“Amarda, don’t—”
She put her hand over his mouth, to silence him. It was the hand she’d used to clear the steam from the window, and it was cold and damp. She said, “Lew, please. Wait. Do you have any idea what my life is like?”
That stopped him. Had he ever wondered about that? When Amarda was not imprisoned in the tower in his mind, what was her life like? She took her hand back from his mouth, but he didn’t speak.
She said, “We’re poor people, who were rich. I was born in Africa, but I’m a foreigner. Even if there were Bantus in whom I was interested—and there are not—I would not be permitted to become friends with them. And they could only want me to humiliate and cheat.”
“Class,” he said, floundering. “Other people, other—” His hands made vague gestures.
“—Indians,” she finished for him. Her eyes burned with an intensity he hadn’t known she possessed. She said, “Three generations of Africa have emasculated our men. You see them on the streets in Nairobi and Mombasa, narrow boys in fancy silk shirts, buying and selling cheap cars and cameras. I shall inherit land; the family will survive; we won’t always be poor. Those boys would love to court me, give me rides on their motorcycles, marry me, take my land, give me babies, and forget me.” She shrugged, a very bitter gesture. “One day, that’s what will happen.”
Thinking of Young Mr. Balim, knowing she had told him the truth, he still tried to deny it, saying, “That doesn’t have to—”
“But it does.” Now she looked at him as though he were the child. “What do you think? Shall I go to London, walk along Sloane Street, be discovered for the fashion magazines? Shall I return to India, a land even my father wasn’t born in, and find hundreds of lovely friends, thousands of eligible suitors?”
“Oh, Amarda.” He couldn’t even argue anymore.
More softly, resting her hand gently on his, she said, “Lew, don’t you know how exciting you are to me? There in my kitchen, with your breezy manner of adventure and derring-do, and even a thrilling suggestion of crime in the background. Not some awful crime like murder, but a thrilling crime: smuggling, piracy. Lew, you were the only hero I’d ever met.”
They’d shared the fantasy! “Oh, Jesus,” he said, wanting merely to undo everything. After all, she really was the waif, and she did need his protection. And he had no solution for her. He wasn’t a hero, he was a fraud.
She said, “Lew, I know you’re not my hero. We can just pretend for a little while, and then you’ll go back to your airwoman.”
He shook his head, eyes downcast. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” Her more impish smile showed now, the way she’d smiled while taking him into the empty borrowed house. “It’s wonderful with you,” she said.
“And with you.”
She leaned forward to kiss him, very chastely, closed lips to closed lips. “Next time in Nairobi,” she whispered.
Next time. Why was he so weak? Why couldn’t he stand up and say no like the hero she claimed he was? “All right,” he said.
Her fragrance filled the Peugeot because it was on his body. He drove north, switching to the B8 at Luanda (where Frank and Ellen had taken the road the other way, to Port Victoria), and arrived at Butere shortly before two o’clock. The railroad station, a small brick colonial reminder, was a very sleepy place, with a dozen skinny ragged men snoozing or smoking in the dank waiting room, away from the rain.
He found Kamau Nyaga, the assistant terminal manager, in his office. Nyaga was a short and stocky man with a thick moustache and large black-rimmed glasses. He had the pouty expression of the petty tyrant, and at first he apparently thought he would play the game of making Lew wait.
No, he would not. Lew didn’t have Frank’s hearty bonhomie with these minor-league pests, that palsy shoulder pat of friendship which nevertheless implied the punch of punishment. What Lew had instead was an undisguised contempt, suggesting a barely restrained rage at the shabbiness and venality around him. If the minor officials went along with Frank because they wanted him to remain friendly, they went along with Lew because they didn’t want him to go crazy.
Nyaga pretended to read documents while Lew stood across the desk from him. Lew counted privately to three—not very slowly—then leaned forward, resting his palm and splayed fingers on the paper Nyaga was perusing, and said, “I’m here for Mazar Balim’s sewing machines.”
“Sewing machines?” Not yet intimidated, merely indignant, Nyaga reared back in his squeaking chair and glared. “Who do you happen to be?”
“The representative of the owner. You were told I was coming.” Picking up the handful of documents from the desk, Lew flipped through them, saying, “These aren’t about our sewing machines.”
Nyaga was on his feet; he was squawking like a rooster. “Privileged documents! You can’t—! Unauthorized—!”
The terminal manager’s was a very small office; still, Lew gave it the most dramatic gesture the space would permit, flinging his right arm out, hurling the handful of papers with disdain at the side wall. As they fluttered to the ground, he said, “I’m here for sewing machines.”
Nyaga was looking everywhere at once; at Lew, at his denuded desk, at the open door (to cry for help from the layabouts outside?), at the crumpled papers on the floor. “This office,” he managed to say, his voice trembling with emotion, “is for railway business. It is not for rowdies and—and—and—crazy persons.”
“I understand there will be,” Lew said, his manner still contemptuous but now less threatening, “certain storage charges.” Looking around, he found the room’s second chair in the corner behind the door, and dragged it over with his foot hooked in a rung.
“Charges,” Nyaga said, as though coming to consciousness after having been stunned with a brick. “Yes, of course. Property cannot be stored for free.” When Lew sat down, Nyaga returned to his squeaking swivel chair behind the desk.
Lew said, “Mr. Balim has obtained a legal opinion that the railway should pay us interest on the money lost because of the delays in this shipment.”
That statement was banal and stupid enough to reassure Nyaga, who actually smiled in response, saying, “To resolve that question in court obviously would involve even more delay.”
“Mr. Balim would prefer not to cause trouble.” Lew shrugged and curled his lip to make clear his own quite different preference. “He is prepared to pay reasonable storage charges.”
“He is a businessman,” Nyaga said in a relieved tone. Opening and shutting desk drawers, he muttered, “Storage charges, storage charges…”
“Are the sewing machines still in the same freight car?”
Nyaga stopped. He blinked, and licked his lips. “Goods wagon?” he asked. “Well, no. But reloading is not a problem.” He busied himself again with his desk drawers.
“Where are they?”
“Not a problem at all.”
“Where are they stored?”
“Well, here. Of course here. Here at the railway station. Ah, this is the proper form.” He brought up a pad of receipt flimsies and began to insert several well-used sheets of carbon paper. “Let’s see, storage nine days—”
Lew said, “I’ll want to check the machines, of course, be sure they haven’t been damaged.”
“Yes, yes. First we deal with the storage charges, and then—”
“You don’t know where they are,” Lew said.
Nyaga gaped at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t know where the sewing machines are!”