Asked how can the past be changed? The past is past. Except in our memories. He rapped me gently on the head. Jeanne, Jeanne, why can’t you understand this? The short course in Olo ontology. Only m’arun is real. M’fa is a show, only shadows, a game. Plato in Africa. But it is a gift of the orishas. They let us sorcerers play with it, as a father may let his little son play with his spear, his bow. But not use it. Not break it. We must observe debentchouaje. New word = harmonious connectedness? Way things are supposed to be? What happens if a sorcerer doesn’t? Then the orisha comes, he said. I said, But the orishas come all the time. Ifa comes to give oracles, Eshu comes to open the gates, the orishas ride their devotees at the ceremonies of the Yoruba … No, no, he said, I mean the orisha comes in himself. Not as a spirit, as in the ceremonies of the Yoruba and the Songhai gaws. The true orisha. And what happens then? I asked him. He shrugged. It depends on the situation. A disaster. A great blessing. Have you ever seen this? Once, he said, a long time ago. I don’t want to see it again.
TWENTY-SEVEN
They were in the homicide unit, at Barlow’s desk, and Barlow had the whole story now, as reconstructed by Paz, with the weird parts edited out, smoothed, made rational. Barlow chewed on it silently for a while, and Paz experienced the familiar and unpleasant feeling of being assessed.
“You told anyone else about this, Jimmy?”
“No. I thought I’d run it by you first.”
“Good,” said Barlow. “Let’s see if I got you straight, now. Here’s this lady you got locked up, who used to be Tuoey, but she’s really Jane Doe. She’s married to DeWitt Moore, a famous writer who happens to be in town, doing his show in the Grove, but also doing these murders, because he’s also an African witch doctor in his spare time, which is why he’s doing the murders and cannibalism in the first place. Also, besides thinking he’s a witch doctor, with strange powers, he also has a gang of accomplices and some kind of African witch powder drug that he’s using to mess up the minds of his victims and the folks who’re trying to guard them. And he also killed Mary Doe a couple years back, even though we found he had a perfect alibi. Those African powders again. Have I got it all?”
“You don’t believe it, right?”
“No, I didn’t say that. I believe you got the real Jane there, and this Moore character is the killer. That’s good. Far as the rest of it goes … it’s pretty tall.”
“Tall? A little while ago you were saying that Satan was loose in Dade County.”
“Oh, he’s loose all right,” said Barlow, unfazed. “But that’s not the kind of fact I take to the state’s attorney. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, which in this case means evidence and a story they can eat and not spit up. Meanwhile, your girl there ain’t exactly a reliable informant.”
“Then talk to her yourself! See what you think. Whether she’s criminally involved or not, she’s still protecting him with all this witch doctor crapola.” He laughed humorlessly. “Crazy? Yeah, crazy I’ll give you.”
They brought Jane Doe out of the holding cell and back to the little interview room. Paz watched while Barlow talked to her, in his usual quiet and effective way. No sarcastic remarks, no one-liners from old Barlow, just two people talking. They had a tape recorder on, getting it all. Paz had seen it many times before, and it pissed him off, because he couldn’t do it himself, he always had to show the mutt he was in charge, that he couldn’t be fooled. He knew it, he knew it was dumb, but he couldn’t help himself, which was why he was doomed to be the bad cop, and never the one who got the confession and cleared the case.
The story she told was essentially the same one she had told to Paz earlier, but more detailed and easier in the telling. Barlow ran her through the nights the women were murdered. No alibi for Wallace, she was at home alone with the kid. Vargas, she was with friends all evening. At the time of this latest, Alice Powers at the Milano, Jane told them, she had been at a bembe.
“Come again?”
“A bembe is a Santeria ritual,” Doe explained. “People dance and the orishas, the spirits, come down and take them over for a while and give advice.”
“You don’t tell me! And did you get any advice from these spirits, ma’am?”
“I did. I was advised that before I close the gate it must be opened. And that I was to bring the yellow bird to the father. I was advised to flee by water.”
“That’s real interesting. What do you make of it?”
“I’m not sure. Ifa is often indirect. The fleeing by water part is fairly clear, though.”
“By water, hm? Why didn’t you?” Paz noted that Barlow was enjoying himself. And, more remarkably, so was the woman. There was a light in her face, now, and Paz looked at her with more interest. Her bony features were never going to be on a magazine cover, but besides that she’d let herself go a good deal, and she didn’t have any taste. Paz liked women with taste. Flair. That hairdo was a disaster.
She said, “I don’t have a boat. Also, I have to find some allies first, and I have to stop my husband. I feel responsible.”
“I see,” said Barlow. “Well, you’ll give us some names and we’ll check it out. Now, these allies … you’re talking about this gang that Detective Paz here thinks your husband has got?”
She shot Paz a look. “No, I meant magical allies. There isn’t any gang. It is a figment of Detective Paz’s imagination. My husband is doing this all by himself.”
“Would you like to explain how?” asked Barlow.
The woman did so, the whole story, thousands of years, the various botanicals, the pineal body, the melanocytes, the exohormones, the supporting neurophysiological research, with actual references added. Barlow was silent for a while after this, the tape softly whirring, recording nothing.
“You got any idea why, ma’am?” he asked.
“Why what?”
“Why he’s doing this?”
“I thought I explained that. The neuroleptic substances in the excised and consumed organs …”
“No, I got that part. He’s going to get some boosted power for his witchcraft. I mean why does he want it? What’s he going to do when he gets it?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea what he’s like now. I think maybe he sees himself as the revenge of Africa on white America. He wants to show us that there’s a black technology that sets all our technology at naught. Stuff like that. He’s an extremely angry man.”
“I reckon,” said Barlow. “And he got this idea in Africa?”
“He got the means in Africa. Maybe he always had the idea. No, that’s not true. He had a desire to be seen, really seen, as himself, not as a ‘black’ fill-in-the-blank, a black poet, black playwright, black husband of a rich white woman. And he thought he never could be, I mean seen in that way, and it made him crazy. He got the idea that what the race needed was a Hitler, that the white people would never take blacks seriously until then. And Africa, where we went, what he learned there, I think it transformed him, the sad, angry stuff that was deep inside?it just took over and ate everything else, until only the Hitler part was left. It happens. Maybe it even happened to Hitler. That’s one theory. A friend of mine used to say that dealing in the magical world without some transcendent moral authority was about the most dangerous thing anyone could do. And Witt didn’t have one.”
“That’s quite a story, Jane,” said Barlow, after a long pause.
“Tell us about your sister,” said Paz, abruptly, and got a questioning look from his partner. He didn’t care. He felt angry, and not just at the killer.