Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  The four were lolling at their ease inside the engine shed. What work they had done so far was in the realm of housekeeping; they’d cleared some of the rusted garbage into far corners of the shed, blocked two broken windows with old sheets of corrugated metal, and created a fireplace of rocks beneath another window, which would serve as a rough-and-ready flue. They had surely heard the roar of the arriving mopeds, but they were still lying around their small fire, telling lies and laughing, when Charlie and Mguu walked in.

  Mguu began by carrying on about the fire. Charlie was supposed to translate—into Swahili, as only two of the men were Kikuyu, the others being animals—but instead he said to Mguu, “These men know about smoke completely, Frank. There are farms all around here; the farmers light fires in their fields; no one will think about a little smoke.”

  That calmed Mguu, though he did stay grumpy. He ordered the laborers to rise and follow him outside, where, with much arm waving and kicking at the rusted rails stacked beside the shed, he explained what they were supposed to do. Charlie translated, interpolating asides that made the laborers bite their cheeks to keep from laughing.

  Yes, they understood. Yes, they saw that the turntable must be moved to align with the track. Yes, they agreed that the buffer at the end of the track must be removed and the track extended with these rusty rails to the lip of the gorge. Yes, they followed the reasoning behind the idea that they must cut a hole in the thick shrubbery and hedge between the spur track and the main line, but that they then must create a removable blind of branches on some sort of framework to conceal the hole they had made. Yes, they heartily concurred that they must not be caught by the Ugandan police or Army. (If they were caught, however, it wouldn’t be a total disaster, since these four hadn’t been told the ultimate purpose for their work.) And, at long last, yes, they accepted the deadline of one week. All would be accomplished. And now let us have some beer.

  “I don’t know about those birds,” Mguu said, later that afternoon, as they tromped back to the access road and their mopeds.

  “Oh, they’ll do very fine,” Charlie said. “I vouch for them.”

  Mguu gave him a hard look. “You vouch for them? Jesus.”

  He prays a lot, Charlie thought.

  The man tried to run away, but Mguu shouted him down. It was a wonderful thing to see, as effective as another man throwing a rock; Charlie much admired it.

  They had come out of the woods, and there was the man, poking around their mopeds. Charlie had seen at once that he didn’t have the manner of a thief but instead the manner of curiosity. It was only that he tried to run away that made him seem like a thief. And then Mguu roared, and the man dropped, and now he crouched there beside the road, waiting, sitting on his heels, trembling slightly, his head bowed down between his knees.

  Charlie and Mguu strode forward and stood over him. Charlie could see he was not Kikuyu, but possibly Luo or some other lake tribe. “Stand up!” Mguu yelled. Charlie repeated that in Swahili, not yelling, and the man slowly uncoiled and stood.

  He was a very raggedy man, the kind you would see on construction projects in Nairobi pushing a wheelbarrow full of concrete blocks. His torn clothing was gray; his knobby knees were gray; his bare feet were beige and cut-covered; his hands were swollen from work or disease; the leathery brown skin of his fingers ballooned up around the orange nails.

  “Ask him,” Mguu said, “what he’s doing here.”

  Charlie asked. The man, sullen but submissive, answered, “mfupa,” which means “bone.”

  “Ah,” Charlie said. He had already decided this raggedy man meant nothing. He explained to Mguu, “He says he’s a peddler. He buys and sells bones.”

  Mguu looked startled. “Bones!”

  “There’s a living for a poor man in bones,” Charlie said gently. “And cloth, and other rubbish.”

  “Oh,” Mguu said, in sudden understanding. “A rag-and-bone man. We used to have those in the States.”

  “Used to have?” Here was another unexpected window into that other world so far away. Charlie was always interested to learn more about that place of fantasy. “Used to have, Frank?”

  “Nobody does that anymore.” Mguu dismissed the idea with his typical curt hand wave, while continuing to glower at the boneman.

  “Nobody?” In Charlie’s mind loomed an image of the homes of America—they looked like cinema motel rooms—with all the corners piled with unclaimed rubbish. Could that be true? He’d never seen such a thing in the films, but it was well known the cinema lied about real life. If it were really so, what an opportunity for some enterprising boneman!

  But Mguu’s attention was fixed on this current boneman, who looked not enterprising at all. “There’s no bones here,” he said, angry and dangerous. “What’s he doing here?”

  Charlie put the question. The boneman mumbled something incomprehensible, which Charlie translated as “He doesn’t know.”

  “Doesn’t know? He damn well better know!”

  Charlie rephrased the question. The boneman mumbled more nonsense. Charlie shrugged. “He just doesn’t know, Frank.”

  “He’s going to know,” Mguu said, and before Charlie could blink, Mguu had punched the boneman in the face.

  The boneman sat on the vine-covered ground. For an instant, as though all of creation had been startled by Mguu’s violence, nothing happened. Charlie, the boneman, Mguu, all three remained unmoving. Then Mguu, opening his punching hand as though it were stiff, said, “Ask him again, Charlie.”

  Stooping in front of the boneman, Charlie could see that his eyes were turned inward, his jaw muscles were slack, his hands were at ease in his lap. Straightening, Charlie said, “He thinks now about dying.”

  “A good thing to think about,” Mguu said, misunderstanding. “Tell him, he gives me a straight answer or he is dead.”

  “No, Frank,” Charlie said. But how to explain what was happening? He had noticed over the years that the whites didn’t seem to have this capacity for death that was so natural in the tribal African. In a situation of hopelessness or misery the African, armed with his fatalism, could merely sink into a lassitude and then slip quietly out of existence. It was very well known, but not to the whites.

  Or not to most whites; one white doctor to whom Mr. Balim had sent Charlie three years ago had said it was because the tribal Africans were all sick anyway. They all lived with malaria (which infected everybody but only killed one percent of blacks) and several other diseases, against which a certain level of immunity or accommodation had been developed over the millennia. But still their bodies were weakened, and it was easier for them to let loose their grip on the reins of life.

  It was an explanation Charlie himself didn’t believe—he knew it was merely sensible at some point to die, and the African is sensible—but perhaps it was an explanation that would please Mguu.

  No; it was too complicated. Charlie couldn’t go through all that. He merely said, “Frank, this is just a poor boneman, looking in the woods for what he can find. He knows no answers at all, and he thinks you’ll go on hurting him, so he is thinking about dying to be away from all this.”

  “What?” Mguu hunkered down to look at that closed-in face, with the eyes like those of an animal caught for too long in a leg trap, no longer struggling, prepared now for death. “Bah,” Mguu said, and stood up, brushing his hands on his trousers, looking almost embarrassed. “What a country,” he said, and turned away and tramped back toward the mopeds.

  But Charlie had kept watching the boneman—had those eyes minutely glistened when Mguu turned away? Charlie frowned, studying that ragged head.

  Up the road, Mguu called, “Come on, Charlie!”

  Charlie squatted, looking, and the empty eyes looked back. Did or did not something move inside there?

  “Charlie!”

  It occurred to Charlie he should kill this boneman right away, this instant. But he couldn’t kill coldly, like a white man; he had to build a rage first, an
emotion for killing.

  “Goddammit, come on!”

  Toward Mguu, of course, such an emotion would be easy and very quick to build. Charlie stood, his own mind filling with the fatalism he imputed to the boneman. Either he was a boneman, and would matter to them no more, or he was something else, and would return to their lives.

  Charlie rejoined Mguu, and they climbed on the mopeds and started for the lake. When Charlie looked back, just before the first curve, the boneman had not moved.

  23

  Walking down Greek Street at two in the morning, past the all-night sex shops with their white-painted shop windows and glaring red-lettered signs, Baron Chase was stopped by two weaving, smiling, slender Jamaicans who seemed to be high on dope and not liquor. “Mon,” one of them said, “mon, give me a bob.”

  “Get out of my way,” Chase said.

  The evening rain had stopped, but the sparkling wet streets remained deserted. The two blocks farther on to Shaftesbury Avenue with its lights and traffic and pedestrians might as well have been two miles; they might as well not be in London at all. The smiling Jamaicans crowded closer, smelling absurdly of coconut, the spokesman saying, “And a bob for my friend, mon, we want an egg.”

  “If I had you in my country,” Chase said, his voice low and compelling, “I would have your ears removed and roasted in the oven and fed you for your dinner.”

  “What country is that, mon?” the Jamaican asked, giggling as though it were all a joke, as he reached out for Chase’s sleeve.

  Chase’s hand came up, too fast to be seen. The heel thudded upward into the Jamaican’s nose, shattering the bone, shoving the splinters up into the man’s brain. Dying, his wide eyes already filming, the Jamaican collapsed slowly backward onto the uneven wet slate sidewalk.

  The other one ran. He didn’t wait to see what happened to his friend nor to find out what Chase meant to do next. He simply spun shakily on his heel, regained his balance, and dashed tottering around the corner of Manette Street and out of sight.

  Chase walked on, ignoring the twisted man on the sidewalk, who looked as though he’d been flung there from a truck. What country is that, mon? echoed in Chase’s ears, and he walked down to Shaftesbury Avenue and turned right toward Piccadilly Circus.

  Uganda. Violent Uganda. Depraved Uganda. Horrific Uganda. My country. He could feel it repainting him in its own colors; he had to get out.

  London seemed so tame. There had been a period in his life when his greatest pleasure was London after dark; so much more accessible than Paris. To walk the streets of Soho and the West End after midnight with his pockets full of pounds, among the prostitutes and the sharp-nosed petty crooks and the innocent schoolboys out on a fling, to choose one’s amusements, playing different parts every night; that had been the Technicolor of his existence, and now it had all faded. A few years of open sesame at the State Research Bureau—his private nonfaked Madame Tussaud’s—had turned the rest of the world pale.

  In Piccadilly Circus, the restless motion of the night crawlers still continued, though it was less crowded than it had been at midnight, when he’d last walked through. The puffy-bodied sullen-faced girls in their miniskirts and shoulder-padded jackets and eyes heavily underlined in black, the skinny awkward long-necked boys in their tight black tubular pants and their sweat shirts reading UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI (bought here in London on Oxford Street), the nervous sagging-bellied older homosexuals stumbling toward the humiliation they half craved and half dreaded, the brassy semipro hookers always in pairs and wearing blond wigs like wood shavings; they all still promenaded, restless and purposeless, their eyes and mouths dissatisfied and guarded against further hurt. The coughing black taxis curved ceaselessly past the statue of Eros in the middle of Piccadilly, heading elsewhere, scooting away, very few with their amber FOR HIRE signs lit; not here.

  There was no actual sense of order, but the trend of pedestrian flow was clockwise, echoing the movement of the traffic. Joining the minority that trekked in the opposite direction, Chase studied the faces and the bodies as they came toward him. And this place might as well be the exercise yard of a concentration camp whose commandant, with a more than usually macabre sense of humor, has dressed his charges out of captured theatrical trunks.

  What shall I have tonight? What here will best ease for a little while the boredom? The hour was late; the pubs were closed; the air was cold and dank from the earlier rain; the desperation all around was rising closer to the surface; whatever Chase wanted from this chorus line was his for the beckoning.

  The fourth time he passed the same pair of boys, painfully thin, dressed almost identically in bulky black cable-knit sweaters and tight blue jeans and cracked cheap “western” boots, their hands and necks gray—not with the dirt of toil but with the grime of sluttishness—he shrugged to himself and nodded to them, then took the next turning at Glasshouse Street, the dark narrow block behind the brightly lighted curve of Regent Street. Glancing back when he reached the far corner, he saw them trailing almost reluctantly after him; smiling, he turned right on Regent Street past the gleaming huge shop windows filled with clothing to be worn in a world those boys would never know.

  He could have anything, anyone, from that sink. His trend increasingly had been to choose boys, but he told himself that meant nothing. Boys were simpler somehow, that’s all. And since he never permitted anything to be put into his own body, but only inserted himself into them, he was clearly not homosexual.

  Once free of Piccadilly Circus, the empty cabs switched on their FOR HIRE signs; Chase hailed one before he’d walked as far as Beak Street. “One moment,” he said to the driver, “for my friends.”

  The driver, a narrow-faced Jewish Cockney, twisted to look back at the approaching boys. “It’s your life, gunnor,” he said. “Innit.”

  “It is.” Holding the door open, Chase ushered the now shyly smiling boys into the cab. “Enter my golden coach,” he said.

  At ten in the morning the hotel-room phone rang. Chase, blurrily waking, fumbled for the receiver, muttered something into it, and heard Emil Grossbarger say, “Zey have brought him back.”

  Chase’s mind was filled with the wisps of dreams, red and black silhouettes fast receding, no longer forming their story, leaving only a faint nervous residue of terror. He had no idea what Grossbarger was talking about. “What? Who?”

  “Sir Denis Lambsmitt. Chase, vat do you know of ziss?”

  “Lambsmith?” Orienting himself, remembering who and what he was, Chase sat up straighter in the bed. “What do you mean, he’s back?”

  “I had him removed from ze Uganda negotiation,” Grossbarger said. On the phone, one became more aware of the husky power of that voice, still potent with the strength that had been stolen from his body. “Vunce ve made our own arrangement, you und I, my dear Baron, I vished zat man’s keen eye removed from ze arena of our activities.”

  “Yes, yes.” Impatient with himself, rubbing his sleep-blurred face with his free hand—smelling faintly of soap from last night’s shower, after the boys had been sent away—Chase said, “Who brought him back?”

  “Your government. Vy did zey do zat?”

  “I have no idea,” Chase said, astonished to realize it was the truth. He had not the vaguest idea who in Uganda would have done this, or what they could have had in mind. It was frightening to have such sudden unexpected ignorance about the arena in which he struggled for survival.

  “I vant him out of it,” Grossbarger said. “Ziss is very important to me.”

  “I can, uni—” Chase shook the sleep webs out of his brain. “We can contain him. I assure you he won’t know what’s going on.”

  “I vant him avay! Und not killed, zat tips our hand. Out of ze operation complete.”

  In Grossbarger’s intensity, Chase found the sudden shocking realization of just why the man was so upset. Yes, and why he had wanted Lambsmith removed in the first place. With hatred at this knowledge welling up inside him, hatred and rage, C
hase became calmer, more assured, more hidden. “I’ll cut short my vacation, Emil,” he said, using the older man’s given name for the first time, doing it deliberately, to twist the knife in them both. “I’ll go back to Kampala today.” He should in any event; clearly, he had been away too long. “I’ll find out what’s happened.”

  “Und you vill remove Sir Denis Lambsmitt from ziss operation!”

  “You have my guarantee.”

  “Our partnership depends upon it.”

  Chase cradled the phone and sat a moment longer in bed, brooding at the mirrored bathroom door, in which he could see reflected the room’s main window. It wasn’t Sir Denis’s keenness, the likelihood of his discovering their plot, that was agitating Emil Grossbarger so much; no, not at all. Chase saw through that. The fact was, Emil Grossbarger liked Sir Denis Lambsmith, he considered himself Sir Denis Lambsmith’s friend, he was trying to protect his friend, ease his friend out of the area of danger.

  Who would do that for me?

  In Chase’s world the evidences of friendship were so few that he almost never had to remember the existence of such a thing. To have it flaunted in his face here and now, under these circumstances, involving two such creatures as Grossbarger and Lambsmith, was galling, insupportable. Who would concern himself for Baron Chase in that way?

  They use me, that’s all. Even Amin doesn’t really like me.

  Chase picked up the phone to change his airline reservation.

  In one of those coincidences that aren’t so farfetched as they at first appear, Sir Denis was on the same plane. He had been in London, he explained, at meetings with the Coffee Board, when the request had come in from the Ugandan government that he be reinstated as the Coffee Board’s mediator. He had learned this news not much sooner than Chase, and both men had promptly made arrangements to return to Kampala, Chase to see what he could do to regain control of the situation, Sir Denis at the request of the Ugandan government. The most sensible route for them both was the all-night London-Tripoli-Entebbe, Air Uganda flight.