So they were gone, and the house, for the first time since I moved into it, was empty. Fine, then; that settled it. I made a plan. It was more a piece of theater than a plan, however. In my life here, I had been acting in a play not of my making for so long that it was all I had. A role. As soon as I have fed the boys their breakfast, I’ll dress them the way Woodrow likes to see them, in blazers and ties, like little brown gentlemen enrolling at Choate, and I’ll dress myself accordingly in my long, white, chiffon dress and carry the silly, saffron-colored parasol and wear a soft, wide-brimmed hat against the sun, and with my sons in tow I’ll march into the leader’s office like a latter-day Scarlett O’Hara and demand the immediate release of my husband. After that, I’ll make up another little piece of theater and play it out. And then another, and if necessary, another.
When I had the boys fed and properly dressed, tasks I normally left to Jeannine, but not today, maybe not ever again, I telephoned Woodrow’s office. To my relief, Satterthwaite — Richard, as I now freely called him — answered. He’d already heard that his boss had been taken in the night by the leader’s security force. Richard was scared, I could tell by his shaky voice, usually so suavely controlled. He was sure that he was about to be arrested, too.
I told him not to be ridiculous, Woodrow would be released quickly, it was all a mistake and would be settled in a few hours. He partially believed me. I was the boss’s wife, after all. In reality, all I cared was that he make it possible for me and the boys to be driven to the leader’s door in a ministry car chauffeured by the minister’s personal assistant. It was in the script.
“The best thing you can do now,” I said to Richard, “if you want to keep your job in the ministry, is help me get Woodrow home quickly and safely. Which you can do by driving me and the boys directly to the presidential palace, as if no one has done anything wrong. Because no one has. Have they, Richard?”
“No. No one. Not Mister Sundiata, for sure,” he said.
“And certainly not you, Richard. The car is still here at the house, the soldiers left it. So come over here right away.”
THE BOYS AND I stepped one by one from the tinted interior of the Mercedes onto the white-gravel walkway to the ignominiously named White House, a faux plantation house with tall white columns and verandas, office and residential wings right and left, and tall windows and porticos — like a set for an antebellum movie, Mandingo maybe, or Roots.
“Wait for us here, Richard,” I said. “We shan’t be long.” I snapped open my parasol, lined the boys up behind me like ducklings, and marched up the wide steps to the guard box at the top, where I waved off the guard with a regal flip of my free hand, as if he had come forward to escort me in rather than to stop me, and kept moving. It was never done, but I was a woman, a white American woman, with her children, and so it was permitted. I and my three somber-faced boys, who must have been as much in awe at that moment of my queenly entitlement as of the colossal scale and splendor of the building that we seemed to have taken possession of, swept on unimpeded, all the way up the wide, curving, carpeted stairs to the second floor, through the outer office and past the startled secretaries to the antechamber of the office of the leader himself, where finally we were stopped, not by a member of the staff, but by a white man emerging from the inner sanctum just as I and my ducklings arrived at the wide, polished mahogany door.
It was Clement, Sam Clement, the fellow from the American embassy — in his early forties back then, fair haired and southern, a Princetonian with a tennis-court tan and the beginnings of a bourbon paunch, and wearing, just as you’d expect of our man in Africa, a rumpled, straw-colored, linen suit. I’d caught him by surprise, and he took a backwards step, recognizing me, and delivered his sweet, sad smile, a Virginia Tidewater all-purpose smile passed down in the family, father to son for generations.
“Why, hel-lo, Dawn!” he said, putting lead-footed emphasis on the name, as if to remind me that he still remembered my real name and, while I might fool the natives, I was no mystery to him. “Missus Sundiata,” he added.
I gave him a curt nod and pushed past and through the doorway. “I’m here to see the leader,” I announced and entered the large, bright, sunlit room. I brought the boys to my side now, clustering them around me, and heard the door snap shut behind us as if with smug satisfaction, and faced the leader, who stood behind his desk, a small, tight smile on his lips. He grows larger every time I see him, I said to myself. Taller, wider, thicker, like a hippopotamus.
“Miz Sundiata,” he pronounced, as if announcing my arrival at a formal ball, then chuckled. He may be illiterate, an ignorant pig of a man, but he knows how to play the chieftain, I thought. He clasped his hands below his chin and looked us over like a judge about to issue his verdict. He wore a double-breasted, dark gray suit, bright white shirt and paisley tie, with a floppy silk handkerchief dangling from his breast pocket. “Wife of the esteemed Minister Woodrow Sundiata. And his sons, too, I see,” he added and smiled down at them.
I knew I had only a little time before he grew impatient with the occasion and had me removed. “President Doe, what are the conditions of my husband’s release?”
His eyebrows rose into his forehead, then lowered, and his round face darkened from brown to nearly black. I half-expected smoke to blow from his nostrils and ears, his eyes to glow red as coals, and I drew my children closer to me. “You in naw place fe’makin’ demands, Missy!” he told me, lapsing into pidgin, speaking rapidly, almost losing me. Because I knew the subject and could read his emotions from his face, I was able to follow him adequately and look for openings. He told me that my husband was a traitor and a thief. A bad man, top to bottom. Not fit to be the father of these beautiful boys or the husband of a nice lady like me.
“Me curse de name of de man!” the leader of Liberia declared, and he spat on the vast Oriental carpet.
My sons grabbed the folds of my dress and moved tightly against me. They knew now that I had lied to them last night. Papa was not the friend of the leader after all. I’d probably lied about the dogs, too. And much else. I calmly stroked their heads and waited for the exhibition, for I knew that’s what it was, to run its course. The man ranted, he roared, he glowered and lowered his voice to a weird whisper, then roared again. This was his theater, his play, too, and he loved it.
I began to catch the gist of his complaint. Over one million dollars had been secretly extracted—“Em-bezzled!” he kept repeating, as if he’d just learned the word. The money had been taken from funds allocated to the General Services Agency by the State Department of the United States of America. It was money that had been embezzled, therefore, from the generous citizens of the United States. And did I know who was in charge of the Liberian General Services Agency? Did I? Of course I knew! Charles Taylor, my husband’s closest friend and ally, was in charge of the General Services Agency! Over one million dollars, one-point-four million U.S. dollars, to be exact, were missing from the books, gone, fled the country, probably in Switzerland in a secret bank account in the name of Charles Taylor and Woodrow Sundiata, waiting to be wired back to each of their separate accounts here in Monrovia as soon as they thought no one was looking for it anymore!