While Lew thought this out, Amarda Jhosi continued to study him, her expression gradually growing less certain until she said, “Didn’t you know? Did you truly not know?”
“I suppose I should have guessed.” Sighing, Lew took his napkin from his lap and dropped it on the table beside his cup and plate. “Thank you, Pandit,” he said, getting to his feet. “I appreciated the tea, and the conversation.”
Pandit stared at him, wide-eyed. “But where are you going?”
“I’ll wait in the car. Nice to have met you, Miss Jhosi. That’s all right, Pandit, I can find the door. And I promise I won’t steal anything along the way.”
He was reading the Peugeot owner’s manual for the second time, without as yet having learned why the car was called a 504, when the front passenger door opened and Amarda Jhosi slid in, dressed again in her Burberry and rainhat. He looked at her, trying to appear stern to hide his leap of pleasure. “Can I help you?”
“You can accept my apology,” she said. She removed the rainhat and again shook out her hair; a gesture he could grow very fond of.
“Apology accepted,” he said in an offhand manner, as though her apology hadn’t mattered one way or another; punishing her a little.
“I thought I understood things,” she said. “You confused me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Please, don’t be mad at me anymore.”
He had been more or less looking past her, at the rain-streaming side window; now he looked at her and saw that she was trying to be honest with him. She had the vulnerability of someone who has deliberately disarmed herself. As always, Lew’s reaction to such risky vulnerability was to become extremely protective. “I’m not mad,” he said. He touched his fingertips to her hand in her lap; it was wet with rain. “You didn’t have to come out here in the rain to apologize to me.”
She smiled, disarming them both. “I didn’t,” she said. “At least not just to apologize.”
“I get it,” he said, disappointed but not surprised. “You also want to pick my brains.”
She frowned. “Sorry?”
“You want to ask me questions. You want to know what’s going on.”
“That’s right.” Then she shook her head and said, “No. Let me tell you what I thought I knew, and you tell me where I’m wrong.”
“Sure.”
“Some people are stealing a lot of coffee from Uganda, smuggling it into Kenya. They came to Mr. Balim to help them make the coffee seem legitimate again.”
“I’ve been fighting the phrase ‘launder the coffee,’” Lew said. But then, seeing she didn’t understand that Americanism either, he said, “Never mind. Balim isn’t an agent, he’s one of the principals, but you’ve got the general idea. Go on.”
“Mr. Balim came to my grandmother, knowing our financial troubles. I assumed you were one of the thieves.”
“I am, I guess,” Lew said. “But the word thief isn’t quite the right one.”
“Isn’t it stealing?”
“From Idi Amin. Your family used to live in Uganda, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Most of our holdings were there.”
“How old were you when you left?”
“Fifteen.”
“So you can remember the way it was, with Amin.”
“Yes, I—” But then, all at once, her chin was trembling. She blinked and looked away, nodding. He saw her try to speak, but her control was slipping away and she couldn’t do it.
“Hey,” he said, startled and embarrassed. “Hey.” He put an arm around her shoulders, touched her trembling jawline with his other hand, drew her close in, seeing the tears well up in her eyes as he pulled her close, tucking her head in against his shoulder and chest, holding her very tight, letting her sob it out.
She cried for a long time, while he kept trying to find the right thing to say, without success. Finally, sometime after the racking sobs had ended and her body had become merely soft and passive against him, her muffled voice said against his chest, “I’m all right now.”
Reluctantly he eased the pressure of his arms, permitting her to move slightly away and lift her face to look at him. She was so beautiful, and so sorrowful, and so vulnerable, that he couldn’t not kiss her. And her lips were as soft as the lawns of Heaven.
She responded. Her arm slid around his neck; the soft lips opened; the heat of their bodies commingled. He moved his arm, and his hand brushed her full breast, and her arm tightened around his neck. He held the breast, feeling the hardening of nipple through layers of cloth, feeling the warmth of her body, the sweetness of her tongue.
Which of them broke off first he had no idea; they seemed to do it together, at once, as though in response to some outside noise. But his mind had suddenly filled with thoughts of Ellen, of Amarda’s youth, of the idea that he was taking advantage of her emotional condition, of their exposed situation here in the car in the daytime beside the house, and he pulled away from her just as she was pulling away from him.
They stared at one another, wide-eyed. Her softness and warmth were still with him, an invisible blanket warming but frightening him. He whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be,” she said. She grabbed his wrist in her hand, squeezed painfully. “Don’t be,” she repeated, and turned away. Fumbling with the handle, she pushed open the door and hurried away into the rain.
17
The rain poured down, well into its second week; ten days and nights of drenching downpour. The pockmarked face of the lake was muddy, everything on the surface of the planet was saturated and soft, and everywhere you looked was water. The pregnant cloudbanks pressed so low to the ground they gave you a headache just thinking about them.
Frank Lanigan sat in the front of the boat, inside his slicker and rainhat and heavy boots, thinking about his headache. Behind him, Charlie scooped rainwater out of the boat with a coffee can, while at the rear the boat’s owner sat by the outboard motor, steering them toward Uganda.
Uganda. There it was, visible in the downpour, dead ahead. The brow of a dark giant rising up out of the lake. A turd floating in a world of water. A brown-black otter, resting. The Mysterious Island of the ghost stories, where the shipwrecked sailors meet the crazed professor and the living dinosaurs and the things that suck your blood in the night.
Somewhere inside all his steamy cloying clothing Frank had a pint flask full of bourbon. The bourbon might help, but the job of getting to it would hurt far more, so he just sat there, cursing his fate, cursing Africa, cursing the rain, cursing Lew for not having completed this job the first time.
Slowly the broken coast of Uganda came nearer. Behind Frank, playing harmony to his thoughts, the boatman cursed his motor in a slow, almost loving litany, baritone voice and cough of engine blending into a lullaby of discontent within the endless barrage of the rain.
Bwagwe Point passed slowly on the left as they entered Macdonald Bay. Before the long rains this neighborhood had been alive with Ugandan soldiers on antismuggling detail, but in weather like this the smugglers and troops both stayed home. Everybody stays home, Frank thought in angry self-pity, except me.