Age of Voodoo Read online

  “Who wouldn’t be?” said Albertine. “If Lieutenant Buckler is right and we’re going to be facing zuvembies, or something like zuvembies, anxiety is the only sensible response.” Her tone shifted from sympathetic to inquisitive. “Was there somebody in this dream, by any chance? Somebody you’ve not seen before?”

  “Yes,” Lex said, a little too quickly. He backpedalled, not sure he wanted to give away too much about himself, about the workings of his subconscious mind. He had met this woman less than twenty-four hours ago. They had had sex, but he still hardly knew her. “Sort of. You know how, in dreams, someone can seem familiar even though they’re a complete stranger? There was a bloke like that in this one.”

  “Describe him.”

  Lex supplied a brief verbal sketch of the top-hatted man.

  “Baron Samedi,” said Albertine. She didn’t seem all that surprised.

  “Oh yes. The one you said Papa Doc Duvalier cribbed his look from. I remember. That’ll be why I recognised him. You see pictures of him all over the place, don’t you?”

  “The Baron? Nine out of ten tattoo parlours here have him in the window as one of their design samples. He’s a popular choice of body art, particularly among young men. Decals on motorbikes, airbrushed pictures on surfboards, murals on the side of houses—you can find images of him just about everywhere you look. He’s the loa even people who know nothing about vodou know about. Everyone thinks he’s hot stuff, and that makes the Baron happy. He thinks he’s pretty hot stuff too.”

  “And I suppose I was dreaming about him because you mentioned him yesterday.” To Lex, this was comforting. Dreams were the mind’s clearing-house, a way of sifting through, sorting and storing the jumbled data of the day. Albertine had talked about Papa Doc and Baron Samedi, and Lex’s hindbrain had conflated the two and then invited the Haitian dictator to put in an appearance among the parade of human monsters whose shades haunted Lex while he slept. Duvalier may not have been one of Lex’s Code Crimsons but he certainly fitted right in with the rest. The Baron Samedi get-up conferred a kind of star status on him, as though he were a veteran actor wheeled out of retirement to spruce up the cast of a long-running show.

  “Maybe,” said Albertine. “Or it could be that the Baron wished to take a look at you.”

  Lex could not help but feel a chill at her words. “Don’t be daft.”

  “It would be just like him to drop by and introduce himself. If there’s trouble ahead, and especially if it involves a bokor, then the Baron is likely to have a stake in the proceedings. Black magic and the Baron are never far apart. He wanted to get the measure of you, that’s what I think. See what he’s up against. Did he say anything?”

  “No, just laughed. A lot.”

  “Was there anyone else with him?”

  How to account for the presence of so many dead men in his dream? It was impossible without also cracking open a door onto his former life, one he had kept firmly shut since his move to Manzanilla, and inviting another person to peek through. He didn’t know Albertine well enough for that—not by a long shot. “No. Nobody else. Only him.”

  “I just wondered if perhaps Legba showed his face too.”

  “Legba?”

  “Loa of the crossroads. He’s always there at the outset, when there are decisions to be taken, choices to be made, a journey to be embarked on. Looks like a beggar, usually has a dog or two with him, smokes a corncob pipe, walks with a limp...”

  “You could be describing Gable,” said Lex with an ironic laugh.

  “Gable?”

  “This old tramp, lives down by the intersection between the hill road and the coastal highway. You must have seen him, surely. I pass him almost every evening on my way to and from the rum shack.”

  “I don’t venture out to this corner of the island much. I stick to Port Sebastian and the windward side. The civilised areas.”

  “Well, he’s a fixture round these parts. I bung him the odd dollar now and then. He’s harmless. Most of the time.”

  “But not all of the time?”

  It was a leading question. Perhaps Lex wanted to be led.

  “Well, not last night, that’s for sure,” he said. “He collared me as I was walking home. Had a bit of a funny turn. Grabbed hold of me and started banging on about beginnings, and me having a job to do, and not turning away help. I just thought he’d been hitting the hooch a little too hard.”

  Albertine sat up. “What was his name again?”

  “Gable.”

  “G-A-B-L-E?”

  “I presume that’s how it’s spelled.”

  “Saints preserve us.” She swivelled round, sprang out of bed, gathered up the bathrobe.

  “What’s up? Why the sudden flurry of activity? Was it something I said?”

  “We have to go out. You and me. We don’t have much time, not if we’re going to fit it in before picking up with Lieutenant Buckler and friends.”

  “Fit what in? You’re not making any sense.”

  “Lex.” She fastened the cord of the bathrobe, depriving him of a far from unpleasant view. “You have met Papa Legba, face to face. And if we’re not too late, we should be able to get his personal blessing for what we’re about to do at Anger Reef.”

  SEVENTEEN

  NACHONS

  GET DRESSED. I’LL see you outside in ten minutes.

  Those were Albertine’s last words to him before she left the bedroom in a hurry. Ten minutes later, Lex was stationed beside the Subaru, waiting. Rikki poked his head out from the bushes and ambled over, looking more than a little bemused. His attitude seemed to be: What are you doing up and about at this ungodly hour? This is when I prowl, not you.

  “Believe me,” Lex said to the mongoose, “if I had the first clue what any of this was about, I’d tell you.”

  “Talking to animals, Lex?” Albertine had just emerged from the house.

  Rikki took one look at the stranger, turned tail and fled.

  “That doesn’t seem like you at all,” she continued. “Far too sentimental.”

  “The mongoose doesn’t answer back,” Lex said. “He’s the perfect conversationalist.”

  He held the passenger door open for her, then climbed in the driver’s side. Within moments the 4x4 was bouncing down the driveway, headlights peering into the mist-tendrilled dark.

  “You probably think this is crazy,” Albertine said, “haring off in the middle of the night to go see a tramp.”

  “Crazy isn’t the first adjective that springs to mind. Not quite.”

  “It’s typical Legba, though. He’s such a cheeky one. Loves games and mischief, hide-and-seek and peekaboo. If there’s a chance he can pull a trick on you, such as revealing himself to you without you realising, then he’ll take it. He can’t resist a bit of duplicity.”

  “You’re saying Legba is... Gable? Gable is a voodoo loa in disguise?”

  “No. I’m saying Legba elected to ride this Gable person in order to speak to you. Gable is the ideal candidate for being Legba’s chwal. He’s a beggar, like Legba. He has dogs, like Legba. He lives at a crossroads, and Legba is all about the crossroads. Did you say he’s lame?”

  “There’s something wrong with his feet. He gets around using a metal crutch.”

  “Yes. Legba has difficulty walking because he has one foot in heaven and the other on earth. He’s the intersection, you see, the gateway between the two realms. For that reason he’s the first loa we salute in any ceremony. He opens the channels of communication in both directions.”

  “Like a sort of spirit walkie-talkie.”

  “You mock, but yes. And sometimes the reception is poor, and that’s no accident. Legba enjoys baffling as much as he enjoys enabling. If he sends you a message, it’s seldom direct and unambiguous. It can be interpreted several different ways, just as you can head several different ways at a crossroads. He has a penchant for riddles, anagrams, paradoxes...”

  “Gable is an anagram of Legba.”

  “Exa
ctly, and that’ll be one more reason why Legba chose him as his mouthpiece,” Albertine said. “So many similarities between the two of them. The name is merely the clincher, the icing on the cake.”

  “What if we get there, wake Gable up, and Legba chooses not to pick up the phone and call?”

  “Then we’ll have wasted our time. But we’ll have lost nothing by trying.”

  “Nothing except a couple of hours’ extra sleep,” Lex muttered.

  “Don’t whinge. It doesn’t suit you,” said Albertine. “Besides, from what I can gather, you’re used to this sort of thing. Functioning on little sleep. Being awake at strange hours of the night. Your job, military life, demanded it.”

  “That was then, when I was younger. I have a more relaxed work ethic these days.”

  “You mean doing as little of it as you can get away with.”

  “None at all, if possible.”

  “You’re turning into an islander man. Shame on you.”

  “Can’t be helped. I blame the humidity.” Lex guided the Subaru down the snaking turns of the hill road, past smallholdings each consisting of a concrete house, usually unfinished, and an acre or two of crops—maize, cassava, sometimes pineapples—plus a goat for milk. Farming that was one notch above subsistence level. “So the loa, they’re like gods, are they?”

  “You’re after a lecture on vodou?”

  “Now seems as good a time as any. It’ll help pass the journey, and since I appear to be bumping into loa on a regular basis, I suppose I should find out as much about them as I can. Forewarned is forearmed.”

  “Well, you asked for it,” said Albertine. “Vodou is what’s called a syncretic religion. That’s to say, a fusion of religious traditions, one hiding under the other. You have the original belief system that was brought over to the West Indies from Africa with the slave trade. Overlaid on that is Roman Catholicism, which was imposed on the slaves by their masters, who Christianised them in the hope of ‘civilising’ them and wiping out their ‘savage’ tendencies. The two iconographies mixed and matched, swapped addresses, Facebook-friended each other, and vodou is the result. I wrote my degree thesis on this subject as part of my major in religious studies.”

  “Scholarship girl?”

  “God, yes. I could never have afforded Cornell otherwise. Luckily for me, there are federal grants for students in the so-called developing world.”

  “America reaching out and doing its bit to foster US global hegemony.”

  “Cynic.”

  Lex took his hands off the wheel in a brief shrug.

  “It was a serious culture shock,” Albertine said, “going from Manzanilla to an Ivy League college. The first winter in upstate New York nearly killed me. You have no idea how strange it seemed to experience rain that was freezing cold—let alone snow. But I’m digressing.”

  “You are.”

  “Vodou originated in a number of regions of Africa, principally the Congo, Dahomey, which is now Benin, and Yorubaland, which is now part of Nigeria. It also has roots in the traditions of the indigenous tribes of the West Indies, the Arawak and Taino. It’s a stew of different influences, but to me that’s a plus, not a minus.”

  “Good sturdy mongrel stock. No inbreeding.”

  “Yes. That’s it. Slaves, of course, were forbidden from practising their faith openly. They were regarded as infidels and would be punished severely for any overt expression of non-Christian belief. So they devised a cunning way of maintaining their ancestral customs without being seen to do so. They adopted the Catholic saints as stand-ins for the spirits and gods of their own religions, worshipping them by name but secretly worshipping the equivalent loa all the while. So St Patrick, for instance, was used as a substitute for Damballah, since both of them carry staffs and are linked to snakes. The Blessed Virgin Mary was used for Erzulie Freda, crippled St Lazarus for Legba, St George for Ogun... The list goes on. Their masters never twigged. The slaves also chose to acknowledge the supremacy of a single deity above all others, whom they named Bondye.”

  Lex recalled the footage from Anger Reef, the cry of “Bondye! Bondye! Hear me, Bondye. I am coming for you.” Who had that been, shouting? Logic dictated that it was François Deslorges, a.k.a. Papa Couleuvre. And what did the words signify? He couldn’t tell, but he was convinced they meant nothing good.

  “The loa act as Bondye’s intercessors,” Albertine continued. “They represent Him to us and vice versa. They’re spirits, saints, even angels, all rolled into one. Bondye is aloof and unknowable, while the loa are earthy, capricious, contrary, argumentative, benevolent, malevolent—just like us, in other words. They like to be honoured and flattered, sacrificed to, and if you treat them kindly they’ll reciprocate, but if you annoy them or insult them, well, they’ll let you know about it in no uncertain terms. There are three nachons of loa—three categories, three families. First you have the Rada nachon. They were brought over by the Fon and Ewe peoples of Dahomey. The Rada are wise, mostly, and tend to think things through before acting, although that isn’t to say you can always trust them. All three of my husbands are Rada. My peristyle is entirely dedicated to them. They’re ‘cool’ loa.”

  “They hang out behind the bike sheds smoking.”

  Albertine gave his remark all the respect she felt it deserved, which was none. “It’s not a value judgement. ‘Cool’ means slow-working but reliable, easy to deal with. Then you have the Petro loa, a more forceful nachon, born in the swelter of the Congo. They’re a lot more elemental and aggressive than the Rada. Finally you have the Guédé nachon. They’re lords and ladies of the underworld, kings and queens of death, but they’re not as gloomy and morbid as that makes them sound. They’re incredibly lively, vibrant, not to mention violent. Death inevitably entails rebirth, a new start, the chance to begin again, one door closing, another one opening. And proximity to death sharpens the appetite for life, doesn’t it? So the Guédé loa love to party, and intoxicate themselves, and even indulge in orgies. They’re ‘hot’ loa in every respect, fiery and sensual.”

  “Okay,” said Lex. “So they’re the ones to get to organise your stag or hen do.”

  “And also the wake at your funeral,” said Albertine. “So there it is, a very basic outline of the nachons. The system is somewhat more complicated than I’m making out. The divisions aren’t necessarily so clear-cut.”

  “That’s all right. I’m fine with the simplified version.”

  “I thought you would be. Would you like me to list which loa belong to which nachon?”

  “Not right now.”

  “I understand. Informational overload. Lex Dove’s memory cache has reached capacity.”

  “No.” Lex pointed ahead. “It’s because we’re nearly there.”

  The crossroads was in sight.

  Albertine’s grip on the shoulder bag in her lap tightened. She struck Lex as excited, but also apprehensive.

  He felt apprehension too, and tried to fathom the reason for it. They were just going to have a chat with a homeless hobo, weren’t they?

  No, not necessarily.

  It could be a great deal more than that.

  EIGHTEEN

  LEGBA BY CANDLELIGHT

  GABLE WAS NOT to be seen at the crossroads. The patch of roadside grass where he and his dogs liked to sit lay empty, an oval of flattened stems shining in the moonlight.

  “He has a camp.” Lex indicated the thickets of acacia and cabbage palmetto beyond. “Somewhere in there.”

  “You can see where he’s trampled a path going to and from,” said Albertine. “Let’s follow it.”

  “Me first.”

  “My hero.”

  Lex carefully pushed through the fans of palmetto leaf, holding them aside so that they didn’t slap back on Albertine. Twenty metres in they came to a clearing. There was a crude makeshift tent fashioned out of wooden stakes and a tarpaulin, and a small cooking fire which had long since gone out. The ground was littered with empty bottles, tin cans and packe
ts of tobacco, chocolate wrappers, chipped crockery, pages from ancient editions of the Manzanilla Times, assorted grubby items of clothing, some damp-swollen paperbacks, and a few household electrical items, such as a broken transistor radio and a pocket calculator which Gable must have scavenged from a tip or somebody’s dustbin. Of Gable himself, or his cane dogs, there was no sign.

  “He can’t have left,” Lex murmured, mostly to himself. “He never leaves. He’s always hanging around here. This is his home.”

  “He wouldn’t have abandoned all his belongings, either,” Albertine said. “No, he’s nearby.”

  “Probably we scared him off, coming through the undergrowth like that. Gable,” he called out softly. “It’s Lex. The Englishman. I know it’s stupid o’clock in the morning, but there’s nothing to be alarmed about. I just want to talk. I’ve brought a friend. Very nice lady. You’ll like her.”

  Past the camp lay nothing but dark forest. The trees—pine, seagrape, copperwood—whispered and hissed. Unseen creatures croaked and shrilled. Lex used his peripheral vision to scan the shadows, hoping to discern the silhouette of the tramp peeking nervously round a trunk, his canine companions at his heels. Nothing. Nothing but branches and leaves fluttering and swaying in the breeze.

  Gable was out there, though. Lex sensed it. Instinct told him the tramp had not gone far. With those lame feet, how could he have?

  “Gable, honestly, we mean you no harm.”

  “It’s Legba,” Albertine said to Lex. “He’s playing hard to get. Sometimes he’s like this, pretending to be coy. You have to make an effort with him, so that he feels appreciated.”