The City of Lost Fortunes

by Bryan Camp

  Criminel’s snout twisted in a sneer. The whites of his eyes seemed filled with blood. He opened his mouth—to say something vulgar and threatening, to speak the words of a spell—but Jude didn’t give him the opportunity. He drew back a fist, the one that still held the gris-gris bag, and shoved it as far as he could down Criminel’s throat, yanking his arm back just as Criminel’s jaws snapped shut, scraping a layer of skin off of his knuckles on the canine fangs.

  Jude shouted the word for close, sealing Criminel’s mouth shut tight, just as he’d done to Barren in the cemetery. The loa dropped Jude, who landed on his feet and backed away, skin flushed and heart thumping. Criminel fell to his knees, clawing at his lips, making choked, gagging noises, his breath coming in shudders.

  Jude turned toward the tree loa and started to laugh, amazed that he was still on his feet. Bois made a hesitant move toward Jude, his long, multiple limbs held up in what, moments before, would have been menacing but now looked cartoonish. Jude raised a fist slick with blood from his split knuckles and—muttering the word for burn—spat fire into the open palm of his other hand. He gave the wooden creature his best “don’t fuck with me” stare. Gotta give me points for showmanship, at least, he thought, forgetting for a moment that Renai could no longer hear his internal dialogue.

  Bois, big as he was, looked from Jude’s fist to Criminel sprawled on the grass and back to Jude, and turned to flee.

  His path was blocked by Cross, who hadn’t been standing there a moment before. Fresh tears of tar leaked from Cross’s hate-filled eyes. He made a savage chopping gesture at Bois and spoke the word that meant close. The wooden loa reached out to Cross, his words like wind through the leaves, but Cross’s magic was already taking effect. Groaning and creaking in a way that seemed somehow painful, Bois became still, became just another tree. Cross smirked and turned his attention to Jude.

  “Look,” Jude said, “if you’re in the middle of something, Renai and I can just come back later.”

  Cross appeared in front of him and, with negligent flicks of his fingers, extinguished the crackling flames from Jude’s palm and jabbed him in the stomach with one slim hand. Though the body he rode stood no higher than Jude’s chest, Cross’s blow knocked him back a couple of steps, made him struggle for balance, yet Cross seemed surprised that Jude stayed on his feet. The spike of adrenaline in Jude’s bloodstream started to recede, replaced by waves of increasing pain. His mind raced. He had no tricks left, and the satchel was far out of reach. There was something, though, something he’d pulled out of the satchel back before he’d been killed. He reached into his shirt and pulled the rosary of marble beads and silver crucifix from around his neck. He held it up so Cross could see it. “Don’t make me use this,” he said. “Just give me back the bag and let us go.”

  Cross chuckled, implacable and callous as distant thunder. “Don’t let the horns fool you, podna,” he said. “I ain’t no demon to get exorcised by the likes of you.”

  Exorcism, Jude thought, that’s it. He knelt down and scooped a small, thick chunk of oak branch off the ground. He threaded the loop of the rosary around the stick, wrapping it around and around, and then held the ends tight with his throbbing, bleeding hand.

  “Fuck you playin’ at?”

  Jude gave the stick an experimental shake, the rosary beads clattering against the oak. It wasn’t the best asson—the ceremonial rattle of voodoo rituals—but it might just serve. Especially if the loa in question was already looking for a way in. Jude shook the improvised rattle as hard as he could and sang out at the top of his lungs:

  Papa Legba, open the gate for me, ago eh

  Atibon Legba, open the gate for me

  Open the gate for me, Papa, so I may pass

  when I return I will thank the loa!

  Legba started fighting Cross within Celeste as soon as Jude started chanting, as soon as he called upon the loa to open the way. Celeste’s face shifted from a horned young man’s, to her own, to an old smiling man’s and back again—so swiftly that they all started to look like the same face. She doubled over and trembled, though Jude couldn’t say whether it was from pain or from ecstasy. Nor could he be sure which of the loa would end up with control of her body. He picked up his satchel, his whole body protesting the motion.

  Jude opened his mouth to say something, but Renai called out from the edge of the clearing. “No, it’s cool,” she yelled. “I’ll just untie myself from these creepy fucking magical vines!”

  Jude left Cross and Legba to their struggle and hurried over to Renai, pausing as he stepped over Criminel to reach down and grab Regal’s dagger, strangely grateful that they’d cleaned his blood from the blade. “Language, young lady,” he said as he reached Renai’s side, grinning, until he saw the expression on her face. He dropped to his knees and hugged her, whispering soothing noises.

  “Please, Jude,” she said, hushed as though she was afraid of being overheard, “I don’t want to die here.”

  He tucked the dagger away into his satchel, spoke the knots in the vines open, and helped her to her feet. There were questions he wanted answers to, how Criminel had gotten Regal’s dagger, what Cross knew about what the gods wanted from the satchel, why he’d felt it necessary to have him killed, but none of them were as important as getting Renai out from under these dark trees and back into the light.

  They ran from the clearing and didn’t give the immortals behind them a single glance back.

  By the time they were out of the park, Renai had recovered her composure enough to pull away from Jude, to retie the bandanna around her dreads and give him a “the hell were you thinking” glare. Jude pretended not to see it. Sal came swooping out of the shadows to perch on Jude’s shoulder. “That,” he said, “was the dumbest, most reckless, and ill-advised, stone-cold badass thing I have ever seen.” He looked at Renai. “Right?”

  She shrugged. “S’alright. I was tied up for most of it.”

  “What next?” he asked. “The night is young, right, Jude?”

  Jude’s stomach made some alarming noises. He looked down and saw that his shirt was still all torn and bloody from the knife wounds that had killed him. He reached into his satchel, his gift running out from within him to his fingers once again, as it should be. He pulled out a Beatles T-shirt that a seventeen-year-old Tulane hopeful had lost on a college visit to the city last year. He traded it out for his bloody murder shirt, and this time it was Renai who pretended not to notice that he’d taken off his shirt.

  “Way I see it,” Jude said, “you two had my back against some kind of voodoo god royalty back there. Least I can do is buy you a meal.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  After Sal hacked up his dog-shape from somewhere inside his tiny raven’s gullet, a short walk down St. Charles and around the bend of Carrollton brought them to Camellia Grill, a late-night diner that had been a staple of night owls and half-drunk college kids since the mid-’40s. Jude had been both, at one time or another.

  A line often stretched out the front door due to the limited countertop seating, but Jude’s luck held, and he and Renai and Sal walked right in and claimed a few stools. The only other customers were a handful of tourists—who advertised themselves by wearing Mardi Gras beads in the middle of summer—and a younger white couple sharing an order of fries and laughing over whatever they were showing each other on their phones.

  In a way, the place seemed to be a bubble from the past, the small kitchen of flattop grills and mini-fridges behind the counter staffed entirely by gregarious black men in white chef’s jackets and bow ties—many of whom had worked there for years—who gave you daps to let you know they were your waiter before taking your order.

  When their waiter, Dante, turned and flashed his gold-toothed grill at Jude, the hunger in his stomach shifted like a living thing, and Jude found himself ordering without any semblance of control: enough food for two meals, with coffee and a chocolate freeze (which was like a milkshake only better in some inscruta
ble way) to drink, and a slice of apple pie warmed right on the grill to finish it off. The waiter called their requests out to the cooks, who shouted the order back. If Dante had any problems taking an order from a dog, he gave no sign; indeed, he seemed far more concerned with flirting with Renai once he’d determined that she and Jude weren’t “a thing.” She gave him the sweet eye right back.

  “Mind telling me where your scrawny ass is gonna keep all that food?” Sal asked. “We can’t exactly bring to-go boxes where we’re going.”

  “Sure,” Jude said, “right after you tell me why Dante didn’t blink when a stray dog plopped his furry ass on his bar stool and asked him how it was hanging.”

  Sal’s ears twitched. “Anybody here’s a stray, it’s you.” He leaned forward and lapped at the cup of ice water in front of him.

  Another couple of white folks walked in, a middle-aged woman and a young man, who acted like fist-bumping his waiter was a ridiculous inconvenience and started telling Dante what he “needed” to eat before the waiter had a chance to introduce himself. Jude could see Dante repressing the urge to tell the prick to go fuck himself as he turned away to get their drinks.

  “And?” Jude asked Sal.

  “And I’m a death spirit. People get a glimpse of me, they pretend they didn’t, and then they immediately try real hard to forget that they did.” He gestured with his muzzle in Dante’s direction. “You ask him what I look like? He’d describe the most bland person you’ve ever met. Ten minutes after we leave, I won’t even be a memory. Why you think I’m letting you two drag me around topside like this? Just talking to you like people is worth the ass-chewing I’m gonna get when we get back.”

  Jude had to resist the urge to scratch Sal between the ears, settled instead for patting him on the back, halfway between a human gesture of camaraderie and a doggie “who’s a good boy” thumping on the side. When he touched the psychopomp, Jude’s gift reacted as it had before the storm, alerting him to the presence of Sal’s loss without overwhelming him, handing him a thread he could follow if he chose to tug on it. It felt familiar somehow, a loss he’d touched before, and then it occurred to Jude why Sal had seemed familiar when he’d seen him back in the cemetery where Renai had been entombed.

  “You were the guard dog at Dodge’s card game,” he said.

  Sal’s head drooped, like Jude had just accused him of pissing on the carpet. “Was wondering if you were gonna remember that,” he muttered. “Starting to think we all looked alike to you. Like I said, this psychopomp gig is only part-time. Sometimes I carry messages for the dead back to the living. Sometimes I work security.” He made the dog-shape’s equivalent of a shrug. “It’s a living.”

  Jude didn’t answer, really only half listening, distracted by the hunger worming through his insides, by the fierce itching of the scabbed-over stab wounds that stretched across his chest and stomach, by the desire to throw something heavy at the asshole down the counter. Sal had warned him that part of the magic Cross had used to restore life to his corpse would supercharge his healing, but that it wouldn’t be pleasant . . . and not without its own price. He was tearing his napkin into little strips to keep from scratching.

  He hadn’t caught the change in Sal’s demeanor, so it was a surprise when the psychopomp apologized, his voice heavy with guilt. “I shoulda just done my job,” he said, like he was trying to convince himself as much as Jude, “but I didn’t know you, and I had no idea it was gonna turn out like this and—”

  “Shhh,” Renai said, smoothing back the fur on his head in a way that managed to seem comforting and not demeaning. Jude hadn’t even known she was listening. “Look, nobody’s upset with you, okay? Why don’t you just start from the beginning?”

  Their food arrived, and—after assuring the psychopomp that he was listening—Jude tore into it with an intensity that made even a seasoned waiter like Dante raise an eyebrow. “Ain’t nobody gonna take it from ya,” he said, chuckling. The first few mouthfuls, instead of satisfying, felt like they fell into an abyss as complete as the Devourer’s maw. Sal, whose guilt hadn’t kept him from snapping up his own meal, started explaining even though his mouth was full.

  He hadn’t been hired by Dodge to guard the game, nor—as Jude had assumed—to jump out and startle the players as they arrived. He hadn’t been working for the fortune god at all: it was Legba who’d asked him to be there . . . to keep Jude away from the game entirely. Dodge had taken Sal aside when he arrived and made him a side offer. If he’d make a show of keeping Jude away and then let him in anyway, the fortune god had promised the same thing Jude had promised outside Audubon Park: to help him find what he’d lost when he abandoned his former life.

  “And now I feel like such shit,” Sal said, a whine coming into his voice, “because now you’re dead and she’s dead, and Papa was trying to keep it all from happening. I let him down and I let you down, and here you are buyin’ me a cheeseburger like I ain’t stabbed you in the back.”

  “I didn’t get stabbed in the back,” Jude said, after swallowing the last of his pie. “I got it in the stomach, wanna see?” He made as if to lift his T-shirt.

  “Jude, don’t be such an asshole,” Renai said. “Can’t you—”

  “No, I’m making a point. Did you stick a knife in me? No. That was Baron Criminel. Did you tell him to do it? No, again. Cross did that.” He jerked his head toward Renai. “You didn’t have anything to do with what happened to her, either.”

  Across the counter from them, the young prick with the older companion was telling her a story about getting caught being drunk at work, after he’d had a few too many at lunch with his boys. “I said to myself, ‘This is it, I’m gonna get fired.’ How crazy is that, right?” He spoke with the casual, confident disregard of wealth, of someone who had never actually been fired before, not even—by the sound of it—in this account of showing up intoxicated. Like someone who had never had his will subject to the whim of someone else’s. The kind of person who had been related to every boss he’d ever had, who was simply waiting his turn to be the boss himself.

  Jude’s hunger had subsided to a dull ache, but the itch on one of his wounds had grown to a full-on burn, like someone had poked a soldering iron into his flesh. He reached under his shirt and the skin there was hot, feverish. “I can’t forgive you,” he said to Sal, “but only because there’s nothing to forgive. You couldn’t have stopped me from getting in that game even if you’d tried.”

  Sal chuckled and started to say something, but Jude lurched to his feet and hurried for the bathroom, his hand clutching his belly, the pain becoming suddenly unbearable. This can’t be right, he thought. Just before he left the loud, hissing grill area of the kitchen and made his way back into the prep area, all gleaming stainless steel tables and cooking utensils, he heard Dante tell someone, “Told that boy he was eatin’ too fast.”

  This pain had nothing to do with what he’d eaten, though. It was in his skin, not his stomach. Once he closed and locked the men’s room door, he pulled his shirt up and off, wincing as the motion stretched the muscles near the part of him that burned. In the streaked and dirty mirror that hung over the bathroom’s one sink, Jude examined the wounds that had killed him. They were each about the size and shape of a lipstick kiss left behind on a barroom napkin, puckered with pink-tinged scar tissue and crusted over with reddish-brown scabs. Tentatively, he touched the one that was the source of his concern and found a small, hard bulge beneath the skin of his solar plexus. His heart rate, already elevated from the pain, cranked up into panic. He started imagining what the loa might have shoved in there—just like Sal had done with the doubloon—when it was still an open wound, magical tracking devices or explosives or eggs.

  That last one made his vision go a little gray at the edges.

  Grinding his molars together against the pain, Jude probed the area around the lump and felt it shift. Before he could talk himself out of it, he sucked in a breath and dug at the scab with one fingernail wh
ile the other hand squeezed. For a moment, all he managed was searing agony, and then, a squelch of pus and blood and something hard and pea-shaped and about the size of a dime popped out of him and went plink-plink inside the porcelain of the sink. Relief made his knees a little weak.

  A handful of toilet paper pressed against the reopened wound stopped the surprisingly thin trickle of blood oozing out of him, the itch of reknitting flesh resuming immediately now that he’d removed its obstacle. He peered into the sink and saw, in the drain trap, the pearl that he’d used against Scarpelli—the one he’d accidentally swallowed and then forgotten, assuming it would dissolve in his stomach, like the fabled earring Cleopatra had drunk with her wine. As he washed his hands and let the water rinse off the pearl, he pieced together what must have happened. One of the knife wounds must have pierced whatever digestive organ held the pearl, and his body had been forcing the object out like a splinter, as part of Cross’s resurrection magic.

  Jude fished it out of the drain and dried it off along with his hands, its sense of loss tickling along his fingers, its promise of a greater mystery that he’d felt outside of Scarpelli’s mansion and ignored. Curious, Jude let the knowledge of it flow into him. It tore into his mind and his soul, an electric charge that shook the room, like a lightning strike so close it lifted the hairs on your arms.

  Jude now saw what the pearl really was, understood how it could amplify spells and charm minds the way that it did, why it imposed the penalty that it took. He pulled his magic away from it, awed for a moment by the power that he held in his hand.