“Paid for by international development funds.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Cute, huh?”
Ellen nodded. “Balim is very very clever, isn’t he?”
“Balim is a fucking genius,” Frank said.
The only fly in the ointment, Frank explained, was that he was going to have to spend a lot of time here, making sure the work was done right, the supplies weren’t stolen, and the truth about their plans didn’t come out prematurely. “Originally I’d figured Lew for this job,” he explained, shaking his head in disgust, “but I got to admit I’m the one to do it. I know how to deal with these Bantus.”
Yes, Ellen thought, the white man’s method. Kick ass. Yell, scream, get red in the face. And on his side, the native smiles and nods and works as slowly as possible and pretends to be stupid, and all the time he’s robbing you blind. And both sides are satisfied with the arrangement.
“The worst of it is,” Frank was saying, “I can’t be too visible here, because I’m white. Some son of a bitch’ll tell the police at Kakamega there’s a white man hanging around Port Victoria, and we’re screwed. So I’m gonna have to camp out.”
“Camp out? In a tent?”
“Yup. That’s why I came out today, to pick the site. Up in the hills there. If I leave it to Charlie, he’ll pitch the fucking tent on a scorpion’s nest. And if I live through it, he’ll act stupid, like it was a mistake.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Ellen said.
“Come on for a hike.”
They walked back up from the lakeshore through the unending rain, and Frank spent a useless moment by the trucks yelling at Charlie about breakage. Then they walked on, diagonally away from the village, up a steep rocky slope covered with gnarled low shrubs and stubbly green new growth. Bony trees were farther up toward the ridge.
Looking back, Ellen saw two small boats approaching the shore near where they’d been standing, each carrying two men and several lumpy sacks. The sound of their outboard motors was obliterated by the rain. Smugglers, probably; no, certainly.
The steep hill made for hard climbing, particularly since both the mud and the rocks were slippery under their boots. Concentrating on the climb, they spoke no more until they reached the ridge and had started down the much gentler slope on the other side. Perhaps because of the earlier mention of the Jhosi plantation, during the silent walk uphill Ellen brooded on her problems for almost the first time since leaving Kisumu, and after they’d reached the top she astonished herself, as they walked along on the nearly level land, by suddenly saying, “Frank, do you know that Lew’s having an affair?”
He frowned at her, uncomprehending. “With you,” he said.
“No, with somebody else.”
“Greedy bastard.”
The phrase made her believe Frank really did know nothing about it, so she said nothing more. They walked along, Frank glowering out ahead of them, apparently thinking about nothing but the right place to pitch his tent, until he looked at her again and said, “Who’s the lucky girl?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He stopped entirely. “Listen,” he said. “Are you one hundred percent sure?”
“Of course not. Nobody is until the other person suddenly tells you. And the other person always does suddenly tell you.”
“People are shits,” Frank said.
“True. I was hoping you could confirm or deny.”
“Lew doesn’t confide in me.” Frank said. “Not that kind of thing, anyway. He’d be afraid I’d go sniffing after you myself.”
“He’d be right,” she said, smiling despite herself.
He held a hand up, dangling it from the wrist as though broken. “I got burned once.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that bad.” Not liking the way the conversation was tending, she looked around and said, “How about over there? For your tent.”
He stared in the direction she was pointing. “Where?”
“There, where the land rises a little.”
They walked over to the spot, a low knob or mound, overgrown with weeds and shrubs but treeless. The bony trees were all around, like layers of barbed wire protecting this hillock. Neither the town nor the lake could be seen. “Possible,” Frank said. “Very very possible.”
“It’ll be drier than the land around it, but still protected.”
“Sure.” Frank turned in a great circle, looking at the view without delight. “Home sweet home,” he said. “Jesus. In some previous life I must have been one hell of a villain.”
21
Lew was at the wheel of the Morris Minor, in the rain, with Ellen in the passenger seat beside him, on their way to Balim’s office. And it was at the corner, barely half a block from their house, that he saw the gray Citroën parked on the verge and knew at once it was Amarda Jhosi’s car.
Amarda herself was behind the wheel; he saw her smile through the rain-streaming window as he drove by. Had Ellen seen? Glancing at her, he saw she was looking for something in her shoulder bag.
Driving on, he experienced a sudden surge of erotic memory. The second trip to Nairobi in particular came back to him with the force of hypnotic suggestion. That was the time Balim had not come along, and Amarda had met him in that same Citroën. “I just have something to pick up at a friend’s house,” she’d said as they’d driven away from the airport (and Ellen). “It isn’t out of the way.” The friend, of course, had not been at home, and when Amarda had said, “You might as well come in,” the radiance of her smile had answered all his questions. She was the round-breasted Indian Princess, slowly smiling, soft and young and very willing to learn.
The third time, with Balim along, the connection with Amarda had been more hurried, more guilty, less ecstatic; but still he had followed her eagerly into the storage shed behind her house, rolling with her on the rough burlap sacks, surrounded by the clatter of the rain.
There had been no more trips to Nairobi, which was just as well. Amarda was wonderfully enjoyable, but she was also dangerous, and while she had asked for nothing, he couldn’t help the guilty feeling that he had taken her gift somehow under false pretenses. It was better to let the affair die from inanition.
But now Amarda was here, in Kisumu, smiling at him half a block from the home he shared with Ellen. Do we really have to pay for our falls from grace, every single one? I don’t want to lose Ellen, he thought, and glanced at her profile beside him in the car. It was probably just his imagination, but she looked awfully stony.
Lew had to struggle to keep his mind on what Balim and Isaac Otera were saying. The railroad that came to Kisumu, they told him, was not the main line it had once been. The true main line now angled northward at Nakuru, then ran west into Uganda, leaving the much-struggled-for track to Kisumu nothing but a branch. This branch had been more recently extended northwestward, paralleling the lakeshore but running farther inland, and terminating at Butere, thirty miles away.
It now appeared that at some time in the last two weeks a shipment of sewing machines—fifty-seven machines, crated separately, from Japan—that should have been delivered to Balim here in Kisumu had unaccountably not been offloaded from the freight train and had wound up in the terminus at Butere. “Now,” Isaac said, showing his annoyance by shuffling the various documents and manifests and flimsies in his lap, “some railway officials in Butere are making trouble.”
With his sad smile, the smile suggesting that yet again the human race had justified his worst suspicions, Balim said, “It’s a bribe they want, of course. Chai. The questions are: first, How much? and second, To whom? It is one of those moments, my dear Lew, that call for a firm hand and a white face.”