Waking the Moon

“Although you were very unkind to poor Miss Hyde Park last week, cette femme maudite! What can you have been thinking? I saw her show and it left me in tears. Je pleurais.”

Justine dabbed an eye with a ruby-pointed finger, then smiled as she gently slapped Annie’s cheek. “And you! I haven’t seen you since Wigstock, except on TV. And now you have troubles with voudon?”

Annie glanced from Baby Joe to Justine, who were eyeing each other with polite wariness.

“Um, well…” Annie cleared her throat. Justine was really Helen’s friend. Annie had only met her once before; she’d forgotten how imposing she was. “Justine, I need you to help me find someone. Someone special.”

“In here?” Justine swept the room with a disdainful glare. “Cherie, you will need a Geiger counter to find someone special here.”

“No, not here. I don’t know where, exactly.”

“Uh-huh.” Justine rolled her eyes. She leaned over to pluck a cigarette from Baby Joe’s pack, then slid into the booth beside Annie. “Girl problems, Annie?”

“Sort of.” Annie looked at Baby Joe. “Now, I know this is going to sound crazy, but…”

She told them about the rave. Her vision—if that’s what it was—of ritual sacrifice and the eerily beautiful demon in the boathouse, Angelica’s role in the killing, the attempt to slay Annie herself, and then the phone call early the next morning, when Annie learned that Angelica had successfully derailed her tour. Finally, she told them of the woman who had saved her.

“And that freaked me as much as the rest of it. Maybe more.” Annie leaned back in the booth and tugged at the collar of her tuxedo shirt. “God, I’m exhausted.” She turned to Justine, who was listening with great seriousness, her dark eyes wide. “And I can’t believe I’m telling you guys this. I’d think I hallucinated it all, except I know that kid is dead. And I know a strange woman brought flowers to me after my show that night. Patrick saw her, and Helen saw the flowers, and I recognized her—”

Baby Joe shook his head. “You sure about that, Annie?”

“No. I’m not sure. It was dark, I was scared to death, and messed up—I mean, they must have slipped me something, for me to see all that crazy shit! But I’m pretty certain. I got a good look, and…”

Her voice trailed off. She stared miserably down at the floor. “Maybe I’m just going nuts.”

Justine shook her head. “Uh-uh. I believe you. Things like that, they happen to me all the time. Except for the black gardon with a face.” She shuddered, wiping her mouth with a cocktail napkin and examining the lipstick stain as though it were an omen. “Now you said you have a photo for me? Because Justine knows a lot of people, but she is not psychique.”

“Yeah. Sorry.” From her knapsack Annie withdrew an envelope, opened it carefully, and removed a black- and-white photo, brown-stained and curling around the edges. “It’s just an old Polaroid. But it’s the only one I have.”

“Hmmm.” Justine squinted as Baby Joe peered over her shoulder, looking like he wanted to snatch the photo from her hand. “Well, you are right, it is not very good. But—”

“Who took that picture?” demanded Baby Joe.

Annie looked annoyed. “I don’t remember. We were at a Halloween party. I had a life too, you know.”

“Mes enfants!” Justine shook a finger at Baby Joe. She pursed her lips and stared at the photo for another moment, then slid it into a small plastic reticule hanging from her waist. “Tant pis: not someone I know, but we’ll see. Now, I have to meet some friends of my own, so you will excuse me.”

She stood, towering above the others. “Annie, you know how to call me? But it will be a while—”

“How long?”

Justine tilted her head, eyeing the girls onstage. “Bridge-and-tunnel amateurs,” she sniffed. “How long? A month…”

“A month! I can’t wait a month—”

“You wait this long, you can wait a month. But I will start asking about your friend. Give Helen a kiss for me. And you—”

She ducked to kiss Baby Joe on the lips, letting her long fingernails tickle his throat. “Mr. Malabar! You need a date for one of your shows, you give me a call. Your friend has the number.” Light sparked the zircon in her front tooth as Justine smiled and strode off through the club.

“That puto’s something else,” observed Baby Joe.

“Helen knew Justine back when she was Jerome.” Annie sighed. “Sometimes I think I’ve lived too interesting a life. Listen, Baby Joe—I hate to freak and run, but I’m so tired I feel sick, and that—”

She pointed at the remains of her vodka martini. “—that didn’t help.”

Baby Joe looked at her—the circles beneath her eyes that weren’t smudged makeup, the sparks of silver- grey in her cropped hair. “Where you staying, hija?” he asked, reaching across the table for her hand.

“With friends.”

“Where?”

Annie turned away. “I can’t tell you. And I’m really not trying to be difficult,” she insisted, when Baby Joe glowered. “But someone tried to kill me a few days ago, and—”

“And that’s a good fucking reason to tell me where you’ll be! Or come stay at my place—”

“No.” Annie shook her head stubbornly. “Forget it, Baby Joe, don’t even say it—just let me do this my way, okay? I promise, I’ll call you if I hear anything from Justine—”

“Fuck that! You better call me tomorrow—”

“Friday, okay? I’ll call you Friday, I promise—only don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

“What about Sweeney?”

Annie stood. She pulled a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap from her knapsack and stepped out of the booth. With the cap slung on backward and the sunglasses riding on her snub nose, she looked about fourteen. “Sweeney? I don’t think so. Look, Baby Joe—”

He met her in the aisle and threw an arm around her shoulder, hugged her close to him. “Look nothing! You better—”

“Shh.” Annie stood on tiptoe and placed a finger on his lips. “I probably shouldn’t even have told you. You’re not going to write about this, are you?”

“Don’t insult me.” He walked her to the door, stood inside while she stepped out into the blazing late afternoon heat and shrieking tumult of midtown. “But you better call, hija.”

Annie laughed. “Don’t insult me! Friday—”

“I’ll be waiting.”

He stayed on at the strip joint after she left, checking his voice mail for messages, then leaving word at the paper that he’d be back late that night. He had a show to cover at Failte, a tiny downtown back room where a new band from Ireland would be playing after midnight. But there was a lot of ground to cover between now and then. It was almost one hundred degrees out on the pavement, and he’d already started a tab here. So he stayed.

Baby Joe hated places like this—too clean, too many suits, the dancers all commuters from Rutgers and SUNY Purchase working to pay off their student loans. Not to mention ten bucks for rail liquor and a DJ playing the Top Ten from the Jukebox in Hell. Still, he moved to a seat in front of the stage, knocked back a few more drinks and watched and thought about Annie and Sweeney and Oliver Crawford, about Hasel and Hasel’s widow and Angelica Furiano. During a break, he talked with a dancer who was doing her thesis on the films of Ed Wood. Baby Joe bought her a seven-dollar ginger ale and gave her the name of a guy in Atlantic City who’d worked on Glen or Glenda.

After that he lost track of time. Outside the air took on that lowering orange-purple glare of city night, the sky between the high-rises colored like viscera. But inside all was rainbow light and smoke, the a/c cranked all the way down to sixty, so that he began to feel sorry for the dancers, their goose-pimpled flesh and the way they