Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  The memories flooded back. Not just his family (that memory was never far away), but everything else he’d had and no longer possessed. His house, his friends, his work, the relationships with people at the Ministry for Development, even the four peach trees in his backyard. His future, too, the future that hadn’t happened and now never would—that also shone in on him with the sunshine through the windshield, closing his throat with the pain. He drove, eyes forward, hurting so much that he didn’t want to move any part of his body.

  The land was familiar, the sunlight familiar, the ribbon of road familiar. The few vehicles they passed bore yellow license plates as in Kenya, but beginning with U, not K. The people in the occasional village were more brightly dressed than in the countryside around Kisumu.

  God help him, God help him, he was home.

  27

  For Idi Amin, the least enjoyable aspect of his office was his office. He very much liked to be out on maneuvers with his Army, or observing a flyby of his Air Force, or making a whirlwind tour of “inspection” in a jeep at the head of a convoy of troop-filled trucks, racing through the small towns, laughing at the dogs and the babies and the chickens as they scurried out of his way.

  Official dinners, they were also nice. And official lunches, official teas, official cocktail parties. Also official tours of locations such as Owen Falls Dam (making sure those thrown-away bodies which had not yet been eaten by the crocodiles had discreetly been removed the day before) or the Field Marshal Idi Amin Air Force Base at Nakasongola, seventy miles north of Kampala. (The air base was a particular favorite, though also something of an embarrassment. Amin, early in his presidency, had ordered it built, with its modern camouflaged underground hangars, because he wanted to protect his Air Force from the fate that had hit the Egyptians in the 1967 Six-Day War, when the Israelis had destroyed virtually the entire Egyptian Air Force on the ground on the very first day. However, Amin had only about twenty modern warplanes in his Air Force, which he couldn’t bear to keep so far away from himself, so the Field Marshal Idi Amin Air Force Base normally stood empty while his total Air Force remained at Entebbe, where the Israelis had wiped it out last summer. He had new planes now, though, and always ordered a few of them to Nakasongola before an inspection.)

  Unfortunately, for the leader of a modern nation there’s more to the presidency than Army maneuvers and VIP inspections. From time to time he must seat himself in his office, listen to a lot of boring details from various ministers, make decisions, give orders, and even occasionally sign something. (He really disliked that part. He had learned late in life how to sign his name, and he remained convinced there was something funny about the look of it, that it didn’t have in some strange manner the appearance of a real signature. He thought other people could see the difference and were deliberately hiding their knowledge from him.)

  As with many men who have reached the top in the world of power politics, Idi Amin’s talent was not for governing but for climbing. Now that there was nowhere left to climb, he was frequently bored or resentful or ill at ease, as though it were the world’s fault he had nothing left to do with his skills. Again as with so many such men, he had turned his energies to the obsessive struggle to retain the power he’d achieved, even if his enemies and competitors were frequently no more than ghosts.

  But you can’t chase ghosts all the time, no matter how many you’ve made. Today, all his appointments finished, nowhere else to go, Amin prowled the large plush room he’d inherited from Milton Obote, drinking beer and thinking about next month’s Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference to be held in London. The British had been making a fuss lately about his attending; they said bad things about him and didn’t want him to go. They claimed it was because of the way he treated his enemies, but he knew that was false. Didn’t all strong leaders treat their enemies harshly? Of course; how else could you intimidate them, keep them in check? It was simple hypocrisy.

  There had even been discussion in the British papers about his meeting with Queen Elizabeth. If he were to attend the conference, naturally he would with all the other heads of state be on the reception line to meet the Queen (whom in any event he had already met six years ago), and these newspapers had raised the question as to whether or not this Queen should shake Idi Amin’s hand. Yes, and he knew why, he knew why that was such an issue. “Amin’s red hand,” they called it, but they meant Amin’s black hand. Yes, they did.

  Back in the 1950s, when he was in the Army, then called the King’s African Rifles, he was the only black enlisted man on the Nile Rugby Team with all those white officers. Every time they played a game in Kenya there would be a reception afterward, and while the rest of the team enjoyed the festivities Idi Amin would sit alone in the bus, waiting to be driven back to the barracks. Yes, he knew what color hand they didn’t want their Queen to touch.

  “Sir?”

  Amin had been deep in the past, staring sightlessly out his window, clutching his beer bottle by the neck. He was six feet four; he had a big gut he hadn’t owned back in 1951 and 1952, when he was heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda; he filled this room with a brooding intensity. He looked over at his secretary, a uniformed soldier, a Kakwa like himself. He liked to have people around him who spoke his tribal dialect; in it he said, hoping for something interesting, “Well? I am very deep in thought here.”

  “Your Excellency, Mr. Chase wonders if you could spare five minutes to see him.”

  Chase. It was possible that Chase would be amusing, particularly if he was here to talk against Sir Denis Lambsmith again. “Yes, I’ll see him,” Amin said, then added, “No, wait. Tell him I’ll see him soon, he should wait.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency.”

  Amin, smiling, watched the secretary-soldier close the door; then he turned back to the window and to his thoughts.

  On the whole, he would prefer to attend that conference. Such official occasions were among the best parts of being a head of state, and it was always enjoyable to twit the British and strain the fabric of their surface politeness.

  Also, there was London, which he liked very much. Amin had been to several places outside Africa—to Rome to see the Pope, to New York to address the United Nations—but his favorite trip had been back in 1971, the Summer after he had taken power, when he had gone up to London to see the Queen. They’d had lunch together, and he’d explained at length his economic and educational plans for Uganda. Of course, that had been before he’d understood the depth of British faithlessness.

  Chase. He was Canadian, of course, not British, but how much of a distinction was that? An African from this tribe and an African from that tribe were as different as winter from summer, but all white men—at least, all English-speaking white men—were the same. When it came to white people, he could only agree with the attitude of Roy Innis, who back in March of 1973 had made him a life member of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.

  In preparation for an enjoyable conversation with Chase, Amin went back to his desk, unlocked a side drawer, and took out the Xerox copy of the letter, which he spread in front of himself on the desk. He still wasn’t a very good reader, but he’d had this one read to him by a trustworthy educated Nubian, and by now he had it memorized. It was typewritten, with neither date nor business-address heading, and it looked like this:

  Dear Emil Grossbarger,

  When we last talked, I assured you I would be able to have Sir Denis Lambsmith removed from the Brazil deal. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Amin has decided for reasons of his own that he wants Lambsmith around, and has even gone so far as to insist that Lambsmith be at Entebbe to oversee the physical departure of the coffee.

  It would be difficult, probably impossible, for us to communicate directly before the deed is done. I know what you said when we were last together in London, and I know you were quite serious. On the other hand, when we reach a spot where simply nothing can be done to alter the situation, the sensible man accepts reality as it is and goes on
from there. On the assumption that we’re both sensible men, I am continuing to work as though our deal were intact. You have my assurance that no harm will come to Sir Denis.

  It was signed Baron Chase. Amin studied that signature as though there were something to be learned from it. The capital B and capital C were large and round, like village huts. The other letters, except for the h in Chase, didn’t properly exist at all, but were represented by wandering trails, like animal paths leading from a water hole. On the other hand, the h was a guidon, a straight knife-edged flagpole with a tiny pennant at the top. Baron Chase. Very interesting.

  Chase had written the letter just before the end of the long rains, a few days after his return from London. He had already, as he stated in the letter, done his best to poison Amin’s mind against Sir Denis Lambsmith, but from what Patricia Kamin had told him, it was Sir Denis whom Amin wanted near him, and nobody else. Sir Denis was a skin-deep man, a technocrat without imagination. He didn’t have the imagination to be dishonest or clever, and he had no secret plans or intentions in connection with this coffee sale.

  Which was true of no one else involved. The Brazilians and the Bogotá Group were shifty, clever, very knowledgeable, out for their own advantage at every instant. Emil Grossbarger, of course, was completely untrustworthy, and Chase was a schemer by some sort of inner compulsion. No, it was bland unthreatening Lambsmith with whom Amin wanted to deal, particularly when his judgment of the man was supported by Patricia’s spying.

  And when his other spies could protect him from the other actors in the play, including Chase.

  This letter had reached Amin by a means almost as circuitous as the route it had taken to Grossbarger. Chase had brought it, already sealed, to an English pilot named Wilson, one of the regulars on the Stansted whisky run. Swearing Wilson to secrecy, Chase had given him some money and asked him to carry the letter to England and from there mail it to Grossbarger in Zurich. Wilson had agreed, had carried the letter to Stansted, had there steamed it open and made a Xerox copy, had resealed the letter and mailed it to Grossbarger, had brought the copy back to Uganda, had requested a personal meeting with the President, and had given him the copy and his story. Wilson’s reward was already in his personal Swiss bank account.

  The question now was: What were Chase and Grossbarger up to? If it was merely that Chase was taking an extra little bribe on the side, that he was pressuring Grossbarger with some nonexistent problem solvable by money, then more power to him. Amin saw no reason to interfere with other people’s little scams, so long as their scams didn’t interfere with his.

  But there was something about this letter, something that just didn’t sound right. “… before the deed is done.” “… as though our deal were intact.” What deed? What deal? The “deed” could merely refer to the sale and shipment of the coffee. The “deal” could mean nothing more than a side-issue bribe. Still, there was something wrong, and the main problem was why Chase and Grossbarger wanted Sir Denis out in the first place. And why did Chase find it necessary to assure Grossbarger that “no harm will come to Sir Denis”? Were they afraid he knew, or would learn, something of what they were up to?

  If so, that was even more reason to keep Sir Denis around. If he were to learn anything about Chase and Grossbarger, Patricia would soon get it from him, and then Amin himself would know.

  So. Inasmuch as possible, the problem of Chase was under control. Slipping the letter back into the drawer, dropping the beer bottle into the basket under his desk, Amin buzzed his secretary.

  “Send in Mr. Chase.”

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” Chase said.

  Amin smiled. Chase had always maintained a proper formality in his presence, and even though Amin knew the formality was duplicitous and only a surface sham he enjoyed it. It was a confirmation of who he had become. “Good-ah morning, Baron,” he said, his voice rumbling like a sleepy purr. “My only Baron,” he added.

  Chase would go on standing, though at his ease, until and unless Amin invited him to sit down. “You’re looking well, sir,” he said. “I understand you were jogging this morning.”

  “Basket-ah-ball game this afternoon,” Amin said. “With-ah my flyers.” He meant the pilots of his Air Force, bright hard young men who treated him with a delicate combination of barracks-yard camaraderie and careful respect. Some had been trained by the British, some by the Israelis, a few by the Russians, or the Americans, and the most recent by the Libyans.

  “Good luck,” Chase said. The closest he came to informality was occasionally to drop the “sir.”

  “Thank you.” Amin grinned. “My-ah T-shirts now come,” he said, and gestured to a stack of cardboard cartons in the corner. “Take one.”

  “With the picture?” Smiling his amusement and anticipation, Chase went over and opened the top carton. “Shall I try one on?”

  “Of course,” Amin said. “How-ah you gonna know if it-ah fit?”

  Unselfconsciously, Chase slipped off his tan sports jacket, his light-green figured tie, and his white shirt. His chest and back were very white and pasty, padded with unhealthy-looking fat in globules under the skin. Old wounds puckered and scarred his torso and upper arms, as though once, years before, he had rolled in barbed wire.

  He’s been in many battles, Amin thought, studying the man, and all at once he remembered his own testimony before the Commission of Inquiry back in 1966, looking into an ivory- and gold-smuggling operation out of the Congo as a consequence of which Amin had wound up with forty thousand pounds in his Kampala bank account and a lot of gold bars in his house. Amin had told the Commission of Inquiry—which had ultimately found nothing against him—that he’d served in Burma and India during World War II; in fact, he hadn’t even joined the Army until 1946, and the only “war” he’d ever been involved in was a punitive expedition with the Fourth King’s African Rifles in 1962, organized to put down some cattle rustlers in the Lake Turkana section of Kenya. The accusations that time against his platoon, of torture and murder, had faded away into an inconsequential muddle, as they always did.

  Chase pulled on one of the T-shirts and turned to face Amin, arms spread out. “How does it look?”

  “Fine,” Amin said, laughing, looking at the blown-up black-and-white photograph spread across Chase’s chest.

  Two years ago, during the Organization of African Unity summit meeting here in Kampala, Amin had arranged to be carried to the meeting seated in a litter borne by four British businessmen who lived in Uganda, and followed by another white man, a Swede, carrying a tiny parasol on a long stick to shade Amin’s head. A news photograph had showed Amin, in the litter, waving happily to a cheering crowd, and it was this photograph Amin had now had reproduced on several thousand white T-shirts.

  Looking down, Chase said, “It came out very well. The white man’s burden, eh?”

  “That’s-ah right! That’s-ah right!”

  Neither of them mentioned that the right-rear bearer of the litter, an Englishman named Robert Scanlon, had recently been killed with a sledgehammer over at the State Research Bureau because of a business dispute with some people there.

  Coming back over to the desk, patting the photo on his chest, Chase said, “This is what I wear today.”

  “Oh, no,” Amin protested, “not all-ah day. You look-ah so nice in you clodes.”

  “Underneath, then,” Chase said. “It’ll be my secret.”

  “One-ah you secrets,” Amin said with an amiable smile. “Sit-ah down, my little Baron.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Chase settled himself into his accustomed chair and said, “What I’m mostly here to talk about is coffee.”

  And Sir Denis Lambsmith? Amin’s eyes brightened. “Yes?”

  “The train can roll this week. Friday. Will the planes be there?”

  It was Amin’s style to divide tasks among several people, so that only he ever knew the full dimensions or the complete story of what was going on. While Chase was dealing with Sir Denis, and
to a lesser extent with the Brazilians (and on his own hook with Emil Grossbarger), it was Amin’s Deputy Minister of Development who’d been given the job of seeing to it that the Grossbarger Group provided the eight transport planes that had been agreed on. The planes were to be at Entebbe when the initial trainload of coffee arrived, and they would shuttle this first consignment of coffee to Djibouti, where it would be loaded onto ships in the Indian Ocean.

  But there was a problem, and Chase unfortunately had now pointed to it. “We gonna get the planes,” Amin said, exuding confidence. “There’s-ah still one-ah two details-ah to be work-ed out.”

  “Positioning costs,” Chase said. “I heard about it.”

  “You hear about a lot-ah tings,” Amin said, displeased.

  “I was wondering if there was anything I could do to help.”

  “It-ah will work itself out,” Amin told him, shutting the door on that conversation. “And-ah dah train can still go on-ah Friday, even if we got to-ah store dah coffee a day or two day at-ah Entebbe.”

  As was so often the case when things became irritating for Amin, the problem was money. The planes were being chartered from a firm based in Switzerland, which was insisting on what it called “positioning costs” before it would divert eight aircraft from their current work in Europe. It was the firm’s contention that to “position” each large cargo plane, fueled and with crew, at Entebbe would cost thirty-five thousand dollars U.S., money it was demanding in advance.

  Since the Brazilians and the Grossbarger Group had already paid Uganda the advance money—and it had already been spent—they could not be called upon to pay these unexpected costs. However, Uganda’s foreign-exchange position—as usual precarious—would not permit a payment of two hundred eighty thousand U.S. dollars prior to shipping the coffee and being paid the other two thirds of the price.