Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem

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Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem Page 13

by Jonathan Woods


  A cup of tea laced with Teacher’s doesn’t help. I smoke another cigarette. I even try reading a novel. The Dunwich Horror. Next moment I’m pacing back and forth between my hot plate and the drafty windows of my rented lodgings. Ancient floorboards creak under my steps; dead flies litter the windowsill.

  I can’t stop thinking about the lady who vanished. Her haunting face materializes like a faded photograph in the cloud of blue cigarette smoke circumnavigating my room. She must have been freezing her ass off in that skimpy outfit with her coat hanging open, her nipples as hard as teak in the bone-chilling damp.

  When I look down I have a hard-on.

  I need some air.

  I need to get laid.

  Shrugging into my raincoat and leaving the gold earring on my bedside table, I stomp down to the vaporetto stop for San Marco. A crowd is waiting, including several attractive women. I try to catch an eye, even commenting on the arctic weather to one tart wearing a gypsy skirt and dangly bead earrings. But there are no takers. Their mothers warned them long ago to beware of gringos bearing gifts.

  It’s even colder out on the water, as we cross the channel from the Lido to Venice proper. But I stay on deck sucking down the salt-rimmed air.

  When we arrive at the Piazza San Marco vaporetto stop, I stroll up the stone jetty to the Hotel Danieli. A grande olde dame, a former doges palace from the Renaissance, the Danieli looks across the jetty to the treacherous tides and currents of the Basino di San Marco, where the Grande Canal meets the unforgiving sea. Its unassuming dusty rose façade reminds me of a lithe older woman who answers her door wearing a terrycloth robe. Going inside is like watching her disrobe. The lobby is a vast golden whorehouse, its atrium soaring five-stories, ascended on two sides by a grand staircase. The pick-up lounge, supported by exquisitely carved columns and soundproofed by thick oriental carpets, is as vast as the Russian steppe.

  Taking a Wall Street Journal from the pile at one end of the concierge desk, I sit down in the lobby lounge and order a beer. On my left two women sit close together talking earnestly in German. I wonder if they’re planning the resurrection of the Third Reich. The younger, perhaps in her thirties, suddenly jumps up and runs from the lounge in tears. A domestic dispute.

  Abandoning my newspaper, I pick up my glass of beer and walk over to the survivor, a woman at the end of her fifties stuffed into tight leather pants and a chocolate-brown blouse, her hair combed straight back like a man’s. High cheekbones have kept her face from collapsing. But her mouth is as thin and careworn as a cheap motel room.

  “Is this seat taken?” I ask.

  She smiles up at me, her canine teeth glinting in the light of a chandelier, and motions noncommittally to the empty chair.

  “May I be entirely honest?” I ask, leaning forward from the edge of the seat.

  “If you must.”

  She speaks English with a heavy Berlin accent.

  “You were the only person I saw when I entered the room.”

  “Maybe you should consult an ophthalmologist.”

  I take a sip of my beer.

  “I like Venice in the winter,” she says.

  “Cold as a witch’s tit out there,” I say. Then: “Have you had lunch?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve just eaten breakfast.”

  “Then an aperitif or a café correcto?”

  “I’d like to get some air.”

  “Have you been to the Lido?”

  Outside she lights a cigarette.

  “Can you float me a loan?” I whisper, nibbling her neck. “A hundred and fifty euros.”

  Holding the cigarette between her lips, she rummages in her gaudy chain-draped designer bag the size of a small suitcase, hands me a wad of currency. I slip it into my money clip without counting it.

  “You’re American,” she says.

  “Does that make a difference?”

  “Not so long as you profess your undying hatred of George Bush.”

  I clutch her arm and start down the quay toward Piazza San Marco.

  “Not the vaporetto,” she says. “Let’s take a water taxi. So much more intimate.”

  Who am I to object? It’s her nickel. Though I don’t see what’s so intimate about having the two-man speedboat crew gazing lustfully at her ass whenever it sways in their direction.

  Her raccoon-collared bomber jacket goes well with her mannish haircut. Just before we board the water taxi I buy a paper cone of roasted chestnuts from a street vendor. We stand in the open cockpit of the motor launch scarfing them down and throwing the shells overboard.

  “Why was your friend crying?” I ask.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Then make something up.” I take a long swig from my flask before offering it to her, which she declines. “Or tell me your life story.”

  After a pause she says: “My father was an officer in the Waffen-SS. He was stationed in Venice among other places.”

  “That’s weird.” I gaze off across the turgid lagoon. “My dad worked for J. Edgar Hoover.”

  “He was thrown in prison when the Reich fell. They wanted to bring him to trial and execute him. But he had too many friends. After awhile all charges were dropped and he was released. Then he met my mother and here I am.”

  “The key to this game is attention to detail,” I say. I pull a photograph from my wallet. It shows J. Edgar Hoover and another man standing on the steps of the Supreme Court. “That’s my father,” I say, pointing at the other man in the picture.

  She laughs.

  “I guess your old man did some bad shit during the war,” I say.

  But she’s not in a confessional mood.

  “I’ll have that drink now, if you don’t mind.

  We don’t talk for the rest of the crossing.

  From the docks we walk up Gran Viale Santa Maria Elizabetta. The café lights are on. The fog seems to be rolling back in.

  “Let’s stop for a coffee first,” I say.

  “No,” she says. “Let’s buy a bottle and take it up to your room.”

  In no time we’re naked, sitting cross-legged on my bed drinking shots of slivovitz and doing high fives. The steam radiator is actually giving off heat and I’m getting excited looking at her plush, slightly-gone-to-seed body.

  “Look.” She points. “Your thing is sticking up.”

  “My thing? You mean my cock.”

  Next moment she’s sucking on it like it’s the holy grail of lollipops.

  It’s the beginning of the end.

  An hour later my German frau, sated, snores contentedly. I realize I don’t even know her name. Nor does she know mine, unless she glanced at the unopened letters on my night table.

  Curious, I open her handbag. Amid an assortment of feminine debris, I find a leather cardholder containing a MasterCard and a German personalausweis card. They bear the same name: Sabrina Bauer.

  Her name has an alliterative crispness like an ice-cold melon with prosciutto. But it doesn’t matter because soon she will be dead!

  Jesus! Where did that thought come from?

  For a flash moment I see her nude body, twisted by death, sprawled across my bed. A scarlet stain defaces the white linen sheets.

  Then I’m thrown back amid the living, where I stagger backward, collapsing into the chair at my writing desk. Frau Bauer snorts and turns over onto her stomach. Her sex peaks provocatively beneath the crevasse of her buttocks.

  But I’m no longer interested. The lust that drove me to the Danieli is back again but Sabrina Bauer’s charms are not the solution.

  My armpits pool with sweat. My head throbs. My ears ring with a siren’s song.

  It’s the voice of the woman I witnessed at the cemetery. I’m sure of it, even though I’ve never heard her speak.

  Pulling the blankets around Frau Bauer’s bare shoulders, I grab my coat and the not quite empty bottle of slivovitz and slip out quiet as a mouse. By my watch it’s only four o’clock when I leave my stuffy Victorian ro
oming house but the day has already sunk in deep despairing evening.

  Feverishly I tramp up and down the Gran Viale Elizabetta searching for my graveyard naiad in the half dozen cafes still open.

  Nada.

  Then I decide to go back to the graveyard. Why? It’s lunacy to think the woman I’m searching for would return there at this miserable hour. But I go anyway. On the way I stop at a pharmacy, with its glowing green cross, and buy a flashlight. The back street route I take is devoid of passing cars, of any human appearance.

  When I slip through the narrow opening left in the wrought-iron cemetery gate, light streams from the windows of the caretaker’s apartment. Giuseppe is smoking a cigar. An espresso pot steams on the stove. I knock on the door and enter, holding up the bottle of slivovitz.

  Giuseppe’s eyes light up.

  “My friend, my friend. You are just in time for coffee.”

  He pours two cups. To each I add the last of the slivovitz in equal parts.

  “Do you know the woman who was here early in the morning?” I ask.

  “What woman?”

  “The one in the long black coat.”

  Giuseppe still has a blank look on his face, though this is not an unusual condition.

  “Come on! Don’t be a jerk.” I finish my coffee in two gulps. “She was standing looking at one of the gravestones on the middle path.”

  “No woman,” says Giuseppe. He winks at me; taps his forehead. “You need woman?” he asks in English. Giuseppe is trying to improve his English. I wonder whether he’s considering pimping his sister to me. A country girl, buxom, olive-skinned, and brainless.

  “Of course there was a woman. She was wearing a black coat. Under the coat she was nearly naked. You should remember that.”

  Giuseppe shakes his head.

  “No woman,” he says obstinately.

  Whatever. My nerves prick me to my feet. Giuseppe rises and grips me around the shoulders. As I leave he says:

  “You drink less slivovitz.” Then, as an afterthought: “Fuck more.”

  A stupid grin splits his face like a knife through a cantaloupe.

  My flashlight piercing the pitch-blackness like a Cyclopean eye, I walk up into the cemetery and stop at the third headstone on the middle path. It’s a cheap, unpolished stone with just a name and dates. Aliza Paolozzi 1924 – 1944

  Was Aliza Paolozzi a relative of the woman I’m so desperately seeking? Based on the dates, was the deceased a victim of some Nazi atrocity? Or just an unfortunate death at a young age? Brought down by cholera, typhoid fever or some other malevolence.

  There are no clues to even begin to answer these questions. But a new possibility rises in my head. My mystery woman and the deceased might share a last name. It’s a long shot, but tomorrow I’ll ask my landlady if she knows any families with the name Paolozzi.

  Mist congeals like oil and drips down my collar as I slog back toward civilization. My feet are wet and turning blue. But my mind is revved-up.

  I’m loco with desire. If it’s the last thing I do, I must find this odd, beautiful, nameless woman and take her to bed. It’s how Adam must have felt when he came upon Eve in the Garden.

  Walking through the treacle-thick fog shrouding the Lido, I realize I’ve made a wrong turn somewhere. The Gran Viale Elizabetta with its beckoning cafes should be just up ahead. But it isn’t. Only another empty street overarched by the blank looming facades of mausoleum-like houses. The only sound is the reverberating echo of my own footsteps.

  Around a curve I find the Snack Bar Gogol. A long narrow room with a bar down one side. Dim lights. A guy polishing a glass, moving the stale panini and tramazini around in the flyblown display case.

  And there she is, my bone yard seductress who set my cojones on fire. She sits sideways in a booth toward the back, her bare legs thrust outward in perfection. The tabletop in front of her is empty. Of course she is alone.

  When I enter the Snack Bar Gogol she stares at me with her unearthly seaweed green eyes. A black nausea twists my stomach. I’ve never been so frightened. I want to run for my life. Those eyes know the inside skinny on Hell. Have been there and back.

  Then a gunmetal coin drops like a sluice gate and she’s the world’s finest hooker, an innocent’s first love, and the girl from Ipanema, all rolled into one. The air reeks of her perfume. She’s been waiting for me for a while.

  “Two araks,” I say to the bar guy.

  I carry the drinks over to where she’s now sitting up straight and ease down opposite her.

  Her hand strokes the inside of my leg. I’m going crazy.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “I need you to help me,” she says.

  “Do you live on the Lido?” I ask.

  She puts her finger on my lips.

  “I don’t have much time,” she says.

  The arak goes down like burning acetone.

  “I want to make love to you,” she says. “But first you must promise me. To do the one thing that I ask.”

  I hold up my right hand with two fingers crossed.

  “My mother and father died at Auschwitz. I watched their prison train leave Venice. I should have been on that train. Instead I slept with the local SS Gruppenfuhrer. He treated me like a pet monkey. But I was alive. One day in a rage he pulled out his Lugar and shot me dead. After I had already given him my soul.”

  “That’s a great story,” I say. “My dad worked for J. Edgar Hoover.”

  When she stands up, she’s wearing a glove-tight black dress. Against the fabric her skin is as white as bleached bone. Walking toward the cesso, she looks back, motions to me with one finger. When I follow her in, she locks the door of the pissoir and grabs for my cock. I assume the role of a roué in a French porn novel. There’s barely room for two people, so my seductress rests her ass on the edge of the tin sink jammed in one corner. Her dress rucked above her waist, her legs point to the ceiling. I’m thrusting away like an Olympic swimmer in his final race.

  Except it’s not just me. Two mirrors, one behind the door, the other over the sink, project in either direction a hundred me’s having it off with a hundred murdered Jewish women. No. There must be a thousand thrusting and roiling images stretching toward infinity.

  But all the women have different faces and bodies!

  It’s as though I’m shtuping a chorus line of exotic, wildly enthusiastic shtetl maidens all at the same time. How does that work exactly?

  After a while I have to slow down.

  “What is it you want me to do?” I gasp.

  Next thing I know I’m coming to on the piss-reeking floor of the cesso. At first everything is black & white. Then colors bleed in. The only trace of my seductress is her fading perfume. Staggering to my feet, I tuck away my frazzled dick.

  Back in the bar, it’s just me and the bar guy. My skin prickles, as if someone has beaten me with nettles. When I pay for the araks, my hands shake so badly I can barely count out the coins. I’m geared up. I can do this.

  Outside I immediately go into a jog. Up down. Up down. Up down. Then I turn and head up the street. At the next corner I’m on the Gran Viale Elizabetta, back in familiar territory. I’m running flat out now. The few people out and about turn to look as I race by. My cigarette-destroyed lungs wheeze and gasp for air.

  I bound up the steps of the boardinghouse where I live. The front door crashes open. I bowl past my landlady Signora Ricci, knocking her on her ass, and bolt up the stairs.

  When I throw open the door to my room, Frau Bauer sits up in a fright, just as I rest the barrel of my .25 caliber pistol against her forehead and pull the trigger.

  No one in here believes me. That I was intimate with a ghost. Of course, I produce no evidence to substantiate this claim. I don’t tell the doctors about the gold earring that I hide under my tongue whenever any of them or the hospital attendants are in the vicinity. If I told them, they would confiscate it.

  Yes, I tell them. I fucked a ghost. The ghost of a Je
wish woman murdered in 1944 for no reason at all. Murdered by Waffen-SS Gruppenfuhrer Heinrich Bauer.

  Shark Bite

  The twelve-foot tiger shark moved effortlessly beneath the undulating, silvery surface of the sea. Having risen from the frigid depths, she felt pleasure from the warmth of the sun stroking her body. At the shallowest portion of her run, the sunlight drew her hulking shadow across blank patches of open sand.

  After the long winter she was pregnant again. Which put her in an ill humor. She wanted to pick a fight with an air dweller; rip him to bits.

  Hunger surged through her gut. She flicked her tail angrily, her fin breaking through the barrier between water and air in a white-edged cleaving, like a scar.

  Through the rolling lens of the sea, the air dwellers walked at the edge of the beach, stood looking out to sea, splashed in the shallows. But none came further into the water then where the waves broke on the shallow sandbar, well away from the deep drop off where she circled.

  The day before she had chanced upon an air dweller flailing pathetically across the sea’s pulsing surface. Sweeping up from below, drawn inexorably by the air dweller’s thrashing movements, she struck the swimmer. Her teeth chomped through muscle and bone. Amid a crescendo of desperately splashing limbs, she drew the air dweller under, leaving a wake of spreading blood and torn fragments of flesh.

  The day after the swimmer ran out of luck, a shark hunter drove out from town in his cowboy-red F-150 pickup. He sported a waxed mustache, cold blue eyes, and a faded cap bearing a crescent moon and palmetto. Along the calf of his right leg a jagged slug-white scar marked a long ago encounter with a denizen of the deep. An inflated two-man Zodiac flopped in the truck bed.

  Armed to the teeth, the shark hunter and his assistant pushed the Zodiac through the surf and scrambled aboard. The surfers, playing it safe, waved from their stools up at the snack bar, holding their long necks aloft in mock salute.

  “Piss on them,” the shark hunter said.

  For hours they cruised the Zodiac back and forth, hither and yon, on both sides of the shark nets anchored 200 yards offshore. They ran Blue Runners and Jacks as bait, dumped sheep’s blood in the water, drank a case of beer, cursed and swore a blue streak.

 

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