Tropic of Darkness (6 page)

CHAPTER

NINE

By noon, Jack was up and about, blinking rather dazedly. He was a little hung over, not too badly, but there was more than that. He remembered the dream, and Pierre laughing at him. And felt neither anger nor resentment. Merely a strange emptiness that left him feeling thoughtful.

The Frenchman's words last night had caused it. And Mantegna's passion—where had that name even
come
from?—for the woman in that incredibly vivid dream. It had all seemed so
real
, like he had actually visited the past in another man's body. In the waking world, he had never wanted any woman quite that badly. And could what Pierre had said have been correct . . . might he have begun to yearn for someone special?

Realistically, of course there was little chance of that, living the kind of life he did. So Jack decided to just get on with it, moving carefully about the room and getting ready to meet the band that Pierre had put him in touch with.

He found them waiting in the downstairs bar, sprawled nonchalantly around a low glass table, showing no impatience, no apparent sense of time at all. He'd lived in these parts long enough to be entirely used to that.

The eldest and their leader was at least four years his junior, but Jack got along with them well enough. For their part, they seemed politely fascinated by him. They had quite simply never played with a Yanqui before.

“We cannot pay, you understand,” the leader explained apologetically. “You have no work permit and it is not allowed. We'll cut you in, however, on more than your fair share of the tips. Shall we say, thirty percent?”

Jack agreed that that would be just fine. He wasn't here for money. The experience was the thing.

“You know where Club Felix is? Just across the square from here. First set is tomorrow evening, ten o'clock.”

“How about rehearsals?” Jack asked.

The man grinned and shrugged simultaneously, a typically Latin gesture.

“We never rehearse, my friend. We go with the flow.”

So there was that. A good first meeting though, everything considered. He was a little relieved, nonetheless, when they lined up to shake hands with him and left. He'd managed to hide it but, deep down, he still felt pretty shaky.

Pierre's sly, mocking words kept on repeating themselves in his head.
“Is that it, Jack? Is that what you're looking for, these days? A lady who understands your deepest self, your inner being?”

He'd never really stopped to think about his life in terms like those before. Now he began to wonder. He was already in his thirties. Where to go, from this point on?

It somehow all came back around to that strange dream he'd had. Except it hadn't even been a particularly scary one. So why—he wondered once again—had he woken up with such a yell?

He turned it over glumly for a while, and finally came to the conclusion that it had to be the local booze.

A shadow moved across Jack's table, bringing his head up. A slim young black man, casually but neatly dressed, was standing with his hands propped on the back of the chair opposite, smiling down at him. Jack saw that he was about to get hustled again—
inside
the hotel this time, for chrissakes.

Then he noticed the book clutched in the fellow's hand.
Henry V
. Shakespeare. It looked so out of place that his interest was immediately roused.

“I don't want to bother you, sir,” the boy asked, “but are you an American, by any chance?”

Jack nodded and allowed him to go on.

“My name is Luis. I'm a student at the university. English is my major, and I read it well enough. But I like to practice my speech.”

“I'd hardly say you needed to.”

Luis shrugged.

“I was wondering, have you seen Old Havana yet? The cathedral? The museums?”

Jack figured out, at last, where this was heading.

“Um—no, thanks. I don't need a guided tour.”

“The Columbus Cemetery, then? It's very interesting.”

A broad smile split Jack's features.

“Uh-huh? And how much would you want to show me this extremely interesting cemetery?”

“Twenty dollars?”

“But I thought you needed to practice your English. You ought to be the one paying me, don't you think?”

That made the young guy stare down at the parquet flooring, resignation etched onto his brow.

“Then I apologize for troubling you,
Señor
. Please excuse me. And enjoy your stay here.”

He was turning around to leave when it occurred to Jack he
did
have a whole afternoon to kill. And what the hell, this kid seemed decent enough and was only trying to make an honest buck.

“Ten dollars,” he offered.

Luis stopped.

“Fifteen?”

And Jack laughed, standing up.

“Well . . . first, let's see how ‘very interesting' this cemetery is, okay?”

*   *   *

It was worth twenty. Actually no, a good deal more than that.

The Columbus Cemetery had the entire history of Cuba buried in its parched brown earth. There were governors and generals, priests and martyrs, actors, baseball players, poets, journalists. Even the great chess master Capablanca lay there, out-gambited by death at last.

Everywhere Jack looked there were marble angels, whole celestial squadrons of them, wings spread out against the sky. And stone crosses in every style imaginable.

There were signs too, almost everywhere he looked, of practices other than Christianity.

Laid by many of the graves were little figurines, bowls of spoiled fruit, and even cooked foodstuffs. Arrangements of shells and stones and cigar stubs, and candles in glass jars.

He had a pretty good idea what this was about, but pretended not to notice it at first, fearful of offending Luis.

“We're now entering the oldest part,” the student was explaining.

He had proved to be an excellent and thorough guide, with not only knowledge of his island's history, but a sense of pride in it.

“Over here—” he began saying.

Then he seemed to finally notice the attention Jack was paying to the fetishes and symbols. They were more in evidence than ever in this section of the grounds.

“Oh.” Luis peered at them himself, trying to seem nonchalant. “This stuff, this is nothing. Just a local custom.”

“It's Santería, isn't it?” Jack countered.

He had come across it many times before, although only ever in passing. He had brushed against its outer edges and no more than that, usually in the poorer barrios of some large city.

Cuban voodoo, pretty much. Its gods each identified with a Catholic saint. It had spread right across Latin America, so he'd heard. But its practitioners were obsessively secretive, especially round Yanquis like himself.

He cocked his head to one side, peering at the boy.

“Hell, Luis, I thought this was supposed to be an atheistic sort of place. How widely is this stuff used here?”

His guide was looking increasingly awkward, but was honest enough to give him the straight answer that he wanted.

“Most people believe in it a little bit. The poor, of course, believe a lot.”

“And what opinion does the government have of that?”

“They don't have too much problem with it. Even if they did, there's not a whole load they could do about it.”

Jack mulled this over carefully, and then rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

“I'll tell you something, my friend. Cuba is the strangest and most contradictory place I've ever been to.”

Luis relaxed a little, humor coming back into his expression.

“Maybe that's why we've survived so long. No one can quite figure this place out, not even those who live here.”

They continued past the tombs and headstones.

*   *   *

Jack and Luis had reached a row of short, dense trees. About a dozen of them, planted very closely, with their branches so entangled that Jack could not make out what lay beyond. Almost like they had been put there deliberately, as some kind of barrier.

Nearing them, he thought he could detect a curious, and unpleasant, odor on the hot, still air.

Jack wandered around their edge and found himself looking at the last three graves before the cemetery wall. Each was topped with a small, rounded marker, heavily pitted with age and lichen dappled. And the one nearest him, set slightly apart from the other two, had a few fetishes placed around it, nothing more than that.

But the other pair . . .

Jesus, it certainly explained the smell.

Both plots were covered to opacity with the corpses of small animals in various stages of decay. Many were bare bones and skulls, stripped completely of their flesh. Others appeared to be more recent.

Jack fished a handkerchief out of his pocket, held it to his nose, repelled and fascinated at the same time.

Many of the sacrifices—and he was quite certain that was what he was looking at—were of birds. Cockerels and hens and doves. But there were turtles and opossums too, and even what looked like a cat. They'd either had their throats slit or had been decapitated.

Most of the small cadavers writhed with the motion of insects in their remains. A black blanket of flies continually rose and settled.

Jack turned his attention back to the other, more abandoned headstone, and thought he could make out a date. 1760 something or other.

It made him queasy getting any closer, but he'd never seen the likes of this before. He reached gingerly across, saw that there was moss obscuring the inscription. So he scratched at it with his thumbnail.

SANTIAGO DEFLORES, 1713–1766.

There was no further lettering of any kind. Not a hint of who this man had been, or what he might have done. Jack was just about to reach out for the other markers, which were completely unreadable.

Luis grabbed him sharply from behind, yelling
“No!”

And pulled him back.

Jack looked around, startled. And saw to his bewilderment that the young man was petrified. There was a rigid expression on Luis's features and his pale brown eyes were very wide.

The student clutched his chest.

“I'm sorry,” Luis wheezed. “I shouldn't have let you get that close.”

Jack took another glance in the direction of the graves.

“What
is
this, anyway?”

Luis followed his gaze sideways, rather than directly. The young man's eyes were hooded, the frightened expression still in place. And this wasn't any illiterate street urchin either. Rather, a bright young fellow who until this moment had shown nothing but good sense.

“Would you prefer to go elsewhere?” Jack asked.

“No, it's good. Just don't go touching anything else, okay?”

“I promise. But you don't strike me as the type to go getting all freaky over just a few dead birds.”

“You're right,” the boy breathed, nodding. “Even now, I'm trying to tell myself that I am being stupid. But some things . . . they are part of you and never quite let go.”

And this was apparently one of them.

Luis turned his gaze away, trying to gather his wits a little.

“It's like this, Jack. When I was small, some of the neighborhood kids used to come here for a dare.”

“Uh-huh? And?”

“They'd take turns jumping over those two graves. I was too little to join in, so I'd only sit and watch. And one day, a new kid decided to have a try.”

He ran a hand through his short hair, the memory taking hold of him.

“Armando. ‘Fat Armando,' we called him, too fond of food. He ran toward the graves. He jumped. But he was far too heavy, and his foot landed on the edge of the second plot. Two days later, Armando was dead.”

Jack could scarcely believe the young man was serious about this. But he asked, “You're kidding? How?”

“He died in his sleep. Nobody could find a cause for it.”

“And you think it's because he touched that grave?”

“I know that sounds crazy. But it's what we're brought up to believe, man.”

Jack had come across some attitudes like this before during his travels through the Latin world. Superstition took on new dimension, extra depth, in countries such as these. Unless you'd been raised with it since infancy, you could never quite believe in certain things the way these people did.

So he asked, more quietly, “Whose graves are these exactly?”

“Perhaps we ought to move away,” came the reply. “Again, I'm sorry. I'd just feel a bit more comfortable.”

Jack hesitated, still rather bewildered, and then followed him back behind the line of trees.

*   *   *

“In the eighteenth century, when this was a Spanish colony and slaves worked the plantations, one of the richest men in Cuba was Santiago DeFlores. Yes, the man in the first grave.”

“Under that cruddy little headstone? But didn't the rich folk around here usually have grander stuff, like mausoleums?”

Luis insisted if Jack listened, it would become clear.

And as the boy kept talking, Jack detected something in his tone. A measured rhythm and a cadence, like this had been told by others many times before, and there was memory involved. Luis was not merely explaining the story. He was reciting it, like a catechism he had learned.

“DeFlores lived on his plantation for most of the year, and it was a big plantation. Half the land between Camagüey and Las Tunas was his. But he also kept a mansion on the far side of Havana Bay, for him to stay at when he visited the capital. He did that several times each year. Oh yes, he lived an opulent life. For all his riches, though, he never had much luck in love.”

His first wife, apparently, had been a great beauty who was never faithful to him. She was banished from society, left Cuba and was never seen of or heard from again.