Michael Gruber - Tropic of Night

Manes punched keys. The computer warbled and hissed.

“I’m in the EthnobotDB database. Uh-uh. No S. golungensis. There’s a related Schrebera used in folk medicine.”

“How about to make poison?”

“Poison. Okay, that’d be the PLANTOX database. Just a second, here. I’ll just check out the genus for starters. Nope, a blank. Which doesn’t mean actually that much. These general databases are always a little behind the curve. You need an ethnobotanist.”

“Isn’t that you?”

“No, I’m a plant systematist. I figure out which plants are related to which and also decide if something somebody collected is a new species or not. An ethnobotanist actually goes out and works with locals to see how they use plants. Drug companies hire them in platoons.”

“Got a name of one I could talk to?”

“There’s Lydia Herrera, she’s pretty good, at the U. I know she’s around because I just saw her the other day. Your problem’s going to be finding someone who knows West Africa, assuming you’re interested in this particular tree.” He paused. Paz could see he was about to expire from curiosity thwarted, and was not surprised when he asked, “So … what’s the connection between the specimen and the murder? If I may ask …”

“You could, but I couldn’t tell you anything. Sorry, it’s procedure.”

Manes chuckled and said wryly, “Yeah, and of course, an unusual tropical plant is connected to a murder, you can’t tell, it could be a tropical botanist did it.”

“Could be,” said Paz, unsmiling. “For the record, did you know the victim, Deandra Wallace?”

A short nervous laugh. “No, not that I know of. Who was she?”

“Oh, just a woman, up in Overtown. Back to what you were saying, about finding someone who knew about Africa?”

Manes seemed relieved to get back to his field. “Right. Well, most of the ethnobotanists in this part of the world are going to have experience in the American tropics?makes sense, of course, we’re close and we have political and economic connections with Latin America. Most of the West African botany’s been done out of France, and the East African out of Britain, for obvious reasons, the former colonial powers. I’m sorry I can’t help you more.”

Paz finished writing and put away his notebook, thanked Manes, and collected his nut from the table. His opele nut. An accomplishment to know its name. Back at his car, he sat in the front seat with the door open and read through his notes. He always did this after an interview; it was another one of Barlow’s rules. Make sure you got what you want before you leave the informant. In all, good news. The crime scene contained a rare nut, which was better than if the thing was growing all over South Florida. He had actually written “rare nut.” You could say that again, he thought, and laughed. It was a shame he couldn’t share it with Barlow. He used his cell phone to call the University of Miami locator, and then called Dr. Herrera’s office, using Manes’s name but not identifying himself as a detective, making an appointment with the secretary for later in the day.

Paz drove out of Fairchild and turned north. A rare nut. He thought it would be nice to find the other half of that particular Schrebera golungensis shell. He had a thought and pulled out his notebook and, stopped for the light on Douglas, he made a note to ask Lydia Herrera if she knew why the thing had a little hole drilled in either end.

It’s peanut butter and jelly for lunch today in the Bert and Ernie lunch box and a banana and four Fig Newtons and orange juice in the little thermos bottle. Luz has discovered her appetite and is looking a little less peaky now, a little less like a starveling sparrow. Her hair is glossy and held by two pink plastic barrettes in the shape of bows. It reaches down to the small of her back. I’ve dressed her in a navy T-shirt, denim shorts, and red sneakers. If this is ever over and we survive, I’ll buy her something pretty, I swear it. I’m wearing my office costume, which today is a shapeless cotton bag printed with vomit-colored picturesque ruins, a degraded Piranesi effect. My legs are bare and stuck into what we used to call health shoes, the precise color and near the shape of horse droppings. It took me a while, but I believe I have found the most unattractive hairstyle for the shape of my face, which is angular, with what my mom always called good cheekbones. I have taken much of the good out of them by choosing blue plastic harlequin eyeglasses, with lenses that tint themselves automatically in sunlight. The lenses tend also to obscure my eyes, which are pale gray-green in color. I try not to look people in the eye in any case, and I don’t imagine there are many at my place of work who know what color they are. The hairdo and glasses make me look ten years older, and quite retired from the sexual sweepstakes. Which I am.

We leave the apartment, after a brief altercation about bringing her bird book to day care. They frown on personal items at day care, as it causes quarreling, a lesson we should all take from preschool and apply to our lives. Actually, I am pleased that she objects. It is a good sign, she having spent her little life so far as a terrorized punching bag. She loves that bird book, especially the section on the care and feeding of young birds. The mother bird shoves food down the gaping maw of the baby bird. She gets it. The other night I fed her with bits of cookie as we read, and it made her giggle. I’m the mother and you’re the baby. Then she wanted to feed me. I let her and she said her first full sentence, in my presence at least, “Now I’m the mother and you’re the baby,” and we laughed, and I thank Saint Agnes, patroness of young girls, that the grammar engine is still intact in there under my quick kiss.

She calls me Mother, now, curiously formal, but I don’t mind at all, except she says it “Muffa,” and it sounds to me like the Olo m’fa, which literally means support, or pedestal, and signifies the squat wicker pedestal on which the babandole places his zanzoul, the ritual container in which magic elements are put to blend and generate power, ashe as they say. Figuratively, it is the world?material reality, the web of nature, upon which God has placed the Olo, and which supports them.

We leave the bird book and go out into the typically damp south Floridian morning, thickened air hanging in quasi-visible streamers from the canary allamander, the blushing oleander, the crotons colored like plastic toys, and the gray-barked fig with its insidious brown tendrils strung with beads of moisture. We climb into the Buick and I have to run the wipers because the window is covered with dew. I crank it up, and Luz turns the radio on, always set to WTMI, classical music. I dislike drums now, I do not wish to feel the beat. They are playing some passacaglia for violin, Paganini, perhaps. I turn it down. I like Mozart, Haydn, Vivaldi. And Bach best of all, the intricate order and the illusion of rules, the ghosts of protection. Quite drumless.

It is a short hop down Hibiscus to Providence Congregational Church, which dispenses, besides an unstressful vanilla religion, the best day care in Miami. There is a long waiting list for Prov, but we jumped the list over all the Brittanys and Jasons from the good side of the Grove, because of our peculiar appearance and the sad story I spun for the director, Mrs. Vance: a little African exoticism, a little heartbreaking separation, a little traumatic death, just a touch of touching impairment. A shabby white lady and her mulatto kid, striving and desperate, that was the picture. And grateful, unlike so many of the actual poor, who are so often testy and suspicious. My husband taught me a great deal about how to stimulate white guilt, and I find I can use it effectively in the service of my kid, and do. It bowled nice Mrs. Vance over and she affirmatively acted.