Writing this looking out at the brown Niger, from the deck of our houseboat. You can really get anything you need on the water, from the floating market, including black hashish. We both smoke a good deal. It makes things easier, and he says it helps him write. I wouldn’t know, he doesn’t read things to me anymore. No sex, I don’t want it, he doesn’t offer. We haven’t spoken about Lagos.
Dull days these, in the dust of the archives, will give it another month, then take a little cruise, maybe upriver to Djenne to see the mosque, the largest mud structure in the world, they say. The kind of thing poor Mali would be distinguished for.
11/20 Bamako
A tiny discovery today, the journal of a Salesian father who worked at a leprosarium here in the late 19th. Crumbled, full of wormholes, but still legible. He mentions Tour de Montaille, who stopped by for a cure, an officer of good family, in the last stages of exhaustion, with fever, says Fr. Camille, if I am translating correctly, with tales of monstrous occurrences among the natives of the northern interior, un gens trcs deprave qui s’appelle des Oleau. This is, as far as I know, the only independent mention of the Olo anywhere. (Tour de Montaille blowing smoke at the priest? fever delirium?) The leper hospital was located near the present town of Mdina, about 120 km northwest of here. The hospital no longer exists, according to the French embassy, closed in 1921.
Shopped for Xmas presents in the Petit Marche later. Found a remarkable pistol for Dad, in prime condition, an 1896 Mauser nine mm, with the famous red nine stamped on the handle, and an antique amber necklace for Mary. For Dieter, an album of old studio photographs from the French days, and a terrific market painting for Josey. Didn’t get anything for W., yet. Maybe a silver hash pipe, he might wear out the one he’s got before the holidays. Shipped all of it off to Sionnet. Thought about Christmas there, got a little homesick. Nothing for Mom either, not that it matters, she’ll hate whatever I buy. Doe stubbornness, not ever to give up on people. Got it from Dad. May explain why I am still with W. So I will keep looking.
11/23 Bamako
On a roll now, sometimes it happens that way, M. always used to say, one discovery leads to another. In one of the street markets, shopping for Mom. Spotted a small leopard mask, ivory, heavily incised, with the eyes made of some greenish stone?looked just like her, the expression. It turned out to be a Mande article, and the shopwoman was knowledgeable about its provenance. While she was wrapping it in newspaper, I looked around the place. The usual mix of textiles, jewelry, fetishes, except that she seemed to have a wider range than the usual market joint, and better taste. It was just sitting there, sticking out of a clay pot that stood on the head of a big drum, looking very old, yellowed like ivory, with shallow geometrical inscriptions on it. It had a hole drilled in one end.
Trembling when I brought it up to the proprietor. Turtleshell, she said, Fula from upriver. I asked her where she got it. A trader. Name? She looked doubtful. I flashed money. A man named Bonbacar Togola, a trader and hunter. Where could he be found? In Mdina, she said, and I saw stars. I bought the little thing without even the pretence of bargaining and walked out, with the leopard mask, too. My mother’s gift, that had got me into the place to make this spectacular find. In the street I checked it out again. Good I took physical anthro. Saw that it really was the sternum of a neonate human, decorated and drilled for hanging in the house of a witch. Tour de Montaille had described just such a house, and the hanging racks of such objects (idubde) amp; also the rituals that produced them. I’m holding an actual Olo artifact! Thanks, Mom!
TWENTY-FOUR
They seemed to be in a park bordered by poplars in full leaf, through the trunks of which shone dappled lawns. The road ended in a broad apron of tan gravel, washed golden in pools by shafts of sun. They parked and climbed stone stairs to a terrace, and there was the house, Sionnet. It was long and rambling and many-gabled, a Queen Anne fantasy in rose brick and tan stucco, its gray slate roofing pierced by dozens of brick chimneys. There was a large white wooden barn off to the right, and through some trees they could see the glitter of a greenhouse, and beyond that the sheen of the Sound. Seabirds shrieked above, and they heard the sound of a mower in the distance.
Paz and Barlow walked to the front door, past a flagpole from which the Stars and Stripes crackled in the breeze. The terrace was nearly as large as a football field and formal in design, with neat, bright flower beds, and lozenges of lawn cut by graveled paths. A group of workmen in khaki were doing some repairs on the stone balustrade that enclosed it. The front door was iron-bound, thick-planked dark wood, pierced by a small diamond window.
Paz pulled the bell. The door opened?a young woman, rounded, pretty, with pale blond hair done up in a bun, her face pink and damp from some distant kitchen. She wore a white uniform and a pin-striped apron over it. Paz goggled; he had never seen a white servant before, except in movies depicting foreign nations or earlier ages. Barlow displayed his shield.
“Miss, we’re police officers. From Miami, Florida? We’d like to see Mr. John Francis Doe.”
She said, calmly, as if police visits were routine at Sionnet, “Oh, uh-huh, Mr. D. said you’d be by. He’s over there, you must have walked right past him.” Here she pointed at the work crew at the balustrade. “He’s the tall one in the Yankees ball cap.”
The four men were replacing a copper gutter that ran along the pedestal of the balustrade. Doe seemed to know what he was doing, as did the three men?all young, two white kids and one who might have been Latino. Doe stood up and looked the detectives over. He looked a little longer at Paz than at Barlow, and Paz knew why. Barlow made the introductions and Doe shook their hands, saying, “Jack Doe.”
The man was taller than either of them by a good few inches, late fifties, with a leathery, bony face and a jutting square chin, his skin burned a few shades darker than the bricks of his home. He had sad, deep-set eyes the color of Coke bottles. “Let’s go sit out back,” he said.
Doe led them through a breezeway, across a pebbled courtyard, past a white wooden gate, and out to the rear of the house. Below them there was another terrace with a long green swimming pool on it, and beyond that, a lawn that sloped down to a two-story white boathouse and a dock. Doe flung his long frame down in an iron lounge chair covered in faded green canvas and motioned the others to similar seats around a white metal table, under a patched dun canvas umbrella. He offered them iced tea. When they accepted he pressed a button set into a patinaed brass plate cemented into the wall behind him. Paz thought about that, just a detail, what sort of person you had to be to have a buzzer for calling servants set in an old brass plate cemented into a stone wall on your terrace overlooking your pool.
A man came out through French doors. He was older than Doe, silver haired, and he wore a tan apron over navy blue trousers, a white shirt, and a striped tie. Again, Paz had the peculiar sense that he had fallen out of regular life. A butler was going to bring him iced tea. This soon arrived on a silver tray, in tall, sweating glasses, which Paz was certain were never used for anything but iced tea. There was a long silver spoon in each glass, and a straw made out of glass, and there was a fat round of lemon stuck on the lip of the glass, as in advertisement illustrations. The tea was strong and aromatic.
They exchanged small talk?the nice weather, the pleasant temperature, Florida, the fishing in the Keys. Both Barlow and Doe had been bonefishing down there. The cops studied Doe and he seemed to study them. Barlow said, “This is a fine place you got here, Mr. Doe. I take it your people have been here a good while.”
“Yes, since 1665. On the land, that is. This house dates from 1889. Before that, there was a wooden structure from 1732, which burned. That barn you can see from the front of the house is preRevolutionary, 1748. I keep my car collection in it.”
“My, my,” said Barlow. “And you and your missus live here all by yourselves?”
A pause, long enough for one intake of breath and an exhalation. “No, my wife is unwell. She lives in a care facility in King’s Park, not far from here. So I’m on my own, except for the help, of course. They’re all students. We put them through school, any college they can get into, graduate school, whatever they want, and in return they put in some time here. Except for Rudolf, who brought the tea, and Nora, who was my children’s nurse and has a room here. And, of course, when I go, the state’ll get the whole shebang. A museum, I guess. And that’ll be that.”
“End of an era,” said Paz. Doe nodded politely, and Paz felt like a jerk. After a brief silence, Barlow said, “Mr. Doe, as we told you on the phone, we’ve had some trouble down our way, and the FBI believes that the fella who
