Authors: Joe Gores
Yana, dressed in jeans and a pastel turtleneck, was getting ready for Teddy White’s second candle reading. The first had been
a great success; because of the strength of the curse, she’d had to use eighteen candles at $50 each. Tonight she would be
burning another eighteen candles—this time at $100 each.
For her, preparing to cast out demons did not, as it did for a Catholic priest, involve confession and absolution, nor spiritual
exercise to strengthen the soul and cleanse impurities from the psyche. Yana, before getting into her low-cut silver gown
that shimmered like fish scales, merely reviewed again what Ramon had gleaned from Teddy’s wallet and garbage.
Theodore Winston White III hadn’t heard that Yuppiedom, that phenomenon of the ’80s that had put Sharper Image on America’s
corporate map, was now considered
déclassé
. He still thought the one with the most toys wins.
So he drove an Alfa-Romeo Quadrifoglio Spider. He drove a Lexus LS400. When up in the snow, he drove a Toyota 4Runner equipped
with mud and snow tires, all the luxury option packages, a ski rack, and a side pocket full of lift tickets for Squaw and
Incline and the Village—even though he didn’t know how to ski.
Receipts and prescriptions in the garbage, along with ads, Godiva chocolate wrappers, throwaways, coffee grounds (whole-bean
fresh-ground French Roast/Guatemalan, of course), showed that:
Teddy worked out three days a week with a personal trainer, Linda Perry, at the World Gym in Kentfield, while wearing sweats
with the legend
Live Well, Eat Right, Die Anyway
on them.
When not at the gym, Teddy wore Armani suits, Versace sportswear, custom-made dress shirts, Valentino ties, Dior underwear,
Bally shoes.
Teddy belonged to the Mount Tam Racket Club and the Pacific Union Club and, through his late adoptive father, the Bohemian
Club.
Teddy had credit cards from I Magnin’s and Neiman Marcus, the American Express Goldcard, Gold MasterCard, and Visa Gold (three
different lending institutions each), Tire Systems, Discover Card, the Pacific Bell phone card, the AT&T phone card, the Sprint
phone card, and the MCI phone card.
Teddy had travel pass cards from Travel Access and Western Airlines (Travel Pass II) and American Airlines and Alaska Airlines
and United Airlines. Hertz, Avis, and Budget, of course.
Not that he ever used any of them.
Teddy subscribed to The
New York Times
and
Time
and
Newsweek
and
The Wall Street Journal
and
National Review
and
Playboy
and
Penthouse
and
Skin Diver
and
Esquire
and
GQ
and
Spy
.
Not that he ever read any of them.
Teddy had check guarantee cards from seven different banks.
Not that any of them were much good. Between his monthly trust checks from the bank, he pretty much ran on empty.
Teddy also looked pale and was losing weight, and, most promising, had begun getting acupuncture treatments for a mild sciatica
attack from a Chinese woman doctor named Wu.
And Teddy even now was on his way in for his second candle reading. Showing that Teddy, despite all the sophisticated trappings
of his Yuppiedom, was a fool.
“He is here,” said Ramon in low tones from the doorway.
“I’ll get dressed. Keep him waiting in the hall.”
Even that was carefully calculated. The hallway was dim, the incense overpowering. An opened window behind the plush drapes
made it clammy and stirred the old-fashioned crystal lampshades into an incessant tinkling contrived to unnerve. Teddy was
indeed unnerved: sitting in the half-dark, shivering and squeezing his hands, he jumped and twitched like a galvanized frog
when Ristik suddenly appeared before him.
“Yana is now prepared to receive you.”
The
boojo
room was stifling with incense and the waxy smoke of eighteen candles, as if hell itself breathed out contagions.
“You have come,” said Yana in a deep voice almost not her own. Her eyes gleamed ferally. Tonight her lips were very red, overripe—slightly
obscene fruit ready to be bitten.
“I… yes, I… tonight you… you…”
“Sit.”
Teddy sat down across the little table from her. The room was dim; there was no crystal ball. Yana took his hands; already
there was familiarity in this action, the shared intimacy of trysting lovers, an implied security that made her necessary.
She shut her eyes. Her silver gown shimmered as her body began a sinuous, unnerving, snakelike undulation by candlelight.
Sweat rolled down between her half-bared breasts. The incense made Teddy’s head ache, made him want to lick away those rivulets
of sweat, made him, for God sake, start to get an erection!
But then Yana cried out,
“Chi mai diklem ande viatsa!”
in a voice now definitely not her own. A voice deep, thick, guttural, almost male.
“Chuda. Che chorobia.”
Terror made him bold. He had to know, “What does it mean?” he demanded. “What are you saying to me?”
She was silent. Her body had stopped writhing, She seemed not even to breathe. Her eyes were open again. In the dim light
the pupils subsumed the irises, leaving only obsidian buttons that stared at him without blinking, not even once.
“I see a snake. In your buttocks. Down the back of your leg. Beware. A yellow woman touches you.” Her voice was male, throaty,
threatening. Her face worked. “Needles. Beware.”
“My sciatica,” breathed Teddy. There was no way she could have known. She was indeed psychic. “My acupuncturist—”
“The yellow woman has made you sick.”
Teddy’d had the flu twice since he had started with Madam Wu. He’d gotten prescriptions for it.
“She has caused you to be…
no!
The snake inside your body is
not
from her! But… the snake grows…”
There it was again. The snake. Her words terrified him. A snake. Inside him. Growing. “You mean canc…” He had difficulty
with the word.
“Cancer?”
“The same snake killed your mother.”
He leaned forward, his fingers tight about her wrists. “
My real
mother died of cancer?”
“It is you who speaks of cancer. I speak of the snake.” Obsidian eyes, reptile eyes, the
eyes
of a snake. Flat, black, unwinking, without pupils. “From beyond the grave your mother warns you.” Her face, her eyes softened.
“May she sleep well.”
Teddy had always known, in his heart of hearts, that his
real
mother was dead. Now Madame Miseria had confirmed it.
“I am but a conduit. The spirit speaks through me. She says you have much money… that is not really yours.”
“My
mother’s
spirit? My
real
mother says that I…”
But Yana’s head had fallen on her chest. Her fingers were lax in his. Her mouth had fallen open as if in profound sleep, but
she was breathing rapidly, shallowly, like a person in great pain. She suddenly sprang straight up from her chair.
“Mene!”
she cried, words she had memorized from the Old Testament she had loved when learning to read.
“Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin!”
She was staring over his head, her eyes wider than eyes could possibly be, popping out of a face now so congested it was almost
purple. Teddy, no Bible scholar, whirled in dread expectation of seeing, not the words that Yahweh’s moving finger had writ
on Belshazzar’s wall, but demons hulking behind him.
Nothing. No one. Just an empty room. He turned back. Yana had fallen back into her chair. She sprawled like a rag doll. She
looked exhausted. Her voice was slow, dragging.
“The curse is in your body… the snake is growing there… because… when you were small… you wanted your foster parents dead
…
you
created the snake… out of cursed money…”
“No!” cried Teddy. “I… I loved them, I…”
He went dumb. When they told him he was adopted, for a fleeting moment he’d wished them dead, to unsay the terrible knowledge
of his real parents’ rejection. Or had that death wish been so that he would be left their
money?
Could that insidious thought have lain in ambush within his mind down the years, exactly like a snake, finally growing into
…
cancer?
He began thickly, “How did you know that I—”
“Give me a dollar.” She was brusque, almost cold. She snapped her fingers. “Quickly! We must test whether your money is cursed.
If the snake in your body indeed comes from your money, then perhaps there is a way… one way… to save you…”
“How? Save? How can? You? You
must
save—”
“The dollar.”
As if mesmerized, he took out a dollar bill, started to hand it to Yana. She shook her head and pointed at the table.
“My touch would affect the power, make the curse more potent,” Another gesture, this one to a point beyond him. “Through the
curtain. Water. A bowl. Quickly.”
Teddy tossed his dollar down and jumped from his chair, feeling the thick horrible ropelike snake in his buttocks and down
his left leg as he ran limping across the room. Behind the curtain was a tiny alcove with a sink and a stack of ceramic bowls.
He filled one from the tap, carried it back to Yana.
“Put it on the table. Put your dollar bill in it.”
He picked up the dollar from the table and dropped it in the water. They sat on either side of the bowl, watching it. The
water began to discolor. But not green from the dye in the money— which was supposed to be waterproof anyway. No. It was getting
pink. Then red. Getting redder. Blood-red. His mother’s blood. His own blood. In his money.
“Cursed,” Yana said in a flat voice devoid of hope or pity; and Teddy knew he was going to be sick.
B
ut she wouldn’t allow him even that. Not right away.
“We have to be sure of the curse, we have to let the evil hatch,” she told him at the head of the stairs. “When you get home,
wrap a fresh egg in a sock and put it in a shoe…”
“A… shoe? But… what kind…”
“Any kind. Just leave it there. Also collect all the cash money you can and put it in a paper bag with the shoe and the egg
and leave it. When I call you, bring both with you to me.”
Only then was Teddy, shaking as if with fever, allowed to pay for the candles and go down to vomit out his horror at Madame
Miseria’s revelations into the slanting Romolo Place gutter.
* * *
As he was so engaged, Larry Ballard was leaving his two-room studio apartment on Lincoln Way with his case files and repo
tools. On impulse he drove a dozen blocks west along the southern edge of Golden Gate Park to Jacques Daniel’s.
Beverly had hung up on him five times since her car had gotten dinged up, which just wasn’t fair. Look what had happened to
him
—without any insurance to cover it like she had, either.
Oh, man, he sure
hoped
she had insurance to cover it.
Bev and her partner, Jacques, had renamed the little neighborhood bar “Jacques Daniel’s,” swept out the local rummies, put
in an espresso machine, hung ferns and fake Tiffany lamps, and started serving trendy drinks like Sex on the Beach. It was
not a meat market, Beverly saw to that; rather, a place where neighborhood singles could mix and mingle. In the grand old
tradition, they were about to sponsor a softball team.
Ballard stuck his bruised face and thatch of sun-whitened hair into the bar’s blast of light and heat and noise. Hammer was
hammering eardrums on C/D. Beverly and Jacques were behind the stick serving them up with both hands, but when Ballard pushed
the door wider and stepped through, Bev exploded.
“Out!”
she yelled over the noise.
“Aw, Bev, can’t we talk about i—”
“
Out
, or I’ll throw you out. Jacques.”
Heads were turning, eyes were staring. Jacques sighed and took off his apron and dropped it on top of the beer cooler. Small,
wiry, quick, balding, he once had been a diver with Cousteau. He and Ballard had SCUBA-dived together, they took karate from
the same master—but he
was
Beverly’s partner.
Ballard said placatingly, “Bev, it was an
accident.
”
“My beautiful car.” Fire blazed in her eyes. Her lips were a thin enraged line. “Jacques. Do something.”
Ballard began, “The insurance—”
“Insurance?
The car is totaled.
Totaled!
I don’t want insurance! I want my—”
Ballard lost it. “Why do you have to be such a sorehead? I mean, if the insurance’ll buy you a new car—”
The blazing eyes were on Jacques now. “If you won’t throw this bastard out of here…”
Jacques made little nodding, placating gestures toward her. He took Ballard’s arm and spoke in his elongated Gallic vowels.
“Larree, better you to go…”
Ballard let himself be herded out. If he wanted to patch it up with Beverly, he couldn’t fight her partner: he’d lose whichever
of them ended up on his back in the gutter. Outside, with the doors swinging back and forth behind them, Jacques released
his arm with a fatalistic French shrug.
“Larree, how can you reason with her
maintenant?
You should have telephoned first—”
“I did. Five times. She hung up each time.”
He said illogically, “Just as I said. So there is no reasoning with her now. Maybe never,
hein?
” He added, with bourgeois practicality, “
Peut-être
this is the end.
Fin
.”
“Yeah.
Fin
. Shit.” Ballard started rapidly away down the street, then turned back to add, “Pardon me,
merde
,” before going on again.
He drove right to the Montana, slid a tire iron up his jacket sleeve, and walked through the garage checking out the parked
cars. No more Mr. Nice Guy for Larry Ballard.
No Mercedes for Larry Ballard, either. Twelfth floor, leaning on the doorbell for a timed two minutes. Nobody home. He printed
CATCH YOU LATER in block letters on a business card that he stuck, bent, between doorknob and doorjamb.