A maze of tired, impoverished neighborhoods lay north and west of the airport, along the most direct route through town to the National Palace. Sodium lamps, mounted high up on the telephone poles, would be flickering to life when dusk came, lighting the potholed streets with a jaundiced shade of yellow. The poles were burdened with a rat’s nest of power lines and cabling as if each household had strung their own wire, and in most cases they probably had. It was a miracle there wasn’t a rash of electrocutions every time it rained.
The moon had set earlier that day, and so aside from the occasional street lamp, the neighborhood’s nighttime illumination would mainly come from porch lights and the bare-bulb glare stabbing out the open windows and doorways of the festively painted shacks, all of them topped with rusting tin roofs.
The high beams and off-road lights of the speeding caravan announced their approach through the gathering haze, and Mas caught glimpses of urban living in a staccato stream of snapshots, as they rumbled past one cluster of hovels after another.
The air-conditioning was blasting and all the windows were down. Just the way Mark likes to drive, only different, Mas thought with a private grin. The vehicle was bristling with weapons thrust into the dusty air. Even the driver had a Glock in his free hand, his elbow resting on the windowsill. Mas was fairly certain that the rules of engagement were open to interpretation, and if anything crazy went down, the judge would side with the PNP.
She sat back and tried to relax, catching glimpses of families and old folks and restive young men as the caravan barreled through the faded neighborhoods.
The caravan suddenly braked and all the drivers leaned on their horns. Mas sat up in alarm, instinctively reaching for her Sig-Sauer in the holster riding high on her hip. La Croix touched his own weapon, just in case. They let her strap on her gun at the Salle Diplomatique, though they explained that she had to hand it over when she got to the palace. That was fine by her, but they weren’t there yet, and all the troops were shouldering their weapons.
She craned her head to see out the side windows. A crowd of people had spilled into the street, blocking their way. They were gathered for a bonfire in an empty dirt lot, chanting and dancing wildly to a hectic, persistent drumming. A large animal, perhaps it was a doe, was roasting on a spit over the fire. To her untrained eye, it looked like a drunken barbecue, but as the caravan rolled closer she realized it wasn’t anything of the sort.
A bare-chested houngan was dancing around the bonfire, dangling a wristwatch in his hand for the chanting crowd to see. He drank from a bottle of rum in his other hand, and as he took the last swallow he bit off the glass neck of the bottle and chewed it with a leer on his lips. That inspired the crowd and several of the others who were drinking, both men and women, to do the same.
Manbos in long white dresses were prancing around the fire, stamping their feet and keening in a strange language Mas had never heard before, lifting their hems for the men in the crowd to grind against them. Some of the sex was simulated, and some of it was quite real.
Two of the dancers were juggling a large painted portrait of Zamba Boukman. They tossed it into the fire and the crowd cheered wildly, over and over.
The houngan suddenly shouted an order. Half a dozen men rushed in and lifted the heavy iron spit onto their shoulders in response. The houngan then grabbed a long pike that was being kept for him by two young women, and held it aloft. The tip of the pike was fitted with a life-like plaster bust of a scowling Zamba, hand-painted in careful detail.
The houngan raised the pike aloft and quick-marched down the road. The six men followed, carrying the carcass double-time. The crowd followed behind them, bringing their drums and rum and surging into the street.
Mas’ SUV jerked to a slow crawl as they passed the bonfire. For several slow seconds, she was eye to eye with Zamba’s image, as angry flames danced around his scowling portrait.
“What’s all that about?” she asked La Croix, keeping her eyes on the parade just ahead of them.
“Voodoo,” he told her. “The local religion. They’ve been active lately.”
“Why?”
He glanced at her before he replied, looking at the back of her head. “They sense something is about to happen,” he finally said. “Don’t you?”
She still had her back to him. “Who’s the guy in the painting? They don’t seem to like him very much.”
“His name is Zamba, a powerful voodoo priest, hundreds of years old. They want him to go away.”
She finally looked back at him and shrugged. “He’s dead. What’s the problem?”
Isaac La Croix smiled at her without humor, while the driver glanced in his rearview mirror at the naïve white lady in the back seat. He was one of the PNP bodyguards who accompanied Minister Delatour to meet Zamba at the airport. Her silly question made him stifle a laugh.
“People say he still walks among us,” La Croix patiently explained to her.
Mas frowned, digesting his statement, and turned back to watch. It vaguely reminded her of a New Orleans funeral in that it was a throng of chanting, dancing participants, but they didn’t seem particularly jovial. Far from it. There was distinct menace in the air. And given what La Croix had just told her, even though it couldn’t possibly be true, the entire display was somehow disturbing.
She peered ahead through the driver’s open window, trying to get a better look at what the men were carrying. She didn’t know they had deer in Haiti, particularly within the city limits. A hunter must have bagged the animal in the hills, and brought the entire carcass back to the city.
The caravan was still moving forward at a crawl and all the drivers were still leaning on their horns. The lead vehicle finally passed the head of the procession and accelerated, and then the one behind it did the same.
Mas’ driver floored it and they rolled up quickly alongside the head of the procession. The charred carcass chained to the spit was swaying side to side with each step the six men took, in rhythm to the drumming and chanting of the crowd that followed behind them.
Just before Mas’ vehicle overtook the men, the carcass finally came into clear view. It wasn’t a doe. It was a naked man, still smoldering from being roasted alive.
The houngan was dancing around the men who carried the spit, taunting the corpse with what Mas surmised was the dead man’s wristwatch. It wasn’t merely a trophy; it was a way for the houngan to hold on to the man’s soul.
She sat back heavily as the Mercedes picked up speed, and stared unfocused at the back of the driver’s seat trying to absorb what she just witnessed. It took a while. Particularly unsettling to her was the fact that no one else in the vehicle seemed to think that anything was out of the ordinary.
“He was probably one of Zamba’s priests, celebrating his return,” La Croix finally explained softly.
“Where did he go?” she asked him, still staring at the back of the driver’s seat.
“To Hell, Agent Mas. Where else would the Devil’s servant go?”