Donald Westlake - Kahawa

Lew said, “There’s an order I won’t have any trouble following. Nice to meet you.”

“And you. Both of you.”

Ellen tried to say something polite, but a yawn overtook her. Balim laughed, and when the yawn was finished, so did Ellen. She waved to him, unwilling to try to speak again, and allowed Lew to lead her back into the Land-Rover.

The five-minute drive was a blur. She had no real sense of her surroundings, and was aware only that they stopped in front of a small low house of tan stucco. Inside, she had a sense of hard surfaces and cheap furniture and primary colors. Frank, talking heartily, carried their flight bags in and showed them the bedroom and went away, slamming the front door. “No more,” Ellen said, and pulled off her clothing as she approached the bed, and lost consciousness as she was drawing back the sheet.

It was dark. Ellen came awake slowly, out of confused dreams and heavy sleep. She was perspiring; the sheets and pillowcase were wet. She turned in the too-soft bed, grunting, and felt the hard, angular body of Lew beside her, slick with sweat. She knew him wonderfully well, in darkness or in light. She ran her hand down his hot damp belly, felt the wet tangle of hair, felt his cock half-erect.

“Mp,” he said when she touched him, and moved in a way that said he wasn’t completely asleep. She grasped his cock and as it rose from slumber he reached awkwardly for her, his questing hand bumping into her nipple. He clutched her breast, and his foul-breathed mouth invaded hers. “Oh, God,” she tried to say, but it was muffled by his tongue.

Through the contortions she held on to his cock. She loved it, she filled her mouth with it and then she filled her cunt with it. They were so wet that, as they fucked, their stomachs made suction noises, poppings and fartings that eventually made Lew mutter, “Shit. Enough of this.” He grabbed her leg and turned her over without losing contact. Knees and shoulders and cheek on the bed, holding her breasts with both hands, she opened her mouth and gasped into the pillow as he pounded her from behind. Another orgasm. “Who’s counting,” she mumbled into the pillow, and ground her ass backward into his belly.

“What?”

“Shut up and fuck!”

“Oh, you smart cunt.” He slapped the right cheek of her ass, which did nothing for her but make her mad.

“Just fuck !” she yelled, and reached back to slap his thigh just as hard.

“Damn damn damn damndamndamn damn KEE-RIST !”

But then they couldn’t find tissues or towels or anything at all. Rolling around on the swampy bed in the humid night, his come tickling her legs, she said, “Where in God’s name are we?”

“Africa,” he said.

“Jesus Christ.” she said.

It was Sir Denis Lambsmith’s first visit to Kampala. He faced it with the same thrill of anticipatory horror with which at the age of six he would greet the arrival of the magician at a friend’s birthday party: Can he really do magic? Will he choose me to hold the hat, the birdcage, the scarlet scarf? Will something dreadful happen, at last, this time?

There was almost no passenger air traffic in and out of Uganda anymore, but Entebbe International Airport was maintained as though for the imminent arrival of thousands, perhaps millions, of tourists. Waiting areas and rest rooms were kept immaculately clean. The duty-free shop stood uselessly open; the stout girl on duty listlessly took the quiz in a two-month-old copy of the British Cosmopolitan . Next door the gift shop was also open, tended by an arthritic old man who slept with his cheek pressed against the cash register. Behind him, colonies of insects had taken up housekeeping in the stuffed lions and giraffes.

Mr. Onorga, the Uganda Coffee Commission man, met Sir Denis at immigration and led him out to a waiting chauffeur-driven black Mercedes. Riding in the backseat with Sir Denis, Onorga seemed glum, distracted, like a man with family worries. Conversation was limited to weather and scenery. Sir Denis, a tall white-haired man of sixty-one, with the stoop-shouldered quasi-humble stance of the British aristocrat, was bursting with questions about Idi Amin—Is he really as dreadful as they say? As imposing? As brutal? Will he choose me ?—but of course politesse forbade such curiosity, without at least some opening indication from the host that gossip was in order. But Mr. Onorga’s gloom blanketed all.

Daringly, Sir Denis did offer one opening himself, when Mr. Onorga asked, “How is Brazil?”

“Improving,” Sir Denis said. “We rather think the worst excesses may be over. Changes of government are trying times; still, life settles into its wonted way soon enough.”

Which was an opening Mr. Onorga could have driven an Army truck through, had he desired; but he merely nodded, gloomy in his satisfaction, and asked if Sir Denis had ever been to the United States.

“Several times,” Sir Denis said, irked, and looked out the car window at a poverty-stricken city: ragged people, boarded-up shop-fronts, shriveled-leg polio victims scuttling across the crumbling sidewalks on their hands and rumps. Among them, the few healthy and well-dressed people seemed to be written in italics. Many of these latter were dressed in the same odd style as the driver of their car: wide-leg trousers, flashy cheap shirts, shoes with built-up heels, very dark sunglasses. When one of these came along, the other pedestrians seemed to make a point of getting out of his way.

Much more beautiful was the Nile Mansions Hotel, a sprawling luxury establishment built on the same grounds as the International Conference Center. A short and skinny bellboy took the luggage, as Mr. Onorga conducted Sir Denis across the lobby to register.

Some electricity in the air, some awareness that everyone else’s awareness was directed to a certain spot, caused Sir Denis to look away to the side, toward a long, cool-looking cocktail lounge flanked by a bar. The dozen or so people in there were sitting very still, speaking fitfully to one another, as Mr. Onorga had spoken in the car. And at the far end of the lounge, at a table by himself, sat a massive man in an ill-fitting gray safari suit, who was gazing with heavy eyes toward the lobby. His hand was closed negligently around a glass, and as Sir Denis watched, he lifted the glass and drank. Immediately, the other customers in the lounge also drank, hurriedly, gratefully. The glasses returned to the tables, and the massive man’s eyes shifted, not seeming to focus on anything in particular.

It’s Idi Amin! Sir Denis blinked in astonishment and apprehension, while a most irrelevant memory surfaced in his brain. Back in the 1940s, during the war, he had been seconded for nearly two years to the U.S. Navy, in Washington, D.C., in connection with the transatlantic convoys running the U-boat blockade. His family had been with him, and one Christmastime he had taken his daughter, Anne, then three, to see Santa Claus at Garfinckel’s. That stout figure, all red and white, had been the center of attention on his throne at the end of the room, exuding a benign—and of course inaccurate—aura of power: the power to give, to answer prayers, to provide happiness. Here in Uganda, was this not the other side of the same coin, this heavy figure all black and gray?

Anne, Sir Denis remembered, had been afraid of Santa Claus, had cried and refused to approach him. She had had her Christmas presents, anyway.

Formalities at the registration desk were brief. And why not? He was, after all, Sir Denis Lambsmith of the International Coffee Board, here to complete negotiations for the sale and shipment of a very large portion of Uganda’s next coffee crop to the Brazilians. As such, he represented a strong—perhaps an overwhelming—figure of importance in the Ugandan economy. Reminding himself of this, trying to ignore the weight of those heavy eyes on his shoulder and arm, Sir Denis signed the registration card, accepted the three messages waiting for him, gravely shook hands with Mr. Onorga, as gravely thanked him for his courtesy and kindness, and followed the bellboy toward his room.