by Cara Black
She copied that down. And wondered why Benoît, a world authority on pigs, had been consulted about Hydrolis’s water-treatment proposals. She had to search further. At the documents desk, she requested information on World Bank funding for projects in Haiti. The long-haired mec winked at her. “Those documents come from the basement. Sorry, you missed the last request time by half an hour.”
“You mean . . . ?”
“First thing tomorrow.”
She’d have to come back. Unless Martine already had the skinny tomorrow.
“The coffee machine still downstairs?”
“I’d love to join you, but I’m on shift. It’s on the lower level.”
She put four francs in the espresso machine. A thick spurt of brown liquid dripped into the plastic cup. The same watered-down taste, but it was full of caffeine. She tossed it away after a few sips. Poor Darquin, she thought, if only she knew what he’d wanted to tell her. She felt even less safe than before.
Her horoscope in the latest Elle advised her to take out life insurance. She’d never even made out a will. Who would her apartment go to . . . Miles Davis? René? Or would the law award it to Mireille?
Back upstairs at the long wooden table, now more wide awake, she checked the Journals de Culture Haitian for historical articles and those on vodou. To understand the meaning of that circle of salt, Benoît’s severed ear and peeled skin. . . . The article that caught her eye concerned black vodou.
Black vodou rituals, not practiced in modern times, came from old practices in Benin and the Cameroons, in Africa. They involved the severing of extremities. The leader, the Grandissime, tortured victims, preferably young ones, and drank their blood, which was thought to give a certain potency to him.
That could put another spin on Benoît’s murder, a gruesome one, as Morbier had suggested. But she doubted that the murderer had killed Benoît to drink his blood.
In an article about the 1758 colonial laws governing Haitian sugarcane harvesting, she found an interesting and revealing quote: “The cane was rushed to have its sweet sap crushed from it between rollers. If a black slave happened to get a limb caught in these rollers through excessive haste or exhaustion, it was simply hacked off with a machete and the wound cauterised with a torch rather than production being slowed.”
Aimée read further: “It was legal for any White to take any-thing from a black or mulatto he thought better quality than what he owned himself—be it a piece of furniture, a horse or the coat off his back—and if that black ignored this, his ear was chopped off.”
Significant? But this had taken place under colonial rule long ago. After twenty minutes, she sat back disappointed. Circles of salt were used in vodou for purification, a cleansing rite. Nothing linked salt to execution or death: quite the opposite.
It didn’t add up.
She thumbed through the Lancet, the British medical jour-nal. A real egghead’s delight, full of technical studies.
In the third issue, she located an article on swine fever and the importation to Haiti of a white pig species. In essence, it blamed U.S. imperialism for the replacement of the native species of small black pigs. The Lancet entry listed an article in the UK Guardian from a year earlier as a source.
Pressed for time, she hurried, but it took ten more minutes before she located the Guardian on microfiche. What she saw in the Letters to the Editor section made her sit up. The letter, dated 2 April 1996, had been written by Professeur Azacca Benoît.
Dear Editor,
To give historical context to your article on African swine fever, I bring to your attention the fact that the dis-ease entered the Dominican Republic and soon spread down the Artibonite River and over the border into Haiti. The epidemic swiftly killed one third of Haiti’s pigs. But, by late 1981, it seemed to have run its course. The U.S. was taking no chances, however. It funded a program to slaughter every pig in Haiti.
To the peasants producing most of Haiti’s food, the program was devastating. Their small black Haitian pigs, which largely fended for themselves, were so critical to their economy that the same word was used for “pig” and “bank.” People hid their pigs in holes and caves, but President Duvalier’s tonton macoutes rooted the animals out and shot them. Even quarantined herds were exterminated. This decimated the peasants’ economy.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) argued that the slaughter should be seen less as a problem than an opportunity. By replacing the small black pigs with large white ones from the U.S., Haiti could be-come a pork exporter and a lucky new participant in the modern world agricultural economy.
The new pigs grew fast, but needed as much pampering as the Duvaliers. While the peasants lived in bamboo shacks and ate only the food they grew for themselves, the white pigs needed concrete houses, showers, and imported food and medicine. Water resources were prioritized for pig-breeding, which became the preserve of big business, leaving the peas-ants with nothing. It is no exaggeration to say that the demise of the Kreyòl pig sped the demise of Baby Doc.
President Aristide’s new government began to import black pigs from other islands and distribute them to the peasants. As a result, when Aristide was overthrown, the new military leaders declared that the black pigs were communist pigs, whose owners should be rounded up as subversives. The white pigs, by contrast, were capitalist pigs and a source of national pride. By the time Aristide returned, in 1994, the peasant economy had been strangled, and much of the peasants’ land had been bought up by companies growing coffee or flowers for export to America. The water systems were now prioritized for foreign export agriculture.
Respectfully,
Professeur Azacca Benoît,
Ecole Normale Supérieur, Paris
Benoît’s own words. She wondered if, a year and a half later, this letter was connected to his current research. Huby would know. He’d shown her the pig-tissue slide. She called the lab, got the recording, and hit Huby’s extension. Voicemail again, and he still hadn’t returned her previous call. She left another message.
She checked the time. If she didn’t hurry, she’d be late. Outside, in the bustling square fronting the Pantheon, the pavement cafés were filled with students. The only evidence that Darquin had died there was the street cleaners, with their plastic brooms, watering the cobbles and sweeping his blood into the gutter.
“DIGGING TO CHINA again?” Aimée asked Delair, the Banque Morel security guard at the reception desk. She gestured to a hole in the floor surrounded by orange plastic net-ting, a grill-like fence, and danger signs.
Delair shrugged. “Pipes burst three floors down. Nice mess in the remnants of the Roman cistern. Again.”
It made her spine prickle. She hated the enclosed claustrophobic feel of the database center below, knowing that tons of rock, sandstone, and concrete were suspended above her. And she wondered if siting the bank’s database center underground had been such a good idea. No doubt a web of tunnels, quarries, and old German bunkers honeycombed the earth beneath their feet.
“Like rats, those cataphiles,” said Delair, ex-army by the look of him: short en brosse hair and straining biceps under his blue shirt. He punched the newspaper he held, whose head-line was “Diana autopsy results inquiry,” then pointed to a small article: “Party disrupted in tunnels under the Arènes de Lutèce,” the Roman arena.
“My former unit would make pâté of them. Zut alors, these underground flics treat these types like playground kids, slap-ping their wrists.”
“Most of the cataphiles are students or office workers get-ting their weekend thrills partying,” Aimée said. “Harmless enough.”
Delair shook his head. “Not only dangerous,” he said, frowning, “but full of undesirables, hiding. . . .”
“That’s an urban myth, Delair,” she said, signing in on the log.
“Myth? Before the bank installed the steel fence, they rousted out a nest of illegals camping in the adjoining Roman cistern.” He gestured to a printed EVACUATI
ON/EMERGENCY diagram of the building on the wall highlighting the exits and placement of fire extinguishers. “There. Right next to where you work. Walled up now, of course.”
She’d never realized. “But how do they find these places?”
“They come out of the sewers at night, like the rats they are, take night jobs from people who need to work. Filch and steal, too.”
She’d attended parties in the catacombs; all-night benders put on by third-year med students. Could Mireille have gone underground literally? She’d need a contact, an entrée into that world. Negotiating the kilometers of tunnels, passages, and quarries required knowledge. No easy feat. The cataphiles knew of entrances and passages the authorities had no clue about. They could always burrow their way one tunnel ahead of the authorities.
Right now she had security systems to run here. She didn’t relish seeing the expression on René’s face when she arrived late. Again.
Delair waved her through the metal gate. She went down three flights of stairs, held her badge up to a reader, and the steel doors of Morel’s database center opened.
“René?” she called. But she heard only the low whirr of running computers and the humming ventilation system. She saw a note in René’s slanted script—to check on a glitch in the virus program—taped to the first terminal screen. Surprised, she set her bag down. So unlike René.
Bien sûr, he’d set up the network monitoring system, and at this point she could run the security program in her sleep. Yet she remembered René’s more than usual irritation at this “wild goose chase” over Mireille. Had he thought she’d gone too far? But she knew she hadn’t even touched the surface.
René’s accusations came back to her: getting sidetracked, his fear that she’d neglect the business.
She remembered his large green eyes wide with excitement over that startup: “the coming thing,” he’d called it. She’d brushed his suggestion off with a quick “later” and had seen the slump of his shoulders.
But data security systems waited for no one. She did a few neck rolls and got to work.
Two hours later, systems monitored and virus scans complete, she debated calling René. She felt hesitant to interfere or interrupt some powwow with this startup client. He thrived on exploring new challenges. She’d agreed to expand their work and hire Saj. Why, they’d signed the contract with the con-tractor this week! Leduc Detective had broken even for once.
Yet the thought that he might find working for a startup more appealing stuck in her mind, wouldn’t go away. A nervous dread vibrated through her. René, the cautious and con-servative one, never jumped without thought.
She used the land line and dialed René’s number. No answer.
Wednesday Night
RENÉ STUMBLED ON the cobbles, cursing the dark street once known as rue des Malefies, the street of witches in the Latin Quarter. His hip ached, had for days, and, despite his misgivings, he’d sought a rebouteux, a bone-fixer. A healer with the “gift” who selected her clientele. Similar healers went by many names: rebouteux or panseux or magnetiseurs, and thousands of them practiced in France.
In pain and desperation he’d come here, to this dark hole, this practitioner of a nebulous craft, despite all scientific or ana-lytic knowledge. And he’d sooner die than let Aimée know.
He knew of the laying on of hands and the incantations, the ancient mix of Latin and patois, handed down from one rebouteux to the next. Sorcery, some called it, in his village bordering the château where he’d grown up. He’d witnessed both healings and those beyond healing. Along with the kids from the village, he’d mocked the old ways, for once feeling part of the group . . . but when seven-year-olds knocked on his door for him to come out to play, he’d shrunk back. He’d been eighteen, preparing for university.
But old wives’ tales, as his mother said, were based on something.
At the address for the healer stood a small produce shop with a torn awning. A mistake, he thought, and checked again. No mistake. What healer practiced out of a rundown grocery?
René hesitated, the whole idea now seeming like supersti-tious nonsense. His fibula, the outer bone in his lower leg, had grown faster than his shin. The doctors had advised straight-ening and lengthening his legs, a torturous procedure utilizing the braces he’d suffered in childhood, now looming again. It was what he wanted to avoid.
He’d come this far, left the work for Aimée. He’d ask across the street at Bar Mimile, a crumbling stone-and-plaster affair with windows none too clean. In the window he could just make out a board displaying a bière special written in white chalk.
“Eh, Monsieur?” An olive-skinned man with thick black eyebrows wiped the counter at the level of René’s head.
A narrow room, cigarette smoke spiraling from an ashtray, high stools. In this kind of place, one ordered a drink before pumping for information.
“Un bière,” he said. “Stella, à la pression.”
The man slapped a cardboard coaster on the zinc counter. He reached for the Stella Artois beer pull.
René looked around. No tables. A sixties decor: brown wood veneer, faded turquoise walls, a framed autographed photo of a young Françoise Hardy with her guitar. The still-reclusive singer had to be in her sixties now.
A young man in tight jeans sat in the corner talking on a cell phone. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth.
“And how will I reach the glass?” René asked.
“How you usually do, I imagine.” The man set down the tall glass of golden beer topped by white foam. He came around the counter, flipping the towel over his shoulder, and pulled out a stool. René imagined the difficult climb to mount the rungs.
The man took the beer and coaster and set them on the stool’s red leather seat. “Peanuts?” he asked.
“Non, merci.”
“I’m Mimile,” the man said, an expectant look in his eye.
René reached into his pocket, figuring he wanted payment.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
René blinked. Nothing about Mimile looked familiar: thirties, slight paunch, brown wavy hair long behind the ears, a Mediteranean complexion. To most people, all dwarves, like all Asians, looked alike. He couldn’t count the times people “recognized” him.
“Désolé,” he said, wondering how to phrase his question about the healer.
“Funny,” Mimile said. “Since your girlfriend killed my cousin Déde.”
Surprise banished René’s pain. Fear took its place. “Déde . . . who?”
“Belleville Déde,” he said. “On the water tower. I saw you at the inquest.”
Now he remembered. Wary, he stepped back. “You mean my partner?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Déde kidnapped her and held her at gunpoint at the Belleville reservoir. She acted in self-defense. If you remember, the court exonerated her.”
Mimile’s expression hadn’t changed.
“Guess if you have a problem with that, here’s your money,” René said.
Not the best time to defend himself. Of all the bars in the Latin Quarter, he’d picked this one to walk into. His hip ached; pains were shooting down his leg. But he prepared for a fight by centering the force in his chi. He winced. He’d never get to the first defensive position. Times like this, his black belt counted for nothing. Retreat, he realized, was the best option, and he eyed the door.
“Finish your drink,” Mimile said. “Blood counts for some-thing, eh, but Déde was a bad seed my mother never tired of saying. A two-bit player.”
René’s shoulders relaxed a centimeter. “Sorry, Mimile.”
“Belleville breeds them, eh?”
René didn’t know, but he nodded.
“Not like here. Like now, anyway.” Mimile pulled out a cigarette, lighting it with a flick of his lighter. “Just thirty years ago. . . .” He took a drag, gestured out the window. “People attended church and were afraid to turn the corner because of the gypsies, afraid of the evil eye. Whole gypsy families
lived in one room in the rundown hotels.”
René took a sip. Mimile evidently liked to talk.
“Eh, once I knew everyone on the street; a preserve of poets and students, shopkeepers, workers, bar owners like me, pro-fessors from the Grands Ecoles. Some working girls.” Mimile winked. “Even the old alchemist in his nineties who lived upstairs.
Mimile swiped down the counter with a towel and shrugged.
“That’s until Mitterand moved a few blocks away and made the neighborhood fashionable. And too expensive.”
Shadows lengthened in the street. René downed his beer, wishing it had given him more courage than he felt.
“Not many of us left now,” Mimile said. He shook his head in disgust. “Full of tourists, too.”
“I heard there’s a healer nearby,” René said.
“Aaah, you buy into that?”
René gripped his beer glass. “What have you heard?”
“A strange one. Maman avoided her, some story from the war. Others call her a sorcerer.”
“And you?”
“A bag of hot air. You’re looking for her, right?” He pointed. “Across the street in the produce shop.”
René set ten francs down, but Mimile waved it away. “On me.”
“I’d feel better if you’d take it . . . Déde and all,” René said, unsure if that had come out the right way. But then what did one say?
“Sooner or later Déde had to face the accordion, that’s what my maman said, the big one in the sky.”
“Still, like you said, family. . . .” René stumbled for words.
“How do you think we pay the mortgage on this place, eh? Déde’s insurance money. Zut! I thought you were sniffing around, you know, checking up on us.”