Not quite an hour after that, she replied it to the pleasant overweight girl who ran the empty coffee shop. “You be careful,” the girl told her, “and don’t go far away.” “No, I won’t,” Ellen promised, fortified by her two cups of coffee, and went back out.
The late-night air was as humid as ever, but with a chill in it off the lake. Turning the collar of her Burberry up, putting her hands in the pockets, Ellen strolled along through pockets of light and shadow, moving this time toward the main entrance from the highway.
The problem was, Frank had said twenty-four hours and that was just nonsense. If Lew was going to make it here at all, it would have to be before daylight; after that, a lone wanted white man wouldn’t be able to move an inch without discovery. And tomorrow night would be too late; Ellen couldn’t possibly refuse to leave with her plane.
So it was tonight that Lew had to get here, and the main questions were: How would he arrive, and how would he make contact? Poor Agatha Christie had had no hope of attracting Ellen’s attention after that phone call; she’d tried to read, but her eyes failed to focus on the page. And when she came to the conclusion there would be no way for Lew to signal her in this room—the night clerk received and listened to all calls coming into this building—she put the Christie down, shrugged into her Burberry, and went out to answer three times the question, “Where are you going?”
The two extremes of her walk were the main entrance and the runways. If Lew came boldly in via the main road, as she fully expected him to do, they would meet right here along the road and could make their plans. If his presence in Uganda were known, if he were being hunted, he might choose a less visible route, in which case he would surely head for the planes, and she would meet him there.
In the meantime, the wait was equal parts tension and boredom. Entebbe, which was perhaps the most underutilized commercial airport in the world by day, became an absolute desert of inactivity by night. The coffee shop was kept open very late, as though in deliberate defiance of reality, and here and there a slow-moving janitor cleaned, and the occasional soldier or sentry passed, but that was it. And for all Ellen knew, she would walk back and forth in this empty airport another six or seven hours, until well after sunup; for all she knew, she would walk here uselessly. Lew might not appear at all.
What would she do if daylight came, and no Lew? Thoughts of borrowing a car; but to drive where? She had no idea where he was, what had happened to strand him when the others left, what condition he was in. Either he had some sort of vehicle or he would certainly steal one. Either the Ugandan authorities were searching for him or they didn’t know he was in their territory. Either—
He’s a soldier, she reminded herself. He’s trained to survive in bad situations. He even trains others. He’ll get here.
At the traffic circle—the road signs, inspired by Uganda’s British former owners, called it a roundabout, a word Ellen thought very well described the night she was having—she turned about and strolled slowly again toward the low stucco-faced buildings of the airport. The few sharp lights and the low pale flat-roofed buildings made her think of prisons or prisoner-of-war camps.
A car came purring toward her from the roundabout. She glanced back, hoping against hope, stepping off the blacktop onto the packed-dirt verge, and when the black car slowed she had a moment of absolute assurance, was already smiling when she saw it wasn’t Lew at the wheel after all but a woman. A very attractive black woman, under thirty, quite elegant. If it weren’t for the strain lines around her eyes and mouth, she would be absolutely beautiful. But she wasn’t Lew.
Idly, Ellen wondered what such a person could possibly want at this airport at this hour. Surely she wasn’t the graveyard-shift countergirl in the coffee shop. There were no passenger planes scheduled, either in or out. Could she be a hooker? If so, for whom?
The car having stopped beside her, the woman smiled out her open window, saying, “Excuse me. Could you direct me to the transient aircrews’ quarters?”
“Of course,” Ellen said, and did so, pointing, and the woman thanked her and drove off, the black car humming to itself, in no apparent hurry.
So she was a hooker, summoned by one of the pilots. Ellen was surprised, not because this looked like a “good girl” or anything like that, but because as a hooker she would be far more expensive than most pilots would be willing to pay.
Ellen walked. Ahead, the car’s brakelights flashed on, and it came to an abrupt stop. Then the white backup lights gleamed, and the car backed hurriedly toward her, whining, weaving from side to side. Now what?
Again the car halted beside her. Ellen looked in, frowning, and behind the beautiful black woman, up from the floor in back, reared the smiling, sheepish face of Lew. Ellen stared from his smile to the woman’s—very knowing eyes, that woman had—and back at Lew. “I might have known,” she said.
Wishing her flight bag were full of rocks, Ellen flung it out her room window at Lew’s head, twelve feet below. He caught it, the bastard, waved to her, and scampered away into the darkness. I really ought to leave him here, she thought. The man’s incorrigible.
At the same time, she was trying to be fair. In the car, in a dark corner of a parking lot, they had described everything to her—well, perhaps everything—and it wasn’t his fault that Patricia Kamin had needed rescuing just as he was driving by. Nevertheless, she rebelled at the inevitability of it, and was annoyed by the knowledge that Lew Brady would always find some beautiful woman who needed to be rescued, whether from the hopelessness of life like Amarda or from physical assault like Patricia. The calls for help would just keep coming, and one thing you could say for Lew: he would always get it up.
Well, he never rescued me, she thought as she left her room and headed for the lobby, and she was surprised at how comforting she found that idea. It was true. She had often wanted him, but she had never needed him, and that made a difference. There was some comfort at least in the reflection that their relationship was a break with tradition.
In fact, come to think of it, she was the one rescuing him. Take that, Lew Brady.
The night clerk was astonished by her. “Out again? You need your sleep.”
“I’m a copilot,” Ellen told him. “I’ll sleep tomorrow in the plane.”
He laughed politely, and out she went, turning once more toward the parked planes.
It was very hard this time to maintain a strolling pace. She reached the taxiway, and her old friend the insecure guard passed by, and she gave him a big smile. He was getting used to her; he actually flickered a frightened smile of his own in response. She moved on, ambling, hands in pockets, smelling the night air fragrant from the exotic specimens in the botanical garden, and when she reached the Uganda Skytours plane there was no one at all in sight.
Poor Mike. He had known it was coming, some sort of bad ending was coming, but he was tied to his property. The authorities would have let him and his wife leave Uganda at any time, but not with the plane. He could fly the plane out, but not with his wife aboard. He had tried to keep everything, hoping for the best, and in the end he had lost it all, including himself. But how do you know for certain that moment when your way of life has become a sinking ship that must be abandoned? Jews in Hitler’s Germany; intellectuals in Stalin’s Russia; Christians in Amin’s Uganda. People were imprisoned most securely by who they had chosen to become.