by J. F. Penn
She walked over to a display board of information, reading that the synagogue had been built in 1356. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, it became a church then eventually a museum in the early 1900s. It now remained as a testament to the people who had lost their homes under the Alhambra Decree, also known as the Edict of Expulsion, made by the Catholic monarchs of Spain, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. Many of Spain's Jews converted because of persecution and pogroms, but the rest chose to leave rather than betray their faith.
"Incredibly, the Alhambra Decree was only revoked in 1968 following the Second Vatican Council,” Martin said, his voice low out of respect for the place. “And it was only in 2014 that the government passed a law allowing dual citizenship to Sephardi Jewish descendants as compensation.”
"But that won’t bring back the people who once thrived here,” Morgan said. “We can't change history, and the diaspora was a curse and a blessing, as the verse in Deuteronomy says. Jews live all over the world now. They cannot be wiped out as those monarchs and so many others intended. Now, let’s find this hamsa.”
A second-floor gallery stretched the length of the top floor above the main hall. It would have been reserved for women, segregated from men during services, but now it was part of the museum. They climbed the stairs and walked into the gallery.
Morgan gazed into the cabinets, examining the meager offerings left behind, a tiny glimpse of the once vibrant Jewish community. Mezuzahs, a small menorah, old letters written in Hebrew, and ritual objects for a bris – but no hamsa.
There was nothing of importance here. It was a dead end.
New Orleans, USA.
A voice came from inside the Voodoo Museum, as a curl of smoke escaped the shutters.
“What you waiting for, cher? Come on in here.”
Naomi pulled open the door and walked inside, Jake following behind. The front room of the house was a little shop crammed full of voodoo souvenirs. It was dark with the shutters so tightly closed, but Jake could just make out gris-gris charms, fetish dolls, vials of potion, and books on the voodoo history of New Orleans. The line between real belief and tourist tack was hard to navigate in this eclectic city. While voodoo had its true practitioners, there was clearly a commercial side. It was no different to Catholic places of pilgrimage like Lourdes, where plastic Mary figurines filled with ‘holy water’ were sold to the faithful on every inch of the pilgrimage route.
An old African-American woman sat smoking a fat, rolled-up cigarette, sweet-smelling smoke curling around her. She was thin, her flesh tight against her skull, a bright green headscarf wrapped around her white hair. The woman regarded Jake with curiosity.
“You've seen him, boy.” Her voice was croaky, but there was a hint of steel under her words.
Jake’s heart pounded in his chest as he met the old woman’s keen gaze. She pointed up with her cigarette to a dark figure painted above the tourist shelves. A skeletal man etched in charcoal, a top hat on his head. Baron Samedi, loa of the dead.
“He may have worn a different face, but you’ve seen him. And you will see him again.”
The old woman focused her attention on Naomi. “But you, child, you have a new soul. You may yet see.” The old woman tilted her head to one side. “Or you may be called by the bones to the world of the dead.”
The old woman lapsed into silence. She took a long drag on her cigarette, the sweet-smelling haze filling the room. Jake felt the air shift around her, and suddenly he saw beyond the tacky trinkets in front of him, sensing an older power here, a deeper current swirling beneath.
He opened his mouth to speak, but Naomi stepped forward. “OK, well, thank you for your welcome.” She opened her handbag and brought out a piece of paper. “We’re here to meet Fabienne Beauvais.”
“What do you want with my granddaughter?”
The sound of footsteps came from a doorway. A lithe young woman walked out of the museum rooms beyond. Neat dreadlocks hung down to her mid-back, tied with a silk scarf of brilliant turquoise that matched her t-shirt. Her eye makeup was perfectly applied, her lips dark with a crimson shade. She was a modern incarnation of mixed-race New Orleans, but there was more than a trace of the old woman in her features.
“You welcoming our guests properly, Mamere?” The young woman held her hand out. “I’m Fabienne, welcome. You must be Naomi.”
“And I'm Jake.” Jake held his hand out and shook hands with Fabienne. Their eyes met, and he felt a jolt of attraction arc between them. He dropped her hand and took a step back.
The old woman cackled with laughter. She pushed herself up to her feet, stubbing her cigarette out. “You show this one everything, child. He can handle it.”
The old woman shuffled out the door and into the sunshine.
Fabienne rolled her eyes. “Please forgive my grandmother. She’s stuck in the old ways. Doesn't understand the need to bring in money at the same time as respecting the spirits. But, I think we can do both here in New Orleans. Come on through to the museum, and I’ll show you.”
Fabienne led Jake and Naomi through a series of rooms in the old house packed full of voodoo sacred objects and offerings from the faithful – or just the superstitious. The rooms were claustrophobic, every inch of wall space and most of the floor covered with dusty and faded things.
“You asked how our Catholic faith integrates with voodoo. Well, here’s one example.” Fabienne pointed at a table where an old Bible lay open to the book of Proverbs, chapter 25. It was covered in offerings, a copper key, several rings, coins, a little toy in the shape of a crocodile, a Milky Way chocolate bar, photos of loved ones, dollar bills, lipstick and face cream, a higgledy-piggledy mess of every day detritus left as offerings to the spirits.
A skull with a black top hat, cigarettes and money spilling from its eye sockets sat next to the Bible. Baron Samedi once more.
Further on, an altar as large as a dining table sat with a statue of the Virgin Mary in pride of place, surrounded by other saints and an icon showing Jesus of the Sacred Heart, a red orb shining luminous in his chest. The altar was piled high with offerings, bright beads from Mardi Gras, vials of dark liquid, letters and business cards, sweets and money.
Fabienne gestured toward the altar. “Our faiths are deeply entwined, as sure as my blood is both African and American.” She pointed to the images of the saints. “Papa Legba holds the keys to the underworld and is associated with St Peter and his keys to the gates of heaven. Some say roosters are sacrificed to Papa Legba because St Peter denied Christ three times before the rooster crowed. Snakes are worshipped in voodoo with Damballah, and he is often represented by St Patrick, and also Moses. Patrick drove the serpents out of Ireland and Moses held up the brazen serpent in the desert. Some say that eating flesh and drinking blood is part of voodoo, but of course, it’s actually related to the Catholic Mass, when transubstantiation turns bread and wine into the real flesh and blood of Christ.” Fabienne shrugged. “You can see how people might get confused.”
She led them on into another room. The skull of a horse painted with a white cross hung next to femur bones tied with black ribbon. A mummified cat lay on a shelf, desiccated skin tight against its rigid bones, its head thrust toward the heavens.
“Black cat juju,” Fabienne explained. “Used to protect the home against evil spirits around the Day of the Dead.”
Jake noticed a piece of wood as long as an arm bone, spiked with nails hammered into every inch. To some, it may have looked like a weapon, but Jake knew it for what it really was. He had seen such sacrificial objects in Africa. For every sin, a nail was driven in, each blow of the hammer sending evil into the wood rather than the person who committed the crime.
“You can see the mixed mythology in so many ways.” Fabienne pointed at an image of a half-man, half-alligator. “The rougarou is said by some to be the loup-garou of the French werewolf tradition, but here in the bayou, it has the head of an alligator.” She smiled. “We like to
localize our dark secrets.”
Her words were light, but Jake sensed something else beneath. The museum may have been designed to extract tourist dollars, but there was truth underlying it. Myths had wound themselves together here over generations, and evil committed in the Deep South compounded whatever spirits lay beneath the earth, bloodshed bringing ancient nightmares to life.
They finished the tour of the museum and returned to the first room. Naomi walked back to the Bible, her fingers tracing the words of the text.
“When we were at the cathedral, we discovered that Père Antoine had baptized Marie Laveau. Have you heard that story?”
Fabienne nodded. “Of course. There’s no conflict between Catholicism and voodoo in our tradition, only that manufactured by those who wish to discredit us. The voodoo statement of faith includes belief in the spirits and all things visible and invisible, the gods of Africa, and the saints of the Catholic Church.”
She led them into a narrow corridor, stopping by a painting of a light-skinned woman with dark eyes, her hair wrapped in an ivory-colored headscarf with red trim. “This is Marie Laveau, proud Catholic and Voodoo Queen. Père Antoine baptized her and presided over her marriage in his later years. Some say that they were scandalously close, but perhaps they merely talked of religious and spiritual matters. When the Catholic authorities tried to remove him, there is a rumor that he gave Marie something to hide, something he wanted to keep out of the hands of certain factions in the Church. Some say what he gave her is still protected by the Creole voodoo community.”
“Do you know what it was?” Jake asked.
Fabienne shook her head, a glimmer of fear in her eyes. “There are only rumors, and to be honest, I’m done with the old superstitions. It’s time to bring our beliefs into a modern age. But my grandmother, Albertine, is one of the elders.” She looked at Jake. “She clearly saw something in you, so perhaps she will talk further about it. But it would need to be away from the city. She won’t talk of such things here. She believes it’s polluted now, and the loa will not come to her in this manufactured world.”
“Where do we need to go?”
“She lives in the bayou. I can take you to her tonight.”
10
New Orleans, USA.
As they walked away from the museum, Naomi felt a rising dread at the thought of heading into the bayou later. She was a city girl, raised in the high-rise jungle of New York, where predators wore human masks as they stalked the shadowed streets. She knew how to deal with them well enough, but she had experienced little of adventure in the wild. She was more at home with books, even sleeping in her tiny office when she was deep into research.
The stacks of the local library had been her escape from the poverty and despair of her neighborhood growing up. She read of heroes who roamed the African savannah and turned the pages as intrepid heroines hunted evildoers across ancient cities. She reveled in the cathartic thrill of story, but she also loved closing the book and returning to her ordered world where she could control her surroundings.
But Naomi couldn’t control everything, and when her little sister, Esther, died suddenly of meningitis, her parents poured everything into their remaining daughter. They worked two jobs each to pay for her education, both of them urging her on to forge a path in academia, both of them revering books and knowledge over physical pursuits that might harm her in some way. Living as if wrapped in cotton wool was a small price to pay for her parents’ peace of mind.
Joining ARKANE with her PhD in Linguistics enabled Naomi to play a part in the adventures of agents in the field, but usually from the safe confines of her office in the basement of the United Nations building. There were over 800 languages spoken in New York alone, so she had no shortage of projects, but her time with Jake on the hunt for the relic of the angel had given her a new perspective. She’d experienced the city she thought she knew from another angle, navigating tunnels beneath the streets, exploring the island of the dead – and killing a man who almost finished her first.
Naomi still dreamed of his face, snarling as he fought with her, eyes wide with shock as he died, but the experience only made her want to get out of the office more often. She had faced fear and death and made it through to the other side. The only way to become a better agent was to face it again. So when this mission had come up, she’d asked to be assigned. There had to be a purpose to her life beyond studying books and artifacts in the depths of the ARKANE offices.
She turned her head to look at Jake beside her as they headed through the streets of the French Quarter back to the hotel. He was quiet, lost in thought, but in his eyes, she saw a glimmer of excitement. He was going to the bayou, with or without her, and she would not be left behind.
Toledo, Spain.
Morgan walked over to the edge of the gallery where it overlooked the main hall of the synagogue. From this high up, she could see the Hebrew script more clearly. It curved around the edge of the wall near the ceiling, each letter in pure white against a dark background, as if floating against the expanse of the cosmos. It made Morgan think of her father bent over his Torah meditating on the shapes of the letters, looking past surface meaning to allegorical interpretation according to his Kabbalistic belief.
The memory jogged something she had glimpsed in the museum below, a brief notice about the history of Kabbalah in Toledo during the Middle Ages.
She spun around to Martin, who had wandered over to look at the finials on a Torah crown.
He looked up at her sudden movement. “What is it?”
“Remember after the Gates of Hell mission, when I brought back my father’s journals from Israel?”
Martin nodded. “Yes, of course, I scanned and archived them as you requested.” He tapped his pocket. “I can access them all through the portal on my phone.”
Morgan walked over to the long bench at the end of the gallery and patted the seat next to her. “Right, we need to search them for any mention of Toledo. If there was a scholar of Kabbalah here, then my father would have known him.”
Martin sat more than a few inches away, enough to preserve his personal space, and Morgan respectfully didn’t lean over, waiting for him to access the scanned journals. His fingers moved incredibly fast over the keypad as a frown deepened between his eyebrows.
After a few minutes, he smiled and held the phone out for her to see. “Here, Rabbi Jonah Ben-Avraham. It looks like your father met him several times at Kabbalah conferences.”
Morgan stood up and straightened her clothes. “Right then, time to go see if he’s still in town. You stay here.”
She headed back downstairs to the entrance and explained her family connection to the volunteer on the desk.
He nodded in recognition of the name. “Of course, Rabbi Jonah still lives in Toledo, just around the corner in the heart of the Jewish Quarter. He doesn’t get many visitors these days. Do you want me to call him?”
“Yes, please. I know my father would have wanted me to pay my respects.”
The man dialed and spoke in Hebrew for a few minutes, then put the phone down and turned back to Morgan.
“The Rabbi says he remembers your father and would be happy to meet you. If you could wait in the gallery upstairs, he’ll be along shortly.”
Morgan returned to the gallery and sat together with Martin. It wasn’t long before slow footsteps ascended the stairs and an old man walked in. His brown corduroy suit had seen better days, but it gave the Rabbi a professorial air. He wore a white kippah on his balding head with a blue Star of David in the middle that matched his piercing eyes. The Rabbi might have been past his heyday of Kabbalah scholarship, but Morgan knew she wouldn’t want to face him across a debating chamber.
She stood up as he entered and walked over to greet him. “Rabbi Jonah, thank you for meeting us. I’m Morgan Sierra, and this is my colleague, Martin Klein. I think you knew my father.”
The Rabbi reached out and clasped Morgan’s outstretched hand in both of his. “S
halom and welcome to you both. I knew Leon in better times and I was sorry to hear of his passing. He taught me much of Kabbalah.” He released Morgan’s hand and looked at her more closely. “I see him in your features, but more than that. You have his curiosity, too.”
Morgan pulled out her phone. “It’s curiosity that brings us here, actually.” She scrolled to the picture from Ezekiel and turned it round so he could see. “This is a page from the illustrated Toledo Bible in the cathedral. Do you know why the hamsa might be on a Christian manuscript?”
Rabbi Jonah leaned closer, gazing at the figures around the edges of the page. The skeletons rising from the grave. The prophet with his outstretched arm summoning the power of God. When he looked at Morgan again, there were clouds in his blue eyes as if he could see a storm coming.
“The book of Ezekiel is from Jewish scripture, of course,” the Rabbi said. "But the Hand of Ezekiel is something else. Quite the legend in these parts, although perhaps there is more to it than just a story.”
He paused and for a moment, Morgan didn’t know whether he would speak of what he knew. Then the Rabbi sighed. “The hamsa can represent the five-fold books of the Torah. It can be a gesture of friendship, of healing and protection. But here in this city of three cultures, it represents a physical object.”
The Rabbi shuffled slowly toward the end of the gallery. In the last cabinet, a wooden chest stood behind glass. It was nothing to look at, crumbling and mostly rotted away, not worth a second glance.
The Rabbi slid the glass across, opened the chest and pulled out a folded piece of cloth, turned yellow with age. “For the sake of your father, I share this with you.”