The Saint on the Spanish Main (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  He headed straight for the bar of the Châtelet des Fleurs and the long relaxing drink that he had looked forward to all the way up. The waiter who was on duty brought him a note with it.

  Dear Mr Templar,

  I’m sorry your visit yesterday had to be so short. If it wouldn’t bore you too much, I should enjoy another meeting. Could you come to dinner tonight? Just send word by the bearer.

  Sincerely,

  Theron Netlord

  Simon glanced up.

  “Is someone still waiting for an answer?”

  “Yes, sir. Outside.”

  The Saint pulled out his pen and scribbled at the foot of the note:

  Thanks. I’ll be with you about 7.

  S. T.

  He decided, practically in the same instant in which the irresponsible impulse occurred to him, against signing himself with the little haloed stick figure which he had made famous. As he handed the note back to the waiter he reflected that, in the circumstances, his mere acceptance was bravado enough.

  4

  There were drums beating somewhere in the hills, faint and far-off, calling and answering each other from different directions, their sound wandering and echoing through the night so that it was impossible ever to be certain just where a particular tattoo had come from. It reached inside Netlord’s house as a kind of vague vibration, like the endless thin chorus of nocturnal insects, which was so persistent that the ear learned to filter it out and for long stretches would be quite deaf to it, and then, in a lull in the conversation, with an infinitesimal retiming of attention, it would come back in a startling crescendo.

  Theron Netlord caught the Saint listening at one of those moments, and said, “They’re having a brûler zin tonight.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The big voodoo festive ceremony which climaxes most of the special rites. Dancing, litanies, invocation, possession by loas, more dances, sacrifice, more invocations and possessions, more dancing. It won’t begin until much later. Right now they’re just telling each other about it, warming up and getting in the mood.”

  Simon had been there for more than an hour, and this was the first time there had been any mention of voodoo.

  Netlord had made himself a good if somewhat overpowering host. He mixed excellent rum cocktails, but without offering his guest the choice of anything else. He made stimulating conversation, salted with recurrent gibes at bureaucratic government and the Welfare State, but he held the floor so energetically that it was almost impossible to take advantage of the provocative openings he offered.

  Simon had not seen Sibao again. Netlord had opened the door himself, and the cocktail makings were already on a side table in the living room. There had been subdued rustlings and clinkings behind a screen that almost closed a dark alcove at the far end of the room, but no servant announced dinner: presently Netlord had announced it himself, and led the way around the screen and switched on a light, revealing a damask-covered table set for two and burdened additionally with chafing dishes, from which he himself served rice, asparagus, and a savory chicken stew rather like coq au vin. It was during one of the dialogue breaks induced by eating that Netlord had caught Simon listening to the drums.

  “Brûler—that means ‘burn,’ ” said the Saint. “But what is zin?”

  “The zin is a special earthenware pot. It stands on a tripod, and a fire is lighted under it. The mambo kills a sacrificial chicken by sticking her finger down into its mouth and tearing its throat open.” Netlord took a hearty mouthful of stew. “She sprinkles blood and feathers in various places, and the plucked hens go into the pot with some corn. There’s a chant:

  “Hounsis là yo, levez, nous domi trope;

  Hounsis là yo, levez, pour nous laver yeux nous:

  Gadé qui l’heu li yé.”

  “Later on she serves the boiling food right into the bare hands of the hounsis. Sometimes they put their bare feet in the flames too. It doesn’t hurt them. The pots are left on the fire till they get red hot and crack, and everyone shouts ‘Zin yo craqués!’”

  “It sounds like a big moment,” said the Saint gravely. “If I could understand half of it.”

  “You mean you didn’t get very far with your researches today?”

  Simon felt the involuntary contraction of his stomach muscles, but he was able to control his hands so that there was no check in the smooth flow of what he was doing.

  “How did you know about my researches?” he asked, as if he were only amused to have them mentioned.

  “I dropped in to see Atherton Lee this morning, and asked after you. He told me where you’d gone. He said he’d told you about my interest in voodoo, and he supposed you were getting primed for an argument. I must admit, that encouraged me to hope you’d accept my invitation tonight.”

  The Saint thought that that might well qualify among the great understatements of the decade, but he did not let himself show it. After their first reflex leap his pulses ran like cool clockwork.

  “I didn’t find out too much,” he said, “except that voodoo is a lot more complicated than I imagined. I thought it was just a few primitive superstitions that the slaves brought with them from Africa.”

  “Of course, some of it came from Dahomey. But how did it get there? The voodoo story of the Creation ties up with the myths of ancient Egypt. The Basin of Damballah—that’s a sort of font at the foot of a voodoo altar—is obviously related to the blood trough at the foot of a Mayan altar. Their magic uses the Pentacle—the same mystic figure that medieval European magicians believed in. If you know anything about it, you can find links with eighteenth-century Masonry in some of their rituals, and even the design of the vêvers—”

  “Those are the sacred drawings that are supposed to summon the gods to take possession of their devotees, aren’t they? I read about them.”

  “Yes, when the houngan draws them by dripping ashes and corn meal from his fingers, with the proper invocation. And doesn’t that remind you of the sacred sand paintings of the Navajos? Do you see how all those roots must go back to a common source that’s older than any written history?”

  Netlord stared at the Saint challengingly, in one of those rare pauses where he waited for an answer.

  Simon’s fingertips touched the hard shape of the little tin plaque that was still in his shirt pocket, but he decided against showing it, and again he checked the bet.

  “I saw a drawing of the vêver of Erzulie in a book,” he said. “Somehow, it made me think of Catholic symbols connected with the Virgin Mary—with the heart, the stars, and the M over it.”

  “Why not? Voodoo is pantheistic. The Church is against voodoo, not voodoo against the Church. Part of the purification prescribed for anyone who’s being initiated as a hounsis-canzo is to go to church and make confession. Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary are regarded as powerful intermediaries to the highest gods. Part of the litany they’ll chant tonight at the brûler zin goes: Grâce, Marie, grâce, Marie grâce, grâce, Marie grâce, Jésus, pardonnez-nous!”

  “Seriously?”

  “The invocation of Legbas Atibon calls on St Anthony of Padua: Par pouvoir St-Antoine de Padoue. And take the invocation of my own patron, Ogoun Feraille. It begins: Par pouvoir St-Jacques Majeur…”

  “Isn’t that blasphemy?” said the Saint. “I mean, a kind of deliberate sacrilege, like they’re supposed to use in a Black Mass, to win the favor of devils by defiling something holy?”

  Netlord’s fist crashed on the table like a thunderclap.

  “No, it isn’t! The truth can’t be blasphemous. Sacrilege is a sin invented by bigots to try to keep God under contract to their own exclusive club. As if supernatural facts could be altered by human name-calling! There are a hundred sects all claiming to be the only true Christianity, and Christianity is only one of thousands of religions, all claiming to have the only genuine divine revelation. But the real truth is bigger than any one of them and includes them all!”

  “I’m s
orry,” said the Saint. “I forgot that you were a convert.”

  “Lee told you that, of course. I don’t deny it.” The metallic-gray eyes probed the Saint like knives. “I suppose you think I’m crazy.”

  “I’d rather say I was puzzled.”

  “Because you wouldn’t expect a man like me to have any time for mysticism.”

  “Maybe.”

  Netlord poured some more wine.

  “That’s where you show your own limitations. The whole trouble with Western civilization is that it’s blind in one eye. It doesn’t believe in anything that can’t be weighed and measured or reduced to a mathematical or chemical formula. It thinks it knows all the answers because it invented airplanes and television and hydrogen bombs. It thinks other cultures were backward because they fooled around with levitation and telepathy and raising the dead instead of killing the living. Well, some mighty clever people were living in Asia and Africa and Central America, thousands of years before Europeans crawled out of their caves. What makes you so sure that they didn’t discover things that you don’t understand?”

  “I’m not so sure, but—”

  “Do you know why I got ahead of everybody else in business? Because I never wore a blinker over one eye. If anyone said he could do anything, I never said ‘That’s impossible.’ I said ‘Show me how.’ I don’t care who I learn from, a college professor or a ditch-digger, a Chinaman or a nigger—so long as I can use what he knows.”

  The Saint finished eating and picked up his glass.

  “And you think you’ll find something in voodoo that you can use?”

  “I have found it. Do you know what it is?”

  Simon waited to be told, but apparently it was not another of Netlord’s rhetorical questions. When it was clear that a reply was expected, he said, “Why should I?”

  “That’s what you were trying to find out at the Public Library.”

  “I suppose I can admit that,” Simon said mildly. “I’m a seeker for knowledge, too.”

  “I was afraid you would be, Templar, as soon as I heard your name. Not knowing who you were, I’d talked a little too much last night. It wouldn’t have mattered with anyone else, but as the Saint you’d be curious about me. You’d have to ask questions. Lee would tell you about my interest in voodoo. Then you’d try to find out what I could use voodoo for. I knew all that when I asked you to come here tonight.”

  “And I knew you knew all that when I accepted.”

  “Put your cards on the table, then. What did your reading tell you?”

  Simon felt unwontedly stupid. Perhaps because he had let Netlord do most of the talking, he must have done more than his own share of eating and drinking. Now it was an effort to keep up the verbal swordplay.

  “It wasn’t too much help,” he said. “The mythology of voodoo was quite fascinating, but I couldn’t see a guy like you getting a large charge out of spiritual trimmings. You’d want something that meant power, or money, or both. And the books I got hold of today didn’t have much factual material about the darker side of voodoo—the angles that I’ve seen played up in lurid fiction.”

  “Don’t stop now.”

  The Saint felt as if he lifted a slender blade once more against a remorseless bludgeon.

  “Of course,” he said, and meant to say it lightly, “you might really have union and government trouble if it got out that Netlord Underwear was being made by American zombies.”

  “So you guessed it,” Netlord said.

  5

  Simon Templar stared.

  He had a sensation of utter unreality, as if at some point he had slipped from wakeful life into a nightmare without being aware of the moment when he fell asleep. A separate part of his brain seemed to hear his own voice at a distance.

  “You really believe in zombies?”

  “That isn’t a matter of belief. I’ve seen them. A zombie prepared and served this dinner. That’s why he was ordered not to let you see him.”

  “Now I really need the cliché: this I have got to see!”

  “I’m afraid he’s left for the night,” Netlord said matter-of-factly.

  “But you know how to make ’em?”

  “Not yet. He belongs to the houngan. But I shall know before the sun comes up tomorrow. In a little while I shall go down to the houmfort, and the houngan will admit me to the last mysteries. The brûler zin afterwards is to celebrate that.”

  “Congratulations. What did you have to do to rate this?”

  “I’ve promised to marry his daughter, Sibao.”

  Simon felt as if he had passed beyond the capacity for surprise. A soft blanket of cotton wool was folding around his mind. Yet the other part of him kept talking.

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Don’t be absurd. As soon as I know all I need to, I can do without both of them.”

  “But suppose they resent that.”

  “Let me tell you something. Voodoo is a very practical kind of insurance. When a member is properly initiated, certain parts of a sacrifice and certain things from his body go into a little urn called the pot de tête, and after that the vulnerable element of his soul stays in the urn, which stays in the houmfort.”

  “Just like a safe deposit.”

  “And so, no one can lay an evil spell on him.”

  “Unless they can get hold of his pot de tète.”

  “So you see how easily I can destroy them if I act first.”

  The Saint moved his head as if to shake and clear it. It was like trying to shake a ton weight.

  “It’s very good of you to tell me all this,” he articulated mechanically. “But what makes you so confidential?”

  “I had to know how you’d respond to my idea when you knew it. Now you must tell me, truthfully.”

  “I think it stinks.”

  “Suppose you knew that I had creatures working for me, in a factory—zombies, who’d give me back all the money they’d nominally have to earn, except the bare minimum required for food and lodging. What would you do?”

  “Report it to some authority that could stop you.”

  “That mightn’t be so easy. A court that didn’t believe in zombies couldn’t stop people voluntarily giving me money.”

  “In that case,” Simon answered deliberately, “I might just have to kill you.”

  Netlord sighed heavily.

  “I expected that too,” he said. “I only wanted to be sure. That’s why I took steps in advance to be able to control you.”

  The Saint had known it for some indefinite time. He was conscious of his body sitting in a chair, but it did not seem to belong to him.

  “You bastard,” he said. “So you managed to feed me some kind of dope. But you’re really crazy if you think that’ll help you.”

  Theron Netlord put a hand in his coat pocket and took out a small automatic. He leveled it at the Saint’s chest, resting his forearm on the table.

  “It’s very simple,” he said calmly. “I could kill you now, and easily account for your disappearance. But I like the idea of having you work for me. As a zombie, you could retain many of your unusual abilities. So I could kill you, and, after I’ve learned a little more tonight, restore you to living death. But that would impair your usefulness in certain ways. So I’d rather apply what I know already, if I can, and make you my creature without harming you physically.”

  “That’s certainly considerate of you,” Simon scoffed.

  He didn’t know what unquenchable spark of defiance gave him the will to keep up the hopeless bluff. He seemed to have no contact with any muscles below his neck. But as long as he didn’t try to move, and fail, Netlord couldn’t be sure of that.

  “The drug is only to relax you,” Netlord said. “Now look at this.”

  He dipped his left hand in the ashtray beside him, and quickly began drawing a pattern with his fingertips on the white tablecloth—a design of crisscross diagonal lines with other vertical lines rising through the diamonds they formed, the
verticals tipped with stars and curlicues, more than anything like the picture of an ornate wrought-iron gate. And as he drew it he intoned in a strange chanting voice:

  “Par pouvoir St-Jacques Majeur, Ogoun Badagris nèg Baguidi, Bago, Ogoun Feraille nèg fer, nèg feraille, nèg tagnifer nago, Ogoun batala, nèg, nèg Ossagne malor, ossangne aquiquan, Ossangne agouelingui, Jupiter tonnerre, nèg blabla, nèg oloncoun, nèg vanté-m pas fie’m…Aocher nago, aocher nago, aocher nago!”

  The voice had risen, ending on a kind of muted shout, and there was a blaze of fanatic excitement and something weirder than that in Netlord’s dilated eyes.

  Simon wanted to laugh. He said, “What’s that—a sequel to the Hutsut Song?” Or he said, “I prefer ‘’Twas brillig and the slithy toves.’ ” Or perhaps he said neither, for the thoughts and the ludicrousness and the laugh were suddenly chilled and empty, and it was like a hollowness and a darkness, like stepping into nothingness and a quicksand opening under his feet, sucking him down, only it was the mind that went down, the lines of the wrought-iron gate pattern shimmering and blinding before his eyes, and a black horror such as he had never known rising around him…

  Out of some untouched reserve of will power he wrung the strength to clear his vision again for a moment, and to shape words that he knew came out, even though they came through stiff clumsy lips.

  “Then I’ll have to kill you right now,” he said.

  He tried to get up. He had to try now. He couldn’t pretend any longer that he was immobile from choice. His limbs felt like lead. His body was encased in invisible concrete. The triumphant fascinated face of Theron Netlord blurred in his sight.

  The commands of his brain went out along nerves that swallowed them in enveloping numbness. His mind was drowning in the swelling dreadful dark. He thought, “Sibao, your Maîtresse Erzulie must be the weak sister in this league.”

  And suddenly, he moved.

  As if taut wires had snapped, he moved. He was on his feet. Uncertainly, like a thawing out, like a painful return of circulation, he felt connections with his body linking up again. He saw the exultation in Netlord’s face crumple into rage and incredulous terror.