“Loretta’s pretty sure he’s not.”
Canov made a tossing gesture with one hand. “Or she’s trying to fake somebody out by pretending she thinks so. He does seem to be reliably dead. We got a broad spectrum of media out to do resonance tests at the houses he lived in, and in his old law office in Seal Beach, and they found no ringing lifelines that worked out to be him. The one that seems to be his thuds dead at around 1975, when he disappeared.”
“What kind of mediums?” Obstadt hated faggoty overprecise language.
Canov shrugged. “Hispanic brujas, a team of psychics from USC, autistic kids, ghost-sniffing dogs, even; a renegade Catholic priest, two Buddhist monks; we fed LSD to some poker players and had them do sixty or seventy hands of seven-stud with a Tarot deck in the law office one night. We had some blind fencers in, and videotaped ’em, watching for spontaneous disengages, but we didn’t see any dowsing effects. And all the EM stuff, TV sets and current and compasses, behave normally.”
“Okay, so he’s dead,” said Obstadt, “and his ghost hasn’t been hanging out at the places you checked. Is it wandering around?”
“Not if he died anywhere locally—it looks like he just dispersed, or was eaten. He published an as-told-to book in 1962, Spooked, but no copy we’ve found in libraries or bookstores or junk stores has any flyspecks on it at all, and we located a dozen copies of his high-school yearbooks, all of them with clean pages where his picture is. His parents were both cremated—Neptune Society—but his godfather’s buried at the Hollywood Cemetery next to Paramount Studios, and we keep scattering dirt on the old man’s marker, but the only time it’s cleaned off is when the maintenance people do it.”
Obstadt nodded. “‘Kay.” He stood up and crossed the carpeted floor to an east-facing window. “And right now go to Venice, will you? Check out this business with the fish and the lobsters.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I should like to buy an egg, please” she said timidly.
“How do you sell them?”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
ONE of them had finally been for real. Maybe.
Angelica Anthem Elizalde stood in the center of the tiny botánica shop and stared resentfully at the morbid items for sale. On one wall were hung a hundred little cellophane bags of dried herbs, along with crude cloth “voodoo dolls” that cost two dollars apiece; on the opposite wall, on shelves, were ranked dozens of little bottles with labels like ABRE CAMINO and LE DE VETE DE AQUI—“Road Opener” oil and “Stay Away Law” oil—and aerosol spray cans labeled ST. MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL and HIGH JOHN THE CONQUEROR (“Spray all areas of your surroundings. Make the sign of the Cross. Repeat spraying as necessary”). In the glass case by the cash register were a lot of books with colored pictures of Jesus and Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Devil on the covers—one, called Conjuro del Tobacco, by Guillermo Ceniza-Bendiga, was apparently a handbook on how to tell the future by watching the ash on cigars.
She had sat in the bus station on Seventh Street until dawn, and then stashed her canvas bag in a locker and walked east, over the Fourth Street bridge into the old Boyle Heights area of L.A., where she’d grown up after the move from Norco. When the police had brought bloodied Mexicans into Lincoln Heights Receiving Hospital, just a few blocks up Soto here, they’d always just called the area Hollenbeck Division, but Elizalde had liked the words Boyle Heights, and she had always tried to focus on the old Craftsman and Victorian houses on the narrow streets, and not on the bars and liquor stores and ropa usada used clothing stores.
And she had always been somehow personally embarrassed by botánica shops like this one.
The two young women behind the counter were conversing in fast, colloquial Spanish, ignoring Elizalde.
Elizalde frowned, not sure how she felt about being mistaken for an Anglo; but she just blinked around impatiently and gave no indication that she understood what was being said. One of the women assured the other that the tourist would soon get bored and leave; the other resumed the topic of laundry, reminding her friend that Saturday was Halloween and that she had better not leave her clothing out if it rained that night: “La ropa estará mojado en to espiritu, y olada mal por meses”—The clothes will be soaked in ghost-tea, and stink for months.
This is the vein, all right, Elizalde thought dourly. All the creepy stuff that I was brought up to believe was orthodox Roman Catholicism.
She remembered her surprise when a fellow student at UCLA had mentioned being a Roman Catholic. Elizalde had asked him how an intelligent person could really believe, for example, that rolling a raw egg over a child would cure fever—and then she’d been humiliated when he’d assured her that there was nothing like that in Catholic doctrine, and asked her where she had got such an idea.
She had of course chosen to laugh it off as a joke, rather than tell him the truth: that her mother had viewed taking Communion at church, and curing afflictions by rolling eggs over sick people—or by burning cornflowers, or eating papers with incantations scrawled on them—as all part of the same faith.
A plastic lighter and an open pack of Marlboros lay on the glass counter; and Elizalde, reminded by the cigar-ash book of a trick her grandmother used to perform, impulsively laid a dime on the counter and took one of the cigarettes. The women stopped talking and stared at her, but didn’t object when she lit it.
She puffed rapidly, not inhaling, and when she had a half-inch of ash she tapped it off onto the glass and with a fingertip rapidly smeared it into the shape of a six-pointed Star of David. Then she puffed hard at the cigarette for a full half-minute, while the two women on the other side of the counter watched cautiously. Elizalde wiped her right hand hard down the flank of her jeans.
Finally she tapped the long ash into her dry palm; she squeezed it, rubbed it around with her fingers, and pressed her hand down onto the center of the star.
If this was done correctly, with the heel of the hand imprinting a beardlike semicircle and the curled-under fingernails scraping clean spaces that looked like shadowed eye sockets and then jiggling across the ash forehead, the result was a face that was plausibly that of Jesus, identifiable by the beard and a sketchy crown of thorns. Elizalde’s grandmother had reduced grown men to tears with the apparently miraculous image.
Elizalde lifted her hand away—it had worked well enough.
One of the women crossed herself, and the other opened her mouth as if to say something—but then the ash pattern on the glass started to move.
Elizalde had glanced down when the women’s eyes had gone wide and they’d stepped back, and at first she’d thought a draft was messing up her crude picture; but the ash image was re-forming itself. The jagged streaks that had been the crown of thorns became straggly lines like unruly bangs, and the broad smear of beard crowded up and became the jowls of a fat face. The ash around the eye gaps arranged itself in a finely striated pattern, representing baggy wrinkles.
Fleetingly it occurred to Elizalde that her palms were too damp now to do the trick again. The blood was singing in her ears, and she gripped the metal edge of the display case because her sense of balance was gone.