He himself, he knew, was not that presentable. The bishop laughed at his appearance, saying, “That’s not much of a disguise, that dirt on your face.”
“I’ve been driving; I didn’t want anyone to notice a white face going by. Bishop, how did you get out of there?”
“An attorney in Jinja named Byagwa,” the bishop said. “Sometimes he can help in religious cases. Fortunately, mine was one of the problems in which his persistence finally bore fruit. But what of you?”
The young clergyman had also come in and shut the door, and now stood smiling to one side, hands clasped in front of himself. Lew said, “A friend of mine in Kenya managed to get through to somebody in the government here. They convinced the Research Bureau it was all a mistake.”
“You were very fortunate indeed,” the bishop said blandly. “Oh, by the way,” he said, gesturing at the young priest, “this is my assistant, Father Njuguna.”
Lew and Father Njuguna smiled and nodded at one another. Bishop Kibudu watched Lew’s face, his manner still smiling and friendly. “Your popping up again,” he said, “suggests that you weren’t entirely candid with me last time.”
“I don’t think I will be this time either,” Lew admitted, and shrugged. “I’m involved in a little something. Nothing you could endorse, but you wouldn’t oppose it, either. We’re giving Idi Amin one in the eye, in a small way. Not an important way, but every little bit helps.”
“It has been said,” the bishop commented, “that you can tell a man by the quality of his enemies. That’s all I need to know about you.”
“Thank you.”
“You need help. I hope it’s something within my grasp to do.”
“I’m trying to get out of the country,” Lew said, and grinned again, adding, “For obvious reasons.”
The bishop nodded.
“I have a way out,” Lew went on, “if I can get to Entebbe. But the Nile bridge is blocked. If I can get across it, I’ll be all right.”
“Is that all?” the bishop asked. “You simply want to get across the Nile?”
“Yes, please.”
“Nothing could be simpler,” the bishop said. “Come along.”
In the church basement, by the light of another kerosene lantern, the bishop showed Lew his coffin. “You will be very comfortable in it, I assure you,” he said.
“I don’t particularly want to be comfortable in it,” Lew told him.
Earnest young Father Njuguna said, in complete seriousness, “You’ll be the first to use it.”
Lew laughed. “That’s good to know. Just so I’m not the last.”
Bishop Kibudu said, “We shall paint your face and hands with colors that would make a grown man faint, suggestive of various terrible diseases. We shall put a little piece of very strong cheese in the coffin with you. I myself will drive our hearse, and Father Njuguna will drive your own vehicle. In no time at all, you will be on the other side of the Nile.” Grinning like Mr. Pickwick, he made a clerical joke: “That’s not the Jordan, mind you. The Nile.”
Lew said, “Bishop, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”
“But it’s nothing,” the bishop protested. “It’s so very little a thing, a brief drive to Jinja and back. Are you sure there’s nothing more we can do? Drive you on to Entebbe?”
“No, no, I’ll be fine once I’m across that bridge. I don’t want to make fresh trouble for you.”
“Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” the bishop quoted. “And never more so than in Uganda. May your path be easy from here on.”
“Thank you.”
“And may you,” the bishop said, “find no employment for that pistol under your shirt.”
69
Landing being such a delicate operation, Frank handled it himself, running the raft aground with such violence that the man standing at the front of the pile of sacks fell off into the shallow water and sat up muddy and sputtering. “Shit,” Frank commented, pulled the rope that shut down the outboard motors, and looked at Port Victoria.
It had become practically a metropolis. An Army truck to one side apparently contained a generator, to feed a pair of floodlights in which the smoky oil-drum fire looked neurotic and useless. Kenyan Army troops lolled on the ground at their ease, an official Mercedes-Benz was parked in the center of things, a pair of government civil-service types waited with their fat-cat smiles firmly in place, and here came Mr. Balim down to the water’s edge, calling across, “Frank! Where’s Bathar?”
“Shit,” Frank said again. “Be right there!” he called, then turned to Charlie, saying, “You might as well untie Chase now. He isn’t going anywhere.” And to Chase he said, “I’m now going to have a talk with Balim Senior. Any message, you son of a bitch?”
But Chase had nothing to say. He looked toward the lights and people in expressionless silence.
Frank climbed down the wall of sacks, waded through the shallow water to the shore, and said, “Mr. Balim, Lew went back to get him.”
Shock made Balim look like a round-headed hand puppet. “Back? Back where?”
“Your old pal Chase joined the party.” Frank was aware of the civil-service types coming this way, and hurried through his story. “He bushwacked Young—your son, up at the depot. Knocked him out and left him there. Lew volunteered to go back and get him.”
“In Uganda? They’re both in Uganda?” Balim stared across the water as though he could see them. “How will they—? What will they do?”
“Get to Ellen at Entebbe. That’s Lew’s idea.” As the government men arrived, Frank said, “Lew’s very good, Mr. Balim. He’ll get out. But to help him, I’ve got to get to a phone as soon as I can.”
One of the government men, blandly smiling, said, “Is there a problem?”
“Nothing serious,” Frank told him. “Listen, I just got here, I’m kind of confused. Okay if I talk to my boss privately a minute?”
One of them started to frown, but the other one smiled and said, “But of course. You’d be Mr. Lanigan? Take all the time you need, Mr. Lanigan.”
While the government men went back over to the Mercedes, talking quietly together, and the second raft bunked quietly ashore beside the first, Frank led Balim upslope and off to one side, saying, “Fill me in. What’s going on here?”
“The Kenyan government knew what we were doing,” Balim told him. “They could have stopped us, but they let it happen for their own reasons.”
“They don’t like Amin, either.”
“That would be one of the reasons, I suppose.” Balim glanced away toward the lake, clearly still distracted by thoughts of his son; but then he called himself back, saying, “There’s also money. Less for us, some for those fellows and their friends.”
“Very cute,” Frank said. “We do all the heavy work, they get all the gravy.”
“The very definition of a government,” Balim suggested. “Who were those people attacking you out there?”
“More hanky-panky from Chase. He set us up to be hijacked.”
“I should never have done business with that man,” Balim said. “And please don’t say ‘I told you so.’”
“I’m biting my tongue.”
Balim frowned. “But what’s he doing now?”
Frank turned to look over at the Mercedes, where Chase, looking like the beachcomber in a Maugham story, was in confidential conversation with the two government men, both of whom seemed quite interested. Frank said, “Selling some widows and orphans, I suppose.”
Quietly Balim murmured, “Frank. If Bathar does not come back, would you do me a great service? Would you kill that Baron Chase?”
“My pleasure,” Frank said. “I don’t know why I never did it before.”
70
There were no telephones in the transient aircrews’ quarters at Entebbe. When the word came just before midnight that there was a phone call for her in the lobby, Ellen was seated on her bed reading an Agatha Christie, and was not yet far enough into it to
realize she’d read it before. She frowned at the knock on the door, calling out, “What is it?”
“Telephone, missus.” It was the night doorman, who insisted for some reason on calling Ellen “missus.”
Telephone? Unless it was somebody from Coast Global to say they were washing the whole operation—which was not a bad idea—Ellen couldn’t think who might call her here. “Be right out,” she answered, reluctantly put down the paperback, and slipped into her shoes.
The coffee train, of course, had not arrived. The official story was that the train had broken down the other side of Jinja, which was even possibly the truth, but Ellen in her secret smiling heart knew they’d pulled it off. Lew and Frank and all of them, they’d really done it; they’d slipped into Uganda, knocked off that blessed train, and skinned back out again with all that coffee. More power to them. Tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever she finally got out of Uganda, she might make a phone call of her own, a nice circumspect call of congratulations on a job well done.
In the meantime, her own job wasn’t getting done at all. There were confusions about payment, there were conflicting orders as to whether or not the other coffee that actually had arrived via truck from west-central Uganda should be loaded onto the planes, and nobody seemed to know who was in charge or what was supposed to happen. Three of the planes had been loaded, not including Ellen’s, and two of them had taken off, the pilot of one saying to Ellen before departure, “If they won’t pay us, we’ll sell their coffee ourselves.” Anarchy was becoming the rule of the day. Perhaps the Ugandans had also figured that out, because the third full plane was barred from taking off, and the other five members of the fleet continued to stand empty.
The phones were across from the check-in desk, in small booths with windowed doors. “Number three,” the night clerk said, and Ellen went into booth number three, picked up the receiver, and said, “Hello?”
The first voice she heard belonged to a male operator, who wanted to know if she was absolutely and for certain no-fooling Ellen Gillespie. Once she’d convinced him she was, there followed a silence so long she was about to give up and return to Agatha Christie, when all at once Frank’s voice came roaring into her ear: “—from a hole in the ground!”
“Frank?” She believed it, but she didn’t believe it. “Frank, is that you?”
“Ellen? By Christ, have I got through at last?”
She thought, He’s going to say something awful about Lew. “Frank? What’s going on?”
“Lemme give you the message quick,” he said, “before these assholes fuck up again. An old pal of yours from Alaska was just in town, looking for you.”
That made no sense, no sense at all. “Who?”
“Fella named Val, uh, dammit, Val—”
Then she got it. “Deez?”
“Dietz! That’s it, Val Dietz.”
“What did old Val have to say for himself?” Ellen asked, wondering why Lew would use such a roundabout way to get in touch with her. Did he think she was mad at him or something?
“He’s gone on to Uganda now,” Frank said, being as casual as a fanfare of trumpets.
“Uganda? He’s here?”
“Right. He says he hopes to get to Entebbe sometime in the next twenty-four hours, maybe he can buy you a drink.”
“I’d—” She gripped the receiver with both hands, turning her back on the glass door. “I’d be delighted. I hope he shows up.”
“Oh, he’s a reliable fellow,” Frank said. “Nice to talk with you, Ellen.”
“You, too, Frank.”
She hung up, but stayed in the booth half a minute until she had her emotions and her facial expressions under control. The coffee had been stolen. Frank was apparently okay. Lew was still in Uganda. He was trying to make his way here. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, and took a deep breath, and went out of the booth to the lobby, where she saw the night clerk avidly watching something going on outside.
The view out the glass front doors was across an empty parking lot toward the main terminal building. Signs just before the parking lot pointed toward the botanical garden and zoo down on the lakeshore. In the parking lot, under a floodlight on a tall pole, four black men were wrestling with a white man.
Lew! she thought, but as she stepped closer to the lobby doors she recognized the white man as the middle-aged American pilot named Mike. He ran Uganda Skytours; he had brought her here just the other day. Yes, and he’d brought Lew back to Kisumu that time.
And now they were beating him very severely, those four garishly dressed men. Ellen turned to see if the night clerk were phoning the police, but he had turned away and was busily filing a lot of small cards in a metal drawer. She faced front again, to see two black Toyotas pull up to the struggling man, and realized she was watching the secret police make an arrest. The men, with Mike, all piled into the two cars and were driven rapidly away.
Ellen went over to the desk. “You saw that,” she said.
“Oh, you don’t want to see things in Uganda,” he told her, not looking up from his filing. “No, no, nothing to see around here.”
Ellen shook her head. “But … why did they do it? He isn’t anything bad, he’s just a pilot.”
He sneaked her a quick look. “You know him?”
“He flew me here.”
The night clerk studied his filing. “Many young pilots back,” he said, as though he weren’t talking to her at all. “Air Force pilots, come home, thrown out of America.” Slamming the little file drawer in a satisfied manner, he nodded and said, “Uganda Skytours. New owner for that plane tomorrow. Good night.” And he went through into the inner office, shutting the door behind himself.
71
Patricia, crammed into the backseat of the Toyota between two of her captors, slowly rose through the warm comfortable gelatin layers of shock toward the knife-edge pain of reality. Reluctantly she drifted up to that spinning, hopeless, fast-moving world in which she no longer wanted to struggle to stay alive.
But the habit of life, the habit of struggle, was too ingrained. Despite herself, the external world’s signals were still being received; she became aware that they were not on their way to the State Research Bureau but were traveling east instead on Jinja Road. Why was that? She didn’t want to ask the question, she didn’t want to have to think, but her mind insisted, it kept turning the problem over, and even offered a theoretical solution: Whoever did this doesn’t want me where I can reach my friends. They’re taking me to Jinja Barracks.
A vision of men came unbidden into her mind, a room filled with men all smiling at her in a horrible way. They cared nothing about her wit, her elegance; they coveted her beauty only to mangle and destroy it. In the vision they moved closer.
The future was unbearable, but so was the past. Memory plucked at her, the memory of Denis falling dead, taking away with him into that nothingness the brightest and happiest future she had ever known. Leaving her with this instead: abasement, degradation, horror, and at long last death.
The men in the car were talking about her, laughing and telling one another what the soldiers at Jinja Barracks would do to her. Of course she had the strength to hate, but what good was that? There would be no revenge, no escape. She was now nothing but a trinket for boys to play with and break. Let me die, she asked herself, pleading with that active brain to stop its fussing, turn itself off, rescue her the only way that was left.
Could I try to escape, so they’d shoot and kill me?
The man on her right roughly stroked her thigh. “We ought to take some of this ourselves,” he said. “Before they mess it up at Jinja.”
The driver laughed, agreeing. “She won’t look so good tomorrow.”
“Stop somewhere,” the man on her right said, gripping her leg.
“When we’re out of the city,” the driver said.
Let me die. Please.
72
They did open the coffin. Lew hadn’t believed they would, but they did. They took one
look at him, and one whiff of him, and slammed the lid so hard it bounced. He heard them jabbering away out there at Bishop Kibudu, and then came the solid thunk of the hearse’s side door being slammed. Lew breathed a sigh of relief, forgetting about the cheese, and then had to hold his breath till the nausea became less acute.
It had been too nice a dinner to throw up, particularly while flat on one’s back in a coffin at a police checkpoint on the Nile. Lew swallowed, and held his breath again, and counted slowly in his mind. When I get to five hundred, he promised himself, I’ll surrender to the police.
The dinner had been at Bishop Kibudu’s insistence. He simply wouldn’t permit Lew to cross his path like this without a celebration. Father Njuguna was sent out into the lanes and byways of Bugembe, returning with a couple-dozen parishioners, evenly divided between men and women, and many of them carrying something for the feast. Chicken three different ways, two sorts of stew, a rice and vegetable dish that seemed both Oriental and wonderful, other vegetables, fruits, even some local cheese.
Cheese. The same sort with which he now shared this stuffy box, but several years younger.
The celebration had taken place in the church basement, near Lew’s coffin. A lot of beer had been brought along, but he drank sparingly of that. The beer he’d downed all day at the depot had mostly worn off by now, which was just as well.
All in all, it was a very nice celebration, even if rather hurried. Hymns were sung, other rescues and deliverances from Ugandan officialdom were recounted, and one of the men present gave a progress report on the new church, which was not actually a church at all but a small concrete-block storehouse behind a furniture factory. Idi Amin’s religious persecutions had reached the level where it was dangerous to attend Christian services, so this church here, of which Bishop Kibudu was so proud, would remain at least for now a symbolic empty shell; within the month the bishop and his congregation would have transferred to their new secret quarters at the furniture factory. “There are many secret churches now,” one of the few English-speaking parishioners explained to Lew. “It is the only way, in Uganda, we can keep in touch with God.”
Kahawa Page 49
