The Seersucker Whipsaw

by Ross Thomas

  The trouble came when the roving bands of political hooligans—of all parties—decided to expand their operations. Devised as a form of patronage that offered a few shillings a day and the opportunity to be a general nuisance, the hooliganism broadened into highwaymanship. No longer content with heckling the opposition speakers and harassing their audiences, the gangs started throwing blockades across main roads and robbing the passengers of private autos and mammy wagons.

  Chief Akomolo was the first Albertian leader to crack down. He ordered Acting-Captain Oslako to stop the banditry. The job kept the Captain busy. His force was limited and the hooligans had fast transport. They would hit an intersection of highways at six o’clock in the morning. Seven hours later, three hundred miles away, and out of the Captain’s jurisdiction, they would be busy robbing somebody else. Oslako and his men managed to capture a few hooligans. Even more important, or useful, they managed to kill some in the process. The Old Boy network among the British civil servants got cranked up again and both the northern and eastern regions announced their determination to eliminate the highwaymen. After the police in those regions caught and killed a few, the robberies stopped.

  Captain Oslako dropped by to see me one afternoon during either the fourth or fifth week of the campaign. It was just after the last of the road robberies. I was sitting on the porch, drinking a glass of instant iced tea, and sniffing the honeysuckle. Shartelle and Jenaro were out on a grass roots swing and I had stayed behind to okay copy on the weekly party paper that was published either on Thursday or Friday. It depended on the whim of the printer. I also had to file press releases every morning and night and make sure that the buttons, fans and credit cardholders fell into the proper hands. Things had gone smoothly enough. Smooth for Albertia. A plane load of buttons had been forced down in Accra and the Ghanaian military government impounded them on the theory that they were part of a plot by Nkrumah to regain power. The buttons probably are still in Accra, rusting away.

  Everybody had buttons by then. Alhaji Sir Alakada Mejara Fulawa’s were white with blue lettering and read “HAJ.” Dr. Kensington O. Kologo, from the east, had smaller ones that read “KOK” for his initials. Ours were the biggest of all, a good two-and-a-half inches in diameter, with white backgrounds and red letters that formed the “I GO AKO” slogan plus the party symbol of a crossed hoe and rake. Shartelle described them as “damned aggressive buttons.” I just thought they were the biggest.

  “You look relaxed, Mr. Upshaw,” Captain Oslako said after he took a chair next to the honeysuckle and accepted a cold bottle of beer.

  “It won’t last,” I said.

  “I suppose not. Those hooligans were causing no end of bother. I think we’ve put a stop to it.” He had a nice BBC accent.

  “Killing a few seemed to help.”

  “As Captain Cheatwood was fond of saying, ‘My men enjoy their work.’”

  “He seemed to know his job,” I said.

  “Did you know him well?”

  “No. I met him once. He paid a social call.”

  “He was an interesting man. He had fantastic sources of information.”

  “He said he’d been here a long time.”

  Captain Oslako crossed his lean legs. He was wearing a starched khaki uniform and white wool socks with the clodhopper shoes. The socks looked hot and I wondered if they itched.

  “You have no idea why he came to call on you that night—the night he was killed?”

  “None. Are you sure that he was calling on us?”

  “He was in your driveway.”

  “Maybe he was forced into it from the road.”

  “So he could be dispatched in a more secluded spot?”

  “Maybe.”

  “His widow said that he was merely out for a walk,” Oslako said. A remnant of my newspaper training made me wince mentally at his use of the word “widow.” It recalled a comment by my first city editor about an obituary I had written: “Mr. Upshaw, Mr. Jones has been dead only a few hours. Mrs. Jones will be a widow for perhaps years to come. Let us be charitable and refer to her as his wife, not as his widow.”

  “Then I suppose he was,” I said. “Just out for a walk.”

  “Some have advanced the theory that his murder inspired the hooligans to turn to highway robbery; that the murder gave license to lawlessness.”

  “What do you think?”

  “To be frank, I don’t know. I discount the theory of simple robbery. Captain Cheatwood was too good a policeman to let a common cutpurse get the better of him.”

  “That’s my impression.”

  “It may have been inspired by a personal grudge. Or because he knew something that someone thought he shouldn’t.”

  “And someone killed him to shut him up?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You seem to have an ample supply of theories, Captain.”

  Oslako sighed. “Many theories, but few facts. I even thought that he may have been killed to prevent him from giving you information which might affect the outcome of the campaign. But you seem unable to substantiate that.”

  “He had no information, as far as I know.”

  “Did you talk about the campaign at all?”

  “Yes. We talked about the arrangements for the counting of the ballots, the poll-watching, and so forth. Just the mechanics.”

  Oslako rose. “Thank you for the beer, Mr. Upshaw. I take it Mr. Shartelle is out of the city?”

  “Yes. He’s making a tour with Chief Jenaro.”

  We said goodbye and Captain Oslako left. His former superior had trained him well. I wondered if we should have told him about the letter-like trenches that Cheatwood had scrawled in the dirt. I decided to talk to Shartelle about it when he got back.

  One of the purposes of the Shartelle-Jenaro tour was to check up on the revival meetings which were then in full progress and which featured the two defectors who were now safely back in the Akomolo fold. I had written each a slightly-embellished speech that revealed in sordid detail how they had been lured into the camps of the opposition with promises of money and orgiastic goings-on. According to my speeches, the one who went north got the most money and the fanciest parties. They had lasted for three days and three nights and I described them in prurient, lip-smacking detail. When a twinge of conscience, slight but still noticeable, caused me to suggest to Shartelle that I might stick just a trifle more closely to the facts, he had grinned his wicked grin and replied: “We ain’t in the truth business, Petey.”

  The defector who had gone east was a lawyer and turned out to be something of a ham. We decided he should go on last. He gave a quiet, calm presentation, made even more chilling by the factual manner in which he recounted the experiences I had dressed up for him.

  When the pair switched back to Akomolo’s party, they had stirred up interest among the voters. We started to receive reports that the camp meetings were drawing larger crowds than either Dekko or Akomolo. Shartelle and Jenaro had gone to see for themselves.

  Anne was busy with some school functions the evening that Captain Oslako came to call, so I had dinner alone. After dinner I went back out on the porch for coffee and brandy and to sniff the honeysuckle some more. While I sat there the talking drums began their nightly commercial. I could recognize the one they played that night. It was “I Go Ako.” The following night the drums were again scheduled to attack the vile vapors in the sky. We had heard that one of the skywriting pilots had been stoned at an airport when he landed for fuel.

  I had one more press statement to write that evening. It was in praise of Chief Akomolo’s efforts as mediator in the week-long strike of the Federated Association of Albertian Night Soil Collectors. It was a release whose writing I found easy to postpone.

  Jenaro had finagled the deal with the general secretary of the Albertian Trade Union Congress. I never asked what the payoff was and he never told me. As a boon, however, the general secretary had thrown in the support of the National Union of Unemployed Wor
kers, an organization of growing membership which was useful to issue statements, swell crowds, provide sympathetic pickets, and make a lot of noise.

  The strike had gone on for a week throughout the country and the residents of the larger towns, especially Ubondo, Barkandu and the capital cities of the northern and eastern regions, grew restive and demanded a quick settlement. The stench in the areas of Ubondo which had no sewers made me sympathize with the residents.

  The night soil collectors were demanding a shilling a day raise; those who drove the honey wagons were asking for one and six because of their higher professional status. At the proper time, Chief Akomolo stepped forward and offered to mediate the dispute. After a twelve-hour bargaining session (starting at six in the evening and continuing until six in the morning, a dramatic touch which I supplied) the Chief had emerged from behind the traditional closed doors to announce an agreement: The night soil collectors were to get an increase of nine pence a day; the honey wagon drivers would get a shilling. The price of night soil collecting would go up 8.3 per cent. I held out for the odd percentage because it was harder for the customer to figure and it also sounded as if the formula had been reached after careful collective bargaining conducted in the best of faith.

  “The Chief came out of that night soil mess smelling like a rose,” Shartelle had commented. He was back from his tour the day after Captain Oslako visited me. For the rest of the campaign, Shartelle spent most of his nights at the Widow Claude’s. During the days we counseled with Chiefs Dekko and Akomolo by telephone. The helicopters had been painted a bright silver with “AKO” in big blue letters on one and “DEKKO” in red letters on the other.

  Both helicopter pilots seemed to be without nerves. If they spotted a group of five persons, they set the machines down so that the candidates could hop out and shake hands. Dekko was making up to twenty-five speeches a day. He started at five in the morning and quit at midnight. Dekko toured the surrounding area by car or even bicycle when it got too dark for Veale, the South African, to fly.

  Chief Akomolo, older and tiring more easily, kept to a schedule that called for a minimum of a dozen speeches a day, countless visits to homes, plus dinners, banquets, and palm- wine drinking bouts. He concentrated on the northern and eastern regions, leaving the west mostly to Dekko. The reports that came back to Jenaro and Diokadu grew encouraging, even optimistic. Jenaro sliced them in half, but the number of green flags on the wall map continued to grow.

  The day before the three major candidates were to appear at a mass rally and speech marathon at the Ubondo race track, we received a call from Jack Woodring of the United States Information Service.

  “This is the clean-cut American lad from the USIS.”

  “We don’t need any,” I said.

  “You’re going to have visitors.”

  “Who?”

  “The honorable Felix Kramer, United States Consul General, and the only slightly less honorable Clarence Coit, his Political Affairs Officer. You met him.”

  “I remember.”

  “They’ll arrive this afternoon, but they won’t stay for dinner. That’s my chore. Would you and Clint like to come? We’re having hash.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “Anything I can’t stand is a poor excuse. We’ll make it another time.”

  “Thanks, Jack.”

  He said I was welcome and hung up. I turned to Shartelle. “Felix Kramer is dropping by this afternoon with Coit.”

  “Up for the rally?”

  “I’d assume so.”

  Shartelle and I had spent the morning alone trying to figure out whether the campaign had peaked. We decided that it hadn’t, that it was still gathering momentum, but so were the campaigns of the opposition. We decided we had a fifty- fifty chance and that we were pulling away. We ate lunch alone. Anne was teaching school; Claude was running her liquor business. We had hamburgers made of coarsely- ground beef, broiled rare, on buns that Anne had baked herself. The hamburgers were topped off with thick slices of onion, lettuce and mayonnaise. We drank German beer. There were also French fried potatoes.

  “Very good lunch,” Shartelle told Samuel.

  “Madams teach me, Sah. They very good teacher.” He disappeared back into his kitchen which Anne and the Widow Claude had had sterilized. Samuel had grumbled at first, but the meals improved. He quickly learned some basic dishes that he prepared skillfully. He also mixed a betterthan-average martini.

  “The poor bastard’s ruined,” I told Shartelle.

  “Why?”

  “None of the British will hire him after having worked for an American. We spoil them.”

  “There’s going to be more Americans here than British pretty soon. Old Samuel will make out. Did you pay them this month?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, now, Pete, I sort of went around and gave them each an extra couple of pounds, figuring it’s Pig’s money and all.”

  “Sort of, huh? That’s nice. I raised them all two pounds.”

  “I’d say we’ve settled the servant problem in pretty fair style.”

  We were having coffee when Kramer’s Cadillac rolled up to the front, an American flag streaming from a fender staff. Kramer got out first. He was in his late forties, perhaps even fifty, and he was slightly tubby and didn’t seem to give a damn about it one way or another. He had dark brown eyes, his head was smoothly bald and tan on top, and the hair around the sides was cut short and speckled with gray. Coit followed Kramer out of the car.

  Shartelle and I were on the porch. “If you folks haven’t had lunch, I believe we could give you a couple of hamburgers and a bottle of beer that would make you feel plain homesick. I’m Clint Shartelle, Mr. Kramer, and this is Pete Upshaw. Hi, Mr. Coit.”

  Kramer, wearing a light blue suit with black shoes, mounted the steps of the porch and shook hands with us. “I despise myself for it, Mr. Shartelle, but we didn’t have lunch and I can’t resist a hamburger.” We shook hands with Coit and he said he’d have a hamburger, too. I yelled for Samuel and gave him the order. He brought more coffee for Shartelle and me while the hamburgers broiled. He brought cold beer for Coit and Kramer.

  “I’m sorry I missed you in Barkandu, gentlemen,” Kramer said, “but I’m glad you had the chance to talk with Clarence here.”

  “We had a nice talk,” Shartelle said. “You up for the rally, Mr. Kramer?”

  “That’s part of it. We’re on a pre-election swing, really. So I may as well ask you what you think—or what you predict.”

  “Akomolo by a landslide.”

  “That your honest or professional opinion?” Coit asked.

  “I’d hate to separate the two.”

  “I’ve heard that Kologo’s been making gains,” Coit said.

  “Now you must have been talking to those young kids from the States he’s got running his campaign over there. They’re from that new agency in Philadelphia. You recollect its name, Pete?”

  “Communications, Inc. I never heard of it before.”

  “You ever hear of it, Mr. Coit?”

  “Yes, indeed,” the man from the CIA said. “I believe it’s gained quite a reputation for itself in the short time it’s been organized.”

  “Funny I never heard of it,” Shartelle said.

  “What effect do you think the skywriting is having, Mr. Shartelle?” Kramer asked.

  “Why, I think it’s doing real fine for the opposition. It’s hurting the hell out of us, of course, and I just wish we’d thought of it first.”

  “I’ve heard that it’s backfiring.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Out in the bush they’re saying that it causes sterility and impotency—the smoke from the skywriting.”

  “I never,” Shartelle said and clucked his tongue some.

  “Does Kologo have a blimp?” I asked.

  Kramer nodded.

  “Goodyear blimp?”

  He nodded again.

  “They had all the ideas, didn’t they,
Clint?” I said.

  “Seems that way.”

  Samuel brought in the hamburgers on a tray and served two each to Kramer and Coit. They ate hungrily while I fetched them another beer.

  “Wonder how Kologo’s outfit got that blimp over here?” I asked. I didn’t care who answered.

  “I understand that they dismantled it, flew it over in sections by plane, and reassembled it,” Kramer said. I wondered if he knew what Coit’s job really was.

  “Must have cost a heap of money,” Shartelle said.

  Coit took a swallow of his beer and said: “Goodyear plans to use it again on a goodwill tour throughout Africa and Europe. They’ve been thinking about it for some time.”

  “I thought the goverment had an embargo on the export of helium.”

  “It’s been lifted,” Coit said.

  “Generally,” I asked, “or just in this specific case?”

  Coit didn’t squirm, but he didn’t look comfortable. “For this particular case, I believe.”

  “Well, it sure is a good idea,” Shartelle said. “That old blimp floating up there with Kologo painted on the sides and a streamer a couple of blocks long with his name on it trailing out behind. I bet it’s a fine sight to see. Get a lot of votes, too.”

  Kramer swallowed a belch. “I don’t know, Mr. Shartelle. I’d say your more orthodox methods seem to work better. We’ve been getting some protests at the Consulate about the blimp. It seems that out in the bush for some reason they believe it’s an atomic bomb—or that it carries one. I don’t know how these rumors get started, but even the French have made a discreet inquiry about it.”

  Coit changed the subject. “You are convinced then that it’s Akomolo in a sweep? He has been getting around, I’ll grant you that. Both he and Dekko.”

  “Let’s just say we’re confident. By the way, Mr. Kramer, I suppose you heard about the murder of Captain Cheat- wood?”

  “Yes. I was sorry to hear about it. I’d met him and he seemed highly competent.”

  “Got stabbed to death right out on our driveway,” Shartelle said, looking at Coit.