“Some cracked ribs, a few staples to hold my arm together,” I said. “Good as new. These are my friends. Chogyi Jake. Aubrey.”
“Thank you,” Aubrey said as he shook the killer’s hand. “You didn’t have to take Jayné to the hospital like that. I want to say how much I appreciate that you did.”
“It was nothing,” Mfume said, gesturing with his cigarette, the smoke leaving a faint contrail in the air. “It was the least I could do.”
“She doesn’t look good,” I said. “Amelie. Or Legba. Whatever. She doesn’t look good.”
“She isn’t,” Mfume said. “And it’s getting worse. She has less energy. She’s confused more often. I’m no doctor, but I think she has had another stroke. At least one. Perhaps several.”
“She is bound up with the city, isn’t she?” Chogyi Jake said.
“I don’t know,” Mfume said. “She might be. The first stroke and the hurricane coming at the same moment seems too poetic to be simply chance, but… other people suffered as well. Suffered worse. And she isn’t as young as she once was. There may be no reason to assign a spiritual significance to it.”
“Did you know her daughter?” I asked. “Sabine’s mother. The one that died.”
“No,” Mfume said. “No, I didn’t come here until after all of that.”
“You came for Carrefour,” Aubrey said.
“In a sense,” Mfume said and took a drag from his cigarette. The ember glowed in the darkness like a fire on the horizon. His hooded eyes and long face considered each of us in turn.
“I suppose,” he said, “it would be simplest if I began at the start of things.”
NINETEEN
“I grew up in Haiti, one of the fortunate few,” he said. “I was well educated. I never wanted for food. It marked me as a child of great privilege. The poverty in Port-au-Prince is unlike even the worst desperation in the States, and the countryside makes the city look like the promised land. I knew nothing of riders or voudoun. It was superstition. Something for the servants and the beggars on the streets. My family was Catholic, and I grew up within the church and the protective light of Christ Jesus.
“That didn’t go so well as I might have hoped.
“I was twenty-four when Carrefour took me. I had been accepted to law school in the States. My family was very proud. There was a girl I had been seeing, beneath my station, but very beautiful. I went one night to say my good-byes to her, and she took the news of my good fortune poorly. We fought, and… she bit me. Hard enough to draw blood.
“I hid the injury, and thought nothing of it. Three days later, she came to my family’s house, weeping and demanding that I return something to her, but she could not say what precisely I was supposed to have taken. I know now, but at the time I thought she’d gone mad. We sent her away, and I went on with my preparations.
“I left Haiti on my sister’s eighteenth birthday, and I have never gone back.
“At first, all seemed well. I was taking classes, making new friends. Being in the States was more than living in another country. It was a different world. I thought that the dreams were only that. They came every few weeks, and they were not precisely the same, but there were some elements in common. A sense of having been betrayed, and of both rage and the power to act upon it. Asleep, I was the righteous vengeance of God against those who had wronged me. Once, early, I woke to find my bedsheets slit. I thought at the time they had been ripped in the laundry and I’d made it worse in my sleep.
“I began dating a classmate. Cassandra, her name was. She was beautiful and intelligent. She’d been born poor in New York and fought her way through the public schools. She worked twice as hard as any of us. I think I began with her just to see if it was possible to distract her. I had been with women before, but Cassandra was a level above them all. I fell in love with her as I had never done, and so she was the first that Carrefour killed.”
He seemed to sag against the iron railing. His gaze was lost in the air before him. We didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t know that the devil had come inside of me, you see. Not then. Not for years. To begin, it was only that the dreams got worse, and after I’d had one, the whole next day I would be in a foul mood. And then, I started becoming suspicious. Cassandra would study at the library very late, just as she always had, but I became convinced that she was meeting someone. Another man. There was no evidence, of course. It was the rider whispering in the back of my mind, but I believed the thoughts were my own. It persuaded me.
“I had a key to her apartment. I believed that I only intended to frighten her, to show her that betraying me was foolish. I can say that what I did seemed right at the time. It seemed innocent. I went to her apartment one night, parked several streets away so that she would not see my car. I waited with the lights off. And when she came in…
“I believed that I was doing it, you see. They were my hands. My arms. It was my voice. Even if it felt as though I were only watching it happen, how could that have been true? And as it was going on, I felt a terrible sense of peace. Because this is what Carrefour does, you see? It feeds you its rage and its pain, it ties you into a knot. Then when it takes control of you, there is the reward. Peace. Pleasure. Transcendence, almost.
“When Cassandra was gone, I sat with her body for hours. I was horrified. I was stunned with grief. And I was confused, because I had enjoyed what I had done to her. What Carrefour did to me was like training a dog. Punishment and reward. Classical conditioning. And it worked.
“I withdrew from the law program. I was afraid to be around people who had known Cassandra. I moved. Not out of the city but across town. I found work at a small accountancy doing simple data entry. And the beast within me grew stronger. The woman who came in twice a week to help with filing befriended me, and four months later, I killed her too.
“Of course I hated myself, but the pleasure—the release—of my crime was the only peace Carrefour allowed me. It began speaking to me then, a voice within my head. And sometimes it changed me. My fingernails became knives. My skin grew pale. I wasn’t a fool. I was hearing voices. Hallucinating. Clearly, I had suffered a schizophrenic break, but with what I had done, who could I ask for help? Three times, I tried to kill myself, but the rider would not let me. I slaughtered two more women.
“I was quite mad by then. I believed that I had been possessed by a demon, but I also believed that I was making that up. I thought I was innocent, and that I was a monster best shot on sight. My victims deserved it and they did not. I began stalking women who had made no overtures of friendship toward me. And beneath it all, there was the sense of betrayal and the rage and the hunger for vengeance that was the rider’s. I learned the name Legba and of loa and the power of the crossroads between our world and theirs.
“Each time I committed my crimes, the sense of peace and relief that came with it would deepen. I don’t know if it was Carrefour learning how better to control me, or only that I had been broken of my grief and guilt. Broken of it or accustomed to it. For a day, two days, three I would be myself again. The world would have some tiny ray of hope. I could eat. I could sleep. I told myself that it was over, that I could stop. But inevitably, Carrefour would shift in the back of my mind, and I knew it was happening again.
“And then an angel of God’s grace by the name Karen Black saved me.”
Mfume paused, considering his cigarette. Aubrey squatted down, his back against the rough stucco of the wall. In the dark, it was hard to make out details, but I thought he was sweating. Marinette hadn’t ridden him for more than a few hours, and he was listening to a lifetime under the rider’s whip. I couldn’t have imagined a worse nightmare for him.
Mfume plucked a fresh cigarette from his pack, lit it from the butt of the last one, and flicked the still-burning ember down into the street. It glowed like a falling star, then went out.