by Swigart, Rob
“There’s no one here,” Vincent protested. He climbed the steps and tried the front door. It swung open.
“Come in.” The voice came from the darkness beyond the two candles stuck on the floor. They cast a pale yellow light in small circles that revealed only the bare wooden floor. Shadows stirred outside the circles of light.
Vincent shielded his eyes, trying to see into the gloom. “Who is it?”
“Come in,” the voice repeated, sharply this time, and Vincent stepped through the door, which closed behind him.
“Cavanaugh?”
“Sit.”
“No. I want to know who this is. What am I doing here?”
There was no reply. Slowly a figure moved forward. He was wrapped in burlap, a wide-brimmed floppy hat hid his eyes, but when he tilted his head back, Vincent saw that he had thick wads of cotton stuffed into his nostrils. Somehow the effect was not comic at all; it was terrifying.
“I am Baron Samedi.” The voice was deep, heavily accented. “From tonight you are reborn.”
“You’re Cavanaugh. What do you want?” Vincent reached for the handle of the door behind him. The figure took a step toward him, and Vincent stepped back. He found the handle, turned it. The door was locked.
Baron Samedi crooked his finger. “Come.” Vincent took a halting step. “Now sit.” Vincent sat.
As his eyes adjusted he could see the ceiling was crisscrossed with string. Small flags dangled from it, along with what could have been photographs of human skulls. Behind the looming figure was a large cross made of bamboo and wrapped in a webbing of thick rope and scraps of crimson material. Dozens of bottles were standing at the foot of the cross, many of them holding the stubs of candles. “I don’t believe all this, you know,” Vincent said. “You’re Cavanaugh. I know you. I don’t believe all this mumbo jumbo.”
“Of course. You are a Western man, aren’t you? A skeptic. That is all right, Monsieur Meissner. Baron Samedi does not require a believer. Have you been to Haiti, Monsieur Meissner? No? Well let me tell you what you could learn in Haiti is what is going to happen to you tonight. It requires nothing but your presence. Look around you.”
Shapes were forming on the walls now. Did the candles flare up, grow brighter? Vincent could not be sure. He could see gargoyle shapes, devil faces without horns. Red tongues hung from their mouths, pierced by crudely drawn daggers.
“Baron Samedi is the Guardian of the Cemetery,” the man said. Vincent thought it was the man he had met earlier as Cavanaugh. Now he was not so sure. “We will go there soon, Vincent. You and I. To the cemetery. It is just down the hill from here. Very, very old, this cemetery. No one uses it any more. Except you. You will use it, tonight.”
“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The figure shook his head, sending wild shadows leaping on the walls and ceiling. The door opened, and the four men filed in. Now they were dressed in burlap robes and red bandanas. They moved around the edges of the room and sat cross-legged, staring at Vincent in silence. Their faces were flat, dead, their eyes expressionless.
“You have spoken with others, have you not, since you met Cavanaugh?” Baron Samedi asked quietly.
Vincent decided he would not answer. “Yes,” he said, despite himself.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. A Frenchman, Duvalois, something like that.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him what you said, you were going to the Big Island. You were going to help me. I thought you worked with him.”
“Duvalois! No, it is all right. You did well. I am going to help you. I’m going to do it all. Believe that.”
The men seated around the room picked up small drums and began to tap. Vincent closed his eyes, and somehow not seeing was worse than seeing, so he opened them again. The figure of the Baron Samedi was seated before him, large eyes staring into his. He felt the first tendrils of panic twitch at his heart.
Suddenly the figure leaned forward and hissed. “You will die tonight, Vincent.”
The drumming grew louder.
“Why?” Vincent tried to think, tried to grasp at something that made sense.
The figure laughed. “They always ask why, Vincent. Because this is Power, and I possess it.” He lifted his hand; it held a teacup. “There is a powder in this cup. It gives death and takes it away. You will wish for it soon, Vincent. You will beg me to give you this powder that gives death.” He held up his other hand, and in it was a clear plastic bag. “Here is another powder, Vincent. It is the concombre zombi. It comes from a very common plant, growing wild all around you. You will have this, too, Vincent, and you will be mine. You will be reborn; you will have a new name.”
“I don’t want…”
The drumming increased in speed, grew louder. The flames on the candles flickered and danced in time to the erratic, syncopated beat.
The Baron Samedi put down the plastic bag and poured some of the powder from the teacup into his palm. He looked at it thoughtfully. Vincent stared, fascinated. He couldn’t tear his eyes away, though the other man was not even looking at him. It was as if he were not even there. Suddenly, the man leaned forward and blew the powder in his palm hard into Vincent’s face.
Vincent gasped, and with that breath the nightmare truly began.
They chanted something guttural and dark, and he could not move. He thought once they were lighting more candles, and now he could see, on shelves along the rear wall, row after row of human skulls staring with empty sockets into Vincent’s soul.
Another time the man was talking to him in a conversational tone as if they were old acquaintances just met after a long separation. He was telling him about his death as if it were a commonplace. “You cannot move, of course,” the man said. “You are, in fact, dead. Soon you will float away from your body. It is very pleasant, to leave the body. You will enjoy it, for a time, but I will not let you go far. That would be very bad. You will look down on your body and think it is a worm; you will want nothing more than to leave it behind. But I will call you back.”
And later. “Now we will bury you.” Vincent wanted to scream, but his eyes were wide and staring, and he could not talk. They carried him outside and, with one man on either side, supported him down the narrow trail, slippery with a passing rain. A strange light led the way, and Vincent thought it might be a torch that threw red shadows into the trees.
The cemetery was as empty as Baron Samedi said it was. Baron Samedi was the Guardian of this place, and he pointed with his long finger at the ground, and they fell to digging. The others put Vincent in a box, and he died.
When he came to life again, it was dark and close, and he heard the sound of something falling above him, above his face. He wanted to reach out to push away the heavy presence, but he could not move, and his mind fell to singing nursery rhymes over and over. And then his name, and then no name at all, no words at all, only senseless sounds from before speech.
Suddenly, he was facing sky, and the man was bending over him, the cotton in his nose, the burlap wrapped around him, and he dusted Vincent’s face with powder again, and Vincent did scream then, and the scream echoed and echoed and made no sound at all.
He looked up and saw the elongated shadows of the five men standing in a circle around him. They bent down with a strange jerky motion and lifted him up, and they led him over to another crude cross that looked familiar, wrapped in ropes and red cloth, and they baptized him, giving him the name of Baka, the spirit of evil. And when the sun came up, he sat and stared at it in wonder because he did not know who he was.
“This thing,” Baron Samedi touched Vincent with the toe of his boot, “he will confess to the world that the foundation assassinated its own people and tried to blame France. Won’t you, my little beast?”
Vincent looked up but did not speak. No one had told him what to say.
“I leave him with you for the next few hours,” the Phoenix who called himself Cavanaugh
said. “Duvalois is here, and I must take care of him. I will be on the Big Island, but tonight I will return. The police, as he said, may find out what happened. We must stop them— the Koenig woman with the kid, the policeman. He will be back from Tahiti. I assume you took care of the Koenig?” A couple of the figures nodded. “Good. The women are smart, though. So we have much work yet to do. Baka will help us. Later. He will be very useful indeed.”
TWENTY-TWO
BURNING MAN
Alain Duvalois stood beside the bed and scowled at the rumpled spread, one of thousands in a long line of hotel rooms. Outside, the beaches filled with tourists caressed by balmy air, warmed by subtropical sun.
No one else could do what he had to do. No one else knew Phénix the way Alain Duvalois knew him.
He’d been forced to wait for this gun, a lightweight composite graphite-and-plastic affair of dubious accuracy disassembled and scattered through his checked luggage. It was stupid to have to pack a large suitcase full of useless clothing just to get a gun into this country.
But then this whole thing was stupid. Duvalois thought the man had done France a favor, but now it was out of control. Lawsuits were in the air. The man had gone over. Everyone had known that was possible, someone like that couldn’t be stable. Now that he had gone over, he was capable of terrible things. Only Alain Duvalois knew what things.
He’d poisoned everyone on the ship. That was fine, but there was a survivor; if she recovered, that would not be fine. Then, too, he had engineered the affair in Raïatéa, with Queneau. That was not fine, and it did not make sense. Queneau was a popular man, loved by natives and French alike. Killing him was crazy. Perhaps it could be blamed on Noel Taviri, a known troublemaker, and the native separatist movement, but Alain did not want to think about the public relations problem that scenario presented. It was a mess.
The man had knowledge, very special knowledge. He had skill and the kind of determination needed to act on his knowledge. And he was insane. He was a rogue. Duvalois had to stop him.
To terminate him, with prejudice.
He knew how difficult the assignment was going to be, what little chance he had of success; he knew what little chance he had of returning to Tahiti alive. He cursed himself, because he had argued in favor of termination. He thought there was no possibility he would get the assignment. He was too old and out of shape, close to retirement. He should have a desk at SDECE somewhere, filling out request forms and filing field reports.
He should not be here fitting the stock to the frame of this ridiculous toy. The sound the two parts made when they met was soft and damp and totally without authority. It was the sound of high-tech, and did not belong here in the Waiohai Beach Resort Hotel on Poipu Beach, on the south coast of Kauai.
He put on a light sports jacket over the gun and left the room. He would pass through airport security without difficulty.
The lobby was busy with sunbathers and hostesses in light green muumuus. Waitresses moved deftly through the mob, carrying trays of pink and green drinks with tiny paper umbrellas and slices of pineapple in them.
Alain drove his rented car out the Koloa Road. Small puffs of clouds formed over the volcanic peak in the center of the island. It reminded him of Tahiti, but it was not the same. He had to remember it was not the same.
Yesterday he had checked the hospital. He had called the newspaper office. He had called the Coast Guard. He had the available facts. He read in The Garden Isle about the murders of two women, tourists, both expertly strangled, leaving no prints. He had spoken with Sangier from the French Consulate in San Francisco. Sangier had told him to talk to the owner of the ship, a man named Meissner. Meissner was the fulcrum, the place where he could stand to flush out the Phoenix.
He had then met with Vincent Meissner. He had been seated in an overstuffed and oddly uncomfortable chair in the lobby of the Hilton, looking at some papers in a manila folder. Duvalois had watched for a few moments from the entrance until the fat man looked up at him and smiled. It was a smile with neither warmth nor welcome.
The lobby of the Hilton was indistinguishable from the lobby at the Waiohai, from a thousand other lobbies. A lobby was a place for waiting, a room you passed through. Duvalois had settled into the next chair and ordered a beer from the attentive waitress in a pink muumuu with a plumeria blossom behind her ear.
“I want this situation resolved,” Meissner had said without preamble. “I told Cavanaugh the same. I want it finished. I have work to do.”
Duvalois had grunted but said nothing. The waitress in the pink muumuu returned with his beer. He dropped a few crumpled dollars on her tray and she went away. He did not ask who Cavanaugh was; he knew perfectly well Cavanaugh was Phénix.
“Cavanaugh is an… unusual man,” Duvalois said after swallowing half his beer. It was cold. Almost too cold.
“He seemed to know how to get the job done. There’s some kind of fanatical right-wing group in France. They attacked the Ocean Mother crew. He’s making up the evidence.”
“Ah, yes. Evidence.” Duvalois looked into his glass. He was not interested in evidence.
Meissner stared at him. “Who are you, Duvalois? You work with Cavanaugh, don’t you? Or with Sangier?”
“We are… colleagues.”
“Then get on him. Tell him it needs to end. The whole thing is getting out of hand. Too many groups, too much confusion and conspiracy. No one can benefit from such confusion. The press doesn’t like confusion. International tribunals do not like it. I don’t like it.”
Duvalois spread his hands, his beer finished. “Of course,” he’d said softly. “I am happy to talk to him. But I cannot talk to Cavanaugh if I do not know where he is.”
Meissner was surprised. “You don’t know?”
“Alas, he forgot to leave his forwarding. I came up in a hurry. He was to meet me at the airport,” Duvalois lied smoothly. “It seems he was meeting with you at the time.”
“Of course, I see.” Meissner had tugged at the skin of his throat. “He said he was going to go to Hawaii. The Big Island. To a town south of Kona. He was going to pick up the evidence there; someone he knew could put it together. He knows people. That’s what he said. He knows people. Tomorrow, he said.”
That was yesterday. Today Duvalois left the hotel. He drove to the airport and turned in his rental car. He would find Phoenix on the Big Island. He knew people, too.
The flight from Kauai was convenient and quick, the intermediate landing in Maui little more than a bounce, and he was there, talking to one of the people he knew.
She was old. Older than he was, older even than he felt. Her face was nested in wrinkles and wreathed in smoke from the cigarette dangling from her lower lip. The cigarette was stuck there by some alchemy known only to her.
She was French, from Marseille, but her soul was black as the smoke that poured from the factory stacks of Rouen. She was Duvalois’s sister-in-law, and she had lived in Hawaii for twenty-seven years, watching her small pension dwindle away.
So she supplemented her income in various ways. Duvalois handed her a new one-hundred-dollar bill. She snapped it taut a couple of times, squinting at it through the smoke. They spoke in French.
“You want to know what is in this town? Nothing is in this town at all. That’s why I like it, you shit. Your shit of a brother liked it here. It killed him, so I like it here.”
“Why would a certain man want to come here?” he asked, watching a spider so impossibly large as to suggest mutant insects from the horror films of the 1950s climb the streaked wallpaper of her living room. “A man interested in, oh, say, the occult?”
She coughed, sending a spray of ashes onto him. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? You come flapping in here and spread your diseased old carcass all over my lovely furniture and expect me to read your mind? Ha!” She took the cigarette away from her mouth and squinted at it. It failed to pass this test, apparently for length, for she smashed it out in an overflowing
ashtray and immediately lit another, a Gauloise, harsh, thick, and cancerous.
“Now, Florence, I did not come flapping in here, and your furniture is not lovely, it’s disgusting. So tell me. I don’t have much time.”
“Small blessings, anyway,” she muttered. “Drink?”
He shrugged of course, and she poured out two thick glasses of Pernod. He let the licorice fire drown his throat. He still felt cold. Then he looked at her.
“There’s a school for kahuna here,” she said. “Anyone wants to learn about the occult, they go there, talk to Waialani O’Brien.” Her fingers shook. The growing ash on her cigarette trembled.
“What kind of a name is that? Never mind.” He finished his Pernod. “Merci, Florence.” He stood up.
“Go fuck yourself,” she said. She brushed at the place he had been sitting with a dish towel. “And don’t bother coming back, you piece of shit. I never liked your brother. I like you less.”
“You’re welcome,” he said from the door. She was lighting another cigarette. He smiled at her fondly and left.
Her house was a dismal condominium on a beach abandoned by the tides of tourism. The School for Kahunas was three blocks away on a side street, a makeshift residence awash in nostalgia for a past when magicians and healers ruled the souls of the people. Duvalois had seen its like in Tahiti and Fiji and Samoa.
He sat in his a car indistinguishable from the one he had rented in Kauai, and watched the house for an hour.
That was all it took. Phénix came out and looked both ways. Duvalois smiled, but it was a grim smile. Who was he now, this Phénix? Was he still Cavanaugh? Or someone else?
Whoever he was, he turned the other way and walked slowly, almost aimlessly, toward the beach.
Alain Duvalois was not a naive man. He did not doubt that Phénix was luring him, had deliberately told Meissner where he was going. He had no option but to follow. He put the car in gear and drifted along the deserted and poorly maintained road, pretending to look at street numbers. At the corner, he stopped and watched his man get into a car the twin of his. Phénix pulled away with a roar and a flurry of leaves, and Duvalois accelerated behind him.