“What you said earlier about him….,” Conquer mumbled, tearing his eyes away from the painting.
“Just a second, honey,” said Verbena, putting up one long finger.
At the top of the stairs she came to a door, painted the same indigo as the drawn window shades Conquer had seen outside.
She knocked on the door and leaned in close, both to listen and speak through it.
“China? You coming out, baby?”
“I don’t feel up to it, Mama,” answered a muffled, miserable sounding voice.
“Well fetch yourself something to eat or you’ll be sliding through sewer grates.”
“Yes, Mama.”
Verbena pursed her lips and shook her head. She straightened, and gestured to Conquer to follow her down the hall.
“Poor thing. New girl. She’s taking Papa’s death so hard.”
“What’s all this ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ jive?” Conquer asked.
“No jive. These poor children were cast out from their families for being what they are,” said Verbena, motioning for him to follow her down the upstairs hallway. “Every child needs a mama and a papa, especially when the ones they were born with forfeit the right to the title.”
They came to a large bedroom at the end of the hall that was right out of Gone With The Wind, with a Southern style four-poster canopy bed and French dressing table, matching bookshelves, fleur-de-lis wallpaper. There were paintings of places he barely remembered from his childhood; the rain slick avenue of Royal Street with its baroque, cast-iron balconies, lit by a lone streetlamp. Another of The Presbytere looking from Jackson Square. A row of cottages with folks sitting on the porches in the evening, smoking.
“We took our honeymoon in New Orleans,” Verbena said, following his eyes. “I fell in love with it. Always hoped we’d go back there someday.”
“You painted these?”
Verbena nodded, and went to one of the bookshelves.
“Never could make much of a living off it. Up here they pay thousands of dollars for finger painting and soup cans. White folks. These are your uncle’s books.”
Conquer walked cautiously into the room.
He squinted at the shelf. There was a row of slim paperbacks with titles like Rabbit’s Trick, The Penetrating Gaze, Go Do That Voodoo, and Get Thee Behind Me, Satan! They all bore the name Silas Méchant.
“Never knew he was a writer,” said Conquer.
Curious, he slid Get Thee Behind Me, Satan! out. It was some kind of detective novel, put out by a Hamilton Lodge Press. The cover depicted a light skinned, long haired black man all in tight white leathers, with a huge golden cross belt buckle, who sort of resembled an effete Ron Green in Superfly. He was standing tall in front of a pink Cadillac. Sprawled across the hood of the Caddy on his belly was a lean, muscled, horned red Devil figure, totally naked, a pitchfork dangling lazily from one hand, running his own serpentine, arrowhead tail suggestively between his fingers under his pointed Van Dyke, looking hungrily up at the main character.
“What the fuck is this?” Conquer exclaimed, flipping through the pages, not daring to do much more than skim the lurid writing inside to confirm his suspicions.
“Peter Rabbit, The Fey Detective,” Verbena laughed lightly. “Occult detective sort of stuff, like Duke de Richleau and Phillip Marlowe but with a faggy, black edge. I was his cover artist. That’s how we met. They were a big hit. Mainly, I think, because he put real places in the stories. They’re kind of undercover Damron Guides, you know?”
Conquer looked blankly at Verbena.
“Like a green book for queers,” said Verbena. “A guide to bath houses, massage parlors, which parks are safe and when, friendly bars. Wherever we traveled he did research. L.A., ‘Frisco, Chicago, New Orleans. The supernatural stuff was mostly real too. These used to fly off the rack at The Magickal Childe.”
Conquer shook his head and put the book back.
Then he noticed a framed black and white photo on the shelf; Uncle Silas looking stylish in sunglasses and a porkpie hat, that ever-present Isis Knot belt buckle. He was grinning ear to ear, holding eight year old John Conquer standing on a fire hydrant. He remembered his mother taking this picture.
“He loved you a whole lot,” Verbena said.
“Never told me he was still alive.”
“He respected your father’s wishes.”
“How about when my mama died?”
“He sent money to Mama Underwood for you,” Verbena said. “Every month.”
Mama Underwood had taken Conquer in after his mother had been run down by a taxi when he was twelve.
“She never said anything.”
“Mama Underwood was a churchgoing woman,” Verbena said. “She didn’t want him around anymore than your daddy did. Oh, she took the money though.”
“What about when I came back from ‘Nam?” he said, putting the picture back on the shelf. Angry, full of hate, teaching kids in the Bronx what he’d learned at Parris Island; he could have used a real family then.
“You were grown. He had his own family to take care of by then.” She tentatively laid a hand on his elbow. “I know this is like losing him all over again.”
It really was. To think his uncle had been a few train stops away all these years, playing daddy to a bunch of….
Conquer pushed it aside.
“You said the cops wouldn’t investigate his death. What happened?”
“I found him in bed. He was always an early riser, so I went upstairs to check on him. They said it was a heart attack.”
Conquer looked at Verbena.
“The man jogged every morning before dawn,” said Verbena, catching that look. “He was a swimmer. He was in excellent physical health.”
“Sometimes a heart just runs out of beats,” Conquer said with a shrug.
“A woman knows.”
Conquer couldn’t stop a grin.
“Maybe. But….”
“Don’t say it,” said Verbena holding up her hand. “You know, I thought you would have some empathy. I thought you’d look into it. If ever you loved Silas….” She began to tear up, and put the back of her hand to her face and turned away.
Conquer sighed.
“What am I supposed to do, dig the man up and check his cholesterol?”
“Somebody beat you to it,” Verbena said.
“What?”
Verbena turned back to him, dabbing at her eyes with a purple lace handkerchief.
“We laid him to rest at Greenwood Cemetery, in the plot he set aside for the both of us. He wasn’t in the ground for a week before he was dug up.”
“You mean somebody took his body?”
“Unless he dug himself out. I went to lay flowers. The caretaker was there, trying to clean up the mess. The dirt was piled like a dog had dug him up.”
“Then what you want me to look into is a grave robbery, not a murder.”
“He was murdered,” Verbena insisted. “A week before he died one of the girls, Amaretta, died in her sleep. She was twenty years old, in the prime of life, but they said heart attack. Now John Conquer, are you going to stand there and tell me a man can catch a heart attack like the flu?”
“She died the same way?”
“The same way. In her room, in the night, in bed.”
“Was her body stolen?”
Verbena started.
“I….don’t know. I never thought to check. After Silas….I was so upset.”
“Greenwood Cemetery?”
Verbena nodded.
“What was Amaretta’s real name?”
“Christopher Charles Aimes,” said Verbena, and spelled it.
“You really don’t have a phone?”
“Noisy things. Anybody I care to talk to, they come and see me.”
“Right. Wait here, then.”
As he was leaving the house, he nearly bumped into a light skinned transvestite in a silk robe backing out of the indigo bedroom door and closing it quietly.
> She gasped at the sight of Conquer, and let out with;
“Eh! Eh! Gawd! Oonah gimme skayre, jookass!”
Conquer nearly burst out laughing.
“Sorry,” he said.
Fine featured, her black braided hair laced with cowrie shells, she could have fooled him in a dim club. She saw it too, and flashed a tentative smile.
“It’s alright, you just startled me.”
That affect. Genteel, southern. No trace of the deep low country patois she had flung out in a pinch. It was a good act.
“You must be Chinaberry.”
“China. You have me at a disadvantage,” she said, holding out her hand to be kissed. More Tennessee Williams than Zora Neale Hurston now.
He chuckled and shrugged past her for the stairs.
“Let’s keep it that way.”
She frowned at him.
“Po’buckranigga,” he heard her mutter as he went out the front door.
It took longer to find a working payphone than to find out what had become of Christopher Charles Aimes’ body from Lou Lazzeroni. Six dimes too.
“Yeah my guy at the 7-1 tells me it’s the second body missing from Greenwood inside a week,” said Lazzeroni. “Looks like there’s a run. Anything we should be concerned about? Vampires maybe?”
Lazzeroni was always on the lookout for vampires after that thing at Harlem Hospital.
“No vampires, Lou. Maybe something else.”
“Alright, well. Keep in touch if you need me,” Lazzeroni said.
Conquer found Verbena waiting on the front porch, smoking through a long cigarette holder and staring hard at the Hasidim walking up and down the street.
“Do you want to know what I think?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “I think we are under magical attack by some unseen power. I think it’s those Jews.”
“Jews,” Conquer repeated.
“You’ve seen how they look at us. They hate us. I think they summoned up some kind of Old Testament demon to stop their hearts.”
“I heard of a lot of things, but I never heard of a rabbi givin’ people heart attacks,” said Conquer. “Unless he ran a deli.”
What he knew of Jewish necromancy didn’t seem to fit this either. It was mainly divinatory stuff.
“I understood you had a head for this kind of thing,” Verbena said. “For spiritual matters. In Harlem they say John Conquer is the man you call. They know you even in the boroughs, after that thing that went down at the Empire Roller Disco.”
Conquer shrugged. He’d gotten a lot of referrals after that one.
“Christopher Charles…”
“Amaretta,” Verbena corrected him.
“Amaretta’s body was dug up too. Look, I could do some divinatory stuff,” Conquer said. “But without a body….”
“Boy, you misunderstand. I’m a full-fledged mambo,” Verbena cut him off, drawing herself up. “What need do I have of your hoodoo? Your walking boy and your bone rattling and your pendulums? Don’t you think I can call upon the whole Ghede Nation?”
“Then what do you need me for?”
“To deal with his killer, whomever or whatever it is,” said Verbena. “I’m a mambo, not Peter motherfuckin’ Cushing. This type of shit is above my pay grade. In the meantime, I need a hounto.”
“A drummer?” Conquer said, dubiously.
She led him inside, and this time, downstairs, and pulled a chain. A sleepy black goat tied in the corner bleated in alarm at their appearance. Here then was the badji; the heart of their société; a dirt-floored honfour with a decorated poto mitan center post and altars. Painted on the walls were a variety of Catholic saints, alternating with sequined applique flags depicting lwa, the living, deified ancestral spirits of Vodun, next to their white European counterparts; Maman Brigitte and Saint Bridget, Erzuli and Our Lady of The Seven Sorrows, her heart bristling with swords, high-hatted Papa Ghede and the archangel St. Gabriel, and a great and gloriously colored flag of Ghede Nibo in his black hat and tails and a purple ball gown, beside a painting of Saint Gerard Majella, bearing a crucifix and skull and gazing heavenward. These were all evidently painted by Verbena’s hand.
But it was the batterie in the corner that drew Conquer’s attention, and his heart. They were the same lovingly crafted drums he had played with his uncle and his father as a boy.
He crossed the temple space to them, and ran the palm of his hand across the hide of the great leopard-spotted Manman. It was like the rough page of a favorite old book turning back to the beginning of its beloved story. He closed his eyes and saw the twirl of his mama’s skirts, the glint of his papa’s smile, and the sweat sheen on his laughing uncle’s face. Holding his hand there, the taut drum felt like the belly of a pregnant woman, its unborn rhythm kicking lightly against his palm in holy expectancy.
“Your uncle said he taught you when you were a boy. He said before that, you were initiated by your grandmother.”
“That was more years back then I can remember,” Conquer said. “I haven’t touched a drum in….”
“Amaretta beat the Boula for us, “Verbena continued. “She’s gone. Tonight, you’ll take her place. For your uncle. We’ll ask Ghede Nibo what became of them, and you will give them justice.”
Each lwa of each nation responded to their own rhythm, but Verbena assured Conquer that Guede Nibo, leader of the dead, patron of those who had gone under the waters before their time, would surely come tonight, whether or not there was a master drummer on the Boula.
To be safe though, they practiced in the basement all afternoon, Verbena reacquainting Conquer with the functions of the drums and the power behind them. Some of these lessons, he remembered from his uncle.
“Three drums in the Rada batterie, representing the three worlds,” said Verbena, instituting a low, steady ostinato on the Segon which Conquer took up with his sticks. “The Boula and the Segon play the constant rhythm, the heartbeat of the earthly world. It is the duty of the Manman drummer to shatter that rhythm, to alter the current.” She increased the rhythm slightly to demonstrate, and nodded as Conquer’s beat changed accordingly. “This calls to Papa Legba the gatekeeper, and heralds the descent of the lwa down the center pole from Lavilokan, onto a willing cheval. Now do you got all that, nephew?”
“Nephew, huh?” Conquer said. “That make you my auntie or my uncle?”
“Child, look at me. I am an Auntie born.” She slapped his knee and he laughed, laying aside his sticks. “Now let’s eat. I’ll introduce you to my daughters. Your cousins.”
“I don’t know,” Conquer said warily, as she stood and took him by the wrist. “What the hell are we gonna have to say to each other?”
“You have to beat the drum to hear the sound,” said Verbena, pulling him along.
She led him upstairs to a tasty meal of djondjon rice and fried griot with plantains. Maybe the cook, Jasmine, heavy set and dark skinned with a wisp of chin hair, made for a homely woman, but in the kitchen she was Pam Grier.
It turned out Conquer didn’t have to say much at all. They did most all the talking.
Dinner, reserved at first, became a boisterous thing once Conquer and the queens warmed to each other. He grew to accept their playfulness and flirting, and recognized his Uncle Silas’ dry wit in their biting, hilarious back and forth, and even, deep down, to envy it a little. This was the type of family dinner he’d never really had.
They came from all over; Ginger had been run out of Texas, Rosemary had been cut off from a sizable inheritance and a big house in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. Damiana was from Chicago, Lobelia and Calendula from New Orleans and Lafayette respectively. Jasmine hailed from Port Au Prince, which explained the cooking. Chinaberry, or China, as she liked to be called, demurely claimed Daufuskie Island in South Carolina.
She remained aloof towards Conquer after their earlier interaction, but, he noticed, she seemed to be apart from the others too, austere where they were raucous. Verbena had said she was the newest among them
, but she seemed slightly disapproving of their antics, and except for Verbena, they in turn shunned her. Conquer wondered if their carefree display made China uncomfortable in light of the deaths, which Verbena had said she’d taken particularly hard.
After dinner, Verbena led the others down into the honfour to prepare, and Conquer volunteered to remain up in the kitchen with Jasmine doing dishes.
This won over the big Haitian queen in a major way. She scrubbed as he dried, and she rubbed one big hip against him like an oversized cat at every opportunity. Given the space she took up at the sink, there were plenty.
“You will beat the Boula tonight?” Jasmine asked.
“That’s the idea. I’m not very good.”
“Psh. They say a borrowed drum never makes good dancing, but the Boula is of your blood. You will do Papa proud,” Jasmine said. “You look like him. We all loved that man.”
“Somebody didn’t, according to Verbena,” Conquer said. He looked at her sideways, saw her purse her lips. “Maybe you don’t believe he was murdered.”
“I love Mama Verbena. She must do whatever she must to get past this hurt.”
“But his body was dug up. So was Amaretta’s,” said Conquer. “That’s a pretty big coincidence, ain’t it?”
“Perhaps. But you know as well as I what left handed business goes on in cemeteries all over this city in the dark of the night,” Jasmine said. “Witches, Devil-worshipers, cults. Strange times; enough to make a person question their faith. Bondye bon.”
“Do the others believe Amaretta and my uncle were killed?”
“Ginger would believe anything Mama Verbena says. She was half beaten to death when she stumbled off the bus from Dallas. Mama Verbena saved her life. Lobelia and Calendula would leap into fire for her. Rosemary thinks as I do.”
“What about China?”
“That one,” said Jasmine, wrinkling her nose. “Se rat kay k ap manje kay. No, not a rat. A stray cat. At the Harlem Ball, she competed as a Femme Queen. She cried like a baby when she lost. We learned she was just up from the South, and had no money, no place to stay. Papa took pity on her. He should never have brought her into this house.”
Conquer (The John Conquer Series Book 1) Page 5
