“No, Your Excellency.” A fast study, this Jinja yardmaster had needed only once to hear how the president was properly addressed by his entourage.
“You are a man who sees things,” Amin suggested. “This train could not have gone through Jinja while you were having a piss in the men’s room.”
“Your Excellency, I didn’t relieve myself at all, Your Excellency, in that hour. And the stationmaster was with me as well. Your Excellency I swear by my life, that train did not go through Jinja.”
“Your life. Yes,” Amin said, brooding at the man, seeing the shock in his eyes.
A member of the entourage said, “Your Excellency, there are seven stations after Jinja to Luzira. Every one has been called; none has seen the train.”
Another member of the entourage said, “Your Excellency, we have checked with Kakira and Luzinga on the Mbulamuti northern branch from Jinja. The train did not go up that way.”
“It couldn’t have, Your Excellency,” the yardmaster said, “without switching through my yards. I would have seen it.”
“You bicycled,” Amin said, brooding, beginning to hate this smart fellow and all this “Excellency”-ing. “This train went through Iganga. It did not appear at Jinja. It can go nowhere but on the track, so it stands to reason it must be on the track between Iganga and Jinja! But you bicycled.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“Yes, Your Excellency!” Amin mimicked, beginning to give himself over to the pleasure of losing his temper. “Yes, Your Excellency! You saw no train, no accident, no evidence, nothing!”
The yardmaster, now too frightened to reply at all, stood helplessly staring at Amin, and in the silence they all heard the sound: chuff. And again: chuff. Looking up, away from the miserable yardmaster, Amin saw a locomotive through the station window, slowly easing past. “It’s there!” he cried.
“No, Your Excel—”
But Amin had forgotten the yardmaster. Pushing through his entourage, he stepped out onto the sunny platform, where the curious spectators, mostly children, fled in all directions. Big, heavy, glowering, triumphant, jaw sticking out, Amin stepped forward, put his hands on his hips, and glared in sudden bewilderment.
It wasn’t the train. It was just a locomotive and tender, and in any case it was pointing the wrong way: from Jinja. It was a 29 Class, just like the missing Arusha. This one was numbered 2938 and named Samia.
The entourage and the much more reluctant railwaymen came out onto the platform. The Jinja yardmaster said, “Your Excellency, I had this engine sent from Jinja to help us study the track.”
“Very good,” Amin said grudgingly. The man rubbed him the wrong way, that was all. Like all those doctors, professors, lawyers; all those Baganda, Langi, Acholi; all those smooth bastards who thought they were better than the poor Kakwa soldier Idi Amin.
The engineer of Samia had climbed down out of the cab, and now he reported to Amin in great excitement, “Oh, Mr. President, there was nothing! Not a sign, not a trace!”
“The coffee,” Amin said, as though to himself. Slowly he nodded. “My little Baron,” he said, while his entourage looked at one another in confusion. “That’s what he’s up to, he’s stealing my coffee. But how is he doing it?”
Everyone waited respectfully while Amin thought. It would be hours before Chase was brought back from the Rwanda border; by then his scheme, whatever it was, might already be accomplished. Even now, in some unimaginable way, the coffee train could be on some track—some unknown, other, mysterious, incomprehensible, mind-bending track—steaming away out of the country.
“No!” Amin cried, punching the air with his big fist. “They won’t do it! You,” he said, pointing at Samia’s engineer, “turn that thing around.”
The engineer looked dumbstruck. The Jinja yardmaster said, “Your Excellency, there’s no turntable here. But the train can run just as well backward.”
“Then we run it backward,” Amin decided. “Come along,” he said, shooing the engineer in front of himself. “They’re stealing my coffee. We must find them and stop them.”
They ran it backward. They traveled slowly, and Amin stood up on top of the tender, arms akimbo, glaring every which way, looking for signs of where the train had gone and how it had been done.
(If he’d come through half an hour earlier, standing that high atop the tender, he would probably have seen over the hedge the last two cars of his missing train, but by the time Samia passed that place four cars had been dumped into the gorge, the rest of the train had rolled forward among the trees and shrubbery, and there was nothing to be seen.)
Here and there dirt roads crossed the track, some abandoned, some still in use. None showed the slightest indication of any odd activity lately. An anti-smuggling helicopter was visible at one point, way to the south over the lake, and Amin thought for one mad instant of the train’s being spirited away by helicopters. But thirty helicopters, dangling thirty railway cars, not to mention however many helicopters it would take to lift one of these extremely heavy steam engines? And no one anywhere to see it happening? Not even the Israelis could pull off such a thing.
As Jinja appeared dead ahead with no train in sight, Amin yelled, “Stop! Go back again, go back! It’s somewhere, it’s here somewhere, the clue is somewhere!”
Three members of his entourage were crowded into the cab with the engineer and the fireman. The others had piled into the automobiles to drive along the highway paralleling the rail line, occasionally visible when road and track ran close together. Now, with a great deal of fuss the engine was reversed again, to run frontward, and the automobiling entourage also reversed.
Nothing, nothing, and still nothing. When they traveled in this direction, smoke and steam made it impossible to ride atop the tender, so Amin crowded down into the cab with the rest, where he couldn’t look at both sides of the track at the same time. The frustration, the overcrowding, the blindness on one side; all combined to make him finally yell, “Stop! Stop here!”
They stopped. Amin, with his belief in witchcraft and spirits, was now convinced something from another world had given him this sign, had told him where and when to stop. (The coffee train, however, had been removed from the track three miles farther on.)
What was the clue? What was the thing that made this spot call out to him? Amin tramped up and down the track in front of the sporadically coughing locomotive, glaring at the rails, the spikes, the joint plates, the sleepers, the gravel bed, the narrow dirt trails on both sides, the encroaching jungle growth.
Frustration built and built, and at last he stopped and stamped one booted foot hard on a sleeper. That was good, but not good enough. “I want my coffee!” he bellowed into the empty air. Jumping up high, he crashed both booted feet onto the sleeper; that was better. Doing it again, jumping up and down, waving his clenched fists over his head, Idi Amin roared, “I want my train! I want my coffee! I want my traaaaaaaiiiiininnnnnnnnn!!!!!”
53
Mazar Balim owned radios. Any number of radios: shortwave, commercial band, two-way, any kind you might want. He sold them at retail in his three stores, in Kisumu and Kericho and Kakamega. He sold them at wholesale out of his five-eighths-blue warehouse buildings on Kisiani Street. And he did not understand why it had not been possible to demand that Bathar take a radio with him.
Oh, he knew the reasons; the traceability of radio signals and all that. But when he paced the rooms of his two buildings, unable to sit still in his office, and when he passed the carton after carton of radios on his storage shelves, it bothered him horribly. It was terrible that he couldn’t reach out to one of these wonderful machines, made in Taiwan or Hong Kong, that he couldn’t switch it on and have Bathar right there, Bathar’s voice reaffirming that he was alive and well, although in Uganda.
If at least Isaac were still here, Balim would have someone to talk with about his anxieties, he wouldn’t have to keep them buried inside. Isaac would be sympathetic, sensible, reassuring. Except, of
course, that the sensible, reassuring Isaac was now gadding about Uganda himself, playing at pirate, swashbuckling deep within the borders of a nation where, for him in particular, discovery meant death.
As it did for Bathar. An Asian. A smuggler. A man already expelled from Uganda once.
Perhaps I should let him go to London. Perhaps Africa is no good at all for Asians, no accommodation ever will take place. But that was a hard thought for Balim to accept. Prowling his merchant domain, frightened for his boy, brooding about the past and the future, Balim still felt the weight of his own father upon his shoulders.
Mazar Balim had been raised in the absolute knowledge that he would one day take over the family business. There had been no option, nor any reason to think of an option. He had tried to instill the same feelings in Bathar, but something had changed, some aura in the air had shifted, and none of today’s generation was so unthinkingly secure as he had been about the future or about the continuation of family businesses.
The common reference to the Asians as the Jews of Africa was perhaps after all too glib. There were certainly similarities enough: the outsiders who retained their own customs and languages and religions; the shopkeepers and bankers, harbingers of the middle class, bringing with them civilization and usury, hated for their knowledge and success and difference. But in Europe and America it had finally been possible for the Jew to assimilate if he wanted to, or at most times and places to retain his difference if he preferred. Though anti-Semitism certainly existed, the Nazi experience was seen as an aberration, whereas in Africa the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians had been hailed by politicians of the surrounding black countries as a template for their own futures.
If Bathar were in London, the firm of Balim & Son would eventually cease to exist.
If Bathar were murdered in Uganda, the firm of Balim & Son would certainly cease to exist.
At least in London they won’t kill him. So long as he stays out of the East End.
If my boy comes back alive, God, I promise I will let him do what he wants with his life.
Late in the afternoon a stockroom worker approached, hesitantly, unused to dealing directly with the owner. “Master,” he said, “men in the office.”
Balim frowned, his mind still full of thoughts of expulsion and pogrom. “Men in the office?” And Isaac not here, Frank not here, Lew Brady not here! Reluctant to confront them, these men in his office, he asked, “How dressed?”
“Northern clothes, master.”
Suits; somewhat reassuring. Possibly merely salesmen. “What people?”
“Bantu, master.”
Black; could be good, could be bad. Government functionaries, seeking a bribe? “How many?”
“Two, master.”
So at least physical violence was unlikely. “Thank you,” Balim said, with more careful courtesy than he usually showed his employees, and hurried away to the offices, where he found the two men at their ease in Isaac’s room. How empty the place looked; how vulnerable Balim felt; how secure and comfortable these black men were, seated and smiling in their own country.
They rose, almost identical men of the civil service mode, a bit rumpled as was considered the appropriate way to express their independence from the European culture that had engulfed them. One had a thick moustache, the other black-framed eyeglasses. Both carried soft leather document cases under their left arms.
The moustached one stepped forward, smiling. “Mazar Balim?”
“I am Balim. In what way may I serve you?”
“I am Charles Obuong,” the moustached man said, not offering to shake hands, using his right hand instead to indicate his companion. “And this is Godfrey Magon. We are with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, just up from Nairobi.”
“Import Control Department,” Godfrey Magon added. They both spoke in correct academic English.
A bribe, then; on what pretext? “I do hope I may be of assistance.”
“Oh, we think that quite possible,” Charles Obuong said. “We are here to discuss with you this shipment of coffee you are anticipating.”
Shock froze Balim, but none showed on the surface. Polite but puzzled, he said, “Coffee?”
Godfrey Magon smiled, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses. “From Uganda,” he said.
“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” Balim said. He had begun to perspire fiercely under the arms. He accepted the belief that Africans have a keener sense of smell, so he pressed his arms tightly to his body to keep them from getting a whiff of his fear. They know! he thought. They know everything!
“It would be better,” Charles Obuong said, “if we could dispense with the first several hours of denials and evasions.”
“You see,” Godfrey Magon explained, his manner almost kindly, “we believe someone else plans to steal the coffee before it reaches Kenya.”
“With violence,” Charles Obuong said.
Balim by now had given up trying not to look shocked and fearful. “With violence?”
Charles Obuong nodded, smiling as though he quite enjoyed the anticipation of violence. “Oh, I’m afraid so,” he said.
“Unfortunately,” Godfrey Magon said, “our investigator was murdered by one of your people before he had completed his investigation.”
“Oh, no, surely not!”
“I’m afraid so,” Godfrey Magon said, but not as though he intended to make a major issue of it. “None of us can understand,” he said, “why your chap wanted to murder a simple boneman.”
“Boneman?” Balim shook his head; innocence always left him at a loss. “I know nothing of this,” he said.
Charles Obuong waved a deprecating hand. “That is beside the point, for the moment. The concern for now is our desire that this coffee should come to Kenya.”
Balim stared. “Oh, yes?”
Both men beamed at him. Godfrey Magon said, “Have you not heard of balance of payments? Of the difficulties of such small nations as ours in avoiding trade deficits? Of the terrible prices we are paying for the importation of oil?”
“Uganda plants,” Charles Obuong said. “Kenya harvests. So good for our trade deficit. You are a patriot, Mr. Balim.”
“Perhaps,” Godfrey Magon said, “we would be more comfortable if we continued this chat in your private office.”
54
When he heard Kekka’s voice, Chase felt a moment of utter black despair. Amin, that cunning cunning bastard. Of all the crooks and incompetents in Kampala, by God he’d chosen the one who’d give Chase the most trouble. Could Kekka be outfoxed? Could he be bribed? Chase remembered, vividly, all those sessions in the State Research Bureau, and he knew he absolutely had to get out of this. Some way, any way. Somehow, between here and Kampala, he must either escape or die.
They had tied him with many ropes, his arms twisted painfully behind him, his knees bent and one rope looped first around his ankles and then around his neck, so that if he tried to straighten he would choke himself. But not to death, unfortunately; at the instant of unconsciousness, his legs would relax, the pressure on his throat would ease, and he would live some more.
The only faint hope he could retain was based on the lucky chance that he apparently had no broken bones. Those bastards had tried enthusiastically enough, but for all their pummeling and kicking they seemed merely to have given him a lot of bruises and scrapes. So long as he was not physically impaired, there was still some faint chance he could get himself out of this mess.
How many hours had he been lying here in the stench and heat inside this mud hut, the packed ground painful under his bruised body? The corner of the outside world he could see through the angle of the low doorway was still in daylight, though the shadows were lengthening. And now one of the shadows was Kekka’s, and he could hear Kekka’s voice giving orders, and two soldiers came in to grab Chase by the ankles and the belt and drag him outside, not caring whether they choked him or not.
Kekka stood in front of the hut, spraddle-legged in the
dirt, hands on hips, staring with those cold eyes at Chase on the ground. With him was that damned fat border guard, and angry-looking Ulu and Walter, and a platoon of uniformed soldiers. In the background was a camouflage-painted armored car, dusty from the road.
I’m honored, Chase thought ironically. They’re taking no chances with Baron Chase.
Kekka said, “So, Captain. They tell me you speak Swahili after all.”
It was too late to deny it. His voice horribly hoarse—it was so important not to seem weak now, or afraid—he croaked in Swahili, “Ali. Let me talk with you, friend.”
“I don’t like your accent,” Kekka said.
“Ali, I have something for you.”
“And I,” Kekka said, opening his trousers, “have something for you.”
Chase squeezed his eyes shut, clamped his mouth tight, and felt the spray of warm urine rove over his face and hair, while the soldiers giggled together. When at last it stopped, Chase kept his eyes closed but called, “Ali, motakaa.” Automobile. Then, hoping Kekka would know the English but none of the others would, he added, low and intense, “Money!”
A kick in the stomach knocked the wind out of him and bounced open his eyes. He stared up at Kekka’s contempt. “If you speak again, in that miserable accent,” Kekka said, “I shall have my men shit on you.”
Something something some way out some hope somewhere some way not finished not finished not finished like this. The silent Chase stared, panting like a long-distance runner.
“Put him in the car,” Kekka said, and turned away.
The soldiers picked him up, not gently, and carried him toward the armored car. To one side the Mercedes stood silent, all doors open. These fools here had run it all afternoon, crowding in for the air conditioning, until they’d used up the gasoline. Tens of thousands of dollars were in the panels of those open-sagging doors. There had to be a way to buy safety with that much. “Ali!” Chase called, not caring what he risked. “The Benz! Don’t leave the Benz!”
Kahawa Page 42
