“I had not completely made my point.” To Lew she said, “I was talking of Pandit, and I was saying that the home is also a school, and I was about to suggest that the sense of self and the sense of morals Pandit learns in his home will be very important to him in later life.”
“Absolutely,” Lew said. The tea and cakes had given him something to do with his hands, but the hot tea had combined with the airless warmth of the room to create a stuffy, clogged, distracted feeling.
“Pandit has seen Mr. Balim here,” the old lady went on. “He has seen you here. If we continue as originally envisaged, the day will come when he will see many truckloads of coffee here which he will know we have not grown on our few acres. He will ask questions.”
Amarda said, “He has already asked questions, Mama, about Mr. Balim and Mr. Brady. Mostly about Mr. Brady.”
Glancing at the girl, Lew could read the hostility behind the neutral facade. It had, of course, been bad tactics to break with her before this meeting; a quick roll in that house in Nairobi and Amarda would be on his side now. But he couldn’t have made himself treat her that cynically, so now she would do her subtle best to sabotage his mission.
If only Ellen had come along! Not only so he could prove there was nothing between himself and Amarda, but also to help with the old lady. Mama Jhosi would have been impressed by Ellen, and would have realized any plot with Ellen in it couldn’t be all bad.
But Ellen had been difficult, and Amarda had set herself to be impossible, so Lew was left to struggle here on his own in this hot mummified room. Struggle and fail, no doubt; so he might as well get it over with. “I believe, Mama Jhosi,” he said, “I understand your point. If Pandit sees a criminal act performed in his own home, with the connivance of the two people he most looks to for moral guidance, what will happen to his own moral and ethical self?”
The old lady smiled, and made a small gesture with both hands. (She still held her book, marking her place.) “You do see,” she said.
What Lew saw, all at once and startlingly, was that he was exactly following Balim’s instructions: he was talking morality, good and evil. But he hadn’t intended it—he’d had no clear idea what he might say—and it seemed to him Mama Jhosi, rather than he, had led the conversation in this direction. But was Balim right, yet again? Baffled but emboldened, Lew returned to the attack.
“I see and I sympathize. And you may well be right. At Pandit’s age—what is he, twelve?—a simplistic morality may be the best approach. There’ll be time later, I suppose, for him to learn how to think through the knottier moral questions.”
Amarda gave him a quick look of annoyance, but her grandmother frowned, shaking her head slightly, saying, “Knottier moral questions? I see no moral question at all. The subject is stolen coffee. Thievery.”
“Of course.” The heat was his friend now; it bound them all together as in a secret hiding place. He said, “Mama Jhosi, may I tell you a story from my personal experience?”
“If you wish.”
“I am not a criminal by profession. I am a soldier.”
“A mercenary,” Amarda said.
“That’s right. My usual job is instructing recruits. Several years ago, you may recall, one of the factions in the Congo civil war took to rounding up groups of white missionaries, white medical people, and so on, and massacring them.”
“And nuns,” the old lady said. “I remember how sad that was; they killed many nuns.”
“I was just going to mention nuns. There was an orphanage—” Then Lew stopped and grinned and waved his hand in a negative gesture, saying, “The children were already gone; this isn’t a tear jerker story.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Amarda said in her neutral voice, “He means he will not try to sway you with sentimentality.”
“Oh, I see.” She was no longer marking the place in her book with her finger. She seemed almost to be smiling. “So there shall be no orphans in this story.”
“Only the nuns,” Lew promised. “Eleven of them, French-speaking. We had no transportation and we couldn’t take them on into the thick of things with us, but we didn’t like leaving them there. Now, there was a Land-Rover we’d seen, that had some journalists in it, that had been left with its driver while the journalists walked ahead. We went back to the Land-Rover, and the driver said he had to stay there and wait for the journalists. So we pulled him out of there, and we stole his Land-Rover and brought it to the nuns. One of them could drive, and away they went. The journalists were very angry.”
“Yes,” the old lady said. Now she was definitely smiling, while Amarda was cold and tight-lipped.
“Now, that’s not a particularly knotty moral question,” Lew said, “but it’s beyond the level of subtlety you want to permit for Pandit. We did steal that Land-Rover.”
“Oh, now, Mr. Brady,” she said dismissively, as though disappointed in him, “that was in a war. Things are different in a war, everybody knows that.”
“You’re in a war, Mama Jhosi,” he told her. “Forgive me, but you must know you’re in a war, whether you want to be or not. Idi Amin is waging war against you and a lot of other people. He has already harmed you in this war, as you well know. And he’s harmed Pandit, too.”
“A war is battles. It isn’t coffee.”
“Money from coffee is the main thing keeping Idi Amin in power. And his victims are just as dead as if they’d been on a traditional battlefield. But all right,” he said, sitting back, raising his hands as though to acknowledge defeat. “The point you’re making is your own relationship with your grandson. I can’t argue against that. The operation will go on in any event, as you realize.”
Amarda said, “Of course it will. My grandmother doesn’t suppose she is stopping the theft from happening.”
Theft. Thanks a lot, Amarda. Lew said, “Even at this late date, I’m sure Mr. Balim will have no trouble finding another coffeegrower happy to take your place. Someone for whom the issue is money alone, without the satisfaction you might have in avenging yourself just a little against Idi Amin. That other person’s motives will be less moral than yours would have been.” Leaning forward once more, Lew said, “Mama Jhosi, it was out of his fondness for you, and his awareness of your treatment at Amin’s hands, that Mr. Balim came to you in the first place.”
“I am sure that is true.” The old lady was agitated now; her fingertips silently tapped the blue-velvet cover of the book in her lap. “I have not discussed this with Pandit,” she said. “Amarda, have you?”
“Yes,” Amarda said. She hesitated, reluctant to go on, then looked hard at Lew, saying, “He sees it the way you do, Mr. Brady. A heroic adventure against the forces of evil.” Turning back to her grandmother, she said, “Pandit thinks Mr. Brady is a hero. Like a footballer.”
“A footballer?” The old lady studied Lew with mock severity. “Without a poster, I hope.”
“No poster,” Lew said, smiling.
She shook her head, thinking things over. Amarda sat rigidly, eyes lowered, looking at nothing but the tea service. Lew had won, and he knew it, and the astonishing thing was that Amarda had made it possible. The faint perfume hung in the close air, and he thought of Amarda’s bedroom, somewhere deep inside this house, which he had never seen.
Mama Jhosi sighed. “There seems to be no completely satisfactory answer,” she said, and looked speculatively at Lew. “But I suppose it won’t hurt Pandit to have his heroes, if he shows some care in his choices. You may tell Mr. Balim that I will keep to our original agreement.”