“Sir, I can only tell you this is a mistake. I have no—”
“You refuse to write the paper?”
There was nothing to say. Lew looked at the angry thick face of Major Minawa until one of the prowling men came over and stood in front of him, blocking Minawa from sight. The man calmly rapped his knuckles hard on top of Lew’s head. Lew winced but made no other move. The man rapped again, harder, and when Lew still showed no reaction he became enraged and pounded his fist down onto Lew’s head the way Minawa had just a moment ago pounded the table top. Pain jolted through Lew’s head, spread behind his eyes, swelled in all the muscles of his neck. If the man did that again, he would surely cause damage. Lew unclenched his hands from around his knees, preparing to kick, but Minawa said something in Nubian and the other man made a disgusted sound, slapped Lew across the face in a halfhearted way, and moved to the side.
Minawa said, “You will write the paper.”
“I would if I could, Major,” Lew told him, “but there’s nothing for me to say.”
The man on the sofa said, “Kalasi?”
“No,” said Minawa. “Not yet.” To Lew he said, “Stand up.” Lew did so, and Minawa said, “Come over here. Open your pants. Put your cock on the table.”
Lew stared at him. “Do what?”
Both prowling men now rushed over to hit and kick at him until he did as he’d been ordered. He stood there, humiliated, in pain, trousers open and penis a tiny helpless fish on the edge of the table, and he felt a fear very unlike the fear of death.
Minawa picked up a rusty—no, bloodstained—bayonet from the clutter on the table. He tapped it gently on the table near Lew’s shrinking member. He said, “You will write the paper.”
“Major,” Lew said, his mouth and throat completely dry, “Major, I’d write anything you wanted me to write. You know that. But if you say put down names of contacts in Uganda, I’ll have to make them up. There are no contacts in Uganda.”
Everyone in the room waited to see if Minawa would become angry. Minawa himself seemed to wait with the same sense of suspense. Finally he nodded and put down the bayonet and said, “The names are more important. You’ll give them to me later. You think you won’t, but you will.”
Laughing softly, the man on the sofa said, “You’ll tell us the thousand names of God. You’ll beg us to listen.”
“Close your trousers,” Minawa said, expressing contempt, as though Lew had been guilty of a social breach. Then he spoke in Nubian.
The two men who’d brought Lew in here got up from the sofa, one of them gesturing for Lew to go to the door. Lew turned, and found the man who’d hit him on the head standing there, blocking his way. Smiling at him, the man lifted his hand and extended his pinky with the long fingernail toward Lew’s left eye. The tip of the nail nearly touched the eyeball. Lew looked at him, unblinking, thinking, If you put that in my eye, I’ll rip your Adam’s apple out before they can stop me.
The man’s smile faltered, as though he found himself less funny than he’d expected. Or as if he’d seen something he didn’t like in Lew’s expression. He lowered the hand and spoke in Nubian past Lew to Minawa. They all laughed, which gave the man back his self-confidence; grinning, he stepped to one side and gestured elaborately for Lew to exit.
There was singing some distance ahead, a hymn being sung by many voices. Lew and his guards descended several flights of stairs, down into the earth under the State Research Bureau building, and the ragged but determined chorus of male voices grew steadily louder. The melody was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” but the words were Swahili.
Sunlight was far away now, the corridors and stairwells lit by harsh fluorescents too widely separated, so that the areas of glare led to pockets of shadow. The floors and walls were stained as though rivers of blood had flowed through here, and afterward had been imperfectly cleaned. Under Lew’s shoeless feet the steps were cold.
And then they reached a closed metal door with a ventilator opening near the top; it was from behind there that the singing came.
A soldier with a machine pistol had been sitting on a wooden stool beside the door. Lew’s escort spoke to him, and he stood, putting the machine pistol on the stool while he unlocked the door. At the sounds of the unlocking the singing within faded away into an expectant, perhaps horrified, silence.
The soldier pulled open the door, and a most incredible stench poured out, with the force of a physical punch to the stomach. A compound of rot, of human feces, of blood, of filthy unwashed bodies and filthy clothing, of urine and spoilage and death and fear. Lew stepped back against the opposite wall, appalled, and his two escorts laughed at him.
At first the interior was merely a sort of writhing darkness, the mouth and throat of some hideous monster exhaling that stench, but then the soldier hit a light switch beside the doorway and a fluorescent ceiling light came on in there, and the look of the place was even worse than the smell.
When the Yugoslavs had constructed this building for the Ugandan government, they’d included a tunnel leading from its basement to Amin’s Lodge, so he would have an escape route if ever he were besieged on his hilltop, and so he could in privacy come from the Lodge to the State Research Bureau to participate in the torture and murder here. (He liked, while wearing a gas mask, to club people to death with the butts of two pistols.) But the tunnel had turned out not to be the most practical route between the buildings, so the Lodge end had been sealed off and now the tunnel was used as a kind of holding pen for Research Bureau victims.
The tunnel was six feet high and five feet wide, and full of men. They were all black; some were half-naked; some wore rags and the torn remnants of clothing; all were barefoot. There were over a hundred in there, sitting or crouching on the floor, their backs against the wall, receding into the semidarkness beyond the fluorescent’s reach. Many of them were bloodstained, many had fresh wounds on their heads or chests or arms, and all of them blinked and moved in the sudden light, slack-jawed and moronic-looking.
A man near the door chattered in a fast panicky Swahili at the soldier, while pointing at someone or something farther back in the tunnel—perhaps the rusty trash barrel in the middle of the floor there.
No, it was about one of the other prisoners. The soldier replied, and there was a brief discussion, during which Lew adjusted his mind to this horror and gave his guards no more reason to laugh. Then two of the men in there stood up, picked up another man by the ankles and arms and, crouching under the low ceiling, carried him out and laid him on the floor in the corridor. He was dead. At some time recently, the hinge of his jaw had been broken and left unattended; the jagged-edged protrusion of white bone, blood-smeared, just under his ear, was as vivid as a scream against his black skin.
Lew was pushed forward. He crossed the threshold and stood there under the fluorescent, looking at the astonishment on all those faces as they stared back: a white man, in their Hell. Then the door clanged shut and the light went out.
In the dark he could hear them murmuring around him. The smell in here was violent in its intensity, and made more so by the darkness; it made him want to vomit, but at the same time was so thoroughly foul that it dried his mouth and throat and made vomiting impossible.
Lew wasn’t quite sure what to do—if he took a step, he’d probably walk on somebody—but then a hand touched his shin and a voice low to his right said, “Sit here. There’s room.”