and she laughed in triumph.

“Take it out!”

“No!” she shouted, jabbing him with real savagery. “Put it in!” she demanded, and raped him, first in this position, then that, but always with the damnable finger there, urging him on. Deep inside one another, they clawed and tangled on the bed, Sir Denis biting hard at her shoulders and breasts, trying to draw blood from her buttocks with his nails, even at one point clutching her by the throat and strangling her while pumping away below with the desperation of the driven beast.

He thought he was dying; he thought he’d exploded, had a stroke, had a heart attack, was already dead. There had never been an orgasm like it, something beyond pleasure, even beyond pain, extending into some alternative universe of inside-out wrenching unreality. It was like being thrown into flames, or into ice water. Pain lanced up from his scrotum and out the tip of his cock, and even she screamed from it, grinding down, pressing for more, insisting on every last drop of agony, while he thrashed on the bed, his muscles knotting, his bones shattering, his empty tortured belly draining out of him and into her.

And this time the tigress was satisfied. While he panted, sweat running on his body, she stretched like a well-fed cat. Then, laughing, lightly slapping his cheek, she tripped away to the bathroom, and when she came back, she poured out two small glasses of sweet thick local wine from the bottle she’d brought. She cut his with water from the bathroom sink, saying, “No Englishman likes this without water.”

It was still too sweet, but he was in too much rapture to deny her anything. In this bed tonight she had made him a thirty-year-old, and his aching, quivering, trembling body was in seventh heaven. The combination of gratitude, delight, and lust with which he looked at her could fairly be called love. He drank the wine.

Neither of them was immediately ready for sleep. With the room illuminated only faintly by the bathroom light through the slightly open door, they sat side by side on the bed, backs against the wall, sipping the wine, and she asked him about his work. He told her about Grossbarger and the Brazilians. He told her about his confusing conversations with Baron Chase. He told her more things and then more, and was surprised to hear himself, but still he went on answering her questions, sipping the wine. And when the wine was finished, she said, “Now you sleep.”

“Oh, yes.” He lay flat on the bed, then rolled half over to kiss the inside of her thigh. “Thank you, Patricia,” he said.

“My pleasure.” She ruffled his thin white hair, and very soon he fell asleep.

She was still awake an hour later, when the scratching sounded at the door. He heard it, in the deepest part of his sleeping brain, but didn’t wake up. Nor did he do anything but shift position slightly when she slid out of bed, crossed the room naked, unlocked the door, and opened it for Idi Amin to enter.

He was beaming, grinning from ear to ear. Nodding over at the sleeping man, he whispered in Swahili, “He talked a lot. That’s good.”

“I enjoyed it,” she whispered.

Amin snuffed the musky air. “Lot of fucking going on in here.”

“You know me,” she whispered, grinning.

“Get ready for it,” he said.

She knelt on the floor, legs spread, head and shoulders down, round smooth rump high. Amin opened his trousers and knelt between her ankles and shoved himself into her. Clamping his hands on her buttocks, he moved her back and forth like a machine he was operating. He grunted from time to time, and she moaned into the carpet.

On the bed, Sir Denis slept, frowning, uncomfortable. He dreamed of large dogs eating dark chunks of meat among boulders. They frightened him, and yet he was above them, merely an observer.

In the morning, he awoke alone.

14

The stench never got better. Lew had expected to grow used to it, but every intake of breath brought the same revolting shock, those fumes spreading through the brain with a message of despair: No one in such a place as this should ever hope for comfort or happiness again.

And yet, many of the men in here—perhaps even a majority—seemed not to have abandoned hope entirely. Low-voiced conversations took place; there was the intermittent singing of hymns; now and again there was even an instant of wry laughter. Whenever a man, driven by the imperatives of his body, was forced to use the trash barrel, he invariably apologized for the addition he was now making to the general stink. “We are mostly Christians here,” Bishop Kibudu said by way of explanation, and he meant people who were active and fervent in their religion.

That Idi Amin’s repression, which began as tyranny’s usual weapon of terror against political dissent, ended finally as massive religious persecution was partly an accident of history, partly a result of Amin’s own ignorance, as the Bishop explained. Amin had been put into power in 1971 with the help of the British and the Israelis, neither of whom had any idea what sort of monster they were spawning. All the British knew was that Amin’s predecessor, Milton Obote, appeared to be leaning too far to the left; the Marxist rather than the Labour left. And all the Israelis cared about was the rebellion then going on in southern Sudan, the nation lying between Egypt and Uganda; with a friendly government in Uganda, Israel could give covert assistance to the Sudanese rebellion, thus tying up thousands of Egyptian troops who might otherwise be turned against Israel.

Amin had always been a soldier, caring only for that, with no active interest in religion. He came from the Muslim north of Uganda but had never claimed to be a Muslim. In talking with ministers and priests he had expressed interest in Christianity but had never followed through. When he visited Israel shortly after taking power, he had many nice things to say about Judaism.

But that was also the trip when he asked the Israelis to help him attack the Tanzanian port city of Tanga in order to give his landlocked country a corridor to the Indian Ocean. He also asked for a lot of money, but was vague about how he intended to spend it. And in that same period he asked the British to give him a fleet of jet bombers, explaining he wanted to use them to bomb South Africa.

Just as the British and the Israelis were both saying no to Amin—a bit belatedly—he happened to meet Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, the fool who runs Libya. Gaddafi, a Marxist Muslim, explained to Amin that the Israelis were really Jews, who are no good, and that the British were capitalists, and therefore also no good. He further explained that Libya had millions of dollars in oil wealth, to be spent to advance the cause of radical Islamic Marxism around the world. “But that’s me!” Amin told him, suddenly discovering his deep religious feelings, and he went on to explain to Gaddafi that Uganda was a Muslim nation with only a splinter of Christians left, and that he—Idi Amin Dada himself—had set as his primary task the complete Islamization of his country.

It’s a mark of Gaddafi’s grip on reality that he believed this guff. Uganda in fact is the most thoroughly Christianized nation in Africa, having been the target of European missionaries for nearly a hundred years. In 1972, when Amin was telling Gaddafi that the country was ninety-five percent Muslim and only five percent Christian, it was in truth eighty-five percent Christian, and six percent Muslim. (The final nine percent still clung to the old tribal animist creeds; a favorite rock or tree.)

Gaddafi began to give Idi Amin money; pots of money. And weapons. And a country house for himself and his family in Libya. And whatever else Amin wanted.

And Amin, for his part, began to give Gaddafi results. He turned against Britain and Israel, saying “Hitler was right about the Jews, because the Israelis are not working in the interest of the people of the world, and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas in the soil of Germany.” He banned twenty-nine Christian sects. Entire congregations were arrested, imprisoned, beaten, sometimes murdered en masse. The Salvation Army was banned. White ministers were usually left alone, but black ministers were tortured and killed. Of the five hundred thousand people eventually murdered by Amin’s government with the help of Gaddafi’s money, over half went to their deaths believing themselves to be Christian martyrs.

Bishop Kibudu explained some of this to Lew, as the hours went on. In a place of such horror, calm conversation seemed to help, to keep the brain from exploding. The bishop described the church he and his parishioners had built at Bugembe, a suburb of Jinja. In return, Lew described Alaska to the bishop, who had never been to the Western Hemisphere. The bishop told church anecdotes involving weddings, the visits of foreign clergymen, comical mix-ups at picnics. Lew told cleaned-up mercenary anecdotes: travel on rafts on the Congo River, rifles shipped with the wrong-caliber bullets. And every second of every minute of every hour was intolerable.

And of course there were the lice. The tunnel was filled with lice, living on the wounded bodies, inside the filthy clothing. Lew felt them crawl on him, and at first he fought back, but they came in the thousands, inside his pants, inside his shirt. He scratched when they bit him, but whenever he put his hand under his shirt it was as though his skin were moving. With all his will, he tried to pretend they weren’t there.

From time to time the door was opened, the glaring fluorescent light was turned on, and a minidrama was played out. Three times, additional men were pushed in, always bleeding from fresh cuts and scrapes and puncture wounds. Twice, certain men’s names were called and they went out. Those times, the stillness in the fetid tunnel took on a new quality, a communal gathering together, because those men were going to their death.

“John Emiru. Nahum Tomugwang. Godfrey Okulut.”

Each man, tattered, encrusted with blood, struggled to his feet and climbed over all the other legs to the doorway. Each man was handcuffed, his hands in front of his body. Quiet good-byes were said by the men still seated on the tunnel floor. The handcuffed men nodded, keeping their heads down. The door shut. The light went out. Bishop Kibudu said, “They will soon see God.”

“There are many ways to die here,” said a man across the way. “They don’t like to use bullets, that’s too expensive. They may strangle you with wire. They may cut you through with swords. They may beat you with tire irons.”

“Sledgehammers,” said another man. “When they take out the men one at a time, it’s for the sledgehammer.”

Lew scratched his bites and licked his dry lips. “Why one at a time?”

“Well, two at first,” said the man. He had the manner of a fussy teacher, perhaps at the high-school level. “Two men are taken out. One is handed a sledgehammer and told if he will beat the other man to death he will be set free. So he does it, and then another man is brought out and given the sledgehammer and told he will be set free if he kills the second man. And so on.”

“It is Satan’s work,” Bishop Kibudu said. “To try to make the sin of murder a man’s final act before he goes to God’s judgment. These people have given themselves over to the Prince of Darkness.”

Each time the door opened, someone called to the guard to ask what time it was. The stupidity of that, here where time no longer mattered, finally prompted Lew to comment to the bishop, “He sounds as though he’s got an appointment somewhere.”

“It’s for the history,” the bishop said.

“History?”

“This will come to an end. There will be survivors. Each one of us records in his mind as much as he can of what goes on here. At two in the morning of March twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-seven, this person and that person were taken away. When this is over, the survivors will write down what they know. They shall bear witness for the rest of us.”

“And if there are no survivors?”

“God survives. God’s history lasts. God’s justice is final.”

The light came on, the door opened, and the soldier was there, with two other soldiers, both carrying rifles with bayonets attached.

“What time is it?”

“Three-thirty in the morning. Lewis Brady.”

“God be with you,” the bishop said.

It is sometimes possible to defeat handcuffs. If, when the cuffs are being attached, one tenses one’s forearms and thumbs and fingers just so, the wrists expand slightly and the cuffs are likely to be attached one notch looser than otherwise. That’s the first step.

It seemed to Lew the first step had worked; when he relaxed, the cuffs didn’t feel particularly tight.

The soldiers with the bayoneted rifles apparently spoke no English. They jabbered together in some other tongue—not Swahili—and directed Lew with gestures and shoves. They would be going back the way he had come.

Along the way, on the right, was an open door leading to a fairly large concrete cell. The three men who had been taken away an hour ago were in there, on their hands and knees, scrubbing the cell with their cuffs still on. At first it looked as though a fifty-gallon drum of chocolate syrup had burst in there, but then Lew realized it was blood. Thick on the walls, lying in three-inch-deep puddles on the floor. A warm sick fragrance flowed out the open door. The kneeling men were themselves now covered with the blood as they soaked rags in it and squeezed out the rags over buckets. Lew staggered, feeling nausea and vertigo, but the soldiers shoved him on, and the vision of that cell was left behind.

Lew continued to totter and to slump, giving the impression that he was very weak, and while slumped he greased his hands with the sweat from his chest and neck.

To remove the handcuff, you fold the base of the thumb in as tight to the palm of your hand as you can get it, at the same time folding the little finger in from the other side. You push the cuff upward along the hand, screwing it back and forth. You spit on your hand to increase the lubrication. There’s a spot where the bone at the base of the thumb and the bottom knuckle of the little finger conspire against you, but you keep twisting, feeling the flesh tear, feeling the sting of sweat and saliva in new cuts. But once you’re past that point, the handcuff is off.

At the foot of a flight of stairs, with the soldiers behind him, Lew fell forward onto the steps. Head lowered, looking past his body, he could see their feet as they came up to chivvy him onward. It was the left cuff that was loose, so when he sprang up turning from the steps he lashed his right hand around, the dangled cuff smashing into one soldier’s face. The man screamed, dropping the rifle, falling back against the wall, and Lew kicked out at the other soldier’s groin.

But number two was already backpedaling, aiming the rifle. He seemed uncertain what to do, had probably been ordered to bring Lew along without too much violence; they still wanted to question him about the CIA.

Before the soldier could make a decision, Lew jumped him, lunging forward, then ducked to the side as the man brandished his rifle. Lew’s right arm thrust forward beside the rifle, the loose cuff sliding onto the bayonet, scraping along it to the hilt like a perfect throw in a ring-toss game. Lew flung his arm upward, and the rifle twisted out of the soldier’s hand and fell to the ground. Lew kicked him in the face as he reached for the weapon, grabbed it himself, turned, and as the other soldier came groggily away from the wall Lew ran him through with the bayonet. He heard the blade grate and break against the concrete wall.

The other soldier tried to run, back down the corridor. Lew caught him in three steps, folded his arms around the man’s head, and snapped his neck. He let the body drop, then looked from one soldier to the other. Both dead. Good.

When in action, when plying his trade, there was a thing that took over in Lew, a welding of mind and body as complete and as efficient as that in a concert pianist on a stage or a basketball player on the court. At other times he might have opinions about war, about destruction, about killing, but when he was in it, the opinions ceased to exist. He was a craftsman of death, and he was good at his craft.

The rifles were their only weapons. In their pockets were some Ugandan shillings and some matches, all of which he took. Also the key to the handcuffs.

Without the cuffs, carrying the rifle with the unbroken bayonet, still shoeless, Lew hurried up the stairs.

At the top, the corridor turned to the right. Looking around the corner, Lew saw a guard seated on a bench, gazing at a comic book, apparently half-asleep. He was possibly thirty feet away.

A shot would attract attention, even in here. Lew detached the bayonet, leaned the rifle against the wall, and held the bayonet against his right forearm, its hilt in the cupped palm of his hand. Then, his manner confident and decisive, he strode around the corner and directly toward the guard.

He had thought it out this way: either his presence in this building as a prisoner was generally known, or it was not. Did every paltry soldier know every detail of the events here? There was a good chance that a white skin and a self-confident manner would carry the day.

They did. The guard looked up, mildly curious, and then mildly surprised to see the strange white face, and then horribly astonished when Lew stabbed him through the throat.

Back to pick up the rifle. With rifle in his left hand and the bayonet in his right—blade cleaned on the dead guard’s sleeve—he hurried forward, retracing his steps from yesterday afternoon.

Two men in uniform came out of a room ahead of him, failed to see him, and strolled away down the corridor, one of them lighting a cigarette for the other. Lew killed them both, one with the bayonet and the other with his hands, then went back to the room they’d come out of. It was a plain small office, empty although the light had been left on. Bound copies of The Economist filled a low bookcase under the windows; before Amin, the State Research Bureau had really been a statistical section.

The casement window wouldn’t open all the way until he broke the mechanism. Then he could look down and see that he was on the first floor, but with a fairly long ten-foot drop to packed brown earth. Floodlights glared out there, but they were concentrated on the parking areas and the barbed-wire fence, leaving the building walls in semidarkness.

Up the hill, through the trees, shone the lights of some sort of villa.

Lew dropped the rifle first, then jumped, carrying the bayonet. He lost it when he landed and rolled, but found both weapons and moved around the building, staying close to the wall.

Barbed-wire fence. A guarded front gate. But parked in front of the building was a black Mercedes-Benz, and pacing impatiently beside it was a tall white man in Ugandan Army uniform. A white man in Ugandan Army uniform!

Lew was too cheered by his good luck to question it. In that uniform, in that car, with his white face, surely he could get through the gate and away.

Again the rifle was left behind, this time with the bayonet beside it: he wanted no blood on that uniform. He moved through the shadows, crouching, stopping, easing on. The man paced back and forth, his range from just ahead of the Mercedes to two paces behind it. That was where Lew would get him; behind the car.

The man completed a circuit. He turned. Lew came up like a panther out of a tree, his arms reaching for the man’s head, closing, twisting.

“Lew Brady!”

His victim shouted it, and that half-strangled cry saved the man’s life. An inch from death, he hung there from Lew’s arms while Lew listened to the echo of his own name.

Still holding on, feeling the man taut but not struggling in his grip, Lew eased himself back, breathed deeply, moved slowly out of that killing mode in which he’d been operating. It was hard not to kill this man; it was very hard. Still holding him, still wanting to finish the move, he whispered in his ear, “Who are you?”

“Baron Chase! I’m here to get you out!”

Baron Chase. Frank had talked about him; Balim had mentioned him. His arm aching from the incomplete action, Lew released the man and stepped back as Chase turned, holding his throat, leaning back against the rear fender of the Mercedes for support. “My God,” he said, his voice very hoarse. “You’re damn good.”

“Explain yourself.” Lew had no interest in chitchat.

“Balim sent me word. I put on this uniform and came down to get you out.” Then Chase looked more closely at Lew, frowning at his eyes. “You haven’t hurt anybody, have you?”

Lew laughed at him.

15

When the second call came, at four-fifteen in the morning, Ellen and Young Mr. Balim—whom she now called Bathar—were playing Parcheesi at the elder Balim’s desk. Bathar, having just rolled doubles twice in a row, had captured two of Ellen’s pieces, and she, very involved in the game, said, “I need some good news now.” And the phone rang.

Bathar sat smiling fondly at her as she picked up the receiver and listened to the conversation. It was Baron Chase again, the same man who had called the first time, when Ellen had listened to Balim describe the problem with a wonderful slippery economy. This call, the conversation was even shorter.

“Package recovered,” Chase said to Balim, who had picked up his extension at home.

“Any damage?”

Ellen stopped breathing, waiting for the answer.

“Not to the package.” That had been said with some sort of inexplicable bitter twist. But then, more normally, Chase said, “I’ll ship it back to you in the morning.”

“Very good. Your help is appreciated.”

In the room, Bathar said, “You’re smiling.”

Ellen hung up while the two men were saying their farewells. “He’s all right,” she said.

“I could tell.”

“He’ll be back tomorrow.”

Bathar got to his feet. “Shall I drive you home?”

“Don’t you want to finish the game?”

“No.” Bathar seemed amused by something. “I don’t think I was going to win, anyway.”

She was so absorbed in the idea of Lew that it wasn’t until the next day that she caught his meaning.

The sky was heavy with clouds in the morning, great dirty pillows and blankets piled up and falling about, some moored in their places while, above or below, thinner layers scudded along in full sail.

Frank picked her up at the house—she’d slept fitfully, awakened early, breakfasted on crackers and Coke—and drove her out to the airport. He seemed bad-tempered this morning, but she hardly noticed; she was just grateful he wasn’t making any of his heavy-handed passes.

As they turned in at the airport entrance, he finally said something that attracted her attention by making the reason for his sulkiness clear. “You and Young Mr. Balim have a good time last night?”

Oh, for Heaven’s sake. Laughing at him, treating him like a pet, some shambling Saint Bernard dog, she said, “Wonderful. The positions he knows.”

“Very funny,” Frank said, and drop-kicked the Land-Rover into a parking space, where he beat it to death with his elbows.

A private charter plane was to bring Lew to Kisumu from Entebbe, but of course communication at these small airports was minimal at best, so there was no telling when he’d arrive. Ellen paced back and forth in front of the building, looking up at the cloud herds ranging over the sky, and after a few minutes Frank brought her a bottle of White Cap beer.

“I thought you were mad at me,” she said.

“I am.” But a self-conscious grin lurked behind his crossness. “But I figured it out,” he said, “and you wouldn’t be screwing anybody while Lew was in a jam.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Back in nineteen oh five,” Frank said, wiping the bottle mouth on his palm and taking a swig of beer, “the British provincial commissioner banned women from living in Kisumu.”

“Why?”

“They had too many plagues here already.”

“I see.”

He laughed heartily, delighted with his sally. Then, having apparently evened some sort of score and satisfied himself, he said, “No, but that’s just about right. This whole place used to be swamp before the British cleared it. And the gulf is so long and narrow, there isn’t much water circulation in from the main body of the lake, so what you had here was stagnant water plus swamps. So that meant malaria, dysentery, blackwater fever, bubonic plague—”

“Lovely,” she said.

“Sleeping sickness used to wipe out a lot of them,” Frank said, with some evidence of survivor’s satisfaction. “And when the British were here, it seemed like thinking about the diseases was sometimes as bad as catching them. They had plenty of suicides, people who couldn’t take the suspense anymore, wondering which sickness would get them. That’s why for a while they banned women.”

“They should have banned everybody.”

“They almost did. One of the provincial commissioners here then, a guy named John Ainsworth, he said, ‘Kisumu is not a place for a melancholy man.’”

“Did he say who it was for?”

“Jokers and jollies, I guess. Same as today.”

“Jolly Rogers, you mean.”

“That, too. Is this our plane?”

It came in from the north, a twin-engine Cessna inching along under the clouds like a fly walking on a ceiling. The breeze at ground level, damp and warm, came out of the west over the lake, so the small plane turned away to its left before reaching them and spiraled down some invisible banister in the sky, touching the ground far away at the eastern end of the runway.

Ellen and Frank walked out across the field, the dead grass crackling under their feet. The plane approached, throttling back; it passed them, went on to the other end of the runway, turned off onto the taxiway, and slowly trundled back, wing tips gently bouncing. On both doors was a stylized drawing of a leaping impala and the name “Uganda Skytours.”

“There he is!” Ellen pointed at Lew, identifiable in the copilot’s seat. He and the pilot were the only ones aboard. Ellen waved, then felt silly about it, then waved again, defiantly.

Both men climbed down from the plane once it had come to a stop. The pilot was middle-aged and white and very worried-looking. He carried a manila envelope.

Lew looked a mess. His clothes were torn and filthy, and his face showed recent bruises and cuts that had been given no more than hasty first aid. His look was drawn, as though he hadn’t slept much, but more than that, he looked as though he were thinking hard about something, like an inventor just before the breakthrough.

Ellen went to him, feeling oddly awkward, as though they were strangers. Touching his arm, she said, “Lew?”

He looked at her from miles away, then grinned and said, “I am in Heaven.” But the light touch was forced.

So was hers. “Welcome to cloud nine,” she said.

He gazed at her as though his mind had gone blank, then abruptly pulled her close, wrapping his arms tightly around her, bending her back, his face pushed into the angle of her throat, the lines of his body pressed against her. “Jesus Christ,” he said, his lips moving against her skin, “but you feel good.”

“Ahhh,” she said, closing her eyes, going limp, feeling him hold her. “So do you, so do you, so do you.”

The fretful pilot said, “Frank Lanigan?”

“That’s me.”

“Envelope for you. For somebody named Balim.” He had an American accent.

“Right.”

“I have to get back,” the pilot said. “I can’t be—My wife is—I want to beat the rains if I can.”

“Have a good flight,” Frank told him.

Lew finally released Ellen and, one arm still around her waist, turned to the pilot, saying, “Thanks.”

“My pleasure. I needed the work.”

“You ought to get out of there,” Lew said.

The pilot ducked his head, like someone who is used to being beaten. Gesturing almost with hatred at the plane, he said, “That’s all I’ve got. Things will get better. And I keep her gassed up and ready to go.”

“Sure,” Lew said.

Startled, the pilot looked skyward. “The rain!” he said, as Ellen felt a fat drop of water hit her arm. “Good-bye!” the pilot cried, scurrying back to his plane. “Good-bye!”

Frank, holding the manila envelope, said, “Glad you got back, Lew.”

“Me, too. I didn’t like it there.”

“Come on,” Frank said. “It’s gonna rain like shit in a minute.”

They walked back across the field, which now lay dry and expectant, strangely gleaming with pearl-gray light, awaiting its lover, the rain. Lew walked in the middle, the others unconsciously guarding him, protecting him. Frank said, “I’m sorry I sent you there. You know?”

“I don’t blame you,” Lew told him. His arm around Ellen’s waist was nervously fidgeting. “I really don’t. You didn’t bring me all this way to lose me.”

“That’s right.”

“The car’s gone,” Lew said. “So’s the camera. Chase says forget them. I got my own stuff back, though.”

“Balim’ll cope,” Frank said. “Are there any pictures in the camera?”

“No. I didn’t get that far before they grabbed me.”

Ellen said, “What happened? What went wrong?”

“A few years ago I worked for an army in the Sudan, backed by Libya. I quit, and they put my name on some enemies’ list. Libya and Uganda are very tight these days, so on the Ugandan border they’ve got Libya’s lists.”

“Christ on a crutch,” Frank said. “You go along and go along, and all of a sudden your past comes up and kicks you in the nuts.”

The storm broke just before they reached the house. Before, there had been the occasional lone fat drop on the windshield, but all at once it seemed there was no windshield at all, just a massive waterfall, and they were behind it.

Or inside it. With the abruptness of a bucket’s being upended, the world was suddenly nothing but falling water, splashing, ricocheting, thundering, drenching everything in sight. “Good Lord!” Ellen cried, her voice lost in the barrage. The long rains had arrived.

But Frank could be heard, storm or no storm. “Shit!” he yelled, flinging the wheel back and forth as though trying to shake the rain off the car. “Goddam son of a bitch!” he shouted, as the Land-Rover slued and slid forward into the unknown; not a thing could be seen through that streaming windshield. “You could have waited an hour, you filthy bastard!” he brayed at the sky, shaking his fist, and stuck his head out into the storm so he could see something of where they were going. And, “You’re here!” he roared at them a few seconds later, as the Land-Rover sideswiped a parked Datsun and came to a stop in front of the house. Frank’s head, out in the rain for half a minute, looked like something found four hundred years later in a sunken Spanish galleon.

“Come in for a minute!” Ellen shouted, not wanting him at all but thinking she should be polite.

He shook his head, spraying them with water. “I’m going home! And get drunk!”

Lew waved his hand at Frank and clambered out of the Land-Rover. Ellen followed, stepping directly into a lukewarm shower with the taps turned on too full. She ran through it, drenched to the skin before she’d taken a step, and tumbled with Lew into the house.

Standing in the living room, the roar of the rain all around them, they struggled with their sopping clothes, peeling the layers off their rubbery skin, just throwing the soaked stuff onto the floor. Ellen looked at Lew, and his tanned flesh was pitted and scarred all over, as though he’d been rolling in gravel. “Lew! What happened? What is that?”

He looked down at himself with apparent dislike. “Bites,” he said. “I think I got rid of them all, but I’ll keep washing.”

“Got rid of what?”

“Lice. Ellen,” he said with great weariness, “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fine. Fine. What I think we ought to do is borrow Frank’s suggestion and get drunk.”

“Maybe so.”

But the house was almost as wet as the outer world, and it took awhile to make a nest for themselves. Open windows had to be shut. Lew found a length of rope and rigged it up in the living room while Ellen dragged the pile of clothing into the bathroom and wrung everything out. Then, with the laundry hung and their bodies scrubbed dry—using every towel in the house—and wearing dry clothes, they shut themselves in the kitchen, and Ellen turned on the stove burners to bake away some of the humidity. Then at last, with the drumfire of rain held safely at bay, with the small blue rings of gas flame, even this minimal rusty kitchen became comfortable and homelike.

Then Lew talked. It wasn’t true that he didn’t want to talk about what had happened, it was that he didn’t want to be questioned about it. He needed it to come out at its own pace, and with his editing. Ellen made scrambled eggs and toast, which they washed down with beer, and he told her some of what the State Research Bureau was like. She tried to maintain a blank alert expression, because she saw that every time she reacted, with horror or pity or revulsion, he backed away from telling her any more. But she was given enough to have a clear picture of the place.

As for his getting out, starting as an escape and ending as a kind of rescue, he seemed more reticent. It was clear that along the way he had injured, probably killed, one or more people, but he never made that part explicit, and when she asked him what the result of it would be, he dismissed it with quick contempt, saying, “Chase’ll deal with that. He’ll invent something. The truth doesn’t mean anything there.”

After a while they stopped talking and merely sat together at the kitchen table, Lew brooding, Ellen watching him. She had never in her life been so acutely aware of another person. She knew how much comfort he needed, and how unready he was to accept it, so she merely watched him and waited.

After a while, he said, “I’ll tell you one thing.”

“Yes?”

His expression was grim; his eyes gazed away at something she couldn’t see. “There’s more to it than coffee,” he said. “There has to be.”