Miami Midnight (16 page)

The
babalawo
had listened in attentive silence, almost as though he had expected all her secrets to come tumbling out like that.

“Jimmy Santo Marin and I went to Coral Gables High together,” he had told her when she was through. At her dumbfounded look, he had grinned. “Oh, yeah, Jimmy went on to the rich boy’s school, the U of Miami. I got my diploma up at Florida State.” He’d leaned back in his chair, his clever black eyes watching her stunned reaction. “Even back then he was into championship tennis, competitive swimming, broke his leg trying to make first string quarterback, all the usual glory stuff. Of course, if you knew the women in the family...” he’d added cryptically. “Jimmy was committed to the classic pattern—firstborn, only son, head of the family, workaholic high-achiever, drives himself and everybody else around him nuts. Jimmy’s always been a tiger.”

Gaby’s mind had reeled. This yuppie voodoo practitioner and James Santo Marin knew, or at least had known, each other? She had been suddenly glad she’d left out the more intimate details of what had taken place on the living room couch. That, she’d decided, was no one’s business. Not even a
Santería
high priest’s.

“I don’t understand what this is all about,” she now said a little angrily. “Don’t tell me I’m having an anxiety attack, either. I want some explanations.”

“Okay.” The
babalawo
sat forward in his chair and recited in careful, academic Spanish,
“‘He visto vivir un hombre con el punal al castado.’”

Gaby stared blankly at him. “I’m sorry. My Spanish is not very good.”

“It was written by a very fine poet, José Martí, who also happens to be the great liberator of Cuba. Translated, it refers to someone who is living very dangerously.” He added, quite offhandedly, “So Jimmy likes you, huh? Well, he’s a great-looking guy, but actually I don’t think he’s been all that involved with women. Most of it’s just publicity.”

“I—I’m not,” Gaby began with a return of the curious breathlessness that attacked her when she talked, or even thought, about James Santo Marin, “at all involved with—”

“What I’m doing right now,” the
babalawo
interrupted, “is setting up on the computer a general consultation for you using the Table of Ifa. Are you familiar with the Chinese I Ching?” He shot her an inquiring glance. “No? Okay, then think of what I do as like casting horoscopes. Actually the Table of Ifa of the Yorubas is based on a system of divination just as ancient and complicated as the zodiac, only it happens to be African and not ancient Babylonian. Incidentally, the Babylonians believed we are descended from the gods, just like the Yoruba. We’re not dealing with trash here.”

“Oh,” Gaby said. “I didn’t think we were.”

“Honey, you’re so polite.” He turned to look at her. “But then this whole visit is fascinating,” he murmured, openly admiring her. “After all, how many times am I going to get a gorgeous young Anglo society lady in here with a
Santería
problem?”

Gaby’s lips tightened. “If you don’t mind, can we get down to why I came here? I’d like to know why someone put the
Santería
at my house.”

The
babalawo
put his elbows on the computer stand and rested his chin on his fingertips. “Killing the old dog was an afterthought,” he said to the lighted screen. “That’s not kosher. The chicken was more straightforward. But I agree, nobody went to all that trouble for the
latino
family in the garage. They wanted you to get the message.”

“What message?” Gaby cried. “So far nobody’s told me what anything means!”

He peered at the display, where a series of patterns were rolling up in long columns. “How’s the tummy? The soda pop taking care of it? You sure you feel up to all this?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

He sighed. “Miss Collier, because you’re a nice Anglo doll and don’t practice
Santería
, I’m going to limit some of the invocations, cut out a lot of the deep stuff. You see, in my culture the
babalawo
is witch doctor, diviner, father confessor, and psychologist all rolled into one. It gives me a lot of leeway.” He ducked his head, consulting the keyboard. “Has somebody already explained to you that in the islands you could go to mass in the village church, and then practice an African religion like
Santería,
and have the best of both worlds?”

When Gaby nodded, the
babalawo
lifted his well-manicured hands from the keyboard and held them out to her. “See the color of my skin, Miss Collier?” he asked softly. “I’m like most people from the Caribbean. I’m a mix of three races, Indian, African, and white, and I’ve got the heritage of all three.
Santería
speaks to me just as it speaks to my people, you understand?”

Gaby nodded. She supposed she did.

“Now what I’m doing here,” he went on, typing in a command, “is trying to find out why someone is putting a
bilongo
against you. That was the stuff you found at your back door.”

She said, hesitantly, “The police seemed to think it was a priestess.”

“Don’t tell me what the police think. I know all the practitioners. None of them are nuts enough to do something like this.” He shrugged. “But I could be wrong. When you get a bad
santero
, when some of them are into Congo
palo
, you get into really heavy stuff.”

The
babalawo
, too, had his cabinet of the
orishas,
a piece of plain gray-green office equipment. It also included “heads” made of coconuts covered with clay, and decorated with symbols dedicated to Orunla, the special god of divination. One sat on his desk.

The comparison with casting a horoscope was a good one, Gaby thought uneasily. From time to time the
babalawo
muttered an incantation over his
okuele
, a chain linking eight round medallions of tortoise shell engraved with symbols. The
babalawo
threw it down on the
estera
, a grass mat spread over a table beside his desk, and the medallions formed themselves into simple patterns. Or, as he explained, one and zero, the system of binary numbers. Then he loaded the data into the computer.

“I gather you didn’t tell Ibi,” he said, “about Jimmy Santo Marin.”

“No.” The idea that the
babalawo
knew James Santo Marin still unnerved her. “Mostly she talked about a goddess Oshun. And Chango, or something.”

“She
what
?” He lifted his hands from the keyboard in surprise. “She did what?”

“There was a jar of honey,” Gaby explained a little nervously. She wasn’t sure what they were talking about. “She gave me some before I could stop her.

“To her surprise the
babalawo
laughed.

“Chango? And Oshun?” He turned around in his chair to face her, his dark face intent. “Did she tell you about Chango’s fire and the lightning and the thunder?”

Gaby stared at him, open-mouthed.

“Oshun is the Yoruba goddess of love,” the
babalawo
went on. “Honey is her symbol. It’s a charm for—Oh, never mind,” he said quickly, seeing the expression on her face.

Gaby was thinking that the incomprehensible words and spells of the wizened old black woman in her bizarre temple, and now the high-tech psycho-jargon of this high priest with his computer, were weaving a curious web about her. There was no other explanation for the way she felt.

She gave herself a little shake. Her imagination was running wild, but she could almost sense the invisible strands as they were laid around her, one by one. The
babalawo
knew James Santo Marin. And hadn’t Crissette’s boyfriend, David, unerringly picked the right
iyalocha
to visit? The real question, though, was not just why the web was being spun about her, but who the spider was at the center of it, waiting for her.

“Come here,” the
babalawo
said. “All the way around the desk. I want you to look at something.”

Gaby did as he said. When she looked over his shoulder at the lighted computer screen, he pointed to long columns of words rolling up it.

“I’m going to line up the gods of some other ancient religions with the
orishas
. I got this out of a book. Look, here’s the Hebrew cabalistic tree of life reading down from Kether, Chochmah, et cetera. Now here are the Yoruba gods. I’m going to line them up with the cabala and on the other side we put the Greek pantheon, then the Roman. Kronos matches Orunla, Zeus matches Obatala, they’re both sky gods, and they match the Roman Jupiter.” He punched up another line of names. “Here’s Oshun-Netzach-Aphrodite-Venus. You see how they’re all alike? Here’s Yemaya-Yesod-Artemis-Moon Goddess. And here’s Chango-Tiphereth-Apollo-Sun God. No matter what you call it, it’s an umbilical cord straight to the cosmos and the universal mystery. And it’s all just as subjective as Hawking’s astrophysical collapsing of time and space.”

Gaby wasn’t listening. Wasn’t there a pattern to everything, she wondered, that had been happening to her from the very moment she’d seen James Santo Marin in the woods of his Coral Gables estate? What if all this voodoo was a wild plot to make her doubt her own sanity? Who, for instance, she mused, looking around the
babalawo
’s office, even knew she was in Little Havana this afternoon?

The
babalawo
pressed a key. The columns of gods faded from the screen and a pattern of black and white circles came up.

“Now when I cast the
okuele
there are only five ways they can lie: all white, three white one black, two white two black, three black one white, and all black. Sometimes it used to take days for a
babalawo
to read the patterns, the combinations are endless. It’s a binary system, yes no, go no-go. That’s why the computer can process it. But when you get the pattern
oyekun
which is all black, over and over like I did when I was casting your
okuele
, it means something very bad. That’s why Ibi Gobuo was so shook.”

Gaby backed up a few steps. She had to get out of here, she thought a little desperately. But where was David? If she ran out of the office and down the stairs, would he be below, waiting for her? Or was he a part of this, too?

“Okay, that’s the bad news,” the
babalawo
said cheerfully. “The good news is there are other patterns called
diloggun
that modify it. Each divination set has a proverb. The one that keeps coming up with yours nonstop is called
Obbara
. Interestingly, it’s the only one where Chango and Oshun speak together. It’s very ancient. Do you want to know what it says?”

He looked up to see her staring at him. “The
Obbara
says, ‘A noble king does not tell lies.’”

Gaby shook her head. “I don’t understand any of this,” she said. “It hasn’t answered any of my questions. I think I’d better go.”

He turned back to the computer screen. “I can’t tell you anything about James Santo Marin, Miss Collier,” he said in a different voice. “You’ll have to figure that problem out for yourself. But I don’t deny there’s plenty of drug dealing going on in Miami.”

Gaby suddenly realized the
babalawo
’s long dissertation on the African voodoo religion hadn’t gone anywhere because he didn’t intend it to.

“You’ve been stringing me along!” she accused him.

“Now, now, don’t get upset.” He wasn’t smiling. “Remember, I’m not charging you anything for this. And my usual fee is pretty steep.”

“I don’t care how steep it is.” Gaby looked around for her purse. “The
iyalocha
was giving me the runaround, too, wasn’t she?”

“Look, I answered the question about what happened at your house.” He sounded defensive. “Yes, it was somebody’s idea of
Santería
. The
bilongo
on the back door was vicious. I can’t relate to it.” The
babalawo
turned his back to her, hunching over the keyboard. “But if you have to have a clear-cut message, Miss Collier, okay. I would say that somebody wants very badly to kill you.”

The door to the
babalawo
’s office burst open with a bang. The
babalawo
did not lift his gaze from the computer display. He merely said, “Hey, what took you so long?”

Gaby whirled, knocking over the empty 7-Up can. It rolled across the desk and dropped to the floor. She hardly noticed.

The tall figure in blue jeans and a tight black T-shirt filling the doorway was out of breath, almost bursting with fury. The brilliant dark eyes blazed at Gaby.

“Just tell me,” James Santo Marin said angrily, “what the hell you think you’re doing.”

Chapter 11

“They telephoned you!” Gaby grabbed for the railing and held onto it, refusing to let James Santo Marin pull her down the stairs from the
babalawo
’s office.

“Damn right,” he snarled, breaking her grip with an angry jerk. “I’d break their necks if they didn’t!”

At street level Gaby balked, bracing one arm against the door. “You bastard, let go of me. I’m not going anywhere with you! You killed my dog!”

“I didn’t kill anybody’s dog.” He managed to pry the street door open enough to push her through. “Walk nice. I don’t want to start a damned riot on
Calle Ocho
.”

“You jerk!” She was almost sobbing. “I have a friend waiting for me. Believe me, he’ll—he’ll take you apart!”

“Who, the Jamaican? I told him to get lost.”