Dennis Wheatley - The White Witch of the South Seas

The White Witch of the South Sea's

by Dennis Wheatley

1

Doomed to Die in a Ditch

Gregory Sallust was dining alone at the Copacabana Palace, the most luxurious of the many hotels situated along the Rio great bay to the south of de Janeiro, which is Brazil s most famous playground.

Since losing his beloved Erika he had spent much of his time alone; not from necessity, as he had many friends in Europe and, although no longer young, was still very attractive to women, but owing to a restlessness that impelled him to spend the greater part of each year travelling.

To most places where he intended to spend a fortnight or more he took introductions; but new acquaintances could not be expected to give him all their time and, as no woman could replace Erika, for him the casual affairs he had indulged in had been short lived. In consequence, he had become quite used frequently to going to his room immediately after dinner and reading in bed.

But tonight he had an engagement, and one which promised to be very interesting. On arriving in Rio he had looked up an old war time friend, Colonel Hugo Wellesley, who was now Military Attach at the British Embassy. During the past few days Hugo and his wife Patricia had entertained him most kindly, and the Colonel had arranged for them to attend a Macumba ceremony.

Macumba is the form of Voodoo widely practised in Brazil, and ceremonies of a kind were put on regularly to attract tourist money; but this was to be the real thing, from which all non practitioners were normally excluded. The all powerful Chief of Police had secured agreement for Hugo

and his party to be present and, in case of trouble, they were being provided with a police escort.

Gregory's knowledge of the Black Arts was confined to his reluctant cooperation with a Jewish Satanist during the last years of the Second World War, when they had made use of Hitler's belief in the occult to drive him to commit suicide instead of leaving Berlin for the Bavarian Alps where, with a still undefeated army, he could have prolonged Germany's resistance.' Voodoo and its allied cults were entirely new territory to Gregory; so, although he had no intention whatever of allowing himself to become involved, he was looking forward to the ceremony as a fascinating entertainment.

At half past nine he asked the hall porter to get him a taxi. As he stood waiting for a few minutes outside the hotel, he could see the whole curving sweep of the splendid Copacabana Bay. It was early January, so in Rio high summer and during the daytime the long beach was black with people. Even at this hour innumerable couples lay scattered upon it. Thousands more, enjoying the comparative cool of the evening after the long, hot day, were strolling along the promenade, lit by the myriad lights from hotels, shops and cafes.

The city of Rio consists of several valleys which run like gaps between outspread fingers into the great mountain range that cuts it off from the interior, and Copacabana is separated from Rio itself by a lofty spur that runs right down into the sea; so Gregory's taxi took him through a long tunnel under the spur, then through the streets in the nearest valley to a small park with many lovely tropical trees. High up on one side of the park stood the President's Palace and, beyond it, still higher up and backing on to a mountain, the fine residential block in. which the Wellesleys had an apartment.

On Gregory's arrival he found the small party already assembled. His host was a lithe, dark, handsome man in his late forties, his hostess a pretty blonde with merry blue eyes. When he had selected a daiquiri from a tray presented by a white coated houseman, she introduced him to her other

guests a Brazilian couple named da Fonseca, a Madame Manon de Bois Tracy and Captain Candido Sousa from Rio Police Headquarters.

The da Fonsecas were middle aged and, judging from the 's jewels, very wealthy. For a while the conversation became general, then the da Fonsecas resumed an animated discussion they had been having earlier with Hugo in Portuguese. The Police Captain a big, round faced, jovial man spoke only broken English, but in an unembarrassed spate of words was obviously endeavouring to impress Patricia; so, having accepted a second drink, Gregory turned his attention to Madame de Bois Tracy, whom he had rightly assumed to be French.

She was of medium height and what the French term a 'belle laide' when they wish to describe a woman who is not beautiful but definitely alluring. Her attractions lay in a pair of magnificent brown eyes beneath delicately tapering eyebrows and a pretty figure that her dress sense enabled her to display to the best advantage. Her nose was snub, with wide nostrils, her lips thick, which suggested a dash of coloured blood somewhere in her ancestry, and her complexion was sallow. Gregory put her age down as a little short of forty and was quick to realise that she was a sophisticated woman of the world who could prove intriguing and amusing.

The outer wall of the main room in the Wellesleys ' apartment was one huge window which could be wound down during the great heats as it was now, for the evening was oppressively hot and sultry. Having been there in the daytime, Gregory knew that from the window there was one of the finest views imaginable. It looked out over the President's Palace and hundreds of other roofs to the world famous entrance to Rio harbour and to Sugar Loaf Mountain, the outline of which could still be seen against a background of blue black sky, twinkling with a myriad of stars. Further off, across a wide sheet of water, lay another mountainous shore. The Portuguese explorer Gongalvo Coelho had come upon this great area of bays, capes and estuaries on January 1st, 1502. On sailing up into it, he had assumed that he was entering the mouth of a broad river and so erroneously named it River of January. Darkness now hid a great part of this magnificent panorama; but, from eighty feet above the park, which lay immediately below, thousands of lights gleamed in the dusk, giving this valley of the city a fairy like quality.

By unspoken agreement Gregory and Manon de Bois Tracy carried their drinks over to the wrought iron balustrade installed to prevent children or incautious people from falling from the big window. Finding her English halting, he changed his conversation to French, as he was fluent in several languages. She told him that she was in Rio only on a holiday and that her home was in Fiji. Friends there had given her an introduction to the wife of the First Secretary of the British Embassy, and it was at dinner with them that she had met the Wellesleys. Afterwards she and Patricia had chanced to talk about the occult, and it was this that had led to her being invited to witness the Macumba ceremony that night.

As she talked, in an attractive, slightly lisping voice, she was studying Gregory acutely. Owing to the habitual stoop with which he walked, his lean head thrust a little forward like a bird of prey, he appeared shorter than his five foot eleven inches. His hair had turned nearly white, owing to the strain he had endured while a secret agent for long periods in Germany during the Second World War; yet his face belied his age. The only two furrows on it were deep laughter lines curving from nose to chin on either side of his mouth. An old scar ran up from the corner of his left eyebrow to his forehead, on which the thick hair came down smoothly in a widow's peak. From long habit, when speaking in a foreign language, he used his hands to stress the views he uttered. On international affairs his opinions were well informed, highly practical and always tinged with a cynical humour.

Gregory had not been talking to Manon de Bois Tracy for very long before she decided that he was quite an exceptional man considerably older than herself, but nonetheless attractive for that, and one with whom it might prove highly rewarding to become on intimate terms; while Gregory had come to the conclusion that she was the most unusual and intriguing woman he had met for a long time.