Snakepit (11 page)

“Do you still want to drive in the East African Safari Rally?”

“I am not fast or steady enough to drive. In fact, there are many better drivers. All I can do is navigate, but I hate map-reading under such pressure. I decided to wait. I am happy with what I have,” he said nonchalantly, as if he were talking about somebody whose prospects did not interest him a jot.

At the party he exploded some spectacular fireworks which climbed the sky in a noisy rush, unfurled and dominated the air in short piercing intervals. Bat couldn't get enough of the sight, even if Babit was worried about drawing attention.

Amidst the explosions, a Euphoria 707 full of Bureau agents parked one house away from them. The men got out and spied on the proceedings. They anticipated action, the turning of tables, emptying of wallets, maybe even the abduction of a woman. Unfortunately for them, they had to stop their salivating; it was one of those untouchable houses, with untouchable guests. They swore and cursed. One of the most frustrating aspects of Bureau work was having to show restraint, and being careful not to get into shoot-outs with the Public Safety Unit or the notorious Eunuchs, even if you were in the mood. With gallons of adrenaline and testosterone to jettison, the men drove away looking for some fool to fall into their itching hands.

At one interval Bat was called away to the phone. He swore under his breath, thinking that it was General Bazooka, who had the habit of calling him at awkward times, sometimes on Saturday or Sunday, sometimes deep in the night, on ministry business, but really to test him.

“Why didn't you invite me?”

“What happens in this house is none of your business,” he said firmly.

“It is my business. You are the father of my child, my first love.”

“I don't remember seeing any virginal first blood that night.”

“You don't understand. Maybe you don't know how to love.”

“I have no intentions of taking lessons. Stop calling my house for no reason.”

“Your daughter wants to see you.”

“I will come round. Now get off the phone. My guests are waiting.”

“One day you will beg me to return. I am the rightful lady of the house.”

“Keep on dreaming. Good night,” he said, replacing the receiver.

Half an hour later the phone rang again.

“Is that the housegirl speaking?”

“It is the lady of the house speaking,” Babit replied curtly.

“I am the lady of the house, child.”

“I am not your child, woman. Stop bothering us. Get yourself a man.”

“Bat is my man. You are the intruder. Before you brought your fat face into the house everything was fine. You are responsible for my child's suffering, my suffering, everybody else's suffering. Why don't you just leave?”

“Bat made his choice. Live with it. He will never take you back.”

“Wait and see. You are barren as a stone. You will not last. Save yourself the humiliation and leave with some dignity. Leave before something happens to you.”

“Nothing is going to happen to me. You are going to remain where you are. I am staying here, with or without a child,” she said, and replaced the receiver. The phone rang immediately after. She picked it up and replaced it. It rang again and again. She unplugged it.

When most of the guests had left and the two of them were sitting on the sofa before going to bed, Babit told Bat about the phone calls.

“She called me earlier. Why should she have bothered you?”

“I don't know.”

“I told her to stop calling. I will have a firm word with her.”

“She said that you don't like barren women.”

“Who said you were barren?”

“I have not yet conceived, have I? How many months is it since . . . ?”

“I am not thinking about children, dear,” he said, squeezing her and pulling her into his chest.

“It would be nice to give you a son.”

“What has brought this on? Are you in the mood to compete?”

“A man needs an heir though,” she said pensively.

“To need an heir you have to be dead first, and I am alive. I am going nowhere,” he said, holding her hand and stroking her palm suggestively.

“It was a very nice party. It made me feel special.”

“One day I will take you to England. I want you to see Cambridge and meet my friend Damon Villeneuve. We will stay in luxury hotels and enjoy the best of everything.”

“It all sounds fantastic, but how will you pay for it?”

“There you are, worrying again.”

“I am sorry.”

“A good woman checks the nuts and bolts.”

Bat kept thinking that everything he wanted was in his house that night. It felt as complete as a fortress, a moated castle. Outside, the guard kept an eye on the night. In one room, his sister and her husband slept. In another, his brother and his exploding dreams. In the master bedroom, he lay next to Babit, feeling her hot skin as she slept. The room itself was cool, the smell of wildflowers stealing in with the wind. Two colonial administrators had slept here. Two white kings; top members of the elite, as the Saudi prince would have put it; two brothers, in other words. The brotherhood of veiled threats, blackmail, brutal arm-twisting, humiliation and guilt? Or something more subtle? He himself felt like royalty of sorts. Kingship had become democratized by money and power. Soldiers and the elite were the new royalty, with new rituals and hierarchies. Mimicking the princes of old by stabbing, poisoning, and burning each other in a quest for a little more power and money and prestige. The lucky losers went into exile, the unlucky ones died. I have no intention of going into exile. I want to die right here in this country but in due course. I want dictators to come and go, leaving me behind to run new ministries. My friend Villeneuve has only recently had his own coronation. He is now a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons. I am happy for him. The Conservative MP he replaced was found dead in his flat with a garbage bag over his head, his stiff bluish dick in his hand, a pornographic movie in the video deck, pornographic magazines strewn around his feet like autumn leaves. Royalty, eh?

THE SAUDIS WERE as good as their word. They started delivering construction equipment, large aggressive machines which tore up the earth to make room for military barracks and installations. By now Bat knew that the Ministry of Power had been used to divert resources from other ministries for military purposes. The leeway the Saudis enjoyed was immense. Was this the beginning of the prince's island-buying spree? Were the islands going to be used for military purposes? Nobody seemed to have the answers. The situation was made hazier by rumours that Amin had given the green light for the demolition of the king's palace, which would be replaced by the biggest military barracks in the country, with mosques, playgrounds, swimming pools and gigantic hangars to house MiG 200 fighter-bombers. It was said that he wanted the grand project finished in time to mark ten years since his defeat of the king's forces in 1966. There were rumours of impending civil unrest among southerners if he dared go through with the plans. There were threats to poison food and water used by the military and to flood their barracks with dysentery and diarrhoea. The country was awash with fictions and fabrications, with both opponents and proponents chopping up scanty fact and liberally mingling it with fantasy.

The feverish rivalry between the Saudi princes was bound to surface and bear consequences locally. Trouble took an indirect route. One day at a state banquet Robert Ashes called General Bazooka aside and confronted him with the fact that money had changed hands before the elder prince had been awarded the contract. The news hit the General like a scalding gust of foul wind. The fact that it was his arch-enemy who broke the news to him made him mad. Is there no limit to the power this bastard wields?

Since taking over the Anti-Smuggling Unit, Robert Ashes' power had multiplied tenfold: he now also investigated corruption, whatever that was. What if he told the Marshal about all the money? Was the man trying to blackmail or threaten him? Or was he just flaunting his powers, rubbing it in? More troubling was the fact that he had failed to plant spies in this snake's camp. How long would this imbalance of power remain unaddressed? Why weren't other disgruntled generals taking action against this reptile?

Within a very short time Robert Ashes had become the Marshal's darling confidant. General Bazooka had hoped that the relationship would cool down after a year or so, but it was just gaining momentum. Ashes had added the role of court jester to his repertoire. He cracked jokes and played pranks nobody would get away with. He made generals unwittingly sit on balloons which made prolonged farting noises at big functions or meetings of the Defence Council, which he dared call the Farting Council. The Marshal loved it.

One day he drove to a state banquet in a dirty lorry which carried four Englishmen dressed as eighteenth-century nobles, complete with white wigs, powdered faces and knickerbockers. The Marshal laughed loud and long as the clowns held a beer-drinking and beef-eating competition. When it was discovered that the clowns had eaten pork instead of halal meat, the Muslim generals were scandalized and wanted to use the case to get rid of Ashes. But the cocaine-snorting, whisky-swilling Marshal only made Ashes apologize, and the matter was forgotten.

Another time Ashes brought three white nuns dressed as Kakwa traditional dancers. They wore flamboyant headgear, skin loincloths, beads and amulets, and carried spears and bull-horns. They leaped and swayed clumsily while the scandalized audience clapped and whispered. A large bathtub was brought and they held a mud-wrestling contest. Afterwards the Marshal found out that the women were not nuns but the wives of Copper Motors officials. He loved Ashes' creativity and improvisation.

On another occasion Ashes came wearing a gorilla suit with axe teeth and red lips. The audience froze, expecting Amin to take grave offence. The gorilla hopped about snatching hats from the heads of appalled generals. Amin clapped loudest. Some generals suspected that the Marshal had ordered the hat-snatching just to humiliate and unsettle them. Maybe they were the gorillas. In a world of shifting loyalties and acute uncertainty, Robert Ashes seemed to be the only person above it all, if you disregarded Dr. Ali, who alternated as God or Satan and came and went as he pleased. He could do no wrong. He was a loaded gun which could go off in anybody's face. To cap it all, the Marshal had promoted Robert Ashes to the rank of colonel in the Uganda army, as a reward for his tireless efforts to stamp out the cancer of coffee-smuggling. This, General Bazooka thought bitterly, at a time when the cancer was grinding to its climax. And why was he not promoted for putting down the most recent rebellion in the army?

Up to this moment General Bazooka had feared only one man: the Marshal. Now he discovered that he also feared Colonel Robert Ashes. How long would it take before this reptile got promoted to general? And how much more dangerous would he become?

“General, I am thinking about investigating this affair properly,” Ashes said, grinning, savouring the fact that he had made the word “general” sound like it meant “pus.” He lit his Cuban cigar and pulled a large volume of smoke into his lungs. “Uganda cannot afford to be in the bad books of the Saudi royal family. Those people can topple this government in the blink of an eye.”

General Bazooka overlooked the insult and started panicking. He really did not know what to do. He thought about begging Ashes for time, for mercy, for any scrap of benevolence out of desperation. “Take it easy, Colonel. It is nothing serious,” he said, mustering up his courage.

“Marshal Amin will decide what is serious and what is not, General.”

By now General Bazooka was sure that there was a spy in his ministry, just like he planted spies in other ministries. He was determined to take swift action. With the spy, or spies, gone, he knew that Ashes would be stalled.

“Enjoy the party, General,” Robert Ashes said enigmatically, and walked away.

General Bazooka became so angry that he almost had a fit. His lower lip quivered and his hands shook. He was losing touch. What had become of the Victoria woman? Nothing. He had sent her on a mission and instead of doing her job she had become pregnant. He could have set things right, but he had just ignored it. He had become soft and lost sight of his priorities. Perhaps that was why he had lost his beautiful islands and crocodiles and the command of the prestigious Anti-Smuggling Unit. Perhaps the Marshal saw that he was no longer as sharp as before and had decided to teach him a lesson and send him a big warning. This had to end. Now. He had to nip it in the bud. He had to show that he was still the best commander, or one of the best commanders, in the country.

AT A FEW MINUTES PAST FOUR that afternoon, Bat got a phone call summoning him to the Nile Perch Hotel. It was not unusual to be in the middle of something important and then be called away. On his cynical days Bat said that he was nothing more than a messenger boy for the General. It always put him in a temper to be torn away from something, but he was learning to live with it. He set everything aside, slid on his coat, straightened his tie, and walked out. Cursing, he got into his car and drove off. It was a fine day: clear, hot, windy, not a trace of humidity in the air. The Parliament Building looked majestic, a monument to power carved out of ivory. The soldiers at the gate were statuesque, the smoke coming from their cigarettes adding a grotesque touch to their figures. A string of Boomerangs swept past, horns blaring, tailed by Stinger jeeps with swaying aerials.

Within minutes he was at his destination. He parked, locked, and walked away from his car. He briefly thought about the prince's Porsche 999. He could feel the vibrations that monster engine had given him in the desert. He walked quickly, hardly noticing the soldiers lying about in the grass, weapons held idly, now benign as sticks. Did this sort of boredom breed the killer instinct and fire up the explosions? The soldiers looked at him with supreme indifference. He was just another suit, another boss to many people in a certain office or factory brown-nosing with a general or colonel or somebody else of real importance. Nothing showed on the faces of the soldiers, which looked dead, buried in the depths where no man, except their commanders, could reach them. They seemed untouched by love, hate, passion, moved only by the order to act.