Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  She might have screamed, but he banged her head on the cement floor of the alley and her eyes went glassy. She started to scream later, but he got a hand over her mouth and cut off the scream. She did not manage to bite him. He was careful.

  Then, while she struggled, he drove the point of the ice pick precisely into her heart.

  He left her there, dead and turning cold. He dropped the ice pick into a sewer. He found the subway arcade and rode the IRT back to where he had come from, went to his room, washed hands and face, got into bed, and slept. He slept very well and did not dream, not at all.

  When he woke up in the morning at his usual time he felt as he always felt, cool and fresh and ready for the day’s work. He showered and he dressed and he went downstairs, and he bought a copy of the Daily Mirror from the blind newsdealer.

  He read the item. A young exotic dancer named Mona More had been attacked in Washington Heights and had been stabbed to death with an ice pick.

  He remembered. In an instant it all came back, the girl’s body, the ice pick, murder—

  He gritted his teeth together until they ached. The realism of it all! He wondered if a psychiatrist could do anything about it. But psychiatrists were so painfully expensive, and he had his own psychiatrist, his personal and no-charge psychiatrist, his Sergeant Rooker.

  But he remembered it! Everything, buying the ice pick, throwing the girl down, stabbing her—

  He took a very deep breath. It was time to be methodical about this, he realized. He went to the telephone and called his office. “Cuttleton here,” he said. “I’ll be late today, an hour or so. A doctor’s appointment. I’ll be in as soon as I can.”

  “It’s nothing serious?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Nothing serious.” And, really, he wasn’t lying. After all, Sergeant Rooker did function as his personal psychiatrist, and a psychiatrist was a doctor. And he did have an appointment, a standing appointment, for Sergeant Rooker had told him to come in whenever something like this happened. And it was nothing serious, that too was true, because he knew that he was really very innocent no matter how sure his memory made him of his guilt.

  Rooker almost smiled at him. “Well, look who’s here,” he said. “I should have figured, Mr. Cuttleton. It’s your kind of crime, isn’t it? A woman assaulted and killed, that’s your trademark, right?”

  Warren Cuttleton could not quite smile. “I . . . the More girl. Mona More.”

  “Don’t those strippers have wild names? Mona More. As in Mon Amour. That’s French.”

  “It is?”

  Sergeant Rooker nodded. “And you did it,” he said. “That’s the story?”

  “I know I couldn’t have, but—”

  “You ought to quit reading the papers,” Sergeant Rooker said. “Come on, let’s get it out of your system.”

  They went to the room. Mr. Cuttleton sat in a straight-backed chair. Sergeant Rooker closed the door and stood at the desk. He said, “You killed the woman, didn’t you? Where did you get the ice pick?”

  “A hardware store.”

  “Any special one?”

  “It was on Amsterdam Avenue.”

  “Why an ice pick?”

  “It excited me, the handle was smooth and strong, and the blade was so sharp.”

  “Where’s the ice pick now?”

  “I threw it in a sewer.”

  “Well, that’s no switch. There must have been a lot of blood, stabbing her with an ice pick. Loads of blood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your clothes get soaked with it?”

  “Yes.” He remembered how the blood had been all over his clothes, how he had had to hurry home and hope no one would see him.

  “And the clothes?”

  “In the incinerator.”

  “Not in your building, though.”

  “No. No, I changed in my building and ran to some other building, I don’t remember where, and threw the clothes down the incinerator.”

  Sergeant Rooker slapped his hand down on the desk. “This is getting too easy,” he said. “Or I’m getting too good at it. The stripper was stabbed in the heart with an ice pick. A tiny wound and it caused death just about instantly. Not a drop of blood. Dead bodies don’t bleed, and wounds like that don’t let go with much blood anyhow, so your story falls apart like wet tissue. Feel better?”

  Warren Cuttleton nodded slowly. “But it seemed so horribly real,” he said.

  “It always does.” Sergeant Rooker shook his head. “You poor son of a gun,” he said. “I wonder how long this is going to keep up.” He grinned wryly. “Much more of this and one of us is going to snap.”

  Hilliard’s Ceremony

  The old man sat on a low three-legged stool in the courtyard. He had removed his caftan and sandals. Hilliard had thought he’d be wearing a loincloth beneath the caftan, but in fact the old man was wearing a pair of boxer shorts, light blue in color. The incongruity struck Hilliard for a moment, but it did not linger; he had already learned that incongruity was to be expected in West Africa. Hilliard, nominally a cultural attaché, was in fact a coordinator of intelligence-gathering in the region, running a loose string of part-time agents and trying to make sense of their reports. Incongruity was his stock-in-trade.

  He watched as two women—girls, really—dipped sponges in a large jar of water and sluiced the old man down with them. One knelt to wash the old fellow’s feet with near-biblical ardor. When she had finished she stood up, and her companion indicated to the old man that he should lean forward with his head between his knees. When he was arranged to her satisfaction she upended the clay jar and poured the remaining water over his head. He remained motionless, allowing the water to drain from him onto the hard-packed dirt floor.

  “They are washing him,” Atuele said. “For the ceremony. Now he will go into a room and light a candle and observe its flame. Then he will have his ceremony.”

  Hilliard waited for Donnelly to say something, but his companion was silent. Hilliard said, “What’s the ceremony for?”

  Atuele smiled. He had a well-shaped oval head, regular features, an impish white-toothed grin. He had one white grandparent, and was dark enough to be regarded as a black man in America. Here in Togo, where mixed blood was a rarity, he looked to be of another race altogether.

  “The ceremony,” he said, “is to save his life. Did you see his eyes?”

  “Yes.”

  “The whites are yellow. There is no life in them. His skin has an ashen cast to it. He has a stone in his liver. Without a ceremony, it will kill him in a month. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps a week, perhaps a matter of days.”

  “Shouldn’t he be—”

  “Yes?”

  “In a hospital, I was going to say.”

  Atuele took a cigarette from the pack Donnelly had given him earlier. He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, watching the smoke rise. Tall poles supported a thatch woven of palm fronds, and the three of them sat in its shade. Atuele stared, seemingly fascinated, as the smoke rose up into the thatch.

  “American cigarettes,” he said. “The best, eh?”

  “The best,” Hilliard agreed.

  “He came from the hospital. He was there a week. More, ten days. They ran tests, they took pictures, they put his blood under a microscope. They said they could do nothing for him.” He puffed on his cigarette. “So,” he said, “he comes here.”

  “And you can save him?”

  “We will see. A stone in the liver—without a ceremony it is certain he will die. With a ceremony?” The smiled flashed. “We will see.”

  The ceremony was doubly surprising. Hilliard was surprised that he was allowed to witness it, and surprised that its trappings were so mundane, its ritual so matter-of-fact. He had expected drums, and dancers with their eyes rolling in their heads, and a masked witch doctor stamping on the ground and shaking his dreadlocks at unseen spirits. But there were no drums and no dancers, and Atuele was a far cry from the stereotypical witch doctor. He wore no mas
k, his hair was cropped close to his skull, and he never raised his voice or shook a fist at the skies.

  At the far end of the walled compound, perhaps twenty yards from where they had been sitting, there was a small area reserved for ceremonies, its perimeter outlined by whitewashed stones. Within it, the old man knelt before a carved wooden altar. He was dressed again, but in a pure white caftan, not his original garment. Atuele, too, had changed to a white caftan, but his had gold piping on the shoulders and down the front.

  To one side, two men and a woman, Africans in Western dress, stood at rapt attention. “His relatives,” Donnelly whispered. Alongside Atuele stood the two girls who had washed the old man. They were also dressed in white, and their feet were bare. One of them, Hilliard noticed, had her toenails painted a vivid scarlet.

  She was holding an orange and a knife. The knife looked to be ordinary kitchen cutlery, the sort of thing you’d use to bone a roast. Or to quarter an orange, which was what Atuele had the old man do with it. Having done so, he placed the four sections of fruit upon the altar, whereupon Atuele lit the four white candles that stood upon the altar, two at either end. Hilliard noticed that he employed the same disposable lighter he’d used earlier to light his American cigarette.

  Next the girl with the red toenails covered the old man’s head with a white handkerchief. Then the other girl, who had been holding a white chicken, handed the bird to Atuele. The chicken—pure white, with a red comb—struggled at first, and tried to flap a wing. Atuele said something to it and it calmed down. He placed it on the altar and placed the old man’s hands on top of the bird.

  “A lot of the ceremonies involve a chicken,” Donnelly whispered.

  No one moved. The old man, his head bent, the handkerchief covering his head, rested his hands upon the white chicken. The chicken remained perfectly still and did not let out a peep. The girl, the old man’s relatives, all stood still and silent. Then the old man let out a sigh and Hilliard sensed that something had happened.

  Atuele bent over the altar and drew the chicken out from under the man’s grasp. The chicken remained curiously docile. Atuele straightened up, holding the bird in both hands, then inclined his head and seemed to be whispering into its ear. Did chickens have ears? Hilliard wasn’t sure, but evidently the message got through, because the bird’s response was immediate and dramatic. Its head fell forward, limp, apparently lifeless.

  “It’s dead,” Donnelly said.

  “How—”

  “I’ve seen him do this before. I don’t know what it is he says. I think he tells them to die. Of course, he doesn’t speak English to them.”

  “What does he speak? Chicken?”

  “Ewé, I suppose.” He pronounced it Eh-veh. “Or some tribal dialect. Anyway, the chicken’s dead.”

  Maybe he’s hypnotized it, Hilliard thought. A moment later he had to discard the notion when Atuele took up the knife and severed the chicken’s head. No blood spurted. Indeed, Atuele had to give the bird a good shake in order to get some of its blood to dribble out onto the dirt in front of the altar. If Atuele had hypnotized the bird, he’d hypnotized its bloodstream, too.

  Atuele handed the bird to one of the girls. She walked off with it. He leaned forward and snatched the handkerchief from the old man’s head. He said something, presumably in Ewé, and the old man stood up. Atuele gathered up the sections of orange and gave one each to the old man and his relatives. All, without hesitation, commenced eating the fruit.

  The old man embraced one of his male relatives, stepped back, let out a rich laugh, then embraced the other man and the woman in turn. He held himself differently now, Hilliard noticed. And his eyes were clear. Still—

  Atuele took Hilliard and Donnelly by the arm and led them back into the shade. He motioned them to their chairs, and a male servant came and poured out three glasses of palm wine. “He is well,” Atuele announced. “The stone has passed from his liver into the liver of the chicken. He is lively now, see how he walks with a light step. In an hour he will lie down and sleep the clock around. Tomorrow he will feel fine. He is healed.”

  “And the chicken?”

  “The chicken is dead, of course.”

  “What will happen to the chicken?”

  “What should happen to a dead chicken? The women will cook him.” He smiled. “Togo is not a rich country, you know. We cannot be throwing away perfectly good chickens. Of course, the liver will not be eaten.”

  “Because there is a stone in it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I should have asked,” Hilliard said, “to see the chicken cut open. To examine the liver.”

  “And if there wasn’t a stone in it? Alan, you saw the old man, you shook his hand and looked him in the eye. He had eyes like egg yolks when he walked in there. His shoulders were slumped, his gut sagged. When Atuele was done with him he was a new man.”

  “Power of suggestion.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What else?”

  Donnelly started to say something, held off while the waiter set drinks and a bowl of crisp banana chips before them. They were at the Hotel de la Paix in Lomé, the capital and the only real city in Togo. Atuele’s hamlet, twenty minutes distant in Donnelly’s Renault, seemed a world away.

  “You know,” Donnelly said, “he has an interesting story. His father’s father was German. Of course, the whole place was a German colony until the First World War. Togoland, they called it.”

  “I know.”

  “Then the French took it over, and now of course it’s independent.” Donnelly glanced involuntarily at the wall, where the ruler’s portrait was to be seen. It was a rare public room in Togo that did not display the portrait. A large part of Hilliard’s job lay in obtaining foreknowledge of the inevitable coup that would one day dislodge all those portraits from all those walls. It would not happen soon, he had decided, and whenever it did happen, it would come as a surprise to businessmen like Donnelly, as well as to everyone like Hilliard whose job it was to predict such things.

  “Atuele was brought up Christian,” Donnelly went on. “A modern family, Western dress, a good education at church schools. Further education at the Sorbonne.”

  “In Paris?”

  “Last I looked. You’re surprised? He graduated from there and studied medicine in Germany. Frankfurt, I think it was.”

  “The man’s a physician?”

  “He left after two years. He became disenchanted with Western medicine. Nothing but drugs and surgery, according to him, treating the symptoms and overlooking the underlying problem. The way he tells it, a spirit came to him one night and told him his path called for a return to the old ways.”

  “A spirit,” Hilliard said.

  “Right. He quit med school, flew home, and looked for people to study with. Apprenticed himself to the best herbalist he could find. Then went upcountry and spent months with several of the top shamans. He’d already begun coming into his powers back in Germany, and they increased dramatically once he channeled his energies in the right direction.”

  Donnelly went on, telling Atuele’s story. How he’d gathered a few dozen people around him; they served him, and he saw to their welfare. How several of his brothers and sisters had followed him back to the old ways, much to the despair of their parents.

  “There are shamans behind every bush in this country,” Donnelly said. “Witch doctors, charlatans. Even in the Moslem north they’re thicker than flies. Down here, where the prevailing religion is animist, they’re all over the place. But most of them are a joke. This guy’s the real tinsel.”

  “A stone in the liver,” Hilliard said. “What do you suppose that means, anyway? I’ve heard of kidney stones, gallstones. What the hell is a stone in the liver?”

  “What’s the difference? Maybe the old guy had some calcification of the liver. Cirrhosis, say.”

  “And Atuele cured cirrhosis by giving it to the chicken?”

  Donnelly smiled gently. “Atuele wouldn’t s
ay he cured it. He might say that he got a spirit to move the stone from the man to the chicken.”

  “A spirit again.”

  “He works with spirits. They do his bidding.”

  Hilliard looked at his friend. “I’m not sure what happened back there,” he said, “but I can live without knowing. I was in Botswana before they sent me here, and in Chad before that. You see things, and you hear of things. But what I’d really like to know is how seriously you take this guy.”

  “Pretty seriously.”

  “Why? I mean, I’m willing to believe he cures people, including some specimens the doctors have given up on. Powers of the mind and all that, and if he wants to think it’s spirits, and if his clients believe it, that’s fine for them. But you’re saying it’s more than that, aren’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why?”

  Donnelly drank his drink. “They say seeing is believing,” he said, “but that’s crap. This afternoon didn’t make a believer out of you, and why should it? But think what an impact it must have had on the old man.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I had a ceremony,” Donnelly said. “Nine, ten months ago, just before the July rains. Atuele summoned a spirit and ordered it to enter into me.” He smiled almost apologetically. “It worked,” he said.

  The Hilliards’ dinner was guinea fowl with a rice stuffing, accompanied by sautéed green beans and a salad. Hilliard wished his wife would get their cook to prepare some of the native specialties. The hotels and all of the better restaurants served a watered-down French cuisine, but he’d eaten a fiery stew at an unassuming place down the street from the embassy that made him want more. Marilyn had passed on his request to the cook, and reported that the woman did not seem to know how to cook Togolese dishes.

  “She said they’re very common anyway,” she told him. “Not to Western tastes. You wouldn’t like them, she said.”

  “But I do like them. We already know that much.”

  “I’m just telling you what she said.”