Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

Frank studied the trussed-up man with some surprise, almost with admiration. “You’re a pirate, Chase,” he said. “Do you know that? You’re a goddam pirate.”

  Chase had no comment.

  “All right.” Frank brooded, looking forward. “Where do they figure to hit us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re a liar, but it doesn’t matter. I know. The only sensible place is the narrows between Matale Point and Sigulu Island.”

  “Frank!” Chase said, struggling against his ropes. “You can’t outrun them! Frank, you’re not just killing yourself, you’re killing me!”

  “Be quiet now,” Frank told him. “I’m thinking.”

  Standing, Frank pondered a minute, then turned away and headed toward Charlie and the others back by the steering stick. Chase called something after him, which Frank ignored. Reaching the three Bantu, he said, “Charlie, old son, I’m gonna take you into my confidence.”

  “Oh, nice!” Charlie said. Moonlight reflected from his bright eyes and white teeth and wet chin.

  “D’ja ever hear of pirates, Charlie?”

  “Oh, yes,” Charlie said. “Even so, in the cinema. Swing on ropes. Swords.”

  “You got it. And that’s what’s out in front of us. Except no swords. Guns.”

  Charlie looked around at their raft. He was a quick study. “Bad completely,” he said.

  “I figure,” Frank told him, “they’re waiting for us off Sigulu Island. Where it’s narrow there, between the island and the shore.”

  “Oh, sure,” Charlie said, happy in agreement. “Ambush. Very good.”

  “Good for them, not good for us.” Gesturing at the other two Bantu, who were watching and listening and not picking up one English word in ten, Frank said, “Can either of these boys swim?”

  “Oh, excellently. They’re Luo, all Luo swim.”

  The Bantu smiled when they heard their tribe’s name. Frank smiled back at them, then said, “Charlie, I want one of them to swim back to the next raft, and then to the one after that, and the one after that, and all the way to the last one, where Isaac is. Okay?”

  “Much swimming,” Charlie suggested.

  “Then he treads water,” Frank said impatiently, “he waits for the raft to catch up. Every raft, he gives them the message. There’s pirates ahead, we should pull up closer together, we’re going around the other side of Sigulu Island.”

  “Much longer way,” Charlie pointed out.

  “Can’t be helped. Tell him.”

  So Charlie picked one of the Bantu and started to tell him the story in that goddam Swahili. While he was still at it, Chase started calling and yelling. “Tell it to him right, so he remembers,” Frank warned the jabbering Charlie, and stomped across the coffee sacks to kick Chase in the head. “Speak when you’re spoken to,” he said.

  64

  By the light of his pencil flash, Lew studied the dead minister in the bed of the pickup truck. He’d been hit very hard on the head, more than once, and had bled considerably in his transit to a better world. Smears of blood on the metal suggested the assault had probably taken place elsewhere, then the body was thrown in the back and driven here.

  Lew turned in a slow circle, playing the narrow beam of light on the road, the tracks, the surrounding trees and undergrowth. There was simply no sign of Young Mr. Balim. Either he was alive and had gone away, or he was dead and some animal had taken the body for dinner. But if the latter, wouldn’t there be drag marks, some indication? There was nothing; only the rattletrap old black pickup parked just shy of the tracks, facing downhill, driver’s door open, and in its bed a dead man in clerical garb.

  Driver’s door open, but no interior light showing. Lew went over to the cab, sat sideways in the driver’s seat, found the small bulb in its translucent plastic pocket, and clipped it back in its socket. Weak light gleamed. Lew unclipped the bulb again and stood beside the open door.

  He saw now the way Chase had done it. Drive down the access road, stop here; Young Mr. Balim would be down there across the tracks, unable to see anything past the headlights. Then, leaving those lights on as a lure, Chase had slipped out of the pickup—no interior light to give him away—and waited for Young Mr. Balim to come investigate. There should be sign.

  Lew bent low to the ground, moving the light in small slow arcs, starting beside the open door and working his way toward the back. It was just beside the rear wheel that he found the bloodstain, still soft to the touch. There wasn’t much of it, and the ground nearby didn’t seem particularly disturbed. Alive, then.

  Straightening, he flicked off the pencil flash and waited for his eyes to readjust to darkness, his left hand resting on the pickup’s rusty side panel. Young Mr. Balim had regained consciousness and had wandered off. Where? Though the keys were in the pickup, he hadn’t taken it, neither to chase down to the lake after the rest of them nor to flee in the opposite direction. Had he wandered off and then passed out again?

  In addition to everything else, Lew was beginning to feel the weight of time. It was nearly ten o’clock; the train had been hijacked nine hours ago. Sooner or later the Ugandan authorities must find this old depot, on some ancient map or mentioned in some old annual report. Maintenance Depot Number 4—Iganga. When they learned of its existence they would come here in strength, and they wouldn’t wait for daylight to do it.

  “If I were Bathar,” Lew muttered to himself, aloud in the darkness, “what would I do?”

  Go to the depot. Then run, taking the pickup. But he hadn’t taken the pickup.

  Still, the depot would be first. Maybe that’s where he passed out again, or where he just sat down in a funk and abandoned hope.

  Lew had left the Army truck just below the level crossing. Now he went back to it, swung aboard, started the engine, switched on the lights, and backed down as far as Ellen’s Road. Then he angled around, turning the wheel as energetically as Frank at his worst, and drove in.

  But Bathar wasn’t there. The four last freight cars stood patiently on the spur track, waiting to be the major item of evidence in the coming investigation. Empty beer bottles littered the landscape as though all the softball teams in Chicago had come here together for a picnic. Small animals scuttled away from the light, disturbed from picking through the leftover bits of food. When Lew shut off the engine and stood out on the running board to listen, he could hear the water at the bottom of the cliff gnawing at the rocky shore of Thruston Bay. “Bathar!” he called, four times, once in each cardinal direction, but there was no answer.

  Driving back out Ellen’s Road, he went more slowly, studying the undergrowth to left and right. At the access road he stopped again and called Bathar’s name, then turned uphill and went back up to the railway line.

  “He’s gone, that’s all.” Wandering in the woods, or trying to make it across Uganda to the border on foot, or unconscious somewhere not far from here, or after all dead.

  Lew put Young Mr. Balim out of his mind. He had wasted his time coming back here, had accomplished nothing but to strand himself. Having jumped over the cliff, it was now time to figure out how not to fall.

  Young Mr. Balim had chosen not to take the pickup, but Lew would prefer it to the Army truck, which at the moment might call too much attention to itself. Leaving its headlights on to operate by, he crossed the tracks on foot, opened the pickup’s hood, and smeared his face and hands with black engine grease. Then he dragged the dead man out onto the ground and rolled him away from the road, cleaning the grease from his palms on the back of the man’s coat.

  The pickup’s engine was reluctant to awaken; it kept coughing and going back to sleep, like a drunk in a doorway. But Lew was patient with it, like a Salvation Army girl, and at last the coughs became continuous, the engine came completely awake, and when Lew let out the clutch, it actually went to work.

  He turned around on the level crossing, then headed uphill to the main road, the springless wheels bouncing and pounding on the washboard surface. At
the verge of route A109, two lanes of empty silent blacktop in the darkness, he hesitated for just a second.

  This was where they’d grabbed him, right here. The memory of the State Research Bureau returned, strong and vivid, every stench, every evil sight of it. He couldn’t go back there; he dared not go back there. They would remember him as clearly as he remembered them, and he knew this time what they would do. They would begin by damaging one or both of his legs, to keep him from going anywhere. They might also remove some of his fingers or possibly just cut off both his hands. Then they’d be ready to begin.

  His body ached in anticipation. His wrists burned, feeling the blade. “Damn Bathar,” he muttered.

  No. It’s damn Chase, or possibly damn everybody. Or just damn himself for volunteering, for not being able to ignore the image of Mr. Balim hearing the news. It was to avoid being there when Mr. Balim was told that had made him come back into the horror.

  “I could be on the raft,” he muttered, “halfway home.” He fought the floor-shift lever into first gear, let out the clutch, and drove out onto A109, turning left, west, toward Jinja and Kampala. “Halfway home,” he repeated.

  65

  “Rest,” Isaac said.

  The dripping man, exhausted, nodded and let his body sag back onto the tarpaulin-covered coffee sacks, while Isaac walked back to the man working the steering stick to tell him the change in direction. The other two men on this raft squatted beside the weary messenger, staring at him with wide eyes. Pirates!

  Isaac didn’t use that melodramatic word. “We’re changing our route,” he told the steersman. “There may be a ship by Matale Point meaning to steal the coffee from us. So we’ll go around the other side of Sigulu.”

  “Much longer,” the steersman said.

  “But safer,” Isaac told him. “If that ship is really there.”

  The steersman was truculent. “You should have given us all guns,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s better if we don’t have to fight. Try to keep up close to the raft ahead.”

  “We should have guns out here,” the steersman insisted.

  “Nothing to do about that now,” Isaac told him, and went away forward, not wanting any more of that conversation. Nor did he intend to be baited into repeating Lew’s reasons for not arming these amateurs. He himself was an amateur, and he had no doubt but that Lew had been right.

  The messenger still sprawled on his back, gazing up at the quarter-moon, his chest heaving. Over the last hour he had nine times dived into the water, swum from one raft to the next, clambered up the twelve-foot wall of sacks, and repeated Frank Lanigan’s message; then, after a brief rest, he had dived again. By the fifth time he had become very tired, and others had offered to carry the message the rest of the way, but he had refused. Like most of the men, he lived in fear of Frank Lanigan—which Frank, who knew only Charlie’s cheekiness, would have been astonished and a bit abashed to know—and he was the one to whom Frank Lanigan had entrusted this commission. He would delegate it to no one, but would finish the job himself. He had, too, though he’d come close to drowning on the final two laps, and was now so worn he couldn’t even return Isaac’s encouraging smile.

  “Sigulu,” said one of the other men, and pointed ahead and to the left.

  Isaac squinted but couldn’t yet see it. Despite the quarter-moon, despite the almost cloudless sky filled with high small white pinpricks of stars, it was a very dark night, the lake a deep black velvet, its softness obscuring all outlines. The coast of Uganda had disappeared behind them almost the instant they’d quitted Macdonald Bay, and ever since they might just as well have been in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or traveling on some fuzzy black cloud between the planets.

  The man who had pointed at Sigulu Island said, “Are there really pirates, Mr. Otera?”

  “Well, there are certainly thieves in this world,” Isaac said, smiling, trying to make a joke of it to reassure the man. “We just stole a train. When you do that sort of thing on the water, they call you a pirate.”

  The other man said, “You can’t steal a train on the water.”

  The first man gave him a pitying look. “How can a person be so stupid?” he asked.

  A wheezing sound distracted them all. It was the messenger, too exhausted to laugh, laughing. That made the others laugh, and when they’d stopped they were all friends again. “I see the island now,” Isaac said.

  It was a low shape ahead of them. The next raft forward was already angling to the right to go around the island’s blunt end. By day, you would be able to see the coasts of both Uganda and Kenya from here, but now nothing was visible but that furry back humped up out of the water.

  Isaac went aft to sit near the steersman and watch Sigulu Island move slowly past. The island was a good ten miles long, and at their current rate would probably be there on the left for nearly an hour.

  Half an hour after they’d first spotted Sigulu Island, the steersman said in a strangely hushed voice, “Mr. Otera.”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something behind us, Mr. Otera.”

  A chill ran down Isaac’s spine. At first he didn’t even think of the pirates. Being out here alone on the water, emptiness all about, and then the odd wording of the steersman—”There’s something behind us”—made Isaac think first of ghosts, or lake monsters, supernatural and incomprehensible. But when he turned about, the hairs rising up on the nape of his neck, that black shape he saw bearing down on them, running without lights, cutting a harsh white V of foam through the water, was nothing otherworldly at all, except in name. It was the Angel, tired of waiting, seeking them in the open water of the lake. And finding them.

  The Angel, originally named Kikuyu, had been built under commission to the Marine Services Division of the Kenya & Uganda Railway in 1925, and until the Victoria was finished in 1959 she was the largest ship on the lake. Two hundred thirty-seven feet long, with a beam of thirty-seven feet, she had a cargo capacity of eleven hundred tons. But she possessed almost no passenger space, and the railway found her wastefully large, so in 1963 they sold her to a private company. She had had four owners and three names by now and was showing signs of her final decline: rust, persistent leaks, rotted hoses, and uncertain engines. But she was still big, and when traveling empty she was still fast, and she came steaming onto the rafts like Juggernaut, high-sided, black, inexorable.

  “Down!” Isaac screamed. “The pirates!” And he flattened himself face down on the tarpaulin.

  White light bathed him: a searchlight from the ship’s prow. Not looking up, Isaac folded his hands over his head, crushed his nose down into the rough gray canvas, and prayed for invisibility.

  The stuttering sound was so diminished by the great emptiness of the lake that he didn’t at first realize it was a machine gun, strafing them. Screams mingled with the stutter, and the flat crack of rifle fire joined in.

  They’re not giving us a chance! Isaac thought, as though they were all playing some game with rules. Terrified, believing himself already dead, he pressed lower and lower onto the lumpy sacks of coffee beans. A wasp stung the back of his left leg, and he whimpered into the canvas.

  The machine gunner had a problem. He was firing down on the rafts from a greater height, and was under orders to avoid shooting up the cargo as much as possible. The men who lay flat made extremely difficult targets, but those who sat up or paused to shout or ran to the edge to jump were simple hits. Those who actually did jump overboard were picked off in the water by the riflemen, guided by the smaller spotlights.

  When the white glare flicked away from Isaac he lifted his staring eyes and saw the Angel already passing the next raft, pinning it in the beam of the searchlights, the guns chattering and cracking.

  On this raft, the steersman and one passenger were simply gone, leaving Isaac and the messenger and one other man. Isaac scrambled to them on all fours, crying, “Are you hurt? Are you hurt?”

  Neither had been hit, though both were
as panicky as Isaac himself, who had a three-inch gash burned in the fat of his upper leg. Teeth chattering, the messenger said, “What do we do? They’ll come back.”

  “Swim to Sigulu,” Isaac said. “It’s our only chance.”

  Shocked, the other man said, “Sigulu is in Uganda! Mr. Otera, tomorrow—!”

  “God help us then,” Isaac said. “But if we stay here now, they’ll kill us sure.”

  The messenger cried, “Look! Look!”

  The Angel, hurrying past the third raft, was suddenly veering off, no longer shooting, steering toward the open lake. Beyond her was a confusion of movement, other lights, the crackle of other guns. While Isaac stared, trying to sort out what he was seeing, there came the authoritative phoom of a small naval gun, a flash of muzzle fire, and a great spout of water burst up beside the turning Angel.

  “More pirates!” the messenger screamed, and dropped to his knees. “Oh, Mother Mary! Oh, Mother Mary, gaze upon your little child!”

  The naval gun barked again, this time the waterspout springing up behind the Angel. Isaac could see more clearly now, and could make out that two ships were in pursuit of the pirates. Small lean fast cutters, they were painted white and festooned with lights. First one fired its gun, then the other.

  The fourth shot caught the Angel high on her port side, behind the bridge. Smoke at once billowed up, as though it had been preexisting, imprisoned inside there, and an instant later orange flames peeked through the new breach in the hull.

  The two pursuing ships flanked the Angel, repeatedly firing, closing the distance, the guns achieving a practice-range accuracy. Holes and smoke and flame transformed the Angel into a writhing stage set of disaster on the placid lake. Twisting figures showed against the orange flames as they fell or leaped into the water.

  While one of the white ships remained close to the Angel, continuing while she died to harry her with shot, the other veered away in a great sweeping circle that brought it at last behind the line of rafts. As it came forward, Isaac saw the flag whipping at its fantail: three horizontal stripes, black and red and green, separated by narrow white bands, and with crossed spears and a Masai shield in the center. The flag of Kenya. The Kenyan Navy. “We’ve been rescued,” Isaac whispered. His breath was a painful rasp in his throat.