Waking the Moon (57 page)

Baby Joe dropped his cigarette on the floor and let it burn there. “She knows some. Hasel’s letter, and I faxed her some other things. Articles.” Glitter and grey ash sifted over him; he waved it away and said, “I’ve tried calling her this week but she’s never at the museum. Which is strange, ‘cause I don’t think she’s taken a vacation in five years. When I call her at home I just keep getting her machine.”

He fell silent. Annie couldn’t meet his eyes: they were so black he looked stoned or crazy drunk, and ferociously intense. She turned instead to gaze at the stage, where two women caressed each other with luminous violet talons. The mirrored floor beneath them was streaked with sweat and god knows what else. One of them arched her back so that her blond mane swept the floor. Her spike heel impaled a twenty-dollar bill, and she laughed.

“Fucking shit.” Annie swore beneath her breath and looked away. The sight of them sickened her, and the sound of the men watching, the way their drunken voices got husky and boyish at once. And their smell, that almost imperceptible musk of—what? Sweat and semen and whiskey-fueled hope, she guessed; then realized it was Baby Joe she could smell, the oily taint of vodka on his skin and pungent tobacco on his breath. Without wanting to Annie cringed, thinking of her old friend sitting beside her with an erection, his eyes fixed on the stage.

It almost makes you think they get what they deserve …

She recoiled in horror at the thought.

“What?” Baby Joe put a hand on her shoulder and started to his feet, looking around with that same fierce gaze. “You see someone,
hija
?”

At his touch she jumped, her skin prickling. But it was only Baby Joe. Sweet rude Baby Joe, with his Peter Lorre giggle and nicotine-stained fingers, his angry gaze directed at some imagined enemy out there in the strip club.

He’s being protective,
Annie thought with amazed tenderness,
protective
of me!

“N-nothing … She stared past him at the women onstage, their motions no longer grotesque or crude but merely pathetic, even childish. Suddenly she laughed.

“What?” Baby Joe demanded, but Annie could only point.
“What?”

“Just the idea,” she finally gasped through her laughter.

“What
idea?” Baby Joe stared at her suspiciously.

“That Angelica could take over the world. That she could make us all afraid of each other—afraid enough to—”

She reached for his hand; but at that moment a shadow fell across the table. With a small cry Annie looked up. Baby Joe’s back stiffened against the booth’s leather seat, but then Annie exclaimed in relief.

“Justine! Jeez, you scared me.”

“Ah-nee!” a lilting voice sang out. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

“It’s okay, Baby Joe.” Annie scooted across the seat to make room. “This is Justine. She’s a friend of mine. I asked her to meet us here.”

Above them towered a six-and-a-half-foot Caribe beauty, her long black hair oiled and twisted into corkscrews, her full lips and high cheekbones dusted with silver powder. She wore a shocking pink sheath slit to her thighs, and over that a pink rubber girdle, and pink rubber platform shoes with tiny silver starfish embedded in them. A zircon studded one of her very white front teeth.

“Mr. Malabar. What a pleasure. I
enjoy
your writing in the
Beacon.”
Her deep voice was French-inflected, luscious as fine chocolate. Her hand folded around Baby Joe’s, larger and stronger than his, studded with rings and smelling of Obsession perfume. “Although you were very
unkind
to poor Miss Hyde Park last week,
cette femme maudite
! What can you have been thinking? I saw her show and it left me in tears.
Je pleurais.
”

Justine dabbed an eye with a ruby-pointed finger, then smiled as she gently slapped Annie’s cheek. “And
you
! I haven’t seen you since Wigstock, except on TV. And now you have troubles with
voudon
?”

Annie glanced from Baby Joe to Justine, who were eyeing each other with polite wariness.

“Um, well …” Annie cleared her throat. Justine was really Helen’s friend. Annie had only met her once before; she’d forgotten how imposing she was. “Justine, I need you to help me find someone. Someone special.”

“In
here?”
Justine swept the room with a disdainful glare.
“Chérie,
you will need a Geiger counter to find someone special here.”

“No, not here. I don’t
know
where, exactly.”

“Uh-huh.” Justine rolled her eyes. She leaned over to pluck a cigarette from Baby Joe’s pack, then slid into the booth beside Annie. “Girl problems, Annie?”

“Sort of.” Annie looked at Baby Joe. “Now, I know this is going to sound crazy, but …”

She told them about the rave. Her vision—if that’s what it was—of ritual sacrifice and the eerily beautiful demon in the boathouse, Angelica’s role in the killing, the attempt to slay Annie herself, and then the phone call early the next morning, when Annie learned that Angelica had successfully derailed her tour. Finally, she told them of the woman who had saved her.

“And
that
freaked me as much as the rest of it. Maybe more.” Annie leaned back in the booth and tugged at the collar of her tuxedo shirt. “God, I’m exhausted.” She turned to Justine, who was listening with great seriousness, her dark eyes wide. “And I can’t believe I’m
telling
you guys this. I’d think I hallucinated it all, except I know that kid is dead. And I know a strange woman brought flowers to me after my show that night. Patrick saw her, and Helen saw the flowers, and I recognized her—”

Baby Joe shook his head. “You
sure
about that, Annie?”

“No. I’m
not
sure. It was dark, I was scared to death, and messed up—I mean, they must have slipped me
something,
for me to see all that crazy shit! But I’m pretty certain. I got a good look, and …”

Her voice trailed off. She stared miserably down at the floor. “Maybe I’m just going nuts.”

Justine shook her head. “Uh-uh.
I
believe you. Things like that, they happen to me all the time. Except for the black
gardon
with a face.” She shuddered, wiping her mouth with a cocktail napkin and examining the lipstick stain as though it were an omen. “Now you said you have a photo for me? Because Justine knows a lot of people, but she is not
psychique.
”

“Yeah. Sorry.” From her knapsack Annie withdrew an envelope, opened it carefully, and removed a black-and-white photo, brown-stained and curling around the edges. “It’s just an old Polaroid. But it’s the only one I have.”

“Hmmm.” Justine squinted as Baby Joe peered over her shoulder, looking like he wanted to snatch the photo from her hand. “Well, you are right, it is not very good. But—”

“Who took that picture?” demanded Baby Joe.

Annie looked annoyed. “I don’t remember. We were at a Halloween party. I had a life too, you know.”

“Mes enfants!”
Justine shook a finger at Baby Joe. She pursed her lips and stared at the photo for another moment, then slid it into a small plastic reticule hanging from her waist.
“Tant pis:
not someone I know, but we’ll see. Now, I have to meet some friends of my own, so you will excuse me.”

She stood, towering above the others. “Annie, you know how to call me? But it will be a while—”

“How long?”

Justine tilted her head, eyeing the girls onstage. “Bridge-and-tunnel
amateurs,
” she sniffed. “How long? A month …”

“A month! I can’t wait a
month
—”

“You wait this long, you can wait a month. But I will start asking about your friend. Give Helen a kiss for me. And you—”

She ducked to kiss Baby Joe on the lips, letting her long fingernails tickle his throat. “Mr. Malabar! You need a date for one of your shows, you give me a call. Your friend has the number.” Light sparked the zircon in her front tooth as Justine smiled and strode off through the club.

“That
puto
’s something else,” observed Baby Joe.

“Helen knew Justine back when she was Jerome.” Annie sighed. “Sometimes I think I’ve lived too interesting a life. Listen, Baby Joe—I hate to freak and run, but I’m so tired I feel sick, and
that
—”

She pointed at the remains of her vodka martini. “—that didn’t help.”

Baby Joe looked at her—the circles beneath her eyes that weren’t smudged makeup, the sparks of silver-grey in her cropped hair. “Where you staying,
hija
?” he asked, reaching across the table for her hand.

“With friends.”

“Where?”

Annie turned away. “I can’t tell you. And I’m really not trying to be difficult,” she insisted, when Baby Joe glowered. “But someone tried to
kill
me a few days ago, and—”

“And that’s a good fucking reason to tell me where you’ll be! Or come stay at my place—”

“No.” Annie shook her head stubbornly. “Forget it, Baby Joe, don’t even say it—just let me do this my way, okay? I promise, I’ll call you if I hear anything from Justine—”

“Fuck that! You better call me tomorrow—”

“Friday, okay? I’ll call you Friday, I promise—only don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

“What about Sweeney?”

Annie stood. She pulled a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap from her knapsack and stepped out of the booth. With the cap slung on backward and the sunglasses riding on her snub nose, she looked about fourteen. “Sweeney? I don’t think so. Look, Baby Joe—”

He met her in the aisle and threw an arm around her shoulder, hugged her close to him. “Look nothing! You better—”

“Shh.” Annie stood on tiptoe and placed a finger on his lips. “I probably shouldn’t even have told
you.
You’re not going to write about this, are you?”

“Don’t insult me.” He walked her to the door, stood inside while she stepped out into the blazing late afternoon heat and shrieking tumult of midtown. “But you better call,
hija.”

Annie laughed. “Don’t insult me! Friday—”

“I’ll be waiting.”

He stayed on at the strip joint after she left, checking his voice mail for messages, then leaving word at the paper that he’d be back late that night. He had a show to cover at Failté, a tiny downtown back room where a new band from Ireland would be playing after midnight. But there was a lot of ground to cover between now and then. It was almost one hundred degrees out on the pavement, and he’d already started a tab here. So he stayed.

Baby Joe hated places like this—too clean, too many suits, the dancers all commuters from Rutgers and SUNY Purchase working to pay off their student loans. Not to mention ten bucks for rail liquor and a DJ playing the Top Ten from the Jukebox in Hell. Still, he moved to a seat in front of the stage, knocked back a few more drinks and watched and thought about Annie and Sweeney and Oliver Crawford, about Hasel and Hasel’s widow and Angelica Furiano. During a break, he talked with a dancer who was doing her thesis on the films of Ed Wood. Baby Joe bought her a seven-dollar ginger ale and gave her the name of a guy in Atlantic City who’d worked on
Glen or Glenda.

After that he lost track of time. Outside the air took on that lowering orange-purple glare of city night, the sky between the high-rises colored like viscera. But inside all was rainbow light and smoke, the a/c cranked all the way down to sixty, so that he began to feel sorry for the dancers, their goose-pimpled flesh and the way they clutched at their cheap silk kimonos as they strode offstage. He’d actually started to fuzz out on the girls, lost in his own dreamscape. It was seeing Annie again, and thinking about Oliver and the others—something he’d been doing too much of since Hasel’s death. He dipped his head to light another cigarette—he had myriad packs tucked into his pockets, like a hiker padded with trail mix—tossed the match on the floor, and swiped his long hair back from his eyes. And whistled.

At the edge of the stage, near the mirrored alley leading back to their dressing rooms, three girls stood watching him. Not the kind of girls you usually saw at places like this, either. They were far too young and brown, slender and restive as mink, their long dark hair pulled into topknots from which stray tendrils trailed like smoke. They reminded him of child prostitutes back in Manila, girls he’d seen washing in the runoff from hotel laundries. These three looked
way
underage, their bodies muscular and lean, small-breasted like young girls’ bodies but with swelling hips. They were barefoot, and naked except for copper bracelets about their tiny wrists and ankles and silver necklaces upon their breasts. They stood side by side by side, staring at Baby Joe with narrow black eyes and smiling.

“Dios ko,
” he murmured. “New floor show.”

He stared back at them and finished another drink. His mouth tasted burned from too many cigarettes, and the vodka was starting to give him a headache. He knew he should think about paying up and heading out to Failté, but he wanted to see what those girls were up to.

He didn’t know how long he’d been watching them, but after a while he realized that the music had changed, from a monotonous downtown club standard to something he couldn’t place. One of those eco-techno anthems, all soft percussives and breathy vocals in a language nobody could understand. Only in this music there was the rhythmic pulse of the sea and a faint hissing sound, steady and measured as his own breath.

“Hey,” whispered Baby Joe. The girls didn’t move. There was none of the usual chatter between performers, just those intense dark eyes boring into him. “Nice.”

A moment later the girls took the stage. Not a replay of the same slow grinding dance he’d been watching all afternoon, but like circus acrobats vaulting into a ring. They leapt onto the raised platform, springing airy and careless as children through the smoke, their bare feet slapping the mirrored floor. Once there they seemed surprised: they stared giggling down at their reflections, pointing and hiding their faces behind their thin brown hands. Baby Joe glanced around to see if anyone else thought this was strange, but no one seemed to take any notice at all. The place had grown more crowded, but most of the clientele was jammed up against the bar. He turned back to the stage again.