Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

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

  “Where is this train?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Of course.”

  “This is Ugandan coffee.”

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

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

  “Frost hit the crop.”

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

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

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

  “The train never reaches Jinja,” Chase said.

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

  “You steal it.”

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

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

  “Clerks. Accountants. Drivers. Warehousemen.”

  “Frank Lanigan.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chase smiled. “Money.”

  “Doesn’t Idi Amin pay you well?”

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

  “Ah.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “An uncomfortable position.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “The train runs in three months.”

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

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

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

  3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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