Donald Westlake - Kahawa

Patricia, crammed into the backseat of the Toyota between two of her captors, slowly rose through the warm comfortable gelatin layers of shock toward the knife-edge pain of reality. Reluctantly she drifted up to that spinning, hopeless, fast-moving world in which she no longer wanted to struggle to stay alive.

But the habit of life, the habit of struggle, was too ingrained. Despite herself, the external world’s signals were still being received; she became aware that they were not on their way to the State Research Bureau but were traveling east instead on Jinja Road. Why was that? She didn’t want to ask the question, she didn’t want to have to think, but her mind insisted, it kept turning the problem over, and even offered a theoretical solution: Whoever did this doesn’t want me where I can reach my friends. They’re taking me to Jinja Barracks.

A vision of men came unbidden into her mind, a room filled with men all smiling at her in a horrible way. They cared nothing about her wit, her elegance; they coveted her beauty only to mangle and destroy it. In the vision they moved closer.

The future was unbearable, but so was the past. Memory plucked at her, the memory of Denis falling dead, taking away with him into that nothingness the brightest and happiest future she had ever known. Leaving her with this instead: abasement, degradation, horror, and at long last death.

The men in the car were talking about her, laughing and telling one another what the soldiers at Jinja Barracks would do to her. Of course she had the strength to hate, but what good was that? There would be no revenge, no escape. She was now nothing but a trinket for boys to play with and break. Let me die, she asked herself, pleading with that active brain to stop its fussing, turn itself off, rescue her the only way that was left.

Could I try to escape, so they’d shoot and kill me?

The man on her right roughly stroked her thigh. “We ought to take some of this ourselves,” he said. “Before they mess it up at Jinja.”

The driver laughed, agreeing. “She won’t look so good tomorrow.”

“Stop somewhere,” the man on her right said, gripping her leg.

“When we’re out of the city,” the driver said.

Let me die. Please.

They did open the coffin. Lew hadn’t believed they would, but they did. They took one look at him, and one whiff of him, and slammed the lid so hard it bounced. He heard them jabbering away out there at Bishop Kibudu, and then came the solid thunk of the hearse’s side door being slammed. Lew breathed a sigh of relief, forgetting about the cheese, and then had to hold his breath till the nausea became less acute.

It had been too nice a dinner to throw up, particularly while flat on one’s back in a coffin at a police checkpoint on the Nile. Lew swallowed, and held his breath again, and counted slowly in his mind. When I get to five hundred, he promised himself, I’ll surrender to the police.

The dinner had been at Bishop Kibudu’s insistence. He simply wouldn’t permit Lew to cross his path like this without a celebration. Father Njuguna was sent out into the lanes and byways of Bugembe, returning with a couple-dozen parishioners, evenly divided between men and women, and many of them carrying something for the feast. Chicken three different ways, two sorts of stew, a rice and vegetable dish that seemed both Oriental and wonderful, other vegetables, fruits, even some local cheese.

Cheese. The same sort with which he now shared this stuffy box, but several years younger.

The celebration had taken place in the church basement, near Lew’s coffin. A lot of beer had been brought along, but he drank sparingly of that. The beer he’d downed all day at the depot had mostly worn off by now, which was just as well.

All in all, it was a very nice celebration, even if rather hurried. Hymns were sung, other rescues and deliverances from Ugandan officialdom were recounted, and one of the men present gave a progress report on the new church, which was not actually a church at all but a small concrete-block storehouse behind a furniture factory. Idi Amin’s religious persecutions had reached the level where it was dangerous to attend Christian services, so this church here, of which Bishop Kibudu was so proud, would remain at least for now a symbolic empty shell; within the month the bishop and his congregation would have transferred to their new secret quarters at the furniture factory. “There are many secret churches now,” one of the few English-speaking parishioners explained to Lew. “It is the only way, in Uganda, we can keep in touch with God.”

After the meal and the singing, Lew was fitted for his coffin. His legs and torso were wrapped around in a white sheet, and then three of the men lifted him up and laid him ever so gently on the pink quilting; which turned out to be a lot thinner than it looked and which was tacked onto extremely hard and uncomfortable wood. (The customary occupant, of course, wouldn’t be expected to complain.)

Four or five of the women then set about painting his face and hands, using lipsticks and soot from the kerosene lanterns and leftover sauce from one of the chicken dishes and various other things he didn’t want described too clearly. They all had a wonderful time with the project, laughing and telling each other jokes in Swahili, clapping their hands at particularly grotesque accomplishments, and generally having great fun at his expense.

Somebody offered to find a mirror so Lew could see the transformation for himself, but he said no. He could see what his hands looked like, which was precisely like the hands in the final painting of Dorian Gray in that old movie, and that was enough for him. “I’ll have to live with this face the rest of my life,” he told them. “I don’t want too many scary memories associated with it.”

At the end, the bishop gave Lew two items: a two-foot-long stick, for propping up the coffin lid so he could get air on the journey, and a small lumpy package wrapped in aluminum foil. “That’s the cheese,” the bishop said, handing it to him as though it were radioactive. “Don’t open it before we get there.” A horridness seemed to hover around the little package, a tiny but virulent little demon, perhaps the assistant devil in charge of all the world’s tooth decay. Lew put it down gently on the quilt beside his left hip, propped the lid open with the stick, folded his hands, and was carried in his coffin up the stairs from the basement and out to the waiting hearse, a battered old vehicle of the same vintage as his pickup, and lacking glass in its back window.

Hushed good-byes were combined with hushed giggles, and the last he saw of Bishop Kibudu’s flock, the men were waving and the women were blowing kisses and they were all laughing. The bishop drove, Father Njuguna presumably followed in the pickup—in what strange ways it had gone from minister to minister—and soon they had left Bugembe behind.

The partition between the driver’s compartment and the business space contained a sliding panel, which the bishop left open, but there seemed very little to say beyond Lew’s expressions of gratitude and the bishop’s assurances that it was nothing at all. “You have a wonderful congregation,” Lew said.

“Magnificent people. They keep me going.”

Lew suspected it was the other way around, but he didn’t say so.

The little foil-wrapped package was making its presence felt; or smelt. The bottom of the bottommost cistern in Calcutta; an elephant graveyard on a hot day; the interior of a freezer after a three-week power failure; those were some of the images that came into Lew’s mind as the hints and tendrils came into his nose, and the damn thing wasn’t even open yet.