Tropic of Night jp-1

by Michael Gruber

  “A poison?”

  “Yes. Extremely potent. I don’t know what it’s doing here. Was the woman poisoned, too? I read the story in the paper this morning. I thought it was an evisceration.”

  Paz decided to yield a scrap of information. “Apparently she died before she had time to bleed to death. Her heart stopped. Could this ouabain do that?”

  “No question. In Central Africa they use it to kill elephants.” She gestured at the tox report. “As I said, this is remarkable. The cocktail of substances?I have no idea what the result of this combination would be.”

  “We figure he wanted to knock her out, so he could, um, do his operation.”

  “I don’t know.” She put her finger on one of the polysyllabic names. “This one here is a phenanthrene.”

  “What’s a phenanthrene?” Paz had his notebook out and was scribbling in it.

  “A narcotic. Morphine and codeine are phenanthrenes. I’d have to check, but I think it’s the one derived from Fagara zanthoxyloides, which is widely used as a narcotic in West Africa.”

  “So that would have knocked her out.”

  “In the right dose, yes. But then why this other stuff? Some of them typically make the user run around hallucinating like crazy. But who knows what they would do in combination? And we don’t know what the original dose was. What about the stomach contents?”

  “Zip. She took it in through the nose or skin.”

  “Hmph! That’s unusual, but not unknown?snuffs and salves applied to the mucosa. Usually they ingest an infusion or eat the raw plant matter. Fascinating. And then there’s this. tetrahydra-?-carboline. What’s that doing there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not a botanical. It’s an alkaloid found naturally in the brain and especially in the pineal body. In her lungs? It’s interesting because it’s chemically related to ibogaine and the various Banisteriopsis and Tabernanthe alkaloids.”

  “Why is that interesting?”

  Dr. Herrera allowed herself a sigh. “It’s fairly complicated and I don’t see what forensic value it has. And, as I thought I had made clear, I’m extremely busy …”

  “Why don’t you let me be the judge of forensic value. Just give me the dummy version.”

  “Fine.” She spouted rapidly and in monotone. “Question: why should chemicals produced by plants have profound psychotropic activity in human brains? Answer: because plants have evolved to produce analogues and antagonists of alkaloids and neuroactive substances present in the brains of animals so that if animals eat them they will get sick and learn not to eat them. Opiates, for example, imitate brain endorphins and bind to the same sites, hyoscine competes with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, the harmines and other indole derivatives are chemically similar to serotonin, which is an important neurotransmitter in brain regions associated with emotionality and perception. It’s probably why they can act as hallucinogens. The fact that tetrahydra-?-carboline is related to ibogaine, et cetera, is interesting for the same reason. What it means, we don’t know. The pineal gland’s function is obscure?it seems to be some kind of endocrine gland in antagonistic relationship to the pituitary, and hence intimately connected with a whole range of physiological and psychological control functions. In fact, now that I think about it, there’s another pineal hormone, adrenoglomerulotropine, that’s identical to a psychotropic botanical, 6-methoxytetrahydroharman.”

  Paz had more or less stopped listening. Her spiel was completely beyond him, not that he would ever admit this. The last named gobbledygook, however, was familiar. “That was in the corpse, too, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  “Yes. But don’t ask me what it all means, because I don’t know. Nobody does. You’re at the frontiers of psychopharmacology here.”

  “Would Dr. Salazar?”

  Herrera frowned. “Maria? Of course not. Less than I do, certainly. She’s an anthropologist.”

  “I don’t mean the hard science. I meant the particular mix of drugs. Maybe she’s seen it before.”

  She shrugged. “It’s unlikely. Santeros don’t typically use powerful psychotropics. They’re more into elacampane and sarsaparilla, and botanical symbolism. Now … will that be all?”

  Paz stashed his notebook and stood. “Yes. You’ve been very helpful, Doctor, and I want to apologize for any misunderstanding with your secretary.”

  A slight smile. “You mean you wouldn’t have had me locked up?”

  “Only in an extremely comfortable cell. And, if the Miami PD can ever do you a favor …”

  “Thank you. If you catch this guy, I’d love to talk with him. About plants.”

  “Let’s catch him first. By the way, do you happen to know when Dr. Salazar will be back? I called her house and got a message …”

  Dr. Herrera looked down at her desk. “Yes, but I can’t help you there. Maria keeps her movements somewhat confidential.”

  “And why is that?”

  “You’d have to ask her,” said Dr. Herrera, not smiling at all anymore.

  Paz left, feeling he had missed something important. He didn’t like being on the frontiers of science, and he did not see how the dense slug of information he had extracted from the ethnobotanist brought him any closer to the murderer, who now seemed to be not only a skilled surgeon, but a master of psychopharmacology. Ordinarily, putting an unknown suspect in a new class was a good thing. If you knew your guy was a plumber and you found he liked bass fishing, that was good. If you found out he bred beagles, even better. It was possible to interview all the bass-fishing, beagle-breeding plumbers in Dade County and ask them where they were on the night of, and there you had it. Skillful eviscerators who knew a lot about tropical pharmacology should have generated a similarly small class, but … where to begin looking? Hunters? Actual surgeons? Butchers? Veterinarians? With a sideline in tropical plants?

  Paz stepped from the shade cast by the science building and the morning sun socked him in the face. He put on his Vuarnets and crossed Memorial Drive almost unseeing, deep in his own head. The vision: a black man slipping around a corner, climbing the stairs to Deandra Wallace’s apartment. A black man because the vic was black, and that was the way it almost always went: people kill their own, plus there was Deandra’s boyfriend’s testimony about the African witch doctor, they had to take account of that, too. And a white fellow at night in Overtown would have registered like a comet in the minds of neighbors and passersby. An intelligent black man. He’d left no obvious clues, besides that damned nut, and they knew that Youghans’s violent outburst had been responsible for it ending up under the bed. The killer had lifted the rest of the opele, obviously, but missed the one nut. So, not so perfect. But the attempted frame was clever, and if not for Barlow’s religio-cracker intuition, Youghans would have gone down for it. So, an intelligent, educated black man. Not a homeboy. But a race man. Interested in Africa, in African ritual and culture. That’s how he had hooked Deandra, who had also been an aficionado of sorts. Rebelling from the striving, conventional parents. And the African angle was looking more interesting. The plants that had produced the drugs in the victim’s body were African plants. Could the guy be an actual African? He used an African-sounding name. That would be something else to check.

  He was in shade again; the tower of the Richter Library loomed over him, and obeying an impulse, he entered the building. Like any autodidact, Paz knew how to use a library. He spent an hour or two in the pharmacology section, copying down chemical structures to go with the substances found in the victim and those Herrera had mentioned. He couldn’t follow the neurophysiological material very well?there seemed to be an inordinate number of substances involved in producing thought, rather more than seemed necessary to Paz, given the extremely simple nature of most people’s thoughts. But he read enough to recognize that Herrera had been right when she said that not much was known about the connection between the soup of chemicals and the production of mental states. Abandoning these researches, he went to seek mor
e wisdom on the use of psychotropic botanicals by traditional shamans. His beeper went off?Barlow calling?but he ignored it and continued his pacing through the stacks. The University of Miami does not have a graduate program in anthropology, but it does have a department of Caribbean and African Studies, and a special collection in Richter to go with it. This has its own room, a typical special-collection establishment: counter with a clerk, several long blond wood tables, ceiling-high shelves all around, a few display cabinets exhibiting books and photographs.

  Two dark women were working quietly at one of the long tables. They glanced up when Paz came into the quiet room and went back to what they were doing. At another table, surrounded by books and papers, sat an elderly woman writing in a notebook. The hair stood up on the back of Paz’s neck as he recognized her.

  He noted that her hands were ink-stained, that she used an old-fashioned fountain pen, that her white hair was thick and wiry, springing out from the sides of her head in two wedges, like pieces of angel cake. She was wearing a fawn-colored linen dress with a pointed collar and a row of closely spaced jet buttons down the front, and she had thrown a dark mohair cardigan over her shoulders against the air-conditioned chill. He stared at her; she looked up briefly and went back to her writing. He sat down opposite her and said, in Spanish, “Dr. Salazar, if you could spare me a minute or two, I very much wish to speak with you.”

  Her head popped up. A peculiar series of expressions passed across her face: first surprise, then an instant of fear, then a resettling of the features into the social persona, reserved and a little wary. She said, “Why is that, senor? And how did you know I was here?”

  Her face was covered with tiny wrinkles, but the peach-colored skin still clung closely to the fine bones. A curved, bold nose, a determined chin, the eyes still bright, though sunken into their sockets and brown-shadowed beneath. She looks older than she did on the book jacket, Paz thought, and also that she must have stopped traffic in 1940s Havana. He displayed his badge and photo identification.

  “I’m a homicide detective. I want to discuss certain aspects of a recent murder with you. As for how I knew you were here, I didn’t. I thought you were out of the country. I came here to do some research and here you were. Synchronicity.”

  “You mean serendipity, Detective,” said Dr. Salazar after a considering moment. “It would be synchronicity only if I sought you out before you knew you wanted to see me.”

  TEN

  Running around naked looking for the trick of it is perhaps as good a symbol of the relationship I had with Marcel Vierchau as anything else. In memory, now, he is always laughing and I am trying to find the joke, on the verge of feeling hurt. Yet it is difficult to stay angry with a man having so good a time, and he was never vindictive, or mean, or cruel. He just thought I was funny; and was I not? A large, somewhat overbred American girl, mad for sex and ethnography, desperate for approval, would have been funny to a man like Marcel, and especially amusing were my pathetic efforts to spy out his secrets. While we were together, I would actually hide myself and try to watch him, looking for the incredibly clever, spidery apparatus that enabled him to pull off his stunts. When he was out of the apartment, or the tent or the van, I made it a habit to poke through his things. Yes, embarrassing; and worse, I never found anything.

  Marcel knew, and it amazed him, because his whole life was dedicated to teaching that real magic was a technology of the mind, not of smoke and mirrors. It’s your Catholic prejudice against witchcraft, he’d tell me, you can’t allow yourself to believe that someone you love is really a witch and so you look for wires.

  We were together for seven years, continuously, almost. Based in Paris, we traveled to every continent?city, jungle, desert, steppe. The problem with a relationship like that is that the girl gets spoiled. His friends are so much more interesting than your friends. When famous people listen to you respectfully at dinner parties, do you really want to go clubbing with twenty-somethings? You don’t. They say the young woman delights in her sexual power over the older man, and that this is good for her confidence and self-esteem. Maybe so, but in exchange her real life is stolen from her, and she grows up twisted, like a pear tree espaliered against the wall of the Great Man. And what does she do when the wall crumbles? As it must.

  I don’t know whether thinking about Marcel and what happened in the garden last night are connected. No, I do know?it’s all connected. For a long time I was spared the pangs of memory; post-traumatic shock, I suppose, or perverted will, but now things are loosening up, like the ice breaking in springtime on the Yei.

  It’s going to be another (another!) hot day today and here I am thinking about the Yei. I used to think about the Yei in Danolo, too, memories of coolness being especially precious there. I’m a northern girl. I love fog and mist, and crisp, cheek-pinching nights, and crunching through snow, and so I ask you why am I here and why have I spent much of my life in the fucking tropics? I don’t suffer from the heat, as some do, though. I’m adaptable to the various extreme climates where live the sort of people anthropologists dote on: steaming jungles, baking deserts, frozen steppes.

  Perhaps I could show up at Medical Records in shorts and T-shirt, the same sort of outfit that Luz is now pulling on. She wishes to select her own clothes and dress herself. Muffa is merely to watch, and check the clock and worry about being late.

  The Yei is a river in Siberia, one of those long, sluggish Arctic rivers that only ascend to literate consciousness as crossword clues. Six down: Siberian river, three letters: the mighty Mil. The winding Sem. The rushing Yei. The Chenka pass the winter on its banks, and one winter I did, too, with Marcel, so that I could harvest a doctoral dissertation out of the soil he had so brilliantly cultivated. I was twenty-seven and it had lately occurred to me that being Vierchau’s beautiful assistant was not a lifetime career. I was to study woman’s magic, which among the Chenka is quite different from the men’s magic that Marcel knew about.

  The Chenka are pastoralists related to the Yakut, and speak a similar language, but their connection with the various Yakut tribes is obscure. The other Yakut avoid them, sometimes even deny that there are any Chenka people at all. Except when they wish to learn. The Chenka operate a kind of informal, floating sorcerer’s university and at any particular time you will find among them Yakuts, Buryats, Altais, Evenks, and peoples from even further off, Yukakirs, Nenets, Khants, and, once, an American, me.

  Marcel discovered the Chenka in 1969 in the journal of a Soviet functionary named T. I. Berozhinski. This included an eyewitness report of how a group of Siberian nomads had walked through a cordon of OGPU troops who had come to arrest them. This occurred in daylight, and none of the secret policemen saw a thing. Berozhinski saw them, but when he told the commissar in charge, he got sent straight to the gulag, where he died. Other than this, the Chenka were unknown to history or anthropology.

  Marcel was thunderstruck by the account. If Berozhinski was not bemused himself or a liar, the Chenka had witched their way through scores of the most brutal, unimaginative, and disciplined men on earth. This was no pathetic ethnic remnant like the jungle tribes he and his colleagues normally studied. He was instantly on fire to see them for himself.

  Marcel arranged for a scientific study visa, went to Siberia, met the Chenka, was amazed. He went again and stayed for his seven years. The rest is now familiar from the pages of his book. The Chenka had real magic, whatever that means.

  Another peg snagging the folds of the net of my life. Berozhinski begat Vierchau, and Vierchau begat Doe. Since the start of our connection, not more than days after that first marathon in bed, I had been bugging Marcel to take me to the Chenka. It was somehow never arranged. Always other commitments intervened or there was some hitch with the authorities, or they invaded Afghanistan, or something. But now at last I, too, was encamped upon the Yei, learning how to make mare’s milk yogurt, kvass, and women’s magic. So called. The Chenka practice a sexual egalitarianism quite remarkab
le among pastoral societies, which tend to be ferociously patriarchal, women being merely a sort of cattle. Among the Chenka it is otherwise, and I think it is because the women exercise substantial powers in the magical realm. The women, for example, decide who is to marry whom, and whether they will have children, and of what sex. So the Chenka and Marcel believed, and during my year with them I saw nothing to contradict it. Puniekka expressed amazement when I told her that in the lands of the Alues, the non-Chenka, there were such things as unwanted children, and people who wanted children and couldn’t have them. She was further astounded that we did not routinely determine the sex of our babies in advance.

  Puniekka was the shaman in whose yurt I lodged. This was another of the disappointments of my Siberian experience. I had imagined that Marcel and I would live together, as a team. I thought he was being hyberbolic when he said that when we got to Chenka we would hardly see each other. But it was so. Sexual segregation among the Chenka during the seasonal migration is nearly total. The men are out all day moving the herds, and the women are cooking, brewing, and making things as the carts rumble across the steppe. The men all eat together, too, in their herding camp. The women bring them their morning and evening meal, packed in clay pots. Child rearing is matrilocal: women own the yurts, carts, and all the physical apparatus of the culture, except for personal clothing, harness, and magical apparatus. The men own all the animals. Paternal care is diffuse and paternal lineage obscure. The Chenka understand the association of pregnancy with sex, but they often attribute the qualities of a child to spiritual rather than earthly parenthood.