Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  Because he was so useful to the people in power, Byagwa dared more than most lawyers could these days in helping his church friends. And because he had been so useful, and knew (quite literally) where so many bodies were buried, he was not bothered, as he might otherwise have been. This office, for instance, was not bugged, nor was his telephone tapped, making this one of the very few places in Uganda where the present meeting could have occurred.

  “Well,” Byagwa said, coming around from behind his desk, “you’ll want to talk together.” And he smiled and bowed and departed, carefully closing the door behind himself.

  “We might as well get down to it,” Frank said. “Get changed, Isaac.”

  But Chase shook his head and put his finger to his lips. Frank frowned, and they all listened, and heard the hall door close. Frank strode to the inner door, opened it, and demonstrated to Chase that the reception room was empty. “Okay?”

  “Not yet.”

  Chase looked around the office and decided the most logical place to start was the desk. The drawers were all innocuous, except that the bottom left was locked. Lying on the floor under the desk while Frank and Otera watched in bafflement, Chase found the tiny wire emerging from the bottom of the desk under that locked drawer. Carefully tacked into place along a seam between two pieces of wood, the wire ran to a tiny button microphone at the outer corner of the desk.

  “Good,” Chase muttered. He used the screwdriver from his pocketknife to pry the microphone loose from the wood, then yanked it to break the wire and crawled out from under the desk. “Byagwa would also like to know what’s going on,” he said, dropping the microphone onto the middle of the attorney’s green blotter. “And what’s in it for him.”

  “The dirty bastard,” Frank said, glaring at the button on the green.

  “Ah, well,” Chase said. “Who among us is above such little tricks? Now, Frank, we can get down to it.”

  So they did. Chase settled himself in the chair behind the desk, and Frank took a white envelope from his pocket and dropped it disdainfully next to the microphone. Meantime, Otera started to change from his chauffeur’s uniform to the uniform on the chair, transmogrifying himself into a captain in the Ugandan Army.

  Inside the envelope, Chase found the confirmation from the Zurich bank. Thirty thousand dollars had been deposited by Balim into his new account there. “Earnest money,” he had described it to Balim, when insisting on some cash payment in advance. To protect Balim, the deposit had been made in such a way that he could order it withdrawn and redeposited into his own account at any time within thirty days. Balim had accepted this concept of “protection” because he had assumed he would be alive in thirty days.

  “Good,” Chase said, stowing the confirmation away. Then he brought from his inner jacket pocket a large manila envelope. Pushing the microphone to one side, he emptied papers from this envelope onto the desk, saying, “Let’s see what we have here. Identification for Mr. Otera. You’re Captain Isaac Gelaya now,” Chase told the man, who was across the room putting on his military trousers. “I gave you your own first name, in case anyone calls to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Otera seemed very muted for some reason. Was it funk? Chase frowned from Otera to Frank, wanting to point out that a misstep now by Otera could destroy the whole operation.

  Frank read the unspoken concern and shook his head. “Don’t worry about Isaac. He’s very deceptive. He looks like a mild-mannered fella, but inside he’s a killer.”

  Otera smiled a mild-mannered grateful smile, and zipped his fly.

  Not completely convinced, Chase returned to the papers on the desk. “Here’s the authorization for today’s truck. And this is for the ones on Friday.”

  Frank said, “It’s definitely Friday?” Behind him Otera, knotting his brown uniform necktie, became very still.

  “Definitely Friday,” Chase said.

  Otera came forward, tie knotted a bit unevenly, legs awkwardly rigid. “Let’s get it over with.”

  “Straighten your tie,” Frank told him, as Chase handed him the documents.

  Otera stood silently, nodding and fussing with his tie, as Chase explained what each piece of paper was for. But when Chase started to tell him how to get to Jinja Barracks, the man interrupted, saying, “I know Jinja.”

  Chase looked at him, the rigid face, the office-worker appearance, the wound-up-spring determination. A Ugandan, he suddenly realized. Refugee. A fled civil servant. Much became clear, including why Chase had been feeling such hostility from the man. “Then you know the Barracks are within walking distance,” he said.

  “Of course. Frank, here are the keys to the car.”

  Taking them, Frank said, “We’ll see you from the window when you drive by.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know where we’ll meet.”

  “Of course.”

  Frank and Otera shook hands. Chase, seated at the desk, watched with a small smile as Otera left, then watched Frank go over to the windows, pull the curtain back a bit, and gaze out at the street. Talking to his back, Chase said, “Your life is in that man’s hands, you know, Frank.”

  Frank didn’t look around. “Better than in yours,” he said.

  30

  By the time they reached the plantation, Lew and Amarda weren’t speaking. She had wanted to stop at that availably empty house, but he had refused, and when she’d asked why, he’d had to tell her it was finished between them. And because it was so difficult to say such a thing, he’d had to build up a head of steam and then practically yell it at her. “There’s no future in it, that’s all! It’s pointless and it’s making trouble and it has to stop!”

  “What sort of trouble? What are you talking about?”

  “Just trouble.” He could feel himself being sullen, and he blamed Amarda for making him be that way. “I don’t want to lose Ellen, that’s all.”

  “Over me?”

  “Over anything.”

  “I’m not worth such a risk.”

  “If you say so,” he’d said, knowing he was ungracious, but unable to carry the burden any longer.

  And that had been the end of the conversation. For the rest of the drive, Lew had felt rude but virtuous—not an unpleasant feeling.

  At the house, a stony-faced Amarda led him into a small, overly furnished, stuffily hot room where her grandmother, today in a light-green silk sari, sat reading from a book with a blue-velvet cover and gilded pages. The old woman lifted her head, the reading lamp with its dark glass shade reflecting from her round spectacle lenses, and gestured for Lew to sit in an elaborately carved armchair facing her. “I’ll get tea,” Amarda said.

  The old woman closed her book but kept her finger in it to mark her place, and remained silent until Amarda had gone out and shut the door. Then her first words weren’t encouraging. “I have no idea, Mr. Brady, why your friend Mr. Balim has seen fit to send you to me.”

  Neither did Lew, if it came to that. “Well, Mama Jhosi,” he said, speaking softly and leaning forward as though to protect her from storms and abrasions, “Mr. Balim seemed to think there was some sort of problem.”

  “It is not a problem,” she said. “I have changed my mind, that is the only thing. As for the money, Mr. Balim knows I shall return it from our next harvests.”

  There was a faint flowerlike scent of perfume in the stuffy warm air. Lew said, “I’m not here to talk about money, Mama Jhosi.”

  “Of course not.” She made a small perhaps unconscious movement with the book in her lap, suggesting her desire to return to it.

  Lew’s hands felt too large, too cumbersome. Not knowing what else to do with them, he gripped his knees as he leaned toward her. “Please,” he said, “would you tell me why you’ve changed your mind?”

  “My grandson,” she said.

  “Pandit.” Lew smiled in remembered pleasure. He’d seen the boy twice and had enjoyed their conversations both times. “A very nice boy.”

  “A
t school now. But the home is also a school.”

  “Of course.”

  “I do not expect,” she said, her eyes small and unreadable behind the reflecting lenses, “that Pandit will have a very easy life.”

  “It’s starting well, at least.”

  “You mean material comfort.”

  “That, too,” Lew acknowledged. “But what I mostly meant was the home he has here, and the people around him. You, and Amarda.”

  As though on cue, Amarda entered with a tray bearing tea things, and for the next few minutes the ritual of an English tea interrupted the conversation. Amarda was silent, unsmiling, rigid. Was the old lady aware of the tension emanating from her granddaughter, and would she have any idea of its cause?

  When they were all furnished with tea and little cakes, the grandmother said, “Amarda, I was explaining to Mr. Brady why I have changed my mind about Mr. Balim’s so thoughtful proposition.”

  Amarda sipped tea, expressionless, not looking at Lew. “Does Mr. Brady understand, do you think, Mama?”

  “I had not completely made my point.” To Lew she said, “I was talking of Pandit, and I was saying that the home is also a school, and I was about to suggest that the sense of self and the sense of morals Pandit learns in his home will be very important to him in later life.”

  “Absolutely,” Lew said. The tea and cakes had given him something to do with his hands, but the hot tea had combined with the airless warmth of the room to create a stuffy, clogged, distracted feeling.

  “Pandit has seen Mr. Balim here,” the old lady went on. “He has seen you here. If we continue as originally envisaged, the day will come when he will see many truckloads of coffee here which he will know we have not grown on our few acres. He will ask questions.”

  Amarda said, “He has already asked questions, Mama, about Mr. Balim and Mr. Brady. Mostly about Mr. Brady.”

  Glancing at the girl, Lew could read the hostility behind the neutral facade. It had, of course, been bad tactics to break with her before this meeting; a quick roll in that house in Nairobi and Amarda would be on his side now. But he couldn’t have made himself treat her that cynically, so now she would do her subtle best to sabotage his mission.

  If only Ellen had come along! Not only so he could prove there was nothing between himself and Amarda, but also to help with the old lady. Mama Jhosi would have been impressed by Ellen, and would have realized any plot with Ellen in it couldn’t be all bad.

  But Ellen had been difficult, and Amarda had set herself to be impossible, so Lew was left to struggle here on his own in this hot mummified room. Struggle and fail, no doubt; so he might as well get it over with. “I believe, Mama Jhosi,” he said, “I understand your point. If Pandit sees a criminal act performed in his own home, with the connivance of the two people he most looks to for moral guidance, what will happen to his own moral and ethical self?”

  The old lady smiled, and made a small gesture with both hands. (She still held her book, marking her place.) “You do see,” she said.

  What Lew saw, all at once and startlingly, was that he was exactly following Balim’s instructions: he was talking morality, good and evil. But he hadn’t intended it—he’d had no clear idea what he might say—and it seemed to him Mama Jhosi, rather than he, had led the conversation in this direction. But was Balim right, yet again? Baffled but emboldened, Lew returned to the attack.

  “I see and I sympathize. And you may well be right. At Pandit’s age—what is he, twelve?—a simplistic morality may be the best approach. There’ll be time later, I suppose, for him to learn how to think through the knottier moral questions.”

  Amarda gave him a quick look of annoyance, but her grandmother frowned, shaking her head slightly, saying, “Knottier moral questions? I see no moral question at all. The subject is stolen coffee. Thievery.”

  “Of course.” The heat was his friend now; it bound them all together as in a secret hiding place. He said, “Mama Jhosi, may I tell you a story from my personal experience?”

  “If you wish.”

  “I am not a criminal by profession. I am a soldier.”

  “A mercenary,” Amarda said.

  “That’s right. My usual job is instructing recruits. Several years ago, you may recall, one of the factions in the Congo civil war took to rounding up groups of white missionaries, white medical people, and so on, and massacring them.”

  “And nuns,” the old lady said. “I remember how sad that was; they killed many nuns.”

  “I was just going to mention nuns. There was an orphanage—” Then Lew stopped and grinned and waved his hand in a negative gesture, saying, “The children were already gone; this isn’t a tear jerker story.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Amarda said in her neutral voice, “He means he will not try to sway you with sentimentality.”

  “Oh, I see.” She was no longer marking the place in her book with her finger. She seemed almost to be smiling. “So there shall be no orphans in this story.”

  “Only the nuns,” Lew promised. “Eleven of them, French-speaking. We had no transportation and we couldn’t take them on into the thick of things with us, but we didn’t like leaving them there. Now, there was a Land-Rover we’d seen, that had some journalists in it, that had been left with its driver while the journalists walked ahead. We went back to the Land-Rover, and the driver said he had to stay there and wait for the journalists. So we pulled him out of there, and we stole his Land-Rover and brought it to the nuns. One of them could drive, and away they went. The journalists were very angry.”

  “Yes,” the old lady said. Now she was definitely smiling, while Amarda was cold and tight-lipped.

  “Now, that’s not a particularly knotty moral question,” Lew said, “but it’s beyond the level of subtlety you want to permit for Pandit. We did steal that Land-Rover.”

  “Oh, now, Mr. Brady,” she said dismissively, as though disappointed in him, “that was in a war. Things are different in a war, everybody knows that.”

  “You’re in a war, Mama Jhosi,” he told her. “Forgive me, but you must know you’re in a war, whether you want to be or not. Idi Amin is waging war against you and a lot of other people. He has already harmed you in this war, as you well know. And he’s harmed Pandit, too.”

  “A war is battles. It isn’t coffee.”

  “Money from coffee is the main thing keeping Idi Amin in power. And his victims are just as dead as if they’d been on a traditional battlefield. But all right,” he said, sitting back, raising his hands as though to acknowledge defeat. “The point you’re making is your own relationship with your grandson. I can’t argue against that. The operation will go on in any event, as you realize.”

  Amarda said, “Of course it will. My grandmother doesn’t suppose she is stopping the theft from happening.”

  Theft. Thanks a lot, Amarda. Lew said, “Even at this late date, I’m sure Mr. Balim will have no trouble finding another coffee grower happy to take your place. Someone for whom the issue is money alone, without the satisfaction you might have in avenging yourself just a little against Idi Amin. That other person’s motives will be less moral than yours would have been.” Leaning forward once more, Lew said, “Mama Jhosi, it was out of his fondness for you, and his awareness of your treatment at Amin’s hands, that Mr. Balim came to you in the first place.”

  “I am sure that is true.” The old lady was agitated now; her fingertips silently tapped the blue-velvet cover of the book in her lap. “I have not discussed this with Pandit,” she said. “Amarda, have you?”

  “Yes,” Amarda said. She hesitated, reluctant to go on, then looked hard at Lew, saying, “He sees it the way you do, Mr. Brady. A heroic adventure against the forces of evil.” Turning back to her grandmother, she said, “Pandit thinks Mr. Brady is a hero. Like a footballer.”

  “A footballer?” The old lady studied Lew with mock severity. “Without a poster, I hope.”

  “No poster,” Lew said, smiling.<
br />
  She shook her head, thinking things over. Amarda sat rigidly, eyes lowered, looking at nothing but the tea service. Lew had won, and he knew it, and the astonishing thing was that Amarda had made it possible. The faint perfume hung in the close air, and he thought of Amarda’s bedroom, somewhere deep inside this house, which he had never seen.

  Mama Jhosi sighed. “There seems to be no completely satisfactory answer,” she said, and looked speculatively at Lew. “But I suppose it won’t hurt Pandit to have his heroes, if he shows some care in his choices. You may tell Mr. Balim that I will keep to our original agreement.”

  Amarda walked Lew down the hall toward the front door. “Thank you,” he said.

  The look she gave him was cold and unfriendly. “For what? I told the truth, that’s all.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “But I did have to.” Stopping in the hall, facing him, she said, “I behaved properly. To Pandit you are still a hero, but to me not anymore. And when I think of you from now on, I will say to myself, I behaved properly.’”

  “I still thank—”

  “Wanube is waiting for you in the car. He works for us. He will drive you back to the airport.”

  Lew would have tried to speak again, to thank her or say goodbye, but she turned on her heel and walked away.

  At the airport, smiling, happy, he found Ellen reading a magazine in the waiting room and said, “Everything’s fixed.” And he meant—and he wanted her to understand—that everything was fixed. Not just the job Balim had sent him to do, but also the entanglement with Amarda. That too was fixed—forever—and with very little damage on either side.

  “That’s fine,” Ellen said, rising, stowing the magazine in her shoulder bag; but for some reason she didn’t seem particularly interested or involved.