Windows were in two walls, lightly curtained. Pointing, Frank said, “East and north.”
“So you get the morning sun.”
“But not too much.”
Rush rugs partly covered the gleaming floor. There was no closet, but in a large old armoire hung his bush jackets and trousers, all laundered to a fare-thee-well. The small bathroom, seen through a partly open door, was less attractive than the rest but had been so thickly painted with white enamel and so determinedly scrubbed so often that it too managed a look of Spartan simplicity and dignity. An air conditioner, not turned on, was built into the wall below one of the north-facing windows. “Do you use that much?”
“Only when I work up a sweat.”
Wrong technique. That was for girls you met in bars. “The house seems nice and cool without it,” she said, nicely and coolly.
“It’s the thick walls. Are you Lew’s exclusive property?”
She laughed, in pleasure and surprise. “Very good!” she said, and actually clapped her hands together when she turned to congratulate him. “That puts me on the defensive!”
He found it impossible to hide his annoyance; maybe he wasn’t even trying. “I just want to know how to behave,” he said. “If Lew owns you, that’s it.”
Something happened now that wasn’t his fault, though it was hard not to hold him responsible, anyway. As so often in a situation like this, without any overt threat from the man, she was reminded of her comparative physical frailty. If he wanted, right now, he could knock her out, he could strangle her, he in fact and in truth could do whatever he wanted with her. She would struggle, of course, but eventually he would win.
Sometime ago she had learned various self-defense measures, just because of the recurrent moments like this, but she doubted they would be much of a surprise to somebody like Frank. So she stood in this room saying no to him, and she would go on saying no to him, but in a far corner of her brain she was afraid of him; she knew it was ultimately his choice whether or not he took her no for an answer.
Neither her expression nor her intentions changed, but in the back of her mind the fear lived, sending out little tendrils through her thoughts like the red lines from a gangrenous wound. “You know who owns me, Frank,” she said, trying neither to show the fear nor to blame him for it. “I own me, the way you own this house. And if I ever decide to give you a tour, I’ll let you know.”
Frank laughed, visibly relaxing. Had she been in danger? “That’s okay, then,” he said. “I’ll be around. And I’ll remind you every once in a while.”
“I’m sure you will,” she said.
She did have a beer after all, with the sandwiches, in the plane, flying over Lake Victoria. The sandwiches, on thick slices of darkish white bread, were like housed salads, the basic ham or chicken engulfed in pepper slices, pieces of cheese, lettuce, tomato, very thin radish slices, bits of herbs. It was messy eating, juice and tomato shreds falling into the paper napkins on their laps, the plane caring for itself in the easy updrafts over the lake. The White Cap beer was pleasantly sharp, dangerously gassy, the perfect accompaniment.
While they ate, Frank told her odd bits from his reading of African history. “The Baganda,” he said, “they’re the main tribe in Uganda, they were the most civilized blacks in Africa before the white men came. They had a king, called the kabaka, and a court, and a whole civilized social structure. But they were already crazy.”
“In what way?”
“When the first Englishman arrived—his name was Speke—he met with a kabaka called Mutesa, and gave him gifts, the way the white men always did. Give you some cloth and beads and shit, and then take your country.”
Ellen laughed, her mouth full of sandwich.
“Anyway,” Frank said, “Speke showed Mutesa the first firearms he ever saw in his life. Mutesa had him shoot some cows. Then Speke gave Mutesa a carbine, and Mutesa—he was on his throne, in court—he gave the carbine to a page and told him to go outside and shoot somebody and let him know how it worked.”
Ellen stared. “You’re making this up.”
Shaking his head, Frank said, “The page went out, Speke heard a bang, the page came back and said it worked just fine, the fellow was lying out there dead.”
Ellen kept trying to read hoax in Frank’s face, but it simply wasn’t there. She said, “But who did he kill?”
“Nobody knows. It didn’t matter. Listen, if you don’t believe me, you look it up. Speke wrote about it in a book. Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.”
“That’s the most awful thing I ever heard.”
“They haven’t changed much since,” Frank said in gloomy satisfaction.
Finished with lunch, Ellen circled low over the lake while Frank dropped the paper bag of their garbage. Then she turned north, toward the lowering dark coast of Uganda.
Flying along, relaxed from the beer and from the successful conclusion of the bedroom scene, she said, “You worked it this way on purpose, didn’t you? Separating Lew and me.”
“Sure,” he said, comfortable and self-assured. “But we really do need both. The man on the ground to look up close at what’s there. And the aerial surveillance to know what the enemy will be able to see when the time comes.”
The enemy. Despite himself, Frank couldn’t help but view this as a military maneuver. Ellen smiled to herself and flew northward while, beside her, Frank studied the charts. “There’s Dagusi Island,” he said, pointing ahead and slightly to the right. “Stay to the right of it; we’ll go over Macdonald Bay. That’s where the road ends.”
Uganda sloped sharply upward from the lake, heavily forested, unlike the brown scrubland along the Kenyan coast. Macdonald Bay was an irregularly shaped pocket of restless water, glinting and glistening.
Frank had dragged up from the rear seats the khaki canvas bag with his cameras, one of which he selected, screwing a lens on. “The road should be somewhere along the left shore,” he said. “It won’t be much; it hasn’t been used for years.”
“Is that it?”
A faint scar of brown scratched westward from the water’s edge, disappearing almost at once into the trees. “Good eyes,” Frank said, looking through the camera’s viewfinder. “Get down on the deck, let’s take a—”
A jet buzzed them, crossing their route from left to right, going very fast. It was all so sudden and so close that Ellen automatically pulled up, then had to retrim, while the afterimage cleared in her brain. A fighter, with camouflage paint. “What was that?”
“MiG,” Frank said, sounding grim but not yet scared. He held the cameras in his lap. “Ugandan Air Force.”
“What’s he doing?” She craned forward to look all over the sky but couldn’t see him.
“Well, we’re in his airspace. Coming back at three-o’clock level.”
Once again the jet whooshed by, this time more slowly, arcing lazily away at the last instant as Frank gave a big hearty wave and smile out his window. In addition to its registration numbers, the plane had a symbol on the side of the fuselage: a flag shape divided diagonally from bottom left to top right. The upper triangle was green, the lower an orangy-red.
“He’s making me nervous,” Ellen said. “I’m going back over the lake.”
But halfway through her turn, the jet appeared again, sailing by. It was so much faster than they were—and couldn’t slow to their speed without risking burnout—that it was hard to get a clear picture, but she had the impression the pilot had waved this time on the way by. For confirmation, the jet waggled its wings once it was out in front, then lifted into the sky, hurrying away, due west.