Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (17 page)

Pulling the blankets around
Frau
Bauer’s bare shoulders, I grab my coat and the not quite empty bottle of
slivovitz
and slip out quiet as a mouse. By my watch it’s only four o’clock when I leave my stuffy Victorian rooming house but the day has already sunk in deep despairing evening.

Feverishly I tramp up and down the Gran Viale Elizabetta searching for my graveyard naiad in the half dozen cafes still open.

Nada
.

Then I decide to go back to the graveyard. Why? It’s lunacy to think the woman I’m searching for would return there at this miserable hour. But I go anyway. On the way I stop at a pharmacy, with its glowing green cross, and buy a flashlight. The back street route I take is devoid of passing cars, of any human appearance.

When I slip through the narrow opening left in the wrought-iron cemetery gate, light streams from the windows of the caretaker’s apartment. Giuseppe is smoking a cigar. An espresso pot steams on the stove. I knock on the door and enter, holding up the bottle of
slivovitz
.

Giuseppe’s eyes light up.

“My friend, my friend. You are just in time for coffee.”

He pours two cups. To each I add the last of the
slivovitz
in equal parts.

“Do you know the woman who was here early in the morning?” I ask.

“What woman?”

“The one in the long black coat.”

Giuseppe still has a blank look on his face, though this is not an unusual condition.

“Come on! Don’t be a jerk.” I finish my coffee in two gulps. “She was standing looking at one of the gravestones on the middle path.”

“No woman,” says Giuseppe. He winks at me; taps his forehead. “You need woman?” he asks in English. Giuseppe is trying to improve his English. I wonder whether he’s considering pimping his sister to me. A country girl, buxom, olive-skinned, and brainless.

“Of course there was a woman. She was wearing a black coat. Under the coat she was nearly naked. You should remember that.”

Giuseppe shakes his head.

“No woman,” he says obstinately.

Whatever. My nerves prick me to my feet. Giuseppe rises and grips me around the shoulders. As I leave he says:

“You drink less
slivovitz
.” Then, as an afterthought: “Fuck more.”

A stupid grin splits his face like a knife through a cantaloupe.

My flashlight piercing the pitch-blackness like a Cyclopean eye, I walk up into the cemetery and stop at the third headstone on the middle path. It’s a cheap, unpolished stone with just a name and dates. Aliza Paolozzi 1924 – 1944

Was Aliza Paolozzi a relative of the woman I’m so desperately seeking? Based on the dates, was the deceased a victim of some Nazi atrocity? Or just an unfortunate death at a young age? Brought down by cholera, typhoid fever or some other malevolence.

There are no clues to even begin to answer these questions. But a new possibility rises in my head. My mystery woman and the deceased might share a last name. It’s a long shot, but tomorrow I’ll ask my landlady if she knows any families with the name Paolozzi.

Mist congeals like oil and drips down my collar as I slog back toward civilization. My feet are wet and turning blue. But my mind is revved-up.

I’m
loco
with desire. If it’s the last thing I do, I must find this odd, beautiful, nameless woman and take her to bed. It’s how Adam must have felt when he came upon Eve in the Garden.

Walking through the treacle-thick fog shrouding the Lido, I realize I’ve made a wrong turn somewhere. The Gran Viale Elizabetta with its beckoning cafes should be just up ahead. But it isn’t. Only another empty street overarched by the blank looming facades of mausoleum-like houses. The only sound is the reverberating echo of my own footsteps.

Around a curve I find the Snack Bar Gogol. A long narrow room with a bar down one side. Dim lights. A guy polishing a glass, moving the stale
panini
and
tramazini
around in the flyblown display case.

And there she is, my bone yard seductress who set my
cojones
on fire. She sits sideways in a booth toward the back, her bare legs thrust outward in perfection. The tabletop in front of her is empty. Of course she is alone.

When I enter the Snack Bar Gogol she stares at me with her unearthly seaweed green eyes. A black nausea twists my stomach. I’ve never been so frightened. I want to run for my life. Those eyes know the inside skinny on Hell. Have been there and back.

Then a gunmetal coin drops like a sluice gate and she’s the world’s finest hooker, an innocent’s first love, and the girl from Ipanema, all rolled into one. The air reeks of her perfume. She’s been waiting for me for a while.

“Two araks,” I say to the bar guy.

I carry the drinks over to where she’s now sitting up straight and ease down opposite her.

Her hand strokes the inside of my leg. I’m going crazy.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“I need you to help me,” she says.

“Do you live on the Lido?” I ask.

She puts her finger on my lips.

“I don’t have much time,” she says.

The arak goes down like burning acetone.

“I want to make love to you,” she says. “But first you must promise me. To do the one thing that I ask.”

I hold up my right hand with two fingers crossed.

“My mother and father died at Auschwitz. I watched their prison train leave Venice. I should have been on that train. Instead I slept with the local
SS Gruppenfuhrer
. He treated me like a pet monkey. But I was alive. One day in a rage he pulled out his Lugar and shot me dead. After I had already given him my soul.”

“That’s a great story,” I say. “My dad worked for J. Edgar Hoover.”

When she stands up, she’s wearing a glove-tight black dress. Against the fabric her skin is as white as bleached bone. Walking toward the
cesso
, she looks back, motions to me with one finger. When I follow her in, she locks the door of the
pissoir
and grabs for my cock. I assume the role of a roué in a French porn novel. There’s barely room for two people, so my seductress rests her ass on the edge of the tin sink jammed in one corner. Her dress rucked above her waist, her legs point to the ceiling. I’m thrusting away like an Olympic swimmer in his final race.

Except it’s not just me. Two mirrors, one behind the door, the other over the sink, project in either direction a hundred me’s having it off with a hundred murdered Jewish women. No. There must be a thousand thrusting and roiling images stretching toward infinity.

But all the women have different faces and bodies!

It’s as though I’m
shtuping
a chorus line of exotic, wildly enthusiastic
shtetl
maidens all at the same time. How does that work exactly?

After a while I have to slow down.

“What is it you want me to do?” I gasp.

Next thing I know I’m coming to on the piss-reeking floor of the
cesso
. At first everything is black & white. Then colors bleed in. The only trace of my seductress is her fading perfume. Staggering to my feet, I tuck away my frazzled dick.

Back in the bar, it’s just me and the bar guy. My skin prickles, as if someone has beaten me with nettles. When I pay for the araks, my hands shake so badly I can barely count out the coins. I’m geared up. I can do this.

Outside I immediately go into a jog. Up down. Up down. Up down. Then I turn and head up the street. At the next corner I’m on the Gran Viale Elizabetta, back in familiar territory. I’m running flat out now. The few people out and about turn to look as I race by. My cigarette-destroyed lungs wheeze and gasp for air.

I bound up the steps of the boardinghouse where I live. The front door crashes open. I bowl past my landlady Signora Ricci, knocking her on her ass, and bolt up the stairs.

When I throw open the door to my room,
Frau
Bauer sits up in a fright, just as I rest the barrel of my .25 caliber pistol against her forehead and pull the trigger.

No one in here believes me. That I was intimate with a ghost. Of course, I produce no evidence to substantiate this claim. I don’t tell the doctors about the gold earring that I hide under my tongue whenever any of them or the hospital attendants are in the vicinity. If I told them, they would confiscate it.

Yes, I tell them. I fucked a ghost. The ghost of a Jewish woman murdered in 1944 for no reason at all. Murdered by
Waffen-SS Gruppenfuhrer
Heinrich Bauer.

Shark Bite

The twelve-foot tiger shark moved effortlessly beneath the undulating, silvery surface of the sea. Having risen from the frigid depths, she felt pleasure from the warmth of the sun stroking her body. At the shallowest portion of her run, the sunlight drew her hulking shadow across blank patches of open sand.

After the long winter she was pregnant again. Which put her in an ill humor. She wanted to pick a fight with an air dweller; rip him to bits.

Hunger surged through her gut. She flicked her tail angrily, her fin breaking through the barrier between water and air in a white-edged cleaving, like a scar.

Through the rolling lens of the sea, the air dwellers walked at the edge of the beach, stood looking out to sea, splashed in the shallows. But none came further into the water then where the waves broke on the shallow sandbar, well away from the deep drop off where she circled.

The day before she had chanced upon an air dweller flailing pathetically across the sea’s pulsing surface. Sweeping up from below, drawn inexorably by the air dweller’s thrashing movements, she struck the swimmer. Her teeth chomped through muscle and bone. Amid a crescendo of desperately splashing limbs, she drew the air dweller under, leaving a wake of spreading blood and torn fragments of flesh.

The day after the swimmer ran out of luck, a shark hunter drove out from town in his cowboy-red F-150 pickup. He sported a waxed mustache, cold blue eyes, and a faded cap bearing a crescent moon and palmetto. Along the calf of his right leg a jagged slug-white scar marked a long ago encounter with a denizen of the deep. An inflated two-man Zodiac flopped in the truck bed.

Armed to the teeth, the shark hunter and his assistant pushed the Zodiac through the surf and scrambled aboard. The surfers, playing it safe, waved from their stools up at the snack bar, holding their long necks aloft in mock salute.

“Piss on them,” the shark hunter said.

For hours they cruised the Zodiac back and forth, hither and yon, on both sides of the shark nets anchored 200 yards offshore. They ran Blue Runners and Jacks as bait, dumped sheep’s blood in the water, drank a case of beer, cursed and swore a blue streak.

But no shark fin sliced the undulating gunmetal surface.

When the sunlight ebbed, they put into shore.

Sitting in the cab of the F-150, the shark hunter, his nose sunburned, his knees stiff from kneeling in the Zodiac, reached under the seat and found the bottle of hooch.
“No fuckin’ way am I comin’ out here on Sunday,” he said to his partner.

He took a long pull on the bottle.

Then started the engine and headed back toward town.

As he glanced in the rearview mirror, the lights at the snack bar flickered and went out. The engine roar of the last departing surfers rose and faded as they revved a deuce of decked-out Harleys and razzooed into the night. The pickup passed two campers lolling on canvas and aluminum deck chairs in front of their tent pitched by the roadside, working their way through a screw-top bottle of wine. The glow of a gas lantern set on the table between them kept the darkness at bay.

The waves glowed phosphorescent in the starlight.

After forty years of cruising the seven seas, the tiger shark was wise to the ways of air dwellers. When the roar of the Zodiac’s engine reverberated in her head, she dove deep and swam silently, her mind awhirl with thoughts of the coming metamorphosis. After four hundred million years, it was time to fight back against the pillagers and despoilers of the seas in a new way. Every shark she met over the last circle of time as she swam through the oceans and seas, the bays and inlets and harbors, had repeated the same mantra. The transformation was coming. Soon it would be here. Soon.

As she swept through the deep, she felt strange forces tugging and remolding her essence, transmuting her very being into something else, something new and frightening and unbelievable.

When the light from above began to fade and the pulsing echo of the Zodiac’s engine ceased, she rose from the stygian deep. As the million dots of milky ancient light appeared, glinting off the glassy cusp between water and air, she knew the time had come. The moment of evolution had arrived.

She felt herself grow lighter. Every second growing lighter and lighter. Up and up and up she came, faster and faster. At last exploding out of the sea, climbing into the air.

The wheels of the Sheriff’s pearl-colored Escalade crunched on the sandy shoulder of the coast road, some fifty yards south of Earl’s Snack ‘n Beer. The Sheriff slammed the truck door and walked toward Deputy Smith. Bobbi E. Lee Smith, in a Clemson T-shirt, jeans, and a tan windbreaker, was seriously out of uniform. But after all, it was eight a.m. on Sunday morning.

“What the hell is this, Bobbi?”

“Some jogger called it in. It’s bad. Real bad.”

It was a fuckin’ massacre is what it was.

Blood soaked into the shredded remains of a canvas tent. Aluminum tent poles twisted and snapped in two. Fragments of flesh clinging like odd ornaments to the glossy leaves of a rhododendron thicket.

“Reminds me a that movie
Saw
played over at the Starplex,” Bobbi said.

The Sheriff’s boot struck something that rolled away like a soccer ball. Except it wasn’t a soccer ball. It was a human head! The Sheriff leaned over and gagged. Somehow he kept his breakfast down.

“Jeezus.”