by Cave, Hugh
"What's wrong with your laundress?" Clarisse asked. In a difficult situation such as this, you had to be friendly, take your time, and hope for sudden inspiration. "The fiev is going around, I hear."
"It's not the fever. It's what her boyfriend gave her."
"Oh?"
"He picked it up from some slut, and now she has it."
The moon face did not smile, but Clarisse did so inwardly. All you had to do was be patient and there it was: the answer. She turned her head to gaze at the little girl.
Merry was trying to imitate Edita, rubbing a tiny panty between her hands. Clarisse glanced at the basket of dirty clothes.
"Your answer could be right there, Edita."
"Eh?"
"In the child's panties."
"I don't follow you."
"It's a known fact. If you have the sickness and wear something belonging to a virgin, it will go away. The very best thing is a child's panty."
"Anna is too big to wear such a trifle!"
"She wouldn't have to wear it. She can just place it inside her own garment next to where the trouble is." Clarisse leaned so far forward, she was in danger of falling into the wash pan. "Where does this Anna live?"
"Just off the Pétionville Road, in Lalue."
"Would you like me to take her one?"
"Would you?"
"A friend of yours is a friend of mine. Just tell me how to find her. And you'd better give me two of those. Two you haven't washed yet. It's better if they haven't been washed since the virgin wore them. And the person with the sickness mustn't wash them either, so she ought to have more than one."
Edita gazed at the child, whose small white face now wore a pout. Though she had been taught a few words of Creole by the servants, Merry of course could comprehend nothing of the conversation in progress and obviously felt left out.
"Look, honey," Edita said in halting English. "Go bring the towel by the kitchen sink, will you? We should wash it."
Happy to be included again, the youngster sped toward the house.
Edita's hand darted to the basket and plucked out two panties. "Quick! Hide them!" she told her friend.
The woman from Margal's home stuffed the garments down the front of her dress. They were safely out of sight when the child returned.
"Now tell me where this Anna lives exactly," Clarisse said.
"You know Rue Carmeleau?"
"Yes."
"On the right side, just before you reach the Petionville Road, there is a gray house with a veranda. You'll see a little lane beside it. Go down that lane, and in back of the big house you'll find a small one with a door painted blue." Edita leaned from her stool to clasp the other's hand. "Clarisse, may le bon Dieu bless you for your kindness!"
"It's nothing," Clarisse murmured as she turned away.
She would, of course, deliver one of the panties to the house with the blue door. She would have to do that, because Anna ought to be cured. But not both. No, indeed. And Margal would be pleased with her, even though he had not bothered to tell her why he wanted something worn by the little girl.
At the gate she waved farewell. Edita waved back. The child sang out "Good-bye!" in a voice as pure as the flute song of the mountain musician-bird.
Now that's odd, the Dawson's cook thought as their caller disappeared from view. Yes, that's really a little strange. Clarisse never did say why she came here this afternoon, did she?
Returning to the bedroom with a drink in his hand, Brian Dawson said to his wife, "I'll be staying at the Greenway, in case you need to reach me. You have the phone number."
She had finished packing for him and now stood by the bed with her back to him. How much would he drink, she wondered, before their guests arrived for dinner? In giving him the afternoon off, had the Embassy really thought he would use it to prepare notes for the people in Miami?
"Yes, I know it," she said. "By heart."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Don't you always go to the Greenway?"
"Is there some reason I shouldn't?"
"Of course not."
"All right, then. If you have to get in touch with me, that's where I'll be. And if you call and I'm not there, just leave a message."
If you're not there, Sandra Dawson thought. Which, of course, you won't be—will you?
Chapter Three
While Sandra Dawson was driving her husband to the airport the following morning, Margal's Clarisse walked down through the city to the waterfront. From there, amid perpetual bedlam, gaudy open buses with fanciful names embarked on long, dusty journeys to all part of Haiti.
All Clarisse knew about Léogane was that it was a coastal town, said to be a hotbed of voodoo, twenty-odd miles out on the Southern Peninsula. Perhaps the voodoo had something to do with her being sent there? Though Margal was not a houngan but a bocor—there was a distinct difference—he sometimes dealt with important voodoo practitioners.
Actually, Margal had told her nothing about her mission except how to find the man whose name was on the envelope she carried.
A dozen or so buses were lined up at the place of departure this morning. Some were empty, some half full, some seemingly ready to be on their way. One that could take her to Léogane was already crowded, she saw with dismay. Even its roof was piled high with assorted goods belonging to its passengers. Someone was taking two live chickens, tied by their legs to the roof rail. Others were transporting baskets of fruit, sacks of flour, stems of green bananas.
There were better ways of getting to Léogane, she had complained to Margal. By the smaller, more comfortable tap-taps, for instance. But no, he had insisted she ride a camion. On a tap-tap, the wrong kind of person might recognize and question her.
She paused by the front of the vehicle and spoke in Creole to the driver, who had not yet climbed onto his seat. "I am going to Léogane. When are you leaving, please?"
"Right now."
"The seat beside you—is it taken?"
"It will cost you extra."
"Why?"
Looking her over, he grinned. "Well, you're not an ordinary passenger. You'll be crowding me more than most." The grin excised the insult from his remark. "Shall we say an extra ten gourdes?"
She paid without argument, and he helped her onto the seat. A moment later the vehicle lumbered out of line to begin its journey.
While negotiating city traffic the driver remained voiceless. Only when the outskirts village of Carrefour was behind them did he relax and begin humming a little tune. At the market town of Gressier, fourteen miles from the capital, some of his passengers got off and he climbed onto the roof to hand down their belongings.
As the camion rolled on again, swaying less frighteningly on the curves now because it was less top-heavy, he glanced at Clarisse with interest. "Where are you going in Léogane, m'selle? I live there, as it happens. If you don't know the town, perhaps I can help you."
"No, I don't know the town, and I'm concerned. I have to find someone."
"Who, may I ask? Perhaps I know the person."
She opened her sisal handbag and took out the letter. "Paul Polivien. He lives near the marketplace."
"And owns a fishing boat?"
"I wasn't told that."
"He is the one, though. Unless there are two Paul Poliviens in Léogane, which I doubt." Removing a hand from the wheel, he patted her thigh. "Don't worry. You have no problem. When we stop at the market I will point out where you must go."
A fishing boat, Clarisse thought, unaware that she was frowning. Now what could Margal want with a man who owned a fishing boat?
Had she been able to see what her Margal was doing just then, she might have been even more puzzled.
Though he usually did not move about without her, preferring to call her and be carried, he could do so if he had to. It involved employing his powerful arms to lower himself from bed or chair to the floor, then using them as crutches. His pride found this distasteful, but despite the damage d
one to his body by the fire that had so nearly destroyed him, he was far from helpless.
Clarisse had left him seated by the window, as usual, but now he was in motion. Crossing the room to the chest of drawers beside his bed, he pulled open the bottom drawer and rummaged amid certain paraphernalia of his trade for a piece of white chalk and a candle. The candle was black.
Black candles could be bought in certain shops in the city, of course. People had need of them for voodoo rites. Margal made his own, however, and more went into the making of them than a mere knowledge of how to dip a string in melted wax.
His candles contained a blend of ingredients known only to himself, and the dipping was accompanied by incantations of his own invention.
With the selected candle in his shirt pocket—for he needed both hands to move himself about the room—he went now to an uncarpeted part of the floor where he used the chalk to draw a circle five feet in diameter. Inside that circle he drew another, and inside that one, a third. Seating himself within the innermost circle, he lit the black candle and set it upright in front of him in a puddle of its own wax.
The smoke it gave off contained an unpleasantly sweet odor, like that to be encountered in, say, a dosed room in which a dead rat was rotting.
From inside his shirt the legless man now extracted the soft white garment delivered to him the afternoon before by Clarisse. Through the night it had been stored for safekeeping under his pillow, where it had kept him awake half the night with anticipation. Holding the panty up in front of him now, he fixed his gaze on it.
His eyes glittered. Remarkable eyes anyway, as any enemy of his could testify if still alive, they acquired a redness now that made them resemble smoldering coals. An observer might have expected the fragile bit of cloth dangling in front of them to burst into flames. But it did not.
After a moment of this, a sound began to vibrate in the room, reaching into the corners and crannies, as did the smoke and dead-rat odor of the black candle. The sound emanated from Margal's mouth, though his lips scarcely moved. It consisted of words sometimes heard in voodoo services, but not in the usual order. In a church it might have been a prayer spoken backward.
As it droned on, his upthrust hands brought the stolen garment slowly toward his face, until it pressed against his lips and he was breathing the incantation through it.
The chant continued. The panty grew warm against his skin. The candle burned with a greenish-yellow flame in front of him. Time passed.
In the living room of the Dawsons' house, farther down the street, six-year-old Marcia Dawson, called Merry, knelt on the floor with a box of crayons and a coloring book.
With her protruding pink tongue seemingly alert to lick up any mistakes, she concentrated on adding color to a picture of children skating on a frozen lake. Her father had bought the book for her on one of his trips to Miami
Suddenly, in spite of her concentration, the child stopped what she was doing and stood up, her head atilt, as though she had heard her name called.
"What, Edita?"
From the kitchen came the young woman who had been doing the washing the afternoon before. "You want me, ti-fi?"
"I thought you called me."
"Uh-uh. M' pa té rélé ou."
Merry struck a hands-on-hips pose and pretended to be indignant. "Now what does that mean?"
"It means 'I did not call you.' Say it now. M' pa té rélé ou."
Merry solemnly tried to repeat it, was as solemnly corrected, and tried again. The two of them played this game often. "You can learn Creole quicker than I can learn your English," Edita had insisted. "You're smarter than I am."
"But I heard someone calling me! I know I did!"
"Nobody is here but you and me, honey. Your mother will be home soon, though, so don't worry."
Sandra Dawson at that moment was returning alone from the airport. The plane had been late taking off, and she had stayed with Brian until he boarded. Neither of them had said much. All through the long wait she had thought mostly about the fact that she would be alone now for two weeks.
As she drove along Grand' Rue, past the Iron Market, she caught herself wishing she had the courage to phone Ken Forrest at his north-coast sisal plantation and ask if by any chance he would be coming to the capital in the next few days.
She wouldn't, of course. But even thinking about it caused her pulse to quicken.
At that moment, in Léogane, Clarisse was in the presence of the man whose name was on the envelope she had been told to deliver.
The driver of the camion, true to his promise, had shown her where to find Paul Polivien, who lived only a little distance from the town's big marketplace. Fortunately she had found him at home.
Now she sat with him in his quite respectable parlor, where he had finished reading the letter and was frowning at her across a cup of coffee brought to her at his command by a woman he had introduced as his wife. About fifty years old, he was a short, wiry fellow with such prominent ears, she felt she ought to put her hands on them and press them against his head.
"It will be best if I go back with you, I think," he was saying.
Having no idea what was in the letter, Clarisse could only look at him and say, "Oh?"
"I believe so. To give you a message for him would not be enough. I should know his response to it. Unless I talk to him face-to-face, you could be coming and going more times than you care to."
"I do what he tells me to," said Clarisse.
"As will I, of course. Who would not, when dealing with such a man? But certain plans have already been made and—well, as I say, I will go back with you. I know a man with a car who can be persuaded to take us, I think" He stood up. "Make yourself at home, please. I'll return soon."
She drank her coffee. The wife came and asked whether she would like more, and on being told "No, thank you," gave her a curiously searching look and took the cup and saucer away.
In twenty minutes a car stopped outside the house, and Polivien reappeared.
"You are ready, Madame?"
She rose.
Turning toward the kitchen doorway, he called out, "Yolande! I am going to the city."
His wife showed herself and said, "When will you be back, if I may ask?"
"I don't know."
"If some of those people come looking for you, what am I to tell them?"
"You needn't worry. They will not arrive until tomorrow."
She shrugged. Polivien motioned to Clarisse and strode to the door.
The car waiting there, with a bearded man at the wheel, was a big one but old and battered, as were so many of the machines in the country towns. The driver leaned back to open a rear door for Clarisse. Polivien sat in front.
When they had put a few miles behind them in silence, Polivien turned around and said, "Are you comfortable, Madame?"
"Thank you, yes."
"You must tell me where our friend is to be found. The letter did not say."
There was a reason, of course, for his not using the name Margal in the presence of the driver, Clarisse told herself. It was a name well known, and its owner was believed to be dead. "In Turgeau," she said. "Rue Printemps."
"Ah, yes." He turned to the driver. "You know where that is, Albert?"
"I think so."
"I will direct him when the time comes," Clarisse offered. Then, having Polivien's attention, she added almost casually, "I hear you own a boat, M'sieu Polivien."
"That is so."
"A fishing boat?"
"Yes, though at times I find other uses for it."
She frowned at him. "Not to take our people to Florida, I hope."
"My boat has never been close to Florida, Madame. Or any other part of the United States." He put an end to the questioning by turning around and lighting a cigarette. No one spoke again until the driver took a wrong turn near their destination and Clarisse had to correct him.
Margal was seated on the sea-green chair by his bedroom window when the car stoppe
d at the curb below. The black candle had been returned to its drawer, the circles erased from the floor with a wet rag he always insisted Clarisse leave with him. Nothing remained to indicate what he had done there during his housekeeper's absence.
Assuming she had hired a taxi in Léogane to bring her home, he watched her struggle out of the machine and was pleased with her for returning so promptly. Then, when he saw her followed by the small man with the protruding ears, he leaned closer to the glass, not pleased at all. He had expected only a message from that one, not a visit.
In a moment, hearing footsteps on the stairs, he turned his head to direct his scowl at the door of the room. Someone knocked—it was Clarisse, of course. At his growled "Come in!" she opened the door for Polivien to enter and then, following him, said with a shrug, "M'sieu Polivien insisted on speaking with you, Margal. Shall I bring some refreshment?"
"No. Just leave us." He motioned the other to a chair.
Polivien sat and said nervously, "You did not instruct me to come, but I felt I ought to." His gaze traveled slowly from the bocor's face to his arms and hands, taking in the disfigurations left by the fire. "Mon dieu!" he whispered. "We heard the fire consumed you. How did you escape?"
"With the help of Clarisse. But you are to say nothing to anyone about it. Do you understand?"
"Of course."
"Why are you here?"
"Because in your letter you said 'a week or so' and I already have a firm commitment to make a trip the day after tomorrow. After that I must do some work on the boat and will not be able to go again for perhaps a month."
The corners of Margal's mouth turned down. "The day after tomorrow? Can't you delay for a day or two?"
"Not safely. I have twelve passengers arriving tomorrow, some from so far away they have left home already. My neighbors will be suspicious if that many people stay long at my house."
