“Oh, my dear.” She stepped forward, reaching out to touch his arm.
“I can see what it is, of course,” he said. “Grossbarger and Chase have come to an agreement, and they want me out of the way.”
“So it is coffee.” For just an instant her face was tense with calculation. Then she shook her head, and focused on him again, and smiled sadly at whatever she saw in his eyes. “Yes, of course,” she said. “But this won’t make any difference to us.”
“It won’t?” He was so convinced of their finish that he couldn’t even try to hope.
“There are things I wish I could tell you,” she said, her gentle hand pressing his arm. “But you’ll see, my dear, it isn’t over. Not between us.”
He didn’t believe her, but courtesy required him to pretend that he did. “Thank you, Patricia,” he said. “If for nothing else, thank you for bringing me back to life.”
“Stay alive,” she said, with that well-remembered seductive smile. “For me.”
“We should leave. You won’t want to miss your plane.”
20
Through April and into May, in the first five weeks of the long rains, Ellen flew only four round trips: three to Nairobi, and one all the way to Mombasa, seven hundred miles eastward on the Indian Ocean. Those few intervals above the clouds, in the beautiful gold of sunlight, made things not better but worse; each time, the return to Earth through those miserable clouds was an awful experience, leaving her bad-tempered for hours afterward.
The rain affected everybody. Even Frank seemed less boisterous and Mr. Balim not quite so smoothly self-assured. As for Lew, the rain and the forced inactivity were probably enough to explain his recent tension, his distracted, almost guilty manner, his impatience and suppressed anger. Still, Ellen thought there was more to it than that. She thought he was having an affair.
If so, it was the girl in Nairobi. The first flight there, Ellen’s passengers had been Balim and Lew, and afterward Lew had described to her the Jhosi family, their current plight, and their relationship with the coffee-smuggling operation. The second time, a week later, Lew had been the only passenger, bringing papers for the grandmother to sign. He had been met at the airport by the granddaughter, Amarda, who was to drive him to the coffee plantation while Ellen refueled and dealt with the airport paperwork.
Lew had mentioned Amarda Jhosi in his account of the first meeting, but had referred to her only glancingly, as though she were unimportant, thereby leaving out far too much. He hadn’t mentioned that she was beautiful, with large sad eyes. And he hadn’t mentioned that she was in love with him.
Well, men had less sensitivity about such things; it was possible he didn’t realize Amarda Jhosi was in love with him. Still, Ellen dated his increasing testiness and irritability from that second Nairobi trip, when he had been gone with the girl for five hours—to sign papers?—and had volunteered an unconvincing story afterward about traffic jams.
Ellen’s third rainy-season flight had been the one to Mombasa, carrying Frank and two small canvas bags. Ivory or some other illegal commodity had been involved in that flight, she suspected, but she’d asked no questions and Frank had volunteered no answers. Because of the distance involved, that one had been an overnight trip, and Ellen had been fully prepared to fend off further unwanted advances from Frank that night in the Whitesands Hotel. It had been a pleasant relief when he had remained merely cheery and companionable, telling her over dinner comic or horrific incidents from Mombasa’s history, and not once making even the most oblique suggestion that they might spend the night together. Since then, she had warmed more to Frank, and even thought of him now as a friend.
Finally, three days ago, there had been the third trip to Nairobi. This time, Mr. Balim was along as well as Lew, and from the conversation in the plane Ellen understood that Balim was bringing money to the Jhosi family to be used in connection with the smuggling. They would have to order and pay for thousands of sacks with their own plantation’s imprint. They would have to arrange for transportation of the resacked coffee from the plantation, as well as for storage during the time the coffee was in their care.
The girl Amarda was at Wilson Airport again, to chauffeur them, and it seemed to Ellen the girl avoided her gaze. And this time, when the two men returned after four hours, Ellen thought there was a new amused twinkle in Balim’s eye, the look of a man holding tight to a delicious and diverting secret.
During this period of rain-caused idleness, Ellen had taken to hanging out at Balim’s place of business, where there was at least usually some sort of activity to watch, to distract herself. And she did enjoy talking with Isaac Otera, a decent and very sad man. Of course, Frank was always enjoyable to watch, crashing from wall to wall.
Today, arriving in midmorning, she found Frank dressed like some demon out of Kabuki, all swathed in shiny black raingear, stomping out of the office. Seeing her, he said, “You busy? Wanna go for a ride?”
“In the rain? Where to?”
“A town that never happened,” he said. “Come on along.”
“What the hell,” she said, and went with him.
“Port Victoria,” Frank said, squinting like a gargoyle through the wet windshield. “It was gonna be the champ, and it wound up a bum.”
They were driving northwest out of Kisumu on the B1. The rain was in its medium stage—relentless but not a downpour—and Frank had covered the front passenger seat with a blanket to eliminate the traces of Charlie, so Ellen could ride beside him. She felt unreasonably happy and light, as though some stuffy, constricting woolen overcoat she’d been wearing for months had at last been flung off. Settling herself comfortably on the blanketed seat, smiling in anticipation at Frank’s craggy profile, she said, “What happened to Port Victoria?”
“The British, to begin with,” he said. “When they were building the railroad, they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. They had four surveys done, and no two of them agreed, but of course back then a successful survey was one where nothing or nobody ate the surveyor. About the only thing they all agreed on was the place where the railroad should meet the lake.”
“Port Victoria,” she suggested.
“Wait for it.” He liked to tell his stories at his own pace, without being interrupted.
“Sorry.”
“This place—okay, Port Victoria—it’s up on the northeastern shoulder of the lake, with fairly high land right behind it. No swamps, see, but no mountains, either. It’s at the outer southern point of Berkeley Bay, so the lake is right in front of it, with a natural deep-water harbor, and Berkeley Bay around to the side for protected mooring.”
“Sounds good,” Ellen said.
“It is good. It’s terrific. That’s why they named it Port Victoria, right? It was supposed to be the major port on Lake Victoria, both of them named after that queen.”
“Something went wrong.”
“Something always goes wrong,” Frank said. “What happened this time, the British knew they were gonna end the railroad at Port Victoria, and they knew they were gonna start the railroad at Mombasa, but the seven hundred miles in between they were kind of fuzzy about.”
Ellen laughed, saying, “Because of things eating the surveyors.”
“Sure. It was so bad, they were still surveying out in front of the railroad while they were building it. And of course, the more detailed the survey, the closer they got to the reality on the ground, the more expensive it was. Like, a team would go through in the dry season and say, Fine, we got solid ground, just lay your track right down and zoom. Then the rains come, and it turns out there’s absolute rivers there, the track washes away, and all of a sudden for every ten miles you’ve got to do six miles of bridges.”