Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  They met in the VIP lounge at Heathrow, where Chase was savagely delighted to see the man who had just become his enemy, and where Sir Denis obviously had to use all his diplomatic skills to suggest pleasure on his side at the encounter. After normal greetings and expressions of surprise and joy, they got themselves drinks at the bar, and then Chase insisted on changing his seat assignment so they could travel together. “You needn’t do that, if it’s too much trouble,” Sir Denis said, and Chase smiled, showing his teeth. “No trouble at all,” he said.

  The lounge receptionist made the change, and Chase carried his new boarding pass over to where Sir Denis sat by the windows, leafing through an old issue of Punch. Moving dots of red and white light in the blackness beyond the windows defined the wanderings of taxiing planes. “Not a bit of trouble,” Chase announced, and settled with angry happiness into the overstuffed chair to Sir Denis’s right.

  Sighing, Sir Denis closed the magazine and showed its cover to Chase, saying, “I fear I’m no longer English. I’m away from the country too much these days; half the cartoons in here make no sense to me.”

  “England is a club,” Chase said, as though agreeing with Sir Denis’s point. One of Chase’s grievances was that he himself was Canadian, which was one small step from being nothing at all.

  “England is a club? Perhaps so.” Sir Denis smiled ruefully, dropping the magazine onto the table beside his chair. “I may have permitted my membership to lapse.”

  “At least we got you back onto the Brazil-Uganda team,” Chase said with his most welcoming smile.

  Sir Denis looked at him keenly. “Did you have something to do with that?”

  With a modest shrug, Chase said, “You seemed the right man for the job. I merely said as much to Amin.”

  “I see. Thank you very much.”

  Sir Denis’s disappointment was evident, and Chase laughed to himself because he knew why. Sir Denis had assumed it was Patricia who had worked his renomination; and in fact it might well have been. Chase smiled at the thought of what hoops Patricia would run this old fool through. “It was my pleasure,” he said.

  Amin himself met them at Entebbe. He was in another of his personae, that of the distinguished statesman. His medium-gray single-breasted suit was beautifully tailored to maximize his shoulders and chest while minimizing his gut. His tie was a dark blue, modestly figured with silver lions rampant, and his shirt was snowy white, still faintly marked with the creases from its folding by the manufacturer. His feet, which were of normal size, looked tiny in their shiny black shoes under his imposing top-heavy figure. Only the bulging side pockets of the suit jacket—containing, as Chase well knew, wads of cash in shillings or pounds or dollars, to be spent or given away as whim might dictate—spoiled the tailored perfection of his figure.

  Amin came out of the terminal building alone, striding across the tarmac toward the plane as they disembarked. His happiest and most welcoming smile beamed out at them, and he strode forward with his hand already outstretched. As the other passengers—Ugandan or European businessmen—glanced nervously and curiously out of the corners of their eyes, Amin approached Sir Denis and pumped his hand, saying, “My friend-ah, my friend-ah. How could I continue without you completely? That-ah mee-nister that-ah fired you is gone from that post. Gone from my-ah government-ah completely. When I-ah hear what he do, I act-ah at once.”

  He’s taking the credit for it himself, the wily bastard. Chase stood to one side and smiled, willing Sir Denis to see his stance as that of the modest civil servant permitting his superior to claim the rewards for his own unsung work.

  As for Sir Denis, he seemed, at least on the surface, honestly delighted to be in the presence once more of President for Life Idi Amin Dada. In fact, he said so. “I’m delighted, Your Excellency. I hope I may go on being of use to you.”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, we-ah work together like-ah—” Briefly, Amin was seen to flounder for a simile; then he found it: “—like-ah Cain and Abel. Brothers.”

  “Brothers,” agreed Sir Denis, utterly unflappable. “Delighted,” he repeated; so even he was at a loss for words.

  Amin didn’t bother to shake hands with Chase, but he acknowledged his presence with a big grin, saying, “Welcome-ah home, Baron. You been-ah now gone too long.”

  So he had. “It’s good to be back,” Chase said, returning Amin’s smile.

  “My right-ah hand,” Amin said, and grinned again at Sir Denis, saying, “What-ah you think-ah my Baron? Maybe I make him now a duke.”

  It was a joke Amin had essayed before; Chase responded as he always did: “Oh, no, sir, I’m content to be a lowly Baron.”

  “Modest completely. Come along-ah.”

  Here in Uganda the rainy season was less relentless than it was to the east, through the Rift Valley, and today was one of the periods of respite. Though the tumbling clouds still roiled across the sky, there was a faint glow in the air and a soft warmth that was not quite too humid for comfort. From the dankness of London to the austere aridity of Tripoli to the tropical breeze of Entebbe was a journey from Purgatory through Hell to Heaven. Meteorologically speaking.

  Today’s car was the black Mercedes convertible, the one the Israelis had imitated last summer in their raid for the hostages. That false Mercedes, emerging first out of the bowels of the landed lead aircraft with the flags of Uganda and of Amin’s presidency fluttering above its headlights, had distracted and confused the airport garrison just long enough. For weeks afterward Amin had refused to travel in his own Mercedes, as though blaming the car for his humiliation, but he hadn’t been able to keep away from it permanently; the meanings and symbols of the Mercedes-Benz were too powerful.

  The chauffeur stood at natty attention beside the car, all four doors of which were open. Air Uganda ground crew in their white jumpers were stowing the luggage in the trunk. Amin told the chauffeur in Swahili, “I’ll drive. Go back in one of the other cars.” (Chase understood Swahili very well—better than any of them, including Amin, guessed—but he would never speak it. His unsuspected fluency was yet another small weapon in the arsenal of his self-defense.)

  The chauffeur saluted and marched away like a windup toy. Amin bent his smiling black head toward the aged white head of Sir Denis, as if he were a solicitous keeper in an old-age home, saying, “I’m-ah drive you. I’m-ah show you the beauties of my country. You sit-ah now in front with me.”

  “An unexpected pleasure,” Sir Denis said. (How he’s squirming, Chase thought in elation, watching Sir Denis’s unruffled surface.)

  Chase had the wide backseat to himself. The top was down, and when Amin jolted the car forward—he drove too fast, too carelessly, too inexpertly, and had already gone through several crashes—the wind of their passage yanked at Chase’s thinning hair as though to scalp him. Brushing the wisps of hair off his forehead, he looked back and saw the two cars of bodyguards following at a discreet—but not too discreet—distance.

  There had been attempts made on Idi Amin’s life. No matter how spontaneous his actions appeared, he was always well guarded; too many men in Uganda needed him, not merely for their livelihoods but for their lives. If Amin were to be assassinated, it would change nothing for the country, since the structure of oppression would remain in place. But the struggle among the lesser Nubians to take Amin’s place would be more horrific than even Chase could imagine.

  Up front, Amin was talking at Sir Denis, giving him a travelogue filled no doubt with inaccurate statements about Uganda’s history, its flora and fauna, and Amin’s own development plans for the nation. Chase didn’t even try to catch the words as the wind whipped them past him. He already knew more true facts abut Uganda than Amin did, and as for Amin’s development plans, those began and ended with the so-called “whisky runs,” flying coffee to Stansted in England and Melbourne in Florida in the United States, returning with the liquor and luxury goods that kept the Nubians in line. That was the development plan, and it worked considerably better at ac
hieving its goal than most plans in the Third World.

  Chase spent the drive brooding on his own development plans. What he was trying was much riskier and more subtle than the whisky runs, but if it worked it would give him just as much security as the whisky runs gave Amin. Money. A lot of money. Money to retire on, perhaps in some lesser island in the Caribbean, from which he could still make his occasional trips to London. And to New York, as well. And all his life he had wanted to test the rumors about New Orleans.

  Amin was the first to see the trouble ahead. That was like him, part of the secret of his success; he had a cat’s sensitivity to potential danger.

  They had reached the city and were driving along Kampala Road, lined with shops that had once belonged to the now-expelled Asians. Half were now closed, for lack of capital, lack of expertise, lack of initiative. Among the few battered vehicles on the street, the gleaming expensive Mercedes seemed like a visitor from another planet. Much more typical was the lumbering, plank-sided, blue-cabbed truck that came crawling out of a side alley ahead of them, filling the road, seeming to take forever to get out of the way.

  Chase didn’t see the other truck until after Amin was already in action. The second truck had been parked on the other side of broad Kampala Road, and it was with unusual speed that it abruptly started up and swung across the lanes of traffic to meet the first truck head-on, effectively barricading the road.

  But Amin was fast, and when necessary he was incredibly decisive. With a sudden loud growl, like a lion disturbed at its meat, he slammed his foot on the accelerator, twisted the wheel, and ducked down as low as possible behind the steering wheel.

  Acceleration yanked Chase out of his reverie. He too could act fast in a crisis, and afterward he realized it was the threat to his relationship with Grossbarger should Sir Denis be killed that made him, even before protecting himself, pull forward against the acceleration, slap Sir Denis on top of his white head, and yell, “Down!”

  The Mercedes had leaped up onto the sidewalk. A woman was walking there hand in hand with her young son. Men with machine guns were coming out of an abandoned storefront just ahead of the car. The driver of the plank-sided truck was desperately trying to shift the ancient gear into reverse. The woman flung her son at the street just before the Mercedes smashed into her and threw her like an empty cigarette pack through a plate-glass display window.

  Then Chase was on the floor in back and could see no more, and bullets were shredding the windshield; another windshield to be replaced. He could feel the car scrape through between the concrete storefront and the rear bumper of the truck. The Mercedes rocked on its springs, seemed about to fly, bounced instead off the sidewalk and back into the roadway, and at last slackened its pace.

  Rising hesitantly upward, Chase looked back at the pitched battle around the trucks. Amin’s bodyguards were exchanging shots with the attempted assassins, who were now doing their vain best to flee. If they were lucky, they would be killed cleanly this minute, by gunfire.

  April; it was only April. This was the third assassination attempt this year, and like the others it would be reported in no newspapers, on no television broadcasts, through no wire services.

  I’m right to get out, Chase thought. It’s breaking down.

  Up front Amin was laughing, was slapping the shaken Sir Denis on the knee, was already turning the near-miss into a triumph, a joke, an anecdote. He had told Chase, and he apparently meant it, that he knew no assassin could kill him because he had already seen his own death in a dream. It would not happen, he’d assured Chase, for a long long time.

  24

  Naked, standing in front of the mirrored dresser in Frank’s bedroom, Ellen reflected again that sex never seemed so wonderful after the event as it always did while it was going on. By moving her head a bit she could see Frank, sprawled on his back on the bed, on the new coral-colored blanket he’d thrown over it after ousting the stupid dog, George. Both pillows were bunched now beneath Frank’s head as he idly scratched his hairy stomach and smiled in sleepy contentment. He had a good time, the bastard, she thought.

  The only sound was the continuing chatter of the rain, a rustle like a million chipmunks gnawing rotted wood. If it hadn’t been for the rain—

  It had started at the end of March, the rain, and today was the nineteenth of May. Seven weeks of rain. Cracks appeared in walls; leaks developed in ceilings, warps in doorjambs. Dresser drawers stuck; flour and beans and bread rotted on their shelves; the green-black stain of mildew spread over everything in the world like some sort of surrealistic total eclipse.

  If it hadn’t been for the rain—

  Probably, Lew wouldn’t have taken up with that Asian girl in the first place. It was surely his own forced inactivity, brought on by the endless rain, that had led him to distract himself with that creature. In normal circumstances it would not have happened. Not with Lew the man he was. And not with Ellen the woman she knew she was.

  If it hadn’t been for the rain—

  She herself would have been more occupied, more content. She would have been flying three or four times a week rather than three or four times a month. She would have spent time and thought and care on that awful little house they’d been lent, and by now she would have made it into something like a home. And she wouldn’t have had all this empty time in which to brood and grow touchy and miserable, in which to plot shabby revenges.

  If it hadn’t been for the rain—

  Frank too wouldn’t have grown bored and tired. His camping-out adventure on Lake Victoria, just perfect for his twelve-year-old-boy’s mind, would have contented and amused him. He would not have come back to Kisumu dull and restless and angry. He would have permitted their relationship to remain at that level of nonsexual friendship which had been with such difficulty attained, and which was the only possible long-lasting relationship they could have. He would not, on his return from Port Victoria, have thrown just one more pass, out of general irritation and ennui.

  And she would not have accepted.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. They had gone to bed together, they had enjoyed it, and from now on, the whole situation was going to be that much worse. And all because of the rain.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Frank said, and then, as though as a result of his having spoken, he hugely yawned.

  “I was thinking how much I hate this rain.”

  He chuckled, very comfortable, and said, “You’ve got a beautiful ass.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll tell you what I was thinking, and this isn’t bullshit. You know I don’t do this kind of bullshit.”

  “Mm?”

  “You’re the best I’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s God’s truth, may He strike me dead, I thought I was gonna fall out of my skin a couple times there. I thought I was dead and fucking an angel.”

  She laughed, rising partway out of her funk, saying, “What a hand you are with a compliment.”

  “Lew doesn’t deserve you.”

  Oh, no, none of that. Suddenly decisive, Ellen turned away from the mirror, crossed the bedroom in two strides, knelt on the bed and straddled him, her pubic hair brushing his belly. Her fingers, not gentle, counted their way up the ribs on his left side. He winced away but wouldn’t move his hands from behind his head to defend himself. He watched her, surprised, amused, interested, not alarmed.

  She pressed her fingernail into his flesh between the third and fourth ribs, just under the nipple. “If Lew ever hears about this,” she said, bearing down, meaning every word of it, “if Lew so much as ever suspects, I’ll put the knife in right there. I will, Frank.”

  Frank chuckled, trying to pretend the fingernail didn’t hurt. “Lew would do it first, honey,” he said. “Don’t you worry, old Frank has no death wish.”

  She relaxed the pressure but didn’t yet move her hand. “Just so you understand.”

  “I read you, loud and clear.”

  She started then to climb off him, but he put h
is hands on her waist, pulling her down to sit on his stomach. She could feel him rising again against her buttocks. He said, “Don’t go, I like you there.”

  So did she, goddammit. She was angry, she was bad-tempered, she was rain-obsessed, she was driven mad by inactivity, but at the same time she did like those hammy hands on her waist, she liked the nudge of that hard cock against her cheek.

  He was something different from Lew, he was blunter and more stupid and less sensitive, but there were moments when crudity had its own charm. Almost against her will, she could feel herself softening to complement his hardness, she could feel the juices begin to flow. Knowing what he wanted, she lifted herself slightly on her knees, inching backward toward him—

  And stopped. Frowning, she lifted her head like a herbivore in the forest who’s heard a distant sound. His hands on her waist pressed her farther back toward his waiting member, but she didn’t move. “What’s that?” she said.

  “What’s what? Goddammit—”

  Pushing his hands away, she climbed off the bed and went over to the nearest window. She pulled the curtain aside and looked out, listening to the splashes of individual water drops falling from branches and eaves.

  It was true. And something in the quality of the light, the altitude of the clouds, told her this was no mere respite, this was the real thing. She looked back at Frank, bewildered on the bed. Her eyes were shining. She didn’t need him at all. “The rain has stopped,” she said.

  PART THREE

  25

  Lew walked into the room carrying a two-by-four and a battered black attaché case. He put the case down, hefted the two-by-four, and faced his student body.