They rejoined the trail back by the shallow pond. The invisible sun was over the forest now; the tunnel had taken on a paler green glow, almost chartreuse, and dark sweat stains had begun to blossom under the armpits of Selene's blouse by the time they reached their destination. This was a dense patch of jungle by the side of the trail, which to Selene was indistinguishable from the rest of the forest except for a greater profusion of overhanging liana vines.
"Cure-root," said the boy, pointing to a brown vine as thick as Selene's ankle dangling through the bottom-most layer of the forest canopy, twining around the base of an elephant-leg tree inches from the forest floor, then climbing the trunk back up into the canopy. "Know why dey call it so?" He unslung his machete and hacked once at the woody vine where it joined the trunk of the tree, then once again a few feet higher; he pried the severed section of vine away from the tree, and handed it to Selene. " 'Cause a little of dis ga cure you of livin'."
She took it, examined one of the cleanly cut ends, from which a candy-cane pink sap was beginning to ooze. Cure-root, she thought. A liana vine. Instant paralysis. As she put two and two together the root began to tremble in her hands. It occurred to her that she was even luckier to be alive than she'd first suspected. She wondered if anybody else had ever been dosed with belladonna, distachya, and curare in the space of three days and lived to tell about it.
Oh my poor, poor liver! she thought shakily, handing the vine back to Joe-Pie.
* * *
The process of preparing the curare took about two hours. Granny worked under the shade tree in her backyard. First she shaved the bark off the cure-root and put it aside, then shaved the rest of the root into a small iron kettle. That she hooked onto a small chain hanging from a pulley over the great cauldron, and had Selene lower it partway down into the boiling water. Then at intervals she sprinkled into the bobbing kettle first the crushed leaves from the water plant, then the gray-green leaves from the bush, then the bark shavings, and lastly the purple flowers.
It was Joe-Pie's job to keep the fire up. Selene was given charge of the chain, maintaining a constant temperature in the kettle by lowering or raising it at Granny's instructions, while the weed woman danced with surprising spryness around the cauldron as the blue smoke shifted, tossing in leaves or stirring the kettle with one hand, holding the skirt of her black dress out of the fire with the other.
At the very end of the process, Granny had Selene lower the kettle into the cauldron all the way to the lip while Joe-Pie worked a hand bellows to raise the temperature of the fire. Selene secured the last loop of the chain to the nail at the base of the tree, then approached the cauldron. Granny warned her to hold her breath, then let her peek in. A violet-white paste in the bottom of the kettle was being condensed at a rapid boil. Granny sent Selene back to the chain, and at the precise moment that the last of the moisture had cooked away, signaled Selene to raise the kettle as high as it would go.
Granny backed away a step. Using her long wooden paddle as leverage, she overturned the heavy cauldron, sending the boiling water pouring down on the fire. A dreadful hissing and billowing ensued. Selene gasped—it looked as if Joe-Pie had been steamed alive, but gradually he reappeared, grin first, through the blue-white smoke. "Dot's de best part," he assured her.
* * *
When Tosh arrived to drive Selene and Joe-Pie to the beach, he was bursting with news. According to Francis Sylvester, a cab-driver who had served the Drinkers at the Greathouse both as a Drink (sort of a feudal blood donor) and a chauffeur, there hadn't been any unusual visitors at the Greathouse—or at least not any who had taken cabs. But something out of the ordinary had taken place in the past few months: around the end of August Mr. Whistler himself had flown to England to visit his father.
Just how out of the ordinary that was, though, was something perhaps only Selene could truly have appreciated. Jamey and his father hadn't seen each other in thirty years. He never talked much about his old man either. It occurred to her as Tosh dropped them off at a small lagoon protected by a grove of poisonous manchineel trees just south of the Old Town that she didn't even know his first name; he'd always been referred to facetiously as Whistler's Father. Oddly enough, she did remember his address, though—No. 11 was how Jamey always referred to the home of his youth. No. 11 Cranwick Square. She reviewed what little else she knew about Whistler's Father while floating on her back in the blood-warm Caribbean while Joe-Pie snorkeled for lobsters.
Like the son, the father had been born wealthy. The bulk of the Whistler legacy came from the building of the trans-Russian railway, a fortune that was enhanced over a hundred years later with the discovery of a trunkful of genuine James Abbott McNeill Whistler drawings in a Baltimore attic.
What else did she know? Jamey was born in Baltimore, she remembered; the family vacationed on Santa Luz, where Jamey was cared for by a Luzan nanny. But when Jamey was around twelve the old man, who fancied himself a painter, had moved the family to London to carry on the Whistler tradition. Went ten years without selling so much as a cartoon. How had Jamey put it? "Failure is always a tragedy. Even a rich man's failure is a tragedy. Unless he hangs on to all his money. Then it's a comedy—he gets to keep everything but his self-respect."
Jamey's mother died when he was nineteen, whereupon his father had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown; according to Jamey the old man had been on antipsychotic medications ever since. As far as she knew, he had never remarried. When Jamey turned twenty-one, Nanny Eames invited him back to Santa Luz for a visit and initiated him as a Drinker. Within a year of his return to London he was expelled from the country for the crime of curing his father's housekeeper of migraine through the use of an old English folk remedy: bleeding. It was quite an amusing story, the way Jamey told it. "So what if I drank the stuff?" he had protested to Selene years later. "The bloody megrims went away, didn't they?"
But the old man had gone ballistic when Jamey was arrested. "Monster was the kindest thing he called me. Oh man, his meds weren't working that day. That's when I got my never-darken-my-towels-again speech. Haven't seen or spoken to him since."
Jamey had always left Selene with the impression that he had been permanently eighty-sixed from the UK, as well as his father's presence. But if that were true then Whistler and his father must have reconciled, or Jamey wouldn't have risked reentering the country in order to see him.
Just then Joe-Pie interrupted Selene's train of thought with a shout of "Lobster!" She swam over to him; he pointed down to the ocean bed. Her mask and snorkel were hanging around her neck. She spat into the mask and swished the spit around to keep it from fogging, the way Joe-Pie had taught her, slipped it over her head, took the snorkel between her teeth, and blew it clear. When she rolled over and peered under the water she could make out on the bottom a tailless, bluish-white carapaced critter hunkered next to a pile of rocks or coral that resembled ossified human brains.
"Watch me," said Joe-Pie. He swam a dozen yards parallel to the shore, in the direction that the lobster was facing, taking a loop on a pole from behind his back, then diving straight for the bottom. He approached the lobster from the front, and when he'd gotten close enough, extended the pole so that the loop was immediately behind the crustacean. Then he propelled himself forward, and the lobster scuttled backward into the loop. The boy pulled the pole up sharply, tightening the wire; the lobster, claws scrabbling frantically, was lifted from the ocean floor.
Joe-Pie swam to the surface, waving the lobster at the end of the pole in Selene's face; she yelped and splashed away from it. "It may not be much of a nose," she informed him, swimming farther out to sea, "but it's the only one I've got."
"You got two ears," Joe-Pie pointed out gleefully. She ignored him, and he left her alone to reboard her tram of thought. Now where was she? Oh yes—was there any chance it was Whistler's father who was behind whatever had happened to Jamey? Had the old fellow gone round the bend again? Or perhaps something had happened during Jamey'
s visit. Another quarrel over blood? Couldn't have been over money—both Whistlers had more money than God. And from what Jamey had told her about his grandfather's will, one of those WASP-y generation-skipping trusts, Jamey would get the rest of the money when the old man died, but it wouldn't work the other way around: when Jamey died, the Whistler Legacy would go to his children, not his father.
Suddenly it dawned on Selene that circumstances had changed considerably in the past week. If Lourdes and little Cora had indeed perished in the fire, then Jamey's only living heir was Martha Herrick. But there were only two people on earth who knew that Jamey was Martha's father: the long-lost Moll Herrick, and Selene herself. And the only proof of Martha's paternity was a letter from Moll to Selene, a letter that was sewn safely into the lining of Selene's Book of Shadows.
Which was where it would remain for the time being, Selene decided, rolling over onto her stomach and striking out for shore. Martha Herrick might be a wealthy woman someday soon, but until Selene knew just who was trying to kill Jamey, and why, she would keep that knowledge to herself.
As for her next step, once again she'd found a simple one. And fortunately, she had brought along her passport.
* * *
Tosh insisted on driving Selene down to the seaplane dock on Saturday morning, though it was only a few blocks from the hotel to the harbor. She tried to pay him for his services, and had just about talked him into taking at least his gas money when they heard the clip-clop of goat hooves on cobblestones. Tosh caught sight of Granny in her black dress and bonnet. Hurriedly he thrust the money at Selene, ducked back into his cab, and steered one-handed away from the seaplane shack as the goat cart approached—Selene had the distinct impression that the other hand was cupping his balls.
Joe-Pie couldn't wait for the goat cart to reach the dock. He jumped off the little backward-facing rear seat and raced across the cobbled square toward Selene as if he were going to jump into her arms. As always, however, he stopped short and thrust out his hand; she shook it solemnly.
"Thank you for coming to see me off, Joe-Pie." His eyes darted down to the shopping bag at her feet. She reached down and handed him his parting gift as the Rastaman and Granny climbed out of the cart; he had the paper off and the box open before their feet hit the ground. Reeboks, of course.
"Wit pump," he breathed reverently. "Cool."
For the Rastaman, Selene had purchased a new yachting cap with an anchor patch at the front, navy blue to replace the white one gone yellow from age and smoke, and for the weed woman, she had a bag of devil's cherries. In return, Granny handed her a paper of pins. Selene opened her bag, found the little "For Our Guests" sewing packet from her hotel room, opened the cellophane package of needles, and slipped Granny's present inside.
"Be careful now," Granny warned her.
"You be careful with those," Selene replied.
Another round of formal handshakes, Luzan style, then a round of hugs, California style, before Selene boarded the gently rocking seaplane. She looked back once as the plane taxied toward the mouth of the harbor—the three of them were climbing back onto the goat cart—then hurriedly fastened her seat belt as the Goose gained speed, pontoons thumping against the waves, each bounce a little higher than the one before, until at last they were airborne.
The plane banked in a circle and flew back over the island; Selene pressed her nose against the Plexiglas for a last glimpse of the cozy little harbor. She could make out the goat cart crossing the square far below, the Rastaman in his blue cap, and Granny in her black bonnet facing forward—a blue dot and a black dot. Joe-Pie was a red dot perched on the backboard, his new shoes bright white dots on his feet.
Selene waved through the salt-rimed window. He couldn't have seen her, but perhaps something got through, because as the Blue Goose flew over the island the boy took off his cap and waved it over his head in a wide circle. Then he leaned back, stuck his feet straight up in the air, and waved his new Reeboks too.
CHAPTER 6
« ^ »
"Mr. Yardley? If you'd come with me, sir?"
If Aldo had been higher when the Customs official at Heathrow took his elbow he might have taken his chances and made a break for it, but as he hadn't had a drink since just before boarding the plane in Athens, he meekly let the man lead him to a holding room that was bare save for a wooden bench and a wall-length mirror—one-way, no doubt.
Aldo's first thought was that his passport had soured for some reason. He should have had more than a few weeks with it. Yardley, a gay American from San Francisco, had been traveling alone, was estranged from his family, had lost most of his friends to AIDS, and was not expected home until spring. In fact, the way Aldo saw it, he'd been doing the fellow a favor. Instead of a prolonged and agonizing death (Yardley had scrupulously warned Aldo of his HIV-positive status—not that Aldo cared, blood drinkers being as immune to AIDS as they were to other diseases), the man had died suddenly, the last words he heard were tendernesses whispered into his ear as Aldo tightened the garrote, and he died with an erection that would have been the envy of any living man. And if his final emission had been involuntary—well, in the larger sense, what orgasm wasn't?
There were, however, other reasons for Aldo to have been detained, he recognized, shifting uncomfortably on the hard bench. He hadn't been holding any explosives or incendiaries, having used up the last of his Plastique Jesus statue, dental-floss det cord, and toothpaste napalm in Tahoe, but it was always possible the customs-house dogs had sniffed some residue. He refused to panic, though: for Aldo, fear was an intolerable sensation, fear was the orphan he'd left behind him when the Securitate had plucked him from under the grim roof of the Orfelinat Gheorghiu-Dej. Besides, whatever it was they were detaining him for, it couldn't be anything as serious as murder or arson, otherwise they'd have cuffed him already—and they'd certainly never have left him alone like this.
Then he caught sight of himself in the mirror across the room and realized that of course they hadn't left him alone. Aldo immediately rearranged his features to communicate anxiety to the unseen observers on the other side of the one-way glass; he had been on that other side often enough with the Third Branch, where the rule of thumb held that the more innocent a suspect was, the guiltier he or she would act, and vice versa.
Just then one more possibility occurred to Aldo. The only person on earth who knew that Aldo was traveling as John Yardley was Aldo's employer. Could the old man have turned him in for some reason? But why? Surely not to avoid paying Aldo—with the old man as wealthy as he was, and in this thing as deep as he was, it would be crazy for him to take a chance like that. Then Aldo remembered, with a sinking heart, that he'd known that his employer was nebun—crazy as a shithouse rat—from the very first. He found his thoughts drifting back to their first meeting, six weeks ago…
* * *
It had been an unseasonably cold September night, and Aldo had popped into the Cock and Fender as much for the fire as for the pint or the companionship. As he walked into the pub, Danny Dimitriu, a sneak thief and pickpocket who resembled Peter Lorre on a starvation diet, and was even lower on the Suterana totem pole than Aldo (his only talent was with dead bodies: Danny was a wizard at making a cadavru disappear), had hailed him from a corner booth. "Striescu! Over here!"
He hurried over and clapped Danny smartly on the back of the head.
"Hey, what was that for?" whined Danny in Romanian.
"For calling my name aloud, you idiot," replied Aldo, also in his native tongue. Idiot—the word was the same as in English.
"Sorry. Buy me a beer and I'll tell you something to your advantage."
And over a pint of Guinness—Romanian beer was one thing no Romanian every waxed homesick over—Danny told him about the nebun—the nutcase—who'd been in earlier that evening, expressing an interest in Romanian folktales. "I gave him the usual story about the nosferatu, but he's done his homework. He wants to know about the real thing. I thought of you right o
ff."
"Sounds interesting," Aldo said, while trying not to look interested. Though neither man had mentioned it, both knew that the haggling—the Romanian national pastime—had already begun. "Maybe I'll give him a call. I don't suppose you happen to know the number?"
"Oh, but do suppose, my old friend," Danny had replied. "Suppose away!"
It only took another pint—and a menacing look—to obtain the number. The nebun was there within twenty minutes of Aldo's call. It wasn't hard to spot him—the old man was six and a half feet tall, wearing a topcoat over what appeared to be pajamas; his ankles were bare, and on his feet were soft tan sheepskin bedroom slippers. A pair of cheap plastic sunglasses, the kind you grab off a drugstore rack, obscured his eyes.
Aldo raised a forefinger discreetly; the man picked up the gesture from all the way across the bar, through the smoke and the dim light and the black lenses of the sunglasses, and made a beeline for him, moving with a graceful ease that would have been remarkable for a man half his apparent age.
"Are you Aldo?"
"If you're Jonas."
"Call me Jo. I understand you're an expert on v—"
Aldo cut him off. "Perhaps you should order a drink and we can continue our discussion at a more private location—say that last booth in the corner." He was employing what would have been his own natural Romanian accent, had he not been cured of it in the Institut Limba Strain, the foreign language school run by the Third Branch.
"But it's occupied."
"They'll be leaving soon."
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