Four or five of the women then set about painting his face and hands, using lipsticks and soot from the kerosene lanterns and leftover sauce from one of the chicken dishes and various other things he didn’t want described too clearly. They all had a wonderful time with the project, laughing and telling each other jokes in Swahili, clapping their hands at particularly grotesque accomplishments, and generally having great fun at his expense.
Somebody offered to find a mirror so Lew could see the transformation for himself, but he said no. He could see what his hands looked like, which was precisely like the hands in the final painting of Dorian Gray in that old movie, and that was enough for him. “I’ll have to live with this face the rest of my life,” he told them. “I don’t want too many scary memories associated with it.”
At the end, the bishop gave Lew two items: a two-foot-long stick, for propping up the coffin lid so he could get air on the journey, and a small lumpy package wrapped in aluminum foil. “That’s the cheese,” the bishop said, handing it to him as though it were radioactive. “Don’t open it before we get there.” A horridness seemed to hover around the little package, a tiny but virulent little demon, perhaps the assistant devil in charge of all the world’s tooth decay. Lew put it down gently on the quilt beside his left hip, propped the lid open with the stick, folded his hands, and was carried in his coffin up the stairs from the basement and out to the waiting hearse, a battered old vehicle of the same vintage as his pickup, and lacking glass in its back window.
Hushed good-byes were combined with hushed giggles, and the last he saw of Bishop Kibudu’s flock, the men were waving and the women were blowing kisses and they were all laughing. The bishop drove, Father Njuguna presumably followed in the pickup—in what strange ways it had gone from minister to minister—and soon they had left Bugembe behind.
The partition between the driver’s compartment and the business space contained a sliding panel, which the bishop left open, but there seemed very little to say beyond Lew’s expressions of gratitude and the bishop’s assurances that it was nothing at all. “You have a wonderful congregation,” Lew said.
“Magnificent people. They keep me going.”
Lew suspected it was the other way around, but he didn’t say so.
The little foil-wrapped package was making its presence felt; or smelt. The bottom of the bottommost cistern in Calcutta; an elephant graveyard on a hot day; the interior of a freezer after a three-week power failure; those were some of the images that came into Lew’s mind as the hints and tendrils came into his nose, and the damn thing wasn’t even open yet.
“This is Jinja,” the bishop said. “Not much longer now.”
“I’m set.” Though he wasn’t, really; it suddenly occurred to him that the winding sheet effectively separated him from the pistol under his shirt. Had that been deliberate on the bishop’s part? Well, if things went wrong up ahead, a pistol wouldn’t help much anyway.
“Bridge ahead,” the bishop announced. “Open the package now, and close your lid.”
“Right.”
Lew opened the package, and his nostrils slammed shut. His hair curled, his lungs became corrugated, his tongue died, his teeth shriveled and went back up into his gums. The skin under his eyes turned to leather. His ears fell off.
Close the lid? With himself in here with that? Turning his head away, hoping in vain for fresh air, Lew gulped in a full breath, tucked the reeking package in against his left leg under a fold of the winding sheet, removed the propping stick and slid it under his right leg, closed his eyes like a proper dead person, and lowered the lid.
Yug.
Then, after an eternity, they opened the lid, which gave him at least a memory of fresh air, but with great alacrity they slammed it shut again, and down inside there Lew began counting. At five hundred he would turn himself in… .
Two forty-seven… two forty-eight… The hearse started slowly to move, but Lew continued to count, and had reached two sixty-one when the bishop’s voice came faintly through the lid: “All right, now.”
“Nggaaaaaahhh!” Lew flung back the lid, sat up, grabbed the little package, and hurled it through the glassless rear window.
Laughing, the bishop said, “If any pedestrian saw you sit up like that, he must have fainted.”
“The cheese’ll bring him around,” Lew said unsympathetically.
Farewells were said in the darkness behind a closed general store in Njery, the first little town on the west side of the Nile, less than two miles from the bridge. Fortunately, it seemed that the winding cloth had absorbed most of the cheese odor; unfortunately, it was the only thing he could use to wipe the death mask from his face. “I explained you were a plague victim,” the bishop said, while Lew cleaned himself up. “And that we’d had to wait two weeks for official permission to bury you.”
Father Njuguna, standing to one side, smiling, hands clasped before him, said, “The life of an adventurer must be a very interesting one.”
“I don’t know,” Lew said. “Not if traveling with that dead cheese was a high point.” Then he shook hands with both men, thanked them again for their help, and asked them to repeat his thanks to their parishioners. The bishop said, “May God bring us together again, under less exciting circumstances.”
“Amen.” Lew held the bishop’s hand in both of his. “I’d say ‘God bless you,’ but why would He take my word for it? Besides, it’s clear He already has. May Uganda get healthy enough to deserve you. Good-bye.”
On the outskirts of Kampala, a golf course lay beside the road on the right. Lew, driving properly in the left lane, the time well after midnight, the road very sparsely dotted with other traffic and completely free of pedestrians, glanced across at the golf course, the smooth curling fairways, the triangular flags limp on their poles at the greens, the swimming pool-shaped sand traps, and it surprised him to realize that of course there must be people in Kampala who used that golf course, who came out in the sunlight, well fed, well dressed, blessed with leisure time and money, and spent a pleasant afternoon knocking the little white ball around the course. In any society, no matter how repressive, how terrible, how awful the things done, there are always those people who remain untouched, who live their comfortable easy lives in the middle of horror and death, as though absolutely nothing untoward is going on.
Lew was startled from his reverie by an astonishing sight in his headlights: across the way, a black Toyota was stopped at the verge, headlights off but running lights on. Several men—three or four men—were wrestling with a slender attractive well-dressed girl; all were African. Seeing Lew’s lights, they grabbed the girl up bodily and ran away with her, out onto the golf course.
It wasn’t his business. He couldn’t even be sure who were the good guys and who the bad. He had troubles enough of his own. He yanked the pickup across the road, trying to find those running figures in his dim headlights, failed, and finally slammed to a stop in front of their car.
A Toyota. License plate starting with UVS. In his lights the men had been garishly dressed. They and their car were exactly like the men and the car when he’d been arrested.
Lew slapped off the pickup’s lights, jumped out onto the ground, unlimbered the pistol from under his shirt, and trotted off into the darkness.
It was easy to follow them; the girl was screaming bloody murder. The rolling land in this blackness was a little tricky underfoot, but he didn’t have a lot of fighting girl to contend with and could make better time than they could.