Heat assaulted him. Although the shed wasn't equipped with a heating system, and although the walls weren't even insulated, the small building — twelve-foot by-ten — was nevertheless extremely warm. Lavelle had no sooner entered and pulled the door shut behind him than he was obliged to strip out of his nine-hundred dollar topcoat in order to breathe comfortably.
A peculiar, slightly sulphurous odor hung in the air. Most people would have found it unpleasant. But Lavelle sniffed, then breathed deeply, and smiled. He savored the stench. To him, it was a sweet fragrance because it was the scent of revenge.
He had broken into a sweat.
He took off his shirt.
He was chanting in a strange tongue.
He took off his shoes, his trousers, his underwear.
Naked, he knelt on the dirt floor.
He began to sing softly. The melody was pure, compelling, and he carried it well. He sang in a low voice that could not have been heard by anyone beyond the boundaries of his own property.
Sweat streamed from him. His black body glistened.
He swayed gently back and forth as he sang. In a little while he was almost in a trance.
The lines he sang were lilting, rhythmic chains of words in an ungrammatical, convoluted, but mellifluous mixture of French, English, Swahili, and Bantu. It was partly a Haitian patois, partly a Jamaican patois, partly an African juju chant: the pattern-rich “language” of voodoo.
He was singing about vengeance. About death. About the blood of his enemies. He called for the destruction of the Carramazza family, one member at a time, according to a list he had made.
Finally he sang about the slaughter of that police detective's two children, which might become necessary at any moment.
The prospect of killing children did not disturb him. In fact, the possibility was exciting.
His eyes shone.
His long-fingered hands moved slowly up and down his lean body in a sensuous caress.
His breathing was labored as he inhaled the heavy warm air and exhaled an even heavier, warmer vapor.
The beads of sweat on his ebony skin gleamed with reflected orange light.
Although he had not switched on the overhead light when he'd entered, the interior of the shed wasn't pitch black. The perimeter of the small, windowless room was shrouded in shadows, but a vague orange glow rose from the floor in the center of the chamber. It came out of a hole about five feet in diameter. Lavelle had dug it while performing a complicated, six-hour ritual, during which he had spoken to many of the evil gods-Congo Savanna, Congo Maussai, Congo Moudongue — and the evil angels like the Zandor, the Ibos “je rouge,” the Petro Maman Pemba, and Ti Jean Pie Fin.
The excavation was shaped like a meteor crater, the walls sloping inward to form a basin. The center of the basin was only three feet deep. However, if you stared into it long enough, it gradually began to appear much, much deeper than that. In some mysterious way, when you peered at the flickering light for a couple of minutes, when you tried hard to discern its source, your perspective abruptly and drastically changed, and you could see that the bottom of the hole was hundreds if not thousands of feet below. It wasn't merely a hole in the dirt floor of the shed; not anymore; suddenly and magically, it was a doorway into the heart of the earth. But then, with a blink, it seemed only a shallow basin once more.
Now, still singing, Lavelle leaned forward.
He looked at the strange, pulsing orange light.
He looked into the hole.
Looked down.
Down…
Down into…
Down into the pit.
The Pit.
XIII
Shortly before noon, Nayva Rooney had finished cleaning the Dawson's apartment.
She had neither seen nor heard anything more of the rat — or whatever it had been — that she had pursued from room to room earlier in the morning. It had vanished.
She wrote a note to Jack Dawson, asking him to call her this evening. He had to be told about the rat, so that he could arrange to have the building superintendent hire an exterminator. She fixed the note to the refrigerator with a magnetic plastic butterfly that was usually used to hold a shopping list in place.
After she put on her rubber boots, coat, scarf, and gloves, she switched off the last light, the hall light. Now, the apartment was lit only by the thin, gray, useless daylight that seemed barely capable of penetrating the windows. The hall, windowless, was not lit at all. She stood perfectly still by the front door for more than a minute — listening.
The apartment remained tomb-silent.
At last, she let herself out and locked the door behind her.
A few minutes after Nayva Rooney had gone, there was movement in the apartment.
Something came out of Penny and Davey's bedroom, into the gloomy hallway. It merged with the shadows. If Nayva had been there, she would have seen only its bright, glowing, fiery white eyes. It stood for a moment, just outside the door through which it had come, and then it moved down the hall toward the living room, its claws clicking on the wooden floor; it made a cold angry, hissing noise as it went.
A second creature came out of the kids' room. It, too, was well-hidden by the darkness in the apartment, just a shadow among shadows — except for its shining eyes.
A third small, dark, hissing beast appeared.
A fourth.
A fifth.
Another. And another…
Soon, they were all over the apartment: crouching in corners; perching on furniture or squirming under it; slinking along the baseboard; climbing the walls with insectile skill; creeping behind the drapes; sniffing and hissing; scurrying restlessly from room to room and then back again; ceaselessly growling in what almost sounded like a guttural foreign language; staying, for the most part, in the shadows, as if even the pale winter light coming through the windows was too harsh for them.
Then, suddenly, they all stopped moving and were motionless, as if a command had come to them. Gradually, they began to sway from side to side, their beaming eyes describing small arcs in the darkness. Their metronomic movement was in time with the song that Baba Lavelle sang in another, distant part of the city.
Eventually, they stopped swaying.
They did not become restless again.
They waited in the shadows, motionless, eyes shining.
Soon, they might be called upon to kill.
They were ready. They were eager.
CHAPTER THREE
I
Captain Walter Gresham, of Homicide, had a face like a shovel. Not that he was an ugly man; in fact, he was rather handsome in a sharp-edged sort of way. But his entire face sloped forward, all of his strong features pointing down and out, toward the tip of his chin, so that you were reminded of a garden spade.
He arrived at the hotel a few minutes before noon and met with Jack and Rebecca at the end of the elevator alcove on the sixteenth floor, by a window that looked down on Fifth Avenue.
“What we've got brewing here is a full-fledged gang war,” Gresham said. “We haven't seen anything like this in my time. It's like something out of the roaring twenties, for God's sake! Even if it is just a bunch of hoods and scumbags killing one another, I don't like it. Absolutely won't tolerate it in my jurisdiction. I spoke with the Commissioner before I came over here, and he's in full agreement with me: We can't go on treating this as if it were just an ordinary homicide investigation; we've got to put the pressure on. We're forming a special task force. We're converting two interrogation rooms into a task force headquarters, putting in special phone lines and everything.”