“What are these?” I ask. “That first is from a Mr. Picard. He wants you to see him this evening. I asked him what it was concerning and he just said in this real deep voice, ‘He’ll know.’” She laughs at her own mimicry. “He seems like a funny man.”
I have to take a couple of breaths before I can manage to speak around the lump that fills my chest, “Yeah, barrel of laughs.”
Trying to look normal, I wander toward my desk.
“Robert, you forgot to ask about the second one. That one should be really good news.”
“Yeah?”
“Well,” she says, “your career management officer left a message. He says he may have your next post for you.” She cocks her head to one side. “Where’s Ouagadougou?” she asks, though she pronounces it “Wog-a-doo-doo,” which is actually pretty close.
“On the outskirts of hell.”
I spend the rest of the day writing my cable.
11
“Well done, monsieur.” Jacques Razafintsalama appears genuinely pleased that I’ve come out a winner tonight, if only by a few francs.
“Thanks, Jacques.” I try to sidle past the Zebu Room’s manager, who stands between me and the elevator. If I had any sense, of course, I’d stay away from this place, but I truly believe it’s this or the bottle. Or is that only another of the thousand ways I try to kid myself?
Jacques’ smile turns apologetic. “I’m sure you haven’t forgotten your appointment with the Colonel.”
Like a prisoner caught trying to escape, I fall in behind the Malagasy and once more walk down the long corridor toward Picard’s office. We enter the private sanctum of the Zebu Room’s owner to find him banging at his air conditioner. The Frenchman frowns at Jacques. “I told you to get this fixed.”
Jacques bows slightly. “My apologies, Colonel.”
“Merde.” Picard strikes the machine once more then forces a smile as Jacques backs out the door. “I hear you’ve had a good night, Robert. I’m so pleased.”
I tweak my neck, trying to relieve a crick in my soul. “Now that I know how gracious you guys are about losing, I’ll have to try winning more often.”
Picard laughs a little too loudly before sitting down behind his desk. “What did you make tonight? Maybe ten thousand francs? At this rate you’ll have me paid off in—what?—twenty years?” Like a stern uncle, he actually wags a finger at me. “Not good enough, Bobby. Can I call you Bobby?”
“No. What do you want, Picard? You want to write a letter to the embassy? Go ahead, write it. That won’t get your money to you.”
Picard throws out his hands in resignation. “You’re right, Robert. Sometimes one has to be satisfied with taking one’s payment in blood, so to speak.” This time, when Picard sighs, it’s not for effect. His normally ruddy face is pale and his look is inward. After a moment, he swivels his chair around and looks for a long time at the photo of his daughter. Over his shoulder, he says to me, “Your daughter …”
“Christine.”
“How old did you say she was?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen.” He is silent so long that I think of quietly sneaking out. But Jacques is probably outside the door, ready to shove me back in. “A daughter needs her father at that age,” Picard says. “I never knew my daughter at sixteen. I saw her briefly when she was fifteen. A few minutes in an airport. She is twenty-four now.” He leans back in his chair, addressing the photo. “And still unmarried. Still a maid.”
A maid? I can’t manage to laugh at the antiquated language or the sentiment behind it.
Picard swivels back and his eyes unhappily roam the confines of his office. Abruptly, he rises to his feet. “Let’s get out of here.”
The big Frenchman opens a door behind his desk. I can see the top steps of a circular staircase. Picard stands in the doorway and with a crooked finger beckons me to follow. He descends the steps, grunting at each tread. I hesitate. Who knows I’m here but Picard and Jacques? If I were to disappear….
I follow my host down.
A tall floor lamp is the only light in the large suite, a set of rooms decorated entirely in white—white walls, white furniture, white fixtures. The thick white carpet and heavy drapes deaden sound like a funeral parlor. The air feels dead, unbreathable.
“Make yourself comfortable, Robert.” Picard waves toward a white armchair and drifts into the kitchen. “A drink?”
“No. Thanks.”
“Ah, yes. Your problematic liver. A fruit juice perhaps. Please, let me play host.”
I struggle against a sense of unwanted familiarity, as if I were watching him walking around in his underwear.
The former soldier of fortune comes back with a glass of wine for himself and hands me a tumbler of mango juice. He lifts his wineglass in casual salute and cocks his head at me. “So, Robert, you owe me a great deal of money, yes? I have shot men for less than this. Much less.” Picard flips a dismissive hand. “No, I’m not going to shoot you. I’ve killed too many men. It is the great debit against my name.” The Frenchman stares into his wineglass, his smile fading like a light winking out. “I can still see some of them. At night.” His chuckle makes my blood run cold. “I sleep very poorly, thinking about these things—paying the interest on my outstanding balance, you might say. One day the principle will come due, I suppose.” He shakes the thought away. “But now … Well that’s not how I make my living anymore. Besides, as I say, I like you.”
“I’m going all gooey inside, Maurice. I owe you money you don’t think I’ll ever pay back. And you’ve invited me down here because you want to do something about it.”
Picard raises his eyebrows, lets them fall back. “Yes, Robert, this is a business meeting, isn’t it?” Picard’s smile reveals a picket of clenched teeth. He takes a deep draught of his wine and sets the glass on an end table. “Robert, I don’t want to ruin you.”
“It’s gratifying to us sheep when the wolves claim they’re pulling for us.”
With a sudden, “Bouf!” Picard bangs his fist on the table, knocking his glass to the floor. The red wine spatters the carpet like blood.
“I have no use for your comedy. Tomorrow I could write a letter to your ambassador, telling her that you are in debt to me for thousands of dollars.”
I decide to brazen it out. Is this a good strategy, or am I just tired of living? “They’d probably send me home in disgrace and an early retirement. That’s swell, Maurice. But doing that wouldn’t give you enough hard currency to pay taxi fare to the airport. If I’m thrown out, the money I owe you is lost.”
“It’s lost now.”
“Well, as you say, you could have me shot.” I decide to give him a glance at the card I’m holding in my hand. “Maybe your friend in Tamatave would do the job.”
Behind his fixed smile, Picard’s eyes go cold as death.
Sometimes you don’t know you’ve gone too far until you’ve already crossed the line. I’d calculated that knowing Picard’s connection to Andriamana could be a bargaining chip. For the first time, I realize it could get me killed.
The two of us pass an immeasurable moment staring into the abyss. It’s Picard who steps back first, blowing a long breath through his pursed lips. “Yes, the estimable Captain Andriamana.”
Shaken by the glimpse into my own grave, I can barely whisper. “I’m told he’s as ambitious as Beelzebub. You don’t worry that what you think you have on him is in fact something he has on you?”
The Frenchman shakes his head almost imperceptibly. “I’m a vazaha. We once ruled this island. For the Malagasy, old ways of thinking don’t die. He may despise me, but he won’t touch me.” Picard tries to regain his swagger. “Robert, you have a gift for self-destruction. For your sake—no, for mine—let me suggest a way out of your dilemma.”
Not trusting my voice to remain steady, I only nod.
The owner of the Zebu Room tilts his head back and runs his fingers through his hair as he sits on the couch opposite me, tapp
ing his fingers on its white upholstered arm. “You’re going to get off easy. All you have to do is break the law.”
“Lucky me.”
Picard’s jaw clenches. “Just be quiet a moment. Just … be quiet. You mustn’t get me excited. For a moment I felt my former self coming upon me. I was quite prepared to kill you.”
“‘Old ways are the best ways,’” I say, and consider Picard’s claim that I have an urge toward self-destruction.
Picard actually chuckles. “So they say. However, it would gain me nothing—at least for now. Listen, we both have problems. You need out from under your debt, and I have mountains of Malagasy francs I cannot spend. Separately, our problems look insurmountable.” He holds his hands a foot apart, measuring the predicament. “Yet, together we can solve them. In the future, when you come to my casino, I will have Jacques hand you a package. It will contain a stack of Malagasy francs—perhaps several hundred dollars worth at a time. You will exchange them at your embassy for dollars. If anyone asks, you can say you won them. I will back you up. The next time you come, you will hand the dollars to Jacques. Soon you will have discharged your debt to me and I will have enough dollars for my visa and my travels.” He spreads his hands with a little wave at the end, demonstrating how the problem evaporates. “It’s so simple.”
“And, as you say, so illegal.”
Picard throws his hands in the air. “Oh, everything is against the law. Are you saying you won’t do it?”
“Why don’t you just arrange for me to win, like Rabary?” I want to ask again exactly what Rabary has on him, but that’s a topic for a different conversation.
“Pah! It’s harder than it looks. Gamblers study the tables like mystics study the kabala. It is hard enough to arrange for one—but for two? People would notice. Very bad for business.” He sounds like any harassed businessman trying to balance the competing needs of two valued clients. “Besides, there is another condition. You will no longer be welcome at the tables here. I can’t be bailing out my boat while you come here every night and drill more holes in it. I know you like to take chances, but you’ll have to do it somewhere else from now on.”
Behind the hush of the apartment’s deep silence, I can hear the murmur of voices from the gaming room above—the pleasant buzz of people indulging their vices.
“It’s that important to you,” I ask, “getting to France and seeing your daughter again?”
Picard scoffs at my naïveté. “France? I cannot go to France. They’ll arrest me. Do you know what that’s like? You have exiled yourself voluntarily. Me, I am a wanted man on two continents. I have nothing but this.” He leans back on the couch and waves his arm, indicating the suite of rooms and the second-rate gaming room above them. “I will have to meet my daughter somewhere else. Perhaps Morocco. Maybe Malta. Meet her on the sly, as if I were some sort of criminal.”
This isn’t the moment to point out that, in fact, he is a criminal.
“And, tell me, if I go back, if I see her again, will I again be the man she knew so many years ago? The sort of man a father should be for his daughter, young and strong and energetic. And will she still be my little girl? Can I regain that time?” He flashes a smile that looks like a wound. “If I were to stay here, maybe I would come to feel as the Malagasy do, that those ancient times, when she was a young girl, are still there.” His fingers trembling, he stretches out his open hand. “Just there, almost within my grasp. But if I stay here, I will never see her again.” He closes his fist.
“Stuck,” I mutter, more to myself than to Picard.
“Tell me, Robert, are you in or out?”
“How much do you need?”
He thinks for a moment. “Eight thousand should do it. That’s quite a discount on what you owe me.”
“Eight—” The sum startles me. “I’ll have to think about it.” I try to sound casual, but am talking around a lump in my throat as big as a tennis ball.
Picard slaps the coffee table with both hands and rises to his feet. “Fine. Think about it. But don’t take too long, Robert. Don’t take too long.”
We both understand that I haven’t said no.
12
“Why, Mr. Knott, I didn’t think it was possible to win this much money all at once.” Annie, the embassy cashier gives me a sly smile. “You know gambling’s a vice.”
“There are worse, believe me.”
I told Picard I needed to think it over, but it didn’t take me long to grasp the inescapable. Three days after my conversation with Picard I returned to the Zebu Room and received the first package from Jacques.
“You look like you were up half the night celebrating,” Annie says with a laugh.
I don’t want to tell her that I spent the night staring at the ceiling, contemplating the wreck I’ve made of my life.
“You want this in fifties, Mr. Knott?”
“Can you make it hundreds?”
“Certainly. I’ll just have to get them from Miss Brandt. She keeps them in the—”
“No. That’s okay. Make it fifties.”
She counts out fifteen bills and change. “Sign here, Mr. Knott.” She smiles again. “Congratulations, maybe this is the beginning of a big winning streak.”
“Wouldn’t that be lovely?”
Across the narrow street that runs in front of the embassy, a long flight of refuse-encrusted steps, cleaned only by the uncertain rains, leads up to the center of town. Every day a blind accordionist sits at the bottom of the steps playing jaunty little tunes.
Nearly every day for more than two years, I’ve walked by the man without giving him so much as a kind word. This time, as I pass, I drop the musician a thousand franc note, knowing it’s less an act of charity than an attempt to slip a bribe to Fate.
Somehow the man senses the banknote settling on top of the few coins he has received that morning. He tips his head back with that disconcerting appearance of exaltation so characteristic of the blind and says, “Merci, M’sieur Knott.”
“Jesus!” I skitter around the man like a startled terrier. How does he know my name? How could he have known who it was at all? What kind of place is this, where even blind men know the unknowable?
I run up the steps two at a time until I’ve left him far below.
Still shaken, I walk through the gardens in the Place de l’Independence and make my way past the Presidential palace before turning down a narrow street and descending the steps on the other side of the hill.
The sight of the American Cultural Center and the thought of being yoked to its director, Gloria, for the afternoon feels like a dash of salt on the snail of my soul.
I nod at the lone, unarmed guard outside the door—the extent of security at the center—and climb the stairs to the third floor, where I stick my head into Gloria’s office. Without a word of greeting, I tell her, “Let’s go.”
She frowns, but grabs a chi-chi little blazer she wears to appointments and calls down the corridor, “Josephine!”
Josephine Andonaka, a short woman with a beehive hairdo, likes to say she’s been the press assistant for us, “since the invention of the alphabet.” She appears in Gloria’s doorway, a cigarette hanging from her lip and a narrow look in her eye.
“Josephine,” Gloria says, “we’re off to Notre Madagascar to straighten out its owner about that baby parts article.” Gloria invariably speaks to her staff in English. “While I’m gone, can you write up a press release on that book donation to the university?”
Josephine waggles her head. “Certainly, Miss Burris.” She shoots me an indecipherable look and disappears back down the hallway, leaving a wraith of cigarette smoke uncoiling in the doorway.
“She’s not coming with us?” I ask.
“I figured I should go on these visits without staff, establish myself.”
“As someone who can’t take advice from more experienced hands?” I want to ask, but settle for, “You could use a translator at these things.”
She sighs for
my benefit. “I can speak French.”
“Yeah, you can hear what this guy says, but Josephine can tell you what he means.” I lean against the doorway. “When I first got here, my predecessor in the political section, a guy named Schenk, told me, ‘They all speak in code around here. When you begin to understand it, it’s time to go.’ Believe me, you’re not there yet.”
Gloria looks at me blankly for a moment, then laughs.
Though I’m accustomed to the hole-in-the-wall nature of all but the biggest Malagasy periodicals, I raise my eyebrows when Gabriel, the Center’s driver, pulls up in front of the ramshackle house near the train station.
“This is it?” Gloria asks.
Gabriel, a pudgy man with a worried smile, nods. “Yes, Miss Burris, Notre Madagascar.”
I look at Gloria “You called, told them we were coming?”
Gloria nods. “Josephine made the appointment two days ago. They should be ready.”
“Let’s hope we are.” I get out of the car and make my way up the dirt walkway. Gloria squeezes by me so she can knock on the door before I reach it.
A thin white-haired man in a raggedy sweater answers. “Yes?”
“Is Monsieur Randrianjana in?” Gloria asks in French.
The man’s clear eyes widen and a smile lights his face. “Why, yes, I am he. You must be my visitors from the American Embassy. Please come in.”
With a surprisingly youthful bounce in his step, Randrianjana tiptoes to the middle of the room and fiddles with the tea things he’s laid out on a wooden table, nervously scooting the cups and saucers half an inch then moving them back again. On a large table against the wall a stack of cheap paper sits beside a grimy printing press of ancient make.
He beckons us to sit down. “I’m so glad you’ve come. Will you have some tea with me?”
The room smells of too much wood smoke and too few baths, an earthy mix of which, over the past couple of years, I’ve almost grown fond. While we seat ourselves, the white-haired publisher circles around the table pouring tea into chipped cups, his lips moving in an internal dialogue that threatens at any moment to become external.
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