“Oh,” said Sir Denis, at a loss for the first time in his adult life. “Well, yes, I see. Perhaps so.”
“Foreign exchange,” Idi Amin said, and leaned forward in the friendliest way to pat Sir Denis’s arm. “Very happy,” Idi Amin said.
Sir Denis, in the hot humiliating fire storm the world had now become, once more felt Baron Chase’s hand on his elbow. With one final statement to Amin, he allowed himself to be led away.
Afterward, in his hotel room, writing up his notes of the meeting, he couldn’t remember for the life of him what that last thing had been that he had said to Idi Amin. Somehow, he doubted it had been adequate.
7
That morning Mazar Balim closeted himself in his office with Isaac Otera for an hour to discuss various details of business. Isaac had brought to Balim’s commercial affairs a bureaucratic love of files and paperwork it had never known before. At first Balim had been made uneasy by this massive tidying, and had complained, “Isaac, when some government eventually hangs me, they will use all these papers of yours as their only evidence.” But eventually he’d grown used to it, and now he was even pleased at how thoroughly his business was known by this nonmember of his family, this non-Asian, this in fact black Ugandan.
They were interrupted at one point by Frank, who was told by Balim through Isaac to wait. Then they continued, one careful neatly labeled manila folder at a time, until all lake and railroad shipping, all warehousing, all sales and purchases, all payments and collections, had been taken under consideration and discussed. Then at last Balim smiled his round shy winning lovely (completely deceitful) smile and said, “Thank you, Isaac. Would you tell Frank to come in?”
“A moment, sir,” Isaac said, surprisingly enough. Instead of rising, he continued to sit on the wooden chair beside the desk, knees together, all the manila folders in a neat stack on his lap. “May I speak?” he asked.
“Of course,” Balim said, his smile turning politely quizzical.
“You have not discussed with me this new operation,” Isaac said.
Balim nodded agreement, his face showing nothing.
“You have not asked me to open a file, to check anyone’s references, to do a cost estimate, to arrange warehousing, transportation—”
“Yes, yes,” Balim said. “The point is taken.”
“In sum,” Isaac said, with his own small functionary’s smile, “it is to be presumed that I know nothing about the operation at all.”
“I would never presume that, Isaac.”
“If I understand the situation correctly,” Isaac went on, “the centerpiece of the operation will be the theft of a large amount of coffee inside Uganda and its smuggling into Kenya.”
“I take it,” Balim said, “that your source of information is Charlie.”
Isaac ignored that. He said, “I appreciate your delicacy in not involving me in an illegal and quite probably violent act. You have naturally taken it for granted that, since I am an active Christian, and since my background is in government affairs, I would prefer to have nothing to do with such an activity.”
“You do me honor by the suggestion,” Balim said.
“However,” Isaac told him, gently yet firmly, “in some ways this operation is similar to any complex business undertaking. There will be partners and employees—the two Americans who arrived yesterday, for instance—who must be vetted and their positions made clear. There will be questions of transportation, perhaps of lodging. Sooner or later the coffee itself must reenter normal business channels, and must do so armed with appropriate paperwork.”
Balim watched him, bright-eyed, and softly said, “Are you volunteering, Isaac?”
“One cannot, of course, volunteer for what is already one’s job.” The tiny smile again came and went. “But there is another point to consider.”
Balim waited, nodding slightly, hands folded on his plump lap.
“I still have contacts within Uganda,” Isaac said. A sudden harshness always came into his voice when he spoke of his native land, the only indication of the complexity of the emotions he forced himself to conceal. “The economy is collapsing,” he went on. “It might be fair to say it has already collapsed. The expulsion of the Asians had a lot to do with that, of course—”
“Then there is justice, after all,” Balim murmured.
“But there’s also,” Isaac said, “the financial ignorance of Amin and his Nubians. They’re doing worse than living on capital; they’re living on the bank itself.”
“Nicely put.”
“Coffee is their life preserver.” Isaac leaned forward, his stifled agitation causing him to ruffle the folders on his lap, so they were no longer perfectly aligned. “The people starve, but Amin buys whisky and cars and new uniforms, and coffee pays for it.”
“No doubt.”
“I am not a hero,” Isaac said, the tension fading from his face. He sat back, realigned the folders, seemed to sigh through all his body. “I am not the lone man with a rifle,” he said, looking down at his dark hands on the pale folders, “who slips across the border and hunts down the tyrant. To avenge his—his family.”
“Isaac,” Balim said softly, leaning forward as though he might touch Isaac’s hand.
“I am a bureaucrat,” Isaac said, not looking up. “I am a paper shuffler.”
“Isaac, you are a man. Every man has his purpose.”
Now Isaac did look up. The eyes in his dark face were always a bit red around the pupils, but now they were more so. “Every sack of coffee that is stolen from Amin,” he said, “shortens his time. The more coffee is stolen and smuggled out of the country, the sooner he’ll run out of money to keep his Nubians drunk and himself in new medals. I hope that train carries every coffee bean from the entire crop.”
“May God hear your words,” Balim said, gently smiling.
“You’ll need me,” Isaac told him. “Not, of course, to hold up the train.”
“Of course.”
“Shall I open a file?”
“Yes.”
“What shall I label it?”
Balim thought. “‘Coffee Break,’” he said. “Tell Frank to come in now.”
Isaac smiled and got to his feet. At the door, holding the stack of manila folders, he turned back and said, “Thank you, Mr. Balim.”
“Thank you, Isaac.”
Isaac went out and Frank came in, boots thudding the floor, khaki whipcord trousers rustling, pressed cotton shirt neatly buttoned and sleeves rolled up to his biceps. “’Morning, Mr. Balim,” he said, and dropped backward into the armchair.
“My first impression of your friends,” Balim said, “was a good one.”
“I wanted to talk about that,” Frank said. “About the way we handle Lew Brady.”
“Handle?”
“He wasn’t the first fella I called,” Frank said. “To tell the truth, he wasn’t even the tenth.”
“Oh, no?”
Frank scratched his head with a rasping sound. “I don’t know what’s happening to everybody. People I know, they’re all dead or disappeared or retired. Retired—can you figure that?”
“People get older,” Balim suggested.
“Those guys? Dan Davis? Rusty Kirsch? Bruno Mannfelder?” Shaking his head, Frank said, “More and more, they’re all getting like Roger Timmins.”
The reference to their previous pilot made Balim’s eyebrows rise. He said, “How did Mr. Timmins take it?”
“Badly. Complained. Anyway, the point is, I finally got Lew, and at least he isn’t over the hill or gone to drink or retired or dead.”
“But?”
“But we gotta handle him,” Frank said. “The thing is, Lew’s what you call an idealist.”