by Dale Lucas
She answered. “Safe’s in my office, end of the hall on the left.”
The gun-barrel hovered. “Move, then. Tick, tick, mammy.”
Angie did as she was told. She turned and marched down the hall, followed by the lead tough and a couple of his fellows. The crowd of tricks and johns parted before her as she marched. It was just as she’d cleared the crowd and moved past the gunmen at the aft end of the hallway that she heard breaking glass above, followed by a quick storm of gunshots, and more screams.
“The fuck... ?” the lead hood muttered. Clearly, not part of the plan. He turned to one of the pair following him. “Go check it out and—”
Just then, the lights that lined the hallway—small, tasteful chandeliers and electric wall-sconces that looked like old-fashioned gas lights—all dimmed, threatening to go out. The darkness in the corridor was oppressive when it pulsed and threatened to swallow them all. The crowd in the center of the corridor, still held at gunpoint, all cried out in unison, not sure what was happening. Angie shot a quick glance at the lead hood who held the gun on her. Above the bandito mask that covered the lower half of his face, she saw wide, wondering eyes and a knitted brow.
Definitely not part of the plan.
Then, there were voices above: the toughs; the robbers. There were orders bandied back and forth; the thump of feet on the carpeted floor-boards, then a rumbling, rending crack, screams, and a storm of gunfire; fast, thick volleys whose violence and fury bled right through the floor to meet them.
Then the lights all dimmed again, pulsing twice this time before finally staying lit.
Angie felt the hood’s hand on her arm, the press of the warm gun-muzzle between her shoulder-blades. “The safe, lady. Now.”
Angie nodded and moved forward again. They’d only made it three steps when more gunfire and screams gave way to curses and a persistent, thumpety-thump-thumping as two bodies came rolling down the stairs from the third floor.
Again, the knot of tricks and johns in the hall all screamed. They fell against the walls and one another, not believing what they were seeing, nor understanding it.
The men who rolled down the stairs screamed and writhed, engulfed in flames. But the flames on one were crimson red—redder than any fire Angie had ever seen; and the flames on the other were ice blue. The hoods tumbled end over end, over one another, then finally came crashing to a halt on the landing. Both flopped and twisted so violently that Angie thought they might break their own spines.
And they kept screaming. Oh, how they screamed and screamed. And from where she stood, she noticed something else strange: the flames licked at their victims, but they didn’t seem to burn anything.
What the hell was going on?
“Sammy!” the head tough shouted, pointing to one of the shotgunners, then suggesting the hoods on fire. “Douse those two and—”
The lights dimmed again, pulsing, fighting the power of some unseen darkness that hated them and wanted them out, out, out. In the flickering light, Angie’s eyes started toying with her. She saw snatches of frightened faces; saw one of the shotgun hoods shuffling over to the pair of blazing men in the shuddering dark, laying down his sawed-off, whipping off his coat, and trying to beat them out; saw the other gunmen in the corridor—she counted seven in all—whipping their guns and their wide, rolling eyes from side to side in the strobe of the failing light, trying to make sense of what was happening.
Then the devil arrived, and Angie thought she understood, even if the rest didn’t.
He swung in through the window at the street end of the corridor, arriving in a spray of shattering glass and blasting away with a pair of .45’s before his heavy boots had even hit the floorboards. The shotgunner trying to douse his comrades took a full barrage in his chest and went sprawling. As two more hoods with pistols lunged forward on opposite sides of the stairwell and took aim, Angie lost sight of the shadowy attacker for a moment as he ducked sideward, behind the third-floor stairs. Then he emerged on the far side, tossing small spheres that shattered when they hit the gunmen square in their chest. More flames burst forth and engulfed them—the crimson sort—and the gunmen fell, writhing and screaming and begging mercy, just like their comrades hunkered on the landing.
The nearest hoods opened fire. The shadow man didn’t stop moving. As bullets punched holes in the plaster walls and riddled the underside of the third floor stairs, the attacker dove, snatched up the cast-off shotgun from the first hood he’d taken, rolled into a crouch against the west wall, and fired. The spray went wide and tore the nearest gunman wide open. As the gunman opposite the stranger kept firing from across the gulf of the stairwell, the stranger shot to his feet, skated sideward, pumped, and loosed another blast. The wall went dark red with a crazy floral pattern of blood and buckshot.
The lights still flickered, as if the stranger’s very presence affrighted them. The corridor was ablaze with curses and gunfire, the johns and tricks on the deck, faces down, holding one another as shields and as comfort, the hoods all rushing forward to meet the newcomer.
He tossed two more of his strange grenades. The flames of one actually took two close-spaced gunmen and down they went, writhing and screaming. The other hit a hood in the face, broke his nose, stunned him, and sent him reeling, but didn’t actually break. Angie caught the look of frustration on the stranger’s face at that, but he carried on, finding some cover where the corridor narrowed to reload and prepare another charge.
His face: a broad face, under a top hat and a nest of island dreads, painted like a skull.
Angie’s knees went out from under her. She was on the floor now, head and body low, but still watching. A vodou baron? Here? In a gunfight with hoods in her cathouse?
How the hell did she rate?
The Cemetery Man and two more gunmen exchanged volleys at close range. The Cemetery Man took hits—Angie saw them—but he shook off the shock of them and kept going, as if they were no more than annoyances, not mortal wounds. The hoods that made them went down with new colonies of .45 slugs in pulverized chests.
Someone grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked her to her feet. Angie screamed, the pain searing through her scalp. It was the lead hood, the one who’d been taking her to the safe. He drew her up in front of himself and leveled his pistol over her shoulder. She was a shield now. She felt his hot breath on her shoulders.
And now she was staring down the barrel of the Cemetery Man’s smoking .45’s. The hungry, empty darkness of those gunbarrels and the look in his eyes suggested he’d be at ease shooting right through her. She was just some Harlem whore-monger, after all; not an innocent woman by any stretch, and not exactly a community light.
“What’re you dressed for?” the hood growled behind her. “Halloween?”
“Dressed for a funeral,” the Cemetery Man replied.
“Yours,” the hood sneered, and fired.
The shots took the Cemetery Man square in the chest and he sprawled. The tricks and johns nearest him went skittering away as he fell, as if terrified even of touching him in death. He landed with a thud on his back and didn’t move. Angie waited. The hood that held her pushed her forward. No one made a sound. They were all watching the dead hoodoo man, waiting for some sign of life. He gave none.
Angie and the hood that held her inched closer. He kept his gun levelled around her, still used her as a moving shield. Angie was too terrified to fight him.
She studied the Cemetery Man in the still-flickering lights of the corridor: dressed all in black except for a purple and black striped waistcoat underneath his ratty old black trench coat, and a long red scarf around his throat. As they neared, Angie noted that the scarf still moved on the dead man’s chest, snake-like, alive.
The hood pushed her aside a little, to get a better look.
That’s when the Cemetery Man moved. He snatched up the unbroken grenade and hurled it from where he lay. Angie saw the little clay sphere streaking toward her and tried to duck it. It took her capto
r square in the chest and shattered. Red flames engulfed them both.
Then Angie felt herself falling, felt the flames licking at her skin and bones and her very soul, and heard a hundred fierce and furious voices in the center of her brain and knew a pain and a shame and a sorrow and a suffering like none she’d ever imagined on earth.
Only in hell was there suffering of this sort.
Then her mind couldn’t take any more, and everything went out like the shuddering lights.
XX
The night was filled with frightened faces, fleeing crooks, and pleas for mercy, but finally, even the Dread Baron had to call it an eve and head back to his sanctum.
He had one more stop to make along the way, though. The Baron needed to give Aces & Eights a quick once over to see if he could root out the source of that sickening vileness, that undertow of dread that had coiled in his guts like a clammy snake, the terrible foreboding he’d felt that afternoon, just after that poor sap in the flies had taken a header onto the stage; just before Birdie cut Dell and got him bleeding like a stuck pig in the kitchen.
It was four in the morning and the place was deserted. Doors were no bar to him, and soon enough, he was inside, puffing on his cigar as he wandered the back corridors and stairwells, letting his gut play dowsing rod to the bad juju that the building held. Sure enough, he found what he was after: that sinking feeling overtook him when he stepped onto the vast, empty stage, seemed to pull at him through the floor, sure as gravity. Just to be certain, he drew one of a number of small brass pendants from around his neck, this one bearing a Saint Sebastian icon on one side, Papa Legba’s veve—his vodou seal—on the other. Papa Legba being the keeper of the crossroads, a doorman to the back alleys of the otherworld, his sign should be drawn where the evil was most concentrated.
It hung plumb straight at first. As the Baron moved toward the front of the stage, the pendant cord bent backward, and the pendant hung at a crazy angle impossible by all the laws of physics. Circling the spot brought the same result.
It took him a few minutes—the club was quite the labyrinth —but at last he located the stairwell to the basement and descended. The basement was vast, with high ceilings and wide open spaces, towering, sentinel rows of industrial shelving and clanging, chuffing chambers where the furnace and the water pipes waited like penned-up beasts of burden. The Legba veve bent before him on its cord, leading the way, and the Baron followed it, passing through criss-crossing corridors, slipping round shelves rife with mislabeled (that is, disguised) bottles of booze and wine, canned goods, and unemployed kitchen tools. Finally, he came to a dead-end alcove near the rear of the largest basement chamber, and there, between high shelves loaded with spare place settings yet to be unpacked, the pendant pointed straight down, suggesting a rusted old manhole cover in the dusty floor.
The Dread Baron knelt, replaced the veve round his throat, and lit a match off his calloused thumb. In the yellow light, he saw clear indications of movement round this dusty span of floor. Likewise, the manhole cover bore handprints on its rim.
The match flame nearly burnt his thumb and he blew it out. In the dark, he pried his fingers under the edges of the manhole cover and heaved it up and over, the iron bulk of the thing straining his muscles. It made a loud clang on the cement foundation. Instantly, an invisible but palpable vileness wafted out of the empty space beneath: not a smell, exactly, just a feeling, deep in his nethers, up his spine, down to the tips of his fingers. He felt blood thundering in his ears and the warmth of a flush in his white-painted cheeks.
Even Ogou—horsed to him, part of him—stirred and recoiled from the malignancy that billowed like smoke out of that gulf. Good God, the Baron wondered. What could it be?
He drew another match from his coat, popped it on his thumb. The sulfur flared and the darkness receded.
He peered down into a shallow well, at the bottom of which was a strange sculpture of human bones—four skulls upon a flat pair of crossed fibulas, adorned with strange symbols, animal talons, crow-feathers, and tiny skulls.
He stared, reading the thing, trying to drink in the sight of it and burn it into his memory before the match burned out. It was strangely familiar—not so unlike a million vodou altar-pieces he’d seen in some of the more fearsome, benighted Petro peristyles he’d visited—and yet, the symbols painted roughly upon it and something about its construction were alien. It was modeled out of the same black recesses of consciousness and ancient worship that vodou sprang from, but it was not vodou. Its origins were completely unknown to him.
Then he heard the low, guttural snarl of some beast in the dark, and turned toward the sound. The match still glowed in his left hand, nearly burned down to his clutching fingers. His right dove into his coat and drew out one of his .45s, training it toward that loathsome sound from the darkness.
Suddenly, the manhole cover slid across the short span between where it lay and the well it had covered. With a cacophonous clang, it fell back into its seat. Before the Baron could decide what he’d just witnessed, the beast in the darkness snarled again, seemed to huff and heave, and one of the great, heavy shelves that towered over him pitched sideward with a groan, falling right toward him.
The Baron leapt and the shelf unit—easily four times his own weight—came crashing down against its neighbor. That neighbor toppled, setting off a clamorous domino effect, filling the vast cellar with the thunder of chaos crashing down, row upon orderly row.
He didn’t wait to find out what had brought the shelves down. He turned and ran.
That charm in the well was bad news. But, the Queen Bee was a big girl—and engaged in dirty business, to boot. If she had enemies powerful enough and determined enough to put a hex that heinous upon her—well, who was he to interfere? There were plenty of innocent people in Harlem who needed his help, after all. The Queen Bee would just have to reap the bitter harvest of a fortune made on running numbers, bootlegging and turning tricks.
As he hurried away over the rooftops from Aces & Eights, he silently wished her luck.
She’d need it.
Chapter 8
Gideon Mann sighed, but it sounded like a temperamental tiger’s snarl. It was too early in the morning for b.s. of the present sort: first, word in the wee hours of a raid at Angie’s 129th Street brothel and a debriefing that left everyone more baffled than not; then, a terrible mess in the club’s basement, courtesy of a late-night prowler; and finally, the late arrival of a delivery truck from the harbor loaded with crates marked DUTCH PORCELAIN – FRAGILE! that should have contained cognac and champagne, but that actually turned out to contain Dutch porcelain.
As the boys opened crate after crate, verifying that each did, indeed, contain what they were marked to contain and not the contraband that they should have, Gideon mulled over his talk with Angie. She was an old hand at the business: cool, collected, equal parts actor and observer. That’s what made her trembling, nervous recounting of the events in the brothel so troubling: the frightened, shame-faced woman that Gideon spoke with at four in the morning was merely the ghost of the shameless, pleasantly profane Angie he knew.
“It was the Cemetery Man,” she kept going on. “Baron Samedi. Packin’ heat. Throwin’ fire.”
Gideon had drawn a long drag on his cigarette. “So Baron Samedi knocked over the joint?”
“No,” Angie said. “He came after. It was white men knocked us over; ginzos if I had to guess, but I couldn’t see their faces too well. Masked. All of them.”
“So you think some Italians rolled the joint,” Gideon said. “Then came the Cemetery Man?”
Angie had nodded, eyes wide in her dark face. “That fire he was packin’—it was hellfire, pure and simple, Gideon. The sort that burns the poison out. Digs up all your sins and sets them to tearing at you.”
Gideon had been confused then. “Fire? What are you talkin’ about?”
“Grenades, like,” Angie said, frustrated. “Grenades full of red and blue flames. Some burn
hot and some burn cold. I took the hot sort and it burned me, Gid. Burned me clean to my soul.”
“There ain’t a mark on you,” Gideon said, suggesting that maybe Angie was misremembering, having snapped and gone plain loco.
“Ain’t that sort of fire,” she had said. “It ain’t after your flesh, Gid. It’s after your soul.”
“Enough,” Gideon said, back in the moment, tired of watching the boys open crates on the loading dock that only contained porcelain knick-knacks. They all stopped their work and stared, wondering what came next.
Gideon’s eyes caught sight of movement in the foggy alleyway beyond the loading dock. Before he could even have suspicions as to who, or what, he was seeing, they came out of the fog and closed a little cordon around the truck and the dock.
Cops. First they appeared on foot, then three cars rolled slowly into the alleyway, blocking all exits. That cinched it. This whole mess with the porcelain was a set-up. Someone had bait-and-switched them, and Gideon just hoped he’d have the chance to find the man or woman who’d done it.
But for now, he had to deal with the situation at hand. He looked to the truck driver, a fat fool named Calvin who’d driven for them a hundred times. Calvin’s pudgy, slack face gave his answer: he was just as surprised to see the cops as Gideon and the boys were. Ditto the crates.
Shit.
The cops fanned out across the mouth of the loading dock, led by short, fat Officer Heaney, the same cherry-nosed papist son of a bitch who’d harassed them just two days before for a grease. The bastard smiled broadly: clearly, he was in on the joke.
Gideon put it all together fast: they’d insulted Heaney the other day; he’d reported to his superiors, who’d reported in turn to theirs—the Irish or the Italians or the Jews or all three. They’d applied some thumbscrews, greased some palms, intercepted the shipment somehow, and made sure that the booze crates disappeared and these dummy crates loaded with porcelain angels and saucers arrived.
