Donald Westlake - Kahawa

She’d been on that last stint when they’d met. Lew, after six and a half years on the African continent, involved in wars from Chad in the north to Angola in the south, Ethiopia in the east to Biafra in the west, had suddenly run out of Dark Continent conflicts and had accepted a job offer half the world away, in the Caribbean, training anti-insurgency forces on one of the smaller islands there.

The most sensible travel route had been via Amsterdam and New York, and it was in New York that he’d been intercepted by a message: his employer government had just been overthrown, before he could arrive and train anybody to defend it.

Out of work again, Lew had gotten in touch with a pilot he’d known in Africa, a man now working for a commuter airline between New York City and the Hamptons, operating out of Flushing Airport in Queens. At that airport, Lew had first seen this beautiful woman pilot, back from her day’s sunburn chores, and he had been immediately hooked.

Her manner at the start was cool but friendly. Gradually she became less cool, and then more friendly, and finally Lew moved in with her for the rest of that summer. And in the fall, when Ellen was offered the job here in Alaska, they’d agreed he would come along.

“Hello, lover,” she said now as she slid into the car and kissed his lips; comfortably, not passionately. Then, as he put the car in gear, she switched off the heater and opened her window. He’d known she would do that. “Spring,” she said, with marked satisfaction.

He steered in a long curve toward the gate in the chain link fence. “Nice flight?”

“So-so.” She looked out her open window, elbow resting on the sill, short nails tap-tapping the plastic of the door. She was often like this after flying, a little nervous, vibrant, edgy, hyperactive. He had learned with disappointment that it was a bad time sexually; she was distracted by the sky. She said, “The same trees get boring, eventually.”

“Nothing to deliver?” Her primary job was to carry papers, blueprints, instructions up to the field offices where the pipeline was being laid; sometimes there was a reply, and they’d detour past the construction company’s Valdez office to drop it off.

But not today. “No, we can go home.”

The guard at the airport was an old friend by now; he waved at Lew, who waved back.

Ellen said, “How’s the class?”

“Improving, finally.”

“I thought so. You’re starting a nice shiner. What else did you do today?”

“Made some calls. Talked to some people.”

“Any luck?”

“Dim possibilities. Not really.”

They were passing a construction site; yellow earthmovers crawled on a churned-up corner lot behind a sign featuring a future bank. Ellen looked at it, then said, “Remember what you said when we came up here?”

He did. “‘There must be plenty of work,’” he quoted, “‘for an able-bodied man in Alaska.’”

“You’re making yourself old, Lew,” she told him. “Sitting around, waiting. Playing with truck drivers. You aren’t a house pet.”

“I could operate a bulldozer,” he said, voice flat, not as though he were making a serious suggestion. “I could tend bar. Repossess automobiles. Drive a truck for the pipeline.”

“Lew,” she said gently, “Alaska isn’t going to war.”

“Somebody is.”

The phone was ringing when they parked beside the trailer they called home. “Jesus!” Lew cried, and ran. He pounded into the bedroom, to their only phone, shedding clothes, already certain, and when Ellen came in a minute later he was grinning so broadly he looked as though he meant to eat the phone. “Frank,” he was saying, as a believer who sees a vision might say, “It’s the Mother of God.”

Ellen sat on the bed and Lew paced, jamming the receiver against his ear and mouth, holding the cradle in his other hand. “God, yes, Frank,” he said. He barely understood Frank’s words, didn’t at all understand what job he was being offered, and couldn’t have cared less. Frank Lanigan—good old Frank Lanigan, from Angola and Portuguese Guinea and Ethiopia—Frank Lanigan was offering him a job , a piece of work. In Africa .

Then he noticed Ellen sitting there, and he interrupted Frank to say, “One thing. There’s one thing.”

“What’s that?” The voice came thousands of miles to sound clear and uninflected in Lew’s ear.

“I’ve sort of doubled up with somebody else,” Lew said. “A pilot. You got work for both of us?”

“A pilot? Lew, I don’t think so. This isn’t the kind of job—”

“She travels with me,” Lew insisted. “I’m sorry, Frank, but that’s the way it is.” And he waved the phone cradle at Ellen, to wipe away her troubled expression, to reassure her it would be all right.

“Lew, I could ask some—Did you say she ?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh. That makes it different. She gotta be a pilot?”

Exultation made Lew savage. “Hold it,” he said, and cupped the mouthpiece while saying to Ellen, “It doesn’t have to be pilot, does it? It could be any job for an able-bodied woman, right?”

She laughed, calling him a bastard. He grinned at the phone and said, “Sorry, Frank. It has to be pilot.”

“We’ll work something out,” Frank said.

They spent a few more minutes discussing the transportation details, while Lew grinned without interruption at Ellen seated on the bed. Then he said good-bye and slapped together the halves of the phone. “Don’t get up,” he said.

Ellen’s first sight of Frank Lanigan, in the main waiting room at Wilson Airport, in Nairobi, reminded her just why it was she found Lew Brady so precious. Lanigan was like most of the men Ellen had met in these outlandish global crannies: hairy, sweaty, an overgrown boy, a blunt roughneck with an inflated opinion of his own courage and prowess. Lew, living in the same world, was stronger and braver than any of them, and he didn’t know it . How could she help but treasure him?

Proudly Lew made the introductions, as though he’d invented each of them especially for the pleasure of the other. Frank Lanigan took Ellen’s hand in his hammy fist and leaned toward her a connoisseur’s smile, saying, “Lew always could pick ’em.”

Already I’m a them , Ellen thought. “Nice to meet you,” she said, with her boring-party smile. Cold bitch , said Frank Lanigan’s eyes, behind the welcoming heartiness. That’s right , her eyes said back as she withdrew her hand from his, and her smile could have iced an entire bucket of daiquiris.

Frank looked away from it at the two battered flight bags beside them on the floor, saying, “This all your luggage?”

“We travel light,” Lew told him.

“A woman who travels light,” Frank said. “Will wonders never cease?”

Oh, you bastard, Ellen thought. She watched with some amusement as Frank tried to figure out which bag was hers—so he could carry it, of course, the eager overgrown Boy Scout approach—then grabbed one at random. The right one, as it happened. Lew picked up his own bag and Frank said, “This way,” adding to Ellen as they started off, “We’re putting you right to work.”

“Oh, yes?”

Ellen had been so doubtful about this whole deal that she hadn’t actually quit her job in Alaska, but had merely asked for and received two weeks off without pay. If the African adventure came out badly, she could always turn right around and go back. She still rated the normal courtesy airline discount for flights and hotels, so she wasn’t risking much in coming all this way with only the vaguest promise of a job once she got here. But now perhaps the job was real?