Moses Isegawa - Snakepit

“I want to beat that goat-fucker to a pulp,” he told his advisor.

“Not yet, General,” the colonel said. “A man acting on behalf of the Marshal cannot be taken lightly. Especially not when he is the boss of the Anti-Smuggling Unit. He can easily ruin us completely.”

“What am I supposed to do? Sit here and wait like some dog’s dick trapped inside a bitch’s pussy?”

“Ah. .”

“I auctioned that man some time ago, Colonel. I offered you ten thousand dollars in cash for his worthless balls. Why is he still alive? Are there no men hungry enough to take him on? Why do I still have this cross to bear?”

“You saw what we did to his house, General. I have got another trap nicely laid out for him. At the lake. I will nail that shit-eater this time,” said the colonel, thinking that ten thousand dollars was too miserly a price on the head of a man like Robert Ashes, and that if the General wanted a symbolic gesture to show his disregard, he should have auctioned him for a dollar. Now that would be something.

“How long do I have to wait inside this bitch’s pussy? How long? My Bureaucrat One is gone. What greater humiliation is there for a minister than to have his biggest official carted off like a bucket of shit?” He hit his chest, flailed his arms and finally rested them on his hips. “I participated in the coup that launched this royal family. I have defended the government against all its enemies. And now I have to grovel at the feet of this stinking turd?”

“Things change, General,” the colonel began tentatively, thinking that it should be the General, such a powerful man, saying these words, not him. “You can never tell what Marshal Amin in his deep wisdom is thinking. Otherwise, why didn’t he inform you of that reptile’s order? How long has it been since he invited you to his home to play hide-and-seek with his children?”

“You are right. There must be something going on, somebody poisoning the Marshal’s mind. What do you think I should do?”

“Caution while we work out the next move.”

“Caution! Caution! Again! How long am I supposed to be cautious? When will you bring me his head on a stick?”

“Soon, pretty soon. He is aware that we are after him. He switches cars at the eleventh hour. He goes by air when everybody expects him to go by boat. It is hard to nail the dog-fucker, but it is just a matter of time, General.”

“I should have killed that Cambridge turd and it is you who stopped me. He should die before Reptile gets to him. It will rob his victory of meaning. A coffin will be a good reward for his investigations.” The General looked outside his office at the Parliament, rising squarely out of the ground to symbolize the power of the nation, or rather of those at the helm, and thought about the man held in its bowels. Things have indeed changed in a bizarre way, if a general can’t get his way in matters like this, he thought, feeling angrier by the minute.

“It won’t help, General,” the colonel said, knowing that his boss was not thinking straight at all and was too caught up in his vanity and sense of power to see the big picture. “Ashes knows where he is by now. He wants to use this incident for personal profit. If you thwart him at the eleventh hour, he is going to come down hard on us. He could even tell the Marshal about it. If he doesn’t, he is going to hurt us badly in some other way.”

“You are right. I am going to wait,” General Bazooka hissed, and stormed out. He realized that a prince was no king: he still had to take crap from his king, especially if he was a self-declared king of Africa. As a prince, he could piss on the heads of peasants, but he could not get his way all the time. Princes tended to be disposable and they often destroyed each other. Ashes was a prince too, with equal powers of destruction.

THE ACOLYTES LOCKED Bazooka’s men in a villa in Nakasero. Under interrogation, they revealed what they knew. Ashes learned that Bat was called away to the Nile Perch Hotel ostensibly to meet his boss. The motive for the disappearance remained unclear, which was common among these incidents, and he could only guess. The news that the man was still alive cheered him. The mission was going to end more quickly than he had expected.

But the Acolytes arrived too late; the prisoner had been moved. General Bazooka had taken him to an unknown location. This turn of events put Ashes in a very foul mood. He hated this kind of game when he was not the one initiating play.

GENERAL BAZOOKA MADE HIMSELF as elusive as possible. He travelled in unmarked cars, singly or with two men. He stayed most of the time at Kasubi with his wife and children. The first week as a full-time husband and dad was interesting. He drank a lot and slept a lot. He kept an eye on things when he was awake; he barked at servants and looked at his children’s exercise books. He was happy to learn that his favourite son did not like school and did not perform well. He talked to him about the importance of the army and the chances he stood as the son of a general. He showed him different guns, told him heroic stories and made him promise to enlist as soon as he finished primary school. Secondary school he could do in the army. The boy was very happy to hear that his father was on his side. The other children were less enthusiastic, but he believed he would get them eventually. He visited his wife’s shop. He found the business of waiting for customers and drinking tea or beer tedious, to say the least. He fled to the city, driving around, dropping in on friends.

After a week small things started making him lose his temper. One morning he shot at a housegirl because she did not move quickly enough when he ordered her to bring a fresh spoon to stir his coffee. His wife intervened and reprimanded him. He took offence. It had just been a warning shot, he said, and no big deal. He felt walled in. Deflated by his helplessness in the face of Ashes. He decided to go north, by road, to see what was going on up there. He needed the inspiration and a break from all the madness. He hoped to come back renewed, combative, sharp.

The first part of the journey was very exciting. He was travelling through familiar territory. It felt very reassuring to see soldiers at roadblocks taking care of business. They reminded him of his days as a hunter of armed robbers. At one roadblock, however, he caught soldiers taking bribes. He stripped them naked, made them roll in mud and jump up and down while singing his favourite nursery rhyme: “Humpty-Dumpty.” The fun part was saying the lines and hearing the miscreants repeat them after him. Afterwards he made a little speech excusing himself to the civilians, who would go away praising this big officer who came from nowhere and saved them from the rapacious soldiers at the roadblock. He left the place feeling good and eager to see what lay ahead.

But the farther he drove north, the more it dawned on him that, outside the city and the towns, government was a very thin concept. To begin with, people did not recognize him at all. He stopped several times to buy things, taking the trouble to enter the small dusty shops with old rusty roofs, but nobody called his name. The goods he wanted were almost always unavailable, except on black market, which was not for soldiers with medals dangling on their chests. He got irritated by these empty shops whose shelves were yawning except for empty cigarette cartons stuffed in for decoration. There was no cooking oil, no paraffin, no food, nothing.

“Nothing!” he yelled at the tenth shop. “Then what the Devil are you doing opening an empty shop? How long have you been here?”

“Since 1971,” the man said dolorously, his eyes as sad as his clothes. “Each year the prices kept going up till we could not afford the stock any more.”