The Necromancer's House (14 page)

This is what Andrew does at the AA meeting.

He greets Bob, the chair, on his way in, remarking once again on how happy Bob is. How goddamned, unassailably
happy
. The man went to jail four times for DUI and involuntary manslaughter, got evicted, lost two marriages, a boat, and a career as a charter captain; now he works at a church resale shop, hasn't got a pot to piss in, and yet . . .

“Andrew! Haven't seen you in a week or two. We missed you!”

“I must have felt you missing me, Bob. Here I am.”

Bob hugs him like Andrew's his little brother, nothing fake about it.

Unlike when his own brother hugs him, though that hasn't happened for a while.

Maybe fifteen years since Charles gave Andrew something other than a perfunctory manshake.

Bob has fifteen years sober, a bona fide elder statesman.

Bob's nothing like Charley.

Bob went for donkey-and-sandals Jesus, knows Charley's BMW Jesus is something else.

Bob's eyes twinkle like he figured out God's his secret Santa and he knows you'll figure out he's yours, too, in your own sweet time. Early on, Andrew swung between feeling inspired by Bob and really resenting him; where does a beat-up old fellow who isn't much to look at, can't do magic, can't afford a restaurant meal, and hasn't gotten laid since the Berlin Wall fell get off just
glowing
like that? It's a little like being luminous, only Bob will never learn magic out of a book and make things happen in the world. All the magic happens in Bob's head—he stopped trying to change the world and just changed how he looks at it.

It's genius, really, if you can manage it.

Why make a big house for yourself when you're happy in a shack?

Why lust for a new car when your crank-handle windows work fine and Chancho fixes your rusted-out old beater at cost?

You could shit in Bob's shirt pocket and he would run to spread it on his blueberry patch.

Between her introduction to the hostile side of magic and the coming death of her father, Anneke needs Bob.

With the ancient Russian crone who captured and tortured Andrew twenty-nine years before now stalking him, the magus needs Bob, too.

Bob doesn't know exactly what's wrong in their lives, they don't share tonight, but he's glad they came. He reads from the Big Book, and then he talks about forgiveness.

Andrew has trouble staying on message.

He's not thinking about forgiveness.

He's thinking about self-defense.

He's thinking about revenge.

New Orleans in June is a sort of bright, dangerous sauna whose steam seems to come from the crotches and armpits of its citizens; its nucleus is a tangle of colonial streets where tourists tread on bones; they drink liquors distilled from the sweat of dead West Africans, the grandchildren of whom have been pushed to low ground to await their centennial drowning, but some of these don't wait quietly. It is easy to get shot here, or stabbed, or clubbed toothless, even in the bright places that smell of rum and fruit juice, even as rotten cops look down at you from the saddles of their horses and fat Iowans and Michiganders sleep above them in overpriced hotels, dreaming of the morning's beignets.

Haint likes this about the French Quarter; he likes walking among the entitled and the blind and feeling their condescension toward him; he is another curiosity in a city teeming with them, an intentionally scarred and branded black man with skin that looks almost indigo, his crown of graying hair horseshoeing a balding dome that bears a front-to-back row of scars he inflicted himself with a hot razor.

“I liked your letter,” Haint says to Andrew as both men sit sweating in Coops. “You write your words tight and plain and press hard with the pen, none of this loopy shit.”

“I e-mailed you,” Andrew says.

Haint enunciates each of the next words carefully, as if explaining things to a well-meaning but disappointing child.

“I am talking. About the way. I saw it in my head. I saw your e-mail as a letter.”

Haint is one of those half-mad users whose conversation must be sifted to separate delusion from actual magic. This is often difficult.

“You press hard with the pen,” he continues. “
You mean what you say
's what that says, and I keep such men close to my heart.”

He wipes his ridged dome with the greasy and formless bicycle cap he carries more than wears, then takes another bite of the jambalaya he has rendered lukewarm in temperature (if not in taste) with Crystal hot sauce that pools like orangey blood around its rim.

“Will you help me?” Andrew says.

“Another thing I like 'bout you is you don' try and act like you ain't scared.”

Andrew nods.

“Anybody smart's scared of that ol' . . . her. Her, I mean. I didn't even know she was real. Heard bad stories, figured they was stories. But if she is an actual
actuality
, and she
is
that old, she gonna make Marie Laveau look like a Girl Scout, home team pride aside and all. Yeah, I'll help. But keep the book. I ain't got no use for books and I don't read English so good's I got any hope of readin' Russian.”

The part about not reading English is a flat lie. Haint reads like an Oxford scholar but hides his brilliance behind a hedge of
ain't
s and
cain't
s.

Andrew's e-mail offered one of the treasures he brought home in 1983, a beautiful tome on invisibility written in the time of Peter the Great, a remarkably valuable book for reasons both aesthetic and practical.

But what Haint says next tells Andrew the hoodoo man already knows how to disappear and isn't interested in acquiring something to barter with.

“I want that hand.”

“You already have a Hand of Glory. Hell, I heard you had three of them.”

“Not like that one. Mine open locks and turn lights on and off. Useful as hell, don't get me wrong. But you know what that Russian hand does, don't you?”

“Stops hearts.”

“Works, don't it?”

“It works.”

“How do you know?”

“It works.”

“Prolly you knocked a squirrel out of a tree with it. Only you ain't never tried on a person 'cause you ain't like that. Me, I'm like that. That's why you want me.”

Andrew nods. Of course Haint had heard of Baba's lethal Hand of Glory; Haint is a collector of murders, a man who has gathered an arsenal of artifacts that take life. He is rumored to have a Turkish knife that, when used on a piece of lambskin the user has bled on, will cut or stab whatever the user thinks about cutting or stabbing, even across the sea, provided he has seen it and can picture it clearly. Years ago he carried a Polaroid camera around his neck in case he wanted to capture your image.

Now Steve Jobs has armed him with a smartphone.

If you are on Facebook, or if your image can be Googled, it is said this man can cut your throat no matter how far away you live from his warehouse apartment on Frenchman Street. Or Carondelet. Or wherever it is this week—it is also rumored that Haint's apartment is actually in a black trash bag he can blow up into the window of any abandoned place, and leave with in minutes.

He received Andrew's e-mail under the name [email protected]. Until 2000, when he finally went digital, he used to get letters through a PO box under the name Sam E. DiBaron. It was the same PO box he used to arrange killings, but never for money.

Always for things.

Never yet for anything he wanted as much as Baba Yaga's Hand of Glory.

“Can you do it?”

“If I cain't, you cain't.”

“That's not an answer.”

“No. 'Cause I don't have one. I don't know if she can die, and if she cain't, I don't know if I can stay hid from her.”

“I did.”

“I know. That's the only reason I'm thinking about trying this crazy shit. How's your boudin?”

Andrew nods appreciatively.

“They don't put it on the menu; never on the menu 'cause they cain't sell enough for how fast it goes bad; just on special sometimes. Normally you don't want restaurant boudin—what you want is gas station boudin somebody's mama boiled up in a Crock-Pot out in Grosse Tête or Scott or Breaux Bridge, if you can stand them coon-asses out there. But it ain't bad here. They know what they doin' here. Dreddy white fella in the kitchen plays a mean fiddle, too. I'm goin' to hear him tonight. You wanna come?”

“Love to. Thanks.”

Haint now swigs his beer and uses a thumb-struck stove match to relight the reeking stub of cigar he has rested on the crown of his bottle cap. At his third puff, a woman at the booth to the right issues a dainty cough behind a dainty hand, at which the polo-shirted man with his back to them turns and throws a disapproving glance.

It was probably this fucker who stacked Jack Johnson songs on the Internet jukebox.

Haint discreetly raps the table with his knuckle and a car alarm goes off on Decatur Street outside. The man looks doorward now and excuses himself, fumbling with his keys. As he crosses the threshold, Haint deftly snaps the matchstick between two fingers with his thumb and the big man trips, foolishly trying to break his fall with his hand. His wrist snaps audibly and he issues a gagging cry. The woman gets to her feet, her distaste for cigar smoke and shirtless black men forgotten. The waitress runs to help, wiping her hands on her apron. The dreddy bearded fellow peers out the kitchen door, and a teenaged boy begins to film the incident with his phone, ignoring his mother's admonitions. The jukebox sputters now, aborting the song it had been playing and starting up Billie Holiday's “They Can't Take That Away From Me.”

Haint keeps eye contact with Andrew throughout, puffing contentedly on his cigar. Mismatched earrings shine dully in the hoodoo man's ears.

“Maybe you can.”

“Maybe I can,” the man agrees, his eyes twinkling.

Andrew has some time to kill before night comes down, so he walks around the Quarter. Construction everywhere, as usual; torn-up roads blocked off with orange webbing, tourists filtering by one another on what's left of the sidewalk, stepping carefully around piles of shelving for this or that new store. On Royal Street, women in Mardi Gras feathers dance in the heat while cameras turn and film crewmen detour folks up Orleans, some of these pooling up in the margins and holding up phones to film or snap stills of the dancers.

On Dauphine, the woman who runs a perfumery is yelling at the owner of the tattoo parlor next door because the new electric purple paint job smells like paint. He nods at her briefly, then goes inside. She yells at his retreating back, is still yelling at the door when he comes back out holding a ukulele, which he plays in accompaniment to her oration, driving her volume up and making her widen her eyes with fury. Andrew is nearly jabbed in the eye by her gesticulating finger, laughs as he continues past them, has the good sense not to answer when she screams, “What's so funny!” at his back.

Andrew's shirt is good and soaked by the time he gets to his former apartment on St. Ann, a small second-floor flat now annexed to the Sanson boutique hotel. He stands below it and looks up, noting how much neater and more inviting it looks now. Hanging plants cascade from the balconies thereof in majestic gouts of green. A woman in a turquoise bathrobe stares unashamedly down at him, a sort of bright balcony house cat drinking something red from a clear plastic cup. Her colors go so well with the aqua stucco behind her that she might have been paid to hold that post.

“Afternoon,” he says to her.

She raises her glass and inclines her head slightly, with the gentility of diurnal inebriation.

He misses his Vieux Carré flat but cut it loose after Katrina. He wasn't really coming here often enough to justify the expense, after all, and it's normally not too hard to find a hotel.

Normally.

 • • • 

He heads south again, then left on Bourbon, right on Frenchman.

The Frenchman voodoo shop sits beneath a wooden sign depicting a bat in an eighteenth-century powdered wig. The bat holds a tiny skull in one foot and a tarot pack in the other, echoing the American eagle motif with its olive branch and quiver. Miss Mathilda, an enormous black woman in an Indian-print dress, advises a pinch-faced man in a tweed suit.

“Now, this kind of service is not cheap because it is real. Do you understand me, sir? This is not a joke.”

She cuts her eyes to Andrew when he enters.

The man in tweed does, too.

She winks at Andrew, looks back at the man, actually uses her finger to turn his face back toward hers. He suffers this. She goes on.

“You will need to bring me film of your father, plus one or two personal effects of his, preferably things he handled frequently.”

The man looks at Andrew again.

Miss Mathilda says, “He's a friend, we can speak in front of him.”

She can barely contain her smile.

She turns the man's face once more with her finger, swallows him with her eyes.

“In two weeks or thereabouts we will receive the tape and call you. About the tape; it must be VHS.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Do you have VHS footage of your father?”

“Doing what?”

“Anything.”

“Christmas. Is Christmas okay?”

“We love Christmas at the Frenchman voodoo shop.”

“But I only have one copy. And nobody makes VHS anymore.”

She plucks a business card from between the teeth of a cat's skull.

“This man on Tchopitoulas does. Ring the bell downstairs. And don't be alarmed if he answers in his boxers. Just between us, he's a little touched, but he's the best man in the city for vintage electronics.”

“How do I . . .”

“Know it's real?”

She uncurls a finger, points a black fingernail with a triangle of diamond chips in it like stars. Points at a red door hung with testimonials.

“That room. You'll watch it the first time in that room. If your father does not speak to you, you will not be charged.”

His eyes dance over her face, looking for the scam.

“I won't?”

“Of course not. I told you, this is the real thing. We have no need to cheat anyone.”

“Three thousand even? No tax?”

She nods.

“Where does the tape go?”

“I'm not at liberty to say.”

“Is this legal?”

She smiles broadly.

“My friend, nobody has ever asked me that before.”

 • • • 

When the man leaves, Andrew and Miss Mathilda bear-hug each other, laugh together, talk.

“How long are you here for, pretty man?”

“Not long.”

“You smell like hoodoo.”

“Guilty.”

“And boudin. Have you been eating boudin?”

He nods.

“Where's mine?”

He shrugs, smiling. She's younger than him by a decade but always makes him feel twelve. He resolves to bring her boudin when he leaves.

“But how about that? That guy. You think he'll want a trapdoor?”

“Could be.”

“What a coincidence. Walking in just then, I mean.”

“Not as much as you might think.”

“How so?”

“My dear Mr. Blankenship, I offer your service several times a day most days. To anyone who lingers at the altar of the dead with hope or sadness in their eyes. And of course to anyone who buys a candle to light or hangs a photo. Look how many!”

The tin tree standing over the waxy altar blooms with pictures of the dead. Incense lingers.

She goes on.

“It's just that so few people have that kind of money now. Even for parlance with the blessed dead.”

“I'm doing all right.”

“If you were doing all right, you wouldn't have given up that sweet little apartment.”

He blinks twice, squints like he does when he's about to ask a favor.

She anticipates him.

“Seeing a friend, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Gun show this week,” she says.

“Uh-huh.”

“Hotels all booked.”

He's ashamed of his poor planning.

“That's right.”

She fishes around near the register.

Holds up three brass keys as if fanning three cards.

“Pick.”