Half the Day Is Night (29 page)

They are having seizures, Mayla thought. It was as if she had caught it from him, or as if the ground had suddenly conducted an electric shock. And then the man, and then the woman, straightened up. The man began to pace in harsh staccato movements, but the woman began dancing. Gliding, dancing, beautiful smooth movements, her face an alien mask.

The man went over to the table and appraised the food, and then Mayla lost sight of him, swept by the current of dancers. In a moment she could see him through the people again, and she could see he had a roll and was chewing on it. Nobody else was eating, but nobody seemed to find his actions odd.

Two people standing by the table nodded to him, respectful.

Then Mayla was swept past him again.

She stepped on the heel of the person in front of her, a woman in white satin. She murmured sorry, although the woman did not look around and could not have heard her.

She could see the man again, and he was looking at her. Someone came up to him and he turned his head and smiled, let the woman take his hand. Then he gestured, telling her something, his palms flashing pale.

Think about the dance, not the man. He was all right.

But she couldn't get back the feeling. She looked back at the man and he was wearing sunglasses, the shining black glass turned towards her, and she knew he was looking at her even though she couldn't see his face.
Papa Legba.

Step and glide, step and glide. People possessed by the loa weren't supposed to remember what had happened afterward. They were supposed to have amnesia for the time of possession. She wondered what was happening to the man, did everybody have hidden personalities that only multiple personalities and the possessed got to use?

She stepped on the woman's heel again and embarrassed she found her way out, through the people. From the wall she turned around and caught a glimpse of Tim. He was grimacing and his eyes were closed and he was part of the river. She could see it, even though he was awkward in the dance, he was caught up in whatever the rest of these people felt.

And she wasn't.

“Lady,” a woman touched her arm, speaking loudly to be heard over the drums. “Papa Legba, ask you come.”

She looked over and the sunglasses were watching her.

“Papa Legba say come,” the woman—really a girl—said again.

She followed the girl around the edge of the room.

The girl did a kind of bob in front of the man with the sunglasses. He touched her head and nodded, a paternal gesture. The he held his hand out for Mayla. She took it, he clasped her hand loosely, his was hot, and she felt a tension in all her body at his touch. The drummers were playing some sort of intricate over and under, filling the air around them with sound she could feel buffeting her.

The man in the sunglasses beckoned her to follow him in the room with the pillar and the altar, where everything had started. She wondered what she was going to be talking to. How had he known that she had paid a donation, had he been in the room when she saluted with the water jug? Probably. Of course, she was a blanc and she wasn't wearing white. It was easy to guess she was here for something.

It was not so loud in the room with the altar. “Girl,” he said and stopped. Paul came around the edges of the crowd.

The man—or Legba if she was supposed to believe all this—nodded at Paul and spoke in Creole. Paul held out his hand in ritual salutation and braced himself, standing with his feet a little wide as if for a blow. When the loa took his hand he rocked back on his heels a bit, as if a current of electricity had passed through him.

The power of the loa, she had heard of that. Did the loa pass from the man to Paul? No, the shock didn't mean that, Paul was still Paul.

She expected Paul to be deferential, but while he was respectful, somehow he was less unnatural with the loa than he was with her. He wasn't friendly, the way he was with her, but he was relaxed.

“Papa Legba asks how you passed the night,” he said. Which was odd, that was how you said good morning in Creole,
“Et le nuit?”

“One gets along,” she said, puzzled.

“Papa Legba says you do not have such good night vision, but he sees you have glasses,” Paul said.

“I don't understand,” she said.

“In your bag,” Paul said. “He means the sunglasses.”

“Oh,” she said.

“He says you need to develop your night vision. You need to see in the dark.”

Fortune-telling talk, vague horoscope kind of things that could relate to anyone. But she couldn't help it, she could feel tears welling up in her eyes. Sometimes, when people told her nightmares, her eyes would water, she didn't know why. Ghost stories made her want to cry. She had that now, too much feeling, she didn't want to see in the dark.

“Tell him, sunglasses don't help you see in the dark,” she said.

Legba grinned yellow uneven teeth before it was translated.

“He says it will make you practice,” Paul said. “If you can see with the sunglasses, then it will be no problem to see without them.”

“Girl,” said Legba, “this isn't your home.”

“You mean Marincite?” she asked. What did he mean, that she shouldn't think about trying to get a job with Marincite Corp?

“You are not a child of Guinee, you don't belong on the sea. You must find another home.” He had no trouble with English. “It is a good ceremony,” he said, and then something to Paul in Creole. She wished she had studied Creole.

Legba paid no more attention to her, it was as if she had vanished. He walked away, taking another piece of bread off the table and then passing unerringly through the crowd of dancers until he found Paul's sister, the
houngoun.
He talked to her for a moment. Then he shook himself, kind of shook his shoulders, and then was shaken as if by some terrible spasm, and fell, limp. People grabbed him, held him like a puppet by the arms, and he was all elbows and joints. They pulled him to a chair, and sat him down and took off the sunglasses. Layte folded them into a pocket of her dress.

The man raised his head, his face slack as if exhausted, and looked around, blinking. He raised his hand to his chest and rubbed it slowly, not as if it ached, but as if to reassure himself.

“What is a child of Guinee?” Mayla asked Paul.

“We are all children of Guinee, anybody who listens to the loa,” he said.

“Why did Legba say I'm not a child of Guinee?”

“Maybe because you have not been initiated?” Paul said. But he didn't sound as if he believed it.

“He told me to go home. Maybe I should leave.”

She half expected Paul to shake his head, but he just dropped his eyes, his face blank. “I will take you home,” he said.

Something changed in the dancing, something in the rhythm. Not the drums, but something. She thought it was a possession, and she craned to see, but all she could see was that people had stopped. People didn't stop for possessions.

It was a possession, a middle-aged woman standing in the middle of the room. She stood with her shoulders back. Mayla didn't know any female loa except Erzulie, loa of love. Was this woman Erzulie? It was hard to see around people.

Mayla could see Layte come out on the floor and talk with the woman. The woman's voice was deeper than Mayla expected, almost male sounding, although maybe that was the air mixture in Marincite. The woman shifted and there were people in the way again, and then the woman had sunglasses on. Mayla was pretty sure that Erzulie didn't wear sunglasses. Legba? The woman was different from the man, when he'd been Legba, but maybe that was just the personality of the person coming through. It wasn't supposed to.

Paul sucked on his lower lip.

“Who is it?” Mayla asked.

“I don't know,” Paul said.

Whoever it was was demanding something.

“I think it's Carrefour,” Paul said.

Carrefour? The sorcerer? “Why is he here?”

Paul shrugged.

Not for her, she hoped.

“I'll take you home,” Paul said. “Wait, and I'll get your friend.”

“What will happen?” Mayla asked.

“My sister will take care of him,” Paul said. “Don't worry. He is just powerful right now.”

*   *   *

By rights, Mayla thought, a company with a name like Robit ought to have been in robotics, but of course it wasn't. It did some sort of solar cells.

The deal was this, MaTE needed to buy itself from its parent company, Marincite Corp. To raise the money, it was going to buy another company and then borrow against that company. The company they were going to buy was called Robit. It was something of a financial shell game, but it was all legal.

She was working with Owen Cleary of MaTE. He had been Danny Tumipamba's assistant. She told him her banker joke. God was thinking of expanding heaven so he was checking out real estate. He found a great patch of land, sunny, elysian, wonderful, and was surprised to run into the devil who was thinking of purchasing the same piece of land.

God said to the devil, “You can't be serious, there's nothing devilish about this place, if you brought people here they wouldn't be suffering the torments of the damned.”

The devil shrugged. “It would take a lot of work, I don't know if it's worth the time and the financing. I'll have to think about it.”

God said, “Aren't you worried about it being gone before you decide?”

The devil looked at God and laughed. “Like you've got any bankers?”

Owen laughed politely.

To buy Robit, they needed to get more stock on the market. So they bought what stock was available, and that made the price go up.

She waited for the big investors—the pension plans and the mutual funds—to read the upswing and start to release shares to the market. MaTE had to buy enough of Robit to make the price go up about five points. A lot of the stock was in trust portfolios—pension plans, money markets. If the stock went up, the software that controlled the buying and selling for the trust would release a little into the market.

So the big investor funds would make enough available to allow MaTE to keep buying and to keep the price artificially inflating. Then they would profit take, selling a little more and a little more. Robit was regarded as an undervalued stock, a good growth stock, but it didn't pay much dividend. She figured when it reached twenty-one there'd be a number of large sell orders. Then the price would dip as MaTE held off buying. At nineteen MaTE would buy again.

They were playing against the big computer-monitored investment programs, carefully manipulating the stock to put a lot of it on the market. If MaTE got 35% of the Robit stock today it would be enough of the corporation that MaTE would control the board. Then they'd use that equity to pay Marincite Corp. for MaTE.

The trick was to spend enough money to pry open Robit but not to spend so much money that Robit was too expensive.

At one-thirty in the afternoon while she was eating a bagel Owen Cleary of MaTE said, “It's at twenty-one and an eighth.”

“It should start to fall,” she said. Although he knew that.

At two o'clock the stock was holding at twenty-one even. There wasn't a lot of activity, but a few people bought takeover stock, hoping it would continue to go up. Surely by two-thirty it would start to go down.

At about a quarter to three it started to climb. “Someone else is buying,” she said. She felt sick. Who would be buying?

A white knight maybe? Somebody out to protect Robit? By now the street would know that MaTE was making a move, Robit might have appealed to someone to buy them, a friendly buyer.

She called Singapore and established a link with New York to increase Owen's credit. Owen started buying at twenty-two. That meant that MaTE would start its life as a new company heavily indebted, but that was a risk they had already decided to take.

The stock went to twenty-five. This was not good, this was a worst-case scenario. They couldn't afford to go on. The New York Stock Exchange was querying, the loan was now larger than the assets of the bank, did First Hawaiian have a guarantee?

Polly Navarro was her sugar daddy, he would use Marincite Corp. money to guarantee the loan. “Owen, call Polly,” she said. “New York is going to shut down our funds.”

It had all been agreed on, Polly would step in if things went wrong.

After a moment Owen said, perplexed, “I can't get Polly.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I've got his tickler number,” Owen said, “but there's no answer. He's not answering.”

“Call his secretary,” she snapped.

The secretary said Mr. Navarro was not available and he didn't know where he was.

“Owen,” she said, “What the fuck is going on?”

“Maybe he's in the john,” Owen said.

She had an image of Polly in the john, pants around his knees. Once it was in her head it was stuck there, hard to think around.

She queried someone in New York, a broker she had worked with, could he find out who was buying Robit?

Yeah, he could find out, give him a moment.

While she was waiting, New York suspended credit to First Hawaiian pending a guarantee. Singapore followed suit.

The loan was at $172,000,000 more than the worth of the bank. First Hawaiian was technically bankrupt. At this moment, on paper, her company was worthless.

Her broker came back. “Marincite Corp. is buying Robit,” he said.

“Who else?” she said, exasperated.

“Just you,” he said.

That made no sense. If no one else was buying, the price shouldn't be going up. First Hawaiian was burning down.

“I'm going to look for Polly,” Owen said.

In the john? she wondered.

Robit was bleeding, she could see the shares spilling into the market and someone was buying them. The stock was at twenty-six. And First Hawaiian couldn't give Owen any money to buy stock because First Hawaiian's creditors had stopped giving money.