Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

In Uganda in 1977, a particular trainload of coffee, mostly belonging to dictator Idi Amin, is worth six million dollars. As a group of scoundrels and international financiers hijack the train, the double and triple crosses pile up and the comic tension escalates in a brawling brew of buffoons, bumblers, beans and boxcars.

Release date: April 11, 2001

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 512

Sample

“Everyone who’s read Donald Westlake knows he’s the funniest man in the world. If there were a different set of values at work in our glum society, Westlake would have won National Book Awards and Pulitzers . . . [and] there would be statues of him in every municipal park.”

—Washington Post Book World

 

“A stunner, a real stunner, the ultimate in the genre of the very hard-boiled thriller. . . . A brilliantly plotted narrative . . . at times ironically funny, at others sadistic, this could be described as impure Joseph Conrad, plus a wild splash of H. Rider Haggard.”

—Los Angeles Times

 

“Westlake’s grandest caper novel . . . KAHAWA is super whizbang; like a heat-seeking missile, it will unerringly streak to the larcenous side of your heart, and warm it.”

—Detroit News

 

“A dilly of a thriller . . . a story with more twists than a mamba . . . KAHAWA is good to the last page.”

—New York Daily News

 

“A remarkable novel. . . . Devastating portraits, a wealth of political and historical insights into the African continent, and a hell of a lot of fun.”

—Robert Ludlum

 

“A steaming brew of derring-do. . . . It’s great fun to read . . . excitement galore.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

“This fine, fat, memorable novel is Westlake’s best yet.”

—John D. MacDonald

 

“Spellbinding. . . . Antic ingenuity and wit . . . delivers an emotional wallop that should win Westlake his widest audience yet.”

—Cosmopolitan

 

“KAHAWA is marvelous.”

—Playboy

 

“Engrossing. . . . Great fun.”

—Library Journal

 

“Such a splendid hugger-mugger that if you don’t like it, there’s something wrong with you. . . . No reader that I will ever want to meet should dare complain.”

—New York Times

 

“The acknowledged master of the humorous adventure novel . . . here takes a new and unexpected turn into Evelyn Waugh country and introduces pain to the laughter.”

—Martin Cruz Smith

 

“Thoroughly engrossing. . . . A wonderfully executed, typically excellent Westlake piece.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

 

“Funny, sexy, violent, and jammed with authentic atmosphere. . . . One of Westlake’s best. . . . It’s a gem.”

—Publishers Weekly

 

“Excellent. . . . Westlake’s best book.”

—Roanoke Times & World News

 

“A character-full, fast action yarn.”

—Houston Chronicle

 

“Donald E. Westlake [is] the Noel Coward of crime. . . . He displays an excellent ear for bitter-salty urban humor, composed of equal parts raunch and cynicism.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

 

“Westlake is a real pro.”

—Booklist

 

“There are few if any who do caper novels better than Westlake.”

—Mystery News

 

“Donald Westlake keeps showing me people I’d like to meet.”

—Rex Stout

 

“Westlake tosses the sand of petty frustrations and human fallibility into the well-oiled machine of the thriller.”

—TIME

 

“Westlake is among the smoothest, most engaging writers on the planet.”

—San Diego Tribune

 

“The master of the rolling scam.”

—James Grady

 

NOVELS

Humans • Sacred Monster • A Likely Story Kahawa • Brothers Keepers • I Gave at the Office • Adios, Scheherazade • Up Your Banners

 

COMIC CRIME NOVELS

Baby Would I Lie? Trust Me on This • High Adventure • Castle in the Air • Enough • Dancing Aztecs • Two Much • Help I Am Being Held Prisoner Cops and Robbers • Somebody Owes Me Money • Who Stole Sassi Manoon? • God Save the Mark • The Spy in the Ointment • The Busy Body • The Fugitive Pigeon • Smoke

 

THE DORTMUNDER SERIES

Don’t Ask • Drowned Hopes • Good Behavior • Why Me • Nobody’s Perfect Jimmy the Kid • Bank Shot • The Hot Rock

 

CRIME NOVELS

Pity Him Afterwards • Killy • 361 Killing Time • The Mercenaries

 

JUVENILE

Philip

 

WESTERN

Gangway (with Brian Garfield)

 

REPORTAGE

Under English Heaven

 

SHORT STORIES

Tomorrow’s Crimes • Levine • The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution and Other Fictions

 

ANTHOLOGY

Once Against the Law (coedited by William Tenn)

My gratitude goes, first and foremost, to Dean Fraser, who shared his experience and expertise to a wonderful degree. Les Alexander created the necessary environments with unflagging optimism, and Rich Barber, Knox Burger, and Gary Salt usefully shared their enthusiasm and professionalism.

I can best express my gratitude to some individuals by not spelling out their names. My friend T.E.M. of the railway ( who introduced me to M. F. Hill’s The Permanent Way) was patient, helpful, and amusing. J.M. of the Coffee Board provided tea and information. In Grosvenor Square, R.B. was charming and insightful, while C.M. provided anecdotes and lovely copper nugget.

Back home, Brian Garfield, Gloria Hoye, and Justin Scott made fine suggestions along the way, and Walter Kisly built a bridge just when it was most needed. As for Abby . . . she knows; she knows.



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. I had current events to research (Idi Amin, and how he got where he got, and what it meant) as well as history (the European exploration/invasion of Central Africa, and what followed), so there was much to get lost in. The end was reached when I found myself halfway through a one-thousand-two-hundred-page book called The Permanent Way, by M. F. Hill, which was the official history of the building of the railroad upon which my coffee train would travel half a century later. “That’s it,” I said. “This is ridiculous. As soon as I finish the other six hundred pages of this book, I’m going to work.”

The Permanent Way, and other books, were interesting and useful, but one book, called Uganda Holocaust, by Dan Wooding and Ray Barnett, published by Zondervan, changed both me and the novel I was going to write; for the better, I think.

It seems that some Christian evangelical sects set great store by “giving witness,” which is to say, speaking about and airing and publicizing great works of charity or martyrdom or goodness, done in Christ’s name. It also seems that Idi Amin’s primary goal during his years in power was to eliminate Christianity from Uganda, a large if unworthy task, since Uganda’s sixteen million people were seventy-five percent Christian. Amin’s onslaught resulted in over five hundred thousand Christian martyrs, people who went to their deaths not because they were political or rebellious or dangerous, but only because they were professed Christians. This was the largest and most extensive Christian martyrdom since Rome before Constantine. How’s that for a distinction?

The instant Amin was driven from Uganda, Wooding and Barnett flew in with tape recorders to take witness from the survivors, and published the results in Uganda Holocaust, a book that not only made me horribly familiar with the inner workings of the State Research Bureau, but also changed the character of the story I would tell. As I told my wife at the time, “I can’t dance on all those graves.”

 

*  *  *

 

So it was still a caper, but now it was something else as well, something more and, I think, deeper. My own emotions of pity and rage and contempt were entwined with the story, though I knew better than to let them take over. But they were there, spicing the stew.

And altering the book in more ways than one. As you know, in our country “sexandviolence” is one word, and piously we recoil from its depiction; sure. In Kahawa, though, both sex and violence had to play a stronger part than usual in my novels, because the material demanded it. I would never throw in what is called gratuitous sexandviolence, because I have too much respect for story. If a word, one single word, distracts the reader from the story I’m trying to tell, out with it. Since both sex and violence can be distracting, I usually depict them sparingly, trying mostly to get my effects by allusion and implication. Not so in Kahawa; the book demanded a stronger approach.

Of course, when it was published, I got complaining letters, and their general tenor was, “I’ve always liked your books, and so has my teenage son/daughter, but how can I show him/her this book with all this graphic sex in it?” Five hundred thousand dead; bodies hacked and mutilated and tortured and debased and destroyed; corridors running with blood; and nobody complained about the violence. They complained about the sex. Ah, such wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beasties.

 

*  *  *

 

My research was not limited to books; my wife and I also went to Kenya, and to London, to see some of the locations and talk with some of the people. (We did not go into Uganda, merely looked at it across Lake Victoria, since this was 1980, Amin was barely three years out of power, and Uganda was still in a state of anarchy. Trips to Uganda at that time were mostly one way.)

Accompanying us on the trip was the person who had originally told Les Alexander the story, which he had knowledge of because of his connection with the pilots who were supposed to fly the coffee shipment from Entebbe. This person has been in many interesting places at interesting times, and was an education in himself, though not quite perhaps as solid as an education from books. Later, when he learned that I was writing an introductory note of gratitude to those who had helped me put the book together, he phoned to ask a favor: Would I mind thanking him under a pseudonym? (He mentioned the name he would prefer.) He didn’t want his own name in print, but he did like the idea of being thanked for his part in the enterprise.

So I thanked one person under an alias; is that the strangest part of the story? Maybe.

 

*  *  *

 

About that title. Kahawa. It is the word for coffee in Swahili. It leads to the slang word for coffee in some parts of Europe: “kawa.” (In Polish, “kawa” is the regular word for coffee.) The original is the Arabic “qahwa” or the Hebrew “kavah,” and really it’s all the same word, virtually around the world. A c or k or q at the beginning, a w or v or f in the middle. Kahawa is coffee. Unfortunately, it’s a little obscure to be a title.

 



 

The problem was, the change in the book as I got into my research. Originally, I was going to call it Coffee to Go; a fun title for a fun caper. After a while, that title just slunk off in embarrassment. Then I found myself toying with pomposities like Time of the Hero, but my feeling is, if the title is too boring to read all the way through, it might keep readers from trying the novel. So Kahawa it is.

 

*  *  *

 

The original publisher of Kahawa, in 1982, was in the midst of an upheaval. My original editor was let go before publication, to be replaced by an oil painting of an editor; pleasant, even comforting, to look at, but not much help in the trenches. The publisher moved by fits and starts—more fits than starts, actually—and though the book received good reviews, no one at the publishing house seemed able to figure out how to suggest that anybody might enjoy reading it. So it didn’t do well.

My current publisher is not suffering upheavals, my current editor is lively and professional, and when it was suggested that Kahawa might be given a second chance of life, I was both astonished and very pleased. I’ve made minor changes in the text, nothing substantive, and agreed to write this introduction, and here we are, by golly, airborne again.

By coincidence, I ran into that oil painting at a party a few months ago. He said, “Are you writing any more African adventure novels?”

“No,” I said, “but Warner is going to put out Kahawa again, in hardcover.”

His jaw dropped. “Why?” he asked. (This is what we have to put up with, sometimes.)

“I think they like it,” I said.

I hope you do, too.



Each ant emerged from the skull bearing an infinitesimal portion of brain. The double thread of ants shuttling between corpse and nest crossed at a diagonal the human trail beside which the murdered woman had been thrown. As a shadow crossed the morning sun, a dozen ants became crushed beneath the leathery bare feet of six men plodding down the trail from the Nawambwa road toward the lake, each bearing a sixty-kilogram sack of coffee on his head, none of the scrawny men weighing much more than sixty kilos himself. The surviving ants continued their portage, undisturbed. So did the men.

Farther downslope, the trail ended in a tangle of foliage at the edge of Macdonald Bay, with Lake Victoria visible beyond Bwagwe Point. The six men dropped their coffee sacks and sprawled beside them for a short rest, using the sacks as pillows. Two smoked cigarettes; three chewed sugarcane stalks; one scratched insect bites around his missing toe.

A helicopter flap-flapped by, very loudly, and the men became utterly still, looking up through the screen of leaves and branches as the big olive-green chopper went by, like a bus wearing a beanie. It was the same sort as the large helicopters used by the Americans to deliver troops to battle in Vietnam, but the markings showed it belonged to the Army of Uganda. Three black men in American-style combat uniforms crouched in the broad doorway in the chopper’s side, peering down at the lake.

The six coffee smugglers, invisible beside the trail, watched and listened without reaction until the helicopter chuff-chuffed away across the sky, westward toward Buvuma Island. Then they all talked at once, with nervous enthusiasm, agreeing the helicopter had been a good omen. Having just searched this area, it was unlikely to return for some time. And how lucky they themselves hadn’t arrived twenty minutes earlier; by now, they would have been visible and helpless on the open water.

Since luck was with them, they should seize the moment. Their two canoes were dragged out of hiding—the rifles safe within, the ancient, untrustworthy outboard motors still attached at the rear of each boat—and were pushed into the water. The sacks of coffee were loaded, the men arranged themselves three in each canoe, and they proceeded slowly out across the bay, southward, the motors stinking, the low morning sun in the eastern sky stretching their shadows across the calm water.

Forty minutes later they had progressed fifteen miles, heading east now toward the narrow strait between the mainland and Sigulu Island and thence to Berkeley Bay. The border between Uganda and Kenya—a line seen only on maps—bisected Berkeley Bay, and not far beyond lay the tiny, unimportant town of Port Victoria, their intended landfall. A much shorter route for smuggling lay directly across Berkeley Bay from Majanji or Lugala on the Uganda side, but the shore there was heavily patrolled this year. And because so many floodlight-bearing helicopters prowled the border at night, the risky daytime passage had become safer.

All six men heard the chuff-chuff at once, over the nasal sputter of the outboard motors, and looking over their shoulders they saw the giant thing sailing toward them through the sky, like something on wires attached to God’s fingers. There was no escape this time; they’d been seen, the helicopter was floating in a circle around them, its open doorway filled with pointing men.

It was guns they were pointing, and then firing. The smugglers had been prepared for arrest, for some brutality, possibly for torture, but they had not been prepared to become target practice in a great bathtub. Two of them dragged old Enfield rifles up from the canoe bottoms and returned the fire.

The soldiers, not expecting armed resistance, had flown too low and too close, the better to score hits on their fish in the barrel. Instead of which, two men in the helicopter doorway staggered back into the darkness within, and a third dropped like a full sack out into the air, falling beside his rifle down into the water. The helicopter, as though God had been startled at His play, jerked upward into the sky and tore away northwestward, toward land.

The men in the canoes were now terrified. The helicopter would soon be back, possibly with others. There wasn’t time to reach that invisible line in the water and the dubious safety of Kenya. To their left was the shoreline of Uganda, low dark folds of hills, but they were in great fear of returning there. Directly ahead mounded Sigulu Island, ten miles long and a mile or two wide and covered with thick brush, but the soldiers would expect them to hide there and would have hours and hours of daylight for the search. To the right, a cluster of tiny brushy islands lay like suede buttons on the water; after a quick conference the six agreed to make for one of these. They ripped open the sacks and dumped the coffee into the lake, both to lighten the boats and to make it possible to deny that they were the coffee smugglers; but they kept the sacks, because they were poor men and thrifty.

They chose an island at random, pulled the canoes well up from the water’s edge, and covered both their boats and themselves with layers of brush. But they were men who had never been in the sky, and were unaware of the clear lines the canoes had made in the mud and the brush, arrow shafts leading from the water directly to their hearts. When the helicopter did return within the hour and, after only the slightest hesitation, landed on the island of their hiding place, they could only believe it was devilry.

The officer in the helicopter was extremely angry. When the six men were found and lined up in front of him, he beat their faces with his fists and lashed their arms with a piece of brush. They had killed one of his men and wounded two others; it was a personal humiliation, an official disgrace, a blow to his hopes for military advancement. It was a blot on his copybook.

The six men denied that they were smugglers, which only enraged the officer more. He kicked their legs with his U.S. Army boots, while a uniformed man with an expressionless white face watched from the helicopter doorway. And when the empty coffee sacks were found, the officer turned cold and dangerous in his fury. He ordered the six men to lie on the ground on their bellies. He ordered his soldiers to pour gasoline onto the coffee sacks, and to spread one sack on each prone man. Then he personally set the fires. The flames in sunlight seemed to dance in midair, lightly, inoffensively, while the tan burlap darkened to match the stenciled black Swahili word Kahawa.

The men writhed and screamed beneath their burning blankets, and the rancid smoke rose into the clear sky as the white man in the helicopter doorway lit his cigar.

The soldiers broke up the canoes with small hatchets, and then boarded the helicopter and were flown away, through the drifting smoke.

This occurred early in March of 1977. It was reported in the London Times on April 5.





Lew Brady picked up the two-hundred-thirty-pound man, turned him over like a sack of potatoes, and flipped him onto the mattress. The other two attackers stood around blinking, openmouthed, not moving forward. “What’s the matter with you birds?” Lew demanded. He grabbed one by his unzipped leather jacket, spun him, yanked the jacket shoulders so the garment came halfway down the man’s arms to hold him like a straitjacket, then shoved him into the other guy. They stumbled together, tripped over the edge of the mattress, and fell on the two-hundred-thirty-pound man.

Lew stood with hands on hips, frowning down at the muddle of men. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you clowns should just join the union.”

One of the other men in the room said, “Mr. Brady, that’s not fair. You’re trained, and we’re not.”

“Training you idiots is what it’s all about.”

The three men on the mattress were beginning to take out their frustrations on one another, with fists and elbows. “Hold it, there, hold it.” Lew leaned down to pull them apart, “I’ll tell you when to fight.”

They straggled to their feet, and Lew herded them over with the rest of the class: sixteen brawny adult males, all standing around looking sheepish and sullen, like a football team at the end of a winless season. “Line up,” Lew told them. “Face the mirror.”

This large top-floor space in a ramshackle low office building on the outskirts of Valdez, Alaska, was intended to be a rehearsal hall. Several ballet classes met here, as did a Yoga society. One long wall was mirrored. A piano stood in one corner and a cluster of folding chairs in another. Half a dozen ratty mattresses were scattered on the floor. Wide windows gave a view of the used-car lot across the way.

During Lew’s first four months up here in Valdez, while he was learning to pronounce it “Val—deez” like a native, it had seemed there were no jobs at all here for a man of his profession. But then he’d met Alan Kampolska, who owned a small local trucking operation and was being harassed by union “organizers” attracted by the pipeline construction. Kampolska’s drivers were big and tough, but they didn’t know how to handle themselves against goon squads.

Which was where Lew came in, with his experience as a Green Beret and a mercenary in Africa. Kampolska had offered to hire him to teach his boys how to conduct the war against the union thugs. Lew, bored and frustrated, had agreed. But it was slow hard work, not at all like training recruits in an army.

The main problem was mental attitude. In most self-defense classes it’s the instructor’s job to build self-confidence by a long string of small victories; but these guys were brawlers and sluggers, men who could handle themselves in tough situations, and the problem was they were suddenly facing an enemy too mean and too organized for them. Their reaction was a kind of aggrieved bewilderment, a belief that they were already defeated. So Lew had switched from the orthodox method of ego boosting to an unorthodox program of kicking the shit out of them. If he couldn’t build them up to self-confidence, maybe he could knock them down to self-respect. (And he was also, of course, working off some of his own irritable frustration.)

Now, with the sixteen in a glum row facing the mirror, Lew marched back and forth like the top sergeant he had frequently been. “Look at yourselves,” he ordered. “You’re a crowd of big, tough, no-nonsense sons of bitches, you look like you could hunt bear with a baseball bat, but you walk in here and all of a sudden you’re a goddam bunch of ballet dancers.”

The man who’d complained before complained again. “You’re a trained professional, that’s why.”

Lew shook his head. “Tell me the truth,” he said, making it a general question. “You want to throw in the towel, just give up and join the union?”

“No,” they said. “Shit, no,” some of them said. “Fuck the union,” some others said.

Which was good spirit, but not quite good enough. Lew sighed, and went over to stand directly in front of the complainer, a tall and rangy white man named Bill, who sported several tattoos and a straw cowboy hat. Looking him in the eye, Lew said, “Bill, if we met in a bar and got into an argument, what would you do?”

Bill had the sullen look of a man who expects to be hurting in a few seconds. “Throw a punch at you, I guess,” he muttered.

“And what would I do?”

“Grab my fist, twist it around behind my back, and run me into the wall.”

“You’ve seen me do that.”

“I sure have,” Bill said. The others all chuckled. They loved to see one another get thrown around.

Lew said, “Bill, can you see in your mind that move I make?”

“Sure I can. I dream it.”

“Then do it.”

Bill massively frowned. “I dunno. I—”

“I’m giving you more warning,” Lew told him, “than you’ll get on the street. I am about to throw a punch. You’ll either do the move, or you will become punched in the face.”

“Jesus,” Bill said, and Lew punched him in the face. Bill sat down on the floor, everybody laughed, and Lew sighed.

He turned to another of the men, but what he would have said was drowned out by the sudden roar of a low-flying plane skimming past, barely above the building roof. Everybody in the room instinctively ducked his head and hunched his shoulders until the roar faded. Then Lew saw his students exchange an amused and knowing glance, and he shook his head.

As they all knew, he was living with a pilot named Ellen Gillespie, who worked for the pipeline construction company. She always buzzed him on her return flight so he could drive out to the airport and pick her up.

Which made it seem like he was pussy-whipped or something—that’s what these clowns were grinning about—but it wasn’t like that at all. Ellen was Grade A; they fit together terrifically; everything was or should be fine. Would be fine if he would line up a real job somewhere.

Okay. The plane’s roar had faded, and he had another few minutes before leaving for the airport. Standing close to his next victim, a very broad-shouldered black man named Woody, Lew said, “Okay, Woody. You know the move?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” There was a gleam in Woody’s eye; he was really going to try for it this time. Lew hoped the man would succeed, to give the entire class a lift. He also hoped the wall he was run into wouldn’t be the one with the mirror.

“You’re about to get punched,” he said, reared back his fist, and felt a sharp pain in his shin. “Ow,” he said, his concentration broken, and Woody punched him smartly in the eye. Then Lew threw his own punch; Woody plucked his fist out of the air, spun him, twisted his arm up his back, and ran him into the side wall.

Suddenly older and a lot more tired, Lew picked himself off the floor as his students yelled and cheered and clapped Woody on the back. The son of a bitch had kicked him in the shin!

When the celebrations and congratulations at last died down, Lew said, “There. That’s what I’m talking about. Woody, you’re the first guy here to figure it out. The rest of you guys think it over, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He stood ramrod-stiff while his class trailed out, chatting and chuckling and offering to buy Woody any number of beers. Then, alon