The Penalty (7 page)

“It’s a sacrificial knife,” Fillol said. “Used in certain
Veneración
ceremonies. You know Veneration, Worship? Ancestor Worship?”

“I know a bit about it,” Faustino murmured, still sickeningly preoccupied by the thought of having a thing like that thrust into one’s body.

“Not the ideal stabbing weapon,” Fillol said. “Normally you’d want something narrower and a bit longer. The usual victims of this kind of weapon are chickens or goats. The carving is meant to be Maco. He is the ancestor who dispenses law and justice. And revenge.”

Faustino looked up at him.

Fillol smiled thinly. “No, I’m not an expert. I only know it’s Maco because we use him on our crime posters, in a useless attempt to persuade people that we have powers we don’t really have. Did Salez talk about Veneration at all? Could he have been mixed up in that sort of thing? Working on a story about it, something like that?”

“No. He didn’t mention it at all. I can’t imagine he could’ve been involved … I mean, he’s not even, wasn’t even…”

Fillol cocked his head. “Not even what? Black? Of African descent? It’s not unknown for non-blacks to get into Veneration. Besides, everyone up here is African one way or another.”

Faustino shoved the pictures away. “So you believe this was some sort of religious killing?”

“I don’t believe anything,” Fillol said. “But whoever did it left the knife in. They wanted us to find it.” He glanced at his watch. “So, what time did you say you left Salez’s office?”

“Four, maybe a couple of minutes after.”

“And you didn’t see him again, after that?”

Faustino knew a can of worms when he saw one. He shook his head rather sadly and said, “No. That was the last time I set eyes on the poor bastard.”

When Fillol announced that the interview was over Faustino stood, shook the detective’s hand and turned to go.

“Señor Faustino? You forgot these.”

Fillol was holding out the envelope with the tickets in it. Surprised, Faustino took them. He noted a certain cold amusement in the sergeant’s eyes.

Fillol said, “You’d met Captain Varga before?”

“Who?”

“The officer who came in earlier. It seemed to me that you recognized him.”

Faustino frowned thoughtfully, then shook his head. “No.”

“Sure?”

“Yes, quite sure. I know hardly anyone in San Juan. And this is certainly the first time I’ve had the pleasure of meeting any of its police officers.”

Fillol nodded. “Very well.” He took a card from his pocket. “If you think of anything else, or want to contact me, use the second of these two numbers. Please speak only to me personally, okay? And don’t leave any messages on the answering machine.”

Fillol’s smile did not change the look in his eyes.

“Our message service here is not always reliable.”

F
ROM HIS HOTEL
room, Faustino phoned his piece to the news desk of
La Nación
, with strict instructions that his name should not appear above it or in it. Then he changed into a fresh shirt and walked down to the Old Quarter, tacking back and forth across the narrowing streets to stay in the shade. There were few people and little traffic in the Pillory at this time of day; the heat was so intense that it seemed to resonate in the air like the echo of a gong. At the corner of the Calle Liberador he found a small café and dived into the shadow of its awning, gasping. He sat sipping iced coffee, keeping watch on the small door cut into the massive main entrance to the Church of Christ the Redeemer.

After twenty minutes had passed, Faustino began to wonder if he’d got his timing wrong. He hadn’t. A small group of tourists emerged from the church, hastily rummaging in their bags and pockets for sunglasses. He watched them shake hands with their guide, tip him, then disperse, harried by two small boys bearing sheets of cardboard to which strings of beads were pinned.

Faustino stood and stepped into the pitiless light. But there was no need for him to cross the street; Edson Bakula saw him immediately. Faustino raised his hand, then mimed drinking.

Bakula stared, motionless, for several seconds, then approached.

“I’d like to buy you a drink,” Faustino said. “If you’ve nothing better to do.”

“Sure. Why not?”

When the waiter appeared, Bakula ordered a rum and lime cocktail, speaking in the peculiar lilting accent of the North. It was not the voice he used in his trade, the one he now used to address Faustino.

“So, Señor Faustino.”

“Paul, please.”

“Okay,
Paul
.”

“I’d like to talk to you about Veneration,” Faustino said.

“Ah. Well, there is an excellent museum up on—”

“Been there, done that. I’ve also been to a Veneration, er, ceremony, ritual, whatever the word is. Last time I was here. Six years ago.”

“Really. And what did you make of it?”

Indeed, what
had
he made of it?

Faustino had gone with a temporary girlfriend, the two of them squeezed one night into a minibus with a dozen other paying adventurers and driven to one of the outer darknesses of San Juan. They’d sat, shoeless, along three sides of a large, harshly lit shed with whitewashed walls. Against the other wall four listless-looking drummers sat behind a low altar – a coffee table – upon which were dishes of bread, salt and fruit and a pile of loosely rolled cigars. Also half a dozen figurines; they’d looked to Faustino like gaudily dressed dolls from a cheap toyshop. The twenty or so worshippers were all female, all dressed in white slavery-era costume. They milled about in an apparently aimless fashion, ignoring the visitors; now and again they would embrace one another and utter eerie cries like tree-canopy birds.

After a considerable amount of time the pai entered the room. He was a tall light-skinned black man wearing white clothes and a fixed sneer, as though his moustache was giving off a foul smell. He blew long jets of cigar smoke from his flared nostrils. The drummers struck up and the women began a shuffling, swaying dance, stomping the floor with bare feet. Soon – too soon, Faustino thought – one of them was writhing on the floor in front of the altar, moaning and gabbling in an invented or lost language, while the pai blew his smoke over her body and the other women yelped their bird calls.

This had gone on for several minutes, then the possessed woman got to her knees, pressed the pai’s hand to the crown of her head, lit a cigar from the altar, and rejoined her companions. Then the whole damned thing had started over again: the drumming, the dancing, another woman possessed, the room filling with shifting strata of blue smoke.

At the beginning of the evening Faustino had felt a bit … embarrassed, perhaps. Even intimidated. After two hours of this repetitive mumbo-jumbo these feelings had given way to a sullen boredom. He and the girl had tried to slip away in search of a taxi, but had found the iron gate between the yard and the street locked. It had been three o’clock in the morning before they’d been delivered back to their hotel. It was odd, really, that such a tedious and irritating experience should have lodged so vividly in his memory. Maybe it was because the two tickets for the performance had cost him eighty dollars.

He said to Edson Bakula, “With all due respect, I think they were taking the piss.”

Bakula smiled happily. “Because they took your hard-earned money off you? Well, yes, of course. But I’m sure you’ll be comforted to know that it would have been put to good use. Houses of Worship use their takings from tourists to provide education and medicines for the poor, among other things.”

“That’s all right, then,” Faustino said, lighting a cigarette.

“I take it you were at a white ceremony. White room, white clothes, and so on?”

“Yeah.”

“White ceremonies are healing ceremonies. Through the pai, people speak with their spirit ancestor, who gives them advice, comfort, strength. And God knows they need it. These people have hard lives.”

There was something about Edson Bakula that was … what? Patronizing? Schoolmasterish? Something that didn’t quite fit with his fine face, his easy smile.

But Faustino nodded understandingly. “And white ceremonies are the ones that tourists get to see, I assume. But there are other kinds?”

Bakula swirled his glass, apparently interested in the way the chunks of lime lurched among the ice.

“In San Juan,” he said, “white ceremonies are the most common. This is because for a long time now, people have come here from the country thinking that the life will be easier. It is not. Instead we found hardships, temptations, crimes we had not imagined. And were not ready for. So, of course, the Veneration houses that offered healing became popular. Important.”

As a journalist, Paul Faustino was always hugely pleased, as if he’d won a game of cards with a weak hand, when someone avoided answering a question. Because it had been, obviously, a good question. The trick was to wait a while before asking it again.

So he said, “I noticed that you said
we
just now. You said
we
found hardships and whatever. So you’re not a city boy? You’re from the country?”

Edson Bakula raised his hands and leaned back in his chair, smiling. “Ah. You have seen through my cool urban disguise. Yes, of course. I’m from the Cane Country. They still call it that, even though the sugar business collapsed a long, long time ago. You’ve heard of it?”

“Sure. They also used to call it the Land of the Colonels, is that right? Because plantation owners liked to pretend they were military commanders?”

Bakula emptied his glass and put it down on the table. His smile was a thing of the past.

“Sugar,” he said. “Such a soft word. Such a good word for something full of sweetness. Something so
white
, when it is refined.”

Faustino concealed a sigh inside a stream of cigarette smoke.

“In fact,” Bakula continued, “the Cane Country is a place where a slow holocaust took place. At a low estimate, one million slaves died producing sugar for the colonels. Sugar cane also destroyed the forests and exhausted the soil. So even after slavery was abolished, people continued to die in huge numbers, of poverty, hunger, disease. And alcoholism, of course.”

Faustino tapped Bakula’s glass with a fingernail. “Another?” he asked innocently. “I rather fancy one of those myself.”

When the waiter had come and gone Faustino said, “It’s still pretty rough up there in the Cane Country, isn’t it? Cheers, by the way.”

Edson Bakula hesitated briefly, then chinked his glass against Faustino’s. He said, “You could take a taxi to San Juan’s new multi-million-dollar airport, and in less than an hour be flying over what looks like one of the most desperate parts of Africa. You probably wouldn’t believe it.”

“And would I be right in thinking,” Faustino said, getting there at last, “that up there Veneration isn’t all nice touristy white ceremonies dedicated to the healing ancestors like Amalu and Ochandja? That other ancestors have a little more, er, influence? Like Maco, for instance?”

Bakula sat back and studied Faustino’s face for several moments. Eventually he said, “Yes, perhaps. So tell me, Señor Faustino – Paul – what is the nature of your interest in these matters? Are you writing something?”

“No.”

“Ah.” Bakula smiled ironically. “So it’s a personal interest? A spiritual quest?”

“Hah!”

“No? You have no interest in spiritual matters?”

“No, thank God,” Faustino said. “Fortunately, the religious gene in my family seems to have skipped a generation. My mother suffered badly from it. I am, happily, a sensualist. The real world is quite enough for me.”

“Some would describe such an attitude as superficial.”

“Oh yes,” Faustino agreed. “I am undeniably a superficial person. I like the surfaces of things. I have yet to see a car that looks better without its paintwork, or a woman who looks better without her skin. Have you?”

Edson Bakula seemed to consider the question seriously. But he said, “So why are we having this conversation?”

Faustino sipped his drink. Then he told Bakula about Maximo Salez, and about the knife. The guide listened without interrupting, staring at the surface of the table, running the backs of his fingers through the moisture on the outside of his glass.

When Faustino had finished, Bakula said, “And you imagined that I might be able to cast some light on this business? That I have, what, inside information about the cults in this city?”

Faustino lifted his shoulders, a defensive gesture. “I didn’t have anyone else to discuss it with. And you seem like a very well-informed person.”

“And I am from the heartland of Maco worship.”

“Well, yes, although I didn’t know that until…”

Bakula looked up at Faustino now. “I can’t help you,” he said.

“Can’t, or won’t?”

The guide’s expression hardly changed, but it was clear that he wasn’t used to being challenged. He ran a finger over his disfigured lower lip, then said, “I dare say there have been white people killed in the name of Maco. Considering the history of this place, it would not be surprising. But the knife means nothing in itself. You can buy them in tourist shops, I’m sorry to say.”

He stood up.

“Right,” Faustino said. “Well, thanks for your time.”

“Thank you for the drinks.” Bakula looked out at the sun-hammered square. “Perhaps your friend just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In San Juan most people are.”

W
EARING ONLY BOXER
shorts and a T-shirt, Faustino took a beer from the minibar and went out onto his balcony. The lowering sun had filled the street below with shadow but also cruelly illuminated the scabby masonry and skewed roof tiles of the buildings opposite. He watched a plane cross the bay on its low approach to the airport; its fuselage reflected pink light.

On its website, the hotel had made a big deal of the views of the bay that could be enjoyed from the upper floors. In reality, the great swathe of blue was interrupted in several places by tall and astonishingly ugly buildings, most of them rearing up from the industrial stretch of the waterfront. Closer to the hotel, perhaps only a street away, the elaborate and crumbling twin campaniles of a church jutted into the sky. Skinny weeds sprouted among their cracked tiles, and Faustino wondered idly how they lived, so far from soil. One of the towers still had its bell, dimly visible inside the arched opening. Inside the other arch there was only darkness; but as Faustino watched, this darkness changed shape and moved. A humped form moved briefly into the light and became a vulture. It eased its shoulders and stretched its neck like a priest who has sat too long in the confessional, then turned, shat, and shuffled back into the shadows.