Frank glowered. “What?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
Frank had grown more and more angry at that groaning truck out in front of them, and once they reached the town’s weedy square he took the immediate opportunity to yank the Land-Rover in a wide sweep around the other vehicle, honking furiously. “Stupid bastard!” he yelled, but since the windows were closed against the rain, nobody could have heard him but Ellen.
A bumpy muddy lane led downhill on the right side of the square, beginning like an afterthought between two of the verandahed buildings. Frank charged through there as though daring the Land-Rover to hit one of those walls, then skittered and skewed and side-slid down the long muddy slope between tiny flat-roofed houses that were more Caribbean than Wild West.
The lake was out ahead, at the bottom of the hill, with a strange large round cane-and-reed hut off to one side. Ellen thought, Now we’re in the South Pacific. To the left, near the shore, was another huge truck like the one now lumbering down the lane after them. As Frank slued around and parked behind this second one, its doors opened and two men climbed down, wearing shabby raincoats and straw hats.
“Time to kick ass,” Frank said, with clear satisfaction. Pulling on his shiny black plastic rainhat, thus completing once again his Kabuki demon costume, he kicked open the Land-Rover’s door, splashed out into the mud, and stood with arms akimbo in the very ideogram of rage as the second truck wheezed and sagged around in a great semicircle and came to a stop beside its brother.
Ellen also climbed out of the Land-Rover, wearing her red rainhat and dark-blue raincoat and faded blue jeans and black knee-high boots, and heard the two men in the straw hats jabber away at Frank in Swahili. “Ah, shut up,” he told them, and called across the Land-Rover’s hood at Ellen, “The stupid bastards won’t learn English!”
“Very good English,” one of the men said indignantly.
“Then talk English,” Frank told him.
The man hesitated, frowning mightily, apparently having thoughts about his dignity; then he rattled off some more words in Swahili.
“Shit,” Frank answered, and turned to the two men who had emerged from the other truck, one of whom was Charlie. “Where’ve you been, you guttersnipe?”
“Oh, it’s a very heavy load completely,” Charlie said. He was the only one present not dressed for the weather, and already his filthy white shirt and baggy black trousers were soaked and clinging to him. He seemed neither to notice nor care.
“Double shit,” Frank commented. “You gonna go to work now?”
“Absolutely,” Charlie said, and turned to speak Swahili to the three other men, all of whom answered at the same time, each obviously pleading his own special case. Charlie went on blandly talking through their answers, and Frank turned away, shaking his head in disgust. “Come on down to the lake,” he called to Ellen, who was still standing on the other side of the Land-Rover, “before I forget myself and stomp these clowns into the turf.”
They walked down the slope together in the rain, their hands in their raincoat pockets. Pulled up on the bank were several long narrow rowboats, brightly colored, most with a flat board at the back for mounting an outboard motor. Ellen said, “This is your natural harbor?”
“Sure.” He waved an arm away toward the right. “Berkeley Bay in there.” Jutting his chin forward, he said, “That’s Uganda.”
Straight ahead, a low hill rose out of the water, surprisingly close, looking like an island. Flying over Uganda with Frank, back when Lew was captured, Ellen had had no particular feelings about the land itself, but now that dark featureless hill in the rain, looming up out of the water, did bear an aura of menace. “It doesn’t look pleasant,” she said, and shivered inside the coat.
“The funny thing is,” Frank said, “it is pleasant. The land, I mean. It’s the lushest, richest part of the entire continent of Africa. Stanley said Uganda was the pearl of Africa.”
“A pearl with a curse on it,” Ellen said, and Frank laughed. Then he said, “You want another quote? This is from Sir John Gray, used to be Chief Justice in Uganda when the British had it. He said the history of Uganda is ‘a crime to which there have been no eyewitnesses.’”
“But if the land is so rich—”
“Only man is vile.”
Ellen turned away from that low hill across the water and looked back upslope, where Charlie and the other three men had pulled the tarpaulins off one of the trucks and had started to unload masses of concrete blocks by the simple method of standing up on top of the load and tossing them down into a messy muddy pile. When they landed on one another they chipped and broke, but the men didn’t seem to mind. Ellen said, “What’s that all about, anyway?”
“The hotel,” Frank said, grinning with another secret joke.
“Hotel? Here?” She looked down at the shoreline, which was mud and weeds and grass; hardly a tourist’s beach.
“Sure,” Frank said. “Regional development. Build the joint up. Next thing you know, you got Elizabeth Taylor and Bianca Jagger dropping in. Paparazzi at Port Victoria.”
Ellen laughed at the idea, then said, “Come on, Frank. What’s up?”
“Balim had a little chat,” Frank said, rubbing his thumb and the side of his first finger together in the universal sign language for a bribe’s being passed, “with a fellow at the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife.”
“The Ministry of what?”
“Have I ever lied to you?”
“Probably,” Ellen said. “Is there really a Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife?”
“Sure. Think about it; you’ll see it makes sense. When the tourists come to Kenya, it’s to see the wildlife.”
“Not much wildlife around here,” Ellen said, glancing around again, “apart from Charlie.”
“Look at those idiots,” Frank said. Crack, crack, the concrete blocks were bouncing off one another.
“Frank, why a hotel?”
“Okay.” Looking away toward Uganda, he said, “When this fucking rain stops, we’re gonna go over there and get ourselves several tons of coffee. We’re gonna need boats to ship it over here. We’re gonna need trucks to get it to the plantation.”
“The Jhosi plantation,” Ellen said, with a sudden surprising spasm of misery.
“Right,” Frank said, not noticing. “We’re gonna need work crews here to load and unload. We’re probably gonna need storage facilities, because the coffee’ll come in quicker than we can truck it out. Now, you see what this town looks like. How much traffic you think they get on that road, the average day?”
“Not much.” Coming in, they’d met that one blue bus, and had seen three men riding bicycles laden down with huge burlap sacks; Frank had said those were smugglers.
“That’s right. Sometimes a truck or two, even a legitimate delivery to the market. But not heavy traffic. A lot of smuggling goes through here, but it’s all small-time.”
“Of course.”
“Now,” Frank said, “not everybody on this old planet is as easygoing as you and me. Here and there you’ve got busybodies. Here and there you’ve got people who might even rat to the cops when they see something they don’t understand.”
“I’m beginning to get the picture,” Ellen said.
“For the next couple months,” Frank told her, “there’ll be trucks going in and out of here every day. There’ll be work crews. There’ll be construction materials, including all the wood we’ll need to make the rafts to bring the coffee over. There’ll be storage facilities.”
“But at the end,” Ellen pointed out, “there will be a completely useless hotel.”