“But it’s nothing,” the bishop protested. “It’s so very little a thing, a brief drive to Jinja and back. Are you sure there’s nothing more we can do? Drive you on to Entebbe?”
“No, no, I’ll be fine once I’m across that bridge. I don’t want to make fresh trouble for you.”
“Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” the bishop quoted. “And never more so than in Uganda. May your path be easy from here on.”
“Thank you.”
“And may you,” the bishop said, “find no employment for that pistol under your shirt.”
69
Landing being such a delicate operation, Frank handled it himself, running the raft aground with such violence that the man standing at the front of the pile of sacks fell off into the shallow water and sat up muddy and sputtering. “Shit,” Frank commented, pulled the rope that shut down the outboard motors, and looked at Port Victoria.
It had become practically a metropolis. An Army truck to one side apparently contained a generator, to feed a pair of floodlights in which the smoky oil-drum fire looked neurotic and useless. Kenyan Army troops lolled on the ground at their ease, an official Mercedes-Benz was parked in the center of things, a pair of government civil-service types waited with their fat-cat smiles firmly in place, and here came Mr. Balim down to the water’s edge, calling across, “Frank! Where’s Bathar?”
“Shit,” Frank said again. “Be right there!” he called, then turned to Charlie, saying, “You might as well untie Chase now. He isn’t going anywhere.” And to Chase he said, “I’m now going to have a talk with Balim Senior. Any message, you son of a bitch?”
But Chase had nothing to say. He looked toward the lights and people in expressionless silence.
Frank climbed down the wall of sacks, waded through the shallow water to the shore, and said, “Mr. Balim, Lew went back to get him.”
Shock made Balim look like a round-headed hand puppet. “Back? Back where?”
“Your old pal Chase joined the party.” Frank was aware of the civil-service types coming this way, and hurried through his story. “He bushwacked Young—your son, up at the depot. Knocked him out and left him there. Lew volunteered to go back and get him.”
“In Uganda? They’re both in Uganda?” Balim stared across the water as though he could see them. “How will they—? What will they do?”
“Get to Ellen at Entebbe. That’s Lew’s idea.” As the government men arrived, Frank said, “Lew’s very good, Mr. Balim. He’ll get out. But to help him, I’ve got to get to a phone as soon as I can.”
One of the government men, blandly smiling, said, “Is there a problem?”
“Nothing serious,” Frank told him. “Listen, I just got here, I’m kind of confused. Okay if I talk to my boss privately a minute?”
One of them started to frown, but the other one smiled and said, “But of course. You’d be Mr. Lanigan? Take all the time you need, Mr. Lanigan.”
While the government men went back over to the Mercedes, talking quietly together, and the second raft bunked quietly ashore beside the first, Frank led Balim upslope and off to one side, saying, “Fill me in. What’s going on here?”
“The Kenyan government knew what we were doing,” Balim told him. “They could have stopped us, but they let it happen for their own reasons.”
“They don’t like Amin, either.”
“That would be one of the reasons, I suppose.” Balim glanced away toward the lake, clearly still distracted by thoughts of his son; but then he called himself back, saying, “There’s also money. Less for us, some for those fellows and their friends.”
“Very cute,” Frank said. “We do all the heavy work, they get all the gravy.”
“The very definition of a government,” Balim suggested. “Who were those people attacking you out there?”
“More hanky-panky from Chase. He set us up to be hijacked.”
“I should never have done business with that man,” Balim said. “And please don’t say ‘I told you so.’”
“I’m biting my tongue.”
Balim frowned. “But what’s he doing now?”
Frank turned to look over at the Mercedes, where Chase, looking like the beachcomber in a Maugham story, was in confidential conversation with the two government men, both of whom seemed quite interested. Frank said, “Selling some widows and orphans, I suppose.”
Quietly Balim murmured, “Frank. If Bathar does not come back, would you do me a great service? Would you kill that Baron Chase?”
“My pleasure,” Frank said. “I don’t know why I never did it before.”
70
There were no telephones in the transient aircrews’ quarters at Entebbe. When the word came just before midnight that there was a phone call for her in the lobby, Ellen was seated on her bed reading an Agatha Christie, and was not yet far enough into it to realize she’d read it before. She frowned at the knock on the door, calling out, “What is it?”
“Telephone, missus.” It was the night floorman, who insisted for some reason on calling Ellen “missus.”
Telephone? Unless it was somebody from Coast Global to say they were washing the whole operation—which was not a bad idea—Ellen couldn’t think who might call her here. “Be right out,” she answered, reluctantly put down the paperback, and slipped into her shoes.
The coffee train, of course, had not arrived. The official story was that the train had broken down the other side of Jinja, which was even possibly the truth, but Ellen in her secret smiling heart knew they’d pulled it off. Lew and Frank and all of them, they’d really done it; they’d slipped into Uganda, knocked off that blessed train, and skinned back out again with all that coffee. More power to them. Tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever she finally got out of Uganda, she might make a phone call of her own, a nice circumspect call of congratulations on a job well done.
In the meantime, her own job wasn’t getting done at all. There were confusions about payment, there were conflicting orders as to whether or not the other coffee that actually had arrived via truck from west-central Uganda should be loaded onto the planes, and nobody seemed to know who was in charge or what was supposed to happen. Three of the planes had been loaded, not including Ellen’s, and two of them had taken off, the pilot of one saying to Ellen before departure, “If they won’t pay us, we’ll sell their coffee ourselves.” Anarchy was becoming the rule of the day. Perhaps the Ugandans had also figured that out, because the third full plane was barred from taking off, and the other five members of the fleet continued to stand empty.
The phones were across from the check-in desk, in small booths with windowed doors. “Number three,” the night clerk said, and Ellen went into booth number three, picked up the receiver, and said, “Hello?”
The first voice she heard belonged to a male operator, who wanted to know if she was absolutely and for certain no-fooling Ellen Gillespie. Once she’d convinced him she was, there followed a silence so long she was about to give up and return to Agatha Christie, when all at once Frank’s voice came roaring into her ear: “—from a hole in the ground!”
“Frank?” She believed it, but she didn’t believe it. “Frank, is that you?”
“Ellen? By Christ, have I got through at last?”
She thought, He’s going to say something awful about Lew. “Frank? What’s going on?”
“Lemme give you the message quick,” he said, “before these assholes fuck up again. An old pal of yours from Alaska was just in town, looking for you.”
That made no sense, no sense at all. “Who?”