At the sound Yoiyo Calderón was instantly up on his feet in the dark, scrabbling in a desk drawer for his pistol and at the same time kicking away the light blanket that constrained his feet. He was not in his bed, he had not been in his bed for several nights, not since the dreams had begun; he was sleeping on the long, lush leather of the couch in his den. His nights were now spent here because he did not want to disturb the sleep of his wife, not that he was ever particularly sensitive to her rest or any other aspect of her being, but she asked questions and gossiped and had a wide circle of acquaintances. He did not want it abroad in the Cuban community that J. X. F. Calderón was losing it, was goingloco, was afraid of bumps in the night.
The sounds were coming from the front of the house, he thought. Thumps and scratchings, like rending wood, and a low coughing growl. He looked briefly at the phone. Call the police? No, not in the house, looking around, asking questions, poking into his affairs. Instead, he slipped into a light robe, and pistol in hand, he walked out of the room and down the stairs in the dark. In the entrance hall he stopped and listened again. It was cool now, the air conditioners were silent for the season, the only noises were the quiet clicking of automatic machinery in the house, a distant vehicle, the ever-present rattle and swish of tropical foliage in the breeze. He looked at the security panel, the little green lights said all locked up, secure, which was far from how he felt, and with a soft curse, he switched the thing off and unlocked the front door.
There was his front walk, his lawn, the peaceful Gables street. He took a step outside, pointing the gun. There was a black lump of something on the path, and when he leaned over to look at it, he cursed again, this time aloud. It was a pile of feces, of a vaguely familiar type. Calderón was hardly an expert on cat shit, coming as he did from a social stratum that employed others to empty cat boxes, but his daughter had always had cats, and he had observed the occasional accident. This was cat, and if its volume was any indication, it had emerged from a beast the size of a man.
A sound behind him made him whirl, gun outstretched, finger closing on the trigger. He saw two things at once. One was his front door, its oak surface torn to ribbons by long scratches. The other was his daughter, Victoria, standing in the doorway, dressed in pink silk pajamas, her mouth gaping in shock. Calderón shoved the pistol into the pocket of his robe. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing. Go back to bed.” He started for the doorway.
“It’s not nothing. I heard sounds. That’s why I got up. And you were pointing a gun.”
“Well, obviously itwas nothing or I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you,” said Calderón, raising his voice. He was staring at the soft earth of the flower beds on either side of the walk. With his slippered foot he effaced the pugmarks of a gigantic cat, or at least those he could reach from the walk.
“What are you doing?” Victoria asked.
“Nothing! How many times do I have to say it? Now go back to bed or we’ll have your mother down here and that’s all I need.”
He made a shooing motion with his hand, and after a few seconds, she turned and walked away. He followed her into the house, and as he switched on the security system a dissatisfied frown appeared on his face, as it often did when he contemplated his daughter. Calderón was not happy with his children. Juan Jr., the elder, or Jonni, as he called himself, was in New York, attempting to become an actor or singer and living rather prematurely the life of a star on his father’s money. This girl had been married off right out of college in a wedding that left little change from a hundred grand, to the Pinero boy, a connection with one of the wealthiest Cuban families in Miami. Who drank, as it turned out, and had peculiar tastes (although this was not discussed among the Calderóns) and who had, three months into the marriage, run his Mercedes off Alligator Alley and into a canal. Victoria returned home, where she would probably remain forever. Not a beauty, unfortunately, but at least she wasn’t like some of these girls he saw around town, Cuban girls, from good families, too, with their bodies hanging out of their clothes and up to God-knew-what craziness. His one concession to modernity was to allow her to work, under his eye, naturally, and here, at least, she had proven her father’s daughter. He’d started her in the development office at JXF, where she’d shown an excellent eye for property and had, in fact, been the lead on the Consuela Coast deal. He was glad she was competent, but it irked him like an unscratchable itch that it was the girl and not the boy who was in the business.
Calderón returned to the den, where he dozed uncomfortably in front of a stupid movie on the gigantic television, until dawn appeared through the windows. When he heard the servants stirring, he called down and ordered Carmel the maid to clean up the mess on the front walk, and then got his construction manager out of bed and told him that some kids had vandalized his front door and that he wanted it replaced instantly. Some hours later, when he walked out, a crew was already at work on the door. Asked what he wanted done with the old door, Calderón said, “Burn it.”
But the door and what it represented was not so easily removed from his mind. All during that morning he found himself drifting away at meetings, brought out of fearful reveries by an unnatural silence, looking up at a table full of worried or too-interested faces, and having to fake some response. This could not be tolerated, for his empire was sustained by an inverted pyramid of deals, each one larger than the last, each one secured by what had gone before. Should the word get around in certain circles that Yoiyo Calderón was losing it, should his Consuela Resort go sour…it was not worth thinking about, it wasn’t going to happen, he would…
What? Like many men of his generation and profession and culture, he had no true friends. He had contacts and associates instead, and he certainly was not going to bring up what had happened last night with Garza and Ibanez. He’d promised to handle any problems with the Puxto timber deal, and that was all they needed to know. His wife was a decoration, his father senile, his son useless, he had no brothers, he could not discuss these things with an employee.
He had a meeting after lunch about Consuela Coast with Gary Rivas, his VP for sales, and Oscar Clemente, his CFO, and some of their junior people. And his daughter. The discussion was about cash flow, as nearly all his meetings seemed to be about recently. Like any big project, the Coast, as the firm called it, got its initial funding from banks, collateralized by the property itself, which money was used for initial planning and the obtaining of permits, then the construction of the first units and the amenities, in this case a country/yacht club, golf course, and marina. The money from the sales of the first units would be used to service the loans and allow construction of the next tranche of units. Actual profits would not kick in until 70 percent of the homes and condos had been sold; until then, the company was running on vapor. This was the nature of the business, and it was not for the faint of heart. This was why Calderón liked it.
They sat, they talked small a little, and then Rivas and Clemente passed out spreadsheets and went into their presentations. Rivas had the bad news, although he did not call it that. He was about Victoria’s age, dark-haired, generous of gesture, cap-toothed, and tailored to an almost unnatural degree of perfection, as if injection-molded from plastic, like Barbie’s Ken. It seemed that the nineties were over, and condos on the west coast of Florida were not leaping off the shelves at a low end of $1.2 million. He thought he would make his targets off the Europeans and the Asians, and the thankful decline of the dollar, but it would be a near thing. Victoria looked at his projections and thought it would be an impossible one, even if the Coast became the most fashionable buy for every plutocrat from Lisbon to Shanghai, but she remained silent. Her father didn’t question the figures either, and they moved on to Clemente.
Uncle Oscar, as he was called among the Calderóns, had a freckled bald dome of a head on which artful swirls of dark-dyed hair reclined. His bright black eyes flicked in disconcerting magnification behind huge thick black-framed lenses. He spoke a thickly accented English, interlarded with frequent spates of Cuban idiom. Clemente was a classic green-eyeshade type, a legacy from the previous generation of Calderóns, who’d won his spurs sneaking Victoria’s grandfather’s millions out of the island just before Satan took over Havana. According to him, the pyramid of interlocking loans was holding up and would cover the company’s burn rate well into the following year, assuming a whole list of good tidings: the prime rate low, labor available and docile, all contractors diligent and smartly on schedule, the banks willing with the usual rollovers, and…
Victoria’s eyes darted to a set of asterisked entries that seemed to balance out the spreadsheet to create this miracle of financial solidity. She added them up mentally and said, “Wait a second, where does this five point five mill come from? Investment income?”
They all stared at her, and she felt her face flush. “I mean…it doesn’t appear on the latest financials, and without that it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to service the major loan from First Florida. Does the bank have this as part of our collateral?”
Oscar looked at Calderón, and it was clear to Victoria that the CFO didn’t know the source of the money either. Calderón said, “It’s Consuela Holdings money. It’s there. Let’s move on.”
“Consuela? There’s no cash flow from Consuela. It’s a speculative outside investment. Why’re we claiming it as an asset against which we’re proposing to borrow?”
Calderón chuckled. “My little girl’s a financial genius now. A year ago she couldn’t tell an asset from a baby buggy and now she’s running the business for me. Kids, huh?” Everyone around the table had a good laugh at that, and now Calderón stared at her with his special macho gaze until she dropped her eyes and he said, “When I want your advice I’ll ask for it, understand? Now, Oscar, let’s get this finished.”
Calderón observed his daughter shrink into submission, which reaction made him feel somewhat more in control, and after the meeting he retired to his office, having told the secretary to hold calls. He sat behind his desk squeezing a little red ball said to be good for relieving tension and thought about the real problem, the one closely related to the $5.5 million the stupid girl had mentioned. Clearly, someone had killed Fuentes, and this someone was now trying to threaten him by last night’s vandalism. Fuentes had been torn by what was supposed to have been a big cat, an obvious scam, and someone had marked his property, as if by a big cat. They were trying to frighten them away from the Puxto, that was clear enough, and therefore it was necessary to find the people who were doing this and stop them or frightenthem off. He had applied fear before this, including physical fear on occasion, and he understood that once the decision was made, there was no point in holding back. He dialed a number in Colombia, not the one he had used some days ago, but a special one, a cell phone, for emergencies only.
“Yes?” said the quiet voice.
“Hurtado?”
“Yes.”
“Calderón. Look, the situation we talked about the other day? I think you need to be involved.”
“I’m listening.”
“There was an incident at my house last night. It’s connected with the death of Fuentes, I think.”
“Someone contacted you?”
“No, just some vandalism, a warning. The marks of a big cat, just like there were around Fuentes’s body.”
A hissing silence; then, “And what is it you expect me to do about it, Yoiyo?”
Calderón took a deep breath. “Well, you know they killed one of us and threatened me. This is not the work of some little environmentalistcabrón. This has to come from your end, despite what you said before.”
“Really? What about the man and his Indian at Fuentes’s office?”
“A distraction. These environment crazies, they climb up and live in trees, they drive spikes, at worst maybe a bomb, and then they’re all over the papers with their manifestos. This is different. Forgive me for saying so, but it has a Colombian feel to it.”
“A Colombianfeel?”
“Yes!” Calderón’s voice rose. “They tore Antonio topieces, goddamnit! They ripped the heart from his body, his liver…Americans don’t do things like that.”
“No, that’s true. But calm yourself, my friend. I’m sure something can be arranged. We need to find who’s doing this business and make them stop, this is the important thing, yes?”
“Of course. So, you’ll organize this in some way?”
“I will. My people will be in touch with you. And Yoiyo? You’ll let me handle this quietly, yes? No publicity, no fuss, and no contact with the authorities. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Good. My best regards to your family.”
The line went dead. Calderón wiped his face with his handkerchief. It was some minutes before he trusted his legs to carry him to the little bar in his office.
Victoria Calderón returned to her much smaller office, where there was no bar. Her body was damp with a nasty fear-sweat. She plucked at her clothes and wished for a shower. She sat behind her desk and tried to work. The words and figures danced wrongly across the page, and she mouthed an unaccustomed curse, and another, and then gave vent to her quite considerable store of Spanish profanity, learned mainly during her brief marriage, but not of course loud enough to be heard through the flimsy walls of her office. Yes, it was still true: he could with a word and a sneer turn her into the brainless ornament of his fancy.
Now, almost without thought, she found her fingers punching the buttons of her phone, and in a moment she was listening to the warm, humorous voice of her favorite person in the world, her mother’s crazy sister, Eugenia Arias, who, blessed with a perfect ear for tones of woe suppressed, cut through the attempted small talk with “What’s he done to you now?”
After listening to her niece for some time, she said, “Come down to Eskibel’s and I’ll buy you a drink. Three drinks. Then we’ll go to the fronton and make piles of cash, and then maybe we’ll both get lucky with apelotero.”
Victoria giggled. “Oh, God, I should! It’d drive him crazy.”
“It’d serve him right, the bastard. Oh, come! You can be here in half an hour. We can grab a bite and be in our seats by seven. Yes?”
Victoria actually thought about it for a long moment. Aunt Eugenia, the younger of the two sisters, was a jolly, fleshy woman, as unlike her sib as nature and temperament could arrange. She was unmarried, screwed around with low, beautiful, worthless men, drank copiously, kept an antique Jaguar saloon with a chauffeur to drive it, and made, to the dismay of her family, an excellent living as a professional jai alai gambler. She was tolerated at the larger family gatherings, but Yoiyo Calderón did not approve of her, and so his daughter was strongly discouraged from her society.
Victoria answered, “I don’t know…I’d have to lie to him, and to my mom, and he’d find out and then I’d be in the doghouse for weeks…”
“What, he’s going toground you? Vicki, I have news for you: you’re an adult. You’re twenty-eight. Let him kick you out. You’ll move in with me, I’ll teach you to bet jai alai. You’ve got a good head for figures, you’d be a natural at it.”
A laugh caught Victoria by surprise, the suggestion was so outrageous, so not her. She changed the subject and they talked on, of family and Eugenia’s louche life, and when they ended the conversation, Victoria felt herself again. Which was? She didn’t quite know, but it was not as an escapee like Eugenia, she decided as she turned again to the close-ranked numbers, not escape, but victory. Her father’s daughter, after all.
There was a plaque at the base of the tree, placed by the South Florida Horticultural Society. This plaque proclaimed it the largest tree in Florida, and informed the interested that it was aFICUS MACROPHYLLA, a banyan fig, and had been planted around 1890 by a minister to provide shade for his church. It still provided shade to the large brick-built steepled building that had replaced the tin-roofed original, and also, in the late afternoon, to the low, modern structure that housed the Providence Day School, K through six. The tree covered an area the size of a big-league baseball diamond, a vast ball of dark green elongate shiny leaves suspended over dozens of trunks and subtrunks, smooth and gray as elephants, and in the spooky cloud-stopped light of this afternoon, like elephants these seemed to march with infinite slowness across the lawn that surrounded it. There was a wooden bench established under one of its boughs, slung cleverly between two living buttresses. Upon this sat Miss Milliken, the first-grade teacher, who read to her class fromTik-Tok of Oz, a special treat at the end of the day. The parents knew to collect their children there on paradisiacal afternoons such as this, and there was a small circle of adults, almost all well-turned-out local matrons or young nannies, standing around the clump of sitting children, listening while the chapter was read out. The sole listener who was neither matron nor nanny was Jimmy Paz.
The book closed, the children sprang up and began to chatter, the parents moved in. Some grabbed their youngsters and moved off in a determined manner, to tightly scheduled activities meant to build up résumés. The students at Providence Day came from a social stratum that did not believe in wasting the unforgiving minute, whose members believed that it was never too early to sacrifice to the gods of success. Jimmy Paz was not one of these either, nor were several others, who demonstrated by their costumes and vehicles that they were the heirs of the former indigenes of Coconut Grove-the laid-back, the artistic-even if wealthy enough to afford Providence’s stiff fees. These gathered around Miss Milliken to chat, to discuss their children briefly, to hang out with one another in the welcome shade of the great tree.
Unconvivial Paz, no former hippie, no artist, followed his daughter’s lead into the green center of the ficus. Here he observed a demonstration of tree climbing and was forced to admit that he could not swing upside down from a low limb by his knees. He could, however, still tickle her so that, giggling, she lost her grip and fell into his arms.
“Daddy, do you know there’s a monster in this tree?”
“I didn’t know that. Is it scary?”
She considered this briefly. “A little scary. Notvery scary, likearrrrrgh! ” She demonstrated what scary would be like by physical gestures and a snarling face. “He talks to me,” she added. “In Spanish.”
“Really. What about?”
“Oh, stuff. He’s from a real jungle, and he can talk to animals. I showed him to Britney Riley, but she couldn’t see him. She said I wasstupid. I hate her now.”
“I thought she was your best friend.”
“Uh-uh. She’s a total dummy. My new best friend is Adriana Steinfels. Can she come to our house?”
“Not today, honey. Can you show me the monster?”
“Okay,” with which she took his hand in hers and led him deeper into the maze of prop-roots. The air there was damp, cool, and filled with the spicy-rotten smell of the leaf and fruit litter below. They came to a gray-green vertical column that looked as big around as a dump truck: the main trunk of the state’s largest tree. Amelia pointed upward. “He lives up there,” she said, and waited for a moment, listening, then shrugged. “I think he’s not there now. Where’s Abuela?”
“Something came up. She had to go to herilé.”
“Could we go, too?”
“We could,” said Paz, somewhat to his own surprise. It would mean a fight with his wife. Did he want that? Maybe it was time to have the whole thing out. Whether Paz believed in Santería or not, the thing was part of his child’s heritage, not to mention his own, and this absolute ban had suddenly become unbearable. Amelia was not a Britney or an Adriana, a white bread…the wordgusano, a maggot, floated into consciousness, and was shoved down again. The kid was a mutt, and seven was not too early for her to learn where she came from. Okay, now they’d have it out. He loved his wife dearly, in parts, but her materialist self-righteousness he did not love, and he’d come to the end of avoiding the issue. So he told himself, and ran a few little testing arguments through his head, as husbands so often do, as he left the bowels of the fig tree and entered the open air, clutching the little warm hand. The monster in the tree, though-also not a good sign. Amelia had gone through a number of imaginary playmates, and Dr. Mom had explained at length that it was perfectly natural at the appropriate age. Was this the appropriate age? Nearly seven? Paz had thought that real friends took over the social impulse about now, and dumping a real friend because of an imaginary one could not be right. Now he was about to take the child to a place where nearly every adult had an imaginary friend who emerged unpredictably from the spirit world and took them over completely-would that betherapeutic under the circumstances? He knew what her mother would say to that. Paz told this line of thought to stop and it did but promised to come backreal soon.
Theilé, the Santería congregation, was lodged in the unprepossessing home of Pedro Ortiz, located in the largely Cuban-inhabited area southwest of the original Little Havana on SW Eighth Street, which bore therefore the Spanglish name of Souesera. He had to park the Volvo two blocks away, so great was the number of cars-mostly venerable and including a number of well-used pickup trucks-that crowded the streets nearby and also the small former lawns of the houses, now converted into green-painted asphalt parking lots. It was the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, an important day in Santería, for when the African slaves first saw statues of that saint, they had conflated the beads of his rosary with the palm-nut chains used in Yoruba divination and so associated the Italian saint with Ifa-Orunmila, theorisha, or spirit, of prophecy. It was considered particularly auspicious to get your fortune told on this day, hence the crowd and hence the presence here of Margarita Paz. Paz explained some of this to his daughter as they walked; she took in the information in the perfectly accepting manner of children, and then asked, “Will they tell a fortune for me?”
“I don’t know,” said Paz honestly. “You could ask Abuela. She knows more about this stuff than me.”
“What’s in that bag?”
Paz hefted the plastic sack. “Yams.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Do we have to eat them?” Not a yam fan, Amelia, despite his best efforts. “No, they’re for theorisha, ” he said. “Ifaloves yams.”
“Yuck,” said Amelia, unimpressed by the tastes of the Lord of Fate.
They went into the house. Paz’s nostrils were immediately full of the typical smell of such places-burning wax from scores of candles, the sweet incense sold inbotánicas throughout the city, the earth smell of piles of yams, the sweetness of coconut and rum, and beneath all, the acrid odor of live fowl. Despite the murmur of the crowd, these could be heard clucking from their pens in a room at the back of the house.
He held tight to Amelia’s hand, although the place was full of children running free. Besides these, the people were of all ages, as one would expect at any church, and of all colors, too, although tending to the darker shades indigenous to the Cuban community.
“Look, Abuela!” Amelia cried and tore away to greet her grandmother. Paz liked to see the two of them together, because of the expression that came over his mother’s face when she embraced hernieta. It was joy unrestrained, an expression he did not recall seeing there during his own youth. Once he had felt a pang of resentment at such times, but no longer. None of that mattered anymore, whether or not his wife the shrink agreed. Some of the joy even carried over to him. Mrs. Paz embraced him, kissed him on both cheeks, smiled, showing the gold teeth.
“You brought her,” said Mrs. Paz.
“Sure, why not?”-a question that had a real answer, which they both knew.
“Thank you,” she said, and Paz had to keep from gaping. It was the first time his mother had ever thanked him for anything.
The grandmother and the child moved through the crowd, greetings and cooings arising in their wake. Paz followed, bemused, feeling the removal of a weight he had not realized he was carrying. The child was no stranger to praise, but her immediate family was small, and praise was associated with accomplishment. She had not ever received a flood like this, and he saw her shyly blossom. Paz got the feeling that the members of theilé had been prepped for this by grandmotherly boastings. And why not? he thought; she’s had a rough life, this is a small enough pleasure to give her. His mother seemed to have transformed herself into an entirely different woman from the stern field marshal of the restaurant and his childhood home. Not for the first time he wondered why she had not raised him in Santería. Apparently age was no barrier, as the many children here proved. Again he suppressed resentment.
They approached the sanctuary, a tent of yellow and green silk partially enclosing a squat cylinder covered with satin brocade in the same colors-thefundamentos, or sacred ritual symbols, of Ifa-Orunmila. Dozens of candles in glass holders burned around this shrine, and the floor was covered with layers of yams and coconuts. Amelia was allowed to deposit a yam and then taken to see the cake, a huge wedding-style confection of many tiers, on which was inscribed in icingMaferefun Orunmila.
“Is that a birthday cake?”
“Yes, in a way,” said Mrs. Paz. “It’s the day we celebrate and give thanks to Orunmila. See here, it says ‘thanks be to Orunmila,’ in Lucumi.”
“Could we eat it?”
“Later, dear. First we have to see ourbabalawo. Now, he’s a very holy man, so when we meet him, we bow and say ‘iboru iboya ibochiche.’” They practiced this a few times and then pushed through a thicker crowd to where Pedro Ortiz, thebabalawo, sat on a simple caned chair. Mrs. Paz and Amelia dropped to their knees and said “may Ifa accept the sacrifice” in the modified Yoruba language called Lucumi by Cubans. Mrs. Paz introduced Amelia to thesantero. Paz watched from a short distance. Ortiz was a slight cordovan-colored man with a thick head of black hair just starting to go gray and large dark eyes that seemed all pupil. He embraced both Mrs. Paz and Amelia and then looked over the heads of his followers directly at Paz, who understood that thebabalawo knew pretty much what he was thinking. It interested Paz that he had expected this and was untroubled by it. Yes, weird stuff happened, weird stuff would continue to happen. It was a permanent part of his life, and it looked like it would start to be a part of his daughter’s life, too. His mother was beckoning him. Ortiz rose and shook hands. No bow was apparently expected from the great quasi-agnostic. Mrs. Paz said, “He has agreed to throw Ifa for Amelia. It’s very important, but you’re the father, and so you have to agree.”
“Um, right. What’s going to happen?”
“Just agree, Iago!” she said sharply.
“Okay, Mamí,” he said. “Your show. I trust you.” As the words came out, he found that he actually did.
Ortiz led the way into a smaller room in the back of the house. In it were vases full of tropical blooms and trays of fruit, and there were depictions of theorishas on the walls: Ifa in his guise as St. Francis, Shango as St. Barbara, Babaluaye as St. Lazarus, and the rest. In one corner was a life-size statue of St. Caridad, the patroness of Cuba, and along one wall was a large mahogany cabinet, thecanistillero, repository of the sacred objects. The only other furnishings were a folding bridge table with a round wooden box in its center, and four straight chairs. Ortiz sat in one of these and waited while the others sat. Ortiz looked into Paz’s eyes and said, “We don’t usually ask Ifa to tell the future of children, you know. Their future is so little formed that it would be disrespectful to ask. In a way, their little spirits are still held in the hands of their ancestors, such as yourself and Yetunde here.” Here Ortiz smiled briefly at Mrs. Paz, who nodded when she heard her name-in-religion. “And of course the child’s mother. So, what I will do is throw Ifa for you yourself, asking if there is anything that needs to be done or not done for the child’s sake. It’s difficult to make such a reading, but I have agreed because of the love and respect I have for Yetunde. So, now I need you to give me five dollars and twenty-five cents.”
“Oh-kay,” said Paz, “five and a quarter. Here you go.” He handed the man a bill and a coin. Ortiz wrapped the coin in the bill using a complex origamilike fold. He opened the box on the table and took from it a chain made of eight curved pieces of tortoiseshell connected by brass links, and an ordinary drugstore notebook and pencil. The wordopele floated up from memory. Paz had seen one of these before but never in actual use. Ortiz pinched the currency and coin around the center of theopele and pressed this to Paz’s forehead, breast, hands, and shoulders, and then did the same to Amelia. He placed the money in the box, and after a low humming incantation that proceeded for some minutes he raised the chain and let it fall with a small tinkling clatter on the table.
Thebabalawo studied the line of the shells, observing which had fallen concave side up and which ones concave side down. This, Paz knew, is how Ifa speaks to men. Ortiz made marks on a sheet of paper torn from the notebook, a vertical stroke for concave-up and a circle for concave-down, two columns of four marks. He studied these, frowning, looked sharply at Paz, frowned more deeply, studied Amelia. Finally he uttered a soft grunt and asked Paz if he had a dog.
“A dog? No, we don’t. We have a cat.”
Ortiz shook his head. “No, it would be a large dog, or…something. Are there neighbors with such an animal?”
“There’s a poodle down the block. Why are you asking this?”
“Because…hm, this is very strange, very strange. I have been doing this for forty years and I don’t recall theorisha ever sending this. You know, all this was born in Africa and there are some things that happen in Africa that don’t happen here. The locusts don’t come and eat our crops. We don’t give cows in exchange for our wives. Very strange.” He stared at theopele as if he hoped it would change itself into another shape.
“But it involves a dog?” Paz asked.
“Not really. But what else could it be? Here we have no lions. Lions don’t carry off our children here in America. But here it is, ‘the oldest child is taken by the lion.’ That’s how the verse goes.”
“You could do it again,” Paz suggested after a moment. There was a peculiar cold chill in his belly, and without thinking he reached out and grasped his daughter’s hand.
But Ortiz shook his head. “No, we don’t mock theorisha. What is given is given. But it’s certainly a great puzzle. I will have to pray about this, and make a sacrifice, too. Oh, and that is another peculiar thing. There is a sacrifice required.”
“You mean an animal, right?”
“No, the oracle speaks about a human sacrifice, but it’s not definite. The verse reads ‘who is so brave as to sacrifice the dear one?’ When such things appear, we always take it to mean a spiritual sacrifice, a purification. But, as I say, in forty years, this has not been told to me. There are very many figures, not only two hundred fifty-six from the one throw, as you see, but changing with the days and the seasons. Not allbabalawo know this. Come back and see me again, and may Orunmila give us more light then.”
The three of them walked out of the room, and an elderly woman passed them going in. A long line of people had formed, like that outside the toilets at a theater, all chattering softly in Spanish, waiting to know the future. Paz felt a ferocious anger displacing the fear from his mind, together with whatever small scraps of credulity he had so carefully assembled. After sending Amelia off to where they were serving cake, he directed it at his mother.
“What was that all about?”
“You’re angry.”
“Ofcourse, I’m angry. Animals eating kids? Human sacrifice? Do you have any idea what it’s going to take to get her to bed now? She already has dreams about animals eating her up.”
His mother’s eyes grew wide. “What! She has dreams like that! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why? Because they’re just dreams, Mother. All kids have nightmares at her age, and this kind of crazy…stuffdoesn’t help. Speaking of which, I must have been nuts to bring her here. All of this…” He gestured to the room, the devotees in their standing clusters. He couldn’t think of any word that was not vile, for all of this.
“You don’t understand,” she said with uncharacteristic calm. “You should be made to thesantos, like a man. But you hold back, and this is why Orunmila can’t speak to you clearly.”
She spoke as to a child, and this made Paz even angrier. His mother wasn’t supposed to be calm like this, he wanted a fight. He said, “I’m taking tonight off,” a statement normally guaranteed to produce a battle.
But she only nodded and said, “If you like.”
“I’ll see you later, then,” he said and turned away to collect Amelia.
Who was not to be found.
Paz strode through the rooms, pushing past crowds that seemed to have grown thicker, and thicker, too, the odor of the candle and incense, and warmer the rooms. Sweat ran into his eyes and soaked the sides of his shirt. He called her name, he asked strangers if they had seen a little girl (pink shirt and jeans, pink sneakers) and got concerned but unhelpful looks, shakes of the head. With panic rising in him, he ran outside and looked up and down the block. The air felt wonderfully cool against his hot skin, but he plunged back into the heat and the noise, with his stomach lodged in his throat.
And found Amelia sitting peacefully on her grandmother’s lap, having bits of smeared yellow and green icing wiped from her mouth. She said, “Daddy, I got a piece with Orunmila’s name written on it.”
“That’s nice,” said Paz from an arid mouth. “Where were you? I was looking all over for you.”
“I was right here with Abuela all the time.”
Paz could not meet his mother’s glance. He would have sworn out a federal affidavit that he had been in this very room four times in the past ten minutes, and that it had contained neither Margarita Paz nor her small descendant.
Paz let Amelia sit in the shotgun seat of the Volvo like the irresponsible daredevil dad he was. The wife always made her sit in the backseat for that extra level of safety, but Paz as a cop had seen a lot more car wrecks than she had, and he thought that safetywise it was a toss-up. Also he liked having her up there with him. He himself had spent what seemed like years in the front seat of an old Ford pickup with a bright stainless catering rig on the bed, sans seat belt in an interior vaunting any number of steel edges capable of piercing young skulls. He had survived this, and such riding with his mother remained among his dearest memories of childhood.
He was now driving in a dreamlike state, more or less southward toward home, but when he reached the turnoff to South Miami he passed it by and headed farther south on Dixie Highway. I could keep going, he thought, down to the Keys, to Key West, the end of the road. He could get a boat and a hose-rig and dive for conch, and Amelia could sit up topside and mind the regulator. He could open a little shack and serve conch fritters to the tourists and drink a lot of rum and let Amelia take care of him. That was a kind of life. He knew guys who had it, and they seemed pretty happy until their livers crumpled or they went boating in their rusty old automobiles. He wanted a beer to go with these stupid thoughts.
He pulled into a truck stop just north of Perrine, at the point where suburban Miami fades into rough and rural. It comprised a squalid array of gas stalls and a low office/grocery made of peeling white concrete, somewhat uglier than it had to be, as if in defiance.
“Can I have a Dove bar?” asked Amelia.
“No, your mother’s going to slaughter me as it is. I’ll get you a juice box. Don’t move and don’t touch the car.”
“I can drive a car.”
“I’m sure, but not today, okay?”
Paz got out and went into the store. The air was cruelly refrigerated and stank of microwaved tacos. He purchased a six-pack of Miller talls and a box of juice. He sat in the car, popped a can, and drank most of its tasteless fizz in one long swallow.
“That lady has clown hair,” said Amelia.
Paz looked. The lady, an African American, indeed wore a thick helmet of bright orange hair, also tiny blue satin shorts, high-heeled sandals, and a red tube top that served up her large breasts like puddings. There were several other similarly dressed ladies lounging around, chatting to truck drivers and a car full of what looked like Mexican farmworkers. As they watched, the lady with the clown hair walked off with a stocky man in a feed cap and a long trucker’s wallet stuck in his back pocket and fixed to his belt by a chain.
“Is she that man’s wife?” asked Amelia.
“I don’t know, darling. I think they’re just friends.”
“He’s going to let her ride in his truck. He’s a demon.”
“Is he. How can you tell?”
“I just can. I can tell demons and witches. Some witches are good witches, did you know that?”
“I didn’t. What about monsters? Are there good and bad monsters?”
“Of course. The Credible Hunk is a good monster. Godzilla is a good monster. Shrek is a good monster.”
“What about vampires?”
“Daddy, vampires are just make-believe,” explained Amelia patiently, “like Barbies. Look, there’s that lady who had dinner with us.”
Paz looked. Beth Morgensen had just stepped out of a Honda and was talking animatedly with a couple of the road whores. They appeared to be well acquainted.
Paz downed the rest of his beer and started the car, planning on a quick getaway, but the sound of the engine had attracted attention, and Beth walked over, grinning. She gave Paz a fat kiss through the window, holding lip contact a little longer than was strictly required, and then eyed the beers.
“Getting your load on before going home to the wife. How perfectly working-classish of you.”
“Ever the sociologist.”
“Accompanied by the little darling, I see. How are you, sugar?”
“Fine,” said Amelia and sucked loudly on her juice straw. Whatever was happening was grown-up stuff, boring and a little disturbing. More interesting were the funny ladies who now came vamping up to the car, cooing over Amelia in a friendly way. Beth made introductions, as at a garden party. It was all very civilized. One of the whores offered to watch the child while Paz did whatever business he needed to do (laughter). Another offered a lowball price on account of you got such a cute baby. Not that I want another one. More laughter, in which Beth joined. Paz pasted a sickly grin on his face and traded wisecracks until their business called and they drifted away.
“Are you what they call a participant-observer in this study?” Paz asked, with a little edge to it, at which Beth Morgensen chuckled and said, “Oh, no, Jimmy darling, you know I’m a charitable foundation. I just give it away.” She drew a business card from her bag, licked it lazily, and stuck it to the visor above his head. “Call anytime. Sociology never sleeps.”
On the way back, Paz removed the card from the vinyl, and instead of tossing it, his hand moved as if compelled by a mystic force and slid it into the pocket of his shirt.