Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

“The law is on our side.”

“We are the law; we fought the war; we lost people,” the man said disdainfully. At the front of the shop, business was going on as usual. We could hear porters calling to each other, feet crunching, trucks roaring, car engines grinding and high voices warning pedestrians to watch out lest they get crushed. In and out of the shop came people with big bundles of money. They ordered large quantities of merchandise. Everybody paid in cash.

“I know what you boys are looking for,” the fat man said coldly. “You want money, and I can understand it. You went to the bush to topple the old government, and now that you are in power, you realize that a man needs cash to enjoy victory.”

“We just want to search your store, sir.”

“I can understand your frustration. Here are traders who never seem to have done anything for the country. We never went to the bush. We were rich before you went to the bush, and we are richer now. Yet you who went hungry and thirsty and faced death have nothing. But remember, we financed the war.”

“Show us your stores, sir,” Lwendo said, toughening, evidently unimpressed with the lecture.

The man was biding his time, probably waiting for somebody who had not shown up. He finally took us to the store, whose location Lwendo already knew because of the tip. He also knew the license plate number of the vehicle which had brought the goods, and many other details. I felt a chill going down my spine as we followed the man. Somebody might be hiding in the corridors with a knife, or one of the naked-torsoed men could dump a fifty-kilo bag of cement on one of us, making it look like an accident. It was all in my head. The place was stacked with goods up to the rafters. Lwendo was looking for a little logo, nearly invisible, on the blankets. They couldn’t have removed it; it was almost impossible to do so with poor technology. Cleverly enough, the goods were at the very back, and some men had to come in and move bales of things before we could get to them. We were all sweating: the men with effort, me with nerves, Lwendo with the excitement of the scoop. When the man realized that the game was up, he sent the men away and made his proposition. Lwendo calculated how much the things were worth in dollars.

“The best thing would be to take you to Lubiri Barracks and get some of that maize kicked out of you,” Lwendo said coldly. “As you said, you have been having too much of a good time all these years.”

“No, no, please. You have to understand. I am not the sole owner.”

“Do you want to tell us who sold you the goods and how the deal was cut?”

My impression was that the man, like many traders, had a few contacts in government or in the army, but that they were weak. Also, no army officer or government official liked his name getting splashed around in criminal circles. The deal always was: once the goods left one hand, it was every man for himself, good luck to all involved. In the past, the man would have made only one phone call and we would have got picked up and made to look like the criminals. Things were different now. Lwendo considered how the people in Kakiri had created a wall of silence, and he decided that if he took the man in, the investigations might go on forever. He asked for a few thousand dollars, and he got it. We had crossed the line; there was no turning back.

I had never felt so exposed as on the way out of that building. The skin on my back tingled. When people pressed against me, I expected the cold blade of a knife to sink into my ribs. There were even more people now, because it was lunchtime. There were men carrying saucepans of boiling meat and fish to places where women sold food to traders and laborers. What if somebody emptied a seething pan on us and made off with the money? It was all so easy in the confusion. Why hadn’t somebody thought of that? Out on Luwum Street, overlooking the taxi park on one side and the mosque and Nakivubo Stadium on the other, Lwendo said, “This is why I insisted on working with you. You can never cut such deals with somebody you don’t trust one hundred percent. You see how easy it is to betray someone?”

I laughed, and he slapped me on the back.

“I am on my way out of the army,” he said joyously.

“Provided our luck sticks,” I cautioned.

“It will stick like hell, don’t worry.”

The pattern was set: we reported two out of every three cases; the third was ours, and we pocketed the money. Did the padre know about us? I never knew, but he would have been naive to believe that we were angels, especially when the official government line was that corruption was dying in the top echelons, though still pervasive at the bottom. The political cadres, of which Lwendo was not a member, brought in to root out police corruption were not doing well either. Many of them had taken the Lwendo line and were feathering their own nests.

It came as no real surprise that when our game was picking up, sudden changes were made. Almost all the staff at the Rehabilitation office and the warehouses was transferred, and new people were brought in. We were among the few survivors.

“Business” slowed down for some time. We went back to making those long, arduous journeys to obscure places on the back of rotten trucks and in terrible, overloaded buses. One of the worst was to Mubende, one hundred kilometers from Kampala. The first forty kilometers were on tarmac, the last sixty on hellish seasonal roads that disappeared in storms. At one place, a truck had jackknifed into a swamp, and another truck that tried to outflank it had ended up deeper in the swamp. The cargo on the second truck was being unloaded and placed in what was left of the road. We had nowhere to go, and there was no transport anyway at that late hour. We spent a chilly, hungry night in the bus, waiting for a tow truck.

The case here concerned iron sheets which had disappeared without a trace. Our guess was that they had been sold at Mityana, a fast-growing town which was a magnet for all sorts of crooks. The padre was sore because he knew these areas very well, having worked here as a Catholic priest for many years and briefly as a representative of the guerrilla movement. He wanted the case thoroughly investigated. By now we knew that the Kibanda Boys probably had something to do with it. They had found more and more friends in government and in the army, people with Lwendo’s frame of mind.

At Mubende, we discovered that indeed the sheets had been sold at Mityana. We hurried back. The eerie thing was that the two men we arrested never begged for mercy or threatened us. What was their secret? Was it pure stoicism or knowledge that they would get us later?

“I don’t like this at all,” I said to Lwendo as he smoked one cigarette after the other. Here we were, in this strange town, sitting in a small restaurant that still smelled of paint, and there were people out there who wanted to get us.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said confidently, as though he were bulletproof. “Nobody can touch us.”

“How are we going back?”

“By taxi,” he said cockily.

“Why don’t we use a government vehicle on some of these missions?”

“That would blow our cover.”

I looked outside: Mityana was a dynamic little town. New buildings were going up all the time — the whole place seemed to be one big construction site. There were bare-chested men going up scaffolds with pans of concrete, and others coming down. Concrete-making machines were spinning their fat bellies ceaselessly, and foremen’s voices agitated the air with supreme impatience. Trucks and buses were rolling in, together with overloaded pickup vans full of people and merchandise. Shoppers from Mubende and the surrounding areas poured in and out of town in hordes. Outside Mityana, level with the horizon, was Lake Wamala. The serenity of its silver-gray surface did not calm my nerves.