“Get outta here,” Pinky says.

“Swear to God,” Ralph tells him. “I seen him. Maybe it’s just some kind of voodoo jive – I don’t know the actual cause of the injury.” His face contorts into a look that’s half smile, half grimace. “What he says is – a zombie got pissed at him and bit it off.”

“Bit off his lip?” Dora gasps. She crosses herself in a surreptitious way, the motion so minimal as to be almost undetectable.

“Like this,” Ralph says, and makes a lunging, biting motion toward Dora, “like a snapping turtle.”

Dora lets out a yelp.

“One bite,” Ralph says. “That’s all it takes.”

Pinky and I catch lunch at Katy’s, a ramshackle place on the Bayou Boeuf that offers a bait shack and boat launch along with sandwiches and drinks.

“Now, that’s a good po’boy,” Pinky says, taking a big swig of Coke to wash down the last bite. “Good as the food is in N’Awlins, it’s gettin’ harder and harder to find a top-drawer po’boy. My personal theory is that you got to get out into the countryside, because the places in town go an’ change the grease too often. What you think, Arthur?”

Arthur is the man behind the counter, apparently an old friend of Pinky’s. (“No one ever forgets me,” Pinky explained. “That’s for damn sure.”) Arthur’s dark face opens in a sweet gap-toothed smile. He shakes his head. “This a genuine compliment or you sayin’ my grease got whiskers?”

“No, I mean it,” Pinky insists. “It’s like aged beef. Young oil’s got no bouquet. It’s just neutral. Doesn’t add anything.”

“Ça s’adonne. Comme çi ça se fait ici? Not just for Arthur’s po’boys, no.”

“My ami here,” Pinky says, indicating me, with a slow doleful shake of head, “tout mauvais. Man stole his chirren.”

“No!” He looks at me with a shocked expression, then looks back to Pinky. “Vraiment?”

The two go back and forth in a patois I can’t understand, and then Pinky says, “Little boys, friend. Not but six years old. My friend breaking his head and heart tryin’ to find them. Afraid they goin’ come to harm, you know. Looking for the man who took them, the path brings him this way.”

“To Katy’s?” His eyes check over to me.

“No, not to Katy’s, not direct. The path takes him to Berwick, where the man we lookin’ for lived. Grew up in that place.”

“You hunt this man?”

“That’s right. Boute à boute.”

“He a black man?”

“No, he’s a white man” – a laugh – “although not as white as me. Crazy man, name of Byron Boudreaux. You know him?”

Arthur shakes his head. “Not me, no.”

“Here’s the thing. We hear this Byron took up with a houngan somewhere round Morgan City. This a while back, few years back.”

Arthur’s eyes widen. “You shittin’ me?”

“That’s what we hear. We’re looking to find this houngan, see if he can tell us anything about where Byron might be now – because we think if we find Byron, we find those little boys. All we know about the houngan: he missin’ his upper lip.”

“Ain?” Arthur holds his upper lip between his thumb and two fingers. “No top lip?”

Pinky nods. “That’s what I’m told.”

“I do hear of this man,” Arthur says. “They say zombie kiss him, take his lip. Man’s famous.”

“What’s his name?” I ask.

“Diment. He the houngan without the lip. Doctor Aristide Diment. Big bizango.”

“What’s a bizango?” I ask.

“A houngan – he’s a voodoo priest, yes? And the bizango, that’s kind of his congregation only they be real close, like a family,” Arthur explains.

“More like a secret society,” Pinky says.

“You got the sickness or problem in your life,” Arthur says, “or you need advice, you go to the houngan. The houngan know how to please the loa, know how to make the mojo – keep your marriage strong, or find you a sweetheart, or get your business goin’ on its way. Some of them know the dark ways, too. Some of them serve with both the hands.” Arthur casts his eyes down, and I see him make a tiny sign of the cross. “Doctor Diment – he one of these.”

“‘Serve with both hands’?”

Arthur continues to look down. He shakes his head.

“That means the priest is a sorcerer,” Pinky says. “Got supernatural powers. Worship with one hand, do magic with the other.”

I nod. “So Diment is a magician. Now I understand Boudreaux’s interest.”

“Yes, but it’s not that simple,” Pinky says. “Voodoo is a very, very complex thing. You could spend a long time with it and never begin to understand. I only know the little bit I do because I had a case once. Supposed to be this woman died of a curse, but her relatives didn’t go for it. Came to me. Turned out she’d been murdered.”

“She poison?” Arthur asks.

Pinky nods. To me, he explains: “There are herbs that heal and potions that sicken. The houngans and manbos – that’s a female priest – study the remedies and poisons in the natural world. It’s part of their training.” He turns to Arthur. “Is that right?”

“That about right,” Arthur says, once again displaying his warm smile. “You might be sayin’ it’s the doctor part of the witch doctor.”

“Supposed to be,” Pinky says, “they only cure you of what’s got a supernatural origin.” He nods toward Arthur. “This Byron Boudreaux, Arthur – he poisoned his own daddy, got sent away for that.”

Arthur winces.

“Poison goes way back with voodoo,” Pinky says, tapping his glass against the tabletop. “Down in the Indies on the plantations, some of the slaves used slow-acting poisons against their masters. That’s what first got them worried down there about the religion of the slaves. Plus there were rumors of supernatural powers – to Christians, that was obviously the devil at work. Witchcraft. Between the poison and the magical powers – pretty soon the plantation owners running scared. You never knew where something bad might come from, who might put a curse on you or poison your food. That’s when the authorities really started trying to repress the religion.”

“Repress it?”

“Oh, they tried and they tried and they tried. Between the government and the church, they thought they could squeeze voodoo down. But what happened was repression just drove voodoo to hide itself. For the most part, it hid right in plain sight. See, the only way slaves could carry on their worship was to pretend they was Christian – which the masters encouraged. Eventually the voodoo got itself all mixed up with Christian practices. All the voodoo loa, the beings who rule the spirit world, have Christian figures or saints as counterparts. The loa Legba, for instance – he’s St. Peter.”

“I heard that once before.” I remember Scott telling me about the figure on the dime: Mercury, St. Peter, and also Legba.

“You see the point, right? Slaves could pretend they’re devout, worshiping St. Peter, and all the time it’s Legba. And then after a while – it’s both.” He turns to Arthur. “What’s another one?”

“The Virgin Mary, she’s Ezili. St. John the Baptist is Chango. St. Patrick, he’s Dambala Wedo. It go like that right down the line.”

I turn to Arthur. “What about Diment,” I ask, “you know him?”

“Jamais,” Arthur says. “Know of him, yes. He live near the cemetery in Morgan City. You go back on 182, get into Morgan City. I think it’s Myrtle street take you down toward the water. You cross over the railroad tracks, keep goin’ little way. They’s a place down there, Lasseigne’s, little corner store. You ask the man in there, Felix. Tell him I sent you. He know where to find Maître Diment.”

“Thanks, Arthur.”

“Yes,” I add, shaking the man’s hand. “Thank you very much.”

“Pas de quoi. Bonne chance.” He nods. “I hope you find your chirren.”