“That sums it up,” she said, and smiled through her doubts, and handed him back his pen.
29
So he knows I’m going to Jinja.
That same sentence kept recurring in Chase’s mind as he drove east on A109, amid the groaning trucks that gave an impression—utterly false—of a soundly functioning economy. So he knows I’m going to Jinja.
And he tells me he knows.
Meaning there are further things he doesn’t know. For instance, he doesn’t know why I’m going to Jinja, because if he had the slightest suspicion about the truth, I’d already be dead. Or wishing I were.
But it also means he’s suspicious of me, more than in the normal way of being mistrustful. He thinks I’m up to something, but he doesn’t know what it is, so he’s poking at me a little to see what happens.
Poke all you want, Idi. All you do is strengthen me in my resolve.
Until very recently, he had thought he would continue on here for a while, possibly even a year or two, after making his double killing on the coffee deal. But this operation was making him nervous, and now Amin’s attitude was making him even more nervous. Once the coffee was gone, why wouldn’t Amin begin to believe that Chase had had something to do with its disappearance?
So the thing was to get out, right away. Not with the coffee, no; he had no desire to be present when Balim and Company received their little extra surprise. But at the same time as the coffee went, he would go. His papers were such that he could leave at will, so why not slip out of the country as soon as the word came that the coffee had actually been stolen? There was no reason why not, and plenty of reasons why he should.
Jinja, the source of the Nile, that romantic ideal of the Victorian imagination, has today become a plain and ordinary town, part small manufacturing center and part bedroom community for the civil servants at Kampala, fifty miles away. The whole is brooded over by the Army’s Jinja Barracks, site of the first massacre of Idi Amin’s rule, when several hundred officers and men from suspect tribes—Langi and Acholi, mostly—were herded into a small building and machine-gunned.
Not far from the Barracks was the business center of town. The lawyer Edward Byagwa’s office stood upstairs from a now-defunct shoe store, once owned by Asians, then given to an Army officer from the Barracks, who, not knowing how to reorder, abandoned it when the stock ran out. Byagwa shared the second floor with a dentist, who hadn’t been seen for about two months. His family remained hopeful.
Byagwa’s secretary in his reception room was his wife; a fairly good guarantee of loyalty, assuming there were no domestic difficulties. She was a stocky unattractive woman who was reading an old copy of Queen, and who looked up with a mixture of apprehension and annoyance when Chase walked in. Seeing he was a white man, and therefore unlikely to be dangerous to her, she dropped the apprehension but kept the annoyance. “Yes?”
“Baron Chase. I’m expected.”
“You’re late. The others are already here.” Not rising from her desk, she gestured at the inner door.
“I am Captain Baron Chase,” he said, smiling at her, “an adviser to our President.”
She stared at him, the threat sinking home. In Uganda, no one was permitted to call himself “President” of anything, not of a club or a company or a trade union. No one but Idi Amin. For another person to give himself the title “President,” no matter of what, was a capital offense. So this man was telling her that he was close to Amin and that he was, after all, potentially dangerous to her, and that she should irritate him only at her risk.
Yes; she understood. Her mouth opening into a wide O, she started hurriedly and awkwardly to her feet. But then Chase smiled, arresting her with his hand, saying, “No, don’t get up. I can find my way.”
The inner office had a wall of windows overlooking the street, covered by a layer of thin curtains. The furniture was scanty and functional, placed for efficiency rather than beauty on a worn gray carpet; an Army uniform was folded on one chair. The walls were pale green and contained no decoration other than the attorney’s framed documents.
Entering, Chase first saw Frank Lanigan, sprawled on a wooden-armed chair like a defeated gladiator. The man was dressed in suit and tie, but looked as ridiculously crumpled as ever. “Hello, Frank,” Chase said, smiling. “Long time no see.”
“Not long enough.” But Frank did get to his feet and consent to shake hands. They both squeezed hard, but stopped before it became a contest. “This is Isaac Otera,” Frank said, gesturing to a black man in chauffeur’s uniform.
Isaac Otera, Chase knew, was Balim’s office manager and the one who was supposed to get the trucks. He certainly didn’t look the part. And why is the man staring at me like that?
Neither Chase nor Otera offered to shake hands, and it was with some relief that Chase turned to the third man in the room, the attorney, Edward Byagwa. “Our host, I believe,” he said.
Byagwa did want to shake hands, and Chase obliged, finding the lawyer’s paw soft and pulpy, like the rest of him. Byagwa had a round head and a round face of polished bronze, with a very wide mouth and bulging eyes. He’s stuck midway between frog and prince, Chase thought, amusing himself, as he released the man’s hand.
Edward Byagwa was many things, too many things, and some inevitable day he would overstep himself. His wife outside was right to be apprehensive. An active churchgoer, Byagwa appeared in court frequently to defend priests and ministers against accusations ranging from treason (the storing of weapons in church basements was a popular charge) to the holding of services allied to one of the banned Christian sects. At the same time, he served as a go-between in smuggling operations involving Army officers and government figures, and had allegedly been very helpful back in 1973 in getting automobiles across the border into Kenya. (The ousted Asians had left behind many fine cars, but the Ugandan shilling was then already worth only a fraction of the Kenyan shilling, and true profit could be turned on those cars only if they could be gotten out of the country. That was the first time in Amin’s reign that the border with Kenya was closed; Amin closed it himself, to try to keep those cars in Uganda. Byagwa had helped many important people to realize their profit after all.)
Because he was so useful to the people in power, Byagwa dared more than most lawyers could these days in helping his church friends. And because he had been so useful, and knew (quite literally) where so many bodies were buried, he was not bothered, as he might otherwise have been. This office, for instance, was not bugged, nor was his telephone tapped, making this one of the very few places in Uganda where the present meeting could have occurred.
“Well,” Byagwa said, coming around from behind his desk, “you’ll want to talk together.” And he smiled and bowed and departed, carefully closing the door behind himself.
“We might as well get down to it,” Frank said. “Get changed, Isaac.”
But Chase shook his head and put his finger to his lips. Frank frowned, and they all listened, and heard the hall door close. Frank strode to the inner door, opened it, and demonstrated to Chase that the reception room was empty. “Okay?”
“Not yet.”
Chase looked around the office and decided the most logical place to start was the desk. The drawers were all innocuous, except that the bottom left was locked. Lying on the floor under the desk while Frank and Otera watched in bafflement, Chase found the tiny wire emerging from the bottom of the desk under that locked drawer. Carefully tacked into place along a seam between two pieces of wood, the wire ran to a tiny button microphone at the outer corner of the desk.