But not Frank. He strode through it all as though the place were in the Arctic. “The offices are back here.”
Frank opened the door and led them into another world, a much more European or American world, with neat office furniture, a Kenya Railways calendar on the wall beside a color photograph of President Jomo Kenyatta, and a crisply proper black man at the desk wearing a dark-gray suit, white shirt, narrow light-gray tie.
Frank made the introductions: “Isaac Otera, Ellen Gillespie, Lew Brady.”
“We met on the phone,” Lew said, shaking the man’s hand.
Isaac Otera looked puzzled for just a second, then vaguely disapproving. “I have never heard that locution before,” he said pedantically. “Is it an Americanism?”
Surprised, Lew said, “I guess it is.”
Frank said, “Isaac’ll fill you in. Ellen, come along.”
“Where?” Lew immediately asked, and just as immediately regretted it. He avoided Ellen’s eyes.
“To talk with her boss,” Frank said. To Ellen he said, “You’ll like it in here. Air conditioning.”
Frank and Ellen disappeared through the inner doorway, and Isaac gestured to the wooden chair beside his desk. “Sit down.”
Lew sat, and Isaac opened his lower-right-hand desk drawer, taking from it a camera—a Cavalier SLR II, made in East Germany—putting it on the desk, saying, “Frank says you are familiar with cameras.”
“I can take a picture. I don’t win prizes.”
“Good.” From the same drawer came a white legal-size envelope. Isaac shook its contents out onto the desktop: a set of keys, several papers. Pushing the items one at a time toward Lew, he said, “There’s a yellow Honda Civic parked in the back, rented from Hertz. Keys, rental contract. You have an international driver’s license?”
“Sure.”
“Good. This is your confirmed reservation for three nights starting tonight at the International Hotel in Kampala.”
“I’m going to Kampala?”
“No.”
From the drawer Isaac now took a road map and opened it to the section he wanted, then placed it on the desk in front of Lew. It was a map of Kenya, but the left quarter—the part Isaac was showing him—also included some of Lake Victoria and some of Uganda and even, at the lower left corner, some of Tanzania. Kenya’s share of the lake frontage was very minor indeed.
“We are here,” Isaac said, touching with his square-nailed fingertip the farthest eastern point on the lake. Not even the lake itself, but an extension from it called Winam Gulf.
Reading the name Kisumu below the fingertip, Lew nodded and said, “Okay.”
The finger moved up across the top of the lake. “Jinja,” Isaac said.
“Wait a second.”
Lew leaned over the map to familiarize himself with at least the basic layout. From Kisumu it was probably seventy to eighty miles north along the shore to the Uganda border at the northeast corner of the lake. Then, turning west and running along the northern coast of the lake, it was perhaps another seventy miles to Jinja, which Isaac had started to point at, and fifty miles beyond that to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, on the shore at the very farthest left extreme of the map. “Okay,” Lew said.
Isaac’s finger again touched Jinja. “Until nineteen thirty-one,” he said, “the railway from the coast terminated here. Then the bridge was built over the Nile.”
Surprised, Lew said, “The Nile?”
“This is the Nile.” Isaac’s finger slid along a slender blue line snaking northward from Jinja, flanked by the red lines of highways, the yellow lines of minor roads, the black lines of railways. “This is where it starts from the lake.”
“The source of the Nile.” Lew found himself grinning. In his years in Africa he’d been all around this territory, but never exactly here. And while he didn’t have Frank’s love of history, he was at least aware of the search for the source of the Nile as having been the great Quest of the nineteenth century, civilized man’s last major trek into the unknown before the turn to space. Explorer after explorer had died or returned broken with disease in the effort to trace the Nile to its source. And now it was merely a spot on a map, called Jinja, with a railroad.
Apparently Isaac was following Lew’s train of thought. Drily he said, “We always knew where it was.”
“You probably should have kept the secret.”
“We tried to.” But pedantry took over again, and Isaac went back to his earlier, humorless manner, saying, “In any event, when the railway crossed the Nile in nineteen thirty-one, it made obsolete some equipment that had been used there earlier when Jinja was the end of the line. Some of that equipment is still in existence. We have a report on it, but so far we have no photos or reliable eyewitnesses.”
“A report? From somebody in Uganda?”
Isaac frowned. He placed his palm on the map, fingers splayed, and looked earnestly at Lew. “Forgive me if I am blunt, Mr. Brady,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“I am not a thief,” Isaac said. “Nor is Mr. Balim. If the purpose of this exercise were to steal cotton from Tanzania or copper from Zaire, I would have nothing to do with it.”
Lew watched him carefully. “What is it, then?”
“A blow against Idi Amin.” A sudden grating quality rasped in Isaac’s voice as he spoke the name, and a hardness came into his face, as though he combined in himself both the flint and the steel.
Lew smiled, suddenly feeling at home. Appearances had been wrong. This man wasn’t an office clerk, he was a partisan!
Misunderstanding the smile, Isaac said, “Not everyone is motivated merely by money.”
“Oh, I know,” Lew agreed. “Believe me, I know that. Frank just led me to—”
“Frank does what he does for his own reasons.”
“He led me to believe those were everybody’s reasons.”
Isaac shrugged. “He can’t be expected to describe what he doesn’t understand.”
“True.”
“But what about you? I’d assumed you were like Frank.”
“I can always make a living,” Lew told him. “I’d rather do something interesting.”
Isaac gave him a long scrutiny. Lew sat unmoving under that gaze, at attention, like a dog being patted by his master’s friend. Finally Isaac smiled and said, “I’m surprised Frank had the wit to select you.” Unfolding a piece of poor-quality, thick typewriter paper and handing it over, he said, “Read this.”
Lew looked at words printed with ball-point pen in a large and somewhat naive hand. Without introduction, without signature, it read:
EAST AFRICAN RAILWAYS MAINTENANCE DEPOT NUMBER 4—IGANGA
AN ENGINE SHED AND TURNTABLE. WATERING FACILITIES USED TO DRAW WATER UP FROM THE GORGE (THRUSTON BAY) VIA AN OLD PETROL ENGINE-DRIVEN PUMP (COVENTRY CLIMAX). ENTIRE FACILITY CHOKED WITH VEGETATION.
TURNTABLE CONSTRUCTED IN THE FORM OF A WOODEN PLATFORM ON A-SHAPE STEEL GIRDER FRAME ROTATING IN A SINGLE-GROOVE TRACK ON LARGE CASTER-TYPE WHEELS. TURNED MANUALLY.
20′ TRACK BEYOND TURNTABLE TOWARD GORGE, SAFETY BUFFER AT END STILL IN PLACE.
ORIGINAL CONNECTING SECTION TO MAIN LINE REMOVED WORLD WAR TWO FOR USE ELSEWHERE ON LINE, DUE TO SHORTAGE OF MATÉRIEL. SPUR TRACK STILL IN PLACE BEGINNING 12′ FROM MAIN LINE. INVISIBLE FROM MAIN LINE DUE TO VEGETATION.
AMPLE SUPPLIES OF RAIL (BUT NO SLEEPERS) PILED UP BESIDE ENGINE SHED.
OLD SERVICE ROAD FROM HIGHWAY STILL PASSABLE FOR 4-WHEEL-DRIVE VEHICLES. RUNS TO LAKE.
Lew finished, nodded, and put the sheet of paper on the desk. “That’s the report from inside Uganda.”