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 consists 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.
It’s still dark, but dawn can’t be far away. The rain is easing up. We pass a road sign saying we’re thirty klicks from Tamatave. I lean over the back seat and gently shake Nirina’s leg to wake her.
“I think we’re getting close. You’ll have to tell us where to turn off.”
Nirina blinks awake and looks around, her eyes half-closed—the same face she wore when she woke next to me in bed. As if she reads my thoughts, she looks frankly into my eyes. I turn away, reminding myself that it’s all over.
Walt sits up, his face slack with fatigue, and I give him a smile that I hope looks more confident than I feel.
He stares blankly at me, wide-eyed as a child. “Where are we?”
“On the coast, nearly to the boat.”
He grunts weakly. I wonder if he’s up to the voyage that still lies ahead. Too late to worry about that now. “Okay, where do we turn off?” I ask Nirina.
She peers into the darkness and soon points to a clump of trees near a fisherman’s hut, apparently a landmark. “There’s a gravel road to our right, one or two kilometers ahead. It will lead us down to the beach.”
Not believing in our luck, I again look in back of us for the Citroen and see only darkness.
Before I can turn around, I hear Nirina catch her breath and whisper, “Oh, no.”
The roadblock in front of us is much like the one we went through earlier that night, two oil barrels and a metal gate between them. But these policemen—four of them—are out in the open with no shelter from the storm. They’re soaked, weary, ill-tempered—and better armed.
As Speedy rolls up to the barricade two of the policemen aim Kalashnikovs at our Peugeot. A third, wearing sergeant’s stripes, holds up his hand, ordering us to stop. He waves at the fourth policeman to put down a two-way radio and train his flashlight on Speedy. His hand on his holster, the sergeant motions for Speedy to roll down his window.
The sergeante pokes his head inside, his eyes dark and humorless. Water drips from the visor of his cap. He grunts something at Speedy in Malagasy.
Speedy says something back, then turns to me. “I told him we work for the embassy. He wants to see your identification,” he tells me.
The policeman frowns at my diplomatic ID and waves at the cop with the flashlight to shine its beam on the front of the car. The sergeant steps back, regards the diplomatic plates and frowns again. He has the man with the radio send some message. Like cops in the U.S., they make a show of not being in a hurry. After several minutes he hands my ID back and again speaks to Speedy in Malagasy.
Speedy says to me, “He wants to know why you are out on the road at this hour.”
Behind the policeman a tinny voice crackles over the two-way radio.
I ask Speedy, “Does he know who we are? Is he looking for us?”
I repeat the story I gave to the policemen near Moramanga, that I’m delivering a speech in Tamatave. While Speedy translates, I glance nervously in the mirror.
“Listen,” I say to Speedy, “tell him that the mayor of Tamatave is waiting for me. I don’t want to have to tell him I’m late because his police force held me up.”
The policeman glares at me and drops the pretense that he doesn’t speak French. “No, you listen, Monsieur. I do not answer to the mayor, but to my superior, Captain Andriamana. You are in Madagascar and will obey the orders of Malagasy authorities. I have been told to look for a car with diplomatic plates. I am going to ask you to pull to the side of the road. Captain Andriamana is on his way here. You will wait for him.”
Something in the sergeant’s eyes, or maybe the fact that he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do until Andriamana arrives, speaks of a small wormhole of uncertainty.
Walt stirs in the back seat. “Robert, what the hell’s going on here?”
“They’ve pulled us over. We’re supposed to wait for some captain to show up.” I don’t tell him that we may be waiting for our own deaths. I try to think of a way out of this. If I tell Speedy to make a run for it, they’ll shoot us to pieces. If we stay, maybe we get shot anyway. I feel for the pistol in my pocket, but know it would do me no good. I might get one poor son of a bitch of a Malagasy policeman. Then they would get us.
Walt grumbles unintelligibly for a moment, then bursts out, “Robert, you tell them to let us through.”
“Take it easy, Walt. They’ve all got guns.”
“Hell, where I come from everybody’s got guns. I ain’t impressed.”
The sergeant frowns at Walt. “Who is he?”
Speedy speaks rapidly in Malagasy, smiling and nodding toward Walt in the back seat. The officer looks at Walt, then at Speedy again. He tries to maintain a sneer of disbelief, but I see doubt creeping into his eyes.
“What are you telling him?” I ask.
Over his shoulder, Speedy says to Walt in his pidgin English, “Sit up, Monsieur Walt. I am telling him you are the Ambassador of America and you don’t want any delays.”
“Speedy—” I start, but Walt growls over me.
“Good. You tell those sonsabitches that the Ambassador—” I’m about to tell Walt to take it easy when I catch a distant glimpse of approaching headlights in the side mirror. Whatever hand Walt thinks he’s holding, I figure it’s time to let him play it. I lean over the seat and say, “Ride ’em, cowboy.”
Walt jumps into his role with both feet. “Tell this pissant cop and these other peckerwoods that I’ll have their badges for this. Hell, I’ll tell ’em myself.” He opens the car door and steps out. I can’t hear him clearly, but the words don’t matter now because he’s got the tune exactly right.
All the frustration of six months under the thumb of Malagasy prison guards has broken through Walt’s depleted store of patience. His finger shakes as he points to the policemen at each end of the barricade, the ones with rifles, and chews them out like a drill sergeant.
Speedy doesn’t bother to translate.
Trying to regain control of the situation, the sergeant barks something at Walt but backs up a step while he does it, then another. The two policemen with the Kalashnikovs lower their weapons. The sergeant waves at them to raise them again. But Walt’s in charge now, kicking at the pavement and shouting orders. With a sweep of his arm he tells them to “open that goddamn barricade, and do it now!”
The two policemen need no translation. Caught between their sergeant and a rampaging vazaha, they waver a moment, then pull the barricade aside even as the sergeant rages at them to close it again.
Barking a few last words over his shoulder, Walt gets back in the car. “Okay, Speedy, get us out of here.”
By now, the beams of the Citroen’s lights are only a few hundred yards away, coming steadily along the half-flooded road.
I get an idea. “Speedy, tell the sergeant it’s the car behind us they want to stop.”
Now Speedy sees the Citroen too. He leans out the window and calls to the sergeant. As I hoped, this message erodes what little confidence remains to the policeman. Buffeted by doubt, and with his authority crumbling, he turns his anger on the other policemen, motioning them to let us pass.
I tell Walt, “Great job, Mr. Ambassador.”
“Buncha peckerwoods,” Walt mumbles, slicking back his rain-soaked hair. He slumps in the back seat, exhausted by his efforts.
Behind us, I see the police closing the barricade. The sergeant, trembling with fury, orders the Citroen to halt. I almost wish I could stick around to watch.
We’ve traveled only a few hundred yards when Nirina points to a graveled track leading off to the right. “There’s the road.”
I look back as the big Citroen pulls up to the roadblock. They can see us turning. They’ll know exactly where to chase us down.
Jouncing in his seat as he turns down the roughly cut road, Speedy says, “Maybe they will call for the Captain and maybe Monsieur Picard and wait for him before doing anything.”
“Picard figures Andriamana’s on his side, and he’s not going to wait if he thinks he can get me now.” I remember what Rabary said at the Queen’s Palace and wonder if Picard understands how dangerous an ally Andriamana might prove. I finger Esmer’s gun in my coat pocket like a man working his prayer beads.
Within a hundred yards, the gravel disappears and the road turns into a pair of muddy ruts. The Peugeot’s tires began to slip. Through the rain and the woods around us, I catch a glimmer of yellow light in the mirror. The cops must have let Picard straight through.
“Damn! Can’t you make this log go any faster?”
A note of impatience creeps into Speedy’s voice. “I can’t even go this fast, Monsieur Knott.” As if to prove his point, the car suddenly toboggans from one side of the narrow track to the other. Speedy fights the wheel, working to keep the slithering Peugeot pointed forward.
I’m beginning to think Speedy could drive through anything when the young Malagasy shouts, “Merde!”
Rounding a curve, the road drops into a swale and the Peugeot’s headlights catch an expanse of muddy water that spans the road. The car hits it hard, sending a wall of water over the windshield. Tires whirring in the mud, the car slithers across the road like a snake.
Over the roar of the engine, I hear a whoop and a crazy laugh and realize it’s coming from me. The perverse ecstasy of danger infects Walt too. He sits up in the back seat, a wild look in his eye and yells, “Go, Speedy, go!”
Speedy downshifts and laughs maniacally. The rev counter soars over the red line. “She’s swimming!” he shouts.
A violent bump shakes the car and its nose cants up as the tires find some purchase and we leap out of the water, throwing mud in every direction. The Peugeot scrambles up the slope, our headlights pointing into the sky.
Speedy fights the car through another twisty stretch of mud. Even Nirina cheers.
“What a driver!” I laugh.
A huge grin on his face, Speedy starts to say something as he wrestles the car around a sharp corner. Before he can get a word out, the headlights pick up a tree that has fallen across the path. Speedy stands on the brakes, but it’s too late. The car barely slows before smashing into the fallen tree.