15

NEON HAND WAS ATTACHED to a pagan-witchcraft store. There was a big neon hand in its window, just like the kind in gypsy fortune-teller windows, only at the Neon Hand it was flanked by a neon Budweiser bottle on one side and the word “Guinness” in red on the other.

I went to the bar to see if the bartender knew what was going on, and she didn’t, though she signed me up to speak with the resident fortune-teller, who was “scrying” with someone in a back room at the moment and wouldn’t be available for a while. Scrying, I knew from Sally, is the ancient art of staring into crystals or other shiny surfaces in order to receive prophetic visions. It was perfected by Nostradamus.

It was a lighthearted kind of place, Neon Hand, no pentagrams, or anything too dark and creepy, in this joint. The place was decorated in very soothing pale green. Aside from the bar lights, the only lights were hundreds of rows of tiny Christmas bulbs in soft pastel colors, pink, yellow, blue, green, and white, blending to give the room an iridescent cast. There were shelves filled with books about magic, and old-fashioned looking jars of herbs, and the walls were lined with an eclectic selection of magic celebrity photos. Most of them I recognized—Aleister Crowley, Gerald B. Gardner, Austin O. Spare, even Elizabeth Montgomery, Sabrina, and Kim Novak. It was a Gen-X/Y bar, so you had to expect a few ironic pop-cultural references to lighten things up.

“I know you,” said a man leaning on the bar. “Small world. You look different, though.…”

It was Greg, a guy we’d interviewed for our ANN special report on the paranormal. He heads a group of middle-aged warlocks called the Viziers, who use their “magical powers” to get twenty-year-old women to sleep with them, which my neighbor Sally saw as a shameful squandering of power and I saw as just plain nuts.

“Yeah. Robin Hudson, ANN. I’m sorry. I don’t have time to talk right now.…”

“Aw, you have time to talk to me.” The guy fancied himself to have quite a mesmerizing stare, and he fixed his eyes on me, like he was trying to make me fall under his spell. As if staring into his eyes would somehow block my brain, my libido, my peripheral vision, and, most important, my sense of smell, since he had breath like the inside of Jeffrey Dahmer’s refrigerator.

I was a tad over the hill for this loser, and I looked like a redheaded version of an unholy mating between Don King and Madeline Kahn (at the end of Young Frankenstein), but it was late, he was drunk and obviously desperate. Funny thing, though: When I’d met him out of costume during our special report, when I was a lot more attractive, he hadn’t vibed to me at all. Now I looked dead and he was all charged up. Maybe he had a thing for dead girls.

What a lousy time to get hit on. Because I suspected that magic had less to do with whatever conquests this guy could claim than Pfizer, I was careful to watch my seltzer and lime as the bartender brought it to me. What I didn’t need right now—any time, but especially right now—was Dr. Bombay slipping a roofie or ’lude or something into my seltzer. Roofies, or date-rape pills, are many times stronger than Valium and have the scary side effect of inducing temporary amnesia, so you don’t even remember what happened. I didn’t need one. I felt like I’d been under the influence of one for twenty-plus years.

“I can’t talk right now,” I said, more insistently. “I’m waiting for someone.”

“Waiting for me?”

“No, I’m not waiting for you.”

I stopped.

Maybe I was waiting for him.

“Do you know Julie Goomey?” I asked. “Or Anne Winston?”

“Should I?” he said.

“Do you have a clue for me?”

“I have a clue for you right here,” he said, putting his hand on his crotch.

Loser. No wonder he needed “magic” to meet women.

“A woman doesn’t generally go into a bar alone unless she’s looking for something,” he said.

“Yeah, a seltzer and a seat alone,” I said, walking away to a booth, thinking, Right, gotta go, the microchip in my buttocks is beeping. Amazing. It’s the nineties, and a woman still can’t walk into a pub to quaff a refreshment without its being seen by some dinosaur as a blatant attempt to get laid. Every time I thought the human race was evolving, I’d meet some Missing Link who’d been left behind—and who was probably spreading his seed around and polluting the gene pool.

I wanted to say to the guy, Why don’t you just lose the magic and whatever else you use and just talk to women? Why do you have to control them? Don’t you want to find a nice woman your own age who shares your interests and appreciates you for who you are?

But then I remembered that I am the last person who should be giving advice.

The place smelled faintly of burning herbs. Not too much, though. It’s a floral, funereal smell that wears on you quickly, I’ve found, and the Neon Hand had dealt with this by burning all spells in closed fireplaces that vented upward through charcoal filters, installed because of neighbor complaints.

According to the booklet about magic tucked into the menu at my table, there was always a fortune-teller on duty at Neon Hand to do palms, tea leaves, computer astrological charts, even mix a “nontoxic”—i.e., positive—spell for you. Black magic was not allowed.

I was hungry again, so I ordered a veggie burger. More out of nervousness than anything else, I read through the booklet, a brochure really, while I ate. The cover bore a drawing of a woman identified as Hecate, goddess of the dark side of the moon, queen of ghosts and other dark and hidden things, ruler of magic and wisdom. Did that ever resonate with me tonight.

“Magic,” the booklet said, “is understanding of, cooperation with, and respect for nature. Traditional Science is the attempted manipulation and mastery of nature.” Scientists were at this very moment growing human hair in test tubes and human ears on the backs of white mice without immune systems, concocting all sorts of molecular monstrosities meant to approximate fat, and combining genes from pigs and tomatoes. I couldn’t help thinking how provident this last could be. Add a lettuce gene and you have a BLT. Or combine a gene from those French pigs that sniff out truffles with a gene from the truffle, and create a truffle that finds itself.

Lucky truffle.

Meanwhile, the booklet went on ominously, auspicious albino crocodiles appear in Cambodia, a thousand-mile column of migrating toads makes its way through provincial China, a green cat is born in Denmark, bunches of frogs shower down from the sky in several places in Scotland, and in Iowa a farmer reports a cow who tracks, captures, and eats chickens. Here in New York, coyotes roam the Bronx, wild boars had been sighted in Staten Island and Queens, and a large alligator was pulled from a pond in Brooklyn. Mother Nature is coming back, the booklet warned.

And, boy, is she pissed.

Just then someone said, “Hi, Robin, how are you?”

It was Sally, standing by my booth.

“Hi, Sally. I’m fine. You?”

“Well, the PMS medication I’ve been taking has caused a slight numbness in my left arm.…”

“So I’ve heard.”

“And I broke up with Joshua. Actually, he broke up with me.”

“Who is Joshua?”

“Oh, you didn’t meet him. He was my most recent boyfriend. Robin, why can’t I meet a nice guy?”

I wanted to tell her—Sally, get into therapy and grow your hair out to cover your baldness and your tattoo. You have a big scorpion up the back of your bald head! Some men, believe it or not, consider this a turnoff. But I didn’t know how to tell her this without hurting her feelings and sending her off the deep end, and subtler expressions of this sentiment missed their mark. For a week in the spring, she’d worn a wig, and she looked very pretty with hair, which I mentioned to her. But that phase didn’t last long.

The one time I was able to get her to talk about her appearance, she told me that the man of her dreams would see through to her soul and that’s how she’d know he was the right one, which sounds lovely in theory, except a succession of right ones had come through her doorway and turned out to be wrong. Despite all my subtle and non-subtle hints, she refused to see a shrink, though she did consult with one of her nutty gurus, Sister Delia, a reader of past lives whose real name was Norma Finsecker.

“I dunno, Sal. I’m the wrong person to ask. What are you doing here?”

“I’m waiting for someone. And while I was waiting I was assisting the resident fortune-teller. It’s been busy tonight—Halloween and all. Hey, you know what? I saw Louise Bryant about an hour ago. At the window here.”

“Oh,” I said. “No shit.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m waiting for someone too.”

“Who are you waiting for?”

“I don’t know.” I suddenly got it. “Who are you waiting for?”

“Somebody to pick up an envelope for a murder mystery,” she said.

“Who hired you to do this?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Sally, this is a scam, and my intern Kathy has been sucked up into it, so you’d better tell me what you know.”

Sally chewed her lower lip. “Her name is Anne Winston. She’s a client and had become a friend. Don’t you remember? I mentioned her last week, the friend I wanted to bring along tonight. But she said she couldn’t make it, and then she hired me to do this delivery.”

“I remember you mentioning a friend, the one who was having an affair with a guy who was going to jail, and the wife was on to them. But I don’t remember you mentioning her name,” I said, as I opened the envelope.

“Psychic-client privilege,” she said. Ever since I chewed her out for telling people she advised me, she had been keeping client names confidential. It was her theory now that you could tell anything about someone as long as you didn’t reveal who the person was.

“You’ve met her, this Anne?”

“Yes. She came by a few times. Mostly we talked on the phone, for two months, maybe a little more. She read about me in the newspaper.”

“She read about me,” I said. I was catching on. “She read that I was one of your ostensible clients. She was coming to you to get info about me.”

The envelope contained a key, a newspaper clipping, and a cryptic clue. The story, from summer 1991, was about the bones of a Perrugia-family thug, Frankie “the Fish” DeMarco, being found in the old Brooklyn dunes. The guy had been a numbers runner, a hijacker, a procurer, and was suspected of a couple of hits before he vanished. He’d been missing for over a decade. It jarred me. Was there really a murder? Or was this another red herring?

“Who the hell is Frankie the Fish?” I asked. Sally didn’t know.

The clue was baffling. “Grand Four-Eyes cousin with leg braces.” At first I didn’t get what Julie was trying to say with this gratuitously strange imagery. I wracked my brain trying to come up with associations or allusions that decoded it, but it made no sense. It sounded like something that was badly translated from English into a completely incompatible language like Hindi, and then translated (badly) back into English.

“Do you know what this key fits?” I asked Sally.

“No.”

“What did she look like? Anne Winston.”

“Pretty, a blonde …”

“Dye job? Wig?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Did she pay by credit card?”

“Cash.”

“Did she talk about me?”

“Not by name. I never identified you by name.”

Well, that was big of her. It would be so hard to figure out who Sally’s unnamed redheaded friend who worked in twenty-four-hour news was.

“Whatever. She knew we were all going to go out tonight. She knew it was a Girls’ Night Out.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“And this envelope came to you by FedEx today?”

“How did you know?”

I’m a fucking psychic, I thought, but didn’t say. I filled Sally in on what had gone down, watching her expression grow sadder and more alarmed. When Sally’s face grew sad, it was heartbreaking. I thought to myself, I bet she had super-cooties when she was a kid.

“Anne Winston is Julie Goomey,” I said. Julie might have had a co-conspirator named Anne who worked with her at this perverse charity, but Julie wouldn’t send someone else to get info on me from Sally. She’d have too much fun doing it herself.

“I was so sure about her. I was so sure about what I saw for her. How could I be so wrong?”

“You’re only human.”

“I fucked it up. I am so worthless.… I am such a fraud.”

“Sally, everyone makes mistakes.”

“Now I know what my orange dream means. It means I’m a fraud.”

“The orange dream?”

“I dreamed I invented the orange. I didn’t have any money for the subway, so I gave the token clerk my orange, and he threw it onto the tracks. A big rat came and took it and it was gone. And it was the only orange in existence.” At this, she burst into tears.

Suddenly, I realized that, in some weird way, Sally was right to shave her head and have a scorpion up the back of it. It was right for her to express herself. She was weird and tough (scorpion), vulnerable and exposed (bald head). Now that I thought about it, this suited her. When Sally was completely insane in the spring, after her cat, Pie, died and her then True Love pulled a gun on her and took off with her life savings, she started wearing that wig, going without makeup, and wearing dull clothes. It was so nutty. For her, I mean. It was like she had slipped into another person’s skin, kind of the way the actors in horror movies slipped into prosthetic faces and other body parts. Yet I knew this must have been how she looked, more or less, back when she was growing up in Darien, Connecticut, before she went to Princeton and fell in with a coven of witches there.

The wig and the clothes lasted about a week. Then I hired her to consult on our special report on the paranormal, and she reverted to herself.

“Sally, calm down. Don’t jump to any conclusions. Everything will be fine,” I said, putting one arm around her.

“How do you know everything will be okay?”

“I have no choice but to believe that,” I said.

“Maybe if I burn some bladderwrack … Omigod, bladderwrack won’t do it, will it? I really fucked up,” Sally said. “I’m a complete fraud. I knew it.”

“Sally, don’t do anything drastic. Everything is going to be all right.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told your friend, that everything would be all right, and I was wrong,” Sally bawled so the whole place could hear. I’m sure this instilled lots of confidence in people who were waiting to have their fortunes read. “Oh God, I just had a vision flash through my head … a terrible vision.…”

“It’s all some kind of joke, Sally. Don’t panic. You’re only human. Can you tell me anything else about this Anne, whose name is really Julie?”

“She seemed so nice. I was helping her a lot with her problems.”

“What problems?”

“The married boss, the wife, and she had a bad childhood.”

Julie’s childhood was bad, I had to admit. But lots of people had shittier childhoods. Sooner or later, you deal with it and move on, right?

Sally couldn’t stop crying. I kept rubbing her back with one hand as I whipped out my notebook with the other and started playing with the name. Anne Winston. It wasn’t up to Julie’s regular standards. She’d always liked aliases like Carol Merrill, Terence J. Mahoney, or Putli Bai, Indian Bandit Queen.

I studied the clue again.

“Grand,” I read again. “Four Eyes cousin with leg braces.”

It took me a few minutes of brain strain and a few more passes over the clue to figure it all out. Grand was the name of the best hotel in Ferrous.

Four Eyes. There was a kid, a grade ahead, nicknamed Four Eyes. Come to think of it, he had a young cousin with leg braces who attended Camp Hapalot.… Victor? Vincent.

There was a Hotel Vincent, near Gramercy Park, and we had stopped there, very, very briefly, that night in New York, on the ride back to our hotel.

My phone rang in my hand, startling me and scaring Sally into a more energetic round of sobbing.

“Robin? Claire. Still can’t find anything on Anne Winston.”

“I wonder if she’s a real person, and Julie’s just been using her name tonight. Hmmm. What about George the rich guy?”

Sally got up and went to the bar. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her order and pound back a shot of something.

“Nothing yet,” Claire said. “Nobody on the night shift has a fucking clue, so I’m sitting here between two computers, one doing a slow search through last week’s scripts for the words ‘fugitive’ and ‘George,’ and another flashing all the newsphotos we used last week during my shows. I’ll know it when I see the photo. I’ve only got a few dozen more to go through. Where are you going now?”

“The Hotel Vincent. I don’t know why yet, but I guess I’ll find out when I get there.”

“I’ll call you when I find out who this guy is and why he’s news,” Claire said. “Have you heard from Tamayo?”

“No. Wasn’t she with you?”

“She went to check out the apartment building Julie Goomey lived in before 1990.”

“I was just about to call her.…”

“I just called her, Rob. There was no answer. I’m worried. Very worried.”

“She may have gone to talk to someone and left the phone somewhere. You know how absent-minded she can be.”

“Robin, I have a very bad feeling about all this. Be careful, okay?”

“Sure.”

Sally was at the bar talking to Greg the “warlock.” I saw her put back another shot of something.

“Sally, I gotta go,” I said. “Take it easy, sweetie.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said, already slurring her words.

“No, you can’t go with me. I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said.

“Have another drink,” said the warlock.

I wanted to stay and look after Sally, but I couldn’t, and I couldn’t take her with me either, not in her state. Jeez, this good-friend stuff was tricky. Before I left, I called a car service to get a car to take her home. Even though it was just a few long blocks from here back to our apartment building, and traffic was going to be a pain because of all the people on the streets, I felt better having professionals take her home. There was a long wait for a car, so I took the bartender aside and asked her to keep an eye out for Sally in the interim, try to get her away from the warlock. I also left a message with the bartender for Tamayo, in case she showed up here, that I was going to the Hotel Vincent, and she should call me or Claire.

When I left the Neon Hand on Avenue A, that Yma Sumac song I’d heard at Joy II, “Virgenes del Sol,” started playing in an endless loop somewhere at the back of my head—beating drums, chanting men, Yma’s desperate, ethereal shriek. My heart was beating to the drums. I couldn’t even feel my legs.

The megavitamin was finally kicking in.