There was nothing mysterious or out of the ordinary about the existence of the report itself, which had been copied at the American embassy in Port-au-Prince and passed to Dolan by an old friend of his in the Miami office of the Bureau—PIs were dead in the water if they couldn’t rely on old friends in law enforcement or the clerks of the court. The parties involved in the murder were American citizens and, after interviewing his client in Florida, the Bureau had sent a team of agents to Haiti to figure things out, but they botched it, said Dolan, they were dumber than pet rabbits, they didn’t talk to the coroner, they didn’t talk to the cops who took her body away that night, they never bothered to take a look at the car, and they resurfaced in Miami forty-eight hours later with much the same information with which they had started.
At that moment, though, Tom Harrington had no interest in who had killed Jackie or why. All he wanted to know was who was the source of this report and how had he ended up in it. Dolan said it wasn’t anything to worry about. When the agent had interviewed his client in the federal lockup in Miami, his client had suggested that his wife had an enemy or two in Haiti, and that the Bureau should talk to a driver named Gerard Hurbon, and although the Feds did track down Gerard, who subsequently named Tom Harrington and mentioned Tom’s trip up north with the girl, they never pursued the lead, according to Dolan, because they already had fallen in love with the scenario of least resistance to their limited capacity to operate in a place like Haiti. Here was a guy who had arranged a contract killing of his wife for what else but the money, and chosen Haiti as the venue for the crime because who was ever getting to the bottom of anything in Haiti.
The problem was, said Dolan, his client was adamant that the life insurance policy was her idea; maybe he was lying but how do you prove the assignation of an idea. So after all this, Dolan wanted to know from Tom if the girl had any enemies in Haiti, and Tom had sucked the dregs off the ice from his last of too many drinks and said, yeah, I guess she did, and went straight to bed, his mind not spinning but pickled in astonishment, trying to understand how Eville Burnette had escaped mention in this report, or if for some unimaginable reason Connie Dolan was keeping that card facedown on the table.
So here’s what we’ll do, said Dolan as Tom revived himself with bitter coffee. First and easiest, talk to the accountant, already arranged by Dolan, and on cue the Montana’s obese accountant, Monsieur Frantz, walked duck-footed across the terrace, his white dress shirt like a broad sail on a barge of hips, the knot of a pink tie loosened around his enormous neck. That’s possibly the biggest man in Haiti, Tom thought, marveling at not a drop of sweat on all that flesh while Tom himself had, by the simple act of eating, already soaked his collar and underarms, but the mystery ended when the two Americans stood to shake Monsieur Frantz’s hand, which was as wet as a dishwasher’s, and Tom absorbed this greater marvel, a fat man whose sweat glands seemed to reside solely in his palms. The accountant dragged a chair out several feet from the table and slowly lowered himself into it, closing his eyes for a moment and bowing his head in reverence, his face a dark moon of regret, and declared without prompting, Oh, poor Mr. Smith, Mr. Smith was a very nice man.
Who’s Mr. Smith? said Tom.
Mr. Smith was the client.
Hold on, said Tom, under the impression that the client’s name was Gardner.
Connie Dolan explained that Gardner was Renee’s surname, not the client’s.
Cute, said Tom, and asked if the client’s name was really Mr. Smith.
No, said Dolan. His name is John Doe.
This is really very aggravating, said Tom. What’s his name?
Don’t ask, said Dolan. The Feds have a gag order on his name. They arraigned him under John Doe.
Why?
Ask them.
Is that legal?
You’re the lawyer, my friend.
Tom leaned back from the table in exasperation and swung his head toward Monsieur Frantz, who had removed a cheap fountain pen from his shirt pocket to doodle tiny precise daisies on the paper placemat in front of him, the side of his hand leaving a crescent-shaped blotch of moisture behind. You must have seen his passport, Tom said. What was the name on his passport?
Monsieur Frantz stopped his pen and his eyes seemed to swell with mirth. Mr. Smith, he said and then proceeded to laugh good-naturedly in response to every question Connie Dolan asked him. In five minutes it was over and the accountant set sail back to the ledgers in his office behind the front desk, followed by Dolan, who intended to exchange dollars for gourdes, ignoring Tom’s suggestion that they could get a better rate on the black market. Lingering over his fourth cup of coffee, Tom watched the two men go and thought, What a waste of time—Fed or retired Fed, what’s the difference? Even if you stopped working for the government you didn’t stop thinking like the government. He stood up from the table and bent down for the shoulder bag that went with him everywhere and happened to notice an addition to the garland of Monsieur Frantz’s flowery doodles, two names emerging from the petals, Mr. Smith and Mr. Doe, overlaid with a bar of Xs, and a third name, Mr. Parmentier, underscored by a row of daisies given improbable happy faces. Tom walked out toward the car park weighted down by an all too familiar angst, crossing a line that he could feel strongly but failed to see, struggling to come to terms with what he was doing here in Haiti with Conrad Dolan, why he wasn’t at this minute in a taxi on his way to the airport and home.
The truth was, Tom Harrington had no business in Haiti anymore—the graves of the massacred had been exhumed, the remains—some of them—identified. Tom himself had deposed scores of witnesses and relatives, the Ministry of Justice was a toddler seesawing between tantrums and nap time, and the Truth Commission had decayed on the vine of his idealism. The sly Mr. Dolan’s ability to establish a close association between Jackie and Tom was pointless and poisonous. He had no answers for Dolan; there was nothing about his relationship with the girl he wanted to explain, nothing that needed to be explained for Dolan’s purposes.
But it was not a mystery, after all, was it, he admitted to himself on his way through the foyer and back into the smash of light and the tightness in his brow of an approaching headache. He was staying because of the girl, because of the disease he had contracted, which was the girl, the only woman he had ever truly hated without first having truly loved. Even in her death he was without a cure for her, and he began to imagine that he might have always been this way.
CHAPTER SIX
Voodoo, vodou, the ancient religion of Guinée, was transported from Western Africa in the hearts of slaves to the New World, a rational theocratic view as theocratic views go, despite the ignorance with which it is commonly judged. Vodou is a pair of eyes that sees the divine in everything—trees, oceans, crossroads, rivers, mountains—and honors that divinity while striving to manipulate it as well. It assigns every force—love, hate, lust, death, health, success, failure—its guardian spirit, its lwa, saints by any other name, only unlike the saints the lwas could be summoned to take possession of mortal beings, to borrow for a few minutes or a few hours the flesh and the voice of a dancer or petitioner or priest, although the exact point or purpose of these earthly visitations was lost on Thomas Harrington. Every force begets a counterforce, and in that sense vodou was little different than the other religions of man, and like other men Haitians lived with the fears bred in and of darkness, and Haiti’s darkness was the darkness of another, lost world that its people were not yet ready to let fall away, even as they diluted it with the powdered milk of Christianity.
Tom admired Haitian vodou because he admired Haitian culture, the drumming especially and splashy colors, the exuberant aggression of its rhythms, the beguiling cartoonishness of its imagination, the bawdy good nature and earthy metaphors of the language and, more seriously, the strict ethics and commonsense codes of the village, and he saw how the p
eople found courage and a last reservoir of hope in vodou’s animistic rituals, but beyond this benevolence, he did not actually know much about it, nor did he much care to, given his fundamental indifference toward all religions and the swaddle of their illusions. A disciple of anything but the law he was not. He enjoyed vodou’s spectacle and creativity and had seen the naked pilgrims in the waterfalls of Eau Claire, had witnessed the sacrifice of an enormous bull, beheaded with several mighty swipes of a ceremonial sword, had watched women young and old ridden by the lwas, and had been the invited guest of Haiti’s most famous houngan, the emperor of the Bizango Society, one of vodou’s five secret sects, at a celebration deep in the countryside, three neighborly days of drinking and tireless dancing and feasting and had come away with the impression that the event had much in common with the Knights of Columbus holiday weekends his parents had taken him to as a child.
Don’t expect Hollywood, he told the girl, Jackie, as they parked in the dust alongside a bend in the road north of Saint-Marc. It’s not like that.
But she either did not hear him or did not care and started up the footpath that traversed a dirt bank, her camera bag slung over her shoulder and the Nikon with the big lens in her left hand. Gerard, in a rare mood, said he preferred to remain with the car but Tom coaxed him to come along by promising to switch seats with him on the way back, and the two men climbed the bank after the girl, who had disappeared over the top. Flags tied to hand-cut poles stirred in the breeze above them. Tom asked Gerard the word for soul and Gerard said it was, ang—angel.
Why are you here with this business? Gerard grumbled.
When have I heard you complain about any business? Tom asked.
Houngan business is different.
The temple compound was modest, built of mud and wattle in the bare packed dirt on the small plateau above the bank, its three adjoining sections forming an open courtyard where Jackie stood, surveying without reaction the fabulous murals painted on the hounfour’s walls: St. George slaying a dragon from atop his white horse; the braided serpents of Dumballah, creator of the universe; the three-horned Bosou, the lwa of crops and fecundity; and the skull-faced Lord Baron in top hat and tails, the master of the graveyard and the implicit mascot of Tom and the various teams of forensic anthropologists he had brought to the island and supervised during the occupation. The paintings, at least those with human figures, were strikingly Byzantine, and Tom had expected he and Gerard would have to wait while Jackie photographed the images but she never raised her camera, not once all day had she raised it, and he had begun to wonder about her lack of motivation. He could not remember having met a photographer for whom Haiti had been anything but an endless unwrapping of violent and beautiful gifts. Yet as he came up next to her he realized she wasn’t looking but listening and when he stopped walking he heard it as well, the chanting of a single voice, deep and sonorous but subdued and not close by, coming from somewhere inside the compound.
Where do we go in? said Jackie.
Each of the three rectangular wings of the hounfour had its own wooden door but only the central entrance was not chained and Tom opened it and looked into the darkness beyond at the chamber’s barrenness and its smoke-blackened beams, Jackie peering over his shoulder, the sudden current of her breath in his ear. On the center post a leather bullwhip hung from a nail and in the dimness along the far wall there were several large ax-hewn drums. She wanted to know what this space was and he told her it was the main ceremonial peristyle, although it seemed no more suited for ceremony than a livestock pen. The walls muted the chanting, its source was elsewhere, and they backed away from the door.
Gerard stepped out from around the corner at the front of the courtyard and called for them to come his way and they circled behind the building toward the chanting, following him to what appeared at first to be a narrow wattle cook shed attached along its length to the rear of the compound, its outer walls like coarse cloth woven from thin branches, its roof a single section of rusted tin, a crooked door frame hung with a soiled curtain of moss-green satin.
He is here, said Gerard, pointing toward the curtain, and Harrington knew on this occasion he could depend on Gerard for little more than that.
Bonjour, Tom said, pulling the curtain aside, his vision glancing off the bright daffodil yellow of a woman’s skirt and across a dark row of faces, adjusting to the dappled shadows. Something burned sweetly in the air, an incense of cedar and perhaps herbs. He was prepared for the awkwardness of his interruption but the people crowded inside the little shed—five, on old metal folding chairs along the inner wall and, at the far end facing the doorway, a sixth; the chanting houngan on his humble throne, a wooden chair elevated on dusty planks in front of an altar of burning candles and votives and trashy fetishes—hardly took notice of him. The priest acknowledged him with an accepting nod and after a moment gestured with his left hand toward the chair nearest him and the man who occupied it stood up and wedged himself into the remaining space in the corner.
This generosity could not be refused and Tom left Gerard and the girl behind him in the doorway, easing forward from the curtain, stepping around a calabash bowl on the ground with something filthy in it to the seat, which was missing its back support. He sat quietly with a bow toward the priest and the man he had displaced. Then, without a word, Jackie handed her bag and camera to Gerard and stunned Tom by slipping forward onto his lap, the bones of her pelvis rolling into his thighs. His body tightened with the shock of her weight and the fruity scent of her hair in his face and he tilted his chest away from her until his back was glued against the cracked mud wall and he could feel himself sweating into it. Not knowing what to do with his arms he let them hang down toward the dirt floor and struggled to regain his senses.
He settled into the cadence of the houngan’s low voice, a stream of spoken music that began to cohere as Tom concentrated on the words, his mind slowing into Kreyol, and he and Jackie stared freely at the man, Tom rapt, the girl curious but unimpressed. Here in the countryside there was nothing remarkable about the houngan’s appearance: he wore chestnut-brown field pants tied at the waist by a length of hemp rope, the toes of his wide bare feet as gnarled as roots; a clean white short-sleeved shirt with the tails neatly tucked, and a gold-banded wristwatch, the one overt symbol of his success in life. His face was the face of an ordinary man, certainly not brutish; his sweaty cheekbones and brow glinting and striped with blades of sunlight stabbed through the weave of the walls. He sat erect and looked straight ahead with clear eyes—no boogeyman droop or blear to them at all—that concentrated on a phantom presence somewhere in the air before him. Without meeting Tom’s eyes, Jackie leaned her head back and turned her face as though she might kiss him and he unconsciously held his breath while she brought her mouth to his ear. Her movement disrupted the balance of their two bodies perched together and he put a hand on her shoulder to steady her.
What’s this guy doing? she whispered and turned again so her own ear was at his mouth, his lips accidentally brushing its soft fold, but Tom drew back and could not speak. He was trying to understand all the words and to hold very still because the friction of every infinitesimal shift of her hips was having its effect on him and the language was difficult to comprehend without Gerard’s assistance.
As he listened, though, he understood enough to become amazed—they had walked in on an exorcism. The priest was addressing a djab, demanding that the demon leave but leave what or whom Tom couldn’t make out, and for this sacred task the houngan had summoned a lwa for assistance, Erzulie Mary, but apparently she had not yet chosen to attend or was for some reason resisting his entreaty. The houngan seemed to grow impatient with the spirit, his invocation more insistent and coaxing. His arm dropped to the floor beside his throne and he raised a bottle of clairin in the air and spilled an offering into the dirt below his platform and then for the first time paused in his chanting to take
a gulp from the bottle himself and then the chanting resumed with greater passion. Jackie wiggled in his lap and Tom, who had all but forgotten the others in the shed, was startled into a broader awareness as people began to moan like souls in purgatory.
He bobbed his head around Jackie’s and looked to his left, to the four throwaway chairs and their human cargo. There was furtiveness in the heavy-lidded eyes of the first three—an old farmer in his straw hat and a middle-aged woman and a younger one—but it was the woman in the fourth chair, the chair nearest the doorway, that transfixed him. She wore a housedress with its top half pulled down to her waist and there she sat, her emaciated torso naked and streaming glittering feverish rivulets of sweat across the washboard of her ribs, her bare breasts haggish and surreal, withered to triangular flaps and repulsive, and yet even the agony of her face could not mask the youth that refused to leave it—Tom guessed thirty, which might well mean twenty; it was impossible to tell anyone’s age in Haiti—and her hair was pulled into girlish braids on each side of her head. Clearly the woman was ill and, unlike her companions who occasionally emitted piteous cries, she herself was seized by panting and her eyes seemed to float unanchored in the pooled expanse of their sockets.
Yet even as he registered the overwhelming nature of the woman’s suffering he turned away and again forgot her, his attention reclaimed by the heels of the houngan’s pink palms now booming on the goatskin head of a large drum clasped between his knees, the chant rising to such a pitch of fervor that his eyes bulged and flecks of spittle clung to his lips. In this squall of primal rhythm that sought to wake up the gods, the drum made Jackie squirm, the squirm’s inevitable creation a mad pulse between his legs, and as he hardened beneath her and the drum roared its challenge to the spirits the squirm modulated into a subtle bounce, a straining thrust downward and release upward in the tense muscles of her buttocks. There was a scolding voice in his head —Hey. Please. Stop this—but he felt his resistance weakening, felt the need to reach around and cup her breasts with each hand, felt his mind draining toward blankness and his flesh jolted into trembling reflex and he felt himself succumb to the deliciously stuporous possibility of just shoving himself straight up into the center of her where he would explode.
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