“Maybe once, years and years ago. But nothing in recent memory. She was a lonely young woman, detective. I am going to miss her terribly. I loved her very much.”

“You loved her.”

“Yes.”

“Was there ever a time that you two . . .”

“Dated?”

“Yes.”

“I’m gay, detective.”

“I see,” Paris says, choosing not to jot that bit of information in his notebook. “I hope you didn’t expect me to just know that.”

“No,” Gaston says. “I suppose not. But I trust it answers your question.”

“It does. But only one of them.”

“Touché.”

“Did Fayette work on the twentieth of this month?”

Gaston checks the calendar blotter on his desk. “No. She was off that day.”

“Can I ask where you were on the twentieth?”

“I was here. I closed the shop at six-thirty, stopped at the CVS and bought every cold medication they had. I then went home, took said drugs, and curled up with The English Patient.”

Paris is going to assume he is talking about the book or the movie. “And you didn’t go out?”

“Ever take NyQuil, detective? No. I didn’t go out. I was comatose.”

Paris flips shut his notebook. “Anything else you can add, Mr. Burke?”

“Only that Faye was also very good with computers. She set up everything here. The accounting software, the database for our mailing lists.” Suddenly, Gaston brings his hand to his mouth. “I just realized something.”

“What’s that?”

Gaston Burke says: “I am absolutely dead without her.”

16

The dead live here.

The cauldron, the nganga, sits in the center of the room, a room decorated with black shag carpeting, black walls, black ceiling. Twelve feet by twelve feet. The sparse light from the half-dozen votive candles deployed in a loose six-foot circle seems to soak into the darkness like moon-silkened blood into virgin snow.

Outside, in the hallway, there are red and green lights strung along the crown molding; a pine-scented wreath between the elevators, just above the call buttons. In the lobby, there is a huge silver tree, ringed with multicolored lights and laden with dazzling ornaments.

In here, there are no lights. In here, it is always midnight. In here, it is a place called Matamoros, a place called El Mozote. In here it is My Lai. Srebenica. Amritsar. Phnom Penh. In here, in this undying darkness, the silence is interrupted only by the screams of the dead, cold and unavenged, their pleadings a brutal red sea at the bottom of my cauldron.

But the black room doesn’t hear them. The black room stores their pain, nurtures it.

I made the nganga, my first, from an old Charmglow gas grill I found on a tree lawn on Neff Road. I waited until the middle of the night to bring it up in the service elevator. If anyone had seen me, they most certainly would have wondered what I was going to do with a huge, dilapidated gas grill in an apartment building with no balconies.

No pets, no kids, no barbecues, the building super had told me when I scoped the Cain Towers apartments on Lee Road for the first time. Of the twenty or so apartments, it was hard to believe there wasn’t a cat, a kid, or an hibachi lurking in one of them, but these were the rules.

I sanded and painted the round, deep bowl, then emblazoned Ochosi onto its side. It now contains flesh. Flesh of this earth. Flesh that is rotting. It will only be a matter of time until the smells reach the hallway, the elevator.

I must act.

I squat next to the cauldron, sip the Metusalem rum laced with the very last of the Amanita muscaria, the rarest of magic mushroom. I will need more. I light the cigar and exhale smoke in a casual orbit around me. Smoke draws the gods. Smoke masks the overwhelming odors of human meat gone bad.

I inhale deeply, drawing strength from the ill-starred spirits in the nganga, filling my lungs, my being, with the power of such tormented flesh. The brain of a whore. The brain and hands of a seducer . . .

I close my eyes.

I am nkisi.

I begin to dream of Mexico as the amanita takes hold. I dream myself fourteen, standing nude, drenched in my own sweat, the sweat of others. I am in the room over Cedrica Malo’s bodega, waiting for the dry creak of the first step, the first of eighteen dry, wooden steps that will bring a watcher, a toucher, a torturer. The fan overhead turns slowly, barely molesting the air so thick with sour smells. There are soiled black silk sheets on the bed; gold-veined mirrors above.

Suddenly, the step cries out again, its aching back wondering how many more.

Yet I know that, outside, the hot Tijuana sun still sears the sidewalks, the streets, the very minds of the reprobates who come here. It is just afternoon. Hours to go.

So they come. Eighteen steps, turn to the left, one or two more steps. Push. There is no lock on the door to the room above Malo’s. One is not needed. The door opens and the noise intrudes quickly after, crashing inside me like a black gale; followed, always, by the hideous touching, by the fantasy of skulls caving in, razors carving flesh, throats, gurgling with contrition.

All the men who climb the stairs are big-fisted, like my dad.

All the women, rich and violent.

Because I am the grail. Fourteen years old, unlined, shoulders and hands like a man. I am the prize that Cedrica Malo offers in her lottery, the one it costs five hundred dollars to play, the one that will make us both rich.

Sometimes the lottery winners ask me to trade in pain. Sometimes, in sacrifice. But always I am bound to deal in pleasure, and to collect its many debts.

The black room swoons.

El brujo esta aquí.

The witch is here.

And I will look you in the eye and tell you I am an itinerant farm-worker from Culiacán, and you will believe me. I will tell you I operate a hot air balloon over Napa Valley, and you will believe me. I will tell you I am a baker from New Orleans, and you will believe me.

I will fuck you in your marriage bed, my workman’s fatigues around my ankles, while your husband fetches the mail.

The blood will flow, sweet and plenteous.

I will tell you that I love you.

The world will fall silent.

And you will believe me.

17

She scans the newspaper for details, but this day, there is no mention of the Willis Walker murder in the Plain Dealer. It had made the second section for one day, a small item that said a man named Willis James Walker, forty-eight, had been found dead in a room at the Dream-A-Dream Motel, and that cause of death had not been determined. Nor were there any suspects in custody.

She is sitting at a window table at a restaurant on the west bank of the Flats, watching the river flow, sunglasses down, an untouched plate of al pomodoro with angel hair pasta growing old in front of her.

She had managed to sleep through the night, which frightened her a little. Somehow, the image of Willis Walker on the floor of that filthy bathroom had not invaded her dreams. She had thought she would be haunted by the image for years to come—probably as she sat in a jail cell at the ORW—but, so far, it isn’t happening. And that is a little unnerving.

Perhaps it’s because she knows that she has a job to do. To get this money into a trust. To raise her daughter. Willis Walker was a big, violent man standing between her and that goal. Fuck him, she thinks. He took his chances and lost.

He hit on the wrong damn girl.

She pays the check, bundles up, and steps outside. She walks down Main Avenue for a few blocks, to Center Street, where her car is illegally parked. She turns onto the nearly deserted street and is happy not to see a bright orange ticket on her windshield, her mind already a deadfall of numbers, apprehension, sorrow, promise, fear.