Donald Westlake - Kahawa

“Nothing serious,” Frank told him. “Listen, I just got here, I’m kind of confused. Okay if I talk to my boss privately a minute?”

One of them started to frown, but the other one smiled and said, “But of course. You’d be Mr. Lanigan? Take all the time you need, Mr. Lanigan.”

While the government men went back over to the Mercedes, talking quietly together, and the second raft bunked quietly ashore beside the first, Frank led Balim upslope and off to one side, saying, “Fill me in. What’s going on here?”

“The Kenyan government knew what we were doing,” Balim told him. “They could have stopped us, but they let it happen for their own reasons.”

“They don’t like Amin, either.”

“That would be one of the reasons, I suppose.” Balim glanced away toward the lake, clearly still distracted by thoughts of his son; but then he called himself back, saying, “There’s also money. Less for us, some for those fellows and their friends.”

“Very cute,” Frank said. “We do all the heavy work, they get all the gravy.”

“The very definition of a government,” Balim suggested. “Who were those people attacking you out there?”

“More hanky-panky from Chase. He set us up to be hijacked.”

“I should never have done business with that man,” Balim said. “And please don’t say ‘I told you so.’”

“I’m biting my tongue.”

Balim frowned. “But what’s he doing now?”

Frank turned to look over at the Mercedes, where Chase, looking like the beachcomber in a Maugham story, was in confidential conversation with the two government men, both of whom seemed quite interested. Frank said, “Selling some widows and orphans, I suppose.”

Quietly Balim murmured, “Frank. If Bathar does not come back, would you do me a great service? Would you kill that Baron Chase?”

“My pleasure,” Frank said. “I don’t know why I never did it before.”

There were no telephones in the transient aircrews’ quarters at Entebbe. When the word came just before midnight that there was a phone call for her in the lobby, Ellen was seated on her bed reading an Agatha Christie, and was not yet far enough into it to realize she’d read it before. She frowned at the knock on the door, calling out, “What is it?”

“Telephone, missus.” It was the night floorman, who insisted for some reason on calling Ellen “missus.”

Telephone? Unless it was somebody from Coast Global to say they were washing the whole operation—which was not a bad idea—Ellen couldn’t think who might call her here. “Be right out,” she answered, reluctantly put down the paperback, and slipped into her shoes.

The coffee train, of course, had not arrived. The official story was that the train had broken down the other side of Jinja, which was even possibly the truth, but Ellen in her secret smiling heart knew they’d pulled it off. Lew and Frank and all of them, they’d really done it; they’d slipped into Uganda, knocked off that blessed train, and skinned back out again with all that coffee. More power to them. Tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever she finally got out of Uganda, she might make a phone call of her own, a nice circumspect call of congratulations on a job well done.

In the meantime, her own job wasn’t getting done at all. There were confusions about payment, there were conflicting orders as to whether or not the other coffee that actually had arrived via truck from west-central Uganda should be loaded onto the planes, and nobody seemed to know who was in charge or what was supposed to happen. Three of the planes had been loaded, not including Ellen’s, and two of them had taken off, the pilot of one saying to Ellen before departure, “If they won’t pay us, we’ll sell their coffee ourselves.” Anarchy was becoming the rule of the day. Perhaps the Ugandans had also figured that out, because the third full plane was barred from taking off, and the other five members of the fleet continued to stand empty.

The phones were across from the check-in desk, in small booths with windowed doors. “Number three,” the night clerk said, and Ellen went into booth number three, picked up the receiver, and said, “Hello?”

The first voice she heard belonged to a male operator, who wanted to know if she was absolutely and for certain no-fooling Ellen Gillespie. Once she’d convinced him she was, there followed a silence so long she was about to give up and return to Agatha Christie, when all at once Frank’s voice came roaring into her ear: “—from a hole in the ground!”

“Frank?” She believed it, but she didn’t believe it. “Frank, is that you?”

“Ellen? By Christ, have I got through at last?”

She thought, He’s going to say something awful about Lew. “Frank? What’s going on?”

“Lemme give you the message quick,” he said, “before these assholes fuck up again. An old pal of yours from Alaska was just in town, looking for you.”

That made no sense, no sense at all. “Who?”

“Fella named Val, uh, dammit, Val—”

Then she got it. “Deez?”

“Dietz! That’s it, Val Dietz.”

“What did old Val have to say for himself?” Ellen asked, wondering why Lew would use such a roundabout way to get in touch with her. Did he think she was mad at him or something?

“He’s gone on to Uganda now,” Frank said, being as casual as a fanfare of trumpets.

“Uganda? He’s here ?”

“Right. He says he hopes to get to Entebbe sometime in the next twenty-four hours, maybe he can buy you a drink.”

“I’d—” She gripped the receiver with both hands, turning her back on the glass door. “I’d be delighted. I hope he shows up.”

“Oh, he’s a reliable fellow,” Frank said. “Nice to talk with you, Ellen.”

“You, too, Frank.”

She hung up, but stayed in the booth half a minute until she had her emotions and her facial expressions under control. The coffee had been stolen. Frank was apparently okay. Lew was still in Uganda. He was trying to make his way here. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, and took a deep breath, and went out of the booth to the lobby, where she saw the night clerk avidly watching something going on outside.

The view out the glass front doors was across an empty parking lot toward the main terminal building. Signs just before the parking lot pointed toward the botanical garden and zoo down on the lakeshore. In the parking lot, under a floodlight on a tall pole, four black men were wrestling with a white man.

Lew! she thought, but as she stepped closer to the lobby doors she recognized the white man as the middle-aged American pilot named Mike. He ran Uganda Skytours; he had brought her here just the other day. Yes, and he’d brought Lew back to Kisumu that time.

And now they were beating him very severely, those four garishly dressed men. Ellen turned to see if the night clerk were phoning the police, but he had turned away and was busily filing a lot of small cards in a metal drawer. She faced front again, to see two black Toyotas pull up to the struggling man, and realized she was watching the secret police make an arrest. The men, with Mike, all piled into the two cars and were driven rapidly away.

Ellen went over to the desk. “You saw that,” she said.

“Oh, you don’t want to see things in Uganda,” he told her, not looking up from his filing. “No, no, nothing to see around here.”

Ellen shook her head. “But… why did they do it? He isn’t anything bad, he’s just a pilot.”

He sneaked her a quick look. “You know him?”

“He flew me here.”

The night clerk studied his filing. “Many young pilots back,” he said, as though he weren’t talking to her at all. “Air Force pilots, come home, thrown out of America.” Slamming the little file drawer in a satisfied manner, he nodded and said, “Uganda Skytours. New owner for that plane tomorrow. Good night.” And he went through into the inner office, shutting the door behind himself.