Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  Even with nearly thirty men at work, under the instructions of the four former railway employees, it was a long and cumbersome job. Four spikes had to be levered out of every metal sleeper over a distance of some forty yards; that was nearly a hundred sleepers. The joint plates with their rusty nuts and bolts had to be removed at the point of the break. Then, inch by painful inch, the two lengths of rail, about seven tons of metal in all, had to be pried away from their nests in the sleepers and urged toward their new alignment. To do it, twenty men would stand in a row beside one rail, holding twenty pry bars angled under it; at a signal, all twenty would heave upward and the rail would move; not very far, but it would move.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the work force was digging shallow trenches for logs to be used as crosspieces on the new trajectory. Not only were one hundred sleepers at seventy pounds apiece too much to move in the time they had, but at the end of the exercise, in order to hide themselves, they would have to put this goddam track back together again.

  While Lew oversaw the track work with the help of Young Mr. Balim, Frank roamed the entire area of the depot looking for trouble to yell at. Down the track a ways Charlie, now wearing the earphones, hunkered against the telephone pole Frank had climbed, chewing sugarcane stalks as he listened contentedly to the conversations from Jinja railway station. If Frank in earphones on that pole had looked like a performing bear, Charlie in earphones drooling under the pole looked like a performing monkey in the same circus.

  By ten-thirty the new spur was beginning to take shape. The southernmost rail had been pried and levered and shoved and inched and cursed into place, up on the logs, angling now leftward away from its original bed, curving over the logs and down to meet the end of the spur track, where it was over two feet too long.

  “Shit,” said Lew. “All right, we have to increase the angle up at the other end.”

  With several spikes driven in near the spur end to keep that part from moving, the workmen levered the other end back toward the original bed, increasing the angle of the curve. The end of the rail where it lay overlapping the rusty spur seemed to shrink, jerking backward an inch or more at each heave.

  “Chini! Chini!”

  Young Mr. Balim was so excited at being useful, he was actually hopping up and down, flapping his arms like the young traveler in the Indian tales who sees the djinn. Most of the men wasted a few seconds looking around for Lew, to see if this were another test, but when they saw the sentry at the access road waving his arms over his head they scattered in commendable fashion, leaving nothing behind except a very oddly splayed section of line. The sentry stopped waving and, apparently having already been seen by whoever was coming, hunkered down on his heels beside the track like any unemployed man waiting for a train; not to board it, to look at it.

  From his concealment Lew could see the crossing, and what first appeared on it was a cow, ambling along with slow purposefulness as though returning from church. It was tan, tall, long-nosed, big-shouldered, bony-legged, half-wild, looking more like an ox than a cow, and nothing at all like the picture-book black-and-white cows in American fields.

  Beside Lew, Young Mr. Balim giggled. Lew shook his head, and the giggling stopped.

  Three more similar creatures now appeared, two of them stopping in stupid-cow fashion to graze on the crossing, where there was nothing green. The herder, a gray-brown boy of about seven wearing a crimson shirt and short brown pants and carrying a stick almost twice as long as himself, came up onto the crossing to lecture the dawdlers, his manner that of a patient but disappointed teacher in a class for slow pupils. He and the sentry nodded to one another, and two more cows stepped up onto the crossing, heads nodding as they wondered what the stopped ones had found to eat.

  The boy had charge of nine cattle in all, and obviously knew them very well. And they knew him; he merely had to show the stick to get them moving. In three minutes the cattle had finished crossing the track, and a minute later the sentry waved the all clear.

  As everybody came back up onto the track, Frank came stomping up the spur line and stopped to give a critical eye to their progress. “Coming along, huh?”

  “Slow and unsteady,” Lew said.

  Frank nodded, looking at the track. The northern rail was still part of the main line, but the southern rail was curved down to the spur. “I never saw a railroad spread her legs before,” he commented.

  I’m getting too cocky, Isaac warned himself. It isn’t this easy; something could go terribly wrong.

  But at the moment things were going wonderfully right. The same motor-pool sergeant was in the office, and apparently Isaac had sufficiently cowed him last time, so that today all he wanted was to show how cooperative he could be. “Twenty trucks,” he announced as Isaac walked in on the dot of eleven. “All gassed up and ready.”

  “That’s fine,” Isaac said. “I told the General we could count on you.”

  “You did? Thank you, that’s very good of you. And accurate, accurate.” Grabbing a clipboard off the wall, the sergeant said, “Come along and look at your trucks. Beauties, every one of them.”

  The sergeant had a strange eye for beauty. The twenty trucks lined up on the tan dirt of the yard looked as though they might have taken part in the retreat to Dunkirk: battered, filthy, canvas covers ripped, headlights broken, windshields starred, bumpers missing. Mostly British Leyland, but with a few Volvos and even some Mercedes-Benz and Fiat diesels, they looked more like vehicles coming in to the motor pool for general repair than going out for regular use. But so long as the tires were sound and the engines ran, Isaac wouldn’t complain. “Many general dents and scratches,” he wrote on the form on the sergeant’s clipboard, and signed: “Captain I. Gelaya.”

  No old friend appeared today to stop his heart. It was clear that Obed Naya had not turned him in, had kept his own counsel. What had the man thought was going on? If only there were some safe way to get in touch, to thank him, but any contact at all would be dangerous to Obed. A letter or a phone call would attract the wrong attention. It would be a poor thank-you to get his old friend killed.

  Once he’d signed for the trucks, he went back to the one he’d driven here and ordered the men out. In their ragbag of army clothing they looked about like the other soldiers at Jinja Barracks. Isaac enjoyed pretending to be a tough officer, barking at the men, ordering them into the trucks. Once he saw that in fact all the engines did work, he thanked the sergeant once more, promised to return the trucks by noon tomorrow, and led the convoy out of the Barracks and eastward out of town.

  They were merely an Army convoy, one of the commonest of sights on Ugandan roads. No one gave them a second glance.

  At a quarter to twelve, Chase came smiling out of the jewelry shop on Kampala Road. Ugandan shillings would be useless to him after today, so he had just converted most of his into a small but lovely diamond necklace. He should be able to sell it for at least twenty thousand dollars once he got to Europe.

  This was his last stop. Eat lunch now, before departure? No; now that things were in motion he was increasingly gripped by a sense of urgency, a strong desire to keep moving. He could stop at a market, buy some food to eat on the way. Deciding that, he returned to the Mercedes, stowed the small flat box containing the necklace in the glove compartment, and drove away from there. Westward, away from Kampala, away from Jinja and the coffee train. Away from Uganda, away from the past. Away from danger.

  Frank walked along the track to where Charlie half snoozed, smiling dreamily inside the earphones, listening to the busy talk of the workaday world. It was just noon. “Charlie,” Frank said. “Where’s the train?”

  “Oh, hello, Frank. They just called.”

  “Who did?”

  “Tororo station. Train gone through, making good time.”

  Frank stared at him. “Gone through Tororo?”

  “Sure. Very fast train.”

  “Jesus H. Galloping Christ!”

  Frank pounded back up the track
to where Lew and the workmen were easing that second rail closer and closer to the spur. “Son of a bitch, Lew!” he yelled. “The fucking train’s ahead of schedule!”

  Lew looked down the track, as though expecting to see the thing coming. “Where is it?”

  “Eighty miles from here. Gone through Tororo already. The bastards are highballing.”

  Lew looked around, then bawled, “Bathar!”

  Young Mr. Balim appeared, as though from under a sleeper. “Here I am.”

  “Tell them,” Lew said, “we’ve got to do this faster. The train’s an hour from here.”

  “Oh, my gosh.”

  “Not an hour,” Frank said. “They can’t do eighty, not that full.”

  “Tell them an hour,” Lew insisted.

  While Young Mr. Balim translated—it griped Frank’s ass that a punk like that could rattle off the fucking Swahili—Frank turned and saw an army truck just going over the level crossing. “Isaac’s back! Get these people moving, Lew.”

  Frank trotted down the track to the access road, where truck after truck was now lumbering across. Who asked the goddam railroad to run ahead of schedule? Jumping up onto a passing running board. Frank rode down to where Isaac was directing everybody where to park. “Hey, Isaac!”

  Isaac waved, grinning from ear to ear, the ultimate schoolboy playing hooky. “No trouble at all,” he called. “I am reborn a highwayman.”

  Frank had no time for amenities. “Isaac, the train’s running ahead of schedule. It’s already past Tororo. Get your drivers up to help Lew move that fucking track.”

  “Tororo!” Turning away, Isaac started shouting panicky instructions at his drivers. More Swahili.

  It was like a conga line, with Lew at the head, Young Mr. Balim behind him, Frank, Isaac, the four ex-railwaymen and the forty-eight laborers. Fifty-six men in a row, all stooping over to grasp the double lip of the rail in both hands, tensing, waiting.

  “On three,” Lew called. “You do it, Bathar.”

  Young Mr. Balim’s voice sounded clear and musical over the tracks: “Moja! Mbili! TATU!”

  The hundred twelve hands gripped; the fifty-six backs strained and lifted; the rail cleared the ground and moved leftward not quite a foot, and fell.

  “Again!”

  “Moja! Mbili! TATU!”

  “Moja! Mbili! TATU!”

  “Jesus,” Frank grumbled, “isn’t the fucker there?”

  Lew looked down at the two lengths of rail, the main track gleaming, the spur orange-red with rust. We should have guessed, he thought. “It’s there,” he said. “Come take a look.”

  While the men all straightened and rubbed their backs, stretching and laughing at one another, Lew and Frank and Isaac and Young Mr. Balim and the ex-railwaymen all stood looking at the rails. Frank said it: “It’s two fucking feet too fucking short.”

  Lew sighed. “We took two straight lines,” he said, “and curved them. The outer curve has to be longer than the inner curve to come to the same place.”

  “Two feet. We’ll derail the fucking train if we try to run it over that.”

  Lew turned to Young Mr. Balim. “These men have been working here for a week. Ask them if they’ve seen any short piece of rail we could fit in there.”

  Young Mr. Balim asked the question, but didn’t have to translate the negative headshakes. Frank said, “Goddam son of a bitch dirty bastard.”

  Hardly noticing the fact, Lew had taken over. “Frank,” he said, “we didn’t come this far to get stopped by some little gap in the rail. We’ll work something out. You start them driving spikes. Have we got the measure?”

  “Right here,” Young Mr. Balim said, picking up the long notched stick they would use to be sure the rails were the right width apart.

  “Give it to Frank. You and these guys come with me. There’s got to be something in this depot we can use.”

  Frank stood holding the stick Young Mr. Balim had given him. He looked truculent and confused. “Now what?”

  Lew said, “Frank, we’ve got the first rail spiked into place. You use the measure to put the second rail the right distance from it, and have the men spike it in. I’ll be right back.”

  “Where’s my translator?” Frank was demanding; as Lew led his party down toward the engine shed, Frank overrode Isaac’s attempt to volunteer by bellowing, “Charlie, you asshole, get over here!”

  The interior of the engine shed was an agglomeration of half-eaten food, ancient rotting leaves, animal and bird droppings, rusting tools and metal tables, rotted planks and foul wood smoke. Lew and the other five searched through this mess without result; everything they came up with was either too long or too fragile for the weight it would have to support.

  “Something,” Lew said, hands on hips, glaring around.

  “Not in here,” Young Mr. Balim said.

  “Outside, then.”

  Outside, beside the shed, there were still a few unused rails, but they were all sixteen-footers. No good. While the others scuffed through the trash beside the building Lew, not knowing what he was looking for, wandered alone down the spur line to the turntable, paused there to look around and see nothing of use, and walked on. The last of the added rails stopped less than five feet from the lip of the gorge. Far below, the water of Thruston Bay could be heard beating against the coastal rocks.

  What could they use? Turning back, Lew was starting to retrace his steps when he saw the old buffer that had been removed from the end of the track now lying off to the right in the weeds. A trapezoid around a large thick rusty spring with a black rubber knob on the front, the frame of the buffer was made of lengths of rail!

  “Jesus Christ,” Lew said for his own benefit, then yelled, “Bathar! Bring ‘em down here!”

  There were gaps at both ends of the inserted piece, but neither was more than an inch long. Extra log supports were under the insert, which had been fixed in place with so many spikes it looked as though it had acne.

  “All right,” Frank said as he threw away the measure stick. “Now we’ve finally got the welcome mat, let’s go steal the fucking train.”

  45

  The train ran west from Tororo at fifty-five miles an hour. The heavy-laden cars roared and rumbled on their way, the wheels banging into the joints, the metal couplers gnashing together, the bodies swaying and jouncing left and right on their old springs. The locomotive strained forward as though representing steam engines everywhere, hurling defiance at the world of diesel. The big steel wheels ran so fast the connecting bars were a blur. Smoke and steam fled out the stacks, and the engineer wailed the whistle for the level crossings, where people stared as the huge snarling shrieking metal snake, a third of a mile long, went thundering by.

  Back when they’d been picking their path through the Tororo yards, they’d had to slow to such a crawl that the fireman had hopped out, run to the station, bought two sandwiches and four beers, and was back aboard before the transfer was completed to the east-west line. But now, as they ate the sandwiches and drank the beer, there was nothing ahead but fine weather and clear track.

  The little stations shot by: Nagongera, where the sleeping stationmaster leaped out of his chair on the shaded platform as though the devil himself were rushing by; Budumba, just before the clattering trestle bridge over the swampy southern toe of Lake Kyoga; Busembatia, where the train quivered and clanged over the switches that led to the northbound Mbulamuti branch loop; Iganga, where a school soccer game faltered to a stop as the white-shirted boys in dark-blue short pants turned to stare and the black-and-white soccer ball went bounding away on the green grass. The engineer laughed and sounded the banshee whistle one extra time for luck.

  “Flag ahead!”

  The engineer turned and frowned, and the fireman pointed dead ahead, where a very sloppy soldier beside the track waved a red flag vigorously over his head.

  Automatically, the engineer released the throttle bar and applied the brakes, and they shot by the grinning flag-waving so
ldier. What did it mean? The next station was Magamaga, just before Jinja. Was there trouble there? Trouble on the track?

  Down the line another soldier waved a red flag, and beyond him an Army truck straddled the rails, blocking the train.

  “It’s Army,” the fireman said. He sounded frightened.

  “We have to stop.” The engineer sounded frightened, too. The Army. Who knew whose side the Army was on these days?

  But stopping a train this big, this long, this heavy, was easier said than done. The brakes slammed on all the way down the line of cars, the impulse running back through the hydraulic hoses, the wheels under the cars shuddering to a halt, skidding and scraping along the rails, throwing sparks. The locomotive hurled up a great whoosh of steam, neighing like a fractious horse, not wanting to stop, fighting the brakes. The wide-eyed driver of the truck (an Asian, he looked like, what was an Asian doing in Uganda?) hurriedly drove off the track, but the train did finally grind down to a loud, steam-hissing, metal-banging, infinitely prolonged halt, forward motion ceasing just before it reached the spot where the truck had been.

  The second soldier was an officer. The engineer, torn between worry and irritation, watched him trot this way along the gravel beside the track, still carrying his red flag. Far back, well beyond the last car, the other soldier had thrown his own flag away and could faintly be seen running in this direction.

  The officer was out of shape; a desk man, probably. He was winded when he reached the locomotive, where the engineer yelled down to him over the continuing hiss of steam, “What’s the matter?”

  The officer gasped and blew for a minute, increasing the engineer’s impatience, before he managed to say, “Trouble.”

  “Trouble? I guessed there was trouble. What sort of trouble?”

  “You’re being hijacked,” the officer said.

  The engineer didn’t at all understand. “What’s that?”