Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  At the moment, Amin’s people in Kampala and in Zurich were attempting either to convince the charter company to trust Uganda—a sovereign nation among nations, after all—for payment later, or to find some other air cargo company that would. So far, things weren’t going too well, though it was possible they could still make a deal with an American company, Coast Global Airlines, which had already in the last few years made lesser coffee shipments from Uganda to the United States. Coast Global’s primary problem seemed to be finding sufficient spare planes and crew for the job.

  Chase rose, saying, “Well, if everything’s in hand, I’ll be off.”

  “Yes,” Amin said. It was disappointing that Chase hadn’t once mentioned Sir Denis Lambsmith. Amin watched him cross the room back over to his clothing, and then added, “To Jinja.”

  Chase looked surprised, but not worried. “That’s right,” he said. He put his white shirt on over the Idi Amin T-shirt, and buttoned it up.

  “To see a lawyer,” Amin said, his friendly smile unchanged. “Name of Edward-ah Byagwa. Wha-ta you need-ah lawyer for, little Baron?”

  “I’m buying some land near Iganga,” Chase said. “Used to be church land.” Smoothly he knotted his green tie.

  “Buy-ing?”

  Chase grinned, making them conspirators together. “You know me,” he said, shrugging into his tan sports jacket. “I like things to be nice and legal.”

  “I know you, little Baron,” Amin agreed. “Have a good-ah time, in Jinja.”

  Chase paused at the door, looking back, grinning again with the open smile that Amin knew to be his most thoroughly false expression. “So you knew I was going to Jinja,” he said. “I can’t get anything past you, can I?”

  “I hope-ah not,” Amin told him. “I hope-ah not completely.”

  28

  Sex last night, and sex again this morning. He’s feeling guilty, Ellen thought, because he’s on his way to see his girl friend. She watched Lew’s profile as they drove to Balim’s offices, and in his expressionless face she read deceit, guilt, and self-indulgence.

  She hadn’t told him about her conversation yesterday with Balim, nor did she see any reason why she should. He’d want to know why she was quitting Balim to work elsewhere, and that would lead inevitably to the name of Amarda Jhosi, and Ellen simply didn’t want that whole scene. She didn’t care to learn whether Lew would deny everything, or promise to reform, or even attempt to defend himself. When a thing is over, it’s over, that’s all; and this phase of Ellen Gillespie’s life was over.

  In Balim’s office she sat quietly to the side, in the brown armchair into which Frank normally flung himself, while Balim explained today’s problem to Lew. “The grandmother,” he said, with an embarrassed little smile, as though she were his own grandmother and he were solely responsible for her. “The grandmother won’t stay in place.”

  “I don’t think she likes us,” Lew said.

  “Poor lady.” Balim sighed. “What she doesn’t like is the position in which she finds herself. The moral niceties in stealing from Amin, who stole from her, are too subtle for Lalia Jhosi. What is wanted here is reassurance, someone to convince her she hasn’t fallen in with thieves.”

  “Then you should talk to her yourself,” Lew said. “Or send Isaac. That’s what I told him yesterday.”

  Ellen looked sharply at him. Had he tried to get out of this trip? But that was just guilt again, and cowardice. The main difference between men and women, Ellen thought, is that men have so much simpler emotions; they can’t deal with complexity. If Lew were really trying to avoid Amarda Jhosi, it could only be because she was making him confused.

  “Ah, no,” Balim was saying, “you are the man for the job. I am a merchant, and undoubtedly a shady character. At first I was a very good friend to bring my compatriots, my fellow refugees, this opportunity. But as time has gone on, Lalia Jhosi has come to realize that I am merely a sharp practitioner, the sort of Asian who gives Asians a bad name. As for Isaac, he would surely alarm the old lady by talking politics. She wants involvement with politics even less than with crime; after all, she’s already seen what politics can do.”

  Lew glanced with a kind of frustrated anger at Ellen, then said to Balim, “But what am I supposed to do?”

  “Be a clean-cut American boy. A fighter for justice and a defender of the oppressed.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No, I’m quite serious,” Balim said, and Ellen believed he was. “Lalia Jhosi is impressed by you. You remind her of the hero in American films. So you go to her and you reassure her that what we are all engaged in is an adventure, but an adventure with a moral purpose.”

  “Oh, boy,” Lew said, shaking his head.

  “You don’t talk about profit, as I would have to do. You don’t talk about politics, as Isaac would have to do. You don’t talk about the mechanics of the thing, as Frank would have to do. You talk about good and evil, and you show her that we are the good guys.”

  “The good guys.”

  “That’s right. You’ll have no trouble with it, Lew, I promise. Just go to Nairobi and be a hero.”

  As Ellen landed in bright sunlight and taxied the plane to an available pad at Wilson Airport in Nairobi, Lew broke an extended silence between them by saying, “Why not come along?”

  She had been listening to the tower and thinking about other things. She stared at him for a blank second, then said, “To the coffee plantation?”

  “Sure. It’s a very interesting place.”

  He wants me to protect him from that girl, she thought. But she wouldn’t do it, she wouldn’t let him force her to make his decisions for him.

  Besides, it was already finished. As they left the office in Kisumu, Balim had said to her, quietly so Lew couldn’t hear, “No change?” and she had shaken her head, to which he had given his sad fatalistic shrug. And in any event she had the appointment here, all set up. “Oh, I don’t think so, Lew,” she said, turning down the invitation. “There’s really too much to be done at the airport.”

  He was surprised, and showed it. “Too much to do? Come on, Ellen, you spend most of your time just hanging around, reading magazines. You’ve told me so yourself.”

  “Well, today there’s too much to do,” she said, turning the plane in a tight U and stopping on the pad. “And I really don’t want to go.”

  “Why not, for God’s sake?”

  She shut down both engines, then looked at him frankly and clearly. “I’m not interested in the Jhosi family, Lew,” she said. “Nor in their coffee plantation. Nor in a nice drive through Nairobi.”

  He had understood her subtext; she saw his face close in defensive anger. “Have it your own way,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  She climbed down from the plane, and he followed. He started to help her tie it down, but she said, “Go on, Lew, the grandmother’s waiting.” They could both see, some distance away beyond the chain link fence, Amarda Jhosi standing beside her car on tiptoe, happily waving, like the girls in war movies welcoming their men back from battle.

  Lew hesitated, obviously torn, looking between Ellen and the waving girl. “You sure you won’t come?”

  “Positive.”

  He nodded, as though coming to a decision. “See you later,” he said, and walked off.

  She kept her back turned, busy with the ropes to tie the plane down, until she was certain they had gone.

  Among the tiny cubbyhole offices for the various small cargo and charter air services, Ellen found the one marked CHARTAIR, LTD. in sky-blue letters that leaned speedily to the right. Inside, a worried-looking black man sat crowded in between large dark filing cabinets, as though the cabinets were guards sent to keep him here until time for the execution. His desk was messy, his wastebasket overflowing, and the small blackboard on the side wall listing future charters was so cluttered with half-erased or crossed-out numbers and names that it made no sense at all. “I’m looking for Mr. Gulamhusein,” Ellen said
.

  The condemned man lifted his worried head. He held a ball-point pen in his hand, and two red pencils were stuck in his woolly hair above his right ear. In a surprisingly firm and self-assured voice, belying everything else about him, he said, “You would be Miss Gillespie?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mr. Gulamhusein phoned from Nairobi,” the man said. “He has been unfortunately delayed, but he will be here within the hour.”

  “That’s all right,” Ellen said, though she was disappointed that she couldn’t get the details over right away. “I have other things to take care of. I’ll be around the terminal.” She left the man there and walked toward the airport manager’s office with her documents, trying not to hear herself thinking that she should have gone with Lew to the plantation.

  Mr. Gulamhusein was another Asian, an overgrown fig of a man with a smoothly smiling exterior which seemed to be imperfectly shielding panic. But he was efficient; he had brought the employment contracts and the Ugandan immigration form and the other papers.

  The condemned man had relinquished his seat between the filing cabinets to Mr. Gulamhusein and had gone away for a cup of tea. Mr. Gulamhusein unceremoniously cleared the messy desk by piling all the papers in a kind of compost heap to one side, then neatly laid out the documents he’d brought in his shiny black plastic attaché case, saying, “You will want to read everything most carefully before you sign.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Ellen said, and settled down to read.

  Because of the eight-hour time difference between Kenya and New York, she had had to get up at two in the morning, night before last, once she was sure Lew was asleep, and drive to Balim’s office (having earlier gotten his permission) to make the phone call to the pilots’ agency at Kennedy Airport. She had used them before, and in fact they’d gotten her the job in Alaska. All she’d said this time was that she wanted a job anywhere in the world, but when she’d mentioned that she was calling from Kenya, the man at the other end of the line had become very interested, saying, “We may have something right there, very near you. Short-term job, but it ends in the States.”

  “Perfect,” she’d said.

  It would take a second phone call, and the man had agreed there would be someone in the office at eleven that night, which for Ellen would be seven the next morning. And when she made that second call, the deal was arranged.

  So here she was with the East African representative of Coast Global Airlines, a large American cargo company, reading the contract for her employment. Sometime tomorrow, Wednesday, a plane lacking a copilot would be arriving at Entebbe from Baltimore. Ellen, at Coast Global’s expense, would be flown by charter from Kisumu to Entebbe to become that plane’s copilot. Her documents from Ugandan immigration would permit her to stay in the transient aircrews’ accommodations at Entebbe, but not to leave the airport. On Friday, she would crew as the plane, fully loaded, went to Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden and returned empty. There would be three, and possibly four, round trips, but in any event she would be paid for four. On Saturday or Sunday she would crew back to Baltimore, where she would be paid. And by then, according to the man at the agency, they would surely have another more long-term job lined up for her. It couldn’t be better.

  The strange thing was, she was so involved in her own plans and her own unhappiness and her own determination to get out of this situation that had become intolerable to her that it never even entered her mind there might be any connection between the cargo she would be flying to Djibouti on Friday and the trainload of coffee Lew and the others expected to be stealing any day now.

  “Everything’s fine,” she said, putting the papers down on the cleared part of the desk. “May I borrow a pen?”

  “Certainly.” It was an expensive silver fountain pen, which he uncapped before handing her. Watching her begin to sign and initial the various papers, he said sympathetically, “You were not content in your previous work?”

  “That sums it up,” she said, and smiled through her doubts, and handed him back his pen.

  29

  So he knows I’m going to Jinja.

  That same sentence kept recurring in Chase’s mind as he drove east on A109, amid the groaning trucks that gave an impression—utterly false—of a soundly functioning economy. So he knows I’m going to Jinja.

  And he tells me he knows.

  Meaning there are further things he doesn’t know. For instance, he doesn’t know why I’m going to Jinja, because if he had the slightest suspicion about the truth, I’d already be dead. Or wishing I were.

  But it also means he’s suspicious of me, more than in the normal way of being mistrustful. He thinks I’m up to something, but he doesn’t know what it is, so he’s poking at me a little to see what happens. Poke all you want, Idi. All you do is strengthen me in my resolve.

  Until very recently, he had thought he would continue on here for a while, possibly even a year or two, after making his double killing on the coffee deal. But this operation was making him nervous, and now Amin’s attitude was making him even more nervous. Once the coffee was gone, why wouldn’t Amin begin to believe that Chase had had something to do with its disappearance?

  So the thing was to get out, right away. Not with the coffee, no; he had no desire to be present when Balim and Company received their little extra surprise. But at the same time as the coffee went, he would go. His papers were such that he could leave at will, so why not slip out of the country as soon as the word came that the coffee had actually been stolen? There was no reason why not, and plenty of reasons why he should.

  Jinja, the source of the Nile, that romantic ideal of the Victorian imagination, has today become a plain and ordinary town, part small manufacturing center and part bedroom community for the civil servants at Kampala, fifty miles away. The whole is brooded over by the Army’s Jinja Barracks, site of the first massacre of Idi Amin’s rule, when several hundred officers and men from suspect tribes—Langi and Acholi, mostly—were herded into a small building and machine-gunned.

  Not far from the Barracks was the business center of town. The lawyer Edward Byagwa’s office stood upstairs from a now-defunct shoe store, once owned by Asians, then given to an Army officer from the Barracks, who, not knowing how to reorder, abandoned it when the stock ran out. Byagwa shared the second floor with a dentist, who hadn’t been seen for about two months. His family remained hopeful.

  Byagwa’s secretary in his reception room was his wife; a fairly good guarantee of loyalty, assuming there were no domestic difficulties. She was a stocky unattractive woman who was reading an old copy of Queen, and who looked up with a mixture of apprehension and annoyance when Chase walked in. Seeing he was a white man, and therefore unlikely to be dangerous to her, she dropped the apprehension but kept the annoyance. “Yes?”

  “Baron Chase. I’m expected.”

  “You’re late. The others are already here.” Not rising from her desk, she gestured at the inner door.

  “I am Captain Baron Chase,” he said, smiling at her, “an adviser to our President.”

  She stared at him, the threat sinking home. In Uganda, no one was permitted to call himself “President” of anything, not of a club or a company or a trade union. No one but Idi Amin. For another person to give himself the title “President,” no matter of what, was a capital offense. So this man was telling her that he was close to Amin and that he was, after all, potentially dangerous to her, and that she should irritate him only at her risk.

  Yes; she understood. Her mouth opening into a wide O, she started hurriedly and awkwardly to her feet. But then Chase smiled, arresting her with his hand, saying, “No, don’t get up. I can find my way.”

  The inner office had a wall of windows overlooking the street, covered by a layer of thin curtains. The furniture was scanty and functional, placed for efficiency rather than beauty on a worn gray carpet; an Army uniform was folded on one chair. The walls were pale green and contained no decoration other than
the attorney’s framed documents.

  Entering, Chase first saw Frank Lanigan, sprawled on a wooden-armed chair like a defeated gladiator. The man was dressed in suit and tie, but looked as ridiculously crumpled as ever. “Hello, Frank,” Chase said, smiling. “Long time no see.”

  “Not long enough.” But Frank did get to his feet and consent to shake hands. They both squeezed hard, but stopped before it became a contest. “This is Isaac Otera,” Frank said, gesturing to a black man in chauffeur’s uniform.

  Isaac Otera, Chase knew, was Balim’s office manager and the one who was supposed to get the trucks. He certainly didn’t look the part. And why is the man staring at me like that?

  Neither Chase nor Otera offered to shake hands, and it was with some relief that Chase turned to the third man in the room, the attorney, Edward Byagwa. “Our host, I believe,” he said.

  Byagwa did want to shake hands, and Chase obliged, finding the lawyer’s paw soft and pulpy, like the rest of him. Byagwa had a round head and a round face of polished bronze, with a very wide mouth and bulging eyes. He’s stuck midway between frog and prince, Chase thought, amusing himself, as he released the man’s hand.

  Edward Byagwa was many things, too many things, and some inevitable day he would overstep himself. His wife outside was right to be apprehensive. An active churchgoer, Byagwa appeared in court frequently to defend priests and ministers against accusations ranging from treason (the storing of weapons in church basements was a popular charge) to the holding of services allied to one of the banned Christian sects. At the same time, he served as a go-between in smuggling operations involving Army officers and government figures, and had allegedly been very helpful back in 1973 in getting automobiles across the border into Kenya. (The ousted Asians had left behind many fine cars, but the Ugandan shilling was then already worth only a fraction of the Kenyan shilling, and true profit could be turned on those cars only if they could be gotten out of the country. That was the first time in Amin’s reign that the border with Kenya was closed; Amin closed it himself, to try to keep those cars in Uganda. Byagwa had helped many important people to realize their profit after all.)