“You and me,” she said. “Lew, do you remember who you were before you knew me?”
“Who I was? What do you mean?”
“You got along in life. You had friends, you had lovers, different people important to you at different times.”
“Oh, now, wait a minute.”
But she was inexorable. “Then we met,” she said, “and we got to be very important to each other for a long while.”
“We still are.”
He tried to take her hand, but she moved it away. “No, we aren’t. It used to be—Well, you went to Alaska to be with me. I came here to be with you. Now I’m going to the States. Will you come with me?”
“Come with—? How can I? The job—the coffee job—it’s just about to happen!”
“Lew,” she said, “the worst thing in the world is to try to hang on after something is over.”
He was finally getting used to this. He sat back in the chair, pushing his plate away, and looked at her. “For you it’s over, is that it?”
“For you, too,” she told him. “You just haven’t thought about it yet. Would you like to drive me to the airport?”
A new astonishment. “When?”
“I should leave in about fifteen minutes. I’m already half packed.”
He could feel the bitter twist in his lips when he smiled. “No long good-byes, huh?”
“That’s right. If you don’t want to drive me, that’s okay, I understand. I’ll call Bathar.”
“Young Mr. Balim? I’ll drive you.”
“Thanks, Lew.”
He watched her get to her feet, a beautiful woman, in some weird way at the center of his life. “If everything’s so goddam over,” he said, “how come I’m still jealous of that twerp Bathar?”
“Habit,” she said, smiling. She started away, to finish packing or whatever, then paused to say, “I told you where I’m going. If we were still now what we once were, I wouldn’t want to go, and you wouldn’t want to stay here without me.”
“Not that way, Ellen,” he told her. “I went to Alaska with you because I wanted to be with you, not because you were challenging me to prove myself. What you’re doing now is something else; heads you win, tails I lose.”
“Nobody wins, Lew,” she said.
By the time they reached the airport he was more or less acclimated to the idea. He would still much prefer her to stay—he had no thought, for instance, of haring off after Amarda again now that the coast was clear—but if it wasn’t right for Ellen, then he knew there was no way he could keep her. It was hard, but he knew he shouldn’t even make the attempt. The day of the caged bird is over.
Still, it was tough to have this new weight on his chest, and even tougher that the only person he could go to for comfort and solace was the cause of it. And would no longer be available. He couldn’t argue her out of her decision—at some level that he wasn’t yet ready to deal with, he even thought she might be right—but he couldn’t be as casual as she was, either. (He knew her calm was possible because she was the one making the move, and because she’d already had a while to get used to the idea.) Still, an emotional scene could only spoil their memories of one another; she wanted to go out on an easy level, and he could give her at least that much. What was roiling inside could stay there.
They’d been almost completely silent on the drive out to the airport, absorbed in their separate thoughts, Lew working his way through this new idea of what life was now going to be like, but as they walked from the car to the terminal it occurred to him to wonder about the details of her transition. “What plane are you taking? What’s the route?”
“They’re sending a charter for me from Entebbe.”
“Entebbe!”
“Yes, I’ve got a one-shot job with an American carrier called Coast Global. A little cargo ferrying to Djibouti, and then I go back to the States with the plane and look for another job after that.”
Lew had seen the truth right away. “Jesus, Ellen,” he said, “when do you do this little cargo ferrying?”
“Friday.”
“Hah!”
She stopped and stared at him, and he could see she was just about to get angry. They’d been doing very nicely, dealing with the emotional quagmire of their breaking up, and here Lew was suddenly filled with mysterious laughter, bubbling over with chipper secrets.
He explained: “It’s our coffee, honey!”
Then she got it. “For God’s sake! It has to be.”
“So we’re still in the coffee business together,” he said, grinning, taking her arm, walking her into the terminal. “In fact, here’s something to think about.”
“What?”
“If the coffee actually shows up where you are, you’ll know old Lew isn’t doing too good.”
It was the same plane and pilot that had brought him back from Uganda in April. Uganda Skytours. The plane looked the same, but the middle-aged American pilot—owner, with his wife, of Uganda Skytours—looked just a little seedier, a little more desperate.
Nevertheless, Lew was glad to see him. They shook hands, and Lew said, “Ellen, this is Mike. He brought me back, remember?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And now he’s taking you away.”
She shook the pilot’s hand, saying, “How are you?”
“Can’t complain,” he said, which was patently untrue.
“Mike’ll take good care of you.” Lew was feeling extremely awkward, unable to work out how to say good-bye.
“Be ready when you are,” the pilot said, and tactfully walked back over to his plane.
“Have a good flight,” Lew said.
“Have a good robbery.”
So he took her in his arms and kissed her, and she felt just as good as ever. And she responded just as well. “Jesus,” he whispered into her hair, “can’t we—”
Her body went rigid, pulling away from him. “Don’t.”
He released her, but he had become filled now with this urge to make things become somehow different. “Listen,” he said, and in desperation he finally did bring out the dread name: “Amarda—”
“No,” Ellen said, and touched his lips with her fingertip to make him stop. “I knew about that,” she said, “and that was part of it, but it wasn’t really the main thing.”
“What was?”
She paused, as though she hadn’t really thought about it before, and with some suggestion of surprise in her voice, she said, “You know, I think it was the rain.”
There was no answer to that; he knew all at once exactly what she meant. But even though it was a perfect exit line—and they both knew that, too—he had one more thing to say. He took her arm and they walked toward the plane, and he said, “Listen, don’t get married or anything.”
“I wasn’t planning to, but why?”
“I’m likely to show up in your life again someday.”
She smiled, apparently pleased at the idea. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” she said.
PART FOUR
34
The train was made up at Tororo, on the Kenya-Uganda border, on Wednesday morning. It consisted of thirty-three enclosed freight cars with a combined carrying capacity of over nine hundred tons. (Coffee this month was selling on the commodity markets for seven thousand dollars U.S. a ton; when full, the train would carry six million dollars’ worth of coffee.)
At the head of the train was a steam locomotive of the 29 Class, originally put in service in January of 1953. On the black metal side of its tender still showed the white letters EAR, for East African Railways. On its round front face, beneath its headlight, was a brass plate with the number 2934, and on both sides of the cab, under the windows, were brass plates bearing the name Arusha. All 29 Class locomotives were named for East African tribes.
In the four years since Idi Amin had broken up East African Railways, there had been virtually no replacement of Uganda’s rolling stock. (By contrast, Kenya had in this time almost completed its transition from steam locomotives
to diesel.) Uganda’s locomotives were old and tired; the freight cars were rusted and worn, many of them with broken boards and loose trucks and wheels with flat spots that needed regrinding. Maintenance was at emergency level only, new parts were hard to come by, and there was generally a disinterest in keeping the line at full efficiency. The present management, placed there by the present government, treated the railway as a found object, to be used for as long as it lasted and eventually to be thrown away and forgotten.
Two little Class 13 shunting engines plied back and forth through the yard, finding the most serviceable of the remaining cars and lining them up on one track, where the yardmen hooked up the couplers and the hydraulic hoses for the brakes. (The electrical systems had broken down in so many of the cars that it wasn’t worthwhile even to attach those cables.) On the side of each chosen car a yardman scrawled with white chalk KAHAWA—coffee—in large scraggly letters.
Finally the coal-burning locomotive, the Arusha, was backed into place at the head of the line of cars, and the last couplers and hoses were attached. The engineer and fireman took their positions in the locomotive cab, and just before noon the engineer pressed down the long lever and the Arusha moved slowly forward, the complicated network of bars that connected the big wheels lifting and falling, the shiny-rimmed wheels turning almost delicately along the track. (Far above, the Uganda Sky tours plane flew over, its nasal roar buried in the chuff-chuff of the straining Arusha.)
A series of crashing jolts ran back through the thirty-three empty cars, as the couplers down the line lost their slack and one after the other the cars reluctantly but obediently joined the march. As the yardmen walked away, thinking about their lunches, the coffee train moved slowly out of the yard and onto the main line.
Gathering speed, black smoke and white steam angling back against the blue sky, Arusha and her children ran north toward Mbale, twenty-five miles away. From there, she would angle on a great curve northwestward through the waist of the country, traveling from the Kenyan border on the east up through Soroti and Lira and Gulu and then curving around southwestward to Pakwach on the Zaire border in the west, where the Victoria Nile from Lake Victoria meets with the Albert Nile from what used to be Lake Albert but is now Lake Mobutu Sese Seko. (There was also now a Lake Idi Amin, farther south toward the Tanzanian border region of West Lake, whence the forces would eventually come to overthrow Amin.)
The distance to be covered by the train was just over three hundred miles. The rail line itself continued on from Pakwach, turning northward again and running a further fifty miles up to Arua, from where Idi Amin had originally come. But there was little coffee up that way, closer to the Sahel, that sub-Saharan area of dryness and frequent drought, where the desert is on the move southward.
The train being empty and the land for the most part relatively flat, they made very good time when in motion, running at sixty miles an hour through the lush Ugandan landscape, the empty cars rattling and chattering along the way. But from Mbale on, they had to make frequent stops, dropping off cars at every freight station they came to. By Friday, on their return, these cars would be full to capacity with sacks of coffee.
Wednesday night they lay over in Gulu, two thirds of the way to Pakwach. In the morning they would finish the western journey, and tomorrow afternoon they would start the return.
35
The night Patricia confessed she was a spy was also the night Sir Denis proposed marriage. The proposal came first, with them together in his bed at the Nile Mansions Hotel, and her immediate thought was: How they’ll laugh when they listen to the tape! “Don’t, my dear!” she said, trying to cover his mouth with her hand, but the damage was done. The words were on the tape, forever.
Also the words before that. She didn’t need to give him the doped wine anymore; he was willing, and more than willing, to tell her whatever she asked. Was it because he was naive, or because he understood she was spying on him and he was willing to pay this price to keep her? She knew he was in love with her, and for the first time in her life a man’s love had made her feel guilt.
When they were apart, it was easy to be dismissive and scornful about his love, to disbelieve in it and remain unaffected. After all, he was thirty years older than she, he was white, he was an English aristocrat. His “love” for her could be nothing but lust, mixed with that famous English craving for degradation.
But when they were together, she knew the love was real. She had another human being’s life and happiness in her hands, and she didn’t want them. She wanted power, but not this way. She wanted control, but not if it was only to destroy.
Patricia was also an aristocrat, though she would never tell that to Sir Denis, fearing he would fail to understand and would be condescending to her. For what did the English understand of royal lines outside Europe; except, perhaps, for India? But Uganda too had noble families, a history of kings and courts.
In the old days, the largest and most powerful tribe in the area now Uganda was the Baganda, which controlled the land on the north side of the lake. The Baganda lived in cities, wore fine clothing, had established a sophisticated legal system, possessed excellent houses rather than the mud huts of the tribes down in the Rift Valley. The king of the Baganda was called the kabaka; it was Kabaka Mutesa II who, in accepting the gift of a rifle from the English explorer Speke, sent a page from his court outside with it to shoot a bystander to see how well the weapon worked. And it was from the line of Mutesa II that Patricia Kamin was collaterally descended.
When the British took over Uganda, it was the Baganda tribe from the southern half of the country who provided the civil servants, later the university professors, the doctors and lawyers, and the local political power. And when eventually the British departed, leaving the Nubians from northern Uganda in control of the Army, it was to a very great extent the Baganda who controlled the government. The later accession of Idi Amin was originally seen by many Ugandans approvingly as the revolt of the poorer-educated northern underclass against the oppressive aristocracy of the southern Baganda.
Patricia’s father had been a literature professor at Makerere University—English literature, naturally, not African. She had grown up in an atmosphere of combined luxury and tension. She was among the select few on the inside, while the unshod many were always visible wherever one turned. Some people were struck to pity by this circumstance; some became embarrassed and fled to London or Paris or New York. Patricia became hardened.
She had spent three years in London finishing her education, but the clammy climate and the color of her skin kept her from settling there. At home she was the right color, but more than that, at home she was an aristocrat, and everybody knew it.
Independence had made it more difficult to be ostentatiously an aristocrat. Whatever might be said against the colonizers—and a lot could be said against them—they had more or less effectively kept the lid on tribal conflicts and bloodlusts during the three generations of colonial rule. The removal of that overseeing power had quickly shown that three generations weren’t enough; the old hatreds, the old feuds, were as alive and virulent as ever.
Patricia’s father had died, of natural causes, and quite coolly she had looked for another protector, finding him in an Army colonel, a Langi named Walter Unbule. He had looked up to her as the blueblood she was, and throughout the Obote years his own star had seemed to be in the ascendant. But then Amin came in, and Colonel Unbule had been among those massacred at Jinja Barracks in 1971.
Seeing very early that the rules had changed, and that the new rules would be much tougher than the old, Patricia had gone directly into Amin’s camp for her next protector, finding him in the State Research Bureau, another colonel, this one a Lugbara (Amin’s mother’s tribe) named Musa Embur. He was married, which made it better; a man is always more solicitous of his mistress. Once or twice he had offered to marry her as well—multiple marriage was legal and common in Uganda, and at the moment Amin himself had four wives—but Pa
tricia preferred the freedom of action implicit in her present situation. And besides, Embur had introduced her to Amin.
Amin frightened her, and excited her. Without his power he would have been nothing but a clumsy bear, not even amusing, but the natural way he wielded his power—as though of course he would be powerful, answerable to no one but himself—gave him a fascination to which very few women were immune.
For the past two years Patricia had been a spy for Amin, mostly responding to rumors that this or that individual high in government was disloyal, was possibly even thinking of a coup. Amin told her whom to go after, and what he wanted to learn. She had exposed some plotters and had proved some others blameless (a few times too late to make any difference to the suspect), but until Sir Denis Lambsmith she had never grown to care for any of the men she came in contact with.
What was she to do? It was only as a spy that she would be allowed to continue her relationship with this man, but she no longer wanted to play that part with him. And what secrets did he know, in any event? He was an honest businessman, nothing more. Even when it seemed there might be something, there was not.
Tonight, for instance, before the proposal of marriage, he had told her that Emil Grossbarger believed the coffee shipment was in danger of hijack. But had he any proof, any names, any hints, the slightest suggestion of what the plot might be or who was Grossbarger’s informant? Nothing. Sir Denis knew nothing, and it was cruel to play him this way, and she’d already known she wanted to stop even before he’d said that dreadful thing about marriage. “Don’t, my dear!” she said, in panic, thrusting her hand against his mouth.
He misunderstood, of course. “It’s the age difference, you mean. Patricia, my darling, if I—”
“No no no, please,” she said, terrified he would make even more of a fool of himself for the microphones. “Come along,” she told him, climbing out of the bed, pulling him by his long white arm. “Come on, now, we’ll take a shower, we’ll talk later.”
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