Kahawa

25

Lew walked into the room carrying a two-by-four and a battered black attaché case. He put the case down, hefted the two-by-four, and faced his student body.

They reminded him somewhat of his truckers’ class back in Valdez, except that he doubted he’d have as much trouble getting this mob to fight back. There were forty-eight of them here, in this large littered storage room in Balim’s second building. They were Balim’s employees, or the friends or relatives or fellow tribesmen of Balim’s employees, and it was his job over the next few days to turn them into something approaching an invading army. At the moment, what they most looked like was the Saturday-night overflow from a tough-neighborhood bar.

Charlie had been assigned to Lew as an interpreter, and stood beside him now, chewing a piece of sugarcane and looking extremely relaxed. Lew gazed over his troops, most of whom looked no more than mildly curious at what was about to happen, and said to Charlie, “Tell them to sit down.”

Charlie spoke. Since the crew was a mixed tribal bag, mostly Luo and Kikuyu, he spoke in Swahili, a language of which Lew had only a smattering—certainly not enough to cope with the slurring elision-filled singsong rapid delivery of Charlie. But surely it was taking too long to translate “Sit down,” and Lew noticed that many of the men exchanged amused glances as they settled themselves on the dusty floor.

“Charlie,” Lew said. When the man turned his small alert face, Lew said, “Charlie, all you have to do is translate what I say.”

“Oh. sure.” Charlie said.

Lew hefted the two-by-four. “Tell them,” he said, “I am now going to show them what to do if a man comes at them with a stick.”

Charlie nodded, and spoke in Swahili. Again there was a ripple of amusement among the seated men. Charlie turned back to Lew, ready for the next translation.

“Right.” Lew held out the two-by-four. “Take this.”

“Sir?”

“Go ahead, take it.”

Confused but obedient, Charlie took the piece of wood, transferring his sugarcane to his left hand.

Lew stepped back about three paces. “Come at me with the stick, Charlie,” he said.

Charlie looked blank for a second, then frowned down at the two-by-four and back up at Lew. “I pretend? Pretend to attack you?”

“If you want,” Lew said indifferently. “Whatever you want to do.”

With a little smile, Charlie turned to the audience and spoke again in Swahili. An appreciative murmur spread through the men; several hid big grins behind their hands.

Lew said, “I didn’t give you anything to translate, Charlie.”

“I just told them what will happen,” Charlie explained. “So they will not be startled.”

“Fine. Come on, now.”

“Okay.”

Charlie came forward, pretending to pretend. Lew had expected that—a deceptively mild approach rather than a lunging screaming performance—and he saw the instant when Charlie’s eyes changed, just before the quick leap forward and the slashing swing of the two-by-four, aimed squarely for Lew’s head.

Lew stepped forward inside the swing, his left arm going up at an angle to deflect the blow upward, at the same time that his right foot was coming up very hard into Charlie’s crotch. Charlie screamed, a very satisfying sound in any language, and shriveled to the ground like an ant on a burning log. The two-by-four hit the floor and bounced away.

The men loved it. They laughed; they clapped their hands; they said admiring things to one another. Lew bent down to place a solicitous hand on Charlie’s shoulder, saying, “You all right, Charlie?”

Charlie couldn’t quite raise his head far enough to look up but he did manage to nod.

“Will you still be able to translate? Should I get somebody else to translate?”

“I can do it.” Charlie’s voice sounded as though it were being strained through canvas.

“I need good translations, Charlie. Accurate translations. You’re sure you’re up to it?”

Now Charlie did lift his head. He and Lew studied one another, their faces just a few inches apart, and Lew watched Charlie work out the equation in his own mind. Bad translation equals extreme pain. Good translation equals an end to pain.

Slowly, Charlie nodded. “I can do it,” he said.

“Fine. Let me help you up.”

Charlie stood, his posture and expression those of a very old man. Lew made a little show of dusting him off, while the watching men giggled and slapped their knees. Then Lew said, “Ready?”

Charlie swallowed noisily. Standing a bit straighter, he said, “Yes. Ready.” His voice wasn’t normal yet, but it was better.

“Good. Tell them the purpose of that demonstration was to prove that a weapon does not make a man invincible.”

From Charlie’s tone, and the men’s interested reaction, he was translating verbatim now. Satisfied, Lew went on: “But we are not going into Uganda to look for a fight. There’s a shipment there, to be loaded and unloaded. That’s what we’re going for. Most of us will not be armed.”

There was a stir of dissatisfaction when Charlie translated that last sentence. Lew said, “If Ugandan Army or police attack us, we will leave Uganda at once. My job is to teach you how to get back to the rafts in case of attack. In other words, how to retreat, while those with guns protect your rear.”

One of the seated men made an indignant statement. Charlie said, “He says, give them all guns, they’ll protect themselves.” He was clearly pleased that Lew was being given some trouble.

Lew nodded. “Look at the man next to you,” he told them, and waited while they listened to the translation and then did actually look back and forth, confused and self-conscious, laughing at one another.

Lew went on slowly, giving Charlie plenty of time to put it all in Swahili: “That man beside you has very little experience with guns, and no experience at all with war. Imagine you are walking in the woods, with an entire army somewhere around. Imagine that man now sitting beside you is also in the woods, somewhere nearby. There’s a commotion up ahead. People are shooting; people are yelling. With all the trees and bushes, you can’t see what’s going on, you can’t tell who’s who. Do you really want that man now sitting beside you to have a gun, out there in those woods, near you?”

There was general discontent at that. Several of the men had things to say. Like most people, they wanted to believe they were capable of decisive heroic action. Probably the most difficult part of Lew’s job—in the armies he’d worked for, as well as here—was to get people to understand their limitations. Once they’d accepted how ignorant and unready they were, they’d be prepared to start listening to instruction.

Charlie, having a wonderful time, turned back to Lew. “They say—”

“I know what they say.”

Hunkering down in front of the attaché case that he’d brought in here like any schoolteacher entering any classroom, opening it so the lid obscured the contents from his students, Lew took out two pistols, both Italian-made Star .38 caliber. Shutting the lid, he stood and faced the group, the pistols held loosely in his hands. “Tell them this, Charlie. If any man here thinks he knows guns well enough to be trusted with one in Uganda, he can prove it by dueling with me now.” At continuing stunned silence from his left, he said, “Tell them, Charlie.”

Charlie did, and the men became wide-eyed and silent. Lew went on: “We’ll stand on opposite sides of this room, each of us holding his pistol at his side. Charlie will count to three, and then we will both begin firing, and continue until somebody has been hit. I won’t shoot to kill; I’ll aim for the knee.”

They discussed it among themselves. Lew continued in a negligent manner to show them the pistols.

At last Charlie, his manner betraying a surprised and reluctant admiration, said, “They don’t want to do it.”

“Tell them this. I’ll say what they know and what they don’t know. And if anyone disagrees with me, he can always call my bluff.”

Charlie translated that with as much relish as when he’d thought it was Lew who was in trouble. The seated men looked mulish and resentful as they listened, but not actually rebellious.

Lew put the pistols away, snapped the case shut, and went on with his lecture.

“I don’t want any of you to die in Uganda. I don’t want you to shoot each other, and I don’t want you to be shot by the police. Mr. Balim knows I have worked as an instructor in different armies, and he has asked me to teach you what you have to know to be safe on our trip together. We only have a few days, so if you don’t want to learn, or you don’t like the way I teach, you can leave. No one will argue with you.”

Lew looked around the room, expecting that this bluff also would not be called. The men were being offered a very healthy bonus for this work, and had been told only the bare minimum they needed to know: that they would travel over the lake to Uganda, that they would work as loaders there of a “shipment” (they hadn’t been told of what), and that they would travel back to Kenya the next day. Lew expected a combination of greed and curiosity to keep them all actively involved.

He was right. They settled down at last, and he talked to them about the terrain they would be covering. He explained how, in heavy woods, even a group their size could avoid being seen from the air. He told them how to react under fire: never run in a straight line, and—most important—never assume immediately that they’re shooting at you. “You’re hiding behind a tree. They’re shooting at some other guy. You panic and run. Now they’ll shoot at you, and probably hit you, too.”

He told them what to do in case they were captured: “Tell them everything they ask. Tell them the truth, cooperate, give them anything they want. Let them see how scared you are. And keep a very sharp eye out for a chance to get away. Listen to me, this is important. If you come on like a tough guy, they’ll beat you down and eventually they’ll kill you. If you behave like a nervous wreck, and answer all their questions, they won’t worry about you very much, they might even get careless with you. In a battle, there’s lots of distractions. If you see a chance to run, take it.”

Out of the attaché case he brought an example of the one weapon he wouldn’t mind their carrying: a woolen sock, filled with sand. “Just tie it loosely. If you think you’re about to get caught, untie it, dump the sand out, throw the sock away. Then you’ve never had a weapon at all.”

They enjoyed the sock full of sand; from the way they pointed at Charlie and laughed and said several things, they wanted Lew to demonstrate the weapon on Charlie. “What are they saying?” Lew asked, straight-faced.

“Nothing,” Charlie said. “Just nonsense.”

Lew moved on. He was starting to get into the question of hiding in the woods during a police sweep when Isaac came in with an interruption. “Mr. Balim says he’s sorry, but you can’t work with these people tomorrow.”

“Why not? We don’t have much time. And this was his idea.”

“Mr. Balim says, you can have them every day after tomorrow. But, he says, you must fly to Nairobi tomorrow morning.”

Nairobi. Amarda.

Lew hadn’t thought of her since—Since the rain had stopped? Since she had driven away from Kisumu two weeks ago? Since last night’s muddled and mostly forgotten dreams? If he never saw her again, the affair was over. “Isaac,” he said, “I’ve got these people to train. Can’t you make the trip this time?”

“A black man, a black Ugandan, deal with an Asian family?” Isaac shook his head with a rueful smile. “Besides,” he said, “I’m supposed to go on a trip with Frank tomorrow.”

“A trip? Trip?” Irritable, Lew looked around at the observing, interested men. “It isn’t fair to them,” he said.

Isaac said, “Lew? What’s wrong?”

Meaning that he wasn’t behaving sensibly. Isaac would begin to wonder why he was making such a fuss over the training of these laborers—earlier, in Isaac’s presence in Balim’s office, Lew had given no such indication of concern for these men—and he might even begin to suspect the truth. “All right,” Lew said. “Sorry, Isaac, I don’t mean to be bad-tempered. I’m just having a little trouble with this crowd, that’s all.”

“Then you won’t mind a day off,” Isaac said.

Ellen will fly me; Jesus. “Not a bit,” Lew said, forcing a cheerful grin. “Nairobi, here I come.”

26

“The border,” Isaac said. His mouth was dry; his eyes kept blinking; his hands trembled on the steering wheel.

“You wanted an adventure,” Frank said from the backseat. “Here it is.”

Looking in the rearview mirror, Isaac saw Frank lounging at his ease back there, his tie somewhat askew, his suit jacket open, his white shirt rumpled at his waist. Frank seemed happy, unconcerned, merely amused by Isaac’s fear. I must be like that, Isaac told himself. I must watch Frank, and if he is not afraid I must also be not afraid.

And if the moment comes when Frank is afraid?

Turning his mind sternly away from that question, Isaac slowed the gray Mercedes to a stop just before the red-and-white- striped pole that blocked the entry to Uganda. On the left stood the small shed containing customs officials and border guards. Two sloppily uniformed men with repeating rifles strapped to their backs leaned negligently by the shed door, watching the Mercedes without expression.

Frank leaned forward, extending his document wallet over Isaac’s shoulder, saying, “Here you go, old son. Knock ’em dead.”

“Or vice versa,” Isaac said. His voice was trembling, spoiling the unaccustomed effort at a joke. He hated that.

Frank laughed. “Just don’t tell ’em your right name.”

“No fear of that.”

Very reluctantly, Isaac opened the Mercedes door, stepped out into the warm sunlight, adjusted his chauffeur’s cap and dark-blue chauffeur’s jacket, and walked on watery legs toward the shed.

After Lew Brady’s experience, back before the rains, it had been decided that no one connected with this operation dared enter Uganda again using his own name and ID. Therefore, through various contacts of Balim’s in Nairobi, false documentation had been arranged, so that now, when it was necessary to go to Uganda in a more open manner than the lake route Frank had twice used, they were (they hoped) prepared.

Isaac, grown increasingly discontented with his clerk’s role, had purchased false identification for himself as well, explaining to Balim that Frank would need from time to time a translator who looked more civilized than Charlie. Also, Frank would surely welcome the presence of someone who already knew the ground. And, finally, there were things to be done in Uganda that only a black man could do, and whom could Balim trust for those things more than Isaac? Balim had responded by reminding Isaac that the first law of survival was never to volunteer; then he had accepted the voluntary offer. So here Isaac was, willy-nilly, a man wanted by the Ugandan police, a man high on Idi Amin’s personal death list, walking—however shakily—directly into the lion’s den.

Inside the overheated metal-roofed shed were half a dozen soldiers and customs officials, all looking bored and mean and half-drunk, as though they might murder him, or at the very least pull off his arms and legs, merely for a moment’s amusement. Without a word, looking neither left nor right, Isaac put Frank’s documents and his own on the chest-high counter dividing the room, then stood there like an exhausted horse, waiting.

After a moment, the oldest and least-dangerous-looking of the men came forward and began slowly to study those papers: Frank’s green American passport, Isaac’s red Kenyan passport, Frank’s letters and other identification, Isaac’s driver’s license, the Mercedes registration.

These papers claimed that Frank was an American named Hubert Barton, an employee of International Business Machines, on his way to Jinja to discuss a computer installation there with an attorney named Edward Byagwa. (Photostat copies of correspondence between Byagwa and IBM were included.) The papers also identified Isaac as a Kenyan national named Bukya Mwabiru, employed as a chauffeur by East Africa Car Hire, Ltd., main office in Nairobi. The Mercedes registration showed it to be owned by the same company (of which Mazar Balim owned thirty percent).

The border guard frowned his way through these documents one by one, mumbling to himself from time to time, his lips moving. Finally he glowered at Isaac and said, “Barton.”

“In the auto.” Not trusting his voice—it might break, crack, fail entirely, somehow give him away—Isaac spoke as few words as possible.

The guard moved slightly to his left, so he could look through the open doorway and see Frank sprawled on the backseat of the Mercedes. “Why doesn’t he come in here?”

“Air conditioning,” Isaac said, and even essayed a shrug. “He’s an American.”

The guard grunted. Saying nothing else, he brought up stamp and pad from under the counter and stamped both passports, then wrote illegibly over the stamps. However, instead of giving the papers back to Isaac, he lifted a leaf in the counter, stepped through, lowered the leaf, and marched out of the shed, carrying the papers.

Isaac followed, half-afraid the other guards would yell at him to stay. He trailed the guard over to the Mercedes, where the man gestured with the papers for Frank to open the window. Frank did, and the guard said, severely, “Jambo.”

“That means ‘hello,’ doesn’t it? Jambo yourself, pal,” Frank said. “Jesus, it’s hot out here. Anything wrong, driver?”

“No, sir,” Isaac said.

“Well, jambo some more,” Frank told the guard, and pushed the button to reclose the window.

How can he do that? Isaac asked himself. Frank’s nonchalance, rather than reassuring him, was just increasing his terror. And this is the easy part, he reminded himself gloomily.

The guard, rebuffed, frowned a moment longer at the car, as though considering whether or not to search it (not that there was anything to be found in it). Then, abruptly turning away, the man handed the documents wordlessly to Isaac and gestured at one of the lounging soldiers to raise the barricade. Isaac, his hand trembling so hard he had trouble opening the car door, slid in behind the wheel, dropped the papers on the other leather bucket seat, watched the red-and-white pole lift out of the way, put the engine in gear, and for the first time in three years moved onto the soil of Uganda.

The memories flooded back. Not just his family (that memory was never far away), but everything else he’d had and no longer possessed. His house, his friends, his work, the relationships with people at the Ministry for Development, even the four peach trees in his backyard. His future, too, the future that hadn’t happened and now never would—that also shone in on him with the sunshine through the windshield, closing his throat with the pain. He drove, eyes forward, hurting so much that he didn’t want to move any part of his body.

The land was familiar, the sunlight familiar, the ribbon of road familiar. The few vehicles they passed bore yellow license plates as in Kenya, but beginning with U, not K. The people in the occasional village were more brightly dressed than in the countryside around Kisumu.

God help him, God help him, he was home.

27

For Idi Amin, the least enjoyable aspect of his office was his office. He very much liked to be out on maneuvers with his Army, or observing a flyby of his Air Force, or making a whirlwind tour of “inspection” in a jeep at the head of a convoy of troop-filled trucks, racing through the small towns, laughing at the dogs and the babies and the chickens as they scurried out of his way.

Official dinners, they were also nice. And official lunches, official teas, official cocktail parties. Also official tours of locations such as Owen Falls Dam (making sure those thrown-away bodies which had not yet been eaten by the crocodiles had discreetly been removed the day before) or the Field Marshal Idi Amin Air Force Base at Nakasongola, seventy miles north of Kampala. (The air base was a particular favorite, though also something of an embarrassment. Amin, early in his presidency, had ordered it built, with its modern camouflaged underground hangars, because he wanted to protect his Air Force from the fate that had hit the Egyptians in the 1967 Six-Day War, when the Israelis had destroyed virtually the entire Egyptian Air Force on the ground on the very first day. However, Amin had only about twenty modern warplanes in his Air Force, which he couldn’t bear to keep so far away from himself, so the Field Marshal Idi Amin Air Force Base normally stood empty while his total Air Force remained at Entebbe, where the Israelis had wiped it out last summer. He had new planes now, though, and always ordered a few of them to Nakasongola before an inspection.)

Unfortunately, for the leader of a modern nation there’s more to the presidency than Army maneuvers and VIP inspections. From time to time he must seat himself in his office, listen to a lot of boring details from various ministers, make decisions, give orders, and even occasionally sign something. (He really disliked that part. He had learned late in life how to sign his name, and he remained convinced there was something funny about the look of it, that it didn’t have in some strange manner the appearance of a real signature. He thought other people could see the difference and were deliberately hiding their knowledge from him.)

As with many men who have reached the top in the world of power politics, Idi Amin’s talent was not for governing but for climbing. Now that there was nowhere left to climb, he was frequently bored or resentful or ill at ease, as though it were the world’s fault he had nothing left to do with his skills. Again as with so many such men, he had turned his energies to the obsessive struggle to retain the power he’d achieved, even if his enemies and competitors were frequently no more than ghosts.

But you can’t chase ghosts all the time, no matter how many you’ve made. Today, all his appointments finished, nowhere else to go, Amin prowled the large plush room he’d inherited from Milton Obote, drinking beer and thinking about next month’s Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference to be held in London. The British had been making a fuss lately about his attending; they said bad things about him and didn’t want him to go. They claimed it was because of the way he treated his enemies, but he knew that was false. Didn’t all strong leaders treat their enemies harshly? Of course; how else could you intimidate them, keep them in check? It was simple hypocrisy.

There had even been discussion in the British papers about his meeting with Queen Elizabeth. If he were to attend the conference, naturally he would with all the other heads of state be on the reception line to meet the Queen (whom in any event he had already met six years ago), and these newspapers had raised the question as to whether or not this Queen should shake Idi Amin’s hand. Yes, and he knew why, he knew why that was such an issue. “Amin’s red hand,” they called it, but they meant Amin’s black hand. Yes, they did.

Back in the 1950s, when he was in the Army, then called the King’s African Rifles, he was the only black enlisted man on the Nile Rugby Team with all those white officers. Every time they played a game in Kenya there would be a reception afterward, and while the rest of the team enjoyed the festivities Idi Amin would sit alone in the bus, waiting to be driven back to the barracks. Yes, he knew what color hand they didn’t want their Queen to touch.

“Sir?”

Amin had been deep in the past, staring sightlessly out his window, clutching his beer bottle by the neck. He was six feet four; he had a big gut he hadn’t owned back in 1951 and 1952, when he was heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda; he filled this room with a brooding intensity. He looked over at his secretary, a uniformed soldier, a Kakwa like himself. He liked to have people around him who spoke his tribal dialect; in it he said, hoping for something interesting, “Well? I am very deep in thought here.”

“Your Excellency, Mr. Chase wonders if you could spare five minutes to see him.”

Chase. It was possible that Chase would be amusing, particularly if he was here to talk against Sir Denis Lambsmith again. “Yes, I’ll see him,” Amin said, then added, “No, wait. Tell him I’ll see him soon, he should wait.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

Amin, smiling, watched the secretary-soldier close the door; then he turned back to the window and to his thoughts.

On the whole, he would prefer to attend that conference. Such official occasions were among the best parts of being a head of state, and it was always enjoyable to twit the British and strain the fabric of their surface politeness.

Also, there was London, which he liked very much. Amin had been to several places outside Africa—to Rome to see the Pope, to New York to address the United Nations—but his favorite trip had been back in 1971, the summer after he had taken power, when he had gone up to London to see the Queen. They’d had lunch together, and he’d explained at length his economic and educational plans for Uganda. Of course, that had been before he’d understood the depth of British faithlessness.

Chase. He was Canadian, of course, not British, but how much of a distinction was that? An African from this tribe and an African from that tribe were as different as winter from summer, but all white men—at least, all English-speaking white men—were the same. When it came to white people, he could only agree with the attitude of Roy Innis, who back in March of 1973 had made him a life member of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.

In preparation for an enjoyable conversation with Chase, Amin went back to his desk, unlocked a side drawer, and took out the Xerox copy of the letter, which he spread in front of himself on the desk. He still wasn’t a very good reader, but he’d had this one read to him by a trustworthy educated Nubian, and by now he had it memorized. It was typewritten, with neither date nor business-address heading, and it looked like this:

It was signed Baron Chase. Amin studied that signature as though there were something to be learned from it. The capital B and capital C were large and round, like village huts. The other letters, except for the h in Chase, didn’t properly exist at all, but were represented by wandering trails, like animal paths leading from a water hole. On the other hand, the h was a guidon, a straight knife-edged flagpole with a tiny pennant at the top. Baron Chase. Very interesting.

Chase had written the letter just before the end of the long rains, a few days after his return from London. He had already, as he stated in the letter, done his best to poison Amin’s mind against Sir Denis Lambsmith, but from what Patricia Kamin had told him, it was Sir Denis whom Amin wanted near him, and nobody else. Sir Denis was a skin-deep man, a technocrat without imagination. He didn’t have the imagination to be dishonest or clever, and he had no secret plans or intentions in connection with this coffee sale.

Which was true of no one else involved. The Brazilians and the Bogotá Group were shifty, clever, very knowledgeable, out for their own advantage at every instant. Emil Grossbarger, of course, was completely untrustworthy, and Chase was a schemer by some sort of inner compulsion. No, it was bland unthreatening Lambsmith with whom Amin wanted to deal, particularly when his judgment of the man was supported by Patricia’s spying.

And when his other spies could protect him from the other actors in the play, including Chase.

This letter had reached Amin by a means almost as circuitous as the route it had taken to Grossbarger. Chase had brought it, already sealed, to an English pilot named Wilson, one of the regulars on the Stansted whisky run. Swearing Wilson to secrecy, Chase had given him some money and asked him to carry the letter to England and from there mail it to Grossbarger in Zurich. Wilson had agreed, had carried the letter to Stansted, had there steamed it open and made a Xerox copy, had resealed the letter and mailed it to Grossbarger, had brought the copy back to Uganda, had requested a personal meeting with the President, and had given him the copy and his story. Wilson’s reward was already in his personal Swiss bank account.

The question now was: What were Chase and Grossbarger up to? If it was merely that Chase was taking an extra little bribe on the side, that he was pressuring Grossbarger with some nonexistent problem solvable by money, then more power to him. Amin saw no reason to interfere with other people’s little scams, so long as their scams didn’t interfere with his.

But there was something about this letter, something that just didn’t sound right. “… before the deed is done.” “… as though our deal were intact.” What deed? What deal? The “deed” could merely refer to the sale and shipment of the coffee. The “deal” could mean nothing more than a side-issue bribe. Still, there was something wrong, and the main problem was why Chase and Grossbarger wanted Sir Denis out in the first place. And why did Chase find it necessary to assure Grossbarger that “no harm will come to Sir Denis”? Were they afraid he knew, or would learn, something of what they were up to?

If so, that was even more reason to keep Sir Denis around. If he were to learn anything about Chase and Grossbarger, Patricia would soon get it from him, and then Amin himself would know.

So. Inasmuch as possible, the problem of Chase was under control. Slipping the letter back into the drawer, dropping the beer bottle into the basket under his desk, Amin buzzed his secretary.

“Send in Mr. Chase.”

“Good morning, Mr. President,” Chase said.

Amin smiled. Chase had always maintained a proper formality in his presence, and even though Amin knew the formality was duplicitous and only a surface sham he enjoyed it. It was a confirmation of who he had become. “Good-ah morning, Baron,” he said, his voice rumbling like a sleepy purr. “My only Baron,” he added.

Chase would go on standing, though at his ease, until and unless Amin invited him to sit down. “You’re looking well, sir,” he said. “I understand you were jogging this morning.”

“Basket-ah-ball game this afternoon,” Amin said. “With-ah my flyers.” He meant the pilots of his Air Force, bright hard young men who treated him with a delicate combination of barracks-yard camaraderie and careful respect. Some had been trained by the British, some by the Israelis, a few by the Russians, or the Americans, and the most recent by the Libyans.

“Good luck,” Chase said. The closest he came to informality was occasionally to drop the “sir.”

“Thank you.” Amin grinned. “My-ah T-shirts now come,” he said, and gestured to a stack of cardboard cartons in the corner. “Take one.”

“With the picture?” Smiling his amusement and anticipation, Chase went over and opened the top carton. “Shall I try one on?”

“Of course,” Amin said. “How-ah you gonna know if it-ah fit?”

Unselfconsciously, Chase slipped off his tan sports jacket, his light-green figured tie, and his white shirt. His chest and back were very white and pasty, padded with unhealthy-looking fat in globules under the skin. Old wounds puckered and scarred his torso and upper arms, as though once, years before, he had rolled in barbed wire.

He’s been in many battles, Amin thought, studying the man, and all at once he remembered his own testimony before the Commission of Inquiry back in 1966, looking into an ivory-and gold-smuggling operation out of the Congo as a consequence of which Amin had wound up with forty thousand pounds in his Kampala bank account and a lot of gold bars in his house. Amin had told the Commission of Inquiry—which had ultimately found nothing against him—that he’d served in Burma and India during World War II; in fact, he hadn’t even joined the Army until 1946, and the only “war” he’d ever been involved in was a punitive expedition with the Fourth King’s African Rifles in 1962, organized to put down some cattle rustlers in the Lake Turkana section of Kenya. The accusations that time against his platoon, of torture and murder, had faded away into an inconsequential muddle, as they always did.

Chase pulled on one of the T-shirts and turned to face Amin, arms spread out. “How does it look?”

“Fine,” Amin said, laughing, looking at the blown-up black-and-white photograph spread across Chase’s chest.

Two years ago, during the Organization of African Unity summit meeting here in Kampala, Amin had arranged to be carried to the meeting seated in a litter borne by four British businessmen who lived in Uganda, and followed by another white man, a Swede, carrying a tiny parasol on a long stick to shade Amin’s head. A news photograph had showed Amin, in the litter, waving happily to a cheering crowd, and it was this photograph Amin had now had reproduced on several thousand white T-shirts.

Looking down, Chase said, “It came out very well. The white man’s burden, eh?”

“That’s-ah right! That’s-ah right!”

Neither of them mentioned that the right-rear bearer of the litter, an Englishman named Robert Scanlon, had recently been killed with a sledgehammer over at the State Research Bureau because of a business dispute with some people there.

Coming back over to the desk, patting the photo on his chest, Chase said, “This is what I wear today.”

“Oh, no,” Amin protested, “not all-ah day. You look-ah so nice in you clodes.”

“Underneath, then,” Chase said. “It’ll be my secret.”

“One-ah you secrets,” Amin said with an amiable smile. “Sit-ah down, my little Baron.”

“Thank you, sir.” Chase settled himself into his accustomed chair and said, “What I’m mostly here to talk about is coffee.”

And Sir Denis Lambsmith? Amin’s eyes brightened. “Yes?”

“The train can roll this week. Friday. Will the planes be there?”

It was Amin’s style to divide tasks among several people, so that only he ever knew the full dimensions or the complete story of what was going on. While Chase was dealing with Sir Denis, and to a lesser extent with the Brazilians (and on his own hook with Emil Grossbarger), it was Amin’s Deputy Minister of Development who’d been given the job of seeing to it that the Grossbarger Group provided the eight transport planes that had been agreed on. The planes were to be at Entebbe when the initial trainload of coffee arrived, and they would shuttle this first consignment of coffee to Djibouti, where it would be loaded onto ships in the Indian Ocean.

But there was a problem, and Chase unfortunately had now pointed to it. “We gonna get the planes,” Amin said, exuding confidence. “There’s-ah still one-ah two details-ah to be worked out.”

“Positioning costs,” Chase said. “I heard about it.”

“You hear about a lot-ah tings,” Amin said, displeased.

“I was wondering if there was anything I could do to help.”

“It-ah will work itself out,” Amin told him, shutting the door on that conversation. “And-ah dah train can still go on-ah Friday, even if we got to-ah store dah coffee a day or two day at-ah Entebbe.”

As was so often the case when things became irritating for Amin, the problem was money. The planes were being chartered from a firm based in Switzerland, which was insisting on what it called “positioning costs” before it would divert eight aircraft from their current work in Europe. It was the firm’s contention that to “position” each large cargo plane, fueled and with crew, at Entebbe would cost thirty-five thousand dollars U.S., money it was demanding in advance.

Since the Brazilians and the Grossbarger Group had already paid Uganda the advance money—and it had already been spent—they could not be called upon to pay these unexpected costs. However, Uganda’s foreign-exchange position—as usual precarious—would not permit a payment of two hundred eighty thousand U.S. dollars prior to shipping the coffee and being paid the other two thirds of the price.

At the moment, Amin’s people in Kampala and in Zurich were attempting either to convince the charter company to trust Uganda—a sovereign nation among nations, after all—for payment later, or to find some other air cargo company that would. So far, things weren’t going too well, though it was possible they could still make a deal with an American company, Coast Global Airlines, which had already in the last few years made lesser coffee shipments from Uganda to the United States. Coast Global’s primary problem seemed to be finding sufficient spare planes and crew for the job.

Chase rose, saying, “Well, if everything’s in hand, I’ll be off.”

“Yes,” Amin said. It was disappointing that Chase hadn’t once mentioned Sir Denis Lambsmith. Amin watched him cross the room back over to his clothing, and then added, “To Jinja.”

Chase looked surprised, but not worried. “That’s right,” he said. He put his white shirt on over the Idi Amin T-shirt, and buttoned it up.

“To see a lawyer,” Amin said, his friendly smile unchanged. “Name of Edward-ah Byagwa. Wha-ta you need-ah lawyer for, little Baron?”

“I’m buying some land near Iganga,” Chase said. “Used to be church land.” Smoothly he knotted his green tie.

“Buy-ing?”

Chase grinned, making them conspirators together. “You know me,” he said, shrugging into his tan sports jacket. “I like things to be nice and legal.”

“I know you, little Baron,” Amin agreed. “Have a good-ah time, in Jinja.”

Chase paused at the door, looking back, grinning again with the open smile that Amin knew to be his most thoroughly false expression. “So you knew I was going to Jinja,” he said. “I can’t get anything past you, can I?”

“I hope-ah not,” Amin told him. “I hope-ah not completely.”

28

Sex last night, and sex again this morning. He’s feeling guilty, Ellen thought, because he’s on his way to see his girl friend. She watched Lew’s profile as they drove to Balim’s offices, and in his expressionless face she read deceit, guilt, and self-indulgence.

She hadn’t told him about her conversation yesterday with Balim, nor did she see any reason why she should. He’d want to know why she was quitting Balim to work elsewhere, and that would lead inevitably to the name of Amarda Jhosi, and Ellen simply didn’t want that whole scene. She didn’t care to learn whether Lew would deny everything, or promise to reform, or even attempt to defend himself. When a thing is over, it’s over, that’s all; and this phase of Ellen Gillespie’s life was over.

In Balim’s office she sat quietly to the side, in the brown armchair into which Frank normally flung himself, while Balim explained today’s problem to Lew. “The grandmother,” he said, with an embarrassed little smile, as though she were his own grandmother and he were solely responsible for her. “The grandmother won’t stay in place.”

“I don’t think she likes us,” Lew said.

“Poor lady.” Balim sighed. “What she doesn’t like is the position in which she finds herself. The moral niceties in stealing from Amin, who stole from her, are too subtle for Lalia Jhosi. What is wanted here is reassurance, someone to convince her she hasn’t fallen in with thieves.”

“Then you should talk to her yourself,” Lew said. “Or send Isaac. That’s what I told him yesterday.”

Ellen looked sharply at him. Had he tried to get out of this trip? But that was just guilt again, and cowardice. The main difference between men and women, Ellen thought, is that men have so much simpler emotions; they can’t deal with complexity. If Lew were really trying to avoid Amarda Jhosi, it could only be because she was making him confused.

“Ah, no,” Balim was saying, “you are the man for the job. I am a merchant, and undoubtedly a shady character. At first I was a very good friend to bring my compatriots, my fellow refugees, this opportunity. But as time has gone on, Lalia Jhosi has come to realize that I am merely a sharp practitioner, the sort of Asian who gives Asians a bad name. As for Isaac, he would surely alarm the old lady by talking politics. She wants involvement with politics even less than with crime; after all, she’s already seen what politics can do.”

Lew glanced with a kind of frustrated anger at Ellen, then said to Balim, “But what am I supposed to do?”

“Be a clean-cut American boy. A fighter for justice and a defender of the oppressed.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, I’m quite serious,” Balim said, and Ellen believed he was. “Lalia Jhosi is impressed by you. You remind her of the hero in American films. So you go to her and you reassure her that what we are all engaged in is an adventure, but an adventure with a moral purpose.”

“Oh, boy,” Lew said, shaking his head.

“You don’t talk about profit, as I would have to do. You don’t talk about politics, as Isaac would have to do. You don’t talk about the mechanics of the thing, as Frank would have to do. You talk about good and evil, and you show her that we are the good guys.”

“The good guys.”

“That’s right. You’ll have no trouble with it, Lew, I promise. Just go to Nairobi and be a hero.”

As Ellen landed in bright sunlight and taxied the plane to an available pad at Wilson Airport in Nairobi, Lew broke an extended silence between them by saying, “Why not come along?”

She had been listening to the tower and thinking about other things. She stared at him for a blank second, then said, “To the coffee plantation?”

“Sure. It’s a very interesting place.”

He wants me to protect him from that girl, she thought. But she wouldn’t do it, she wouldn’t let him force her to make his decisions for him.

Besides, it was already finished. As they left the office in Kisumu, Balim had said to her, quietly so Lew couldn’t hear, “No change?” and she had shaken her head, to which he had given his sad fatalistic shrug. And in any event she had the appointment here, all set up. “Oh, I don’t think so, Lew,” she said, turning down the invitation. “There’s really too much to be done at the airport.”

He was surprised, and showed it. “Too much to do? Come on, Ellen, you spend most of your time just hanging around, reading magazines. You’ve told me so yourself.”

“Well, today there’s too much to do,” she said, turning the plane in a tight U and stopping on the pad. “And I really don’t want to go.”

“Why not, for God’s sake?”

She shut down both engines, then looked at him frankly and clearly. “I’m not interested in the Jhosi family, Lew,” she said. “Nor in their coffee plantation. Nor in a nice drive through Nairobi.”

He had understood her subtext; she saw his face close in defensive anger. “Have it your own way,” he said.

“Thank you.”

She climbed down from the plane, and he followed. He started to help her tie it down, but she said, “Go on, Lew, the grandmother’s waiting.” They could both see, some distance away beyond the chain link fence, Amarda Jhosi standing beside her car on tiptoe, happily waving, like the girls in war movies welcoming their men back from battle.

Lew hesitated, obviously torn, looking between Ellen and the waving girl. “You sure you won’t come?”

“Positive.”

He nodded, as though coming to a decision. “See you later,” he said, and walked off.

She kept her back turned, busy with the ropes to tie the plane down, until she was certain they had gone.

Among the tiny cubbyhole offices for the various small cargo and charter air services, Ellen found the one marked CHARTAIR, LTD. in sky-blue letters that leaned speedily to the right. Inside, a worried-looking black man sat crowded in between large dark filing cabinets, as though the cabinets were guards sent to keep him here until time for the execution. His desk was messy, his wastebasket overflowing, and the small blackboard on the side wall listing future charters was so cluttered with half-erased or crossed-out numbers and names that it made no sense at all. “I’m looking for Mr. Gulamhusein,” Ellen said.

The condemned man lifted his worried head. He held a ball-point pen in his hand, and two red pencils were stuck in his woolly hair above his right ear. In a surprisingly firm and self-assured voice, belying everything else about him, he said, “You would be Miss Gillespie?”

“That’s right.”

“Mr. Gulamhusein phoned from Nairobi,” the man said. “He has been unfortunately delayed, but he will be here within the hour.”

“That’s all right,” Ellen said, though she was disappointed that she couldn’t get the details over right away. “I have other things to take care of. I’ll be around the terminal.” She left the man there and walked toward the airport manager’s office with her documents, trying not to hear herself thinking that she should have gone with Lew to the plantation.

Mr. Gulamhusein was another Asian, an overgrown fig of a man with a smoothly smiling exterior which seemed to be imperfectly shielding panic. But he was efficient; he had brought the employment contracts and the Ugandan immigration form and the other papers.

The condemned man had relinquished his seat between the filing cabinets to Mr. Gulamhusein and had gone away for a cup of tea. Mr. Gulamhusein unceremoniously cleared the messy desk by piling all the papers in a kind of compost heap to one side, then neatly laid out the documents he’d brought in his shiny black plastic attaché case, saying, “You will want to read everything most carefully before you sign.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Ellen said, and settled down to read.

Because of the eight-hour time difference between Kenya and New York, she had had to get up at two in the morning, night before last, once she was sure Lew was asleep, and drive to Balim’s office (having earlier gotten his permission) to make the phone call to the pilots’ agency at Kennedy Airport. She had used them before, and in fact they’d gotten her the job in Alaska. All she’d said this time was that she wanted a job anywhere in the world, but when she’d mentioned that she was calling from Kenya, the man at the other end of the line had become very interested, saying, “We may have something right there, very near you. Short-term job, but it ends in the States.”

“Perfect,” she’d said.

It would take a second phone call, and the man had agreed there would be someone in the office at eleven that night, which for Ellen would be seven the next morning. And when she made that second call, the deal was arranged.

So here she was with the East African representative of Coast Global Airlines, a large American cargo company, reading the contract for her employment. Sometime tomorrow, Wednesday, a plane lacking a copilot would be arriving at Entebbe from Baltimore. Ellen, at Coast Global’s expense, would be flown by charter from Kisumu to Entebbe to become that plane’s copilot. Her documents from Ugandan immigration would permit her to stay in the transient aircrews’ accommodations at Entebbe, but not to leave the airport. On Friday, she would crew as the plane, fully loaded, went to Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden and returned empty. There would be three, and possibly four, round trips, but in any event she would be paid for four. On Saturday or Sunday she would crew back to Baltimore, where she would be paid. And by then, according to the man at the agency, they would surely have another more long-term job lined up for her. It couldn’t be better.

The strange thing was, she was so involved in her own plans and her own unhappiness and her own determination to get out of this situation that had become intolerable to her that it never even entered her mind there might be any connection between the cargo she would be flying to Djibouti on Friday and the trainload of coffee Lew and the others expected to be stealing any day now.

“Everything’s fine,” she said, putting the papers down on the cleared part of the desk. “May I borrow a pen?”

“Certainly.” It was an expensive silver fountain pen, which he uncapped before handing her. Watching her begin to sign and initial the various papers, he said sympathetically, “You were not content in your previous work?”

“That sums it up,” she said, and smiled through her doubts, and handed him back his pen.

29

So he knows I’m going to Jinja.

That same sentence kept recurring in Chase’s mind as he drove east on A109, amid the groaning trucks that gave an impression—utterly false—of a soundly functioning economy. So he knows I’m going to Jinja.

And he tells me he knows.

Meaning there are further things he doesn’t know. For instance, he doesn’t know why I’m going to Jinja, because if he had the slightest suspicion about the truth, I’d already be dead. Or wishing I were.

But it also means he’s suspicious of me, more than in the normal way of being mistrustful. He thinks I’m up to something, but he doesn’t know what it is, so he’s poking at me a little to see what happens.

Poke all you want, Idi. All you do is strengthen me in my resolve.

Until very recently, he had thought he would continue on here for a while, possibly even a year or two, after making his double killing on the coffee deal. But this operation was making him nervous, and now Amin’s attitude was making him even more nervous. Once the coffee was gone, why wouldn’t Amin begin to believe that Chase had had something to do with its disappearance?

So the thing was to get out, right away. Not with the coffee, no; he had no desire to be present when Balim and Company received their little extra surprise. But at the same time as the coffee went, he would go. His papers were such that he could leave at will, so why not slip out of the country as soon as the word came that the coffee had actually been stolen? There was no reason why not, and plenty of reasons why he should.

Jinja, the source of the Nile, that romantic ideal of the Victorian imagination, has today become a plain and ordinary town, part small manufacturing center and part bedroom community for the civil servants at Kampala, fifty miles away. The whole is brooded over by the Army’s Jinja Barracks, site of the first massacre of Idi Amin’s rule, when several hundred officers and men from suspect tribes—Langi and Acholi, mostly—were herded into a small building and machine-gunned.

Not far from the Barracks was the business center of town. The lawyer Edward Byagwa’s office stood upstairs from a now-defunct shoe store, once owned by Asians, then given to an Army officer from the Barracks, who, not knowing how to reorder, abandoned it when the stock ran out. Byagwa shared the second floor with a dentist, who hadn’t been seen for about two months. His family remained hopeful.

Byagwa’s secretary in his reception room was his wife; a fairly good guarantee of loyalty, assuming there were no domestic difficulties. She was a stocky unattractive woman who was reading an old copy of Queen, and who looked up with a mixture of apprehension and annoyance when Chase walked in. Seeing he was a white man, and therefore unlikely to be dangerous to her, she dropped the apprehension but kept the annoyance. “Yes?”

“Baron Chase. I’m expected.”

“You’re late. The others are already here.” Not rising from her desk, she gestured at the inner door.

“I am Captain Baron Chase,” he said, smiling at her, “an adviser to our President.”

She stared at him, the threat sinking home. In Uganda, no one was permitted to call himself “President” of anything, not of a club or a company or a trade union. No one but Idi Amin. For another person to give himself the title “President,” no matter of what, was a capital offense. So this man was telling her that he was close to Amin and that he was, after all, potentially dangerous to her, and that she should irritate him only at her risk.

Yes; she understood. Her mouth opening into a wide O, she started hurriedly and awkwardly to her feet. But then Chase smiled, arresting her with his hand, saying, “No, don’t get up. I can find my way.”

The inner office had a wall of windows overlooking the street, covered by a layer of thin curtains. The furniture was scanty and functional, placed for efficiency rather than beauty on a worn gray carpet; an Army uniform was folded on one chair. The walls were pale green and contained no decoration other than the attorney’s framed documents.

Entering, Chase first saw Frank Lanigan, sprawled on a wooden-armed chair like a defeated gladiator. The man was dressed in suit and tie, but looked as ridiculously crumpled as ever. “Hello, Frank,” Chase said, smiling. “Long time no see.”

“Not long enough.” But Frank did get to his feet and consent to shake hands. They both squeezed hard, but stopped before it became a contest. “This is Isaac Otera,” Frank said, gesturing to a black man in chauffeur’s uniform.

Isaac Otera, Chase knew, was Balim’s office manager and the one who was supposed to get the trucks. He certainly didn’t look the part. And why is the man staring at me like that?

Neither Chase nor Otera offered to shake hands, and it was with some relief that Chase turned to the third man in the room, the attorney, Edward Byagwa. “Our host, I believe,” he said.

Byagwa did want to shake hands, and Chase obliged, finding the lawyer’s paw soft and pulpy, like the rest of him. Byagwa had a round head and a round face of polished bronze, with a very wide mouth and bulging eyes. He’s stuck midway between frog and prince, Chase thought, amusing himself, as he released the man’s hand.

Edward Byagwa was many things, too many things, and some inevitable day he would overstep himself. His wife outside was right to be apprehensive. An active churchgoer, Byagwa appeared in court frequently to defend priests and ministers against accusations ranging from treason (the storing of weapons in church basements was a popular charge) to the holding of services allied to one of the banned Christian sects. At the same time, he served as a go-between in smuggling operations involving Army officers and government figures, and had allegedly been very helpful back in 1973 in getting automobiles across the border into Kenya. (The ousted Asians had left behind many fine cars, but the Ugandan shilling was then already worth only a fraction of the Kenyan shilling, and true profit could be turned on those cars only if they could be gotten out of the country. That was the first time in Amin’s reign that the border with Kenya was closed; Amin closed it himself, to try to keep those cars in Uganda. Byagwa had helped many important people to realize their profit after all.)

Because he was so useful to the people in power, Byagwa dared more than most lawyers could these days in helping his church friends. And because he had been so useful, and knew (quite literally) where so many bodies were buried, he was not bothered, as he might otherwise have been. This office, for instance, was not bugged, nor was his telephone tapped, making this one of the very few places in Uganda where the present meeting could have occurred.

“Well,” Byagwa said, coming around from behind his desk, “you’ll want to talk together.” And he smiled and bowed and departed, carefully closing the door behind himself.

“We might as well get down to it,” Frank said. “Get changed, Isaac.”

But Chase shook his head and put his finger to his lips. Frank frowned, and they all listened, and heard the hall door close. Frank strode to the inner door, opened it, and demonstrated to Chase that the reception room was empty. “Okay?”

“Not yet.”

Chase looked around the office and decided the most logical place to start was the desk. The drawers were all innocuous, except that the bottom left was locked. Lying on the floor under the desk while Frank and Otera watched in bafflement, Chase found the tiny wire emerging from the bottom of the desk under that locked drawer. Carefully tacked into place along a seam between two pieces of wood, the wire ran to a tiny button microphone at the outer corner of the desk.

“Good,” Chase muttered. He used the screwdriver from his pocketknife to pry the microphone loose from the wood, then yanked it to break the wire and crawled out from under the desk. “Byagwa would also like to know what’s going on,” he said, dropping the microphone onto the middle of the attorney’s green blotter. “And what’s in it for him.”

“The dirty bastard,” Frank said, glaring at the button on the green.

“Ah, well,” Chase said. “Who among us is above such little tricks? Now, Frank, we can get down to it.”

So they did. Chase settled himself in the chair behind the desk, and Frank took a white envelope from his pocket and dropped it disdainfully next to the microphone. Meantime, Otera started to change from his chauffeur’s uniform to the uniform on the chair, transmogrifying himself into a captain in the Ugandan Army.

Inside the envelope, Chase found the confirmation from the Zurich bank. Thirty thousand dollars had been deposited by Balim into his new account there. “Earnest money,” he had described it to Balim, when insisting on some cash payment in advance. To protect Balim, the deposit had been made in such a way that he could order it withdrawn and redeposited into his own account at any time within thirty days. Balim had accepted this concept of “protection” because he had assumed he would be alive in thirty days.

“Good,” Chase said, stowing the confirmation away. Then he brought from his inner jacket pocket a large manila envelope. Pushing the microphone to one side, he emptied papers from this envelope onto the desk, saying, “Let’s see what we have here. Identification for Mr. Otera. You’re Captain Isaac Gelaya now,” Chase told the man, who was across the room putting on his military trousers. “I gave you your own first name, in case anyone calls to you.”

“Thank you.”

Otera seemed very muted for some reason. Was it funk? Chase frowned from Otera to Frank, wanting to point out that a misstep now by Otera could destroy the whole operation.

Frank read the unspoken concern and shook his head. “Don’t worry about Isaac. He’s very deceptive. He looks like a mild-mannered fella, but inside he’s a killer.”

Otera smiled a mild-mannered grateful smile, and zipped his fly.

Not completely convinced, Chase returned to the papers on the desk. “Here’s the authorization for today’s truck. And this is for the ones on Friday.”

Frank said, “It’s definitely Friday?” Behind him Otera, knotting his brown uniform necktie, became very still.

“Definitely Friday,” Chase said.

Otera came forward, tie knotted a bit unevenly, legs awkwardly rigid. “Let’s get it over with.”

“Straighten your tie,” Frank told him, as Chase handed him the documents.

Otera stood silently, nodding and fussing with his tie, as Chase explained what each piece of paper was for. But when Chase started to tell him how to get to Jinja Barracks, the man interrupted, saying, “I know Jinja.”

Chase looked at him, the rigid face, the office-worker appearance, the wound-up-spring determination. A Ugandan, he suddenly realized. Refugee. A fled civil servant. Much became clear, including why Chase had been feeling such hostility from the man. “Then you know the Barracks are within walking distance,” he said.

“Of course. Frank, here are the keys to the car.”

Taking them, Frank said to Otera, “We’ll see you from the window when you drive by.”

“Yes.”

“And you know where we’ll meet.”

“Of course.”

Frank and Otera shook hands. Chase, seated at the desk, watched with a small smile as Otera left, then watched Frank go over to the windows, pull the curtain back a bit, and gaze out at the street. Talking to his back, Chase said, “Your life is in that man’s hands, you know, Frank.”

Frank didn’t look around. “Better than in yours,” he said.

30

By the time they reached the plantation, Lew and Amarda weren’t speaking. She had wanted to stop at that availably empty house, but he had refused, and when she’d asked why, he’d had to tell her it was finished between them. And because it was so difficult to say such a thing, he’d had to build up a head of steam and then practically yell it at her. “There’s no future in it, that’s all! It’s pointless and it’s making trouble and it has to stop!”

“What sort of trouble? What are you talking about?”

“Just trouble.” He could feel himself being sullen, and he blamed Amarda for making him be that way. “I don’t want to lose Ellen, that’s all.”

“Over me?”

“Over anything.”

“I’m not worth such a risk.”

“If you say so,” he’d said, knowing he was ungracious, but unable to carry the burden any longer.

And that had been the end of the conversation. For the rest of the drive, Lew had felt rude but virtuous—not an unpleasant feeling.

At the house, a stony-faced Amarda led him into a small, overly furnished, stuffily hot room where her grandmother, today in a light-green silk sari, sat reading from a book with a blue-velvet cover and gilded pages. The old woman lifted her head, the reading lamp with its dark glass shade reflecting from her round spectacle lenses, and gestured for Lew to sit in an elaborately carved armchair facing her. “I’ll get tea,” Amarda said.

The old woman closed her book but kept her finger in it to mark her place, and remained silent until Amarda had gone out and shut the door. Then her first words weren’t encouraging. “I have no idea, Mr. Brady, why your friend Mr. Balim has seen fit to send you to me.”

Neither did Lew, if it came to that. “Well, Mama Jhosi,” he said, speaking softly and leaning forward as though to protect her from storms and abrasions, “Mr. Balim seemed to think there was some sort of problem.”

“It is not a problem,” she said. “I have changed my mind, that is the only thing. As for the money, Mr. Balim knows I shall return it from our next harvests.”

There was a faint flowerlike scent of perfume in the stuffy warm air. Lew said, “I’m not here to talk about money, Mama Jhosi.”

“Of course not.” She made a small perhaps unconscious movement with the book in her lap, suggesting her desire to return to it.

Lew’s hands felt too large, too cumbersome. Not knowing what else to do with them, he gripped his knees as he leaned toward her. “Please,” he said, “would you tell me why you’ve changed your mind?”

“My grandson,” she said.

“Pandit.” Lew smiled in remembered pleasure. He’d seen the boy twice and had enjoyed their conversations both times. “A very nice boy.”

“At school now. But the home is also a school.”

“Of course.”

“I do not expect,” she said, her eyes small and unreadable behind the reflecting lenses, “that Pandit will have a very easy life.”

“It’s starting well, at least.”

“You mean material comfort.”

“That, too,” Lew acknowledged. “But what I mostly meant was the home he has here, and the people around him. You, and Amarda.”

As though on cue, Amarda entered with a tray bearing tea things, and for the next few minutes the ritual of an English tea interrupted the conversation. Amarda was silent, unsmiling, rigid. Was the old lady aware of the tension emanating from her granddaughter, and would she have any idea of its cause?

When they were all furnished with tea and little cakes, the grandmother said, “Amarda, I was explaining to Mr. Brady why I have changed my mind about Mr. Balim’s so thoughtful proposition.”

Amarda sipped tea, expressionless, not looking at Lew. “Does Mr. Brady understand, do you think, Mama?”

“I had not completely made my point.” To Lew she said, “I was talking of Pandit, and I was saying that the home is also a school, and I was about to suggest that the sense of self and the sense of morals Pandit learns in his home will be very important to him in later life.”

“Absolutely,” Lew said. The tea and cakes had given him something to do with his hands, but the hot tea had combined with the airless warmth of the room to create a stuffy, clogged, distracted feeling.

“Pandit has seen Mr. Balim here,” the old lady went on. “He has seen you here. If we continue as originally envisaged, the day will come when he will see many truckloads of coffee here which he will know we have not grown on our few acres. He will ask questions.”

Amarda said, “He has already asked questions, Mama, about Mr. Balim and Mr. Brady. Mostly about Mr. Brady.”

Glancing at the girl, Lew could read the hostility behind the neutral facade. It had, of course, been bad tactics to break with her before this meeting; a quick roll in that house in Nairobi and Amarda would be on his side now. But he couldn’t have made himself treat her that cynically, so now she would do her subtle best to sabotage his mission.

If only Ellen had come along! Not only so he could prove there was nothing between himself and Amarda, but also to help with the old lady. Mama Jhosi would have been impressed by Ellen, and would have realized any plot with Ellen in it couldn’t be all bad.

But Ellen had been difficult, and Amarda had set herself to be impossible, so Lew was left to struggle here on his own in this hot mummified room. Struggle and fail, no doubt; so he might as well get it over with. “I believe, Mama Jhosi,” he said, “I understand your point. If Pandit sees a criminal act performed in his own home, with the connivance of the two people he most looks to for moral guidance, what will happen to his own moral and ethical self?”

The old lady smiled, and made a small gesture with both hands. (She still held her book, marking her place.) “You do see,” she said.

What Lew saw, all at once and startlingly, was that he was exactly following Balim’s instructions: he was talking morality, good and evil. But he hadn’t intended it—he’d had no clear idea what he might say—and it seemed to him Mama Jhosi, rather than he, had led the conversation in this direction. But was Balim right, yet again? Baffled but emboldened, Lew returned to the attack.

“I see and I sympathize. And you may well be right. At Pandit’s age—what is he, twelve?—a simplistic morality may be the best approach. There’ll be time later, I suppose, for him to learn how to think through the knottier moral questions.”

Amarda gave him a quick look of annoyance, but her grandmother frowned, shaking her head slightly, saying, “Knottier moral questions? I see no moral question at all. The subject is stolen coffee. Thievery.”

“Of course.” The heat was his friend now; it bound them all together as in a secret hiding place. He said, “Mama Jhosi, may I tell you a story from my personal experience?”

“If you wish.”

“I am not a criminal by profession. I am a soldier.”

“A mercenary,” Amarda said.

“That’s right. My usual job is instructing recruits. Several years ago, you may recall, one of the factions in the Congo civil war took to rounding up groups of white missionaries, white medical people, and so on, and massacring them.”

“And nuns,” the old lady said. “I remember how sad that was; they killed many nuns.”

“I was just going to mention nuns. There was an orphanage—” Then Lew stopped and grinned and waved his hand in a negative gesture, saying, “The children were already gone; this isn’t a tear jerker story.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Amarda said in her neutral voice, “He means he will not try to sway you with sentimentality.”

“Oh, I see.” She was no longer marking the place in her book with her finger. She seemed almost to be smiling. “So there shall be no orphans in this story.”

“Only the nuns,” Lew promised. “Eleven of them, French-speaking. We had no transportation and we couldn’t take them on into the thick of things with us, but we didn’t like leaving them there. Now, there was a Land-Rover we’d seen, that had some journalists in it, that had been left with its driver while the journalists walked ahead. We went back to the Land-Rover, and the driver said he had to stay there and wait for the journalists. So we pulled him out of there, and we stole his Land-Rover and brought it to the nuns. One of them could drive, and away they went. The journalists were very angry.”

“Yes,” the old lady said. Now she was definitely smiling, while Amarda was cold and tight-lipped.

“Now, that’s not a particularly knotty moral question,” Lew said, “but it’s beyond the level of subtlety you want to permit for Pandit. We did steal that Land-Rover.”

“Oh, now, Mr. Brady,” she said dismissively, as though disappointed in him, “that was in a war. Things are different in a war, everybody knows that.”

“You’re in a war, Mama Jhosi,” he told her. “Forgive me, but you must know you’re in a war, whether you want to be or not. Idi Amin is waging war against you and a lot of other people. He has already harmed you in this war, as you well know. And he’s harmed Pandit, too.”

“A war is battles. It isn’t coffee.”

“Money from coffee is the main thing keeping Idi Amin in power. And his victims are just as dead as if they’d been on a traditional battlefield. But all right,” he said, sitting back, raising his hands as though to acknowledge defeat. “The point you’re making is your own relationship with your grandson. I can’t argue against that. The operation will go on in any event, as you realize.”

Amarda said, “Of course it will. My grandmother doesn’t suppose she is stopping the theft from happening.”

Theft. Thanks a lot, Amarda. Lew said, “Even at this late date, I’m sure Mr. Balim will have no trouble finding another coffeegrower happy to take your place. Someone for whom the issue is money alone, without the satisfaction you might have in avenging yourself just a little against Idi Amin. That other person’s motives will be less moral than yours would have been.” Leaning forward once more, Lew said, “Mama Jhosi, it was out of his fondness for you, and his awareness of your treatment at Amin’s hands, that Mr. Balim came to you in the first place.”

“I am sure that is true.” The old lady was agitated now; her fingertips silently tapped the blue-velvet cover of the book in her lap. “I have not discussed this with Pandit,” she said. “Amarda, have you?”

“Yes,” Amarda said. She hesitated, reluctant to go on, then looked hard at Lew, saying, “He sees it the way you do, Mr. Brady. A heroic adventure against the forces of evil.” Turning back to her grandmother, she said, “Pandit thinks Mr. Brady is a hero. Like a footballer.”

“A footballer?” The old lady studied Lew with mock severity. “Without a poster, I hope.”

“No poster,” Lew said, smiling.

She shook her head, thinking things over. Amarda sat rigidly, eyes lowered, looking at nothing but the tea service. Lew had won, and he knew it, and the astonishing thing was that Amarda had made it possible. The faint perfume hung in the close air, and he thought of Amarda’s bedroom, somewhere deep inside this house, which he had never seen.

Mama Jhosi sighed. “There seems to be no completely satisfactory answer,” she said, and looked speculatively at Lew. “But I suppose it won’t hurt Pandit to have his heroes, if he shows some care in his choices. You may tell Mr. Balim that I will keep to our original agreement.”

Amarda walked Lew down the hall toward the front door. “Thank you,” he said.

The look she gave him was cold and unfriendly. “For what? I told the truth, that’s all.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“But I did have to.” Stopping in the hall, facing him, she said, “I behaved properly. To Pandit you are still a hero, but to me not anymore. And when I think of you from now on, I will say to myself, ‘I behaved properly.’”

“I still thank—”

“Wanube is waiting for you in the car. He works for us. He will drive you back to the airport.”

Lew would have tried to speak again, to thank her or say goodbye, but she turned on her heel and walked away.

At the airport, smiling, happy, he found Ellen reading a magazine in the waiting room and said, “Everything’s fixed.” And he meant—and he wanted her to understand—that everything was fixed. Not just the job Balim had sent him to do, but also the entanglement with Amarda. That too was fixed—forever—and with very little damage on either side.

“That’s fine,” Ellen said, rising, stowing the magazine in her shoulder bag; but for some reason she didn’t seem particularly interested or involved.

Lew had been assuming her bad temper was the result of some suspicion she had about him and Amarda; couldn’t she see there was no longer anything to be suspicious about? He was sorry she hadn’t been out front to see him arrive without the girl. Nailing home that message, he said, “Some employee of the family drove me back. An old man, a Kikuyu, named Wanube. Maybe the slowest, vaguest, worst driver I’ve ever seen. I finally took the wheel while he sat in back. Come to think of it, maybe that’s what he had in mind.”

“Probably so,” Ellen said, still distracted. “You ready to go?”

“Sure. Ellen? What’s the problem?”

Now she did finally look at him, and he saw her eyes come into focus. “Sorry, Lew,” she said. “I was thinking about something else. You talked the grandmother around, did you?”

“That’s just what I did. I think she half wanted to be talked around, anyway.”

“So Mr. Balim was right to send you. Come on, let’s get back and give him the news.”

They walked out the terminal’s side door and headed for the plane. Lew said, “Ellen? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said, and suddenly became much livelier. “Just half-asleep from sitting around, I suppose.” Looping her arm through his as they walked along, she said, “There’s no reason we can’t be friends.”

Now, what did she mean by that?

31

At the very first bureaucratic foot-drag, Isaac forgot to be scared. He almost forgot who he really was, and what this charade was all about, because what came flooding into the forefront of his mind was his normal technique for dealing with minor-league officiousness, clerical obstructionism, and the arrogance of petty authority. When the motor-pool sergeant, a sloppy man in a sloppy uniform, said indignantly, “We can’t break into our schedule to service a truck for you now, you should have phoned yesterday,” Isaac’s immediate answer was to point to the phone on the sergeant’s desk and say, “Put me through to the commanding officer.”

Now, if he’d stopped to think about it, that was just about the most dangerous thing he could have done. These documents from Chase should carry the day with the Jinja Barracks motor pool—and in fact they’d gotten him through the gate and this far already—but in order to divert suspicion from Chase later on, the documents could eventually be shown to be forgeries. If the sergeant were to call Isaac’s bluff and put him through to the Barracks commander—which is exactly the way some truly self-important bureaucrats would have handled the situation—Isaac could well be in deep trouble very fast. He could see the sequence now: the commander sides with his sergeant, and in order to complain about the lack of advance warning, he puts a call through to the individual in Kampala whose signature was on this requisition. “What order for a truck? I never—” Isaac’s heart began to pound.

But. “No need to be that way, Captain,” the sergeant said, at once losing his fine indignation and becoming mulish and sullen, like a man who’s already been chewed out by his superiors more than once for unnecessary interference. “I’m just saying we don’t have a truck for you at this exact instant.”

Isaac had the man on the run now. Suddenly cool—really and truly cool, he was astonished to realize—just as though he weren’t standing in this office in this low concrete-block building next to the motor pool, deep within Jinja Barracks in Uganda, with thousands of Amin’s troops all around him like piranha fish around a drowning kitten, still thoroughly cool, Isaac made a show of looking at his watch. “At what instant do you suppose you will have a truck for me?”

“That’s hard to say.” The sergeant made an effort to reconstruct his former indignation. “You come in here; you disturb the schedule; I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

“Well, I know, my friend,” Isaac said. “You see who signed this order?”

The sergeant looked again—reluctantly, it seemed—at that very important signature. “Yes, I know, I know.”

“This isn’t for me. I’m a captain. Do you think, if that truck were for me, I’d drive it myself?”

“Oh, I understand,” the sergeant said, unbending a little, as though in acknowledgment that he and the captain shared the same fate: constant harassment from above.

“If I am late with that truck,” Isaac said, “I’m sorry, but I won’t take all the blame myself. I didn’t get to be a captain that way. Do you understand me, sergeant?”

The sergeant did. He also understood why Isaac had made a point of emphasizing their comparative ranks. “Yes, of course,” he said, looking worried.

“So I’m sure we’ll both do our best,” Isaac suggested.

“Certainly. Why not? Hmmm, let’s see, I’ll have to, um…” He took down one of several clipboards in a row on the wall over his desk and leafed through the papers on it. “I’ll just check outside,” he said. “You understand, I’ll have to give you a truck already in process of being serviced for someone else. This alters the schedule a great deal. Well, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be back.”

The sergeant bustled out, carrying the clipboard with him. Isaac went over to the window to watch the man walk out across the motor pool, where a few dozen vehicles, ranging from large tractor-trailer rigs to buses to jeeps, were parked higgledy-piggledy on the tan dirt, in no discernible design. The sergeant’s implication of neat, orderly, bustling, highly organized activity orchestrated to a tight schedule was belied by the sloppiness visible everywhere and the inertia common to those few troops he could see.

Strangely, Isaac felt less sure of himself, less concealed and more in danger, now that he was alone. He seemed to need someone to pretend in front of before he could feel secure in his impersonation.

The sergeant was out of sight, somewhere in there among the trucks and buses. What if he’d seen through Isaac’s disguise? What if he’d already guessed that the documents were bogus, and even now he was on the phone somewhere out there, calling for a squad to come arrest the impostor?

Four men came into view from behind a building to the right, carrying rifles as though they were fishing poles after a long day without a nibble. Isaac stiffened, all the old fear coming back. Once again he was hidden in that shrubbery in the warm night behind his house, looking at all the lit windows and listening to the machine-gun fire within.

The four soldiers drifted laggardly by, not quite dragging their rifles in the dirt. The sergeant, moving with self-satisfied fussiness, reappeared among the motor-pool vehicles and came marching back to the office, where he said, “Well, I succeeded for you. It wasn’t easy.”

“I’ll have a truck soon?”

“Ten minutes, no more.” He returned his clipboard to its nail on the wall with a solid slap of self-satisfaction at a job well done. “It’s being gassed up now,” he said, “windshield cleaned, everything fine.”

“That’s good.” Isaac touched the other requisition on the sergeant’s desk. “Now, about this for Friday.”

“Twenty trucks.” The sergeant, very dubious, shook his head.

“Three days from now, plenty of warning,” Isaac pointed out, and they spent the next fifteen minutes haggling over that, the sergeant at last promising that he would do his best—he couldn’t answer, of course, for incompetent staff or careless previous drivers or the importunings of even more important individuals than the one whose signature was on this request—but at least he would do his best, and quite possibly, at noon on Friday, twenty trucks would be ready and forthcoming.

“It helps,” the sergeant explained, “that you won’t need drivers.”

A knock on the door was followed by the appearance of a grease-covered skinny man in uniform trousers and dirty undershirt, who said the truck was ready. “Exactly on time!” the sergeant exclaimed inaccurately. “Come along, Captain.”

The truck was just outside, a five-ton Leyland Terrier, several years old, with a black canvas cover on an aluminum frame over the bed. The engine was running; that is, it was loudly coughing and missing. “Not warmed up yet,” the sergeant said. Extending another clipboard and a ball-point pen, he said, “No dents or scratches. Sign here.”

Isaac wrote on the form under Comments: “Many general dents and scratches.” Then he signed, with something of a flourish, “Captain I. Gelaya.” Pleased that he’d signed the name without hesitation, relieved and happy that he was getting away with this so easily, he handed the clipboard back.

“Isaac!”

Responding automatically to his name, and also to the sound of a familiar voice, Isaac turned, and his heart leaped into his throat.

He was face-to-face with a man named Obed Naya, who was also in the uniform of an Army captain, but who wore his uniform legitimately. An old friend, Obed Naya, a onetime classmate at Makerere University. A man who’d had dinner at Isaac’s house, who had danced with Isaac’s wife. He had entered the Army after university, in the latter days of the Obote presidency, and he and Isaac had seen less and less of one another after Amin had taken over. He was now something in engineering for the Army, and he knew who Isaac really was, and Isaac no longer had any idea who Obed Naya might in the last few years have become.

Brazen it out. What would Frank do? “Obed,” Isaac said, forcing a broad smile onto his face, stepping forward with hand outstretched. “It’s been a long time.”

Delight was being replaced by confusion in Obed’s eyes as they shook hands. He blinked at Isaac’s face, then at his uniform, his captain’s bars. Utterly bewildered, he said, “I had no idea you, uhh…” And Isaac could see him beginning to remember the truth, what had really happened to his old friend Isaac Otera.

“They had me up north for a while,” Isaac said, babbling to keep Obed from speaking. He squeezed Obed’s hand hard, begging him to go along for the sake of their old friendship. “But now I’ve been transferred again. Amazing how things change, isn’t it?”

“Yes… yes.”

“Well, I mustn’t keep my General waiting. It’s been wonderful to see you again, Obed.” Isaac stopped and peered intently at Obed’s stunned face. “I mean that,” he said. “Wonderful to see you again, see that you’re healthy, you’re all right. We’ll have to get together soon.”

“Yes,” Obed said in a faraway voice.

Isaac felt his old friend’s eyes on him as he climbed up into the truck’s dirty cab and forced the floor shift into first gear. What was Obed thinking? What conclusions would he draw? Would he permit Isaac to get away, out of friendship or bewilderment, or would he suddenly raise the alarm? “This impostor—!” But he remained silent, beside the truck, his face a mask of shock.

The truck jolted forward. Isaac fed the gas slowly. He didn’t want the engine to stall; he didn’t want to seem to run away. In the rearview mirror on the truck door beside him, he could see Obed staring.

Up ahead, the Mercedes turned off the road at the spot where Lew had been captured by the men from the State Research Bureau. Isaac, following in the clumsy truck, looked in his mirror and saw only empty road behind him. He made the turn off the highway.

It was an hour since he’d driven away from Jinja Barracks, shaking at the wheel of the truck with pent-up fright and the nearness of his close call with Obed. Willing his hands to behave themselves on the steering wheel, he’d driven the truck through town and past the building holding the lawyer’s office. He’d leaned out the cab window on the way by, pretending to stare at something up ahead, so Frank could get a good look at him. Then he’d circled the block twice, and the second time Frank had pulled out in front in the Mercedes, leading the way east out of Jinja toward the Kenyan border.

And now, with no trouble at all, here they were on the old access road, overgrown with shrubbery, rutted and pitted underneath. Ahead, the Mercedes moved at barely five miles an hour, rocking and dipping on the uneven ground as though it were a small boat in a choppy sea. The truck followed in a more elephantine manner, its big tires crushing down the rocks and roots that made the Mercedes dance.

After a quarter of a mile, the Mercedes stopped and Isaac braked the truck behind it. Frank came back and said, up through Isaac’s open window, “No problems?”

“No problems. I ran into an old friend, but he didn’t give me away.”

Frank looked startled, but then he grinned. “Didn’t give you away, huh? Isaac, you’re wasted in an office; you were born for this life.”

“I’ll be glad, just the same, to be back in that office.”

“Sure you will. Park this thing off to the right here, out of the way. We’re far enough now; we can’t be seen from the highway, and we can’t be seen from the railroad.”

“Fine.”

Isaac put the truck where Frank had suggested, then joined him in the Mercedes. He got into the backseat where his chauffeur’s uniform awaited him, and changed clothing while Frank bumped and groaned them on down the road. When the Mercedes stopped, Isaac looked forward and saw the gleaming steel stripes just ahead.

“Come on,” Frank said. “Come look at our model railroad.”

They got out of the car and walked down to the railway line. Looking back up the hill at the Mercedes, parked incongruously in the middle of the semitropical forest, surrounded by trees and vines and brush, Isaac was confused for a second because the car didn’t look as out of place as it should; then he realized that luxury-car advertising for years has featured lavish color photos of gleaming expensive automobiles in the woods or on deserted beaches or perched on mountaintops. Now I know why they were there, Isaac thought. Their drivers were stealing coffee.

Frank said, “What are you grinning about?”

“A stray thought. Not important.”

“It’s somewhere down this way,” Frank said, and led the way along the rail line to the right.

Isaac couldn’t help looking back over his shoulder along the track from time to time, even though he knew no train would be coming. As part of his clerical role in this operation, he had learned the current status of Uganda Railways, and it was scanty indeed. There was no longer passenger service on the main line between Kampala and the eastern border with Kenya at Tororo. Generally speaking, two daily trains now passed this spot, one in each direction, both freights, both traveling at night to avoid the heat of the sun.

Frank stopped, in the middle of the tracks. Hands on hips, white shirt sweat-damp beneath his rib cage, he stood glaring this way and that, saying, “It’s around here someplace.”

“What is?”

Isaac slowly turned in a circle. Fore and aft, the rail line was flanked by near-jungle growth, hedges and shrubs and limber small trees crowding in on both sides, green walls ranging from eight to twelve feet in height. There was a special small mower locomotive made for this sort of climate, manufactured in Cleveland in the United States, with whirring cutter blades mounted on both sides; three or four times a year, that engine had to be run up and down the line to cut back the encroaching plant life. With the sudden new spurt of growth following the long rains, the mower engine would be due soon for another run.

“Hey!” Frank yelled, as though to somebody. “Goddammit, where are we?”

Nowhere, as Isaac could plainly see. Way to the east, the track curved gently out of sight around to the left, still enclosed by greenery except for the one break at the access road. The same was true to the west, except that the curve to the right was closer and there were no breaks for roads.

“Goddammit,” Frank said, “do we have to walk all the goddam way around the other way?”

“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Isaac said, and then he shrieked and jumped back, nearly tripping over the rail, as a huge section of greenery to his left all at once opened up!

“There you are,” Frank said.

“Wa—wa—wa—” Isaac stared at a tangled green mess of leaves and branches, eight feet square, that had simply separated itself from the real world and turned itself into a door, into something from a fairy tale.

From behind this now slightly ajar impossible door, a voice suddenly cried in Swahili, “It’s falling!”

“It’s falling?” In his bewilderment and panic, Isaac still remembered his duty as translator; Frank had no Swahili. “It’s falling,” Isaac told him in English.

“Shit!” Frank cried, and leaped forward, arms outstretched.

And it was falling. This segment of the green wall had now become a green wave, a tidal wave toppling slowly over onto them. “I can’t hold it!” cried the Swahili voice.

Frank had flung himself against the shrubs and saplings, was contesting his own weight against theirs. Isaac, reacting more slowly, now jumped to help him, at the same time crying out in Swahili, “We’re pushing!”

But it didn’t matter. The thing, whatever it was, leaned now off-balance, and the demands of gravity were inexorable. Slow, painfully slow, but nevertheless inevitable, the section of wall bore down on them. The voice from beyond it despairingly called out the name of a tribal snake god for the Lake Turkana region, and Frank and Isaac both collapsed backward onto the track, under a massive blanket of green.

Isaac, quite naturally, began to thrash about, but Frank yelled, “Don’t break it!” and Isaac stopped, baffled. Don’t break it?

The wall or wave or blanket or fantasy or whatever it was teetered now on the southern track of the rail line, leaving just enough leeway so that a man could crawl out from underneath, scratching his hands and making his chauffeur’s uniform filthy in the process. Clambering to his feet, hatless, covered with leaves and stones and dirt, Isaac found himself facing a barefoot man dressed in blue work pants, naked to the waist, who was grinning sheepishly and saying, “It takes more than one man to hold it.”

“What’s the son of a bitch say?”

Frank had crawled out from under the thing on the other side, looking just as messy as Isaac and twice as angry. Isaac translated what the man had said, and, “No shit,” Frank commented. “All right, just so it isn’t busted.”

Now Isaac looked down at the thing. On this side, there was a complicated trellislike arrangement of sticks and bamboo poles, lashed together, and with many tree branches and shrubs in turn lashed to the poles. The whole thing was two or three feet thick, and had to be very very heavy.

“We’d better get it back into place,” Frank said. “Tell him to call the others.”

“He says,” Isaac translated, “to call the others.”

“Very good.” Turning away, the man trotted off downhill.

And now for the first time Isaac looked through the magic doorway. A path as broad as a railway line extended away down the slope, and after a few yards there actually was a railway line on it, old and rusted. The old tracks ran directly downhill, becoming quickly obscured because of all the undergrowth choking them. Nearer, tree stumps and disturbed earth showed where the rail line had been cleared and the pathway to it created.

Isaac became aware of a sound that had been obscured when the wall was in place. It was the whine of a chain saw. Now, over it, came the sound of the blue-trousered man calling. The saw stopped; another voice answered. The voices rang clear and echoing in the upper branches of the trees, disturbing birds, which fluttered briefly, calling to one another, then settled back again.

“If he knew one man couldn’t do it,” Frank grumbled, “then why the fuck did one man try to do it?”

“Because you have such a loud intimidating voice,” Isaac told him.

Frank thought about that. Isaac could see him trying to remain stern and angry. “If I’m so fucking intimidating,” Frank said, “how come you talk to me like that?”

“Because I see through you,” Isaac said.

Up through the woods, along the rail line, the blue-trousered man returned with three other men, all dressed in a similar style, though two did wear frayed and torn shirts. The three newcomers were highly amused at the sight of their blind lying on the tracks, and they made several remarks at the blue-trousered man’s expense. He laughed along with the others, so it was all right.

The four men, with Frank and Isaac helping, lifted the blind and jockeyed it back into position, where it was wedged in so tightly by the branches on both sides that it didn’t even need to be tied in place.

All six men were now inside. Frank said, “Let’s see how they’re coming along,” and they all walked back down the hill, following the old rail line. They had to struggle through trees and thick undergrowth until they came to another cleared section, where the broad path began again. Once more, tree stumps and fresh shallow holes between the rails showed just how much plant growth had had to be removed. And looking down the line, Isaac could now see the engine shed and the spur track angling away to the right.

One of the men, who wore a pale-green dress shirt from which the sleeves had been raggedly cut off, gestured to the uncleared portion of track from which they’d just emerged and said to Isaac, “Tell him we’ll do that last.”

Isaac passed the message on. Nodding, Frank said, “Smart. Another layer of protection.” Isaac translated that, and the man in the green shirt smiled.

Walking on, they followed the spur down to the turntable. One of the potential problems, Isaac remembered, had been that the turntable was rusted into place at an unusable angle. But now it was aligned, fitting almost perfectly with the rails.

All four men wanted Isaac to explain to Frank just how difficult that job had been, how many tools they’d broken, how long it had taken. Isaac translated about half of it, and in the translation back, he made Frank’s casual acceptance of their work sound much more enthusiastic than it was.

They had done a lot in five days, beginning in rain but latterly in drying sun. Beyond the turntable, the old bumper had been removed and was lying unceremoniously in the shrubbery to one side of the track. The track itself had been extended with rails from beside the engine shed. Lacking ties or sleepers, they had half buried thick logs at intervals from the end of the original track to the gorge and then attached the rail plates and rails to those. It was a makeshift, tottery affair and couldn’t last long, but it only needed to last one day.

What the men were working on now was the path from the engine shed out to the access road, creating a surface that would permit trucks to pass. Trees and undergrowth were being cut away and the resulting logs and branches used to fill in the ruts and gullies that crossed the route. Less than a quarter of the distance had been covered, but they could already see that it would work.

“Okay,” Frank said, stamping up and down the completed portion. “This fucker’s gonna do the job.” Then he grinned at Isaac and said, “This was Ellen’s idea, remember?”

“Of course—”

“Let’s—” Frank stood looking around, hands on hips in his usual expression of impatience.

“What is it?”

“A plank, board—something.” Frank held his hands about a yard apart.

Isaac translated the request, and one of the workmen immediately laughed, nodded, and trotted away to the engine shed, to return a minute later with an old one-by-six, originally part of a window frame, both ends rotted away by dampness. “Perfect,” Frank said, and pulled out his boot knife.

They all stood around watching as he laid the board on the ground, knelt over it, and carved the thick letters into the time-grayed wood, revealing slightly darker wood underneath. When it was finished, the board said: ELLEN’S ROAD. “There,” Frank said.

Isaac, during the carving, had explained to the workmen that Ellen, Mr. Balim’s white woman pilot, was the one who had thought up this road. They had all seen the woman around Balim’s office, had thought of her as eminently fuckable, and were well pleased to have the road named after her. (Although in its earliest days Swahili had developed a written language and literature using Arabic orthography, that false start had been swept away and replaced by the European alphabet when the Portuguese overran the Arab merchant towns along the Indian Ocean early in the sixteenth century. Today the literate speaker of Swahili uses the same alphabet as the literate speaker of English; “road” in Swahili is njia, but “Ellen” is Ellen.)

After much discussion about the perfect location for the sign, a roadside tree near the engine shed was chosen, one of the workmen shinnied up, and the board was nailed into place. As the nailer slid back down, the others raised a cheer, which rang through the woods.

Well, well, Isaac thought, the world of the active man can be rather fun.

But now they got back to business. “Three days,” Frank told the workmen, through Isaac, and they all grinned and nodded and said there would be no problem. “Okay,” Frank said. “We’ll go out this way. I don’t wanna mess with that blind again.”

The last several uncleared yards of Ellen’s Road were rough going, particularly since Isaac was wearing ordinary shoes, as would befit the chauffeur of a Mercedes.

At the access road, Frank stopped and looked downhill. “Twenty miles to the lake,” he said. “Easy as falling off a house.”

Behind them, the chain-saw buzz started up once more. That nasal noise somehow only re-emphasized the quiet and the peacefulness of this forest, the tall graceful yellow-barked thorn trees, smaller trees of a dozen kinds, several varieties of purple acanthus, hibiscus in many colors, ground orchids, and here and there the creeper vine called setyot, which flowers only once in every seven or eight years; there are tribes who wait for its flowering before initiating their youngsters into manhood. Songbirds moved through the higher branches, keeping their distance from the chain saw and the movements of men.

“It’s beautiful here,” Isaac said, gazing around, watching a robin-chat—a small bird with yellow face and breast, gray wings, snowy white head—soar from branch to branch, pausing at each to announce one or another of its many brief songs. “Beautiful, peaceful.” Sadly, nostalgically, thinking of Obed Naya, he said, “What a wonderful country this could be.”

“Nice place for a battle, though,” Frank said critically, studying the forest around them. “Particularly if you were attacking from uphill. Well, come on, let’s get you back to that office you like so much.”

32

Late Tuesday afternoon, and Sir Denis was exhausted. He could hardly keep his eyes open, and the softness of the Daimler’s upholstery, the smoothness of the drive, the calm skill of the chauffeur up front beyond the glass partition; all struggled passively against his desire to stay awake. “My Lord, but I’ll be glad when this is over,” he said.

Beside him, a fur wrap over his useless legs, Emil Grossbarger snorted, saying, “Also I. Ziss Amin is not a businessman.”

“I don’t know why he insisted I be there when the coffee is shipped. As though I were some sort of dispatcher. But he made it a condition of the sale. Yet another condition of the sale.” Sir Denis yawned. “The last, I hope. Excuse me.”

“After ziss, you can go home to São Paulo, you can rest.”

“I’m not as young as I used to be.”

There was a little silence in the car while they both pondered that statement; neither of them was as young as anybody used to be. Outside, the modern glass-and-concrete banking towers of Zurich went by, pink with embarrassment in a mountain sunset. A Volvo with red United Nations license plates rode for a while ahead of them before turning off toward the lake. How odd it was that so many offices of the United Nations were here, in Switzerland, a country that didn’t even belong to the UN. Perhaps, Sir Denis thought, the rest of the world is trying to learn the secret that’s kept the Swiss out of every war fought since 1521.

“I had you removed, vunce, from ze Uganda transaction.”

This was the first either of them had mentioned that. On Sir Denis’s arrival this morning from London, to meet with Grossbarger for the first time since his removal and reinstatement, he had wondered how the man would act toward him, and how he himself would behave in return. And the answer had been, they would both ignore the incident.

They had had a good lunch in Grossbarger’s private dining room, in his apartment atop the tower containing his offices, during which no word of hostility or explanation was either requested or offered. Much of the conversation, in fact, had been about the wild mountain scenery, dark green below and gray-white-black above, forming the unexpected cyclorama background to this hard, modern, commercial city. “Ze mountains mock our little buildings,” Grossbarger had said, smiling conspiratorially at them out his forty-seventh-floor window.

But now, at almost the last minute, as Grossbarger accompanied Sir Denis to the airport, the subject was all at once brought up. “I had you removed, vunce, from ze Uganda transaction.”

“I know that,” Sir Denis said, treading carefully. No inflection in his voice, he said, “I’ve wondered why you did it.”

“You must know,” Grossbarger answered, “zat not all ze coffee sold in ze vorld is of an unquestionable pedigree.”

“Smuggling, you mean. The ICB does what it can.”

“Vich is nossing,” Grossbarger said, patting his fur lap rug in evident satisfaction. “Vat can your Coffee Board do ven legitimate roasters collude in ziss smuggling?”

Roasters was the coffee industry term for the companies that bought the coffee from the growers, prepared it, and packaged it for retail sale. “We know the problem,” Sir Denis said, “but a roaster has no obligation—moral or legal—to question the bona fides of every shipment of coffee he buys.”

“Of course not! And in any event, legitimate growers also collude, helping to bring smuggled coffee back into legitimate channels. Even governments, my friend, have been known to turn a blind eye and a ready palm ven ziss smuggling goes on.”

“Are you suggesting the coffee Uganda is selling the Brazilians is smuggled from somewhere else?”

“Oh, no, no!” Grossbarger’s mobile mouth expressed eleven kinds of amusement. “Uganda does not smuggle coffee in. Uganda smuggles coffee out. Particularly very recently as ze social structure zere breaks down. Do you know ze nation called Malavi?”

“Malawi? Yes, of course, in Africa.”

“East of Zambia, souse of Tanganyika.”

“Tanzania,” Sir Denis corrected.

Smiling slyly, Grossbarger said, “Nostalgia. In any event, Malavi is really outside ze African coffee-growing belt, alzough it has in recent years exported some small amount. But zis year! My friend, zis year Malavi is a major coffee producer!”

In principle, Sir Denis disapproved of such occurrences in the world of coffee, no matter how common they were or how they were winked at by all concerned. But Grossbarger’s delight was so infectious that he couldn’t keep from returning the smile, saying, “How fortunate for Malawi’s growers.”

“Growers zey are, perhaps. Harvesters zey are, certainly. You know, my friend, ve Sviss”—that said without the faintest hint of irony or discomfort—“have known for centuries ze value of having a lake as a border viss anozzer country. So hard to patrol a lake, you know. And it iss almost as zough ze colonial powers vere consciously turning ze continent of Africa into a gigantic board game called ‘Smuggling’ ven zey laid out ze national boundaries. Lake Victoria borders sree nations, Lake Nyasa sree, Lake Tanganyika—Is ze lake still called Tanganyika?”

Acknowledging the teasing with a head bob and a grin, Sir Denis said, “Yes, it is. Your former German colony is still referred to in the name of the lake.”

“Good. Lake Tanganyika borders four countries! How can zere be legitimate business at all?”

“I sometimes wonder,” Sir Denis said. “But I don’t understand the connection with, um—”

“Viss my kindness toward you?” Looking pleased with himself, ruffing up the fur throw, he said, “Oh, yes, kindness, I am not being ironic. You see, my friend, I vas given information zat somesing vould happen to zat coffee shipment.”

“You mean theft?”

“Eggzactly. Seft und smuggling go togezzer. Just ze ozzer day I vas reading in ze paper, a truckload of coffee vas hijacked in Nairobi by two men viss guns. Eighty-five sousand English pounds’ vorth of coffee in vun truck. Vell vorth ze attention of any gunman.”

“What is supposed to happen to the Ugandan shipment?”

“I don’t know.” Grossbarger shrugged, looking away now at tiny patches of farmland, neatly planted, small and artificial-seeming against the backdrop of the mountains. The airport wasn’t far. “Perhaps nossing,” Grossbarger said. “But to be honest, Denis, if somesing does happen, I vished you not to be harmed.”

“Harmed?”

“Oh, yes, I am serious. Zese people, you know, zey are not chentlemen like you and me. Und in ziss case, zeir opponent, ziss Idi Amin, he is also not a chentleman. I felt zere vas danger to anyone involved.”

“Emil,” Sir Denis said, earnestly and awkwardly, “I am touched, and I thank you. But I could wish you’d spoken to me directly, to learn if I wanted such protection.”

“You vould say no! In your position, I vould say no! So I tried surreptitiously to have you removed from ze scene of danger, und I failed. Und so now I tell you ze truth, so you may defend yourself. Somesing may happen to zat shipment. Keep out of ze vay, if it does.”

Smiling, Sir Denis said, “I don’t fancy arguing with gunmen.”

“Good. Anozzer sing. Ze vorst sing you could do vould be speak to ze Ugandan officials. Ve have no proof; ve have no facts; ve have no suspects. But if somesing does happen, und you have varned zem in zis vague vay, zey will detain you for questioning for ze rest of your life.”

“Yes, I see that.” Sir Denis rubbed a hand over his face. “And I thought my only problem was exhaustion.”

The Daimler was turning in at the airport entrance. “Keep vell, my friend,” Grossbarger said.

The stewardess woke him in Rome, where he must change planes.

The stewardess woke him in Tripoli, where he must change planes.

The pilot woke him at Entebbe. “We’re here, sir.”

Here? Sir Denis opened stinging eyes and looked at morning, somewhere on the planet. “Wum—” his mouth tasted terrible, full of woolly caterpillars. “Where?” he asked.

The pilot, a young Libyan Muslim, easygoing and self-confident with his modern skills, had seen these overly tired businessmen before, pushing themselves till they dropped. “Entebbe, sir,” he said. “Wednesday morning, May twenty-fifth, nineteen seventy-seven. End of the line.”

“End of the line,” Sir Denis said, moving his stiff, cramped body. I am sixty-one years of age. “Yes, thank you.”

33

Lew stared at her. “You’re doing what?”

“I’m leaving,” Ellen said. “I’ve got a job.”

“A job?” They were seated at right angles at the kitchen table, in front of breakfasts of coffee, melon slices, and thick pieces of toast. Warm sunlight angled in through the open windows, gleaming on the surfaces they had together cleaned and polished, shimmering on the curtains Ellen had hung, highlighting the white-painted shelves Lew had put up. He frowned down at the food on his plate. “You’ve got a job. Balim,” he said as though accusing her of disloyalty to the firm.

“He knows about it.” She seemed awfully goddam calm, but on the other hand, this wasn’t a surprise to her. “He’s getting a new pilot.”

“A new—” There were so many spiky points on this ball she’d thrown him that he didn’t know which one to grab for first. “What kind of job? Where are you going?”

“Back to the States.”

The States. Was there a glimmer of understandable sense in that? Almost hopefully, because then at least he’d have some idea what was going on, he said, “Are you homesick? Is that it?”

But she laughed, as though relieved at the opportunity to break the tension—break her tension, not his—and said, “No, Lew, I’ve never been homesick in my life. I’m an Army brat, remember? I wouldn’t know where home is.”

“Then—Then, what?” The name Amarda trembled on his tongue, but it was just possible that Amarda was not the problem, and it would be stupid to open up that subject if he didn’t have to. “Ellen, what is it?”

“You and me,” she said. “Lew, do you remember who you were before you knew me?”

“Who I was? What do you mean?”

“You got along in life. You had friends, you had lovers, different people important to you at different times.”

“Oh, now, wait a minute.”

But she was inexorable. “Then we met,” she said, “and we got to be very important to each other for a long while.”

“We still are.”

He tried to take her hand, but she moved it away. “No, we aren’t. It used to be—Well, you went to Alaska to be with me. I came here to be with you. Now I’m going to the States. Will you come with me?”

“Come with—? How can I? The job—the coffee job—it’s just about to happen!”

“Lew,” she said, “the worst thing in the world is to try to hang on after something is over.”

He was finally getting used to this. He sat back in the chair, pushing his plate away, and looked at her. “For you it’s over, is that it?”

“For you, too,” she told him. “You just haven’t thought about it yet. Would you like to drive me to the airport?”

A new astonishment. “When?”

“I should leave in about fifteen minutes. I’m already half packed.”

He could feel the bitter twist in his lips when he smiled. “No long good-byes, huh?”

“That’s right. If you don’t want to drive me, that’s okay, I understand. I’ll call Bathar.”

“Young Mr. Balim? I’ll drive you.”

“Thanks, Lew.”

He watched her get to her feet, a beautiful woman, in some weird way at the center of his life. “If everything’s so goddam over,” he said, “how come I’m still jealous of that twerp Bathar?”

“Habit,” she said, smiling. She started away, to finish packing or whatever, then paused to say, “I told you where I’m going. If we were still now what we once were, I wouldn’t want to go, and you wouldn’t want to stay here without me.”

“Not that way, Ellen,” he told her. “I went to Alaska with you because I wanted to be with you, not because you were challenging me to prove myself. What you’re doing now is something else; heads you win, tails I lose.”

“Nobody wins, Lew,” she said.

By the time they reached the airport he was more or less acclimated to the idea. He would still much prefer her to stay—he had no thought, for instance, of haring off after Amarda again now that the coast was clear—but if it wasn’t right for Ellen, then he knew there was no way he could keep her. It was hard, but he knew he shouldn’t even make the attempt. The day of the caged bird is over.

Still, it was tough to have this new weight on his chest, and even tougher that the only person he could go to for comfort and solace was the cause of it. And would no longer be available. He couldn’t argue her out of her decision—at some level that he wasn’t yet ready to deal with, he even thought she might be right—but he couldn’t be as casual as she was, either. (He knew her calm was possible because she was the one making the move, and because she’d already had a while to get used to the idea.) Still, an emotional scene could only spoil their memories of one another; she wanted to go out on an easy level, and he could give her at least that much. What was roiling inside could stay there.

They’d been almost completely silent on the drive out to the airport, absorbed in their separate thoughts, Lew working his way through this new idea of what life was now going to be like, but as they walked from the car to the terminal it occurred to him to wonder about the details of her transition. “What plane are you taking? What’s the route?”

“They’re sending a charter for me from Entebbe.”

“Entebbe!”

“Yes, I’ve got a one-shot job with an American carrier called Coast Global. A little cargo ferrying to Djibouti, and then I go back to the States with the plane and look for another job after that.”

Lew had seen the truth right away. “Jesus, Ellen,” he said, “when do you do this little cargo ferrying?”

“Friday.”

“Hah!”

She stopped and stared at him, and he could see she was just about to get angry. They’d been doing very nicely, dealing with the emotional quagmire of their breaking up, and here Lew was suddenly filled with mysterious laughter, bubbling over with chipper secrets.

He explained: “It’s our coffee, honey!”

Then she got it. “For God’s sake! It has to be.”

“So we’re still in the coffee business together,” he said grinning, taking her arm, walking her into the terminal. “In fact, here’s something to think about.”

“What?”

“If the coffee actually shows up where you are, you’ll know old Lew isn’t doing too good.”

It was the same plane and pilot that had brought him back from Uganda in April. Uganda Skytours. The plane looked the same, but the middle-aged American pilot—owner, with his wife, of Uganda Skytours—looked just a little seedier, a little more desperate.

Nevertheless, Lew was glad to see him. They shook hands, and Lew said, “Ellen, this is Mike. He brought me back, remember?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And now he’s taking you away.”

She shook the pilot’s hand, saying, “How are you?”

“Can’t complain,” he said, which was patently untrue.

“Mike’ll take good care of you.” Lew was feeling extremely awkward, unable to work out how to say goodbye.

“Be ready when you are,” the pilot said, and tactfully walked back over to his plane.

“Have a good flight,” Lew said.

“Have a good robbery.”

So he took her in his arms and kissed her, and she felt just as good as ever. And she responded just as well. “Jesus,” he whispered into her hair, “can’t we—”

Her body went rigid, pulling away from him. “Don’t.”

He released her, but he had become filled now with this urge to make things become somehow different. “Listen,” he said, and in desperation he finally did bring out the dread name: “Amarda—”

“No,” Ellen said, and touched his lips with her fingertip to make him stop. “I knew about that,” she said, “and that was part of it, but it wasn’t really the main thing.”

“What was?”

She paused, as though she hadn’t really thought about it before, and with some suggestion of surprise in her voice, she said, “You know, I think it was the rain.”

There was no answer to that; he knew all at once exactly what she meant. But even though it was a perfect exit line—and they both knew that, too—he had one more thing to say. He took her arm and they walked toward the plane, and he said, “Listen, don’t get married or anything.”

“I wasn’t planning to, but why?”

“I’m likely to show up in your life again someday.”

She smiled, apparently pleased at the idea. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” she said.