What's a mile long, rusty, slow, and worth a fortune? It's a freight train full of kahawa, Swahili for coffee, and it belongs to none other than the jovial, bloodletting dictator Idi Amin. Locked away in his palace of secrets, fear, and torture, Amin doesn't know that in the lush heart of his Uganda some of the world's most unscrupulous, oversexed mercenaries, moneymakers, and thieves are busy plotting to steal all this kahawa in one fell swoop, sending the international coffee market and a varied cast of court jesters, spies, and crooks into deadly conniptions. You see, in a madman's kingdom, stealing a freight train of coffee isn't just taboo; it's a kick.
INTRODUCTION: 1995
I was in Los Angeles, meeting with some other people on some other
business entirely, and when I got back to the hotel, there was a message
from Les Alexander, in New York. I had known Les as a friend for some
years, and while we had talked about working together on something or
other, it had never happened. At that time, he was a book packager and
sometime television producer; he is now a film producer. I was and am a
novelist with a minor in screenwriting.
When I returned Les's call, he was boyishly excited. He had a true
story, he said, that would make the basis for a great novel. I told him,
as I tell everyone in such circumstances, "I'll listen, but I won't give
you an answer today. I'll call you tomorrow. I don't want to make a
mistake and be locked into something I don't really want to do, or
locked out of something it turns out I did want to do."
"Fair enough," he said. "A group of white mercenaries, in Uganda, while
it was under Idi Amin, stole a railroad train a mile long, full of
coffee, and made it disappear."
"Forget the twenty-four hours," I said. "I'll do it."
* * *
So it began as a caper. I've written capers, before and since, both
serious (novels about a professional thief named Parker, written under
the pseudonym Richard Stark) and comic (the Dortmunder series), so I
feel I know a bit about the form. (It probably says something
discreditable about me that I put the serious work under a pseudonym and
the comic under my own name.)
One thing I know about the caper is that it helps if the job is
outrageous in one way or another. Once, for instance, before the
government started paying by check, Parker stole the entire payroll from
a United States Air Force base. Dortmunder, not to be outdone, has made
off with a complete bank, temporarily housed in a mobile home.
And what could be more outrageous than to steal a mile-long train from
the dread Idi Amin, and make it disappear? This is going to be
fun, I thought.
* * *
Then I started the research. Please permit me at this point to say a
strong word against research. I hate it. My feeling is, the whole point
of going into the fiction racket was so I could make it all up. We get
enough facts in real life; that's the way I see it.
Unfortunately, that's not the way anybody else sees it. If you get a
fact wrong in a novel, I have found, people will write you letters full
of the most grating kinds of sarcasm and superiority. Of course, not all
facts are equally holy among readers. Should you get a detail about a
gun or a car wrong, the weight of mail will drive the postman into the
sidewalk, but if you get the population of Altoona, Pa., wrong, you
probably won't hear from many people at all; three or four. So if I were
to write a novel set in Uganda during the reign of Idi Amin Dada, and if
I cared about the health of my mailperson, I had to do some research.
And here's the other thing I hate about research. Once I actually start
it, I get lost in it. Research is my own personal Sargasso Sea. It's
exactly like entering one of our civilization's mental attics, a
quotation book or thesaurus or large dictionary, looking for just
one thing, and being found in there three days later by search
parties, seated on the dusty floor, intently reading.
That's what happened this time.
