Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I was trying to get to the border, but I had to hide every time a car came along. I was still groggy, and once when I was hiding I just fell asleep. Then I woke up and started again, and people came out of a little hotel by the road and saw me and chased me. Because I’m an Asian, I guess.”

  Lew swiveled around to grin at him, saying, “Well, did you have fun?”

  “I guess I did, really,” Bathar said, “so long as I survived.”

  “And will you go to London now?”

  “Oh, absolutely. In all the bad moments, I kept telling myself, ‘There’s London at the end of this.’”

  Patricia said, “You’re going to London?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “I thought I might go back there, too,” she said. “I have cousins in Fulham.”

  “A nice neighborhood, Fulham,” Bathar suggested. “Near to Chelsea and all. I used to live in Bayswater with the other wogs, but I didn’t much like it.”

  “My cousins could put you up,” Patricia offered, “until you find your own place.”

  “Why, thank you. Would they be putting you up, too?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Until I find my own place.”

  The conversation in the backseat continued, Patricia and Bathar not at all hiding their mutual pleasure of discovery. In front, Ellen silently drove. Unbuttoning his shirt, Lew pulled out the long triangular pennant, dark green with the orange numbers on it, that he’d been wearing wrapped around his chest. 16.

  Looking at him, Ellen said, “What’s that?”

  “My flag. My guidon, standard, pennant. I’ll have to get it a new pole.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “It came from the golf course where Patricia was having that trouble.”

  “So it’s a souvenir.”

  “Well, no. Not exactly.” Holding the flag up, studying it in the dim control-panel light, he said, “At first, when I saw it, I thought it was a good joke. That’s why I took it. But now I think it really is my flag.”

  “Because you’ll be forever sixteen?”

  “Maybe so,” he said, grinning at her. “But for another reason, too. I’ve been in so many armies, fought so many times under so many different flags. This time there wasn’t a flag at all, there were no noble ideals, there wasn’t even a cause beyond money. But I bet I did more good today, more real good in the world, than I’ve ever done in my life before.” He waved the flag. “I’m going to keep this to remind me not to get too serious about other people’s flags.”

  “You mean you won’t hire out as a merc anymore?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure what I could do instead.” He shrugged. “Grow up, maybe, though I’d rather not. I’ll have to think about it. What about you? Still going back to the States?”

  She gave a little sigh and shook her head, as though in long-suffering irritation. “Oh, I suppose not,” she said. “You get in too much trouble when I’m not around. Besides, I’d like to see what kind of knight you’ll be, following that flag.”

  Lew smiled, reaching out to touch her shoulder. “I’ll be good,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  EPILOGUE

  Idi Amin slept, and dreamed. He dreamed that he rode on a white cloud over Lake Victoria, and the lake was steaming. All the lake had turned into coffee, hot steaming coffee, and bobbing on that lake of coffee were the severed heads of all his enemies. Hundreds of heads, thousands, millions of heads floating and nodding on that great lake of coffee, extending to the horizon in every direction, steam rising up past the dead nostrils and the eyes held open with staples.

  It was a good dream, very pleasant and comforting. In his dream, on the cloud, sailing above them all, Idi Amin smiled.

  AFTERWORD

  Idi Amin, unfortunately, is real. So are or were his cronies (Major Farouk Minawa, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi) and his victims (Mrs. Dora Bloch, Archbishop Janani Luwum).

  Africa is real, sort of. Uganda is real. The railroad, the town of Jinja, the State Research Bureau building, all the stage sets are real.

  The 1977 failure of the Brazilian coffee crop and the resultant rise in worldwide coffee prices are real. The long-established practice of smuggling coffee out of Uganda, which reached some kind of manic peak in 1977, is real.

  So much for reality.

  The specific coffee-smuggling operation described in this novel—though similar events did take place—is an invention. The characters connected with that operation, every last one of them, are fictional, without specific real-world counterparts.