by Robert Moss
“It’s there,” she said, pointing to a low wall with a substantial cement-block building set back among the trees. “Charming. It smells like a slaughteryard.”
He glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes past midnight. Harry’s enthusiasm for this nocturnal expedition had begun to wilt even before they had left the house. It was impossible to live fully in Brazil, even for twenty-four hours, without becoming aware of a world of magic and mystery. You might try to avoid looking at it squarely; it was there nonetheless, looking at you. A girl he had met at an embassy party, the fashionable widow of a coffee planter, had bribed his previous housekeeper to slip a love potion under his mattress, some concoction sewn up inside the body of a toad. The potion was supposed to make Harry fall in love with his pursuer, but he had detected it from the stench before it had worked its spell. At least that was what Luisa had said when he had told her the story.
In bustling, money-mad Sao Paulo, Harry had visited a hall as big as St. Paul’s where educated, affluent men and women came by the hundreds to hear mediums convey messages from the spirits of the dead. Those who were sick lined up to have their tumours or inflamed appendixes extracted by an illiterate who operated with a rusty kitchen knife without benefit of anaesthetics or disinfectants, guided by the spirit of a dead surgeon.
In Copacabana, on New Year’s Eve, he had found the beach transformed into a forest of candles. Elegant couples in evening clothes and barefoot kids from the favelas jostled for space. They brought their dreams and their gifts to the water’s edge in the hope that Yemanja would hear them and carry their offerings away in her long tresses, which streamed across the beach like waves. This told the lucky ones their secret desires would be granted.
To hurried visitors from colder climes, this was all hoodoo and hocus-pocus, the sort of thing civilized people had outgrown in the Middle Ages. Major Mackenzie, the choleric Canadian who presided over the fortunes of Rio Light, was fond of observing that “idolatry and moonshine” were proof of the debility of the country’s racial stock, and a reason why Brazil, for all its vast natural riches, would never catch up with his native land in its economic development until “practical men” — white men, of course, and Canadians or Scots for preference — took charge.
As he had told Colin Bailey, Harry did not pass judgment on these things. He recognized the power of the African religion in the lives of its initiates, who did not refer to it as voodoo (a bastard word derived from the language of the Fon people of Dahomey, whose slaves had mostly gone to Haiti) but as candomblé or macumba or umbanda, names drawn from the tribal memory of the Yoruba. The gods of candomblé, like those of other men, were jealous lords, as unpredictable as the forces of nature to which they were so intimately related. They demanded blood sacrifice. They took possession of their worshipers and rode them like horses. Knowing this much, Harry had never presumed, before that night, to intrude on a gathering of their devotees.
Luisa had talked him into it by describing the night’s entertainment as a quite ordinary event in the social cycle, a bit like a child’s first communion or a bar mitzvah, an occasion for family festivities. A girl called Elza, Luisa’s distant cousin — how distant it was impossible to say, given the uncertainty about their fathers — had spent a month in seclusion, preparing for this final rite of initiation into the cult. Over the past weeks Luisa, playing surrogate mother, had sent live animals and special delicacies, as prescribed by Ivan the witch doctor, to the terreiro. Harry had lost patience with her when he learned that she had dipped into her slender savings to pay for a cow and two goats. He suspected that, whatever else was going on, Ivan Pessoa and his friends were not going hungry. He became curious to get a good look at this witch doctor with the Russian forename who had such a reputation so Luisa claimed — for making and breaking spells.
But he decided to go only at the last moment, when he came home from the office and realized that he was supposed to be dining with the Mackenzies. Stella Mackenzie was a good sort, until the last couple of gins; her breezy, cheerful vulgarity reminded Harry of a barmaid at a pub he liked on the Fulham Road. But Major Mackenzie, with his monocle and his one-eyed opinions, was insufferable. Listening to him was almost enough to make Harry sympathize with the Reds, who wanted to put a bomb under Rio Light. Worse yet, Summerhayes would be in attendance, and Harry had been studiously trying to avoid him since that miserable business involving Harvey Prince. Summerhayes had come beating on Harry’s door, quite hysterical, when news of the American’s death had appeared in the press. Summerhayes had managed to convince himself that a witness would come forward to identify him to the police and that there would be a dreadful scandal. The prospect of Lady Maude’s rage seemed to terrify the poor man even more than the chance — which Maitland considered too slight to be worthy of discussion — that the government would declare him persona non grata. He had refused to take comfort from anything Harry could say, reproaching him with the eyes of a faithful hound that has been beaten for no reason he can comprehend. All in all, Harry was happy to seize on an alternative to Stella Mackenzie’s soiree.
He now realized that the slaughterhouse stink was rising from a little cabin that stood on the left side of the path. The cabin was no taller than Harry, but the door was a huge slab of wood hewn from a single trunk and secured with some serious-looking bolts and padlocks.
Harry made a show of holding his nose.
“You can smell Exti,” Luisa said, squeezing his arm.
“I smelled him a fair way off.”
“He must be fed before the rituals,” she added with an air of authority. “And the birds and the animals must all be black. Otherwise he will come and play tricks.”
Exti was the devil. At least that was how he was often represented, at the head of a great host of lesser demons. But in this temple, Satan was better-treated than in Chris-tian churches. He wasn’t cast out. He was asked very politely to stay in his own house just outside the terreiro, guarding the paths.
They passed knots of people smoking and talking in low voices and reached an open space, walled in on three sides. The floor was beaten earth strewn with fresh leaves. There were benches along two of the walls, men sitting on one side, women and girls on the other. The atmosphere was reassuringly, disappointingly normal, even in the uncertain light of the hurricane lamps slung from the ceiling. It might have been a church social, except for the offerings of cane brandy and manioc flour laid out beside the candles in a magic square — and the snakes.
Harry did not notice them until he had almost walked into one. A shadow passed across his eyes. He stopped short and found himself staring into the open jaws of a viper. He stood frozen until a girl started laughing. She was a pretty, catlike little thing in swirling yellow skirts, with a turban wrapped tight around her ears. She saw his eyes move in her direction and stuffed her hand across her mouth, still bubbling over with mirth. The snake had not moved.
Harry let out his breath and ducked his head under the jaws of the dead viper. He saw now that there were snakes suspended from the roof at each corner of the terreiro.
Luisa embraced the little brown girl in the yellow skirts and led her over by the hand.
“This is Elza.”
Elza looked up at Harry, wide-eyed, and burst out laughing again.
“I must go and dress,” Luisa announced. “There is Ivan.”
Harry followed her glance. Ivan certainly did not look like a witch doctor. He was short and light-skinned, with curly grey hair and a neat grey beard, wearing a loose cotton shirt that hung down over a copious paunch, smoking and gossiping with his parishioners. Luisa said a few words to him. He turned. His bright, intent eyes seemed to be searching for something behind Harry. He nodded and patted Luisa’s cheek.
Harry found a place on the bench reserved for the men and steeled himself for what Luisa had warned would be a long night.
Ivan vanished into one of the rooms that opened off the main hall and reappeared with an iron rattle. H
e jangled it lazily, and three black men took their places behind the tall, pot-bellied drums. The drums talked for what seemed like an eternity. Over them, the voices of Ivan and the senior drummer rolled monotonously, invoking the orixás in their own language. Harry’s eyelids began to grow heavy. He glanced furtively at his watch. But little by little, the beat became more insistent, the chorus more peremptory. One by one the initiates rose from their places and joined a conga line. Luisa was among them, dancing between an elephantine black grannie in spectacles and a trim, tidy little Portuguese matron. They shuffled and whirled with surprising grace. The rhythm was subtly infectious. Before he was aware of it, Harry’s feet were marking time.
Suddenly a terrible howl went up, and Grannie Elephant fell as if she had been literally bowled off her feet. Her weight carried her through the thicket of arms that was raised to catch her, and her shoulder landed in Harry’s lap. The drums talked louder, faster, Ivan’s voice rose higher in praise, and the other devotees whisked Grannie Elephant away, removing her spectacles and her shoes so she would not damage herself as she wheeled about, eyes tightly closed, in a strange rolling motion, emitting groans and wails, bent over at the waist as if someone were riding on her back. Harry had not had time to recover from this spectacle when there was a piercing shriek, and Elza went careening across the dance floor. They caught her before she went down, and soon she was stalking about, bent over at the waist, eyes shut, like a hunter in the long grass.
Self-hypnosis, Harry thought. Or very effective playacting. It was horribly contagious. Ivan looked well under. The white man seated next to Harry, who had seemed fairly remote from the proceedings, screamed and lurched out into the circle of the possessed. At the same instant there came a bellow of pain and rage that made Maitland think of a wild animal falling into a pit full of sharpened stakes. To his dismay he realized that this noise was coming from Luisa, who was bucking and prancing, a mount for her savage god.
One by one, the possessed were led out into the roncό — the sanctuary — through one of the doors behind the drummers.
Some of them returned in procession, under a shower of wildflowers and fresh-cut herbs, decked out in the regalia of their patron saints. Luisa wore blue and white, for Yemanja, with a silver helmet, a mirror, a sword and a veil of shimmering strands that gusted in front of her face. Her eyes were still closed.
The dancing and singing went on until dawn and climaxed in a deafening ovation that must have carried all the way to Rio. Lesser spirits — the spirits of children and ancestors — now made their entry. Elza came hopping up to Harry with a brace of pacifiers in her mouth, giggling and drooling like a mischievous infant.
“Do you like our candomblé?”
“It’s charming,” Harry said. “Me encanta.”
“Es encantado!” Elza shrieked and clapped her hands. “He’s spellbound!” She skipped away and tried to piggy-back on Luisa’s shoulders.
To Harry’s relief, Luisa looked more or less normal. “What did it feel like?” he whispered to her.
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, do you actually see them — these orixás?”
“Not see them, not the way you mean. But after — it’s difficult to say. It’s like feeling a thickness in the air, like seeing colours that don’t exist.”
He might have pursued this, but Elza darted up and handed him a bottle of beer and a plate of farofa, rice and some unidentifiable grey meat.
“Breakfast?”
“Breakfast.”
“She’s really very pretty,” he remarked to Luisa, watching the lilt of the girl’s body as she went to serve the others.
“You should see her without her turban. They shaved her head.”
He dug his fork into the rice, downed his beer and murmured to Luisa, “Can we go now?”
“First you talk to Ivan,” she said firmly. “For the registro.”
Ivan received him in a cell-like room, a third of whose space was occupied by a massive wooden sideboard laden with statues of the orixás, cauldrons, piled necklaces and curious talismans of wood and iron. The place smelled of blood and incense. Harry did not look too closely at the bones and feathers sticking out of a pot in the corner.
Ivan squatted on one side of a straw mat, his bare feet wide apart, and motioned for Harry — who had been told to leave his shoes at the door — to sit on a low chair opposite, his feet resting between the priest’s. There were formalities to be observed; ritual greetings in the language of the Yoruba, an offering to Exu to open the paths. Ivan wrote out Harry’s full name on a piece of paper and recited it several times in the course of a long incantation. Then he gave Harry an object to hold in either hand, a seashell and a piece of carved bone. He made Harry rub them quickly together behind his back and then hold out his hands, concealing the contents. Ivan picked one, examined the contents without comment, and cast the cowrie shells. For thousands of years, these had been the most popular oracle of the Yoruba. Each pattern had scores of possible meanings, to be drawn from oral memory — from thousands of verses handed down from one priest to the next — and by testing and retesting, casting the shells over and over again.
“It is not good,” Ivan said at last. “There is death and sickness. We must discover the source of the evil.”
He cast the shells again.
“One source of the evil is a spirit,” he pronounced. “A spirit that was separated from its body too violently, so that it lingers, not knowing where to go.”
He looked up sharply. “Have you killed a man?”
“No”
Ivan frowned, and Harry found himself thinking about Harvey Prince, and then about the young tough Bailey had killed in an alley near the Lisbon docks.
“There is danger from others who are living,” Ivan went on. “A fire is growing strong, very close to you. You have not yet begun to feel its flames.”
He threw the cowries again and started to tell Harry about his family and his earlier life. His statements were remarkably accurate, down to the stillbirth of Maitland’s younger brother.
Harry felt increasingly nervous and uncomfortable. Perhaps Ivan does have psychic powers, he thought. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into his guesses.
“You were born with a caixa de mistérios,” Ivan announced. “A box of mysteries. You must take care to keep secret what is meant to be secret. The walls have ears.”
Ivan’s fingers moved back and forth, casting and recasting the shells. He paused to dab his finger in a saucer of some oily vermilion mixture and pressed it against the roof of his mouth. He asked Harry to do the same.
“To make the telling easier,” he explained.
The taste was not as offensive as Harry had expected.
“Xango te defiende,” Ivan said, with greater force. “Xango defends you. But there is another who is angry. You must appease them both.”
Ivan explained what this would entail, and Harry tried hard not to make a face.
Ivan looked hard at him. “This is not a game,” he said flatly. “You have invoked a power. It will show itself to you.”
Afterwards it was Luisa’s turn. Harry drank some more beer and watched Ivan’s congregation at play, dancing to music on the radio as if the party were just beginning. He wondered how these people found time to sleep, let alone work. The neighbours were obviously either stone deaf or part of the gathering. He tried to dismiss what Ivan had said. The man was a fortune-teller, admittedly more convincing than the gypsies who read palms or tea leaves at Brighton Beach, but no different in kind.
But when Luisa came back, she looked worried, almost desolate.
She did not speak for a long time after they got into the car. They were climbing toward the house at the edge of the rain forest when she said, “You must do what Ivan said.”
“I don’t have your way with chickens,” he countered, laughing it off. “Besides, I used to give donations to the RSPCA.”
“What is RSPCA?”
“
Oh, never mind.” In his worn-out condition, he did not feel up to explaining the RSPCA and the English reverence for all forms of animal life.
“Another can do it for you,” Luisa pursued, “but it won’t be the same. There will be consequences.”
“Look, we’ve both had a long night. Let’s have a decent breakfast and get some shut-eye, shall we? Thank God it’s the weekend.”
When she said, “Cook your own bloody bacon and eggs,” he realized she had picked up more English than he had given her credit for.
2
Emil Brandt padded out of the kitchen in his underwear, carrying a tumbler and a bottle of scotch.
Lenka did not look up from her sewing.
“You said you weren’t going to touch hard liquor till the end of the week,” she reminded him.
“So I couldn’t wait.”
She rammed her foot down on the pedal of the ancient Singer sewing machine, and the needle whirred.
“Do you have to do that?” Emil appealed to her, collapsing into the armchair next to the fan. “We’re not in Minsk.”
“It helps not to look at you,” Lenka said savagely.
“So you don’t care to look at your husband anymore? You’re not such a bathing beauty yourself.”
“You’re falling apart. Who’s going to tell you except me?” He sighed while she followed the needle, hemming a tablecloth they would probably never use.
“You’re a hard woman, Lenka.”
“So how else would I still be with you?”
He drank and leaned closer to the fan to dry the sweat from his face. The heat was killing him, and the summer still lay ahead. He felt sorry for Lenka but sorrier still for himself. He hardly slept any more. He felt as if insects were crawling under his skin.
It had been worse since the American had died. Max Fabrikant had come storming in, demanding to see copies of every communication that might have passed through the hands of the radio man, ordering the rest of them about like children or mental defectives. Emil had been obliged to report the episode to Moscow, of course. In an attempt to cover himself, he had reported that he had been wary of Harvey Prince for some time and had severely restricted his access. Emil doubted whether this would counteract the poison Max was spreading. Max must have found out by now that Emil had personally recruited Harvey Prince during his stopover in New York. Prince came recommended by one of Emil’s most trusted agents, a man he relied on in the old days when they joked that he was the czar of the American Communist movement. Emil had no reason to distrust either Harvey Prince or his sponsor. The boy had his failings, for sure, and he was close to a crack-up after that business in the north, but Emil privately refused to think of him as a traitor. In fact, he suspected something very different: that Max Fabrikant had cooked up the whole affair in order to destroy him.
