after my children I said that Olarun had not blessed me yet. At this she increased the intensity of her stare, amp; frowned. Then she made a shooing gesture, and Akinkuoto withdrew, rather more quickly than he was accustomed to move.
Then we sat in silence some more. The camcorder lay dormant in my hand, as if a mere ceremonial object, like her silver-mounted horsehair whisk. African time. An iyalase is the shadow on earth of Iya Nla, the Great Mother. This figure is extinct in our culture, for the few powerful women we have are imitation men; it is the only form of power we recognize. Among the Yoruba, though, a ferociously male-dominated society, the specifically female kind of power remains intact, and enormously potent. The whole Gelede ritual is a thing devised by men to keep it placated. Every male in Yorubaland knew that Olaiya, or her sisters, could shrivel a man’s penis (so that he would, as their saying has it, have to go to bed with his pants on) or insure that no wife ever bore him a son. The deity she represents is also the patroness of all art and culture and agriculture. She loves to be amused, entranced. At all costs she must be kept from irascibility. We used to have her in Europe, too, but we got rid of her, substituting the Virgin, whose power is not at all the same.
She broke the long silence by asking me why I had come to her place. I started with the usual anthro excuse, we wanted to know the ways of her people, we had heard of her wisdom and the beauty of her celebrations, and so on, but she cut me off with a gesture. No, the real reason, she said. The heart reason. She added, I don’t usually see eebo women. I find them disturbing. They are either men in costumes they can’t take off, or crushed things like beetles. You are different, and interesting. Yemaya of the sea was in you once, but you cast her off by fear. Ashe is waiting to flow through you in great quantity, but you block it. The orishas wish to give you gifts, but you refuse them. Why is that?
I said I didn’t know. She said, You do. There is an alujonnu in you. You should have it removed. You know this. I agreed that I did. She shrugged, and said, We will have palm wine and kola now. She clapped her hands twice and called something over her shoulder. Two young women dressed in white hurried in and placed a low table before her loaded with prepared nuts and bowls of wine. We ate and drank. Then she said, Your husband beats you. I said no and touched my bandaged head. An accident only. She said, Yes, he beats you. Why? Are you unpleasing to him at night? Is his supper not ready when he wants it? Or is it because you have given him no sons? All of the above, I thought, but said, We have different customs. She gave me that look, I said, I’m afraid that he has an evil spirit in him, too. No idea why I said that, but she said, Of course, because you didn’t purify yourselves before your marriage. You should be purified together, or else, someday, you will kill him or he will kill you. But you are the stronger, I think. I saw her hand go out and select a colored stone from a jar. She stared at it for a minute and then enveloped it in a fold of her robe. She said, This has been interesting. I will remember it. I felt a little shiver. I had heard about memory stones but never seen it done. It’s what they use in traditional societies instead of notebooks and tape. She would be able to play back our interview in her memory about as accurately as I might have, had I got it all on the Sony, which was not running.
More silence then, and I was able to turn the subject to anthro, gratefully. She taught me some hymns. Here is one:
Homage my mother, the Osoronga
Mother with the beautiful eyes
Who has a thick bunch of hair in her private parts
The mother who owns a brass tray
And a brass fan
The famous bird of the night that flies gracefully.
Not exactly “Lead, Kindly Light,” but we have different customs. One of the things she said was, You are ugly, true, but your character is good at the root. Iwa l’ewa. Meaning character is beauty; Dad hinted at this all the time, but never actually came out and said it. I left her in a daze, to find that night had fallen.
Three days later there was a Gelede odun, a festival, and I saw my first dances. Dance is not quite the word. Gelede is a combination of grand opera, ballet, the circus, a tabloid newspaper, and a psychotherapy session. There is nothing else like it in the world, because other people tend to put all those aspects of culture in different boxes. Not the Yoruba. No one knows exactly what the word Gelede means, but one etymology suggests it stands for “a thing that relaxes and indulges carefully.” It jollies up the most awesome thing on earth, Earth herself.
Dance lasted three days, I have it all on tape, meaningless, you had to be there. What glory!
Morning of the third day, Berne drove up with Tunji, told me that W. had been arrested for narcotics trafficking, and was in Lagos Jail. I went to where Olaiya was sitting on her stool of honor and took my leave, on my knees. She told me not to go, but I did. On the way back, he filled me in. Early that morning, the cops had burst into the Palm Court and searched it. They said they were looking for drugs, said that W. had been arrested as a major American gangster drug lord. Dave said that the idiots W. was hanging with figured that since they had an American contact, they didn’t have to pay off the cops anymore. Maybe W. had actually told them he was an American drug lord. It’s not beyond him at all.
Back in Lagos, I got on our satellite phone and pulled the red handle again, and this morning a sweating, nervous oil company guy, accompanied by two refrigerator-sized Nigerians carrying submachine guns, walked into Lary’s Palm Court with an aluminum suitcase containing fifty thousand dollars.
Have to stop writing and go see Colonel Musa.
TWENTY-ONE
Barlow laid out what they had. Paz thought he was good at this, a man who spoke with the Almighty often, and was thus not likely to be cowed by a gaggle of police brass. The room was crowded to capacity, with Neville D. Horton up at the head of the table, flanked by his gofers and assistant chiefs, then Captain Mendes, then the relevant captains and lieutenants who supervised the people who actually knew what was going on.
Barlow covered both cases, stressing the similarities: the precise duplication of the cuts in all four victims, mothers and unborn babies, the type and quantity of the drugs found in the bodies at autopsy, the fact that there was no forced entry, the fact that the crimes had been accomplished in complete silence, with the victims unbound, yet not struggling while they were cut into butcher’s meat.
His words emerged in stately periods; he paused dramatically at the right places; he asked rhetorical questions (“Did we find other similarities? Yes, we did”) and his delivery was free of the usual verbal tics. It was very much like a sermon, but one lacking a moral point at the end. Paz was glad that Barlow omitted the material about Tanzi Franklin, because it was embarrassing, and it led nowhere. Nor did Barlow try to cover the sorry truth? that they had no leads at all, no suspects, nothing to look for, no real evidence at all except for the bizarre nature of the crimes themselves; a tropical nut used in divination; a cloudy description by a piss-bum of a fellow he had seen talking to Deandra Wallace in a park; a partial bike tire track; and a tiny piece of what had turned out to be obsidian. When he got to that part, Barlow nodded to Paz. “My partner there, Detective Paz, has found out a little something about that fragment from the Vargas murder scene. Jimmy?”
Paz stood and went to the front of the room. They had planned this so that Paz would be on his feet, standing next to Barlow and ready to field questions, if any, about what Cletis called the spooky stuff. Paz cleared his throat and said, in a voice that sounded too loud in his own ears, “Yes, I showed the sample to a geologist at the university. He says it’s a volcanic glass called obsidian. He examined it under a microscope and concluded that it showed marks of pressure flaking. We’re thinking that the chip came from a stone knife.”
A buzz greeted this statement. Mendes knuckle-rapped on the table and turned to the county medical examiner, John Cornell, a wizened veteran with a reputation, which he loved polishing, for being vinegary.
“Doc, what about it? Are the wounds on the two victims consistent with a stone knife?”
“They’re consistent with a sharp knife, a very sharp knife, around three inches long,” said Cornell. “There’s no way of telling what the knife was made of.”
“I meant, could you get a stone knife sharp enough to do that kind of cutting?”
“Oh, hell, yeah. It’s just glass, really. There’s a kind of eye surgery where surgeons routinely use glass knives. If you know what you’re doing, you can get a glass edge that’s essentially one molecule thick. You can’t get any sharper than that. The problem with glass knives is that they chip if you breathe on them wrong, and then you have to knap a new edge.”
