Age of Voodoo (20 page)

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

G
ABLE 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 packets 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.”

“How do we do that?”

“First, a
vévé
.”

“A what?”

Instead of replying, Albertine opened her bag and took out a jam jar filled with some kind of pale powder. Unscrewing the lid, she knelt and began tapping the powder out onto the ground in a pattern. First she sketched out a pair of bisecting lines of identical length to form a cross. This she ornamented with smaller crosses in all four corners where the lines met, followed by notches at intervals along the lines themselves, like increments on a ruler. Finally she added a design to the tip of each arm of the cross. At the north tip she put a circle divided into quadrants, and at the east an asterisk and beside this a fish shape and what appeared to be a shepherd’s crook. At the south tip she drew what looked like a feather, or perhaps a fisherman’s lure, and at the west another asterisk and something resembling a curly letter E.

“A
vévé
is a cosmogram,” she told Lex. “Every loa has one—a sacred glyph embodying his or her essential nature. It’s important to keep it as symmetrical and unbroken as possible. Drawing a
vévé
looks easy, but believe me, it takes practice to get it just right.”

“What’s the powder? Ground-up human bone?”

She shot him a look. “Cornmeal, as a matter of fact. Now the doorway to Legba is open. But a libation is needed.”

She produced a miniature of rum and sprinkled some drops onto the
vévé
.

“And some illumination.”

She set a small, stubby black candle down in the centre of the
vévé
, screwing the base into the dirt. A match flared. A flame guttered and grew at the candle’s wick. The smoke coiling up from it was scented—floral and faintly earthy.

As the candle flame strengthened, shedding its glow over the campsite and Gable’s meagre scatter of possessions, the surrounding forest seemed to quieten. The calls and songs of animals became muted, dwindling to a quick chirrup here, a piping squeak there. A stillness descended, and Lex, for no appreciable reason, felt the hairs on the nape of his neck stand on end. The air seemed charged, as though a distant storm was brewing, its power building in the atmosphere. He itched to have a gun in his hand. The SIG Sauer was back in the Subaru’s glove compartment. He wished he’d brought it with him. He would feel safer then, more in control.

“And finally some rhythm,” said Albertine.

Her shoulder bag, a seemingly inexhaustible fund of voodoo paraphernalia, yielded a rattle. It was made out of a gourd and adorned with multicoloured glass beads. The vertebrae of some creature—a snake was Lex’s guess—dangled from it, strung on leather thongs.

“My
asson
,” she said, and Lex was tempted to make an amusing pun on the word but resisted. It didn’t seem appropriate. Or wise.

Albertine began to shake the rattle, initially beating out a simple four-four time but adding new quavers and semiquavers every few bars, increasing the complexity. Turning to face each of the cardinal points of the compass one after another, starting with west, she said, “
D’abord
.
À table
. Adonai. Olandé.”

Next came some rapid chanting in French Creole, the words tumbling out too thick and fast for Lex to catch more than one in ten. The rhythm from the asson gathered pace. Seeds inside the rattle chittered drily while the snake vertebrae whirled on their thongs and clicked insistently against the gourd’s thick mottled skin.

Albertine stirred her body into a gentle, swaying dance. She led with her hips, her feet moving to set positions, the rest of her following. The chant continued unabated, and the asson flickered in her hand, describing neat, wavy patterns in the air as it clattered and thrummed.

“Money.”

Lex was so mesmerised by her actions, so transfixed by the spectacle of this woman conducting her one-person ceremony in the steam of a tropical night, that he didn’t realise she was addressing him.

“Money.” She barked out the demand again in a gap between the fluid sentences of her chant. “Put some money down on the
vévé
. An offering. A gift for Legba, to invite him to join us.”

“Okay. Yes. Right.”

Lex delved into his pocket and scattered some loose change onto the
vévé
.

“More,” said Albertine. “That’s nothing.”

He extracted one of the M$100 bills in his wallet and added that to the coins.

“Good. Use this, Legba,” she said in English, “to buy some of the sweet things that you love. Molasses, cane syrup, candied peanuts. Whatever will make your tongue drool and your belly happy.”

Then she resumed her Creole chant once more, and her dance intensified, growing wilder and more abandoned. Her brow was knitted in concentration. Perspiration stippled her face. She seemed utterly lost in herself, the ritual evidently as hypnotic to perform as it was to watch. She was now another Albertine altogether, not the cool, self-possessed power dresser who fixed computers and wrote code for the government, rather an elemental being, the maenad who had entered Lex’s bedroom just a few hours ago and seized him, gripped him,
devoured
him, slaking her lust with his. She vibrated with the frenzy of the dance, quivering like a twanged guitar string.

And then a voice sounded from the darkness of the forest.

“I hear your call, chile. I hear it an’ I heed.”

And out into the candlelight hobbled Gable, his two dogs beside him.

O
NLY IT WASN’T
Gable. Looked like him, limped like him, but it was not simply Gable. In his gaze was that unaccustomed clarity which Lex had seen the night before last, that deep mysterious intelligence, as though someone else’s eyes had replaced Gable’s, someone else was staring from his head, someone sharper, someone
other
.

The cane dogs, likewise, were more alert than normal. Still flea-bitten mutts, but with none of the languid happy-go-lucky look of a tramp’s dogs, content with their humble lot. These were fierce animals, ear-pricked and watchful, as though the Alsatian or the Rhodesian ridgeback buried in their hodgepodge heritage had come to the fore, a single vital strand of canine DNA asserting itself over the rest. They weren’t just with Gable—they flanked him, guarding him. Outriders in a pack.

“You’ve summoned your Papa Legba,” said Gable to Albertine. “You’ve hauled me out of heaven, an’ me accept your gifts, an’ likewise your submission.”

In response, Albertine sank to her knees, head bowed. Lex didn’t know whether to do the same. A glance and a gesture from Albertine, a downward waft of the hand, put paid to his dithering. He joined her, circumspectly, in genuflection.

“We come as supplicants, Legba,” Albertine said. “A journey lies ahead for us, one that may contain many dangers, and we crave your blessing and your counsel.”

“Oh, me know ’bout your journey, baby girl,” said Gable. “An’ let me tell you, it’s a hard road you goin’ to be travellin’. Stony an’ full of turns. Me wish you luck with it.”

“Luck?” said Lex, unable to suppress a snort. “Is that all?”

Gable rounded on him, eyes ablaze. “You were maybe hopin’ for somet’ing more? Lex Dove, me don’ know what you think me is—me don’ know if you yourself know—but one thing me do know is that me don’ have the power to make life easy for you, no, sir. Me can’t be wavin’ no magic wand and makin’ everyt’ing go zackly how you’d like. Loa don’ work that way.”

“He meant no disrespect, Legba,” Albertine said. “He’s a newcomer to the
dogwe
. He hasn’t yet learned the right attitude.”

“Too true, he ain’t,” said Gable. “An’ me make allowances for that. That’s why me still talkin’ to you. Any
vodou
serviteur
spoke to me like he just did, me would have upped and gone and probably wouldn’t return for a month or more. My back would be well an’ truly turned.”

“Didn’t mean to offend,” Lex mumbled, more for Albertine’s sake than Gable’s.

“Yeah, an’ you keep it that way,” said Gable sternly. “Because, mister, you’re already treadin’ a fine line, and you don’ want any more bad trouble comin’ your way than you already got. Right now, it’s friends you’re in need of, not more foes, an’ certainly not more woes. Foes and woes you got aplenty. Me see the dead that are all around you. Oh, yes, me see ’em all right. You been the Baron’s right-hand man most of your adult life, whether you realise it or not. You been busy pilin’ up the bodies, fillin’ the grave holes.”

Gable bent over Lex, staring hard into his eyes. Lex stared back, refusing to flinch or even blink. He would not let on how unnerving Gable’s words were. They seemed to reach inside him like claws and scrape at his innermost self, his tenderest places, his most zealously guarded depths of conscience. He would not let that show.

“The dead won’t leave you alone, Lex Dove. Change your home, change your name, change your face, don’ matter, they always there with you.”

A grubby index finger poked Lex in the chest.

“In here,” Gable hissed. “Inside.”

Lex fought the urge to swat the hand aside, maybe snap Gable’s wrist in the process. That would teach him not to prod, not to provoke.

“The dead live,” Gable went on. “The dead never die. They bound to you. You create ’em, you responsible for ’em, so they follow you forever after, like fledglings after the mama bird. You can fix that, but it’s hard to do, so hard. You want to be free of the undying dead, you first got to face ’em. Confront ’em. Beat ’em down. You can destroy the dead, but you need to be careful not to destroy yourself while you’re at it. That’s my advice to you, Lex. That, an’ this.”