He didn’t know how much longer he could handle this unrelenting assault on his senses. He gave his head a shake but couldn’t seem to drive away the fug that was clouding his mind and if ever there was a time to remain sharp-witted, this was it.
Suddenly the doors of the ballroom crashed open: their audience had arrived and it was an august audience at that. Even as he bowed his greeting, Vanka spotted Heydrich, Crowley, Clement, Beria…
Beria.
Foul up tonight and Beria would ensure that his days on the Demi-Monde were very short.
Very short but unbelievably fucking painful.
Striding arrogantly into the hall, Heydrich took the tall chair directly in front of the hounfo with Beria seated to his left and a slim and heavily veiled woman to his right. Next to Beria was Crowley, who was looking decidedly out of sorts, with Comrade Commissar Dashwood perched uncomfortably alongside. There were a couple of other dignitaries making up the rump of the audience but with one exception Vanka didn’t recognise any of these supernumeraries.
The exception was General Mikhail Dmitrievich Skobelev, unmistakable in his trademark white uniform and ridiculous whiskers.
Skobelev, commander of the ForthRight army and the man who had fought the Royalist Poles to a standstill at the Battle of Warsaw. The General was a living, breathing hero and, more importantly, the man who had come within an ace of killing Vanka, the man who had sworn to revenge his family for the insult Vanka had inflicted by bedding the General’s sister.
Of all the rotten fucking luck. Of all the people he hadn’t wanted attending the seance.
Vanka almost panicked and for a moment wondered whether he shouldn’t just grab Ella and run for it. Then he remembered that he was wearing a mask and managed to get control of himself. It was impossible for Skobelev to recognise him; the mask completely covered what was left of the bruise on the side of his face.
He stood up straight and made a signal to the percussionists pounding away in the minstrels’ gallery. The music stopped but unfortunately the hammering in Vanka’s head kept right on going. Taking a deep, calming breath, he strode forward to the front of the hounfo acutely aware that every stride he took brought him nearer to Skobelev. He was sure the bastard was studying him.
‘Comrade Leader… Comrade Vice-Leader… Your Holiness… comrades and ladies.’ He pitched his voice as low as he dared, hoping that Skobelev wouldn’t recognise it.
The bastard was studying him.
‘Tonight, the mambo Marie Laveau, the foremost practitioner of WhoDoo magic in all of NoirVille, will commune with a Daemon. She will use her occult power and her psychic wiles to dominate the Daemon’s will and bend it to her bidding.’
Skobelev leant forward in his chair trying to get a better look at Vanka. Automatically he edged back as far into the shadows as he dared.
‘Behind me you see a hounfo, a WhoDoo temple built especially for tonight’s performance. Using the hounfo, the mambo Laveau will entice the loa, the Spirits, into this the physical world. Then by her spells and her incantations and her feminine allures…’
That got a reaction…
‘… she will persuade the mightiest of these loa, Great Lord Bondye, to possess her. Only the Great Lord Bondye has the power to overcome the will of a Daemon. Once possessed by the Great Lord Bondye, no secret can be withheld from mambo Laveau.’
Such was the intensity of Skobelev’s interest that Vanka decided to cut things short. He made a hurried bow and glanced towards Aleister Crowley. ‘Your Holiness, if you will bring forward the Daemon.’
Crowley grunted up out of his seat and clapped his hands. From the side of the room two SS guards used their batons to prod a young girl – slim, medium height with raven-black hair – forward, persuading her to limp across the polished wooden floor of the ballroom until she was standing in the middle of the hounfo facing the audience.
Vanka was a little disappointed. He had always imagined Daemons to be great hulking creatures with tails and horns, creatures who breathed fire and smelt of brimstone, but instead he was being presented with a rather nondescript and skinny girl.
Daemons obviously weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
Nondescript and skinny though the Daemon was, from the way it struggled with its guards it showed it was a feisty little piece. But its struggling didn’t last long: one of the guards gave it a backhand slap across the face that sent it spinning to the floor. For an instant the mask of defiance the Daemon wore slipped and Vanka saw a frightened girl beneath. Instinctively he stepped across the hounfo to take the creature by its arm and help it back up onto its feet. Unfortunately that necessitated stepping out of the shadows.
Seeing him in the limelight, Skobelev started forward in his seat like a dog scenting a rabbit. He beckoned to one of Crowley’s aides and began an animated discussion with the man. Vanka tried to keep calm.
After a moment’s hesitation the Daemon accepted his help but it obviously wasn’t happy about it: from the glare it gave Vanka he was certain that if its hands hadn’t been bound it would have tried to scratch his eyes out. He was also pleased it was gagged: his head was pounding and he wasn’t in the market for a lot of screaming and shouting. He gave a second signal to the musicians and immediately the drumming began again, but now it was slower, more ponderous and more ominous.
Vanka led the Daemon to the altar at the furthest end of the hounfo and indicated that it should lie on it. The Daemon tried to refuse but as Vanka pushed it forward he managed to get close enough to whisper in its ear. ‘We’re here to rescue you, so don’t struggle. Understand?’
The Daemon’s eyes widened and it gave an almost imperceptible nod.
Vanka moved back to the front of the hounfo. Skobelev was now whispering instructions to two Checkya guards.
He was saved by Ella. As the drumming gained in volume, Ella, hidden under the cloak, began to twitch.
The seance had begun.
When Ella’s mother had been alive, she had insisted on her daughter taking dancing lessons. But that was a long, long time ago. Now all Ella had to guide her in her WhoDoo dance was her own imagination, the remembrance of any number of music videos she had watched, the clips she had seen of Josephine Baker performing her danse sauvage and the beat of the drums. All this informed her that she should emerge from beneath her cloak slowly, sinuously, undulating her long supple body to the rhythm pounding through the ballroom. So, like some strange serpent sloughing off its skin, Ella wriggled off the cloak covering her, to emerge, spiralling and squirming, into the half-light. And as she emerged, she drew astonished gasps from the audience.
The astonishment might have been because she was black. She knew from her discussions with Vanka that for a black woman to perform before that architect of racial purity Reinhard Heydrich was simply unprecedented. When she had met the man – the Dupe – in Fort Jackson she had seen firsthand how Heydrich felt about blacks and she had come to understand that he had poisoned the ForthRight with this hate. She could feel the audience’s revulsion. The vibes she was experiencing told her that Heydrich and his crew didn’t just hate blacks, they abhorred them.
As she lissomed to her feet, stretching her arms up… up… up towards the ceiling high above her head, she wondered how intelligent, educated people, as those in her audience presumably were, could come to think like this. Maybe, as her mother had often told her, it was true that when people believe others are their inferiors all they do is demonstrate their concerns about their own inferiority. True or not, Ella couldn’t have made a bigger impression if she’d just stepped out of a flying saucer.
But Ella knew that it wasn’t simply that she was black that had disturbed the audience. What they found equally disturbing was her costume, or rather the near-naked body they could see under it. When she had been designing her outfit for tonight’s performance she had wanted it to be so shocking that her audience would forget everything else. The last thing she wanted was for them to wonder whether what they were witnessing was just a piece of magical theatre. And to do that she knew she would have to tantalise, to tease and show a lot of flesh.
Not that Ella had any concern about being near-naked: what she had an objection to was her nakedness being exploited by people like Burlesque Bandstand. But she was perfectly relaxed about exploiting it to her own ends. She knew she was a good-looking woman and had no compunction at all about using her sexuality to control
