This is another one of those stories that I know has some partial truth. The main character "Jim" was in fact a fellow veteran of my father's and he was indeed a police officer in New York. As for the rest, because at the beginning, my father gives a nod to Edith Hamilton with a quote, from her book "Mythology", I assume the rest is entirely fiction. Either way, I hope you agree it is interesting.
ARTEMIS UNVEILED
"Actateon, a great hunter was out hunting and, hot and thirsty entered a grotto where a stream widened into a pool. But all unknowing he had chanced upon the favorite bathing place of Artemis, and at the very moment when the goddess had let fall her garments and stood in her naked beauty on the water's edge. The offended divinity gave not a thought to whether the youth had purposely insulted her or had come there in all innocence. She flung into his face drops from her wet hand and he was changed into a stag. His heart became a deer's heart and he who had never known fear before was afraid and fled. His dogs saw him fleeing. They fell upon him, his own faithful hounds, and killed him." Edith Hamilton, 'Mythology'.
IN ANOTHER AGE AND TIME
Big Jim called as usual just before Christmas. He has phoned me at this time of year for more than twenty-five years. We were buddies overseas in World War II and served together after the war in an army reserve unit. Jim's civilian capacity was, before and after the War, as a police officer in New York City. He lives quietly now that he is reclusive and at an age when we are fated to a redundancy of memory and a repetition of oft told tales. I assume I will now be regaled with another oldie. I am wrong. He mentions a name that has never occurred before in his garrulous dissertations--his partner, Barney, a detective with whom he spent years in the Vice Squad in those regions of the Bronx which, if one is wont to draw comparisons of degradation, was and still is comparable to a nether region of the ancient Greek underworld, Tartarus, or Hell.
"I know," he begins, "I never talked about Barney, and for good reason. I didn't believe his story at first. One thing for certain, he had guts. It was worth your life to venture into the areas of some of our assignments; you know, numbers, vice, prostitution, and murder were a daily occurrence. Nothing deterred him. Barney was a hunter. He was fearless and he was feared. He was hated particularly by a new enclave of sectarian criminals from revolutionary torn Haiti. They were dreaded for a hitherto unknown type of criminal retribution--the profligate use of the machete.
It was rumored they were headed by a woman, one never seen but prominent in legend.
Then, one day Barney lost it. I can almost name the day it happened. It was the day we were on a drug and murder outbreak in the Haitian enclave of the South Bronx. We had a warrant to search a particular building. When we came out there was fear in his eyes. He acted as if there were someone or something behind him, and his hand was locked tightly on the butt of his pistol.
One day, when he had it particularly bad, he told me his reason for his sudden change from hunter to prey. It came afer we consumed a half bottle of Bourbon at a local gin mill.
'Remember Jim,' he said, 'when we tossed that building on Cortlandt Street. I open the door on one of the most elaborate bath rooms I ever see, white marble, an immense tub, more like a pool--blinding golden fixtures. When I walk in she rises from the suds filled bath, brazenly nude, soap foam dotting the perfection of her golden brown body, a beauty such as I have never seen. I am startled, and paralyzed. She stares at me coldly and flicks a handful of suds in my face.'
I laughed when he told me all this. 'Forget it Barney," I said, 'that's pure supersition. There's no such thing as voodoo.'
I stopped laughing when his body was found, torn, as if by wild dogs."
