The Last King of Scotland (1998) (41 page)

He pulled the chair round and sat on it once again, putting the staff on the table next to the plate.

“Yes, and I know that very soon I will escape from here. Alive. Because, as I have said, my dreams always come true. And I know that someone will foot it here swiftly to help me…”

I felt a deadly weight hanging around my neck.

And then he said: “Yes, I know many things. For example, I know that you are there, Doctor Nicholas, and that you have been listening to me for the duration of this time. You see, there is a mirror on this side of the room also. Why don’t you come and join us?”

My voice stuck in my throat. I raised a hand before my eyes.

“Do not be foolish. You are my very special doctor. Come here.”

I felt my foot go forward. There was, indeed, a mirror.

“You muzungu are never as clever as you think you are,” said Idi.

I saw myself moving in the mirror. The one he had been watching me in. And now he was in front of me. The tricorn at a jaunty angle on his head. On the table, on the plate: the other head.

I stood there, face to face with him now, and shaking. Like a driver at the wheel, he spun round the plate. At once I recognized the grisly visage as that of the Archbishop of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Boga-Za’ire, the very one who had married him.

“You didn’t expect that, did you?” he said. “In truth I am sorry for it. It was done without my permission. It was one of those times. They brought me the head in this and I was very angry. It had been frozen.”

He held up the wool bag. It was heavy with blood and melt-water.

“Anyway,” he said, “that was before.”

He looked at himself in the mirror. “But tell me, why did you come back here?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but only a dry croak came out.

“I know, it is because you love me. Unlike many people, you do not think I am a foolish muntu and a savage man who eats babies. You are too intelligent to think that.”

Again, I was speechless.

“Let me tell you the truth about that, Doctor Nicholas. While I was a sergeant in the English army and my mission was to infiltrate the Mau Mau organization in Kenya, Uganda and in the Belgian Congo, I was captured by cannibals of a Mau Mau tribe and I was forced to eat flesh with other English soldiers. We risked death if we refused. We ate human meat only in order to accomplish our military mission, which I consider now as heroic. It was the English fault, you see. If they had not come to Africa, where we did not want them, and pushed us off our lands, there would have been no Mau Mau. If there had been no Mau Mau, I would not have been fighting Mau Mau. Therefore I would not have eaten human flesh. Do you follow?”

“Yes,” I gasped, finally. “But…you know there are soldiers outside, and crowds of people. They will kill you.”

“They love me really,” he said. “They have forgotten. They will remember. Because I am like a father to them. There is a part of me in every one of those people. In Uganda and worldwide. Completely. Otherwise, how could they have supported me?”

“What do you mean?”

“They wanted to be me, to live in me, because they did not want to be themselves.”

“Maybe…they were just afraid of you and the soldiers,” I ventured.

“That is also true,” he said, thoughtfully. “But they did want to be me also, or they wanted something from me. The foreigners more than any. The Americans and the Soviets, the French and the English, the Israelis and Saudi Arabians, the Pakistanis and the Indians and the Bangladeshis and the Koreans. And the East Germans. All were my friend. Only the West Germans did not help me. Yes, nearly all the world was my friend – militarily, diplomatically, economically. Like many were buying coffee from Uganda – especially the United States, where they like coffee very much and bought half of all our coffee. They were our top trading partner. Or they sold me guns and aeroplanes or other things. Britain, Israel, America – all of them helped me train the State Research Bureau, who, as you know, have their headquarters next door. By the way, I am sorry that you had to stay there. But I had to teach you a lesson. Please, sit down.”

I did as he said. My mind was in turmoil.

He continued, “You can relax now. All that is over. A new era has begun. I do not mind leaving now. I have had all a man could ask for. It is only natural that things should change. You can’t overtake time.”

“Where will you go?”

“I have many friends worldwide. Colonel Gaddafi has offered me the hand of his daughter in marriage.”

“How will you get out?”

He picked up the staff and gesticulated with it as he spoke. “I have two planes standing by at Nakasongola air base, a Lockheed Hercules C-130 cargo plane and my Gulfstream executive jet. They can take me anywhere I want in the world.”

“But how will you get out of the city? It’s swarming with Tanza-nians. How will you get out of the Lodge?”

“Doctor Nicholas, you know that I am the best commando in the world, and also a master of disguise.”

“You won’t get out. It’s impossible. Why didn’t you go earlier?”

“You heard me. I was thinking. Thinking and praying. Now I need you to help me!”

He snapped the staff in two, seemingly effortlessly.

I jumped at the sharp noise.

“Please.” His voice was suddenly quieter, weaker in timbre. “I beg of you.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I have a plan. There is an exit out of here through the State Research Bureau, as you know. But that will be guarded. I have seen them through the spyhole in the wall. They are taking bodies from there even now. They are putting them into bags. You can look if you want.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to look.”

“Doctor Nicholas,” he said. “You are a good man. Let me tell you a secret. There is also a tunnel that comes out by the road to Entebbe. I had it put in for just such an occasion as this. I would very much like for you to go there with a vehicle. The exit is by the envi poster. Do you know where I mean?”

“Yes,” I said, “but why should I help you?”

“Because I ask it of you. Because you are good.”

Idi was a man of enormous bulk, but his countenance could on occasion display a certain delicacy. It did so now. This wasn’t Idi the ranter, he of the knitted brow and grinding teeth, the hand hitting the desk with heavy dunts. This was something else.

He came round and leaned over me. “Please help me,” he said again, leaning closer. I could feel his breath in my ear. His voice was slow this time, like dripping honey.

My head spun. The softness of his voice had awakened in me an emotion I could hardly begin to understand. I felt dizzy and yet my thoughts were as clear as fresh spring water. My imagination was feverishly vivid in that long moment, yet my powers of analysis and application remained intense. I knew that I had been in a reprobate condition for some time because of my closeness to him and now – having been mired in cowardice and indecision for so many months – I was presented with an opportunity to overturn that. Not by handing him over to the Tanzanians (though I noticed that there was a submachine-gun leaning against the wall beside him), but another way.

The emotion I felt for him was pity, and I knew that the way out of the darkness into which I had allowed myself to fall was to help him. There it was. The path of my departure was free.

“All right,” I said. “I will.”

W
ell, I suppose I must confess it now. I failed even in that questionable resolution. You have heard the most important part of my tale, and I will not detain you long with the details of my escape from Uganda and subsequent events.

I did manage to obtain a vehicle. Colonel Kuchasa was still outside Nakasero when I emerged. I persuaded him we needed a Land Rover at the hospital for medical reasons – to transfer some wounded Tanzanian soldiers. I told him we didn’t have enough beds. And then I drove to where Idi had said the exit was. It was dark by the time I arrived, but the moon was high and full and even without the headlights on I could read the ridiculous ditty on the poster.

She’s got the looks

She’s got the style

She’s got the kind of skin

That drives ‘em wild

Hey what she got?

SHE GOT ENVI!

It had taken over an hour to get the Land Rover, however, and I didn’t know whether he had given up on me. I sat there at the wheel for a bit. Once again, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether to wait or to drive off. Either way, I didn’t know whether I was being tempted by good or bad.

In the end, after another hour, it was simply irritation with waiting that made me turn the key in the ignition. I followed the road out of the city and then down to the lake shore. I didn’t know quite where I was heading, and even though no one could see me, I felt foolish sitting there with the folds of my surgical gown about my knees.

I drove on, past the marshes. Soon, I knew, I would come to State House, where there were more Tanzanians. And my bungalow. I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t go anywhere.

I stopped the Land Rover and looked about. I was in a village by the lakeshore, deserted and almost totally destroyed. I slowly realized that it was the one where Marina and I had hired the boat.

I got out and walked down to the pier. There were several dinghies moored there, a number with outboard motors. They were rocking gently, and the noise of the boats rubbing against the wood soothed me. Almost without thinking, I gathered some jerrycans of fuel from the boats and climbed down into the biggest one, untied the lanyard and pulled the starting cord.

I could see lights across the dark expanse of the lake. Kisumu, Kenya. I trained my eye on them. NG seeking a light. The motor rattled away, and I glided like a phantom across the lonely vast-ness of Lake Victoria. For the first time in years, I felt free. At the stern, the algae bloom thrown up by my passage glowed red in the darkness – not just one red but a coral-scarlet-salmon-ruby-crimson host of incarnadine, incandescent shades.

I don’t know how long it took me. Six hours? Seven? At one point, a triangle of geese flew across the moon high above. Their throaty noise, summoning some half-buried memory from the past, made me long for Scotland.

In any case, it was almost dawn when I reached the port town. Climbing up the wall of the dock, I grazed my thighs and shins – badly, drawing blood – and also got myself covered in the brown slime that clung to the concrete.

There was no one about. I sat at the top for a few minutes, breathless, and then, pulling myself together, went in search of the police station. I must have cut a curious figure, walking in there in my gown. The sergeant at the desk wrote down my name and promised to follow up my request for a telephone with which to call the British Ambassador in Nairobi. It was time to go home.

∗

At least, that is what I thought. In the event, I was taken to Nairobi in a police car. There, rather than delivering me to the Embassy, they brought me to an ancient fort and locked me in a cell. No one would answer my questions when I shouted through the bars. Shocked and exhausted, I collapsed on the bed and started to sob.

Eventually, I pulled myself together enough to look round the cell. There was no window there, only a ventilator high up in the walls. The latter were made of massive stone blocks, bigger and older than the ones at Nakasero. There was Kikuyu graffiti scratched on the blocks, which led me to believe this had been a place where the British had interviewed suspects during the Mau Mau emergency. But they could just have been written by more recent detainees…I knew that President Moi’s regime had its own complement of human rights abuses.

As can well be imagined, I was extremely confused. I didn’t understand why I was being detained until later that day. At around four o’clock, I was taken from the cell into an interrogation room, where a senior police officer was seated with a folder of papers in front of him on the desk.

“We are holding you on suspicion of murder,” he informed me. “We are considering charging you with planting a bomb on a light aircraft bound from Kampala to Nairobi. Do you have anything to say?”

I explained about the lion’s head and my total ignorance of what it contained.

“He was using me,” I protested. “I had absolutely no knowledge of a bomb. I even knew Swanepoel, the pilot, personally. I nearly got on that plane myself. I wish I had.”

“That is a very tall story,” the police officer said. “How do you expect us to believe it? We know that you were closely involved with Amin.”

“Amin put me in prison. You can check it.”

He looked through the papers in the folder. I caught a glimpse of a photograph. My own face. I had no idea when the picture had been taken, or who had taken it.

“But you were his doctor. We have intelligence on this matter.”

“It was just a job, and one I regret ever taking. I was never involved in any criminal activity.”

“In our view you were as close to Idi Amin as anybody was.”

“I want to speak to the British Ambassador,” I said, horrified that I was once again in danger.

He kept asking me questions. “Were you a member of the State Research Bureau? How much were you paid to plant the bomb? Is it correct that you were present at scenes of torture at SRB headquarters?”

I replied, each time, that I was being held illegally, that I had nothing to say, and that I wanted to speak to the Ambassador. Eventually he stopped the barrage of questions and gathered up his papers.

“Well, what’s going to happen?” I demanded, as he was leaving.

“I am sorry, Doctor Garrigan,” he said. “The Kenyan government is of the opinion that you are part of the deposed dictator Amin’s apparatus of repression, and therefore guilty of crimes against humanity. And that you knowingly planted the bomb, on his instructions, on that plane. We will either be charging you to that effect – and we would aim to get a confession – or we will be sending you back to Uganda to face trial under the new government there.”

They returned me to the cell. I lay on the bed again – in great distress, as I would remain all night. I remember muttering to myself, and rocking my body to and fro. I also dimly recall a muzungu in a suit standing in front of the bars of the cell at one point, speaking English to me. But by then I was too delirious to reply.