Donald Westlake - Kahawa

“This is Jinja,” the bishop said. “Not much longer now.”

“I’m set.” Though he wasn’t, really; it suddenly occurred to him that the winding sheet effectively separated him from the pistol under his shirt. Had that been deliberate on the bishop’s part? Well, if things went wrong up ahead, a pistol wouldn’t help much anyway.

“Bridge ahead,” the bishop announced. “Open the package now, and close your lid.”

“Right.”

Lew opened the package, and his nostrils slammed shut. His hair curled, his lungs became corrugated, his tongue died, his teeth shriveled and went back up into his gums. The skin under his eyes turned to leather. His ears fell off.

Close the lid? With himself in here with that ? Turning his head away, hoping in vain for fresh air, Lew gulped in a full breath, tucked the reeking package in against his left leg under a fold of the winding sheet, removed the propping stick and slid it under his right leg, closed his eyes like a proper dead person, and lowered the lid.

Yug.

Then, after an eternity, they opened the lid, which gave him at least a memory of fresh air, but with great alacrity they slammed it shut again, and down inside there Lew began counting. At five hundred he would turn himself in… .

Two forty-seven… two forty-eight… The hearse started slowly to move, but Lew continued to count, and had reached two sixty-one when the bishop’s voice came faintly through the lid: “All right, now.”

“Nggaaaaaahhh!” Lew flung back the lid, sat up, grabbed the little package, and hurled it through the glassless rear window.

Laughing, the bishop said, “If any pedestrian saw you sit up like that, he must have fainted.”

“The cheese’ll bring him around,” Lew said unsympathetically.

Farewells were said in the darkness behind a closed general store in Njery, the first little town on the west side of the Nile, less than two miles from the bridge. Fortunately, it seemed that the winding cloth had absorbed most of the cheese odor; unfortunately, it was the only thing he could use to wipe the death mask from his face. “I explained you were a plague victim,” the bishop said, while Lew cleaned himself up. “And that we’d had to wait two weeks for official permission to bury you.”

Father Njuguna, standing to one side, smiling, hands clasped before him, said, “The life of an adventurer must be a very interesting one.”

“I don’t know,” Lew said. “Not if traveling with that dead cheese was a high point.” Then he shook hands with both men, thanked them again for their help, and asked them to repeat his thanks to their parishioners. The bishop said, “May God bring us together again, under less exciting circumstances.”

“Amen.” Lew held the bishop’s hand in both of his. “I’d say ‘God bless you,’ but why would He take my word for it? Besides, it’s clear He already has. May Uganda get healthy enough to deserve you. Good-bye.”

On the outskirts of Kampala, a golf course lay beside the road on the right. Lew, driving properly in the left lane, the time well after midnight, the road very sparsely dotted with other traffic and completely free of pedestrians, glanced across at the golf course, the smooth curling fairways, the triangular flags limp on their poles at the greens, the swimming pool-shaped sand traps, and it surprised him to realize that of course there must be people in Kampala who used that golf course, who came out in the sunlight, well fed, well dressed, blessed with leisure time and money, and spent a pleasant afternoon knocking the little white ball around the course. In any society, no matter how repressive, how terrible, how awful the things done, there are always those people who remain untouched, who live their comfortable easy lives in the middle of horror and death, as though absolutely nothing untoward is going on.

Lew was startled from his reverie by an astonishing sight in his headlights: across the way, a black Toyota was stopped at the verge, headlights off but running lights on. Several men—three or four men—were wrestling with a slender attractive well-dressed girl; all were African. Seeing Lew’s lights, they grabbed the girl up bodily and ran away with her, out onto the golf course.

It wasn’t his business. He couldn’t even be sure who were the good guys and who the bad. He had troubles enough of his own. He yanked the pickup across the road, trying to find those running figures in his dim headlights, failed, and finally slammed to a stop in front of their car.

A Toyota. License plate starting with UVS. In his lights the men had been garishly dressed. They and their car were exactly like the men and the car when he’d been arrested.

Lew slapped off the pickup’s lights, jumped out onto the ground, unlimbered the pistol from under his shirt, and trotted off into the darkness.

It was easy to follow them; the girl was screaming bloody murder. The rolling land in this blackness was a little tricky underfoot, but he didn’t have a lot of fighting girl to contend with and could make better time than they could.

Had they heard him coming, or could they see him against the dim light from the roadway? One of them was suddenly standing in front of him, looking very severe, absolutely secure in his power and authority, barking something in Swahili that was probably along the lines of mind-your-own-business.

Hardly slackening stride, Lew lifted his gun hand in a fascist salute. The man stared, following the pistol upward, and Lew kicked him in the crotch, then gun-butted him on the back of the head as he doubled over. One down.

They had stopped up ahead, on one of the greens. Lew trotted forward; the girl screamed; there came the sound of repeated slapping. “Let her go!” he yelled, and fired a shot in the air.

Astonishment. Silence. Even the girl was silent, but when he came closer he could see her alone on the green near the flag, on her knees; struggling groggily to rise, she only fell over.

Lew reached her, went down on one knee, and said, “Miss? Do you speak English?”

“I don’t speak anything anymore,” she answered, gasping, face down on the cropped grass, voice bitter.

“I’ve got wheels over there. Can you—”

A shot rang out. Lew dropped flat beside her. “They don’t give up easy,” he said.

“Get away from here,” she told him. Her face, when she turned toward him, was beautiful, but ravaged by strain. “Don’t buy trouble, don’t—”

“Hush,” he told her. “Let me listen.”

“They’ll kill you. They’ll kill you right here.”

“Hush!”

She hushed. He lifted his head to listen, looking left and right. Just beside them, the flag lazily moving in a slight breeze read 16 . Looking at it, he laughed out loud.

A pair of shots were fired, apparently at the sound of his laughter. The girl stared at him as though he were crazy. “That’s what I’ve been needing,” he explained, gesturing at the flag.

She shook her head. Apparently she didn’t know whether she was more afraid of the Research Bureau men or of her rescuer. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“The flag. All through this deal something’s been missing, and that’s it. Now I know what I’m fighting for. Green sixteen.”

She worked hard at being cool, but her voice trembled. “Mister,” she said, “terrible things have happened to me tonight. Don’t make fun.”

Out there in the darkness, voices shouted to one another. “I’m sorry,” Lew said. “I’ve been under a certain amount of pressure myself. Now, those boys may attack. Or they may just try to stay between us and the road. On the other hand, I want to get behind them so I can finish them off, because their vehicle is a lot better than mine. Do you know why I’m telling you this?”