Kahawa

16

Lew had experienced African rainy seasons before; but to have gone through them was not the same as getting used to them. You didn’t ever get used to them.

He was supposed to fly with Balim to Nairobi to meet some Kenyan coffeegrowers on some sort of business. The weather had not changed—water and mildew were spreading like a curse from God—but when Ellen phoned the airport control tower that morning, they told her takeoffs and landings were possible at both Kisumu and Nairobi, and that the cloud cover was so low they should be able to fly above it the whole way. So Lew phoned Balim with that information, and he said they would go ahead.

They drove from the house directly to the airport, where Balim had been delivered by his son. In the damp empty waiting room Balim looked eager but just a bit apprehensive. He was dressed for the weather in a hugely voluminous black raincoat, which made him look like a beach ball in mourning. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t pleasant to fly in such weather, but oh, you know, the highway would be much much worse. Very dangerous.”

“We’ll be careful,” Ellen promised.

“Bring back my father, Ellen,” Young Mr. Balim said. “He’s the only one who knows what we’re all doing.”

They got very wet crossing the field to the plane, which a sopping employee of Balim’s was untying from its mooring ropes. Because Balim was a bit too chubby to be comfortable in the rear seats, Lew went back there while Balim sat beside Ellen. The interior of the plane became steamy at once, smelling unpleasantly of wet clothing. To Lew, the little windshield wiper swiping back and forth against the glass in front of Ellen’s face was thoroughly inadequate for the job; it gave her a clear space the size and shape of a lady’s fan to look through, which in any event kept covering over again with streams of water as they taxied to the end of the runway.

Balim was the sort who chattered to distract himself from his nervousness. While they waited out at the end of the runway, he told them about his first flight ever, which had been from Kampala to London, by way of Cairo and Rome, a trip lasting more than two days. It had been 1938, just before the outbreak of war, and he had been fourteen years of age and on his way back to school.

Ellen asked, “What school?”

“Eton.”

“You went to Eton? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

But Balim was unfailingly gracious, even when struggling not to show that he was frightened. “I’m rather surprised at it myself,” he said. “I had hoped to go on to Cambridge, but the war changed things.”

Lew, intrigued, said, “What was your subject?”

“History. Asian history, primarily. Unfortunately, mostly from the English point of view.”

Ellen said, “You and Frank have something in common, then.”

“Oh, we have rare old arguments. History, after all, is nothing but interpretation.”

“I have clearance,” Ellen said, meaning the other conversation she was listening to, in her earphones.

While Balim several times patted his seat belt to be sure it was still in place, and started some rambling panicky sentence about having visited Cambridge once before the war and having been impressed by the trees, Ellen accelerated and the little twin-engine plane first rolled then scampered down the rain-slick runway, propellers chopping up the raindrops and throwing out behind them a wake of fine silver mist.

Then the plane lifted, as though it had taken a sudden quick ingulp of breath, and in the next second they were a flying thing, inches from the ground, then feet, then yards, then bearing no relationship to the earth at all.

The rain and their weight made the little plane fight hard for altitude, struggling up through the downpour, poking into the dirty clouds, then being engulfed in gray dimness, water streaming everywhere, the plane bucking in the weird air currents inside the clouds. Then all at once they burst through into sunlight so bright and clean and astonishing that all three of them cried out in wonder. “Ah!” said Ellen, and “Jesus!” said Lew, and “Oh, my Lord!” said Balim. The sun.

Seen from above, the clouds were clean, a great soft white comforter spread over the king-size bed of the world. The sky had the utter mile-after-mile clarity of a September blue. And the sun was a great golden round smiling king of creation, happy to see them.

“I’d forgotten,” Lew said, “what the son of a bitch looks like.”

The plane flitted on, between sky and cloud, a cheerful toy left to play on its own while the titans were elsewhere; at lunch, or taking their naps. Their clothing dried, and the air in the cabin became sweet. Balim stopped patting his seat belt. Ellen relaxed her grip on the stick and looked at her reflection in the mirror she’d mounted on the post between windshield and door. Lew sat back and grinned, stretching luxuriously. The sun shone, and all was right with the world.

The descent into Nairobi was like a self-inflicted wound. With obvious reluctance Ellen pointed the plane’s nose downward, picked fastidiously at the wispy top threads of the clouds, then all at once dropped down from sun through sunny translucence through eerie white through increasingly dirty gray, with water droplets running rearward along the side windows. Then they dropped out of the cloud layer, like a bedbug out of some grungy flophouse mattress, and there below lay Nairobi, sopping wet and feeling very sorry for itself.

Wilson Airport was just beyond the unfinished new airport. Ellen had to circle while a KLM flight landed and a small private plane took off; then she came down through the bead curtains of rain toward the runway, which looked as slippery and treacherous as glass. Balim started six or seven sentences on as many topics, finished none, patted his seat belt a lot, and they were on the ground, taxiing forward, losing speed, not fishtailing or somersaulting or nose-diving or doing any of the other things they’d all been more than half expecting.

It seemed strange to leave Ellen here, but of course the pilot stayed with the plane. She would deal with airport formalities and buy gas and then wait for Lew and Balim to return.

The rental car was waiting: a four-door maroon Peugeot 504. Balim sat in back, visibly delighted to be no longer in the plane, and Lew drove through Nairobi, following Balim’s directions.

Wilson Airport was south of the city, while the coffee plantation they wanted was to the north; unfortunately, there was no way to go around the town. Still, despite the rain and despite the congestion, traffic scooted along at a pretty good clip. Lumbering trucks, little rusty taxicabs, wetly gleaming Mercedes-Benzes, saturated bicyclists, and completely oblivious pedestrians all contested together, weaving a manic tapestry on the wet streets.

In all the cultures in the world, the rich live on the hills above the city. Leaving behind the crowded, raw-looking, hurriedly constructed streets of the main part of Nairobi, Lew steered upward through decreasing traffic and increasingly expensive-looking houses. After a while the streets became wider and sported gentle curves, sure signs of wealth. They passed the German Embassy, two other official residences. They passed a boarding school where the visible children were all white.

“This is why Kenya has remained a stable country,” Balim said from the backseat, “while so many other independent African nations have fallen away into bankruptcy and corruption. Kenyatta is of the Kikuyu tribe. When independence came, the Kikuyu thought they would be moving into these houses, but they did not. The whites are still here; the Indians are still here; the successful blacks are still here. That’s why international commerce can continue in Nairobi, and Kenya remains solvent. It would have been very popular politics to give these houses to the Kikuyu down from their mountain villages, but it would have killed the country. And where would we be today, eh, Lew? You and I?”

“I don’t know where you’d be, Mr. Balim,” Lew said, grinning at him in the rearview mirror. “I’d be in Alaska.”

“We owe much to Jomo Kenyatta,” Balim said.

The city itself was left behind, and then the suburbs, and still the Peugeot climbed upward into the foothills of the Narandarua Range, north of Nairobi. A group of black schoolgirls in bright purple jumpers, carrying many-colored umbrellas, waved and laughed at them as they drove by, and a few minutes later Balim said, “That is coffee.”

This time Lew frowned into the rearview mirror. “What is?”

“The shrub growing on both sides of the road. We are in the plantation.”

Lew then realized they were driving through cultivated fields. The shrubs were about three feet high, very bushy, and with intensely green leaves. In the rainswept distance he could see their parallel rows curving across the hillside, like a drawing in a children’s story, grainily reproduced.

“Beyond the next curve,” Balim said, “there is a white house on the left. That is our destination.”

“Fine.”

The land sloped down on that side, and the house would have been very easy to miss, being set low and back from the road and surrounded by trees. A rain-gullied gravel driveway lay just beyond the curve; taking that, Lew circled down and around amid the trees and came to a stop at the side of the house, facing a three-car white wooden garage.

Before they could open their doors, a broadly beaming skinny black man with a huge black umbrella appeared beside them. He gestured for Lew to wait in the car and opened the rear door for Balim. Having safely escorted Balim from car to house under the umbrella, he returned for Lew. “Good rain,” he said, smiling and nodding as they hurried toward the side door. “Excellent rain.”

“Very good rain,” Lew agreed.

Lew’s first impression inside the house was of darkness, as a setting for a tiny woman dressed all in white. This broad brushstroke was followed almost immediately by far too many details. The woman was very old. She was clearly an Indian, and in fact with her round spectacles she looked absurdly like Mahatma Gandhi. The white swath of cloth covering her from neck to toe was a sari. The rings on her tiny gnarled fingers were all of a style: intricate dark-gold vinelike bands clutching small glistening stones of red or green.

The black man with the umbrella disappeared down a narrow dark corridor crowded with furniture. There were dark green walls, mahogany sideboard, rococo gold-framed mirror, small Persian rugs spaced on the gleamingly waxed dark floor, a wooden staircase leading upward with black steps and white risers and banister.

Balim’s normal politeness was redoubled in here, intensified into an almost palpable concern, as though this old lady were both extremely fragile and terrifically important personally to Balim. “Mama Jhosi,” he said, “may I introduce a young friend of mine from America, Mr. Lewis Brady. Lew Brady, may I take pleasure in introducing Mama Lalia Jhosi, who is the mistress of this magnificent house.”

Lew could rise to formality when required. Taking Mama Jhosi’s hand—a collection of pencil stubs in a tiny leather sack—into his own, and half bowing over it, he said, “I am very pleased, madame.”

“You are tall,” she said. Her voice was as gnarled as her hand, rough and very faint. “A man should be tall.”

“And a woman should be beautiful,” Lew said, smiling broadly to show he meant to compliment her, and released her hand.

The giggle and head bob she gave were astoundingly girlish—heartbreakingly girlish—in acknowledgment of the gallantry. Then, stepping slightly to the side, she said, “And may I present my grandson, Pandit Jhosi. Mr. Lewis Brady.”

The grandson was eleven or twelve, a slender solemn boy with soft Indian skintone and features, and huge dark eyes. He wore sneakers and blue jeans, but his white-and-blue vertically striped dress shirt was buttoned at neck and wrists, making him look like a miniature of a formal Indian shopkeeper. Lew saw in his eyes that he was intelligent and shy; a bright boy who knew it was appropriate now to shake Lew’s hand but was too shy to initiate the move. Lew helped him out of the impasse by extending his own hand, smiling, saying, “Pleased to meet you.”

“And you.” The boy’s handshake was correct; two pumps, and release.

His grandmother touched his shoulder. “Tell Ketty we would like tea.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Balim said gently, “Pandit, Lew Brady knows very little about coffee plantations. Why don’t you take him with you to the kitchen and tell him about them?”

Ah. The pilot stays with the plane; the chauffeur waits in the kitchen. Whatever Balim’s business in this house, it didn’t include Lew, who grinned at the seriousness with which Pandit accepted the task, saying to Balim, “Yes, sir, I’d be happy to,” then looking up at Lew to say, “We have a very modern kitchen.”

“I’d be interested to see it.”

As Pandit led Lew down the long corridor, Mama Jhosi ushered Balim into a room to the side. Now they could talk Hindustani together without rudeness. Lew was still grinning at the courtliness with which people around here got their own way, when Pandit opened a door at the far end of the corridor and ushered him into a gleaming large kitchen, which was, as he’d been promised, very modern. Copper pans hung over a large pale-wood central table. The appliances along the walls were all brushed chrome or white porcelain, and included a large separate freezer. The uniformed black woman reading a newspaper spread on the table was middle-aged and just a bit hefty. Pandit said to her, “Ketty,” and then flowed away at her in Swahili. Ketty nodded, folded her paper, got to her feet and, turning away, presented a huge behind, tightly swathed in the black uniform skirt and framed by the string and side hems of her white apron.

Pandit said, “Would you like some tea?”

“Thank you, yes.”

Lew sat at the table, across from where Ketty had been, and drew her folded newspaper close. But then he saw it was in Swahili, and pushed it away again.

Pandit brought to the table: two teacups with saucers and spoons; two small plates with butter knives; a teapot on a tray, the pot covered by a quilted tea cosy; a small silver tray holding a silver cream pitcher and a silver bowl containing lump sugar; two linen napkins; a butter dish; a saucer of lemon circles; a graceful china ashtray; a plate containing an assortment of cakes and pastries. Meantime, Ketty was assembling a similar though larger grouping on a silver tray; as she carried it out of the room, moving in a stately manner only partially undercut by her absurd rear end, Pandit sat down across the table from Lew and said, “Are you very much interested in coffee plantations?”

Something told Lew this was a kid with whom honesty was the best policy. “Not really,” he said.

“I am, of course,” Pandit said. “But it is my job to be.”

“Because you’ll inherit.”

“I already have some managerial responsibilities,” the boy said.

Lew grinned at him, hoping he’d understand the grin was one of comradeship and not mockery. The boy was so solemn and intelligent, and yet still a kid. “I saw the coffee bushes on the hillsides,” he said, “when we were driving in. I can see there’s a lot of responsibility there.”

“Oh, that isn’t all ours.”

“No?”

“No. It used to be, but when my parents died and we came here, my grandmother had to sell most of our land.”

Already knowing the answer, Lew said, “Came here? From where?”

“Uganda.”

“Ah.”

“Have you been to Uganda?”

“Yes,” Lew said.

“I was seven when we left,” Pandit said, “so I don’t really remember it.”

“It’s not a pleasant place,” Lew said. “This is much nicer.”

“Still,” Pandit said, “I would like to see it someday. When things are different, of course.”

“Of course.”

Getting to his feet, Pandit said, “The tea should be ready.” He removed the cosy, picked up the elaborately black-and-gold pot, held the top with his fingertips, and gently swirled the tea for a moment. Then he poured out Lew’s cup, and the room filled with a delicious aroma. “Sugar?”

“One lump, thank you.”

Pandit gave him sugar, using small silver tongs. “Milk or lemon?”

“Milk. That’s fine.” This was the pervasiveness of British civilization: in the middle of a coffee plantation, they sat down to a formal tea.

At last Pandit, having poured his own tea, covered the teapot with the cosy, sat down again, and they both chose pastries.

Lew said, “What are you interested in besides coffee?”

“Football,” Pandit said.

“Oh, really?”

“I am a very big fan of the Italian team,” Pandit said, his eyes shining.

“The Italian—” Then he caught on. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I was confused. I thought you meant American football.”

“No, soccer. I don’t like American football.” Then, catching himself in a possible discourtesy, he quickly asked, “That doesn’t offend you?”

“Not at all,” Lew said, smiling at him. “What don’t you like about American football?”

“It keeps stopping,” the boy said. “Every time it starts, you just begin to get interested and it stops. Football—excuse me, I meant to say soccer—soccer isn’t like that. I find it much more exciting.”

“I suppose it all depends what you’re used to,” Lew said. “Baseball, now, in that game nothing ever happens, and yet it’s still the most popular sport in America.”

“That’s the way it is with cricket,” Pandit said, and shrugged. “Cricket’s all right,” he said dismissively.

There was a door in the far wall; this now opened and a girl came in, carrying two string bags, both filled with various small packages. She was dressed in tan slacks and a tan raincoat and round soft rainhat. “Ah,” she said, smiling at Lew and then at Pandit, “you brought a friend home from school.”

Pandit, flustered but still the gentleman, jumped to his feet, saying, “Amarda, this is Mr. Lewis Brady. Mr. Brady, may I present my sister, Amarda Jhosi.”

Lew rose, hit his head on a hanging copper pot, winced, grinned, said, “Ouch. Hello.”

“Oh, those pots,” she said with a commiserating smile. “We aren’t used to men around here. Tall men, I mean,” she said, bowing a bit at her brother. She looked to be about twenty, with Pandit’s large liquid dark eyes but her own softly oval face. The Indian Princess, Lew thought.

“I’ll get you a cup,” Pandit offered.

“Thank you. It’s beastly outside.”

Lew watched, not yet fully realizing that he was smitten, as she removed her hat and shook out her thick black hair. The hat and raincoat went on a chair; she wore a white-on-white blouse, and around her throat a thin gold chain. She unloaded the string bags quickly, putting things away in the refrigerator or on shelves, while Pandit set a third place at the end of the table, between the males. He poured the tea, added a lemon circle, selected a brownish square piece of cake for her dish, and was just sitting down again when she joined them, saying, “Perfect.” Seating herself, she said, “But why are we hiding out here in the kitchen?”

“Mama is in the parlor with Mr. Balim.”

Her manner at once changed; understanding came into her face, and something else. Giving Lew a quick look of unconcealed distaste, she said, “I see.”

The smitten one cannot stand rejection. Lew said, “Is it that distasteful to break bread with the chauffeur?”

The look she gave him now was honestly bewildered. “I beg your pardon?”

“I could wait in the car, if you prefer.”

Pandit, shocked at this breach of etiquette but determined to maintain his own civility, said, “Surely not!”

“Chauffeur?” echoed Amarda Jhosi; then she said, “Oh, I see what you mean. No, to be honest, I hadn’t even thought that word.”

Himself bewildered now, Lew said, “What word did you think?”

“It doesn’t matter. Have some cake.”

Ignoring the pastry plate she held up for him, he said, “Miss Jhosi, what word did you think?”

She hesitated, frowning at him, wanting it to be forgotten. But when she saw he intended to stick on this point, she gave an annoyed little headshake, put the cake plate down, gave her brother a little apologetic look, frowned at the lemon circle drifting in her tea, and said, “If you insist, the word I thought was thief.”

Lew was so angry he could barely control himself. The source of her mad against Balim was her own business, but he wouldn’t let her tar him with the same brush. Holding his voice lower than usual, to keep from shouting, he said, “What have I ever stolen from you, Miss Jhosi?”

Her annoyance showed itself again in a quick glare, and she said, “You know what I’m talking about.”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Aren’t you here right now to negotiate with my grandmother about the stolen goods?”

Stolen goods? Balim had said nothing about the reason for this trip, hadn’t even suggested it was connected with their own coffee caper, but now the whole thing laid itself out in front of Lew’s eyes, as clearly as if Balim himself had taken Lew into his confidence.

Here is a family, the Jhosis, who used to have coffee plantations in both Uganda and Kenya. They were among the Asians expelled from Uganda by Amin in 1972, when in some manner the parents of these two died—or were killed. That would have left the grandmother and the children with nothing but this Kenyan plantation, part of which they’d had to sell off because of their financial bind. On the other hand, here is Balim, who will soon be in possession in Kenya of tons and tons of smuggled coffee; somehow it will be necessary to reintroduce that coffee into legal channels of trade. Why not arrange for the coffee to be shipped from the Jhosi plantation, under the Jhosi brand name? In typical Balim fashion, he will be solving a problem of his own and helping needy co-nationals at the same time.

While Lew thought this out, Amarda Jhosi continued to study him, her expression gradually growing less certain until she said, “Didn’t you know? Did you truly not know?”

“I suppose I should have guessed.” Sighing, Lew took his napkin from his lap and dropped it on the table beside his cup and plate. “Thank you, Pandit,” he said, getting to his feet. “I appreciated the tea, and the conversation.”

Pandit stared at him, wide-eyed. “But where are you going?”

“I’ll wait in the car. Nice to have met you, Miss Jhosi. That’s all right, Pandit, I can find the door. And I promise I won’t steal anything along the way.”

He was reading the Peugeot owner’s manual for the second time, without as yet having learned why the car was called a 504, when the front passenger door opened and Amarda Jhosi slid in, dressed again in her Burberry and rainhat. He looked at her, trying to appear stern to hide his leap of pleasure. “Can I help you?”

“You can accept my apology,” she said. She removed the rainhat and again shook out her hair; a gesture he could grow very fond of.

“Apology accepted,” he said in an offhand manner, as though her apology hadn’t mattered one way or another; punishing her a little.

“I thought I understood things,” she said. “You confused me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Please, don’t be mad at me anymore.”

He had been more or less looking past her, at the rain-streaming side window; now he looked at her and saw that she was trying to be honest with him. She had the vulnerability of someone who has deliberately disarmed herself. As always, Lew’s reaction to such risky vulnerability was to become extremely protective. “I’m not mad,” he said. He touched his fingertips to her hand in her lap; it was wet with rain. “You didn’t have to come out here in the rain to apologize to me.”

She smiled, disarming them both. “I didn’t,” she said. “At least not just to apologize.”

“I get it,” he said, disappointed but not surprised. “You also want to pick my brains.”

She frowned. “Sorry?”

“You want to ask me questions. You want to know what’s going on.”

“That’s right.” Then she shook her head and said, “No. Let me tell you what I thought I knew, and you tell me where I’m wrong.”

“Sure.”

“Some people are stealing a lot of coffee from Uganda, smuggling it into Kenya. They came to Mr. Balim to help them make the coffee seem legitimate again.”

“I’ve been fighting the phrase ‘launder the coffee,’” Lew said. But then, seeing she didn’t understand that Americanism either, he said, “Never mind. Balim isn’t an agent, he’s one of the principals, but you’ve got the general idea. Go on.”

“Mr. Balim came to my grandmother, knowing our financial troubles. I assumed you were one of the thieves.”

“I am, I guess,” Lew said. “But the word thief isn’t quite the right one.”

“Isn’t it stealing?”

“From Idi Amin. Your family used to live in Uganda, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Most of our holdings were there.”

“How old were you when you left?”

“Fifteen.”

“So you can remember the way it was, with Amin.”

“Yes, I—” But then, all at once, her chin was trembling. She blinked and looked away, nodding. He saw her try to speak, but her control was slipping away and she couldn’t do it.

“Hey,” he said, startled and embarrassed. “Hey.” He put an arm around her shoulders, touched her trembling jawline with his other hand, drew her close in, seeing the tears well up in her eyes as he pulled her close, tucking her head in against his shoulder and chest, holding her very tight, letting her sob it out.

She cried for a long time, while he kept trying to find the right thing to say, without success. Finally, sometime after the racking sobs had ended and her body had become merely soft and passive against him, her muffled voice said against his chest, “I’m all right now.”

Reluctantly he eased the pressure of his arms, permitting her to move slightly away and lift her face to look at him. She was so beautiful, and so sorrowful, and so vulnerable, that he couldn’t not kiss her. And her lips were as soft as the lawns of Heaven.

She responded. Her arm slid around his neck; the soft lips opened; the heat of their bodies commingled. He moved his arm, and his hand brushed her full breast, and her arm tightened around his neck. He held the breast, feeling the hardening of nipple through layers of cloth, feeling the warmth of her body, the sweetness of her tongue.

Which of them broke off first he had no idea; they seemed to do it together, at once, as though in response to some outside noise. But his mind had suddenly filled with thoughts of Ellen, of Amarda’s youth, of the idea that he was taking advantage of her emotional condition, of their exposed situation here in the car in the daytime beside the house, and he pulled away from her just as she was pulling away from him.

They stared at one another, wide-eyed. Her softness and warmth were still with him, an invisible blanket warming but frightening him. He whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be,” she said. She grabbed his wrist in her hand, squeezed painfully. “Don’t be,” she repeated, and turned away. Fumbling with the handle, she pushed open the door and hurried away into the rain.

17

The rain poured down, well into its second week; ten days and nights of drenching downpour. The pockmarked face of the lake was muddy, everything on the surface of the planet was saturated and soft, and everywhere you looked was water. The pregnant cloudbanks pressed so low to the ground they gave you a headache just thinking about them.

Frank Lanigan sat in the front of the boat, inside his slicker and rainhat and heavy boots, thinking about his headache. Behind him, Charlie scooped rainwater out of the boat with a coffee can, while at the rear the boat’s owner sat by the outboard motor, steering them toward Uganda.

Uganda. There it was, visible in the downpour, dead ahead. The brow of a dark giant rising up out of the lake. A turd floating in a world of water. A brown-black otter, resting. The Mysterious Island of the ghost stories, where the shipwrecked sailors meet the crazed professor and the living dinosaurs and the things that suck your blood in the night.

Somewhere inside all his steamy cloying clothing Frank had a pint flask full of bourbon. The bourbon might help, but the job of getting to it would hurt far more, so he just sat there, cursing his fate, cursing Africa, cursing the rain, cursing Lew for not having completed this job the first time.

Slowly the broken coast of Uganda came nearer. Behind Frank, playing harmony to his thoughts, the boatman cursed his motor in a slow, almost loving litany, baritone voice and cough of engine blending into a lullaby of discontent within the endless barrage of the rain.

Bwagwe Point passed slowly on the left as they entered Macdonald Bay. Before the long rains this neighborhood had been alive with Ugandan soldiers on antismuggling detail, but in weather like this the smugglers and troops both stayed home. Everybody stays home, Frank thought in angry self-pity, except me.

The boat poked into the bay, putt-putting, almost drifting with some storm-induced tide, becoming a child’s toy that bobbed in the great rain-drenched bathtub of the bay. They remained unchallenged, and Frank roused a little, thinking about the task at hand, wishing Lew could have been sent again (not even thinking about Ellen), and finally turning to yell, “Keep to the left, you asshole!” at the boatman, who was drifting them eastward into the middle of the bay, probably out of some subconscious desire to be back in—to the east of here—Kenya.

Shit. As usual, his most determined statements remained un-understood by their targets; fuming, Frank suffered through a translation of his command by Charlie, knowing that whatever Charlie was saying, it bore little or no relationship to the original.

Nevertheless, it worked. The boat angled left; it even seemed to increase just a trifle in speed. “It’s along here,” Frank said, then wondered whom he thought he was talking to. “I hate rain,” he said, and slumped deeper inside his clothing.

Charlie’s translation of Frank’s shout at the boatman had somehow blossomed into a full-fledged conversation. Behind him Charlie rattled away, the boatman rumbled back; Charlie took his turn, the boatman his—a regular dialogue. Charlie pointed vaguely ahead and to the left, the boatman pointed vaguely a bit to the left of that, Charlie pointed somewhere else, the boatman pointed at his engine, Charlie pointed at Frank, and through it all they kept yakking away together, like long-lost brothers who had never cared for one another. “I think I’ll kill them both,” Frank muttered.

Through the curtains of rain, on the bank to the left, he could just make out their intended landfall: a muddy crescent where a faint two-track dirt road came down to the water’s edge. “There it is, you goddam idiots!” he yelled, and cuffed Charlie across the head to distract him from his patter with the boatman. “Right there!”

“Yes, it is,” Charlie said. Even in this downpour, still dressed in nothing but tattered shirt and trousers, he remained cheerful and unaffected. “We were just talking about it,” he said, and calmly went back to his conversation.

“Lying bastard,” Frank muttered.

The boatman steered them to the crescent, where they ran aground a good twenty feet from shore. Frank shook his head. “We got to do better than that,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” Charlie said. While the boatman unlocked his motor and tilted it forward, lifting the screw out of the water, Charlie hopped over the side, grabbed the thick frayed end of rope tied to the bow, and waded them ashore. Surprisingly strong for all his skinniness, Charlie pulled a good half of the boat up onto the mud with Frank and the boatman still in it. Of course, the mud itself was half water. When Frank stepped into it, his booted feet sank in halfway to the knee; pulling out, against the suction, he felt the mud doing its best to yank the boots right off him.

The boatman also clambered over the side, and now the three of them dragged the boat the rest of the way over the mud and up onto the solid cross-hatching of last year’s dead grass. Like the Abominable Snowman, Frank lumbered around in the mud, plop-squirking at every step, while Charlie and the boatman were agile in their bare feet, slithering around like upright eels. That Charlie’s squalid unconcern was somehow better attuned to the circumstances than Frank’s careful preparations only made Frank’s mood worse.

With the boat on relatively solid ground, they pulled the tarp off the two mopeds and carried them to the beginning of the road. Then Charlie stood grinning, the rain already washing the mud from his shanks, as Frank opened his slicker, opened the coat within, found the flask, and pulled it out. The first short swig of body-warming bourbon burned his throat and brought tears to his eyes, but they could count as tears of gratitude. Blinking them away, Frank knocked back another, longer swallow, then screwed the cap back on the flask and smiled as he felt the welcome warmth spread through his body the way molten steel runs to fill the mold.

But then, looking at the mopeds, he frowned again. It was a damned undignified mode of transportation for a grown man, this stubby motorized bicycle with the ridiculously thick wheels. But Maintenance Depot Number 4 was a good twenty miles up the road, and no other vehicle could have been brought here over the lake. “Might as well do it, then,” Frank said, stowing away the flask and rebuttoning all his coats. Jabbing a dripping thumb over his shoulder at the boatman, he said to Charlie, “Tell him to wait.”

“Oh, he knows,” Charlie said.

“Tell him, if he doesn’t wait we’ll get him for it later.”

Charlie looked dubious. “Later? If he leaves us here, we don’t have any ‘later.’ He knows that, too.”

So did Frank. “Will he stay?”

“He wants his money,” Charlie said with a shrug. “If something scares him, he will go away.”

“Shit.” Shaking his head, Frank said, “Come on, then, let’s get it over with.”

They climbed onto the mopeds, both of which snarled into life at the first kick, and started up the faint double track into the low dense trees, Frank slightly in the lead on the right-hand rut, Charlie a bit behind him on the left. Looking back, Frank saw the boatman had climbed back into the boat, where he now sat, unmoving, his back against the upturned engine, forearms folded on his sunken stomach. He seemed asleep; or dead.

This road had been cleared by the railroad-building British seventy years earlier, and abandoned fifty years after that. The occasional passage of a farmer’s wagon or truck in the twenty years since had been sufficient to keep the twin track visible against the ground, but not sufficient to keep saplings and brush from encroaching. “This’ll be hell on the trucks,” Frank said, shoving the moped through the tangle of shrubbery. He felt that he looked like the clown in the circus who rides the tiny tricycle, and he wasn’t far wrong.

The forest was dense here, the old road completely covered by tree branches, which screened out most of the rain. Individual drops could be seen and heard—and felt—and the air seemed cooler and not quite so humid. The ground was just a bit less spongy. It was almost as though the rain had stopped barely a minute ago and these were the final droplets shaking out of the trees.

The effect of the mopeds’ nasal roar was strange in this empty, wet forest. It seemed both very loud and utterly silent. It seemed to be posing some further corollary question to the old one about the tree falling in the forest. The only effect the engines seemed to have was that the quality of the empty silence behind them was more shimmering, more tense, than the empty silence in front.

The mopeds were theoretically capable of doing fifty miles an hour, but not in this terrain. They did manage short spurts of twenty, even twenty-five, but more usually traveled at fifteen and sometimes even slowed to ten or less. The land was a persistent gradual uphill slope, the forest unchanging all around them, here and there a small path—cut by humans or animals—leading away to the right, inland. The lake was never more than a few miles away to the left, but there was no hint of it.

Frank kept one eye on the odometer, and they had gone nineteen and four-tenths miles when some change in the mass of the sound filling his ears made him glance to his left, where he failed to see Charlie. Looking back, frowning, he saw that Charlie was stopped fifty yards back, standing beside his moped, cheerful and patient, gazing alertly this way.

“Now what?” Frank made a U-turn from the right track onto the left, not quite getting bucked off when the moped hit a root in the middle of the maneuver, and roared back to where Charlie stood, smiling in all innocence. “What-chagot?”

“Path to the turntable.” He pointed.

Frank looked, and damned if there didn’t seem to be the faint remnant of a path there, leading away from the road. Squinting through rain and trees, shielding his eyes with his hand as though from sun, Frank thought maybe he could see some sort of building back in there. Hard to tell.

“You drove by it,” Charlie said.

Frank understood then that Charlie was getting revenge for his having pointed out their landing spot. “You are a prick,” he said. Getting off the moped, kicking its kickstand harder than necessary, he tromped away on the path toward the perhaps-building, knowing that if he looked back he would see Charlie as happy and guileless as ever. He didn’t look back.

Charlie had been right; this was Maintenance Depot Number 4. The old engine shed was there, a long tall corrugated-iron structure open at the uphill end, big enough to hold a steam locomotive, sagging and rusty now but still intact. Beside it were piled half a dozen sixteen-foot rails, orange with rust. Trees and brush had so overgrown the area that one tree branch grew into the building through a glassless window.

Frank unlimbered two cameras and moved steadily around the area, taking pictures, wiping the lenses, crouching in positions where water could run down the back of his neck, while Charlie strolled through the open end of the engine shed and lolled at his ease in there, amid mounds of rusted metal.

The site was pretty much as described in that memo Chase had sent. Rusted track led down from farther up the hill, bifurcating, one line running straight down into the big empty maw of the engine shed, the other angling away to the right and leading to the old turntable. As to this track and turntable, all of which was frozen with rust, there was both good news and bad news. The good news was that the old switch was rusted in position to run a train toward the turntable rather than toward the engine shed, which was what they would want, but the bad news was that the turntable had been left positioned at an angle to the line of track. It was going to be a bitch to get that ancient rusty turntable unstuck and lined up with the track.

Oh, well; Frank took his pictures and kept going. Beyond the turntable, the track continued another twenty feet, almost to the dropoff; a sudden unexpected cliff, that was, with forest growth right to the edge and a nearly hundred-foot drop down into Thruston Bay, whose boulder-strewn shoreline looked in the rain like something from a gothic novel.

Frank next retraced his steps, past the turntable and the engine shed and the dozing Charlie and on along the line of track up the hill. Bushes and trees, some of them sizable, grew up between the rails all along the way. Then, abruptly, the rails stopped. The dismantled connecting plates lay on the ground to one side, and there was not even a hint anymore of where the old rails and sleepers had once lain. “Damn rain,” Frank said, squinting, trying to see through the wall of foliage in front of himself, but there was nothing to see except greenery and water.

He got really wet shoving through that batch of growth between the old spur and the main rail line. He struggled through, kicking and punching, elbowing the tree branches, and all at once he popped out onto the single-track main line of Uganda Railways, the well-used rails wetly gleaming, reflecting the gray-white sky. Standing between the rails, Frank took more pictures, and observed with satisfaction that absolutely nothing of Maintenance Depot Number 4 could be seen from here.

The wet steel sleepers made slightly iffy footing as he tramped away eastward to where the level crossing still existed—though unrepaired—for the old access road. Up there to the left was where Lew had been grabbed by the State Research Bureau. Frank gave a dark glower in that direction; if it hadn’t been for those bastards, Lew would have done the job then and there. Now they couldn’t risk Lew’s getting picked up a second time, so it was Frank who had to slog around in the rain, the faithful Charlie at his side (at Mr. Balim’s order). And Lew was back in Kisumu, taking over more and more of Frank’s regular job.

What the hell; he was here, and the job was done. Now all he had to do was go back to the engine shed, collect Charlie, and return to the boat. He started down the access road, stowing the cameras away in their canvas bag, and a sudden thought made him stop, lifting his head.

What if he didn’t go back for Charlie? The son of a bitch would survive—this was his turf—but he’d be out of Frank’s hair for a while, and maybe even permanently. And if he got back without the moped, that’d be a mark against him with Mr. Balim.

Frank could say he’d looked all over for Charlie, had shouted his name, but Charlie must have been somewhere asleep. Finally, afraid the boatman wouldn’t wait any longer, he’d had to leave. (He would walk the moped the first mile, so the roar of its engine wouldn’t alert Charlie to what was happening.)

Feeling like a kid playing hooky, excited and guilty and expecting to be caught at any second, Frank continued down the road. After he’d taken a few steps, exhilaration (and bourbon) rose up in him so strongly that he broke into a shambling downhill run.

It’s a good thing he ran; there was only one moped there, at the start of the path.

The son of a bitch! The dirty unreliable bastard! Of course he was doing the same thing, and there wasn’t a way on Earth to prove it. Frank could hear no engine sound, so Charlie was walking the moped the first mile, exactly as Frank had planned. If Frank tried to sneak up on him by walking his own moped, he’d never overtake the rat, but if he started his own engine, Charlie would hear it, would immediately start his, and would come tearing back with some innocent bullshit story about flower picking or something.

It wasn’t fair. “Shit,” Frank said, and started the moped, and bumpity-dumpityed away toward the lake.

18

The slide show of Frank’s trip to Uganda took place in a smallish storeroom in Mr. Balim’s second building. A number of sewing machines and shoe cartons and lounging employees having been removed, and a few folding chairs having been introduced, Isaac set up the projector and screen and took charge of the room lights, while Frank ran the show.

The audience was small and intent. Lew and Ellen and Balim and Young Mr. Balim and Isaac sat watching the screen as Frank flashed slide after slide, describing each picture in turn. Lew and Isaac held pads and pencils and made occasional notes.

“This is the bay, coming in. Tough to see with the damn rain, but there’s no villages or houses right down by the water. All forest, thick growth.

“This is the landfall. It’s mud up to your ass. Even if we go in two or three weeks after the rains stop, it’s still gonna be like that. We’ll have to bring enough planks to build a house or we’ll never load the boats.

“You can see the road is clear. A lot of brush and shit, but we’ll have big trucks.

“It’s nineteen-point-four miles from lake to depot. I took pictures along the way to show how it was. Maybe too many pictures.”

Balim: “No, no, Frank, this is very good. We’ll want to see as much as we can, as though we’d been there ourselves.”

Young Mr. Balim: “As Von Clausewitz said, the map is not the terrain.”

Lew took his eyes off the screen, turned his head, and gazed at Young Mr. Balim. Von Clausewitz? Young Mr. Balim was smiling at Ellen’s profile. He switched his smile to Lew, so Lew looked back at yet another blown-up slide of a forest trail in a drenching rain.

“This is about the steepest incline we hit. It never gets worse than maybe one in ten, one in nine. The trucks’ll go down full and come back up empty, so there shouldn’t be any trouble.

“Okay. Here’s the path in to the depot. This could be a problem. It’ll slow us down if we have to carry all that coffee out from the depot to the road, but you can see what it looks like. We won’t get any trucks in there.”

Balim: “Couldn’t we clear the trees, make a road?”

“Clear the trees, sure. But there’s no roadbed there, it’s all erosion and gullies and roots and rocks and more shit than you can think about. You’d have to spend a day in there with a bulldozer.”

Isaac: “That would leave a very visible scar from the air.”

Lew: “How about a corduroy road? Chop down the trees that have to go, and use the logs for a road surface.”

“You’d need too many logs. I paced it out, best as I could, and I make it ninety feet from the depot to the road.”

Lew: “If the footing’s that bad for the trucks, it’ll be even worse for the coolies. Can they carry seventy-pound sacks through there?”

“Like I said, this is where we got a problem.”

Young Mr. Balim: “Frank, there must already be a road in to the depot. That’s what the access road was for.”

“If there ever was, I couldn’t find it. The way I figure, the access road runs up and down the slope, so rain doesn’t hurt it. But the road in to the depot ran crosswise on the slope, so over the years the runoff just turned it back into gullies, and trees and brush grew up, and now that road is gone. A tree can grow a lot in twenty years.”

Ellen (surprising them all): “How about a brush road?”

Lew (nervous for her): “A what?”

Ellen: “Taking your idea about the corduroy road, but you’d just use logs to fill the deepest ruts, then lay tree branches and bushes down over the whole thing. Drive a truck back and forth on it, keep laying brush and packing it down, and pretty soon the trucks themselves will tamp it into a road.”

Balim: “Miss Ellen, have you seen this done?”

Ellen: “Twice, as a matter of fact. Once in Guatemala, when they were trying to get medical supplies in after an earthquake, and once in Oregon, where a man was building vacation houses on a lake he owned, and he was very short on capital. He built the first houses using the brush road, then put down macadam once they started to sell.”

Balim: “What do you think, Frank?”

“I think it’s a terrific idea. Stick around, Ellen.”

Ellen: “I will.”

Lew looked at her smiling face, feeling equal portions of love and possessiveness, and then grinned, very happy, when she winked at him.

Frank went on with the show. “Here’s the depot. You see the rails there, we can use those when we connect to the main line. Building’s intact, very good shape.

“Here’s Charlie asleep. I couldn’t resist it, just once.”

Young Mr. Balim: “Charming. The drool, especially.”

“Spur line. Tracks are rusty but usable. Switch here rusted into place, but it’s the right place. A lucky break. But here’s the turntable, our next problem.”

Isaac: “It’s angled wrong. Why on earth did they do that?”

“Beats me. We’re gonna have to break it loose and line it up with the rest of the track so we can use the extra twenty foot beyond it. As it is, that train’s gonna be so long you’ll be able to kiss the caboose from the main line.”

Balim: “Speed is everything.”

“Don’t I know it. Here’s the track going up to the main line. We got a lot of trees to cut down.”

Lew: “More matériel for Ellen’s road.”

“Check. Here’s where the track stops. You notice you can’t see shit, but the main line’s just the other side of the hedge. And here it is, and now you can’t see the depot.”

Young Mr. Balim: “You’ll have to cut an awfully big hole in that hedge to get the train through.”

“We’ll mask it when we’re done. That isn’t one of the problems.”

Young Mr. Balim: “I am relieved.”

“Here’s where the access road crosses the track. Up there’s where they nabbed you, Lew.”

Lew: “We’ll have to put up a plaque.”

19

It was with exceedingly mixed emotions that Sir Denis Lambsmith, watching the passengers from the Entebbe-Tripoli-London flight emerge from the Terminal 3 passageway at Heathrow, saw that walking forward beside Baron Chase was Patricia Kamin, beautiful and stylish and utterly at her ease. Even at nine in the morning after an all-night flight, he thought, she was unruffled perfection.

He was delighted to see her, of course, delighted and astonished—but with Chase? What could be their relationship? Remembering his own three nights with her in Kampala—she had come to him every night, had left him thrilled and satiated, and had always been gone in the morning—he could only suppose her connection with Chase was sexual; but he didn’t want to think that. He remembered that she had been seconded for a while to the Ugandan Embassy in London, so perhaps she was here on official business, and sharing the flight with Chase was mere coincidence. He clung to that shred of possibility as they approached him.

It was strange, but the white man looked more out of place in London than the black woman did. In Kampala, Chase was appropriate, of a type not unknown in that part of the world, but walking into London with his dark-blue canvas flight bag he looked like some prowling barbarian slipping unsuspected through the city gates. Patricia Kamin, who in Kampala was an exotic touch of sophistication in a pretty but small-time provincial capital, in London was a bird of magnificent plumage in its right setting; she might be this year’s modeling find, or movie star, or diplomat’s wife.

They both greeted Sir Denis with handshakes—Chase gripping him hard, as though to arrest him, Patricia’s touch light and brief and stirring. Her eyes laughing at him, she said, “So this is how you look in London.”

“And how you look in London,” he answered. “More beautiful than ever.”

“Gallantry,” Chase commented without inflection, like a man identifying a kind of tree.

“You have luggage?”

“Of course,” Patricia said. “Empty trunks, to carry home full.”

As they walked toward the baggage area, Chase said, “We can drop Patricia at the hotel.”

“Delighted.”

“I’m here on business,” Patricia said, answering his unasked question. With a mock grimace of distaste, she said, “Very boring. But at least there’ll be time for shopping.”

Perhaps we could go shopping together, Sir Denis wanted to say. The presence of Baron Chase inhibited him.

While Patricia and Chase waited with the few other milling passengers at the baggage carousel, Sir Denis went out to the car—a black Daimler parked in the Special Arrangements area behind the Annex—and collected the chauffeur to help with Patricia’s putative empty trunks. There turned out to be only two of them, and not so large at that. “You can’t intend much shopping after all,” Sir Denis said.

“Ah, but I’ll also buy luggage.”

The gentlemen permitted Patricia to enter the car first, then Sir Denis as host—this being his nation—stood aside for Chase, which put Chase between the other two on the wide soft backseat. Too late, Sir Denis realized he would have preferred the possibility of leg contact with Patricia.

Up on the M4, heading for London, Patricia explained her mission: the Ugandan Air Force wished to purchase some computer equipment from an American firm, and she had to clear it with the American Embassy in London. “Any purchases of a military nature,” she said, “even indirectly military, have to be approved by that man.”

“Very powerful man.” A ridiculous twinge of jealousy moved in Sir Denis’s mind: the thought that Patricia was being sent on this mission because she could influence the man at the American Embassy with her sexual favors. To distract himself from that unwelcome—and certainly unworthy—idea, he said, “I thought Uganda and the United States were at odds.”

“Oh, this is a simple commercial deal,” she said dismissively. “U.S. government permission is really a formality, just to guard against our buying things like atom bombs.”

“You expect no difficulty, then,” Sir Denis said, happy to have that ungracious suspicion put to rest.

Which Patricia did, emphatically. “If there were any difficulty in it,” she said, “they wouldn’t send me. I’m just a glorified courier.”

Sir Denis smiled, extremely happy, then saw Baron Chase looking at him with a crooked grin. Flustered, imagining for just an instant that Chase could read his mind, Sir Denis sat back against the Daimler’s upholstery and permitted the conversation to proceed without him.

Patricia had to be let off first, of course. Her hotel was small but elegant, on Basil Street in Knightsbridge. “Very convenient to Harrods,” Sir Denis commented, risking another smile, willing himself not to know whether Chase was watching.

“That’s why I chose it,” Patricia said. Then she stood for a minute on the sidewalk while the chauffeur removed the luggage from the trunk and turned it over to a dark-blue-uniformed bellman who had trotted briskly out of the hotel. Chase was also staying here, but would be going on first to the meeting that had brought him to London.

While Chase was looking the other way, Patricia mouthed at Sir Denis, “Call me.” He nodded, and his smile this time could have cracked his cheeks.

After they dropped Patricia off, the Daimler had to maneuver the endless stretch of traffic jam along Knightsbridge to Hyde Park Corner, then rolled through Green Park and past the Queen Victoria Memorial and St. James’s Park along the Mall to the impressive multidomed sweep of Admiralty Arch. Trafalgar Square was also crowded with the usual black taxis, red double-decker buses, endless scooting little Morris Minis looking like dirty washing machines on wheels; the chauffeur steered them around past the National Gallery, took the left, shot up toward Leicester Square, made another left, and ducked into the underground parking garage beneath one of the new tall office buildings that the British appropriately call office “blocks” and that are making sections of London (or at least so Sir Denis thought) look more like some lesser city—Indianapolis, perhaps, or Montreal.

There was no conversation in the car after Patricia’s departure, but in the elevator up from the parking subbasement to the twenty-third floor, Sir Denis said, “You realize, I’ll only be introducing you. I won’t be staying.”

Baron Chase’s cynical grin flickered again, like phosphorescent fire on a bog. “I know,” he said. “Your skirts will remain clean.”

“If you like.”

And in fact it was close enough, Sir Denis had to admit. When he had left Uganda, three weeks earlier, he’d carried to Zurich with him the results of his strange conversations with Chase; the man’s hesitancies, non sequiturs, moral probings, and the final message to Emil Grossbarger: “Tell our friend I can’t discuss the details with neutrals. He must send me somebody of his own.” Grossbarger had laughed when Sir Denis repeated this message and, like Sir Denis, had understood it at once, saying, “Zis is crooked business he hass for me.” Sir Denis had agreed, and had been disappointed but not surprised when Grossbarger had gone on, “Vell, ve’ll listen to him. It might be amusing.”

In the next two weeks, Sir Denis had been home to São Paulo, and to Bogotá, and to Caracas; all on matters dealing with the concerns of the Bogotá Group but having little to do with the Brazil-Uganda deal. Coffee prices and coffee supplies this year were unusually volatile throughout the world; in addition to the untimely frost that had destroyed so much of Brazil’s crop, an earthquake had reduced Guatemala’s production to a fraction of normal, and continued civil war in Angola made the crop there uncertain. The Bogotá Group was concerned about stability in the coffee market. They liked the price high, but not too high; they liked their product’s supply to be less than demand, but only slightly less.

Returning to London three days ago, principally to serve as a conduit of opinion between the Bogotá Group and the International Coffee Board. Sir Denis had found that Emil Grossbarger was also in town, and had a commission for him. “Zis Baron Chase is coming Sursday. I shall meet viss him in my solicitor’s offices. Vould you be so kind as to perform ze introductions? You should leave immediately afterward, of course,” he’d finished, his mobile mouth moving, and had gone off into gales of laughter.

Sir Denis had agreed, realizing at once the two reasons for Grossbarger’s request, neither of which had anything to do with formality or politeness. The first was that Grossbarger would want assurance that the man he was talking to was in fact Baron Chase and not some secondary figure sent by Chase in his stead for reasons of his own. And the second was accountability: Grossbarger might at some time in the future want to be able to prove that the meeting had actually taken place.

So it was that Sir Denis had traveled today out to Heathrow in the Daimler provided by Grossbarger, where he had been given the totally unexpected present of Patricia Kamin. His mind full of Patricia he now rode upward in the elevator with Chase, then led him down the corridor to Suite 2350: heavy mahogany double doors with the law firm’s title affixed in brass letters—eight names, the last two separated by an ampersand, but nothing to indicate what business these eight men might have joined to undertake.

The receptionist, an American girl but with a narrow-nosed oval English face, recognized Sir Denis, announced him, and very shortly the secretary came out, an older woman, dowdily dressed in the seeming parody of a rural postmistress. Sir Denis and Chase followed her down the carpeted hallway past doors closed or ajar, from behind which came the murmurs of serious, intense conversations.

Grossbarger’s London solicitor was named Lissenden (number five on the entrance door); rather than a working attorney, he looked most like the sort of tall graying distinguished actor who makes a living portraying lawyers and heads of intelligence agencies and sometimes—though not quite so effectively—doctors. He was emerging from his office as the others arrived; with a hurried wave, backing away as though embarrassed, he called too cheerily, “Well, I’ll leave you to it!” and disappeared through another doorway. Sir Denis wondered if Chase understood that Lissenden was avoiding at all costs being introduced to Baron Chase; a quick glance at the man’s profile proved nothing.

Emil Grossbarger was seated in a large armchair with its back to the sweep of plate-glass window; behind him, the low gnarled roofs of Soho could be seen far below.

Sir Denis performed a flat uninflected introduction: “Emil Grossbarger, may I present Baron Chase from Uganda. Baron Chase, Emil Grossbarger from Zurich.”

“Forgive me if I don’t stand,” Grossbarger said, gesturing at the walker beside his chair. “I’m not ze man I was.”

“I’m sure you are, Mr. Grossbarger,” Chase said, stepping briskly forward to bow slightly as he took Grossbarger’s hand. “The body may be less. I’d guess the mind is more.”

“Vat a compliment!” Grossbarger said, actually squirming with delight, pumping Chase’s hand. His mouth moved like a reflection in water, and to Sir Denis it seemed the old man really was taken with the flattery.

Releasing Grossbarger’s hand, Chase said, “May I sit?”

“Do! Do! Of course!”

The room had been arranged as if it were a stage set with Grossbarger backlighted so that his face was a dimly seen silhouette against the glare. But Chase, acting not as though to counteract that design but merely as though his own passionate interest made him want to be closer to Grossbarger, at once pulled another chair across the pale-blue carpet, leaving darker lines of ruffled nap, and placed the chair diagonally to Grossbarger’s right, so that now Chase would be facing him directly (without the window in his line of sight) while Grossbarger would have to turn his head somewhat.

But Chase didn’t immediately sit. He stood behind the chair, both hands on its back, like an agnostic listening to predinner grace, while Grossbarger beamed at Sir Denis, saying, “Sank you for bringing zis chentleman to see me.”

“My pleasure,” Sir Denis said, but he could see that it was in truth Emil’s pleasure, that Emil saw in Chase another player of The Game, saw at once the possibilities for both conflict and mutual understanding available only to those who share the same secret life and world view. Professional tennis players and military leaders and politicians all are closer to their opponents than to anyone in the outside world. The off-duty policeman would rather talk shop with a burglar than mortgages with the next-door neighbor. In the same way, Emil Grossbarger was already closer to Baron Chase than he would ever be to Sir Denis Lambsmith, and Sir Denis recognized this fact with an inevitable twinge of envy and a reluctance to depart.

However, Grossbarger’s expression of thanks had been Sir Denis’s cue to leave, and so he did, saying, “Well, as you know, I can’t stay. But I was happy to be able to bring you together.”

“Delightful,” Grossbarger agreed, while Chase contented himself with a cold smile of dismissal.

As he was leaving the office, the door not yet completely closed, he heard Grossbarger say apologetically, “I am so sorry, Mr. Chase. My neck, ze strain. If you could move your chair just slightly. Sank you zo much.”

He wanted me to hear him win that round, Sir Denis thought, and he walked back toward the elevator smiling.

There were fewer people in Harrods than during the holidays, but the customers were still primarily tourists from the Continent. Combining this fact with the high percentage of Pakistanis and Indians and other Commonwealth citizens among the store’s sales employees, there tended to be any number of comic vignettes going on at all times. Appreciatively Sir Denis watched the performance as a Norwegian woman attempted to pay a Pakistani salesgirl for a Japanese calculator in kroner, but he felt rather sorry for the Danish man with scanty English attempting to buy an Italian suit in the right size from a self-important Indian salesman who had apparently no English at all.

For the most part, though, Sir Denis ignored the passing vaudeville of sales transactions between pairs of people who lacked a common language or currency or agreement on clothing sizes. Instead, he concentrated on Patricia’s fashion show.

She was buying, as she had said she would, a great deal of clothing. She had been in her hotel room when Sir Denis had called her from the pay phone in the garage level of Grossbarger’s solicitor’s building, and she had clearly been delighted to hear from him. “Come with me to Harrods,” she’d said, “and help me choose my wardrobe.”

He had been happy to say yes. Grossbarger’s Daimler had returned him to the hotel on Basil Street, where he’d wondered if Patricia might invite him up to the room; but she’d come down instead, and they’d walked the few blocks to Harrods, and now he was having the time of his life, seated on a small but comfortable chair while Patricia paraded before him in dress after dress, sweater after sweater, blouse after blouse.

Alicia, whom he had loved absolutely, had never given him this treat, had never even led him to suspect that such gratification existed. Her own clothes buying had been done almost exclusively in solitary twice-a-year campaigns; forays against the shops organized as by a general brilliant in tactics, from which Alicia invariably returned exhausted and triumphant. That the expedition could instead have a wonderful languorous hint of the harem about it, Sir Denis had never guessed; again his gratitude toward Patricia informed his more carnal feelings.

After an hour or so, during which Patricia selected a variety of garments and instructed they all be delivered to the hotel, she suddenly said, “I’m famished. Come upstairs, let me give you lunch on my expense account.”

It was just lunchtime, and the broad, cream-colored, low-ceilinged room on the top public floor was half-filled, mostly with middle-aged women. Patricia selected their wine and guided Sir Denis in his choice of entrée with that easiness of manner that had only recently come to women; the motherly waitress seemed to admire it from afar, as though she found Patricia’s manner as unattainable as her beauty.

Over glasses of Chablis, Sir Denis said, “When do you have to see your American Embassy man?”

“Oh, not till tomorrow. We’re forbidden to do business the same day we arrive. Jet lag, you know.”

“Chase seemed untroubled by jet lag.” Sir Denis was chagrined to hear the jealousy in his voice: of Chase and Patricia? Chase and Grossbarger?

“Oh, Chase,” Patricia said dismissively. “He isn’t human, he’s a cat. Do you know, he slept from the instant he boarded that plane until the announcement to fasten our seat belts for landing?”

“Did he really? I envy that.” It was pleasant to find a safe outlet for the expression of his envy.

“He’s so cold,” she said, and shivered.

“He is that.”

Suddenly much more serious, she leaned forward, reaching across to cover his hand with hers. “You ought to look out for Baron Chase,” she said.

“Oh, I agree.”

“No, I mean it.” She hesitated, then plunged forward. “I can tell you things now that I couldn’t say in Kampala.”

Immediately there flooded into Sir Denis’s mind the memory of his unguarded conversation with Patricia that first night she had come to his room. The next day he had been astounded at the openness with which he’d answered everything she’d asked, particularly given his memory of Chase’s earlier warning that the rooms were undoubtedly wired. He was not a stupid man, and it had occurred to him to wonder if she had doped him with that wine, but ultimately he had decided she had not. He wanted to believe in her—that was the most important thing—but he had other evidence as well: the fact that he was a businessman dealing with businessmen and not a spy dealing with spies; the fact that his secrets were all so small and unimportant and mercantile; and the fact that she had come back to him the next two nights, when there had been no questions and no loose talk.

Now, in confirming to him again the warning that the rooms at the Presidential Lodge were bugged, she re-aroused that worry, and gave it an additional wrinkle of complexity. Was she guilty after all, and speaking to him now out of the subtlety of the spy? Or was her reference to the eavesdroppers the final proof of her innocence?

Exploring that ambiguity, as one pokes one’s tongue experimentally against the aching tooth, Sir Denis said, “I seem to remember I told you far too many things in Kampala.”

She closed her eyes as though embarrassed, her hand clenching on his. “Oh, I know,” she said, and opened her eyes to stare at him. “We were too excited, my darling, and we got a little drunk. The next day I remembered—And how I led you on—Thank God you didn’t say anything against Amin.”

That possibility had never even crossed Sir Denis’s mind; he’d been too concerned about his merchant’s secrets. But if he’d said disparaging things about Idi Amin? If he’d made fun of the man? Less than two years ago, Amin had imprisoned a British writer named Dennis Hills for having said in a book that Amin was a “village tyrant.” Hills had been sentenced to death, and had been released only when British Foreign Minister James Callaghan flew to Uganda to plead personally for Hills’s life. (That time, Amin had been seated in a hut with a very low door, so Callaghan had to bow as he entered Amin’s presence.)

Patricia smiled reassuringly, squeezed his hand once more, and said, “Well, it’s over. We were lucky, my dear, and we didn’t let it happen again.”

“No, we didn’t.” With his free hand, Sir Denis lubricated his dry mouth with wine.

“The point is,” Patricia said, returning to earnest seriousness, “Baron Chase is up to something.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”

“I suspect,” she said, “he’s planning to betray Amin in some way.”

“If so,” Sir Denis said, “he’s either a braver or a more foolhardy man than I am.”

“Please don’t repeat this,” she said, looking very tense and worried. “Not to anybody.”

“You have my word.”

“And don’t let him involve you. Whatever it is he’s doing, don’t let him convince you to help him.”

“Certainly not.”

“Do you know why he’s in London?” Then, obviously seeing the quandary in Sir Denis’s face—should he mention Grossbarger or lie to her?—she laughed and patted his hand, saying, “I know about Emil Grossbarger.”

“Good,” he said, smiling back, relieved.

She released his hand to sip wine, then didn’t take his hand again. “Officially,” she said, “he’s come here to talk with the Grossbarger Group—which of course means Grossbarger—”

“Of course.”

“—about the planes for the coffee airlift to Djibouti.”

Sir Denis lifted an eyebrow: so that was Chase’s story. “I see.”

She had been watching him keenly. Now she smiled again and said, “No, you don’t believe it, either.”

“I don’t?”

“It’s too small a mission,” she said. “Anyone could have done it. I could do it. Chase could even have done it with a phone call.”

“I agree.”

“But Grossbarger requested the meeting personally,” she said, “and asked for Chase.”

“Direct action,” Sir Denis commented admiringly.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” she said. “I think Chase is trying to make some sort of deal of his own with Grossbarger. Remember, in Uganda he wouldn’t tell you what his message to Grossbarger was?”

That was one of the things he’d babbled away about that first night. Wincing at the memory, he said, “Yes, of course I remember.”

“Well, somehow he did get his message through to Grossbarger, and Grossbarger is interested, and now they’re trying to work out some sort of deal together.”

“I daresay you’re right,” Sir Denis said; what he didn’t say was that he knew for a fact she was right. Wondering if she knew more than he did, he said, “What sort of deal do you think it is?”

Unfortunately, she shook her head. “I have no idea. Could it have something to do with coffee? But Grossbarger has other interests, hasn’t he?”

“Of course. Grossbarger is an investor, in whatever looks safe enough and profitable enough. The Grossbarger Group is venture capital at a very high level.”

“But he’ll talk with Baron Chase,” she said, frowning with the intensity of her bewilderment. “What on Earth could Chase be offering him?”

“I’ve asked myself that same question a dozen times,” Sir Denis said, “without finding a satisfactory answer.”

“Is he selling Uganda?” That had been said facetiously, but then she frowned again, saying, “I wonder. Is he selling Uganda?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Revolution,” she suggested. “Could Chase be talking to Grossbarger about financing a revolution? There’d certainly be profit in it if the revolution succeeded.”

Sir Denis shook his head. “I know Emil Grossbarger fairly well,” he said. “I imagine he’s capable of very many things, but he wouldn’t touch a revolution.”

“Not under any circumstances?”

“Not under any circumstances. Revolution is emotion, and Emil Grossbarger won’t put his money on another man’s emotion.”

Patricia laughed, in surprise as much as pleasure. “You read people very well,” she said. “I wonder what you think of me.”

“You know what I think of you,” he said, and was gratified to see that special sensual smile touch her lips.

The motherly waitress was bringing their food at last. Patricia said, “I’ve done enough shopping for today. After lunch, I’d love to go back to the hotel and just rest awhile, but I don’t want to run into Chase.”

“Come to my hotel,” he suggested, trying to be casual but already feeling the heat of arousal in his body.

“Delicious idea,” she said, smiling again in that same way.

The waitress walked off frowning, glancing back over her shoulder at the stylish young black woman and the distinguished elderly white man.

Anne wasn’t using the farm in Sussex that weekend, so on Saturday Sir Denis and Patricia drove down there in a rented Ford Escort. On the way, they talked together easily, comfortably, each dipping into that store of anecdote freshly available with the advent of a new partner. They touched on the question of Grossbarger and Chase only once, and glancingly, when Patricia said, “Why did you have to meet Chase at the airport?” He explained then his role in introducing the two men, and she said, “So you’re the go-between.”

“I suppose I am, in a way.”

“I’m surprised they wouldn’t tell you what it was all about.”

“They think I’m too sort of honest,” he said, with a self-deprecating smile.

She studied him sharply for a few seconds, then smiled, visibly relaxing, saying, “And of course they’re right.”

“Thank you,” he said.

At Foxhall (pronounced Foxell or, when the natives were trying for wit, Fossil) Sir Denis turned left onto the small macadam road, barely two lanes wide, that led after several miles to the farm. “That’s my land there,” he said, nodding at the freshly turned earth under the cloud-filled sky.

“You farm it?” She sounded amazed and delighted.

Unfortunately he had to say, “No, I lease most of the land to local men. All I keep for myself is the house and the woods.”

He had been hesitant at first about bringing her up here, but the closer they got to the place the more he knew he was doing the right thing. In the old days he’d had a great deal of pleasure and contentment here, but in the years since Alicia’s death the farm had taken on a different meaning in his life; it had become a solitary place, where he could work and read, but not particularly a place of joy or serenity. Introducing Patricia to the farm would shake it up, renew his relationship with it. And perhaps with himself.

Leading from the road to the house was a quarter-mile gravel lane between fields; the one on the left recently plowed, the one on the right still with its spring stubble of dead stalks and fresh weeds. At first the house was invisible, its presence indicated only by the cluster of evergreens at the end of the lane. standing there like a Swiss Guard in uniforms of dark green. The house itself stood in their midst, a low two stories, half-timbered, with beams of so dark a brown they seemed black against the white plaster. Faintly visible behind and to the left were a springhouse and the nearest barn, both lumpy humble structures of native stone.

“It’s beautiful,” Patricia said, leaning forward to smile at the house through the windscreen. “It’s a fairy tale.”

Sir Denis smiled. A house of this design, nestled alone in the woods, always made people think of fairy tales. He normally responded to comments like that by saying, “If you owned it, you wouldn’t think so. For me, it’s plumbing problems, mildew, cracking plaster, field mice, and outrageous taxes.” But with Patricia he forbore; he wasn’t of a mind to spoil the mood.

The Kenwyns were a local farm couple who leased some of his land and who also took care of the house during those long periods when neither he nor his daughter was in residence. Sir Denis had phoned them from London this morning, so when he and Patricia entered the house, it had been aired out to some extent (though the mustiness of disuse remained faintly discernible) and most of the surfaces were dusted. The central heating (still considered a luxury in this corner of England) had been turned up, and a fire had been laid in the beam-ceilinged living room. Mrs. Kenwyn having asked if Sir Denis was bringing a guest, two of the bedrooms upstairs would have been readied; to avoid shocking local sensibilities, he would have to remember to muss up the guest-room bed before departure on Monday.

They carried the luggage upstairs, where Sir Denis pointed out the woods visible from the master-bedroom windows, stretching away for more than a mile into the countryside. “Later on,” he said, “if you feel like it, we can go for a walk. I’m sure I have wellies you could wear.”

“That’s later,” she said. “Right now, I very much want to be made love to.”

“I am at your command,” he said, and she took him at his word.

They never did get outdoors again that day. Between napping and lovemaking, Saturday was nearly at an end before they came back downstairs, he in his mildew-tinged old maroon silk robe, Patricia looking like a sexy, wayward little girl inside the massive quilted pink folds of an ancient robe of Alicia’s. They made a supper out of tins, and Sir Denis lit the fire the Kenwyns had prepared in the living room. Seated on the long sofa facing the fire, they drank a Saint-Émilion from his cellar and talked about their lives from before they’d known each other, and the darkness beyond the windows was unbroken by any sort of light.

When she opened his robe and lowered her head to his lap he was no longer even astonished at the frequency with which she could arouse him. She stayed there, and drew the lightning out of him like drawing a wasp’s sting out of one’s flesh, and then they both fell asleep in that position, awakening much later, cold and stiff and giggling, the fire nearly out. Laughing and touching one another, they made their way upstairs to bed, and awoke to a wonderfully sunny Sunday. “Now,” she said, “I’ll take that walk in the woods.”

In the mud room by the rear door he had an assortment of wellingtons, knee-high lined rubber boots. She found a pair that fit well over her walking shoes, and they tramped through the spring-boggy woods hand in hand. She kissed him as a reward for finding a sweet-singing bird whose name he did not know.

They went for a drive in the afternoon, and stopped in a pub where the mackintoshed-locals clearly couldn’t tell whether they should be astounded by the black woman herself or by her choice of companion. That was funny, too, and on the drive back they made up the dialogue that must have taken place around that bar after their departure.

There was a restaurant in a town fifteen miles away—good plain food—where once again they were a sensation, but the proprietors and other customers were too well bred to make an obvious fuss. Returning to the house after dark, the black sky flung with high tiny stars and a gibbous moon, they found that the unseen Kenwyns had set a new fire in the living room that awaited only Sir Denis’s match.

Patricia had completed her business at the American Embassy on Friday—the permission, about which there would be no problem, would be forthcoming to the computer supplier in the States—and would be taking an afternoon plane Monday to Rome, transferring there to an overnight flight for Tripoli and Entebbe. All her luggage and her new purchases (including a third suitcase, as threatened) were with her now, and Sir Denis would drive her straight to Heathrow tomorrow. In bed tonight he already felt her loss, felt nostalgic for the weekend even before it was over, and he slept with her head nestled on his shoulder, his arm curled around her back.

They were in the process of loading the car and closing the house on Monday morning when the phone rang for the first time all weekend. There was only one phone in the house, in the kitchen, and Sir Denis was a bit out of breath when he got to it.

It was Bentley, one of the men from the International Coffee Board’s London office. “Forgive my calling you at your weekend retreat,” he said, “but I wanted to get hold of you before you made any plans.”

“Of course. Not to worry.”

“The fact is,” Bentley said, and Sir Denis could hear an uncharacteristic awkwardness in the man’s voice, “you won’t be involved with the Uganda transaction any longer.”

His heart seemed to stop. In the other room, Patricia was humming some tune as she made a last stroll around the house. I’ll lose her, he thought (not acknowledging to himself even then what the thought implied, what knowledge about her he was denying), but he kept his voice steady when he said, “I won’t? Why on earth not?”

“Um,” Bentley said. “I’m supposed to fob you off with some sort of answer, you know, but I can’t help asking a question of my own. What’s the relationship between you and Emil Grossbarger?”

“Emil—? I—I hardly know how to answer that. We get along; we work well together.” I’ll lose her. “What are you trying to say, man?”

“You didn’t hear it from me,” Bentley told him, “in fact you don’t know this at all, but you’re out at Grossbarger’s request.”

“That’s impossible!” But even as he said it he could feel the floor of the world shift beneath his feet, could sense the stage sets of reality being reordered into a new perspective.

“I can tell from your voice,” Bentley said, “that you don’t know what this is all about.”

“Am I that obvious? All right, then, I don’t know what it’s all about.”

“Grossbarger went out of his way,” Bentley said, “to assure us that he had no fault to find with you, either personally or professionally. He said he wanted to make the change for reasons of his own, and would always be happy to work with you again in the future.”

“Then it makes no sense,” Sir Denis said. I’ll lose her. “Who’s replacing me?”

“Walter Harrison.”

Sir Denis knew him; an American, with a special interest in the Mexican coffee business. “Still someone from the Bogotá Group, then,” he commented.

“I was rather hoping you could explain it.”

In that instant the penny dropped, and Sir Denis could have explained it, but he did not. “I’m as baffled as you are,” he said.

“As it now stands,” Bentley told him, “you can go home at any time.”

Meaning São Paulo, of course. “Thank you.” Sir Denis said. “I’ll talk to you before I go.” I’ll lose her.

Very hesitantly he returned to the living room, where the ashes in the fireplace were cold and dead. Patricia rose from an armchair, her expression concerned, saying, “What is it? It must have been bad news.”

Staring at her more intently than he realized, willing the awfulness to be over as quickly and cleanly as possible, he said, “Emil Grossbarger has asked the Coffee Board to replace me on the Uganda sale.”

“Oh, my dear.” She stepped forward, reaching out to touch his arm.

“I can see what it is, of course,” he said. “Grossbarger and Chase have come to an agreement, and they want me out of the way.”

“So it is coffee.” For just an instant her face was tense with calculation. Then she shook her head, and focused on him again, and smiled sadly at whatever she saw in his eyes. “Yes, of course,” she said. “But this won’t make any difference to us.”

“It won’t?” He was so convinced of their finish that he couldn’t even try to hope.

“There are things I wish I could tell you,” she said, her gentle hand pressing his arm. “But you’ll see, my dear, it isn’t over. Not between us.”

He didn’t believe her, but courtesy required him to pretend that he did. “Thank you, Patricia,” he said. “If for nothing else, thank you for bringing me back to life.”

“Stay alive,” she said, with that well-remembered seductive smile. “For me.”

“We should leave. You won’t want to miss your plane.”

20

Through April and into May, in the first five weeks of the long rains, Ellen flew only four round trips: three to Nairobi, and one all the way to Mombasa, seven hundred miles eastward on the Indian Ocean. Those few intervals above the clouds, in the beautiful gold of sunlight, made things not better but worse; each time, the return to Earth through those miserable clouds was an awful experience, leaving her bad-tempered for hours afterward.

The rain affected everybody. Even Frank seemed less boisterous and Mr. Balim not quite so smoothly self-assured. As for Lew, the rain and the forced inactivity were probably enough to explain his recent tension, his distracted, almost guilty manner, his impatience and suppressed anger. Still, Ellen thought there was more to it than that. She thought he was having an affair.

If so, it was the girl in Nairobi. The first flight there, Ellen’s passengers had been Balim and Lew, and afterward Lew had described to her the Jhosi family, their current plight, and their relationship with the coffee-smuggling operation. The second time, a week later, Lew had been the only passenger, bringing papers for the grandmother to sign. He had been met at the airport by the granddaughter, Amarda, who was to drive him to the coffee plantation while Ellen refueled and dealt with the airport paperwork.

Lew had mentioned Amarda Jhosi in his account of the first meeting, but had referred to her only glancingly, as though she were unimportant, thereby leaving out far too much. He hadn’t mentioned that she was beautiful, with large sad eyes. And he hadn’t mentioned that she was in love with him.

Well, men had less sensitivity about such things; it was possible he didn’t realize Amarda Jhosi was in love with him. Still, Ellen dated his increasing testiness and irritability from that second Nairobi trip, when he had been gone with the girl for five hours—to sign papers?—and had volunteered an unconvincing story afterward about traffic jams.

Ellen’s third rainy-season flight had been the one to Mombasa, carrying Frank and two small canvas bags. Ivory or some other illegal commodity had been involved in that flight, she suspected, but she’d asked no questions and Frank had volunteered no answers. Because of the distance involved, that one had been an overnight trip, and Ellen had been fully prepared to fend off further unwanted advances from Frank that night in the Whitesands Hotel. It had been a pleasant relief when he had remained merely cheery and companionable, telling her over dinner comic or horrific incidents from Mombasa’s history, and not once making even the most oblique suggestion that they might spend the night together. Since then, she had warmed more to Frank, and even thought of him now as a friend.

Finally, three days ago, there had been the third trip to Nairobi. This time, Mr. Balim was along as well as Lew, and from the conversation in the plane Ellen understood that Balim was bringing money to the Jhosi family to be used in connection with the smuggling. They would have to order and pay for thousands of sacks with their own plantation’s imprint. They would have to arrange for transportation of the resacked coffee from the plantation, as well as for storage during the time the coffee was in their care.

The girl Amarda was at Wilson Airport again, to chauffeur them, and it seemed to Ellen the girl avoided her gaze. And this time, when the two men returned after four hours, Ellen thought there was a new amused twinkle in Balim’s eye, the look of a man holding tight to a delicious and diverting secret.

During this period of rain-caused idleness, Ellen had taken to hanging out at Balim’s place of business, where there was at least usually some sort of activity to watch, to distract herself. And she did enjoy talking with Isaac Otera, a decent and very sad man. Of course, Frank was always enjoyable to watch, crashing from wall to wall.

Today, arriving in midmorning, she found Frank dressed like some demon out of Kabuki, all swathed in shiny black raingear, stomping out of the office. Seeing her, he said, “You busy? Wanna go for a ride?”

“In the rain? Where to?”

“A town that never happened,” he said. “Come on along.”

“What the hell,” she said, and went with him.

“Port Victoria,” Frank said, squinting like a gargoyle through the wet windshield. “It was gonna be the champ, and it wound up a bum.”

They were driving northwest out of Kisumu on the B1. The rain was in its medium stage—relentless but not a downpour—and Frank had covered the front passenger seat with a blanket to eliminate the traces of Charlie, so Ellen could ride beside him. She felt unreasonably happy and light, as though some stuffy, constricting woolen overcoat she’d been wearing for months had at last been flung off. Settling herself comfortably on the blanketed seat, smiling in anticipation at Frank’s craggy profile, she said, “What happened to Port Victoria?”

“The British, to begin with,” he said. “When they were building the railroad, they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. They had four surveys done, and no two of them agreed, but of course back then a successful survey was one where nothing or nobody ate the surveyor. About the only thing they all agreed on was the place where the railroad should meet the lake.”

“Port Victoria,” she suggested.

“Wait for it.” He liked to tell his stories at his own pace, without being interrupted.

“Sorry.”

“This place—okay, Port Victoria—it’s up on the northeastern shoulder of the lake, with fairly high land right behind it. No swamps, see, but no mountains, either. It’s at the outer southern point of Berkeley Bay, so the lake is right in front of it, with a natural deep-water harbor, and Berkeley Bay around to the side for protected mooring.”

“Sounds good,” Ellen said.

“It is good. It’s terrific. That’s why they named it Port Victoria, right? It was supposed to be the major port on Lake Victoria, both of them named after that queen.”

“Something went wrong.”

“Something always goes wrong,” Frank said. “What happened this time, the British knew they were gonna end the railroad at Port Victoria, and they knew they were gonna start the railroad at Mombasa, but the seven hundred miles in between they were kind of fuzzy about.”

Ellen laughed, saying, “Because of things eating the surveyors.”

“Sure. It was so bad, they were still surveying out in front of the railroad while they were building it. And of course, the more detailed the survey, the closer they got to the reality on the ground, the more expensive it was. Like, a team would go through in the dry season and say, Fine, we got solid ground, just lay your track right down and zoom. Then the rains come, and it turns out there’s absolute rivers there, the track washes away, and all of a sudden for every ten miles you’ve got to do six miles of bridges.”

“Expensive,” Ellen agreed.

“The British Parliament was paying for all this,” Frank said, “and right from the beginning there was a strong minority that didn’t want to build the railroad at all. They were the anti-Imperialists, called the Little England group, and they didn’t want the interior of Africa opened up and colonized and made part of the British Empire. After ten years, when the cost of the railroad was just about doubled from the first estimate but they were actually getting close to the lake, the Little England bunch finally got their way. The money wasn’t shut off entirely, but the faucet was turned way down.”

“But they still reached the lake.”

“Sure. At Kisumu. Fifty-five miles closer than Port Victoria, a swamp next to a stagnant gulf, and it’s another forty miles across the gulf to the regular part of the lake. The British were just like anybody else: they spent like idiots when they didn’t know what they were doing, and as soon as some ready cash would have helped they got stingy.”

“So Port Victoria never happened.”

Nodding, Frank said, “It would have been what Kisumu is, a rich trading town with tourist hotels and its own airport and all that shit. Instead, it’s got a population of maybe a hundred, a little open-air village market, and that’s all. Also, the last twenty-five miles in is dirt road.”

“Dirt! In this weather?”

“It’s not that bad,” he said. “Most of it is rock. The way they build that kind of road, they just come in with bulldozers and scrape the topsoil away, and underneath you got rock. Anyway, back to the story. There’s a kicker in it.”

“A happy ending for Port Victoria after all?” Oddly enough, she had found herself sympathizing with the town, as though it were a person who’d been unjustly treated.

“In a way,” Frank said. “All the regular commerce went to Kisumu, but that left Port Victoria with all its natural advantages and nobody to use them. The natural harbor, the firm uphill land, the protected bay. And besides that, you’ve got Uganda just ten miles across the water.”

“You’re going to say smuggling.”

Frank laughed; history delighted him. “Sure, it’s smuggling. The biggest smuggling port on the lake. The straight world got the swamp and the stagnant gulf and a town called Kisumu, sounds like a sneeze. The underworld got Port Victoria.”

What Frank had called “mostly rock” turned out, in Ellen’s opinion, to be mostly mud. When they turned left off the B1 at Luanda—the sign pointed toward Siaya and Busonga, without mentioning Port Victoria at all—they were almost immediately half-mired in a broad lake of orangy-red mud. The road was very wide, probably three lanes (if it could be said to have such things as lanes), with high mud walls on both sides to channel the rain and keep it from running off. Those walls were undoubtedly the topsoil that had, according to Frank, been scraped off when this “road” had been built.

They passed a group of schoolgirls in bright pink jumpers and white blouses, all carrying gaudily colored umbrellas. A few glowered at the truck in sullen suspicion, but most showed cheery smiles under their umbrellas, and many waved.

Everywhere she went, Ellen saw these groups of schoolchildren, the girls in bright-colored jumpers, the boys frequently in short pants and white shirts and blue blazers. The strangest thing was to see a group of neatly dressed teenagers walking at the end of the day across the stubby fields toward their homes; a cluster of low mud huts, lacking electricity or running water. How do they get up in the morning in such hovels, she wondered, and manage to turn themselves into clean, pressed, shining-faced students? How far they were traveling to reach the twentieth century, and how quickly and surely they were making the journey.

Their own journey, on the other hand, was rather slower and more uncertain. The Land-Rover slithered and slued along this endless rice paddy, the wheels throwing mud in all directions. (Frank had slowed down when they passed the schoolgirls so as not to splash them.) Here and there a solitary person walked, occasionally someone was to be seen hunkered under a large umbrella by the roadside waiting for God knows who or what, and once a dangerously skidding blue bus crammed with passengers came lurching the other way, the driver madly honking his horn in lieu of attempting to control the wheel. Frank eeled by him, and Ellen stared back at all the white-eyed black-faced passengers seen through the steamy windows frighteningly close.

There were no more history anecdotes on this part of the trip. Driving took all of Frank’s attention and, as usual, most of his muscles. Keeping clear of the flailing elbows, Ellen sat close to the door and watched the muddy world go slowly by.

Frank had said Port Victoria was fifty-five miles from Kisumu, and at the rate they were going, it was beginning to seem it would take a week, when all at once the road made an abrupt right-angled turn at a village—not even a village; not anything at all that Ellen could see—called Busonga, and directly in front of them was a narrow, fast-running, muddy river and a small open ferry. “Good God!”

Frank was grinning at her as he wrestled the Land-Rover to a stop on the slippery macadam incline running down to the water. “Forgot to tell you about this,” he said. “The ferry over the Nzoia. Little adventure to tell your grandchildren.”

Suspiciously studying the ferry, which was inching this way from the farther shore, Ellen said, “You sure I’ll have grandchildren?”

“I’m willing to do my part,” he said.

She looked sharply at him, but saw that he was merely joking and not making a pass. “I’ll think of something funny to say,” she said, “when we reach the other side.”

The ferry was merely a large square raft, with a filthy greasy big engine bolted to it on one side. A thick cable attached to metal stanchions on each bank dangled across the river and through the raft’s engine so the ferry could slowly and agonizingly winch its way across the stream. In addition, another higher cable was slightly upstream; a third cable, one end of which was attached to the upstream side of the raft, was noosed around this higher one to keep the ferry from drifting too far downstream, thereby creating too much stress on cable number one as it was fed through the engine. Friction between the wire noose and the cable it was to slide along made the ferry move in slow uncertain fits and starts, like a very sleepy drunk.

The ferry had metal pipe railings on both sides, and twin narrow metal ramps for vehicles jutting out at front and back. At the moment there were about a dozen people standing clustered in the middle of the thing, dressed in red and white and yellow and pink, most holding umbrellas, forming a bright-colored temporary geodesic roof. More foot passengers waited on this side of the river; the monotony of their wait had been broken by the unexpected arrival of a Land-Rover containing two white people. Ellen stared back, but she grew bored before they did.

The man who ran the ferry was short, with a stout torso but spindly arms and legs like a spider’s. Also spiderlike in his movements, he crawled and swarmed over his engine, making a great complicated to-do about the landing, with the metal ramps scraping up onto the macadam.

Despite the ferryman’s angry shouts and warnings, most of the passengers had jumped off and gone on about their business before he’d finished docking to his own satisfaction. Then there was a semicomic moment when the waiting passengers all rushed on and the ferryman had to order them off again, with many yells and curses and flailings of his spindly arms, so the Land-Rover could be carefully maneuvered into position first. Ellen, feeling vaguely guilty that she was inside in the dry while all those people were out there in the wet, smiled apologetically at everybody whose eye she met, while Frank cursed under his breath at the contradictory instructions of the ferryman, who kept waving Frank to turn this way and that, when obviously the sensible thing to do was merely drive up the ramps and onto the ferry and stop.

Well, he did, at last, and the foot passengers followed, and the ferryman collected everybody’s fare. The vehicle was charged four shillings—about fifty cents—while from watching the ferryman make change, it seemed to Ellen foot passengers paid far less.

“This is the most relaxing part of the trip,” Frank said as the ferryman threw his engine into gear and the metal ramps scraped back again off the macadam. Suiting his actions to his words, he leaned back in the seat, folded his arms over his chest, closed his eyes, and smiled in lazy comfort.

And the strange thing was, he was right. The motion of the ferry, the combination of hesitant forward motion with the constant sideways thrust of the river, was oddly soothing, the physical equivalent of a lullaby. Their progress was slow, easy, soporific, and out of their hands. The river was so narrow that even with its rapidity and muddiness it didn’t look really dangerous, and the other passengers under their roof of joined umbrellas seemed pleased by their presence, as being an entertaining break from routine. The far shore, which was much steeper, approached slowly through the rain, and Ellen found herself relaxing more than she had done in a month. The tensions went away; the frustrations faded; the uncertainties grew less important. “I want to stay here forever,” she murmured, and beside her, Frank comfortably chuckled.

The routine between frantic ferryman and disinterested passengers was repeated on the opposite bank, and so was that between ferryman-as-incompetent-direction-giver and Frank-as-long-suffering-driver. But at last they were off, and spurting up the muddy slope, people ducking out of the way of the great gobs of maroon gunk thrown back by the tires straining for purchase. They reached level ground and a much narrower road, arched over by rows of trees. “That was fun,” Ellen said. “Thanks.”

“You don’t get any of those in—Where are you from, anyway?”

“Everywhere. I was an Army brat. Air Force, really. My father was a pilot.”

“You learned from him?”

“Starting when I was fourteen. He’s flying for PSA now.”

They talked awhile about cities and countries where Ellen had grown up, finding that while they’d both lived in several of the same places, it had never been at the same time. But Ellen loved meaningless coincidences as much as anybody, and was pleased whenever it turned out that Frank had been such-and-such a place three years after she’d been there, or two years before.

At a fork in the muddy road they turned left, and very soon overtook a monstrous sagging lumbering smoke-snorting truck, its load covered with tan canvas tarpaulins. The springs on its right side were completely shot, so that at all times it seemed in the process of falling over; even if the road had been wide enough to pass, that tottering hulk would have intimidated most drivers.

“Shit,” Frank said. “They’re supposed to be there already; they left two hours before us.”

She had no idea what he was talking about. “Who?”

“Charlie,” he said in disgust, pointing at the truck. “They can’t take the ferry, so they came around the long way, through Sio.”

“They have something to do with us?”

“That’s our work crew,” Frank said, and despite his annoyance he grinned. “We didn’t come out here just to play might-have-been.”

“Oh,” Ellen said, suddenly realizing. “The smuggling capital.” Of course this had to do with the coffee caper; for some absurd reason it spoiled things a bit that this expedition wasn’t merely an outing for its own sake.

“That’s right,” Frank said. “The smuggling capital; that’s good. Did you read in the Standard about the outboard motors?” The Standard was a Nairobi newspaper, also available in Kisumu.

“Outboard motors? No.”

“You know Lake Naivasha? It’s two hundred miles east of here, big lake. Already this year, every outboard motor on that lake was stolen; at least, every outboard motor that wasn’t locked away in somebody’s house.”

“Is that true? Why?”

“To come here for the smuggling. Uganda’s breaking down. This year, there’ll be more import-export by smuggling than by regular trade.”

Ellen suddenly had an image of them all—herself, Lew, Frank, Balim, even Isaac Otera—as carrion eaters, buzzards or hyenas, waiting on the sidelines for some stricken creature to die. It was a discomfiting vision. She said, “It seems tough on the people.”

“Around Lake Naivasha? They’ll recover.”

“No, in Uganda.”

“Uganda!” He seemed truly astonished. “We aren’t screwing the people,” he said, “they’re the ones doing the smuggling. They’re getting out from under their government, that’s all, the best way they can, poor bastards.”

“What’s going to happen next?” she wondered. “In Uganda, I mean.”

“What usually happens, I suppose,” he said. “Things’ll get worse.”

Port Victoria looked like the cowtown in Western movies. Not the big town with the saloons full of fancy women, but the little nothing-town where the stagecoach changes horses. The dirt road—mud road, really—ended in a large scraggly weedy square with low stucco or cement buildings on three sides. Most of the buildings featured verandah roofs over mud or cement walks, above which were false fronts. Peeling old political posters glued to the walls looked like wanted posters from those same Western movies. A dozen or so adults and children lounged in the comparative dryness under the verandah roofs. Low hills surrounded the village on three sides, adding to the sense of frontier isolation. Only the presence of a small white British Leyland truck parked in front of what seemed to be a general store took the scene out of the American nineteenth century and put it in the African twentieth.

Was there a sense here of unfulfilled destiny? In this sleepy village did there still dream the egg of the merchant metropolis that had never been born? It was probably merely that she’d heard the history of the place from Frank, but it nevertheless seemed to Ellen that there was something vaguely sad about the town, sad in a way other than the sadness endemic in rural towns everywhere, more than that usual sense of personal loss, of stunted promise and missed opportunity. Here it was no mute inglorious Milton that was evoked, but the image of an entire city that had failed to be. The missing railroad yards, warehouses, docks, movie palaces, bars, mansions, slums, vitality, purpose; all seemed to hover minimally and unnoticeably in the air behind the reality of the town, the aura of a ghost too weak even to haunt the place.

And the second subtext here, of course, was the underworld: Port Victoria’s secret life as a smuggler’s haven. In addition to the bland reality of surface appearance, in addition to the ghostly echo of what might have been, there was also the hidden face of corruption. Everyone she saw might be a smuggler or a thief; every building might conceal booty. Smuggling always leads to further crimes, to bribery, theft, or murder; in losing its original destiny, Port Victoria had become something strange and fascinating and in a way pathetic, almost like a failed person. Looking around her, Ellen said, “It’s a Graham Greene character as geography.”

Frank glowered. “What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

Frank had grown more and more angry at that groaning truck out in front of them, and once they reached the town’s weedy square he took the immediate opportunity to yank the Land-Rover in a wide sweep around the other vehicle, honking furiously. “Stupid bastard!” he yelled, but since the windows were closed against the rain, nobody could have heard him but Ellen.

A bumpy muddy lane led downhill on the right side of the square, beginning like an afterthought between two of the verandahed buildings. Frank charged through there as though daring the Land-Rover to hit one of those walls, then skittered and skewed and side-slid down the long muddy slope between tiny flat-roofed houses that were more Caribbean than Wild West.

The lake was out ahead, at the bottom of the hill, with a strange large round cane-and-reed hut off to one side. Ellen thought, Now we’re in the South Pacific. To the left, near the shore, was another huge truck like the one now lumbering down the lane after them. As Frank slued around and parked behind this second one, its doors opened and two men climbed down, wearing shabby raincoats and straw hats.

“Time to kick ass,” Frank said, with clear satisfaction. Pulling on his shiny black plastic rainhat, thus completing once again his Kabuki demon costume, he kicked open the Land-Rover’s door, splashed out into the mud, and stood with arms akimbo in the very ideogram of rage as the second truck wheezed and sagged around in a great semicircle and came to a stop beside its brother.

Ellen also climbed out of the Land-Rover, wearing her red rainhat and dark-blue raincoat and faded blue jeans and black knee-high boots, and heard the two men in the straw hats jabber away at Frank in Swahili. “Ah, shut up,” he told them, and called across the Land-Rover’s hood at Ellen, “The stupid bastards won’t learn English!”

“Very good English,” one of the men said indignantly.

“Then talk English,” Frank told him.

The man hesitated, frowning mightily, apparently having thoughts about his dignity; then he rattled off some more words in Swahili.

“Shit,” Frank answered, and turned to the two men who had emerged from the other truck, one of whom was Charlie. “Where’ve you been, you guttersnipe?”

“Oh, it’s a very heavy load completely,” Charlie said. He was the only one present not dressed for the weather, and already his filthy white shirt and baggy black trousers were soaked and clinging to him. He seemed neither to notice nor care.

“Double shit,” Frank commented. “You gonna go to work now?”

“Absolutely,” Charlie said, and turned to speak Swahili to the three other men, all of whom answered at the same time, each obviously pleading his own special case. Charlie went on blandly talking through their answers, and Frank turned away, shaking his head in disgust. “Come on down to the lake,” he called to Ellen, who was still standing on the other side of the Land-Rover, “before I forget myself and stomp these clowns into the turf.”

They walked down the slope together in the rain, their hands in their raincoat pockets. Pulled up on the bank were several long narrow rowboats, brightly colored, most with a flat board at the back for mounting an outboard motor. Ellen said, “This is your natural harbor?”

“Sure.” He waved an arm away toward the right. “Berkeley Bay in there.” Jutting his chin forward, he said, “That’s Uganda.”

Straight ahead, a low hill rose out of the water, surprisingly close, looking like an island. Flying over Uganda with Frank, back when Lew was captured, Ellen had had no particular feelings about the land itself, but now that dark featureless hill in the rain, looming up out of the water, did bear an aura of menace. “It doesn’t look pleasant,” she said, and shivered inside the coat.

“The funny thing is,” Frank said, “it is pleasant. The land, I mean. It’s the lushest, richest part of the entire continent of Africa. Stanley said Uganda was the pearl of Africa.”

“A pearl with a curse on it,” Ellen said, and Frank laughed. Then he said, “You want another quote? This is from Sir John Gray, used to be Chief Justice in Uganda when the British had it. He said the history of Uganda is ‘a crime to which there have been no eyewitnesses.’”

“But if the land is so rich—”

“Only man is vile.”

Ellen turned away from that low hill across the water and looked back upslope, where Charlie and the other three men had pulled the tarpaulins off one of the trucks and had started to unload masses of concrete blocks by the simple method of standing up on top of the load and tossing them down into a messy muddy pile. When they landed on one another they chipped and broke, but the men didn’t seem to mind. Ellen said, “What’s that all about, anyway?”

“The hotel,” Frank said, grinning with another secret joke.

“Hotel? Here?” She looked down at the shoreline, which was mud and weeds and grass; hardly a tourist’s beach.

“Sure,” Frank said. “Regional development. Build the joint up. Next thing you know, you got Elizabeth Taylor and Bianca Jagger dropping in. Paparazzi at Port Victoria.”

Ellen laughed at the idea, then said, “Come on, Frank. What’s up?”

“Balim had a little chat,” Frank said, rubbing his thumb and the side of his first finger together in the universal sign language for a bribe’s being passed, “with a fellow at the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife.”

“The Ministry of what?”

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“Probably,” Ellen said. “Is there really a Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife?”

“Sure. Think about it; you’ll see it makes sense. When the tourists come to Kenya, it’s to see the wildlife.”

“Not much wildlife around here,” Ellen said, glancing around again, “apart from Charlie.”

“Look at those idiots,” Frank said. Crack, crack, the concrete blocks were bouncing off one another.

“Frank, why a hotel?”

“Okay.” Looking away toward Uganda, he said, “When this fucking rain stops, we’re gonna go over there and get ourselves several tons of coffee. We’re gonna need boats to ship it over here. We’re gonna need trucks to get it to the plantation.”

“The Jhosi plantation,” Ellen said, with a sudden surprising spasm of misery.

“Right,” Frank said, not noticing. “We’re gonna need work crews here to load and unload. We’re probably gonna need storage facilities, because the coffee’ll come in quicker than we can truck it out. Now, you see what this town looks like. How much traffic you think they get on that road, the average day?”

“Not much.” Coming in, they’d met that one blue bus, and had seen three men riding bicycles laden down with huge burlap sacks; Frank had said those were smugglers.

“That’s right. Sometimes a truck or two, even a legitimate delivery to the market. But not heavy traffic. A lot of smuggling goes through here, but it’s all small-time.”

“Of course.”

“Now,” Frank said, “not everybody on this old planet is as easygoing as you and me. Here and there you’ve got busybodies. Here and there you’ve got people who might even rat to the cops when they see something they don’t understand.”

“I’m beginning to get the picture,” Ellen said.

“For the next couple months,” Frank told her, “there’ll be trucks going in and out of here every day. There’ll be work crews. There’ll be construction materials, including all the wood we’ll need to make the rafts to bring the coffee over. There’ll be storage facilities.”

“But at the end,” Ellen pointed out, “there will be a completely useless hotel.”

“Paid for by international development funds.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Cute, huh?”

Ellen nodded. “Balim is very very clever, isn’t he?”

“Balim is a fucking genius,” Frank said.

The only fly in the ointment, Frank explained, was that he was going to have to spend a lot of time here, making sure the work was done right, the supplies weren’t stolen, and the truth about their plans didn’t come out prematurely. “Originally I’d figured Lew for this job,” he explained, shaking his head in disgust, “but I got to admit I’m the one to do it. I know how to deal with these Bantus.”

Yes, Ellen thought, the white man’s method. Kick ass. Yell, scream, get red in the face. And on his side, the native smiles and nods and works as slowly as possible and pretends to be stupid, and all the time he’s robbing you blind. And both sides are satisfied with the arrangement.

“The worst of it is,” Frank was saying, “I can’t be too visible here, because I’m white. Some son of a bitch’ll tell the police at Kakamega there’s a white man hanging around Port Victoria, and we’re screwed. So I’m gonna have to camp out.”

“Camp out? In a tent?”

“Yup. That’s why I came out today, to pick the site. Up in the hills there. If I leave it to Charlie, he’ll pitch the fucking tent on a scorpion’s nest. And if I live through it, he’ll act stupid, like it was a mistake.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Ellen said.

“Come on for a hike.”

They walked back up from the lakeshore through the unending rain, and Frank spent a useless moment by the trucks yelling at Charlie about breakage. Then they walked on, diagonally away from the village, up a steep rocky slope covered with gnarled low shrubs and stubbly green new growth. Bony trees were farther up toward the ridge.

Looking back, Ellen saw two small boats approaching the shore near where they’d been standing, each carrying two men and several lumpy sacks. The sound of their outboard motors was obliterated by the rain. Smugglers, probably; no, certainly.

The steep hill made for hard climbing, particularly since both the mud and the rocks were slippery under their boots. Concentrating on the climb, they spoke no more until they reached the ridge and had started down the much gentler slope on the other side. Perhaps because of the earlier mention of the Jhosi plantation, during the silent walk uphill Ellen brooded on her problems for almost the first time since leaving Kisumu, and after they’d reached the top she astonished herself, as they walked along on the nearly level land, by suddenly saying, “Frank, do you know that Lew’s having an affair?”

He frowned at her, uncomprehending. “With you,” he said.

“No, with somebody else.”

“Greedy bastard.”

The phrase made her believe Frank really did know nothing about it, so she said nothing more. They walked along, Frank glowering out ahead of them, apparently thinking about nothing but the right place to pitch his tent, until he looked at her again and said, “Who’s the lucky girl?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He stopped entirely. “Listen,” he said. “Are you one hundred percent sure?”

“Of course not. Nobody is until the other person suddenly tells you. And the other person always does suddenly tell you.”

“People are shits,” Frank said.

“True. I was hoping you could confirm or deny.”

“Lew doesn’t confide in me.” Frank said. “Not that kind of thing, anyway. He’d be afraid I’d go sniffing after you myself.”

“He’d be right,” she said, smiling despite herself.

He held a hand up, dangling it from the wrist as though broken. “I got burned once.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad.” Not liking the way the conversation was tending, she looked around and said, “How about over there? For your tent.”

He stared in the direction she was pointing. “Where?”

“There, where the land rises a little.”

They walked over to the spot, a low knob or mound, overgrown with weeds and shrubs but treeless. The bony trees were all around, like layers of barbed wire protecting this hillock. Neither the town nor the lake could be seen. “Possible,” Frank said. “Very very possible.”

“It’ll be drier than the land around it, but still protected.”

“Sure.” Frank turned in a great circle, looking at the view without delight. “Home sweet home,” he said. “Jesus. In some previous life I must have been one hell of a villain.”

21

Lew was at the wheel of the Morris Minor, in the rain, with Ellen in the passenger seat beside him, on their way to Balim’s office. And it was at the corner, barely half a block from their house, that he saw the gray Citroën parked on the verge and knew at once it was Amarda Jhosi’s car.

Amarda herself was behind the wheel; he saw her smile through the rain-streaming window as he drove by. Had Ellen seen? Glancing at her, he saw she was looking for something in her shoulder bag.

Driving on, he experienced a sudden surge of erotic memory. The second trip to Nairobi in particular came back to him with the force of hypnotic suggestion. That was the time Balim had not come along, and Amarda had met him in that same Citroën. “I just have something to pick up at a friend’s house,” she’d said as they’d driven away from the airport (and Ellen). “It isn’t out of the way.” The friend, of course, had not been at home, and when Amarda had said, “You might as well come in,” the radiance of her smile had answered all his questions. She was the round-breasted Indian Princess, slowly smiling, soft and young and very willing to learn.

The third time, with Balim along, the connection with Amarda had been more hurried, more guilty, less ecstatic; but still he had followed her eagerly into the storage shed behind her house, rolling with her on the rough burlap sacks, surrounded by the clatter of the rain.

There had been no more trips to Nairobi, which was just as well. Amarda was wonderfully enjoyable, but she was also dangerous, and while she had asked for nothing, he couldn’t help the guilty feeling that he had taken her gift somehow under false pretenses. It was better to let the affair die from inanition.

But now Amarda was here, in Kisumu, smiling at him half a block from the home he shared with Ellen. Do we really have to pay for our falls from grace, every single one? I don’t want to lose Ellen, he thought, and glanced at her profile beside him in the car. It was probably just his imagination, but she looked awfully stony.

Lew had to struggle to keep his mind on what Balim and Isaac Otera were saying. The railroad that came to Kisumu, they told him, was not the main line it had once been. The true main line now angled northward at Nakuru, then ran west into Uganda, leaving the much-struggled-for track to Kisumu nothing but a branch. This branch had been more recently extended northwestward, paralleling the lakeshore but running farther inland, and terminating at Butere, thirty miles away.

It now appeared that at some time in the last two weeks a shipment of sewing machines—fifty-seven machines, crated separately, from Japan—that should have been delivered to Balim here in Kisumu had unaccountably not been offloaded from the freight train and had wound up in the terminus at Butere. “Now,” Isaac said, showing his annoyance by shuffling the various documents and manifests and flimsies in his lap, “some railway officials in Butere are making trouble.”

With his sad smile, the smile suggesting that yet again the human race had justified his worst suspicions, Balim said, “It’s a bribe they want, of course. Chai. The questions are: first, How much? and second, To whom? It is one of those moments, my dear Lew, that call for a firm hand and a white face.”

Lew grinned, trying to appreciate Balim’s humor and stop thinking about Amarda here in Kisumu. Did she mean to talk to Ellen? What was going to happen? He said, “I’ve got the idea.” To Isaac he said, “Do we have a name?”

“Two names.” Isaac extended a small sheet of paper marked in blue ink with his small neat handwriting. “One is Kamau Nyaga, who calls himself assistant terminal manager. I phoned a railway friend in Nakuru, and at the moment the manager’s position at Butere is unfilled, so this fellow is making hay while the sun shines.”

Balim chuckled. “An odd metaphor, under the circumstances,” he said, with a nod toward the windows, against which the rain was streaming.

“Lew knows what I mean,” Isaac said, at his prissiest.

“Yes, I do.” But, he thought, what does Amarda mean?

“The other,” Isaac went on, “is called Godfrey Juma. He is freightmaster and has been there for a very long time.”

“We have bribed him before,” Balim said drily. “That is, Frank has. You can give him Frank’s best.”

“I will.”

“Unfortunately,” Isaac said, “we cannot tell from here which of these two has authority, or even the physical control of the shipment.”

“We don’t,” Balim pointed out, “wish to bribe the wrong person.”

“I see that,” Lew said.

“It’s as bad as having two women,” Isaac said with a sigh.

Lew peered sharply at him; had he meant something by that? But Isaac’s face was as open and innocent and humorless as ever. Feeling grim, Lew got to his feet, saying, “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Merely do your best,” Balim suggested. “Romance them both, but only plight your troth with one.”

Oh, for God’s sake. “That’s what I’ll do, then,” Lew said, and got out of there before they could drive him any more crazy.

The gray Citroën was in his rearview mirror, beyond the rain-running back window. Being on a mission where face was of importance, Lew had been given one of Balim’s better cars, an almost undented black Peugeot. He had barely steered it out of town, heading northwest through the rain on the B1, when the gray Citroën appeared behind him.

He didn’t notice it at first, because he’d been thinking about Ellen. Was it possible for a woman to clench her lips? Leaving Balim’s building, going out to the rain and the Peugeot and the uncertainties of both Butere and Amarda, Lew had kissed Ellen good-bye, and it had seemed to him that her lips were harder than usual; corrugated, almost. Or was that merely paranoia? Or guilt? “Shit,” he said out loud, driving along, and that was when he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the Citroën.

His first impulse was to hit the accelerator, but of course he couldn’t do that. Nor could he hit the brake and stop, not here on the main road out of Kisumu. So he kept driving until he reached Kisiani, where he took the small unpaved turnoff to the left. Not far out of town he found a place where farm vehicles had beaten a path in to the right past a cluster of trees. He made the turn, jounced around behind the trees, and stopped.

The Citroën was huge in his mirror, like a brooding shark. Lew stepped quickly out into the rain, wanting the meeting to take place in her car, not his.

“Surprised?” she said, smiling at him in uncomplicated happiness as he slid into the Citroën.

“More than I can say.” Slamming the car door, he took her in his arms and kissed her; not because he wanted to, but because he knew very well it was what he was supposed to do.

But then he did want to.

It was in the role of hero that he had first met her. He was the hero and she the damsel in distress. He was the handsome stranger and she the beautiful virgin in the bosom of her family. He was Lochinvar and she—Except that, in the poem, Lochinvar’s damsel was named Ellen.

His own Ellen had seemed an irrelevancy then, not mentioned in sagas. But she did exist, the outer world did exist, and the wall he’d built between reality and fantasy had crumbled this morning when he’d first seen Amarda’s car half a block from his house. The damsel in distress doesn’t drive two hundred miles to get laid.

In the Citroën now, sex finished, the beast slaughtered yet again, the two of them sprawling on bedlike reclining seats, it was possible at last for Lew to move in the direction of rational thought. So far from being a helpless orphan, Amarda at twenty was a grown woman capable of getting what she wanted out of this world. How much did she want Lew, and for how long? How much trouble did she want to make? What did she intend to do about Ellen?

The Citroën was like some cave on an asteroid somewhere. The interior was very warm now, the windows completely steamed over, and the rain—filtered through tree branches—thudded erratically on the roof. In this setting, the girl naked and luscious beside him, Lew set out to end the relationship. “Um,” he said.

“Don’t say anything.” Her murmuring voice was languorous with the satisfaction. Her small warm hand traveled slowly down across his chest and belly.

“Um!” He sat up, turning away from her hand, trying desperately to think of something to say. “What time is it?”

“The clock works.” Her rejected hand, not seeming to mind, gestured idly toward the dashboard.

He barely looked at the thing. The point wasn’t the time but his reaction to time. “I’ve got so much to do today,” he said.

“Mmmmmmmm.”

Dear Lord. He risked a look at her; how could he give that up? Almost without his collaboration, his hand stole forward to touch that breast. “You are something,” he said.

But then all at once she was brisk, sitting up, stretching—he held the bowl of her belly and dreamed he’d live in the cave forever—saying, “It is late. I have to get back; I have to see Mr. Balim.”

Cold reality. Drawing back his hand, hunching himself protectively over his lifted knees, he said, “Balim? What for?”

“That’s why I’m here.” She leaned forward to pull a box of tissues from the shelf under the dashboard, then looked back with her sunniest smile. “Aren’t I clever?”

“I’m sure you are.”

Cleaning herself like a cat, she said, “My grandmother had more questions. Also bills to be paid, extra expenses. I convinced her I should drive here today, much better than asking poor Mr. Balim to fly to us every time.”

“Of course.”

“You make me so messy,” She said comfortably, balling up tissues.

Her grin when she looked sidelong at him was filled with the innocence and freshness that made him her fool. “I wanted to see you on your home ground.”

“Am I different?”

“Sadder, I think. I don’t know why.”

“Ellen,” he said, forcing the name out before he could stop himself. He had to bring this to an end, no matter what his body wanted.

She looked first startled, then hurt, as though he had betrayed some pact between them. “Oh, dear,” she said.

“I don’t want to lose Ellen,” he said. “But I don’t want to hurt you.”

“And you think it has to be one or the other.”

“Sometimes I think it’ll be both.”

Turning away, she rubbed a small circle in the steam of the side window so she could peer out at rain-soaked farm fields. “Ellen is very beautiful.”

“That isn’t—”

“And very sophisticated.” Amarda turned back to him, an intelligent, wistful child. “She is very exciting,” she said, “and you are very exciting.”

“Amarda, don’t—”

She put her hand over his mouth, to silence him. It was the hand she’d used to clear the steam from the window, and it was cold and damp. She said, “Lew, please. Wait. Do you have any idea what my life is like?”

That stopped him. Had he ever wondered about that? When Amarda was not imprisoned in the tower in his mind, what was her life like? She took her hand back from his mouth, but he didn’t speak.

She said, “We’re poor people, who were rich. I was born in Africa, but I’m a foreigner. Even if there were Bantus in whom I was interested—and there are not—I would not be permitted to become friends with them. And they could only want me to humiliate and cheat.”

“Class,” he said, floundering. “Other people, other—” His hands made vague gestures.

“—Indians,” she finished for him. Her eyes burned with an intensity he hadn’t known she possessed. She said, “Three generations of Africa have emasculated our men. You see them on the streets in Nairobi and Mombasa, narrow boys in fancy silk shirts, buying and selling cheap cars and cameras. I shall inherit land; the family will survive; we won’t always be poor. Those boys would love to court me, give me rides on their motorcycles, marry me, take my land, give me babies, and forget me.” She shrugged, a very bitter gesture. “One day, that’s what will happen.”

Thinking of Young Mr. Balim, knowing she had told him the truth, he still tried to deny it, saying, “That doesn’t have to—”

“But it does.” Now she looked at him as though he were the child. “What do you think? Shall I go to London, walk along Sloane Street, be discovered for the fashion magazines? Shall I return to India, a land even my father wasn’t born in, and find hundreds of lovely friends, thousands of eligible suitors?”

“Oh, Amarda.” He couldn’t even argue anymore.

More softly, resting her hand gently on his, she said, “Lew, don’t you know how exciting you are to me? There in my kitchen, with your breezy manner of adventure and derring-do, and even a thrilling suggestion of crime in the background. Not some awful crime like murder, but a thrilling crime: smuggling, piracy. Lew, you were the only hero I’d ever met.”

They’d shared the fantasy! “Oh, Jesus,” he said, wanting merely to undo everything. After all, she really was the waif, and she did need his protection. And he had no solution for her. He wasn’t a hero, he was a fraud.

She said, “Lew, I know you’re not my hero. We can just pretend for a little while, and then you’ll go back to your airwoman.”

He shook his head, eyes downcast. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” Her more impish smile showed now, the way she’d smiled while taking him into the empty borrowed house. “It’s wonderful with you,” she said.

“And with you.”

She leaned forward to kiss him, very chastely, closed lips to closed lips. “Next time in Nairobi,” she whispered.

Next time. Why was he so weak? Why couldn’t he stand up and say no like the hero she claimed he was? “All right,” he said.

Her fragrance filled the Peugeot because it was on his body. He drove north, switching to the B8 at Luanda (where Frank and Ellen had taken the road the other way, to Port Victoria), and arrived at Butere shortly before two o’clock. The railroad station, a small brick colonial reminder, was a very sleepy place, with a dozen skinny ragged men snoozing or smoking in the dank waiting room, away from the rain.

He found Kamau Nyaga, the assistant terminal manager, in his office. Nyaga was a short and stocky man with a thick moustache and large black-rimmed glasses. He had the pouty expression of the petty tyrant, and at first he apparently thought he would play the game of making Lew wait.

No, he would not. Lew didn’t have Frank’s hearty bonhomie with these minor-league pests, that palsy shoulder pat of friendship which nevertheless implied the punch of punishment. What Lew had instead was an undisguised contempt, suggesting a barely restrained rage at the shabbiness and venality around him. If the minor officials went along with Frank because they wanted him to remain friendly, they went along with Lew because they didn’t want him to go crazy.

Nyaga pretended to read documents while Lew stood across the desk from him. Lew counted privately to three—not very slowly—then leaned forward, resting his palm and splayed fingers on the paper Nyaga was perusing, and said, “I’m here for Mazar Balim’s sewing machines.”

“Sewing machines?” Not yet intimidated, merely indignant, Nyaga reared back in his squeaking chair and glared. “Who do you happen to be?”

“The representative of the owner. You were told I was coming.” Picking up the handful of documents from the desk, Lew flipped through them, saying, “These aren’t about our sewing machines.”

Nyaga was on his feet; he was squawking like a rooster. “Privileged documents! You can’t—! Unauthorized—!”

The terminal manager’s was a very small office; still, Lew gave it the most dramatic gesture the space would permit, flinging his right arm out, hurling the handful of papers with disdain at the side wall. As they fluttered to the ground, he said, “I’m here for sewing machines.”

Nyaga was looking everywhere at once; at Lew, at his denuded desk, at the open door (to cry for help from the layabouts outside?), at the crumpled papers on the floor. “This office,” he managed to say, his voice trembling with emotion, “is for railway business. It is not for rowdies and—and—and—crazy persons.”

“I understand there will be,” Lew said, his manner still contemptuous but now less threatening, “certain storage charges.” Looking around, he found the room’s second chair in the corner behind the door, and dragged it over with his foot hooked in a rung.

“Charges,” Nyaga said, as though coming to consciousness after having been stunned with a brick. “Yes, of course. Property cannot be stored for free.” When Lew sat down, Nyaga returned to his squeaking swivel chair behind the desk.

Lew said, “Mr. Balim has obtained a legal opinion that the railway should pay us interest on the money lost because of the delays in this shipment.”

That statement was banal and stupid enough to reassure Nyaga, who actually smiled in response, saying, “To resolve that question in court obviously would involve even more delay.”

“Mr. Balim would prefer not to cause trouble.” Lew shrugged and curled his lip to make clear his own quite different preference. “He is prepared to pay reasonable storage charges.”

“He is a businessman,” Nyaga said in a relieved tone. Opening and shutting desk drawers, he muttered, “Storage charges, storage charges…”

“Are the sewing machines still in the same freight car?”

Nyaga stopped. He blinked, and licked his lips. “Goods wagon?” he asked. “Well, no. But reloading is not a problem.” He busied himself again with his desk drawers.

“Where are they?”

“Not a problem at all.”

“Where are they stored?”

“Well, here. Of course here. Here at the railway station. Ah, this is the proper form.” He brought up a pad of receipt flimsies and began to insert several well-used sheets of carbon paper. “Let’s see, storage nine days—”

Lew said, “I’ll want to check the machines, of course, be sure they haven’t been damaged.”

“Yes, yes. First we deal with the storage charges, and then—”

“You don’t know where they are,” Lew said.

Nyaga gaped at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“You don’t know where the sewing machines are!”

Lew jumped to his feet, the wooden chair tipping over behind him, Nyaga blinking up at him through his black-rimmed glasses. “You goddam fraud,” Lew told him, “you were gonna collect your storage charge and then send me out to Juma!”

“Juma? Juma?” Nyaga couldn’t seem to figure out any response other than faked indignation. “Who is this Juma?”

“Your freightmaster, you fucking asshole!” Lew pointed a rigid finger at the astonished Nyaga’s nose. “If you come out of this office, I’ll wring your neck like a chicken.”

Leaving, he slammed the door so hard everybody in the waiting room woke up.

Godfrey Juma was a different kettle of fish, an older, grizzled, no-nonsense sort of man, who took chai when it came his way because bribery was part of the world order, but who nevertheless found pride and dignity in knowing his job and doing it well.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know where the sewing machines were, either. “Believe me, sir, I would be happy to take your money,” he told Lew, the two of them standing under the corrugated roof out of the rain at the end of the platform, with various pieces of rolling stock on the several tracks beyond. “But as it happens, the crates were stolen.”

Truly irritated, Lew said, “Stolen! How? When? Why didn’t somebody report it?”

Juma pointed. “Sir, do you see that goods wagon?”

The freight car in question was new, silver-sided, with the slanted red KR of Kenya Railways. “I see it,” Lew said. He was about to become dangerous.

“Your shipment arrived in that wagon. I at once saw it had not been consigned to this station, and so I had it shunted onto that track to await further instructions.”

“Yes?”

“During my period of being off-duty,” Juma said, “our terminal manager—”

“Nyaga.” Were he to look over his shoulder, Lew knew, he would see the round-eyed, round-mouthed, round-spectacled face of assistant terminal manager Kamau Nyaga peering through his rain-bleared window, like a squirrel waiting for the dogs to pass.

“That is the man.” Juma nodded, his expression carefully neutral. “For greater safekeeping,” he said, “or so he claimed, Mr. Nyaga had the crates removed, you know, to that shed.” He pointed to a small corrugated-metal building surrounded by weeds, off to one side of the yard.

“Yes?”

“I feared they would not be so safe in that location, so I did instruct my crew to return them to the goods wagon. Somewhere in the process, then or later, very distressingly, they disappeared. I believe they were Mr. Nyaga’s responsibility at the time of disappearance.”

Lew nodded. “And he blames you.”

“Sir, I’m afraid that is so.”

Except that the goddam sewing machines were gone, it was a comic situation. The two bosses, knowing there was money to be made out of that shipment, stealing it back and forth from each other until some third party—or possibly either Juma or Nyaga himself—retired the booty from the game. Being tough, but not physically threatening, Lew said, “The railway committee of inquiry will certainly figure out who’s responsible.”

“Committee of inquiry?” Juma took on the worried look of an aging man thinking about his pension. “Why would there be a committee of inquiry? There are railroad-yard thefts every day.”

“Mr. Balim is insured,” Lew lied. “The insurance company will insist on an inquiry.”

“Oh, the insurance company.” Juma looked more and more worried. An insurance company was a much more serious threat than some minor Asian merchant.

Lew said, “Frankly, I suspect the committee of inquiry will find reasons to be displeased with both you and Mr. Nyaga.”

“Unjust interpretations, you know, sir,” Juma said, scraping his work-roughened hand over his grizzled cheeks, “could of course be made against my actions. Believe me, sir, if I could hand over those sewing machines, I would, and charge you nothing for them.”

“I don’t like to see an older man driven out of his job,” Lew said. “Do you suppose Nyaga knows more than he’s telling?”

“I wish he did, sir.” Juma shrugged fatalistically. “But I’m afraid he is the victim in this case as much as I.”

Lew had pressed as hard as he could, and nothing had come of it. Juma couldn’t help him; Lew had no doubt the man would if he could. Was it worthwhile to roust Nyaga again, go back into that office and rough him up a little? No; Juma’s reluctant exoneration of Nyaga had been an expert’s opinion.

While Lew had been thinking things over, Juma had been staring out mournfully over his small messy rusty freight yard, as though seeing it for the last time. Now, suddenly enlivened, magically taller, more sure of himself, with the fresh gleam of hope in his eyes, he spun back to Lew and said, “Sir! Perhaps after all there is a way out.”

“Yes?”

“Come with me, sir.”

Juma led the way down the concrete steps at the end of the platform and out across the freight yard in the rain. They had to step high over the rails, skirt the larger and dirtier puddles, place their feet carefully on the rain-slick metal ties, hunch their necks down into their collars to keep the droplets from slithering in.

At the extreme far corner of the yard, near the tall barbed-wire-topped fence, stood one of the older freight cars; peeling maroon paint and the old multicolored seal of the East African Railways Corporation. Undoing two large padlocks, Juma pushed open the side door and said, “There.”

The wooden floor of the car was at chest height. Looking in, Lew could see stacked large crates—somewhat shorter than coffins—covered with stencils and pasted-on travel documents. “What is it?”

“Outboard motors. Sir, see for yourself.”

They climbed up the metal rungs into the cool but dry car, and Juma used a large screwdriver from his hip pocket to pry the lid off one of the crates. Inside, nested in Styrofoam and wrapped in grayish clear plastic, lay a 120-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor, gleaming in orange and white and black enamel, its small fanlike propeller painted a dull green.

“There are forty of them.” Juma said. “Worth more than fifty-seven sewing machines.”

Considerably more. Lew said, “You’re suggesting a trade?”

“A goods train is being made up this afternoon, to return to Nakuru,” Juma said. “I can put this car on it, assigned to Kisumu. Mr. Nyaga knows nothing of this shipment, sir.”

“Ah-hah.”

“I shall telephone to my friend Mr. Molu in the Kisumu freight office, and he will understand that you shall be picking up the shipment on behalf of its consignee.”

“Who is this consignee? Who do these motors belong to?”

“Oh, no one, sir,” Juma said. “An Asian, sir, you know, that sort of bad man. He was going to use these engines in his smuggling, you know, on Lake Victoria.”

“Oh, yes? What’s this Asian’s name?”

“Hassanali.”

Lew remembered having heard Balim speak disparagingly once or twice about a man named Hassanali, an out-and-out crook, a man who made a practice of sailing too close to the wind. “What happened to him?”

“Oh, he killed a boatman, sir, who had cheated him. You know there is no honor completely among those thieves, sir. The police have got him now.”

“So he has other things to worry about than his outboard motors.”

“Oh, yes, sir.” Patting the sleek flank of the exposed motor, Juma said, “You can rescue these beautiful machines from a life of crime, sir.”

“Save them from being used in smuggling,” Lew said, and laughed, feeling better than he had in days. There was nothing like absurdity to put things back in proportion. Even Amarda would pass. “Come along, Mr. Juma,” Lew said. “We’ll have tea and talk this over.”

22

There are spirits in the air, and in the ground, and inside trees, who make it their business to call human beings to their deaths. This is why, when a male child is born in many African tribes, he is not initially given his true name, but is lent a temporary false appellation to confuse the spirits of death. Should the child survive his first few years—and most do not, despite this subterfuge—he is given his permanent name.

But even this is not his real name. That he selects for himself at puberty, and will probably never tell anyone. Thus the African travels under an alias at all times, secure in the knowledge that nobody knows who he really is.

However, the process of naming has two further ramifications. The African may privately rename those persons who are important in his life; this secret name, which he will not tell the person thus dubbed, gives him an important power over that person. And of course when traveling among people other than one’s own tribe, one permits these strangers to cloak one with some nonsense syllable or other, to be shrugged off once the foreign travel is complete.

So Charlie’s name was not Charlie. That was merely the bark he responded to when among the animals; that is, persons who were not Kikuyu. His death-fooling temporary name was long in the past, his permanent name was spoken exclusively by members of his branch of the Kikuyu in the villages along the western scarp of the Narandarua Range, and his real name was known only to himself.

Among the animals, the only one so far honored with a name by Charlie was Frank. Charlie had named him Mguu, and it gave him secret pleasure every time he saw the man to know that he alone knew this was Mguu. The name was from the Swahili—Mguu was not worth a name from Charlie’s native Kikuyu dialect—and means “foot.” It seemed to Charlie that foot expressed Mguu very well; his stamping around like an elephant, his roaring, his rushing into situations without thought or preparation. Also, Charlie had seen in the cinema cartoons about a blind white man named Mr. Magoo, and this seemed to add a proper dimension: Mguu, the blind foot.

Late afternoon. During a pause in the rain, Mguu left his tent and crossed the clearing to where Charlie squatted, skinning a not-quite-dead gazelle. “Charlie,” Mguu said.

Charlie stood, smiling his cheeriest smile, the red knife in his red hand. Mguu pointed at it. “Put that down.”

“Oh, sure, Frank.” Negligently Charlie stuck the knife into the gazelle, which in gratitude expired. “What may I do?”

“It was only a joke,” Mguu said, his expression mean. “I know that, Charlie.”

Charlie looked alert, inquisitive, ready to help. He wiped his bloody hand on his shirtfront.

“But,” Mguu went on, “the joke’s over. So now one of two things is gonna happen. Either you’ll give me back my malaria pills, or I’ll twist your scrawny neck, leave your body here and your head over there, and drive back to Kisumu for a fresh supply of pills.”

Behind Charlie’s bland smile and gleaming eyes, the speedy brain buzzed, till all at once the smile blossomed into a tooth-baring, hearty, friendly laugh, and Charlie said, “A joke! That’s right, that’s right, Frank, I can never put anything over on you!”

“That’s right,” Mguu said.

The westward sky, over the lake and under the clouds, was gossamer-white and pale blue, descending to lavender at the watery horizon, with an undercoating of gold. Charlie and Mguu walked out across the scrubland, some distance from camp, before Charlie shinnied up a flat-topped tree, causing a white-winged bateleur eagle to rise skyward in heavy flapping irritation. Riffling through the dry ordure of the eagle’s nest, Charlie grasped what he was looking for and descended with the bottle intact, which he plunked with the pride of the successful hunter into Mguu’s palm.

In the lengthening shadows Mguu looked back toward camp, then up at the nest in the tree. “Some hiding place for a joke,” he said.

Flying insects were beginning to swarm, including no doubt some of the thirty-eight varieties of mosquito which carry malaria in this part of the world. “If a thing is worth doing,” Charlie said, “it’s worth doing well.”

Early next morning, Charlie and Mguu came down the hill in a fresh downpour, paused at the hotel construction site so Mguu could shout and puff and wave his arms at the men digging the hole for the footing, and then they gathered the drunken boatman and putt-putted across the mouth of Berkeley Bay and past Sigulu Island, and so out across Lake Victoria, now well within the territory of Uganda. The gentle rain slackened and after a while stopped; looking back, Charlie could see it still falling upon Kenya.

The last time they had come to the landfall at Macdonald Bay, Charlie and Mguu and the boatman had built a blind to conceal the two mopeds. It had not been disturbed, and the mopeds were still there, though wet and rusty. It was not raining at this moment, but it had done so recently, and everything in the woods was wet. Mguu refueled the mopeds from the can in the boat, and when they started the engines the racket seemed to shiver the raindrops off the leaves.

Yesterday afternoon, a truck carrying Michelin tires had crossed from Kenya into Uganda at Moroto, far to the north of here. The border guards who had been bribed there by the driver to permit him to bring in this illegal shipment without filling in the required forms or paying the usual taxes and fees had been led to believe this was merely a normal smuggling operation, tires bound for Masindi, a prosperous upland town to the west of Lake Kyoga. They had been unaware that in the hollow center of the stacks of tires there were seated four men, hired by Mazar Balim with the assistance of Lew Brady. The four men had track gang experience with Kenya Railways, and they were traveling with a variety of tools: shovels and prybars and wrenches and sledgehammers. They also shared their hiding place with bedrolls and several cartons of tinned or packaged food.

Last night the truck, having followed back roads southward past Lake Opeta and Mount Elgon, had eventually reached the spot on the Tororo-Kampala road where Lew had been arrested by the State Research Bureau men. There, under cover of darkness, the truck had been driven as far as possible down the old service road and the laborers had emerged from their cocoon of tires to carry their tools and provisions down to Maintenance Depot Number 4. And now this morning Charlie and Mguu were coming to the depot to give the men their instructions.

The four were lolling at their ease inside the engine shed. What work they had done so far was in the realm of housekeeping; they’d cleared some of the rusted garbage into far corners of the shed, blocked two broken windows with old sheets of corrugated metal, and created a fireplace of rocks beneath another window, which would serve as a rough-and-ready flue. They had surely heard the roar of the arriving mopeds, but they were still lying around their small fire, telling lies and laughing when Charlie and Mguu walked in.

Mguu began by carrying on about the fire. Charlie was supposed to translate—into Swahili, as only two of the men were Kikuyu, the others being animals—but instead he said to Mguu, “These men know about smoke completely, Frank. There are farms all around here; the farmers light fires in their fields; no one will think about a little smoke.”

That calmed Mguu, though he did stay grumpy. He ordered the laborers to rise and follow him outside, where, with much arm waving and kicking at the rusted rails stacked beside the shed, he explained what they were supposed to do. Charlie translated, interpolating asides that made the laborers bite their cheeks to keep from laughing.

Yes, they understood. Yes, they saw that the turntable must be moved to align with the track. Yes, they agreed that the buffer at the end of the track must be removed and the track extended with these rusty rails to the lip of the gorge. Yes, they followed the reasoning behind the idea that they must cut a hole in the thick shrubbery and hedge between the spur track and the main line, but that they then must create a removable blind of branches on some sort of framework to conceal the hole they had made. Yes, they heartily concurred that they must not be caught by the Ugandan police or Army. (If they were caught, however, it wouldn’t be a total disaster, since these four hadn’t been told the ultimate purpose for their work.) And, at long last, yes, they accepted the deadline of one week. All would be accomplished. And now let us have some beer.

“I don’t know about those birds,” Mguu said, later that afternoon, as they tromped back to the access road and their mopeds.

“Oh, they’ll do very fine,” Charlie said. “I vouch for them.”

Mguu gave him a hard look. “You vouch for them? Jesus.”

He prays a lot, Charlie thought.

The man tried to run away, but Mguu shouted him down. It was a wonderful thing to see, as effective as another man throwing a rock; Charlie much admired it.

They had come out of the woods, and there was the man, poking around their mopeds. Charlie had seen at once that he didn’t have the manner of a thief but instead the manner of curiosity. It was only that he tried to run away that made him seem like a thief. And then Mguu roared, and the man dropped, and now he crouched there beside the road, waiting, sitting on his heels, trembling slightly, his head bowed down between his knees.

Charlie and Mguu strode forward and stood over him. Charlie could see he was not Kikuyu, but possibly Luo or some other lake tribe. “Stand up!” Mguu yelled. Charlie repeated that in Swahili, not yelling, and the man slowly uncoiled and stood.

He was a very raggedy man, the kind you would see on construction projects in Nairobi pushing a wheelbarrow full of concrete blocks. His torn clothing was gray; his knobby knees were gray; his bare feet were beige and cut-covered; his hands were swollen from work or disease; the leathery brown skin of his fingers ballooned up around the orange nails.

“Ask him,” Mguu said, “what he’s doing here.”

Charlie asked. The man, sullen but submissive, answered, “mfupa,” which means “bone.”

“Ah,” Charlie said. He had already decided this raggedy man meant nothing. He explained to Mguu, “He says he’s a peddler. He buys and sells bones.”

Mguu looked startled. “Bones!”

“There’s a living for a poor man in bones,” Charlie said gently. “And cloth, and other rubbish.”

“Oh,” Mguu said, in sudden understanding. “A rag-and-bone man. We used to have those in the States.”

“Used to have?” Here was another unexpected window into that other world so far away. Charlie was always interested to learn more about that place of fantasy. “Used to have, Frank?”

“Nobody does that anymore.” Mguu dismissed the idea with his typical curt hand wave, while continuing to glower at the boneman.

“Nobody?” In Charlie’s mind loomed an image of the homes of America—they looked like cinema motel rooms—with all the corners piled with unclaimed rubbish. Could that be true? He’d never seen such a thing in the films, but it was well known the cinema lied about real life. If it were really so, what an opportunity for some enterprising boneman!

But Mguu’s attention was fixed on this current boneman, who looked not enterprising at all. “There’s no bones here,” he said, angry and dangerous. “What’s he doing here?”

Charlie put the question. The boneman mumbled something imcomprehensible, which Charlie translated as “He doesn’t know.”

“Doesn’t know? He damn well better know!”

Charlie rephrased the question. The boneman mumbled more nonsense. Charlie shrugged. “He just doesn’t know, Frank.”

“He’s going to know,” Mguu said, and before Charlie could blink, Mguu had punched the boneman in the face.

The boneman sat on the vine-covered ground. For an instant, as though all of creation had been startled by Mguu’s violence, nothing happened. Charlie, the boneman, Mguu, all three remained unmoving. Then Mguu, opening his punching hand as though it were stiff, said, “Ask him again, Charlie.”

Stooping in front of the boneman, Charlie could see that his eyes were turned inward, his jaw muscles were slack, his hands were at ease in his lap. Straightening, Charlie said, “He thinks now about dying.”

“A good thing to think about,” Mguu said, misunderstanding. “Tell him, he gives me a straight answer or he is dead.”

“No, Frank,” Charlie said. But how to explain what was happening? He had noticed over the years that the whites didn’t seem to have this capacity for death that was so natural in the tribal African. In a situation of hopelessness or misery the African, armed with his fatalism, could merely sink into a lassitude and then slip quietly out of existence. It was very well known, but not to the whites.

Or not to most whites; one white doctor to whom Mr. Balim had sent Charlie three years ago had said it was because the tribal Africans were all sick anyway. They all lived with malaria (which infected everybody but only killed one percent of blacks) and several other diseases, against which a certain level of immunity or accommodation had been developed over the millennia. But still their bodies were weakened, and it was easier for them to let loose their grip on the reins of life.

It was an explanation Charlie himself didn’t believe—he knew it was merely sensible at some point to die, and the African is sensible—but perhaps it was an explanation that would please Mguu.

No; it was too complicated. Charlie couldn’t go through all that. He merely said, “Frank, this is just a poor boneman, looking in the woods for what he can find. He knows no answers at all, and he thinks you’ll go on hurting him, so he is thinking about dying to be away from all this.”

“What?” Mguu hunkered down to look at that closed-in face, with the eyes like those of an animal caught for too long in a leg trap, no longer struggling, prepared now for death. “Bah,” Mguu said, and stood up, brushing his hands on his trousers, looking almost embarrassed. “What a country,” he said, and turned away and tramped back toward the mopeds.

But Charlie had kept watching the boneman—had those eyes minutely glistened when Mguu turned away? Charlie frowned, studying that ragged head.

Up the road, Mguu called, “Come on, Charlie!”

Charlie squatted, looking, and the empty eyes looked back. Did or did not something move inside there?

“Charlie!”

It occurred to Charlie he should kill this boneman right away, this instant. But he couldn’t kill coldly, like a white man; he had to build a rage first, an emotion for killing.

“Goddammit, come on!”

Toward Mguu, of course, such an emotion would be easy and very quick to build. Charlie stood, his own mind filling with the fatalism he imputed to the boneman. Either he was a boneman, and would matter to them no more, or he was something else, and would return to their lives.

Charlie rejoined Mguu, and they climbed on the mopeds and started for the lake. When Charlie looked back, just before the first curve, the boneman had not moved.

23

Walking down Greek Street at two in the morning, past the all-night sex shops with their white-painted shopwindows and glaring red-lettered signs, Baron Chase was stopped by two weaving, smiling, slender Jamaicans who seemed to be high on dope and not liquor. “Mon,” one of them said, “mon, give me a bob.”

“Get out of my way,” Chase said.

The evening rain had stopped, but the sparkling wet streets remained deserted. The two blocks farther on to Shaftesbury Avenue with its lights and traffic and pedestrians might as well have been two miles; they might as well not be in London at all. The smiling Jamaicans crowded closer, smelling absurdly of coconut, the spokesman saying, “And a bob for my friend, mon, we want an egg.”

“If I had you in my country,” Chase said, his voice low and compelling, “I would have your ears removed and roasted in the oven and fed you for your dinner.”

“What country is that, mon?” the Jamaican asked, giggling as though it were all a joke, as he reached out for Chase’s sleeve.

Chase’s hand came up, too fast to be seen. The heel thudded upward into the Jamaican’s nose, shattering the bone, shoving the splinters up into the man’s brain. Dying, his wide eyes already filming, the Jamaican collapsed slowly backward onto the uneven wet slate sidewalk.

The other one ran. He didn’t wait to see what happened to his friend nor to find out what Chase meant to do next. He simply spun shakily on his heel, regained his balance, and dashed tottering around the corner of Manette Street and out of sight.

Chase walked on, ignoring the twisted man on the sidewalk, who looked as though he’d been flung there from a truck. What country is that, mon? echoed in Chase’s ears, and he walked down to Shaftesbury Avenue and turned right toward Piccadilly Circus.

Uganda. Violent Uganda. Depraved Uganda. Horrific Uganda. My country. He could feel it repainting him in its own colors; he had to get out.

London seemed so tame. There had been a period in his life when his greatest pleasure was London after dark; so much more accessible than Paris. To walk the streets of Soho and the West End after midnight with his pockets full of pounds, among the prostitutes and the sharp-nosed petty crooks and the innocent schoolboys out on a fling, to choose one’s amusements, playing different parts every night; that had been the Technicolor of his existence, and now it had all faded. A few years of open sesame at the State Research Bureau—his private nonfaked Madame Tussaud’s—had turned the rest of the world pale.

In Piccadilly Circus, the restless motion of the night crawlers still continued, though it was less crowded than it had been at midnight, when he’d last walked through. The puffy-bodied sullen-faced girls in their miniskirts and shoulder-padded jackets and eyes heavily underlined in black, the skinny awkward long-necked boys in their tight black tubular pants and their sweat shirts reading UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI (bought here in London on Oxford Street), the nervous sagging-bellied older homosexuals stumbling toward the humiliation they half craved and half dreaded, the brassy semipro hookers always in pairs and wearing blond wigs like wood shavings; they all still promenaded, restless and purposeless, their eyes and mouths dissatisfied and guarded against further hurt. The coughing black taxis curved ceaselessly past the statue of Eros in the middle of Piccadilly, heading elsewhere, scooting away, very few with their amber FOR HIRE signs lit; not here.

There was no actual sense of order, but the trend of pedestrian flow was clockwise, echoing the movement of the traffic. Joining the minority that trekked in the opposite direction, Chase studied the faces and the bodies as they came toward him. And this place might as well as be the exercise yard of a concentration camp whose commandant, with a more than usually macabre sense of humor, has dressed his charges out of captured theatrical trunks.

What shall I have tonight? What here will best ease for a little while the boredom? The hour was late; the pubs were closed; the air was cold and dank from the earlier rain; the desperation all around was rising closer to the surface; whatever Chase wanted from this chorus line was his for the beckoning.

The fourth time he passed the same pair of boys, painfully thin, dressed almost identically in bulky black cable-knit sweaters and tight blue jeans and cracked cheap “western” boots, their hands and necks gray—not with the dirt of toil but with the grime of sluttishness—he shrugged to himself and nodded to them, then took the next turning at Glasshouse Street, the dark narrow block behind the brightly lighted curve of Regent Street. Glancing back when he reached the far corner, he saw them trailing almost reluctantly after him; smiling, he turned right on Regent Street past the gleaming huge shopwindows filled with clothing to be worn in a world those boys would never know.

He could have anything, anyone, from that sink. His trend increasingly had been to choose boys, but he told himself that meant nothing. Boys were simpler somehow, that’s all. And since he never permitted anything to be put into his own body, but only inserted himself into them, he was clearly not homosexual.

Once free of Piccadilly Circus, the empty cabs switched on their FOR HIRE signs; Chase hailed one before he’d walked as far as Beak Street. “One moment,” he said to the driver, “for my friends.”

The driver, a narrow-faced Jewish Cockney, twisted to look back at the approaching boys. “It’s your life, gunnor,” he said. “Innit.”

“It is.” Holding the door open, Chase ushered the now shyly smiling boys into the cab. “Enter my golden coach,” he said.

At ten in the morning the hotel-room phone rang. Chase, blurrily waking, fumbled for the receiver, muttered something into it, and heard Emil Grossbarger say, “Zey have brought him back.”

Chase’s mind was filled with the wisps of dreams, red and black silhouettes fast receding, no longer forming their story, leaving only a faint nervous residue of terror. He had no idea what Grossbarger was talking about. “What? Who?”

“Sir Denis Lambsmitt. Chase, vat do you know of iss?”

“Lambsmith?” Orienting himself, remembering who and what he was, Chase sat up straighter in the bed. “What do you mean, he’s back?”

“I had him removed from ze Uganda negotiation,” Grossbarger said. On the phone, one became more aware of the husky power of that voice, still potent with the strength that had been stolen from his body. “Vunce ve made our own arrangement, you and I, my dear Baron, I vished zat man’s keen eye removed from ze arena of our activities.”

“Yes, yes.” Impatient with himself, rubbing his sleep-blurred face with his free hand—smelling faintly of soap from last night’s shower, after the boys had been sent away—Chase said, “Who brought him back?”

“Your government. Vy did zey do zat?”

“I have no idea,” Chase said, astonished to realize it was the truth. He had not the vaguest idea who in Uganda would have done this, or what they could have had in mind. It was frightening to have such sudden unexpected ignorance about the arena in which he struggled for survival.

“I vant him out of it,” Grossbarger said. “Ziss is very important to me.”

“I can, um—” Chase shook the sleep webs out of his brain. “We can contain him. I assure you he won’t know what’s going on.”

“I vant him avay! Und not killed, zat tips our hand. Out of ze operation complete.”

In Grossbarger’s intensity, Chase found the sudden shocking realization of just why the man was so upset. Yes, and why he had wanted Lambsmith removed in the first place. With hatred at this knowledge welling up inside him, hatred and rage, Chase became calmer, more assured, more hidden. “I’ll cut short my vacation, Emil,” he said, using the older man’s given name for the first time, doing it deliberately, to twist the knife in them both. “I’ll go back to Kampala today.” He should in any event; clearly, he had been away too long. “I’ll find out what’s happened.”

“Und you vill remove Sir Denis Lambsmitt from ziss operation!”

“You have my guarantee.”

“Our partnership depends upon it.”

Chase cradled the phone and sat a moment longer in bed, brooding at the mirrored bathroom door, in which he could see reflected the room’s main window. It wasn’t Sir Denis’s keenness, the likelihood of his discovering their plot, that was agitating Emil Grossbarger so much; no, not at all. Chase saw through that. The fact was, Emil Grossbarger liked Sir Denis Lambsmith, he considered himself Sir Denis Lambsmith’s friend, he was trying to protect his friend, ease his friend out of the area of danger.

Who would do that for me?

In Chase’s world the evidences of friendship were so few that he almost never had to remember the existence of such a thing. To have it flaunted in his face here and now, under these circumstances, involving two such creatures as Grossbarger and Lambsmith, was galling, insupportable. Who would concern himself for Baron Chase in that way?

They use me, that’s all. Even Amin doesn’t really like me.

Chase picked up the phone to change his airline reservation.

In one of those coincidences that aren’t so farfetched as they at first appear, Sir Denis was on the same plane. He had been in London, he explained, at meetings with the Coffee Board, when the request had come in from the Ugandan government that he be reinstated as the Coffee Board’s mediator. He had learned this news not much sooner than Chase, and both men had promptly made arrangements to return to Kampala, Chase to see what he could do to regain control of the situation, Sir Denis at the request of the Ugandan government. The most sensible route for them both was the all-night London-Tripoli-Entebbe, Air Uganda flight.

They met in the VIP lounge at Heathrow, where Chase was savagely delighted to see the man who had just become his enemy, and where Sir Denis obviously had to use all his diplomatic skills to suggest pleasure on his side at the encounter. After normal greetings and expressions of surprise and joy, they got themselves drinks at the bar, and then Chase insisted on changing his seat assignment so they could travel together. “You needn’t do that, if it’s too much trouble,” Sir Denis said, and Chase smiled, showing his teeth. “No trouble at all,” he said.

The lounge receptionist made the change, and Chase carried his new boarding pass over to where Sir Denis sat by the windows, leafing through an old issue of Punch. Moving dots of red and white light in the blackness beyond the windows defined the wanderings of taxiing planes. “Not a bit of trouble,” Chase announced, and settled with angry happiness into the overstuffed chair to Sir Denis’s right.

Sighing, Sir Denis closed the magazine and showed its cover to Chase, saying, “I fear I’m no longer English. I’m away from the country too much these days; half the cartoons in here make no sense to me.”

“England is a club,” Chase said, as though agreeing with Sir Denis’s point. One of Chase’s grievances was that he himself was Canadian, which was one small step from being nothing at all.

“England is a club? Perhaps so.” Sir Denis smiled ruefully, dropping the magazine onto the table beside his chair. “I may have permitted my membership to lapse.”

“At least we got you back onto the Brazil-Uganda team,” Chase said with his most welcoming smile.

Sir Denis looked at him keenly. “Did you have something to do with that?”

With a modest shrug, Chase said, “You seemed the right man for the job. I merely said as much to Amin.”

“I see. Thank you very much.”

Sir Denis’s disappointment was evident, and Chase laughed to himself because he knew why. Sir Denis had assumed it was Patricia who had worked his renomination; and in fact it might well have been. Chase smiled at the thought of what hoops Patricia would run this old fool through. “It was my pleasure,” he said.

Amin himself met them at Entebbe. He was in another of his personae, that of the distinguished statesman. His medium-gray single-breasted suit was beautifully tailored to maximize his shoulders and chest while minimizing his gut. His tie was a dark blue, modestly figured with silver lions rampant, and his shirt was snowy white, still faintly marked with the creases from its folding by the manufacturer. His feet, which were of normal size, looked tiny in their shiny black shoes under his imposing top-heavy figure. Only the bulging side pockets of the suit jacket—containing, as Chase well knew, wads of cash in shillings or pounds or dollars, to be spent or given away as whim might dictate—spoiled the tailored perfection of his figure.

Amin came out of the terminal building alone, striding across the tarmac toward the plane as they disembarked. His happiest and most welcoming smile beamed out at them, and he strode forward with his hand already outstretched. As the other passengers—Ugandan or European businessmen—glanced nervously and curiously out of the corners of their eyes, Amin approached Sir Denis and pumped his hand, saying, “My friend-ah, my friend-ah. How could I continue without you completely? That-ah mee-nister that-ah fired you is gone from the post. Gone from my-ah government-ah completely. When I-ah hear what he do, I act-ah at once.”

He’s taking the credit for it himself, the wily bastard. Chase stood to one side and smiled, willing Sir Denis to see his stance as that of the modest civil servant permitting his superior to claim the rewards for his own unsung work.

As for Sir Denis, he seemed, at least on the surface, honestly delighted to be in the presence once more of President for Life Idi Amin Dada. In fact, he said so. “I’m delighted, Your Excellency. I hope I may go on being of use to you.”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, we-ah work together like-ah—” Briefly, Amin was seen to flounder for a smile; then he found it: “—like-ah Cain and Abel. Brothers.”

“Brothers,” agreed Sir Denis, utterly unflappable. “Delighted,” he repeated; so even he was at a loss for words.

Amin didn’t bother to shake hands with Chase, but he acknowledged his presence with a big grin, saying, “Welcome-ah home, Baron. You been-ah now gone too long.”

So he had. “It’s good to be back,” Chase said, returning Amin’s smile.

“My right-ah hand,” Amin said, and grinned again at Sir Denis, saying, “What-ah you think-ah my Baron? Maybe I make him now a duke.”

It was a joke Amin had essayed before; Chase responded as he always did: “Oh, no, sir, I’m content to be a lowly Baron.”

“Modest completely. Come along-ah.”

Here in Uganda the rainy season was less relentless than it was to the east, through the Rift Valley, and today was one of the periods of respite. Though the tumbling clouds still roiled across the sky, there was a faint glow in the air and a soft warmth that was not quite too humid for comfort. From the dankness of London to the austere aridity of Tripoli to the tropical breeze of Entebbe was a journey from Purgatory through Hell to Heaven. Meteorologically speaking.

Today’s car was the black Mercedes convertible, the one the Israelis had imitated last summer in their raid for the hostages. That false Mercedes, emerging first out of the bowels of the landed lead aircraft with the flags of Uganda and of Amin’s presidency fluttering above its headlights, had distracted and confused the airport garrison just long enough. For weeks afterward Amin had refused to travel in his own Mercedes, as though blaming the car for his humiliation, but he hadn’t been able to keep away from it permanently; the meanings and symbols of the Mercedes-Benz were too powerful.

The chauffeur stood at natty attention beside the car, all four doors of which were open. Air Uganda ground crew in their white jumpers were stowing the luggage in the trunk. Amin told the chauffeur in Swahili, “I’ll drive. Go back in one of the other cars.” (Chase understood Swahili very well—better than any of them, including Amin, guessed—but he would never speak it. His unsuspected fluency was yet another small weapon in the arsenal of his self-defense.)

The chauffeur saluted and marched away like a windup toy. Amin bent his smiling black head toward the aged white head of Sir Denis, as if he were a solicitous keeper in an old-age home, saying, “I’m-ah drive you. I’m-ah show you the beauties of my country. You sit-ah now in front with me.”

“An unexpected pleasure,” Sir Denis said. (How he’s squirming, Chase thought in elation, watching Sir Denis’s unruffled surface.)

Chase had the wide backseat to himself. The top was down, and when Amin jolted the car forward—he drove too fast, too carelessly, too inexpertly, and had already gone through several crashes—the wind of their passage yanked at Chase’s thinning hair as though to scalp him. Brushing the wisps of hair off his forehead, he looked back and saw the two cars of bodyguards following at a discreet—but not too discreet—distance.

There had been attempts made on Idi Amin’s life. No matter how spontaneous his actions appeared, he was always well guarded; too many men in Uganda needed him, not merely for their livelihoods but for their lives. If Amin were to be assassinated, it would change nothing for the country, since the structure of oppression would remain in place. But the struggle among the lesser Nubians to take Amin’s place would be more horrific than even Chase could imagine.

Up front, Amin was talking at Sir Denis, giving him a travelogue filled no doubt with inaccurate statements about Uganda’s history, its flora and fauna, and Amin’s own development plans for the nation. Chase didn’t even try to catch the words as the wind whipped them past him. He already knew more true facts about Uganda than Amin did, and as for Amin’s development plans, those began and ended with the so-called “whisky runs,” flying coffee to Stansted in England and Melbourne in Florida in the United States, returning with the liquor and luxury goods that kept the Nubians in line. That was the development plan, and it worked considerably better at achieving its goal than most plans in the Third World.

Chase spent the drive brooding on his own development plans. What he was trying was much riskier and more subtle than the whisky runs, but if it worked it would give him just as much security as the whisky runs gave Amin. Money. A lot of money. Money to retire on, perhaps in some lesser island in the Caribbean, from which he could still make his occasional trips to London. And to New York, as well. And all his life he had wanted to test the rumors about New Orleans.

Amin was the first to see the trouble ahead. That was like him, part of the secret of his success; he had a cat’s sensitivity to potential danger.

They had reached the city and were driving along Kampala Road, lined with shops that had once belonged to the now-expelled Asians. Half were now closed, for lack of capital, lack of expertise, lack of initiative. Among the few battered vehicles on the street, the gleaming expensive Mercedes seemed like a visitor from another planet. Much more typical was the lumbering, plank-sided, blue-cabbed truck that came crawling out of a side alley ahead of them, filling the road, seeming to take forever to get out of the way.

Chase didn’t see the other truck until after Amin was already in action. The second truck had been parked on the other side of broad Kampala Road, and it was with unusual speed that it abruptly started up and swung across the lanes of traffic to meet the first truck head-on, effectively barricading the road.

But Amin was fast, and when necessary he was incredibly decisive. With a sudden loud growl, like a lion disturbed at its meat, he slammed his foot on the accelerator, twisted the wheel, and ducked down as low as possible behind the steering wheel.

Acceleration yanked Chase out of his reverie. He too could act fast in a crisis, and afterward he realized it was the threat to his relationship with Grossbarger should Sir Denis be killed that made him, even before protecting himself, pull forward against the acceleration, slap Sir Denis on top of his white head, and yell, “Down!”

The Mercedes had leaped up onto the sidewalk. A woman was walking there hand in hand with her young son. Men with machine guns were coming out of an abandoned storefront just ahead of the car. The driver of the plank-sided truck was desperately trying to shift the ancient gear into reverse. The woman flung her son at the street just before the Mercedes smashed into her and threw her away like an empty cigarette pack.

Then Chase was on the floor in back and could see no more, and bullets were shredding the windshield; another windshield to be replaced. He could feel the car scrape through between the concrete storefront and the rear bumper of the truck. The Mercedes rocked on its springs, seemed about to fly, bounced instead off the sidewalk and back into the roadway, and at last slackened its pace.

Rising hesitantly upward, Chase looked back at the pitched battle around the trucks. Amin’s bodyguards were exchanging shots with the attempted assassins, who were now doing their vain best to flee. If they were lucky, they would be killed cleanly this minute, by gunfire.

April; it was only April. This was the third assassination attempt this year, and like the others it would be reported in no newspapers, on no television broadcasts, through no wire services.

I’m right to get out, Chase thought. It’s breaking down.

Up front Amin was laughing, was slapping the shaken Sir Denis on the knee, was already turning the near-miss into a triumph, a joke, an anecdote. He had told Chase, and he apparently meant it, that he knew no assassin could kill him because he had already seen his own death in a dream. It would not happen, he’d assured Chase, for a long long time.

24

Naked, standing in front of the mirrored dresser in Frank’s bedroom, Ellen reflected again that sex never seemed so wonderful after the event as it always did while it was going on. By moving her head a bit she could see Frank, sprawled on his back on the bed, on the new coral-colored blanket he’d thrown over it after ousting the stupid dog, George. Both pillows were bunched now beneath Frank’s head as he idly scratched his hairy stomach and smiled in sleepy contentment. He had a good time, the bastard, she thought.

The only sound was the continuing chatter of the rain, a rustle like a million chipmunks gnawing rotted wood. If it hadn’t been for the rain—

It had started at the end of March, the rain, and today was the nineteenth of May. Seven weeks of rain. Cracks appeared in walls; leaks developed in ceilings, warps in doorjambs. Dresser drawers stuck; flour and beans and bread rotted on their shelves; the green-black stain of mildew spread over everything in the world like some sort of surrealistic total eclipse.

If it hadn’t been for the rain—

Probably, Lew wouldn’t have taken up with that Asian girl in the first place. It was surely his own forced inactivity, brought on by the endless rain, that had led him to distract himself with that creature. In normal circumstances it would not have happened. Not with Lew the man he was. And not with Ellen the woman she knew she was.

If it hadn’t been for the rain—

She herself would have been more occupied, more content. She would have been flying three or four times a week rather than three or four times a month. She would have spent time and thought and care on that awful little house they’d been lent, and by now she would have made it into something like a home. And she wouldn’t have had all this empty time in which to brood and grow touchy and miserable, in which to plot shabby revenges.

If it hadn’t been for the rain—

Frank too wouldn’t have grown bored and tired. His camping-out adventure on Lake Victoria, just perfect for his twelve-year-old-boy’s mind, would have contented and amused him. He would not have come back to Kisumu dull and restless and angry. He would have permitted their relationship to remain at that level of nonsexual friendship which had been with such difficulty attained, and which was the only possible long-lasting relationship they could have. He would not, on his return from Port Victoria, have thrown just one more pass, out of general irritation and ennui.

And she would not have accepted.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. They had gone to bed together, they had enjoyed it, and from now on, the whole situation was going to be that much worse. And all because of the rain.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Frank said, and then, as though as a result of his having spoken, he hugely yawned.

“I was thinking how much I hate this rain.”

He chuckled, very comfortable, and said, “You’ve got a beautiful ass.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll tell you what I was thinking, and this isn’t bullshit. You know I don’t do this kind of bullshit.”

“Mm?”

“You’re the best I’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s God’s truth, may He strike me dead, I thought I was gonna fall out of my skin a couple times there. I thought I was dead and fucking an angel.”

She laughed, rising partway out of her funk, saying, “What a hand you are with a compliment.”

“Lew doesn’t deserve you.”

Oh, no, none of that. Suddenly decisive, Ellen turned away from the mirror, crossed the bedroom in two strides, knelt on the bed and straddled him, her pubic hair brushing his belly. Her fingers, not gentle, counted their way up the ribs on his left side. He winced away but wouldn’t move his hands from behind his head to defend himself. He watched her, surprised, amused, interested, not alarmed.

She pressed her fingernail into his flesh between the third and fourth ribs, just under the nipple. “If Lew ever hears about this,” she said, bearing down, meaning every word of it, “if Lew so much as ever suspects, I’ll put the knife in right there. I will, Frank.”

Frank chuckled, trying to pretend the fingernail didn’t hurt. “Lew would do it first, honey,” he said. “Don’t you worry, old Frank has no death wish.”

She relaxed the pressure but didn’t yet move her hand. “Just so you understand.”

“I read you, loud and clear.”

She started then to climb off him, but he put his hands on her waist, pulling her down to sit on his stomach. She could feel him rising again against her buttocks. He said, “Don’t go, I like you there.”

So did she, goddammit. She was angry, she was bad-tempered, she was rain-obsessed, she was driven mad by inactivity, but at the same time she did like those hammy hands on her waist, she liked the nudge of that hard cock against her cheek.

He was something different from Lew, he was blunter and more stupid and less sensitive, but there were moments when crudity had its own charm. Almost against her will, she could feel herself softening to complement his hardness, she could feel the juices begin to flow. Knowing what he wanted, she lifted herself slightly on her knees, inching backward toward him—

And stopped. Frowning, she lifted her head like a herbivore in the forest who’s heard a distant sound. His hands on her waist pressed her farther back toward his waiting member, but she didn’t move. “What’s that?” she said.

“What’s what? Goddammit—”

Pushing his hands away, she climbed off the bed and went over to the nearest window. She pulled the curtain aside and looked out, listening to the splashes of individual water drops falling from branches and eaves.

It was true. And something in the quality of the light, the altitude of the clouds, told her this was no mere respite, this was the real thing. She looked back at Frank, bewildered on the bed. Her eyes were shining. She didn’t need him at all. “The rain has stopped,” she said.