Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  He found Kamau Nyaga, the assistant terminal manager, in his office. Nyaga was a short and stocky man with a thick moustache and large black-rimmed glasses. He had the pouty expression of the petty tyrant, and at first he apparently thought he would play the game of making Lew wait.

  No, he would not. Lew didn’t have Frank’s hearty bonhomie with these minor-league pests, that palsy shoulder pat of friendship which nevertheless implied the punch of punishment. What Lew had instead was an undisguised contempt, suggesting a barely restrained rage at the shabbiness and venality around him. If the minor officials went along with Frank because they wanted him to remain friendly, they went along with Lew because they didn’t want him to go crazy.

  Nyaga pretended to read documents while Lew stood across the desk from him. Lew counted privately to three—not very slowly—then leaned forward, resting his palm and splayed fingers on the paper Nyaga was perusing, and said, “I’m here for Mazar Balim’s sewing machines.”

  “Sewing machines?” Not yet intimidated, merely indignant. Nyaga reared back in his squeaking chair and glared. “Who do you happen to be?”“

  “The representative of the owner. You were told I was coming.” Picking up the handful of documents from the desk, Lew flipped through them, saying, “These aren’t about our sewing machines.”

  Nyaga was on his feet; he was squawking like a rooster. “Privileged documents! You can’t—! Unauthorized—!”

  The terminal manager’s was a very small office; still, Lew gave it the most dramatic gesture the space would permit, flinging his right arm out, hurling the handful of papers with disdain at the side wall. As they fluttered to the ground, he said, “I’m here for sewing machines.”

  Nyaga was looking everywhere at once: at Lew, at his denuded desk, at the open door (to cry for help from the layabouts outside?), at the crumpled papers on the floor. “This office,” he managed to say, his voice trembling with emotion, “is for railway business. It is not for rowdies and—and—and—crazy persons.”

  “I understand there will be,” Lew said, his manner still contemptuous but now less threatening, “certain storage charges.” Looking around, he found the room’s second chair in the corner behind the door, and dragged it over with his foot hooked in a rung.

  “Charges,” Nyaga said, as though coming to consciousness after having been stunned with a brick. “Yes, of course. Property cannot be stored for free.” When Lew sat down, Nyaga returned to his squeaking swivel chair behind the desk.

  Lew said, “Mr. Balim has obtained a legal opinion that the railway should pay us interest on the money lost because of the delays in this shipment.”

  That statement was banal and stupid enough to reassure Nyaga, who actually smiled in response, saying, “To resolve that question in court obviously would involve even more delay.”

  “Mr. Balim would prefer not to cause trouble.” Lew shrugged and curled his lip to make clear his own quite different preference. “He is prepared to pay reasonable storage charges.”

  “He is a businessman,” Nyaga said in a relieved tone. Opening and shutting desk drawers, he muttered, “Storage charges, storage charges …”

  “Are the sewing machines still in the same freight car?”

  Nyaga stopped. He blinked, and licked his lips. “Goods wagon?” he asked. “Well, no. But reloading is not a problem.” He busied himself again with his desk drawers.

  “Where are they?”

  “Not a problem at all.”

  “Where are they stored?”

  “Well, here. Of course here. Here at the railway station. Ah, this is the proper form.” He brought up a pad of receipt flimsies and began to insert several well-used sheets of carbon paper. “Let’s see, storage nine days—”

  Lew said, “I’ll want to check the machines, of course, be sure they haven’t been damaged.”

  “Yes, yes. First we deal with the storage charges, and then—”

  “You don’t know where they are,” Lew said.

  Nyaga gaped at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You don’t know where the sewing machines are!”

  Lew jumped to his feet, the wooden chair tipping over behind him, Nyaga blinking up at him through his black-rimmed glasses. “You goddam fraud,” Lew told him, “you were gonna collect your storage charge and then send me out to Juma!”

  “Juma? Juma?” Nyaga couldn’t seem to figure out any response other than faked indignation. “Who is this Juma?”

  “Your freightmaster, you fucking asshole!” Lew pointed a rigid finger at the astonished Nyaga’s nose. “If you come out of this office, I’ll wring your neck like a chicken.”

  Leaving, he slammed the door so hard everybody in the waiting room woke up.

  Godfrey Juma was a different kettle of fish, an older, grizzled, no-nonsense sort of man, who took chai when it came his way because bribery was part of the world order, but who nevertheless found pride and dignity in knowing his job and doing it well.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t know where the sewing machines were, either. “Believe me, sir, I would be happy to take your money,” he told Lew, the two of them standing under the corrugated roof out of the rain at the end of the platform, with various pieces of rolling stock on the several tracks beyond. “But as it happens, the crates were stolen.”

  Truly irritated, Lew said, “Stolen! How? When? Why didn’t somebody report it?”

  Juma pointed. “Sir, do you see that goods wagon?”

  The freight car in question was new, silver-sided, with the slanted red KR of Kenya Railways. “I see it,” Lew said. He was about to become dangerous.

  “Your shipment arrived in that wagon. I at once saw it had not been consigned to this station, and so I had it shunted onto that track to await further instructions.”

  “Yes?”

  “During my period of being off-duty,” Juma said, “our terminal manager—”

  “Nyaga.” Were he to look over his shoulder, Lew knew, he would see the round-eyed, round-mouthed, round-spectacled face of assistant terminal manager Kamau Nyaga peering through his rain-bleared window, like a squirrel waiting for the dogs to pass.

  “That is the man.” Juma nodded, his expression carefully neutral. “For greater safekeeping,” he said, “or so he claimed, Mr. Nyaga had the crates removed, you know, to that shed.” He pointed to a small corrugated-metal building surrounded by weeds, off to one side of the yard.

  “Yes?”

  “I feared they would not be so safe in that location, so I did instruct my crew to return them to the goods wagon. Somewhere in the process, then or later, very distressingly, they disappeared. I believe they were Mr. Myaga’s responsibility at the time of disappearance.”

  Lew nodded. “And he blames you.”

  “Sir, I’m afraid that is so.”

  Except that the goddam sewing machines were gone, it was a comic situation. The two bosses, knowing there was money to be made out of that shipment, stealing it back and forth from each other until some third party—or possibly either Juma or Nyaga himself—retired the booty from the game. Being tough, but not physically threatening, Lew said, “The railway committee of inquiry will certainly figure out who’s responsible.”

  “Committee of inquiry?” Juma took on the worried look of an aging man thinking about his pension. “Why would there be a committee of inquiry? There are railroad-yard thefts every day.”

  “Mr. Balim is insured,” Lew lied. “The insurance company will insist on an inquiry.”

  “Oh, the insurance company.” Juma looked more and more worried. An insurance company was a much more serious threat than some minor Asian merchant.

  Lew said, “Frankly, I suspect the committee of inquiry will find reasons to be displeased with both you and Mr. Nyaga.”

  “Unjust interpretations, you know, sir,” Juma said, scraping his work-roughened hand over his grizzled cheeks, “could of course be made against my actions. Believe me, sir, if I could hand over those sewing machin
es, I would, and charge you nothing for them.”

  “I don’t like to see an older man driven out of his job,” Lew said. “Do you suppose Nyaga knows more than he’s telling?”

  “I wish he did, sir.” Juma shrugged fatalistically. “But I’m afraid he is the victim in this case as much as I.”

  Lew had pressed as hard as he could, and nothing had come of it. Juma couldn’t help him; Lew had no doubt the man would if he could. Was it worthwhile to roust Nyaga again, go back into that office and rough him up a little? No; Juma’s reluctant exoneration of Nyaga had been an expert’s opinion.

  While Lew had been thinking things over, Juma had been staring out mournfully over his small messy rusty freight yard, as though seeing it for the last time. Now, suddenly enlivened, magically taller, more sure of himself, with the fresh gleam of hope in his eyes, he spun back to Lew and said, “Sir! Perhaps after all there is a way out.”

  “Yes?”

  “Come with me, sir.”

  Juma led the way down the concrete steps at the end of the platform and out across the freight yard in the rain. They had to step high over the rails, skirt the larger and dirtier puddles, place their feet carefully on the rain-slick metal ties, hunch their necks down into their collars to keep the droplets from slithering in.

  At the extreme far corner of the yard, near the tall barbed-wire-topped fence, stood one of the older freight cars; peeling maroon paint and the old multicolored seal of the East African Railways Corporation. Undoing two large padlocks, Juma pushed open the side door and said, “There.”

  The wooden floor of the car was at chest height. Looking in, Lew could see stacked large crates—somewhat shorter than coffins—covered with stencils and pasted-on travel documents. “What is it?”

  “Outboard motors. Sir, see for yourself.”

  They climbed up the metal rungs into the cool but dry car, and Juma used a large screwdriver from his hip pocket to pry the lid off one of the crates. Inside, nested in Styrofoam and wrapped in grayish clear plastic, lay a 120-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor, gleaming in orange and white and black enamel, its small fanlike propeller painted a dull green.

  “There are forty of them.” Juma said. “Worth more than fifty-seven sewing machines.”

  Considerably more. Lew said, “You’re suggesting a trade?”

  “A goods train is being made up this afternoon, to return to Nakuru,” Juma said. “I can put this car on it, assigned to Kisumu. Mr. Nyaga knows nothing of this shipment, sir.”

  “Ah-hah.”

  “I shall telephone to my friend Mr. Molu in the Kisumu freight office, and he will understand that you shall be picking up the shipment on behalf of its consignee.”

  “Who is this consignee? Who do these motors belong to?”

  “Oh, no one, sir,” Juma said. “An Asian, sir, you know, that sort of bad man. He was going to use these engines in his smuggling, you know, on Lake Victoria.”

  “Oh, yes? What’s this Asian’s name?”

  “Hassanali.”

  Lew remembered having heard Balim speak disparagingly once or twice about a man named Hassanali, an out-and-out crook, a man who made a practice of sailing too close to the wind. “What happened to him?”

  “Oh, he killed a boatman, sir, who had cheated him. You know there is no honor completely among those thieves, sir. The police have got him now.”

  “So he has other things to worry about than his outboard motors.”

  “Oh, yes, sir.” Patting the sleek flank of the exposed motor, Juma said, “You can rescue these beautiful machines from a life of crime, sir.”

  “Save them from being used in smuggling,” Lew said, and laughed, feeling better than he had in days. There was nothing like absurdity to put things back in proportion. Even Amarda would pass. “Come along, Mr. Juma,” Lew said. “We’ll have tea and talk this over.”

  22

  There are spirits in the air, and in the ground, and inside trees, who make it their business to call human beings to their deaths. This is why, when a male child is born in many African tribes, he is not initially given his true name, but is lent a temporary false appellation to confuse the spirits of death. Should the child survive his first few years—and most do not, despite this subterfuge—he is given his permanent name.

  But even this is not his real name. That he selects for himself at puberty, and will probably never tell anyone. Thus the African travels under an alias at all times, secure in the knowledge that nobody knows who he really is.

  However, the process of naming has two further ramifications. The African may privately rename those persons who are important in his life; this secret name, which he will not tell the person thus dubbed, gives him an important power over that person. And of course when traveling among people other than one’s own tribe, one permits these strangers to cloak one with some nonsense syllable or other, to be shrugged off once the foreign travel is complete.

  So Charlie’s name was not Charlie. That was merely the bark he responded to when among the animals; that is, persons who were not Kikuyu. His death-fooling temporary name was long in the past, his permanent name was spoken exclusively by members of his branch of the Kikuyu in the villages along the western scarp of the Narandarua Range, and his real name was known only to himself.

  Among the animals, the only one so far honored with a name by Charlie was Frank. Charlie had named him Mguu, and it gave him secret pleasure every time he saw the man to know that he alone knew this was Mguu. The name was from the Swahili—Mguu was not worth a name from Charlie’s native Kikuyu dialect—and means “foot.” It seemed to Charlie that foot expressed Mguu very well; his stamping around like an elephant, his roaring, his rushing into situations without thought or preparation. Also, Charlie had seen in the cinema cartoons about a blind white man named Mr. Magoo, and this seemed to add a proper dimension: Mguu, the blind foot.

  Late afternoon. During a pause in the rain, Mguu left his tent and crossed the clearing to where Charlie squatted, skinning a not-quite-dead gazelle. “Charlie,” Mguu said.

  Charlie stood, smiling his cheeriest smile, the red knife in his red hand. Mguu pointed at it. “Put that down.”

  “Oh, sure, Frank.” Negligently Charlie stuck the knife into the gazelle, which in gratitude expired. “What may I do?”

  “It was only a joke,” Mguu said, his expression mean. “I know that, Charlie.”

  Charlie looked alert, inquisitive, ready to help. He wiped his bloody hand on his shirtfront.

  “But,” Mguu went on, “the joke’s over. So now one of two things is gonna happen. Either you’ll give me back my malaria pills, or I’ll twist your scrawny neck, leave your body here and your head over there, and drive back to Kisumu for a fresh supply of pills.”

  Behind Charlie’s bland smile and gleaming eyes, the speedy brain buzzed, till all at once the smile blossomed into a tooth-baring, hearty, friendly laugh, and Charlie said, “A joke! That’s right, that’s right, Frank, I can never put anything over on you!”

  “That’s right,” Mguu said.

  The westward sky, over the lake and under the clouds, was gossamer-white and pale blue, descending to lavender at the watery horizon, with an undercoating of gold. Charlie and Mguu walked out across the scrubland, some distance from camp, before Charlie shinnied up a flat-topped tree, causing a white-winged bateleur eagle to rise skyward in heavy flapping irritation. Riffling through the dry ordure of the eagle’s nest, Charlie grasped what he was looking for and descended with the bottle intact, which he plunked with the pride of the successful hunter into Mguu’s palm.

  In the lengthening shadows Mguu looked back toward camp, then up at the nest in the tree. “Some hiding place for a joke,” he said.

  Flying insects were beginning to swarm, including no doubt some of the thirty-eight varieties of mosquito which carry malaria in this part of the world. “If a thing is worth doing,” Charlie said, “it’s worth doing well.”

  Early next morning, Char
lie and Mguu came down the hill in a fresh downpour, paused at the hotel construction site so Mguu could shout and puff and wave his arms at the men digging the hole for the footing, and then they gathered the drunken boatman and putt-putted across the mouth of Berkeley Bay and past Sigulu Island, and so out across Lake Victoria, now well within the territory of Uganda. The gentle rain slackened and after a while stopped; looking back, Charlie could see it still falling upon Kenya.

  The last time they had come to the landfall at Macdonald Bay, Charlie and Mguu and the boatman had built a blind to conceal the two mopeds. It had not been disturbed, and the mopeds were still there, though wet and rusty. It was not raining at this moment, but it had done so recently, and everything in the woods was wet. Mguu refueled the mopeds from the can in the boat, and when they started the engines the racket seemed to shiver the raindrops off the leaves.

  Yesterday afternoon, a truck carrying Michelin tires had crossed from Kenya into Uganda at Moroto, far to the north of here. The border guards who had been bribed there by the driver to permit him to bring in this illegal shipment without filling in the required forms or paying the usual taxes and fees had been led to believe this was merely a normal smuggling operation, tires bound for Masindi, a prosperous upland town to the west of Lake Kyoga. They had been unaware that in the hollow center of the stacks of tires there were seated four men, hired by Mazar Balim with the assistance of Lew Brady. The four men had track gang experience with Kenya Railways, and they were traveling with a variety of tools: shovels and pry bars and wrenches and sledgehammers. They also shared their hiding place with bedrolls and several cartons of tinned or packaged food.

  Last night the truck, having followed back roads southward past Lake Opeta and Mount Elgon, had eventually reached the spot on the Tororo-Kampala road where Lew had been arrested by the State Research Bureau men. There, under cover of darkness, the truck had been driven as far as possible down the old service road and the laborers had emerged from their cocoon of tires to carry their tools and provisions down to Maintenance Depot Number 4. And now this morning Charlie and Mguu were coming to the depot to give the men their instructions.