“Fella named Val, uh, dammit, Val—”
Then she got it. “Deez?”
“Dietz! That’s it, Val Dietz.”
“What did old Val have to say for himself?” Ellen asked, wondering why Lew would use such a roundabout way to get in touch with her. Did he think she was mad at him or something?
“He’s gone on to Uganda now,” Frank said, being as casual as a fanfare of trumpets.
“Uganda? He’s here?”
“Right. He says he hopes to get to Entebbe sometime in the next twenty-four hours, maybe he can buy you a drink.”
“I’d—” She gripped the receiver with both hands, turning her back on the glass door. “I’d be delighted. I hope he shows up.”
“Oh, he’s a reliable fellow,” Frank said. “Nice to talk with you, Ellen.”
“You, too, Frank.”
She hung up, but stayed in the booth half a minute until she had her emotions and her facial expressions under control. The coffee had been stolen. Frank was apparently okay. Lew was still in Uganda. He was trying to make his way here. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, and took a deep breath, and went out of the booth to the lobby, where she saw the night clerk avidly watching something going on outside.
The view out the glass front doors was across an empty parking lot toward the main terminal building. Signs just before the parking lot pointed toward the botanical garden and zoo down on the lakeshore. In the parking lot, under a floodlight on a tall pole, four black men were wrestling with a white man.
Lew! she thought, but as she stepped closer to the lobby doors she recognized the white man as the middle-aged American pilot named Mike. He ran Uganda Skytours; he had brought her here just the other day. Yes, and he’d brought Lew back to Kisumu that time.
And now they were beating him very severely, those four garishly dressed men. Ellen turned to see if the night clerk were phoning the police, but he had turned away and was busily filing a lot of small cards in a metal drawer. She faced front again, to see two black Toyotas pull up to the struggling man, and realized she was watching the secret police make an arrest. The men, with Mike, all piled into the two cars and were driven rapidly away.
Ellen went over to the desk. “You saw that,” she said.
“Oh, you don’t want to see things in Uganda,” he told her, not looking up from his filing. “No, no, nothing to see around here.”
Ellen shook her head. “But… why did they do it? He isn’t anything bad, he’s just a pilot.”
He sneaked her a quick look. “You know him?”
“He flew me here.”
The night clerk studied his filing. “Many young pilots back,” he said, as though he weren’t talking to her at all. “Air Force pilots, come home, thrown out of America.” Slamming the little file drawer in a satisfied manner, he nodded and said, “Uganda Skytours. New owner for that plane tomorrow. Good night.” And he went through into the inner office, shutting the door behind himself.
71
Patricia, crammed into the backseat of the Toyota between two of her captors, slowly rose through the warm comfortable gelatin layers of shock toward the knife-edge pain of reality. Reluctantly she drifted up to that spinning, hopeless, fast-moving world in which she no longer wanted to struggle to stay alive.
But the habit of life, the habit of struggle, was too ingrained. Despite herself, the external world’s signals were still being received; she became aware that they were not on their way to the State Research Bureau but were traveling east instead on Jinja Road. Why was that? She didn’t want to ask the question, she didn’t want to have to think, but her mind insisted, it kept turning the problem over, and even offered a theoretical solution: Whoever did this doesn’t want me where I can reach my friends. They’re taking me to Jinja Barracks.
A vision of men came unbidden into her mind, a room filled with men all smiling at her in a horrible way. They cared nothing about her wit, her elegance; they coveted her beauty only to mangle and destroy it. In the vision they moved closer.
The future was unbearable, but so was the past. Memory plucked at her, the memory of Denis falling dead, taking away with him into that nothingness the brightest and happiest future she had ever known. Leaving her with this instead: abasement, degradation, horror, and at long last death.
The men in the car were talking about her, laughing and telling one another what the soldiers at Jinja Barracks would do to her. Of course she had the strength to hate, but what good was that? There would be no revenge, no escape. She was now nothing but a trinket for boys to play with and break. Let me die, she asked herself, pleading with that active brain to stop its fussing, turn itself off, rescue her the only way that was left.
Could I try to escape, so they’d shoot and kill me?
The man on her right roughly stroked her thigh. “We ought to take some of this ourselves,” he said. “Before they mess it up at Jinja.”
The driver laughed, agreeing. “She won’t look so good tomorrow.”
“Stop somewhere,” the man on her right said, gripping her leg.
“When we’re out of the city,” the driver said.
Let me die. Please.
72
They did open the coffin. Lew hadn’t believed they would, but they did. They took one look at him, and one whiff of him, and slammed the lid so hard it bounced. He heard them jabbering away out there at Bishop Kibudu, and then came the solid thunk of the hearse’s side door being slammed. Lew breathed a sigh of relief, forgetting about the cheese, and then had to hold his breath till the nausea became less acute.
It had been too nice a dinner to throw up, particularly while flat on one’s back in a coffin at a police checkpoint on the Nile. Lew swallowed, and held his breath again, and counted slowly in his mind. When I get to five hundred, he promised himself, I’ll surrender to the police.
The dinner had been at Bishop Kibudu’s insistence. He simply wouldn’t permit Lew to cross his path like this without a celebration. Father Njuguna was sent out into the lanes and byways of Bugembe, returning with a couple-dozen parishioners, evenly divided between men and women, and many of them carrying something for the feast. Chicken three different ways, two sorts of stew, a rice and vegetable dish that seemed both Oriental and wonderful, other vegetables, fruits, even some local cheese.
Cheese. The same sort with which he now shared this stuffy box, but several years younger.
The celebration had taken place in the church basement, near Lew’s coffin. A lot of beer had been brought along, but he drank sparingly of that. The beer he’d downed all day at the depot had mostly worn off by now, which was just as well.
All in all, it was a very nice celebration, even if rather hurried. Hymns were sung, other rescues and deliverances from Ugandan officialdom were recounted, and one of the men present gave a progress report on the new church, which was not actually a church at all but a small concrete-block storehouse behind a furniture factory. Idi Amin’s religious persecutions had reached the level where it was dangerous to attend Christian services, so this church here, of which Bishop Kibudu was so proud, would remain at least for now a symbolic empty shell; within the month the bishop and his congregation would have transferred to their new secret quarters at the furniture factory. “There are many secret churches now,” one of the few English-speaking parishioners explained to Lew. “It is the only way, in Uganda, we can keep in touch with God.”
After the meal and the singing, Lew was fitted for his coffin. His legs and torso were wrapped around in a white sheet, and then three of the men lifted him up and laid him ever so gently on the pink quilting; which turned out to be a lot thinner than it looked and which was tacked onto extremely hard and uncomfortable wood. (The customary occupant, of course, wouldn’t be expected to complain.)