Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  They found Duplessis in the park, the great Park that essentially divided the two worlds of the city. He wore a long red-leather coat over a gray suit of the Edwardian cut he always favored—just like the one we tear off him that night, Damballa, just like that suit—and he was standing under a young willow tree, leaning on a dainty, foppish walking stick, smiling slightly as he watched children playing in a sandbox. When Arceneaux and Garrigue came up with him, one on each side, he did not speak to them immediately, but stood looking calmly from one face to the other, as his smile broadened. He was as handsome as ever, velvet-dark and whip-lean, unscarred in any way that they could see; and he appeared no older than he had on the night they had spent whittling him down to screaming blood, screaming shit, Damballa….

  Duplessis said softly, “My friends.”

  Arceneaux did not answer him. Garrigue said inanely, “You looking well, Compe’ Alexandre.”

  “Ah, I have my friends to thank for that.” Duplessis spoke, not in Creole, but in the Parisian French he had always affected. “There’s this to say for hell and death—they do keep a person in trim.” He patted Garrigue’s arm, an old remembered habit of his. “Yes, I am quite well, Compe’ Rene. There were some bad times, as you know, but these days I feel as young and vigorous as…. oh, say, as any of your grandchildren.” And he named them then, clearly tasting them, as though to eat the name was to have eaten the child. “Sandrine…. Honore…. your adorable little Manette….” He named them all, grinning at Garrigue around the names.

  Arceneaux said, “Sophie.”

  Duplessis did not turn his head, but stopped speaking.

  Arceneaux said it again. “Sophie, you son of a bitch—pere de personne, fils de cent mille. Sophie.”

  When Duplessis did turn, he was not smiling, nor was there any bombast or mockery in his voice. He said, “I think you will agree with me, Jean-Marc, that being slashed slowly to pieces alive pays for all. Like it or not, I own your poor dear Sophie just as much as you do now. I’d call that fair and square, wouldn’t you?”

  Arceneaux hit him then. Duplessis hadn’t been expecting the blow, and he went over on his back, shattering the fragile walking stick beneath him. The children in the sandbox looked up with some interest, but the passersby only walked faster.

  Duplessis got up slowly, running his tongue-tip over a bloody upper lip. He said, “Well, I guess I don’t learn much, do I? That’s exactly how one of you—or was it both?—knocked me unconscious in that filthy little place by the river. And when I came to….” He shrugged lightly, and actually winked at Arceneaux. He said softly, “But you haven’t got any rope with you this time, have you Jean-Marc? And none of your little—ah—sculptor’s tools?” He tasted his bloody mouth again. “A grandfather should be more careful, I’d think.”

  The contemptuous lilt in the last words momentarily cost Garrigue his sanity. Only Arceneaux’s swift reaction and strong clutch kept him from knocking Duplessis down a second time. His voice half-muffled against Arceneaux’s chest, Garrigue heard himself raging, “You touch my chirren, you—you touch the doorknob on my grandbabies’ house—I cut you up all over again, cut you like Friday morning’s bacon, you hear me?” And he heard Duplessis laughing.

  Then the laughter stopped, almost with a machine’s mechanical click, and Duplessis said, “No. You hear me now.” Garrigue shook himself free of Arceneaux’s preventive embrace, nodded a silent promise, and turned to see Duplessis facing them both, his mouth still bleeding, and his eyes as freezingly distant as his voice. He said, “I am Alexandre Duplessis. You sent me to hell, you tortured me as no devils could have done—no devils would have conceived of what you did. But in so doing, you have set me free, you have lost all power over me. I will do what I choose to you and yours, and there will be nothing you can do about it, nothing you can threaten me with. Would you like to hear what I choose to do?”

  He told them.

  He went into detail.

  “It will take me some little while, obviously. That suits me—I want it to take a while. I want to watch you go mad as I strip away everything you love and cannot protect, just as you stripped away my fingers, my face, my organs, piece by piece by piece.” The voice never grew any louder, but remained slow and thoughtful, even genial. The soulful eyes—still a curious reddish-brown—seemed to have withdrawn deep under the telltale single brow and contracted to the size of cranberries. Arceneaux could feel their heat on his skin.

  “This is where I live at present,” Duplessis said, and told them his address. He said, “I would be delighted if you should follow me there, and anywhere else—it would make things much more amusing. I would even invite you to hunt with me, but you were always too cowardly for that, and by the looks of you I can see you’ve not changed. Wolves—God’s own wolves caging themselves come the moon, not even surviving on dogs and cats, mice and squirrels and rabbits, as you did in Joyelle Parish. Lamisere a deux…. Misere et Compagnie—no wonder you have both grown so old, it’s almost pitiful. Now I”—a light inward flick of his two hands invited the comparison—“I dine only on the diet that le Bon Dieu meant for me, and it will keep me hunting when you two are long-buried with the humans you love so much.” He clucked his tongue, mimicking a distressed old woman, and repeated, “Pitiful. Truly pitiful. A très—très—tot…. my friends.”

  He bowed gracefully to them then, and turned to stroll away through the trees. Arceneaux said, “Conjure.” Duplessis turned slowly again at the word, waiting. Arceneaux said, “You ain’t come back all by yourself, we took care. You got brought back—take a conjure man to do that. Which one—Guillory? I got to figure Guillory.”

  Duplessis smiled, a little smugly, and shook his head. “I’d never trust Guillory out of my sight—let alone after my death. No, Fontenot was the only sensible choice. Entirely mad, but that’s always a plus in a conjure man, isn’t it? And he hated you with all his wicked old heart, Jean-Marc, as I’m sure you know. What on earth did you do to that man—rape his black pig? Only thing in the world he loved, that pig.”

  “Stopped him feeding a lil boy to it,” Arceneaux grunted. “What he do for you, and what it cost you? Fontenot, he come high.”

  “They all come high. But you can bargain with Fontenot. Remember, Jean-Marc?” Duplessis held out his hands, palms down. The two little fingers were missing, and Arceneaux shivered with sudden memory of that moment when he’d wondered who had already taken them, and why, even as he had prepared to cut into the bound man’s flesh….

  Duplessis laughed harshly, repeating, “My insurance policy, you could say. Really, you should have thought a bit about those, old friend. There’s mighty conjuring to be done with the fingers of a loup-garou. It was definitely worth Fontenot’s while to witch me home, time-consuming as it turned out to be. I’m sure he never regretted our covenant for a moment.”

  Something in his use of the past tense raised Arceneaux’s own single brow, his daughters’ onetime plaything. Duplessis caught the look and grinned with the flash of genuine mischief that had charmed even Arceneaux long ago, though not ma Sophie, never—she knew. “Well, let’s be honest, you couldn’t have a man with that kind of power and knowledge running around loose—not a bad, bad man like Hipolyte Fontenot. I was merely doing my duty as a citizen. Au ’voir again, mon ami. Mon assassin.”

  Watching him walk away, Arceneaux was praying so hard for counsel and comfort to Damballa Wedo, and to Damballa’s gentle wife, the rainbow Ayida, that he started when Garrigue said beside him, “Let’s go, come on. We don’t let that man out of our sight, here on in.”

  Arceneaux did not look at him. “No point in it. He want us to follow him—he want us going crazy, no sleep, no time to think straight, just wondering when…. I ain’t go play it his way, me, unh-uh.”

  “You know another way? You got a better idea?” Garrigue was very nearly crying with impatience and anxiety, all but dancing on his toes, straining to follow Alexandre Duplessis. Arceneaux put his hands on th
e white man’s arms, trying to take the trembling into himself.

  “I don’t know it’s a better idea. I just know he still think we nothing but a couple back-country fools, like he always did, and we got to keep him thinking that thing—got to. Because we gone kill him, Rene, you hearing me? We done it before—this time we gone kill him right, so he stay dead. Yeah, there’s only two of us, but there’s only one of him, and he ain’t God, man, he just one damn old loup-garou in a fancy suit, talking fancy French. You hear what I’m saying to you?”

  Garrigue did not answer. Arceneaux shook him slightly. “Right now, we going on home, both of us. He ain’t go do nothing tonight, he want us to spend it thinking on all that shit he just laid on us. Home, Rene.”

  Still no response. Arceneaux looked into Garrigue’s eyes, and could not find Garrigue there, but only frozen, helpless terror. “Listen, Rene, I tell you something my daddy use to say. Daddy, he say to me always, ‘Di moin qui vous lamein, ma di cous qui vous ye.’ You tell me who you love, I tell you who you are.” Garrigue began returning slowly to his own eyes, looking back at him: expressionless, but present. Arceneaux said, “You think just maybe we know who we are, Compe’ Rene?”

  Garrigue smiled a little, shakily. “Duplessis…. Duplessis, he don’t love nobody. Never did.”

  “So Duplessis ain’t nobody. Duplessis don’t exist. You gone be scared of somebody don’t exist?” Arceneaux slapped his old friend’s shoulder, hard. “Home now. Ti-Jean say.” They did go to their homes then, and they slept well, or at least they told each other so in the morning. Arceneaux judged that Garrigue might actually have slept through the night; for himself, he came and went, turning over a new half-dream of putting an end to Alexandre Duplessis each time he turned in his bed. Much of the waking time he spent simply calling into darkness inside himself, calling on his loa, as he had been taught to do when young, crying out, Damballa Wedo, great serpent, you got to help us, this on you…. Bon Dieu can’t be no use here, ain’t his country, he don’t speak the patois…. Got to be you, Damballa…. When he did sleep, he dreamed of his dead wife, Pauline, and asked her for help too, as he had always done.

  A revitalized Garrigue was most concerned the next morning with the problem of destroying a werewolf who had already survived being sliced into pieces, themselves buried in five different counties. “We never going to get another chance like that, not in this city. City, you got to explain why you do somebody in—and you definitely better not say it’s cause he turn into a wolf some nights. Be way simpler if we could just shoot him next full moon, tell them we hunters. Bring him home strap right across the hood, hey Ti-Jean?” He chuckled, thinking about it.

  “Except we be changing too,” Arceneaux pointed out. “We all prisoners of the moon, one way another.”

  Garrigue nodded. “Yeah, you’d think that’d make us—I don’t know—hold together some way, look out for each other. But it don’t happen, do it? I mean, here I am, and I’m thinking, I ever do get the chance, I’d kill him wolf to wolf, just like he done Sophie. I would, I just don’t give a damn no more.”

  “Come to that, it come to that. Last night I been trying to work out how we could pour some cement, make him part of a bridge, an underpass—you know, way the Mafia do. Couldn’t figure it.”

  Garrigue said, “You right about one thing, anyway. We can’t be waiting on the moon, cause he sure as hell won’t be. Next full moon gone be short one loup-garou for certain.”

  “Maybe two,” Arceneaux said quietly. “Maybe three, even. Man ain’t going quietly no second time.”

  “Be worth it.” Garrigue put out his hand and Arceneaux took it, roughness meeting familiar lifelong roughness. Garrigue said, “Just so it ain’t the little ones. Just so he don’t ever get past us to the little ones.” Arceneaux nodded, but did not answer him.

  For the next few days they pointedly paid no attention to Duplessis’s presence in the city—though they caught his scent in both neighborhoods, as he plainly made himself familiar with family routines—but spent the time with their children and grandchildren, delighting the latter and relieving the men of babysitting duties. Garrigue, having only sons, got away without suspicions; but neither Noelle nor Arceneaux’s daughter-in-law Athalie were entirely deceived. As Athalie put it, “Women, we are so used to men’s stupid lies, we’re out of practice for a good one, Papajean,” which was her one-word nickname for him. “I know you’re lying, some way, but this one’s really good.”

  On Saturday Arceneaux, along with most of his own family, accompanied Garrigue’s family to the Church of Saints Philip and James for Manette Garrigue’s First Communion. The day was unseasonably warm, the group returning for the party large, and at first no one but Arceneaux and Garrigue took any notice of the handsome, well-dressed man walking inconspicuously between them. Alexandre Duplessis said thoughtfully, “What a charming little girl. You must be very proud, Rene.”

  Garrigue had been coached half the night, or he would have gone for Duplessis’s throat on the instant. Instead he answered, mildly enough, “I’m real proud of her, you got that right. You lay a hand on her, all Fontenot’s gris-gris be for nothing next time.”

  Duplessis seemed not to have heard him. “Should she be the first—not Jean-Marc’s Patrice or Zelime? It’s so hard to decide—”

  The strong old arms that blocked Garrigue away also neatly framed Duplessis’s throat. Arceneaux said quietly, “You never going to make it to next moon, Compe’ Alexandre. You know that, don’t you?”

  Duplessis looked calmly back at him, the red-brown eyes implacable far beyond human understanding. He said, “Compe’ Jean-Marc, I died at your hands forty and more years ago, and by the time you got through with me I was very, very old. You cannot kill such a man twice, not so it matters.” He smiled at Arceneaux. “Besides, the moon is perhaps not everything, even for a loup-garou. I’d give that a little thought, if I were you.” His canine teeth glittered wetly in the late-autumn sunlight as he turned and walked away.

  After a while Noelle dropped back to take her father’s arm. She rubbed her cheek lightly against Arceneaux’s shoulder and said, “Your knee all right? You’re looking tired.”

  “Been a long morning.” Arceneaux hugged her arm under his own. “Don’t you worry about the old man.”

  “I do, though. Gotten so I worry about you a whole lot. Antoine does too.” She looked up at him, and he thought, Her mama’s eyes, her mama’s mouth, but my complexion—thank God that’s all she got from me…. She said, “How about you spend the night, hey? I make gumbo, you play with the grandbabies, talk sports with Antoine. Sound fair?”

  It sounded more than fair; it sounded such a respite from the futile plans and dreaded memories with which he and Garrigue had been living that he could have wept. “I’m gone need take care some business first. Nothing big, just a few bits of business. Then I come back, stay the night.” She prompted him with a silent, quizzical tilt of her head, and he added, “Promise.” It was an old ritual between them, dating from her childhood: he rarely used the word at all, but once he did he could be absolutely relied on to keep it. His grandchildren had all caught onto this somewhat earlier than she had.

  He slipped away from the party group without even signaling to Garrigue: a deliberately suspicious maneuver that had the waiting Duplessis behind him before he had gone more than a block from the house. It was difficult to pretend not to notice that he was being followed—this being one of the wolf senses that finds an echo in the human body—but Arceneaux was good at it, and took a certain pleasure in leading Duplessis all over the area, as the latter had done to him and Garrigue. But the motive was not primarily spite. He was actually bound for a certain neighborhood botanica run by an old Cuban couple who had befriended him years before, when he first came to the city. They were kind and brown, and spoke almost no English, and he had always suspected that they knew exactly what he was, had known others like him in Cuba, and simply didn’t care.

  He sp
ent some forty-five minutes in the crowded little shop, and left with his arms full of brightly colored packages. Most amounted to herbal and homeopathic remedies of one sort and another; a very few were gifts for Damballa Wedo, whose needs are very simple; and one—the only one with an aroma that would have alerted any loup-garou in the world—was a largish packet of wolfbane.

  Still sensing Duplessis on his track, he walked back to Noelle’s house, asked to borrow her car briefly, claiming to have heard an ominous sound from the transmission, and took off northeast, in the direction of the old cabin where he and Garrigue imprisoned themselves one night in every month. The car was as cramped as ever, and the drive as tedious, but he managed it as efficiently as he could. Arriving alone, for the first time ever, he spent some while tidying the cabin, and the yet-raw grave in the woods as well; then carefully measured out all the wolfbane in a circle around the little building, and headed straight back to the city. He bent all his senses, wolf and human alike, to discovering whether or not Duplessis had trailed him the entire way, but the results were inconclusive.

  “Way I been figuring it over,” he said to Garrigue the next day, drinking bitter chicory coffee at the only Creole restaurant whose cook understood the importance of a proper roux, “we lured him into that blind pig back on the river, all them years ago, and he just know he way too smart for us to get him like that no second time. So we gone do just exactly what we done before, cause we ain’t but pure-D country, and that the onliest trick we know.” His sigh turned to a weary grunt as he shook his head. “Which ain’t no lie, far as I’m concerned. But we go on paying him no mind, we keep sneaking up there, no moon, no need…. he smell the wolfbane, he keep on following us, we got to be planning something…. All I’m hoping, Compe’ Rene, I’m counting on a fool staying a fool. The smart ones, they do sometimes.”