Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  What the hell; he was here, and the job was done. Now all he had to do was go back to the engine shed, collect Charlie, and return to the boat. He started down the access road, stowing the cameras away in their canvas bag, and a sudden thought made him stop, lifting his head.

  What if he didn’t go back for Charlie? The son of a bitch would survive—this was his turf—but he’d be out of Frank’s hair for a while, and maybe even permanently. And if he got back without the moped, that’d be a mark against him with Mr. Balim.

  Frank could say he’d looked all over for Charlie, had shouted his name, but Charlie must have been somewhere asleep. Finally, afraid the boatman wouldn’t wait any longer, he’d had to leave. (He would walk the moped the first mile, so the roar of its engine wouldn’t alert Charlie to what was happening.)

  Feeling like a kid playing hooky, excited and guilty and expecting to be caught at any second, Frank continued down the road. After he’d taken a few steps, exhilaration (and bourbon) rose up in him so strongly that he broke into a shambling downhill run.

  It’s a good thing he ran; there was only one moped there, at the start of the path.

  The son of a bitch! The dirty unreliable bastard! Of course he was doing the same thing, and there wasn’t a way on Earth to prove it. Frank could hear no engine sound, so Charlie was walking the moped the first mile, exactly as Frank had planned. If Frank tried to sneak up on him by walking his own moped, he’d never overtake the rat, but if he started his own engine, Charlie would hear it, would immediately start his, and would come tearing back with some innocent bullshit story about flower picking or something.

  It wasn’t fair. “Shit,” Frank said, and started the moped, and bumpity-dumpityed away toward the lake.

  18

  The slide show of Frank’s trip to Uganda took place in a smallish storeroom in Mr. Balim’s second building. A number of sewing machines and shoe cartons and lounging employees having been removed, and a few folding chairs having been introduced, Isaac set up the projector and screen and took charge of the room lights, while Frank ran the show.

  The audience was small and intent. Lew and Ellen and Balim and Young Mr. Balim and Isaac sat watching the screen as Frank flashed slide after slide, describing each picture in turn. Lew and Isaac held pads and pencils and made occasional notes.

  “This is the bay, coming in. Tough to see with the damn rain, but there’s no villages or houses right down by the water. All forest, thick growth.

  “This is the landfill. It’s mud up to your ass. Even if we go in two or three weeks after the rains stop, it’s still gonna be like that. We’ll have to bring enough planks to build a house or we’ll never load the boats.

  “You can see the road is clear. A lot of brush and shit, but we’ll have big trucks.

  “It’s nineteen-point-four miles from lake to depot. I took pictures along the way to show how it was. Maybe too many pictures.”

  Balim: “No, no, Frank, this is very good. We’ll want to see as much as we can, as though we’d been there ourselves.”

  Young Mr. Balim: “As Von Clausewitz said, the map is not the terrain.”

  Lew took his eyes off the screen, turned his head, and gazed at Young Mr. Balim. Von Clausewitz? Young Mr. Balim was smiling at Ellen’s profile. He switched his smile to Lew, so Lew looked back at yet another blown-up slide of a forest trail in a drenching rain.

  “This is about the steepest incline we hit. It never gets worse than maybe one in ten, one in nine. The trucks’ll go down full and come back up empty, so there shouldn’t be any trouble.

  “Okay. Here’s the path in to the depot. This could be a problem. It’ll slow us down if we have to carry all that coffee out from the depot to the road, but you can see what it looks like. We won’t get any trucks in there.”

  Balim: “Couldn’t we clear the trees, make a road?”

  “Clear the trees, sure. But there’s no roadbed there, it’s all erosion and gullies and roots and rocks and more shit than you can think about. You’d have to spend a day in there with a bulldozer.”

  Isaac: “That would leave a very visible scar, even from the air.”

  Lew: “How about a corduroy road? Chop down the trees that have to go, and use the logs for a road surface.”

  “You’d need too many logs. I paced it out, best as I could, and I make it ninety feet from the depot to the road.”

  Lew: “If the footing’s that bad for the trucks, it’ll be even worse for the coolies. Can they carry seventy-pound sacks through there?”

  “Like I said, this is where we got a problem.”

  Young Mr. Balim: “Frank, there must already be a road in to the depot. That’s what the access road was for.”

  “If there ever was, I couldn’t find it. The way I figure, the access road runs up and down the slope, so rain doesn’t hurt it. But the road into the depot ran crosswise on the slope, so over the years the runoff just turned it back into gullies, and trees and brush grew up, and now that road is gone. A tree can grow a lot in twenty years.”

  Ellen (surprising them all): “How about a brush road?”

  Lew (nervous for her): “A what?”

  Ellen: “Taking your idea about the corduroy road, but you’d just use logs to fill the deepest ruts, than lay tree branches and bushes down over the whole thing. Drive a truck back and forth on it, keep laying brush and packing it down, and pretty soon the trucks themselves will tamp it into a road.”

  Balim: “Miss Ellen, have you seen this done?”

  Ellen: “Twice, as a matter of fact. Once in Guatemala, when they were trying to get medical supplies in after an earthquake, and once in Oregon, where a man was building vacation houses on a lake he owned, and he was very short on capital. He built the first houses using the brush road, then put down macadam once they started to sell.”

  Balim: “What do you think, Frank?”

  “I think it’s a terrific idea. Stick around, Ellen.”

  Ellen: “I will.”

  Lew looked at her smiling face, feeling equal portions of love and possessiveness, and then grinned, very happy, when she winked at him.

  Frank went on with the show. “Here’s the depot. You see the rails there, we can use those when we connect to the main line. Building’s intact, very good shape.

  “Here’s Charlie asleep. I couldn’t resist it, just once.”

  Young Mr. Balim: “Charming. The drool, especially.”

  “Spur line. Tracks are rusty but usable. Switch here rusted into place, but it’s the right place. A lucky break. But here’s the turntable, our next problem.”

  Isaac: “It’s angled wrong. Why on Earth did they do that?”

  “Beats me. We’re gonna have to break it loose and line it up with the rest of the track so we can use the extra twenty foot beyond it. As it is, that train’s gonna be so long you’ll be able to kiss the caboose from the main line.”

  Balim: “Speed is everything.”

  “Don’t I know it. Here’s the track going up to the main line. We got a lot of trees to cut down”

  Lew: “More matériel for Ellen’s road.”

  “Check. Here’s where the track stops. You notice you can’t see shit, but the main line’s just the other side of the hedge. And here it is, and now you can’t see the depot.”

  Young Mr. Balim: “You’ll have to cut an awfully big hole in that hedge to get the train through.”

  “We’ll mask it when we’re done. That isn’t one of the problems.”

  Young Mr. Balim: “I am relieved.”

  “Here’s where the access road crosses the track. Up there’s where they nabbed you, Lew.”

  Lew: “We’ll have to put up a plaque.”

  19

  It was with exceedingly mixed emotions that Sir Denis Lambsmith, watching the passengers from the Entebbe-Tripoli-London flight emerge from the Terminal 3 passageway at Heathrow, saw that walking forward beside Baron Chase was Patricia Kamin, beautiful and stylish and utterly at her ease. Ev
en at nine in the morning after an all-night flight, he thought, she was unruffled perfection.

  He was delighted to see her, of course, delighted and astonished—but with Chase? What could be their relationship? Remembering his own three nights with her in Kampala—she had come to him every night, had left him thrilled and satiated, and had always been gone in the morning—he could only suppose her connection with Chase was sexual; but he didn’t want to think that. He remembered that she had been seconded for a while to the Ugandan Embassy in London, so perhaps she was here on official business, and sharing the flight with Chase was mere coincidence. He clung to that shred of possibility as they approached him.

  It was strange, but the white man looked more out of place in London than the black woman did. In Kampala, Chase was appropriate, of a type not unknown in that part of the world, but walking into London with his dark-blue canvas flight bag he looked like some prowling barbarian slipping unsuspected through the city gates. Patricia Kamin, who in Kampala was an exotic touch of sophistication in a pretty but small-time provincial capital, in London was a bird of magnificent plumage in its right setting; she might be this year’s modeling find, or movie star, or diplomat’s wife.

  They both greeted Sir Denis with handshakes—Chase gripping him hard, as though to arrest him, Patricia’s touch light and brief and stirring. Her eyes laughing at him, she said, “So this is how you look in London.”

  “And how you look in London,” he answered. “More beautiful than ever.”

  “Gallantry,” Chase commented without inflection, like a man identifying a kind of tree.

  “You have luggage?”

  “Of course,” Patricia said. “Empty trunks, to carry home full.”

  As they walked toward the baggage area, Chase said, “We can drop Patricia at the hotel.”

  “Delighted.”

  “I’m here on business,” Patricia said, answering his unasked question. With a mock grimace of distaste, she said, “Very boring. But at least there’ll be time for shopping.”

  Perhaps we could go shopping together, Sir Denis wanted to say. The presence of Baron Chase inhibited him.

  While Patricia and Chase waited with the few other milling passengers at the baggage carousel, Sir Denis went out to the car—a black Daimler parked in the Special Arrangements area behind the Annex—and collected the chauffeur to help with Patricia’s putative empty trunks. There turned out to be only two of them, and not so large at that. “You can’t intend much shopping after all,” Sir Denis said.

  “Ah, but I’ll also buy luggage.”

  The gentlemen permitted Patricia to enter the car first, then Sir Denis as host—this being his nation—stood aside for Chase, which put Chase between the other two on the wide soft backseat. Too late, Sir Denis realized he would have preferred the possibility of leg contact with Patricia.

  Up on the M4, heading for London, Patricia explained her mission: the Ugandan Air Force wished to purchase some computer equipment from an American firm, and she had to clear it with the American Embassy in London. “Any purchases of a military nature,” she said, “even indirectly military, have to be approved by that man.”

  “Very powerful man.” A ridiculous twinge of jealousy moved in Sir Denis’s mind: the thought that Patricia was being sent on this mission because she could influence the man at the American Embassy with her sexual favors. To distract himself from that unwelcome—and certainly unworthy—idea, he said, “I thought Uganda and the United States were at odds.”

  “Oh, this is a simple commercial deal,” she said dismissively. “U.S. government permission is really a formality, just to guard against our buying things like atom bombs.”

  “You expect no difficulty, then,” Sir Denis said, happy to have that ungracious suspicion put to rest.

  Which Patricia did, emphatically. “If there were any difficulty in it,” she said, “they wouldn’t send me. I’m just a glorified courier.”

  Sir Denis smiled, extremely happy, then saw Baron Chase looking at him with a crooked grin. Flustered, imagining for just an instant that Chase could read his mind, Sir Denis sat back against the Daimler’s upholstery and permitted the conversation to proceed without him.

  Patricia had to be let off first, of course. Her hotel was small but elegant, on Basil Street in Knightsbridge. “Very convenient to Harrods,” Sir Denis commented, risking another smile, willing himself not to know whether Chase was watching.

  “That’s why I chose it,” Patricia said. Then she stood for a minute on the sidewalk while the chauffeur removed the luggage from the trunk and turned it over to a dark-blue-uniformed bellman who had trotted briskly out of the hotel. Chase was also staying here, but would be going on first to the meeting that had brought him to London.

  While Chase was looking the other way, Patricia mouthed at Sir Denis, “Call me.” He nodded, and his smile this time could have cracked his cheeks.

  After they dropped Patricia off, the Daimler had to maneuver the endless stretch of traffic jam along Knightsbridge to Hyde Park Corner, then rolled through Green Park and past the Queen Victoria Memorial and St. James’s Park along the Mall to the impressive multi-domed sweep of Admiralty Arch. Trafalgar Square was also crowded with the usual black taxis, red double-decker buses, endless scooting little Morris Minis looking like dirty washing machines on wheels; the chauffeur steered them around past the National Gallery, took the left, shot up toward Leicester Square, made another left, and ducked into the underground parking garage beneath one of the new tall office buildings that the British appropriately call office “blocks” and that are making sections of London (or at least so Sir Denis thought) look more like some lesser city—Indianapolis, perhaps, or Montreal.

  There was no conversation in the car after Patricia’s departure, but in the elevator up from the parking sub-basement to the twenty-third floor, Sir Denis said, “You realize, I’ll only be introducing you. I won’t be staying.”

  Baron Chase’s cynical grin flickered again, like phosphorescent fire on a bog. “I know,” he said. “Your skirts will remain clean.”

  “If you like.”

  And in fact it was close enough, Sir Denis had to admit. When he had left Uganda, three weeks earlier, he’d carried to Zurich with him the results of his strange conversations with Chase; the man’s hesitancies, non sequiturs, moral probings, and the final message to Emil Grossbarger: “Tell our friend I can’t discuss the details with neutrals. He must send me somebody of his own.” Grossbarger had laughed when Sir Denis repeated this message and, like Sir Denis, had understood it at once, saying, “Zis is crooked business he hass for me.” Sir Denis had agreed, and had been disappointed but not surprised when Grossbarger had gone on, “Vell, ve’ll listen to him. It might be amusing.”

  In the next two weeks, Sir Denis had been home to São Paulo, and to Bogotá, and to Caracas; all on matters dealing with the concerns of the Bogotá Group but having little to do with the Brazil-Uganda deal. Coffee prices and coffee supplies this year were unusually volatile throughout the world; in addition to the untimely frost that had destroyed so much of Brazil’s crop, an earthquake had reduced Guatemala’s production to a fraction of normal, and continued civil war in Angola made the crop there uncertain. The Bogotá Group was concerned about stability in the coffee market. They liked the price high, but not too high; they liked their product’s supply to be less than demand, but only slightly less.

  Returning to London three days ago, principally to serve as a conduit of opinion between the Bogotá Group and the International Coffee Board, Sir Denis had found that Emil Grossbarger was also in town, and had a commission for him. “Zis Baron Chase is coming Sursday. I shall meet viss him in my solicitor’s offices. Vould you be so kind as to perform ze introductions? You should leave immediately afterward, of course,” he’d finished, his mobile mouth moving, and had gone off into gales of laughter.

  Sir Denis had agreed, realizing at once the two reasons for Grossbarger’s request, neithe
r of which had anything to do with formality or politeness. The first was that Grossbarger would want assurance that the man he was talking to was in fact Baron Chase and not some secondary figure sent by Chase in his stead for reasons of his own. And the second was accountability: Grossbarger might at some time in the future want to be able to prove that the meeting had actually taken place.

  So it was that Sir Denis had traveled today out to Heathrow in the Daimler provided by Grossbarger, where he had been given the totally unexpected present of Patricia Kamin. His mind full of Patricia, he now rode upward in the elevator with Chase, then led him down the corridor to Suite 2350: heavy mahogany double doors with the law firm’s title affixed in brass letters—eight names, the last two separated by an ampersand, but nothing to indicate what business these eight men might have joined to undertake.

  The receptionist, an American girl but with a narrow-nosed oval English face, recognized Sir Denis, announced him, and very shortly the secretary came out, an older woman, dowdily dressed in the seeming parody of a rural postmistress. Sir Denis and Chase followed her down the carpeted hallway past doors closed or ajar, from behind which came the murmurs of serious, intense conversations.

  Grossbarger’s London solicitor was named Lissenden (number five on the entrance door); rather than a working attorney, he looked most like the sort of tall graying distinguished actor who makes a living portraying lawyers and heads of intelligence agencies and sometimes—though not quite so effectively—doctors. He was emerging from his office as the others arrived; with a hurried wave, backing away as though embarrassed, he called too cheerily, “Well. I’ll leave you to it!” and disappeared through another doorway. Sir Denis wondered if Chase understood that Lissenden was avoiding at all costs being introduced to Baron Chase; a quick glance at the man’s profile proved nothing.

  Emil Grossbarger was seated in a large armchair with its back to the sweep of plate-glass window; behind him, the low gnarled roofs of Soho could be seen far below.