“Oh, excellently. They’re Luo, all Luo swim.”
The Bantu smiled when they heard their tribe’s name. Frank smiled back at them, then said, “Charlie, I want one of them to swim back to the next raft. and then to the one after that, and the one after that, and all the way to the last one, where Isaac is. Okay?”
“Much swimming,” Charlie suggested.
“Then he treads water,” Frank said impatiently, “he waits for the raft to catch up. Every raft, he gives them the message. There’s pirates ahead, we should pull up closer together, we’re going around the other side of Sigulu Island.”
“Much longer way,” Charlie pointed out.
“Can’t be helped. Tell him.”
So Charlie picked one of the Bantu and started to tell him the story in that goddam Swahili. While he was still at it, Chase started calling and yelling. “Tell it to him right, so he remembers,” Frank warned the jabbering Charlie, and stomped across the coffee sacks to kick Chase in the head. “Speak when you’re spoken to,” he said.
64
By the light of his pencil flash, Lew studied the dead minister in the bed of the pickup truck. He’d been hit very hard on the head, more than once, and had bled considerably in his transit to a better world. Smears of blood on the metal suggested the assault had probably taken place elsewhere, then the body was thrown in the back and driven here.
Lew turned in a slow circle, playing the narrow beam of light on the road, the tracks, the surrounding trees and undergrowth. There was simply no sign of Young Mr. Balim. Either he was alive and had gone away, or he was dead and some animal had taken the body for dinner. But if the latter, wouldn’t there be drag marks, some indication? There was nothing; only the rattletrap old black pickup parked just shy of the tracks, facing downhill, driver’s door open, and in its bed a dead man in clerical garb.
Driver’s door open, but no interior light showing. Lew went over to the cab, sat sideways in the driver’s seat, found the small bulb in its translucent plastic pocket, and clipped it back in its socket. Weak light gleamed. Lew unclipped the bulb again and stood beside the open door.
He saw now the way Chase had done it. Drive down the access road, stop here; Young Mr. Balim would be down there across the tracks, unable to see anything past the headlights. Then, leaving those lights on as a lure, Chase had slipped out of the pickup—no interior light to give him away—and waited for Young Mr. Balim to come investigate. There should be some sign of it.
Lew bent low to the ground, moving the light in small slow arcs, starting beside the open door and working his way toward the back. It was just beside the rear wheel that he found the bloodstain, still soft to the touch. There wasn’t much of it, and the ground nearby didn’t seem particularly disturbed. Alive, then.
Straightening, he flicked off the pencil flash and waited for his eyes to readjust to darkness, his left hand resting on the pickup’s rusty side panel. Young Mr. Balim had regained consciousness and had wandered off. Where? Though the keys were in the pickup, he hadn’t taken it, neither to chase down to the lake after the rest of them nor to flee in the opposite direction. Had he wandered off and then passed out again?
In addition to everything else, Lew was beginning to feel the weight of time. It was nearly ten o’clock; the train had been hijacked nine hours ago. Sooner or later the Ugandan authorities must find this old depot, on some ancient map or mentioned in some old annual report. Maintenance Depot Number 4—Iganga. When they learned of its existence they would come here in strength, and they wouldn’t wait for daylight to do it.
“If I were Bathar,” Lew muttered to himself, aloud in the darkness, “what would I do?”
Go to the depot. Then run, taking the pickup. But he hadn’t taken the pickup.
Still, the depot would be first. Maybe that’s where he passed out again, or where he just sat down in a funk and abandoned hope.
Lew had left the Army truck just below the level crossing. Now he went back to it, swung aboard, started the engine, switched on the lights, and backed down as far as Ellen’s Road. Then he angled around, turning the wheel as energetically as Frank at his worst, and drove in.
But Bathar wasn’t there. The four last freight cars stood patiently on the spur track, waiting to be the major item of evidence in the coming investigation. Empty beer bottles littered the landscape as though all the softball teams in Chicago had come here together for a picnic. Small animals scuttled away from the light, disturbed from picking through the leftover bits of food. When Lew shut off the engine and stood out on the running board to listen, he could hear the water at the bottom of the cliff gnawing at the rocky shore of Thruston Bay. “Bathar!” he called, four times, once in each cardinal direction, but there was no answer.
Driving back out Ellen’s Road, he went more slowly, studying the undergrowth to left and right. At the access road he stopped again and called Bathar’s name, then turned uphill and went back up to the railway line.
“He’s gone, that’s all.” Wandering in the woods, or trying to make it across Uganda to the border on foot, or unconscious somewhere not far from here, or after all dead.
Lew put Young Mr. Balim out of his mind. He had wasted his time coming back here, had accomplished nothing but to strand himself. Having jumped over the cliff, it was now time to figure out how not to fall.
Young Mr. Balim had chosen not to take the pickup, but Lew would prefer it to the Army truck, which at the moment might call too much attention to itself. Leaving its headlights on to operate by, he crossed the tracks on foot, opened the pickup’s hood, and smeared his face and hands with black engine grease. Then he dragged the dead man out onto the ground and rolled him away from the road, cleaning the grease from his palms on the back of the man’s coat.
The pickup’s engine was reluctant to awaken; it kept coughing and going back to sleep, like a drunk in a doorway. But Lew was patient with it, like a Salvation Army girl, and at last the coughs became continuous, the engine came completely awake, and when Lew let out the clutch, it actually went to work.
He turned around on the level crossing, then headed uphill to the main road, the springless wheels bouncing and pounding on the washboard surface. At the verge of route A109, two lanes of empty silent blacktop in the darkness, he hesitated for just a second.
This was where they’d grabbed him, right here. The memory of the State Research Bureau returned, strong and vivid, every stench, every evil sight of it. He couldn’t go back there; he dared not go back there. They would remember him as clearly as he remembered them, and he knew this time what they would do. They would begin by damaging one or both of his legs, to keep him from going anywhere. They might also remove some of his fingers or possibly just cut off both his hands. Then they’d be ready to begin.
His body ached in anticipation. His wrists burned, feeling the blade. “Damn Bathar,” he muttered.
No. It’s damn Chase, or possibly damn everybody. Or just damn himself for volunteering, for not being able to ignore the image of Mr. Balim hearing the news. It was to avoid being there when Mr. Balim was told that had made him come back into the horror.
“I could be on the raft,” he muttered, “halfway home.” He fought the floor-shift lever into first gear, let out the clutch, and drove out onto A109, turning left, west, toward Jinja and Kampala. “Halfway home,” he repeated.
65
“Rest,” Isaac said.