“I’m sure,” Velhez said, “something can be done. There’s certainly goodwill on all sides.”
“One third?”
“Uganda, I understand, has foreign-exchange problems.” Velhez tried to shrug away Uganda’s political mess. “The closing of borders and so on. One can understand their position.”
“I have difficulty,” Sir Denis said, “understanding the position of any principal who reneges on an already completed negotiation.”
Looking more and more worried, Velhez said, “But you’ll speak with them?”
Knowing he meant the consortium, Sir Denis said, “They aren’t politicians, Carlo, they’re businessmen. They’ve already committed themselves to an initial outlay of well over one and a half million U.S. dollars. Not counting the cost of transport, warehousing and all the rest.”
“But you’ll speak with them.”
Sir Denis sighed. His practiced mind had already reached the compromise that all parties would be able to live with. The task now was to get them all to accept it. Laying the groundwork, he said, “Carlo, you know I’ll do my best.”
“Something can be worked out,” Velhez said, as though uttering a prayer.
“To be frank with you,” Sir Denis said, not being at all frank, “I think it very unlikely Grossbarger will move at all.”
Startled, almost angry, Velhez cried, “The profit remains the same!”
“But the initial risk increases. There are other investments these same men can make, severally or together. Also, there’s the loss of income from the additional capital being tied up.”
“I realize that.” Velhez blew in agitation through his bandit moustache. “But we’ve come this far.”
“It’s possible,” Sir Denis said, noticing how suddenly alert Velhez became, “that I’ll be able to bring them up a bit. But certainly not to fifty percent of the new demand. Not to six million dollars.”
“Perhaps forty-five, forty—”
“No, Carlo. These people are going to be very angry when I talk to them, and neither you nor I can blame them.”
“Of course,” Velhez said. “But it’s not our fault. Surely they’ll understand that.”
“I doubt they’ll much care whose fault it is,” Sir Denis pointed out. “I am willing, Carlo, to urge the Grossbarger group to increase their advance payment to two million U.S.”
“Two! Out of twelve!”
“If I were to ask for more,” Sir Denis said, “they’d hand me my hat at once. I’m not at all sure but what they’ll do so, anyway. However, we can but try.”
“Two million,” Velhez repeated, his expression dazed. “Ten million from us.”
“What I’ll also do,” Sir Denis went on, “is have a word with the chaps here. Captain Chase, or whoever it might be. Perhaps we can bring them down a bit.”
“I don’t know about that,” Velhez said. The wind was well and truly out of his sails; even his moustache sagged.
“Well, we’ll speak with them,” Sir Denis said. “We may have a beneficial effect. And what I’ll suggest to you now, just between ourselves—”
Velhez sat up. “Yes? Yes?”
“When I speak to our friends in London and Zurich,” Sir Denis told him, “I won’t talk in terms of percentages. I’ll put the idea of raising their ante to two million in the best possible light, and with luck they’ll agree. Then, whatever concession you and I can obtain from the people here will benefit exclusively your share of the obligation.”
Sir Denis Lambsmith’s great talent lay not in finding brilliant solutions to knotty problems but in finding brilliant ways to describe and present the messy pedestrian solutions that were usually the best of a bad lot of options. Velhez, having five minutes ago believed that his new liability was to be a mere six million, now became happy and relieved to hear that whatever relief from ten million he could wangle for himself he wouldn’t have to share with his partners. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “It’s possible, I suppose, possible we could talk them down to a quarter rather than a third. In that case, with two million from our other friends, our own cost would be no more than seven million.”
“Let’s not be premature,” Sir Denis warned. “There are still many people to be brought on board.”
“You’re right.” Velhez stood in a sudden hurry, moustache aquiver. “I must phone São Paulo.”
“I have some telephoning of my own,” Sir Denis said, also rising. “I’ll see you at the reception.”
“At the reception,” Velhez replied. “Good luck to us both.”
Suite 202 was guarded by sloppy-looking soldiers in British-style uniforms and berets. Inside, in a room awkwardly combining traditional English and modern Danish furniture with Arab carpets and wall hangings, there was a fairly large and motley crowd. The white faces belonged mostly to businessmen, British or American, German or Scandinavian, plus a sprinkling of diplomats from those foreign embassies still open in Kampala: Arab, mainly, but also the French and a few others. The blacks present were of three sorts: slender cold-faced men in military uniform; male and female civil-service types in suits and party frocks, providing the underlay of cocktail-party chit-chat; and beetle-browed, angry-eyed men in safari suits or loud shirts, many wearing large dark sunglasses, most of them standing with side-thrust hip and one arm reaching behind their backs to clutch the other elbow. It was a childlike posture, but it made Sir Denis think of evil children, as though the hand gripping the elbow were a last restraint from some thoroughly vicious act.
Sir Denis was later arriving than he’d wanted to be, having been held on the phone for quite some time, principally with the consortium’s de facto leader in Zurich, Emil Grossbarger. Still, he assumed his hosts were bugging his telephone and would understand why he was late.
As he entered the large central room of the suite—the party seemed to flow also into rooms to left and right—Carlo Velhez approached with a tall and somewhat heavyset white man. Both were carrying drinks. Carlo’s expression was hectic, his frantic eyes almost distracting attention from his luxurious moustache, while the other man had a lidded look, like a snake on a sunny rock. Baron Chase, Sir Denis told himself.
“Sir Denis Lambsmith,” Carlo Velhez said in his thickly accented English, his voice quivering with suppressed emotion, “may I present Captain Baron Chase.”
“Delighted,” they both said, and Sir Denis extended his hand, which Baron Chase took but did not return. Instead, continuing to hold Sir Denis’s hand, Chase said, “We must get you a drink.”
“Thank you, I—”
Still gripping him by the hand—an experience Sir Denis found horrible—Chase turned half away, lifting his free arm in a signal. “Can’t have our guest of honor without a glass in his hand.” In his speech, Chase affected a jaded homosexual style that he probably thought of as upper-class. His accent was homogenized midlantic.
A servant—short, skinny, young, apprehensive, foul-smelling—pressed rapidly through the crowd to Chase’s side. Sir Denis, while ordering a gin-and-tonic, was not at all surprised to see the man who had been his driver from the airport standing against the wall with two similarly dressed fellows, all frowning and glowering alike. Like the Tontons Macoute in Haiti, the “secret” police in this country were blatant about their existence.