“More pirates!” the messenger screamed, and dropped to his knees. “Oh, Mother Mary! Oh, Mother Mary, gaze upon your little child!”
The naval gun barked again, this time the waterspout springing up behind the Angel. Isaac could see more clearly now, and could make out that two ships were in pursuit of the pirates. Small lean fast cutters, they were painted white and festooned with lights. First one fired its gun, then the other.
The fourth shot caught the Angel high on her port side, behind the bridge. Smoke at once billowed up, as though it had been preexisting, imprisoned inside there, and an instant later orange flames peeked through the new breach in the hull.
The two pursuing ships flanked the Angel, repeatedly firing, closing the distance, the guns achieving a practice-range accuracy. Holes and smoke and flame transformed the Angel into a writhing stage set of disaster on the placid lake. Twisting figures showed against the orange flames as they fell or leaped into the water.
While one of the white ships remained close to the Angel, continuing while she died to harry her with shot, the other veered away in a great sweeping circle that brought it at last behind the line of rafts. As it came forward, Isaac saw the flag whipping at its fantaiclass="underline" three horizontal stripes, black and red and green, separated by narrow white bands, and with crossed spears and a Masai shield in the center. The flag of Kenya. The Kenyan Navy. “We’ve been rescued,” Isaac whispered. His breath was a painful rasp in his throat.
The rescuers slowed beside the raft, bathing it with their own searchlight. “Smugglers,” said a bullhorned voice. “You are under arrest. You will proceed with us to landfall at Port Victoria.”
“Thank you, Mother Mary,” the messenger said.
But the other man was indignant. As the Navy ship went on to deliver its message to the other rafts he glared after it, hands on hips. “This is Uganda territory!” he announced. “They can’t arrest us!”
“You must tell them that,” Isaac said, “after we are very safe.”
66
Patricia’s small house on Nakasero Hill was, like Patricia herself, neat and modern and beautifully adorned, and yet impersonal. But Patricia felt herself to be no longer impersonal—Denis had made that change in her—so she could move from this house, which she had loved, without regret.
She had never brought Denis here before, possibly because of an unconscious fear that the house would reveal too much about her true self, but now it was merely a discarded shell, the cocoon of her former person. When she brought him here now, the intent was to be self-revelatory, to show him the emptiness he had filled, the reason for her gratitude.
And also, of course, this was to have been their last night in Kampala. The plan had been that Denis would finish his business with the coffee shipment out of Entebbe sometime today, they would spend tonight here in Patricia’s house, and tomorrow they would fly away forever. But now that the train had broken down there was a very annoying delay; of no longer than one day, certainly, but annoying nevertheless.
Patricia had planned the menu and the evening with great care. Her cook was a Ugandan woman who had spent years in the employ of a wealthy Ugandan Asian family. Those people had taken her with them on their frequent vacations to Europe and had sent her to various cooking courses in France and Switzerland. She was now a culinary artist of sensitivity and skill, who cast a knowing yet still loving eye over the raw materials available to her in Uganda, adapting her sophisticated knowledge to the local fare.
She and Patricia had planned tonight’s dinner together, through the cook’s tears. (She was staying behind in Uganda, with her family; Patricia had given her a farewell bonus that had made her heart stop for just a second. They were truly fond of one another.)
The cook, as her final act in Patricia’s employ, served the meal. Patricia and Denis sat in the small dining room beside the window looking out onto her garden, which was illuminated by small amber spotlights hidden under the eaves; smiling, Patricia said, “This is who we are now.”
Denis poured the gentle Pouilly-Fuissé, and they toasted themselves. Then dinner began, with African avocados, plump and sweet and buttery, with a crayfish filling. The same wine took them through a course of grilled lakefish, the tastes delicate and evanescent, hiding in the firm nonoily meat.
The main course was a lamb curry with many sweet and spicy condiments, and lentils, and string beans as small and thin as a cat’s whiskers, and to go with it a clear Château Montrose Médoc. Dessert was various fruits—mangoes, different kinds of melon, passion fruit, pineapple—with a homemade sorbet, and accompanied by a light dry Zeltinger Moselle.
They lingered for hours over the meal, now alone in the house, and at its end they made love, gently and without urgency.
Later, they went through the house selecting what Patricia would take with her and what leave behind. There were small objects, beautiful in themselves, which she no longer wanted because of the circumstances of their acquisition. She found herself explaining these rejections, and they became a kind of autobiography and confession, an emptying out of the past. Denis stood with her, holding the small things in his hands, listening to her stories, accepting them, erasing them from existence, giving her absolution with his nod and his smile.
The knock at the door, shortly before midnight, was only a minor annoyance and interruption—a servant returning for some forgotten possession, something like that—until Patricia opened it and the four State Research Bureau men came in, angry-looking with their beetle-browed glares, foolish but menacing in their nylon shirts and platform shoes and flare-bottomed pants. “Patricia Kamin,” one of them said.
“You know me,” Patricia answered, and they did. And she knew all four of them, if only by sight. And although she didn’t understand yet what the trouble was, she knew at once it was very serious.
But her first fear was for Denis, who came into the living room holding in his hand a piece of ivory carved to the shape of a rose, with a bit of stem and two very sharp thorns. “May we help you?” he asked, looking coldly at the four men, doing that British thing of showing anger by becoming very correct and polite.
The men ignored him. One of them said to Patricia, “You come with us.”
“She most certainly will not,” Denis said, stepping boldly forward. “Just what do you—”
“Denis!” She was terrified for him; he clearly didn’t understand the thinness of this ice. “Don’t, Denis.”
“I know about this country, Patricia,” he told her. “I’m certainly not going to let you go off with these—”
Two of the men approached to take her arms. Then it moved very quickly. Denis, saying something else, tried to intervene; the man who had spoken to her reached out to push Denis away; Denis lifted the hand with the ivory carving in it; the man grabbed the carving out of his hand, then cried out and dropped it on the floor; he stared in horror at the blood dots in his palm where the thorns had stabbed him. “Poison!” he cried. “You poisoned me!”
“No!” Patricia screamed, and would have thrown herself between them but the other two men gripped her arms tightly; and the man who thought he was poisoned pulled a small pistol from his hip pocket and shot Denis three times in the face.
They then spent five minutes there, twisting Patricia’s arms and pulling her hair to make her tell them the name of the poison and its antidote. “No poison,” she kept saying over and over, not caring what they did or what happened. Whenever they released her head she looked again at poor Denis sprawled on the floor. He had never believed how bad they were. He had never been willing to know just how bad human beings can be, and the unwillingness had finally killed him.