I had to go through three flunkies before I got to Billy. “What you want?” he said. “You know this is Survivor night.”
“I forgot, Billy. Want me to call back? I can call back.”
“This is the two-hour finale, then the reunion show. Won’t be over ’til eleven and I’m shutting it down after that. Now you got something for me or don’t you?”
I could hear laughter in the background and I hesitated, picturing him hunched over the phone in his den, a skinny, balding white man whom you might mistake for an insurance salesman or a CPA, no doubt clad in one of his neon-colored smoking jackets.
“Jack, you better have something good,” Billy said. “Hair’s starting to sprout from my palms.”
“I’m not sure how good it is, but…”
“I’m missing the immunity challenge. The penultimate moment of the entire season. And I got people over, you hear?”
Billy was the only person I knew who could pronounce vowels with a hiss. I gave him the gist of it, trying not to omit any significant details, but speeding it along as best I could.
“Interesting,” he said. “Tell me again what she said when you spoke to her.”
I repeated the conversation.
“It would seem that Miz Verret’s agenda is somewhat different from that of the Darden Corporation,” Billy said. “Otherwise, she’d have no compunction about reporting your conversation.”
“That was my take.”
“Voodoo business,” he said musingly.
“I can’t be sure it’s got anything to do with voodoo.”
“Naw, this here is voodoo business. It has a certain taint.” Billy made a clicking noise. “I’ll get back to you in the morning.”
“I was just trying to do you a favor, Billy. I don’t need to be involved.”
“Honey, I know how it’s supposed to work, but you’re involved. I got too many eggs in my basket to be dealing with anything else right now. This pans out, I’m putting you in charge.”
The last thing I had wanted was to be in business with Billy Pitch. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make a ton of money with Billy, but he was a supremely dangerous and unpleasant human being, and he tended to be hard on his associates. Often he acted precipitately and there were more than a few widows who had received a boatload of flowers and a card containing Billy’s apologies and a fat check designed to compensate for their loss and his lamentable error in judgment. In most cases, this unexpected death benefit served to expunge the ladies’ grief, but Alice Delvecchio, the common-law wife of Danny “Little Man” Prideau, accused Billy of killing her man and, shortly after the police investigation hit a dead end, she and her children disappeared. It was rumored that Billy had raised her two sons himself and that, with his guidance, hormone treatments, and the appropriate surgery, they had blossomed into lovely teenage girls, both of whom earned their keep in a brothel catering to oil workers.
Much to my relief, no call came the following morning. I thought that Billy must have checked out Pellerin and Verret, found nothing to benefit him, and hadn’t bothered getting back to me. But around ten o’clock that evening, I fielded a call from Huey Rafael, one of Billy’s people. He said that Billy wanted me to run on out to an address in Abundance Square and take charge of a situation.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Billy says for you to get your butt over here.”
Abundance Square was in the Ninth Ward, a few blocks from the levee, and was, as far as I knew, utterly abandoned. That made me nervous.
“I’m coming,” I said. “But I’d like to know something about the situation. So I can prepare for it, you understand.”
“You ain’t need nothing to prepare you for this.” Huey’s laugh was a baritone hiccup. “Got some people want watching over. Billy say you the man for the job.”
“Who are these people?” I asked, but Huey had ended the call.
I was angry. In the past, Billy had kept a close eye on every strand of his web, but nowadays he tended to delegate authority and spent much of his time indulging his passion for reality TV. He knew more about The Amazing Race and The Runway Project than he did about his business. Sooner or later, I thought, this practice was going to jump up and bite him in the ass. But as I drove toward the Ninth Ward, my natural paranoia kicked in and I began to question the wisdom of traipsing off into the middle of nowhere to hook up with a violent criminal.
Prior to Katrina, Abundance Square had been a housing project of old-style New Orleans town homes, with courtyards and balconies all painted in pastel shades. It had been completed not long before the hurricane struck. Now it was a waste of boarded-up homes and streets lined with people’s possessions. Cars, beds, lamps, bureaus, TV sets, pianos, toys, and so on, every inch of them caked with dried mud. Though I was accustomed to such sights, that night it didn’t look real. My headlights threw up bizarre images that made it appear I was driving through a post-apocalyptic version of Claymation Country. I found the address, parked a couple of blocks away, and walked back to the house. A drowned stink clotted my nostrils. In the distance, I heard sirens and industrial noise, but close at hand, it was so quiet you could hear a bug jump.
Huey answered my knock. He was a tall drink of water. Six-five, six-six, with a bluish polish to his black skin, a lean frame, pointy sideburns, and a modish goatee. He wore charcoal slacks and a high-collared camp shirt. Standing in the door, a nickel-plated .45 in hand, he might have been a bouncer at the Devil’s strip club. He preceded me toward the rear of the house, to a room lit by a kerosene lantern. At its center, one of Pellerin’s bodyguards was tied to a wooden chair. His head was slumped onto his chest, his face and shirt bloody. The air seemed to grow hotter.
I balked at entering and Huey said, “What you scared of, man? Lord Vader there ain’t going to harm you. Truth is, he gave it up quick for being a Jedi.”
“Where’s the other guy?” I asked.
“Man insisted on staying behind,” Huey said.
I had a sinking feeling, a vision of the Red House at Angola, guards strapping me down for the injection. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “You tell Billy I’m not going down for murder.”
Huey caught me by the shoulder as I turned to leave and slammed me up against the wall. He bridged his forearm under my jaw, giving me the full benefit of his lavishly applied cologne, and said, “I didn’t say a goddamn thing about murder, now did I?” When I remained silent, he asked me again and I squeezed out a no.
“I got things to take care of,” he said, stepping back. “Probably take me two, three hours. Here go.” He handed me the .45 and some keys. “You get on upstairs.”
“Who’s up there?”
“The card player and his woman. Some other guy. A doctor, he say.”
“Are they…” I searched for a word that would not excite Huey. “Uninjured?”
“Yeah, they fine.”
“And I’m supposed to keep watch, right? That’s all?”
“Billy say for you to ask some questions.”
“What about?”
“About what they up to.”
“Well, what did he tell you?” I pointed at the bodyguard. “I need something to go on.”
“Lord Vader wasn’t too clear on the subject,” said Huey. “Guess I worked him a little hard. But he did say the card player ain’t a natural man.”
Some rooms on the second floor of the townhouse were filled with stacked cots, folding tables and chairs, and with bottled water, canned food, toilet paper, and other supplies. It seemed that Billy was planning for the end times. In a room furnished with a second-hand sofa and easy chairs, I found Verret, Pellerin, and a man in his fifties with mussed gray hair and a hangdog look about the eyes. I assumed him to be Doctor Crain. He was gagged and bound to a chair. Verret and Pellerin were leg-shackled to the sofa. On seeing me, Crain arched his eyebrows and tried to speak. Pellerin glanced up from his hand of solitaire and Verret, dressed in freshly ironed jeans and a white T-shirt, gave me
a sorrowful look, as if to suggest she had expected more of me.
“It’s the night shift,” Pellerin said and went back to turning over cards.
“Can you help us?” asked Verret.
“What’s up with him?” I pointed at Crain with the gun.
“He annoyed our previous keeper.” Pellerin flipped over an ace and made a satisfied noise. “He’s an annoying fellow. You’re catching him at his best.”
“Can you help us?” Verret asked again, with emphasis.
“Probably not.” I pulled a chair around and sat opposite the two of them. “But if you tell me what’s going on with you, what’s the relationship between the Darden Corporation and Tulane, the Ezawa project…I’ll try to help.”
Pellerin kept dealing, Verret gave no response, and Crain struggled with his bonds.
“Do you know where you are?” I asked. “Let me you clue you in.”
I told them who had ordered their kidnapping, mentioning the Alice Delvecchio incident along with a couple of others, then reiterated that I could probably be of no help to them—I was an unwilling participant in the process. I was sorry things had reached this pass, but if I was going to be any help at all, they ought to tell me what was up; otherwise, I couldn’t advise them on how to survive Billy Pitch.
Verret looked to Pellerin, who said, “He ain’t that damn sorry. Except where his own sorry ass is concerned.”
“Is he telling the truth?” she asked.
“More-or-less.”
Crain redoubled his efforts to escape, forcing muted shouts through his gag.
“I guess that’s why you’re so expert at the tables,” I said to Pellerin. “You’re good at reading people.”
“You have no idea, Small Time,” he said.
I wiggled the gun. “You’re not in a position to be giving me attitude.”
“You going to shoot me?” He gave a sneering laugh. “I don’t think so. You’re about ready to piss yourself just hanging onto that thing.”
“Josey!” Verret started to stand, then remembered the shackles. “I’ll tell you,” she said to me. “But I’d rather do it in private.”
Crain threw a conniption fit, heaving himself about in his chair, attempting to spit out his gag.
“You see,” she said. “He’s going to act like that every time I tell you something. I have to use the restroom, anyway.”
I undid the shackles, then I locked Crain and Pellerin in and escorted her down the hall, lagging behind a step so I could check out her butt. When she had finished in the john, we went into one of the storerooms. I set up a couple of folding chairs and we sat facing one another.
“May I have some water,” she asked.
“Help yourself.”
She had a drink of water, then sat primly with the plastic bottle resting on one knee. I knew I had to watch myself with her—I’d always been a sucker for tall brunettes who had that lady thing going. She must have had a sense of this, because she worked it overtime.
“Here’s what I know,” I said. “The Ezawa project was investigating voodoo remedies. And Josey Pellerin, according to your bodyguard, is not a natural man. That suggests…well, I’m not sure. Why don’t you just tell me everything?”
“Everything? That’ll take a long time.” She screwed the bottle cap on and off. “The project wasn’t considered important at the outset. The only reason Ezawa got funding was because he was a golfing buddy of one of the trustees. And he was brilliant, so they were willing to give him some leeway. He isolated a bacterium present in the dirt of old slave graveyards. He used dirt from the graveyard at the Myrtles—that old house over in Saint Francisville? The bodies were buried in biodegradable coffins, or no coffins at all, and the micro-organisms in the dirt had interacted with the decomposing tissues.”
She left room for me to ask a question, but I had none.
“A DNA extract from datura and other herbs was introduced into the growth medium,” she said. “Then the bacteria were induced to take up DNA and chromosomes from the extract, and Ezawa injected the recombinant strain into the cerebellum and temporal lobes of a freshly dead corpse. The bacteria began processing the corpse’s genetic complement and eventually the body was revivified.”
“Whoa! Revivified?” I said. “You mean, it came back to life?”
She nodded.
“How long were these people dead?” I asked.
“On the average, a little under an hour. The longest was about an hour and a half. The process required a certain amount of time, so the bodies had to be secured quickly.”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Getting the paperwork done for releasing a body generally takes more than an hour.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Jesus. Ezawa was basically making zombies. High-tech zombies.”
She started, I presumed, to object, but I headed her off.
“Don’t bullshit me,” I said. “I grew up voodoo. Datura’s one of the classic ingredients in the old recipe books. I bet he tried goat’s rue, too…and Angel’s trumpet. The man was making zombies.”
She frowned. “What I was going to say, the term was appropriate for most of the patients. They were weak. Helpless. They rarely survived longer than a day. But there were a few who lived longer. For months, some of them. We called them ‘slow-burners.’ We moved them out to a plantation house in bayou country and brought in a clinical psychologist to assess their new personalities. You see, the patients developed personalities markedly different from the ones they originally had. The psychologist, Doctor Edman, he believed these personalities manifested a kind of wish-fulfillment. His theory was that the process changed a portion of the RNA and made it dominant. ‘The bioform of their deepest wish,’ that’s how he put it. The patients manufactured memories. They recalled having different names, different histories. In effect, they were telling us—and themselves—a new life story, one in which they achieved their heart’s desire. The amazing thing was, they had abilities commensurate with these stories.”
I could have used some of Pellerin’s ability to read people. What she had told me had a ring of authenticity, but if I were to accept it as true, I would have to rearrange my notion of what was possible. I started to speak, but I was on shaky ground and wasn’t certain which questions to ask.
“It’s hard to believe,” she said. “But it’s the truth.” She let some seconds slip past and then, when I remained mute, as if she were trying to keep the conversation going, she went on: “I disagreed with Edman about a great many things. He demanded that we allow the patients to find their own way. He believed we should let their stories come out naturally. But I thought if we prompted them some, if we reminded them of their original identities…I don’t mean give them every detail, you understand. Just their names and a little background. That would have afforded them a stronger foundation and perhaps we wouldn’t have had so many breakdowns among the slow-burners. These people were re-inventing themselves out of whole cloth. They were bound to be unstable. I was hoping Crain would agree with me, but…” She made a contemptuous gesture, then seemed to remember where she was. “Do you want to know anything else?”
I still was at a loss for words, but I managed to say, “So I’m guessing Pellerin’s a slow-burner.”
“Yes. He was born Theodore Rankin. He’s forty-three. He believes he’s the world’s best poker player. And he may well be.”
“What was he before?”
“A bartender. He was killed during a robbery. I don’t know how the corporation got hold of the body.”
“The corporation. I assume they took the project over after it went in the toilet at Tulane.”
“That’s right. But there was a gap of ten years or so.”
“Why’re they so interested in a poker player?”
“It’s not the poker playing per se that’s of interest, it’s the patients’ underlying abilities. Their potentials go far beyond the life story they construct for themselves. We don’t underst
and what they can do. None of them lived long enough. But with the advances in micro-biology made during the last two decades, Doctor Crain thinks Josey may live for years. He’s developing more rapidly than the others, too. That may be a result of improvements in the delivery system. We used a heart pump at Tulane, but now they…”
“I don’t have to know the gearhead stuff.” I mulled over what she had told me. “You were fired from the original project. Why would Darden hire you? Where do you fit in?”
Verret toyed with the bottle cap. “I helped a patient escape. I couldn’t go along with what they were doing to him anymore. He developed some astonishing abilities while he was on the run. I’m the only person who’s dealt with someone that advanced.”
“What sort of abilities we talking about?”
“Perceptual, for the most part. Changes in visual capacity and such.”
She said this off-handedly, but I doubted she was being straight with me. I decided not to push it, and I asked what they had been doing at Harrah’s.
“At Tulane we kept the patients confined,” she said. “But Crain thought Josey would develop more rapidly if we exposed him to an unstructured environment under controlled conditions.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Turns out we didn’t have much control.”
“How much does Pellerin know?”
“He knows he was brought back to life. But he doesn’t know about the new personality…though he suspects something’s wrong there. It’s up to me to determine when he’s ready to hear the truth. Things go better if we tell them than if we let them piece it together on their own.”
“I still don’t understand your function. What exactly is it you do?”
Dagger Key and Other Stories Page 29