Unsympathetic Magic
Page 34
“I don’t think I like your tone,” said Catherine.
“And setting my bed on fire last night?” I said in outrage. “What was that?”
“Setting your bed on . . .” Catherine made a sound of amusement. “Someone set your bed on fire? My, what an interesting life you do lead.”
“That wasn’t you?” I said in surprise. “Then it must have been Celeste.”
“You overestimate her. Her skills were limited and, as you should recall, she was quite busy last night.”
“Why did she help you? Serve you?” I asked. “Whatever.”
“She wanted what everyone wants—influence, importance, respect.”
“She thought you could give her those things?”
“I encouraged her to think it. Celeste was never that well liked, you know. Not even by her own houngan. Her gifts were not well-suited to serving others. I was the one who showed her a better path to the recognition she craved.”
I heard the past tense again. The sense of finality, of a life story ended. “Where is she now?”
“What a tactless question. Especially when your tone implies you already know the answer.”
There were still people in the building. I would scream for help. I was opening my mouth to do so when my throat closed. I gasped for air, unable to breathe.
Catherine pulled her hand out of her desk drawer. I saw that she was holding a tiny little doll, crudely fashioned out of wax. Her fist squeezed its legs into immobility while her thumb and forefinger pinched its throat. Gasping futilely for air, I saw that the doll had a few strands of brown hair—my hair—on its little wax head.
There was also a Star of David drawn crudely on the doll’s stomach. I thought that was in questionable taste, and I wanted to say so—but I couldn’t speak.
“I made a second one,” Catherine said. “I believe in being prepared. It’s an essential ingredient for success.”
She let go of the poppet’s throat. Able to breathe again, I inhaled for a scream. Before the air could leave my lungs, Catherine banged the wax doll’s head against the desk, and I blacked out.
24
When I regained consciousness, I was in the park, it was nighttime, and I was being carried by four zombies.
I had somehow wound up in Frank Johnson’s nightmare.
But unlike Frank, my legs were bound, as well as my hands. I supposed Catherine had learned her lesson after the one that got away.
I felt guilty about Frank’s near death experience at Biko’s hands as I realized that Catherine had known all along where he lived, but she had left him alone—until I started meddling and got Lopez to ask probing questions about him. Before that, Catherine had evidently considered Frank too minimal a threat to expend her attention on.
And what exactly did she need her attention for, anyhow? Where was all this leading us?
I had a horrible feeling I was about to find out. My body tilted at a precarious angle, and the zombies started ascending stairs. Moving carefully, since I didn’t want them to drop me at this juncture, I looked around and confirmed my suspicion. We were on the crumbling stone steps leading up to the old watchtower. Whatever had excited Nelli the night she had come here, it must have had something to do with this—the smell of zombies on these stairs.
The zombies held me aloft, high overhead, as we ascended. I remained very still, since they didn’t seem exactly steady on their feet, and I didn’t think I’d survive a tumble down these stairs. I practiced breathing evenly, grateful that I could breathe, and wondered how long I had been unconscious.
I guessed a few hours at least. It was nighttime now, the sky pitch-black overhead. The city must still be in the grip of the blackout; the park was completely dark, and as we rose higher through the trees, I could see that the surrounding buildings were also completely dark.
Whatever Catherine was planning, she evidently needed complete darkness for it. She didn’t want to be seen.
That didn’t seem very promising from my perspective.
The moonless, starless sky was a raging sea of thunder and lightning. The noise stampeded through my aching head, and the flashing light was disorienting, making me dizzy as I was carried backward and at an uncomfortable angle up to the forgotten nineteenth-century watchtower atop this steep, isolated hill in the middle of Harlem.
We were in Manhattan, a densely populated borough! Surely I should be able to get someone’s attention.
As soon as we reached the comparative safety of the broad stone plaza, I made my move. My hands had been tied in front of me, rather than behind. Now I lifted them to remove the gag from my mouth, and I screamed as loudly as I could. Then my heart sank as I realized that no one would hear me over the noise of the thunder. There was no one else in this park, and the surrounding houses and apartments were all too far away. Even without the competition of the thunder, I doubted anyone would hear me.
Nonetheless, I screamed again.
“Would you stop that?” Catherine’s voice snapped at me. “I told them to gag you! What happ—oh, for God’s sake!”
I was roughly yanked out of the zombies’ cold hands and thrown down to the stone pavement. The ground was wet. I remembered that it had been raining hard when I was knocked out by a bokor with a poppet. My tiny vinyl skirt rode up to my waist, the push-up bra stabbed me, and I felt the fishnet stockings tear. If I had known I was going to be kidnapped, I would certainly have worn something else this evening.
Catherine towered above me, wearing a long robe of red silk. I was surprised, because her fashion sense had really seemed more subdued and classic than that.
She kicked me in irritation. “After what happened with Frank Johnson, I told them to tie your legs. But I forgot to specify that your hands should be tied behind you so that you couldn’t remove your own gag!” She made a guttural sound of frustration. “Take my word for it, don’t work with zombies!”
I rolled away from her. Venting her frustration, she followed after me, kicking me again. I grunted in pain.
“It’s like working with children!” she raged. “Delinquent children! That goddamn snake was smarter than these creatures are!”
“So get rid of them,” I snapped. “Why keep them around?”
She shrugged. “They do the heavy lifting. I’ve got brains, not brawn.”
“They’ve got to be hard to keep hidden,” I said rubbing my aching ribs where she had kicked me. “Where do you hide them?”
“Sometimes in the basement. Sometimes in the woods on this hill. One of the few good things about a zombie is that it’ll sit in total silence and stillness—not even breathing, obviously—for days at a time. So they’re easier to conceal than you’d suppose.”
While she talked, I looked around the plaza. There was a small bonfire in the spot where I had previously noticed charring and ashes. And in its dim glow, I could see several vévés drawn in red on the paving stones.
Now I remembered—it was in those books Puma had given me. Red was the color of a Petro ritual.
Catherine, the bokor, was invoking dark gods on this isolated hilltop, beneath the thundering, lightning-streaked sky.
This could only be a bad thing. So I needed to stall her. No, it wasn’t much of a plan, but it might give me time to think of a better one.
And the best way to stall her was to keep her talking. One of the first things I’d noticed about this woman was how much she loved the sound of her own voice.
“Raising zombies from the grave sure couldn’t have been easy,” I said, struggling surreptitiously with the bonds on my wrists. “That’s some major mojo. Plus a lot of logistical problems. Sneaking in and out of grave-yards, digging all that dirt, getting them from the cemetery back to Harlem. You put a lot of talent and hard work into creating these, um, lads.”
“You have no idea.”
“But you failed with the first one, didn’t you?” Yes, I rubbed it in a little. There didn’t seem to be much point anymore in trying not to offend her.<
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“It was my first experiment. I was new to raising the dead.” She sounded a little defensive. “And I made some mistakes. So that one was unpredictable. Too hard to control. I had to get rid of it. Darius was desperately afraid that we’d be exposed because of that one.”
“So he was in on it with you?” I was wriggling my ankles, trying to loosen the bonds.
She made a little waggling gesture with her elegant hand. “Sort of.”
It hit me suddenly. The poppets. The handsome man whom Jeff and Biko had been sure was gay. What Puma had told us about love spells.
“Oh, my God!” I said. “You seduced Darius with voodoo! You made a poppet of him and—ugh!—rubbed bodily fluids into it! Didn’t you?”
“It’s not as easy as they tell you,” she said. “Saliva doesn’t work. Neither does sweat. For a man, it’s got to be semen.”
Tired of talking to her from my prone position, and also afraid she’d kick me again, I sat up. “You used his semen? Okay, that’s too much information.”
“I could make you a poppet like that to secure the detective, in exchange for your silence.” She added, even as I was opening my mouth to pretend to agree to this proposition, “But you don’t need one for him, do you? That was obvious even before you walked into my office in that digusting condition today. Did he do that to you all in one evening? He’s really not the altar boy he pretends to be, is he?”
“Er, back to the part about letting me go in exchange for my silence,” I said.
“Pardon? Oh! No, that was just a flight of fancy,” she said dismissively. “I know several languages and dialects, and I have so many esoteric and secret skills, that sometimes I just wish I could use them more often. But you don’t need any sort of potion or poppet or charm, of course, because you’re going to be dead shortly. So what’s the point?”
“How shortly?” I asked with more than casual interest.
She looked up at the churning black sky, where low clouds were gathering directly overhead, flashing with ravenous heat and light. “Very shortly. It’s almost time for the ritual to begin.”
“Who inflicted the white darkness on Nelli?” I said, desperate to distract her from her purpose. “Was that you?”
“No, it was Celeste. The dog had attacked her snake, it deserved to be punished. She could also incapacitate you and Dr. Zadok at the same time. And so on and so forth.”
“Incapacitate?” I repeated. “If Max and I had been one split-second slower to escape, we’d be dead.”
“And that would certainly have been a bonus. I really wasn’t paying that much attention. Frankly, I rather agreed with you that the snake was dangerous and unattractive. But . . .” She sighed and shrugged. “Did I mention that good help is hard to find? I needed a disenchanted Vodou mambo to assist me, so I made compromises. One does so in all things, you know, not just with men.”
“Compromises like enchanting a gay man to sleep with you so you’d have a lover?”
“Have you seen his photo? He was very handsome. And athletic. And—oh!—the stamina.” Her tongue came out of her mouth for a moment, as if she were licking the memory.
I looked away. “What about your husband? Rumor has it that he had, er, stamina.”
“Stamina was not what he had,” she said irritably, gazing up at the clouds again. “I looked the other way through a lot of philandering.”
“Why?” When I saw the expression on her face, I said, “Oh, right. Because he was a billionaire.”
She shook her head. “Men like Martin—well, all men, really—fool themselves into believing a beautiful woman twenty years his junior wants him for himself alone. That was convenient for me, so I let him believe it.”
“So it was all about the money?”
“Money and power,” she said. “It’s always about money and power. Or are you still too young to know that, Esther?”
“Max always says that evil is voracious.”
“How quaint.”
“I still don’t understand why you killed Martin, though.” There was an obvious reason it had never even occurred to me that she had done so. “You were better off with him alive. Everyone knows you only got a modest amount of money when he died.”
“I’ll have to give up the penthouse if I don’t get more money!”
“Whoops, I guess I touched a sore spot,” I said. “So did you not know about the will?”
“I knew, but I didn’t think challenging it in court would be so fruitless! Especially not when I made sure he seemed out of his mind in the final days of his life. It should have been easy to convince a judge that he’d been losing his mind for a while. But that board of directors at the foundation . . .” She gave nasty snarl. “It’s the old boy system. Every one of them is pals with half a dozen judges. I hadn’t counted on that.”
“You should have just put up with the philandering.”
“I did! But then Martin decided to divorce me!”
“Really? Gosh! Who can fathom the ways of the heart?”
“And two expensive divorces had taught him the value of having his third wife sign an iron-clad pre-nup. So I’d have gotten nothing if he’d left me. Nothing!”
“Lopez knows,” I said suddenly. “He knows you killed Martin. And that you killed your first husband, too—to attract Martin as a grieving, available, younger widow I suppose? And Lopez knows you killed Darius!”
“Yes, I’m aware of that.” She was openly amused at my crestfallen expression. “But it doesn’t matter what he knows, Esther, since he can’t prove anything. More to the point, he’ll be dead by morning, anyhow.”
“What?” Forgetting about my furtive attempts to loosen my bonds, I hopped awkwardly to my feet. “What?”
“I’ve administered a topical poison, one that seeps through the skin and induces death by slow paralysis.”
“What? When? Where is he?”
“He’s lying on the floor of the Petro ritual room at the foundation, next to the corpses of Mambo Celeste and Napoleon—neither of whom, I must confess, I expect to miss.”
I flung myself against her, wild with rage and anguish. “No! No! What have you done? You murdering bitch! I’ll kill you myself! Noooo!”
She was shouting in Creole. I realized as I felt strong, cold, lifeless hands grabbing me that she had issued instructions to the zombies. They seized me, put my gag back in my mouth, and dragged me—kicking, squirming, struggling, weeping, and howling with rage behind my gag—toward the tower.
Catherine rose, came toward me, and slapped me sharply across the face. As I stared at her with mute, venomous hatred, she straightened her red robe.
“This is your doing,” she said. “You have no one to blame but yourself. I’m not a fool. I don’t actually want to kill an NYPD detective. That’s far more trouble than it’s worth!” She pointed a finger accusingly at me. “But he burst into the foundation after dark looking for you. He was uttering insults and threats, and he would have torn the place apart with his bare hands if I hadn’t stopped him.”
She smoothed her red robe over her summer dress. “I administered what’s known as an ordeal poison. Frankly, it’s a nasty way to die. But under the circumstances and with such short notice, it was the only reasonable choice open to me.”
I growled in rage and lunged for her again. The grip of the zombies holding me was firm, though; I barely moved two inches.
“Be honest with yourself, Esther,” Catherine said. “Would he be lying in agonized paralysis awaiting his death now if not for you?”
Tears streamed down my face as I realized Lopez would never have gotten involved in this case in the first place if it hadn’t been for me. If only I hadn’t called on him for help the night I was arrested!
Using the tight grasp of the zombies as leverage, I raised both my legs off the ground, swung from their grip, and kicked out at Catherine as hard as I could. But being bound and held captive made me slow and clumsy. She saw it coming and easily evaded the blow.
She said something in Creole. In response, the zombies started to shift me. I seized the opportunity to tear off my gag again.
“And your lover?” I shouted over the rising thunder. “The one you had to hex to get him into your bed? Why did Baron Samedi come for him, you murdering bitch?”
She leaned closer to me and smiled maliciously. “Because Darius balked at what we were going to do with Shondolyn. Which was that same thing that, after she was gone, I planned to do with Puma.” Her breath brushed my face as she said, “Since you’re the one who stole them both from my grasp, it’s fitting that you should take over that role tonight.”
“What role? What are you doing to do?”
“Human sacrifice.”
She produced a key from the pocket of her robe as I gaped at her. Then she used it on the shiny new lock that Lopez—Lopez! I wailed silently—had previously noticed on the entry gate to the watchtower.
“You can’t do this!” I shouted.
“I’m afraid I must.” She gave an order to the zombies, and they started dragging my squirming, kicking, grunting body toward the gate. “I have asked for great power and wealth from the darkest of the Petro loa. I’ve asked for the ability to nullify my late husband’s will, break open the trust, and empty the foundation’s coffers of the billion or so dollars that should be mine”
“You’re doing all this for money?” I blurted. “To woo lawyers and dazzle judges?”
“Power and money,” she said. “In the end, they’re the only things that matter, Esther.”
“The spirits demand a human sacrifice in exchange for that?”