‘No … you won’t get sick. See – the sick person in the picture, it’s a man. So some man you know may contract some illness, or maybe have a seizure of some kind. When I turn up some more cards I can be more specific.’
‘Maybe Frank will catch the chlamydia. Or maybe he’ll have a heart attack. A heart attack, that would be simpler! A heart attack would get it all over real quick, if you know what I mean, and not nearly so embarrassing to explain to the kids how God took him.’
I turned over the next card, giving Mrs Ratzenberger my toothiest Liberace grin as I did so. I was trying to give her the impression that I was totally upbeat about her future because totally upbeat is all that my clients ever want to hear. They don’t want to face the fact that within fifteen years, tops, their relatives are going to be making an appointment for them at the Blasberg Funeral Chapel and squabbling with each other over their last will and testament.
It was the nine of spades, but there was something really weird going on here. In the Parlor Sibyl, the nine of spades is Mort – Death – and it shows a grim-faced skeleton in a ratty brown robe holding a half-empty hourglass in one hand and a scythe in the other. But somehow this nine of spades was different. It depicted a man with wild hair and a horrified look on his face sitting bolt upright in bed. He had thrown back the blanket to see that his legs had become thin and black and scaly and his feet had turned into claws, like the legs of some monstrous crow. Standing beside the bed was a smiling man with a gray beard and a long gray coat with buttons all the way down the front. Like the figure of death in the original Parlor Sibyl card, he too was holding an hourglass in one hand, although in this hourglass the sand had nearly all run through. In the other hand he was holding not a scythe but a charred wooden cross, from which the smoke was still rising.
The card was titled Scourge.
I stared at it for a long time, and I was aware that my hand was trembling as I held it, even though I felt more baffled than scared. I counted the spades in the top left-hand corner of the card and there were definitely nine of them, and the nine of spades should have been the Death card, except that this wasn’t. This was the Scourge card, and in two years of reading this deck I had never seen the Scourge card before, like ever.
‘Well?’ asked Mrs Ratzenberger. She was beginning to grow impatient, and she twisted around in her chair and beckoned through the window to her Chinese houseboy to bring us some more champagne. ‘And more strawberries!’ she shrieked out. Then she turned back to me and said, ‘What does that mean? Frank’s going to die of a leg infection? I mean, what’s the matter with that guy? Bird flu?’
‘No, no, nothing like that,’ I told her, quickly improvising. ‘It’s, like, symbolic. It means that somebody is going to let you down – somebody you thought you could count on. Legs, see – they stand for support. They stand for trust. But you’re going to find out that your trust in one particular person was misplaced, and that they’ve been two-timing you, or at the very least taking you for granted.’
‘It’s that Morris Dressel,’ said Mrs Ratzenberger, without hesitation. ‘I always thought he was a fonfer! He persuaded Frank to invest two-point-five million in Funeral Reef, and I’ll bet you it never gets off the ground! I’ll bet it never gets under the water, either!’
‘Funeral Reef? What’s that?’
‘It’s for when you pass away, God forbid. They mix your ashes into a concrete ball and drop it into the ocean, and all the balls build up to make a reef for the fishes. It’s supposed to be a way you keep on making a contribution to the world, even after you’re dead.’
‘But you get crabs on reefs, don’t you, and barnacles, and shellfish aren’t kosher.’
‘That’s exactly what I told Frank. Did he listen?’
‘Well, whatever,’ I told her, ‘this card is definitely advising you to be cautious in your business ventures, or else you’re going to get your fingers burned.’
OK … I admit that I was lying to her through my grinning teeth but I didn’t have a clue what the Scourge card really meant any more than she did, and I was only telling her what she wanted to hear.
I hesitated before turning over the next card. It was the three of spades, which was normally titled Pièges, which meant Traps, and showed a poacher laying out nets to catch wild birds – probably ortolans since the Parlor Sibyl was French. At least this was a card that I recognized.
‘You’re going to have a disagreement with Frank,’ I said. ‘This card always foretells a domestic bust-up. You’re going to have a fight over somebody’s incompetence.’
‘Morris Dressel! What did I tell you? He’s going to lose all of Frank’s money! We’re going to have a fight and then Frank’s going to have a heart attack and I’ll never get his two-point-five million back!’
That’s one of the things I like about my job – usually. I turn over a couple of cards and the next thing my clients are telling their own fortunes for me. They know what they want to happen to them much better than I do, after all. Well, I usually like it, but this afternoon the cards were coming up with messages that I was finding both confusing and irrelevant, and I have to say scary, too.
The next card I turned over was another that I had never seen before – Cauchemar, which means Nightmare. It showed a skinny woman in a long white nightgown wrestling on her bed with a shapeless black figure like an octopus, except that this octopus had two red eyes like a demon. Standing at the foot of the bed watching them was the same gray-bearded man from the Scourge card, although this time he was holding a long beaded necklace in his right hand and a stick decorated with red and black feathers in his left.
On the yellow wallpaper beside the bed there was a large dark stain, or maybe it was the shadow of the woman and the demon as they struggled on the bed together. There was something about the shape of this stain or shadow that really unsettled me. I didn’t know why, but it reminded me of something disturbing. It reminded me of being frightened – not just frightened, but scared shitless, like when you’re a kid and it’s the middle of the night and you think that the bathrobe on the back of your bedroom door has come alive. I couldn’t think when I had been frightened as much as that, or why, but it was a feeling I didn’t like at all – especially since I didn’t have the remotest idea what this Cauchemar card was trying to tell me.
‘Well?’ asked Mrs Ratzenberger.
‘Oh, right – this is you struggling with your conscience.’
‘Conscience? What conscience?’
‘You’re torn, that’s the trouble. See how this woman’s nightdress is torn? The “Good You” is fighting the “Bad You”. You want to give Frank a hard time for what he’s been doing, but at the same time you’re a very humane, tolerant woman.’
‘I am? I mean, I am.’
‘Of course you are, because you understand that husbands only stray so that they can appreciate the radiant beauty and the scintillating personality of the woman they married. After forty years of being faithful, you know – how else could they make a comparison, and fully understand how lucky they are?’
Mrs Ratzenberger seemed to be pleased enough with this interpretation. As I turned up card after card, however, each one of them proved to be stranger and grimmer and less comprehensible than the one before. It became harder and harder for me to persuade Mrs Ratzenberger that cards like Catastrophe Tuérie, Émeute and Suicide were indicators that everything in her life was coming up roses. It didn’t help that the illustrations on the cards became increasingly menacing and bizarre.
Tuérie (Killing) showed a father sitting at the head of a dinner table with a carving-knife and fork clutched in his fists, smiling. On either side of him sat the five members of his family, his wife and his sons and his daughters, with their plates in front of them. They were dressed for dinner, but they had all been beheaded. Their necks were nothing but bloody stumps, and their heads were lying on their plates, with perplexed expressions on their faces, as if they couldn’t understand what had happened t
o them. Not only that, but their heads were all mixed up, so that the mother’s head was lying on her daughter’s plate, and so on.
The dining-room door was ajar, so that you could just see the gray-bearded man standing there, watching them, and boy did he look smug.
Then there was Émeute, which means Riot (you don’t have to be too impressed with my French, I checked out all of these words with Google Translate). Émeute showed a whole crowd of people attacking each other in the street with knives and swords and clubs and broken bottles. Their injuries were horrific – like one woman’s intestines were hanging out and trailing between her legs as she was fighting off a man with a cutlass, and a small boy had both of his legs severed below the knee. An elderly man had been impaled through his chest with an iron railing, and a young woman was having her face forcibly pressed into the red-hot coals of a brazier, and her hair was catching fire.
Fortunately for me, the Chinese houseboy arrived at the moment that I turned up that particular doozy, and Mrs Ratzenberger was distracted.
I finished the session as quickly as I could and told her that in the next few weeks of her life she was going to have more excitement than she had ever experienced before. I told her that all of her omens were amazing, and that she was amazing, and that the cards adored her. The stars adored her, too. She was a Gemini, and this was going to be a life-changing month for Geminis.
I deliberately omitted to remind her that just because life is going to be exciting doesn’t always mean that it’s going to be enjoyable. There’s such a thing as too much excitement. I also didn’t remind her that ‘life-changing’ doesn’t necessarily mean a change for the better. But anyhow Mrs Ratzenberger was delighted with what I told her, and while I packed away my deck of cards and finished my champagne and threw the rest of the strawberries at the seagulls, she went into the house for a while, and when she came back she was carrying a dark-blue velvet-covered box.
‘Here,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘Frank gave me this for our last wedding anniversary but I want you to have it as payment for today. Frank is a two-timing noyef, but you, Harry – you’re a true held.’
‘No, no, Mrs R,’ I told her. ‘I can’t take your anniversary present. That wouldn’t be right. Besides, I take only cash. I don’t have a bank account right now and apart from that I like to make life complicated for the IRS.’
‘Harry, you’ve done me so much good today, better than one of Marty’s massages, I swear to God. Please – take it. It’s only a trinket, but you could sell it for a whole lot more than four hundred dollars.’
‘Actually, I didn’t tell you yet, but last month I put up my fee to five. With the greatest reluctance, of course.’
‘That’s OK, Harry. You have to make a living. But take this, please. If you don’t want to sell it, give it your lady friend.’
She kept jabbing this blue velvet case at me, so in the end, very much against my will, I took it.
‘Open it,’ Mrs Ratzenberger insisted. She was so excited that she was skipping up and down like a little girl, and her flat breasts flapped up and down underneath her peach silk pajamas like two tortillas.
I opened it. Inside, nestling on cream-colored satin, was a diamond bracelet. It was plain and simple and modern and unexpectedly tasteful for the Ratzenbergers, but it was set with so many pavé diamonds that I couldn’t even guess what its value could be. I wasn’t a pawnbroker, but I was sure of one thing: it was worth a hell of a lot more than a measly five Benjamins,
The jeweler’s name inside the box was Van Cleef & Arpels, 9870 Collins Avenue, Bal Harbor.
‘I can’t possibly accept this,’ I told Mrs Ratzenberger, closing the box with a snap and holding it up to her. ‘It’s far too valuable. Besides, what’s Frank going to say when he finds out you’ve given it away? He’s going to go ape.’
‘That’s the whole darn point,’ said Mrs Ratzenberger. ‘I want to show Frank that jewelry and money don’t count for nothing. I don’t want his bracelets or his rings or his necklaces. I want him to be my husband again. I want him to talk to me when he comes home, and I want him to be faithful, and I want to see his rope rising because of me. Not too often, that would be a nuisance, but now and again.’
‘I still can’t take this bracelet, Mrs R. For what this is worth, I’d probably have to tell your fortune a hundred times over.’ I didn’t add that she would probably have checked out before I even got as far as reading number thirty-six, but then diplomacy is all part of a psychic’s stock-in-trade.
‘I want you to have it, Harry, and that’s that,’ said Mrs Ratzenberger. ‘If you won’t take it, I shall scream and scream and say that you tried to rape me.’
Now I was born and brought up in Manhattan on the Lower East Side, and believe me I’ve been threatened a few times in my life. But the thought of having to explain to the Miami/Dade Police that I had not attempted to have my wicked way with an eighty-three-year-old woman with a Roast-A-Bag cleavage was more than I could face.
‘OK, you win,’ I said. ‘I’ll take it.’
I was thinking to myself: next time I come here to read her fortune I’ll bring it back and hide it under the bed or something, so it looks like she simply mislaid it. She probably won’t even remember giving it to me.
There it was: the warning bell, jangle-jangle-jangle, and it didn’t matter if I was genuinely psychic or not, I should have heard it ringing in my head. She probably won’t even remember giving it to me. But I was too busy thinking what a pain in the rear end it was that I had spent two-and-a-half hours with her and I hadn’t made a nickel out of it.
I stood up, lifted my djellaba and pushed the jewelry case into the pocket of my Armani jeans. Then I gave Mrs Ratzenberger a fond embrace and kissed her porcelain cheeks. Underneath those peach silk pajamas she felt like one of those skeletons you see hanging up at the back of biology class. Her bones didn’t even feel as if they were joined together.
The Chinese houseboy showed me downstairs to the front door with a scowl. I don’t know why he disliked me so much. Maybe in my starry djellaba he thought I was Voldemort on vacation.
As I walked across the hot red asphalt driveway to my metallic green Mustang, Mrs Ratzenberger leaned over the rail of her veranda and called out, ‘Harry! You’ve forgotten something!’
I stopped, squinting up at her with one eye closed against the sun. Jesus, don’t tell me she’s forgotten that I’ve read her cards for her, and I have to go back and start over.
‘Harry, my mystic motto! You forgot my mystic motto!’
‘Oh, sorry, Mrs R. So I did.’ I pondered for a few moments, and then I called back, ‘A diamond with a flaw is worth more than a perfect matzo ball!’
Mrs Ratzenberger silently repeated it, moving her lips as she did so. It was like watching a goldfish trying to recite the pledge of allegiance. After she had repeated it three or four times, though, she nodded.
I gave her a wave, climbed into my car, and headed back down East Star Island Drive with Mudcrutch playing Scare Easy on the stereo, little realizing how much trouble I was in.
SIX
When I first came south to Miami, I was planning on staying no longer than three months. My old friend Marcos Hernandez had asked me to take care of his house in Coral Gables while he was touring Europe with the Joe Morales Mariachi Orchestra, and I looked on it like an extended vacation. It never occurred to me that I would be seduced so quickly by the sunshine and the ocean and the girls in their minuscule bikinis – not to mention the envelopes stuffed with fifties which Florida’s elderly widows would press into my hands in a return for a glimpse into their very predictable futures.
It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t miss for a moment the endless grumble of Manhattan’s traffic and the brontosaurus honking of fire trucks and the jostling crowds on the sidewalks and my musty-smelling walk-up loft on West 13th Street. I never thought that I would have no urge whatsoever to return to those idle mornings in Think Coffee, setting the world to r
ights with the would-be artists and the unpublished poets and the laptop warriors, as well as the dreamy-eyed girls with their bandannas and their spiky black mascara who didn’t realize that the Beatniks had died out half a century ago and still thought that Allen Ginsberg might come walking through the door at any moment.
Marcos had returned from his tour, but he had generously allowed me to stay in the dinky guest cottage at the end of his garden, which looked like Snow White used to live there, only it would have been too small to accommodate more than her and three out of the seven dwarves, tops. I had a bedroom and a living room and a shower, as well as a kitchenette that overlooked Triangle Park. It was a pretty rudimentary place to live, all rough stucco and whitewash and Mexican rugs, and Marcos and his pals kept me awake most nights playing huapango music and laughing and stamping on the floor. All the same, the cottage was clean and it was secluded and it was free.
I finished my day’s fortune-telling at five thirty p.m. While Mrs Edwards had tutted and twitched and suspiciously sucked at her dentures, I had told her at the James Hotel that she could look forward to golden times ahead. To be fair, I knew that she was sitting on an investment portfolio worth more than three hundred million dollars, and with that kind of wealth it’s pretty hard to be glum for very long. After Mrs Edwards, I had given one more reading to Mrs Bachman in Hialeah, who was lying on her sickbed with a feeding tube up her right nostril and five Persian cats on her lap who continually hissed at me as if I were the Grim Reaper come to take their meal-ticket away.
Both times I used my Tarot cards instead of the Parlor Sibyl. I didn’t want any Catastrophe or Scourge or Tuérie cards coming up again, especially since Mrs Edwards always paid me double my normal fee and Mrs Bachman was ready to snuff it at any moment, and I didn’t want to be held legally responsible for scaring her to death.
I knew that I had to find out if those Parlor Sibyl cards would still be the same when I looked at them again. On my way home, however, I put off the evil moment by dropping into John Martin’s Irish Pub on Miracle Mile for a pint of Guinness and a Johnny Walker chaser. OK, I admit it. I needed some Irish courage before I looked through the deck and tried to work out how some of the most optimistic of fortune-telling cards had become so threatening and so grotesque.
Plague of the Manitou Page 5
