by Brian Hodge
“Welcome back among the mortals.” Mama Charity smiled at him from a chair halfway across the room, wide bare feet kicked up on a worn hassock. The soles were callused and dirty. “You hungry?”
He blinked and licked dry lips. “Thirsty.”
She nodded toward the bedside table, a glass of waiting water. He gulped it down. His muscles were rubbery, and even his bones felt as heavy and well used as anvils.
Mama Charity chuckled at his sorry plight. “Now you know why Saturday night is ceremony night. Most the time, we got to sleep away the whole next day.”
“What…” He frowned, shut his eyes and sought to recollect the night. Memories grasping drums and little else. “I…”
“Like waking up some morning after a bottle of whiskey, isn’t it?” She laughed with impish delight and great trembling breasts. “You don’t remember a thing, do you?”
“No.”
Nodding, then, “That’s the way it happens. Wasn’t you falling down, then prancing around like some general front of his troops. It was the loa inside you, sent you off somewhere else while he made himself at home in your body. Child, child, rode you good and hard for your first time. More than four hours, I think, till he turned loose of you. You laid right where he dropped you and that was it for you for the night.”
“Four hours?” He tried to imagine it, losing himself for that long, yet continuing to move about. He might have done anything, to anyone, and blame would never touch him.
Napoleon sank into the bed, comfort and safety, and pulled the covers up high. Bare beneath them, except for his briefs. Who had carried him up here, and stripped him of his clothes? Who had folded them neatly and left them upon the dresser near the foot of the bed? Intimate strangers.
“Who came down for me?” Did he even want to know?
“A loa called Macandal.” She crossed her legs, quite unladylike, and tugged one ankle toward her lap. Absently picked at the callus on her big toe while frowning. “Threw me with that one, yes he did. Never saw Macandal, not a once in my whole life, and I can say honest, now, it was a frightening pleasure to make the acquaintance. Whole different fire in your eyes, that’s for damn sure. Thought it might’ve been Ogu come down, but no, you didn’t go for the sword, didn’t want that at all.” She leaned forward in her chair to imitate for a moment. “Had your arm tucked back some, all limp and useless, like it was broke and you done forgot it was there. Took me a minute to realize. Macandal.”
The name meant nothing to him. “Who is he?”
“Macandal? He was a man, once as real as you or me. The dead, so long as their families reclaim their souls, they become gods too, time enough goes by. Most times no one prays to them except their families. Little tiny loa, no one even knows their names but their relatives. You and me? Maybe someday we’ll be loa, maybe someday people be praying to us for favors. And that’d suit me just fine, if my children and my grandchildren remember me after I’m gone, and think I can still do ’em some good. But Macandal? Now there’s a dead-man-turned-loa a whole country remembers.”
Mama Charity rose to cross creaking floorboards, footsteps heavy toward the window, nearly arthritic. Could this be the same nimble dancer of the night before? She leaned on the windowsill and looked out upon the face of morning, land and water and time.
“Wonder what that Jo-Jo’s doing with my shop,” she said. “He’s got a good heart, but not much sense. Lets people talk him down on price too much, or gives out little bonus trinkets. Lagniappe. Must be part Cajun, I suspect.” She turned around, back to the window, ample rump against the sill. “You think I’m a greedy woman, Napoleon? Never can tell what you’re thinking.”
He smiled. Had never meant to keep his feelings secret, but maybe it had become force of habit. His chauffeur’s face.
“I think,” he said, “you’re more generous than you give yourself credit.”
Mama Charity twisted her lip, chewed on it in thought, then shrugged. “Business is business.”
“Macandal. Tell me about him.”
“Ah. Macandal.” Broad face gone dreamy with legend. “Two hundred and fifty years ago, on that island you came from, when they called it Saint Domingue, slave name of François Macandal caught his arm in the gears of a cane press on a sugar plantation. Arm got yanked into the machine, and chewed right up to the shoulder. What was left of his arm, he pulled it out on his own. No use, though. He lost it, somebody took a machete to it to finish the job. They say the pain took him by the other hand and showed him visions of where he was born in Africa, in the kingdom of the Mandingo.
“Most men, they’d’ve died right there, but the slaves already knew Macandal wasn’t like most men. He could take a whipping and not flinch a muscle, and come nights he told stories of the motherland, so vivid it was like he took ’em there. The ladies, they’d quarrel to see who got to share his bed because his dreams were so powerful. So when he lost his arm that way and didn’t die, no surprise those slaves started thinking he was immortal.
“Well, a one-arm slave wasn’t much good in the cane fields, so the French, they sent Macandal to herd the cattle out into the pastures, and no one really knows what he did all day, out there by himself. Some say he talked to the plants to learn their magic. Some say what he learned, he picked up from the old runaway slaves already living in caves them whites didn’t know about. Only thing for sure, Macandal was one angry man, and he had himself a desire for revenge strong as any lust he might feel for any woman.
“He turned runaway, and nobody went after him. It took hounds to run down a slave, and his owners weren’t about to risk losing any hounds for some one-arm nigger, so they let him go. Worst mistake they ever made. Macandal lived up in the hills and spent six years roaming down at night to put together a web of his very own spies, the slaves that worked on the insides of the plantations. During those same years, he worked like a druggist in the caves, putting together just the right combination of plants and molds and fungus and the venoms of animals and insects, until he had him a poison that suited what he had in mind all along.
“To the French, it was just like the devil himself come up from hell. First their cattle started dying in the pastures. Next their dogs. And then the poison got inside their homes … their food, their well water, medicine, even fresh fruit and the kegs of ale right off the ships.” Mama Charity’s shoulders shook with the gentle laughter of irony. “Must’ve been a scary, scary time for ’em all, didn’t know who to trust.
“Well, they caught him, you know it was too good to last. The whites, they had their ways, and pain was right the top of their list, and a little girl give up his name. And Macandal, I guess he got to believing his own rumors. He still liked his ladies, and he came down to go to a dance, and somebody recognized him, and that was it for Macandal’s travels.
“The French, they planned to burn him at the stake and be public about it. But even when they tied him to the stake, Macandal didn’t even look like he cared. You can bet the slaves noticed, and got to wondering what he had up his sleeve, and you can bet this started to get the whites nervous as little yappy dogs. They set the tinder on fire, and it was only when the flames got to his legs that Macandal come alive. That man screamed to the sun and shook his body with all the pain he must’ve been holding in his whole life, and he tore the stake he was tied to right up out of the ground, and ran down off the fire.
“Damn near had a riot then, all those French crawling all over each other to get away. The guards said they caught Macandal again, that they tied him to a board and threw him back on the fire. But you couldn’t’ve found a single slave what said they saw it happen…
“Especially after the poisonings started up again right where they left off.”
Mama Charity nodded, conclusive, and went back to her chair. Napoleon shut his eyes, let the imagery of martyrdom and resurrection wash over him. This ebony savior of eloquence and stealth and pride. So close to his own heart and soul now, whether he liked it or not … and
Napoleon decided that he did.
“Do you believe he got away?” Napoleon asked.
Slowly, with great regret, Mama Charity shook her head. “I’m sure they caught him again, just like they said they did. But it don’t matter what I believe. Don’t even matter if he died that day or not. In their eyes he was a fearsome god already, and his body had to die sometime. What matters is he had a spirit about him, something they couldn’t kill no matter how many fires they set.”
Napoleon nodded with firm jaw. And here it was, all before him now. His purpose, his guiding light. He swung his legs out of bed, feet ginger upon the cold floorboards.
“I’m hungry now,” he said.
Mama Charity smiled. “Set a fire in you, too, did he?”
Napoleon nodded.
Her smile broadened. “Then welcome, child. Welcome. First moment I laid eyes on you, I had a feeling I’d be calling you hunsi. Sometimes you just know.”
Chapter 24
Langley, Virginia
After leaving his charges behind in their Gretna motel rooms, Ruben Moreno flew back to Miami. Gathered a few things, including some old credentials and a couple of favors he could call in from a prior colleague, and booked a Sunday afternoon flight to Washington, D.C. Bright and early Monday morning he was ready for a quick trip to the past, hold the nostalgia. He doffed his usual bomber jacket and tan chinos, slipped into a rarely worn dark gray suit, white shirt, and red tie. There. Good little drone.
Ten miles by cab, then he was overlooking the Potomac, in Langley, Virginia. HQ building of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Moreno gave his name to a guard at the entrance gate, paced onward into the building proper to get his temporary ID at the badge office. Such an insular world, a hive of bureaucratic bees, half of whom never knew what the other half were doing. The grand foyer was massive, solid as a mountain, as befitting a government branch, with walls and columns of white marble. One wall was a graven home to Agency motto, plagiarized from the Gospels: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
It hadn’t taken Moreno long before he’d started to rely on that for a bitter laugh.
Recruited out of Special Forces in Vietnam, he had gone into Agency training at Camp Perry with lofty ideals. A surprising number of them had, patriots to the core. It had been 1974, and his second tour of duty in-country had short-timed him within easy view of stateside release.
Ruben Moreno was prime Agency material, a communications expert with a gift for languages. He’d arrived in Vietnam speaking his mother tongue, English, plus fluent Spanish and some French, and left speaking three dialects of Vietnamese and workable Russian, as well. Born to a Cuban father and a black mother, he could pass for Hispanic or black, and by the time his year of training was complete, it was looking as if he’d been culled for service in Latin America and the Caribbean.
But postgraduate Agency work was being conducted in a wholly different climate than when he’d gone in for training. Botched operations in Vietnam had turned the CIA into the laughingstock of the world’s intelligence community, and the punching bag of the free press. Incompetence was routinely rewarded at Langley with medals and promotions. All for morale, of course. The Agency took care of its own. And these were the people with whom he thought he would continue to serve his country?
Moreno went active in 1975, thinking since he had gone this far, might as well see his career through. Maybe even contribute to changing the organization, for the better, from the inside.
He could admit it. He’d been a naïve fool. And shedding excess idealism could only contribute to a longer, healthier lifespan.
A ballsy thing, then, what he was doing today, certainly the act of one who had come up through the ranks and was seasoned not so much by bluff and threat and treachery, as by circumnavigating red tape and swimming in a bureaucratic sea where rule number one was Cover Your Ass, and rule number two was Look For Leverage. That he had retired early didn’t mean he’d forgotten where a number of Nicaraguan bodies were buried, both figuratively and literally. And once he had paid a visit upstairs to Deputy Director Coffmann of the DDO branch — preceded by a phone call to the man’s Arlington home Saturday night — he was accorded the courtesy due an officer retired with honors, and with grudging clearance for research in Special Registry Archives.
Strictly personal use, he promised. No, he wasn’t writing a book. No, he wasn’t planning a speaking tour. And no, he wasn’t acting as consultant to a film crew. For that matter, he didn’t even want to peruse Agency files. He swore Coffmann looked grateful enough to replace two years back on his lifespan.
Learn how to handle these guys, and favors came almost painlessly. Still, Fort Bragg had never prepared him for this kind of life.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Too bad the Gospel of John couldn’t have better clued him in on just how long truth could take to learn.
Haiti had been the final straw, and for the life of him, Moreno couldn’t point to any specific incident. Enthusiasm for his career had died, he supposed, not with a bang, but a series of gradually more anemic whimpers.
Haiti was his third tour overseas, and he’d flown in in mid-1985. From the air, you could never forget your first sight of Haiti, the western third of the island of Hispaniola. To the east, the Dominican Republic looked like green velvet. And Haiti? You could see the border from fifteen thousand feet. Crumpled brown mountains left bare after out-of-control deforestation, by peasants so poor their last financial recourse was to cut down the trees and slow-roast them into charcoal. From the air, to Moreno’s eye, Haiti was shaped like a giant crab claw, with Port-au-Prince nestled snugly in the juncture of the pincers.
Little wonder this country had known so little peace in her history. Even the geography hungered for pressure.
Moreno was there to make sure the Duvalier dynasty didn’t survive another six months. As before, in prior duty assignments, Moreno was stationed as a drone at the embassy and spent as little time there as possible. Speaking fluent Creole by now, Moreno, as well as others, filtered out into the Haitian peasantry and found allies to the cause. Fertile recruits among the anti-Duvalierists, both in organized groups and loose coalitions, and if there was anything about these folks that impressed Moreno, it was that they were so zealously committed to the freedom of their country, they would die. Gladly. Not as martyrs or heroes, but as willing cannon fodder. It was in one of these groups that Moreno had linked up with Christophe Granvier — a real find given his American education and background — and had turned the man into his eyes and ears.
CIA case officers rarely did hands-on dirty work. They were trainers, merchants of idealism, suppliers of weapons and mercenaries, power brokers who thought in terms of logistics and statistics. Most of them never even carried a sidearm.
And so it had been in Haiti. Stockpiles of foreign weapons, never traceable to the U.S., were perpetually kept in storage for supply to anticommunist freedom fighters the world over. And while it increasingly looked as if Jean-Claude Duvalier would topple under his own weight, stockpiles had nevertheless been earmarked for Haitian rebels, in case the State Department couldn’t get him to bow out without bloodshed. One word, and the airlift would begin. That Duvalier was less a communist than Ronald Reagan didn’t matter. The regime was growing decidedly unfriendly to Agency interests, and in this case, the Agency was again taking care of its own.
Ugly business. Moreno was sorry he ever agreed to set foot on Haitian soil. It was as duplicitous a contingency plan as anything he’d heard about from Vietnam or, later, Angola. He’d hung with it only because, if you left, you could always be replaced by some guy who would behave like an even bigger asshole.
Insofar as the Agency was concerned, Haiti wasn’t about politics at all, but commerce. Sources in Colombia had fingered a plan by Haiti’s coffee exports minister, Luissant Faconde, to boost to an unprecedented level his country’s cocaine exports to the United States. That th
e CIA would care about the harm it could do to end users was laughable. But…
Panama and Manuel Noriega already had a lock on that pipeline and weren’t about to turn over a piece of the action. Noriega was a cooperative guy, user-friendly, and Panama far more strategically vital than Haiti. What’s one more favor among strange bedfellows?
And so Jean-Claude Duvalier went down without a fight, and with him went Luissant Faconde, minus one arm thanks to an vengeful Christophe Granvier. Agency involvement had been limited to general rabble-rousing and stoking the flames of revolution, including an incidental three Haitian deaths wherein it was staged to appear as if a trigger-happy pair of army grunts had fired on unarmed civilians. Negligible sacrifice of indigenous lives, worth the resentment it fueled against the army. Like throwing gasoline on a fire.
On the February evening before he was to leave Haiti, Ruben Moreno had sat with Christophe in a hotel patio bar, watched the sunset while they put down an interminable succession of rums. Lots of planes arriving, departing. Sunset was given to jets and heavy air traffic, something about the weather patterns.
He’d wanted to cry, for some odd reason. This country had gotten to him like prior stations Nicaragua and Chile never had. This land of proud rebellion and mysticism, where omens and violence were found around every corner, where slum-dwellers had to sleep in shifts because there wasn’t enough room … and where, against all evidence to the contrary, they never lost hope that tomorrow could be better. For those few who knew what he truly was, and had embraced him for it, for the change he represented … boarding that plane tomorrow was going to feel like a betrayal of every trust placed upon him.
That he’d lied to every last one of them about his true purpose in being here was bad enough. Worse, he was leaving with the country no better off than it had been under Duvalier. A provisional military government, so fucking what, these bozos would have the death squads out again before the month was up. The only guy vying for leadership who wanted it for the right reasons was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a radical reformist priest disliked in U.S. circles because, not only wasn’t he going to kiss white Republican ass, his passionate and eloquent speeches came too close to American ears to sounding like socialism.