Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  W. is eating this up, asking questions, and scratching away on a pad?his area of expertise, the weird way in which the races ape one another. Knew he was getting it all wrong?nothing to do with race, everything to do with money?but was so happy to see him animated again that I didn’t butt in.

  Greer talked about Yoruba origins, said the old bards of the kings of Oyo claimed the Yoruba came from Mecca, but that’s obvious fabrication based on prestige of Islam. That Y. not entirely autochthonous seems beyond doubt, most probably they came from the east, in waves during the early first millennium a.d. His best guess is that they came from Meroë, a kingdom in upper Egypt that flourished between the second and fourth centuries.

  A little discussion of Afrocentrism here, the name of Meroë always sparks that, Meroë having conquered Egypt proper at one point, a rare example of black folks getting over on the other kind and thus to be cherished. Then a giant leap to: Egypt equals black, Egypt founded Western civ. thus white civilization another rip-off from the good guys. Demolished (I thought a bit unkindly) by Berne; he’s got a quick fuse in the presence of nonsense. He said this obsession with Egypt and Nilotic ethnic types has been a disaster in West Africa, and was invented by white colonialists in the first place, so that they could rule by favoring people who looked like them?light skins, thin lips and noses. The Tutsi in Rwanda, the Hausa in Nigeria, and it was disgusting to see Africans falling for it. You got a world-class culture right here in Yoruba and you despise it because it doesn’t have MTV and chrome trim. W. did a long angry rant about how the white man would never respect the black man until the black man had real power, power to hurt the white man. What Africa needed was a black Hitler!

  Stunned silence. Greer stepped in, asked Berne to talk about the Olo.

  Odd tale. A crazy Frenchman back in the 19th C. found a small group in isolated district in Fr. Equatorial who claimed to be from Ifé, but Ifé before the Yoruba got there. The Yoruba pantheon, they claimed, were them . They had godlike powers back then, in the golden age, now they’ve fallen on hard times. Tour de Montaille, his name was. Don’t recall hearing it before, said so?Berne explained he had discovered the original journals, but was unable to verify the existence of Olo, so assumed either the Frenchie made it all up, or they were extinguished or dispersed in the past century. Wrote a brief piece in J. African Hist., probably in library here. I said I would check it out. He said read the Fr. journals, too, they’re here also, if the termites haven’t got them.

  Actually, a jolly evening, the best in a while. W. did not go out carousing with Ola and his pals as usual. Instead, later, a polite knock on my door. I succumbed. After, I wanted to talk, about us, about the craziness, about how he was feeling, for God’s sake, but he fell asleep, is sleeping now as I write this. I can’t sleep. It will have to be Xanax again. Still, maybe the worst is over.

  10/4 Ado-Joga

  Here in this little village west of Lagos, Berne setting me up w/ Adedayo, Gelede mask carver, most gorgeous wood-carving tradition in Yoruba art. Interesting: Gelede artists are men, but tradition pays homage to the spiritual power of elderly women, called awon iya wa, “our mothers.” Not common in Africa, needless to say. Or anywhere else. Feminist in me finds it terribly exciting. These women have such power that they have to be entertained, cosseted, praised, and placated, lest they turn into witches, and bring destruction down on communities. Result = Gelede masked dance ritual. Unlike other Yoruba dance rituals, which address the forces of the spirit world, Gelede concerned mainly with this world, as personified in the terrible old women. The dances speak to social and spiritual issues affecting daily life, like art in Europe in Greece, in Middle Ages.

  Mr. Adedayo very old, dignified, aristocratic, works in a tiny yard in front of his atelier, sitting on the ground with his back against a fig tree. Berne asked him if I could video him at work, A. gave me funny look, said he “didn’t think you could take pictures of that,” meaning the spiritual work. Taped mere physical work, however, for hours, strange, a numen coming off him and off the mask he was working on, hard to describe. A sense of groundedness in culture, in the earth, in the flow of ashe ?

  He was using a tool that made a tiny triangular dent in the wood and he was making a pattern with it on the side of the mask, just hundreds of tiny three-cornered dents, in lines and swirls, and I could not pull my eyes away. Night fell. A woman came out with a lantern. Both Berne and I gasped and then laughed. It was like being in church used to be like. Compare artists’ studios in SoHo, they don’t have this there.

  Mentioned this later to Berne, he called it the unspoken and secret rewards of anthro, far more significant than the plaudits of our peers, why we put up with the sulky camels and the insects. Said, surely he taught you that, meaning M., who actually did teach me that, or tried; he lived for it, and I have been trying to forget it, because it’s a drug for us poor etiolated, alienated, mechanical corpse-colored people, and I think I have a tendency to OD. Changed subject just then, because I knew if conversation went on in this vein, he would press me on what happened in Chenka, which I can’t talk about.

  10/5 Lagos

  Reading the paper on Tour de Montaille. I took our little Canon down to the library this afternoon, and copied Berne’s paper and the original French journal. Interesting stuff?the Olo or Oleau, “real magic” again? It would be like discovering a tribe in Iran or Russia who still had the oral version of Homer as a living, bardic experience. TdM. was vague about the location but somewhere north of the Baoulé in present Mali. (??ethnographic traces, artifacts?) Interesting tradition of infant sacrifice, too. Not uncommon in recent Nigeria, but typically a mere ritual murder, a burial with the chief, or you knock a kid on the head in hard times, avert some curse, or the old Ibo habit of burying twins alive in jars. According to these journals this is not the same thing?this is somehow using the body of the neonate, ritual cannibalism, or drugs. M. would say drugs?using the mother-child system as a chemical retort? To produce what? If I didn’t have the Gelede project set up already, I’d take a shot at going up to Mali and poking around.

  W. not at dinner, no one seems to know where he’s off to. Asked Soronmu, but got a shifty answer. He’s with some of the loki, local hard boys, getting color (so to speak) for his work.

  10/6 Fucking Lagos

  Total disaster. Can’t write now. The idiot!

  EIGHTEEN

  Where are you going?” Mrs. Paz asked as he headed for the door.

  “I’m going out, Mami,” he answered. “I’m going to do some shopping, and get my car washed and cleaned up, and then I’m going to clean my place. Then I might go over to the pool and swim. Or I might do nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?” Giving him the stone face.

  “Nothing means nothing. See, Mami, this is what we call in English a day off. I’m taking a day off today, and I plan on taking a day off tomorrow, too. It’s the weekend . I only get one weekend in every four off and I’m going to take it easy.”

  “I need you here tomorrow,” she said, not amused.

  “You may need me, but you won’t have me. I realize you don’t think the police do work, but we do, and so I’m taking what we Americans call a break .”

  “You know, son of mine, you’re not too big that I can’t slap your face if you talk to me like that. What about tonight?”

  “I’m going out,” Paz said.

  “Who with?”

  “With a young woman. I will buy her a meal, not here, and take her to the theater, and afterward I expect to take her home and have as much sexual intercourse as I can manage.”

  She threw a good one at his ear, but he was ready for it and rocked back so that her fist sailed past his face, and then he made his escape out the back door of the kitchen. She stood in the door and yelled imprecations at him as he trotted down the alley. As always after these incidents, he resolved to quit working for her and move out of the rent-free apartment. The place was booming; she had more money than God and cou
ld easily afford to hire any chef in the city. These resolves never bore fruit, however, other than a dull depression that blighted a day he had anticipated for weeks. He did not do the errands he had planned, nor did he go to the pool. Instead, after showering, he sat in his shorts in his apartment with the shades pulled down and watched sports on television and drank Coronas until they were all gone, and then fell into a doze. As he slipped off he remembered the dashboard statue. He had meant to ask his mother about it but hadn’t, and probably wouldn’t now. Not that she would tell him the straight story anyway. Lies and secrets chez Paz, that was the rule. Why he had become a dick, he thought, and slept.

  Willa lived in a tiny apartment on McDonald, from one window of which, when the wind was just in the right quarter to move the leaves of a royal palm, one could see a patch of bay the size of a paperback novel. She was ready, and looked as well as Willa ever looked in clothes: a loose knit top with a roll collar, made of some rough and sparkly dark purple yarn, and wide white trousers in a silky material. Her springy hair was piled high up on top, compressed, but still allowing delicious little red coils to protrude against her white neck. Paz planted a soft kiss beneath one of these. Out they went.

  He took her to a ferny joint on Commodore Plaza, the kind with incompetent (hi, my name is Melanie) young women waiting table and a menu of dishes that were healthy, generally pastel in color, and pale in taste. He did not care for this sort of food, but she liked it, and she knew he didn’t, and was grateful. They walked holding hands down Main to the Coconut Grove Playhouse and took their seats.

  After a few disorienting minutes, Paz to his surprise found himself enjoying the show. It was really a series of satirical sketches, loosely tied together by the story of Simple, a black kid who wanders Candide-like across America in search of the authentic black experience. When playing black people, the cast members put on “black” masks and costumes, right onstage, and sometimes they also layered “white” masks and costumes on top of the black ones. The actors exchanged masks and costumes and shifted around on the minstrel-style set, and their skill was such that after a while it was hard to tell the actual race of the performer. You saw only the masks, which was the main point.

  “This is un-fucking-believable,” said Paz to Willa during the intermission. “I’m glad you talked me into it.”

  “Yeah, it’s terrific. You notice people checking us out, we being the only interracial couple in the place.”

  “What interracial? I’m Cuban,” said Paz, and she laughed. “Who is this guy? Moore, the writer?”

  “Oh, DeWitt Moore?he was quite the enfant terrible a couple years back. He had a couple of smashes, including this one here, and since then he’s been keeping a low profile, reviews and poetry mostly. He’s got a lot of enemies.”

  “I can see why. This thing’s an equal-opportunity fuck-you.”

  “Indeed. He’s supposed to be here tonight, by the way.”

  “Yeah?” Paz looked around the crowded lobby. “Where?”

  “Onstage. He likes to show up and take one of the chorus parts, like Alfred Hitchcock. In New York, people who hated him used to buy tickets on the off chance that he’d take a bow after and they could pelt him with refuse. That man is staring at you.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t look. Middle-aged white guy in a turtleneck. Arty type. Now he’s telling his date. She’s staring, too. Are you more famous than you’ve let on?”

  “No, probably someone I arrested,” said Paz, turning to look the arty gent in the eye. The man nodded at him familiarly. Paz had no idea who he was.

  “What’s that buzzing noise?” Willa asked.

  “Shit! It’s my damn beeper.” Paz pulled it out of his pocket and studied its tiny screen, his brows twisted. “Some asshole probably misplaced a time sheet or something. Wait here, I’ll go call.”

  But when Paz called on his cell phone, the operator patched him through to a radio car, and after a minute or so he found himself talking to Cletis Barlow.

  “Jimmy, you got a pen? You need to get out here right now.”

  “What? I’m in the middle of a date. I’m at the theater. What the heck is so important?”

  “He done it again. Cuban woman. In Cocoplum.”

  “Oh … fuck !” cried Paz, with his thumb over the phone mike. Cocoplum was a wealthy bayside development south of the Grove, favored by the Cuban upper crust. If the bastard wanted the absolute maximum in police attention he had made a good choice of victim.

  “You still there, Jimmy?”

  “Yeah. Look, are we sure it’s the same guy?”

  “It’s a carbon copy of Deandra Wallace,” said Barlow. “No breakin. No struggle. The same cuts, the baby done the same. Bet you a bag of silver dollars they find the same drugs in her. Man came home and found his wife and baby like that? Jesus wept! Take down the address.”

  Paz did. When he got back to Willa, they were flashing the lights and the lobby was draining of people.

  “What?” she asked, seeing his face.

  “That guy killed another pregnant woman. I got to go. You can watch the rest of this, if you want, or I can drive you home, but I’ll probably be tied up all night. If you want to stay, I can give you cab fare …”

  “No, I want to come with you.”

  Paz looked up at the ceiling, registering extreme disbelief. “Come on, babes, it’s police business. I can’t take a date to a murder scene.”

  “I won’t be at a murder scene. I’ll stay on the good side of the yellow tape like the rest of the gawkers. Please, Jimmy?it’s our last night and I’ll never see you again until I’m a famous writer and I come to the Miami Book Fair and you come up to the table to get an autograph …”

  Paz sighed dramatically. “It’ll be hours and hours. What in hell will you do ?”

  “I’ll absorb atmosphere. I’ll have conversations. I’m a writer. Puh-leeeeze … ? “

  So they drove down together, Paz having made her swear on the ghost of William Butler Yeats that she would keep out of trouble. In a little while they were at the crime scene, a more impressive showing than the one that had attended the death of Deandra Wallace. There were more than a dozen official cars in the cul-de-sac, radio cars and the big Ford sedans used by the brass, besides an ambulance, a crime-scene-unit van, a generator truck supplying power to the floodlights that illuminated what was clearly the victim’s home. This was a large, two-story, Spanish-style affair, with a tile roof and two wings, one of which enclosed a four-car garage, all set amid lavish plantings and irrigated lawns backing on Biscayne Bay. It looked like a stage set under the lights.

  Paz parked a good distance away, reminded Willa to stay put, and walked toward the house, shoving his badge wallet onto his breast pocket to display the shield. There were little knots of neighbors at the head of the cul-de-sac, as well as three TV vans setting up to broadcast live, all under the supervision of a couple of uniforms. The neighbors looked stunned and worried. Good, thought Paz, unkindly, as he went by. He stopped by the crime-scene truck and picked up a steno pad, a set of plastic booties, and a pair of rubber gloves.

  The suits were out in numbers in front of the house, among whom Paz spotted his homicide shift lieutenant, Romeo Posada, and the homicide unit commander, Captain Arnie Mendés. He did not care for either of them, but Mendés at least had a set of brains. He nodded to both of them as he stepped into the house and took in the scene. An oval entrance hall, high-ceilinged with a gilt chandelier hanging on chains, a tile floor, white, gold-flecked, underfoot, straight ahead a formal stairway, doors to the left and right. A crime-scene tech was dusting the French windows in the huge living room to the right. Paz asked him where the scene was. The guy pointed upward. “The master bedroom, hang a left at the head of the stairs. You want to bring a vomit bag, Jimmy. Fucker did a number on the poor bitch. You figure it’s the same guy from Overtown?”

  “We’ll have to see,” said Paz, and headed up the staircase. The master bedroom was
the size of a helipad, and done in shades of yellow?drapes, shag rug, the trim on the king-size four-poster. A cheerful color, which made the prevailing color of the bed and its occupant a particularly obscene contrast. Barlow was staring at the dead woman, motionless, his head down. A couple of CSU cops wandered around taking strobe photos and vacuuming every surface.

  Paz stood next to his partner and studied the woman’s face. The eyes were slightly open, but otherwise she looked like she was sleeping. Early twenties, Paz estimated, tanned body, thick blond hair in a shag cut, a little plump in the cheeks, but nice even features.

  “Where’s the baby?” Paz asked after several heavy swallows that tasted unpleasantly of semidigested grilled pompano with mango confit.

  “Bathroom,” said Barlow.

  Paz took a look in the adjoining bathroom, which was huge also, and brightly lit, yellow like the bedroom, and equipped with a shower stall, a Jacuzzi bath, two sinks, and a vanity table of the type used by movie stars, with the lightbulbs all around the mirror. The little gray corpse was lying half on this table and half in the sink, with its severed umbilicus hanging down like an appliance cord. There was a CSU man in the shower stall, clanking tools.

  Paz pulled his eyes away from the never-born baby. “Anything good?”