by Brian Hodge
It was altogether good for business, this and his very real penchant for inspiring dread in those who looked into the cobalt of his eyes. Extradimensional eyes, wise in their way, not only to the minds of civilized men who did their best to outflank their own laws, but also to the currents of something far less tangible. His seemed the eyes of the rarest sort, a cynical visionary.
And indeed, it was so.
Often, he was witness to a soul’s departure from the body whose life he had just extinguished. Sometimes swift as a rising comet, other times lingering like the nebulous jellyfish of smoke left by a burst of fireworks. To others in his line of work it might have been a curse, a haunting fit to drive them into other careers, but to Eel it was nothing if not a fascination. Here was proof of something more beyond the veil of reality.
And if it could be seen, surely it could be manipulated.
Death, this divestiture of the eternal from the temporal, had been his profession. Why shouldn’t it become his science, and his religion?
His primary focus remained on the practical, however. Eel’s was not a life in which a known preoccupation with the mystical was even admired, much less safe. And it was the June 1981 job in Montana that provided the real impetus to go a new direction.
Some guy in his early fifties — twenty older than Eel — tucked away in solitude in a junky rental house miles past nowhere, north of Billings. To whom he was a threat and why were as puzzling as they were immaterial. Eel crept in through a window, took the guy out with an icepick through the ear. He had seemed to know Eel’s purpose as soon as he laid eyes on him, and in the babble of the condemned, who believe they can bargain with the executioner, he had promised Eel they could both share in the profits of the book. Eel said nothing, and a moment later, neither did the dead man.
Curious, he poked amid the rubble of empty bottles, clotted ashtrays, and half-eaten meals left to grow mold. TV Guides were filed in careful order of chronology, eight years’ worth, and he found military marksmanship medals mounted in a pine display case, dusty and jammed into a desk drawer. In another was a folder of incomplete pages that appeared, in skimming, to detail this man’s presence in Memphis, on April 4, 1968. The day Martin Luther King had been shot.
The typewriter atop the desk had no dust on its keys.
Eel torched the house, as he was supposed to, and it went up like dry cordwood. The folder he kept, read at his leisure on the plane, and back home. Delusional ravings, possibly. Or a pauper’s attempt to feed a rumor mill and reap the rewards sown in controversy. Or maybe the truth.
He had seen stranger things.
But the episode was a wake-up call, and subsequent nights were often spent staring at walls and windows, wondering if and when might come the day when his eternal silence was more valuable than his talents. He knew thereafter that his days in D.C. would have to be numbered, by choice.
November, five months later: the first glimmer of a genuine alternative. An infrequent but reliable associate, a lackey of the G. Gordon Liddy bent, contacted Eel about someone wanting a job done in town. Some crime boss down in New Orleans, subcontracting for an unnamed third party outside the country. The target was columnist Cass Petersson of the Washington Post, which Eel daily read from front to back, and he knew without referencing that she had recently been scathingly critical of the new Republican administration’s commitment for increased aid to the Haitian government. Atrocities to the Haitian people and to rivals of its dynastic regime were dark legend, Petersson hammered relentlessly. First under Dr. Francois Duvalier, whose Tonton Macoute conducted reigns of terror at his whim, then under his son Jean-Claude, who had assumed president-for-life status in 1971 after Papa Doc’s death.
Eel could understand how, with the consciousness she was raising, and the sentiment she was starting to inspire against the Haitian government, Cass Petersson could be construed as a thorn in the side of the wrong people. Most of the American populace was woefully ignorant of Haiti, and her tales of bodies routinely dumped along the airport road raised hackles. Death squads in Central and South American countries were one thing, and quite distant. But Haiti? This was the Caribbean. Jamaica. The Bahamas. Too close to home…
And interesting in the extreme. Eel had long been an admirer of the elder Duvalier’s consolidation of power after taking office in 1957. The man had exhibited sheer genius. In a country where a fickle military could stage a sudden coup, Papa Doe had come up with his own counterbalance, employing a secret police whose loyalty was unfailing. A power base in Port-au-Prince was inadequate, though, and so Duvalier had enlisted devotees throughout the countryside, in the form of bokors, the sorcerers of the vodoun religion, practitioners of its darker elements: magie noire. After convincing them that he was a sorcerer of the highest magnitude, Duvalier enlisted them as terrified followers and enforcers of his will. For their allegiance he became a professed enemy of the Catholic Church, protecting vodoun’s priests and priestesses from the influence of missionaries by forbidding their persecution.
A Tonton Macoute — loosely translated as “Uncle Bogeyman,” the macoute being a peasant satchel in which a shadowy night figure might stash a stolen child — was an easily recognizable figure in his blue uniform, and armed with machete and pistol and, later, Uzi submachine gun. They wore dark sunglasses to hide their eyes, peasant theory being, if you could not see their eyes, they might be concealing the fact that they were zombis.
Brilliant. Not only did the Tonton Macoute have muscle on their side, but a fear factor that went unrivaled. They might not merely kill you, they could also steal your soul. Eel had done enough study to convince himself of an inherent legitimacy to both the psychological and spiritual powers of vodoun, reading texts by anthropologists who had traveled to Haiti as skeptics, or detached observers at best, and who had gone home believers.
Upon his approach for the Washington Post contract, Eel broke tradition and did something he had never done before: requested a sitdown with the party who wished to hire his services. That Eel’s reputation preceded him was of no little value, and in their late-night meeting, in a car parked upon a wharf overlooking the Mississippi, the thick sensuality of its scent wafting through the windows, Eel managed to confirm suspicion. The kill order on Cass Petersson had come from a high official within the Haitian government. It was all he needed to know.
For Eel had already done considerable research on his client. Nathan Forrest’s organization had been in long-term contention with Sicilians for the control of the New Orleans underworld. How might it someday profit them, Eel proposed, should they apply to intimidation and violence an added dimension of spiritual terrorism? Taking a lesson straight from the Tonton Macoute.
After some consideration, Nathan Forrest had been intrigued by the possibilities. He was local, he knew this city, understood the way tendrils of black and Creole influence wove through more than two centuries of New Orleans history, pervading more facets of its culture than not. This was the city which, more than a century before, had embraced voodoo queen Marie Laveau to the bosom of high society.
An unholy alliance, its rewards were bountiful all the way around. Columnist Cass Petersson was found on her sofa by her ex-husband, dead of an overdose of barbiturates. She had taken them voluntarily, if unwillingly, while Eel sat across from her with a pistol and a picture of her nine-year-old son, waxing sadly philosophical about lax security at the boy’s private school. Eel watched her cry and eat the pills with trembling fingers; watched while she fell asleep, while she ceased breathing altogether. Until a wisp of iridescence rose before Eel’s placid eyes, and he followed it to the ceiling.
Eel’s unnamed Haitian backers applauded from across the azure tropical sea. The strengthening voice of a pest, silenced, while no one could say she’d been martyred for her convictions.
And Eel had done it for free, demanding not cash for the plying of his trade, but knowledge. Nathan Forrest and his brother had their own stake in the web of bargains with officials
of the Duvalier regime. Soon thereafter, an exchange took place through the swamp port of Bayou Rouge. Andrew Jackson Mullavey had paid cash for the importation of some sixty Haitian men, women, and children. Peasants and dwellers of Port-au-Prince slums could disappear with equal ease; no one would speak a word in protest.
And Duvalier’s people? They got to take Eel home with them. An exchange student apprenticed to the Tonton Macoute.
He took with him a receptive and open mind, made an eager pupil of gun and machete, learning his trade all over again, realizing that his education had been lacking. That there were things worse than the threat of a bullet through the forehead, worse even than death. That there was indeed a consciousness — many of them — beyond the veil of time and sight, and should they choose to take notice of men and women and their concerns, it was primarily at the insistence of flattery. Names they no longer possessed, if ever they had, but should they deign to answer summons, then names they needed, if only for mortal minds to catalogue.
Under the auspices of a dreaded Red Sect that called itself Les Cochons Sans Foils, Eel learned the dark and sacred names. He took to heart the techniques of flattery and beseechment of these allies that could not be seen. Reviled, feared throughout the countryside, Les Cochons Sans Foils were sorcerers whose ritual dress was white and red, and whose name meant “hairless pigs,” a name given to sacrificial prey. To Eel it had never been a question of good or evil — outmoded concepts for peasants and all others whose monochromatic vision blinded them to the rainbow of possibilities. This was about power, manipulation, and philosophies undreamed of by all but the boldest seekers.
Tall, thin, bleached of color, Eel was more than white, he was a negative image of a fearsome Macoute, and life in Haiti was altogether different than in America. It didn’t matter who saw him here, and his countenance was no longer something to hide. Djab blanc, the peasants called him, even those who had never seen him, only heard of him in whispered dread: white devil.
Four years later he returned to New Orleans a very different man, and Nathan Forrest welcomed him as a Wall Street trader might welcome the payoff of a long-range investment. Eel structured his own small society of elite soldiers, and yes, there were believers to be found.
The Sicilians were still a problem, and Nathan Forrest paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in tribute just to be assured of continued operation without their interference. It would never do.
So Eel took care of it.
He had Don Frank Luchese kidnapped out of his own home, along with two bodyguards, four more of whom were left dead in various rooms. They were brought back, blindfolded, into the bowels of the French Quarter, to the stone humfo beneath Charbonneau’s. Eel watched, impassive, as Luchese was chained to iron brackets on the wall. Using a machete, Eel hacked the hands and feet from one bodyguard to get Luchese’s attention. Blew a powder into the face of the second and together they watched him slip into what appeared to be a coma. And what a revelation to learn that tough old Sicilian men, when pushed to the wall of endurance, could soil their clothes and wail like children waking from bad dreams.
Eel took what he needed from this boss of bosses — hair, nails — then had him sent home, unharmed. In Luchese’s coat pocket, to be found later, was the tongue of the first bodyguard, and sewn to the red spongy meat was a small note: February 20, 1:00 PM.
The next day — that very date — in his Jefferson Heights home, surrounded within and without by a battalion of guards, an enraged Frank Luchese plotted retribution. Until an hour past noon, when he suffocated on his own grotesquely swollen tongue.
Clearly, a power shift of astonishing magnitude was in the making.
All in all, Eel was pleased. He was a quick study, and by the look of things over the weeks to follow, so was the rest of the New Orleans underworld.
Which just went to prove one thing: You could never underestimate the public relations value of a good object lesson.
When Eel moved off Luissant Faconde, now cooling on the stone floor, it was only to turn him over, face up. He dragged the body deeper into the humfo, took off his own jacket, and went to work on the dead man’s clothing. Everything went into a casual pile … topcoat, slacks, shirt, underwear, even the glasses, one lens now cracked and starred.
From one of the tables, just waiting for the moment, he took an electric shears and relieved Faconde of his hair, both head and pubis. His flabby chest and belly were smooth already, and that on his arm was sufficiently sparse.
Behold, the hairless pig. The rite and the designation were only for the truly committed.
Eel moved over to the brick and stone oven in the wall to start its fires burning, for long, slow heat. Surely this use was nothing the French builders had intended. But its cultural diversity was what had always made New Orleans truly great.
Chapter 21
Escalation
They took the St. Charles Streetcar away from the Garden District and the home of Christophe Granvier. This crushing sense of futile malaise, Justin had felt it before. As if he’d just made a spectacularly poor impression during a job interview. It wasn’t that he had failed to move Granvier on the issue — anybody could fail — it was that the sense of rejection seemed so overwhelming.
“You know,” April said, “as bad as it was that five people died of cyanide poisoning, there are some awfully creepy sidebars going on. That chicken?” Her lip and nose curled with disgust. “It’s kind of funny, on the one hand, but then again, there’s something really sick about it.”
Justin nodded. Nor had he forgotten that small ornithological talisman he’d found in his guest room at Mullavey’s. He’d kept it, in part as a reminder, the rest defiance. Nothing had happened to him of particularly ill effect, so if it had been intended as some mojo set against him, it was a failure. As things had turned out, Leonard had been the one to fall victim to peculiar fate.
“You work for some strange people,” she murmured, sounding as weary as he was beginning to feel, and she drew knees beneath her to curl into the wooden seat.
The streetcar clattered and rocked beneath them, and why did everybody on it, when observed from the corner of his eye, appear to be living more productive lives? They were cruel strangers, angels sent to test by mockery.
Soft, cool skin massaging across the back of his neck, April’s hand, and he shut his eyes, strained into her.
“What about that guy from the newspaper here you talked to the other day,” he said. “What was his name?”
Her hand stilled on his neck. “Ummm … Ron. Ron Babbet. Why?”
“Think he might be interested in a story? If nobody else wants to believe this, or do anything about it, maybe somebody in the media will.”
April nodded quietly, said they could try, she could call for his number once they got back to their hotel. She was tired, he could tell just by looking at her, curled into the seat. Trying hard to hang tough on this without backing down, and maybe, before long, it would take its toll. He would prefer to get the machinery of some kind of justice into gear before her reserves were too diminished.
“But what if,” she said, “it doesn’t work with him, either? Even if Ron Babbet goes for it, his editor could take one look at whatever article he might write, and flush it right down the toilet. Because you know Mullavey would more than likely bring the paper up on libel charges. Or he’s golfing buddies with the publisher, and gets it squashed that way. I’ve seen it happen, Justin. I worked for a newspaper once, and I know it happens. So, what if?”
He nodded and did not want to meet her eyes. Out the window, night was far less threatening. “Then it happens again.”
“And what are you going to do then?” April pressed with soft urgency. “I can’t watch you tear yourself up into little pieces over it, day after day. I just can’t. And you’ll do that to yourself, I know you. You’ll sit there and stare at the walls and turn it over and over and over in your mind, and you’ll try to think of one more thing you could’ve d
one.” April took a long, deep breath, skimmed hooked fingers through her hair, back from her forehead. “I know it’s important to you, and I know why. It’s important to me, too. But sometimes? People like Mullavey get away with it. They just get away with it.”
And people like us can’t change that. This April left unsaid, but he knew. He knew.
She was wiser than he, of course. He’d always known this. April the pragmatist, the realist, and he the more impulsive of the pair, who too frequently failed to stop and think things through. Consequences were something to be dealt with as they appeared, not anticipated. Spend your life fretting over what could go wrong, you ran the risk of never budging. Justin supposed he needed April for her grounding influence, and always would.
“You knew it was going to turn out this way, coming here.” He slumped back into the seat, smiled at her as he might on first awakening. “Didn’t you?”
“I suspected.”
“And you didn’t stop me. Or try to talk sense into me.”
“It wouldn’t have worked. We just would’ve argued.”
Right again. At times he thought he hadn’t grown much past adolescence, in some ways. Never taking the word of a wiser person for it, always had to find out for himself, the hard way.
The St. Charles Streetcar dumped them back out onto Canal before turning back again, the way it had come. They crossed Canal and onto Royal, hand in hand, nine blocks back to their hotel with a turn up St. Peter. The Quarter was the sort of place in which you found excuses to walk, everywhere a new sight, new scent, new delight. Given better circumstances, they could have been having the time of their lives here. The honeymoon they’d been unable to afford a year ago. Their anniversary was coming up next week, and he wondered if she realized yet. Certainly enough things had been shoved to the back of the mind lately.