Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (37 page)

Whatever that Polytechnique-trained economist turned dictator was, stupid he wasn’t. As he entered our compound beside tribally shawled Madame M’Lawa—Celeste favored Pierre Cardin on most days, but this was her official regalia—his eyes needed only one sweep of the scene once they’d rested on his own portrait atop the Residence roof to spot the dominant fact at our Fourth of July reception and cookout.

“Où est le général N’Koda?”
Where is General N’Koda?

“I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” Gary Cooper’s voice maundered from the garage. Then we heard gunfire.

Posted by: Pam

Cadwaller stepped forward. “
Monsieur le Président
, I have no way of knowing what’s going on.
None
,” he emphasized as M’Lawa stared, because our reputation did precede us. “Until we learn more, I must strongly advise you to return to the
Palais du Président
immediately. We have no local communications here.”

M’Lawa hesitated. Too many thoughts were gnashing gears behind that hefty forehead, and he had no way of telling which were significant. The mind of a dictator has to make room to not only brew his own schemes, but monitor the hypothetical ones of a dozen or a hundred other men—including, just now, Hopsie’s own.

“I strongly advise it,” Cadwaller repeated. “You have only your bodyguards with you. Think,
Monsieur le Président
. The Presidential Guard is at the
Palais
, not here. They’re your best hope to retrieve this situation, whatever it is.”

From far off in that muggy still air came a grenade’s sharp but humidity-muffled crack. Later we realized it must’ve been the attack on the radio station going in. Audibly nearer us and coming closer every second, we heard grinding engines and shouts, along with more rifle shots—more likely exuberant than hostile, as they had no opposition up that way—from the north end of Boul’ Mich. In case my daisysdaughter.com readers have forgotten, that was where the Army’s barracks were, across from the sports palace.

“
Monsieur le Président
, you don’t have much time,” said Ned Finn briskly, flicking away a Marlboro as he returned from a quick inspection of the street. “I don’t think they’ve blocked the road to the
Palais
just yet. But their advantage right now is that they know exactly where you are.”

That clinched it. Though his eyes said he hadn’t worked everything out—one gear was still sticking—M’Lawa nodded.
“Voiture!”
he commanded his nearest bodyguard.
“Celeste!”
he called to his wife, who at the first shots had started for the Residence porch as if guided by her own portrait glowing on its hot tin roof.
“On y va.”

Without waiting to see if she was obeying—he could always get another wife, but had only one
Palais du Président
—he turned and let his bodyguards muscle him out of the Embassy compound. They were only muscling humid air, but habit is habit, and Celeste M’Lawa said
“Oh, et puis zut”
and scooted to join them. As more gunfire erupted, she found time to grab my elbow with a startlingly mischievous smile.

“
Mon Dieu
,
how I’ve longed for this day,” she confided. “This damned kerchief! You will visit us on the Riviera, won’t you?
Le soleil d’hier m’est beaucoup plus agréable.
” After a quick one-two
Parisienne
cheek peck, then she was gone too.

“Christ, Ned!” said Hopsie with uncommon relief once we’d closed the gates behind them. “That was close.”

“Damn close,” Ned agreed. “You see Celeste head for the Residence? She knew.”

“What was going on?” That was Bermuda-shorted Faddle, clutching a half eaten hot dog.

“Hon, he was on U.S. territory,” Ned explained with a grin of reprieve. “If he’d thought fast enough to ask us for asylum, Jesus! By the time we got an answer from Washington—”

“He’d have been singing ‘Edelweiss’ in my shower,” said Cadwaller. “And then what if they’d tried to take him by force? N’Koda’s too smart for that, but a mob is a mob.”

Were we ever in for a shock.
“Let them come!”
mad little Sean Finn shrieked, gripping his toy musket. “‘If they mean to have a war’—”

“‘Let it begin here!’”
whooped Tommie Sawyer in his fierce Iroquois war paint.

“Oh good God,” Hopsie said as the full lunacy of the kids on the post sank in. “Pam, round up
all
the kids and get them the hell inside the Embassy. No, the Residence. I don’t think there’ll be much shooting, but they don’t know it’s real.”

Sean burst into tears. “Yes, we do. Yes, we do.”

“Nan, Laurel, Carol!” I called. “I’m going to need help.”

Cadwaller meanwhile had bounded up to the porch, where the microphone set up for the official exchange of Independence Day greetings stood under Melville’s banner. “I must ask the Nagonese Cabinet to leave,” he announced. “We cannot offer you any protection. Buzz! Handle that. Members of the diplomatic corps are naturally free to stay here or return to their own Embassies as they wish.”

“Are you joking, Ambassador?” Ehud Tabor called out merrily. “These are the best seats in the house.”

“Yes, and there’s a great deal of beer,” Klaus Schlitten chimed in.

“Goliadkin,” said Hopsie, away from the microphone and back down the porch steps. “Your call, of course, but I think it might be best if you
did
stick around. We don’t know what’s happening in Ouibomey—unless, of course, you know what’s happening here,” he added, now wry.

“It wasn’t us either,” said the Soviet Ambassador. “Cadwaller, it really wasn’t you?”

“Nope,” Hopsie said. “And my word on that too. Tell your government. Goliadkin, you don’t think the Chinese—?”

Goliadkin laughed. “How would we know? How would anyone?”

The grinding engines, exuberant shots, and chants from the far end of Boul’ Mich were getting steadily more thunderous. As Buzz Sawyer shepherded the soon-to-be-former Nagonese Cabinet toward our compound’s rear exit, Rich Warren mounted a ladder to take down M’Lawa’s and Madame M’Lawa’s portraits. He took down JFK’s and Jackie’s too, puzzling me until I saw his inspired idea of hooking them to the compound’s front gate.

As for me, I was rounding up children. Two Warrens, two Sawyers, Sean-pronounced-Seen—oh, my God.

“Tommie!” I shouted. “Have you seen Nell Finn?”

His lip curled. “The squaw?”

Finally—and I must admit satisfyingly—I lost my temper with the Sawyers’ little princeling. “Listen, you brat! Do you want to have a fight with
me? C’est ça que tu veux?
”

May I remind you that he was in second grade and I was five foot ten? Is this the right time to mention that after the kids on the post saw a French-dubbed version of
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
at the Bijou Castafiore, I’d caught more than one of them looking at me as if eccentric, literally lofty Mrs. Cadwaller was a certain someone’s Plon-Plon-Ville avatar?

“Pam!” Carol Sawyer exploded. “I’m sorry, but you can’t yell at my son. If there’s yelling to do, I’ll do it, all right? Nan’s got her hands full with Sean and no wonder. Can you please find Nell on your own?”

I stared around. Rich had killed John Philip Sousa, but our houseboys were still surreally bringing our remaining guests drinks. The oncoming engines and glad cries and rifle shots were vying with exhilarated diplomats’ laughter and banter. Then with new woe I recalled what I’d seen rolling out our compound’s front gate just after M’Lawa and Celeste bustled through it.

Unsure how close the rebels were by now, I knew I didn’t want to unbar and reopen the gate. Blessing myself for choosing a pantsuit and sandals that morning, I forked left gam and then right over the compound’s low wall and saw Nell immediately. Under her Pocahontas feather and clutching her hula hoop, she was staring transfixed up Boul’ Mich.

What she was staring at was pretty transfixing even if you’d seen Paris liberated. Like the four clanking behind it, the lead snowplow was packed with perspiration-oiled soldiers hanging off every stanchion, rifles raised and mixing cheers with lusty renderings of “
Le soleil d’aujourd’hui.
” Crowning them in the thick shimmer of heat were big portraits of N’Koda and Nagonese flags. No red ones, I noted swiftly, alleviating Cadwaller’s most urgent concern.

Trotting alongside and behind were the reserve N’Koda had smuggled in from upcountry: a few hundred of his tribal kinfolk from the north. Gaunt-armed and bony-shouldered in the sleeveless ribbed cotton undershirts that were pretty much the
mission civilisatrice
’s only notable contribution to noncoastal Nagon, they were armed with upcountry’s traditional hunting weapons: machetes and iron bows with cloth grips and slung quivers of grim iron arrows. Quite a few of them were wearing one of Buzz Sawyer’s eight thousand screwdrivers as a festive pendant on a lanyard around their necks: “Smart man, N’Koda,” Cadwaller said later. “Even-steven.”

“Nell, what on earth,” I stammered at the top of my lungs. Realized I’d better walk and not dash to her: someone running might look like a target. Her pinched grave face looked up.

“If this be my fate, I must submit,” she said calmly—a line adapted from, so help me, the Pocahontas chapter of
Glory Be
.
Some distant part of me felt flattered.

Frenzy came first. “For God’s sake!” I screeched. “What is
with
you damn children?”

“Oh, that’s simple!” she said, clearly pleased and surprised to be asked. “We don’t know what’s expected of us. Richie Warren thinks that if we guess right we’ll all get to go home to the States, but he makes a lot of stuff up. We all do.” Then she turned to face the rumbling snowplows.

Right, right! The snowplows. I’d grown moderately used to jiggling the infant Tim Cadwaller on our Paris visits to Chris and Renée. I’m pretty sure I’d never tried to hoist a nine-year-old.

“My hoop!” she implored as I staggered while lifting her, that stupid feather going right up my left nostril. So I had to bend back down to grab that too. Then I ran and dumped Nell on the far side of the compound wall before scrambling over myself. Lost a sandal and my pantsuit tore on a snag.

Once I’d got her inside the Residence, I had a glum chore to perform. “Carol,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry. You were completely right. I had no call to blow up that way.”

Looking up from a sofa between Tommie and the younger Sawyer boy, who was still dolefully toying with his Spirit of ’76 flute—not unintelligently, she’d made him take off the head bandage—Carol relished her new Get Out of Jail Free card. My tantrum had cost me any right to go on obliquely exiling her for oinking it up with Ned the summer before. Not that I’d ever been rude: Hopsie would’ve caned me. In a group of women this small, you could still do a lot just by whose conversational gambits you seized on.

“We all know it isn’t an average day. It’s just—Pam, if you were a mother, you’d know how sensitive they are at that age.”

I would love to report Tommie was pulling the wings off flies just then. But if so, he was only pulling them off with his eyes.

“Tommie!
Je vous demande pardon. J’avais tort
,” I said.

“Say thank you, Tommie,” Carol prodded. “Be gracious for once in your life.”

“Why?” he said sullenly. “Just because Cruella’s married to Dad’s stupid boss?”

I looked at Carol, she looked at me. Then we shared our friendliest laugh since the Sawyers got to Nagon. “Yes,” she said.

“Darn tooting,” I said. “But never mind. It’s all right.”

“What’s happening, Pam?” Nan Finn asked. “Outside.”

I beamed. “Well! Since I’m not a mother, I’m going right back out to find out.”

Posted by: Pam

I’d barely stepped onto the Residence’s now diplomatically jammed porch when Nan followed me. “Oh, I mean the hell with it,” the glorious girl laughingly said, holding up her Kodak. “When’ll I get a chance to see this again?”

“What about Sean?”

“Cruella, thank God
you
own a copy of
The Longest Day
.”

“Signed, too.” Something clicked. “When’s Sean’s birthday?”

“November. Did I tell you what I’m trying to get him?”

“Uh-uh.”

“A cannon from Ouibomey. The Portuguese consul still has some sort of squatter’s rights at the fort, and—oh, my God. That’s them.”

Indeed it was. Festooned with shouting and singing soldiers, one after another of the snowplows of the
1er Régiment Blindé
clanked and squealed over crumbling, patchy hundred-degree asphalt past our Fourth of July frieze of diplomats greasy with fried chicken, Bermuda-shorted secretaries munching hot dogs, and white-coated Residence houseboys passing Coca-Cola and popcorn. As each of them reached the gates mounted with our portraits of JFK and Jackie, there were cries of
“Vive l’Amérique!”
and
“Vive le Président Kennedy!”

“Propaganda,” Goliadkin said. “N’Koda coached them. They don’t know what they’re—”

“Nous t’aimons, Jacqueline!”
an exuberant voice called brawnily from the third snowplow.

More single-minded and also less interested in what they were trotting past, N’Koda’s northern tribal kinsfolk began a steady chant of
“À bas M’Lawa! Vive le Nagon libre.”
Even so, Hopsie couldn’t resist teasing Goliadkin. “Such a pity Chairman Kruschev married so young,” he said, stuffing a pipe that told me he was convinced we were safe.

“We still don’t know what’s happening in Ouibomey,” Goliadkin reminded him. “There, I’m sure the Nagonese people’s expressions of devotion to the Chairman and his impressive wife are extraordinary.”

“Yes, they would be. Nan!
Stay
on the porch, please.”

“Sorry!”

“Well,
I
think he’s full of shit, Mr. Ambassador. Excuse my French,” Virgil Scoleri unexpectedly took it upon himself to bellow. “Those goddam snowplows! Goliadkin, do you think we’re stupid?”

“Can you rephrase that in the first person singular? I’m a guest here, Mr., ah—”

“Virgil Scoleri!” our Admin guy thundered, shoving out a paw. “Pleased to meet you! Put ’er there. Take a pew.”

“Virgil,” said Cadwaller quietly. “Go to the Embassy. Wait to see if anything comes in by teletype. Short of our death
en masse
, under no circumstances are you to compose or send a cable of your own to the Department. You must have one like him,” he added to Goliadkin once Virgil’s bull neck and sweat-palimpsested white shirt were stalking Embassyward.

After a hesitation, Goliadkin held up three fingers. He didn’t need to say a word.

We heard the rest later. How the fifty or so Presidential Guards who didn’t decamp tried desperately to get the sixth snowplow off its plinth to barricade the
Palais
’s main gate; of course its engine hadn’t tasted gas since it rolled off the jetty. How the lead rebel snowplow smashed through, spilling soldiers off its flanks who didn’t need to do too much shooting before forty-seven or so Presidential guards realized that losing your life for Jean-Baptiste M’Lawa was one moronic way to go.