“And cursing someone with death in a fortune cookie,” Lucky said, “is a plan. Cold and calculating. Not something you do in a fit of temper.”
“If a curse is what we’re talking about here.” I looked at Max.
“Well, you all know what I think,” John said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, yeah, we heard from you, Mr. Mundane,” said Lucky. “Now the ball is in the doc’s court. Right?”
“Indeed,” said Max, rising to his feet. “I shall take this fortune to my laboratory now and try to determine forthwith if it has mystical properties . . . or was merely a vicious mundane prank.”
“Let’s go,” I said, eager to find out whether Evil was going to intrude on my film role—because tomorrow, I was going to convince Benny’s nephew to cast me in ABC even if I had to get Nelli to sit on his chest and show him her fangs in order to persuade him that I was right for the part.
We said goodnight to Lucky as we donned our coats, gloves, and hats. Then John, Max, Nelli, and I made our way through the silent Italian portion of the funeral home and back out into the wintry night. A thin blanket of fresh snow coated the sidewalks now. It had stopped coming down, but the temperature had dropped and the wind had picked up.
Shivering a little even inside my warm coat, I took Max’s arm and huddled close to him and Nelli, following John as he led the way back to the parking garage.
“Lily Yee made quite an impression on you,” I said quietly to Max.
“Hmm?” He’d obviously been lost in thought again. “Oh. Yes . . .” He was silent for a long moment, then said, “She reminds me of someone.”
“Someone special, I gather?”
“Yes. Someone who was quite special.” It was too dark to see his expression, but his voice sounded sad.
“Is Lily a lot like her?”
“In appearance, very much so. In circumstances, not at all, I suppose.” He thought it over. “In other ways . . . I don’t know her well enough to say.”
“Who was she, Max?” I asked, curious about someone who was obviously a powerful memory for him.
“Li Xiuying,” he said on a sigh. “Beautiful Flower.”
“What happened to her?”
“Oh . . . she died.”
“How?”
He shook his head. “It was a long time ago, Esther.”
I was even more curious now, since Max wasn’t usually reticent about his past. On the contrary, he could be loquacious to a fault. But I could tell that if I pursued this subject, I would be intruding on something he didn’t really want to talk about. Max was not a moody man by nature, so I realized there must be heartbreak behind the name Li Xiuying. I supposed he would tell me about it when he was ready—or perhaps not at all.
I was a little concerned about him, but not hurt that he didn’t choose to confide in me. After all, I kept a number of things private about my relationship with Lopez. We all have things we’d rather not discuss, not even with someone we trust.
After we reached the parking garage, Nelli hopped readily into the back of the hearse and settled down. The streets were less crowded now, and the shift in the weather had improved visibility, so the drive back to the West Village was uneventful. John, Max, and I talked a little more on the way home about our impressions of the wake and the visitors, but the conversation was desultory.
When we got to the bookstore, John offered to drive me to my apartment, but I declined. I knew Max would go down into his laboratory now, rather than upstairs to bed (he lived above the shop), and I was as eager as he was to find out whether the death curse had mystical properties.
So I entered the bookstore with Max and Nelli, shed my coat, and warmed up with a quick cup of hot tea. Nelli lay down by the gas fireplace, though Max didn’t ignite it for her, and promptly fell asleep.
Max pulled the death curse out of his pocket, still in its little plastic bag, and turned it over in his hands, studying the black piece of paper and its sinisterly graceful white symbol.
“I don’t suppose it gives off a vibe or something?” I asked.
“Alas, nothing so self-explanatory,” he said.
“So how do you plan to determine whether that thing is mystical?”
“I’ve been thinking about that all the way home.”
“Oh! I thought you were thinking about . . .” I paused, not wanting to bring up Lily Yee’s name again. I concluded awkwardly, “Exactly that.”
He didn’t seem to notice, absorbed as he was in examining the dark fortune. “I have an idea . . . I once dealt with a matter which had features not dissimilar to our suspicions about the misfortune cookie.”
“In China?” I asked as I followed Max to the back of the bookstore.
“No, in Sicily. That strange episode was . . . oh, well over two hundred years ago, certainly. Goodness! Where do the years go? Nonetheless, I remember it well.”
I recalled that Max once told me he had been questioned by the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily, which had remained active there until the late eighteenth century. But I decided not to ask him any more questions tonight about memories he might not be keen to revisit.
We entered a little cul-de-sac at the back of the shop where there was a utility closet, a powder room, and a door marked PRIVATE. The door opened onto a narrow, creaky stairway that led down to the cellar.
At the top of the stairs, there was a burning torch stuck in a sconce on the wall. It emitted no smoke or heat, only light; it had been burning steadily ever since I had met Max, fueled by mystical power.
I descended the steep, narrow steps behind him as he said, “The situation in Sicily involved miniature replicas of body parts rather than a written fortune—”
“Ugh! That sounds gruesome.”
“Well, not necessarily. As with fortune cookies—which did not originate in China, by the way, though they have become a part of Chinese cuisine throughout America, whether the meal is humble or grand . . . But I digress.”
Now that he was focused on work, he was obviously feeling much more like his usual self. Whatever memories of Li Xiuying haunted him, they had retreated, and he was chatting with engaged enthusiasm as he reached the final step and entered his laboratory.
“Miniature replicas of body parts are normally part of a positive ritual in Sicily. And unlike fortune cookies, whose origin was probably in twentieth-century California, the custom is very ancient.”
“What custom?” I asked.
“Sicilians leave these miniature replicas at the shrines of their favorite saints to entreat their blessings for health and their help with healing.”
“Ah-hah!” I said triumphantly, recognizing the nature of this custom. “Sympathetic magic.”
“Precisely.” Max sat down at his workbench and gestured for me to take a seat on a nearby stool. “But during a dark episode in the eighteenth century, an evil adversary started using such effigies to curse his enemies with ill health and injury.”
“It figures,” I said. “Someone always has to spoil a good thing.”
Like fortune cookies, for example. What evildoer, I wondered, whether mystical or mundane, had taken something so innocent, tasty, and fun, and decided to turn it into a menacing messenger of death?
Max continued, “And since these effigies of human body parts were so common in Sicily, it was essential to devise a means to determine whether any given replica was harmless or cursed.”
I looked around the laboratory and guessed, “So you’re going to use that method to analyze Benny’s fortune?”
“That is what I propose,” he said. “I have my notes from those days, and they contain the formula I used. I know it’s here somewhere . . .”