Madagascar

by Stephen Holgate

  “Did anyone call her house?”

  “The phones are dead in Ivandry, and we can’t seem to raise her on the radio.” She gives me the smile she uses when she’s about to ask me for something she thinks I’m actually capable of doing. “I think you live closer to her than any of us. Why don’t you stop by on your way home? You know how we all love her.”

  Whenever I want to resent her, she says something like this and means it.

  “Sure.”

  “Thank you, Robert,” she says and heads upstairs.

  The PAO’s house is at the bottom of a narrow lane above the rice paddies bordering Ivandry. The guard opens the gate as I pull up.

  “Is Miss Gloria in?”

  The old guy, a fellow named Masiso, had briefly been my guard a year earlier but is still too shy to speak to me. He waggles his head and points toward the front door.

  When no one answers my knock, I let myself in.

  “Gloria?”

  No response. No maid, no houseboy, no cook. I picture finding Gloria with a box of Kleenex, nursing a cold and watching TV in the living room. But the TV isn’t on and the room’s empty except for a lot of still-unopened packing boxes.

  I know the modest single-story house from my evenings of bringing the former PAO home drunk. In every corner lurk the ghosts of those nights when Boswell could barely stumble through the door and his wife glared at me with undisguised loathing.

  I head down the hall. To my surprise, the master bedroom is unused, empty but for a desk and a twin bed pushed against the wall. I go to the next room down the hall, wondering why she would take the smaller bedroom for herself, as if she were a guest in her own house. The picture of a Gloria different from the one I’ve known begins slowly to come into focus.

  I tap on the door and go in. The dark bedroom smells of sickness and sweat—odors that pose unspoken duties on anyone without enough sense to back out of the room and go away.

  “Gloria?”

  A groan comes from the bed.

  I pull back a curtain and open the sliding glass door. Daylight pours in and a wave of fresh air swirls through the room.

  Gloria, looking small and gray, lies sunk in a pile of pillows. She groans again and squints against the sudden light, but she doesn’t have the strength to put a hand over her eyes.

  “What’s with you?”

  She tries to raise her head. “I’m sick.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.”

  A pot, half full of something I don’t want to look at, sits on the floor next to her. Magazines lay scattered on the rumpled bedclothes alongside a plate with a bit of crusted food on it. Today’s Monday. She must have been sick all weekend.

  “What’ve you got?”

  Like a bad phone connection, there’s a lag before she replies. “I don’t know. I’ve been sick to my stomach and have a fever.” Her voice trails off.

  There’s no point pressing her for detailed symptoms. I’m not a doctor and Madagascar is full of unidentified fevers that come and go, occasionally taking the sufferer with them.

  “Don’t you have any staff?”

  “No. I meant to hire some, but …”

  “You haven’t even unpacked yet.”

  “I haven’t had time.”

  I swear quietly to myself and pick up the pot by the bed. I empty it in the hall toilet, take it into the kitchen and fetch a new one. I set it on the floor beside her bed and put my hand on her forehead.

  “When was the last time you took your temperature?”

  “I don’t have a thermometer,” she croaks.

  “You have any aspirin?”

  She shakes her head as if it might break. “I threw them up.”

  I go back to the kitchen and fill a pan with water and ice. I grab a bottle of water from the fridge and a towel from a rack by the stove. When I come back to her room I heft the bottled water. “Here, see if you can keep this down.”

  I unscrew the plastic cap and hold the bottle toward her. Instead of taking it, she puts her hand on mine and tilts the bottle toward her, sipping from it like a baby bird before falling back onto her pillow, panting.

  Taking off my coat, I sit on the edge of the bed, soak the towel in the ice water and lay it sopping wet on her forehead. The cold water runs down her face and neck. She gasps and her hands jerk into the air.

  “Okay, okay. Don’t start flying around the room,” I tell her. “Why didn’t you call the embassy, get Dr. André out here?”

  “The line is …” She nods vaguely toward the phone on the nightstand.

  “How about using your radio?”

  “I let the battery run down and was too sick to plug it back in.”

  “Why haven’t you got any staff?”

  “I can look after myself.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. Just like you’re going to make yourself well without any help. And your boxes are going to unpack themselves. And you’re going to supervise your office staff right into the ground. Oh, shit, you’re not going to start crying, are you?”

  She tries to say something, but I can’t make it out.

  “Look, you’ve probably got one of those things that you’re just going to have to ride out.” I don’t tell her that I believe she has become sick for Walt’s sake, trying to take some of it from him. “When I get to my place I’ll radio Post One to send Dr. Andre out here.”

  “Don’t go.” She can barely croak the words out. “Stay.”

  “No way. If I hang around here, I’m going to get whatever it is you’ve got and … Oh, for crying out loud.” I hand her my handkerchief.

  She dries her eyes and collects herself. “Please don’t go,” she says a little more firmly.

  I pick up the phone. Still dead. “You got any Jell-O?”

  “Jell-O? I might have some in the pantry. It’s—”

  “I know where the pantry is. I saw Boswell throwing up in there once.”

  In the kitchen, I mix the Jell-O with hot water, throw in a little salt and grab a couple of ice cubes from the freezer. “You make your ice with bottled water?” I ask, calling toward the back bedroom. When I get no response I throw the ice away.

  Drinking the Jell-O seems to do her good. I take one of the magazines from the bed and start toward the living room.

  “Don’t go.” Gloria looks at me with such pleading that I stop. I stand at the foot of her bed and flip through a few pages.

  “Good gawd, what is this?” I look at the cover, “Marie-Claire. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “You’re young enough to be my—”

  I realize later I shouldn’t have stood there so long without finishing my sentence.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I settle into a cane chair near the sliding glass door.

  She looks at me, little lines of puzzlement furrowing her smooth young brow.

  I flip a couple more pages without looking at her. “I’ll bet you got in the foreign service straight out of college.”

  “Yes. Brown,” she says with a hint of pride.

  “Figures. Straight A’s in high school, probably at Brown too. Debate club. Voted ‘Most Likely to Succeed.’ Degree in International Relations. Never dated.”

  “Engineering,” she whispers. “The rest is pretty close.”

  “Engineering?” I snort. “I’ll bet your dad was tough on you. Wanted a boy, expected the world of you.”

  “And I did it. Made myself do it all.”

  Despite her illness, something almost savage in her voice gives me an idea of the determination that drove her—and a glimpse of what it cost her.

  “It’s our survival skills that finally kill us,” I say quietly. She says nothing. “And you cry too easily.”

  “How old is your daughter?”

  “What’s my daughter got to do with anything?”

  She looks at me for a long time before saying, “Okay. I get it.”

  Only then do I get it too. I don’t want to know wha
t a shrink would make of it, but I see with frightening clarity that my problem with Gloria has something to do with my daughter. Could reconciling with Gloria put me on track to patching things up with Christine? Maybe. Probably not.

  Out of the quiet lacuna that follows she says, “I’ll bet you did well in school, too.”

  “Me? I got voted ‘Most Likely to be Found Dead in a Motel Room’.”

  She looks at me. “Married.”

  “You or me?”

  “You.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “How old is your—?”

  “I thought we’d dropped that.” I shrug and act like I don’t care. “Sixteen.”

  She looks at me quietly. “You don’t do well with women, do you?”

  I grunt.

  “It’s because you’re afraid.”

  Has she been talking to Nirina? “Just another foreign country to me.” I lean back in the chair and pretend to read.

  “And you don’t understand because you don’t want to.”

  “I think the fever’s making you crazy.”

  Her eyes look so weary—physically, emotionally—that I think for a moment I might cry, too.

  She lifts her chin and says quietly, “Pax?”

  “If you bat your eyelashes at me, I swear I’m going to walk out that door and leave you here to die.”

  She’s still pale and weak and the smile she gives me looks like one of those things a good mortician works onto a corpse. “Pax?”

  “What do you want? Someone to draw up a peace treaty and have me sign it?”

  “Pax?”

  “Yeah, fine. Pax. Whatever.” Her eyes stay on me until I have to look away. “What’s that other mag you got there?”

  She looks at it. “Vogue.”

  “You can have this one back. Slide me the Vogue.”

  We sit together for a long time, saying nothing, looking through our magazines. About five o’clock she falls asleep. When it gets dark, I turn on the light and find a book to read.

  15

  I see it first in Midi.

  I arrive late in the morning, after Cheryl has already laid the morning papers on my desk. As I’m hanging up my coat, she calls to me from her desk. “That’s funny about the burglars, isn’t it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That story you and Gloria gave them about the burglars.”

  A sickening dread lowers over the burned stump of my being. “Oh. That. Yeah.”

  With the self-conscious nonchalance of a condemned man carefully combing his hair before walking down that long corridor, I make myself a cup of coffee, sit down at my desk and pick up the morning’s Midi.

  The story is page one: “American Embassy Accuses Prison Guards of Abetting Burglaries.” My eyes run quickly down the untidy columns. It’s all there, the guards letting the burglars out at night, taking their cut, letting them back in. No quotes from government officials, guards, or burglary victims—much less the burglars—only a paragraph citing the American press attaché as the source. Even as my heart falls into my socks I wonder how in the hell they got the story. And in the same instant I know there’s only one possibility.

  “Cheryl,” I call through the open door, “do we have Notre Madagascar?”

  “It came in yesterday afternoon. Should be at the bottom of your pile.”

  Buried on page three, after a page one article on the prowess of the Russian national hockey team—did the Russians really think there were a lot of hockey fans in Madagascar?—and a page two piece regarding the wine industry in Burgundy, Randrianjana, that gray-haired loon, has run a brief story about the burglars, with an attribution to the American Embassy’s press attaché.

  “Well, bless his heart.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Nothing.” I’m sure that if I were to ask the old guy why he mentioned Gloria, he would tell me he wanted to demonstrate his professionalism by citing his sources. Never mind that he promised he wouldn’t.

  I hear Cheryl’s phone ring. “Hi, Alice. He’s right here, Alice. Right away, Alice.” She hangs up and calls to me. “That was Alice.”

  “Really.”

  “The Ambassador would like to see you.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  As overwork saps her health and erodes her defenses, Michelle Herr’s Tennessee graciousness tends to either kick into antebellum overdrive or disappear under a layer of ice. When I walk into her office I see immediately which one I’m going to get. I’ve always known that, when crossed, she can throw a red velvet tomahawk with the best of them, but I’ve never seen her angry until now.

  It looks like she’s convened a court martial. Pete Salvatore, the DCM, gives me a look that says he doesn’t need this kind of trouble right now. Lynn has come with her notepad. Esmer is reading the article in Midi, moving his lips as he translates the French to himself. Gloria is busy studying her feet.

  I take the one seat remaining. At first the Ambassador expresses the hope that the story in Notre Madagascar is false. After all, Madagascar’s best creative fiction is generally found on the front pages of the daily newspapers. When I shake my head, she suggests that the story’s attribution to the American press attaché has come from the fevered imagination of Notre Madagascar’s well-meaning but unbalanced publisher.

  Gloria’s downcast eyes and my awkward throat-clearing tell her all she needs to know.

  “So you’re saying to me you really gave him this story?” the Ambassador asks.

  Lynn looks at me meaningfully but says nothing. I can hear her asking herself why she ever bothered with me. I haven’t got an answer for her.

  “Do you understand how this will look?” Michelle Herr asks me. I know better than to answer. “Due to your lack of success with your counterpart at the Foreign Ministry, the Malagasy government turned down our request for help on this UN resolution. Now they are going to think that, in retribution, we have decided to publicly embarrass them.”

  “I don’t really think they’ll see it that way, Ambassador.”

  “I disagree, Robert. I really do.” A vein pulses through the layers of foundation on her forehead. “I sent you with Gloria as the more experienced officer, precisely to see that this sort of thing didn’t happen.” She turns on her PAO. “And why would you tell them this story? Surely you knew the publisher couldn’t be trusted.”

  Still pale and thin from her illness, Gloria blinks at the Ambassador, unable to speak. I know that if she starts crying Michelle Herr will give up on her as she’s already given up on me.

  Before Gloria can hang herself by blurting out either tears or the truth, I step in, “No, ma’am. I was the one who told him. He just got us mixed up.”

  The Ambassador’s eyes shift back to me. “It was right at the end of our visit. We were talking about this and that and I decided to tell him a funny story. That’s all.”

  My confession makes her anger perfect, something she can indulge in with no risk of regret.

  “I thought as much,” she says with grim pleasure. Her fists clenched, she stands up and starts pacing the short distance between her desk and the couch, no doubt picturing her political friends back in Washington talking about how she made a mess of things in Madagascar. I want to tell her that no one cares what happens in Madagascar except us. But that would only make things worse.

  “I expect a call from the Foreign Ministry any minute,” she continues, “asking us to explain ourselves. Can I at least tell them that this story about the burglars is accurate? You weren’t just making things up.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And how are you so sure?”

  “Walt Sackett mentioned it to me.”

  “He’s the American you haven’t yet managed to free from prison.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Ambassador Herr’s eyes narrow with displeasure. Gloria has returned to looking at her feet, though her eyes goggle in wonder as I weather Michelle Herr’s wrath.
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  The Ambassador overreacts for a few more minutes, asking how this could have happened, etcetera, etcetera. Finally, when her anger has sucked all the air out of the room, leaving everyone unable to speak, the meeting breaks up.

  I feel Lynn’s eyes crawling all over me. She’s seen me lie before and surely recognizes my phony confession for what it is. Still, I doubt that the look she’s giving me is one of new-found regard.

  As I reach the doorway, Ambassador Herr says to my back, “At least see if you can find out what’s going on at the Foreign Ministry so I can be ready. Call your friend over there. What’s his name?”

  “Roland Rabary.” I want to add, “And he’s no friend,” but it’s too late to introduce new business to the agenda.

  We walk down the hall together, me toward my office, Gloria toward the car waiting to take her back to the center. At the top of the stairs she stops and asks, “Why?”

  “I’m screwed anyway. No point killing your career, too. Besides, it was a favor to her. It helps the old girl when she only has one person to focus on.”

  “Thanks. I mean …” She wants to say something more but can’t find the words and finally turns and hurries down the steps toward the door.

  As I continue down the hall, I can see Esmer standing all too casually outside the security office door, pretending to read Midi.

  “Do they have ‘Peanuts’ in there?” I ask as I try to walk past. I can see he had wanted to get in the first word, to casually say, “Oh, Robert” as I go by, and it bugs him to have me step on his line.

  “Oh, Robert.” He tucks the paper under his arm, determined to recover the initiative. “A funny thing. I was talking to Annie down in admin the other day and happened to mention the casino. She tells me you’ve been coming in regularly with stacks of francs, saying something about a big winning streak.”

  I’m still in full defensive mode from the meeting and manage to absorb this new blow without blinking. “Yeah. What of it?”

  “I thought you said you almost never went in there.”

  “No. I said I almost never see you there.” Esmer’s eyes narrow. I can see that his memory of our conversation that night isn’t very sharp. “Sure, I go in now and then,” I tell him, “and when you’re hot you don’t want to walk away.” I switch subjects. “So, what’s the news from Antsirabe?”