Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  “What’s that?”

  “That it’s dangerous to play hero,” Young Mr. Balim said, “if you aren’t one.”

  The echo of his earlier braggadocio remark to Frank made Lew uncomfortable, which made him aggressive. “How do you know?” he demanded. “How do you know if you’re a hero?”

  Young Mr. Balim shrugged. “You survive,” he said.

  Isaac had been both right and wrong about what would happen next. When the sixth group of freight cars was dropped off the cliff, the men were much more careful; barely half rode the cars, and those who did were much brisker about jumping to the ground. Nevertheless, a man died.

  Lew didn’t ride this time, but stayed on the ground as a good example. It had become evening, already dark under the trees, with bars and tunnels of pink light angling down through the open spaces. Lew watched the empty cars against the pink sky, rolling away, and when he saw the motionless man on the last roof, he cried, “Not again!”

  But it was again. The man was short and chunky, with very heavy shoulders, who before this had been noticeable only because he was one of the very few workmen who wore a hat; a kind of tattered baseball cap, with no team designation. Now he stood on the freight-car roof, facing the cliff, both hands pressed to his heart as if he were a character in a Victorian novel, and leaned forward slightly, as though impatient to be gone.

  There was no laughter. A few voices tried to raise a cheer, but it didn’t take, and in silence everybody watched the madman ride his freight car down through the empty pink air, never changing his posture, not even when his hat blew off. And when the great black mouth of the water opened for him, showing its white-foam teeth, a general sigh went up, quickly dissipating in the trees.

  The men were silent as they turned away, their faces inward-looking, and though everybody was fairly full of beer there was none of the usual roughhousing during the break before returning to work. Friends of the departed man explained that he had been unhappy in love; when this word reached Lew he said, “Shit, so am I! That’s no reason!”

  Isaac was the one who’d told him. Spreading his hands, he said, “It seemed like a reason to him.”

  Lew left for the lake with the next group of trucks, taking with him the engineer and fireman they’d hijacked with the train. Those two, having sworn they wouldn’t try to escape, had much earlier been given their parole and had sort of been hanging around ever since, drinking beer with the boys and generally having a good old time. However, when they saw Lew make preparations to depart, they both came over and said they would like please to come along to Kenya. Lew shook his head at them. “What for? You aren’t in trouble. When we’re gone, you just go back and tell the truth.”

  “Well, mister,” the fireman said, “sometimes in Uganda the truth is not so important.”

  “It was our train,” the engineer said. “They might be very angry, and they would want someone to blame, and perhaps they would blame us.”

  “We like Kenya,” the fireman said. “It’s a very much better country completely.”

  “I have cousins there,” the engineer said. “You say that? ‘Cousins’?”

  “Sure.”

  “We used to like very much when the railway went to Kenya,” the fireman said. “We still have friends on the railway there.”

  “We get jobs,” the engineer said, “and tell everybody the story about this train.”

  “They will buy us beer,” the fireman said, and laughed.

  “We will never have to buy our own beer again ever completely,” the engineer said, and they both laughed.

  “Then climb into the truck,” Lew told them, and went over to tell Isaac he was off, adding, “When you leave, don’t forget Young Mr. Balim up by the road.”

  “Oh, I won’t.” Isaac smiled in the near-darkness. “Can you imagine returning to Mr. Balim without his son?”

  “No,” Lew said, and left.

  He probably should have stayed, but he just didn’t want to anymore. The fun was going out of it. Night was falling, the lugging of coffee sacks was merely manual labor, the repetition of falling freight cars (with or without human sacrifices) had begun to pall, and he kept being given uncomfortable things to think about. First, that his idea of himself as hero might merely be self-aggrandizement; and second, that he didn’t love Ellen enough to jump off a cliff because of her. It was enough to bring anybody down.

  ELLEN’S ROAD said the sign on the way out. “Shit,” said Lew.

  57

  Young Mr. Balim had been made very uneasy by the falling men. He himself was a man who had never known firm ground beneath his feet, so these reminders of how easily he too could drop away and cease to exist, never to matter again, never having mattered in the first place, troubled him and gave him a nervous sensitivity to his own frailty, surrounded by dangers. He tramped back and forth at the level crossing where the access road humped over the track, trying in the physical movements to reassure himself of his own reality, but the thud of his feet sounded hollow in the night, his determined movements the empty gesture of a substance-less shadow.

  For who was he anyway but a half-solid ghost, with little more existence than the insects that whined and buzzed around him? He was a ghost of the British imperial era, which had brought both his grandfathers from India to work on this very railroad, leaving behind both the railroad and the men, like a half loaf of bread and a shopping list abandoned on the kitchen counter after the family has moved. Beyond that he was a ghost of Uganda; in this nation of his birth he was under a death sentence for the simple crime of having lived. And he was the ghost of his father’s dream of security and continuity; there was no security, and this age was the enemy of continuity. Every man stands on the freight-car roof. We fall and fall, our feet planted on the solid surface, and the only question is how long before we hit.

  Lights. It was fully dark now, and lights were suddenly winking at him through the trees from farther up the hill. At first he thought it was lanterns carried by people clambering their way through the undergrowth, but as they came closer he realized they were headlights. Some sort of vehicle was jouncing very slowly down the access road.

  Who? The headlights were yellow, as though the battery were poor, but it could still be police; or Army. Particularly considering those trucks Isaac had borrowed.

  As the yellow light touched him, Young Mr. Balim slid away from the level crossing into the tangle of trees and brush just downhill from the track. Nothing showed behind those slow-moving bouncing headlights. A faintly coughing engine could be indistinctly heard. Crouched down low, Young Mr. Balim watched and waited as the headlights reached the crossing, angled upward for the hump … and stopped.

  Young Mr. Balim waited, staring. The yellow lights gleamed dimly on the upper branches of trees and the engine continued its weak cough, but nothing at all happened. The vehicle refused to move.

  The wait was interminable. From feeling himself an almost incorporeal ghost, Young Mr. Balim now found himself too real by half; his crouched position was becoming distinctly uncomfortable, with shooting pains in his knees and calves, a growing ache in his neck, a heavy muscular cramp spreading across his back. When he could stand it no more, when he was certain ten minutes had gone by—ninety seconds had passed—he shifted position, but then immediately moved again, brush crackling around him.

  Why had his father permitted him to come along on this expedition? Mazar Balim was supposed to be the strong one, so much stronger and more self-assured than his son; why had he allowed Bathar to browbeat him into giving way? And what was Bathar’s own nonsense of derring-do, of wresting some wonderful new fantasy life from the jaws of danger? He had come here as though to an initiation, a long-delayed ritual of manhood, never thinking he might fail and fall and not have mattered. Those two men who had gone over the cliff; neither of them had known their stories would end like that when they left Kenya yesterday.

  He could wait no longer. He had to move, take the chance, go see for h
imself what was happening up there. Maybe after all it was nothing more than a couple using this abandoned road for a lover’s lane.

  Still, do couples on lovers’ lanes keep their headlights burning? With great caution Young Mr. Balim worked his way through the brush, flitted quickly across the track at a point ten feet east of the crossing, and paused again amid the hedges on the other side.

  From this angle, behind and to the left of the vehicle, he could see it silhouetted against the yellow light. It was an old small pickup truck, battered and dark. He couldn’t make out who was in the cab.

  Slowly, slowly, inching forward, he stalked the truck. The frail cough of the engine reassured him, suggesting there was no great strength here to contend against. In a last little nearly silent dash he reached the left rear corner of the truck and paused, his hand on the fender, feeling it vibrate from the wheezing engine.

  Faint light reflected back from the tree branches. In that illumination, as he was about to move forward along the side of the truck, Young Mr. Balim saw a person lying on his side in the open truck bed. Asleep? Curious, he leaned down closer, saw the black face and the white clerical collar, smelled the caked blood before seeing it all over the man’s head, recognized that he was looking at a corpse, heard a faint sound behind himself, spun round in terror, and saw the swinging tire iron for less than a second before it smashed into the side of his skull.

  58

  Chase tossed the tire iron away onto the ground, stepped over the fallen sentry, and went forward to switch off the truck’s engine and lights; they had finished their work. Then, while his eyes grew used to the dark, he went back to the sentry, searched him, and was both surprised and annoyed to find the man had no weapons.

  What sort of operation was Frank running here? An unarmed sentry was a real snag in Chase’s plans. He himself had been stripped of weapons back at the Rwanda border, and of course the minister, former owner of this truck, had not been carrying any guns. Chase’s primary purpose in luring this fellow forward had been to rearm himself at the sentry’s expense.

  All right; it wasn’t the end of the world. Chase looked up at the velvet-gray sky, down at the black undergrowth. His eyes had adjusted as much as they would. Leaving the truck, he stepped over the level crossing, moving slowly, his body still very stiff from his time as a captive.

  There were no more sentries posted. Chase moved down the old road in the dark, senses alert, reaching out with eyes and ears into the forest. He felt the change underfoot when he reached that part of the road which had just recently been mashed down by heavy trucks; reversing himself, he found the side road and moved slowly along it, hearing a confusion of faint noises ahead.

  He almost walked directly into the side of the engine shed, not seeing it under the roof of tree branches. Circling, he saw vague illumination ahead, and took a moment to figure out what it was.

  Of the coffee train, it appeared that only four freight cars were left, standing in a patient row on the old tracks like cows waiting to be milked. Or already being milked; a large Army truck was backed up against the side loading door of each. Kerosene lanterns in the cars gave illumination and tarpaulins thrown over the narrow space between freight-car roof and truck top guarded against that illumination’s being spotted from the air. Hollowly echoing sounds came out to Chase in the still night: feet tramping back and forth, mutters of conversation, thuds of coffee sacks being dropped into place.

  A weapon, Chase thought. I have to have a weapon.

  The truck cabs were empty. He searched them, but the glove compartments, the map racks, the underseat spaces were all devoid of guns. Frank will be armed, Chase told himself. I’d better have a gun in my hand when I meet him.

  A man jumped from one of the freight cars, feet thumping the ground. He walked a bit away from the trucks, then stopped to relieve himself. Chase waited till he was done, then came up behind him, gripped his head and neck between his forearms, and whispered in his ear in Swahili, “If you make a sound, I shall break your neck.”

  The man’s body tensed, but with fear rather than intended action. He froze there, his hands out as though he were falling forward, and Chase whispered, “Where is Frank Lanigan?”

  “Gone—” The man faltered, his voice scratchy and hoarse. “Gone to the lake.” He spoke with a soft Luo accent.

  “The lake. What about Brady?”

  “I don’t—Who?”

  Chase gave him a little squeeze, for being stupid. “The other white man!”

  “The lake!”

  “Quiet!”

  “Gone to—You hurt my neck.”

  “I can do worse,” Chase told him. “Both white men gone to the lake?” That didn’t seem sensible.

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s in charge?”

  “Mr. Otera.”

  Otera. Balim’s office manager. A picture came into Chase’s mind of Otera putting on the Army uniform in that Jinja attorney’s office. Not a difficult opponent. “Where is he?”

  “The farthest wagon.”

  “Who else is with him?”

  “People working.” The man sounded surprised at the question.

  “Bosses,” Chase explained, again squeezing the man’s neck. “What other bosses?”

  “None here. Young Mr. Balim up by the road.”

  So that had been Balim’s son up there, crashing around in the woods. Smiling, Chase said, “Thank you,” broke the man’s neck, and went over to the farthest freight car, where he stood in the darkness beside the truck and called, in imitation of that man’s Luo accent, “Mr. Otera!”

  He had to call the name twice before Otera appeared, pushing aside the hanging end of tarpaulin, squinting, unable to see much in the dark after the lantern light. “Yes?”

  “Something for you to see, Mr. Otera.”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, you must come see, sir.”

  Reluctantly, ungracefully, Otera clambered down out of the freight car and came forward. He was wearing the shirt and trousers of the Army uniform, but not the jacket. “What is it? I don’t see any—Oh!”

  Chase lunged forward, left hand closing around Otera’s neck, right hand grabbing his shirtfront and yanking him in close. “Not a sound!” he whispered, reverting back to English. “You’d be dead in one flick.” His sudden movement had fired up inside his body all those pains that had been so slowly subsiding, none of which showed on his face.

  Otera gaped at him, wide-eyed above Chase’s clenching hand. “Chase!” he whispered in blank astonishment.

  “Where’s your uniform? The jacket.”

  “It’s over—” Otera started, gesturing toward the engine shed, then too late tried to call the gesture back.

  “That’s right,” Chase said, smiling at him. Sure of his man, he switched his grip from throat to upper arm, and pulled Otera along toward the shed. “There was a nice Sam Browne belt with that uniform, and a nice holster, and a nice pistol.”

  “Chase—” Otera said, but then couldn’t seem to think of anything more to say, as he was propelled through the darkness.

  Amiably enough, Chase said, “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead by now. I’ve been through a lot today, and I’ll be more comfortable when I’m armed.”

  Otera, with a new worry, said, “Are they after you?”

  “Not here. Don’t worry,” Chase told him in utter sincerity, “I won’t spoil this operation. Not for anything.”

  The jacket and belt lay on the remaining mound of old rails, on the far side of the shed. Chase, to give warmth and support to his battered body, slipped the coat on, pleased that it was a bit snug. He cinched the belt tight, then snapped open the holster flap and slid the pistol out into his hand. Strength flowed from the cold metal. Otera’s herbivore eyes watched him in the dark. Holding the pistol casually at his side, Chase said, “Let’s go back.” At Otera’s sigh of long-held breath, Chase laughed. “I said I wouldn’t kill you.”

  As they walked back, Chase
said, “How much more is there to do?”

  “These are the last trucks.”

  “Good. We can ride down to the lake together.”

  There was a bit more light near the trucks, and in it Otera frowned at Chase in bewilderment and dislike. “If you’re in trouble,” he said, “if all you want is to come with us to Kenya, you didn’t have to attack me, and arm yourself, and all this business.”

  “We all have our methods, Watson,” Chase said. He made a shooing gesture with the hand holding the revolver. “Go along, go along.”

  Otera turned away, and Chase went to rest himself in the nearest truck cab. But the map light didn’t work, so he went on to the next, where the small narrow glow under the dashboard permitted him to study the weapon with which he’d armed himself.

  It was a good one, though old. An English semiautomatic revolver, a Webley-Fosbery chambered in .455 caliber, it was one of the few pistols ever made which used the recoil of the last shot to cock the hammer and rotate the cylinder for the next. It couldn’t be fired as rapidly as a full automatic, but it had a solid reliable heft to it.

  Holding the gun down under the map light, Chase broke open the cylinder and looked in. For a moment he just gazed in silence, then he laughed at the joke. There wasn’t a bullet in it.

  59

  Balim rode in the back of the Mercedes with the government man called Charles Obuong. The other one, Godfrey Magon, rode up front with the chauffeur; between them, out beyond the windshield, Balim could see if he wished the rural roads of Nyanza province, illuminated by the powerful white headlights of the Mercedes; what he could not see, unfortunately, was into the minds of Charles Obuong and Godfrey Magon.

  Their manner with him was unfailingly polite and friendly, though with the inevitable edge of power and mockery. And they had been quite open, freely repeating to him what they already knew of the smuggling, which was a lot. And even beyond what they knew, they also modestly claimed to have been of logistical help along the way. It was their office, they said, which had expedited the permissions and development-fund loans for the Port Victoria hotel. They had assisted Isaac in his purchase of false identity papers. They had even made lumber available when in the ordinary course of events he might still be waiting for the planks they’d used in making the rafts. They had in effect been Balim’s partners all along, and they didn’t even seem to mind it very much that their “investigator” had apparently been murdered by someone connected with Balim.