“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“Yes, Your Excellency!” Amin mimicked, beginning to give himself over to the pleasure of losing his temper. “Yes, Your Excellency! You saw no train, no accident, no evidence, nothing!”
The yardmaster, now too frightened to reply at all, stood helplessly staring at Amin, and in the silence they all heard the sound: chuff. And again: chuff. Looking up, away from the miserable yardmaster, Amin saw a locomotive through the station window, slowly easing past. “It’s there!” he cried.
“No, Your Excel—”
But Amin had forgotten the yardmaster. Pushing through his entourage, he stepped out onto the sunny platform, where the curious spectators, mostly children, fled in all directions. Big, heavy, glowering, triumphant, jaw sticking out, Amin stepped forward, put his hands on his hips, and glared in sudden bewilderment.
It wasn’t the train. It was just a locomotive and tender, and in any case it was pointing the wrong way: from Jinja. It was a 29 Class, just like the missing Arusha. This one was numbered 2938 and named Samia.
The entourage and the much more reluctant railwaymen came out onto the platform. The Jinja yardmaster said, “Your Excellency, I had this engine sent from Jinja to help us study the track.”
“Very good,” Amin said grudgingly. The man rubbed him the wrong way, that was all. Like all those doctors, professors, lawyers; all those Baganda, Langi, Acholi; all those smooth bastards who thought they were better than the poor Kakwa soldier Idi Amin.
The engineer of Samia had climbed down out of the cab, and now he reported to Amin in great excitement, “Oh, Mr. President, there was nothing! Not a sign, not a trace!”
“The coffee,” Amin said, as though to himself. Slowly he nodded. “My little Baron,” he said, while his entourage looked at one another in confusion. “That’s what he’s up to, he’s stealing my coffee. But how is he doing it?”
Everyone waited respectfully while Amin thought. It would be hours before Chase was brought back from the Rwanda border; by then his scheme, whatever it was, might already be accomplished. Even now, in some unimaginable way, the coffee train could be on some track—some unknown, other, mysterious, incomprehensible, mind-bending track—steaming away out of the country.
“No!” Amin cried, punching the air with his big fist. “They won’t do it! You,” he said, pointing at Samia’s engineer, “turn that thing around.”
The engineer looked dumbstruck. The Jinja yardmaster said, “Your Excellency, there’s no turntable here. But the train can run just as well backward.”
“Then we run it backward,” Amin decided. “Come along,” he said, shooing the engineer in front of himself. “They’re stealing my coffee. We must find them and stop them.”
They ran it backward. They traveled slowly, and Amin stood up on top of the tender, arms akimbo, glaring every which way, looking for signs of where the train had gone and how it had been done.
(If he’d come through half an hour earlier, standing that high atop the tender, he would probably have seen over the hedge the last two cars of his missing train, but by the time Samia passed that place four cars had been dumped into the gorge, the rest of the train had rolled forward among the trees and shrubbery, and there was nothing to be seen.)
Here and there dirt roads crossed the track, some abandoned, some still in use. None showed the slightest indication of any odd activity lately. An antismuggling helicopter was visible at one point, way to the south over the lake, and Amin thought for one mad instant of the train’s being spirited away by helicopters. But thirty helicopters, dangling thirty railway cars, not to mention however many helicopters it would take to lift one of these extremely heavy steam engines? And no one anywhere to see it happening? Not even the Israelis could pull off such a thing.
As Jinja appeared dead ahead with no train in sight, Amin yelled, “Stop! Go back again, go back! It’s somewhere, it’s here somewhere, the clue is somewhere!”
Three members of his entourage were crowded into the cab with the engineer and the fireman. The others had piled into the automobiles to drive along the highway paralleling the rail line, occasionally visible when road and track ran close together. Now, with a great deal of fuss the engine was reversed again, to run frontward, and the automobiling entourage also reversed.
Nothing, nothing, and still nothing. When they traveled in this direction, smoke and steam made it impossible to ride atop the tender, so Amin crowded down into the cab with the rest, where he couldn’t look at both sides of the track at the same time. The frustration, the overcrowding, the blindness on one side; all combined to make him finally yell, “Stop! Stop here!”
They stopped. Amin, with his belief in witchcraft and spirits, was now convinced something from another world had given him this sign, had told him where and when to stop. (The coffee train, however, had been removed from the track three miles farther on.)
What was the clue? What was the thing that made this spot call out to him? Amin tramped up and down the track in front of the sporadically coughing locomotive, glaring at the rails, the spikes, the joint plates, the sleepers, the gravel bed, the narrow dirt trails on both sides, the encroaching jungle growth.
Frustration built and built, and at last he stopped and stamped one booted foot hard on a sleeper. That was good, but not good enough. “I want my coffee!” he bellowed into the empty air. Jumping up high, he crashed both booted feet onto the sleeper; that was better. Doing it again, jumping up and down, waving his clenched fists over his head, Idi Amin roared, “I want my train! I want my coffee! I want my traaaaaaaiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnn!!!!!”
53
Mazar Balim owned radios. Any number of radios: shortwave, commercial band, two-way, any kind you-might want. He sold them at retail in his three stores, in Kisumu and Kericho and Kakamega. He sold them at wholesale out of his five-eighths-blue warehouse buildings on Kisiani Street. And he did not understand why it had not been possible to demand that Bathar take a radio with him.
Oh, he knew the reasons; the traceability of radio signals and all that. But when he paced the rooms of his two buildings, unable to sit still in his office, and when he passed the carton after carton of radios on his storage shelves, it bothered him horribly. It was terrible that he couldn’t reach out to one of these wonderful machines, made in Taiwan or Hong Kong, that he couldn’t switch it on and have Bathar right there, Bathar’s voice reaffirming that he was alive and well, although in Uganda.
If at least Isaac were still here, Balim would have someone to talk with about his anxieties, he wouldn’t have to keep them buried inside. Isaac would be sympathetic, sensible, reassuring. Except, of course, that the sensible, reassuring Isaac was now gadding about Uganda himself, playing at pirate, swashbuckling deep within the borders of a nation where, for him in particular, discovery meant death.
As it did for Bathar. An Asian. A smuggler. A man already expelled from Uganda once.
Perhaps I should let him go to London. Perhaps Africa is no good at all for Asians, no accommodation ever will take place. But that was a hard thought for Balim to accept. Prowling his merchant domain, frightened for his boy, brooding about the past and the future, Balim still felt the weight of his own father upon his shoulders.