Tropic of Night (27 page)

“What can I do for you, Detective?”

Paz told him the story, the killing and its aftermath, omitting the usual small details about the crime itself, and editing the illegal aspects out of the Tanzi incident. “I was wondering if you could throw some light, Doc,” he concluded. He was not hopeful. The guy looked like he could throw light on nothing more exotic than hog production.

“Well, let’s see,” said Nearing, counting elaborately on his fingers, “we got ritual murder, cannibalism, and demonic possession, plus maybe some Ifa divination. Sounds like a typical day in the Magic City.” He had a deep, considering, midwestern voice. “The chamber of commerce wasn’t far wrong when they came up with that one. Where would you like me to start?”

“Maybe with what you do here. I’m not even sure what medical anthropology is.”

“Yeah, you and the board of this fine institution. Okay, here’s the short version. A guy comes into the ER in distress. BP off the scale, severe pain in the belly, recent history of weight loss, blood in the urine, angina, shortness of breath. So they think, uh-oh, a sundae, so they order tests …”

“Sorry, what’s a sundae?”

“A case where you got two or more potential fatal illnesses. In this case they’d figure he was hypertense, untreated, an abdominal cancer the size of a grapefruit, with kidney involvement and maybe congestive heart, too. That’s what they would call the cherry.”

Paz looked blank.

“The cherry on top. Of the sundae. Hilarious intern humor.”

“Got it. Go on.”

“Anyway, the guy’s hopeless, but they give him the tests anyway. And to their surprise, he passes the cancer panel, his EKG is normal, guy’s got arteries like a twelve-gauge Mossberg. He’s got what they call idiopathic symptomology, sick as hell but nothing wrong with him that they can find. Then they get the idea of asking the guy what he thinks is wrong with him, and he says a sorcerer has put the curse on him. So they call me in. I do the interview, and say the guy is Haitian, I’ll call in my own hougan to examine the patient. He’ll confirm the diagnosis: the patient is suffering under a pwin, a curse, sent by a bokor, a sorcerer. We come to some arrangement, and believe me, Medicaid doesn’t want to know about this, and my hougan sets up a curing ceremony?that, or he finds out who the bokor is, and starts a countercurse, so the bad guy will lay off.”

“Does it work?”

Nearing waggled a hand and tilted his head ruefully. “Sometimes, sometimes not. Like chemotherapy. Or surgery.”

“Right. Okay, but what I don’t get is why should a Haitian or anybody who believes they’re cursed come to Jackson? Why don’t they just get their own witch doctor?”

Nearing looked confused. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

“I mean, they get sick because they believe in voodoo or whatever. Their minds control their bodies in some way. So if they believe, they should know the local what-do-you-call-‘ems …”

“Oh, I see,” said Nearing, with a grin. “I should have explained it better. The patients who show up at Jackson aren’t believers. That’s the point. You’re right, in that if they were really into traditional practices they wouldn’t even think about coming here. They come here because they think they’re in America and Jackson Memorial is the big hougan where they dispense the powerful American magic. But it’s not.”

“But they must believe in the voodoo at some level, or it wouldn’t work.”

“That’s a theory,” said Nearing, cheerfully. “It’s certainly what the NP staff subscribes to. Psychosomatic yadda-yadda-yadda, tied to primitive superstition, blah-blah and dismiss it. I’m not so sure.”

“Then what’s the explanation?”

Nearing shrugged. “The explanation is, we don’t know squat about a lot of this stuff. There are drugs in some of these preparations they use, psychotropic drugs, like the ones you described in your murder victim. Okay, that’s rational, that’s inside the, let’s say, protective circle of the scientific paradigm. We also believe that there’s stuff that traditional practitioners can do that’s outside that paradigm but still real. Okay, that’s cool, that’s how science works. We see a baffling phenomenon?radioactivity, life itself?we study the hell out of it and we figure out what shelf it goes on, fit it into the structure. Sometimes the phenomenon is so weird we have to expand the structure, what they call a paradigm shift. That’s what radioactivity did to physics, and that’s basically what we’re doing here, studying weird phenomena and trying to find out how to fit it in.” He grinned. “So, Detective, now you know the secrets of medical anthro. Any questions?”

“Yeah. How do you explain Tanzi Franklin and what happened up in that apartment?”

A helpless gesture. “I can’t really explain it. Not enough data. The way you tell it, as a starting hypothesis, the girl looked out her window and saw the killer. Let’s say the killer saw her. He finds her, he blows some powder on her, makes her extremely suggestible. He implants a suggestion: throw a fit and do weird stuff if anyone asks you what you saw. That’d be one explanation. It’d also be a partial explanation for why this guy is so hard to find.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are any number of traditions in which magic workers can render themselves invisible, and there are hundreds of anecdotal reports of shamanic invisibility by supposedly reputable observers. How do they do it? One answer is drugged suggestion of the observers. The other is the same way David Copperfield does it on TV, by technical illusion. Thus we stay inside the paradigm.”

Paz looked at his notebook. “You said that there could be stuff that’s outside the paradigm but still real. What’s that about?”

Nearing leaned back in his chair, with a humorous expression on his face. “Oh, now we come to the sticky part.” He waved his hand, taking in the office and the facility beyond. “This here is a scientific establishment. Medical anthro is tolerated as long as it plays by the rules, and the main rule is that the poor benighted heathens think they’re hexed and that belief produces psychosomatic symptomology. But the notion that magic has the same reality as, say, molecular bio or the germ theory of disease, no, we don’t go there, uh-uh. That’d be a completely different paradigm. To actually find out anything about it, you’d have to immerse yourself in it, actually become a practitioner, and then of course no one would take you seriously, because you would have lost your scientific objectivity. It’s a sort of catch-22.”

Paz thought about Barlow, who was certainly operating under a different paradigm, especially in regard to this case. Something popped into his head and he flipped back through his notebook to his interview with Dr. Salazar and found what he was looking for. “You mean like Marcel Vierchau or Tour de Montaille.”

Nearing’s ginger eyebrows shot up. “Hey, I’m impressed. You really did some homework.”

“Is there anything in it? Vierchau, I mean.”

“You read his book? No? Here, you can borrow mine.” Nearing reached unerringly into a pile of books and brought out a hardcover. “You can judge for yourself. In the field, it’s pretty much agreed he went off the deep end. For one thing, no one’s been able to find the people he said he stayed with. The Russians haven’t got any records about them.”

“So, what?he made it all up?”

“Well, not entirely. Fieldwork is a tricky business. A lot of times you see what you want to see. Margaret Mead wanted to see girls growing up without sexual hang-ups and that’s what she brought back from Samoa. Bateson wanted to see family dynamics causing schizophrenia, so that’s what he brought back. Vierchau wanted a traditional people to have powerful magical weapons, he called it a ‘technology of interiority,’ and that’s what he found in Siberia. What the truth is …”

Nearing broke off. Paz observed a dreamy look come over the man’s open face. Paz asked, “What is it?”

Nearing snapped to. “What?”

“You were someplace else.”

Nearing gave an embarrassed laugh. “I guess. A little private magic. No, just thinking about Vierchau … I knew his ex-girlfriend in grad school. Her take on him was pretty much what I’ve suggested. Brilliant but flaky. She was quite a girl, though. You know, I’m happily married, two kids, but a week doesn’t go by without me thinking about her. She was a remarkable, remarkable woman. Not particularly gorgeous, but … she had something.” He laughed. “Magic, so to speak. I mention that because it might color my, um, let’s say negative opinion of Vierchau, and theories of that kind.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“She married someone else, a hot-shit poet, who I of course introduced her to. The guy was an old pal of mine and I was very happy for them. Broke my little heart. I got the feeling she never recovered from what happened in Siberia.”

“Which was … ?”

“Oh, he filled her full of shaman drugs, she had a breakdown, and apparently she kept slipping back into it. I heard she went to Africa, went crazy again.” He shook his head. “A damn shame.” He sighed. “Anyway, she died. Killed herself.”

Nearing turned to face him. “Well. Anything else, Detective?”

“Human sacrifice? Cannibalism? Any ideas? Any rumors that anybody’s into it around town?”

Nearing chewed his lip. “No, although it’s hard to rule anything out. As a professional anthropologist I can tell you that in our culture, those who want to eat human flesh generally keep fairly quiet about it.”

End of interview. Nearing got the usual “Call us if you hear anything” and Paz took his book and went out into the steaming bright afternoon. He sat in his car and ran the A/C and went over his notes. Africa again. Paz didn’t like the African angle at all or the magic crap. Or the Vierchau connection. He had the sense of someone playing with him, the business with his own looks, the perp seeming at least to be a ringer for Paz himself. And the incident with Tanzi, that voice, had shaken him more than he could admit, and so he filed it away with the other stuff he did not want to think about. Compartmentalization was Paz’s major mental strategy. He used it now. The weird stuff was not really weird but an artifact of ignorance. When they got the guy, it would turn out that … what? A gang. A cult. Like those wackos down in Matamoros, but more sophisticated. With chemicals, knockout drugs, hypnosis. Inside the paradigm; that was a good new word. Inside the paradigm, weird, but essentially familiar. And something else, he couldn’t quite …

Paz caught a flash of silver going by outside and looked up. The flash was the skin of a catering unit stuck on an old Ford pickup. It was lunchtime, and a good location, outside the hospital, for staff and visitors who might want a break from the cafeteria and were willing to brave both the heat of the day and the more subtle dangers of unsupervised food prep. Paz got out and bought a mango soda and a fruit pastry.

A memory tugged. The cab of his mother’s truck, him in the front seat strapped in, he must have been very young, because as soon as he was old enough to be in school, he had been behind the counter, serving out Cubano sandwiches and making change. His mother would pick him up right at the school, with the roachmobile. Memories of fighting about that, the shame of it. No, but that part was later, not what he was trying to pin down now. He was three or so, he was looking out the windshield and trying to grab the … leaning forward and reaching for … ? A Saint Christopher statue? That was it, a statue on the dash. The Virgin? No, it wasn’t white glow-in-the-dark plastic, it was brightly painted, larger than the commercial suction-cup icons; he could see it so clearly in his mind’s eye. It was painted, lifelike, and he had reached for it so hard that he had heaved himself over the restraint and fallen, knocking his head against the glove compartment knob. And his mother had heard his screams and come …

His mother hadn’t sold the truck until he was around eight. He had spent hours and hours in it, but he couldn’t recall seeing that statue again. The statue on the dash was a white plastic suction-cup Virgin, bland and of no interest. But he remembered a different statue.

It came to him then, the way that a forgotten word pops into the mind, with the same sense of inarguable assurance. A statue of a man in brown monk’s garb, tonsured, the face roughly painted with features, the skin pale chocolate, the mouth a drop of bright crimson, the base green and gold; from the hands clasped in prayer a wire depended, and on the wire, tiny glittering beads that trembled enticingly in the vibrations from the engine. It was a Santería figure, a santo, Orula, in fact, or Ifa, as he had recently learned to call him, the santo of prophecy. But that could not be. His mother despised all that.

Paz felt a coldness flow over the skin of his head, as when standing in the sun a cloud passes over. He looked up, but the sun was there directly overhead, unshielded, merciless.

The place is on Twenty-seventh just off the Trail, one of a line of low concrete-block stucco commercial structures selling goods to the Cubans who didn’t become millionaires in Miami. They sell furniture ( compre lo bueno y páguelo luegos), shoes ( descuentos especiales para mayoristas), sandwiches and Cuban coffee ( comidas criollas), fabrics ( grandes promociones, con los mas bajor precios) and pets. The sign that announces this last is hand-painted on a half sheet of exterior plywood, white on black. They are not running any specials in pets, but we go in anyway, early Friday evening after work, stepping carefully around the low concrete cone placed near the doorway. The place is stifling with the heavy ammoniac smell of chickens. Luz sneezes.

“It smells bad in here,” she remarks. “What are we buying here?”

What indeed? We are here because my transmission joint is up the street and I had spotted this place the last time I was by. There are dozens of them in the region we are now in, known to its inhabitants as Souwesera. They do not sell cute puppies or kitties or tropical fish, but only pigeons, chickens, and an occasional goat. All the animals are either pure white or dead black. The orishas are extremely particular about what they eat; they dislike complex color schemes.

I say to her, “I just have some business to do here. It won’t take long.”

“Who’s those?” Luz asks, pointing to the brightly painted plaster statues.