Night of the Seventh Darkness
by
Daniel Easterman


By the same author

The Last Assassin

The Seventh Sanctuary

The Ninth Buddha

Brotherhood of the Tomb

NIGHT OF THE SEVENTH DARKNESS
Daniel Easterman
LONDON NEW YORK SYDNEY TORONTO
This edition published 1991 by BCA by arrangement with 
Grafton Books
CN 9139
Copyright (c) Daniel Easterman 1991 The Author asserts the 
moral right to be identified as the author of this work All 
rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be 
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, 
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, 
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior 
permission of the publisher.
First reprint 1994

Printed and bound in Germany by Graphischer GroBbetrieb 
Po'Bneck GmbH A member of the Mohndruck printing group
For Betty who else?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
So many people helped at different stages of this book, I 
hardly know where to begin.  My agent, Jeffrey Simmons, and 
my editors in London and New York, Patricia Parkin and Ed 
Breslin, read, commented on, and discussed the manuscript 
at length I cannot say how much their criticisms helped 
change the finished version for the better.  Their first 
line of defence, my wife Beth, acted as critic-in-
residence: a hard job, and worth three years of P.
G.
Wodehouse stories at bedtime.
I could not have done without Claudia Caruana's 
intelligent, informed and un stinting assistance with the 
research for New York.  To Eddie Bell of Harper & Row, a 
million thanks for fixing up our trip to New York and 
helping it go so smoothly.  Warm thanks too to Sergeant 
Raymond O'Donnell of the New York Police Department; Phil 
Petrie, Associate Director of Public Affairs, Kings County 
Hospital, Brooklyn; Jonathan Arden, MD, Deputy Chief 
Medical Examiner at Kings County; Mr. Barrone of Barrone 
Funeral Homes, Brooklyn; and, most of all, to Richie 
Horowitz, our intrepid, entertaining and knowledgeable 
driver, who guided us through the best and worst of 
Brooklyn.
In England, thanks tolan and Margaret Tarbit for their 
ideas on AIDS testing and postmortems Roderick Richards of 
Tracking Line; Elizabeth Murray; Tim Levitt for his naval 
knowledge;
Fred and Christine Hardy for sharing their experiences of 
diving in the Caribbean.
A word of thanks also to all those whose publications I 
plundered for information about Haiti, above all Wade 
Davis, whose two intelligent and lively studies of the 
zombi are models of research and exposition.

PART ONE
The Circle 
Incomplete 
Brooklyn
Twinkle, twinkle 
little star. How 
I wonder what you are .. 

CHAPTER ONE


Fort Greene, Brooklyn Friday, 18 September 1999 Late afternoon. 
The apartment smelled fusty.  Angelina wrinkled 
her nose as she stepped into the hallway.  Fusty.  Or 
maybe something else.
They'd only been away three months, and most of that time 
Filius had been there, Filius and maybe some friends of 
his.  A girl maybe.
Filius had said he didn't have a woman, but she found that 
hard to believe.  He was good-looking, street-wise, and 
from the looks she sometimes found him giving her, 
Angelina didn't think he was gay' Home intoned Richard as 
he came in behind her, putting down two suitcases. The 
word was flat, almost meaningless: a narrow word in a 
narrow doorway.  Angelina stood stock-still, letting it 
sink in.  They were home, whatever that meant.  Their next 
trip abroad wouldn't be for... how long?  No telling.  But 
what was that smell?


"You smell anything?"  she asked, not turning round.  
Richard put his hands on her shoulders, pressing down a 
little.  She disliked the pressure, the feel of his 
hands, hard, proprietorial.


"No."  He bent his face to her neck and sniffed.
"New perfume," he whispered.
"Am I right?"
She'd bought the bottle of Fendi in Geneva on the flight 
back from Kinshasa.  In the cab coming in from JFK, she'd 
applied a few dabs to strategic places, a little 
surreptitiously.  For the three months they'd been in Zaire 
she had studiously avoided perfumes.
The heat turned them rancid on her skin.  Or perhaps it had 
been her skin itself that made them grow sour.
"I don't mean that," she said.  Now she turned to face him.
"Don't you notice anything else?  Kind of fusty.  Or is it 
"musty"?  As though nobody had been here."  She shrugged.
"Maybe it's just the effect of being away.  I'm not used to 
how our own apartment smells."
Or maybe it was Africa, she thought.
She never noticed smells so powerfully in Brooklyn.
Flowers, fruit, people, the sweet smells of decay, the 
jungle bearing down, cloying and dangerous.
He sniffed the air again and looked at her, a sideways 
glance.
"It's your imagination.  The apartment doesn't smell.  Give 
it a day or two, you'll feel better.  Get Africa out of 
your system."
He carried the rest of the baggage into the hallway.
"Can you make some coffee, Angelina?
I'm dead beat."
Angelina made two cups of instant while Rick hauled 
suitcases to the bedroom and started unpacking.  She found 
a jar of cookies that she had bought at Abraham Straus on 
Fulton a week before leaving.  They were still fit to-eat, 
so she put a few on a plate.  Rick joined her in the 
kitchen.  He did look tired, she thought.  And not just 
physically.
The field trip had been a failure.
Most of the time they'd been in Kisangani, then there had 
been the wasted weeks at Lokutu.  Rick was fast turning 
into the sort of ethnologist who prefers working out of an 
air-conditioned office to sharing a tent with snakes and 
bugs.  And he was turning her from his wife and assistant 
into his secretary and general dogs body.
They drank without conversation, adjusting to the thoughts 
and sensations of return.  School started in less than a 
week.  The powers-that-be had decided to go back to a late 
fall start in order to pick up delayed registrations.
Rick had been on Long Island University's faculty for 
twenty years now, but he was still something of an 
outsider.  Those of his colleagues who still lived in Fort 
Greene had apartments in the Towers building or the
Hospital highrise over on Willoughby;
the rest had long ago moved out to Brooklyn Heights or 
Cobble Hill.
But the Hammels stayed on in a decaying brownstone on 
Clermont Avenue, between Myrtle and Atlantic, stranded by a 
tide of upward mobility.
They had moved in ten years earlier.
At first Rick had hoped that the brownstone revival would 
move in their direction.  They had spent a lot of money on 
the property, then waited for things to change.  They were 
still waiting.  The paint on their door was peeling, their 
steps were blocked with garbage, and outside on the street 
young Haitian men and Puerto Rican girls with sad eyes 
dreamed of a sunshine only their parents remembered.  And 
the girls wheeled babies in cheap buggies, and the babies 
kept their eyes shut in all seasons.  In an unused nursery 
at the back of the apartment, white bunny rabbits hopped 
like ghosts across fields of dappled green.
Autumn was fumbling at the edges of the city.  Crossing the 
river from Manhattan, it crept, unannounced and uninvited, 
past the old Navy Yard, all the way to Coney Island and the 
sea.  Angelina looked out of the kitchen window onto a grey 
brick wall opposite.
Brooklyn was a madness she had tried to escape, only to be 
dragged back, again and again, her hair in disarray, her 
eyes shining, softly wild, her mouth wide open in song or 
protest.  What did Rick care?
She felt sure that summer would never come again, that, 
this year, winter's onset would be not simply inexorable, 
but permanent.  She shivered and sipped her coffee and 
looked through unwashed glass at the fading autumn light.
After coffee, they finished unpacking, returning to the 
cheap deal board closet clothes they never wore in New 
York, clothes they might never wear again.  Angelina 
fingered them as she folded them away: light cotton frocks, 
a striped bikini, slacks she had taken for trips up 
country.  She remembered the visit to Switzerland after her 
mother died, the distaste with which she had packed old 
clothes for charity. How suddenly the living became the 
dead, how death rubbed itself over their garments and their 
bedclothes, how it pervaded furniture and books.  She 
lifted a pair of Rick's trousers.  They felt to her touch 
like something a dead man had worn, secondhand, tainted.  
Quietly, she put them away on a wooden hanger, in a corner 
of the wardrobe, out of reach.
Rick was eager to make love.  Here, in Brooklyn, he had 
come alive at once.  That was why they stayed, why this 
apartment had become a chain for her.
Brooklyn gave him life, as much as it took it from her.  He 
took her to bed, urgent, roused, more vivid than she had 
known him at any time in Africa.  She let him undress her, 
let him make his fumbling tour of her body, as though to 
reassure himself that she was still undamaged. Again the 
heavy touch of a proprietor.
Quietening him with a kiss, easing him with her lips but 
not her tongue, she masturbated him, slowly, without 
feeling, without remorse, with long practised skill.  And 
he came quickly.
15 thoughtlessly, messing the sheets, Filius's sheets that 
she had forgotten to change.
He fell asleep almost straight away, naked, middle-aged, 
his thick back turned to her.  She looked down at him with 
something of revulsion.  He had become an unlovely thing in 
her eyes: his paunch, his flaccid,
weeping penis, sunburned skin.  On his square, heavy-browed 
head, the red hair was turning yellow.  His lips were 
flushed, his cheeks stippled with blood.  What did she love 
in him?
Had she ever found anything to love in him at all?  Truly?
She sat bolt upright, eyes fixed on the wall opposite, 
letting the room return in fragments to her consciousness 
as night came slowly into Brooklyn, autumnal, thick, heavy 
with misery.  In Africa, the suddenness of night had always 
surprised and frightened her, the abrupt descent of the 
flecked sun, the instant presence of night in everything.  
But here the world spun less quickly, the earth crawled 
from light to darkness, there was time to put on armour 
against its coming.
She looked at herself in the mirror on the wall, the pale 
mulatto face, the frightened eyes, the heavy brows she had 
plucked as a girl. Letting the sheet fall from her breasts, 
she watched them in reflection, soft, becoming pendulous 
with age.  Was forty-two old?
Her hair still fell darkly on narrow shoulders, her waist 
had not yet thickened, she shaved her legs every second day 
religiously, and wore perfume at home.
Why?  she wondered.  Did it make any difference?  Had it 
ever made a difference?
Night came, and still she sat and listened as the city 
padded beyond her window, vast and predatory.  Beside her, 
her husband's breath rasped, tearing at her ears.  On a 
silent clock, green seconds flickered against the dark.  
She was in New York, not Africa.  But outside another 
jungle sharpened its teeth beneath the same indifferent 
moon.
At eleven o'clock she got out of bed to fix something to 
eat.  Rick was fast asleep.  In the kitchen, she stumbled 
about in semidarkness, her robe pulled tight against the 
chill air, opening and closing cupboards, rummaging through 
the freezer.  She was reminded of mid nigh raids as a 
child, the thrill of food eaten late, the taste of cold 
chicken.  At least Filius had stocked the freezer as asked.  
Angelina had left him one hundred dollars for that purpose 
before leaving.  If anything, he had overdone it.  He must 
have made several trips to the Finast on Myrtle, where she 
knew he did all his shopping.
The bottom drawers of the freezer were packed solid with 
heavy joints of meat.
She found a TV dinner higher up and slipped it into the 
microwave. In
Africa, they had had a boy.  He had cooked and cleaned and 
fetched for them, all for a pittance.
To him she had been white, a white man's woman, as foreign 
as
Rick.  She had already forgotten his name.  The alarm 
buzzed and she took the tinfoil tray from the oven, 
miraculously hot.
In the living room, she threw herself into a chair.
Spooning rice and chicken into her mouth, she ate without 
savour.  What was food these days anyway?  The house plants 
had not survived the summer.  She had not expected them to, 
with or without Filius.
They never did.
The smell again.  Still fusty or musty, whatever.

Fainter now, or more familiar perhaps.  Not quite sweet, 
not quite sour, all around, yet nowhere in particular.
For some reason she could not identify, it made her uneasy, 
as though, somewhere in her mind, she recognized it.  A 
memory?  An
anticipation?
She swallowed the last spoonful of reconstituted chicken.  
Thank you, her stomach said, I really need junk food at my 
time of life.
Back in the kitchen, she found a tub of butter pecan ice 
cream and a spoon.
Ice cream in hand, she went back to the living room and 
switched on the television.
From channel to channel, she flicked without interest.  
Latenight talk shows, recycled situation comedies, rock 
videos, movies that had been old movies the day they were 
released.  Canned laughter, canned applause, canned 
emotions.  She switched off again.
Filius had promised to tape some films while they were 
away.  In the rack were about a dozen, all clearly labelled 
in red marker in Filius's cramped Haitian hand.  Channel 13 
had screened a series of modern French movies over the 
summer.  She scanned the labels:
Zidi's Les Ripoux- he'd known she wanted that;
Tavernier's Coup de
Torchon, set in Africa that could wait; Diva;
Subway; Betty Blue.
Yes, Betty Blue would be perfect.
She slipped the cassette into the machine and switched on.
Images filled the screen.
Beatrice Dalle and Jean Hugues Anglade making love.  
Angelina relaxed. She snuggled down into her seat, deep 
into cushions, deep into the dark, anarchic world of Betty 
and
Zorg.  She knew how it would end, in madness and a quick 
death kicking against a lover's pity, but before that there 
was hope of a certain kind.  The strains of travel washed 
away, Africa washed away.  Rick and his sweat streaked, 
porpoise-like body washed away.  Sighing, she spooned cold 
ice cream into her mouth.
Abruptly, the film flickered and went grainy.  A row of 
frames jumped, then the picture snowed up.  Angelina leaned 
forward angrily.  She had forgotten to tell Filius about 
the fault, forgotten to tell him to take the machine over 
to the electric shop on Fulton to have it repaired.
About two weeks before their departure, the VCR had started 
acting up. While recording, for as much as ten minutes at a 
time, it would slip out of 'record' into 'play', leaving 
gaps in the middle of tapes stretches of flickering snow in 
the new ones, existing recordings in the old.
Layers beneath layers, stripped away.
As she reached for the remote control, the snow on the 
screen began to clear.  Slowly, the picture grew distinct 
again.

It was not Betty Blue.  That was curious.  Angelina 
remembered that she had left blank tapes for Filius to use.  
He must have recorded something else on this one before 
taping Betty Blue on top of it.
There was no sound, just the faint hissing of the tape.  
The quality was poor, the lighting perfunctory.  Huge 
shadows contrasted sharply with patches of brightness, hard 
and finely etched, like an exercise in Expressionism.
Across the tiny screen, dark figures moved as though in 
slow motion, like turtles swimming in a green sea, like 
heavy fish in dim, stagnant waters, behind the glass of an 
aquarium, indifferent to the hand-held camera.  No sound.
The picture unsteady, darkness edged with light, light 
edged with darkness, grotesque figures moving, hesitating, 
still as stone.
Angelina watched transfixed.  Her eyes would not leave the 
screen.  In a long row, stretched through a half circle, 
men and women sat upright in tall chairs.  Out of grey 
shadows they seemed to watch her.  Light crossed their 
faces, wavered, leached away again, but they did not move.  
Like statues, they sat absolutely still, their faces devoid 
of expression, drained of colour or animation.
Some were black, some white, yet something in their 
unmoving faces transcended race.
Something Angelina did not like.
Into the centre of the semicircle stepped a solitary 
figure, a man, naked to the waist, his dark skin glistening 
in the uncertain light.
To his left, flames grew and shrank in a chafing dish set 
on a rough iron tripod.  On his skin, sweat stood out like 
seed pearls, fine and translucent.  Light fell on a 
shadow's edge.  The man turned slowly to face the camera.  
It was
Filius.
And not Filius.  Angelina felt fine hairs like needles of 
ice rise against her neck.  The familiar face was contorted 
and alien.  Filius's lips were drawn back in a tight 
grimace, his nostrils flared, his eyes were wide and 
staring, red, possessed.  She had seen such eyes before, in 
the faces of men and women ridden by the loa, at the height 
of vodoun ceremonies, their bodies suddenly empty, as 
suddenly possessed by gods.
Filius and not Filius.  Man and not man.  The figure turned 
and turned in a tight circle, dancing in silence, as though 
moving to music in his own head.  He held an earthenware 
bowl hard against his chest.  The light caught the surface 
of whatever it held, twinkling like a star every time he 
turned.
There was a crackling sound.  The picture jumped and grew 
still again. The crackling faded and was replaced by duller 
sounds, each at first indistinguishable from the rest.  
Gradually, the sounds became clearer. Filius's breathing, 
harsh and uneven as he danced, a slow drumbeat like the 
pounding of a heart, unlike any vodoun drumbeat she had 
ever heard, an unknown voice speaking from the shadows.  
The words were indistinct at first, then with a terrible 
clarity they came to her, a Creole prayer for the dead that 
she had last heard in Port-au-Prince many years ago:
Prie pou' tou les morts pou' les morts ban donne nan gran 
boh pou' les morts ban donne nan gran dlo pou' les morts 
ban donne nan gran plaine


pou' les morts tue pa' couteau pou' les morts tue 
pa' epee .. . Pray for all the dead
For the dead abandoned in the great wood


For the dead abandoned in the great water For the dead 
abandoned in the great plain For the dead slain by knives
For the dead slain by swords... The dancer with the face of 
Filius stopped.  The drum went on, steady, slightly 
offbeat, insistent.  From somewhere there came a sound of 
sobbing, abruptly cut off.  Filius raised the bowl in both 
hands and turned to face the silent figures watching from 
their seats.  As he stepped towards them, the camera 
followed him, a pace at a time.  Angelina knew somehow that 
the room on the screen was the room in which she sat.
pou' tou les morts, au nom de Mail' Cafou et de Legba;
pou' tou generation paternelle et maternelle .
For all the dead, in the name of Maitre Carrefour and 
Legba;
For all the generations, paternal and maternal... Filius 
dipped his hand into the bowl and drew it out again, 
stretching his fingers towards the first of the seated 
figures.  His hand was red and wet with blood.  Lightly, he 
traced the sign of the cross on the man's
forehead.
The figure did not move.


ancetre et 
ancetere, Afrique 
et Afrique;
au nom de Mail' 
Cafou,


Legba, Baltaza, Miroi .
. ancestor and ancestress, 
African and African;
in the name of Maitre


Carrefour, Legba, Baltaza,
Miroi... None of the figures moved.
The light fell more sharply on them now, as Filius moved 
from head to head, daubing crosses in thick strokes of 
blood.  Angelina stared at the screen, her heart shivering, 
her bowels cold as snow.  The light quivered.  It glanced 
off the dancer's naked back, it lay on the cold, dry skin 
of the watching figures.  No-one moved.
And at last Angelina understood why they did not move, why 
their eyes did not blink in the harsh light, why they let 
the blood run unhindered down their cheeks.  She saw it 
clearly now: the formal clothing, the dry matted hair, the 
ugly, blotched skin.  None of the watching figures was 
alive.
The camera drew closer, drawn irresistibly to their ashen 
cheeks.
Angelina bent forward aghast.  Some must have been in the 
earth for at least two weeks, others perhaps only hours:
the bloom of the mortician's art was still vivid on one 
woman's
cheeks.
Like grotesque wax dolls, like paper effigies, they sat 
immobile to receive the benediction of the cross.  A Mass 
for the dead, with blood instead of wine.
The camera panned back to follow Filius.  The drum ceased 
beating. Priest-like, Filius raised the bowl and poured out 
all the remaining blood in a thick crimson libation.  But 
Angelina scarcely saw him; her eyes were fixed elsewhere.  
In one corner of the screen, indistinctly but unmistakably, 
the second figure from the right began to lift its head.
CHAPTER TWO
Sunday, 27 September
Rick seemed permanently tired.  He had never seemed so 
tired to her before, so lacking in vitality.  The vividness 
he had shown briefly after their return had already 
dissipated.
Africa had sapped him, his work there had left him pale and 
enervated. The illness at Lokutu had left him without 
reserves.  Or was it something else?
Had the old worries come to the surface again?  He never 
told her anything now.  With sick familiarity, she watched 
him pass through the apartment every day, morose, ill-
tempered, ill at ease.
He had watched the video with her and sneered it away, 
derisive and impatient with her fears.  A prank, a game, 
chicken's blood and make-up nothing to get on edge about.  
Look at the room, he said, look at the furniture.
Nothing had been disturbed, there were no traces of blood.
But he seemed on edge himself.  Angelina feared some sort 
of showdown, not just a tremor, but a convulsion that would 
tear them irrevocably apart.  Like a sailor watching a 
darkening sky, she shivered, dreading a storm.
Over a week had passed.
School had started and the first intimations of fall were 
everywhere. The leaves were growing yellow, the winds that 
sliced in off the river were colder every day.
Angelina walked through half empty streets waiting for 
winter, haunted by images of blood and the awkward, sullen 
postures of the living


dead.
Old memories stirred in her, tales from her nursery in 
Port-auPrince, zombis and diabs and lo ups-ga rous the 
dead walking, impatient of the grave.  She shivered in bed 
at night and told her rosary alone in the small hours like 
an adolescent waking out of childhood's long, uneasy 
dream.  On the second day, she threw away the meat in the 
freezer, packet after packet of it, pale meat larded with 
fat and speckled with frozen blood.  Filius had still not 
shown up.
Rick drove to LIU each day and returned in the evenings 
frowning and unresponsive.


She did not try to caress him; she saw no point: whatever 
his troubles were, he would not part with them lightly or 
share them for a kiss. But she knew something was wrong, 
something unseasonal that filled her mind and spirit with 
impotent dread.
In the mornings she painted, alone in the room she called 
her studio, tall, lifeless paintings in muted colours, thin 
and desolate renderings of images from her past.  After 
lunch, she went for long walks to Fort Greene or Prospect 
Park; but however far she went, she could not shake off the 
sense of impending disaster that crept after her, rustling 
the fallen leaves that lay across her path.
The start of school usually saw Rick straining at the 
leash, eager for another year of lectures and seminars.  He 
would start with his graduate students and work down to the 
latest batch of freshmen, outlining projects, refining 
timetables, imparting a sense of bonhomie to all and 
sundry, just to let them know what a swell guy he was.  
Each year, with a regularity that had always astonished 
her, he would come alive with the freshening winds and 
shortening days.
Alive for his students, at least.  But towards her, with 
every year that passed, a little more remote.  Not actively 
unpleasant at least, not often never violent.
Just increasingly distant.
When she talked to him, she sometimes felt like shouting, 
he seemed so far away.  He had started to masturbate in 
private now, in the bathroom, furtively.  To her dismay, 
she realized that she actually preferred it that way.
At least it was better than what the new school year 
usually brought. Each September, Rick looked forward to a 
fresh batch of coeds sifting them for the one or two he 
could always count on screwing by Thanksgiving.
He had never tried to keep his little affairs very secret, 
least of all from her.  It had seemed a sort of bravado at 
first, a cry for help of sorts.  Like a fool she had 
responded by loving him more, offering herself to him again 
and again until the truth had finally revealed all its 
hideous little teeth: that he did it to hurt her, that the 
more she made her body a reward for his infidelity, the 
more he enjoyed the pain he could inflict.
So now she kept her body for herself and was hurt to 
realize that he did not seem to care.  Or notice.
But this year he had not come alive at all.  His step 
remained leaden, his cheeks pallid.
He was forty-nine, angry, fragile, and devoid of grace.  If 
he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, he did not do 
so out of love.
She heard his key in the lock.  It was already after eight.  
She guessed he had been drinking at La Belle Creole on 
Flatbush Avenue.  He had started hanging out there about a 
year ago, drinking raw clairin and enjoying the buzz he got 
from being the only white man in a Haitian rum bar.  He 
never got too drunk, of course; that was his forte, to 
drink and stay in control.  To love and remain unmoved.  He 
had loved her once.  Hadn't he?
"Have you eaten?"
He shook his head.
"Do you want to eat?"



"If you've got anything.
Have you got anything?"  He put down his briefcase, a 
new one he had bought in June.
"I'll see."  She hesitated.


He didn't seem too drunk.
Still in control.
"Have you found Filius yet?"  she asked.
"Not yet."  His eyes avoided her.  He appeared, not merely 
tired, but edgy, as though the slightest push might set him 
off.  His anger, when it came, was invariably cold.  She 
feared the coldness more than blows: his careful, academic 
choice of words, his mannered tone, his pale, implacable 
eyes.
"What do you mean "not yet"?  It's been a week, Rick.  No-
one you've spoken to can remember seeing him since early 
last month.
I want to know what's going on.  I want to know if this has 
anything to do with... that other trouble."  She didn't 
care if she pushed him over the edge tonight.
Filius's disappearance had rattled her.  In her belly, thin 
spiders of fear were crawling, warning her of danger.
The last time any of their friends had seen Filius had been 
two days before Channel 13 transmitted Betty Blue.
"Nothing's going on.  I saw Ti-Jouet at the Creole today.  
He says Filius was talking about going to Haiti.  He still 
has relatives
there.
Ti-Jouet thinks he has a little bien avec down Jacmel way.  
A pretty girl, so they say.  Seventeen and hot as a chilli 
pepper.
He met her there last year on the field trip to Marigot.  
Ti-Jouet thinks she had a baby boy."  Rick paused and 
smiled.  See, his little smile seemed to say, some Haitian 
women are able to have babies.
That's where Filius has gone," he continued.
"You'll see.  He'll come back with his ma man petite, get 
her in through Miami somehow, bring her up here by 
Christmas.  You'll see."
"I think we should bring in the police."
"We've already been into that, Angelina.  The subject's 
closed."
His left eyelid was flickering.  A vein throbbed in his 
temple, dark, thick with blood.  Tonight, she thought, he 
might just lose control for once.
"Not for me, it isn't.  If you won't call the precinct 
station, I will."
"You'll call nobody.  Filius is in Haiti.  Bring in the 
police and you'll just make trouble for him if he's trying 
to get his girl in through Florida."
"What you mean is, it'll make trouble for you.  That's what 
you mean, Rick, isn't it?  Isn't it?"  He knew what she 
meant.



He wasn't dumb.
He snorted and turned away, heading for the bathroom.
Angelina shrugged and sank into the nearest chair.  What 
was the point of arguing?  But she was right, she knew why 
Rick refused to bring in the police.
Half the Haitians in New York were illegal immigrants.  
They struggled over to Miami in old, leaking boats, having 
paid a lifetime's savings for their passage.  A few drowned 
en route, others were rounded up on their arrival and sent 
to Krome Avenue Detention Center.  The lucky ones made 
contact with friends and relatives and went underground as 
quickly as possible.  Some stayed in Miami, the others 
headed north those with a little money to Queens or 
Manhattan, the rest to Brooklyn.
They lived ten to a room in crumbling tenements of brick or 
trembled behind triple locked doors in high-rise 
apartments.  They took grey, 
menial jobs that paid a dollar an hour, sixteen hours a 
day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
Their streets were choked with filth, their neighbours were 
winos and junkies, their rooms were unheated, and they 
shared their food with rats and cockroaches.
It was better than Haiti.
And nobody wanted trouble with the police.
Rick, on the other hand, didn't give a shit about who got 
sent back home and who stayed with the rats.  Ten years 
ago, Angelina would have said he cared a lot.  He was on 
committees for the rights of Haitian refugees; he kept his 
Congressman up late writing letters about the latest 
violation of the immigration laws; he collected money to 
send to would-be refugees from Jeremie and
Cap Hai'tien.  Ten years ago, she'd have said he did it all 
for love. Now she knew better.  Now she knew he did it all 
for Rick.
And he'd been doing it for Rick right from the start.
Haitians had been a godsend to him: a ready-made ethnic 
community on his doorstep, all his to poke and prod and 
label.  He was the great white doctor and they were his 
patients.
Since Baby Doc's accession in 1972 they had come to him in 
droves, and he had built a reputation on their broad, 
uncomplaining backs.  But, like all reputations, it was as 
precarious as yesterday's goodwill.  He walked the streets 
of Fort Greene, Flatbush or Bedford Stuyvesant with care 
not out of fear of muggers, but out of nervousness that 
someone might see through him and walk on past on the other 
side.
Without his tame blacks.
Rick was as good as dead.  If his credibility went, just 
once, he knew he would never get it back again, not in a 
hundred years, not if he called on all the ha and all the 
ancestors in Guinea for their help. They confided in him 
because he was an honorary neg' beneath the skin of a 
blanc.  But if he betrayed them, if he brought the police 
or, worse still, the immigration men into the nooks and 
crannies of their close-knit lives, they would quickly 
close ranks against him.  And that.
Angelina knew, might very well destroy him.

Unless, of course, something else destroyed him first.  She 
thought she knew what that something else might be.  And 
she thought Filius had become involved.
She heard Rick's feet drum down the passage once more.
The front door slammed, shaking its single pane of glass.
Silence filled the apartment again, dark and moody.  
Angelina leaned back in her chair and sighed.  Maybe Rick 
was just jealous of Filius.
Maybe he wished he too could have a seventeen-year-old as 
hot as a chilli pepper.  A little bien avec who could give 
a man children as easily as sneezing.  Who wanted to.
Jealous or not, it looked as though he had gone for the 
night.  She would have to eat dinner alone.  She stood up, 
feeling useless and lazy.  Why not just microwave something 
straight from the freezer, eat it watching TV?  The thought 
pulled her up with a jolt.  The cassette was still in the 
VCR, but nothing could induce her to watch it again.
She wrinkled her nose.  The strange smell was still hanging 
about, she was sure of it.
Maybe she should do some cleaning.  She decided to start in 
the morning.
Monday, 28 September 9 a.m.
Rick had not returned.
Angelina lay flat on her back in bed, staring at a patch of 
damp on the grey ceiling.  Pale sunlight fell across her 
eyes like stale water, hard and grey through the 
interstices of irregularly slatted blinds.
She remembered warm sunlight long ago, strong in the early 
mornings against her skin, long days at
Cap-Hai'tien, summers on Ibo
Beach.  And Tontons Macoutes in cheap dark glasses watching 
them, watching her father, waiting.
Restless eyes behind dark lenses watching.
Breakfast was coffee, black without sugar.  She sipped it 
slowly, feeling it creep inside her, hot and bitter, like 
her memories of
Port-au-Prince, like her life here in Brooklyn.  She 
emptied the cafetiere.  Rick did not return.
She started cleaning in the bedroom.  First the bed, then 
the two closets, finally the carpet and paintwork.  What 
began as a quick tidying operation rapidly grew into an 
all-out onslaught on years of dirt.  She scrubbed and 
polished and vacuumed her way from room to room, as though 
the physical act of cleaning had become an exorcism. She 
was driving out ghosts, pale creatures in dark glasses, 
Baron-Samedi and Baron-la-Croix, Madame Brigitte and 
Marinette, all theguedes, all the spirits of the dead:
her dead.  Rick's dead, all the unborn children that 
shivered in the empty, angry spaces between them.
By noon, she had scoured both bedrooms and the bathroom.
After a short lunch break, she decided to start on the 
living room.
At first, all went smoothly.
She was well into her stride by now, working to a fluent 
rhythm that turned each chore into an act of grace.
Filius had moved the furniture round a little, enough to 
irritate her. She liked things in their proper places.
Bending, she pushed the sofa back against the wall.  It was 
heavy and awkward, and she wondered why Filius had ever 
bothered moving it in the first place.
She paused for breath, sinking onto the sofa.  As she did 
so, she sensed that something was wrong.  Her eyes circled 
the room, nervously scanning the familiar for evidence of 
something out of key.  A chair a little to the left of its 
accustomed position: but it wasn't that.  Her Minton vase 
on the wrong side of the mantel.  Not that.  The Moroccan 
rug about two feet away from its usual place.
No, not that.  Or, at least..
It was at her feet.  She had seen it as she moved the sofa.  
The old wine stain in the carpet had gone.  It had been 
there for years, unlovely and ineradicable.  The rug 
normally covered it.
On her knees now, she went carefully over the carpet.  
There was no sign that there had ever been a stain there.  
With an effort, she moved the sofa to the left, then to the 
right.  Nothing.
She picked up the rug.  Nothing.
She crossed the room and moved one of the chairs.
There should have been a stain here too, just to the left 
of the fireplace, where their old tabby cat Baron Samedi 
had once peed profusely in protest at being locked into the 
room overnight.  But there was nothing.
The more closely she looked, the more certain she became 
that this was not their carpet after all.  Theirs had been 
a plain mushroom-coloured moquette that they had picked up 
cheap at John Mullins' furniture store on Myrtle Avenue 
six, maybe seven years ago.  It had already been past its 
best.  This one was the same colour, but not so badly worn.
Why would Filius want to replace their carpet?  She pulled 
the sofa away from the wall again, leaving a wide area free 
at the back of the room.  The carpet had been tacked down 
lightly along the skirting board.  She pulled hard and it 
came up without resistance.  She worked her way along the 
wall as far as the corner, then round the next side, 
pulling tacks out of the floorboards, easing the carpet 
loose.
Taking one corner of fabric in her hand, she pulled back, 
rolling it up to expose the floorboards underneath.  Bare 
boards at first, and then ... She moved more slowly, 
feeling horror seep into her veins like poison.  Images 
from a week before flashed through her brain in dull, 
ruinous succession.
She heard the petro drums tapping in the night, saw blood 
in a warm stream pouring down against jaundiced, nervous 
light.
The wooden floor was covered in a dark crimson stain.  It 
started near the wall and spread in all directions, beneath 
the carpet.  She rolled the moquette further back, 
uncovering foot after foot of reddened floorboard.  The 
back of the carpet was blotched with red in places,
where the fresh blood had soaked back up from saturated 
wood.  As she exposed more floorboards, the fusty smell 
rose to her nostrils more strongly than ever.
That it was blood she did not for a moment doubt.  She had 
seen it in the film: Filius with the bowl of blood, his 
dark libation to old, unspeakable gods.  And she knew the 
smell almost sweet, faintly cloying, insinuating itself 
between flesh and bone.  She had smelt it before, rancid, 
profuse and all-pervading, deep in the underground cells of 
the old police headquarters in PortauPrince.
Someone had tampered with the floorboards.  They had been 
torn up and nailed clumsily back in place.  Fresh splinters 
showed like raw wounds through the stain.  Bent nails 
betrayed an awkward haste.
She went to the kitchen and took a large screwdriver from 
the toolbox in the utility cupboard.  Its flat blade wedged 
easily between two floorboards.  She prised one up, nails 
creaking in protest, blood-soaked wood rough against her 
flesh, a fingernail tearing.
The stench that came flooding up was unsupportable.  
Angelina gagged and pressed one hand hard against her 
mouth.  She rose and staggered to the window, flinging it 
open.  The air that entered was tainted by nothing worse 
than traffic fumes and industrial waste.
Behind her in the room, she sensed an older, richer 
pollution.
She found a scarf in a drawer and tied it round her mouth 
and nose before returning to the patch of reddened floor.
Steeling herself, she thrust the screwdriver down hard into 
the narrow fissure between the next two planks.  The nails 
groaned as they tore away from the joists.  The hole in the 
floor became wider.  They were on the ground floor here: 
underneath lay nothing but foundations.
Two years earlier, while installing a new gas fire, workmen 
had taken up some floorboards in this room.  Angelina 
remembered a low, walled chamber, smaller than a cellar, 
about five feet deep and twenty square. Its floor had been 
covered in rubble, in which the workmen had found a broken 
clay pipe and two old newspapers dating from 1890.
There was insufficient light to see down through the hole 
she had made. She could feel her body trembling: she did 
not want to look.  But she knew she had no choice.
The flashlight beneath the sink was next to useless, and 
there were no spare batteries.
Then she remembered that
Rick kept a
Maglite beside the bed, which he sometimes used for reading 
at night. Small though it was, it had a powerful beam.
Maglite in hand, she kneeled on the floor beside the gaping 
hole.
The stench filled the room now, stale, corrupt and 
nauseating.  She held her breath and twisted the 
flashlight's head to switch it on.  A hard beam of white 
light stabbed down into the darkness.
At first all seemed a jumble, like the pieces of a half-
assembled jigsaw.  A mixture of colours, shapes and dull 
edged madnesses resolved itself slowly into the lineaments 
of a nightmare.  First a shoe, then a trouser-cuff, and 
finally a hand defined themselves against the trembling 
light, mere inches below the floorboards.  The light swung
this way and that, like a searchlight plucking bombers from 
an entangled sky.  More hands, a decayed face, teeth jagged 
in a lipless grimace, naked limbs, clothed limbs, more 
faces, more hands, more feet, a tattered jumble-sale of 
death, bodies cast aside like abandoned dreams.  Her hand 
lost its grip and the flashlight fell helplessly into the 
aperture.
As she stumbled to her feet, she felt acrid vomit rising in 
her chest. She staggered sideways, tearing the scarf away 
from her mouth.  Again and again she threw up, until her 
stomach was empty.  Crouched on all fours, she shivered, 
sobbing and retching uncontrollably.  And all the time her 
brain screamed with the last image it had seen before she 
dropped the light: a face inches from hers, cheeks streaked 
with blood, eyes open and staring.  Filius's cheeks, 
Filius's eyes, distorted but unmistakable.
Fumbling in the semi darkness, she reached out a hand to 
touch his cheeks.  His skin was cold, cold and dry as 
parchment.  He did not move or utter a sound; but as her 
fingers found his lips, she felt a trace of breath, a faint 
and trembling thing, softer than the softest breeze, 
scarcely a thing at all.  But it was a breath.
Reason told her it could not be true: but she had felt cold 
air against her skin and she knew that either reason was 
lying or the truth was beyond any reason she had ever 
known.
CHAPTER THREE
Filius could not be reached.
He was in a deep coma, a score of only three on the Glasgow 
scale.
The police took him straight to the Cumberland Hospital in 
the Housing Projects, where he had to wait on a stretcher 
in emergency for almost two hours before being seen.  Once 
admitted, he was put through a battery of tests.
Dopamine and dobutamine were administered, a CT scan was 
ordered, and blood was sent for immediate checks.
By early evening he was still comatose.  Heartbeat, 
respiration and body temperature were abnormally low.  
There were signs of uraemia and pulmonary oedema.  His lips 
and extremities were cyanotic.  Electrical potential in the 
brain was barely detectable.  He was hanging to life by the 
thinnest of threads.
Angelina accompanied him to the hospital and remained by 
his side through the evening.
His survival had become a sort of talisman for her.  She 
talked to him in Creole, the way her old nurse had talked 
to her in the long summer nights back home.  But he did not 
respond.  The police let her stay in case he recovered 
consciousness enough to speak, knowing that, if he did, he 
might use Creole instead of English.
Just before midnight his vital signs began to fade.
The doctor in charge ordered him put on a ventilator.  He 
then went off duty.  The orderly responsible for bringing 
the ventilator was called to emergency.  By the time they 
got the machine to his room, Filius had been dead for 
twenty minutes.
The orderly pulled a sheet across his face, stark white 
with the name of the hospital stitched across the top.
Angelina stayed a little longer, watching him in silence, 
waiting to
help with the formalities of identification.
She felt terribly alone.  For the first time she realized 
that she too might die in Brooklyn.
They took her to the 88th
Precinct station house, a dilapidated building on the 
corner of Classon and De Kalb, just down from the Emanuel 
Baptist Church.  From outside, it looked like a fortress, 
guarded, protected, afraid.
It was ugly and square, with a single round tower pointing 
like an accusing finger at the night sky.
Angelina had never been there before, but its dirty red 
brick walls and grey stone windows felt familiar.  Police 
stations had been part of her life once.  She knew only too 
well their sounds and smells, their sudden, chilling 
silences.
She was tired, but every time she closed her eyes the show 
began again, the bizarre horror movie inside her head.
Someone gave her a couple of tranquillizers, but they just 
made the images go fuzzy.
She wanted to throw up, but her stomach was empty.  The 
thought of food nauseated her.
Somehow, she was aware that people were talking to her, 
aware that they wanted her attention;
but she felt as though she had been encased in a block of 
ice, freezing and isolating her, preventing her from 
responding to the outside
world.
A policeman in plain clothes who said his name was 
Lieutenant Abrams explained that they could not let her go 
home.
The apartment had been sealed off; there were officers 
there now, removing bodies, sifting for fingerprints and 
bloodstains, taking photographs.  She wasn't under arrest, 
but they wanted to question her as soon as possible.  Did 
she have any relatives to go to?  She shook her head.  
Friends?  She shook her head again.
Abrams told the desk sergeant to fix her with a place to 
stay for the night.  Desk sergeants are not social 
secretaries.
The man on duty, Moskowitz, would not have called himself a 
racist; he just had a low opinion of black people.  It did 
not matter to him what Angelina had just gone through, and 
he did not want to know.  She looked like just another 
black hooker waiting for her man.  He arranged for her to 
spend the night at the Regal, a cheap hotel on Myrtle 
Avenue.
The Regal was anything but.
Most of its guests were cockroaches, the rest single-parent 
families on welfare.  Social workers called it a halfway 
house.  Halfway between squalor and poverty.
Its long, echoing corridors were lit at exaggerated 
intervals by bare light bulbs trapped behind dusty wire 
cages.  The green and white tiles that covered its public 
areas were cracked and smeared with dirt.  It looked and 
smelled like a public toilet.  It was the sort of place 
that would take a single mulatto woman in at one o'clock in 
the morning without asking questions.

Somebody called a police physician who was busy blood-
testing drunks at the rear of the station.  He accompanied 
her to the hotel and gave her an intramuscular shot of 
diazepam.  In a matter of moments she felt as though she 
could have slept in the alley outside.  Sleep came crashing 
in like waves against a coral reef.
And with sleep, nightmares.
She could not be sure where one ended and the next began.
Now she was in her father's police cell, listening to the 
Tontons whisper in the corridor; now she was suffocating, 
buried alive in a coffin made of splintered floorboards;
and now they were raising her from the grave, men in cheap 
sunglasses, feeding her a paste of sweet potatoes, cane 
syrup and concombre zombi, baptizing her with oil before a 
cross of sablier wood.
But when she woke one dream stood out in memory: she had 
found herself walking in a dark, entangled jungle, between 
trees as tall as buildings, in ribbed and perpetual 
twilight.  This was not Haiti, this was Africa, to which 
the spirits of all the dead returned.
She could hear things grunt and slither in the shadows, but 
when she turned there was nothing to be seen but trees and 
creepers.  She knew that she had been walking for weeks, 
but the rain forest had not come to an end.  The further 
she marched, the denser it became.  Rick was somewhere in 
front of her, out of sight; in their rear, Filius came 
creeping slowly on all fours, blind and deaf and dumb, his 
keen nose following their scent.
She came to a wall of roughly hewn stone blocks, so high 
she could not see its top.  When she tried to walk round 
it, it seemed to go on for ever.  At last she came to a 
tall golden door set deep within the stone.  It felt heavy 
against her hand, but as she pushed, it fell slowly open.  
Stepping across the threshold, she came awake with a start 
and found herself in a strange bed, blinking at shadows on 
a strange ceiling.
Lieutenant Abrams was waiting for her downstairs in the 
lobby.
He'd seen her apartment, smelt the odour of decay: he would 
have waited much longer.
"You want to talk here?"  he asked.
She looked round at the damp, decaying tiles, the hard-
backed chairs. A Puerto Rican woman passed, a howling baby 
in her arms, four older children clinging to her skirt.
"I was thinking more along the lines of the Waldorf 
Astoria," said Angelina.
"I'm not being sarcastic.  I just thought it might be to 
your taste."
"I'm sorry.  I've already bawled out Sergeant Moskowitz.  
He's more used to ..."  He stumbled to a halt, embarrassed.
"Call girls?"
"People in trouble."

"I am in trouble." 

He nodded. "Sorry.  Yes, you are.  Look, there's a diner across the 
street that serves real coffee."

"What time is it?"
"Past twelve.  You sleep well?"
"No.  I had dreams.  Can you tell me what's happening?"
"Relax.  The doc gave you a shot.  You had a bad time 
yesterday.
How are you feeling now?"
"Numb.  I... Does it have to be coffee?"
He shook his head.
"No.  How about a milkshake?"
She smiled.  Not a lot, but it counted as a smile.
"I was thinking more along the lines of a Jack
Daniels."
He returned her smile.
"I know, but the doctor "Fuck the doctor."
He pretended to be shocked.
"OK, lady, whatever you say.  Jack Daniels it is.  I know a 
place on De Kalb.  My car's outside."
He stood up, his eyes quietly fixed on her face.
She'd been pretty once, still was in a faded kind of way.  
Pretty and sad.
Her small mouth turned down at the corners, her eyes were 
like quiet windows across which an unseen hand had drawn 
pale shades.  He liked her accent: a little like French, 
but with something added, something darker.
He wondered what sort of dreams she'd had.  They didn't 
tell you how to handle dreams in police academy.  He looked 
round at the tidy shabbiness of the halfway house.  Nobody 
told you about them, but dreams were what mattered most to 
people in a place like this.  Some dreams they needed just 
to stay alive;
others they spent their whole lives running to get away 
from.
She followed him across the street to his car.  A cold 
drizzle had been falling for some time, a constant shower 
falling from a slate coloured sky.  It had come out of the 
north-east, down from Long Island Sound. The streets were 
grey and dishonest and empty.
Whichever way she looked, she saw nothing but the rain and 
the concrete.  A starving cat scurried past looking for 
shelter.
She'd seen him watching her, guessed what he had been 
thinking.  He was thin, Jewish, too intellectual looking 
for a cop.
She thought he must be thirty-four, thirty-five.
His jet-black hair was thinning at the temples, there was a 
sprinkling of stubble on his chin.  He looked a little 
lost.
They drove slowly east along Myrtle Avenue, Abrams silent, 
unsure of her.  She sat forward in her seat, staring 
blankly through the windscreen at the usual dreary streets.  
Tin cans and broken bottles, dog turds and old syringes: 
the rain soaked into a bent and crumpled universe of fear 
and loathing, block after block of hardened rage and love 
grown bitter and useless.
In a matter of hours, it had all grown cold and unfamiliar, 
and she realized, as though for the first time, how deeply 
she detested it. She turned her face away, looking for 
sunshine;
but there was only the rain and the concrete and the 
addicts huddled in doorways outside the Kingsview methadone 
centre.
They turned right on Classon, past the precinct house, down 
to De Kalb. He pulled in on the next block and double 
parked.  She realized that he hadn't spoken since they'd 
got in the car.
CHAPTER FOUR
The bar was half Puerto Rican, half Italian.  That was why 
they'd called it Murphy's.  It was almost empty: a handful 
of graphics students from the Pratt Institute, an off-duty 
cop, a couple of black call girls in from Bed-Stuy for the 
afternoon shift, an old Sicilian talking quietly in rural 
Italian to the man behind the bar.  Low lights, narrow 
booths with plastic leather seats, faded notices in Italian 
and Spanish, a sour whisky smell, the small ghosts of 
insignificant dreams.  In baroque, rusted mirrors behind 
the bar refracted images of coloured bottles shimmered 
helplessly.


"You like this place?"  she asked.
"No," he answered.
"But it's quiet.  No jukebox, no TV.  We need to talk."
She asked for a Jack Daniels.  He brought a bottle and two 
glasses and set them on the table between them.
"How come a nice girl like you got started drinking this 
stuff?"
"I'm not a nice girl."
"No?"
"No."
They were in shadows, in their own booth, at the back of 
the bar.
On the wall a dim bulb hid its light in a dusty shade.
He poured her a full glass and half-filled his own.  Her 
hand shook as she raised the glass to her mouth.  It 
rattled jaggedly against her teeth.  He said nothing, 
watched her press the glass hard against her lips, whisky 
spilling down her chin.  Her eyes were bright with


tears.
There was rain in her hair.
"When did you last see your 
husband?"  he asked. "I don't 
understand ..."


"You said you were married when we questioned you 
yesterday." "Did I?  I suppose I did.  I don't 
remember."
"You said his name was


Rick, that he taught at
LIU."
"That's right.  He's an anthropologist.  A big man, very 
important.
He runs courses in Caribbean and African religions.
Sometimes he screws his students."  She put the glass down.  
Somehow she'd managed to drink almost half.  She noticed 
that he had not touched his.
Her eyes were wicked and lizard green, wide with tiny 
flecks of amber on the remotest edges of the pupils.  The 
flecks vanished like dust in the least shadow.
Hooded eyes, drugged with sleep: sleep out of which she had 
not awakened in over forty years.  Sea-dark eyes, bereft, 
disenchanted, lonely, soaked with dreams.
She fixed them on his without embarrassment, unblinking, 
pleading for some sort of vision transcending the 
simplicities of sight.
He looked at her with a sad expression.
"You said you had an argument two nights ago.  Is that 
right?"
"An argument?  Yes, I suppose.  He walked out.  He's done 
it before." "What about?"  He hesitated.
"The argument: was it about one of his students?"
She lifted the glass, gulped at the drink, set it down 
again.
"No, I don't think so.  I can't remember.  We don't argue 
about that any longer.  What's the point?  I tell him I'm 
leaving, he says "Go home to Haiti".  What sort of choice 
is that?"  She looked at him.  Why was she talking like 
this, parading her weaknesses in a cheap bar?
"I think ... I think it was about Filius."
The man who died last night?  The one in your apartment?  
Filius Narcisse."
She winced.  She didn't want to think about the apartment.  
At the bar, a student laughed uneasily.  A Jamaican man 
came in and started talking with the call girls.  Angelina 
felt goose pimples walk across her
back.
"Yes," she said.  She wanted to get up and walk out.
leave all this behind, forget anything had ever happened.
"We argued about Filius.  He'd been missing.  I wanted to 
call the police.
Rick said "no"."
"Did he say why?"



She shrugged.
"Does it matter?  He thought it might get some people into 
trouble." "What people?"
She hesitated, then shrugged.
"Haitians, poor people.  He thought you'd make trouble for 
them if you started asking questions."


"What sort 
of 
trouble?" 
She 
shrugged 
again. "Who 
knows?"
"Was he 
worried?"


"I don't know.  Maybe.  
Yes.
I think he was."  She 
knew he was. Why was 
the truth so hard to 
tell? "What about?"


"He didn't tell me."  The lie came easily, like rage.
She refilled the small glass almost to the brim.  Her hand 
was steadier now.
"Had something happened?"
"Happened?"  She felt frightened, trapped.
"Yes.  You said something yesterday about a video.
About this man Filius.  You seemed afraid.  You were ... 
incoherent." He hesitated.
"Look, I understand.  You were agitated."  He paused, 
toying with his glass.  He had not drunk anything yet.
Tell me about it.  Tell me about the video."
She explained as well as she could, her words stumbling and 
hesitant. He listened carefully, sensing the horror in her 
voice, seeing it in her eyes.
"What did you find?"  she asked finally.
"Find?"
She held her breath.  Her heart was making a racket, she 
was sure he could hear.
"In my apartment.  In the living room."  Beneath the 
floorboards, that was what she meant.  But she couldn't say 
it.  Part of her still hoped it had all been a nightmare.
He hesitated.
"You know what we found.


What you found."
"How many?"  she asked in a small, hesitant voice.
He took his time.
"I spoke with Doctor Taylor at the mortuary late this 
morning. Altogether, they brought in nine bodies.
Four had died recently, within the past two months; the 
rest were much older.  Taylor thinks they'd been taken 
from local cemeteries.  Some were still in coffins."
She could smell it even here, the stench of decay.
It had followed her from Africa, it was here with her in 
the bar. "Does Rick know?  Have you told him?"
Abrams looked hard at her.
He was feeling tired.  He'd been up most of last night, 
taken a few hours' sleep, and been back at work since 
nine.  Something told him this was going to be a bad case.
"Mrs.  Hammel, I have some bad news for you."
She didn't seem to respond.
"Do you understand?  Bad news about your husband."
"About Rick?"
He nodded.
"He ... His body was found early this morning.  You were 
still asleep, we ... didn't want to put you through 
another ordeal.  We identified him from documents in his 
wallet.  The pictures matched.  Of course, you'll have to 
come to the mortuary later to make a formal 
identification; but not just yet."
She said nothing at first, just stared at the table, at 
the glass of whisky.  He hated this part of his job, the 
intimacy of bereavement that it forced on him.
"Where?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Where was he found?"
"In the park.  Fort Greene, I mean, not Prospect.  Under a 
tree near the monument.  He'd been ..."
He paused.  There was no easy way to say this.
"Someone killed him," he said.
"A jogger found him early this morning.  The body wasn't 
far from the path, there'd been no real attempt to conceal 
it.
He ..."  Again he hesitated.
He'd been there, seen the remains.
"His throat had been cut.



And ... his tongue had been ripped out."
Someone flushed the toilet just behind their booth.  A door 
slammed upstairs.  A voice cried out plaintively in 
Spanish.
She looked up.  He had expected tears or numbness, but not 
this.
She was looking straight at him.  She was staring into his 
eyes.  And she was smiling.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rain fell all that day.  In the streets, an unending 
downpour turned the world to water cradled in a curious dim 
light.  The gutters were fat and swollen, choked with 
filth.  Beneath leaden pavements the sewers boomed with a 
hollow, tormented ringing.
Angelina accompanied Reuben Abrams to the mortuary in Kings 
County Hospital.  He wanted her to make the formal 
identification of Rick's body.  They parked near the Trauma 
and Emergency entrance and walked through slanting rain to 
the mortuary.  It lay on their right, up a short flight of 
steps.
There was no sign of death here, no reek of formaldehyde, 
just a plain lobby flanked by office doors.  Reuben took 
Angelina through a door on the left marked "Chief Medical 
Examiner'.  A sign read "Identification Hours 9.00 a.m. - 
4.00 p.m."  Angelina wondered what happened to people who 
died outside office hours.
A door on the left was marked "Brooklyn Homicide Police 
Personnel Only'.  On the walls, posters offered advice to 
the newly bereaved.
There were leaflets on a low wooden table.  A clerk came 
out of one of the other offices and greeted Abrams with a 
casual familiarity that said they had both been through 
this before.  He turned and glanced at Angelina, a small, 
sad-eyed man in spectacles.
"Mrs.  Hammel?"
She nodded.  The clerk looked morosely at her.
"Will you step into my office, please?"
Her heart had begun to beat, triggered by the sterility of 
her surroundings, the absence of any real death in the air.
This polite air was too thin for her to breathe.
At a cluttered desk, she was asked to sign a book, then 
requested to prove her identity.  The clerk filled out a 
sheet headed "Personal Identification of Body', three 
copies one for the case file, one for the NYPD Missing 
Persons Bureau, one for the DA.  She had never thought 
death could be this complicated.
"Mrs.  Hammel," the clerk said, "I'm going to show you 
photograph of a man whose body was found this morning in 
Fort Greene Park.  Take your time.
If you can make a positive identification that it is indeed 
your husband, all you will have to do is sign this sheet.  
That will complete these formalities."
She shook her head.
"No photograph," she said.

Her voice was firm, but her heart was shaking.
"I want to see him."
"Mrs.  Hammel, I don't recommend .. ."
The lieutenant placed a hand on the clerk's arm.  The clerk 
sighed. "Very well," he said.
"We have a room downstairs with a window through which you 
may view the remains.  I'll ask them to prepare the body."
Five long minutes later, they were ready.  The clerk led 
Angelina to the viewing chamber.  When she was seated, he 
drew a curtain aside. Beyond the narrow window, in a tiny, 
white tiled chamber, beneath cold lights that buzzed and 
flickered fitfully, half her life lay naked on a stone 
slab.
Someone had combed Rick's hair back hard from his forehead.
There were traces of dandruff on his temples.  His chin was 
dark with stubble.  They had covered his torso with a stiff 
white sheet and propped his head on a rubber pillow.  He 
looked uncomfortable, even with his eyes closed.  His lips 
were cut and bruised where his killer had struggled to 
remove the tongue.  On one cheek a knife had left a ragged 
scar, its edges raw but bloodless.
He was pale and he was changed, but he was still Rick: the 
old Rick she had loved once, so long ago it hurt to 
remember, the Rick of recent years for whom she had lost 
all feeling.  It made no difference now, no difference at 
all.  She nodded her head once and made for the door.
Abrams took her by the elbow and guided her back to the 
offices upstairs.  She leaned on him heavily.  Her limbs 
felt like water.  The sad-eyed man asked her to sign the 
identification form, indicating the spaces with a grimy 
fingernail.  For the first time since her honeymoon, 
Angelina was conscious that the name she used was someone 
else's.  As the official bent forward to retrieve the 
papers, she observed that he had the word "God' tattooed on 
the back of his right hand and "Jesus' on the left.  He 
came round the desk and shook her hand, murmuring stale 
condolences in a stale voice.  She noticed that he had bad 
breath.
At the door, he took her hand again and pressed something 
into it, a piece of folded paper.
Outside in the lobby, she opened it out.  It was a small 
pamphlet, heavy purple ink on pink paper.


"Eternal Life with the Lord Jesus'.
She crumpled it into a ball and threw it down on the 
stark linoleum. "Is he allowed to do that?"
she asked.  She felt the sort of anger that makes no 
sense and hurts because it has no meaning and no outlet.
He shrugged.
"It does no harm," he said.
"But if you ..."


"I don't think about it," he answered sharply.  He took her 
arm and led her outside.  It was still raining.
She did not want to go to another bar.  They stayed in the 
Ford and drove in silence through dizzy rain-drenched 
streets, like careless lovers without a bed, riding out the 
storm.  He thought about her smile in the bar, when he told 
her her husband had been found in a park with his throat 
cut and his tongue ripped out.  She looked tired: he was 
willing to take that as an excuse.
Darkness fell, quiet and drab.  The rain still tumbled 
down, cold and tinged with sodden blue and golden lights.  
It fell in a steady cascade on the shining towers of 
downtown Manhattan, on bars and theatres and fashionable, 
grey-walled galleries, on glass and marble, perspex and 
bronze, lies and postures and simulacra.  It fell without a 
thought on the dark tenements of Harlem, on the angry Babel 
towers of Brooklyn and the south Bronx, on the Housing 
Projects and the railroads, on wood and rust and broken 
glass, on more lies, more postures, more simulacra.
They drove uneasily through sparkling silver streets empty 
of people. The rain and lights struggled to make magic out 
of squalor;
but nothing could dispel the darkness here.  Their world 
was a harsh reality no wand could turn to fairyland.  Rain 
drummed on the metal roof of the car and streamed across 
the blurred windscreen.
"Do you know who might have killed him?"  Abrams asked.
He looked straight ahead, not wanting to look at her.
She remained silent for a while, watching the raindrops 
settle and disperse.  What would a Jewish policeman 
understand of the reasons for Rick's death?
"No," she said.
"No-one hated him that much."
"You think this was done out of hate?"
"No.  I told you, no-one hated Rick that much.  He must 
have run into someone, some crazy person."
He reached out a hand and rubbed a hole in the mist on the 
screen.
"Some of the bodies we found in your apartment had been 
mutilated," he said.
"Some had ears missing.  Some had had their tongues torn 
out.  Or cut out, it makes very little difference."
She did not answer.  They were driving west on Atlantic 
Avenue, beneath the dark elevated tracks of the Long Island 
Rail Road.
Turn right on Portland," she said.
He didn't need to ask where she wanted to go.  Portland led 
straight down to Fort Greene Park.
There's nothing there," he said.
"I want to see."
"It's dark.  It's raining.  There's nothing to see."  He 
had been off duty for two hours now.  What was he doing, 
driving through the rain with this woman whose life had 
just been stripped bare?  He should be
looking for her husband's killer.  Except that he was 
convinced she knew something: a name, a motive, an 
incident.
And maybe something else, something he could not even guess 
at.
He remembered her quiet smile in the bar.
She turned her face to him, and as she did so he saw her 
eyes reflected in the clouded windscreen.
"Please," she said.  The lights of a passing truck wiped 
her reflection from the glass.  He turned the car.
The park had no gates to keep people out at night.  A lot 
of winos and addicts spent the hours of darkness there, 
drinking Thunderbird or shooting up on heroin.  Tonight it 
would be empty Tonight the rain would keep things clean.  
For a little while.
They were already soaking by the time he found the path.  
He carried the flashlight that he always kept in the boot.  
His Browning38 nestled softly against his ribs, snug in its 
little pancake holster.
"It was down here," he said.
"Near the monument."
A line of lights shone like dimestore haloes all along the 
path.  Their fake promise of warmth in the darkness only 
served to make Reuben's sense of desolation sharper.
He didn't want to be here.
They walked slowly down the path, Reuben in front, blinking 
hard against the rain, trying to form a pattern out of 
light and death and darkness.  Angelina followed numbly, 
unsure of her reasons for wanting to come here.  Rick's 
death was still fresh, too fresh, like snow on a withered 
field.  She still did not know how she should react.  There 
would be a funeral, his parents would come down from Boston 
and his brother from Sag Harbor.  There would be faculty 
and students; some of them would shed more tears than she.  
She was the withered field;
for a few days, his death would make her white and 
gleaming.  For a few days.
Reuben found the place at last, a tree set back about three 
yards from the path.  The rain had erased all traces of 
that morning's work: footprints, trowel marks, plaster, the 
small holes in which measurement rods had been placed by 
the photographers.
"We found him here," he said, playing the flashlight over 
the ground. It was coarse and sodden, clumps of trampled 
grass in a sea of mud.
Angelina felt a cold ripple of despair climb to her heart.  
She fought against it, breathing hard.  She hadn't loved 
him, not for years; they'd had no future, not even in acts 
of betrayal.  So why this wounding, this need to weep?  Not 
for him, surely.  For herself then. She had not wanted 
things to end this way.  But it was better than nothing.  
Wasn't it?
There's nothing here now," he said.
"You see?"
She did not answer.  She could see well enough: just mud 
and a scraping together of memories.
By tomorrow there would be nothing at all.  She thought she 
was crying, but when she reached hand to her cheek, she 
found her face was wet with rain, not tears.
"Leave me alone," she snapped, surprised by her own 
impatience.
"I need to think."
He said nothing, just turned and handed the flashlight to 
her, then walked away without a word.
The light stabbed like a thin blade through the thick 
curtain of rain, sweeping over the sodden ground.  There 
should have been something else, she thought, something 
more significant than this.  Rick would not have chosen to 
die in a place like this.  It was too common, too 
anonymous.
She turned to go.  As she did so, the beam fell on 
something at the very edge of vision.  Crossing quickly to 
it, she stooped and reached out her hand.  It was half-
buried in the mud, but it lifted out
easily.
For more than a minute, she held it on the palm of her 
hand, letting the cold rain wash it clean.  She knew what 
it was, of course.  How could she not know?  But she had 
not thought to find it here.
She looked round.  Abrams was nowhere to be seen.  He would 
know nothing of her discovery:
she knew it had been left there after the police had packed 
up and gone, left for her to stumble on.
With a shudder, she slipped the object into the pocket of 
her coat.
CHAPTER SIX
In the car, she started shivering uncontrollably.  Reuben 
switched the heater on to full and turned the car back out 
onto De Kalb.
"You'd better take me back to the hotel," she said.
"I'm sorry about all this.  Sorry I got you wet.  You were 
right: there was nothing there."
"I don't think that hotel's such a good idea.  Not in your 
condition. You've had a tough day.  The next few days may 
be even tougher."
"Can I go back to my apartment yet?"
Reuben slipped across Fulton onto Flatbush Avenue.  He 
shook his
head.
"No way.  The guys in Forensics are still taking it apart.  
I'm
sorry.
They'll put it back together again the way it was."  He 
paused.
Nowhere went back the way it had been.


"Do you want to go there again anyway?"
She reached down and took off her shoes.  They were full 
of water and her stockings were saturated.  She thought 
she would never get dry again.
"No," she murmured.



"Never."
"Any friends?  Relatives?"
She had friends, but no-one she wanted to be with right 
now.
As for relatives ... She shook her head.
He looked at her.  Like a drowned rat, he thought.  Then he 
glanced down at himself.  Steam had started to rise from 
the leg of his trousers nearest the heater.
He burst out laughing.  She followed his eye, saw the 
steam, then glanced at herself.  Water vapour rose from her 
as well.
She threw her head back and shrieked with laughter.  She 
had never laughed so hard before.
Her laughter rose in pitch, breathless, out of control, 
verging on hysteria.  And as suddenly she was crying, her 
body convulsed, her chest heaving in pain.  Reuben drew in 
to the kerb.  He sat by helplessly, unable to comfort her.  
The car filled with vapour, like a steam room, no longer 
laughable.  He reached over and switched off the heater.
Slowly, her tears subsided.
Her self-control returned.  She wiped her face, but it was 
futile, everything was wet.
"We'll go back to my place," he said.  He headed south 
towards West Flatbush.
"It's irregular, but what the hell?  I have to spend time 
with you over the next few days anyway, so I may as well 
have you where I can keep an eye on you.  Can you cook?"
She shrugged.
"So-so.  What I do best is paint.  I like to paint."
"You like to paint?  We'll save that for later.  For the 
moment cooking would be fine.  Even soso cooking.  Regard 
it as rent.
Anything you need?"


To cook with?"
"No, for yourself.  All your stuff's still at your 
apartment." She shrugged.
"I could do with a shower.  And a change of 
clothes."


I'll call by my sister's after I get changed myself.
She's fat, but she used to be thin.  About your size.  She 
never throws anything.  Lives in hope, I guess."
He wondered why he was doing this, giving her such special 
attention. It wasn't that she had lost her husband: she was 
hardly the first attractive widow he had met in the course 
of his work.  But she seemed so strangely alone, more alone 
than anyone he had ever met.  And she had smiled that 
mysterious smile at him.
Against his better judgement, he was in some measure 
captivated.  He'd explain things to the captain tomorrow.
She felt strange, standing naked in his bathroom, her flesh 
covered in goose bumps.  Her reflection multiplied in his 
mirrors, her thin body dark and glistening.  All around her 
were Reuben's things: an electric razor, a single 
toothbrush much the worse for wear, a bottle of Clinique sc 
ruffing lotion, a line of male underwear drying above the 
bath.  Nothing feminine, no evidence of a wife or a regular 
girlfriend. She wondered what she was doing, how she had 
come to be here.  Why was he sticking so close to her?
Didn't he have other things to do, other investigations 
that needed his time?
Did he suspect her of complicity?  Did he know something?
She took another towel from the cupboard above the central 
heating tank and began to rub herself down for the second 
time.
Nothing, she felt, would ever make her properly dry again.
Her clothes lay in a wretched heap on the floor.  She bent 
down to move them onto the radiator.
As she lifted her coat, the small wooden coffin fell from 
the pocket in which she had placed it.  It was about five 
inches long by two wide and painted white.  On each of its 
two sides and the bottom was the name of a different god 
belonging to the Congo rite.  The lid bore Rick's name in 
small, badly formed black letters, next to a painting of 
Papa Nebo, the vodoun oracle of the dead.  A hermaphrodite, 
he wore a white muslin skirt and above it a long tailed 
frock coat.  A black top hat was perched on his head and 
sunglasses framed his white painted face.


This coffin was small.  The next would be a little bigger. 
And the one after that bigger still.
Last of all would be the real thing.
Angelina shuddered and prised the lid up, breaking a 
fingernail. As she had expected, the little box was filled 
with ashes: Rick's tongue, what was left of it.
Still trembling, she tipped the ashes into the toilet 
bowl. 
Breaking the coffin into tiny pieces, she wrapped the 
fragments in toilet tissue and tossed them on top of the 
ashes, then flushed it all away.
"Voodoo," he said.


"I'm sorry?"
"Voodoo.  What do you know about it?"
They were in his kitchen finishing the lamb curry
Angelina had prepared.  He'd had to stop her adding cream 
to the sauce: he still observed the law relating to kosher 
food.  Nights like tonight, he wondered if it made any 
difference.
His parents had moved to Boro Park from Williamsburg in 
1960, after the blacks and Puerto Ricans had started moving 
in.

He'd been five years old, asthmatic, dressed in side locks 
and a knitted skullcap.  All he remembered of the day of 
the move was how his uncle Avrum's hat had fallen off his 
head while he'd been helping Reuben's father lift a heavy 
cupboard into the van.  Reuben had laughed heartily and 
been smacked.
Uncle Avrum had died a fortnight later, and Reuben had 
cried at the funeral, obscurely frightened that his 
laughter might somehow have sent the old man to the grave.  
But Uncle Avrum had not been old, just sick. And it had not 
been laughter that had killed him.
Someone had uprooted him just one time too often.
In later years, Reuben had come to understand.  Somewhere 
in himself he could still feel
Uncle Avrum lurking, his huge fur hat tilted over his 
forehead, hugging the past to himself like a holy relic.  
Even after joining the force, even after his transfer to 
the 88th
Precinct three years ago, Reuben had insisted on keeping 
his apartment in
West Flatbush.  It was fifteen blocks away from his 
parents' house in
Boro Park, within walking distance of his childhood.
Near his parents' house, on 49th Street and 14th Avenue, 
was his old yeshiva, the Bais
Yaakov.  A couple of blocks the other way was the little 
basement synagogue where his father had first taken him to 
pray.  None of his family lived further than fifteen 
minutes away.  Out on the streets, blinking, he travelled 
in time.
When he went on duty, he became a cop.  He acted hard 
nosed, drank Budweiser, laughed at
McMenemy's dirty jokes, worked shabbat when he had to.  But 
those were just the things he did so they would let him be 
a policeman.  At home he wore his kip pa on the street and 
spent most shabbats at his parents' place.
Living two lives was difficult, but the alternative was 
worse.
Every killing, every rape, every outrage against the flesh 
lacerated him inside.  Some cops drank.
Some beat their wives.  His therapy was coming home to West
Flatbush.  Bringing Angelina back here with him was the 
first time he had compromised his personal code.
He hoped he wouldn't have cause to regret it.
"Why do you want to know?"
"You know why.  These killings, your husband's murder.  
There's some sort of voodoo connection, isn't there?"
She looked across the table at him.  He'd taken her into 
his apartment, fed her, given her half a bottle of good 
wine.  What did i| he want?  I Hi.  'is there?"  she asked 
in return.
"Listen," he said.

"In this
Goldener Medina of ours, there are thousands of cult 
murders a year. Do you find that hard to believe?
So do I. But it happens to be true.  Here in New York, we 
have some of the worst: Satanists, drug cultists, 
voodooists every kind of weirdo. And some of them think 
human sacrifice is a cute sort of way to pass the time.  
You saw that video, you saw what was going on.  So what can 
you tell me about voodoo?"
He was missing the point, but he didn't know it and she 
didn't feel up to putting him right.
"What makes you think the things you saw in that film had 
anything to do with voodoo?"
"I don't know.  It looked "Weird?"
"Well, of course."
"And the people doing the dancing and so on were blacks."
He nodded.
"So weird plus black plus murder plus some sort of 
religious ceremony equals voodoo?"
He began to feel uneasy.
"Not necessarily.  There are a lot of black religions.  
There's Santeria, there's "But you think this is voodoo."
"Your husband spent a lot of time with the Haitian 
community.
You're Haitian.  The dead man, Filius, was Haitian."
"In Haiti we call it vodoun."
He shrugged.
"Same thing, surely."


She put down her fork.
"No, Lieutenant.  Not the same thing.  Voodoo is 
Hollywood:
zombies and pins in dolls and mumbo jumbo.  Vodoun is the 
religion of most of the Haitian people."
"I thought they were
Catholics."
"Catholicism is their church.
Vodoun is their faith."
"So you think these killings have nothing to do with... 
vodoun?"
She hesitated.
"I didn't say that.  I just don't think the connection's 
that simple. If there is a connection."



He paused and sipped at his glass.  He felt out of his 
depth.  For three years he'd been working in Fort Greene, 
and still the Haitians puzzled him.
"Are you a..  . ?"
"Vodoumste?  No."  She shook her head.
"My parents... We were what people used to call the elite.  
Haiti may be the oldest black republic, but we mulattos 
have always stayed in charge.  We have the money, the 
education, the links with France. We're more French than 
Haitian, more European than African.  My family attended 
Mass every Sunday.  We never felt a need to dance for God."
"But your husband .. . You don't mind my asking?"
She closed her eyes for a moment, shutting out the new 
images Rick's name conjured up: a pale body on a slab, grey 
mud and grass, a small white coffin.
"No, that's OK.  Rick was an expert on vodoun among 
other things. You can look up his books, read his papers.  
I don't think anybody killed him for that."
"Maybe not.  But I'd like to meet a few people, talk to 
them about what's been going on.  Friends of your husband, 
friends of Filius.
You can point me in the right direction.  You can help me 
if you want to."
Yes, she thought, I can help.  But helping you won't do any 
good.  It's got to end here With Filius, with Rick.  Her 
heart was shaking again. She felt sick.  Sick and 
frightened.
"I can't help you," she said.
"I
don't know anything."  But she looked away when she said 
it, and for the first time he knew she was lying.
The telephone rang.  He hesitated for a moment, looking at 
her, trying to decide whether she was playing games or 
simply frightened.  Then he rose and went into the next 
room.
When he came back his face was troubled.
"It's to do with your friend Filius," he said.


"Something funny's going on."  He paused and sat down.
"Some people came this morning to claim his body.  Said 
they were relatives.  They buried him this afternoon.  
I don't understand it. There should have been an 
autopsy."
Angelina frowned.
"He had no relatives here," she said.
"Did they give their names?


The people who came for him." He shook his head.
"I don't know.  I guess so.  The hospital will have a 
record.  But why have him buried so quickly?  And how did 
they get round the autopsy?" "It's the custom.  Same in all 
tropical countries."
He nodded.
There's something else," he said.
"Yes?"
The lab report.  Apparently there was some sort of mix-up 
and they went ahead with the report on the blood samples 
they took from him.  There's something funny about them.  
Something out of the ordinary."  He hesitated.  She was 
looking at him intently, as though she guessed what he was 
going to say.  They want to dig him up again," he said.  
The pathologist has just been in touch with the state's 
attorney to make an official request for an exhumation."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Wednesday dawned pale and worthless, a tawdry day made 
shiny by yesterday's rain, the light sapped and drained, 
all vigour gone.
For herself, Angelina had never known a day begin so flat.
Literally, she did not know what to do with herself.  
Reuben had gone early to check on the aberrant lab report 
and help speed up the exhumation order.
True, there were things to be done about Rick's burial, but 
she had no stomach for them.  At Reuben's suggestion, she 
had left it all to Rick's secretary at LIU.  Mary-Jo was 
making all the arrangements:
phoning round, placing notices in the papers, speaking with 
the undertakers.  Angelina had not yet spoken with Rick's 
parents, did not want to.  The secretary could take care of 
that as well.
She hauled herself wearily out of bed at ten.  Her clothes 
were still a little damp, but better that than the bits and 
pieces Reuben's sister had lent her, all the wrong fit and 
grossly unattractive.  She had formed an unlovely mental 
image of the sister: loud, lumpy a round-faced Jewish 
matron with heavy breasts and ten kids, who used Avon 
cosmetics and shopped at Macy's once a month.
Reuben's apartment was filled with photographs: his 
grandparents in Hassidic dress, his parents, his brothers, 
his sister on her wedding day, aunts, uncles, cousins, 
nephews, nieces, the living and the dead. He had spoken 
about them the night before: These are my grandparents. I 
never met them, they died in Auschwitz.
And this is Uncle Avrum: he died here in Brooklyn.  The 
funny looking woman is Aunt Rivke.  And that's her boy 
Irving, my cousin: he's at the Yeshiva University."
A litany of names, of faces, of memories.  He never tired 
of reciting them: they were the most important thing in his 
life.  They were his past.  Without them, he was nothing, 
nowhere.  They were the reason he had found her loneliness 
so hard to bear.
On a side table a little apart from the others were several 
coloured photographs of children.
Angelina had picked one up.
"Who's this?"  she had asked.

Reuben had faltered before replying.
"They're all photographs of my daughter Davita," he said.
"She's ten years old.  That's the most recent shot, the one 
with her and the horse; it was taken a month ago."
The photograph showed a slim, dark-haired child with large 
eyes.
She held the bridle of a small piebald pony in one hand, 
smiling against a shaft of sunlight.
"I didn't know you had children."
"Just one, just Davita."
"You're married?"
His voice sounded far away.
"Once," he said.
"I was married once.  There are no photographs.
Excuse me .. ."  And he had stood and gone to the kitchen 
to make more coffee.
Angelina picked up the photos and set them down again They 
meant nothing to her, cracked, faded, crooked in their gilt 
and silver frames; but as she examined them a sudden wave 
of jealousy crept over her, so all-consuming she had to 
close her eyes and grit her teeth together hard to stop 
herself bursting into tears.  The closeness of his family, 
the certainty of his ancestry little matches that would set 
her alight if she let them touch her skin too closely.
She made breakfast and washed up.  When that was done, she 
went to the bathroom and washed her face in soapy water.  
She needed toner, moisturizer, make up.  Maybe she would go 
shopping later.  She washed her hair, using Reuben's 
shampoo, some cheap garbage he'd picked up in an all-night 
supermarket.  It made her hair feel coarse.  She couldn't 
find a hair drier anywhere.
At ten past eleven she went back to the living room.  The 
photographs stared at her from their heavy frames, each one 
a basilisk, its eyes boring into her flesh.  She got up and 
turned them round, facing the wall.  She tried to read, a 
detective story by someone called Robert B. Parker.
Reuben had a row of them on one shelf.  A serial murderer 
was killing black women in Boston.  He left a red rose 
every time he killed.  They were just words, she couldn't 
focus on them.
The photographs still watched her: their basilisk eyes 
could see through gold and silver.  She put down the book 
and walked from room to room gathering them all together.  
They fitted into a large drawer in the kitchen.
In the living room Reuben kept tropical fish in a large 
tank.
They swam together, back and forwards, back and forwards, 
their luminous colours the brightest thing in the room.  
Following Reuben's instructions, she tipped a little food 
into the tank and watched it descend in shining particles 
to the bottom.  The fish were like her, she thought: 
denizens of the tropics doomed to swim for ever in a glass 
tank thousands of miles from home.  She dreamed of sinking 
to the
bottom of the tank and closing her eyes for ever.  Noone 
would ever make her swim again.
At twelve o'clock she took some pastrami from the fridge 
and made herself a sandwich.  She could not remember 
whether or not she had told the police about the parcels of 
meat Filius had left in her apartment. The sandwich felt 
heavy in her stomach.  She left it unfinished.
At half past twelve she got up and took the photographs 
from the drawer.  One by one, she removed them from their 
frames and laid them on the table top.  Old photographs, 
the quick, the dead, the half-remembered.  What right had 
they to stare at her?  She found a pair of kitchen scissors 
in another drawer and started to cut the photographs into 
long strips, then the strips into smaller fragments Losing 
her patience, she threw the scissors aside and began to 
tear the scraps with her fingers, shredding them into 
smaller and smaller pieces: Aunt Rivke and Uncle Avrum, 
cousin Irving and little Davita. When she had finished, 
Reuben's past lay in untidy pieces on the
floor.
She went into the living room and found a bottle of 
Napoleon brandy in a cupboard.  Sipping it slowly, she sat 
in silence, watching the little bright-tailed fish cruise 
back and forwards through their cramped universe.  How many 
circuits of the tank made a lifetime?
There was a valve near the bottom of the tank.  She opened 
it and watched as the water began to drain out onto the 
carpet.  The fish sank lower and lower in the tank, 
desperately swimming, fighting the unexpected current that 
was dragging them down.  At last they lay on the pebbles, 
sand and weeds of the bottom, their luminous bodies 
writhing in a final struggle for breath.
At a quarter past one, she picked up the telephone and 
dialled a Brooklyn number.  A familiar voice answered.
"Aubin, is that you?  I must see you at once.  Yes, right 
away.
I'll come to your place.  Wait for me."
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Your Haitian was HIV positive."
Dr.  Pablo Rivera leaned back in his chair and gazed 
myopically at Reuben over the top of his spectacles.  The 
doctor was in his mid-thirties, a delicate age in his 
profession still young enough to care, experienced enough 
to know that what he did made precious little difference.
Working in the Cumberland put him on the front line.  He 
was fighting a war, but he was no longer sure exactly who 
the enemy was.
"You mean he had AIDS?"  Reuben asked.
Rivera pushed his glasses back against his nose and shook 
his head.
"It isn't as simple as that," he murmured.
They were in Rivera's office on the fourth floor of the 
hospital. Reuben felt ill at ease here.  If he'd only known 
it, he and the doctor had a lot in common.  They were both 
the children of immigrants who had chosen professions in 
which they could help other people.  They had both started 
their careers as idealists.  And they were both growing 
cynical and finding that it hurt.
The hospital served as a focus for both their discontents.
Rivera was learning that medicine can do very little 
against poverty and ignorance.  He vaccinated children and 
pumped their parents full of antibiotics: the old diseases 
went away and new ones took their place. And here in 
sterile corridors, behind walls of polished steel.
Reuben saw the bruises and the knife wounds that mocked his 
every effort.  Rivera stitched the wounds, Reuben 
apprehended the muggers, and all the while tomorrow's 
killers and tomorrow's victims sharpened their blades on a 
dozen high school playgrounds.
"You just said he had HIV."
I'll be more precise, Lieutenant.  Mr.  Narcisse had 
antibodies to the HIV virus.  He may have suffered AIDS 
symptoms, he may not.
If and when I can track down his medical records, I may 
know the answer to that.  Not everyone with HIV goes on to 
develop AIDS.
Not even all AIDS patients have HIV.  And there are even 
some people by no means all of them cranks who don't agree 
that HIV is the cause of AIDS at all.  That may not be 
received wisdom, but it is nonetheless possible to make out 
a very good case for it.
"However, the point at issue is not whether our friend had
AIDS."
Rivera leaned forward.  Reuben noticed that he seemed 
tired.  Most doctors liked to look tired; it made them feel 
good.  But Rivera looked like the real thing.
"In due course I expect to obtain enough information on 
which to base a diagnosis.  But whatever his symptoms, Mr.  
Narcisse does not appear to have died of AIDS.  I only 
mention his being HIV positive to explain how I came to get 
the lab report I telephoned about."
The doctor paused.  He almost managed a smile.
"Lieutenant... can I rely on your discretion?"
"Of course provided the information you give me isn't 
material to this investigation."
Rivera hesitated momentarily.
"No," he said.
"It isn't material.  The thing is this:
quite early on in the whole AIDS crisis, people talked 
about what were termed "the four Hs".  There were four 
social groups who seemed to be particularly prone to the 
disease.  Each could be identified by a word beginning with 
the letter "H".  Homosexuals were the best known.  Then 
haemophiliacs and drug addicts using hypodermics.
The fourth "H" stood for Haitians.
"One Haitian in every 20,000 suffers from AIDS.  That's a 
high proportion.  Haitians were one of the major "at-nsk" 
groups in this country until their government kicked up a 
fuss and had the category abolished.  Officially, I'm not 
supposed to treat Haitians differently to anyone else.  In 
practice, I do."
The doctor picked up a pack of cigarettes from his desk.

"Smoke?"
Reuben nodded and took a cigarette from the pack.  Rivera 
lit it for him, then his own.
Tell me, Lieutenant, where in this country do you suppose 
has the highest ratio of AIDS cases?"
Reuben blew a thin line of smoke through his lips.
"I don't know.  San Francisco, I guess.  Or maybe here in 
New York."
"Wrong.  It's a place called Belle Glade in Florida.  
What's Belle Glade got that other places don't?  Rats is 
one.  Bad sanitation's another.  Slums.  A very high 
tuberculosis rate.  Malnutrition.
And a predominantly Haitian population.
"The problem isn't that people are Haitians.  It just 
happens that Haitian refugees are among the poorest people 
in this country.
Haiti itself is the poorest country in the Western 
hemisphere.
There's a link between poverty and AIDS, same as there's a 
link between heavy drug use or excessive sexual activity 
and
AIDS.
They all shoot your immune system to hell."
Rivera stood and went to the window.  His office looked 
directly onto the Ingersoll Houses section of the Fort 
Greene Housing Project.  Most of his patients came from 
there.  He himself had been born half a mile away, the son 
of Puerto Rican immigrants.  With just a little less luck, 
he'd be down there now, struggling to survive on the 
street.
"A lot of the people we see in this hospital are Haitians.
Officially, I'm not supposed to notice.
Unofficially, I take a blood sample from each one and send 
it to the lab for analysis.  They run a simple
HIV
test.  It's a quick procedure nowadays, and I can find out 
in a couple of hours just what I might be dealing with.  I 
ran a test on Filius Narcisse and, as I told you, he showed 
positive."
He turned back to face Reuben.
"You may not like to hear this.
Lieutenant, but that's why no autopsy was done.  People 
don't like to carry out autopsies on cadavers with HIV.  
They're frightened they might get contaminated by the 
blood.  So Mr.
Narcisse was put briefly on ice before being handed over to 
his next of kin for burial."
"I don't think they were next of kin, Doctor.  As far as I 
know, Mr. Narcisse had no relatives outside Haiti."
Rivera looked mildly surprised, but no more than that.
"I see.  Well, whoever took the body, they seem to have 
been acceptable to the hospital administration.  I don't 
interfere in that sort of thing.  If there's been some sort 
of irregularity, take it up with them."
The doctor paused and drew hard on his cigarette.
"Anyway, that wasn't the last we heard of the deceased.  I 
took more than one blood sample from him before he died.  
For a while now, I've been sending HIV positive samples to 
a friend of mine at College Hospital over on Atlantic 
Avenue.  His name's Joe Spinelli.
One of his hobbies is looking for HIV co-factors.  He has 
access to mass spectrometer using gas chromatography."
Reuben stubbed out his cigarette.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning he looks for molecular structures to identify 
substances th'r might otherwise remain hidden.  Things that 
won't show up in an ordinary blood test.  He mixed a sample 
of Mr.  Narcisse's blood with ether.  When the blood and 
ether separated again, he found traces of several unusual 
substances."
"Such as?"
"I've made a list.  You can take it with you.  I'll be 
sending a copy to the coroner."
"Just give me a rough idea.  Was
Narcisse using drugs?"
Rivera shrugged.
"Not these drugs.  Joe identified a very large number of 
distinct chemical substances, very few of which would 
normally occur in any drug available on the street.
The most likely source for some of them would be either the 
ingestion or subcutaneous insertion of a variety of herbs 
or animal products, probably including several species of 
insect, toads and fish."
The doctor looked down at a sheet of paper on his desk.
"Let me see.  Joe found traces of saponins, a large group 
of glucosides.  In high doses, these can be extremely 
toxic.  One variety, known as sapotoxins, used to be 
administered orally in parts of Africa as a kind of truth 
serum; in large amounts, they interfere with cellular 
respiration and lead to death.
Joe doesn't think there were enough in this sample to 
indicate a lethal dosage.
"He also found varying amounts of tannins, acid resin, 
toxic dihydroxyphenylalanine, and a number of alkaloids, 
including prurieninine and prurienidine.
These can all be found in a number of tropical plants, 
mainly climbing lianas of the Leguminosae family.  In 
certain combinations they can act as psychoactive compounds 
which may lead to hallucinations.
"Here again, Joe doesn't think a toxic dose had been 
administered.
The same applies to several other active chemicals from 
other plants
and to most of those from animal products.  With one 
exception.
There were substantial amounts of tetrodotoxin in this 
man's blood. It's what we call a neurotoxin; in other words 
a poison that acts on the nervous system.  Most neuro 
toxins are proteins, but tetrodotoxin is a nonprotein 
substance of enormous toxicity.
To put it bluntly, it's one of the most poisonous 
substances known.
It's sixty times stronger than strychnine, one thousand 
times more powerful than sodium cyanide.  As little as 0.5 
milligrams of pure tetrodotoxin will kill an adult human 
being.  It does so by causing complete neuromuscular 
paralysis.
Your man was poisoned, Lieutenant.
The only thing that puzzles me is that he was alive when 
you found him."
Rivera removed his spectacles.
Without them his eyes looked weak and bloodshot.  Reuben 
sensed that the doctor's tiredness was not merely physical.  
He recognized the look: he'd seen it often enough in his 
bathroom mirror.
"Lieutenant, if you want to know what happened to your 
Haitian, you're going to have to dig him up again.  As soon 
as possible."
CHAPTER NINE
Her meeting with Aubin had left Angelina ill at ease.  For 
almost an hour afterwards, she walked without any conscious 
purpose down street after tarnished street.
Her heels clipped the sidewalk as she strode along, a 
staccato beat like the tap-tapping of a rada drum.  She 
shimmered through the streets, unaware of the music she 
made.
At about half past four she found herself at the bottom of 
Clermont Avenue, where her apartment was located.  She had 
not meant to come here, not consciously; something had 
driven her, some compulsion she could not name.  Looking up 
and down the street, she saw no-one she knew.
There were no marked police vehicles anywhere in sight.
The apartment was sealed.  Across the edge of the door and 
the frame, a black and white poster bore an official NYPD 
sign saying 'stop:
crime scene'.  Angelina pulled the poster away and inserted 
her key in the lock.  It turned without a sound.
Forensic had finished for the moment.  She could see traces 
of their presence everywhere:
dustings for fingerprints, light pasteboard tags on 
objects, labels saying this or that item had been removed 
as evidence.  Evidence of what?  The living-room door was 
shut tight; she left it that way and headed for the 
bedroom.
In the closet she found a medium sized suitcase and packed 
it with a selection of her better clothes.  Two extra pairs 
of shoes.
Fresh underwear.  Something black for the funeral.  She 
thought of taking black underwear: was that morbid?  She 
didn't even glance at the bed.

Across the corridor in the bathroom she stuffed a large 
toilet bag full of expensive creams and lotions.  Rick had 
never been mean about what she could buy for the bathroom.  
He liked her to look after herself, he used to say.
That's all right, then, she used to tell him: who else is 
going to look after me?
Relics of Rick lay everywhere.
His razor with tiny bristles lodged against the blade, a 
tube of shaving cream, dandruff shampoo, pair of unwashed 
underpants draped unceremoniously over the laundry basket.  
She pretended to ignore
them.
Looking up, she caught sight of herself in the mirror, the 
big mirror over the washtub.  Sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, 
lank hair.
She thought of crimson fish drowning in air, of desperate 
eyes rolling and growing still.
Kicking, kicking, falling still.
She looked in the mirror again.  The harsh fluorescent 
light did nothing to soften the effect.
Her clothes were a mess.  They needed to be dry-cleaned and 
pressed. Or maybe not.  Maybe she would never wear them 
again.
She undressed quickly, pants and bra as well, shivering.  
Her skin felt clammy.  A swarm of goose pimples crawled 
across her arms and chest. She could do with another 
shower, a really hot shower.
The pilot on the gas boiler was still alight.  She found a 
tube of body scrub in the cabinet.
Stepping into the shower closet, she drew the curtain and 
set the temperature gauge to hot.  As she turned the tap, 
water burst from the rose above her head, drenching her in 
freezing water that turned in a matter of seconds to 
steaming.  She gasped, twisting round to let her back take 
most of the stinging cascade.  As she grew accustomed to 
the heat, she closed her eyes and bent her head back, 
letting the water stream across her face.  Slowly, she 
leaned backwards into the water, feeling hard needles on 
her breasts and belly.  Her skin was tingling, the blood 
rising to the surface.  She reached out for the body scrub.
Suddenly, she opened her eyes and blinked the streaming 
water away. She felt frightened without real reason, as 
though the apartment had suddenly come awake.
Behind the shower curtain, shadows loomed.  The bathroom 
shuddered, indistinct behind a veil of steam and plastic.  
Water splashed on the curtain, drowning all sound.  She 
felt her heart beat and reached for the edge of the plastic 
sheeting.  As she drew it back, water sprinkled onto the 
floor.  She blinked heavy drops out of her eyes and 
strained to see.
The bathroom was filling with steam, the mirror already 
coated with an even film of mist.
She turned off the shower.  The water stopped immediately, 
leaving a haunted silence behind.  She stood at the 
threshold of the cubicle, listening.  Behind her, water 
dripped on the tiles.  Drip, drip, drip, like a leaking 
tap.


She strained her ears for other sounds, for a hint of 
something moving in the apartment.  Silence.  And the cold 
dripping sound of water on cracked tiles.
Softly, she stepped out of the shower.  A voice in her head 
kept telling her there was nothing wrong.  What was she 
frightened of?
She had heard nothing.  But she knew what she was 
frightened of.
Her hand reached out for the bath towel draped over the 
rail.
She wrapped it round her, tying it just above her breasts.  
Her bowels felt loose.  It was nothing, she told herself.  
Behind her, water dripped like ice melting.
She remembered her dream, the long walk through the jungle, 
the heavy moisture dropping from the leaves of giant trees.  
She knew what she was frightened of.
Heart in mouth, she opened the door.  The passage outside 
was empty, full of its own silence.
Familiar, yet suddenly alien.  She had become a stranger 
here, in her own home.  Something had driven her out and 
did not want her to return.
She crept on tiptoe to the bedroom.  It was empty.  Her 
heart hammered in her chest, she could not stop looking 
round.  A voice in her head kept shouting, "Get out, get 
out while there's still time!"
She grabbed a sweater and a pair of jeans and hauled them 
on.  A pair of sneakers.  That was all.
She lifted the suitcase.
Suddenly, she realized why she had come to the apartment.  
The source 
of her inner prompting lay in Rick's study, if the police 
had not found it and taken it away.
She put the suitcase down again.
Dressed, she felt less vulnerable than in the bathroom, 
naked.
There's nothing out there," she told herself.  She'd seen 
the poster on the door, broken the seal herself.  But they 
had other ways of entering.  Yes, she thought, she knew 
what frightened her.
Soft as silk, she slipped into the passage.  To her right, 
the livingroom door sat impassive in its heavy frame.  She 
had only to press down the handle, open the door, walk 
inside.  They had all been taken away, the things beneath 
the floor, every last tooth and bone and scrap of skin.  
But that was not what frightened her.
She passed the living room, shivering involuntarily as she 
did so, and crept on down the passage to Rick's study.  The 
door lay partly open. She took a deep breath and reached 
for the light switch.
Bright yellow light filled the room.  She hung back in the 
doorway, hesitating.  It was vital that she retrieve what 
she had come for, yet the impulse to run was overwhelming.  
Blood pumped in her veins, thick and warm, like syrup.
The police had been through everything.  That did not 
matter, of course: she was sure they had not known where to 
look or what to look for.
From the walls, the grim faces of African gods looked down.
Beside them, Haitian oleo graphs of St.  George and St.  
Patrick in gilded timber frames.  A wooden crucifix bearing 
the image of a black Christ.  A shelf of Congo figurines 
from Leogane little fat dolls dressed in red and blue 
spangled satin.  She felt their eyes on her, their scarcely 
restrained anger at her intrusion.
The desk had been rifled, and not by the police.  Files, 
bundles of letters, pens, pencils, paperclips a confusion 
of stationery lay strewn across the floor.
Drawers had been pulled out carelessly and their contents 
tipped out at random.  Rick's three hundred-dollar Italian 
lamp had been dropped and smashed.  His two filing cabinets 
had been systematically scoured. Books had been ripped from 
the shelves along two walls, flicked through and tossed 
aside.
Section by section, she combed the filing cabinets.  
Xeroxes of estate accounts from Haiti dating from the late 
colonial period, all intact. All untouched, as she had 
expected.  Copies of private letters from the same period 
and the reigns of Dessalines, Christophe and Petion, 
complete but for one file.  Whoever had done the searching 
had known what to look for.
In one corner stood a large wooden cabinet, its doors wide 
open, most of its contents strewn across the carpet.  This 
had been the pride of Rick's collection:
livres de commerce from 1735 through to 1788; several 
massive registers of revenues and expenditures known simply 
as grands livres from the French slaving houses of 
Montaudouin, Bouteiller, Michel and d'Havelooze; 
thejournauxor indexes necessary to make sense of the great 
accounts; and several books of ships from traders in 
Nantes, Le Havre and La Rochelle, containing details of the 
slaving vessels themselves, the slaves embarked on them, 
deaths on board, routes travelled.
The cabinet was made from rosewood, a heavy, over 
ornamented piece modelled on the Empire style.  Rick had 
bought it ten years ago at a shop in the Heights.  If the 
dealer had been telling the truth, it had been built by 
Phyfe during his late period in Partition Street the modern 
Fulton.
Prices for a late-Phyfe cabinet had been relatively low 
then, and Rick had bought it on impulse one of the few 
impulses Angelina ever remembered him having.
The dealer had missed or forgotten to mention one detail, 
discovered years later by accident when moving the cabinet 
to its present position.  If you pressed on an acanthus 
leaf on the entablature above the doors, a panel opened in 
the side.
Angelina ran her fingers along the frieze, found the leaf 
and pushed. The panel swung back, revealing a large cavity.
From the cavity she removed a large notebook.  She checked 
through it quickly; it did not appear to have been tampered 
with.
She took a deep breath and started for the door.  The gods 
on the walls watched impassively.  All around, the 
apartment watched with them.  She could sense it breathing, 
slow and steady, unhurried, waiting.
In the passage, the sensation grew.  Insects crawled 
between her skin and flesh.  She could not tear her eyes 
from the living room door.  She wanted to make a dash for 
the front door, out into the hall, into the street; but her 
feet were like a diver's feet, leaden, rooted, holding
her fast in sightless depths.  Inch by inch, she was moving 
towards the door of the living room.  Her heart was beating 
so loudly now she thought the walls must shake.  Her feet 
moved without volition, inch after inch, foot after fearful 
foot.
She could hear nothing but the sound of her own heart 
pounding, a kata drum, white sound against the darkness of 
night, opening the ceremony, opening the doorway to the 
gods.  Ouvri barriepou mon, Legba ... The darkness 
cracking.  Ouvri barrie She lifted her hand and pushed down 
the handle.  Silently, the door swung open.
The room was bathed in a dark light.  Angelina pressed the 
electric switch, but nothing happened.  Slowly, her eyes 
adjusted to the fineness of the light, the grace of its 
absence.
On a chair, dark in the middle of the room, a figure was 
seated, half in, half out of shadows, indistinct features 
puddled by the half-light. Angelina stopped in the open 
doorway, tense, frightened, her eyes straining.
She took a step forward.  There was a sound and a movement 
to her right.  Turning, she saw a second figure step out of 
the dim, unfocused shadows.  The figure stopped and looked 
at her.  Her breath came, sticky and irregular.
"You," she whispered, her voice as soft as cream.  Her head 
was spinning, the room was out of focus, her lungs were 
crammed full of the thick air.  The figure stepped nearer.  
Angelina tried to turn, but the room began to tumble and 
her legs were like ice, melting.
CHAPTER TEN
It was dark by the time the exhumation order came through.
The coroner's department had wanted to wait until morning.  
They liked to keep office hours wherever possible.  The 
dead don't mind waiting," said the clerk when
Reuben called to collect the order.
"I
do," Reuben replied.
He wanted Filius out of the ground and he wanted him out 
now.
Left too long, the blood in the cadaver would start to 
deteriorate.
The police pathologist had explained that biodegradation of 
proteins in the enzymes would lead to the production of new 
enzymes and new proteins, and these in turn could break 
down any drugs still in Filius's system.
He had asked for further exhumation orders on the four 
recent bodies from the Hammel apartment.
It had proved possible to identify them simply by 
circulating photographs to local morticians, and they had 
already been quietly returned to their graves.
That was when Reuben had first become aware that pressure 
was coming from somewhere to keep what Angelina Hammel had 
found beneath her floorboards under wraps.
The undertakers had all been cautioned not to breathe a 
word to relatives.  To spare people's feelings, they'd been 
told; and that had
seemed reasonable enough.  But then one of the undertakers 
had started asking questions, awkward questions.  Where had 
the bodies been found? Did the police have any idea who had 
dug them up?  Were there any others?  At that point an 
official statement had materialized from nowhere like a 
piece of ectoplasm.  There had been four bodies in all. The 
whole thing had been nothing more than a sick practical 
joke by some medical students from Long Island College
Hospital.
No need for relatives to be distressed unnecessarily.  No 
need for promising medical careers to be nipped in the bud.  
Their dean had given the kids a hell of a dressing down.  
The bodies would be restored intact, the kids' families 
would pay for the new coffins and the burials; it would all 
be very discreet.
Reuben had stormed into Captain Connelly's office as soon 
as he saw the statement.
"What medical students?"  he had asked.
"What families?"  Connelly had just shrugged his broad 
shoulders and told Reuben to ignore the statement.
"It's to keep some people happy.
Reuben.  Be a nice guy, play along.  It won't affect your 
investigation, I promise.  This is public relations, is 
all."
To make things worse, Doug Lamont had been sent down from 
the Press Office on Police Plaza.  Full lieutenant at 
twenty-five.  Whizzkid, very smart, should have been in 
advertising.  He lived in Manhattan, in TriBe Ca  In a 
loft.
Wore a suit by Issey Miyake, a shirt by Umberto 
Ginocchietti, Gucci shoes.  Reuben remembered his Uncle 
Nathan's famous dictum:
"Never wear clothes you can't pronounce."
Lamont and his designer outfit had been given instructions 
to field questions if and when they came.  A couple of 
reporters from local papers had got wind of something, 
maybe from one of the morticians. One had come from the 
Haiti Observateur, which had offices over on the old Navy 
Yard site.  Lamont had sent them away smiling, clutching a 
couple of juicy aggravated rape stories packed with 
'privileged information', their heads spinning with a pious 
peroration about elderly widows who might have strokes if 
they heard that their nearest and dearest had been raised 
from dust before their time.  To round things off, he'd fed 
them a liberal dose of 'you play ball with us, we'll play 
ball with you', hinting at goodies that might come their 
way.
Cub reporters, eager beavers who knew how to pronounce the 
names on designer labels, they had swallowed Lamont and his 
hundred-dollar smile like a plate of sushi, cold.  Anybody 
could have done it.  Why had Manhattan sent in Prince 
Charming?
None of the remaining bodies had been identified, nor were 
they likely to be, unless something came up on the dental 
remains.
Reuben had put a new boy called Johnson onto the job of 
checking records for reports of graveyard vandalism.  The 
bodies had gone on ice.  And then the lab report on Filius 
had come in.  Now they were lined up at the mortuary for a 
series of PMs that would continue through the night.  
Nothing complicated.  They knew what they were looking for: 
traces of tetrodotoxin poisoning.
Reuben and his partner Danny
Cohen drove due east on Fulton,
before turning onto Jamaica Avenue, skirting the lower 
flank of the great complex of parks and cemeteries that 
links Brooklyn to Queens. Even in death, the people of New 
York preferred segregation to integration.  High walls of 
stone and rusting fences kept Jews from Catholics, Puerto 
Ricans from Chinese.  No doubt they went to fenced and 
bounded heavens.
"I hate this place," said Danny.
"When I was a kid, my father used to bring me here.  All 
those stone houses with "Cohen" above the door.  I used to 
have nightmares.  I thought "If you're a Cohen, they put 
you in one of those places".  I thought they were little 
prisons."
Just past Stony Road, they turned off into Cypress Hills.
The cemetery was popular with Haitians, though as yet they 
had no separate plot there.  It was non denominational: 
here heathens mixed with believers, blacks with whites.
The rest of the exhumation team was already waiting at the 
cemetery office.  Apart from Reuben and Danny, the team 
consisted of Steve Koreski from the state attorney's 
office; the pathologist who was going to perform the 
autopsy, a Lebanese doctor called Chamoun; the undertaker 
who had supervised the burial; and two longhaired grave 
diggers  To Reuben's surprise.  Sally Peale was standing 
with the others.  Sally was an old girlfriend, a sharp 
lawyer from New York City Hall's legal department.
"On time as usual, Reuben."
Sally was petite, blonde and as hard as nails.  She and 
Reuben had seen a lot of each other once, about three years 
ago, on a very personal basis; but this was the first time 
they had met in a graveyard.  For a moment, Reuben felt a 
familiar tug of attraction: Sally Peale was not someone you 
forgot in a hurry.
With an effort, he smiled;
they were still friends, still saw one another 
occasionally, still gave each other gifts at Christmas and 
Chanukah.
"What are you doing here, Sally?  I didn't think City Hall 
had an interest in this."
"Just keeping an eye on you, Reuben.
How are you?"
"OK.  You look fine."
"I'm hungry.  I'd planned a dinner for tonight."
"Anybody I know?"


Sally sniffed.
"Would I know 
people you know? 
Give me a break, 
Reuben.


Give Steve the authorization and let's get this guy out of 
the
ground."
Narcisse had been buried in the
Parkside section of Cypress Hills, on the cemetery's 
eastern boundary, near the Memorial Abbey.
The team drove slowly between tall, half-glimpsed trees.  
The lights of the cars picked out old Jewish graves on 
their right.  A minute later they entered a vast area of 
Chinese burials, low stones topped by small rocks holding 
down scraps of paper.
They parked beside the Abbey and went the rest of the way 
on foot, walking in single file between low grey and pink 
headstones packed close together.  The names were mostly 
Spanish.  Nobody looked very important or rich.
The edges of the gravel path along which they made their 
way marked the sharpest of all boundaries.  Their 
flashlights picked out names and dates, the stone figure of 
a tiny wounded angel, dim coloured flowers beaten down by 
rain and wind.  A new grave, partly boarded over, yawned 
like a fresh wound in the earth.  Reuben gave it a wide 
berth, shuddering like someone in the presence of an omen.
Narcisse was buried behind the Abbey, not far from the 
Interborough Parkway.  Looking north-west, Reuben could see 
the tall lights of Manhattan perfect against a low sky.  At 
his feet, the fresh earth of the grave was barely visible 
beneath a heap of rain drenched wreaths.
The diggers lifted two arc lamps from their truck, already 
parked nearby.  They often worked at night, especially at 
this time of year.
They switched on the lamps, ripping a swathe of light out 
of the darkness.  Before starting work, they moved the 
flowers to one side. As they did so, a plastic coated card 
detached itself from large wreath and fluttered to the 
ground at Reuben's feet.  He bent and picked it up.
"Dormi pa' fume  Films," it read.
There was no signature.  Reuben slipped it into his pocket.
He had not noticed Sally come up beside him.  She touched 
his arm gently, making him jump.
"Creepy business, huh?"
He nodded.
"Ever been at one of these before?"  he asked.  The sound 
of heavy spades slicing wet earth punctuated his words.
She nodded.
"Half a dozen.  But not at night.


What's so urgent about this one?"
He explained.
"I still think you could have left it till tomorrow," she 
answered. "Or maybe you just like the Burke and Hare 
stuff."  Behind her, the 
diggers bent to their task, mere silhouettes outlined 
against the harsh light.  People stood around in little 
groups, whispering together or watching the digging in 
silence.  Someone gave a nervous laugh.

"Speaking of Burke and Hare," Sally continued.
"What's this story about cowboy medics at the College 
Hospital?"
He shrugged.
"PR," he said.
"On whose instructions?"
"I thought maybe you could tell me."
She shook her head.  Her face was in shadow, but he could 
make out the whites of her eyes.  It seemed like a memory.  
Perhaps it was.
"Look, Reuben, the way I heard it, you found, what was it?  
nine dead people, none of them with any visible signs of 
violence.
Somebody leaps to the conclusion that they've been dug up 
from local graveyards.  Twenty-four hours later they've 
identified some of them and started putting them back into 
the ground.  Believe me, that's quick work.  So who wants 
these people buried?"
He shrugged, a vivid gesture borrowed from his father, who 
in turn had taken it from his father.  It was a shrug with 
ancestry.
"I
really don't know," he said.  Things have been moving fast 
ever since this case began.  Somebody in high places wants 
to play things down."
"You still have an investigation, don't you?"
"Yes, but that's mostly because of the man we're about to 
dig up here. I don't have evidence of foul play in any of 
the other bodies.
The four that were reburied had already been given death 
certificates. All natural causes."
The diggers were already up to their waists.  The grave had 
not begun tasettle, and the loose soil was easy to dislodge 
once they got below the level to which rain had sunk.
"What's going on, Reuben?
Somebody's been asking questions at my office."
"About this?  Who?"
"I don't know.  My boss passes them on to me, says they've 
been shunted down to him."
"From inside your department?"
She shook her head.
"No.  Maybe someone in the mayor's office.
"Someone in administration", is how Jack put it.  Don't 
quote me on this."
"What sort of questions?"
"They want details.  How many bodies, do we know their 
identities, what's being done?



Oh, yes, somebody seems interested in you as well.  Jack 
asked me what I knew about you."
"I hope you told him all the right things."
She smiled.  He remembered her smile from the past and as 
quickly shut the thought out of his mind.


"I said you were a gonif. What else should I tell him?" 
"Does he speak Yiddish?"
"Who needs to speak Yiddish to recognize a gonif?"  She 
paused, growing serious once more.
"What's so special about this case, Reuben?"
He did not answer at once.  The diggers had struck the 
coffin and were starting to remove the last shovelfuls of 
dirt.
"I don't know.  Sally.  But I'd like to find out.  Listen, 
if you hear anything, will you keep me informed?"
"Sure.  Same goes for you."
"Ask around, find out who's behind these questions.  Will 
you do
that?"
She nodded.  They glanced at one another easily.  It would 
take so little: a word, a touch ... "I think Dracula's 
about to come up," Sally said, glancing down at the grave.
One of the grave diggers had come up out of the pit and was 
moving a winch into place over the hole.  A strap was 
fitted through the four handles of the coffin, then 
attached to a line lowered from above.  The second digger 
scrambled out and helped his partner operate the winch. 
Slowly, the coffin rose out of the earth, grinding gently 
against the sides of the hole on its way up, dislodging 
small clods of earth.
The world shrank to an oblong box, all eyes fixed on it.  
The entire scene seemed to Reuben suddenly ridiculous, like 
the denouement of some TV magic show, in which they raise 
the magician in his spangled casket, death-defying in 
straitjacket and chains.  The winch jerked awkwardly, 
tilting the coffin.
Something bumped heavily inside the box.
The diggers went on winding.
Reuben helped the diggers manoeuvre the casket to one side.
The brass nameplate was still shiny, scarcely dulled by its 
brief sojourn beneath the earth.  The light shone like a 
curse, whitening the coffin.  The undertaker stepped out of 
the little crowd holding a long screwdriver in his hand.  
He seemed nervous, his movements clumsy, magnified by the 
harsh light.  Carefully, he worked his way round the 
coffin, loosening the screws.
The two diggers took the lid and slid it to one side.  
Reuben stepped closer, moving between the coffin and the 
light.  A shadow fell across the interior.  Reuben gestured 
and the grave diggers lifted the lid fully away.  Reuben 
edged out of the light and looked down.
The coffin was empty.  On the lace pillow where Filius 
Nafcisse's head had recently rested lay a small white 
coffin covered in writing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
She was splintered, fragmented, a prey to images of 
immaculate decay, walking half-blind down streets of lead 
and pitch as though the world would never end, as though 
she would walk for ever, unimpeded.  Or as if the world had 
already ended and she had been left alone to lurch and 
stumble through the graves.
Her uncertain footsteps carried her, as they had on 
previous occasions of crisis, to the small Haitian church 
on Lafayette.  The small white-painted building seemed to 
her less a beacon than sepulchre, and at first she recoiled 
from it.  The things she had witnessed over the past week, 
above all what she had just seen that afternoon, had 
brought her close to some kind of edge.  She feared 
insanity, but more than that the possibility that a 
rational mind lay behind all this.
The church was dimly lit as it always was at this time of 
day, as though it simply waited to be animated.  A red 
light burned at the little altar, cherry red, flickering 
slightly, the presence of
Christ.
Angelina crossed herself and genuflected awkwardly.  She 
was not a pious woman, the slow movements of devotion made 
her clumsy.  Above the altar, feebly lit and stained a dull 
crimson, the figure of a black Christ watched her slide 
into a pew and bow her head.  Christ the slave, Christ the 
Maroon, Christ the bleeding redeemer of slaves. Could any 
of that be true?
She had been coming to St.  Pierre's for almost a year now, 
off and on. Rick's anger, Rick's indifference, Rick's heat, 
Rick's coldness these had been the goads pricking her to a 
flawed devotion and an imperfect confession.  Or was it 
simply that she was growing middleaged and menopausal and 
in need of faith?
She was still trying to still her mind enough to pray when 
Father Antoine found her.  He'd been expecting her ever 
since he heard of Rick's death.  He knew, of course, that 
Rick had been a Protestant and would have no need of his 
services for the burial.  But Angelina would need him, he 
had been sure of that.
The priest waited a long time beside her, watching in 
silence, waiting for her concentration to wander.  But she 
was not concentrating, only distracted, as ill at ease with 
Christ as she had been earlier that day with Reuben and his 
memories.  Finally, she turned and looked at Father 
Antoine.
"Bonsoir, Angelina.  Tout va bien!
She shook her head.  Her eyes were huge, drained of 
expression.
"No," said the priest, 'of course not.  Forgive me."
He sat down beside her, a big man, clumsy in his black 
cassock.
His huge hands lay in his lap, useless for any act of 
consolation. Here, beneath the pain-filled eyes of his god, 
his priestliness forbade him to offer comfort in any medium 
but words.
"Richard est mart."
"Yes, I know.  Silbert told me yesterday.  I've been 
expecting you.


You should have come sooner." "I'm here now."
"Yes," he whispered. "You're here now." 
"Father, I need to talk to you."
He had never known her like this before.  Troubled, 
yes; but never flat, never drained.
"Of course.  We can talk here or"
"No," she said, her voice abrupt, cracking, 'not talk.
Confess.  I have things I want to confess.


Please, Father, before it's too late."
The big priest looked at her in confusion.  In all the time 
she had been coming to his church, she had never once 
entered the confessional. Tonight she seemed shrunken, as 
though something were eroding her.
"We'll go over there," he said, 'to the confessional.  
You'll find it easier."
She followed him like a whipped dog, or like someone 
carrying a heavy weight, unable to set it down.
The small cubicle had been built awkwardly into the corner 
of the church, near the small chapel of St.  Michel.  
Little light entered it even when the church was fully 
illuminated.  It was a dark place, intended for dark 
thoughts.  Sins do not come out easily into


daylight.
Angelina sat by the grille wondering why she had come 
here.
What could the priest do?  What could she say that would 
change anything?
"How long is it since your last confession?"
A shaft of light fell through the grille onto her lap, 
gilding her. "Twenty years."
The priest recited his formulae, she responded, then 
silence fell between them, heavy with the weight of so 
many un shriven sins.
Where to begin?  Where to end?
Stammering, she said the first thing that came into her 
head.
She had so little practice in this, her tongue would not 
cooperate in the betrayal of her heart.  But slowly the 
words came, hesitant at first, then fluent, a stream of 
them pouring out, thick and delicious, almost choking her.
It took more than an hour, and when she had come to an end 
she was shivering and cold with sweat.  In a shaking voice 
the priest pronounced the formulae of absolution.  But she 
did not feel absolved. Nothing could absolve her.  It was 
nothing she had done:
actions can be blotted out by grace.  It was what she 
knew.

There is no grace for knowledge, no absolution for the 
things that lie in the mind, twittering.
Father Antoine was the first to leave the confessional.  
Angelina followed him, head bent, eyes on the floor.
"Is there anything I can do for you, Angelina?  I want to 
help."
"No, Father, nothing."
"Have you spoken with anyone else about... these matters?"
She shook her head.
"It would be better not to.  But I will be here any time 
you need
me."
Thank you.  Father."  She paused.
"I think I should go now."
"Where are you staying?  I may need to get in touch."


"No, don't do that.  It's all right, I'm with a friend."
"At least let me know where you are."
She gave him the address and he wrote it down in a small 
notebook he kept in his pocket.
As he put the book away, she looked up at him.


"Does it matter that I don't really believe?" How many 
times had he been asked that question? He shook his head.
"I don't know, Angelina.  The thing is to attend Mass and 
confess your sins.  Leave the rest to God."
"Is it really that simple?"
He looked away.  On the altar, the red light flickered and 
went out. He fancied he had felt a draught.
She turned and walked away, down the aisle, out into the 
night.
Father Antoine stood for a little while in silence, his 
eyes fixed on the spot where the light had burned.  He 
would replace the candle later.
He went through the side door that led into the rectory.  
No-one else was at home tonight.  His legs felt heavy, he 
felt sick.  In the study, he sat down, composing himself.  
Finally, he picked up the telephone and dialled.  It rang 
for a long time before anyone answered.
"This is Father Antoine at St.  Pierre's.  I have the 
information you asked for.  But you must promise me that 
you will not harm the
woman."
A voice at the other end spoke calmly, reassuringly.  
Father Antoine took a deep breath.
It took only seconds to dictate her address, but it seemed 
like a


lifetime to him.  The light had gone out in the sanctuary.  
The church was in darkness.
"Listen," he said when he had done.  This is the last time 
you'll hear from me.  Do you understand?  I don't want to 
see you here again.


Not here, not anywhere near me."
There was no answer.  The line had gone dead.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Reuben had given her a door key the night before.  She let 
herself in with it, not knowing whether he was back or not.  
The passage was in darkness, but at its end she saw a light 
shining through the edges of the kitchen door.
She felt numb inside, without feelings.  It was as though 
something dark and heavy was suffocating her: she longed 
for some fresh pain, some unfinished grief to tear her open 
and let her breathe again.  She pushed the door gently and 
it swung open on a loose hinge.
He was sitting on the floor, on cold tiles, cross-legged 
among the mutilated fragments of his family and friends, 
sifting through a crazy jigsaw of smiles and faces, torn 
limbs and broken gestures, searching for something he could 
recognize.  His hands were shaking.
He was weeping silently.
She stood in the doorway and watched him, feeling neither 
guilt nor satisfaction.  His fingers moved like the wings 
of un patterned butterflies against dark petals, brushing 
his exploded past with tiny caresses, powder-soft.  She 
almost wept for him.
He looked up at last and saw her watching, her features 
blurred behind a mist of tears.  She said nothing.  Her 
confession had left her mute and empty.
"Why?"  he asked, knowing there was no answer.
She turned away from him.  Blood was roaring in her head, 
tearing her silence to shreds.
Like him, she wanted to knit things together again.  She 
wanted to hear her own thoughts again.  But there was only 
blood rushing in her brain and voices she did not 
recognize, calling her name from a great distance.  She ran 
out of the apartment, back into the night.
The empty streets stretched in front of her like sewers, 
rank and uninhabited.  It made no difference which way she 
went.
She turned to the right and ran, blind and deaf, trying to 
drown out the voices in her head.
She had reached the corner of Coney Island and Cortelyou 
when she heard his footsteps tight behind her, hard against 
the pavement  There was neither breath nor will left in 
her; she was sapped and torn, unable to carry on.  Her 
breath came in harsh gasps, a sharp pain riveted her side.  
She collapsed against the window of George's Restaurant, 
panting like a fox at bay.  Inside, people were drinking 
coffee and eating the best cheesecake in Brooklyn.
Bright American flags were pinned beside photographs of 
young men and women in a variety of uniforms.  The 
inexhaustible immigrant longing for normality.
He came to her walking slowly.
The tears on his cheeks had not yet dried.  A woman passing 
glanced at them curiously, thinking them lovers in the heat 
of a quarrel. Angelina was shivering, gasping for breath.  
Her hair fell into her open eyes, long and angry.
The woman watched for a moment, then walked on, 
indifferent.
Everyone had troubles.
He touched her shoulder gently, but she winced and drew 
away, almost as though he had slapped her.
"What is it, Angelina?  What are you frightened of?  I 
won't hurt you. The photographs don't matter.  I'm not 
angry, believe me.  I'm hurt, but I'm not angry.  I want to 
understand."
She couldn't look at him, couldn't bear to see his eyes.
All the time she was shaking.  He touched her again and she 
felt something snap inside.  Her hand went back and 
suddenly she was striking him, hard across the cheek, then 
again and again until she was pummelling him furiously with 
clenched fists, striking him anywhere and everywhere his 
face, his arms, his chest, his stomach.  And all the time 
she was silent, as though the rage had only her hands to 
express itself with.
He could scarcely control her.
Her arms flailed, punching him, winding him.  He did not 
want to hurt her, did not want her to hurt herself, but he 
had to stop her.
Somehow, he managed to grab her arms, but she went on 
shaking, strained, convulsive, as though in the grip of a 
fit.
He shouted at her.
"Angelina, try to get control!  Please, Angelina, stop 
this!  You'll hurt yourself!
There's nothing to be afraid of!
want to help you, Angelina.
Please stop!"  But she panted and spat and jerked her arms, 
trying to break free.
And then, as suddenly as it had started, her outburst 
stopped.
She went rigid, her whole body viciously tense.  A moment 
later, she went limp, leaning against the window as though 
about to fall.
He expected tears, and when they did not come, thought she 
might be beyond his help.
"It's all right," she said.
"I'm all right, it's over now.  I'm sorry I hit you.  I'm 
sorry I tore your photographs."
"That doesn't matter.  Come back to the apartment."
He tried to put his arm round her, thinking she might need 
some comfort, but she stepped away from the clumsiness of 
his gesture and walked ahead alone.  He followed her back 
slowly, neither speaking, the
silence round them tangible.  Her breathing was still 
spasmodic and uneven, but the anger or the terror he could 
not decide which it had been seemed to have passed.
In the apartment, he sat her down with a glass of brandy 
and fixed a second for himself.  She was still shaking 
visibly.  At her first sip she shuddered.  The roaring in 
her head had subsided until it was a faint murmur.  The 
voices had become whispers, mercifully distant.  She did 
not recognize them, but they knew her, knew her name, and 
she feared that, if they called insistently enough, she 
might go to them in the end.
"Feeling better?"  he asked after some time.
She nodded.  They were in the living room.  He had cleared 
away the fish; the tank sat in the corner, dark and empty, 
the weeds on the bottom already starting to rot.
"Do you want to tell me what's been happening?"
She shook her head and held her glass out for more 
Armagnac.
The iaste brought back memories of home, of her last years 
in Paris. Her tat her had always sent to a friend in France 
for cases of Vieille Reserve cognac from the Charente.
Dinner guests had lingered over it, saying no-one else in 
the whole of Haiti had such fine brandy.  After his arrest, 
the Tontons had come to steal the last cases from the 
cellar.  To impound it," they had said, but it was stealing 
all the same.  They had left nothing, but it had not 
mattered by then.  No more guests ever came to dinner.
"I went to confession today," she said.
"Really?  And what did you confess?"
She hesitated.
"That's a secret between me and
God."
"And your priest."
She nodded.
"Yes, my priest as well.  But he won't tell you anything.  
They swear oaths, these priests.  I thought you would know 
that."
"Yes, I do know that.  Half of the crimes in this city 
might be solved if that rule could be suspended for just 
one day."  He paused.
"I didn't think you were religious."
"I can be when I need to."
"Do you need to now?"


"I think so, yes."
She changed the subject abruptly, telling him about 
the Vieille Reserve, then, without meaning to, 
about her father.
"Why was your father arrested?"


he asked.
She shrugged.
"Why was anyone arrested in those days?  The Tontons 
Macoutes killed innocent people just to make sure no-one 
felt safe.  Father was a Minister under President Vincent 
and again under Lescot, back in the thirties and forties.  
Minister for Education on both occasions.  When Lescot was 
overthrown in 1946, he left politics and concentrated on 
his rubber plantation near Jeremie.
After Magloire came to power, he persuaded my father to 
take a seat in his cabinet, and when he was overthrown, my 
father went back to the plantation again.  That was in 
1956.  Father was sixty.  I was seven.
The following year, Duvalier was elected, and before long 
the Tontons were hunting down members of the elite.  Our 
family was high on their list: the Hypolite Behards are 
among the oldest of the gens de couleur."
She smiled wanly.
"It's all colour in Haiti, you know.  We've had light skins 
for longer than almost anyone, so we rank high in society."
She shrugged and a frown crossed her face.
"Well, six months after Duvalier came to power, some men 
came to our plantation.  They took father to Port-au-
Prince.  I never saw him again."
She fell silent, gazing at the empty fish tank, at the 
empty glass in her hand.  After her father's death in 
custody, her mother had been taken to a sanatorium in 
Switzerland.  There was no diagnosis, no cure. Angelina was 
taken to see her once a year, but her mother never 
recognized her, never spoke.  Outside her window in the 
long Swiss nights, heavy with the promise of snow, cold 
winds rose and fell against sharp mountainsides.  Inside, 
on a table by her bed, there stood a photograph of a coral 
sea, dim in a silver frame.
As Duvalier's grip tightened on the country, the elite 
began to pack their bags and leave some to Europe, some to 
the States.  At sixteen.
Angelina was sent to school in Paris.  When things settled 
down a little a few years later, her aunt Classinia 
summoned her back to the family villa in Petionville, high 
up in the hills above PortauPrince. She lived there with 
her aunt and a few servants, sipping the last of the good 
wine, watching the purple sun set across the bay, brushing 
her long black hair, and studying her face in a mirror of 
French glass brought to Haiti long ago from Nantes.  At 
night she listened to the tap-taps negotiating the curves 
on the Petionville Road.
"I wanted to be an artist," she said.
"A painter.  When I was in Paris, I studied a little.  I 
had a teacher on the rue St.  Sulpice.
He said I had talent.  Back in Haiti, I painted every day; 
but Rick said I was wasting my time, that I could never 
become a serious artist there.
He said I had to go to New York, that he would buy me a 
studio."
"And did he?"
She shook her head.



"I had a room in my apartment that I called my studio, but 
it was too cramped and dark.  I still paint a little, but 
only for myself.  There were never any exhibitions or 
galleries."
"Have you kept your paintings?"
She looked strangely at him, as though his questions had 
entered forbidden territory.
"There are some back in Haiti," she said.
"And the ones from New York are in a storage depot in 
Bensonhurst. Nobody ever sees them.  I don't know why I 
keep them they just gather dust and cobwebs."


"Could I see them?"
"You wouldn't like them."
"How do you know?"
"I know," she said, "I know."
Richard Hammel found her there on his first research trip 
to Haiti. She was twenty-four, he was thirty-one.  He took 
her every afternoon for picnics to Kenscoff, and most 
evenings for dinner at the Oloffson. They danced disco at 
the Cercle Bellevue and merengues at a nameless club on the 
rue Poste Marchand.  His research grant was almost depleted 
by the end of the first month.
From time to time she accompanied him to a remote houngfor 
in the Artibonite valley, where they watched men and women 
become gods and goddesses.  For two whole months she 
sparkled.  For the first time in her life, she thought she 
was happy.
Up in the refined air of
Petionville, however, those of her relatives who still 
remained in Haiti murmured their disapproval.
Rick was American, far from wealthy and, worst of all, a 
man without ancestry.  In their eyes that made him a thing 
beneath contempt.  The Hypolite-Beliards inhabited a world 
of fine distinctions, a microcosm whose contours were 
determined by fine gradations of skin colouring mulatto, 
marabou, griffon, black, white and even subtler shades of 
taste and breeding.  They spread rice powder on their 
faces, sipped absinthe at the Pigalle and ordered the 
latest novels from Paris.  The marriage was forbidden.
Angelina married him anyway.  The following day, her aunt 
disowned her publicly.  Rick took her straight back to New 
York, to a small apartment in Brooklyn.
Beyond its dirt-stained windows, nothing grew.  No 
mountains, no forests, no coral seas.  For a while she was 
happy and thought she was in love.  And her clock ticked, 
and the slow threads unravelled in her wedding gown.
Later, she lay awake at night and listened to sounds that 
were not there.  Sometimes she fell into bursts of fitful 
sleep and dreamed of a yellow dress she had worn as a 
little girl, when she was seven.
Angelina talked till it grew late.  She had no photographs 
to show Reuben, only tattered memories.
Sunsets and mirrors flickered in and out of sight; her 
words could not bind them, make them stay still.  He 
wondered what she was hiding.  And why.
It was well after midnight when he showed her to her room.  
She hardly remembered having slept in it the night before.  
As he started to close the door, she turned.
"Stay with me tonight, Reuben.
I'd like you to.  Please say you will."  Her eyes pleaded.  
Sunsets and mirrors.  Dim shadows of a little girl.
"You're tired," he whispered.
"We're both tired.  Leave the light on if you're 
frightened.  I'll be sleeping just down the passage."
"Not for that," she said, 'not for comfort."
He paused.  He understood.  Her eyes had come alive.
"For what, then?  We hardly know one another, Angelina.  
I'm not even supposed to have you here.  If my superiors 
heard I'd been sleeping with you as well..  ."


He spread his hands.
"Please, Angelina ... Maybe if things 
were different She closed her eyes and 
nodded.


She did not want to see him. Sunsets and mirrors dazzled 
her. 
She did not see him close the door.  She did not see him 
lean his head against it for a moment, then turn and walk 
away.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He looked at his clock.  It was almost four a.m. Something 
had wakened him.  He climbed out of bed and put on his 
robe.  He could not remember when he had last felt so 
tired.
There was a light coming from the kitchen.  Angelina sat 
there on the floor just as he had sat hours before.  She 
had found a roll of scotch tape in a drawer and was busy 
pasting the pieces of his photographs together.  He watched 
her pick and sort, joining edge to serrated edge, fragment 
to fragment, face to face.
When he came close she did not move, but went on with her 
sorting and sticking as though unaware of his presence.  He 
looked at what she had done: completed squares and 
rectangles lay on the floor beside her, their edges uneven, 
the Sellotape crooked.
Nothing matched.  None of the pieces fitted together.  The 
photo graphs she was building were as broken and diffuse as 
the debris through which she was sifting.
He reached down and put his hand gently on her shoulder.  
She looked up, not startled, not afraid.
"I was waiting for you," she said.
"I've put your family back together again.  Like Humpty

Dumpty.  Look."
He lifted her carefully to her feet.  She was dressed in 
the heavy nightgown his sister had sent.
The clothes she had gone to her apartment to fetch were 
still there, in the suitcase.
The front of the nightgown lay open, exposing a little of 
her breasts. He reached out to close it, but his hand shook 
and he touched her cheek instead.  She saw him look at her, 
felt her heart shake, her skin grow cold beneath the heavy 
fabric.  He stroked her cheek with the hairs on the back of 
his hand.  She kissed his fingers gently.
He could not resist her now.
Smiling, she took his hand and moved it to her breast.  As 
it slipped inside the gown, he drew her to himself and 
kissed her.  Her lips tasted of salt, and he realized that 
tears were coursing down her
face.
She bent back her head and he kissed her neck softly.  His 
hand moved cautiously across her breast, brushing the 
nipple, tearing the breath from her.  She leaned towards 
him and put her mouth against his mouth, kissing him hard, 
her tongue like a moth's wing fluttering against his lips 
and teeth.
Closing her eyes, she saw her own face in a rippling glass, 
Rick's face smiling, naked as winter, Rick's face bruised 
and pale on a bed of stainless steel, the sun sinking naked 
into a crimson sea, her mother naked and lifeless on a bed 
of silk.  Frightened, she opened her eyes again.  Reuben's 
face was close to her.
He helped her slip the nightgown over her shoulders, 
pulling her arms through the frilled, awkward sleeves.  It 
fell heavily to the floor, leaving her cold and naked in 
his arms.
The room was spinning, she felt sick with need.  He lowered 
his head and touched her breasts with open lips, turning 
her to water.  Her legs could hold her no longer; she 
pulled him down, clutching him hard against her for fear 
that the world would tumble out of control.
She whimpered as his fingers touched her thighs, but his 
lips found hers and quieted her.  She knew there was 
nothing pretty about sex, nothing shining in the body.
Rick had taught her that.  Rick and his cold hands and his 
moist skin. She expected nothing, wanted nothing.  This was 
all there was or ever could be: a cold embrace, a moment of 
farce, a squirt of semen cold against her belly.  She 
closed her eyes and saw Rick's face bloated in triumph.
They were naked and struggling now among the flotsam and 
jetsam of a hundred ruined photographs.  The paper shards 
stuck to her skin, their edges biting her.
She smelled vanilla and pepper, heard voices whispering, 
the wind among the rubber trees, felt , Reuben enter her, 
cried out, cried out, opened her eyes, felt the ), world 
tilt and tilt again, heard her voice crying as he moved 
inside her, cried out and closed her eyes.
She wept for a long time afterwards, cradled in his arms.
He had taken her to his bed and pulled the duvet over them 
like a
tent.

Her thighs were still smeared with blood.  He could not 
understand how he had hurt her.
And then she stopped crying and explained, tearing the 
words bloodily from deep inside her, and he lay beside her 
in the darkness, wordless and wounded.
He fell asleep some time after that, exhausted, his arm 
still wrapped about her shoulders.
Outside, a dark wind had come in from the sea and was 
blowing in tortured gasps across the sleeping city.  A 
trashcan toppled with a crash and began to rock back and 
forwards on the sidewalk.
Angelina lay awake, listening to it bang, one hand on 
Reuben's heart as it beat beside her.  He did not waken.
He dreamed he was in a graveyard where the tombs were as 
high as skyscrapers and dogs ran back and forth in silent 
packs.  A long line of people filed between the graves, he 
among them, long shovels across their shoulders, looking 
for a place to dig.
In a neglected corner of the necropolis, they fell on a 
tiny patch of freshly turned earth and set their spades to 
it.  He dug like a madman, deeper and deeper, far into the 
earth.  When he looked round at last, he found himself 
alone in the open grave, standing on a coffin, far away 
from everyone.
Somehow, he managed to squeeze himself into the grave 
beside the coffin and lift the heavy lid.  He shone his 
light on the shrouded form inside.  Angelina's face smiled 
up at him, unblemished, uncorrupted, unutterably beautiful.  
He bent to kiss her and her lips were warm. Slipping his 
hands behind her neck, he raised her to sitting position. 
As he did so, he caught sight of her back.
Underneath, she was a decomposing horror.  Her bare skull 
showed through a tangled mess of matted hair.  Where her 
flesh had been, maggots seethed in a stew of corruption.  
He dropped her and tried to climb back out of the grave.  A 
moment later, he woke up screaming and found her beside 
him, smiling.
She soothed him, saying it was the wind that had frightened 
him, nothing more.  They lay awake after that, speaking 
from time to time like old, familiar lovers who wake in the 
small hours.
Finally, she told him what she had been afraid to tell him 
earlier.
"I went back to my old apartment today," she whispered.  
The apartment where Rick and I used to live."


"Yes, I know.  What 
happened?"
She hesitated and reached 
out for him. "I saw Filius 
Narcisse," she said.


"He was sitting in our 
living room." "You saw 
him?  You're sure?"
She pressed his hand 
tightly.
All around them, the 
darkness crowded. "I saw 
him," she whispered.



"And
I spoke to him."
But she did not tell him who else had been there.  He would 
not have understood.  She did not yet understand perfectly 
herself.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"Dr.  Spinelli?  This is Lieutenant Reuben Abrams.  I 
called yesterday but you were out.  I left a message with 
your secretary."
There was a pause at the other end.  Spinelli had just come 
on duty. He'd had a difficult night.
His new girlfriend had just discovered Alex Comfort: they'd 
got as far as "B' before he collapsed.
"Yes, Lieutenant.  I got your message.  You want to see me.  
What can I do to help you?"
Reuben explained what Rivera had told him, letting Spinelli 
fill in some of the jargon.  He was sitting in the kitchen, 
drinking a cup of lukewarm coffee.  Angelina was in bed, 
trying to sleep.  Spinelli cut him off halfway through his 
explanation.
"Look, Lieutenant, I sent a report on this to Dr.  Rivera.  
If necessary, I'll testify in court that your victim died 
from tetro dotoxin poisoning.  But that probably won't be 
necessary after the autopsy."
There isn't going to be an autopsy."
"Why not?"
"We don't have a body."
A long silence.  When Spinelli spoke again, his tone had 
altered.
"The coffin was empty?"


"Yes.  How did you know?"
Spinelli hesitated before replying.
"Lieutenant, if I'd had my wits about me, I could have 
warned you." "You knew this might happen?"
"No, Lieutenant.  If I'd known I would have told you.  I 
didn't tell you because I didn't use my imagination.  
This is only something I've read about, it never 
occurred to me that it could happen in


New York."
"And just what is it that you've 
read about?" "Have you ever heard 
about zombies, Lieutenant?" "Dr.  
Spinelli, I don't want..."


"No, listen.  Lieutenant.  The man whose blood I tested was 
Haitian, right?"
"That's correct."
Reuben heard Spinelli draw in his breath.
"I guessed that, Lieutenant.  To be fair, I would have done 
so earlier if I'd taken the trouble to look at the man's 
name."  He paused.
"OK, listen to me carefully.  Forget everything you've ever 
heard about zombies, every late night movie you've ever 
seen, every comic you read as a child.
What I'm talking about now is plain fact.
"Believe me, I feel every bit as awkward as you do using a 
word like "zombie".  I'm a doctor, a scientist.  So what 
I'm going to tell you is scientific fact.  What the 
Haitians call "zombies" aren't supernatural beings if I 
thought that, I wouldn't be talking to you, wasting your 
time.  What they seem to be are people who have been put 
into a state of extreme narcosis, a coma more or less 
indistinguishable from death, declared dead, buried and 
then brought back to imperfect consciousness."
"Is this just guesswork?"  Reuben asked.
"Or have you proof?"
"Proof," answered Spinelli.
"A
close friend of mine is an ethno biologist at Harvard.  He 
studies plants and plant remedies in their cultural 
settings.  Mainly, he looks for pharmaceutical applications 
for traditional herbal medicines.
He's done a lot of work on hallucinogens among the Indian 
tribes in Brazil.
"A couple of years ago he heard I was interested in natural 
toxins.
He introduced me to substances I'd never heard of.  One of 
those was something called tetrodotoxin.  The poison is a 
complex molecule occurring naturally in several species of 
marine fish, generally known as puffer fish or blowfish.  
The toxin can be found in their skin, liver, genital organs 
and intestines.  As Dr.  Rivera explained to you, it's 
extraordinarily toxic."
Spinelli stopped speaking.
Reuben could hear him breathing gently, and in the 
background the sounds of a hospital going about its daily 
business.
"Lieutenant, have you ever heard about fugu?"
"Never."
"It's Japanese for puffer fish.
Over there, it's regarded as a sort of delicacy.  All the 
best restaurants serve it.  Thing is, it's potentially 
lethal, so only government licensed chefs are allowed to 
prepare it.
Mostly it's eaten as sashimi, raw flesh taken from the back 
muscles, which are nontoxic.  Even so, people die every 
year from eating fugu that's been carelessly prepared.  So 
why do you think anybody would want to take that sort of 
risk when they could enjoy a dish of prawns instead?"

"It must taste good."
"On the contrary, I'm told it's nothing special.  Taste 
doesn't come into it.  What people are looking for is a 
legal drug experience.
The idea isn't to get rid of all the toxin but to leave 
just enough so that the diner gets a feeling of mild 
euphoria.  A little drunk, a little numb round the mouth, 
like you've just been to the dentist.
"So a lot of people get numb and feel a warm tingling.  
About one hundred a year die.  What happens in between?  
There has to be an in between, right?"
There was the sound of a beeper going off.
"Just a moment, Lieutenant, someone's calling me."
There was a brief pause while the doctor made a call on 
another line. Then his voice returned.
"Where was I?"
"In between numb and dead."
"Right.  Between numb and dead they go into a coma and get 
this they get taken to hospital and declared dead.  All the 
time they're fully conscious.  They can hear, their mental 
faculties are alert, they can even see if someone opens 
their eyes.  But they can't move a muscle, not to speak, 
not even to twitch an eyelid.  To all appearances, they are 
dead.
Sometimes they end up being buried alive.
"In Haiti, they don't ealfugu, but they include puffer fish 
among the ingredients in a poison compound.  A compound 
made by local sorcerers or bokors and popularly known as 
zombie poison.  In other words, the stuff that turns people 
into zombies.  The exact ingredients differ from place to 
place, but the poison always includes some sort of puffer.  
In other words, it contains tetro dotoxin.  If the amounts 
are right, the result is apparent death.  That is stage 
one.
"Stage two is the burial, which usually takes place 
quickly.
Stage three is exhumation, normally the same night.  Stage 
four is the administration of an antidote containing datura 
stramonium.
There's no evidence that datura or any of the other 
ingredients in the supposed antidote actually counteract 
the tetrodotoxin.  But datura is extremely psychoactive.
It produces a state of psychotic delirium, leading to 
confusion and amnesia.  In Haiti, the popular name for 
datura is concombre zombi-the zombie's cucumber."
Spinelli paused again.  He stepped to the door.  Reuben 
could hear him talking in a whisper to someone.  A moment 
later he was back.
"Lieutenant, I've got to go.  If you can come over to my 
"office some time, I'll put together some materials for 
you.  And I'll give you my friend's number."
"Doctor, before you go: are you trying to tell me that you 
think Filius Narcisse has been turned into a zombie?"
"I'll let you make up your own mind about that, Lieutenant.  
I've just
given you some basic facts.
Weave what you like out of them.
Let my secretary know if you plan to drop by.  I'll try to 
make myself available."
The line went dead.  Reuben replaced his receiver and 
closed his eyes. What had started as a straightforward 
homicide case was rapidly turning into some sort of ghost 
hunt.  He didn't believe in ghosts.  Up until five minutes 
ago, he hadn't believed in zombies.
An hour ago, Angelina had told him she had spoken to a man 
she had last seen declared dead in a hospital ward.  Now a 
medical doctor was telling him she may not have been 
hallucinating.
He picked up the phone again.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Danny Cohen arrived at 8.30 with two officers, O'Rourke and 
Grigorevitch.
Reuben explained things while he shaved.
"You believe her?"
"I believe she saw something."
"She could be reliving her original discovery, sublimating 
it by bringing her dead friend back to life.  Sort of a 
transference
thing."
Cohen had been to college, had even majored in psychology.  
He had ideas.
"Listen, Danny, she's a smart lady.  She's had a rough 
time, and maybe she's started seeing things, but I don't 
think so."
"She says he really spoke to her?"  Reuben nodded.
Angelina was still in bed.
"She tell you what he said?  He didn't fill her in on the 
worlds beyond or anything, did he?"
"Cut it out, Danny.  Something frightened her.  You were 
there when we opened up that coffin last night.
She knew nothing about that.  So it's entirely plausible 
that somebody may have taken him back to the apartment.  
Some kind of joke maybe."
"You tell her what we found?"
Reuben put down the razor and rinsed his face.
"What do you think, Danny?  You think I enjoy telling a 
widow that I've just been exhuming one of her friends?"  He 
was growing irritable at Danny's line of questioning.
"OK, OK.  No need to get sore.  So what did she say he told 
her?"
"She says he didn't know who he was, how he'd got there, 
who'd brought him there.  He didn't recognize her, didn't 
respond to his own name. He was a sort of..."
"Zombie?  Is that what you're telling me?  You gonna put 
that in your report?  C'mon, Reuben, wise up.  She's been 
telling you too much about this voodoo crap."
5&I
"Sit down, Danny."
"What's to sit down?  We've got to go.  Save New York from 
the zombies!"
"Sit down and listen."
There was nowhere for Danny to sit but the toilet.  He 
lowered the lid and sat.
"After I telephoned you, Danny, I put a call through to 
somebody called Spinelli.  Joe Spinelli.
He's a consultant haematologist at Long Island College 
Hospital.  I told you about him yesterday he's the guy who 
found the tetrodotoxin in Narcisse's body."
"Right, I remember."
"OK.  I told Spinelli what had happened, that Narcisse had 
gone missing, that somebody thought they'd seen him alive.  
I wanted a medical opinion.  Some way it could have 
happened, something that would make sense in a report."
"So what did he tell you?  This tetrodotoxin gives you 
unearthly powers or something?"
"Don't get smart, Danny.  Just sit there and let me tell 
you what he said."
Reuben told him.  The effect was gratifying.  For the first 
time in the twenty years Reuben had known him, Danny Cohen 
was speechless.  When he finally found speech again, his 
manner had changed dramatically.
"So you think he's still there?
Just sitting there, waiting for somebody to come speak to 
him?"
"I don't know, Danny.  I don't exactly have a lot of 
experience dealing with this sort of thing.
Angelina mentioned that someone had taken the floorboards 
up again. Understandably, she didn't take the trouble to 
check on what was there."
"You think there might be more?"
Reuben shrugged.
"More bodies?  I hope not.  One thing's troubling me, 
though.


Angelina told me our seal was still on the door when 
she arrived. There's no back door to the apartment.  So 
how did Narcisse get in? He may be a zombie, but he 
sure as hell didn't walk through the wall."
"I think we should get over there.  You ready?"


"Sure, let's go."
Danny followed Reuben into the living room, where O'Rourke 
and Grigorevitch were waiting.  As they left, Danny nodded 
in the direction of the guest bedroom.
' "Angelina", eh?  Getting to know the natives, Reuben?"
"Leave it, Danny.  The lady's a widow."  And until last 
night, she was a virgin as well, but let's not get into 
that.  There were some things the Danny Cohens of this 
world could never understand.
At the apartment door, Danny turned to Reuben.
"Hey, I just realized what was wrong.  What happened to 
your photographs, Reuben?  The ones you had of Bubble and 
everybody?"
Reuben did not reply.
Reuben went in first, followed closely by Danny.  They'd 
known one another since they were kids together at the 
local Bais Yaakov yeshiva. Their first memory of one 
another was a fist fight outside school two days before Yom 
Kippur.  Neither could now remember the provocation or the 
result, nor how they had become friends afterwards.  They'd 
gone to high school together and only split up when Danny 
went to NYU.  Then Danny had joined the force as well.  For 
three years now, he had been assigned to Reuben's 
department, and for much of that period they had worked as 
partners.
Reuben felt the chill as soon as he stepped through the 
door.  The seal had been broken, just as Angelina had said, 
and the door itself stood ajar.  Danny came in his wake, 
whistling softly.  The theme tune from Ghostbustersl 
Sometimes Reuben thought Danny had the sensitivity of a bag 
of potatoes.
"Kinda spooky, eh, Reuben?  Cold too.  Remember that bit in 
The Exorcist where the room freezes up?"


"Cut it out, Danny, this isn't funny."
"It's just that I never had no dealings with the other 
side before." "You aren't going to have any now either.  
Listen, Danny."
Reuben turned and faced his friend.
"A joke's a joke, OK?  But you know what we found in here 
last time. That wasn't funny, and this isn't going to be 
funny either."
"But zombies, Reuben .. ."
"Leave off, Danny."
Danny opened his mouth, took another look at Reuben's 
face, and closed it again.  On second thoughts, maybe 
Reuben was right.
Maybe this wasn't funny after all.  And it was cold in 
here.
Officers O'Rourke and Grigorevitch were still standing on 
the landing. Neither man had been to the apartment before, 
but they'd heard plenty about it.  O'Rourke crossed 
himself surreptitiously before venturing over the 
threshold.  Grigorevitch was wishing he hadn't eaten such 
a hearty breakfast.
Reuben switched on the passage light.  The door to the 
living room lay partly open, as Angelina had left it.  
Shadows crowded it.  The chill


seemed to emanate from there, or was that merely his 
imagination working overtime?
"Shut the door," he ordered.
"I
don't want the neighbours poking their noses in."
"You think they're likely to?"


"Danny, people are creeps. Neighbours are creeps with 
windows. 
Your apartment smells, you have an argument with your 
girlfriend, they want to know what's going on.  The people 
here know something big has been happening in apartment A. 
They just haven't been told what.  But they're itching to 
know."
"OK.  So let's get this over with."
Reuben took several steps towards the door.  Suddenly he 
stopped and raised his hand.  He sniffed cautiously.
"You smell something, Danny?"
Danny wrinkled his nose.
"No, I can't .. . Wait a minute."  He sniffed again.
"Oh, shit.
Reuben.  You don't think..  . ?"
Reuben went up to the door and pushed it open.  The drapes 
had been drawn and the room was in darkness.  Reuben put 
his hand round the jamb and found the light switch.  He 
flicked it on.
The room filled with a dull light.  In the floor, boards 
had been ripped up, exposing a gaping hole.  A
cold draught came up from below.
And with it a faint, sickly odour, unfamiliar and 
unsettling.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Angelina woke in a haze, as if on a morning of thunder.  
Her mind was fuddled and her senses awry.  For fully half a 
minute she did not know where she was or how she had come 
to be there.  Then memory flooded back in a torrent of 
disordered images: Rick, his mouth torn and ragged; their 
apartment defiled; Filius, sitting mindless and afraid in 
their rocking chair; Reuben's long fingers, fragile against 
her breast; fish floundering on a wet carpet; warm blood 
trickling down her
thighs.
She sat up dully, aching inside.
She was still naked beneath the warm sheets.  With a sense 
ol wonder, she ran her hands over her body, as though 
discovering it for the first time.  Where had Reuben gone?
"Reuben!"  she called.
"Reuben!"

No answer.  She got out of bed and found a grey kimono 
draped over a chair.  It was on the big side, but she 
slipped it on, drawing the sleeves back.
The apartment was empty.  She looked at her watch: 9.00 
a.m. She realized that he must have gone to her apartment 
to check out the story about Filius.  Of course, Filius had 
become a zombi, that was
obvious.
She took coffee in the kitchen as before.  The scraps of 
photo graph still lay where they had left them earlier that 
morning.
Traces of dried blood clung to them.  She did not know 
whether to be happy or ashamed.  How had Rick put it?
"I have a preference for non-penetration al sex."  Except 
for his coeds of course.  He'd penetrated them often 
enough, or so he'd said.
After breakfast, she went back to her room to dress.  
Outside, the wind still howled, battering the day into 
submission.  The streets were full of debris.  A child ran, 
hooded and blind, in a staggered motion along the sidewalk.  
A car swerved to avoid a branch lying across the roadway.  
A thin dog shuffled past, sniffing desolately at piles of 
stinking garbage.  A broken world, full of broken dreams.
Angelina wondered what was happening about the funeral.  
She should telephone Mary-Jo Quigley at LIU or ask Reuben 
for the name of the funeral director.  Or maybe not.  Maybe 
just let them get on with it and bury him somewhere, all 
his friends and relatives and coeds Somewhere decently out 
of sight.
First of all, though, she had to get herself some fresh 
clothes and toiletries.  She should have asked Reuben to 
pick up the suitcase at her apartment.  Maybe she could 
speak to him later about it.  In the meantime, she could 
get some things downtown.
She called a cab.  When it arrived fifteen minutes later, 
she ran straight out, slamming the door behind her.  The 
wind struck her full in the face, and she bent her head 
down, fighting her way to the cab. She did not notice the 
man watching intently from a doorway on the other side of 
the street.
She got back to the apartment after eleven and dumped the 
shopping in her bedroom.  Her bedroom, not his.  She wasn't 
making any presumptions after a single night, and she 
didn't think he was either.  A white Jewish policeman, for 
God's sake!  Hadn't Rick been enough bad news for a 
lifetime?
She found a large plastic garbage bag and filled it with 
scraps of photograph from the kitchen floor and table.  
Once started, she went on to tidy the rest of the 
apartment.  She'd heard about Jewish men, looking for women 
to play little mother.  Reuben Abrams better not get any 
ideas.
When she finished, she made a decaff to drink with the 
jelly rolls she'd bought in town.  Kids' food;
but that was how she felt today:
little girl in a yellow dress.
And a smell of vanilla and pepper in the air.  Little 
Angelina on papa's knee, sitting so daintily, looking so 
demure, while the wind rustled the branches and ruffled her 
skirt.


High in the air it went, high in the air.
At twelve the telephone rang.
"Yes, can I speak to Lieutenant Abrams?"  A woman's 
voice, a Brooklyn accent.  It sounded familiar.
"I'm sorry, he isn't here right now."
"Oh.  He isn't at the precinct either.  The desk sergeant 
said he'd probably be home.  OK, I'll ring back later."
"Maybe I can take a message.  Who is this?"
"OK, my name's Mary-Jo Quigley, I'm departmental 
secretary at Just a moment.  Is that you, Mrs.  Hammel?"
So ... Little Miss Muffet, earning her curds and whey.


"Hello, Miss Quigley.  I didn't recognize your voice." "I 
didn't know..."  Embarrassed hesitancy.
"Are you under police protection or what?" "Something like 
that.  How are you.  Miss Quigley?" 
"I've been trying to get in touch with you.  Nobody could 
tell me where you were.  I didn't expect..  "
"That's OK.  I haven't much wanted to be around people 
right now."
"I understand, Angelina.  Can I call you Angelina?  I can't 
say how sorry I am about Professor Hammel.  Animals, they 
should be gar rotted I mean it.  The electric chair's too 
good for that type.  They should be made to suffer."
"What type is that, Miss
Quigley?"
"You know.  Degenerates.  Blacks, Hispanics.  I heard they 
mutilated him.  That's gross.
Animals, what else can you call them, people who can do 
that sort of thing?  And such a sweet man, Professor 
Hammel.  A saint.  Nobody should die like that.  But you 
don't need me to tell you.  I was saying to ..."
"Miss Quigley, I don't want to talk about this at present."
"Oh, I'm sorry, I should be more sensitive.  My 
psychosynthesist says I need to empathize more."  A pause.
"Listen, Angie, your parents-in-law are desperate to see 
you.  They're staying in the Heights, at the St.  George.  
You like that place?  Me, I hate it.
Too big.
Anyway, they'd like you to call them.  The rest of the 
professor's family are coming in tomorrow to be at the 
cremation.  Hey, Angie, you don't know what's happening, do 
you?"
"No, I don't know what's happening, Miss Quigley.  Suppose 
you tell me."



Mary-Jo obliged with the funeral details.  Everybody 
would be there.
There would be a service at the university chapel 
afterwards.
"Thanks for ringing, Miss Quigley.  I'll tell the 
lieutenant you were looking for him.  Perhaps he can ring 
you back."
"It's no trouble.  I can call again.  It's just that the 
press have been hanging round.  Him being a professor and 
everything: makes it kinda interesting.  I was 
interviewed this morning for Channel 9. Don't you think 
Gary Douglas is the cutest?  I..."


Little Miss Muffet was enjoying this.  Angelina hung up.
She went to the bedroom and laid her purchases out on the 
bed.
Using a nail clipper, she snipped off the labels.  Two 
hundred dollars hadn't bought a lot; but she had to be 
careful about money now.
Rich hadn't carried much life insurance.
In the bathroom, she stripped off the fat momma's things 
with a sense of relief.  Reuben could take them back with a 
bunch of carnations. What had Jean Brodie called them in 
that movie?
"Serviceable flowers'.  How very true.  As long as she, 
Angelina, didn't have to make a courtesy call.  He wouldn't 
expect her to meet his family, would he?
She looked at herself in the full-length mirror next to the 
door.
Who are you today, Angelina HammeP Correction, Angelina 
Hypolite-Behard Double correction.  Angelina Whoever-You 
Like
He'd liked her breasts, he'd caressed her legs and neck, 
he'd come all the way inside her.  She couldn't believe it: 
as though it was the most natural thing in the world.  She 
wondered if he'd want to do it again tonight.
Maybe it wouldn't hurt so much this time.
Stepping into the shower, she turned the water on full.  It 
was better shower than the one she had at home, a proper 
cubicle with a glass door instead of a fiddling plastic 
curtain on a rail.  Needles of hot water thundered against 
her skin.  Steam filled the cubicle, delicious hot steam 
that bathed her lungs in warmth and misted the glass, 
shutting her off from everything in a tight little world of 
her own.  Little Miss Muffet couldn't find her here.  
Filius the zombie couldn't find her here.
Nobody could find her.
She shut off the water and picked the huge sponge up from 
the floor. She had bought a bottle of Clarins' Bain aux 
Plantes.  A little luxury never did any harm.  She poured a 
generous amount of the shower gel onto the sponge.
Smiling, she leaned back and drew the wet sponge all down 
her front, across her breasts and over her belly.
And screamed and screamed and screamed.  The sponge fell to 
the floor. And after it, the first drop of blood, then a 
trickle, then a stream. She staggered and fell against the 
door of the cubicle, smearing the glass with blood.

Her feet went out from under her, kicking the sponge, 
dislodging one of the dozen razor blades with which it had 
been so lovingly stuffed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Reuben stood looking down into the opening, like a man on 
the edge of a vertiginous drop who knows that in a very 
little while the ground will crumble and he will plummet to 
the bottom.
O'Rourke had brought a large flashlight from the patrol 
car.
He handed it to Reuben, relieved to watch the lieutenant go 
ahead of him.  His hand shook visibly as he handed the 
light across.  No-one wanted to go down there.  No-one 
wanted to be first.
Reuben knelt on the edge and swung the light downwards in a 
series of gentle arcs, crisscrossing the empty, shadowed 
space.
Crumbling bricks, old joists, earth that had been raked and 
sifted in the past few days without throwing up any clues.  
Cobwebs in the corners, miraculously intact.  The darkness 
solid, sweet with death.
But no bodies this time, not even a scrap of grave clothes.
On the side facing Reuben, bricks had been removed from the 
wall. Quite a lot of bricks.
There was an opening big enough for a man to squeeze 
inside.  Something crawled through Reuben's stomach: he 
knew he would be expected to go down there and climb 
through the aperture.  There must be a tunnel, he thought:
the hole in the wall was the source of the draught.  And 
the fetid smell.
"I'm going down," said Reuben.
He was certain someone else had spoken, the words were in 
such contradiction of his state of mind.
More than ever, he wanted to turn and leave this place.
I'll come with you, Reuben."
Danny's voice sounded strange.  The jocularity had been 
stripped
away.
In its place, Reuben sensed raw fear.
"OK.  You'll have to crawl through after me."  Reuben 
hesitated. "O'Rourke you'll find another flashlight in my 
car.  In the trunk. Would you get it for Detective Cohen, 
please?"
"Yes, sir.  I'll get it at once."
O'Rourke would have done anything to get out of there.  He 
took the keys Reuben offered him and turned to go.
"O'Rourke."
"Yes, sir?"
"While you're fetching the flashlight, would you please 
call the
precinct and tell them what we've found here?  Tell them we 
may need some help."
O'Rourke seemed to turn green.
"Do you expect to find ... anything else down there, sir?"
Reuben paused, then nodded.
"Yes,
Officer O'Rourke.  That's exactly what I expect."
O'Rourke turned and stumbled out of the room.  Grigorevitch 
stayed behind.  He was feeling queasier every minute.
No-one said anything at first.
On the mantelpiece, a clock ticked tiredly.  Reuben turned 
and caught sight of his own face, distorted in a cheap 
mirror.  He looked away nervously.  The clock went on 
ticking.  Reuben noticed a fly, high up, circling.  Then 
another, and another.  Circling.  Buzzing.
Landing on the walls and ceiling.
Without warning, the clock stopped ticking.  In the sudden 
silence, the buzzing of flies was magnified.
O'Rourke took five minutes, but it seemed much longer.  
Danny did not thank him when he handed the flashlight over.
"Captain Connelly's in a meeting with the DA, sir.  I left 
your message."
Thanks.  Maybe you can call back later.  We'll go down 
anyway.
You stay here with Grigorevitch and keep your ears pricked.  
If one of us calls ..."  He had meant to go on to say, 
"Come in after us', but the words died on his lips.
"Go for help right away," he finished lamely.
"Understand?"
"Yes, sir."  O'Rourke hesitated.
"Good luck, sir."
Reuben said nothing.  He turned away, then back again.
"O'Rourke, did you ask what the DA was seeing Connelly 
about?"
"Desk sergeant said he thought it was to do with this 
case."  The policeman shrugged.
"But that could just be gossip, sir."
Reuben nodded.  Why should Connelly call in the DA at this 
stage of the case?  They had no suspects, no definite line 
of enquiry.
He gave a mental shrug and lowered himself through the 
opening in the floor.  Danny followed a moment later.
The hole in the wall was ragged, about three feet in 
diameter, and set low down near the floor.


Reuben knelt in front of it and shone the light inside.  
"What can you see, Reuben?"
Danny asked.  Unconsciously, he had dropped his voice to a 
whisper. "This is crazy," Reuben answered.
"I can make out steps.
Old steps roofed in with brick.  They look even older than 
the foundation walls in here.  Everything looks kind of 
mildewed.  There are hundreds of old cobwebs.  Some of the 
bricks are covered in moss. It looks a little damp."
"Can you see anything else?"
Reuben shook his head.
"No.  We'll have to go in."
"Shouldn't we wait till Connelly gets here?  Maybe bring 
in some Special Operations guys to handle it."
"Danny, somebody's got to go in there.  After last time, 
we know there could be survivors.  I don't like it, but 
I've made up my mind and I'm trying not to think about it.  
You can stay here if you prefer."
Danny bit his lip, shaking his head.
"I won't let you go in there alone, Reuben.  I figure if 
you find some Ninja Turtles you'll just keep them to 
yourself."


Reuben turned to his friend.  He could sense his fear.
"What is it, Danny?  What are you frightened of?  
Seriously."
Danny shook his head again.
"It's OK, Reuben.  It's just this place, it's giving me 
the creeps. Come on, let's see what's at the bottom of 
the steps."
For a moment Reuben hesitated.
Finally he nodded.


"Let's go."
The steps went down about twenty feet before levelling out 
onto a flat surface.  Stooping on the bottom step, Reuben 
shone his flashlight ahead.  A narrow tunnel ran into the 
distance.  Like the steps, it was lined with brick, 
cobwebbed, ancient, utterly without light.
The tunnel was narrow but large enough to allow a man 
through without undue difficulty.  Reuben would have to 
stoop a little, but he would have no problem getting 
through.  The ceiling was arched and rounded. The walls 
were cold to the touch.  Reuben stepped inside and at once 
he felt the walls press in on him.  God knew how old they 
were or how long it had been since anyone last crawled 
through here assuming that the tunnel really had been 
intended as a passageway for human beings and was not just 
a branch of an old sewer or some sort of drainage channel 
for the Brooklyn
Battery Tunnel.  The bricks could be loose, his passage 
might dislodge
them, trapping him.  He forced himself not to think about 
that.
Danny squeezed in after him.
They would have to go in single file.  Reuben set off 
slowly, swinging his flashlight into the pitch blackness.  
Behind him, he could hear Danny's muffled footsteps.
From time to time, Danny's light would send shadows into 
the beam of Reuben's, weaving complex patterns among the 
crumbling bricks.  They had no difficulty breathing: the 
air was malodorous, but fresh enough to breathe.
The tunnel seemed to slope downwards, but Reuben could not 
be sure. There were thick cobwebs in places: his hair and 
eyes were already streaked with them, and he could feel the 
legs of living spiders on his scalp and neck.
The powerful beam of the flashlight revealed only a short 
section of tunnel at a time: the passage was bending gently 
as it sank lower into the earth.  They were already well 
out of sight of the opening through which they had entered, 
and Reuben wondered if anyone there would hear them if they 
called.  Hemmed in by brick, choked by dusty cobwebs, he 
could scarcely believe that the apartment still existed.  
The world had shrunk to an impossibly narrow space, to bare 
bricks and the limits of his own body.
"You hear anything, Reuben?"
Danny's voice sounded hoarse.
"Like what?"
"Don't know.  Thought I heard something up ahead."
Reuben swung his light back and forwards.  Moss.  Cobwebs.
Nothing.  He checked his gun, just to know it was there.  
Something scuttled across his path.  A rat, sleek and 
rapid.  It disappeared into the darkness.  They kept on 
moving.
The sound of water dripping raised tiny echoes.  There were 
patches of damp here and there on the walls and ceiling.
Without warning, a side tunnel opened on their right.
Awkwardly, Reuben shone his flashlight into it.  More 
ancient bricks, more shadows, more toneless echoes 
vanishing to nothing.
Five minutes later, they passed a similar opening on their 
left.
They were in some sort of labyrinth.
The air from the side tunnels felt fresher.  Reuben was 
tempted to follow one in the hope that it might lead to a 
way out.  But prudence suggested that it might be safer for 
the moment to remain in the main tunnel.  They kept moving 
forwards.  There were no more side tunnels. The passage 
stretched ahead of them without changing.  Darkness like 
solid slabs of night, an old darkness, dank and 
threatening.
Angry shadows, childhood phantoms, a beam of waving light, 
cutting, growing weak.
Suddenly, Danny hissed a warning.
"Stop, Reuben!  Don't move!"



Reuben froze.
"What is it?"
"There's something behind me." Danny's voice was tense. 
Reuben sensed that his friend was on the edge of panic.  He 
should not have allowed him to come down here.
"Stay calm, Danny."
"I heard something, Reuben.  It came out of one of those 
tunnels back there."
"You heard a rat, that's all."
Reuben could feel his own hair standing on end.  Danny's 
fear was contagious.
"Not a rat, not down here.
Listen, I heard it again."
Reuben heard nothing.  He turned awkwardly and shone his 
light on Danny.  His friend was standing crouched with his 
back to him, staring back along the tunnel as though 
waiting for some thing to emerge from the blackness.  
Suddenly, Reuben heard it too, a scraping sound, low and 
directionless.
"Keep calm, Danny."
But Danny was on edge, old fears of the dark intensified by 
his passage through the tunnel.  By the time Reuben saw 
what he was doing, it was too late.  Danny took out his gun 
and fired wildly into the darkness, again and again, until 
he had emptied the chamber of his pistol.
The shots died away, echo upon echo, leaving the darkness 
whole.  There was a sound like rain dropping on dry leaves: 
the bullets must have dislodged pieces of brick.  Danny's 
hand shook as he put the gun away. He knew he had acted 
stupidly.  His flashlight was still pointed into the 
darkness behind.  More fragments of brick skittered to the 
floor, followed by a small, intense silence.
"Reuben, I..."
As he spoke, another fall of tiny pieces began, turning in 
moments to a roar.
"Get out of there, Danny!  The roof's caving in!"
Danny twisted back, as though by doing so he could 
recompose broken rock.  The roar lifted in volume, drowning 
Reuben's voice.
Reuben grabbed Danny's arm and pulled him along the 
passage.  A cloud of dust rushed down the tunnel, 
enveloping and choking them.  Reuben stumbled, picked 
himself up, ran on.  Danny came behind, coughing, his lungs 
full of dirt.
The roaring ceased.  Dust still filled the tunnel, hanging 
in the starkest of silences.  There were small crashes, 
little rushes of broken rock, but the silence took 
inexorable charge, calming them, stilling their 
convulsions.
Reuben and Danny waited until the dust had settled, then 
crept back along the tunnel, ready to turn and run at the 
first sign of another collapse.  The fall had been about 
fifty feet behind them.
All around it, dust hung in a clumsy ochre cloud.  They 
shone their flashlights on a mass of brick and soil and 
rock.
The debris stretched to the ceiling and beyond, into a raw 
hole.  Parts of the walls had collapsed on either side.
There was no way past.
"What are we going to do, Reuben?"
Reuben played his light up and down the obstruction.  It 
was solid enough, but patently unstable.
"I don't think we should waste time on this, Danny.  We've 
no way of knowing how far back it goes.
They'll know back in the apartment that something has 
happened and send somebody in to get us out.  I'd rather 
not hang around here waiting there could be another cave-
in.  Let's keep on going."
Danny agreed.  They had little choice.  Reuben took the 
lead again and set off in the original direction.
"Keep close behind me, Danny.
Switch off your flashlight we don't know how long we're 
going to be down here."
Danny switched off his light.  All about him grew dark.  
The only light was Reuben's, several feet ahead.
"I'm sorry about what happened back there, Reuben.  I must 
have panicked."
"You were frightened, Danny.  You were frightened before 
you came in here?  What was it you were frightened of?"
There was a long silence.  Reuben could hear Danny's 
breathing, tight behind him, his feet scraping on the 
coarse floor of the tunnel.
"It was a long time ago, Reuben," he said at last.
"I used to have a dream.
A nightmare.  Before we met, when I was a little kid.  The 
dream was full of tunnels, tunnels like this.  I'd get into 
them somehow, and once I was in I realized something was 
chasing me."
"Did you know who?"
"No.  I don't think it was a person.
But I knew it would kill me if it found me.  I used to wake 
up screaming."
"You're awake now, Danny."
"No, Reuben, that's the really scary part.  I'd wake up in 
my bed screaming, but nobody would come.  I'd be all alone 
in my room and I'd be sweating and I'd call out, but nobody 
would come to help me.  So I'd get up and open the door 
and... That's when I got really scared, because when I 
opened the door I'd be in the tunnel again, just like
before, only this time I knew the thing that was chasing me 
was really close.
And I'd run and run and turn a corner and... And then 
something happened and I really woke up.  I can't remember 
what happened."
"And this place reminds you of your dream?"
The silence stretched and stretched.  Reuben stopped and 
turned, letting his light fall on his friend's face.  The 
look of fear was real.
"This is my dream, Reuben,"
Danny whispered.
"Don't you understand?  That's why I panicked.  It's my 
dream all over again.
Only this time I'm not asleep."
They walked on in silence.
The air was already growing thick and stale.  Whatever 
fresh air there had been had come from the two side 
tunnels.
And then, abruptly, the tunnel ended.  There was a gentle 
bend followed by a slight rise that led directly to a brick 
wall.


They could not go forward.  And they could not go back.
They sat by the wall for what seemed a long time, 
saying nothing. The darkness pressed in on them.  In a 
little while,
Reuben's flashlight would run out.
Danny's would give them another hour or two.  Perhaps 
someone would come and rescue them by then.  The 
darkness was very strong.


"You smell something, Reuben?" Danny's voice sounded 
pale and lost. 
"What have we been doing since we came in here?"
Danny wrinkled his nose and sniffed twice.
"It's not that, Reuben.  Not the musty smell.  It's 
something else." Reuben sniffed.  Danny was right, there 
was something different. "It's getting stronger,


Reuben.  It's familiar .. ."
Danny took a deep breath.  Slowly, the expression on his 
face changed. He seemed to go pale all at once, as though 
the blood had been drained from his cheeks.
"What is it, Danny?"
"Oh God, Reuben1 know what it is.  It's gas.  What I'm 
smelling is gas."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN



The gas was seeping slowly into the tunnel from a ruptured 
pipe at the cave-in.  It crept, invisible and deadly, into 
the tight and silent spaces of the little world they had 
made, scarcely perceptible at first, but with every moment 
gaining a little strength.  The air at the site of the 
cave-in was already hard to breathe.  The broken pipe was 
out of reach.
Danny and Reuben tied handkerchiefs round their mouths and 
returned to the wall, knowing their lives were measured in 
minutes rather than hours.  The gas would not take long to 
fill what little space there was.
Reuben shook his light up and down the surface of the wall 
that had cut off their progress.
"What do you think, Danny?"
Danny looked over Reuben's shoulder.
"Looks like it was put up quickly, not like the rest of the 
tunnel.
The mortar's rough, crumbly in places.  I think this is 
just a partition wall somebody put in here to seal the 
tunnel off.  Could even lead to the outside."
"Or the river."
"That's outside.  Anyway, I don't think that's a problem.
The wall's old.  If that was the river out there, it would 
have broken through a long time ago."
Danny reached into a pocket and brought out a large 
penknife, the sort that has a blade for everything.  It 
carried a spike, short but reasonably strong.  Danny passed 
it to Reuben.
"Here, use this."
Reuben started to work at the mortar between two bricks at 
shoulder level.  It crumbled easily.  Reuben worked 
quickly, coughing and wheezing as the gas grew thicker and 
more potent.
Mortar came away in large pieces now, falling around his 
feet; when he had loosened enough of it, he borrowed 
Danny's empty revolver and swung it like a hammer hard 
against the cobwebbed brick, splintering it, dislodging it 
from the remaining mortar.  The brick shattered and gave 
way, falling back into emptiness.
A hazy light was visible beyond the tiny opening.  Reuben 
drew in a mouthful of unpoisoned air, musty but breathable.
"Give me your flashlight,
Danny.  Mine's too far gone."
Reuben shone the light through the hole.  Several yards 
away, he could make out what seemed to be a heavy metal 
grille, its bars pitted and rusted with age.  The tunnel 
seemed to end after the grille, but Reuben could not see 
enough to tell what lay beyond.  He had been holding his 
breath;
sucking in air, he choked on gas and felt his head spin.  
He would have to enlarge the hole quickly.
Dislodging one brick made the rest easy.  Reuben abandoned 
the gun in
favour of his bare hands, pushing and pulling loosened 
bricks until they came away.
One section of wall collapsed intact.  It took only minutes 
to create a hole large enough to crawl through.
On the other side they found themselves in a short stretch 
of tunnel identical to the one in which they had already 
been.
Using Danny's flashlight, they could see the grille 
properly now.  It was a heavy gate, bolted on one side, the 
spaces between its bars woven with generations of spiders' 
webs.
Reuben swept the webs away from the middle section of the 
gate and shone the light through.
Beyond lay a vast chamber, its walls and floor made 
entirely of brick. High up in the far wall, almost out of 
sight from where Reuben stood, a barred and broken window 
allowed a little air and a little light to creep in from 
outside.
The floor of the chamber was dotted with circular stone 
slabs like manhole covers.  The slabs were pierced with 
holes and curiously smooth.  The holes were about the size 
of large coins.  It looked as though nothing in the chamber 
had been disturbed for a long time.
The bolt flew apart at a single kick, but it still took all 
Reuben's strength to move the gate even a couple of inches.  
The hinges had rusted fast.  The effects of the gas were 
lessening rapidly now, but Reuben still felt giddy.
"Let me try."
Danny squeezed past and took Reuben's place at the gate.  
He was better built than his friend and still worked out 
regularly at a gym on Fulton Street.  The gate gave way.  
Not much, but enough.
The way was open.  The chamber was waiting.  For no 
particular reason, Reuben felt terribly afraid.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Danny went in first, with
Reuben close on his heels.  They stood side by side, just 
past the entrance, nervously playing their flashlights back 
and forth along the walls of the tremendous room.
Heavy brick, coarsely laid, bearded with tendrils of 
clinging cobweb, pitted and dark, its mortar gently 
crumbling.  Reuben sensed the age of the place, the 
brooding presence of it, solid, confining, tomb-like. As 
far as they could judge, it was a large chamber, some 
hundred feet by as much again, perhaps twenty five feet 
high.  A heavy wooden door was set in the right-hand wall.
It was Danny who first noticed that the floor was slightly 
concave, sloping in from the four sides to a shallow 
centre.
Along each of the sides ran a low gutter or channel, and 
from each corner in turn, four more gutters ran inward, 
converging at the centre, where the innermost of the 
numerous 'manhole covers' was situated, as if it were a hub 
at the heart of a wheel.
Closer inspection revealed that narrow channels had been 
cut into the brickwork throughout the concavity of the 
floor, leading from the four diagonal runnels to each of 
the manholes, about fifty in number, these
last being distributed, it now appeared, in a series of 
concentric circles running out from the centre almost to 
the edge.  The dimensions of the manholes were regular, 
each measuring approximately two feet in diameter.
Danny stepped onto the floor, for all the world like a 
dancer treading nervously onto an unfamiliar stage, waiting 
for music from the pit to stir him to performance pitch.  
But here there was only silence and the scrape of lonely 
feet on brick.
This place gives me the creeps," Danny whispered.
"What the hell do you think it is?"
"I don't know, Danny.  I wish to
God I did."
"It's cold.  Really cold.  How far down you think we are,
Reuben?"
Reuben shook his head.
"I can't say.  The window's over twenty feet up."
"We went down at least that far when we went in."  Danny 
paused and stepped towards the wall on his left.  Reuben 
noticed that he deliberately avoided stepping on any of the 
manholes, picking his way between them like a child 
sidestepping cracks on the sidewalk.
"Reuben!"  Danny's voice was still low, but the tension in 
it was marked.
"Over here, Reuben.
Look at this."
Reuben joined his friend, unconsciously picking the same 
path between the manholes.  All along the left-hand wall 
ran a series of metal cages, each about the size of a 
filing cabinet laid on its side.
They went closer and Danny shone his light inside.  At the 
back of the first cage, beneath a pile of dust and cobwebs, 
he made out what looked like a pile of bones.


"You don't think..  . ?" "It's some animal, Danny." "You 
want to take a look?" Reuben shivered.
"Let's leave that to the guys from Forensics.  Whatever it 
was, it's been down here a long time."
Each of the cages held at least one pile similar to the 
first. Dustcovered feeding troughs lay against the cage 
fronts.  Any food that might have been in them had long ago 
decayed to nothing.
Reuben made the next discovery.
Shining his flashlight upwards, he noted that the ceiling 
was made of stucco, badly crumbled in places.  All around 
its edge ran a circle of what looked like rusted iron.  He 
took it at first for ornamentation,
yet thought it strange to find such a thing, however plain, 
in a chamber of such puritan aspect.  And then the 
flashlight moved further over and picked out something 
bulky on the far side of the ceiling.
It was a kind of gantry.  Its arm extended from the outer 
circle as far as the centre of the room, where it joined a 
smaller, inner circle, also of rusted metal.  The circles, 
then, were not ornaments but rails for the gantry.  From 
the inner tip of the arm hung a block and tackle fitted 
with a species of grappling hook, the purpose of which was 
immediately clear.
"Do you think it still works?"  Danny's voice brought 
Reuben out of a brief reverie.
Reuben shrugged.
"Depends."
"On what?"
"How old it is.  How badly rusted.  It could be put back in 
working order, sure.  But for the moment
Danny stroked his light up and down the gantry arm.
"You thinking what I'm thinking?"
"That they used this thing to open and close the manholes?"
Danny nodded.
"You're probably right," replied Reuben.
"It seems elaborate, but I can't think of any other 
purpose."
"Lifting merchandise into the holes?"
"Maybe.  Maybe."  Something about the arrangement made 
Reuben uneasy. The gantry had not been used for lifting 
sacks of flour, he was sure of that.
"Want to take a look inside one?"  Danny's voice was 
hesitant.
"Not particularly."
"No, me neither."  Danny gave a little shiver.  Goose bumps 
ran all along his arms.  He looked round uneasily.
"But something tells me we should.  For our peace of mind."
"How do you propose we do it?"  Reuben asked.
"Those lids look as though they weigh a few pounds."
Danny gave Reuben a withering look.
"You should work out more,
Reuben.  Come on, let's give it a try."
Reuben nodded.  He felt diminished, numb, unable to react 
any other way than mechanically.
Deep inside, he felt a powerful urge to look over his 
shoulder.  What had Danny heard in the tunnel, the scraping 
sound that had panicked him into firing?  In spite of the 
room's great size, Reuben was feeling
claustrophobic.
They chose the nearest manhole, having no reason to favour 
one over another.  Reuben switched off his flashlight and 
Danny laid his on the ground, where it shed an oblique 
lozenge of pastel light along the floor.  Facing each 
other, they hunkered down, settling into position carefully 
to avoid straining their backs.
Slipping their fingers into the holes, they flexed their 
muscles and prepared to take the strain.
It was heavier than Danny had anticipated.  Muscles bunched 
in their necks and shoulders, but the cover did no more 
than rock fraction of an inch.  Undaunted, Danny gave it 
everything he had.
"Come... on... Reuben... We..  can... do... it," he gasped.
Reuben closed his eyes.
Lights danced and sparkled against a cloth of black; he 
felt as though his muscles would tear or his shoulder 
blades jump from their sockets. The slab lifted slowly, 
grating as they slid it onto the floor.
Panting, they rested.  Reuben was the first to move.  
Picking up Danny's flashlight, he played it across the 
shadows inhabiting the pit. Dense cobwebs, a rustling of 
spiders' legs, something vague below.  He used the 
flashlight to tear the webs to pieces.
Nervously, he shone the light into the pit again.  Spiders 
scuttling, disturbed and angry, dark legs shimmering.  A 
handful of restless shadows.
Steep walls of glazed brick, cracked and stained.  On the 
bottom, another heap of bones, jumbled and grey.  Old 
bones, brittle bones, long ago scoured clean of flesh by 
the legs of spiders.  And on top of them a human skull, 
patches of dried flesh still clinging to the cheeks, 
strands of long, dirty hair straggling like seaweed across 
the bones beneath.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The strands of matted hair rippled like a fugue through 
Reuben's brain, repeating and repeating their stark, 
tangled message of decay.  He shivered and moved away from 
the open pit, followed moments later by Danny.
The place was a graveyard of stone.  God knew how many 
bones it contained or how long they had been here.  
Wherever they walked, the anonymous dead lay huddled 
underneath.  No names were inscribed on the heavy slabs 
above their remains, no dates marked their births or 
commemorated their deaths.
Reuben reached the edge of the floor and looked back over 
the bone-pits.  One thing disturbed him above all else: to 
bury the dead beneath stone slabs was not unusual; to leave 
them nameless was uncommon yet far from unprecedented.  But 
why would anyone want to seal the graves with slabs like 
these, pierced with large holes, like the lids of boxes in 
which children carry their pet hamsters home?
Without realizing it, they had crossed to the foot of the 
steps, at the top of which the wooden door stood waiting.  
After their latest experience, neither man was eager to see 
what lay behind the door; but they both knew that, if there 
was a more straightforward way out than back down the 
tunnel, it could only lie through the door.  And the gas, 
though much dissipated, was still streaming into the 
chamber.
Reuben climbed the steps while Danny remained at the 
bottom, lighting the way for him.
Gingerly, Reuben touched the plain metal handle, steeling 
himself to turn it.  The mechanism was stiff, but it put up 
little real resistance.  Reuben braced his legs and pulled 
hard.
The door buckled at the top, then gave way all at once, 
moving outwards with a dark grinding sound.  The odour of 
long-dead air filled Reuben's nostrils.  The smell was 
stale and rotten, but it held a faint suggestion of 
something unexpected, a rich, complicated perfume that had 
been shut up in a confined space for centuries, faded yet 
lingering, attenuated to a thin, pale ghost, dark, 
drifting, pitiful.
The hinges locked and the door stuck halfway.  Reuben 
stepped round the door and shone his flashlight into the 
opening.
The entire doorway was veiled from top to bottom in a 
seamless cobweb. Reuben hesitated, as though the web were 
more of an obstruction than the door.
Then, almost savagely, he tore it from side to side.  The 
strands shrivelled and fell away, revealing nothing behind 
but an expanse of blackness into which no light penetrated.
Whatever lay beyond the door, it was not daylight and it 
was not liberty.
Reuben prayed that this was not the entrance to yet another 
charnel house.  What he saw next tore the prayer from his 
lips.
Not horror, not terror, but a dream from which all horror 
and all terror had been surgically removed, leaving a 
small, insane rustling that betokens nightmare lurking in 
the interstices of sleep itself.
The door led into a second room, much smaller than the 
first, darker, heavier: a proper room made sinister by age.  
Beneath a low ceiling of lightly decorated gesso, dark 
wainscoted walls swallowed the yellow light from Reuben's 
hand torch.  The floor was made of parquet covered in 
places by Persian carpets.  There were traces of white sand 
where the wood had last been scrubbed- a practice that had 
died out in the nineteenth century.  A mist of cobwebs 
flapped obscenely in the draught as the door swung open, 
then settled again, vast and brooding, a grey, dust-
shrouded stillness that stifled the room.
The spiders had woven webs of time wild, intricate puzzles 
in which to hold the years like mottled flies.  Behind 
them, choked by shadows, the gilded spines of tall, 
leather-bound books paraded across shelves of dark wood.  A 
globe of the world stood in a wooden support within the 
angle of the farthest corner, its oceans dry and faded, its 
cities fallen, its tall towers gutted and razed.  A large 
spider walked on stilted legs through the dark heart of 
Africa, gaunt and black, striding across the world.
On the rear wall, in lieu of books, hung dusty portraits of 
men in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century dress, iced 
with cobwebs, cracked and warped by long neglect.  They 
stared at Reuben balefully, their hooded eyes cold and 
accusing.  Each held in his hand what appeared to be a rod 
or sceptre of some kind, as though in imitation of a king 
or prince.  But their clothing was dark and sober, and 
their stern features spoke, not of the softness of palaces, 
but of a life dedicated to higher things.
The wall on which the portraits hung was broken at its 
centre by a flight of some dozen stone steps leading 
directly to a low wooden door. On the door was painted in 
red a circle with rays streaming downwards,
emblematic of the sun, and in the centre of the circle 
Reuben recognized the Hebrew words yod, heth, wow, heth: 
the divine name, Yahweh.  Below the sun stood a lion 
holding an open book on which the Latin words semper apert 
us had been inscribed:
For ever open.
At the centre of the room, facing the door, sat a high 
wooden desk shrouded in fantastic cobwebs that stretched 
from its surface to the floor, as though pinning it fast.  
It was on the desk above all that Reuben's nervous gaze 
lingered.  Or, to be more precise, the thing that sat 
behind the desk.
It was the mummified corpse of a man, dressed in clothes 
that dated, like those in the portraits, from the late 
eighteenth or early nineteenth century: a drab Quaker-style 
cassimere coat over a black velvet waistcoat, a white 
muslin stock and cravat, nankeen breeches buttoned just 
below the knee.  All much rotted now, yet still intact. The 
plain clothes of a scholar or a clergyman.
On the desk in front of the mummy, a large book lay open, 
coated in a thick layer of dust.  But he could see none of 
it.  His leather face was covered from chin to forehead by 
a great, circular web.  And in the centre of the web a huge 
spider sat, many legged, thin, quivering gently on its 
fine-spun cradle as it waited patiently for its prey.
The floor behind the desk was bare of carpet.  Beneath a 
thin layer of dust, thick red painted lines were dimly 
discernible.  A large circle enclosed a five pointed star, 
along the inner valleys of which ran two further concentric 
circles, about six inches apart.  At the five points of the 
star stood tall candlesticks, still complete with yellow 
wax myrtle candles.
Reuben crossed behind the desk and bent down low over the 
pentacle. Brushing and blowing, he cleared a section of 
floor and stood up to see it more clearly.  An inscription 
ran around the double inner circle. Reuben recognized 
several Hebrew letters and made out words that he guessed 
were Latin.  Within the centre of the star numerous symbols 
were distributed according to no clear pattern.  Some he 
recognized as astrological emblems, others as cabbalistic 
devices, but the rest were more obscure.  They seemed 
almost African.
He stood up as Danny entered.
Neither man spoke.  Danny stood in the doorway, letting the 
scene sink in little by little.
"You OK, Reuben?"
"It's all right, I'm fine."
"Is this for real?"  he said in a hushed voice.  But he 
knew it was real.
He had seen it before: in his nightmare, years and years 
ago, huddled among damp sheets, screaming for the light.  
Deep down, Danny was frightened, very frightened.  Deep 
down, Danny knew what happened at the end of the nightmare, 
what he had not told Reuben.
Danny stepped across to one of the bookcases.  Brushing 
away the cobwebs, he pulled down a volume from the nearest 
shelf.  It was a large book, folio size, bound in heavy 
calfskin, with large brass clasps.  There was a small table 
nearby.  Danny laid the book on it and opened the clasps.  
The pages were discoloured, but otherwise remarkably well 
preserved.
The title page was in heavy type.  In the centre was a 
circular device made up of four concentric circles, forming 
a band in which were two sets of Hebrew and two sets of 
Greek letters.  Inside the circle were various geometrical 
devices, more Hebrew letters, and rows of what appeared to 
be figures.  At the foot of the circle were the French 
words: Le Grand Pentacule:
The Great Pentacle.
As for the title, it too was in French: Les Clavicules de 
Salomon.
Traduit de I "Hebreux en Langue Latine Parle Rabin 
Abognazar et Mis en Langue Vulgairepar M. Barault 
Archeveque d'Aries.  At the foot of the page was a date: 
M.DC.XXXIV: 1634.
The book itself seemed to be some sort of treatise on 
ritual magic, complete with formulae for incantations, 
talismanic devices, diagrams, and drawings depicting 
magical rites.
Reuben joined Danny.  Together they passed along the rows, 
pulling out books at random, examining each one in turn 
briefly, before returning it to the shelf.
More volumes in French, several in Latin, with mysterious 
titles and curious inscriptions: De Occulta Philosophia 
Libri Tres; De natura hum effectuum causis, sive de 
Incantationibus...; Staganographia, hoc est, ars per occult 
am scripturam animi sui voluntatem absentibus aperiendi 
certa...;
Gnmorium Verum; Lemegeton; Veterum Sophorum Sigilla et 
Imagines Magicae; De Septem Secundeis ... In one row they 
found over forty volumes in
English,
German and Dutch.
Near them were several books in Greek, almost a dozen in 
Hebrew, three in what
Reuben took to be Arabic, and one in a script he did not 
recognize.
The majority dated from the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries, having been published for the most part in 
Paris, Leiden, Cassel, Basle and Darmstadt.
The most recent was a small half folio in English, 
published in Boston in 1800 by Nathaniel Ackerknecht.
Written by one Perseverance Hopkins, it was entitled A 
Sober Warning to the Righteous, being an Account of the 
Recent Events at Nantucket.  It seemed to have been much 
read, and its margins were covered with notes in a fine, 
crabbed hand.  On a narrow table at the rear of the room, 
immediately beneath the brooding portraits, there lay a 
heap of cobwebbed papers, most of which, on close 
examination, proved to be letters.  Strange letters, in a 
variety of languages, but mainly French and German, the 
texts interspersed with Hebrew and Latin quotations, 
strings of numerals, astrological and cabbalistic signs.  
Whole sections of some of the letters appeared to be in 
code.
They came from all over Europe, including several from 
Mitau in Courland, and more than a few from Budapest, Riga, 
Brest, and other cities in the east.
Most interesting of all was a bundle of over forty letters 
in the same hand.

They were in French and headed "Cap Francais'.  The dates 
ran from 1762 to 1807, but the handwriting scarcely varied.
Cap Francais was, of course, the old name for Cap-Haitien, 
the former northern capital of Haiti in the days when it 
was the French colony of St.  Domingue.  The signature at 
the bottom of the letters was illegible.
The bundle was kept in a small box, separate from the other 
letters.
At the bottom of the box was a flat gold object.  In shape, 
it was a half circle about one foot in diameter, with a 
ragged long edge and smooth circumference, as though it had 
been broken from a larger disc. Its surface was covered in 
peculiar markings, all of them unfamiliar to Reuben.
Something about it suggested that its origin, like that of 
the symbols on the floor, might possibly be African.
Reuben closed the box.
"Danny, just so there's no problem with Connelly later on, 
I'm letting you see that I'm taking these with me.  I want 
to show the letters to Angelina.  The half-disc as well."
"I think we should get out of here," said Danny.  He made 
for the stairs.
"Just a minute," Reuben called.  All the time he had been 
in the room, his eyes had returned again and again to the 
seated figure at the
desk.
Something drew him in that direction.
He wanted to see the book, to look at the page the sorcerer 
in Quaker garb had been reading when he died.
Cautiously, he approached the desk from the side.  The 
mummy's hand rested on the page, thin and shrivelled, 
retracted like a claw.  As Reuben moved it, he disturbed 
the body.  The spider shivered and took fright, scuttling 
across its web and down behind, seeking cover in the empty 
socket of the sorcerer's right eye.
Reuben lifted the book, a hefty folio volume, and began to 
draw it away from the desk, as he did so tearing the webs 
that joined it to the mummy and the desk.  A second large 
spider ran out from underneath.
Reuben started, and the book slipped from his grasp, 
falling on the floor with a crash and closing.  He picked 
it up, spluttering in the dense cloud of grey dust.
Reuben balanced the book on the edge of the desk and opened 
it again. The title-page read:
The Liber
Arcanorum r Ketab El


Asrar ofAben 
Pharagi 
Maroccan us
Scriptor
Nubianus
Rende red 
into the 
Englysh e
Tongue from 
the Latin
Translation 
by Trithem 
ills,
Done by an 
Englyshe
Savant
And Most
Lavishly 
Illustrated 
Throughout 
With 
Drawinges 
Taken out of


The Original
Texts,
From a Copy
Found
In the Citie ofFayyum,
Egypt
MDXLI
Slowly, Reuben began to leaf through the yellowed pages.
On each left hand page, the text of the Latin translation 
had been printed, facing the English version on the right.
The main text consisted of short verses, which Reuben took 
to be spells, interspersed with lines of cabbalistic 
letters and talismanic devices written in Arabic:
ov
He had only gone through about ten pages when the book,
which had lain unmoved for so long at a single place, 
snapped at the spine and fell open once more at its 
accustomed position.  The page was taken up entirely with a 
woodcut illustration in the style of the sixteenth century.  
It took Reuben about half a minute to work out the subject 
and composition of the drawing.
When he did so, he closed the book with a shudder and 
walked away from
the desk.
The scene depicted was that of a graveyard, in which the 
events of the coming resurrection were graphically 
illustrated.  The artist had transposed the scene from the 
supposed Egypt of the original, showing instead a European 
cemetery, dotted with the Virgins and crosses of the 
Christian faith.  But this drawing bore no relation to the 
usual depictions of the resurrection, in which the dead 
rise up in radiant bodies of resurrected flesh, clad in 
white and filled with joy as they go to meet Jesus coming 
down from heaven.
Instead, the bodies of the newly arisen were putrid and 
rotten, clothed in the remnants of worm-eaten shrouds.  On 
their decayed faces the artist had contrived to depict 
expressions of horror and extreme terror, while all around 
them was a mist-filled darkness within which strange shapes 
lurked.
But it was none of this that caused Reuben to close the 
book so hurriedly and with such loathing.  It was the sight 
of the things that were licking and nibbling at the limbs 
and faces of the risen corpses, even where they stood 
trembling in their graves.
They were a terrible shade of white, and their bodies, 
Reuben felt certain, would, if they moved, move in a most 
sickening way.
One creature at the far left of the picture had turned its 
... face towards the reader with such an expression of 
hunger and triumph that nothing would ever erase its 
features from
Reuben's memory.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
The door at the top of the stairs had been locked from the 
inside, but the key had rusted fast.  Danny smashed the 
lock with his foot, throwing the door back on broken hinges 
against the wall.  Beyond lay a narrow wooden landing 
choked with dust.  The walls were bare rock.
From the landing, a short flight of rickety wooden stairs 
began a winding ascent.  They climbed slowly, numb, fearful 
of further horrors, conscious of the cracking and creaking 
of ancient wood beneath their feet.  Whoever had built the 
subterranean vaults had taken a great deal of trouble to 
ensure their inaccessibility.
At the top of the stairs they came to a wooden trapdoor.
Like the previous door, it opened onto darkness.
Reuben's flashlight was virtually exhausted.  Danny passed 
his up.
In the stronger light, they saw another tunnel stretching 
ahead of them, narrower than the first and choked with 
thick cobwebs.
Danny went first this time, breaking the webs with his arm 
and the flashlight, his eyes darting in and out of the 
darkness, watching for a sign of movement.
The tunnel ended in another flight of wooden steps, 
leading, like the first, to a trapdoor.  Danny pushed it up 
and climbed through into the space beyond a tiny, box-like 
chamber about three feet square.  Someone had boxed the 
trapdoor in.
The wall was of bricks and mortar, very much like the one 
they had found in front of the grille.  Like it, this one 
was much crumbled and weakened in places.
Smashing a hole large enough for them to crawl through, 
they emerged into a long abandoned cellar.
The building above was a warehouse in a state of total 
dilapidation, one of several in the Front Street area near 
the river that had been awaiting demolition for several 
years.
They found the front door and stepped out into the late 
September sunshine.
blinking away the darkness and the terrors of the night on 
a rubble-strewn street just north of the
Brooklyn
Bridge.
A reception committee was waiting at the
Hammels' apartment.  A team had been down in the tunnel for 
over two hours now, trying to dig through to Reuben and 
Danny, presumed dead or trapped.  The zombie story had been 
related with embellishments to Captain Connelly, who had 
come close to having his long-awaited coronary.  Danny had 
been taken off the case and assigned a new partner.  Reuben 
had been suspended and was told to expect disciplinary 
action.  IAD the police Internal Affairs Department had 
been
notified.
There was talk of an investigation.
"What the hell's going on?"  Reuben demanded.
Nobody knew.
Gisler, the lieutenant in charge, shrugged his shoulders 
and said it must be something to do with vampires.  As he 
stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door, Reuben 
heard his laugh, loud and abrasive, behind him.
Danny stayed behind to make a verbal report.


In the street, Reuben found a payphone.
After half a dozen abortive attempts, he 
tracked down Sally Peale in an office 
somewhere in
City Hall.
"I'm in some sort of trouble.
Sally, but I don't know what it is."
"Is this to do with the
Hammel case?"
"What else?"
"Meet me downtown in half an hour,
Reuben.  There's
Chinese restaurant on
Mott Street, number twenty.



I'll see you there."
"What's the name of the restaurant?"
"I just told you: number twenty.  It's near the
Chinese
Museum.
You'll find me on the ground floor."
Chinatown was graceless, without vibrancy, a name more than 
district. Reuben seldom went there.  He disliked Chinese 
food, the abundant use of pork.
Sally was waiting at a table near the back, among shadows.  
She was dressed in an expensively cut grey suit with a 
cream scarf round her neck, the perfect lawyer.  He thought 
she looked beautiful.
What had gone wrong between them?
"Sit down,
Reuben."  There was a blue and white teapot on the table in 
front of her, and two small china cups without handles.
"Have some tea, Reuben.
It's Pi Lo Chun, green tea from Soochow.  You'll enjoy it."
"I'd prefer beer."
She gave him a look which said, "We've been through this 
before."  A waiter came past and she ordered beer.
Young girls in Chinese dresses wheeled dim sum from table 
to table on small, creaking trolleys, each with its own 
selection and labels in Chinese.  Sally seemed to know or 
guess what was on each one.  She pointed, ordering for them 
both, fat white dumplings and pale, wafer wrapped 
delicacies.  She knew their names in Cantonese.
Reuben felt envious and awkward.  He picked at his food, 
embarrassed to ask which if any of the little parcels 
contained pork.
"Would you prefer duck,
Reuben?"
"I'm all right.  This is fine."
Sally lifted a dim sum parcel between two chopsticks and 
popped it into her open mouth.
Her lips were sensual, the gesture erotic.
Reuben felt a twinge of regret.


"What sort of trouble are you in,
Reuben?"
He explained as best he could.
When he finished, she poured herself another tiny cup of 
tea.  It was
growing strong.  She replaced the lid half on, half off 
the pot.  A waiter came by and took the pot away.  All 
around them Chinese voices rose and fell like chimes.
"Have you told anyone else about what you found?"
"Danny's making a report now."
"But no-one else has spoken to you?


No-one outside the force, I mean."
He shook his head.
"The DA's office, is that what you mean?"
The waiter returned and replaced the pot, refilled with hot 
water. Steam drifted from the spout, languid and 
colourless.
"Something like that," said Sally.
She seemed distrait.  A door slammed in the distance.  In a 
kitchen out of sight, a steam jet hissed, desolate and old.  
On the wall above their heads, old samples of Chinese 
calligraphy hung fading, harbouring some sort of mystery.  
At a nearby table, two old men drank tea and smoked.
"Reuben, if anybody does come round asking questions, will 
you ring me?"  She took a leaf from her filofax and 
scribbled digits on it.
"You can reach me on this number almost any time."
Reuben glanced at it.  It was not her home number or the 
number he had just been using at City Hall.  Without a 
word, he folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket.


"I have to go," she said.
He hesitated.
"Are you seeing anybody?"  he asked.
"Yes.  Are you?"
She seemed unconcerned.  But her eyes rested on him.  
He shook his head.
"I don't know," he said.
"Be careful with the Hammel woman.
I don't want you to be hurt, Reuben."
"But you can't prevent it."
She shook her head.
"No."  She ran her tongue along her lips.


"Are you in love with her?"  
she asked. He looked away.
"I have to go too," he 
said.


He called and called again, but the walls threw her name 
back at him and he knew she had gone.  The silence bound 
him to her suddenly, revealing his need, his expectation, 
his disappointment .
Yesterday, it would have been mere silence, today it was a 
wound, a blade of couch grass cutting an unprotected hand.
Closing the door, he looked at the other wounds he had 
brought home: cuts and bruises, trophies of stubborn 
curiosity.  Those were the shallow wounds.  Deeper still, 
he carried more permanent trophies, images of cobwebbed 
death that shuffled through his mind to find and occupy 
its fractured centre.  Not even the tonguelashing he had 
received from Connelly could wipe out that squalid 
archaeology of death.
His clothes were a mess.
He went straight to the bedroom and stripped off his suit: 
it was only about ten weeks old, now it wasn't even fit 
for a welfare store. Feeling flat and despondent, he 
headed for the bathroom.
Maybe a shower would perk him up.


Blood was spattered everywhere.
Blood on the floor, blood on the towels, blood in the 
shower cubicle, like red paint smeared on glass and tiles.  
He panicked, running from room to room in search of her, 
finding nothing.
Back in the bathroom, a closer examination revealed strips 
of gauze and lint, the empty drum from a roll of surgical 
tape he had kept in the cabinet.
She must have been cut badly, then bandaged herself.  How 
had it happened?  She had been disturbed, but he could not 
believe she had tried to kill herself.
This didn't look like attempted suicide.
He almost slipped on the sponge.  It was just outside the 
shower, soaked in blood.  He bent and picked it up, 
dropping it again when blade sliced his finger.
More carefully this time, he lifted it and took a closer 
look.
The blades had been well concealed: just deep enough to 
stay hidden, just near enough to the surface to do their 
work efficiently.
Angelina had lost a lot of blood.  She must be weak, could 
be lying unconscious somewhere.  But where could she have 
gone?
In her room, he found empty shopping bags.
The clothes his sister had lent her were on the bed.
She had bandaged herself, then dressed and left.  Left 
without writing a note to tell him where she had been 
headed.
The telephone rang.  Three times, then it stopped.  A 
moment later, it began again.
He ran to it, plucking it from the hook.
"Angelina?"


Silence.  Then the sound of breathing on the other end, 
steady, slow. Someone listening.
"Who's there?
Is that you,


Angelina?"
The caller hung up.  The promise of Angelina alive became 
the nervous burring of a call tone.
He saw MaryJo Quigley's name on the pad and called the 
university.
Miss Quigley had not been trying to reach him.  No, she 
hadn't seen Mrs.  Hammel, although she had spoken with her 
earlier.  What time had that been?  About twelve o'clock, 
she guessed.
She'd told Mrs.  Hammel about the arrangements for the 
cremation. Wasn't it a shame they wanted to cremate him?


It was sinful to burn a human body like that.
He thanked her and hung up.  Maybe he was panicking too 
soon.
The most likely thing was that she had bandaged herself 
well enough to get to hospital.
The nearest was Kings County.  Any cab driver would have 
taken her there.
Hospital reception had no record of a Mrs.  Hammel.
The duty nurse didn't think any Haitian women had been 
admitted that afternoon.
He tried the Methodist Hospital and the Caledonian, west 
and south of Prospect Park.
Nothing.  The Maimonides Medical Center on 10th Avenue.
Nothing.  The church where she said she had gone to 
confession the day before.
Nothing.  The undertakers where Rick Hammel's body had been 
taken. Nothing.
He put the phone down.
It rang five seconds later.
"Abrams."
"That you.
Lieutenant?
Hell, I've been trying to get you for the past ten 
minutes."  A homicide squad sergeant, a man called Jesus 
Riley, the misnamed product of an Irish-Mexican alliance.
"I've been making some calls,
Sergeant.


What can I do for you?"
"Could you get over here as soon as 
possible, sir? There's been another 
homicide.


Involves a lady by the name of..."
He paused, as though consulting a record sheet.
"Yeah, the name's Angelina Hammel.  The one whose husband 
was found in the park a couple of days ago."
Reuben felt an almighty chill whistle through his flesh.  
His heart was empty.  He felt nothing, he felt everything.
"She's dead?"
A heartbeat.
How long a heartbeat is.


"No, sir.  The lady's alive. She's been asking for you." "I 
don't understand.
You said a homicide." "That's right, sir. 
Victim's a man by the name of... let me see... Aubin 
Mondesir.
I guess I didn't say that right, sir.
Mondesir was a friend of the lady's.  So she says."
"Who found him?"
"The Hammel woman.  Says she found him dead, rang us 
straight away. She was there when the patrol car arrived."
"How is she?"
Another heartbeat.
"Looks kind of rough.  I asked if she wanted to see a 
doctor, but she said no.
Then she mentioned your name.  Said something about staying 
at your place.
That right, sir?"


Reuben paused.
"Yes,
Sergeant.
That's right."
"Just so I know, sir.  I haven't put that into the 
report.  I heard ..."


Riley hesitated.
"What did you hear, Riley?" "Heard 
you had some trouble, sir. 
The captain got back about half an 
hour ago. Cohen was with him, says 
he wants to see you." "Connelly?"
"No, Cohen.
You going to pick the lady up, 
sir?"
"I'll be down right away.


Keep her out of trouble."
He paused.
"She isn't being held, is she?"
"No, sir.
We'd like to question her later.  But I thought you'd 
prefer to take care of that yourself.  She isn't a 
suspect, if that's what you mean."
"That's fine.
Keep her there.  Tell her I'll be there in fifteen 
minutes."


She didn't speak.  But her eyes told him a lot of things.
Mostly, that she was frightened.
"You feeling OK?"  A stupid question.  Anyone could see she 
was ill. She shook her head and looked at him.  She wasn't 
smiling.
"Let's get out of here."
He drove her straight to the Brooklyn Caledonian, used his 
police badge to jump the queue.  She did not protest.
On the way, he noticed that blood stains were beginning to 
spread across her blouse.
"I bought it this morning," she said.
"It was brand new."
She was crying as she spoke.  But she wasn't crying for her 
blouse. And she wasn't crying for herself.  She was crying 
for him.
He had been inside her, he had taken Rick's place, her 
father's place; and without realizing it, he was becoming 
entangled in the nets of her existence.  There was so much 
he did not know, so much he must never know.  She didn't 
love him, that was impossible.
But she wanted to go somewhere dark and private with him 
and pretend that she did.
He still found it hard to accept that she had still been a 
virgin - a
virgin with experience, maybe, but as untouched as a 
thirteen year-old. Could that be a motive for murder?
Between cold sheets, cold actions shiver against the flesh.
He imagined the hell of that, the daily misery of such a 
marriage.
The self mockery, self doubt, self hatred.
Understandable if she had sought an end.  She was still 
hiding something, he was sure of that.  Just what had she 
been confessing to her priest yesterday evening?


Information relating to Rick's death? Knowledge of her own 
complicity?
He prayed not.
He thought he was falling softly and unwillingly in love 
with her.
Her cuts needed sutures.
The doctor treated her like he treated any black woman with 
razor cuts: he stitched her up, but he made her feel that 
it was all a waste of his precious time.
She had to ask for something to kill the pain.  His curt 
instructions to the nurse implied that she should be 
hardened to this sort of thing. Didn't it happen often 
enough?  Didn't nigger women expect to be slashed by their 
men?
Wasn't endurance of the knife a sign of bravery in Africa, 
weren't scarification and cicatrization tokens of maturity?
She said nothing, felt nothing.  In a way, the doctor was 
right.  She wore her cicatrices on the inside.
But they were marks of shame, not pride.
The drive home took place in silence.
Darkness thickened in familiar streets.  The wind had gone, 
leaving the city flat and desolate.
Behind lighted windows, behind slatted blinds and pleated 
curtains, the figures of men and women moved in slow 
motion, executing a measured dance of death, smiling and 
holding hands, bowing and turning, clothed and naked, 
washed and soiled, twirling, dipping, menace and grace, 
finger to finger, palm to palm, without music, swaying, 
eyes closed, eyes open, breast to breast, lip to silent 
lip, engulfed by shadows in a mindless minuet.  The car 
moved slowly past the windows, past open doors, past dim 
stairways.
Reuben watched the patterns of the night ripple across 
Angelina's face, turned his eyes away and watched the road 
uncoil.
And turned again and saw serrated shadows etched against 
her eyes. CHAPTER TWENTY TWO


"Who did it?"
She turned away, hunched in her chair, eyes closed, an 
empty glass in her hand.


"Who cut you like that?  Who put the razors in the sponge?"
"I don't know."
"I think you do.  They followed you here.  They know you."
She hesitated.
Her eyes opened, unfocused, sad, accusing.
"Not me.  They don't know me they knew Rick.  Can I have 
some more?" She held out the glass in silence while he 
filled it.
"They followed you here, dammit.  What were the razors for 
anyway? Some sort of warning?  Was that it?"
She stared at him, tongue frozen, eyes wide apart.


Her head moved up, then down.  Yes, she nodded, 
yes.
"What about?
What are they warning you about?"
"I don't know," she said.  And filled her mouth 
with whisky. "You must know, or they wouldn't 
waste their time."
She hesitated, swallowing.
"Perhaps they're making a mistake."


He turned aside in disgust.
"How can I help you if you won't tell me 
the truth?" "I don't want you to help 
me.


I didn't ask for your help."
"You need it, dammit!  Look at you."
He stood abruptly, slamming his own glass onto a side 
table, fighting down a sudden anger that was mixed with 
fear.
Storming into the kitchen, he turned on the tap and 
splashed his face with water before filling a glass.
A minute passed, then he heard her come and stand behind 
him. "They're dangerous people," she said.
"I don't want you involved."
He turned to face her.
"I am involved," he said.
"I'm a policeman, this is my job."
"I don't want the police mixed up in this."
"You don't have any choice.  Your husband's been 
murdered.
Your friend Filius was poisoned.



Somebody planted a sponge full of razor blades in my 
bathroom.  My bathroom, in my apartment.
They broke into a police officer's home.
Whether you like it or not, the police are mixed up in 
this.  And in case you hadn't noticed, I thought I had 
gotten myself more than a little involved with you this 
morning.


Or maybe you've forgotten that already."
She winced.
"No," she whispered, "I haven't forgotten."
"Good," he said.
"Because I haven't forgotten either."
For a split second a current of tenderness ran between 
them.
Then he remembered that he was still angry.
"Why did you go to see this man Aubin?  The one you found 
dead this afternoon."
She sat down at the table.
If only she could sleep.
If only he would give her a little peace, allow her to 
think this thing through.
"Aubin is... was a vodouniste, a houngan.  I went to him 
for help." "You said you didn't want help."


She looked down at the floor. "Not your help," she 
said. 
"Not ordinary help.  Aubin understood.
Aubin knew how to help.  He knew these people, knew 
their methods. Someone had arranged for an expedition 
de marts against Rick.  And another against me.
They'd paid a bokor for a pouin chaud."
"I don't understand."
"No," she said.


"You don't, do you?
That's the point I'm trying to make.  You're a blanc.  You 
can fuck me, but you can't get inside my skin, you can't 
dance with me."
Reuben paused before speaking.
"Angelina," he began.
"We could both play this game.  I could confuse you with a 
mouthful of Yiddish catchwords, tell you you're a schwartze 
bitch, and give you a
lecture on racial purity Jewish-style.
But I'm not going to do that because I don't think like 
that and I don't believe you think like that either."
"How the fuck do you know what I think?"
"OK, let's suppose I'm wrong.  You're a very cool black 
lady and honky Jew like me can't get within a million miles 
of you.  So precisely where does that get you?  The answer 
is, in very deep trouble.  Because don't think you can 
handle this thing yourself and I don't think you've got 
anybody else to turn to."  He made eye contact with her.
"But from the way things look, you need help and you need 
it fast.
"Let's agree that there are kinds of help I can't give you, 
the kind you expected from your friend Aubin.
That doesn't mean you don't need the sort of help I can 
offer.
Chances are, you need it even more.  I don't know what an 
expedition de marts is.  But my bet is it doesn't hurt half 
as much as a spongeful of razor blades.
So why don't you just sit back and tell me what you know?  
When you've finished, we can have something to eat and a 
bottle of French wine I just happen to have tucked away in 
my fridge.  After that, who knows? We might watch the Late 
Show.
We might play Monopoly.
We might go to bed."
She sat very still, her eyes on him, seeing him and yet not 
seeing him. When she spoke, her voice seemed to come from 
far away.  If she listened very hard, she could hear a 
white heron crease its wings in flight.
Twelve years ago," she started, "Rick and I were in Haiti.  
He was doing research in the north of the island, based in 
Cap Hai'tien.  His topic was the role of vodoun in the 
revolution of 1791.  He used to make regular visits to Bois 
Caiman, just south of the town, where the vodoun ceremony 
was held that sparked off the uprising.
"One day somebody suggested that he should pay a visit to 
an old plantation house not far from Bois Caiman, a place 
called Petite Riviere
Most of the French manor houses in that area were burned 
down during the revolution, but Petite Riviere survived.  
Rick had been told there were still papers at the house 
dating from before the revolution.
"We went together, it was a hot day in summer."
For some reason she seemed to remember everything about 
that day the weather, what she wore, what they ate, the 
shapes their shadows made against the walls, the rasping of 
crickets in the brown fields.  She had been naked beneath 
her dress, it had clung to her like a damp
rag.
"We took the road through Plaine du Nord and Gallois, then 
turned west into the hills.  Petite Riviere is completely 
isolated.  I think that's why it survived the uprising.  
Our Jeep had difficulty keeping to the track.  We arrived 
midmorning.  There was red lichen on the walls.  I felt 
clammy, angry at Rick for dragging me out there.  But he 
wanted my help looking through any documents we might find: 
my French was always
better than his."
She hesitated, as though haunted by a defect of language.
Someone walked across the floor above, a man's feet, heavy 
and deliberate.
She thought of the swooping beauty of orioles, of orange 
and shadek trees throwing shadows on burnt grass, of the 
hedge ofsabher that had circled the house like a fence of 
knives, its thorns cruel and sharp.
Petite Riviere wasn't much of a place.  What Boukman and 
his rebels had failed to do, time and the climate had done 
instead.
It had originally belonged to a branch of the Pays de 
Bourjolly family, French colonists from La Rochelle.
At the time of the revolution, the owner was Jean-Claude de 
Bourjolly, who was, among other things, the local agent for 
Riedy and Thurninger, the largest of the Nantes slaving 
houses.
According to contemporary historians, de Bourjolly managed 
to escape the massacres and somehow or other get himself 
out of Haiti to
America.
The present owners were poor mulattos who grew sisal for 
sale to an American company in Le Cap.  They claimed to be 
descendants of the first black family to own Petite Riviere 
after the Bourjollys fled.
Perhaps, perhaps not.  In Haiti, everyone looks for some 
descent.
We are all it Guinee, children of Africa, but we are 
desperate for roots.  To be black is not enough, to speak 
lang age is not enough, we must have names, we must become 
a people of pedigrees."
She hesitated, thinking of her own twisted roots, of the 
rank soil in which they had grown.
They lived in old rooms from which the grace had long since 
been ripped away.  No water, no electricity, just shadows 
of the past.  Someone's past, anyone's past, it did them 
just as well.  There were two old men outside on a long 
verandah playing dames, watching the world slide away a 
little further every sunset.  They paid us no attention.
"Rick and I found the papers crammed into a large metal 
trunk in an attic full of dried coffee and mouse droppings.  
They were surprisingly well preserved somehow the trunk had 
kept out damp and spores and mould.  Their condition was 
far from perfect, of course, but most of them were 
surprisingly legible.
"We spent all that day leading through them and sorting 
them roughly into piles.  A little girl watched us I think 
she was the youngest child of the family, about eight or 
nine years old.  She was pretty but quite deformed her head 
hung at an angle, tilted against her shoulders, as though 
the neck had been broken, almost as if she had been hanged. 
Every time I looked up, she was watching from the corner.
Just watching, saying nothing.
tried to talk to her, but she would never reply."
Angelina fell silent, looking past Reuben at a memory, her 
fingers twisting unconsciously on her lap.
The child had died soon afterwards.

Rick's contact had mentioned the fact casually in a letter.  
For months Angelina had been haunted by an image of the 
little girl laid out on the long deal table where she and 
Rick had spread the letters, crumpled in a thin white 
dress, her neck still twisted, her virginity torn by a 
superstitious parent using a thick wooden stick, to ensure 
she did not become a diablesse after they buried her.
Innocence is an open gate for whatever foulness seeks to 
walk into our garden.
"Rick offered the family money for the trunk and its 
contents.
They took fifty dollars American dollars, not gourdes and 
felt sure they had made a bargain.  I suppose they had: 
what use were old scraps of paper to them?
They couldn't even read."
She remembered leaving in the crumbling dark, the doomed 
child watching from the door, speechless, perhaps already 
stricken with whatever was to kill her, the wrong turns, 
the plunging track, headlights tangled in green and 
monstrous leaves, the scent of vetiverin the tainted, 
clammy darkness.  A kata drum had played for miles until it 
too faded and they were wrapped in silence.  Far away, 
across a broad nameless ravine, lights had flickered in a 
long line like fireflies along an unseen path.
The people of the hills walking to the houngfor to become 
gods.
Looking back, she wondered if there had been any omens that 
night, anything that might have hinted at what was to come, 
but nothing came to mind.  She looked hard at Reuben, at 
his hands and eyes and face. What, she wondered, would he 
look like when they had finished with him? Would they let 
her look?  Would they let her touch him?  Would they let 
her kiss him while he died?
CHAPTER TWENTY
THREE
"Most of the papers dated from Bourjolly's time.  There 
were letters from amateurs slaving houses in France, 
letters from friends in St. Domingue and elsewhere in the 
French Antilles, bills of lading, copies of several roles 
d'armement giving details of ships and their crews, minutes 
of the Assemble provinciale for the northern sector of the 
island, even some pages from a gnmoire ..."
"A grimoire?"
"A book of magic spells.
They're still quite popular in Haiti.  Le Petit Albert 
sells very well in shops on the rue Poste Marchand.
They're used in vodoun ceremonies."
"I see.  Go on."
She hesitated now, the clarity of memory growing blurred by 
a presentiment of more immediate truths.
"It took weeks to sort and read through everything.  We 
worked together on the papers Rick's French wasn't up to 
the eighteenth century
style.
But he did the hard work the historical research, tying 
together random facts, making pattern out of mere odds and 
ends.  And he found a pattern, a very coherent pattern, one 
that grew a lot sharper over the next few years."
She paused briefly, then hurried on.
"Bourjolly had got himself mixed up in something very 
peculiar.
Une affaire tres strange et effrayante, that's how he 
described it in a letter to one of his friends in La 
Rochelle."
"When was this?"


She shrugged.
"Seventeen seventy-five, seventy-six.  We never knew for 
sure. Most of what we did find out was pure guesswork.  
Rick trawled 
libraries in France and Haiti.  He spent two summers locked 
away in the National Archives behind the cathedral in Port-
auPrince.
His eighteenth century French got rather good.  He combed 
secondhand bookstores in Paris, went to manuscript auctions 
in the hotel Drouot, spent a fortune.  By the end, he was 
an expert on the French Haitian slave trade."
He sensed her reluctance to come to the point.
"You haven't told me what it was that
Bourjolly got mixed up in."
She shivered slightly, as though a thin wind had sought her 
out and found her alone in his room.  Crossing her arms 
about her chest, she leaned her chin on the back of one 
hand, her eyes on the floor.
She closed her eyes briefly, opened them again.
"Something ..."
she looked straight at him 'something came ashore on a 
slave ship.  It had come from Africa something ... or 
someone."
"I'm not sure
I..."
She ignored him, all thoughts concentrated on events two 
centuries
old.
"He was afraid.  Afraid but fascinated.
Whatever or whoever it was, it changed his life.  In his 
first notes, he makes only passing reference to it, but 
with time his letters and journals what we could find of 
them become the work of a man
obsessed."
She looked past him at the wall.  It started crumbling and 
she looked away.
Stupid wall, why couldn't it stay still?
She had to concentrate, had to keep her mind on the here 
and now.  Or else the world, the whole world would start to 
crumble.


"Rick never really understood," she went on.
"But I knew almost at once what it was that Bourjolly 
found.  What it was that had come from Africa."
She hesitated for a moment, then continued.
"There was a city," she said.


"A city deep in a forest, the
Ituri rain forest in what used to be the Congo.
They call it Zai're now."
She smiled to herself.  This was like a fairy story, one of 
the stories her father used to tell her in the days before 
he was taken away from her.  He would seat her on his lap 
and smile at her and stroke her hair with his big hands, 
and when she had settled down he would tell her stories.  
In bed in the long evenings, he had read to her from the 
Thousand and One Nights, the French translation by Galland.  
But this was no fairy story.
This was true.
"The city was called Tali Niangara, but Arab traders from 
the north referred to it as Madlnat alSuhhar the City of 
Sorcerers.  TaliNiangara was built of stone, and they say 
its walls were almost as high as the highest trees, and its 
gates were fashioned of wood and iron, and sheathed in the 
purest gold.  That may be a fable, but it is true that the 
inhabitants of Tali-Niangara were sorcerers."
"How do you know all this?"  he asked.
"My father told me when I was very small.  Stories had been 
passed down, stories from the old days, from the Kongo 
slaves.
They said that at the heart of Tali Niangara stood a 
citadel where the gods lived and where they talked with 
men.  The people of the city had no need of an army.
Their weapon was the simplest of all: fear.
Outside the gates, the people of the forest, and beyond 
them the villagers who lived on the edge of the forest, and 
further still the people who inhabited the banks of the 
Congo River lived in a state of terror.  They sent tribute 
to TaliNiangara every year, after the
rains:
cattle and grain, leather and cloth and spices, much gold 
and silver, nkisi and slaves.  And every year they sent 
young men and young girls for the gods of Tali Niangara, 
none of whom they ever saw again."
"Why was that?  Why would people just accept such a state 
of affairs? What were they afraid of?"
"You are a Jew," she said, 'not an African.  It would be 
hard for you to understand.  The gods lived in 
TaliNiangara.  They gave power over life and death to the 
sorcerers of the city.  The people on the fringes lived in 
fear of that.  If they did not send the tribute, their 
crops would fail, the game would disappear, their cattle 
would die, their children would grow sick and die.
Better to lose a few than all.
The lords of Tali-Niangara had little need of walls or 
armies."

She sat silent for a while, stilling her heart.  Was her 
own fear the same fear or something more rational?  She 
could not tell.
"For centuries nothing changed," she went on, telling the 
story as her father had told it, as her grandfather and 
grandmother had told it before that.
"The rain forest grew and spread in all directions, the 
river carved a deeper channel to the sea, the people of 
TaliNiangara danced and sang and offered tribute to their 
greedy gods.
This is how the story was told to me.
The priests wrote books in Tifinagh, a script brought to 
them from the deserts to the far north by traders.
They wrote the words of their gods on thin plates of beaten 
gold.
That was the only purpose of their civilization:
to write down the oracles of the gods and pass them down 
from generation to generation, each one adding to the work 
of the one before.  It is said that the citadel of Tali-
Niangara contained a library of over ten thousand golden 
books.
"And it is said that the priests made a circle of gold on 
which they inscribed words of great power and a diagram of 
the city, and gave it to their kings to wear as a token of 
their right to rule, and their power over the lives and 
deaths of all in the city and beyond."
She looked up.
"This is how the story was told to me, Reuben.  By my 
father, when I was very young."
She closed her eyes.
"For centuries nothing changed.
And then, one day in early spring, a band of men with skin 
the colour of milk appeared at the gates of Tali-Niangara, 
men with swords and cannon and muskets, men who did not 
fear the gods or the priests who served them.  They gained 
admission to the city and were offered hospitality by the 
king and his counsellors.
In secret, spells were uttered against them, but they had 
no effect. Curses were written down, but they remained 
unharmed."
For a month the strangers remained, eating, drinking, 
resting.
Finally, on a dark night, they killed the king and his 
bodyguard, looted the citadel, taking many of the golden 
books, and took captive fifty of the city's finest young 
men, including seven priests.
Morning found them deep in the forest, laden with gold and 
in charge of a slave coffle of the best quality.
The coffle moved slowly, urged on by whips, but at a pace 
dictated by the trees and undergrowth through which they 
passed.
The slavers were not unduly harsh towards their captives 
each slave represented an investment of time and money that 
had yet to be recouped.
No-one wanted his share to die before they reached the 
Indies.

But the forest was hostile.  The slavers had to reach the 
river and make it back to its mouth before their ship set 
sail without them.
And the gods of TaliNiangara had begun to take a slow but 
sure
revenge.
One by one the slavers perished, some by simple accident, 
two from snake bites but most from fever.  They began to 
leave behind unnecessary baggage, and at last the gold 
objects, all save a few, that they had brought so far.  
There were fatalities among the slaves as well, but far 
fewer than among their masters.  By the time the coffle 
reached the banks of the Congo, there were only five white 
men left alive and thirty blacks.  Four of the blacks were 
priests.
Back on board the slave ship, the survivors' story excited 
much interest, as did the remaining golden artefacts they 
displayed in private to the captain and his first officers.  
A larger expedition, properly equipped, might bring home 
untold wealth in precious metal and handsome slaves.  The 
ship set sail a week later.
They were not yet fully slaved, but were eager to reach the 
Indies and get home to Liverpool.
The crew was badly outnumbered, but terror of the open sea 
and
conditions on the slave decks kept the cargo passive for 
the first weeks of the long journey.  All the time, 
however, the four priests were plotting, first with their 
fellow exiles from Tali-Niangara, then with picked 
individuals from among the other slaves.  The days went by 
without much happening.
There were deaths among the slaves, mainly from flux.  Two 
of the crew succumbed to fever.
Below decks the stench grew unbearable.
The mutiny began as they entered the Caribbean.  It was 
late at
night.
Most of the crew were sleeping.
Despite their weapons, despite their greater fitness, 
despite their knowledge of the ship, the sailors were 
quickly overpowered.
During the next week, the survivors were tortured.  They 
were not alone.  Once in control, the men of Tali Niangara 
treated everyone else as their vassals;
whether they were white or black made no difference.
Only two white men were spared.  One was the ship's pilot, 
a man called Bellamy.  The other was a French slaving agent 
who had been taken aboard the ship after the loss of his 
own vessel off the African


coast.
His name was Jean-Claude de Bourjolly, the man whose 
papers Angelina and Rick found at Petite Riviere
"We discovered much information about the voyage in 
Bourjolly's letters," continued Angelina.
Things my father had never known, things that had never 
been recorded.
Bourjolly had some knowledge of African languages and 
had long been


fascinated by the religious and magical practices of the 
blacks he had met in Haiti.  He had helped the men of Tali 
Niangara take control of the ship.
"Now he advised the leaders of the mutiny that it was in 
their interest to abandon ship and seek refuge among the 
maroons, escaped slaves scattered through the mountains of 
Haiti.  The longboat was large enough to hold all the 
survivors from Tali Niangara and a few slaves they had kept 
to serve them, together with Bourjolly and Bellamy, without 
whom they knew they would be lost.
"Before getting into the longboat, the priests discovered 
the gold circle that had belonged to their king and other 
pieces of looted gold concealed in a chest in the captain's 
cabin.
They broke the great circle in two and took one half on 
board the longboat, to remain with them in exile.
The other half was left on board the ship in the great 
chest, together with the gold nkisi and the books of the 
gods that had been brought from TaliNiangara.
"The senior priest remained on board with them.  He would 
pray for a dark wind from the west to take the ship and 
blow it all the way back to Africa, to the mouth of the 
Congo, along the river to the shores of the great forest.  
He would return to TaliNiangara to speak with the gods in 
the high citadel.
The men of Tali-Niangara would build canoes and return for 
their brothers in the west.
The circle would be reunited.
There would be a new king.
And the gods of TaliNiangara would take their revenge.  
That would be the beginning of the Night of the Seventh 
Darkness.  The night of the resurrection of all the dead."
Angelina stopped speaking.  She had shut her eyes, blotting 
out the present.
In her mind, she could see the priest, his slavery thrown 
off, standing alone at the prow of the little ship, 
dreaming of a forest he would never see again.  She 
wondered what had happened to him in the end. Had the ship 
sunk or been captured by another vessel?
Rick had spent years trying to find out.  And almost as 
many in a vain search for Tali Niangara itself.  Tali 
Niangara and its fabulous library of golden books.


"Is that 
all you 
know?" 
asked 
Reuben 
after a 
while. 
Angelina 
opened her 
eyes. "I'm 
sorry," she 
said.
"I
was 
drifting."
"Is that 
all you 
know?" She 
shook her 
head.



"Not quite.
There's a little more.
Bourjolly and Bellamy came ashore with the slaves, 
somewhere in the north of Haiti.  It's said that Bourjolly 
had the pilot murdered once he had served his purpose.  I 
don't know what sort of story Bourjolly concocted to 
explain his rescue, but he returned to Petite-Riviere soon 
after that and continued with his former business.
"However, he remained in contact somehow with the slaves 
from TaliNiangara.
In time, they realized that no help was going to arrive 
from the city, that they would never return to Africa.
Within a few years, Bourjolly succeeded in finding places 
on his estate for all of them.
He forged papers of origin for them.  The ship on which 
they had come was never found.  They were all treated well 
at Petite Riviere
Bourjolly found them wives from among the Congolese slaves 
that arrived at Cap Francois.  They settled and had 
families, including the priests. There was no rule of 
celibacy for them to obey."
"Why?  Why did Bourjolly do all this?  He was a slave 
trader himself, you said.  An agent for a slaving house in 
France."
Angelina nodded.
"He wanted knowledge," she whispered.
"Knowledge?
Knowledge of what?"
"Of whatever the gods of Tali-Niangara had taught their 
priests.
The spells, the prayers, the words of power.
Bourjolly wanted to be a magician, you see.  He had studied 
the black arts in Europe.  But by the age of forty he had 
gotten nowhere.
In Africa, he had heard tales of Tali Niangara, the Madlnat 
al Suhhar. With the help of the men he had rescued, he 
thought to find the answers to all his unanswered 
questions, to obtain access to the most ancient mysteries.
"He believed Tali-Niangara had received its knowledge from 
Egypt, the fountain of all wisdom.  He was a Frenchman of 
his period.  In those days in Paris, philosophers believed 
that Egypt had been the source of the prisca sapienta, the 
original wisdom that the ancient Greeks had lost.  So he 
gave his slaves their lives, security, food, women.  In 
return all he sought from them was knowledge of forbidden 
things.  It must have seemed a fair exchange."
She fell silent.


Reuben looked at her.
"Did he get what he wanted?"  he asked.
She looked up.  Her eyes were like white opals, 
steady and watery pale.



"Yes," she answered.
"He was given knowledge.
Knowledge and power.  And the hope of immortality."
CHAPTER TWENTY
FOUR
Reuben got up and crossed to the window, intending to draw 
the curtains.  He glanced out into the rain exhausted 
street. Inexplicably, dry leaves lay sharp and crisp 
beneath the washed-out mantle of a sodium lamp.  Traces of 
Angelina's voice floated on the stillness like a broken 
rose in water, scattered petals drifting down a dark, 
tormented current.  In his mind, a dim pattern was 
beginning to form, inchoate as yet, un channelled its dark 
edges lit by the stuttering dawn of an uncertain 
understanding.
"I don't understand," he said.
"All of this happened in the eighteenth century.  This is 
the 1990s." She looked up, a quizzical glance, and hugged 
herself more tightly.
"Is it?"  she asked.
"Here it is," he answered.
"In this room it is."  He glanced at the calendar on the 
wall, a grid of days and weeks held firmly in the here and 
now.
"But outside?"
she insisted.
"It could be any time.
Years and dates don't matter to these people.  They had no 
calendars until the slave ships came.
Time is all the same to them: past, present, future it's 
all one thing, all one substance."
"What people?
You talked before about "dangerous people".
What did you mean?"  He turned his back on the window, on 
the night. "About a year ago," she said, 'someone got in 
touch with Rick.  He didn't tell me who it was, not at 
first.
But he was frightened, from the beginning he was 
frightened.
"He'd been writing to people, speaking to people for over 
five years and nothing had ever happened.
Librarians, booksellers, other academics, experts on 
African and French colonial history, scholars of vodoun.  
They were all as puzzled as we were by what
Rick had found.  One of them must have shown some of Rick's 
papers to a friend.  Or that friend to another friend, we 
could never find out. But the phone call came, then the 
first visit."

Angelina paused.  Her hands were shaking now.
"Before leaving Haiti," she went on, "Bourjolly founded a 
religion.  He called it Le Septieme Ordre, the Seventh 
Order.
He believed there had been six secret orders through 
history who had been chosen to guard the occult truth:
the Pythagorean Brotherhood, the Egyptian followers of 
Hermes Trismegistos, the Templar Knights, the Rosicrucians, 
the Freemasons and the French Prieure de Sion.  His 
brotherhood was to be the Seventh Order: the last and the 
greatest.
"He modelled it partly on European magical orders and 
partly on African secret societies like the Bizango.
It taught a mixture of western occultism and African 
sorcery.  And it prophesied the resurrection of all things 
when the true king came to sit again on the throne of 
TaliNiangara.  The Night of the Seventh Darkness."
An inexplicable look passed over Angelina's face.  Reuben 
could not say quite what it was, whether dream or fear or 
memory or all three combined.
A moment later it had gone.
"His first followers were his own slaves," she went on.  
They converted others.  And he converted most of his own 
family and several friends in Haiti and France.
When the revolution came and the whites were driven from 
Haiti, the fraternity was led by the priests of Tali-
Niangara.
It still exists.  It is still powerful."
"And they are here, you say?  Here in
New York?"
They have members here," she said.
"Not Haitians Americans.
There are cells in France and several of the former French 
colonies in Africa.
Elsewhere perhaps, I don't know."
She held her hands tight together to stop them from 
shaking.
Her voice felt rough, hard to control.
They visited Rick," she said, 'and suggested that he drop 
his research. He was frightened, but not badly enough to be 
scared off something so important to him.  He just dropped 
what he'd been doing and changed the course of his 
investigations What he discovered next really did frighten 
him."
She shivered again, more visibly this time.
"Are you cold?"
She shook her head.
"Let me finish," she said.
"Rick made enquiries.
He asked one of his graduate students to help him, the man 
you found in our apartment, Filius Narcisse.  After the 
revolution in Haiti, Bourjolly came to the United States.
He arrived in Florida and made his way north as far as New 
England, where he lived in Nantucket for while.
Something unpleasant seems to have taken place, and he was 
forced to flee."
Reuben looked curiously at her.  He suddenly remembered the 
book he had found in the underground chamber: A Sober 
Warning to the Righteous, being an Account of the Recent 
Events at Nantucket.
Written nine years after the Haitian revolution.
"From Nantucket he headed for New York, where he settled on 
this side of the river.  He bought a farmhouse just outside 
the village of Brooklyn Ferry, and a warehouse on Front 
Street."
Reuben felt a deep chill settle in his bones.  He was 
beginning to understand what he had seen earlier that day.
The apartment building Rick and I lived in, the one on 
Clermont Street, was built on the site of Bourjolly's 
farmhouse.  We were living west of the park before that.


About eight years ago.
Rick found some old deeds.  The farmhouse was there 
until the 1840s. Brooklyn was growing, and they needed 
the land to build on. Bourjolly was dead by then, but he 
had a son, Pierre.


Pierre built a row of houses over the farm.
He lived for years in the house our apartment was in.
"Rick became obsessed by the idea of living in that house.  
He'd inherited some money, and he made an offer to the 
people living in our apartment, a Puerto Rican family.  
Rick paid them a good price and they sold out."
"When did
Bourjolly die?"  asked
Rick.
She shrugged.
"I don't know.  Nobody knows.  It's not recorded.
Rick spent a lot of time looking; he even tramped round old 
graveyards for weeks on end, searching for a gravestone.
But he drew a blank.  It's as if the old man just 
disappeared.
Maybe there was another scandal brewing; maybe someone 
forced him out of Brooklyn, just like he was forced out of 
Nantucket."
Reuben pursed his lips.
"No," he said.
"I don't think so."  He stopped.
"I'll explain in a moment.  But you were telling me about 
the things Filius found out."
"Well," continued Angelina, 'it seems that even before he 
arrived in this country, Bourjolly had been building up a 
network of contacts, people interested in occultism and 
magic like he was.
They included some eminent people.  With their help, he 
gathered a small following here.
That may have had something to do with what happened at 
Nantucket.
Some of his followers went on to become prominent figures 
in the new republic lawyers, academics, clergymen, 
politicians.
There was a vogue for secret societies and cults then.
The Swedenborgians had just founded an American church at 
Baltimore. The Freemasons were well established:
George Washington had been initiated in 1752.
"By the early nineteenth century, the Seventh Order had 
become more than just an intellectual pastime for 
influential Americans: it was itself a major path to 
influence.  It grew more secretive, not less. Members were 
sworn to loyalty on pain of death, and by all accounts the 
threat of punishment wasn't a bluff.
"Membership was by invitation only.  Those who accepted the 
invitation had to commit a serious crime:
theft, rape, incest, arson, sacrilege but above all murder.  
The heads of the society retained full details of the crime 
together with a written confession in the hand of the 
aspirant.  That kept people quiet, very quiet indeed.
"During the nineteenth century, the American branch had no 
contact with the group in Haiti, though they did preserve 
links with Paris.
They kept their power and influence, and the order became 
extremely wealthy.  The pattern of membership has changed.  
There are still judges, senators and government officials.
But now the order also includes several industrialists , a 
couple of media tycoons, property developers, stockbrokers 
.  and a number of people connected with organized crime."
She paused and her eyes lifted and grew large, and he 
caught sight of her eyes and th pain in them and the small 
lights that shifted across their borders, and he knew she 
was telling the truth at last and that in telling it she 
was risking everything.
Not just her life, but everything.
And in the moment he understood that, he grew afraid as 
well.
"Rick knew about this?
He and Filius found all this out?"


She nodded.  A marionette without fear or pain. Empty.
"Why didn't they come to us or the
FBI?"
She tried to look away, but he held her gaze. "He wanted .  
" Her voice was reed-like, thin. 
"He thought he could join them, at least get them to 
divulge information he could use.  At the very least he 
would have a book that would crown his career, alter our 
understanding of Haitian history.
But I think he expected more than that.
These were men with power, men with influence
Rick was ambitious.  He talked once about his chances of 
becoming a presidential adviser on Caribbean affairs.  He 
tried to play with them. They don't like that.  They don't 
like being played with."
"And you.  Are you playing with them as well?  Is that what 
the warning was about?"
Her eyes wandered.
"Look at me, Angelina.  Is that what they were warning you 
about?  To stop playing games with them?"
She shook her head, an imperceptible movement.
"They're looking for something.  Something they think Rick 
had. Something they want very badly."
"A file?
Evidence?"
She shook her head again.
"They have most of his files.  They came yesterday or the 
day before, took everything they could.  But they missed 
something, the one thing they really wanted."
"What was that?"
"Rick's notebook," she said.
"He showed it to Filius once, about a year ago.  When I saw 
Filius yesterday, he admitted that he had told the order 
about it before they poisoned him.
He used the notebook as a means of getting into the order."
"Filius was a member?"


She shook her head.
"No, but he wanted to be.
The ceremony iccorded on the video tape was to have been 
the first of several.  It involved ..."



She hesitated.
"I
think Filius killed someone.
That was the blood he had in the bowl.
The whole thing had been recorded to provide a hold over 
Filius, something even better than a signed confession."
"So what happened?"
She shrugged.
They couldn't find the notebook.
Filius wasn't to know.  Rick had a safe hiding place.
I found it yesterday and took it to the nearest branch of 
the Banco di Ponce.  I left it in a safe deposit box."
"So they turned
Filius into a zombie."
She seemed to wince, then nodded.
"A zombi, yes, if you like.  Dead for a while, then brought 
back to life by means of an antidote.  It was a recret 
Bourjolly's slaves brought from Tali-Niangara.
How to kill a man without killing him."
"But they really killed Rick."
She nodded.
"Yes.  When Filius failed them, they waited for Rick to 
return from our trip to Zaire.  They wanted to take him by 
surprise, but the video alerted him.
That was a mistake, I think.  The video.
Someone left it for Rick to see, to frighten him.
But Rick always thought he could outsmart other people.
Even then he thought he could keep one step ahead.  I don't 
know what he did or what he told them.
Maybe he tried to make a deal.  Whatever he tried, it 
didn't work.
They killed him.  And now they're putting pressure on me."
"But they don't want to kill you because you know about the
notebook."
"That's right;
but they may be frightened I'll hand it over to the police.
They know I went back to the apartment."
"What's in the notebook?"

"The things I just told you about, with details of names 
and dates and so on, stuff Rick had been able to dig up.  
He had evidence that could have proved highly uncomfortable 
for them.  I don't think he could have destroyed them, but 
he could have caused them considerable inconvenience.
' "Is that all?"
"No.  Rick kept records of all his research on the ship 
that brought Bourjolly and the slaves from Tali Niangara to 
Haiti.  He came very close to discovering the ship's name, 
maybe even locating the wreck
There's a wreck?"
Angelina shook her head.  Her hair fell softly across her 
forehead, tumbling over her eyes.  She brushed it back.
"I don't know.  Rick was sure the ship could not have 
sailed far.  If it wasn't found drifting and brought to 
harbour, it must have gone down."
"Why is the wreck so important?"
"Because it contains half of the golden disc.  For the 
Night of the Seventh Darkness.
Without it the king will not return."
"Do they have the other half?"  He did not tell her yet 
what he had found.
She shook her head.  This time her hair did not move.
Reuben wanted it to move, to see her brush it away again 
with that easy gesture.
"Rick thought Bourjolly kept it.  It must have disappeared 
with him.  I know Rick had ideas about where it might be.
Something to do with the apartment building.  Maybe he 
thought Bourjolly had buried it on his farm somewhere."
"He wasn't entirely wrong."
"What do you mean?"
Reuben stood and went into the living room.  He came back 
carrying the box he had removed from the underground 
chamber.
From it he took the bundle of letters and passed them to 
Angelina.
She looked through them silently, one at a time, her 
fingers delicate against the fragile paper.
One entire page crumbled as she held it.  Paper and ink and 
the unfractured past.  She read for a long time.  Finally, 
she looked up.
"These are all addressed to Bourjolly," she said.
"They're from a mulatto in Cap Francais, an educated man, a 
clerk.  He seems to have been Bourjolly's chief link with 
the order in Haiti.
Where did you find them?"
Briefly he told her.  He was no longer in any doubt that 
the mummified


remains had been those of Bourjolly himself.
Finally, he lifted the golden semicircle from the box and 
handed it to her.  It was shrill and flat and hard, and 
all across it lines of incised writing walked like 
peculiar insects.


Angelina ran her fingers gently across it.
"This writing is in Tifinagh script," she whispered.
"It must be genuine."  She looked up.
They will kill you," she said.
"They will do anything to lay their hands on this."
"I know," said Reuben.
"I know."  And he took the gold half-moon and laid it in 
the box and closed it without a sound.
The telephone rang, loud and shrill like beaten gold.
Angelina jumped.
Reuben picked up the receiver.  He listened briefly, 
said,
I'll be there', and replaced the receiver carefully.  He 
sat for a moment staring at the phone, then looked at 
Angelina.
"Captain Connelly wants to see me.
He's sending a patrol car over to pick me up.  Won't say 
what it's about.  But he sounded on edge."
He picked up the receiver again and punched in a number 
from memory. Danny answered right away.  He sounded ill 
tempered and in no mood to do anyone a favour, but Reuben 
leaned on him until he gave in.
"Get here quickly,
Danny.  And,
Danny ..."
"Yeah?"
"Bring your gun."  Reuben put the receiver down.
Angelina was waiting in the living room.


She seemed nervous, overwrought.
"I have to go," Reuben said.
"Connelly's given me no choice.  He says it's important.
I don't want you here alone, so I've asked my partner 
Danny to come over.  He should be here in about fifteen 
minutes if he doesn't hang about.  Use the entry phone
His name's Danny Cohen, he's about six four, well built, 
early thirties.
You'll like him.


Don't let anybody else in.  If he asks what's going on, 
tell him."
"I don't want you to go,
Reuben."
"It's OK.  I won't be long.
I promise.
Danny will take care of you.
Trust me."
CHAPTER TWENTY
FIVE
Listen.  What can you hear?
First, the sound of your own breathing Then blood pumping 
in and out of your heart And if you listen very, very 
carefully, you can hear the blood in your head, like a 
river in flood.  They are the only sounds that matter: when 
they fall silent, when you hear nothing, there is only 
death.
He took a deep breath in the darkness and let it out again.  
Two more for good measure.  His heart was racing, out of 
control.  He felt lightheaded, sick and apprehensive.
With the return of full consciousness had come a vast, 
unending fear. The fear was like a blanket, wrapping him, 
smothering him and, like a child beneath tight bedclothes, 
he kicked and struggled, only to find it tighten about him.
He had been in unspeakable darkness.  He had watched 
helplessly as they declared him dead, listened terrified to 
the nails slamming into the lid of his coffin, to the clods 
of wet earth dropping heavily into his grave until there 
was no sound anywhere, no breath, no bloodstream, not even 
a beating heart.
Worst of all was knowing.
Knowing they would return, knowing they would free him from 
the grave only to take him somewhere more terrible.  When 
the sound of spades had sliced through the darkness, and 
been followed by a dreadful scraping of metal against wood, 
he had been beside himself with fear.
They had lifted him from the coffin and fed him a sickly 
paste of sweet potato, cane syrup and concombre zombi.  On 
the following morning, they had given him a second dose, 
then left him alone.
Consciousness had returned, but with it a terrible madness 
induced by the psychoactive agents in the concombre.  
Halfcrazy, he had lain in darkness on a bitterly hard 
floor, while his inner demons raged and trumpeted.
They had come for him before noon and taken him by car to 
another place.
He had escaped through long tunnels smelling of damp and 
rooms filled with bones and things without shape or colour.  
He had found himself at last in an empty room, familiar yet 
strange, like the woman who had spoken to him there.  And 
the man, the man who had frightened her so much.  Now, of 
course, he could remember:
the woman had been Angelina, the room had been the one in 
her apartment where it had all started, the blood and the 
hungry silences.  He could not remember who the man had 
been.
In the end they had brought him back here and put him in 
the darkness behind heavy, bolted door.
Someone struck match, and a yellow flame spurted in the 
darkness.  In an instant it grew calm.  An unseen hand 
placed it against a candle wick, stroking it gently, 
coaxing it into life.
Sing, said a voice and another voice sang, lifting the 
words higher and higher until they touched the ceiling and 
hung in tiny, suspended clusters.  He could make out the 
dim figures of two men, one tall, one of medium height.  
Their backs were to him.  They were dressed in red and 
black, in long embroidered robes that touched the floor.  
The tall man was half-singing, half-intoning a hymn.
His companion lit a second candle.  Flame in proper 
measure, light in fluctuation.
Indistinct, a low altar trembled in front of him.  A third 
candle grew flame and a fourth.  The song went on and on, 
weaving out of the abraded silence dark patterns of love 
and terror.
On the broad surface of the altar, images of the loa stood 
flanked by brightly coloured oleo graphs
Small pots covered in variously patterned cloths, go vis 
holding the loa and spirits of the dead.  On a large plate, 
a goat's skull with brown candles in each eyesocket, beads 
draped across its horns.  A jawless human skull grown thick 
with accumulations of candle grease.  A copy of Le Petit 
Albert, festooned in strings of red and purple beads, 
coated with dust, untouched, untouchable.
The men turned to face him, both singing now.  odd owe do 
meme odd misn wedo, dicke, Damballah-wedo tegi neg ak-dsyel 
.
A large wooden cross stood to the left of the altar, 
dressed in multicoloured cloths and bound with thick ropes.
At its foot bottles, some wrapped in sacking, some clear: 
clairin, whisky, vermouth and brandy.  On the right of the 
altar stood the madoule, the sacred coffin of the Bizango 
societies.
The sight of the coffin awakened a hive of memories.  They 
buzzed in his head, stinging without pity.
Who is your mother?
La Veuve, la madoule.  The widow.  The sacred coffin.
Who is your father?
I have no father.  I am an animal.
Who is your wife?
I am married to the grave.
Who is your son?
I have no children.  The dead do not give birth.
He remembered the questions, his answers.
Standing naked before the altar, his eyes blinking in the 
candlelight, painful after what seemed an age in pitch 
darkness, he called it all to mind.  The questions.  The 
answers.  And the price.
The singing stopped.  He stood frozen to the spot, as 
though the poison was still working in his system.
Expressionless , the men advanced until they were inches 
from him.  The tall man spoke.
"Filius
Narcisse?"
He nodded, too frightened to frame a reply.
"Who is your mother?"
He shook his head, unable to reply.  The question was 
repeated.
"Who is your mother?"
The answer came out of the past, in a voice cracked by 
thirst and
fear.
"La Veuve."
"Who is your father?"
"I have no father.  I am an animal."
Without warning, the men stepped to either side of him and 
grasped him by the arms.  He did not resist.  They pulled 
him and he came, legs like jelly, trembling as they dragged 
him across the floor.
In the side wall of the bagui was set a low, narrow doorway 
on which a vevehad been painted in red.  The doorway opened 
and he was half marched, half dragged into a small circular 
chamber bare of either furniture or ornament.  Walls and 
floor and ceiling had been painted in white.  From the 
high, arched ceiling hung a single bulb, its pale light 
bouncing off the stark white walls, bringing tears of 
sudden pain to his dark-adjusted eyes.
The room was filled with a low-pitched, inarticulate sound 
that rose and fell in harsh, irregular cadences, now 
breaking, now resuming, slipping through his veins like 
ice.  The sound came from underneath the floor, rising 
disjointedly out of rows of small holes pierced in what 
looked like circular manhole covers.
It was less a babble of incoherent voices than a steady, 
muted moan, a plangent cry of despair.
He would have thought these the voices of animals, of 
things without souls, were it not that he knew them to be 
human.  To have been human once.
One of the manhole covers had been raised and slid aside.
The opening was just wide enough to permit a man to pass 
through.
As though at an inaudible signal the tall man spun him 
round while his companion slipped a rope and harness over 
his head and round his shoulders.  He cried out for help, 
knowing none would come.  At the sound of his alarm, some 
of the whining voices rose in pitch, like echoes of his 
own.  There were no words.
They had forgotten language along with their humanity.  In 
time, he knew, he would understand their gibberings 
perfectly.  He wondered if they talked with one another in 
the long, long darkness.
The men hauled him struggling to the edge of the hole.  As 
he reached it, he went suddenly limp, all fight sucked from 
him by the sheer horror of his position.  The tall man bent 
and whispered in his ears, words in a long-dead language, 
the last words in a human voice he would ever hear.  He 
cried out as his feet were kicked from under him and they 
began to lower him into the narrow pit.
The rough stone sides grazed his hips and shoulders as he 
sank lower and lower on the end of the gently turning rope.  
Five feet, eleven feet, deeper and deeper, the circle of 
light above growing smaller by the second.
At fifteen feet he struck the cold hard surface of the 
floor and felt his legs give way.  Except that the shaft 
into which he had been lowered was not wide enough to 
permit him even to crouch.  His knees cracked against the 
side, his buttocks rested on unyielding stone.
Halfstanding, half crouching he sobbed uncontrollably .
An imperceptible tug on a thin cord released the harness.
It fell away and was hauled up rapidly out of sight on the 
end of the rope.
His last contact with the world above, his severed 
umbilical cord.
Some, he had once been told, lasted ten years, twenty 
years.
One, it was said, had gone on as long as forty: bent, 
misshapen, blind, no longer remotely human.  He could not 
understand why they did not simply stop eating the food 
that came every second day.  Crippled, insane, in constant 
pain, they went on living.  That was the horror, that they 
could not turn their backs on life.
There was a grating sound high above.
The pierced slab was pushed back over the hole, clanging 
into place with a note of utter finality.
For a moment that seemed a lifetime the howling stopped.
A deep, unearthly silence fell on the chamber, filled with 
the echo of stone ringing against stone.  Soft footsteps 
moved away.  A door opened and closed.  Someone laughed.
Someone sobbed.
The light remained lit.
So you could just see, out of reach, nineteen tiny holes 
like pinpricks in the everlasting blackness.  A reminder of 
the light.
Like stars, he thought.  Like tiny, twinkling stars.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SIX
The patrolman was a stranger to Reuben, hard-jawed and 
tightlipped.  He did not speak during their long journey, 
other than to introduce himself.  When Reuben asked where 
they were going, he shrugged and said, "I'm taking you to 
Captain Connelly like I've been told," before
turning his eyes back to the road.
"I haven't seen you at the precinct," Reuben said.
"You've just been transferred?"
The man said nothing.
They drove in silence through streets without memory.
Brooklyn was in a state of perpetual flux.
The old Yiddish stores of Reuben's childhood now had 
Caribbean and Spanish names;
synagogues had been turned into churches with names like 
the Trinity Holiness Church of America;
familiar faces had become the faces of strangers.  The car 
was warm but uncomfortable.
Reuben gazed through the windscreen;
the heavy glass made everything seem far away, like a city 
seen through water.  Outside, night clung to the streets 
for warmth.
They headed east through Queens and Nassau County, out of 
the city into the semi-rural parts of Long Island.  Reuben 
dozed briefly, woke to find himself being driven through a 
great darkness, the only lights those of the car.  The long 
beam pulled a crystal world out of nothing: a chalk-white 
road, pale hedges, dark trees with the stain of winter on 
their leaves.
A farmhouse flashed into view and was gone at once, white 
painted gables flat against the dark.  A small windmill 
turned gently in a sea breeze.  A horse stood in a silent 
field, pawing the tangled grass.
They arrived at a gabled house set far back from the road 
among trees and heavy shrubbery.  The style was colonial, 
the fabric modern.  Light shone from a single window in a 
cupola stark against a dark grained sky.
The first and second floors were dark.
The house was like a ship adrift in the night.
The patrolman led Reuben inside, still wordless and sullen.  
He seemed familiar with the layout.  A switch to the right 
of the door lit a long hallway and a white banistered 
staircase.
"Go on up," the patrolman said.
"You're expected."
The stairs led directly to the third floor.  A long 
carpeted corridor took Reuben past closed doors to an 
opening out of which light streamed almost to his feet.  
His heart was out of step, his breath thick in his 
nostrils.  The house felt cold.  There was a tinge of damp 
on the


air.
Somewhere, a heavy clock was ticking, neither slow nor 
fast.  The open doorway drew Reuben in.
Behind it stood a spiral stairway that led upward into a 
lighted space.


Reuben climbed the stairs slowly, one at a time.
He came out into the cupola, a large area over which a 
glass dome stretched.  The air was warm and humid.  It was 
as though Reuben had stepped into a tropical greenhouse on 
a sharp winter's night.
Luscious plants grew everywhere in abundance.
Palms and vines and astonishing red flowers made a world in
miniature.
Brightly coloured orchids flourished in pots of sphagnum 
moss, secluded among masses of thick foliage.
Captain Connelly was seated in a wicker chair to Reuben's 
left, his heavy frame wedged into it like a man's hand in a 
woman's glove; he was nervous, diminished, not really 
present.
As Reuben entered, the captain made no gesture of welcome 
or recognition.
There were sweat stains on his chest and beneath his 
armpits.
Tiny beads of perspiration covered his forehead.
Some distance away from Connelly, his back to the room, a 
dim figure stood gazing through the window into the 
darkness beyond.
Reuben approached Connelly.  The captain watched him 
sharply, but said nothing.
The second man turned.  He was a handsome man in his early 
fifties, clean shaven, his grey hair cut close to his head.  
A wide forehead sloped down to thick eyebrows and a sharp 
nose.  A thin scar ran down his right cheek, white and 
sharp as a razor blade.
He spoke gently, in a softly pitched voice that suggested a 
tight nervous energy wrapped up inside.
Energy, strength, violence perhaps.  The most indirect of 
violence, the best controlled.
"Have you ever noticed.
Lieutenant, how dark it can grow even a few miles from the 
greatest city?
There is more darkness in the universe than light.  One day 
it will extinguish everything."
"Who are you?"  Reuben demanded.
"What do you want?"
To talk.
Nothing more."  The stranger paused.  He gestured towards a 
wicker seat like the one in which Connelly was sitting.
"Please, Lieutenant, take a seat.  This won't take long."
Reuben sat reluctantly.  The stranger took a chair facing 
him.  On the edge of vision, a fluorescent light flickered.
There were no stars in the sky above the glass dome.
"Your captain and I," the stranger began, 'have been 
holding a long and interesting conversation.
Have we not.
Captain?"
Connelly said nothing.  It was as though he had been 
hypnotized.
He watched and listened, but he was not present.
"We have been talking about the Hammel case.  Someone will 
have told you already that you have been suspended.  On 
considering your case, however, we have overruled that 
decision and given you another assignment instead.  You 
will be given details tomorrow.  Please do not waste your 
own time or anyone else's trying to take the Hammel 
investigation any further.
You will find no answers.  There are no answers.  The case 
has been closed.
Permanently."
"Who are you?"  Reuben asked for the second time.
The stranger looked at him oddly, as though the question 
made little sense.
That scarcely matters, Lieutenant.  I've brought you here 
tonight as a matter of courtesy.  Please don't abuse it.  
Be assured that I speak with the highest authority.
Anything I say has been sanctioned at very high levels.  
You are under instructions not to mention this meeting or 
to reveal its contents to anyone.  Do you understand?"
"On whose authority?"
"I already told you the highest.  Do I have to spell it 
out?  This is a matter of national security.  It's no 
longer police business."
"What are you?"  Reuben asked.
"FBI?"
"I'm not at liberty to divulge that.
Your captain can vouch for me.
If you like, you can call me Smith.  Will that make you 
happy?"


"Smith' folded his hands on his lap.  He was in control of 
things and he knew it.
"Lieutenant, I advise you not to cross me.  I have 
complete jurisdiction in this matter.  I require your 
cooperation:
your full cooperation."
"And if I refuse?"
Then I shall have you arrested for obstructing my 
enquiries.  I warn you, Lieutenant, this is a matter of 
the utmost gravity.  You would do well not to withhold any 
information I may seek nor to try to fob me off with false 
or deliberately misleading statements.
But we're wasting time.
I'm sure you understand exactly what I want from you.
And that I know how to get it.  Now, I'd like you to tell 
me what you found today.  What you found in the tunnel."
Reuben hesitated.  It made no sense for the FBI to be 
involved.  Did they know about the order's connection to 
organized crime?
If not, why not come out and say so?  And why shut down 
the investigation?
"I'm putting it all in my report... Mr.
Smith."
Smith shook his head.
There will be no report, Lieutenant.  Do you understand?
I only want a verbal statement from you tonight.
Just to set my own mind at rest."
Reuben knew there was nothing he could do.
Smith had the whip hand, whether he was from the FBI or 
another agency.
Carefully, Reuben explained to Smith what he and Danny had 
found.  But he said nothing about the letters or the gold 
half circle.
He hoped Danny had kept quiet about them as well.
"What will happen now?"
he asked when he had finished.
"Happen?"
"To the things in the tunnel.  The books and everything."
Smith leaned back in his chair.
"Nothing," he said.
"Nothing will happen to them.  They will remain where they 
are.  The tunnels are a health hazard.
I would not be surprised if either you or Mr.  Cohen has 
contracted an unpleasant disease.  The city authorities 
have already given instructions to seal the tunnels off.
Eventually, they will be filled in."
Smith's hands were by his side, fleshy hands that rested 
softly on the arms of the wicker chair, the right hand 
just slightly out of sight. Behind him, dark green leaves 
arched against the night.  The fluorescent tube flickered 
like the aura at the start of a migraine.
"Let us pass on, Lieutenant.
I want to know what the Hammel woman has told you.  I am 
informed that she has been living with you for a few days 
now.  You have been very charitable.  But she must have 
told you something of interest by
now."
"I don't think we talked about anything that would 
interest you."
Smith's voice underwent a subtle but perceptible change.  
The urbanity slipped away and was replaced by menace.  The 
menace was almost tangible, something you could reach out 
and touch, like a knife.
"I assure you.  Lieutenant Abrams, that anything you and 
Mrs.  Hammel may have talked about is of consuming 
interest to me."
Reuben got out of the chair.


I'd like to leave," he said. "That would not be 
advisable. Lieutenant.
Please sit down."  The man who called himself Smith 
made no move. It was all in the voice "Are you 
threatening me?"  asked
Reuben.
"I don't know," said
Smith.
"Do you feel threatened?"


"Yes, I feel threatened."
"Good.  Very good.  That is exactly how I want you to feel.  
Please sit down."
Smith turned to Connelly.
"Captain, perhaps you would like to show the lieutenant the 
items you so kindly brought with you."
Connelly looked up, like someone woken from a bad dream.  
He nodded and bent down to lift a briefcase sitting beside 
his chair.  From it he took a large, thick envelope.
He passed it to Reuben.
Reuben opened the envelope and slipped out us contents onto 
his lap. There were around twenty photographs, large colour 
prints.  They showed children, both girls and boys, ranging 
in age from about five to thirteen.  The children were all 
naked or partly clothed, their bodies arranged in what 
might pass in certain minds for erotic poses.  Reuben 
recognized the photographs.
About a year earlier, he had found them in an apartment 
where a homicide had taken place.
The investigation had led to the uncovering of a ring of 
paedophiles throughout Brooklyn Heights.
There had been arrests.  Most of the cases had yet to come 
to court. The photographs had not yet been used in 
evidence.
"Unpleasant, aren't they?"
said Smith.
"It seems they were found in your private locker at the 
88th
Precinct.
Fortunately for you, they were handed to Captain Connelly 
here, who has not yet passed them on either to Vice or 
Internal Affairs.  I'm sure you appreciate just how 
difficult life could become for you.
Lieutenant, if he were to do so."
So that was it, thought Reuben.  A crude but effective 
piece of blackmail.
They could plant more photographs anywhere they liked: in 
Reuben's desk, in his apartment, maybe even in his security 
box at the bank.


He had handled a lot of obscene material on that case:
there would be no shortage of photographs bearing his 
fingerprints. Reuben stood.
He looked down at


Connelly, then at
Smith.
"I want someone to drive me home."
"The patrol car is waiting for you downstairs."
Reuben turned and headed for the stairs.
Take care.
Lieutenant."
Smith's voice was dark, tired, almost seductive.
Behind him, heat rose from the little jungle.  Think 
about what I've just said.  Think very hard.
And, Lieutenant..."
Reuben turned.  Both men were watching him.
"Watch your back."
CHAPTER TWENTY
SEVEN
"Trust me."
The two most dangerous words in the language.  Any 
language.  But Angelina trusted nobody, not even 
herself.
When Reuben went, he left behind a silence as 
frightening as a protracted scream.  The silence howled 
at her until she pressed her hands over her ears and 
locked it in, deep down, away from the night outside.
Danny arrived ten minutes later, a little on edge.  He 
had been planning on spending the evening alone, to take 
the edge off his


sorrows with a few drinks.
Babysitting Reuben's new girlfriend had not been on the 
agenda.
The first half hour passed awkwardly.
Angelina was petulant, frightened, ill at ease, and Danny 
had come to her sullen and perplexed.
Connelly's lecture had done its work inside him.
Danny didn't mind that Reuben was keeping the woman in his 
apartment, nor that he wanted him to look after her.
He had done half a dozen personal protection jobs in the 
past.  That was the problem: he knew just how boring they 
could be.
They talked of this and that.  Danny found a large bottle 
of Glenfiddich in the drinks cabinet and poured two 
generous glasses.
He wasn't on duty, after all.
He wondered just how much Angelina knew about what was 
going on, how much of that day's business Reuben had 
revealed to her, if anything. Apart from Connelly, he'd 
spoken about it to no one himself.  It still haunted him:
the long tunnel, the room with the pits and the cages, the 
sleeping library with its blind and cobwebbed guardian.
The evening wore on.  The level in the whisky bottle went 
down, most of it via Danny's glass.  Angelina told him 
about the razors and how she thought they had come to be 
there.
The rooms were quiet, very quiet, tense, still full of 
Reuben's abandoned silence.
No conversation helped.
She talked about Rick in careful sentences
157 that were somewhere between grief and celebration.  
Danny scarcely responded.  He seemed to be somewhere else, 
thinking or dreaming or floating in a place fast between.
It grew cold.  Angelina lit the gas fire.  Little yellow 
flames flickered and cast an artificial cosiness across the 
dim room.  She wondered when she had last seen sunshine, 
real sunshine.
"Reuben had a lot of photographs," said Danny.
"Photographs of his family.  He always had them, every 
apartment he ever lived in.  Did he tell you what he did 
with them?"
Angelina looked at the bobbing flames, at the reflections 
they made in the brass surround.  She saw her own face 
reflected, its mute image warped by metal and flame.
"They're gone," she said.
"Reuben threw them out.  He'd had enough of them."
Danny looked blankly at her, sensing the deceit, yet unable 
to articulate it.
"Reuben would never do that," he said.



"He loves his family.
They mean everything to him."
"I know."  She spoke gently, her words filled by the 
hissing of the fire.  Nothing but rain and mist, and in 
the summer heat without light.
"But it happened."
Danny looked at her, at the firelight in her hair, saying 
nothing.
He thought Reuben would find her beautiful.  Such things 
happened. Perhaps she was beautiful, he didn't know.  He 
did not ask much of a woman himself.  But Reuben was 
different.
"Have you slept with Reuben?"  he asked, astonished by 
his own effrontery.
"Yes," she said.
He looked at her again.
Yes, he thought,
Reuben would know how to touch a woman like this, how to 
talk to her. She leaned towards him.
Tell me about Reuben," she said.
"He told me you were his best friend.


That you've known him for a long time."
Danny nodded.
He watched a lock of hair fall quietly across her eyes, 
watched her hand brush it back.  The firelight glided 
across her skin, turning it to copper.
Reuben would find her mysterious and cold and beautiful, 
Reuben would know how to break down her reserves.
"Reuben is the loneliest man I know," he said.
"He has his family, he has friends, he's almost never 
alone.  But he's as lonely as somebody living on the moon.  
He's lonely and he's perplexed, only he won't admit it to 
himself."
"Perplexed?  About what?"


Danny shrugged.
"About life, I think.  No, that's wrong.  About goodness."
"I don't understand."
"Reuben was brought up to believe in goodness, in the power 
of virtue. His parents are strict.  Not
Hassids, but observant.
They told him God is good, that the universe is pervaded 
with goodness. In spite of everything, in spite of the 
Holocaust.

Worse than that, in some way because of the Holocaust.
That's what they used to tell him."
He paused, looking at her skin, watching the firelight 
transform it. She seemed to glow from within.
"But Reuben can't find that goodness, so he worries and 
gets upset.  He thinks God is part evil, that maybe there 
is no God.  But his childhood was filled with God.  He 
can't get rid of God without getting rid of his childhood, 
and he can't get rid of his childhood without getting rid 
of his parents, and he loves his parents.
So he's perplexed.  And everywhere he looks he sees evil 
instead of the goodness he was brought up to expect."
"Because of his job?
Because he's a policeman?"
Danny shook his head.  He sipped more whisky.  It had 
started to taste sour in his mouth.
"Not because of that.
Because of who he is.  The job doesn't help;
but Reuben would find fault with God even if he was a 
rabbi.
Which he isn't."
"Is that what makes him lonely?"
Danny hesitated then nodded.
"Yes," he said.
"I'd never thought of that, but I think that's it.
The universe isn't full enough for him.  He tries to fill 
it with people or memories or something, but what he really 
wants is goodness. Not love or harmony or peace.  Just 
goodness."
"What about women?
Does he have anyone?"
Her heart beat awkwardly, in forlorn cadences.  His 
loneliness drew her to him like a blind moth through 
endless darkness.
"He has you."
"Only last night.  I slept with him once.
He doesn't have me."


"He has nobody else."
"And before?"
There was a long silence.
The cold outside pressed densely against the 
windowpane. When Danny spoke, his voice had 
altered.



"Reuben was married once.
Did he tell you that?"
She nodded.
"His wife was called Devorah.  She was more beautiful than 
anything you can imagine.
They were childhood sweethearts.
They grew up together on the same street, spent all their 
time together.  She was just nineteen when they got 
married.
Reuben was twenty one
Danny fell silent, listening to voices from the past.
"They were happy?"
He looked up and nodded.
"Yes," he said.
"Very happy.  I've never seen people so happy.  It lasted 
four
years."
"What happened?"
Again the silence.
"You can tell me," she said.
There was an accident," Danny said.
They were on holiday with their daughter Davita at a Jewish 
summer camp in Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Mountains.  
The camp's really a small settlement of summer cottages on 
a lakeside.
Devorah and Reuben went swimming one morning very early.  
There's a current in the middle of the lake.
Devorah wasn't a good swimmer.  She knew about the current, 
but that morning for some reason she was careless.
Reuben lost sight of her, then saw her struggling.  He did 
what he could, but he couldn't save her.  He's never 
forgiven himself."
Danny looked away.  There were tears in his eyes.  He had 
known Devorah a long time too.
"And their daughter?"
"Davita?  She lives with Devorah's parents.  Reuben 
couldn't cope alone, so they adopted her.
He visits as often as he can.  They're in Canada, a place 
called Hamilton, just south of Toronto.  They moved away 
from here after the accident."
Danny fell silent again.
He wondered what Reuben had done with his photographs of 
Davita.
Angelina said nothing.  She stood and went to the window.

The street was empty.
Empty and altered.
Without people, streets change, lose meaning.
But she was not deceived.  They were out there.  In luxury 
apartments, in offices of glass, in lobbies of polished 
marble, in long, sleek cars, in indoor gardens splendid 
with vines, at the tops of spiral staircases, their feet 
poised to descend, in tunnels of deepest night, in 
graveyards speckled with shadows.  Out there.  Waiting.
IS^
CHAPTER TWENTY
EIGHT
Angelina woke with a start, surfacing from a dream of scars 
and ruined beauty.  The wind had risen again, tumbling into 
the night slumbering streets like a drunk, howling, 
clattering, spilling pockets of dark rain like cheap wine 
on stained and broken sidewalks.  She lay in bed and 
listened to its roaring, and something told her it had not 
been the wind that had woken her.
The clock beside her bed said 1.15.  Reuben should have 
been back ages ago.
For a matter of seconds the wind dropped and a silence full 
of suppressed rage filled the night.  It was like the 
moment when, between the rada and the petro drums, in the 
thin space between love and lust, a silence shivers among 
the gods.  She knew something was wrong.  The wind cried 
out again, breathless, hunting, in search of peace.
She pulled back the bedclothes and stood trembling in the 
darkness, naked, cold and blind.  A cotton robe lay at the 
foot of the bed. Groping, she found it and slipped it on.  
Her hand hovered for a moment over the light switch, but 
she thought twice and pulled it away.
In the passage nothing moved.  Danny had stayed on in the 
living room after she went to bed.  She wanted to call his 
name, but fear held her back.
They were here, she was sure of it.
Here with her in the private spaces of her darkness.  She 
moved slowly, holding her breath.  The wind was muffled 
now, but other sounds came to her finely attuned ears: a 
creaking joist, wood panelling cracking in the cold, the 
apartment stretching and relaxing in the spaces of the 
night.  She had to get to Danny at all costs.
The door to the living room was outlined by thin white 
lines of
light.
She moved towards it on bare feet, as though in slow 
motion, every muscle tense, every hair on end, like threads 
pulled taut against the bright straining edge of a razor 
blade.  The door seemed miles away, small and unreachable.  
In her ears, the silence hissed like steam, making her 
flinch.
An age later, she finally reached the door.  If only she 
had brought weapon with her, a stick, a shoe, anything to 
defend herself with.
Her breath was thick and clumsy, choking her, her heart was 
being strangled by a giant hand.

Shaking, she reached for the handle and opened the door.  
Light flooded into the passage, drowning her.
She thought she screamed, but the voice that cried out was 
inside her, ringing in vast, empty silences.  She could not 
give physical voice to her fear.
Danny was still in the chair where Angelina had left him.
Death must have been rapid.  The wire had cut deeply into 
his neck, slicing through his windpipe as easily as a sharp 
blade.
A footstep sounded on the floor behind her.  She spun 
round, stifling cry.  A tall man stepped out of the 
kitchen.  He held a heavy gun in one hand, a long silencer 
attached to the barrel.
"You don't listen, Mrs.  Hammel," he said.
"We send you warnings, but you don't listen.  We told you 
to go home to Haiti, to forget all this, but you stay here 
and mock us."  His voice was steady, his breathing soft and 
calm.  She looked into his eyes for comfort, but there was 
none.  He spoke of Haiti, of going home;
but she knew there could be no homecoming for her now, no 
journey back over dark waters, only a winter's night in 
Brooklyn and the wind heavy between stone buildings and her 
executioner towering over her with sadness in his eyes.
"Lieutenant Abrams can't help you now," he said.
"You're on your own.  You know what I want.
I won't harm you if you tell me where it is."
She realized that he had taken Danny for Reuben.  A small 
mistake, but she clung to it the way a man about to hang 
clings to the buoyancy of air.
He was moving towards her now, slowly, with deliberation in 
his step, conscious of his strength, keyed up alert.  His 
height alone intimidated her.
She moved backwards into the room, shaking with fear, her 
eyes fixed on his face, desperate for time, desperate for 
Reuben to return.  And in that moment the thought hit her 
like a slap across the face: what if Reuben had already 
returned?  What if he was lying dead in another room?
She panicked and turned, twisting away from him like a 
trapped animal. As she did so, her eye caught the half-
empty bottle of
Glenfiddich sitting where
Danny had left it earlier.
Without pausing to think, she snatched it up by the neck 
and smashed it hard against the edge of the table.
Whisky and broken glass fell together onto the carpet.
She raised the long bottleneck with its jagged edge, 
slashing the air, warning him off.
Terror would give her the courage to cut him, she knew 
that.


"Stay back!" she shouted. "Stay back or I'll hurt you." 
The man only smiled and moved warily into the room.
He was confident in his strength, scornful of her ability 
to harm him; but down on the streets he had seen more than 
once what broken glass could do, even in a frightened man's 
hand.  He could shoot her, of course, but he preferred not 
to take the risk that involved.  If she died, they might 
never find what they were looking for.  He slipped the gun 
back into its holster.
He was only feet away now, forcing her round the room like 
a dog driving a sheep, moving her into a corner.  She 
stumbled against a low stool, caught herself, and slashed 
out wildly with the broken bottle.
The man swayed as he pulled back, losing balance 
momentarily.
Taking her chance, she lunged forward, jabbing at his face.  
The glass tore his cheek, just below the left eye, gouging 
a line of flesh away, opening the cheek to the bone.
Blood sprayed out onto the carpet.  The stranger staggered, 
crying
out;
but as Angelina drew back her hand to strike again, he 
grabbed her wrist and pulled her arm down forcibly, jarring 
it, jerking the broken bottle out of her grasp.  Then he 
was on her, his weight bearing her down, pressing her to 
the floor.
Ignoring the pain of his wound, he grabbed her with both 
hands around her neck, squeezing hard.  Blood poured from 
his wound, hot against her eyes and in her open mouth.
She flailed out in sheer terror, crying, spitting, her 
hands pummelling his chest.  He held tight, pressing harder 
and harder, his fingers like steel bands.  Her blows 
started to weaken, they became less and less precise, now 
they were mere taps, now nothing.  And a great blackness 
blossomed in her head, shot with flashes of light, and 
there was pain, and no breath, and nothing, and nothing, 
and nothing.
He let her head fall back to the floor with a heavy thud.  
Her face and neck were drenched with blood.
Shaking, he stood and looked down at her.
'
"Now," he whispered, gritting his teeth against the pain, 
'now we can begin."
CHAPTER TWENTY
NINE
Reuben drew up to the kerb and shut off his engine.
Instantly, the night filled with the roaring of wind.  He 
switched off his lights and looked out into the darkness.  
Thin clouds scudded nervously across watery, frightened 
moon.  He rested his head against the steering wheel.  The 
plastic felt cool but devoid of comfort.  He
felt drained.  Not just tired, but dry, emptied of self.  
His limbs felt heavy, as though embedded in concrete.  His 
head throbbed with pain.
He had been brought back almost two hours earlier by a 
different driver in an unmarked car, a black Lincoln with 
Washington number plates and dropped outside his apartment.  
The second driver had been no more communicative than the 
first.  Dark fields, then bright lights on the Long Island 
Expressway back to Brooklyn.  Reuben had watched the 
Lincoln drive out of sight, then taken his own car and 
driven straight to the precinct.
Kruger had been on the desk.  That at least was a bonus 
Pete Kruger wasn't the sort to run to Connelly with tales 
about late-night
visits.
Reuben had gone down to archives, in the hope of finding 
something to make sense of what was happening.  An hour 
later he sat staring at a blank wall while fine goose 
pimples crept along his spine and cold sweat bathed the 
palms of his hands.
There were no files.  Nothing related to the case.  No 
exhumation records.  No files on organized crime 
investigations with Haitian links.  Nothing on Richard 
Hammel.
Nothing on Filius Narcisse.
Nothing on Aubin Mondesir.
Afterwards, he had telephoned Sally, using the number she 
had given him.
There had been no reply.
He sat in the car, staring through the windscreen at a 
street as empty as himself.
Higher up, the branches of angry trees attacked the 
darkness, lashing out madly, tearing the night to shreds.  
He felt cold and sick and hungry.
All he wanted to do was sleep.
With an effort, he dragged himself from the car.  In an 
instant, he was just another piece of debris, pummelled by 
the storm.  He locked the car door and turned towards his 
apartment building.  As he did so he glanced up.
Something was wrong.  His sluggish brain struggled to 
interpret the warning that his tired eyes had registered.  
He stood, leaning against the car, looking up at his 
apartment, fighting the tiredness.
Suddenly he understood.
There was no light in the living room.
No light, but there should have been.
Danny hated drawn curtains.
If he was in there they would be wide open and light would 
be streaming from the window.  It was after one thirty, but 
there was no way Danny would have gone to bed.
And if he was sitting up watching Angelina, the most 
logical place for him to be was in the living room.

With the curtains open.
Reuben slipped a hand inside his coat and drew his .38.
He stopped at the foot of the stairs to remove his shoes.  
Inwardly, he cursed himself for having left Angelina so 
long, for having allowed her to remain at an address her 
attackers knew about.
Holding his breath, he began to move up the stairs one at a 
time, his back pressed against the wall, his gun aimed 
upwards along the stairwell.
Nothing was moving.  There were no sounds.
His door was at the end of the first floor corridor.
Halfway there, he saw that it was lying open a fraction.  
Behind it, a light was burning in the passage.  The 
corridor was cold, deserted.  He felt his hands grow clammy 
with sweat.  His mouth was dry.
Blood moved in his veins like muddy water, sluggish and 
afraid.
At the door he spread himself against the wall and 
listened.  At first he heard nothing, then out of the 
silence he plucked a small, wavering sound.  A voice.  A 
man's voice, low, insistent.  Not Danny's voice.
Slowly, he pushed the door open.
He swung into the opening, his gun ready, fear and anger 
charging him, wiping out his tiredness.  The empty passage 
stretched away for ever, familiar, unfamiliar.  He stepped 
inside, his unshod feet silent on the soft hall carpet.
The livingroom door was wide open.
From it, he could hear the man's voice, louder now.
"It will not be painful," said the voice.
"You will feel nothing at first.  After a while you will 
begin to feel dizzy.  Your limbs will seem light, there 
will be a sensation of numbness in the tongue.
Soon after, you will start vomiting.  You will grow cold, 
extremely cold.
The numbness will move to other parts of your body.
Paralysis will follow.  What happens next will depend on 
how exactly I have measured the dose.  You may become 
comatose.  You will be buried alive.  Or you may die.  But 
it will take a long time, and you will be fully conscious 
right to the end.
"However, it is your choice.  If you choose differently, 
you can avoid any harm coming to you.
It is entirely up to you."
There was no reply.
Reuben felt as though something primitive had crept into 
his blood.  He was a hunter stalking prey.
Robert de Niro on a mountaintop, high above a swirling mist 
in
autumn.

Elation filled his emptiness.
Filled him and contaminated him at the same time.
He crept to the door and inched his head round.
They were off to the left, behind the door.  The man had 
his back to Reuben.
Angelina was strapped to a chair, staring straight ahead.
On a low table beside the chair sat a large hypodermic 
syringe and beside it a bottle filled with a dark coloured 
fluid.
Reuben took a careful step through the door.  As he did so, 
he noticed something on the floor near the chair in which 
Angelina was sitting.  A man's body sprawled on the carpet, 
the throat sliced half through by a wire.
Reuben closed his eyes tightly and clutched the door for 
support.  A great beast lifted its head and bellowed, 
shaggy and misshapen across abandoned hillsides.
Reuben opened his eyes.
Danny was still there.
In his heart, like a terrible weight.
Reuben could feel the beginnings of a lifetime's pain.
His instinct, his yearning was to pull the trigger, but he 
could not risk hitting Angelina.  And he wanted the man 
alive.  The roar of the wind masked his entry to the room.  
He moved to the right, away from the door, in case there 
should be a second man in the apartment.
"Put your hands very slowly behind your head," said Reuben.
Take one step backwards, then turn and face me.  If I see 
anything resembling a weapon in your hand, I will blow your 
head all round this room."  He spoke quietly, using words 
he had used before, going by the book, watching his 
prisoner for the first sign of trouble.  But his hand was 
shaking and his head was roaring like the wind.  Not Danny, 
it screamed.  Danny can't be dead!
But Danny was lying rigid on the floor and the man with his 
back to Reuben had killed him, and Reuben hoped he would 
give him an excuse to blow him away.
The man fell silent and lowered his hands to his sides.
"Put your hands behind your head and turn round like I told 
you.  I would rather shoot you than let you live, so be 
very, very careful."
Slowly, deliberately, the man turned.  His face was pale.
There were traces of blood in his eyebrows and on his neck.  
A large plaster had been stuck over one cheek.
"Whoever you are, mister, you're making the biggest mistake 
of your life," he said.
"Now, take my advice.  Put the gun down, back off, and go 
on back to wherever you came from."
"Undo the straps.  Let her out of the chair."
"You're making .. ."
Reuben fired once over the man's head.
Very close.
"OK, OK.  Keep cool."  The man turned and stepped behind 
the chair.  He unbuckled the leather straps.
They fell to the floor.  The man straightened, and as he 
did so his hand moved swiftly, and he came up twisting and 
firing.
He was good, but not good enough.
Reuben's first bullet took him in the right shoulder.
The stranger staggered, thrown off balance by the bullet's 
impact.  The gun flew from his hand across the floor.  His 
face showed momentary signs of pain, then grew calm again.  
He kept on coming.
Reuben fired again.  The second bullet took the man in the 
stomach, low down.  Again he staggered.  Deep in his throat 
a low roaring sound began.
Suddenly, he moved, taking Reuben completely by surprise, 
throwing himself onto his assailant.
Reuben staggered back, firing twice, missing both times.
Before he could regain his balance, Reuben was knocked 
sideways by his assailant's flailing arm.
In an attempt to recover, he sidestepped towards the coffee 
table.
Slipping awkwardly, his stockinged foot landed heavily on a 
shard of broken glass.
He cried out and fell, the gun flying from his hand, 
crashing into the wall out of reach.
A second lump of glass caught him in the small of the back, 
near his right kidney.
He cried again, lurching forward onto his stomach, trying 
to get away from the glass.
Twisting to reach the piece of bottle embedded in his back, 
Reuben saw the stranger halt and turn.  He began to pull 
the shard away, struggling to get to his knees, but the man 
was on him, bearing him down, using his weight to pin him 
against the floor.
The room started to spin.  The pain in his back was tearing 
at him, wrenching him into unconsciousness, filling him 
with itself, like thousands of tiny glass splinters.
From an inside pocket, the stranger drew out a long, sharp 
bladed knife.  He drew back his right hand, aiming the 
knife at Reuben's
head.
Desperately, Reuben found the strength to twist aside.  The 
knife caught him on the temple, a glancing blow that took a 
chunk of hair and flesh with it.  The man raised the knife 
a second time.
Reuben brought his knee up hard into the man's groin.  He 
grunted and
doubled up, dropping the knife.  Reuben repeated the blow, 
then turned hard, throwing his assailant off.
With an effort, he dragged himself aside.
The tall man was rallying already.  Reuben found the lump 
of glass and pulled it free.  It had pierced through his 
overcoat, deep into his flesh.  He could feel blood soaking 
into his clothes.
He staggered to his feet, looking for his gun.  The 
stranger was up again, knife in hand.  A searing pain went 
through Reuben's right foot as he pressed down on it.  He 
stumbled, allowing his attacker to catch him and bring him 
down again.
Reuben had his opponent's arm this time.
The man's face was pressed down against his, his breath in 
his nostrils, his eyes wide open, full of rage.  Rage and 
something else. Triumph?
Ecstasy?
Loneliness?
Duty?  He held the knife with powerful fingers, forcing it 
down nearer and nearer Reuben's throat.
They had rolled near to the chair on which Angelina was 
still sitting, unable to move.  The knife was inches away 
now.  Reuben's left hand touched something hard and cold.
Taking it in his fingers, he lifted it.  It was the 
hypodermic.  It had been knocked to the floor during the 
struggle.
Reuben arched his back, struggling to bring his left hand 
round.  The point of the knife was against his throat now, 
his right arm was weakening.  In his head, bright lights 
exploded and a dull pounding echoed like thunder.
He twisted sideways another couple of inches and pushed up 
hard with the hypodermic.  The point took the man full in 
his right eye.
There was a faint popping sound as it burst its way into 
the ball. Reuben let go of the syringe.  It hung slightly 
askew, still embedded in the eyeball.
The stranger screamed aloud, both his eyes wide open in 
surprise and horror.
The knife dropped as he clutched with both hands at his 
eye.
Reuben rolled away.  He was groggy and his gun was still 
out of reach and he thought he was going to throw up.  The 
stranger writhed in agony, blood reddened fingers fumbling 
at his face.  The hypodermic had fallen to the floor.
Reuben crawled towards the spot where he had last seen the 
.38.
It was only feet away, but it felt like miles.  He reached 
it at last, and as he did so the nausea rushed over him in 
waves.
He threw up, felt the room heave, smelt vomit in his 
nostrils, sensed searing pains in his back and foot.  He 
lurched forward, fumbling for the gun.  The floor came 
towards him, rushing fast like a train, and hit him hard.

There was nothing after that.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The night stood still.
After hours of madness, the wind had dropped.  Like a 
butcher's knife passing over bone, it had scraped the sky 
clean, leaving a broken web of tangled stars, fever-bright 
and naked in a perfect winter blackness. As suddenly as it 
had come, the gale had spent its force.  Now a charged and 
violent stillness brooded over the city.  The wind had 
scoured it too, but it remained dirty and wretched.
No falling stars dropped into its wounded streets, no fire 
from heaven came to burn its dross away.
They lay like spent lovers on Reuben's bed, not sleeping, 
not talking, just listening to the night pass by.  It would 
be day soon, but not for them.
Before long, there would be light.  But not for them.
They were in constant darkness now.
The stranger had gone, taken his wounds and staggered out 
bloody into the last of the storm.  The chair in which 
Angelina had been strapped stood empty.
Danny lay where he had fallen in the lounge, unseeing eyes 
staring at the ceiling.  He could wait.
Angelina lay in Reuben's arms like a child stripped of 
innocence and greed.  She felt dead inside and old, and she 
knew you were one or the other, but it didn't matter.
The struggle with Danny's killer had left her bruised, but 
otherwise unhurt.  Unhurt on the surface, where it meant 
nothing.  Reuben held her, but she knew that in his mind he 
was holding Danny, holding his own childhood before it 
slipped away from him for ever.  He was further than ever 
from the goodness he sought, trapped in the middle of life 
without dreams or reasons or beauty.  She leaned back 
against him helplessly and felt his unquiet breath touch 
her neck.
"We have to leave here."
His voice was a whisper in the darkness.
She went on gazing into space, saying nothing, wanting 
nothing.
"They know where we are," he said.
"Once the man who was here makes it back to his friends 
they'll come looking for us.  We have to get out."
A long silence followed.  She felt his breath on her skin, 
calm and unfamiliar, a tiny, fragile thing on a night of 
storms.
"He came last year," she said.
"Several times.  He was the man who visited Rick after the 
first phone call."
"Did he tell you where he came from, who sent him?"
She shook her head.



"He had some sort of official card.
An ID card.  I never saw it.
Rick told me.  As if he belonged to a 
government agency." "Did Rick ever say which 
agency?
Did he have suspicions?"
"No," she answered.


"The card didn't say."
"But Rick believed he was from the government?"
In the darkness she nodded unseen, long strands of her 
tumbled hair brushing lightly against his cheek, strands 
of her life tangling with his.
"Do you think he could be responsible for the killings?
Filius, Rick, maybe your friend Aubin?"


He had to listen hard for her reply.
"Yes," she whispered, very sweet and gentle.  He kissed her 
on the neck.  Her skin tasted faintly of blood.  He closed 
his lips and rolled away.
"We have to leave here," he said.
One of Uncle Shmuel's more celebrated sayings was:
"Winter is for penguins."  He had never seen a penguin in 
his life, outside Prospect Park Zoo.  For that matter, he 
hadn't seen very many winters either.
Not since leaving Europe anyway.
Every September he and his wife Rivke packed half a dozen 
suitcases with summerweight clothes and boxes from 
Steingass's Deli, locked up their apartment in Boro Park, 
and took an Eastern Air Lines 727 direct to Miami.
They had been going there since 1954.
This year was no exception.
Reuben's cousin Dora was puzzled when he asked for the key, 
but she knew better than to ask questions from family.
Especially when 'family' means a police lieutenant who once 
saw you kissing Hymie Kornblum in the back of a Ford and 
has never forgotten.
She gave him the key and a promise that she would mention 
it to no-one. Reuben guessed he would have two or three 
days clear before it proved too much for her to keep 
bottled up.
Maybe a day longer before Smith or one of his boys came 
knocking at the door.  Or shooting their way in.
"How's Danny,
Reuben?  I haven't seen him in weeks.



Is he still seeing that little blonde?
What was her name?  Tanya?
Sonia?"
"Dora, please don't ask me about Danny tonight.  I'm 
sorry, I can't explain."
The blood drained from Dora's face.
"Is something wrong, Reuben?
Has something happened to Danny?"
He needed to speak to someone.  But not now.
"Danny's dead, Dora.
But I can't talk about it yet.  It's something I can't 
deal with.  Not yet.
I'll come round in a couple of days.  I'll tell you 
everything then."
She looked at him as though he had struck her a heavy 
blow.  Her eyes were beginning to well with tears.  He 
looked round.
Angelina was waiting in the car out on the street.  It was 
dawn.  He turned and walked slowly away.  Later, much 
later, like a memory, he heard Dora close the door.
He called the precinct from the apartment.
Pete Kruger was still on the desk.
He took the news about Danny hard.
Reuben gave him a detailed description of the killer.
"Who is this guy.
Lieutenant?  We got a file on him?"
"He works for a government agency.  I'm willing to 
guarantee you won't find so much as a parking ticket 
listed in his name.  He killed Danny in mistake for me, 
but I think he would have killed him anyway." "Homicide 
will want to talk to you, Lieutenant."
"Not now.
Tell them I called in sick.  There are things I have to 
do.
I'll be in touch in a couple of days."
The captain won't like this."
"I don't expect him to."  Reuben paused.
"Tell them to look after Danny."
"I'll see to it.
Lieutenant, before you go, I've got a message for you from 
Maguire.
Do you want me to read it to you?"
Sam Maguire was with Homicide.  He'd been put onto the 
Mondesir case.
"Go ahead."
"He says to tell you that this guy Aubin Mondesir," he 
pronounced the first name as
Awbin - 'the one they found yesterday ..."
"I know who you mean."
"Seems
Mondesir was into narcotics.  A pusher.  Not major league 
or nothing, but doing all right.  Dealt in smack,
coke, some crack.
Maguire thinks maybe he crossed some of his friends or 
somebody wanted to move in on his territory.  He's going 
to be with Narcotics this morning.
Wants you to ring him."
Thanks, Pete.
Tell him I'll be in touch.
But not yet.  I need some time for this other thing.
Tell Sam he's probably right.
Mondesir got in with the wrong people."
He hung up and stood for a long time just staring at the 
telephone. Inside, he was crying, but there were no tears 
in his eyes.
Angelina had gone to bed.
He found her sleeping there.
Sleep seemed like a good idea.  He couldn't remember when 
he had last felt such deep tiredness, such agony of mind.
His wounds were hurting badly, but a handful of 
painkillers would take care of that.
He found some in the bathroom, then joined Angelina in the 
bedroom. Shmuel and Rivke had twin beds.  Reuben was 
asleep even before he hit the mattress.
It was well past noon when he struggled back to 
consciousness.


He was aching in several places and his wounds were 
stinging.
His head felt as though it had been packed with lead shot 
and shaken. At first he did not remember the night before 
or what had happened to Danny.  When he did, the memory 
came with a freshness that was all but unbearable.  He lay 
stunned, breathing heavily, waiting for his mind to catch 
up with the pain.
Angelina was already up.
There was an indentation where she had been lying on the 
other bed. She would be in the kitchen.  He doubted if his 
aunt and uncle would have left any fresh food, but there 
might be cookies and coffee. Reuben rolled himself stiffly 
off the bed and staggered into the kitchen.
Angelina was not there.
There was no sign of anybody having made food or drink.  He 
went to the bathroom.  The door was wide open.  Angelina 
was not inside.
"Angelina!
Where are you, Angelina?"  His voice echoed dully in the 
empty apartment, dying away among dust sheets and polythene 
bags.
He felt fear stab through him like a long, polished needle.
Room after room he hunted for her.  She was nowhere.
He found the note pinned to the rear of the front door.
"Reuben I need to sort things out.  I need time and I need 
space. Please don't try to find me.  I have your phone 
number here in case something comes up, but I'd rather not 
have to use it.  I'm grateful that you looked after me.  
I'm grateful that you loved me.
And I'm sorry about your friend Danny.
Be good.
Whatever that means."
It doesn't mean anything,
he thought.
Doesn't mean anything at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
He tried to contact Sally again.
There was still no answer.  He rang her number at City Hall 
and was told she was not there.  When he gave his name, he 
was told to hold on. Half a minute later, the person at the 
other end said Sally had left a message for him.  It 
consisted of a name and an address:
Dr.  Nigel Greenwood, Kent Hall, Columbia University.  That 
was all. Reuben thanked the speaker and hung up.
The switchboard at Columbia put him through to Greenwood's 
extension. The voice that answered was English, the accent 
straight out of Brideshead Revisited.
"Ah, yes.  Miss Peale spoke to me about you last night.  
She said you had made certain discoveries that would 
interest me, and she thought I might in turn be of some 
assistance to you.  I have a double class in a few minutes, 
but I'm free after that.  Why don't you come out to 
Columbia?  Say in about two hours' time.  You'll find Kent 
Hall behind the entrance opposite West 16th Street.  Just 
go up the steps in front of the library on your left.  Kent 
Hall's just past there on your right.  You can't miss it.  
My name's on the board downstairs, beside the lift.  I'll 
be waiting for you."



Reuben took the Bourjolly letters and the half-circle of 
African gold and packed them in a box.  He took a cab to 
downtown Manhattan, paid the subscription for a safe 
deposit vault, and left the box there.
Getting to Columbia took a while.
Central Park was closed to traffic.  Broadway was choked.  
The lift at Kent Hall was out of order.  He found 
Greenwood at last in a small office on the fourth floor.  
The room was nineteenth century, wood-lined, crammed with 
books and papers.  Greenwood filled the rest of it 
perfectly.
Reuben wondered if the university selected its faculty on 
the basis of how they looked in what was to be their 
natural habitat.
The
Englishman wore a tweed jacket, mustard waistcoat, brown 
cords and a paisley pattern bow tie.  He was in his 
forties, balding, slightly fat.
There was a strong smell of pipe smoke over everything.
They shook hands and
Reuben sat on the opposite side of the desk, peering at
Greenwood through the gaps between piles of precariously 
balanced books, many of them old leather bound volumes.
The covers were foxed and stained, a little like their 
owner.
"Do you know Miss
Peale well?"
asked
Greenwood.
"We're .. good friends," Reuben replied.
"We've worked together on several cases."
"Same here.  She brings her problem cases to me, I help 
out when I can."
"You teach law?"
Greenwood smiled and shook his head.
"No.  Nor anything remotely like it, I'm afraid.
I'm a medievalist with a specialization in the Latin 
translation s of Eastern texts.  By "Eastern" I mean 
"Middle Eastern" mainly Hebrew and Arabic.  I had research 
post at the Warburg Institute in London up until six years 
ago;
then a professorship came up here and I leapt at it.
Things aren't what they were in England, certainly not in 
the universities.  Death by a thousand cuts.
Professorships are like gold dust; and a field like mine 
is always among the first to go.



"Can you make any money out of it?"
they ask.
"Does it have industrial application s?"  I have to answer, 
no.  Why on earth should it?
They would have asked Socrates or Plato the same question.
Given them the sack, I shouldn't wonder.  So I came here: 
the barbarians aren't quite as much in evidence.  So, what 
can I do for you?"
"I'm not sure, Professor.
Latin texts?"
Reuben looked round the room.  Books in Latin.
Books in Hebrew.  Books in what he took to be Arabic.
It seemed familiar.
"Well, the texts are raw material," said Greenwood.
"I
actually write on the history, sociology, and social 
psychology of occultism:
things like magic, witchcraft, astrology.
You may not take such matters seriously.
Personally, I do not.  That is to say, I do not believe in 
them.  I would not, for example, consult an astrologer 
about what I should do tomorrow or next year.
But people in past centuries did believe, and their beliefs 
shaped their actions.
Hence the importance of studying those beliefs.
And there are still plenty of people who believe in such 
matters today. New
York has tens of thousands of occultists of one kind or 
another."


"And Sally brought her legal problems to you?  I don't 
understand. '
Greenwood leaned forward in his chair.
He needed a haircut.
Two haircuts.
"Well, not legal problems exactly.
There is rather more to Miss Peale than I think you 
realize." "Really?"
"Yes, really.  A good deal more.  But I think that is 
for her to


explain.  She told me you had made ... certain 
discoveries"
Reuben nodded.  He explained as best he could what he 
and Danny had found in the tunnel and the chambers 
beyond.
"Do you remember the titles of any of the books you 
saw?"
Greenwood asked.
"Only a few.  There was one in French.
Clavicles I think it was.


Translated from Hebrew."
"Yes.  That would be the Clavicles of Solomon, the Key of 
Solomon the King.
There aren't many printed copies around, though I've seen 
plenty of manuscripts It's the most important of 
thegrimoire s, the textbooks used by magicians in Europe.
Supposed to have been written by King Solomon himself.
Nonsense, of course;
but there are several books of magic ascribed to him in 
tradition. Did you know he was supposed to have been a 
magician?"
Reuben nodded.
"Yes, some of the midrash "Ah, yes, of course.
You are a Jew.
forgot.
There are numerous Biblical traditions.  Many of them 
passed into Islam, and through Arabic texts into Latin.
Well, did you find any other books?"
Reuben recited the names of the few he could remember.


Greenwood nodded at each one, as at the names of old 
friends.
But at the last he looked up, startled.
"Say that again."
"A Sober Warning to the Righteous," repeated Reuben.
"It was an account of some events at Nantucket around 
1800."
The professor remained silent.  His face had clouded.  He 
seemed uneasy for the first time since Reuben had entered 
the room.
"That is a very rare book," he said at last.
"Only a few copies were ever printed, and even fewer 
survived.  I think most of them were burned.
But I've seen one in the library at Yale."  He paused.  The 
events it describes are most unpleasant.


To find it in a library such as you have described I 
find ... unsettling.
' "I think it may be connected to other matters," said 
Reuben.
"Indeed?  And what matters might they be?"
Carefully, avoiding any temptation to dramatize or 
embellish his narrative, Reuben related to the professor 
the details he had learnt from Angelina about Bourjolly 
and the Seventh Order.  It took a long time.
When he finished.
Greenwood sat staring across the desk, motionless, his 
face pale, almost ashen.
"You say there were letters."
"Yes, a lot of letters.  I took the ones that had come 
from Haiti. I've still got them."
"But you say there were others.  From
Mitau, Budapest and Riga."


"Among other places, yes."
"I
see.
Perhaps, Lieutenant, it is better you did not carry them 
away." Greenwood pushed away his chair and stood.
He walked to the window and looked out.  Below him, 
students walked to classes in the fading light of an autumn 
afternoon.
"Lieutenan t, tell me, do you know what has become of those 
tunnels, the chambers you discovered?
Are your people exploring them?"
Reuben shook his head.
"I don't think so, not unless they're pulling the wool over 
my eyes.  I was told they'd been sealed off.  I think they 
plan to have them filled in."
The Englishman nodded.  He turned away from the window.
"Perhaps that is for the best.
Yes, even at the cost of such a library, that might be for 
the best. But I think they will have taken the books first.
And the other things as well..."


"Sally thought you could help me." 
"Yes, perhaps I can. But I need time.

I would like to see the letters you took from Bourjolly's 
library.
And I would very much like to speak to Mrs.  Hammel."
"I'm afraid I don't know where she is.  She left this 
morning.  I think she plans to disappear."  A look of 
concern crossed Greenwood's face.
"I'm sorry to hear that.  Try to find her.
Lieutenant.
For both your sakes, it is imperative that you find her.  I 
can't help you any further at the moment.
Contact me tomorrow.
Here, this is my home number:
you can ring me there.  I will expect to hear from you.
Now I suggest you go and try to find Mrs.


Hammel.  As a matter of extreme urgency."
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Reuben returned to the apartment about six.
As far as he could tell, no-one had followed him and no 
one had the building under surveillance.  Angelina had not 
come back.
He went first to a corner store and bought some groceries.
He was not hungry, but he knew he had to eat.  Back in the 
apartment, he ate cold food without enjoyment.
After that he renewed the dressings on his wounds.
At eight he rang his parents to tell them about Danny.
They'd heard the news already from Danny's brother.
His mother told him they had been worried about him all 
day.
Some men from the police department had been round that 
afternoon asking questions
Reuben's mother thought their names were Quirk and 
Maguire.  They wanted Reuben to get in touch.
His mother wanted to know where he was, and for the first 
time in his life he lied to her.
"I'm in New Jersey," he said.  He was growing anxious 
about his cousin Dora and when she would tell people his 
whereabouts .
Two days was optimistic.
He gave her twenty-four hours at most.
"Are you in trouble, Reuben?"
His mother's voice was brittle with worry.  He felt eight 
years old again, without the stout scaffolding of 
innocence.
"A kind of trouble.



Mother."
"Is it ... Is it to do with what happened to Danny?"  A 
dumb question, but she had to ask it.
"I loved
Danny,
Mother.  He was like a brother."
"Reuben, I have to meet his mother.  I have to speak with 
her.  Her son was found dead in your apartment.
You are missing.  The police are asking about you.  What am 
I to
say?"
"Tell her what I just told you.
Tell her Danny and I were working together on a case and 
someone killed him.
Tell her I know who the killer is.


I'll find him, Mother, I promise."
"In New Jersey?
You'll find him in New Jersey and bring him back?"  Her 
voice seemed infinitely sad to him, like music he had 
once known and now knew no longer.
"No, Mother," he whispered.
"I won't bring him back.  I'll kill him."


The phone call came just before eleven.
"Can speak to Lieutenant Abrams?"  A woman's voice, a 
little hoarse and breathless.
A dingy sort of voice, it sounded as though it hadn't been 
washed in weeks.
Not Angelina's voice, but a similar accent.
"I'm
Abrams.
Who's speaking?"
"Is not important.
You got a pen and paper?"
"Unh-huh."
"So, write down this address: 497 Gibson Street, Bedford 
Stuyvesant. Apartment nineteen.
You got that?"


"Yes, I've got it.

What do you want me to do?"
"I got a friend of yours here.
She in trouble, bad trouble, say she want you come fetch 
her.
Right away."
"What sort of trouble?"
"Bad trouble, m'sieu.  She need your help.  She need it 
bad.  Better come right away."
"Let me speak to her."
There was stillness, then the voice returned.
"Wait."
He waited.
It seemed a long time, but it could not have been more 
than three or four minutes.
When Angelina came to the phone, her voice was scarcely 
recognizable. "Reu ... Reuben?"


"Is that you,
Angelina?
What's happened?"
Another stillness, as though she had gone away again. 
"I'm ... I'm ... Reuben ... get me ... I need .. Help 
me" 
Her voice tailed off, indistinct, the words half formed  
She sounded drunk.
Drunk or... high.
Christ, he'd been stupid!
Aubin
Mondesir had been a pusher.  Not major league, but 
getting there. Angelina had gone to see him yesterday to 
score;


but she'd got nothing because he was dead.
All that stuff about his being a voodoo priest and giving 
her some sort of spiritual sustenance had been pure 
bullshit.
"Angelina, what have you taken?
How much?
Have you
OD'ed?"
But Angelina did not answer.  The other woman came on the 
phone


again.
"Like I say, she need your help.  You got the address.  
You want to help, you better make it quick."
The line went dead.
The silence that followed was not golden.  What is?
CHAPTER
THIRTY THREE
There are theologians who say that hell is not a place, 
but a state of mind.  They are wrong.
Hell is Gibson Street.
Reuben drove slowly with extinguished lights, watching 
grey shadows mingle on each side.
The walls of tall, eroded houses loomed from the darkness 
like silent mausoleums.
They had been polished and elegant once, full of life and 
comfort at Thanksgivin and Christmas.
Now they huddled together in the squalid gloom, in and out 
of season, tattered and grimy, all comfort gone.  It was 
as though someone had come down with a greasy rag and 
rubbed all their brightness away.
In places, braziers burned on the open sidewalks, throwing 
red sparks out upon the glistening air.  Huddled around 
them, bent against the cold, small groups of fallen angels 
folded uneasy wings against the sharp, unwelcoming night.
Dark, haggard figures scuttled in and out of half-lit 
doorways.
From dim and curtained windows, behind panes of cracked 
and twisted glass, hidden eyes stared and slowly blinked, 
seeing nothing.
Snatches of broken music surged out of nowhere harsh, 
brittle, full of measured despair.
The wind took it and snapped it in two, like glass.
Reuben passed a ruin that had once been an apartment 
house.  It had been neglected, then abused, then stripped, 
then abandoned, then gutted, and finally left to rot.  
There was a hole in one wall, about six inches square.
Graffiti danced all round it.
Arrows pointed inwards from the rim towards the centre.
It looked like a significant hole.  It was.
Reuben knew what the hole was for:
you stood on the street side and put your hand through the 
opening, clutching as many dollars and dimes as you'd been 
able to scrape up during a day's hustling.
A hidden dealer would take your thin wad and replace it 
with an even smaller packet holding a sixteenth or less of 
H. The anonymity was pure, the heroin anything but.



Reuben watched a couple of shivering angels shuffle past, 
drowning in a narcotic dream.  Drugs could not make them 
rich.  Drugs could not take away their hunger or their cold 
or their despair.  But drugs could make them numb.
Numbness was good.
Numbness was better than sleep.
Numbness was God enthroned in a paradise of lies.
The street had a darkness all of its own, as though God had 
created it especially.
None of the streetlamps worked.  The last one had been 
smashed two years ago, and nobody had ever come to replace 
it.
The residents preferred it that way.
Number 497 was one of the reasons.
It was a Renaissance Revival brownstone, five storeys high.  
Tall and black and gutted with shadows.
Most of its windows had been boarded up, the ornamental 
iron balustrade that had once climbed the steps was long 
gone, the brickwork was crumbling.
Words like "Renaissanc e' and "Revival' sounded like sick 
jokes in Bedford Stuyvesant.
Reuben parked the car directly opposite.  He got out and 
locked it, watching out of the corners of his eyes for 
signs of movement.
A kid was watching him from the steps of a house two doors 
down.  Ten years old, maybe less.
Reuben motioned to him, calling him over.
The boy stared at him for a while, hesitating.
Reuben motioned again.
Casually, the boy detached himself from the railing against 
which he had been leaning.  He knew the language of the 
street better than he knew English.  He came towards 
Reuben, a swagger in his step.  He wasn't a child.
Childhood was short lived round here: kids moved into 
adulthood as soon as they could steal purses or hot-wire 
cars or run dope or pimp for their sisters.  Some could do 
all of those things and worse by the age of six.
The kid stopped several feet away, swaying lightly on the 
balls of his feet.
He knew Reuben was a cop: the white face was enough.
Civilians didn't come round here unless they were desperate 
or lost, and Reuben did not look either of those.
"Yeah?"
Reuben took a ten dollar bill from his pocket.


This is yours," he said.
"I
want you to look after my car, see nobody 
touches it. If it's still OK when I come 
out, you get two more. That a deal?"


The boy looked at the note, then at Reuben, then back at 
the note again.
"Twenty now, thirty after," he said.
Reuben shook his head.
"I'm not here to bargain, son.  Take it or leave it.  But 
if I come out and find so much as a scratch on this 
machine, I'm coming back with some friends and you are 
going to wish you'd taken the money."
"I got friends, too, mister."
"You've got shit.
Don't fool with me, son.  You take the money, you look 
after the car, you watch me drive away from here with a 
smile on my face, and you wake up in the morning thirty 
dollars richer.  Not to mention the value of my friendship.
Bring in your friends and all you've got is big trouble."
Reuben still found it bizarre to be talking like this with 
a child.
But they learned their English from TV and their manners 
from the street.
Chances were the kid was already a prostitute and the star 
of a dozen paedophile movies.
Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy didn't figure in his 
vocabulary.


The boy hesitated a moment longer, then he held 
out his hand. "Make it forty and you've got a 
deal."
Reuben shook his head again.


"Thirtyfive.  Ten now, the rest after.
I won't be long.  Think of it as getting 
rich quick." The child pursed his lips and 
spat on the ground.
"You better not be long, mister.  I got 
things to do." Reuben handed over the ten.


"Remember, ' he said.
"Even a single scratch and you'll 
see me again." "Wouldn't want that, 
mister.
Wouldn't want to see you again, 
ever."


Reuben 
turned 
to go. 
"Hey, 
mister.
Where 
you 
goin'?" 
Reuben 
pointed.


The kid shook his head slowly.
"That's a shooting gallery, mister.  If you got a friend in 
there, he's not worth bringing out."
The street door lay partly open, held ajar by a battered 
shopping trolley.  The sign on the side said it had come 
from Finast.
Reuben pushed it aside and stepped through.  A sharp wind 
followed him, blowing dust and trash and pieces of old 
newspaper into the narrow hallway.
A 'shooting gallery' was a place where they lined addicts 
up in a room and cranked them up one after the other.  The 
same spike for fifty or more in a row before it started to 
get blunt.
The lobby was desolate, lit dully by a single dust shrouded 
bulb. Smells of stale beer and fresh urine hung listless on 
the battered
air.
On the left, a dim stairwell stumbled through hal flit 
landings to heights of absolute darkness.
Spray-can graffiti held the crumbling plaster of the walls 
together, bright blues and greens and yellows on a base of 
dull brown paint:
a roster of forgotten names, proclamations of love and 
hate, a hooker's number, gang slogans in misspelled French, 
a phallus and testicles, a woman with her legs spread.  Art 
in the service of desperation
A man was leaning at the foot of the stairs, arms crossed, 
back gently arched against the loosened balustrade, face 
masked behind creased shadows.  He wore a cheap navy suit 
and imitation Gucci loafers, the little bridles on their 
aprons tarnished already by the first salt rains of 
autumn'.
Reuben knew why he was there.
This was a guard post on tribal territory, and he was the 
watcher.
It was war in the streets out there:
American blacks against West Indians, Jamaicans against 
Haitians, blacks against Hispanics.
This was gangland.
And Reuben belonged to all the wrong gangs.
The man came forward, a couple of steps, like a gigolo 
advancing at a dance.  His face was still in shadows.  He 
knew the shadows well, how to come and go in them.  Reuben 
caught a glimpse of golden earring, a narrow cheekbone 
grazed momentarily by light, a small hand in a tight 
leather glove, the fingers bright with golden rings.
"You lookin' for someone, blanc?"  The question was spoken 
slowly and deliberately.


Reuben shook his head.
"I don't want trouble.
Someone rang me, told me to come down here.
Apartment nineteen.
Maybe you know about it."
The man sauntered forward into patch of yellow light.  
In his mid twenties he was handsome, pomaded, self 
controlled.
smell of cheap perfume clung to him, a thin veil over 
an underlying odour of sweat.  He moved like a man who 
did not expect to live to thirty.
Didn't expect to.


Didn't much want to. "You want coke, blanc? Crack?
Maybe you in the wrong place.
Very bad for you here; very dangerous."
"Someone phoned me.
A friend of mine needs help.  A Haitian, Angelina Hammel.
Apartment nineteen."
The man eyed him like a pest control agent surveying a 
roach.
The look made Reuben tense.  He was being sized up.
Reuben had brought cash, all he had taken from his own 
apartment: nearly five hundred dollars.  A man could get 
himself killed for a lot less.
Down here, they killed people for a pair of sneakers or a 
baseball jacket.
"I don't want coke, I don't want crack, and I don't want 
trouble.


I'll be out of here in five minutes.  You won't even smell 
me."
"I smell you already.
You smell like a cop to me."
Reuben had to decide quickly whether to tough it out or try 
to play it soft.  The lookout scared him.
Not because he was tough, but because he was not.
Men like him were straw: they would burn in a very little 
flame.  But like straw everywhere, they liked to hurt 
sometimes, just to show that, given the chance, they too 
could be flint.
"That's none of your business.
This is private.  I said I'm not looking for trouble.  But 
if you give me any it won't be private any longer."
Time to make his move.  Reuben started for the stairs, 
intending to brush past the lookout.  As he did so there 
was a flash and the man was holding a long knife inches 
away from Reuben's face.
Upstairs someone coughed, a long, racking cough that 
spluttered out into breathlessness.  A door slammed.


Music came, rapping to steady beat.
Down in the hallway, everything was quiet.
Reuben could hear himself breathing, a primitive, 
alien sound. The man held the knife close to 
Reuben's throat.  The long blade shimmered heraldic 
all y, smooth, well-oiled, razor sharp


Reuben took a step back, his eye tight on the blade.  The 
man moved forward, keeping the knife in place.  He was 
poised, easy, entranced by the shining of his own blade.
He had done this before.
Abruptly, Reuben sidestepped and spun, rolling out of the 
blade's reach.  The man slashed thin air, twisted and 
slashed again, catching Reuben's shoulder.
Reuben moved in, trying to get close.  The younger man 
turned and lunged: a fencer's movement, but without a 
fencer's grace or a fencer's strength.
Reuben sidestepped easily and brought his hand down sharply 
on the thin forearm.
Bone snapped with an audible crack.  Numb fingers dropped 
the un blooded knife to the floor.
The man bent double, whimpering.
"Next time," said
Reuben, 'pick on someone your own size."
CHAPTER THIRTY
FOUR
Apartment nineteen had long ago ceased to be an apartment 
in any meaningful sense of the term.
Its battered and scorched front door had been strengthened 
so many times with steel plates, mortice locks and bolts 
that it resembled more than anything the gate of medieval 
fortress.
On either side of the door, a ghetto artist had employed 
considerable skill to paint two garish figures, like 
Chinese deities guarding the entrance to a Buddhist temple.  
The name of each figure had been printed in crude red 
letters underneath.
On the left stood "Baron H', a skeletal god of heroin, with 
a pale soapy skin and tiny pupils set in dreaming eyes.  
From a scrawny neck hung a necklace of spent syringes, and 
from his open mouth and nostrils wreathes of drug-heavy 
smoke coiled towards the ceiling.
His counterpart was "L'lmperatr ice C, a tall woman dressed 
in a white muslin dress under a man's black frock coat
She wore a shiny top hat like the vodoun god, Baron Samedi, 
her nostrils were red and dilated, and blood dripped from 
her long fingernails .
Her face had been daubed a chalky white.  In one hand she 
held a bottle of rum, in the other a gravedigger 's long 
handled shovel.


Heroin and Cocaine, the guardian deities of the new 
Hades.
Reuben banged on the door and went on banging until 
someone came. "All right, all right!  I coming!"
came a testy voice.
An eye appeared behind the small glass peephole, then 
vanished. Heavy bolts clanked noisily back.  The door 
opened about six inches, taut against heavy chains.


Reuben could see no-one.  A bitter smell of heroin smoke 
wafted through the narrow opening.
"Out?  What you want?"
"I've come for
Angelina
Hammel."
There was a pause, then the door closed.  A rattling sound 
as the chains were drawn through hasps, a muttered oath, 
and the door re-opened.
The space behind was thick with shadows, the air tight, 
almost unbreathable.  Dotted among the shadows, small 
purple lights danced gently at floor level.  The apartment 
resembled a field hospital in
France around 1916.  Large holes had been smashed through 
all the walls, as though heavy artillery had bombarded 
them.  One room led into the next.  And over everything a 
pall of grey smoke hung like mist over trenches of the dead 
and dying.  On low beds, on ancient sofas, on the bare 
floor, the damned were scattered carelessly about, as 
though in slumber.  Some moved in their stupor, some lay 
still, while all about them coils of soporific smoke 
tumbled in a slow and measured dance.
Here, in the inner sanctum of its faith, the dragon moved 
as incense, warm and rich and comforting.
Reuben coughed.
Beside him stood an old black woman, bent and gnarled as a 
withered tree.  She pushed home the bolts in the door and 
shuffled her hunched frame round to look at him.  Her teeth 
were gone, her eyes half blind with cataracts, her hair a 
few tufts on a naked skull.
"Angelina?  You want see
Angelina?"
Reuben nodded.  Her voice was stretched and hoarse, yet 
somehow beautiful, as though it was all that remained of a 
once aching
loveliness.
The crone murmured something unintelligible, then turned 
and walked away, beckoning.
Reuben followed.
On his left, one thin man bent over another, injecting him 
carefully in the back of his leg, the needle seeking a vein 
not yet collapsed.
Further on, large-eyed woman sat on her haunches, her hand 
idly stroking the neck and shoulders of a man lying rigid 
on a sheet of dirty foam rubber.
A bleak compassion ran softly through the smoke and chilly 
air.
Love was not wholly absent in hell.  Not wholly absent, not 
wholly present.  No god offered salvation on the strength 
of it.  A shot of heroin was a shot of heroin, however 
lovingly administered.
Angelina was lying on her back, legs bent high against her 
chest, eyes open, staring without animation at a web of 
shadows high up on the ceiling.  Her face was relaxed and 
blank, as though a thin and subtle blade had separated it 
from pain and memory.  No blood, no mess, no stitches: a 
very perfect surgery.  But the wound would heal and the 
skin would close and the pain would return, fiercer than 
before.
"What happened?"
The little woman stared uncomprehendingly at him.  He bent 
down.
Angelina's breathing was shallow but regular.  On the floor 
near her lay an empty syringe.
Her sleeve had been rolled up.
Someone had introduced her to the joys of mainlining.
Or had she already played that game a little?  He wondered 
who had telephoned him.
It had not been the old woman.
Something was wrong, but he could not even guess what it 
was.
From the apartment upstairs a dull sound drew his 
attention.
Not loud, not wholly soft, as elegant and jagged as ice 
floating on swollen rivers to the sea in spring, a drum was 
beating, its rhythms hard and clear on the drugged air.  
Above their heads, the gods were gathering.
Not the gods of this place, but the old gods, strong, 
persistent, angry against the accumulatin g darkness of a 
new world and a new age.
The brittle tapping of the tiny kata drum was joined by the 
slower throb of the se gond pulsed and rhythmical, calling 
the gods to dance. In the steady, naked air the low 
throbbing hung over them, heavy and drifting as snow.
Angelina stirred, as though something deep within her had 
been awakened by the drumbeats.
Her lips trembled, opening a fraction, breath coming in 
fragments.
"Africa .  " she whispered.



He bent down to hear her.
Her voice had a thinness he had only heard before in the 
dying.
"Africa is coming .  " she said.  And he looked round 
and felt it in the air, dense, tangible, creeping 
through centuries and across seas into the broken 
harbour of the drug saturated room.
Her lips grew quiet, her eyes flickered and grew still.
Reuben straightened.
"I want to move her," he said.


"Can you help me carry her down? I have a car outside."
The old woman broke into a grin. "We take her together," 
she said. "We go ride in car together." 
Together they managed to get Angelina through the door and 
onto the landing.
Taking her down the stairs would be more difficult.
Reuben slipped her arm round his neck while the old woman 
kept her legs clear of the floor.
Step by jarring step, flight by flight they eased her down 
until they came to the last landing.
Reuben looked down.
Two men were waiting for him at the foot of the stairs.
He turned to the old woman, obscurely hoping she had the 
power to help. But she was already gone, ha ring back up 
the stairs with what little breath remained in her.  He 
turned back and looked down again.
They were still waiting.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
Somehow he didn't think these were friends of the gigolo 
whose arm he had broken, come to repay him in kind.
They weren't dressed like anybody's friends.  He could tell 
by their eyes that they meant business and that they were 
unaccustomed to making mistakes.  Now he understood what 
had felt wrong:
the whole thing had been some sort of set up.
He helped Angelina down the last flight.  She whimpered 
once, speaking broken words in a language utterly strange 
to him.  He told her all was well, that they would be home 
soon.  But they had no home to go to, and all was not well.
They waited while he laid his burden down.  One was white, 
one black. They were impassive, one on either side of the 
door, like gods guarding
the route out of the Underworld.
Reuben felt his .38 against his ribs, a dismal, aching 
weight.
The white man wore a cashmere overcoat, dark burgundy, 
unbuttoned.
His hair was swept back and lightly oiled.  On his feet he 
wore expensive brogues, English shoes with a high shine.  
He was smoking a long cigarette between tight, unsmiling 
lips.  As Reuben came nearer, he took it firmly between the 
index finger and thumb of his right hand, removed it from 
his mouth, and let it fall.
A line of smoke fanned through his lips and lay for a 
moment like a thin veil over his long smooth face.
He crushed the cigarette beneath his foot with a small, 
circular motion.
Reuben could smell the corrupted stench of raw urine.
It filled his nostrils with an acidic, lonely odour, the 
underlying perfume of the ghetto.
"You're a long way from home, cop."  The white man spoke, 
tense, irritated words.  The accent was Florida, the manner 
cosmopolitan.  He was a white man who had spent a long time 
with blacks.
In a different place and time, with different friends, he 
might have been a civil rights worker or an anthropologist.  
He would think black and talk black, but his skin would 
always betray him.
"You get lost, maybe?
You come here looking for something soft and white down 
among the nigras?
Looks like you found something soft and black instead."
The lady's sick.  I'm taking her home."
The man shook his head.
"The lady is wanted elsewhere.


And you are not wanted at all."
"In that case, I'd like you to let me past.  But the woman 
comes with me."
The
Floridan turned to his friend.
"What do you think, Augustin?  Is this man talking what 
think he is talking?"
The black man returned his partner's gaze.  He was oiled 
and sleek and wellmuscled, dressed in a white wool suit.
His little shaven head caught beads of reflected light and 
turned them all at once to gold.
"Shit," he said.
"He talking shit."  The accent was Haitian, via Miami.


"That's what I thought."
The white man turned to Reuben.
"You met a friend of Augustin's last night, a man 
called Kominsky. Kominsky is hurt bad.
He has bullet wounds.  He is blinded in one eye."
"His right eye,"


Augustin said.
"He will never see again with that eye," murmured the 
white man.
"He is hurt in body and he is hurt in soul."
"Hurt in soul," repeated Augustin.
"He like you to suffer."
Augustin ran a thin hand over his shining crown, as though 
reassuring himself of its smoothness.
"He ask me to see to it when I leave the hospital.  So you 
got to suffer."
Augustin slipped a hand into his inside pocket and 
withdrew it holding an ivory handled flick knife.
He pressed a button and thin blade glistened in the pale 
light.
Reuben moved his hand towards his jacket.
As he did so, he heard in quick succession two cold, 
deliberate clicks as more knives were opened.
Out of the shadows at the rear of the ground floor 
hallway, two dark figures emerged.  The street door opened 
and a fifth man entered.
The latest arrival turned and secured a thick chain across 
the door. The way out was barred.
Reuben felt beads of sweat sting his forehead.
He drew his


revolver.
Nervously, he watched them circle round, five moths caught 
in the trammels of his light, uncertain where to commit 
their wings.
Their silence unnerved him.  He imagined that they sang to 
one another in the empty reaches of the night, when the 
city grew silent, like deep plunged whales booming in the 
darkness of Nantucket Sound, violent lullabies to ease them 
quietly to sleep in the dark, unpainted nursery of the 
ghetto.
Their eyes were huge and hungry, beyond pity or appeal.
Reuben drew back the hammer of his gun and drew a bead on 
the white man, whom he took to be the group's leader.  As 
he did so, he felt a sudden edge of cold steel against his 
throat.  A voice whispered in his ear.
Throw down the gun."
Up until that moment, everything had seemed to move in slow 
motion.
In less than a second, it all speeded up again, so fast it 
went out of control.
The man with his knife at Reuben's throat had come inches 
too close.
Reuben leaned into the blade, letting his assailant tilt a 
fraction further to the right, tipping him just to the edge 
of imbalance.
Unconsciously the man brought his right foot forward three 
inches to compensate.
Reuben let his arm go limp and held the gun down, as though 
about to drop it as ordered.
Instead he fired into the man's instep.
The crack of the gun was followed instantly by a scream of 
pain and the clatter of a knife hitting the floor.
Reuben slammed back and sideways, throwing his would be 
assassin to the ground.
He got off another shot, winging one of the two men who had 
emerged from the hallway.
The figures in front of him scattered, fanning out.
The white man drew an automatic pistol, aimed quickly and 
profession ally, and fired twice, narrowly missing Reuben's 
shoulder.
There was a sudden splintering of glass followed by a much 
louder sound, like a controlled explosion.
The street door lifted off its hinges and crashed 
backwards, careering into the wall, gouging out chunks of 
raw plaster before tilting back on the chain and swinging 
half into the street.
Through the gaping hole where the door had been, three men 
entered the hallway.  Two were dressed in what looked like 
the uniform of a SWAT team, black Kevlar vests and peaked 
caps.
They carried suppressed MP5 sub machine guns without 
stocks.  The third was the man who called himself Smith.  
He was dressed in a light blue suit and carried no weapon 
of any description In the street outside, a blue light 
flashed, jewelling the night.
Three of the men with knives turned and broke away.
They did not go far.  From the rear of the passage, two 
more figures with submachine guns made an appearance.
There was an abrupt, nervous silence, broken moments later 
by the clatter of steel blades hitting the ground.
Smith walked up to the white man who had been the leader of 
the
group.
He raised a hand and struck him hard across the cheek.
The man staggered but stood his ground.
Smith was the first to speak.

This was unauthorized," he said.  The other man hung his 
head.
"However great the provocation , nothing is done without 
authorization You know the penalty."
"He blinded Kominsky.  He shot him and put out his eye.
Kominsky wanted him dealt with."
"An eye for an eye?
Is that it?
Kominsky makes a mess of things, so you have to go one 
better?  This is an operation, do you understand?
Not a game, not a picnic, not some personal vendetta."
Smith turned to one of the


SWAT team if SWAT team it was. "Take them outside," he 
said. "Drive them back to headquarter s. I'll deal with 
them later."
Soon he was left alone with Reuben and Angelina.  He held 
out a hand to Reuben.
"Your gun.
Lieutenant , please."
"I don't think you have the right to ask me for it."
Smith looked impatient.
"You are not a policeman any longer, Lieutenant.
You are a murder suspect.
Things have worked out better than I might have hoped when 
I last spoke with you.  You can either hand me the gun or 
try to shoot your way


out.
Now ..."
He paused and stretched his hand nearer to Reuben.
"The gun, please."
Reuben hesitated a moment longer, then handed the 
gun to Smith. Thank you.
Lieutenant.
That was a wise decision.
Come with me."


CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
They call Brooklyn 'the borough of churches and 
cemeteries'.  You pray, you die, you go to heaven.  Heaven 
isn't Brooklyn, of course.
Heaven isn't any place people actually live.  Church is the 
nearest some people get, which isn't saying much.
Strictly speaking, the place to which Reuben had been 
brought was not a church any longer.  It was just a 
derelict shell waiting for the bulldozers to arrive and put 
it out of its misery.  A priest with tired eyes had come 
and taken the relics away from beneath the altar, together 
with the grains of frankincense that had been deposited 
with them, bones and blood and dried flesh.  The altar 
stone was gone, the sanctuary lamp extinguished, the 
murmuring of benedictions hushed. Nothing remained but a 
faint echo of holiness a spire without bells, walls without 
statues, windows without images, broken and boarded and 
sad.
Reuben sat on what had been the altar table, shivering in a 
stiff draught that blew through a door at the back.  The 
only light came from a dozen or so gas-fired lamps that had 
been set up before his arrival. Smith had gone an hour ago, 
leaving him with two heavy types who had been waiting 
outside on Gibson Street.  They resolutely refused to 
answer any of Reuben's questions or to be drawn on where 
Smith had got to.
Reuben had been bundled into another Lincoln, blindfolded 
and driven to the church in silence.  Angelina and he had 
been separated.  He did not know where they had taken her.  
Once, trying to get some sort of explanation from Smith, he 
had been punched hard in the solar plexus and told to keep 
quiet.  He lost all sense of time and direction.  They had 
travelled a long way, but Reuben had a feeling they were 
still in Brooklyn, that the car had gone in circles to its 
destination.
The doors at the front of the church opened and Smith 
entered.
accompanied by two more heavyweights.
With them came a much thinner man whom they were pushing in 
front of them.  The fourth man stumbled and picked himself 
up awkwardly.  He appeared to be handcuffed and in pain.  
As the small group drew
nearer.
Reuben recognized Smith's prisoner as the man who had 
killed Danny, the one he had heard called "Kominsky'.  
Kominsky looked rough.  He wore thick bandages over the 
right side of his face.  He was wearing pyjamas and had 
slippers on his feet.  Someone had taken him straight from 
a hospital bed.  He looked at Reuben uncomprehendingly.  
Still bunched together, the small group came within ten 
feet of the altar and stopped.
Smith detached himself from his companions and came softly 
towards Reuben.  Reuben slid off the stone table.  The 
older man gazed at Reuben detachedly.  There was no feeling 
in his eyes, no more than if he were an entomologist and 
Reuben a moth pinned to a specimen board. Reuben's mother 
would have recognized the look.  She had been through the 
camps, she had seen men and women with that look many 
times.  It still lingered in unsuspected corners of her 
life, even now in old age. Reuben sensed it vividly, as 
though her recognition had been passed in blood to his own 
eyes and heart.  He sensed it and shivered involuntarily as 
Smith came close.
"There used to be angels here," Smith said.  His voice 
sounded far away.
"In the windows, with red and purple wings, like terrible 
butterflies. And just up there, on either side of the 
altar, two plaster angels
leaning over us at Mass, golden, with their hands stretched 
out."
He paused and turned slowly, scanning the desolate walls 
and shadowed ceiling, searching in vain for something no-
one else could see.
"I was a child here once," he said.
"My father used to bring me to this church for Mass, after 
my First Communion.  Once a week and on holy days.  I 
became an altar boy.
They dressed me in white and gave me a censer to carry.  I 
thought I was pure at heart.  We all did.
Pure like Jesus.  Pure like Father Tirali."  He paused, 
looking high up at thick shadows above the transept.
"How quickly we learned the truth."
He looked back at Reuben, his eyes empty.
"What about you?"  he asked.
"Did you have angels?  Little gold angels to watch you lose 
your purity?
Or are you still pure at heart.
Lieutenant?  You come of an angelic breed, do you not?"
"The place my father took me to had no images.  Not even 
angels."
Smith raised his eyebrows.
"No?  How sad.  Angels are very beautiful."
"What have you done with Angelina?"
"How like a Jew to change the subject.  What makes you 
think I have done anything with her?"
"She needs help.  Medical help.  If she goes into a coma, 
she may
die."
Smith took a step closer.  His breath laid a faint cloud on 
the chill air.
"She's safe, Lieutenant, perfectly safe.  The question is, 
are you?"
Reuben looked round, at the church, at the powerfully built 
men in padded suits, at the thin man trying not to show his 
fear.
"I think it's time you gave me an explanation, Smith.  
You've no authority to hold me here.  You don't even have a 
charge."
"No?  I think the charge is very clear.  You are suspected 
of murdering your former partner, Danny Cohen.  There is a 
warrant out for your arrest.  You were picked up tonight in 
an apartment house known to be used by dope peddlers.  You 
were in the company of a coke user and several known 
dealers.  And you were in possession of a briefcase 
containing ten pounds of one-hundred percent pure Colombian 
peri ca
Wholesale value around two hundred thousand dollars.  A lot 
more if it ever hit the streets."
Smith folded his arms across his chest.  He looked long at 
Reuben, as though measuring him for his next words.

"You're a dangerous man, Lieutenant," he said.
"You know too much.  And too little.  My superiors want to 
silence you. There are different ways of achieving that, of 
course.  Simple ways. And more complicated, such as the one 
I have chosen.  The reason for my taking the difficult 
option is that I need to present you with a choice of your 
own.  My superiors want more than just a promise that you 
will keep your nose out of their affairs.  They want all 
the information you have succeeded in gathering, they want 
any files Mrs.  Hammel brought to you from her apartment, 
they want a certain notebook, and they want whatever it was 
you took from the underground chamber yesterday."
"What would I get for giving you all that?"
Smith shrugged.
"To walk out of here without a stain on your character.


Tomorrow morning you may go to your precinct house as 
usual.
No-one will arrest you.  No-one will even know about this 
evening's little incident.  On the contrary, you will find 
a letter on your desk from the police commissioner 
notifying you of a significant promotion."
"And if I tell you to go to hell?"
"You go there with me.  You will be found guilty of Danny
Cohen's murder.  It will be proved that he uncovered your 
involvement with narcotics peddling.
You will be sentenced.  There will be no need to use those 
photographs I showed you.  Perhaps I can use them for 
someone else.  Mrs.
Hammel possibly."
"I know who killed Danny.  With half a chance I can prove 
it.  I only have to open my mouth in court."
"Yes," said Smith.
"Perhaps you can."
He half-turned his head and snapped his fingers 
peremptorily.  The men behind him stepped forward, pulling 
Kominsky forward.
"You are, I think, destined to be Mr.
Kominsky's nemesis," said
Smith.
"You have already wounded him very badly.  And you have 
cost him the sight of one eye.  And here he is, and here 
are you."
Smith gestured to one of the heavies.
The man pushed
Kominsky to his knees.  The wounded man looked frightened.  
Not angry, not vengeful, just frightened.
He shivered uncontrollably.


Smith had not taken his eyes off
Reuben.  He held out his hand and the man on his right 
handed him a pistol, a Browning 9mm
Hi-Power autoloader.  Smith took it with the nonchalance of 
a man who had held one often enough not to think about it 
any longer.
He held the gun out to Reuben.
"It is loaded," he said.
"I make you
Kominsky's executioner.  He would have had his friends kill 
you tonight.  Your life for his eye.
Last night he killed a friend of yours in mistake for you.  
Your friend's life for yours.  Now you can make amends.  
Kominsky's life for your friend's."
Reuben took the gun.  Smith's bodyguards had levelled their 
own weapons on him.  He knew he would not have a chance to 
point the pistol at anyone but
Kominsky.  Kominsky looked at him, his single eye eloquent 
with
terror.
Reuben lifted the gun.  It felt heavier than any gun he had 
ever raised before.  He thought of
Danny lying on the floor with his throat sliced open.  Of 
Angelina strapped to the chair next to him.  He held the 
gun to Kominsky's head. If he shut his eyes it would be 
just like target practice.  Fire, reload; fire, reload.  He 
shut his eyes.  An eye for an eye, a life for a life.
"I'll kill him.  Mother," he had said.  His finger pressed 
against the trigger.
He opened his eyes and dropped the gun.  Smith was watching 
him, unperturbed.
"I take it that you decline my offer, Lieutenant."
Reuben said nothing.  His hand was shaking.
Smith picked up the gun.  With unaffected casualness, he 
pressed the barrel against the nape of Kominsky's neck.  
Kominsky was shaking like a leaf.
Reuben looked into Smith's eyes.
"Last night," said Smith to Reuben, 'and tonight again 
perhaps, you may have thought that the difference between 
yourself and Mr.  Kominsky was that between love and hate.  
Or love and indifference.  Perhaps that is so.  But since 
then things have become simpler.  You still have a chance 
between life and death.  You made that choice just now.  
But Kominsky made his choice last night when he failed in 
his mission."
Smith pulled the trigger and blew a hole the size of a fist 
through the back of Kominsky's head.  A violent shudder 
went through the ravaged body, blood threw itself in pulses 
through the de sanctified air. Reuben shut his eyes.  
Kominsky's body slumped lifelessly to the ground.  The 
sound of the explosion echoed again and again through the 
abandoned church.

Smith handed the gun back to his associate.
"You have until tomorrow morning.
Lieutenant Abrams.  Five a.m. I will see you then."
He turned and started to walk away.
Reuben opened his eyes and watched him go.  In mid-stride 
Smith paused and turned his head.
"I'm very sorry.  Lieutenant.  I forgot to mention how very 
well your mother looks.  What age is she now?  Seventy?  
She looks very well. I'm sure she and your father will both 
live to a ripe old age.  Don't you think so?"
And he turned and walked away and there was no sound, no 
sound at all, and on the floor where priests and acolytes 
had walked, blood flowed like a bitter memory of wine.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Reuben looked at his watch.  Two fifteen, less than three 
hours before Smith was due to return.  They had put him in 
a small room that had once been the sacristy and was now 
filled with rubble and a smell of damp.  In one corner, a 
broken plaster statue raised its hand in a pointless 
gesture of benediction.  He had a chair, a light and plenty 
of time in which to think.
The single door was locked from the outside, the window 
with its clumsy board of plywood lay out of reach, even 
when he stood on the chair.
Smith held almost all the cards.  To be precise, he had 
Angelina and Reuben's parents, not to mention a stiffening 
corpse lying un shriven in a side chapel next door.
The corpse may not have been much of an asset, but it said 
Smith could be every bit as ruthless as he seemed.  Reuben, 
on the other hand, had a notebook, a gold half-circle, and 
a story about a boat that had once sailed from Africa.  The 
problem was knowing just how important all that was to 
Smith and why.  Reuben could try stalling, but there was 
every chance that to do so would cost his mother, his 
father and Angelina their lives.
The simple solution seemed to be to tell Smith all he knew, 
tell him where the semicircle and the notebook had been 
hidden, and turn up in the morning to collect his letter 
from the commissioner.
Unfortunately, nothing Reuben had seen of Smith made him 
think he could trust him.  He could tell Smith eveiything 
and Smith might still kill them all.  Smith was not an 
independent agent.  He was answerable to men more powerful 
than himself.  What he had done to Kominsky, they, no 
doubt, would do as readily to him.
Angelina and Reuben knew too much to be left in 
circulation.
At two-thirty, one of the heavies made his rounds.  A 
different one looked in every half-hour, checked that 
everything was normal, and locked the door again.
Each one in turn refused to be drawn into conversation, 
even to the extent of answering the simplest of questions.
He was hungry and cold and desperately in need of sleep, 
but there was no food and no heat, and true sleep would not 
come.

Once or twice he dozed in the chair only to waken with an 
aching neck and the barbed hooks of nightmare still 
embedded in his brain.  His wounded foot and back hurt 
badly.  And he knew there was no way out.
At four o'clock he asked for a cup of coffee or tea 
anything that might warm him and keep him alert.  The guard 
merely shrugged and left. Nothing came.  Outside, a siren 
wailed in the distance, grinding the stillness into little 
bits.  They were in the city all right.
But where?
He didn't notice the scraping noise at first.  It came from 
high up, at the window.  He turned and glanced up.  At 
first he noticed nothing. The lamp shed a very limited 
light, and most of the board covering the window was hidden 
in shadows.  Then, just as he was about to turn away, his 
eye caught a movement at the bottom corner of the window, 
on the left-hand side.  The nails were being pushed back 
out of the window frame
There was no glass, and Reuben felt the tiniest shiver as a 
faint draught edged through the tiny opening.  There was a 
rattling sound and he caught sight of something dropping 
from the bottom of the window onto the floor.  The board 
fell back into position.  He heard a sound outside, as 
though someone had jumped lightly to the ground.  Then 
silence, heavier than ever.
The door opened and the previous guard entered.  He was 
carrying an MP5K, the stockless miniature version of the 
standard MP5.  It was a fraction over one foot long, less 
than half the length of an MP5 A2, and weighed only 4.4 
pounds.  But the bullets it fired went just as fast and did 
just as much damage.
"I thought I heard something.  What are you up to?"
Reuben's brain raced.  He glanced down at the floor in 
front of him. Near his right foot was a piece of broken 
stone, part of the building waste with which the room was 
filled.  He drew his foot back and kicked it hard.  It 
landed in a pile of rubble with a muted rattling sound.
"Just kicking about.  If you brought me some coffee I'd 
have something better to do."
The guard glanced round the room.  For a moment Reuben 
thought he would notice the small gap in the window-board, 
but it was too well shadowed from where he stood.  He 
shrugged and went out again.  Reuben heard the key turn 
dutifully in the lock.
He got up and walked softly over to the spot just below the 
window where the object must have fallen.  It was obvious 
enough if you were looking for it: a small metal tube about 
three inches long, taped at one end.  He picked it up and 
peeled away the tape.
A loose roll of bond paper dropped into his open hand.  
There was a typed message on one side, produced on a manual 
machine with dropped 'e's:
Reuben Remember the chimp with the funny walk at the
Bronx Zoo?  The one we saw the day after we first met?  OK, 
that's just so you know this note is genuine.  Hide the 
tube and destroy this paper as soon as you've finished 
reading it.  The man you call Smith is holding your parents 
hostage at their apartment.  Mrs.  Hammel has been taken to 
a private hospital, where she'll be safe for the next 
twenty-four hours.  Concentrate on your parents and 
yourself.
Agree to Smith's demands, but insist on seeing your parents 
before handing anything over.  Once you've been taken to 
their apartment, tell him the things he wants are kept in a 
concealed safe in your own place. Insist again that your 
parents accompany you there.  A loaded gun has been placed 
in the second drawer down on the right-hand side of your 
desk.  The rest is up to you.  If you succeed in getting 
out, ring the number I gave you.  It will be manned 
permanently for the next seventy-two hours.  I can arrange 
safe custody for your parents and help you find Mrs.  
Hammel.
In return I need your cooperation.  Please take care.  
Sally.
Reuben held his breath.  The room seemed to shift, as 
though its moorings had come adrift.  He closed his eyes, 
fighting a sensation of dizziness and nausea.  When he 
opened them again, the sacristy was unchanged.  The dust 
and rubble lay all around as before.  The statue gazed 
dispassionately at him, sinless and without pain.
There was a sound of feet outside.
Quickly, he shredded the message, slipped it back into the 
tube and pushed the whole thing through a hole in the back 
of the statue's
head.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Smith was precise in his timing.  They brought Reuben out 
to him at one minute past five.  A fine tracery of dawn 
light was creeping nervously through a broken window high 
above the nave.  The body of the church was raw and 
stained.  The morning was empty of purpose.  There seemed 
no possibility of warmth or comfort anywhere.
Reuben put his conditions quietly and without apparent 
emotion, hoping his nervousness did not show.  Smith was 
fragrant and detached, almost withdrawn; he had slept well, 
bathed and perfumed himself before leaving for the church.  
To the casual eye he looked like an accountant or a 
computer salesman setting out to work, pale-eyed and 
tightly buttoned and ready to earn another day's worth of 
pension.  Like an accountant or a salesman, he seemed bored 
by the proceedings, as though last night's brief violence 
had emptied him of rage and hope together. At his feet, a 
pool of antique red quivered across the dust as the 
unsteady light found a surviving pane of vivid scarlet 
glass.
He agreed readily to Reuben's conditions, as though they 
had in some measure been expected.  Reuben sensed that 
Smith possessed that curious instinct of the successful 
criminal, an intuitive ability to distinguish between 
violence for an end and violence without purpose. Being 
tough is no good if you do not know when to bend.  A 
moment's hesitation, then he shrugged his shoulders and 
nodded.
Abruptly he indicated to his men that it was time to leave.  
They extinguished the lamps, performing in their fashion a 
second ritual of de consecration  Kominsky's bloodied body 
they left on the altar steps, an offering of sorts.  A 
trace of Smith's expensive perfume lingered in the unheated 
air, completing the sacrament with incense.
Everything went as planned.  Reuben's parents were tired 
and frightened, but unharmed.  They had long ago learned to 
master their fears, trained by a stiffer lash than any 
Smith could wield.  His mother wore a copper-coloured 
woollen dress and a pepper shawl.
Her hair was pinned back as always in a tight bun.  No 
make-up, no jewels.  Just an old woman who had looked death 
in the face too often for it to matter one time more.
She smiled nervously at Reuben, then looked away.  Reuben 
saw her as if
for the first time.
His father sat beside her, holding her hand, saying 
nothing.
Reuben had forgotten how fragile the old man had grown, how 
tightly his mottled skin was stretched over wasted muscle 
and brittle bone.
"They come with me," Reuben said, daring to press his 
demands now they had come this far.
"I hand the papers over to you, you and your people leave.  
That's it. Two old people: it's nothing to you."
Smith shook his head this time.
They're alive.  You've seen them.  What more do you want?"
"I want them to stay alive.  You can have what you want, 
all of it.
But I must have them.  Your exhibition last night did 
nothing to make me trust you."
"It was not intended to.  The very opposite.  But if it 
keeps you happy and saves time, I see no reason to be 
difficult.  Where are the papers?"
Reuben hesitated just long enough to make it seem real.
"At my apartment."
"You're lying.  My people have been through that place with 
tweezers. There's nothing there."
"I didn't leave them in a drawer for you or anyone else to 
find.
They're there, believe me.  What the hell would I have to 
gain by lying?"
Smith pressed his lips together.
"I don't know.  But you've got plenty to lose.  If I don't 
have those papers in my hand in the next half hour, I will 
personally cut your mother's throat over your kitchen 
sink."
That was when Reuben decided to kill him.
The apartment was cordoned off just as Angelina's had been.  
Using his own key, Reuben let everyone in his parents, 
Smith and two of Smith's subordinates.  The others had gone 
off duty.  It had been a hard
night.
Up to this point, Reuben had given almost no thought to 
what t-"M might happen once he found the gun.  The first 
problem was his parents: he did not want them anywhere 
within the line of fire, assuming that there was going to 
be some shooting.  The second was how to take care of three 
trained combatants in the confines of a small apartment 
with just one gun and no back-up.  The gun if it was there 
at all would give him an edge for about three seconds.
And after that?
He turned to Smith.
"My parents should be lying down.
You've kept them awake all night.  Look at my mother.  
She's tired and
she's frightened.  My father too.  They can wait in my 
bedroom while we get this thing sorted out."
Smith glanced at the elderly couple.


Take his mother into the bedroom.
Keep an eye on her.  The father can stay with us."
Reuben did not try to argue.  At all costs he had to 
prevent Smith suspecting anything.  One of the bodyguards 
took his mother into the bedroom.  At least both problems 
were now somewhat reduced.
The study was neither light nor dark, but suspended in a 
sort of twilight.  Someone had closed the blind Reuben 
normally kept it open allowing only a pale, insignificant 
light to filter through.
Smith entered first and switched on the overhead light.  
More than tweezers had been used on the room.
There was little actual mess good searchers are 
systematic, not clumsy but it was evident that not an inch 
had been spared the attention of expert hands and eyes.
Even the wallpaper had been peeled away in places.
Reuben crossed to where Smith was standing.  His father 
followed, then the man guarding him.
The old man closed the door and stood leaning against the 
jamb.  He seemed near to collapse.  His face was grey and 
sickly.  Reuben looked at him, but there was no expression 
in the old eyes.
The papers are in a floor safe," said Reuben, improvising 
at every step.  He wanted to kiss his father, tell him he 
loved him.  Frailty kept them apart.  It had always done 
so.  First, the frailty of childhood, then that of youth, 
and now the final frailty of age.


"I
keep the key in my desk."
Smith glanced round at his companion.
"Parker?"
"It's OK, sir," the man said.
"We did a good job on this room.  The desk is clean."  He 
meant there was no gun in any of the drawers.
Reuben hoped he was wrong.
"Did you find a key?"
Parker shrugged.  He had broad shoulders.  When he shrugged 
a lot of muscles rippled beneath his tweed jacket.  On his 
left shoulder, under the jacket, he carried a pistol in a 
holster.  He still held his Uzi in his right hand, casual 
but not off guard.
"No way of knowing, sir.  Curtis did the desk.  He's good 
on desks. Does a thorough job."
"He won't have found it," Reuben interrupted.
"I keep it taped in the back of a drawer.  Out of easy 
reach."
"Curtis is good," Parker repeated.  It was heartwarming to 
hear the team spirit at work.
"I'll check it, for God's sake."
Reuben made for the desk, trying to retain some sort of 
initiative. The last thing he wanted was for Smith or his 
gunman to put his hand into the drawer in search of a 
nonexistent key and bring it out holding a pistol.  If 
there was a pistol.
Reuben reached the desk.  Smith was watching him closely.
What if the message had been some sort of hoax?  What if 
Curtis had been in here after the gun was deposited, what 
if the desk really was clean?  Better not think.  Try to 
look cool.  Reuben opened the second drawer down as 
instructed and slipped his hand inside.
It lay there waiting, hard and sleek and as cold as Smith's 
heart.
He knew it at once: a Heckler and Koch P7.  He had used one 
before for target practice.  The heavy butt with the 
squeeze cocker in front identified it at once.  Someone had 
used forethought: with a four inch barrel, the gun was easy 
to conceal and manoeuvre.  The butt felt unusually thick.  
Reuben guessed it was loaded with the thirteen-round 
magazine rather than the standard eight.  He fumbled, 
getting his fingers round the awkward butt.  In a rage, his 
heart hammered deep inside his chest.
He felt sick.
"Something wrong, Lieutenant?"  Smith took a step forward.
The key's gone.  Your thugs have made a pig's breakfast of 
this
place."
Smith edged closer.  Reuben kept on making fumbling 
gestures.
He felt remote.  His hand moved in a dream.
"Let me look."
Reuben glanced up.  His father was still by the door.  
Parker stood near him, too close for safety.
Smith was by his side now.  Like a man on the edge of a 
hurtling precipice, Reuben cast everything away and jumped 
into the void, swinging the gun up and round in a single 
action, grabbing Smith by the neck with his free hand, 
ramming the gun hard against his temple, ruffling his 
neatly combed hair.
He felt Smith stiffen, not in fear but readiness.
"Tell Parker to put his gun down.  He has about two 
seconds."
Reuben tried to keep his voice calm.
But inside a storm had taken hold of him.
Parker hesitated.  Smith nodded.  The big man dropped the 
Uzi.
At the same instant, he reached out for Reuben's father, 
pulling him in front of himself as a shield.  A moment 
later, he drew his pistol and held it to the old man's 
head.  Stalemate.
Reuben hit Smith hard on the side of the head, knocking him 
to the floor.  Smith groaned and tried to get to his knees, 
but failed to make it.  Reuben threw himself behind the 
desk.
Whatever he may have become since, Parker had been trained 
in hostage rescue, not terrorism.  He dumped his shield and 
went into a low crouch, shooting through the desk at the 
spot he thought Reuben had reached, his pistol pumping out 
a series of heavy-duty Glaser bullets that ripped the 
veneer and wood chip to shreds.
Reuben just made it behind a metal filing cabinet.  
Parker's next three rounds ricocheted blindly off steel.  
Reuben stood and got off two rounds.  They took Parker full 
in the belly, ripping the stomach wall apart and throwing 
him back against the wall.  Whoever had loaded the gun must 
have used high velocity ammunition.
A heavy foot kicked the door open, throwing Reuben's father 
sideways to the floor.  A moment later, the second guard 
rolled into the room, ducking, twisting, and rising 
smoothly into a crouch.  His Uzi lifted, seeking a target.  
Reuben shot him in the face at close range.  The silence 
that followed was very pure.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
"Papa, are you all right?"  Reuben bent down and lifted his 
father to a sitting position.  The old man was shaken, but 
seemingly unhurt.
"Yes," he wheezed.
"I'm all right.
See to your mother, Reuben.
See she's not hurt."
Reuben helped the old man to a chair.
Hurriedly, he picked up the fallen guns.  Parker and his 
partner were no further threat.
Smith was out cold.  Carrying the gun, Reuben dashed to the 
bedroom. His mother was crouching on the bed, her back 
against the wall, praying in a quiet voice.
She looked up in fear that turned to relief when she 
recognized her son.
"I he aid gunshots, Reuben.  Is your father safe?"
Reuben nodded.
"He's fine."
"I want to see him."
"He's sitting down in my study.  I don't want to take you 
in there.
Two men are dead."
"I've seen people dead before this, Reuben.  Two more won't 
hurt me." "Wait.  I'll bring Papa to you."
Reuben dropped most of the guns, retaining only the P7 for 
his own
use.
He returned to the study.
His father was sitting where Reuben had left him.  Smith 
was on his feet.  In one hand he held a pocket radio 
transceiver.  In the other he grasped a steel knife with a 
bevelled point and a razor edge.  On the floor lay strips 
of tape that must have been used to secure the knife to his 
calf.  He held it with the blade pressed deep inside 
Reuben's father's mouth.  The old man was spluttering, 
scarcely able to
breathe.
Smith neither paused nor turned as Reuben appeared in the 
doorway.
"Abrams has just come back," he said softly, speaking into 
the handset. I'll deal with him first.
Get here as quickly as you can.
And tell unit six to hurry."
Releasing the switch.  Smith returned the handset to his 
pocket.
He kept his eyes on Reuben's father.
"Toss the gun gently in my direction, Abrams," he said.
"Very gently."  His voice was calm and controlled.  He did 
not seem to be under any pressure.
"I'll kill you anyway, Smith.  Let him go."
Reuben saw the imperceptible movement of Smith's hand as he 
pressed the tip of the knife into the soft area behind his 
father's palate.  Drops of bright blood mingled with saliva 
appeared on the old man's lips.  He was gagging for breath.  
His thin hands gripped the edges of the chair like twigs.
Reuben capitulated and tossed the gun towards Smith.  It 
landed by his feet.
As the gun hit the floor, Smith pressed forward and up 
simultaneously. The knife was made of high-carbon steel.  
It could pierce a steel drum without bending or snapping.  
The old man's head was paper to it.  The thrust lifted 
Reuben's father from the floor.  Smith held him like a fish 
on a gaff, while blood exploded from his open mouth.  The 
old man lurched, twisted and went limp.
A length of steel protruded from the top of his skull.
Reuben cried out and ran towards Smith.  Smith's hand was 
drenched with blood.  He let go of the knife, dropping the 
dead man with it and, stooping, snatched the gun from the 
floor.
Reuben was only feet away.  He saw the barrel hesitate, 
then rise.
All reason gone, he flung himself backwards, crashing 
heavily against the door jamb.  Smith fired twice, hot 
bullets hacking plaster from the wall mere inches from 
Reuben's head.
Numb, Reuben rolled through the door, twisting as he 
tumbled, staggering to his feet.  A bullet whistled through 
the doorway half a second after him.  He found his balance 
and turned to see his mother outside the bedroom.  Their 
eyes met.
Reuben grabbed her and pulled her towards the front door.
Behind him, he heard feet at the study door.  There was an 
occasional
table beside the front door, bearing a glass vase.  Reuben 
picked up the vase, turned and hurled it full at Smith as 
he came through the door.  It caught him hard in the chest, 
knocking him off balance and winding him.
"Run, Mother!  Run!"
Half-carrying, half-dragging, Reuben pulled his mother 
along the passage to the head of the stairs.
They were halfway down the first flight when he heard Smith 
crash through the apartment door.  His mother was light, 
but she had begun to panic, and Reuben found it hard to 
manhandle her down the stairs. "Avrumel!"  she shouted.
"Avrumel!"
His father's name.  She had heard the shooting and seen the 
blood. "Avrumel!"  she went on shouting, in a frenzy now, 
fear and grief mingling.  There were tears on Reuben's face 
as he dragged her away, bright tears turning his father's 
blood to water.
Smith was hard behind them.  His feet sounded heavy on the 
stairs, pounding like hammers.  They reached the street 
door.
Smith was perhaps a flight behind.
Reuben pushed his mother through the door.
"Run!"  he shouted.
"Keep running!"
Smith appeared at the top of the stairs.  He got off two 
quick shots, barely an inch too high.  Reuben followed his 
mother through the door. He caught her at the kerb.  There 
was nowhere left to run.
Passers-by looked round as they heard the shooting and the 
sound of running feet.  From near at hand a siren wailed, 
coming rapidly closer: someone had called the cops.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a black sedan came skidding 
towards them.  A man wearing a balaclava was leaning out of 
the passenger window, aiming a pistol in their direction.  
Reuben threw his mother to the ground, covering her with 
his body, and at the same moment Smith came out of the 
street door.  The car screamed to a halt, bumping along the 
kerb. There were loud screams.  People ran for cover.  The 
siren altered in pitch as a police car rounded the corner 
half a block away.
Smith hesitated.  Reuben got his mother to her feet and 
pulled her behind a parked Volvo 760.  A moment later, the 
windows of the car shattered as the gunman in the pursuit 
vehicle got out and started firing in their direction.  He 
was carrying an ugly-looking Franchi SPAS twelve-gauge 
shotgun, pumping a shell into the chamber, firing, pumping, 
reloading with a fresh magazine every eight rounds, pumping 
and firing again as though he was out hunting ducks.
There was a squeal of tyres as the police cruiser slammed 
on its brakes.  A uniformed policeman in the passenger seat 
leaned through the side window, pointing a large handgun at 
the sedan.
The gunman turned, aimed and fired twice, shattering the 
cruiser's windscreen.  A second later, he went down, his 
throat torn away by a .357 Magnum bullet.

Someone threw open the rear door of the cruiser, shouting 
at Reuben and his mother.
"Hurry up!  Get in!"
Smith ran forward, trying to get behind the Volvo.  The 
figure in the back seat of the cruiser fired at him, 
forcing him back.  A second sedan came at full speed from 
the direction of the park.  The police marksman was out of 
the car now, aiming across the roof of the Volvo to give 
covering fire to Reuben and his mother.  They scrambled 
across the street, Reuben pulling the old woman.  She was 
rigid with fear, unable to act for herself any longer.
Reuben pushed her onto the back seat.
"Get her out of here!"  he shouted.
"I
want Smith!"
"Leave him."  A man's voice, sharp and uncompromising.
"He killed my father."
The second sedan screeched to a stop.
Two more gunmen were already piling out of it, firing
indiscriminately.
"Later.  We've got to get out of here."
There was the sound of another siren.
Reuben hesitated a fraction longer, then tumbled into the 
cruiser, pressing his mother down against the seat.  A 
battery of machine-gun bullets burst through the rear 
window, climbing and exiting through the roof.
The driver was already in gear and moving off at speed.
The car lurched round the corner and picked up speed.  
There was no siren now, just the roar of the engine and the 
squeal of tyres on the blacktop as they twisted through the 
traffic.  Cars pulled in to the right to make way.
Reuben straightened and helped his mother to sit up.  She 
felt heavy.
"It's OK, Mama.  We made it."
Silence.  He caught sight of the face of the man beside 
her.  He looked down at his mother, at her eyes.  They had 
not made it after all.
CHAPTER FORTY
Babylon is tinted glass.  Tinted glass and tinted lives.  
And in the dark thoroughfares, broken glass and broken 
dreams.  There are hanging gardens on towers of bronze, and 
whores walk lightly on streets full of steam and stars, 
while high above them, on thrones of painted cedar wood 
pale princes in the latest fashions watch them pass.
The car with black-tinted windows drove north-west towards 
the towers of Manhattan, passing over Brooklyn Bridge.  The 
Hudson ran underneath, water cold river bright bladed with 
liquid steel.  To Reuben's right, the sprawling edifice of 
the Watchtower building held silent vigil over
the world of the unchosen.  There would be no resurrection 
today.
The police cruiser had not been a police cruiser.  That was 
all anyone had been willing to tell him.
They had abandoned it in a private garage on Eastern 
Parkway and transferred to the present car, a Chevrolet.  
Another vehicle, a long black car without windows in the 
rear, had collected his mother's body. She had seemed too 
small for it, for the foolish length of it.  They had laid 
her on a stretcher and wheeled her out into the open air 
briefly before shutting her inside, as though for ever.  
There had been no rush.
Reuben had watched the car head out into the street and 
mingle with the morning traffic along the Parkway, sunlight 
twinkling on its wing mirrors.
They were on the South Street Viaduct now, heading into 
town.
Reuben was numb.  He did not speak to the man beside him, 
the one who had risked his life snatching him out from 
under a hail of gunfire. The man had said his name was 
Jensen.
Reuben wondered where Smith was now, what he was doing.
Reuben could see his hand.  Smith's hand, the blood laced 
about it, his father's blood.  He could hear echoes in his 
head, the sound of a knife in his father's skull.  Behind a 
wire-mesh fence on the right, kids were playing basketball.  
The whole world seemed to be going on as though nothing had 
happened.
They turned left onto East 34th Street.  A few blocks 
further west, the car drew up outside a newly built tower 
of bottle-green glass.
Its name was displayed in gold letters above a shimmering 
entrance: Izumo Taisha Tower.  The letters spelled out the 
name in Japanese and English both.  It meant nothing to 
Reuben.
Jensen led Reuben through a crowded lobby to two rows of 
elevator doors, six to each row, facing one another.  Wind 
roared through the elevator shafts.  A soft bell chimed and 
on their left doors opened. Some people stepped out, but 
only Reuben and Jensen entered.  Jensen produced a key from 
his pocket and inserted it into a security lock on the 
console.  The lift began to rise.
They went up in the elevator together, towards the clouds, 
in silence. Bright yellow numbers shimmered as they 
climbed.  The silence grew. The numbers vanished and were 
replaced by Reuben's mother's face, by its arrested 
vehemence.  Her face and his father's face blurred and 
became one.  Reuben shook his head.
The numbers stopped at the ninety ninth floor, but the lift 
went on climbing.  At last the bell chimed and the doors 
opened.
Emptiness as far as the eye could see, shut off by walls of 
tinted glass.
An uncarpeted floor of raw concrete.  Items of building 
equipment.  No walls, no partitions.
The row of elevator shafts provided the only breaks in the 
monotony.
Far away, near a high window, several figures were 
standing.
Jensen motioned to Reuben that he should walk that way.  As 
he did so, most of the figures detached themselves from the 
window and came
towards him.  Three men, all in their mid-thirties, shook 
Reuben's hand and introduced themselves.  He forgot their 
names at once.  He had no space for any but the simplest of 
names.  Smith.
His eyes remained on the last figure, the one who had 
remained at the window, gazing out.  When he was only a few 
paces away, he stopped.
"Hello, Reuben," Sally said in a lost voice, a voice little 
more than a whisper.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I
can't tell you how sorry I am."
And he sensed the anguish in her voice, and the regret and 
the anger, and he said nothing.  Nothing at all.
"Come here, Reuben.  Here to the window."
He still said nothing, but stepped up to the window beside 
her.
"Look out there, Reuben," Sally whispered.
"What do you see?"
He looked out and saw low clouds drifting about the highest 
buildings Pan Am, Chrysler, American Brands.  There were no 
people anywhere. From this height, they were not even 
visible as specks.  Only his father and his mother adrift 
in the lifeless air, reflections without substance. "New 
York," said Reuben.


Sally shook her head. "No," she said.
"Not New York.
Babylon.  Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and 
Abominations of the Earth."
He did not ask what she was talking about; he thought he 
knew.
The clouds moved sluggishly, painfully, breaking and re-
forming as they passed through the city.  Pale sunlight 
filtered through them to the streets below, starved of 
warmth or meaning.  His parents were dead.
Sally turned.
"I am truly sorry," she repeated.
Awkwardly, she reached for him and drew him towards her, 
embracing him gently.  He endured the embrace for a moment, 
then pulled away.  He could not bear to be touched.  He was 
still in shock, still numb with bereavement.  Sally let her 
arms fall to her sides.  It was cold in the vast, unheated 
space.
"Let's sit down, Reuben," she said.
"We have to talk."
Someone had arranged plastic chairs in a circle at the 
centre of the floor.  The four men were already seated.  
Reuben followed Sally and was offered a place.  Sally took 
the remaining seat, facing him.  She
was dressed simply, in a burgundy skirt and sweater.  She 
wore little earrings in the shape of crocodiles.  Her eyes 
were unreadable.
"Reuben," she began, "I know you want to be alone, but 
there isn't time.  I also know you must have questions, but 
I must ask you to be patient.  I may not have answers to 
all of them, others it may not be possible for me to answer 
now, some maybe never.  You will just have to accept that.
"The matters I am about to divulge are highly classified.  
They're among the most sensitive items of information 
currently on record in the United States.  Not even the 
president has been informed of them. Nor is he likely to 
be, unless.  " She hesitated.
"Unless circumstances force our hand."
Reuben interrupted.
"Who are you, Sally?  Why are you doing this?  Why are you 
killing all these people?"
Sally shivered and leaned forward in her seat.
"Please, Reuben, let me talk.  Let me explain.  After that 
you may ask any questions you wish."
Reuben nodded.  The empty space in which he sat was nothing 
compared to the great gulf that had opened inside him.  His 
father was standing by the window looking out at the 
emptiness.  He would not turn his head.
"First of all," Sally said, 'let me introduce the others 
properly."
She said their names and they stood, one by one, and shook 
Reuben's hand: Chris Leach, a former psychology professor, 
tall, wiry, pensive; Curtis Kolstoe, a lawyer like Sally, 
plump, with large brown eyes and a penetrating stare;
Hastings Donovan, an ex-cop, redheaded, well-built, 
reserved; and Emeric Jensen, a former theology teacher from 
Dartmouth College.
"Emeric," said Sally, 'maybe you'd better explain a bit 
about us."
Jensen raised his eyebrows.  He was blond, about thirty-
five, delicately built, and somewhat shy.
"Why do you always pick on me?"  he asked.
"You used to teach theology," Sally answered.  This is your 
punishment."
Reuben sensed something between Sally and Jensen that was 
not professional rapport and was not friendship.  He 
shrugged inwardly. What did a little thing like that matter 
now?
Jensen leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his 
chin resting on clasped hands.  Reuben imagined this was 
how he had started seminars back in his teaching days.
The five of us are part of a larger team based in 
Washington," he began.
"Our official title, when we use it, is CSA.  That stands 
for the Cult Surveillance Agency.  I know that sounds a 
little weird, but I can assure you we aren't weird at all.
We're a regular government agency set up six years ago as 
part of a
collaboration exercise between the FBI, CIA and National 
Security Agency.  The CIA has been getting edgy about 
fundamentalist sects for years, ever since Rios Montt made 
himself president of Guatemala back in when was it?"
"Eighty-two," Kolstoe said.
"Back in eighty-two.  You may recall that episode.  Montt 
belonged to an American sect called the Church of the 
Complete Word.  When he became president, they had no more 
than eight hundred members in the country; but immediately 
afterwards money started coming in from all over the place.  
All the diehard fundamentalists were going to make 
Guatemala safe from communism and godlessness.  If he'd 
lasted long enough, the Church of the Complete Word would 
have run the country.
"Rios Montt was only the tip of an iceberg.  There was 
Khomeini in Iran, of course.  Just before he was deposed, 
Marcos was made head of the Transcendental Meditation 
organization in the Philippines.  The Moonies are deeply 
involved in financing anticommunist movements in several 
Latin American countries.
"During the eighties, religion became a major political 
force again, and it doesn't seem to matter whether the 
people involved are traditionalists or not.  The FBI 
started getting interested around the time of the Jonestown 
massacre in Guyana.  Here in the States, cult members 
frequently mess with the federal authorities.  They kidnap 
somebody, move him or her across state lines; maybe a 
deprogrammer sticks his head in, takes the kid back to 
Kentucky or Oregon.  All federal of fences  I don't have to 
tell you about cult based murders.
"All this was getting too complicated for one agency, 
especially since most of these cult groups are 
international.  So a presidential committee was set up in 
1987 to recommend what sort of action should be taken.  The 
result was the CSA.  At which point I hand you back to Miss 
Peale."
Sally did not move at first.  She seemed to be marshalling 
difficult thoughts, weighing what could not be weighed, 
balancing what could not be balanced.  Reuben thought she 
looked tired.  Tired and sad.  He thought she looked more 
sad than tired.  As though a great weight lay on her.
"Reuben," she said hesitantly, "I know you're tired.  I 
know you've been through a lot and you'd like to have time 
to yourself and a chance to sleep.  But I want you to 
listen to what we have to tell you first. Then you can 
sleep or do whatever you feel you have to do.
The problem is that things are starting to move faster than 
I anticipated.  What happened last night and this morning 
took me completely by surprise.  We didn't know that 
Kominsky would send his friends after you, that they would 
set you and Mrs.  Hammel up like that.  Or that Smith would 
take advantage of the situation.  It might have been days 
before he found you.  By then we'd have been in a position 
to take him out."
She paused, uncertain how to go on.
"Suppose you tell me exactly what's going on," said Reuben 
suddenly. His voice was quiet, but it was inflected with 
anger.  After what had happened, after such a nightmare, to 
be sitting so calmly in a green silence above the city 
talking of problems and advantages, as though analysing a 
game of chess.
"My best friend was killed two nights ago, I saw my father 
knifed and my mother shot this morning, and you behave as 
though this is all in a day's work.  Just who the hell do 
you think you people are?"

Sally stood up, agitated.  She wanted to hold Reuben, 
reassure him, comfort him.  But this was neither the time 
nor the place.
"Just try to keep cool, Reuben.  It won't help if you get 
angry.  You can't do anything, you can't bring anybody 
back; but you can sure as hell make certain that Smith and 
his bosses don't do the same thing to anybody else.  Now, 
do you want me to go on?"
Reuben nodded.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"OK, listen carefully.  I was transferred to work with the 
CSA two years ago.  I'd already been working for the FBI 
for ten years, the past five of them as an undercover agent 
in City Hall.  There's no need to go into what I did there, 
but you can probably make some intelligent guesses.  Two 
years ago my boss called me to his office and introduced me 
to Emeric and Curtis.
"They'd been working for about six months on a major 
investigation, and a lot of trails seemed to lead to City 
Hall.  The investigation involved a religious cult with a 
membership recruited exclusively from the upper ranks of 
society.  I think you know what cult I mean."
She took a deep breath.
"At first it seemed like a regular investigation, just a 
little more bizarre than usual.  Then it started to get 
complicated.  We began to put more people on it, and the 
complications grew worse.  A year ago we found some clues 
that led to Washington.  High up in Washington.  Smith will 
have suggested as much to you.  He was not lying."
"Who is he?  He said he represented "the highest 
authority".
What did he mean?"
Sally frowned and looked at her colleagues.  Leach shook 
his head.  She turned back to Reuben.
"I'm sorry, Reuben, but I can't reveal that.  All I can 
tell you is that the Seventh Order has infiltrated several 
government agencies over the years."
"He said "the highest authority"," protested Reuben.  He 
was angry. What right had these people to keep him in the 
dark?
"Did he mean the president?  Is that what you're afraid to 
say?  I have to know."
Chris Leach interrupted.
"Lieutenant, I understand your frustration.  But this is a 
national security issue.  We want your help, but you don't 
have clearance for this information."
"Then get it.  If you want me to help you, I need to know 
what's going on.  Who Smith is, who his bosses are, how 
high this thing really goes. Otherwise, you can all go 
screw yourselves."
Reuben was shaking now.  Images of blood made patterns 
behind his eyes. He leaped to his feet and headed for the 
elevator.
Sally came after him, reaching for his arm.  He pushed her 
away violently.  He would find Smith himself.  Find him and 
send him to hell without anyone's help.

He pressed the button for the elevator.  Nothing happened.  
He stabbed repeatedly at the button, and still the elevator 
did not come.  He slumped against the wall, sobbing.  
Images of blood.
Photographs torn and bloody on his kitchen floor.  A spider 
striding across a continent of blood.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Sally held him for a long time while he wept.  She had 
loved him a little, but not enough.  There had been gaps in 
Reuben's life, raw holes that no-one could fill.  Now they 
had grown in a matter of days to unimaginable proportions.  
She doubted if he would ever find peace again.
She wanted him now for selfish reasons.  National security, 
the public good, even the saving of human lives were mere 
cliches.
Sally wanted Reuben because he could help her achieve her 
ends.
All the time she held him she thought of nothing but means 
and ends. There was a little pity in her somewhere, and a 
little love, and a lot of sadness, but they rattled 
brokenly inside her own emptiness.
Hastings Donovan, the red-headed cop, came over with a 
bottle of bourbon and two glasses.  When Reuben had 
recovered enough to drink, Donovan sent Sally away and sat 
with him, plying him with whisky.  He talked at random 
about his experiences on the force.  He'd been with the 
vice squad for eleven years, seen too much, felt too much.  
This wasn't much better, but it was enough to keep him 
sane.
Kolstoe, the lawyer, drew up a chair.
"I've been in touch with Washington," he said.  They've 
given a go-ahead for you to have a full security clearance.  
I know you feel bad, and I know this isn't the best time; 
but I think we should do some more talking.  Some real 
talking.
Are you up to that?"
Reuben nodded, still numb, still shaking.
"I'm OK," he murmured.
"I'm ready."
They formed a semicircle once more.
Kolstoe took up where Sally had left off.
"Smith's real name," he said, 'is Forbes.  Warren Forbes."  
Sunlight came through one of the windows, falling green and 
golden across his face and down onto the dusty floor.
"He is a senior official in the CIA's Directorate of 
Operations.  Since the age of nineteen, he has been a fully 
initiated member of the Seventh Order.  His father was a 
member before him.  He was in Vietnam and Cambodia, had a 
complicated career there, became a CIA operative.
"Forbes is only one of several members of the Order who 
have risen to important positions within the US 
intelligence community over the past twenty years or so.  
We know the names of some of them, others we just suspect.  
We know that there is a group run by Forbes within the CIA. 
Forbes is in charge, but he receives his own instructions 
from the central committee of the Order.  Or so we think.

We don't really know.  Most of the time we're going on 
informed guesswork.
"For several years now, there has been a renegade movement 
within the Directorate of Operations, made up of men who 
aren't happy with the way the country's foreign policy is 
being directed, who are dissatisfied with how the country 
itself is being run.
Forbes is a key force in this movement.  Over the years he 
has arranged for other malcontents to be initiated into the 
Seventh Order.  It's given him a hold over them, allowed 
him to steer their overall policy in directions favourable 
to the Order.  The Order has its own ideas about how this 
country should be run and how we should handle our foreign 
affairs.
Broadly speaking, its ideas are right wing and extremist."
Reuben raised a hand to interrupt the lawyer.
"You're telling me you've managed to pull all this together 
in the past couple of years?"
Kolstoe nodded.
"CSA has more resources than you might guess.  We managed 
to infiltrate Forbes's group within the Directorate.  Up 
until two months ago, we had a fairly steady flow of 
information.  Then it dried up suddenly, and we haven't had 
any contact from our mole since then.
"In spite of that, we still continue to monitor the Order, 
and we know that something major is being planned.  The 
Hammel business panicked some of them and let us get a 
little closer.  It brought Forbes to New York.  It made 
them lean on some people a little too heavily.  They're in 
danger of blowing their cover.  We think Forbes knows that 
and wants to act now, before it's too late."


"Why are you telling me all this?"
Sally broke in.
"Because we need your help, Reuben.
Angelina Hammel knows more than she's telling you.  She 
isn't a member of the Order, and what she said about being 
in danger from them was true.  They want her husband's 
notebook, they want to find the ship that brought the 
Order to Haiti.  We think they're planning something on 
the island as a preliminary to a series of political 
manoeuvres in the Caribbean and Latin America.  For some 
reason the boat is important.  Angelina knows something.
She has a brother who is chief of the Haitian secret 
police.  We think he visited her here in New York a few 
days ago, then went back to Haiti."
Sally breathed in hard.
"Reuben, I want you to persuade her to go to Haiti with 
you.  She trusts you, she has already confided in you.  
She knows the country very well, much better than she 
pretends.  Let her use the notebook, find whatever it is 
the Order is looking for, bring them out into the open."
Reuben shook his head.
This is crazy.  We don't even know where Angelina is."



"Yes, we do.  I said so in my note.
Forbes had her taken to a hospital in Westchester County, a 
place called St.  Vincent's.  She's being kept there under 
surveillance, but we can get her out.  She'll need a few 
days to recover from the overdose, but if all goes well you 
could leave for Port-au-Prince in four days' time."
Tell me what I get out of this."
"Forbes is still at large, Reuben.  We want you to help put 
him behind bars.  For a very long time."
Reuben got to his feet.
"I don't want him behind bars," he said.
Nobody said anything.  Reuben walked to the nearest window.  
It was smeared with putty, white fingerprints against the 
glass.  They were so high here the world did not seem to 
matter.
"We aren't particular."  Jensen, the theologian, had 
spoken.
"Prison is only one option.  No-one would object if you 
found other ways of dealing with Mr.  Forbes.  He is not of 
critical importance. It's the people behind him we are 
really after."
"And Angelina?  What happens to her?"
"Nothing.  She has done nothing that we know of, nothing 
criminal. It's for you to decide."
Reuben watched sunlight fall on a small white cloud.
"I will have to attend my parents' funeral," he said.  His 
voice sounded far away to him.
"That isn't possible, Reuben," said Sally.
"You know it can't be done.  Forbes has men out looking for 
you.  Your own people have a warrant out for your arrest.  
The funeral is the obvious place for them to look.  I'm 
sorry, but it's out of the question."
"I'm the eldest son, I have to recite the kaddish."
"It's out of the question, Reuben."


There was a long, awkward silence. What they were asking 
was very hard. 
"I will at least have to see Devorah's parents to explain.  
And Davita. I will have to spend time with her.  You will 
not deny me that."  He turned and looked directly at Sally.
She nodded.
"Very well, Reuben.  But you can't go to their house.  Let 
me arrange it."
The cloud broke and he saw a great precipice all the way to 
the ground. For some reason he remembered a story from the 
Christian gospels, about how Satan had taken Jesus to a 
high place and tempted him. Reuben looked out on 
nothingness.  There were no angels there to catch him if
he fell.
PART TWO
The Circle Full Again Haiti "Lavender blue, dilly dilly, 
lavender green When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be 
queen.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Moments of arrival, moments of departure.  And sometimes, 
between them, moments of grace perhaps as few as two or 
three in a single lifetime. Even if someone should be 
blessed with more than that, the moments will be stretched 
out so finely and with such vast distances between, that 
nothing will fill the waiting.  Not dreams, not hopes, not 
lies.  No, thought Reuben, not even lies.
The late-afternoon Haiti Air flight for Port-au-Prince had 
left La Guardia at 16.05 and was due to land at half past 
eight.  Reuben had been provided with money and a new 
identity backed up by watertight documentation.  He was 
travelling as Dr.  Myron Phelps, with papers showing that 
he was going to Haiti on a Fulbright award in order to 
complete work left unfinished by his late colleague, Dr.  
Richard Hammel.  He was accompanied by Dr.  Hammel's widow.
Angelina.  At the airport, nobody had waved goodbye.
The plane dipped and rose again as it entered a pocket of 
turbulence. Angelina stared straight ahead, suspended in 
her own thoughts, if she had any.  The doctors at St.  
Vincent's had saved her life, but they had not given back 
her soul.  Taking her from the hospital had been simplicity 
itself.
Sally had brought all the necessary documentation, Emeric 
Jensen had been introduced as Professor Hammel, and no-one 
had remembered a recent murder victim of the same name.  
Why should they?  In New York, like anywhere else, killers 
get the headlines, victims are numbers on the back page.  
They had taken Angelina out together, one on either side, 
holding her arms like old and valued friends.  She had 
known neither of them.  It had not mattered.
The next day had been difficult for Reuben.  While Angelina 
rested in a Manhattan hotel room, he travelled on his new 
passport into Canada. Sally had arranged for Devorah's 
parents and Davita to stay in a hotel in Port Rowan on the 
shores of Lake Erie.
Telling Davita about her grandparents' deaths was harder 
than he could have imagined.  She had loved them 
extravagantly.  He spent two days with her, walking, 
explaining, nursing her grief with his own grief. He had 
not told her about Danny.  Danny was well, he told her when 
she asked.
On the evening of his return to New York, he had contacted 
Nigel Greenwood.  The Englishman had sounded frightened.  
He had hung up on Reuben.
The following day, he and Angelina had gone to her bank and 
to the safe deposit vault in order to recover the things 
they had locked away. Reuben had decided to take everything 
to Haiti.
Another round of turbulence, worse this time.  Angelina 
glanced through the window.  Out in the darkness a small 
green light flashed on the wingtip, the very extremity of 
flight.  An hour ago, she had watched the sun set behind 
the Appalachians, green and purple, a monstrous sign.  The 
sea moved far beneath them, rich with waves.
The 737 lurched again.  A wild crackling attacked the 
intercom, then
the pilot's voice came over clearly, announcing that he was 
taking them up to avoid an electric storm ahead.  A 
stewardess asked everyone in French and English to return 
to their seats and fasten their belts. The pitch of the 
engine changed and there was a marked tilt as the little 
jet lifted.
Glancing round the cabin, Reuben felt conspicuous.  He was 
almost the only white passenger on board.  Two rows in 
front of him there sat an American couple in early middle 
age.  Reuben wondered what their business was.
Nobody went to Haiti for tourism now, and very few for 
trade.
Duvalier and his Tontons Macoutes had done a lot in their 
day to dampen enthusiasm for the place, and the regimes 
since then with a little help from AIDS had only reinforced 
the general impression of abject poverty, danger and 
insecurity.
The plane levelled out.  Angelina glanced through the 
window again. She felt a vague presentiment, an onset of 
darkness.  The wingtip moved solidly through nothingness.  
Not far below, black thunderclouds flashed into view as 
lightning washed across their backs.  There was no sound.
She was deeply conscious of her own mortality tonight, fine 
threads drawn taut, easily snapped, as thin as spiders' 
webs between weaving and dawn.  Between her teeth and 
tongue, she could taste the moments; they glided like ice 
across the ridges of her inner mouth.  Moments were all she 
had, all anybody had, the last as delicate as the first. 
Beneath her, clouds exploded silently in flames and 
returned to darkness.  She felt flimsy and trembling, 
upheld by air.  It was warm in the cabin.  Haiti was down 
there, waiting.
"Why are you angry with me?"  she asked.
Reuben looked round.  She had hardly spoken until now.
"Angry?"  he said.


"I'm not angry." "Yes," she replied. "You are angry.
Is it the cocaine?"
He did not reply at first.  Looking past her, through the 
dark window, he saw sheet lightning dapple fin and cloud.
"Not the cocaine," he answered grudgingly.
"The deception.  On top of Danny's death.  My parents' 
deaths.  Your silence, your games."
"All that?"  she said.  The plane seemed for a moment to 
drop, weightless, uncontrolled, then it gathered strength 
and pulled the air around itself once more.  Angelina 
breathed deeply.  She was not afraid, but fear touched her 
edges, like a thin tickle in the throat that may become a 
cough in time.
"You think too highly of yourself," she said, 'to feel my 
deceit so intimately.  We hardly know one another.  You're 
nothing to me, just a man I've shared a bed with."
She regretted the words once she had uttered them.



"I'm sorry.  That sounded flippant.
But you must understand:
yours would be the least of my betrayals.  The cocaine was 
there before you, I saw no reason for you to be involved."
"I was involved."
"But not because you slept with me.
That was another involvement.  You confuse things when you 
talk like this.  I'm several people, you can't own all of 
me.
Perhaps not any of me."
"I don't want to own you.  What good would that do?"
She watched the green light beckon.
As far back as she could remember, she had been owned by 
men.


Different currencies, different rates of exchange, but 
the same caresses, the same infidelities.
"Did you bring cocaine with you?"  he asked.
She nodded.
"Sally gave me a quarter-kilo.  Enough to keep me out of 
trouble.
I don't have a big habit.  Maybe I can sell some: we may 
need money." "I've got money."  The CSA was taking care 
of everything.
"Are you mainlining?"
She shook her head.
"Not regularly.  Three, four times in the past month or 
so.  I still snort.  Reuben, I've only been using coke 
for eighteen months."
"But you need it.  You've got a need."
She seemed ready to deny it, but in her hesitation 
recognized the truth.
"Yes," she whispered.
"I'm not an addict, but I need it sometimes.
This week I needed it.  Rick, Filius, all of that.  You."
"Rick started you, didn't he?"
She nodded.
"It was one of his compensations, like clothes or 
perfume.  Coke was the best, the nearest thing to sex."
"I don't approve," he said.
She looked out again.  The storm was massing everywhere 
beneath them, like a city.


"No," she whispered.
"I know.  You thought I was exotic at first, a tropical 
fruit the gods had dropped in your unpolluted lap.  Danny 
could have his blondes, but you had something better, you 
had me, a black widow who'd never been laid."
He tried to look away, but she held him with her eyes.
"I opened my legs and you came crawling in and you thought 
I would be grateful "Please, Angelina, let's not..."
"One early-morning screw and you thought you had it made.
Then you found out I'm a dope fiend, the sort you read 
about in your Sunday paper, and you remembered all the 
times your momma warned you about us the bad girls that 
nice boys don't date, the bad black girls Jewish boys 
shouldn't be seen with, and you knew in your heart of 
hearts that all you ever wanted was your precious Devorah 
..."
"Stop this, Angelina, stop it now.  I don't want you 
talking about Devorah."
"Why not?  Is she some sort of saint?
You never talked about her, you didn't even have 
photographs of her in your apartment.  What was wrong?  Was 
she so different from the rest of us?"
He lifted his hand as though to strike her, then let it 
fall.  He could feel her anger, like an open flame close to 
him.
"No," he said, his own anger falling away from him.
"She was just like the rest of us.  Two days before the 
accident, I found out she was seeing somebody else."  He 
paused.
Angelina was the first person he had ever told this to.  
Not even Danny had known.
"I let her drown," he said.
"I didn't try to save her."
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
There was a sudden, heavy lurch.  The plane seemed to 
tumble sideways. The lights flickered and went out.  For 
what seemed an eternity, they swooped through darkness, 
finally levelling out in a buffeting of angry winds.  The 
lights blinked twice then stayed on.
There was a crackling as the Tannoy came to life.  The 
pilot's voice came through again, less sharply this time.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry to have to tell you that, 
owing to the bad weather we've been having, we are being 
forced to divert to Jacmel. Transport will be arranged from 
Jacmel to Port-au-Prince or, for those who prefer, there 
will be overnight accommodation.  Our estimated time of 
arrival at Jacmel is 2100 hours.  Since there may still be 
some rough weather up ahead, I would ask you all to remain 
seated and to keep your safety belts secured."
It was dark and wet and driven with wind at Jacmel.  The 
airport was deserted, unprepared for an incoming flight of 
any description, least of all an international one.  Soon 
after the plane taxied to a halt, a military Jeep drew 
alongside, carrying four armed soldiers and an
officer.  The soldiers took up positions on the tarmac, 
faintly visible from the plane.  The officer looked things 
over before returning to the terminal.
No-one was allowed to leave the plane, not even the 
aircrew.
Two hundred yards away, in the small terminal building, a 
single yellow light was the only sign of life.  It seemed 
impossibly remote.
The storm had passed, and in the cabin it was growing 
uncomfortably hot.  No-one complained.  They had all been 
here before, if not in Jacmel itself, in a place very like 
it.
As the waiting lengthened, Angelina grew sleepy and 
unreachable. Reuben covered her with his jacket and left 
her in a light doze.
He wanted to go outside, out of the stifling cabin, into 
the waiting night.  Inside the cabin, little pools of light 
illuminated groups of passengers, some chatting, some 
sitting passively.  Most seemed nervous, landing so far 
away from the capital.  Rumours of the behaviour of Jacmel 
customs officials were circulating, causing disquiet.
Passing along the aisle to stretch his legs, Reuben was 
hailed by the American man two rows along.  He was a tall 
man with sweptback hair and a small ginger moustache, 
neatly trimmed.  Aged maybe forty-five, conservatively 
dressed, bright-eyed and bushy tailed  Not military, Reuben 
thought, not quite a businessman, certainly not a tourist.  
The broad, open face exuded something not innocence 
exactly, certainly not naivete.  Desperation, perhaps.
"Hi!  The name's Doug.  Doug Hooper.
This is my wife, Jean."
Reuben glanced down at the tiny woman in the window seat.
She'd been bought in a Woolworth's somewhere in the Midwest 
downtown Kalamazoo or a shopping precinct outside
Indianapolis.  Doug had bought her with coupons probably, 
she'd been just what he wanted, and every day he kept her 
squeaky clean, almost as good as new.  Reuben noticed that 
she was wearing a Holly Hobby dress; it had probably been 
part of a batch she'd bought in the early seventies.  It 
was in great shape.
"Reu ... Myron Phelps.  Pleased to meet you."
"Why don't you take a seat, Myron?
Looks like we're going to be stuck in here for a little 
while."
There was plenty of room: the flight had been half-empty.
Reuben saw no escape.  Reluctantly, he slipped in beside 
them.
"You with that lovely black woman back there?"  Jean Hooper 
asked.  She had big eyes and bunchy little eyebrows that 
went up and down independently when she talked.  Her voice 
was startlingly pleasant.
"I... Oh, yes," Reuben stammered.
"Sure, she's with me."
"We couldn't help noticing you both together.  You make 
such a handsome couple."  Doug's voice was coarser than his 
wife's, but he'd been


working on it.
"She your wife?"
Reuben got some saliva moving in the back of his mouth.  He 
shook his head.
"No," he said.
"She's ... a widow.
Her husband died recently.  He was a colleague of mine at 
LIU.  We're travelling to Haiti together to finish up some 
of his work there."
The Hoopers' faces moved simultaneously into what Reuben 
took to be their bereavement counselling posture.
"I am so sorry to hear of your friend's death," said Doug.
"You must tell his widow that we will pray for her.  And 
her husband. Souls in the Abha Kingdom need our prayers for 
their progress." Reuben frowned.
"In the where?"
"The Abha Kingdom," interposed Mrs.  Hooper.
"It's Arabic for the Most Glorious Kingdom, the realms 
beyond." Reuben took a deep breath.  He should have 
guessed: missionaries. Military organization, business 
acumen and Holly Hobby dresses.  And not even regular 
missionaries, but devotees of some obscure cult.
Reuben half-rose.  Doug put a gentle hand on his arm.
"Don't worry, Myron.  We're not trying to convert you.  Our 
faith forbids proselytization.  We just like to share the 
good news with everyone God sends our way.  We're Baha'is, 
members of the Baha'i Faith."
"Missionaries," said Reuben.
"You're missionaries."
They looked hurt, as though he had said the wrong thing.  
Doug pursed 
his lips a little and tried to smile; Jean performed a half 
circle with her eyebrows.
"Not missionaries," she said.
"We don't have missionaries in our faith, no more than we 
have
clergy.
Doug and I are pioneers.
That's our name for those who leave their homes to bring 
the cause of God to other lands.  Not missionaries, Myron: 
pioneers, just like the old settlers.  There's a 
difference."
Reuben nodded.  He was sure there was.
It was just that he couldn't see it.
"You've got some sort of centre here?"

Doug nodded.
"Been here some time.  But it's hard for the native 
believers.
They've got so little money, so little education.  They 
need outside help, for a time at least.  Jean taught high 
school back home, French and English; I had a little 
engineering company.  We never had a call to pioneer 
before, but back in April we were visiting our temple in 
Wilmette, out near Chicago.  That was when we got the call.  
I sold up, Jean packed her job in, and we bought a little 
shop in
Port-au-Prince."
Reuben looked at them, first one, then the other.  They had 
that air of aggressive sanity only the professionally 
religious acquire.
"You bought a shop in Haiti?"
"Yep."  Doug laughed, a loud, nervous laugh that brought 
glances from round the cabin.
"Sounds crazy, doesn't it?  Well, we don't care.  It's our
sacrifice."
"What sort of shop?"
"A bookshop," said Jean.
"We're going to sell a range of books educational, 
religious, uplifting.  Books on world peace, world unity, 
the brotherhood of
man."
"You believe in that, do you?  The brotherhood of man?"
"Well, of course.  It's the essence of our faith.  The 
founder of our faith, Baha'u'llah, came to earth with the 
mission of unifying mankind. It won't happen all at once, 
but the day will come."
"Do you have permission?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Permission to sell books?  I've heard the government is 
... a little strict on the subject of publications."
Doug Hooper frowned.
"No, sir, I don't think that will be a problem.  We have 
nothing pornographic, nothing subversive.  Just uplifting 
books on universal peace and world harmony.  We have a 
friend in the government.  General Valris.  He was
Minister of Culture until a few months back.  We were in 
touch with him before he got moved into his present 
position.  He's
Minister of Defence now.  Jean and I thought we'd have to 
make contact with the new Minister of
Culture, but no, the general said
"Come right ahead".  He's enthusiastic.  It seems ironic, 
doesn't it, a general helping the cause of peace?  But 
nothing happens by accident in the cause of God.
These people like the Baha'is, they know they can depend on 
us, on our loyalty.  We are loyal to the government of any 
country we may live
in."
"Even dictatorships?"
Hooper gave Reuben a disapproving look.
That's not for us to judge, sir.  We don't involve 
ourselves in politics.  Our mission is to bring unity, not 
to add to divisions."
Reuben managed to stand.
"I wish you both luck," he said.  He paused.
"You do understand that there's no-one in Haiti who can 
help you if you get into any trouble?  No embassy, not even 
a consulate.  You'll be on your own."
Jean Hooper smilingly shook her head.
"No, sir," she whispered.
"Not alone.
Baha'u'llah will be with us every step of the way.  He's 
with us in here now.  He's all the embassy we'll ever 
need."
"I'm glad to hear that," replied Reuben.  He was in the 
aisle now, moving away.
"Come and look us up," Doug Hooper said.
"We'll be living behind the shop at first, just till we get 
settled in. It's in the rue des Casernes, not far from the 
National Palace.  Just call in, you'll be very welcome."
The intercom cleared its throat.  All conversation ceased, 
as though someone had flicked a switch.  A moment later, a 
stewardess's voice jabbered into life, distorted by 
interference.
"Mesdames et Messieurs.  Ladies and Gentlemen, we have just 
received official confirmation that all passengers are to 
disembark at Jacme!. Coaches will be waiting to take you 
and your luggage to Port-auPrince, where immigration and 
customs formalities may be completed.  On disembarkation, 
all passengers are requested to surrender their passports 
pending transit to Port-au-Prince, where they will be 
returned for inspection.
Will passengers holding non Haitian passports please retain 
their entry cards?
"On behalf of Captain Forestal and his crew, I wish to 
thank you for having flown with us.  We trust you have had 
an enjoyable journey and look forward to welcoming you 
aboard Haiti Air again very soon."
In the silence that followed, somebody opened the door.  
Steps had been wheeled up to the fuselage.
From outside, the sound of crickets came whirring close, a 
languid, empty sound.  No-one seemed eager to leave the 
security of the plane.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Angelina sensed the mood of the other passengers as soon as 
Reuben wakened her.
They're frightened," she said.



"What about?"  Reuben was busy lifting down his hand 
luggage from the rack.
"About being here in Jacmel, instead of Port-au-Prince.  
They feel out in the open, vulnerable."


"Are we in any danger?"
She shrugged.
"Qui salt?"
Stepping through the open door and down the steps, Reuben 
felt exposed. Trying to smuggle a gun into Haiti had been 
considered and turned down as too risky.  Jensen had 
promised to get one to him in a day or two through a 
contact known only by the code name Macandal, after an 
eighteenth century slave leader.
Until then Reuben would have to go unarmed.  The political 
situation was volatile, the army and secret police had 
become a law unto themselves.  Packing a gun might bring 
trouble; but trouble might come anyway.
He saw the Hoopers go ahead of him into the large wooden 
shed that served as the main terminal building, their self-
confidence wrapping them round like a blanket.  In a way he 
envied them.
There was an air of chaos in the terminal.  Soldiers with 
guns stood at each entrance, casual but alert.  At two 
trestle tables, a pair of corporals were collecting 
passports and shepherding people to different parts of the 
shed.  People had started to argue, there was sporadic 
pushing and shoving.
Reuben sensed right away that the chaos was more apparent 
than real. On a small platform towards the top end of the 
shed, the officer who had come out to the plane was 
watching proceedings very carefully.  He wore tight-fitting 
battle fatigues and a soft green beret complete with silver 
cap badge.
Beside him stood a thin-faced man in civilian clothes, a 
beige suit and an open-necked white shirt.  He wore black 
sunglasses.  The shades were a cliche, the expression on 
the mouth beneath anything but.  On the wall behind the 
pair hung a coloured lithograph of President Ciceron, 
dressed in military uniform.  A large white fan turned 
languidly in the middle of the ceiling, slicing the heat 
like bacon.
They were separating people according to a system whose 
logic was not immediately obvious to Reuben.  It was his 
turn to approach the table. The soldier said nothing, just 
reached out a hand for his passport. Reuben was on edge, 
hoping the CSA boffins had done their job properly; but the 
corporal barely glanced at the photograph.  He added the 
passport to a small heap and nodded at Reuben.
"La-has," he said in French.
"Over there."  Reuben was expected to join a small group of 
people that included the Hoopers and three men who looked 
Hispanic, possibly Dominicans.
The corporal looked at Angelina, then at her US passport, 
then sharply back at her again.  He snapped something in 
Creole and she murmured an indistinct reply.
Wordlessly, he jerked his head back, despatching her to a 
different queue to the one in which Reuben was standing.



Reuben took a step forward.
Angelina shook her head in warning.  Reuben ignored 
her. "Lafemme de man collegue," he protested, using 
schoolboy French. "Avec moi."  The soldier ignored 
him.


Reuben went right up to the table and put a hand on the 
man's shoulder. A few feet away one of the armed soldiers 
drew back the bolt on his rifle and pointed it meaningfully 
at Reuben.
"Go back, Reuben," said Angelina.
"I'll be all right."  She had used his real name 
consciously.  The fictitious Myron Phelps, she thought, was 
fragile, he would force her to indiscretions.  But calling 
him Reuben had solidified him for her. He was coming close; 
she thought she wanted him again.
Without warning, a commotion broke out nearby.  The man in 
sunglasses caught sight of someone in the crowd.  He 
whispered to the officer, then turned and pointed.
There was no attempt to conceal the gesture.  The officer 
nodded to two of his men.  At that moment, the target a 
young man in his late twenties wearing a blue T-shirt and 
jeans saw that he had been spotted. He tried to break away, 
but was headed off by a second man in civilian clothes.
carrying a small pistol.  One of the soldiers moved in to 
help.  The man struggled briefly, then slumped and let 
himself be dragged towards the little platform.  A woman 
screamed and was held back forcibly by friends.
The man in sunglasses stepped down from the platform.  He 
made no effort, showed no emotion.  His hands were in his 
pockets, his eyes hidden.  With an economical gesture, he 
motioned the soldier away. This was police business, he was 
in charge.  Above him, in the ceiling, the fan moved 
sluggishly in a futile circle.  The policeman looked his 
prisoner up and down.  He asked a couple of questions but 
received no answers.  The prisoner was agitated, he kept 
moving from foot to foot. People pretended not to see, made 
efforts not to look.  A woman was crying.  The queues were 
moving again.
A third policeman arrived from nowhere.  He was older than 
the others and wore a blue suit and an old, battered cap.
"Tonton," whispered Angelina.  There are still some left."
The second and third policemen held the prisoner hard by 
the arms.  He did not strain against them.
The man in sunglasses repeated his questions, or perhaps he 
had thought of new ones.  His prisoner either would not or 
could not reply.
Sunglasses slipped a hand into his jacket pocket and 
removed it holding a small white object.  A golf ball.  He 
tossed it into the air three or four times, then made a 
fist round it.  Calmly, he slammed the fist into the 
prisoner's solar plexus.  The man tried to double up, but 
his captors held him hard, ready for the follow-up.  The 
next punch was harder, much harder.  The man choked.  They 
held him firmly.  The third punch ruptured something.  
There was a tearing sound and saliva flecked with blood 
appeared at the captive's mouth.  Sunglasses drew back his 
fist for another swing.
At that moment, there was a shout.
Reuben looked round and saw Doug Hooper striding towards 
the platform, all arms and legs and indignation.
"Jesus!"  whispered Angelina.
"He'll get himself killed."
Hooper had worked himself up.  A soldier tried to stop him 
but was unceremoniously pushed out of the way.  Moments 
later, the American was at the platform.  The two assistant 
cops had let go of their quarry, who was on his knees, 
choking and gasping and spitting blood.  Hooper put a hand 
on the man's shoulder and addressed himself to the 
policeman in sunglasses.
"Just who the hell do you think you are, mister?"  he 
shouted.
"You can't just go punching up on people like that.  I'm 
sure as hell going to report this when I get to the 
capital."
The man in beige looked round, first at his assistants, 
then at the officer on the platform.  They exchanged 
puzzled glances.  Hooper took a step closer to the 
policeman.
"Hey, you," he called.
"Look at me when I'm speaking to you, goddammit.  I want 
your name and some sort of explanation.  I'm a personal 
friend of General Valris."
"Keep your nose out of things that don't concern you, 
blanc."
Reuben looked round.  Jean Hooper was standing about six 
feet away from him, praying intently.
"Is there any Remover of Difficulties save God," she 
murmured.
"Say: Praised be God.  He ..."
"Mrs.  Hooper."  Reuben caught her shoulder.
"Mrs.  Hooper, I think you should go over there and bring 
your husband back before there's trouble.  I don't think he 
knows what he's getting into."
For a moment Jean Hooper seemed not to recognize Reuben.
There was a blankness about her gaze that troubled him.  
Then her eyes changed and she was with him again.
"Don't worry, Mr.  Phelps.  He's quite safe.  You'll see."  
She wasn't smug or overconfident or anything, Reuben 
decided; she was just plain unable to see the reality of 
what was happening.  Or maybe the reality she saw was a 
different reality.  It didn't make any difference, though: 
Doug Hooper was still going to get hurt.
It didn't take long.  The man in sunglasses didn't lose his 
temper.
Nobody lost his temper but the tall American.  He stepped 
up close to the policeman and grabbed his lapel.  The 
policeman clicked two fingers together.  One of his 
assistants borrowed a rifle from a nearby soldier, stepped 
up to Hooper, and rammed the butt hard into his face. The 
American went down without a sound.  His cheek had been 
opened to the bone and he was bleeding.
Jean Hooper fainted.  Angelina ran across to her, unnoticed 
by the
soldier at the table.  The man in sunglasses looked round, 
caught sight of the little group, and strode across.
"Vous etes avec I'Americain?"
Angelina got to her feet and explained.
"No, he was on the plane with us, that's all.  This is his 
wife. They've never been in Haiti before, they don't 
understand yet." "Understand?"
"Respect.  They don't have respect."
The policeman nodded.  Reuben noticed that he had bad 
teeth.
Take him away," sunglasses said, 'before he gets hurt.  
When he comes round, explain to him.  Explain about 
respect."

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The coaches left five minutes later.
"Coaches' was a misnomer: all anyone could lay hands on at 
such short notice were two tap-taps, ancient trucks 
transformed by paint and tin and wooden panelling into a 
cross between a railway carriage and a vast communal taxi.
Gaudy paintings and portentous slogans gave them a mad, 
fairground air. One bore the legend "Celui qui dort dans la 
par esse se reveillera dans la mi sere all along the top 
edge.
"He who goes to sleep in idleness shall awaken in misery."
In the rush, Reuben managed to keep Angelina with him.  
They helped Jean Hooper pull her husband on board and made 
room for him on one of the two wooden benches that ran down 
the sides of the tap-tap.
Hooper's wound was bleeding heavily, but there was no hope 
of proper attention before they reached Port-au-Prince.  An 
elderly Haitian woman clucked round the unconscious man for 
several minutes, went away, and finally returned with some 
sort of poultice that she laid on the
wound.
Hooper moaned and struggled briefly, but did not recover 
consciousness. The woman explained to Angelina that she 
always travelled with a bag of herbs in case of illness.
The poultice contained cadavre gate, aloe vera, comfrey, 
borage, club moss and several other items Angelina did not 
recognize.  These would effectively staunch the bleeding 
until a doctor could put in sutures, but even the old woman 
admitted it was a makeshift job. Reuben hoped Hooper would 
stay out cold until then; but he thought it unlikely.
"He must see a dokte feuilles when he gets to Port-au-
Prince," she said, giving the name of a good man to 
Angelina.  Angelina made a note of the name, but she knew 
Hooper would never go there.  Like all missionaries, he was 
willing to give but unable to take.  That would be his 
downfall.
Jean Hooper was strangely useless, as though the shock of 
the incident had wrecked something fragile and lonely in 
her, something her faith could not quite restore.  Or 
something it did not even recognize.  She
sat on the bench beside her husband, near but not quite 
touching him, a small green backed prayer book in one hand, 
reading baroque invocations in a singsong voice that seemed 
oddly detached from both her and her surroundings.
Two soldiers were assigned to the coach, one to guard each 
end.
Technically, the passengers were still in transit and had 
to be watched until they had completed immigration 
formalities.  The soldiers seemed bored.  They ignored the 
passengers and were in their turn ignored.  On their laps 
they carried French F-11 carbines.
The guns were only .22 rim fires but in the confined space 
of a tap tap they could make their presence felt.
The tap-tap was uncomfortable, but it made solid progress 
along the road north.  For some reason the new highway 
direct to Leogane was closed, and they were forced to take 
the old river valley route via Trouin and Carrefour Fauche.
The darkness was not absolute.  With the passage of the 
storm, a large moon had taken possession of the sky, its 
edges rimmed with gold.  The road was a patchwork of mud 
and rain-filled potholes.
No other traffic passed, no-one walked or rode in either 
direction.
It was as though they had fallen off the edge of the world 
into an emptiness of rain and moonlight.  The tap-tap 
bumped and ground its way along in first and second gear, 
its vestigial suspension useless against the jolts and 
shudderings of the road.  Sometimes, when the tap-tap found 
an easy patch and the roar of the engine lightened, a 
humming of frogs and crickets drifted across the open 
fields.
Small hamlets stumbled past, mere clumps of thatched 
cailles clinging precariously to the sides of the little 
highway.  Doors and windows were firmly closed.  No-one 
came out to watch them pass.
In Haiti, only the sanspoel members of the Bizango secret 
societies and the police move at night.
They followed the stream bed as far as Trouin, fording its 
swollen waters again and again as they struggled along in 
low gear.  At Trouin, the driver turned left at the church 
and began the slow descent to the northern coast.  Behind 
them trundled the second tap-tap, carrying the remaining 
passengers.  The whereabouts of the luggage was an 
impenetrable mystery.
Most of the passengers had given their own up for lost.
The narrow road turned and twisted spasmodically, as though 
the dim headlights were carving it at every moment from the 
darkness.  Once, a small cemetery appeared out of nowhere, 
low whitewashed tombs behind a crumpled hedge of medidmer.  
There was no glass in any of the windows, and a cool breeze 
swept through the coach, refreshing at first, then 
chilling.  Out of the darkness, the perfume of night-
scented flowers came to them, ironic and heavy.
At Carrefour Fauche they turned right onto the main 
peninsula road.  It was nearing midnight.
Somewhere between Fauche and Dufort, they lost the second 
tap-tap.
Reuben remembered seeing its lights when they made the turn 
onto the wider road.  Five minutes later, it was no longer 
there.  Even on a long straight stretch it did not 
reappear.  Reuben mentioned the disappearance to Angelina, 
who spoke in turn to one of the soldiers. He
told her to shut up and sit down.
Doug Hooper was regaining consciousness.  For a moment his 
eyes flickered open, and Reuben thought he saw in them a 
flash of cold anger.  Then the pain washed over him and his 
eyes closed involuntarily.  The tap-tap lurched heavily, 
throwing Hooper hard against the side.  He let out a groan, 
wordless, distressed.  His wife increased her efforts to 
invoke a reluctant God.  The old woman rummaged in her bag 
and brought out a small blue bottle with a cork stopper.  
Taking Hooper's head in one arm, she contrived to open his 
mouth, un stopper the bottle, and administer a few drops of 
a dull brown liquid.  Hooper spluttered once, then grew 
limp.
Angelina asked the woman what she had given Hooper.  She 
merely shrugged and slipped the bottle back into her bag.  
Some remedies you don't talk about.  But whatever it was, 
it had an immediate effect. Hooper was unconscious again in 
moments.
They went through Leogane.  The road was better here, asp 
halted most of the way.  A road sign read "Port-au-Prince 
30 km'.
They would be there soon.  Nobody had told them whether 
they were being taken into the city or out to the airport.  
Probably the latter. No-one was going to get much sleep 
tonight.
The tap-tap had just crossed the first of the two bridges 
over the Monance River when the driver caught sight of a 
roadblock up ahead. Two police Jeeps were slewed across the 
road.  A uniformed policeman stood in the middle of the 
highway swinging a red lamp from side to side. The tap-tap 
driver pulled on his brakes and came to a halt several feet 
from the first Jeep.
"What's going on?"  he asked.
The policeman ignored him.  The door of the nearest Jeep 
opened and a man stepped down.  As he crossed the 
headlights, making for the front door of the tap tap, 
Reuben caught a glimpse of his face, all-seeing eyes hidden 
by dark sunglasses.  It was the secret policeman from the 
airport, the one who had ordered Doug Hooper to be struck.  
Obviously, the main Jacmel-Leogane road was not as 
impassable as they had been given to believe.
The man in the beige suit climbed into the tap-tap, 
followed by a younger policeman in uniform.  The atmosphere 
was tense.  At a signal from the constable, the driver shut 
off the engine.  A massive silence filled the vehicle.  In 
the distance an owl called twice.
The secret policeman looked slowly up and down the coach.  
His eyes did not rest on either Doug or Jean Hooper.  It 
was as though he had forgotten that incident.  Jean had 
fallen silent, mouthing her prayers if they were prayers 
behind tight lips.  The policeman reached inside his beige 
jacket and drew out two small books, American passports.  
He opened first one, then the other.
"Phelps," he said.
"Professor Myron Phelps and Madame Angelina Hammel."  He 
looked up.
"Will you please identify yourselves?"  He spoke in English 
with an American accent.
The question was a formality: their photographs were in the 
passports. Reuben stood up.
"What do you want?"
"You will please accompany me."
"Where to?"
The man said nothing in reply.  He replaced the passports 
in his pocket, turned and went back down the steps.  They 
could hear his feet on the blacktop as he walked back to 
the Jeep.  Then a door slamming. Then silence.  And finally 
the waiting night.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
They were driven at speed towards PortauPrince, the night 
thickening around them, a first whiff of pollution crowding 
the sea air.  Their Jeep travelled in front, carrying them 
and the men in Tonton Macoute uniform from the airport.  
The man in beige followed in the second car, driven by the 
younger policeman.
Shortly after Thor, they turned off to the right, heading 
into the hills above the capital.  Close to the city, the 
countryside was no longer deserted.  Cars and camionettes 
blundered past them, honking loudly up and down precipitous 
hills.  On the verges, mules piled high with sacks and 
bundles of firewood waddled in awkward convoys.  Along one 
side of the road, all heading in the same direction, a 
crocodile of peasant women passed, their heads heavy with 
fruit and vegetables that would be on sale by dawn in the 
city's Marche de Per.  Everyone they passed, whether behind 
a wheel or on foot, pretended not to see them. A rusting 
sign read "Petionville'.
"I used to live near here," Angelina whispered to Reuben.
"Up in the hills, away from the crowds, away from the dirt.  
It hadn't changed much when I last visited.  The rich still 
have their villas and their clubs.  The poor still live in 
Port-au-Prince."  As though in confirmation of her words, a 
shaft of bright moonlight plucked out a white villa perched 
above a rise, an elaborately twisted balcony facing the 
sea, a driveway choked with poinsettias, frangipani and 
flamboyants.  In a high window framed with bougainvillea, a 
solitary light kept vigil behind pale shutters.  Reuben 
glanced at Angelina as if seeing her for the first time.
Moments later, the Jeep swept noisily into an elegant, 
cypress lined square.  There was a small Catholic church on 
one corner.
Facing it, the Hotel Choucoune was still alive with 
merrymakers.  A handful of expensive cars sat on the gravel 
outside, guarded by a mournful-looking man in a battered 
cap.  They passed the hotel and drew up alongside a smaller 
building whose function would have been evident even 
without the sign reading "Garde d'Hai'ti' above the door.  
The second Jeep parked beside them and the man in beige 
stepped out.
They were ushered inside.  The door led precipitately into 
a square lobby that narrowed at the rear into a long, empty 
corridor.
Naked bulbs hung just above head height, each carving out a 
narrow jurisdiction.  On several of them hung old fly-
papers, thick with the bodies of dead insects.  Dead flies, 
dead air, dead lives.  On the walls were pinned rows of 
affiches, all bearing the texts of government declarations: 
Laws and bylaws, extracts from the penal code, decrets, 
reglements, avis, ordonnances de police.  The black letters 
stuck to the posters like yet more flies.  The edges of the 
affiches were brittle and curled.
A wooden chair and wooden table rested by one wall, under a 
photograph of President Ciceron.  There had been other 
photographs on that spot before: the marks of vanished 
nails were still visible in the unrepaired plaster, like 
the stigmata of small, unnecessary
crucifixions.  Nearby, a slogan had been painted in bold 
letters, strong orange against pale blue: Continuerons la 
revolution centre la tyrannic, le despotisme et le 
Duvalierisme.
No-one sat at the table.  No-one leaned against the wall.  
The entrance had a deserted, crumbling, expectant air.  
From somewhere nearby, a faint hum of machinery played 
lullabies to the night, un oiled bitter, unappealing.
The man in the beige suit directed them with a dirty 
fingernail to the corridor at the rear.  As they entered 
it, the sound of the machine faded and was lost.  No 
lullabies tonight.
Here, the mountain coolness that made Petionville so 
popular with the rich and powerful became a rheumatic, 
clinging chilliness.  Reuben had expected cries or screams, 
the cliches of a police state;
but nothing untoward broke the silence.  Nothing but the 
sound of their feet, echoing and hollow on the blistered 
concrete.
At the end of the corridor, a black metal staircase led up 
to the next floor.  Where it debouched onto a small 
landing, they turned left down a side corridor that led 
with the inevitability of a dream to a single steel-rimmed 
door.  The door bore no name, just a number:
AP7.  Beneath the number, earlier figures had been 
solicitously painted out.  And beneath that?
The man in the beige suit knocked.
Here, he was not king, ,4?
perhaps not even a prince.  But he kept his sunglasses in 
place.  A man needs his illusions.  A voice called out, 
"Entrez', and they went in.
It was not, Reuben decided when he thought it over later, a 
remarkable room.  All the harder, then, to understand why 
it so unsettled him. Perhaps he had carried with him from 
New York visions of blood-smeared walls.
Perhaps he had expected bright lights and hunted faces 
shining with sweat.  It was not like that at all.  It was 
plain and quiet, a mundane room in a tree-lined suburb.
The windows were shuttered, blank.  The walls were salmon-
pink, meticulously bare.  In one corner a birdcage hung, 
white, rococo, carpeted with seeds.  In its centre, on a 
wooden swing, a summer tanager perched, its rose-red 
plumage smooth and unruffled, its little black eyes, keen 
and sultry, watching them enter.
On a plain metal desk a simple reading lamp cast a soft 
glow on the features of the room's other inhabitant.  He 
was a man of medium height, a mulatto, aged about forty, 
refined rather than good-looking, sad-eyed, heavy-lidded, 
spent.  He wore a plain white linen shirt and a dark green 
tie of Chinese silk, perfectly knotted.  Pressed under 
other circumstances to describe him.
Reuben might have guessed his trade to be that of poet or 
musician. There was a wounded intensity about him, a 
fervour or a tentativeness that suggested inspiration or 
pain much internalized.
In his hand he held a fountain pen, poised above a sheet of 
paper.  He had just been writing or was about to write.  
The indeterminacy seemed deliberate, part of a game he 
played, a gesture with no purpose other than to keep others 
guessing.  There was nothing else on the desk, just the 
lamp and the sheet of paper.

Reuben looked quickly round.  The whole room was naked.  A 
birdcage for ornament, a desk to write on, a chair on which 
to sit.
And in one corner, a second chair, heavier than the first, 
bolted to the floor.
Thank you.  Captain Loubert," said the man behind the desk.
"That's all for now.  Leave the passports and go."
The man in beige took the passports from his pocket and 
left them on the desk.  The door closed behind him.  The 
silence that remained was palpable, charged.  For the first 
time all evening, Angelina seemed genuinely on edge.
"My apologies," said the man behind the desk, speaking 
easily in barely accented English.  They tell me you had a 
difficult flight, that your plane was diverted.  And now 
you have been dragged here to see me, miles out of your 
way, through that terrible Haitian countryside."
He stood and came out from behind the desk.  His chair 
grated unpleasantly across the floor.  In one hand he held 
the passports.
"How are you, Angelina?"  he asked.  He smiled, a broad, 
uninhibited smile, without depth.  He moved towards her, 
but kept a little distance.  Angelina remained silent, her 
eyes fixed on the floor.
"Why didn't you write?  Why didn't you tell me you were 
coming?  I could have met you at the airport, saved you a 
lot of trouble.  You don't want trouble, do you?"  He moved 
closer, put the palm of one hand against Angelina's cheek.  
She seemed upset by his nearness.  Upset, but not afraid.
"There was no time," she said.
"It was a last-minute decision."
The man looked hard at her.
"Evidently," he said.  His hand dropped and he faced 
Reuben.
"I am sorry," he said.
"I have not introduced myself.  Major Bellegarde, Chief of 
Security for this departement.  My jurisdiction covers 
Port-au-Prince and the surrounding region.  And you ..."
He glanced down at Reuben's passport.
"You are Professor Myron Phelps.  A friend of Rick's."
Bellegarde held out his hand.  Reuben took it.  Then shook 
hands with a restrained formality that seemed out of place.
"I have the honour to be Angelina's brother," Bellegarde 
continued.
"Rick's brother-in-law.  I confess I never knew him well, 
but I am nevertheless distraught to hear of his death.  And 
under such terrible circumstances.  One hears such dreadful 
things of New York.  Are they any nearer to finding his 
killer?"
Reuben shrugged.
"I couldn't say.  I've heard that the police may be closing 
the case for lack of evidence."

"But that is absurd!"  Bellegarde regarded his sister 
intently.
"Ma pauvre Angelina, a widow at such an early age.  I 
grieve for
you."
The major turned abruptly and went back to his seat.  He 
still had not apologized for the absence of chairs.
"What do you want with us.  Max?"
asked Angelina.  She seemed little affected by his 
frivolous show of compassion.
"To see you, that is all.  To satisfy my curiosity.  To 
remind you that Haiti is not always... a safe place.
N'est-ce pas?"
He spread the passports on the top of his desk, a little 
like a croupier preparing the table for a game of cards.
if" "You understand, do you not, that in the event of 
trouble, you cannot have diplomatic representation?"
"We are not expecting trouble," Angelina said.  It was a 
game in which no-one could speak the truth.
"Of course not.  But trouble sometimes comes, whether one 
wants it or not.  That is its nature."
He paused and pushed the passports towards the extremity of 
the desk, as though inviting them to come to him in order 
to collect them.
"You understand my function here?  We are no longer Tontons 
Macoutes. We are the Bureau de la Securite Nationale.
People are not afraid of us as they were of the Tontons.  
They come to us in moments of trouble.  It is our duty to 
prevent trouble, trouble of any description.  You do 
understand, don't you?"
"Is that why one of your men had an American citizen 
assaulted with a rifle butt at Jacmel airport this 
evening?"  Reuben had been storing up anger about the 
incident, unable to vent it until now.
Bellegarde did not flinch.
"The incident has been noted.  Mr.  Hooper will not be 
charged.
But he must learn to be careful.  I understand he has 
certain religious affiliations, that he is dedicated to a 
philosophy of obedience to the state.  We expect great 
things of a man with such a philosophy.  He in turn may 
have expectations here.  But first he has to learn where 
such obedience begins."  Bellegarde paused.  The tanager 
sang and fell silent.  Its wings had grown weak with long 
captivity.
"And you, Professor," the major continued.
"What is the purpose of your visit here?  I take it that 
you have a purpose, that you are not here merely for a bout 
of nostalgia."
"Myron is here to continue Rick's research," said Angelina, 
a little too hastily.
"Yes, of course, Rick's research," Bellegarde echoed.


"African influences on early Haitian culture."
He smiled deprecatingly.
"Our records are surprisingly complete.  We throw nothing 
away.  Not even from the old days."  He paused and turned 
his attention to Reuben.
"Forgive me, Professor, but is it not term-time?  
Shouldn't you be at where is it?  Long Island University, 
dispensing lore and wisdom?


The summer is the time for research, surely?"
"I'm on a sabbatical," answered Reuben.  Too glib, he 
thought.
Too ready with the right reply.
"I see.  Yes, of course, a sabbatical."
"There are plans to publish Rick's last book, the one he 
was working on when he was killed.  There may even be a 
festschrift, a memorial volume."  Reuben hurried on.
He was being imprudent, spending all his explanations in 
one go, but the room impelled him, the charge in it, the 
nakedness.
"I decided to come here to tie up all the loose ends.  Rick 
left plenty of leads."
Bellegarde smiled.  It seemed an honest enough smile, 
unforced.
"Leads.  You talk like a policeman, Professor.  You must 
find time to visit me, I'd like to chat about your leads.  
The dark continent, the new world, all of that.  You will 
keep in touch, won't you?"
"Well, of course.  Naturally."
"No, it's not natural at all.
Professor.  It would be natural to avoid this place as much 
as possible.  But I insist on our chats.  Nos petites 
causettes.  It is not the American way, I know, but I will 
force a certain intimacy on you.  Angelina knows me very 
well, of course.
She has no need of chats or intimacy, do you, Angelina?"
Angelina shook her head gently, pathetically.
"But you, Professor, I want to keep a fatherly eye on you.  
I want to be sure you are safe.  Angelina too, of course.  
A brotherly eye.
You would not credit it, but I have heard rumours of her 
death."
Bellegarde's eye caught Angelina's, a malicious capture.  
He did not smile.
"Unfounded rumours clearly:
witness your presence here tonight.  You are not a ghost, 
are you, Angelina?  Or one of our notorious zombis!  A 
zombi cadavre perhaps, or a zombi astral."  He hesitated.
"No, I don't think you are any of those.  You seem as alive 
as ever to me.  But rumours make me nervous.  They are a 
sort of neurosis, a malady that threatens the very basis of 
society.  Here in Haiti we take rumours very seriously.



My job is their 
elimination." Bellegarde 
stood.  He turned to 
face Reuben once more.


"Take my advice.  Professor.  Keep me informed of your 
activities.
The climate at this time of year can be very unhealthy for
foreigners."
He took the passports from the desk and handed them to 
Reuben and Angelina.
"Here," he said.
"You should keep these safe.  Perhaps you would be better 
with a passport from one of the Bizango societies.  That 
will allow you to walk freely by night, wherever you choose 
to go.
The sans poel walk where they wish.
But then you know all about Bizango."
Neither Reuben nor Angelina said anything.  In the cage, 
the tanager watched and listened.
"I do not know where you intend to stay for the duration of 
your visit, but I would appreciate it immensely if you 
would keep me notified.  A telephone call will do:
the phones are working very well these days.  Our beloved 
president places a premium on efficiency.
A new Haiti is emerging.  You will see.
"For tonight, I recommend you stay at the Choucoune 
opposite.
Mention my name: they will give you a preferential rate.  
Your luggage has been taken there already.
Everything is in order."  He glanced meaningfully at 
Angelina.
"Nothing has been disturbed.
You have my word for that."
Reuben nodded.
Thank you," he mumbled.  He felt foolish.  Bellegarde 
seemed not even to notice him.
"Angelina," said the major.
"I would like you to have something, a reminder of this 
reunion. Here." He went to the cage and opened the door.  
The tanager flapped its
wings and hopped along the bar.
Bellegarde whistled and slipped his hand towards the little 
bird.  He caught it expertly in a single motion.  It 
scarcely fluttered as he took it.  He held it out to 
Angelina.
"It's yours," he said.  The hotel will find a cage for you 
to keep it in.  It has no name.  You can call it anything 
you like."
She took the bird from him, flinching slightly as it 
wriggled in her cupped hand.  Bellegarde smiled and opened 
the door.
As they made to go, Reuben glanced down at the floor, where 
something had caught his eye.  On the wooden floor, near 
the doorjamb, there were traces of blood.
And beside the blood, like a tiny piece of ivory, a human 
tooth.
Reuben looked up.  Bellegarde took his hand and shook it.  
The light from the corridor fell across his body, casting a 
long shadow back across the floor, onto the second chair, 
the chair bolted to the
floor.
The man in the beige suit was waiting to take them out 
again.  He went ahead of them, back down the stairs, along 
the narrow corridor, into the sleeping lobby.  Not a word 
passed between them.
Outside, fairy lights were still shining on the hotel.  It 
was like a passing ship, white and appalling in the night.
Angelina opened her hands.  She had crushed the tiny bird 
to death. Its black eyes stared at her, seeing nothing.  
She dropped it quietly to the ground.  The air was cold.  
She shivered as they walked to the hotel.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Far below, the sea hummed and shimmered in a haze of 
morning heat.  It was as if there had never been a storm, 
would never be a storm again. Far away, draped in mist and 
white cloud, the lie de la Gonave marked the start of the 
deep waters of the western bay.
Northward, beyond the Cul-de-Sac plain, green and blue 
mountains touched a copper sky.  And beyond the mountains, 
yet more mountains, like an obsession, darkening as it 
gained in strength.
The taxi gave a jolt as it struck a pothole.  A moment 
later and they were out of the sunshine, drumming in steep 
shadows past a row of tattered wooden houses, their 
gingerbread eaves and latticed shutters twisted and broken, 
their gaudy paintwork stained and peeling.  The little 
Peugeot rounded a sharp bend, almost throwing off the cases 
precariously balanced on its roof rack
It was nearly noon.
Angelina had been tempted to stay in Petionville.  She had 
felt herself cocooned in the hotel.
Cocooned and seduced.  Clean white sheets, cool air, crisp 
linen on her breakfast table, hot chocolate a la franqaise.  
She had taken her time over breakfast, thinking of the 
insurance money that might soon be coming her way, of how 
many nights of clean sheets it would buy.
Then Reuben had come and punctured her idyll.  He had spent 
a sleepless night, harried by queer dreams and little 
nightmares.
Bellegarde knew everything, he had known before their 
arrival, he had been expecting them.  Was it perfidy or 
chance or a simple comedy of errors?  More than ever Reuben 
felt like a pawn in someone else's deadly game.  Should he 
tell Angelina that he knew Bellegarde had been in New York, 
that brother and sister had met there?
"We have to leave," he said.
"Bellegarde's on to us, he's stringing us along.  The best 
thing we can
do is keep out of his way."  He had come to her room after 
finishing breakfast in his.  They were sitting outside on 
her balcony, looking down into the hotel courtyard.
"You can't do that," she murmured, biting into a chocolate 
brioche.
"Why not?"
"You'll see," she said.  A thin line of melted chocolate 
trickled across her chin.  She licked it away lazily.
"Why didn't you tell me about him?
Why didn't you warn me?"
"What good would that have done?  He was bound to learn of 
our arrival sooner or later.  It was just a question of 
when."
"You said ... You implied your family had been pushed out 
of politics after your father, after his arrest.  How come 
your brother is head of the secret police in Port-au 
Prince?"
She shrugged.
"Oh, Maxeldwan is much more than that," she said.
"He's not just Chef de Securite for the capital, you know.  
That's just his official title.  Actually, Max runs the 
whole thing.  He reports directly to the president."
"You haven't answered my question."
Reuben was ill at ease.  Her manner had changed again since 
coming here, during the ride to Petionville.  She seemed to 
be slipping back into something he could not define, a 
style, a mannerism
"You forget that wheels come full circle here," she said.
"Max didn't like life in the wilderness, he wanted 
influence, he regarded it as his birthright.  So he changed 
his name to Bellegarde my mother's name.  Then he made the 
right friends and waited for Duvalier to go.  Duvalier 
went, Max's friends found their destinies, and Max was 
given his own little fiefdom."
With deft fingers she broke a croissant in half and spread 
butter and jam on it.  Carefully, she poured herself 
another cup from the silver chocolatiere.
"He knows who I am," said Reuben.
"Oh, I don't think so.  You're nobody.
Max is not omniscient."
"He knows I'm a policeman.  He hinted at it.
"You talk like a policeman, Professor," that's what he 
said."
Angelina smiled, as though indulging him.
"But he's right.  You do talk like a policeman.  You are a 
policeman. Nothing sinister in his guessing."
"Yes, Angelina, there is.  Bellegarde knows something is 
going on.  He knows I'm in this country under a false name, 
on a false passport.  He could have me arrested for that 
alone."

"That wouldn't be Max's way.  He'd never act hastily.  
Softly, softly, catchee monkey, that's his method.  He'll 
have us watched, see what we're up to.  And now..."  She 
laid her knife down.
"Suppose you tell me exactly what it is we're supposed to 
be doing here."
Reuben looked at her, astonished.
"You mean you don't know?  Didn't Sally fill you in?  She 
told me you understood the dangers, that you'd volunteered 
to come with me, show me the ropes."
Angelina nodded.
"She told me a little.  But I was still half-drugged on 
Sunday.  I'm only really coming round now.  Sally told me 
she was working for the government, that you had agreed to 
work for them as well.  She told me you're in trouble, that 
they've called off the investigation into Rick's murder, 
and that the only way for you to clear your name is to 
break into the group here.
And she told me I'd be in greater danger if I stayed in New 
York. Well?
 Is any of that true?"
He explained in as much detail as he could.  Angelina 
listened intently, watching the sun shift in the courtyard 
and tiny birds dart in and out of tall, elegant trees.
When he finished she remained silent for a while, her face 
a mask.
Sunlight touched her.  His fingers grazed her hand and 
moved away again.
"Watch out for Max," she said at last.
"He'll watch and wait and let you think you have a long, 
long rope. But in the end he'll hurt you.
And kill you if it pleases him."
Her chocolate had grown cold.  Tiny crumbs lay on her lap 
like gold. She shivered and was silent for a very long 
time.
The slums were worse than anything Reuben had imagined.
Angelina had insisted that the driver take them that way, 
she wanted Reuben to see, wanted him to get Haiti in 
perspective.  This was what she had been brought up to 
avoid, what her brother Max worked so hard to perpetuate.
The first thing Reuben noticed was the heat, the second was 
the stench. People lived here like dogs, like vermin, in 
their own excrement, in a world of garbage, among open 
sewers, beside the rotting carcasses of dead animals.
Their homes were cardboard boxes, plastic bags, pieces of 
beaten tin. They lasted a night, two nights, sometimes as 
much as a week, and then the rains came and hammered them, 
or a high wind rose out of the sea and blew them away, or 
fire broke out and burned them down.  The shanty town was a 
thing of wind and air, constantly shifting, growing, 
falling, combining, recombining.
Last night's storm had wrought havoc.
People scurried through mud and foul-smelling refuse, 
retrieving scraps of sacking, burlap and nylon, tin cans, 
broken sticks.
Brooklyn was bad.  Gibson Street was bad.  But compared to 
this, life there was luxury.  Reuben closed his window, 
shutting out the stench and the sounds.  But he could not 
shut out the faces.
They drove on into the city, through narrow streets packed 
with cars and tap-taps, pack animals and two-wheeled carts 
pulled by wheezing men and narrow-chested boys, a frantic 
explosion of legs and wheels, where nothing mattered so 
much as getting through at speed.  Reuben kept his eyes 
closed most of the way.  Angelina directed the driver to a 
quiet street near the Catholic cathedral, just off the rue 
Bonne Foi.  The street seemed to have no name.
Angelina did not give it one.
They stopped outside a two-storey wooden house, painted 
bright pink with blue shutters.  Worn steps led up to a 
glass-paned door.  Angelina pulled a bell while Reuben 
waited at the foot of the steps with the luggage.  People 
passed, staring uninhibitedly at him.
A few children called out bravely, "allo, bland' and ran 
away giggling. Footsteps sounded inside the house.  A young 
girl in a white dress opened the door and peered out.  
Angelina whispered a few words to her and she disappeared.
Seconds later, the doorway was filled with a tumult of 
noise and colour.  Angelina was swallowed up by a huge 
woman who seemed to be made of yard upon yard of bright 
printed cotton.  The two women embraced, held one another 
at arm's length, and embraced again.  And all at once 
Angelina was weeping uncontrollably, cradled in the other 
woman's vast bosom like a wounded child.
Still weeping, Angelina was led inside, leaving Reuben 
stranded at the foot of the steps.  The door had been left 
wide open.  He waited a minute longer, then just picked up 
the cases and carried them inside.
Angelina was not hard to find.  She had been taken to the 
rear of the house, to a large kitchen redolent with herbs 
and spices, where she sat on a low, stiff-backed chair 
surrounded by the huge woman and a cluster of others, all 
of lesser bulk.  Everyone ignored Reuben.
Bit by bit, Angelina's tears subsided.  Someone brought a 
bottle of clairin, someone else started singing in a low 
voice.  Finally,
Angelina glanced up and caught sight of Reuben standing 
awkwardly in the doorway, hot and ill at ease.  She smiled 
and beckoned to him.
"Reuben, I'm sorry, I've been very rude.  Let me introduce 
you."
She stood up and took the large woman's hand in hers.
"Reuben, this is Mama Vijina.  Vijina is a mambo, what you 
would call a voodoo priestess.  Rick and I always stayed 
here when we were in Haiti. She taught him what he knew 
about vodoun, introduced him to the mysteries.  I've just 
told her that he's dead.
Vijina liked Rick.  She was one of the few people who did.  
I think she understood him.  Or something."
Vijina was, Reuben guessed, in her mid-fifties, maybe a 
little older. Her body was a triumph of the flesh, hidden 
in a voluminous cotton robe printed with vibrant colours in 
an abstract pattern.  On her head she wore a matching 
scarf, tied in the traditional manner.
And between the two lay her face.
Reuben found himself unable to look away from her face, to 
disengage his eyes from her eyes.  It was an ordinary face 
raised by some inner alchemy to another level.
Or perhaps an extraordinary face toned down and made 
bearable for ordinary mortals.  The more he looked, the 
less he understood.  He sensed serenity and at the same 
moment anger; unbridled lust hand in hand with absolute 
purity; vision and blindness, pride and humility, age and 
infancy a mass of contradictions and no contradiction at 
all. He looked away at last, as though he had been 
released, and caught Angelina's eye.
"You'll see," she said.
"You'll see.
Rick didn't understand at first either."
Angelina turned and spoke quietly to Vijina in Creole.  
Reuben heard his name and once, he thought, that of Max 
Bellegarde.
There were other introductions.  No-one spoke English.
This is Locadi," said Angelina, pressing forward the young 
girl in white who had opened the door.  She seemed about 
sixteen, pretty but shy.
"Locadi is a hounsi, one of Mama Vijina's novices.  She'll 
look after us.  I'm told she speaks a little French, she'll 
understand if you speak slowly."
Half an hour later, food was brought:
some fried plantain, red beans, aubergine, plenty of rice.
During the meal, Reuben watched Angelina.  Since arriving 
at Mama Vijina's she had undergone another transformation.  
The spoilt brat of Petionville had vanished and been 
replaced by someone wholly at ease in these humbler 
surroundings.  She ate with a tin spoon, sharing a plate 
with two other women, unselfconscious, unaffected, happy.  
Reuben wondered who she really was.
After the dishes had been cleared away, Angelina explained 
that she wanted time alone with Mama Vijina.
"What about you, Reuben?  What would you like to do?"
"I think I should call on the Hoopers, see how Doug Hooper 
is.  Is it very far?  Maybe I can call a cab."
Angelina smiled.
This isn't New York.  Vijina doesn't have a telephone.  
Locadi will take you.  It isn't far.  Don't worry, you'll 
be perfectly safe.  It isn't Harlem out there.  Being white 
won't put you in any danger."


The mention of danger made Reuben frown.
"I'm not worried about the street.
What about here?  Does Bellegarde know about this place?"
"Max knows everywhere.  There's no point in trying to hide 
from him. Forget about him.  There are other people to 
worry about.  And this is


as safe as anywhere in Port-au Prince.  Trust me."
Even as she spoke the words, she remembered when she had 
last heard them.  Did Reuben remember too?
Better not to think.
He turned to go.  Locadi was waiting by the door.
"Reuben?"
He turned back.  Angelina stepped up to him and kissed 
him gently on the cheek, near his mouth.


"Be careful," she said.
"Whatever you do, don't get separated from Locadi."
She turned away.  Mama Vijina was waiting for her in 
another room. CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
New York
Sally glanced at Emeric, then crossed to the desk and took 
out a bottle of bourbon and a glass.  She drained the 
bottle and tossed it into the waste basket.  They were back 
in the glass tower, on a different floor, hugged by low 
clouds that left thin trails of condensation on the tinted 
windows.  It was like being in paradise, to be so high 
without wings.  Except that paradise was somewhere else, 
Sally did not know where.  All she knew was that it was not 
here, that this was an anteroom of hell.
"You should have told him," she said.
She did not face Emeric, could not bring herself to face 
him.
She looked through the window at the clouds, at the 
skyscraper lights reflecting off the droplets of water that 
made them.
"I told him a great deal," Emeric said.
"We both did."  He was standing at a bookshelf, sorting 
through
papers.
"More than he had a right to know, more than either of them 
was entitled to know."
' "Had a right"?  "Entitled"?  Jesus, you don't understand, 
do you? Who gives people rights?  Who entitles them?  
Reuben Abrams deserves to be told everything there is to 
know about this operation.  You can give him that right."
"And just what do you think he ought to know?  Beyond what 
we've told him already, that is."
She took a sip of bourbon, changed her mind, and drank it 
all in a single swallow.  It took a while for her to reply.
"That twelve out of fourteen agents we had working as a 
surveillance unit in Haiti were massacred last week.  That 
there's going to be a coup d'etat there any day now.  And 
that they are likely to get caught up in the fighting.
Caught up, arrested, tortured, and put to very messy 
deaths."
IV
That's not necessarily true.  If all goes well..."
"Fuck you, Emeric!  Just how much chance do you think there 
is of that?"  She paused.
"Did you tell Reuben about Bellegarde?"
"Only that he is Angelina Hammel's brother.  That he is 
chief of the security police."
Sally turned sharply to face him.
"Is that all?  Didn't you think to tell him who Bellegarde 
really is? Who he believes he is?"
"I didn't think it would help Abrams to know.  I didn't 
think it was that important.  I still don't."
"What about her, what about the woman?"
"What about her?"
"You know damn well what I mean.  Does she know?"
Emeric shrugged.
"I expect so.  Yes.  I spoke to her.  I think she 
understood."
"You think?"
Emeric put down a pile of papers.
"Sally, this whole thing happened so quickly.  If we'd 
taken time to ask questions, put both of them through a 
proper debriefing, whatever, the whole business would have 
been over before they even got to
Haiti."
"So you just sent Reuben into that... mess..  . without a 
clue as to why he's really there, without any backup ..."
"He's got backup."
"What?  A couple of frightened agents who are doing what 
they can to get the fuck out of there before somebody 
slices their throats?"
"I'm going to get more people in.  I'm taking people out of 
Cuba and the Dominican Republic."
"Who know next to nothing about the situation in Haiti."
Emeric played with his papers.  He looked nervous.
"Some of them have been there before.
Look, Sally, I don't like this any more than you do.  I'd 
prefer not to use Abrams like this.
But I don't have any choice.  And from the look of things 
he doesn't have much choice either."
Sally looked down on the clouds.  She thought of the city 
hidden below, of the streets, of the tunnels beneath the 
streets.  She thought of Reuben kissing her, on a Sunday 
afternoon in August, long ago, or so it
seemed.  She thought that she could jump out onto the 
clouds and that they would buoy her up for ever.
And she knew it was all an illusion.
Emeric was right.  None of them had a choice.  They had 
what anyone else had: they had their pick of illusions.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Hooper was in bed in a cramped room behind the shop, 
surrounded by cases of books stamped "Baha'i Publishing 
Trust, Wilmette, Illinois'. The room was stuffy, 
malodorous, dimly lit.
Hooper was propped up against a pair of dirty pillows.  
Blood had soaked through the bandage on his jaw.
He had been given a shot of something, morphine probably, 
and told to rest.  A prayer book lay on a chair beside the 
bed.  Next to it sat a half-eaten portion of rice and beans 
on a tin plate.
Reuben had brought a bottle ofclairin, genuine Barbancourt, 
the very best.  Hooper refused it.  Reuben shrugged: he 
should have guessed they'd be tee total  Locadi shrugged as 
well and slipped the bottle into her bag: it would make a 
suitable offering for the loa.
Her gods were not so particular nor so mean-spirited.
"I guess I stepped out of line last night," said Hooper 
between gritted teeth.  He could scarcely move his jaw, was 
lucky it had not been broken.
"What you did was stupid," said Reuben.
"But I admired you for it.  You'll convert me yet."
Hooper shook his head.  His eyes seemed melancholy, focused 
on middle America.
"It wasn't the Baha'i thing to do.
Law and order come before personal conscience.  I was 
interfering with the rule of law.  Maybe that policeman was 
rough, but this is his country.  I'll pray for him, of 
course.  I'll pray for him and the man he hit, both of 
them.  But I was out of line."
"It was the Christian thing to do," said Reuben.
"Most people don't have the courage to step in like that.  
Maybe it would be better if more of us did."
"You a Christian?"
Reuben wondered what he was supposed to answer.  The truth 
was simplest.
"No, a Jew.  What's your position on
Jews?"
"Oh, we love all religions.  God has revealed himself in 
many ways, to many people.  But you Jews keep missing out.  
You rejected Christ, then Muhammad, and now Baha'u'llah."
Reuben said nothing.  He looked round the dingy, windowless 
room, at the dirty walls.  It was stifling.  Someone had 
hung a piece of Arabic
calligraphy high up above the bed.  It was the only new 
thing.
"Not much of a place, is it?"  Hooper said.
Reuben shook his head.
"Jean will have it spick and span in a couple of days.  
She's a marvel. Wait and see."  He leaned across the bed 
and fumbled on the floor, coming back up again with a box 
in his hand.  He laid it on the bed and reached inside, 
drawing out a Hershey bar.
"Here," he said, holding it out to Locadi.  An American 
with a candy bar, an impoverished child: the old, simple 
equation.
Locadi hesitated, then smiled and took the chocolate, 
ramming it in beside the da iring in her bag.
Reuben cleared his throat.
"Is there anything I can get you?
Food?  Medicine?"
Hooper shook his head, wincing as he pulled a suture.
"No, thanks.  The friends are looking after us.  We have 
everything we need."
"If you find you do want something or if... you do have 
trouble on account of this business at the airport, let me 
know.  Locadi can leave the address with your wife."
Thank you.  The doctor says I can get up tomorrow.  Maybe 
we'll come and visit you."
"Yes," said Reuben, wondering how Mama Vijina would take a 
visit from missionaries.
"Yes, that would be nice."
He spoke to Jean Hooper on the way out.  She was in the 
shop arranging books, along with two Haitians and a third 
man whom she introduced as Sirus Amirzadeh, an Iranian.  
Amirzadeh was a pharmacist, he had supplied the drugs for 
Hooper.
A refugee from the Islamic Revolution, he had lost a 
brother and a cousin back in Iran, both executed.  The 
faith had started in Iran, was a persecuted minority there.
Reuben asked him why he had come to Haiti.  He gave the 
same answer as the Hoopers: "To be a pioneer.  Muhajir, we 
say in Persian.
Someone who leaves home for the sake of God."  He was aged 
about thirty, slim, middle-class, intelligent.  He spoke 
good English.
Reuben would not have taken him for a missionary.
"I was taken through a slum this morning," Reuben said.
"Maybe you've seen it, it's south of the city, on the way 
to Carrefour."
"Yes, I've seen it.  There are several slums in Port-au-
Prince.  Haiti has the worst shanty towns in the western 
hemisphere."
"What does your faith say about that?

Will your being here make any difference to them?"
Amirzadeh shook his head.  He had large, soulful eyes, eyes 
without ambiguity.  Reuben could not look at them.
There is very little we can do.  We are a poor religion, 
not like your American evangelists.  Whenever we can, we 
put some money into development, education.
This shop is part of an educational project."
Jean Hooper broke in.
"Giving people bread isn't getting to the real problems, 
you know. What they need is a new society, a new structure.  
If you're living in a house that's falling down, you don't 
try to patch it up, you go out and build a new one.  That's 
why we're here, Sirus and Doug and myself. We're laying the 
foundations for a new order.
One day there'll be a Baha'i state here, eventually 
there'll be a Baha'i world state.  Then you'll see.
The whole world under a single faith.  All mankind as one.  
Justice everywhere, no poverty, no starvation.  You must 
learn to take the long view.  Professor Phelps."
Her eyes were shining.  Like the Iranian's, they lacked 
ambiguity, they were vehicles for certainty.  Her vision of 
a perfect world was the only rapture she possessed; it 
sustained her, it would let her walk through slums without 
flinching.
Reuben said nothing.  He wanted to ask how these people 
could plan to build a state and claim not to be involved in 
politics.
But it was beyond him.  He said nothing and left.
In a doorway facing the shop a man in sunglasses was 
watching them, not trying to conceal his presence.  Locadi 
craned her neck and whispered in Reuben's ear, "Securite'.  
He nodded and they passed on.  The man did not follow.  So 
Max was keeping an eye on the Hoopers.
Whether it was tiredness or being in unfamiliar 
surroundings or the annoyance he still felt at Jean 
Hooper's vision, Reuben let himself be careless.  The man 
in the doorway was not the only watcher in the street.  
Other eyes followed him as he walked back with Locadi, 
gazing up like any sightseer at the pink and white towers 
of the great cathedral.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Macandal made contact on Saturday morning, not in person 
but through an intermediary.  He used a child, a boy sent 
to deliver bottles of orgeat to Mama Vijina from a shop on 
the rue Borgella.
There was to be a vodoun gathering that evening, at 
Vijina's houngfor on the outskirts of the city.
The orgeat, sweet and sticky, along with bowls of flour and 
eggs, would form part of an offering to Damballah.  With 
the bottles came a message addressed to Reuben as Professor 
Phelps, asking him to meet Macandal that night, at the 
houngfor.  The message did not refer to a gun, but it did 
hint at Macandal's having something Reuben would find 
useful.
"Am I invited?"  Reuben asked Angelina.  They were sitting 
alone on the se afront watching small boats unload their 
goods: coffee from Jacmel,
vetiver from Ducis, sisal and rubber from St.  Marc.
Large sacks moved from the wharf side to waiting carts.  
Men sweated, grinning or frowning under their heavy loads.  
There was plenty of work to do.  But no-one was getting 
rich.
To the houngfor?  Of course.  You're an anthropologist, a 
student of vodoun, it's natural that you should go."
"I won't know what to do, I'll be out of place."
Angelina grinned and shook her head.
The sea breeze caught her hair and lifted it gently.  
Behind them, the city was dimmed by a faint haze of 
pollution.  Dockers shouted, throwing heavy crates and 
sacks ashore.
"Don't worry," she said.
"I'll be with you.  There are no formalities.  You won't be 
expected to do anything, just watch.  You can do that, 
can't you?"
"What about you?  Will you watch?  Or take part?"
She shrugged.
That depends."
"Depends on what?"  A seagull whirled past, white and 
mocking.
"On the ha.  You cannot make them come.  You can invite 
them, cajole them, even bribe them; but in the end they 
come on their own terms."
"Will Max's man bother to follow us there?"
He was alluding to the man in shades who had tailed them 
all the way from Mama Vijina's down to the docks and who 
was still there, watching from a distance, partly hidden 
behind a derrick.
"Yes," she answered.
"They aren't as stupid as all that.  Don't underestimate 
Max or the people who work for him.
They aren't being clumsy: they want you to see them.  Be 
careful tonight when you meet this Macandal.  It's a good 
place to meet, but don't think there won't be eyes on you."
Reuben looked out to sea, past the pollution of the harbour 
to the simplicity of the blue horizon.
Over two hundred years ago, something had come here from 
beyond the ocean, something for which men were still 
prepared to kill.
Now boats arrived with a different cargo: white and soft, 
but just as deadly.
"Let's go back," he said.
"I feel as if I'm on vacation here.  We came to do a job: I 
want to take a proper look at Rick's notes."
Angelina stood.  She looked around and saw what Reuben saw: 
a polluted city on the edge of a blue sea, squalor at the 
foot of soaring mountains, corruption in paradise.  But 
this was only the surface.  If there was time, she would 
peel back the covers and show him what lay
underneath.  She would begin tonight.
They spent the afternoon in Mama Vijina's tiny front 
parlour, reading Rick's notebook.  It was a large volume of 
over three hundred pages. Rick had kept laborious notes of 
all his researches, with cross-references, bibliographical 
details and the texts of especially important passages.
Throughout the book he had pasted or stapled news cuttings, 
photocopies and letters.  It was comprehensive and it was 
dynamite.  The further Reuben read, the better he 
understood the Order's anxiety to lay hands on it.  The 
notebook contained names, addresses, positions, details of 
criminal acts committed by Order members, surmises as to 
the real extent of their influence in American society.
If half of what Rick had discovered was true.  Sally and 
her fellow agents from the CSA were fishing in shark-
infested waters.
An entire section of the notebook was devoted to material 
on the slave trade.  It had been through his research into 
the movement of human cargoes from Africa to the New World 
that Hammel had first traced the origins and spread of the 
Seventh Order.  His notebook was filled with photocopies 
and original documents related to his search, above all his 
quest for the ship that had brought the cult from Tali-
Niangara to the shores of Haiti.
Slowly, out of ancient paper and faded ink, a world began 
to take shape for Reuben.  A barbaric, incomprehensible 
world whose boundaries were chains and fetters, hooks and 
branding irons.  As Angelina read to him, translating the 
dry accounts and stiff letters of long-dead traders and 
sea-captains into the living accents of her voice, phantoms 
took on flesh.
Young men sold for a piece of Guingamp cotton or an ancre 
of spirits, women made captive for a handful of rassades or 
a toque of cowrie shells, children snatched from their 
parents for a cocked hat or a dash of cotton.  Black bodies 
crammed like books on a shelf into the holds of tiny, 
airless ships.  The long wait off glittering African coasts 
for the ships to be fully slaved, the wasted bodies tossed 
overboard, the smell of vinegar on sundrenched decks, the 
suicides, the 'bloody flux', scurvy, the land receding, the 
open sea, the long journey into slavery.
Above all else, it was the imagined sounds that made 
Reuben's flesh creep in the silence of Mama Vijina's house: 
the roaring of surf, the creaking of timbers, the riveting 
of irons, the rattling of chains, the cracking of sisal 
whips, the groans of the sick and the despairing, the wind 
in tattered sails, the sizzling of tall owed flesh beneath 
the brand, the snapping of brittle bones.
They found what they were looking for late that afternoon.
Towards the back of the notebook.  Rick had made a long 
entry in red ink under the heading: "Haiti Items to be 
checked in Archives."  The note consisted of a list of 
eighteenth-century newspapers published in St.  
Domingue/Haiti: the official gazette, Les Affiches 
Americaines; the Journal General de Saint-Domingue, La 
Gazette du Jour, the Journal de PortauPrtnce, L "Aviseur du 
Sud and La Sentmelle du Peuple.  In the margin Rick had 
placed several exclamation marks.  And he had underlined 
the entire entry twice.
By each title, he had written a series of dates ranging 
from May to September 1775.  Underneath, in a series of 
circles, he had jotted down several names, each with a 
question mark: Nairac?
Maniable?  Castaing?  Le Jeune?

The previous page of the notebook had contained an entry 
dated a few months earlier, immediately prior to Rick's 
departure for Africa.  If he had been planning on an 
investigation in the archives at Port-au-Prince, he had not 
been able to carry it out.  Reuben and Angelina would go to 
the archives first thing in the morning.
While they were reading, it had grown late.  There was a 
quiet knock on the door and Locadi entered.
"It will soon be time to leave," she said.  The gods will 
be waiting at the ptristyle."
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
In darkness, night begins.  The air had grown thick with 
drumbeats.
They were calling the night, urging it to take possession.  
Those who feared the darkness barred their doors and 
windows.  Others watched and listened, remembering.
The night was warm, but Reuben shivered as he stepped into 
the car, a small Peugeot he had hired that morning.  
Angelina climbed into the driver's seat, while four of Mama 
Vijina's friends crammed themselves impossibly into the 
rear.
Even with the doors closed, they could hear the drums, 
hard, insistent, at the edges of the night.
They drove through startled, ugly streets, past cramped and 
huddled buildings, silences, fears, beggars in doorways, 
tattered flags, shutters that winked briefly and slammed 
shut as they passed.  Angelina headed straight down to the 
rue du Quai, then north towards the airport.  They passed 
the ro-ro terminal on their left, then Bowen airfield on 
the right, and headed out into the plain.  The city 
flickered, stuttered, and finally faded away entirely.
The darkness entered them.  No-one spoke.  They were 
already half-divine.
The road took them down avenues of mango trees, ripe fruit 
hanging at the ends of long green stems.  Soon the trees 
gave way to dark fields of sugar cane, still and silent in 
the unmoving night.
Here and there, houses appeared in their headlights, 
whitewashed like tombs, hunched beneath the shade of giant 
palms.
A side road took them down to the peri style the central 
building where most of the night's activities would take 
place.  People had already gathered in large numbers.
Some had arrived on foot, others by camionette, several by 
bicycle, a few by car.  The benches were packed with men, 
women and children, dressed in their finest clothes, but 
behaving more as if they were at a picnic than a religious 
service.  Some were smoking, some were drinking from 
bottles of kola-champagne, a few were sipping clairin.
At the centre of the peri style rose a tall pole, a tree 
trunk trimmed and set upright in a circular concrete base.  
It was down this tree that the loa would descend, entering 
the lower world from the realm of the spirits.  The base 
had been decorated with lively paintings: a Haitian flag, a 
black goat, a serpent, several crosses, a human skull. On 
it stood candles in iron holders, several bottles of rum 
and sundry offerings.
The Hoopers were there, near the door leading into the 
bagui, the inner
sanctuary.  Locadi had asked them and they had come ahead 
in a camionette with Mama Vijina.  They looked awkward and 
out of place, most of all because they were trying so hard 
to act natural and be nice to everybody.  Doug Hooper's 
cheek was no longer bandaged, but for two inches it was 
severely marked by a line of black sutures, surrounded by 
the yellow and purple of bruised flesh.  Jean had put on 
her best frock, but beside the vivid colours of those worn 
by the women around her, it seemed tame and drab.  Doug 
caught sight of Reuben as he and Angelina entered, smiling 
and waving as though relieved to see another white face.
They found seats near the entrance.
Angelina was different tonight, her hair, her skin, her 
eyes had changed.  She wore a bright red scarf and a 
matching dress.  In the light of the flaming torches 
planted round the peri style she seemed to take fire.  Men 
noticed her, some casting unequivocal glances in her 
direction.  Several women caught sight of her and smiled, a 
few came across to hug and kiss her, reminding her of when 
they had last met. Reuben felt excluded.  He looked round 
the peri style wondering which of the participants was 
Macandal.  Maybe he had not yet arrived.
A heavy drum began to beat, the se gond hunting for a 
rhythm, running, catching, halting for breath, starting up 
again.  Then, tacking round it, the staccato flourishes of 
the kata, sharp and nervous.  And finally the deep 
throbbing of the largest drum, like a rumbling from a deep 
pit.  People shuffled in their seats, awaiting the start of 
the ceremony, but no-one sat up straight or adopted a pious 
expression. Someone laughed, a couple argued, a child cried 
out.  People still came and went, some carrying plates of 
hot grillot or bottles of warm kola they had bought at a 
little stand outside.
Suddenly, the drums stopped.  A door at the rear of the 
peri style opened wide and Mama Vijina appeared, 
accompanied by half a dozen hounsis carrying flags and a 
man dressed in white with a red scarf tied round his neck.
Mama Vijina proceeded to the poteaumitan and began to pour 
libations of rum and other spirits all around its base.  
Reuben felt a shiver of unfamiliarity pass along his spine.  
This was not the affable, simple woman in whose house he 
had spent the past two days.  Her features, her bearing, 
her stature all had changed.  She was the room and the 
night, the music, the darkness, the flaming torches; all 
eyes were focused on her, she took them and drew them into 
herself, ready to discharge them when she became a steed 
for the gods to ride.
The hounsis formed a semicircle and began to sing, clapping 
their hands softly for the rhythm:
Legba!  soleil te leve, Legba,


Ouvri barrie pou man, Legba Ouvri bamepou toute mouneyou 
Mail' passe toute mourn main Bondye.
Her libations completed, Mama Vijina started to greet her 
visitors. Those well known to her she would take by the 
hand, leading them out onto the floor before turning them 
in a single pirouette as a mark of honour.  The Hoopers 
she ignored.
She came towards Reuben and Angelina, not a large, fat 
woman any longer, but a priestess privy to mysteries.  To 
Reuben she merely


nodded, in recognition of his presence and the fact that he 
was her guest; but Angelina she took by the hand and turned 
three times on the dusty floor, her eyes fixed on 
Angelina's, her head nodding again and again in approval or 
encouragement.  Angelina seemed flustered and sat down in 
some confusion.  Reuben noticed people looking at her.
The ceremony bent the night to shape.
Mama Vijina stood near the poteau-mi tan setting a rhythm 
for the 'zepaules, the first dance, purifying the air, 
purifying the bodies of those present for the coming 
theophany.  All round the peri style people clapped and 
stamped their feet.  The drums acquired a voice, rising, 
falling, speaking aloud.  Mama Vijina began to sing, a song 
for Erzulie, a song for Sin Jak Maje, a song for Damballah-
wedo, bringing them down, drawing them in.  The drums went 
out among the crowd, tearing away both thin and heavy veils 
from eyes and faces, revealing other eyes, other faces 
underneath.
The gods entered her one by one.  She knew their 
personalities, their likes and dislikes, their voices and 
their gestures.  The hounsis brought out the clothing and 
accoutrements for each in turn: Sin Jak's sword, his rum 
and Florida Water; Gede's hat and dark glasses; Erzulie's 
gold-edged veil of blue.  And she put them on and danced, 
possessed, entranced.  And as he watched, Reuben understood 
what he had seen that first day, when he had puzzled at the 
contradictions in Mama Vijina's face.
At her side, the hounsis began to tremble as the loa 
entered them, twisting, jerking, staggering.
And now the mood was changing and the gods were moving to 
the edges of the crowd.  Reuben looked round as a woman 
near him started to tremble, then stood up, swaying from 
side to side.
She saluted Mama Vijina, who turned her in a triple 
pirouette, then continued dancing.  A hounsi produced a 
live white chicken from somewhere and began to dance, 
holding the bird by its legs, swinging it round and round 
her head, wings flapping wildly, head twisting from side to 
side in a futile bid for freedom.  Feathers tore loose and 
fluttered to the ground, the hounsi rose and fell, the 
chicken's struggles grew weaker and weaker.  And suddenly 
she took its head in her hand and twisted, tearing the head 
away, scattering blood over her white dress.
Wings jerked convulsively, feathers fell like snow, the 
young girl danced.  It was Locadi.
Someone touched Reuben on the shoulder, then a voice 
whispered in his ear, "Follow me."  He looked round in time 
to see a man walking away from him, someone dressed in a 
white T-shirt and jeans.  The T-shirt bore a slogan printed 
in black: I Ran the World.  Reuben turned to Angelina to 
say he had to leave, but she did not respond.  Her eyes had 
glazed over and she was breathing heavily, sliding deeper 
and deeper into trance.
"Are you all right, Angelina?"  Reuben bent over her, 
worried.  He took her hands in his, trying to get her 
attention.  A woman sitting next to Angelina frowned and 
pulled his hands away, shaking her head.
Throughout the peri style men and women were entering 
various levels of trance, some still seated, others rising 
and dancing or acting out the parts of the gods who were 
riding them.  Reuben reasoned that Angelina could come to 
no harm.  These people knew what to do.  And he had 
business to attend to.
The man in the T-shirt had gone.

Reuben stood and went in the direction he had taken, 
towards the entrance.  There was no-one in a white T-shirt 
near the door.  He stepped outside.  It took half a minute 
for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.  He could see no-
one.
Behind him, the sound of drumming and singing seemed 
suddenly remote. He could hear frogs croaking.
Above him, stars riddled a black sky, more stars than he 
had ever
seen.
He walked away from the peri style  In the darkness he 
could make out only shadows, trees and bushes, mediciniers, 
mapous and sharp
sabliers.
There was a rustling in the bushes to his left, then a 
shadow, moving away quickly, a man running.
Reuben shouted out, but the man had gone.  He thought of 
running after him, but knew it would be a waste of time in 
the darkness.  Instead he hurried towards the bushes.
Barely visible in the starlight, something white lay on the 
ground. Reuben ran over and knelt down.  The man in the T-
shirt and jeans was lying there, moving spasmodically.  
There was a sound like a balloon deflating.  Then a harsh 
bubbling.  Then nothing.  The limbs convulsed once and 
stopped moving.  Reuben leaned across, trying to see the 
man's face.  His head was framed in a spreading pool of 
blood.  Someone had opened his throat with a thin blade.  
The blood glistened dully in the starlight.  Somewhere 
drums were beating.
i ' 'ftCHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Quickly, Reuben frisked the body of the man he thought to 
be Macandal. There was something under his T-shirt, a hard 
object taped round the waist.  Reuben used his pocket-knife 
to cut away the tape.  The object was a gun, an automatic 
pistol presumably the weapon Jensen had promised in New 
York.  With it, taped to Macandal's back, were several 
magazines.  The CSA kept its promises.  At a price.
Reuben stood, fumbling with the magazines, trying to slip 
them into his jacket pockets.  They were heavy, they would 
make the jacket hang suspiciously.  He had to assume that 
someone might be looking.  There was little point in trying 
to find the killer.  And even less point in drawing 
attention to himself by alerting people to his discovery.  
Let someone else find him in the morning, next week, next 
month.
Taking the body under the armpits, Reuben pulled him back 
further into the bushes, where he would be better hidden.  
He scuffed over his own footprints, knowing that he was 
obscuring the killer's at the same time.  He sensed that it 
did not matter.
He headed back towards the peri style
With luck, no-one would have missed him, or at best they 
would have assumed he had answered a call of nature.  The 
drums were beating faster now, the singing was growing 
hoarse.  He wondered what was happening to Angelina.
Someone was standing by the entrance.
As he drew nearer.
Reuben saw that it was Hooper.  The American was looking 
flushed.
"I thought I saw you come out," Hooper said.  Thought I'd 
do the same. It's a little hot and smoky in there.  Guess 
I'm still not feeling like I should."
Reuben still had the gun in his hand.
He reached behind his back and slipped it into the 
waistband of his trousers.  But something told him Hooper 
had noticed.  He wondered if the missionary had seen 
anything else.
"I'd heard about this stuff before we came out.  Doesn't 
make a lot of sense to me, though the folks in there seem 
happy enough.  I can see it's going to be an uphill 
struggle to make any headway here.
They're a bit like children, don't you think?"
"Didn't seem that way to me.  Most of them looked pretty 
grown-up." "You think so?"
"It's their way.  Hooper.  They've been Catholics for three 
hundred years.  It hasn't made more than a superficial 
impression.
This is their religion, they want to keep it.  I can 
understand.  It ties you to your past.  They don't want 
something new."
"We'll see."
Hooper shifted uneasily.  There was a heady smell in the 
air, a fragrance too exotic for his suburban nostrils.  
After the fumes and incense of the peri style he felt 
subverted.
Reuben moved to go back inside.  He didn't want to be away 
too long in case his absence was noted.
Hooper put a hand on his arm, drawing him back.  He put his 
face up close to Reuben's.
"You know these people, Professor.
What do you think?  Can they be trusted?"
Reuben shrugged.  Just what was Hooper's game?  His bruised 
cheek looked hot and diseased in the light that escaped 
from the watt led enclosure behind them.  Their 
conversation was half drowned by the throbbing of drums and 
the pounding of dancing feet.
"As much as anybody, I suppose?  Why?"
Hooper hesitated.  He had bad breath.
Reuben remembered the half-finished meal of rice and beans.
"Well, I'll tell you," he said, like someone with a guilty 
secret. "Something's wrong.  I'm not sure what I should do.  
I went to see General Valris this morning.  Dapper little 
guy, a mulatto.  They say he's rich, owns a couple of 
plantations and some factories.  Well, went to see him to 
talk about the shop.  You recall I told you he was the one 
who asked us to come here, made a lot of noises about 
having an English-language bookshop in Port-au-Prince.  
Only this morning he didn't seem to remember any of that.
"I had to wait two hours before I could get in to see him.  
Didn't seem to me that he was busy, though.  I
think it was done just to get
38# me on edge.  I thought maybe he'd heard something about 
... About what happened when we got here, out at the 
airport.  But that wasn't it."
Reuben thought he could guess what was coming.  You didn't 
have to be too bright to see it.
"We talked a bit about the shop, but he seemed like he'd 
lost interest. Kept looking out the window, fiddling with a 
cigar, hardly listening. After a while he just went quiet.  
So I went quiet too, and we just sat there looking at one 
another.  Then he leaned forward, his big cigar in his 
hand, like he was going to confide in me or something, and 
he said will you believe this?  he said "Your people have a 
lot of money, don't they?"  though it didn't sound like a 
question to me."
Reuben nodded.  What else had Hooper expected?  A kiss on 
his wounded cheek?
"I see.  What did you tell him?"
Hooper pulled himself up, his eyes freshly filled with 
outrage.
"What the hell do you think I told him?  I said we were a 
poor religion, we didn't have money like some big sects he 
might be thinking of."
"Don't you?"
"No, sir, we don't.  Most of our followers are what I 
suppose you'd call Third World people.  We had money in 
Iran at one time, but that all finished after Khomeini came 
to power."
"A lot of sects have money.  The televangelists pull in 
millions.
Even after what happened to Jim Bakker, they still bring in
millions."
That's what Valris said.  Hell, I told him we're not an 
operation like that."
"You have a lot of temples and some pretty fancy buildings 
in Israel. I've seen photographs.  Your set-up didn't look 
too poor to me."
"Take my word for it, Professor, we don't have money to 
spare.
Anyway, that isn't the point.  Even if we had, it wouldn't 
be available for the purposes Valris had in mind."
"Which were?"
"Come on, you know.  He was going to feather his own nest.  
He'd dream up some project, some educational project to 
launder it all through, but it would end up in his own bank 
account.  He's up to something, he needs cash badly.  He... 
He more or less threatened that if I didn't persuade my 
people to come up with the cash, we'd be finished here. All 
of us, not just
Jean and myself.  Do you think he could do that, have us 
thrown out?"
Reuben nodded.
"I'm sure he could.  You and your wife, no problem.  You'd 
be out on the next plane, he'd only have to sign a piece of 
paper.  With
Haitians he might not even have to bother with the 
formalities.
Can you get the money?"
Hooper shook his head.  Beads of sweat had formed on his 
forehead.  He was having difficulty holding down his anger.
"No, I'm not even going to try.  All we can do is pray.  Or 
maybe you know someone with influence, someone we could 
talk to.  I'm told your friend Mrs.  Hammel is sister to 
the chief of police.  Is that true?"
Reuben nodded.
"Yes," he said, 'it's true.  But I don't think Angelina has 
much influence with her brother."
"One of the friends here tells me they're very close."
"He must be mistaken."
"Professor, we have a lot to offer this country, we can 
help in plenty of ways.  But not with cash.
Please ask Mrs.  Hammel to speak to her brother at least."  
I'll do what I can."
"Please do.  Professor.  We need to stick together.  I need 
you, but you might need me.  We can help one another."
"I don't understand.  I don't need help."
Hooper looked sideways at Reuben.  His battered face came 
close.
"Perhaps you do, Professor.  We all need help.  Keep in 
touch you know where to find me."
Reuben left Hooper standing in the doorway and went inside.
Angelina was in the centre, dancing with Mama Vijina, her 
hair uncovered, her dress pulled back from her shoulders, 
the tops of her breasts visible, sweat on her skin, her 
body swaying.  The dance was a grinding parody of sexual 
union, the movements heavy and sensual. Angelina's hips 
undulated in time with the rhythm of the drums, now slow, 
now fast.  Reuben felt roused.  He wanted her, needed her.  
Her image thrust all other images out, her swaying form 
held him transfixed.
And then he looked down at his hands.
They were covered in blood.  He looked up quickly, but no 
one was watching him.  His eyes fell on Angelina once more, 
and this time he felt disgusted by her, repelled by her 
movements, by the contortions of her face.
Turning, he rushed out of the peri style  Hooper was still 
at the entrance, watching him.  Reuben ignored him and went 
on past, heading down the lane to where the Peugeot was 
parked.  The key was still in the ignition where Angelina 
had left it.  He got in and turned the key round hard.  The 
engine started right away.
The only drumming he could hear was the pounding of blood 
in his own head.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
The banging on the door woke him abruptly from a troubled 
sleep.

Mama Vijina's maid had let him in the night before, an old 
woman by the name of Dieudonne.  Actually, 'maid' sounded a 
little grand:
she was some sort of relative, a cousin or aunt, who had 
come to Port-au Prince five years ago from Les Cayes and 
taken up residence with Mama Vijina in return for help 
around the house.
She was arthritic and seldom attended vodoun ceremonies now 
except for some small gatherings held in the house itself, 
when neighbours came to bring their problems to Mama 
Vijina.
He had not slept at first on his return from the houngfor 
at Bois
Moustique.  On the road back he had lost his way several 
times and worked himself into something of a state by the 
time he made it to
Mama Vijina's door.  In bed, he had tossed and turned, 
trying in vain to free his mind of the scenes he had left 
behind: darkness and the flames of torches, the tight skins 
of drums pulsating, doors opening between one world and the 
next, Mama Vijina changing.
Angelina lost in a dream dark drummers wove.
The knocking came again, louder now.
No-one had returned from the ceremony yet, and he wondered 
if they planned to remain there all day.  Angelina had 
spoken of ceremonies that went on for days at a time, 
sometimes even weeks.  She had not expected this one to 
last long, though.  They had made plans to visit the
National Archives that morning.
More pounding, the sound of footsteps and Dieudonne's voice 
shouting, telling whoever it was to hold on.  For a panicky 
moment he wondered if something had happened at the 
houngfor, then he remembered that it had. He looked at his 
hands.  They were clean:
he had stopped somewhere on the way back, at a small stream 
or a ditch, he could not remember, and washed the blood 
away.
Someone knocked at his door.  Dieudonne, saying something 
he did not understand.  He threw back the sheets and rolled 
out of bed.
He was still wearing his trousers, but nothing else.  A 
moment later the door burst open and two men crowded into 
the room.  Reuben looked up.  He recognized the sunglasses 
and the beige suit.
Bellegarde stood with his back to the room, staring through 
his window. There was nothing outside but an empty 
courtyard, bare brick, cracked flagstones.  But if he 
closed his eyes the courtyard would fill with memories.  
Lights would flare and feet crack across the concrete, a 
voice his voice, Loubert's voice, a thousand voices would 
ring out, shots would be fired, silence would come.  And he 
would open his eyes and the courtyard would be empty and 
ringed with weeds and stained with blood where the rains 
had not washed it away.
He turned and looked carefully at Reuben.  Things were 
moving faster than he had anticipated.  He walked to his 
desk and sat.
"Please, Professor Phelps.  Sit down."
There was a chair this time, a plain metal affair with a 
plastic
seat.
Reuben did as Bellegarde asked him.
"You did not like the hotel after all?"
"I'm sorry?"
The Choucoune.  You and Angelina only spent one night 
there.
I've heard it's comfortable.  Angelina likes her comfort.  
As you must know."
"It's too expensive.  Sabbaticals don't pay for themselves.  
And Mama Vijina is a valuable resource."
"A resource?"  Bellegarde's eyebrows lifted.
"Ah, I understand.
For your research.  Of course.  How is that going, your ...
research?"
Reuben shrugged.
"As expected.  I've made a little discovery since my 
arrival.
Nothing major, but it may lead to more."  He hesitated.
"Major, why have you brought me here?  I'm sure you're a 
busy man, that you don't have time for chitchat."
"But I told you, Professor, how much I looked forward to 
our little chats.  Had you forgotten?"
"No, I hadn't forgotten.  Why have you asked me here 
today?"
In reply, Bellegarde pushed a sheet of paper across the 
desk.
Reuben looked at it.  It was a photograph, black and white, 
five by four, a man's head and shoulders.
"Yes?"
"Have you ever seen this man before,
Professor?"
Reuben shook his head.
"You're quite sure?  Take a close look."
Reuben looked.
"No," he answered.
"Never."
"Perhaps we all look alike to you, could that be it?"
"Don't insult me.  No, I haven't seen this man before.  Not 
as I remember."
"Perhaps your memory is deceiving you.  You were seen 
speaking to him last night, at Bois Moustique."
Fear drained Reuben's heart.
That's not possible," he murmured.
"I
spoke to no-one."
Bellegarde raised his eyebrows again.
"Oh?  You spoke a few words to him, or he to you, my man is 
not sure which, then you followed him outside."
Reuben hesitated.
"I went outside, yes.  To get some fresh air.  That's 
perfectly correct.  And on my way back I spoke for a while 
with Doug Hooper, the American missionary who came here on 
the same flight.  But I saw no-one else."
Bellegarde reached out and took the photograph.  He 
replaced it in a small buff file, put the file into his 
drawer.
"That's a pity, Professor.  Yes, a pity."
"Why?"
"Oh, you might have been of some help to us.  The man whose 
photograph I showed you was found dead earlier this morning 
in some bushes less than a hundred metres from the peri 
style at Bois Moustique.  You're still sure you didn't see 
him?"
Reuben shook his head.
"Positive."
"My informant thinks you had blood on your hands when you 
came back into the peri style
Reuben's hands were on the desk, he had put them there when 
he looked at the photograph.  He glanced down, thinking 
perhaps there were still traces of blood, that dried pieces 
might have lodged beneath his nails. But they were clean.  
He must have washed hard last night.
"Blood?  That's absurd.  The only blood I saw last night 
was chicken's blood."
"You did not ask how the victim was killed.  I find that a 
little curious, especially in someone like yourself, a man 
whose life is devoted to questions, little questions like 
that.  Most people ask, "How did he die?", something of 
that nature."
"I'd rather not know.  I'd rather not know how he died."
"His throat was cut.  Someone cut it with a sharp blade.  
We haven't found the weapon yet."
"But surely this has nothing to do with you, you aren't 
Homicide."
Bellegarde scratched his chin.  Reuben noticed that he wore 
a fine aftershave, something with cloves.
"You seem to know a lot about my job, Professor.  It's for 
me to decide what comes within my province, what does not."  
He paused, tapping his fingers lightly on the desk.
"The dead man may have been a victim of a robbery.  There 
had been something taped to his waist.  Drugs possibly.  Or 
a gun.  Something he


did not want other people to see him carrying.  Do you 
have a gun. Professor?"
With a lurch of fear, Reuben remembered that he had placed 
the pistol in a drawer in his room.  What if they searched 
it?  Could they use it to tie him to the killing?
Should he admit to having the gun, pretend he'd brought it 
with him into the country?  He wasn't even sure what type 
of weapon it was, there hadn't been time to look properly 
last night.
"No, of course not.  Why would I have a gun?"
"Or drugs.  Perhaps you use drugs.  A lot of Americans use 
drugs." Reuben felt hot.  There was no air conditioning, 
not even a fan.


"Are you planning to plant some drugs on me?  Is that it?  
So you can have an excuse to arrest me?"
Bellegarde did not react.
"Why should I want to do that.
Professor?  I have enough trouble already, enough arrests 
to make, enough interrogations to carry out.  You flatter 
yourself if you imagine I would go to such lengths.
This is not a police state.  Here you are free.  We do not 
like to fill our prisons."
"What about now?  Am I free?  Free to leave?"
"Of course.  Perhaps later you would like to make time to 
give a statement.  About your movements last night, that's 
all.  It'll take ten minutes, a quarter of an hour.
This afternoon, say."
Reuben nodded.  He wanted to get out.
His head was pounding, he felt sick.  He glanced sideways, 
to the corner, to the chair screwed to the floor.  
Bellegarde noticed his glance but said nothing.
Reuben stood.  He felt unsteady.
Breakfast would help.  He had not eaten.  Food would 
restore his balance.
Tell me, Professor, how was Angelina last night?"
"Angelina?"
"Did she dance?  Did you see her?"
"I think she ... Yes, I think she danced."
"Who was she this time?  The snake Damballah?  The 
ferocious Ogounferaille?  Or sexy Erzulie?"
Reuben felt a knot tighten in his stomach.
"I wouldn't know," he whispered.
"No?  I imagined you'd seen her often before.  But perhaps 
she's more


restrained when you're around.
Perhaps the loa do not favour her so well in your 
presence." "What are you implying?"
"Nothing, Professor.  Absolutely nothing.  I'm only 
her brother. You're her husband's friend.  You must 
know so much more than I."


Reuben said nothing.  He turned and went out, slamming the 
door.  It was even hotter in the corridor.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
The gun was gone.  Reuben checked as soon as he got back, 
throwing open the drawer into which he had tossed it the 
night before.  It was gone, and all the ammunition with it.  
He wondered if they would wait until that afternoon, or 
whether Max would send some of his boys round to pull him 
in right away.
Angelina and the others had still not returned.  There was 
no telephone at the houngfor, of course, no way of getting 
in touch short of driving out there.
At the bedroom window he looked out.
Someone was down there, lounging in a doorway opposite, 
watching the house.  He had to think hard.  Who had killed 
Macandal?  Had it been done to implicate him, or had the 
timing been fortuitous, a mere trick of fate?  The killer 
had not been a robber, of course, otherwise he would have 
found and taken the gun.  Or had Reuben disturbed him doing 
just that?  It was possible, but instinct told Reuben it 
was highly unlikely.
In the minute or two that had passed between Macandal's 
making contact and Reuben's following him outside, someone 
had attacked the Haitian and cut his throat.  That 
suggested that somebody had not wanted Macandal and Reuben 
to meet, to talk.
Which in turn suggested that Macandal had been onto 
something or someone.
Reuben went downstairs and asked Dieudonne to make him 
something to eat.  He wondered if the Hoopers were back 
yet.
Someone had told Bellegarde about the gun, he couldn't have 
guessed from the tape alone, it could have been holding 
almost anything. Reuben was sure Hooper had seen the gun.  
Hooper needed to ingratiate himself with someone in 
authority, needed to badly.  Badly enough to shop a fellow 
American?  Probably.  Law and order came first in Hooper's
book.
Turning in probable criminals wouldn't cause a man like 
Hooper many sleepless nights.
Dieudonne brought him a plate of boiled green bananas with 
two eggs and a cup of coffee.  He finished it quickly, 
without relish.
Yes, he thought, he should pay Hooper a visit, try to talk 
to him, maybe even tell him something about working for the 
government, appeal to his famous sense of loyalty.
He set off on foot, trying to remember the way he had gone 
with Locadi.
Walking on his own, he felt exposed.  He knew he was being 
followed, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Kids waylaid him, little kids with bare feet trying to sell 
him things he did not want or to offer their services as 
guides.  Their older brothers offered him women, drugs, 
boys.  He wondered why the sight of a white face should 
turn some people's minds to thoughts of vice.  The answer 
was simple, of course.  Whites had money, and without ready 
money vice doesn't really stand much chance.
He turned a corner and saw the shop half a block away.
Something was going on people were gathered outside, there 
were bits and pieces of furniture on the street.  Maybe 
business was booming already.
Jean Hooper was standing outside with a group of Haitians 
and the Iranian, Amirzadeh.  The shop looked as though a 
bomb had hit it.  The windows had been smashed, the books 
scattered and torn, the cabinets and other fittings torn 
from the walls and thrown into the street.
Jean looked round as Reuben approached.  Her eyes were red 
and puffy. She was covered in dust.
One sleeve of her Holly Hobby dress was torn.  She looked 
at Reuben for a few moments, then turned and got back to 
work.
Doug Hooper came out of the shop.
"It happened while we were away last night," he said.
"We got back late, there was some trouble up at the voodoo 
place.  It was like this when we got back.  It's Valris's 
work, of course.  You remember what I told you."


"Are you going to pay him?" "Got no money to pay him with." 
"Maybe he'll make some other kind of deal."
"What sort of deal?"
"I don't know.  Try him."
Hooper looked round.  He bent down and picked up a handful 
of pamphlets.  On their covers were smiling faces, people 
of many races united in the cause of world peace.  Someone 
had trampled on them, ground his heel into the faces.
"Maybe I will," Hooper said.
"There's no point your opening this place again if you 
don't."
"No, I suppose not.  But first we'll pray about it.  You'd 
be surprised what doors can open when you pray."
Reuben turned to go, then remembered why he had come.
"You said there was trouble out at Bois Moustique.  What 
sort of trouble?"
"Bois Moustique?  Oh, you mean the voodoo temple.  Seems 
some guy got himself murdered last night.  Kinda spooky.  I 
mean, you read about voodoo and ritual murders, and there 
you have somebody getting his throat cut.  They found him 
in some bushes this morning.  We spent the
night there, couldn't get away.  Looks like we'll have to 
buy ourselves a motor car.  Anyway, the police came out, 
questioned most everybody.
Of course, nobody had anything.  They took your friend, the 
priestess, into custody.  Your friend Mrs.  Hammel's OK, 
though.  She stayed behind to clear things up, but she said 
she'd be back soon."
"You tell them anything about me, about our conversation?"
Hooper looked flustered.
"You're not telling me you had something to do with what 
happened, are you?"
"No, but I think somebody told the police I had a gun.  I 
think you saw me with one last night.  Maybe you mentioned 
it to them."
"Well, maybe I did.  I'm sorry if that caused you any 
trouble.  But I had to be honest.  I had to tell them what 
I'd seen.  I saw you go out, then come back in carrying a 
gun."
"You tell them anything else?"
Hooper shook his head violently.
"Listen, Hooper, I have business here in Haiti, business 
that has nothing to do with you.  I don't want you poking 
your nose in.  If it's any reassurance, it's legitimate 
business."  He indicated the shop, the broken glass with 
his chin.
"Maybe this has taught you something.  You can't trust 
anybody here, not unless you know them.  Maybe not even 
then.  Stick to what you know.  Sell books, make converts, 
but let me get on with what I came here to do.  Do you 
understand?"
Hooper nodded.  He was red-faced, a little embarrassed, a 
little angry. Reuben suspected he had a temper.  Well, he 
knew he had,
he'd seen it at the airport.  He wondered what Hooper would 
do about the raid on his shop.  Pray?
Confront Valris head on?
"I have to go," said Reuben.
"If there's something I can do, I'll do it, but I can't 
make any promises."  He paused.
"I still think you should consider leaving."
Hooper said nothing.  Reuben shook hands with Amirzadeh and 
spoke briefly to Jean Hooper.  She looked worried.  As 
though she knew something nobody else knew.
Reuben turned and walked away.  His heel crunched hard on a 
sliver of broken glass, a piece of the Hoopers' shattered 
dream.  He remembered bright shards of photographs 
littering his kitchen floor, memories like confetti, dreams 
like garbage.  Looking round, he saw the tiny knot of 
people milling about the shop.  Doug Hooper was watching 
him walk away. He looked like a man in a dream who sees 
everything around him disintegrating but finds to his 
horror that he cannot wake up.
Reuben understood exactly how he felt.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Angelina returned just after noon with Mama Vijina and 
Locadi.:' The police had held the mambo for a while, but in 
the end they had ' found no charges to press.  She was 
popular, her arrest would serve no useful purpose.  
Angelina was quiet and withdrawn, as though her exertions 
of the previous night had exhausted her, not physically but 
in spirit. The sexuality she had displayed in the dance was 
wholly absent now.  It was as though she had slipped on her 
virgin's mask again.
After a brief rest, she went with Reuben to the police 
station in Petionville, where he made a statement to a 
monosyllabic sergeant in a silent room on the ground floor.
Outside, he told her about Macandal.
From Petionville they went to the central post office in 
the Place d'ltalie.  With his contact murdered and his gun 
snatched, Reuben felt vulnerable.  He put a call through to 
Sally.  It was against instructions, but he needed to speak 
to someone.  Sally was terse.
He thought she sounded worried.  She promised to make 
contact again. This time there would be no slip-ups.  When?  
asked Reuben.
Soon, she said.  Very soon.  Reuben hung up.
It was a short walk from the post office to the archives, 
at the rear of the Episcopalian cathedral.
The building in which the archives were stored had suffered 
from neglect for many years.
That any books or papers survived in it at all was a minor 
miracle.
The door was locked when they arrived, but persistent 
questions led to the director's house a street away.
The director was a wizened little man with a palsied arm 
and loose-fitting dentures.  His name was Minot, and he had 
been in charge of the archives for as long as anyone 
remembered.  The government paid him a miserly stipend that 
had not altered in decades, and from here and there he 
scraped up enough funds to keep the little institution 
going.
Nobody really cared.  Here, history lay in the blood.  The 
printed books and manuscript papers of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries were the work of colonists:
what did such things matter to the descendants of slaves?
Minot found the journals listed in Rick's notebook.  They 
were all there, but several had survived in extremely poor 
condition.  The director remembered a letter from Rick that 
he had received earlier that year, enquiring about several 
items, including the newspapers and journals.
Heaped together, the papers did not amount to very much.  
They were all weekly or monthly publications, none running 
to more than a dozen pages.  But the print was dense, the 
language archaic and the references frequently obscure.
They were hampered most of all by Reuben's lack of anything 
more than basic French.  He did his best, scanning items in 
bold type for one of the names mentioned in the notebook.  
Three hours after they started, he was still trying.
It was Angelina who struck lucky.  Her attention was drawn 
by the wording of a leading text, and the very first line 
of the article
confirmed that her instinct had been correct.  The piece 
ran to several columns in the Supplement aux Affiches 
Americaines for 30 July 1775. It was headed Mystere 
maritime pres du Cap' - "Maritime Mystery near Cap 
Franqais':
"Gaston Maniable, capitaine des Cinq Cousines, negner 
fraichement arrive de Nantes en passant par la Cote 
Guineenne, a main tenant pres ente un rapport sur son 
voyage auxfonctionnaires du port du Cap, rapport qui 
contient le recit suivant..."
' "Captain Gaston Maniable, master of the Cinq Cousines, a 
slaving vessel newly arrived from Nantes by way of the 
Guinea Coast, has now submitted a report of his journey to 
the harbour officials at Le Cap, in which the following 
account is included.  We reproduce the captain's story here 
by reason of its extreme curiosity and as a salutary 
warning to those inclined to treat too indulgently negro 
slaves still fresh from barbarism and not yet submitted to 
the yoke of civilization."  '
Shorn of its flourishes and digressions, Maniable's account 
made engrossing reading.  Engrossing and disturbing.
"Man brick, les Cinq Cousines, bateau de 150 tonneaux 
equips en mars dernier par les amateurs d'Havelooze de 
Nantes, a quitte Ouidah sur la Cote Guineenne le 5 mai, 
apres y etre reste ancre trois bans mois, dans 
I'attented'un contingent completdenoirsdel'interieurde 
pays.."  ' "My ship, the Cinq Cousines, a brig of 150 tons 
fitted last March by the slaving house d'Havelooze of 
Nantes, left Ouidah on the Guinea Coast on the fifth of 
May, having lain at anchor there a good three months, 
awaiting a full consignment of blacks from the interior.
' "The crew consisted of six offiders mariniers: myself, a 
second captain, M. Nairac, a lieutenant, an ensign, a pilot 
and a surgeon;
three offiders non-mariniers: a master, a bosun and a 
carpenter;
seven mate lots five novices and two ship's-boys.  All the 
events herein described were witnessed by some or all of 
these, above all by myself and the staff and petty 
officers, all reliable men with whom I have sailed before.  
Their personal testimonies have been appended to my own 
report.
' "From Africa, we made good headway by the westward 
currents to within not many miles of the Ascension Islands, 
at which point we turned north for the Antilles, keeping 
well clear of the Brazil coast out of dread of Portuguese 
pirates.  It was our hope to make a rapid passage before 
the hurricane season should begin, our destination being 
St.  Domingue, for since the last war only English ships 
lie at Martinique and our other possessions.
' "In the middle part of July, we entered the Caribbean, 
and on the twentieth were near our destination, in the 
coastal waters a day's journey west of Le Cap.
' "At midday on the 20th, we took a reading on the sun, 
finding ourselves a little north of latitude 18 , with a 
tall landmass far away on the starboard beam that we took 
to be the island of Navassa.
Ahead of us lay another ship, a small vessel, seemingly in 
the same current, yet making little headway.
There was a strong wind out of the SE, forcing us to tack 
westwards, falling behind the strange ship.  By nightfall, 
we were fast upon her, but she had no lights, wherefore we 
deemed it prudent to hold back until morning.
' "At first light, we saw her to be an English snow and 
thought it wise
to demonstrate our peaceful intentions.  Even then we 
thought it strange that neither the main topgallant nor the 
fore topsail had been fully rigged.  I was brought up on 
deck to see for myself, reckoning that perhaps there had 
been an outbreak of fever on board or a rebellion of slaves 
and that they might be in need of help.
' "Using my glass, I thought it curious that no-one was on 
deck, nor was any lookout stationed.  The snow's name was 
written clearly on her stern, the Hallifax, out of 
Liverpool.  I had heard of her at Cabinda, and of her 
master.
Captain Briggs.  A good ship that had completed the 
triangle ten times or more."  ' "The triangle?"  Reuben 
interrupted.
"He means the full slaving journey:
England to Africa, Africa to the West Indies, then back to 
England."
"I see.  Go on."
' "We lowered our ebb anchor and set down the yawl with six 
men on board: M. Castaing, the ensign, with the bosun and 
the pilot rowing, and three mate lots all armed for fear 
there had been a rebellion and there were slaves still 
below decks.  They boarded the Hallifax by means of a 
Jacob's ladder at the stern and set about to search the 
ship.
' "Half an hour later all returned, having been through the 
Hallifax from top to bottom and found no-one, alive or 
dead.  I myself boarded the yawl and returned with them to 
the snow.  We found all intact, as though both crew and 
slaves had been spirited away and might at any time return.
There was still ample food in the hold and water for a 
month in the kegs.  The log was on the captain's table, 
which I took, though I saw it was incomplete.
' "We attached a cable from the Hallifax to ourselves with 
the intention of towing it in to Cap Franc,ais, for we 
thought it must be worth much to its owners, being wholly 
sound and in every way seaworthy.  I left three men on 
board her, to keep her rigged and steered.  The wind had 
changed, blowing now out of the S W, giving us an easy 
passage towards St.  Domingue.
' "It was in the early hours of the following morning, the 
22nd, that there came the first hurricane of the season.  
Seeing it was not possible to sail both ships, I brought 
off my men and slipped the cable.  We made the Windward 
Passage without difficulty and came into port on the 23rd, 
safe though much battered.  Of the fate of the Hallifax I 
know no more than this, save that I think it certain she 
sank without hands on the morning of the storm."  '
Angelina finished reading.  The paper lay on the table in 
front of them, a piece of history crumbling to dust.  Now 
that they had a date, it was not difficult to identify 
references to the mystery of the Hallifax in other 
journals.  There had been some sort of enquiry at Le Cap, 
copies of Maniable's report had been despatched to the 
authorities in Paris, they had communicated with their 
counterparts in England. The Hallifax, its crew and its 
cargo of slaves had been given up as lost. "It was the 
Hallifax.  wasn't it?"
asked Angelina.
Tm not sure," said Reuben.
"Maniable's account doesn't square with what you've told 
me.  The position, the direction the ship was moving in, 
the absence of any signs of a rebellion.  We know there was 
an uprising, that the crew and some of the slaves were 
massacred.  Nothing fits."
"But the report has three of the names we were looking for.
Maniable himself, his second-in command, Nairac, and 
Castaing, the ensign."
"Yes, there is that.  But it may all mean something else."
"Perhaps we're overlooking something.
The answer may not be in these papers but elsewhere."
Reuben thought hard.  If what they were looking for had 
been available in public documents like these, surely it 
would have been unearthed and acted on well before now.  
There had to be other documents.
They found the director cleaning his teeth in a tiny office 
at the rear of the building.  He slipped the teeth back 
into his mouth, smiled and said he would be more than happy 
to assist.  Wheezing, he accompanied them back to their 
table.  It was growing late, and the lights had already 
been switched on, but Minot was in no hurry.  Researchers 
came so seldom to see his treasures.
When he finished reading, he sat immobile for a long time, 
his withered arm askew across the table top.  Then, all at 
once, he gave a little smile.
"Nairac," he whispered.
"Of course.
Nairac.  Please wait here, I will be back."
He was gone a long time.  When he returned he was covered 
in dust and cobwebs.  In the crook of his good arm, he 
carried a tin box.  He set it down ceremoniously on the 
table top and wiped a layer of dust from the lid.  On a 
faded brown label they could just make out the name 
"Nairac', written in a crabbed eighteenthcentury hand.
Inside were bundles of papers deeds, bills of lading, 
letters.
Minot and Angelina started to read through everything while 
Reuben watched pessimistically.  It was a wild goose chase, 
nothing more.
The letter was right at the bottom of the tin, as though it 
had been hidden there.  Angelina knew it was what they had 
been looking for because of the signature:
Gaston Maniable.
It was a piece of paper folded in three, with bits of 
broken sealing wax clinging to one side and an 
indecipherable address somewhere in France on one flap.
"It's dated 26 January 1776, and directed to an address in 
Cap Francais," said Angelina.
"It starts, "My Dear Nairac, your Letter finds me in bodily 
health at home with my beloved Wife and Children, but yet 
in deepening distress of Spirit.  I am not like to embark 
on a fresh Voyage this Year, and have thought that I may 
not set to sea again in the Years that remain to me.  You 
must do as you reckon needful of yourself and Madame
Nairac.  Those Matters whereof you know give me no quarter.  
I have not known a peaceful night since then, though I pray 
incessantly for it. My dear Wife knows nothing, though my 
condition gives her grave
distress.
I cannot tell her, for fear it would so taint her Life as 
to make it un liveable
' "Our Secret must go to the grave with us.  We have sworn 
an Oath and must stick by it.  If any knew the Truth of 
what we saw on board the Halhfax, it would mean the end of 
all our work and more besides.  No ships would sail again 
for Africa, no slaves would know a moment's safety in the 
Antilles.  But more than that, for as you know, it would 
cause universal perturbation of mind.
' "I have a favour yet to ask of you, if you will do it.  
In my Journal, I have stuck by the story we concocted with 
the crew, as is set down in my official report of the 
Voyage.  But the ship's Log had the true entry for the 
position of the Hallifax, on the Formigas Bank at longitude 
75 52' and latitude 18 27', where we sank her and all that 
was aboard her, at 14 fathoms, as you will not need 
reminding.
I have changed that entry to show her further North, nearer 
the Windward Passage, at 74 54' and 19 21'.
' "I have also altered the Daily Record, that it may seem 
we met the Hallifax and took her under tow on the eve of 
the storm that took us on the 22nd.  If any should question 
my entries, will you stand by me and say I made some 
errors, being taken of a slight fever?  It is unlikely any 
will ask, but M. Gradis, newly appointed by my employers to 
supervise the Books of Ships, has a reputation for the 
assiduous checking of Logs.
' "If you should be in Nantes again, you must visit us.  
Poor Doctor Le Jeune is at Sea once more, having taken ship 
on the Cygogne out of Le Havre, but I fear he is not the 
man you knew.  He cannot erase from his mind the sight of 
the Savage seated at his dreadful Feast.  And those other 
Matters of which you know.
We did right to send him to the bottom of the Sea; but he 
will not lie at rest there.  None of them lie at rest.
' "Arnaud sends greetings, as does Castaing.  All are firm 
in their oath.  May God go with you.  And may you find the 
peace that eludes me."  '
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
They passed in a flurry of sunlight and spindrift into the 
central waters of the Gonave Channel.  The sea swell 
deepened perceptibly, tossing their little boat 
ridiculously through the waves, like a child's toy.  From a 
distance, the water had appeared seamless, an un channelled 
expanse of expensive blue silk shot with gold.  Close up, 
it was broken and choppy, raked by petulant currents and 
heavy tides. A thin black oil slick, the castoff of a 
gravel scow just in from Jeremie, lay glistening lazily in 
the hot sun, casting a net of rainbows miraculously across 
their path.  When Reuben glanced back, it was black and 
inert, a dull, flat streak against uneasy waters.
On the sides of their boat, the name Fanchette could just 
be made out. Old paint, old lettering, an old romance: not 
even the current owner knew who Fanchette had been.  It was 
a forty-foot Bertram offshore motorboat that had seen 
better days.  The wooden hull was patched, the decks 
unpolished, the portholes in need of cleaning.  Only an 
experienced eye would have seen that the Fanchette was, in 
fact, a lot more seaworthy than some of those shining 
fibreglass cruisers that
spend their weekends off the coast of Florida.
The Fanchette's skipper was Sven Lindstrom, a fifty-year-
old Swede who had arrived in Port-au Prince for two weeks 
in 1969 and never left.  He had grown accustomed to sun and 
sea, cheap rum, and people who did not go into a terminal 
sulk for six months every year.  Each Christmas he swore 
that it would be his last in Haiti, that he would go home 
to his wife and children in Norrkoping, that he would 
celebrate the coming lul and the long, dark days after it 
in their company.
If Lindstrom had a singularity that set him apart from 
other men, it was that he really thought they would still 
be there waiting.
As the Haitian tourist trade had declined, so too had 
Lindstrom.
For years, he had made a reasonable living out of rich 
Americans and sun-starved Scandinavians who came to fish 
and snorkel off the fabled coast of Hispaniola.  Now, he 
fished mainly for himself, and what he couldn't sell he ate 
or fed to Sam, the ship's cat.  Sam was a half-starved, 
one-eyed tabby with worms, a foul temper and sharp claws. 
He was about two hundred years old, regularly sick, and 
predisposed to violent diarrhoea in the rare event of his 
drinking milk.  Lindstrom had been given him ten years 
earlier by an American tourist called Samuel Harris Latimer 
III, who had found the cat scrounging for scraps on the 
docks at Les Cayes.
Sam hadn't been the only thing found scrounging on the 
quay.
Two years earlier, Lindstrom himself had picked up a waif, 
an orphan he had discovered sleeping on board his rowing 
boat one morning.  The boy had not known his precise age, 
nor his name, nor where he had come from.  Lindstrom had 
called him August without an 'e' in honour of Strindberg 
("Streend-berry' he pronounced the name emphatically) and 
made him his ship's-boy.
August was about twelve or thirteen, illiterate, un 
washable surly, and utterly devoted to Lindstrom.  Man and 
boy enjoyed a curious symbiosis, a deep sympathy of one 
waif for another.
Angelina had known the Swede in the old days, before either 
Sam or August, and pinned her hopes on his still being 
around.  If anyone could find the wreck of the Hallifax, he 
could.
There wouldn't be much left, that was the trouble.  Back in 
Sweden, they could haul ships out of the murky depths after 
centuries and all but refloat them.
Here ship worms called teredos could riddle a wreck in five 
years, destroy it in twenty.  The warm waters of the south 
are not kind to wood.  Timbers rot, the best ships fall 
apart, the tides and currents scatter what remains across 
the ocean bed.  They would be lucky if they found so much 
as a nail.
Reuben had learned to dive on three successive holidays at 
Eilat on the Red Sea, starting when he was fourteen.  Since 
then he had dived only a few times, always in safe waters.
He still remembered striking out to sea on his first visit 
to Eilat and staring across copper waves towards Aqaba, 
white and trembling on the coast of Jordan.  So very near, 
so very far.  He had dived, and all at once geography and 
history had both been wiped away: pink coral crept in all 
directions, fish swam past invisible lines of border and 
nation. Ever since, he had felt a sense of panic in open 
waters, a fear that he might drown and dissolve in waves 
that were more and less than water.
Devorah's death had introduced a harsh new element into his 
fear of
deep water.  The thought of what might He ahead chilled him 
to the bone.  The drowned do not lie at peace.  Maniable 
had known it; and Reuben knew it too.
They carried an air compressor to keep their tanks filled, 
but Lindstrom had insisted on taking extra tanks as well: 
he'd known the compressor to break down in the middle of an 
expedition, forcing a return to port.  With only two 
divers, and one of those fairly inexperienced, there would 
be a severe limit on the amount of time they could spend 
underwater, especially if they had to go down to any great 
depth.
But first they had to find a wreck or something that might 
have been a wreck.  Lindstrom did not have the most 
sophisticated equipment, but he'd managed to cadge a proton 
magnetometer off a Haitian friend who still hunted for 
wrecks from time to time in the hope that one of them would 
yield up more than barnacles and interesting coral shapes.  
Once upon a time, pirates and treasure galleons had sailed 
these shores.  A man could find a fortune in pieces of 
eight if only he knew where to look.
They were well past the lie de la Gonave now, open sea to 
starboard, the padded coast of the long southern peninsula 
vivid on their port side, its green flanks punctuated by 
the flashing light on Grande Cayemite Island.  Beyond the 
light, they could make out the higher peaks of the La Hotte 
Mountains, dark blue against a clear sky.  Over the land, 
banks of white cumulus were stacked like dreams.
August was below stacking and filling air tanks.  Angelina 
had gone up front.  Sam was perched on top of the cabin, 
washing his paws and dreaming of coloured fish in coral 
lagoons.  Lindstrom was at the wheel, Reuben beside him 
watching the radar.
If they kept to a steady fifteen knots, it would take about 
fifteen hours to reach the Formigas Bank, over two hundred 
miles away.
Maniable had been precise about the spot where the Hallifax 
had been sunk, but Lindstrom had warned them not to put too 
much faith in his figures.
"What you got to understand is navigationals.  Now is easy, 
now you got radio time signals, now you got Loran, now you 
got Vecta RDFs.  Is easy, no?  What they had then was 
bugger all.  Quadrant, log line, half-minute glass, made 
plenty mistakes.  Could be a minute out, could be ten 
minutes, could be more.  Jag vet inte.  Then is the 
weather."
The what?"
"Weather.  Winds, stormings, this fucking hurricane 
Maniable is talking about.  Tide, currents.  Is always 
moving underneath, is always some frenzy.  Round the 
Formigas you always got a heavy swell, strong breezes.  A 
big storm can move some wrecks half a mile maybe.  How many 
storms we got round here?  Gales a lot.
Hurricane maybe once, twice a year.
Two hundred years, could be anywhere by now.  Might not be 
on the bank, might have been shoved off the cliff, gone to 
the bottom, where we never find it."
"What you're saying is you think we're wasting our time."
Lindstrom pushed back his old peaked cap and scratched his 
head.  He looked parched and leathery, like an Iron-Age 
prince dredged out of a Scandinavian bog.  His fair hair 
had been bleached entirely white long ago.



"Ne-e-e-e-j, I don't say that.  Not wasting.  Could take 
time, is
all.
Could take years, I don't mind.  You got enough money, we 
be big friends in our old age."
Reuben sighed and looked at the sea.
Maybe Lindstrom wasn't such a good idea after all.  The 
Swede had nothing better to do than sail around all day 
soaking up the sun while pretending to look for a wreck 
that might not even be there.
He could keep himself in clairin and fried chicken fctr 
months at this rate.  He could keep Sam in lobster 
thermidor.  The one good thing was that they didn't have 
years.  They didn't have months.  They didn't even have 
weeks.
Angelina was standing in the prow, staring out to sea.  
The gaudy waters entranced her, the sunlight on them in 
spasms, blatant, gilding an immensity of green-capped 
darknesses.
"Vatyou got to onderstond is navigationals," said Reuben 
in a heavy accent, mocking Lindstrom.  The Swedish chef 
from the Muppets. Angelina laughed and turned.
"Navigationals?"
"Ond vedder.  Stormings, footing hurricanes."


She smiled and returned her gaze to the sea. "His Creole's 
not much better," she said. 
"Can we trust him?  He could be onto a good thing, sailing 
us around in circles out here for the next six months."
"We aren't helpless," she said.
"We can check his readings.  I know how to use a 
magnetometer.  My brother used to take me in his boat.  
When I was about fifteen."
"Who, Max?"
She nodded.
"We never found anything; no wrecks, I mean.  But there 
were some small discoveries.  A cannon, an anchor, bits of 
chain.  The sea round here is littered with objects, if you 
know where to look."
"But no sunken treasure."
"Oh, yes.  We didn't find any, but it's out there, plenty 
of it.
Spanish galleons, English buccaneers, French slavers 
returning home with booty from the colonies.
It's there all right."
"But we aren't looking for treasure, are we?"
She shook her head slowly.
He looked at her, unable to connect this calmness with the 
possession of two nights ago.

As though she read his mind, she half turned  Her eyes were 
sad.
"You still disapprove, don't you?"
she said.
"Of what you saw at Bois Moustique."
"I... don't know.  Most of it I didn't understand."
"You left when you saw me dancing.
They told me afterwards."
"Macandal "It had nothing to do with that.  You still 
disapprove.  You think I'm an addict, a slut, God knows 
what."
"It seemed "You thought it was an orgy, didn't you?  That 
we'd be copulating in some sort of jungle frenzy, all our 
inhibitions torn away."
"I'd heard ..."
"You'd heard about voodoo, about sacrificing the two-legged 
goat, about scenes of sexual abandon, black bodies writhing 
in the throes of lust." She paused and watched the long 
waves strike the bow.
"You're full of shit."
"Angelina, you're putting words into my mouth."
"What, then?  What did you think?  You didn't stay to 
watch, did
you?"
"You were .. . You and Mama Vijina .  Like a couple making 
love."
"It aroused you, is that it?  You'd have preferred it if 
you'd been on the floor with me.  Listen, Reuben, you've 
got a lot to learn.  That wasn't an orgy, it was a 
religious ceremony.  If anybody gets out of line, goes too 
far, tries to take their clothes off, whatever... if they 
do that, the laplace takes them out of the peri style till 
they cool down.  The gods do strange things.  They take our 
bodies, they borrow our emotions, they ride us like horses.  
Sometimes it's very dark inside, sometimes your whole life 
is dark, and then the loa come and light you up, you shine, 
there are stars and suns and forks of lightning all through 
your body.  I can't explain, I can only tell you how I 
feel."
She paused.  The sea moved beneath her, aghast with its own 
energy.
"Sometimes there's anger, sometimes happiness, other times 
you feel you want to strut about and smoke a big cigar and 
laugh in people's faces. That's Sin Jak.  And sometimes 
lust.  There's nothing wrong in that, it's how people feel 
sometimes when they're being honest.  Nothing happens, 
there's a morality.  It's just ... In the dance, feelings 
come to the surface, things you bury.  You don't have to 
approve, I don't ask for your approval.  But I'd like us to 
be friends.  I'd like you to trust me."
The boat was dipping and rising heavily now, the sea was 
all around them, the shore was slipping away, they were 
surrounded by water. Reuben looked over the side.
It would be so easy to vanish here, to drop over the edge 
and into the waves, let the sea solve everything.

"I was brought up to deny all that," said Angelina.
"We are civilized, French, as good as white, there was more 
France than Africa in our blood.  When I was fifteen, I 
used to sit in a narrow room painted with white lilies 
reading Huysmans and Rimbaud and Gerard de Nerval.  Can you 
imagine that, the pretentiousness of that?  On pale 
evenings in summer, when the sun came down close to the sea 
and the boats lay scattered in the bay like fantasies, I 
would stand on my balcony, reciting poetry until the 
darkness silenced me.  Je suis le tenebreux - le veuf - 
1'in console Le prince d'Aqmtaine a la tour abohe ..."
She paused and watched the water turn to spray.
"I was a spoilt, pretentious child," she whispered.
"Without lust.  I had such a darkness inside me, such a 
fierce darkness."
"What happened?"
"I learned to dance.  I went with Max once to watch our 
savage neighbours, to feel superior, to feel the power of 
my darkness against their light.  And instead I lost 
myself, I became a puppet for the mysteries.  Lust came 
later."
"With Richard?"
She looked at him quickly, then away again.
"Oh, yes," she whispered, "Richard."
She pronounced the name as though it were French, Ree-shar, 
in a mocking, testing tone.
"Richard came and touched me."  She hesitated.
"But I didn't feel any lust.  He touched me here ..."  Her 
hand grazed her breasts, tenderly.
"And here ..."  Her hand moved lightly between her legs.
Tears lay on her cheeks, or was it sea spray?
"But I didn't feel any lust.  You don't have lust, your 
civilization has abolished it.  Even my father, even he 
abolished it."
"Your father?"
"You didn't know?  Didn't I tell you?"
But she was mocking him now, she knew she had not told him.


"My father touched me long before Rick, he was the first, 
the forerunner.  But there was no lust, no fire.  His 
hands were cold, he was an old man, he was civilized even 
in that."
And Reuben heard her, saw her hands move, saw the sea 
spray on her cheeks, in her eyes; but in his folly, in 
his Jewishness, in his preoccupation with what was 
wholesome, in his dream of a different angst, more 
speakable, less private, in his darkness without lust, he 
did not believe her.
With Devorah, it had never been like that.


Behind them, a voice called out.
"Is time for your trick at the wheel.
Professor!"
And Angelina turned and wiped her eyes and smiled at her 
foolishness. CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The Formigas Bank is really the top of an underwater 
mountain, thirty-four miles off the north-east tip of 
Jamaica.  On average, it lies between four and eight 
fathoms deep, somewhere from twenty-four to forty-eight 
feet.  At its edges, it drops away sharply into deeper 
waters, as much as three and a half thousand feet at one 
spot.  Less than ten miles out and the depth grows to over 
seven and a half thousand.  The bank is a reverse L-shape, 
with a leg thirteen miles long and an average of four miles 
wide, at whose southern end is a foot ten miles in length.  
It lies under more than fifty square miles of ocean.  It is 
tiny when compared with the Pedro and some other banks; but 
you could sink a fleet of small ships on it and have 
trouble finding them again.
After three days, Reuben was beginning to think Lindstrom 
might be right: even if the Hallifax had gone down here, it 
must have slipped off the edge long ago.
Using a combination of magnetometer and Wesmar scanning 
sonar, the Fanchette swept back and forwards along the 
bank, surveying the sea bed along a grid roughly marked out 
by Lindstrom.
Each strip they covered was two hundred yards wide and 
thirteen miles long, and it took them about an hour to go 
from one end to the next. They were now almost finished 
with their first sweep, maybe their only sweep of the bank.  
So far, they had dived three times, all short descents.
They had found two discarded oil drums, a propeller, a 
pirate's hoard of tin cans and a modern wreck already 
listed on the charts.
Reuben had learned more about diving in those brief 
expeditions with Lindstrom than at any time before.  But 
the fear had not left him.
The sonar showed the sea bed in a 360 degree circle round 
the Fanchette.  It was more useful than a simple CRT depth 
sounder, which only showed what was happening immediately 
underneath the hull.  It could locate a wreck, but not if 
it was as old and broken up as the one they were looking 
for.
With luck it might show up an irregularity that would turn 
out to be a cannon or a scattering of ballast stones.  But 
its main use was to prevent them running into unexpected 
obstructions.  These were not well charted waters.
Their chief hope lay in the magnetometer, a device designed 
to give a reading for any ferrous metal object on or near 
the sea bed.
Even wooden ships carried plenty of metal: cannons, chains, 
gratings, swords and, of course, bullion.  The latter was 
highly unlikely in the case of a slaver, but there would be 
chains and manacles in
abundance.
Every so often, Lindstrom would set his autopilot to steer 
down one side of a square course, then come back to help 
either Reuben or Angelina make sense of the magnetometer 
and sonar.  August sat up in the prow smoking or staring at 
the sea, moving only from time to time
to prepare cups of coffee or meals.  Sam prowled the deck 
or lay on the engine housing, gazing wistfully at the 
occasional passing seabird.
After the first day, nobody talked very much.  The world in 
which they moved was silent to the core.  If they looked 
hard, they could make out the peaks of the Blue Mountains 
to the south-west, but most of the time they were out of 
sight of land.  There were no lights.  They saw no other 
ships.  In the nights, when they anchored, they would watch 
the last flecks of the setting sun turn to darkness, and it 
seemed as though they had slipped off the face of the 
earth.
"I'm sorry," said Angelina.  It was past noon.  They had 
just eaten and were holding fast on the sea anchor for a 
while.
"I was unfair.
You have no reason to make allowances for my hang-ups.  I'm 
still spoilt and pretentious.  You must think I'm a child."
Reuben shook his head.
"I never know what to believe about you, that's all.  You 
confuse
me."
"Believe anything and everything.  I confuse myself.  It's 
not your confusion I mind, it's your disapproval."
"I can't help that," he said.
"It's something I was brought up with, something I need to 
help me do my job.
Most of the people I deal with are scum.  Husbands who kill 
their wives, wives who kill their husbands, children who 
stab their parents to death, parents who batter their 
children's heads against bloody walls.  I have to 
disapprove.  I can't afford pity or understanding, an 
emotion like that.  It would kill me."
She did not answer at once.  The sea was silent.  It had no 
pity, no emotion.
It killed at random, with or without reason.
"I'm sorry for you," she said.
"Yes," he answered.
"You can afford to be."  But in spite of his denials, he 
knew he was full of pity and racked with doubt, and that 
pity and doubt were killing him.
He wanted to love her, to cancel all his doubts in a 
consuming trust, to turn pity into something resolute and 
kind.  No-one had ever shown him how to do it.
Lindstrom raised the anchor and restarted the engine.  They 
moved on. The sea stretched out in front of them like a 
death.  It was altogether meaningless, it held no 
fascination, yet they were in awe of it, knowing it could 
turn on them at any moment and take them into its presence 
for ever.
It was like death, like any death.
Two hours later, they completed the last leg of the grid.  
The Formigas Bank had defied them, turned them away empty 
handed.  Lindstrom turned off the engine and lowered the 
sea anchor.

"Looks like they missed the bank," he said.
Reuben nodded.  Maybe it hadn't been such a great idea.
"We could make another sweep.  You can miss easy, this 
equipment not so fucking fantastic, you know."
Reuben shook his head.
This was just a shot in the dark anyway.  Even if we'd 
found the wreck, there's no saying it would have meant a 
thing.  I think we've been wasting our time.  Let's go 
home."
Lindstrom nodded, then turned.
"Of course, is one possibility," he said.
"Maniable could have got mixed up.  Mistook the position.  
Could be the Hallifax sank on the Grappler."
"The what?"
"Grappler Bank.  Here, let me show you."
They descended to Lindstrom's smelly little cabin.  At the 
rear, a small table was spread with charts and a sleeping 
cat.  On top was the British Hydrographic Office chart of 
Jamaica and the Pedro Bank, first printed in 1866, with 
corrections up to 1973.  The HMS Vidal had taken soundings 
round Jamaica between 1954 and 1957, the HMS Fox and HMS 
Fawn had done the Pedro Bank area in 1970.
Between Jamaica and the Formigas lay a smaller bank, the
Grappler.  It lay exactly five miles south-west of the 
bottom end of the Formigas.  Lindstrom made a quick 
measurement.
"Five miles long," he said.  Two wide.
Deeper than the Formigas.
About fourteen fathoms.  Eighty feet.
Deeper in some parts.  We can do in eight hours.  What you 
think?"
What was there to think?  They had come this far, they 
might as well finish the job.  They could be back in Port-
au-Prince tomorrow night.
It was 3.47 exactly on the following afternoon when the 
magnetometer went wild.  The sonar showed uneven patches 
immediately beneath the area it had just passed over.  
Lindstrom stopped the engines and ordered August to drop 
the light anchor.
Reuben was already dressed in trunks.
He talced himself quickly and Angelina helped him slip on 
his black neoprene suit.  Over it he pulled on the buoyancy 
compensator jacket that held his second stage regulator and 
octopus, depth and pressure gauges, and compass.  Lindstrom 
fitted Reuben's aluminium tank into the straps on the BC 
jacket while he adjusted his weights and fins.
"Well?  Any good?"  Reuben asked.
Lindstrom gave a Nordic shrug.
"Perhaps."

"Anything on the sonar?"
Lindstrom went across to the instrument and looked closely 
at it for about half a minute.
Interpretation was everything.  Finally he pursed his lips.
"Jasd."  Slowly, he came back to the rail.
"Could be," he said.
"Looks like ballast stones maybe.  Wait for me."
Reuben spat into his mask, smeared it, dipped it into the 
water, and slipped it on.  He felt tense.  His heart was 
beating more than it should.  With an effort, he controlled 
his breathing.  He had a full tank, but he had no wish to 
waste air.
He picked up his Pulse 6 metal detector.  Beside him, 
Angelina strapped on Lindstrom's tank.
It was time.  Reuben stepped onto the diving platform 
attached to the Fanchette's stern.  Angelina bent forward 
and kissed his cheek.
"Good luck," she said.
He slipped the mouthpiece of the second stage into his 
mouth and took a couple of experimental breaths.  The 
system was working.  Wordless, he toppled backwards into 
surging waves.  The world vanished.  In a terrible silence, 
in a singing of waters, he sank down into a world without 
wind or air or voices.
He was alone in silent waters, among green shadows speared 
by shafts of light, in a liquid caress that took him from 
all sides and dragged him down.  A trail of bubbles joined 
him to the surface, vanishing upwards like a string of 
pearls.  The sea was warm and full of light.  His depth 
gauge read fifty feet and he had not reached the bottom 
yet.  The bright eyes of fish stared at him, incurious and 
dumb.
Somewhere above him, Lindstrom splashed into the sea.
Light came slipping down from the surface, vibrating, 
strangely intensified.  All around him, hastening, afraid, 
he sensed the shadows of drowning men.
Without warning, he found himself swimming among tall, 
waving fronds, sea-whips filled with sudden, darting fish.  
The sea bed here was lumpy and uneven, rising and dipping 
without apparent reason.  As he topped a sudden rise, the 
floor flattened out abruptly.
Strewn across it, like the beads of a broken necklace, lay 
hundreds upon hundreds of little spheres.
Lindstrom had been right, they had located a trove of 
ballast stones. The deep currents had played marbles with 
them until they had settled, finding their own lodgements 
in the ocean floor, acquiring crusts of coral and weed.  A 
moment later, the Swede swam past him and picked one up, 
cradling it in one hand while he gave a thumb-to-forefinger 
sign with the other.
They swam on.  Half a minute later, Lindstrom made the 
second discovery.  It must have been what triggered the 
magnetometer reading, a vast entanglement of corroded 
chains, scarcely recognizable at first. Nothing seemed real 
or constant in the parched underwater light.
The chains had been welded into a solid mass, or rather a 
series of discrete masses.  Some sections had, however, 
been strung out more than others, their rusted links 
unmistakable.  There were fetters at their ends, the gyves 
and manacles of a slaving vessel.  In one, by some horrid 
accident, what looked like the bones of a human hand and 
arm were still en fettered
For the next twenty minutes, they swam back and forth 
across the sea floor, crisscrossing one another's path, 
using their underwater metal detectors, seeking for 
something, anything that might identify the wreck.  Reuben 
found an astrolabe and something that might have been a 
chamber pot Lindstrom picked up a long, rusted bayonet.  
There were several other clumps of metal that would have to 
be thoroughly scraped and cleaned before their identity 
could be guessed.  They put them in bags carried at their 
sides.
Reuben's air was already low when he spotted it.  He was 
not at all sure what it was at first, just that it was made 
of metal and large.
With Lindstrom's help, he managed to work it loose from a 
mass of sediment, breaking pieces away with his diving 
knife.  Reuben decided to take it up with him for a closer 
look.  He pulled the toggle on his BC jacket and it 
inflated in seconds, giving him extra buoyancy. Keeping a 
tight grip on his find, he rose with it through rays of 
streaming light.  It seemed heavy and reluctant to return 
to the surface.
Almost unrecognizable beneath a crust of barnacles and 
coral, the narrow barrel of a small ship's cannon lay on 
the deck.  Acting on Lindstrom's instructions, Angelina 
started work on it, carefully dislodging the calcified 
sediment that encased it.  It took over an hour before 
anything came to light, but when it did it was worth it. 
Around the firing hole the armourer had cast a coat of arms 
and beneath that two names and a date:
Halhfax, Liverpool, 1751.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
"Who gave the fucking cat milk?"
Lindstrom strode into the cabin in a fury.
"Is cat shit everywhere.  Is fucking horrible."
Angelina put a hand to her mouth and rolled her eyes.  She 
confessed that she had been trying to ingratiate herself 
with Sam.
The cat had three hates in life:
children, women and policemen in uniform.  He had given 
Angelina filthy looks ever since they set off.
She had found a tin of powdered milk in the little galley 
and made up a saucerful.  Surely, she had thought, powdered 
milk won't do any harm. Wrong.
"The last thing we need on a boat this size is a cat with 
squits," Lindstrom thundered.
"It's all right," said Angelina, standing.
"I'll clean it up."
"Is everywhere.  Is a lot of cleaning."


Angelina grinned sheepishly and went on deck.  Sam was 
standing in the prow looking aggrieved.  The light was 
starting to fade from the sky. The surface of the sea was 
red with blood, or so it seemed.  Slanting rays from the 
setting sun had laid a film of bright crimson across it. 
The water seemed glassy, ill at ease.  Angelina waved at 
the cat.  He looked away.
Lindstrom sat down beside Reuben.


"We have a problem," he said. "Cat diarrhoea?"  Reuben 
smiled. 
Lindstrom shook his head.  He was not smiling.
"No, not like that.  A real problem.
Could be serious."
"Well?"
"Is the radio.  Is out of order."
"What do you mean?"
"What you fucking think I mean?  Is not working.  Is 
kaput.  We got to go back."
"Can't you fix it?"
Lindstrom shook his head.
"Is something broken.  Is an old radio, I can't get no 
spare parts. Not in Port-au-Fucking-Prince."
"How badly do we need it?"  As far as Reuben could tell, 
they'd hardly used it so far.
The Swede shrugged his broad shoulders.
"For navigationals, I don't need.  But for weather, for 
warnings, that is important."
"You think the weather's going to change?  It looks fine 
to me."
Lindstrom shook his head.
"No, is changing.  Is still the storm season.  Could be 
rough by tomorrow.  Maybe very rough.  I am nervous not 
knowing how much is getting worse."
"Can't we sail to Jamaica?  It's only what?  Thirty-odd 
miles."


"Ja, we can do that.  But in Jamaica they start asking 
questions.
They get crazy about drugs.
"What you do-yin, mon," they say.
"Why you come all this way from Haiti?"  Then they put you 
in jail." Reuben sighed and reached for a can of beer.  It 
was a local Haitian brew called Prestige, scarcely worth 
drinking, but he was hot after the long spell underwater.
"I'd like to finish here," he said.
This was the hard part.  I don't want to leave now we've 
actually found the wreck."
"Ja, I understand, but you got to remember this is only a 
small boat. You want more, you got to hire somebody else.  
We can only go down a few more times.  Look at the dive 
tables.  And we is running out of fuel."
"I'd still like to go down again.
One more day, then we can leave.
We can go down tonight.  How about that?"
Lindstrom frowned, then shrugged.
"OK, we go down again.  Tonight, maybe tomorrow morning."
Reuben nodded.  It didn't look as though he had much 
choice.  If only he knew what he was looking for.
The long beam stabbed through the darkness like a rolled-up 
paper tube. Reuben let his breath out in a hiss of 
expanding bubbles.  He was in a tunnel again, trapped on 
all sides by impenetrable night.
Breathing hard, he closed his eyes, but that was worse: he 
could see white flapping shapes crawling sightlessly 
towards him down soft, sunless slopes.  He opened his eyes 
and blinked as the light swayed ahead of him, scattering 
fish, revealing secret chambers in the coral led 
wilderness.  Slowly, reason returned.
The worst thing was keeping one's bearings.  At times, 
there was " no up or down, no forwards or backwards, no 
left or right.  He and Lindstrom were both attached to the 
Fanchette by lines like long umbilical cords, but even 
these could get tangled, lost in the shadows. The boat 
itself was brightly lit, but it was not always visible.  He 
swam in a profound loneliness, through a silence filled 
with the sounds of his own mortality: the frightened 
beating of his heart, the coming and going of air through 
his lungs.
And then the shadows stopped and the water trembled, 
breaking his light into a million pieces.
Reuben blinked and without thinking rubbed his mask.  He 
looked again, holding his breath until it hurt.  Slowly, he 
breathed out again, filling the world with broken bubbles.  
Like a ghost crammed into shadows it has come to detest, or 
the victim of a terrible accident nailed into a misshapen 
coffin, the remains of the Hallifax lay trapped in a low 
gully.
There was little left of her.  The spars and rigging had 
been ripped away, the masts had disappeared, all of the 
prow and most of the upper and main decks had gone, and 
what remained of the hull had been broken up and scattered 
mercilessly.  Long, flowing weeds covered the exposed 
beams.
Sponges grew where there had once been portholes.  
Creatures with long legs and popping eyes crawled in and 
out of gaping apertures.
Reuben swam closer.  Even in his neoprene suit, he was 
shivering.  He didn't want to be here.
What had Maniable found on board the Hallifax that had made 
him sink her and run?  What had come from Africa, hidden 
beneath her hatches?
What was still lying on the sea bed, waiting for someone to 
come after all these years?
The afterdeck had been the least damaged area.  Reuben 
guessed that Maniable and his men had holed the ship near 
the bows, that she had gone down prow first, shifting her 
ballast as she went, scattering the stones, chains and 
other loose objects from that region, then running forward 
until she finally broke up here, half a mile in front.  
Time and the sea had taken care of the rest.
He knew he should wait for Lindstrom to find him, but in 
spite of his fear he felt an impatience, a burning 
curiosity to explore what was left of the ship.  Just below 
him, he saw what must have been the wheel, several of its 
spokes broken, lying flat against the remains of the 
afterdeck.  Near it, weeds fringed a large, rectangular 
hole. Reuben shone his light inside.
It had been a doorway leading to after cabins where the 
ship's officers and captain had had their quarters.  He 
tied his line to a rotten beam and prepared to go inside.
With his tank and other equipment, Reuben was almost too 
awkward to pass through the little opening, but with some 
manoeuvring he managed it.  He knew he was being careless 
going down without Lindstrom. Diving without a buddy is 
reckless.  If something happened, the Swede might never 
find him in time.
Reuben checked his air gauge.  There was enough left for 
another twenty minutes.  That didn't give him long to 
search.
The staircase had rotted away long ago.  A metal rail 
remained, pointing downwards at a sharp angle.
Reuben followed it feet first.
Moments later he touched bottom.  He swung the light 
around.
Through a second opening lay a large empty space, and for a 
moment he thought he had entered the open sea again.  Then 
he noticed portholes. Swimming inside, he noticed that most 
of the contents of the cabin had been thrown forward onto 
the bulkhead through which he had entered.  By some 
miracle, a lantern still hung, rusted and barnacled, from 
the ceiling.
There was a second door in the opposite bulkhead.  Reuben 
swam gently towards it, leaving a trail of bubbles through 
the abandoned chamber. Even before the crushing and bending 
it had undergone, this had been a tiny ship.  The officers 
would have slept and eaten here, cramped together in bad 
weather, stewing in the heat of summer, wasting with 
fevers, shivering with agues.  Below them, in much worse 
conditions, the rest of the crew would have sweated and 
coughed their way through the long passage to Africa, the 
West Indies and back.  Deeper still, in the bowels of the 
Halhfax, the slaves had been squashed together, manacled by 
wrist and ankle.
Reuben flicked his fins and headed for the second opening.  
He guessed this led into the captain's cabin.  The light 
fumbled its way ahead of him into the gap.  He followed, 
straining to make sense of a jumble of beams and debris.  
Small fish swam past him, unperturbed.  Something scuttled 
into its hole.  On a pile of debris slammed against the 
near bulkhead, he saw what was left of a human skull.  Then 
another.  Then an arm bone  A ribcage.  Bones as white as 
the underbelly of a shark.
Eye sockets.  Teeth.
What exactly had Maniable and the others found?  A scene 
like the one
in Angelina's apartment back in Brooklyn?  Body piled upon 
body, limb upon limb?  No wonder he had sunk the Hallifax.
But why had he not spoken of it to a soul?  Why had he 
sworn his crew to secrecy?  What else had he found?
Prominent among the debris was something that looked very 
like a box. Reuben picked and scrabbled his way to it.  It 
was a large metal chest, heavily encrusted and dented in 
places, but otherwise intact.
He remembered what Angelina had told him: "They broke the 
great circle in two and took one half on board the 
longboat, to remain with them in exile.  The other half was 
left on board the ship in the great chest, together with 
the gold nkisi and the books of the gods..."  He tried to 
prise the lid open, but it was sealed tightly by two 
centuries of encrustations.
He looked at his air gauge.  Time was running out.  There 
was no way he could manhandle the chest out alone.  He 
would have to come back for it with Lindstrom.
Turning a somersault in the confined space, he headed for 
the door. Through the officers' cabin, back up the stairs, 
his heart racing, his skin still crawling.
On top again, he untied his line.
Where the hell was Lindstrom?
The Swede had gone off fifteen minutes earlier to cover a 
different sector.  Reuben scanned the darkness.
He was nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps he had already gone back up.
Reuben decided to follow him.
Just then he saw a flicker of light, just to the left, 
towards where the prow had been.  Going higher, he saw it 
more clearly.
Lindstrom must have found the ship as well.  Reuben waved 
his own lamp back and forwards.  Lindstrom did not signal 
in reply.
Reuben waved again, swimming closer.
Still no response.
Reuben hurried now.  Lindstrom might be absorbed in 
something, his back to him.  Or something might be wrong.  
The sea bed here was littered with rubbish from the wreck.  
Lindstrom's light was only yards away now.  Reuben could 
see a string of air bubbles rising through it.  He swung 
his own lamp towards it.
On the bed lay the Hallifax's sheet anchor, the largest of 
the three it had carried.  Underneath it Lindstrom was 
pinned to the floor by his legs.  The anchor must have been 
propped up against something, then dislodged somehow by the 
Swede.
Reuben swam right up to him.
Lindstrom was breathing but barely conscious.  Reuben bent 
down and put his shoulder against the anchor.  It would not 
move.  He guessed it weighed at least a ton.
He scrabbled underneath in the hope of being able to dig 
Lindstrom out.
The floor at this spot was solid.
Raising Lindstrom's head, Reuben managed to take a squint 
at the air gauge on his tank.
Different divers use up air at different rates.  
Lindstrom's gauge said he had five minutes' worth of 
compressed air left.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Reuben did not stop even to consider swapping tanks.  His 
own were almost exhausted, and Lindstrom might be seconds 
away from death.  He could be that close himself.  
Hurriedly, he tied the end of his line round the anchor.
Without pausing, he kicked hard and pushed upwards at top 
speed, breathing fast but evenly to keep his pressure 
balanced.
On the surface, he ripped out his mouthpiece and pulled the 
mask onto his forehead.  Inches away in the darkness, the 
Fanchette was bobbing against her anchor, her lights like 
something from another world. Reuben shouted loudly and 
moments later Angelina appeared at the gunwale, followed by 
August.
"You were down a long time, Reuben.
Sven warned you about taking risks.  Where is he anyway?"
Reuben pulled himself up the ladder and was helped over the 
side. Gasping for breath, he spoke quickly.  The air felt 
tense, hard to breathe.
"No time ... to explain ... Need new tanks... Get one ... 
for me ... One for Sven .. . Hurry."
Angelina guessed what was happening right away.  She 
hurried off, shouting rapidly in Creole at August, 
explaining what was needed.  In seconds they reappeared, 
each carrying a scuba tank.
August helped Reuben unstrap his, then pulled the fresh 
tank into place.  Reuben took the second tank and fitted 
his octopus his alternate air source to the valve.
I'll be back up," he said.
"Sven may be hurt.  Get some first-aid stuff ready, make up 
a bed in the cabin."
He did not bother with the dive platform.  Jumping straight 
in over the side, he floundered for a moment, keeping tight 
hold of the second tank, then found the line he had 
attached to the anchor.
Without it, finding the Hallifax in time would have been a 
hopeless task.  As it was, the descent seemed to Reuben an 
eternity.  More than five minutes had gone by, he knew 
that, but he was afraid even to glance at his wristwatch to 
see just how many.  Lindstrom's only hope was that whoever 
had filled the tanks had erred on the side of generosity 
for once.  It wasn't much to hang your life on.
Down he sank, twenty feet, thirty, forty, fifty, in slow 
motion, a dull ringing in his ears, the pressure growing 
gently.  The light vanished more rapidly this time, the 
darkness felt even more complete; not only visible, but 
tangible.  He could feel it creeping inside him, filling 
him, making him part of its world.
Suddenly, he caught sight of Lindstrom's light below him, 
like a beacon
in the darkness.  A beacon or... a corpse candle?  He shone 
his lamp down, swinging the beam until he found the anchor 
and the man trapped underneath.  A thin trail of bubbles 
trickled up from Lindstrom's mouth.  The tank was on its 
last legs.
Reuben set the replacement tank down by Lindstrom's head.
The Swede was still conscious enough to know what was 
happening and to help.  At a signal from Reuben, he held 
his breath.
Reuben pulled out his old mouthpiece and as quickly 
replaced it with the fresh one.  Lindstrom sucked the air 
in greedily, knowing he could afford to breathe deeply 
again.  He lifted a hand and grabbed Reuben briefly by the 
wrist, squeezing hard.
Reuben helped the Swede slip out of the BC jacket that held 
his empty tanks.  Without them, Lindstrom was able to lie 
back at an easier angle.  Reuben found a couple of large 
sponges growing nearby, cut them from their beds, and 
slipped them under his friend's head to serve as a pillow.  
Having done what little he could to make the other man 
comfortable, he turned his attention to the anchor.
It was large and it was heavy.  What was worse, it seemed 
to have settled firmly.  Reuben tried to rock it from 
several positions, but it was like trying to move a 
boulder.  To shift it, he would need a winch. The nearest 
thing on board the Fanchette was a crowbar.
Lindstrom was held by the upper legs and abdomen.  A quick 
check reassured Reuben that, even if there were broken 
bones, the Swede was losing very little blood from flesh 
wounds.  A severe cut, something involving veins or 
arteries, would have caused him to bleed to death long 
before Reuben could bring help.
Lindstrom's only hope lay in their getting assistance of 
some kind in Jamaica.  It would take them two and a half 
hours to get there, maybe an hour or two to buy or hire a 
winch or get another boat, two and a half to return.  From 
five to seven hours.
They had about ten hours' worth of air left on board, 
assuming Lindstrom used it up at his usual slow rate.  At 
least he would be still.  The mathematics were inescapable.  
There was no way Reuben or anyone else could stay down here 
with Lindstrom, using up precious air at double the rate.  
He would have to leave all the tanks here, within reach of 
the trapped man, abandoning him where he lay to wait for 
their return.
That was bad, and it couldn't be helped, but it wasn't the 
worst.  If Lindstrom passed out and was unable to make the 
changeovers from tank to tank as time passed, he would 
drown anyway.  Just like Devorah. Reuben shut his eyes to 
block out the images: a white hand floundering above tiny 
waves, ripples in cold water, an uninhabited darkness.  He 
opened his eyes again to see Lindstrom staring at him.
Reuben had a small plastic slate and china glass pencil.  
Quickly, he scribbled a me sage
Tain?"
Lindstrom nodded.
Reuben rubbed out the first message and wrote a second.
"Not bleeding much.  Not bleed to death."
Lindstrom nodded again.  He understood.  Reuben rubbed and 
wrote.
"Can't lift anchor.  Need machinery.
Will bring tanks down.  Must stay awake.  Understand?"
Lindstrom nodded.
"Set alarm and keep resetting.
Understand?"
He understood.
"Will get winch in Jamaica.  Straight back.  Not long."  He 
paused. There was just room for a few more words.
"No other way.  Don't worry."
He put the pencil away, bitterly aware of the 
meaninglessness of what he had just said.  Lindstrom had 
every reason to worry.  The Swede reached out and pulled 
him back, holding out a hand for the slate and pencil.  
Reuben passed them to him.
"Better kill me now.  Don't want wait so long.  Don't want 
stay down here alone.  Afraid."
Reuben had a diving knife strapped to his leg, a short 
Dacor Hi Tech knife with a sharp blade.  He could put 
Lindstrom out of his misery as he asked, spare him hours of 
physical and mental agony, waiting for help to arrive, 
watching the air dwindle in each tank, tank after tank, 
until he reached the last and there were only minutes left.
He shook his head.
Lindstrom scribbled frantically.
"Watch out for Sam," he wrote.
"Is fucking stupid cat.  Is getting old.  Look after him.  
Promise." Reuben nodded.
"I promise," he said, knowing Lindstrom could not hear him.  
Lindstrom rubbed the slate and wrote again.
The boy, August.  Need education.  Do what you can."
Reuben made an "O' signal with his thumb and forefinger.
Lindstrom let the slate drop to the sea bed.  There was 
nothing more to say.  Neither man said goodbye.
The darkness was rich, purple and menacing.  It was humid 
at first, the air stifling.  Then a breeze set in from the 
south.  Half an hour later, it had moved to the west.  By 
the time they saw Folly Point lighthouse to the east of 
Port Antonio, it had changed direction twice more.  The sea 
had started to steepen, and they were pitching with 
increasing violence.
"I don't like this, Reuben," murmured Angelina.  They were 
the first words she had spoken since leaving the Grappler 
Bank.
August was steering, she and Reuben were watching the radar 
and sonar screens.
"I wish to God Sven had mentioned the radio earlier.

We might have been able to do something.  This is still 
hurricane weather, we could be in for trouble."
Back on the Grappler, they had left one of the Fanchette's 
orange life rings  A bright light flashed on top of it, 
designed to be visible to a search party.  Now it bobbed 
about heavily, lashed by the growing winds.  A line went 
from it to the sea bed, directly to the anchor beneath 
which Lindstrom lay trapped.
He slipped in and out of consciousness, dreaming of 
firelight in Norrkoping and waking to the dark sea all 
around him.  The pain in his thighs was almost unbearable.  
All sense of feeling had left his knees and lower legs.
He was already on his third tank of air, alternating 
between his firstand second-stage regulators.
Beside him he could see the other bottles lying where 
Reuben had left them, precise reminders of the short span 
remaining to him.
Reuben glanced up from his screen.
"How long before it gets too bad to sail in?"
Angelina shrugged.
"I'm not a sailor.  You'll have to ask someone when we dock 
at Port Antonio.  But from general experience with storms, 
I wouldn't say very long."
There was a long silence.
"We can't leave him there," Reuben said at last.
"I promised I'd come back.  He wouldn't be there if it 
wasn't for
me."
Angelina said nothing.  Ahead of them, the Folly Point 
light appeared, then vanished, swept from view by a steep 
swell.
It took them almost another hour to make it to port.  
Entering the harbour in heavy seas through almost total 
darkness was a nightmare. They passed Folly Point on their 
port side and Navy Island almost invisible to starboard.
There were two harbours on the chart, West Harbour and East 
Harbour, and Reuben did not know which to choose.  In the 
end, he settled for East Harbour because it looked more 
central to the town.  They passed Fort George and the high 
hill of the peninsula below it.
They anchored a little further in, staying in deep water.  
August stayed on board while Reuben and Angelina took the 
dinghy ashore, weaving their way in past wildly bobbing 
banana boats.  It had started to rain, thick, stinging rain 
that scudded across the waves like metal shot.
There was no-one on the dock and no one in any of the 
offices around it. The entire harbour area was deserted.  
They headed for the nearest lights.  The rain had soaked 
them thoroughly by now and was busy trying to work its way 
deeper in, beneath their skin.
Three hours had already gone.
Up on Harbour Street, a reddish light was coming from a 
small bar, its doors and windows closed tightly against the 
storm.  The front was
gaudily painted with flowers.  A single illuminated sign 
hung over the door, advertising Red Stripe beer above the 
name of the bar: Goat's Horn Club.  Reuben smilingly 
recognized it as the name of a cannabis variety.  He pushed 
the door open.  A blast of reggae music thundered into the 
night.
Reuben pushed his way in, closely followed by Angelina.  
The door slammed behind them.
In one corner, a battered jukebox was hammering out hard 
rhythms by a local reggae band.
"Babylon gonna fall tonight.  And all its children, black 
and white." A small group of men, some sporting dreadlocks, 
stood around it, cans of beer in their hands.  From the 
ceiling hung strings of old single records by Jimmy Cliff, 
Toots and the Maytals, and old Skatalites discs from the 
sixties.  There was a narrow bar, stocked mostly with Red 
Stripe and Dragon Stout.  A few tables and chairs made up 
the rest of the furniture.  On one wall, posters of Bob 
Marley and Yellowman added the only colour to the smoke-
filled room.
The record stopped.  In the silence, all eyes were on the 
newcomers.  A low mutter was followed by laughter round the 
jukebox.  The men were mostly young and well-built, with 
tight trousers and shirts.  There were two women at the 
bar, hookers on a night when nobody much wanted to be 
hooked.  Behind the bar stood an older woman, cleaning 
glasses. At a table sat two banana boat loaders nursing 
glasses of white rum and ganja One eyed Angelina up and 
down very thoroughly.
"We need help," said Reuben.
Somebody pushed a button on the jukebox and another record 
fell onto the turntable.
"I said we need help.  We have a man trapped out on the 
Grappler Bank. We need a winch.  Do any of you know where 
we can find one?"
Most of his words were drowned by the loud music coming 
from the jukebox.  The young men turned their backs and 
moved in time to the music.  The loaders stared into their 
rums.  The hookers stared at one another.
Angelina swore out loud and walked across to where the 
jukebox stood. It was plugged into a socket halfway up the 
wall against which it leaned.  Without pausing, Angelina 
grabbed the plug and yanked it free of the socket.
The music lurched and groaned to a halt.  One of the men in 
dreadlocks made a grab for Angelina's arm.  She gave him a 
look that froze him in his tracks.
"The man said we need help," she stated.
"We've just come in off the Grappler Bank.  We have to go 
back to rescue a man on the sea bed.  We don't have time to 
fuck about.


So, who do we see?"
There was a prolonged silence.  Then one of the 
loaders spoke. "No-body gonna go to sea tonight.
You man is dead.  Leave him be, lady.  It go-yin be a 
bad night." "How bad?"


The loader shook his head.
"Bad, lady.  Very bad.  An' it gonna get a lot worse."  He 
paused and looked at her, straight.  His eyes were red and 
his lips were wet with rum.
"Don' you listen to de ra-di-o?
Dere a hurricane on its way.  It comin' here to-night."
CHAPTER SIXTY
Outside, the storm was growing in intensity, gathering 
strength and anger by the minute.  While his companions 
watched, no longer laughing, the loader took Reuben and 
Angelina to the door and pointed through driving rain to 
their right, at a row of little lights.
They were, he said, the windows of a shipping office on 
Bridge Street. Someone there might be able to help them, 
could at least tell them more about the hurricane.
Half-running, half-pushed by swirling gusts of wind, lashed 
all the way by squalling rain, they stumbled towards the 
lights.
Nearby, there was a crash as something heavy fell to the 
ground.
The concrete beneath their feet was treacherous, coated 
with oil and sluiced by a constant stream of angry water.  
They ran blind and deaf through the maelstrom, holding 
hands like children, as much for comfort as for balance.
The 'shipping office' was a low wooden hut connected by a 
single wire to the nearest telephone pole.  Reuben tried 
the door.  It was locked. He could feel the seconds 
slipping through his fingers, the minutes scurrying out of 
reach.  He started pounding on the thin wooden panels. 
There was no answer.  He lifted his hand and hammered 
again.  And again.
"Hey, mon, what all dis knocking for, mon?  Can't you see I 
busy?" Reuben hammered again furiously.  The door was flung 
open.
In the entrance, haloed by yellow light, stood a little man 
of about fifty in shirt and trousers.
"Can't you see I workin', mon?  I got bus' ness to do.  
What you want, knocking like dat?"
Reuben didn't waste time with explanations.  He pushed past 
the man, bringing half the rain in Jamaica into the hut 
with him.
Angelina followed, bringing the other half.
"Hey, mon, who ya t'ink you are, comin' in here jus' like 
that?
You waan' some shelta, you go look somewhere else."
The man's outrage, Reuben saw at once, probably had less to 
do with the rainwater they were spilling across his floor 
than with the presence in one corner of a pretty looking 
girl with wide eyes and a wider bosom. She was seated at a 
flimsy wooden desk in front of a typewriter, but from the 
look of her blouse she hadn't been there long.
Reuben twisted round.
"Please, listen," he said.  He dragged a wallet from inside 
his sailing jacket and pulled out a wad of dollars.  With 
the police making
searches and his gun already stolen, he had not liked the 
idea of leaving so much cash lying round Mama Vijina's.
"You can have this," he said.
"You can have whatever you like.  All we want is your 
help."
The man looked hard at the money, then at Reuben.  Next, he 
looked at Angelina, and finally at the money again.
"You better sit," he said.
It took a minute to explain.  When Reuben finished, the man 
frowned. "Listen to me, mon," he said.
"Not even Jesus Christ, not even Jan walkin' on de waaters 
tonight, you understand what I sayin' to you?  Is a 
hurricane comin' dis way, and it is comin' faa st
"How soon?"
Carefully, the man explained.  The hurricane had first been 
spotted forming in the Caribbean south of the Dominican 
Republic two days earlier.  It had been travelling steadily 
westwards since then, picking up strength as it moved, at 
about ten miles an hour.
The centre was expected to pass just south of Jamaica, 
between the island and the Pedro Cays.  Northern Jamaica 
and the waters to Haiti and well beyond could expect gusts 
of over one hundred miles an hour. Expected time of 
arrival, between three and four hours from now.
Reuben turned to Angelina.


"What do you think?"  he said. "Would we have any chance at 
all?" She took her time before answering. "No, not much," 
she said.
"Even on land, a hurricane is devastating.  At sea, it's 
like nothing you've ever seen.  But it is possible to 
survive.  If you don't hit a reef or you aren't driven onto 
rocks, if your pumps are in order and you don't take on 
more water than your boat can handle, yes, maybe you can 
get through.
Lindstrom could do it.  He could sail that boat through 
anything.
But you, me, August..."
"If we don't go, he'll die."
"I know.  But he may die anyway.  We may succeed in 
rescuing him just to put him through hell before he drowns 
with us."
"I'm going to take that risk.  You stay here with August.  
There's no point in all of us getting killed."
"Like hell.  You can't handle that boat on your own.  And 
you certainly can't dive and watch the Fanchette at the 
same time.
August can stay here.  I'm coming with you."
Reuben opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of 
it.  He turned
to the owner of the hut, who was watching them with 
disbelief.
"You want to earn this money?"
"I not comin' in no boat, mon.  Not if you give me a 
million
dollars."
"I'm not asking you to come with us.
I want you to take me somewhere I can get hold of a winch.  
I need to haul that anchor up."
The Jamaican raised his eyebrows.
"A winch?  Tonight?  You mus' be crazy."
"I'll hire it, buy it, or steal it.
Time's running out.  You must know someone near here."
The man thought hard.
"Does 'im have to be a winch?"  he asked at last.
"I don't know.  What else do you suggest?"
"What about a jack, mon?  A big trolley jack jus' what you 
need.
Have dat anchor off him in a flash."
Reuben nodded.
"I should have thought of that.  Where can we get one?"
The man gave a big grin and started for the door.
"C'mon, I show you."
A curtain of water blotted out the lights of Port Antonio 
as though they had never existed.  The lighthouse gave a 
final flicker and vanished into the night behind them.
All around them the darkness was absolute, like no other 
darkness Reuben had ever known.  It was alive with rain and 
wind and the deep, hollow thrashing and groaning of the 
sea.
Reuben realized that their chances of finding Lindstrom 
again were extremely slim.  It would take all the skill and 
luck they possessed just to find the Grappler Bank again.  
If they did not get blown hopelessly off course, if the 
light was still attached to the life ring if the life-ring 
had not been torn already from the sea bed, they might just 
make it there in the end.  A lot of ifs.  And no room for 
error.
They had been unable to force August ashore.  Neither 
threats nor cajoling had succeeded in undermining the boy's 
absolute devotion to Lindstrom, whom he called 'le 
Capitain'.  He sat now at the rear of the small deck house, 
cradling Sam in his arms, shivering, fighting his fear of 
the giant waves that pounded the boat.
Lindstrom, parsimonious when it came to paintwork or polish 
or fancy equipment he knew he would never need, had spent 
what money he had once earned on one or two items of real 
value.  One of these was a top-of-the-range Aqua Meter 
compass, the sort that would stay rock steady in all but 
the very worst conditions.  In such high seas, it would be 
impossible to sail straight back to the spot where they had 
left Lindstrom.  As the wind shifted and turned, they would 
have to
change course to avoid being overwhelmed by side-on waves.  
Their course would be erratic.  They would be lucky if they 
got within twenty miles of their target.
The little boat ploughed through a steep swell that rose at 
times like a metal wall above her or opened to reveal a 
long drop down which she plunged like a roller coaster out 
of control.  That they made progress at all was 
astonishing.
The journey back to the Grappler would take much longer 
than originally calculated.
They had taken on extra fuel at Port Antonio, along with a 
trolley jack from a garage on Red Hassell Lane run by a man 
called Winston, a friend of the shipping clerk.  Apart from 
payment for the fuel and jack, no money had passed hands.  
Once people had realized that Reuben and Angelina really 
did plan to sail back out to the bank in the hope of 
rescuing a friend, they had done everything in their power 
to help. Winston's family had come to the dock with them.  
The shipping clerk, whose name was Byron, had found a 
couple of fishermen to help carry the jack and fuel out to 
the Fanchette.  Food had been pressed into their hands.  
There had been promises of prayers in the parish church. 
No-one had known where to find a two-way radio in time.
Now, all that was gone.  They were alone where nobody could 
help them. Confined to the deck house like prisoners, they 
held on tight.  They had all been sick several times, until 
all that was left was a dry retching that left them weak 
and trembling.  Each time the boat ran to the crest of a 
swell, they waited for the lurching madness of the dive to 
follow. Each time it dived, they thought it would go on, 
straight down into the depths.  Speech was useless.
Wind and rain and waves tore words to shreds the moment 
they were spoken.
Reuben looked at the chronometer.
02.".03.  Lindstrom had four hours' oxygen left.  They'd 
been at sea again for two hours now.  Fighting against a 
wind that seemed to come from more than one direction at 
once, it would take at least another three to reach their 
destination.  They held tight and watched as wall after 
wall of water came crashing down across their prow.
It seemed to go on for ever.  Wind like slaps from a 
giant's hand, rain like a second ocean, swollen waves like 
houses, night like eternity, no light, no moon, no stars, 
no silence, a dry sickness in the pit of the stomach, 
nausea in the bowels, fear of drowning, fear of crushing, 
fear of the dark, a headache pounding like a hammer behind 
aching eyes, a shaking in the hands and arms, mere inches 
of thickened glass between them and the extremities of 
hell.
In the end, it was almost five hours after setting out from 
Port Antonio that they saw the light, a flicker of white 
far off, broad on the port bow.  A moment later, it was 
hidden by tall seas.  All three crowded to the narrow 
window, straining for the least hint of the light's return.  
Sam stayed where he was, riding out the storm.
Minutes passed like hours.  There was nothing but sea, 
nothing but the darkness of the storm behind it.
Suddenly, a heavy swell lifted them above the surrounding 
waters and they saw it, the white light of the buoy on the 
southern edge of the bank.  If the life-ring was still in 
place, it would be about a mile and a half north-west of 
here.
All they had to do was get to it.

Lindstrom had about an hour of air left in his tanks.
At that moment, the wind sank briefly, as though taking 
breath.
Reuben got a rough bearing.  Angelina looked up from the 
sonar screen and nodded encouragingly.  They were over the 
bank.
Twenty minutes later, they saw it: a red light shut in by 
unimaginable darknesses.  The question was, how close could 
they get to it?  Too far away, and Reuben would not be able 
to relocate the wreck in time.  They changed course, 
heading for the spot they thought the light had last been.  
When they saw it again, ten minutes later, it was just as 
far away and abaft the port beam.  Ten minutes more and it 
had shifted to starboard.  It was still a mile away, maybe 
more.  Given time and patience, they could make it.
Now, they had neither.
Reuben changed into his neoprene suit and strapped on the 
remaining tank.  He looked at Angelina.
It was time.
The door opened onto madness.  Reuben braced himself and 
stepped out, dragging the jack with him.  The wind tore at 
him, threatening to hurl him bodily across the rail.  
Angelina came behind.  They staggered to the gunwale, using 
a line to steady them against the blasts. Underfoot, water 
ran in a perpetual stream, tearing at their legs, pulling 
them down.  Angelina grabbed a stanchion and attached a 
second line to it, one made up of several lengths tied 
tightly together.  If it should snap or come loose.
Reuben would have little hope of ever making it back to the 
boat.
Tying the line to his belt, she leaned forward and kissed 
him briefly on the lips.  They tasted of salt.  Everything 
tasted of salt.  She wanted to hold him, but she dared not 
let go of the stanchion.
"Good luck," she shouted, her words torn away before they 
reached him. He nodded, seated himself on the gunwale, 
flipped backwards, and was gone.  She looked out at the 
spot where he had hit the water, but there was nothing,
not even a ripple.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
He felt himself sinking fast, wholly at the mercy of vast 
forces over which he had no control.  Within seconds, the 
roaring of the storm had become a memory, but even here 
beneath the surface he was buffeted and tossed like a cork.
As he neared the bottom, the turbulence subsided, but the 
sea was still in a state of constant movement.  He could 
feel himself lifted and dropped by a deep, nauseating surge 
that passed back and forwards through the water.  There was 
a thud as he let the jack crash to the sea bed.  Lifting it 
again, he used his spare octopus to inflate his BC jacket.  
Now he had enough buoyancy to lift the jack and swim with 
it on a strap around his neck.
Before diving, he had taken a rough bearing on the light, 
and now, using the compass on his combo gauge, he began to 
swim in its approximate direction.  In spite of his 
buoyancy, the jack weighed him down, made his motions 
awkward.  He propelled himself mainly with his flippers, 
head down, legs at full stretch, kicking, struggling in the
dark interior of the ocean, flattened bubbles tight and 
bursting as they struggled upwards away from him, back 
towards the terrible surface and the storm.
He switched on his lamp.  Beneath him, the ragged sea bed 
stretched away indifferently.  Heavy fish mumbled past, 
their eerie fins dazzling, mouths opening and closing, 
watchful, sad.  Several feet away, the grey flank of a 
lonely barracuda shark glided past.
Reuben kept swimming, praying there were no makos nearby.
He saw the light long after he had given up hope, a faint 
white blur to his left, dim but unmistakable, the long-life 
glow-worm he had attached to the anchor before leaving 
Lindstrom.  Twisting abruptly, he kicked hard, feeling 
renewed strength run through his veins.
He might still make it after all.
The beam of his lamp caught the anchor, then Lindstrom 
lying where Reuben had left him.  No air bubbles flickered 
upwards.
There was no sign of life.
Reuben knelt down beside his friend.
He was too late after all.
Looking more closely, he saw that the Swede had not died 
because he had run out of air.  He must have taken his own 
life, tearing the air tube away from his mask.
And then he looked even more closely.
The tube had not been torn away.  It had been sliced 
cleanly in two. Reuben looked down for Lindstrom's knife.  
It was not there. Scrabbling through mud and silt, he 
looked for it everywhere, but he could not find it.  And 
then he looked at Lindstrom's ankle, where it protruded 
from the anchor.  His diving knife was still in its sheath. 
Not only that, but Lindstrom could never have reached it 
from where he lay. Lindstrom had not taken his own life.
Someone else had done it for him.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Reuben unfastened the strap and dropped the jack to the sea 
bed.
With a quick jerk, he pulled on the toggle that deflated 
his buoyancy jacket.  It would be a waste of time now to 
move the anchor.  He would leave the old sailor down here 
with the Hallifax, down in his element with the fish and 
the other anonymous dead.
A sea burial; he would have wanted nothing less.
Relieved of his burden, he thought at once of why 
Lindstrom's killers had come here in the first place.  He 
would have to look, of course, have to be sure.  They had 
not killed Lindstrom for sport.  He had been no threat to 
them but perhaps he had seen something, somebody ... 
Someone had followed the Fanchette from Port-au-Prince, 
that was obvious, staying out of sight until they knew or 
guessed that they had found the wreck.  They must have 
watched the Fanchette leave nine hours ago, sailed to the 
spot where she had been anchored, and found the life-ring.
The rest had followed naturally.

Leaving his line tied to the anchor, Reuben swam freely 
through the surge back to the wreck.  Nothing had changed.  
Here, things only changed in decades, in centuries.  He 
slipped in through the quarterdeck entrance, then slowly 
down the narrow pit where the stairs had been, along the 
officers' cabin, into the room of bones.
The chest was gone, as he had thought it would be.  The 
bones had been disturbed, other objects tossed aside, some, 
for all Reuben knew, taken along with the chest.
They must have known what they were looking for.  Angelina 
had known about the chest, and Reuben did not believe the 
Seventh Order was not aware of it too.
The killers would be heading back to Port-au-Prince by now, 
caught like the Fanchette in the grip of the hurricane.  By 
tomorrow, the chest could be at the bottom of the sea 
again, more deeply submerged than ever, beyond human reach 
for good.  Apart from the gold objects from Tali Niangara, 
what had it contained?
Treasure from Europe?  Gold and jewels, rings and earrings, 
strings of rich white pearls, a lacquered portrait of a 
long dead paramour?
The usual relics of the damned?
Reuben swam back through the sea-eaten wreck, dejected, 
lonely, a man of sin, guilt heavy upon him like the air he 
carried on his back, weighing him down even while it kept 
him alive.  Had his father and mother died for this, a 
handful of trinkets from the Gold Coast, a rusted locket, a 
lock of lover's hair?  In a corner of the officers' cabin, 
a moray eel stirred its long, flexible body.
Reuben kicked upwards and emerged into the emptiness of the 
deep and the green sea.
Boarding the Fanchette proved the most dangerous part of 
the entire operation.  The boat had been circling, keeping 
as near as possible to the life-ring.  He had swum to it 
underwater, guided by its lights. But to get aboard, he had 
to come to the surface, and conditions on the surface had 
deteriorated rapidly.
After re inflating his BC jacket, he let the now redundant 
tank and its array of tubes and valves drop to the bottom.  
He could breathe well enough through the snorkel attached 
to his mask.
The problem was getting on board a bucking motorboat in 
thirty- and forty-foot seas before his strength gave out 
and he followed his tank to the sea bed.
Time and again, he was grabbed by giant waves and slammed 
hard against the side of the boat.  He was bruised and 
tiring now, the deep exhaustion of days taking its toll at 
last.  His hands slipped as he struggled to grab the ladder 
Angelina had lowered over the side.  He lost track of the 
number of times he made the attempt, the number of times 
his bleeding fingers found a purchase only to be torn away 
again, leaving him floundering in steep waters yards from 
the yawing craft.
He was weakening fast, every effort draining him, making 
the next gargantuan.  The next attempt or the one after 
would be his last. Desperately, he dragged himself through 
a torment of waves, kicking and flailing for safety.
Just as he reached for the ladder, a wave more powerful 
than the rest threw him forward against the side of the 
boat, knocking the snorkel from his teeth.  Fighting for 
breath, he saw the Fanchette pulling away
from him.  He was beaten down, tossing, swallowing water, 
choking, drowning.
Suddenly, something landed in the water five or six feet 
away.
Angelina had seen him at last and rushed on deck, risking 
her life in order to throw the second life-ring on a line 
to him.  The ring righted itself, popping its tiny light to 
guide him.  He paddled for it, fighting against a sucking 
undertow that sought to pull him under.
And he had it, hard and perfect as a gem against his 
fingers, tearing skin from his knuckles.  He had it and he 
was not letting go.
She pulled him in, sitting on the deck, feet braced against 
the gunwale, while August got a line round her and lashed 
it fast to stanchion.  Reuben made it to the side, got his 
hands round the first rung of the ladder, and started to 
haul himself up.
No-one said a word as he staggered on board and crawled to 
the deck house.  He was alone, and that was all they needed 
to know.
They followed him, slamming the door against the storm, 
watched as he collapsed helpless in front of the steering 
column.
The deck lurched and lurched again, then the whole world 
heaved.
He was on his knees, vomiting salt water, his guts 
churning, his throat burning.  A dry retching came, then 
coughing until he thought he would die.  He looked up and 
saw Angelina and August staring at him, and he tried to say 
he was sorry, but nothing came but the thick, angry 
coughing, then he looked again and Sven was there, his 
white hair floating in the moving currents, then he was 
caught by the undertow and sucked down, down into dark and 
soundless depths where everything began again.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Washington DC Sunday, 18 October
9.30A.M.
Washington had never looked so unwelcoming.  The storms had 
passed, leaving the land exhausted and the sky desolate.
The Potomac was still muddy and swollen with heavy 
rainwater sluiced down from the Alleghenys.  Sally rubbed 
mist from her windscreen; the city tumbled past.  She had 
forgotten how lonely it could be here.
It was time to make a move.  The CSA could not handle the 
Seventh Order on its own any longer.  They had called a 
meeting of selected intelligence personnel, people they 
knew they could trust.
Everyone had been invited on a strictly one-to-one basis: 
no one knew the others would be present.
The conference was to be held at the home of Sutherland 
Cresswell, the CSA's Washington based director.  Sutherland 
had been fully briefed about the Order from the start, but 
on the basis of recent events had reached the decision to 
ask for help from other agencies.
Choosing whom to tell had not been easy.  No-one knew 
precisely how far Forbes-Smith and his bosses had 
infiltrated the intelligence network and other government 
departments.  They had the names of twenty-eight 
individuals known to have been recruited to the Order or 
placed by it in positions of influence.
Another fifty-three names had been filed as suspected 
members.
Eleven people were known to be under the Order's direct 
influence; Cresswell was fairly sure that Forbes held 
sensitive files on numerous other individuals whose sexual, 
financial or political indiscretions laid them open to 
pressure.
In the end, the CSA had drawn up a shortlist of people 
known personally to Cresswell, Sally and the New York team.  
The shortlist had been closely scrutinized by each one in 
turn, then run through a computer to eliminate anyone with 
more than formal connections to any known or suspected 
Order members, whether inside or outside the agencies.  The 
list they were left with consisted of only five names: Mike 
Fordham, a senior official in the CIA's Directorate of 
Intelligence;
Joel Garrison, secretary to the National Intelligence 
Council; Grace Sala from the National Security Agency; 
Chris Markopoulos, with the CIA's Directorate of 
Operations; and Kevin McNamara from the FBI.
The meeting had been made to look as informal as possible.
Sutherland Cresswell lived in a large house outside the 
city, on the road to Annapolis.  He had suggested a Sunday 
because it would help guarantee full attendance and 
encourage the invitees and anyone else to think this was no 
more than a weekend get together.  A barbeque was planned 
for lunch, provided the weather held up.  Cresswell's wife 
and children would be there.  Mike Fordham and Hastings 
Donovan were both bringing their children, who were about 
the same age as Cresswell's. Joel Garrison and Kevin 
McNamara were bringing their wives.
Sally was among the last to arrive.  The drive was full of 
cars.  At the doorway, Sutherland was waiting to greet his 
guests.  The house was set back from the road among red and 
gold trees, at the centre of a thickening carpet of fallen 
leaves.  Every so often, a figure would slip out from 
behind a tree, blow on his hands or mutter discreetly into 
a handset, and vanish again.
Security was tight.
The cries of children at play could be heard from the back 
garden.
Smoke spiralled from a low brick chimney.  There was a 
bonfire somewhere near; as Sally stepped out of the car, 
the smell of burning leaves brought back to her memories of 
her childhood in New Hampshire. She did not notice the 
sunlight flash momentarily on a pair of high-powered 
binoculars on a ridge above the house.
The cosiness ceased the moment she got inside.  Sutherland 
had arranged for them to meet in his den, a large, book-
lined room on the second floor.  Most of the people in the 
room were strangers to Sally and, for that matter, to one 
another.  The little CSA group had huddled together in one 
corner.
There was very little conversation.
Cresswell had had the entire house swept for bugs earlier 
that morning, using the team now guarding the grounds.  
They had all been hand picked by Sutherland himself.  He 
had gone through the house with them to ensure that nothing 
was missed.
The last to arrive were the McNamaras.  Kevin followed 
Cresswell into the study, puzzled like everyone else except 
the CSA contingent to find so many others there.  Cresswell 
was silent and grim-faced.  Outside, the voices of children 
wrenched the fall air, counterpoints to the words already 
passing through his brain.  Perhaps it was appropriate, he 
thought.  What else was it all about?

He went to the front of the room and took up a position 
facing his small audience.  Never before in his career had 
he felt so nervous.  In the next hour or so, decisions 
would be made that would have a profound effect on his own 
country and several other states.  It was certain that, as 
a result of what this small group decided, lives would be 
lost or ruined.  He felt a terrible responsibility.  And a 
terrible fear.
"Ladies, gentlemen," he began.
"I must apologize for practising this small deception on 
you and bringing you all here under false pretences.  You 
will have guessed by now that I had special reasons for 
inviting you here today and in this manner.  Most of you do 
not, I think, know one another by sight, although in some 
cases you may have heard each other's names.  So, first of 
all, I'd like you to introduce yourselves one at a time."
When the introductions were over, Cresswell took the floor 
again.
"In a few moments," he said, "CSA's New York Regional 
Director, Miss Sally Peale, will explain to you the reasons 
for this meeting.  I want you to listen very carefully to 
what she has to say.  Everything she will tell you has been 
checked and double-checked by myself and a handful of 
highly dependable operatives at CSA headquarters here in 
Washington.  I believe Miss Peale's information to be 
substantially correct.  I also believe her conclusions to 
be extremely reliable. Please do not jump to hasty 
judgements.
Let her finish what she has to say.
After that, you may ask any questions you wish."  He paused 
and looked round.
"Sally .. ."
She spoke for over an hour, taking her audience from 
outright scepticism all the way to dismayed belief.  She 
had facts, documents, photographs, sources, all at her 
fingertips.  Using overhead transparencies prepared on her 
Apple Hex, she showed them figures, maps, lines of 
communication, dates.  But her words and images were merely 
a gloss on what lay beneath, like pancake make-up on the 
face of a corpse.
In the narrow room, lit by a quiet sun, the laughter of 
children rippling in autumn-scented air, an ancient evil 
struggled to life.
"About a year ago," Sally said, 'we set up a small 
surveillance unit in Haiti.  We had a total of fourteen 
operatives, mostly locals and second-generation Haitian 
Americans from Brooklyn and Miami.
Three weeks ago, twelve of those operatives were killed in 
a series of separate, coordinated attacks in Port-au-
Prince, Cap-Haitien, and one or two smaller towns.
One of the Americans managed to get out alive.  The 
fourteenth man, a Haitian known to us as Macandal, was 
murdered nine days ago at a voodoo ceremony outside Port-
au-Prince.
"The survivor was a man called Felix Simon.  He managed to 
get to Miami and was able to make contact with us shortly 
afterwards.
Unfortunately, he was badly hurt in the attack, and is 
currently in hospital, otherwise I would have had him here 
today to tell you what he knows.  I spoke to him two days 
ago, however, and I was able to form a rough picture of 
what seems to be happening there at the moment."
She paused and sipped water from a glass on the table in 
front of her. The tension in the room was tightening.  Even 
the sounds of the children outside seemed muted.
"As most of you already know, the situation in Haiti has 
been more than usually unstable since General Ciceron came 
to power.
Opposition groups have been formed in all the major towns.
Money has been coming in from Cuba.  Given time, we 
estimate that a full-scale revolution could put Haiti 
firmly into the communist camp. Now, some of you may 
disagree with that analysis.  Unfortunately, that makes no 
difference to what is about to happen.
"The fact is that the Seventh Order thinks there will be a 
communist revolution if nothing is done to prevent it.  
Rather than wait for Ciceron to be overthrown and for their 
own plans to be set back indefinitely, they have decided to 
take pre-emptive action.
They have a candidate for the presidency, the current 
Minister of Defence, General Louis Valris.
"We have ..."  This was the hard part.
"We have two people working for us in Port-au-Prince at the 
moment, neither a trained operative.  One is a New York 
City police lieutenant, the other a Haitian woman whose 
brother is head of Cic ron's internal security service.
"Lieutenant Abrams and Angelina Hammel were sent to Haiti 
as bait." Sally closed her eyes.  She saw dark fish with 
serrated teeth swimming through tumbling waters.  She could 
not tell them everything, that had been agreed.
"We think the fish may have bitten.  Yesterday, President 
Ciceron declared a curfew.  There are reports of troops on 
the streets in several cities.  The main airports have been 
closed.  And we have lost all contact with our two agents.  
We believe Warren Forbes is also now in Haiti.  I am 
personally certain that he is merely waiting for orders to 
act.  We have to act quickly, and we have to act 
decisively.  That is why you have been brought here today."
Sally sat down.  She felt drained.  Her hands were shaking.
The eyes of the entire room were fixed on her.  She looked 
at her watch.
It had been time for lunch ten minutes ago.  She wondered 
why Sutherland's wife hadn't phoned through to the den to 
say things were ready.  Sutherland had asked her to do so 
to avoid the morning session dragging on.  It was vital 
that everyone be fresh and ready for the most gruelling 
part of the day, the afternoon discussion.
Sutherland looked at his watch too.  He had an odd feeling 
that something was not quite right.
Carefully, he looked round the room.  Nothing seemed out of 
place. Sally got to her feet again to clarify one or two 
points that demanded immediate attention.
Sutherland could feel the small hairs rise on the back of 
his neck.
What was it?  Why did he feel on edge?
Sally sat down.  Emeric Jensen offered some comments.  
Someone else asked a question.

Sutherland Cresswell did not hear what was asked, he was 
too busy listening, too busy clearing his mind.
And suddenly it clicked into place.  It was not a sound, 
but an absence of sound, a silence that had drawn his 
attention.  The children had been playing outside, running 
back and forwards, shouting, laughing. At some point those 
sounds had stopped.
Had his wife brought them in to get ready for lunch?  
Sutherland listened hard.  There was no sound of either 
children or adults downstairs.  He knew the house, he and 
his family had lived there for fifteen years, he knew its 
sounds.
Without saying anything, he stood and walked to the side 
window of the study, the one looking out on the patio and 
garden.
He looked down.
Something happened to time.  It stood still, raced fast, 
stood still again.  He listened to his heart beating, and 
between each beat entire lifetimes passed.  He heard voices 
behind him, but he did not understand what they were 
saying.
"I said, are you all right, Sutherland?"  Sally took a step 
towards him.  He did not seem to hear her.  What was he 
looking at?  Why were his hands clenched together so hard?  
She drew alongside him.  He had gone as white as paper.  
She followed his gaze, through the window and down to the 
garden.
"Oh sweet Jesus!"
The children were lying on the lawn, scattered where the 
gas.
had felled them, some face down, others face up.  Suzie 
Cresswell was there, the one in a pink sweater.  Sally 
recognized Donovan's twin girls, Ellen and Linda.  A couple 
of adults were among the children.
A man dressed in black clothes and wearing a black gas mask 
was picking his way between the still figures.  He carried 
a gun with a silencer in his hand, and one by one he was 
despatching his victims with single shots in the back of 
the neck.  Each body jerked in turn and lay
still.
Sally turned and grabbed her jacket, slung across the back 
of chair. Faces were turned to her, uncomprehending.  Some 
people were on their feet already.  She pulled out her 
communications handset and pressed the transmit button.
"Gary!  Robert!  Are you down there?  Can you hear me?"  
She was trying to raise the security team they had left on 
duty outside the house. She knew them all by name.


"Pete!  Come in, anybody! Answer me, for God's sake!" 
There was a sound of footsteps in the corridor outside the 
study. The last thing she heard, the last thing any of 
them heard was loud 
crash as the door exploded inwards.  The last thing she 
saw was a man dressed in black and carrying a heavy sub-
machine gun.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Port-au-Prince lay battered and bruised in uncertain 
sunlight, guarded


from the rear by towering, wasted hills.  The sea thrust 
itself against the shore like a salt-tipped tongue probing 
a rotten cavity.  Calm waters after angry seas, light after 
darkness, silence after rage, putrefaction after death.  
Only the sea moved, turgid, covered with oil and seaweed, 
flotsam of every description, a ragged, dirty thing.
The Fanchette limped towards the harbour, riding low in the 
water.  A bird swooped out of the clear blue sky, white-
winged and raucous, grazing the deck house as it passed.  
The little boat had taken on water and her pumps had 
started to seize up.  Reuben, Angelina and August stood on 
deck, wordless and numb, watching the sea part in front of 
them.
They had ridden out the storm all the first night and 
through much of the following day, sleeping and waking 
intermittently, their dreams white and naked, possessed by 
the hurricane.
Angelina had woken screaming on three occasions, with no-
one to comfort her.  August had sat staring out at the sea 
for a long time, until he too fell into a raging sleep.  
Reuben swam through bitter darknesses and was possessed by 
gods he neither knew nor loved.
His parents did not visit him there, nor Devorah, nor 
Lindstrom, nor Danny, none of the dead.  But he saw the 
living, he saw Sally and Forbes and Max Bellegarde dancing 
a strange dance, and Doug Hooper, bloody and heroic and 
grey-skinned, turning in their midst, a necklace of burning 
pamphlets strung around his neck.
"Where will you go", August?"
Angelina had not wanted to put the question until now.
"What will you do?"
The boy shrugged.  Without Lindstrom, he had nowhere to go, 
no means of making a living, no future.  Angelina looked at 
his ragged clothes and dirty bare feet.  What was he?  
Twelve, thirteen?
A piece of flotsam like the rubber tyres and empty bottles 
that choked Port-au-Prince harbour.  A ship's-boy without a 
master or a ship.  The Fanchette.  she had little doubt, 
would be sold to pay off Lindstrom's debts.  Not a gourde 
would be left.
"I think you should come with us," she said.
The boy shrugged again.  He held the old tabby in his arms, 
stroking the salt-stained fur with an automatic motion.
"Sam can come, too," she said.
But for how long?  This was no longer her home, they would 
never get permission to take August into the United States.  
Perhaps Mama Vijina could help.
August nodded.  He knew better than to reject the 
generosity of the rich.  In his eyes, Reuben and Angelina 
were fabulously wealthy.  He had learned how to take what 
little he could get from life with apparent grace.  But he 
still resented it, still wished for the freedom to throw it 
all back in someone's face again.
They anchored off the little jetty just north of Fort Ste 
Claire and paddled ashore in the dinghy, leaving their 
equipment behind.  The harbour was strangely deserted, as 
though the storm had sapped everyone's will, tempting them 
to stay off work for the day.  There was a tension in the 
morning air that had not been there when they left, an 
uneasiness not wholly the work of the hurricane.

The Peugeot was waiting for them where they had left it.
Everywhere there were puddles of water from the storm.  
Driving back to Mama Vijina's, they saw further signs of 
devastation on every side. The wind had torn across the 
island, ripping up trees, tearing down fences, snatching 
chickens from their pens and grackles from their nests, 
mincing, shredding, pummelling, wrecking without pity or 
shame. The tangled streets were filled with debris that had 
been carried miles before being deposited here:
twisted pots and pans, broken calabash bowls, coconuts, 
spades, candles, a broken crucifix.
Everywhere, windows had burst under the terrible pressure 
of the wind, strewing shards of broken glass in all 
directions.  Reuben thought of the Hoopers, of the 
destruction of their shop.  They had had their hurricane in 
advance.  He wondered what had become of them.
Mama Vijina was waiting for them.  Someone had seen the 
boat come in and passed the word on.
The electricity had been cut, the telephones were out, but 
Port-au Prince functioned after its own fashion, according 
to different rules. They were not dependent on telephones 
or newspapers to spread the word. If you wanted the real 
news, you didn't tune in to the radio, you listened to the 
bush telegraph.
They ate a little, pretending an appetite they did not 
feel.
Someone talked of love in smooth, evasive terms: love of 
the mysteries, love of the ocean, love of death.  From their 
chairs, they could smell hibiscus and oleander, almond and 
bougainvillea, dark smells, labile and singular, 
resurrected from the storm.  They talked of nothing. Mama 
Vijina watched the boy, knowing how little he could hope 
for. Someone else talked of solitude.  There was a tinkling 
of spoons on plates, a brightness of knives, the scent of 
resurrection.  In the street outside, men and women put 
their lives back together carefully, as they had done many 
times before.
There was talk of penitence.
No progress had been made on the killing of Macandal.  The 
police had identified him as a man of thirty-four named 
Otard Le Sauveur, a griffon from Les Cayes, a clerk with 
the Ministry of Culture, no criminal record.  He left a 
woman afemme ca ille in Port-au-Prince, by whom he had 
three children, and another- a femmeplacee-in Carrefour. 
His killer was being sought.  There were no clues.
When her friends left, the women who talked of love and 
solitude, Mama Vijina brought Reuben and Angelina close and 
told them disturbing news. The political situation was 
tense and deteriorating, there was talk of a crackdown on 
political opponents, of a curfew, of blood running in the 
streets.  The long promised elections would not now be 
held, people were urged to unite in loyalty to their chief 
and protector, President Ciceron, troublemakers would be 
shot on sight.  Rumours abounded, graffiti had appeared on 
walls last night, fear lay on the city like a gloved hand.  
Love and solitude.  The only ways out.
Shortly after breakfast, August disappeared.  Sam remained 
behind, mewing discontentedly, refusing food.  Locadi came 
in, wearing a flowered dress, and took him away, 
scratching, bewildered.  Angelina gave her Lindstrom's hat, 
brought from the Fanchette, to put beside him, but Locadi 
refused it, saying it would not comfort him, that cats are 
not dogs after all.


They went upstairs after that, to sleep.  Angelina lay 
awake for long time, watching light diffused through the 
blue shutters, its patterns shifting lazily on the floor.  
If she closed her eyes, the room seemed to pitch and yaw, 
and she would be forced to open them again in order to 
focus on something hard and unmoving.
When sleep did come at last, her dreams were filled with 
the smell of crushed vanilla and the bittersweet taste of 
French chocolate.
It was long past noon when she woke.  The room was dark, 
but filled with tiny points of light.  The sun made 
dappled shapes on the naked wooden floor, soft yet 
intense, like butter melting on chafing dish. She had been 
awakened by a sound, and for a long moment she felt fear 
constrict her, pulling at her heart and throat.
There was a shadow at the foot of the bed, still, not 
moving.
With a start, she realized it was Reuben.  He was standing 
silently, watching her.  A long arrow of sunlight fell 
slantwise across his chest.  He did not move at all.
And every moment he grew to be less shadow and more flesh, 
as her eyes regained their accustomed wholeness of sight.
"I couldn't sleep," he said finally.
"The bed kept moving, everything kept moving."
"I know," she said, her voice languid with sleep.
"You were sleeping," he told her.
"I watched you."
"How long?"
"I don't know."  He paused.
"A
long time."
In the street outside, a woman's voice sang a love song, 
slow and poignant, before night fell.
There would be a curfew, tanks would lumber past, the song 
would
fade.
"I was dreaming about my father," she said.
"Was that true?"  he asked.
"What you told me before, about..."
He could not complete the sentence.  The thought appalled 
him.
She did not answer.  True or untrue, she dreamed of 
vanilla scented hands, of an old man's beard grazing her 
cheek.
Reuben came closer and sat on the edge of the bed.  She 
had taken off her clothes, she was naked beneath a thin 
sheet, she was filled with remnants of uneasy sleep.  All 
awkwardness had fallen away from them, the storm had torn 
down the barriers between them, they had been dead, they 
were undergoing a resurrection.
Or another death.



She sat up in the bed, and the sheet fell away, leaving her 
breasts and shoulders bare, a terrible vulnerability.  He 
leaned forward and touched her cheek and neck, brushing her 
tired skin with long, naked fingers.  She sighed and turned 
to him, feeling sleep turn to arousal, death to 
resurrection.
He bent down and kissed her shoulder, running his lips and 
tongue along the line of the bone.
She had not washed, she still carried the sea on her body.  
Her skin tasted of salt, not the salt of the body, but a 
deep ocean salt.
He slid onto the bed alongside her, feeling her arms slip 
round his neck, pulling him to her.
This is the dance as well," she said.
"I don't understand."
"Let me teach you," she whispered.
The sheet fell away and she was naked beneath him.  
Somewhere a drum began to beat.  In the street, the love 
song rose and fell like the sea.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
It took a long time for the smoke to clear.  The street had 
filled with ash and cinders, the gutters ran thick with 
blackened water, people stood in little clumps chatting and 
watching.  There had been some difficulty in getting the 
engine near enough, and even then the water pressure had 
proved unsatisfactory.  Neighbours had helped with buckets, 
but little had been salvaged, the fire had been too fierce. 
There had been damage to the houses on either side as well.
They might have to be demolished.
A thin breeze lifted some of the ashes into the morning 
air.
They were light, as light as gossamer, they floated in the 
slightest current.  Close up, it was possible to make out 
thin white ghosts traced over them, the shades of printed 
words.  On the ground, indifferent feet trampled them to 
dust.
They had heard of the Hoopers' disaster soon after waking.
Locadi had come in distressed, saying there had been a fire 
in the rue des Casernes, the American bookshop had been 
burned to the ground.
Without waiting for breakfast, they had hurried round to 
see what they could do.  Ever since their arrival, Reuben 
had felt a strange sense of responsibility for the 
missionaries.  And he was still uneasy about Doug; it was 
not a real fear that the American could do him harm, more a 
foreboding, a sense that Hooper's inner misery of spirit, 
his search for certainty of purpose might lead him into 
trouble.
The Hoopers were physically unhurt, but dazzled by the 
enormity of what had happened, the gross disenchantment of 
their loss.  Everything had gone, even the small things, 
clothing, toothpaste, Hershey bars. Reuben found them 
huddled together in the ash-filled street staring numbly at 
the twisted ruin of their enterprise, as though engaged in 
a silent prayer that had the power to undo the viciousness 
of fire.
Haltingly, Jean explained how they had returned to the shop 
late the night before, after a meeting of some sort, a 
"Feast' she called it,
though it sounded a sober enough occasion, coffee, 
biscuits, interminable prayers.
They had fallen asleep, Doug with the aid of painkillers as 
usual, and gone on sleeping until well after three, when 
they had been roused from paradisiacal dreams by shouting 
voices and crackling flames.  Running outside, Doug had 
noticed an unmistakable smell of paraffin.  It had been 
sprinkled liberally throughout the shop.
Doug drew himself close to Reuben.  His hair was wild, he 
had not shaved since his beating, his eyes looked shocked 
and drugged.
"This is Valris's doing, just like before," he hissed.
"He tried again yesterday, he gave me an ultimatum.  I had 
to turn him down.  Now this happens.  But he'll pay, I'll 
see he pays."
Jean Hooper grabbed her husband tightly by the arm.
That's enough of such talk, Douglas Hooper.  If this was 
anyone's doing, it was God's.  He wants to test us, to 
prove we're worthy.  The Assembly will help.
We'll go to the Assembly."
But Doug pulled away.  He was not to be appeased, not even 
by the spectre of virtuous sacrifice.
"We're wiped out, Jean.  Don't you understand that?  God 
would test us, but He wouldn't wipe us out.  What would be 
the point of that? Valris's to blame, Valris and his thugs.  
But I'll teach him a lesson, a good, old-fashioned American 
lesson that he won't forget."
Reuben drew Hooper aside.


Take your wife's advice, Mr. Hooper," he said.
"Don't let
Valris drag you into something you'll regret.  This isn't 
Indiana.  The man who ordered this can have you jailed or 
shot or thrown into the sea, no questions asked.
Something's going on, or haven't you noticed?  They say 
there'll be a curfew tonight.  There have been arrests.  
Beatings.  Two people have died in custody.  You're naked 
here, you have no-one to look after your interests.  Forget 
Valris, forget Haiti.  Cut your losses now, before it's too 
late.  You may not get another chance."
Hooper did not answer.  He was unreachable.
Reuben sighed and turned to
Jean Hooper.
"Where will you stay?"
She pointed to a group of half a dozen men and women 
standing near the shop.
The friends will take care of us," she whispered.  They're 
our family now."
"Go there now," Reuben said.

"But be on the first flight out of Port-au-Prince."
She fixed him with her persistent gaze.
Thanks for your concern.
Professor, but we came here for reason and we'll stay until 
God tells us otherwise.  Don't worry about us; worry about 
yourself."
August was waiting for them when they got back to Mama 
Vijina's.
Locadi had prepared a meal of fried chicken in Creole 
sauce, red beans, aubergine and rice.  He was eating as 
though he had fasted for a month. Angelina thought he 
looked tired.  No, more than that.
Crushed.  He looked fifty, not twelve or thirteen.  Or was 
it just that she had not noticed it before?
They joined him, piling food high on their plates, 
realizing that they too were hungry.  The previous evening 
had been spent with Mama Vijina, talking, switching between 
the government-owned Tele National and the two channels of 
the nominally independent Tele-Hai'ti, listening to Radio 
Cacique, interpreting the conflicting reports coming in 
from the city and the countryside.  Reuben had gone to the 
post office to telephone Sally again, only to be turned 
away.  All communication with the outside world had been 
suspended.
The Dessalines Battalion, the country's largest, had been 
confined to barracks and placed on round-the-clock alert.  
The Presidential Guard had been doubled.  All military 
leave had been cancelled.  General Nord Laguerre, the 
army's CommanderinChief, had been called to the Palais 
National for a lengthy consultation with the president and 
General Valris.  There had been arrests in Port-au-Prince, 
Cap Haitien, Port-de-Paix, Jeremie, Les Cayes and Jacmel.  
Max had spoken on the radio, cautioning restraint, hinting 
darkly of worse deeds to come.
They had gone to bed early, made love again, and stayed 
awake talking into the small hours.
Through the open window of Angelina's room, the moon had 
painted everything with magic.
Slowly, they had opened themselves to one another, offering 
the broken pieces of their individual lives for scrutiny.
This morning it all seemed unreal and far away, the 
caresses, the intimacies, the long, perfect silences.  The 
taste of ashes filled their mouths.
August did not talk much at first.  No-one asked where he 
had been or what he had been up to.
Angelina watched him eating, the hurried, anxious motions 
of a scavenger brought up to fend for himself.  Lindstrom 
had done little to civilize him.  As he grew full at last 
he started to slow down.
Finally, he laid his spoon aside.
"I found them," he said.
"The ones what done it."  His mouth was smeared with sauce.  
Angelina reached across and wiped it with her handkerchief.  
He did not shy away.
The ones who did what?"  she asked.

"The ones what killed the
Captain."
She looked round at Reuben and told him what the boy had 
just told
her.
"Ask him how he knows."
She asked.  He shuffled a little, then launched into his 
story.
"It weren't easy," he said.
"I
had to ask lots of people.  Down the docks.  I did all the 
jetties, the ro-ro terminal, container dock, all the way 
down near as far as the navy yard.  It's a mess down there.
Fuckin' storm's done the whole place up.  Anyway, I asked 
who else come in after the hurricane, apart from us.  See, 
whoever killed the Captain couldn't have got back in once 
the storm started.
They'd have been maybe halfway back here when it got bad, 
maybe not as far as that.  Either they'd've heaved to and 
taken their chances, or they'd've put down a storm anchor 
like what we did.
Once things settled down, they'd've come in ahead of us."
"You don't know they came back here, to Port-au-Prince."
"They followed us out there, didn't they?  After that 
hurricane, they wouldn't fuck about, they'd get straight 
back.  An' there was three boats what got in before us.  I 
got their names.  There was coaster what got stuck comin' 
down from Santiago.  You can rule him out.  There was a 
fishing boat called the Ti Coyo.  Engine packed up.  They 
knows them down the docks.  I've seen them going out 
myself.  They're all right.
"But the third one, that's the one.  The Quinquin.  Forty-
footer, same as the Fanchette.  Come in day before 
yesterday.  No engine trouble or nothin', just got stuck, 
they said.  Skipper's a man called Gro Moso. Had three 
passengers with him.  Nobody knew them."
"What were they like, these passengers?"
Two blacks and a blanc.  The white shouldn't be hard to 
find.
He has a scar.  A long scar on his right cheek."
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
The knocking woke them just after midnight.  Reuben rolled 
out of bed half-asleep, reacting automatically.  There was 
a second round of knocks, heavier this time.  He slipped on 
his trousers, opened the drawer by the bed, and drew out 
his new gun.  August had obtained it from a man who owned a 
hardware stall at the Iron Market.  It was an old Czech 
CZ75, a locked breech, double-action auto that had needed 
extensive cleaning and oiling before it would even take a 
magazine.  It wasn't much of a gun to trust your life to, 
but it had been the only gun in Port-au Prince that 
afternoon.  The knocking came again, more insistent than 
ever.  There was a sound of footsteps heading for the door.
Angelina was bolt upright in bed.



"It's not the police," 
she whispered. "How do 
you know?"
"They wouldn't bother 
knocking. They'd smash 
the door down.


If it was a mistake, too bad."
"Who, then?"
She shrugged.
"Smith?"
"Same thing.  Why give us a warning?"
Apart from buying the gun, they had spent the afternoon 
looking for Smith, speaking with August's contacts up 
and down the waterfront. There'd been no firm leads, 
only sideways glances, nervous coughs. Someone knocked 
on the bedroom door.


"Who is it?"  Angelina asked. "Vijina.  You've got to come 
quick." 
Reuben went to the door and opened it.  Mama Vijina was 
standing in an old cotton dress.
She looked empty, more desolate than tired.
"It's the American woman," she said.
"She's with a man I don't know.  Looks like she's in 
trouble.  I don't understand what she's saying."
Angelina told Reuben what Mama Vijina had said.  She 
wrapped a sheet round her and slipped out of bed.
"Go down," she said.
"I won't be long."
Jean Hooper was in the tiny front room, nervously watching 
shadows gather round a collection of oleo graphs and 
figurines Mama Vijina sometimes used the room as a bagui 
and as a place to meet people from the neighbourhood when 
they came for advice.
She was sitting on the chair normally reserved for Mama 
Vijina herself, a large, ornate chair upholstered in cheap 
red velvet.
Beside her stood Amirzadeh.  He looked pale.  In the 
doorway, Locadi stood quietly, keeping a sleepy eye on 
their visitors.
The missionary looked terrible, even worse than she had 
done that morning after the fire.  She had been crying, and 
the little makeup she wore had run, staining her face.  
Everything about her was tense: her hands, her jaw, her 
neck, her eyes.  When Reuben entered the room, she stood up 
at once, then sat down again, as though pushed.
"You shouldn't be here," Reuben said.
"You took a terrible risk coming out tonight.  They're 
shooting people
on sight.  Don't you know there's a curfew?"
He didn't know why he was so abrupt with her.  Something in 
her manner made him want to be harsh.  He wanted to shake 
her bodily, shake sense into her.  Or was it just a 
reaction to his own fear of a few minutes ago?
She didn't answer at once, apart from a couple of gulps 
that sounded like a reply strangled at birth.  For a moment 
she closed her eyes. Her lips moved in their old recourse.  
Reuben felt as though he could hit her: she had put 
everyone at risk, coming here as though her prayers 
rendered her invisible.  And the Iranian, he should have 
known better, he had lived here long enough.
She looked up at Reuben.  There was nothing in her eyes.  
No appeal, no apology, no anger, no rebuke.


"Doug's been arrested," she said. "They're holding him in 
jail;
God knows what they're doing to him."
Reuben looked from the woman to Amirzadeh.  The Iranian 
held a short amber rosary in one hand, moving each bead 
deliberately through his long, tense fingers.
The beads clicked gently together as they turned.  Reuben 
looked at Jean Hooper again.
"How do you know this?"  Reuben asked.  There's a curfew.  
Your husband shouldn't even be out of the house."
"I had a telephone call," said Amirzadeh.
"Someone told me Doug had been arrested by the security 
police.  He is being held at Petionville."
"Did they tell you what he's being charged with?"
Amirzadeh looked at Jean
Hooper.
"May I tell him?"
"It's all right," she said.
"I'll tell him myself."  She hesitated nevertheless.  
Speech had not touched her eyes.  Her eyes were empty.  
Wherever she had gone, it was deep inside.
"Professor Phelps, Doug killed ... he killed .. . that man 
..."
Reuben's heart skipped a beat.
At that moment, Angelina entered the room.  Locadi left to 
make
coffee.
"What man?"
That general, the one who was supposed to help us.  The 
traitor in our midst, the Judas Valris.  They say Doug 
killed Valris."  She was growing distressed now, her eyes 
bulging with tears.  What did she mean, 'the traitor in our 
midst'?  Had the phrase some meaning other than the 
obvious?  She was crippled in speech tonight, her tongue
stumbled, spilling words.
Angelina went across to comfort her, but she shook her off.
"You've got to find him, got to get him out, got to ... got 
to .  "
Her voice was rising.  The words came out in little jerks, 
fragments thrown out without meaning or purpose.  Her 
manner was disquieting. She remained down inside herself, 
insulated from everything, warm and comfortable, in some 
sort of communion with her God, while her voice rose and 
her body shook as though they were things wholly 
independent of her.
"Got to ... got to ... got..."
Reuben turned to Amirzadeh.  The Iranian seemed fairly 
casual, as though this sort of thing happened to him every 
day, as though grief and torment were a business like any 
other.  The beads moved precisely through his fingers.
"Is it true?"  Reuben asked.
"Did Doug kill Valris?"
Amirzadeh shrugged, an Oriental gesture, the equivocal, 
nuanced mannerism of a bdzari merchant feigning a lack of 
interest in a potential customer.
"Ach namldanam.  I don't know," he said.  He spoke in 
careful English, in the fluted accents of north Tehran.  
That is what they told me.  I think they are telling the 
truth.  Why should they lie?
There is no reason for them to lie."
"Were you there?  Did you see
Doug when he left?"
Amirzadeh shook his head.  His face was well-formed, an 
exquisite beauty, a carved solemnity, like Darius 
conquering.
"I only arrived half an hour ago.  After the phone call."
"And here?  Why did you bring her here?"
The Iranian hesitated.  Nearby, Jean Hooper smiled and 
frowned alternately, without reason, as though her 
conscience both rebuked and comforted her.
"I told her your friend Mrs.  Hammel is the sister of 
Bellegarde.  I thought she might be able to help.  Or you, 
you are an American.
Maybe he will listen to you."


"You could have come alone.
There was no need to risk her life taking her out in the 
curfew." Amirzadeh shrugged again, remote, indifferent.
"She is safe now.  But I think we have to do something."
Reuben turned to speak to Jean again.  She was staring 
at him, as though wondering who he was and what she was 
doing here.  But she seemed more in control of herself, 
as though a crisis had passed and the next was still a 
little distance away.



"Mrs.  Hooper, do you think there's any truth in this 
story?"
Reuben asked.
"I know your husband was hot-tempered, but surely ..."
Reuben realized as he asked the question why the story 
sounded so hard to believe.  He had not treated Doug Hooper 
as an adult.
Hooper didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't swear, maybe 
didn't have sex. Some religious people are children in 
adults' clothing.
But it looked as though Doug Hooper had just grown up.
"He's been threatening something since last night.  You 
heard him this morning.  Threats, terrible threats.  He has 
no forgiveness.
He has no love any more: not for me, not for God.  The fire 
was the last straw.  I think it could be true."
They say he had a gun,"
Amirzadeh said.
"What sort of gun?"
The Iranian shrugged.
They did not say.  A pistol of some sort, perhaps."
Reuben looked at Jean Hooper.
"Do you know anything about a gun?"
She shook her head.
"No.  Doug never had a gun back home.  And he wouldn't have 
known where to get one here."
She looked at Angelina.
"Please, Mrs.  Hammel, you've got to do something.  You've 
got to speak to your brother.  The Faith will be finished 
here, finished.  We've got to get him out of jail, make 
them forget this ever happened."
It was all she cared about, the reputation of her faith.  
She didn't give a damn for Doug, nor for his intended 
victim.  Reuben did not care whether the entire Baha'i 
mission got kicked out of Haiti;
but Hooper's escapade could turn nasty.
"Mrs.  Hooper," Reuben said, 'there's nothing any of us can 
do tonight. There's a curfew on.
There are trigger-happy soldiers out on the streets looking 
for targets.  It won't help the situation any if Angelina 
or I get shot." "I can help you," said Amirzadeh.
"I can get you through the checkpoints."
Reuben shook his head.


"Far too risky," he said.
They're shooting on sight."
Amirzadeh made a gesture unfamiliar to Reuben, the Iranian 
equivalent of a quick headshake, a rapid, upward tilt of 
the head accompanied by a click of the tongue.
"They will make an exception, you will see.  I am a 
pharmacist.
Even in a curfew, people need drugs.  Someone may be sick, 
someone else may be dying.  I have a special pass.  My car 
is painted with a red cross.  There is a blue light for the 
roof.  Believe me, you will be safe.  I have done this many 
times.  Curfews are nothing new in
Haiti."
"Please," pleaded Jean Hooper.
"Please go with him.  Professor.
You and Mrs.  Hammel are our only hope.  If you leave it 
till the morning, Doug could be dead.
They say he tried to kill a government minister during a 
curfew."
Reuben turned to Angelina.  Jean Hooper had shown a bit of 
realism for a change.
"What do you think?  Will Max listen to you?"
She shrugged.
"I don't know.  But I can talk to him.  If Mr.  Amirzadeh 
can get us to Petionville safely, I'm willing to speak with 
Max.  If Max is willing to speak with me."
"Very well," said Reuben.
"We'll risk it."
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
In a curfew, silence mutates.
Insensibly, it takes on different forms, different 
modalities.  It drifts, it collects in doorways, it creeps 
in through unshuttered windows, open keyholes, unguarded 
fan lights.  Sometimes it is tense, like the moments before 
a bomb explodes, or a gun fires, or a child dies.  
Sometimes it is seductive, like the quiet between a man and 
a woman before they make love.  Or sad, as though a little 
time had passed and they were about to quarrel.
So many silences, so many moods, so many shields to keep 
the vociferous world at bay.
Reuben felt them tighten round him now, all the silences, 
skintight, perfect, mantles for his fear.  They were 
halfway to Petionville. Amirzadeh had stopped the car and 
switched the engine off, letting the silences flood inside.  
They had already passed through two checkpoints, at each of 
which the Iranian had flashed his papers.  He explained 
that Dr.  Phelps had been summoned from the Adventist 
Hospital at Diquini, just south of the city, to treat 
General Valris at his Petionville home.  The soldiers had 
heard of the attempted assassination, but had no 
information on the state of the general's health.  Rather 
than bethe cause of a potentially fatal delay, they waved 
Amirzadeh's Volvo estate through at once.
The roadblocks were serious affairs.  At one, a light tank 
had been
parked, its engine purring resonantly, ready to respond at 
once in the event of an all-out alert.
Near it had stood a Fiat 55-13 armoured bus.  Amirzadeh had 
whispered to Reuben that it was full of soldiers or riot 
police equipped to deal with any outbreak of civil 
disorder.  Reuben got the impression that the Iranian 
approved.
Disorder of any kind was anathema to him, as it was to the 
Hoopers.
They had entered the heart of Petionville.  On their right 
began a series of villas built on bluffs overlooking the 
road on one side, the city on the other.  The Volvo's 
headlights picked out long gravel led driveways lined with 
red hibiscus.  The flowers shimmered like blood, as though 
the darkness was bleeding.  Huge white moths danced in the 
light, fluttering like pieces of silver, their powdered 
wings dizzy and confused.
Angelina held tight to Reuben's hand in the rear of the 
car.
The square was filled with police and military vehicles.  A 
steady throbbing came from the engines of two Panhard AML 
H60-7 armoured cars parked outside the Choucoune.  There 
were no guests to revel there tonight.
Nervous-looking soldiers, most of them little more than 
children, stood beside a personnel carrier, smoking or 
staring into the darkness. There were lights in none of the 
buildings except the police headquarters. Floodlights 
bathed the entrance in stark white light. Guards were 
posted at the door.
Amirzadeh showed his pass, but his story held no water 
here.
Angelina came out and talked at length in Creole with one 
of the guards.  Reuben watched her from the car.  His hands 
were sticky with sweat.  He wondered how they had ever 
allowed Amirzadeh to persuade them into thinking they could 
pull this off.
But Angelina was Max's sister in more than name.  In New 
York, she was no-one, just a professor's wife, a failed 
painter, half-white, half-black, a creature of the in-
betweens.
Here, she had the confidence of family and class, the 
assured ness of someone who knew just how things worked.
The guard disappeared inside with alacrity and came out 
less than five minutes later.  Angelina and Reuben were to 
go inside.  Amirzadeh was to wait in the car.
Max was waiting for them, not in his office, but in a large 
room on the ground floor.  The walls of the room were 
covered with maps and bulletin boards.  There was a large 
table bearing a map of Portau-Prince on which roadblocks 
and guard posts were indicated by small models.  As they 
entered, Max was busy shouting instructions down a 
telephone.  He did not look up until he had finished 
speaking. Someone handed him a despatch.  He glanced at it, 
nodded and threw it on his desk.
"Good evening, Angelina, Professor.  I have been expecting 
you.
You have come to see your friend Mr.  Douglas Hooper.  Poor 
Mr. Hooper, you will find him the worse for wear.  He has 
been foolish, your Mr. Hooper.  No, not foolish stupid.  
Extremely stupid."
"Is it true he killed someone?"
Angelina asked.
"A government minister?"
Bellegarde nodded.  A soldier came in and handed him a 
heavy sealed envelope.  He signed for it and put it to one 
side.
"I must apologize," he said.
"As you can see, we are extremely busy here tonight."  He 
paused briefly, as though trying to remember what they had 
just been talking about.
"Yes," he said, 'it is true.  He shot General Valris.
Somehow, Hooper managed to get into the general's house.
Valris's bodyguard picked him up after the shooting.  They 
beat him rather badly, I'm afraid, but the officer in 
charge had the wit to stop them short of killing him.  He 
knew I would be interested in a white man, an American, who 
had carried out an assassination here in Haiti. And I am 
interested.  Very interested."
Reuben leaned forward across the desk.
"But surely you realize this was not a political act, that 
Hooper cannot have meant anything sinister by it.  Valris 
had done those things to make life hard for Hooper.  You 
must have heard.  He wrecked his shop, then burned it down.  
Hooper's a fool as you say," he overreacted.  But you must 
know that he's politically naive."
"Yes," Max replied, "I know all about that.  But I cannot 
concern myself with motives or with who is and who is not 
naive.  We are in the middle of a political crisis, or 
haven't you noticed.
Professor?
I must go by what I see.  A citizen of a country with which 
Haiti does not possess diplomatic relations, an American 
with a loaded gun enters the grounds of a house belonging 
to the Minister of Defence and shoots him.  Surely you can 
see that that is serious.  Or are you naive as well.  
Professor?"
Angelina interrupted.
"Max, you said yourself that what Hooper did was stupid.  
Do you honestly think that if there was anything more to it 
that the CIA would use a man like that?"
"Who said anything about the
CIA?"
That's what was in your mind, wasn't it?"
Bellegarde shrugged.
"Not necessarily," he said.  He fell silent.  His eyes 
alighted on the envelope.  He opened it, glanced through 
its contents and pushed it away again.
"I'd like to see him," said Reuben.
"Talk to him.  Where are you holding him?"
"Hooper?"

"Hooper, of course."
"He's here, where did you expect?  I'm not sure that I want 
you to sec him or speak with him."
"I'd like to hear what he has to say."
"Of course, that would be natural."  Max turned to 
Angelina.
"What do you think?  Should we let them talk?"
Angelina nodded.
"Yes," she said.
"If there are questions later, if Hooper dies, then 
Professor Phelps can testify he saw him alive while in your 
custody.
I'd like to see him too."
Bellegarde shook his head.
"No, little sister.  I'd like to speak with you myself.  
You can stay here.  I'll send one of my men with the 
professor.  He may see Mr. Hooper if he wishes."
Bellegarde called a man lounging near the door.  It was the 
man in the beige suit, the one called Loubert.  He 
sauntered across and smiled at Reuben.  Bellegarde snapped 
out instructions.
"Come with me," Loubert said.
Reuben went with him to the door.
Angelina watched him go.  Max watched him go.  Angelina 
said nothing. Max said nothing.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
The cell into which Hooper had been thrown was one of seven 
on the ground floor.  The doors seemed flimsy and the bars 
on the window exaggeratedly thin; but Reuben guessed that 
nobody in here would be healthy enough to attempt breaking 
out.  A stench of stale urine and human faeces hung on the 
unmoving air.  Reuben gagged as he entered the cell.
A weak yellow bulb gave enough illumination to send half 
formed shadows scurrying into the corners of the narrow 
cell.  The ceiling was thick with spiders' webs.  There 
were traces of dried blood on the walls.  On the floor lay 
a low pallet bed, and on the bed Reuben could make out a 
dim figure covered by a thin blanket.
Valris's soldiers had not killed Doug Hooper, it was true.  
But that was more or less a technicality.  It took no more 
than a glance for Reuben to tell that, even if Hooper did 
recover, his life would scarcely be worth living.  The bed 
and blanket were caked in blood.
Hooper was semiconscious.  He stirred as Reuben sat on the 
edge of the bed.  There were no Hershey bars here, no 
photographs of saints. Hooper tried to move his arms in a 
vain attempt to fend off the blows he thought were about to 
descend.  Both arms had been broken in several places.  One 
hand had been repeatedly crushed beneath someone's boot.
"It's all right, Doug, it's me, Myron Phelps.  I've come to 
help you.
I'm going to try to get you out of here."
Hooper rolled his head towards Reuben.  The wound on his 
cheek had been reopened and enlarged.  Both eyes were 
closed, puffy and bruised.  His lips were thick and smeared 
with blood.  He opened his mouth to speak, revealing 
bleeding gums; most of his teeth had been smashed out with 
a rifle butt.  Reuben winced as he noticed that his left 
ear had been sliced partly off.
Reuben felt a huge anger swell in him.  He turned and 
shouted at Loubert.
"Why the fuck haven't you taken him to hospital?  He needs 
treatment! What are you people, savages?"
Loubert pretended not to understand.  He leaned against the 
door and cleaned his fingernails.
Even here he wore his shades.
"Phelps .. ."  whispered Hooper in a broken voice.
"Who ... I don't... remember..."
"It doesn't matter.  I'm going to get you out, take you to 
hospital.  I won't let them keep you here."
"No-one ... speaks English," Hooper wheezed.  He tried to 
move to a more comfortable position, but the resulting pain 
almost caused him to black out.  Reuben suspected that he 
must have several broken ribs.  He was afraid to touch him.
"Please," he said.  Try not to move.  I'll tell Bellegarde 
you've got to be given morphine and put in a proper bed.  
Amirzadeh's outside.  He has drugs in his car."


"Co .. . closer ..."
whispered Hooper.  Reuben bent down.
"No .  gun .. . Never .. . had .  gun ... Wanted ... to 
... talk .. . Valris .. . Not .. . kill..  .


Please .. . believe me .. ." "I believe you," said Reuben. 
"I believe you."  He reached out a hand uncertainly and 
touched Hooper gently on the side of the neck, where he 
seemed to be without bruises. Tears were leaking through 
the blackened lids of Hooper's eyes.  Reuben took a paper 
tissue from his pocket and wiped them away.  Where was 
Hooper's God now?  he wondered.  Where was anybody's God?
There was a sound at the door.
Reuben turned.  Max Bellegarde was standing in the doorway 
watching. Loubert moved aside to let his superior enter.  
Max seemed altered, strange, his affability, however false, 
now stripped away.
"What has Mr.  Hooper been telling you, Lieutenant Abrams?
What sweetnesses has he been whispering to you?"
Reuben stood.  For a moment he did not register that 
Bellegarde had used his real name.  Had the major known 
from the beginning?  Or had


Angelina just told him?
"He tells me he had no gun," Reuben said.
"He says he went to speak to Valris, that's all.  I 
believe him." Bellegarde snapped his fingers.
A uniformed policeman stepped out of the shadows behind 
and handed him something.  The major held it up towards 
the light.  It was a gun in a plastic bag, a Browning Hi-
Power.
"I see you recognize it, Lieutenant.  It is the gun found 
in Mr. Hooper's possession when he was arrested.  It has 
his fingerprints." Bellegarde paused.
"It also has yours."
That's a lie," exclaimed Reuben.


"Hooper never saw that gun. Your men took it from my room. 
You planted it on him, planted his fingerprints."
"So you do admit that it is your gun.  Lieutenant.  Well, 
let us see if Mr.  Hooper remembers it too."
Bellegarde took three long strides across the cell.  He 
ignored Reuben, standing near the edge of Hooper's bed.  
Without warning, Bellegarde grabbed a clump of the 
missionary's hair in his right hand and pulled him to a 
half sitting position.  Reuben made to go for the major, 
but there was a click behind him and he stepped back again.
"Don't be a fool.  Lieutenant," Bellegarde said.
"Captain Loubert doesn't care if he shoots you or not, it's 
all the same to him."
Max held Hooper's head a foot or so away from his own face.  
He dropped the gun on the bed and held his free hand close 
to Hooper's mouth.
"Such a mess," he said.
"You need those teeth attended to."
Deftly, Bellegarde inserted long fingers between Hooper's 
ravaged gums. The American cried out as Max took a broken 
tooth between thumb and forefinger and rocked it back and 
forwards.
The tooth finally came free of the gum, spilling fresh 
blood over Hooper's chin and chest.
Bellegarde repeated the manoeuvre with a second tooth.  
Hooper lost consciousness.
Max looked round.  He seemed almost disappointed that his 
victim had slipped away from him.
"We have plenty of time, Lieutenant.  There is no rush.  My 
wife and children are safe asleep at home.  I am not 
expected back while the crisis continues.
"Now, tell me if I am correct or not.  You obtained this 
gun from a US
government agency known as the CSA, an agency to which you 
are temporarily attached.  You then gave the gun to Mr.  
Hooper here, who is also an American government agent.  
Hooper proceeded to carry out his mission, namely to shoot 
and kill General Louis Valris, the Haitian Minister of 
Defence.
Unfortunately for him and for you, but luckily for the 
Haitian people, Hooper was arrested by the general's 
bodyguard after completing his mission.
That is substantially correct, is it not?"
Reuben said nothing.  What was the point?
"You have nothing to say?  Too bad.  Mr.  Hooper goes 
before a firing squad later tonight.  A confession might 
have gained him some time.  No matter, I have absolutely no 
interest in Mr.  Hooper.
It is you who interest me now.
Lieutenant.  You and the people you work for."
The major stood.  He glanced round the cell as though 
seeing it for the first time.  His head almost touched the 
spiders' webs.  Black shapes moved across the ceiling on 
dreadful legs.
"Very well," Max said.
"I think it is time to leave Mr.  Hooper to his fate.  
There are more important matters to be discussed."
He stopped and came close to
Reuben, very close.
"We have a long journey ahead of us tonight.  I will have 
to ask you to be patient, very patient."
They left Hooper lying on the bed, like a piece of wreckage 
on the ocean floor.  The blankets had fallen from him, 
divesting him of his last protection.  Was he dreaming?  
Reuben wondered.  And did he dream of paradise or hell?
Bellegarde led Reuben to the front of the station, out into 
the crowded square.  Amirzadeh's car had gone.  There was 
crackling from a radio set nearby, and a clash of gears as 
an armoured truck lumbered past the Choucoune.
Angelina was nowhere to be seen.
A large black Mercedes drew alongside.  Loubert was at the 
wheel. "Where's Angelina?"  Reuben asked.


"If we're going 
somewhere.
I'd like her to come 
with us." "Angelina?"  
Bellegarde repeated. 
"You must be 
mistaken.


I know no-one of that name."
Max opened the door and motioned Reuben inside.  For a 
moment, Reuben stared at him as though about to strike 
him.  He looked round.  Was


Angelina there, in the shadows watching?
Or downstairs in a cell like the one they had just left?  
He bowed his head and got into the car.  Max got in beside 
him and closed the door softly.  No-one said a word as 
Loubert drove off into the waiting night.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
There was no wind, no rain nothing but a blank sky and the 
night empty above a barren countryside.  They drove through 
all manner of silences: the silence of curfew, and the 
silence of empty fields, the silence of night and the 
silence before dawn.  No-one stopped them, no-one 
questioned their coming or their going:
Bellegarde had telephoned ahead to each roadblock in turn.  
It was as if the country lay in his hand, perfectly, like 
an apple fallen from a high tree.  An apple whose centre 
was already rotten.
They headed north out of PortauPrince, following the road 
that led past Bois Moustique.  After Bon Repos, the road 
twisted north-west, skirting the coast towards St.  Marc.  
In the back of the car, lapped by silences, Reuben slept 
and woke several times;
each time when he awoke he saw Max Bellegarde sitting in 
the same position, wide awake, his hands on his lap, 
staring at his own reflection in the window.
The night was full of soldiers.
They sat in doorways smoking lonely cigarettes, or leaned 
against mournful barricades blowing on their fingers for 
warmth.
Once, there was a sound of gunfire, hesitant and far away, 
drifting across the night through vast plantations of green 
sugar cane.
They passed through St.  Marc without stopping.  The town 
was deserted, as though a sudden pestilence had ravaged its 
inhabitants.  It was a place of closed shutters and locked 
doors.
Dawn appeared, sullen and menacing, high in the east above 
the Black Mountains.  In a haze of imperfect morning light, 
they passed ghost-like through a desert world: flat beds of 
mud stretched endlessly in every direction, pocked by the 
tangled wickerwork of dark mangrove thickets; huge salt 
pans lay stark and crystalline in the ragged sunlight, 
pools of blue and green and sickly yellow.  The world 
seemed vast and uninhabited.  There was no warmth in 
anything.
They passed through the slums of Gonai'ves and headed east 
into the Chaine de Balence mountains.  Reuben rubbed his 
eyes and watched uncomprenendingly, lost beyond all hope.  
He knew where they were going.  He had guessed the name of 
their destination.
Petite-Riviere stood dreaming in a dark and twisted valley 
ringed by hills.  They came upon it abruptly, on a tight 
road arched by vines. Reuben knew it at once;
even from the distance he could sense the tainted ness that 
clung to it, an ancient corruption, time sensed as 
distance.  The hillsides all around were charred and 
desolate.  Stunted plants and gaunt, unnatural trees were 
all that remained of the old plantation.
It was as though a sorcerer, bitter and defeated, had laid 
waste all about him with a single, poisonous spell.
Stone had fallen from stone, roof tile from roof tile 
rafter from
rafter, beam from beam.  Neither time nor nature had been 
gentle with Petite-Riviere.  Old walls stood bowed beneath 
the weight of long, clinging vines.  Spiders wove webs in 
the spaces where doors and windows had once stood.  How 
long, Reuben wondered, had things been like this?  When did 
Angelina say she and Rick had visited the house? Twelve 
years ago?  Could it have fallen into such ruin in so short 
a time?  It must already have been well on its way by then.
The Mercedes bumped and slithered along a track that was 
little more than a groove through thick vegetation.  The 
sun had gained in strength, filling the little valley with 
humid warmth.
Between the trees, pale butterflies sparkled in strips of 
sunlight, moments of dreaming in the midst of rank reality.  
They drew up near what had been the entrance to the main 
house.  There had been lawns and peacocks here once.  Now 
weeds grew as high as a man's waist.
"Come with me.  Lieutenant," Bellegarde said, laying a soft 
hand on Reuben's arm.  He had still not explained how he 
came to know Reuben's true identity, nor had Reuben asked 
him to.
They stepped out of the car onto an expanse of overgrown 
weeds and jagged thorns.  A rough pathway had been hacked 
to the entrance, in which a door of sorts still stood.  
Bellegarde led the way.  Reuben came next, followed by 
Loubert, not visibly tired by his long spell at the wheel.
Petite-Riviere was, if anything, more decayed inside than 
out.  It looked as though no-one had set foot there in 
decades.  Reuben could see no sign of habitation, no 
evidence of the family Angelina said had been in residence 
twelve years earlier.  The staircase directly ahead had 
rotted and collapsed in the centre, eaten away by termites 
and damp.  Where the plaster was still intact, the walls 
were sheeted in a layer of green mould, broken here and 
there by patches of naked
stone.
Bellegarde seemed to know his way.  He led Reuben along the 
passage, past the ruined staircase, to a gaping doorway 
beyond which lay a huge, unfurnished room.  Reuben picked 
his way gingerly across a floor of cracked and broken 
stones.  The original windows had been bricked up, but in 
places shafts of purple sunlight stabbed through gaping 
holes in the ceiling.  Glancing up, Reuben saw traces of 
fine mouldings and elegant cornices, their detail lost for 
ever to the ravages of damp.
They passed into a smaller room, very dark and cold.
Loubert pushed Reuben inside.  At the far end, Bellegarde 
stood waiting by an open door.  As Reuben approached, the 
major held something out towards him.
"Here," he said, 'you'll need this."
It was a battered hurricane lamp.  Loubert came forward 
with box of matches and struck one to light Reuben's lamp.  
Max lit one for himself and handed a third to Loubert.
There's no electricity here.
Lieutenant.  Not even gas.  But this is better than 
nothing.  Whatever you do, don't lose it."
Reuben could now see that the open door by which Max had 
been standing led directly to a flight of steep stone 
steps.  Max did not falter. Holding his lamp high, he set 
off down the stairwell.
Moments later, the light from his lamp had been swallowed 
by darkness.
Reuben hesitated.
Loubert came up behind and pushed him in the back.  He 
stepped through the doorway.
The steps went down at an acute angle, spiralling tightly 
about narrow central pillar.
Bellegarde's feet could be heard below, ringing on the cold 
stone. Using his right hand to follow the wall of the 
narrow shaft, Reuben held the lamp in his left, shining its 
yellow light on the steps immediately in front.  They were 
badly worn in the centre, the mark of generations.
Reuben already had a premonition of what he would find at 
the bottom. This must have been Bourjolly's first 
experiment in excavating chambers under the earth.  Reuben 
wondered what he had accomplished here, assisted as he must 
have been by long accumulated wealth and the strong backs 
of African slaves.
He was not prepared for the sight that met him as he turned 
the last bend and stepped from the stairwell.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
A vast field of stone trembled in front of him, its broad 
flagstones lit by flickering torches.  Above it, a low roof 
of stone stretched in every direction.  Some distance in 
front, the open expanse gave way to a forest of iron-banded 
pillars crisscrossed by narrow vaulted arches. It was as 
though Reuben had stepped into the heart of a dark 
cathedral, a hollow place without sunlight.  The torches 
became mere sparks in the further reaches, and beyond the 
narrow radius of their unsteady light lay doubled and 
trebled darknesses without number.
Bellegarde was waiting outside the opening, lamp in hand, a 
shadow in a shadow land
They knew they could never return to Tali-Niangara," he 
said, 'so they built another city here, a city beneath the 
earth, where they could speak freely with their gods.  
There were already caves here, underground passages that 
had been used by Bourjolly's ancestors as wine cellars.  He 
spent a fortune widening and expanding them, throughout the 
years before the revolution.
Afterwards, his followers continued the work, digging, 
repairing, building.  There are tunnels that stretch for 
miles.  There are natural caves so huge no-one has seen 
them from end to end."
Reuben shivered.  Why had Bellegarde brought him here?  The 
major sighed and looked curiously at Reuben.
Time to go," he said.  Time to meet old friends."
He set off across the stone field without waiting.  Loubert 
pushed Reuben between the shoulder blades.
At regular intervals, they saw small huts of stone.  
Something in the style of their construction reminded 
Reuben of photographs he had seen of the facades of ancient 
Egyptian tombs and palaces, though much debased.  They came 
before long to the first of the great pillars, thick piers 
of stone carved in intricate patterns.  Here again, Reuben 
was reminded of Egypt: the carvings showed tall figures 
bearing staffs, and beneath their feet clumps of reeds and 
lotus flowers.  Bellegarde strode on ahead, glancing to 
neither left nor right.
They came after that to an open space like a city square, 
devoid of
pillars or huts.  Reuben could hear sounds like a 
susurration of muffled voices, low and faint.
He glanced round, but whichever way he looked he saw only 
empty space. And then he looked down.
He was standing on a circular slab, a stone slab pierced 
with nineteen holes the size of coins.  Everywhere he 
looked, the floor was made up of the slabs, identical to 
those he had seen in Brooklyn.  The sound was coming from 
beneath the ground, through the holes.
Bellegarde halted and looked back.  He saw Reuben staring 
at the ground.
That interests you, does it?"
he asked.
"That sound."
As though prompted by his voice, there was a noise very 
like barking. It stopped and was followed by the sound of a 
human voice sobbing.
"They can hear us," Bellegarde said.
"They hear our voices and they try to answer us.  Don't be 
afraid. Lieutenant.  They can't hurt you.  They are long 
past hurting."
"What is it?"  Reuben demanded.
The sounds were growing in volume now.  Every time someone 
spoke, it seemed to act as a cue for renewed effort on the 
part of whatever was kept beneath the slabs.  There were 
dozens, hundreds of slabs, all pierced with holes.
"What is making those noises?"
he cried.  And a sound rose up near him that was very like 
a human voice, muttering what sounded almost like words.
"The pets of the gods," said Bellegarde.
"In Tali-Niangara, the children who were sent as tribute to 
the gods were placed in deep pits like these.  Every few 
days, food would be brought for them, and water.  They 
lived full lives, though much restricted.
The youngest of them forgot the world outside and grew to 
adulthood knowing nothing but the pits.
Those who displeased the gods were brought to join them.  
It was harder for them: they could not forget the life they 
had led before.
The pits were always full.  When one died, another would be 
found to take its place."
Reuben stood frozen to the spot with horror.  The 
gibberings and murmurings all around him were coming from 
the mouths of human beings. With a shudder, he remembered 
the pitiful remains he and Danny had found in the pit they 
had opened in Brooklyn.
He heard a scraping sound beneath his feet, and a 
scampering, and he wondered what Danny had seen in the 
tunnel.
They moved on quickly across the pitted floor while the 
chattering rose and fell around them.  Bellegarde and 
Loubert seemed wholly unaffected
by the dreadful sounds, but Reuben could bear them no 
longer and ran with his hands clasped over his ears.
They came to a dark tunnel, very like the passage that had 
led to Bourjolly's library in Brooklyn.
Bellegarde entered, motioning to Reuben to follow.  The 
tunnel wound through solid rock for about five hundred 
yards before ending at a heavy wooden door.
Bellegarde knocked and a muffled voice from inside 
answered.
Grasping a stout iron handle, he pushed the door open and 
stepped through.  Reuben followed, then Loubert, who closed 
the door behind him.
It was as if a genie, summoned up out of a brazen lamp, had 
transported wholesale to Petite Riviere Bourjolly's 
Brooklyn library.  The same books lined the same wood-
panelled walls, the same portraits stared fiercely out of 
identical frames, the same great globe sat in the centre of 
the floor, and on the floor itself the great pentacle lay 
waiting for the touch of a sorcerer's hand.
At a desk littered with papers, withered fingers still 
clutching the pages of an open book, Bourjolly sat 
unmoving, still clothed in the garments in which he had 
died.
Only one thing was different.
On the wall above the desk hung large painting.  It had not 
been in the library in Brooklyn.  The style was realistic, 
but modern.  It showed the scene from the engraving in the 
book Bourjolly had been reading, the scene of the 
resurrection.  The open graves, the corrupted bodies 
rising, the horror on the faces of the risen dead.  The 
painting showed two major differences from the original: 
here, the dead were black, not white.  And the things that 
licked and sucked their flesh had come up out of deep pits, 
pits identical to those Reuben had passed only minutes ago.  
On the lower edge of the frame, a title could be read:
La Nuit des Septiemes Tenebres The Night of the Seventh 
Darkness. "Please don't worry.  Lieutenant.
What you see is not an hallucination."  '
The voice came from the back of the room.  A figure 
detached f;
itself from a clutch of ill formed shadows and stepped into 
the centre. Reuben felt the hairs on the back of his neck 
rise.
Smith.
Reuben tensed.  He felt the barrel of a gun pressed against 
his temple; Loubert was taking no chances.  Smith reached 
out one hand casually and lifted a strand of Bourjolly's 
decayed white locks, letting the hair run through his 
fingers almost playfully.
"It was an achievement, don't you think, to get him all 
this way intact."  He dropped the lifeless hair and waved a 
hand at each of the walls in turn.
"All of it dismantled, packed and shipped here in a matter 
of days. Then reassembled in his own private chamber, as 
though it had been waiting for his return all these years."
"Why have I been brought here?"

Reuben demanded.
"You've got what you want.  I'm no further use to you."
Smith smiled.
"Please sit down, Lieutenant.
We know one another by now, there is no need to stand on 
ceremony." Loubert took Reuben's elbow and steered him to a 
chair.  Smith took a second chair facing him.
Bellegarde and Loubert stood at distance, watching.
Smith reached down and lifted a large leather briefcase 
onto his lap. From it he took two large, buff-coloured 
envelopes.  Leaning back in the chair, he smiled again.  It 
was not a warm smile, more a baring of teeth, like a beast 
of prey moving in for the kill of a lifetime.
"I understand you like photographs," he said.
"The art of observation and distortion.  Or perhaps that is 
the nature of all art.
Science too, if we are to be honest.  But photography has a 
particular poignancy.  It allows us to hold a moment for 
ever.  A person, a place. Like an insect caught in amber.  
A painting is many moments, but a photograph is truly 
instantaneous.  That smile, that frown, that injudicious 
look in the eye, that declaration of love or hate."
Smith hesitated, then drew a bundle of photographs from one 
of the envelopes.
"Photographs have an affinity with death," he said.
"When we are dead, we go on living in them, smiling, 
frowning, looking sadly at the photographer we love or 
hate, at our own image in the unyielding lens."
He held up a photograph, near enough for Reuben to see, a 
photograph of Sally Peale.  Then, without a word, he let it 
flutter to the floor.  He raised a second photograph.  This 
also showed Sally, but not as Reuben remembered her: 
riddled with bullets, spattered with blood, a look of 
surprise on her unmoving face.  Then a closeup.  Still 
Smith did not speak.
Reuben watched as he took photograph after photograph from 
the pile, first the living, then the dead: Sutherland 
Cresswell, his wife and children, Emeric Jensen, Hastings 
Donovan and his children, everyone who had been at the 
meeting in Washington.
Smith told Reuben the identities of those he did not 
recognize.
Then another batch of photographs.
Danny smiling, Danny on a slab;
Reuben's father in an old photograph, young, newly arrived 
in America, Reuben's father, unrecognizable, bloody; 
Reuben's mother alive, Reuben's mother dead; Rick Hammel in 
academic robes.  Rick Hammel where Reuben had first seen 
him, a newly discovered murder victim;
Sven Lindstrom in a fall of sunshine, Sven Lindstrom 
underwater as Reuben last remembered him;

and, last of all, Devorah at their wedding, followed by a 
photograph of Devorah's grave.
Smith let the portraits fall to the floor, a cemetery of 
stiff, shiny paper.  Reuben recollected the dismembered 
photographs he had found in his own apartment, the ones 
Angelina had ripped to shreds, his own gallery of the 
living and the dead.
"I hope you are watching, Lieutenant," Smith whispered.
"This is not an art lesson.  I want you to remember all 
these faces."
He gathered the photographs together, straightened their 
edges and returned them to the envelope.  He paused and 
smiled.
From the second envelope he drew out a single photograph 
and laid it on Reuben's knee.
Davita sitting on a chair, staring red-eyed into the 
camera.
Beside her sat Smith, expressionless.  Reuben made to lunge 
for Smith, but Loubert was there as before, his gun barrel 
hard against Reuben's neck.
"Don't worry," Smith said.
"She is perfectly safe.  No-one has harmed her.  No-one 
need harm her. Assuming you make the right choice, that is.  
Otherwise ..."
He took another photograph from the second envelope.  
Reuben could not at first make out what it showed.  Then he 
realized, and his blood went cold.  A square of perfect 
blackness, broken only by a pattern of white dots, nineteen 
dots arranged in concentric circles, like a constellation 
of tiny stars.
For a long time Reuben sat and stared at the darkness in 
the photograph.  He knew the pit had been prepared, not for 
him, but for Davita.
"Why?"  he asked.


"Why me?  Why
Davita?"
Smith shrugged.
"Why not?  Life does not give us many reasons.  It is 
enough for me that you are here and that I have a use for 
you.  If you help me, your daughter will spend the rest of 
her life in the sunshine.  It is entirely up to you."
"What do you want me to do?"
asked Reuben.  There was nothing in his voice, not even 
hate, not even contempt.  Nothing.
"I want you to kill someone,"
Smith said.
Reuben held his breath.  He felt a terrible pain in his 
head and the beginnings of nausea.
"Who?"  he asked.



"Who do I 
have to 
kill?" "The 
president," 
answered 
Forbes.  The 
president of 
Haiti."
CHAPTER 
SEVENTY-ONE


She is sitting in a shaft of sunlight.  It is oblique, it 
falls through the tinted glass of a high window, it is warm 
and trembling, alive with swimming motes of dust, and it 
lies perfectly against her skin like vanilla scented ice 
cream.
Her father used to buy her ice cream years and years and 
years ago. Max was seventeen when he found them, Angelina 
eating ice cream, desperate, trembling, eyes half-closed, 
her father's hand halfway up her soft yellow skirt.
They had come for her father the next day, the men in 
cotton uniforms, the men with guns and eyes like lead.  She 
knew Max had told, and she thought he had told them about 
that, about what her father had done with her, that they 
had taken him away for that.  But later, much later she had 
learned the truth.  What he had really told them.  And why.  
It was not until Rick spelled it out for her that she 
understood how Max had built his own career on that simple 
betrayal of their father.
Out of rage.  And outrage.  And malice.  And greed.  And 
jealousy.
The sunlight was real.  Oblique and tinted and very real.  
Max had sent her to his house, high in the hills at 
Kenscoff.  She was waiting for him to return.  She was 
afraid.
Jealousy.  More than anything it had been jealousy.  Max 
had wanted her for himself.  Somehow she thought she had 
always known that, always wished a little that it might be 
so.  Max was powerful now.  He would be more powerful yet.  
His betrayal had borne fruit.
She held something on her lap.
A golden circle, a flat disc of beaten and incised gold, 
carefully repaired.  The tiny staples that held it together 
were scarcely visible.  It was as if it had never been 
broken.  She ran a finger over it, again and again, 
savouring its hardness, its preciousness, its power.  The 
light danced across its surface adoringly.
IIy avail unefois... Once upon a time there was... She 
smiled.
Once upon a time there was a city in a forest.  She smiled 
again.  The old fairy story, the one her father had told 
her before Max had him taken away.  It was her only comfort 
now.  The smile left her face.
Something dreadful was going to happen.
Tali-Niangara was a memory, a ruin in the heart of a vast 
and uncharted rain forest.  The bones of its kings had long 
ago crumbled to dust in their ivory caskets.
But the symbol of their power had been resurrected from the 
sea bed. The gods were waiting to be reborn.
Angelina held the disc up to the light.  She remembered the 
story of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp, the genie that 
could be conjured up from its depths, the magic that the 
merest rubbing could unleash. There
was no need for magic now.  Let others believe in magic, in 
ancient gods.
With her circle of gold, she knew she could accomplish all 
that and more.
She looked up.  The clock said half past four.  Max was 
coming home.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
The cathedral stank.  Beneath layers of crusted wax and 
incense, traces of an older, thicker scent lingered like 
rotting flesh hidden by the uncorrupted skin of some long-
dead saint.  The church was not ancient; its oldest 
sections dated only from the late nineteenth century, but 
it had acquired a patina of age.  Something older than its 
indifferent icons, older than its painted windows, older 
than Christianity itself, something primeval clung to its 
stones.
High up in one of the twin towers, a lonely bell rang out, 
tolling for the dead, a steady, doleful note repeated into 
an empty sky.
Below, the diminutive figures of priests and their 
assistants scurried about in the transept, setting the 
stage for the rites to come.  The open coffin was already 
set up on a trestle, draped in the Haitian flag, nestling 
in a bower of red and white flowers.
The priests had gone to General Valris that morning at the 
cathedral gate, asperging his remains to the chanting of 5;
iniquitate and the refrain of De profundis.
They had preceded him into the church, while choir boys 
sang Exultabunt Doming.  Reuben had watched, hidden and 
alone, as they set the coffin before the high altar and lit 
candles all around.
Doug Hooper had been buried at night in an unmarked grave.
Jean Hooper had been bundled on board the first flight to 
leave Haiti since the lifting of the curfew.  The State 
Department had released a statement denying Hooper's 
involvement in a US plot against President Ciceron and 
condemning the execution.  No-one had paid any attention. 
Today's funeral was to be a set piece, the focus of the 
nation's grief. Or at least a proclamation of victory.  The 
curfew had been ended, the threat of a coup was over.  So 
it seemed.
Forty feet above the floor of the chair-filled nave, Reuben 
huddled against the wall of the clerestory, nursing a 
migraine like a sentinel against sleep.  He had been there 
since the previous night, smuggled in through a side 
entrance by two of Valris's favourites.
The night had passed slowly, haunted by the little, 
meaningless sounds of the empty church and the faint 
susurration of his own breath.  His only companion had been 
a small red light burning in the sanctuary. With dawn even 
that had faded.
He supposed he could escape, but what would be the point?
Where could he run to?  If he was not there at noon to 
shoot President Ciceron, Smith would set his terrible 
machine in motion.
Reuben did not for a moment doubt his ability to carry out 
the
threat.
It had not taken Reuben long to work out what Smith and 
Bellegarde wanted.  They had set him up along with Hooper 
to provide proof of a CIA plot against Ciceron.  Hooper's 
presence in the country had been
purely fortuitous, but his disagreement with Valris had 
played into their hands.  Today, Reuben would kill the 
president.  Within minutes, he would be found and taken, 
dead or alive, probably the former.
His link to the Valris assassination would be established, 
his connection with the CSA made public.  A US plot 
unmasked and announced to the world press.  No doubt other 
plotters would be discovered.  And arrested.  And shot.  In 
a matter of days, Smith and Bellegarde would watch power 
fall into their waiting hands like a heavy, ripe mango 
dropping from a tree.
Reuben had already assembled and checked his weapon, an H 
6- K PSG1 semi-automatic sniper's rifle.  The assassination 
was to look well planned and properly equipped.  The PSG1 
had a free floating barrel with adjustable stock, it had 
been fitted with a 6 x 42 Hensoldt Wetzler scope adjustable 
from 100 to 600 metres, and it rested on a well-balanced 
tripod attached to the gun's fore end  The fact that he had 
never used one before, that he was not in any sense a 
trained assassin would not, of course, matter in the least.  
He would not shoot to miss.  Smith had spelled out the 
consequences of such a ploy.  And its pointlessness.  The 
pit was purely for psychological impact:
they could shoot Da vita just as easily.
He glanced at his watch.  The funeral was due to begin in 
fifteen minutes.  Already, the first mourners had begun to 
trickle in.  The dignitaries would arrive late, of course, 
the president last of all.
Reuben closed his eyes against a stab of pain, then settled 
back against the wall.
When the time came, he would be hidden behind a high stone 
balcony, one of several running all along the clerestory.  
He had been positioned almost halfway back along the nave, 
giving him good angle towards the sanctuary, at the foot of 
whose steps the coffin had been placed.  At some point in 
the ceremony, the president would place flowers on the 
casket, then ascend the pulpit to address the congregation 
and the press.  That would be Reuben's cue, his signal to 
strike.
The cathedral was filling now.
Candles had been lit, incense was being wafted through the 
aisles, a shaft of light entered through window in the west 
transept, falling with almost theatrical perfection across 
the bank of flowers dying about the dead general.
The first arrivals were the nobodies: civil servants, local 
merchants, representatives of Haiti's dwindling foreign 
community friends of the family.
Next came the close relatives, some sobbing, others 
curiously silent. And at last it was the turn of the 
dignitaries.  First, those of minor rank: the director of 
the Banque Nationale, the president of the Haitian Chamber 
of Commerce, the chief of police, the rector of the 
University of Haiti, several judges, lawyers, newspaper 
editors.
Finally, the creme de la creme:
two generals, the commandant of the Presidential Guard, the 
admiral-in-chief of Haiti's tiny navy, representatives of 
the remaining diplomatic corps, the papal nuncio, members 
of the country's leading families, cabinet ministers.
There was a pause in the procession.  People took their 
seats.
Reuben felt sweat break out on his brow.  He felt sick.  
Sick from pain
and sick from apprehension.
He was not an assassin, but shoot or not he would be a 
cause of death today.  He wanted to stand and cry out, but 
that would only be a signal for Davita's death.
The bishop of Port-au-Prince entered.  A voice announced 
the arrival of the president.  The congregation rose to its 
feet with a scuffling sound and muffled coughing.  Ciceron 
walked slowly down the centre aisle, flanked by guards in 
ceremonial uniforms.
He was dressed in black and wore a black velvet arm band  
Reuben stared through a tracery of stone, eager to see the 
man he had to kill.
Behind Ciceron, wearing a dress uniform that suggested a 
major upgrading of his rank, walked Max Bellegarde.  He too 
wore an arm band of black velvet.  He was not alone.  By 
his side walked, not his wife, not his mother, but his 
sister Angelina, dressed all in black, in mourning, as 
Reuben had first seen her.
The bell stopped in mid-swing, as though frozen.  Gently, 
the echoes of its last note vibrated and died away into the 
thin air.
On the streets, all traffic had been stopped since eight 
o'clock. Silence swooped on the capital like a bird of 
prey, portentous and heavy winged
Inside the cathedral, a tiny, tinkling bell rang out, clear 
and precise against a sound of suppressed sobbing.  Not 
everyone was here for show or veneration.  The priests in 
their funeral attire began the Requiem Mass, their faces 
all solemnity, wreathed in clouds of incense.
She sat in the front row beside her brother, among the 
generals and the diplomats.  He could tell that she was 
uneasy.  Every few moments, her head would turn, now this 
way, now that.  Was she looking for him, did she know he 
was still alive?  He saw Max bend and whisper in her ear. 
He felt ice run through his veins.  What was he to do?  No-
one had prepared him for this.
The Mass droned on, familiar cadences in an unfamiliar 
tongue, the mysteries of death spread out in a mixture of 
French and Latin.
It was not the first Requiem Mass Reuben had attended.  
Every year since enrolling at police college he had gone to 
at least two funerals of fellow officers killed in the line 
of duty.  A high proportion were Irish, Italians, Poles.  
He knew the funeral Mass almost better than the Kaddish.  
Surprised, he realized he was crying silently, crying 
because he had not recited the Kaddish for his father or 
mother.  He had no brothers, it had been his duty.  And if 
Davita died?
He leaned back and waited, his eyes fixed on the Mass 
below.  The voices rose and fell, the figures of the 
celebrants moved among incense to unworldly rhythms, like 
participants in someone else's dream.  Black faces, black 
hands, black voices, trapped in the gestures of a foreign 
creed.
There should have been dancing, Reuben thought, there 
should have been drums.  God should not be so remote, his 
son so ethereal, their visitations so parsimonious and so 
trite.
But at last there was an end.
The bishop completed the rites of the Absolutio, the 
celebrants dispersed.  A hush fell on the cathedral, an 
expectancy.  At the altar, physically unaltered, Valris's 
body lay inert in its flower-heavy coffin, a mute testimony 
to the harshness of the world outside.

Reuben saw Ciceron stand and make his way alone to the 
altar steps. The president seemed tired, a small, unloved 
man with sad eyes.  He faced the congregation silently for 
what seemed a long time.  Someone coughed.  Someone else 
cleared his throat.  Ciceron began to speak, simple words 
in Creole, a eulogy for a man he had not loved.  Reuben 
could not understand a word.  It made no difference.
Reuben aimed for Ciceron's head, a millimetre above the 
nose.
He was at an angle, but it hardly mattered: at this range 
one good shot would be fatal.  It was easy to do.  He 
thought of Danny, of his own father, of his mother, of 
Devorah, of all his dead and nearly dead.  He thought of 
Davita.  He thought of a dark pit.  Softly, he closed his 
eyes and muttered the first words of the Kaddish, "May His 
great name be magnified and hallowed in the world which He 
created according to His will."
He opened his eyes and aimed again.
What was Ciceron to him?  He put the rifle down.  It was 
impossible.
He was not a killer.
A second later, a loud shot rang out.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
The shot was followed by a silence so complete, so intense 
it was as though the world had been stopped dead in its 
tracks.  Then pandemonium broke out, stifled at first, 
rapidly growing in volume and inarticulateness.  Reuben 
looked down into the body of the cathedral. Ciceron was 
down, sprawled across the steps like a broken doll.  He did 
not move.  No one went near him.  Reuben had no doubt he 
was dead.
The president had been accompanied to the church by a 
circle of bodyguards.  Everywhere, men in soft suits and 
uniforms were brandishing guns, their eyes roving the 
crowd, looking every where for the source of the killing 
shot.
The shot had come from the clerestory opposite.  Reuben 
stood and looked across.  The assassin was plainly visible, 
a dark face behind a gleam of burnished metal.  Loubert.  
He lowered the rifle, turned and gazed across the empty 
space at Reuben.  Their eyes met.  Loubert raised his rifle 
and aimed at Reuben.  He pulled the trigger.  Nothing 
happened.  His gun had jammed.
Reuben did not hesitate.  He picked up his rifle and put it 
to his shoulder.  Without aiming, without deliberating, he 
fired, three quick shots, iron among stone.
One hit the opposite balcony, the others took their mark.  
Loubert lurched away from the edge, dropping his rifle into 
space.
It fell to the nave with a clatter.
By now, most of the congregation had tumbled out into the 
street, leaving the president's bodyguard and several 
dignitaries huddled together in the transept.  Some of the 
security men were trying to hustle the remaining 
dignitaries away from what was obviously the target area.  
There was a clatter of feet on the stone stairs leading to 
the clerestory on both sides of the nave.
Reuben threw his rifle away and stood up.  He put his hands 
on his head.
They might not shoot if they thought him harmless.
Max appeared at the top of the steps alone, unarmed.  He 
had known what to expect.
"It's all right, Lieutenant,"
Max said.
"You'll be safe with me."
Reuben stepped out of the shadows.  He could smell incense.
The sound of shooting still echoed in his ears.
"What's happening?"  he asked.
"You're all too quick for me.
You move from one death to the next like children sampling 
sweets." "I'm president now," Max said.
"I'm in control.  You're safe with me.  Come downstairs.  
Angelina's waiting for you."
"Is she all right?"
Max glanced at him curiously.
"Why shouldn't she be?  Angelina has always been all right 
with me." Reuben wondered what he meant.
They went down, Max leading the way, Reuben's abandoned 
rifle in one hand, Reuben following like a lamb.  He had 
begun to understand.  The stairs led down to the transept.  
Light fell at his feet, thick, like syrup.  Ahead of him, 
the coffin stood like a misplaced carnival float, grotesque 
and redundant.
The crowd had thinned.  Down the steps leading to the 
opposite clerestory, two security officers were manhandling 
the body of the president's killer.  A third man carried 
his rifle.  He brought the rifle to Max, who exchanged it 
for the one he had taken from Reuben.
Angelina was standing near the president's body.  
Correction, the ex-president's body.  Max was president 
now.
Beside Angelina stood a tall man dressed in a sober three 
piece suit. Smith.  Or Warren Forbes.
His name scarcely mattered.
Smith's hair was carefully brushed and he wore a tiny 
silver ring on the forefinger of his right hand.
"Why, Angelina?"  Reuben asked.
She said nothing.  She seemed as though in a state of 
shock.  Or indifference.  There was something in her hand.  
A large disc, a disc of gold.  It seemed both familiar and 
unfamiliar.
Angelina stepped towards Max.
She held out the circle, the ancient token of the kings of 
Tali-Niangara.  With this, Max would be more than a mere 
president.
He would found a dynasty.  He took it from her and held it 
up to the light.  The metal glistened, gold more ancient 
than the pomp of Christ. He looked round the cathedral, 
like a conqueror in a foreign temple.
"It belongs to Max," she said.
"One of the priests who came to Haiti on the Hallifax was 
the son of the king.  He was our ancestor.
Max is the ruler by right.  The king has returned.  Tonight 
is the Night of the Seventh Darkness."
And all at once Reuben knew who had painted the canvas he 
had seen in the small room beneath Petite-Riviere.
"Back in Haiti, I painted every day."  What else had she 
painted?
Angelina smiled a soft smile, unlike any Reuben had ever 
seen her smile before.  When I am king, dilly dilly, you 
shall be queen ... Then, quite without awkwardness, she 
turned and transferred the smile to Reuben.  He regarded 
her impassively.  He had loved her, he still wanted her.  
Max was her brother, he couldn't be jealous of her brother.
She came to him, poised, silent, smiling.  Came to him and 
put her arms round him, hard, pressing her body to his, her 
lips to his cheek.
"Quickly," she whispered.
"In the pocket of my jacket.  The left pocket.  Hurry!"
He stroked her back, then brought his hand round to the 
pocket of the light coat she wore over her mourning dress.  
She held him tighter. His hand fastened round the handle of 
a small pistol.
"Hurry, Reuben."  Her breath was hot against his ear, her 
tone
urgent.
He looked over her shoulder.
Smith was standing only yards away, watching, suspecting 
nothing. Reuben pulled the gun from Angelina's pocket, 
raised it and fired twice.  Both bullets struck the tall 
man in the chest.  He howled with unexpected pain.  Reuben 
thought of his father and fired twice again. She held him 
while he fired, held him tight against her.  Smith 
stumbled, his shirt stained with blood.  Reuben remembered 
his mother and fired once more.
No-one tried to interfere.  No one came for him.  Smith 
pitched forward, his bloody chest in tatters.  On the 
floor, he cried out with rage.  He crawled forward.  Reuben 
fired again, aiming at his head.
The bullet struck the nape of his neck.  Angelina held him, 
whispering, "Enough, Reuben, enough."
He tasted nothing.  No sweetness.  No honey.  All a 
deception, then: revenge was nothing.  She took the gun 
from him.  It was a small automatic.  It had been fully 
loaded with seven bullets.
He had fired six.  She held him and kissed him hard on the 
lips, then pulled away again.
She put the gun to his head.
"I love you, Reuben," she said.
"More than my father, more than Max.  You understand, don't 
you?"
"No," he said.  He said it to everyone, but most of all to 
her, most of all to Danny, most of all to his parents, most 
of all to himself.
"No," he said.  It was all he had left to say.
She bent forward again and kissed him very hard, the 
hardest kiss in all the world.  As she did so, she squeezed 
the trigger.  It was harder than the kiss.  Her eyes were 
open.  Wide open and utterly, utterly blank.
Daniel Easterman was born in Ireland in 1949.
He studied English Literature at Trinity College,
Dublin, and Persian and Arabic at the
University of
Edinburgh.  Between 1975 and 1979 he carried out research 
for his doctoral thesis on Shi'ite
Islam at King's
College,
Cambridge.  He has lived in most parts of the


British Isles, as well as in Iran and
Morocco.
For several years he was lecturer in
Islamic Studies at Newcastle
University.  Now writing full-time, he holds an honorary 
post at Durham University.
Apart from his literary and academic interests he is 
involved in the promotion of alternative medicine.  He 
lives in the north of England with his wife, a 
homeopath, and their cat, a tabby.