American Spy

by Lauren Wilkinson

  “Hmm.” I thought about what I was going to ask him to do. “You say that now.”

  “So if you want to drive that’s fine. You’re a good driver.”

  “That’s a nice thing to say.”

  “It’s true.”

  “I learned from the best. You and Pop.”

  I smiled over at him. He had grown. He wasn’t the same man whose proposal had been scattered with sexist, Five Percenter nonsense, like “the woman is the man’s field to produce his nation.” He had a steady job, doing maintenance work off the books. And he’d managed to keep himself out of jail for the last decade. He’d grown up for the sake of his son, Chris. Robbie and I both wanted to be the best versions of ourselves for our children.

  We arrived at the beach. I laid a couple of blankets on the sand, slathered you both in sunblock, handed over your shovel and pail. As I was helping you fill the pail, Robbie exhaled and looked out at the blue water. “Wow. I wish Chris could’ve come. He would love this.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Good. He’s kinda into some shit I don’t really get though.” He glanced around, even though there was no way Chris, or anyone who knew him, could possibly have heard.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like comics and shit. And cards.”

  “Baseball cards?”

  “Nah, like comic cards. I don’t know. I was mad heated with Rosa, like why she letting him do this nerd shit for? I’m not trying to see my son get his ass beat. Now I’m more cool with it. Sort of.”

  “How’s Rosa doing?” I said, asking after Chris’s mother. I didn’t fully understand the terms of his relationship with her, other than that they’d never been married and that he sometimes lived in the apartment where she was raising their son.

  “Good,” he said.

  “She know where you are?”

  “She might.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “No.”

  “Then how would she know?”

  He shrugged.

  “She still letting you stay by her?”

  “Not right now.”

  I nearly laughed at his caginess as I glanced over at him. When we were growing up, we used to call him Pretty Rob, and he’s still very good-looking. His skin is a rich brown, and there’s a delicacy to his features that contradicts his roughneck affectation. Women have always liked him. Robbie was my first love, and he’s my oldest friend. He’s one of the most loyal people I’ve ever known, having stuck with me even after the Feds knocked on his door.

  That reminds me: I’d said there was a specific reason that I had very few friends left in New York. The reason was the bureau. Part of their application process was an extensive background check, so a pair of white men in suits—they were obviously Feds—went around the neighborhood interviewing people about me. The same thing happened with my college friends, and it spooked everyone. They knew that if the Feds were asking about me, there were no good reasons for that.

  That episode marked me in a way that I couldn’t wash off. But I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I felt sorry for Helene. It must’ve been much harder for her to give up the neighborhood after she enlisted than it had been for me.

  The one thing that upset me was that while I was being investigated, the little red address book that Helene had brought me back from Martinique disappeared. One day it was just no longer in the desk I’d always kept it in, which made me feel like I was going crazy. I was heartbroken; I had a very strong sentimental attachment to that book. I’m still sorry it’s gone.

  I looked down at his basketball shorts. “You still don’t have a bathing suit?”

  “What I need a bathing suit for?”

  “You go to the beach. You been to Coney Island.”

  “Yeah, but not to go in. There’s plastic bags in the water and shit. And, like, glass. It’s not this.”

  “The first time Pop took my mom to Jones Beach she wouldn’t even step on the sand.”

  He smiled. “How’s he doing?”

  “Not too bad.”

  “Tell him I say hello.” Although Pop couldn’t stand Robbie, the feeling wasn’t mutual.

  “I will.”

  Robbie was looking out at the horizon again. “You know I never left the country before?”

  “Maman,” you said, William. “I want to go in.”

  I stood and walked you both to the water’s edge. Robbie followed.

  As the water lapped your feet, Tommy, you said solemnly, “It’s cold.”

  You took my hand, and we waded farther into the water together. I showed you both how to float. Robbie tried it too, and he sank, then came up coughing and splashing and laughing. Then he tossed you up in the air, William, and you laughed as he caught you.

  “Again!” You couldn’t get enough roughhousing. He tossed you up in the air again and once more you squealed with laughter.

  “You wanna turn?” he asked you, Tommy. You shook your head and paddled toward me. You hadn’t quite warmed up to him yet.

  Later, back on the sand, I took some pictures of the three of you together—I’d brought an old camera that belonged to your grandmother. I also made sure that Robbie took some of the three of us.

  “I’m hungry!” William, you threw yourself into my lap. I went into my tote and held out the Baggie full of mango to you.

  “I don’t want that.”

  “I don’t have anything else.”

  You plucked a cube out, popped it into your mouth. “You take one.”

  I shook my head and smiled. “They’re for you and your brother.” You pressed a piece against my mouth. “I want to share.”

  I knew you wanted to take care of me, so I let you tuck the piece of mango between my lips. I laughed. “That tickles!”

  I felt Robbie smiling at me. William, you started laughing too. I leaned in and gave you rapid-fire kisses on the cheek that you squirmed against, squealing, showing off a mouthful of mango.

  * * *

  —

  BACK AT HOME, when Tommy opened the door, Poochini bolted out of the house. I shouted after him as I watched him dart toward the feral sugarcane that separated Agathe’s property from the neighbor’s farm. I called for my mother to come get you two out of your bathing suits, then went running blindly after him screaming, Poochini! Poochini!

  I ran into the cane patch, calling his name as I moved through the green stalks. I stood still, hoping to hear him crashing through the cane. It was unnervingly quiet, like standing alone during a snowfall. I looked around. I was lost—I had no idea what direction I’d come from. My back was damp with sweat. I closed my eyes, to try and orient myself, but started to panic. I saw that man. Felt his hands squeezing my throat. When the sugarcane finally expelled me, I was at the edge of the road that led to Agathe’s farm. As I started in the direction of the house, I saw my mother’s truck approaching. Robbie was behind the wheel.

  “Glad I found you. Your mother’s been calling around. She says one of your neighbors saw him on his farm. It’s just a few miles up.”

  I got into the truck beside him.

  “I need to find him.”

  “I know.”

  “I want everything to be normal for my boys.”

  “I know. Don’t worry, it will be.”

  I was quiet.

  “Tell me about that dog. What did you get him for? Protection?”

  “Sort of, but he’s too sweet. I’m glad he was in the room with the boys that night. When that man…That man could’ve killed him.”

  “He could’ve killed you.”

  “You think I don’t know that, Robbie? I can’t think about that.” It was too late. Tears were welling up in my eyes. Embarrassed to cry in front of him, I looked down at my lap. He stopped the car and when he said my name I leaned i
nto him. He put his arm around me, and I wept with my head against his shoulder, as he rubbed my back. I cried until I was exhausted. Robbie is one of the few people who’ve seen me cry, which is how I know I love him. He had never let me down, not once. Like when I asked him to come out there and he didn’t hesitate. I told him I felt better. He started the truck again.

  As we approached the neighbor’s property, a tree came into view. Poochini was sitting beneath it with a young man that I knew by face but not name.

  “Poochini,” I called. He stood. Tired from his adventure, he ambled over slowly and calmly hopped up into the truck. I thanked the young man, who waved back.

  Poochini stretched out. His panting filled the cab. As we headed back, I picked sandburs out of his coat and pressed my face into his neck and called the dog an idiot. Robbie laughed. Then he pulled a face.

  “What?”

  “His breath stinks.”

  I laughed too. He smiled at me. Then he reached out tentatively and patted the dog between the ears.

  11

  NEW YORK, 1987

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW THOMAS Sankara he was laughing.

  He was at the front of the General Assembly hall, the small delegation from Burkina grouped around him, everyone else looking serious. He should’ve been nervous; he was about to deliver a speech at the UN. But, no, he was up there cracking up over something Blaise Compaoré had said.

  I’d read about the delegation’s members in the case file Ross had given me: Blaise and his wife, Chantal; a security officer named Sam Kinda; a young man named Vincent Traoré, who’d be serving as a translator on the trip.

  I was watching from a distance, in the interpreter’s booth. A harried UN employee, a member of the chief of protocol’s staff whom I’d briefly met for the first time the day before, had asked me to bring a copy of Sankara’s speech up there.

  I’d gone up some stairs and found a door with English engraved in black on a white plaque. When I’d knocked, an interpreter with feathered hair and large round glasses appeared, took the pages from me, and, as she looked them over, absently stood aside to let me in the booth—it seemed like she expected someone in my role to stay and watch the speech from there, so I went inside and crossed to the bank of windows looking down on the hall. Viewed from behind and above, the room’s magnitude dwarfed the suit-jacketed backs of the assembly members sitting in the curved rows of seats.

  Sankara crossed to the green marble podium, and his delegation sat at a table to the right. The secretary-general and two other UN officials were sitting on the platform above and directly behind Sankara, and on the gilded back wall, presiding over them all, was the enormous UN emblem, two olive branches embracing the world.

  He began his speech without any hoopla. I wasn’t wearing interpreters’ headphones, so I could barely hear him and instead listened to it in the steady voice of the interpreter speaking into her microphone on the honey-brown console. To be honest, I was a little bored.

  “Mr. President, Mr. Secretary-General, honorable representatives of the international community, I bring you fraternal greetings from a country whose seven million children, women, and men refuse to die of ignorance and hunger any longer. I come here with the aspiration to speak on behalf of my people, on behalf of ‘the disinherited of the world,’ those who belong to what’s so ironically called the Third World. And to state, though I may not succeed in making them understood, the reasons for our revolt.

  “Of our seven million inhabitants, over six million are peasants. And this peasantry, our peasantry, has been subjected to the most intense exploitation at the hands of imperialism and has suffered the most from the ills we inherited from colonial society: illiteracy, obscurantism, pauperization, cruelty in many forms, endemic diseases, and famine.”

  The interpreter waved an extra set of headphones at me. I took them, not convinced that would improve the experience, but it turned out his voice was pleasing and sonorous. As I listened to it, I felt something warm open inside my chest.

  “Imperialism tries to dominate us from both inside and outside our country. Through its multinational corporations, its big capital, its economic power, imperialism tries to control us by influencing our discussions, and influencing national life.”

  Even from a distance, his posture transmitted confidence and passion and excitement. Despite his natural charisma though, I remained unconvinced by his Communism. Che Guevara had given a similar speech in front of the General Assembly. So had Fidel Castro, I realized, and the similarity sent a cold flush through me. I remembered being seven, the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Curled in bed, the castle-shaped night lamp on our dresser casting its yellow light on the wall, Helene had looked over: “Ça va?” You okay?

  “Ouais.” I squeezed our mother’s teddy bear in a headlock—she’d left it behind—and stared up at the play of shadows on the ceiling.

  “Sure you’re not scared?” she asked in French.

  I said no, but she knew I was lying. Helene pulled the quilt off her bed and came to mine. She squeezed in beside me and slung her arm over my body. She soon fell back asleep, but I was too paralyzed by guilt and fear to do the same. I’d spent the previous few days praying for Saint George to help the Americans drop a bomb on Cuba—to help us kill Castro before he could kill us was how I’d been putting it in my mind. But then I’d realized how close Martinique was to Cuba and began to fear that what I’d asked for would come true. If my prayers were answered and the bomb killed Agathe, I understood, in the excessively accountable way of nervous children, that it would be my fault.

  I respected Thomas Sankara’s government for its socialist policies, which stood in stark contrast to those of Reagan, who’d spent the last six years pumping money into the military while slashing funding for domestic programs. He was happily presiding over a gap between the rich and the poor that was yawning wider every year; one that we felt harder than most people. But I couldn’t allow myself to be seduced by the ideas of a politician like Sankara, who called himself a Marxist, a fraught word at a tense time.

  The problem with the good he was doing was that it made his Communism palatable. He was too charismatic. Although his country was one of the poorest in the world, he had still managed to galvanize support across the continent. It was worrisome when that happened in countries that had recently become independent. Because they were no longer under the control of a colonial power, there were ideological vacuums in those countries. And I understood the fear that Communism would rush in and fill those voids.

  I thought Communism was dangerous. That opinion could’ve been the product of propaganda—as Sankara would’ve argued—or it could’ve been because I’d grown up watching it fail again and again around the world. Watching people die because of that failure. Reaganomics was an unpleasant little philosophy too, and when you added the punitive character of our country to it, we emerged as a breeding ground for a really virulent strain of cruelty. But the alternative was worse.

  Sankara finished his speech, and it was met with muffled applause. I turned to the interpreter who said, “That wasn’t too bad.”

  “Yeah. Not too bad at all,” I agreed with a nod as I put the headphones back on the console.

  I went downstairs. My assignment that day was straightforward if not exactly simple: I was to guide his delegation around the UN and eat lunch with them after his speech. I was to be present, charming, and familiar so that he would feel comfortable with me, and I could gather my intel.

  It was my first undercover assignment, but I felt strangely confident; slipping into a false identity had proven to be easy for me. I’d had a lot of informal practice with performing different versions of myself to please other people: The good version of me that Mr. Ali knew, the good version of me that had attended City College, the good girl who’d grown up in Queens.

  I found Sankara and his delegation gathered
around a UN staffer I’d met the day before. The staffer introduced me in French by the alias Ross had assigned me and told the delegation that I was from the chief of protocol’s office. Up close, Sam Kinda was tall and broad—I would’ve guessed he was a member of the president’s security force even if I hadn’t read it. Compaoré was also tall, a head above Sankara, a lanky and youthful man wearing black slacks and a gray tunic with a pattern of white diamonds around the shoulders and neck. Chantal Compaoré was attractively ample and looked elegant in a gold brocade dress, matching head wrap and large, hammered-gold earrings that dangled on both sides of her wide, square face. Vincent Traoré had a short Afro, was wearing black plastic eyeglass frames, and couldn’t have been more than twenty.

  And then there was Thomas Sankara himself. He was very handsome in person, and had a magnetism that the photographs I’d seen of him couldn’t capture. He was wearing his captain’s uniform and red beret, and was very commanding in them. When I put out my hand to shake his, he took it in his own warm, rough one and held on to it for just a moment longer than was appropriate.

  “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. President,” I said in French.

  When he smiled at me, I felt like I recognized him. I knew the gentle strength of his voice before I heard it and the liveliness of his dark eyes, the sweep of pink in his lower lip. All that sounds sentimental. And silly, I guess, or even incomprehensible. But that’s what it was like when I met your father.

  The staffer told Sankara that the two Diplomatic Security Service agents—they knew I was undercover—and I would accompany his delegation for the rest of the day. Then he started in on an excessive amount of instruction about our lunch in the delegates’ dining room.

  Enough to be condescending, but I tried to believe it was how he’d been trained to deal with all dignitaries: cover the bases. Sankara, who was increasingly getting annoyed, finally put up his hand. “That’s enough. If I have any questions I’ll ask Ms….” he said with a gesture toward me as he referred to me by my alias. The staffer took the cue and as he made to leave he said, “Well, Mr. President, it truly was an honor.”