Long Live the Mausoleum!
Vida longa ao mausoléu! in Portuguese.
God help me, I’m involved with a blue-eyed blonde brat of a school girl. Hell’s bells! Mephistopheles, I teach her which of her moves will ensnare a sucker and lead him by the nose. Skin like ivory, she comes up with the stare, the smile, the pleading looks. And I say, “Yeah, that’s it! There y’ go. Perfeito. Use that look. That’s the hook. Hasta la vista, baby!”
Coaching her.
She calls it “squeezing.” She squeezes her victim like she’s a Burmese python, squeezing the life out of a goat. “I’ll squeeze him… like this!” she cackles, staring, staring. Pure dominatrix, she’s a damn big-eyed, bug-eyed seductress. But don’t get me wrong, a dream girl, sweet sixteen years young, she is good. A capable agent.
The L’île des Blondes accent, as thick as cream and as slippery as butter, gives away her country of origin, the Island of the Blondes way up north. That’s not her fault, we don’t get to choose our parents or where we are born. Her genes lay the groundwork to who she is. Being in a minority makes her strive that much harder. Named Esmerelda, her codename is Firefly. Some busybody at Child Welfare would no doubt have a hemorrhage, but that’s not my beeswax. Screw ’em. This is espionage, we make the rules as we go, and if that includes sacrificing some sweet young thing to the mission, so be it. None of the recruits have ever said “no.”
Vampires, we prey on the young, drowning them in money, privileges, fine clothes and great vacations.
And this particular job is so falling-off-a-log simple! There are other commando units who train for serious action like occupying the presidential palace or taking over the airport, invading a shipyard or manning government offices. Firefly and I focus on something as painless as stealing a door key.
I hate downtown. Queen Street with all the high-end shops. Embassy row. The patisserie. Radio Uhuru, which sits between the Portuguese Embassy on one side and Chez Claus, the interior design shop, on the other. Uhuru is a Swahili word that means freedom, independence, liberty. All the things we lack. It’s also the name of our country.
A prosperous island nation off a major coast, when seen from a distance, the entire island is a shallow cone, topped by Mount Bwana, the volcano. Measuring X by Y, 286 square miles— 74,703.7 hectares— battered by the ocean, rags to ridges, embossed on the edges, we are still a fly speck on a classroom-size map of the world.
Multi-racial and overshadowed by our Portuguese heritage, it’s not by chance that most of the movers and shakers in the upper crust of society bear Portuguese surnames. So why are we ruled by a childish dictator? Yes, the people elected him, it seems like eons ago, but did they know who they were electing? He is both a symptom of our malaise and a cause of our division. Brown as a walnut, the latest bee in President Joaquim “Babyface” Madeira’s bonnet is his predecessor’s mausoleum. He wants to put his name on it. In cursive. And name the adjacent area the Joaquim Madeira Memorial Park and Texas-Style Barbeque. Otherwise, throwing a temper tantrum, he threatens to tear it all down! “It’s in terrible shape, that mausoleum, terrible,” he claims. “The roof is caving in. On a scale of one to ten, I give it a two. Without me, pfft! It’s gone.”
The edifice honors Old Gabe, pater familias, the much-beloved Father of his Country. Volcanic black sand and lava flows have always been part of our surroundings, but it was President Gabriel Rodrigo wa Menza, a handsome, elegant black man, who started mining the island’s potash deposits on the ancient seabed and quarrying limestone for making cement. His use of crushed basaltic lava rock ushered in the modern Uhuru building trade with its signature black concrete architecture. Memories of Old Gabe leave President Madeira choking on the fumes.
Parliament resembles a graveyard. Neither political party, the lefty Dumbocrats nor the right-wing Pelicans, says a thing. Madeira’s supporters have guns and our politicians don’t want to get shot.
This is how our world ends. Madeira sold out to a foreign power and the only protesto was a universal shrug. He unleashed a ragged mob of followers on the Parliament and no one blinked. He suggested ingesting bleach and using hydroxychloroquine to combat Covid-19 and there was nada reaction. He denies climate change and is accused of telling over 30,000 lies, but no one says a word. There’s controversy regarding his family finances and his fancy airplane, while his sons sell classic BMW brand military motorcycle relics from World War Two, army surplus gas masks and Cessna light aircraft lacking documentation. Only to be met with silêncio. An autocrat, the prezident is dabbling in AI and siccing deportation squads on the migrant community, but so far, all I hear is distant grumbling. One protester got arrested, accused of vandalizing the moat around the palace, but that is hardly a rebellion of Tiananmen Square proportion. Lonely at international conferences, Madeira jockeys for a seat next to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni so he can drool all over her dress. Our cup runneth over! He’s unleashed a measles epidemic on the favela with screech owls the single jarring response. Give the man credit, he dominates the discourse. Our very own “Babyface” Madeira, bread & circuses, a performance artist, his realm is pure genius.
The Autoridade Aduaneira, Tributária e Pechinchar— the Customs, Tax and Haggling Authority, also called Finanças— has been trying to catch him for years. He claims that he is being unfairly tormented by a cabal of left-wing radical accountants.
“When I was young,” Madeira tells the adoring crowd at a rally, “I considered myself a follower of Muhammad Ali. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee! A title is only as great as its owner and I am the greatest! There is nothing artificial about my intelligence. The previous administration let this place go to hell. Mount Bwana is eating this island, turning its roads to ash and stifling guano production. When people say our island is a sack of shit, I say ‘Yes, it is. Bird shit. Guano. Full of nitrates.’ I always have your best interests at heart, people. Uhuru está na moda, Uhuru is in fashion. We are importing strawberry soda from Egypt and coconut groves from Micronesia. We are cloning an ancient, long-legged chicken from Easter Island in Polynesia that lays blue eggs. Coming soon to a plantation near you! Only through my efforts can the Kingdom of Uhuru blossom into a new, golden age.” Then, ’Quim does his little war dance, fists in the air, jumping around like a Mexican jumping bean.
“In Turkmenistan,” Madeira explains, returning to the microphone, “their leader Niyazov erected an enormous, 39-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat. The statue, it’s on a turntable which rotates, so his face always points toward the sun. Now how neat is that? So I ask you, why don’t we have that? I’ve put my face on postage stamps, on Uhuru’s currency and on banners outside government buildings, so why not a statue? It will be privately financed and won’t cost the taxpayer six pence.” After which he advises the crowd to buy the Joaquim Madeira edition of the Bible and Joaquim Madeira brand crypto currency.
I love this dude. No filter, no guardrails, he’ll say and do anything. Frontal lobes enflamed, he spouts vitriol on his social media account. When online, I never read him, since he upsets me. Everyone else reads him, though, so it’s not like we don’t know where he stands.
“We must stop Migration,” he insists on his website Antisocial. “Who needs them??? Not since the Short Trek North from Togo to the island of Uhuru by our Forefathers, the continent-spanning Mombasa Trading Caravans, has this chunk of earth been inundated by so many omnivorous Newbies and namby-pamby Bonobos. The unwelcome riffraff from shithole countries, these migrants don’t know how to send Morse code or roll a decent cigar. We got here first, y’all. I am arranging for them to be deported to Angola. It is an hysterical anomaly. Historical… ‘historical’ is the word I am looking for. It is an Historical Anomaly, but this island is ours! Except for the pesky Portuguese, of course, intermarrying with anything that moves. Horny, those Portuguese sailors would marry goats, if they could!”
A grifter, since he tore down the east wing of the palace and paved over the rose garden, there’s no reason to think Madeira will spare the mausoleum. He has also, despite his claims to the contrary, gotten Uhuru involved in a war. Which he insists on calling “a regional conflict,” as if dead soldiers will be any less dead if the conflict is only regional.
“If the Las Palmas don’t give up their stockpile of war canoes, we will utterly annihilate them through the creative employment of slingshots in a military taskforce titled ‘Bathroom Fury,’” he assures us, preening on television like a peacock during his yearly State of the State Speech. “Of course, there’s also the creative use of weather balloons as attack vehicles. Forget drones! Ask the Japanese, ever since World War Two, balloon bombs have been the next big thing. Still another alternative is to award me the Nobel Peace Prize. See? That way the world will avoid a lot of bloodshed. Are you getting this, Nobel Committee? Come in, Oslo! You choose. We may be a small conflagration, but we are chock full of grim prospects. Who knows, we may reintroduce genocide and the slave trade. As American president Richard Nixon once said, ‘When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.’ Saber rattling is politics of a different color. I am unapologetically patriotic. We will never be an anarchist country, that’s not who we are! The Las Palmas have treated us very badly. We have blockaded their major port, driving up the price of palm oil and suntan lotion. If they have a currency crisis, let them print more money. Or they can adopt the Uhuru pound sterling as legal tender, if they want. Last bell, who is buying?”
Transactional, everything is negotiable and the dude is always open to suggestions.
“The last brave soul to roll out of the war zone on a golf cart, please replace the divots before you leave,” he requests. “And don’t forget, everyone who joins the Armed Forces gets a £5,000 signing bonus.”
All 365 days a year, he rules the news cycle. Every newspaper has at least one outrageous Babyface headline. Did he really tell the Chinese that they are free to invade Perspiration Island as long as Uhuru gets to keep the guano rights? Are there really 100,000 people lined up to buy the Joaquim Madeira One Million Pound Immigrant Visa Gold Card? What are their names?! Is Joaquim Madeira really a second cousin to Uganda’s Idi Amin? Amidst his gaslighting, his bending of reality and his outright lies, what will remain of our country in ten years’ time?
Battling his demons, often it is hard to tell if he is having any fun.
“The Madeira administration represents a meaningful step toward justice for monk seals, deep sea fishermen, gun owners, crypto investors, crypto-fascists, country western singers, hippies from Gibraltar and victims of the atrocities in Rwanda,” he declares. “The lesbian community has no better friend— I call them Lizzies— than Joaquim Madeira. Whatever happened to the Victoria’s Secret catalog? I found their models very attractive.”
Madeira is Portuguese for “timber,” a surprising coincidence since the president was a real estate developer in his youth. The traditional Uhuru hut is made of woven palm fronds.
“Our chair in the United Nations General Assembly,” he brags, “is 13 centimeters wider than economy class seating.”
Liberdade. Liberty! I’ve spent more time staring at the front door of Radio Uhuru, my cellphone camera raised in position, than I care to remember. I’ve taken pix of anyone going in and everyone coming out. Staff, bike messengers, delivery boys, vendors, interviewers, interviewees. When done, I trot to the L’île des Blondes consulate on Viela Americana, where we hunt through newspapers and wedding pictures, high school yearbooks and photographs from diplomatic receptions, putting a name to every face we can.
Most weekday evenings, I have watched Senhor Tristão Zarco, the general manager of Radio Uhuru, a pale white dude in a tan linen jacket and black baseball cap, as he locks the front door of the building and wanders down the block to his boxy gray Citroën parked by the curb.
. . .
At the mausoleum itself, after an escalating series of outages and outrages, five hundred protesters show up on a Wednesday afternoon to make their voices heard. They carry signs proclaiming “Hands Off Old Gabe!” and “Mad-Mad-Madeira” and “No Kinks” and the reusable protest placard “Leave Me Be, Don’t Tetch Me!” If Joaquim Madeira is a super patriot, where does that leave the rest of us? Filled with resentment and opposition. Statistically, we are at the peak of hurricane season in the North Atlantic, but fortunately, we don’t get rained out. People wear white hats that say “Farewell Uhuru’s Criminal Kingdom.” Opinion appears divided between whether Madeira is unbelievably awful or awfully unbelievable. He is also having Parliament painted lime-green and adorned with stained glass windows, which just adds kindling to the fire. Employees of the mausoleum have organized this event, with the intent of getting coverage in Friday’s newspaper. Um passarinho me contou, a little bird told me. An employee gave me the tip.
I am Mr. Everybody, standing next to you at a demonstration, dressed in sweats and tennis shoes. I am a mirror of your thoughts, angry but not too angry, the dude who never checks his watch since he has an internal clock with circadian rhythm that keeps time 24 hours a day. When I go to the Island News Print Shop to get a sign made saying “Mau-Mau-Mausoleum,” pale-skinned Tomás Falcão, the printer, gets all officious and uppity, refusing to do it because of the historical connection to the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. So, we’re an African nation after all.
O presidente is a step ahead of the protesters, ordering the guards to lock the doors to the mausoleum! After the night cleaning crew finds a dead bat in an exhaust duct, President Madeira declares the building a health hazard and closes it to the public prior to fumigation. Rather than walking through the murky, ammonia-infused interior to pay our respects, where the mummified body of Old Gabe lies under glass, moldering away in the half-light, we are forced to sit on the grass outside instead, smoking ganja. Some hold hands, marching in circles on the concrete parking apron, chanting “Not Yet Uhuru!” and “Kumbaya, m’Lord, kumbaya!” Weathered reps of Associação de Marinheiros e Fuzileiros Navais, the Association of Sailors and Marines, their skin like shoe leather, hand out Gimbal’s LavaBalls Hot Cinnamon Candy, our secret weapon of choice. Made in USA.
The word from the palace is that President Madeira is raging. This is so not good.
Lawyers tell me that if Babyface tears down the mausoleum in defiance of a court order and is allowed to get way with that, the country will have opened a Pandora’s Box constitutionally, where he can proceed to dismantle our entire parliamentary form of government without any personal consequences. Once he is in defiance, there is nothing to hold him back. What we see as a catastrophe, Madeira sees as an opportunity! He’s gaming us. Uneasy, we know that a single call from on high will send the backhoes roaring into action.
Scary stuff. I wish the protesters “Bella ciao” and leave it at that.
. . .
T minus one and counting, I lurk around the safe house. Nervous as a cat, too upset to eat, I have sour coffee stomach. This case of nerves feels so atrocious, I may take up smoking again. I don’t, but I could. Esmerelda Firefly is smoking up a storm. Gen Z, a throwback to the 1950’s, she prefers unfiltered cigs, daintily plucking grains of tobacco off her tongue. She seems unaware of the tension of the moment. Ah, to be sixteen again, oblivious to everything that is more than ten feet in front of my nose! My arthritic thumb aches in time to my heartbeat. I tell myself it is meaningless, but the bugger hurts.
I hand her tickets to a rap concert, which she examines and returns to me. “One adult, one kiddie,” I point out, eliciting an angry glance.
“Who is he?” she asks.
“A rapper from my generation.”
“Whatever,” she shrugs.
Avaricious by nature, she becomes fascinated by deeds, spending an hour online poring over real estate properties. “C’mon, coach! Buy me a big ol’ plantation,” she nags. “We’ll grow tobacco and I’ll have your babies.”
I try to come up with all kinds of reasons why this dream may be both impractical and undoable, but since I have trained her to be a man-eater, I am not all that surprised when she turns on me and bites the hand that feeds her.
“We’ll be tobacco kings! Island King Cigarettes, laced with marijuana,” she envisions, happy as a clam.
Rather than arguing, I google the island’s extensive legislation regulating crop cultivation, especially smokables, but a 16-year-old princess is not so easily dissuaded by mere logic.
After a 20-minute rain shower, she and I make a quick circuit of the neighborhood. The trees are heavy with fruit. Bees and dragonflies fill the air. We take turns splashing in puddles left in the pavement. Dressed entirely in black, Firefly keeps laughing at me open-mouthed, a fount of cackling mirth. A total turn-on, I find her wildly attractive.
I try not to linger too long on the island’s history, as this compendium of journal entries would grow to book length. For instance, Muddville the capital is named after Dutch explorer Cornelis Mudd. Brave of heart but foolish, he and his crew marched into the village of Kigunzi— Swahili for “corn cob”— in the year 1839 and staked claim to the island in the name of King William I of the House of Orange. Only to have their sorry asses driven back into the sea a year later, following a month-long siege by a well-trained native militia under rebel leader Katanga Kabiyé from the other end of the island. Favoring partition, Cornelis proposed, “You kaffirs can live down south while we maintain a colony here in the north.” That never happened, culminating in a series of palace intrigues that resulted in the town being christened in the late explorer’s name. While his severed head, mounted on a spear, was exhibited for days in the village square.
Today, the gambling casinos are the power behind the throne, but their dress code is a bore.
“Whatever you need, I can help you find it,” Firefly offers. Out of the mouths of babes! She makes me feel like a dirty old man.
We go back inside, but tired of watching her smoke, I jog down the hill to the seawall. One of the few advantages of living on an island, you have water on all sides. Otherwise, I do not recommend an island economy, where almost everything has to be brought in by ship or plane. In our case, it is easier to list what indigenous industries we have than to give you a list as long as a telephone catalog of what we lack.
Without busting a gut, our main claim to fame is our coffee industry. Punching above our weight, production is small-scale, spread among a handful of estates with a few thousand Arabica trees in each. The combo of mild climate and volcanic soil is ideal, while the lower average temperature causes the coffee cherries to mature more slowly, resulting in an aromatic bean with highly nuanced flavor. The roaster in the Monte Python Tropical Gardens produces high grade beans with our own unique Uhuru profile. “A tangy, minty flavour with notes of African cockroach, brake fluid and volcanic ash, it is like drinking high-grade sludge,” says O Guia Oficina Mecânica, the national Car Repair Workshop Guide which, on a scale of one to three, awards it five stars. Most of the crop is consumed locally by the island’s booming third-wave café culture. Black sand beaches attract a funkier trade of tourist. Still, the occasional sack of beans is sold on the mainland as a luxury gourmet product. We’ve won those funny-looking medallions from Parisian tasting competitions. Everything on the island and its brother is available for export, but competing with Yemen, the birthplace of coffee, is tough.
Believe it or not, we also have our own electronics industry, factories and everything, although the raw materials have to be shipped in. Farmers grow bananas, mangoes and papayas. We have chicken farms and dairy farms, tobacco plantations and a cigarette factory. We have fishermen and smokehouses for smoking their catch. An island full of palm trees, laurels and ancient conifers that survived the last ice age, we have a papermill over by Lake Royale, providing us with coarse-grained toilet paper and paper towels, but polluting the lake. The building trade and small-scale ship-building are smoothly running concerns. Our shipyards are full of rusting hulls and stray dogs. We import boat engines from China. We even had a slicker factory, making rainwear, but it went bust.
That’s about it, everything else, all the gaudy clothes and shiny baubles in the shop windows on Queen Street as well as mountains of beef, has to be shipped in by boat or plane from the mainland. The airport is nice: chic and modern with scads of black stucco buildings, but flights to and from the Arabian Peninsula are banned to reduce the threat of terrorism.
I sleep very badly.
Rising early on T-day, I jog five miles along the seawall and then eat a breakfast of fried eggs, sausage and mango. Firefly has gone home to her folks which is fine by me, after too many hours with a provocative teenager, I am ready to strangle people. Besides, the action doesn’t start until everyone leaves work eventide.
Esmerelda’s classmates, I am told, complain about her mouth, so apparently her training has spilled over into her private life. What is worse, practicing her black arts even on me, I too have been corrupted. She calls me Jimmy Bond and undresses me with her eyes. When she and I first met, I still had a fiancée named Margareta von Roth. Spying the silver engagement ring on the ring finger of my left hand, my protégée asked, faking a casual tone, “Ho hum! What is that?” She pressed a black-painted fingernail against the ring, tap! tap! tap!
“Oh, I just wear it to hold the female population at bay,” I joked.
“Are you engaged?” she demanded, unamused.
“Well, kinda sorta, yes.”
“Where does she live?” she asked accusingly.
“She lives on L’île des Blondes, the Island of the Blondes.”
“Is she a blonde?” demanded Esmerelda, looking surprisingly grown up and angry.
“No, she’s a raven-haired beauty from an aristocratic family.”
“That’s so… far… away!” my pupil exclaimed, giving me a thousand-watt stare. “How often… do… you … meet?”
“Not so often,” I admitted. “Twice a year, on the holidays.”
“You can’t be engaged and only meet your fiancée twice a year!” my firefly insisted, turning away to give me a closer look at all that blonde hair.
One two three, lickety-split, within two days, I telephoned Margareta and broke off our engagement.
“Where’s your ring?” demanded secret agent Firefly when next we met.
“I broke off the engagement.”
“Oh? Why?”
“She lives so far away and we meet so seldom,” I pointed out. “Besides, I am in love with a little woman right here in town,” I confessed.
“Oh?” asked Firefly archly. “What does she look like?”
“She has the world’s blondest hair and the world’s bluest eyes,” I explained, glancing at Firefly’s hair and looking into her eyes.
“Oh, well,” declared Firefly, full of laughter, “you broke up because your fiancée lives so far away. That makes sense.”
And that was that. End of story.
As I see it, Margareta and my engagement was a casualty of Deep Learning.
Everybody pays. There’s no such thing as a free meal.
If I was writing a spy thriller, I’d call it “Codename: Firefly.” Very exciting.
The dark arts are not to be toyed with. Esmerelda is a brat, but I love her.
. . .
Island News, the national newspaper, published three times a week on pulpy paper, lands on the doorstep. It comes out Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. A throwback to the colonial era, it uses formal typography, archaic phrases and starchy commentary. “Magistrate Jinxes Madeira Plan” says the headline. “Teardown not in cards,” says the subhead. Over coffee, I sit and read how our Dear Leader spends almost every waking minute fretting over the memory of his predecessor. He has also replaced the Board of Directors of the mausoleum with lackeys of his own choosing. Jerk, why can’t he let it go? We all have our hang-ups, but that doesn’t mean he needs to make a full-time meal of it.
Among other things, I judge people based on their taste in music. My fave recording artist is songbird Sailor Twist, so what does that say about me? You mention “island music,” people immediately think steel drums and calypso. Sailor is better than that. Filled with pep rally momentum, she belts out every tune like it’s a Bronx cheer.
“Boyz, boyz, keys to the city
They make life incredibly shitty
You got the cheese, you get the keys.”
If I even try to interest my paramour Firefly in Sailor’s songs, her immediate reaction is “Turn that off.” For all her talents, Firefly can’t sing a note. She can’t even rap. Instead, she sits in a chair bouncing one leg over the other and prattles about her romantic conquests. Not exactly music to my ears. All Joaquim Madeira listens to is country.
I get one unhappy visit in the early afternoon, pasty-faced Sérgio de Oliveira from Headquarters.
“Ready to take the training wheels off your tricycle?” he asks, giving me a ghastly smile. Lanky as a beanstalk, dressed in a black trenchcoat and slouch hat like some Gestapo character in a bad movie, looking down his nose at me, the only reason I put up with him is the package he plops on the kitchen table. “If you or your cohort should be captured, call this number,” he instructs, handing me a matchbook with a fancy cover. La Folie des Bananes says the logo in a weird purple font.
“I’ll pass it on to my little friend,” I agree.
“What do you mean?” he asks, his entire face a giant question mark. “It’s an insurance policy for you, blockhead. We’ve— “
“Why in the world would someone who doesn’t smoke be carrying a book of matches on his person?” I counter.
“We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to provide you with invisible backup,” he explains testily. “Don’t muck about.”
“Of course,” I reply. Anything to get him out of there. “Have we squared operations with Madeira’s personal guard force?”
“You mean his Praetorian Guard?” he sneers. “They’re fanatics.”
“Have we fixed it? Yes or no?”
“Sheesh!”
“Don’t sheesh me. Anything subversive contains an element of risk. They’re professionals and they take pride in protecting the president. Have we ironed it out? I don’t want any unnecessary gunplay.”
“Willy Wonka, as always! Stop your fretting, Lulu. Your friend Babyface Madeira has fired so many people, he is one of the least popular dudes in government. The smell of defeat hangs over his administration like a shroud.”
“Answer the question!”
Glaring at me, he tugs at the brim of his hat and leaves.
Ugh! A bike messenger could have made a better delivery.
Being out in the field, I hadn’t realized how intensely the bureaucratic anger among the elite has solidified. Well, now I know. Onward to victory!
I make fish tacos for lunch.
Firefly comes to the safe house at four o’clock in the afternoon, which is fine, we have time. I check out the microwave transmitter built into the lining of her schoolbag. “Say something.”
“Something.”
“Ha, ha, very funny.”
She and I walk into town. Firefly is in a strange mood, all but sleepwalking. Staring straight ahead, she keeps quietly growling about how she much prefers wide open spaces to a jail cell.
“Nobody is going to jail,” I assure her.
“Oh?” she bitches, pent-up resentment flooding her voice. “Is that supposed to be a good thing? I can hear it now: ‘She was shot for committing treason.’ Isn’t that nifty!”
“No one is getting shot.”
“Banished to Nicaragua? Life on a banana plantation? What kind of choices are you offering me here?”
“Shut up!” I seethe, so I guess you could say that we are both a bundle of nerves.
There is a maddening sensation to using a 16-year-old child to counter the misadventures of a seeming 8-year-old. I can forgive the dumbness of youth, yes, but what is Madeira’s excuse? We loiter by the malt shop. Waiting. Relief through action breaks the tension. As soon as the general manager, the pale, finicky Senhor Tristão Zarco, leaves Radio Uhuru, my angel darts across the square and flops to the pavement right in front of him. He’s tripping over her. “What’s the matter?” he asks. “Didja slip?”
“Look, I scraped my knee!” she blurts, standing erect on one leg, latching on to Sr. Zarco with a schoolgirl claw. Shaking her head, all wide-eyed and innocent, her blonde hair dances across her shoulders.
White earbuds plugged in my ears, I listen in. Her transmitter only covers up to 30 feet, but it’s not like they are walking out of range.
“Look!” says Firefly, waving her hands in his face. “Red nail polish.”
“Yeah, okay, very nice,” he mumbles and I can see from across the square, baseball cap or no, that he is blushing. Firefly leans against him and shakes a pebble from her loafer. The girl is inspired! “Do you work in radio?” she gushes. “I would love to work in ra-di-o,” she insists and starts prattling: “Where do you live? Where are you parked? No really, is that your car? Is that a Citroën? What did it cost?” Her hands keep playfully fishing in his pockets. She wrinkles her nose and laughs. “Oops, are these your keys?” she asks, just as they reach his auto. She selects a key and tries to open the car door. Wrong key, of course. “Here, you open it,” she declares in a bossy, starchy British schoolmarm manner.
As soon as he opens the car door, she pushes him onto the back seat, knocks off his baseball cap and jumps on top of him. “Hey, girlie, get off me!” he yelps, but there’s no corralling her, lips pressed against his, her tongue down his throat, her hands reaching hungrily for his nether parts.
By now, I have hiked across the square and fetched his keys where they have fallen on the pavement. Hightailing it to the front door of the radio station, I have to wait while a tall, charcoal black Maasai woman named Noonkishu exits the building, her head held high like she owns the town. Dressed in a bright red shuka, a kind of modern-day toga, she broadcasts on the Maa, Dinka and Kalenjin language programs. Having snubbed me at political functions, I am not surprised that she breezes right by me as if I don’t exist. Left panting in her wake, I finally get an opportunity to test the keys on Zorro’s keyring. Bingo! The square cut Schlage key fits the front door of Radio Uhuru. Sliding the key off his keyring, I pocket it before hustling back to the Citroën where I drop the keyring on the floor of the car and get my sorry ass out of there, the air thick with the smell of Firefly’s talcum powder.
Whatever misgivings he might have had, Sr. Zarco is no match for Firefly’s wily ways. Eventually, she’s had enough, but he’s middle-aged and just getting warmed up. Here’s where the Sturm und Drang of espionage takes over. Firefly has trained for this and services him as efficiently as any prostitute.
Flouncing from the car, running her fingers through her hair, schoolbag over her shoulder, she says “Hey, mister! You dropped your keys!” and hands them to him.
I don’t know what Sr. Zarco thinks is going down, but I hear him asking where she lives and how can he get in touch with her? His face is beet red.
I feel like shouting “White guy speak with forked tongue!” But I don’t. As they said during the Mau Mau Uprising, “Mzungu Arudi Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru.” Let the white man go back to Europe, let the African regain freedom.
Firefly blows off our befuddled Elmer Fudd and comes parading past my lookout. “Haul ass with a hall pass!” she quips. Nose in the air, she marches up the hill and around the corner toward the Township of Vikmansburg.
Almost desperate, the old geezer revs up his car, puts it in gear and roars after her, but, of course, when he turns the corner, she is gone!
Hiding in the bushes, waiting until the coast is clear.
I’m no mind reader, so I won’t try to guess what the general manager of Radio Uhuru thinks just happened.
. . .
Back at the safe house, Firefly and I wait for things to cool down. I make my telephone call. “The chair is on the table,” I recite, barely able to control my excitement. Then, congratulating Firefly on a job well done, I change into business casual attire.
Wishing a cheerful “Banzai!” to my playful housemate, I return to Queen Street, where I wait until a quiet moment and let myself into Radio Uhuru. This is not something that can be done online, it requires a physical presence IRL, in real life. Unfolding my map, I head to the broadcast booth where a mulatto announcer in a white shirt is interviewing two members of the Royal Ornithologists Club on the topic “A binary challenge: Guano harvesting versus Heimische Striped Nightmare Stork hatchlings.” Weirdly specific. I stick my head in the booth. “Pássaros, birds, are an important issue!” I agree. “Please interrupt this program to play this tape.”
“You jest,” complains one of the birdwatchers. Pink-skinned, he sports a full red beard like a modern-day Viking. Toying with his field glasses, he’s just aching for a fight. “This is a serious situation,” he preaches. “Guano dust in high enough concentrations can clog the stork’s uterus. They start laying eggs with crepe-paper-thin shells.” Lifting them to his face, he peers at me through his field glasses.
“Thin eggshells are unsafe at any speed,” bleats his companion.
“Oh, great,” I groan. “Bird sex!”
Brandishing my pistol, I hand the announcer a 7-inch plastic reel of brown recording tape, which makes him laugh. “Stone Age stuff,” he chuckles, going to the supply closet and rolling a TEAC reel-to-reel tape recorder on wheels into the broadcast booth. The machine looks squat and monstrously impressive. I expect it to bleep like R2D2. “What’s the occasion?” asks the announcer sangfroid, cool as a cucumber, as if bandidos bearing recording tape and waving guns is part of his daily grind.
What’s your name?” I ask.
“Philippe.”
“Well, Philippe, I really appreciate you doing me this favor.”
“What’s on the tape?” he asks doubtfully.
“La Marseillaise,” I assure him.
Plugging in the tape recorder, Philippe couples it to the mixing console with black cables that have RCA jacks on one end and XLR connectors on the other. Cueing up the tape, he gives me a last, sardonic look. “Are you gonna get me fired?” he asks. Terrified, the ornithologists run from the building.
“Anything you do is under duress,” I point out. “I shouldn’t worry about it. I am holding you at gunpoint.”
“Only, I know who you are,” he exclaims. “It’s embarrassing.”
Ours is a small island.
“Extenuating circumstances drive me to take direct action,” I tell him. “We’re a fucked-up society.”
He doesn’t look convinced.
“We have broadcast at least five minutes of dead air. Shall we run the tape?” I suggest.
Philippe runs the tape. Sure enough, it starts off with the Marseillaise. I watch Philippe adjust the volume.
“Viva a revolução!” booms the voice of opposition leader Patrice Kabiyé, carrying on the family tradition. “Long live the revolution! The people have had enough of Babyface Madeira. We are invoking Article 25 of the Constituição. From now on, we are the Free-Thinking Republic of Uhuru. Even as I speak, the people have occupied the presidential palace, the airport, government buildings, the fishing fleet, farmer’s market and the municipal barracks. Sorry ’bout that! Freedom! Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité! Parking is available.”
And that’s how we did it, with a little help from our fellow islanders. Security agencies the world over have a history of instigating coups d’état, it’s a favorite stock in trade.
I intend to wait two years for Esmerelda to turn 18 and then I’ll marry her. To bed in Tibet, perhaps. She owns me.
. . .
“Madeira won’t see you,” says José, my boss, during my debriefing.
“He’ll see whoever enters his cell. Why? What are you afraid of?” I wonder. We are meeting in a safe room at HQ at three o’clock in the morning, so I am not exactly getting a red-carpet rollout.
“You are a meddler. You meddle,” says José and the rest is histrionics.
I’m considered a pacifist since I want to let Babyface live and stand trial for his assorted misdemeanors, felonies, swindles, idiocies and snake oil promises. Por favor, Deus, faça parar. Please, God, make it stop! I would have done the same with Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, but if you let a deposed ruler live, there is the risk that he will rally his peeps and start a civil war. No one wants that.
So while President Madeira was brooding over Old Gabe’s mausoleum, dive-bombing the go-fast boats of drug runners on the high seas and making war, we took out the trash and returned the power to the people.
Hallelujah, free at last!
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