It was still too sweet, but he was in too much rapture to deny her anything. In this bed tonight she had made him a thirty-year-old, and his aching, quivering, trembling body was in seventh heaven. The combination of gratitude, delight, and lust with which he looked at her could fairly be called love. He drank the wine.
Neither of them was immediately ready for sleep. With the room illuminated only faintly by the bathroom light through the slightly open door, they sat side by side on the bed, backs against the wall, sipping the wine, and she asked him about his work. He told her about Grossbarger and the Brazilians. He told her about his confusing conversations with Baron Chase. He told her more things and then more, and was surprised to hear himself, but still he went on answering her questions, sipping the wine. And when the wine was finished, she said, “Now you sleep.”
“Oh, yes.” He lay flat on the bed, then rolled half over to kiss the inside of her thigh. “Thank you, Patricia,” he said.
“My pleasure.” She ruffled his thin white hair, and very soon he fell asleep.
She was still awake an hour later, when the scratching sounded at the door. He heard it, in the deepest part of his sleeping brain, but didn’t wake up. Nor did he do anything but shift position slightly when she slid out of bed, crossed the room naked, unlocked the door, and opened it for Idi Amin to enter.
He was beaming, grinning from ear to ear. Nodding over at the sleeping man, he whispered in Swahili, “He talked a lot. That’s good.”
“I enjoyed it,” she whispered.
Amin snuffed the musky air. “Lot of fucking going on in here.”
“You know me,” she whispered, grinning.
“Get ready for it,” he said.
She knelt on the floor, legs spread, head and shoulders down, round smooth rump high. Amin opened his trousers and knelt between her ankles and shoved himself into her. Clamping his hands on her buttocks, he moved her back and forth like a machine he was operating. He grunted from time to time, and she moaned into the carpet.
On the bed, Sir Denis slept, frowning, uncomfortable. He dreamed of large dogs eating dark chunks of meat among boulders. They frightened him, and yet he was above them, merely an observer.
In the morning, he awoke alone.
14
The stench never got better. Lew had expected to grow used to it, but every intake of breath brought the same revolting shock, those fumes spreading through the brain with a message of despair: No one in such a place as this should ever hope for comfort or happiness again.
And yet, many of the men in here—perhaps even a majority—seemed not to have abandoned hope entirely. Low-voiced conversations took place; there was the intermittent singing of hymns; now and again there was even an instant of wry laughter. Whenever a man, driven by the imperatives of his body, was forced to use the trash barrel, he invariably apologized for the addition he was now making to the general stink. “We are mostly Christians here,” Bishop Kibudu said by way of explanation, and he meant people who were active and fervent in their religion.
That Idi Amin’s repression, which began as tyranny’s usual weapon of terror against political dissent, ended finally as massive religious persecution was partly an accident of history, partly a result of Amin’s own ignorance, as the Bishop explained. Amin had been put into power in 1971 with the help of the British and the Israelis, neither of whom had any idea what sort of monster they were spawning. All the British knew was that Amin’s predecessor, Milton Obote, appeared to be leaning too far to the left; the Marxist rather than the Labour left. And all the Israelis cared about was the rebellion then going on in southern Sudan, the nation lying between Egypt and Uganda; with a friendly government in Uganda, Israel could give covert assistance to the Sudanese rebellion, thus tying up thousands of Egyptian troops who might otherwise be turned against Israel.
Amin had always been a soldier, caring only for that, with no active interest in religion. He came from the Muslim north of Uganda but had never claimed to be a Muslim. In talking with ministers and priests he had expressed interest in Christianity but had never followed through. When he visited Israel shortly after taking power, he had many nice things to say about Judaism.
But that was also the trip when he asked the Israelis to help him attack the Tanzanian port city of Tanga in order to give his landlocked country a corridor to the Indian Ocean. He also asked for a lot of money, but was vague about how he intended to spend it. And in that same period he asked the British to give him a fleet of jet bombers, explaining he wanted to use them to bomb South Africa.
Just as the British and the Israelis were both saying no to Amin—a bit belatedly—he happened to meet Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, the fool who runs Libya. Gaddafi, a Marxist Muslim, explained to Amin that the Israelis were really Jews, who are no good, and that the British were capitalists, and therefore also no good. He further explained that Libya had millions of dollars in oil wealth, to be spent to advance the cause of radical Islamic Marxism around the world. “But that’s me!” Amin told him, suddenly discovering his deep religious feelings, and he went on to explain to Gaddafi that Uganda was a Muslim nation with only a splinter of Christians left, and that he—Idi Amin Dada himself—had set as his primary task the complete Islamization of his country.
It’s a mark of Gaddafi’s grip on reality that he believed this guff. Uganda in fact is the most thoroughly Christianized nation in Africa, having been the target of European missionaries for nearly a hundred years. In 1972, when Amin was telling Gaddafi that the country was ninety-five percent Muslim and only five percent Christian, it was in truth eighty-five percent Christian, and six percent Muslim. (The final nine percent still clung to the old tribal animist creeds; a favorite rock or tree.)
Gaddafi began to give Idi Amin money; pots of money. And weapons. And a country house for himself and his family in Libya. And whatever else Amin wanted.
And Amin, for his part, began to give Gaddafi results. He turned against Britain and Israel, saying “Hitler was right about the Jews, because the Israelis are not working in the interest of the people of the world, and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas in the soil of Germany.” He banned twenty-nine Christian sects. Entire congregations were arrested, imprisoned, beaten, sometimes murdered en masse. The Salvation Army was banned. White ministers were usually left alone, but black ministers were tortured and killed. Of the five hundred thousand people eventually murdered by Amin’s government with the help of Gaddafi’s money, over half went to their deaths believing themselves to be Christian martyrs.
Bishop Kibudu explained some of this to Lew, as the hours went on. In a place of such horror, calm conversation seemed to help, to keep the brain from exploding. The bishop described the church he and his parishioners had built at Bugembe, a suburb of Jinja. In return, Lew described Alaska to the bishop, who had never been to the Western Hemisphere. The bishop told church anecdotes involving weddings, the visits of foreign clergymen, comical mix-ups at picnics. Lew told cleaned-up mercenary anecdotes: travel on rafts on the Congo River, rifles shipped with the wrong-caliber bullets. And every second of every minute of every hour was intolerable.
And of course there were the lice. The tunnel was filled with lice, living on the wounded bodies, inside the filthy clothing. Lew felt them crawl on him, and at first he fought back, but they came in the thousands, inside his pants, inside his shirt. He scratched when they bit him, but whenever he put his hand under his shirt it was as though his skin were moving. With all his will, he tried to pretend they weren’t there.