“How do you do,” Chase said, smiling. “I’m sorry, I have no Swahili.”
“Oh, yes. English fine. You, sir,” the plump guard said, gesturing for Chase to precede him into the shed. Behind him, a skinny weirdly boned woman wrapped in a cheap bright-patterned red cloth emerged from the hut, carrying an old desk drawer full of forms and stamps and pencils.
Chase had to duck his head to get through the doorway. The interior of the shed contained a wooden tabletop supported on old beer cases. Two backless chairs faced one another across this table.
The plump guard, entering, gestured to the chair Chase was to take, then settled himself with comic grandeur on the other. The woman came in, put the desk drawer handy to the guard’s right elbow, and stood to one side behind him, hands clasped in front of her crotch.
Chase handed over his Ugandan passport, saying, “As you see, I am a member of the government.”
“Ah! Fine!” said the guard, using his English. “Very fine.” He took the passport and opened it.
Chase saw him change; that was the first thing. The guard was not a subtle man, nor a very bright one. His smiling face became stiff with shock; his shoulders hunched; he began very rapidly to blink.
So I didn’t have this much time after all, Chase thought. He folded his arms, the fingers of his right hand snaking in under his left sleeve toward the automatic.
The guard stared too long and too unseeingly at the passport, attempting to compose himself. Then he looked up, still furiously blinking, and gave Chase a huge smile in which panic was the chief component. “More papers,” he said. “Me papers.” Then he turned to the woman, as though instructing her in what papers she was to get; but what he said in Swahili was, “Get Ulu and Walter. This is the man the President wants. When he goes out, they must shoot his legs.”
“All right,” the woman said. Now she too was ineffectively hiding fear and excitement and panic.
“But they must not kill him,” the plump guard said. “The President wishes to speak to him.”
I bet he does. Smoothly rising, drawing the automatic from his sleeve, Chase said in Swahili, “Don’t move.” He didn’t shoot them right away because the sounds would attract Ulu and Walter.
The damn woman. The gun frightened her, all right, but it frightened her the wrong way. Instead of freezing, she screamed and jumped and then ran at Chase! She dashed at him the way the dazzled rabbit hurls itself into the automobile’s headlights, and to the same effect: Chase killed her.
But it was no good. He’d had to shoot, and yet she kept coming. He shot again, and she threw her arms around him in an embrace of death. The miserable little .25 had no stopping power.
The dying woman encumbered him, pressing his gun hand between their bodies. By the time he freed it the plump guard was ready, the desk drawer held high over his head, papers and rubber stamps flying every which way as he brought the drawer crashing down onto Chase’s wrist.
Then two men came running into the shed and knocked him down.
They were both the dead woman’s lovers. It was all the plump guard could do to keep them from kicking Chase to death.
49
Lew and Young Mr. Balim stood on the track and watched the last two dozen spikes being driven into the sleepers. The rails had been put back where they belonged. Two of the ex-railwaymen were attaching the joint plates, spitting on them, smearing them with dirt to hide the new scratches. Most of the work crew had already left, going down with Frank to start the unloading.
Young Mr. Balim finished rolling the long wire around the earphones, then tucked the ball of phones and wire under his arm; there was no longer any need to eavesdrop on Jinja. “Wouldn’t you like to be here?” he asked. “I mean, when they realize the whole bloody train is gone.”
“But there isn’t any here here,” Lew told him, and gestured at the ongoing line of the track. “Just twenty-five miles between Iganga and Jinja, and no train.”
“The look on their faces,” Young Mr. Balim said, chortling, and the look on his face changed when he glanced back up the track leading toward Jinja. “Now what?” he said.
Lew turned, and here came the sentry he’d posted down there, pelting along the track, risking his balance by waving his arms over his head as he ran. Lew said, “Find out what it is.”
Young Mr. Balim trotted forward, calling in Swahili. The man stopped to answer, pointing behind himself. Young Mr. Balim turned back to Lew. “He says, a man on a bicycle.”
“Christ.” Lew looked back at the men hammering in the spikes; only a few remained undriven. “Tell them to forget all that. Just get down and out of sight. With their tools.”
“Right.”
While Young Mr. Balim did that, Lew waved vigorously at the other sentry down by the access road. Go away, he waved. Get out of sight. Go down the road. The sentry seemed confused for a moment, but then he saw the workmen hurrying to hide and he responded with a comprehending wave and then trotted away.
The first sentry had already without pausing run through the opening in the hedge, and now the workmen streamed after. Lew went last, pausing for one quick look around, then jumping over the rail and trotting down through the gap.
Half a dozen workmen were poised to slide the blind back into place. They were jockeying it into position when the cyclist first appeared around the curve to the west, riding in the narrow dirt strip beside the railway’s gravel bed. Weary, perspiring in his dark-blue official Uganda Railways jacket and dark-blue round hat, all unknowing he pedaled doggedly past the scene of the hijacking, his right sleeve brushing the blind, his movements watched through twenty tiny chinks in the shrubbery. On he went, pursuing the lost train as doggedly as he pursued his course in accountancy. He didn’t know it yet, but he would bicycle all the way to Iganga.
50
“Your Excellency,” the uniformed male secretary said, “very good news. Captain Chase has been found.”
His ebullient mood having been spoiled by the defection of Chase, Idi Amin had taken to his porch at the Old Command Post, where he now sat with a bottle of beer and four of the returned airmen. They’d been striving very hard to recapture the amiability and self-satisfaction they’d enjoyed at lunch, but without much success; the jokes and laughter and reminiscences, even Amin’s, were too obviously forced. It was harder and harder for Amin to ignore the fact that he wasn’t happy, and the airmen were right to become increasingly nervous, though not smart to show it.
But now, in a flash, everything changed. The sun shone. Amin’s merry smile spread across his face, his eyes lit up, he even clapped his big hands together, the long fingers splayed wide and only the palms hitting, as when children try to applaud. “Ah, now we have something!” he cried. “Where is this scoundrel?”
“Major Okwal is on the phone, Excellency.”
“You boys wait here,” Amin said, heaving himself to his feet. “I’ll tell you about this scoundrel.”
The secretary led the way to Amin’s office, where the phone waited off the hook, then bowed and departed, shutting the door. Amin sat at his desk, picked up the receiver, smiled like a lion who sees a zebra, and said, “So, Major Okwal? You have him?” It was Amin’s practice not to identify himself on the phone, assuming that everyone would know who he was.
“Yes, Excellency.” Major Okwal was a Lugbara, Amin’s mother’s tribe. A colorless man, he had attained a middle rank in the State Research Bureau, where he was an effective if not imaginative interrogator. Amin treated him as he would a dull inoffensive cousin.