Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  Lew said, “Major, I can only assure you I have never been an employee of the CIA in my life.”

  Still gazing at the ceiling, the man on the sofa said, as though reasonably explaining some simple concept to a dull child, “We will kill you before you can kill us. We have to protect ourselves; that is justice.”

  “I am a tourist,” Lew said. “I have hotel reser—”

  Minawa pounded his palm flat against the table top. “You are not a tourist! You are a mercenary soldier, a provocateur, an agent of the CIA!”

  “No, sir, I’m—”

  “If you lie,” Minawa said, pointing a blunt finger, “it will go very badly for you. We already know everything. You will write a paper. You will write what the CIA told you to do in Kampala. You will write the names of the people you were supposed to contact in Uganda.”

  “Sir, I can only tell you this is a mistake. I have no—”

  “You refuse to write the paper?”

  There was nothing to say. Lew looked at the angry thick face of Major Minawa until one of the prowling men came over and stood in front of him, blocking Minawa from sight. The man calmly rapped his knuckles hard on top of Lew’s head. Lew winced but made no other move. The man rapped again, harder, and when Lew still showed no reaction he became enraged and pounded his fist down onto Lew’s head the way Minawa had just a moment ago pounded the table top. Pain jolted through Lew’s head, spread behind his eyes, swelled in all the muscles of his neck. If the man did that again, he would surely cause damage. Lew unclenched his hands from around his knees, preparing to kick, but Minawa said something in Nubian and the other man made a disgusted sound, slapped Lew across the face in a halfhearted way, and moved to the side.

  Minawa said, “You will write the paper.”

  “I would if I could, Major,” Lew told him, “but there’s nothing for me to say.”

  The man on the sofa said, “Kalasi?”

  “No,” said Minawa. “Not yet.” To Lew he said, “Stand up.” Lew did so, and Minawa said, “Come over here. Open your pants. Put your cock on the table.”

  Lew stared at him. “Do what?”

  Both prowling men now rushed over to hit and kick at him until he did as he’d been ordered. He stood there, humiliated, in pain, trousers open and penis a tiny helpless fish on the edge of the table, and he felt a fear very unlike the fear of death.

  Minawa picked up a rusty—no, bloodstained—bayonet from the clutter on the table. He tapped it gently on the table near Lew’s shrinking member. He said, “You will write the paper.”

  “Major,” Lew said, his mouth and throat completely dry, “Major. I’d write anything you wanted me to write. You know that. But if you say put down names of contacts in Uganda, I’ll have to make them up. There are no contacts in Uganda.”

  Everyone in the room waited to see if Minawa would become angry. Minawa himself seemed to wait with the same sense of suspense. Finally he nodded and put down the bayonet and said, “The names are more important. You’ll give them to me later. You think you won’t, but you will.”

  Laughing softly, the man on the sofa said, “You’ll tell us the thousand names of God. You’ll beg us to listen.”

  “Close your trousers,” Minawa said, expressing contempt, as though Lew had been guilty of a social breach. Then he spoke in Nubian.

  The two men who’d brought Lew in here got up from the sofa, one of them gesturing for Lew to go to the door. Lew turned, and found the man who’d hit him on the head standing there, blocking his way. Smiling at him, the man lifted his hand and extended his pinky with the long fingernail toward Lew’s left eye. The tip of the nail nearly touched the eyeball. Lew looked at him, unblinking, thinking, If you put that in my eye, I’ll rip your Adam’s apple out before they can stop me.

  The man’s smile faltered, as though he found himself less funny than he’d expected. Or as if he’d seen something he didn’t like in Lew’s expression. He lowered the hand and spoke in Nubian past Lew to Minawa. They all laughed, which gave the man back his self-confidence; grinning, he stepped to one side and gestured elaborately for Lew to exit.

  There was singing some distance ahead, a hymn being sung by many voices. Lew and his guards descended several flights of stairs, down into the earth under the State Research Bureau building, and the ragged but determined chorus of male voices grew steadily louder. The melody was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” but the words were Swahili.

  Sunlight was far away now, the corridors and stairwells lit by harsh fluorescents too widely separated, so that the areas of glare led to pockets of shadow. The floors and walls were stained as though rivers of blood had flowed through here, and afterward had been imperfectly cleaned. Under Lew’s shoeless feet the steps were cold.

  And then they reached a closed metal door with a ventilator opening near the top; it was from behind there that the singing came.

  A soldier with a machine pistol had been sitting on a wooden stool beside the door. Lew’s escort spoke to him, and he stood, putting the machine pistol on the stool while he unlocked the door. At the sounds of the unlocking the singing within faded away into an expectant, perhaps horrified, silence.

  The soldier pulled open the door, and a most incredible stench poured out, with the force of a physical punch to the stomach. A compound of rot, of human feces, of blood, of filthy unwashed bodies and filthy clothing, of urine and spoilage and death and fear. Lew stepped back against the opposite wall, appalled, and his two escorts laughed at him.

  At first the interior was merely a sort of writhing darkness, the mouth and throat of some hideous monster exhaling that stench, but then the soldier hit a light switch beside the doorway and a fluorescent ceiling light came on in there, and the look of the place was even worse than the smell.

  When the Yugoslavs had constructed this building for the Ugandan government, they’d included a tunnel leading from its basement to Amin’s Lodge, so he would have an escape route if ever he were besieged on his hilltop, and so he could in privacy come from the Lodge to the State Research Bureau to participate in the torture and murder here. (He liked, while wearing a gas mask, to club people to death with the butts of two pistols.) But the tunnel had turned out not to be the most practical route between the buildings, so the Lodge end had been sealed off and now the tunnel was used as a kind of holding pen for Research Bureau victims.

  The tunnel was six feet high and five feet wide, and full of men. They were all black; some were half-naked; some wore rags and the torn remnants of clothing; all were barefoot. There were over a hundred in there, sitting or crouching on the floor, their backs against the wall, receding into the semidarkness beyond the fluorescent’s reach. Many of them were bloodstained, many had fresh wounds on their heads or chests or arms, and all of them blinked and moved in the sudden light, slack-jawed and moronic-looking.

  A man near the door chattered in a fast panicky Swahili at the soldier, while pointing at someone or something farther back in the tunnel—perhaps the rusty trash barrel in the middle of the floor there.

  No, it was about one of the other prisoners. The soldier replied, and there was a brief discussion, during which Lew adjusted his mind to this horror and gave his guards no more reason to laugh. Then two of the men in there stood up, picked up another man by the ankles and arms and, crouching under the low ceiling, carried him out and laid him on the floor in the corridor. He was dead. At some time recently, the hinge of his jaw had been broken and left unattended; the jagged-edged protrusion of white bone, blood-smeared, just under his ear, was as vivid as a scream against his black skin.

  Lew was pushed forward. He crossed the threshold and stood there under the fluorescent, looking at the astonishment on all those faces as they stared back: a white man, in their Hell. Then the door clanged shut and the light went out.

  In the dark he could hear them murmuring around him. The smell in here was violent in its intensity, and made more so by the darkness; it made him want to vomit, but at the sam
e time was so thoroughly foul that it dried his mouth and throat and made vomiting impossible.

  Lew wasn’t quite sure what to do—if he took a step, he’d probably walk on somebody—but then a hand touched his shin and a voice low to his right said, “Sit here. There’s room.”

  Lew crouched, touched bodies, touched the cold rough wall where they had moved over to give him space. He sat, put his back against the wall, started to stretch his legs, and bumped them into someone else. “Sorry.”

  “Put your legs over mine,” said the man across the way. “Later, we’ll reverse.”

  “Thank you.”

  The man beside him, the one who had touched his shin and spoken to him, now said, “Have courage, brother. God will watch over you.”

  There was some dim light from the ventilator slot in the door. By its light, Lew could see that the man was portly, gray-bearded, probably the wrong side of fifty. He wore a torn white shirt and black trousers, and he had recent cuts around his eyes and on the bridge of his nose, as though he’d been hit while wearing glasses. He said, “I am Bishop Michael Kibudu.”

  “Lew Brady. Bishop?”

  “Of the Evangelical Baptist Mission. My church is in Bugembe.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Two months. I don’t believe there has ever been a white man in here before. Not in here. Would it be improper for me to ask what unlucky chance brought you to this place?”

  “They got it into their heads I’m connected with the CIA.”

  “Ah. They accused the archbishop of being in the employ of the CIA.”

  “The one they killed? Is this some kind of religious persecution or something?

  Bishop Kibudu smiled, a sweet sad incongruous expression.

  “Something like that,” he said. “May I ask, are you saved?”

  Had that particular question ever been asked in more ridiculous circumstances? “I don’t think so,” said Lew.

  12

  Frank took a swallow of 7Up, then carefully poured gin into the bottle and gently swirled it. He tasted again, nodded in satisfaction, and carried the bottle into Balim’s office, where Balim himself was on the phone, while to one side Isaac Otera and Bathar (who was known to everyone except his father as Young Mr. Balim) looked worried and useless as they watched Ellen pace back and forth in front of the desk, her expression full of storm clouds. “Here,” Frank said, and extended the bottle.

  She glared at him, at his hand, at the 7Up. “What’s this?”

  “Got gin in it. Calm you down.”

  “I don’t want to calm down, you prick,” she said, and turned away to glare instead at Balim, talking slowly and insinuatingly and gently into the telephone.

  Frank threw a mutinous look at the back of her head and downed the spiked 7Up himself. She was going too far, that’s all, and his sense of guilt was finally giving way to anger. They were doing what they could, weren’t they?

  Drawing the conversation to a close, Balim extravagantly thanked the person he’d been talking to and with apparent reluctance hung up. He said to Ellen, “Now we must wait, the most difficult part of all.”

  “It’s been hours.” Even Frank could see it was only her anger that kept her from falling apart; still, she shouldn’t go on calling him names in front of everybody.

  “Patience is our only friend, at this point,” Balim said.

  “He could already be dead.”

  “Please,” Balim said, rising heavily from behind the desk, “put that much out of your mind. I have been told that a shipment of black Toyotas was received from Japan in Uganda within the last year, all consigned to the government. So these are not kidnappers or bandits.” He had come around the desk while talking, and now he tenderly touched Ellen’s forearm with his fingertips, as a faith healer might, as though to encourage a flow of his own strength and assurance into her. “They have taken Lew into custody, that is all.”

  “But we don’t know what they’ll do to him.”

  Frank said, “They’ll question him. It’s some kind of mix-up; they think he’s somebody else. They could even figure it out for themselves and let him go.” He didn’t himself quite believe any of this.

  Ellen gave him a look of utter contempt, but at least she didn’t call him a prick. She said to Balim, “I want to call the American Embassy.”

  Not again, Frank thought, we’ve been through all that. But Balim was patience itself. He said, “Ellen, I know my concern for our friend pales beside yours, but believe me, my concern is real, and if the American Embassy could help us I would phone them first. First.”

  “Of course they’ll help. He’s an American citizen.”

  “The American Embassy in Uganda is closed. Shall an American chargé d’affaires in Nairobi phone the French Embassy in Kampala and ask a chargé d’affaires there to make what would surely be a routine inquiry for a wandering American believed to be in Ugandan custody?”

  “Why not?”

  “Who is this American? the Ugandan authorities would ask themselves. Who is he that diplomats ask after him? And soon they will learn he has a long career as a mercenary soldier in Africa.”

  “The same with the American Embassy in Nairobi,” Frank said, “not to mention the Kenyan government. What’s our connection with this guy Brady? What are we all up to? See what I mean?”

  Even as he finished his statement, Frank saw by the warning looks from the others that he’d made some sort of tactical error, but he didn’t know what it was until Ellen turned to glare at him, saying, “So that’s the point, is it? This deal you’re all in on. We’ll try everything we can to get Lew back, just so it doesn’t endanger the deal.”

  Fortunately for Frank, Balim himself answered, saying, “Ellen, no, certainly not! Frank made his point badly, but his intention was a good one, I assure you.”

  Frank didn’t much care for Balim’s talking about him that way, even just as a psychological ploy with Ellen; nor did he care at all for Ellen’s sneer of contempt when she said to Balim, “A good intention, from Frank?”

  Isaac Otera suddenly said, “You call it a deal. Maybe it is.”

  Everybody turned in astonishment to look at Isaac, who wore the tight-clenched expression of the public speaker struck by stage fright but determined to go on. Blinking, hands closed into fists at his side, he said, “Maybe it’s something else. But whatever it is, if it comes out that Lew is in Uganda to help set up a coffee-smuggling operation, you’ll never see him again.”

  “That’s right,” Balim said.

  With a huge smile, feeling a great weight lift off his chest, Frank pointed at Isaac and said, “That’s what I meant! That’s the whole thing!”

  Isaac took a hesitant step toward Ellen, saying, “The truth is, even though Lew was arrested because of some mistake, he has something to hide. Whatever we do to rescue him, we mustn’t risk giving away his secret.”

  “Good God,” Ellen said faintly.

  Balim said, “I am attempting now to get in touch with a gentleman high up in the Ugandan government. It may take—”

  “Father, dear Father,” Young Mr. Balim said, “tell her the whole truth. She deserves it.”

  Frank glowered, thinking, He’s after her, the slimy little wog, but the elder Balim nodded, accepting his son’s reproof. “The habit of secrecy,” he said, “is at times too strong in me. Ellen, our associate inside Uganda in the coffee transaction is a white man named Baron Chase, who is very high up in the government there. One of Amin’s most trusted assistants.”

  “A white man?”

  “Frank has known him for years.”

  “A snake in the grass,” Frank said.

  “But even a snake in the grass,” Young Mr. Balim said, smiling comfortably at Frank, “can have its uses.”

  “I bet it can,” Frank told him.

  Balim Senior said to Ellen, “I can’t call Baron Chase directly. What I have done is send messages to him through two separate intermediaries, that he should
get in touch with me at once, on a matter of the utmost urgency. Those two gentlemen are both now on their way to Uganda. If one of them experiences difficulty—”

  “Or cold feet,” said Young Mr. Balim.

  “I think more highly of my friends than does my son,” Balim said, giving Ellen a rueful smile. (Frank saw that she faintly responded to the smile; Balim could do anything, when he set his mind to it.) “Still,” Balim added, “if for any reason one of my couriers fails, the other must surely succeed. Then Baron Chase will phone me, I will explain the problem, and he will arrange for Lew’s release.”

  Still clearly dubious, Ellen said, “You make it sound almost easy.”

  “It almost is. You go home now,” Balim said, patting Ellen’s shoulder, “and I’ll call—”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

  “Ellen, I promise I’ll call you the minute—”

  “Where should I go?” she demanded, astonishing Frank by suddenly flaring up at Balim. “Back to that little house by myself? Or to your guest room, or Frank’s living room? I’m better here.”

  “But if the call comes late at night, when I’m at home?”

  She looked at the telephone on his desk. “Wouldn’t it be the same number there?”

  Balim laughed, again patting her shoulder, saying, “You win.”

  “If the phone rings, I’ll pick up, but I won’t speak. I’ll just listen. No matter what he says, I won’t say a word.”

  “I believe you,” Balim said. “You can stay.”

  The pail contained two sandwiches that Bibi had made, four bottles of White Cap beer, two glasses, napkins, a small bag of homemade cookies. Frank looked in the pail, smiled, and was pleased. Putting its top on, he smacked the giggling Bibi on the rump and carried the pail out to the Land-Rover.

  It was nearly eleven at night. The streetlights of Kisumu are dim and widely spaced. There isn’t much by way of nightlife, not out on the streets. Frank kicked the Land-Rover past houses that were mostly dark, or with a wan light showing pink through cloth-covered windows, and parked at last in front of Balim’s buildings. Two of the guards—ramshackle ragged men for whom hard hats and Sam Browne belts served as uniforms—lounged near the door on upturned wooden boxes; they made some small effort to look alert when Frank appeared, but didn’t go so far as to stand. The other guards would be around back, from where the possibility of theft was naturally greater.