Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  The rescuers slowed beside the raft, bathing it with their own searchlight. “Smugglers,” said a bull-horned voice. “You are under arrest. You will proceed with us to landfall at Port Victoria.”

  “Thank you, Mother Mary,” the messenger said.

  But the other man was indignant. As the Navy ship went on to deliver its message to the other rafts he glared after it, hands on hips. “This is Uganda territory!” he announced. “They can’t arrest us!”

  “You must tell them that,” Isaac said, “after we are very safe.”

  66

  Patricia’s small house on Nakasero Hill was, like Patricia herself, neat and modern and beautifully adorned, and yet impersonal. But Patricia felt herself to be no longer impersonal—Denis had made that change in her—so she could move from this house, which she had loved, without regret.

  She had never brought Denis here before, possibly because of an unconscious fear that the house would reveal too much about her true self, but now it was merely a discarded shell, the cocoon of her former person. When she brought him here now, the intent was to be self-revelatory, to show him the emptiness he had filled, the reason for her gratitude.

  And also, of course, this was to have been their last night in Kampala. The plan had been that Denis would finish his business with the coffee shipment out of Entebbe sometime today, they would spend tonight here in Patricia’s house, and tomorrow they would fly away forever. But now that the train had broken down there was a very annoying delay; of no longer than one day, certainly, but annoying nevertheless.

  Patricia had planned the menu and the evening with great care. Her cook was a Ugandan woman who had spent years in the employ of a wealthy Ugandan Asian family. Those people had taken her with them on their frequent vacations to Europe and had sent her to various cooking courses in France and Switzerland. She was now a culinary artist of sensitivity and skill, who cast a knowing yet still loving eye over the raw materials available to her in Uganda, adapting her sophisticated knowledge to the local fare.

  She and Patricia had planned tonight’s dinner together, through the cook’s tears. (She was staying behind in Uganda, with her family; Patricia had given her a farewell bonus that had made her heart stop for just a second. They were truly fond of one another.)

  The cook, as her final act in Patricia’s employ, served the meal. Patricia and Denis sat in the small dining room beside the window looking out onto her garden, which was illuminated by small amber spotlights hidden under the eaves; smiling, Patricia said, “This is who we are now.”

  Denis poured the gentle Pouilly-Fuissé, and they toasted themselves. Then dinner began, with African avocados, plump and sweet and buttery, with a crayfish filling. The same wine took them through a course of grilled lakefish, the tastes delicate and evanescent, hiding in the firm non-oily meat.

  The main course was a lamb curry with many sweet and spicy condiments, and lentils, and string beans as small and thin as a cat’s whiskers, and to go with it a clear Château Montrose Médoc. Dessert was various fruits—mangoes, different kinds of melon, passion fruit, pineapple—with a homemade sorbet, and accompanied by a light dry Zeltinger Moselle.

  They lingered for hours over the meal, now alone in the house, and at its end they made love, gently and without urgency.

  Later, they went through the house selecting what Patricia would take with her and what leave behind. There were small objects, beautiful in themselves, which she no longer wanted because of the circumstances of their acquisition. She found herself explaining these rejections, and they became a kind of autobiography and confession, an emptying out of the past. Denis stood with her, holding the small things in his hands, listening to her stories, accepting them, erasing them from existence, giving her absolution with his nod and his smile.

  The knock at the door, shortly before midnight, was only a minor annoyance and interruption—a servant returning for some forgotten possession, something like that—until Patricia opened it and the four State Research Bureau men came in, angry-looking with their beetle-browed glares, foolish but menacing in their nylon shirts and platform shoes and flare-bottomed pants. “Patricia Kamin,” one of them said.

  “You know me,” Patricia answered, and they did. And she knew all four of them, if only by sight. And although she didn’t understand yet what the trouble was, she knew at once it was very serious.

  But her first fear was for Denis, who came into the living room holding in his hand a piece of ivory carved to the shape of a rose, with a bit of stem and two very sharp thorns. “May we help you?” he asked, looking coldly at the four men, doing that British thing of showing anger by becoming very correct and polite.

  The men ignored him. One of them said to Patricia, “You come with us.”

  “She most certainly will not,” Denis said, stepping boldly forward. “Just what do you—”

  “Denis!” She was terrified for him; he clearly didn’t understand the thinness of this ice. “Don’t, Denis.”

  “I know about this country, Patricia,” he told her. “I’m certainly not going to let you go off with these—”

  Two of the men approached to take her arms. Then it moved very quickly. Denis, saying something else, tried to intervene; the man who had spoken to her reached out to push Denis away; Denis lifted the hand with the ivory carving in it; the man grabbed the carving out of his hand, then cried out and dropped it on the floor; he stared in horror at the blood dots in his palm where the thorns had stabbed him. “Poison!” he cried. “You poisoned me!”

  “No!” Patricia screamed, and would have thrown herself between them but the other two men gripped her arms tightly; and the man who thought he was poisoned pulled a small pistol from his hip pocket and shot Denis three times in the face.

  They then spent five minutes there, twisting Patricia’s arms and pulling her hair to make her tell them the name of the poison and its antidote. “No poison,” she kept saying over and over, not caring what they did or what happened. Whenever they released her head she looked again at poor Denis sprawled on the floor. He had never believed how bad they were. He had never been willing to know just how bad human beings can be, and the unwillingness had finally killed him.

  After five minutes, when the man with the cuts realized he was feeling no symptoms, he gave up the idea that he’d been poisoned. “Bring her along,” he said. “That man. Making fun of me.” He went over to kick the body to relieve his feelings, then followed Patricia and the others out of the house.

  67

  When the two government officials took the radio equipment out of the trunk of the Mercedes and set it up on the car’s hood, Balim was at first baffled. They’d already brought a truckload of soldiers with them to Port Victoria, these same soldiers now sprawled at their ease over the grassy slope between the hotel and the shore; who was left for these so-very-civil civil servants to get in touch with?

  Someone. Godfrey Magon picked up the microphone and called a lot of letters and numbers into it, over and over, with maddening patience and to no effect at all, till abruptly the radio spoke in a snarling voice so distorted by static and a poor speaker system that Balim couldn’t understand a word of what was said. Apparently, though, Godfrey Magon could; he replied in rapid sentences, quick questions that were answered with the same loud brusque incomprehensibility. Finally satisfied, Magon put down the microphone, lit a cigar, and leaned against the Mercedes’s fender to gaze with benign self-complacence at the dark lake.

  Meanwhile, Charles Obuong was admiring the hotel in the flickering light of the smoky oil-drum fire. “Good workmanship,” he told Balim. “I’m glad to see you took it seriously and not merely as a diversion.”

  “I’m a businessman,” Balim answered. That was a point he wanted in the forefront of Obuong’s mind. He missed Isaac acutely; this was precisely the sort of person Isaac always handled.

  “You are a very good businessman,” Obuong said. “I don’t doubt that, not at all.” Nodding at the unfini
shed hotel, he said, “Do you know what I foresee for this place?”

  Balim foresaw nothing further than a sale at a modest profit to some retired Britisher or German who desired, on a small nest egg, to emulate William Holden. “I am eager to know,” he said.

  “Here in Kenya,” Obuong began, in the style of a cocktail-party bore with a set piece to deliver, “we are creating a traditional civilization. That is, a civilization based on a growing middle class. Not socialism, not Tanzania’s collective farms”—said with some disdain—”nor the feudal states of most of black Africa, with their widening gulf between the rich few and the poor many. No; here in Kenya we are replicating, in less than a hundred years, the entire history of Europe.”

  “Interesting,” Balim said politely.

  Obuong smiled at him in the firelight. “More than interesting for you, Mr. Balim. Vital for you. The Asian must accommodate himself to Kenya if he wishes to survive here. So he must know what Kenya is, and what it is not.”

  Balim said, “Mr. Obuong, can it be that you are friendly in spirit toward me?”

  Obuong’s smile almost became a laugh, but then was replaced by earnestness. “Your former land,” he said, “is a very unhappy one. If the same sort of thing were to happen here, I personally would live in fear all the minutes of my life. I would be exposed because of my governmental position, and my success, and my education. A contented middle-class Kenya is necessary to my peace of mind.”

  Admiringly Balim said, “Very few people, of any rank or color, have thought it through quite that clearly.”

  “Whatever my personal opinions may be,” Obuong said, “and I will admit to you privately that I have my ambivalences, nevertheless I know that a Kenyan middle class must be heterogeneous. We need the Asian shopkeepers; we need the white farmers; we even need the Arabs from the coast.”

  Smiling, Balim said, “Even?”

  “Some of my ambivalence,” Obuong said, and shrugged. “I can get along with all sorts, if I must, to have a peaceful and comfortable life. Which brings me back, Mr. Balim, to this fine hotel of yours.”

  “Ah, yes, my hotel.”

  “Our tourist industry is still supported almost completely by the northern whites,” Obuong said, “but, as you know, those people will never come here.”

  “One can hope,” Balim murmured.

  “An intelligent businessman does not live on hope. We both know, Mr. Balim, this will never be a place for foreign whites to visit, despite the lake, the harbor, the potential. But what of our own middle class, eh? On my holiday, shall I go to Treetops to be stared at by the Swedes and Americans as though I were one of the exotic animals at the water hole? Where is my tourist spot, Mr. Balim?”

  “Very interesting,” Balim said, this time meaning it.

  “The growing middle class,” Obuong said, nodding at the hotel. “That’s the hope of the future for your hotel, Mr. Balim, as it is my personal hope for my personal future. Do not sell the hotel when this is all over. Do not throw it away.” Lowering his voice, turning his shoulder against his partner, Magon, over by the car, he said, “We can talk again, a little later. A few months from now.”

  In Balim’s mind the flower opened. A partnership with Obuong, government influence, links to the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, improved roads, subsidiary businesses … I must buy a great deal more land here, Balim thought, knowing that Obuong was thinking the same thing. But I must buy through fronts, natives, not with the name Balim attached. Isaac can—

  “Look!”

  It was Magon. When Balim turned, Magon was standing beside the Mercedes, pointing out at the lake. “Ah, now,” Obuong said, awed, below his breath.

  Far out on the lake, flames were leaping up, smoky and orange; an imitation of their oil-drum fire on a massive scale. “Bathar!” Balim called, and ran heavily down to the water’s edge, where he stood staring at the oblong bowl of flame against the black night. Sounds of guns and explosions came faintly over the water.

  Obuong had immediately shouted something at Magon, who grabbed up the microphone and called into it, his voice merely excited. Obuong, meanwhile, came down to stand beside Balim and say, “Your son is with them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m surprised. I hadn’t thought—”

  The abruptness with which Obuong cut off the sentence made Balim turn to give him a bitter smile. “You hadn’t thought Asians took their own risks, did their own dirty work. He wouldn’t be there if it were up to me. Bathar is already heterogeneous, part of your middle class. Shopkeepers know better than to look for adventure.”

  “That’s no raft burning,” Obuong said, “it’s a ship. Come along; we’ll find out what’s happening.”

  They went over together to the Mercedes, where the radio was responding to Magon’s questions. But Balim still found the radio voice unintelligible and was grateful when Magon translated: “A ship attacked the rafts. We have interceded.”

  “In whose waters?” Obuong wanted to know.

  Balim had his own more urgent question. While Magon relayed Obuong’s query through the radio, Balim said, “Who has interceded?”

  “We have,” Obuong said. “The Navy. We put two patrol boats out there to make sure nothing went wrong.” With a limpid smile, he added, “Such as the rafts deciding to make for a different landfall.”

  Magon said, “They’re in Ugandan waters, but there was no choice. It’s the Angel, out of Kisumu. It was firing on the rafts.”

  Balim touched the cool flank of the Mercedes for support. I’m a businessman, I shouldn’t be involved in these things, nor should Bathar. Let him go to London. There, the middle class has won.

  The radio continued to snarl, and Magon continued to translate: “They have attacked the Angel and sunk her.”

  The distant sounds of firing still continued. Obuong, sounding angry, said, “She isn’t sunk, we can see her burning.”

  “She’s as good as sunk,” Magon said. “There were no survivors.” He shrugged with the microphone. “Let them play.”

  Obuong, grim-faced, caught Balim looking at him and managed a small smile. “I hate disorder,” he said. “Excessive force. I am no friend of chaos.”

  “But chaos has many friends in Africa, still,” Balim said, looking out at the burning ship.

  68

  Pistol in his right hand, Lew slipped into the dim church, which was lit only by three candles on the altar at the far end. Three old women dressed in white knelt in front pews, praying. A young man in a black cassock and large round eyeglasses crossed the altar and disappeared through a low door at the side. The silence of the church was accented by the sibilant whispers of the praying women.

  Driving through Bugembe in the old pickup truck, just a few miles before Jinja, seeing the town’s name on the road sign, Lew had remembered Bishop Michael Kibudu from the dreadful holding cell in the State Research Bureau. Evangelical Baptist Mission; he’d spoken with pride of his church in Bugembe. But that had been only a passing memory, unimportant until Lew had driven into Jinja and had seen the police check at the bridge.

  He must cross the Nile to get to Entebbe. If one bridge at Jinja was blocked, the other would also be. The next nearest bridge was forty miles north at Mbulamuti, and why wouldn’t that also be blocked? A white face blackened with grease would not get him through a police check; that was why he had turned around and come back to Bugembe. There was nowhere else to go for help.

  He felt terribly exposed as he walked down the center aisle to the altar, right hand holding the pistol under his shirt, but none of the women looked up from their exhortations. Stepping over the rail, Lew went through the low door into a small sacristy, whose wooden walls were covered with hung vestments. The young clergyman was at a rolltop desk in the corner, copying numbers from a hymnal by the light of a kerosene lamp. He lifted his head to stare at Lew, his eyes startled behind the large glasses. “It’s all right,” Lew told him, fast and low, as he closed the door. “I’m a friend
of Bishop Kibudu.”

  The clergyman got to his feet. His manner, though frightened, was alert and suspicious. “You know the bishop? May I ask from where?”

  “The State Research Bureau. We were in a cell there together.”

  Astonishment replaced apprehension. “You’re the white man? The bishop was certain you had died. We remember you in our prayers.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Lew said.

  “The bishop will be delighted,” the clergyman said, clasping his hands together in front of himself like a much older man.

  It was Lew’s turn to be astonished. “He’s alive?” He brought his hand out empty from under his shirt.

  “Oh, yes, our bishop has come back to us. Are the police after you?”

  Lew grinned. “The police, the Army; you name it.”

  “Wait here,” the clergyman said, and went out through a door in the opposite wall.

  It was only after the clergyman had gone that it occurred to Lew that he’d taken the man on faith, with no particular reason to do so. Why would Kibudu be alive? Why wouldn’t this curate, or whatever he was, to save his own skin, be calling the police right now? I should have gone with him, Lew thought, his hand reaching again for the comfort of the pistol under his shirt.

  But it actually was Bishop Kibudu who next came in through that door, beaming from ear to ear, rolling forward, arms outstretched for a bear hug, crying, “God is wonderful, God is good! You have lifted my spirits!”

  “And you mine,” Lew said, grinning back, permitting himself to be crushed in the bishop’s surprisingly strong embrace. Then they stood at arm’s length to study each other, and Lew was happy to see that only a few small scars around the bishop’s eyes remained as visible reminders of his time at the State Research Bureau. Cleaned up, horn-rim glasses perched on his broad nose, he looked more a scholar than a bishop, and not at all like a broken victim in a foul dungeon.