Kahawa Page 3

  Now Isaac was Mazar Balim’s inside man, just as Frank was his outside man. While Frank dealt with bribery and thievery and occasional rough stuff from thugs who saw profit in intimidating an Asian merchant, Isaac talked to bureaucrats from the government and the railway and the airline, he conferred with the representatives of American and European companies offering goods for sale, he dealt with taxes and tariffs and import restrictions. Set a bureaucrat to catch a bureaucrat; old Balim knew what he was doing, every time.

  The phone conversation never actually ended; as with most such dealings, it merely faded away into vague suggestions and possibilities. As usual, Isaac outwaited his opponent, and there was just a glint of combative triumph in his eye when at last he cradled the receiver and said, “You’re dusty.”

  “I stink,” Frank said accurately, and gestured at the door. “Who’s in there with the boss?”

  “No one. Mr. Balim isn’t here.”

  “Not here?” Frank got restlessly to his feet, hitching his belt around his sweat-soaked waist. “Where is he?”

  “Flew to Nairobi this morning. I expect him—”

  The door opened and an employee stuck his black head in and said something fast to Isaac, who spoke equally quickly back. The employee disappeared, and Isaac said to Frank, “He’s coming in now.”

  “Is that what he said?” It rankled with Frank that after a hundred years of hanging out with Englishmen these natives were still determined to talk Swahili. It wasn’t as though Swahili were their native tongue; they all had tribal languages, hundreds of them throughout eastern and central Africa. Swahili wasn’t even a proper language at all, when you stopped to think about it. The very word Swahili came from the Arabic word sawahil, meaning “coast.” When the Arabs had founded their trading cities at Zanzibar and Mombasa and elsewhere on the east African coast in the seventh century, and intermarried with the several Bantu tribes they’d found living there, this bastard tongue had emerged, using Bantu syntax and a combination of tribal and Arabic vocabularies. The Arab slave caravans had carried this African Yiddish a thousand miles westward across the continent in their bloody man-harvests, so that even today when a Nandi, for instance, wanted to converse with an Acholi, it was always in that damn Swahili.

  Frank had been kicking around Africa for nearly twenty years, ever since Katanga, and he had made it a point of honor to resist learning Swahili. He knew enough to take himself successfully through a parade ground or a battle—”More ammunition here,” “Keep your fucking head down,” “Whose foot is that?”—but no more. Let the Bantus learn damn English, like civilized people.

  Mazar Balim came in, looking rumpled but not upset. “The road from the airport continues to deteriorate,” he said. “Soon we shall not be able to ship light bulbs.”

  “Or beer,” said Isaac.

  Frank, unable to repress his curiosity, said, “How was Nairobi?”

  “Very excited about itself. Isaac, anything of import?”

  “Nothing that can’t wait.”

  “Good. Frank, come in. You look very dusty; have you been home?”

  “Not yet.”

  Frank followed Balim into a small, crowded but comfortable room in which the windows were all blocked by filing cabinets, except the one tumorous with an air conditioner, which Balim turned on at once. “Our friend in Eldoret is our friend again, I presume,” he said, edging through the clutter to sit in the old wooden swivel chair behind the desk. The two scarves thrown over the chair were so threadbare they had virtually no color left.

  Shutting the office door, dropping like an abandoned novel into the brown vinyl chair facing the desk, Frank said, “All fixed,” and went on to give an account of the fixing that was totally unfair to Charlie. At the end of which, Balim nodded and said, “That’s good. I knew you and Charlie would handle it.”

  “Mm,” Frank said.

  “There is another matter,” Balim said. “What do you think of coffee smuggling out of Uganda?”

  “Profitable.” The 7Up in his hair, drying in the air conditioner’s draft, was making his head itch. “Dangerous,” he went on. “Not a long-term business.”

  “Agreed.” Balim smiled as though a bright pupil had once again showed his promise. “But as an extremely profitable one-time operation, what then?”

  “Depends on the circumstances. You’ve got something, huh?”

  “Depends on the circumstances,” Balim said. “I would like you to study the situation.”

  “Sure.”

  Balim touched papers on his desk, not as though he were looking for anything in particular but more as though to reassure himself as to his identity and strength. “This task,” he said, “will undoubtedly consume very much of your time.”

  “For how long?”

  “Three months, perhaps longer. Would you know someone you could hire, on a temporary basis, to take over some of your duties?”

  “A merc?”

  “A white man, yes.” Obviously enjoying the irony of the phrase. Balim added heavily, “An old African hand.”

  “There aren’t that many wars going on right now,” Frank said. “I’ll call around, come up with somebody.”

  “Somebody you trust.”

  “Come on,” Frank said, grinning. “Think again.”

  “I do beg your pardon.” Balim performed his own kind of grin. “I meant, of course, someone you know how much you can trust.”

  “Can do.”

  As Frank got to his feet, stretching out the tightnesses in his joints, scratching the 7Up crystals on his head, Balim said, “You might be interested in who has brought us this opportunity.”

  “Someone I know?”

  “An old friend.” Then Balim corrected himself, raising one finger. “No, I’m in error again. An old acquaintance.”

  “Who?”

  “Baron Chase.”

  Frank stopped scratching, the itchy 7Up forgotten. “That son of a bitch? You want to deal with Baron Chase?”

  “That’s why,” Balim said, “I’ll be wanting your undivided attention in the days ahead.”

  “You’ll need more than me,” Frank told him. “You’ll need a special angel from God. Chase would melt his grandmother down for the silver in her hair.”

  “I do believe you,” Balim said, shrugging, “but I am driven by my poor merchant’s greed. He has offered us a railroad train, a freight train, a complete train filled with very valuable coffee. I want that coffee, and so I must deal with Baron Chase. But only with you, Frank, always at my side.” Balim smiled, waggling a finger. “Which is why it is so important,” he said, “that you find just the right person to be your assistant. Choose carefully, Frank.”

  4

  Out at Valdez International Airport, Lew Brady sat in a five-year-old Chevrolet Impala and felt the heater’s dry air destroy the interior of his nose while he watched Ellen Gillespie taxi the Cherokee to its pad. Although it was nearly April, Lew still thought of the climate as wintry. “I’m freezing to death here,” he muttered. “These Alaskans are crazy.”

  It didn’t help when Ellen came out of the plane in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved lavender blouse. She came smiling and waving across the stubby new grass, a tall and slender woman with short dark-blond hair and a long angular face that combined beauty with efficiency in a way that left Lew helpless with desire.

  Ellen was twenty-eight, daughter of a commercial pilot who’d taught her to fly when she was still in her teens. She was licensed for multiengine jets, but she didn’t want to spend years apprenticing as navigator and engineer, and her youth and sex limited her to jobs for which she was overqualified: commuter services in Florida, skywriting in California, even dragging a sunburn-treatment message through the blue summer haze over Fire Island.

  She’d been on that latter stint when they’d met. Lew, after six and a half years on the African continent, involved in wars from Chad in the north to Angola in the south, Ethiopia in the east to Biafra in the west, had suddenly run out
of Dark Continent conflicts and had accepted a job offer half the world away, in the Caribbean, training anti-insurgency forces on one of the smaller islands there.

  The most sensible travel route had been via Amsterdam and New York, and it was in New York that he’d been intercepted by a message: his employer government had just been overthrown, before he could arrive and train anybody to defend it.

  Out of work again, Lew had gotten in touch with a pilot he’d known in Africa, a man now working for a commuter airline between New York City and the Hamptons, operating out of Flushing Airport in Queens. At that airport, Lew had first seen this beautiful woman pilot, back from her day’s sunburn chores, and he had been immediately hooked.

  Her manner at the start was cool but friendly. Gradually she became less cool, and then more friendly, and finally Lew moved in with her for the rest of that summer. And in the fall, when Ellen was offered the job here in Alaska, they’d agreed he would come along.

  “Hello, lover,” she said now as she slid into the car and kissed his lips; comfortably, not passionately. Then, as he put the car in gear, she switched off the heater and opened her window. He’d known she would do that. “Spring,” she said, with marked satisfaction.

  He steered in a long curve toward the gate in the chain link fence. “Nice flight?”

  “So-so.” She looked out her open window, elbow resting on the sill, short nails tap-tapping the plastic of the door. She was often like this after flying, a little nervous, vibrant, edgy, hyperactive. He had learned with disappointment that it was a bad time sexually; she was distracted by the sky. She said, “The same trees get boring, eventually.”

  “Nothing to deliver?” Her primary job was to carry papers, blueprints, instructions up to the field offices where the pipeline was being laid; sometimes there was a reply, and they’d detour past the construction company’s Valdez office to drop it off.

  But not today. “No, we can go home.”

  The guard at the airport was an old friend by now; he waved at Lew, who waved back.

  Ellen said, “How’s the class?”

  “Improving, finally.”

  “I thought so. You’re starting a nice shiner. What else did you do today?”

  “Made some calls. Talked to some people.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Dim possibilities. Not really.”

  They were passing a construction site; yellow earthmovers crawled on a churned-up corner lot behind a sign featuring a future bank. Ellen looked at it, then said, “Remember what you said when we came up here?”

  He did. “‘There must be plenty of work,’” he quoted, “‘for an able-bodied man in Alaska.’”

  “You’re making yourself old, Lew,” she told him. “Sitting around, waiting. Playing with truck drivers. You aren’t a house pet.”

  “I could operate a bulldozer,” he said, voice flat, not as though he were making a serious suggestion. “I could tend bar. Repossess automobiles. Drive a truck for the pipeline.”

  “Lew,” she said gently, “Alaska isn’t going to war.”

  “Somebody is.”

  The phone was ringing when they parked beside the trailer they called home. “Jesus!” Lew cried, and ran. He pounded into the bedroom, to their only phone, shedding clothes, already certain, and when Ellen came in a minute later he was grinning so broadly he looked as though he meant to eat the phone. “Frank,” he was saying, as a believer who sees a vision might say, “It’s the Mother of God.”

  Ellen sat on the bed and Lew paced, jamming the receiver against his ear and mouth, holding the cradle in his other hand. “God, yes. Frank,” he said. He barely understood Frank’s words, didn’t at all understand what job he was being offered, and couldn’t have cared less. Frank Lanigan—good old Frank Lanigan, from Angola and Portuguese Guinea and Ethiopia—Frank Lanigan was offering him a job, a piece of work. In Africa.

  Then he noticed Ellen sitting there, and he interrupted Frank to say, “One thing. There’s one thing.”

  “What’s that?” The voice came thousands of miles to sound clear and uninflected in Lew’s ear.

  “I’ve sort of doubled up with somebody else,” Lew said. “A pilot. You got work for both of us?”

  “A pilot? Lew, I don’t think so. This isn’t the kind of job—”

  “She travels with me,” Lew insisted. “I’m sorry, Frank, but that’s the way it is.” And he waved the phone cradle at Ellen, to wipe away her troubled expression, to reassure her it would be all right.

  “Lew, I could ask some—Did you say she?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh. That makes it different. She gotta be a pilot?”

  Exultation made Lew savage. “Hold it,” he said, and cupped the mouthpiece while saying to Ellen, “It doesn’t have to be pilot, does it? It could be any job for an able-bodied woman, right?”

  She laughed, calling him a bastard. He grinned at the phone and said, “Sorry, Frank. It has to be pilot.”

  “We’ll work something out,” Frank said.

  They spent a few more minutes discussing the transportation details, while Lew grinned without interruption at Ellen seated on the bed. Then he said good-bye and slapped together the halves of the phone. “Don’t get up,” he said.

  5

  Ellen’s first sight of Frank Lanigan, in the main waiting room at Wilson Airport, in Nairobi, reminded her just why it was she found Lew Brady so precious. Lanigan was like most of the men Ellen had met in these outlandish global crannies: hairy, sweaty, an overgrown boy, a blunt roughneck with an inflated opinion of his own courage and prowess. Lew, living in the same world, was stronger and braver than any of them, and he didn’t know it. How could she help but treasure him?

  Proudly Lew made the introductions, as though he’d invented each of them especially for the pleasure of the other. Frank Lanigan took Ellen’s hand in his hammy fist and leaned toward her with a connoisseur’s smile, saying, “Lew always could pick ‘em.”

  Already I’m a them, Ellen thought. “Nice to meet you,” she said, with her boring-party smile. Cold bitch, said Frank Lanigan’s eyes, behind the welcoming heartiness. That’s right, her eyes said back as she withdrew her hand from his, and her smile could have iced an entire bucket of daiquiris.

  Frank looked away from it at the two battered flight bags beside them on the floor, saying, “This all your luggage?”

  “We travel light,” Lew told him.

  “A woman who travels light,” Frank said. “Will wonders never cease?”

  Oh, you bastard, Ellen thought. She watched with some amusement as Frank tried to figure out which bag was hers—so he could carry it, of course, the eager overgrown Boy Scout approach—then grabbed one at random. The right one, as it happened. Lew picked up his own bag and Frank said, “This way,” adding to Ellen as they started off, “We’re putting you right to work.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  Ellen had been so doubtful about this whole deal that she hadn’t actually quit her job in Alaska, but had merely asked for and received two weeks off without pay. If the African adventure came out badly, she could always turn right around and go back. She still rated the normal courtesy airline discount for flights and hotels, so she wasn’t risking much in coming all this way with only the vaguest promise of a job once she got here. But now perhaps the job was real?

  “You’re our pilot,” Frank told her over his shoulder as he led the way toward the exit, shoving aside the dozens of raggedy-dressed black men offering taxis. “No taxi!” he bellowed, and pushed through the door into the blinding sunlight of Africa.

  Lew had been only one of the reasons Ellen had agreed to this iffy voyage. Africa was the other. She had worked in both North and South America as well as in Southeast Asia, she had seen Japan and parts of Europe as a tourist, but the entire African continent was new to her. She was fascinated by the thought of it, a fascination only slightly dampened by the cholera and yellow-fever and typhus shots they’d had to take bef
ore departure, and the supply of malaria pills they were supposed to take—one every Tuesday—not only during their entire stay in Africa but for two full months thereafter. It was beginning to seem that Africa was not only as exotic but also as hospitable to the human race as Mercury or Jupiter.

  Her first ground-level view was disappointing. Flat dry scruffy fields under a huge baking sun. The taxis, small and rusty but with gleaming windows, were clustered helter-skelter near the terminal exit, drivers and hangers-on sitting on the fenders and hoods. The airport buildings, low and hot-looking, reminded her of smaller islands in the Caribbean.

  “This way,” Frank shouted. Swinging Ellen’s flight bag at an importuning cabman, he marched off around the side of the building.

  Ellen glanced at Lew, to see him smiling and beaming and gawking around as though he thought he was home. He loves this awful place, she thought, and her heart sank.

  There was a brief business of showing documents at a gate in a chain link fence, and then they started off across the scrubby ground toward a double row of tied-down planes to one side of the main east-west runway.

  Ellen walked close beside Lew, saying to him too softly for Frank to hear, “Does he expect me to fly something?”

  “Beats me,” Lew said. “Maybe so.”

  In the last sixty hours, they had flown by commercial airliner from Alaska to Seattle, and from there to New York, where they’d had a three-hour layover before the overnight Alitalia flight to Rome. In Rome they’d taken a hotel room near the airport for the day, followed by the final overnight flight to Nairobi, arriving at eight in the morning. They had crossed thirteen time zones and had spent twenty-three hours in the air. And now was Ellen expected to fly a plane she’d never operated before over land she’d never seen before in a country and a continent and with an air-traffic system that were all new to her?