He was reading the Peugeot owner’s manual for the second time, without as yet having learned why the car was called a 504, when the front passenger door opened and Amarda Jhosi slid in, dressed again in her Burberry and rainhat. He looked at her, trying to appear stern to hide his leap of pleasure. “Can I help you?”
“You can accept my apology,” she said. She removed the rainhat and again shook out her hair; a gesture he could grow very fond of.
“Apology accepted,” he said in an offhand manner, as though her apology hadn’t mattered one way or another; punishing her a little.
“I thought I understood things,” she said. “You confused me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Please, don’t be mad at me anymore.”
He had been more or less looking past her, at the rain-streaming side window; now he looked at her and saw that she was trying to be honest with him. She had the vulnerability of someone who has deliberately disarmed herself. As always, Lew’s reaction to such risky vulnerability was to become extremely protective. “I’m not mad,” he said. He touched his fingertips to her hand in her lap; it was wet with rain. “You didn’t have to come out here in the rain to apologize to me.”
She smiled, disarming them both. “I didn’t,” she said. “At least not just to apologize.”
“I get it,” he said, disappointed but not surprised. “You also want to pick my brains.”
She frowned. “Sorry?”
“You want to ask me questions. You want to know what’s going on.”
“That’s right.” Then she shook her head and said, “No. Let me tell you what I thought I knew, and you tell me where I’m wrong.”
“Sure.”
“Some people are stealing a lot of coffee from Uganda, smuggling it into Kenya. They came to Mr. Balim to help them make the coffee seem legitimate again.”
“I’ve been fighting the phrase launder the coffee,” Lew said. But then, seeing she didn’t understand that Americanism either, he said, “Never mind. Balim isn’t an agent, he’s one of the principals, but you’ve got the general idea. Go on.”
“Mr. Balim came to my grandmother, knowing our financial troubles. I assumed you were one of the thieves.”
“I am, I guess,” Lew said. “But the word thief isn’t quite the right one.”
“Isn’t it stealing?”
“From Idi Amin. Your family used to live in Uganda, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Most of our holdings were there.”
“How old were you when you left?”
“Fifteen.”
“So you can remember the way it was, with Amin.”
“Yes, I—” But then, all at once, her chin was trembling. She blinked and looked away, nodding. He saw her try to speak, but her control was slipping away and she couldn’t do it.
“Hey,” he said, startled and embarrassed. “Hey.” He put an arm around her shoulders, touched her trembling jawline with his other hand, drew her close in, seeing the tears well up in her eyes as he pulled her close, tucking her head in against his shoulder and chest, holding her very tight, letting her sob it out.
She cried for a long time, while he kept trying to find the right thing to say, without success. Finally, sometime after the racking sobs had ended and her body had become merely soft and passive against him, her muffled voice said against his chest, “I’m all right now.”
Reluctantly he eased the pressure of his arms, permitting her to move slightly away and lift her face to look at him. She was so beautiful, and so sorrowful, and so vulnerable, that he couldn’t not kiss her. And her lips were as soft as the lawns of Heaven.
She responded. Her arm slid around his neck; the soft lips opened; the heat of their bodies commingled. He moved his arm, and his hand brushed her full breast, and her arm tightened around his neck. He held the breast, feeling the hardening of nipple through layers of cloth, feeling the warmth of her body, the sweetness of her tongue.
Which of them broke off first he had no idea; they seemed to do it together, at once, as though in response to some outside noise. But his mind had suddenly filled with thoughts of Ellen, of Amarda’s youth, of the idea that he was taking advantage of her emotional condition, of their exposed situation here in the car in the daytime beside the house, and he pulled away from her just as she was pulling away from him.
They stared at one another, wide-eyed. Her softness and warmth were still with him, an invisible blanket warming but frightening him. He whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be,” she said. She grabbed his wrist in her hand, squeezed painfully. “Don’t be,” she repeated, and turned away. Fumbling with the handle, she pushed open the door and hurried away into the rain.
17
The rain poured down, well into its second week; ten days and nights of drenching downpour. The pockmarked face of the lake was muddy, everything on the surface of the planet was saturated and soft, and everywhere you looked was water. The pregnant cloudbanks pressed so low to the ground they gave you a headache just thinking about them.
Frank Lanigan sat in the front of the boat, inside his slicker and rainhat and heavy boots, thinking about his headache. Behind him, Charlie scooped rainwater out of the boat with a coffee can, while at the rear the boat’s owner sat by the outboard motor, steering them toward Uganda.
Uganda. There it was, visible in the downpour, dead ahead. The brow of a dark giant rising up out of the lake. A turd floating in a world of water. A brown-black otter, resting. The Mysterious Island of the ghost stories, where the shipwrecked sailors meet the crazed professor and the living dinosaurs and the things that suck your blood in the night.
Somewhere inside all his steamy cloying clothing Frank had a pint flask full of bourbon. The bourbon might help, but the job of getting to it would hurt far more, so he just sat there, cursing his fate, cursing Africa, cursing the rain, cursing Lew for not having completed this job the first time.
Slowly the broken coast of Uganda came nearer. Behind Frank, playing harmony to his thoughts, the boatman cursed his motor in a slow, almost loving litany, baritone voice and cough of engine blending into a lullaby of discontent within the endless barrage of the rain.
Bwagwe Point passed slowly on the left as they entered Macdonald Bay. Before the long rains this neighborhood had been alive with Ugandan soldiers on anti-smuggling detail, but in weather like this the smugglers and troops both stayed home.
Everybody stays home, Frank thought in angry self-pity, except me.
The boat poked into the bay, putt-putting, almost drifting with some storm-induced tide, becoming a child’s toy that bobbed in the great rain-drenched bathtub of the bay. They remained unchallenged, and Frank roused a little, thinking about the task at hand, wishing Lew could have been sent again (not even thinking about Ellen), and finally turning to yell, “Keep to the left, you asshole!” at the boatman, who was drifting them eastward into the middle of the bay, probably out of some subconscious desire to be back in—to the east of here—Kenya.
Shit. As usual, his most determined statements remained ununderstood by their targets; fuming, Frank suffered through a translation of his command by Charlie, knowing that whatever Charlie was saying, it bore little or no relationship to the original.
Nevertheless, it worked. The boat angled left; it even seemed to increase just a trifle in speed. “It’s along here,” Frank said, then wondered whom he thought he was talking to. “I hate rain,” he said, and slumped deeper inside his clothing.
Charlie’s translation of Frank’s shout at the boatman had somehow blossomed into a full-fledged conversation. Behind him Charlie rattled away, the boatman rumbled back; Charlie took his turn, the boatman his—a regular dialogue. Charlie pointed vaguely ahead and to the left, the boatman pointed vaguely a bit to the left of that, Charlie pointed somewhere else, the boatman pointed at his engine. Charlie pointed at Frank, and through it all they kept yakking away together, like long-lost brothers who had never cared for one anoth
er. “I think I’ll kill them both,” Frank muttered.
Through the curtains of rain, on the bank to the left, he could just make out their intended landfall: a muddy crescent where a faint two-track dirt road came down to the water’s edge. “There it is, you goddam idiots!” he yelled, and cuffed Charlie across the head to distract him from his patter with the boatman. “Right there!”
“Yes, it is,” Charlie said. Even in this downpour, still dressed in nothing but tattered shirt and trousers, he remained cheerful and unaffected. “We were just talking about it,” he said, and calmly went back to his conversation.
“Lying bastard,” Frank muttered.
The boatman steered them to the crescent, where they ran aground a good twenty feet from shore. Frank shook his head. “We got to do better than that,” he said.
“Oh, sure,” Charlie said. While the boatman unlocked his motor and tilted it forward, lifting the screw out of the water, Charlie hopped over the side, grabbed the thick frayed end of rope tied to the bow, and waded them ashore. Surprisingly strong for all his skinniness, Charlie pulled a good half of the boat up onto the mud with Frank and the boatman still in it. Of course, the mud itself was half water. When Frank stepped into it, his booted feet sank in halfway to the knee; pulling out, against the suction, he felt the mud doing its best to yank the boots right off him.
The boatman also clambered over the side, and now the three of them dragged the boat the rest of the way over the mud and up onto the solid cross-hatching of last year’s dead grass. Like the Abominable Snowman, Frank lumbered around in the mud, plop-squirking at every step, while Charlie and the boatman were agile in their bare feet, slithering around like upright eels. That Charlie’s squalid unconcern was somehow better attuned to the circumstances than Frank’s careful preparations only made Frank’s mood worse.
With the boat on relatively solid ground, they pulled the tarp off the two mopeds and carried them to the beginning of the road. Then Charlie stood grinning, the rain already washing the mud from his shanks, as Frank opened his slicker, opened the coat within, found the flask, and pulled it out. The first short swig of body-warming bourbon burned his throat and brought tears to his eyes, but they could count as tears of gratitude. Blinking them away, Frank knocked back another, longer swallow, then screwed the cap back on the flask and smiled as he felt the welcome warmth spread through his body the way molten steel runs to fill the mold.
But then, looking at the mopeds, he frowned again. It was a damned undignified mode of transportation for a grown man, this stubby motorized bicycle with the ridiculously thick wheels. But Maintenance Depot Number 4 was a good twenty miles up the road, and no other vehicle could have been brought here over the lake. “Might as well do it, then,” Frank said, stowing away the flask and rebuttoning all his coats. Jabbing a dripping thumb over his shoulder at the boatman, he said to Charlie, “Tell him to wait.”
“Oh, he knows,” Charlie said.
“Tell him, if he doesn’t wait we’ll get him for it later.”
Charlie looked dubious. “Later? If he leaves us here, we don’t have any ‘later.’ He knows that, too.”
So did Frank. “Will he stay?”
“He wants his money,” Charlie said with a shrug. “If something scares him, he will go away.”
“Shit.” Shaking his head, Frank said, “Come on, then, let’s get it over with.”
They climbed onto the mopeds, both of which started at the first kick, and started up the faint double track into the low dense trees, Frank slightly in the lead on the right-hand rut, Charlie a bit behind him on the left. Looking back, Frank saw the boatman had climbed back into the boat, where he now sat, unmoving, his back against the upturned engine, forearms folded on his sunken stomach. He seemed asleep; or dead.
This road had been cleared by the railroad-building British seventy years earlier, and abandoned fifty years after that. The occasional passage of a farmer’s wagon or truck in the twenty years since had been sufficient to keep the twin track visible against the ground, but not sufficient to keep saplings and brush from encroaching. “This’ll be hell on the trucks,” Frank said, shoving the moped through the tangle of shrubbery. He felt that he looked like the clown in the circus who rides the tiny tricycle, and he wasn’t far wrong.
The forest was dense here, the old road completely covered by tree branches, which screened out most of the rain. Individual drops could be seen and heard—and felt—and the air seemed cooler and not quite so humid. The ground was just a bit less spongy. It was almost as though the rain had stopped barely a minute ago and these were the final droplets shaking out of the trees.
The effect of the mopeds’ nasal roar was strange in this empty, wet forest. It seemed both very loud and utterly silent. It seemed to be posing some further corollary question to the old one about the tree falling in the forest. The only effect the engines seemed to have was that the quality of the empty silence behind them was more shimmering, more tense, than the empty silence in front.
The mopeds were theoretically capable of doing fifty miles an hour, but not in this terrain. They did manage short spurts of twenty, even twenty-five, but more usually traveled at fifteen and sometimes even slowed to ten or less. The land was a persistent gradual uphill slope, the forest unchanging all around them, here and there a small path—cut by humans or animals—leading away to the right, inland. The lake was never more than a few miles away to the left, but there was no hint of it.
Frank kept one eye on the odometer, and they had gone nineteen and four-tenths miles when some change in the mass of the sound filling his ears made him glance to his left, where he failed to see Charlie. Looking back, frowning, he saw that Charlie was stopped fifty yards back, standing beside his moped, cheerful and patient, gazing alertly this way.
“Now what?” Frank made a U-turn from the right track onto the left, not quite getting bucked off when the moped hit a root in the middle of the maneuver, and roared back to where Charlie stood, smiling in all innocence. “Whatchagot?”
“Path to the turntable.” He pointed.
Frank looked, and damned if there didn’t seem to be the faint remnant of a path there, leading away from the road. Squinting through rain and trees, shielding his eyes with his hand as though from sun, Frank thought maybe he could see some sort of building back in there. Hard to tell.
“You drove by it,” Charlie said.
Frank understood then that Charlie was getting revenge for his having pointed out their landing spot. “You are a prick,” he said. Getting off the moped, kicking its kickstand harder than necessary, he tromped away on the path toward the perhaps-building, knowing that if he looked back he would see Charlie as happy and guileless as ever. He didn’t look back.
Charlie had been right; this was Maintenance Depot Number 4. The old engine shed was there, a long tall corrugated-iron structure open at the uphill end, big enough to hold a steam locomotive, sagging and rusty now but still intact. Beside it were piled half a dozen sixteen-foot rails, orange with rust. Trees and brush had so overgrown the area that one tree branch grew into the building through a glassless window.
Frank unlimbered two cameras and moved steadily around the area, taking pictures, wiping the lenses, crouching in positions where water could run down the back of his neck, while Charlie strolled through the open end of the engine shed and lolled at his ease in there, amid mounds of rusted metal.
The site was pretty much as described in that memo Chase had sent. Rusted track led down from farther up the hill, bifurcating, one line running straight down into the big empty maw of the engine shed, the other angling away to the right and leading to the old turntable. As to this track and turntable, all of which was frozen with rust, there was both good news and bad news. The good news was that the old switch was rusted in position to run a train toward the turntable rather than toward the engine shed, which was what they would want, but the bad news was that the turntable had been left positioned at an angle to the line
of track. It was going to be a bitch to get that ancient rusty turntable unstuck and lined up with the track.
Oh, well; Frank took his pictures and kept going. Beyond the turntable, the track continued another twenty feet, almost to the dropoff; a sudden unexpected cliff, that was, with forest growth right to the edge and a nearly hundred-foot drop down into Thruston Bay, whose boulder-strewn shoreline looked in the rain like something from a gothic novel.
Frank next retraced his steps, past the turntable and the engine shed and the dozing Charlie and on along the line of track up the hill. Bushes and trees, some of them sizable, grew up between the rails all along the way. Then, abruptly, the rails stopped. The dismantled connecting plates lay on the ground to one side, and there was not even a hint anymore of where the old rails and sleepers had once lain. “Damn rain,” Frank said, squinting, trying to see through the wall of foliage in front of himself, but there was nothing to see except greenery and water.
He got really wet shoving through that batch of growth between the old spur and the main rail line. He struggled through, kicking and punching, elbowing the tree branches, and all at once he popped out onto the single-track main line of Uganda Railways, the well-used rails wetly gleaming, reflecting the gray-white sky. Standing between the rails, Frank took more pictures, and observed with satisfaction that absolutely nothing of Maintenance Depot Number 4 could be seen from here.
The wet steel sleepers made slightly iffy footing as he tramped away eastward to where the level crossing still existed—though unrepaired—for the old access road. Up there to the left was where Lew had been grabbed by the State Research Bureau. Frank gave a dark glower in that direction; if it hadn’t been for those bastards, Lew would have done the job then and there. Now they couldn’t risk Lew’s getting picked up a second time, so it was Frank who had to slog around in the rain, the faithful Charlie at his side (at Mr. Balim’s order). And Lew was back in Kisumu, taking over more and more of Frank’s regular job.
Kahawa Page 17