Tropic of Night (45 page)

The paarolawats comes a little closer to me. A faint breeze stirs (maybe from the fan of the fat lady!) and I catch his smell, a horrible reek of old alcohol and unwashed, perhaps even slightly putrid flesh, and, of course, dulfana. This one is a crumpled-looking man, anywhere from forty-five to sixty-five years, wearing wino rags, balding, whose freckled skin’s base color is that of a cardboard carton left out in the sun and rain. He’s looking right at me, out of his dead eyes; he shuffles a step closer, then another. The jitney arrives at the curb, an old Ford Econoline van driven by a skeletal Haitian. The waiting people board it, casting baleful looks at me as they pass, or so it seems.

The jitney pulls away, and I’m left alone with the paarolawats. He slips-slides toward me in that horrible way they have, which I remember even though I have only seen one before. You’re not supposed to let them touch you, I remember that, too. They’re loaded with all kinds of exotic chemicals; their skin is dripping with witch secretions. The horror movies have it right for once. I back away. I am thinking, This would be a good time to wake up, if this is a dream, and if not I am going to have to run for it, if that fucking cab doesn’t get here in one minute, and then a voice behind me says, “Hey, there, Eightball, what’s happening?”

It is the detective, again. He is walking toward the paarolawats, with his hand out. He is going to shake hands with a zombie! I move quickly to stand in his way and I say, “Detective, I just remembered something I forgot to tell you.”

“Yeah? That’s great, ma’am. Do you know old Eightball Swett, here? Mr. Swett is one of our colorful neighborhood characters …”

I grab his sleeve. “No, he’s not. Could we go to your car? I mean right now!” Because the thing has begun to move, a couple of quick shuffles and he’s reaching out his hand. They can move pretty fast over short distances, although, depending on how ripe they are, if they push it any they tend to lose bits and pieces.

The detective picks up my tone and lets me drag him to his white Impala. We both get in, and the paarolawats is right there as I close the door with a slam. He paws at the window and a bit of him sticks to the glass like bird shit. Now I’m practically crying, “Please drive, please drive drive drive drive drive!”

When we are well away, he says, “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”

“I was just nervous. That man made me nervous.”

“Nervous?” he says. “That palsied piss-bum made you nervous, when less than an hour ago I saw you take down a big strong gangbanger practically without breaking stride?” I am silent. He says, “We need to have a talk, Jane.”

“I told you, my name is Dolores Tuoey,” I say, barely convincing myself.

“Jane Doe. I should say, Dr. Doe, really. I read your paper on the Olo. Some of it went past me, but what I could understand was pretty amazing.”

Last shot. “I’m not Jane Doe. People were always getting us confused.”

“Really? Whereabouts was this?”

“Bamako. In Mali. I was a nurse-midwife there and she was doing some anthro work upcountry in the Boucle de Baoulé. We ran into each other from time to time and … people commented. Jane’s dead, I heard.”

“Yeah, and she must be buried under a plain tablet in Calvary Cemetery in Waltham, Mass., with ‘Sister Mary Dolores Tuoey, S.M.’ on it. You know, Jane, the problem with phony ID, especially if it’s based on a real person, is that it’s like a model of the Golden Gate Bridge made out of toothpicks. They look sort of okay, but they won’t bear any real weight.”

He gives me a bright cat smile. “So why’d you fake the suicide?”

“I have to pick up my daughter,” I croak. My mouth feels full of fine sand.

“Yeah, she’s at Providence. Okay, no problem.” He turned south onto Dixie Highway. “Actually there is a small problem: where did you get the daughter? You sure didn’t have one when you sailed away into the sunset. Your dad would have noticed it. I met your dad the other day, as a matter of fact. He doesn’t miss much, Jack Doe.”

I say nothing, feeling miserable, like a kid caught out in a dumb fib. In silence, then, we arrive at Providence. Luz is with her little gang of girls, gossiping. I wave and call out. Luz comes up to the strange car, her face clouding. I get out and hug her, and tell her our car is getting fixed and the nice policeman from this morning is going to drive us home.

Which he does, and makes no move to drive away out of my life, but gets out and follows us up the stairs as if invited. I make Luz her snack, carrot cake and lemonade, popping another two pills privily as I do so, and I offer some refreshment to him. He accepts, and we all snack away like a thermonuclear family. Luz is uncharacteristically quiet; she is used to the dyad, or Polly’s family, or school, and also she picks up the tension. I prod her about her day. She sang. Some of the kids got their costumes, but she did not. She hopes to be a robin or an owl. Or a fish. As we talk, I see that she keeps casting sidelong looks at him, at her little arm and his big hand and wrist on the table, and no wonder, they are almost exactly the same color. She asks if she can go play with Eleanor across the street. I watch her from the landing as she trots across and rings Dawn Slotsky’s bell.

“Nice kid,” he says. “She seems to get on with you pretty good. It’d be a shame to see her end up in some foster home.”

“Why? Are you going to arrest me?”

“I might. It seems to me you’re looking at obstruction of justice, imposture, uttering false instruments, conspiracy to commit murder. Or murders.”

In my worst nightmares, it has never occurred to me that I would be in undeserved danger from the police, that someone might think I had committed a crime that I actually didn’t commit. I sit down, collapse actually, in the chair across from him. Maybe this is also part of Witt’s plan! To stick me with his killings. Yes, that would be a Witt thing to do, to close all doors for me, leaving only one open, one that led to him. And amusing.

The cop says, “What you have to understand is that all the stops are out on this one. We have the closest thing to unlimited resources. We will, for example, find out where that kid came from, and we will find out what you did for every day of your life since you sank that boat. I’m not being a hard-ass here, but that’s just the way things are. If you’re not on our side in this, then you’re on his side, and if that’s the case, we’re going to drop the jailhouse on you. You’ll be under the jail. Do you understand me?” I say nothing. Things are emerging. They think I am some kind of accomplice? I have speed thoughts. Get the Mauser, kill this cop, grab Luz, take his car, escape?no, steal a boat, escape by water, Ifa said, oh, and the chicken, got to have the yellow bird, but what about the others? No, actually, the flaw is that I am not a murderer, or maybe I am, maybe I …

I start to shake, like someone with a bad flu. Perhaps it is the amphetamine, or more magic, all chemicals anyway. He is looking at me peculiarly. He can see inside my head. I wait; he is boring into my brain, and I am so ashamed; it is worse than being naked in Mrs. W.’s office. I can’t stay on my chair. I see myself lying on the floor, from a distance. I am getting smaller and smaller. Now I see Dolores Tuoey in my kitchen. She is wearing her funny little nun scarf on her head and her acacia-wood crucifix, and lugging that big canvas bag she always had with her; she is walking away from me, down a corridor that does not exist in my kitchen, it is a shady covered arcade, like they have in the Petit Marché in Bamako. I want to shout out, Hey, Dolores, where are you going? But there is something in my mouth, an extra-large tongue perhaps, or a fur-covered creature, or a young vulture. So I can’t shout at all and she gets smaller, and stops and turns around and smiles and waves, the way she did when our paths crossed in Bamako. Good-bye, Dolores, see you in heaven!

I am actually on the floor, I find, and he is bathing my face with a cold, damp, dish towel, very tenderly. I sit up, fast, and get to my feet; I am in the bold, self-confident phase of amphetamine now, with the appropriate teeth-grinding jaw lock. Also, I am completely Jane again. Running and hiding are over. I am so glad not to be waking up in my hammock in the moonlight! And am I ever ready to talk!

“Well, Detective Paz,” I say, “you got me.”

“You’re Jane Doe.”

“Yes, Jane Clare Doe, Ph.D., of Sionnet, New York.”

He nods, he is pleased with himself. “Okay, I’ll call an officer to take care of the kid and then we’ll go downtown and you can make a full statement.”

“No, actually, we’ll stay right here, and I’ll tell you what you need to know. I’ve got as much interest in stopping him as you do?more, probably. But the first thing you need to do is forget your usual procedure. If you insist on taking me downtown, I’ll shut my mouth and stand on my right to remain silent except for my phone call, which will be to the firm of lawyers that has been twisting the legal system on behalf of my family since 1811, and I assure you that they will leave your police department a smoking ruin. So I’ll help, but on my terms only. Your choice.”

It is so lovely to be bold Jane Doe again. Perhaps I’ve pushed him too far. He scowls, nods, sits down, takes out his notebook. “Okay, shoot; but if I smell any horse manure, it’s going to be a small room downtown, and bring on your lawyers.” I sit across the table from him. He says, “You said ‘him.’ That’s your husband, Malcolm DeWitt Moore.”

“Yes.”

“And you believe he’s the one committing these murders, the pregnant women, Wallace and Vargas and Powers?”

“It’s certain.”

“Did he kill your sister, too?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You’d have to ask him that.”

“Why do you think?”

“He was practicing a ritual he learned in Africa. It gives him power.” A partial truth, but no matter.

“Did you help him?”

“No. No one helps him. It’s personal. It has to be done alone.”

“What has to be done alone? The killings?”

“Yes, that and the consumption of the extracted body parts. Portions of the posterior atrial wall, the spleen, and the anterior uterine lining of the mother, and from the baby, a piece of the midbrain, including the pituitary, the hypothalamus, and the pineal body.”

He gives me a long look. “So you know all about this stuff, huh?”

“A good deal. Not as much as he does, of course.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I’m just a fairly proficient apprentice sorcerer, while he is a fully accredited, extremely powerful witch.”

“Uh-huh,” he says, and I see he is starting to deflate. He thought he had a big piece of his big case and now he’s starting to think he’s got a mere nut who’ll walk on an insanity plea. I say, “Of course, he’s not as powerful as he will be. That’s why he’s doing the okunikua. “

“The … ?”

“The okunikua. It’s Olo, it means the fourfold sacrifice. It’s a dontzeh thing, or it used to be?sorry, a witch thing. The Olo disapprove of it. But my husband enjoys revivals. He needs one more baby and then it’ll be done. It’d be nice to stop him before he gets it and completes. I’m not sure anything can stop him if he completes, except maybe Olodumare.”

“Who’s that?”

“God. The Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen. The Ancient of Days.”

I smile helpfully. He puts on a false one, and leans back and knits his hands behind his head.

“How do you know he needs one more?” he says. “Maybe this last one, in your yard, was number four. Maybe he did one somewhere else that we don’t know about.”

“No,” I say. “They take the breastbone of the last one. It becomes an amulet. An idubde. “

“I hope you’re not being cute, Jane,” he says. “Crazy I can deal with, but not cute. Why don’t you drop the mumbo-jumbo and just tell me how he does it. What does he have, some kind of spray? He sprays a knockout drug, right?”

“He could. But he can make the stuff in his own body. The faila’olo, and the chint’chotuné, sorry, I mean the invisibility and the? I guess the closest translation would be power over thought via sorcery, those he can do himself. Like sweating or breathing. He’s not a regular kind of person anymore. Olo sorcerers know how to modify their bodies, through programs of ingesting mutagenic compounds, combined with mental and physical disciplines. They’re walking drug factories. They can exude psychoactive drugs, extremely powerful, highly targeted ones, from the melanocytes on their skin surface. It’s all mediated by the pineal body. That’s how he made that paarolawats at the bus stop.”

“What’s a parlo … you mean Swett?”

“A paarolawats is what you would call a zombie. A person who is essentially dead, but the witch can give him certain simple tasks to do and can ride in him if he wants.”

I see pity appear in his eyes. The poor nutcase is what he’s thinking. This infuriates me. I shut my own eyes and take two deep breaths, centering. “Oh, Christ in heaven!” I cry. “Look, you think I’m some sort of pathetic cultist with a bundle of weird ideas, and you’re not listening, really, you’re not writing it down in your little book. Focus on this, Detective Paz: This is real! It’s as real as guns and cars. It’s a fifty-thousand-year-old technology that you don’t understand, and unless you do understand it enough to work with me, you have about as much chance of stopping Witt Moore as a bunch of savages have of stopping a locomotive by stretching a grass rope across the tracks.”

“Cute,” he says, smugly. “What we’re going to find here is that your guy’s got some powder in a jar that he’s immune to himself, and he’s got some way of shaking it out so it affects people in a certain area, and he’s got a gang of fellow fruitcakes who like to cut up pregnant ladies, which explains how he can be in two places at once. Occam’s razor, Jane. You’re a scientist, you know about Occam and the simplest explanation. So we don’t have to worry about zombies or the goddamn pineal gland.”

He pulls out a cell phone. “If you want to tell me about that version, Jane, I’m all ears. Otherwise, off we go.”

I had not thought it would be so exhausting, and I feel a pang of sorrow and regret about me and Marcel in Chenka, what it must have been for him trying to convince me. I say, “You are a moron, Detective Paz.”