Lew jumped to his feet, the wooden chair tipping over behind him, Nyaga blinking up at him through his black-rimmed glasses. “You goddam fraud,” Lew told him, “you were gonna collect your storage charge and then send me out to Juma!”
“Juma? Juma?” Nyaga couldn’t seem to figure out any response other than faked indignation. “Who is this Juma?”
“Your freightmaster, you fucking asshole!” Lew pointed a rigid finger at the astonished Nyaga’s nose. “If you come out of this office, I’ll wring your neck like a chicken.”
Leaving, he slammed the door so hard everybody in the waiting room woke up.
Godfrey Juma was a different kettle of fish, an older, grizzled, no-nonsense sort of man, who took chai when it came his way because bribery was part of the world order, but who nevertheless found pride and dignity in knowing his job and doing it well.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know where the sewing machines were, either. “Believe me, sir, I would be happy to take your money,” he told Lew, the two of them standing under the corrugated roof out of the rain at the end of the platform, with various pieces of rolling stock on the several tracks beyond. “But as it happens, the crates were stolen.”
Truly irritated, Lew said, “Stolen! How? When? Why didn’t somebody report it?”
Juma pointed. “Sir, do you see that goods wagon?”
The freight car in question was new, silver-sided, with the slanted red KR of Kenya Railways. “I see it,” Lew said. He was about to become dangerous.
“Your shipment arrived in that wagon. I at once saw it had not been consigned to this station, and so I had it shunted onto that track to await further instructions.”
“Yes?”
“During my period of being off-duty,” Juma said, “our terminal manager—”
“Nyaga.” Were he to look over his shoulder, Lew knew, he would see the round-eyed, round-mouthed, round-spectacled face of assistant terminal manager Kamau Nyaga peering through his rain-bleared window, like a squirrel waiting for the dogs to pass.
“That is the man.” Juma nodded, his expression carefully neutral. “For greater safekeeping,” he said, “or so he claimed, Mr. Nyaga had the crates removed, you know, to that shed.” He pointed to a small corrugated-metal building surrounded by weeds, off to one side of the yard.
“Yes?”
“I feared they would not be so safe in that location, so I did instruct my crew to return them to the goods wagon. Somewhere in the process, then or later, very distressingly, they disappeared. I believe they were Mr. Nyaga’s responsibility at the time of disappearance.”
Lew nodded. “And he blames you.”
“Sir, I’m afraid that is so.”
Except that the goddam sewing machines were gone, it was a comic situation. The two bosses, knowing there was money to be made out of that shipment, stealing it back and forth from each other until some third party—or possibly either Juma or Nyaga himself—retired the booty from the game. Being tough, but not physically threatening, Lew said, “The railway committee of inquiry will certainly figure out who’s responsible.”
“Committee of inquiry?” Juma took on the worried look of an aging man thinking about his pension. “Why would there be a committee of inquiry? There are railroad-yard thefts every day.”
“Mr. Balim is insured,” Lew lied. “The insurance company will insist on an inquiry.”
“Oh, the insurance company.” Juma looked more and more worried. An insurance company was a much more serious threat than some minor Asian merchant.
Lew said, “Frankly, I suspect the committee of inquiry will find reasons to be displeased with both you and Mr. Nyaga.”
“Unjust interpretations, you know, sir,” Juma said, scraping his work-roughened hand over his grizzled cheeks, “could of course be made against my actions. Believe me, sir, if I could hand over those sewing machines, I would, and charge you nothing for them.”
“I don’t like to see an older man driven out of his job,” Lew said. “Do you suppose Nyaga knows more than he’s telling?”
“I wish he did, sir.” Juma shrugged fatalistically. “But I’m afraid he is the victim in this case as much as I.”
Lew had pressed as hard as he could, and nothing had come of it. Juma couldn’t help him; Lew had no doubt the man would if he could. Was it worthwhile to roust Nyaga again, go back into that office and rough him up a little? No; Juma’s reluctant exoneration of Nyaga had been an expert’s opinion.
While Lew had been thinking things over, Juma had been staring out mournfully over his small messy rusty freight yard, as though seeing it for the last time. Now, suddenly enlivened, magically taller, more sure of himself, with the fresh gleam of hope in his eyes, he spun back to Lew and said, “Sir! Perhaps after all there is a way out.”
“Yes?”
“Come with me, sir.”
Juma led the way down the concrete steps at the end of the platform and out across the freight yard in the rain. They had to step high over the rails, skirt the larger and dirtier puddles, place their feet carefully on the rain-slick metal ties, hunch their necks down into their collars to keep the droplets from slithering in.
At the extreme far corner of the yard, near the tall barbed-wire-topped fence, stood one of the older freight cars; peeling maroon paint and the old multicolored seal of the East African Railways Corporation. Undoing two large padlocks, Juma pushed open the side door and said, “There.”
The wooden floor of the car was at chest height. Looking in, Lew could see stacked large crates—somewhat shorter than coffins—covered with stencils and pasted-on travel documents. “What is it?”
“Outboard motors. Sir, see for yourself.”
They climbed up the metal rungs into the cool but dry car, and Juma used a large screwdriver from his hip pocket to pry the lid off one of the crates. Inside, nested in Styrofoam and wrapped in grayish clear plastic, lay a 120-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor, gleaming in orange and white and black enamel, its small fanlike propeller painted a dull green.
“There are forty of them.” Juma said. “Worth more than fifty-seven sewing machines.”
Considerably more. Lew said, “You’re suggesting a trade?”
“A goods train is being made up this afternoon, to return to Nakuru,” Juma said. “I can put this car on it, assigned to Kisumu. Mr. Nyaga knows nothing of this shipment, sir.”
“Ah-hah.”
“I shall telephone to my friend Mr. Molu in the Kisumu freight office, and he will understand that you shall be picking up the shipment on behalf of its consignee.”
“Who is this consignee? Who do these motors belong to?”
“Oh, no one, sir,” Juma said. “An Asian, sir, you know, that sort of bad man. He was going to use these engines in his smuggling, you know, on Lake Victoria.”
“Oh, yes? What’s this Asian’s name?”
“Hassanali.”
Lew remembered having heard Balim speak disparagingly once or twice about a man named Hassanali, an out-and-out crook, a man who made a practice of sailing too close to the wind. “What happened to him?”
“Oh, he killed a boatman, sir, who had cheated him. You know there is no honor completely among those thieves, sir. The police have got him now.”
“So he has other things to worry about than his outboard motors.”
“Oh, yes, sir.” Patting the sleek flank of the exposed motor, Juma said, “You can rescue these beautiful machines from a life of crime, sir.”
“Save them from being used in smuggling,” Lew said, and laughed, feeling better than he had in days. There was nothing like absurdity to put things back in proportion. Even Amarda would pass. “Come along, Mr. Juma,” Lew said. “We’ll have tea and talk this over.”