They Thirst (19 page)

And sitting there in the middle of it was Solange, wearing her long white robe cut low to show the soft dark swelling of her breasts. She was sitting on the sofa, her arms crossed tightly as if she were chilly. She was staring at the Ouija board.

"Morning," Wes said and plopped himself down in a chair. An instant later he stood up to remove the filled ashtray he'd sat down on. There was a ring of ashes on his ass. "Christ!" he said softly, surveying the damage. "If the guys at the Domino Club could only see me now. As they say." He saw she was not paying attention; her eyes were fixed on a spot at the center of the board. "I didn't feel you get out of bed. What time were you up?"

She blinked and glanced up at him as if just now aware that he'd walked into the room. "Wes," she said. "I . . . I've been up for a long time. I couldn't sleep after the sun rose." She looked at him for a long time and then smiled appreciatively. "You look like someone hit you with a
nganga."

"A nuhwhat? What's that?"

"An evil spell. A big one." Solange frowned slightly and turned back to the board. She picked up the planchette and examined the bottom of it with a fingertip.

"Better watch out for that bastard," Wes said. "It might bite you. I'm going to kick Martin Blue's ass the next time I see him. He could've put my eye out!"

She replaced the planchette. "What are you saying, Wes? That Martin was in control of what happened here last night?"

"Sure he was! I saw his hands! He skidded that thing right off the board!" When Solange didn't reply, he walked over to the picture window and looked down at the swimming pool. A bright yellow and greenstriped lawn chair was floating in it; there were some Coors cans at the deep end. "All right," he said finally. "I know that silence. What are you thinking?"

"Martin didn't do it," she said. "He had no control over it, and neither did I. Something very violent and very strong was here . . ."

"Oh, come on! Listen, I can take that mumbo stuff when we're at a party, but when we're alone, I wish you'd forget the spirit world!"

"You don't believe?" she asked coolly.

"Nope."

"Do you pray to God?"

He turned from the window to face her. "Yes, but that's different."

"Is it? Think back. You were playing high-stakes poker in a room at the Las Vegas Hilton nine months ago. You were playing against some very influential and wealthy men."

"I remember."

"Do you remember the final hand? You closed your eyes for a second before you picked up that last card. To which spirit were you praying?"

"To . . . I was wishing for an ace from Lady Luck. That's not a spirit."

She smiled faintly, her nostrils flaring. "I say it is. All deities are spirits, and all beliefs can become deities. Oh yes, Wes, you believe." She regarded the board again. "You saw. You spelled out the words."

"What words? It was gibberish!"

"It was a message," Solange said quietly. She shivered and lifted her gaze to him. "The spirits are troubled, Wes. There's a great, terrible
nganga
in the air. If you had Bantu blood in your veins, you could feel its vibrations, or smell it like the reek of old vinegar. The spirits know every mystery; they see the future and try to protect us from harm, if we will only listen to what they say." Wes smiled slightly, and Solange's eyes snapped with anger. "I've never felt a power before like the thing that was here last night! It simply silenced the beneficent voices; it brushed their spirits away with as much effort as it takes to flick a fly away! That was the thing that spelled out the final message, the thing that took the planchette into its power and . . ."

"Stop it," Wes said abruptly.

Solange's face tightened. She stared at him for a few seconds with what Wes sometimes referred to as her "molten ink" eyes, and then she rose gracefully. "I didn't mean to upset you ..

"I'm not upset!"

". . . but I wanted you to know the truth ..

"Oh, for Christ's sake!"

". . . about what happened last night. I
have
told you the truth."

"And the truth shall set us free." His grin spread. "Seems like I've heard that before."

"Wes!" Tension was stretched tight in her voice now. "You can stand on your stage and make your little jokes for other people; you can contort your face and voice and make the people think you live for their laughter, but don't think for an instant that you can put on your disguise in front of me! Sometime the jokes will have to end; the laughter will die. And you'll have to face the world on its own terms without falsehood."

"What world are we talking about, dear? The spirit domain, I assume?"

Solange had already turned away. She crossed the living room, her white gown swirling behind her, and disappeared into the far hallway. He heard the faint sound of a door closing.
Her problem is, she can't take a joke,
he thought.

He rose to his feet and went through the living room and the short, connecting hallway to the kitchen, where copper cooking utensils hung from an overhead rack and African woodcuts decorated the walls. He found a carton of orange juice in the refrigerator and took a variety of plastic bottles from the vitamin cupboard. As he downed his breakfast, he was aware that his pulse was kicking hard. He'd been thinking of that planchette coming for his face like a runaway Nike missile, and he knew that there was no damned way Martin Blue could've done it.
The bastard had been scared witless. So what, then? Spirits, like Solange said? No, that was bullshit!
When Solange got started, she could really lay it on thick, stuff with crazy names like
Santeria, brujeria, nkisi, makuto.
Once he'd peeked inside the ornately carved wooden box she kept under the bed. There was a strange collection of peacock feathers, seashells, black and red candles, corn husks, white coral, and some kind of weird iron nails wrapped up with string inside. Wes tolerated her beliefs, but he had drawn the line several months ago when she'd wanted to put a twig tied with a red ribbon behind every door in the house.

He'd never known her last name; the man who'd lost her to him in the Vegas poker game hadn't known it either. She told Wes she was born in Chicago, the daughter of a woman who'd been a classical actress in Japan and an African man who was a practicing
santero,
a good magician. She was born, she said, on the seventh day of the seventh month at exactly seven o'clock in the evening. On the day before her birth, her father had dreamed of her sitting on an ivory throne with seven stars moving about her head like a glittering tiara. Which seemed to be a damned good omen, the way Solange had explained it. It was supposed to mean that she had inherited her father's powers of white magic, that she was to be considered a living talisman. Solange didn't talk about the things she'd learned from her father in her formative years, but Wes figured she must've been pretty important. Solange recalled that people always came to their door, wanting to touch her, or ask her about problems they were having with love or money.

When she was ten years old, walking home from school with the snow falling softly, a car had pulled up to the curb, and two black men had stuffed a rag into her mouth and thrown her onto the backseat. She was blindfolded— she could vividly recall the coarseness of the cloth against her face—and the car traveled all night. They went fast, over all kinds of roads. When the blindfold was taken off, she was at a big house with snow-filled woods all around. For several days she was locked in a beautifully furnished bedroom with windows that looked down on an ice-glazed lake and fed by a black man in a white suit who brought her food on a silver tray. On the third day she was taken to a glass room full of jungle vines and blooming red flowers, where a large-bellied black man who wore a gray-striped suit and smoked a cigar waited. He was very nice to her, very friendly, and offered her a lace handkerchief to wipe her eyes when he told her that she wouldn't be going home again because this was her home now. His name was Fontaine, and he said there were some things Solange was going to have to do for him. She was going to have to give him good fortune and protect him from evil. Or something might happen to her mother and father.

It was only gradually, she'd told Wes, that she learned he was a bad man, a gangster who controlled most of the Harlem rackets. His power was slipping, and he'd heard about her through some of his people in South Chicago. In a period of four years, during which Solange did very little but read the lines in his hand and touch photographs of different men to feel their weaknesses, Fontaine never came to her bedroom, never laid a hand on her. He left her alone, first because he was beginning to fear her all too accurate predictions of the future and the incantations that caused his enemies to suddenly wither from health to sickness; also, his brain was steadily being gnawed away by syphilis. Many nights she could hear Fontaine roaming the long hallways of the mansion, howling like an animal in mad rage. In the end it was the syphilis, not his enemies, that crept up on him with a deadly hand, and none of Solange's incantations or poultices could halt its advance. Fontaine was locked away behind a massive oak door, and soon after that a couple of well-dressed white men came to the house, paid Fontaine's business manager a great deal of money, and took Solange with them to the west.

Her new owner was an elderly Mafia
capo
who wanted her around for good luck; he'd heard of what she'd been doing for Fontaine and knew that Fontaine's business had shown an eighty-percent increase while she'd been with him. He never touched her either, but a couple of his hired men did come to her room one night. They said if she ever dared to tell what they did, they'd cut her throat. That went on for a long time, until Solange fashioned corn husk dolls of them and set them on fire. They died when their Lincoln Continental slammed into the rear of a Sunoco gas truck on the San Diego Freeway.

And so it went on, year after year, a succession of powerful and greedy men. Another Mafia lieutenant, then a motion picture studio head, then a director, then a record company executive who was robbing his partners blind. She was with him when she met Wes, who was doing a show in Vegas. It wasn't much money, but at least it would take him through the bad period after his second series had been canceled. He was looking for private action, too, so he'd gotten himself invited to this poker game at the Las Vegas Hilton with a group of big money players, Solange's record exec among them. During the long, grueling game Solange had sat behind the man; Wes remembered she had had a bruise on her cheek. Anyway, the guy's luck had started turning bad and went downhill; after he'd lost the first thirty thousand or so, he'd taken Solange into a back room and whaled the shit out of her, then brought her in again and shoved her back in her chair. Her eyes were swollen and red; the record exec was really starting to sweat. After another three hours the game had pared down to just the two of them: there was a stack of red chips in front of Wes and a look of animal fear on the record exec's face. But he'd wanted to play on, and so it continued until he had no more chips, nor money, nor keys to his robin's-egg blue Cadillac. Wes was willing to leave it there. "SIT DOWN!" the man had screamed. "I TELL YOU WHEN TO LEAVE!"

"You're through, Morry," one of the onlookers said wearily. "Give it up."

"SHUT UP! Deal the cards . . . COME ON!"

"You're cleaned out," Wes said. "The game's over."

"No, it's not!" He'd turned and gripped Solange's arm with a crushing hand. "I'm putting her up as security!"

"What? Forget it!"

"You think I'm kidding, Richer? Listen, punk, this bitch is worth her fucking weight in gold! She can suck your cock right out of the roots; she'll fuck your eyeballs out with tricks you never even heard of!"

"Now listen, I don't think . . ."

"Come on, you lousy little punk! What do you have to lose? You're floating in my cash!"

It was the second use of that word that got to Wes. He paused for a moment and looked at the beautiful, battered woman behind him. He wondered how many times she'd had to endure this man. Then he said, "I'll accept her as security on five hundred dollars." Solange had responded with a slight nod.

And ten minutes later it was all over as Wes sat facing a beautiful royal flush. The record exec had leaped to his feet and grabbed Solange's face, squeezing her jaw so hard she whimpered. "Back off, you sonofabitch!" Wes had said quietly. "You're marking up my merchandise."

Then the guy had really turned ugly, making all kinds of threats about how Wes would never have a series again because he had connections with all three networks, and as for recording, forget it! Someone gave the poor bastard a drink and ushered him out of the room. For a long time Wes sat looking at Solange across the poker table, not knowing what the hell to say or do. She broke the silence: "I think he chipped my tooth."

"You want to find a dentist?"

"No. It's all right. I've seen you on television before. You're the comedian," she went on. "I remember now, I saw your face on the cover of
TV Stars."

He nodded. "Yeah, I made that cover and a lot more. There was an article on me in
Rolling Stone,
too. I've got a couple of comedy albums out." He stopped, feeling foolish for tooting his horn in front of a woman whose right eye was swollen and blue and whose left one was an odd shade of yellow. Still she was beautiful: it was an exotic, cool beauty that had made Wes's pulse gallop ever since she'd walked in.