Donald Westlake - Kahawa

“No.”

“Because I’m going to need your help. I can see you’re bright and quick-witted, so even though you’ve been through a lot, it would help if you could avoid hysteria.”

She was considerably calmer already. “I thought you were the hysteric,” she said.

“That’s just my outgoing personality. Now, what you do, you lie here and talk to me. Can you do deep voices?”

Sounding like a girl foghorn, she said, “Like this?”

“Use it sparingly. See, I’m going out there and deal with those fellows, and in the meantime you stay here and hold a conversation.”

“So they’ll think you’re still here. I get it.”

“Right. See you soon.”

He started away, but she said, “Wait a minute! What if they come here ?”

“Holler.”

“Oh. Sure.”

Lew crawled down over the edge of the green onto the shaggier grass of the fairway. Another shot sounded from out there, followed by an angry yell from another direction. Lew wriggled rapidly along the ground on elbows and belly and knees, while behind him the girl said, “If you don’t mind a question, how long ago did you escape from the mental home?” Foghorn voice: “Just today.” Own voice: “And is it true you’ve been running President Amin’s foreign policy all these years?” Foghorn voice: “No, he does that himself.”

The men up ahead were arguing. Without knowing the language, Lew could still guess that one faction wanted to rush the sixteenth green right now, while the other faction wanted to wait until dawn, or possibly send for reinforcements, or whatever.

They were undisciplined and poorly trained. They kept jumping up and moving around, shouting to one another, silhouetting themselves against the running lights of their own car in the background. Lew crawled around their right flank, came up behind his first choice, took his knife out of its sheath in his boot, waited till the man finished yelling a sentence about something or other, and then put him away. A search revealed two handguns but no car keys.

On his way to number two, Lew came across the fellow he’d hit at the beginning, who was just sitting up, rubbing his head, and thinking about taking part. Lew dispatched him and crawled on.

The next man was even more active than the first, probably more nervous. In the distant blackness the girl continued her inane conversation. Lew approached his man, knife in right hand and pistol in left. The fellow turned, saw him, and at once attacked, shrieking and swinging his pistol barrel at Lew’s head.

Lew stepped inside the swing, drove the knife up and across, and stepped out of the way to let the man fall. Then he went on to the last one, who was calling questions, getting no answers, and becoming too nervous.

Far too nervous. Before Lew could reach him, he made a dash for the car. Discarding the knife, Lew dropped to prone position on the fairway, arms stretched out in front of himself, left hand palm up on the stubby grass, pistol butt cradled in that palm, right hand holding the grip, finger squeezing back gently on the trigger as he sighted on those Toyota lights. Sooner or later, his man would cross them.

He did. Lew fired twice, and the man dropped.

He was tough to find in the dark, but it was worth the search, since he was the one with the keys. Pocketing them, putting the pistol away in his hip pocket and the wiped-clean knife back into his boot, Lew permitted the girl’s voice to lead him back to the sixteenth green. As he neared her, he said, “It’s okay, we’re alone now.”

She gasped, clutching her throat, then made out who it was and said, “They’re gone ? They ran away?”

“They’re dead.”

“Thank you,” she said. She was suddenly fierce. “Thank you thank you thank you. I hope you made them hurt a lot .”

Worried, he knelt beside her, touching her shoulder, feeling her vibrate like an overstrained machine. “Take it easy,” he said. “They’re gone now. It’s over.”

“They killed the man I was going to marry.”

“I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

She folded herself against him, becoming less tense. Was she going to cry? No. “I can’t tell you,” she said, breath warm through his shirt against his chest. “I’m back from the dead, from the worse-than-dead. They were taking me to Jinja Barracks.”

“Through green sixteen?”

“They wanted me for themselves first. They wanted me while I was still fresh.”

“Oh. Yes, I suppose so.”

She lifted her head, and when her cheek brushed his jaw he was surprised to feel dampness. So there had been a tear—two at the most. This was no Amarda. “You saved me,” she whispered.

“Triple A is here to help.”

“Don’t joke,” she murmured, her lips moving lightly against his.

Not again. “Miss—”

“Patricia,” she said and kissed him, and he couldn’t not hold her, he had to be aware how alive she was, how good she felt.

This is impossible, he thought. This is ridiculous. I’m on my way back to Ellen, there’s dead bodies around here like lawn statues, this can’t be happening.

But it was. After earthquakes people fall into one another’s arms; after ship sinkings, disastrous fires, pitched battles, the survivors reach for one another; after the dragon is slain, the damsel rewards the knight; after the danger, life surges.

She lowered her head to his shoulder. “I know it’s awful,” she whispered, then looked up again, half erotic and half defiant. “I can’t help it. Terrible things happened, I don’t know how I can feel this way, but I do. I was in Hell, there was no hope, and now I’m back, and I need something warm and friendly inside me.”

“I’m Lew.” he said.

“You understand, Mr. Chase,” said the smarter one, Obuong, “we can make no commitment now. There will still have to be a very close investigation.”

Chase understood a lot more than that. “I welcome an investigation,” he said, smiling his self-confidence. “All I hope for is the opportunity to be of service, to prove my worth to the government and people of Kenya.”

They stood in a close triumvirate beside the Mercedes, Chase and Charles Obuong and Godfrey Magon. Along the shore four rafts were now moored, their eighty feet of width using up all the available coastline space. The fifth and sixth rafts were even now being lashed to the lakeward edges of the first and second by a squad of soldiers. The remaining soldiers continued to sprawl on the ground, accompanied by a growing number of Balim’s bewildered workmen, who didn’t yet know if they were under arrest. Frank had been given permission to go off in a truck to the general store to make his important phone call, and Balim himself paced nervously back and forth in front of his unfinished hotel, gazing out at the lake, even though he knew his son wasn’t out there.

As for Chase, he had snatched—he was even now snatching—victory from the jaws of defeat. The most incredible day of his life this had been, ranging all over southern Uganda and now to Kenya, twice captured and in presumably hopeless circumstances, twice surviving to land on his feet. His Mercedes was gone, with the wealth hidden in its door panels. The Angel had failed in its mission about as thoroughly as it was possible to fail. Chase had been bound, beaten, pissed on, insulted, robbed, and betrayed; and yet at the end he would finish on top.

And why not? How could these tame bureaucrats resist a man who’d spent his life playing such minor officials as though they were toy drums? He spoke to them with assurance, insinuatingly, letting them know he shared with them the bureaucrat’s outlook and language. Also, he was a modestly famous man in East Africa; he had accompanied Amin here and there as a high-level official, he had been photographed with popes and presidents and prime ministers. Past troubles in another land had no importance here. It was true that Obuong and Magon were seeing him now in an unfortunate state, but his name and manner and background simply had to override his dirty face and torn clothes. They were minor civil servants, and he was the sort to whom they had learned in infancy to bend the knee; how could they hold back against him?