“Path to the turntable.” He pointed.
Frank looked, and damned if there didn’t seem to be the faint remnant of a path there, leading away from the road. Squinting through rain and trees, shielding his eyes with his hand as though from sun, Frank thought maybe he could see some sort of building back in there. Hard to tell.
“You drove by it,” Charlie said.
Frank understood then that Charlie was getting revenge for his having pointed out their landing spot. “You are a prick,” he said. Getting off the moped, kicking its kickstand harder than necessary, he tromped away on the path toward the perhaps-building, knowing that if he looked back he would see Charlie as happy and guileless as ever. He didn’t look back.
Charlie had been right; this was Maintenance Depot Number 4. The old engine shed was there, a long tall corrugated-iron structure open at the uphill end, big enough to hold a steam locomotive, sagging and rusty now but still intact. Beside it were piled half a dozen sixteen-foot rails, orange with rust. Trees and brush had so overgrown the area that one tree branch grew into the building through a glassless window.
Frank unlimbered two cameras and moved steadily around the area, taking pictures, wiping the lenses, crouching in positions where water could run down the back of his neck, while Charlie strolled through the open end of the engine shed and lolled at his ease in there, amid mounds of rusted metal.
The site was pretty much as described in that memo Chase had sent. Rusted track led down from farther up the hill, bifurcating, one line running straight down into the big empty maw of the engine shed, the other angling away to the right and leading to the old turntable. As to this track and turntable, all of which was frozen with rust, there was both good news and bad news. The good news was that the old switch was rusted in position to run a train toward the turntable rather than toward the engine shed, which was what they would want, but the bad news was that the turntable had been left positioned at an angle to the line of track. It was going to be a bitch to get that ancient rusty turntable unstuck and lined up with the track.
Oh, well; Frank took his pictures and kept going. Beyond the turntable, the track continued another twenty feet, almost to the dropoff; a sudden unexpected cliff, that was, with forest growth right to the edge and a nearly hundred-foot drop down into Thruston Bay, whose boulder-strewn shoreline looked in the rain like something from a gothic novel.
Frank next retraced his steps, past the turntable and the engine shed and the dozing Charlie and on along the line of track up the hill. Bushes and trees, some of them sizable, grew up between the rails all along the way. Then, abruptly, the rails stopped. The dismantled connecting plates lay on the ground to one side, and there was not even a hint anymore of where the old rails and sleepers had once lain. “Damn rain,” Frank said, squinting, trying to see through the wall of foliage in front of himself, but there was nothing to see except greenery and water.
He got really wet shoving through that batch of growth between the old spur and the main rail line. He struggled through, kicking and punching, elbowing the tree branches, and all at once he popped out onto the single-track main line of Uganda Railways, the well-used rails wetly gleaming, reflecting the gray-white sky. Standing between the rails, Frank took more pictures, and observed with satisfaction that absolutely nothing of Maintenance Depot Number 4 could be seen from here.
The wet steel sleepers made slightly iffy footing as he tramped away eastward to where the level crossing still existed—though unrepaired—for the old access road. Up there to the left was where Lew had been grabbed by the State Research Bureau. Frank gave a dark glower in that direction; if it hadn’t been for those bastards, Lew would have done the job then and there. Now they couldn’t risk Lew’s getting picked up a second time, so it was Frank who had to slog around in the rain, the faithful Charlie at his side (at Mr. Balim’s order). And Lew was back in Kisumu, taking over more and more of Frank’s regular job.
What the hell; he was here, and the job was done. Now all he had to do was go back to the engine shed, collect Charlie, and return to the boat. He started down the access road, stowing the cameras away in their canvas bag, and a sudden thought made him stop, lifting his head.
What if he didn’t go back for Charlie? The son of a bitch would survive—this was his turf—but he’d be out of Frank’s hair for a while, and maybe even permanently. And if he got back without the moped, that’d be a mark against him with Mr. Balim.
Frank could say he’d looked all over for Charlie, had shouted his name, but Charlie must have been somewhere asleep. Finally, afraid the boatman wouldn’t wait any longer, he’d had to leave. (He would walk the moped the first mile, so the roar of its engine wouldn’t alert Charlie to what was happening.)
Feeling like a kid playing hooky, excited and guilty and expecting to be caught at any second, Frank continued down the road. After he’d taken a few steps, exhilaration (and bourbon) rose up in him so strongly that he broke into a shambling downhill run.
It’s a good thing he ran; there was only one moped there, at the start of the path.
The son of a bitch! The dirty unreliable bastard! Of course he was doing the same thing, and there wasn’t a way on Earth to prove it. Frank could hear no engine sound, so Charlie was walking the moped the first mile, exactly as Frank had planned. If Frank tried to sneak up on him by walking his own moped, he’d never overtake the rat, but if he started his own engine, Charlie would hear it, would immediately start his, and would come tearing back with some innocent bullshit story about flower picking or something.
It wasn’t fair. “Shit,” Frank said, and started the moped, and bumpity-dumpityed away toward the lake.
18
The slide show of Frank’s trip to Uganda took place in a smallish storeroom in Mr. Balim’s second building. A number of sewing machines and shoe cartons and lounging employees having been removed, and a few folding chairs having been introduced, Isaac set up the projector and screen and took charge of the room lights, while Frank ran the show.
The audience was small and intent. Lew and Ellen and Balim and Young Mr. Balim and Isaac sat watching the screen as Frank flashed slide after slide, describing each picture in turn. Lew and Isaac held pads and pencils and made occasional notes.
“This is the bay, coming in. Tough to see with the damn rain, but there’s no villages or houses right down by the water. All forest, thick growth.
“This is the landfall. It’s mud up to your ass. Even if we go in two or three weeks after the rains stop, it’s still gonna be like that. We’ll have to bring enough planks to build a house or we’ll never load the boats.
“You can see the road is clear. A lot of brush and shit, but we’ll have big trucks.
“It’s nineteen-point-four miles from lake to depot. I took pictures along the way to show how it was. Maybe too many pictures.”
Balim: “No, no, Frank, this is very good. We’ll want to see as much as we can, as though we’d been there ourselves.”
Young Mr. Balim: “As Von Clausewitz said, the map is not the terrain.”
Lew took his eyes off the screen, turned his head, and gazed at Young Mr. Balim. Von Clausewitz? Young Mr. Balim was smiling at Ellen’s profile. He switched his smile to Lew, so Lew looked back at yet another blown-up slide of a forest trail in a drenching rain.
“This is about the steepest incline we hit. It never gets worse than maybe one in ten, one in nine. The trucks’ll go down full and come back up empty, so there shouldn’t be any trouble.