Finally Chase retraced his steps, looking at all the work that had been done. They’re working for me, he thought in secret pleasure. Only for me.
Chase’s small neat house was in northwestern Kampala, off Bombo Road. He could see Makerere University from his front windows, and Mulago Hospital was up behind his yard. The house had belonged before 1972 to the son of a wealthy Asian merchant. Chase had kept most of the boy’s toys—the pool table and stereo system and small private screening room—but had had to give up the silver-gray Porsche to a Public Safety Unit colonel who had obsessively craved it.
Generally, throughout the house, the Asian decorations had given way to Chase’s simpler style. The rooms were more bare and Spartan now, and footsteps echoed as they would not have done in the past. A living-room wall on which had hung a tapestry carpet in vivid reds and greens now featured neatly framed black-and-white or color pictures of Chase himself with noteworthy figures of the day: people who had permitted themselves to be photographed with him during their stay in Kampala, or people he’d met while accompanying Amin on official visits overseas. Colonel Juba was studying these photographs with his disapproving air, hands clasped behind his back, when Chase walked in at a little after eight o’clock that evening. The two uniformed men with Juba, one showing a captain’s rank, the other a major’s, lolled at their ease on the overstuffed maroon mohair chairs left over from the previous occupant.
Seeing front-room lights on from the driveway, Chase had merely assumed his servant girl, Sarah, was doing some late cleaning up, but when he saw Juba and the other two—he recognized them, knew they were cronies of Juba’s, but didn’t know their names—he realized at once he was in trouble.
He didn’t show it. “Colonel Juba! What a surprise. Is Sarah getting you something to drink?”
“No, thank you, Captain Chase. Is this really the Pope?”
Chase seldom used his Ugandan Army rank. To be called “captain” was another signal of trouble. Walking forward, his awareness strongly on the two seated men, both nodding and smiling and as yet taking no part in events, Chase said, “Yes, that’s the Pope, all right. And that’s me.”
“Did you ask his blessing?”
Colonel Juba was a Muslim, like most of the men closest to Amin. Chase gave him an alert look, saying, “Do you think I’ll need it?”
“Oh, we all need blessings,” Juba said. “President Amin wants to see you.”
“Personally?”
“Oh, yes. You can help him with that Swiss man who is buying the coffee.”
Juba had gone too far with that. He was not as good at subtlety and double entendre as he thought. But Chase didn’t show that he now knew not only that he was in trouble but also why he was in trouble. Instead, he smiled and said, “Anything I can do, as President Amin knows. Where is he today? The Old Command Post, isn’t it?”
“No, he’s at Bureau headquarters.”
Serious trouble. Very very bad trouble. “We shouldn’t keep him waiting, then,” Chase said.
He knew, whatever might happen, he was leaving this house for the last time. But he didn’t look back.
41
Just before sunset a car came sluing and sliding down the slope from the village of Port Victoria, skidding to a stop by the unfinished hotel. Lew had been sitting up on top of one of the completed rafts, looking westward out over the calm violet waters of the lake at the ochre ball of the setting sun. Thin lines of cloud bisected the sun to radiate colors in an extravagant display of blues and reds, magenta and maroon and indigo, rose and ruby and plum, gold and brass and aquamarine. The narrowing band of sky between sun and lake looked bruised, but the rest of the western sky was a topographical map of Heaven.
The colors affected the Earth as well, turning everything into Technicolor, brighter and ruddier and more golden than life. The men, their construction work finished, lay about on the ground with the unreal clarity of a Dali painting, and the arriving car semaphored golden and crimson greetings from its windshield. Lew turned to watch, and when the car stopped Young Mr. Balm came smiling and chipper out from behind the wheel while a somewhat less enthusiastic Isaac emerged on the passenger side.
Frank strode toward the car, his ink-black shadow sliding over the copper bodies of the reclining men. While he and Isaac talked together, Young Mr. Balim walked toward Lew, his smile at once arrogant and shy. “You’re King of the Mountain?”
“Come up.”
The top of the raft was a good yard from the ground. Lew grasped Young Mr. Balim’s slender wrist and hauled him up, where the two could turn again and look at the sun, now shrunken slightly as though receding, and deepened to a rich cinnabar. Its bottom edge very nearly kissed the lake horizon. “Beautiful,” Young Mr. Balim said. “I like your view.”
“Thank you. I got the impression from your father this morning that you weren’t feeling too well.”
“Oh? What did he say?”
“Nothing. Just looked disapproving.”
“Ha.” Young Mr. Balim said, “He led me to believe you and Frank were utterly unscathed.”
“Propaganda.”
“I thought so.”
The violet disk of the sun touched the water, then became minutely flattened on the bottom, like a locomotive wheel in need of regrinding. Lew said, “You here to see us off?”
“I’m coming with you.”
Lew gave him a surprised look, and was startled to see the extent of Young Mr. Balim’s vulnerability as he stood there in the red light, smiling painfully, braced to be made fun of. Quickly shifting gears, Lew said, “Then, welcome aboard.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I meant for not asking if my father knew I was here.”
“Frank will.”
“Oh, I know. Isaac did already. When do we leave?”
Lew nodded at the sun, continuing its lesson in conic section. “When that stops watching us,” he said.
Frank and Isaac had come over, Frank belligerent and Isaac worried, and both now stood below them. The clarity of the light of just a few moments ago was gone, the redness becoming tinged with black, creating ambiguity. There was no ambiguity in Frank. “Bathar,” he said, his hands on his hips, “your father is crazy.”
“The sins of the sons,” Young Mr. Balim said, with a graceful shrug.
“You’re no fucking use over there, Bathar,” Frank said. “You gonna carry sacks?”
“I shall play the lute.”
“Oh, fuck off. Come on, Isaac, it’s time we launch these mothers. You can translate; Christ knows where Charlie is. Lew, you keep an eye on Young Bathar.”
Isaac gave them a nervous apologetic smile, then was drawn away in Frank’s wake. Frank was already yelling at the prone men. Young Mr. Balim’s eyes glinted in the red light as he looked at Lew, saying, “That puts us both in our place.”
Twilight was short, and decreasingly spectacular, but as the colors drained out of the sky, swirling down after the sun into that slot on the western rim of the world, a hundred million stars gradually became apparent, very high crisp tiny points of white, with a quarter-moon at shoulder-height over the lake. In this uncertain and constantly shifting illumination, the rafts were one at a time wrestled over the muddy shoreline and out onto the warm water. Long planks were laid between each raft and the nearest reasonably dry ground, and everything was loaded. By the time the sky was almost completely black, except for a dark-reddish blur at one spot on the horizon, as though a city were in flames on the far side of the lake, they were ready to go.