St. Agnes' Eve

by Malachi Stone

  She fixed me with a hard stare. “What I believe isn’t important. What is important is that your buddy Kokker believes it, and he has reason to. So be careful, Ricky. We all know he’s nuts. But some say he may actually possess the real Lilith talisman. I think they’re right.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because going on twenty years ago the want ads suddenly stopped, and Kokker clammed up about the whole thing. He never mentioned the Lilith talisman again.”

  “He invited Diane and me to dinner. January twentieth.”

  Liz blanched. “Don’t go,” she hissed with a hoarse rasp that startled me with its intensity. “Whatever you do, stay home that night. Put the kids to bed early. Hold on to your wife. That’s Saint Agnes’ Eve, an occult holiday, and Kokker and his crowd are way into the dark side.”

  “Saint Agnes’ Eve is the Keats poem, right? Something about a girl seeing her future husband?”

  Liz had pursed her lips while I spoke. She continued to stare right through me. “I’m not talking romance here, Ricky. There are those who believe that the evil dead can be raised on Saint Agnes’ Eve. There’s sure to be a black mass with all the trimmings somewhere within an easy broomstick commute from where we’re sitting right now. And you’re talking about having dinner that night with a man who’s heavy into the black arts. A man who may possess the actual Lilith talisman.”

  “So you’re saying Kokker controls this Sisterhood you believe really exists? Come on, Liz. What does he get out of it?”

  She looked away like someone whose instinct for self-preservation was starting to kick in. Then she said, “Money. Power. Sex, maybe. I get the impression Kokker was one of those guys who was always undersexed growing up. Now he’s got a trophy wife and even she’s not enough for him. See, Lilith was—is—a seducer, of men as well as women. The girls in the Sisterhood are just pure fire and brimstone in bed.”

  “That sounds like the voice of experience,” I said.

  She ignored me. “Kokker has always been obsessed with sex. This Lilith thing plays into his perversions. He may have stumbled onto the darkest secret of the Sisterhood.”

  I took her hand as though she were my sister. “What is it, Liz?”

  She pulled away. “God, you’ve got a lot of negative energy today, Ricky. I can tell just by your touch that you’ve been with him.”

  “So tell me.”

  “See, there is reputed to be an inner circle of purebloods in the Sisterhood, and they all loathe men.”

  “Purebloods? That sounds like kind of a difficult feat to pull off, biologically speaking. I’ve got four kids, remember? Give me credit for knowing a thing or two about human reproduction.”

  “We’re not talking human here. The Sisterhood—at least the purebloods—are a totally separate species, even though they look just like us. Don’t forget you’re talking to a midwife, Ricky. I’ve seen a lot of things in twenty-five years. Some of them have been pretty strange. Plus I take courses to stay current.”

  “In what? Applied witchcraft?” I regretted the remark immediately.

  “Human physiology,” she chided. “With an emphasis in hematology. I run up to SIUE three nights a week. Have you ever heard of parthenogenesis?”

  “What?”

  “Asexual reproduction. Snakes use it sometimes,” she said. “And they’ve been able to induce it in rabbits in the lab. The offspring are always female.”

  “So you’re saying this ‘serpent’s wife’ theory has some biological validity? That the Sisterhood has been able to induce asexual reproduction in humans? How?”

  “Who knows what characteristics, what talents, Lilith may have devised in order to survive her self-banishment to the wilderness? All I can tell you is that science knows parthenogenesis is a natural response to environmental adversity, a last-ditch survival mechanism for preservation of the species. The Sisterhood can reproduce woman-to-woman to pass along their own genetic diversity and refrain from interbreeding with humankind. Specifically, with men.”

  “What are the purebloods afraid of, anyway?” I asked, trying to mollify her as well as myself by poking some holes in her theory. “If all the offspring are female, and they can’t interbreed with males, we’re all pretty safe, aren’t we?”

  “I didn’t say they couldn’t interbreed. I said they could refrain from it.”

  “What does all this have to do with Kokker?”

  “He probably has the talisman, and its power over the Sisterhood is legendary. It goes all the way back to Solomon’s day.”

  “King Solomon? Come on, Liz. What did you do, buy up all the occult books from the Elvis Presley estate?”

  “Go ahead and laugh,” she said, “just do me one favor and skip dinner with Kokker on Saint Agnes’ Eve.”

  “OK, but only if you tell me what King Solomon could possibly have to do with the Lilith talisman.”

  “Legend has it Solomon sealed up seventy-two spirits. Demons. One of them was Lilith. He did it with a charmed dagger, a talisman that could destroy her power over men. Then along came the Babylonians. They sacked the temple and the palace, taking the Jews into captivity. One of the things they plundered, so the story goes, was the Lilith talisman. With me so far?”

  “So the Babylonians let the Lilith genie out of the bottle and didn’t even get to collect on their three wishes?” This was not the conversation I had expected to have when I cut myself shaving that morning.

  “The talisman confers untold wealth and power upon its human possessor for a season, but ultimately brings doom and ruin,” Liz said. “Just remember what happened to King Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. There’s a jinx on the talisman that makes the Hope Diamond look like a lucky rabbit’s foot.”

  “Kokker seems to be doing all right for himself,” I said. “I’m the one could use a little less doom and ruin these days.”

  “But that’s my point,” Liz said. “The thief of the Lilith talisman, the books say, enjoys untold wealth and power for twenty years, but then suffers doom and ruin unless the twenty-year cycle is renewed. See, in nature everything is in cycles. There are twenty-year cycles, hundred-year cycles, millennial cycles. The natural world’s clock spins ‘round and ‘round like the universe. Evil or good, whatever you do comes back to you, we witches say, three times. Nature is cyclical. Time is cyclical. Linear time is a modern hallucination by comparison, a distortion. The true line doesn’t exist in nature.”

  “Liz,” I said, “I’d love to sit here and discuss geometry with you…”

  “I know, I know,” she said, waving her hand as she rose. “You have other people waiting. I’ll give Diaz whatever information I can. Have him come by the shop tonight. Thanks, Ricky.” She took my hand in both of hers, negative energy or not. “Be very careful. For my sake, and for the sake of those you love.”

  I told her I would. That was before the dark side threw me its first curve. She was right. True lines don’t exist in nature.

  Chapter Five

  La Belle Dame Sans Souci

  Rosy lights from Diane’s salon still filtered through the closed draperies and onto the lawn when I came home that night to find all four monkeys lounging in the family room. I went looking for Diane. When I tried the shop door, it was locked. She called out, “Who is it?” in a falsetto singsong.

  “It’s me,” I said, in a voice that sounded even more tired than I felt. I heard the snick of a deadbolt sliding free.

  “You’re alone, aren’t you?” she murmured, suddenly wary. I opened the door and stepped inside.

  Diane stood in the center of Remembrance of Things Past waving a small piece of paper overhead and smiling her best bedroom smile. She was wearing a two-piece outfit—a wedding ring and an engagement ring. All the furniture in the shop had been cleared out.

  Naked as Eve, Diane ran to my arms, practically knocking me down. She waved her slip of paper under my nose. It was a check for fifty thousand dollars. I thought it was a joke at first. Diane maypo
le-danced around me while I studied it. It was made out to Diane Galeer, and signed by Sandra Kokker.

  “She stayed all afternoon,” Diane panted into my ear, leaning on my shoulders. “Bought one piece after another, on the spot, without haggling. She bought everything. She even made me an offer on my Baba’s icon.”

  My eyes darted to the eastern wall of the shop. The icon of the Theotokos still hung there as always. The God-bearer of Sarov. An icon “not made with hands.” Centuries ago, after a miraculous spiritual visitation by the Mother of God to a monastery in Sarov, one monk had a special vision as he slept. The vision led him to the icon’s hiding place where it had been secreted from some forgotten iconoclastic mob. No one then living had ever seen it before. Often illumined in those early days with a supernatural glowing light, the icon was believed to work miracles whenever someone stood before it in true faith and prayed for Mary’s intercession with humility and tears. Diane’s grandmother had managed to hide it away again after the latest mob of iconoclasts took over Russia. Her mother had spirited it to the United States in the lining of a trunk. Diane took courses in art restoration before even attempting the task of cleaning away generations of candle soot. Her painstaking efforts had restored the icon to its original brilliance. I crossed myself. Diane caught me and said, in a reproving tone, “You don’t think I’d ever sell it, do you?”

  I knew better. Once I’d broached the subject of having the icon appraised and insured. It would probably bring six figures from a collector. Diane didn’t speak to me all day. We made up that night, only because her Bible told her not to let the sun go down on her anger. “Come on,” she said now, tugging my wrists toward the workroom. “There’s a bug I want you to kill.”

  I hung my clothes on a hall tree she was in the midst of resurrecting from oblivion. We lay down on a drop cloth she’d spread to protect the mattress on a mission-style double bed that had belonged to my mother, and I killed that bug dead. I do some of my best work in Diane’s workroom.

  Later, I lay next to her, near-dreaming as I stared at the water stain marks and cracks in the ceiling plaster and listened to her voice. Diane invariably wanted to chat after we made love; the more inspired the lovemaking, the more intense the conversation after. She’d talk with her hands. Tonight she was unusually energized. I wanted to believe it was my workroom bug-killing prowess that had caused her excitement, but I knew it had to be the sale.

  “We’re out of debt, Chet,” Diane sighed, her hands behind her head. She rolled toward me, planted a sloppy kiss that bore down on my lips, and burrowed her tongue into my mouth. Then she scissored one leg over mine, a sure sign she wanted seconds.

  I feared that my body would betray me and disappoint her. Maybe Crankenstein would prove cheaper and longer lasting than Viagra. And I didn’t even need a prescription.

  “How does it feel?” she whispered in my ear mere minutes later.

  “Can’t you tell?” I said. It came out like the grunting gasp of a distance runner.

  “To be out of debt, I mean.”

  I drew up my torso to look at her; we both thrust away in up-tempo rhythm. As she always did when she was getting close, Diane slipped her hands behind her head and entwined her fingers in the long, dark tendrils of her hair.

  “Sandra’s really pretty, isn’t she?”

  “Hadn’t thought about it,” I lied.

  “Well, she is,” Diane said, crossing her ankles against the small of my back to hold me inside of her. Or force me in even deeper. “She invited us over for dinner. January twentieth.”

  I stopped what I was doing. “And you said?”

  “I told her we’d love to,” Diane said, her voice smooth and sweet as sangria. “It’ll be a wonderful chance to see her house with all the stuff I sold her set up in it. Maybe by then I’ll have even more to offer her.” She giggled. “Anyway, I couldn’t very well say no, Ricky. I know how you hate to socialize, but for heaven’s sake, the woman’s just handed me fifty thousand dollars.”

  I wasn’t so sure it was for heaven’s sake, but what did I know? Precious blood had been purloined from the highest vessels of my brain to serve a baser purpose. Then Diane said with an impish smile, “She’s got quite a set of what you men call headlights on her, too. Right, Ricky?”

  “Not like yours, baby,” I said a moment later, collapsing against her. “She’s had a little surgery, you know.”

  She play-slapped me on my vaccination scar and said, “So you have been looking, you dirty man, you!”

  I was afraid the mood was gone, that she might be angry. Then she caressed my right hand and brought it gently up to her lips. She looked into my eyes and sucked the business end of my middle finger.

  Saints help me, I was instantly ready again. For Diane, I was ready to break bread with the devil. It looked like she’d already accepted his dinner invitation.

  Chapter Six

  Civil Blood

  I found Diaz already parked in my office when I arrived the next morning. He slumped in a chair, the heels of his size-twelve, spit-shined cop shoes propped up on one corner of my in-tray like they’d been bronzed there. I could take one look at him and tell he’d been working the graveyard shift. He alternated between second and third shift at the Sheriff’s Department so he could keep his days open for us. Specifically, for Janis.

  Diaz stood nearly six feet two. He was my age but muscled like an All-American, his glossy dark hair lying straight back, his moonlight-pale forehead, strong jaw and steely features irresistible to women—except for the woman he wanted. Diaz was like a dog where Janis was concerned, but they’d never dated as far as I knew. She’d always be the one to give him his marching orders at the firm: to tell him which deadbeats had to be found and served, which elusive witnesses needed interviewing. She never led him on exactly, as far as I could tell, but her simply being there was all the encouragement Diaz needed.

  I’d thought for years that Janis and Diaz would make an ideal couple: both devout Catholics, both smart investigators. He’d never remarried after losing Ellen, the beloved wife of his youth, to ovarian cancer years ago. Janis, a single working mother, struggled to raise a teenage daughter needing a father figure. Perfect, right? I knew Diaz thought so. That only left Janis to make it a hat trick.

  “Liz Hare’s girlfriend playing hard to get? A little impromptu game of lezbo leapfrog?” he asked in a tired monotone. He’d gotten my message.

  “More like hide-and-seek,” I said. “And we’re keeping track of our time on this one.”

  He pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket and waved it at me by way of bored acknowledgement. “Liz and I are old pals,” he said.

  “The Carla Tremayne murder? She said you’d remember. Said you even suspected her at one time.”

  “She was so right for that,” Diaz said, shaking his head. “And that was no murder, man. That was more of a hog-butchering jamboree, you want my opinion.”

  “Pretty bloody?”

  Diaz slumped lower in the chair. Moments passed. I figured Liz probably owed us about seven bucks for the conversation so far. Finally, he said, “Looked like she was wearing a low-cut red satin dress until you got closer.” He sawed the karate-chop edge of his hand back and forth across his chest. “Whoever did her hacked them clean off at the bust line, then took their time stabbing her over and over, every stab missing the heart. She just kept on pumping the blood out. No defensive wounds, either.”

  “She was a hooker, right?”

  “A gal would have to be pretty damn well paid to let them do all that to her, wouldn’t you say? And no, we had no evidence she was a hooker, other than the fact she was working in a massage parlor at the time. No arrests, no traces of customer DNA in any of the usual hidey-holes. Strictly Hoosier hand jobs. She was no socialite, that’s for sure. They might have paid more attention to her if she had been. Take my advice: don’t get murdered if you’re poor. They’ll treat your case like spitting on the sidewalk.”

  “Corone
r did an autopsy, right?”

  Diaz erupted with a dry, spasmodic wheeze of a laugh—the laugh of a man who’s been working way too many hours and has seen a few too many atrocities along the way.

  I asked, “What’s funny?”

  “I just thought of that crazy Lester,” Diaz said. “That was before he got himself elected coroner. He had his first gig as a night assistant down at the morgue back then. Had Tremayne’s corpse all hosed off and nicely laid out on the slab before I could even get there. Who knows how much evidence might have gone down the drain, you know? Anyway, once Lester knows he’s got me for an audience, he looks down right in the dead broad’s face—gets all intimate-like—and goes, ‘Hey, baby, I’d tell you a joke that’d make you laugh your tits off, but I see you already heard it.’”