Manitou Blood (5 page)

Mrs. Teitelbaum's cherries rattled. “But, I don't want to lose all this money! This is the reason why I come to see you, Mr. Erskine! I come here to find out what is going to happen to me, so that it won't!”

I went to the window and parted the dusty brown velvet drapes with two fingers. Down below, on Seventeenth Street, a young Hispanic woman was leaning over her stroller, wiping ice cream from her toddler's mouth. She had masses of black curly hair, and she was wearing a tight yellow top with an embroidered sun on the front of it, from which her enormous breasts seemed desperate to escape by any route possible; and the smallest pair of white cotton shorts. I think God was punishing me for not keeping up my Spanish lessons. I could just imagine her reaction if I went down to the street and tried the only Spanish come-on
line that I knew, “
Le importa si me siento aqui?
”—“Do you mind if I sit here?”

I came to terms with reality and let the drapes fall back. “There
is
something you can do, Mrs. Teitelbaum. If you really want to change your weekend, you could try a little something from the Magic Pantry.”

“The Magic Pantry?”

“I don't often recommend that my clients should resort to spells, Mrs. Teitelbaum. I'm not saying that they don't work. Oh boy—
what!
—there's no denying that they
work!
But they're not cheap, and they can have unpredictable side effects.”

“I certainly don't want to lose seventeen thousand dollars, Mr. Erskine, whatever the side effects.”

I went to the glass-fronted cabinet at the far end of the room and made a performance of producing a key on the end of a very long chain. I unlocked the doors, which actually wasn't too difficult because the lock had been missing when I bought it. Then I reached inside and brought out a green glass jar with a tarnished brass lid. I opened it, and let Mrs. Teitelbaum smell it.

“Herby,” she decided. “What is it?”

“Spikenard. If you put a few leaves in a bag, and keep the bag under your pillow, all of your possessions will remain safe, at least for as long as the spikenard stays fresh.”

“Well, that sounds ideal.”

“It does, doesn't it? But there is a very dramatic side effect, I'm afraid.”

“What's that?”

“Spikenard will also make you irresistible to younger men. If you sleep on a bag of spikenard every night . . . well, the chances are that you'll soon find yourself a vigorous young lover at least half your age. He'll have a very big—well, let's not get too descriptive about it, but you won't be disappointed.”

Mrs. Teitelbaum's left eyelid started to twitch. “This really works?”

“Of course. Spikenard is one of the most powerful herbs in the Magic Pantry. Definitely not to be sneezed at.”

“Well, if it really will protect my money, maybe I'll take some. How much is it?”

“Two-fifty for three leaves, I'm afraid.”

“If it saves me seventeen thousand, that's nothing. As for the side effect . . . well, I guess I can live with the side effect.”

I picked out three leaves, but then I hesitated. “I just thought of a problem.”

“Problem? What problem?”

“Well, spikenard will keep your money safe, and you'll get your young stud. But when you've grown tired of him, you won't be able to get rid of him—ever.”

“Never?”

“No—not so long as you're sleeping with spikenard under your pillow. If you want him to go, you'll have to throw away the spikenard, but that means that you'll lose your money, too. It's a question of losing it later, rather than sooner.”

Mrs. Teitelbaum poked her nose into the jar and took a deep, appreciative sniff. For a few seconds, I could see that she was very close to deciding that $17,480 wasn't too high a price to pay for several weeks of bedroom gymnastics with a younger man. But in the end, she couldn't bring herself to two-time her bank account. She handed back the jar and said, “Oh, well. What else do you have?”

I went back to the hutch, rummaged around, and produced another green jar. “Here, try this,” I suggested. “Blood root.
Sanguina canadensis
. It's a member of the poppy family. The Native Americans used blood root to stain their bodies before they went out scalping people, and they still use it today, as a dye.”

Mrs. Teitelbaum sniffed at this jar, too, and wrinkled up her nose. “Musty,” she decided.

“Ah, yes, but heap plenty powerful. If you keep blood
root in your purse, Mrs Teitelbaum, you will never lose your money, ever. You can use it to protect your home, too—simply by nailing a small piece of it under your windowsill. I promise you, if you take blood root home with you tonight, your weekend will be totally different. No lost purse, no falling picture, no flooded carpets, no stolen pearls. Everything that came up in the cards will be canceled.”

“
Canceled
? You're sure?”

“They don't call me the Incredible Erskine, Herbal Visionary, for nothing. I see, I interpret, I fix. I can heal the future before it happens.”

“So, for the blood root, how much?”

I sucked in my breath. “It's pretty hard to get hold of, these days, Mrs. T. Most
sanguina canadensii
have been wiped out by genetically modified sarsaparilla. But I guess I could let you have a couple of inches for six-fifty.”

Mrs. Teitelbaum opened her purse, took out a money clip that looked like a raccoon trap, and tugged out a ten dollar bill. “Can you break this for me?”

I didn't allow myself to waver. When it comes to extracting money out of wealthy old women, wavering is fatal. Wealthy old woman have gotten wealthy by being totally unscrupulous—by marrying bald, rich, old bastards for lucre, not for love—by tactical divorcing and equally tactical remarrying—and they will screw you for the price of a dayold newspaper if you show the slightest hesitation. They're vampires, and the only way to get the better of them is to hammer a stake through their checkbooks.

“Actually . . . it's six
hundred
and fifty,” I told her. Then I let out my famous high-pitched laugh, as if she had just played an incredibly funny practical joke on me. You knew all along that it was $650, you wicked, wicked woman! You were pulling my leg, weren't you? What a rib-tickler you are!

She tugged out six $100 bills, one at a time, and then five tens. This was where not wavering came into it. What was she going to say? That she had really expected me to sell
her a whole two inches of rare Apache blood root for $6.50? I mean, how stupid would
that
have made her look?

I took her money with that special sleight-of-hand they teach you at magician's school, so that the mark is barely aware that it's gone. Money—
fwwp!
—no money. Then I leaned forward and said, very confidentially, “You promise you won't tell anyone how much I charged you, will you?”

She looked up at me, not quite understanding what I meant.

“That's a
very
special price,” I explained. “I wouldn't sell blood root to anybody else for that kind of money.”

I let out another scream of laughter, and this time Mrs. Teitelbaum laughed, too.

As I opened the door of my apartment, however, she hesitated. “Mr. Erskine—” she said.

I thought for a split second that she was going to say, “Give me back my six hundred and fifty dollars, you double-dealing two-bit chiseler.” But instead she whispered, “That
other
herb, the first one you offered me—?”

“The spikenard?”

“That's it, the spikenard. I was wondering . . . so long as the blood root can guarantee to keep my money safe . . .”

“Oh . . . you were wondering if the spikenard could keep it
doubly
safe.”

“Well, yes. Kind of extra security, if you know what I mean.”

“In spite of
the side effect
.”

“Mr. Erskine, I haven't had a side effect since Mr. Teitelbaum passed over.”

“I don't know, Mrs. Teitelbaum. You're sure you can handle it? Some of my ladies have complained of getting
very
tired.”

“I'm in the best of health, Mr. Erskine. I eat only fish. Well, sometimes a little chicken; and maybe a cream
strudel now and again. But I do Pilates, and I walk ten thousand paces a day, every day, and always in a different direction.”

“Well . . . okay. So long as you don't hold me liable for any—you know—
overexertion
.”

“Mr.
Erskine
!” Mrs. Teitelbaum protested, all flushed and coquettish. And she hadn't even
bought
any spikenard yet, let alone found herself an eager young lover with a very large resumé.

I opened up the cabinet, took out the green glass jar, and gave her three leaves of spikenard. “Under your pillow, Mrs. Teitelbaum, in a pure white linen bag. That'll do the trick.”

She tugged three hundred dollar bills from her money clip and held them out to me. But just as I was reaching forward to
fwwp
them out of her fingers, she snatched hold of my wrist, and held it tight. “There's just one more thing.”

What?
I thought.
She's wearing a wire and I'm under arrest.

“You didn't give me my mystic motto,” she said, reprovingly.

“Oh! Oh, yes! Your mystic motto! How could I forget?”

Shit
, I thought. I used to own a rare nineteenth-century copy of
Bultitude's Compendium of Astrological Admonitions
, but I must have dropped it in the street when I had to move out of our apartment on East Eighty-sixth Street. I'll bet some wino found it, and even now he's terrified of sitting cross-legged under a medlar tree on the eighth of August, or seeing two gray cats through the rungs of a ladder. But the real nuisance is that, these days, I have to invent my own mystic mottoes.

“Ahhmmm . . . ‘If you stand under a lemon tree for long enough, the falling blossom will turn you into a bride.' ”

“Mr. Erskine.” I swear to God there were tears in Mrs. Teitelbaum's eyes. I gently eased the hundred dollar bills from between her fingers, one, two, three, smiling all the time.

“Good-bye,” I said, ushering her toward the door. “Next week, same time?”

“There's just one more thing,” she told me.

“Ye-e-es?” I asked, sweeter than ever.

“Fifty dollars change.”

But that was another day's consultations over. I went to the window and dragged back the drapes, in the faint hope that the bosomy young Hispanic woman with the stroller was still out there, but of course she wasn't. Anyhow, think about it, she was probably hopelessly devoted to the father of her child, who was built like The Rock and worked as a bodyguard for some famous Cuban
guaracha
band, and who would rip the arms off any man who came within breathing distance of her, especially a forty-three-year-old mystic in a green cape made out of a stretch-nylon couch cover and a golden skullcap that was actually a Mickey Mouse hat with the ears unstapled.

“Harry . . .” she would pant, her glistening lips only two-and-a-half inches from mine, so that I could smell the extra-hot salsa on her breath, “I want you so bad . . . but I have promised my impossibly bulging breasts and my endless legs to Raimondo.”

And I would say, with infinite tenderness, “
No tiene usted algo más barato?
”

I went through to my tiny kitchen, opened the icebox and took out a bottle of Guinness. It's an acquired taste, Guinness: like burnt toast, only beer. But it's good for a man living on his own, because it's food and drink in the same bottle, and you never have any dishes to wash. I took a long swallow, burped, and then I went back into the living area to tidy up my fortune-telling cards.

How are the mystic fallen, I thought. Up until thirteen months ago I had been living with Karen and Lucy in faded grandeur up on East Eighty-sixth Street, now here I was in this dingy little two-room apartment over Khaled's Pakistani
Provisions, in a rundown district that I liked to call Upper Greenwich Village.

I hadn't even unpacked properly yet, although I had managed to buy nine mismatched bookshelves and stock the walls with all my tatty old volumes of magic and fortune-telling and demonic arts. I had covered my table with a crimson candlewick bedspread, and set out my crystal ball and my phrenological bust, and I regularly burned sandalwood incense to cover the smell of dry rot and Indian cooking from downstairs. What can you say? Life's a bitch and then you smell of fenugreek.

I don't really know how or why our marriage came apart. I guess it was mostly my fault. I'm never truly fulfilled unless I'm desperate. Like the painter Edouard Munch of
The Scream
fame once said, “Without anxiety, I would have been a ship without a rudder.” There was nobody else involved, even that smug tangerine-tanned bastard Rodney Elwick III who kept inviting himself around for large glasses of chilled sauvignon whenever he felt like it, and laughing with Karen in the kitchen while I was playing drafts with Lucy.

“Something funny?” I used to say, appearing in the kitchen door, and they both used to look at me as if I had a booger hanging out of my nostril. I was an outsider. I wasn't even
new
money. I was no money at all, of any age. All the money was Karen's.

But Rodney Elwick III wasn't totally to blame. I was jealous, yes, but I have to admit that I was also bored, and discontented, and kicking my heels. I felt that my life was being wastefully torn away, day by day, like the blank pages from somebody else's diary. I had discovered the terrible truth that happiness isn't everything. To know that we're alive, we need challenges, and we need problems, and most of all we need
worry
.

So here I was, the Incredible Erskine, Herbal Visionary, with all the worry that anybody could wish for, and absolutely no money, but alive.