Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I am an important man,” the boneman said with an attempt at dignity, his voice hoarse as though from disuse. “If you kill me, you will be hunted down.”

  “By the Society of Bonemen?” In his combined comedy and rage—fueled by his recent thoughts about Lew Brady—Charlie overdid himself; he played too hard, the way the cat plays with the bird. Before he knew it he had crushed that Adam’s apple, and the creature below him was gurgling and thrashing, eyes sticking out, tongue swelling.

  “Oh, no good,” Charlie said, sitting back on the animal’s agitating stomach. “Very stupid. Mr. Balim would think I had become foolish. Oh, dear.”

  Leaving the boneman to gurgle himself to death, knowing his wisest move was not to mention this at all to Mguu, Charlie sighed and got to his feet and went away to find a socially acceptable place to relieve himself.

  40

  For many miles, the A104 parallels the northern railway line. At times the track is visible from the road, where they run next to one another on the straighter flatter stretches, while at other times the rail line is hidden by jungle or low hills. Baron Chase, driving north at the wheel of one of the black Toyotas belonging to the State Research Bureau, missed the coffee train in one of those latter areas, but when he reached Opit and saw that the loaded freight cars there were gone, he realized his error, reversed, and drove back south.

  The train crew and yard crews had already done a lot, picking up the loaded cars from Pakwach East, then Lolim, Aparanga, Bwobo, Gulu, and Opit. And when Chase rearrived at Otwal, the train was just pulling out, now almost twenty cars long. Ahead were Lira, Aloi, Achuni, and Soroti, the largest town along the way, where they would undoubtedly spend the night. Tomorrow morning, they would have only Okungulo, Kumi, Kachumbala, and Mbale at which to pick up the filled cars. No later than lunchtime tomorrow the train should be full and traveling nonstop to Tororo to join the main line and turn westward for Kampala and Entebbe.

  Chase traveled parallel to the train from Otwal to Lira, passing through field after field of coffee, the bushes all glossy green, already growing their next crop of cherries. A coffee tree left to itself will grow thirty feet tall, but the growers prune them to fifteen feet or less, for ease of harvesting. (In some places, like the Jhosi plantation, they are kept to bush height.) Toward the end of the rainy season these fields had crawled with harvesters, men and women and children, all circling back three or four times to pick each bright-red cherry when ripe. Once the rain was finished and the sun appeared, the cherries were spread on outdoor cement floors to dry, then were sent several times through fanning and hulling machines to remove dried hulls and interior yellow pulp, freeing the two beans that lie inside each cherry, their flat faces together. Two membranes still surrounded each bean, an inner delicate one called the silver skin and a more brittle outside one known as the parchment. These were removed in further cleaning machines, which led to sorting machines where the beans were separated by size, then to a hand-culling process to remove imperfect beans, and finally into a machine that weighed and bagged them ready for shipment.

  Chase and the coffee train flowed and sailed through the coffee fields in their rolling green landscape under the high hot blue sky, here and there a field all white with clusters of jasmine-like coffee flowers to counterbalance the smudgy line of black smoke drawn back from the locomotive over the full cars. The train whistle wailed at level crossings; the wheels of the loaded freight cars clattered and burbled along the rails; the cars all swayed at separate rhythms in the warm air. Driving along, Chase looked over at the coffee train and smiled. KAHAWA, said the white chalk letters, car after car, KAHAWA KAHAWA KAHAWA. Mon-ey-for-me, said the wheels on the rails, mon-ey-for-me, mon-ey-for-me, mon-ey-for-WOOOO-oo-u.

  As the train slowed at Lira, Chase speeded up to dash over the level crossing just before the barriers were put down. His foot hard on the accelerator, he did the hundred sixty miles to Tororo in less than two hours, confident that his license plate—beginning with UVS, a declaration of the Toyota’s official ownership—would keep any stray policeman from bothering him. At Tororo he turned west on the A104 and accelerated again.

  It was not quite six o’clock when he turned off the empty highway onto the access road and bumped slowly down as far as the parked Army truck. He stopped the Toyota there, afraid it might get stuck farther on, and walked down past the railroad tracks to the path leading in to the maintenance depot.

  The path had been rather astonishingly widened and smoothed; walking on it, Chase saw it would give the trucks no trouble at all. Even his Toyota would be able to traverse this new road. At the inner end, a board nailed to a tree gave the expanded path a name: ELLEN’S ROAD. Chase was reminded of World War II and the U.S. Marines on their South Pacific islands with their self-consciously humorous road signs: TOKYO—1,740 TIMES SQUARE—9,562.

  The depot showed signs of activity, a great deal of cleaning up and rearrangement, but no human beings were in sight. Chase had been listening for the past five minutes or so to the repeated buzz of a chain saw; following the sound, he walked up the spur track almost to the hidden main line, where he found four men cutting away the last of the young trees and underbrush blocking the line.

  Not knowing who Chase was, the four men were not at all pleased to see him. They looked actually threatening for a minute, until he mentioned the name Frank Lanigan. Then they smiled and relaxed and told each other in Swahili that he must be all right, just another of Balim’s white men.

  Chase gave no indication that he understood the Swahili. In English he asked, “Is Frank Lanigan here?”

  None of them had English. He was forced to do charades, pointing at the ground while asking for Lanigan. It would have been easier, of course, merely to speak Swahili, but the habit of hiding that capability was so ingrained in Chase by now that it never even occurred to him to use it.

  They finally did understand, and let him know through their own elaborate sign language that Frank was still in Kenya, but would be here tonight. Chase let them know he wanted to leave Frank a message, and they assured him with gestures that they would deliver it. “I hope so, you buggers,” Chase said.

  He carried a smallish notebook, in one page of which he now wrote: “Train maybe 3PM, maybe 6PM. No hue and cry at motor pool. C.” Ripping the page out, he folded it in half and wrote on the outside “Frank Lanigan,” then gave it with a stern warning in English to the spokesman for the group, a man in a filthy sleeveless green shirt, who smiled and nodded and repeated all his assurances.

  Finally Chase retraced his steps, looking at all the work that had been done. They’re working for me, he thought in secret pleasure. Only for me.

  Chase’s small neat house was in northwestern Kampala, off Bombo Road. He could see Makerere University from his front windows, and Mulago Hospital was up behind his yard. The house had belonged before 1972 to the son of a wealthy Asian merchant. Chase had kept most of the boy’s toys—the pool table and stereo system and small private screening room—but had had to give up the silver-gray Porsche to a Public Safety Unit colonel who had obsessively craved it.

  Generally, throughout the house, the Asian decorations had given way to Chase’s simpler style. The rooms were more bare and Spartan now, and footsteps echoed as they would not have done in the past. A living-room wall on which had hung a tapestry carpet in vivid reds and greens now featured neatly framed black-and-white or color pictures of Chase himself with noteworthy figures of the day: people who had permitted themselves to be photographed with him during their stay in Kampala, or people he’d met while accompanying Amin on official visits overseas. Colonel Juba was studying these photographs with his disapproving air, hands clasped behind his back, when Chase walked in at a little after eight o’clock that evening. The two uniformed men with Juba, one showing a captain’s rank, the other a major’s, lolled at their ease on the overstuffed maroon mohair chairs left over from the previous occupant.

  Seeing front-room lights on from
the driveway, Chase had merely assumed his servant girl, Sarah, was doing some late cleaning up, but when he saw Juba and the other two—he recognized them, knew they were cronies of Juba’s, but didn’t know their names—he realized at once he was in trouble.

  He didn’t show it. “Colonel Juba! What a surprise. Is Sarah getting you something to drink?”

  “No, thank you, Captain Chase. Is this really the Pope?”

  Chase seldom used his Ugandan Army rank. To be called “captain” was another signal of trouble. Walking forward, his awareness strongly on the two seated men, both nodding and smiling and as yet taking no part in events, Chase said, “Yes, that’s the Pope, all right. And that’s me.”

  “Did you ask his blessing?”

  Colonel Juba was a Muslim, like most of the men closest to Amin. Chase gave him an alert look, saying, “Do you think I’ll need it?”

  “Oh, we all need blessings,” Juba said. “President Amin wants to see you.”

  “Personally?”

  “Oh, yes. You can help him with that Swiss man who is buying the coffee.”

  Juba had gone too far with that. He was not as good at subtlety and double entendre as he thought. But Chase didn’t show that he now knew not only that he was in trouble but also why he was in trouble. Instead, he smiled and said, “Anything I can do, as President Amin knows. Where is he today? The Old Command Post, isn’t it?”

  “No, he’s at Bureau headquarters.”

  Serious trouble. Very very bad trouble. “We shouldn’t keep him waiting, then,” Chase said.

  He knew, whatever might happen, he was leaving this house for the last time. But he didn’t look back.

  41

  Just before sunset a car came sluing and sliding down the slope from the village of Port Victoria, skidding to a stop by the unfinished hotel. Lew had been sitting up on top of one of the completed rafts, looking westward out over the calm violet waters of the lake at the ochre ball of the setting sun. Thin lines of cloud bisected the sun to radiate colors in an extravagant display of blues and reds, magenta and maroon and indigo, rose and ruby and plum, gold and brass and aquamarine. The narrowing band of sky between sun and lake looked bruised, but the rest of the western sky was a topographical map of Heaven.

  The colors affected the Earth as well, turning everything into Technicolor, brighter and ruddier and more golden than life. The men, their construction work finished, lay about on the ground with the unreal clarity of a Dali painting, and the arriving car semaphored golden and crimson greetings from its windshield. Lew turned to watch, and when the car stopped Young Mr. Balim came smiling and chipper out from behind the wheel while a somewhat less enthusiastic Isaac emerged on the passenger side.

  Frank strode toward the car, his ink-black shadow sliding over the copper bodies of the reclining men. While he and Isaac talked together, Young Mr. Balim walked toward Lew, his smile at once arrogant and shy. “You’re King of the Mountain?”

  “Come up.”

  The top of the raft was a good yard from the ground. Lew grasped Young Mr. Balim’s slender wrist and hauled him up, where the two could turn again and look at the sun, now shrunken slightly as though receding, and deepened to a rich cinnabar. Its bottom edge very nearly kissed the lake horizon. “Beautiful,” Young Mr. Balim said. “I like your view.”

  “Thank you. I got the impression from your father this morning that you weren’t feeling too well.”

  “Oh? What did he say?”

  “Nothing. Just looked disapproving.”

  “Ha.” Young Mr. Balim said. “He led me to believe you and Frank were utterly unscathed.”

  “Propaganda.”

  “I thought so.”

  The violet disk of the sun touched the water, then became minutely flattened on the bottom, like a locomotive wheel in need of regrinding. Lew said, “You here to see us off?”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  Lew gave him a surprised look, and was startled to see the extent of Young Mr. Balim’s vulnerability as he stood there in the red light, smiling painfully, braced to be made fun of. Quickly shifting gears, Lew said, “Then, welcome aboard.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I meant for not asking if my father knew I was here.”

  “Frank will.”

  “Oh, I know. Isaac did already. When do we leave?”

  Lew nodded at the sun, continuing its lesson in conic section. “When that stops watching us,” he said.

  Frank and Isaac had come over, Frank belligerent and Isaac worried, and both now stood below them. The clarity of the light of just a few moments ago was gone, the redness becoming tinged with black, creating ambiguity. There was no ambiguity in Frank. “Bathar,” he said, his hands on his hips, “your father is crazy.”

  “The sins of the sons,” Young Mr. Balim said, with a graceful shrug.

  “You’re no fucking use over there, Bathar,” Frank said. “You gonna carry sacks?”

  “I shall play the lute.”

  “Oh, fuck off. Come on, Isaac, it’s time we launch these mothers. You can translate; Christ knows where Charlie is. Lew, you keep an eye on Young Bathar.”

  Isaac gave them a nervous apologetic smile, then was drawn away in Frank’s wake. Frank was already yelling at the prone men. Young Mr. Balim’s eyes glinted in the red light as he looked at Lew, saying, “That puts us both in our place.”

  Twilight was short, and decreasingly spectacular, but as the colors drained out of the sky, swirling down after the sun into that slot on the western rim of the world, a hundred million stars gradually became apparent, very high crisp tiny points of white, with a quarter moon at shoulder-height over the lake. In this uncertain and constantly shifting illumination, the rafts were one at a time wrestled over the muddy shoreline and out onto the warm water. Long planks were laid between each raft and the nearest reasonably dry ground, and everything was loaded. By the time the sky was almost completely black, except for a dark-reddish blur at one spot on the horizon, as though a city were in flames on the far side of the lake, they were ready to go.

  The four outboard motors on each raft had been yoked together so they could be steered by a single L-shaped arrangement of boards. With the men distributed on each raft and the gangplanks pulled on board, they allowed themselves to drift a bit farther from shore before starting the engines. The first few made a kind of muted snarling sound, easily lost in the immensity of air over the lake, but as more and more engines turned over the quality of the noise changed, and by the time the full forty were running it sounded as though Berkeley Bay had been invaded by all the world’s killer bees. In a straggling line, the ten rafts moved out onto the lake.

  Lew and Young Mr. Balim traveled with three other men on the last raft, Lew manning the steering bar. The oil drums were lashed broadside to the direction of thrust, and their rounded metal sides slid through the water with a surprising lack of friction. There was no great speed to be had with these rafts, but the smoothness of the journey came as a surprise to them all.

  Anti smuggling patrols were likely, both ships and helicopters. To help evade them, the big gray tarpaulins were unrolled before the rafts crossed into Ugandan territorial waters at Sigulu Island, covering the passengers and supplies so that no reflection from metal, no distinctive shape, would give them away. Now the rafts had become twenty-foot-square gray islands, low and lumpy, almost invisible from the air. Lew and the other pilots remained outside the tarpaulins, watching the thin moonlight shatter on the water.

  The men had used poles and mounds of supplies to prop up the tarpaulins enough to create tent spaces within, in which they sat and talked together, the soft burr of Swahili resonating out over the lake. Beneath that, and the sputtering roar of the outboard motors, the clicking sound of pebbles meant kalah was being played, in the dark. By touch alone, the players would know how many pebbles were in each of the twelve cups, and what the implications were after each move. Lew had playe
d kalah, but never well, and would never play against these men for money; you had to be born and raised to that game. Like chess masters, the best players knew at all times where all seventy-two pebbles were and what every possible future sequence would create for the next five or six moves. In the old days, entire herds of cattle, hundreds of slaves, even entire kingdoms, were won or lost at kalah.

  Young Mr. Balim sat just under the edge of the tarp, his back against two wooden cartons filled with fruit. After a long silence, while he looked back past Lew at the shoreline they were leaving, he said, “Do you know why my father agreed?”

  “Did you need his agreement?”

  “Ah, yes, I’m afraid so,” Young Mr. Balim said, grinning. “He consented because he saw my restlessness was becoming again too strong, and it was time to give me a small concession. I may be twenty-eight, you know, but I am not my own man. By no means.”

  “Why not?”

  “Money. I am like a wife, I am dependent on my father.”

  “Do you have to be? Can’t you get money on your own?”

  “Then I am a house pet,” Young Mr. Balim said, easily shifting his justifications, “too spoiled by the easiness of my life.”

  “Then why come along tonight?”

  “A conflict.” Young Mr. Balim seemed to spend most of his time laughing at himself. “I want to be a grown-up, but I don’t want to give up the easy life.” Leaning forward, tapping Lew’s boot for emphasis, he said, “Here’s my harebrained scheme. I shall be a party to this escapade. My father will not be able to refuse me some small share of the profits. With that money I shall go back to London and set myself up in some sort of business.”

  “London?”

  “Oh, yes, I love London. Nowhere else on Earth for me. That’s why my father gives me motorcycles instead of cash, you see; so I can’t get away. He wants me to stay in Kisumu and take over his business someday. But what he refuses to think about is that the Kenyans will throw us out.”