Dear Emil Grossbarger,
When we last talked, I assured you I would be able to have Sir Denis Lambsmith removed from the Brazil deal. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Amin has decided for reasons of his own that he wants Lambsmith around, and has even gone so far as to insist that Lambsmith be at Entebbe to oversee the physical departure of the coffee.
It would be difficult, probably impossible, for us to communicate directly before the deed is done. I know what you said when we were last together in London, and I know you were quite serious. On the other hand, when we reach a spot where simply nothing can be done to alter the situation, the sensible man accepts reality as it is and goes on from there. On the assumption that we’re both sensible men, I am continuing to work as though our deal were intact. You have my assurance that no harm will come to Sir Denis.
It was signed Baron Chase. Amin studied that signature as though there were something to be learned from it. The capital B and capital C were large and round, like village huts. The other letters, except for the h in Chase, didn’t properly exist at all, but were represented by wandering trails, like animal paths leading from a water hole. On the other hand, the h was a guidon, a straight knife-edged flagpole with a tiny pennant at the top. Baron Chase. Very interesting.
Chase had written the letter just before the end of the long rains, a few days after his return from London. He had already, as he stated in the letter, done his best to poison Amin’s mind against Sir Denis Lambsmith, but from what Patricia Kamin had told him, it was Sir Denis whom Amin wanted near him, and nobody else. Sir Denis was a skin-deep man, a technocrat without imagination. He didn’t have the imagination to be dishonest or clever, and he had no secret plans or intentions in connection with this coffee sale.
Which was true of no one else involved. The Brazilians and the Bogotá Group were shifty, clever, very knowledgeable, out for their own advantage at every instant. Emil Grossbarger, of course, was completely untrustworthy, and Chase was a schemer by some sort of inner compulsion. No, it was bland unthreatening Lambsmith with whom Amin wanted to deal, particularly when his judgment of the man was supported by Patricia’s spying.
And when his other spies could protect him from the other actors in the play, including Chase.
This letter had reached Amin by a means almost as circuitous as the route it had taken to Grossbarger. Chase had brought it, already sealed, to an English pilot named Wilson, one of the regulars on the Stansted whisky run. Swearing Wilson to secrecy, Chase had given him some money and asked him to carry the letter to England and from there mail it to Grossbarger in Zurich. Wilson had agreed, had carried the letter to Stansted, had there steamed it open and made a Xerox copy, had resealed the letter and mailed it to Grossbarger, had brought the copy back to Uganda, had requested a personal meeting with the President, and had given him the copy and his story. Wilson’s reward was already in his personal Swiss bank account.
The question now was: What were Chase and Grossbarger up to? If it was merely that Chase was taking an extra little bribe on the side, that he was pressuring Grossbarger with some nonexistent problem solvable by money, then more power to him. Amin saw no reason to interfere with other people’s little scams, so long as their scams didn’t interfere with his.
But there was something about this letter, something that just didn’t sound right. “… before the deed is done.” “… as though our deal were intact.” What deed? What deal? The “deed” could merely refer to the sale and shipment of the coffee. The “deal” could mean nothing more than a side-issue bribe. Still, there was something wrong, and the main problem was why Chase and Grossbarger wanted Sir Denis out in the first place. And why did Chase find it necessary to assure Grossbarger that “no harm will come to Sir Denis”? Were they afraid he knew, or would learn, something of what they were up to?
If so, that was even more reason to keep Sir Denis around. If he were to learn anything about Chase and Grossbarger, Patricia would soon get it from him, and then Amin himself would know.
So. Inasmuch as possible, the problem of Chase was under control. Slipping the letter back into the drawer, dropping the beer bottle into the basket under his desk, Amin buzzed his secretary.
“Send in Mr. Chase.”
“Good morning, Mr. President,” Chase said.
Amin smiled. Chase had always maintained a proper formality in his presence, and even though Amin knew the formality was duplicitous and only a surface sham he enjoyed it. It was a confirmation of who he had become. “Good-ah morning, Baron,” he said, his voice rumbling like a sleepy purr. “My only Baron,” he added.
Chase would go on standing, though at his ease, until and unless Amin invited him to sit down. “You’re looking well, sir,” he said. “I understand you were jogging this morning.”
“Basket-ah-ball game this afternoon,” Amin said. “With-ah my flyers.” He meant the pilots of his Air Force, bright hard young men who treated him with a delicate combination of barracks-yard camaraderie and careful respect. Some had been trained by the British, some by the Israelis, a few by the Russians, or the Americans, and the most recent by the Libyans.
“Good luck,” Chase said. The closest he came to informality was occasionally to drop the “sir.”
“Thank you.” Amin grinned. “My-ah T-shirts now come,” he said, and gestured to a stack of cardboard cartons in the corner. “Take one.”
“With the picture?” Smiling his amusement and anticipation, Chase went over and opened the top carton. “Shall I try one on?”
“Of course,” Amin said. “How-ah you gonna know if it-ah fit?”
Unselfconsciously, Chase slipped off his tan sports jacket, his light-green figured tie, and his white shirt. His chest and back were very white and pasty, padded with unhealthy-looking fat in globules under the skin. Old wounds puckered and scarred his torso and upper arms, as though once, years before, he had rolled in barbed wire.
He’s been in many battles, Amin thought, studying the man, and all at once he remembered his own testimony before the Commission of Inquiry back in 1966, looking into an ivory-and gold-smuggling operation out of the Congo as a consequence of which Amin had wound up with forty thousand pounds in his Kampala bank account and a lot of gold bars in his house. Amin had told the Commission of Inquiry—which had ultimately found nothing against him—that he’d served in Burma and India during World War II; in fact, he hadn’t even joined the Army until 1946, and the only “war” he’d ever been involved in was a punitive expedition with the Fourth King’s African Rifles in 1962, organized to put down some cattle rustlers in the Lake Turkana section of Kenya. The accusations that time against his platoon, of torture and murder, had faded away into an inconsequential muddle, as they always did.
Chase pulled on one of the T-shirts and turned to face Amin, arms spread out. “How does it look?”
“Fine,” Amin said, laughing, looking at the blown-up black-and-white photograph spread across Chase’s chest.
Two years ago, during the Organization of African Unity summit meeting here in Kampala, Amin had arranged to be carried to the meeting seated in a litter borne by four British businessmen who lived in Uganda, and followed by another white man, a Swede, carrying a tiny parasol on a long stick to shade Amin’s head. A news photograph had showed Amin, in the litter, waving happily to a cheering crowd, and it was this photograph Amin had now had reproduced on several thousand white T-shirts.