Miami Midnight

by Davis, Maggie;

  “No, nothing like that. We come only to ask a few questions.”

  But Gaby pulled him to a halt. “Did you ever consider that somebody could be just trying to frighten me? Do you think somebody could rig up a tape machine or something, and put it in the walls at my house to make that sound?”

  He was silent for a moment. “No,” he murmured finally, shaking his head, “it is no tape recorder.”

  “How can you be sure? Suppose it’s the same people who are following me in the black limousine.”

  “Maybe people are following you, that could be. But what we have heard in the house is something else.”

  He seemed very sure, and Gaby sighed.

  “Well, then,” she said. “Let’s go visit this priestess. My car’s parked—”

  “But we are here.”

  They had stopped in front of an entrance sandwiched in between an H & R Block tax office with signs in Spanish and a tiny joyería, a jewelry store. David guided her through a narrow hallway and up a flight of stairs. At the top was a door to what seemed to be an apartment. David entered without knocking, and Gaby saw they were in a tiny waiting room with several plastic chairs and a coffee table with old magazines scattered on it. It looked like the very shabby office of a dentist.

  “Shouldn’t we ring a bell or something?” she whispered. Her nostrils were registering a faintly familiar odor of spices and smoke, and heavy, tropical food.

  He pushed her ahead of him. “I think the iyalocha is expecting us.

  The inner room was blindingly dark after the sunlight of the street. It took Gaby’s eyes several long minutes to adjust. When they did she saw one wall of the room was almost solidly covered with silk flowers, bits of tinsel that winked like mirrors, fishing nets and seashells, and swags of red, green, and purple velvet and satin, some with glittering gold fringe. The wall seemed to be one gigantic, floor-to-ceiling, stupendously gaudy altar.

  In front of the wall, on red and blue velvet-draped stands, were brightly painted plaster statues of Catholic saints, big pottery vases and earthenware pots, cheap plastic dolls dressed in gold and satin costumes, and several varieties of knives, including machetes and replicas of two-headed ceremonial axes. On the floor were pottery dishes filled with pastries, and baskets of tropical fruit—pineapples, mangoes, guavas, papayas, red, green, and yellow bananas, and a number of coconuts. Beside the baskets were three huge primitive drums decorated with black symbols. Through the draped satin and velvet, the tinsel, the artificial flowers, and the statues flickered the flames of a hundred candles.

  Gaby stood transfixed. That same haunting odor had followed them: heavy sweet perfume of tropical flowers mixed with spices and garlic, cigar smoke, and something that could only be the pungent stink of raw, heady rum.

  The room was not only dim but suffocatingly hot. Windowless, and obviously without air-conditioning. The humming dark, the cluttered space, the myriad tiny candle flames, and the heat all made Gaby dizzy. Something in the pit of her stomach, too, responded with an ominous tremor.

  “Iyalocha,” David said softly behind her.

  A small figure that Gaby had taken for another plaster statue, it was so still and unmoving, suddenly nodded its head. An incredibly tiny black woman, wearing a long scarlet dress of magnificent taffeta silk decorated with heavy festoons of lace, and a green satin head kerchief knotted in the front, African style, was the priestess, the santera, of the temple. Her face, with a slightly beaked nose, had the blackest eyes Gaby had ever seen.

  “Miss Gabrielle, this is the iyalocha, Señora Ibi Gobuo.” In the stillness David’s voice seemed unnaturally loud. “You don’t call her santera. This priestess is African. You call her what I said, iyalocha.”

  The little figure in front of them did not move.

  “Now,” David said, “we must wait to see if she will speak to us.”

  The black eyes under the green satin headcloth unhurriedly looked Gaby over from the top of her hair to her shoes. It was quite an inspection. Gaby felt herself raked with a strange, dark intelligence that measured her looks, the way she was dressed—and much more than that—very thoroughly.

  “Come.” The old, strangely disembodied voice was so commanding, Gaby jumped. She moved forward, thinking the priestess was so small she would almost have to crouch down to speak to her.

  “Iyalocha,” David began, “this—”

  An impatient hissing sound cut him off. The iyalocha’s old, bony hand, so black it seemed a shadow, extended toward Gaby, index finger pointing.

  Watching it, Gaby felt a trickle of perspiration snake down her back. The smoke, the heavy odors of food, the dark and fragrant flowers were having their effect. She could hardly keep her eyes open. She stared at the hand with its pointing finger. Something was flowing from it straight into her. She would swear it.

  “I know why you come,” the iyalocha said in a strange little parrot voice. Her pointing finger held Gaby pinned. “You are changing, mundele, you will change more. Oshun likes pretty clothes. She makes herself beautiful for Chango.”

  Gaby took a deep breath. Was it her turn to say something? “Excuse me, iyalocha,” she whispered, “but I came here to ask you—

  “He comes with the lightning all around him,” the old woman said, ignoring her. “In the thunder and the storm. That is Chango’s sign.”

  Gaby watched as the gnarled black hands rose to shape a circle. “In the big storm and the lightning,” the priestess crooned, “Chango come to you. He is so beautiful and strong. El arena del fuego. He brings the ring of fire.”

  Gaby gaped at her. This much hit home. The little priestess couldn’t know the ring of fire was a part of that nightmare Gaby hoped she’d never dream again. When she turned to look at David, he only shook his head.

  Instead of answers, they were finding more questions. Who was Chango? And what did this have to do with anything?

  The stiff red taffeta gown rustled and whispered as the iyalocha turned away. “I speak Yoruba,” the tiny woman said, “the true language of Santería. But for you I will speak your language, maybe sometimes Spanish, a little.”

  Gaby was growing even more uneasy, wanting to get it over with. “Señora—iyalocha, I want to know why my dog was killed. The police said someone was practicing Santería at my house, but they thought it was meant for the Cuban family who lives in our garage apartment. Who used to live in our garage apartment,” she corrected herself. “The Escuderos have disappeared.”

  The old woman wasn’t listening. In a high, sweet, trancelike voice she said, “Your mother loves you, niña, even if you think she don’t. She took the bad things what was meant for you.” She paused, her black eyes unseeing. “But she will be better. That is so.”

  Gaby’s mouth went dry. For a moment the voice had been, incredibly, Jeannette’s voice. A long time ago, when her mother had been young and vital.

  She was still telling herself she was mistaken when the iyalocha said imperiously, “Ven aquí, mundele. Quiero explicarlo.”

  Come with me. I want to explain.

  The iyalocha stopped in front of a large mahogany cabinet and pulled open the doors. “This is the canasterillo, the cabinet where the otanes of the gods are kept. These are great African gods of Santería. I will explain and you will listen, mundele, because I do not do this again.”

  An old black hand touched the top shelf lightly. “Here is the place for Obatala, a very great god for peace, purity. He is orisha of the sky. Obatala is like Jesus Christ. His color is white, is sign of the white dove.”

  The gnarled fingers moved to the second shelf. “Here is Oshun, the orisha of the river waters. Oshun is beautiful young goddess. Su color es amarillo y rojo—yellow like gold, red like love.”

  The shelf, Gaby saw, was filled with fans, bottles of perfume, a jar of Sioux Bee honey, coral necklaces, and several tiny toy canoes made of plastic.

  She watched the old black hands lift the jar of honey and open it. Then, moving too quickly for
her to pull back, the hand reached out and the priestess dabbed sweet sticky stuff across her lips.

  Startled, Gaby licked her mouth, tasting the honey. The more she tried to get rid of it, the more the honey clung to the inside of her mouth and her lips. It had a bitter aftertaste. The iyalocha watched her closely. “You like, you like?” she asked.

  Gaby swallowed with difficulty, longing for something to wipe the honey away. “Nice,” she said, untruthfully.

  The iyalocha turned back to the cabinet. “Third is Oshun’s sister who is Yemaya the ocean waters. Oshun is orisha of love, rainbow, rivers. Sister Yemaya goddess is woman, mother. All the house belong to Yemaya and women who carry baby and have childbirth. They pray to her.”

  The hand moved down to the last shelf. “Is Oya here, the orisha of cemeteries and the dead.” The iyalocha shut the cabinet door abruptly. “We don’t talk about Oya of the people of the dead now. Maybe later.”

  The little figure moved to another, smaller cabinet. “Here live more orishas, very powerful, Ogun who makes iron, Eleggua who tells the future and past, Babalu-ai-ey who heals the sick, plenty more. But here in his own place, I show you—Chango!”

  She opened the doors of the finely carved cabinet to reveal several shelves scattered with candles and bowls, a miniature two-headed ax, a handful of dried okra and cornmeal, two apples, a dark, overripe banana, and gold coins. Behind these stood a small statue of a woman dressed in medieval red and white robes. She held a sword, and at her side was a miniature castle tower.

  “Santa Barbara is saint for him,” the iyalocha said, touching the plaster statue of the Catholic saint. “But Chango is man orisha, very beautiful, god of fire and lightning, very powerful, mysterious.” She paused. “And mucho sexy. Chango make very good love.”

  Gaby held her hand to her mouth. She couldn’t get rid of the honey’s terrible taste. “David, what is she talking about?” she whispered.

  He stirred. “Mundele is white person in Yoruba, Miss Gabrielle,” he whispered back. “The iyalocha says an orisha, an African goddess of Santería, claims you. Even though you are a mundele. One of Oshun’s manifestations is Ye Ye Caridad. Sort of like Venus, only more so.”

  The iyalocha was rummaging in one of the baskets of fruit on the floor as though her visitors weren’t there. Gaby was feeling slightly nauseated. “We’d better go,” she told David from behind her hand.

  The priestess lifted a coconut and sniffed it. “We must make the dar coco al santo.” She held out the coconut. “When we do that, the orisha will answer your questions.”

  Gaby swallowed again. “We weren’t going to stay, for any sort of ceremony, really.”

  But the tiny black figure in the flame-colored dress had begun chanting. “Illa mi ile oro illa mi ile oro vira ye yeye oyo ya mala ye icu oche oche oye ogua ita...”

  “David,” Gaby murmured. Her stomach was rebelling. The room’s overpowering heat made her dizzy. David apparently didn’t hear as the priestess continued chanting in Yoruba. She took down a machete from the altar wall and, placing the coconut on a stand, she hacked it quickly into several pieces with the big knife.

  Gaby fixed her gaze on a bunch of artificial poppies to keep down the growing uproar in the pit of her stomach. She never liked the smell of coconut. Why couldn’t she get David to do something?

  The iyalocha gathered up the coconut pieces in both hands and shut her eyes. Then she violently scattered them on the floor around her. All the broken pieces of coconut landed with the dark sides up. The black woman gave a little indrawn hiss.

  “Oyekun!” the iyalocha rasped.

  They were just pieces of fresh coconut, Gaby told herself, trying not to look at them. The odor of coconut milk drifted up to her. Somehow, she thought grimly, she didn’t need to be told that the message was not good.

  “Yo veo todo es oscuro. Muy loco,” the old voice intoned “Pero, oiga—yo veo una mujer muy mala!”

  For a long moment the iyalocha stood poised on the tips of her tiny feet like a little bird ready for flight. Then she settled back on her heels.

  “Is too much for me,” she announced matter-of-factly. “We need go see the babalawo right away.”

  “Miss Gabrielle.” David’s voice seemed to come from far away. “She wants to take you to the high priest.”

  Gaby was bathed in a cold sweat. Something was wrong. She felt sick but she couldn’t seem to do anything about it.

  “Miss Gabrielle, are you listening?” That was David’s voice again. “The cocos fell in the pattern of oyekun, which is bad. The worst.”

  The little iyalocha stepped in between them, pointing a gnarled finger at David’s chest. “No queremos poetas aquí!” she said shrilly. “Your friend is not what he seem!”

  Gaby was seeing only a dirty gray mist. “David...” She had to struggle to speak. “Did you understand that?” It was like a nightmare. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was fading completely away. “It’s crazy. The iyalocha thinks you’re a poet!”

  In the next instant Gaby realized she should have told David to get her out of there. Quick. She was either going to be sick to her stomach, or she was going to faint.

  She felt David’s arms go around her. “Oh, Miss Gabrielle!”

  No, not sick to her stomach, Gaby thought dimly. She was definitely going to faint.

  Chapter 10

  The hot afternoon sun seeped in through vertical blinds and fell in stripes on the babalawo’s office carpeting. The room was frigid, typically, for Miami in late summer. The air-conditioning was set at near-freezing, but this was also, the high priest had already explained, for his computer, a magnificent AT&T array that covered his desk and two nearby stands.

  “Damn, there it comes again,” he muttered, peering at the changing divination patterns on the computer screen. “Ibi Gobuo is right, we really have a problem.” He sat back, chin in hand, studying the screen. “From what I can make of it, somebody’s really messing around.”

  The babalawo’s office was in a small stucco building not far from the iyalocha’s apartment. Even through the double plate-glass windows Gaby could hear the thready sound of downtown traffic.

  The last thing she had expected to find was a yuppie practitioner of Cuban voodoo, dressed in a natty continental-style black silk business suit, white shirt, and Countess Mara tie with a tasteful diamond stick pin. But then she understood Jorge Castaneda was no ordinary high priest of Santería. He was a graduate of Florida State University in Tallahassee—his diploma was on the wall behind his desk—had a large clientele, and was very successful. He was the only babalawo in Miami, probably anywhere, he’d assured her, who used a personal computer to interpret the messages of the Santería gods. In his late thirties, swarthily attractive with his black hair perfectly styled in a razor cut and slightly-darker-than-gold skin, he was a little concerned about Gaby’s bad experience at the iyalocha’s.

  “It was the heat,” she said, and finished the cold 7-Up the babalawo had brought her from the drink machine in the hall. She was embarrassed that she’d nearly fainted in the old priestess’s apartment. It was just another mysterious symptom, she supposed, of her body’s inability to adjust to Miami’s climate.

  “The iyalocha thinks you’re muy sensitiva,” the babalawo said, typing in another line. “She thinks you caught a lot of heavy vibrations, that you nearly fainted because you made a ... ah, psychic connection.” He squinted at the screen. “I didn’t want to argue with her, but frankly, I don’t think you had anything going with the orishas, I think it was a real mundele anxiety attack. Fainting is a white lady’s thing,” he went on with barely concealed irony. “It’s very restrained. My people, when they’re scared, throw up all over the place.”

  “I wasn’t having an anxiety attack,” Gaby said stiffly. “It was just the heat.” She didn’t want to admit how close she’d come to doing that very thing.

  “No?” The babalawo hit another key and the patterns rolled over again, rather like t
he combinations in a slot machine. “I think an anxiety attack is valid. You impress me,” he said, absorbed in the screen, “as a lady who’s a lot more scared than you want to let on. It’s the pits to be scared of everything.” Before Gaby could protest, he added, “Most iyalochas hate referring their clients to a higher authority. Like me. But Ibi got kinda blown away. Your cocos kept coming up oyekun. She couldn’t believe it.”

  Gaby clamped her lips shut on a retort. Whatever had come over her at the iyalocha’s was a false alarm, a moment’s unpleasant dizziness, and she’d tried to tell them so. But David had clucked over her like a mother hen so much that he’d been sent to wait downstairs on Eighth Street. Interviews with the babalawo were conducted in strictest privacy anyhow. Even the iyalocha wasn’t allowed to stay.

  Her second blunder, Gaby now realized, was blurting out everything to Jorge Castaneda. She’d been so rattled by nearly fainting, the iyalocha, the whole bizarre afternoon, that she’d told the so-called high priest all about the drug deal at the fashion show, the death of Jupiter, the strange sounds in her house, even how many times she had been followed by the black Cadillac limousine. And finally and most regretfully, she’d spilled something she hadn’t wanted to reveal to anyone—James Santo Marin’s visit to her house during the storm.

  The babalawo had listened in attentive silence, almost as though he had expected all her secrets to come tumbling out like that.

  “Jimmy Santo Marin and I went to Coral Gables High together,” he had told her when she was through. At her dumbfounded look, he had grinned. “Oh, yeah, Jimmy went on to the rich boy’s school, the U of Miami. I got my diploma up at Florida State.” He’d leaned back in his chair, his clever black eyes watching her stunned reaction. “Even back then he was into championship tennis, competitive swimming, broke his leg trying to make first string quarterback, all the usual glory stuff. Of course, if you knew the women in the family...” he’d added cryptically. “Jimmy was committed to the classic pattern—firstborn, only son, head of the family, workaholic high-achiever, drives himself and everybody else around him nuts. Jimmy’s always been a tiger.”