Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle

by Carlos Allende

  “That was pretty dumb, darling,” the cat chuckled. “You have to admit it. You weren’t prepared to go hunting. But what’s done is done. We’re learning.” He interrupted himself, noticing that another tear rolled down the little witch’s cheek. “We’re not making any progress, are we? Let’s leave this for now.” He put his paw on the paper and looked up towards Josie’s bedroom. “What are you going to do with the body? It’s not a ham, my dear. It will not mature if we leave it hanging there. You can’t just toss it into the canal and hope that no one will notice. Tempting, certainly—God only knows what lies below that thick layer of waste—but bodies tend to float; it would attract seagulls.”

  The cat remained pensive for a second. “Besides, you don’t want to do it too close to the house.” He licked his whiskers. “They’ll find out she’s gone and the police will start asking questions. They already know where you live. This is what I think you should do—you’d better go lock the door, my dear; you don’t want anyone to peep in and listen.”

  Monday morning, Dr. Nishimura’s wife noticed that the coffee at her husband’s office was much stronger than usual. She added water and more milk to her cup, but that didn’t do. She had to brew a new batch. She made a mental note to reprimand the maid, but then she got distracted with a call from a patient, and the little woman left before Mrs. Nishimura could say anything. On Tuesday morning, the same. Had it been a mistake or was she doing it on purpose? Only Mrs. Nishimura and the cleaning lady drank coffee. Her husband preferred tea, and her husband’s patients were forbidden coffee.

  “Wasteful,” Mrs. Nishimura said a few times. “Wasteful and careless.”

  Mrs. Nishimura didn’t notice the big dark bags under her cleaning lady’s eyes. If she had, she would have understood that her maid’s oversight had not been one after all. The coffee was stronger for a reason: the little woman was dead tired. She hadn’t slept more than a couple hours in the previous two nights. She had been busy flaying and carving Lina’s body into pieces small enough so she could put them inside her handbag.

  “Let’s cut her in pieces,” was what her familiar had recommended. “Then throw the pieces around Venice. No one will ever know where they came from, and who will be surprised to find a toe or an arm lying on the pavement in this seedy slum? After all, this is Venice.”

  A homeless man looking for food inside a trash bin discovered the first piece, an ear, that same Tuesday. The next day someone else found a toe and called the police. After that, a man reported that his dog had brought home something that looked like human intestines. Then someone else found a hand buried under the sand, and Lina’s heart appeared under the altar of the church in Coeur D’Alene.

  By Friday, enough pieces had been found for the police to identify the body as the one of Miss Lina Barnett.

  That night, Richard called the Grand Hotel and asked to be connected with Josie. The girl had been staying in Russell’s room since she had been forced to leave hers on Sunday.

  “Did you kill Lina?” the millionaire asked coldly.

  It hadn’t been an easy week for her either. The first night that Josie spent at the Grand Hotel she was still too upset by Heather’s death and the fight with her landladies to complain, but the old hotel was as close to being grand as Venice itself was close to the Atlantic Ocean. The floors creaked with every step. There was dust and mold everywhere, only one bathroom for the entire third floor, and not only was Russell’s room too small and bare—one bed, one chair, a tin table, and a bookshelf made out of bricks and wood planks—but he shared it with a crabby giant named Pitt, a poet with a dark mane and a graying beard which, Josie suspected, and later Russell confirmed, was lice infested.

  “I don’t like him that much either,” Russell confessed to his girlfriend, but didn’t explain why he hadn’t yet tried to move to another room or find a different roommate.

  The bed belonged to Pitt. Therefore, Josie and Russell had to sleep on the floor inside a sleeping bag, a relic of the Korean War that the poet had bought at a pawn shop.

  It didn’t matter. They made love that first night, as quietly as possible, so as not to wake up the giant.

  Josie spent the first minutes of the following morning watching Russell sleep, passing the tip of her finger over his eyebrows, caressing the thin wrinkles around his eyes, the tip of his nose, the fuzz on his right earlobe.

  Russell opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “Good morning,” he said, as if that was the eleven thousandth good morning he’d given her.

  Josie raised her head. Pitt was already gone. She tried to kiss Russell, but he shook his head.

  “My breath smells terrible,” he said.

  Josie laughed. She kissed him anyway. Russell tightened his lips. He looked so vulnerable and yet so manly. She wished to grow old next to him and wake up to his bad breath every day.

  “Rest your head on my chest,” he said, and closed his eyes again.

  She took a shower standing on her tip toes, taking care not to touch the tiles covered in mold or the mildewed shower curtain.

  Not five minutes had passed when someone started banging on the door.

  “I’m about to explode in my pants!”

  Annoying, yes, but she wouldn’t complain. Not yet. She stepped out of the shower, wrapped herself in a towel a bit too small to cover her entirely and far too rough to be comfortable, and walked down the hallway with the dignity of a queen, scarcely granting a scornful look at the offender. She had to share? She would share. She would wake up a bit earlier, before dawn, before anyone else needed to use the toilet. The Grand Hotel was her new home and nothing could be so bad as to prevent her from enjoying it, neither a shared room with a giant full of lice, nor a shared bathroom.

  However when it came to getting a free breakfast at the Gas House Café, a perk that all the guests of the Grand Hotel had grown accustomed to, and she was refused service for not being an official member of the artists’ colony, Josie started to feel a little unwelcome.

  Russell’s response didn’t assuage her discomfort.

  “I guess I’ll just see you later,” he rubbed the stubble on his chin with his right palm.

  Josie left for work.

  That night she made it back to the room before Russell. Pitt had a word with her: “You have to go,” he said, then got into his bed and turned his back to Josie.

  Josie couldn’t give an immediate reply, and Pitt didn’t seem to be expecting any. She opted to do the same. She lay down on the old sleeping bag that was now her bridal bed, and tried to think of nicer things than Pitt’s terrible manners, until she fell asleep.

  Russell arrived a little after midnight.

  “What are you doing here?” He woke her up.

  “I’m staying with you now—don’t you remember?”

  “That’s true,” Russell laughed. “I forgot!”

  He was drunk. Or high. Or both, she couldn’t tell. That night they only cuddled.

  Tuesday afternoon she decided to clean the room. She found a broom, a mop with the strands hardened from dried paint, and a bucket without a handle. Russell offered to help, and between the two, they managed to get rid of all the cobwebs. They found enough dirty dishes, pots, and utensils under Pitt’s bed to equip a small kitchen. Josie washed the dishes in the bathroom and piled them on his side of the table. The room looked much better, they thought, but the giant seemed unimpressed when he returned.

  Wednesday, Josie had a fight with one of her neighbors over the length of her showers, and again she was asked to leave.

  On Thursday, Russell didn’t come back to sleep.

  The worst thing that night was the heat: eighty-two degrees. Being inside that room felt like taking a bath inside a bowl of chicken soup, and the stench of sweat coming from Pitt had more than doubled.

  The ceiling fan wobbled noisily, threatening to fall on on
e’s head at any moment, but it helped cool the room a little. Pitt preferred to keep it off, however, because he feared it would cause him pneumonia.

  “But it’s hot!” Josie complained.

  She could open the window, take a cold rinse, or take a hike, Pitt proposed, before getting into his bed. The fan would stay off.

  The giant slept with his clothes on. He only took off his shoes and his jacket. He sweated like hog. Like a horrible, hairy, heavy, smelly, and disgusting one, Josie thought. His blanket was drenched in sweat, yet he didn’t seemed to be annoyed by the weather.

  Josie took the recommended cold rinse. She lay down on the sleeping bag in her nightie, a white Miss Elaine with lace embroidery on the collar that she had borrowed from Sears. It was too hot, so she sat up. Never did she hate anyone as much as she now hated that bearded monster, she realized; not even Eva. Her nightie felt sticky, prickly, and anything but sexy. Her own hair was unbearable. She held it up with her hands wishing she could cut it off. She sat there for a good twenty minutes, grumbling about her bad luck, until Pitt started snoring. Then she stood up and turned on the fan. It sounded like a biplane having trouble staying aloft.

  Pitt woke up a moment later with a loud sneeze. “I told you to keep that thing off,” he groaned from his bed.

  “It’s too hot,” Josie bawled.

  “Turn it off!”

  “No.”

  Pitt wobbled to the wall switch, turned off the fan and went back to his bed. Josie leaped up and turned the fan back on.

  “Fuck, woman!” Pitt growled from his bed. “Keep that fan off. Don’t you understand?”

  “It stays on,” Josie hollered back.

  Pitt stood up again and walked to the wall switch. But as soon as he had turned the fan off, Josie threw a shoe that hit him on the back of his neck.

  “Ouch!” the poet complained.

  “Leave it on,” the girl threatened to throw another shoe.

  Pitt reached for the first object he could lay his hands on, a pulp magazine, and hit the girl on the nose with it.

  “How dare you?” the girl shrieked.

  Pitt responded with a threatening glare.

  Josie reached for the broom that she and Russell had used the day before to clean the room and raised it to hit the poet, but the broom hit the blades of the rickety fan causing the appliance to fall on top of her.

  Pitt started laughing.

  “How can you laugh?” the girl cried rubbing her head and left shoulder. “It could have killed me!”

  “I told you to leave it alone.”

  Josie looked at her fingertips. “I’m bleeding!”

  “Good!” the poet went back to his bed. “Maybe you’ll bleed to death and leave me alone.”

  Josie grabbed the broom again and jumped across the room with a battle cry. She hit Pitt several times, until the handle broke. Then, thinking that the bearded bard would trail her with murderous intentions, she ran out of the room screaming, “He’s going to kill me!” through the hallway.

  Pitt, however, was too surprised—horrified, to be precise—to chase her. He was a scary-looking man, but very much anti-violence. He stayed in bed, rubbing his arm and the side of his torso, confused by what had just happened, until he finally fell asleep.

  Josie reached a door at the end of the corridor that led to a staircase. She went through the door and hastily climbed the steps until she reached a second door at the top that led to the roof. The air felt cooler outside, but still dense and heavy. She leaned against the door to keep it closed until she was sure Pitt wasn’t coming after her. She needed to leave, but where would she go? She had no place and no money. She sat down with her back reclined against the parapet wall and cried for a couple minutes.

  “Why do these things happen to me?” she lamented. “Why did I have to leave my room? And where is Russell? Why isn’t he here to protect me?”

  It started to rain. A soft tip-tap rain, the type that makes you believe you won’t get wet if you keep moving. At least the rain felt refreshing, Josie consoled herself. The clouds reflected the city lights, giving the firmament a whitish color, almost as bright as before sunrise.

  “Man, it’s raining,” she heard a groggy voice say.

  “Russell?” Josie asked, standing up.

  “Baby doll?” Her boyfriend crawled from behind the water tank. “It’s raining,” he burst into a laugh.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I fell asleep,” Russell giggled.

  “What were you doing up here?”

  “I was…” Russell rubbed his face trying to remember, “…writing poetry?” He exhaled deeply. “Johnny was here too. We were writing.”

  “You were shooting junk!” Josie scolded.

  “No, no,” Russell protested. “I don’t do that, I told you. Grass, some bennies, that was it. Wait, we had some peyote,” he added, suddenly remembering what had caused him to doze off. “Man, that was powerful. I thought of so many things! I was writing notes, but then I realized my notes didn’t make any sense, and I started scratching my notebook until I ripped the paper. I destroyed it completely, the pen went through all the pages to the back cover. I was like, ‘Damn, I ripped my notebook!’ I felt powerful, though, as if I didn’t need words to express myself anymore. Then Johnny realized my notebook was gone. We searched for it, but then we realized I had never had it—ha! I wasn’t taking notes at all. I must have left my notebook inside the room.”

  “How come you were writing poetry then?” the girl asked, with a pout.

  “I don’t know. The muse whispered words into my ear, and I repeated the words to Johnny. He liked my words—her words,” he added with a big grin, as if suddenly everything started to make sense. “He said he’d like to write stuff like that for his wife. Things aren’t going too well with them. Where is he?”

  “He must have left,” Josie said. “There’s no one else here.”

  “Maybe we should go inside. We’re getting wet.”

  “I can’t go back to the room. I hit Pitt with the broom.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because he wouldn’t let me have the fan on,” Josie sniveled. “The fan fell on my head when I was trying to hit him and he started laughing—I hate this place, Russell,” she gasped. “I cannot stay here anymore.”

  “I’m sorry you lost your room.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “It wasn’t, yes,” he acknowledged, rather unsympathetically. “You cannot stay here in any case. Larry told me you had to go. Could you try to get your place back?”

  “After what they did to me? No,” Josie shrieked.

  “What if you apologize?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Well, sometimes you say things that you shouldn’t say, baby doll. People will stop liking you.”

  “I don’t want to be liked,” Josie replied. “I want to be respected.”

  They ended up sleeping in the corridor, cuddled together. The next morning, Russell sneaked inside the room and took Josie’s suitcase out so she could change in the bathroom. She left for work before anyone else was up.

  She returned to the hotel a little after five to find her suitcase waiting for her by the entrance. The clerk at the front desk informed her that she had been officially expelled from the artists’ colony, as per direct orders from Mr. Matthews. If she wanted to stay in the hotel, she would have to pay for a room like a regular guest.

  “It’s the rules,” the man said, and proceeded to shuffle papers inside a cabinet behind his desk, making his best effort to ignore her.

  Josie sat on the steps at the entrance of the hotel wondering what she should do while she waited for Russell. And that’s when the hotel clerk let her know she had a call from Richard.

  “What did you just say?”


  “I asked if you killed my fiancée,” Richard repeated. He sounded calm, but mildly exasperated. “You were the last person to see her.”

  “Of course not! I don’t understand. What happened to her?”

  “I’m not blaming you, Sylvia. Sometimes I wanted to kill her myself, she was so rude. I just want to know if you did it.”

  “No! Why would I do that? Why are you calling me Sylvia—? Is she dead? What happened?”

  Richard took a deep breath. “She’s dead, unfortunately. Murdered,” the millionaire added with derision. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, I just wanted to make sure it hadn’t been you. I would be terribly mad at you if you had killed her. Well, mad is a strong word, but for sure disappointed. I’m at the morgue. All of this has been rather unpleasant. So, how are you?”

  “How am I?” Josie faltered, “Shocked. How are you?”

  “Not too well, my dear. It’s terribly sad. Her wedding gown arrived just yesterday—such a beautiful dress. It cost me a fortune. I told the police you were the last person who saw Lina and I think they think now that you killed her. They may stop by to ask you a few questions.”

  “What?”

  “I said that they may want to ask you some questions. Are you deaf? I told them that you were jealous…”

  “Jealous? Why would you say that?”

  “Well, for a start, I was marrying her instead of you, wasn’t I? I guess jealous was the wrong word to use. But you never liked Lina, did you? No one did. Don’t worry, sugar doll, if you didn’t kill her—and I take your word that you didn’t—you have nothing to worry about. The police will sort it out. They’re not going to arrest an innocent woman, are they? Oopsie-doops, my nickel is almost up. Bye now. Say hi to Russell—is he all right?”

  “He’s okay,” the girl managed to respond.

  “That’s good to hear. Guess what? I’m having Bob over for dinner,” he added, in a secretive tone. “His wife is out of town visiting her mother. He complained that he’d been eating cheese and tomato sandwiches all weekend—I couldn’t let him starve, could I? I didn’t tell him that Lina died, though, because I didn’t want to make him feel awkward. Anyway, take care, sweetie. Ta-ta!” Richard hung up.