Night of the Seventh Darkness

by Daniel Easterman

Genres: Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Returning from a trip abroad to find the bodies of voodoo practitioners buried alive in her Brooklyn apartment, Haitian-born artist Angelina Hammel asks streetwise cop Reuben Abrams for help.

Release date: December 4, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

Fort Greene, BrooklynFriday, 18 September 199–Late afternoon

The apartment smelled fusty. Angelina wrinkled her nose as she stepped into the hallway. Fusty. Or maybe something else. They’d only been away three months, and most of that time Filius had been there, Filius and maybe some friends of his. A girl maybe. Filius had said he didn’t have a woman, but she found that hard to believe. He was good-looking, street-wise, and from the looks she sometimes found him giving her, Angelina didn’t think he was gay.

‘Home,’ intoned Richard as he came in behind her, putting down two suitcases. The word was flat, almost meaningless: a narrow word in a narrow doorway. Angelina stood stock-still, letting it sink in. They were home, whatever that meant. Their next trip abroad wouldn’t be for . . . how long? No telling. But what was that smell?

‘You smell anything?’ she asked, not turning round. Richard put his hands on her shoulders, pressing down a little. She disliked the pressure, the feel of his hands, hard, proprietorial.

‘No.’ He bent his face to her neck and sniffed. ‘New perfume,’ he whispered. ‘Am I right?’

She’d bought the bottle of Fendi in Geneva on the flight back from Kinshasa. In the cab coming in from JFK, she’d applied a few dabs to strategic places, a little surreptitiously. For the three months they’d been in Zaïre she had studiously avoided perfumes. The heat turned them rancid on her skin. Or perhaps it had been her skin itself that made them grow sour.

‘I don’t mean that,’ she said. Now she turned to face him. ‘Don’t you notice anything else? Kind of fusty. Or is it “musty”? As though nobody had been here.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just the effect of being away. I’m not used to how our own apartment smells.’

Or maybe it was Africa, she thought. She never noticed smells so powerfully in Brooklyn. Flowers, fruit, people, the sweet smells of decay, the jungle bearing down, cloying and dangerous.

He sniffed the air again and looked at her, a sideways glance.

‘It’s your imagination. The apartment doesn’t smell. Give it a day or two, you’ll feel better. Get Africa out of your system.’

He carried the rest of the baggage into the hallway.

‘Can you make some coffee, Angelina? I’m dead beat.’

Angelina made two cups of instant while Rick hauled suitcases to the bedroom and started unpacking. She found a jar of cookies that she had bought at Abraham & Straus on Fulton a week before leaving. They were still fit to-eat, so she put a few on a plate. Rick joined her in the kitchen. He did look tired, she thought. And not just physically.

The field trip had been a failure. Most of the time they’d been in Kisangani, then there had been the wasted weeks at Lokutu. Rick was fast turning into the sort of ethnologist who prefers working out of an air-conditioned office to sharing a tent with snakes and bugs. And he was turning her from his wife and assistant into his secretary and general dogsbody.

They drank without conversation, adjusting to the thoughts and sensations of return. School started in less than a week. The powers-that-be had decided to go back to a late fall start in order to pick up delayed registrations.

Rick had been on Long Island University’s faculty for twenty years now, but he was still something of an outsider. Those of his colleagues who still lived in Fort Greene had apartments in the Towers building or the Hospital high-rise over on Willoughby; the rest had long ago moved out to Brooklyn Heights or Cobble Hill. But the Hammels stayed on in a decaying brownstone on Clermont Avenue, between Myrtle and Atlantic, stranded by a tide of upward mobility.

They had moved in ten years earlier. At first Rick had hoped that the brownstone revival would move in their direction. They had spent a lot of money on the property, then waited for things to change. They were still waiting. The paint on their door was peeling, their steps were blocked with garbage, and outside on the street young Haitian men and Puerto Rican girls with sad eyes dreamed of a sunshine only their parents remembered. And the girls wheeled babies in cheap buggies, and the babies kept their eyes shut in all seasons. In an unused nursery at the back of the apartment, white bunny rabbits hopped like ghosts across fields of dappled green.

Autumn was fumbling at the edges of the city. Crossing the river from Manhattan, it crept, unannounced and uninvited, past the old Navy Yard, all the way to Coney Island and the sea. Angelina looked out of the kitchen window onto a grey brick wall opposite. Brooklyn was a madness she had tried to escape, only to be dragged back, again and again, her hair in disarray, her eyes shining, softly wild, her mouth wide open in song or protest. What did Rick care?

She felt sure that summer would never come again, that, this year, winter’s onset would be not simply inexorable, but permanent. She shivered and sipped her coffee and looked through unwashed glass at the fading autumn light.

After coffee, they finished unpacking, returning to the cheap dealboard closet clothes they never wore in New York, clothes they might never wear again. Angelina fingered them as she folded them away: light cotton frocks, a striped bikini, slacks she had taken for trips up country. She remembered the visit to Switzerland after her mother died, the distaste with which she had packed old clothes for charity. How suddenly the living became the dead, how death rubbed itself over their garments and their bedclothes, how it pervaded furniture and books. She lifted a pair of Rick’s trousers. They felt to her touch like something a dead man had worn, second-hand, tainted. Quietly, she put them away on a wooden hanger, in a corner of the wardrobe, out of reach.

Rick was eager to make love. Here, in Brooklyn, he had come alive at once. That was why they stayed, why this apartment had become a chain for her. Brooklyn gave him life, as much as it took it from her. He took her to bed, urgent, roused, more vivid than she had known him at any time in Africa. She let him undress her, let him make his fumbling tour of her body, as though to reassure himself that she was still undamaged. Again the heavy touch of a proprietor.

Quietening him with a kiss, easing him with her lips but not her tongue, she masturbated him, slowly, without feeling, without remorse, with long-practised skill. And he came quickly, thoughtlessly, messing the sheets, Filius’s sheets that she had forgotten to change.

He fell asleep almost straight away, naked, middle-aged, his thick back turned to her. She looked down at him with something of revulsion. He had become an unlovely thing in her eyes: his paunch, his flaccid, weeping penis, sunburned skin. On his square, heavy-browed head, the red hair was turning yellow. His lips were flushed, his cheeks stippled with blood. What did she love in him? Had she ever found anything to love in him at all? Truly?

She sat bolt upright, eyes fixed on the wall opposite, letting the room return in fragments to her consciousness as night came slowly into Brooklyn, autumnal, thick, heavy with misery. In Africa, the suddenness of night had always surprised and frightened her, the abrupt descent of the flecked sun, the instant presence of night in everything. But here the world spun less quickly, the earth crawled from light to darkness, there was time to put on armour against its coming.

She looked at herself in the mirror on the wall, the pale mulatto face, the frightened eyes, the heavy brows she had plucked as a girl. Letting the sheet fall from her breasts, she watched them in reflection, soft, becoming pendulous with age. Was forty-two old? Her hair still fell darkly on narrow shoulders, her waist had not yet thickened, she shaved her legs every second day religiously, and wore perfume at home. Why? she wondered. Did it make any difference? Had it ever made a difference?

Night came, and still she sat and listened as the city padded beyond her window, vast and predatory. Beside her, her husband’s breath rasped, tearing at her ears. On a silent clock, green seconds flickered against the dark. She was in New York, not Africa. But outside another jungle sharpened its teeth beneath the same indifferent moon.

At eleven o’clock she got out of bed to fix something to eat. Rick was fast asleep. In the kitchen, she stumbled about in semi-darkness, her robe pulled tight against the chill air, opening and closing cupboards, rummaging through the freezer. She was reminded of midnigh raids as a child, the thrill of food eaten late, the taste of cold chicken. At least Filius had stocked the freezer as asked. Angelina had left him one hundred dollars for that purpose before leaving. If anything, he had overdone it. He must have made several trips to the Finast on Myrtle, where she knew he did all his shopping. The bottom drawers of the freezer were packed solid with heavy joints of meat.

She found a TV dinner higher up and slipped it into the microwave. In Africa, they had had a boy. He had cooked and cleaned and fetched for them, all for a pittance. To him she had been white, a white man’s woman, as foreign as Rick. She had already forgotten his name. The alarm buzzed and she took the tinfoil tray from the oven, miraculously hot.

In the living room, she threw herself into a chair. Spooning rice and chicken into her mouth, she ate without savour. What was food these days anyway? The houseplants had not survived the summer. She had not expected them to, with or without Filius. They never did.

The smell again. Still fusty or musty, whatever. Fainter now, or more familiar perhaps. Not quite sweet, not quite sour, all around, yet nowhere in particular. For some reason she could not identify, it made her uneasy, as though, somewhere in her mind, she recognized it. A memory? An anticipation?

She swallowed the last spoonful of reconstituted chicken. Thank you, her stomach said, I really need junk food at my time of life. Back in the kitchen, she found a tub of butter pecan ice cream and a spoon.

Ice cream in hand, she went back to the living room and switched on the television. From channel to channel, she flicked without interest. Late-night talk shows, recycled situation comedies, rock videos, movies that had been old movies the day they were released. Canned laughter, canned applause, canned emotions. She switched off again.

Filius had promised to tape some films while they were away. In the rack were about a dozen, all clearly labelled in red marker in Filius’s cramped Haitian hand. Channel 13 had screened a series of modern French movies over the summer. She scanned the labels: Zidi’s Les Ripoux – he’d known she wanted that; Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon, set in Africa – that could wait; Diva; Subway; Betty Blue. Yes, Betty Blue would be perfect.

She slipped the cassette into the machine and switched on. Images filled the screen. Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade making love. Angelina relaxed. She snuggled down into her seat, deep into cushions, deep into the dark, anarchic world of Betty and Zorg. She knew how it would end, in madness and a quick death kicking against a lover’s pity, but before that there was hope of a certain kind. The strains of travel washed away, Africa washed away, Rick and his sweat-streaked, porpoise-like body washed away. Sighing, she spooned cold ice cream into her mouth.

Abruptly, the film flickered and went grainy. A row of frames jumped, then the picture snowed up. Angelina leaned forward angrily. She had forgotten to tell Filius about the fault, forgotten to tell him to take the machine over to the electric shop on Fulton to have it repaired.

About two weeks before their departure, the VCR had started acting up. While recording, for as much as ten minutes at a time, it would slip out of ‘record’ into ‘play’, leaving gaps in the middle of tapes – stretches of flickering snow in the new ones, existing recordings in the old. Layers beneath layers, stripped away.

As she reached for the remote control, the snow on the screen began to clear. Slowly, the picture grew distinct again. It was not Betty Blue. That was curious. Angelina remembered that she had left blank tapes for Filius to use. He must have recorded something else on this one before taping Betty Blue on top of it.

There was no sound, just the faint hissing of the tape. The quality was poor, the lighting perfunctory. Huge shadows contrasted sharply with patches of brightness, hard and finely etched, like an exercise in Expressionism. Across the tiny screen, dark figures moved as though in slow motion, like turtles swimming in a green sea, like heavy fish in dim, stagnant waters, behind the glass of an aquarium, indifferent to the hand-held camera. No sound. The picture unsteady, darkness edged with light, light edged with darkness, grotesque figures moving, hesitating, still as stone.

Angelina watched transfixed. Her eyes would not leave the screen. In a long row, stretched through a half-circle, men and women sat upright in tall chairs. Out of grey shadows they seemed to watch her. Light crossed their faces, wavered, leached away again, but they did not move. Like statues, they sat absolutely still, their faces devoid of expression, drained of colour or animation. Some were black, some white, yet something in their unmoving faces transcended race. Something Angelina did not like.

Into the centre of the semicircle stepped a solitary figure, a man, naked to the waist, his dark skin glistening in the uncertain light. To his left, flames grew and shrank in a chafing dish set on a rough iron tripod. On his skin, sweat stood out like seed pearls, fine and translucent. Light fell on a shadow’s edge. The man turned slowly to face the camera. It was Filius.

And not Filius. Angelina felt fine hairs like needles of ice rise against her neck. The familiar face was contorted and alien. Filius’s lips were drawn back in a tight grimace, his nostrils flared, his eyes were wide and staring, red, possessed. She had seen such eyes before, in the faces of men and women ridden by the loa, at the height of vodoun ceremonies, their bodies suddenly empty, as suddenly possessed by gods.

Filius and not Filius. Man and not man. The figure turned and turned in a tight circle, dancing in silence, as though moving to music in his own head. He held an earthenware bowl hard against his chest. The light caught the surface of whatever it held, twinkling like a star every time he turned.

There was a crackling sound. The picture jumped and grew still again. The crackling faded and was replaced by duller sounds, each at first indistinguishable from the rest. Gradually, the sounds became clearer. Filius’s breathing, harsh and uneven as he danced, a slow drumbeat like the pounding of a heart, unlike any vodoun drumbeat she had ever heard, an unknown voice speaking from the shadows. The words were indistinct at first, then with a terrible clarity they came to her, a Creole prayer for the dead that she had last heard in Port-au-Prince many years ago:

Prié pou’ tou les mortspou’ les morts ’bandonné nan gran boispou’ les morts ’bandonné nan gran dlopou’ les morts ’bandonné nan gran plainepou’ les morts tué pa’ couteaupou’ les morts tué pa’ épée . . .

Pray for all the deadFor the dead abandoned in the great woodFor the dead abandoned in the great waterFor the dead abandoned in the great plainFor the dead slain by knivesFor the dead slain by swords . . .

The dancer with the face of Filius stopped. The drum went on, steady, slightly offbeat, insistent. From somewhere there came a sound of sobbing, abruptly cut off. Filius raised the bowl in both hands and turned to face the silent figures watching from their seats. As he stepped towards them, the camera followed him, a pace at a time. Angelina knew somehow that the room on the screen was the room in which she sat.

pou’ tou les morts, au nom de Mait’ Cafou et de Legba;pou’ tou generation paternelle et maternelle . . .

For all the dead, in the name of Maître Carrefour and Legba;For all the generations, paternal and maternal . . .

Filius dipped his hand into the bowl and drew it out again, stretching his fingers towards the first of the seated figures. His hand was red and wet with blood. Lightly, he traced the sign of the cross on the man’s forehead. The figure did not move.

. . . ancêtre et ancetère, Afrique et Afrique;au nom de Mait’ Cafou, Legba, Baltaza, Miroi . . .

. . . ancestor and ancestress, African and African;in the name of Maître Carrefour, Legba, Baltaza, Miroi . . .

None of the figures moved. The light fell more sharply on them now, as Filius moved from head to head, daubing crosses in thick strokes of blood. Angelina stared at the screen, her heart shivering, her bowels cold as snow. The light quivered. It glanced off the dancer’s naked back, it lay on the cold, dry skin of the watching figures. No-one moved.

And at last Angelina understood why they did not move, why their eyes did not blink in the harsh light, why they let the blood run unhindered down their cheeks. She saw it clearly now: the formal clothing, the dry, matted hair, the ugly, blotched skin. None of the watching figures was alive.

The camera drew closer, drawn irresistibly to their ashen cheeks. Angelina bent forward aghast. Some must have been in the earth for at least two weeks, others perhaps only hours: the bloom of the mortician’s art was still vivid on one woman’s cheeks. Like grotesque wax dolls, like paper effigies, they sat immobile to receive the benediction of the cross. A Mass for the dead, with blood instead of wine.

The camera panned back to follow Filius. The drum ceased beating. Priest-like, Filius raised the bowl and poured out all the remaining blood in a thick crimson libation. But Angelina scarcely saw him; her eyes were fixed elsewhere. In one corner of the screen, indistinctly but unmistakably, the second figure from the right began to lift its head.

Sunday, 27 September

Rick seemed permanently tired. He had never seemed so tired to her before, so lacking in vitality. The vividness he had shown briefly after their return had already dissipated. Africa had sapped him, his work there had left him pale and enervated. The illness at Lokutu had left him without reserves. Or was it something else? Had the old worries come to the surface again? He never told her anything now. With sick familiarity, she watched him pass through the apartment every day, morose, ill-tempered, ill at ease.

He had watched the video with her and sneered it away, derisive and impatient with her fears. A prank, a game, chicken’s blood and make-up – nothing to get on edge about. Look at the room, he said, look at the furniture. Nothing had been disturbed, there were no traces of blood.

But he seemed on edge himself. Angelina feared some sort of showdown, not just a tremor, but a convulsion that would tear them irrevocably apart. Like a sailor watching a darkening sky, she shivered, dreading a storm.

Over a week had passed. School had started and the first intimations of fall were everywhere. The leaves were growing yellow, the winds that sliced in off the river were colder every day. Angelina walked through half-empty streets waiting for winter, haunted by images of blood and the awkward, sullen postures of the living dead.

Old memories stirred in her, tales from her nursery in Port-au-Prince, zombis and diabs and loups-garous: the dead walking, impatient of the grave. She shivered in bed at night and told her rosary alone in the small hours like an adolescent waking out of childhood’s long, uneasy dream. On the second day, she threw away the meat in the freezer, packet after packet of it, pale meat larded with fat and speckled with frozen blood. Filius had still not shown up.

Rick drove to LIU each day and returned in the evenings frowning and unresponsive. She did not try to caress him; she saw no point: whatever his troubles were, he would not part with them lightly or share them for a kiss. But she knew something was wrong, something unseasonal that filled her mind and spirit with impotent dread.

In the mornings she painted, alone in the room she called her studio, tall, lifeless paintings in muted colours, thin and desolate renderings of images from her past. After lunch, she went for long walks to Fort Greene or Prospect Park; but however far she went, she could not shake off the sense of impending disaster that crept after her, rustling the fallen leaves that lay across her path.

The start of school usually saw Rick straining at the leash, eager for another year of lectures and seminars. He would start with his graduate students and work down to the latest batch of freshmen, outlining projects, refining timetables, imparting a sense of bonhomie to all and sundry, just to let them know what a swell guy he was. Each year, with a regularity that had always astonished her, he would come alive with the freshening winds and shortening days.

Alive for his students, at least. But towards her, with every year that passed, a little more remote. Not actively unpleasant – at least, not often – never violent. Just increasingly distant. When she talked to him, she sometimes felt like shouting, he seemed so far away. He had started to masturbate in private now, in the bathroom, furtively. To her dismay, she realized that she actually preferred it that way.

At least it was better than what the new school year usually brought. Each September, Rick looked forward to a fresh batch of co-eds, sifting them for the one or two he could always count on screwing by Thanksgiving.

He had never tried to keep his little affairs very secret, least of all from her. It had seemed a sort of bravado at first, a cry for help of sorts. Like a fool she had responded by loving him more, offering herself to him again and again until the truth had finally revealed all its hideous little teeth: that he did it to hurt her, that the more she made her body a reward for his infidelity, the more he enjoyed the pain he could inflict. So now she kept her body for herself and was hurt to realize that he did not seem to care. Or notice.

But this year he had not come alive at all. His step remained leaden, his cheeks pallid. He was forty-nine, angry, fragile, and devoid of grace. If he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, he did not do so out of love.

She heard his key in the lock. It was already after eight. She guessed he had been drinking at La Belle Créole on Flatbush Avenue. He had started hanging out there about a year ago, drinking raw clairin and enjoying the buzz he got from being the only white man in a Haitian rum bar. He never got too drunk, of course; that was his forte, to drink and stay in control. To love and remain unmoved. He had loved her once. Hadn’t he?

‘Have you eaten?’

He shook his head.

‘Do you want to eat?’

‘If you’ve got anything. Have you got anything?’ He put down his briefcase, a new one he had bought in June.

‘I’ll see.’ She hesitated. He didn’t seem too drunk. Still in control.

‘Have you found Filius yet?’ she asked.

‘Not yet.’ His eyes avoided her. He appeared, not merely tired, but edgy, as though the slightest push might set him off. His anger, when it came, was invariably cold. She feared the coldness more than blows: his careful, academic choice of words, his mannered tone, his pale, implacable eyes.

‘What do you mean “not yet”? It’s been a week, Rick. No-one you’ve spoken to can remember seeing him since early last month. I want to know what’s going on. I want to know if this has anything to do with . . . that other trouble.’ She didn’t care if she pushed him over the edge tonight. Filius’s disappearance had rattled her. In her belly, thin spiders of fear were crawling, warning her of danger. The last time any of their friends had seen Filius had been two days before Channel 13 transmitted Betty Blue.

‘Nothing’s going on. I saw Ti-Jouet at the Créole today. He says Filius was talking about going to Haiti. He still has relatives there. Ti-Jouet thinks he has a little bien avec down Jacmel way. A pretty girl, so they say. Seventeen and hot as a chilli pepper. He met her there last year on the field trip to Marigot. Ti-Jouet thinks she had a baby boy.’ Rick paused and smiled. See, his little smile seemed to say, some Haitian women are able to have babies.

‘That’s where Filius has gone,’ he continued. ‘You’ll see. He’ll come back with his maman petite, get her in through Miami somehow, bring her up here by Christmas. You’ll see.’

‘I think we should bring in the police.’

‘We’ve already been into that, Angelina. The subject’s closed.’ His left eyelid was flickering. A vein throbbed in his temple, dark, thick with blood. Tonight, she thought, he might just lose control for once.

‘Not for me, it isn’t. If you won’t call the precinct station, I will.’

‘You’ll call nobody. Filius is in Haiti. Bring in the police and you’ll just make trouble for him if he’s trying to get his girl in through Florida.’

‘What you mean is, it’ll make trouble for you. That’s what you mean, Rick, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ He knew what she meant. He wasn’t dumb.

He snorted and turned away, heading for the bathroom. Angelina shrugged and sank into the nearest chair. What was the point of arguing? But she was right, she knew why Rick refused to bring in the police.

Half the Haitians in New York were illegal immigrants. They struggled over to Miami in old, leaking boats, having paid a lifetime’s savings for their passage. A few drowned en route, others were rounded up on their arrival and sent to Krome Avenue Detention Center. The lucky ones made contact with friends and relatives and went underground as quickly as possible. Some stayed in Miami, the others headed north – those with a little money to Queens or Manhattan, the rest to Brooklyn.

They lived ten to a room in crumbling tenements of brick or trembled behind triple-locked doors in high-rise apartments. They took grey, menial jobs that paid a dollar an hour, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Their streets were choked with filth, their neighbours were winos and junkies, their rooms were unheated, and they shared their food with rats and cockroaches.

It was better than Haiti. And nobody wanted trouble with the police.

Rick, on the other hand, didn’t give a shit about who got sent back home and who stayed with the rats. Ten years ago, Angelina would have said he cared a lot. He was on committees for the rights of Haitian refugees; he kept his Congressman up late writing letters about the latest violation of the immigration laws; he collected money to send to would-be refugees from Jérémie and Cap-Haïtien. Ten years ago, she’d have said he did it all for love. Now she knew better. Now she knew he did it all for Rick. And he’d been doing it for Rick right from the start.

Haitians had been a godsend to him: a ready-made ethnic community on his doorstep, all his to poke and prod and label. He was the great white doctor and they were his patients. Since Baby Doc’s accession in 1972 they had come to him in droves, and he had built a reputation on their broad, uncomplaining backs. But, like all reputations, it was as precarious as yesterday’s goodwill. He walked the streets of Fort Greene, Flatbush or Bedford Stuyvesant with care – not out of fear of muggers, but out of nervousness that someone might see through him and walk on past on the other side.

Without his tame blacks, Rick was as good as dead. If his credibility went, just once, he knew he would never get it back again, not in a hundred years, not if he called on all the loa and all the ancestors in Guinea for their help. They confided in him because he was an honorary neg’ beneath the skin of a blanc. But if he betrayed them, if he brought the police – or, worse still, the immigration men – into the nooks and crannies of their close-knit lives, they would quickly close ranks against him. And that, Angelina knew, might very well destroy him.

Unless, of course, something else destroyed him first. She thought she knew what that something else might be. And she thought Filius had become involved.

She heard Rick’s feet drum down the passage once more. The front door slammed, shaking its single pane of glass. Silence filled the apartment again, dark and moody. Angelina leaned back in her chair and sighed. Maybe Rick was just jealous of Filius. Maybe he wished he too could have a seventeen-year-old as hot as a chilli pepper. A little bien avec who could give a man children as easily as sneezing. Who wanted to.

Jealous or not, it looked as though he had gone for the night. She would have to eat dinner alone. She stood up, feeling useless and lazy. Why not just microwave something straight from the freezer, eat it watching TV? The thought pulled her up with a jolt. The cassette was still in the VCR, but nothing could induce her to watch it again.

She wrinkled her nose. The strange smell was still hanging about, she was sure of it. Maybe she should do some cleaning. She decided to start in the morning.

Monday, 28 September

9 A.M.

Rick had not returned. Angelina lay flat on her back in bed, staring at a patch of damp on the grey ceiling. Pale sunlight fell across her eyes like stale water, hard and grey through the interstices of irregularly slatted blinds. She remembered warm sunlight long ago, strong in the early mornings against her skin, long days at Cap-Haïtien, summers on Ibo Beach. And Tontons Macoutes