Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  Balim watched him, bright-eyed, and softly said, “Are you volunteering, Isaac?”

  “One cannot, of course, volunteer for what is already one’s job.” The tiny smile again came and went. “But there is another point to consider.”

  Balim waited, nodding slightly, hands folded on his plump lap.

  “I still have contacts within Uganda,” Isaac said. A sudden harshness always came into his voice when he spoke of his native land, the only indication of the complexity of the emotions he forced himself to conceal. “The economy is collapsing,” he went on. “It might be fair to say it has already collapsed. The expulsion of the Asians had a lot to do with that, of course—”

  “Then there is justice, after all,” Balim murmured.

  “But there’s also,” Isaac said, “the financial ignorance of Amin and his Nubians. They’re doing worse than living on capital; they’re living on the bank itself.”

  “Nicely put.”

  “Coffee is their life preserver.” Isaac leaned forward, his stifled agitation causing him to ruffle the folders on his lap, so they were no longer perfectly aligned. “The people starve, but Amin buys whisky and cars and new uniforms, and coffee pays for it.”

  “No doubt.”

  “I am not a hero,” Isaac said, the tension fading from his face. He sat back, realigned the folders, seemed to sigh through all his body. “I am not the lone man with a rifle,” he said, looking down at his dark hands on the pale folders, “who slips across the border and hunts down the tyrant. To avenge his—his family.”

  “Isaac,” Balim said softly, leaning forward as though he might touch Isaac’s hand.

  “I am a bureaucrat,” Isaac said, not looking up. “I am a paper shuffler.”

  “Isaac, you are a man. Every man has his purpose.”

  Now Isaac did look up. The eyes in his dark face were always a bit red around the pupils, but now they were more so. “Every sack of coffee that is stolen from Amin,” he said, “shortens his time. The more coffee is stolen and smuggled out of the country, the sooner he’ll run out of money to keep his Nubians drunk and himself in new medals. I hope that train carries every coffee bean from the entire crop.”

  “May God hear your words,” Balim said, gently smiling.

  “You’ll need me,” Isaac told him. “Not, of course, to hold up the train.”

  “Of course.”

  “Shall I open a file?”

  “Yes.”

  “What shall I label it?’

  Balim thought. “‘Coffee Break,’” he said. “Tell Frank to come in now.”

  Isaac smiled and got to his feet. At the door, holding the stack of manila folders, he turned back and said, “Thank you, Mr. Balim.”

  “Thank you, Isaac.”

  Isaac went out and Frank came in, boots thudding the floor, khaki whipcord trousers rustling, pressed cotton shirt neatly buttoned and sleeves rolled up to his biceps. “’Morning, Mr. Balim,” he said, and dropped backward into the armchair.

  “My first impression of your friends,” Balim said, “was a good one.”

  “I wanted to talk about that,” Frank said. “About the way we handle Lew Brady.”

  “Handle?”

  “He wasn’t the first fella I called,” Frank said. “To tell the truth, he wasn’t even the tenth.”

  “Oh, no?”

  Frank scratched his head with a rasping sound. “I don’t know what’s happening to everybody. People I know, they’re all dead or disappeared or retired. Retired—can you figure that?”

  “People get older,” Balim suggested.

  “Those guys? Dan Davis? Rusty Kirsch? Bruno Mannfelder?” Shaking his head, Frank said, “More and more, they’re all getting like Roger Timmins.”

  The reference to their previous pilot made Balim’s eyebrows rise. He said, “How did Mr. Timmins take it?”

  “Badly. Complained. Anyway, the point is, I finally got Lew, and at least he isn’t over the hill or gone to drink or retired or dead.”

  “But?”

  “But we gotta handle him,” Frank said. “The thing is, Lew’s what you call an idealist.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “He don’t think he is,” Frank explained. “He thinks he’s a mercenary, like anybody else. But when the chips are down, he likes the idea he’s doing some good in this world.”

  “I see.”

  “So when you talk to him,” Frank suggested, “try to push the political side a little bit, see what I mean? How what we’re really doing is giving Amin one in the eye. He’ll go for that.”

  “Ah,” said Balim. His smile turned sadly downward. “I’ll tell you the best thing, Frank. You have your friend Lew talk to Isaac.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Absolutely,” Balim said. It was the saddest smile in the world. “Every man has his purpose.”

  8

  In London, Sir Denis stayed at the Inn On the Park, which actually stood a short block away from Hyde Park, though it was true that, while eating breakfast by the window in his high-floor room, he could look over the tops of the intervening buildings to see the broad green vista of the park, with the Serpentine, the equestrians along Rotten Row, the short fat Arab women in their black shrouds of cheap cloth and their black plastic domino masks, and the stripped corpse-like mammoth logs of the ancient elms stricken by blight and cut down in a panicky effort to save the remaining healthy trees.

  After breakfast, Sir Denis walked through the Grosvenor domain, past the American Embassy at Grosvenor Square, and over to the Coffee Board headquarters on Warren Street, just south of Oxford Street. The two men he met there were named Bennett and Cleveland, and the discussion centered on the character and prospects of Idi Amin.

  “You’ve seen him,” Bennett said. “What’s your reading?”

  “An erratic man,” Sir Denis said. “I don’t doubt he could be dangerous.”

  “He has already been dangerous,” Cleveland said drily.

  Bennett said, “Did you talk much while you were there with a chap named Onorga?”

  “From the Uganda Coffee Commission,” Sir Denis said. “Yes, he met me at the airport. A dour fellow.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing. He barely opened his mouth.”

  Bennett and Cleveland looked meaningfully at one another. Cleveland said, “Puts paid to Onorga, if you ask me.”

  Sir Denis frowned from one to the other, then concentrated on Bennett, the more serious of the two. “What’s wrong?”

  “Onorga was our man on the scene.”

  Sir Denis was astonished. “But he didn’t say a word!”

  “Afraid to,” Cleveland suggested. “Knew they were onto him.”

  Sir Denis said, “Why do you think there’s trouble?”

  “He hasn’t radioed,” Bennett said, “since you left Kampala.”

  Sir Denis knew that somewhere within this building was assembled a highly complex and expensive communications system, but he had never concerned himself with its function. It was true that coffee was grown on almost every continent and consumed in every nation, and it was also true that a vast amount of money changed hands over coffee. (Last year the United States alone had paid over two and a half billion dollars for the coffee it had imported.)

  The International Coffee Board controlled not the product itself but its movement through the commodity markets in the financial centers of the world. Sir Denis was a part of the overt expression of that control. He had always been aware that a covert section also existed, but he preferred to know little or nothing about it and to believe that under normal circumstances it was neither needed nor employed.

  But here it was, and gloomy little Mr. Onorga was a part of it. Sir Denis said, “You think he was fired?”

  “We think he’s dead,” Bennett said.

  “If he’s lucky,” Cleveland added.

  “Dead?”

  Sir Denis kept waiting for them to laugh, to say they’d been pulling his leg
. But Bennett merely shrugged and said, “He was a spy, if you like.”

  “An industrial spy, then, at the very worst,” Sir Denis said, finding himself becoming indignant. “And not even that, if he was merely reporting to the Board. You don’t kill a man for a thing like that.”

  “We don’t,” Cleveland agreed. “Idi Amin does.”

  “Have there been inquiries?”

  “When the archbishop was murdered two months ago,” Bennett said, “there were any number of inquiries. There are still inquiries. The archbishop was rather a more important man—”

  “Prominent,” corrected Cleveland.

  “It’s all the same,” Bennett told him, and turned back to Sir Denis. “The answers to the inquiries about the archbishop have been almost flippant in their disregard for facts. If we were to inquire after Onorga, they’d merely laugh at us.”

  “Poor devil,” Sir Denis said. “No wonder he seemed so morose. There’s no objection, I hope, to my asking after him myself on my return down there? Merely in a friendly way, asking after the fellow I’d met the last time.”

  “You may do,” Cleveland said, “if you’re that keen to waste your time.”

  Bennett said, “Our problem at the moment is, we do need very much to recruit someone else.”

  “Not easy,” Cleveland added, “under the circumstance.”

  “Nor kind to the recruit, either,” Sir Denis pointed out. “Always assuming you’re successful.”

  “If anyone does take on the job—” Bennett started, and Cleveland interpolated, “—which is unlikely.”

  Bennett nodded at him, faintly showing impatience. “Of course,” he said. “But if someone does agree to have a go, he won’t be ignorant of the danger.”

  Cleveland laughed. “Hardly,” he said.

  Bennett leaned closer to Sir Denis. “Did you meet anyone else there? Anyone who might be useful?”

  “I met very few of the locals. Principally Onorga, in fact.”

  Cleveland said, “When you go back, you might just keep an eye out.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Given a head of government as unstable as Idi Amin,” Bennett said, “we would feel very much more content had we a listening post on the ground.”

  “I can see that,” Sir Denis said. “I’ll do what I can.”

  For the rest of the meeting they discussed the changed circumstances of the sale, now that Uganda was demanding a third down rather than a tenth. The Brazilians were suffering but would find the money, and Sir Denis could report that the Grossbarger group had accepted with fairly good grace their own small increase in the required front money.

  “In fact,” Sir Denis said, “I’m having lunch with Emil Grossbarger today.”

  “He’s in London?”

  “Just for a few days, apparently. So far, he doesn’t seem particularly worried about the deal.”

  “Perhaps,” Cleveland said, “he doesn’t yet understand the situation.”

  Emil Grossbarger was a large heavy shambling man of nearly eighty, with long unkempt white hair and big-knuckled hands. Arthritis and old age had conspired against him, so that now he had to move with the aid of a walker, but when seated he looked as powerful as he had always been, his meaty shoulders and barrel chest forming the proper base for his large outthrust head. He had a long pointed nose, deep-set pale-blue eyes that glared through unobtrusive gold-rimmed glasses, and a broad sensuous mouth that mirrored his emotions with fluid constant movement, now laughing, now frowning, now snarling as though to bite.

  They would lunch together at the club they shared, the Special Services, just behind Harrods. The club was open to present and past members of the intelligence services of the NATO countries and their immediate families. Sir Denis, during his Washington stint in World War II, had been a spy for British Intelligence, learning as much as he could about the discrepancies between what the United States told its allies it meant to do and what it actually meant to do. In the same war, Emil Grossbarger had been of fairly high rank in German Military Intelligence, until he became one of the few plotters in the July 1944 attack on Hitler to escape with his life. He’d made it to Switzerland just ahead of the Gestapo, had become a Swiss citizen shortly after the war, had gone to work for a Swiss bank in its security department—counterintelligence, actually, protecting the identities of depositors—and had soon become a financial force himself. Today he could command almost unlimited funds for whatever prospects attracted his attention.

  The Special Services was the only club in the world to which both Sir Denis Lambsmith and Emil Grossbarger were likely to belong. The club’s NATO referent meant that both sides of World War II were unusually well represented among the members present at any one time in the small but neat orange-brick building on Herbert Crescent. The conversations that took place over sole and hock in this dining room, between former enemies, would have raised eyebrows among those who still believe the history of the world is the struggle between good and evil.

  Grossbarger had brought a guest with him, a shrunken old man with whom he had been speaking in German before Sir Denis arrived, apologizing for being late. The walk had taken a bit longer than he’d expected.

  “Sink nossing of it,” Grossbarger ordered him. “All my valks take longer zan expected. Ziss is Reinhard Neudorf, Sir Denis Lambsmitt.”

  Shaking hands, seating himself at the table, unconsciously patting the snowy linen, Sir Denis said, “Neudorf? The name seems familiar.”

  “I was naughty during the war,” the old man said, with an unrepentant sly smile. His English was much better than Grossbarger’s, and he used it in an insinuating way, as though he could be much more unholy in this tongue than in his native German.

  “Nuremberg,” Sir Denis suggested, the memory very hazy.

  “They sentenced me to eight years in prison.”

  “He served sree,” Grossbarger said, his mobile mouth laughing. “Zey needed him, so zey released him.”

  “I am an engineer,” Neudorf said. “I build very good dams, with or without bodies.”

  “An excellent engineer,” Grossbarger insisted, and leaned forward in mock confidentiality to add, “Ve vere just discussing ze Fourth Reich.”

  “Very soon,” Neudorf explained, deadpan, “National Socialism will accomplish its long-awaited return.”

  “Heil whoever,” agreed Grossbarger, “und march. Ze swastika on ze rise!”

  “However,” Neudorf said with a faint shrug, “the time never seems quite perfect.”

  “Ve have very many brilliant soldiers, all around ze world, merely awaiting ze call.” Grossbarger’s eyes flashed; his mouth gobbled at the comedy.

  “Unfortunately, at any given moment,” Neudorf said, “most of them are in hospital.”

  “Und ze rest,” Grossbarger added in satisfaction, fondly patting the walker that stood beside his chair like a misplaced bit of tubular balcony railing, “are like me.”

  “But we haven’t abandoned hope,” Neudorf explained. “For what could be more terrifying and undefeatable than a dedicated band of crippled old men with a dream?”

  Grossbarger laughed so loudly and enthusiastically he nearly toppled off his chair, and had to clutch at the walker for support. Neudorf watched him, smiling faintly, then shook his head and said to Sir Denis, “Please excuse me for one moment.”

  “Certainly.”

  Sir Denis watched Neudorf move away from the table. Apparently he had recently lost a great deal of weight. His clothing hung tent-like on him, and the two main tendons in the back of his neck stood out like iron rods holding up his head.

  Grossbarger had finished laughing, and now he leaned forward again, much more seriously, to say, “I hope you vere not offended.”

  “Not at all,” Sir Denis said, though he wasn’t sure whether the joke had been offensive or not.

  “He is dying,” Grossbarger explained, waving a big gnarled hand after Neudorf. “He likes zese jokes, so I indulge him. And I let it
continue in front of you because you are a man of ze world.”

  An intended compliment, then. Responding to it indirectly, Sir Denis said, “Years ago, in the United States, I was told a bit of American slang. ‘The elevens are up.’ In fact, the American Navy officer who told it to me was referring to President Roosevelt at the time.”

  “Ze eleffens are up?”

  “The tendons at the back of the neck,” Sir Denis explained. “When they stand out like that, the man is dying.”

  Grossbarger looked thoughtful, his mouth chewing the information. “A more cold-blooded phrase zan I would have antizipated from zat nation,” he decided, then shrugged it away. “However, ze characteristic of Reinhard’s illness is such zat he vill frequently be leaving us to enter ze toilet. Ve can discuss business matters during zose intervals.” Turning to the hovering waiter, he said, “I hope you will not be offended if I do not choose one of your no doubt excellent English vines. But I vould prefer a Moselle, ze Bernkasteler Doktor. You know ze one I mean.”

  The waiter acknowledged that he did. He distributed the Xeroxed sheets of today’s menu and left. Grossbarger shook his head at Sir Denis, saying, “One of ze few dry Moselles left. Zey add too much sugar now. For ze American taste, I am afraid. Ze export market.” Fatalistically, he shrugged.

  “I find myself more and more moving to the Italians,” Sir Denis agreed. “Though we have some surprisingly good wines in South America, mostly from Argentina.”

  With another burst of laughter, Grossbarger slapped the table and cried, “Grown by our co-conspirators, of course! I must tell Neudorf!”

  “He’s returning.”

  Grossbarger tapped the side of his nose. “Business later.”

  The next time Neudorf left was between the quiche and the sole. Sir Denis immediately described his experiences in Kampala, and Grossbarger listened intently, asking one or two quick questions. He seemed untroubled by the increased down payment. At the finish he said, “Ze nub of ze ting is Amin himself, of course. I vould like to understand him better.”