Snakepit (20 page)

In his helicopter he flew to the desecrated office. Phones were ringing, unfinished work was strewn on desks, employees were moving about with no idea what to do next. He berated the guards and every person he came across. In a rage, he called Ashes' office, but he was out and nobody knew when he would return. He called the Office of the President, now run by the Eunuchs, and heard that Ashes had been authorized to find the missing man.

“I want to beat that goat-fucker to a pulp,” he told his advisor.

“Not yet, General,” the colonel said. “A man acting on behalf of the Marshal cannot be taken lightly. Especially not when he is the boss of the Anti-Smuggling Unit. He can easily ruin us completely.”

“What am I supposed to do? Sit here and wait like some dog's dick trapped inside a bitch's pussy?”

“Ah . . .”

“I auctioned that man some time ago, Colonel. I offered you ten thousand dollars in cash for his worthless balls. Why is he still alive? Are there no men hungry enough to take him on? Why do I still have this cross to bear?”

“You saw what we did to his house, General. I have got another trap nicely laid out for him. At the lake. I will nail that shit-eater this time,” said the colonel, thinking that ten thousand dollars was too miserly a price on the head of a man like Robert Ashes, and that if the General wanted a symbolic gesture to show his disregard, he should have auctioned him for a dollar. Now that would be something.

“How long do I have to wait inside this bitch's pussy? How long? My Bureaucrat One is gone. What greater humiliation is there for a minister than to have his biggest official carted off like a bucket of shit?” He hit his chest, flailed his arms and finally rested them on his hips. “I participated in the coup that launched this royal family. I have defended the government against all its enemies. And now I have to grovel at the feet of this stinking turd?”

“Things change, General,” the colonel began tentatively, thinking that it should be the General, such a powerful man, saying these words, not him. “You can never tell what Marshal Amin in his deep wisdom is thinking. Otherwise, why didn't he inform you of that reptile's order? How long has it been since he invited you to his home to play hide-and-seek with his children?”

“You are right. There must be something going on, somebody poisoning the Marshal's mind. What do you think I should do?”

“Caution while we work out the next move.”

“Caution! Caution! Again! How long am I supposed to be cautious? When will you bring me his head on a stick?”

“Soon, pretty soon. He is aware that we are after him. He switches cars at the eleventh hour. He goes by air when everybody expects him to go by boat. It is hard to nail the dog-fucker, but it is just a matter of time, General.”

“I should have killed that Cambridge turd and it is you who stopped me. He should die before Reptile gets to him. It will rob his victory of meaning. A coffin will be a good reward for his investigations.” The General looked outside his office at the Parliament, rising squarely out of the ground to symbolize the power of the nation, or rather of those at the helm, and thought about the man held in its bowels. Things have indeed changed in a bizarre way, if a general can't get his way in matters like this, he thought, feeling angrier by the minute.

“It won't help, General,” the colonel said, knowing that his boss was not thinking straight at all and was too caught up in his vanity and sense of power to see the big picture. “Ashes knows where he is by now. He wants to use this incident for personal profit. If you thwart him at the eleventh hour, he is going to come down hard on us. He could even tell the Marshal about it. If he doesn't, he is going to hurt us badly in some other way.”

“You are right. I am going to wait,” General Bazooka hissed, and stormed out. He realized that a prince was no king: he still had to take crap from his king, especially if he was a self-declared king of Africa. As a prince, he could piss on the heads of peasants, but he could not get his way all the time. Princes tended to be disposable and they often destroyed each other. Ashes was a prince too, with equal powers of destruction.

THE ACOLYTES LOCKED Bazooka's men in a villa in Nakasero. Under interrogation, they revealed what they knew. Ashes learned that Bat was called away to the Nile Perch Hotel ostensibly to meet his boss. The motive for the disappearance remained unclear, which was common among these incidents, and he could only guess. The news that the man was still alive cheered him. The mission was going to end more quickly than he had expected.

But the Acolytes arrived too late; the prisoner had been moved. General Bazooka had taken him to an unknown location. This turn of events put Ashes in a very foul mood. He hated this kind of game when he was not the one initiating play.

GENERAL BAZOOKA MADE HIMSELF as elusive as possible. He travelled in unmarked cars, singly or with two men. He stayed most of the time at Kasubi with his wife and children. The first week as a full-time husband and dad was interesting. He drank a lot and slept a lot. He kept an eye on things when he was awake; he barked at servants and looked at his children's exercise books. He was happy to learn that his favourite son did not like school and did not perform well. He talked to him about the importance of the army and the chances he stood as the son of a general. He showed him different guns, told him heroic stories and made him promise to enlist as soon as he finished primary school. Secondary school he could do in the army. The boy was very happy to hear that his father was on his side. The other children were less enthusiastic, but he believed he would get them eventually. He visited his wife's shop. He found the business of waiting for customers and drinking tea or beer tedious, to say the least. He fled to the city, driving around, dropping in on friends.

After a week small things started making him lose his temper. One morning he shot at a housegirl because she did not move quickly enough when he ordered her to bring a fresh spoon to stir his coffee. His wife intervened and reprimanded him. He took offence. It had just been a warning shot, he said, and no big deal. He felt walled in. Deflated by his helplessness in the face of Ashes. He decided to go north, by road, to see what was going on up there. He needed the inspiration and a break from all the madness. He hoped to come back renewed, combative, sharp.

The first part of the journey was very exciting. He was travelling through familiar territory. It felt very reassuring to see soldiers at roadblocks taking care of business. They reminded him of his days as a hunter of armed robbers. At one roadblock, however, he caught soldiers taking bribes. He stripped them naked, made them roll in mud and jump up and down while singing his favourite nursery rhyme: “Humpty-Dumpty.” The fun part was saying the lines and hearing the miscreants repeat them after him. Afterwards he made a little speech excusing himself to the civilians, who would go away praising this big officer who came from nowhere and saved them from the rapacious soldiers at the roadblock. He left the place feeling good and eager to see what lay ahead.

But the farther he drove north, the more it dawned on him that, outside the city and the towns, government was a very thin concept. To begin with, people did not recognize him at all. He stopped several times to buy things, taking the trouble to enter the small dusty shops with old rusty roofs, but nobody called his name. The goods he wanted were almost always unavailable, except on black market, which was not for soldiers with medals dangling on their chests. He got irritated by these empty shops whose shelves were yawning except for empty cigarette cartons stuffed in for decoration. There was no cooking oil, no paraffin, no food, nothing.

“Nothing!” he yelled at the tenth shop. “Then what the Devil are you doing opening an empty shop? How long have you been here?”

“Since 1971,” the man said dolorously, his eyes as sad as his clothes. “Each year the prices kept going up till we could not afford the stock any more.”

“Are you blaming the government for this?”

“The government is doing a very good job. It is the factories; they closed down.”

The General found himself tongue-tied, and he stormed out to save face.

At the next trading centre, with a line of flat-faced shops with porches, he could bear it no longer. As soon as he heard the same dirge, he rushed into the back of the empty shop, kicking aside jerrycans and boxes. Miraculously, he found there bags of sugar, salt, tins of cooking oil, cartons of beans . . .

“Hoarding! You are sabotaging the government by hoarding goods and keeping the prices up,” he shouted at the top of his voice, as if he wanted the whole country to hear.

The man, wearing a faded blue shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows, old-fashioned stove-pipe trousers and bathroom sandals, said nothing; neither did he look impressed.

General Bazooka wanted to call the people of the town together and cane the man in public before selling his stock at government prices. But when he asked the man who he was, he turned out to be the father of a friendly general. In fact, the shop was registered in the general's name. General Bazooka was mortified. He ordered his men to take a few kilos of whatever they wanted and marched back to his jeep. Yes, he was in the north, this huge sweeping area peopled by so many tribes lumped together under the term “northerner.” He felt detached from the terminology and from the people. The connection seemed to have broken when he left for the south. The language of his dreams and ambitions did not flourish in this soil. The shallowness of his solidarity with these people shocked him. He was irritated by the stifling heat, the thinning vegetation, the luxuries of the city he had left behind.

“It is a bloody desert out here,” he told his men. They shook their heads, as if to say he had been corrupted by the south, for they were glad to be back, to travel through the land of their fondest memories.

The farther he went, the more convinced he became that the journey was a mistake. I should have gone to visit my mother instead of coming here, he said to himself. He could get no coherent picture here, only fragments. The whole country seemed about to fall to pieces. To the north-east, the Karamojong were busy with their cattle-herding, raiding neighbouring tribes as far as the Kenyan border. If these guys wanted cattle, they took the war all the way down to the east, laying waste hundreds of kilometres if necessary. For many of them Kenya was just an extension of Uganda, and they crossed over the border, firing their guns and arrows till they got cattle or defeat.

Guns proliferated in the region, making cattle-rustling a lethal explosion of internecine warfare. The gun had risen to become a symbol of manhood, an integral part of the culture. Many soldiers had sold their guns for cash in this region. He felt angry that this had been allowed to happen. The result was that most parts of Karamoja were no-go areas. The people did what they wanted. Police, army, the taxman; nobody dared go there. The place was the toughest spot in the country.

The more he neared his home area, the place where he was born, the more impatient he grew. He regretted having left his helicopter behind. He had seen enough on the ground for a lifetime. This place would have looked better from the air, less challenging, flattened to blandness by the science of flight. I would not have had to see those haggard cows, he thought, at least not in detail. I came here on holiday, not on a fault-finding mission. I am not a fucking vet or the Minister of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry. Where did those little black pigs come from? They are so small they look like rabbits. The pathetic goats look no better. They seem to be blaming people for keeping them alive.

He got on the radio; he wanted his Mirage Avenger sent immediately. There was no connection. He tried to call the nearest barracks, seventy kilometres away, and also failed. He suddenly felt stranded. What the hell was going on if a general was not assured of a working radio? What if something happened to his family? It looked like a trap which might have been set by Reptile.

In the West Nile District, he felt calm again. He was among his tribesmen. He realized how little the government had done for the area despite the promises made almost every day: there was no electricity; there were few schools and hospitals; there was a dearth of drinking water. The most visible change was that young people wore bell-bottom trousers and silver sunglasses, and dreamed of going south to work for the State Research Bureau.

In the evenings, he had meetings with a number of chiefs. He promised them cattle, cars, mansions, helicopters if they encouraged young men to join the army. He wanted to have men in the army who looked up to him, men he could trust. He could employ them as his personal bodyguard, a sort of personal army within the army to fight for him. He knew that his promises were hollow, but they were the currency a leader spent in order to get certain things done.

He missed being able to indulge his rage, the blazing urge to dominate, which he felt in the south. There was no kick in it here. Spitting beer at these people would only look and feel foolish. Shitting his pants would simply be pathetic. The south did things to him the north didn't. The biggest part of him was down there; without it, he felt out of balance. It came to him that power was a very atmospheric liquor; where you drank it mattered most. Feeling lost, he decided to go and see his mother.

At Jinja his mother was very glad to see him. She had a big house among trees not far from the lake. She cooked him big meals, went with him for walks and showed him around. She liked the town, with its spacious roads, large houses, the nice weather. She really loved doing business, talking to customers, visiting local ones to see how her fish nets performed. She took him to visit her circle of friends, old ladies in their sixties and seventies. They met every week to drink tea and spend lazy afternoons talking about the past. He did not pay attention to what they said but liked the fact that they treated his mother with great respect. On the way home, she reminded him to bring the children to stay with her when the city became dangerous.