Mob Magic, page 5
"I'd like my belongings back. Especially the rosaries."
"Yeah, the white one with the glow inna dark cross yer gramma gave you when you made yer first holy communion—real class. I never had nothin' that swell when I was a kid. Well, pally, Saint Al's gonna deliver, an' when I do, maybe you an' me'll make a little deal. That jake with you?"
"I guess so. But how will I know you kept your part of the bargain?"
No reply. Joel peered into the shadows and sniffed the air, seeking the stink of a cigar, but there was nothing but gloom and mildew.
Then his eyelids were bright and he was shaking— no, being shaken. He opened his eyes and was staring at Sister Agatha's slab of a face, inches from his. "On your feet, you lazy sack!"
Joel realized that he had been sleeping and dreaming a strange dream about a Chicago criminal. He arose and followed Agatha into the hall, which was even drearier in the morning light.
"The bakery didn't have any leftovers, so it'll have to be oatmeal for breakfast," Agatha said. "Start making some while I—"
"Making what?"
"Oatmeal."
"I don't know how."
Agatha sighed. "All right, start a pot of coffee—"
"Coffee is a drug," Joel said indignantly.
"We'll risk a bust. Get busy."
"It's evil, and besides, I don't know how."
"Mop the floor."
"I don't know how."
"Tell you what. I'll get a postage stamp and you can write me a list of what you do know how to do."
"Are you ridiculing me?"
Agatha grabbed two fistfuls of her sleet-colored hair and pulled. "Sit down and stay out of the way—can you manage that?"
"Certainly," Joel replied with what he was sure was devastating dignity.
He sat on a folding chair and, for a while, watched the woman scurry around the kitchen area. After a few minutes, reality again ebbed and he was in the gray limbo; he found it comfortable. When he returned, suddenly and rudely, to the world, he was behind the counter, ladling creamy goo onto a tin plate, being called "numbnuts" by Benny, the dwarf.
"Hey, Twinkletoes, done any sunbathing lately?" The male officer he had met yesterday was next to Benny.
"What's on your mind, Willy?" Agatha asked from the sink, where she was spraying water onto a plate.
"Your name's Terwilliger, right?" the officer asked Joel, who nodded.
"The narks busted a crack house last night, found these." said the officer. He had a suitcase in either hand and a third under his left arm. "Got your name on 'em. Bulls say they ain't evidence and that I could return 'em to their owner, which is you." He dropped the cases onto the linoleum.
"Was there a man named Choo-choo?" Joel asked.
"Was is right. His ass is cooling in the morgue. Dumb skel pulled a piece and the bulls put him down."
"He's dead?"
"That's what usually happens when you take a load of nine mike-mike slugs in the chest."
"That means he was shot with automatic pistols," Agatha explained.
For the first time since he left the seminary, Joel smiled. "Good. He deserved it."
The officer raised his brows and smirked. "Ain't you s'posed to love your enemies?"
"Yes. But he wasn't my enemy. He was bad! He stole my belongings."
"Yeah, that'd make him public enemy number one, all right." The officer touched a forefinger to his cap and walked away.
Joel turned to Agatha. "Could you help me carry my belongings?"
"I don't know how."
"I don't think you're telling me the truth."
"I'll mention it in confession."
Joel dragged the suitcases back to the clothing room, opened them and inspected the contents. Nothing was missing. He lifted the white rosary with the glow-in-the-dark cross, gazed at it reverently—and sniffed. Something in the air. Cigar smoke?
He spent the rest of the morning saying the sorrowful mysteries. Then Agatha entered, pulled his ear, which really hurt, and led him to the hall. He ladled stew until Agatha told the diners to go away. As he was carrying an empty pan to the sink, at Agatha's command, he hit the coffee urn with his elbow and knocked it to the floor Agatha had just finished mopping, spilling a mixture of liquid and brown grit onto the linoleum. Agatha moaned and rapped his skull with a knuckle.
Lips trembling, eyes watering, Joel said, "You liked that!"
"I wouldn't say 'liked.' I'd say, 'deeply enjoyed.' I'd say 'got a whole lot of satisfaction.' I'd say 'never had so much fun in my life.' "
"You're not a nun!"
"You got me. I'm actually Satan's little sister."
Joel fled to the door. "I'm going out."
"No," Agatha said in a voice Joel did not recognize, holding up her long skirt and running from the counter to put a hand on his arm. "They'd chop you into dog meat. Just go say your rosary. I'll handle the chores."
That seemed like a good idea. Joel was upset; it seemed wrong, almost sacrilegious, for Agatha to have a good idea. But he remembered what his grandmother had once taught him—"The devil can quote scripture for his own purposes"—and was comforted.
He knelt among the boxes and heaps of clothing and, fingering the white beads, said the sorrowful mysteries, the joyful mysteries, and the glorious mysteries. The familiar prayer solidified into solid objects—no, not objects: angels, clean and shining and pure. They carried him to the limbo, no longer gray but now a gleaming place sculpted from golden clouds.
He felt a pain in his knees, and the clouds vanished. He was in the clothing room, kneeling in the rectangle of dirty light from the window, staring at a familiar clump of shadow.
"Did Saint Al deliver the goods or did Saint Al deliver the goods?" Al Capone blew out a jet of smoke that smelled, not like a cigar, but like the sulfur in Joel's high school chemistry class. "Choo-choo's breathin' the Chicago river. He ain't really, but it's a great gag. Tickles me."
"You're real."
"Helluva lot realer than Prisca, an' you can take that straight to the bank. Anyway, whaddaya say, pally? You ready to play the game my way?"
"What game?"
"The game'a life... ." Al mumbled another word; it sounded like "numbnuts," but Joel was sure he must have misheard it.
"I don't know how," he said.
"Not yet, you don't, 'cause you ain't had no advantages. But you can learn. Lemme take it slow for you. Ast you a question. Who do you hate?"
"Nobody."
"Yeah? What about this Agatha frail?"
"I don't hate her. I just wish she'd burn in fiery torment for eternity."
"She could keep Choo-choo company."
"You could do that?" Joel asked, rising and rubbing his knees. "To Sister Agatha?"
"Naw. But you could, see? Lemme tell you a story. There was these two rats back in Chi town. They was actin' like they was pals of mine, but they was really rats, see? So I invite 'em to a real swell feed and just when they're gettin' ready to dig into the eats and I get behind 'em with a bat and bam bam bam I smack their brains all over the tablecloth."
"You killed them with a baseball bat?"
"They was astin' for it, just like that Agatha frail! What I done was only right! Now, do yourself a favor. Take a gander behind that big box in the corner."
Joel limped on stiff legs to a cardboard carton that had once contained a gas stove and pulled it away from the wall. In the dim glow from the window, he saw a baseball bat standing on its fat end.
"Go 'head," Al Capone said. "Pick it up."
Joel's fingers closed around the tape on the narrow end of the bat and he lifted it.
"Feel good?" Al Capone asked. "Now you gotta ast yourself if you wanna go on bein' pushed around and if that frail in the next room don't deserve what I give them rats back in Chi."
"She does," Joel said, righteousness swelling within him.
" 'The Lord helps them what helps themselves,'" Al Capone said. "I done Choo-choo for you. The frail's yours."
Feeling like St. Louis, like Joan of Arc, even like the Archangel Michael himself—like all the mighty warriors of holiness throughout the ages—Joel shouldered his weapon and opened the door to the dining hall, dark except for light from the street lamps shining through the front windows. Sister Agatha was sitting at the table nearest the counter with her back to him, her head bowed, her shoulders slumped. He gripped the bat tighter and crept toward her. As he drew hear, he heard a snuffling sound. Was she weeping? Or perhaps just sleeping?
"Go on," Al Capone said from everywhere at once. "Hit her."
Joel raised the bat over his head.
"Go on!"
Trembling, filled with rage and loathing and frustration, Joel dropped the bat and whispered, "I don't know how."
* * *
MONEY WELL SPENT
by Janet Pack
"Isn't this fun?" Theresa di Luna, known as Tesa Ato nearly everyone, snuggled her chin against her husband's shoulder despite the cloying heat. "I just love old stuff, and New Orleans is famous for it."
"Yeah, yeah," Marcello di Luna, called Marc, replied shortly. Unease on several counts wormed down his neck, tandem to sweat. First, he was dressed in off-the-rack short-sleeved shirt and cotton slacks bought by his wife, instead of his usual hand-tailored suits and shirts. He did not appreciate the indifferent fit since it did little for his stocky Italian-American frame. Second, he stood in an unknown place out in the open. Anything could happen. His three personal bodyguards were worried—he could tell by their restive postures and quick eye movements. Third, he was hot. The New Orleans temperature had pushed into the eighties by noon with equal amounts of humidity. Marc hated sweating except for exercise. And fourth, he stood in a graveyard looking at white crumbling stone encasing moldering bones with French names. Graveyards had bothered him since he was five, when Uncle Carlo had been gunned down by a rival family at Uncle Stephano's funeral. Marc and his father Julio escaped with minor wounds, but only because two bodyguards sacrificed themselves.
Graveyards gave him big-time willies. This one was no exception.
Today his nerves were worse than usual. His hands trembled. Perhaps it was the residual stress from that business deal he'd closed before leaving Chicago. It had been necessary to snuff the lives of three midlevel managers who'd proved inefficient or untrustworthy. An easy job turned messy because one assassin had allowed his target enough breath to curse his murder's instigator before he died. That made Marc more wary than ever. The last thing he'd done before leaving his office for this vacation was have his big multitalented personal assistant, Guido, permanently lose that assassin. No one would ever find the body. Marc had tied up all the loose ends quickly and quietly, traits for which he'd become famous in the Chicago "business."
Decisive, tough, honest most of the time, determined to do things for the good of his company and his extended family. His reputation didn't include his secret credence in hexes, charms, and curses. The thin voices of his victims, clamoring from beyond the pale, increased enough to dent the mental barrier he'd built against them. Grimacing, Marc shut them out and reinforced his defenses.
He'd never admitted this superstition about graveyards or ghosts to anyone, not even to Tesa. Di Luna considered it a personal weakness. He tried to shrug off the impression of something dire hanging above his head in the shimmering blue sky and pay attention to the guide's historical harangue. Tesa had insisted on a tour of the above-ground St. Louis cemetery just beyond Rampart Street. He'd paid triple for the privilege of a private tour. What could happen?
"Anything," he muttered, glancing about. Preparation for the unexpected had kept Marc alive years longer than anyone predicted, had made him at age thirty-four the youngest and most dynamic leader in the annals of the Chicago organization. He intended to keep his position as long as possible.
Now he stood on a walkway in this seedy garden of oven-shaped crypts listening to a young black woman narrate the peculiar burial practices of a city below sea level. Looking down, he snatched his hand away from the slat of a worn park bench someone had installed more than a hundred years ago so they could share Sunday picnics with dead relatives. The back of his neck crawled again. His hand ached for a weapon even though he knew his only targets were phantoms.
"Make it short," he growled, interrupting the guide. His baritone sounded as sticky as the humidity.
She stopped in mid-sentence, gave him a penetrating look, and nodded. "This way," she said, turning and leading them to a site that appeared identical to many other graves except that the middle one in the stack of three had little notes tied with red ribbons shoved into cracks in the stone. The bright satins fluttered languidly in the reluctant breeze. In front of the tomb, where grass wilted, there were several baguettes both stale and fresh, plates of rotting beans and rice, and two tall dark-green bottles of sealed French wine. Coins of all denominations littered the area, particularly quarters. A fan of five carefully placed silver dollars had dulled during their sojourn in front of the oven vault.
Marc grunted, estimating the total of the coinage. "Person could get some quick money here. That's a pretty good pile."
"No one would ever do that, Mr. Di Luna," the guide's conviction unnerved him more. "Some of this money, like those silver dollars, has been here for over a year, undisturbed as long as I've been guiding tours. It's never touched because it means the worst possible luck."
"Why?" Marc asked, trying to ignore a peculiar itch between his shoulder blades.
"Because this is the most famous grave in the cemetery. Buried here is Marie Laveau, the renowned voodoo queen. Practitioners believe that if they offer food or money and leave requests, Marie will answer." She smiled as if sharing secrets. "In fact, there were two Marie Laveaus, both buried in this crypt. The daughter took over when the mother resigned her calling as voudoun leader, returned to the Catholic faith, and dedicated her last years to healing the sick."
"Voodoo is still practiced here?" squealed Tesa. "Ooooohh, spooky!"
"That's it." Marc grabbed his wife's elbow and spun her toward the cemetery's wrought-iron gate as his tremors exploded into full-blown shakes. "I'm not gonna listen to any more of this crap."
"But we're only half done," Tesa pouted.
"Sir, I hope I haven't offended ..." the guide stuttered.
Marc whirled away from the voodooienne's grave and stumbled on nothing, falling to his knees against the gravel walkway. Rising, waving away his bodyguards, he discovered a quarter stuck to one sweaty palm. Propelled by his need to exit one of New Orleans' historical wonders and desperate get back to the normalcy of leading the mob in Chicago, he dropped the coin in a pocket of his slacks and forgot about it. Shoving through the graveyard's wrought-iron gates, he pushed Theresa into the cool dark plush of the waiting limousine. The bodyguards piled in behind them.
"Back to the hotel," Marc ordered the driver over his wife's protests.
From the relative safety of their double suite, he directed Tesa to cancel the rest of their reservations and call the airport to begin refueling of the company's private jet. Opening the private bar in the room, Marc chose a drink, poured it into a hotel glass, and tossed it down, ignoring Tesa complaints about his canceling the rest of their vacation. He followed the first drink with another, and a third, tasting none. Despite the dulling edge of alcohol, his shakes remained.
That night, in his own opulent bed in Chicago, the dreams began. Balls of gray wax with dark hair like his coiled inside, studded with bright feathers. Dead bats, reeking of turpentine and snuff preservative, sometimes of other, more noxious, smells. A pendant of writhing snake that grew until it crushed him. Marc tossed and turned, unable to rest.
Drums began after the first week, their heavy beat controlling the pace of his heart. Chanting and singing followed two days later in barely understandable French that had an African-Carribean island twang. He began seeing figures, sweaty, gyrating bodies clothed in loud or faded colors, a few not clothed at all, shadows against flickering torchlight. The distinct sensation of power chilled his visions, wild and only marginally controlled, a far different kind from that Di Luna manipulated for the majority of the Chicago underworld.
Marc soon looked haggard from lack of rest. His sense of humor disappeared, his lauded patience with subordinates vanished. On Tesa's insistence, DiLuna visited his doctor. The doctor prescribed sleeping pills, suggesting if they didn't help in a week Marc should make another appointment. The sleeping aids made him groggy but did nothing to stop the dreams. Di Luna threw them away and ignored his doctor's advice.
That night the voices began. They popped in artd out of his nightmares, ebbing at what seemed the most intriguing moments of argument. Voices speaking French with a Carribean-African inflection. Two female voices spitting at one another like fur-fluffed cats. Marc fretted about his inability to understand them as well as his inability to banish their presences.
The third night, in the midst of a spate of bullet-like antique French, the language became as clear as most English to Marc.
"... and what do you propose we do with him since he hasn't heard us? Allow him to continue to ramp about with all that power? He is nearly unstoppable now."
"Oui," the older, darker voice replied, turning soft with memories. "He should have been my consort at the ceremonies by the lake ... at least for a little while." The cold smile implicit in that statement, as well as the unspoken threat of what happened to some of the men after, made Marc shudder.
"Not that you'd return to that life since your reconversion to the Church and your taking up good works," the younger sniped.
