“You don’t know where my money is?” he said with his gloomy face looking odious.
“No, I don’t.”
“What can I say?” he said coldly, suppressing his ire, shrugging his massive shoulders. “Ten years of eating and fucking with the bugger and you don’t know anything about the most important deal in his career!”
“No, I don’t.”
“I am not going to waste your time,” he said looking outside, the effort of keeping calm almost causing him tears. “Guard, lock her up.”
Ashes walked out and left the guards to lock the woman in the room they used for the detention and interrogation of smugglers. He wished she would shout, call him back, and confess.
In the meantime, Big Bossman became frantic. He reported the abduction of his wife to the State Research Bureau, who did nothing when they found out that it was the boss of the Anti-Smuggling Unit who had her. The same morning, Ashes visited Bossman at his offices on Kampala Road and asked him where his money was. Big Bossman sat behind a huge gleaming bureau with a black telephone and open paper files covering half of it. His large head was as red as ripe coffee berries and his hands were trembling. He was dressed in a grey suit with a blue tie, which he thought gave the impression that he was still in control. The fact that another Englishman, not a Ugandan general, was standing in his office, threatening to crush his dreams to a pulp, troubled him deeply although he did his best to appear calm.
“Be patient, will you? The papers are coming today or tomorrow. As soon as they are here, I will inform you immediately and you will know that I have been telling the truth all along.”
“Your time is up, Alan, or Bossman or whatever they call you,” Ashes declared, standing in front of him and fixing his morose bulldog eyes on him.
“I want my wife back,” his adversary said, his voice almost breaking with emotion.
“She is an accessory to murder and fraud. I have information to show that you and your wife murdered your deputy and made it look like a suicide. There is also information linking you to guerrilla activity. Now, tell me where my money is, and I let both of you get out of the country never to return,” Ashes said softly, menacingly.
“Give me time, but please don’t hurt her,” Bossman pleaded as he realized that things had slipped out of his control.
“I have not touched a hair on her head or groin,” Ashes replied with distaste.
“Give me two days and your money will be here.”
“Deal,” Ashes said coldly, knowing that Bossman was lying to him.
As soon as Ashes left, Bossman contacted General MiG 300, another passionate hater of the man.
“Relax and leave everything to me. This is the easiest assignment you have ever given me,” the man replied.
Bossman gave him one hundred thousand dollars in cash and promised him a big bonus after the mission.
“I am going to do whatever it takes, friend. You know me, when I say everything, I mean including sending a MiG 200 bomber. The plane is just one phone call away. It will strafe the island and a helicopter gunship will then land and fly her away. I have the dollars to bribe everybody concerned twice over.”
Bossman was reassured. How desperately he wanted to hear somebody call him a friend. MiG 300 never issued idle threats or bouncing promises. He had asked for two days. Bossman knew that Ashes would wait because time was all he had. He could not jeopardize his position by doing anything foolish. Two days and his wife would be out of the country.
Ashes, however, acted very swiftly and contrary to Bossman’s expectations. Within hours of leaving Bossman’s office, he accused him of colluding with Tanzania-based dissidents. Using fabricated evidence, he arrested him. By now Ashes could hardly control his rage. Ten million! Added to the fortune in Switzerland, he would have been thirty million to the good. He could not believe that Bossman had expected to get away with the swindle. In Amin’s Uganda! People died for a pancake, a kilo of sugar, for nothing. But ten million dollars!
Big Bossman, still in his grey suit and blue tie and black Clarks, was flown to the island. It was not an enchanted view that greeted his arrival. The air felt too chilly, too loaded with pollen and the noise of parrots. The sight of his wife in a cage pumped him with confusion, impatience for rescue. He could see that she had given nothing away. He felt a massive jolt of relief. Soon MiG 300 would be here, tearing roofs off houses, cutting trees in half, sending the bastards packing. Within hours of rescue, they would be over the border; within days, they would be on a tropical island sipping rum punch.
Bossman had met his wife at a time when a man begins to doubt whether he will ever meet a soul mate. No white woman wanted to accompany him to Uganda. Many thought he was mad even to suggest it. They quaked when they heard of the killings. And Kate came and everything changed. He always prayed that they die would together, and be buried side by side. He could not see himself continuing without her, getting used to another person or spending his last days alone. Ashes might shake them but would not destroy them. The soldiers had put them in the same room, behind the same bars, and left. The Bossmans held, kissed, talked, cried and encouraged each other as the hours ticked away and birds sang, monkeys howled and other animals called. He forced her to eat, in case they had to run or walk long distances after the rescue. They now felt an intimacy only danger and hysteria can generate. Their lives lay scoured to the core. The night together fortified them; they sucked energy from each gesture, loading their souls for the rough ride to freedom.
Ashes appeared early the next morning. He entered the room, sat on a chair, a Havana in his mouth, a whisky in his hand. He looked tired, dishevelled, manic.
“Where is my money? I have given you a whole night to remember the details and put together a credible story.”
Nothing was forthcoming from Mr. and Mrs. Bossman, as the Witherthrushes liked to be called in their days of power, except stubborn silence.
Ashes called the Pounder. The giant man came feeling with his free hand the weight of a metre-long pestle, smooth as an egg. The woman was held down and the man started to work on her feet. Two blows and they were gone. She fainted, frothed, and oozed all over the place. The exercise lasted barely four seconds; it was so fast that Bossman could hardly believe it had occurred. He hardly had time to swallow, cough and speak up. At that moment he knew that his world lay in ruins. Ashes wanted their lives and the money, if possible. He would get one, not both. In another four seconds the woman’s arms were gone. Bossman soiled himself and let out a long tortured wail that would have chilled the blood of less hardened mortals. Ashes barely took notice.
By this time Bossman was kneeling on the ground, hitting his palms on the floor with uncontrolled grief. The speed of his descent from cocky British businessman to dejected, pathetic old man was blinding. He felt angry with himself for having underestimated his fellow Englishman. He had been too confident of the protection of the local British Embassy, who were among his customers; contacts in the British government in London; friendly generals in the Uganda army; his connections in the murky world of business; his reputation as a tough guy who not only faced down dictators but made lesser men cringe and do his will. It was all gone, reduced to straw in the wind by this odious man with the cigar and the large nose.
Ashes looked at his former conspirator reduced to a miserable wretch and drew no satisfaction from the sight. In future I will be more careful, less trusting, he thought angrily. Whoever I do business with, be it a Britisher, American or Greenlander, will have to earn my trust. I will follow them like a shadow. Nobody will have any benefit of the doubt. It struck Ashes that maybe the two had been counting on a rescue. It almost made him laugh. By whom? And how? Short of Amin, who was out of the country, intervening, he saw nobody with the balls to tackle him at all, least of all on home turf. At the end of it all, he realized that he did not care any more what his captives had or had not been planning or expecting.