Tropic of Night jp-1

by Michael Gruber

  This journal is a new one, given to me by my father for our trip, God knows where he got it, but I love it. Several hundred unlined pages of the kind of thin all-rag paper they used to use for Bibles, bound in boards and protected with thick aluminum covers. These can be closed with a hasp that has a serious barrel lock on it. It will be my African field journal.

  8/24 New York

  Got our visas today, Nigeria, Mali, Benin, Gambia. Others pending. W. like a kid, showing his stamped passport off to waiters, people on the street. I’m also assembling gear for expedition, things people need in 3rd world. Tampons. Vitamins. Ciprofloxin. Imodium. A pound of Xanax. Lots of passport photos. Greer very helpful, been there lots of times. I want to call M., but can’t. Why? Who am I afraid of hurting? Him? W.? Myself?

  W. unhelpful as ever, this time not his fault, he’s sick from shots. I am, as usual, not, which he seems to resent. People like to do things for him, however, and he has grown used to good service. I cosset him and give him materials on the Yoruba, which both of us find fascinating. He is reading the big Abrams art book, I am going through Bascom on Yoruba divination. I love them already: the artistic sensibility of quattrocento Italy melded with the religious passion of ancient Israel. Or maybe they are the closest survival into modern times of what the ancient Greeks must have been: artists in their blood and bone, warriors, close to the gods. Like the Greeks, too, they fought one another, the little kingdoms often at war, and subject to the depredations of the empires to the west and north, Fon and Hausa, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries their chief polities collapsed and hundreds of thousands of Yoruba became prisoners in local wars and were shipped to the plantations of Cuba, Haiti, America, and Brazil, in one last and remarkably homogeneous consignment of slaves. The survivals of African magical and religious practices in the New World?voudoun, candomble, Santeria?are all descended from the Yoruba, or secondarily from African nations influenced by the Yoruba.

  This prep is very pleasant. No, more than pleasant. I am conscious of a deep happiness, something I have not felt for a long time, not, in fact, since I was a girl in the company of my father, not since our shipwreck, when everything went sour. And, I can confess now, I was not happy being Wife-Of. I find I need work, serious work that I’m good at. And also, while I’m confessing, it gives me a kick to be for once the senior member of the dyad. (I guess I was happy with M., but that was sort of a delirium I see now, a Gemisch of hot sex and hero worship, and which I understood at some level could not last.) Although I have to say that in our city life W. never made much of being the main guy. I fear that, his particular little tics aside, he is a more decent and generous person than I am.

  9/2 Sionnet Labor Day

  We drove out, a miserable trip on the expressway, instead of taking the Chris-Craft from City Island with Dad and Mary and her boyfriend. The misery of crawling traffic I have rationally estimated as being not as great as having W. puking his guts over the stern, so I drove the rental with reasonable grace, what I get for marrying a lubber. For his part, W. felt guilty, which he is not really very good at, he tends to get smarmy solicitous, which I can’t stand. We were a little tense therefore, but this got blown away when we passed the Walt Whitman Mall on the road to Huntington, and he did his usual parody, I Hear America Shopping, line after line, biting and hilarious, and this, I think, makes up for a lot of lost time on the water. W. loves Whitman, and he joked once that what tipped the scales for him asking me to marry him was when he found out that Walt had grown up just down the road from Sionnet, and apparently was in and out of the house all the time with my great-great-great-great-grandfather Matthew, who was his contemporary, and who remained a close friend all his life. Matthew Doe backed Walt’s newspaper and received in return signed copies of all his published work and a bunch of manuscripts. The manuscripts are in the Library of Congress, but we kept the books, and my dad gave W. for a wedding present an 1860 Blue Copy of Leaves of Grass, with Walt’s annotations in it, which knocked him out.

  It was late afternoon before we arrived, and everyone was already out on the back terrace with drinks. My mother was there because Mary was there, because I doubt she would have changed her plans just to see me off for a year or two in Africa. Mary was her usual self, there is never anything new to say about Mary, she was fully formed at five years old. The boyfriend is new, however, and an improvement on the usual run. He is Dieter Von Schley, the photographer, very proper, blond and bony, lovely manners, a Prussian type, although he is actually from Cologne. A Catholic, too, remarkably, and not apparently a heroin addict like the last one. He and my dad are in love already, Dad has shown him the cars, amid much rolling of eyes by Mom and Mary. Dad looked unchanged, like the house. Mom unveiled the new face-lift, a Brazilian job, and I think she got taken, or maybe it is that her personality has been etched into her features so deeply that even a Brazilian surgeon can’t quite re-create the lovely Lily of yore. She must be pushing sixty now, although she has forbidden birthdays for decades. She has not piled up much treasure in heaven, I’m afraid, and little flashes of fear are starting to show.

  W. did his part, having turned the charm up a couple of notches, retailing New York theater and celebrity gossip, and I was doing mine, which was keeping in the background. No one asked me anything about the Yoruba. Except, I must record, that W. was talking about the new production of O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten and about the movie star, R.T., who’s in it, and who everyone knows is a total queen, and Mom said, “Ooh, I love him, he’s so sexy. What part does he play?” and I, with no thought at all, said, “He plays Miss Begotten.” Not exactly Wilde, I know, but W. cracked up anyway, and we had to explain it to Mary, and Mom frowned and gave me a stern little lecture on homophobia. W. thought that was funny, too, and made a joke out of it, another act of mercy added to his score.

  Our Labor Day dinner was what it always was, the first oysters of the season and barbecued game hens; we are very traditional at Sionnet, and our big occasions invariably include oysters, upon which the family fortunes were originally founded. I do still have moments of bliss there, and this was one of them, sitting out on the north terrace, stuffed with good food and lounging in our soft and ratty wicker (the interval having arrived when Mom was drunk enough to be sentimentally nice to me and not drunk enough to start in on how I had ruined her life), and I was just reflecting that the only thing lacking was my brother’s presence, when Josey walked in. I leaped up and gave him a big slightly drunken barbecue-sauce kiss and fixed him a plate. He had flown in to MacArthur-Long Island on his Learjet, and come up in a limo, a very new-money thing to do. I know he loves me, but I think he pulls stunts like that to piss off Dad.

  He had going-away presents for us, too: a GPS locator for me, of spectacular complexity, and for W. a pith helmet. Which I must say, W. accepted with good enough grace. Mary gave me an Hermcs scarf, something she no doubt got from a fashion shoot, but pretty all the same. Mom gave me a check, which is what she always gives me, and gave me from the age of about seven. Buy yourself something, honey. Dad gave me one of those universal tools, in a wash-leather bag. He was in heaven, of course, he lives for the moments when everyone is all together and reasonably content, and he got out the 1898 cognac and poured every one a thimbleful and made a very nice speech wishing us bon voyage, and noting that the date we were scheduled to leave, the fifth of September, was the anniversary of the first landfall of the Doe family in North America, and how proud he was of me and W. and how he hoped our journey would be as prosperous. It was a typical Dad speech, sentimental, a little embarrassing, but lovable.

  After which Mary, with her unerring instinct for seizing at any moment the center of attention, spoke up and said that she and Dieter had decided to get married. Which meant Dad would get his St. Patrick’s wedding after all, and Mom would be able to throw the party of the year, and I would, of course, miss it, which I guess made it perfect from her point of view and Mary’s.

 
Later, in our room, I let myself fall apart. W. comforted me, now that I think about it, rather in the way Josey used to do. And I am not comforted, although profoundly grateful as I nevertheless sink into my usual slough of self-contempt. So Mommy doesn’t love me, get over it, Jane, you’re a grown-up now, and so on, what a wretch you are, you have everything, everything! As my brother says, dial 1-800-BOOHOO. We are in my old room, my girlhood room, with the worn provincial furniture, my girlhood bed, too, which is a little narrow for the two of us, and when I have stopped the disgusting weepies he gives me a good one, and I make a lot of noise, more than necessary, to tell the truth, to alert the house that despite them I am happy.

  I am counting the days, I am so glad to be leaving this scene, the arty city, the family drama. That’s the truth, M.

  THREE

  Jimmy Paz knew that it was going to be a bad one when he saw Bubba Singleton puking into the gutter, supporting his huge frame on the rear bumper of his patrol car. Bubba had been doing patrol in the Central District for over a dozen years and he had had ample opportunity to learn what the heat of a South Florida summer can do to a corpse in a remarkably short time, so this had to be something more than the usual leaking, reeking, bloated, livid, maggot-squirming foulness covered in giant roaches.

  Paz got out of his Impala and walked past two police cars and a crime-scene unit van to the front of the four-story concrete-block-stucco tenement. A couple of uniforms were holding the perimeter, looking uneasy, as cops always did in Overtown in the hot time, and beyond them a small crowd of the curious had gathered. Overtown is an area of Miami occupied by low-income African-Americans. If you are a tourist coming from the airport on your way to the sun and fun of Miami Beach and you mistakenly turn off the airport freeway and you realize your mistake and try to backtrack, then Overtown is the area you backtrack through. Every couple of seasons some tourist does this and comes to a bad end.

  Jimmy Paz, in fact, had recently been involved in one of these unhappy events, a Japanese couple yanked from their car, the woman raped and brutalized, the man shot. He had cleared the case in twenty-four hours, in the time-honored fashion of hanging around the ‘hood and asking questions and keeping his eyes open until the morons who did the thing tried to buy a set of speakers with Ishiguro Hideki’s Visa card. There was even a little shoot-out, although the mope had only been wounded and nobody got on Paz’s case because he, too, was black and so, under the peculiar rules of American police practice, he had a license to shoot down citizens of whatever color with only nonhysterical investigation to follow. Even more so, in his case, because he was also of Cuban extraction, which accounted for the wit of the bystanders here, shouting, “Yo, spigger!”

  Paz ignored this and kept his face neutral (a practiced skill) and made a show of checking his appearance in the car window. Paz was a stocky, muscular man of thirty-two, the color of coco matting, with a smooth round head, on which the hair had been cropped almost to the skin. His ears were small and neat and his eyes, set in lanceolate sockets, were large, intelligent, warm brown in color, but not warm at all. The roundness of his head and these eyes and the general flatness of his features gave him a feline look. This was intensified when he grinned, the bright small teeth startling against the tan of his skin.

  He wore a Hugo Boss linen jacket, black Ermenegildo Zegna slacks, a short-sleeved cotton shirt in tiny black checks, and a knit navy tie, open at the neck. On his feet he wore three-hundred-dollar Lorenzo Banfi suede shoes. Paz, in other words, dressed like a cop who took bribes. But he did not take bribes. He was unmarried and undivorced and lived rent-free in a building owned by his mother. By so dressing, however, he managed to piss off both the considerable number of his MPD confreres who did take bribes and those who remained straight; which was the point.

  Paz took a tube of Vicks VapoRub out of his jacket pocket as he entered the building and ran a bead around the interior of each nostril. This was an old cop trick designed to cover the stench of death, but it also helped with the background stink of the building. This had exterior stairways leading to narrow, open walks guarded by low concrete walls topped by a steel pipe. Painted a fecal brown, it had the architectural charm of a public lavatory, perhaps one reason why the entrance and stairs had been used as one. Paz felt, as he usually did when entering one of these dwellings, a blast of strong emotion?rage mixed with shame and pity?and waited until it subsided, when he became once again pure cop, strapped into that invulnerable persona, like a pilot in an F-18. He would have had to eat handfuls of Valium to otherwise create that much emotional armor. He enjoyed the pay and benefits, but, really, the armor was why he had become a policeman.

  The patrolman at the door of the victim’s apartment, a fat-faced fellow named Gomez, was slouched against the wall sniffing and clearing his throat, which suggested that he had also checked out the interior scene. The armpits of his white uniform shirt were sodden and he wiped with the back of his hand at the fine oily sweat on his forehead as Paz approached. Paz was famous in the Miami PD for not sweating. During his time in uniform, he had once chased a street robber for six blocks down Flagler Street, on a day when the asphalt had been softened to something like taffy, and grabbed the kid, and brought him in, maintaining a bone-dry face, and with the press still in his shirt. This was another thing against him from the point of view of Gomez, the first thing being his color and his features and the fact that, although possessing such a color and such features, he was yet undeniably Cuban. Paz was, technically, a mulatto, and technically, so was Gomez, but Paz was clearly on the black side of the line and Gomez was on the white, like some 98 percent of the Cubans who had fled Castro for America, and therein lay the agony of Jimmy Paz’s life. He paused to pass some of it on to Gomez.

  “Hey, Gomez, how you doing?” Paz asked, in Spanish.

  “I’m okay, Paz,” said Gomez, responding pointedly in English.

  “You don’t look okay, man, you look like shit. You look like you want to puke,” said Paz.

  “I said, I’m okay.”

  “Hey, you want to puke over the rail, go ahead.” Paz indicated the open side of the passage. “There’s just a bunch of niggers down there. You puke on them, hell, it’s just another day in Overtown.”

  “Fuck you,” said Gomez in English.

  Paz shrugged, said, “No habla ingles, senor,” and walked into the apartment. It was hot and it stank with a stink so forty-weight-crankcase-oil heavy that it seemed to drag the lungs down into the belly. The temperature had been in the nineties, cooking the carnage in the airless apartment, which would have been bad enough, but this was something else. The agents of decay and dissolution must have been helped by some elaborate butchery.

  Just inside the door, Paz opened his briefcase, removed a pair of latex gloves, and put them on. He could hear noises and see strobes going off in the rear as the crime-scene crew did their work. They had already finished in here, the fingerprint powder strewn liberally about. A moment to look around, then, before he dived in.

  Paz saw a small, low-ceilinged room, with walls painted a dingy yellow and the floor covered with institutional brown linoleum, worn to hairy dullness along the routes of heavy traffic. It was furnished with a blue velvet couch, relatively new, an older vinyl-covered armchair, maroon in color and cracked along the back cushion, several folding tin tables printed with a floral design, and a shiny twenty-eight-inch color TV, facing the couch and the chair. On the floor was a five-by-nine shag rug, striped to mimic a zebra’s coat. Someone had spilled something brown on it?a soda or coffee. On one wall, above a worn wicker credenza painted yellow as street lines, hung a large velour cloth illustrating several Africans hunting a lion with spears. On the other wall were two African masks, mass-produced flimsy things that were on sale in local shops: a stylized face with slanted eyes and a stylized antelope. On the same wall were family portraits in cheap fake-gilt frames. A group of respectable-looking people dressed for church; a couple of school portraits of kids, smilin
g hopefully; two graduation pictures, one boy, one girl, clearly brother and sister; and one formal portrait of a middle-aged woman with deep-set eyes and a glossy flip to her hair. All the people in the pictures were black. The wall and the pictures were speckled with little dots of red-brown, as if someone had goosed a can of spray paint to test the nozzle. There was one brad sticking out of the wall with nothing hanging from it, and a rectangular area of clear wall with no spots, obviously a place where a picture had hung.

  A crime-scene technician came into the room lugging a fat carryall, waved to Paz, and departed. A few seconds later came another CSU guy with a camera. Paz said, “Hey, Gary, did anyone take a picture off that wall? Where the nail is?”

  “Not that I saw, unless somebody snatched it before we got here.”

  “Okay, I’ll ask. You done in there?”

  “Yeah,” he said, then paused. “Jimmy, you’ll want to catch this guy.”

  “We want to catch all of them, man.”

  “Uh-uh, Jimmy,” said the technician. “I mean you’ll really want this one.”

  He left and Paz went into the bedroom. There was nothing in the tiny room but a cheap white-painted “brass” bed, a white pine bureau, and two people, one of whom was dead and one of whom was Paz’s partner. Cletis Barlow was a fiftyish white man built on Lincolnesque lines, one of the ever fewer representatives on the Miami PD of the original population of Florida, an old-time cracker. Barlow looked like a redneck preacher, which he was, on Sundays. He had been a homicide detective for nearly thirty years, and had in common with Jimmy Paz little more than street smarts and a strong stomach.

  “The M.E. been yet?” asked Paz, staring at the thing on the bed.