Murder in the Sentier

Tuesday Afternoon

OUSMANE SADA, THE KORA PLAYER, wanted to help Idrissa, but first he had to get direction. And only the marabout, the fortune-teller, could point the way.

Ousmane mounted the worn wooden steps of the Sentier hotel. Too bad Idrissa hadn’t come with him, but at least she was safe staying at his place. He knocked twice on the hotel door with the number 5 stenciled on it. From inside he heard a muffled “Entrez.”

He removed his embroidered skullcap, took a deep breath, then opened the door.

“Bonjour,” he said. “I seek guidance.”

The marabout nodded.

In the cheap hotel room on rue Beauregard, maps of star constellations were strewn over the ragged chenille-covered bed. He set an envelope in the marabout’s hollowed-out gourd bowl. The marabout, a bland-faced foreseer of the future, ignored his action. A marabout never acknowledged hadiya, gifts from his taalibe, his followers. In Ousmane’s village outside Dakar in Senegal, the price had been chickens.

The marabout’s taalibe would rebuild their wealth on the path to salvation. Hard work and many hadiyas improved one’s chances of going to Paradise. A spiritual economy, his father had called it.

But Ousmane’s father’s marabout, whose photo he wore in the talisman around his neck, would frown on this visit. Loyalty to one’s marabout was important. Even though Senegal was thousands of miles away, his pulse beat rapidly.

Ousmane inhaled the familiar willow bark and cinnamon scent from the burning cones. He saw the day’s fortune in Arabic letters tacked on the gouged plaster wall. He twitched. He’d felt out of sorts for days now. Must have la grippe—the flu. Sweating and feverish, he felt thirsty.

The marabout would throw the shells, arrange the beads, and interpret the signs. Tell him if his woman, Cheike, still waited to marry him. So he would return home, which was what his heart told him. And the signs would show him how to keep Idrissa safe.

He’d borrow the fare from his cousin Khalifa, a sanitation engineer, to keep him from drinking it away. Khalifa was different, he liked it here. The food clotted with cow’s excrement they called butter, the raw horse meat eaten only by jaguars and tigers in his country, the painted women who preened and sold themselves on the street like pheasants in the market.

Since his childhood, Ousmane had strung fishing lines, patched and woven the nets, to face another day in the tepid ocean. He remembered gripping the flapping fins and shining scales of the fish his family caught in the turquoise waters. At first, his work in the Sentier sewing factory had seemed bearable. He slept alongside other workers on mattresses on the factory floor, like he’d done at home on mats with his siblings. Yet the cold damp from the stone floor seeped into his bones. Stayed there. No crusty vanilla sand caked on his calves. There were no warm orange sunsets laced by the smell of roasting peanuts.

Idrissa had noticed. His music suffered. Some nights he felt so tired after pressing and ironing the clothes in the factory, too tired to pluck the strings of his kora to accompany Idrissa’s songs.

“Ask your question,” said the marabout.

A stained yellow floral drapery flapped in the breeze from the open window. Hesitant at first, Ousmane wiped his brow, then gathered his courage and spoke.

The marabout threw the shells. The sound as the cowries clicked competed with the shouts of cart pullers below in the street. The marabout frowned. “Your question was not framed with a pure heart,” he intoned. He pointed to the shells’ configuration. “Don’t be stingy with the truth.” The marabout’s long brown fingers snaked over the shells. He waited, lost in thought.

“Tell me what the shells say.” Ousmane trembled, asking in their language, Wolof.

“Tiens!” said the marabout, refusing to speak their native tongue. “Your request rebounds on you. Where is your respect?”

“I’m confused.”

The marabout reached over and flipped Ousmane’s shirt collar down. He pointed to the talisman around Ousmane’s neck. “The shells confirm, you belong in another’s following.”

Ousmane cringed.

“It’s forbidden, you know that,” the marabout said. “Now a curse will bite at your heels, as wild dogs guard a village.”

Guilt filled Ousmane. Would the marabout’s curse doom him, or Idrissa?