Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  Shenda hesitated, but Bullfinch did not.

  The dog raced across the street and catapulted himself at the man.

  The living skeleton’s reaction was out of all proportion to the unarmed assault. As if facing some supernatural creature, the arsonist-killer dropped his gun, screamed, threw up his arms and tottered backward.

  Bullfinch impacted, sending the man over completely to bounce his head off the curb.

  By the time Thurman made his lame way over, Shenda was kicking the unconscious man in the side and screaming.

  “Bastard! You fucking killer bastard!”

  Thurman pulled her back. “Shenda, stop!”

  Shenda collapsed like a string-and-bead toy whose pushed button releases the tension that sustains it. Thurman kneeled to hold her up. A migraine was flowering behind his eyes.

  And then he saw the killer’s face.

  Furnace skies. Sand lacquered with blood. Greasy, roilsome black clouds.…

  And to his instant horror, Thurman knew he knew him.

  11.

  La Iyalocha

  Nothing would ever, ever be the same.

  And Shenda Moore was the one to blame.

  This sad couplet ran and ran in Shenda’s brain. Like a mean virus of found poetry self-assembled from fridge-magnet vocabulary. As towers and spurts of crackling fire illuminated her dog and the two men and her own crumpled self on the oil-slicked macadam, Shenda realized with absolute certainty that what she had long awaited and pretended not to fear—like a child whistling in Oya’s graveyard—had now found her. The unraveling of all her careful labors. The major fuck-up. The explosion of chaos you’re lucky to walk away from. The shitstorm that takes innocent bystanders and chews them up like pumpkin seeds.

  Innocents like Fuquan Fletcher.

  Poor Fuquan!

  And despite all prior pretense of equanimity, the disaster scared her.

  Scared the piss out of her—

  And made her fighting mad!

  Some sick and evil motherfucker was going to pay.

  Sirens began to wail like delighted banshees. Shenda leaped to her feet.

  “In the car with this pig. Quick!”

  Thurman’s expression revealed major perplexity. “But the police—”

  “The police are whores! They know this man and his bosses! They suck at the same hindteat! Believe me!”

  Thurman bent and lifted the unconscious killer’s arms. Shenda saw the crippled Swan try to hide a wince and grunt.

  “Oh, Thurman, I forgot. Can you do it?”

  “I can do it—”

  Between them they hustled the guy into the back seat of the Jetta. Shenda lashed his arms and legs together with rope from the trunk. Bullfinch leaped in and sat atop the man’s chest, proudly on guard. Shenda and Thurman piled in. They tore off in the direction opposite from the hastening firetrucks just a block away.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To my aunt’s house.”

  Shenda hadn’t known the answer to Thurman’s question until he asked it. But as soon as she opened her mouth, their destination was obvious.

  Only Titi Yaya could help her now.

  As she drove, Shenda filled Thurman in on the shakedown moves being directed at the Karuna and other businesses in town.

  “This has to be Maraplan’s doing. Mealey and his fucking Zingo! He practically told me something like this was coming. And me, the stupid smart bitch, so muy competent, thinking I could handle everything myself! Look where it got me. Look where it got Fuquan!”

  Shenda could feel tears threatening to spill out. No, not yet. She sought to relieve some of her feelings by smacking the steering wheel with her fists; the car veered; she recovered.

  Thurman looked appalled. “Shenda, don’t be so hard on yourself. If the authorities were in on this, what else could you have done?”

  “A lot! I could have hired some security guards, for one thing.”

  “And then maybe more people would have died. No, these are jokers who don’t mind how many bodies they leave in their wake.”

  Shenda turned to study her passenger’s face. “You sound so sure. What do you know?”

  Thurman shared what he knew.

  “Louie Kablooie,” whispered Shenda. El pulpo grew more and more tentacles. In a louder voice: “Then the jerks behind Zingo—they’re the same ones who fucking poisoned all you Gulf War vets!”

  “It sure looks like it.”

  “I hate them!”

  Thurman said nothing for a moment. Presently: “Well, I was full of hate for a long time too. Then you told me it was all old shit.”

  Shenda was too angry to listen to her own past advice. “Well, it’s new shit again. Get pissed.”

  Their cargo did not awake during their journey cross-town. Within twenty minutes, Shenda was in the neighborhood, parking in front of the brownstone where Titi Yaya lived.

  They hustled the killer up the steps like a sack of cornmeal, the pudgy daffodil Bullfinch somberly following, one awkward jump at a time, tags on his collar jingling. Shenda rang her aunt’s bell just to alert the woman, but used her own key. They were quickly in the tile-floored foyer without anyone seeing their unconventional arrival.

  Thurman was gasping. “Is there an elevator?”

  Shenda was winded too. And everything felt unreal. “Not needed. Just down the hall.”

  They half dragged their captive down the hall. At the end, a door was already opening.

  There stood Titi Yaya, elder sister of Shenda’s Mom, Consolacion Amado.

  La iyalocha.

  The small and trim old woman wore a blue-striped white-flannel robe and corduroy slippers. Necklaces and bracelets adorned her form. Long, unbound coal-black hair was at odds with her age-lined, dark honey-colored face. Equally unlikely—yet so comfortingly familiar to Shenda—was a vibrant power, tinged with sexuality, that radiated off her, blazed in her eyes.

  “I was not sleeping,” said Titi Yaya. “The cowries told me there would be trouble tonight, Shen-Shen. And I encountered the twisted branch of Eleggua in my path on the way to the store this morning. I knew that you would need me.”

  “Oh, Titi! Everything’s gone wrong!”

  “We’ll fix what we can. Although I have to tell you the signs are not good.”

  They were inside, door shut, as safe as possible, considering.

  Shenda looked around. Nothing had changed since the day a scared and tearful five-year-old had come to live here, after the child’s father, Tresvant Moore, crack-addled, had killed Consolacion and himself.

  All the furniture was old-fashioned and immaculate, much of it in transparent plastic covers. Worn rugs had been vacuumed speckless. Artificial flowers and innocuous prints decorated end tables and papered walls. Smells of cooking, ancient and recent, permeated the air—and below that olfactory layer, the unmistakable whiff of omiero, that potent herbal concoction.

  So far, so normal, an apartment like that of any other aleyo, any other nonbeliever.

  But then Shenda’s eye traveled to the altars and shrines, earthly homes of the celestial orisha gods and afterlife eggun spirits. Colorful and cloth-draped, laden with statues, pictures, vases, sopera tureens, instruments of sacrifice. Sumptuously bestrewn with offerings of live flowers, toys, cigars, rum and food.

  Titi Yaya’s apartment was a casa de santo, a Santeria temple, site of a thousand, thousand ceremonies, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly observances and propitiations, possessions, beseechings and repayments, spell-castings and curse-cleansings, a refuge for petitioners and meeting place for Titi Yaya’s peers, the male babalawos and female iyalochas.

  All of this had been taken for granted by the growing child named Shenda Moore. She had hardly given a thought to the various sanctified weirdness that she had often witnessed. The tambors, the rogatión de cabeza, the Pinaldos. It had all been part of the new stability she had experienced upon being taken under the wing of her unmarried aunt.

  And yet, so
mehow, she had never penetrated fully into the Religion—or it had failed to penetrate her. About the time she would have been expected to commit to Santeria, she began hanging with the Black kids at school—her father’s seductive heritage—and the Cuban half of her background grew even less interesting to her. Analogue, antique and uncool.

  After testing the stubborn strength of her niece’s convictions, Titi Yaya had refrained from coercion. Only an occasional mild reminder from time to time that the door was still open.

  Santeria didn’t proselytize, didn’t do missionary work.

  You came to la iyalocha because you needed the orishas.

  And now Shenda was here.

  But maybe too late.

  Titi Yaya stooped to pet Bullfinch and whisper in his ear. The dog’s tail propellered. Rising, the santera addressed Shenda.

  “Get that man in a chair. And untie him.”

  “But Titi, he’s a killer!”

  “He can cause no harm here.”

  With Thurman’s help, Shenda did as she was told. Shanghaied into this mess, the man was being more accepting than Shenda had any right to expect.

  Thurman whispered. “Your aunt. She’s some kind of witch?”

  “Not witch. Priestess.”

  “Oh. Her place is weird. But nice. You know—I had a massive headache when I came in here, but it’s gone now.”

  “That always happens.”

  Across the room, Titi Yaya, now barefoot, took no notice of them. She made the foribale, the prostration before the altar.

  The altar of Babalu-Aye.

  Louie Kablooie, as five-year-old Shenda had dubbed him.

  Saint Lazarus was the plaster Catholic disguise the orisha wore: a loincloth-clad, sore-riddled, bearded beggar with crutch, his loyal dog always by his side.

  Standing now, shredding coconut husk fibers before the statue, feeding with liquid the saint’s sacred stones concealed in the ornate tureen, chanting in Yoruban, Titi Yaya was invoking his help.

  She paused, turned to her visitors.

  “I need the derecho.”

  Shenda’s purse was forgotten in the car. She said to Thurman, “Give me a dollar.”

  Thuman dug in his pocket and came up with a bill. Shenda passed it to la iyalocha, who tucked it into a niche of the statue.

  The ceremony was long and complex. The day began to catch up with Shenda. Despite all the terror and turbulent emotions, she found her eyelids drooping. She cast a glance at Thurman Swan. He seemed riveted, as did an alert Bullfinch. The Mara- plan-Isoterm hireling remained eyelid-shuttered and unstirring.

  Suddenly Titi Yaya spun and was upon them. It was not as if she had moved, but as if the room had revolved around her.

  Behind her face Babalu-Aye dwelled.

  The old woman clutched the killer around the waist with both hands. His body jolted as if electrified, his eyes snapping open.

  Then she—or rather, the orisha within her—lifted him as if weightless, holding him effortlessly aloft.

  Babalu-Aye’s voice was a guttural growl. “Speak!”

  The man began to recite his personal history, starting with his name.

  Kraft Durchfreude’s story unreeled for hours. Shenda and Thurman sat transfixed at the enormity of the far-stretching, long-living evil his tale contained. Dawnlight filtered through the gauzy curtains before he was done. For the whole time Babalu-Aye held him ceilingward like a doll, a rigid tableau.

  When at last the recitation was finished, Babalu-Aye dropped Durchfreude back in the chair. The orisha departed his servant, and Titi Yaya returned, her loaned body seemingly unaffected by the superhuman exertion.

  Shenda rubbed her grainy eyes. “Titi Yaya, what—what is he?”

  “An egungun, a shell. He is possessed by the dead man he once was.”

  Thurman spoke. “A zombie?”

  “If you will.”

  “What can we do with him?” asked Thurman.

  “I can end his artificial life with the proper spell—” suggested la iyalocha.

  Shenda had been thinking about the immense horrors wrought by Durchfreude and the Phineas Gage League. Now she spoke.

  “No. Wake him up enough to realize what has been done to him. Some of the things he said make it seem he’s halfway there already. Then—send him back to his masters.”

  Titi Yaya reached out to touch Shenda’s wrist. “That will set large and uncontrollable forces in action, daughter. You play one orisha against another. Are you ready for the consequences?”

  Shenda felt emptied of emotions. Pity, remorse, fear, hope, hate—all were just words without referents. Her body was thin as a piece of paper. Only weariness ached inside her.

  “All I know is that I don’t want to live in a world where such things go on. Let’s end them if we can.”

  “Very well.”

  Into the kitchen stepped Titi Yaya. Sounds of bottles and tins being opened, bowls and spoons and whisks being employed trickled in to Shenda and Thurman.

  She returned with two small vials full of subtly differing cloudy mixtures, one open and one corked. From the open one, she anointed Durchfreude’s joints and head, made him swallow the remaining pungent liquid, chanting all the while.

  The egungun’s eyes showed white, his limbs twitched. Bullfinch barked. Durchfreude got spastically to his feet. When his vision was again functioning, he lurched out of the casa de santo.

  Shenda knew it was time for them to leave also. “Titi, you know I can never repay you.”

  “The debt is all mine, daughter. I should have been more forceful with you, made you take the Necklaces, gotten you under the protection of the orishas. Now I fear it is too late. The gods do not like being ignored for so long. And they are vengeful when slighted. I will work for you despite this.”

  Shenda hugged her aunt. “Thank you, Titi! That’s all I can ask. Come on, Thurman. I’ll drive you home.”

  Thurman and Bullfinch preceded Shenda. At the outer door, when Thurman was already down the stairs and on the street, Titi Yaya pressed the second vial into Shenda’s hand. “This is for your sick boyfriend, dear. It will help him.”

  Boyfriend?

  Shenda regarded Thurman thoughtfully.

  Boyfriend.

  What didn’t Titi Yaya know?

  12.

  A Cavern Measureless to Man

  Samuel Stanes wore only a small head bandage a month after his surgery. Even in the dim light of the abandoned subway station, Twigg could detect the powerful knowledge of the limitless freedom conferred by the neuro-alteration alight in the newest member’s eyes.

  Now the Phineas Gage League was up to full strength. The resulting synergy and competition would doubtlessly inspire them all to new heights of ambition and conquest. At times, Twigg enjoyed the cruel play that flourished amongst them. At other times, he would have preferred to have the entire world to himself, resenting the presence of the others. But such had been the way since the League began.

  Not that there could never be changes.

  And yet Twigg, even in his speculative heresy, failed to intuit that changes waited literally just around the corner.

  Out of the darkness and into the station pulled the little mining train, Kraft Durchfreude at the helm.

  The Dark Intercessor looked like a poorly constructed scarecrow from the fields of Dis. He seemed to have spent a longish period of dirty action without bathing or changing his normally immaculate suit, resulting in a shambolic appearance.

  Twigg shook his head ruefully. Deplorable and dangerous. Shameful, if such a word could apply. It was like watching a corpse rot. This would have to be the meeting where they dealt with Durchfreude. They could send him on an errand and discuss his fate then.

  Climbing aboard with his peers, Twigg noticed two oddities.

  The pile of victims in the last car was covered with a tarp.

  And instead of the expected whiff of unclean flesh, a strange herbal odor wafted off their driver. Twigg found it instinc
tively repugnant.

  Down the long dark descent the train chugged, finally arriving in the flambeau-lit charnel cave.

  The cold flyblown broken meats of their last feast still festooned the tables. The corpses, thankfully, had been removed. But no pleasant repast awaited their delectation. The smells of old rot were gagsome.

  Further strangeness: Durchfreude did not servilely hasten to move up the portable steps for their ease of disembarking. He seemed frozen at the controls of the train.

  With Twigg taking the initiative, the League members got awkwardly out.

  Now Durchfreude did an unprecedented thing. He backed up the train until the last car effectively blocked the narrow tunnel mouth, their only exit from the meeting place.

  Twigg began to feel very ill at ease.

  Durchfreude stepped down. Jerkily, he moved to the caboose. Awkwardly, he pulled the tarp off.

  The victims therein were already unfairly dead, some of them quite messily. With a burgeoning horror, Twigg recognized one of the corpses as a highly placed Isoterm executive. Others he knew as important members of other PGL-led companies, a fact confirmed by gasps and demands made by his compatriots.

  “What is the meaning of this?” “Is this some kind of obscene joke?” “I can’t believe what I’m seeing!” “Durchfreude, explain yourself!”

  Give their senior member full credit for bravery. Creaky old Firgower moved toward the Dark Intercessor, relying on old patterns of dominance.

  “We want to know the meaning of your actions right now!” quavered the very illustrious head of Stonecipher Industries.

  By way of explanation, Durchfreude reached in among the bodies and retrieved an exceedingly sophisticated automatic weapon.

  A rubber apron was not a satisfactory shield. The first blast cut Firgower to gory flinders, giving the others time to scatter.

  But in the final sense, there was no place to run.

  With stoic lack of affect, Durchfreude calmly potted the screaming members wherever they sought to hide. In their frantic scrambles and inevitable death throes, all the furniture of the chamber was overturned and smashed.

  Twigg’s mind on the conscious side of the dam was blank. But not for long. A single stray bullet in his side filled his superman’s brain with crimson anguish.