by Unknown
I hit him, with my fist, in the nose. Someone grabbed me from behind, pawing at my shorts. I grabbed his wrist. Uki-waza, the floating techniques. Mae-otoshi, the front drop. You’re supposed to let go of the guy’s wrist when he floats away from you, but I didn’t, and he bellowed when it snapped.
Hard to recall this next part. I was in a circle of them, eyes and teeth, W. on the floor, blood gushing from his nose, stain on his white shirt. Shouting at me, all of them, waving fists & someone hit me on the head with a bottle, heard the crash, felt the beer run down my back, then Boom, deafening noise, ringing in ears. Screams. And the stink of gunpowder. A woman’s outraged voice. Mrs. B. The sound of more screams, the flop of sandals, the stomp of shoes, a door slamming. Des was there, holding me, asking if I was all right, me bleeding all over him. No, as a matter of fact.
The boom was Mrs. Bassey’s shotgun. She was leaning over me, too, propped on the smoking weapon. Everyone was there, gaping, amazed.
Mrs. Bassey sewed up my head gash. A nurse, too, in her early years, it turned out. You are well rid of that one, my girl, she kept saying, sewing away. Yes, but I wanted him back. Not that creature. I wanted my husband .
I woke up late when the dope wore off and descended to the library. Everyone was very polite, and kind. Dave Berne asked me if I wanted to go to Esale-Eko, which is a district of Lagos where the Gelede tradition is strong, he had a contact there, Akinkuoto, a babalase, meaning priest stage manager of dances.p>
I escaped into Africa-time then, for twelve days, during which I didn’t write in my journal, or anywhere else, just wandered with a camcorder, talking with anyone who would talk with me.
One interview with Olaiya, the iyalase, the shrine mother. She had heard about me and told Akinkuoto to bring me by.
She was sitting on cushions in a dim low-ceilinged room, and at first all I could see of her was her clothing, a large headcloth folded in a wide roll across the top of her head and a billow of white robe, with a fold thrown over one shoulder, toga-style. Closer, I could feel the ashe pour from her face like a fountain. “Aristocratic” doesn’t begin to describe her face. Someone like that looks into your eyes, you feel the shock in your chest and belly, like a blow. I thought of Puniekka in Chenka and was afraid, & I bowed spontaneously, like you do crossing the altar in church. Akinkuoto made the introductions, which were elaborate. I could feel his tension, and he was probably easier with her than any man in the community. He treated her like a carload of nitroglycerine, but she didn’t look at him, only at me. We did the ritual greetings, also lengthy, as always in Yorubaland. When in the course of these she asked after my children I said that Olarun had not blessed me yet. At this she increased the intensity of her stare, & frowned. Then she made a shooing gesture, and Akinkuoto withdrew, rather more quickly than he was accustomed to move.
Then we sat in silence some more. The camcorder lay dormant in my hand, as if a mere ceremonial object, like her silver-mounted horsehair whisk. African time. An iyalase is the shadow on earth of Iya Nla, the Great Mother. This figure is extinct in our culture, for the few powerful women we have are imitation men; it is the only form of power we recognize. Among the Yoruba, though, a ferociously male-dominated society, the specifically female kind of power remains intact, and enormously potent. The whole Gelede ritual is a thing devised by men to keep it placated. Every male in Yorubaland knew that Olaiya, or her sisters, could shrivel a man’s penis (so that he would, as their saying has it, have to go to bed with his pants on) or insure that no wife ever bore him a son. The deity she represents is also the patroness of all art and culture and agriculture. She loves to be amused, entranced. At all costs she must be kept from irascibility. We used to have her in Europe, too, but we got rid of her, substituting the Virgin, whose power is not at all the same.
She broke the long silence by asking me why I had come to her place. I started with the usual anthro excuse, we wanted to know the ways of her people, we had heard of her wisdom and the beauty of her celebrations, and so on, but she cut me off with a gesture. No, the real reason, she said. The heart reason. She added, I don’t usually see eebo women. I find them disturbing. They are either men in costumes they can’t take off, or crushed things like beetles. You are different, and interesting. Yemaya of the sea was in you once, but you cast her off by fear. Ashe is waiting to flow through you in great quantity, but you block it. The orishas wish to give you gifts, but you refuse them. Why is that?
I said I didn’t know. She said, You do. There is an alujonnu in you. You should have it removed. You know this. I agreed that I did. She shrugged, and said, We will have palm wine and kola now. She clapped her hands twice and called something over her shoulder. Two young women dressed in white hurried in and placed a low table before her loaded with prepared nuts and bowls of wine. We ate and drank. Then she said, Your husband beats you. I said no and touched my bandaged head. An accident only. She said, Yes, he beats you. Why? Are you unpleasing to him at night? Is his supper not ready when he wants it? Or is it because you have given him no sons? All of the above, I thought, but said, We have different customs. She gave me that look, I said, I’m afraid that he has an evil spirit in him, too. No idea why I said that, but she said, Of course, because you didn’t purify yourselves before your marriage. You should be purified together, or else, someday, you will kill him or he will kill you. But you are the stronger, I think. I saw her hand go out and select a colored stone from a jar. She stared at it for a minute and then enveloped it in a fold of her robe. She said, This has been interesting. I will remember it. I felt a little shiver. I had heard about memory stones but never seen it done. It’s what they use in traditional societies instead of notebooks and tape. She would be able to play back our interview in her memory about as accurately as I might have, had I got it all on the Sony, which was not running.
More silence then, and I was able to turn the subject to anthro, gratefully. She taught me some hymns. Here is one:
Homage my mother, the Osoronga
Mother with the beautiful eyes
Who has a thick bunch of hair in her private parts
The mother who owns a brass tray
And a brass fan
The famous bird of the night that flies gracefully.
Not exactly “Lead, Kindly Light,” but we have different customs. One of the things she said was, You are ugly, true, but your character is good at the root. Iwa l’ewa. Meaning character is beauty; Dad hinted at this all the time, but never actually came out and said it. I left her in a daze, to find that night had fallen.
Three days later there was a Gelede odun, a festival, and I saw my first dances. Dance is not quite the word. Gelede is a combination of grand opera, ballet, the circus, a tabloid newspaper, and a psychotherapy session. There is nothing else like it in the world, because other people tend to put all those aspects of culture in different boxes. Not the Yoruba. No one knows exactly what the word Gelede means, but one etymology suggests it stands for “a thing that relaxes and indulges carefully.” It jollies up the most awesome thing on earth, Earth herself.
Dance lasted three days, I have it all on tape, meaningless, you had to be there. What glory!
Morning of the third day, Berne drove up with Tunji, told me that W. had been arrested for narcotics trafficking, and was in Lagos Jail. I went to where Olaiya was sitting on her stool of honor and took my leave, on my knees. She told me not to go, but I did. On the way back, he filled me in. Early that morning, the cops had burst into the Palm Court and searched it. They said they were looking for drugs, said that W. had been arrested as a major American gangster drug lord. Dave said that the idiots W. was hanging with figured that since they had an American contact, they didn’t have to pay off the cops anymore. Maybe W. had actually told them he was an American drug lord. It’s not beyond him at all.
Back in Lagos, I got on our satellite phone and pulled the red handle again, and this morning a sweating, nervous oil company guy, accompanied by two refrigerator-si
zed Nigerians carrying submachine guns, walked into Lary’s Palm Court with an aluminum suitcase containing fifty thousand dollars.
Have to stop writing and go see Colonel Musa.
TWENTY-ONE
Barlow laid out what they had. Paz thought he was good at this, a man who spoke with the Almighty often, and was thus not likely to be cowed by a gaggle of police brass. The room was crowded to capacity, with Neville D. Horton up at the head of the table, flanked by his gofers and assistant chiefs, then Captain Mendés, then the relevant captains and lieutenants who supervised the people who actually knew what was going on.
Barlow covered both cases, stressing the similarities: the precise duplication of the cuts in all four victims, mothers and unborn babies, the type and quantity of the drugs found in the bodies at autopsy, the fact that there was no forced entry, the fact that the crimes had been accomplished in complete silence, with the victims unbound, yet not struggling while they were cut into butcher’s meat.
His words emerged in stately periods; he paused dramatically at the right places; he asked rhetorical questions (“Did we find other similarities? Yes, we did”) and his delivery was free of the usual verbal tics. It was very much like a sermon, but one lacking a moral point at the end. Paz was glad that Barlow omitted the material about Tanzi Franklin, because it was embarrassing, and it led nowhere. Nor did Barlow try to cover the sorry truth?that they had no leads at all, no suspects, nothing to look for, no real evidence at all except for the bizarre nature of the crimes themselves; a tropical nut used in divination; a cloudy description by a piss-bum of a fellow he had seen talking to Deandra Wallace in a park; a partial bike tire track; and a tiny piece of what had turned out to be obsidian. When he got to that part, Barlow nodded to Paz. “My partner there, Detective Paz, has found out a little something about that fragment from the Vargas murder scene. Jimmy?”
Paz stood and went to the front of the room. They had planned this so that Paz would be on his feet, standing next to Barlow and ready to field questions, if any, about what Cletis called the spooky stuff. Paz cleared his throat and said, in a voice that sounded too loud in his own ears, “Yes, I showed the sample to a geologist at the university. He says it’s a volcanic glass called obsidian. He examined it under a microscope and concluded that it showed marks of pressure flaking. We’re thinking that the chip came from a stone knife.”
A buzz greeted this statement. Mendés knuckle-rapped on the table and turned to the county medical examiner, John Cornell, a wizened veteran with a reputation, which he loved polishing, for being vinegary.
“Doc, what about it? Are the wounds on the two victims consistent with a stone knife?”
“They’re consistent with a sharp knife, a very sharp knife, around three inches long,” said Cornell. “There’s no way of telling what the knife was made of.”
“I meant, could you get a stone knife sharp enough to do that kind of cutting?”
“Oh, hell, yeah. It’s just glass, really. There’s a kind of eye surgery where surgeons routinely use glass knives. If you know what you’re doing, you can get a glass edge that’s essentially one molecule thick. You can’t get any sharper than that. The problem with glass knives is that they chip if you breathe on them wrong, and then you have to knap a new edge.”
“So this could have happened with this one, where we got that chip?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Arnie,” said Cornell, “I wasn’t there when he did it, so I couldn’t say. Find me the knife and I’ll maybe testify as to its consistency with the wounds observed on the deceased.”
Mendés grinned, indicating he was charmed by the crusty old gent, and turned his attention to the sole stranger at the table. “Well, maybe it’s time to hear what the FBI has to say. As you all know, we asked Agent Robinette down from the behavioral sciences unit at Quantico when it became clear that we were dealing with a serial killer. So, Agent Robinette, if at this point in time you can tell us anything at all about the kind of man we’re looking for, we’re all ears.”
Robinette said, “Thank you, Captain,” and then brought a manila folder out of a briefcase and arranged it neatly in front of him, as if he were a schoolboy called on to read a report. He had something of the schoolboy’s look, too, although he must have been sixty: a round, smooth, face, with a button nose and a button chin and bright blue eyes, the skin on his face smooth and reddened as if he had just come from some outdoor sport. His hair was a gray buzz cut, like an astronaut’s.
After a brief summary of the principles of serial killer profiling, he said, “The good news, if you can call it that, is that we think we’ve seen this man’s work before?a case in a town on Long Island in New York State, a little under three years ago.” He took a sheaf of eight-by-ten glossy color photographs and passed them over to Dr. Cornell. The medical examiner looked through them, and passed them along. While this viewing proceeded, Robinette went on. “The victim’s name was Mariah Do, born Mary Elizabeth Doe. She was a fashion model and the daughter of a prominent family on the north shore of Long Island. Very old money. Because of their local influence, they were able to keep the crime extremely quiet. Hardly any press, except the bare news of the murder. No details got out, which in a case like this, as you know, is pretty rare, especially when the victim is well known. It probably wouldn’t have turned up in our system if the state cop who handled it hadn’t been through several of our training courses. We keep a file on cannibalistic acts, as part of the VICAP database, as I’m sure you’re all aware.”
Paz actually hadn’t been aware. These cases constituted his first contact with cannibalistic acts. When the photographs reached him he studied the woman carefully. She had been strikingly lovely. The cheekbones stood out like wedges in the harsh light of the crime-scene strobe, and the hair that spread out on either side of the dead face was silky and white-blond. The wounds appeared to be similar enough to the ones they had observed in real life, and it seemed in any case unbearable that there should be two guys independently doing these. He passed the sheaf to Barlow, who glanced through them quickly and asked, “This woman, the victim?did she have any connection with any kind of cult, African, Haitian … ?”
Robinette nodded, as if he had been expecting the question. “Not the woman as such, that anyone could determine. But her sister was an anthropologist, and had recently returned from Africa. She’d gotten sick over there and was recuperating at her family home. She apparently committed suicide right after her sister’s funeral.” This caused a little stir in the room. Robinette nodded. “Yeah, that would’ve been something to look into, but the locals didn’t go after it, or the state. This family, as I said, swings a lot of weight in those parts, and they’re Catholic, so the police were, let’s say, not encouraged to delve into the suicide aspects. The private opinion is, or I guess I should say, was, that the sister did it, because it looked so obviously like an inside job, a particularly awful domestic murder.” He shuffled through his file. “The victim’s sister and mother were in the house at the estimated time of the murder, but it’s a huge place, an old-fashioned Long Island mansion. Neither of them heard anything. Two servants in the house, too, ditto. The victim’s father and her husband, and the sister’s husband, who, by the way, was also recently returned from Africa, were about five miles away at the time of the crime, at an automobile show. All three said they were never out of each other’s sight the whole afternoon. Of course, that could’ve meant they all were in on it, but that’s something nobody up there wanted to push. When you people called us, we ran the description through VICAP and this one popped up, a perfect match. I don’t think there’s any question it’s either the same guy or a ritual cult killing with more than one operator following exactly the same procedure.”
More murmuring, which Barlow interrupted by saying, “I’d like to take a look at the names of those fellas at the car show.”
“You can have our whole file, Detective, for all the good it’ll do you. Like I said, it’s scanty. At fi
rst they were looking for a wandering maniac, but when the sister killed herself, the investigation sort of ran out of steam. Again, I guess they figured the sister went batty and did the murder and then killed herself out of remorse, a day or so after the funeral. There was some indication, which you’ll see in the file, that there was bad blood between the sisters, that the older sister was jealous that the younger one was having a baby. And she’d been sick, delirious, and apparently wasn’t too tightly wrapped to begin with. Now, of course …”
Of course. A mumbling interlude, stopped by Mendés rapping sharply upon the table. “Thank you, Agent Robinette. Based on this other case, and the two down here, do you have enough to give us some idea of what kind of guy we’re looking for?”
“Yes, we’ve been thinking about that long and hard, Captain, and I have to say that I don’t think our standard sort of profiling is going to do us much good here. I doubt very much that our unknown subject is a sexual psychopath.”