Madagascar

by Stephen Holgate

  Walt looks at me, skeptical. “So, you’re using us as bait?”

  “Yeah, I am. And I won’t pretend there’s no danger in it for you.”

  He thinks it over, glances at Nirina, then Speedy, then back at me. “Okay. You’ve done a lot for all of us. I guess we can afford to give some back.”

  “Thanks, cowboy.”

  “And where are you going to be, while we’re doing all this?” he asks.

  “I’ll leave a couple minutes after you and go the other way. We’ll meet up after they’ve let you go.”

  “If they let us go,” Walt says.

  I know he’s speaking the thoughts of the others. I have to be straight with them.

  “That’s right—if.”

  “Okay, where do we meet you?”

  I haven’t thought it through very well. A hot flush of anxiety runs through me. If I can’t think even a few minutes ahead, how will we ever get away with this?

  Nirina rises from her chair. “We will meet at my place.” She tells Speedy, “I’ll direct you,” and then turns to me. “You know where it is.”

  I avoid looking at Walt. “All right. We’ll meet at Nirina’s.”

  Speedy says, “I’ll have to drive fast.”

  He’s looking forward to it. I smile and shake my head. “Speedy, you’re o-kay.”

  Ten minutes later, I’m standing under the awning at the edge of the parking lot with Walt and Nirina when Speedy drives up in an ancient Renault. Even in the pouring rain, the Malagasy guard takes his time, looking in the trunk, running a mirror around the underside of the car, but the police on the street barely look up.

  Finally, the guard lets him in and shuts the gate. Nirina and Walt bundle into my car. Speedy jumps behind the wheel. The engine rumbles to life. Opening the gate once more, the guard gives me a look that says he doesn’t much care for my making him run around in the rain while people drive in and out for no good reason.

  I motion for Speedy to roll down the window. “Remember, drive quickly and draw them away. Good luck. I’ll see you at Nirina’s.”

  Speedy pops the clutch. The car jumps through the open gate and squeals on the wet pavement and into the street.

  Like a cat jumping after a mouse, the Citroen with the broken headlight speeds down the street after them.

  The guard frowns. “There go three men in a hurry, sir.”

  “In the Peugeot? They’re just—”

  “No, Monsieur Knott. In the Citroen.”

  “Three? I thought there were only two.”

  “No, Monsieur. Another car dropped off a large man a few minutes ago and he got in with the other two. It was very strange, sir, the way they seemed to be waiting there. I was going to speak to the Marine. But now they’re gone.”

  I try to sound casual. “This third guy, was he Malagasy?”

  “No, sir. A vazaha.”

  I grunt like I’ve been hit in the stomach. Nothing to be done about it now. But I feel a wave of real fear for Walt and Nirina and Speedy.

  A few minutes later I get into the stolen Renault and drive out through the gate into the empty street.

  Shantytowns surround Antananarivo like the rings around Saturn. Coming from the direction of the embassy, I have trouble finding the particular area Nirina had directed me to the night I drove her home. After to-ing and fro-ing for a quarter of an hour I finally stumble upon it. My car is nowhere in sight.

  There are plenty of reasons why I might arrive before they did, none of them good. I’ve been improvising every step I take, dragging the others with me. Any misstep, any failure to anticipate what might happen next, can get them all killed. Me, too. But I’d only be getting what I had coming.

  The intensity of the storm continues to grow. I wonder if the demonstrators and cops on the avenue have been blown away in the wind, taken into the sky like those nannies in Mary Poppins.

  The car is rocked by the wind and pounded by the rain while I wait out the longest minutes of my life. I’m raked by worry and the sense of my own culpability if anything should happen to the three of them while they carry out my plan—a plan that looks increasingly harebrained.

  I’m about to turn around and head back for the embassy, thinking that for some reason they might have returned there, when a pair of headlights appear in the mirror. Speedy? Picard? I feel for the pistol in my pocket before I notice that the headlights are clear, not yellow, and show no sign of a broken lens. The car pulls up behind me and I can make out the lines of my Peugeot. I let out a long sigh of relief.

  Struggling against the rain and the gusting wind, I get out of the stolen car, walk back to my own and jump into the front passenger seat.

  “It worked just as you said, Monsieur Knott,” Speedy tells me. “The car followed us to the Colbert. When we stopped, the other car stopped beside us and two men jumped out with their hands under their coats.” As my eyes adjust to the dark, I can see that Speedy appears shaken, his eyes wide. “I thought they were going to shoot us. But they were looking for you.” He shouts to be heard over the wind. “I told them you were still at the embassy. They talked to someone waiting in their car, then left again.”

  I look at Nirina, sitting next to Walt in the back seat. “You’d know Picard. Was it him?”

  She nods. I can see she’s frightened. I want to tell her the worst is over, but a drive over dissolving highways followed by an ocean crossing in a small boat during the middle of the monsoon lay ahead. There are still plenty of ways this could end badly.

  “You did great,” I tell Speedy and lean over the back seat to look at Walt. “How ya doing, pardner? ”

  The old cowboy is leaning against Nirina, breathing shallowly, his face slack with fatigue. A couple of days in the embassy had done him good, but his reserves are low.

  “A little winded, s’all. Not used to all this runnin’ around.”

  I motion to Speedy, “Let’s switch places. I’ll drive for a while. We’ll leave the Renault here.”

  I get behind the wheel. The wind buffets the car, whistling through gaps around the windows. The rain pounds against the roof. I can’t bring myself to start the car.

  “What’s wrong?” Nirina asks.

  “I’m fighting twenty years of caring what other people write in my annual evaluation.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” she says. “We can take the other car, try to make it to the coast ourselves.”

  I shake my head. “Once the police know Walt’s gone—and Picard will likely tell them—they’ll be looking for him everywhere. I don’t think you’d get through the roadblocks in that car. Besides, I need to get out of here, too. My old life is over. I’ve made up my mind.”

  The exhilaration I had felt earlier in the evening has evaporated, leaving me with an emotional hangover. I turn the key, put the car in gear, and head out of town.

  21

  Only the pounding rain and the gusting wind break the silence of our escape. As we drive away from Antananarivo and rise into the dark hills east of the city, the old Chinese-built road narrows and we’re forced to dodge small mud slides and fallen trees.

  We’ve been underway perhaps an hour when I brake to a stop.

  “What’s the matter?” Walt asks from the back seat.

  I point at two orange flames flickering in the rain a hundred yards ahead of us. “Roadblock.”

  We’ve already breezed through a checkpoint at the edge of town. The diplomatic plates and my assurance that I was heading home with friends were enough. My presence here, in the middle of a hurricane, will be harder to explain.

  Flashlight beams point in our direction, but we’re too far away for anyone to clearly make us out.

  Walt props himself up on one elbow. “Any chance they’re looking for us already?”

  “Maybe. If the phones are working. Or if they’re in contact by radio.” The weight of the gun in my pocket feels like an anvil. I put the car in gear and the Peugeot crawls forward.

  The roadblock co
nsists of a couple of oil drums topped with hurricane lamps, and a metal gate set between them. Three policemen stand out of the rain on the covered porch of a darkened shop.

  “Let me do the talking,” I tell the others. I stop the car and am about to get out when something in the mirror catches my eye. A flash of light? Something moving in the darkness? I turn around and look through the back window. Nothing. I’m jumpy as hell, seeing things in the dark now.

  “What’s up?” Walt asks.

  “Nothing. I thought maybe …” Through the curtain of rain and the swirling wind the light appears once more, far below and perhaps a kilometer away—maybe twice that distance along the twisting road. Once more, the light disappears then returns—yeah, just like a car on a twisty road. After a few seconds the image resolves itself into the beams of a car’s headlights flickering yellow through the gaps in the trees. Did one of the lights throw a white beam as well, like the broken headlamp on the Citroen?

  “Nirina, you saw Picard when his goons stopped you by the Colbert. Do you think he got a look at you too?”

  She turns in her seat and looks into the darkness behind us. “I don’t know,” she says in a hushed voice. “Perhaps.”

  “He knows you, yes? From that time you talked to him about your friend who owed him the money. The one Andriamana shot.”

  She blinks uncertainly. “I’m not sure he would remember me.” Her voice has gone quiet as she understands what lies behind the question.

  “Let’s say he does.” This is no time to mention that there’s hardly a man in the world who wouldn’t remember seeing her. “So, Picard chases after you this evening, finally catches up and finds I’m not with you. He goes back to the embassy, has one of his men talk to the cops waiting outside and figures out I’m gone. Maybe it takes him a few minutes to put it all together, but he finally understands he’s been suckered.” I tap my fingers nervously against the steering wheel. “My bet is he’s going to remember you’re from the coast, like the kid he had killed. And he’s going to guess that’s where we’re headed.”

  I jump when a gray-haired policeman taps at the window. I show him my diplomatic ID and explain that I’m traveling with staff members to give a speech in Tamatave the next day. The man doesn’t ask why I would drive through a storm like this simply to give a speech. Vazaha are alien beings and their ways unknowable.

  The cop motions for the other two policemen to move the barricade aside.

  If that’s Picard behind me—and everything in me says that it is—I hope the police take more time with him than they have with me.

  Driving the twisting highway isn’t easy at the best of times, but in the dark, with gale winds and heavy rain, it’s a slow and dangerous business. A landslide chokes the road nearly shut at one point. A couple miles further on, part of the pavement has fallen away, narrowing the road to a single lane for a hundred yards.

  Nirina leans over the seat, her mouth close to my ear. “Do you think the Colonel would phone Andriamana and have him arrest us?”

  I can hear in her voice the residual fear from the night the police captain had eyed her in the village, the night we came close to dying in each others’ arms. Could Picard be so unaware of his own peril with Andriamana that he might call on his help again? “I don’t know. With any luck the phones are out.”

  She nods, but I can sense her fear.

  For the next hour we make slow, steady progress along the narrow highway. I look in the mirror, searching for yellow headlights in the distance, but find only darkness. Still, I can’t afford to doubt that Picard and his men are back there, hidden by the storm and the twisting road.

  An hour later, as we come up on the town of Moramanga, I’m beginning to feel better about things. There’s no sign of Picard, and the rain and wind are starting to let up. Maybe I’m feeling a little smug as I round a corner on the narrow roadway.

  “Sonofabitch!” I shout and slam on the brakes. The car slews sideways on the wet pavement and I fight for control before it lurches to a stop.

  Walt, who has been asleep, wakes with a start in the back seat. “What the hell’s goin’ on?”

  “I think we just ran out of luck,” I tell him.

  A fallen tree blocks the road in front of us. I glance in the mirror. I haven’t seen the headlights of the Citroen in fifteen minutes and have been telling myself that something must have happened to Picard, a breakdown, an accident. But I don’t believe it.

  I squeeze the steering wheel until my knuckles hurt, my mind running in circles. I can’t go forward, don’t dare go back.

  It’s Speedy who figures a way out.

  “Monsieur Knott, I saw a road just in back of us. Maybe we can reach Moramanga that way and find another road from there down to the highway.”

  It’s better than any idea I have. I back down the road and turn up a dirt lane that soon becomes a river of mud. I shove the gearshift into low, flutter the throttle. The car shudders, threatening to whir to a halt in the clinging mud. I tell myself not to panic. With any luck, Picard will miss this road and end his night stuck in front of the fallen tree.

  No. Too easy.

  Toward the top of the long slope, the road becomes firmer. The little Peugeot tops the rise heading into town. Relaxing my death grip on the wheel, I look in the mirror at Walt leaning against the car door, gray and unwell. I think of the miles ahead and the long sea voyage to Mauritius in stormy weather. Could Speedy and Nirina be so determined to liberate the old guy that they kill him in the process?

  I take my eyes off the road for an instant and glance at the car’s gauges. “Damn!” After hours of slow driving and wheel-spinning, the gas gauge twitches just above empty.

  I drive slowly into town, barely touching the accelerator, searching the gloom around us for a gas station.

  “There,” Nirina points to a ramshackle building with a fuel pump in front, shuttered for the night.

  A wisp of smoke rises from a vent in the roof. We’re in luck. The owner lives in his station.

  Standing in the rain with Nirina beside me, I bang on the door hard enough to shake the walls. From somewhere inside a voice grumbles at us. It doesn’t sound like, “Come in.” I pound harder. Finally, Nirina calls to the attendant in Malagasy. After much shuffling and griping, the door opens a few inches and a lone eye peers through the crack. Its owner gives a shout and shrinks back at the sight of a tall, bedraggled vazaha looming out of the storm. He tries to close the door, but I’ve put my foot inside the doorframe. I say to Nirina. “Tell this guy we’re in a hurry.”

  Nirina lights into him like a banshee, shrieking orders and pointing to his pumps. More afraid of her wrath than my presence, the man finally comes out, growling uncertainly, and fills the tank from his ancient gravity-fed pump. Nirina points to a road leading through the darkened village. Trembling, the attendant nods. Nirina says to me, “He tells me we can follow this road back to the highway.” I can see her white teeth as she smiles in the dark. “You see? It’s useful traveling with a tromba woman.”

  “I never doubted it. But we’d better get out of here. I’m surprised Picard isn’t on us already.”

  “I am driving now, Monsieur Knott. You’re tired.” Speedy stands by the driver’s door, holding out his hand for the keys.

  He’s right. After my adventures of the last day and a half, I’m nearly as beat as Walt. “Okay.”

  Soon we’re back on the road, and discover that on the eastern side of the hills the storm has done its worst and moved on. The reach of the Peugeot’s headlights increases in the gentler rain and Speedy leans back in his seat.

  “So, Monsieur Knott,” he says, “do you think the phones are working?”

  “No idea, Speedy. I hope not. If they are, I think Picard will have called the local police.”

  “Or maybe the police radios are working.”

  “The radios only reach so far. They’d have to go through a couple of relays to get to Tamatave. By the time it got there, the message
might be so garbled they’d think they’re supposed to hold a parade for us.”

  “Maybe.” Speedy thinks it over. “On the other hand, if Monsieur Picard was able to call, or managed to have the police radio Tamatave before he left Antananarivo, I may get a chance to meet the formidable Captain Andriamana tonight.” His eyes light up as if talking about meeting a movie star. “With the Captain in front of us and the Colonel in back of us, we’ll have to hurry or we will get caught between them.” He takes his hands off the wheel and squeezes them together in a gruesome gesture.

  I slump in my seat. “This hasn’t been much of a plan, has it?”

  His eyes on the road, Speedy seems game enough for a regiment. “We’re almost there. Besides, we’re not doing it for ourselves. We’re doing it for Mister Walt,” he says with a glance at the back seat. “But we all get something from it, don’t we?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nirina will go with Mister Walt and start a new life. You will get Mr. Walt out of Madagascar, like you promised. And that will make you free.”

  “Free.” Could it be so easy? “What about you? What do you get from all this?”

  “I’ll help my friend go home. That’s better than giving him Peter Stuyvesants in prison. And when I return to Miss Gloria, she’ll think I’m a hero.”

  “Y’know, Speedy, you may be right.”

  “Of course I am.”

  For the first time Speedy’s smile strikes me as not so much a reflection of his unquenchable optimism, but as a way of hiding depths he normally wished to conceal from a vazaha. I think back on what Rabary told me the night of the dinner at my house, that my mere presence, my inability to speak the same language as the Malagasy, makes it impossible for me to truly understand them. I see only the façade they adopt when around me. I look at Speedy and realize I’m traveling with a stranger—but one I trust.

  “Well, then, speed on, brother.”

  We reach the coast highway, the rain forest giving way to rice paddies and long stretches of flooded road. In the deepest spots water laps at the car doors and Speedy slows to a crawl. I imagine potholes big enough to sink a bus hiding under the placid surface of the water. But the engine runs strong and we drive steadily north with the metronome of the windshield wipers marking time.