Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“Yana is now prepared to receive you.”

The boojo room was stifling with incense and the waxy smoke of eighteen candles, as if hell itself breathed out contagions.

“You have come,” said Yana in a deep voice almost not her own. Her eyes gleamed ferally. Tonight her lips were very red, overripe — slightly obscene fruit ready to be bitten.

“I... yes, I... tonight you... you...”

“Sit.”

Teddy sat down across the little table from her. The room was dim; there was no crystal ball. Yana took his hands; already there was familiarity in this action, the shared intimacy of trysting lovers, an implied security that made her necessary.

She shut her eyes. Her silver gown shimmered as her body began a sinuous, unnerving, snakelike undulation by candlelight. Sweat rolled down between her half-bared breasts. The incense made Teddy’s head ache, made him want to lick away those rivulets of sweat, made him, for God sake, start to get an erection!

But then Yana cried out, “Chi mai diklem ande viatsa!” in a voice now definitely not her own. A voice deep, thick, guttural, almost male. “Chuda. Che chorobia.”

Terror made him bold. He had to know. “What does it mean?” he demanded. “What are you saying to me?”

She was silent. Her body had stopped writhing. She seemed not even to breathe. Her eyes were open again. In the dim light the pupils subsumed the irises, leaving only obsidian buttons that stared at him without blinking, not even once.

“I see a snake. In your buttocks. Down the back of your leg. Beware. A yellow woman touches you.” Her voice was male, throaty, threatening. Her face worked. “Needles. Beware.”

“My sciatica,” breathed Teddy. There was no way she could have known. She was indeed psychic. “My acupuncturist—”

“The yellow woman has made you sick.”

Teddy’d had the flu twice since he had started with Madam Wu. He’d gotten prescriptions for it.

“She has caused you to be... no! The snake inside your body is not from her! But... the snake grows...”

There it was again. The snake. Her words terrified him. A snake. Inside him. Growing. “You mean cane...” He had difficulty with the word. “Cancer?”

“The same snake killed your mother.”

He leaned forward, his fingers tight about her wrists. “My real mother died of cancer?”

“It is you who speaks of cancer. I speak of the snake.” Obsidian eyes, reptile eyes, the eyes of a snake. Flat, black, unwinking, without pupils. “From beyond the grave your mother warns you.” Her face, her eyes softened. “May she sleep well.”

Teddy had always known, in his heart of hearts, that his real mother was dead. Now Madame Miseria had confirmed it.

“I am but a conduit. The spirit speaks through me. She says you have much money... that is not really yours.”

“My mother’s spirit? My real mother says that I...”

But Yana’s head had fallen on her chest. Her fingers were lax in his. Her mouth had fallen open as if in profound sleep, but she was breathing rapidly, shallowly, like a person in great pain. She suddenly sprang straight up from her chair.

“Mene!” she cried, words she had memorized from the Old Testament she had loved when learning to read. “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin!”

She was staring over his head, her eyes wider than eyes could possibly be, popping out of a face now so congested it was almost purple. Teddy, no Bible scholar, whirled in dread expectation of seeing, not the words that Yahweh’s moving finger had writ on Belshazzar’s wall, but demons hulking behind him.

Nothing. No one. Just an empty room. He turned back. Yana had fallen back into her chair. She sprawled like a rag doll. She looked exhausted. Her voice was slow, dragging.

“The curse is in your body... the snake is growing there... because... when you were small... you wanted your foster parents dead... you created the snake... out of cursed money...”

“No!” cried Teddy. “I... I loved them, I...”

He went dumb. When they told him he was adopted, for a fleeting moment he’d wished them dead, to unsay the terrible knowledge of his real parents’ rejection. Or had that death wish been so that he would be left their money? Could that insidious thought have lain in ambush within his mind down the years, exactly like a snake, finally growing into... cancer?

He began thickly, “How did you know that I—”

“Give me a dollar.” She was brusque, almost cold. She snapped her fingers. “Quickly! We must test whether your money is cursed. If the snake in your body indeed comes from your money, then perhaps there is a way... one way... to save you...”

“How? Save? How can? You? You must save—”

“The dollar.”

As if mesmerized, he took out a dollar bill, started to hand it to Yana. She shook her head and pointed at the table.

“My touch would affect the power, make the curse more potent.” Another gesture, this one to a point beyond him. “Through the curtain. Water. A bowl. Quickly.”

Teddy tossed his dollar down and jumped from his chair, feeling the thick horrible ropelike snake in his buttocks and down his left leg as he ran limping across the room. Behind the curtain was a tiny alcove with a sink and a stack of ceramic bowls. He filled one from the tap, carried it back to Yana.

“Put it on the table. Put your dollar bill in it.”

He picked up the dollar from the table and dropped it in the water. They sat on either side of the bowl, watching it. The water began to discolor. But not green from the dye in the money — which was supposed to be waterproof anyway. No. It was getting pink. Then red. Getting redder. Blood-red. His mother’s blood. His own blood. In his money.

“Cursed,” Yana said in a flat voice devoid of hope or pity; and Teddy knew he was going to be sick.

But she wouldn’t allow him even that. Not right away.

“We have to be sure of the curse, we have to let the evil hatch,” she told him at the head of the stairs. “When you get home, wrap a fresh egg in a sock and put it in a shoe...”

“A... shoe? But... what kind...”

“Any kind. Just leave it there. Also collect all the cash money you can and put it in a paper bag with the shoe and the egg and leave it. When I call you, bring both with you to me.”

Only then was Teddy, shaking as if with fever, allowed to pay for the candles and go down to vomit out his horror at Madame Miseria’s revelations into the slanting Romolo Place gutter.

As he was so engaged, Larry Ballard was leaving his two-room studio apartment on Lincoln Way with his case files and repo tools. On impulse he drove a dozen blocks west along the southern edge of Golden Gate Park to Jacques Daniel’s.

Beverly had hung up on him five times since her car had gotten dinged up, which just wasn’t fair. Look what had happened to him — without any insurance to cover it like she had, either.

Oh, man, he sure hoped she had insurance to cover it.

Bev and her partner, Jacques, had renamed the little neighborhood bar “Jacques Daniel’s,” swept out the local rummies, put in an espresso machine, hung ferns and fake Tiffany lamps, and started serving trendy drinks like Sex on the Beach. It was not a meat market, Beverly saw to that; rather, a place where neighborhood singles could mix and mingle. In the grand old tradition, they were about to sponsor a soft-ball team.

Ballard stuck his bruised face and thatch of sun-whitened hair into the bar’s blast of light and heat and noise. Hammer was hammering eardrums on C/D. Beverly and Jacques were behind the stick serving them up with both hands, but when Ballard pushed the door wider and stepped through, Bev exploded.