Donald Westlake: Kahawa

Now Isaac was Mazar Balim’s inside man, just as Frank was his outside man. While Frank dealt with bribery and thievery and occasional rough stuff from thugs who saw profit in intimidating an Asian merchant, Isaac talked to bureaucrats from the government and the railway and the airline, he conferred with the representatives of American and European companies offering goods for sale, he dealt with taxes and tariffs and import restrictions. Set a bureaucrat to catch a bureaucrat; old Balim knew what he was doing, every time.

The phone conversation never actually ended; as with most such dealings, it merely faded away into vague suggestions and possibilities. As usual, Isaac outwaited his opponent, and there was just a glint of combative triumph in his eye when at last he cradled the receiver and said, “You’re dusty.”

“I stink,” Frank said accurately, and gestured at the door. “Who’s in there with the boss?”

“No one. Mr. Balim isn’t here.”

“Not here?” Frank got restlessly to his feet, hitching his belt around his sweat-soaked waist. “Where is he?”

“Flew to Nairobi this morning. I expect him—”

The door opened and an employee stuck his black head in and said something fast to Isaac, who spoke equally quickly back. The employee disappeared, and Isaac said to Frank, “He’s coming in now.”

“Is that what he said?” It rankled with Frank that after a hundred years of hanging out with Englishmen these natives were still determined to talk Swahili. It wasn’t as though Swahili were their native tongue; they all had tribal languages, hundreds of them throughout eastern and central Africa. Swahili wasn’t even a proper language at all, when you stopped to think about it. The very word Swahili came from the Arabic word Sawahil , meaning “coast.” When the Arabs had founded their trading cities at Zanzibar and Mombasa and elsewhere on the east African coast in the seventh century, and intermarried with the several Bantu tribes they’d found living there, this bastard tongue had emerged, using Bantu syntax and a combination of tribal and Arabic vocabularies. The Arab slave caravans had carried this African Yiddish a thousand miles westward across the continent in their bloody man-harvests, so that even today when a Nandi, for instance, wanted to converse with an Acholi, it was always in that damn Swahili.

Frank had been kicking around Africa for nearly twenty years, ever since Katanga, and he had made it a point of honor to resist learning Swahili. He knew enough to take himself successfully through a parade ground or a battle—“More ammunition here,” “Keep your fucking head down,” “Whose foot is that?”—but no more. Let the Bantus learn damn English, like civilized people.

Mazar Balim came in, looking rumpled but not upset. “The road from the airport continues to deteriorate,” he said. “Soon we shall not be able to ship light bulbs.”

“Or beer,” said Isaac.

Frank, unable to repress his curiosity, said, “How was Nairobi?”

“Very excited about itself. Isaac, anything of import?”

“Nothing that can’t wait.”

“Good. Frank, come in. You look very dusty; have you been home?”

“Not yet.”

Frank followed Balim into a small, crowded but comfortable room in which the windows were all blocked by filing cabinets, except the one tumorous with an air conditioner, which Balim turned on at once. “Our friend in Eldoret is our friend again, I presume,” he said, edging through the clutter to sit in the old wooden swivel chair behind the desk. The two scarves thrown over the chair were so threadbare they had virtually no color left.

Shutting the office door, dropping like an abandoned novel into the brown vinyl chair facing the desk, Frank said, “All fixed,” and went on to give an account of the fixing that was totally unfair to Charlie. At the end of which, Balim nodded and said, “That’s good. I knew you and Charlie would handle it.”

“Mm,” Frank said.

“There is another matter,” Balim said. “What do you think of coffee smuggling out of Uganda?”

“Profitable.” The 7UP in his hair, drying in the air conditioner’s draft, was making his head itch. “Dangerous,” he went on. “Not a long-term business.”

“Agreed.” Balim smiled as though a bright pupil had once again showed his promise. “But as an extremely profitable one-time operation, what then?”

“Depends on the circumstances. You’ve got something, huh?”

“Depends on the circumstances,” Balim said. “I would like you to study the situation.”

“Sure.”

Balim touched papers on his desk, not as though he were looking for anything in particular but more as though to reassure himself as to his identity and strength. “This task,” he said, “will undoubtedly consume very much of your time.”

“For how long?”

“Three months, perhaps longer. Would you know someone you could hire, on a temporary basis, to take over some of your duties?”

“A merc?”

“A white man, yes.” Obviously enjoying the irony of the phrase, Balim added heavily, “An old African hand.”

“There aren’t that many wars going on right now,” Frank said. “I’ll call around, come up with somebody.”

“Somebody you trust.”

“Come on,” Frank said, grinning. “Think again.”

“I do beg your pardon.” Balim performed his own kind of grin. “I meant, of course, someone you know how much you can trust.”

“Can do.”

As Frank got to his feet, stretching out the tightnesses in his joints, scratching the 7UP crystals on his head, Balim said, “You might be interested in who has brought us this opportunity.”

“Someone I know?”

“An old friend.” Then Balim corrected himself, raising one finger.

“No, I’m in error again. An old acquaintance.”

“Who?”

“Baron Chase.”

Frank stopped scratching, the itchy 7UP forgotten. “ That son of a bitch? You want to deal with Baron Chase ?”

“That’s why,” Balim said, “I’ll be wanting your undivided attention in the days ahead.”

“You’ll need more than me,” Frank told him. “You’ll need a special angel from God. Chase would melt his grandmother down for the silver in her hair.”

“I do believe you,” Balim said, shrugging, “but I am driven by my poor merchant’s greed. He has offered us a railroad train, a freight train, a complete train filled with very valuable coffee. I want that coffee, and so I must deal with Baron Chase. But only with you, Frank, always at my side.” Balim smiled, waggling a finger. “Which is why it is so important,” he said, “that you find just the right person to be your assistant. Choose carefully, Frank.”

Out at Valdez International Airport, Lew Brady sat in a five-year-old Chevrolet Impala and felt the heater’s dry air destroy the interior of his nose while he watched Ellen Gillespie taxi the Cherokee to its pad. Although it was nearly April, Lew still thought of the climate as wintry. “I’m freezing to death here,” he muttered. “These Alaskans are crazy.”

It didn’t help when Ellen came out of the plane in Khaki slacks and a short-sleeved lavender blouse. She came smiling and waving across the stubby new grass, a tall and slender woman with short dark-blond hair and a long angular face that combined beauty with efficiency in a way that left Lew helpless with desire.

Ellen was twenty-eight, daughter of a commercial pilot who’d taught her to fly when she was still in her teens. She was licensed for multiengine jets, but she didn’t want to spend years apprenticing as navigator and engineer, and her youth and sex limited her to jobs for which she was overqualified: commuter services in Florida, skywriting in California, even dragging a sunburn-treatment message through the blue summer haze over Fire Island.