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I reinforced the barrier on my doorstep using the red earth and salt I kept in a clay pot beside the door. Latching the deadbolt to ward off more mundane burglars, I took the steps two at a time. When I reached the walled courtyard, I heard the muted clatter of the loft bell again. This wasn’t some sprawling estate. The man had feet of his own.
“What is you geekin’ for,” I muttered.
I followed the narrow path between the house and the wall toward the kitchen door. Larger buildings with white facades and wraparound balconies crowded in close like protective older brothers around Kitterling’s mauve stepchild. From my loft to the kitchen door was a thirty-second walk, tops. I could count on no fingers the number of times he’d made the trip.
Many a time I’d considered taking my knife to the network of woven cords scattered throughout Kitterling’s house, part of the “preserved history” he claimed was protected by building codes. Better yet, cutting the servant’s bell free and shoving it where it would ring every time Ed got off his ass. Likely I’d never hear it again.
But I needed an employer who didn’t ask questions. Having one who also understood the basics about the Above and Below, the realms of the spirit world and magic, was a plus. One who happened to meet all those requirements and pretended to be a legitimate antique dealer in This World? Well, that was even better.
Could I manage alone? I asked myself that question daily. Conjurations and bewitchments only went so far toward making a living. Too many would draw attention. I needed his legitimate storefront as much as he needed me to keep the fringes of the shadowy world he mined for riches from collapsing in on him.
And for all his flaws, Kitterling knew his business. No way this 410-stamped West Baltimore exile would have ever cared about the difference between Georgian and Victorian, or Italian walnut and American. Meanwhile, his leads on artifacts often went interesting places. Through him, I could explore areas of magic my mentor refused to teach.
Kitterling used me, I used him. The ivory to my ebony. Yin to my Yang.
The narrow galley kitchen I passed through hadn’t been updated since before my birth. Far from Momma’s home cooking, it had the vibe of recipes torn from magazines. I opened the capsule shaped refrigerator and grabbed a beer off the shelves clearly labeled “Mr. Kitterling.”
Mister Kitterling. He insisted on the formality. Said it signaled respect and kept our relationship professional. Not sure I’d have it any other way.
A closed casket filled the center of the adjoining dining room. Empty, Mister Kitterling often joked with clients that the casket was for sale at a steep discount if they’d accept the contents as part of the deal.
Back in the day, he’d run a funeral parlor out of this same house. Handling funerals led to estate sales and discoveries which led to his somehow becoming wise to the true nature of magic; a story he has refused to share.
Quid pro quo.
The antiques kept in this room were for the more discerning collector. Encounters with the realm of the Below saturated the masks, urns, and fetishes decorating the walls. With so many in one place, I could easily slip right across the boundary here, no fee for the boatman required. A tickle threatened the back of my throat.
I moved quickly through the dining room. Sunlight streamed into the entryway through the open front door. I closed my eyes to bask in the glow. Those rays trapped the vigor and renewal of the Above. I wanted to unbutton my shirt and let the energy collect on the golden breastplate, then spread throughout my chest, cleansing the impurity there. I could feel it as much as I could feel the envelope of death on either side.
Across the entryway was the study. A forest of Chippendale and Horrix furniture created the habitat for an entire savanna’s worth of taxidermy, natural and otherwise. Some, I’d bagged. At night though, lights from the street would catch their glass eyes and they’d stare accusingly. Creeped a brother out.
That werewolf head? Not a bison fur fake like Mutombo. Thinking back on that night made the sunlight sputter.
“Glad you could finally join me, Eustace.”
Whatever trace of warmth I’d been clinging to disappeared.
The name’s Ace. Some people, the ones who knew me from the force mostly, called me by my last name, Grant. Nobody calls me Eustace except my mother. And this clown.
Edward Kitterling sat on a stool behind a glass case at the far end of the entry hall. He was a burnt candle of a man. A flicker of gray sprouted above his receding hairline which always escaped whatever tin-can hair wax he used to slick the silvery sides. Face long and sallow, his cheeks dripped from high cheekbones. Every day, every occasion, he wore a suit, usually brown with a checked pattern. He called himself a Loyalist as if the British had surrendered Florida only yesterday.
Kitterling eyed me over the rim of his glasses. He squinted suspiciously at me then the beer. “A little early? Or is that the custom in Baltimore?”
I lifted the beer. “For my mentor.” Among the many secrets we kept from each other, the true nature of Atofo, my shaman mentor, was one of them. I ignored the raised eyebrow which made clear he was certain I’d chug his floral hipster brew as soon as I hit the porch. “What’ve you got for me today?”
“There is an heirloom of surpassing significance which I require you to procure.” His aloof gaze drifted to a piece of paper on the counter.
“What’s new?” I asked, moving closer. Everything in the mahogany case Kitterling hunched over had been an heirloom of some significance or another.
He spun the piece of paper like turning a dial. “I received this e-mail,” he said the word, elongating the first letter as if I needed reminding that the internet was a thing, “from a colleague. He believes the Shaw Sword to have been located.”
I took the paper from the counter. Kitterling had taken a black marker to the header information and blocked out the sender’s email address. The body simply read, “Your next task” and included directions to somewhere in South Carolina.
“Sword? What are we talking? Some son of a son of some Southern aristocrat lost his family butter knife or whatever?”
“Don’t be an ass.” Kitterling slowly repeated the name, “Shaw.”
I frowned. You pick up historical facts in the antique business out of necessity. But I don’t study. I know the hierarchy of the Baltimore gangs on my old beat better than the Presidents of the United States. I need to experience it, feel it in my hands, before anything sticks.
“Robert Gould Shaw.” Kitterling fired the name as a warning shot for his lecture. “Colonel of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the first African American unit of the Civil War. Several volumes on this period are located in the study. You should be familiar with your history.”
Your history. The history of ‘you people’. The servant’s bell cord dangled way too close to his throat. I half-listened, half-fantasized.
“Confederate forces confiscated Shaw’s sword after he fell in battle. Toward the end of the war, it was believed to have been recovered. Given to his family for safekeeping,” Kitterling paused and rolled his eyes, “they promptly lost track of this priceless heirloom.”
Throwing shade at the uneducated masses for not recognizing the treasures in their own cupboards was part of his MO. I couldn’t help but feel his interest was different this time. He almost seemed to take the loss personally. As if he had more of a right to ‘my people’s’ inheritance than they did.
“And you want me to help this family find their property.” Kitterling’s Curiosities didn’t deal in good deeds. But I jumped on the chance to get under his skin.
“There has always been some question as to whether or not the recovered weapon was even the proper sword,” he said, unaffected by my combo. “My contact,” he reached over and smartly flicked the paper in my hand, “believes they have located the original.”
“Is your contact a black history museum? Because if what you’re saying is true, this sword,” I said, done trading jabs, “carried by my people, shouldn’t be for sale.”
“Your people,” Kitterling said drolly. “I’m quite afraid you misunderstood. Shaw was white.”
Of course. Fighting to end slavery hadn’t ended the idea black soldiers would need a white officer. Yet another reason I hadn’t bothered to read any of Kitterling’s volumes in the study.
Ready to get his mug out of my face, I forced a smile and turned to leave.
“And Eustace.” I bristled at the name. “See that the car comes back clean. The country roads always leave their mark. Cheerio.”
I stabbed the folded paper into the air and walked out.
***
‘THE CAR’ AS KITTERLING called it was a 1961 Caddie. Mirror black with a pristine white interior she always got stares cruising up the A1A. Mystified, morbidly curious stares. Discreet she wasn’t. The only place she’d blend in was at the head of a funeral procession.
Because Bubonic was a hearse.
For Kitterling, it was just ‘The Car’, even though she wasn’t no damn car. For me, she was a plague. A clot migrating through the arteries of this ancient city. I kept my eyes straight ahead as I waited at lights which felt too long. People sometimes pulled to the side of the road, no flashing lights and sirens required.
In a past life, I could appreciate the fusion of macabre and class. But I couldn’t maintain a low profile with all the gawking.
Who died? Who was going die? Questions from all the stares I got which I didn’t want to answer.
Today’s burning question was different: Why would anybody take a hearse up to Mrs. Tish Adelaide’s Olde Chicken Fry? I wondered the same damn thing as I pulled into the parking lot.
Tish, owner and operator of the permanently parked food truck had named her business with more cheek than tongue, both of which were on the menu if you asked. She’d commandeered the lot right across from the ‘Old’ Jail. In Saint Augustine, everything was ‘Old’ or ‘Ancient’. A sixty-year-old hearse likely fit in better than even I figured.
Soul food though, not souls, that was Tish’s specialty. She’d become a local legend for her chicken. And in true Southern tradition, she’d drop just about anything into her fryer. I’d come for her less frequently requested menu items.
“Well if it ain’t my favorite funeral director,” she said, smile as big as the hips hidden behind the open window. She let her motherly bosom rest on the counter. “Usual, hon?”
“You know me.”
I waited at the window while she disappeared into the back of the truck. “You want I should read them?” she called out; her voice muffled by the hum of an open refrigerator.
“It’s whatever.”
I propped an elbow on the counter and gazed into the city. Seemed like a typical off-season day. The streets weren’t yet crowded with tourists every waking moment. A trolley crawled along; the attached cars empty. The driver held a conversation with his single passenger, not needing to shout over the loudspeaker or sing drunken songs with bar hopping kids. The sky was crystal clear, the temperature perfect even with the extra jacket I wore to conceal my weapons. A genuinely beautiful day.
Except for that raven who’d darkened my stoop. He’d been perched there, head cocked, waiting. He hadn’t bothered to peck at the dried corn offering like a normal bird, just flew off with it.
Back in the kitchen, Tish let out an involuntary “Huh-uh.”
She was bent over the counter, her glittering fingernails stabbing and probing. Her head wagged unrestrained. I knew that look. The one that said she wasn’t about to tell me what she’d seen. She scooped a squishy fistful of intestines off the counter and slid toward the fryer, head still shaking.
Tish wasn’t the first of her family to find local fame. Her mother and grandmother both had been well known, but not for their cooking. They’d been hoodoo practitioners. They followed a tradition which, like every other bit of American magic, resulted from a fusion of Old World, New World, and the fruits of the cradle of civilization brought here in chains.
And like all the other conjures, rootworkers, shamans, medicine men, and backwoods wizards I’d encountered, the power of Tish’s matriarchs had diminished over time to become a tiny ripple of its former flow.
Loss of faith could be blamed. On the other hand, magic couldn’t just up and disappear. Arcane powers buzzed under the surface of This World twenty-four seven, untapped. I felt them in the sun and the shadow. Magic remained, only questions were how much, and would it be enough for a cure?
Tish started humming and I leaned in to listen to her smooth tone over the pop and sizzle of the fryer. Whatever she did in that tiny kitchen was nothing short of magic. The divine smell could lure people from a block away. Whether she recognized it or not, the song, the hand me down recipes, the small collection of candles she kept near the cutting board where she performed her readings for me, those all tapped into the well of magic and spirit.
“That be all?” she asked. The paper bag she offered shone with splotches of grease. I stuffed a hand in my pocket to dig out some cash. Tish shook her head. “Not many people come asking for chitlins no more. I can appreciate a man with an appetite for everything, you feel me, hon?”
I gave her a smile which I hoped she couldn’t read. Southern cooking I could deal with. The “whole animal” philosophy though wasn’t for this city boy.
“Now you got me worrying,” I said, putting my wallet away. “What did you see?”
Her mouth set into a frown. “You know, it’s all for fun.”
“You have a gift.”
She set the bag down and scooted it across the counter. “Well, here’s your gift then.” She stepped back and scrubbed her hands on her apron. “But you be careful out there, Ace.”
“That bad, huh?”
One more stop, and I’d be off to face whatever doom she’d prophesied. First, I’d face a different kind of danger. My mentor.