Madagascar Read online

  I pull into the carport of the large two-story house I merit as head of the political section. Funny, if I were head of the pol section in Paris, I’d have half a dozen officers under me and live in an apartment. Here, I’m the only pol officer and get a place that’s practically a mansion. Costs the taxpayer a couple hundred a month.

  For a moment, I sit behind the wheel and listen to the ping of the cooling engine. When I get out, I don’t go inside right away, but wander into the back yard, dark and quiet at this hour, and take a deep lungful of the clean, thin air—the French describe the climate up here on the central plateau as pleasantly unhealthful—and try to exhale the tension built up by my meeting with Picard. I hear the snick-snick-snick of Monsieur Razafy cutting the grass with hand clippers in the front yard. I once bought him a gas-powered mower, but Razafy, a serious, solidly-built man, refused it. “I have always done it this way.” I tried to tell him the mower would save him a lot of time. Razafy just looked at me with an expression that asked, “What is time—your kind of time—to me?”

  As quiet as it is in the back yard, I know I’m not alone. Somewhere across the dark expanse of lawn and shrubs lurks Bobby, the resident chameleon, rough and beautiful as an uncut jewel. I swear I’ve never seen him move, but I’ve also never seen him in the same place twice. Sometimes I can’t find him at all and I think maybe he’s gotten through the wall somehow and moved on. Then, an hour later, there he is, sunning himself in the middle of the lawn as if he has never been anywhere else in his life. When I walk by he follows me with first one then the other of his bulging, turret-like eyes. Chameleons are considered bad luck and Razafy regards him with something not so dark as fear nor so benign as respect. They give each other a wide berth.

  A gust of wind rustles the trees and I look up at the sky. Flashes of lightning reveal great thunderheads stacked to the east, the lightning bolts not striking the ground but leaping from cloud to cloud, blinking like some kind of celestial pinball machine. It’s all silent, the thunder swallowed by the miles, the storm like a distant battle, weighted with unreadable portent. The sky here is big, and when I start thinking like this it’s time to go inside.

  As I come in through the kitchen door the snoring of my maid, Jeanne, rolls up the hallway from her small room at the back of the house. I grope my way through the dark living room, switch on a lamp and pick up the phone. Good, a dial tone—never a given. When the call goes through, the ringing on the other end sounds as distant as Mars.

  “Hello?”

  Even through the filter of miles and bad connections she sounds older, more mature. Sixteen. What does she look like now? I haven’t seen her in two years.

  “Christine?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, sweetheart.”

  A long pause, then her voice—flat, guarded. “Hi, Daddy.”

  “I was thinking of you earlier tonight, thought I’d call. How you doin’ ?”

  Again, that pause. Maybe just the lag in the connection as it bounces off some distant satellite, perhaps the measure of my daughter’s ambivalence toward me, the need to weigh every word she speaks to me. “Fine,” she finally says.

  “I’m calling you all the way from Madagascar.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “It’s night here.”

  “I know.”

  “You just got home from school?”

  “No school today. Teacher in-service.” Her voice takes on a sudden note of urgency. “I have lots of homework to do. I need to get to it.”

  “Okay. I just wanted to call and say hi. Say hi to your mom. And to Howard.”

  “They’re going out to dinner tonight. I get the house to myself. An evening without his lectures.”

  The pleasure of thinking she doesn’t much care for her mother’s new husband makes me indulgent. “Be nice to him, sweetheart.”

  “He’s not my father.”

  I wait for her to say, “You are,” but she doesn’t think of it. I want to bring up the fact that Howard held off marrying her mother for over a year because it would end her mother’s alimony, but it would make me sound cheap.

  “Hey, sugar.”

  “Yeah?” she asks, a little breathless now as she sprints toward the moment when she can hang up.

  “I’m staying sober. Four months now.” I think of telling her I’ve replaced the alcohol addiction with a gambling addiction, but neither of us would be sure it was a joke.

  Silence. Then, “Good, Daddy.” She seems to know it needs something more. “That’s real good, Daddy.”

  “Tell your mom about it.”

  “I will. Goodbye.”

  I fight the anger rising in my chest at how badly she wants to hang up on me. I stand with the receiver to my ear, hoping maybe she’s still there. Finally, I put the phone back in its cradle, turn off the lamp, and head upstairs.

  I undress in the dark and slip into the sheets. As I close my eyes I catch myself praying, the impulse as unconscious as leg twitches. Each night it takes me by surprise, and each night I stop before I know what I’m praying for.

  I roll onto my stomach and, from the other side of the bed, pick up a bit of the fading warmth and a hint of perfume.

  “Oh, shit.”

  I get out of bed, put on my bathrobe, and walk down the hallway. A bar of light shows under the door of the study. Tying my robe shut, I walk toward the light like a dying man.

  Lynn lies curled up on the couch in her nightgown, watching a movie on the DVD player. No cable or satellite service stretches its reach far enough to take us in. More than anything else, that’s what reminds me we’re living far below the horizon of the connected world.

  She glances up, her honey-colored hair down over one blue eye, and gives me a look meant to turn me to stone. Then she turns back to the TV.

  “An old Errol Flynn movie.” I say it as if nothing could make me happier.

  “Captain Blood. It came in with the commissary shipment today. I’ll put it out on the shelf after I’ve watched it. Gotta take some advantage from being the head of admin.”

  After that first glance, she doesn’t want to look at me.

  “Hey, Lynn. Sorry. I know it’s late.”

  “I came over after work. Kept thinking you’d be home any minute.”

  Over the course of a stormy three-month liaison we’ve run the gamut—passionate fights, gut-wrenching remorse, ecstatic sex, soul-devouring doubt. We’ve never known peace. Her calmness at this moment carries the whiff of death.

  “I was going to call, but—”

  “But you forgot I was coming over.” Her sigh is bottomless. “I heard you on the phone just now.”

  “I called my daughter.”

  “I should have known. You’re always depressed after you talk to her.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You didn’t get in a fight with her again?”

  “Didn’t have time.”

  For ten years Lynn was married to a political officer. A guy named Dewey. I never cared enough to get straight whether that was his first name or his last. Two-career marriages are tough in the foreign service and they’ve been divorced for a couple of years now. No kids. A shame. Lynn would have made a good mom. Instead she’s head of Admin, mom to the whole embassy.

  “What time is it?” she asks.

  Still thinking of my phone call, I ask, “There? Here?”

  “Here.”

  “Almost midnight.”

  Ignoring the storm warnings, I sit on the couch and try to pull her feet onto my lap, make her think everything’s fine. Without taking her eyes off the screen she curls into a tighter ball. I cup her feet in my hands. She relents, stretches out. Slowly, I run my hand up her leg, caress her thigh, trying to steer us away from these parlous shoals, back into open water. We’ve always been good in bed. Maybe that’s all there’s ever been between us.

  “I think I’ll go home,” she says.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s too late to be going anywhere.”
I need her to stay. This isn’t a night I want to spend alone.

  She narrows her eyes at me. “What’s eating you?”

  “Nothing.” I try to shrug it off. “I gotta see some guy in prison tomorrow.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  “I mean, prison. In Madagascar. Sweet Jesus.”

  “You make it sound like it was you.” I can’t bring myself to answer. “But that’s not it. You went to the casino tonight.”

  “For a little bit.”

  “You lost.”

  I try to fake a smile. “Hey, I always lose.”

  “That’s you, isn’t it? Pick a losing hand and ride it as far as it’ll go. At the casino. At work. Us.”

  I laugh, hoping to convince her she’s joking. Bad choice. It comes off as mockery.

  “That’s it, buddy-o,” she says, “I’m going home.”

  She slides off the couch and walks down the hall, leaving me watching Captain Blood. I should probably follow her, remonstrate, plead, cajole, but I’m caught up in Flynn’s sword fight with Basil Rathbone. Maybe I should grow a pencil-thin mustache like Flynn’s. Sure. And take fencing lessons, too. The chicks’ll come flocking.

  Belatedly, I call down the hall. “Lynn.” Nothing. “Lynn, it’s too late to go anywhere.” I hear her take her toothbrush from the cup in the bathroom. A very bad sign.

  I get up and head down the hall.

  Dressed in the clothes she’d worn from work, she walks toward the stairs without looking back. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says.

  With that, she’s gone.

  A moment later I hear the gate swing open. She’ll walk to her place. It’s only three doors down the street. With an almost musical “clunk,” the big metal gate swings shut again.

  In the renewed silence, I hear Monsieur Razafy go back to cutting the lawn in the dark.

  3

  A shiver runs down my back as I peer through the car window at the stained and crumbling walls of the old prison. Choking on fear and loathing, I step out of the car. Before I take more than a couple of steps toward the gate, a wave of panic steers me back to the car. I lean in through the window toward Samuel, the embsasy-assigned driver I get when on official business. “For God's sake, keep the engine running. I may want out of here in a hurry.”

  Taking this for a joke, Samuel giggles and turns the ignition off. “I’ll be right here, Monsieur Knott.”

  For a couple of reasons, there’s no point getting sore at him. First, he’s Malagasy and regards almost everything in a different light. I wonder what he sees in this situation. Whatever it is, he clearly thinks it’s funnier than hell. Second, he’s my only way out of here.

  Muttering under my breath, I show my credentials to the guard, and the iron gate, groaning like the damned, slowly slides aside.

  I step into the stone-walled compound and nearly retch at the overwhelming stench of sweat, shit, wood smoke, and death. Before leaving on vacation, Don Schiff, the consular officer, who normally handles stuff like this, told me what to do. “Just walk across the courtyard to the main guardroom and ask to see the American.” Sure. Just take a stroll across the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

  Memo to self: Kill Don Schiff when he comes back from vacation.

  From the barred windows of the wooden cell blocks, clusters of brown faces peer down at me, their eyes aglow, their mouths murmuring, “vazaha, vazaha”—“stranger,” “foreigner”—weighty words on this island-planet. In the eyes of the Malagasy an air of potent yet erratic magic clings to the unknowable vazaha—powerful, foolish people unable to distinguish good from bad, right from wrong, bringing fortune to the undeserving and disaster to the virtuous.

  Prisoners idling in the courtyard stop talking to stare at me as I walk past. Most of them are bird-thin, their bodies wasted to bare essence, their souls protruding through thin layers of flesh. Yet a handful of them look startlingly healthy, round-faced, their clothes washed and patched. These are the prisoners whose families take care of them. A Malagasy prison, besides denying its inmates sanitation or medical care, clothes or dignity, gives them no food. The men live—or die—off whatever their relatives can provide. For many families, the inmate was their sole breadwinner. Without him they can give only enough to facilitate a prolonged starvation.

  While I’m watching them watching me, I nearly trip over a man lying in the meager shade of a dying tree. His closed, sunken eyes, his shallow rapid breaths testify that he’s preparing to slip over the threshold and become one of the ancestors.

  I quicken my step, crossing the courtyard as quickly as dignity allows. On the far side of the prison’s dusty square I find the unpainted wooden door of the guardroom and push it open.

  Inside, a dozen prisoners fill the small room. Some, their heads bandaged, wear bloodstained clothes and slump against those chained to them.

  Two guards in faded cotton uniforms look up from their work of checking in the prisoners. The older of the two, a man with a graying mustache and large watery eyes, steps away from the line of newly matriculating inmates, takes me by the arm and hustles me back outside, shutting the door behind him.

  He asks me my business.

  “I’m here to see the American prisoner.”

  “Oh, yes, the American prisoner.” He smiles. “Certainly.”

  Walt Sackett’s cell smells of filthy clothes and unwashed bodies, of the slop bucket in the corner, and of a despair so profound as to render speech difficult.

  “You’re getting your mail?” I ask him. His face is gray and he slumps on the edge of his mattress as if he might fold up and die right in front of me.

  “Beats me.” Sackett hunches his sagging shoulders and lets them drop. “I don’t s’pose they’d tell me if they was holding something back.”

  The American’s flesh hangs off him in folds like something he’s about to slough off. From Don’s description, Sackett had, only a few months earlier, carried the vital heft of a guy who liked the long hours and hard work of a cattleman, one who knew how to reward himself at the end of the day with a fat steak and a couple of beers. Now, sitting in his dark cell, he seems hollowed out, as if it were the idleness killing him, not the uncertain diet and the filth of a Malagasy prison.

  “You have any letters for me to take, Mr. Sackett?”

  He grinned awkwardly. “Just call me Walt.” He’s from eastern Oregon, but his voice carries the twang of Oklahoma or Texas.

  “Okay. I’m Robert.” I sit across from him on the cell’s other mattress. Like Sackett’s, it rests on the floor and I talk over the top of my knees.

  “Yeah, got a couple letters here.” Sackett reaches under his mattress and pulls out two stained envelopes. “They’re for—my wife.”

  I wonder about the catch in Sackett’s voice. Estrangement? Shame? Or simply the loneliness and regret of living in a prison on the far side of the world?

  The aging cattleman waves the envelopes and forces a half-smile. “I don’t seem to have a stamp. I’ll pay you back when …” He forces a thin smile.

  “Forget it. We’re good for a couple of stamps,” I tell him. “I’m afraid I haven’t got any mail for you. You telling everyone to write you in care of the embassy?”

  “I sure am.” Sackett takes a pencil from his shirt pocket and addresses the envelopes. “I ‘preciate you taking care of these.” He clears his throat but doesn’t look at me. “Any chance I’ll be getting outta here anytime soon?” He adds hurriedly, “I know you fellas have a lot more important things to do than get a broken-down cowboy out of prison.”

  “There’s nothing more important to us than springing you out of here,” I tell him. He knows I mean it.

  The close air of the wooden cell makes me shiver even on this warm January morning, summer in Madagascar, where everything seems the opposite of what it should be. “How they treating you?”

  “Oh, all right I guess.” Sackett wheezes while he talks. Allergies? Bronchitis? Tuberculosis? It could be anything. “
I dunno. I guess maybe most of the other fellas here have committed some kinda crime. Done something to land themselves in jail. But no one deserves this.” He attempts a gesture to take in the prison and its inmates and the despair in which they lived. But there is no gesture for hell and he gives it up. “I seen ’em rot and die just waiting to come to trial. Me, I was stupid and ignorant. Maybe that’s worse than being a criminal.”

  When I’d first heard of Sackett I figured I knew the type; one of those guys who seems tough and smart and determined, yet always needs to catch one more break to make it all happen. Frustrated at home, they think they can find that break in a foreign country, where they figure the rules that hold them back in the States don’t apply. They never understood that they’re going up against an entirely different set of rules, rules they know nothing about until they’ve broken them. I remember the American in Morocco, a sharp-eyed former ag exec from Missouri. He planned to grow aloe for skin lotion, but nothing went right, and he gradually spiraled into trafficking in kif, the local cannabis, and, like Sackett, ended up in prison. Or the guy from Louisiana I met in Mozambique, determined to make himself a player in the as-yet nonexistent ‘oil bidness,’ dropping names of men he knew with Amarada Hess and Shell and BP, walking with a swagger and standing with his hands on his hips. He started out sharing cigars with ministers in fine restaurants and ended up three months later filling out the embassy forms to borrow the eleven hundred bucks to get back home.

  Sackett is different. For one thing, he’s older. Sixty-four. I’d read his file and wondered what the old guy could be looking for so far from home. What was lacking in his life that he thought he could find here? The others I’d known were essentially con men. Not Sackett. He came here from a cattle ranch in eastern Oregon, ready to work hard. He’d done enough homework to know that Madagascar’s central plateau has good grazing land and hardy cattle. He even had enough sense to pay “fees” to a powerful minister for permission to buy livestock and two thousand hectares—about four thousand acres—of good, well-watered land.

  His run lasted six months. The ministry waited until he got his ranch up and running, with a few hundred head of the humped-back zebu cattle and his grassland in good shape before starting to send him notices for previously unmentioned taxes.