‘Anna,’ whispered a voice.
She slowly lowered her hands away from her face and lifted her head. The morgue remained utterly silent.
Not again, she thought. This time, it must be my imagination. I didn’t witness John Patrick Bridges dying, but David died in my arms. I saw the last breath bubble out of his mouth and burst.
He’s dead. Like Bernie Fishman told me, there is no such thing as zombies. He’s dead, and dead men don’t speak.
She waited. The morgue’s refrigerating system suddenly clicked and whirred into life and made her start. Her presence in the room must have marginally raised the temperature. She couldn’t make up her mind if she ought to stay here any longer or not. Supposing David wasn’t dead? Or supposing he was dead, but he was still trying to communicate with her? She knew the idea was far-fetched, but right now she was still so stressed that she could have believed anything – even that David was speaking to her from that place that mediums call ‘the Other Side’.
‘Anna,’ whispered the voice. ‘Anna, help me.’
Anna stood up. When she looked at David, her knees almost gave way, and she saw prickles of white light in front of her eyes, as if she were going to faint. His head was still in the same position, and he was still bearded with dried blood, but his eyes were open and he was staring at her.
She took two cautious steps to the side, and his eyes followed her.
‘Anna, don’t leave me. Please, help me. Get it out of me.’
The voice was louder this time, more urgent, and there was no question that it was David’s.
‘Are you still alive?’ she asked him. ‘David – listen to me, are you still alive?’
He didn’t answer, but continued to stare at her, and little by little, his expression began to change. His jaw dropped down as if he were about to scream, and his eyes began to bulge. ‘Anna, get it out of me!’
Anna couldn’t stop herself from shaking. Her medical training told her that she ought to check David for vital signs, feel for a pulse in his blood-encrusted neck, just as she had with John Patrick Bridges. But she knew what the result would be. He might be whispering to her, his eyes might be open, but he wasn’t breathing and his heart wasn’t beating, and by all of the usual clinical criteria life was extinct.
She knew that she shouldn’t be afraid of him, because he was still David. He still looked like her lover and her best friend and the man she had lived with for over three years. At the same time, though, there was something inside of him that was making him plead with her to get it out, even though he was technically dead, and the thought of what that could be really frightened her. What could terrify him as much as that, even after he had breathed his last breath?
‘David,’ she said, but her voice was so quiet that she could scarcely hear it herself. She cleared her throat and said, ‘David,’ louder this time. ‘David, what is it? Don’t you understand, David? I’ve lost you. You’re gone.’
‘Anna – it hurts so much – please, Anna – I can’t – I can’t – Anna, I can’t!’
With that, David began to convulse – jolting up and down on the gurney more and more violently, just as John Patrick Bridges had done. Soon he was heaving himself from side to side as well. The gurney’s framework crashed and clanked, and Anna was frightened that David was going to throw himself on to the floor.
She gripped his left wrist, pinning it down against the gurney’s vinyl mattress, and then she reached over and took hold of his right wrist, too. She leaned across him, trying to press as much of her weight on his chest as she could, even though she weighed less than a hundred and thirty pounds.
For a few moments she had to use all of her strength to keep him flat on his back, but gradually his convulsions began to subside. He gave a few more uncontrolled twitches, and then he lay still. She lifted her head and looked at his blood-bearded face. His eyes remained open, and his jaw was still sagging in that silent scream, but now there was no sign of life at all, not even life after death.
She released her grip on his wrists and stood back. Her own heart was beating so hard and so fast that it hurt. She didn’t know if she ought to go looking for the night-duty doctor or not. She didn’t want to be accused of tampering with David’s body, since that might compromise her chances of being allowed to take samples. And after all, if she couldn’t understand how David had managed to throw a violent fit when he was dead, she very much doubted if he could.
Of course, David’s expression was grotesquely different now from the placid face he had been wearing when he was first wheeled into the morgue. However, Anna guessed that it was unlikely that the night-duty doctor would come in to check him again; and when the medical examiner eventually showed up to start his post-mortem, he may well think that David’s features were unnaturally rigid and distorted, but he would have no idea how much they had altered since his death.
Anna folded over the sheet to cover his face. As she did so, she said, ‘May God take care of you, David, my darling,’ even though she wasn’t at all sure that it was David who was lying there. In body, perhaps, but in spirit? The morgue seemed even chillier now, and she couldn’t help feeling an urge to get out of there as quickly as she could.
She was halfway to the door when another voice said, ‘Anna.’
It wasn’t David’s voice. It was croaky and old, but it was commanding. She stopped, with her hand raised toward the door-handle. She wanted to hear what the voice was going to say, but on the other hand she was close to panic. She had read Bible stories about people talking in tongues. It was supposed to be a sign that they were possessed. But when did dead bodies start talking in tongues?
‘Anna,’ the voice insisted, as if it expected her to stay and listen. It reminded her of Mr Burroughs, her old science teacher from the Ursuline Academy, who had probably understood her more than anybody else when she was growing up, even her father. But this voice had a threatening tone to it, too. It was as cold as a snake sliding across the tiled floor toward her.
‘Don’t try to interfere, Anna. The end has been coming for a long, long time. Nothing can stop it now, especially not you.’
‘Who are you?’ she retorted, even though she was so frightened that it was almost a scream.
There was no reply, so she turned around and went back to the gurney and pulled down the sheet. It was still David under there, with the same terrified expression on his face. She stood there with the corner of the sheet in one hand, breathing hard.
She was just about to drop it back when David’s tongue emerged from his open mouth, pale and bluey-gray, more like a slug than a human tongue. It circled around his lips, licking off the dried blood, and then it disappeared back into his mouth again.
Anna crossed herself. She had stopped going to church long ago, but she felt that she had just seen something appear from hell, and she couldn’t think what else to do for self-protection.
FIVE
It makes no difference how goddamn psychic you are, you can never see your own fate coming until it turns up on your doorstep with a box of moldy candies in its hand and a cheesy grin on its face. If psychics could really see the future, they wouldn’t step out in front of buses without looking or contract HIV from rent boys or find themselves trapped in burning theaters halfway through their comeback performance like that famous French clairvoyant whose name escapes me (so, you know, he couldn’t have been all that famous).
In spite of that, I should have foreseen what the consequences of my fortune-telling session with old Mrs Ratzenberger were going to be, considering her early-stage Alzheimer’s and her overwhelming wealth. One day I’m going to write a book about my fortune-telling experiences in Miami, and I shall call it The Rich And The Ga-Ga.
Anyhow, we were sitting on the veranda of Mrs Ratzenberger’s glassy and stainless-steely house on East Star Island Drive. For those of you who are not too familiar with Miami, Star Island is a man-made lozenge of land situated to the west of Miami Beach in Biscayne Bay and
accessible only by a narrow causeway. If you’re thinking of buying a home here, make sure you have at least seven-point-five million in your back pants’ pocket. Mrs Ratzenberger’s property was valued at nine.
You would have thought that life was a kind of never-ending paradise for Rosa Ratzenberger. Here we were, sitting under the crimson bougainvillea with the bay glittering all around us, drinking champagne with white strawberries bobbing around in it. You wouldn’t have taken her for eighty-three, because her ash-blonde hair was immaculately bobbed and her face was as smooth and shiny as a Venetian carnival mask. She was wearing loose silky peach-colored pajamas and sandals, and her scarlet fingernails and toenails were perfectly polished. You could have opened your own jewelry store with the diamond and emerald and ruby rings that sparkled on her fingers, or at least a concession selling high-class knuckledusters.
All that gave away her age was the paper-thin skin on the back of her hands and her suntanned cleavage, which looked like one of those crinkly chicken roasting bags after two-and-a-half hours in the oven. Well – that and the fact that she was way out on the left-hand side of doolally.
As wealthy and as groomed as she was, Mrs Ratzenberger was in a state of high agitation. She was convinced that her husband Frank was having an affair with Celia Briscoe, the catering manager at Ocean Palms Golf Club, where he now spent most of his life after retiring from his bagel-bakery business in Queens. Celia Briscoe was forty-two, so she was only half Frank’s age, and she was a natural blonde with blinding-white teeth and enormous shadayim who wiggled her ass as she walked across the restaurant. Not only that, but she was a shiksa. That was the way Mrs Ratzenberger described her, anyhow, which I have to confess made me pretty darn keen to meet this Celia Briscoe myself.
‘Do you have any proof that Frank and this Celia Briscoe are playing hide the salami together?’ I asked Mrs Ratzenberger. ‘Have you checked his cell for any incriminating messages?’
She didn’t answer at first, but watched me intently as I laid out a circle of fifteen cards on the gray oak-topped table, plus a cross of five cards in the center. This afternoon I was using a deck of eighteenth-century French cards that I had bought years ago in a magic store in Greenwich Village: the Parlor Sybil, which roughly translated means a person in your living-room who you are dumb enough to pay to tell your fortune.
‘He’s not interested in me any more,’ she said at last, flapping her hand. ‘He comes back home from the golf club around seven or eight, then he just sits in front of the TV and watches baseball or Man v. Food until it’s time to go to bed. Hardly says a word, not even, “How was your day?” Monday they gave me a celebratory lunch at the Jewish Museum for all the funding I’ve been giving them over the years. But did Frank give a damn?’
‘I don’t know, Mrs Ratzenberger,’ I confessed. ‘Did he?’
She reached across the table and prodded my forearm with her sharp red fingernail. ‘When I told him all about it – the lunch, and the certificate they gave me – he said, “Oh! A certificate already! But what did they give you to eat?” Then before I could answer he said, “Don’t tell me. Chicken-turkey soup! Chicken-turkey soup that tastes of nothing! That’s all they ever serve at The Jewish Museum, chicken-turkey soup, and it tastes of nothing. Not chickens. Not turkeys. It don’t even taste of water.”’ She threw her hands up. ‘There! That’s Frank for you! He’s complaining about the soup, and he wasn’t even there!’
‘Um,’ I said. ‘Why not let me start turning these cards over and see what the future has in store for you, Mrs R?’ I had been here nearly an hour already, and I was booked to give another reading at the James Hotel in two hours’ time. The trouble was, most of these old biddies weren’t really interested in what their cards foretold. They just wanted an afternoon’s companionship from a slightly battered but reasonably good-looking reprobate like me. The rich may be richer than us, but they get just as lonely. Lonelier, even. The black American Express card may buy you anything you want, but it has never been known to whisper the words, ‘I love you.’
‘Even in the feathers, it’s the same,’ said Mrs Ratzenberger. ‘Frank’s rope never rises. Never. Not once in three years now! He’s using up all his energy on that shiksa, that’s what I think! You should see Marty! All I have to do is pop my fingers, and what do I get?’
‘I don’t know. What do you get? And who’s Marty?’
‘Marty’s my masseur. Well, he’s more of a personal trainer. He comes three times a week to keep me in shape. Just because I’m eighty-three, that doesn’t mean I can’t stay in shape! Look at Jane Fonda! She’s only eight years younger than I am, and I have a much less wrinkly neck.’
‘But Marty …?’
‘Oh, Marty! His rope rises! Oh, yes!’ She tried to pop her fingers to demonstrate how she triggered a response from Marty, but she was wearing too many rings and it just looked as if she were desperately clawing at the air.
I didn’t exactly see how Mrs Ratzenberger could give Frank a hard time for his alleged adultery with the shiksa if she were playing pop the schmeckel with Marty – especially since it was more than likely that poor old Frank couldn’t get his rope to rise for any woman, whatever her age and whatever her religion and however impressive her shadayim.
But to get her off the subject I turned over the first card, and it was the nine of hearts – Surprise – which showed a brown-haired woman in a long red apron standing in shock in front of an empty birdcage.
‘There!’ I said. ‘This is one of the best cards in the deck.’ (It is, too, believe me. It always means good luck. You don’t seriously imagine that the Incredible Erskine could ever tell anything but the truth to his gullible and highly lucrative clientele?) ‘This card means that something very, very satisfying is coming your way, Mrs Ratzenberger, and it’s a surprise. It may have escaped your notice but the first three letters of “surprise” can be pronounced like “sir”. Then there’s a “p” which may be a discreet reference to a part of this “sir’s” anatomy. And then, at the end of “surprise” you get the last four letters which spell “rise”!’
‘You don’t mean—?’ said Mrs Ratzenberger with a frown, although the frown was only in her voice. Her Botox didn’t allow her actual face to frown.
‘I’m only telling you what the cards are telling you, Mrs Ratzenberger, and you were the one who shuffled them, after all.’
It was a very warm afternoon. Even out here in the balmy breeze of Biscayne Bay it was over thirty-four degrees, and I was beginning to feel extremely sweaty and tangled-up in my ankle-length black djellaba, although I had dropped back its tall pointy hood. I had bought it online for $37 from Djellabas-R-Us because it was Moroccan and supposed to keep a man cool and comfortable in the summer heat. My current girlfriend Sandy had sewn silver stars on it in order to give me that psychic look. Actually I felt more like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
‘But even if Frank does manage to get it up,’ said Mrs Ratzenberger, ‘what’s going to happen then?’
‘Without being crude about it, I imagine that you two will schtup. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘But it’s not going to change anything, is it? He’ll still go off playing golf every day, and he’ll still come back in the evening and not say a word to me.’
‘It’s hard to say, if you’ll excuse my double entendre. Maybe, once his physical prowess returns to him, he’ll show more interest in you. You have to take these things one schtup at a time. Anyhow,’ I said, ‘that’s only the first card. We have nineteen more to go, and who knows what they’re going to predict?’
‘To be honest with you, Harry, I was hoping maybe for a divorce. Frank and me don’t have a pre-nup, and I could easily get to keep the house and two-thirds of his money. He’s worth forty-three million at least.’
‘Why don’t you see what the other cards have to say, before you file?’
‘All right,’ Mrs Ratzenberger nodded. And then, as I turned up the next card, she sa
id, ‘What surprise?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You said I was going to have a surprise. Did you say that, or was it my lawyer? I did talk to my lawyer, didn’t I, about the divorce?’
‘Mrs Ratzenberger, right now you’re not filing for divorce, you’re having your fate foretold in the cards.’
Mrs Ratzenberger blinked at me as if she had never seen me before. Then, suddenly, she smiled as much as her collagen-inflated lips would allow her. ‘Go on, Harry,’ she said, coquettishly. ‘What’s the next card?’
‘Ah,’ I said. I was almost as confused as she was. When I first came down from New York and started telling fortunes in Miami, I have to admit that I used to find these ‘senior moments’ pretty disconcerting. Once I visited an elderly woman in Surfside, and after I had spent two-and-a-half hours reading her cards I left her house only to realize that I had left my cell behind. When I rang her doorbell to retrieve it she welcomed me inside and said, ‘Come on in, Mr Erskine! I can’t wait for you to tell me my fortune!’ So – I had to read her cards twice, but at least she paid me twice.
I turned over the next card. It showed a man in a tattered yellow tailcoat sitting in a wing chair looking seriously sick. A young woman is bringing him a bowl of soup but he looks like he has no appetite. Maladie, Illness, the eight of spades. This card hadn’t come up since the last time I read Mrs Zlotorynski’s fortune and two weeks later she died of deep vein thrombosis.
‘Well, that doesn’t look too encouraging,’ said Mrs Ratzenberger. She put on her upswept Cadillac-fin spectacles to peer at it more closely. ‘I’m not going to get sick, am I? I’ve been very short of breath lately. My doctor says it’s stress due to self-absorption, whatever that means, but I’m not so sure.’
Plague of the Manitou Page 4