Madagascar Read online

  Blank Slate Press

  Saint Louis, MO 63116

  Copyright © 2018 Stephen Holgate

  All rights reserved.

  Blank Slate Press is an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group, LLC

  www.amphoraepublishing.com

  Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of the imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in historical or contemporary accounts, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. The book should be read solely as a work of fiction.

  For information, contact:

  Blank Slate Press

  4168 Hartford Street, Saint Louis, MO 63116

  www.amphoraepublishing.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Cover Design by Kristina Blank Makansi & Elena Makansi

  Cover art: IStock

  Set in Adobe Caslon Pro and Marion

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940506

  ISBN: 9781943075485

  For John and Richard

  MADAGASCAR

  a novel

  Stephen Holgate

  Blank Slate Press | St. Louis, MO

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  I bring my fist to my ear and listen to the clacking of the dice, unable to shake the fear that I’m listening to the rattle of my own fate. The voices of the gamblers in this second-rate casino swirl around me like a river—eddies of French and Malagasy, whorls of variously-accented English, ripples of Italian and Japanese. Maybe these currents will carry the dice on their long fall toward the table and give me the nine I so desperately need. I close my eyes and blow, one last attempt to breathe on the dice some unearned quantum of good fortune, an overdraft on my depleted karmic account.

  The croupier, a short, diffident Malagasy in an ill-fitting jacket, frowns at me and sighs. “Monsieur Knott.”

  “All right, all right,” I tell him and grudge-flick the dice down the long green table, where they bounce awkwardly, skid to a stop, and thumb their nose at me—a three. Craps.

  The croupier gathers in the dice like a mother retrieving her children from the attentions of a dubious stranger.

  I might look for solace in the faces of my friends among the other gamblers, but I have no friends among the gamblers, have few friends of any description. Even those I have don’t like me.

  Working on my mojo as the Man Who Doesn’t Care, I take a sip of tonic water, gone warm and flat, and stroll away from the table like an actor walking offstage.

  I glance at my watch. Eleven o’clock. Only in Madagascar would this seem late. Nowhere to go but home. But I put the moment off, drift over to the tall windows at the far end of the room and gaze at the reflection of the tall fellow before me, still lean, though no longer athletic, hair flecked with gray. I flash myself an unpersuasive smile.

  The Zebu Room is named after the humpback cattle that roam in every field, graze in every pasture, and stand on every street corner in Madagascar. The place sits like a boil on the top of the Hotel Continental, looking out over the vast darkness of Antananarivo, a city of two million souls—or four million, or six million, no one really knows—its shadowy expanse sprinkled with a few pinpricks of electric light and, out in the spreading shanty towns, the faint orange glow of oil lamps. Fourteen stories below, a gap-toothed string of streetlights edges the nearly deserted boulevard.

  I try to pick out the distant lights of the country’s main prison and feel relieved when I can’t find them. Still, I can’t shake the dread of tomorrow’s visit to the crumbling penitentiary and its unhappy population of the brutal, the venal, and the luckless. More particularly, I don’t want to think of the lone American rotting in his cell up there. Walt Sackett. Malfortunate sonofabitch. I picture him up there, gray, filthy and unwell, his life dribbling away in a hell hole beyond the reach of home or God or the American Embassy. I try to shake the image from my mind, rid myself of the corrosive conviction that his fate is not unlike my own.

  I put my empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter and head for the door.

  “Monsieur Knott, you are leaving so soon?” The voice cinches around my neck like a cowboy’s lasso.

  Even before I turn around, I recognize the wheedling tones of Jacques Razafintsalama, the Zebu Room’s manager. He regards me with finely counterfeited regret.

  “Just going down to put a couple more francs in the parking meter.”

  Jacques smiles at my little joke. We both know I’m more likely to find a unicorn on the streets of Antananarivo than a parking meter.

  “The Colonel wishes to see you,” he says.

  I tap my watch like a man in a hurry. “It’s getting late. Maybe another time.”

  But I’m not fooling anyone. We both know it isn’t a request.

  I fall in behind the Malagasy, who leads me toward a corridor at the far end of the room.

  Maurice Picard, a fat, red-faced Frenchman in his fifties, gets up from behind his desk and offers me his meaty hand.

  “Robert, how are you?” he asks in English and waves me into a chair.

  A ceiling fan turns slowly overhead, purely decorative in the air-conditioned office.

  Maurice insists his staff call him Colonel, out of respect, he tells them, for his former position in the French army. Occasionally he lets it drop that he made his stack as a soldier of fortune in Central Africa, fighting for a variety of dubious causes. Unfortunately for Picard, a string of defeats had, in the eyes of the victors, transformed his military adventures from a struggle for national liberation into a catalogue of war crimes. Chased by demands for his extradition should he ever reappear in his native France, Picard hopscotched from one unwelcoming African republic to another until he eventually landed on the island nation of Madagascar, the end of the line, a part of Africa and yet physically separate, as if it too had been cast out. There he bought the Zebu Room from a dying German who, like Picard, had run out of luck and places to run.

  For years Picard tried to set the tone for his establishment by appearing each night in a dinner jacket, his diamond-studded cufflinks twinkling in the understated light, his heavy cologne speaking to a fat man’s insecurity about his own excesses. Few of his gamblers heeded his call to elegance, continuing to come to the gaming room in street clothes until he finally traded the tux for shapeless khakis and a flowered shirt that bulged over his large belly, “to make this place less stuffy, give it a flavor of the tropics,” he says. It really means he’s given up, that despite the tally of each night’s profits he is, like the German before him, losing whatever existential wager he has made on his casino. And on Madagascar.

  “A drink?”

  I wag a finger in a negative kind of way and pat a spot where I believe my liver to reside.

  “Ah, yes, Robert.” Picard’s breezy familiarity and his insistent on using my Christian name sends a twist of unease deep into my gut. Fo
r all his outward affability, Picard has always struck me as the kind of man who could strangle you with a length of piano wire then walk into the kitchen and make himself a sandwich without even washing his hands.

  With the grunt of a big man shifting his weight, Picard settles behind his desk and nods at Jacques, who backs out of the room, closing the door behind him. A photo of a young woman sits in a frame on the cabinet behind Picard.

  “Pretty girl,” I tell him, hoping the subtle compliment about his girlfriend might buy me a dram of grace.

  The Frenchman turns and gazes at the picture. “My daughter. She lives in France.” He might have been saying she lives on the moon. “You’ve told me you have a daughter too, yes?”

  I don’t much care to share anything about the sole issue of my loins with this thug, but I’m the one who started this conversation, so I say, “Christine. She’ll turn seventeen this year. ”

  “Christine,” Picard sighs, as if it were the name of every daughter lost to her father.

  With a swift pivot of his chair the big man turns his back to me. “You like the dice,” he declares, like a sideshow mind reader. He folds his hands over his ample stomach and leans back in his chair. “Now, the Malagasy, they prefer the roulette table,” he says, twirling his finger. “Round and round it goes. Like their sense of time. You know they don’t see it—time, I mean—as a straight line like we do. We Europeans ride on a train going from the point of our birth toward”—the flicker of a smile here—“some unknown destination. Going immutably forward. For them … Well, they’re all on a carousel. All of them—and their revered ancestors—going in never-ending circles.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I hear.” The chair is hard, the air short of oxygen. I can’t breathe and want desperately to be somewhere, anywhere, else.

  Maurice, though, seems to be enjoying himself. “For an instant we run alongside each other, Robert, the Malagasy and us, and we think we’re travelling together. But we’re on entirely different tracks.” He smiles philosophically. “It’s like their sense of everything, elliptical, everyone talking in circles, dancing around what they mean. Very Asian. Never”—he brings his hand down like a cleaver, sending a shiver through what’s left of my soul—“never coming at you directly.”

  “You seem to have picked something up from them.”

  Picard looks at me quizzically, then laughs. “Ah, maybe so.” He clasps his hands together and leans over his desk, making the room feel smaller. “So, did you have a good night, Robert? Walking away with a little of my money, I hope?”

  I manufacture a shrug. “My luck’ll change.”

  “It’s going to have to, Robert.” Picard nods toward the gaming room beyond the door. “You signed for your chips again tonight?”

  “I run a tab,” I say, acknowledging what we both know.

  “A large one, my friend, a very large one. Fourteen million Malagasy francs.” He makes a low whistle at this weighty sum. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know. I forgot to bring my abacus.” I lean back, clasp my hands behind my head. Just a couple of friends talking.

  He squints at a piece of paper in front of him as if he hasn’t already memorized the figure. “Twelve thousand dollars American, I believe.”

  “I’m good for it. The State Department pays us decently. Besides, what else am I going to spend my money on in Madagascar?”

  Picard smiles and spreads his hands, a man laying everything on the table. “Yes. And you get paid in dollars, lucky boy. Non?” He slips into French as his smile fades. “Look at me. I rake in hundreds of thousands every night. Millions. Bouf! All of it in Malagasy francs. Play money.” He mimes tossing a handful of it into the air. “Try cashing it in for something real—euros, Swiss francs, dollars. The banks won’t do it. The Malagasy franc’s a non-convertible currency, they say.” He flicks his hand and blows across his palm. “And, as you say, Robert, what is there to spend it on?” He cocks his head and winks at me. “How much longer are you in Madagascar?”

  “Almost seven more months.” I try to make it sound like so many years.

  “Seven months.” Picard grunts, ruminating on this. “And you can pay me—what?—nearly two thousand dollars a month until you leave?”

  “You know I’m not allowed—”

  “To pay me with any of the embassy’s precious dollars. Yes, I know.” Picard leans back in his chair and stares at the ceiling fan. “You’re a diplomat,” he sighs, “so I can’t have you arrested.” He pauses a bit too long before adding, “Not that I would want to. I can’t even sue you.” The injustice of it creeps into his voice. He leans forward again, crowding me, and asks, “And if I wrote a letter to the embassy—well, what then? Private debts are private matters, no?”

  With a soft plonk the pebble drops into the pool of our conversation and I feel myself bobbing on its ripples.

  Disgrace over gambling debts seems so old-fashioned, like something from a Russian novel. But the Department itself is as old-fashioned as hoopskirts, tut-tutting its way backwards into the future. And in the mind of Diplomatic Security large debts to foreigners are, like idle hands, the devil’s playground.

  “You know, Maurice, I really haven’t got much of a career to ruin.”

  Picard waves his hand, trying to deny that I’ve taken his words exactly as he meant them.

  “Look at me, Maurice. Twenty-two years in the foreign service. Forty-seven years old. And what am I? Political officer in Madagascar. And I only got this post because all the places farther from Washington are at the bottom of the ocean. My desk officer back at State never returns my e-mails. No one reads my cables. No one yearns to take my place. Why? Because no one cares what happens here.”

  “Ah, Robert, so much takes place here. The island is enormous. Madagascar—”

  “Is like an old lady’s private parts. Everyone knows it’s down there somewhere, but nobody really cares. We’ve sailed over the edge of the world, you and me. What the hell harm do you really think you can do to me now?”

  “Well, exactly, Robert, what harm can I do you?”

  But the counterfeit colonel knows his man. After years dedicated to crawling up the treacherous slopes of the hierarchy, a foreign service officer can no more surrender even his most tattered ambitions than he can decide to breathe something other than oxygen.

  “In a few years, I’ll be past fifty. When I fail to get my next promotion—and I will—I’ll be shoved into honorable retirement.” I try to laugh at the punchline my life has become. “Retirement to what? I’ve spent most of my adult life overseas. The States are as foreign to me as they are to your average Malagasy. How many years have I spent in Africa representing a country I don’t even know anymore? We’re just alike, Maurice, you and me. Stateless. Professional foreigners.” The little speech gains me no applause. “Okay. How’s this?” I waggle my head like one of the island’s Indian merchants offering a bargain. When I go, I’ll give you my car. A Peugeot. Worth at least eight thousand dollars.”

  Picard emits another loud bouf! “I already have a car. And even if I sell yours, I only get another pile of Malagasy francs. No, we’ll have to make some other arrangement.” He flashes a smile like a snake flicking its tongue. “I’m sure something will occur to us. Something to our mutual benefit.” The big Frenchman stands and holds out his hand. The audience is over. “Always good to see you Robert.”

  We cluck a few affable words of parting and shake hands. Mine is sweaty and cold and I make for the door like a man with a fast-moving fire behind him. Standing at the end of the corridor, Jacques Razafintsalama bows politely and gives me his most ironic smile, the one he saves for those who kid themselves that they won’t be back. I cross the gaming room, this time avoiding the view through the tall windows and their prospect of the distant prison.

  2

  In the unlighted parking lot of the Continental, I steady my shaking hands and wonder if Picard is standing at his window looking down at me, chuckling to himself.
“Let him write his goddamn letter,” I mutter. But my chest feels tight, and it takes a couple of tries to draw a good breath.

  The night air tastes of exotic flowers blossoming in the dark and carries a promise of rain. In a couple of months, the jacaranda petals will fall like lavender snow.

  I put the car in gear and drive along the small lake bordering the Continental. The boulevard leads through a tunnel that separates the upper town from the lower, and comes out along the sad and faded Avenue de l’Independence, the city’s main boulevard, its shops shuttered and dark, the marketplace and its sea of white umbrellas folded up. The street is empty, deserted even by the children who crawl up to the cars at stop signs, begging for change, their faces eaten by leprosy or their spines deformed by congenital disease. More often than money, they ask for pens, at least from me. “Donnez moi stilo.” Sometimes, if I’m stuck in traffic—it only takes a few cars to make a traffic jam here—I take a government-issue pen out of my pocket and hand it to one of them. Mostly I keep going.

  On the overbuilt slopes that rise above the rows of dilapidated colonial facades, dim lights glow in the tall, mud brick houses. I imagine their lamplit rooms crowded with ghosts. Most Malagasy believe their ancestors are always present, just over their shoulders, their spirits squeezing into every corner, tapping at the windows, haunting the doorways until there’s not enough room for the living.

  It only takes a few minutes to drive through the empty town and out the Route Hydrocarbure to the residential neighborhood of Ivandry where most of the embassy’s Americans live. We have big houses, like our wealthy Malagasy neighbors, and, like them, we live behind high walls edged with the red blossoms and menacing thorns of Spanish Bayonet to persuade burglars to knock over less protected houses.

  I turn up the short drive in front of my place and flash the headlights. The night guard, Monsieur Razafy—like a lot of Malagasy he has only one name—swings the gate open, touches the brim of his cap, and gives me a chin-up nod to welcome me home.