Neither of them was immediately ready for sleep. With the room illuminated only faintly by the bathroom light through the slightly open door, they sat side by side on the bed, backs against the wall, sipping the wine, and she asked him about his work. He told her about Grossbarger and the Brazilians. He told her about his confusing conversations with Baron Chase. He told her more things and then more, and was surprised to hear himself, but still he went on answering her questions, sipping the wine. And when the wine was finished, she said, “Now you sleep.”
“Oh, yes.” He lay flat on the bed, then rolled half over to kiss the inside of her thigh. “Thank you, Patricia,” he said.
“My pleasure.” She ruffled his thin white hair, and very soon he fell asleep.
She was still awake an hour later, when the scratching sounded at the door. He heard it, in the deepest part of his sleeping brain, but didn’t wake up. Nor did he do anything but shift position slightly when she slid out of bed, crossed the room naked, unlocked the door, and opened it for Idi Amin to enter.
He was beaming, grinning from ear to ear. Nodding over at the sleeping man, he whispered in Swahili, “He talked a lot. That’s good.”
“I enjoyed it,” she whispered.
Amin snuffed the musky air. “Lot of fucking going on in here.”
“You know me,” she whispered, grinning.
“Get ready for it,” he said.
She knelt on the floor, legs spread, head and shoulders down, round smooth rump high. Amin opened his trousers and knelt between her ankles and shoved himself into her. Clamping his hands on her buttocks, he moved her back and forth like a machine he was operating. He grunted from time to time, and she moaned into the carpet.
On the bed, Sir Denis slept, frowning, uncomfortable. He dreamed of large dogs eating dark chunks of meat among boulders. They frightened him, and yet he was above them, merely an observer.
In the morning, he awoke alone.
14
The stench never got better. Lew had expected to grow used to it, but every intake of breath brought the same revolting shock, those fumes spreading through the brain with a message of despair: No one in such a place as this should ever hope for comfort or happiness again.
And yet, many of the men in here—perhaps even a majority—seemed not to have abandoned hope entirely. Low-voiced conversations took place; there was the intermittent singing of hymns; now and again there was even an instant of wry laughter. Whenever a man, driven by the imperatives of his body, was forced to use the trash barrel, he invariably apologized for the addition he was now making to the general stink. “We are mostly Christians here,” Bishop Kibudu said by way of explanation, and he meant people who were active and fervent in their religion.
That Idi Amin’s repression, which began as tyranny’s usual weapon of terror against political dissent, ended finally as massive religious persecution was partly an accident of history, partly a result of Amin’s own ignorance, as the Bishop explained. Amin had been put into power in 1971 with the help of the British and the Israelis, neither of whom had any idea what sort of monster they were spawning. All the British knew was that Amin’s predecessor, Milton Obote, appeared to be leaning too far to the left; the Marxist rather than the Labour left. And all the Israelis cared about was the rebellion then going on in southern Sudan, the nation lying between Egypt and Uganda; with a friendly government in Uganda, Israel could give covert assistance to the Sudanese rebellion, thus tying up thousands of Egyptian troops who might otherwise be turned against Israel.
Amin had always been a soldier, caring only for that, with no active interest in religion. He came from the Muslim north of Uganda but had never claimed to be a Muslim. In talking with ministers and priests he had expressed interest in Christianity but had never followed through. When he visited Israel shortly after taking power, he had many nice things to say about Judaism.
But that was also the trip when he asked the Israelis to help him attack the Tanzanian port city of Tanga in order to give his land-locked country a corridor to the Indian Ocean. He also asked for a lot of money, but was vague about how he intended to spend it. And in that same period he asked the British to give him a fleet of jet bombers, explaining he wanted to use them to bomb South Africa.
Just as the British and the Israelis were both saying no to Amin—a bit belatedly—he happened to meet Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, the fool who runs Libya. Gaddafi, a Marxist Muslim, explained to Amin that the Israelis were really Jews, who are no good, and that the British were capitalists, and therefore also no good. He further explained that Libya had millions of dollars in oil wealth, to be spent to advance the cause of radical Islamic Marxism around the world. “But that’s me!” Amin told him, suddenly discovering his deep religious feelings, and he went on to explain to Gaddafi that Uganda was a Muslim nation with only a splinter of Christians left, and that he—Idi Amin Dada himself—had set as his primary task the complete Islamization of his country.
It’s a mark of Gaddafi’s grip on reality that he believed this guff. Uganda in fact is the most thoroughly Christianized nation in Africa, having been the target of European missionaries for nearly a hundred years. In 1972, when Amin was telling Gaddafi that the country was ninety-five percent Muslim and only five percent Christian, it was in truth eighty-five percent Christian, and six percent Muslim. (The final nine percent still clung to the old tribal animist creeds; a favorite rock or tree.)
Gaddafi began to give Idi Amin money; pots of money. And weapons. And a country house for himself and his family in Libya. And whatever else Amin wanted.
And Amin, for his part, began to give Gaddafi results. He turned against Britain and Israel, saying “Hitler was right about the Jews, because the Israelis are not working in the interest of the people of the world, and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas in the soil of Germany.” He banned twenty-nine Christian sects. Entire congregations were arrested, imprisoned, beaten, sometimes murdered en masse. The Salvation Army was banned. White ministers were usually left alone, but black ministers were tortured and killed. Of the five hundred thousand people eventually murdered by Amin’s government with the help of Gaddafi’s money, over half went to their deaths believing themselves to be Christian martyrs.
Bishop Kibudu explained some of this to Lew, as the hours went on. In a place of such horror, calm conversation seemed to help, to keep the brain from exploding. The bishop described the church he and his parishioners had built at Bugembe, a suburb of Jinja. In return, Lew described Alaska to the bishop, who had never been to the Western Hemisphere. The bishop told church anecdotes involving weddings, the visits of foreign clergymen, comical mix-ups at picnics. Lew told cleaned-up mercenary anecdotes: travel on rafts on the Congo River, rifles shipped with the wrong-caliber bullets. And every second of every minute of every hour was intolerable.
And of course there were the lice. The tunnel was filled with lice, living on the wounded bodies, inside the filthy clothing. Lew felt them crawl on him, and at first he fought back, but they came in the thousands, inside his pants, inside his shirt. He scratched when they bit him, but whenever he put his hand under his shirt it was as though his skin were moving. With all his will, he tried to pretend they weren’t there.
From time to time the door was opened, the glaring fluorescent light was turned on, and a minidrama was played out. Three times, additional men were pushed in, always bleeding from fresh cuts and scrapes and puncture wounds. Twice, certain men’s names were called and they went out. Those times, the stillness in the fetid tunnel took on a new quality, a communal gathering together, because those men were going to their death.
“John Emiru. Nahum Tomugwang. Godfrey Okulut.”
Each man, tattered, encrusted with blood, struggled to his feet and climbed over all the other legs to the doorway. Each man was handcuffed, his hands in front of his body. Quiet good-byes were said by the men still seated on the tunnel floor. The handcuffed men nodded, keeping their heads down.
The door shut. The light went out. Bishop Kibudu said, “They will soon see God.”
“There are many ways to die here,” said a man across the way. “They don’t like to use bullets, that’s too expensive. They may strangle you with wire. They may cut you through with swords. They may beat you with tire irons.”
“Sledgehammers,” said another man. “When they take out the men one at a time, it’s for the sledgehammer.”
Lew scratched his bites and licked his dry lips. “Why one at a time?”
“Well, two at first,” said the man. He had the manner of a fussy teacher, perhaps at the high-school level. “Two men are taken out. One is handed a sledgehammer and told if he will beat the other man to death he will be set free. So he does it, and, then another man is brought out and given the sledgehammer and told he will be set free if he kills the second man. And so on.”
“It is Satan’s work,” Bishop Kibudu said. “To try to make the sin of murder a man’s final act before he goes to God’s judgment. These people have given themselves over to the Prince of Darkness.”
Each time the door opened, someone called to the guard to ask what time it was. The stupidity of that, here where time no longer mattered, finally prompted Lew to comment to the bishop, “He sounds as though he’s got an appointment somewhere.”
“It’s for the history,” the bishop said.
“History?”
“This will come to an end. There will be survivors. Each one of us records in his mind as much as he can of what goes on here. At two in the morning of March twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-seven, this person and that person were taken away. When this is over, the survivors will write down what they know. They shall bear witness for the rest of us.”
“And if there are no survivors?”
“God survives. God’s history lasts. God’s justice is final.”
The light came on, the door opened, and the soldier was there, with two other soldiers, both carrying rifles with bayonets attached.
“What time is it?”
“Three-thirty in the morning. Lewis Brady.”
“God be with you,” the bishop said.
It is sometimes possible to defeat handcuffs. If, when the cuffs are being attached, one tenses one’s forearms and thumbs and fingers just so, the wrists expand slightly and the cuffs are likely to be attached one notch looser than otherwise. That’s the first step.
It seemed to Lew the first step had worked; when he relaxed, the cuffs didn’t feel particularly tight.
The soldiers with the bayoneted rifles apparently spoke no English. They jabbered together in some other tongue—not Swahili—and directed Lew with gestures and shoves. They would be going back the way he had come.
Along the way, on the right, was an open door leading to a fairly large concrete cell. The three men who had been taken away an hour ago were in there, on their hands and knees, scrubbing the cell with their cuffs still on. At first it looked as though a fifty-gallon drum of chocolate syrup had burst in there, but then Lew realized it was blood. Thick on the walls, lying in three-inch-deep puddles on the floor. A warm sick fragrance flowed out the open door. The kneeling men were themselves now covered with the blood as they soaked rags in it and squeezed out the rags over buckets. Lew staggered, feeling nausea and vertigo, but the soldiers shoved him on, and the vision of that cell was left behind.
Lew continued to totter and to slump, giving the impression that he was very weak, and while slumped he greased his hands with the sweat from his chest and neck.
To remove the handcuff, you fold the base of the thumb in as tight to the palm of your hand as you can get it, at the same time folding the little finger in from the other side. You push the cuff upward along the hand, screwing it back and forth. You spit on your hand to increase the lubrication. There’s a spot where the bone at the base of the thumb and the bottom knuckle of the little finger conspire against you, but you keep twisting, feeling the flesh tear, feeling the sting of sweat and saliva in new cuts. But once you’re past that point, the handcuff is off.
At the foot of a flight of stairs, with the soldiers behind him, Lew fell forward onto the steps. Head lowered, looking past his body, he could see their feet as they came up to chivvy him onward. It was the left cuff that was loose, so when he sprang up turning from the steps he lashed his right hand around, the dangled cuff smashing into one soldier’s face. The man screamed, dropping the rifle, falling back against the wall, and Lew kicked out at the other soldier’s groin. But number two was already backpedaling, aiming the rifle. He seemed uncertain what to do, had probably been ordered to bring Lew along without too much violence; they still wanted to question him about the CIA.
Before the soldier could make a decision, Lew jumped him, lunging forward, then ducked to the side as the man brandished his rifle. Lew’s right arm thrust forward beside the rifle, the loose cuff sliding onto the bayonet, scraping along it to the hilt like a perfect throw in a ring-toss game. Lew flung his arm upward, and the rifle twisted out of the soldier’s hand and fell to the ground. Lew kicked him in the face as he reached for the weapon, grabbed it himself, turned, and as the other soldier came groggily away from the wall Lew ran him through with the bayonet. He heard the blade grate and break against the concrete wall.
The other soldier tried to run, back down the corridor. Lew caught him in three steps, folded his arms around the man’s head, and snapped his neck. He let the body drop, then looked from one soldier to the other. Both dead. Good.
When in action, when plying his trade, there was a thing that took over in Lew, a welding of mind and body as complete and as efficient as that in a concert pianist on a stage or a basketball player on the court. At other times he might have opinions about war, about destruction, about killing, but when he was in it, the opinions ceased to exist. He was a craftsman of death, and he was good at his craft. The rifles were their only weapons. In their pockets were some Ugandan shillings and some matches, all of which he took. Also the key to the handcuffs.
Without the cuffs, carrying the rifle with the unbroken bayonet, still shoeless, Lew hurried up the stairs.
At the top, the corridor turned to the right. Looking around the corner, Lew saw a guard seated on a bench, gazing at a comic book, apparently half-asleep. He was possibly thirty feet away.
A shot would attract attention, even in here. Lew detached the bayonet, leaned the rifle against the wall, and held the bayonet against his right forearm, its hilt in the cupped palm of his hand. Then, his manner confident and decisive, he strode around the corner and directly toward the guard.
He had thought it out this way: either his presence in this building as a prisoner was generally known, or it was not. Did every paltry soldier know every detail of the events here? There was a good chance that a white skin and a self-confident manner would carry the day.
They did. The guard looked up, mildly curious, and then mildly surprised to see the strange white face, and then horribly astonished when Lew stabbed him through the throat.
Back to pick up the rifle. With rifle in his left hand and the bayonet in his right—blade cleaned on the dead guard’s sleeve—he hurried forward, retracing his steps from yesterday afternoon.
Two men in uniform came out of a room ahead of him, failed to see him, and strolled away down the corridor, one of them lighting a cigarette for the other. Lew killed them both, one with the bayonet and the other with karate, then went back to the room they’d come out of. It was a plain small office, empty although the light had been left on. Bound copies of The Economist filled a low bookcase under the windows; before Amin, the State Research Bureau had really been a statistical section.
The casement window wouldn’t open all the way until he broke the mechanism. Then he could look down and see that he was on the first floor, but with a fairly long ten-foot drop to packed brown earth. Floodlights glared out there, but they were concentrated on the parking areas and the barbed-wire fence, leaving the building walls in semidarkness.
Up the hill, through the trees, shone the lights of some sort of villa.
Lew dropped the rifle first, then jumped, carrying the bayonet. He lost it when he landed and rolled, but found both weapons and moved around the building, staying close to the wall.
Barbed-wire fence. A guarded front gate. But parked in front of the building was a black Mercedes-Benz, and pacing impatiently beside it was a tall white man in Ugandan Army uniform. A white man in Ugandan Army uniform!
Lew was too cheered by his good luck to question it. In that uniform, in that car, with his white face, surely he could get through the gate and away.
Again the rifle was left behind, this time with the bayonet beside it: he wanted no blood on that uniform. He moved through the shadows, crouching, stopping, easing on. The man paced back and forth, his range from just ahead of the Mercedes to two paces behind it. That was where Lew would get him; behind the car.
The man completed a circuit. He turned. Lew came up like a panther out of a tree, his arms reaching for the man’s head, closing, twisting.
“Lew Brady!”
His victim shouted it, and that half-strangled cry saved the man’s life. An inch from death, he hung there from Lew’s arms while Lew listened to the echo of his own name.
Still holding on, feeling the man taut but not struggling in his grip, Lew eased himself back, breathed deeply, moved slowly out of that killing mode in which he’d been operating. It was hard not to kill this man; it was very hard. Still holding him, still wanting to finish the move, he whispered in his ear, “Who are you?”
“Baron Chase! I’m here to get you out!”
Baron Chase. Frank had talked about him; Balim had mentioned him. His arm aching from the incomplete action, Lew released the man and stepped back as Chase turned, holding his throat, leaning back against the rear fender of the Mercedes for support. “My God,” he said, his voice very hoarse. “You’re damn good.”
Kahawa Page 14
