Madagascar

by Stephen Holgate

  When he got the first bill Sackett drove the thirty miles into town to visit his friend the ag minister, a short man who wore cologne thick as a smokescreen. I can see him, picking at some imaginary lint on his lapel while he assures Sackett that “these little fees are nothing more than a bureaucratic inconvenience.” He instructed Sackett to remit the taxes through him, in cash. After a couple of months of this Sackett told the minister that he couldn’t get any more money until he sold some calves the following spring. A few days after that, three policemen and an official in a white shirt came out to his ranch with an arrest warrant for trespass and illegal importation of cattle. In his broken French, Sackett tried to explain that he had a deed for the land and that the cattle weren’t foreign, he’d bought them locally. The man in the white shirt smiled. “But monsieur is a foreigner, so it is really the same thing.”

  The embassy first heard of Sackett when the Malagasy government transmitted the required notification that an American citizen was being held in one of its prisons. After hearing his story, the embassy lodged a formal protest with the Foreign Ministry. But the American aid program was too small to demand respect or afford us the leverage to get him out of jail.

  Sitting on his thin prison mattress, Sackett shifts his weight from one tired haunch to the other. “When’s Don coming back?” he asks.

  “He’s on home leave. A kind of extended vacation. It’ll be another six weeks or so,” I tell him. “I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me until then.”

  “I didn’t mean …”

  “It’s all right.”

  On the floor of the cell someone has used a piece of charcoal to lay out the lines for a local game called “cops and robbers.”

  Sackett sees what I’m looking at. “Funny game, Robert. You ever play it?”

  I’ve seen the rune-like patterns drawn in the dirt along the side of the road near my home, the guards playing it by the hour while keeping half an eye on the houses they’re hired to protect.

  “No, never played it myself.”

  With the toe of his shoe, Walt Sackett traces the lines of the playing board. “It’s kinda like checkers. You take the other guy’s pieces by moving toward them, or—now here’s the real Malagasy thing about it—or by moving away from them.” He laughs his broken laugh. “Just right for people who don’t know whether they’re coming or going. I figure—” The clanking of the cell door interrupts his thought.

  A young Malagasy stands in the doorway, dressed in a ragged shirt and poorly patched trousers. He cocks his head to one side when he sees a stranger in the cell.

  Sackett waves him in, and for the first time since I’d been there smiles naturally. “Speedy, how ya’ doin’?” He grins at me. “My cellmate. I call him Speedy. Like Speedy Gonzalez.”

  “He’s quick on his feet?”

  “Nah. He just knows how to get around the cat.”

  The young man—I’d guess he isn’t over twenty—nods at the guard holding the door open as if the officer were a bellboy and he, Speedy, has decided he’ll take the room.

  Despite his scarecrow appearance he bounces into the room like a man blessed by fortune. He offers me a smile and an outstretched hand. “I’m Dokoby Rakoto. Speedy. Enchanté.”

  Enchanté? I can’t keep from laughing with pleasure at this ragged kid with the manners of Fred Astaire. He laughs with me.

  Sackett beams like a proud father. “My cellmate’s all right, ain’t he?”

  I shake the young man’s hand. “That he is.”

  Remembering something, Speedy snaps his fingers and in a sort of pidgin English says, “Ah, Monsieur Walt. Cigarette.” From his shirt pocket he takes a pack of the cheap Pieter Stuyvesants favored by most Malagasy and tosses it into Sackett’s lap. Then, with the smile of a magician performing his favorite trick, he pulls a mango from his pants pocket and hands it to his cellmate.

  Sackett grins. “Speedy, you’re o-kay.”

  Dokoby Rakoto flashes a smile at Walt then crawls onto the mattress behind me and lies down. “No, monsieur, don’t get up,” he tells me in French, then turns on his side to sleep.

  Sackett says, “Speedy’s just coming back from a long night’s work.”

  “Work?”

  “Yeah.” Sackett chuckles and nods vaguely toward the guardroom. “How much do you figure the government pays those guys to keep an eye on us? Not much, that’s what. So the guards have to find a way to make a little something on the side.”

  “And Speedy has something to do with that?”

  Sackett indicates the young man curled up behind me. “Speedy’s a burglar. Lot of burglars here. And the guards figure what’s the use of all that talent goin’ to waste? So they let ‘em out at night to do what comes natural. When they come back in the morning, the guards take their cut. Speedy, he drops half what he takes with his momma and his sisters before coming back, and gives the other half to the guards.” He juggles the mango in his hand. “Looks after me a little too.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  The cowboy holds up a hand as if taking an oath. “God’s own truth.”

  “Why don’t the burglars just run away once they’re out?”

  Walt squints at Speedy. “The police’d track ‘em down again. And the guards know where their families live. They’d just be buying trouble.”

  “So most of the guys I saw in the guardroom are burglars?”

  “In the guard room?”

  “A bunch of prisoners, all chained together. Guards acted like they didn’t want me to see them.”

  Walt Sackett frowns and shakes his head. “Funny thing. They been bringin’ in lots of prisoners from the countryside. If I understand it rightly, they’re havin’ some sort of riots or something.”

  “Riots?”

  “Something like that. Must be in the papers.”

  I give him the truth. “The chance of something making the papers in this country is in exact inverse to its importance.”

  Sackett squints uncertainly. “Well, my French ain’t much. Maybe I’m not hearin’ it exactly right.”

  “What part of the countryside are they coming from?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe from the coast. Some town there. Tommy-something.”

  “Tamatave?”

  “Maybe that’s it. But I think some of these fellas are from other places too.”

  Like a jack-in-the-box, Speedy pops his head over my shoulder and again uses his broken English, “Mister Walt. I see your woman at gate. I tell guard, let her come here.” He points at his eye then toward the gate then, with his hands, suggests a set of curves.

  The old cattleman glances at me, tosses his head a little too casually. “Just … She’s just a friend. She’s the one keeps me fed. Nirina.” There’s something in the way he says her name.

  “Nirina,” Speedy echoes with a smile and lies down again.

  The silence that follows tells me it’s time to leave. I look at my watch. “I’ll be back in a few days,” I tell him. “I’ve got a meeting at the Foreign Ministry, then I have to—” I feel a worm of guilt squirming in my gut. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to …”

  “It’s okay. Probably good for me to remember there’s a world out there.”

  “I’ll see that your letters get in the mail this afternoon.” I get up from the mattress and look at the envelopes. “You don’t have the return address on these. You want me to—?”

  “Nah.” Sackett avoids my eyes. “Just send ‘em the way they are.”

  If Sackett doesn’t want his wife to know he’s in prison, it’s none of my business.

  “I’ll be back in a few days, Walt.”

  “Okay, Robert.” Again, that half-smile. “I ‘spect I’ll be here.”

  I force a laugh and tap on the cell door. When the guard opens up, I find myself facing a tall young woman with long black hair. Her impossibly dark eyes look all the deeper against the sandalwood hue of her skin. I stand back in surprise. I wish I could coin the word
“beautiful” right here, as if it had been waiting for her to appear.

  In one hand, she carries a cloth-covered basket. Walt Sackett’s lunch—and probably dinner. Likely breakfast too.

  The old cowboy struggles to his feet. “Hello, darlin’,” Sackett says. He has a hard time taking his eyes off her long enough to glance at me. “This is Nirina.”

  But I already know her, at least by sight. I can see by a slight widening of her eyes that she recognizes me too. A mask lowers over her features, demanding—assuming—my silence.

  I try to remember if I’ve ever heard her name before. I’ve seen her occasionally with the party crowd in the bar at the Continental. In the midst of the laughing and drinking, she sits at the bar with a distant smile on her face—with the others, but somehow not of them. For a few months she’d been a frequent guest at the parties thrown by the embassy’s Marine guards. Yet even there, the center of attention for a bunch of love-starved Marines, she gave the impression of being by herself.

  About a year ago one of the Marines, a skinny redhead named Bud, had talked about marrying her. The gunny—gunnery officer, a sergeant—in charge of the six-man detachment sat him down and told Bud that he’d known lots of girls like her and Bud had better get wise. She just wanted the visa to the United States that came with being his bride, and would leave him as soon as she had her feet on the ground. He hadn’t added, “Besides, she has way too much class for a guy like you,” but everyone except Bud could see that.

  I try to remember the last time I saw her. It had been about nine months. Yeah, about the time Walt Sackett came to the island.

  For a moment we stand facing each other in the doorway—the American diplomat and the Malagasy party girl—then I step aside and, with a slight bow, let her into the cell, feeling her sexual gravity bend the light around me as she passes.

  The girl allows Sackett a chaste embrace, offering her cheek to him while casting a sidelong glance at me. Behind her back, Sackett makes a gesture, indicating that I shouldn’t let her see the letters.

  Now maybe I understand the catch in Sackett’s voice when he mentioned his wife. I tell myself that this, too, is none of my business. But, outside as I step into the sunshine, I can still feel the warmth of her breath on my ear, where she whispered as she passed, “Please. I need to see you.”

  4

  Roland Rabary, head of the Foreign Ministry’s Americas Desk, leans back in his swivel chair and skims the two-page demarche, his eyes occasionally darting at me, as if judging whether I’m serious in bringing this document to him, asking for his country’s support on a matter before the U.N.

  Rabary is an ugly little man on an island of beautiful people, the handsomest I’ve ever known. With his frog-like gash of a mouth and a nose that appears to have partially melted at some point in the distant past, Rabary has to know how far short he falls of local standards, further souring an already prickly disposition.

  Frowning theatrically, he lays the two pages on his desk with a loud sniff. “So, your superiors in Washington want our United Nations delegation to support a condemnation of Iran’s behavior.” As if in compensation for his homeliness, he possesses a beautiful voice, resonant and deep.

  “Washington has instructed—”

  Rabary waves a hand like a man swatting at a fly. “Washington’s instructions end at your desk, not mine.” He hunches his shoulders in a Gallic shrug, an acquired trait. Like many Malagasy elites, Rabary’s resentment of the French is aggravated by the fact that he can’t break free of the compulsion to measure himself by their standards.

  With a flick of his fingertips, he pushes the paper away from him. “Iran has been helpful to us on more than one occasion, while you Americans ignore us except when you want to tell us what to do. You know we can’t support this.”

  I open my mouth to argue with him, but can see the futility of it. “Yeah, I was told the age of miracles had passed.”

  He chuckles. A sop to make me feel better.

  It’s a strange relationship we have. Required by our governments to seek support for policies we know the other side will never agree to, Rabary and I refuse each other’s entreaties then fall back on professional expressions of civility. Over time we’ve formed a genial sort of bond, with each of us playing, in turn, the sadist and the masochist.

  I offer a defeated sigh. “Well, I’ll tell ‘em I tried.”

  Rabary makes something like a smile and takes a cigarette from a box on his desk. “Tell them you really made me sweat,” he says in English. Rabary spent a year at Cornell and likes to sprinkle remembered idioms into our conversations.

  “I’ll do that. The embassy will be impressed by how almost successful I am.” I lean forward in my chair and clasp my hands on top of his desk. “Look, I need to talk to you about something else. You have an American in one of your prisons. A man named Walter Sackett.”

  Rabary exhales a stream of smoke through his unfortunate nose. “I know all about your Walter Sackett. He faces serious charges.”

  “All of them phony. You know that. He’s been squeezed dry by the ag minister. There’s nothing left. It’s time to let him go.”

  Rabary swivels his chair away from the desk and stares out the window.

  I can see him making a calculation on how to leverage this situation to his advantage. Somehow it doesn’t add up and he shakes his head. “No. There’s nothing I can do. He will have to wait for his trial. If he has done nothing wrong, he will be found innocent.”

  “He’s sixty-four and unwell. He could die before he comes to trial.”

  Rabary continues to gaze out the window. “You are providing him with food?”

  “He has a girlfriend who helps him.”

  The Malagasy stubs out his cigarette and swings his chair back around. “The Ministry of Justice has been known to re-examine certain cases—”

  “He can’t bribe anyone anymore. He’s broke.”

  “Perhaps you misunderstand me.”

  “Perhaps I don’t.”

  We glare at each other and recalibrate our positions.

  “I have no patience with this sort of thing,” Rabary says, fiddling with a pen. “If Sackett were French, his government would have paid to settle the charges weeks ago.”

  “We’re not the French.”

  Rabary lets my comment hang in the air like the smoke curling up from his cigarette. “You’re quite emotional about this Sackett fellow. It’s not like you. Really, Robert, it’s unbecoming.”

  “Knock it off, Rabary.”

  “It is much easier for us both when you, um, maintain a professional distance, Robert.” The pleasing timbre of his voice cushions the cynicism. He leans back in his chair and changes the subject. “A diplomatic note crossed my desk the other day. I see you have a change in personnel at your embassy.”

  “Yeah, a new Public Affairs Officer. She comes in next week.”

  “Someone new to plead your case to the press. A woman this time.”

  Do I catch something in the tone of Rabary’s voice? “And young enough to be your granddaughter, Roland.”

  Rabary smiles and waves away the unstated accusation. “You have less than a year left here, yes? Where will they send you next?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ve put in some requests. And you? You’re still hoping for Paris?”

  The Malagasy diplomat frowns. It’s his natural expression and seems to relax him. The Malagasy embassy in Paris will need a new political officer in the coming year. Rabary has for months been speaking of it with the dreaminess of a knight speaking of the Holy Grail.

  He holds the pen between his forefingers, addressing it rather than me. When he’s serious he has a hard time making eye contact. “One needs promotion to the proper grade to be considered for such a position. This year I did not get promoted, and …” He lets the thought trail away and glances at me furtively. I think he feels ashamed of himself when he tells the truth. “Still, it is not impossible. Under the right circ
umstances.” With the air of a man who has revealed too much, he stands up and holds out his hand to indicate our meeting is over, adopting a genial manner to cover his abruptness. “I haven’t seen you around the Zebu Room lately.”

  “I leave early. It doesn’t take long to lose.”

  “Ah, yes. You are becoming famous for it.”

  I wonder how long it will take for word of my ill luck to spread to the embassy. I try to smile. No point letting him know how much it bothers me. “And you always win.”

  I mean it as a joke but Rabary shoots me a sidelong glance freighted with suspicion. Out of curiosity, I poke a stick at the sensitive spot. “Picard must dread seeing you come in.”

  “Yes, our good friend, Picard.” Rabary turns his head away, but his eyes linger on me, searching for something. Apparently satisfied he hasn’t found it, he opens the door to his reception room. His pretty secretary looks up.

  On an impulse, I switch back to French so that anyone within earshot can understand. “I hear you’re having some unrest in the countryside. Maybe on the east coast. Tamatave?”

  Rabary starts to close his door, as if to keep my words from escaping, but it’s too late for that. So he smiles and makes a dismissive gesture. “Everything is fine in Tamatave—and elsewhere.” He’s a good liar but I’ve caught him off guard. “Who would tell you such nonsense?”

  “I got it from a passing lemur.”

  Rabary laughs like a man gargling razor blades. “Lemurs are notorious rumor-mongers. I wouldn’t want you to go around repeating this. You will only look foolish.”

  “Thanks for the tip.” I take a couple of steps into his outer office before turning back. “Rabary, do something for me—don’t forget about Walt Sackett. You and me, maybe we deserve to be stuck here. He doesn’t. He needs to go home.”

  The Malagasy smiles and says nothing. With a nod, he indicates to his secretary that she should escort me downstairs.

  We’ve barely stepped into the hallway when I spot a familiar figure shambling up the corridor.