Donald Westlake - Kahawa

She gave a little sigh and shook her head, as though in long-suffering irritation. “Oh, I suppose not,” she said. “You get in too much trouble when I’m not around. Besides, I’d like to see what kind of knight you’ll be, following that flag.”

Lew smiled, reaching out to touch her shoulder. “I’ll be good,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

Idi Amin, unfortunately, is real. So are or were his cronies (Major Farouk Minawa, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi) and his victims (Mrs. Dora Bloch, Archbishop Janani Luwum).

Africa is real, sort of. Uganda is real. The railroad, the town of Jinja, the State Research Bureau building, all the stage sets are real.

The 1977 failure of the Brazilian coffee crop and the resultant rise in worldwide coffee prices are real. The long-established practice of smuggling coffee out of Uganda, which reached some kind of manic peak in 1977, is real.

So much for reality.

The specific coffee-smuggling operation described in this novel—though similar events did take place—is an invention. The characters connected with that operation, every last one of them, are fictional, without specific real-world counterparts.

Idi Amin slept, and dreamed. He dreamed that he rode on a white cloud over Lake Victoria, and the lake was steaming. All the lake had turned into coffee, hot steaming coffee, and bobbing on that lake of coffee were the severed heads of all his enemies. Hundreds of heads, thousands, millions of heads floating and nodding on that great lake of coffee, extending to the horizon in every direction, steam rising up past the dead nostrils and the eyes held open with staples.

It was a good dream, very pleasant and comforting. In his dream, on the cloud, sailing above them all, Idi Amin smiled.

Copyright © 1981, 1982 by Mantra Productions

Introduction Copyright © 1995 by Donald E. Westlake