Aces & Eights

by Dale Lucas

“Harlem’s mine,” House snapped. “That makes the Cemetery Man mine to deal with.”

  “If Harlem’s yours,” Nasario said, “it’s cause we say so. Cause we made it that way. So by our good graces, Harlem’s yours—

  but the Cemetery Man is ours. Capiche?”

  “Bene,” House said, trying to smile even as he scowled.

  XX

  Most days and nights, Madame Marie lost no sleep and thought of herself as a fine, upstanding pillar of the community. She knew she dealt in black market trade goods and contraband thrills, but what of it? And if she spilt blood, it was only to protect herself or her employees.

  But sitting face to face, as she did now, with the Reverend Barnabus Farnes of Harlem’s Mother Zion African Methodist Church, made her feel like quite the blood-drenched sinner. Maybe it was his sterling moral reputation or his dour face—both added up to a decidedly Old Testament feel about the man. Either way, his severe gaze and stony countenance shrunk her and made her feel like a naughty little girl about to get a spanking.

  “You want me to bless a house of sin, gin, and jazz?” the reverend said, wizened old baritone rumbling from his rather thin, bony chest.

  “I’m not just looking for a blessing, reverend,” Madame Marie said, trying to maintain her dignity. “I need an exorcism.”

  “You could start by closing its doors and opening a real business establishment. One that helps this community: a manufactory or some such, but—”

  “Reverend,” she said, losing her patience, “this is serious.”

  “So am I, miss,” he said, and he meant it. “Despite my reputation, Miss Meriwether, I am not a teetotaler or a prude. I have no objection to good men and women enjoying an evening’s repaste with wine or liquor, or dancing out their curdled dreams and workaday frustrations. But, by God, woman—Harlem doesn’t need another gin joint with a gangster’s grubby hands in the take!”

  “Now see here,” she started, not even sure what kind of defense she could offer. That she wasn’t a gangster?

  “No, you see here!” the reverend said, and his voice rose and boomed in the cavernous, now-empty church like thunder on a mountaintop. “You’re sowing jobs and putting money in black pockets; for that, I cannot fault you. But your brand of business, Miss Meriwether, draws violence, and graft, and corruption, and sows its seeds in this community as well. If your most recent endeavor seems somehow poisoned, I daresay you should not first speak to a preacher, but to a policeman.”

  “This ain’t the tangle of graft or booze or gambling or numbers, reverend!” Madame Marie shot back. “I’ve had deaths! I’ve had terrible chills and passed through what seemed like clouds of malignancy, sure and settled as a fog! There is something wrong in that place, reverend! And for the well-being of my people and myself and this community that you say you care so much about, I need the hand of God!”

  “You need to expiate your guilt,” the reverend said, lowering his eyes.

  Well, he was at least partially right about that. But what, precisely, was she guilty about? Going to a vodou mambo before coming to a man of God? Leading that vodou mambo into a sparring match with powers that she wasn’t equal to meet? The Queen Bee was still haunted by Mambo Rae Rae’s exasperated, shameful scream as the protective veve’s she tried to lay burst into smoking flames and some invisible, but very solid phantom had bolted from the dark and lifted the woman a full twenty feet into the air. Rae Rae had struggled, floating there for some moments, then been released and tumbled again, her fall, and her tail bone, broken on one of the dining room tables.

  The Queen Bee had sent that Farnes boy with Rae Rae to Harlem Hospital. And the Queen Bee had decided that where hoodoo failed, God Almighty might succeed.

  “Come down there with me,” the Queen Bee begged. “Walk inside. Let me give you the two-bit tour. I promise you, reverend, you’ll feel it too—and I’m guessing whatever it is will feel you. If I can convince you this isn’t a figment of my imagination, will you help me?”

  The reverend considered this, long and hard, picking at his nibbled old fingernails. “This is not an endorsement of your establishment.”

  “I ain’t askin’ for it. And I ain’t even askin’ you for a blessing. I’m askin’ you to chase something unnatural out of that place. Whatever it is, it doesn’t belong there. A man of God should recognize that much, at least.”

  He sighed. Checked his watch. “I need to be back here in two hours.”

  “I could make a donation to the church, reverend.”

  He stared at her as he rose. “This church doesn’t want your money, Queen Bee. Let me get my things.”

  Chapter 9

  The Queen Bee’s Lincoln pulled up to the rear entrance of Aces & Eights, and out came Madame Maybelle Meriwether and the Revered Barnabus Farnes. Over his long coat he wore a purple mantle—an official raiment of his office—and he carried in his hands a Bible. Madame Marie also knew that he carried more accoutrements in his pockets: a small wooden cross, a flask of blessed water, and a flask of blessed palm oil. Thus the Queen Bee led the Reverend Farnes into her den, and began the business of showing him around.

  They entered by way of the loading dock in the alley, so their first stops were the storerooms and kitchen. For a moment, the reverend paused in the loading dock hall and turned, staring back toward the stairwell at the end of the hall that led down to the cellar. The Queen Bee waited, finally asking him what he thought he’d seen or heard.

  “Nothing,” the reverend said. “Carry on.”

  So they moved through the kitchen; took the stairs used by the wait staff up to the second floor and emerged into the dining room. The reverend gave the place a long, slow look, then suggested the stage. Dorey and Croaker followed them without a word, staring wide-eyed at the reverend, as though he might damn the two of them at any moment for even associating with the notorious Miss Meriwether.

  Then they passed from the stage into the long backstage corridor, and there, in the dusky light beneath a long line of swinging drop lamps, Madame Marie felt a cold embrace, and saw her breath plume in the half light. She spun around to speak with the reverend.

  Reverend Farnes had stopped in his tracks, halfway up the length of the hall ahead of them. He raised his eyes and seemed to search the darkness above them and around them; watched the plumes of his own breath in the harsh, dim light of all those weak, hooded light bulbs; almost seemed to smell the evil at work. Finally, gravely, he reached into his pocket and drew out the small wooden cross. He moved further away from them, searching the shadows and the peripheries, the cross held out before him as if it were a shield. He was feeling it out, the evil; eager to flush some fleeting sign from the shadows. Marie didn’t know what he was searching for, precisely, but whatever he was doing, he seemed to do it with authority. Then, the reverend spoke.

  “I’d like to apologize, Madame Maybelle,” he said, voice catching in his throat.

  “For what, reverend?”

  He turned, slowly, deliberately, suspiciously. “There is something here, and it bears a terrible, ill will to all who would cross its path...”

  Madame Marie looked to Dorey and Croaker, her bodyguards. They were each nearly a foot taller than she, but both looked like wide-eyed, scared children dreading a visit from the Boo Hag.

  The reverend continued his slow march of the long, high corridor, peering myopically into the darkness surrounding him. Finally, reaching a point some distance from Madame Marie—the crossroads of the stage right corridor and the long backstage corridor they were traversing—he stood tall, slowly opened his Bible, and settled on a certain passage. He squared his shoulders, and addressed the empty air about him.

  “‘O lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee! Let my prayer come before thee; incline thine ear unto my cry! For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draweth nigh unto the grave!”

  He paused, turning the page to seek another passage. As Madame Marie watched, the lights in the corr
idor seemed to flicker, as if preparing for a surge of power.

  The reverend continued. “‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty! Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night!’ Now tell me, devil, what is your name?”

  Madame Marie’s belly dropped into her knees. A deep rumbling, like the moving of great machinery or the hungry snarl of a predatory beast, rose up from beneath her, as though the foundation of the building itself were answering the reverend’s challenge.

  “What is your name?” the reverend demanded. “If you don’t answer me, I’ll be forced to call the Lord down upon you, and you will be sorry!”

  Again, the foundations creaked. Dorey uttered a little sound, like a child in the throes of a nightmare. Croaker choked and coughed.

  “You boys stand fast,” Madame Marie said. “Be brave now... whatever happens.”

  “I will know your name!” the reverend boomed. “I will draw you out like poison and see you banished from this place! There is no power here to withstand the power of God! The might of the light of our Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ!”

  At the invocation of Christ’s name, the lights in the corridor darkened, as if their power supply strained under some terrible weight.

  The reverend seemed to smile. “You don’t like that, do you? The name of our Lord and Redeemer! Jesus Christ!”

  Again, the lights dimmed. Behind Madame Marie, a bulb exploded with a sound as strident as a gunshot, and Dorey and Croaker both fell upon her, crushing her in a bear embrace, and she fought to shrug them off. “Ain’t a gun!” she screamed. “It’s the reverend! He’s drawin’ it out!”

  “What is it, Queen Bee?” Croaker hissed.

  “Just be brave now, Croaker. Stand for me.”

  “I draw you out!” the reverend cried. “I draw you out, Satan! I draw you out, Lucifer! I draw you out, you who are Legion! You who are damned! You, who our Father cast out from Heaven at the dawn of Time!”

  The floor beneath them buckled and thrummed. The lights in the corridor dimmed and flared at mad intervals. The rumbling of the earth beneath them and the creaking of the walls above and around them filled their ears. Madame Marie shrank into Croaker’s and Dorey’s still-tight embrace, coming to think of the two scared boys now as her only shelter. What was the reverend drawing out? What was it that had poisoned this place?

  He turned and called down all the four legs of the back-hall crossroads he now stood at, as if addressing adversaries in each. “I draw you out, Fallen Star, like poison! I spit you out, Satan, like lukewarm water! Like sour wine! Like the water from the tainted well that sickens and gives no life!”

  The lights in the corridor all danced on their hanging cords, and the shadows tilted crazily and the whole world seemed to be hitching and toppling, this way and that.

  “Give me your name or I shall see you lifted up and humiliated before all the Heavenly host! In the name of God, and His son, Jesus Christ, and with all the force of the Holy Spirit, I bind you and draw you out of this wounded house! Like shrapnel from a wound! Like poison from a serpent’s bite! Like the pus of infection, I call you forth and bid you, NAME YOURSELF!!!”

  The lights in the corridor exploded in rapid succession, and the whole world was plunged into darkness.

  XX

  Dr. Dub Corveaux turned the corner in front of his brownstone just as the last light of the waning day turned everything on the block deep, smoky shades of purple and gold. He’d just eaten dinner—his only decent meal all day—but the food sat in his stomach like a bag of bricks. It’d been a hell of a day, full of desperate patients and ill tidings, one after another. The only thing worse than the weariness he felt was the realization that none of the troubles he’d faced that day were mere bad luck or coincidence.

  It started before he’d ever left his apartment. While still dressing, he’d heard a frantic pounding on the front door downstairs, and voices raised, calling out again and again for a doctor. He’d hurried down to see what the commotion was about and found a pair of young men in kitchen aprons, wide-eyed and frantic. One of them had his fist balled up in a bundle of towels, soaked through and dripping blood. The other carried a wax sandwich bag with his friend’s two fingers in them. Apparently they worked at a delicatessen, and the bloody one had surrendered two of his fingers while slicing some country ham.

  Before he’d finished sewing the young man’s fingers back onto their nubs, Cecile had arrived with terrible news: some fellow in the apartment building just a block from her own had gotten into a heated argument with his wife in the night, beaten her within an inch of her life, then stabbed her repeatedly to finish the job. There had been a thick crowd outside the building when she’d passed by, all clucking about the noise and the mess.

  Later in the morning, a short, thick-set Jamaican drycleaner had barged in with one of his employees in tow—his own son, barely out of his teens, face scalded horribly by a burst steam hose on his pants presser. Dub did what he could, but suggested that the drycleaner get his son to the hospital once they’d left his office.

  Finally, in the afternoon, after a string of folks complaining of headaches, nausea, and ‘the general willies’ as one old woman put it, a sobbing mother had swept through his door with her eight year-old in her arms. The boy was still breathing, but he’d been beaten badly. More than a few of his teeth were gone.

  “Animals,” the woman kept hissing as Dub examined the boy and tried to stabilize him before sending them, too, to the hospital. When he asked who’d done this, she offered a hysterical re-cap: her boy had been playing marbles with some friends on their favorite stoop, just around the corner from her own apartment. An argument erupted. Before anyone knew what was happening, the other three other boys had ganged up on her son, and they laid into him without mercy.

  “Over marbles?” Dub asked, amazed.

  “It’s that boy Jerome,” she spat. “He’s jealous. My baby had a big ol’ glassy with an American flag in the middle. Jerome wanted it all for himself.”

  Dub didn’t know much about marbles, but he knew they generally weren’t worth beating a playmate to death for.

  The string of terrible injuries and upsets seemed to throw a pall over the whole day. It wasn’t until he was nearly out the door that it had all come together, and all because Cecile had made an offhand remark.

  “Terrible,” she said, shaking her head. “Such a mess, all in one little block.”

  “One little block?” Dub asked.

  Cecile, who was filing away the day’s paperwork, nodded but did not bother to face him. “Yes, sir. Right over round 137th and Lenox. That fella lost his fingers... the drycleaner... the fella stabbed his wife... them kids... the whole mess from the same block. Most of our other patients come from up that way, too. Somethin’ in the water, maybe?”

  Dub didn’t offer an answer. He’d simply shrugged and taken his leave. He needed something to eat, badly. All through his dinner he’d mulled over Cecile’s musings about their busy day. All in one little block... right over round 137th and Lenox.

  The same block as Aces & Eights.

  That revelation had haunted him all the way back to his brownstone. When he made it there, weary and filled with a terrible forboding, Fralene Farnes waited for him on the stoop. He was delighted to see her, but the cloud of worry in her eyes and the way she moved to meet him the moment he appeared and led him away by the arm without explanation left him a little puzzled.

  She explained on the way. Her uncle, the Reverend Barnabus Farnes, had returned home just an hour or so before, muddle-headed, muttering, and generally bearing an air of wrongness about him. Fralene had tried to get an explanation from him, but her uncle Barnabus just shrugged her off, advised her to keep herself to herself, and disappeared into his study. Before Dub could even ask what part he could play in this turn of events, Fralene offered that her uncle had seemed to like him when they’d met and talked the other night; perhaps if
Dub came around, her uncle would emerge; or, at the very least, invite Dub in for a pow-wow.

  So, he went along, and within a block or so, even though Fralene was still trembling with worry, her arm in his rested almost casually, as though they were just out for a sundown stroll.

  When they reached the parsonage, Dub knocked on the door of the reverend’s study and offered the only words he could come up with. “Reverend, sir? It’s Dr. Dub. Heard you had a rough day and thought maybe we could talk.”

  No answer. Fralene urged him on silently. Dub tried again.

  “She’s worried, reverend. You wanna at least show your face, make sure she knows you’re safe?”

  The door opened then and the reverend did indeed show his wrinkled, wizened old face. To Dub’s surprise, he looked more annoyed than troubled or crazed. The reverend looked at Fralene.

  “See?” he said. “I’m alive. Now go make yourself useful and stop worryin’ over me, girl!”

  Fralene balked. Dub felt a fury coming on. “Uncle!”

  The reverend looked to Dub. “You hungry? I’m hungry. Fralene, go rustle us up some supper. I think there’s some leftover beans in the icebox and some of that ham, too.”

  “Uncle Barnabas!”

  “Doctor, come on in,” the reverend said, ignoring her. “I got some distemper you may be able to diagnose.” He yanked Dub into the office and shut the door behind them.

  The office den was small but cozy. There were many books, magazines, and journals, a Victrola in one corner along with a wooden box of records in paper sleeves, and two chairs. The reverend bid Dub sit, and Dub did as he was told. The reverend slumped into a rocking, rolling desk chair and stared at the doctor with weary eyes. He sighed, but his pursed lips almost made it sound like a whistle.

  “Long day?” Dub asked, suddenly very curious as to the cause of the reverend’s troubles. He also noticed a bottle and small tumbler sitting out on the reverend’s desk: brandy, if he guessed right.