For conventional pretty, Lisa Reilly was hard to beat, Paz thought, and she had the non-butter-melting look, too. Demure. She drove a red Saab 900 convertible, which made sense if you knew her the way Paz did. He glanced over at her from the driver’s seat of his Impala. She was excited, her cheeks colored, her eyes bright. Riding in a cop car at last, helping the cops on a murder case. Reilly was a cop buff, but of a more select sort than the types that hung around cop bars. The way he met her, she had been a witness in a case. The suspect, Earl Bumpers, had been raping his two daughters for years and pounding on them, too, and he had eventually killed the older one, which brought him to the attention of Paz. The younger daughter, a nine-year-old named Cassie, was the chief witness, and Reilly had therapized away her terror and prepped her for the trial, and the guy went down for it, death, and the two of them, Paz and Reilly, had gotten a little play in the press. He had spotted her in the witness bullpen, and been attracted, the big frank china blues, the golden hair in a staid little knot at the back, the thin, tight body, and he had struck up a conversation. Later, he had spotted her in the Friday six o’clock meat market at the Taurus in the Grove with all the other single women, which surprised him. He’d moved on her in his usual respectful way, and they’d started in. Six or so months, maybe once a week. She was married but separated, no problem there.
She had a practice in the Gables, a nice paneled office, with the dolls and toys, but she dealt mainly with the eating problems of teenage girls. Getting a terrified murder witness to talk was a little out of her line, although she had done it that once and was clearly hot to do it again. Paz was stretching his authority way past the gray area, providing a private shrink for a potential witness, a minor. He had not mentioned it to Barlow, never mind his shift commander, and he was a little nervous. Excited too; both of them nervous and excited.
They were going to do it in the Meagher apartment, Paz’s suggestion, a nod toward the color of legality in his mind. Just a cop who felt sorry for a scared kid, a welfare kid, too, and was bringing a personal friend by to give a little counseling. Should some constructive evidence happen to emerge, why there was nothing wrong with using it, just like you would use a piece of evidence lying in plain sight. Paz figured he could work out a plausible story if anything popped right, which was why he had not told anyone. He wanted to present this to Barlow all tied up, as a coup, as something to make up for the boner about Youghans.
Mrs. Meagher offered sugary iced tea and butter cookies, the tea in tall glasses set in raffia sleeves, with a long spoon in each. They sat around in the tatty, spotless living room, in which the smell of lemon furniture polish fought bravely the base stink of the building and neighborhood. The boy was impatient and resentful of being denied either release to the streets or TV, the girl her usual silent and sullen self. The small talk did not take off. Reilly shot Paz a look: this isn’t working. She changed her approach, asked to speak to the grandmother alone. They went into the kitchen. Paz could hear low talking. Randolph got up and turned on the television, a sitcom, canned laughter. Paz saw no reason to object. After ten minutes or so, Reilly came back with the grandmother. Reilly’s face wore her courtroom expression of neutral goodwill. She approached the girl.
“Tanzi, your grandmother and I have been talking, and we’ve agreed that, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to try hypnosis with you. Do you understand what that means?”
The girl nodded. Randolph said, excitedly, “Yeah! I saw this show where the guy went into his past lives and shit.” Mrs. Meagher said, “Hush your mouth, boy!”
They shut off the television and moved a straight chair in front of the girl, and turned down the lights. Reilly sat in the straight chair and began to speak in the traditional low, insinuating tone. She had tried to do it with Paz once, but it hadn’t worked. It worked with Tanzi Franklin, though?she went off like the television in less than three minutes: head sunk to her chest, eyes closed, breathing with the deep and regular pace of slumber.
“All right, Tanzi,” said Reilly. “It’s last Saturday, around eleven-thirty at night. Do you know where you are?”
“My room.” The girl’s speech was slow, and muffled, as if coming through a blanket.
“Okay, I want you to look out the window of your room and tell me what you see.”
“Roofs. Windows. I was looking for Amy, but she ain’t home. I see them. Theys fighting. The pregnant lady and her boyfriend. He starts in busting up stuff and she be trying to stop him. He hit her on the head. She fall down and he yell at her some more. Then he leaves. She gets up. She’s crying.”
Stopped. A few words of encouragement put the needle back in the groove.
“She’s trying to pick up stuff off the floor. She’s on the couch. He’s talking to her.”
Reilly glanced at Paz and said, immediately and carefully, to Tanzi, “Who’s talking to her, Tanzi? The boyfriend came back?”
“No,” she said. “Not the boyfriend. Him.”
“Can you tell us what he looked like, Tanzi?” said Reilly. Paz could hear the excitement in her voice, under the professional drone.
Tanzi opened her eyes. She looked directly at Paz. Her right arm rose slowly, until the extended index finger pointed straight at him. Mrs. Meagher let out a small cry.
Reilly said, “You mean he looks like Detective Paz?”
“Yes.” The eyes shut again. The arm dropped.
“Tanzi, do you know who he is?” asked Reilly.
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
The child’s eyes opened again. Paz heard Reilly’s gasp, and then the eyes looked at him, and it was not any fourteen-year-old girl who gazed out through them either. A voice far too deep and rumbling ever to have come out of the larynx of a Tanzi Franklin said, “Me.”
It came in a long extended syllable, striking them all with the nauseating effect of an earthquake’s first tremors. Mrs. Meagher screamed. Tanzi rolled her eyes back in her head, twisted off the couch, and went into a back-arching, teeth-chattering, foaming convulsion. Randolph P. Franklin leaped from his chair and onto Paz, tearing at his face and clothes, trying to get at Paz’s pistol. He was shouting something like “I’ll get him, I’ll get him!” Paz stood up, the boy clinging to him with his legs, holding on with one hand and grabbing for the gun with the other. He seemed to have an unnatural energy. Paz himself felt blurry, as if he, too, had been somewhat hypnotized. He saw Reilly drop down to attend to the convulsing girl. Mrs. Meagher was yelling something that Paz couldn’t make out. He had just pinned Randolph P. Franklin’s arms when something smacked heavily against the back of his head. He looked around and saw Mrs. Meagher holding the handle of a big saucepan in a two-handed grip, getting ready to whale him again.
“Ma’am, please put down the pot …” he began. She swung at his head, but he twisted away and this time the pot hit his shoulder. He tripped over the writhing Randolph and fell down. Mrs. Meagher couldn’t bend over very well and so she could only pound him in a grandmotherly way, but managed all the same to sprinkle him with the contents of the pot.
After a while Mrs. Meagher became exhausted and dropped her weapon. She sat down on a chair, looking gray, and cried. The boy extricated himself and embraced his grandmother. He was crying, too. Tanzi’s convulsions had stopped. Lisa Reilly had moved her so that she was lying flat on the couch. She was holding the girl’s hand, talking softly, but eliciting no apparent response. Paz stood and brushed white gobbets from his clothes. He walked over to the couch. The girl looked destroyed; her mouth was flecked with blood and foam.
“How is she?”
“Jesus, Jimmy, I don’t know,” Reilly said in a frightened whisper. “She’s breathing okay. She’s not convulsing. But I’m not a doctor. I think I’m over my head here. What do we do now?”
“I don’t know,” Paz whispered back. “I think we should offer to get the kid to a hospital and then get out of here. Why don’t you talk to the old lady, smooth things over?”
Reilly gave him a sharp look but did as he suggested. She spoke softly. Paz saw the old woman shake her head emphatically, her sparse hair flying. Reilly came back to him and said, “She doesn’t want any more help. Not from us. We should get out of here. I left my card, in the unlikely event …”
They left. Randolph P. Franklin had the last word. Glaring at Paz, he said, “I see you around here again, nigger, I’m gonna bust a cap on your sorry black ass.”
In the car, Paz looked at Reilly and said, “What can I say? I didn’t expect that. It came out of left field.”
“Farther off than that, I think. Good Christ!” She shuddered. “You still have some stuff in your hair.”
“Mashed potatoes,” he said, picking at himself. She brushed at him, annoyingly. “Leave it!” he snapped, and slammed the car into gear. They drove in silence.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to snarl. I’m a little shook.”
“A little? Jesus! I’m jelly. Jimmy, what the hell was going on there?”
“You’re asking me? You’re the shrink.”
“No, I have a doctorate from the Barry College School of Social Work. I talk to Gables teens about their body image. I don’t fucking do exorcisms!”
“You did great with Cassie Bumpers.”
“Oh, Cassie Bumpers! All she wanted was someone to tell her she wasn’t the spawn of Satan and didn’t deserve to have the devil fucked out of her by her daddy’s holy prick. I can deal with frightened little kids. Back there … back there, that was something else entirely. I don’t know what the hell that was. No, I do know, I think …”
“What?”
“Possession,” she said, and he looked over at her to see if she were joking, but her face was grim and pale.
“What do you mean, possession? Like with the head turned around backward and the green vomit?”
“Yeah, right. Go to a library sometime. There’s yards of documentation on it from nearly every culture in the world, from nuns with stigmata to snake handlers in the Ozarks to Siberian shamans. I won’t even mention Africa or what goes on right down the street in Miami fucking Florida. Santeria. Christ, you should know more about that than I do.”
“Yeah, that’s what everybody says,” said Paz sourly. “So … what? The hypnosis, like, triggered this … thing?”
“I guess. You saw the girl. She went under like a lead sinker. Hence suggestible in the extreme. She pointed at you.” She paused and looked at him appraisingly. “You know, it’s possible that the killer really did look like you.”
“Come on.”
“Why not? Both times she freaked out it was when you were around. It’s no crime. One of my brothers-in-law looks like Ted Bundy. Of course, a lot of us think he actually is a serial killer …”
“I take your point. Say more about suggestible.”
“Okay, I’m a pro, so I was very careful not to make any suggestions. That’s the big confusion factor when you work with hypnosis, especially with kids. Tiffany, are you sure Mr. Jones didn’t put his hands up your panties? Didn’t Mr. Jones dress up as a devil and sacrifice to Satan? Oh, yes, he did, the kid agrees, and then he made me eat poo-poo. You can get people to say anything, you can implant all kinds of false memories, even without meaning to, and the subjects will swear themselves blue that the shit really happened. I know I didn’t suggest anything of the kind to her, and then, when I ask her who the guy was, out comes this voice two octaves lower. Did you see her eyes?”
“Yeah, I saw.”
She shuddered. “Jimmy,” she said, “buy me a drink. Buy me two drinks.”
They stopped on a bar on West Flagler east of the freeway, a neon-lit, beer-smelling place with a night game from Atlanta on the TV and a mixed crowd of boat bums and genial rummies in it. They got a couple of dirty looks, but no one made any trouble and the service was fine. He ordered a Bud, she a double scotch. She inhaled it and immediately flagged the barmaid for a refill.
When he thought she was ready, he spoke. “You said she was real suggestible. But somebody had to plant that suggestion in her head. Somebody who knew she was a potential witness.” He thought for a moment. “That means somebody knew I was going to question her. So they grabbed her and, I don’t know, hypnotized her so she would block what she saw.”
Reilly took a sip of her new drink. Her face was flushed now and her eyes were showing white around the blue iris. “I thought you said she went nuts the first time you talked to her.”
“Yeah, but they still could have …” His voice trailed off.
“Right. How did they know to grab that particular kid? Unless you’re proposing that a crack team of homicidal hypnotists fanned out and did everyone on that side of the building. Come to think of it, the boy and the granny weren’t acting all that tightly wrapped either. Why the hell should they get homicidal all of a sudden? Maybe we’re dealing with induced mass hallucination here.”
“There’s such a thing?”
“Oh, yeah. Flying saucers. Thousands of people think they’ve been abducted by aliens. That’s now, in a materialist age. In other cultures, in the past, the sky’s the limit. My point … did I have a point? Oh, yeah, my point was that there’s more to human psych than they teach in college. Your guy does ritual murders, nobody can see him coming or going, and if somebody does happen to spot him, he throws a fit on them from long distance. You don’t need a nice lady social worker, baby: what you need is a fucking witch doctor.”
“You making a referral?” Trying to lighten it up a little, but she was serious.
“Yeah, for your information. Dr. What’s-his-face. Works at Jackson. He gave us a lecture at Barry about the dark forces rampant in Miami. Medical anthropophagist. No, that’s who we’re looking for. Anthropologist. Newman? Began with an N. I could think of it if I had a little more scotchie. I’ll tell you one thing, darling. I’m fucking glad I’m not nine months pregnant.” She finished her drink and started softly to weep.
Paz took her home, which was an apartment on Fair Isle in the Grove. She opened a bottle of white wine and they finished it off. Paz had never gone to bed with Lisa Reilly without her being fairly drunk, but she was really drunk this time. She liked to get on top and pound it. He usually had bruises across his pubic bone the next day. Paz made it a point to concentrate on one woman at a time during the actual act, but now, as she pumped away, he found himself thinking of Willa Shaftel, about how plump and soft and jolly she was and how much, really, he was going to miss her. Reilly was making steam-engine noises through her teeth and moving more violently, working herself up and down and grinding, an altogether industrial sort of sex, Paz thought, and when she went off, she would flail at him with hard little fists and bony knees and elbows.
She finished and collapsed on him, drooling on his cheek. This was merely the first round, he knew. It was not mere lust. It was the kind of screwing people do in wartime, to keep away the terrors.
At work the next morning, Paz found a note from Barlow on his desk, directing him to interview room one. There he found his partner with a rummy?a sagging, middle-aged, freckle-skinned black man with bloodshot eyes. You could smell it coming off him. He seemed startled to see Paz, although Paz could not remember seeing the man before.
“Jimmy, this here’s Eightball Swett,” Barlow said. “Mr. Swett got some information about our case up there in Overtown. He seen a fella with Deandra Wallace.” Paz sat down on a reversed chair and gave Swett the eye. Swett looked down. His face twitched.
“Go ahead, Mr. Swett,” said Barlow. “We’re all listening.”
“Was in that Gibson park,” said Swett. “I hang there sometimes, you know, have a couple, shoot the shit. Anyway, last Thursday, maybe, or Friday, I seen her. She big as a house, couldn’t hardly walk, and she sat on a bench, and there’s this dude sitting with her. She talking to him and he talking to her, but real sincere, like he trying to get into her, which was dumb, ‘cause sure as shit he already got into her, him or someone else. ‘Cause she be big as a motherfuckin’ house.”
“Yes, we know that,” said Barlow. “Could you hear what they were talking about?”
“Nah, they’s too far away. Anyway, they left together. I ain’t see them no more after that.”
“What did this man look like?” asked Barlow.
“Just a regular dude,” said Swett. Again he threw a quick glance at Paz. “Nothing special. Dap, though. Had a suit on, white or tan, light color anyway, shiny shoes, fresh shine. I used to do it, so I knows.”
“What did the man look like, Mr. Swett?” Barlow insisted. “Big? Small? Light? Dark? What?”
A nervous shrug. “You know, just a regular dude … normal looking.”
Paz said, “Mr. Swett, let me ask you something. Look at me.” Paz stood up. “Just say it right out. Did the man you saw have a resemblance to me?”
Swett nodded vigorously. “Yeah, yeah, he did. I spotted it the minute you walked in here. I said, damn, that boy look like that other dude’s brother.” He narrowed his eyes, studying Paz. ” ‘Bout the same size, same no-hair, same shade of skin. Maybe the guy was a little … softer, a little older, I don’t know. No, something else … the dude was, I want to say, brighter …”
“You mean a lighter complexion?” asked Paz.
“No, it ain’t that. Something like … light coming off a him, like some kind of movie star, like they look, you know? Not like real folks. What I thought, when I seen the two of them, here be a preacher and he be trying to help this sister got herself in trouble.”
They sent Swett off to work with an Identi-Kit technician, and the two detectives busied themselves for a time with other cases. The drawing came back and they looked at it together.
“You have the right to remain silent,” said Barlow.
“That’s really weird,” said Paz. The likeness was the usual anti-portrait, stripped of personality, and in Paz’s view, quite useless for actual identification. It showed a round-headed, high-cheeked, shaven-haired, light-skinned black man. It looked a good deal like Paz and several thousand others in Dade County.
“Yes, it is. That old boy just about jumped when y’all walked in there. I guess you can account for your whereabouts on the night of.”
“Last Saturday? Gosh, I can’t recall. Oh, I know! I wrapped up my chef knives and took a long walk all by myself.”
“For the record, Jimmy. A lot of folks going to see this thing.”
“For the record, I worked at the restaurant until eleven-thirty, and spent the rest of the night with a lady named Beth Morgensen. Want her number?”
“No, but if you strike again, we may need it. Anyway, a lucky break, Mr. Swett walking in. We have a face, at least. A small reward brings in the street folks pretty good. I wonder why they call him Eightball? It looks like a long time since he was steady enough to lean over a pool table.”
“It’s a drink,” said Paz. “Olde English 800 malt liquor. The drink and people who drink it are eightball.”
“Well, well. I never knew that.”
“I never knew you played pool.”
“I don’t, anymore,” said Barlow. “But I ran some tables a time or two back when I was raising Cain. I guess you’ll tell me, after a while, how come you knew our suspect looked like you before old Eightball copped to it.”
Paz felt blood rush to his face. In an instant a set of lies and evasions flashed through his mind, all dismissed as fast as they appeared.
“Someone else told me the same thing,” Paz said, and went through the sorry events of the previous night.
Barlow listened to this without reaction. When Paz was done he said, “Son, you and your girlfriend better hope that old lady don’t know any sharp lawyers.”
“I do hope. Meanwhile, we got confirmation about the physical appearance, which is good.”
“Unless he witched that, too, fixed it so anybody saw him would think he looked like the investigating officer.”
“Cletis, come on!”
“Still don’t believe it?”
“What, you do?”
“I got to. Like I already told you, Our Lord spent a good parcel of His time driving out unclean spirits. The smartest thing Satan ever done was making folks believe he ain’t real.”
There seemed nothing to say to this. Paz remained silent, waiting for Barlow to come down on him for the stupidity at Mrs. Meagher’s.
To Paz’s relief, though, he saw that Barlow was going to let it pass, because in a lighter tone, he said, “Now what about this medical anthropologist? We might catch us a lead there.”
“I’ll get on it,” said Paz. At his desk he checked the time, then dialed Lisa Reilly’s number, reaching her between her fifty-minute client hours.
“Did I do anything awful?” she asked.
“No, I wouldn’t call three guys and a German shepherd awful. Unusual, maybe.”
“Oh, stop it! I’ve been walking bowlegged all morning. Was that all you?”
And more lascivious chatter. It was one of her habits, he knew, and Paz normally went along with it cheerfully enough, but today he found it wearing. There was something too bright about her tone. He decided to switch it off.
“Look, Lisa, why I called?I need the name of that anthropology guy you mentioned.”
“I’m sorry, what guy?”
“It was after that scene at Mrs. Meagher’s?you said I needed a medical anthropologist, and you said you heard a lecture …”
“Oh. Jesus, that really happened, didn’t it? Are you going to check on that little girl?”
“Yeah, sure,” Paz lied, “so, if you could look it up?”
“Right.” There was the sound of drawers opening and paper being flipped. Paz wrote down the name and phone number, and said, “Thanks, Lisa. I’ll call you later, maybe we’ll get together next week sometime.”
“Yeah, about that … I actually was going to call you. I think maybe I’m going to get back with Alex.”
The husband. “Oh, yeah? When did this happen?”
“Oh, we’ve been seeing each other more over the last couple of weeks. I guess we both decided it was time. We want to have kids.”
“That’s nice. And what was last night? A farewell fuck?” He was surprised at the vehemence with which he spoke.
“No, I was going to bring it up, but after what happened and me getting a little blasted … and let’s face it, we went into this with no promises on either side. I thought that was the deal.”
“Yeah, it was,” he said tightly. “Well, good. What can I say? Have a nice life, Lisa.”
“Ah, Jimmy, don’t be like that. We can still be friends.”
“Yeah, the pair of you can have me over sometime. It’ll be great. I got to go now.”
And that was that, thought Paz, good-bye, Lisa. He called Ticketmaster and got a couple of tickets to Race Music for that Friday night, and then called Willa Shaftel’s machine and left a message confirming the date. Then business again: a call to Jackson Memorial put him in touch with the Medical Anthropology Unit and he made an appointment with a Dr. Louis Nearing.
Medical Anthropology, Paz found, was stuck in a short blind corridor in building 208, out of the way of real doctors but convenient to the ER, where nearly all of its clients arrived. Outside Nearing’s office there was a corkboard nearly covered with witch-doctor cartoons cut out of magazines. He knocked, received a “Yo!” in response, and walked in. It was a tiny place, hardly larger than a suburban bathroom, and it was the messiest office Paz had ever seen. Nearly every horizontal surface?desk, floor, shelves, the computer monitor, and the seats of a pair of side chairs?was covered with paper: stacks of books, some of them splayed open, journals, clipped articles, stuffed file folders, magazines, cardboard cartons, reprints, notebooks, and stapled computer printouts. In the interstices and hung from the walls and ceiling were impedimenta in startling variety, adding to the wizard’s-cave effect: cult statues, masks, bundles of herbs and feathers, crystals, stuffed animals and birds, colorful and folkish-looking pouches and bags, a green-and-white Notre Dame football helmet, and what looked like shrunken human body parts. The occupant sat hunched over his computer keyboard, with the light from the screen giving his face an appropriately mystic glow. He turned to Paz and grinned, showing large tombstone teeth. “Just let me finish this thought. Move that shit and have a seat.”
Nearing pounded heavily on the keys. Paz couldn’t see how tall he was, but he was big, his neck thick, his shoulders heavy, his forearms powerful and covered with a rich golden pelt. Nearing gave a little grunt of satisfaction, punched one last key, spun around on his chair, and stood up, extending a meaty hand. Six four, at least, Paz estimated, a moose. He had a wide, flat, ingenuous face, blue eyes behind cheap plastic frames, the lenses none too clean. He wore a plaid, short-sleeved shirt and wrinkled chinos with a military belt.
“What can I do for you, Detective?”
Paz told him the story, the killing and its aftermath, omitting the usual small details about the crime itself, and editing the illegal aspects out of the Tanzi incident. “I was wondering if you could throw some light, Doc,” he concluded. He was not hopeful. The guy looked like he could throw light on nothing more exotic than hog production.
“Well, let’s see,” said Nearing, counting elaborately on his fingers, “we got ritual murder, cannibalism, and demonic possession, plus maybe some Ifa divination. Sounds like a typical day in the Magic City.” He had a deep, considering, midwestern voice. “The chamber of commerce wasn’t far wrong when they came up with that one. Where would you like me to start?”
“Maybe with what you do here. I’m not even sure what medical anthropology is.”
“Yeah, you and the board of this fine institution. Okay, here’s the short version. A guy comes into the ER in distress. BP off the scale, severe pain in the belly, recent history of weight loss, blood in the urine, angina, shortness of breath. So they think, uh-oh, a sundae, so they order tests …”
“Sorry, what’s a sundae?”
“A case where you got two or more potential fatal illnesses. In this case they’d figure he was hypertense, untreated, an abdominal cancer the size of a grapefruit, with kidney involvement and maybe congestive heart, too. That’s what they would call the cherry.”
Paz looked blank.
“The cherry on top. Of the sundae. Hilarious intern humor.”
“Got it. Go on.”
“Anyway, the guy’s hopeless, but they give him the tests anyway. And to their surprise, he passes the cancer panel, his EKG is normal, guy’s got arteries like a twelve-gauge Mossberg. He’s got what they call idiopathic symptomology, sick as hell but nothing wrong with him that they can find. Then they get the idea of asking the guy what he thinks is wrong with him, and he says a sorcerer has put the curse on him. So they call me in. I do the interview, and say the guy is Haitian, I’ll call in my own hougan to examine the patient. He’ll confirm the diagnosis: the patient is suffering under a pwin, a curse, sent by a bokor, a sorcerer. We come to some arrangement, and believe me, Medicaid doesn’t want to know about this, and my hougan sets up a curing ceremony?that, or he finds out who the bokor is, and starts a countercurse, so the bad guy will lay off.”
“Does it work?”
Nearing waggled a hand and tilted his head ruefully. “Sometimes, sometimes not. Like chemotherapy. Or surgery.”
“Right. Okay, but what I don’t get is why should a Haitian or anybody who believes they’re cursed come to Jackson? Why don’t they just get their own witch doctor?”
Nearing looked confused. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”
“I mean, they get sick because they believe in voodoo or whatever. Their minds control their bodies in some way. So if they believe, they should know the local what-do-you-call-‘ems …”
“Oh, I see,” said Nearing, with a grin. “I should have explained it better. The patients who show up at Jackson aren’t believers. That’s the point. You’re right, in that if they were really into traditional practices they wouldn’t even think about coming here. They come here because they think they’re in America and Jackson Memorial is the big hougan where they dispense the powerful American magic. But it’s not.”
“But they must believe in the voodoo at some level, or it wouldn’t work.”
“That’s a theory,” said Nearing, cheerfully. “It’s certainly what the NP staff subscribes to. Psychosomatic yadda-yadda-yadda, tied to primitive superstition, blah-blah and dismiss it. I’m not so sure.”
“Then what’s the explanation?”
Nearing shrugged. “The explanation is, we don’t know squat about a lot of this stuff. There are drugs in some of these preparations they use, psychotropic drugs, like the ones you described in your murder victim. Okay, that’s rational, that’s inside the, let’s say, protective circle of the scientific paradigm. We also believe that there’s stuff that traditional practitioners can do that’s outside that paradigm but still real. Okay, that’s cool, that’s how science works. We see a baffling phenomenon?radioactivity, life itself?we study the hell out of it and we figure out what shelf it goes on, fit it into the structure. Sometimes the phenomenon is so weird we have to expand the structure, what they call a paradigm shift. That’s what radioactivity did to physics, and that’s basically what we’re doing here, studying weird phenomena and trying to find out how to fit it in.” He grinned. “So, Detective, now you know the secrets of medical anthro. Any questions?”
“Yeah. How do you explain Tanzi Franklin and what happened up in that apartment?”
A helpless gesture. “I can’t really explain it. Not enough data. The way you tell it, as a starting hypothesis, the girl looked out her window and saw the killer. Let’s say the killer saw her. He finds her, he blows some powder on her, makes her extremely suggestible. He implants a suggestion: throw a fit and do weird stuff if anyone asks you what you saw. That’d be one explanation. It’d also be a partial explanation for why this guy is so hard to find.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are any number of traditions in which magic workers can render themselves invisible, and there are hundreds of anecdotal reports of shamanic invisibility by supposedly reputable observers. How do they do it? One answer is drugged suggestion of the observers. The other is the same way David Copperfield does it on TV, by technical illusion. Thus we stay inside the paradigm.”
Paz looked at his notebook. “You said that there could be stuff that’s outside the paradigm but still real. What’s that about?”
Nearing leaned back in his chair, with a humorous expression on his face. “Oh, now we come to the sticky part.” He waved his hand, taking in the office and the facility beyond. “This here is a scientific establishment. Medical anthro is tolerated as long as it plays by the rules, and the main rule is that the poor benighted heathens think they’re hexed and that belief produces psychosomatic symptomology. But the notion that magic has the same reality as, say, molecular bio or the germ theory of disease, no, we don’t go there, uh-uh. That’d be a completely different paradigm. To actually find out anything about it, you’d have to immerse yourself in it, actually become a practitioner, and then of course no one would take you seriously, because you would have lost your scientific objectivity. It’s a sort of catch-22.”
Paz thought about Barlow, who was certainly operating under a different paradigm, especially in regard to this case. Something popped into his head and he flipped back through his notebook to his interview with Dr. Salazar and found what he was looking for. “You mean like Marcel Vierchau or Tour de Montaille.”
Nearing’s ginger eyebrows shot up. “Hey, I’m impressed. You really did some homework.”
“Is there anything in it? Vierchau, I mean.”
“You read his book? No? Here, you can borrow mine.” Nearing reached unerringly into a pile of books and brought out a hardcover. “You can judge for yourself. In the field, it’s pretty much agreed he went off the deep end. For one thing, no one’s been able to find the people he said he stayed with. The Russians haven’t got any records about them.”
“So, what?he made it all up?”
“Well, not entirely. Fieldwork is a tricky business. A lot of times you see what you want to see. Margaret Mead wanted to see girls growing up without sexual hang-ups and that’s what she brought back from Samoa. Bateson wanted to see family dynamics causing schizophrenia, so that’s what he brought back. Vierchau wanted a traditional people to have powerful magical weapons, he called it a ‘technology of interiority,’ and that’s what he found in Siberia. What the truth is …”
Nearing broke off. Paz observed a dreamy look come over the man’s open face. Paz asked, “What is it?”
Nearing snapped to. “What?”
“You were someplace else.”
Nearing gave an embarrassed laugh. “I guess. A little private magic. No, just thinking about Vierchau … I knew his ex-girlfriend in grad school. Her take on him was pretty much what I’ve suggested. Brilliant but flaky. She was quite a girl, though. You know, I’m happily married, two kids, but a week doesn’t go by without me thinking about her. She was a remarkable, remarkable woman. Not particularly gorgeous, but … she had something.” He laughed. “Magic, so to speak. I mention that because it might color my, um, let’s say negative opinion of Vierchau, and theories of that kind.”
“What happened to the girl?”
“She married someone else, a hot-shit poet, who I of course introduced her to. The guy was an old pal of mine and I was very happy for them. Broke my little heart. I got the feeling she never recovered from what happened in Siberia.”
“Which was …?”
“Oh, he filled her full of shaman drugs, she had a breakdown, and apparently she kept slipping back into it. I heard she went to Africa, went crazy again.” He shook his head. “A damn shame.” He sighed. “Anyway, she died. Killed herself.”
Nearing turned to face him. “Well. Anything else, Detective?”
“Human sacrifice? Cannibalism? Any ideas? Any rumors that anybody’s into it around town?”
Nearing chewed his lip. “No, although it’s hard to rule anything out. As a professional anthropologist I can tell you that in our culture, those who want to eat human flesh generally keep fairly quiet about it.”
End of interview. Nearing got the usual “Call us if you hear anything” and Paz took his book and went out into the steaming bright afternoon. He sat in his car and ran the A/C and went over his notes. Africa again. Paz didn’t like the African angle at all or the magic crap. Or the Vierchau connection. He had the sense of someone playing with him, the business with his own looks, the perp seeming at least to be a ringer for Paz himself. And the incident with Tanzi, that voice, had shaken him more than he could admit, and so he filed it away with the other stuff he did not want to think about. Compartmentalization was Paz’s major mental strategy. He used it now. The weird stuff was not really weird but an artifact of ignorance. When they got the guy, it would turn out that … what? A gang. A cult. Like those wackos down in Matamoros, but more sophisticated. With chemicals, knockout drugs, hypnosis. Inside the paradigm; that was a good new word. Inside the paradigm, weird, but essentially familiar. And something else, he couldn’t quite …
Paz caught a flash of silver going by outside and looked up. The flash was the skin of a catering unit stuck on an old Ford pickup. It was lunchtime, and a good location, outside the hospital, for staff and visitors who might want a break from the cafeteria and were willing to brave both the heat of the day and the more subtle dangers of unsupervised food prep. Paz got out and bought a mango soda and a fruit pastry.
A memory tugged. The cab of his mother’s truck, him in the front seat strapped in, he must have been very young, because as soon as he was old enough to be in school, he had been behind the counter, serving out Cubano sandwiches and making change. His mother would pick him up right at the school, with the roachmobile. Memories of fighting about that, the shame of it. No, but that part was later, not what he was trying to pin down now. He was three or so, he was looking out the windshield and trying to grab the … leaning forward and reaching for …? A Saint Christopher statue? That was it, a statue on the dash. The Virgin? No, it wasn’t white glow-in-the-dark plastic, it was brightly painted, larger than the commercial suction-cup icons; he could see it so clearly in his mind’s eye. It was painted, lifelike, and he had reached for it so hard that he had heaved himself over the restraint and fallen, knocking his head against the glove compartment knob. And his mother had heard his screams and come …
His mother hadn’t sold the truck until he was around eight. He had spent hours and hours in it, but he couldn’t recall seeing that statue again. The statue on the dash was a white plastic suction-cup Virgin, bland and of no interest. But he remembered a different statue.
It came to him then, the way that a forgotten word pops into the mind, with the same sense of inarguable assurance. A statue of a man in brown monk’s garb, tonsured, the face roughly painted with features, the skin pale chocolate, the mouth a drop of bright crimson, the base green and gold; from the hands clasped in prayer a wire depended, and on the wire, tiny glittering beads that trembled enticingly in the vibrations from the engine. It was a Santeria figure, a santo, Orula, in fact, or Ifa, as he had recently learned to call him, the santo of prophecy. But that could not be. His mother despised all that.
Paz felt a coldness flow over the skin of his head, as when standing in the sun a cloud passes over. He looked up, but the sun was there directly overhead, unshielded, merciless.