Simon Templar could not help looking a little surprised. For Mr Netlord was not only a white man, but he was unmistakably an American, and Simon had some vague recollection of his name.
2
It can be assumed that the birth of the girl who was later to be called Sibao took place under the very best auspices, for her father was the houngan of an houmfort in a valley that could be seen from the house where Simon had taken her, which in terms of a more familiar religion than voodoo would be the equivalent of the vicar of a parish church, and her mother was not only a mambo in her own right, but also an occasional communicant of the church in Pétionville. But after the elaborate precautionary rituals with which her birth was surrounded, the child grew up just like any of the other naked children of the hills, until she was nearly seven.
At that time, she woke up one morning and said, “Mama, I saw Uncle Zande trying to fly, but he dived into the ground.”
Her mother thought nothing of this until the evening, when word came that Uncle Zande, who was laying tile on the roof of a building in Léogane, had stumbled off it and broken his neck. After that much attention was paid to her dreams, but the things that they prophesied were not always so easy to interpret until after they happened.
Two years later her grandfather fell sick with a burning fever, and his children and grandchildren gathered around to see him die. But the young girl went to him and caressed his forehead, and at that moment the sweating and shivering stopped, and the fever left him and he began to mend. After that there were others who asked for her touch, and many of them affirmed that they experienced extraordinary relief.
At least it was evident that she was entitled to admission to the houmfort without further probation. One night, with a red bandanna on her head and gay handkerchiefs knotted around her neck and arms, with a bouquet in one hand and a crucifix in the other, she sat in a chair between her four sponsors and watched the hounsis-canzo, the student priests, dance before her. Then her father took her by the hand to the President of the congregation, and she recited her first voodoo oath:
“Je jure, je jure, I swear, to respect the powers of the mystères de Guinée, to respect the powers of the houngan, of the President of the Society, and the powers of all those on whom these powers are conferred.”
And after she had made all her salutations and prostrations, and had herself been raised shoulder high and applauded, they withdrew and left her before the altar to receive whatever revelation the spirits might vouchsafe to her.
At thirteen she was a young woman, long-legged and comely, with a proud yet supple walk and prematurely steady eyes that gazed so gravely at those whom she noticed that they seemed never to rest on a person’s face but to look through into the thoughts behind it. She went faithfully to school and learned what she was told to, including a smattering of the absurdly involved and illogical version of her native tongue which they called “French,” but when her father stated that her energy could be better devoted to helping to feed the family, she ended her formal education without complaint.
There were three young men who watched her one evening as she picked pigeon peas among the bushes that her father had planted, and who were more impressed by the grace of her body than by any tales they may have heard of her supernatural gifts. As the brief mountain twilight darkened they came to seize her, but she knew what was in their minds, and ran. As the one penitent survivor told it, a cloud suddenly swallowed her: they blundered after her in the fog, following the sounds of her flight: then they saw her shadow almost within reach, and leapt to the capture, but the ground vanished from under their feet. The bodies of two of them were found at the foot of the precipice, and the third lived, though with a broken back, only because a tree caught him on the way down.
Her father knew then that she was more than qualified to become an hounsis-canzo, and she told him that she was ready. He took her to the houmfort and set in motion the elaborate seven-day ritual of purification and initiation, instructing her in all the mysteries himself. For her loa, or personal patron deity, she had chosen Erzulie, and in the baptismal ceremony of the fifth day she received the name of Sibao, the mystic mountain ridge where Erzulie mates with the Supreme Gods, the legendary place of eternal love and fertility. And when the houngan made the invocation, the goddess showed her favor by possessing Sibao, who uttered prophecies and admonitions in a language that only houngans can interpret, and with the hands and mouth of Sibao accepted and ate of the sacrificial white pigeons and white rice, and the houngan was filled with pride as he chanted:
Thereafter she hoed the patches of vegetables that her father cultivated as before, and helped to grate manioc, and carried water from the spring, and went back and forth to market, like all the other young women, but the tale of her powers grew slowly and surely, and it would have been a reckless man who dared to molest her.
Then Theron Netlord came to Kenscoff, and presently heard of her through the inquiries that he made. He sent word that he would like her to work in his house, and because he offered wages that would much more than pay for a substitute to do her work at home, she accepted. She was then seventeen.
“A rather remarkable girl,” said Netlord, who had told Simon some of these things. “Believe me, to some of the people around here, she’s almost like a living saint.”
Simon just managed not to blink at the word.
“Won’t that accident this afternoon shake her pedestal a bit?” he asked.
“Does a bishop lose face if he trips over something and breaks a leg?” Netlord retorted. “Besides, you happened. Just when she needed help, you drove by, picked her up, took her to the doctor, and then brought her here. What would you say were the odds against her being so lucky? And then tell me why it doesn’t still look as if something was taking special care of her!”
He was a big thick-shouldered man who looked as forceful as the way he talked. He had iron-gray hair and metallic gray eyes, a blunt nose, a square thrusting jaw, and the kind of lips that even look muscular. You had an inevitable impression of him at the first glance, and without hesitation you would have guessed him to be a man who had reached the top ranks of some competitive business, and who had bulled his way up there with ruthless disregard for whatever obstructions might have to be trodden down or jostled aside. And trite as the physiognomy must seem, in this instance you would have been absolutely right.
Theron Netlord had made a fortune from the manufacture of bargain-priced lingerie.
The incongruity of this will only amuse those who know little about the clothing industry. It would be natural for the uninitiated to think of the trade in fragile feminine frotheries as being carried on by fragile, feminine, and frothy types, but in fact, at the wholesale manufacturing level, it is as tough and cut-throat a business as any legitimate operation in the modern world. And even in a business which has always been somewhat notorious for a lack of tenderness towards its employees, Mr Netlord had been a perennial source of ammunition for socialistic agitators. His long-standing vendetta against organized labor was an epic of its kind, and he had been named in one Congressional investigation as the man who, with a combination of gangster tactics and an ice-pick eye for loopholes in union contracts and government regulations, had come closest in the last decade to running an old-fashioned sweat-shop. It was from casually remembered references to such things in the newspapers that Simon had identified the name.