For my father
Sydney Scott Prather
CHAPTER ONE
We could see the low, bone-white hotel now, its wings curving toward the sea like the base of a sun-bleached skull.
For an hour the island had been growing on the horizon as the “Wanderer II” sailed steadily west, pushed by the winds of the Caribbean. The small spot of mossy green we’d first seen on the earth’s curved rim was now unmistakably Verde Island, near enough to us that we could see the froth of the surf spreading on the black sand beach near the hotel.
It didn’t look dangerous.
Verde Island looked like something out of a travel folder designed by a liar—preposterously beautiful, with white-sand and black-sand beaches, a scalloped blue lagoon before the graceful hotel, low and lush green land to the south, and, much farther to the north, higher land with several jagged peaks there solid against the sky.
Behind the hotel rose the soaring bulk of Damballah-Loa, Verde’s long-extinct volcano. Low on its steeply slanting side were the hotel’s two score “cabins,” and above them, a half dozen larger and even more lavish private homes. Thick cables supporting the little cars that carried guests up to those cabins—after the fashion of ski lifts at snow resorts—from here were cobwebs against the volcano’s dark face. In the lagoon near the hotel were slips for the hotel’s boats, which could be rented for fishing, cruising, and water-skiing; and a mile to the south was the dock where soon we would tie up and disembark.
Gazing at all that travel-folder beauty, I decided Ed Wylie must have died a natural death or else peace and contentment had killed him. Murder? Murder just didn’t belong in a place like this.
“Isn’t it gorgeous, Shell?”
That was lovely blonde Vanessa Gayle, on my left. Very close on my left. In fact, I had my arm around her slim, firm, warm, exciting, vibrant waist—it was some waist—and was holding her in a pretty firm grip, so she wouldn’t fall off the boat.
“That’s the word,” I said.
“It sure isn’t anything like L.A., is it?”
The slangy abbreviation sounded harsh and out of place here on the blue and balmy Caribbean Sea. But Vanessa was right. Los Angeles and Verde Island seemed parts of different planets entirely. This was a far, far cry from, say, Broadway between Third and Fourth Streets, downtown in the City of the Angels. That’s the location of the Hamilton Building, wherein is the office of Sheldon Scott, Investigations, wherein sometimes I am—since I am the Shell Scott of Sheldon Scott, Investigations.
In several years of investigating everything from missing husbands to multiple homicides in and around Los Angeles and Hollywood, even including jaunts to Mexico City and Acapulco and Hawaii, this was the farthest I’d roamed from the well-traveled routes of the world. Verde Island was definitely off the beaten path. Only one small airline included Verde in its itinerary, and only rarely did a passenger ship make it a port of call. Except for that, all contact with the “outside” world was with the passenger-carrying freighters that docked here once or twice a month, and with the “Wanderer II” itself. While one island after another in the Bahamas, the Lesser Antilles, the outer islands of the West Indies chain, had become centers of farming, manufacture, or tourism, Verde had rested quietly, almost untouched by the growth and progress all around it.
Before leaving the States I’d dipped into the Encyclopædia Britannica and a book or two. So I had a rough idea of what lay ahead of me.
Verde Island. In the Caribbean Sea almost due west of Martinique, above the fringe of the old Spanish Main. Here, two hundred years ago, pirates roamed, and Dutch, French, and Spanish slavers sold their pounds of flesh for pieces of silver. It had been ruled at different times by the Spanish, the British, the French—and, for thirty years following the massive slave uprising of 1814, by the slaves’ descendants themselves. It was now, at least temporarily, a French possession; the island was a stew of peoples and tongues, seasoned by French, Spanish, British, and hodgepodge races, but predominantly black—descendants of those thousands of slaves carried here in sailing ships during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The white population was probably no more than five hundred people. But one of those people was John Farrow, codeveloper—with the now-deceased Ed Wylie—of the Sunrise Hotel, my destination. He had sent for me, asking me to come here and investigate the “strange circumstances” of his partner’s sudden death. Just how strange, or how sudden, I didn’t yet know; but I would be meeting Farrow in less than an hour.
Vanessa said, “I’d better go freshen up a bit, Shell. So unhand me, you beast. Or unarm me.”
“How about disarm?”
“Either dis one or dat one. Whichever arm you’re—”
I groaned. “Vanessa, puns are the lowest—”
“I have an excuse. A monster kept me awake most of the night.”
“Who? I’ll kill it.”
She smiled. I smiled. We both knew who. Me, that’s who. Except for the four-man crew, we were the only people aboard the “Wanderer.”
* * * *
Before Vanessa joined me at the rail again, I’d had time to finish the tag ends of packing in the two suitcases I’d brought along, and the “Wanderer” was nosing in toward the dock, sails furled and twin diesels throbbing as the skipper signaled for the engines to turn slow astern. The deck shuddered beneath our feet, the lead for the bowline was thrown to a black-skinned native on the dock, then there was a soft shock as the boat nudged the thick pilings.
Lines fore and aft were made fast, and in a few minutes the gangplank was down and we were ready to disembark. I didn’t know what, if any, excitement lay ahead, but for me it was excitement enough just to be here. There was something in the air—something more than the rich spicy scent of fruits and flowers and the luxurious warmth of the breeze, more than the dazzling array of colors.
On the dock a handful of natives worked; others sat silently and watched. One weird-looking character, wearing what appeared to be a woman’s woven-reed hat, stared up at me. Beyond the far end of the dock were a dozen or so tin-roofed shacks, and I could see mounds of vegetables and fruits before some of them. It looked like a small local market place. Men and women in brightly colored clothing moved lazily among the stalls. From there a dirt road snaked west toward the sun just dropping past the edge of Damballah-Loa, and on the road three women walked, each balancing something on her head. Going home, I guessed, now that the sun was nearly gone.
From the elevation of the “Wanderer’s” deck I could see past green clumps of banana trees, slim and graceful coconut palms, to the rough peaks at the north end of the island. It seemed to me I’d never seen a more beautiful place in my life. A mile away were patches of white gleaming through the trunks of palms. That was the Sunrise Hotel. I wondered if there was any transportation or if I’d have to walk.
Behind me Vanessa said, “It’s so lovely. I could die here.”
“Don’t say that. Say live here.”
She smiled.
She’d changed into a white linen skirt and a simple white blouse, and she had her pale blonde hair pulled back and tied behind her head. She was something to see: tall and slim, but with enough fine firm flesh to go around, and just a little more; lips the red of a Stop light but with a Go smile on them; a pale white body and hot green eyes that made me think of jungles. Her face made me think of jungles, too, in a way. The eyes seemed, but weren’t, slanted; she looked just a little savage. She was just a little savage.
“Well, let’s go,” I said.
We walked down the gangplank and turned left toward the sheds or stalls at the dock’s end. The character who’d been staring at me earlier was still staring. I thought maybe it was because I probably looked like nothing that had visited this island in the last fifty years. Or maybe longer. Since the Stone Age, say. Not that I look like a cave man or Cro-Magnon citizen. Not exactly.
I’m six feet two inches tall with my socks on and weigh two hundred and six pounds, and I’m sun-browned to the approximate shade of mangrove roots, which accents the whiteness of my inch-long hair and the equally obvious whiteness of the brows angling up over my eyes and then slanting down sharply at their ends, as if fractured. My eyes are gray to begin with, and set in the deep tan of my chops they probably look lighter than they really are, so I figured I could stare just as menacingly as this character.
Which I did as he walked toward me, his fixed gaze holding to my face. I stared smack back at him, even leaning forward a little. It didn’t faze him. I started wondering what the hell he was doing.
This guy was brown-skinned, with bushy hair spraying out from under that wide-brimmed hat I’d noticed before and a sharp-featured face that might have been African and Mexican blended together. His eyebrows were bushy and tangled and black, going every which way, partly obscuring his dark eyes, and his nose was thin and came to a point sharp enough to be dangerous if he should happen to blow it, something which he apparently had not done for some time.
He was dressed in ragged white pants cut off under the knees and a red, blue, white, and green shirt with long, billowing sleeves. He wore black bands like elastic garters over the shirt sleeves above his elbows, and around his neck was a string of bright beads. In his right hand he held some kind of gourd at the end of a short, curved stick. It looked, believe it or not, like a rattle.
It was a rattle.
He rattled it at me.
“Ahgee hoo, wah chacha wah-boom,” he chanted—or something like that. At least remotely like that.
I knew most of the Verdean natives spoke a patois formed from French, Creole, Spanish, a little African, and local invention—and I couldn’t understand any of it. But whatever he was saying, it didn’t sound like, “Welcome to Verde, O White God.” It didn’t sound like that at all.
He was getting that stuff off at a fine clip, in a kind of nasal singsong, going rapidly up the scale and then sliding back down as if he was shooting the words up one nostril and down the other, and all the while he kept shaking that damned rattle at me.
I’d stopped and was looking at the guy with alarmed amazement, and he was standing about six feet from me. Now he started hopping up and down in one spot and moving no more than two or three inches vertically, and he’d just got to a part about like, “Vahkee muerdo, muerdo, Damballah fie fooey!”—again, I stress that that’s what it sounded like, at least remotely. But, whatever he was saying and doing, I’d had enough of it to last me for a while. So I said, “Forget it, champ. Get lost. Vanish.”
It was as if I hadn’t spoken. He just kept on with the noises. I looked at Vanessa. “What the hell is this?” I said.
She didn’t answer. She was looking at the spook, one hand touching her throat. She didn’t look overcome with happiness. Well, I didn’t blame her exactly.
“The spook had now dug into his pants or shirt somewhere and come up with a snake. Yeah, a snake. It was dead and dangly, but that didn’t help much. He was shaking the rattle in one hand and whipping the snake around in the other, not singsonging now but just spitting out a single word from time to time.
He danced around me in a circle, quivering like a fat woman in one of those vibrating reducers, and when he got back to where he’d started he dropped both arms to his sides, looked up into the air, and cried, “Aieeee!”, I think.
I said, “I am going to pop you.”
He looked at me.
Well, maybe he didn’t understand English. I took a step toward him, held my right hand up, open, palm toward his face. Then I slowly closed it into a large fist and drew it back to my shoulder.
It was clear as could be that I intended to bash him right in the mouth, but it didn’t seem to faze him. He grinned. He had two teeth out in front, I noticed. Maybe he didn’t think he had much more to lose. But he must have known it was going to hurt. Nonetheless, he just grinned, then shook his rattle and snake and said, “Muerdo, Damballah!” or sounds to that effect. Then he turned and walked away.
“What the hell was that?” I said.
Vanessa remained silent. But, of the half dozen men who’d earlier been sitting limply on the dock, and who were still sitting limply on the dock, one spoke.
He used a kind of warped English, but him I could understand. “You go,” he said. He pointed past me to the boat, then to me, then to the boat again. “You go. Away, over water.”
“Go? I just got here. If you think I’m going to sail away just because a creep with St. Vitus’s dance shakes a rattle and a snake at me and bounces his beads—”
“Him no beads.”
“Him no beads?”
“Him wanga.” He ran a brown hand around his neck. “Much bad in him. Pow’ful wanga. You get sick and die now.”
“Ha,” I said. And ha-ha, I thought. So that’s what the performance had been about. The creep had been trying to cast some kind of spell on me, apparently. Well, he couldn’t hex me. Not me, he couldn’t.
But, by golly, I felt a little chill. It seemed colder, all right. And then suddenly I realized my eyesight was failing. It was getting darker. And colder. The twitchy bastard had frozen my blood or something. But it couldn’t be. I didn’t believe. That stuff was all a lot of baloney.
I was standing there, wondering if I’d freeze solid and get all white and slick and frosty on the outside, and maybe with my tongue hanging out a little bit, when I realized what had happened.
Nothing. Nothing supernatural, anyway. It was merely that the sun, which had been dropping past the volcano’s edge, had now slipped all the way down and the tropic darkness had started to fall. The rest had been my imagination.
Ha-ha, I thought again. Can’t hex me. I’m immune. No such thing as a hex. I’m immune. Just a lot of baloney. I’m immune.
I was still thinking when Vanessa said softly, “That man just about scared me to death.”
“Ha,” I said. “It was nothing. Nothing. That stuff doesn’t work unless you believe. And you and I know there’s no danger from a guy shaking sticks.”
“But … they do practice voodoo here, don’t they, Shell?”
“Sure. So they practice voodoo. So what?”
In reading of Verde I’d come across much about the basic religion of the island, voudon or voodooism—much like the Haitian and South American variety, but with indigenous corruption and invention. Plus a liberal addition of sorcery, black magic and such. But I hadn’t thought much about it, except to think some of the dances might be interesting.
For example, the Cha Cha—that’s straight out of Haitian and Cuban voodooism, chacha being the name of a rattle used in voodoo ceremonies. Or mambo—the voodoo word for a priestess of the supernatural religion.
That creep hadn’t been doing a Cha Cha or a mambo, though.
Vanessa said, “Well, I don’t know much about it, but it’s—it’s scary.”
We’d started walking to the end of the dock, and I said, “So let’s go to the hotel and get a drink. I think I could use a drink. To warm my bloo—to warm me up a little.”
“I could use a couple myself,” she said. “Let’s.”
CHAPTER TWO
Only we didn’t get that drink right away. At least not together.
When we reached the group of stalls and little sheds, I noticed that there were not only fruits and vegetables on display but also numerous examples of native handicrafts. Next to a table heaped with yams, alligator pears, and little bananas, was a stall displaying calabash gourds, straw hats, woven beach bags, and sandals. On its left was another, laden with trays and bowls and bracelets made of tortoise shell and a big mass of crudely fashioned but interesting jewelry—earrings, bracelets, rings, and pendants, made of coral, polished stones, metal bands, and more tortoise shell.
Vanessa, being a woman, simply had to rummage among the earrings and doo-dads. She told me to go on to the hotel and she’d follow later, having spotted an old Model A coupé with “Taxi” printed on its doors in yellow paint. Finally I left her haggling over the price of a pretty with a fat native woman in a bright dress, a pink turban, and enormous earrings dangling down to her chins. The fat woman paused to light a shiny Coleman lantern, then returned to the haggle—and I took off.
Not far. A dirt path led between rows of stalls, northward toward the hotel, and I hadn’t walked more than thirty yards that way when somebody called, “Mr. Scott!” in a strangely tight voice.
It startled me. Nobody here knew me; nobody even knew my name, for that matter, except John Farrow, I supposed. And it had been a woman’s voice, too.
The sound had come from my left. Ten or fifteen feet away, a very tall man and a girl stood close together next to a ten-year-old Chrysler sedan painted bright red. The door was open, and it looked as if the tall man was trying to push the girl into the front seat of the car.
It was pretty dark, with only the last glow from the sky and faint light from a nearby lantern illumining them, but it didn’t take much looking to know the guy was in fact wrestling with the girl. And then she called again, “Shell—Mr. Scott. Help me.”
I moved over there, stopped next to them. The tall man was gripping both the girl’s arms beneath her shoulders, and her face was twisted with pain. As I stopped by them, the man turned his head and stared at me. Down at me.
He was quite a sight. The dim illumination didn’t help, but even in broad daylight he would have been more than a little disturbing if you had caught sight of him without warning. He was at least four inches taller than my six-two, and his dark eyes were as big as any I’d ever seen on a man. Huge and dark and with a kind of black fire in them under straight black brows, and projecting out and down from the brows was a nose resembling a small scythe—extremely thin, sharply ridged, curving toward his dark lips like a hook or an eagle’s beak. His hair was tight against his big head, like a curly black skullcap.
“Let her go,” I said.
“This none of your business. Get away.” The voice was thick and low, smooth and syrupy.
“It is now,” I said.
“Go away. I warn you.”
He peeled his lips back and smiled, or snarled, and I blinked several times. I think my mouth sagged open. He had false teeth, but what teeth they were—steel, they were. Steel teeth. Like George Washington had. These looked like they might even be the same set. Big, square, glittering in the dim light. He was the damndest looking man I’d ever seen.
But I’d had enough of creeps warning me. I reached for his wrist, got it, bore down a little, and pried. It came up with my hand, as I’d figured it would. But I hadn’t figured his next movement.
He let out a kind of screech and let go of the girl with his other hand, then leaped at me as I released him. At least that was the impression I got. He whirled around toward me, flapping his arms up, hands bent at the wrists and splayed out at me like Dracula descending on the sleeping virgin, and I thought he was just about to poke me, or scratch me, or slap me, or maybe even try choking hell out of me.
I didn’t puzzle myself about which of those things he was preparing to do. I popped him.
I didn’t plan it. I’ve had so many guys swing at me or jump me in my time that the reflex has become automatic. My hand did it all by itself. It snapped up from my side and formed a fist, which smacked the tall guy squarely beneath the chin. His mouth was open a little, and it clicked shut with enough force that, if he’d had real teeth before, he might have needed repairs on all of them. But there was merely a clink, and then he was lying at my feet next to the red sedan.
At our feet, rather. He was crumpled between the girl and me. I started to take a good look at her, but it turned out there wasn’t time for a good look.
She said, “Oh, dear!” as if truly distressed—and from behind me there was a sudden babbling. I looked around.
Half a dozen people were near us, including two women with big tin cans balanced on their heads, and all of them were wailing and yelping. “Ai!” “Ohhhh!” “Mordieux! Mordieux!” and such, including just plain indescribable wailing. One of the women moved forward so rapidly that the tin can got unbalanced and fell from her head with a clank, which I’ll bet didn’t happen often.
They were all breaking up. Two men pointed rigid fingers at me and muttered unintelligible things, and another clapped his hands over his eyes and then spun around and ran.
“What the hell is this?” I said—for perhaps the third or fourth time recently. It was just about all I’d said since setting foot on this damned island.
“Oh, dear,” the girl said again.
Then she grabbed my hand and pulled at it. “Hurry. Come with me, Mr. Scott. Hurry.”
“What the—I mean, what’s going on? Who’s that creature on the dirt down there? How’d you know my name?”
“Later. Please come.”
She led me fifty yards or so to an almost new station wagon, slid under the wheel, and waited for me to climb in on the other side. In a minute we were ripping down a dirt road in the general direction of the Sunrise Hotel.
I found a cigarette in my coat pocket, took my time lighting it, had a couple of big drags, then said, “Hello.”
“Hello.” She turned her head and smiled at me.
It was a sweet smile—in a sweet, almost an enchanting face. In the light from the dashboard I could see thick chestnut-colored hair falling forward slightly over a smooth brow, massed behind her head and crumpled on her shoulders. Her eyes were like dark star sapphires, and her lips looked tender. The warmth and glow of health, of pulsing blood, filled her lips and cheeks, and maybe even those dark eyes.
“Who are you?” I said.
That quick glance again, that smile again. “Alexandria Maria Ducharme,” she said. “I am called Dria.”
“Dria.” I let it roll on my tongue. I liked it. She’d pronounced her last name “Doosharm.” I said, “Is that French?”
“Ducharme is. The rest—My father was a Greek Frenchman, or a French Greek, and my mother was born in a little town called Bariloche, not far from Buenos Aires, in Argentina.” She called it “Arrhenteena.” “There is perhaps a little Indian, or Indio, and I like to think maybe there is a drop of Aztec blood in me as well.”
“If that’s what you like to think, so do I.” Whatever it was, it was magic. She almost made me forget about the guy with the rattle and the weirdo with the steel teeth. Almost.
“Dria,” I said. “I just climbed off the ‘Wanderer,’ but I’m more at sea now than I was then. Will you start talking—about anything? Maybe things will begin making sense. Though I doubt it.”
“Mr. Farrow sent me. He knew you were to be on the ‘Wanderer,’ and when he saw it he sent me, so that someone would be there to meet you, and also so you would have a way to the hotel.”
“Well, that makes sense. Keep going.”
“I suppose you mean the trouble with Mordieux.” Mordieux. That was what one or two of those wailing people back there had been wailing. “Is that the guy I clobbered?”
“Yes. Count Mordieux—at least, that is what he calls himself. He is the most powerful hungan on the island. Hungan—you would call that voodoo priest. He says he is the God of the Dead, controls many loa.”
“Looked like he was trying to control you. What was that wrestling match about?”
“I saw him near the dock with Michel, one of his hunsi, and when Michel went on down to the dock, Mordieux stopped me. I said I had come to meet the passengers off the ‘Wanderer,’ and he told me—again—that I would have to come to his sanctuary. For weeks he has been concerned for me to go back there.”
“Sanctuary?”
“Every hungan or mambo of voodoo has what is called a sanctuary, or humfo, where they live, take care of the sick, hold ceremonies and rituals—in one way, like a church. Only much more than that. Some of the colony also live on the sanctuary grounds, and Mordieux’ is the biggest and most lavish on the island, with the most and largest buildings.”
She had turned from the narrow road and was now going up Sea Drive, a curving blacktop road. We passed by the thin trunks of tall coconut palms and green banana trees, then suddenly came into a large clearing before the hotel. Dria drove on around the clearing, swung left toward the big white building.
On our left, directly before the hotel’s entrance, was an enormous swimming pool, and, beyond the pool, nearer the sea, which was a hundred yards or so away, was what looked like a half acre of orchids. On our right white steps led up to the hotel, which faced east, and the curving wings I’d first seen from aboard the “Wanderer” cupped themselves around the pool and the clearing—and us. The lobby was brightly lighted, and in the curving walls of the hotel light glowed cheerfully from behind the windows of dozens of rooms.
Dria parked at a low curb paralleling the asphalt. I asked her to tell me more about Mordieux and especially her trouble with him, why he was so concerned about her going to his sanctuary, or whatever she’d said.
Dria shrugged and drummed on the steering wheel with her fingers. “I told you of my father, my real father. After I was born here, he left. He went away and did not return. When I was young, my mother married again, married him who was known as Papa Lurin. A hungan of great wisdom and good power, a good man and a good hungan. All of Verde to this hour thinks well of Papa Lurin. Still, when I was young, my mother died, and my stepfather cared for me. Until he too … died.”
She gave the word “died” an odd inflection; it twisted in her mouth. I said, “When was that, Dria?”
“One year and four months now he is dead. It was then that Count Mordieux became the new hungan of what had been my stepfather’s humfo. He had been Papa Lurin’s confiance—you would say his next below … his right hand. And one year and four months ago I left the humfo and have not returned. Then I lived there. Now I work at the Sunrise and live not far from here, close to the city of Verde.”
“So Mordieux wants you back in the sanctuary, huh? Because you lived there before?”
“That, and because I was like the daughter of Papa Lurin. I am friends, I am close, with all of the colony. The new hungan says it is not well that I am no longer of the colony. They wish me there, and he has promised them I will return.”
“He’s promised them? It’s up to you, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But in this year Mordieux has many times talked to me. Now, this last month and more, he has said I must go back. He has said that if I will not he will send the dead against me.”
“He’ll what?”
“It is an evil thing, l’envoi-morts.” Her voice was soft. “It is a most powerful thing, and if Baron-Samedi agrees, the dead enter one and hold him. He grows thin, and when he begins to spit blood it is known he is held close and soon will himself be of the dead.” She paused. “Already Mordieux has thrown the stone against my door.”
I know my eyes must have been bugging in the near darkness, and my mouth was a bit ajar, and I don’t know what I might have said right then. But, fortunately, Dria laughed suddenly.
“But I am not afraid,” she said. “I know how to make the dead let go. I am the daughter of Papa Lurin.”
I swallowed. I could still hear the sound of her voice as it had been seconds ago, low and soft, and kind of spooky. Finally I said, “Must be hellishly important to him that you go back.”
“Yes. He has made the promise. But I am still here. A hungan’s powers must have effect or he will lose the confidence of his people. If that happens, they will take back their pots-de-tête, which contain their souls, and they will not pay him to cure sickness. He will be as nothing.”
It struck me that, no matter what I’d come here for, I’d walked in on a war. A war between a creepy hungan with steel teeth and a little lovely with star sapphire eyes. I knew whose side I was on, too. But I also knew it sure as hell wasn’t my kind of war. I’m not really superstitious or anything like that, not really, but … well, the hell with it.
I said, “The way he was hauling you around, I guess he figured if the, um, dead couldn’t do the job he’d have to do it himself.”
“It would seem. He was trying to force me into his car. This month past he has been most insistent, severe in what he has told me. It is of much importance to him.” Dria paused, then went on, “He is very strong. I could not do anything. I was afraid. I have not thanked you, Mr. Scott. For helping—”
“No need to. I’m kind of glad it happened, now.” I thought a moment. “I think.”
“But you should not have hit him. You cannot be expected to understand, but that was a terrible thing to do.”
“What’s so terrible? The guy was about to choke me or something. Or grab me, anyway—”
“No. He would not use physical force against you. At least, that is not what he was doing then. He was calling on his loa, his bad loa. To do … bad things to you.”
“Yeah? How about that? I guess I loa’ed the boom on him—strike that. That damned Vanessa … Uh, loa is that spooks—spirits?”
“Spirits … gods. The invisible powers. Some men have the ability to call upon them for aid or for attacks upon their enemies. So it is told.”
“I gather you must believe that stuff. Pardon my indelicate air. What I mean is, I guess you believe in the loa, those invisible powers? In voodoo?”
She was studying her fingernails as if they were highly interesting, not looking at me. “I was born here. As I said, I grew up with Papa Lurin. And so I grew up with voudon, also. Even as some people grow up in the Catholic Church, or the Jewish religion, or as Protestants or Buddhists. It is our religion here, Mr. Scott. I have outgrown much of it, of course. But … I have seen many strange things. Things I cannot explain.” She paused. “I know some of it is not logical. I am a woman now. With a mind and belief of my own. But perhaps we do not ever outgrow all the things of our childhood.”
I didn’t say anything.
After a few seconds she went on, “That is not important, Mr. Scott. Important is that you struck Mordieux. This was seen by others. Tomorrow—no, tonight, it will be known all over the island. Before the dawn all will know this. The big white-haired one inflicted injury on Count Mordieux, God of the Dead, chief and most powerful hungan of all Verde. Now, surely, the white-haired one will grow thin and pale and waste away and die; yes, his spirit will grow small and dry, and leave him.”
Her voice had dropped lower, and she spoke very softly now, as if more to herself than to me. Shadows filled the inside of the car, and she almost whispered as she went on. “This they will say. And Mordieux himself—he will now stop at nothing. As I said to you before, you cannot be expected to understand. You are from another place, yes, another time. But you have done the terrible thing. And if only to keep his power with the people, to keep his, ‘face,’ you might say, he must have revenge upon you. His people will expect it. Even I expect it.” She bit her lip. “I should not have asked you to help me. I did not think—”
“Look, don’t worry about it. I’m not worried about it.”
That’s what I said. But I kind of wanted to go somewhere and spit. Just to make sure.
Dria looked at me then, her eyes shining. “Please take care,” she said. “Listen. There are here many good hungan and mambo. They care for the ill, feed those who have no food, give shelter to those who are without shelter. They call upon their loa, feed them, make sacrifice to them, that there may be help and good for their people. It is good, and they are good. All these things Count Mordieux does also. But he is bad.” She was looking straight at me now and speaking with such gravity and sincerity that I could feel a tightening in the pit of my stomach. “He is not good hungan,” she went on gravely. “He is boko, sorcerer, macandal; he uses bought loa; he works with both hands. He is not good.”
She was silent. I was silent.
Then she said, “I will tell you this. I did not intend, but … My stepfather did not die, as men die. He was old, but he did not die of being old. Count Mordieux killed him. He murdered Papa Lurin.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am sure. I have no way to make others sure. It is only that I know it here.” She pointed to her breast. “But he died as he would have died from the murder of Mordieux, the poison Mordieux would know. And suddenly he died. That is why I left when Mordieux became hungan. He knows I think this, and so do those of his colony. It is why he must make me return. Only when I return will it be known that I absolve Mordieux. My act lifts the cloud from his head.”
So that was it. Dria went on, “You must understand. He is of much danger to you now—now that you have done bad to him. Believe this.”
“Yeah. I kind of think I do, maybe. Yeah. You mean he might shoot me, or stick a spear in me, or something?”
“Not that. Oh, perhaps that.” She was studying her fingernails again. “He will do whatever Count Mordieux can do. There will be ceremonies; he will call his most powerful loa. He will make sacrifice, maybe invoke Damballah-wèdo, and even Saint Expédit and Baron-Samedi.” She paused and rubbed her nails with the tip of her thumb. “Understand, I do not say there is danger to you from this only. No. But I, even I, have seen many strange things….”
I don’t know quite what it was. Maybe her tone … or maybe something in her mind reached out and brushed my mind, and I felt part of what she might have been feeling. All I know is, when she said, “many strange things,” something pulled at my spine. I could almost feel the vertebrae move in a slow, sinuous wriggle like a snake crossing a path.
“Hey, ho,” I said suddenly. Just to make noise, I guess. “Well, maybe I shouldn’t have popped the dandy, but I did it. I didn’t know he was tossing spells and such at me. I thought maybe he was going to bite me. Man, those teeth! A guy could get gangrene, lockjaw—”
“Do not make it a joke.”
“Who’s joking? A guy could get lockjaw.” She was frowning, so I cut it off and said, “Seriously, Dria, I do thank you for the warning. I appreciate it—and I promise you, I’ll take care.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’d better go on inside. I suppose Mr. Farrow’s been expecting me for a while. But first I’m going to have a drink. Maybe a double Zomb—uh, a stiff … a bourbon.”
“I must park the car. Then I will tell Mr. Farrow you are here. In the bar? All right?”
“Fine. Because in the bar is where I’ll be.”
CHAPTER THREE
The lobby of the Sunrise was big and bright. Furniture of wicker and bamboo, with cushions covered in colorfully patterned cloth, was strategically placed in the large room, and a dozen guests relaxed on chairs and couches. The registration desk was against the far wall, and on my right were big carved doors, open now, above which was the name “Coral Room.”
I could see the long bar inside, and a lot of people on stools and at low tables. The place was jammed, but I managed to find a stool at the end of the bar. A gaunt woman who looked more like a dying American tourist than a waitress, wearing pink slacks and a purple blouse, with a narrow-brimmed, woven-reed hat on her head, tottered to a table, bending under the weight of a tray with two little cocktails on it. She was not quite a hundred years old.
Behind the bar a fat man with very pale white skin, wearing Bermuda shorts, black shoes and—yes—black sock, washed glasses. The other bartender, who stopped before me, was clad in white Bermudas and a green sports shirt and was smoking a pipe. He looked like a drunken Irishman.
Hmm, I thought. Where was the magic of the Caribbean? The native waiters flashing brilliant smiles? The steel bands, the wild dancers?
“Helloo-oo, stranger!” the pipe-smoking bartender chortled. “What’s your poison?”
“Bourbon and water, please,” I said. “Instead.”
He picked up a glass, flipped it into the air with a little twitching movement, and missed it. As it clunked on the floor, he shrugged, moved it out of the way with one foot, and picked up another glass. He didn’t flip this one. He poured booze into it—contemptuous of jiggers—then added water and gave me the highball.
I tasted it and said, “That is lousy.”
“Something wrong with it?”
“I think it’s the bourbon. I think it’s Scotch.”
He looked at the bottle still in his hand. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said placidly. “How about that? See?” He showed me the label. Scotch.
“Fine,” I said. “O.K. We all make mistakes. Now how about a bourbon and water?”
He got the drink made and put it in front of me, spilling only a little of it, as I said, “Hope you don’t mind my asking. But have you been a bartender long?”
“About an hour.”
“An hour,” I said.
“Yeah. Maybe a little less.”
I had some of my drink—it was bourbon this time—looked at the bartender and shrugged. I looked at the old waitress, creeping back with her empty tray. At the fat man washing glasses, in his Bermuda shorts and black shoes and—yes—black socks. It was too much for me. This whole damned island was too much for me. Maybe the “Wanderer” had gone down at sea, and I’d drowned, and this was the beginning of my hell.
But suddenly it occurred to me that perhaps I was taking all this too lightly. After all, I owned a piece of this joint now, didn’t I? Sure I did: four and a half per cent, at least. Yeah, there were going to have to be some changes made around here. First thing, those black socks would have to go. In fact, the whole bartender would have to go. And we’d get some waitresses like those I knew back in L.A. at a place called the Harem, the kind who killed off sultans. Then we’d —
“Hey,” the bartender said, breaking in on my thoughts. He was squinting at me. “I’ll bet a buck you just got here.”
“You win a buck.”
He pulled the pipe from his mouth and stabbed it at me. “You must be this Shell Scott.”
“How did you know?”
“John told us—Mr. Farrow. Told us a detective was coming in, so we didn’t need to worry.”
“Didn’t need to worry about what?”
“Well, after the second guy died—”
“Second? There’s been another one?”
“Yeah. Paul, native boy that worked here. Bellhop. Died yesterday. Some of the guests were a little upset, and Farrow told us he’d got in touch with a detective from the States—just in case it wasn’t heart attacks or something. You were already on your way.” He put his pipe back between his teeth.
“Great. Fine. That’s all I needed. Now for some blaring trumpets and big posters—”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. How’d this Paul happen to die?”
“You got me. Just died. Like Farrow’s partner. Laughing and scratching, and then zowie. Dead.”
I was thinking about that—laughing and scratching, and then zowie, dead—when the bartender went on, “I suppose you’re curious about me mixing drinks, and other guests waiting table, and all.”
“Well … a little.”
“We’re just pitching in and helping. When all the local people walked off the job, somebody had to do something. Couldn’t eat cold doughnuts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
“Doesn’t sound very exciting.”