Eva Desamours laced together her long, bony fingers and bent them back until she heard them crack twice and then pop in all three joints. She smiled slightly as she felt the warm effervescent current of released tension bubbling and fizzing back and forth under her skin, enervating her nerves and priming her senses.
Opposite her at the round table she sensed Solomon Boukman wince in the darkness. She knew he hated her doing it, but he should have learnt long ago to live with it; it was the last of the rituals she performed before she read anyone's cards-and she'd been reading his for over twenty years, since he was her apprentice in Haiti.
First she'd shower, soap herself clean and then she'd bathe. She'd scatter a mixture of herbs, flowers and shaved roots at the bottom of the bath tub-mint leaves to clear all paths, belladonna flowers to free the self from the body, mandrake root for the courage to step through any door, vervain for protection against corruption, High John the Conqueror root for the strength of thirty, goldenseal to open the eyes and a mixture of lavender oil and holy water to bind all these powers together. She'd run the bath hot to better free the mixture's essence. Then she'd step into the tub, lie back, close her eyes and let the powers seep into her as she watched the beautiful fish in the aquarium.
After an hour she'd towel herself dry and, naked, walk upstairs and go into the room where she kept her cards.
The room was small and sparse, with dull brown unpainted plastered walls and smooth bare unvarnished floorboards. A wide circle of stolen church altar candles studded with fragments of vulture bones, standing on black-painted iron saucers, and the small crude wooden cupboard where she stored her two decks of cards in specially designed black velvet envelopes were the only furniture. There was no light in the room whatsoever. She'd had the window bricked up when she'd bought the place.
Although she couldn't see anything once she'd entered the room, she'd placed the cupboard sixteen paces to the left of the door. She'd retrieve her tarot cards, make a half turn on her heels and then walk thirteen steps until she was at the edge of the candle circle. She'd step inside and grope around the floor until she found the matches. She'd light the candles anti-clockwise and squat down on her haunches, watching while the room assumed the dull purplish tone of a healing bruise as the oily orange glow coming from the floor combined with the wall's hidden pigmentation.
Then she took the cards out of their envelope, cut them, shu?ed them thoroughly, cut them again, and then dealt them anti-clockwise in a circle, face down.
She squatted in the middle of the circle, took a deep breath and began to speak, in reverse, the names of the clients she would read for that day.
Sometimes it took minutes, sometimes an hour. There are no clocks in the afterlife, only time and the dead aren't bound by appointments.
The cards changed. They came alive. The designs transformed from crude etchings to beautiful visions, as their dull colours grew brighter and fuller and far more vivid than they were in the cold light of day or to the untrained, uninitiated eye. The crimson borders of the de Villeneuve cards thickened and liquefied, as the golden suns they enclosed glowed with a deep rich light, becoming skull-faced ingots mounted on a hellish necklace.
It was then they came, those who watched over her clients: their guides, their counselling voices, the sources of all their instincts and feelings, those who forewarned them in dreams and premonitions, those who pointed to uncanny parallels in events commonly known as fate and sometimes dismissed as coincidence.
To Eva-as to all clairvoyants and mediums-the spirits were human in appearance, assuming a shape she could recognize and relate to. They looked not as they had in death, but as her clients would remember them best, right down to the clothes they wore and the things they brought with them to jog their charges' memories. They came singly mostly, but pairs were fairly common, and once in a while she had to cater for groups of up to seven if a person was particularly loved. The spirits had two things in common-they all looked happy, verging on euphoric, and they told her their names and who they'd come to talk to. They stood in front of her, outside the circle of candles and waited to be summoned in.
The bad spirits came too. They always did, right behind the good, shadowing them, just to mess with the natural order of things, to wreak havoc on an innocent life, destroy it if they could. They always tried to fool her into letting them in too, but she'd long ago learnt to spot the things they couldn't quite fake-the glint in their eyes, the vulpine hint in their smiles, sometimes the things they carried or didn't. She would firmly but politely refuse them entry and tell them to go back to where they belonged.
Yet occasionally the bad spirits got in. It was inevitable. They had genuine business with her clients, debts that needed collecting, earthly transgressions avenging. These ones she had to let in. That was the deal. Some people just had to be stopped before they went on destroying the natural order of things. Balance had to be restored, wrongs done to reach right.
And some bad spirits tricked her. That was inevitable too. They'd been great liars in life, who'd just gone on getting better and better now that time was no obstacle and the prospects were limitless. They were good at acting good.
Solomon Boukman always had his guardian come visit, the one he took his name from, the great one, who'd started it all.
Boukman was the slave turned voodoo priest turned rebel leader who in 1791 started the slave uprising that set Haiti free. The French colonial ladies knew about his extraordinary powers of foresight and used to ask him to read their fortunes in their palms. He didn't need to look. He knew they would die savage and bloody deaths. At night, in the slave quarters, he'd prophesy the overthrow of the French colonial masters and the imprisonment of the 'dwarf who led them'. They said he saw his own death, his head paraded around on a spike for all to see. They said this was what led him to start the uprising that would become a revolution. They said this was what drove him to savagery. He spared no white man, woman or child. He killed them all. He'd rape wives in front of their husbands and then kill their children before he killed them. He was without mercy or compassion.
When he came to talk to Solomon, he came naked, but for a shackle around his ankle, a bloody machete in his hand and white face paint in the shape of a skull. Even though he could do nothing to Eva, she was always a little scared of him.
Nearly all fortunes tellers are fakes and most of the real ones lie. If something bad's coming your way, they'll be the first to know and you the last. They'll snow you under with platitudes and upbeat cliches, tell you everything's going to be all right-anything but the truth.
Eva Desamours was an exception to the rule. She prided herself on always telling the truth, no matter how much it hurt.
She had two kinds of clients-winners and losers, or, the way she saw it, those with futures and those without. She couldn't do anything for the latter, except take their money and look at them pityingly. Their lives weren't just in the toilet but spiralling away down the pipes-the chronically ill, the unemployable, the heartbroken, the all-round desperate. What she told them was rarely pretty. She knew she could have made things easier by sugaring the pill, but what was the use in that? You always got to the poison. She considered people natural optimists, and therefore congenitally dumb: they only ever believed what they wanted to believe, even if the contrary was staring them in the face and shaking them by the hand.
The people with futures she treated differently. After all, there was more to play with and more she could use. They were as vulnerable as their negative counterparts, sharing almost identical needs, desires and aspirations, yet they had more going for them. They had important careers, money, influence and contacts. For them the answer was never, 'No, it isn't going to happen', but, 'Yes, anything's possible-depending on how much you really want it.'
Their replies were invariably the same: 'More than anything.' As was hers: 'I'll see what I can do.'
Eva Desamours was more than just a fortune teller; she was a fixer. If she saw that what they desired wasn't coming for them, she could arrange it so it did. She couldn't change the future-that was completely beyond her powers-but she could delay it for a short spell, distract it so it missed its stop. And while it was finding its way back, she moved things around, so destinies became misplaced: the lonely career woman suddenly started dating the work colleague she'd secretly loved for a year; the married father of three got it on with a waitress he'd lusted after; a business man got a career-making deal; an ambitious employee an unexpected promotion; a couple drowning in debt got a windfall. What she never told them was that in order to do good for them, she dealt with powerful bad spirits-conmen, thieves, fraudsters, murderers; the clever, gifted ones who'd evaded capture in mortal life-and that their moment of bliss came with a hefty price tag. The work colleague turned out to be a hitter, the waitress a herpes carrier, that glorious business deal would lead to its maker's downfall, the glamorous job would be utter hell, and the windfall would come from an insurance payout when one of the couple died in a horrific accident and the other was crippled for life. It was wrong for the uninitiated to mess with the future: the punishment for undeserved happiness was roughly three times its equal in misery. Yet payback didn't happen immediately, and it was in that honeymoon period that Eva capitalized on the goodwill to sort out some business for the SNBC. As she never charged for fixing futures, she accepted favours from her business contacts in kind-setting up offshore accounts, shell companies, helping to broker real-estate deals and buying up businesses to launder the organization's huge amounts of drug money.
Eva had been born with the gift of precognition. She came from a long line of seers and sorcerers, stretching back to Haiti's colonial days. Her great-grandmother Charlotte had been one of the country's most famous mambos. She'd been President Jean-Pierre Boyer's most trusted and-some said-most influential adviser, using spells and sacrifices to keep him in power for twenty-one years.
Eva could read tarot cards at the age of three, and at four she saw her first spirit. By the time she reached her tenth birthday she was telling wealthy Haitian society ladies their fortunes, reeling off details of adulteries, abortions, names and ages of bastard offspring, complex financial and property swindles, and births and deaths with pinpoint accuracy. When she was twelve she was talking to the dead. At fifteen she was enlisting their help in fixing the futures of the living.
In 1963 she was chased out of Haiti by Papa Doc, her former friend and sometime client, after she'd foreseen the end of the Duvalier dynasty.
She took the well-trodden Haitian exiles' path to Miami with her nine-year-old son Carmine and her helper Solomon Boukman then aged eleven. She'd taken Solomon as payment from the family of a barren woman she'd helped get pregnant, but who'd died while giving birth to him.
For the first year, they lived in a house in the Liberty Square Housing Project, a collection of shacks known to the locals as 'Pork 'n' Beans', because of their pinkish-orange colour. There were a handful of other Haitian families there, but it was mostly home to poor black Americans. The two groups didn't get along. The Americans resented the Haitians for moving in on the little turf they had: Liberty Square had, after all, been set up for them alone. The Haitians regularly got robbed, beaten up and sometimes killed. The cops did nothing. To them it was just niggers offing niggers, so who cared as long as it didn't cross racial lines.
A month after they'd arrived, Carmine got attacked by a gang of kids on his way back from the local 7-Eleven. They robbed him of his ten dollars grocery money and kicked him unconscious. Solomon went out, found the gang and attacked them with a razor-sharp machete. He left each of them missing a hand, finger, or an arm, an eye and-in the case of the leader-a nose. He took back the money they'd stolen.
Soon after, Liberty City's Haitian kids formed their own gang, with Solomon as their leader. It was the start of the SNBC. They fought all the local gangs with fists, feet, bats, switchblades, machetes and zipguns. Solomon was always in the thick of it, his combat skills the stuff of street legend. They robbed people, houses and stores. They fenced the goods. They stole cars to order. They ran protection rackets, first for Haitians, then for anybody who'd pay. They worked too for Vernell Deacon-aka the Charmer-Liberty City's most successful pimp. He paid them to watch his whores and guard his brothels. But he didn't think to pay them to watch his back, and he wound up getting shot in a club toilet. Solomon added pimping and prostitution to his gang's portfolio. The more Haitians came to Miami, the bigger the organization became. Solomon then divided it into subsections, giving the most trusted members control of key areas, which freed him up to get into the narcotics business.
Meanwhile Eva Desamours told fortunes to tourists in South Beach. She rented a fold-up table, two chairs and a parasol and joined a line of half a dozen Jewish and Cuban women who read cards, tea leaves, palms and gazed into crystal balls for anyone who gave them five bucks. The first week she read for twelve people, the second she doubled her clientele, and by the fourth, she had to turn people away. She had Carmine with her at all times, holding the money, because he wasn't much use for anything else-especially not Solomon's gang. In the beginning she seriously contemplated sending him back to Haiti, because he was seemingly useless, but then she began to note what a hit he was with women, how they cooed over his caramel skin and doe-like green eyes-just like those bitches had over his scumbag father. And she also noticed how he revelled in their attention and flattery, how sweetly he smiled at them when they told him how pretty he was, which only made them coo and cluck even more. Her cowardly little boy had a way with girls. He sought out their company. He knew how to put them at ease and make them laugh and gain their trust. She understood then his role in her new life.
Eva cut the deck of tarot cards and slid them across the table to Solomon.
He shu?ed them twice, ri?e and strip. She watched his short thick fingers handle the cards with a dexterity belying their shape. His nails were opaque, twisted and yellow, completely overlapping the fingertips and crowning hands rendered grotesquely large and heavy by his thin arms.
When he'd finished, he cut the deck and gave it back to her.
She laid the cards out face up in a descending pyramid, twenty-eight in all, beginning with a single card at the top, then two below, three after that, then four, and so on until she completed the spread with a final row of seven. The last cards on the right-hand side of the pyramid told the future, the ones before them represented significant past events and the undercurrents influencing it.
To an outsider the cards would have appeared flawed, because none of the court cards had faces, their heads represented by outlines around a white inside. Yet they had been specially designed that way, intended only for the most powerful fortune tellers. Once she'd started her reading, Eva would meditate on the court cards, staring deep into the blank space: the features of whoever they were meant to represent would begin to form in her mind's eye, sometimes as clear as a photograph, at other times only faint traces of a face would come through.
'What d'you see?' Solomon asked.
It wasn't good, not at all, but she wasn't going to say anything just yet.
At the top of the pyramid was the King of Swords, which represented Solomon-a powerful, bellicose man who was in a position of high authority in an organization. The second and sixth cards were the Knight of Swords and the Knight of Wands. In-between were three sixes-Wands, signifying plans and ideas; Pentacles, representing money, business and security; and Swords indicating conflict, trouble and strife. But it was the final card in the spread that was the most damaging-the Tower, the great destroyer; harbinger of ruin.
She couldn't understand it. The future had been so bright the last time. What had gone wrong?
'Two men are working against you,' she said, pointing to the Knights. 'Who?'
She stared at the blank space that was the Knight of Swords' face. She saw bloodshot blue eyes staring back at her and almost immediately smelled gunsmoke. She picked up the card, held it to her nose and breathed in deeply. A horrid taste formed at the back of her mouth. She broke it down: alcohol, earth, blood, chemicals, cigarettes. 'This man has killed in cold blood. More than once.' She put her finger on the Knight of Swords. 'He's not an assassin. He's killed for other reasons. Principles. And a sense of failure. But he's weak: he smokes, drinks and has taken drugs.'
Of the other man, she could only see his dark brown eyes, yet she sensed his massive, intimidating build. When she smelled and then tasted his essence it was at first a honeyed sweetness, indicating an even, good-natured temperament and a basic honesty-he was the sort of man who'd always help a friend and never cheat on his wife. Then, almost as soon as she was ready to conclude the man posed no real threat to them, she tasted a hint of vinegary sourness buried in the nectar. As she isolated it and drew it out, the taste became so unbearable she had to spit it out.
'The other man,' she wiped her mouth with a handkerchief and moved her finger to the Knight of Wands, 'is ambitious, but he hides it well. He's the initiator.'
'Who are they?' Solomon asked impatiently.
Before she could answer, Eva saw Carmine down on the ground clutching his gut like he'd been punched. She remembered the Knight of Swords' taste now.
'They're police,' she said and looked at the spread again. 'They're acting alone.'
'Are they from here?'
'Yes.'
'They won't be a problem,' Solomon said.
And then the spirit of Boukman appeared at Solomon's right side. He was holding up a glittering tapestry of the original Haitian flag-blue and red, with the crest in the middle-and pointing to a single thread hanging off the edge. He had his eyes closed as he pointed. Then he opened them, looked at the thread as if seeing it for the first time and pulled it. The tapestry fell apart on the table in an ungainly heap of material and very quickly turned to a spread of dust which Boukman blew away.
She understood what it meant: there was something the cops hadn't seen yet, the tiniest detail, but if they found it, it would spell the end.
She asked the spirit what the detail was, but he didn't answer. It either meant he didn't know or she wasn't meant to know. Which it was, she wasn't allowed to ask.
And for the first time ever she felt afraid.
'We need to find out who these men are,' she said to Solomon, 'and then they must be killed.'