Kahawa Read online

  It had taken nearly two hours on the truck-choked main road to reach the border at Busia. Most of the other traffic had turned off before then, however, and he was the only car visible in either direction when he reached the border, which was officially closed. But the closure primarily affected goods shipments and the nationals of the two countries involved; white tourists with money to spend were not turned away.

  Once in Uganda, with the road almost completely to himself, he had taken barely more than an hour to reach Iganga, and eleven kilometers beyond. The afternoon sun was very high and hot in the sky ahead. The fields and forests all around had the brown, attenuated, thinned-out look that all of Africa gets just before the long rains.

  Twelve kilometers; this was where Isaac had said the old road would be. Slowing to a crawl, Lew studied the verge beside him. Being in a former British colony, he was driving on the left, in a car with the steering wheel on the right, so he had to look across the shiny hood at the brown grass, the faded weeds, the drooping brush and trees.

  Yes? A spot, wide enough for a truck to pass through, where there were no trees. Lew stopped and looked out the left-side window. The cleared swath was plain, (though heavily overgrown. It had the vaguely cathedral look of all untended paths dimmed by overarching trees. This was the place.

  Before turning, Lew glanced in the rearview mirror: nothing. He looked ahead and saw the glint of sunlight on chrome far away. He shifted back into Park, prepared to wait for the car to pass. Taking a map out from the under-dash compartment to explain why he’d stopped, he opened it and studied the lines and the names.

  The car approached swiftly, then more slowly, and Lew had just registered the fact that it was not one car but two—identical new and shiny black Toyotas—when they both abruptly swerved toward him across the road.

  He thought they meant to crash him, and ducked instinctively away, but the one Toyota shuddered to a stop directly in front while the other passed close on his right and angled to a stop, filling the rearview mirror.

  “Oh, I am a goddam fool,” Lew said aloud, and dropped the map. He could drive neither forward nor back. Even if he managed the tight turn into the old abandoned road, it would lead nowhere, and the Honda Civic wouldn’t take him far along it. And there was no point in getting out to run.

  Men were piling out of both Toyotas. They wore extremely dark sunglasses, garish shirts, bell-bottom slacks, platform shoes. Spreading out, they approached the car.

  10

  Ellen liked Mazar Balim more and more. Unlike his son, unlike Frank Lanigan, unlike most of the men she’d met, he wasn’t interested in going to bed with her. But at the same time he clearly did like her, and she was happy to respond to that.

  The meeting went this way: Frank said, “Ellen, come along,” and Lew said, “Where?” and Frank said, “To talk with her boss,” and Ellen knew that Lew would sooner or later drive her into a serious reaction against that sort of thing. Seeing Lew avoid her eyes, she knew he knew it, too. And she went into the next office with Frank.

  Mazar Balim rose from behind his cluttered desk, in his small, cluttered, air-conditioned office. “Ah, Miss Gillespie,” he said. “Do sit in that chair. It receives the benefit of the cool air without the draft.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and sat in the minimal but comfortable green vinyl-covered chair directly in front of the desk, aware of Frank’s dropping backward as though he’d been shot into the battered armchair against the wall.

  Balim said, “It is a wonderful thing to me that I have been born in an age where a woman may be beautiful without shame and at the same time useful without shame. You have flown many planes in many strange parts of the world.”

  “But never before in Africa,” she said, still smiling at the baroque compliment.

  Balim waved his hand. “The air is the same. And now that you are here, let me admit to you boldly that you have been summoned somewhat under false pretenses.”

  The smile curdled on Ellen’s lips. She had feared this from the beginning, that the so-called job would turn out to be merely a placebo to satisfy Lew’s demands, that Lew was the only one they really wanted or needed here. And yet the plane did exist, and there had been a previous pilot whom she’d replaced.

  “The long rains,” Balim said, “will begin any day now. They tend to be very heavy and almost continuous. Most of the time for the next two months it will not be practical for you to fly my plane.”

  “I see.”

  “So we must work you very hard from now till the rains begin,” Balim said, with his sweet smile. “And then again we shall work you very hard when the rains come to an end.”

  “I’ve flown in bad weather,” Ellen pointed out. “Alaska isn’t sunny all the time.”

  Balim smiled. “Still,” he said, “I think you will find our long rains impressive, and you shall fly in them only when absolutely necessary. Now, as to where you shall fly, and for what purpose, let me assure you that I am a much more important and powerful man than I seem.” This was said with such a self-deprecatory grin that Ellen didn’t feel the need for a polite contradiction. Balim went on. “My merchant interests extend across Kenya so far as Mombasa, and also into Tanzania, and from time to time require my personal attention. Frequently I must go to Nairobi or Dar es Salaam or Tanga or even Lindi to deal with customs officials or traders or perhaps customers. Also Frank often must deal with problems at a great remove from here. Finally, there are at times small and delicate shipments which require special handling.”

  “He means ivory,” Frank said, grinning, in the periphery of Ellen’s vision.

  “I was about to mention ivory,” Balim said, looking faintly nettled. “There is no longer any overt trade in ivory in Kenya,” he explained. “Concerns of a humanitarian and conservationist nature have brought an end to the slaughter of elephants, which we all can only applaud.”

  “Mama Ngina,” Frank said, laughing, as though he were deliberately teasing his employer.

  “It is true,” Balim said (Ellen couldn’t tell now if he was annoyed or amused), “that the sale of art objects previously made of ivory from elephants slaughtered in the unenlightened days of yesteryear has also been banned, and that whatever ivory the government can find has been impounded, and that rumors have drawn a connection between Mama Ngina and the warehouses in which these confiscated treasures are stored.”

  Ellen said, “Who is Mama Ngina?”

  “Forgive me,” Balim said. “I forget that my part of the world is a mere unimportant corner. Mama Ngina is the first lady of Kenya. The wife of Jomo Kenyatta.”

  Ellen said, “It’s illegal to own ivory in Kenya?”

  “It is illegal to own it for a commercial purpose,” Balim told her. “Or to sell it.”

  “You want me to deliver ivory for you?”

  “Oh, my dear lady, no!” Balim seemed truly shocked at the idea. “I would never offer to place you in such jeopardy. And certainly not at the salary I am paying you.”

  Ellen laughed despite herself. “I was thinking the same thing.” She was to be paid seven hundred dollars a week plus expenses; six hundred of it to be deposited directly into her bank in San Francisco.

  “You are a pilot,” Balim insisted. “You are not responsible for what your passengers may be carrying on their persons. Nor, if your passengers experience legal difficulty, will that difficulty extend to yourself.”

  “You’re sure of that.”

  “I guarantee it.”

  “It’s all right, Ellen,” Frank said, as though he and she were old comrades and she would know she could trust his word. “This whole ivory scam stinks so much the government wants it kept just as quiet as we do. If I’m stopped, and I’ve got a little ivory statue in my ditty bag, all they’ll do is confiscate it and tell me don’t do it again.”

  “With a Kenyan national,” Balim said drily, “there might be a bit more difficulty. But not with whites.”

  “Besides,” Frank said, “there isn�
�t that much ivory to trade anymore.”

  “Unfortunately,” Balim agreed. “In fact, the goods you will transport are much more likely to be mundane matters indeed. Medicine, for instance, or industrial diamonds, or merely great thick clumps of documents.”

  “I’m used to all of those,” Ellen said. “When do I start?”

  Frank said, “Today.”

  “Good. Where am I going?”

  “Today’s a little different,” Frank said. “Today we’ll just take a joyride. Do a little sightseeing.”

  “Where?”

  “Uganda,” Frank said.

  “I’ll just stop by my place for the cameras,” Frank said. He had thrown a couple of filthy blankets over the filthy passenger seat so Ellen could sit there, saying, “If Charlie were an American Indian, his name would be Running Sore.”

  Ellen laughed, but said nothing, and looked with envy at the little yellow car that Frank had pointed out as Lew’s transportation for today.

  He started the engine, and she watched the exertions with which he forced the Land-Rover to do his bidding. Did all things for him require that much effort?

  Frank’s place was a neat stucco cottage on the fringe of town. A low openwork concrete wall bordered the property and was nearly obscured by a profusion of flowers. “Beautiful,” Ellen said.

  “It’s a great country for flowers,” Frank agreed.

  Getting out of the Land-Rover, Ellen walked along the front wall, looking at the colors. “That’s a delphinium. Is that jasmine?” She pointed to a thorny bush with hard-looking leaves and starfish-shaped white flowers.

  Frank had walked along behind her. “No,” he said. “But it smells like it. In Swahili it’s mtanda-mboo. You can make a pretty good jelly out of the fruit. See that one?” He was pointing at a tall knobby shrub with clusters of dry-looking orangy-yellow flowers. “In Swahili it’s utupa. A very tricky plant. You can get a tough poison out of the leaves, and the antidote for it out of the roots.”

  “Really?”

  “Honest injun. The Masai use little doses of the poison for a laxative. The Luo dip the flowers in water—that makes it holy water—and sprinkle it around the house to keep off the evil spirits. Come on in; we just sprinkled this place yesterday.”

  Whitewashed rocks neatly flanked the packed-earth walk to the front door. “Bibi!” Frank yelled, opening the stained wood door. “Eddah!”

  The entrance led directly into a wide shallow front room, filled with cool-looking sunlight. Ellen looked around at bare white plaster walls, stone floor, heavy rustic furniture, everything extremely neat and tidy, two vases at opposite ends of the room filled with a mixture of the flowers from out front.

  A short giggling black girl in her twenties entered from the rear, swathed in the native style in bright-colored cloth. Her hair was done up in more cloth in a tall gaudy knob on her head, looking like a model of the Guggenheim Museum covered with graffiti. “Eddah gone,” she told Frank, nodding and giggling as though it were a great satisfactory joke. “Gone store.”

  “Bibi, Ellen,” Frank said offhandedly, and told Bibi, “Make sandwiches. Beer. Picnic.”

  The idea delighted her. Her teeth were large and crooked and very white; her eyes were filled with laughter; she kept nodding and nodding her whole body as though each moment of life increased her ecstasy. “Okay yes,” she said. “Double-quick.”

  “Good sandwiches, now,” Frank warned her, and held out his big hand in a threat to spank. “Good thick sandwiches.”

  “Yes, yes,” she assured him, laughing at the idea that she could do anything less than totally please him. Patting the air, laughing, throwing some of her laughter and quick sparkling glances in Ellen’s direction, she hurried from the room.

  “Come take a look at the place,” Frank said.

  This of course was the seduction scene. Knowing there wouldn’t be calm between them until Frank had been allowed to do his mating dance, Ellen said, “Sure,” and went with him to see the place.

  It was some sort of adolescent clubhouse dream: the counselor’s hut in the Boy Scout camp, plus pinups. The entire house was neat and sparkling, which was clearly not Frank’s style, but within the tidiness he had made his presence felt.

  The kitchen, in which merry Bibi sawed away at bread with a serrated knife, was modern and tended heavily to brushed chrome. The dishware was all orange plastic, and one cabinet shelf was filled with jars of dry roasted peanuts. A small white plastic radio quietly played reggae-sounding music, as though for its own enjoyment. Visible through an aluminum screen door was a small kitchen garden, and beyond it, a wire enclosure containing chickens.

  Frank opened the refrigerator, which was of course full of beer, and took out two bottles, but Ellen said, “Too early for me; I just got up. Besides, I’m supposed to fly. You don’t want me to drink at the wrong time, remember?”

  “You win,” he said, grinning, meaning that round but not the fight. “Seven-Up or Coke?”

  “Coke.”

  The hall, which had a few attractive unframed batik pieces on the walls, led one way to the maid’s quarters and the other to Frank’s bedroom, which was dominated by a king-size bed covered with a scarlet spread, on which a medium-size brownish dog of no particular breed lolled at his content. “Goddamit, George,” Frank yelled, “get the fuck off that bed!”

  George, midway between boredom and cowed sullenness, slowly rose, yawned, stepped down to the floor, and slunk from the room. Ellen said, “Washington?”

  “Patton.”

  “Of course,” she said, laughing at him. So the second round was his.

  There were Playmate centerfolds on the white walls, of course, plus a poster of two ducks screwing in midair over the caption “Fly United.” The female demurely smiled, while the male showed a devilish leer. That must be the way they want to see themselves, she thought. And the way they want to see us. “Which way do your windows face?”

  Windows were in two walls, lightly curtained. Pointing, Frank said, “East and north.”

  “So you get the morning sun.”

  “But not too much.”

  Rush rugs partly covered the gleaming floor. There was no closet, but in a large old armoire hung his bush jackets and trousers, all laundered to a fare-thee-well. The small bathroom, seen through a partly open door, was less attractive than the rest but had been so thickly painted with white enamel and so determinedly scrubbed so often that it too managed a look of Spartan simplicity and dignity. An air conditioner, not turned on, was built into the wall below one of the north-facing windows. “Do you use that much?”

  “Only when I work up a sweat.”

  Wrong technique. That was for girls you met in bars. “The house seems nice and cool without it,” she said, nicely and coolly.

  “It’s the thick walls. Are you Lew’s exclusive property?”

  She laughed, in pleasure and surprise. “Very good!” she said, and actually clapped her hands together when she turned to congratulate him. “That puts me on the defensive!”

  He found it impossible to hide his annoyance; maybe he wasn’t even trying. “I just want to know how to behave,” he said. “If Lew owns you, that’s it.”

  Something happened now that wasn’t his fault, though it was hard not to hold him responsible, anyway. As so often in a situation like this, without any overt threat from the man, she was reminded of her comparative physical frailty. If he wanted, right now, he could knock her out, he could strangle her, he in fact and in truth could do whatever he wanted with her. She would struggle, of course, but eventually he would win.

  Sometime ago she had learned various self-defense measures, just because of the recurrent moments like this, but she doubted they would be much of a surprise to somebody like Frank. So she stood in this room saying no to him, and she would go on saying no to him, but in a far corner of her brain she was afraid of him; she knew it was ultimately his choice whether or not he took her no for an answer.

  Neithe
r her expression nor her intentions changed, but in the back of her mind the fear lived, sending out little tendrils through her thoughts like the red lines from a gangrenous wound. “You know who owns me, Frank,” she said, trying neither to show the fear nor to blame him for it. “I own me, the way you own this house. And if I ever decide to give you a tour, I’ll let you know.”

  Frank laughed, visibly relaxing. Had she been in danger? “That’s okay, then,” he said. “I’ll be around. And I’ll remind you every once in a while.”

  “I’m sure you will,” she said.

  She did have a beer after all, with the sandwiches, in the plane, flying over Lake Victoria. The sandwiches, on thick slices of darkish white bread, were like housed salads, the basic ham or chicken engulfed in pepper slices, pieces of cheese, lettuce, tomato, very thin radish slices, bits of herbs. It was messy eating, juice and tomato shreds falling into the paper napkins on their laps, the plane caring for itself in the easy updrafts over the lake. The White Cap beer was pleasantly sharp, dangerously gassy, the perfect accompaniment.

  While they ate, Frank told her odd bits from his reading of African history. “The Baganda,” he said, “they’re the main tribe in Uganda, they were the most civilized blacks in Africa before the white men came. They had a king, called the kabaka, and a court, and a whole civilized social structure. But they were already crazy.”

  “In what way?”

  “When the first Englishman arrived—his name was Speke—he met with a kabaka called Mutesa, and gave him gifts, the way the white men always did. Give you some cloth and beads and shit, and then take your country.”