“Sorry,” I said.
“The history of my people is a dictionary of new ways to suffer. We have a genius for it,” he said. “This new thing should be no surprise. And even so.” He looked away, took a sip from his water glass, folded his hands in front of him. “You mention voodoo, my friend. Do you know what is a bocor?”
“No.”
“In voodoo, there is good magic and there is bad magic. The good, it is like church, yes? A regular service, with a regular congregation, the rituals and offerings and prayers. This is done by a papa-loa. A voodoo priest. Most of the time he will not throw a curse for you for money. Because he worries to keep in, ah, what is the word. In balance. He must balance all the things of this world and the next, you see? A curse will upset this balance and the papa-loa will not do it. For this you must see a bocor. How is it called, a man-witch. A warlock? A sorcerer?”
“Sorcerer works for me,” I said.
“Just so. And this man, the bocor, he does the dark things for money. Help you steal a man’s wife with a love spell. Make your enemy sick. Make a rival to be a zombie. Do not laugh,” he said, raising a long bony finger. “I have seen them. It is not a funny thing, not pretty. It is not a thing for your movies, with the arms out, so—” And he did a pretty good imitation of a Hollywood zombie.
“The bocor can make a powder,” Honore said. “If you eat this powder, or breathe it, or so much as touch it, you are like a dead man but still alive. Then it wears off and you are stupid for a while. He gives you more powder, controls you. You are his slave, like an animal.”
“And this guy on the Black Freighter is doing this?” I asked him.
“He is a bocor. One of the worst. This we know. If he does this, what might be his name—” Honore shrugged. It was a close cousin to his first shrug, saying thirty or forty different things at once. “No one knows his name, or the name of his ship.”
“Then how do you know he’s a bocor?”
Honore gave me a look of great pity. “Who else could do this thing?” he said. “There are so many who speak of it that one day—pfft—it is a fact and everybody knows it. You may say rumor if you like.” The shrug again. “This is another of the small things that separate our worlds. In my world, a rumor reaches a certain moment where it is so persistent that it becomes true. And all the rumors of the Black Freighter say the captain is a bocor.”
“All right,” I said. “Tell me what you know about this guy and his Black Freighter.”
“There are many stories,” Honore said slowly, as if sorting it out while he spoke. “Some of them—it is how mothers frighten their children to be good, yes? Get a good grade or the Black Freighter comes for you.”
“And the rest?”
He smiled. “The rest of the stories say, there is a freighter who takes refugees to America. He takes their money, loads them onto his ship, and no one ever sees them again. He sails away full of people and comes back empty. Perhaps this is just a rumor.” He spread his hands to show it was possible, but he didn’t look convinced.
“What do you think?”
Honore raised his eyebrows. “Me? I think there is a very bad man, a bocor, throwing people into the ocean and taking their money. I think he says, I take you to Miami, to America, but he only takes them half way. Such a one, he would have to enjoy the killing. Perhaps more than the money, who can say. And I think he will go on doing this, until someone stops him, or my country runs out of people who want to come here so much they do not care about the stories of the Black Freighter.”
I looked at Deacon. He was pushing a small piece of bread around his plate with a knife. I looked back at Honore. He was looking at me the same way Deacon was looking at the bread.
“All right,” I said. “If you were going to look for the Black Freighter, where would you start?”
“Here,” Honore said, jabbing his finger down onto the table. The silverware rattled. “Right here, in Miami. He comes here after he dumps the people. He takes back stolen bicycles, old televisions.” He shrugged.
“Miami River?” I asked Deacon.
He looked up from his bread. “Be my guess,” he said. “A small, independent freighter, that’s where he’d have to be.”
“You know anything else that might be helpful?” I asked Honore.
He showed two rows of perfect teeth. “Voodoo comes from an old African word,” he said. “It means snake.”
• • •
Deacon drove me back to the parking lot where I had left my car. The late afternoon shadows were slanting across the tightly packed rows. It made the crummy shopping center look like some romantic old picture.
Deacon nosed into an empty spot. We looked straight ahead. Twenty feet away on the sidewalk a couple of kids came out of a store, stared at Deacon’s car, and went back in the store again. One of the eight radios on the front seat crackled. Another one answered it.
“You look into this, I got to tell you, I can’t help you.”
“Yeah, I figured that.”
“They might even send me after you, to stop you from doing anything that might cause them some political embarrassment.”