Kahawa

34

The train was made up at Tororo, on the Kenya-Uganda border, on Wednesday morning. It consisted of thirty-three enclosed freight cars with a combined carrying capacity of over nine hundred tons. (Coffee this month was selling on the commodity markets for seven thousand dollars U.S. a ton; when full, the train would carry six million dollars’ worth of coffee.)

At the head of the train was a steam locomotive of the 29 Class, originally put in service in January of 1953. On the black metal side of its tender still showed the white letters EAR, for East African Railways. On its round front face, beneath its headlight, was a brass plate with the number 2934, and on both sides of the cab, under the windows, were brass plates bearing the name Arusha. All 29 Class locomotives were named for East African tribes.

In the four years since Idi Amin had broken up East African Railways, there had been virtually no replacement of Uganda’s rolling stock. (By contrast, Kenya had in this time almost completed its transition from steam locomotives to diesel.) Uganda’s locomotives were old and tired; the freight cars were rusted and worn, many of them with broken boards and loose trucks and wheels with flat spots that needed regrinding. Maintenance was at emergency level only, new parts were hard to come by, and there was generally a disinterest in keeping the line at full efficiency. The present management, placed there by the present government, treated the railway as a found object, to be used for as long as it lasted and eventually to be thrown away and forgotten.

Two little Class 13 shunting engines plied back and forth through the yard, finding the most serviceable of the remaining cars and lining them up on one track, where the yardmen hooked up the couplers and the hydraulic hoses for the brakes. (The electrical systems had broken down in so many of the cars that it wasn’t worthwhile even to attach those cables.) On the side of each chosen car a yardman scrawled with white chalk KAHAWA—coffee in large scraggly letters.

Finally the coal-burning locomotive, the Arusha, was backed into place at the head of the line of cars, and the last couplers and hoses were attached. The engineer and fireman took their positions in the locomotive cab, and just before noon the engineer pressed down the long lever and the Arusha moved slowly forward, the complicated network of bars that connected the big wheels lifting and falling, the shiny-rimmed wheels turning almost delicately along the track. (Far above, the Uganda Skytours plane flew over, its nasal roar buried in the chuff-chuff of the straining Arusha.)

A series of crashing jolts ran back through the thirty-three empty cars, as the couplers down the line lost their slack and one after the other the cars reluctantly but obediently joined the march. As the yardmen walked away, thinking about their lunches, the coffee train moved slowly out of the yard and onto the main line.

Gathering speed, black smoke and white steam angling back against the blue sky, Arusha and her children ran north toward Mbale, twenty-five miles away. From there, she would angle on a great curve northwestward through the waist of the country, traveling from the Kenyan border on the east up through Soroti and Lira and Gulu and then curving around southwestward to Pakwach on the Zaire border in the west, where the Victoria Nile from Lake Victoria meets with the Albert Nile from what used to be Lake Albert but is now Lake Mobutu Sese Seko. (There was also now a Lake Idi Amin, farther south toward the Tanzanian border region of West Lake, whence the forces would eventually come to overthrow Amin.)

The distance to be covered by the train was just over three hundred miles. The rail line itself continued on from Pakwach, turning northward again and running a further fifty miles up to Arua, from where Idi Amin had originally come. But there was little coffee up that way, closer to the Sahel, that sub-Saharan area of dryness and frequent drought, where the desert is on the move southward.

The train being empty and the land for the most part relatively flat, they made very good time when in motion, running at sixty miles an hour through the lush Ugandan landscape, the empty cars rattling and chattering along the way. But from Mbale on, they had to make frequent stops, dropping off cars at every freight station they came to. By Friday, on their return, these cars would be full to capacity with sacks of coffee.

Wednesday night they lay over in Gulu, two thirds of the way to Pakwach. In the morning they would finish the western journey, and tomorrow afternoon they would start the return.

35

The night Patricia confessed she was a spy was also the night Sir Denis proposed marriage. The proposal came first, with them together in his bed at the Nile Mansions Hotel, and her immediate thought was: How they’ll laugh when they listen to the tape! “Don’t, my dear!” she said, trying to cover his mouth with her hand, but the damage was done. The words were on the tape, forever.

Also the words before that. She didn’t need to give him the doped wine anymore; he was willing, and more than willing, to tell her whatever she asked. Was it because he was naive, or because he understood she was spying on him and he was willing to pay this price to keep her? She knew he was in love with her, and for the first time in her life a man’s love had made her feel guilt.

When they were apart, it was easy to be dismissive and scornful about his love, to disbelieve in it and remain unaffected. After all, he was thirty years older than she, he was white, he was an English aristocrat. His “love” for her could be nothing but lust, mixed with that famous English craving for degradation.

But when they were together, she knew the love was real. She had another human being’s life and happiness in her hands, and she didn’t want them. She wanted power, but not this way. She wanted control, but not if it was only to destroy.

Patricia was also an aristocrat, though she would never tell that to Sir Denis, fearing he would fail to understand and would be condescending to her. For what did the English understand of royal lines outside Europe; except, perhaps, for India? But Uganda too had noble families, a history of kings and courts.

In the old days, the largest and most powerful tribe in the area now Uganda was the Baganda, which controlled the land on the north side of the lake. The Baganda lived in cities, wore fine clothing, had established a sophisticated legal system, possessed excellent houses rather than the mud huts of the tribes down in the Rift Valley. The king of the Baganda was called the Kabaka; it was Kabaka Mutesa II who, in accepting the gift of a rifle from the English explorer Speke, sent a page from his court outside with it to shoot a bystander to see how well the weapon worked. And it was from the line of Mutesa II that Patricia Kamin was collaterally descended.

When the British took over Uganda, it was the Baganda tribe from the southern half of the country who provided the civil servants, later the university professors, the doctors and lawyers, and the local political power. And when eventually the British departed, leaving the Nubians from northern Uganda in control of the Army, it was to a very great extent the Baganda who controlled the government. The later accession of Idi Amin was originally seen by many Ugandans approvingly as the revolt of the poorer-educated northern underclass against the oppressive aristocracy of the southern Baganda.

Patricia’s father had been a literature professor at Makerere University—English literature, naturally, not African. She had grown up in an atmosphere of combined luxury and tension. She was among the select few on the inside, while the unshod many were always visible wherever one turned. Some people were struck to pity by this circumstance; some became embarrassed and fled to London or Paris or New York. Patricia became hardened.

She had spent three years in London finishing her education, but the clammy climate and the color of her skin kept her from settling there. At home she was the right color, but more than that, at home she was an aristocrat, and everybody knew it.

Independence had made it more difficult to be ostentatiously an aristocrat. Whatever might be said against the colonizers—and a lot could be said against them—they had more or less effectively kept the lid on tribal conflicts and bloodlusts during the three generations of colonial rule. The removal of that overseeing power had quickly shown that three generations weren’t enough; the old hatreds, the old feuds, were as alive and virulent as ever.

Patricia’s father had died, of natural causes, and quite coolly she had looked for another protector, finding him in an Army colonel, a Langi named Walter Unbule. He had looked up to her as the blue-blood she was, and throughout the Obote years his own star had seemed to be in the ascendant. But then Amin came in, and Colonel Unbule had been among those massacred at Jinja Barracks in 1971.

Seeing very early that the rules had changed, and that the new rules would be much tougher than the old, Patricia had gone directly into Amin’s camp for her next protector, finding him in the State Research Bureau, another colonel, this one a Lugbara (Amin’s mother’s tribe) named Musa Embur. He was married, which made it better; a man is always more solicitous of his mistress. Once or twice he had offered to marry her as well—multiple marriage was legal and common in Uganda, and at the moment Amin himself had four wives—but Patricia preferred the freedom of action implicit in her present situation. And besides, Embur had introduced her to Amin.

Amin frightened her, and excited her. Without his power he would have been nothing but a clumsy bear, not even amusing, but the natural way he wielded his power—as though of course he would be powerful, answerable to no one but himself—gave him a fascination to which very few women were immune.

For the past two years Patricia had been a spy for Amin, mostly responding to rumors that this or that individual high in government was disloyal, was possibly even thinking of a coup. Amin told her whom to go after, and what he wanted to learn. She had exposed some plotters and had proved some others blameless (a few times too late to make any difference to the suspect), but until Sir Denis Lambsmith she had never grown to care for any of the men she came in contact with.

What was she to do? It was only as a spy that she would be allowed to continue her relationship with this man, but she no longer wanted to play that part with him. And what secrets did he know, in any event? He was an honest businessman, nothing more. Even when it seemed there might be something, there was not.

Tonight, for instance, before the proposal of marriage, he had told her that Emil Grossbarger believed the coffee shipment was in danger of hijack. But had he any proof, any names, any hints, the slightest suggestion of what the plot might be or who was Grossbarger’s informant? Nothing. Sir Denis knew nothing, and it was cruel to play him this way, and she’d already known she wanted to stop even before he’d said that dreadful thing about marriage. “Don’t, my dear!” she said, in panic, thrusting her hand against his mouth.

He misunderstood, of course. “It’s the age difference, you mean. Patricia, my darling, if I—”

“No no no, please,” she said, terrified he would make even more of a fool of himself for the microphones.” Come along,” she told him, climbing out of the bed, pulling him by his long white arm. “Come on, now, we’ll take a shower, we’ll talk later.”

“A shower? At a moment like—”

“Please.”

Responding at last to the urgency in her face and voice, he permitted himself to be dragged from the bed and herded into the bathroom, where she turned on full-blast both the hot and cold faucets in the shower, then turned, smiling, to say, “Now we can talk. The microphones can’t hear us.”

“Oh, my Lord,” he said, blushing like a boy, his face and neck suffusing, becoming thoroughly red. “I completely forgot about those blasted things. Chase warned me, of course. My, we have given them an earful, haven’t we?”

“On purpose,” she said.

He leaned closer, apparently believing he hadn’t heard. “What was that?”

“It was my job to get you to talk,” she said, looking him directly in the eye. Her own eyes felt skinned; they burned with every tear she’d left unshed her whole life long.

He studied her as though he were no more than a kindly counselor, to whom she had brought a small but nagging problem. “So you are a—It sounds ridiculous to say it, the word itself is ridiculous.”

“I am a spy.” She pronounced the word carefully and distinctly, to rob it of ridiculousness.

“I’d wondered, of course,” he told her, sadly shaking his head. “I will admit it crossed my mind. But to spy on me?”

“I did. I was ordered to.” She held tight to his forearms. “I gave you drugs to make you talk. I have been performing for the microphones.”

“Hardly that,” he said, smiling wanly at her. “I can see where I must appear a doddering old fool, but—”

“No!”

“—but I can’t believe it has been entirely performance. Were it, you wouldn’t tell me now.”

“Of course not.”

“I haven’t known many secrets, have I?”

She managed to return his smile, saying, “Absolutely none. Has there ever lived such an innocent?”

“Keep me innocent, Patricia. Marry me.”

“Please—”

“Stay with me for whatever years I have left. Live with me where you will. São Paulo, London, somewhere else. Wherever you prefer. But not in this country.”

“Not in Africa!” she said, startled by her own vehemence.

“I agree.”

“But we can’t; this is just fantasy. You and I—”

“The age?”

“And the race.”

“Nonsense,” he said, dismissing that. “Day after tomorrow, this annoying transaction will be at last completed. I shall leave Uganda, and you shall come with me.”

“We can’t just—”

“Hush,” he said, and hushed her by kissing her. “Shall I let you go, now I’ve found you? Let us have that shower while there’s still hot water left, and go to sleep, and dream whatever we dream, and talk again tomorrow.”

“All right,” she said, too drained to go on arguing.

“Somewhere without microphones,” he said. “If there is such a place in Kampala.”

36

Wednesday night, Lew couldn’t stand the silent house, so he went for a drive westward along the gulf shore, not realizing until he was passing the place that he had repeated his route that time with Amarda. The memory of her, slippery and agile in the humid car, with the steam on the windows and the rain chuckling on the roof, came back to him alone in this other car now in the night like a physical presence, angering him and making him feel stupid. What Ellen had said about the rain was true—the rain and the long wait when nothing really was happening—but without Amarda they would have survived. Even to remember Amarda now, much less to remember her erotically, showed how little he could trust himself. “I am a fool,” he muttered, glowering out the windshield, “and I do have to go on living with me.”

The African roads at night were populated, people strolling along singly or in groups, walking at the edge of the road itself because the verge was too uneven or too overgrown. They walked in darkness, lit only by stars, and suddenly appeared like apparitions in his headlights. He had to keep steering around them. None hitchhiked or even acknowledged his presence, except that if they were walking toward him they lowered their eyes against his lights. Mostly they were raggedly dressed and walked slowly, ambling along as though to no particular destination. Their society is so mysterious to me, Lew thought, that I don’t even know why they go for walks at night.

Not wanting to return past the Amarda spot, he continued on until he found a rutted stony dirt road leading away to the right. This too was dotted with strollers, and eventually it led back to the main road, the B1, which in turn brought him to Kisumu and home, where he found Frank and Young Mr. Balim getting drunk in his kitchen. “We brought you beer,” Young Mr. Balim said, smiling like a used-car salesman.

“And drank it,” Frank said. “We figured you needed to get cheered up.”

“But you weren’t here,” Young Mr. Balim said. “So we started without you.”

“I’ll catch up,” Lew promised, understanding at once that this was exactly what he needed.

There was lots more beer in the refrigerator. It was already well after midnight, but for the next three hours they drank together in the kitchen, telling one another stories, many of them about women. (Ellen wasn’t mentioned; Lew didn’t feel like talking about her, and the others respected his silence.)

Young Mr. Balim described the tragedy of his life. “Women love me,” he explained. Like his father, he had the ability to smile in various sad and unhappy ways. “They find me irresistible,” he said, and sighed.

“That must be tough,” Frank said, looking surly.

“Yes, it is,” agreed Young Mr. Balim. “For what they love is my exoticism. Not eroticism, exoticism. To most women—except to Indian women, of course; I’ll have nothing to do with them—I am something different, an exotic specimen. They must have me. They want to know what I’m like.”

“How come Indian women?” Lew asked. I am not thinking of Amarda, he told himself. “How come you got nothing to do with them?”

“First I tell you about these other women.”

“The ones who love you,” Frank said, looking increasingly surly. “All these cunts finding you irresistible.”

“Those precisely. ‘What is this Bathar Balim really like?’ they ask themselves. ‘He is very pretty,’ they say.”

“Mp,” said Frank, and took a long swig of beer.

“So they pursue me,” Young Mr. Balim said. “And how can I refuse them?”

“Get to the point,” Lew said, because he wanted to go back to the question of what was wrong with Indian women.

“Well, they seduce me, don’t they?” Young Mr. Balim asked, but went on without waiting for an answer. “And they find I am merely a man, don’t they? Not exotic at all. Erotic, certainly, but not mysterious, not dashing, not romantic. Not a hero. I cannot help but disappoint them. And so they reject me for being ordinary after all.” He sighed, and smiled in utter dejection and drank beer.

“You ain’t ordinary,” Frank told him. Lew could tell that Frank was thinking about getting into a bad mood. “You’re a prince.”

“No fights in my kitchen,” Lew said.

Frank gave him an indignant glare. “Who’s fighting? I just said he was a goddam prince; am I right, Bathar?”

“We are all friends,” Young Mr. Balim said. He blinked a lot, as though trying to get himself under control.

Lew said, “Tell me about these Indian women.”

“What about them?”

“You said you wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”

“Oh, that’s right. Absolutely.” Nodding in agreement with himself, gazing at his brown glass beer bottle, Young Mr. Balim fell silent.

Amazed at his own patience, Lew said, “How come?” And then, because he feared a certain discontinuity in Young Mr. Balim’s thought processes, he laid the whole question out again. “How come you won’t have anything to do with Indian women?”

“Oh,” he answered scornfully, “it’s because with them it’s nothing but fuck-fuck-fuck.”

Frank, who had been nodding, sat up straight. “What’s that?”

“Yes, that’s all they care about,” Young Mr. Balim said, dismissing all Indian women with a disdainful shrug. “Just fuck-fuck-fuck and that’s all.”

“Bathar, pal,” Frank said, “I don’t get your objection.”

“Well, what are we to them? Nothing, just a penis.”

“A what?”

“Cock,” Lew translated for Frank.

“They don’t care about men at all,” Young Mr. Balim explained, becoming more earnest, more doleful, less cynical, as he warmed to his subject. “It’s a society of women, is all, with men on the outside looking in.”

Frank glowered, apparently dubious. “You mean they’re dykes?”

“No, no. It’s all fuck-fuck-fuck with men, but the rest of their lives is women. In India it’s the same, and here, and everywhere you find our Indian culture. The young man marries, he brings his young wife home; right away the important relationship is between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. They talk together; they live together; they have secrets together; they are the true loving pair. And then the young wife sees her husband, and she says, ‘Oh, yes, fuck-fuck-fuck, make babies, now go away,’ and she wipes herself off and goes back to the mother-in-law and they talk secrets together and giggle behind their hands.” He drank beer, and became so extremely sad that the smile was hardly visible at all. “It is terrible to see your culture from the outside,” he said. “Very disheartening.”

It seemed to Lew that Young Mr. Balim’s complaint was somehow an inversion of the social structure American women recently had been criticizing, with the sexes reversed, but the idea was too tenuous for him to try to put it into words. Besides, he was more interested in trying to make Young Mr. Balim’s opinions about Indian women cast some light on his own relationship with Amarda. (He’d forgotten he wasn’t thinking about her.) The fuck-fuck-fuck part was all right, but what about the rest of it? Did it alter his view of what had been going on in that small hot stuffy room in her house the last time he’d seen her? Amarda and her grandmother; he tried to visualize those two giggling together behind their hands, talking sexual secrets about men. Strangely enough, it was easier to see the grandmother that way, and what did that mean?

Soon Frank fell asleep, his head bouncing on the table. “I gotta go to bed,” Lew announced, struggling to his feet, agitating the table so half the empties fell over and Frank snorted and opened one red eye.

“I shall take Frank home,” Young Mr. Balim said. He seemed as neat as ever, but a bit less ironic and more human. Drink apparently was good for him.

“Do what you want,” Lew suggested. “I’m going to sleep. I got a war to go to in the morning.”

At eight-thirty, worn out and hung over, Lew arrived at Balim’s buildings to find Balim’s old canvas-covered trucks in the yard in back, with his forty-eight troops messily loading the food and bedrolls and clothesline and cable and tarpaulins and empty oil drums and cartons of tools and all the other miscellaneous supplies. The forty Evinrude outboard motors Lew had got in trade for the fifty-seven missing sewing machines were already loaded.

Frank appeared unaffected by last night’s debauch, except that he seemed to be having a bit of trouble with his balance, as though something had gone agley in his middle ear. He would sway every now and again, while standing perfectly still on an unmoving flat surface. Otherwise, he was the usual Frank, bellowing and belligerent, slowing the loading process by repeatedly confusing the troops.

As for Young Mr. Balim, he was nowhere to be seen, but a hint to his condition might be garnered from the reproachful look Mazar Balim gave Lew when he came out at one point to check their progress. Lew gave him back a sickly smile, and tried to act as though he for one had had little to drink and a full night’s sleep.

Finally they were ready to go. All the men except for the drivers and two assistants were seated in lumpy crowds in the beds of two of the trucks, and all the supplies had been jammed into the other two. Frank and Isaac and Balim had a little private conversation while Lew sat on the running board of one of the trucks and drank the coffee Isaac had kindly brought out to him. Then Balim and Isaac both came over to smile at him and shake his hand and wish him luck. And then they really did leave.

Frank rode as passenger in the first truck, Lew in the second. The theory was that they would look like work crews and supplies for the hotel being built at Port Victoria. Frank was generally assumed by those locals who had seen him to be an engineer or architect or some such thing, and Lew should be able to slip through under the same mantle.

The first part of the trip was relatively smooth, and Lew fell asleep before they were even out of town. He had a wonderfully healing and restful snooze for an hour and woke up when he was almost thrown through the windshield. “Yike!” he cried, and the bucking cab bounced up again, slamming him back into the seat. He clutched at the door and dashboard for handholds, while staring at the driver, who gave him a huge slant-toothed grin and said, “Sorry.”

Lew got his body under control, and the driver got the truck under control. They were now on dirt road, or rather rock road, a kind of washboard surface made by scraping away the thin topsoil. The thrown-up dust from Frank’s truck just ahead was already clogging Lew’s throat. The usual streams of pedestrians watched them drive by, and presumably then died horribly in the great cloud of orange dust the four trucks must leave in their wake.

Lew studied the driver, a youngish man with long muscular arms and protruding crooked teeth and large cheerful eyes. “You speak English?”

The driver smiled at him again and shook his head. “Some words,” he said. Then he faced front, watching men in the truck ahead hilariously try to play a game of kalah—the stones kept flying out of the cups at every bounce—while he proceeded to recite for Lew’s benefit the English words he did know: “Money. Whore. Policeman. Boss. Fuck. Beer. Dead. Pissed-off.”

It went on like that. He knew about a hundred words in all. Well, it was a kind of conversation.

Port Victoria reminded Lew of Ellen, because she’d been the one who’d described it to him, after her jaunt here that time with Frank. Without knowing its strange history—or nonhistory—it seemed to him nobody would think the place remarkable. It was just a little market village, that’s all, like hundreds of others, with some fishermen’s small houses along the steep road down to the shore. He didn’t see any aura of strangeness or loss, but maybe that was because he was once again feeling the loss of Ellen. He dismounted from the truck when they arrived at the work site, eager to have something to do to distract himself.

Frank was now very cheerful. His problem with balance seemed to be gone, so maybe he too had had some sleep in the truck. He said, “What do you think of the place?”

The hotel was truly abuilding. The concrete-block exterior walls were virtually finished to their completed height of two stories, with rectangular openings showing where doors and windows would someday be placed. To the side, some sheds made of cardboard and rusty metal housed supplies and workmen. Just beyond, Charlie was pissing on a bed of lilies.

“I can’t believe that hotel,” Lew said. “We’re actually building a goddam hotel.”

“After this is over,” Frank said, hooking his thumbs in his belt, “a couple years, maybe I’ll come back, stay in this joint, sit on the terrace up there with my vodka-and-tonic and just look out over the lake at where we did it.”

“You drink beer,” Lew reminded him meanly.

“After this caper I’ll drink vodka,” Frank assured him. “And fuck college women.”

Charlie came over, shaking the last droplets off his cock, which he then stuffed inside his disreputable pants. “All ready to go,” he said.

“Don’t tell me,” Frank snapped. “Tell those other assholes. Start unloading. Shit, man, we got our fortunes to make.”

Lew looked for the first time out over the water. He’d seen the maps, so that low green range of hills over there was Uganda. I am here, he told himself, to steal a train.

He found himself grinning.

37

For lunch, the engineer and the fireman ate sandwiches and drank beer on a pleasant sunny knoll overlooking the swift-moving Albert Nile. During the meal they were both bitten by various disease-bearing insects, but apart from the occasional itch they suffered no ill effects. They had been bitten by these creatures ever since infancy, as had their parents and their parents before them. Various low-level fevers and agues had struck them in their early childhood, and they had been among the minority in their age group to survive. They were immunized now, by nature’s method, which is wasteful of life but effective, and which leaves the body permanently weakened, like an automobile that has been in a frame-wrenching accident.

When the engineer and fireman strolled back to the Pakwach East yards, the four freight cars—which they would call “goods wagons,” in the British style—were just about filled with the sacks of coffee. They signed papers, and then phoned ahead to Lolim, their next stop, to say they were leaving Pakwach and to give an estimated time for arrival at Lolim. They had to do this by public telephone because Uganda Railways had no communication system of its own—certainly no radios in the locomotive cabs—except for hand-cranked field telephone sets at the signal boxes, whose wires were generally strung from tree to tree along the rail line, when they weren’t stolen.

By the time they had steam up, the cars were ready and sealed. It was only fifteen miles to Lolim; the fireman delayed them for a moment, but merely to go buy two more bottles of beer. Ugandan beer, brewed from bananas, is very gassy, very tasty, and very strong. The train with its four cars pulled out of the Pakwach East yards, rejoined the main track, and rolled up the slight incline northeastward toward Lolim.

Neither the engineer nor the fireman was political; nor was either particularly religious, though both had come from Christian families. The engineer was a member of the Basoga tribe, which in the old days had ruled the land just east of the Baganda and were very nearly as advanced. The fireman was a Karamojong, from one of the few families to have come south and abandoned that tribe’s traditional nomadic cattle-herding drought-plagued hand-to-mouth existence in Uganda’s far northeast. Neither of them thought of himself first in terms of tribe or religion or politics. They had been railroad men all their adult lives, and they would go on being railroad men.

Amin’s decision four years before to dismantle East African Railways had troubled them both, but only for practical and personal reasons. In practical terms, it meant their trains no longer could be serviced at the fine modern workshops in Nairobi. And in personal terms, it meant they could no longer go on jaunts to Nairobi and Mombasa, rough colorful cities they found more exciting than Kampala. But the decisions were not theirs to make; they shrugged and went on about their jobs.

Ahead, Lolim. They tossed the empty beer bottles from their moving cab into the newly green fields and sounded the whistle high and clear for the level crossing at the edge of town.

38

Idi Amin was drunk. He had become drunk at lunch, and now he was getting more drunk. Seated on a wooden chair, holding in his left fist a third-full quart bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label scotch whisky, he stared blearily at the face of the colonel who—he well knew, he well knew—had schemed to bring together the entire Langi tribe in a plot against him. “You were very bad, Colonel,” Amin said, and waggled a reproving finger in the colonel’s face.

The colonel’s eyes and mouth were closed. Small clumps of dried blood under his nose had made it seem he had an imperfect moustache. The colonel had been dead for four months and his body had long ago been thrown to the crocodiles in the Nile at Owen Falls Dam, but his head was still here, in the freezer in the Botanical Room at the Old Command Post, one of Amin’s lesser dwellings in Kampala. Three other heads of former enemies were in here at the moment, plus two human hearts, but it was to the colonel that Amin directed his reproaches.

He had started drinking today before noon, and at lunch had had to put up with lectures on economics from a Saudi Arabian who was here to discuss financial assistance for Uganda but who in fact spent all his time criticizing Amin’s handling of the nation’s economy. The Saudi Arabian seemed totally unaware that his arrogant “expertise” was simply the oil-wealth cushion he was reclining on, and that he knew no more than Amin about actually managing financial affairs. Amin had drunk heavily throughout lunch to help him put up with this popinjay, and then had retired here to the Old Command Post and its Botanical Room to go on drinking and to take out his bad temper on his defeated enemies.

A knock sounded at the locked door, across the room behind him. Amin reared up, heavy head turning, staring this way and that for enemies. He glowered at the four sleeping heads in the freezer, and it occurred to him to wonder why they couldn’t be delivered with their eyes open. As they were, they didn’t appear to be paying attention. He would have to talk to Minawa about that.

The knock repeated, more insistently. Amin muttered something and heaved himself up out of the chair, pressing his palm to the freezer for support. “One minute!” he called, first in Kakwa and then in Swahili. “One minute,” he muttered in English, “one minute, sir,” and looked around for somewhere to put down the whisky bottle.

There were a refrigerator and a freezer here in the Botanical Room, side by side. The refrigerator contained beer and other drinks, because Amin liked to entertain close friends in this room. The two were kept locked with a single chain and padlock. Now, closing the deep-freezer of his enemies, Amin fumbled with the chain and padlock, fastened them, and moved toward the door. By the time he reached it, his manner was much less drunk; only his breath and the increased redness of his eyes gave him away.

The person at the door to the outer room was a servant named Moses, a Bagisu from the slopes of Mount Elgon, a placid man, eager to please, with a very ready laugh, who famously loved Amin’s jokes and sense of humor. Amin didn’t realize it, but whenever it was necessary to give him a message while he was drunk or in a bad mood, the other servants always sent Moses, because he was least likely to be killed or beaten.

“Ah, Your Excellency,” Moses said. “Colonel Juba calls. He has a tape for you to listen to. He says he thinks it’s very important.”

“He thinks so, does he? Colonel Juba thinks Colonel Juba is important.” The colonel was in charge of the network of spy microphones, and many of the colonel’s tapes had in truth turned out to be very interesting indeed. Nevertheless, the lunch and the whisky had put Amin in a bad mood, which he was reluctant to give up. “Maybe someday I’ll take one of those tapes,” he said, “and shove it up Colonel Juba’s ass, and spin him in a circle, and listen at his mouth.”

Moses was delighted at the image. “That would be something,” he agreed, laughing and nodding.

Amin’s mood was improving by the second. “Order my car, Moses,” he said. “I’ll listen to this tape.”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” Moses said, and went laughing away across the main room while Amin strode off to piss and wash his face and change his lunch-stained safari suit.

The tape was of Patricia Kamin and Sir Denis Lambsmith, and when it reached the point where Sir Denis proposed marriage Amin, who had been smiling in anticipation of something special, roared with laughter and slapped his knee, looking around to be sure the other men in the room also got the joke. Then he said to Colonel Juba, “That’s it, is it? She really got him, that girl. She’s a holy terror, that girl.”

Colonel Juba was a thin man, painfully thin inside his Army uniform, with a long bony face and a permanent look of disapproval. “No,” he said. “It was the part before that, about the coffee.”

Amin was still feeling the effects of all that drink, although he had gratefully accepted a cup of coffee on arrival here at the State Research Bureau building. The tape was still running on. “Run it back, play it for me again,” he said, then frowned, because the tape now was nothing but a rushing sound, like a great wind through tree branches. “What’s that?”

“They’re taking a shower together,” Colonel Juba said. “They take many showers together.”

“A very clean girl,” Amin said with a big grin. “And a very clean white man.”

The technician rewound the tape, and Amin listened for the second time to the part that Colonel Juba thought important. With Juba and two technicians and two other officers in the room, Amin thought it important not to appear stupid, so this time he listened much more carefully.

At Colonel Juba’s gesture, the technician switched off the tape. The colonel said to Amin, “Well? What do you think?”

Amin brooded for half a minute, much more sober now. He was not an intellectual man, but he was a cunning and clever one. His mind was like an anthill, the busy self-involved thoughts scurrying along the narrow channels. “Send them away, Juba,” he said, and sat nodding while Juba told the other men to leave.

When they were alone, Amin said, “Baron Chase has been talking to that Swiss man.”

“I was thinking that,” Juba agreed. It had never been a secret that Juba was among those who disliked and mistrusted Baron Chase.

“We haven’t known what he’s been saying to the Swiss man.”

“He won’t sleep with Patricia.”

Amin chuckled. “I think he likes to fuck boys.”

“We could send him a boy.”

“No. He wouldn’t give himself away that easy. He’s very clever, very cunning.” Amin recognized his own qualities in other men, and was an excellent judge of whether or not they could be used against him. “He has been restless here for some time,” he said, brooding, remembering his recent encounters with Chase. “Very restless. And he was gone a long time in London.”

Juba waited patiently. He had already come to his conclusion as to what move to make, but of course he’d heard the tape almost an hour before Amin. And he never had cared much for Chase.

“All right,” Amin said at last. “Take two men you trust, you know what I mean. Pick up Chase, but secretly. There are people in government who shouldn’t know about this, not till it’s over. So just you and me, and your two men.”

Juba nodded. “Good,” he said.

“Find out what Chase and this Swiss man are up to.”

“Carefully?”

Amin thought again, but this time very briefly. “No,” he said. “Baron Chase is spoiled for us now. We won’t need him anymore. Squeeze him dry.”

“And then?”

There was a catchphrase Amin used with his closest confidants, which meant that the person should first be tortured—not for information, but as punishment or for exercise—and then murdered. He used the phrase now: “Give him the VIP treatment.”

“Good,” Juba said.

Amin added, “But save the head.”

39

Charlie didn’t understand Lew Brady. The man wouldn’t play the game. Since Monday, the beginning of the training sessions, Charlie had been assigned to Lew Brady as translator and it hadn’t been any fun at all. Brady apparently didn’t realize that one of the fringe benefits in this job, one of the little extras that made the work appealing, was Charlie’s right to make fun of his employers. If he didn’t have that, then what was the point?

And he didn’t have it. Charlie was a fast study, and on Monday he had learned that when he translated Lew Brady’s statements he’d better do so word for word. The flights of fancy, the scatological asides, the absolute poetry of his translations of Mguu’s bellowed orders had made the entire work staff happy for years. Now here was this fellow taking himself seriously and bending Charlie’s bones whenever Charlie wanted to have a little fun. The result was, in addition to the boredom of doing the job right, he was losing face with the other men, who knew what Brady had done to him and why he was being so cowed.

Maybe it would be necessary to kill Lew Brady.

Not so easy, though. Charlie considered going to a witch doctor—the best killing witch doctors came from the Luo tribe, right around this area—but what if word got back to Brady? Or even to Mr. Balim, whom Charlie revered in an almost theological way.

Charlie saw Mr. Balim as a being apart from other men, not to be compared either with his own Kikuyu tribesmen nor with the animals that populated the rest of the world, but as completely something else. In Charlie’s mind Mr. Balim was a great benign sun that beamed upon him, that could read his mind without condemning him, and that understood Charlie’s intelligence and humor and wisdom in a way no other mind had ever done. Mr. Balim gave him authority, Mr. Balim gave him responsibility, and then Mr. Balim completed his joy by giving him absolute understanding combined with absolute acceptance. He knows my heart, Charlie told himself; if ever he would tell his secret name to another human soul, it would be to Mr. Balim.

For some time, Charlie had been trying to think of a private name for Mr. Balim, but so far without success. No word, no name he could think of, was grand enough.

As for Lew Brady, he would soon find a name for him. He was close to deciding on Gijjig, an adaptation of a Kikuyu word for “venereal disease,” though he had to admit the name contained more in it of spite than relevance. Perhaps a name would come; if not, Gijjig would do.

“Charlie, goddammit!”

It was Mguu, interrupting Charlie where he squatted thinking about Lew Brady. Charlie looked up in amiable fashion. “Yes, Frank?”

“Goddammit, Charlie,” Mguu said, “don’t shit on the flowers.”

Charlie looked down between his knees. In truth there were lilies there, but so what? He’d chosen this spot because he intended to wipe himself with a few. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“The locals don’t like it,” Mguu told him. “They been bitching and complaining; every time somebody wants flowers for their house, they’re all over shit from you. Besides, you’re right out in plain sight. Do it up the hill there.”

Charlie hadn’t actually started to relieve himself, having been concentrating so thoroughly on Lew Brady, so now he merely shrugged and straightened up and pulled up his pants. “Whatever you say, Frank,” he said. “I just wanted, me, to be close by in case you needed something translated.”

“Oh, fuck off, Charlie,” Mguu said.

“Okay, then, Frank.”

Charlie drifted on up the hill behind the hotel site, toward where they’d been camping out. He would have done his shitting in some declivity in front of Mguu’s tent, but he doubted Mguu would be using the place again.

At the top of the hill he turned to look back, and the scene below reminded him of pictures in the book Treasure Island, which he had read in school when he was a boy and learning English because his mother—now dead—wanted access to the riches of the city. She had understood clearly that English was the language of the city, and would twist Charlie’s arms or ears if he did badly in his lessons. In her dream, Charlie would grow up speaking English, would travel to the city in the little matatu bus—really just an enclosed pickup truck with two benches in the back—and there he would in some magical manner become plugged into the society of the rich. The money and the clothing and the food and the leisure would somehow flow out of the city and through Charlie and spread like a warm glow all over his mother.

What happened in reality was, Charlie grew up to be Charlie, and his mother died of various illnesses and a lack of medical attention at the age of thirty-seven. Which doesn’t mean she was wrong.

And which does mean that when Charlie stood on the hilltop now and looked down at Port Victoria’s shore, with Berkeley Bay to the right and the open immensity of Lake Victoria to the left and the green hump of Uganda straight ahead, what he thought of was the pictures accompanying Treasure Island.

Most of the men were hard at work down there, swarming over the rafts, while Mguu strode back and forth like a Long John Silver who’d regrown his leg, and Lew Brady played Tom Swift (more of Charlie’s schooldays grab bag of books in English) by overseeing the uncrating and assembling of the outboard motors.

Ten large rafts were being built along the shore, each twenty feet square, made of twenty-foot-long planks nailed to twenty-foot-long crosspieces, the entire arrangement then lashed to empty oil drums. Along one edge of each raft a rough-and-ready assemblage of planks was being fastened underneath the main wooden body, and then four of the Evinrude outboard motors were being attached to each of these assemblies. The reason for this awkward-looking mess was that the rafts would ride so high in the water that if the outboard motors were attached directly to the raft bodies their propellers would be completely up in the air. On the return trip, with each raft carrying tons and tons of coffee, that wouldn’t be a problem.

Seen from the hilltop, the ten rafts were like some Lilliputian armada, about to launch themselves in a soup tureen, but they were more serious than they looked. The men’s lives depended on these rafts, as Lew Brady had said (and as Charlie with perfect fidelity and increasing rage and boredom had translated), so they were taking their work with great seriousness. The ring of hammers beat out over the water and the land.

Charlie turned the other way, and something that might have been a gazelle ducked and leaped and flowed out of sight. Might have been a gazelle, but was not. Charlie pretended he hadn’t seen it, and strolled along like any man looking for a place to shit. His search led him by many angles and ellipses closer and closer to the little bush-filled hollow in which—

“YAAAAA!”

Charlie leaped like a swimmer entering the pool for a two-lap race. The man—not at all a gazelle—surged up out of the brush like a startled quail, but wasn’t fast enough; Charlie brought him down, arms entangling in the man’s legs, the two of them crashing back down into the scratchy leaves and branches.

The man kicked and twisted and flailed about, utterly silent. It was the silence that told Charlie this was an enemy and not merely a sneak thief or a passing stranger. He held tight to whatever parts the man offered—a bony ankle, a bonier wrist—and slowly but inexorably he pulled the man out of the shrubbery and laid him on his back on the stony ground, where he gazed on his closed face and remembered that he had seen this fellow before.

It was the raggedy man, the boneman that Charlie and Mguu had surprised during their visit to the depot. Which was in Uganda. Which was a far far way from here.

I should have killed him last time, when I thought of it.

Charlie straddled him. “Oh, boneman,” he said, his strong fingers toying with the man’s Adam’s apple as a kitten toys at first with a ball of string or a cat toys at first with a wounded bird, “oh, boneman, there is no false story you can tell.”

The boneman apparently recognized that himself. He merely lay there on his back, arms under Charlie’s knees, caramel-colored palms facing up.

“But you could tell me who sent you,” Charlie said. His thumbnail drew a thin line of blood across that moving captive Adam’s apple. “You could tell me that. Who spies? For what purpose?”

“I am an important man,” the boneman said with an attempt at dignity, his voice hoarse as though from disuse. “If you kill me, you will be hunted down.”

“By the Society of Bonemen?” In his combined comedy and rage—fueled by his recent thoughts about Lew Brady—Charlie overdid himself; he played too hard, the way the cat plays with the bird. Before he knew it he had crushed that Adam’s apple, and the creature below him was gurgling and thrashing, eyes sticking out, tongue swelling.

“Oh, no good,” Charlie said, sitting back on the animal’s agitating stomach. “Very stupid. Mr. Balim would think I had become foolish. Oh, dear.”

Leaving the boneman to gurgle himself to death, knowing his wisest move was not to mention this at all to Mguu, Charlie sighed and got to his feet and went away to find a socially acceptable place to relieve himself.

40

For many miles, the A104 parallels the northern railway line. At times the track is visible from the road, where they run next to one another on the straighter flatter stretches, while at other times the rail line is hidden by jungle or low hills. Baron Chase, driving north at the wheel of one of the black Toyotas belonging to the State Research Bureau, missed the coffee train in one of those latter areas, but when he reached Opit and saw that the loaded freight cars there were gone, he realized his error, reversed, and drove back south.

The train crew and yard crews had already done a lot, picking up the loaded cars from Pakwach East, then Lolim, Aparanga, Bwobo, Gulu, and Opit. And when Chase rearrived at Otwal, the train was just pulling out, now almost twenty cars long. Ahead were Lira, Aloi, Achuni, and Soroti, the largest town along the way, where they would undoubtedly spend the night. Tomorrow morning, they would have only Okungulo, Kumi, Kachumbala, and Mbale at which to pick up the filled cars. No later than lunchtime tomorrow the train should be full and traveling nonstop to Tororo to join the main line and turn westward for Kampala and Entebbe.

Chase traveled parallel to the train from Otwal to Lira, passing through field after field of coffee, the bushes all glossy green, already growing their next crop of cherries. A coffee tree left to itself will grow thirty feet tall, but the growers prune them to fifteen feet or less, for case of harvesting. (In some places, like the Jhosi plantation, they are kept to bush height.) Toward the end of the rainy season these fields had crawled with harvesters, men and women and children, all circling back three or four times to pick each bright-red cherry when ripe. Once the rain was finished and the sun appeared, the cherries were spread on outdoor cement floors to dry, then were sent several times through fanning and hulling machines to remove dried hulls and interior yellow pulp, freeing the two beans that lie inside each cherry, their flat faces together. Two membranes still surrounded each bean, an inner delicate one called the silver skin and a more brittle outside one known as the parchment. These were removed in further cleaning machines, which led to sorting machines where the beans were separated by size, then to a hand-culling process to remove imperfect beans, and finally into a machine that weighed and bagged them ready for shipment.

Chase and the coffee train flowed and sailed through the coffee fields in their rolling green landscape under the high hot blue sky, here and there a field all white with clusters of jasminelike coffee flowers to counterbalance the smudgy line of black smoke drawn back from the locomotive over the full cars. The train whistle wailed at level crossings; the wheels of the loaded freight cars clattered and burbled along the rails; the cars all swayed at separate rhythms in the warm air. Driving along, Chase looked over at the coffee train and smiled. KAHAWA, said the white chalk letters, car after car, KAHAWA KAHAWA KAHAWA. Mon-ey-for-me, said the wheels on the rails, mon-ey-for-me, mon-ey-for-me, mon-ey-for-me. WOOOO-oo-u.

As the train slowed at Lira, Chase speeded up to dash over the level crossing just before the barriers were put down. His foot hard on the accelerator, he did the hundred sixty miles to Tororo in less than two hours, confident that his license plate—beginning with UVS, a declaration of the Toyota’s official ownership—would keep any stray policeman from bothering him. At Tororo he turned west on the A104 and accelerated again.

It was not quite six o’clock when he turned off the empty highway onto the access road and bumped slowly down as far as the parked Army truck. He stopped the Toyota there, afraid it might get stuck farther on, and walked down past the railroad tracks to the path leading in to the maintenance depot.

The path had been rather astonishingly widened and smoothed; walking on it, Chase saw it would give the trucks no trouble at all. Even his Toyota would be able to traverse this new road. At the inner end, a board nailed to a tree gave the expanded path a name: ELLEN’S ROAD. Chase was reminded of World War II and the U.S. Marines on their South Pacific islands with their self-consciously humorous road signs: TOKYO—1,740 TIMES SQUARE—9,562.

The depot showed signs of activity, a great deal of cleaning up and rearrangement, but no human beings were in sight. Chase had been listening for the past five minutes or so to the repeated buzz of a chain saw; following the sound, he walked up the spur track almost to the hidden main line, where he found four men cutting away the last of the young trees and underbrush blocking the line.

Not knowing who Chase was, the four men were not at all pleased to see him. They looked actually threatening for a minute, until he mentioned the name Frank Lanigan. Then they smiled and relaxed and told each other in Swahili that he must be all right, just another of Balim’s white men.

Chase gave no indication that he understood the Swahili. In English he asked, “Is Frank Lanigan here?”

None of them had English. He was forced to do charades, pointing at the ground while asking for Lanigan. It would have been easier, of course, merely to speak Swahili, but the habit of hiding that capability was so ingrained in Chase by now that it never even occurred to him to use it.

They finally did understand, and let him know through their own elaborate sign language that Frank was still in Kenya, but would be here tonight. Chase let them know he wanted to leave Frank a message, and they assured him with gestures that they would deliver it. “I hope so, you buggers,” Chase said.

He carried a smallish notebook, on one page of which he now wrote: “Train maybe 3PM, maybe 6PM. No hue and cry at motor pool. C.” Ripping the page out, he folded it in half and wrote on the outside “Frank Lanigan,” then gave it with a stern warning in English to the spokesman for the group, a man in a filthy sleeveless green shirt, who smiled and nodded and repeated all his assurances.

Finally Chase retraced his steps, looking at all the work that had been done. They’re working for me, he thought in secret pleasure. Only for me.

Chase’s small neat house was in northwestern Kampala, off Bombo Road. He could see Makerere University from his front windows, and Mulago Hospital was up behind his yard. The house had belonged before 1972 to the son of a wealthy Asian merchant. Chase had kept most of the boy’s toys—the pool table and stereo system and small private screening room—but had had to give up the silver-gray Porsche to a Public Safety Unit colonel who had obsessively craved it.

Generally, throughout the house, the Asian decorations had given way to Chase’s simpler style. The rooms were more bare and Spartan now, and footsteps echoed as they would not have done in the past. A living-room wall on which had hung a tapestry carpet in vivid reds and greens now featured neatly framed black-and-white or color pictures of Chase himself with noteworthy figures of the day: people who had permitted themselves to be photographed with him during their stay in Kampala, or people he’d met while accompanying Amin on official visits overseas. Colonel Juba was studying these photographs with his disapproving air, hands clasped behind his back, when Chase walked in at a little after eight o’clock that evening. The two uniformed men with Juba, one showing a captain’s rank, the other a major’s, lolled at their ease on the overstuffed maroon mohair chairs left over from the previous occupant.

Seeing front-room lights on from the driveway, Chase had merely assumed his servant girl, Sarah, was doing some late cleaning up, but when he saw Juba and the other two—he recognized them, knew they were cronies of Juba’s, but didn’t know their names—he realized at once he was in trouble.

He didn’t show it. “Colonel Juba! What a surprise. Is Sarah getting you something to drink?”

“No, thank you, Captain Chase. Is this really the Pope?”

Chase seldom used his Ugandan Army rank. To be called “captain” was another signal of trouble. Walking forward, his awareness strongly on the two seated men, both nodding and smiling and as yet taking no part in events, Chase said, “Yes, that’s the Pope, all right. And that’s me.”

“Did you ask his blessing?”

Colonel Juba was a Muslim, like most of the men closest to Amin. Chase gave him an alert look, saying, “Do you think I’ll need it?”

“Oh, we all need blessings,” Juba said. “President Amin wants to see you.”

“Personally?”

“Oh, yes. You can help him with that Swiss man who is buying the coffee.”

Juba had gone too far with that. He was not as good at subtlety and double entendre as he thought. But Chase didn’t show that he now knew not only that he was in trouble but also why he was in trouble. Instead, he smiled and said, “Anything I can do, as President Amin knows. Where is he today? The Old Command Post, isn’t it?”

“No, he’s at Bureau headquarters.”

Serious trouble. Very very bad trouble. “We shouldn’t keep him waiting, then,” Chase said.

He knew, whatever might happen, he was leaving this house for the last time. But he didn’t look back.

41

Just before sunset a car came sluing and sliding down the slope from the village of Port Victoria, skidding to a stop by the unfinished hotel. Lew had been sitting up on top of one of the completed rafts, looking westward out over the calm violet waters of the lake at the ochre ball of the setting sun. Thin lines of cloud bisected the sun to radiate colors in an extravagant display of blues and reds, magenta and maroon and indigo, rose and ruby and plum, gold and brass and aquamarine. The narrowing band of sky between sun and lake looked bruised, but the rest of the western sky was a topographical map of Heaven.

The colors affected the Earth as well, turning everything into Technicolor, brighter and ruddier and more golden than life. The men, their construction work finished, lay about on the ground with the unreal clarity of a Dali painting, and the arriving car semaphored golden and crimson greetings from its windshield. Lew turned to watch, and when the car stopped Young Mr. Balm came smiling and chipper out from behind the wheel while a somewhat less enthusiastic Isaac emerged on the passenger side.

Frank strode toward the car, his ink-black shadow sliding over the copper bodies of the reclining men. While he and Isaac talked together, Young Mr. Balim walked toward Lew, his smile at once arrogant and shy. “You’re King of the Mountain?”

“Come up.”

The top of the raft was a good yard from the ground. Lew grasped Young Mr. Balim’s slender wrist and hauled him up, where the two could turn again and look at the sun, now shrunken slightly as though receding, and deepened to a rich cinnabar. Its bottom edge very nearly kissed the lake horizon. “Beautiful,” Young Mr. Balim said. “I like your view.”

“Thank you. I got the impression from your father this morning that you weren’t feeling too well.”

“Oh? What did he say?”

“Nothing. Just looked disapproving.”

“Ha.” Young Mr. Balim said, “He led me to believe you and Frank were utterly unscathed.”

“Propaganda.”

“I thought so.”

The violet disk of the sun touched the water, then became minutely flattened on the bottom, like a locomotive wheel in need of regrinding. Lew said, “You here to see us off?”

“I’m coming with you.”

Lew gave him a surprised look, and was startled to see the extent of Young Mr. Balim’s vulnerability as he stood there in the red light, smiling painfully, braced to be made fun of. Quickly shifting gears, Lew said, “Then, welcome aboard.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I meant for not asking if my father knew I was here.”

“Frank will.”

“Oh, I know. Isaac did already. When do we leave?”

Lew nodded at the sun, continuing its lesson in conic section. “When that stops watching us,” he said.

Frank and Isaac had come over, Frank belligerent and Isaac worried, and both now stood below them. The clarity of the light of just a few moments ago was gone, the redness becoming tinged with black, creating ambiguity. There was no ambiguity in Frank. “Bathar,” he said, his hands on his hips, “your father is crazy.”

“The sins of the sons,” Young Mr. Balim said, with a graceful shrug.

“You’re no fucking use over there, Bathar,” Frank said. “You gonna carry sacks?”

“I shall play the lute.”

“Oh, fuck off. Come on, Isaac, it’s time we launch these mothers. You can translate; Christ knows where Charlie is. Lew, you keep an eye on Young Bathar.”

Isaac gave them a nervous apologetic smile, then was drawn away in Frank’s wake. Frank was already yelling at the prone men. Young Mr. Balim’s eyes glinted in the red light as he looked at Lew, saying, “That puts us both in our place.”

Twilight was short, and decreasingly spectacular, but as the colors drained out of the sky, swirling down after the sun into that slot on the western rim of the world, a hundred million stars gradually became apparent, very high crisp tiny points of white, with a quarter-moon at shoulder-height over the lake. In this uncertain and constantly shifting illumination, the rafts were one at a time wrestled over the muddy shoreline and out onto the warm water. Long planks were laid between each raft and the nearest reasonably dry ground, and everything was loaded. By the time the sky was almost completely black, except for a dark-reddish blur at one spot on the horizon, as though a city were in flames on the far side of the lake, they were ready to go.

The four outboard motors on each raft had been yoked together so they could be steered by a single L-shaped arrangement of boards. With the men distributed on each raft and the gangplanks pulled on board, they allowed themselves to drift a bit farther from shore before starting the engines. The first few made a kind of muted snarling sound, easily lost in the immensity of air over the lake, but as more and more engines turned over the quality of the noise changed, and by the time the full forty were running it sounded as though Berkeley Bay had been invaded by all the world’s killer bees. In a straggling line, the ten rafts moved out onto the lake.

Lew and Young Mr. Balim traveled with three other men on the last raft, Lew manning the steering bar. The oil drums were lashed beneath the rafts, broadside to the direction of thrust, and their rounded metal sides slid through the water with a surprising lack of friction. There was no great speed to be had with these rafts, but the smoothness of the journey came as a surprise to them all.

Antismuggling patrols were likely, both ships and helicopters. To help evade them, the big gray tarpaulins were unrolled before the rafts crossed into Ugandan territorial waters at Sigulu Island, covering the passengers and supplies so that no reflection from metal, no distinctive shape, would give them away. Now the rafts had become twenty-foot-square gray islands, low and lumpy, almost invisible from the air. Lew and the other pilots remained outside the tarpaulins, watching the thin moonlight shatter on the water.

The men had used poles and mounds of supplies to prop up the tarpaulins enough to create tent spaces within, in which they sat and talked together, the soft burr of Swahili resonating out over the lake. Beneath that, and the sputtering roar of the outboard motors, the clicking sound of pebbles meant kalah was being played, in the dark. By touch alone, the players would know how many pebbles were in each of the twelve cups, and what the implications were after each move. Lew had played kalah, but never well, and would never play against these men for money; you had to be born and raised to that game. Like chess masters, the best players knew at all times where all seventy-two pebbles were and what every possible future sequence would create for the next five or six moves. In the old days, entire herds of cattle, hundreds of slaves, even entire kingdoms, were won or lost at kalah.

Young Mr. Balim sat just under the edge of the tarp, his back against two wooden cartons filled with fruit. After a long silence, while he looked back past Lew at the shoreline they were leaving, he said, “Do you know why my father agreed?”

“Did you need his agreement?”

“Ah, yes, I’m afraid so,” Young Mr. Balim said, grinning. “He consented because he saw my restlessness was becoming again too strong, and it was time to give me a small concession. I may be twenty-eight, you know, but I am not my own man. By no means.”

“Why not?”

“Money. I am like a wife, I am dependent on my father.”

“Do you have to be? Can’t you get money on your own?”

“Then I am a house pet,” Young Mr. Balim said, easily shifting his justifications, “too spoiled by the easiness of my life.”

“Then why come along tonight?”

“A conflict.” Young Mr. Balim seemed to spend most of his time laughing at himself. “I want to be a grown-up, but I don’t want to give up the easy life.” Leaning forward, tapping Lew’s boot for emphasis, he said, “Here’s my harebrained scheme. I shall be a party to this escapade. My father will not be able to refuse me some small share of the profits. With that money I shall go back to London and set myself up in some sort of business.”

“London?”

“Oh, yes, I love London. Nowhere else on earth for me. That’s why my father gives me motorcycles instead of cash, you see; so I can’t get away. He wants me to stay in Kisumu and take over his business someday. But what he refuses to think about is that the Kenyans will throw us out.”

“You think so?”

“Why not? The Ugandans did, and there are constant rumors that the Kenyans will, the Tanzanians will. In Zaire it is already almost impossible for an Asian to live. They’ll throw us out of all of Africa someday, you wait and see.”

“You could be right,” Lew agreed.

“And what price our Kisumu warehouses then? Oh, but London!” Young Mr. Balim beamed. “The worst they will do in London is insult me.” Mimicking some nasal voice calling a dog, he said, “Here, Paki; there, Paki; go away now, Paki.” He laughed and said, “So they call me Paki. I was born in Uganda of a man who was born in Uganda of a man who was born in India, but that’s all right, I’m a Paki. And even a Paki can go to the West End, can shop in Harrods, can buy a little maisonette in Chelsea. A Paki can open a store, and the English will shop there. A Paki—I know a Paki who opened a little advertising agency for little Paki accounts—little travel agencies and tailors and so on—and he did well, and the English began to hire him. Because they saw he was good, you see, valuable to them. Give me a pragmatic people, and I won’t care what they think of me.”

Smiling, Lew said, “What sort of business will you open?”

“We wait upon opportunity,” Young Mr. Balim said. “First this adventure, and then we settle down to Paki respectability.”

The thirty miles to Macdonald Bay took just over three hours, of which the last part was the most difficult. The rafts weren’t particularly agile and had to be jockeyed into position against a very narrow slice of muddy shoreline. Shutting down three of the four outboard motors on each raft, they eased in very slowly, the others drifting slightly while Frank went first, thudding his raft too hard into the shore, ripping loose one of the oil drums. His men saved the drum, unloaded the raft, and dragged it up onto the shore.

By the time Lew steered the tenth raft toward land, gently nudging the mud flat, the other nine had already been dragged as far as possible beneath the cover of the trees and, under the direction of Isaac and Charlie—a true odd couple, that—the men were further hiding the rafts with tree branches and brush. Once Lew’s final motor was shut down, he could hear the receding whine of another motor going away inland; that would be Frank, traveling by moped up to get the truck.

The next three hours were all logistics, the slogging boring frustrating job of getting all your men and all your supplies to the place where they’ll eventually be needed. Lew knew this phase from many battles in several wars and had long ago learned the only thing to do at such a time was to cease having opinions. It was a mistake to think that such-and-such an event should have happened by now, or that this person should have realized that fact, or even that somehow there should have been a better way.

There was no better way. No matter what you thought or planned, the truck would be overloaded the first time after Frank brought it down from the depot, and it would become mired three miles up from the lake, forcing everybody to trek those three miles, unload the damn truck, drag it out of its muddy ruts, and then reload it again, all by the shifting uncertain beams of several flashlights invariably being aimed at the wrong spot.

It was also inevitable that several fistfights would break out, that the soft ground of their landing site would be churned by all those feet into mud, and that when there weren’t too few men for the unloading at the lake there would be too few for the unloading at the depot. And it was probably even inevitable that the truck, on one of its return trips, would drive over a case of beer, smashing all the bottles and giving itself a flat tire, which also had to be changed by flashlight, the whole area stinking of beer.

What wasn’t inevitable was that they would have called it Ellen’s Road.

Lew hadn’t known about that, and didn’t see it until the end because he stayed at the lake during the whole transfer operation, traveling up with the last truckload, he and Frank in the cab, the final ten workmen and the last miscellaneous cases in the back.

Frank wrestled with the wheel, the truck grinding slowly up along the faint line of roadway, its headlights partially covered with tape but still showing the straight road steadily sloping upward, the dark trees and brush on both sides, here and there the startled red reflections of animal eyes. “I’ll tell you something,” Frank said.

“What’s that?”

“This is exactly like the night before a war.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“Yeah, but do you know what makes this job better?”

“What?”

Frank released the wheel for just a second to jab a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the men out of sight and hearing beyond the cab partition. “Those assholes don’t have guns,” he said.

“I know what you mean. Unfortunately, the people on the other side do.”

“We won’t see no people on the other side.”

“I hope you’re right,” Lew said, and awhile later Frank grappled the truck to a standstill, saying, “We’ll walk in.”

With the truck engine and headlights off, the world was at first absolutely black and absolutely silent. None of the starlight or faint moonlight reached down to here through the branches, and all of the surrounding animal life had been frightened into silence by the arrival of the truck.

But gradually new sounds filled the emptiness, the vague mutterings and jostlings of men in an encampment. And off to the left through the trees were glimmers of both flashlights and firelight.

“This way,” Frank said.

They tramped in on a rustling roadway of crushed branches and leaves, soon seeing the depot up ahead, the dim forms of people moving against the lights. “So this is the place where I didn’t get to take pictures,” Lew said, and saw the sign on the tree, and said, “Oh, shit.”

“What’s up?” Then Frank followed Lew’s gaze and said, “Oh. I forgot about that.”

“Your idea?”

“Well,” Frank said, immediately on the defensive, “she did design the fucking thing. And I put it up before she walked out on you.”

“She didn’t walk out on me,” Lew said, obscurely angry. “Not the way that sounds.”

Frank stopped and held Lew by the arm. “Listen, my friend. I’ve known an awful lot of women in my life, and sooner or later every damn one of them will leave you walking around, scratching your head, and saying, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’”

“Frank, don’t give me a whole locker-room—”

“Hear me out, goddammit.”

“Let go my arm,” Lew told him, “and then I’ll listen.”

Frank released his arm. “Ellen was a very good woman,” he said. “One of the best. Too fucking good for the likes of you.”

“And you.”

“I know that. The point is, she packed up her little ditty bag and she went. And you can poke around for weeks if you want to, like you got a thorn in your paw. Or you can say, ‘Screw it, there’s more of them out there in the bushes.’ What the hell, you did all right before you ever knew that particular woman.”

With a crooked smile, Lew said, “Ellen made the same point.”

“There, see? Be as smart as she is and you’ll be a man, my son.”

Lew said, “I’ll tell you what the situation is, Frank, but I don’t feel like talking about it a lot. Ellen leaving was like catching the flu. You get over the flu, but first it gets worse for a while. I saw that sign and I realized it was getting worse.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “I can follow that. Get well soon, pal.”

“Thank you,” Lew said, and walked on with Frank, not looking up again at the sign.

Some of the tarpaulins had been brought up from the lake and had now been made into lean-to tents. Cartons filled with large cans of stew were among the supplies; the tops had been levered off these, and the stew was heating in the cans over several small fires, filling the air with an aroma of dinner. The endless kalah games continued, beer had been distributed, men were laughing and visiting, settling down on blankets inside the tents, starting to relax at the end of a day of hard work.

Lew took a bottle of the warm beer and strolled around the encampment, not wanting conversation with anybody. Just uphill from the maintenance depot, away from the people, there was a clear spot in the roof of branches, where he could look up and see the stars. The moon had risen almost to its apogee. Ellen is ninety miles from here, he thought. Only ninety miles.

42

Ellen couldn’t sleep, but she didn’t want to admit the fact by turning on the light or getting out of bed. Her room here in the transient aircrews’ quarters at Entebbe was small and clean but very cold and impersonal; more a prison cell than a hotel room. There was a slatted blind to cover the window, but she’d raised that some time ago so she could watch the quarter-moon climb diagonally up the sky, moving almost stealthily in its slowness and silence.

Is Lew in Uganda now? They’ll be coming over tonight, to steal the train tomorrow, if nothing’s gone wrong. Has something gone wrong? Is he in Uganda, or have they had to give it up for some reason?

Should I have stayed?

When she’d arrived here yesterday afternoon, it had seemed at first as though she were wasting her time, as though she should have stayed in Kenya merely because there was nothing for her at Entebbe. Certainly the planes weren’t here, and the smiling false man from the government had lied to her for two hours before she’d finally brow-beaten him into admitting the truth.

The truth was that everything was still tentative. It was still, even at this eleventh hour, possible that Coast Global would not be able to assemble sufficient planes, or sufficient personnel to crew them, in time for Friday’s scheduled operation.

The contract Ellen had signed had of course given Coast Global an out, but it was the sort of boiler plate she’d come to accept in such contracts; it never meant anything. But this time it might. According to the contract, if for any reason the job she’d been hired for failed to materialize, she would be paid her expenses to and from her home (Kisumu!) plus one quarter of the agreed-on salary, which would probably be not much more than a thousand dollars.

And at the end of it back she’d be in Kisumu, instead of in Baltimore. Even with her airline discount, it would take most of her money to get to the States via commercial carrier. If she hadn’t quit Balim, of course, he would have been obligated to pay her return fare, but now he was off the hook and Ellen was firmly on it.

Through all the irritation about money and contracts and lying government men, she had kept tucked away in the back of her mind one oddly comforting thought: if the job fell through, if she wound up back in Kisumu after all, it would be some sort of sign or something that she should stay with Lew.

Unless he’d already moved Amarda in.

Her thoughts had grown increasingly troubled, not eased by the five other crew members—casuals, hired like her for this one-time job—who’d showed up in the course of the evening and then this morning. And it wasn’t till nearly noon today that they’d known for certain the job would take place.

The eight undercrewed planes had started arriving at three this afternoon, and the last hadn’t showed until after nine tonight. With the end of uncertainty and the addition of all these other pilots and navigators, a certain conviviality developed, and during dinner in the otherwise empty airport coffee shop Ellen had smilingly turned down three separate propositions. So it was her own fault if she was alone tonight in this bed and unable to sleep.

The moon was nearing apogee, climbing just beyond the top of the windowframe. Is Lew in Uganda? Will the coffee show up here tomorrow? If it does, will that mean they didn’t make the try, or that they tried and failed? The grayish pale moonlight inched out of her eyes and moved away down the blanket, and Ellen drifted into shallow unsatisfying sleep.

43

They took Chase to the State Research Bureau, pretending he’d meet Amin there to “help him” in some undefined way in connection with “the Swiss man who is buying the coffee.” In other words, some corner of Chase’s scheme had unraveled and Amin had sent Colonel Juba to pick at it and find out what it meant.

The first encouraging sign was that Juba didn’t want anyone else to know Chase had been arrested. At the Bureau’s front door, he went so far as to ask the guard, “Is the president here yet?” Chase presumably was not supposed to notice the guard’s bewilderment, nor to hear the irritation in Juba’s hurried “No matter. We’ll wait in his office.”

So. Amin was not certain he had Chase dead to rights. Juba and his two young assistants and Amin himself were probably the only ones who knew Chase was a prisoner. (Amin had to know; Chase was far too important for Juba to arrest on his own initiative.)

So they went to “Amin’s office,” a large square room with gray industrial carpeting and several Danish-style sofas along the wall, which was in fact one of the interrogation rooms, though Amin did use it sometimes in conferences with Bureau people. He also used it for occasional in-person interrogations of his chief enemies, and it was here he’d lost his temper and shot the archbishop. Chase was supposed to be thinking about these associations, of course.

What he was thinking instead was that Amin was too impatient a man not to be here already if he planned to take part in this interrogation. In leaving it to Juba, he was giving himself later deniability. More important, he was also confirming for Chase that he wasn’t yet sure what was going on. They need to get it from my mouth, Chase thought, and they won’t succeed.

Juba, having earlier proved himself inept at clever double entendre, now proved himself inept at the psychological ploy. The next three hours of waiting—ostensibly for Amin—were supposed to soften Chase for the questions to follow, but the delay merely gave him time to plan out his own strategy.

At first Juba tried to fill the time with light conversation, but made the mistake of talking about foreign travel. Poor Juba had never been out of Africa; Tripoli was his cosmopolitan city, where the Libyans had taught him how to use his electronic equipment (some of which probably had created this present trouble). Chase responded with amiable condescension, until even Juba saw he was being made fun of. Then they sat in silence, unless Juba and his men spoke together, which they did from time to time.

And here was an irony Chase could appreciate without approving. After all his years of hiding his knowledge of Swahili, when these three Africans spoke secretly together it was in Kakwa, their tribal tongue, of which Chase knew only one word: kalasi, which means “death.” It might have been his imagination, but he thought he heard them use the word several times.

Colonel Juba tried to maintain an atmosphere of menace with dignity, but the other two, the captain and the major, were in reality only country boys from up north, basking in power and luxury, practically hugging themselves with delight at their great good fortune. In a well-ordered world—and they knew this better than anybody—they would be at best laborers now, on a farm or a construction project, and at worst they would be nothing at all, merely two more idle men whose ugly bitter wives worked small parcels of land for their minimal food supply. But here they were, because of Idi Amin, a “captain” and a “major,” with women and food and drink and clothing and even cars available just for the asking.

The burlesque that Chase was not a prisoner extended so far as their permitting him to go to the men’s room by himself, though the captain did stand in the office doorway watching the men’s room entrance until he returned. And after a while it extended to their offering him beer, when the captain and the major both began to drink. Chase accepted a bottle, but merely sipped at it, noticing that Juba didn’t drink at all.

Finally, after three hours of nonsense, Chase decided it was time to force the issue. Rising—the captain and the major sat up, looking as alert as possible after half a dozen bottles of beer—he crossed to the desk, behind which Juba was seated filling out pointless forms, and reached for the telephone. “Perhaps the president has forgotten,” he said. “He’s at the Old Command Post, isn’t he?”

“No need for that!” Suddenly angry, Juba slapped at the phone, glaring at Chase. “Just sit down.”

“But if it’s so important for the president to see me, we should—”

“He’ll see you in his own good time!” Then Juba got himself back under control, and returned to the game of make-believe: “I’m sure the president doesn’t wish to inconvenience you, Captain Chase.”

“No inconvenience. Merely a desire to be of help.”

“Then there’s another matter you can help on, while we wait.”

Chase was aware that the major was on his feet, prowling around behind him. They could at any time use physical torture, but they preferred the cat-and-mouse tactics until they grew bored. Chase had to sense Juba’s state of mind very delicately, but didn’t want to make his own move until he knew for sure the extent of the problem. He said, “What other matter is that, Colonel?”

“Sometime ago there was a white man imprisoned here. He caused some damage, and you had him released. Why?”

What was this? In his irritation—maybe the stalling tactic had gotten through to him after all—Chase snapped, “All of this was covered at the time. The man was named Lewis Brady, he’s a gun runner working for the Saudis, bringing weapons to Muslim revolutionary forces in Africa. He came here posing as a tourist to meet with me, unofficially, concerning arms shipments for friends of ours in the Sudan, to be shipped through Uganda. Libya unfortunately had his name on the wrong list, as a result of work he did for a pro-Libya faction in the Sudan several years ago. So he was arrested. When he didn’t appear at our meeting, I naturally made inquiries, and I found him here. He was already making his escape when I intercepted him.”

“There is no verification of this story.”

“Verification? The man was here. Libya has acknowledged his work with their people in the Sudan. I have told you his mission. What more do you need?”

“The Saudis—”

“In the first place,” Chase interrupted, really tired of all this, “we couldn’t possibly make an open interrogation to the Saudis about one of their sub rosa projects. And if we did, they would quite properly deny all knowledge.”

Colonel Juba sat blinking at his desk, annoyed and uncomfortable. He tried once or twice to find things to say, then finally blurted, “Do sit down! You make me lean my head back!”

“Sorry, Colonel.”

Chase started for the sofa, but Juba said, “No, here. Sit here,” pointing at the witness’s chair in front of the desk.

So the make-believe was coming to an end. To emphasize his dignity and authority, Juba went on pointing at the chair until Chase had settled himself in it. Then he said, “About this other matter of the Swiss man.”

Chase smiled, leaning forward to put his elbow on the edge of the desk. “The Swiss man, yes. The one who is buying the coffee, as you put it.”

“You told him the coffee would be stolen,” Juba said, then immediately looked doubtful, as though wishing he’d been more roundabout.

“I told him the coffee would be stolen?” This was a distortion of the truth, but still it was more than Chase had thought these people might have. “Why would I say such a thing to a customer? And who says I did?”

“The Swiss man told it to the English Sir.”

The fool! Grossbarger’s enslavement to friendship had landed Chase in the soup. At his scornful best, Chase said, “And I suppose the English Sir told President Amin.”

Juba looked smug; he was at last on sure ground. “He told Patricia Kamin.”

So that was it. The Kamin bitch was the source of his trouble. He wasn’t surprised; she’d been out to get him for a long time. His mind already dealing with thoughts of revenge, Chase said, “There seems to be something wrong here. Did I tell the Swiss man we must have good security because some Ugandan coffee has been stolen? That is possible. Did he repeat this to the English Sir? Why not? And did the English Sir—In bed, I suppose? With the Kamin woman, were they in bed when they talked?”

“That makes no difference,” Juba said.

“So the English Sir, trying to seem brave and dramatic in bed with his whore, tells her a story about danger to the coffee shipment. And for this you bring me here at night, you waste my time, you tell me falsely that President Amin will be here, you—”

“You shut up now!” Juba banged his palm down flat on the desktop.

“I will not shut up! When President Amin learns what you have done—”

“These are his orders!”

Chase sat back, arms folded, gazing without expression at Juba. The situation was out in the open now, and he knew everything he needed to know. He had nothing further to say.

Juba too realized the situation had changed, and relaxed into the thug he really was. Speaking slowly, gazing unblinking at Chase, he said, “When you speak together with your friends, do you talk of ‘the English Sir,’ or do you say ‘Sir Denis Lambsmith’? Do you think I am a great ignorant fool?”

“Not a great ignorant fool.”

“Now you shall learn!” Juba gestured at his assistants. “Search him.”

“Too late,” Chase said. Withdrawing from its forearm holster in his left sleeve the chrome-plated Firearms International .25-caliber six-shot automatic, he fired once, the bullet hitting Juba just under the right eye with enough force to penetrate the brain and kill him but not enough to knock him out of his chair.

Chase was already moving, rolling leftward, kicking the witness’s chair backward, rolling once toward the wall and coming up onto his feet with the automatic trained on the beer-slowed captain and major. Those two, nothing but big loutish boys with slow brains and too much good living, lurched in front of him, wanting to rush but afraid. “Move back to the wall,” Chase told them.

They wouldn’t. Uncertain but belligerent, they stood, weaving slightly, and the major said, “You shoot, they come here.”

“Nobody knows there’s a prisoner in here,” Chase said. “Not even me. That’s why you couldn’t search me before. Move back to the wall.”

“They come,” insisted the major.

The captain said something in Kakwa. It was infuriating to have the wrong language! The major shook his head, then replied; by his eye movements, he was saying they should rush, one to the left, the other to the right.

No, no, can’t permit that. The .25 automatic is really a very small gun; it won’t slow people down, and it isn’t accurate over much distance. Suddenly leaping forward, gun arm extended full in front of himself like a swordsman, Chase shot the major in the mouth, then jumped to the side, reaiming at the captain.

Who stared with disbelief as his comrade slowly fell, hands to his face, then jerked once on the floor and was still. Terrified now, cold sober, a sudden white froth of sweat appearing in his wiry hair, the captain gaped at Chase and dropped to his knees. “Mercy!” he cried.

“Get up. I have use for you alive.”

But the captain merely knelt there, clasping his hands, staring at Chase with full expectation of death. He had too little English, obviously, not much more than that ironic mercy; wherever could he have learned such a word?

In a hurry, Chase at last lifted his self-imposed ban and spoke in Swahili. “You will live if you do what I say. Get on your feet; go over there; stand facing that wall.”

The captain, as astounded at hearing Swahili as if Chase had performed a Biblical miracle, scrambled to his feet, saying, “Yes, sir, yes, sir, I’ll do what you say,” in his own slurry rural version of the language. He retreated to the side wall and jittered there, the white foam of sweat sudsing in his hair and running in droplets down over his collar.

Chase found a total of four handguns on the two dead bodies. Returning the .25 to its forearm holster, he chose a Browning .38 revolver to carry. “All right, Captain,” he said. “Now we go to work.”

It was important that Juba and the others not be found yet, but fortunately in this building disposal of bodies was not a problem. Chase made the captain strip the dead men of their uniform coats, which bore their rank and symbols of office, and hang them with the other coats in the closet. Then he had him carry the major while Chase himself carried the thinner lighter Juba down through the empty midnight corridors—Chase knew where the sentries were and how to go around them—to the concrete-floored room at the back where bodies were placed prior to removal. There were only two corpses here at the moment; a slow night.

Juba and the major were dumped beside the first two. Then Chase said, “Give me your coat, Captain.”

“Oh, sir,” the captain said. “I did what you wished. Let me go home now. Far away from here, not even Uganda. Near Adi, sir,” he said, naming a Zairian town just a few miles from both the Ugandan and Sudanese borders. “I go there, sir, I never come back.”

“Give me your coat.”

“All my family is there, sir. I go live with them, I never bother you again, sir.”

In the end, Chase had to strip the coat off the body himself.

There were a few papers he could use from his own office in the Bureau building, a few weapons, nothing much. He sat at his desk a moment, looking around the barren room—he hadn’t come here often, preferring his sunnier happier office in the Parliament Buildings—and reflected that this part of his life was over. Just in time, he had made his preparations for the future. On the other hand, the preparations themselves seemed to have hastened his departure.

Oh, well. In the world of the living, only Idi Amin and Patricia Kamin knew there was so much as a shadow over his head. His papers would still give him safe-conduct for some time to come, and his orders would still be obeyed. Leaving his office, he walked downstairs to the duty room, where he said to the duty officer, “Give me an arrest form.”

“Yes, Captain Chase.”

Chase filled out the form, naming Patricia Kamin as the person to be arrested, and giving both her home and Sir Denis Lambsmith’s hotel room as possible locations where she might be found. In the appropriate block he wrote “Charge Not Specified.” Under Authority he printed “IAD,” which the duty officer would know stood for Idi Amin Dada. And under Date of Implementation he put not the usual “Immediate” but “Night, 27 May 1977.” Meaning tomorrow night, Friday, after the coffee caper had been successfully pulled off. Finally, he wrote the word “Jinja,” meaning she would not be brought here, where she might be able to contact friends in the Bureau to rescue her, but to Jinja Barracks, where she was unknown.

Returning the form, Chase said, “You see the authority.”

“Oh, yes, Captain Chase.”

“And the place.”

“Jinja; yes, sir.”

“And the date of implementation.”

“Yes, sir. Tomorrow night.”

“We must keep this quiet until then. We don’t want to scare our bird away.”

Laughing, the duty officer said, “No, Captain, we don’t.”

“There’s one thing more,” Chase said.

The duty officer waited, alert.

“This is not something to be written. This is from the President himself.” Chase tapped the form with a fingertip. “Give her the VIP treatment.”