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‘Our man’s a bit of an exception,’ said M. ‘He’s not pure negro. Born in Haiti. Good dose of French blood. Trained in Moscow, too, as you’ll see from the file. And the negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions – scientists, doctors, writers. It’s about time they turned out a great criminal. After all, there are 250,000,000 of them in the world. Nearly a third of the white population. They’ve got plenty of brains and ability and guts. And now Moscow’s taught one of them the technique.’
He was just the man for SMERSH, with just the training. A real, hard weapon of fear and death. And what a brilliant set-up for dealing with the smaller fry of the negro underworld and for keeping a coloured information network well up to the mark! – the fear of Voodoo and the supernatural, still deeply, primevally ingrained in the negro subconscious! And
Not for the first time, Bond felt his spine crawl at the cold, brilliant efficiency of the Soviet machine,
Then let it be a giant, a homeric slaying.
He was reminded to ask for the ‘check’ rather than the ‘bill’, to say ‘cab’ instead of ‘taxi’ and (this from Leiter) to avoid words of more than two syllables. (‘You can get through any American conversation,’ advised Leiter, ‘with “Yeah”, “Nope” and “Sure”.’) The English word to be avoided at all costs, added Leiter, was ‘Ectually’. Bond had said that this word was not part of his vocabulary.
The Travellers Tree, by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
the reputed practice (which is of Congolese origin)
turning people into zombies in order to use them as slaves, the casting of maleficent spells, and the destruction of enemies.
The effects of the spell, of which the outward form may be an image of the intended victim, a miniature coffin or a toad, are frequently s...
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the sacrifice of a ‘cabrit sans cornes’. This hornless goat, of course, means a human being …
Slowly, out of the turmoil and the smoke and the shattering noise of the drums, which, for a time, drove everything except their impact from the mind, the details began to detach themselves … … Backwards and forwards, very slowly, the dancers shuffled, and at each step their chins shot out and their buttocks jerked upwards, while their shoulders shook in double time. Their eyes were half closed and from their mouths came again and again the same incomprehensible words, the same short line of chanted song, repeated after each iteration, half an octave lower. At a change in the beat of the
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Haitian ethnologists connect with the rejuvenation rites of Osiris recorded in the Book of the Dead.
‘le Feu Marinette’, dedicated to a goddess who is the evil obverse of the bland and amorous Maitresse Erzulie Fréda Dahomin, the Goddess of Love.
over the crossbar were pulled the sleeves of a very old morning coat. Here also rested the brim of a battered bowler hat, through the torn crown of which the top of the cross projected. This totem, with which every peristyle must be equipped, is not a lampoon of the central event of the Christian faith, but represents the God of the Cemeteries and the Chief of the Legion of the Dead, Baron Samedi. The Baron is paramount in all matters immediately beyond the tomb. He is Cerberus and Charon as well as Aeacus, Rhadamanthus and Pluto …
The drums changed and the Houngenikon came dancing on to the floor, holding a vessel filled with some burning liquid from which sprang blue and yellow flames. As he circled the pillar and spilt three flaming libations, his steps began to falter. Then, lurching backwards with the same symptoms of delirium that had manifested themselves in his forerunner, he flung down the whole blazing mass. The houncis caught him as he reeled, and removed his sandals and rolled his trousers up, while the kerchief fell from his head and laid bare his young woolly skull. The other houncis knelt to put their
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his forehead screwed up
Then, as though an invisible fist had dealt him a heavy blow, he fell to the ground and lay there, with his head stretching backwards in a rictus of anguish until the tendons of his neck and shoulders projected like roots. One hand clutched at the other elbow behind his hollowed back as though he were striving to break his own arm, and his whole body, from which the sweat was streaming, trembled and shuddered like a dog in a dream. Only the whites of his eyes were visible as, although his eye-sockets were now wide open, the pupils had vanished under the lids. Foam collected on his lips
The ring of spectators rocked backwards as he bore down upon them whirling the blade over his head, with the gaps in his bared teeth lending to his mandril face a still more feral aspect. The ‘tonnelle’ was filled for a few seconds with genuine and unmitigated terror.
The singing had turned to a universal howl and the drummers, rolling and lolling with the furious and invisible motion of their hands, were lost in a transport of noise.
There came a knock on the door and a waiter came in with breakfast. Bond was glad to put the dreadful tale aside and re-enter the world of normality. But it took him minutes to forget the atmosphere, heavy with terror and the occult, that had surrounded him as he read.
It was not louder than a 12-bore cartridge, but in the confined space it was an impressive explosion. The parcel, in tatters, had fallen to the ground. The glasses and bottles on the sideboard were smashed and there was a black smudge of smoke on the grey wall behind them. Some pieces of glass tinkled on to the floor. There was a strong smell of gunpowder in the room.
‘Half-minute acid capsule,’ he announced. ‘Broken by the first hammer-stroke of the alarm. Acid eats through thin copper wire. Thirty seconds later wire breaks, releases plunger on to cap of this.’ He held up the base of a cartridge. ‘4-bore elephant gun. Black powder. Blank. No shot. Lucky it wasn’t a grenade. Plenty of room in the parcel. You’d have been damaged.
‘But the point is,’ said Bond, ‘how did he know what I was here for? Shows he’s got Washington pretty well sewn up. Must be a leak the size of the Grand Canyon somewhere.’
‘D’you want a race riot?’ objected Dexter sourly. ‘There’s nothing against him and you know it, and we know it. If he wasn’t sprung in half an hour by that black mouthpiece of his, those Voodoo drums would start beating from here to the Deep South. When they’re full of that stuff we all know what happens. Remember ’35 and ’43? You’d have to call out the Militia.
This case isn’t ripe yet. Until it is, our policy with Mr Big is “live and let live”.’ Bond looked quizzically at Captain Dexter. ‘In my job,’ he said, ‘when I come up against a man like this one, I have another motto. It’s “live and let die”.’
couldn’t have spoken any louder if he had wished to. He had been born on ‘Lung Block’, on Seventh Avenue, at 142nd Street, where death from TB is twice as high as anywhere in New York. Now, he only had part of one lung left.
He picked up the pair of Moccasin casuals, felt their toes and weighed them in his hand.
‘Harlem’s a bit of a jungle these days. People don’t go up there any more like they used to. Before the war, at the end of an evening, one used to go to Harlem just as one goes to Montmartre in Paris.
Perhaps pick up a high-yaller and risk the doctor’s bills afterwards.
The evening awaited him, to be opened and read, page by page, word by word.
NIGGER HEAVEN
the soft think-speak
would hear the distant rumble on the silent sighing silver rails
pointed stigma of desire.
He turned off his own light and lay thinking of Solitaire and listening to the steady gallop of the wheels beneath his head and the comfortable small noises in the room, the gentle rattles and squeaks and murmurs in the coachwork that bring sleep so quickly on a train at night-time.
His growing warmth towards Solitaire and his desire for her body were in a compartment which had no communicating door with his professional life.
At the last moment he remembered the girl and seized her with his other hand and pulled her in too, banging the door shut with his heel so that Mrs Stuyvesant’s ‘I hope you have a happy …’ was guillotined before the ‘stay’.
jalousies
Dodgems
singlet
The two men stood and watched him flying slowly along just above the surface of the harbour. Suddenly he crashed clumsily down, his long bill snaking out and down in front of him. It came up clutching a small fish which he moodily swallowed. Then the heavy bird got up again and went on fishing, flying mostly into the sun so that its big shadow would give no warning. When Bond and Leiter turned to walk back down the jetty it gave up fishing and glided back to its post. It settled with a clatter of wings and resumed its thoughtful consideration of the late afternoon.
The sun was setting and the sea behind them was a pool of blood.
‘Just occurred to me you two might be hyphenating.’
chaffing
Then he thought of the scrawny neck rising like a turtle’s out of the dirty sweat-shirt. Under the bedclothes the muscles of his arms went taut. Then, his mind made up, he relaxed his body into sleep.
Bond didn’t wait. While he shaved and dressed he ordered some coffee and rolls and a cab. In just over ten minutes he had got them all and had scalded himself with the coffee.
sanguine.
He cast about for something that would raise him an extra two feet. In a land where litter and junk are so much a part of the landscape he soon found what he wanted.
Gandy Bridge,
He stripped and threw his clothes unfolded on to a chair. Then he took a quick shower, cleaned his teeth and gargled with a sharp mouthwash and climbed into bed.
