Malheur then jumped onto the dock and disappeared into the brush without a glance back. I helped Solange out of the boat and held her hand as they led us into a dark passage someone had cut through the mangroves. Gil was in the lead with the flashlight that, this time, thankfully, was not pointed into our eyes. Someone had attempted to build a dirt path above the tide line, but the earth underfoot gave with each step, and when I walked through a puddle, the water that seeped into my boat shoe felt more like mud. My feet were soon slipping around in the grit inside my shoe. The Haitian crewman brought up the rear, apparently guarding us, and I wondered how he was doing in his leather shoes.
The smell was the first thing I noticed. The stink of the rotting vegetation in that mangrove swamp was nothing compared to the stench coming from somewhere up ahead. I pulled my shirt up over my nose. The deeper into the mangroves we walked, the more putrid the air grew.
Then I noticed the quiet. It seemed as though even the insects and the slithery mangrove critters had decided to take a night off. The stillness was giving me goose bumps in spite of the sweat that had now completely soaked my shirt.
We came to a piece of high ground in a clearing; there the cause of the stench became clear. A cinder-block house stood in the center of the clearing. It had been built on big concrete columns so the tidal surge of a hurricane could pass beneath. But tonight, it wasn’t water moving under the house and spilling out across the cleared land. Gil swung his light across the silent ground, and I saw eyes. As the flashlight beam played across their faces—black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Indian—they all turned their heads away, as though ashamed to be found living in such conditions. Hundreds were trying to sleep on the ground, on top of one another, with no shelter from rain or bugs or whatever might come crawling up out of those dark mangroves.
Above us, I heard a door slam, and from the middle of the sea of people came a cough—a chest-rattling, wet, phlegmy cough. Then another. From the other side of the clearing, I heard a young child start to cry and then a mother’s voice speaking softly to him in Creole, trying to calm him. The moaning began from several directions at once and in a variety of pitches, all of them resonating with a hopelessness that was painful to hear. From beyond the tree line, somewhere out in the mangroves, came sputtering noises from somebody suffering from a case of explosive diarrhea.
They’d somehow kept quiet as Malheur had passed.
“My God, who are all these people?”
“None o’ yer business,” Gil said as he stopped at the bottom of the stairs, clicked off the flashlight, and drew a pack of cigarettes out of his pants pocket.
As my eyes grew more accustomed to the dark, I saw next to the house several rusted drums attached to a water catchment system on the roof and a two-burner propane stove resting on a plywood sheet on sawhorses. I wondered if this was the place Solange had worked with Erzulie. No wonder she’d been so thin.
“But they’re human beings. The smell, these conditions— so many kids, too—and they’re sick, Gil.”
He sucked on the end of his cigarette, making the ember glow bright, then nodded his head toward the top of the stairs. “You think he gives a fuck?” His voice sounded different from that of the man who had been yelling at me to shut up in the boat.
I thought about the immigrants who had been killed in Florida and about Margot at the Swap Shop. “But if he is going to sell the restaveks, he must want to keep them healthy.”
“They don’t normally stay here this long,” he said, then he took another long drag on his cigarette. He blew smoke toward the upstairs. “He hasn’t been making runs across since he’s been trying to track down the kid there. He don’t usually stay in Florida.”
“What is it about her? What do they want with her?”
Gil ignored my questions. He dropped the half-smoked butt and ground it out. “You really Red Sullivan’s kid?”
“Yeah, I run Gorda now. So, you did know Red.”
From upstairs came the sound of a door opening, and streams of angry-sounding Creole poured out. Gil mumbled something unintelligible and pointed to the concrete stairs. “Git moving,” he said, and nodded toward the upper landing. “He wants you upstairs.”
I helped Solange up the stairs and through a wood door at the top. Gil was breathing hard just from the climb up the stairs. The room we entered reminded me of Racine Toussaint’s place in Florida. The main light came from two pressurized kerosene lanterns, but at one end of the room was an elaborate altar with dozens of flickering candles, as well as dolls and shells and what looked like a real human skull resting on a crossed pair of thigh bones. Off to one side was a wooden cross that looked like it had been removed from a grave—the downward stake was caked with dirt on the lower third of its length. A rusty shovel leaned against the wall.
Gil and the slim Haitian left us and began talking to some men in an adjoining room. I had no idea what they were saying, but I recognized Malheur’s voice. As the conversation continued, Solange squeezed my hand tighter and she pressed her body against mine.
Seconds later, Malheur made his entrance. He had changed clothes and was now wearing what he had worn that night at Racine’s—black suit, white shirt, narrow black tie, and top hat with a skull and crossbones made of metal studs. His machete was in an elaborate beaded and fringed scabbard on his belt. The slim Haitian entered the room, pushing two other fellows dressed in rags. The three of them crossed to the altar and pulled out drums from beneath the cloth. Malheur produced a bottle of rum and began passing it around. The men drank from the bottle, tipping their heads back, their Adam’s apples pumping as they gulped the liquor. The volume of their voices increased in direct proportion to the amount of rum they consumed, but all the talk was in Creole. Malheur and the other men exchanged comments, looked at me, then burst out laughing.
You don’t have to know the language to know when men are talking about sex. It’s in their eyes, in the way they laugh. I remembered the Capitaine’s little game with my zipper on the ship. I began to understand why Solange was acting as though she feared she would never see me again, and I imagined that anyone looking at the side of my neck would see my pulse pounding in the veins there.
Malheur seated himself with a flourish on a big wooden spool next to the altar. The spool’s wood was weathered to a silvery gray. Probably, it had once been used to run wire around the island, but now it served as a throne for the leader of what seemed to be shaping up to be a Voodoo party.
Solange and I were still standing against the wall about ten feet from the door. I squeezed her hand, and she looked up at me. Inclining my head in the direction of the door, I raised my eyebrows slightly to ask her if she understood. She nodded. Very slowly, we began inching our way toward the exit.
Malheur lined up several bottles and clay pots and produced a mortar and pestle from beneath the table. He began adding ingredients from the pots—dried leaves and dark, foul-smelling liquids—and grinding them together. After pouring some of the rum into the stone bowl, he lit the mixture with a wooden match. He waved his arms in the air over the blue flames and spoke aloud, but his voice was blotted out by the drums that had just started. I had thought the drums at Mambo Racine’s were loud, but these were brutal. It felt as though the drummers were beating directly on my body.
I pressed my hand against my chest and felt for the pouch that Racine had given me. The drums, candles, lanterns, potions, real human bones—these produced some kind of irrational fear. Potions couldn’t hurt me. To be afraid of a six-foot-four-inch murderer was perfectly logical, but it was the blank stare of that skull that made me want to clutch the pouch and start talking to La Sirene.