“Usually, English. English would be the norm.”
“Boring.”
“I’m not saying this is hard-and-fast. This was the norm. You might hear French. You might hear Spanish.”
“Keep going.”
“German, Russian, possibly Yiddish, and, of course, Cantonese.”
“Get out of here. What’s with this Yiddish?”
“My father studied the Kabbalah. Taught himself. A hobby.”
“Get out. Say something in Yiddish.”
“Voorshtlekh mit gehbahkehnch beblekh.”
“Translate.”
“Franks and beans.”
“Great. You’ll never starve.”
Woo takes a deck of cards from his coat pocket and Lenore is about to say, “I don’t play pinochle,” when she sees a skeleton figure pictured on the box and realizes it’s a tarot deck.
“Wouldn’t have picked you for a guy who’d have much use for occult crap,” she says.
“Strictly for amusement purposes,” Woo says, again with the put-on smile that makes him look like an annoyed maître d’ in Chinatown. She watches his hands and is surprised by his skill and comfort with the cards. She wouldn’t have expected it. If she’d been giving Zarelli a rundown on Woo she’d have mentioned an awkwardness, a clumsiness that’s clearly not the case.
“Have you ever used a tarot deck?” he asks.
“High school, I guess,” she says. “Sleeping over friends’ houses.”
“It’s a system like any other. For me, it’s not a question of whether I give credence to its occult history, whether or not I believe in prophecy through the cards. It’s just a system to me, and fascinating within that realm. I don’t have to be as affronted as my colleagues in the hard sciences. I can confront the cards on different terms.”
“So you’re going to tell my fortune?”
“Let’s have a look.”
He hands Lenore the cards and she starts to shuffle. They stare at each other as her hands move, then he nods and she hands the cards back. Woo pulls the top card up and lays it down.
“This is Lenore,” he says. “Interesting. The High Priestess. Learned and practical. A challenge to many men. But she has difficulty forming lasting relationships.”
“Real deep. You couldn’t get hired by a carnival.”
He smiles and turns over several cards, laying them down in a definite pattern. He seems to be concentrating. On the turn of the fifth card, he stops.
“The Moon,” he says in a hushed voice.
“What’s wrong with that?” Lenore asks.
“The Moon is a card of warning. It falls here to show what has occurred in your recent past. It shows danger. The chance of having made an error is great.”
He goes on spreading cards without looking up at her. She wants to laugh, but can’t force it, and instead stares down at Woo’s hands. They hesitate and he looks up at her and says, “I think we should stop with this next one.”
“Which is?”
He flips it over. There’s a picture of an angel blowing a horn, possibly Gabriel, and a naked person emerging from an open coffin.
“It’s the card of Judgment,” Woo says. “This is the future. The future shows a time of judgment will come. A great deal of sorrow. And a calling to atonement for a wrong committed. Something hideous and uncalled-for.”
Lenore’s upper lip begins to quiver and the motion shocks her. It’s a tugging, nervous twitch that she once felt while trying to move a refrigerator, a signal, located randomly in the lip, that the weight of the appliance was much more than her body should be handling. It’s as if a dentist had given her a weird, double injection of both novocaine and some untested muscle stimulant. The tiny nerves in her upper lip first seem to go dead-numb and then tear away, out of control, spastic, and shoot north toward her right ear. She starts to tell herself that she’s having a stroke, a seizure of some kind, but she knows this is a lie. What’s happening to her lip is the result of an overstimulated nervous system, a psyche bullied into a cold, fear-ignoring willfulness, a diet of coffee and screeching music, a year without a normal night’s sleep, and, most of all, the issuance from her gun of two aluminum and lead bullets that tore down a Canal Zone alley at four hundred feet per second and entered the hysterical heart of a redheaded teenage hooker named Vicky.
Woo just stares at her. It’s clear he can see what’s happening to the lip, but he makes no comment, offers no assistance.
Her right hand comes up to her face. She attempts to push the lip physically into place and hold it there, but it’s a useless effort. The lip is locked into its numb then spastic routine and no amount of force from the hand can stop it.
She feels that ceaseless burning pressure behind the eyes, and tears start to come. Immediately, she descends into the breathing pattern of a child half woken from a horrifying nightmare, that choking, irregular, suck-and-heave pattern. Within seconds she’s hysterical. She’s sobbing, choking, keening, moaning, her head slightly flailing around her neck in a jagged circle, a fist pounding into her thigh, her dull fingernails managing to break the skin around her ankle through her socks.
Woo grabs her by the wrists, pulls her hands away from herself. He’s even-voiced, moving moderately, deliberate.
“Lenore,” he says, then he repeats her name, over and over until it takes on the ring and rhythm of a chant.
After a minute he pulls her forward so that her body awkwardly falls, then leans into his. She lets her face, her eyes and the bridge of her nose, find a mount at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, and she collects herself up into a more regular, consistent sobbing.
He moves his fingers slowly through her hair, strokes the back of her neck, whispers into her ear, “Lenore, there are people upstairs now. They’ll hear us, Lenore. They’ll know we’re down here.”
She’s surprised at how much this quiets her. They stay in a rigid and uncomfortable position for several minutes. Lenore thinks of an old movie version of The Diary of Anne Frank that she saw as a child. She and Ike watched it together. She thinks of herself now as Anne Frank, holding herself motionless, waiting, perpetually breathless, for Nazis to kick in the attic door.
Finally, she pulls away from Woo, positions herself back on the floor, cross-legged. She begins to rub at her eyes and says, “I’m sorry.”
Woo simply reaches forward, touches then lightly squeezes her leg.
“Vicky,” she says, as if the name were a word without any assigned meaning, as if she’d read it off the wall of a cave.
Woo nods.
A small red light begins to flash on the receiver on the table. Woo stays silent but starts to point rapidly at the table. Lenore stares at him for a second, then jumps up and moves to the table, grabs the headphones, and brings them to her ear. She hears the traditional phone-ringing sound, reaches out, and turns on the reel-to-reel recorder. The two large wheels of tape begin to turn and the needle in the sound meter box jumps up into view, shocked alive. The phone rings a few times, then there’s a click of a pickup and she hears:
VOICE: Yeah, I’m here.
VOICE: Very good. I hope I didn’t wake you.
Lenore’s heart bucks. She’d bet all her memories of her parents that the second voice, with its accent and confidence, belongs to Cortez.
VOICE: I don’t live here. I’ve got a life besides this shit, okay?
CORTEZ: Relax, Mr. Rourke. There’s no reason we can’t be civil with one another.
ROURKE: I’m not so sure about that.
CORTEZ: Were you offended by my package, Mr. Rourke?
ROURKE: What package? What?
CORTEZ: You’ll find, in this business, Mr. Rourke, there’s a line of demarcation, a pivot of sorts—
ROURKE: I hate it when people talk like this. Too many fucking words—