Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  Isaac, feeling very uncomfortable, said, “Lew, you shouldn’t be the one to do this.”

  “I’m the only one who can,” Lew said.

  His expression sour, Frank said, “Still the fucking hero, huh?”

  “Always and forever, Frank.” Lew was already backing away, grinning, in a hurry to be off. “Remember the message.”

  Isaac said, “Val Dietz, from Alaska.”

  Frank said, “Where’d that name come from?”

  “She’ll understand it.” Pointing at Isaac, Lew said, “Twenty-four hours.”

  “I’ll remember,” Isaac promised.

  Lew turned and trotted away toward the empty trucks. Watching him, Frank muttered, “Ellen’s gonna blame me.”

  61

  He couldn’t believe the pain in his head. It wasn’t fair to hurt like this; no matter how much he’d had to drink, no matter how late he’d stayed up, it just wasn’t fair. If the head was going to explode, why didn’t it go ahead and explode and be done with it? Why go on torturing him, hurting so much he couldn’t even get comfortable, the mattress was so hard and lumpy and—

  Mattress? Lord, Lord, he wasn’t even in bed, he was on the ground somewhere, he’d never made it home, he even had all his clothes on, his shoes—

  Tentatively he opened one eye, saw nothing, and felt increased pain in his skull. Lifting a slow-moving shaking hand, he rested the palm consolingly against his throbbing brow, and the horror he touched there made him shriek! He sat bolt-upright, and stared in blank terror at the blackness all around him.

  “My God. My God.” He had no idea Who exactly his God was, only that in moments of distress he felt the presence of some potentially benign Figure gazing placidly and with some amused interest over the rim of Heaven and down upon poor little foolish Bathar.

  Blood. Caked blood and torn flesh and a great throbbing pounding bruise. And blackness all around; nothing discernible except just beside him this dark small truck. Truck. Corpse in it. Yellow lights, engine coughing, noise behind him, turn, incredibly fast flash of metal.

  Remembering everything—God, are you watching? I’m in Uganda, God—Bathar used the truck to drag himself to his feet. His nerves were all unstrung; he could barely stand; his stomach was roiled; stars and planets spun and imploded in the periphery of his vision. He leaned on the little pickup truck, gasping, waiting for the symptoms to go away, and they didn’t even let up.

  But he couldn’t stay here. He had to get back to the depot, warn them. “There’s a crazy person out here; he hits without warning, for no reason at all. Just a crazy person.”

  But was he? And who was he? And why do such a terrible thing?

  Bathar pushed himself away from the support of the truck, not because he was ready to stand on his own but because he was driven by a sense of urgency. He had to report to Isaac right away, tell him what had happened.

  He tottered over the level crossing, struggling to regain control of his legs, and thought he was doing well enough until he came down to the rocky, uneven, root-hampered roadway, where he promptly fell, breaking his fall painfully with his forearms. He rested awhile on the cool damp ground, but then again made it to his feet and proceeded in a wary half-crouch, hands splayed out to the sides.

  He did fine until, just before Ellen’s Road, he fell over the moped. Frank had ridden it up here at the very beginning, to get the first truck, and the thing had been shoved out of the way after that, its usefulness finished. When Bathar fell over it, he got a handlebar in the stomach that winded him and forced him to lie quietly on the ground for another little space of time. Then, sighing, hoping God was watching and admiring these strenuous efforts, he made it to his feet once more, found Ellen’s Road, worked his way slowly in to the depot, and everybody was gone. Nothing was left but the last four freight cars, stripped of their cargo.

  How could that be? How long had he been unconscious? He stared upward at the sky but saw no indications of dawn. Why had no one come looking for him? And where were they all?

  Gone. They left Uganda. Left Uganda.

  “Oh, my,” Bathar murmured, his own voice a comforting friend in this unpopulated blackness. “Oh, God, am I in trouble.”

  Hurry after them? But how long had they been gone? He’d left his watch at home—ah, the lovely mahogany dresser in his lovely dark cozy comfortable room at home—his watch at home on the dresser top with his wallet, his little gold bracelet, his gold money clip, all his civilized fripperies, because he’d been going off on an adventure. An adventure!

  The rest of them—Isaac and Frank and Lew and all of them—they surely must be out on the lake by now, safely away from Uganda. It had taken him so long to get down here from the level crossing, and they’d already been gone when he’d started or he would have heard and seen the trucks. Long gone. Marooning him, all alone, in this evil place.

  He couldn’t think why they would have done it, but at the moment he didn’t even much care. Later—if there was a later—he would give himself over to rage and paranoia and self-pity, but at the moment he was too nervous for that. He had to move, he had to keep in motion or he would break down completely. Terrified, knowing or believing that his very mind was at risk, that if he stopped moving he would have a nervous breakdown and just sit under some tree somewhere gibbering until they came to take him away, knowing or believing that movement was at least therapy if not otherwise useful, he turned about and tottered away from the depot, back out Ellen’s Road.

  He found the moped by falling over it again, but this time he switched on its headlight, and the sudden appearance of the world out of blank nothingness was comforting.

  Which way? He looked up and down the access road. Down was the lake, but how could they still be there? It would be a dangerous waste of time; he’d simply have to turn around and come back the twenty miles—with who knew how much gas left—and back again past the depot, which by then the Ugandan authorities might very well have found.

  The other way? Up at the head of the access road was the main highway; east on that highway was the Kenyan border. People slipped across that border all the time.

  Bathar mounted the moped, started the sputtering nasal engine, took a deep breath to calm his nerves, gripped the handlebars to keep his hands from shaking, and drove slowly and waveringly away, uphill.

  62

  Every person who came into the office, every report that was made, every caller on the telephone, only made Amin’s rage deeper and more implacable. His big body in the heavy chair behind the desk became increasingly still as the afternoon blended into night, his shoulders sloping, his weight pressed solidly onto the chair, his Army-booted feet planted squarely on the floor. Only his hands and eyes moved, the eyes shifting left and right like gun turrets in search of enemies, his hands touching and investigating one another, the blind fingers of his right hand studying the fingers of his left.

  The train was gone; that was the long and short of it. Coffee worth three million pounds U.K. had been stolen, and the whole train carrying it had been stolen, and no one could find the slightest trace of it or hint as to where it had gone.

  There were theories, naturally, hundreds of theories. The frightened men around Amin spurted theories as if they were Sten guns jammed in firing position; they laid down barrages of theories as covering fire to hide their lack of facts.

  There was the theory that perhaps the thieves had also stolen the wagon ferry from Jinja terminal, the large ferry that carried railway cars across the lake to Mwanza in Tanzania, but apart from the fact that the wagon ferry could carry no more than eight cars—and the missing train, apart from its locomotive, had contained thirty-three cars—there was also the fact that the ferry hadn’t been stolen but was still in service.

  There was also the theory that the train had actually gone through the Jinja yards after all, with the collusion of the railway employees, and had been diverted onto the northbound branch line toward Mbulamuti. But the entire eighty-some miles of
the Mbulamuti branch, with all its spurs, had been searched on the ground and by air to no effect. And the Jinja yardmaster and stationmaster had been tortured for several hours without once changing their stories.

  In an alternate theory, the train had never turned west at Torero at all, but had been spirited across the border there into Kenya. However, extensive questioning with torture of railway employees at Tororo had turned up nothing, nor had torture changed the story of the Iganga stationmaster, who continued to swear that the coffee train had gone through Iganga heading west and had not returned.

  All the helicopters of the anti-smuggling patrol had been brought in from their quadrants over the lake to roam the air instead over the railway line, without finding a thing. The Ugandan Air Force had scrambled, and jets had flashed and swooped here and there through the sky, to no effect. With the arrival of full night, all air activity was stopped, as being pointless.

  The people who came into Amin’s presence to tell him all these things were very reluctant to enter the room and even more reluctant to say what they had to say. But Amin was too angry at the missing train to pay attention to fear in the eyes and voices of his underlings. (He was used to a certain amount of that, anyway.) He asked the occasional question in his slow heavy voice, he made the occasional contemptuous dismissal of this or that crackpot theory, but for the most part he merely sat there like the Minotaur in its maze, waiting for food. In this case, the food would be the people responsible for the missing train.

  And the missing Chase. Ali Kekka had failed on that, even on that very simple task; bring Chase back to Kampala. He had disappeared again, he and the train.

  On one item everyone including Amin was in accord: the train had to be someplace. But that didn’t help much. On the other hand, it did mean they would go on searching; sooner or later the train—and the explanation for its disappearance—would have to be found. It was impossible that the mystery would remain unsolved.

  Which brought up a potentially hopeful road of inquiry. The railway was relatively modern, the Nile bridge at Jinja not having been completed until 1931; a mere forty-six years ago. Surely there were men still alive who had worked on that part of the road, and who would remember if there had ever been a previous line, or a no-longer-used branch, or anything at all off the main track that could have accommodated the train. A search was under way for such ex-employees, hampered by the fact that record maintenance had not been a high priority in Uganda in recent years.

  Night fell, but Amin did not move. Sandwiches and beer were brought him, which he ate at the desk, masticating slowly, rolling his jaws as though chewing the arms and heads of the guilty parties. The phone rang as he was finishing, and it was an Air Force colonel at Entebbe reporting that all aircraft were now down for the night but would be serviced and refueled and ready to take off again at dawn. A man from the Uganda Coffee Commission came reluctantly into the office, stood quivering before the desk, and reported that the cargo-plane crews waiting at Entebbe and Sir Denis Lambsmith of the International Coffee Board had all been told that the coffee train had broken down east of Jinja but was being repaired now and would arrive at Kampala sometime tomorrow.

  Amin looked at the man. “We got to find it first,” he said.

  The Coffee Commission man was a reader, a bit better educated than the soldiers Amin preferred around himself. He said, “We must remember what the great English detective Sherlock Holmes advises. ‘Eliminate the impossible,’ he always said, ‘and whatever is left, however improbable, is the answer.’”

  “Sherlock Holmes, huh?” Amin brooded at the Coffee Commission man, not quite annoyed enough to have him tortured and killed. “Eliminate the impossible, huh?” Holding up his left hand, fingers spread, he ticked off the points. “A train can’t go without tracks. A train is too big to hide. A train can’t disappear. The train disappeared. There’s your impossibles.” He pointed a finger like a battering ram at the unfortunate Coffee Commission man. “Now you tell me,” Amin said. “Tell me now. What do we got left?”

  63

  The ten rafts moved out of Macdonald Bay in a long straggling line, slow and unwieldy, their motors straining and groaning against the weight. Each raft, twenty feet square, was loaded twelve feet high, the coffee sacks covered with the gray tarpaulins, four or five men riding on top of each. Frank stood atop the lead raft, with Chase trussed up to one side and Charlie jabbering away with two other Bantu boys back by the steering stick.

  It was a dark night, the quarter-moon giving very little illumination. Looking back, Frank could barely make out the next two rafts in the line, wallowing along on the placid lake like waterlogged suitcases from some wrecked liner. It had taken three hours to come here from Port Victoria, but it would be more like six hours going back.

  From time to time Chase kicked up a fuss, apparently having something he very much wanted to say, but every time he thrashed around and made those growling noises behind the filthy gag, either Frank or Charlie cuffed him into silence again. However, Frank had continued to brood about that earlier hint of Chase’s, the suggestion that he’d double-crossed them in some way that could mean trouble ahead, so after they’d come out of the bay and completed the long slow broad turn from south to east around Bwagwe Point, Frank stomped over the tarpaulin-covered sacks to where Chase was lying, all wound around with rope like a fly being saved by a spider for a meal later on. Hunkering down beside the man, rapping a knuckle on his temple to get his attention, Frank said, “I’m gonna take that gag off now. You got something to say, say it. But don’t do any shouting or I’ll make you sorry.”

  Chase nodded, eager and anxious. He was already trying to say something, behind the gag. “Wait a minute,” Frank told him while he struggled with Charlie’s knot. Then, when he finally got the gag off, all Chase could do at first was cough and spit and clear his throat. Frank waited, and at last Chase said hoarsely, “Will you make a deal?”

  “With you?” Frank laughed without humor.

  “If we don’t deal,” Chase insisted, lying there, twisting his head to look up at Frank, “you’re certainly dead, and I’m probably dead.”

  “Tell me about it, Chase,” Frank said. “What did you cook up for us?”

  “Do we deal?” Urgently, pressing hard, limbs straining against the ropes, Chase said, “There’s money in it, Frank, there’s plenty of money in it. We can both retire.”

  “Tell me your story.”

  But still Chase hesitated. “Will you deal? Will you come in with me? Can I trust you?”

  Frank laughed at him. “Look where you are,” he said. “If I want, I can just roll you off the edge here. Plop, you’re all gone. Baron Chase gone forever. Fish food. You want to deal? Tell me the story or shut your face.”

  Chase thought about it for a while, obviously unhappy. The side of his face looked raw where it had rubbed against the tarpaulin. Taking a deep breath, shaking his head, he said, “I’ve got to, Frank. You’re my only hope.”

  “Tough,” Frank commented.

  “I sold the coffee,” Chase said.

  Frank frowned. “Sold it? This coffee? Who to?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Chase said. “A man in Switzerland. You’ve never heard of him.”

  “Why would he buy coffee from you, Chase?”

  Chase rested his head against the lumpy tarpaulin. Sounding more tired, he said, “He’s part of the combine buying the coffee. Buying it originally. I told him I had knowledge the coffee wouldn’t make it out of the country, he and his people were going to lose out. But I might be able to find him some other coffee. The price has gone up, anyway; he can charge the Brazilians more for it if it isn’t the same coffee anymore. He cuts his losses and I—we—make a very nice profit.”

  “He went for this?”

  “He told me, if his coffee disappeared, if I had substitute coffee, we had a deal.”

  “Another convent child,” Frank said. “What’s your arrangement?”

  “I del
iver to his people in Dar.”

  Dar es Salaam, capital of Tanzania, was a major port on the Indian Ocean, second only to Mombasa in tonnage of cargo. But it was more than a thousand miles from here. Frank said, “How do you get it there?”

  “By train from Mwanza.”

  Mwanza. Just as Kisumu was Kenya’s principal port on the lake, Mwanza was Tanzania’s, down at the southern tip, the extreme far end of the lake, well over two hundred miles away. Frank said, “These rafts can’t make it to Mwanza.”

  “I know that.” Again Chase hesitated, making it clear that now he was coming to the crunch. Inching cautiously into it, he said, “There’s an Asian called Hassanali.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” Frank agreed. “These are his engines. He had some police trouble.”

  “I arranged his police trouble,” Chase said, not without pride.

  “Why?”

  “He owns a cargo ship called the Angel; it operates out of Kisumu.”

  “I know the Angel,” Frank said. “Huge motherfuckin’ ship for this lake, but we don’t use him. He’s a crook, worse than the railway. But why make trouble for Hassanali?”

  “He wouldn’t deal, but Captain Usoga, who runs the Angel, he would.”

  Frank looked forward at the empty lake. It was very dark out there, except for the tiny glints of moonlight on wavelets. “You’ve got the Angel out there in front of us,” Frank said. “To hijack us.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll have armed men aboard,” Frank said, turning to look back toward the other rafts. “They’ll just steam by and pick us off.”

  “Not if we deal,” Chase said. “Not if I call out to Captain Usoga, tell him who I am. He needs me alive to get his money.”