The 5th Witch Read online

  “I’m blind!” Charlene cried out. “I can’t see anything, Doug! Everything’s gone black!”

  “Vasquez,” Chief O’Malley demanded. “What have you done to these people? What do you want?”

  Orestes Vasquez came across and stood over him, so close that all Chief O’Malley could see of him were his sharply creased white pants and his black-and-white alligator shoes with their almond-shaped toecaps.

  “I thought I made myself crystal clear, Chief O’Malley. All I am looking for is a little cooperation. You do your police thing. I will do my business thing. We don’t have to be bosom buddies. We don’t have to go fishing together or wear matching sweaters. So long as we stay out of each other’s hair, live and let live, everything’s going to be fine.”

  The wind began to die down until it blew with nothing more than a sinister, sibilant whistle, and Chief O’Malley was able to climb to his feet. Lida Siado came across and stood very close to Orestes Vasquez, holding his arm. She still had the clamshells in her eye sockets, yet Chief O’Malley had the strange feeling that she could see him quite clearly.

  “Can you give these people their sight back?” he asked.

  “Yes, if you promise to cooperate with us.”

  Chief O’Malley looked around. Some of his guests were stumbling around the patio, calling out for their friends and loved ones like lost children. “Mary! Mary!” “Guy! Where are you? Guy!” Others were even crawling across the flagstones, too frightened to stand. Still more were huddled together, clinging to each other in desperation, as if frightened that the darkness would drag them away.

  “Doesn’t look like I have much of a choice.”

  “Oh, you always have a choice, Chief O’Malley. It’s just that some choices are more palatable than others.”

  “My wife will get her sight back?”

  “Everybody. All you have to do is say the word.”

  Chief O’Malley nodded. “Okay, then. I’ll see what kind of a game plan I can come up with.”

  “I need your promise, Chief O’Malley.”

  Chief O’Malley took a deep, angry breath. He had never made any concessions to a criminal, ever, even when his cousin Mike had been ambushed and shot dead three years ago by Puerto Rican racketeers. But what else could he do? How could he leave all of these people blinded?

  “How did you do it?” he asked Lida Siado. “Where did that wind come from?”

  She lifted the drum around her neck. “I was taught by the Uitoto Indians, in the Amazon Rainforest in Colombia. They know that every drum, big or small, contains a spirit. Sometimes the spirit of one of your ancestors. Your grandmother or your great-uncle. Sometimes a kukurpa.”

  “A very hungry spirit,” put in Orestes Vasquez. “It likes to eat eyes. And babies.”

  “I rouse the kukurpa by tapping the drum, and the kukurpa calls the spirit of the Night Wind in the hope that the Night Wind will leave it some easy pickings.”

  Chief O’Malley stared at them in disbelief. “You’re talking about black magic?”

  “You can call it that if you want to,” said Orestes Vasquez. “We prefer to call it ethnic spirituality.”

  Lida Siado said, “You should make your promise soon, Chief O’Malley. If you delay much longer, these people will stay blind for the rest of their lives.”

  Chief O’Malley took another look around at his guests. “All right,” he said. “Goddamn you to hell. I promise.”

  Orestes Vasquez smiled. “I knew that you would see reason, Chief O’Malley. For my part, I promise you that I will run my business in a responsible way. There will be no random violence on the streets. If I happen to have a dispute with any other businessman, I will settle it discreetly and efficiently, and your people will never have to be involved. You will see how peaceful and orderly this city will become. History will judge you as the best chief of police that Los Angeles has ever had.”

  “Just give them their sight back, you cockroach, before I change my mind.”

  “Very well. Lida?”

  Lida Siado cupped her hand in front of her face and allowed the two clamshells to drop out of her eye sockets.

  At once, there were cries of, “I can see again! My sight’s come back! I’m not blind anymore!” People started clapping and laughing and hugging each other. Even Mayor Briggs was weeping with relief.

  Orestes Vasquez said, “There! Everything is back to normal, as it should be! I am very pleased to have made your acquaintance, Chief O’Malley. I can see that you and I are going to get along very well.”

  Lida Siado placed four fingertips to her lips and blew Chief O’Malley the gentlest of kisses. “We have made something out of nothing, Chief O’Malley, just like Father Naimuena made the world out of nothing. He attached an illusion to a dream and held it together with his breath.”

  “You’d better leave now,” Chief O’Malley told her, his voice quaking with suppressed rage. “I wouldn’t like to spoil my guests’ evening any further by having you shot.”

  Chapter Six

  When Dan returned to his apartment building on Franklin Avenue that evening, Annie was sitting outside under the globe light that illuminated the steps, playing with her fluffy white kitten. She had folded a piece of paper to look like a butterfly and tied it to a length of thread, and was tossing it into the air so that the kitten jumped up to catch it.

  “Hey, she’s grown,” Dan remarked. “Given her a name yet?”

  “Malkin. It means a witch’s cat.”

  “Very appropriate. Mixed me up any more of your disgusting potions today?”

  “I’m boiling you up some essence of nettle, but it’s not ready yet. I have some rue tea, though. It relaxes you and helps you to think more clearly. And it shows you the next person you will fall in love with.”

  “I’m not looking for love right now, thanks all the same.”

  “Of course you’re not. Nobody ever is. Love always comes looking for you.”

  Dan sat down next to her. “Clear thinking, on the other hand—I could use some of that. Something really weird happened to me today, and the more I think it over, the more I don’t understand it.”

  Annie stared at him closely. “You do look kind of washed out, Dan, if you don’t mind my saying so. What’s wrong?”

  “Well, you know how skeptical I’ve always been about all this witch stuff you do? I think I might have been persuaded different.”

  Annie allowed Malkin to catch the paper butterfly. The kitten rolled onto her back, biting at the butterfly with her tiny teeth and trying to pedal it to pieces with her hind legs.

  Dan told Annie what had happened outside the Palm. He didn’t tell her the grisly details of how Cusack, Fusco, and Knudsen had been incinerated, but he described how he had vomited up quarters.

  “And you think that somehow this woman was responsible?”

  “Like I told you, she was tossing a quarter up in the air only seconds before I barfed. It was like she was taunting me—like she was showing me what was going to happen.”

  “And you say she was Haitian?”

  “That’s right. Her name is Michelange DuPriz. The Zombie said she that she’s a mando, kind of like a medium.”

  “Hmm,” said Annie. “I read an article in National Geographic about voodoo mandos, and one of the things they can do is punish their enemies by making them puke up all kinds of foreign objects. Usually the objects are related to how their enemies offended them. Like, if somebody trespassed on their land, they’d make them puke up stones or dirt. Or if they stole a chicken, they’d make them puke up a whole bunch of feathers.”

  “But how the hell did she get all those quarters into my stomach?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I could try asking my friend Véronique. She lived in Port-au-Prince for three years, teaching English at the University of Haiti, and she was always interested in voodoo. She used to believe that the super in her apartment building was a zombie.”

  “It’s magic, though, isn’t
it, for want of a better word? Not like the stuff I do—not a party trick. Genuine magic.”

  “You always said that magic was a scam. All done by mirrors, that’s what you told me.”

  “Annie, when you puke up thirty dollars in small change, you become a believer pretty damned quick.”

  “Well, we can soon find out for sure.”

  “Oh, yeah? How?”

  “We can do a witch test. It’s very simple. All you need is some salt and a sewing needle.”

  “A witch test?”

  “Sure. They used to do it in Russia in the seventeenth century to find out if anybody in their village was a practicing witch.”

  “With salt? And a sewing needle?”

  Annie stood up. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Dan’s head dropped down, like a man defeated. “Today just gets more and more bizarre by the minute.”

  He followed Annie down the steps to her apartment, which was directly underneath his. The front door was painted maroon and decorated with a sly-looking crescent moon. As soon as she opened it, Dan could smell incense and the herbal preparations that Annie was simmering on her stove. Malkin ran between his ankles, and he almost tripped over her.

  The kitchen was straight ahead of them, and Annie went through to make sure that her essence of nettle hadn’t boiled dry. The living room was off to the left, a large open-plan room with walls painted midnight blue and covered in hundreds of silver-foil stars. Two large couches were set at right angles to each other, each of them draped in a large beige Indian throw with fringes. Between them stood a low wooden table crowded with tarot cards, books on magic and herbal remedies, pottery ashtrays filled with colored beads, two silver statuettes, a half-empty pack of pumpkin seeds, a bong, and a naked Ken doll with twenty or thirty pins stuck in him.

  Dan picked up the Ken doll. “Is this meant to be anybody I know?”

  “It’s a joke. Well, it’s meant to be a joke, but for some reason it freaks everybody out. Especially men.”

  “Are you surprised? Look where you’ve stuck this pin.”

  Dan walked slowly around the room, with Malkin following him. He had been in Annie’s apartment plenty of times before, but because he had never really believed in witchery, he had never taken the time to examine what was on the walls. A medieval astrology chart, like a wheel covered with stars and plowshares and axes, showing the precise date and time that anybody could expect to die. Seven wands, each enameled a different color, with semiprecious stones set into their pommels, arranged in a fan shape. A three-barred cross cast out of bronze, with a serpent winding around it.

  Annie watched him with an amused look on her face.

  “Is this stuff simply for decoration?” he asked her. “Or does any of it actually work?”

  “It depends who’s using it. I could never get those wands to do anything, but I just love the way they look. They’re supposed to be Egyptian, but I doubt if they are. They were probably made in Gary, Indiana.”

  She went over to a small desk in the corner, opened the drawer, and took out a folded street map of Los Angeles. She opened it and laid it out on the rug. Malkin immediately walked across it, then walked back again, enjoying the crackle she made.

  “Come on, you,” said Annie. “You may be my familiar, but right now you’re being nothing but a pesky nuisance.” She carried Malkin out and shut her in the kitchen, returning with a silver-topped saltshaker.

  She knelt on the floor at the edge of the map, and said, “I pour a spoonful of salt onto the map and if it detects a place where a sorceress lives, it will form a little heap.”

  “Amazing. Who needs GPS?”

  “Witches hate salt because it’s the symbol of purity and cleanliness. In the Middle Ages, women used to make a big show of salting their food so that people wouldn’t suspect them of having sex with the devil.”

  “Where does the needle come into it?”

  “You place the needle on the heap of salt, and if it rises vertically of its own accord, then you know that the location is genuine.”

  Dan sat down on one of the couches. “Okay then, why don’t you give it a try? I know where the Zombie lives, so I’ll be able to tell if it works or not.”

  Annie unscrewed the top of the saltshaker and poured about a tablespoonful into the palm of her hand. She scattered it across the map, and at the same time she whispered, “Show me where the witch is hiding. Scurry quick, and find her lair. Show me where the witch is hiding, so that I can trap her there. Salt so clean and salt so white. Show me where she hides this night.”

  “Why are you whispering?” asked Dan.

  “Because this is a Russian incantation, and most Russian incantations are whispered. It makes them more magical. At least the Russians used to think so. The word ‘whisper’ in Russian means the same thing as ‘cast a spell.’”

  Dan stared down at the map. So far, nothing was happening.

  “I don’t think this is going to work,” he told Annie. “Maybe you’re using the wrong kind of salt.”

  “Don’t be so impatient,” said Annie. “Even salt needs some time to think.”

  Dan kneaded his forehead with his fingertips. He felt as if he were developing a migraine. If he had known this morning that he was going to vomit quarters in the street, then try to locate a witch with a road map and a handful of salt, he would have stayed in bed.

  “I can get you some powdered moss if you have a headache,” said Annie.

  “No thanks, I’m fine.”

  “You know what they used to do back in the seventeenth century? If you had a really bad headache, they used to tighten a hangman’s noose around your head. Either that, or they would give you a hard kick in the shins, so that the pain dropped from your head to your legs.”

  “I think I’ll stick to Advil, thanks.”

  Three or four minutes passed. Nothing.

  Dan said, “Either this doesn’t work, or Michelange DuPriz wasn’t a witch at all.”

  “Wait! Be patient. This is Los Angeles, remember, not some Russian village with a population of fifteen retards and twenty-three goats.”

  Dan checked his watch. “Look, I really have to call headquarters. They should have the preliminary results of the autopsies by now.”

  But Annie lifted her finger to her lips and said, “Ssh!”

  Suddenly there was a soft, shifting sound. Dan looked down at the map and saw that the salt was swirling across it like a spiral star. It went around faster and faster, and as it did so the spokes of the star spread wider.

  “I never saw it do this before,” said Annie. “Usually, it all gathers at one point.”

  Instead, the salt separated into four small piles—one in Brentwood, one in Santa Monica, one in Silverlake and the last one in Laurel Canyon, in Beverly Hills.

  “Laurel Canyon, that’s where the Zombie lives,” Dan frowned. “But what are these other piles?”

  Annie stood up, went to her desk, and opened a small woven sewing basket. She came back with a paper pack of needles and drew one out. She laid it carefully on top of the pile of salt on Laurel Canyon, with its point in the center of the pile. Without any hesitation, without Annie touching it, the needle rose and stood vertical.

  “There,” she said. “That proves it. Your Haitian woman is a witch.”

  She laid another needle on the pile in Brentwood. Instantly, the same thing happened: the needle stood by itself and stayed balanced on its point.

  “What does that mean?” asked Dan. “There’s another witch there?”

  Annie laid needles on the third and fourth piles of salt. They both stood erect.

  “We have four witches,” she said. “And very charismatic witches, too.”

  “Four? Jesus, the Zombie wasn’t kidding when he said that magic was coming to town. Here, let me check these locations.”

  He took hold of the needle hovering above Laurel Canyon and used it to puncture the map. Then he cleared away the salt and made an X with his pen. He d
id the same with the needles over Santa Monica and Silverlake.

  He was about to mark the Brentwood location when Annie gripped his hand. “Stop, Dan—be careful! Look!”

  She was right to warn him. The needle was glowing a dull red—and, as they watched it, it began to glow brighter and brighter, until it was white hot. A thin wisp of smoke came out of the map, and the little pile of salt began to crackle and jump.

  “This witch knows that we’ve found her,” Annie said.

  “What?”

  “She knows that we’ve found her. She can probably taste the salt and feel the prick of the needle.”

  The salt turned blue and green, and began to jump even more violently. Then, with a flaring noise, the entire map burst into flame and flew into the air. It floated nearly as high as the ceiling before it was burned into nothing but black ash. It fell, crinkling and glowing, back to the rug. Dan stamped on it to make sure that all of the sparks were extinguished.

  Annie said, “My God. That is one powerful witch. I never knew that there was a witch with that much influence, not in L.A. I don’t know why I never felt her before.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t here before. Maybe she only just arrived.”

  “This is very strange,” said Annie. “It’s worrying, too. I can’t believe that it’s a coincidence, four witches all appearing at the same time. Especially four witches as influential as these.”

  “Could be that they simply decided to hold their annual convention in L.A.”

  “No…witches are very reluctant to travel to other places except when they’re called for, especially if they have to cross salt water. Your Haitian woman must have been specially invited by this Zombie guy. The question is, who are the other three witches, and who invited them? Especially the one who set fire to my map. She’s the strongest, by far.”

  Annie picked up the four needles from out of the ashes and held them tightly between finger and thumb. “You know, I feel very strongly that there’s a connection between these witches, that they’re all in contact with one another.”