The Lower Deep

by Hugh B. Cave

  "Thanks. If I'm to work here, I ought to know more about what's going on. Anyway"—Steve frowned—"Driscoll thinks the voodoo people have it in for us here. Do you put any stock in that?"

  "I don't doubt they resent your being here. Just how they may be expressing their resentment I wouldn't want to guess."

  "I see. On the other hand, Driscoll wasn't talking wholly about voodoo, I'm sure. When he said we'd become a target for evil, he had something like the Devil in mind, as well. Maybe the Devil working against us through voodoo. What would you say to that approach?"

  Funny, Clermont thought, how it broadened a man to talk to someone he liked and respected. He knew a good deal about voodoo, of course, and honestly believed much of it was good for his people. The highly ritualistic services, for instance, and the sense of discipline they instilled. The houngans and mambos with their genuine knowledge of old-fashioned herbal medicine. The belief in an afterlife that held out a promise of something better than the miserable poverty so many peasants had to endure in this one.

  Of course, there was evil in voodoo, as well. At least on the fringe of it, in bocorism and zombiism and related spin-offs. He would not deny that.

  But if anyone had suggested to him yesterday that Dame Marie and the Azagon might be under attack by some force of evil not in the realm of voodoo, he might have been derisive.

  Now he said quietly, "Let's look into it, Steve. Shall we?"

  10

  On leaving the Azagon, Louis Clermont did not go directly back to his office. He stopped his car, an old Renault which he used as seldom as he could, at the home of the Jourdans, near the school for girls where Ginette was a student.

  It was one of the better homes in town, and its owner, Maurice Jourdan, was the town's leading merchant.

  The woman who opened the door had been a St. Joe City beauty once, with café-au-lait complexion, doll-like features, and a superb figure—the dazzling French-African combination that made so many of St. Joe's elite women so attractive. Except for the addition of some twenty pounds of what looked like baby fat, she still retained her beauty.

  "Louis, thank God you've come!" she exclaimed in a voice really lovely, despite her near hysteria. "It's awful! Just awful!"

  Knowing he could have come here before going to the alcoholics' place, Clermont felt a twinge of guilt. "You didn't say over the phone—"

  "Oh, I couldn't! I just couldn't talk about such a thing over the phone!"

  Clermont followed her into the house and was met in the living room by her husband, who gravely and silently shook his hand. Maurice was precisely the kind of man a woman like Leonie Jourdan could be expected to seek out and marry. Tall, physically fit and handsome, ever obedient to his wife's whims, he was at all times more inclined to listen than to talk, while she did the talking for them both.

  He had begun his career as a shopkeeper in Dame Marie, then become a merchant in the capital. With the building of the resort hotel, he had thought a move back to his birthplace would add to his stature and increase his profits.

  Now he knew how wrong a man could be about such things.

  Maurice waited patiently for his wife and Clermont to sit before seating himself. Then he said, "I'd better let Leonie tell you what happened, Louis," and looked expectantly at his wife.

  Clermont looked at her, too.

  "Ginny didn't come home last night." Leonie sobbed out the words rather than spoke them. "Maurice went all over, looking for her. At quarter past two o'clock in the morning, we were just going to phone the police when Roger Etienne drove in with her. At quarter past two, Louis!"

  By "police" she meant the Armée de St. Joseph, whose khaki-uniformed soldiers provided the only police protection in the island's small towns. And the Roger Etienne she referred to was the young lieutenant commanding the Dame Marie post. Clermont knew him as a friend and patient, and knew he was a friend of the Jourdans.

  Clermont waited patiently for the rest of it, guessing he was about to be told that Ginny Jourdan had been picked up intoxicated. There had been reports of drinking among the town's teenagers lately. Of drug use, too. And the way Ginny was behaving, she could easily have been caught up in the flow.

  He was mistaken.

  "Roger found her—he found her naked at Anse Douce," Leonie said in a whisper. "He went there on a hunch, he said, to see if kids were going there now to use drugs, and he saw this girl walking alone on the beach without anything on, and it was Ginny."

  "Had she been using drugs? Or drinking?" Clermont quietly asked.

  "She said no."

  "What explanation did she give?"

  "Only that she—that she felt like taking her clothes off and walking on the beach like that." Tears welled in Leonie's eyes. "Oh, Louis, what's happening to our little girl? She's changed so! We can't even talk to her anymore!"

  "Just a minute." Clermont wished he could talk to Maurice instead, but knew he couldn't without seeming to be rude. "You say Roger found her at the cove. What time?"

  "He brought her straight home and they got here after two, as I've said. At quarter past two."

  Clermont did some thinking. Paul Henninger had come ashore at Anse Douce and turned up at the Azagon about three-thirty, no? And if one believed his story, only his good luck in being attacked by a fish had saved him from swimming out to sea under some kind of hypnosis until he became exhausted and went under. Then only a second stroke of luck—hearing voodoo drums in the town—had told him where the shore was.

  "What time did Ginny go out last night?"

  "About eight. She said she was going over to a friend's house."

  "Did she go there, do you know?"

  "No, she didn't." It was Maurice who answered this time. "That was the first place I went to when we felt something was wrong. She hadn't been there. Then I began searching the town for her."

  "How was she dressed?"

  Obviously puzzled, Maurice only stared.

  "What I'm getting at," Clermont said, "has she begun to dress in a more provocative way lately, perhaps? Is she wearing more makeup? Trying to be different in looks as well as in her behavior?"

  Both of Ginny's parents shook their heads. "No," Leonie said. "If anything, she's been actually—well—indifferent about how she looks lately. As if she didn't care what people thought."

  "Did she go anywhere else last night? Other than to Anse Douce, I mean."

  "She says no—only there. To be by herself. To think things out."

  Maurice said, "I asked her what she had to think out, and she said we wouldn't understand."

  Again Clermont gave a fair imitation of Lincoln in deep thought, with one long-fingered hand cupping his chin. "Anse Douce," he said then, exhaling heavily. "I wish to God I knew what's going on there. Because something is, I can tell you. Where's Ginny now?"

  "I'm right here," came Ginette Jourdan's voice, crisp and defiant, from the hall doorway.

  Clermont resisted an urge to jerk himself around for a confrontation. The girl's parents did that, but he merely turned his head slowly and returned her gaze in silence until her eyes stopped challenging him. "Hi," he said then, quietly. "Come on in and sit awhile, hey? Where've you been? In your room?"

  She walked to the nearest vacant chair and stiffly sat down. She was the beauty her mother must have been at that age, with skin the color of gold. "Yes," she said defiantly. "In my room."

  Silence.

  Here, Clermont thought, watching for some clue to what might be wrong, was the brightest girl in the nuns' school, and probably the loveliest as well. Along with her mother's beauty, she had inherited a quality from her father that made her something very special. There wasn't an adequate word for it.

  "Want to tell me what happened?"

  "My parents have just told you." She tossed her head. "I was on the beach naked, and the lieutenant found me. He wrapped his shirt around me as much as he could, so anyone who happened to see me wouldn't be too awfully shocked, and then he brought me home
."

  "Any special reason you wanted to take your clothes off?" Clermont asked.

  "I felt like it."

  "How long were you there, Ginny?"

  "Hours."

  "Had your clothes off the whole time, or was that just an afterthought, sort of?"

  "I took them off when I got there."

  "And did what?"

  "Sat and looked at the sea. Is there a law against sitting naked on a deserted beach and looking at the sea?"

  Clermont shrugged. "I guess not. But tell me something, girl. Why Anse Douce? What's so attractive about that place lately?"

  "Nobody goes there."

  "You sure of that? I've heard otherwise. In fact, from what I heard just this morning, a certain man was there last night about the same time you were. He had his clothes off, too."

  "Louis!" the girl's mother shrilled.

  Clermont aimed an owlish stare at her. "As I said before, something peculiar is going on at that cove. I don't know what, but I'd say the place is being used by some people in a way it shouldn't be." He shifted his frown back to the girl. "Ginny, are you pregnant, by any chance?"

  The reaction he got to that question was not what he had expected. Maurice Jourdan stiffened and sucked in a breath. Leonie looked at him in utter astonishment and gasped out, "Louis Clermont! For shame!"

  The reaction of the girl herself was the most violent of all. Ginny Jourdan shot to her feet and stood there like a sapling in a high wind, glaring at him with eyes that suddenly seemed on fire with fury. For a moment there was a wild-animal look about her as she bared her teeth while retreating step by step to the door. Clermont could have sworn she snarled at him with her upper lip quivering as she whirled and ran.

  "Whew!" he breathed.

  "What a thing for you to say, Louis Clermont!" Leonie Jourdan's voice dripped acid.

  He pursed his lips and looked at her. "Oh, don't be such a prude, Leonie. Asking a kid today if she's pregnant isn't supposed to shock her. Not if she isn't, at any rate. There's something wrong here."

  An awkward silence followed. Then the girl's father said, "Nevertheless, Louis, I'm sure you're mistaken."

  "I didn't say she is pregnant, Maurice. I only asked her."

  "Well, the implication . . . I'm sure she felt you were accusing her."

  It was time to change the subject, Clermont decided, and relaxed into his Lincoln slouch again. "Look, both of you. I'm going to tell you something I know I shouldn't, because I'm not supposed to discuss my patients. And when I've told you, I'm going over to the army post and have a talk with Roger Etienne. As I said before, I'm convinced something is going on at Anse Douce that ought to be looked into."

  Without using names, he told them about the problems besetting Paul Henninger and George Benson. The nightmares. The sleepwalking. The tongue-biting. Then, with a grunt of relief at having concluded a most unpleasant task, he stretched himself to his feet.

  "And I urge you to have a long talk with your daughter, both of you," he said. "There's nothing I can do if she's going to spit sparks at me for asking a simple question."

  Leonie's eyes filled with tears again, and Clermont relented. "Now here, here, woman." He took her hand and patted it. "Whatever the problem is, it can be solved. You try to find out what it is, and we'll work on it together."

  If Ginny would let them, he thought as he departed. Because one thing he ought to do, as soon as possible, was run a pregnancy check on the girl and how in blazes was he going to persuade her to submit to one?

  Louis Clermont disliked unfinished business. Leaving the army post half an hour later, he returned to his office, took care of two patients who had been waiting for him, then decided to visit the Azagon again.

  This time the door was opened to him by a man with a damp and pallid face—one of those taking the cure, he supposed—and when he asked for Dr. Spence, he was led to the kitchen. Steve was there, talking to a middle-aged black man.

  "Can you spare another ten minutes?" Clermont asked.

  "Of course, Louis." Steve sent an oblique glance at the islander, whom Clermont had seen about town on a number of occasions. "Let's try my so-called office again."

  "Who's that you were talking to?" Clermont asked as they went along the hall together.

  "Our chief cook. Tom Driscoll hired him, and I guess I'm trying to work up enough courage to undo the mistake."

  "Food's bad, you mean?"

  "It isn't good. The garlic seems to get heftier every day, for one thing."

  "Most of our people are fond of garlic. He is from St. Joe, isn't he?"

  "Yes." Steve hesitated, then added, "I'm almost certain I knew him when I worked at the Brightman. But he insists he's never been there."

  "So you think he's hiding something?"

  "I don't know what to think." They were in the office now, and Steve closed the door. "I've asked just about everyone here who might know anything about his past—even phoned the Brightman to see if they remember him—but so far, nothing."

  "I guess we're all a little jumpy these days."

  Clermont sat. Following suit, Steve rested his elbows on the desk, looked at his caller curiously, and waited.

  "Want to tell you about a girl named Ginette Jourdan," Clermont said. "Maybe I shouldn't, but I'm going to. I've just come from her house."

  He told Steve what had happened there.

  "It occurs to me," he said then, "that if we work together on this, we might be able to help both Ginny and your man Henninger. What do you think?"

  Steve did not even hesitate. "I agree."

  "Don't exactly know why I should feel this way," the St. Joe medic went on, "but I do, emphatically. Anyway, I'm fond of the girl. And whatever's happening there at the cove seems to concern her and your Paul Henninger more than anyone else we know about. So if I come up with anything, I'll call you."

  "And if I learn anything here, I'll call you," Steve said. "Better give me your number."

  Clermont offered a card from his wallet, then stood up and put out his hand. Steve clasped it.

  It was odd, Steve mused as the tall figure slouched out of his office. Ever since Clermont's earlier departure, he'd been thinking about the man. Thinking about him in a quite positive way, wishing he knew him well enough to suggest they might work together, somehow, in their effort to solve the Anse Douce riddle.

  Dr. Louis Clermont of the Caribbean island of St. Joseph, black and trained in Paris. Dr. Stephen Spence of the U.S.A., white and trained in New York. Neither of them dedicated to the proposition that the goal of all medics should be to make buckets of money.

  The Lord moved in mysterious ways.

  After telling her husband to sleep and dream the dream, George Benson's wife had disappeared. All that night while Paul Henninger claimed to have been swimming, and all the next day while Dr. Louis Clermont busied himself at the Jourdans' and the Azagon, Alice remained among the missing.

  She finally turned up at eleven o'clock that night, when George was sitting at the kitchen table, trying to figure out some way to persuade the people of St. Joseph to eat shark meat. Some sharks were very good eating, damn it. The black-tip, for instance. Those he had caught here ran from twenty to thirty pounds—a good-sized fish for St. Joe—and the meat of a black-tip was not only both tasty and nutritious, it was white and looked good. A young friend of his back in the States, a kid fisherman named Eddie, had caught one that ran over three hundred fifty pounds—couldn't lift it into his boat and had to tow it home, for the love of Pete—and for a week the kid had talked about how much money he got for it. Maybe if St. Joe's fishermen were told that story . . .

  Alice had been with her friend Germaine, she said. "I'm sorry I didn't let you know I was going there, George. You were asleep when I left and, really, I thought I'd be back in an hour or so. But Germaine was down with this flu that's been going around."

  "I didn't know there was any flu going around," George countered.

  "Well, there is, and
it makes you so weak you just can't cope. She lives alone, so I stayed to help."

  She was lying, of course, George told himself. One of these nights he really ought to follow her and find out what she was up to.

  Then again, who gave a damn?

  11

  The affection George Benson no longer felt for his wife he most certainly did feel for his boat. A thirty-foot, twin-engined cruiser, she wasn't exactly what he had expected, no. Nothing like a commercial fisherman had been available when he arrived in St. Joe and was told to choose what he wanted from secondhand craft for sale on the capital's waterfront. But on his first voyage in her, when he ran her up the coast from the capital to Pointe Pierre, he had loved everything about her.

  With a fresh coat of white paint she looked new now, and she proudly bore a new name, Ti Maman, after one of the country's best-loved folk songs. "Ti Maman" didn't mean "Little Mother," precisely, nor did it precisely mean "sweetheart."

  In St. Joe, a man's "ti maman" was a mistress or sweetheart who had borne him a child.

  Ti maman, fe ti ha pou mwen,

  Pa kité'm allé . . .

  Ti maman, give me a little kiss,

  Don't let me go . . .

  George used the boat in a number of ways. When the north coast road was bad, she was a more convenient means of transportation than his Jeep. And he constantly needed a boat in his work with the fishermen, of course. And sometimes he was required to allow certain of St. Joe's political elite to use her for their pleasure.

  Usually these were St. Joseph City politicians, because the country was run from there. For a weekend of fun and games, they would fly to Cap Matelot. George would meet them with his Jeep and transport them to Pointe Pierre, where the Ti Maman was docked.

  He didn't like it. But in this country, political favors were expected and necessary if one hoped to function.

  At seven A.M. on the Sunday following the latest adventure of George's wife, the Ti Maman purred out of Pointe Pierre with one Felix Abry at her wheel. A suitably nautical cap perched jauntily on his graying hair. His left hand gripped a bottle of beer.