“And then?”
There was a catchphrase Amin used with his closest confidants, which meant that the person should first be tortured—not for information, but as punishment or for exercise—and then murdered. He used the phrase now: “Give him the VIP treatment.”
“Good,” Juba said.
Amin added, “But save the head.”
39
Charlie didn’t understand Lew Brady. The man wouldn’t play the game. Since Monday, the beginning of the training sessions, Charlie had been assigned to Lew Brady as translator and it hadn’t been any fun at all. Brady apparently didn’t realize that one of the fringe benefits in this job, one of the little extras that made the work appealing, was Charlie’s right to make fun of his employers. If he didn’t have that, then what was the point?
And he didn’t have it. Charlie was a fast study, and on Monday he had learned that when he translated Lew Brady’s statements he’d better do so word for word. The flights of fancy, the scatological asides, the absolute poetry of his translations of Mguu’s bellowed orders had made the entire work staff happy for years. Now here was this fellow taking himself seriously and bending Charlie’s bones whenever Charlie wanted to have a little fun. The result was, in addition to the boredom of doing the job right, he was losing face with the other men, who knew what Brady had done to him and why he was being so cowed.
Maybe it would be necessary to kill Lew Brady.
Not so easy, though. Charlie considered going to a witch doctor—the best killing witch doctors came from the Luo tribe, right around this area—but what if word got back to Brady? Or even to Mr. Balim, whom Charlie revered in an almost theological way.
Charlie saw Mr. Balim as a being apart from other men, not to be compared either with his own Kikuyu tribesmen nor with the animals that populated the rest of the world, but as completely something else. In Charlie’s mind Mr. Balim was a great benign sun that beamed upon him, that could read his mind without condemning him, and that understood Charlie’s intelligence and humor and wisdom in a way no other mind had ever done. Mr. Balim gave him authority, Mr. Balim gave him responsibility, and then Mr. Balim completed his joy by giving him absolute understanding combined with absolute acceptance. He knows my heart, Charlie told himself; if ever he would tell his secret name to another human soul, it would be to Mr. Balim.
For some time, Charlie had been trying to think of a private name for Mr. Balim, but so far without success. No word, no name he could think of, was grand enough.
As for Lew Brady, he would soon find a name for him. He was close to deciding on Gijjig, an adaptation of a Kikuyu word for “venereal disease,” though he had to admit the name contained more in it of spite than relevance. Perhaps a name would come; if not, Gijjig would do.
“Charlie, goddammit!”
It was Mguu, interrupting Charlie where he squatted thinking about Lew Brady. Charlie looked up in amiable fashion. “Yes, Frank?”
“Goddammit, Charlie,” Mguu said, “don’t shit on the flowers.”
Charlie looked down between his knees. In truth there were lilies there, but so what? He’d chosen this spot because he intended to wipe himself with a few. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“The locals don’t like it,” Mguu told him. “They been bitching and complaining; every time somebody wants flowers for their house, they’re all over shit from you. Besides, you’re right out in plain sight. Do it up the hill there.”
Charlie hadn’t actually started to relieve himself, having been concentrating so thoroughly on Lew Brady, so now he merely shrugged and straightened up and pulled up his pants. “Whatever you say, Frank,” he said. “I just wanted, me, to be close by in case you needed something translated.”
“Oh, fuck off, Charlie,” Mguu said.
“Okay, then, Frank.”
Charlie drifted on up the hill behind the hotel site, toward where they’d been camping out. He would have done his shitting in some declivity in front of Mguu’s tent, but he doubted Mguu would be using the place again.
At the top of the hill he turned to look back, and the scene below reminded him of pictures in the book Treasure Island, which he had read in school when he was a boy and learning English because his mother—now dead—wanted access to the riches of the city. She had understood clearly that English was the language of the city, and would twist Charlie’s arms or ears if he did badly in his lessons. In her dream, Charlie would grow up speaking English, would travel to the city in the little matatu bus—really just an enclosed pickup truck with two benches in the back—and there he would in some magical manner become plugged into the society of the rich. The money and the clothing and the food and the leisure would somehow flow out of the city and through Charlie and spread like a warm glow all over his mother.
What happened in reality was, Charlie grew up to be Charlie, and his mother died of various illnesses and a lack of medical attention at the age of thirty-seven. Which doesn’t mean she was wrong.
And which does mean that when Charlie stood on the hilltop now and looked down at Port Victoria’s shore, with Berkeley Bay to the right and the open immensity of Lake Victoria to the left and the green hump of Uganda straight ahead, what he thought of was the pictures accompanying Treasure Island.
Most of the men were hard at work down there, swarming over the rafts, while Mguu strode back and forth like a Long John Silver who’d regrown his leg, and Lew Brady played Tom Swift (more of Charlie’s schooldays grab bag of books in English) by overseeing the uncrating and assembling of the outboard motors.
Ten large rafts were being built along the shore, each twenty feet square, made of twenty-foot-long planks nailed to twenty-foot-long crosspieces, the entire arrangement then lashed to empty oil drums. Along one edge of each raft a rough-and-ready assemblage of planks was being fastened underneath the main wooden body, and then four of the Evinrude outboard motors were being attached to each of these assemblies. The reason for this awkward-looking mess was that the rafts would ride so high in the water that if the outboard motors were attached directly to the raft bodies their propellers would be completely up in the air. On the return trip, with each raft carrying tons and tons of coffee, that wouldn’t be a problem.
Seen from the hilltop, the ten rafts were like some Lilliputian armada, about to launch themselves in a soup tureen, but they were more serious than they looked. The men’s lives depended on these rafts, as Lew Brady had said (and as Charlie with perfect fidelity and increasing rage and boredom had translated), so they were taking their work with great seriousness. The ring of hammers beat out over the water and the land.
Charlie turned the other way, and something that might have been a gazelle ducked and leaped and flowed out of sight. Might have been a gazelle, but was not. Charlie pretended he hadn’t seen it, and strolled along like any man looking for a place to shit. His search led him by many angles and ellipses closer and closer to the little bush-filled hollow in which—
“YAAAAA!”
Charlie leaped like a swimmer entering the pool for a two-lap race. The man—not at all a gazelle—surged up out of the brush like a startled quail, but wasn’t fast enough; Charlie brought him down, arms entangling in the man’s legs, the two of them crashing back down into the scratchy leaves and branches.
The man kicked and twisted and flailed about, utterly silent. It was the silence that told Charlie this was an enemy and not merely a sneak thief or a passing stranger. He held tight to whatever parts the man offered—a bony ankle, a bonier wrist—and slowly but inexorably he pulled the man out of the shrubbery and laid him on his back on the stony ground, where he gazed on his closed face and remembered that he had seen this fellow before.