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:
Pour vous protéger.
Merci.
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.
Dear Mr Templar,
I’m sorry your visit yesterday had to be so short. If it wouldn’t bore you too much, I should enjoy another meeting. Could you come to dinner tonight? Just send word by the bearer.
Sincerely,
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:
Thanks. I’ll be with you about 7.
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.