Kahawa

Home > Mystery > Kahawa > Page 37
Kahawa Page 37

by Donald E. Westlake


  “The Saudis—”

  “In the first place,” Chase interrupted, really tired of all this, “we couldn’t possibly make an open interrogation to the Saudis about one of their sub rosa projects. And if we did, they would quite properly deny all knowledge.”

  Colonel Juba sat blinking at his desk, annoyed and uncomfortable. He tried once or twice to find things to say, then finally blurted, “Do sit down! You make me lean my head back!”

  “Sorry, Colonel.”

  Chase started for the sofa, but Juba said, “No, here. Sit here,” pointing at the witness’s chair in front of the desk.

  So the make-believe was coming to an end. To emphasize his dignity and authority, Juba went on pointing at the chair until Chase had settled himself in it. Then he said, “About this other matter of the Swiss man.”

  Chase smiled, leaning forward to put his elbow on the edge of the desk. “The Swiss man, yes. The one who is buying the coffee, as you put it.”

  “You told him the coffee would be stolen,” Juba said, then immediately looked doubtful, as though wishing he’d been more roundabout.

  “I told him the coffee would be stolen?” This was a distortion of the truth, but still it was more than Chase had thought these people might have. “Why would I say such a thing to a customer? And who says I did?”

  “The Swiss man told it to the English Sir.”

  The fool! Grossbarger’s enslavement to friendship had landed Chase in the soup. At his scornful best, Chase said, “And I suppose the English Sir told President Amin.”

  Juba looked smug; he was at last on sure ground. “He told Patricia Kamin.”

  So that was it. The Kamin bitch was the source of his trouble. He wasn’t surprised; she’d been out to get him for a long time. His mind already dealing with thoughts of revenge, Chase said, “There seems to be something wrong here. Did I tell the Swiss man we must have good security because some Ugandan coffee has been stolen? That is possible. Did he repeat this to the English Sir? Why not? And did the English Sir—In bed, I suppose? With the Kamin woman, were they in bed when they talked?”

  “That makes no difference,” Juba said.

  “So the English Sir, trying to seem brave and dramatic in bed with his whore, tells her a story about danger to the coffee shipment. And for this you bring me here at night, you waste my time, you tell me falsely that President Amin will be here, you—”

  “You shut up now!” Juba banged his palm down flat on the desk top.

  “I will not shut up! When President Amin learns what you have done—”

  “These are his orders!”

  Chase sat back, arms folded, gazing without expression at Juba. The situation was out in the open now, and he knew everything he needed to know. He had nothing further to say.

  Juba too realized the situation had changed, and relaxed into the thug he really was. Speaking slowly, gazing unblinking at Chase, he said, “When you speak together with your friends, do you talk of ‘the English Sir,’ or do you say ‘Sir Denis Lambsmith’? Do you think I am a great ignorant fool?”

  “Not a great ignorant fool.”

  “Now you shall learn!” Juba gestured at his assistants. “Search him.”

  “Too late,” Chase said. Withdrawing from its forearm holster in his left sleeve the chrome-plated Firearms International .25-caliber six-shot automatic, he fired once, the bullet hitting Juba just under the right eye with enough force to penetrate the brain and kill him but not enough to knock him out of his chair.

  Chase was already moving, rolling leftward, kicking the witness’s chair backward, rolling once toward the wall and coming up onto his feet with the automatic trained on the beer-slowed captain and major. Those two, nothing but big loutish boys with slow brains and too much good living, lurched in front of him, wanting to rush but afraid. “Move back to the wall,” Chase told them.

  They wouldn’t. Uncertain but belligerent, they stood, weaving slightly, and the major said, “You shoot, they come here.”

  “Nobody knows there’s a prisoner in here,” Chase said. “Not even me. That’s why you couldn’t search me before. Move back to the wall.”

  “They come,” insisted the major.

  The Captain said something in Kakwa. It was infuriating to have the wrong language! The major shook his head, then replied; by his eye movements, he was saying they should rush, one to the left, the other to the right.

  No, no, can’t permit that. The .25 automatic is really a very small gun; it won’t slow people down, and it isn’t accurate over much distance. Suddenly leaping forward, gun arm extended full in front of himself like a swordsman, Chase shot the major in the mouth, then jumped to the side, re-aiming at the captain.

  Who stared with disbelief as his comrade slowly fell, hands to his face, then jerked once on the floor and was still. Terrified now, cold sober, a sudden white froth of sweat appearing in his wiry hair, the captain gaped at Chase and dropped to his knees. “Mercy!” he cried.

  “Get up. I have use for you alive.”

  But the captain merely knelt there, clasping his hands, staring at Chase with full expectation of death. He had too little English, obviously, not much more than that ironic mercy; wherever could he have learned such a word?

  In a hurry, Chase at last lifted his self-imposed ban and spoke in Swahili. “You will live if you do what I say. Get on your feet; go over there; stand facing that wall.”

  The captain, as astounded at hearing Swahili as if Chase had performed a Biblical miracle, scrambled to his feet, saying, “Yes, sir, yes, sir, I’ll do what you say,” in his own slurry rural version of the language. He retreated to the side wall and jittered there, the white foam of sweat sudsing in his hair and running in droplets down over his collar.

  Chase found a total of four handguns on the two dead bodies. Returning the .25 to its forearm holster, he chose a Browning .38 revolver to carry. “All right, Captain,” he said. “Now we go to work.”

  It was important that Juba and the others not be found yet, but fortunately in this building disposal of bodies was not a problem. Chase made the captain strip the dead men of their uniform coats, which bore their rank and symbols of office, and hang them with the other coats in the closet. Then he had him carry the major while Chase himself carried the thinner lighter Juba down through the empty midnight corridors—Chase knew where the sentries were and how to go around them—to the concrete-floored room at the back where bodies were placed prior to removal. There were only two corpses here at the moment; a slow night.

  Juba and the major were dumped beside the first two. Then Chase said, “Give me your coat, Captain.”

  “Oh, sir,” the captain said. “I did what you wished. Let me go home now. Far away from here, not even Uganda. Near Adi, sir,” he said, naming a Zairian town just a few miles from both the Ugandan and Sudanese borders. “I go there, sir, I never come back.”

  “Give me your coat.”

  “All my family is there, sir. I go live with them, I never bother you again, sir.”

  In the end, Chase had to strip the coat off the body himself.

  There were a few papers he could use from his own office in the Bureau building, a few weapons, nothing much. He sat at his desk a moment, looking around the barren room—he hadn’t come here often, preferring his sunnier happier office in the Parliament Building—and reflected that this part of his life was over. Just in time, he had made his preparations for the future. On the other hand, the preparations themselves seemed to have hastened his departure.

  Oh, well. In the world of the living, only Idi Amin and Patricia Kamin knew there was so much as a shadow over his head. His papers would still give him safe-conduct for some time to come, and his orders would still be obeyed. Leaving his office, he walked downstairs to the duty room, where he said to the duty officer, “Give me an arrest form.”

  “Yes, Captain Chase.”

  Chase filled out the form, naming Patricia Kamin as the person to be arrested, and givi
ng both her home and Sir Denis Lambsmith’s hotel room as possible locations where she might be found. In the appropriate block he wrote “Charge Not Specified.” Under Authority he printed “IAD,” which the duty officer would know stood for Idi Amin Dada. And under Date of Implementation he put not the usual “Immediate” but “Night, 27 May 1977.” Meaning tomorrow night, Friday, after the coffee caper had been successfully pulled off. Finally, he wrote the word “Jinja,” meaning she would not be brought here, where she might be able to contact friends in the Bureau to rescue her, but to Jinja Barracks, where she was unknown.

  Returning the form, Chase said, “You see the authority.”

  “Oh, yes, Captain Chase.”

  “And the place.”

  “Jinja; yes, sir.”

  “And the date of implementation.”

  “Yes, sir. Tomorrow night.”

  “We must keep this quiet until then. We don’t want to scare our bird away.”

  Laughing, the duty officer said, “No, Captain, we don’t.”

  “There’s one thing more,” Chase said.

  The duty officer waited, alert.

  “This is not something to be written. This is from the President himself.” Chase tapped the form with a fingertip. “Give her the VIP treatment.”

  PART FIVE

  44

  Eight a.m. The train—locomotive, tender, twenty-seven coffee-laden cars—pulled out of the yards at Soroti, headed south. A brief sprinkle before sunrise had left the world sparkling clean. The engineer and fireman, drinking their after-breakfast beer and feeling the deep vibration of the locomotive as it pulled eight hundred tons of coffee over the shining rails, sang happy songs together as they sailed along the track through the green countryside. They called to pretty schoolgirls crossing the fields toward the main road, carrying their books against their breasts. Some of the girls waved back.

  Lew stood aside while the four men who’d built this blind carefully removed it, pulling it downhill and to the left, leaning it against a tangle of shrubbery. “Very pretty,” he said, and stepped through the magic doorway in the jungle to look at the railroad track. “Very pretty indeed.”

  Young Mr. Balim, who claimed to speak Swahili sufficiently well for the task, had assigned himself to Lew as translator. Following through the gap, he said, “My goodness. To hear about it is one thing, but to see it is something else.”

  “Bathar, tell them this is a very very pretty structure. They did a Grade A job.”

  Young Mr. Balim’s translation was at least close enough to wreathe the faces of the four men in proud smiles. They did a lot of nodding and pointing and talking, all of which Young Mr. Balim translated as “They say they had much difficulty, but they knew the job was very important.”

  “They did just fine. Thank them again.”

  While that was going on, Lew studied the rails. Unlike American track, which is laid with staggered joints so that each joint is always at the midpoint of the opposite rail, the British habitually lay track with parallel joints. This practice makes for a marginally less solid line, but it does come in handy for hijackers intending to divert the track. “These joints here,” Lew said to Young Mr. Balim, having walked down the line a bit to the west. “This is where we’ll open the track. Ask them if they agree.”

  Young Mr. Balim posed the question, which Lew had asked since after all these men had been hired for their railway experience. And the answer was, “Yes, they say that’s the place they had in mind.”

  The up freight had gone by two hours ago, just after dawn, when the brief rain was stopping. The railway was theirs. “We might as well get the work crew up here,” Lew said, “and get started.”

  Isaac, in his Ugandan Army captain’s uniform, approached the truck, where Frank was suspiciously watching the twenty men chosen as drivers select clothing out of the boxes before climbing aboard. He looked as though he suspected them of lying about their ability to drive; which was in fact possible. Isaac said, “How does it look?”

  “What? Oh, the uniform. Fine,” Frank said. “You could strike terror in my heart at forty paces wearing that.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Isaac said.

  “Good. Charlie!”

  A part of Mazar Balim’s business was a brisk trade in Army surplus and used clothing, which was where all the stuff in the boxes had come from. Charlie was helping the men find military-style clothing that fit, though what Charlie knew about right-fitting clothing was anybody’s guess. He looked up at Frank’s voice, said, “Yes, Frank?” and trotted over to receive instructions.

  “Tell those clowns,” Frank said, “we want those uniforms back.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “Those duds are for sale in the shop in Kisumu, they’re supposed to go back on the shelf when we’re done, so they shouldn’t get ‘em all dirty and fucked up.”

  “Okay, fine.”

  Something about Charlie’s translation struck the men funny;

  Isaac, listening, faintly smiled, until he saw Frank glowering at him, beetle-browed. “Did he tell ‘em what I said?”

  “Oh, sure,”‘ Isaac said, and in essence Charlie had delivered Frank’s message. Isaac thought it better if Frank remained unaware of the details. He said, “Couldn’t we speed up this loading process?”

  Frank grinned at him. “In a hurry to get started?”

  “No,” Isaac said truthfully, “I’m in a hurry to get it over with.”

  The bank opened at nine-thirty, and Chase was its first customer, striding in with smiling confidence, greeting the assistant manager by name, handing him the forged request chit from Idi Amin for five thousand dollars U.S., in cash. (That, Chase knew, was the highest amount the assistant manager would give him without telephone verification.) “While you’re getting it,” Chase went on, “I’ll just visit my box.”

  “Certainly. Of course. Miss Ngana? Would you take Mr. Chase to the safe-deposit boxes?”

  Chase had always assumed that Amin knew what was in his safe-deposit box, so he’d never kept anything there but some jewels and personal identification. These he now removed, so that when he returned upstairs with the willowy Miss Ngana, he carried in his pockets about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of ivory figurines and small pieces of jewelry in gold.

  The small canvas packet was waiting on the assistant manager’s desk. Approaching, Chase was overcome by a huge yawn. “Very sorry,” he said, when he could. Not wanting to risk a return to his own house, he’d spent last night with a whore of his acquaintance, who had insisted on giving him his money’s worth.

  “Not at all,” the assistant manager said, smiling. “Many mornings I feel the same myself.”

  “Coffee, that’s what I need.” Chase smiled his secret smile.

  “And less love life,” the assistant manager said, beaming broadly and nervously to show he had dared a joke.

  “That, too. Well, good morning.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Chase.”

  Outside, Chase strode briskly to the Mercedes he’d commandeered last night from the Bureau building’s parking lot. Stuffing the bag of money under the front seat, he started the engine and drove quickly away. He still had three more banks to visit, plus several shops.

  Even success, though, had its bitter taste. Amin is taking millions out of this rotten country, Chase thought, and I’m taking thousands. Big fish, little fish. Ah, well; we all eat as much as we can.

  Frank didn’t realize it, but when he shinnied up a telephone pole wearing earphones connected to a dangling ball of wire he looked like some sort of bear act in the circus. That’s why there was so much snickering going on below. He suspected the racket had something to do with him, however, and resolved to kick ass just as soon as he got to the ground.

  The Ugandan telephone system had last been cared for by the British sixteen years ago. Since then, there had been very little maintenance and absolutely no upgrading. Half the glass insulators were broken or stolen, and the old wires themselv
es were frayed. The service box was dented and rusty, but when Frank opened it the old diagrams and layout in English inside the door were still readable. Still, he had to attach the alligator clips several times before he found the direct line from the railroad office at Jinja. “My, how they chatter,” he said aloud.

  Between the earphones and the alligator clips was a thirty-foot ball of wire, much more than enough to reach from here to the ground. Looking down, Frank saw Charlie directly below, gesticulating and grimacing for an appreciative audience. Taking careful aim, he dropped the earphones and was gratified to see them bounce off Charlie’s head. “Watch out below!” he called amiably, then double-checked that the alligator clips were firmly in place, shut the service-box door, and shinnied back down the pole.

  Ten-fifteen. If the train could be said to have a schedule, it was running ahead. There was something about the sunniness of the morning, the clarity of the air, that made even lazy people feel like working. The one car at Okungulo and the two cars at Kumi had been attached almost before the train was completely stopped, and now the same thing was happening at Kachumbala with its one car. The train was now thirty-one freight cars in length; only the two at Mbale were left to pick up. “We’ll be in Kampala before dinner-time,” the engineer said.

  “If nothing goes wrong.”

  “On a day like this? What could go wrong?”

  Lew had posted one sentry where the access road crossed the track, and the other fifty yards from the work site in the opposite direction, where the curve to the right sharpened. If either of them saw anything, he was to wave his arms energetically over his head. That signal would cause Young Mr. Balim to call out “Chini!” the Swahili word that means “down,” which in turn would cause the work crew, carrying their tools, to scatter off the tracks and take cover in the underbrush on either side. Lew had made them practice this maneuver twice, and believed they understood it. As for Young Mr. Balim, he took his task with utter seriousness, striding back and forth beside the track, frowning first at one sentry and then at the other.

 

‹ Prev