by Hugh B. Cave
12
Late that afternoon, recalling his mutual-aid pact with Steve Spence, Clermont phoned the Azagon to tell Steve what had happened.
"I've just had a visit from Lieutenant Etienne," Steve replied.
"That's interesting. What did he say?"
"He wasn't able to find the boat and seems to doubt the woman's story, Louis. You know her pretty well, it seems. Do you think she's telling the truth?"
"I do now," Clermont said. "And there's more. When I got her home, she told me something she was apparently too rattled to tell him."
"Oh?"
Clermont repeated Elizabeth Langer's story of the naked man swimming.
There was an unnatural silence. Then the American doctor's voice over the phone said, "Louis, listen to me. One of our patients, a lawyer named Lindo, is missing."
"He's the one who let me in the other day?"
"How did you guess that?"
"The way he looked. Damp. Pallid. As if he'd been living underwater or something."
"My God, Louis. You're reading my mind."
"You feel the same about him, you mean?"
"But I've been afraid to say anything. Tell me—did this woman see the swimmer close up?"
"They were almost close enough to touch him, she said. He was white, by the way."
"Louis, do you suppose if I came over with a photo—? There's one in his room."
"We'll take it to her together."
At his desk in the Azagon's office, Steve put down the phone, then abruptly rose and went striding along the downstairs hall to Lawton Lindo's room. He had first become aware of Lindo's absence at breakfast, and had presumed the man was ill again. Though a physical exam only yesterday had turned up no apparent cause for it, the lawyer from Baltimore had for the past few days been noticeably pale and nervous. When questioned, he had complained of headaches again and what he called pressures—not the normal pressures of an alcoholic but—"Well, Doctor, it's as if someone is trying to make me obey unspoken commands. Like the night you found me walking along the shore."
"You're being commanded to do that again?"
"No, but I'm being told to do other things, or my mind is. Stupid things, like 'You must practice holding your breath,' or 'You must go for long walks to strengthen your legs.' As if I'm being prepared for more sinister orders when the time comes, the way a marine is conditioned to be a wartime fighting machine."
A visit to Lindo's room after breakfast had only added to the mystery. His bed had been slept in—for part of the night, at least—but the man was nowhere to be found. Nor was there anything to indicate when or why he had left the Azagon.
No one, it seemed, had seen him since the evening before, when Juan Mendoza had talked to him briefly in the library.
Worried, Steve had gone looking for Mendoza and found him in the game room, playing chess with a patient. But the Cuban could offer nothing helpful. "Lindo was in the library about nine last evening, as I've told you. Just sitting there reading. Don't think I saw him again after that. I'm sure I didn't see him go out."
"Has he been going out at night? You've been watching Henninger. You must know who else comes and goes."
"Sorry," the Cuban said. "I quit the Sherlock Holmes bit after Paul's visit to Red-Light Road. Far as I'm concerned, if he just wants to get the clap, it's none of my business."
Walking into Lindo's room now, after his telephone talk with Louis Clermont, Steve turned to the bureau and saw there the photograph he had mentioned to Louis Clermont. It was a framed color print of Lindo and Paul Henninger standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the Azagon, smiling at the camera. They were good friends, Steve recalled—a friendship based upon Lindo's financial interest in American soccer and Paul's having been a World Cup player. But reaching for the photo, he saw something on the bureau that puzzled him. It hadn't been there when he came looking for Lindo earlier.
A candle. Or, rather, the remains of one, now just a stalagmite of black wax overflowing a holder.
Why a candle? There had been no trouble with the power plant. And why a black one?
Black candles were used in voodoo, of course. And by those even more enigmatic people, the bocors, or sorcerers, who sometimes plied their trade under cover of voodoo. And Lindo's friend, Paul Henninger, had been seen by Mendoza going to that part of town called The Hounfor, hadn't he?
Turning, Steve saw something else bewildering. The window beside the bureau was closed, and across the lower sash was loosely stretched a dressmaker's tape measure, pinned to the curtain on each side.
A candle? A tape measure at the window? What had Lindo been up to before his disappearance?
Steve hesitated, then removed the tape, rolled it up, and thrust it into his pocket. He took the photo and burned-out black candle as well.
Half an hour later, in Louis Clermont's house, he showed those objects to the man who looked like Abe Lincoln.
"Pinned across the window?" Clermont made a face over the tape as he studied it. "Well . . . maybe he was measuring for new curtains or something."
"Louis, for Christ's sake, you don't pin a tape up to measure something. Not and leave it there. Besides, it was hanging limp."
"I'm damned if I know, then. About the candle, either, unless he just likes the idea of candlelight. I'm fond of it myself in the right company. But then, you wouldn't use a black candle, of course. And the romantic bit wouldn't apply at the Azagon, would it?"
Steve thought about where he had spent most of the night before last—in Nadine Palmer's bed, with Nadine in his arms. He hoped it didn't show through his feigned expression of innocence as he replied with a shrug, "No, I guess not."
"Let's go talk with the Langer woman," the St. Joe doctor suggested.
They went in Clermont's little car and found a small crowd of curious plantation workers standing about in the Langers' yard. That mysterious but remarkably effective carrier of island news, the word-of-mouth telédiol, was probably responsible, Clermont suggested. No one knew how it worked, exactly, but work it did.
As the car went past the crowd, Steve saluted a figure in it and the fellow lifted a hand in reply.
"That was your cook, wasn't it?" Clermont said with a scowl.
"Ti-Jean Lazaire. Yes.
"What's he doing here, do you suppose?"
"Just visiting, I imagine. He has Sunday afternoons to himself, and probably has friends here." Clermont still scowled.
They found Elizabeth Langer out of bed, sitting with her nurse in the living room. She looked, Steve thought with compassion, like a woman who had just realized her world had been shattered. Clermont introduced him, and after a mechanical nod in his direction she gazed into space again. He wondered what she saw there:
Clermont pulled a chair up to hers, lowered his lank frame onto it, and showed her the photo of Lawton Lindo and Paul Henninger. "Look at this, please, Elizabeth. By any chance is this man, the one on the left, the one you saw swimming?"
She stared at the picture in silence for a moment, then nodded.
"You're sure? How can you be sure?"
"It's him. I saw his face when Jan reached for him. And the crew cut. Nobody wears a crew cut anymore. I remember thinking Jan used to have one when we first met, in Holland. Jan . . . oh, my God, where is he? What happened to him? Why us?" She dropped her face into her hands, and the room filled with the sound of her sobbing.
Under the reproachful gaze of the nurse, Clermont got up from his chair and moved away, leaving the St. Joseph woman to comfort her.
"What now?" he asked in his car as he and Steve returned to town.
"Yes, what now?" How, Steve wondered, did you tell the wife of a forty-three-year-old Baltimore attorney that her husband was dead? That he'd been swimming naked in the sea off the coast of a Caribbean island, where he'd come to be made whole again, and the sea had opened up and sucked him under? And why, dear God, should she believe it?
"We'd better call Etienne, I suppose," Clermont said.
"He may want to come to your place and talk."
"Yes."
"Ask a lot of questions, no doubt. He's young, with a future in the army. May see this as a step up the ladder, if he can climb it."
Steve thought about that, then nodded. "I won't have any answers for him, I'm afraid. I'll try, of course. But to be truthful, Louis, I'm at my wit's end."
"Anyone would be, Steve."
"Thanks. I'll just have to do the best I can."
There were indeed no answers to the questions young Etienne asked when he turned up at the retreat an hour later. After talking to a number of the Azagon's people, he sat in Steve's office off the lobby, discussing his findings.
"About all we know for sure," he said, "is that something very strange is going on in Dame Marie, Doctor. And part of it seems to be happening here, under your roof."
"Yes."
"No point in rehashing what's happened."
No, Steve thought. Or in my telling you of Tom Driscoll's firm belief that some kind of Evil with a capital "E" is working on our people here. No need to further complicate this.
"But about this business of the black candle and the tape measure," Etienne went on without a pause, "I don't think it means much. When it's explained to us, we may just laugh at ourselves. The fact is, Doctor, we don't have a clue to what's going on."
"You don't think the candle indicates a voodoo connection?"
"Maybe. The tape might, too. But why here?"
"Well, even before I came here, Dr. Driscoll wrote me about the local voodoo people. Said they might give us trouble."
"He really believes that?"
"I'm sure he does." If only, Steve silently added, as a point of entry by means of which those other forms of evil are getting at us.
Etienne shrugged. "You worked at that hospital in Fond des Pintards, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Did the voodoo people there give you any problems?"
Not wanting to offend, Steve hesitated. Some patients at the Brightman had come to the hospital only as a last resort, after being treated by medically incompetent houngans and mambos. In that respect, yes, voodoo had indeed given the hospital problems. But that wasn't what Etienne had in mind, was it?
"Not the way you mean, Lieutenant," he said.
"And I can't think why our people in voodoo here should be concerned about a hospital for alcoholics." Etienne shrugged and stood up. "You'll call me if there's anything new, please?"
"I will."
They shook hands, and the army man departed.
Steve remained in his office, struggling to sort out all that had happened. It was after eleven when he closed the door behind him. The Azagon apparently slept.
But as he started for the stairs he heard something farther down the first-floor hall, and stopped. What he was hearing was a man's voice, low and deep, intoning some sort of chant.
Puzzled, he went along the hall toward it and discovered the chanting was being done behind the closed door of the very room—Lindo's—in which he had found the candle and tape measure. And it was not a chant he was hearing, but a recitation.
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me . . .
The voice was that of Ti-Jean. Lazaire, the chef who insisted he had never been at the Brightman.
Resisting an urge to seize the knob and thrust the door open, Steve retreated to an alcove where the hall light would not reveal him. There he waited, again wondering why the mere presence of this particular St. Joe native caused his hackles to rise. He had to wait a good five minutes, during which the sonorous voice intoned the psalm again. Then the door of Lindo's room opened and Lazaire appeared in the corridor.
Closing the door, he turned soundlessly and with long strides went down the hall to the kitchen, behind which were his own quarters. But he had another destination, it seemed. Turning the opposite way at the end of the passage, he disappeared.
A door opened, clicked shut. There was only one door there. It led to the backyard.
Steve glanced at the watch on his wrist. At eleven-eighteen on a Sunday night, Ti-Jean Lazaire had gone out?
Where to?
It might be possible to find out, he decided. Difficult, yes, but worth a try. Not attempting to walk in the man's footsteps, he hurried down the hall in the other direction and let himself out the front door. Swift strides took-him across the lawn to a corner of the building, in time to see Lazaire go down the side slope to the road and briskly head for town.
"I can walk as fast and as far as you, compere," Steve grumbled, setting out in pursuit. "And you won't hear any footfalls from these old moccasins."
He could, he discovered. Moreover, the night was dark and he could do so without being observed.
Lazaire set a fast pace, however, and at the edge of town took a significant turn. Steve recalled what Juan Mendoza had said after tailing Paul Henninger from the Azagon, the night of the manager's long-distance swim.
"You know the section of town they call The Hounfor, in back of the marketplace? That's where I lost him."
On Steve's left stood a ghostly forest of poles supporting a roof of banana thatch—the now-deserted, open-air marketplace. Lazaire had already passed it and was entering a district of shacks beyond. Could he be seeking the same thing Henninger had sought that night? He probably was, Steve decided. But what was it?
Anyway, I mustn't lose him the way Mendoza lost the fat man, damn it! I've got to find out where he goes.
Steve stepped up his pursuit. The road was narrow here. Even a Jeep would have trouble squirming between the rows of houses. And it was dark. Lazaire was just a shadow ghosting along by the houses, visible only because he was in motion.
For a while he maintained a straight course into the heart of the district. Then a turn to the right, one to the left, and he suddenly disappeared through a gap in a sagging board fence. Steve hurried to the gap and paused there, peering in. But now nothing at all moved, and there was no sign of his quarry.
A huge mapou, a kind of tree sacred to voodoo, dominated the yard, making it so dark that moments passed before his eyes adjusted. Then he saw, beyond the tree, a bigger than average house with a zinc-roofed peristyle attached. The house would harbor a hounfor, he guessed—that special inner sanctum reserved for the altar, the govis, the baptized drums, and other paraphernalia essential to the holding of services, though the roofed peristyle would be where most of the services actually took place.
He could imagine the peristyle yellowed by lantern light and packed with people, drums throbbing and voices shrilling out the chants to the loa, while the houngan in charge traced his intricate vèvés on the ground with cornmeal or ashes and the white-robed hounsis danced. While working at the Brightman in Fond des Pintards he had attended many different kinds of services, ranging from a simple man gé-les-morts, or feeding of the dead, to the mystifying brulé zin in which servitors being raised to the rank of kanzo had to put their hands seven times into iron pots of boiling oil. Never, he knew, would he understand all of what he had seen.
Suddenly he heard a sound of knocking—his quarry rapping on a door, perhaps?—and a rectangle of light at the side of the house momentarily revealed a doorway, a man framed in it, and the familiar figure of Lazaire on the stoop outside. The cook stepped in over the threshold.
The door closed.
What to do now?
There was no point in hanging around, Steve reluctantly decided. He would not be demanding an explanation when Lazaire emerged, anyway—certainly not here. In fact, all this had to be thought about before he questioned the fellow at all.
Perhaps it was a job for Lieutenant Etienne.
But as he turned away, a sound of drumming stopped him. Then a sound of women's voices intoning a chant.
A service? One for which they had been awaiting Lazaire's arrival? Curious to know what kind it might be, he leaned against the fence and wait
ed.
"Agoué, O Agoué Woyo! Li sorti nan mer la! Canon ii chargé! Canon ii chargé pou tire!"
Agoué was their god of the sea, and the words of the chant referred to his coming from there with his cannon loaded, ready to fire. Thunder over the sea was always Agoué's doing. The service, if it was a service, would be a long one.
It would begin here in the hounfor and peristyle, where the drawing of the vèvé by the houngan would be accompanied by drumming and chanting to the usual lineup of gods. The vèvé—in this case Agoué's ship—would disappear under the shuffling bare feet of the dancers. Then the houngan and his helpers would bring from the inner sanctum a small wooden boat that they would fill with food and drink for Agoué himself.
All night long the ceremony would continue in one form or another: chanting, dancing, drumming, the recitation of prayers, at times only a silent vigil. Then at dawn the people would carry their offering down to the sea—no doubt to Pointe Pierre here—where they would embark with it in one of the fishing boats. With them they would carry, along with other sacrificial animals, a white sheep with its feet trussed. White was Agoué's ritual color. The sheep was an essential offering.
There would be more drumming and chanting as the fishing boat put out to sea. Now, too, there would be a sound of seashell trumpets as the craft sailed through the dawn to a chosen place of sacrifice. And there, as the little wooden boat with its offering of food and drink was set adrift, some of the houngan's helpers would become possessed and go into a frenzy, and the white sheep with its feet trussed would be cast into the sea to drown.
It was a ceremony Steve had witnessed during his early investigation of voodoo, before his nightmare experience at La Souvenance and the "lost" five days. It was, too, a service the climax of which he would have walked away from had he been in a position to do so. But why this sort of thing for Ti-Jean Lazaire—if, indeed, it was for him? And if it was, were they doing it in his honor or was it something he had requested and paid for?