“Oh, yes?”
“He don’t think he is,” Frank explained. “He thinks he’s a mercenary, like anybody else. But when the chips are down, he likes the idea he’s doing some good in this world.”
“I see.”
“So when you talk to him,” Frank suggested, “try to push the political side a little bit, see what I mean? How what we’re really doing is give Amin one in the eye. He’ll go for that.”
“Ah,” said Balim. His smile turned sadly downward. “I’ll tell you the best thing, Frank. You have your friend Lew talk to Isaac.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Absolutely,” Balim said. It was the saddest smile in the world. “Every man has his purpose.”
8
In London, Sir Denis stayed at the Inn On the Park, which actually stood a short block away from Hyde Park, though it was true that, while eating breakfast by the window in his high-floor room, he could look over the tops of the intervening buildings to see the broad green vista of the park, with the Serpentine, the equestrians along Rotten Row, the short fat Arab women in their black shrouds of cheap cloth and their black plastic domino masks, and the stripped corpselike mammoth logs of the ancient elms stricken by blight and cut down in a panicky effort to save the remaining healthy trees.
After breakfast, Sir Denis walked through the Grosvenor domain, past the American Embassy at Grosvenor Square, and over to the Coffee Board headquarters on Warren Street, just south of Oxford Street. The two men he met there were named Bennett and Cleveland, and the discussion centered on the character and prospects of Idi Amin.
“You’ve seen him,” Bennett said. “What’s your reading?”
“An erratic man,” Sir Denis said. “I don’t doubt he could be dangerous.”
“He has already been dangerous,” Cleveland said drily.
Bennett said, “Did you talk much while you were there with a chap named Onorga?”
“From the Uganda Coffee Commission,” Sir Denis said. “Yes, he met me at the airport. A dour fellow.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Nothing. He barely opened his mouth.”
Bennett and Cleveland looked meaningfully at one another. Cleveland said, “Puts paid to Onorga, if you ask me.”
Sir Denis frowned from one to the other, then concentrated on Bennett, the more serious of the two. “What’s wrong?”
“Onorga was our man on the scene.”
Sir Denis was astonished. “But he didn’t say a word!”
“Afraid to,” Cleveland suggested. “Knew they were onto him.”
Sir Denis said, “Why do you think there’s trouble?”
“He hasn’t radioed,” Bennett said, “since you left Kampala.”
Sir Denis knew that somewhere within this building was assembled a highly complex and expensive communications system, but he had never concerned himself with its function. It was true that coffee was grown on almost every continent and consumed in every nation, and it was also true that a vast amount of money changed hands over coffee. (Last year the United States alone had paid over two and a half billion dollars for the coffee it had imported.)
The International Coffee Board controlled not the product itself but its movement through the commodity markets in the financial centers of the world. Sir Denis was a part of the overt expression of that control. He had always been aware that a covert section also existed, but he preferred to know little or nothing about it and to believe that under normal circumstances it was neither needed nor employed.
But here it was, and gloomy little Mr. Onorga was a part of it. Sir Denis said, “You think he was fired?”
“We think he’s dead,” Bennett said.
“If he’s lucky,” Cleveland added.
“Dead?”
Sir Denis kept waiting for them to laugh, to say they’d been pulling his leg. But Bennett merely shrugged and said, “He was a spy, if you like.”
“An industrial spy, then, at the very worst,” Sir Denis said, finding himself becoming indignant. “And not even that, if he was merely reporting to the Board. You don’t kill a man for a thing like that.”
“We don’t,” Cleveland agreed. “Idi Amin does.”
“Have there been inquiries?”
“When the archbishop was murdered two months ago,” Bennett said, “there were any number of inquiries. There are still inquiries. The archbishop was rather a more important man—”
“Prominent,” corrected Cleveland.
“It’s all the same,” Bennett told him, and turned back to Sir Denis. “The answers to the inquiries about the archbishop have been almost flippant in their disregard for facts. If we were to inquire after Onorga, they’d merely laugh at us.”
“Poor devil,” Sir Denis said. “No wonder he seemed so morose. There’s no objection, I hope, to my asking after him myself on my return down there? Merely in a friendly way, asking after the fellow I’d met the last time.”
“You may do,” Cleveland said, “if you’re that keen to waste your time.”
Bennett said, “Our problem at the moment is, we do need very much to recruit someone else.”
“Not easy,” Cleveland added, “under the circumstance.”
“Nor kind to the recruit, either,” Sir Denis pointed out. “Always assuming you’re successful.”
“If anyone does take on the job—” Bennett started, and Cleveland interpolated, “—which is unlikely.”
Bennett nodded at him, faintly showing impatience. “Of course,” he said. “But if someone does agree to have a go, he won’t be ignorant of the danger.”
Cleveland laughed. “Hardly,” he said.
Bennett leaned closer to Sir Denis. “Did you meet anyone else there? Anyone who might be useful?”
“I met very few of the locals. Principally Onorga, in fact.”
Cleveland said, “When you go back, you might just keep an eye out.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Given a head of government as unstable as Idi Amin,” Bennett said, “we would feel very much more content had we a listening post on the ground.”
“I can see that,” Sir Denis said. “I’ll do what I can.”
For the rest of the meeting they discussed the changed circumstances of the sale, now that Uganda was demanding a third down rather than a tenth. The Brazilians were suffering but would find the money, and Sir Denis could report that the Grossbarger group had accepted with fairly good grace their own small increase in the required front money.
“In fact,” Sir Denis said, “I’m having lunch with Emil Grossbarger today.”
“He’s in London?”
“Just for a few days, apparently. So far, he doesn’t seem particularly worried about the deal.”
“Perhaps,” Cleveland said, “he doesn’t yet understand the situation.”
Emil Grossbarger was a large heavy shambling man of nearly eighty, with long unkempt white hair and big-knuckled hands. Arthritis and old age had conspired against him, so that now he had to move with the aid of a walker, but when seated he looked as powerful as he had always been, his meaty shoulders and barrel chest forming the proper base for his large outthrust head. He had a long pointed nose, deep-set pale-blue eyes that glared through unobtrusive gold-rimmed glasses, and a broad sensuous mouth that mirrored his emotions with fluid constant movement, now laughing, now frowning, now snarling as though to bite.
They would lunch together at the club they shared, the Special Services, just behind Harrods. The club was open to present and past members of the intelligence services of the NATO countries and their immediate families. Sir Denis, during his Washington stint in World War II, had been a spy for British Intelligence, learning as much as he could about the discrepancies between what the United States told its allies it meant to do and what it actually meant to do. In the same war, Emil Grossbarger had been of fairly high rank in German Military Intelligence, until he became one of the few plotters in the July 1944 attack on Hitler to escape with his life. He’d made it to Switzerland just ahead of the Gestapo, had become a Swiss citizen shortly after the war, had gone to work for a Swiss bank in its security department—counterintelligence, actually, protecting the identities of depositors—and had soon become a financial force himself. Today he could command almost unlimited funds for whatever prospects attracted his attention.