Kahawa Page 5

  The Land-Rover jounced forward. Ellen watched Frank’s shoulders and back moving in great effortful bunched thrusts, the way the man in the carnival wrestles with the alligator. They bounced and skidded away from the airport and out onto a narrow blacktop road cluttered with huge slow-moving trucks. Frank slalomed among them.

  Lew said, “Frank, tell me about Balim.”

  “Asian. Born and raised in Uganda, thrown out. Merchant. Probably rich, I don’t know. I work for him.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Twist arms, break heads, kick asses.”

  Charlie giggled.

  Lew said, “Balim isn’t political?”

  Frank laughed. “Balim thinks politics is a dirty word.”

  “Do you?”

  Frank grinned over his shoulder, then looked out at the road again. “I think it’s a funny word, Lew. Since when did you get political?”

  Lew jounced around in the backseat, gnawing his thumb knuckle, looking worried. “I’ve always been on somebody’s side,” he muttered, but not loudly enough for Frank to hear.

  Charlie turned, smiled beatifically at them both, and said, “Can you tell me why it is that politics makes strange bedfellows? Can you tell me what it is, ‘strange bedfellows’?”

  Surprised, Ellen said, “You speak very good English!”

  He beamed at her. “So do you,” he said.

  Mr. Balim said, “Did you like my plane?”

  “Very much.” Ellen was surprised at how quickly she was warming to this little round man.

  He had been waiting for them in front of what was apparently his place of business, a low long scruffy building of an oddly washed out blue, as though it had been here for a thousand years. Seeing him, Frank had yelled “There he is right there!” and made a violent U-turn in the teeth of oncoming buses and motorcycles. Charlie had chittered something happy-sounding, like a toucan, but when Frank skewed to a halt, Charlie had at once slithered out of sight, as though he were a stowaway.

  And the little round man with the round head, the large soft brown eyes, the hesitant smile, the delicate plump hands, had introduced himself, bowing from the waist. “Mazar Balim. So happy to make your acquaintance.”

  Now, introductions over, the plane mentioned and admired, Balim said, “You must both be very tired from your journey, though I must say you don’t look it. Frank, how do your friends look so fresh after such a trek?”

  “Fever,” Frank suggested.

  “Very possibly so. Go home,” he told them, smiling. “Rest. Eat. Sleep. Make love. Do not see me again until you are wasting away from boredom.”

  Lew said, “There’s an order I won’t have any trouble following. Nice to meet you.”

  “And you. Both of you.”

  Ellen tried to say something polite, but a yawn overtook her. Balim laughed, and when the yawn was finished, so did Ellen. She waved to him, unwilling to try to speak again, and allowed Lew to lead her back into the Land-Rover.

  The five-minute drive was a blur. She had no real sense of her surroundings, and was aware only that they stopped in front of a small low house of tan stucco. Inside, she had a sense of hard surfaces and cheap furniture and primary colors. Frank, talking heartily, carried their flight bags in and showed them the bedroom and went away, slamming the front door. “No more,” Ellen said, and pulled off her clothing as she approached the bed, and lost consciousness as she was drawing back the sheet.

  It was dark. Ellen came awake slowly, out of confused dreams and heavy sleep. She was perspiring; the sheets and pillowcase were wet. She turned in the too-soft bed, grunting, and felt the hard, angular body of Lew beside her, slick with sweat. She knew him wonderfully well, in darkness or in light. She ran her hand down his hot damp belly, felt the wet tangle of hair, felt his cock half-erect.

  “Mp,” he said when she touched him, and moved in a way that said he wasn’t completely asleep. She grasped his cock and as it rose from slumber he reached awkwardly for her, his questing hand bumping into her nipple. He clutched her breast, and his foul-breathed mouth invaded hers. “Oh, God,” she tried to say, but it was muffled by his tongue.

  Through the contortions she held on to his cock. She loved it, she filled her mouth with it and then she filled her cunt with it. They were so wet that, as they fucked, their stomachs made suction noises, poppings and fartings that eventually made Lew mutter, “Shit. Enough of this.” He grabbed her leg and turned her over without losing contact. Knees and shoulders and cheek on the bed, holding her breasts with both hands, she opened her mouth and gasped into the pillow as he pounded her from behind. Another orgasm. “Who’s counting,” she mumbled into the pillow, and ground her ass backward into his belly.

  “What?”

  “Shut up and fuck!”

  “Oh, you smart cunt.” He slapped the right cheek of her ass, which did nothing for her but make her mad.

  “Just fuck!” she yelled, and reached back to slap his thigh just as hard.

  “Damn damn damn damndamndamn damn KEE-RIST!”

  But then they couldn’t find tissues or towels or anything at all. Rolling around on the swampy bed in the humid night, his come tickling her legs, she said, “Where in God’s name are we?”

  “Africa,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  6

  It was Sir Denis Lambsmith’s first visit to Kampala. He faced it with the same thrill of anticipatory horror with which at the age of six he would greet the arrival of the magician at a friend’s birthday party: Can he really do magic? Will he choose me to hold the hat, the birdcage, the scarlet scarf? Will something dreadful happen, at last, this time?

  There was almost no passenger air traffic in and out of Uganda anymore, but Entebbe International Airport was maintained as though for the imminent arrival of thousands, perhaps millions, of tourists. Waiting areas and rest rooms were kept immaculately clean. The duty-free shop stood uselessly open; the stout girl on duty listlessly took the quiz in a two-month-old copy of the British Cosmopolitan. Next door the gift shop was also open, tended by an arthritic old man who slept with his cheek pressed against the cash register. Behind him, colonies of insects had taken up housekeeping in the stuffed lions and giraffes.

  Mr. Onorga, the Uganda Coffee Commission man, met Sir Denis at immigration and led him out to a waiting chauffeur-driven black Mercedes. Riding in the backseat with Sir Denis, Onorga seemed glum, distracted, like a man with family worries. Conversation was limited to weather and scenery. Sir Denis, a tall white-haired man of sixty-one, with the stoop-shouldered quasi-humble stance of the British aristocrat, was bursting with questions about Idi Amin—Is he really as dreadful as they say? As imposing? As brutal? Will he choose me?—but of course politesse forbade such curiosity, without at least some opening indication from the host that gossip was in order. But Mr. Onorga’s gloom blanketed all.

  Daringly, Sir Denis did offer one opening himself, when Mr. Onorga asked, “How is Brazil?”

  “Improving,” Sir Denis said. “We rather think the worst excesses may be over. Changes of government are trying times; still, life settles into its wonted way soon enough.”

  Which was an opening Mr. Onorga could have driven an Army truck through, had he desired; but he merely nodded, gloomy in his satisfaction, and asked if Sir Denis had ever been to the United States.

  “Several times,” Sir Denis said, irked, and looked out the car window at a poverty-stricken city: ragged people, boarded-up shop-fronts, shriveled-leg polio victims scuttling across the crumbling sidewalks on their hands and rumps. Among them, the few healthy and well-dressed people seemed to be written in italics. Many of these latter were dressed in the same odd style as the driver of their car: wide-leg trousers, flashy cheap shirts, shoes with built-up heels, very dark sunglasses. When one of these came along, the other pedestrians seemed to make a point of getting out of his way.

  Much more beautiful was the Nile Mansions Hotel, a sprawling luxury establishment built on th
e same grounds as the International Conference Center. A short and skinny bellboy took the luggage, as Mr. Onorga conducted Sir Denis across the lobby to register.

  Some electricity in the air, some awareness that everyone else’s awareness was directed to a certain spot, caused Sir Denis to look away to the side, toward a long, cool-looking cocktail lounge flanked by a bar. The dozen or so people in there were sitting very still, speaking fitfully to one another, as Mr. Onorga had spoken in the car. And at the far end of the lounge, at a table by himself, sat a massive man in an ill-fitting gray safari suit, who was gazing with heavy eyes toward the lobby. His hand was closed negligently around a glass, and as Sir Denis watched, he lifted the glass and drank. Immediately, the other customers in the lounge also drank, hurriedly, gratefully. The glasses returned to the tables, and the massive man’s eyes shifted, not seeming to focus on anything in particular.

  It’s Idi Amin! Sir Denis blinked in astonishment and apprehension, while a most irrelevant memory surfaced in his brain. Back in the 1940s, during the war, he had been seconded for nearly two years to the U.S. Navy, in Washington, D.C., in connection with the transatlantic convoys running the U-boat blockade. His family had been with him, and one Christmastime he had taken his daughter, Anne, then three, to see Santa Claus at Garfinckel’s. That stout figure, all red and white, had been the center of attention on his throne at the end of the room, exuding a benign—and of course inaccurate—aura of power: the power to give, to answer prayers, to provide happiness. Here in Uganda, was this not the other side of the same coin, this heavy figure all black and gray?

  Anne, Sir Denis remembered, had been afraid of Santa Claus, had cried and refused to approach him. She had had her Christmas presents, anyway.

  Formalities at the registration desk were brief. And why not? He was, after all, Sir Denis Lambsmith of the International Coffee Board, here to complete negotiations for the sale and shipment of a very large portion of Uganda’s next coffee crop to the Brazilians. As such, he represented a strong—perhaps an overwhelming—figure of importance in the Ugandan economy. Reminding himself of this, trying to ignore the weight of those heavy eyes on his shoulder and arm, Sir Denis signed the registration card, accepted the three messages waiting for him, gravely shook hands with Mr. Onorga, as gravely thanked him for his courtesy and kindness, and followed the bellboy toward his room.

  The three messages were from: Captain Baron Chase, signing himself “Deputy Chief of Protocol,” welcoming Sir Denis to Uganda and inviting him to a reception with President for Life Idi Amin Dada in the president’s suite, 202, at five this afternoon; from his daughter, Anne, now thirty-eight and married to a banker in the City, asking him, should he return through London on his way back to Brazil, to call her and to bring her an African woven rush bag; and from Carlo Velhez, of the Brazilian Coffee Institute, saying he was in Room 417.

  Having unpacked and showered and made shorthand notations about the day thus far in his diary—seventeen volumes of this dull stuffy material in crabbed private code were now stored in London and Sussex and São Paulo—Sir Denis phoned Velhez and invited him to the room for a pre-reception conference.

  Whisky and safe water were already in the room. Sir Denis downed a short neat whisky, and had the glass washed and dried and back on the tray atop the dresser before the small economical rapping at the door introduced the small economical person of Carlo Velhez, a tiny dapper man incongruously kitted out with a great flowering bandit’s moustache. In Brazil, Sir Denis and Velhez were matter-of-fact with one another, not close socially or personally, indifferent to one another’s presence or absence; here, in the usual manner of travelers meeting far from home, they were nearly brothers, reacting with honest pleasure to the encounter.

  “Come in, come in.”

  “You’re looking well.”

  “Pleasant flight?”

  “Odd place, this.”

  They then sat down with light whisky-and-waters to discuss the purpose of their being here, speaking together in Portuguese, which infuriated the State Research Bureau men in their basement listening post.

  “There is some question of money,” Velhez said.

  “But the price was determined last month.”

  Velhez nodded, manicured fingers toying with his alarming moustache. “Nevertheless,” he said, “the price continues to rise in the commodity markets.”

  Outrage at human inconstancy had long since faded in Sir Denis to pragmatic weariness; one dealt with the human race not as it should be but as it was. Still, he pointed out the obvious: “The agreed-on price is the agreed-on price. If the market went down, would the Ugandans expect to receive less?”

  “They have been given that argument,” Velhez said drily. “But in fact I think this is only a negotiating step.”

  Sir Denis observed the pale liquid in the bottom of his glass. “Of course. They don’t want more money, they want something else. Some change in the shipping arrangements?”

  “No. We—that is, the consortium—are still to provide eight planes to transship the coffee to the steamers at Djibouti.”

  Velhez smiled sadly beneath the moustache. “What they want is a larger percentage in advance.”

  “How much?”

  “One third.”

  Looking and feeling astonished, Sir Denis said, “Twelve million dollars? In advance?”

  “I have it from Baron Chase himself,” Velhez said. “That’s what they’ll want, and they won’t back down from it. In fact, they’d prefer the suggestion to come from us.”

  “Baron Chase. Captain Baron Chase.” Sir Denis crossed the room to pick up his messages from the bedside table. “Deputy Chief of Protocol,” he read, and looked at Velhez. “Who is this chap?”

  “Canadian. Working—”

  “A white man?”

  The Velhez moustache quivered in amusement. “Exactly so. He may have taken up Ugandan citizenship.”

  “Captain,” Sir Denis repeated. “Captain of what?”

  “Apparently, Amin wanted him to call himself General,” Velhez explained, “but Chase has a finer sense of the ridiculous than Amin, and they compromised at Captain.”

  “What does he do? Is he important?”

  Velhez shrugged. “With one-man rule, it’s hard to say who is or is not important. But Amin has two or three of these whites to advise him, to smooth the way for him internationally, to act for him where his own Nubians would make a botch of things. Chase is ubiquitous.”

  “I must have a word with him, then,” Sir Denis said. “One third in advance. What if, after all, the rains come inopportunely and ruin the crop? What if this government falls? Governments have been known to fall.”

  “So has rain,” Velhez agreed. “So has frost, as we both well know.”

  Sir Denis frowned. “Has Bogotá been informed?” He was referring to the Bogotá Group, the OPEC of coffee, a combine of eight Western Hemisphere producers: Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala. They had approved the original deal.

  But Velhez merely shrugged, saying, “It doesn’t concern them, so long as the final price doesn’t change.”

  “Well, I don’t believe,” Sir Denis said slowly, “that Emil Grossbarger will stand for it.”

  At that, Velhez looked doubly worried, as well he might. Although the actual coffee sale was being conducted between governments—sold by the official Uganda Coffee Commission and bought by the quasi-governmental Brazilian Coffee Institute—there was an inevitable middleman, in this case a venture capital group from London and Zurich headed by a Swiss named Emil Grossbarger. The shipping of the coffee, its delivery to the Brazilians’ customers, and the collection and disbursement of moneys, would be in the charge of this private consortium, which had both the capital and the clout in the international financial community to guarantee delivery and honesty. If the Grossbarger group were to bow out now, if Brazil had to start all over and negotiate for coffee elsewhere to fulfill its commi
tments, the price would certainly be higher, the availability of sufficient product would be very much in doubt, and Brazil might well find itself going into the next coffee season with its new crop already committed to past debts. “Don’t you think,” Velhez asked, unable to hide his anxiety, “you could talk to Grossbarger? Persuade him?”

  “I’m not certain it would be honorable to make the attempt,” Sir Denis said somewhat primly. “Grossbarger came to the ICB because we are known to be neutral in such matters.”

  The ICB, the International Coffee Board, was a London-based organization supported by the coffee industry and endorsed by the governments of both the producer and the consumer nations, with the task of dispassionately overseeing the international coffee trade. Sir Denis, an expert with the ICB for the last seventeen years, a man who moved massive shipments of coffee around the world in a great endless obscure game of Go, and whose special relationship was with the Bogotá Group and particularly the Brazilian Coffee Institute, had at Emil Grossbarger’s personal request handled the negotiations among the various parties to the current sale. So far he had done the work in London or São Paulo, but now that the pact was about to be signed he had come here to Kampala for the final formalities.

  Where an immediate snag had appeared. The agreement, as Sir Denis very well remembered, was for an initial payment of one tenth, or approximately three and a half million dollars U.S., of which the Brazilians and the Grossbarger group would each put up half. Now, at the last minute, this down payment was to be very nearly quadrupled. After pausing to give himself and Velhez another pair of drinks—and allow Velhez to recapture his composure—Sir Denis said, “Emil Grossbarger is simply not a man to toy with.”

  “I’m sure,” Velhez said, “something can be done. There’s certainly goodwill on all sides.”

  “One third?”

  “Uganda, I understand, has foreign-exchange problems.” Velhez tried to shrug away Uganda’s political mess. “The closing of borders and so on. One can understand their position.”