The Illegal Read Online Free Page A

want.”
    Keita hated conversations that led back to his sister’s brains, so he asked his father to explain once again how the madeleines from Zantoroland had become world famous.
    Yoyo said the madeleine was Zantoroland’s only claim to fame, aside from marathoners. The Germans, the French and the British had all taken turns colonizing Zantoroland and populating it with African slaves, and although France had ruled the country only briefly, it had left an indelible mark with its madeleine. The student, Yoyo said, eventually surpassed the professor.
    “You can go to the best pâtisserie in Paris,” Yoyo said, “and you will not find a madeleine that competes with the ones made here. To make a great madeleine,” he said, “you begin with a scallop-shell baking pan. Then, you take the best flour and combine it with butter, vanilla, sugar and eggs. The real trick is to get just the right amount of lemon zest. In France, they just serve the madeleine straight up, like a plain doughnut. No imagination. But here in Zantoroland, we create a little glaze with the zest of an orange or a lemon. This makes the Zantoroland madeleine one of the wonders of the world. And that, my son,” Yoyo said, smiling playfully, “is why Zantoroland will one day outstrip France as an economic power.”
    Charity snorted. “We’ll never outstrip anybody.”
    “What’s ‘outstrip’?” Keita asked.
    “Outperform,” Charity said.
    “May I have another madeleine?” Keita asked.
    “No,” Yoyo said, “but you can finish mine.”
    It was a long walk home from the café. Keita could have run it in eight minutes or walked it in twenty, but it took their mother an hour. Keita had brought a water bottle along, because he knew his mother always needed it—even when she was seated and still—but it didn’t help much. She never seemed to be able to get enough to drink. Lena puffed as she walked. Even though she kept herself trim, she walked up the sloping street like an old woman, stopping repeatedly to bend over and catch her breath.
    At home, she gulped down several cups of water and took a nap.Yoyo sat by their bed for an hour, holding her hand and reading. Then he packed, grabbed his shoulder bag, kissed his wife and children, and left the house.
    Work often took Yoyo from his family, and Keita hated it when his father went away. It was easier to leave, Keita reasoned, than to stay behind. He waved as his father walked down the road. Then he went to the calendar and marked the day his father would return.
    H OURS AFTER THE DEPARTURE, WHEN K EITA IMAGINED THAT his father was high in the air and flying northwest across the Indian Ocean, neighbours shouted in through the window, telling him to turn on the TV. Jenkins Randall—commander-in-chief of the army, and member of the Kano ethnic majority—had staged a coup d’état in Zantoroland. A thousand troops had left the National Barracks, shot the guards posted outside the Presidential Palace and stormed the residence. The president—a duly elected Faloo named Porter Goodson, who had formed a government three years earlier—was hauled from the closet in which he was found hiding, marched onto the lawns of the palace and ordered to confess to crimes against the state. President Goodson refused, and ordered the troops to arrest General Randall. But they remained in place, waiting for the order from their military leader.
    General Randall and his troops ordered all the pedestrians they could find to enter through the gates and gather on the presidential lawns to form a suitable audience. Once a thousand people were found to watch, General Randall paid his foe the ultimate insult: he forced him at gunpoint to remove all his clothes. Then the troops opened fire. The president’s bloody body was dumped into the Fountain of Independence in the main square.
    Randall took control of the television and radio stations and announced that he was naming himself President for Life, declaring that the