“Oh, come on.”
“No, I’m quite serious,” Balim said, and Ellen believed he was. “Lalia Jhosi is impressed by you. You remind her of the hero in American films. So you go to her and you reassure her that what we are all engaged in is an adventure, but an adventure with a moral purpose.”
“Oh, boy,” Lew said, shaking his head.
“You don’t talk about profit, as I would have to do. You don’t talk about politics, as Isaac would have to do. You don’t talk about the mechanics of the thing, as Frank would have to do. You talk about good and evil, and you show her that we are the good guys.”
“The good guys.”
“That’s right. You’ll have no trouble with it, Lew, I promise. Just go to Nairobi and be a hero.”
As Ellen landed in bright sunlight and taxied the plane to an available pad at Wilson Airport in Nairobi, Lew broke an extended silence between them by saying, “Why not come along?”
She had been listening to the tower and thinking about other things. She stared at him for a blank second, then said, “To the coffee plantation?”
“Sure. It’s a very interesting place.”
He wants me to protect him from that girl, she thought. But she wouldn’t do it, she wouldn’t let him force her to make his decisions for him.
Besides, it was already finished. As they left the office in Kisumu, Balim had said to her, quietly so Lew couldn’t hear, “No change?” and she had shaken her head, to which he had given his sad fatalistic shrug. And in any event she had the appointment here, all set up. “Oh, I don’t think so, Lew,” she said, turning down the invitation. “There’s really too much to be done at the airport.”
He was surprised, and showed it. “Too much to do? Come on, Ellen, you spend most of your time just hanging around, reading magazines. You’ve told me so yourself.”
“Well, today there’s too much to do,” she said, turning the plane in a tight U and stopping on the pad. “And I really don’t want to go.”
“Why not, for God’s sake?”
She shut down both engines, then looked at him frankly and clearly. “I’m not interested in the Jhosi family, Lew,” she said. “Nor in their coffee plantation. Nor in a nice drive through Nairobi.”
He had understood her subtext; she saw his face close in defensive anger. “Have it your own way,” he said.
“Thank you.”
She climbed down from the plane, and he followed. He started to help her tie it down, but she said, “Go on, Lew, the grandmother’s waiting.” They could both see, some distance away beyond the chain link fence, Amarda Jhosi standing beside her car on tiptoe, happily waving, like the girls in war movies welcoming their men back from battle.
Lew hesitated, obviously torn, looking between Ellen and the waving girl. “You sure you won’t come?”
“Positive.”
He nodded, as though coming to a decision. “See you later,” he said, and walked off.
She kept her back turned, busy with the ropes to tie the plane down, until she was certain they had gone.
Among the tiny cubbyhole offices for the various small cargo and charter air services, Ellen found the one marked CHARTAIR, LTD. in sky-blue letters that leaned speedily to the right. Inside, a worried-looking black man sat crowded in between large dark filing cabinets, as though the cabinets were guards sent to keep him here until time for the execution. His desk was messy, his wastebasket overflowing, and the small blackboard on the side wall listing future charters was so cluttered with half-erased or crossed-out numbers and names that it made no sense at all. “I’m looking for Mr. Gulamhusein,” Ellen said.
The condemned man lifted his worried head. He held a ball-point pen in his hand, and two red pencils were stuck in his woolly hair above his right ear. In a surprisingly firm and self-assured voice, belying everything else about him, he said, “You would be Miss Gillespie?”
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Gulamhusein phoned from Nairobi,” the man said. “He has been unfortunately delayed, but he will be here within the hour.”
“That’s all right,” Ellen said, though she was disappointed that she couldn’t get the details over right away. “I have other things to take care of. I’ll be around the terminal.” She left the man there and walked toward the airport manager’s office with her documents, trying not to hear herself thinking that she should have gone with Lew to the plantation.
Mr. Gulamhusein was another Asian, an overgrown fig of a man with a smoothly smiling exterior which seemed to be imperfectly shielding panic. But he was efficient; he had brought the employment contracts and the Ugandan immigration form and the other papers.
The condemned man had relinquished his seat between the filing cabinets to Mr. Gulamhusein and had gone away for a cup of tea. Mr. Gulamhusein unceremoniously cleared the messy desk by piling all the papers in a kind of compost heap to one side, then neatly laid out the documents he’d brought in his shiny black plastic attaché case, saying, “You will want to read everything most carefully before you sign.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Ellen said, and settled down to read.
Because of the eight-hour time difference between Kenya and New York, she had had to get up at two in the morning, night before last, once she was sure Lew was asleep, and drive to Balim’s office (having earlier gotten his permission) to make the phone call to the pilots’ agency at Kennedy Airport. She had used them before, and in fact they’d gotten her the job in Alaska. All she’d said this time was that she wanted a job anywhere in the world, but when she’d mentioned that she was calling from Kenya, the man at the other end of the line had become very interested, saying, “We may have something right there, very near you. Short-term job, but it ends in the States.”
“Perfect,” she’d said.
It would take a second phone call, and the man had agreed there would be someone in the office at eleven that night, which for Ellen would be seven the next morning. And when she made that second call, the deal was arranged.
So here she was with the East African representative of Coast Global Airlines, a large American cargo company, reading the contract for her employment. Sometime tomorrow, Wednesday, a plane lacking a copilot would be arriving at Entebbe from Baltimore. Ellen, at Coast Global’s expense, would be flown by charter from Kisumu to Entebbe to become that plane’s copilot. Her documents from Ugandan immigration would permit her to stay in the transient aircrews’ accommodations at Entebbe, but not to leave the airport. On Friday, she would crew as the plane, fully loaded, went to Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden and returned empty. There would be three, and possibly four, round trips, but in any event she would be paid for four. On Saturday or Sunday she would crew back to Baltimore, where she would be paid. And by then, according to the man at the agency, they would surely have another more long-term job lined up for her. It couldn’t be better.
The strange thing was, she was so involved in her own plans and her own unhappiness and her own determination to get out of this situation that had become intolerable to her that it never even entered her mind there might be any connection between the cargo she would be flying to Djibouti on Friday and the trainload of coffee Lew and the others expected to be stealing any day now.
“Everything’s fine,” she said, putting the papers down on the cleared part of the desk. “May I borrow a pen?”
“Certainly.” It was an expensive silver fountain pen, which he uncapped before handing her. Watching her begin to sign and initial the various papers, he said sympathetically, “You were not content in your previous work?”