The Saint on the Spanish Main

1

It was intolerably hot in Port-au-Prince, for the capital city of Haiti lies at the back of a bay, a gullet twenty miles deep beyond which the opening jaws of land extend a hundred and twenty miles still farther to the west and north-west, walled in by steep high hills, and thus perfectly sheltered from every normal shift of the trade winds which temper the climate of most parts of the Antilles. The geography which made it one of the finest natural harbors in the Caribbean had doubtless appealed strongly to the French buccaneers who founded the original settlement, but three centuries later, with the wings of Pan-American Airways to replace the sails of a frigate, a no less authentic pirate could be excused for being more interested in escaping from the sweltering heat pocket than in dallying to admire the anchorage.

As soon as Simon Templar had completed his errands in the town, he climbed into the jeep he had borrowed and headed back up into the hills.

Knowing what to expect of Port-au-Prince at that time of year, he had passed up the ambitious new hotels of the capital in favor of the natural air-conditioning of the Châtelet des Fleurs, an unpretentious but comfortable inn operated by an American whom he had met on a previous visit, only about fifteen miles out of the city but five thousand feet above the sea-level heat. He could feel it getting cooler as the road climbed, and in a surprisingly short time it was like being in another latitude. But the scenery did not seem to become any milder to correspond with the relief of temperature: the same brazen sun bathed rugged brownish slopes with few trees to soften their parched contours. Most of the houses he passed, whether a peasant’s one-room cottage or an occasional expensive château, were built of irregular blocks of the same native stone, so that they had an air of being literally carved out of the landscape, but sometimes in a sudden valley or clinging to a distant hillside there would be a palm-thatched cabin of rough raw timbers that looked as if it had been transplanted straight from Africa. And indisputably transplanted from Africa were the straggling files of ebony people, most of them women, a few plutocrats adding their own weight to the already fantastic burdens of incredibly powerful little donkeys, but the majority laden fabulously themselves with great baskets balanced on their heads, who bustled cheerfully along the rough shoulders of the road.

He came into the little town of Pétionville, drove past the pleasant grass-lawned square dominated by the very French-looking white church, and headed on up the corkscrew highway towards Kenscoff. And six kilometers further on he met Sibao.

As he rounded one of the innumerable curves he saw a little crowd collected, much as some fascinating obstruction would create a knot in a busy string of ants. Unlike other groups that he had passed before where a few individuals from one of the ant-lines would fall out by the wayside to rest and gossip, this cluster had a focal point and an air of gravity and concern that made him think first of an automobile accident, although there was no car or truck in sight. He slowed up automatically, trying to see what it was all about as he went by, like almost any normal traveler, but when he glimpsed the unmistakable bright color of fresh blood he pulled over and stopped, which perhaps few drivers on that road would have troubled to do.

The chocolate-skinned young woman whom the others were gathered around had a six-inch gash in the calf of one leg. From the gestures and pantomime of her companions rather than the few basic French word-sounds which his ear could pick out of their excited jabber of Creole, he concluded that a loose stone had rolled under her foot as she walked, taking it from under her and causing her to slip sideways down off the shoulder, where another sharp pointed stone happened to stick out at exactly the right place and angle to slash her like a crude dagger. The mechanics of the accident were not really important, but it was an ugly wound, and the primitive first-aid efforts of the spectators had not been able to stanch the bleeding.

Simon saw from the tint of the blood that no artery had been cut. He made a pressure bandage with his handkerchief and two strips ripped from the tail of his shirt, but it was obvious that a few stitches would be necessary for a proper repair. He picked the girl up and carried her to the jeep.

“Nous allons chercher un médecin,” he said, and he must have been understood, for there was no protest over the abduction as he turned the jeep around and headed back towards Pétionville.

The doctor whom he located was learning English and was anxious to practice it. He contrived to keep Simon around while he cleaned and sewed up and dressed the cut, and then conveniently mentioned his fee. Simon paid it, although the young woman tried to protest, and helped her back into the jeep.

His good-Samaritan gesture seemed to have become slightly harder to break off than it had been to get into, but with nothing but time on his hands he was cheerfully resigned to letting it work itself out.

“Where were you going?” he asked in French, and she pointed up the road.

“Là-haut.”

The reply was given with a curious dignity, but without presumption. He was not sure at what point he had begun to feel that she was not quite an ordinary peasant girl. She wore the same faded and formless kind of cotton dress, perhaps cleaner than some, but not cleaner than all the others, for it was not uncommon for them to be spotless. Her figure was slimmer and shapelier than most, and her features had a patrician mould that reminded him of ancient Egyptian carvings. They had remained mask-like and detached throughout the ministrations of the doctor, although Simon knew that some of it must have hurt like hell.

He drove up again to the place where he had found her. Two other older women were sitting there, and they greeted her as the jeep stopped. She smiled and answered, proudly displaying the new white bandage on her leg. She started to get out.

He saw that there were three baskets by the roadside where the two women had waited. He stopped her, and said, “You should not walk far today, especially with a load. I can take you all the way.”

“Vous êtes très gentil!”

She spoke French very stiffly and shyly and correctly, like a child remembering lessons. Then she spoke fluently to the other women in Creole, and they hoisted the third basket between them and put it in the back of the jeep. Her shoes were still on top of its miscellany of fruits and vegetables, according to the custom of the country, which regards shoes as too valuable to be worn out with mere tramping from place to place, especially over rough rocky paths.

Simon drove all the way to the Châtelet des Fleurs, where the road seems to end, but she pointed ahead and said, “Plus loin.”

He drove on around the inn. Not very far beyond it the pavement ended, but a navigable trail meandered on still further and higher towards the background peaks. He expected it to become impassable at every turn, but it teased him on for several minutes and still hadn’t petered out when a house suddenly came in sight, built out of rock and perched like a fragment of a medieval castle on a promontory a little above them. A rutted driveway branched off and slanted up to it, and the young woman pointed again.

“La maison-là.”

It was not a mansion in size, but on the other hand it was certainly no native peasant’s cottage.

“Merci beaucoup,” she said in her stilted schoolgirl French, as the jeep stopped in front of it.

“De rien,” he murmured amiably, and went around to lift out the heavy basket.

A man came out on to the verandah, and she spoke rapidly in Creole, obviously explaining about her accident and how she came to be chauffeured to the door. As Simon looked up, the man came down to meet him, holding out his hand.

“Please don’t bother with that,” he said. “I’ve got a handy man who’ll take care of it. You’ve done enough for Sibao already. Won’t you come in and have a drink? My name’s Theron Netlord.”

Simon Templar could not help looking a little surprised. For Mr Netlord was not only a white man, but he was unmistakably an American, and Simon had some vague recollection of his name.

2

It can be assumed that the birth of the girl who was later to be called Sibao took place under the very best auspices, for her father was the houngan of an houmfort in a valley that could be seen from the house where Simon had taken her, which in terms of a more familiar religion than voodoo would be the equivalent of the vicar of a parish church, and her mother was not only a mambo in her own right, but also an occasional communicant of the church in Pétionville. But after the elaborate precautionary rituals with which her birth was surrounded, the child grew up just like any of the other naked children of the hills, until she was nearly seven.

At that time, she woke up one morning and said, “Mama, I saw Uncle Zande trying to fly, but he dived into the ground.”

Her mother thought nothing of this until the evening, when word came that Uncle Zande, who was laying tile on the roof of a building in Léogane, had stumbled off it and broken his neck. After that much attention was paid to her dreams, but the things that they prophesied were not always so easy to interpret until after they happened.

Two years later her grandfather fell sick with a burning fever, and his children and grandchildren gathered around to see him die. But the young girl went to him and caressed his forehead, and at that moment the sweating and shivering stopped, and the fever left him and he began to mend. After that there were others who asked for her touch, and many of them affirmed that they experienced extraordinary relief.

At least it was evident that she was entitled to admission to the houmfort without further probation. One night, with a red bandanna on her head and gay handkerchiefs knotted around her neck and arms, with a bouquet in one hand and a crucifix in the other, she sat in a chair between her four sponsors and watched the hounsis-canzo, the student priests, dance before her. Then her father took her by the hand to the President of the congregation, and she recited her first voodoo oath:

“Je jure, je jure, I swear, to respect the powers of the mystères de Guinée, to respect the powers of the houngan, of the President of the Society, and the powers of all those on whom these powers are conferred.”

And after she had made all her salutations and prostrations, and had herself been raised shoulder high and applauded, they withdrew and left her before the altar to receive whatever revelation the spirits might vouchsafe to her.

At thirteen she was a young woman, long-legged and comely, with a proud yet supple walk and prematurely steady eyes that gazed so gravely at those whom she noticed that they seemed never to rest on a person’s face but to look through into the thoughts behind it. She went faithfully to school and learned what she was told to, including a smattering of the absurdly involved and illogical version of her native tongue which they called “French,” but when her father stated that her energy could be better devoted to helping to feed the family, she ended her formal education without complaint.

There were three young men who watched her one evening as she picked pigeon peas among the bushes that her father had planted, and who were more impressed by the grace of her body than by any tales they may have heard of her supernatural gifts. As the brief mountain twilight darkened they came to seize her, but she knew what was in their minds, and ran. As the one penitent survivor told it, a cloud suddenly swallowed her: they blundered after her in the fog, following the sounds of her flight: then they saw her shadow almost within reach, and leapt to the capture, but the ground vanished from under their feet. The bodies of two of them were found at the foot of the precipice, and the third lived, though with a broken back, only because a tree caught him on the way down.

Her father knew then that she was more than qualified to become an hounsis-canzo, and she told him that she was ready. He took her to the houmfort and set in motion the elaborate seven-day ritual of purification and initiation, instructing her in all the mysteries himself. For her loa, or personal patron deity, she had chosen Erzulie, and in the baptismal ceremony of the fifth day she received the name of Sibao, the mystic mountain ridge where Erzulie mates with the Supreme Gods, the legendary place of eternal love and fertility. And when the houngan made the invocation, the goddess showed her favor by possessing Sibao, who uttered prophecies and admonitions in a language that only houngans can interpret, and with the hands and mouth of Sibao accepted and ate of the sacrificial white pigeons and white rice, and the houngan was filled with pride as he chanted:

Thereafter she hoed the patches of vegetables that her father cultivated as before, and helped to grate manioc, and carried water from the spring, and went back and forth to market, like all the other young women, but the tale of her powers grew slowly and surely, and it would have been a reckless man who dared to molest her.

Then Theron Netlord came to Kenscoff, and presently heard of her through the inquiries that he made. He sent word that he would like her to work in his house, and because he offered wages that would much more than pay for a substitute to do her work at home, she accepted. She was then seventeen.

“A rather remarkable girl,” said Netlord, who had told Simon some of these things. “Believe me, to some of the people around here, she’s almost like a living saint.”

Simon just managed not to blink at the word.

“Won’t that accident this afternoon shake her pedestal a bit?” he asked.

“Does a bishop lose face if he trips over something and breaks a leg?” Netlord retorted. “Besides, you happened. Just when she needed help, you drove by, picked her up, took her to the doctor, and then brought her here. What would you say were the odds against her being so lucky? And then tell me why it doesn’t still look as if something was taking special care of her!”

He was a big thick-shouldered man who looked as forceful as the way he talked. He had iron-gray hair and metallic gray eyes, a blunt nose, a square thrusting jaw, and the kind of lips that even look muscular. You had an inevitable impression of him at the first glance, and without hesitation you would have guessed him to be a man who had reached the top ranks of some competitive business, and who had bulled his way up there with ruthless disregard for whatever obstructions might have to be trodden down or jostled aside. And trite as the physiognomy must seem, in this instance you would have been absolutely right.

Theron Netlord had made a fortune from the manufacture of bargain-priced lingerie.

The incongruity of this will only amuse those who know little about the clothing industry. It would be natural for the uninitiated to think of the trade in fragile feminine frotheries as being carried on by fragile, feminine, and frothy types, but in fact, at the wholesale manufacturing level, it is as tough and cut-throat a business as any legitimate operation in the modern world. And even in a business which has always been somewhat notorious for a lack of tenderness towards its employees, Mr Netlord had been a perennial source of ammunition for socialistic agitators. His long-standing vendetta against organized labor was an epic of its kind, and he had been named in one Congressional investigation as the man who, with a combination of gangster tactics and an ice-pick eye for loopholes in union contracts and government regulations, had come closest in the last decade to running an old-fashioned sweat-shop. It was from casually remembered references to such things in the newspapers that Simon had identified the name.

“Do you live here permanently?” Simon asked in a conversational way.

“I’ve been here for a while, and I’m staying a while,” Netlord answered equivocally. “I like the rum. How do you like it?”

“It’s strictly ambrosial.”

“You can get fine rum in the States, like that Lemon Hart from Jamaica, but you have to come here to drink Barbancourt. They don’t make enough to export.”

“I can think of worse reasons for coming here. But I might want something more to hold me indefinitely.”

Netlord chuckled.

“Of course you would. I was kidding. So do I. I’ll never retire, I like being in business. It’s my sport, my hobby, and my recreation. I’ve spent more than a year all around the Caribbean, having what everyone would say was a nice long vacation. Nuts. My mind hasn’t been off business for a single day.”

“They tell me there’s a great future in the area.”

“And I’m looking for the future. There’s none left in America. At the bottom, you’ve got your employees demanding more wages and pension funds for less work every year. At the top, you’ve got a damned paternalistic Government taxing your profits to the bone to pay for all its Utopian projects at home and abroad. The man who’s trying to literally mind his own business is in the middle, in a squeeze that wrings all the incentive out of him. I’m sick of bucking that setup.”

“What’s wrong with Puerto Rico? You can get a tax exemption there if you bring in an employing industry.”

“Sure. But the Puerto Ricans are getting spoiled, and the cost of labor is shooting up. In a few more years they’ll have it as expensive and as organized as it is back home.”

“So you’re investigating Haiti because the labor is cheaper?”

“It’s still so cheap that you could starve to death trying to sell machinery. Go visit one of the factories where they’re making wooden salad bowls, for instance. The only power tool they use is a lathe. And where does the power come from? From a man who spends the whole day cranking a big wheel. Why? Because all he costs is one dollar a day — and that’s cheaper than you can operate a motor, let alone amortizing the initial cost of it!”

“Then what’s the catch?”

“This being a foreign country: your product hits a tariff wall when you try to import it into the States, and the duty will knock you silly.”

“Things are tough all over,” Simon remarked sympathetically.

The other’s sinewy lips flexed in a tight grin.

“Any problem is tough till you lick it. Coming here showed me how to lick this one — but you’d never guess how!”

“I give up.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not telling. May I fix your drink?”

Simon glanced at his watch and shook his head.

“Thanks, but I should be on my way.” He put down his glass and stood up. “I’m glad I needn’t worry about you getting ulcers, though.”

Netlord laughed comfortably, and walked with him out on to the front verandah.

“I hope getting Sibao back here didn’t bring you too far out of your way.”

“No, I’m staying just a little below you, at the Châtelet des Fleurs.”

“Then we’ll probably run into each other.” Netlord put out his hand. “It was nice talking to you, Mr—”

“Templar. Simon Templar.”

The big man’s powerful grip held on to Simon’s.

“You’re not — by any chance — that fellow they call the Saint?”

“Yes.” The Saint smiled. “But I’m just a tourist.”

He disengaged himself pleasantly, but as he went down the steps he could feel Netlord’s eyes on his back, and remembered that for one instant he had seen in them the kind of fear from which murder is born.

3

In telling so many stories of Simon Templar, the chronicler runs a risk of becoming unduly preoccupied with the reactions of various characters to the discovery that they have met the Saint, and it may fairly be observed that there is a definite limit to the possible variety of these responses. One of the most obvious of them was the shock to a guilty conscience which could open a momentary crack in an otherwise impenetrable mask. Yet in this case it was of vital importance.

If Theron Netlord had not betrayed himself for that fleeting second, and the Saint had not been sharply aware of it, Simon might have quickly dismissed the pantie potentate from his mind, and then there might have been no story to tell at all.

Instead of which, Simon only waited to make more inquiries about Mr Netlord until he was able to corner his host, Atherton Lee, alone in the bar that night.

He had an easy gambit by casually relating the incident of Sibao.

“Theron Netlord? Oh, yes, I know him,” Lee said. “He stayed here for a while before he rented that house up the hill. He still drops in sometimes for a drink and a yarn.”

“One of the original rugged individualists, isn’t he?” Simon remarked.

“Did he give you his big tirade about wages and taxes?”

“I got the synopsis, anyway.”

“Yes, he’s a personality all right. At least he doesn’t make any bones about where he stands. What beats me is how a fellow of that type could get all wrapped up in voodoo.”

Simon did not actually choke and splutter over his drink because he was not given to such demonstrations, but he felt as close to it as he was ever likely to.

“He what?”

“Didn’t he get on to that subject? I guess you didn’t stay very long.”

“Only for one drink.”

“He’s really sold on it. That’s how he originally came up here. He’d seen the voodoo dances they put on in the tourist spots down in Port-au-Prince, but he knew they were just a night-club show. He was looking for the McCoy. Well, we sent the word around, as we do sometimes for guests who’re interested, and a bunch from around here came up and put on a show in the patio. They don’t do any of the real sacred ceremonies, of course, but they’re a lot more authentic than the professionals in town. Netlord lapped it up, but it was just an appetizer to him. He wanted to get right into the fraternity and find out what it was all about.”

“What for?”

“He said he was thinking of writing a book about it. But half the time he talks as if he really believed in it. He says that the trouble with Western civilization is that it’s too practical — it’s never had enough time to develop its spiritual potential.”

“Are you pulling my leg or is he pulling yours?”

“I’m not kidding. He rented that house, anyway, and set out to get himself accepted by the natives. He took lessons in Creole so that he could talk to them, and he speaks it a hell of a lot better than I do — and I’ve lived here a hell of a long time. He hired that girl Sibao just because she’s the daughter of the local houngan, and she’s been instructing him and sponsoring him for the houmfort. It’s all very serious and legitimate. He told me some time ago that he’d been initiated as a junior member, or whatever they call it, but he’s planning to take the full course and become a graduate witch-doctor.”

“Can he do that? I mean, can a white man qualify?”

“Haitians are very broadminded,” Atherton Lee said gently. “There’s no color bar here.”

Simon broodingly chain-lighted another cigarette.

“He must be dreaming up something new and frightful for the underwear market,” he murmured. “Maybe he’s planning to top those perfumes that are supposed to contain mysterious smells that drive the male sniffer mad with desire. Next season he’ll come out with a negligee with a genuine voodoo spell woven in, guaranteed to give the matron of a girls’ reformatory more sex appeal than Cleopatra.”

But the strange combination of fear and menace that he had caught in Theron Netlord’s eyes came back to him with added vividness, and he knew that a puzzle confronted him that could not be dismissed with any amusing flippancy. There had to be a true answer, and it had to be of unimaginable ugliness: therefore he had to find it, or he would be haunted for ever after by the thought of the evil he might have prevented.

To find the answer, however, was much easier to resolve than to do. He wrestled with it for half the night, pacing up and down his room, but when he finally gave up and lay down to sleep, he had to admit that his brain had only carried him around in as many circles as his feet, and gotten him just as close to nowhere.

In the morning, as he was about to leave his room, something white on the floor caught his eye. It was an envelope that had been slipped under the door. He picked it up. It was sealed, but there was no writing on it. It was stiff to his touch, as if it contained some kind of card, but it was curiously heavy.

He opened it. Folded in a sheet of paper was a piece of thin bright metal, about three inches by two, which looked as if it might have been cut from an ordinary tin can, flattened out and with the edges neatly turned under so that they would not be sharp. On it had been hammered an intricate symmetrical design.

Basically, a heart. The inside of the heart filled with a precise network of vertical and horizontal lines, with a single dot in the center of each little square that they formed. The outline of the heart trimmed with a regularly scalloped edge, like a doily, with a similar dot in each of the scallops. Impaled on a mast rising from the upper V of the heart, a crest like an ornate letter M, with a star above and below it. Two curlicues like skeletal wings swooping out, one from each shoulder of the heart, and two smaller curlicues tufting from the bottom point of the heart, on either side of another sort of vertical mast projecting down from the point and ending in another star — like an infinitely stylized and painstaking doodle.

On the paper that wrapped it was written, in a careful childish script:

Simon went on down to the dining room and found Atherton Lee having breakfast.

“This isn’t Valentine’s Day in Haiti, is it?” asked the Saint.

Lee shook his head.

“Or anywhere else that I know of. That’s sometime in February.”

“Well, anyhow, I got a valentine.”

Simon showed him the rectangle of embossed metal.

“It’s native work,” Lee said. “But what is it?”

“That’s what I thought you could tell me.”

“I never saw anything quite like it.”

The waiter was bringing Simon a glass of orange juice. He stood frozen in the act of putting it down, his eyes fixed on the piece of tin and widening slowly. The glass rattled on the service plate as he held it.

Lee glanced up at him.

“Do you know what it is?”

“Vêver,” the man said.

He put the orange juice down and stepped back, still staring.

Simon did not know the word. He looked inquiringly at his host, who shrugged helplessly and handed the token back.

“What’s that?”

“Vêver,” said the waiter. “Of Maîtresse Erzulie.”

“Erzulie is the top voodoo goddess,” Lee explained. “I guess that’s her symbol, or some sort of charm.”

“If you get good way, very good,” said the waiter obscurely. “If you no should have, very bad.”

“I believe I dig you, Alphonse,” said the Saint. “And you don’t have to worry about me. I got it the good way.” He showed Lee the paper that had enclosed it. “It was slid under my door sometime this morning. I guess coming from her makes it pretty special.”

“Congratulations,” Lee said. “I’m glad you’re officially protected. Is there anything you particularly need to be protected from?”

Simon dropped the little plaque into the breast pocket of his shirt.

“First off, I’d like to be protected from the heat of Port-au-Prince. I’m afraid I’ve got to go back down there. May I borrow the jeep again?”

“Of course. But we can send down for almost anything you want.”

“I hardly think they’d let you bring back the Public Library,” said the Saint. “I’m going to wade through everything they’ve got on the subject of voodoo. No, I’m not going to take it up like Netlord. But I’m just crazy enough myself to lie awake wondering what’s in it for him.”

He found plenty of material to study — so much, in fact, that instead of being frustrated by a paucity of information he was almost discouraged by its abundance. He had assumed, like any average man, that voodoo was a primitive cult that would have a correspondingly simple theology and ritual; he soon discovered that it was astonishingly complex and formalized. Obviously he wasn’t going to master it all in one short day’s study. However, that wasn’t necessarily the objective. He didn’t have to write a thesis on it, or even pass an examination. He was only looking for something, anything, that would give him a clue to what Theron Netlord was seeking.

He browsed through books until one o’clock, went out to lunch, and returned to read some more. The trouble was that he didn’t know what he was looking for. All he could do was expose himself to as many ideas as possible, and hope that the same one would catch his attention as must have caught Netlord’s.

And when the answer did strike him, it was so far-fetched and monstrous that he could not believe he was on the right track. He thought it would make an interesting plot for a story, but he could not accept it for himself. He felt an exasperating lack of accomplishment when the library closed for the day and he had to drive back up again to Kenscoff.

He headed straight for the bar of the Châtelet des Fleurs and the long relaxing drink that he had looked forward to all the way up. The waiter who was on duty brought him a note with it.

Simon glanced up.

“Is someone still waiting for an answer?”

“Yes, sir. Outside.”

The Saint pulled out his pen and scribbled at the foot of the note:

He decided, practically in the same instant in which the irresponsible impulse occurred to him, against signing himself with the little haloed stick figure which he had made famous. As he handed the note back to the waiter he reflected that, in the circumstances, his mere acceptance was bravado enough.

4

There were drums beating somewhere in the hills, faint and far-off, calling and answering each other from different directions, their sound wandering and echoing through the night so that it was impossible ever to be certain just where a particular tattoo had come from. It reached inside Netlord’s house as a kind of vague vibration, like the endless thin chorus of nocturnal insects, which was so persistent that the ear learned to filter it out and for long stretches would be quite deaf to it, and then, in a lull in the conversation, with an infinitesimal returning of attention, it would come back in a startling crescendo.

Theron Netlord caught the Saint listening at one of those moments, and said, “They’re having a brûler zin tonight.”

“What’s that?”

“The big voodoo festive ceremony which climaxes most of the special rites. Dancing, litanies, invocation, possession by loas, more dances, sacrifice, more invocations and possessions, more dancing. It won’t begin until much later. Right now they’re just telling each other about it, warming up and getting in the mood.”

Simon had been there for more than an hour, and this was the first time there had been any mention of voodoo.

Netlord had made himself a good if somewhat overpowering host. He mixed excellent rum cocktails, but without offering his guest the choice of anything else. He made stimulating conversation, salted with recurrent gibes at bureaucratic government and the Welfare State, but he held the floor so energetically that it was almost impossible to take advantage of the provocative openings he offered.

Simon had not seen Sibao again. Netlord had opened the door himself, and the cocktail makings were already on a side table in the living room. There had been subdued rustlings and clinkings behind a screen that almost closed a dark alcove at the far end of the room, but no servant announced dinner: presently Netlord had announced it himself, and led the way around the screen and switched on a light, revealing a damask-covered table set for two and burdened additionally with chafing dishes, from which he himself served rice, asparagus, and a savory chicken stew rather like coq au vin. It was during one of the dialogue breaks induced by eating that Netlord had caught Simon listening to the drums.

“Brûler — that means ‘burn,’ ” said the Saint. “But what is zin?”

“The zin is a special earthenware pot. It stands on a tripod, and a fire is lighted under it. The mambo kills a sacrificial chicken by sticking her finger down into its mouth and tearing its throat open.” Netlord took a hearty mouthful of stew. “She sprinkles blood and feathers in various places, and the plucked hens go into the pot with some corn. There’s a chant:

“Later on she serves the boiling food right into the bare hands of the hounsis. Sometimes they put their bare feet in the flames too. It doesn’t hurt them. The pots are left on the fire till they get red hot and crack, and everyone shouts ‘Zin yo craqués!’ ”

“It sounds like a big moment,” said the Saint gravely. “If I could understand half of it.”

“You mean you didn’t get very far with your researches today?”

Simon felt the involuntary contraction of his stomach muscles, but he was able to control his hands so that there was no check in the smooth flow of what he was doing.

“How did you know about my researches?” he asked, as if he were only amused to have them mentioned.

“I dropped in to see Atherton Lee this morning, and asked after you. He told me where you’d gone. He said he’d told you about my interest in voodoo, and he supposed you were getting primed for an argument. I must admit, that encouraged me to hope you’d accept my invitation tonight.”

The Saint thought that that might well qualify among the great understatements of the decade, but he did not let himself show it. After their first reflex leap his pulses ran like cool clockwork.

“I didn’t find out too much,” he said, “except that voodoo is a lot more complicated than I imagined. I thought it was just a few primitive superstitions that the slaves brought with them from Africa.”

“Of course, some of it came from Dahomey. But how did it get there? The voodoo story of the Creation ties up with the myths of ancient Egypt. The Basin of Damballah — that’s a sort of font at the foot of a voodoo altar — is obviously related to the blood trough at the foot of a Mayan altar. Their magic uses the Pentacle — the same mystic figure that medieval European magicians believed in. If you know anything about it, you can find links with eighteenth-century Masonry in some of their rituals, and even the design of the vêvers—”

“Those are the sacred drawings that are supposed to summon the gods to take possession of their devotees, aren’t they? I read about them.”

“Yes, when the houngan draws them by dripping ashes and corn meal from his fingers, with the proper invocation. And doesn’t that remind you of the sacred sand paintings of the Navajos? Do you see how all those roots must go back to a common source that’s older than any written history?”

Netlord stared at the Saint challengingly, in one of those rare pauses where he waited for an answer.

Simon’s fingertips touched the hard shape of the little tin plaque that was still in his shirt pocket, but he decided against showing it, and again he checked the bet.

“I saw a drawing of the vêver of Erzulie in a book,” he said. “Somehow, it made me think of Catholic symbols connected with the Virgin Mary — with the heart, the stars, and the M over it.”

“Why not? Voodoo is pantheistic. The Church is against voodoo, not voodoo against the Church. Part of the purification prescribed for anyone who’s being initiated as a hounsis-canzo is to go to church and make confession. Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary are regarded as powerful intermediaries to the highest gods. Part of the litany they’ll chant tonight at the brûler zin goes: Grâce, Marie, grâce, Marie grâce, grâce, Marie grâce, Jésus, pardonnez-nous!”

“Seriously?”

“The invocation of Legbas Atibon calls on St Anthony of Padua: Par pouvoir St-Antoine de Padoue. And take the invocation of my own patron, Ogoun Feraille. It begins: Par pouvoir St-Jacques Majeur...”

“Isn’t that blasphemy?” said the Saint. “I mean, a kind of deliberate sacrilege, like they’re supposed to use in a Black Mass, to win the favor of devils by defiling something holy?”

Netlord’s fist crashed on the table like a thunderclap.

“No, it isn’t! The truth can’t be blasphemous. Sacrilege is a sin invented by bigots to try to keep God under contract to their own exclusive club. As if supernatural facts could be altered by human name-calling! There are a hundred sects all claiming to be the only true Christianity, and Christianity is only one of thousands of religions, all claiming to have the only genuine divine revelation. But the real truth is bigger than any one of them and includes them all!”

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint. “I forgot that you were a convert.”

“Lee told you that, of course. I don’t deny it.” The metallic-gray eyes probed the Saint like knives. “I suppose you think I’m crazy.”

“I’d rather say I was puzzled.”

“Because you wouldn’t expect a man like me to have any time for mysticism.”

“Maybe.”

Netlord poured some more wine.

“That’s where you show your own limitations. The whole trouble with Western civilization is that it’s blind in one eye. It doesn’t believe in anything that can’t be weighed and measured or reduced to a mathematical or chemical formula. It thinks it knows all the answers because it invented airplanes and television and hydrogen bombs. It thinks other cultures were backward because they fooled around with levitation and telepathy and raising the dead instead of killing the living. Well, some mighty clever people were living in Asia and Africa and Central America, thousands of years before Europeans crawled out of their caves. What makes you so sure that they didn’t discover things that you don’t understand?”

“I’m not so sure, but—”

“Do you know why I got ahead of everybody else in business? Because I never wore a blinker over one eye. If anyone said he could do anything, I never said ‘That’s impossible.’ I said ‘Show me how.’ I don’t care who I learn from, a college professor or a ditch-digger, a Chinaman or a nigger — so long as I can use what he knows.”

The Saint finished eating and picked up his glass.

“And you think you’ll find something in voodoo that you can use?”

“I have found it. Do you know what it is?”

Simon waited to be told, but apparently it was not another of Netlord’s rhetorical questions. When it was clear that a reply was expected, he said, “Why should I?”

“That’s what you were trying to find out at the Public Library.”

“I suppose I can admit that,” Simon said mildly. “I’m a seeker for knowledge, too.”

“I was afraid you would be, Templar, as soon as I heard your name. Not knowing who you were, I’d talked a little too much last night. It wouldn’t have mattered with anyone else, but as the Saint you’d be curious about me. You’d have to ask questions. Lee would tell you about my interest in voodoo. Then you’d try to find out what I could use voodoo for. I knew all that when I asked you to come here tonight.”

“And I knew you knew all that when I accepted.”

“Put your cards on the table, then. What did your reading tell you?”

Simon felt unwontedly stupid. Perhaps because he had let Netlord do most of the talking, he must have done more than his own share of eating and drinking. Now it was an effort to keep up the verbal swordplay.

“It wasn’t too much help,” he said. “The mythology of voodoo was quite fascinating, but I couldn’t see a guy like you getting a large charge out of spiritual trimmings. You’d want something that meant power, or money, or both. And the books I got hold of today didn’t have much factual material about the darker side of voodoo — the angles that I’ve seen played up in lurid fiction.”

“Don’t stop now.”

The Saint felt as if he lifted a slender blade once more against a remorseless bludgeon.

“Of course,” he said, and meant to say it lightly, “you might really have union and government trouble if it got out that Netlord Underwear was being made by American zombies.”

“So you guessed it,” Netlord said.

5

Simon Templar stared.

He had a sensation of utter unreality, as if at some point he had slipped from wakeful life into a nightmare without being aware of the moment when he fell asleep. A separate part of his brain seemed to hear his own voice at a distance.

“You really believe in zombies?”

“That isn’t a matter of belief. I’ve seen them. A zombie prepared and served this dinner. That’s why he was ordered not to let you see him.”

“Now I really need the cliché: this I have got to see!”

“I’m afraid he’s left for the night,” Netlord said matter-of-factly.

“But you know how to make ’em?”

“Not yet. He belongs to the houngan. But I shall know before the sun comes up tomorrow. In a little while I shall go down to the houmfort, and the houngan will admit me to the last mysteries. The brûler zin afterwards is to celebrate that.”

“Congratulations. What did you have to do to rate this?”

“I’ve promised to marry his daughter, Sibao.”

Simon felt as if he had passed beyond the capacity for surprise. A soft blanket of cotton wool was folding around his mind. Yet the other part of him kept talking.

“Do you mean that?”

“Don’t be absurd. As soon as I know all I need to, I can do without both of them.”

“But suppose they resent that.”

“Let me tell you something. Voodoo is a very practical kind of insurance. When a member is properly initiated, certain parts of a sacrifice and certain things from his body go into a little urn called the pot de tête, and after that the vulnerable element of his soul stays in the urn, which stays in the houmfort.”

“Just like a safe deposit.”

“And so, no one can lay an evil spell on him.”

“Unless they can get hold of his pot de tète.”

“So you see how easily I can destroy them if I act first.”

The Saint moved his head as if to shake and clear it. It was like trying to shake a ton weight.

“It’s very good of you to tell me all this,” he articulated mechanically. “But what makes you so confidential?”

“I had to know how you’d respond to my idea when you knew it. Now you must tell me, truthfully.”

“I think it stinks.”

“Suppose you knew that I had creatures working for me, in a factory — zombies, who’d give me back all the money they’d nominally have to earn, except the bare minimum required for food and lodging. What would you do?”

“Report it to some authority that could stop you.”

“That mightn’t be so easy. A court that didn’t believe in zombies couldn’t stop people voluntarily giving me money.”

“In that case,” Simon answered deliberately, “I might just have to kill you.”

Netlord sighed heavily.

“I expected that too,” he said. “I only wanted to be sure. That’s why I took steps in advance to be able to control you.”

The Saint had known it for some indefinite time. He was conscious of his body sitting in a chair, but it did not seem to belong to him.

“You bastard,” he said. “So you managed to feed me some kind of dope. But you’re really crazy if you think that’ll help you.”

Theron Netlord put a hand in his coat pocket and took out a small automatic. He leveled it at the Saint’s chest, resting his forearm on the table.

“It’s very simple,” he said calmly. “I could kill you now, and easily account for your disappearance. But I like the idea of having you work for me. As a zombie, you could retain many of your unusual abilities. So I could kill you, and, after I’ve learned a little more tonight, restore you to living death. But that would impair your usefulness in certain ways. So I’d rather apply what I know already, if I can, and make you my creature without harming you physically.”

“That’s certainly considerate of you,” Simon scoffed.

He didn’t know what unquenchable spark of defiance gave him the will to keep up the hopeless bluff. He seemed to have no contact with any muscles below his neck. But as long as he didn’t try to move, and fail, Netlord couldn’t be sure of that.

“The drug is only to relax you,” Netlord said. “Now look at this.”

He dipped his left hand in the ashtray beside him, and quickly began drawing a pattern with his fingertips on the white tablecloth — a design of crisscross diagonal lines with other vertical lines rising through the diamonds they formed, the verticals tipped with stars and curlicues, more than anything like the picture of an ornate wrought-iron gate. And as he drew it he intoned in a strange chanting voice:

The voice had risen, ending on a kind of muted shout, and there was a blaze of fanatic excitement and something weirder than that in Netlord’s dilated eyes.

Simon wanted to laugh. He said, “What’s that — a sequel to the Hutsut Song?” Or he said, “I prefer ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves.’  ” Or perhaps he said neither, for the thoughts and the ludicrousness and the laugh were suddenly chilled and empty, and it was like a hollowness and a darkness, like stepping into nothingness and a quicksand opening under his feet, sucking him down, only it was the mind that went down, the lines of the wrought-iron gate pattern shimmering and blinding before his eyes, and a black horror such as he had never known rising around him...

Out of some untouched reserve of will power he wrung the strength to clear his vision again for a moment, and to shape words that he knew came out, even though they came through stiff clumsy lips.

“Then I’ll have to kill you right now,” he said.

He tried to get up. He had to try now. He couldn’t pretend any longer that he was immobile from choice. His limbs felt like lead. His body was encased in invisible concrete. The triumphant fascinated face of Theron Netlord blurred in his sight.

The commands of his brain went out along nerves that swallowed them in enveloping numbness. His mind was drowning in the swelling dreadful dark. He thought, “Sibao, your Maîtresse Erzulie must be the weak sister in this league.”

And suddenly, he moved.

As if taut wires had snapped, he moved. He was on his feet. Uncertainly, like a thawing out, like a painful return of circulation, he felt connections with his body linking up again. He saw the exultation in Netlord’s face crumple into rage and incredulous terror.

“Fooled you, didn’t I?” said the Saint croakily. “You must still need some coaching on your hex technique.”

Netlord moved his hand a little, rather carefully, and his knuckle whitened on the trigger of the automatic. The range was point-blank.

Simon’s eardrums rang with the shot, and something struck him a stunning blinding blow over the heart. He had an impression of being hurled backwards as if by the blow of a giant fist, and then with no recollection of falling he knew that he was lying on the floor, half under the table, and he had no strength to move any more.

6

Theron Netlord rose from his chair and looked down, shaken by the pounding of his own heart. He had done many brutal things in his life, but he had never killed anyone before. It had been surprisingly easy to do, and he had been quite deliberate about it. It was only afterwards that the shock shook him, with his first understanding of the new loneliness into which he had irrevocably stepped, the apartness from all other men that only murderers know.

Then a whisper and a stir of movement caught his eye and ear together, and he turned his head and saw Sibao. She wore the white dress and the white handkerchief on her head, and the necklaces of threaded seeds and grain, that were prescribed for what was to be done that night.

“What are you doing here?” he snarled in Creole. “I said I would meet you at the houmfort.”

“I felt there was need for me.”

She knelt by the Saint, touching him with her sensitive hands. Netlord put the gun in his pocket and turned to the sideboard. He uncorked a bottle of rum, poured some into a glass, and drank.

Sibao stood before him again.

“Why did you want to kill him?”

“He was — he was a bad man. A thief.”

“He was good.”

“No, he was clever.” Netlord had had no time to prepare for questions. He was improvising wildly, aware of the hollowness of his invention and trying to bolster it with truculence. “He must have been waiting for a chance to meet you. If that had not happened, he would have found another way. He came to rob me.”

“What could he steal?”

Netlord pulled out his wallet, and took from it a thick pad of currency. He showed it to her.

“He knew that I had this. He would have killed me for it.” There were twenty-five crisp hundred-dollar bills, an incredible fortune by the standards of a Haitian peasant, but only the amount of pocket money that Netlord normally carried and would have felt undressed without. The girl’s dark velvet eyes rested on it, and he was quick to see more possibilities. “It was a present I was going to give to you and your father tonight.” Money was the strongest argument he had ever known. He went on with new-found confidence, “Here, take it now.”

She held the money submissively.

“But what about — him?”

“We must not risk trouble with the police. Later we will take care of him, in our own way... But we must go now, or we shall be late.”

He took her compellingly by the arm, but for a moment she still held back.

“You know that when you enter the sobagui to be cleansed, your loa, who sees all things, will know if there is any untruth in your heart.”

“I have nothing to fear.” He was sure of it now. There was nothing in voodoo that scared him. It was simply a craft that he had set out to master, as he had mastered everything else that he made up his mind to. He would use it on others, but it could do nothing to him. “Come along, they are waiting for us.”

Simon heard their voices before the last extinguishing wave of darkness rolled over him.

7

He woke up with a start, feeling cramped and bruised from lying on the floor. Memory came back to him in full flood as he sat up. He looked down at his shirt. There was a black-rimmed hole in it, and even a gray scorch of powder around that. But when he examined his chest, there was no hole and no blood, only a pronounced soreness over the ribs. From his breast pocket he drew out the metal plaque with the vêver of Erzulie. The bullet had scarred and bent it, but it had struck at an angle and glanced off without even scratching him, tearing another hole in the shirt under his arm.

The Saint gazed at the twisted piece of tin with an uncanny tingle feathering his spine.

Sibao must have known he was unhurt when she touched him. Yet she seemed to have kept the knowledge to herself. Why?

He hoisted himself experimentally to his feet. He knew that he had first been drugged, then over that lowered resistance almost completely mesmerized; coming on top of that, the deadened impact of the bullet must have knocked him out, as a punch over the heart could knock out an already groggy boxer. But now all the effects seemed to have worn off together, leaving only a tender spot on his chest and an insignificant muzziness in his head. By his watch, he had been out for about two hours.

The house was full of the silence of emptiness. He went through a door to the kitchen, ran some water, and bathed his face. The only other sound there was the ticking of a cheap clock.

Netlord had said that only the two of them were in the house. And Netlord had gone — with Sibao.

Gone to something that everything in the Saint’s philosophy must refuse to believe. But things had happened to himself already that night which he could only think of incredulously. And incredulity would not alter them, or make them less true.

He went back through the living room and out on to the front verandah. Ridge beyond ridge, the mysterious hills fell away from before him under a full yellow moon that dimmed the stars, and there was no jeep in the driveway at his feet.

The drums still pulsed through the night, but they were no longer scattered. They were gathered together, blending in unison and counterpoint, but the acoustical tricks of the mountains still masked their location. Their muttering swelled and receded with chance shifts of air, and the echoes of it came from all around the horizon, so that the whole world seemed to throb softly with it.

There was plenty of light for him to walk down to the Châtelet des Fleurs.

He found Atherton Lee and the waiter starting to put out the lights in the bar. The innkeeper looked at him in a rather startled way.

“Why — what happened?” Lee asked.

Simon sat up at the counter and lighted a cigarette.

“Pour me a Barbancourt,” he said defensively, “and tell me why you think anything happened.”

“Netlord brought the jeep back. He told me he’d taken you to the airport — you’d had some news which made you suddenly decide to catch the night plane to Miami, and you just had time to make it. He was coming back tomorrow to pick up your things and send them after you.”

“Oh, that,” said the Saint blandly. “When the plane came through, it turned out to have filled up at Ciudad Trujillo. I couldn’t get on. So I changed my mind again. I ran into someone downtown who gave me a lift back.”

He couldn’t say, “Netlord thought he’d just murdered me, and he was laying the foundation for me to disappear without being missed.” Somehow, it sounded so ridiculous, even with a bullet hole in his shirt. And if he were pressed for details, he would have to say, “He was trying to put some kind of hex on me, or make me a zombie.” That would be assured of a great reception. And then the police would have to be brought in. Perhaps Haiti was the only country on earth where a policeman might feel obliged to listen seriously to such a story, but the police were still the police. And just at those times when most people automatically turn to the police, Simon Templar’s instinct was to avoid them.

What would have to be settled now between him and Theron Netlord, he would settle himself, in his own way.

The waiter, closing windows and emptying ashtrays, was singing to himself under his breath:

“What’s that?” Simon asked sharply.

“Just Haitian song, sir.”

“What does it mean?”

“It mean, I will go to Sibao — that holy place in voodoo, sir. I take oil for lamp, it say. If you eat food of Legba you will have to die:

“After spending an evening with Netlord, you should know all about that,” Atherton Lee said.

Simon downed his drink and stretched out a yawn.

“You’re right. I’ve had enough of it for one night,” he said. “I’d better let you go on closing up — I’m ready to hit the sack myself.”

But he lay awake for a long time, stretched out on his bed in the moonlight. Was Theron Netlord merely insane, or was there even the most fantastic possibility that he might be able to make use of things that modern materialistic science did not understand? Would it work on Americans, in America? Simon remembered that one of the books he had read referred to a certain American evangelist as un houngan insuffisamment instruit, and it was a known fact that that man controlled property worth millions, and that his followers turned over all their earnings to him, for which he gave them only food, shelter, and sermons. Such things had happened, and were as unsatisfactory to explain away as flying saucers...

The ceaseless mutter of the distant drums mocked him till he fell asleep.

He awoke and still heard the song. The moonlight had given way to the gray light of dawn, and the first thing he was conscious of was a fragile unfamiliar stillness left void because the drums were at last silent. But the voice went on — a flat, lifeless, distorted voice that was nevertheless recognizable in a way that sent icy filaments crawling over his scalp.

His window overlooked the road that curved up past the inn, and he was there while the song still drifted up to it. The two of them stood directly beneath him — Netlord, and the slender black girl dressed all in white. The girl looked up and saw Simon, as if she had expected to. She raised one hand and solemnly made a pattern in the air, a shape that somehow blended the outlines of a heart and an ornate letter M, quickly and intricately, and her lips moved with it: it was curiously like a benediction.

Then she turned to the man beside her, as she might have turned to a child.

“Venez,” she said.

The tycoon also looked up, before he obediently followed her. But there was no recognition, no expression at all, in the gray face that had once been so ruthless and domineering, and all at once Simon knew why Theron Netlord would be no problem to him or to anyone, any more.