THE LEBALLECS LIVED half an hour away from the cemetery, at the end of a dirt road that crossed another field and was broken up by a stream, before leading down a sharp slope to a grassy plain overlooking the waterfalls. They hadn’t had to look far for the building material: their home was a sturdy one-floor rectangle whose walls were made of the same sandstone as the abandoned building shell near Clarinette.
Philippe made them wait outside with the dogs while he went to talk to his mother.
Max heard the hum of a generator coming from behind the house.
A dark shape appeared at the bottom of the window nearest the front door, hovered in the glass for a moment, and then vanished.
A while later, the door opened and Philippe beckoned them in. The dogs stayed put.
Indoors it was cool and dark. The air smelled pleasantly sweet, like a well-stocked candy shop, with hints of chocolate and vanilla, cinnamon, aniseed, mint, and orange, all threading in and out of range, never quite settling into a definite fragrance.
Philippe showed them into a room where his mother sat waiting at a long table draped in black silk cloth, trimmed with purple, gold, and silver thread. She was in a wheelchair.
The room was windowless but brightly lit by thick, purple candles positioned in tight rhomboid formations on the floor, or placed in multiple brass candelabras, stood on objects of varying height and length, themselves also shrouded in black cloth. The candles on the ground were three-quarter crosses, the heads substituted by the flame.
The room should have been boiling hot, but the temperature was the bearable side of chilly, thanks to the air-conditioning running on full power and an overhead fan they could hear clicking and grinding above them. The artificial breeze caused the flames to undulate gently on their wicks, making the walls appear to be turning slowly around them, like a great, shapeless beast stalking its prey and biding its time, waiting for its moment, savoring the dread.
Philippe did the introductions. His voice was tender and his body language respectful when he addressed his mother, telling Max she was someone he loved and feared in equal measure.
“Max Mingus, may I introduce you to Madame Mercedes Leballec,” he said and stepped off to one side.
“Bond-joor,” Max said, automatically and unconsciously bowing his head. There was an innate authority about her, a power that thrived on the humility and intimidation of others.
“Mr. Mingus. Welcome to my house,” she spoke in French-accented English, slowly and graciously, enunciating each word in a smooth voice that came across as studied and mannered, one she specially laid on for strangers.
Max placed her in her late sixties or early seventies. She was wearing a long-sleeved blue denim dress with pale wooden buttons down the front. She was completely bald, her cranium so smooth and shiny it seemed as if she’d never had hair. Her forehead was high and steep, while her facial features were cramped close together, squashed down, smaller and less defined than they should have been. Her eyes were so minute Max could barely find their whites, their movements those of shadows behind spyholes. She had neither eyelashes nor eyebrows, but wore an abstract version of the latter in the shape of two bold, arcing, black strokes beginning at the edges of her temples and tapering down to points that almost met in the gap between her forehead and the start of her flat, funnel-shaped nose. Her mouth was small and made a fishlike pout; she had a firm jaw and a chin so deeply clefted it resembled a hoof. She made Max think of an eccentric and slightly scary reclusive old movie queen, postchemotherapy. He shot a quick, comparative look at Philippe, now slouching on a stool behind her, his hands on his lap. He couldn’t see one iota of a resemblance.
She bade them to be seated with a regal sweep of her hand.
“You’re looking for the boy? Charlie?” she spoke as soon as they’d taken their places.
“That’s right,” Max replied. “Do you have him?”
“No,” Mercedes answered emphatically.
“But you know Eddie Faustin?”
“Knew. Eddie is dead.”
“How d’you know he’s dead? They never recovered his body.”
“Eddie is dead,” she repeated, wheeling her chair up closer to the table.
Max noticed the big stainless-steel whistle she was wearing on a string around her neck. He wondered whom it was for—the dogs, Philippe, or both.
“Eddie ever tell you who he was working for—or with?”
“We wouldn’t be sitting here right now if he had.”
“Why’s that?” Max asked.
“Because I’d be rich and you wouldn’t be here.”
Something behind her left shoulder caught Max’s eye. It was a life-size brass sculpture of a pair of praying hands, standing upright in the middle of a draped table. The table was flanked by two long candles on Delphic column–styled sticks. A chalice and an empty, clear, glass bottle were placed either side of the hands. A dog skull, a dagger, a pair of dice, a metallic sacred heart, and a rag doll were arranged behind them in a semicircle. But the display’s focal point was the objects he noticed last of all, placed directly below the hands on a brass dish that might have been a communion-wafer plate: a pair of porcelain eyes, the size of ping-pong balls, with bright blue irises staring right into his.
It was an altar used in black-magic ceremonies. He remembered finding a lot of them in Miami back in the early eighties, when the Cuban crime wave hit and broke all over the city; bad guys prayed to bad spirits for protection before they went off and did bad things. Most cops had loudly dismissed the altars as superstitious bullshit, but deep down they’d been more than a little creeped out by them. It was something they didn’t understand, an influence they couldn’t curtail.
“So, Eddie said nothing at all about the people he was working for?” Max continued.
“No.”
“Not one single detail? Didn’t he even tell you if he was working for a man or a woman? If they were black or white? Foreign?”
“Nothing.”
“Didn’t you ask?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t interested,” she answered in a flat, matter-of-fact way.
“But you knew what was going down?” Max leaned a little over the table, just like he used to do when he was shaking down a stubborn witness in the interrogation room. “You knew he was gonna kidnap that kid.”
“It was none of my business,” she replied very calmly, completely unruffled.
“But surely you thought it was wrong, what he was doing?” Max insisted.
“I’m no one’s judge,” she answered.
“OK,” Max nodded and sat back. He glanced across at Chantale, who was following the proceedings intently, and then at Philippe, who was yawning.
He looked back at the altar, connected with the staring eyeballs, and then took in the background. The wall behind Mercedes was painted turquoise. A headless wooden cross hung in the middle of it diagonally, its beam bristling with long nails, crudely hammered, some bent, most sticking out at crooked angles. The cross looked like it was meant to be falling from heaven.
“How long had you known Eddie?”
“I helped him get his job with the Carver family,” Mercedes answered, smiling slightly as she saw Max looking at the things behind her.
“How did you help him?”
“It’s what I do.”
“And what is that?”
“You know,” she said and her mouth stretched into a smile that showed a row of tiny teeth.
“Black magic?” Max asked.
“Call it what you will,” she said with a dismissive wave.
“What did you do for him?”
“Mr. Carver had a choice between Eddie and three others. Eddie brought me something from each of his competitors—something they’d touched or worn—and I went to work.”
“Then what?”
“Good fortune is not forever. It has to be repaid—with interest,” Mercedes pushed her chair back a little.
“They say Eddie died bad. Is that how he paid?”
“Eddie owed a lot.”
“Want to tell me about it?” Max prompted.
“He came to me with all his problems after he got the job with Carver. I helped him out.”
“What kind of problems?”
“The usual—women, enemies.”
“Who were his enemies?”
“Eddie was a Macoute. Almost everyone he’d ever beaten and robbed wanted him dead. And then there were families of people he’d killed, women he’d raped, they were out to get him too. It’s what happens when you lose power.”
“What did you get out of him in return?”
“You wouldn’t understand—and it’s also none of your business,” she said firmly and waited to see Max’s reaction.
“OK,” Max said. “Tell me about Eddie and Francesca Carver.”
“Some things in life you just can’t ever have. I tried to warn him against pursuing that madness. I didn’t see a good end for it. Eddie wouldn’t listen. He had to have her, the same way he’d had to have everything else in his life. He thought he was in love with her.”
“Wasn’t he?” Max asked.
“Not Eddie.” She chuckled. “He knew nothing about that. He’d raped all the women he hadn’t paid for.”
“And you worked for him?”
“And you haven’t worked for bad people?” She laughed deeply, in the middle of her throat, without opening her mouth. “We’re not that different, we’re both for hire.”
As far as Max could tell, she had nothing to hide, but she was keeping things from him just the same; he sensed it, some vital piece of information slipping through the cracks of everything she was saying.
“How did you try and bring Eddie and Mrs. Carver together?”
“What didn’t I try? I tried everything I knew. Nothing worked.”
“Had that ever happened to you before?”
“No.”
“Did you tell Eddie?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He wasn’t paying me to fail,” she said.
“So you lied to him?”
“No. I tried something else—a rare ceremony, something that’s only done in desperation. Very risky.”
“What was it?”
“I can’t tell you,” she said. “And I won’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not allowed to discuss it.”
She looked a little afraid. Max didn’t push her.
“Did this thing work?”
“Yes, at first.”
“How?”
“Eddie told me he had a chance to take off with the Carver woman.”
“‘Take off’? Like elope?”
“Yes.”
“Was he more specific?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t ask because it didn’t interest you?” Max said.
She nodded.
“So how did it go wrong?”
“Eddie’s dead. It can’t go more wrong than that.”
“Who told you he was dead?”
“He did,” Mercedes said.
“Who? Eddie?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“How’d he do that?”
She pulled herself back closer to the table.
“Do you really want to know?”
Close up, she smelled of menthol cigarettes.
“Yes,” Max said. “I do.”
“Are you of a nervous disposition?”
“No.”
“Very well,” Mercedes rolled her chair back and talked to Philippe quietly in Kreyol.
“Could you two get up and step away from the table so’s we can set up,” said Philippe, getting up from his stool and pointing vaguely to his right.
Max and Chantale went and stood close to the door. The wall space was entirely taken up by wooden display shelves, screwed to the wall, starting close to the ceiling and ending just above the floor. There were twenty individual compartments, each displaying a thick, cylindrical, glass jar filled with clear, yellowy liquid, which held its contents in perfect suspension. Max scanned them randomly, noting a huge egg, a black mamba, a small human foot, a bat, a human heart, a fat toad, a chicken’s claw, a gold brooch, a lizard, a man’s hand…
“What are these for?” Max whispered to Chantale.
“Spells. Good and bad. My mother’s got a few of these. The egg can be used to make a woman fertile or barren,” she said, then pointed to the foot, which Max noticed was professionally amputated above the ankle. “The foot can be used to cure broken bones or to cripple someone.” Then she directed Max’s attention to the hand, shriveled and grayish-green in color. “That’s a married man’s hand. See the wedding ring?” He saw the faded gold band hanging loose at the bottom of the second-from-last finger. “It can either make or break up a marriage. Everything you see here has two possible uses. It all depends on who’s asking and who’s casting. The good spells are done before midnight, the bad after. But I don’t think a lot of good gets done around here.”
“How did they get these?” Max asked.
“They bought them.”
“Where from?”
“Everything’s for sale here, Max,” she said.
He looked back at what the Leballecs were doing.
Philippe had removed the cloth from where they’d been sitting, revealing the varnished wooden table it had been covering. There were markings of various sizes on the surface, indentations painted black. First and most prominent, set in two arches in the middle, facing Mercedes, were the letters of the alphabet: capitals running A to M, and then N to Z. Below, in a straight line ran numbers one to ten. In either upper corner were the words OUI and NON, and on the opposite side was carved the word AUREVOIR.
“Is that what I think it is?” Max asked Philippe.
“It ain’t Monopoly.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“You said you wanted to know.” Philippe smiled. “This is knowledge. You two wanna come over here.”
Max hesitated. What if this was bullshit?
So what if it was, he told himself—bullshit only hurts the believer.
“I thought you charged for this kind of thing?” Max said, not moving.
“So you’re going to do it?” Mercedes asked.
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Mercedes smiled. “Then consider it a gift from me to you. You’re much more of a man than your predecessors—Mr. Beeson and Mr. Medd.”
“You met ’em?”
“Beeson was very rude and arrogant. He called me a ‘hocus-pocus bitch’ and walked out as soon as he saw what we were doing. Medd was more polite. He thanked me for my time before he left.”
“They never came back?”
“No.”
Meaning they didn’t believe in this shit either, thought Max. Which either made him more open-minded or a born-again fool.
“Shall we begin now, Max?”
The table was a huge Ouija board. A notebook, a pencil, and a solid, clear-glass, oval pointer were placed at Mercedes’s side.
They were about to have a séance.
They sat around the table, Max in front of Mercedes, Chantale opposite Philippe, heads bowed, holding hands in a circle, as though they were saying grace. Everyone apart from Max had their eyes closed. He wasn’t going to take it seriously. He didn’t believe in it.
“Eddie? Eddie Faustin? Ou là?” Mercedes called out loudly, filling the room with her voice.
If she was faking, Max thought, she was putting her heart and soul into it. Her face, under the strain of concentration, was even more bizarre than it had been when relaxed. She’d screwed it up so much that her features disappeared almost entirely in whorls and bunches of pinched-together, scrunched-up flesh. She was squeezing Chantale and Philippe’s hands so hard her fists were shaking with the effort. They were both wincing in pain.
The room had gone a shade darker. Max thought he saw something move by the shelves and looked over. The exhibits seemed a fraction brighter and alive, vivid and empty like lit-up clothes-store mannequins on an empty, dark street. He swore he could detect movement in some of them—a pulse beat in the hand, the toes moving at the end of the foot, the snake darting out its tongue, cracks forming in the eggshell. Yet when he focused on them individually, they were utterly lifeless.
Philippe and Chantale tightened their respective grips on Max’s hand, their lips moving soundlessly.
The atmosphere in the room had changed. He did not feel oppressed in there, despite all the black-magic paraphernalia, the knowledge that his predecessors had passed through here on their way to mutilation and, quite possibly, death. But now he felt a tightness creeping into his chest and back, a feeling of someone heavy standing on it.
When he first heard the sound, he didn’t register it as anything special. He mistook it for the fan.
When he heard it again it was closer and louder, coming from right under his nose: a single light tap, followed by the sound of something small scraping over a smooth surface, a sound not unlike that of a zipper being done up, top to bottom, low notes ending on high.
He looked down at the board. Things had changed. The pointer had moved—or been moved—from Mercedes’s side up to the letters. It was indicating the letter “E.”
Chantale and Philippe let go of his hands.
“Qui là?” asked Mercedes.
He saw the pointer turn, independently, to point at “D.”
Max wanted to ask Mercedes how she was doing it, but his mouth was too dry and his balls ice.
Chantale’s face was impassive.
Mercedes had written the first two letters down.
The pointer turned to the right and moved across the board slightly to stop at “I,” its motions jerky yet steady, as if really guided by an unseen hand. It looked impressive—even if it was fake, which he kept telling himself it was, so he wouldn’t freak out.
He thought of looking under the table to see if there was a machine underneath, controlling the spook show, but he wanted to see where it was all going.
Both Mercedes’s hands were on the table.
The pointer moved back to “E” and stayed put. It looked like a big, congealed teardrop.
“He’s here,” Mercedes said. “Ask what you want to know.”
“What?”
“Ask—him—your—question,” Mercedes said slowly.
Max felt suddenly stupid, like he was being taken in and massively conned, all the while being loudly laughed at by an invisible audience.
“All right,” he said, deciding to play along for the time being. “Who kidnapped Charlie?”
The pointer didn’t move.
They waited.
“Ask him again.”
“Sure he understands English?” Max quipped.
Mercedes gave him an angry look.
Max was about to say something about the batteries dying when the pointer jerked into motion and zipped around the two arches of letters, stopping there just long enough for Mercedes to write down what they were before moving on to the next.
When the pointer stopped moving, she held up her pad: H-O-U-N-F-O-R.
“It means temple,” she said.
“As in voodoo temple?” Max asked.
“That’s right.”
“Which one? Where? Here?”
Mercedes asked but the pointer didn’t move.
And it never moved again for them. They repeated the ceremony. Max even tried to empty his mind of all doubting thoughts and cynicism and pretend he really believed in what they were doing, but even so, the pointer didn’t budge.
“Eddie has left,” Mercedes concluded, when she’d tried for the final time. “He usually says good-bye. Something must have scared him. Maybe you did, Mr. Mingus.”
“Was that for real?” Max asked Chantale as they walked back toward the orange grove.
“Did you see any trickery?” Chantale said.
“No, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t going on,” Max said.
“You need to believe in the impossible once in a while,” Chantale retorted.
“I do,” Max grunted. “I’m here aren’t I?”
He was sure there was a perfectly rational, humdrum explanation for everything they’d witnessed at the Leballec house. Accepting what he’d just seen at face value was just too much of a mind-fuck.
Max believed in life and death. He didn’t believe life crossed over into death, although he did believe that some people could be dead inside and appear to be living on the outside. Most lifers and long-timers he’d seen in prison were like that. He was pretty much that way too, a corpse wrapped in living tissue, fooling everyone but himself.