He also acquired a ‘Swank’ tie-clip in the shape of a whip, an alligator-skin billfold from Mark Cross, a plain Zippo lighter, a plastic ‘Travel-Pak’ containing razor, hairbrush and toothbrush, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with plain lenses, various other oddments and, finally, a light-weight Hartmann ‘Skymate’ suitcase to contain all these things.
He was allowed to retain his own Beretta .25 with the skeleton grip and the chamois leather shoulder-holster, but all his other possessions were to be collected at midday and forwarded down to Jamaica to await him.
He was given a military haircut and was told that he was a New Englander from Boston and that he was on holiday from his job with the London office of the Guaranty Trust Company. He was reminded to ask for the ‘check’ rather 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.
Bond looked grimly at the pile of parcels which contained his new identity, stripped off his pyjamas for the last time (‘We mostly sleep in the raw in America, Mr. Bond’) and gave himself a sizzling cold shower. As he shaved he examined his face in the glass. The thick comma of black hair above his right eyebrow had lost some of its tail and his hair was trimmed close across the temples. Nothing could be done about the thin vertical scar down his right cheek, although the FBI had experimented with ‘Cover-Mark’, or about the coldness and hint of anger in his grey-blue eyes, but there was the mixed blood of America in the black hair and high cheekbones and Bond thought he might get by — except, perhaps, with women.
Naked, Bond walked out into the lobby and tore open some of the packages. Later, in white shirt and dark blue trousers, he went into the sitting-room, pulled a chair up to the writing-desk near the window and opened The Travellers Tree, by Patrick Leigh Fermor.[2]
This extraordinary book had been recommended to him by M.
‘It’s by a chap who knows what he’s talking about,’ he said, ‘and don’t forget that he was writing about what was happening in Haiti in 1950. This isn’t medieval black-magic stuff. It’s being practised every day.’
Bond was half way through the section on Haiti.
The next step [he read] is the invocation of evil denizens of the Voodoo pantheon — such as Don Pedro, Kitta, Mondongue, Bakalou and Zandor – for harmful purposes, for the reputed practice (which is of Congolese origin) of 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 stiffened by the separate use of poison. Father Gosme enlarged on the superstitions that maintain that men with certain powers change themselves into snakes; on the ‘Loups-Garoups’ that fly at night in the form of vampire bats and suck the blood of children; on men who reduce themselves to infinitesimal size and roll about the countryside in calabashes. What sounded far more sinister were a number of mystico-criminal secret societies of wizards, with nightmarish titles — ‘les Mackanda’, named after the poison campaign of the Haitian hero; ‘les Zobop’, who were also robbers; the ‘Mazanxa’, the ‘Caporelata’ and the ‘Vlin-bindingue’. These, he said, were the mysterious groups whose gods demand — instead of a cock, a pigeon, a goat, a dog, or a pig, as in the normal rites of Voodoo – the sacrifice of a ‘cabrit sans cornes’. This hornless goat, of course, means a human being…
Bond turned over the pages, occasional passages combining to form an extraordinary picture in his mind of a dark religion and its terrible rites.
… 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 drums, they straightened their bodies, and flinging their arms in the air while their eyes rolled upwards, spun round and round… At the edge of the crowd we came upon a little hut, scarcely larger than a dog kennel: ‘Le caye Zombi’. The beam of a torch revealed a black cross inside and some rags and chains and shackles and whips: adjuncts used at the Ghede ceremonies, which Haitian ethnologists connect with the rejuvenation rites of Osiris recorded in the Book of the Dead. A fire was burning, in which two sabres and a large pair of pincers were standing, their lower parts red with the heat: ‘le Feu Marixiette’, dedicated to a goddess who is the evil obverse of the bland and amorous Maitresse Erzulie Freda Dahomin, the Goddess of Love.