They had done a lot in five days, beginning in rain but latterly in drying sun. Beyond the turntable, the old bumper had been removed and was lying unceremoniously in the shrubbery to one side of the track. The track itself had been extended with rails from beside the engine shed. Lacking ties or sleepers, they had half buried thick logs at intervals from the end of the original track to the gorge and then attached the rail plates and rails to those. It was a makeshift, tottery affair and couldn’t last long, but it only needed to last one day.
What the men were working on now was the path from the engine shed out to the access road, creating a surface that would permit trucks to pass. Trees and undergrowth were being cut away and the resulting logs and branches used to fill in the ruts and gullies that crossed the route. Less than a quarter of the distance had been covered, but they could already see that it would work.
“Okay,” Frank said, stamping up and down the completed portion. “This fucker’s gonna do the job.” Then he grinned at Isaac and said, “This was Ellen’s idea, remember?”
“Of course—”
“Let’s—” Frank stood looking around, hands on hips in his usual expression of impatience.
“What is it?”
“A plank, board—something.” Frank held his hands about a yard apart.
Isaac translated the request, and one of the workmen immediately laughed, nodded, and trotted away to the engine shed, to return a minute later with an old one-by-six, originally part of a window frame, both ends rotted away by dampness. “Perfect,” Frank said, and pulled out his boot knife.
They all stood around watching as he laid the board on the ground, knelt over it, and carved the thick letters into the time-grayed wood, revealing slightly darker wood underneath. When it was finished, the board said: ELLEN’S ROAD. “There,” Frank said.
Isaac, during the carving, had explained to the workmen that Ellen, Mr. Balim’s white woman pilot, was the one who had thought up this road. They had all seen the woman around Balim’s office, had thought of her as eminently fuckable, and were well pleased to have the road named after her. (Although in its earliest days Swahili had developed a written language and literature using Arabic orthography, that false start had been swept away and replaced by the European alphabet when the Portuguese overran the Arab merchant towns along the Indian Ocean early in the sixteenth century. Today the literate speaker of Swahili uses the same alphabet as the literate speaker of English; “road” in Swahili is njia, but “Ellen” is Ellen.)
After much discussion about the perfect location for the sign, a roadside tree near the engine shed was chosen, one of the workmen shinnied up, and the board was nailed into place. As the nailer slid back down, the others raised a cheer, which rang through the woods.
Well, well, Isaac thought, the world of the active man can be rather fun.
But now they got back to business. “Three days,” Frank told the workmen, through Isaac, and they all grinned and nodded and said there would be no problem. “Okay,” Frank said. “We’ll go out this way. I don’t wanna mess with that blind again.”
The last several uncleared yards of Ellen’s Road were rough going, particularly since Isaac was wearing ordinary shoes, as would befit the chauffeur of a Mercedes.
At the access road, Frank stopped and looked downhill. “Twenty miles to the lake,” he said. “Easy as falling off a house.”
Behind them, the chain-saw buzz started up once more. That nasal noise somehow only re-emphasized the quiet and the peacefulness of this forest, the tall graceful yellow-barked thorn trees, smaller trees of a dozen kinds, several varieties of purple acanthus, hibiscus in many colors, ground orchids, and here and there the creeper vine called setyot, which flowers only once in every seven or eight years; there are tribes who wait for its flowering before initiating their youngsters into manhood. Songbirds moved through the higher branches, keeping their distance from the chain saw and the movements of men.
“It’s beautiful here,” Isaac said, gazing around, watching a robin-chat—a small bird with yellow face and breast, gray wings, snowy white head—soar from branch to branch, pausing at each to announce one or another of its many brief songs. “Beautiful, peaceful.” Sadly, nostalgically, thinking of Obed Naya, he said, “What a wonderful country this could be.”
“Nice place for a battle, though,” Frank said critically, studying the forest around them. “Particularly if you were attacking from uphill. Well, come on, let’s get you back to that office you like so much.”
32
Late Tuesday afternoon, and Sir Denis was exhausted. He could hardly keep his eyes open, and the softness of the Daimler’s upholstery, the smoothness of the drive, the calm skill of the chauffeur up front beyond the glass partition; all struggled passively against his desire to stay awake. “My Lord, but I’ll be glad when this is over,” he said.
Beside him, a fur wrap over his useless legs, Emil Grossbarger snorted, saying, “Also I. Ziss Amin is not a businessman.”
“I don’t know why he insisted I be there when the coffee is shipped. As though I were some sort of dispatcher. But he made it a condition of the sale. Yet another condition of the sale.” Sir Denis yawned. “The last, I hope. Excuse me.”
“After ziss, you can go home to São Paulo, you can rest.”
“I’m not as young as I used to be.”
There was a little silence in the car while they both pondered that statement; neither of them was as young as anybody used to be. Outside, the modern glass-and-concrete banking towers of Zurich went by, pink with embarrassment in a mountain sunset. A Volvo with red United Nations license plates rode for a while ahead of them before turning off toward the lake. How odd it was that so many offices of the United Nations were here, in Switzerland, a country that didn’t even belong to the UN. Perhaps, Sir Denis thought, the rest of the world is trying to learn the secret that’s kept the Swiss out of every war fought since 1521.
“I had you removed, vunce, from ze Uganda transaction.”
This was the first either of them had mentioned that. On Sir Denis’s arrival this morning from London, to meet with Grossbarger for the first time since his removal and reinstatement, he had wondered how the man would act toward him, and how he himself would behave in return. And the answer had been, they would both ignore the incident.
They had had a good lunch in Grossbarger’s private dining room, in his apartment atop the tower containing his offices, during which no word of hostility or explanation was either requested or offered. Much of the conversation, in fact, had been about the wild mountain scenery, dark green below and gray-white-black above, forming the unexpected cyclorama background to this hard, modern, commercial city. “Ze mountains mock our little buildings,” Grossbarger had said, smiling conspiratorially at them out his forty-seventh-floor window.
But now, at almost the last minute, as Grossbarger accompanied Sir Denis to the airport, the subject was all at once brought up. “I had you removed, vunce, from ze Uganda transaction.”
“I know that,” Sir Denis said, treading carefully. No inflection in his voice, he said, “I’ve wondered why you did it.”
“You must know,” Grossbarger answered, “zat not all ze coffee sold in ze vorld is of an unquestionable pedigree.”
“Smuggling, you mean. The ICB does what it can.”