The rest of them—Isaac and Frank and Lew and all of them—they surely must be out on the lake by now, safely away from Uganda. It had taken him so long to get down here from the level crossing, and they’d already been gone when he’d started or he would have heard and seen the trucks. Long gone. Marooning him, all alone, in this evil place.
He couldn’t think why they would have done it, but at the moment he didn’t even much care. Later—if there was a later—he would give himself over to rage and paranoia and self-pity, but at the moment he was too nervous for that. He had to move, he had to keep in motion or he would break down completely. Terrified, knowing or believing that his very mind was at risk, that if he stopped moving he would have a nervous breakdown and just sit under some tree somewhere gibbering until they came to take him away, knowing or believing that movement was at least therapy if not otherwise useful, he turned about and tottered away from the depot, back out Ellen’s Road.
He found the moped by falling over it again, but this time he switched on its headlight, and the sudden appearance of the world out of blank nothingness was comforting.
Which way? He looked up and down the access road. Down was the lake, but how could they still be there? It would be a dangerous waste of time; he’d simply have to turn around and come back the twenty miles—with who knew how much gas left—and back again past the depot, which by then the Ugandan authorities might very well have found.
The other way? Up at the head of the access road was the main highway; east on that highway was the Kenyan border. People slipped across that border all the time.
Bathar mounted the moped, started the sputtering nasal engine, took a deep breath to calm his nerves, gripped the handlebars to keep his hands from shaking, and drove slowly and waveringly away, uphill.
62
Every person who came into the office, every report that was made, every caller on the telephone, only made Amin’s rage deeper and more implacable. His big body in the heavy chair behind the desk became increasingly still as the afternoon blended into night, his shoulders sloping, his weight pressed solidly onto the chair, his Army-booted feet planted squarely on the floor. Only his hands and eyes moved, the eyes shifting left and right like gun turrets in search of enemies, his hands touching and investigating one another, the blind fingers of his right hand studying the fingers of his left.
The train was gone; that was the long and short of it. Coffee worth three million pounds U.K. had been stolen, and the whole train carrying it had been stolen, and no one could find the slightest trace of it or hint as to where it had gone.
There were theories, naturally, hundreds of theories. The frightened men around Amin spurted theories as if they were Sten guns jammed in firing position; they laid down barrages of theories as covering fire to hide their lack of facts.
There was the theory that perhaps the thieves had also stolen the wagon ferry from Jinja terminal, the large ferry that carried railway cars across the lake to Mwanza in Tanzania, but apart from the fact that the wagon ferry could carry no more than eight cars—and the missing train, apart from its locomotive, had contained thirty-three cars—there was also the fact that the ferry hadn’t been stolen but was still in service.
There was also the theory that the train had actually gone through the Jinja yards after all, with the collusion of the railway employees, and had been diverted onto the northbound branch line toward Mbulamuti. But the entire eighty-some miles of the Mbulamuti branch, with all its spurs, had been searched on the ground and by air to no effect. And the Jinja yardmaster and stationmaster had been tortured for several hours without once changing their stories.
In an alternate theory, the train had never turned west at Tororo at all, but had been spirited across the border there into Kenya. However, extensive questioning with torture of railway employees at Tororo had turned up nothing, nor had torture changed the story of the Iganga stationmaster, who continued to swear that the coffee train had gone through Iganga heading west and had not returned.
All the helicopters of the antismuggling patrol had been brought in from their quadrants over the lake to roam the air instead over the railway line, without finding a thing. The Ugandan Air Force had scrambled, and jets had flashed and swooped here and there through the sky, to no effect. With the arrival of full night, all air activity was stopped, as being pointless.
The people who came into Amin’s presence to tell him all these things were very reluctant to enter the room and even more reluctant to say what they had to say. But Amin was too angry at the missing train to pay attention to fear in the eyes and voices of his underlings. (He was used to a certain amount of that, anyway.) He asked the occasional question in his slow heavy voice, he made the occasional contemptuous dismissal of this or that crackpot theory, but for the most part he merely sat there like the Minotaur in its maze, waiting for food. In this case, the food would be the people responsible for the missing train.
And the missing Chase. Ali Kekka had failed on that, even on that very simple task; bring Chase back to Kampala. He had disappeared again, he and the train.
On one item everyone including Amin was in accord: the train had to be someplace. But that didn’t help much. On the other hand, it did mean they would go on searching; sooner or later the train—and the explanation for its disappearance—would have to be found. It was impossible that the mystery would remain unsolved.
Which brought up a potentially hopeful road of inquiry. The railway was relatively modern, the Nile bridge at Jinja not having been completed until 1931; a mere forty-six years ago. Surely there were men still alive who had worked on that part of the road, and who would remember if there had ever been a previous line, or a no-longer-used branch, or anything at all off the main track that could have accommodated the train. A search was under way for such ex-employees, hampered by the fact that record maintenance had not been a high priority in Uganda in recent years.
Night fell, but Amin did not move. Sandwiches and beer were brought him, which he ate at the desk, masticating slowly, rolling his jaws as though chewing the arms and heads of the guilty parties. The phone rang as he was finishing, and it was an Air Force colonel at Entebbe reporting that all aircraft were now down for the night but would be serviced and refueled and ready to take off again at dawn. A man from the Uganda Coffee Commission came reluctantly into the office, stood quivering before the desk, and reported that the cargo-plane crews waiting at Entebbe and Sir Denis Lambsmith of the International Coffee Board had all been told that the coffee train had broken down east of Jinja but was being repaired now and would arrive at Kampala sometime tomorrow.
Amin looked at the man. “We got to find it first,” he said.
The Coffee Commission man was a reader, a bit better educated than the soldiers Amin preferred around himself. He said, “We must remember what the great English detective Sherlock Holmes, advises. ‘Eliminate the impossible,’ he always said, ‘and whatever is left, however improbable, is the answer.’”
“Sherlock Holmes, huh?” Amin brooded at the Coffee Commission man, not quite annoyed enough to have him tortured and killed. “Eliminate the impossible, huh?” Holding up his left hand, fingers spread, he ticked off the points. “A train can’t go without tracks. A train is too big to hide. A train can’t disappear. The train disappeared. There’s your impossibles.” He pointed a finger like a battering ram at the unfortunate Coffee Commission man. “Now you tell me,” Amin said. “Tell me now. What do we got left?”