Donald Westlake - Kahawa

“Clerks. Accountants. Drivers. Warehousemen.”

“Frank Lanigan.”

Balim stopped, frowning, gazing past Chase toward the narrow open window. Street noises came faintly. Finally he said, “Frank Lanigan did not discuss this with you.”

Chase had returned the cigar to the corner of his mouth, and now he smiled around it, showing yellowed teeth. “You sound very sure of yourself. You believe Frank Lanigan wouldn’t talk to me without reporting it to you?”

“Frank wouldn’t willingly talk to you at all,” Balim said. “Frank doesn’t like you.”

A little puff of cigar smoke obscured Chase’s face; when the haze dissipated, he was calm and smiling. “Frank would like to steal a train.”

Balim nodded his agreement. “There is that about him,” he said. “A certain boyishness.”

“I’ve known Frank for twenty years,” Chase said. “Since Katanga. He’s stupid, but he gets the job done.”

“But what is your interest in this particular job, this train theft?”

Chase smiled. “Money.”

“Doesn’t Idi Amin pay you well?”

“Very well. In Ugandan shillings, very few of which I can get out of the country.”

“Ah.”

“I’ll tell you frankly, Mr. Balim,” Chase said, with the intensity of a man who speaks frankly very seldom, “Idi Amin is running out his string.”

Balim showed surprise. “Who is there to overthrow him?”

“The world,” Chase said. “When you kill an archbishop, the righteous shall rise up and smite you.”

Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum had only recently been murdered. Balim said, “You don’t think that will blow over?”

“There’s too much to blow over,” Chase said. “He’s getting crazier. He could even turn on me one of these days.”

“An uncomfortable position.”

“I’m forty-nine,” Chase said. “When I signed on with Tshombe in Katanga, I was a kid in my twenties. My joints were never stiff, I could go without sleep for days, and no matter how many people died around me I knew I was immortal.”

“Visions of retirement,” Balim said with a sly smile. “The rose garden. Even the memoirs, perhaps?”

“I want more out of all this than memories,” Chase said, an underground savagery surfacing for an instant. “I’ve been in this fucking continent half my life. I want to take something away with me when I go.”

Balim shifted slightly on the bed, as though he found Chase’s nakedness socially discomfiting. “I can see,” he said, in deliberately businesslike and uninflected tones, “that I am the correct man for you to approach.”

“That’s right.” Balim’s calm had restored Chase’s own equilibrium. He said, “I’m in a position to set the thing up. You have the merchant contacts in Kenya to move the coffee back into legitimate channels. You can finance Frank Lanigan in pulling the caper. You can arrange to bank my share for me in Switzerland. And you have a motive even stronger than money for getting involved.”

Balim’s surprise this time was certainly genuine. “I have? A motive stronger than money? What could this possibly be?”

“Revenge,” Chase told him. “Most of those coffee plantations used to belong to your brother Asians.”

“Who stole them from the departing whites in nineteen sixty-two,” Balim pointed out.

Chase gestured irritably with the cigar; white ash fell on the rug. “The point is,” he said, “Amin stole them in ’seventy-two, when he kicked you people out. It’s Amin’s personal money. You can kick him one up the ass.”

“Well, well.” Balim rose from the bed, adjusting his neat round trousers. “You realize I can’t give you an answer immediately.”

“The train runs in three months.”

“You give me much to think about,” Balim said. “Including the idea that you find me sufficiently trustworthy to bank your profits for you.”

Chase removed the cigar from his teeth, so that his smile looked like the grin of a wolf. “You don’t travel light, my friend,” he said. “You’re a man of homes and shops and warehouses. You know very well, if you double-crossed me, how easy it would be for me to find you.”

“I see,” Balim said. “Spoken by a man who believes revenge is more important than money. I do see. We shall talk again, quite soon.”

Frank Lanigan steered the Land-Rover down Highway A1 toward Kisumu and home. A heavy-jawed, big-boned, ham-handed man of forty-two, Frank drove as though the vehicle were a reluctant mule, shoving the gearshift this way and that, pounding the pedals with his booted feet, mauling the steering wheel, grunting every time the potholed roadway bounced him in the air to thud him down again onto the springless bucket seat. The Land-Rover’s roof had, over the last eighty miles of bad road, mashed his wide-brimmed campaign hat down over his eyebrows and against his ears, adding a headache to all his other body aches and general dirtiness and disrepair. Kisumu couldn’t arrive any too soon.

Frank had been away for three days up at Eldoret, where the provincial inspector for the Department of Weights and Measures was refusing to stay bribed. It was Frank Lanigan’s least favorite type of occupation, that; give him a fight, a war, even a ditch to dig—he’d choose any of them over diplomacy. And particularly diplomacy with a greedy minor official.

In the passenger seat, the scruffy black called Charlie hung on with one hand, bounced around like a paddleball at the end of a string, smiled vaguely, chewed sugarcane, and spat on the floor between his feet. And sometimes on his feet. “Spit out the window, man!” Frank yelled.

“Dust,” Charlie explained with perfect equanimity. Frank wasn’t sure whether he’d never seen Charlie stoned or never seen him straight; all he knew for sure was he wished he’d never seen him at all. Charlie was a dirty, irresponsible, smelly, untrustworthy son of a bitch. Unlike the Luo, the local tribe in this part of Kenya, a serious and hardworking (if somewhat simple) people, Charlie was a bright tricky Kikuyu from the Mau Range, the tribe that had made Mau Mau famous. A Britisher, Sir Gerald Portal, had said it best back in 1893: “The only way in which to deal with Kikuyu people, whether singly or in masses, was to shoot at sight.”

It was too late to shoot Charlie at sight; Frank had been sighting him for nearly three years now, and familiarity had bred a kind of uneasy truce between them, in which neither made any effort to hide his disdain for the other.

And in fact Charlie did have his uses. Mr. Balim had instructed Frank to bring the little bastard along to Eldoret as interpreter and general assistant, and as usual Mr. Balim had been right. It was Charlie, snuffling around among the local wananchi , who’d found the source of the provincial inspector’s instability: a woman, of course, reckless and greedy and discontent. And it was Charlie who last night had gone to the woman and threatened her with a knife, promising it would not kill her. This morning the inspector had abruptly seen the light, and now Frank could come back to Kisumu, report to Mr. Balim, and then go home, have a wash, have a White Cap beer (or maybe two), have a steak on his own screened patio, bed down with a couple of the maids for company, and ease the aches and knots out of his system.

There was a level railway crossing right at the city line, and damn if the barrier didn’t come down, red lights idiotically blinking, just as Frank reached the rotten thing. He squealed the vehicle to a stop, then sat perspiring in the sunlight while the dust of his passage leisurely overtook him. Charlie negligently spat down his own shirt-front. “Christ give me strength,” Frank said.