me as a middle-aged gigolo, was transformed. His gold neck chains, loud tropical shirt and cranberry slacks had given way to faded jeans, blood-stained T-shirt and sandals. He carried a sacred white-handled killing knife, the cuchillo, already used many times. Crates of chickens, pigeons, and guinea fowl were stacked nearly to the ceiling. He had just cut the throat of a young goat, and as I arrived was eviscerating the carcass for the portions vital to the spirit of Elegba, being fed on a bloody altar in the next room, which was forbidden for me to enter. He walked up to me at once, but couldn't shake hands. In one palm was the blade, and in the other a pink-gray stretch of intestine.
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He gripped the knife in his fist, then pinched the membrane with his thumbs and forefingers and stretched it before his eyes, then mine. It became almost transparent. Through it, he said, you could see into the future. He said, "This, what you will see here tonight, is for the health of the people. Not for anything bad. You understand?"
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What later happened between Lorita and Ricky is murky. But eventually there was a terrible falling out. Lorita's greatest fear was that one day Cortez would reappearhis last known whereabouts was said to be Venezuelato use what is literally a secret weapon against her, the itá, the book of life readings given at the initiation ceremony over which Ricky, her original padrino, had presided.
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I argued with Lorita that Ricky could have no power over her. I reminded her she had said as much to her own spiritual clients. "Don't nobody own you," she frequently told people complaining that their boyfriends or girlfriends were controlling their souls. But Lorita has never lost her fear of Ricky. Once, when I brought up the subject, she lowered her eyelids in that cold and distant gaze I had seen sometimes after sacrifices for her clients and looked at me as though I were the biggest fool on the planet.
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