“Oh. Jesus, that really happened, didn’t it? Are you going to check on that little girl?”
“Yeah, sure,” Paz lied, “so, if you could look it up?”
“Right.” There was the sound of drawers opening and paper being flipped. Paz wrote down the name and phone number, and said, “Thanks, Lisa. I’ll call you later, maybe we’ll get together next week sometime.”
“Yeah, about that … I actually was going to call you. I think maybe I’m going to get back with Alex.”
The husband. “Oh, yeah? When did this happen?”
“Oh, we’ve been seeing each other more over the last couple of weeks. I guess we both decided it was time. We want to have kids.”
“That’s nice. And what was last night? A farewell fuck?” He was surprised at the vehemence with which he spoke.
“No, I was going to bring it up, but after what happened and me getting a little blasted … and let’s face it, we went into this with no promises on either side. I thought that was the deal.”
“Yeah, it was,” he said tightly. “Well, good. What can I say? Have a nice life, Lisa.”
“Ah, Jimmy, don’t be like that. We can still be friends.”
“Yeah, the pair of you can have me over sometime. It’ll be great. I got to go now.”
And that was that, thought Paz, good-bye, Lisa. He called Ticketmaster and got a couple of tickets to Race Music for that Friday night, and then called Willa Shaftel’s machine and left a message confirming the date. Then business again: a call to Jackson Memorial put him in touch with the Medical Anthropology Unit and he made an appointment with a Dr. Louis Nearing.
Medical Anthropology, Paz found, was stuck in a short blind corridor in building 208, out of the way of real doctors but convenient to the ER, where nearly all of its clients arrived. Outside Nearing’s office there was a corkboard nearly covered with witch-doctor cartoons cut out of magazines. He knocked, received a “Yo!” in response, and walked in. It was a tiny place, hardly larger than a suburban bathroom, and it was the messiest office Paz had ever seen. Nearly every horizontal surface?desk, floor, shelves, the computer monitor, and the seats of a pair of side chairs?was covered with paper: stacks of books, some of them splayed open, journals, clipped articles, stuffed file folders, magazines, cardboard cartons, reprints, notebooks, and stapled computer printouts. In the interstices and hung from the walls and ceiling were impedimenta in startling variety, adding to the wizard’s-cave effect: cult statues, masks, bundles of herbs and feathers, crystals, stuffed animals and birds, colorful and folkish- looking pouches and bags, a green-and-white Notre Dame football helmet, and what looked like shrunken human body parts. The occupant sat hunched over his computer keyboard, with the light from the screen giving his face an appropriately mystic glow. He turned to Paz and grinned, showing large tombstone teeth. “Just let me finish this thought. Move that shit and have a seat.”
Nearing pounded heavily on the keys. Paz couldn’t see how tall he was, but he was big, his neck thick, his shoulders heavy, his forearms powerful and covered with a rich golden pelt. Nearing gave a little grunt of satisfaction, punched one last key, spun around on his chair, and stood up, extending a meaty hand. Six four, at least, Paz estimated, a moose. He had a wide, flat, ingenuous face, blue eyes behind cheap plastic frames, the lenses none too clean. He wore a plaid, short-sleeved shirt and wrinkled chinos with a military belt.
“What can I do for you, Detective?”
Paz told him the story, the killing and its aftermath, omitting the usual small details about the crime itself, and editing the illegal aspects out of the Tanzi incident. “I was wondering if you could throw some light, Doc,” he concluded. He was not hopeful. The guy looked like he could throw light on nothing more exotic than hog production.
“Well, let’s see,” said Nearing, counting elaborately on his fingers, “we got ritual murder, cannibalism, and demonic possession, plus maybe some Ifa divination. Sounds like a typical day in the Magic City.” He had a deep, considering, midwestern voice. “The chamber of commerce wasn’t far wrong when they came up with that one. Where would you like me to start?”
“Maybe with what you do here. I’m not even sure what medical anthropology is.”
“Yeah, you and the board of this fine institution. Okay, here’s the short version. A guy comes into the ER in distress. BP off the scale, severe pain in the belly, recent history of weight loss, blood in the urine, angina, shortness of breath. So they think, uh-oh, a sundae, so they order tests …”
“Sorry, what’s a sundae?”
“A case where you got two or more potential fatal illnesses. In this case they’d figure he was hypertense, untreated, an abdominal cancer the size of a grapefruit, with kidney involvement and maybe congestive heart, too. That’s what they would call the cherry.”
Paz looked blank.
“The cherry on top. Of the sundae. Hilarious intern humor.”
“Got it. Go on.”
“Anyway, the guy’s hopeless, but they give him the tests anyway. And to their surprise, he passes the cancer panel, his EKG is normal, guy’s got arteries like a twelve-gauge Mossberg. He’s got what they call idiopathic symptomology, sick as hell but nothing wrong with him that they can find. Then they get the idea of asking the guy what he thinks is wrong with him, and he says a sorcerer has put the curse on him. So they call me in. I do the interview, and say the guy is Haitian, I’ll call in my own hougan to examine the patient. He’ll confirm the diagnosis: the patient is suffering under a pwin, a curse, sent by a bokor, a sorcerer. We come to some arrangement, and believe me, Medicaid doesn’t want to know about this, and my hougan sets up a curing ceremony?that, or he finds out who the bokor is, and starts a countercurse, so the bad guy will lay off.”
“Does it work?”
Nearing waggled a hand and tilted his head ruefully. “Sometimes, sometimes not. Like chemotherapy. Or surgery.”
“Right. Okay, but what I don’t get is why should a Haitian or anybody who believes they’re cursed come to Jackson? Why don’t they just get their own witch doctor?”
Nearing looked confused. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”
“I mean, they get sick because they believe in voodoo or whatever. Their minds control their bodies in some way. So if they believe, they should know the local what-do-you-call-‘ems …”
“Oh, I see,” said Nearing, with a grin. “I should have explained it better. The patients who show up at Jackson aren’t believers. That’s the point. You’re right, in that if they were really into traditional practices they wouldn’t even think about coming here. They come here because they think they’re in America and Jackson Memorial is the big hougan where they dispense the powerful American magic. But it’s not.”
“But they must believe in the voodoo at some level, or it wouldn’t work.”
“That’s a theory,” said Nearing, cheerfully. “It’s certainly what the NP staff subscribes to. Psychosomatic yadda-yadda-yadda, tied to primitive superstition, blah-blah and dismiss it. I’m not so sure.”
“Then what’s the explanation?”
Nearing shrugged. “The explanation is, we don’t know squat about a lot of this stuff. There are drugs in some of these preparations they use, psychotropic drugs, like the ones you described in your murder victim. Okay, that’s rational, that’s inside the, let’s say, protective circle of the scientific paradigm. We also believe that there’s stuff that traditional practitioners can do that’s outside that paradigm but still real. Okay, that’s cool, that’s how science works. We see a baffling phenomenon?radioactivity, life itself?we study the hell out of it and we figure out what shelf it goes on, fit it into the structure. Sometimes the phenomenon is so weird we have to expand the structure, what they call a paradigm shift. That’s what radioactivity did to physics, and that’s basically what we’re doing here, studying weird phenomena and trying to find out how to fit it in.” He grinned. “So, Detective, now you know the secrets of medical anthro. Any questions?”
“Yeah. How do you explain Tanzi Franklin and what happened up in that apartment?”
A helpless gesture. “I can’t really explain it. Not enough data. The way you tell it, as a starting hypothesis, the girl looked out her window and saw the killer. Let’s say the killer saw her. He finds her, he blows some powder on her, makes her extremely suggestible. He implants a suggestion: throw a fit and do weird stuff if anyone asks you what you saw. That’d be one explanation. It’d also be a partial explanation for why this guy is so hard to find.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are any number of traditions in which magic workers can render themselves invisible, and there are hundreds of anecdotal reports of shamanic invisibility by supposedly reputable observers. How do they do it? One
