The Penalty

by Mal Peet

Now he was close to me. I could see he was muddled because he knew he was too drunk to get back into the saddle. I took one silent step towards him. He pulled the stopper from the bottle and lifted it to his mouth. While he was still swallowing I stepped up behind him and looped the wedding cord over his head down onto his throat. I crossed my hands and pulled tight. Such strength I had then! He made a sound like sucking mud, and rum came out of his nose.

  I pulled his head back and whispered in his ear, “This is for Blessing.”

  When his hands and legs went useless I dragged him back to the creek and drowned him.

  Like I expected, the news came up to the house early next day. Ma Rosa was still telling us our work when she was called out. Morro had fallen drunk from his horse and drowned in the creek, she told us. Her face tried to keep cloud in it but the sun kept breaking through. She didn’t look at me.

  Later, when the rain was coming down heavy again, I had to go into the kitchen and Madelena was there. She went on one knee and took my hand and placed it on top of her head.

  “Pai,” she said. Just that one word.

  We were like that when I looked over to the entry into the hall and Blessing was standing outside it. She watched for two heartbeats then closed the door.

  So that was how I began. With a vengeance.

  Four: Dead Man’s Landing

  THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH of Saint Francis contained more gold and silver than any other church in Latin America, according to the leaflet Faustino had picked up at the entrance. The saint’s side chapel alone boasted more than thirty kilos of gold leaf which, laid flat, would cover three football pitches. Standing at the elaborate railing that separated the chapel from grubby worshippers, Faustino figured that would be about right. The far wall was a vast and grotesque fantasy coated in the stuff. A horde of pouting golden cherubs with plump golden buttocks hovered around golden niches within which golden madonnas suckled golden baby Christs. From below, gold pillars erupted into golden birds, flowers, weirdly imagined animals. (What were those, Faustino wondered. Camels? Turtles on stilts?) Golden plants writhed around forms and faces that choked on gold. And there in the middle of it all was St Francis himself, who’d taught that poverty and simplicity were the surest routes to God. He was wearing a plain brown habit and was looking upwards, startled, as if to say, “Jesus, what the hell happened?” If he’d asked Faustino that question, Faustino would have said, “Well, Frank, it looks for all the world like some really big guy ate a mix of plaster and gold dust and threw up all over your wall.” But Faustino was hung over, and in a sour mood.

  Faustino glanced at his watch: ten past ten. A creased and ancient woman appeared at his side. She closed her eyes and began a murmured prayer to the saint, although, from the look of her, she didn’t need any tips from Francis on how to live a life of poverty. Faustino ambled back to the central aisle, looking towards the main doors, which were today fully opened. Worshippers were beginning to assemble for Mass; a jumble of fractured and mingling silhouettes moved among the glare. Two of them became distinct as they approached. Edson Bakula and a young girl.

  She was, Faustino guessed, fourteen or thereabouts. Breasts budding beneath the pink T-shirt. Three-quarter length cut-off jeans; dusty flip-flops on her feet. Lighter-skinned than Bakula. Her face was strong and handsome rather than pretty: the face of an older person. Faustino extended his hand to Bakula, who, instead of taking it, grasped Faustino’s elbow, turning him gently.

  “Over here,” he said, and led the way along an avenue of vast pillars and into a small side chapel. It was deserted apart from a group of soiled marble conquistadors kneeling in embarrassment below a crucified Christ. The girl stood looking up at Faustino, not smiling. Examining his face as if he were a famous person who had turned out to be rather disappointing in real life. Above their heads, thick blades of light from the lancet windows sliced the dim air. Dust motes danced like a million golden flies.

  Bakula said quietly, “This is Prima. Primavera de Barros.”

  Faustino’s face began a conventional smile, then froze. De Barros?

  “She is Brujito’s sister. She knows where he is.”

  Later, much later, Faustino tried to recall what he’d felt at that moment. It wasn’t that gleeful uplift, the electrical surge, that a lucky journalist experiences maybe half a dozen times in a working life. That goal-scoring moment of triumph. No, what he remembered was a sort of sudden vertigo. Like walking along an ordinary city pavement and seeing that just ahead it turns into a narrow footpath along the brink of a sheer and infinite precipice. And wanting to turn back but not being able to because the way back, and the city itself, has gone. In fact, at the time, he was immediately and deeply suspicious. But he completed the smile.

  “Señorita,” he said.

  She hesitated, then took his outstretched hand, looking at their hands joined together as if it were the strangest thing.

  Faustino turned to Bakula. “Look, if this—”

  But the girl interrupted him. “Rico came home. He was frightened, yeah? He slept one night in the house then next morning he told Auntie he had to go somewhere an’ I followed him. He went to the graveyard. That’s how I know where he is. There’s only one place you can go from there.”

  She spoke rhythmically, like someone speaking the words of a song while trying to ignore the tune. Or like someone reciting something that has been rehearsed. Her voice was husky, low-pitched, with a strong, almost Caribbean, accent.

  “Rico?”

  “Ricardo,” Bakula said. “Brujito.”

  “Right.”

  The girl said, “I came to find Edson. He said to talk to you.”

  She stood looking at Faustino like somebody lost and helpless but also stubborn, as if she were a foreigner insisting on being understood. It annoyed him.

  “Okay, when was this? When did your brother go home?”

  “Night after that game. The one when he got took off.”

  Faustino looked at her, waiting for some small sign of embarrassment, perhaps, or guilt; but there was none. He turned to Bakula.

  “This is some kind of joke, right?”

  “No.”

  “No? What then? A scam? There’s shit breaking loose all over the country about this thing, and suddenly you pop up with the kid’s sister? Come on, Edson.”

  “We’re telling you the truth, Paul.”

  The girl’s gaze switched back and forth between the men’s faces.

  A thought, an ugly one, occurred to Faustino. He said to her harshly, “Did you try this on Max Salez?”

  “Señor?”

  “Maximo Salez. Another journalist. Like me. Did you tell him this story?”

  “I don’ know no one called that. I ain’t told no one ’cept Edson.”

  Bakula said, “Prima didn’t get to San Juan until yesterday evening. She came on the late boat.”

  Boat? Faustino’s head swarmed with questions that the sensible part of his brain didn’t want answered. He wondered fleetingly if in San Juan it was all right to smoke in church.

  “Okay, Prima,” he said, “tell me this. Everyone’s been looking for Brujito for nearly two weeks. So why haven’t you gone to the police?”

  She looked at him as if he had spoken in a strange language. Then, glancing briefly at Bakula, she said, “No police.”

  Faustino sighed through his nose and raised his eyes heavenward. He found himself looking at Jesus. The sculptor had been at pains to depict the agony of crucifixion. The tortured body seemed on the verge of coming apart under its own weight. The fingers were hooked into claws as if trying to pluck at the spikes through their palms, and the wound in the side had ragged, pouting lips. The face, though, wore a bland, almost blank, expression. Or was that the ghost of a slightly sceptical smile?

  Faustino was startled when the girl expressed what he was feeling.

  “I don’ like it here, Edson,” she said.

  “No? We can go somewhere else. Is that all right with you
, Paul?”

  “Sure. You go wherever you want. I’ve got things to do.”

  Faustino then made the mistake of looking at Prima’s face.

  “Please, Señor,” she said.

  Her eyes were wide and moist. Faustino could detect no trace of guile in them. He looked at his watch, then shrugged and said, “Okay.”

  Which turned out to be a second mistake.

  BAKULA LED THEM into the labyrinth of streets and alleys behind the cathedral. The ways were narrow and crowded, filled with a soft cacophony of competing musics and the heavy odour of food frying in palm oil. At a door unmarked by any sign, Bakula halted and politely stood aside to allow Faustino to enter first.

  Just inside, a very large and very black woman sat behind a counter watching a soap opera on a tiny portable TV set. She wore a white turban and a green T-shirt printed with a portrait of Nelson Mandela. Stretched across the vast balcony of her chest, Mandela’s face was distorted into something grinning and oriental, a cartoon Buddha. When she saw Bakula she raised her hand. Faustino figured that her upper arm was pretty much the same girth as his thigh, but the flesh on it didn’t tremble when she slapped her palm against Bakula’s in a lazy high five.

  At the back of the shop a doorway, curtained with a rainbow of plastic ribbons, opened onto a small walled courtyard. A greeny-blue plastic tarpaulin had been rigged up as an awning; it cast a cool submarine light down onto the half-dozen white tables and the dozen white chairs. Bakula brought a third chair to the table in the far corner and they all sat down.

  Faustino was damned if he was going to initiate any conversation, so he lit a cigarette, crossed his legs and surveyed his surroundings. The only other customers were two men sitting at the table closest to the door. One was tall and lean; the other – the older one with the bandanna on his head – was shorter and stockier. Both had muscles where normal people don’t. They paid no attention to Faustino and his companions; the younger guy was fiddling with a mobile phone while the other watched attentively, as if receiving a silent lesson in modern technology.

  The voice of Bob Marley began to warble softly from a pair of wall-mounted speakers. Prima murmured along with the song, her eyes down, watching her feet.

  The big Mandela-chested woman emerged from the shop carrying a tray. She unloaded it onto the table: a glass jug of what looked like mango juice, a Pepsi, three tumblers, a plate of fried bean rissoles, and a dish of innocent-looking green salsa which, Faustino knew, would light the fires of hell in his mouth if he were fool enough to taste it. Prima had no such qualms; she began to eat enthusiastically.

  When the woman had returned to her soap opera, Bakula said, “Paul, I realize this will seem … strange.”

  Faustino raised his eyebrows and harrumphed smoke from his nose.

  “But I assure you that Prima is telling the truth. She believes her brother’s life is in danger. She came to San Juan to see if I could help.”

  “Why you?”

  Prima swallowed and said, “Auntie told me Edson’s one person in San Juan we can trust.”

  “Really?”

  Bakula said, “Prima’s aunt is someone I know quite well. Santo Tomas is a place I visit from time to time.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Half a day by boat, up the Rio Verde.”

  “Ah,” Faustino said. “In the Cane Country.”

  “Yes.”

  Faustino turned back to the girl, caught her before she could put more food in her face. “And you say that’s where your brother is? In Santo Tomas?”

  “Not exackly. Close by.”

  “Okay. So why doesn’t he just come back to San Juan? Why’s he hiding out in the bush somewhere?”

  She didn’t look at him. “He’s not hidin,” she said eventually. “He can’t leave.”

  “What do you mean, he can’t leave? Are you saying he’s been kidnapped?”

  She seemed unable to answer. She looked away and murmured something Faustino couldn’t catch.

  “Yes,” Bakula said. “He’s been kidnapped.”

  “Well now,” Faustino said pleasantly. “We seem to have a problem here. I happen to know that Ricardo walked away from the DSJ stadium unaccompanied. And in the cathedral, Prima, you told me that he came home and slept in the house, then in the morning went off somewhere – a graveyard, I think you said? And I assume he was alone, is that right?”

  “Yeah,” Prima said sulkily. She glanced at Bakula. “But he said he was expected, tho.”

  “I’m not an expert, of course,” Faustino admitted, “but that doesn’t sound like any kind of kidnap I’ve heard of. Actually, it sounds for all the world like someone doing something of his own free will.”

  In the absence of an ashtray, he tapped ash onto the floor.

  “You know, Edson, after a few years in my trade you develop a nose for bullshit. I can smell it now. I can smell it quite strongly, as a matter of fact. Why don’t you tell me what you want?”

  Bakula did not seem offended. He nodded thoughtfully. “You’re right, of course. We’re not telling you all of it. It does sound as though Ricardo was acting out of what you call free will. But he wasn’t. Prima thinks – I think – that he was terrified.”

  “Terrified? Of what?”

  Prima looked at him, then, and Faustino was dismayed to see that her eyes were wet.

  “He think his spirit’s hex. But it ain’t so. I know it ain’t so.” She shook her head grievously. A teardrop landed on Faustino’s wrist. He resisted the desire to wipe it away but leaned away from her, discomforted.

  “Is a shittin trick, man. Tell him, Edson. Tell him.”

  Her voice was suddenly hard and fierce despite the tears. The two men at the far table glanced in her direction, then away again.

  Bakula reached across the table and snapped the can of Pepsi open. Crack and hiss. He wrapped Prima’s hand around it, saying, “Shh. Be cool. Drink this. It’s all right.”

  Behind and above the girl’s head a small green and yellow lizard scuttled to a new position on the wall and froze.

  Prima sniffed, staring at the keyhole into her Pepsi.

  Bakula said, “We need your help, Paul. The problem is, we are dealing here with things you don’t believe in.”

  Faustino looked blank for a moment or two, then nodded wisely, as if at a gradual revelation.

  “Oh, I see. So we aren’t talking about just any old kidnap here. We’re talking about voodoo kidnap. Is that right? Prima reckons her brother is bewitched?”

  The girl made a sound, “Huh,” that was somehow contemptuous and despairing at the same time.

  Bakula looked away briefly, then said, “Bewitched is not a word that we, I, would use, but…” He seemed affected by tiredness suddenly, and made a visible effort to overcome it.

  “Ricardo’s aunt’s house is a Veneration house. You understand? A place of Worship. The children were brought up rather strictly. Ricardo is particularly devout. He believes, for example, that his skill as a player is a spiritual gift. Literally. And that anything harmful to his spirit will damage his ability. That’s been a source of strength for him. Until now. Prima thinks someone, some people, have convinced—”

  Here Prima again muttered something that Faustino couldn’t make out, and Bakula laid his hand on her wrist to quieten her.

  “Prima is sure that Ricardo believes his spirit has been separated from him. That he is being controlled. She is sure that nothing else can explain what happened.”

  The plastic ribbons across the doorway rustled and another big man, wearing violet-tinted sunglasses, came into the yard. He joined the other two. Elaborate manual greetings were performed, and the man in the bandanna chuckled. It was a rich, attractive sound, a subterranean river running over dark stones. It seemed to Faustino that their company would be more fun than what he was stuck with. He thought, In four hours I’ll be on a plane out of here.

  He said, “May I ask you a question?”

  “Please
do.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “We want you to write the story. To publish the truth in your paper.”

  For a second or two it was as though Faustino had not heard. He sat back in his chair, smiling as if at some mildly amusing anecdote. Bakula watched him, expressionless. Prima sat hunched over her Pepsi, blinking at it; she looked like a hapless child trapped in a tedious adult conversation that had nothing to do with her.

  “It’s a big story, Paul.”

  Faustino stopped smiling. “Really? I had no idea.”

  “I’m sorry. Of course, I mean—”

  Faustino raised a hand, a halt gesture, then put it flat on the table and leaned forward.

  “Go to the police, Edson,” he said, quietly and solemnly. “Really. If you believe what Prima has told you, go to the police. I don’t know how powerful this voodoo stuff is, but I wouldn’t mind betting that a SWAT team with a load of automatic weapons and a bunch of tear gas would sort it.”

  Bakula sipped from his glass, then put it back down precisely on the wet ring it had left on the table. He gazed into Faustino’s eyes; in the filtered light under the awning the shaded half of his face was greenish.

  Very calmly he said, “Paul, Ricardo has been missing for fourteen days. In all that time, no police officers have been seen in Santo Tomas, despite the fact they must know it’s where he comes from, and that Prima and his aunt live there. Why might that be, do you think?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Faustino said, then found that he did. The answer popped bright as sunrise – a sunrise that Bakula had conjured – into Faustino’s head. The police hadn’t gone up the river to look for Brujito because they already knew he was there. Because they were responsible for him being there.

  Bakula was still watching Faustino’s eyes; now he nodded slightly.

  “Yes,” he said. “There is more to this than what you call mumbo-jumbo. It’s a bigger story than you thought.”

  “I see.”

  “And what that means, we think, is that Ricardo will not be set free. Even if the da Silvas agree to a ransom demand, no matter how big it is. Because of what he knows. Because he might talk. He would talk, I imagine. He’s not the most … sophisticated boy in the world.”