“Okay. Here’s the path in to the depot. This could be a problem. It’ll slow us down if we have to carry all that coffee out from the depot to the road, but you can see what it looks like. We won’t get any trucks in there.”
Balim: “Couldn’t we clear the trees, make a road?”
“Clear the trees, sure. But there’s no roadbed there, it’s all erosion and gullies and roots and rocks and more shit than you can think about. You’d have to spend a day in there with a bulldozer.”
Isaac: “That would leave a very visible scar from the air.”
Lew: “How about a corduroy road? Chop down the trees that have to go, and use the logs for a road surface.”
“You’d need too many logs. I paced it out, best as I could, and I make it ninety feet from the depot to the road.”
Lew: “If the footing’s that bad for the trucks, it’ll be even worse for the coolies. Can they carry seventy-pound sacks through there?”
“Like I said, this is where we got a problem.”
Young Mr. Balim: “Frank, there must already be a road in to the depot. That’s what the access road was for.”
“If there ever was, I couldn’t find it. The way I figure, the access road runs up and down the slope, so rain doesn’t hurt it. But the road in to the depot ran crosswise on the slope, so over the years the runoff just turned it back into gullies, and trees and brush grew up, and now that road is gone. A tree can grow a lot in twenty years.”
Ellen (surprising them all): “How about a brush road?”
Lew (nervous for her): “A what?”
Ellen: “Taking your idea about the corduroy road, but you’d just use logs to fill the deepest ruts, then lay tree branches and bushes down over the whole thing. Drive a truck back and forth on it, keep laying brush and packing it down, and pretty soon the trucks themselves will tamp it into a road.”
Balim: “Miss Ellen, have you seen this done?”
Ellen: “Twice, as a matter of fact. Once in Guatemala, when they were trying to get medical supplies in after an earthquake, and once in Oregon, where a man was building vacation houses on a lake he owned, and he was very short on capital. He built the first houses using the brush road, then put down macadam once they started to sell.”
Balim: “What do you think, Frank?”
“I think it’s a terrific idea. Stick around, Ellen.”
Ellen: “I will.”
Lew looked at her smiling face, feeling equal portions of love and possessiveness, and then grinned, very happy, when she winked at him.
Frank went on with the show. “Here’s the depot. You see the rails there, we can use those when we connect to the main line. Building’s intact, very good shape.
“Here’s Charlie asleep. I couldn’t resist it, just once.”
Young Mr. Balim: “Charming. The drool, especially.”
“Spur line. Tracks are rusty but usable. Switch here rusted into place, but it’s the right place. A lucky break. But here’s the turntable, our next problem.”
Isaac: “It’s angled wrong. Why on earth did they do that?”
“Beats me. We’re gonna have to break it loose and line it up with the rest of the track so we can use the extra twenty foot beyond it. As it is, that train’s gonna be so long you’ll be able to kiss the caboose from the main line.”
Balim: “Speed is everything.”
“Don’t I know it. Here’s the track going up to the main line. We got a lot of trees to cut down.”
Lew: “More matériel for Ellen’s road.”
“Check. Here’s where the track stops. You notice you can’t see shit, but the main line’s just the other side of the hedge. And here it is, and now you can’t see the depot.”
Young Mr. Balim: “You’ll have to cut an awfully big hole in that hedge to get the train through.”
“We’ll mask it when we’re done. That isn’t one of the problems.”
Young Mr. Balim: “I am relieved.”
“Here’s where the access road crosses the track. Up there’s where they nabbed you, Lew.”
Lew: “We’ll have to put up a plaque.”
19
It was with exceedingly mixed emotions that Sir Denis Lambsmith, watching the passengers from the Entebbe-Tripoli-London flight emerge from the Terminal 3 passageway at Heathrow, saw that walking forward beside Baron Chase was Patricia Kamin, beautiful and stylish and utterly at her ease. Even at nine in the morning after an all-night flight, he thought, she was unruffled perfection.
He was delighted to see her, of course, delighted and astonished—but with Chase? What could be their relationship? Remembering his own three nights with her in Kampala—she had come to him every night, had left him thrilled and satiated, and had always been gone in the morning—he could only suppose her connection with Chase was sexual; but he didn’t want to think that. He remembered that she had been seconded for a while to the Ugandan Embassy in London, so perhaps she was here on official business, and sharing the flight with Chase was mere coincidence. He clung to that shred of possibility as they approached him.
It was strange, but the white man looked more out of place in London than the black woman did. In Kampala, Chase was appropriate, of a type not unknown in that part of the world, but walking into London with his dark-blue canvas flight bag he looked like some prowling barbarian slipping unsuspected through the city gates. Patricia Kamin, who in Kampala was an exotic touch of sophistication in a pretty but small-time provincial capital, in London was a bird of magnificent plumage in its right setting; she might be this year’s modeling find, or movie star, or diplomat’s wife.
They both greeted Sir Denis with handshakes—Chase gripping him hard, as though to arrest him, Patricia’s touch light and brief and stirring. Her eyes laughing at him, she said, “So this is how you look in London.”
“And how you look in London,” he answered. “More beautiful than ever.”
“Gallantry,” Chase commented without inflection, like a man identifying a kind of tree.
“You have luggage?”
“Of course,” Patricia said. “Empty trunks, to carry home full.”
As they walked toward the baggage area, Chase said, “We can drop Patricia at the hotel.”
“Delighted.”
“I’m here on business,” Patricia said, answering his unasked question. With a mock grimace of distaste, she said, “Very boring. But at least there’ll be time for shopping.”
Perhaps we could go shopping together, Sir Denis wanted to say. The presence of Baron Chase inhibited him.
While Patricia and Chase waited with the few other milling passengers at the baggage carousel, Sir Denis went out to the car—a black Daimler parked in the Special Arrangements area behind the Annex—and collected the chauffeur to help with Patricia’s putative empty trunks. There turned out to be only two of them, and not so large at that. “You can’t intend much shopping after all,” Sir Denis said.
“Ah, but I’ll also buy luggage.”
The gentlemen permitted Patricia to enter the car first, then Sir Denis as host—this being his nation—stood aside for Chase, which put Chase between the other two on the wide soft backseat. Too late, Sir Denis realized he would have preferred the possibility of leg contact with Patricia.
Up on the M4, heading for London, Patricia explained her mission: the Ugandan Air Force wished to purchase some computer equipment from an American firm, and she had to clear it with the American Embassy in London. “Any purchases of a military nature,” she said, “even indirectly military, have to be approved by that man.”