Yes and no—as the Checker rolled slowly by, headed downhill, Rutherford stuck his head out the window. "You ain' no in-surance lady," he yelled to her on his way past.
"What—why do you say that?" called Selene, trotting after the retreating taxi, inhaling exhaust fumes to go along with her incipient heatstroke.
Rutherford sped ahead to put some distance between them, then leaned out the window again and called back to her. "You know who lived here. You ain' a Drinker yourself, but you know. 'Cause if you ain' know, you ain' say 'M'give you ten dollars to wait.' You ga say, 'Why you ain' want to wait here, Mistah Driver? What you scairt of, jumbies?' "
She had nearly reached his bumper; he increased the distance again. "Me whole life, me ain' had no dealings wit Drinkers—now ain' de time to start."
Selene watched the Checker until it disappeared around the bend of the narrow trail. She sat down dazedly on a wide mossy stump with delicate ferns growing from the center. Her scalp was tingling; dark shapes swam across her vision. She put her head between her knees, breathing deeply and slowly until the light-headedness passed.
CHAPTER 2
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The abundant ivies and climbing vines that had once obscured the high stone wall surrounding the Greathouse compound were shriveled into crispy black ropes, but the forest was already at work reclaiming its own: green shoots crept across the path that circled the old plantation grounds, and a few had even begun climbing the scorched wall. Selene followed the path halfway around the compound until she found the entrance, a high, wide archway cut half into, and half under, the wall.
The walkway dipping under the arch was paved with moss-covered bricks so slippery she had to put out her arms like a tightrope walker to keep her balance. Her eyes scarcely had time to adjust to the dank darkness before she was in the light again, staring openmouthed at a Hiroshima-like landscape, a garden of gray ash and broken walls, freestanding chimneys scorched and blackened.
Here and there the ash assumed fantastic shapes, like a surreal topiary; Selene poked at one of these with a charred stick until the overlay of soot crumbled away to reveal a refrigerator. She tugged at the handle; the door yielded grudgingly, to reveal three shelves of Clamato jars, most of which had shattered in the heat of the fire. The sticky crimson residue spattered all over the inside of the refrigerator bore little resemblance to Clamato juice: she had stumbled upon Jamey's private stash.
Quickly she shut the door again. She'd guarded Whistler's secret for so many years that it had become a reflex. After looking around for something to wipe her hands on, Selene settled for clapping them together, producing a sudden cloud of gray dust; as she did so she caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye and wheeled around. Nothing there. She tried to tell herself it was only a puff of smoke, cinders stirring in the breeze, but the pounding of her heart suggested otherwise.
Her knees grew weak again, and her head began to swim, but here in the garden of ashes there was no place to sit. At the other end of the compound a giant gray wedding cake arose from a wide flat ashen plain. Selene scuffed her way across the courtyard, kicking up puffs of smoke. There go my new Mephistos, she thought. A hundred-and-forty-dollar pair of sandals. Not even broken in yet. Then a self-conscious laugh, and another prayer: Let that be the worst of my problems.
As she neared the wedding cake, she saw that under the shroud of ash was a two-tiered stone well covered with a conical roof. From the roof a bucket was suspended from a pulley rig; the bottom tier of the well was a circular bench. With her stick she beat and scraped away a clear patch, then sat down with her back to the well. Her mouth was dry. It occurred to her that all she'd had to eat or drink that morning was a single cup of coffee. No wonder she was feeling faint.
Selene climbed up onto the bench; kneeling with her back to the courtyard, she looked down into the well. Couldn't see to the bottom, but she could smell the water. The bucket was suspended from a chain, and the chain tied off around a rusty spur of metal on the inside of the well. She unhooked it and lowered the bucket down until she heard a splash, then began hauling up. The bucket was heavy now; she leaned away, putting her back into it.
"Need some help wit dot, lady?" said a voice behind her.
With a cry Selene let go of the chain; it whipped through her hands and the bucket hit the water again with a hollow splash. She turned to see a Luzan boy standing at her elbow. "Oh my," she gasped, clapping a hand to her chest. "Where did you come from? You scared the p—the life out of me."
"Come from? Me bahn heah, lady," the boy said indignantly, his fists resting on his narrow hips like the old TV Superman. "Where you come from?"
He was a skinny, shirtless black kid in a pair of baggy red shorts and a faded red baseball cap jammed over jug handle ears. He looked a little like Stan Laurel, if Laurel had been a ten-year-old Luzan.
"California." She stuck out her hand. "My name is Selene."
"Joe-Pie." He took her hand by the fingertips and shook it vigorously.
"Pleased to meet you, Joe-Pie," she said, smiling inwardly. According to the lore, a few leaves of joe-pye Weed—Eupatorium—carried in the mouth would inspire love; carried in the pocket, they were said to guarantee respect for the bearer. "I'm afraid my taxi driver drove off and left me."
"You ain' so afraid as he," said the boy. "Dot mon haul ass so fast his shadow ain' cotch him yet." He hopped up onto the bench and began hauling on the chain; together they drew the brimming bucket from the well. Selene took a careful sip from the rim, half expecting a mouthful of ashes, but the water was sweet, with only a trace of ferrous aftertaste. She tilted the bucket to her lips and drank greedily, spilling half the contents down the front of her blouse, which was now a see-through (she was ever so glad she'd worn her new lacy brassiere), and soaking her shorts and her poor sandals in the process.
"Better so?" asked Joe-Pie.
"Much better," she replied, handing him the bucket.
He poured a narrow trickle of water directly into his mouth without spilling a drop, then lowered the pail, regarding her solemnly over the rim. "You still look green as goatweed," he decided. "You best come home wit me. Me Granny, she's de oldest weed woman on de island—she ga fix you right up." He put the bucket down, hopped off the bench, and held his hand out for Selene.
Stuck in midquest, fresh out of ideas, simple or otherwise, Selene hardly had to think it over. The mythical aspects of her plight were all but unavoidable. Here I am, lost in the forest. A little boy appears out of nowhere to guide me. Ecce puer. Like I have a fucking choice, right?
"Best offer I've had all day, Joe-Pie," she said, taking the small hand in her own.
* * *
A few hundred yards from the Greathouse Joe-Pie ducked off the dundo track, and Selene followed him down a verdant footpath that narrowed to a tunnel through a world gone altogether green, every shade imaginable, emerald, kelly, lime, moss, avocado, olive, jade, leek. Even the air was green, a pale hue like the inside of a cucumber.
It was all terribly disconcerting. Selene felt a little like Alice chasing the White Rabbit as she ducked under overhanging branches and dodged dangling vines, trying to avoid the roots and rocks underfoot without losing sight of Joe-Pie's bobbing red cap as he darted ahead of her down the warrenlike trail. She kept calling to him to take it easy, but asking a boy that age to walk is like asking a hummingbird to fly slowly. Hover or zip, that's the extent of their capabilities. By the time they'd reached the bottom of the trail Selene was bathed in sweat again, but no cooler for it; the extreme humidity of the rain forest prohibited evaporation. The tunnel gave out onto the road directly across from the small clearing with the log cabin that Selene had noticed on her way up into the forest. Joe-Pie was waiting for her.
"Is this your house?" she asked him, bending forward with her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath.
"Me and Granny." He pointed to a column of smoke that seemed to be coming from behind the cabin. "See?" He tu
gged at her wrist and she followed him around the side of the cabin. When she turned the corner Selene saw the source of the smoke. Across a small dirt yard, an enormous iron cauldron was suspended by chains from a tree limb over a smoldering fire of lignum vitae wood; behind it, through the blue haze, she could just make out a silhouetted figure in a wide bonnet and a long black aproned dress stirring the cauldron with a wooden spoon the size of a canoe paddle. "Granny," called Joe-Pie excitedly. "Look what I—" "Cheese and bread, boy!" The woman bustling around from behind the cauldron, wiping her hands on her apron, adjusting her stiff black-ribboned straw bonnet, was a brown-black crone, tough and rubbery and wrinkled as a dried currant. "M'send you out for ladyroot and you come back wit de whole lady. Good ting me ain' send you to fetch goatweed or elephant-leg."
"Dis is Selene, Granny. Taxi man left her up by Greathouse." Granny stopped in her tracks. "Greathouse, you say?" The boy explained about hiding in the bushes when he heard the sound of a car engine climbing the dundo track toward the Greathouse; about seeing two people drive up the hill, but only one drive down; about following Selene into the compound, and spying on her long enough to see that she needed help. "Don't fret none, Granny," he concluded. "It's all bald daylight up deh now—she ain' be Drinker."
"Boy, you ain' know what she be, or ain' be." She peered across the yard at Selene. "What were you doing up by Greathouse, you?" Quickly, Selene considered her response. She didn't want to lie to the crone—things were getting too freaking mythical for that—but she didn't want to appear cowed, either. She opted for a bold joke: "I dunno, picking goatweed?"
It must have struck the right chord—the weed woman came closer. "Oh? And what you do wit goatweed after you pick it?" she asked slyly.
Mythicaler and mythicaler, thought Selene. She had presented herself as a woman of knowledge, and been challenged accordingly by the crone. Fortunately goatweed, the smallest member of the Saint-John's-wort family, known as sinjinweed to the English, corrupted to injun wort in the States, was a staple of the Wiccan pharmacopoeia. "If I were feeling sad, I could make an amulet of the flowers to wear around my neck. If I needed protection, I'd dry a branch and hang it over my window to keep evil spirits at bay. Or maybe I'd give a few leaves to a maiden to put under her pillow so that she could see her future husband in her dreams."
The old woman had listened politely, fiddling absently with her bonnet, removing one of the pins that secured the dangling black ribbon; when Selene had finished, she turned to her grandson. "Leave us now, Joe-Pie."
"But Granny—"
"Don't but your Granny. You want to listen to woman's talk, Granny ga make a woman out of you wit me razor. Go fetch me de ladyroot me ask you to fetch previous. And dis time don't come back without, else Granny can't make Berta Robinson no love-powders, and she ain' ga pay Granny no money, and you ain' ga have no new Beebops on Christmas Day."
"Reeboks, Granny, Reeboks," the boy called cheerfully over his shoulder as he left the yard. "De kind you pump."
The old woman smiled fondly as the boy rounded the corner. "Friendly boy," she said, but the instant they were alone she seized Selene's wrist tightly in one hand and jabbed the pin she'd removed from her hat ribbon into the back of Selene's hand. Selene sprang back, but it was too late—her arm was numb to the elbow.
Out of the frying pan… she thought, confused but surprisingly peaceful as the yard began to spin around her. She never did manage to finish the thought.
CHAPTER 3
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Technically, the villa on Lamiathos appeared to be a difficult job, even for as skilled and passionate a firebug as Aldo, as he'd discovered when he went out to reconnoiter late Tuesday night. Unlike the redwood Marin A-frame, the clapboard El Sobrante farmhouse, or the wood-beamed Tahoe Manor, the stone walls and terra-cotta tiles of the villa would make poor tinder. (The Greathouse had been another matter: constructed in the Danish fashion, the walls were two-foot-thick stucco, but a stucco with a molasses base. Thrifty bastards, those Danish sugar planters. So once the propane, gasoline, and oil tanks had been blown, the rest of the place had burned spectacularly. Or so Aldo had read in the Virgin Islands Sentinel: he'd used time-delayed fuses in order to catch the vampires asleep during the daytime without getting caught by daylight himself, and was back in his bedroom at the Kings Frederick and Christian Arms with the curtains drawn long before the Greathouse had gone up.) But the villa on Lamiathos was wired for electricity, so there weren't all those lovely tanks to blow. And since he'd been seen making inquiries about the place, he couldn't use any sort of explosive or accelerant—better if it appeared to be an accident. But it was difficult to effect an accidental-looking fire in an empty dwelling, unless the wiring was either very old or very new. Fortunately the villa was occupied by the lessor's son, who lived there when Whistler was not in residence—nine or ten months a year. Even better, Aldo had observed for himself, the young man was a smoker. As so often happened, it would prove to be a fatal habit.
* * *
Late Wednesday night Aldo returned to the villa on foot. A two-mile hike, but as he'd polished off the contents of his vacuum bottle before leaving his room, it proved to be an enjoyable and soul-stirring walk indeed, even on such a starless night. The inky sea stretched to the black horizon; wind-whipped waves broke against the foot of the cliffs that dropped sharply from the edge of a goat path hugging the rocky shore of the island.
The path ended abruptly at the border of Whistler's, or rather, George Demetrios's, property, where a barbed-wire fence had been erected across the ancient right-of-way. Aldo dropped his kit bag over the top strand of wire and vaulted the four-foot fence easily. His original thought was to jimmy the sliding glass door that led directly from the patio to the master bedroom, but when he saw a light on in the living room he changed his mind and rang the front doorbell instead, using his elbow so as not to leave a fingerprint.
"Hey English, you loose?" Georgie Demetrios, the ne'er-do-well son of the wealthiest property owner on Lamiathos, came to the door in pajamas patterned like mattress ticking. He and Aldo had met briefly at the taverna the night before when Aldo had purchased his round for the house.
"Loose as a goose," replied Aldo promptly, surprised at the greeting.
"I mean loose—you loose your way?"
"Lost," Aldo corrected him. "You mean lost."
"Yes, lost. You lost?" Bleary-eyed, his glossy black hair night-tossed, Georgie was still not a bad-looking fellow, Aldo thought, though starting to run to alcoholic bloat.
"No, not actually." Aldo smiled disarmingly, dropped his kit bag, raised two fingers into a peace sign, then jabbed them violently into Georgie's eyes with savage speed and pinpoint accuracy. The Greek shrieked, grabbed his eyes, dropped to his knees. In an instant Aldo was on him from behind, reaching around his rib cage with both arms and squeezing the air from his lungs with a whoosh, taking great care not to break any ribs. This way, when they found what was left of the body, there would be no obvious marks on it—not even the eyes, which would have melted as the heat from the fire neared the hundred degrees Celsius mark.
Aldo kept squeezing until the young man was unconscious, then eased off. He knew better than to strangle his victim this time, forensic pathology having reached the point where a cause of death could be determined for even the most pathetically charred of corpses. Georgie would have to die by either smoke or fire. Aldo couldn't even risk smothering him with a pillow. A damn shame. Aldo preferred women victims, but there was an added bonus to asphyxiating men: the male victim's involuntary erection and seminal emission at the moment of death could be quite a treat if you timed it right.
But he could still make use of the body—would have to, now that his thermos was empty. He grabbed his kit bag off the doorstep, locked the front door behind him, knelt at the side of the fallen man, and removed from the kit bag a pair of surgical gloves and an enormous veterinary syringe used for drawing fluid from horses' knees. The glass barrel would hold a
half liter of blood, but he didn't want to be greedy. A pint—not quite a full syringe—would be enough to get him back home to England.
Back home to England. Never dreamed as a child in the Bucharest orphanage that he'd be saying that someday, Aldo thought as he donned his gloves and unbuttoned Georgie's pajama top. He drew his pint through an axillary vein, so that the armpit hair would hide the puncture mark. It was almost certainly an unnecessary precaution, as the body was to be torched—but then, as he'd been taught by Major Strada, no precaution was ever unnecessary. (Advice the major should have heeded himself. Had he done so, he might have survived the fall of Ceausescu as successfully as most of the other Securitate functionaries of his rank.)
After filling his syringe and allowing himself a quick squirt as an aperitif, Aldo replaced the syringe in the bag, rebuttoned Georgie's pajama top, carried the still unconscious body into the bedroom, and laid it on the bed. There was already a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a half full bottle of ouzo, and an empty tumbler on the bedside table. This was going to be almost too easy, he thought, pouring out a glassful of Georgie's favorite beverage, then using his own Zippo to fire up one of Georgie's nasty unfiltered Greek coffin nails.
His next move was to pour most of the contents of the glass carefully along the front of the pajamas, from throat to crotch, then splash the last of it into Georgie's face. At that, the man started coming round. The eyelids fluttered, opened, as Aldo tossed the empty glass onto the bed while puffing furiously on the cigarette without inhaling—he'd given up smoking a few months before, except for the occasional cigar.
The two-finger fork didn't seem to have done any permanent damage to Georgie's sight: the puzzled brown eyes widened as comprehension began to dawn, at which point Aldo dropped the cigarette on the front of the pajamas, just below the throat. Whomp—a beautiful blue sheet of flame played all across the man's chest. Then, as the pajamas caught, the flames turned from blue to a smoke-smudged black and yellow, and the body jackknifed into a sitting position.
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