Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Explain yourself.” Lew had no interest in chitchat.

  “Balim sent me word. I put on this uniform and came down to get you out.” Then Chase looked more closely at Lew, frowning at his eyes. “You haven’t hurt anybody, have you?”

  Lew laughed at him.

  15

  When the second call came, at four-fifteen in the morning, Ellen and Young Mr. Balim—whom she now called Bathar—were playing Parcheesi at the elder Balim’s desk. Bathar, having just rolled doubles twice in a row, had captured two of Ellen’s pieces, and she, very involved in the game, said, “I need some good news now.” And the phone rang.

  Bathar sat smiling fondly at her as she picked up the receiver and listened to the conservation. It was Baron Chase again, the same man who had called the first time, when Ellen had listened to Balim describe the problem with a wonderful slippery economy. This call, the conversation was even shorter.

  “Package recovered,” Chase said.

  “Any damage?”

  Ellen stopped breathing, waiting for the answer.

  “Not to the package.” That had been said with some sort of inexplicable bitter twist. But then, more normally, Chase said, “I’ll ship it back to you in the morning.”

  “Very good. Your help is appreciated.”

  In the room, Bathar said, “You’re smiling.”

  Ellen hung up while the two men were saying their farewells. “He’s all right,” she said.

  “I could tell.”

  “He’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Bathar got to his feet. “Shall I drive you home?”

  “Don’t you want to finish the game?”

  “No.” Bathar seemed amused by something. “I don’t think I was going to win, anyway.”

  She was so absorbed in the idea of Lew that it wasn’t until the next day that she caught his meaning.

  The sky was heavy with clouds in the morning, great dirty pillows and blankets piled up and falling about, some moored in their places while, above or below, thinner layers scudded along in full sail.

  Frank picked her up at the house—she’d slept fitfully, awakened early, breakfasted on crackers and Coke—and drove her out to the airport. He seemed bad-tempered this morning, but she hardly noticed; she was just grateful he wasn’t making any of his heavy-handed passes.

  As they turned in at the airport entrance, he finally said something that attracted her attention by making the reason for his sulkiness clear. “You and Young Mr. Balim have a good time last night?”

  Oh, for Heaven’s sake. Laughing at him, treating him like a pet, some shambling Saint Bernard dog, she said, “Wonderful. The positions he knows.”

  “Very funny,” Frank said, and drop-kicked the Land-Rover into a parking space, where he beat it to death with his elbows.

  A private charter plane was to bring Lew to Kisumu from Entebbe, but of course communication at these small airports was minimal at best, so there was no telling when he’d arrive. Ellen paced back and forth in front of the building, looking up at the cloud herds ranging over the sky, and after a few minutes Frank brought her a bottle of White Cap beer.

  “I thought you were mad at me,” she said.

  “I am.” But a self-conscious grin lurked behind his crossness. “But I figured it out,” he said, “and you wouldn’t be screwing anybody while Lew was in a jam.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “Back in nineteen oh five,” Frank said, wiping the bottle mouth on his palm and taking a swig of beer, “the British provincial commissioner banned women from living in Kisumu.”

  “Why?”

  “They had too many plagues here already.”

  “I see.”

  He laughed heartily, delighted with his sally. Then, having apparently evened some sort of score and satisfied himself, he said, “No, but that’s just about right. This whole place used to be swamp before the British cleared it. And the gulf is so long and narrow, there isn’t much water circulation in from the main body of the lake, so what you had here was stagnant water plus swamps. So that meant malaria, dysentery, blackwater fever, bubonic plague—”

  “Lovely,” she said.

  “Sleeping sickness used to wipe out a lot of them,” Frank said, with some evidence of survivor’s satisfaction. “And when the British were here, it seemed like thinking about the diseases was sometimes as bad as catching them. They had plenty of suicides, people who couldn’t take the suspense anymore, wondering which sickness would get them. That’s why for a while they banned women.”

  “They should have banned everybody.”

  “They almost did. One of the provincial commissioners here then, a guy named John Ainsworth, he said, ‘Kisumu is not a place for a melancholy man.’”

  “Did he say who it was for?”

  “Jokers and jollies, I guess. Same as today.”

  “Jolly Rogers, you mean.”

  “That, too. Is this our plane?”

  It came in from the north, a twin-engine Cessna inching along under the clouds like a fly walking on a ceiling. The breeze at ground level, damp and warm, came out of the west over the lake, so the small plane turned away to its left before reaching them and spiraled down some invisible banister in the sky, touching the ground far away at the eastern end of the runway.

  Ellen and Frank walked out across the field, the dead grass crackling under their feet. The plane approached, throttling back; it passed them, went on to the other end of the runway, turned off onto the taxiway, and slowly trundled back, wing tips gently bouncing. On both doors was a stylized drawing of a leaping impala and the name “Uganda Skytours.”

  “There he is!” Ellen pointed at Lew, identifiable in the copilot’s seat. He and the pilot were the only ones aboard. Ellen waved, then felt silly about it, then waved again, defiantly.

  Both men climbed down from the plane once it had come to a stop. The pilot was middle-aged and white and very worried-looking. He carried a manila envelope.

  Lew looked a mess. His clothes were torn and filthy, and his face showed recent bruises and cuts that had been given no more than hasty first aid. His look was drawn, as though he hadn’t slept much, but more than that, he looked as though he were thinking hard about something, like an inventor just before the breakthrough.

  Ellen went to him, feeling oddly awkward, as though they were strangers. Touching his arm, she said, “Lew?”

  He looked at her from miles away, then grinned and said, “I am in Heaven.” But the light touch was forced.

  So was hers. “Welcome to cloud nine,” she said.

  He gazed at her as though his mind had gone blank, then abruptly pulled her close, wrapping his arms tightly around her, bending her back, his face pushed into the angle of her throat, the lines of his body pressed against her. “Jesus Christ,” he said, his lips moving against her skin, “but you feel good.”

  “Ahhh,” she said, closing her eyes, going limp, feeling him hold her. “So do you, so do you, so do you.”

  The fretful pilot said, “Frank Lanigan?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Envelope for you. For somebody named Balim.” He had an American accent.

  “Right.”

  “I have to get back,” the pilot said. “I can’t be—My wife is—I want to beat the rains if I can.”

  “Have a good flight,” Frank told him.

  Lew finally released Ellen and, one arm still around her waist, turned to the pilot, saying, “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure. I needed the work.”

  “You ought to get out of there,” Lew said.

  The pilot ducked his head, like someone who is used to being beaten. Gesturing almost with hatred at the plane, he said, “That’s all I’ve got. Things will get better. And I keep her gassed up and ready to go.”

  “Sure,” Lew said.

  Startled, the pilot looked skyward. “The rain!” he said, as Ellen felt a fat drop of water hit her arm. “Good-bye!” the pilot cried, scurrying b
ack to his plane. “Good-bye!”

  Frank, holding the manila envelope, said, “Glad you got back, Lew.”

  “Me, too. I didn’t like it there.”

  “Come on,” Frank said. “It’s gonna rain like shit in a minute.”

  They walked back across the field, which now lay dry and expectant, strangely gleaming with pearl-gray light, awaiting its lover, the rain. Lew walked in the middle, the others unconsciously guarding him, protecting him. Frank said, “I’m sorry I sent you there. You know?”

  “I don’t blame you,” Lew told him. His arm around Ellen’s waist was nervously fidgeting. “I really don’t. You didn’t bring me all this way to lose me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The car’s gone,” Lew said. “So’s the camera. Chase says forget them. I got my own stuff back, though.”

  “Balim’ll cope,” Frank said. “Are there any pictures in the camera?”

  “No. I didn’t get that far before they grabbed me.”

  Ellen said, “What happened? What went wrong?”

  “A few years ago I worked for an army in the Sudan, backed by Libya. I quit, and they put my name on some enemies’ list. Libya and Uganda are very tight these days, so on the Ugandan border they’ve got Libya’s lists.”

  “Christ on a crutch,” Frank said. “You go along and go along, and all of a sudden your past comes up and kicks you in the nuts.”

  The storm broke just before they reached the house. Before, there had been the occasional lone fat drop on the windshield, but all at once it seemed there was no windshield at all, just a massive waterfall, and they were behind it.

  Or inside it. With the abruptness of a bucket’s being upended, the world was suddenly nothing but falling water, splashing, ricocheting, thundering, drenching everything in sight. “Good Lord!” Ellen cried, her voice lost in the barrage. The long rains had arrived.

  But Frank could be heard, storm or no storm. “Shit!” he yelled, flinging the wheel back and forth as though trying to shake the rain off the car. “Goddam son of a bitch!” he shouted, as the Land-Rover slued and slid forward into the unknown; not a thing could be seen through that streaming windshield. “You could have waited an hour, you filthy bastard!” he brayed at the sky, shaking his fist, and stuck his head out into the storm so he could see something of where they were going. And, “You’re here!” he roared at them a few seconds later, as the Land-Rover sideswiped a parked Datsun and came to a stop in front of the house. Frank’s head, out in the rain for half a minute, looked like something found four hundred years later in a sunken Spanish galleon.

  “Come in for a minute!” Ellen shouted, not wanting him at all but thinking she should be polite.

  He shook his head, spraying them with water. “I’m going home! And get drunk!”

  Lew waved his hand at Frank and clambered out of the Land-Rover. Ellen followed, stepping directly into a lukewarm shower with the taps turned on too full. She ran through it, drenched to the skin before she’d taken a step, and tumbled with Lew into the house.

  Standing in the living room, the roar of the rain all around them, they struggled with their sopping clothes, peeling the layers off their rubbery skin, just throwing the soaked stuff onto the floor. Ellen looked at Lew, and his tanned flesh was pitted and scarred all over, as though he’d been rolling in gravel. “Lew! What happened? What is that?”

  He looked down at himself with apparent dislike. “Bites,” he said. “I think I got rid of them all, but I’ll keep washing.”

  “Got rid of what?”

  “Lice. Ellen,” he said with great weariness, “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Fine. Fine. What I think we ought to do is borrow Frank’s suggestion and get drunk.”

  “Maybe so.”

  But the house was almost as wet as the outer world, and it took awhile to make a nest for themselves. Open windows had to be shut. Lew found a length of rope and rigged it up in the living room while Ellen dragged the pile of clothing into the bathroom and wrung everything out. Then, with the laundry hung and their bodies scrubbed dry—using every towel in the house—and wearing dry clothes, they shut themselves in the kitchen, and Ellen turned on the stove burners to bake away some of the humidity. Then at last, with the drumfire of rain held safely at bay, with the small blue rings of gas flame, even this minimal rusty kitchen became comfortable and homelike.

  Then Lew talked. It wasn’t true that he didn’t want to talk about what had happened, it was that he didn’t want to be questioned about it. He needed it to come out at its own pace, and with his editing. Ellen made scrambled eggs and toast, which they washed down with beer, and he told her some of what the State Research Bureau was like. She tried to maintain a blank alert expression, because she saw that every time she reacted, with horror or pity or revulsion, he backed away from telling her any more. But she was given enough to have a clear picture of the place.

  As for his getting out, starting as an escape and ending as a kind of rescue, he seemed more reticent. It was clear that along the way he had injured, probably killed, one or more people, but he never made that part explicit, and when she asked him what the result of it would be, he dismissed it with quick contempt, saying, “Chase’ll deal with that. He’ll invent something. The truth doesn’t mean anything there.”

  After a while they stopped talking and merely sat together at the kitchen table, Lew brooding, Ellen watching him. She had never in her life been so acutely aware of another person. She knew how much comfort he needed, and how unready he was to accept it, so she merely watched him and waited.

  After a while, he said, “I’ll tell you one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  His expression was grim; his eyes gazed away at something she couldn’t see. “There’s more to it than coffee,” he said. “There has to be.”

  PART TWO

  16

  Lew had experienced African rainy seasons before; but to have gone through them was not the same as getting used to them. You didn’t ever get used to them.

  He was supposed to fly with Balim to Nairobi to meet some Kenyan coffee growers on some sort of business. The weather had not changed—water and mildew were spreading like a curse from God—but when Ellen phoned the airport control tower that morning, they told her takeoffs and landings were possible at both Kisumu and Nairobi, and that the cloud cover was so low they should be able to fly above it the whole way. So Lew phoned Balim with that information, and he said they would go ahead.

  They drove from the house directly to the airport, where Balim had been delivered by his son. In the damp empty waiting room Balim looked eager but just a bit apprehensive. He was dressed for the weather in a hugely voluminous black raincoat, which made him look like a beach ball in mourning. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t pleasant to fly in such weather, but oh, you know, the highway would be much much worse. Very dangerous.”

  “We’ll be careful,” Ellen promised.

  “Bring back my father, Ellen,” Young Mr. Balim said. “He’s the only one who knows what we’re all doing.”

  They got very wet crossing the field to the plane, which a sopping employee of Balim’s was untying from its mooring ropes. Because Balim was a bit too chubby to be comfortable in the rear seats, Lew went back there while Balim sat beside Ellen. The interior of the plane became steamy at once, smelling unpleasantly of wet clothing. To Lew, the little windshield wiper swiping back and forth against the glass in front of Ellen’s face was thoroughly inadequate for the job; it gave her a clear space the size and shape of a lady’s fan to look through, which in any event kept covering over again with streams of water as they taxied to the end of the runway.

  Balim was the sort who chattered to distract himself from his nervousness. While they waited out at the end of the runway, he told them about his first flight ever, which had been from Kampala to London, by way of Cairo and Rome, a trip lasting more than two days. It had been 1938, just before the outbreak of war, and
he had been fourteen years of age and on his way back to school.

  Ellen asked, “What school?”

  “Eton.”

  “You went to Eton? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

  But Balim was unfailingly gracious, even when struggling not to show that he was frightened. “I’m rather surprised at it myself,” he said. “I had hoped to go on to Cambridge, but the war changed things.”

  Lew, intrigued, said, “What was your subject?”

  “History. Asian history, primarily. Unfortunately, mostly from the English point of view.”

  Ellen said, “You and Frank have something in common, then.”

  “Oh, we have rare old arguments. History, after all, is nothing but interpretation.”

  “I have clearance,” Ellen said, meaning the other conversation she was listening to, in her earphones.

  While Balim several times patted his seat belt to be sure it was still in place, and started some rambling panicky sentence about having visited Cambridge once before the war and having been impressed by the trees, Ellen accelerated and the little twin-engine plane first rolled then scampered down the rain-slick runway, propellers chopping up the raindrops and throwing out behind them a wake of fine silver mist.

  Then the plane lifted, as though it had taken a sudden quick ingulp of breath, and in the next second they were a flying thing, inches from the ground, then feet, then yards, then bearing no relationship to the earth at all.

  The rain and their weight made the little plane fight hard for altitude, struggling up through the downpour, poking into the dirty clouds, then being engulfed in gray dimness, water streaming everywhere, the plane bucking in the weird air currents inside the clouds. Then all at once they burst through into sunlight so bright and clean and astonishing that all three of them cried out in wonder. “Ah!” said Ellen, and “Jesus!” said Lew, and “Oh, my Lord!” said Balim. The sun.

  Seen from above, the clouds were clean, a great soft white comforter spread over the king-size bed of the world. The sky had the utter mile-after-mile clarity of a September blue. And the sun was a great golden round smiling king of creation, happy to see them.