Lew had been assuming her bad temper was the result of some suspicion she had about him and Amarda; couldn’t she see there was no longer anything to be suspicious about? He was sorry she hadn’t been out front to see him arrive without the girl. Nailing home that message, he said, “Some employee of the family drove me back. An old man, a Kikuyu, named Wanube. Maybe the slowest, vaguest, worst driver I’ve ever seen. I finally took the wheel while he sat in back. Come to think of it, maybe that’s what he had in mind.”
“Probably so,” Ellen said, still distracted. “You ready to go?”
“Sure. Ellen? What’s the problem?”
Now she did finally look at him, and he saw her eyes come into focus. “Sorry, Lew,” she said. “I was thinking about something else. You talked the grandmother around, did you?”
“That’s just what I did. I think she half wanted to be talked around, anyway.”
“So Mr. Balim was right to send you. Come on, let’s get back and give him the news.”
They walked out the terminal’s side door and headed for the plane. Lew said, “Ellen? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, and suddenly became much livelier. “Just half-asleep from sitting around, I suppose.” Looping her arm through his as they walked along, she said, “There’s no reason we can’t be friends.”
Now, what did she mean by that?
31
At the very first bureaucratic foot-drag, Isaac forgot to be scared. He almost forgot who he really was, and what this charade was all about, because what came flooding into the forefront of his mind was his normal technique for dealing with minor-league officiousness, clerical obstructionism, and the arrogance of petty authority. When the motor-pool sergeant, a sloppy man in a sloppy uniform, said indignantly, “We can’t break into our schedule to service a truck for you now, you should have phoned yesterday,” Isaac’s immediate answer was to point to the phone on the sergeant’s desk and say, “Put me through to the commanding officer.”
Now, if he’d stopped to think about it, that was just about the most dangerous thing he could have done. These documents from Chase should carry the day with the Jinja Barracks motor pool—and in fact they’d gotten him through the gate and this far already—but in order to divert suspicion from Chase later on, the documents could eventually be shown to be forgeries. If the sergeant were to call Isaac’s bluff and put him through to the Barracks commander—which is exactly the way some truly self-important bureaucrats would have handled the situation—Isaac could well be in deep trouble very fast. He could see the sequence now: the commander sides with his sergeant, and in order to complain about the lack of advance warning, he puts a call through to the individual in Kampala whose signature was on this requisition. “What order for a truck? I never—” Isaac’s heart began to pound.
But. “No need to be that way, Captain,” the sergeant said, at once losing his fine indignation and becoming mulish and sullen, like a man who’s already been chewed out by his superiors more than once for unnecessary interference. “I’m just saying we don’t have a truck for you at this exact instant.”
Isaac had the man on the run now. Suddenly cool—really and truly cool, he was astonished to realize—just as though he weren’t standing in this office in this low concrete-block building next to the motor pool, deep within Jinja Barracks in Uganda, with thousands of Amin’s troops all around him like piranha fish around a drowning kitten, still thoroughly cool, Isaac made a show of looking at his watch. “At what instant do you suppose you will have a truck for me?”
“That’s hard to say.” The sergeant made an effort to reconstruct his former indignation. “You come in here; you disturb the schedule; I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
“Well, I know, my friend,” Isaac said. “You see who signed this order?”
The sergeant looked again—reluctantly, it seemed—at that very important signature. “Yes, I know, I know.”
“This isn’t for me. I’m a captain. Do you think, if that truck were for me, I’d drive it myself?”
“Oh, I understand,” the sergeant said, unbending a little, as though in acknowledgment that he and the captain shared the same fate: constant harassment from above.
“If I am late with that truck,” Isaac said, “I’m sorry, but I won’t take all the blame myself. I didn’t get to be a captain that way. Do you understand me, sergeant?”
The sergeant did. He also understood why Isaac had made a point of emphasizing their comparative ranks. “Yes, of course,” he said, looking worried.
“So I’m sure we’ll both do our best,” Isaac suggested.
“Certainly. Why not? Hmmm, let’s see, I’ll have to, um …” He took down one of several clipboards in a row on the wall over his desk and leafed through the papers on it. “I’ll just check outside,” he said. “You understand, I’ll have to give you a truck already in process of being serviced for someone else. This alters the schedule a great deal. Well, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be back.”
The sergeant bustled out, carrying the clipboard with him. Isaac went over to the window to watch the man walk out across the motor pool, where a few dozen vehicles, ranging from large tractor-trailer rigs to buses to jeeps, were parked higgledy-piggledy on the tan dirt, in no discernible design. The sergeant’s implication of neat, orderly, bustling, highly organized activity orchestrated to a tight schedule was belied by the sloppiness visible everywhere and the inertia common to those few troops he could see.
Strangely, Isaac felt less sure of himself, less concealed and more in danger, now that he was alone. He seemed to need someone to pretend in front of before he could feel secure in his impersonation.
The sergeant was out of sight, somewhere in there among the trucks and buses. What if he’d seen through Isaac’s disguise? What if he’d already guessed that the documents were bogus, and even now he was on the phone somewhere out there, calling for a squad to come arrest the impostor?
Four men came into view from behind a building to the right, carrying rifles as though they were fishing poles after a long day without a nibble. Isaac stiffened, all the old fear coming back. Once again he was hidden in that shrubbery in the warm night behind his house, looking at all the lit windows and listening to the machine-gun fire within.
The four soldiers drifted laggardly by, not quite dragging their rifles in the dirt. The sergeant, moving with self-satisfied fussiness, reappeared among the motor-pool vehicles and came marching back to the office, where he said, “Well, I succeeded for you. It wasn’t easy.”
“I’ll have a truck soon?”
“Ten minutes, no more.” He returned his clipboard to its nail on the wall with a solid slap of self-satisfaction at a job well done. “It’s being gassed up now,” he said, “windshield cleaned, everything fine.”
“That’s good.” Isaac touched the other requisition on the sergeant’s desk. “Now, about this for Friday.”
“Twenty trucks.” The sergeant, very dubious, shook his head.
“Three days from now, plenty of warning,” Isaac pointed out, and they spent the next fifteen minutes haggling over that, the sergeant at last promising that he would do his best—he couldn’t answer, of course, for incompetent staff or careless previous drivers or the importunings of even more important individuals than the one whose signature was on this request—but at least he would do his best, and quite possibly, at noon on Friday, twenty trucks would be ready and forthcoming. “It helps,” the sergeant explained, “that you won’t need drivers.”
A knock on the door was followed by the appearance of a grease-covered skinny man in uniform trousers and dirty undershirt, who said the truck was ready. “Exactly on time!” the sergeant exclaimed inaccurately. “Come along, Captain.”
The truck was just outside, a five-ton Leyland Terrier, several years old, with a black canvas cover on an aluminum frame over the bed. The engine was running; that is, it was loudly coughing and missing. “Not warmed up yet,” the
sergeant said. Extending another clipboard and a ball-point pen, he said, “No dents or scratches. Sign here.”
Isaac wrote on the form under Comments: “Many general dents and scratches.” Then he signed, with something of a flourish, “Captain I. Gelaya.” Pleased that he’d signed the name without hesitation, relieved and happy that he was getting away with this so easily, he handed the clipboard back.
“Isaac!”
Responding automatically to his name, and also to the sound of a familiar voice, Isaac turned, and his heart leaped into his throat.
He was face-to-face with a man named Obed Naya, who was also in the uniform of an Army captain, but who wore his uniform legitimately. An old friend, Obed Naya, a onetime classmate at Makerere University. A man who’d had dinner at Isaac’s house, who had danced with Isaac’s wife. He had entered the Army after university, in the latter days of the Obote presidency, and he and Isaac had seen less and less of one another after Amin had taken over. He was now something in engineering for the Army, and he knew who Isaac really was, and Isaac no longer had any idea who Obed Naya might in the last few years have become.
Brazen it out. What would Frank do? “Obed,” Isaac said, forcing a broad smile onto his face, stepping forward with hand outstretched. “It’s been a long time.”
Delight was being replaced by confusion in Obed’s eyes as they shook hands. He blinked at Isaac’s face, then at his uniform, his captain’s bars. Utterly bewildered, he said, “I had no idea you, uhh …” And Isaac could see him beginning to remember the truth, what had really happened to his old friend Isaac Otera.
“They had me up north for a while,” Isaac said, babbling to keep Obed from speaking. He squeezed Obed’s hand hard, begging him to go along for the sake of their old friendship. “But now I’ve been transferred again. Amazing how things change, isn’t it?”
“Yes … yes.”
“Well, I mustn’t keep my General waiting. It’s been wonderful to see you again, Obed.” Isaac stopped and peered intently at Obed’s stunned face. “I mean that,” he said. “Wonderful to see you again, see that you’re healthy, you’re all right. We’ll have to get together soon.”
“Yes,” Obed said in a faraway voice.
Isaac felt his old friend’s eyes on him as he climbed up into the truck’s dirty cab and forced the floor shift into first gear. What was Obed thinking? What conclusions would he draw? Would he permit Isaac to get away, out of friendship or bewilderment, or would he suddenly raise the alarm? “This impostor—!” But he remained silent, beside the truck, his face a mask of shock.
The truck jolted forward. Isaac fed the gas slowly. He didn’t want the engine to stall; he didn’t want to seem to run away. In the rearview mirror on the truck door beside him, he could see Obed staring.
Up ahead, the Mercedes turned off the road at the spot where Lew had been captured by the men from the State Research Bureau. Isaac, following in the clumsy truck, looked in his mirror and saw only empty road behind him. He made the turn off the highway.
It was an hour since he’d driven away from Jinja Barracks, shaking at the wheel of the truck with pent-up fright and the nearness of his close call with Obed. Willing his hands to behave themselves on the steering wheel, he’d driven the truck through town and past the building holding the lawyer’s office. He’d leaned out the cab window on the way by, pretending to stare at something up ahead, so Frank could get a good look at him. Then he’d circled the block twice, and the second time Frank had pulled out in front in the Mercedes, leading the way east out of Jinja toward the Kenyan border.
And now, with no trouble at all, here they were on the old access road, overgrown with shrubbery, rutted and pitted underneath. Ahead, the Mercedes moved at barely five miles an hour, rocking and dipping on the uneven ground as though it were a small boat in a choppy sea. The truck followed in a more elephantine manner, its big tires crushing down the rocks and roots that made the Mercedes dance.
After a quarter of a mile, the Mercedes stopped and Isaac braked the truck behind it. Frank came back and said, up through Isaac’s open window, “No problems?”
“No problems. I ran into an old friend, but he didn’t give me away.”
Frank looked startled, but then he grinned. “Didn’t give you away, huh? Isaac, you’re wasted in an office; you were born for this life.”
“I’ll be glad, just the same, to be back in that office.”
“Sure you will. Park this thing off to the right here, out of the way. We’re far enough now; we can’t be seen from the highway, and we can’t be seen from the railroad.”
“Fine.”
Isaac put the truck where Frank had suggested, then joined him in the Mercedes. He got into the backseat where his chauffeur’s uniform awaited him, and changed clothing while Frank bumped and groaned them on down the road. When the Mercedes stopped, Isaac looked forward and saw the gleaming steel stripes just ahead.
“Come on,” Frank said. “Come look at our model railroad.”
They got out of the car and walked down to the railway line. Looking back up the hill at the Mercedes, parked incongruously in the middle of the semitropical forest, surrounded by trees and vines and brush, Isaac was confused for a second because the car didn’t look as out of place as it should; then he realized that luxury-car advertising for years has featured lavish color photos of gleaming expensive automobiles in the woods or on deserted beaches or perched on mountaintops. Now I know why they were there, Isaac thought. Their drivers were stealing coffee.
Frank said, “What are you grinning about?”
“A stray thought. Not important.”
“It’s somewhere down this way,” Frank said, and led the way along the rail line to the right.
Isaac couldn’t help looking back over his shoulder along the track from time to time, even though he knew no train would be coming. As part of his clerical role in this operation, he had learned the current status of Uganda Railways, and it was scanty indeed. There was no longer passenger service on the main line between Kampala and the eastern border with Kenya at Tororo. Generally speaking, two daily trains now passed this spot, one in each direction, both freights, both traveling at night to avoid the heat of the sun.
Frank stopped, in the middle of the tracks. Hands on hips, white shirt sweat-damp beneath his rib cage, he stood glaring this way and that, saying, “It’s around here someplace.”
“What is?”
Isaac slowly turned in a circle. Fore and aft, the rail line was flanked by near-jungle growth, hedges and shrubs and limber small trees crowding in on both sides, green walls ranging from eight to twelve feet in height. There was a special small mower locomotive made for this sort of climate, manufactured in Cleveland in the United States, with whirring cutter blades mounted on both sides; three or four times a year, that engine had to be run up and down the line to cut back the encroaching plant life. With the sudden new spurt of growth following the long rains, the mower engine would be due soon for another run.
“Hey!” Frank yelled, as though to somebody. “Goddammit, where are we?”
Nowhere, as Isaac could plainly see. Way to the east, the track curved gently out of sight around to the left, still enclosed by greenery except for the one break at the access road. The same was true to the west, except that the curve to the right was closer and there were no breaks for roads.
“Goddammit,” Frank said, “do we have to walk all the goddam way around the other way?”
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Isaac said, and then he shrieked and jumped back, nearly tripping over the rail, as a huge section of greenery to his left all at once opened up!
“There you are,” Frank said.
“Wa—wa—wa—” Isaac stared at a tangled green mess of leaves and branches, eight feet square, that had simply separated itself from the real world and turned itself into a door, into something from a fairy tale.
From behind this now slightly ajar impossible door, a voice sud
denly cried in Swahili, “It’s falling!”
“It’s falling?” In his bewilderment and panic, Isaac still remembered his duty as translator; Frank had no Swahili. “It’s falling,” Isaac told him in English.
“Shit!” Frank cried, and leaped forward, arms outstretched.
And it was falling. This segment of the green wall had now become a green wave, a tidal wave toppling slowly over onto them. “I can’t hold it!” cried the Swahili voice.
Frank had flung himself against the shrubs and saplings, was contesting his own weight against theirs. Isaac, reacting more slowly, now jumped to help him, at the same time crying out in Swahili, “We’re pushing!”
But it didn’t matter. The thing, whatever it was, leaned now off-balance, and the demands of gravity were inexorable. Slow, painfully slow, but nevertheless inevitable, the section of wall bore down on them. The voice from beyond it despairingly called out the name of a tribal snake god for the Lake Turkana region, and Frank and Isaac both collapsed backward onto the track, under a massive blanket of green.
Isaac, quite naturally, began to thrash about, but Frank yelled, “Don’t break it!” and Isaac stopped, baffled. Don’t break it?
The wall or wave or blanket or fantasy or whatever it was teetered now on the southern track of the rail line, leaving just enough leeway so that a man could crawl out from underneath, scratching his hands and making his chauffeur’s uniform filthy in the process. Clambering to his feet, hatless, covered with leaves and stones and dirt, Isaac found himself facing a barefoot man dressed in blue work pants, naked to the waist, who was grinning sheepishly and saying, “It takes more than one man to hold it.”
“What’s the son of a bitch say?”
Frank had crawled out from under the thing on the other side, looking just as messy as Isaac and twice as angry. Isaac translated what the man had said, and, “No shit,” Frank commented. “All right, just so it isn’t busted.”
Now Isaac looked down at the thing. On this side, there was a complicated trellis-like arrangement of sticks and bamboo poles, lashed together, and with many tree branches and shrubs in turn lashed to the poles. The whole thing was two to three feet thick, and had to be very very heavy.
Kahawa Page 30
