Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  Amin’s decision four years before to dismantle East African Railways had troubled them both, but only for practical and personal reasons. In practical terms, it meant their trains no longer could be serviced at the fine modern workshops in Nairobi. And in personal terms, it meant they could no longer go on jaunts to Nairobi and Mombasa, rough colorful cities they found more exciting than Kampala. But the decisions were not theirs to make; they shrugged and went on about their jobs.

  Ahead, Lolim. They tossed the empty beer bottles from their moving cab into the newly green fields and sounded the whistle high and clear for the level crossing at the edge of town.

  38

  Idi Amin was drunk. He had become drunk at lunch, and now he was getting more drunk. Seated on a wooden chair, holding in his left fist a third-full quart bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label scotch whisky, he stared blearily at the face of the colonel who—he well knew, he well knew—had schemed to bring together the entire Langi tribe in a plot against him. “You were very bad, Colonel,” Amin said, and waggled a reproving finger in the colonel’s face.

  The colonel’s eyes and mouth were closed. Small clumps of dried blood under his nose had made it seem he had an imperfect moustache. The colonel had been dead for four months and his body had long ago been thrown to the crocodiles in the Nile at Owen Falls Dam, but his head was still here, in the freezer in the Botanical Room at the Old Command Post, one of Amin’s lesser dwellings in Kampala. Three other heads of former enemies were in here at the moment, plus two human hearts, but it was to the colonel that Amin directed his reproaches.

  He had started drinking today before noon, and at lunch had had to put up with lectures on economics from a Saudi Arabian who was here to discuss financial assistance for Uganda but who in fact spent all his time criticizing Amin’s handling of the nation’s economy. The Saudi Arabian seemed totally unaware that his arrogant “expertise” was simply the oil-wealth cushion he was reclining on, and that he knew no more than Amin about actually managing financial affairs. Amin had drunk heavily throughout lunch to help him put up with this popinjay, and then had retired here to the Old Command Post and its Botanical Room to go on drinking and to take out his bad temper on his defeated enemies.

  A knock sounded at the locked door, across the room behind him. Amin reared up, heavy head turning, staring this way and that for enemies. He glowered at the four sleeping heads in the freezer, and it occurred to him to wonder why they couldn’t be delivered with their eyes open. As they were, they didn’t appear to be paying attention. He would have to talk to Minawa about that.

  The knock repeated, more insistently. Amin muttered something and heaved himself up out of the chair, pressing his palm to the freezer for support. “One minute!” he called, first in Kakwa and then in Swahili. “One minute,” he muttered in English, “one minute, sir,” and looked around for somewhere to put down the whisky bottle.

  There were a refrigerator and a freezer here in the Botanical Room, side by side. The refrigerator contained beer and other drinks, because Amin liked to entertain close friends in this room. The two were kept locked with a single chain and padlock. Now, closing the deep-freezer of his enemies, Amin fumbled with the chain and padlock, fastened them, and moved toward the door. By the time he reached it, his manner was much less drunk; only his breath and the increased redness of his eyes gave him away.

  The person at the door to the outer room was a servant named Moses, a Bagisu from the slopes of Mount Elgon, a placid man, eager to please, with a very ready laugh, who famously loved Amin’s jokes and sense of humor. Amin didn’t realize it, but whenever it was necessary to give him a message while he was drunk or in a bad mood, the other servants always sent Moses, because he was least likely to be killed or beaten.

  “Ah, Your Excellency,” Moses said. “Colonel Juba calls. He has a tape for you to listen to. He says he thinks it’s very important.”

  “He thinks so, does he? Colonel Juba thinks Colonel Juba is important.” The colonel was in charge of the network of spy microphones, and many of the colonel’s tapes had in truth turned out to be very interesting indeed. Nevertheless, the lunch and the whisky had put Amin in a bad mood, which he was reluctant to give up. “Maybe someday I’ll take one of those tapes,” he said, “and shove it up Colonel Juba’s ass, and spin him in a circle, and listen at his mouth.”

  Moses was delighted at the image. “That would be something,” he agreed, laughing and nodding.

  Amin’s mood was improving by the second. “Order my car, Moses,” he said. “I’ll listen to this tape.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency,” Moses said, and went laughing away across the main room while Amin strode off to piss and wash his face and change his lunch-stained safari suit.

  The tape was of Patricia Kamin and Sir Denis Lambsmith, and when it reached the point where Sir Denis proposed marriage Amin, who had been smiling in anticipation of something special, roared with laughter and slapped his knee, looking around to be sure the other men in the room also got the joke. Then he said to Colonel Juba, “That’s it, is it? She really got him, that girl. She’s a holy terror, that girl.”

  Colonel Juba was a thin man, painfully thin inside his Army uniform, with a long bony face and a permanent look of disapproval. “No,” he said. “It was the part before that, about the coffee.”

  Amin was still feeling the effects of all that drink, although he had gratefully accepted a cup of coffee on arrival here at the State Research Bureau building. The tape was still running on. “Run it back, play it for me again,” he said, then frowned, because the tape now was nothing but a rushing sound, like a great wind through tree branches. “What’s that?”

  “They’re taking a shower together,” Colonel Juba said. “They take many showers together.”

  “A very clean girl,” Amin said with a big grin. “And a very clean white man.”

  The technician rewound the tape, and Amin listened for the second time to the part that Colonel Juba thought important. With Juba and two technicians and two other officers in the room, Amin thought it important not to appear stupid, so this time he listened much more carefully.

  SIR DENIS: You know, Emil Grossbarger told me why he wanted me out of this sale.

  PATRICIA: So it was him?

  SIR DENIS: Oh, I knew that all along. I could never understand why.

  PATRICIA: Maybe he’s up to some hanky-panky.

  SIR DENIS: He says he heard somebody’s going to try to steal the shipment.

  PATRICIA: What?

  SIR DENIS: It’s nothing. Some rumor he heard, Lord knows where.

  PATRICIA: The shipment, it’s—It’s too big. Hundreds and hundreds of tons.

  SIR DENIS: I know that. He just thinks conditions here are too unstable. If something went wrong, he thinks I might get hurt. It was an act of friendship, believe it or not.

  PATRICIA: Yes, of course it was. You should be flattered to inspire such friendship.

  SIR DENIS: You inspire greater feelings than that, Patr—

  At Colonel Juba’s gesture, the technician switched off the tape. The colonel said to Amin, “Well? What do you think?”

  Amin brooded for half a minute, much more sober now. He was not an intellectual man, but he was a cunning and clever one. His mind was like an anthill, the busy self-involved thoughts scurrying along the narrow channels. “Send them away, Juba,” he said, and sat nodding while Juba told the other men to leave.

  When they were alone, Amin said, “Baron Chase has been talking to that Swiss man.”

  “I was thinking that,” Juba agreed. It had never been a secret that Juba was among those who disliked and mistrusted Baron Chase.

  “We haven’t known what he’s been saying to the Swiss man.”

  “He won’t sleep with Patricia.”

  Amin chuckled. “I think he likes to fuck boys.”

  “We could send him a boy.”

  “No. He wouldn’t give himself away that easy. He’s very clever, very cunni
ng.” Amin recognized his own qualities in other men, and was an excellent judge of whether or not they could be used against him. “He has been restless here for some time,” he said, brooding, remembering his recent encounters with Chase. “Very restless. And he was gone a long time in London.”

  Juba waited patiently. He had already come to his conclusion as to what move to make, but of course he’d heard the tape almost an hour before Amin. And he never had cared much for Chase.

  “All right,” Amin said at last. “Take two men you trust, you know what I mean. Pick up Chase, but secretly. There are people in government who shouldn’t know about this, not till it’s over. So just you and me, and your two men.”

  Juba nodded. “Good,” he said.

  “Find out what Chase and this Swiss man are up to.”

  “Carefully?”

  Amin thought again, but this time very briefly. “No,” he said. “Baron Chase is spoiled for us now. We won’t need him anymore. Squeeze him dry.”

  “And then?”

  There was a catchphrase Amin used with his closest confidants, which meant that the person should first be tortured—not for information, but as punishment or for exercise—and then murdered. He used the phrase now: “Give him the VIP treatment.”

  “Good,” Juba said.

  Amin added, “But save the head.”

  39

  Charlie didn’t understand Lew Brady. The man wouldn’t play the game. Since Monday, the beginning of the training sessions, Charlie had been assigned to Lew Brady as translator and it hadn’t been any fun at all. Brady apparently didn’t realize that one of the fringe benefits in this job, one of the little extras that made the work appealing, was Charlie’s right to make fun of his employers. If he didn’t have that, then what was the point?

  And he didn’t have it. Charlie was a fast study, and on Monday he had learned that when he translated Lew Brady’s statements he’d better do so word for word. The flights of fancy, the scatological asides, the absolute poetry of his translations of Mguu’s bellowed orders had made the entire work staff happy for years. Now here was this fellow taking himself seriously and bending Charlie’s bones whenever Charlie wanted to have a little fun. The result was, in addition to the boredom of doing the job right, he was losing face with the other men, who knew what Brady had done to him and why he was being so cowed.

  Maybe it would be necessary to kill Lew Brady.

  Not so easy, though. Charlie considered going to a witch doctor—the best killing witch doctors came from the Luo tribe, right around this area—but what if word got back to Brady? Or even to Mr. Balim, whom Charlie revered in an almost theological way.

  Charlie saw Mr. Balim as a being apart from other men, not to be compared either with his own Kikuyu tribesmen nor with the animals that populated the rest of the world, but as completely something else. In Charlie’s mind Mr. Balim was a great benign sun that beamed upon him, that could read his mind without condemning him, and that understood Charlie’s intelligence and humor and wisdom in a way no other mind had ever done. Mr. Balim gave him authority, Mr. Balim gave him responsibility, and then Mr. Balim completed his joy by giving him absolute understanding combined with absolute acceptance. He knows my heart, Charlie told himself; if ever he would tell his secret name to another human soul, it would be to Mr. Balim.

  For some time, Charlie had been trying to think of a private name for Mr. Balim, but so far without success. No word, no name he could think of, was grand enough.

  As for Lew Brady, he would soon find a name for him. He was close to deciding on Gijjig, an adaptation of a Kikuyu word for “venereal disease,” though he had to admit the name contained more in it of spite than relevance. Perhaps a name would come; if not, Gijjig would do.

  “Charlie, goddammit!”

  It was Mguu, interrupting Charlie where he squatted thinking about Lew Brady. Charlie looked up in amiable fashion. “Yes, Frank?”

  “Goddammit, Charlie,” Mguu said, “don’t shit on the flowers.”

  Charlie looked down between his knees. In truth there were lilies there, but so what? He’d chosen this spot because he intended to wipe himself with a few. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “The locals don’t like it,” Mguu told him. “They been bitching and complaining; every time somebody wants flowers for their house, they’re all over shit from you. Besides, you’re right out in plain sight. Do it up the hill there.”

  Charlie hadn’t actually started to relieve himself, having been concentrating so thoroughly on Lew Brady, so now he merely shrugged and straightened up and pulled up his pants. “Whatever you say, Frank,” he said. “I just wanted, me, to be close by in case you needed something translated.”

  “Oh, fuck off, Charlie,” Mguu said.

  “Okay, then, Frank.”

  Charlie drifted on up the hill behind the hotel site, toward where they’d been camping out. He would have done his shitting in some declivity in front of Mguu’s tent, but he doubted Mguu would be using the place again.

  At the top of the hill he turned to look back, and the scene below reminded him of pictures in the book Treasure Island, which he had read in school when he was a boy and learning English because his mother—now dead—wanted access to the riches of the city. She had understood clearly that English was the language of the city, and would twist Charlie’s arms or ears if he did badly in his lessons. In her dream, Charlie would grow up speaking English, would travel to the city in the little matatu bus—really just an enclosed pickup truck with two benches in the back—and there he would in some magical manner become plugged into the society of the rich. The money and the clothing and the food and the leisure would somehow flow out of the city and through Charlie and spread like a warm glow all over his mother.

  What happened in reality was, Charlie grew up to be Charlie, and his mother died of various illnesses and a lack of medical attention at the age of thirty-seven. Which doesn’t mean she was wrong.

  And which does mean that when Charlie stood on the hilltop now and looked down at Port Victoria’s shore, with Berkeley Bay to the right and the open immensity of Lake Victoria to the left and the green hump of Uganda straight ahead, what he thought of was the pictures accompanying Treasure Island.

  Most of the men were hard at work down there, swarming over the rafts, while Mguu strode back and forth like a Long John Silver who’d regrown his leg, and Lew Brady played Tom Swift (more of Charlie’s schooldays grab bag of books in English) by overseeing the uncrating and assembling of the outboard motors.

  Ten large rafts were being built along the shore, each twenty feet square, made of twenty-foot-long planks nailed to twenty-foot-long crosspieces, the entire arrangement then lashed to empty oil drums. Along one edge of each raft a rough-and-ready assemblage of planks was being fastened underneath the main wooden body, and then four of the Evinrude outboard motors were being attached to each of these assemblies. The reason for this awkward-looking mess was that the rafts would ride so high in the water that if the outboard motors were attached directly to the raft bodies their propellers would be completely up in the air. On the return trip, with each raft carrying tons and tons of coffee, that wouldn’t be a problem.

  Seen from the hilltop, the ten rafts were like some Lilliputian armada, about to launch themselves in a soup tureen, but they were more serious than they looked. The men’s lives depended on these rafts, as Lew Brady had said (and as Charlie with perfect fidelity and increasing rage and boredom had translated), so they were taking their work with great seriousness. The ring of hammers beat out over the water and the land.

  Charlie turned the other way, and something that might have been a gazelle ducked and leaped and flowed out of sight. Might have been a gazelle, but was not. Charlie pretended he hadn’t seen it, and strolled along like any man looking for a place to shit. His search led him by many angles and ellipses closer and closer to the little bush-filled hollow in which—

  “YAAAAA!”

  Ch
arlie leaped like a swimmer entering the pool for a two-lap race. The man—not at all a gazelle—surged up out of the brush like a startled quail, but wasn’t fast enough; Charlie brought him down, arms entangling in the man’s legs, the two of them crashing back down into the scratchy leaves and branches.

  The man kicked and twisted and flailed about, utterly silent. It was the silence that told Charlie this was an enemy and not merely a sneak thief or a passing stranger. He held tight to whatever parts the man offered—a bony ankle, a bonier wrist—and slowly but inexorably he pulled the man out of the shrubbery and laid him on his back on the stony ground, where he gazed on his closed face and remembered that he had seen this fellow before.

  It was the raggedy man, the boneman that Charlie and Mguu had surprised during their visit to the depot. Which was in Uganda. Which was a far far way from here.

  I should have killed him last time, when I thought of it.

  Charlie straddled him. “Oh, boneman,” he said, his strong fingers toying with the man’s Adam’s apple as a kitten toys at first with a ball of string or a cat toys at first with a wounded bird, “Oh, boneman, there is no false story you can tell.”

  The boneman apparently recognized that himself. He merely lay there on his back, arms under Charlie’s knees, caramel-colored palms facing up.

  “But you could tell me who sent you,” Charlie said. His thumbnail drew a thin line of blood across that moving captive Adam’s apple. “You could tell me that. Who spies? For what purpose?”