Age of Voodoo (8 page)

“You’re conscious about your appearance.”

“Show me the islander woman who isn’t. Is that all you’ve got?”

Lex shrugged. “I could go back to telling you how gorgeous you are, if you like.”

“Feel free,” said Albertine.

“Don’t,” said Wilberforce.

“You’ll have to forgive my cousin, Lex. He still thinks I’m the little girl in bunches and spectacles who he had to keep the bullies away from in school.”

“It’s very sweet, the way he looks out for you,” Lex said.

Wilberforce gave him a glare that would have curdled milk.

“It’s very sweet, the way
you
look out for
him
,” said Albertine. “Especially last night. I warned Wilberforce not to get into bed with the Garfish. But oh, no, big fat smartypants, he knew better. He thought it would never come round to bite him on the backside. Thank God he has you for a friend. His own guardian angel.”

Lex was only too happy to take the praise.

“So you have the measure of me, yes?” Albertine said.

Lex nodded. “I think so. Unless there’s something I’m missing.”

“What if I told you I’m into
vodou
?”

“
Vodou
? Is that the same as...?”

“...what you would call voodoo? Yes.”

Lex frowned. “What, so it’s a hobby of yours? Something you study for fun?”

“No. Oh, no. Lex, I’m a mambo. A
vodou
priestess. I worship the
loa
—the spirits. I talk to them and they talk to me. And they are telling me that you, Lex Dove, are in the greatest danger of your life.”

SEVEN

A MESSAGE FROM THE LOA

“R
UN THAT BY
me again,” said Lex.

“A little context first,” said Albertine. “My—and Wilberforce’s—family hail from Haiti originally. Our mothers came over here in nineteen seventy-seven with our grandparents, fleeing the reign of Jean-Claude Duvalier, Baby Doc as he was known.”

“A lovely chap, by all accounts.”

“Not a patch on his father, Papa Doc, but a monster all the same. Baby Doc inherited one of the most corrupt regimes on the planet at the time, his position reinforced by the private militia his father created, the Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale.”

“Better known as the
Tontons Macoutes
.”

“You know your Caribbean history.”

That, and one of Lex’s fields of expertise was dictatorships. “The Tontons Macoutes were some of the biggest bastards ever to walk the earth. They made the Stasi and Pinochet’s DINA look like girl scouts. Twenty thousand Haitians dead at their hands, is that right?”

“Some estimates put it as high as fifty thousand. Dissidents and opponents of the regime, slaughtered in their droves. People would disappear in the night and be found the next morning, or rather their mutilated corpses would. Anyone who was believed to be an anti-Duvalier agitator, they and their entire family would be killed, utterly wiped out. Rape and extortion were commonplace. All this while Duvalier
père
et fils
helped themselves to Haiti’s sovereign wealth, lining their pockets and becoming obscenely rich while honest citizens scrabbled to make a living and went hungry.”

“Haiti’s still a shitbox,” Wilberforce opined, “only now it’s at least a democratic shitbox.”

“Yes, thank you for that, cuz,” said Albertine tartly. “The land of our ancestors, dismissed in a single sentence.”

“And the earthquake a couple of years back?” Wilberforce added. “That was Mother Nature commenting on the place. She was trying to finish the job Papa Doc started.”

“You’re sick.”

“Just saying.”

“The Tontons Macoutes,” Albertine resumed, glowering at her cousin, “sowed terror among the population not only by their actions but by their appearance. They wore denim like Azaka, the loa of agriculture, and used machetes like Ogun, the loa of iron and war. Even their name was designed to prey on people’s fears. Tonton Macoute is a bogeyman from Haitian folklore who kidnaps children and carries them off in a sack. Essentially, they were a perversion of
vodou
beliefs, just as Papa Doc himself was, with his black undertaker’s suit, hat and heavy sunglasses.”

“I don’t get it,” said Lex.

“Papa Doc styled himself after Baron Samedi, the loa of death and cemeteries. His look said, ‘I have power over life and death, and don’t you forget it.’ Although actual practitioners of
vodou
were not held in high regard by him and his bullyboys.”

“Because they might point out that he wasn’t all he claimed to be.”

“Just so. To them, he was a blasphemer. The braver ones said as much, not that it helped. The Tontons Macoutes dealt with them the same way they dealt with all troublemakers. When Papa Doc died in ’seventy-one and Baby Doc took over, things got even worse. More chaotic. Baby Doc didn’t have his father’s charisma or ruthlessness. He fell out with the Tontons Macoutes and was finally forced into exile in ’eighty-six, by which time Haiti was all but ruined. Most of the middle classes and the wealth creators had quit the country long beforehand—the Haitian Diaspora, which took them to places like Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the United States. My grandparents were among them. They came to Manzanilla with my mother and her little sister, Wilberforce’s mother, to seek a better life, but not only for that reason. Also to escape execution. Specifically the execution of my mother.”

“Why?”

“Because she, though only in her teens, was showing signs of becoming a powerful
vodou
adept. And, being in her teens, she was naturally outspoken and rebellious. The two things in Haiti during those years were not a good combination. Things got hot for my family. My grandparents bought passage on a little fishing boat, leaving everything they had behind, and made their way here to begin again. My mother, Hélène, kept up her
vodou
training and studies, and within a decade had become a mambo to be reckoned with. Truly one of the greats.”

“A big woman in every way,” said Wilberforce. He whistled and shook his head. “You should see her, Lex. A metre and a half tall and about a hundred kilos. She’s like a ball, almost perfectly round.”

“Hey, that’s my mama you’re insulting,” said Albertine.

“Who’s insulting? She is big. You can’t deny it. You could shove Aunt Hélène down a hill and she wouldn’t stop rolling ’til she reached the sea.”

“Do you want her to put a
wanga
on you, Wilberforce?” Albertine said. “I can ask her to. A quick phone call is all it’ll take. Steal a washcloth from your house, tie seven knots in it, drop it in a river, and you won’t be able to get hard again, not until you beg her forgiveness. How about that, eh? Your limp little
zozo
dangling between your legs, no use for satisfying any of those dozens of girlfriends you’re forever boasting about.”

Wilberforce blanched, then tried to brazen it out. “It wouldn’t work. You can’t cast a hex on someone who doesn’t believe.”

“But don’t you believe? If you believe even a little tiny bit, it’ll happen. Trust me.”

Wilberforce seemed about to argue further, but Lex intervened. “I’d leave it there if I were you, mate. Don’t want to go messing around with that sort of thing, especially when it involves a part of you you’re so very fond of.”

“Wisely spoken, Lex,” said Albertine.

“I take it the role of mambo is hereditary, then,” Lex said.

“It can be. In my case it is. My sister Giselle and I grew up watching our mother hold her ceremonies, give gifts to the loa, ask them for help on her own behalf and on others’, be ridden by them during the rituals. Giselle pooh-poohed it as peasant superstition, but I knew it wasn’t. It was more than that. It brought tangible results. It was
truth
. So when I was old enough, I asked Mama to start teaching me the ways, and soon I was a
vodouisante
myself, familiar with the loa
nachons
, the songs, the dances, the drumbeats. I now have my own peristyle—a sacred space, kind of a temple—at home, and in my spare time I offer people consultations and advice. I make candles for them to purify their homes with, cast spells to ward off evil or bring luck, heal them if they have some sickness of the soul...”

“It’s a nice little sideline,” said Wilberforce. “They give her money, expensive gifts, free meals. Fleecing the gullible, I call it.”

“Oh, yes?” Albertine said. “And the inflated prices you charge at your rum shack—what’s that if it isn’t fleecing?”

“It’s a legitimate mark-up.”

“But having a two-tier system, one set of prices for locals, another for tourists?”

“That’s just simple economics.”

“And what about when you flew your seaplane, before the airport was built? You used to charge outrageous prices for ferrying passengers and packages between islands. And sometimes you’d claim a parcel had got lost, but for twenty dollars you could ‘find’ it again.”

“The price of aviation fuel—”

“You’re as bad as the Garfish,” Albertine said hotly. “You and he deserve each other. What annoys me is that you wouldn’t even have to owe the man anything if you’d only sold that damn plane of yours.”

“I’m not selling
Puddle Jumper
for anyone or anything,” Wilberforce shot back. “She’s my pride and joy. Besides, I don’t think I’d get that much for her.”

“Not even as spare parts?”

“Cruel. That’d be like selling your own children’s organs.”

“So you’d rather borrow from a crook instead?” Albertine sucked her teeth so viciously it sounded like swearing.

Lex was loath to intrude again, but neither could he take much more of it.

“We’ve gone a bit off-topic,” he said diplomatically. “Albertine, I’m happy to accept that you’re a mambo. Each to their own. Whatever floats your boat. But you say I’m in danger. Do you mean from the Garfish? Because if so, not exactly a newsflash.”

“Not just him. Not him at all, I don’t think.”

“Then who?”

“The loa were not able to specify. Here’s what happened. Last night, I was making an offering to my three husbands.”

Lex raised an eyebrow.

“My three loa husbands,” Albertine clarified. “Every mambo or houngan—that’s a
vodou
priest—is ‘married’ to at least one loa, more usually three. They are the ones who favour us the most and watch over us. Mine are Damballah, Loko and Erzulie Freda, who’s actually female and also Damballah’s wife, but don’t let that confuse you.”

“Not confused at all,” Lex said wryly.

“As I was serving Damballah a saucer of white flour with a white egg on top, all of a sudden he took control of me. I became his ‘horse,’ as we say. His
chwal
. An image of him appeared in my mind. Damballah has many forms, but most often he manifests as a serpent, a white python. He slithered inside me and I in turn fell to the floor and started slithering too, and as I did so he spoke. He told me that the balance of life is at risk of being upset. Cosmic equilibrium is threatened. He gave me your name, saying you were at the centre of it all somehow, and he informed me that you are a friend of my cousin’s, which I knew already as Wilberforce has talked about you now and then. He speaks highly of you, by the way.”

“So I should hope.”

“Damballah was very alarmed, and it is not comforting to see a spirit, an aspect of the godhead, alarmed. He said I must go to you and offer my aid, and must not take no for an answer.” She spread out her hands. Her nails were long, beautifully manicured, lacquered in the richest of reds. “And here I am.”

“Ah,” said Lex. “Interesting.”

Gable at the crossroads last night:
Help’ll be offered you, and when it come, you don’ turn it away, you knowum sayin’? Whatever your finer feelin’s, you don’ say no.

Lex felt an unaccountable shiver run through him. What the fuck was going on here? He felt as though he had been thrown into the middle of some bizarre conspiracy, tides of coincidence swirling heavily around him. This time yesterday morning he’d been contemplating nothing more arduous than going for a run before the sun got too hot, then heading down to the beach afterwards for a spot of snorkelling. Now: a job from Seraphina, a gun battle with gangsters, voodoo, or
vodou
if you preferred...