It was the raggedy man, the boneman that Charlie and Mguu had surprised during their visit to the depot. Which was in Uganda. Which was a far far way from here.
I should have killed him last time, when I thought of it.
Charlie straddled him. “Oh, boneman,” he said, his strong fingers toying with the man’s Adam’s apple as a kitten toys at first with a ball of string or a cat toys at first with a wounded bird, “oh, boneman, there is no false story you can tell.”
The boneman apparently recognized that himself. He merely lay there on his back, arms under Charlie’s knees, caramel-colored palms facing up.
“But you could tell me who sent you,” Charlie said. His thumbnail drew a thin line of blood across that moving captive Adam’s apple. “You could tell me that. Who spies? For what purpose?”
“I am an important man,” the boneman said with an attempt at dignity, his voice hoarse as though from disuse. “If you kill me, you will be hunted down.”
“By the Society of Bonemen?” In his combined comedy and rage—fueled by his recent thoughts about Lew Brady—Charlie overdid himself; he played too hard, the way the cat plays with the bird. Before he knew it he had crushed that Adam’s apple, and the creature below him was gurgling and thrashing, eyes sticking out, tongue swelling.
“Oh, no good,” Charlie said, sitting back on the animal’s agitating stomach. “Very stupid. Mr. Balim would think I had become foolish. Oh, dear.”
Leaving the boneman to gurgle himself to death, knowing his wisest move was not to mention this at all to Mguu, Charlie sighed and got to his feet and went away to find a socially acceptable place to relieve himself.
40
For many miles, the A104 parallels the northern railway line. At times the track is visible from the road, where they run next to one another on the straighter flatter stretches, while at other times the rail line is hidden by jungle or low hills. Baron Chase, driving north at the wheel of one of the black Toyotas belonging to the State Research Bureau, missed the coffee train in one of those latter areas, but when he reached Opit and saw that the loaded freight cars there were gone, he realized his error, reversed, and drove back south.
The train crew and yard crews had already done a lot, picking up the loaded cars from Pakwach East, then Lolim, Aparanga, Bwobo, Gulu, and Opit. And when Chase rearrived at Otwal, the train was just pulling out, now almost twenty cars long. Ahead were Lira, Aloi, Achuni, and Soroti, the largest town along the way, where they would undoubtedly spend the night. Tomorrow morning, they would have only Okungulo, Kumi, Kachumbala, and Mbale at which to pick up the filled cars. No later than lunchtime tomorrow the train should be full and traveling nonstop to Tororo to join the main line and turn westward for Kampala and Entebbe.
Chase traveled parallel to the train from Otwal to Lira, passing through field after field of coffee, the bushes all glossy green, already growing their next crop of cherries. A coffee tree left to itself will grow thirty feet tall, but the growers prune them to fifteen feet or less, for case of harvesting. (In some places, like the Jhosi plantation, they are kept to bush height.) Toward the end of the rainy season these fields had crawled with harvesters, men and women and children, all circling back three or four times to pick each bright-red cherry when ripe. Once the rain was finished and the sun appeared, the cherries were spread on outdoor cement floors to dry, then were sent several times through fanning and hulling machines to remove dried hulls and interior yellow pulp, freeing the two beans that lie inside each cherry, their flat faces together. Two membranes still surrounded each bean, an inner delicate one called the silver skin and a more brittle outside one known as the parchment. These were removed in further cleaning machines, which led to sorting machines where the beans were separated by size, then to a hand-culling process to remove imperfect beans, and finally into a machine that weighed and bagged them ready for shipment.
Chase and the coffee train flowed and sailed through the coffee fields in their rolling green landscape under the high hot blue sky, here and there a field all white with clusters of jasminelike coffee flowers to counterbalance the smudgy line of black smoke drawn back from the locomotive over the full cars. The train whistle wailed at level crossings; the wheels of the loaded freight cars clattered and burbled along the rails; the cars all swayed at separate rhythms in the warm air. Driving along, Chase looked over at the coffee train and smiled. KAHAWA, said the white chalk letters, car after car, KAHAWA KAHAWA KAHAWA. Mon-ey-for-me, said the wheels on the rails, mon-ey-for-me, mon-ey-for-me, mon-ey-for-me. WOOOO-oo-u.
As the train slowed at Lira, Chase speeded up to dash over the level crossing just before the barriers were put down. His foot hard on the accelerator, he did the hundred sixty miles to Tororo in less than two hours, confident that his license plate—beginning with UVS, a declaration of the Toyota’s official ownership—would keep any stray policeman from bothering him. At Tororo he turned west on the A104 and accelerated again.
It was not quite six o’clock when he turned off the empty highway onto the access road and bumped slowly down as far as the parked Army truck. He stopped the Toyota there, afraid it might get stuck farther on, and walked down past the railroad tracks to the path leading in to the maintenance depot.
The path had been rather astonishingly widened and smoothed; walking on it, Chase saw it would give the trucks no trouble at all. Even his Toyota would be able to traverse this new road. At the inner end, a board nailed to a tree gave the expanded path a name: ELLEN’S ROAD. Chase was reminded of World War II and the U.S. Marines on their South Pacific islands with their self-consciously humorous road signs: TOKYO—1,740 TIMES SQUARE—9,562.
The depot showed signs of activity, a great deal of cleaning up and rearrangement, but no human beings were in sight. Chase had been listening for the past five minutes or so to the repeated buzz of a chain saw; following the sound, he walked up the spur track almost to the hidden main line, where he found four men cutting away the last of the young trees and underbrush blocking the line.
Not knowing who Chase was, the four men were not at all pleased to see him. They looked actually threatening for a minute, until he mentioned the name Frank Lanigan. Then they smiled and relaxed and told each other in Swahili that he must be all right, just another of Balim’s white men.
Chase gave no indication that he understood the Swahili. In English he asked, “Is Frank Lanigan here?”
None of them had English. He was forced to do charades, pointing at the ground while asking for Lanigan. It would have been easier, of course, merely to speak Swahili, but the habit of hiding that capability was so ingrained in Chase by now that it never even occurred to him to use it.
They finally did understand, and let him know through their own elaborate sign language that Frank was still in Kenya, but would be here tonight. Chase let them know he wanted to leave Frank a message, and they assured him with gestures that they would deliver it. “I hope so, you buggers,” Chase said.
He carried a smallish notebook, on one page of which he now wrote: “Train maybe 3PM, maybe 6PM. No hue and cry at motor pool. C.” Ripping the page out, he folded it in half and wrote on the outside “Frank Lanigan,” then gave it with a stern warning in English to the spokesman for the group, a man in a filthy sleeveless green shirt, who smiled and nodded and repeated all his assurances.