Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

‘Fortune-telling fraud?’

‘That’s right.’ Eddie folds his hands and leans back for effect. ‘Now, fortune-telling is notoriously difficult to prosecute. It’s banned in some parts of the country, but those bans are rarely enforced. After all, we’ve got people who predict what the stock market is going to do. We’ve got people who predict the weather and get paid for it. Hell, there are horoscopes in every newspaper. What’s more, it’s a cultural issue. These people, they’re what’s called the Rom, the Romani; you might know them as Gypsies. They ran from the Mongols and the Europeans and the Nazis. Historically, they’re poor, they’re underserved. They don’t go to school – they’re bred for fortune-telling since birth. So when you nab someone on fraud charges, what’s the first thing the defense is gonna do? They’re gonna frame it as a free speech issue. They’re gonna frame it as discrimination. So how’d we do it? How’d we convict the Costellos of fourteen federal crimes?’

Something sour rises to the base of Daniel’s throat. Eddie doesn’t have information about Klara, he realizes. Eddie has information about the woman on Hester Street.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘How?’

‘I’ll tell you a story about a man we’ll call Jim.’ Eddie lowers his voice. ‘This man Jim had lost a child to cancer. His wife divorced him. His anxiety was through the roof, and he was in constant muscular pain. So you have a really sick guy, a guy who no one in the mainstream medical establishment will deal with because he’s so off-putting, such a pain in the ass, that his relationships with conventional doctors deteriorate – you get a guy like that, it’s no wonder he winds up on the doorstep of someone different, someone who says, “I can help you; I can do you good.” Someone like Rosa Costello.’

Rosa Costello. Daniel looks at her picture. He knows she isn’t the woman he met in 1969. Her lips are too plump; her face is heart shaped. In a word, she’s prettier. And yet, in his mind, she morphs. Her face assumes the woman’s bullish chin and flat, unaccommodating eyes.

‘So this is how it starts,’ Eddie says. ‘This reader, this Rosa Costello, she goes, “I’m gonna sell you a candle for fifty dollars, and I’m gonna burn it for you and say this prayer, and you’re gonna notice a difference in your nerves.” And when Jim doesn’t notice a difference, she goes, “Okay, so we gotta do more. Let me sell you these leaves, spiritual leaves, and we’re gonna burn these and say a different prayer.” Fast-forward two years and this man has undergone several healing rituals and two very dramatic sacrifices the sum total of which is somewhere in the vicinity of forty thousand dollars. Finally, Rosa says, “It’s your money that’s the problem, it’s cursed and it’s trouble, so you have to bring me ten thousand more, and we’ll get the hex removed.” The sum was termed a donation; this family was termed a church. The Church of the Free Spirit, they called themselves.’

Daniel hadn’t thought he was hungry, but when a waiter appears beside them, he’s ravenous. Eddie orders the tavern wings. Daniel picks the calamari.

‘What you have to understand about these cases,’ Eddie continues, once they’re alone, ‘is that they make prosecutors run like hell. But the Costellos were different. The Costellos were thumbing their noses. When we seized their assets, we found cars, motorcycles, boats, gold jewelry. We found homes on the Intracoastal Waterway. We found fifty million dollars.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Hang on,’ says Eddie, raising a hand. ‘Before the pleas are entered, their defense attorney files a twenty-four-page request for dismissal on the grounds of freedom of religion. They’re their own church, remember? The Church of the goddamn Free Spirit! What’s more, he claims, this is nothing but the most recent example in a long line of Romani persecution. Now, am I saying that all Gypsies are swindlers and crooks? Absolutely not. But we got nine of these ones on grand larceny, false income returns, mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering. We subpoenaed birth records – we wanted to get everyone involved in this thing. There was just one person we couldn’t find.’

Eddie points to the security shots of the woman in the vestibule. She wears a long brown coat and gray shoes that close with Velcro. Her hands rest on the railing of a revolving door, and her white hair hangs in two long, slender braids.

‘Oh my God,’ Daniel says.

‘That your woman?’

Daniel nods. He sees it now. The broad forehead. The pinched, unfriendly mouth. He remembers watching her mouth as she spelled out his future. He remembers the part of her lips, the wet pink tongue.

‘I want you to look carefully,’ Eddie says. ‘I want you to be sure.’

‘I’m sure.’ Daniel exhales. ‘Who is she?’

‘She’s Rosa’s sister. It could be she’s involved; it could be she isn’t. What we do know is that she seems to be estranged from the rest of the family. You find the Rom living in groups, which is why it’s unusual that your woman works alone. Here’s how she’s typical, though: she’s always traveling. And she’s savvy. She works under a number of aliases. She’s not licensed, which is illegal in most parts of the country, but it also keeps her out of the system.’

‘This family,’ says Daniel. ‘Do they not accept payment in the beginning? Because that’s how it was with us. She didn’t ask, or my brother didn’t give it to her. And I’ve always found that strange.’

Eddie laughs. ‘Do they accept payment? They accepted all the payment they could get. Maybe this woman went easy on you ’cause you were kids.’

‘But if that were true, then why would she have said such hideous things? Klara was nine. I was eleven, and she still scared me shitless. The only thing I’ve been able to come up with is that she used fear to hook her customers – like the worse she scares them, the more likely they are to come back. To become dependent.’

When he was a medical resident in Chicago, Daniel shadowed a doctor who used similar techniques: insisting that someone’s depression could not be managed without regular visits, or telling an obese patient he’d die without surgery.

‘Or it doesn’t matter what she says, because she’s already cornered the market. Romani fortune-telling is usually very formulaic: they talk about your love life, your money, your job. Giving you a date of death? That’s ballsy. It’s shrewd. The Rom do a couple other things – the men lay pavement, sell used cars, they do body and fender work – but even if the world stops producing pavement, even if we stop using cars, what’s the one thing that’ll be around as long as human beings? Our desire to know. And we’ll pay anything for it. The Rom have been telling fortunes for hundreds of years with an equal amount of economic success. But your woman goes a step further. If she’s telling you when you’ll die, she’s offering a service that even the other Rom don’t. She has no competition.’

The fireplace is making Daniel sweat. He pulls off his sweater, tugging down the polo shirt beneath. It occurs to him that he hasn’t told Mira where he is, and that he’s supposed to meet her at temple at six. But he can’t leave, not now, not even to write her one of the text messages he’s finally figured out how to send.

‘What else do you know about them?’ he asks as the waiter arrives with their food.

Eddie drags a wing through a glop of electric-orange sauce, then dunks it in thick ranch dressing. ‘About the Costellos? They came to Florida from Italy in the thirties. Probably they were running from Hitler. Like all of the Rom, they’re very private. When they’re not with customers, they speak their own language; they don’t even try to assimilate. They need the gazhe for money – that’s the non-Rom, like us – but they also think we’re polluted.’ He wipes his mouth. ‘It’s the women who tell fortunes. They see it as a gift from God. But because the women interact with the gazhe , the Rom think the women are polluted, too. They’re very obsessive about cleanliness, purity. You go into a Romani house, it’s gonna be spotless.’