“Part of it. Do read it again—I’d rather you didn’t take it with you.”
Smiling at all the implications in that, Lew obediently picked the paper up and read it again.
He was partway through the third reading when the inner door opened and Ellen and Frank came out, Ellen laughing at something. “I certainly won’t,” she said to whoever was still inside—presumably Balim—and came toward Lew, bright-eyed, cheerful, saying, “Hi. How you doing?”
“Going for a ride in a car-car,” he told her. “How about you?”
“Going for a ride in a plane-plane.”
“Up up and away,” Frank said, with his carnivore’s grin.
“Have fun,” Lew told them. The smile made his jaw ache.
They left, and Isaac said mildly, “You’re wrinkling that paper.”
The sun was bright on the hood of the little yellow car. Lew drove slowly, squinting behind his sunglasses, keeping an eye on the odometer. Eleven kilometers since the turnoff at Iganga, and counting.
The trip so far had been uneventful. He’d started from Kisumu at two-thirty, after lunch with Isaac Otera, during which Isaac had told him several Idi Amin horror stories, including (with some reluctance) the details of his own flight from the country. It was clear to Lew by now that Frank was merely being his usual cynical self when he’d claimed this was no more than a simple civilian robbery. Balim and Otera were both Ugandan exiles, driven from their homes by Amin. Otera was in fact a former government official. What was being planned here was every bit as political as an IRA bank robbery in Belfast.
It had taken nearly two hours on the truck-choked main road to reach the border at Busia. Most of the other traffic had turned off before then, however, and his was the only car visible in either direction when he reached the border, which was officially closed. But the closure primarily affected goods shipments and the nationals of the two countries involved; white tourists with money to spend were not turned away.
Once in Uganda, with the road almost completely to himself, he had taken barely more than an hour to reach Iganga, and eleven kilometers beyond. The afternoon sun was very high and hot in the sky ahead. The fields and forests all around had the brown, attenuated, thinned-out look that all of Africa gets just before the long rains.
Twelve kilometers; this was where Isaac had said the old road would be. Slowing to a crawl, Lew studied the verge beside him. Being in a former British colony, he was driving on the left, in a car with the steering wheel on the right, so he had to look across the shiny hood at the brown grass, the faded weeds, the drooping brush and trees.
Yes? A spot, wide enough for a truck to pass through, where there were no trees. Lew stopped and looked out the left-side window. The cleared swath was plain, though heavily overgrown. It had the vaguely cathedral look of all untended paths dimmed by overarching trees. This was the place.
Before turning, Lew glanced in the rearview mirror: nothing. He looked ahead and saw the glint of sunlight on chrome far away. He shifted back into Park, prepared to wait for the car to pass. Taking a map out from the under-dash compartment to explain why he’d stopped, he opened it and studied the lines and the names.
The car approached swiftly, then more slowly, and Lew had just registered the fact that it was not one car but two—identical new and shiny black Toyotas—when they both abruptly swerved toward him across the road.
He thought they meant to crash him, and ducked instinctively away, but the one Toyota shuddered to a stop directly in front while the other passed close on his right and angled to a stop, filling the rearview mirror.
“Oh, I am a goddam fool,” Lew said aloud, and dropped the map. He could drive neither forward nor back. Even if he managed the tight turn into the old abandoned road, it would lead nowhere, and the Honda Civic wouldn’t take him far along it. And there was no point in getting out to run.
Men were piling out of both Toyotas. They wore extremely dark sunglasses, garish shirts, bell-bottom slacks, platform shoes. Spreading out, they approached the car.
10
Ellen liked Mazar Balim more and more. Unlike his son, unlike Frank Lanigan, unlike most of the men she’d met, he wasn’t interested in going to bed with her. But at the same time he clearly did like her, and she was happy to respond to that.
The meeting went this way: Frank said, “Ellen, come along,” and Lew said, “Where?” and Frank said, “To talk with her boss,” and Ellen knew that Lew would sooner or later drive her into a serious reaction against that sort of thing. Seeing Lew avoid her eyes, she knew he knew it, too. And she went into the next office with Frank.
Mazar Balim rose from behind his cluttered desk, in his small, cluttered, air-conditioned office. “Ah, Miss Gillespie,” he said. “Do sit in that chair. It receives the benefit of the cool air without the draft.”
“Thank you,” she said, and sat in the minimal but comfortable green vinyl-covered chair directly in front of the desk, aware of Frank’s dropping backward as though he’d been shot into the battered armchair against the wall.
Balim said, “It is a wonderful thing to me that I have been born in an age where a woman may be beautiful without shame and at the same time useful without shame. You have flown many planes in many strange parts of the world.”
“But never before in Africa,” she said, still smiling at the baroque compliment.
Balim waved his hand. “The air is the same. And now that you are here, let me admit to you boldly that you have been summoned somewhat under false pretenses.”
The smile curdled on Ellen’s lips. She had feared this from the beginning, that the so-called job would turn out to be merely a placebo to satisfy Lew’s demands, that Lew was the only one they really wanted or needed here. And yet the plane did exist, and there had been a previous pilot whom she’d replaced.
“The long rains,” Balim said, “will begin any day now. They tend to be very heavy and almost continuous. Most of the time for the next two months it will not be practical for you to fly my plane.”
“I see.”
“So we must work you very hard from now till the rains begin,” Balim said, with his sweet smile. “And then again we shall work you very hard when the rains come to an end.”
“I’ve flown in bad weather,” Ellen pointed out. “Alaska isn’t sunny all the time.”
Balim smiled. “Still,” he said, “I think you will find our long rains impressive, and you shall fly in them only when absolutely necessary. Now, as to where you shall fly, and for what purpose, let me assure you that I am a much more important and powerful man than I seem.” This was said with such a self-deprecatory grin that Ellen didn’t feel the need for a polite contradiction. Balim went on. “My merchant interests extend across Kenya so far as Mombasa, and also into Tanzania, and from time to time require my personal attention. Frequently I must go to Nairobi or Dar es Salaam or Tanga or even Lindi to deal with customs officials or traders or perhaps customers. Also Frank often must deal with problems at a great remove from here. Finally, there are at times small and delicate shipments which require special handling.”
“He means ivory,” Frank said, grinning, in the periphery of Ellen’s vision.
“I was about to mention ivory,” Balim said, looking faintly nettled. “There is no longer any overt trade in ivory in Kenya,” he explained. “Concerns of a humanitarian and conservationist nature have brought an end to the slaughter of elephants, which we all can only applaud.”
“Mama Ngina,” Frank said, laughing, as though he were deliberately teasing his employer.