Amarda walked Lew down the hall toward the front door. “Thank you,” he said.
The look she gave him was cold and unfriendly. “For what? I told the truth, that’s all.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“But I did have to.” Stopping in the hall, facing him, she said, “I behaved properly. To Pandit you are still a hero, but to me not anymore. And when I think of you from now on, I will say to myself, ‘I behaved properly.’”
“I still thank—”
“Wanube is waiting for you in the car. He works for us. He will drive you back to the airport.”
Lew would have tried to speak again, to thank her or say goodbye, but she turned on her heel and walked away.
At the airport, smiling, happy, he found Ellen reading a magazine in the waiting room and said, “Everything’s fixed.” And he meant—and he wanted her to understand—that everything was fixed. Not just the job Balim had sent him to do, but also the entanglement with Amarda. That too was fixed—forever—and with very little damage on either side.
“That’s fine,” Ellen said, rising, stowing the magazine in her shoulder bag; but for some reason she didn’t seem particularly interested or involved.
Lew had been assuming her bad temper was the result of some suspicion she had about him and Amarda; couldn’t she see there was no longer anything to be suspicious about? He was sorry she hadn’t been out front to see him arrive without the girl. Nailing home that message, he said, “Some employee of the family drove me back. An old man, a Kikuyu, named Wanube. Maybe the slowest, vaguest, worst driver I’ve ever seen. I finally took the wheel while he sat in back. Come to think of it, maybe that’s what he had in mind.”
“Probably so,” Ellen said, still distracted. “You ready to go?”
“Sure. Ellen? What’s the problem?”
Now she did finally look at him, and he saw her eyes come into focus. “Sorry, Lew,” she said. “I was thinking about something else. You talked the grandmother around, did you?”
“That’s just what I did. I think she half wanted to be talked around, anyway.”
“So Mr. Balim was right to send you. Come on, let’s get back and give him the news.”
They walked out the terminal’s side door and headed for the plane. Lew said, “Ellen? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, and suddenly became much livelier. “Just half-asleep from sitting around, I suppose.” Looping her arm through his as they walked along, she said, “There’s no reason we can’t be friends.”
Now, what did she mean by that?
31
At the very first bureaucratic foot-drag, Isaac forgot to be scared. He almost forgot who he really was, and what this charade was all about, because what came flooding into the forefront of his mind was his normal technique for dealing with minor-league officiousness, clerical obstructionism, and the arrogance of petty authority. When the motor-pool sergeant, a sloppy man in a sloppy uniform, said indignantly, “We can’t break into our schedule to service a truck for you now, you should have phoned yesterday,” Isaac’s immediate answer was to point to the phone on the sergeant’s desk and say, “Put me through to the commanding officer.”
Now, if he’d stopped to think about it, that was just about the most dangerous thing he could have done. These documents from Chase should carry the day with the Jinja Barracks motor pool—and in fact they’d gotten him through the gate and this far already—but in order to divert suspicion from Chase later on, the documents could eventually be shown to be forgeries. If the sergeant were to call Isaac’s bluff and put him through to the Barracks commander—which is exactly the way some truly self-important bureaucrats would have handled the situation—Isaac could well be in deep trouble very fast. He could see the sequence now: the commander sides with his sergeant, and in order to complain about the lack of advance warning, he puts a call through to the individual in Kampala whose signature was on this requisition. “What order for a truck? I never—” Isaac’s heart began to pound.
But. “No need to be that way, Captain,” the sergeant said, at once losing his fine indignation and becoming mulish and sullen, like a man who’s already been chewed out by his superiors more than once for unnecessary interference. “I’m just saying we don’t have a truck for you at this exact instant.”
Isaac had the man on the run now. Suddenly cool—really and truly cool, he was astonished to realize—just as though he weren’t standing in this office in this low concrete-block building next to the motor pool, deep within Jinja Barracks in Uganda, with thousands of Amin’s troops all around him like piranha fish around a drowning kitten, still thoroughly cool, Isaac made a show of looking at his watch. “At what instant do you suppose you will have a truck for me?”
“That’s hard to say.” The sergeant made an effort to reconstruct his former indignation. “You come in here; you disturb the schedule; I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
“Well, I know, my friend,” Isaac said. “You see who signed this order?”
The sergeant looked again—reluctantly, it seemed—at that very important signature. “Yes, I know, I know.”
“This isn’t for me. I’m a captain. Do you think, if that truck were for me, I’d drive it myself?”
“Oh, I understand,” the sergeant said, unbending a little, as though in acknowledgment that he and the captain shared the same fate: constant harassment from above.
“If I am late with that truck,” Isaac said, “I’m sorry, but I won’t take all the blame myself. I didn’t get to be a captain that way. Do you understand me, sergeant?”
The sergeant did. He also understood why Isaac had made a point of emphasizing their comparative ranks. “Yes, of course,” he said, looking worried.
“So I’m sure we’ll both do our best,” Isaac suggested.
“Certainly. Why not? Hmmm, let’s see, I’ll have to, um…” He took down one of several clipboards in a row on the wall over his desk and leafed through the papers on it. “I’ll just check outside,” he said. “You understand, I’ll have to give you a truck already in process of being serviced for someone else. This alters the schedule a great deal. Well, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be back.”
The sergeant bustled out, carrying the clipboard with him. Isaac went over to the window to watch the man walk out across the motor pool, where a few dozen vehicles, ranging from large tractor-trailer rigs to buses to jeeps, were parked higgledy-piggledy on the tan dirt, in no discernible design. The sergeant’s implication of neat, orderly, bustling, highly organized activity orchestrated to a tight schedule was belied by the sloppiness visible everywhere and the inertia common to those few troops he could see.
Strangely, Isaac felt less sure of himself, less concealed and more in danger, now that he was alone. He seemed to need someone to pretend in front of before he could feel secure in his impersonation.
The sergeant was out of sight, somewhere in there among the trucks and buses. What if he’d seen through Isaac’s disguise? What if he’d already guessed that the documents were bogus, and even now he was on the phone somewhere out there, calling for a squad to come arrest the impostor?
Four men came into view from behind a building to the right, carrying rifles as though they were fishing poles after a long day without a nibble. Isaac stiffened, all the old fear coming back. Once again he was hidden in that shrubbery in the warm night behind his house, looking at all the lit windows and listening to the machine-gun fire within.