Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  Sir Denis astonished himself by answering, “He said the most extraordinary thing to me.” Until this moment, he had believed he would never tell that to anyone, but somehow the anecdote belonged to Emil Grossbarger and Sir Denis found himself obediently delivering it, like a dog bringing his master the morning paper.

  Grossbarger at once understood that this was the gravy. Eyes quickening, mouth moving, he said, “Oh, yes. Vat did he say?”

  “I had allowed my irritation to show. Because of the sudden change in the terms. And he said, through his translator, ‘My cock is bigger than yours.’”

  Grossbarger roared with laughter, punching his chair arms with his big fists, ignoring the diners who glanced reprovingly from other tables. “Oh, my goodness!” he cried. “Oh, how awful zat must have been for you!”

  “It was, rather.”

  “I sink I love ziss fellow,” Grossbarger said, nodding, his mind working inside the joke.

  “Whom do you love?” Neudorf asked, returning, lowering himself with obvious pain into his chair.

  “Idi Amin,” Grossbarger told him.

  “Ah, yes, the madman of Kampala.” Neudorf turned his sly gaze to Sir Denis, saying, “We’re thinking of declaring him an Aryan. There are one or two problems, of course.”

  The sole arrived then, and Sir Denis was amused at how naturally the waiter rested his tray on Grossbarger’s walker. Discussion slowed while the food was eaten, but midway through, Neudorf had to leave again and Grossbarger said, “You met a man named Baron Chase?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Describe him.”

  “Canadian. Ugandan citizenship, I believe. A nasty piece of work, I suspect. Very close to Amin.”

  “He has been in touch viss me.” Grossbarger watched the last of the second bottle of Moselle poured by the waiter into the three glasses, then went on, “Indirectly. He suggests zat ve might make a deal. I do not know vat he can possibly have in mind, but ven you return you vill contact him on my behalf.”

  Technically, Sir Denis could only represent the International Coffee Board in this transaction, but since the Board’s only purpose was to assure a reasonable level of honesty and consistency in these large-scale coffee deals, it was not at all unusual for one side or the other to employ him at some particularly delicate stage of the operation. He possessed four qualities unlikely to be found anywhere else: he was knowledgeable, trustworthy, dispassionate, and discreet.

  “I’ll be happy to,” he said. “Is it a bribe, do you think? To assure a smoothness of the flow?”

  But Grossbarger shook his head, poking at his remaining fish. “It doesn’t have zat feeling. Ve are already paying chai to a number of minor officials zere. Zat’s vat zey call it in east Africa, you know.”

  “Chai?”

  “It is Swahili for ‘tea.’ I had my research people look it up.”

  “A bribe is tea,” Sir Denis said, frowning. “I don’t follow the derivation.”

  “Ven you vant somesing from ze government,” Grossbarger explained, “you invite ze official concerned to join you in ze shop across ze street from ze government building for a cup of tea vile you discuss ze situation.”

  “Chai,” Neudorf said, seating himself again at the table. “You two are planning a bribe. There’ll be none of that in the Fourth Reich.”

  Grossbarger raised his glass in cheerful mockery. “To ze honest and simple Aryan,” he said. “And to ze blitzkrieg of ze dreaming old men.”

  9

  The shower stall was a concrete-block closet painted a blurry pink, with a mildewed white plastic curtain and a gray cement floor featuring the rusty beauty spot of the drain. Light oozed fitfully through a fixed Lucite panel in the ceiling. The water, which came from a concrete cistern on the roof and was heated by the sun, was a lukewarm trickle in which Lew found it almost impossible to rinse. Elephant Soap was the brand, and it lathered wonderfully, which was a pity.

  He finally gave up, stepped out to the other part of the bathroom, and finished with a cloth dipped in the cold water of the sink. Then, shaved and clean and shivering, he padded wet and naked to the kitchen, where he found Ellen, dressed in tan slacks and a Chorus Line T-shirt, drinking bottled Coke with a small dapper young Asian in a Mondrian silk shirt. The Asian stood, smiling at Lew’s nakedness, his black-olive eyes dancing with mischief. He said, “And you will be Lew Brady.”

  “I not only will be,” Lew said, shaking water drops off his fingertips in case this was someone he should shake hands with, “I already am.”

  “Coke?” asked Ellen, also amused. “This is Mr. Balim’s son.”

  “Bathar Balim, at your service.” He was a few years younger than Lew, and he bowed to emphasize the difference. “I am here with the car,” he said.

  “Yes,” Lew told Ellen, then said to Bathar Balim, “I’m not quite ready.”

  “No hurry.”

  The refrigerator was small and very rusty, both within and without. Ellen took a Coke from it—it seemed to be filled to capacity with nothing but bottles of Coca-Cola and White Cap beer—opened it, and handed it to Lew, who pointed at the elaborate watch on Bathar’s slender wrist, saying, “Could you tell me the time? Our watches stopped.”

  “Seven minutes past one. Do you need the date?”

  “No, thanks.” And not the barometric pressure, either. Lew carried the Coke and the information to the bedroom, where he set his own watch and put on his clothes.

  They had awakened several times, separately or together, in the filtered daylight of the bedroom, but none of the attempts at consciousness had taken until at last Ellen had pounded his hip with her fist, crying out, “We have to get up!”

  So they’d gotten up. In the kitchen—small, cheaply outfitted, with a light-green tile floor—there had been a note on the Formica-and-chrome table: “Lew. Phone 40126 when you’re ready. Frank.”

  The phone had eventually been found in the living room—rickety red Danish sofa, massive Victorian armchair, a white-elephant sale of mismatched tables and lamps—and when Lew had dialed the number, a crisp male voice had answered in Swahili.

  “Frank Lanigan,” Lew had said.

  “Mr. Brady?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Isaac Otera, Mr. Balim’s assistant.”

  “Hello.”

  “Shall I send a car for you now?”

  “Give us half an hour.”

  “Of course.”

  But half an hour hadn’t been quite long enough, not with the soap problem in the shower. Dressed, Lew filled his pockets: wallet, Zippo lighter, three-inch spring-action knife, sunglasses, leather folder containing passport and driver’s licenses and inoculation record and (false) Interpol membership card, Swiss Army knife, ball-point pen, pocket flashlight with a twenty-dollar bill wrapped around the two triple-A batteries. Finishing the Coke, he walked back to the kitchen, where Ellen was laughing warmly at something Bathar Balim had said. The Asian turned his smiling bland face when Lew entered. “All ready?”

  “All ready.”

  Lew put the empty bottle on the table, but Ellen at once picked it up, saying, “Bathar says this is our house now.” The small garbage can had a foot pedal-operated lid, which squeaked when she opened it to throw the bottle away.

  “Home sweet home,” Bathar said, smiling at Lew.

  Lew bared his teeth back. “I’ll have to put up my hunting prints,” he said.

  Outside the house, the humid heat was a surprise. A white haze veiled the sky but did nothing to cut the glare of the sun.

  The house, a low yellow pillbox on a dirt street lined with similar structures, was surrounded by hard-baked dry earth in which only a few sawtooth weeds could grow. This section wasn’t a neighborhood but an encampment; there was no sense anywhere that anyone thought of this place as home. The two tiny black children playing with toy airplanes in the dirt several houses away seemed to be merely idling away the time until the moving van should arrive.

  The car was
a white Nissan safari van, rather cleaner than Frank’s Land-Rover. Ellen rode beside Bathar, Lew behind her. Bathar was as fast a driver as Frank, but much smoother. He seemed to be saying, If anyone could lead a camel through the eye of a needle, it would be me. Lew kept track of the turnings, surprised that his mind contained absolutely no memory of the initial drive here with Frank.

  At Balim’s blue headquarters, Bathar smiled at Ellen and said, “Nice to meet you both.”

  “You, too,” said Lew.

  Smiling, Bathar drove away, as Frank came out the front door, grinning like a Derby winner and saying, “Had your beauty sleep?”

  Lew was feeling generally irritable. Trying for the light touch, he said, “Don’t we look it?”

  “She does. Come on inside.”

  Inside was a cluttered warehouse, piled with cartons, crates, mounds of machinery parts. Because the windows were so dirty and the stacks of goods so messily high, the light was very dim, which gave a first false impression that it must be cooler here than in the glare outside. In fact, it was just as humid and possibly more hot and certainly stuffier. A few blacks, seated on the floor, playing some sort of card game, moved with the slow economy appropriate to the climate.

  But not Frank. He strode through it all as though the place were in the Arctic. “The offices are back here.”

  Frank opened the door and led them into another world, a much more European or American world, with neat office furniture, a Kenya Railways calendar on the wall beside a color photograph of President Jomo Kenyatta, and a crisply proper black man at the desk wearing a dark-gray suit, white shirt, narrow light-gray tie.

  Frank made the introductions: “Isaac Otera, Ellen Gillespie, Lew Brady.”

  “We met on the phone,” Lew said, shaking the man’s hand.

  Isaac Otera looked puzzled for just a second, then vaguely disapproving. “I have never heard that locution before,” he said pedantically. “Is it an Americanism?”

  Surprised, Lew said, “I guess it is.”

  Frank said, “Isaac’ll fill you in. Ellen, come along.”

  “Where?” Lew immediately asked, and just as immediately regretted it. He avoided Ellen’s eyes.

  “To talk with her boss,” Frank said. To Ellen he said, “You’ll like it in here. Air conditioning.”

  Frank and Ellen disappeared through the inner doorway, and Isaac gestured to the wooden chair beside his desk. “Sit down.”

  Lew sat, and Isaac opened his lower-right-hand desk drawer, taking from it a camera—a Cavalier SLR II, made in East Germany—putting it on the desk, saying, “Frank says you are familiar with cameras.”

  “I can take a picture. I don’t win prizes.”

  “Good.” From the same drawer came a white legal-size envelope. Isaac shook its contents out onto the desktop: a set of keys, several papers. Pushing the items one at a time toward Lew, he said, “There’s a yellow Honda Civic parked in the back, rented from Hertz. Keys, rental contract. You have an international driver’s license?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. This is your confirmed reservation for three nights starting tonight at the International Hotel in Kampala.”

  “I’m going to Kampala?”

  “No.”

  From the drawer Isaac now took a road map and opened it to the section he wanted, then placed it on the desk in front of Lew. It was a map of Kenya, but the left quarter—the part Isaac was showing him—also included some of Lake Victoria and some of Uganda and even, at the lower left corner, some of Tanzania. Kenya’s share of the lake frontage was very minor indeed.

  “We are here,” Isaac said, touching with his square-nailed fingertip the farthest eastern point on the lake. Not even the lake itself, but an extension from it called Winam Gulf.

  Reading the name Kisumu below the fingertip, Lew nodded and said, “Okay.”

  The finger moved up across the top of the lake. “Jinja,” Isaac said.

  “Wait a second.”

  Lew leaned over the map to familiarize himself with at least the basic layout. From Kisumu it was probably seventy to eighty miles north along the shore to the Uganda border at the northeast corner of the lake. Then, turning west and running along the northern coast of the lake, it was perhaps another seventy miles to Jinja, which Isaac had started to point at, and fifty miles beyond that to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, on the shore at the very farthest left extreme of the map. “Okay,” Lew said.

  Isaac’s finger again touched Jinja. “Until nineteen thirty-one,” he said, “the railway from the coast terminated here. Then the bridge was built over the Nile.”

  Surprised, Lew said, “The Nile?”

  “This is the Nile.” Isaac’s finger slid along a slender blue line snaking northward from Jinja, flanked by the red lines of highways, the yellow lines of minor roads, the black lines of railways. “This is where it starts from the lake.”

  “The source of the Nile.” Lew found himself grinning. In his years in Africa he’d been all around this territory, but never exactly here. And while he didn’t have Frank’s love of history, he was at least aware of the search for the source of the Nile as having been the great Quest of the nineteenth century, civilized man’s last major trek into the unknown before the turn to space. Explorer after explorer had died or returned broken with disease in the effort to trace the Nile to its source. And now it was merely a spot on a map, called Jinja, with a railroad.

  Apparently Isaac was following Lew’s train of thought. Drily he said, “We always knew where it was.”

  “You probably should have kept the secret.”

  “We tried to.” But pedantry took over again, and Isaac went back to his earlier, humorless manner, saying, “In any event, when the railway crossed the Nile in nineteen thirty-one, it made obsolete some equipment that had been used there earlier when Jinja was the end of the line. Some of that equipment is still in existence. We have a report on it, but so far we have no photos or reliable eyewitnesses.”

  “A report? From somebody in Uganda?”

  Isaac frowned. He placed his palm on the map, fingers splayed, and looked earnestly at Lew. “Forgive me if I am blunt, Mr. Brady,” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I am not a thief,” Isaac said. “Nor is Mr. Balim. If the purpose of this exercise were to steal cotton from Tanzania or copper from Zaire, I would have nothing to do with it.”

  Lew watched him carefully. “What is it, then?”

  “A blow against Idi Amin.” A sudden grating quality rasped in Isaac’s voice as he spoke the name, and a hardness came into his face, as though he combined in himself both the flint and the steel.

  Lew smiled, suddenly feeling at home. Appearances had been wrong. This man wasn’t an office clerk, he was a partisan!

  Misunderstanding the smile, Isaac said, “Not everyone is motivated merely by money.”

  “Oh, I know,” Lew agreed. “Believe me, I know that. Frank just led me to—”

  “Frank does what he does for his own reasons.”

  “He led me to believe those were everybody’s reasons.”

  Isaac shrugged. “He can’t be expected to describe what he doesn’t understand.”

  “True.”

  “But what about you? I’d assumed you were like Frank.”

  “I can always make a living,” Lew told him. “I’d rather do something interesting.”

  Isaac gave him a long scrutiny. Lew sat unmoving under that gaze, at attention, like a dog being patted by his master’s friend. Finally Isaac smiled and said, “I’m surprised Frank had the wit to select you.” Unfolding a piece of poor-quality, thick typewriter paper and handing it over, he said, “Read this.”

  Lew looked at words printed with ball-point pen in a large and somewhat naive hand. Without introduction, without signature, it read:

  East African Railways Maintenance Depot Number 4—Iganga

  An engine shed and turntable. Watering facilities used to draw water up from the gorge (Thrusto
n Bay) via an old petrol engine-driven pump (Coventry Climax). Entire facility choked with vegetation.

  Turntable constructed in the form of a wooden platform on A-shape steel girder frame rotating in a single-groove track on large caster-type wheels. Turned manually.

  20’ track beyond turntable toward gorge, safety buffer at end still in place.

  Original connecting section to main line removed World War Two for use elsewhere on line, due to shortage of matériel. Spur track still in place beginning 12’ from main line. Invisible from main line due to vegetation.

  Ample supplies of rail (but no sleepers) piled up beside engine shed.

  Old service road from highway still passable for 4-wheel-drive vehicles. Runs to lake.

  Lew finished, nodded, and put the sheet of paper on the desk. “That’s the report from inside Uganda.”

  “Part of it. Do read it again—I’d rather you didn’t take it with you.”

  Smiling at all the implications in that, Lew obediently picked the paper up and read it again.

  He was partway through the third reading when the inner door opened and Ellen and Frank came out, Ellen laughing at something. “I certainly won’t,” she said to whoever was still inside—presumably Balim—and came toward Lew, bright-eyed, cheerful, saying, “Hi. How you doing?”

  “Going for a ride in a car-car,” he told her. “How about you?”

  “Going for a ride in a plane-plane.”

  “Up up and away,” Frank said, with his carnivore’s grin.

  “Have fun,” Lew told them. The smile made his jaw ache.

  They left, and Isaac said mildly, “You’re wrinkling that paper.”

  The sun was bright on the hood of the little yellow car. Lew drove slowly, squinting behind his sunglasses, keeping an eye on the odometer. Eleven kilometers since the turnoff at Iganga, and counting.

  The trip so far had been uneventful. He’d started from Kisumu at two-thirty, after lunch with Isaac Otera, during which Isaac had told him several Idi Amin horror stories, including (with some reluctance) the details of his own flight from the country. It was clear to Lew by now that Frank was merely being his usual cynical self when he’d claimed this was no more than a simple civilian robbery. Balim and Otera were both Ugandan exiles, driven from their homes by Amin. Otera was in fact a former government official. What was being planned here was every bit as political as an IRA bank robbery in Belfast.