Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  TWENTY-THREE

  10/31 Lagos—Bamako

  Writing this on the plane, a charter. Personas non grata the two of us. My persona grated away, nothing left, really. Reaching inside, trying to comprehend. What did I do wrong? W. asleep, drugged. Can’t look at him, can’t imagine touching him again. But here he is, I sprang him. Went to see Musa. He screamed and stood very close. I could smell the alcohol on his breath, although he is Muslim. Gave him the money, thought he was going to demand something more personal. Would I have? For W.? Spared that.

  Found W. lying in the corner of a fetid cell, on the floor. He was very glad to see me, pathetically glad, crying. W. not really a tough guy, not physically tough. Not like Greer. I saw they’d broken him completely, his fellow Africans. His face was swollen with bruises and cuts, he’d lost a couple of teeth, too. Later, back at the hotel, we had the Brit doctor who takes care of the oil people in to take a look, knocked him out with Dilaudid & the guy went over him. Fuckers had concentrated a good deal on his groin, as they always do.

  Want my daddy, want Greer to be my daddy. This can’t be over, won’t let it.

  Pilot just came back to say we have clearance. We’re going to Mali. Berne thinks that’s where we need to pick up the trace of the Olo, if there ever were any. I thought about just going home, but I want something to come out of this disaster. W. doesn’t express an opinion. So I will look. We’re taxiing. The plane is shaking so th

  11/2 Bamako, Mali

  Hotel de l’Amitié, the best in town, eighty bucks a night, I took a suite. Have arranged for an English-speaking doc, Dr. Rawtif, a Lebanese, to see W. He still looks pretty bad, but Rawtif says there are no breaks or internal injuries. The genital swelling has decreased, too. They were careful, it seems. I told him and the hotel staff that he was in a car wreck. No one believes this, but they are kind people.

  11/11 Bamako

  He left the suite for the first time today. Shaky on his legs. Still won’t talk about it. We had dinner in the hotel dining room. The place is modern four-star, you could be anywhere provincial, Hamburg, Toulon. Lots of Germans and French, a few Americans, mainly businesspeople and rich tourists. November is the best month here, the height of what passes for a tourist season in Mali. The rains are just over and it is as cool as it ever gets. We got the usual looks.

  I left him this afternoon to visit the contact Greer gave me at the Musée National, a Dr. Traore, asked him about the Olo, got funny look. We spoke about old Tour de Montaille. According to him a charlatan imperialist. Made up stories about witchcraft, human sacrifice, to denigrate Africans, justify la mission civilisatrice . Conversation flagged. Asked him if I could make a financial contribution to the museum. Conversation cranked up again. Dr. Traore had spent a year at Chicago, so we had something in common. I wrote a check, got the run of the archives. He showed me around, the usual long termite-ridden wooden racks of crumbling papers, covered in red-ocher dust. Oddly enough, they have not computerized the catalog at the Musée National du Mali. I wrapped a bandanna around my face and poked around aimlessly for a couple of hours. An incompletely cataloged collection where I will spend rest of my life, manless dried-up stick of a spinster. No, divorcée. Annulée? Find I am more interested in my career now that my marriage has collapsed. If it has. He is quiet now, docile. It is almost worse than when he was being monstrous. Returned to the hotel to find him out cold. Dr. Rawtif has a free hand with the downers.

  11/8 Bamako

  A little scene in the lobby today. W. was just standing there & a tourist came up to him and told him to take his bags out, waving some currency. W. walked away & the guy came after him and grabbed him and W. punched him in the nose. Remarkable, since he is so uncoordinated. I saw it, too. W. grinned, for the first time in months, it seems like. Both of us in a good mood all day behind it. We went to the Grand Marché after that and had lunch, we talked, joked, almost like we used to be. That’s a big “almost.” Can hardly recall how we used to be. Maybe all a fantasy anyway. Romance = hallucination, M. used to say.

  Bamako is a lot nicer than Lagos, there’s a lively buzz, a friendliness, and I have not seen evidence of the nastier sorts of crime. Fell in with an American nurse, a nun actually, Dolores something. Funny bird. She spends most of her time in the bush giving inoculations and other pediatric care. She gets around in a pirogue when she goes upriver and by moped otherwise. Asked her about Bambara lessons, which I’ll need, and she gave me some names.

  11/10 Bamako

  We have to leave the hotel because of W.’s dust-up. I asked him where he’d like to stay and he said anywhere he doesn’t have to see tourists. Talked to Dolores, later. She suggests living on the river.

  11/15 Bamako

  Writing this looking out at the brown Niger, from the deck of our houseboat. You can really get anything you need on the water, from the floating market, including black hashish. We both smoke a good deal. It makes things easier, and he says it helps him write. I wouldn’t know, he doesn’t read things to me anymore. No sex, I don’t want it, he doesn’t offer. We haven’t spoken about Lagos.

  Dull days these, in the dust of the archives, will give it another month, then take a little cruise, maybe upriver to Djenné to see the mosque, the largest mud structure in the world, they say. The kind of thing poor Mali would be distinguished for.

  11/20 Bamako

  A tiny discovery today, the journal of a Salesian father who worked at a leprosarium here in the late 19th. Crumbled, full of wormholes, but still legible. He mentions Tour de Montaille, who stopped by for a cure, an officer of good family, in the last stages of exhaustion, with fever, says Fr. Camille, if I am translating correctly, with tales of monstrous occurrences among the natives of the northern interior, un gens trčs dépravé qui s’appelle des Oleau . This is, as far as I know, the only independent mention of the Olo anywhere. (Tour de Montaille blowing smoke at the priest? fever delirium?) The leper hospital was located near the present town of Mdina, about 120 km northwest of here. The hospital no longer exists, according to the French embassy, closed in 1921.

  Shopped for Xmas presents in the Petit Marché later. Found a remarkable pistol for Dad, in prime condition, an 1896 Mauser nine mm, with the famous red nine stamped on the handle, and an antique amber necklace for Mary. For Dieter, an album of old studio photographs from the French days, and a terrific market painting for Josey. Didn’t get anything for W., yet. Maybe a silver hash pipe, he might wear out the one he’s got before the holidays. Shipped all of it off to Sionnet. Thought about Christmas there, got a little homesick. Nothing for Mom either, not that it matters, she’ll hate whatever I buy. Doe stubbornness, not ever to give up on people. Got it from Dad. May explain why I am still with W. So I will keep looking.

  11/23 Bamako

  On a roll now, sometimes it happens that way, M. always used to say, one discovery leads to another. In one of the street markets, shopping for Mom. Spotted a small leopard mask, ivory, heavily incised, with the eyes made of some greenish stone?looked just like her, the expression. It turned out to be a Mande article, and the shopwoman was knowledgeable about its provenance. While she was wrapping it in newspaper, I looked around the place. The usual mix of textiles, jewelry, fetishes, except that she seemed to have a wider range than the usual market joint, and better taste. It was just sitting there, sticking out of a clay pot that stood on the head of a big drum, looking very old, yellowed like ivory, with shallow geometrical inscriptions on it. It had a hole drilled in one end.

  Trembling when I brought it up to the proprietor. Turtleshell, she said, Fula from upriver. I asked her where she got it. A trader. Name? She looked doubtful. I flashed money. A man named Bonbacar Togola, a trader and hunter. Where could he be found? In Mdina, she said, and I saw stars. I bought the little thing without even the pretence of bargaining and walked out, with the leopard mask, too. My mother’s gift, that had got me into the place to make this spectacular find. In the street I checked it out again. Good I took ph
ysical anthro. Saw that it really was the sternum of a neonate human, decorated and drilled for hanging in the house of a witch. Tour de Montaille had described just such a house, and the hanging racks of such objects ( idubde) & also the rituals that produced them. I’m holding an actual Olo artifact! Thanks, Mom!

  TWENTY-FOUR

  They seemed to be in a park bordered by poplars in full leaf, through the trunks of which shone dappled lawns. The road ended in a broad apron of tan gravel, washed golden in pools by shafts of sun. They parked and climbed stone stairs to a terrace, and there was the house, Sionnet. It was long and rambling and many-gabled, a Queen Anne fantasy in rose brick and tan stucco, its gray slate roofing pierced by dozens of brick chimneys. There was a large white wooden barn off to the right, and through some trees they could see the glitter of a greenhouse, and beyond that the sheen of the Sound. Seabirds shrieked above, and they heard the sound of a mower in the distance.

  Paz and Barlow walked to the front door, past a flagpole from which the Stars and Stripes crackled in the breeze. The terrace was nearly as large as a football field and formal in design, with neat, bright flower beds, and lozenges of lawn cut by graveled paths. A group of workmen in khaki were doing some repairs on the stone balustrade that enclosed it. The front door was iron-bound, thick-planked dark wood, pierced by a small diamond window.

  Paz pulled the bell. The door opened?a young woman, rounded, pretty, with pale blond hair done up in a bun, her face pink and damp from some distant kitchen. She wore a white uniform and a pin-striped apron over it. Paz goggled; he had never seen a white servant before, except in movies depicting foreign nations or earlier ages. Barlow displayed his shield.

  “Miss, we’re police officers. From Miami, Florida? We’d like to see Mr. John Francis Doe.”

  She said, calmly, as if police visits were routine at Sionnet, “Oh, uh-huh, Mr. D. said you’d be by. He’s over there, you must have walked right past him.” Here she pointed at the work crew at the balustrade. “He’s the tall one in the Yankees ball cap.”

  The four men were replacing a copper gutter that ran along the pedestal of the balustrade. Doe seemed to know what he was doing, as did the three men?all young, two white kids and one who might have been Latino. Doe stood up and looked the detectives over. He looked a little longer at Paz than at Barlow, and Paz knew why. Barlow made the introductions and Doe shook their hands, saying, “Jack Doe.”

  The man was taller than either of them by a good few inches, late fifties, with a leathery, bony face and a jutting square chin, his skin burned a few shades darker than the bricks of his home. He had sad, deep-set eyes the color of Coke bottles. “Let’s go sit out back,” he said.

  Doe led them through a breezeway, across a pebbled courtyard, past a white wooden gate, and out to the rear of the house. Below them there was another terrace with a long green swimming pool on it, and beyond that, a lawn that sloped down to a two-story white boathouse and a dock. Doe flung his long frame down in an iron lounge chair covered in faded green canvas and motioned the others to similar seats around a white metal table, under a patched dun canvas umbrella. He offered them iced tea. When they accepted he pressed a button set into a patinaed brass plate cemented into the wall behind him. Paz thought about that, just a detail, what sort of person you had to be to have a buzzer for calling servants set in an old brass plate cemented into a stone wall on your terrace overlooking your pool.

  A man came out through French doors. He was older than Doe, silver haired, and he wore a tan apron over navy blue trousers, a white shirt, and a striped tie. Again, Paz had the peculiar sense that he had fallen out of regular life. A butler was going to bring him iced tea. This soon arrived on a silver tray, in tall, sweating glasses, which Paz was certain were never used for anything but iced tea. There was a long silver spoon in each glass, and a straw made out of glass, and there was a fat round of lemon stuck on the lip of the glass, as in advertisement illustrations. The tea was strong and aromatic.

  They exchanged small talk?the nice weather, the pleasant temperature, Florida, the fishing in the Keys. Both Barlow and Doe had been bonefishing down there. The cops studied Doe and he seemed to study them. Barlow said, “This is a fine place you got here, Mr. Doe. I take it your people have been here a good while.”

  “Yes, since 1665. On the land, that is. This house dates from 1889. Before that, there was a wooden structure from 1732, which burned. That barn you can see from the front of the house is preRevolutionary, 1748. I keep my car collection in it.”

  “My, my,” said Barlow. “And you and your missus live here all by yourselves?”

  A pause, long enough for one intake of breath and an exhalation. “No, my wife is unwell. She lives in a care facility in King’s Park, not far from here. So I’m on my own, except for the help, of course. They’re all students. We put them through school, any college they can get into, graduate school, whatever they want, and in return they put in some time here. Except for Rudolf, who brought the tea, and Nora, who was my children’s nurse and has a room here. And, of course, when I go, the state’ll get the whole shebang. A museum, I guess. And that’ll be that.”

  “End of an era,” said Paz. Doe nodded politely, and Paz felt like a jerk. After a brief silence, Barlow said, “Mr. Doe, as we told you on the phone, we’ve had some trouble down our way, and the FBI believes that the fella who killed our victims is the same man who murdered your daughter Mary. So, painful as it must be to you, we’d really like to hear anything you can tell us about the circumstances surrounding your daughter’s death.”

  Doe rubbed a big gnarled hand across his face. Paz noted that the fingernails were cracked and dirty. It was not what he had thought a rich man’s hand ought to look like.

  “We all left for the car show in Port Jefferson just after lunch,” Doe began, “me and my two sons-in-law, Witt and Dieter.” He had a deep, soft voice and Paz had to strain to hear him over the hiss of the breeze and the gulls’ calls. “The girls didn’t want to go?I mean Jane didn’t; Mary and Lily?my wife, I mean?never were much interested in the cars. Jane was?she used to help me fix them when she was a kid. Anyway, we got there around ten of two. There was a Pierce-Arrow they were showing I wanted to take a look at, a 1923 Series 33 with the Demorest body and the 414-cubic-inch six. A heck of a car, all custom made. It was blue …”

  Here he stopped and shook himself slightly and a little light that had started up in his eyes faded out. “So, we were there for, oh, maybe four hours, for the auction, and I got the Pierce. Never actually took delivery on it. I kind of gave up on the cars, after. We got back around five. Jane was right here, right in this chair here, sleeping, with a book on her lap. Dieter went up to their room to check on Mary, and we heard him yell. And I called the police.”

  Paz said, “So you all, you three men, were all together all the time at this show? Neither of you were out of the sight of the others for the whole four hours?”

  Doe sighed. “Yes, they asked me that. I guess you have to ask questions like that. It’s part of your job. And I know people do terrible things in their families. Lizzie Borden and all. So … it was a big lot, there at the show, and we wandered around a good deal. Dieter was taking pictures. Were they with me every minute? I can’t swear to that. So it’s remotely possible that Dieter could have slipped off, driven back, done it, and come back to the car show. Or I could have, for that matter, although I talked to enough people who knew me to give myself an alibi.”

  “What about your other son-in-law?Mr. Moore?” asked Paz.

  “Oh, Witt didn’t drive. Didn’t even have a license. Jane tried to teach him a couple of times, but it just didn’t take. It was hard enough showing him how to ride a bike. But, you know, that’s just so far-fetched …”

  Barlow said, “We know that, Mr. Doe. Like you said, it’s part of our job. Where is Mr. Von Schley now, do you know?”

  “Back in Germany. Berlin. We keep in touch. A nice kid, really. I hate to say it, but I was surpris
ed he was so decent, the people Mary used to pal around with. Eurotrash, I think they call them, and being so pretty and going into modeling at such a young age, she had a lot of temptation to have the kind of life I wasn’t comfortable with. And we thought she kind of settled down, with the baby coming and all.” A long pause here. “Witt keeps in touch, too. He’s in New York.”

  No he’s not, thought Paz, and said, “Mr. Doe?another hard question. We’ve heard there was … well, tension between your daughters, and we’ve heard that your elder daughter was, maybe, not completely in her right state of mind, that she had a history of … say, imbalance, an unhealthy interest in cults and black magic. It’s probably no secret that people in the local police think it’s possible that, well, that she was involved in Mary’s death. Do you think there’s anything to that?”

  Doe turned his glass-green gaze onto Paz, and they stared into each other’s eyes for what seemed like a very long time. Paz kept his own eyes steady, as a cop must, but he grew increasingly uneasy. Doe’s look was far from hostile; more like curiosity, but he seemed to be sucking out of his inspection more than Paz was giving, was assessing various hidey-holes in Paz’s highly compartmentalized soul, and not liking much what he found there. Paz’s mother, of course, did this all the time. Barlow broke in then, or, Paz imagined, they might have been there until the sun sank.

  “Sir, we’d really appreciate anything you could tell us. I have to say there are some mighty scared folks down there right now, and the only thing we really got to go on now is that this perpetrator was very likely connected in some way to your family. And I personally got no doubt in my mind that if we don’t catch him real quick some other poor girl’s gonna end up like your Mary.”

  Doe seemed to sag in his chair; he closed his eyes and let out a long, long breath. They waited, and watched him suffer. It was perfectly pure suffering, uninterpreted by words or relieved by cries. “You have to understand, Jane almost died in Africa,” Doe said. “When my son, I should say my stepson, Josiah Mount, found her in that hospital in Bamako, she weighed ninety-seven pounds. She was covered with sores, and she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk. Just made these cat sounds. It was the scariest thing I ever heard. I was sure we’d lose her. In any case, we got her into a clinic in the city that specializes in liver diseases; this was at New York Hospital, because we all thought that’s what it was?hepatitis. She was yellow as a canary when she got here, from jaundice, we thought.”