The chauffeur stood at natty attention beside the car, all four doors of which were open. Air Uganda ground crew in their white jumpers were stowing the luggage in the trunk. Amin told the chauffeur in Swahili, “I’ll drive. Go back in one of the other cars.” (Chase understood Swahili very well—better than any of them, including Amin, guessed—but he would never speak it. His unsuspected fluency was yet another small weapon in the arsenal of his self-defense.)
The chauffeur saluted and marched away like a windup toy. Amin bent his smiling black head toward the aged white head of Sir Denis, as if he were a solicitous keeper in an old-age home, saying, “I’m-ah drive you. I’m-ah show you the beauties of my country. You sit-ah now in front with me.”
“An unexpected pleasure,” Sir Denis said. (How he’s squirming, Chase thought in elation, watching Sir Denis’s unruffled surface.)
Chase had the wide backseat to himself. The top was down, and when Amin jolted the car forward—he drove too fast, too carelessly, too inexpertly, and had already gone through several crashes—the wind of their passage yanked at Chase’s thinning hair as though to scalp him. Brushing the wisps of hair off his forehead, he looked back and saw the two cars of bodyguards following at a discreet—but not too discreet—distance.
There had been attempts made on Idi Amin’s life. No matter how spontaneous his actions appeared, he was always well guarded; too many men in Uganda needed him, not merely for their livelihoods but for their lives. If Amin were to be assassinated, it would change nothing for the country, since the structure of oppression would remain in place. But the struggle among the lesser Nubians to take Amin’s place would be more horrific than even Chase could imagine.
Up front, Amin was talking at Sir Denis, giving him a travelogue filled no doubt with inaccurate statements about Uganda’s history, its flora and fauna, and Amin’s own development plans for the nation. Chase didn’t even try to catch the words as the wind whipped them past him. He already knew more true facts about Uganda than Amin did, and as for Amin’s development plans, those began and ended with the so-called “whisky runs,” flying coffee to Stansted in England and Melbourne in Florida in the United States, returning with the liquor and luxury goods that kept the Nubians in line. That was the development plan, and it worked considerably better at achieving its goal than most plans in the Third World.
Chase spent the drive brooding on his own development plans. What he was trying was much riskier and more subtle than the whisky runs, but if it worked it would give him just as much security as the whisky runs gave Amin. Money. A lot of money. Money to retire on, perhaps in some lesser island in the Caribbean, from which he could still make his occasional trips to London. And to New York, as well. And all his life he had wanted to test the rumors about New Orleans.
Amin was the first to see the trouble ahead. That was like him, part of the secret of his success; he had a cat’s sensitivity to potential danger.
They had reached the city and were driving along Kampala Road, lined with shops that had once belonged to the now-expelled Asians. Half were now closed, for lack of capital, lack of expertise, lack of initiative. Among the few battered vehicles on the street, the gleaming expensive Mercedes seemed like a visitor from another planet. Much more typical was the lumbering, plank-sided, blue-cabbed truck that came crawling out of a side alley ahead of them, filling the road, seeming to take forever to get out of the way.
Chase didn’t see the other truck until after Amin was already in action. The second truck had been parked on the other side of broad Kampala Road, and it was with unusual speed that it abruptly started up and swung across the lanes of traffic to meet the first truck head-on, effectively barricading the road.
But Amin was fast, and when necessary he was incredibly decisive. With a sudden loud growl, like a lion disturbed at its meat, he slammed his foot on the accelerator, twisted the wheel, and ducked down as low as possible behind the steering wheel.
Acceleration yanked Chase out of his reverie. He too could act fast in a crisis, and afterward he realized it was the threat to his relationship with Grossbarger should Sir Denis be killed that made him, even before protecting himself, pull forward against the acceleration, slap Sir Denis on top of his white head, and yell, “Down!”
The Mercedes had leaped up onto the sidewalk. A woman was walking there hand in hand with her young son. Men with machine guns were coming out of an abandoned storefront just ahead of the car. The driver of the plank-sided truck was desperately trying to shift the ancient gear into reverse. The woman flung her son at the street just before the Mercedes smashed into her and threw her away like an empty cigarette pack.
Then Chase was on the floor in back and could see no more, and bullets were shredding the windshield; another windshield to be replaced. He could feel the car scrape through between the concrete storefront and the rear bumper of the truck. The Mercedes rocked on its springs, seemed about to fly, bounced instead off the sidewalk and back into the roadway, and at last slackened its pace.
Rising hesitantly upward, Chase looked back at the pitched battle around the trucks. Amin’s bodyguards were exchanging shots with the attempted assassins, who were now doing their vain best to flee. If they were lucky, they would be killed cleanly this minute, by gunfire.
April; it was only April. This was the third assassination attempt this year, and like the others it would be reported in no newspapers, on no television broadcasts, through no wire services.
I’m right to get out, Chase thought. It’s breaking down.
Up front Amin was laughing, was slapping the shaken Sir Denis on the knee, was already turning the near-miss into a triumph, a joke, an anecdote. He had told Chase, and he apparently meant it, that he knew no assassin could kill him because he had already seen his own death in a dream. It would not happen, he’d assured Chase, for a long long time.
24
Naked, standing in front of the mirrored dresser in Frank’s bedroom, Ellen reflected again that sex never seemed so wonderful after the event as it always did while it was going on. By moving her head a bit she could see Frank, sprawled on his back on the bed, on the new coral-colored blanket he’d thrown over it after ousting the stupid dog, George. Both pillows were bunched now beneath Frank’s head as he idly scratched his hairy stomach and smiled in sleepy contentment. He had a good time, the bastard, she thought.
The only sound was the continuing chatter of the rain, a rustle like a million chipmunks gnawing rotted wood. If it hadn’t been for the rain—
It had started at the end of March, the rain, and today was the nineteenth of May. Seven weeks of rain. Cracks appeared in walls; leaks developed in ceilings, warps in doorjambs. Dresser drawers stuck; flour and beans and bread rotted on their shelves; the green-black stain of mildew spread over everything in the world like some sort of surrealistic total eclipse.
If it hadn’t been for the rain—
Probably, Lew wouldn’t have taken up with that Asian girl in the first place. It was surely his own forced inactivity, brought on by the endless rain, that had led him to distract himself with that creature. In normal circumstances it would not have happened. Not with Lew the man he was. And not with Ellen the woman she knew she was.