“A bright girl,” Chase said. “Very good at her job, I believe.”
“I was impressed by her.”
“One of your liberated women, I understand,” Chase went on. “Sexually, if you know what I mean.”
Feigning mere polite interest, heart suddenly beating, the memory of Patricia’s mention of the Swede and the hotel shower suddenly engorged in his head, Sir Denis said, “Oh, really?”
“I’m told she’s quite the bedroom acrobat. I wouldn’t know, myself.”
“You surprise me,” Sir Denis said, heartily hating him.
“I don’t shit where I eat.”
The crudity of the phrase, mixing with the overstimulation of the subject matter, shut Sir Denis down completely, gave him no response at all, and made him unready for Chase’s abrupt change of subject:
“Grossbarger says you’ll talk for him.”
“Well—Yes, I suppose so.”
“You work a lot of sides of the street, eh?”
Sir Denis wanted to slap that knowing smile right off Chase’s mouth. “Not at all,” he said.
“You work for the Coffee Board, you negotiate with the Brazilians for the benefit of Grossbarger and with Grossbarger for the benefit of the Brazilians, you negotiate with us for both of them, and now you’re the go-between on a private arrangement between Grossbarger and me. I call that more than one side of the street.”
“I don’t,” Sir Denis said with utmost stiffness. “I have no personal stake in this matter at all.”
“You aren’t here for your health,” Chase snapped. He seemed angry, that subterranean violence threatening to surface again, as though Sir Denis in insisting on his own legitimacy somehow threatened that of Chase.
Sir Denis explained, “I am here representing the International Coffee Board. I am their employee, and they are the only ones who will pay me any money as a result of this transaction.”
“My, our skirts are clean.”
“I don’t know about yours,” Sir Denis said, “but mine certainly are.” And he was fully aware just how ludicrous it was to engage in this sort of silly contretemps in the middle of this lush flower-filled tame jungle, surrounded by birdsong, watched over by the sun-glinting windows of the pink building.
But perhaps the argument was over. Sir Denis’s last protestation might have done the trick; Chase now looked at him in a brooding way, as though considering the possible truth of what he’d been told. Tentatively, he said, “You transmit bribes.”
“Of course I do.” Sir Denis added, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if, before this transaction is done, I’ll be transmitting you a bribe.”
Chase ignored that deliberate insult; when involved in contemplation of his own advantage, Chase was clearly capable of ignoring any and all extraneous provocations. He said, “If your skirts are so clean—”
“Oh, come,” Sir Denis said, truly weary of this line of argument. “Just because a lot of naive American congressmen can’t accommodate themselves to the reality of this world doesn’t mean I have to be lectured on bribery by the likes of you.”
“American—” Chase seemed honestly bewildered by the reference, then abruptly laughed and said, “Oh, the Lockheed business. Yes, I catch your drift.”
“I would not bribe you to kill a man,” Sir Denis said, “that goes without saying. Nor to commit armed robbery.”
“Pity,” Chase murmured.
“But there are many parts of the world,” Sir Denis went on, “and I believe this is one of them, where the individuals in the pipeline must be given separate acknowledgment of their existence and importance.”
“Oh, well said!” cried Chase, laughing out loud, obviously delighted, holding no grudges at all.
Trying to get the discussion back on a rational and emotion-free track, Sir Denis said, “Emil Grossbarger suggested to me that it wasn’t a bribe you were after.”
“He did, did he? What did he suggest I was after?”
“He didn’t know.”
The two men strolled along the winding paths, the soft earth humped with the twisted dark shapes of exposed roots. There was barbed wire around the pink building; how odd.
Sir Denis kept expecting Chase to continue, to say what it was he wanted from Emil Grossbarger, but Chase had all at once fallen into a kind of blue funk. Sir Denis glanced from time to time at the man’s profile, but he remained deep in thought. From the unusual gauntness of his face, he was sucking on or biting his cheeks.
At last, at a junction of two paths, Chase said, “Well, I suppose we ought to go back. Dinner won’t be long.”
“But—Emil Grossbarger?”
Chase gave him a blank, meaningless smile. “We’ll talk again later,” he said.
The Presidential Lodge was a magpie’s nest, a pack rat’s lair. It was as though Idi Amin were on the mailing list of every gimcrack mail-order supply house in the world. Two wall barometers in one room. Fine Arab tapestries shared wall space with prints of ducks in flight. The furniture was of all styles, all gradations of taste, and there was far too much of it. A large avocado-colored refrigerator stood absurdly in a corner of the formal dining room; from time to time a white-coated waiter brought from it for the assembled guests beer or ice water or white wine.
Idi Amin sat at the head of the table, smiling, expansive, heavy, seeming to be performing some African touring company version of Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
In addition to Sir Denis, at Amin’s right hand, there were nearly a dozen other guests, including Patricia Kamin diagonally across the way, Baron Chase toward the other end of the table, and at Amin’s left the wife Sir Denis had not exactly met the last time he’d been in Uganda. Nor did he exactly meet her this time; though she smiled politely at him when they all went in to dinner, Amin never did introduce her.
The others present included a very nervous middle-aged American white couple, owners of a small air-charter service based at Entebbe and apparently dependent now for their livelihood not on the long-gone tourists but on the scraps from the government table. There was also another of Amin’s white advisers, an Englishman named Bob Astles with a brushy moustache and a hearty beefeater manner; he was apparently a bit closer to the Amin ear than was Baron Chase; at least he was at dinner, being just beyond the unnamed wife and just before Patricia Kamin.
To Sir Denis’s right was a German woman, Hilda Becker, who represented the German manufacturer that had recently delivered several new diesel engines to Kenya Railways; apparently Amin was negotiating with her for similar diesels for Uganda Railways, which unlike the rest of the rail lines of Africa was still run almost exclusively by steam.
Sir Denis would have liked to talk with the German woman, but Amin monopolized him throughout dinner. Gone was the nonsense of translated Swahili; Amin spoke a good and colloquial English, though with quite a pronounced accent: “But the Brazilians will be happy,” for instance, came out “But-a dah Brah-zilians will-ah be hop-pee.” In that slow heavy voice from deep within that barrel chest, with the words forming one by one like bricks and linked by extra syllables, there was an impression of great power, surprisingly lightened by Amin’s laugh and his clear appreciation of the ridiculous. It was as though Henry Kissinger at his most ponderous had been crossed with Muhammad Ali at his most butterfly-and-bee.
Unfortunately, the ponderous side was much more evident than the playful. Sir Denis, to his astonishment, midway through the meal found himself the one-man audience to an Idi Amin lecture on hygiene. “Dis-ah continent,” Amin told him, leaning toward him, lifting one finger from the table to emphasize the point, “dis-ah continent is not ah good place to be dirty. No, is not. You got-ah dah”—and he held thumb and forefinger close together to emphasize their smallness—“bugs. Not like-ah Europe. It’s a cold-ah country, you see. Europe is a cold-ah country. Not-ah so good for dah bugs.” Then he laughed, the hearty boom, and said, “Not-ah so good for dah people, needer.”