I liked him too much to bear easily his self-condemnation, and a kind of grief overcame me. Although I was curious, I knew better than to ask him to tell me more about that mortal fire twenty-four years earlier.
Apprehension led me to speak. “You said … you said foretelling is sometimes a gift for people who’ve suffered greatly. But I dreamed of Fiona Cassidy … and I haven’t suffered greatly.”
He said, “Then in time, you will.”
35
That night I dreamed of moonlit woods through which a creature unseen stalked me, of a moon-washed shore along a dark coast where black waves tumbled to the sand and where I felt drawn into the water even though I knew that beneath the turbulent surface swam something more ominous than mere sharks, of a moon-dappled plain where massive slabs of rock thrust skyward like pieces of the shattered vaults of fallen castles and where some presence whispered to me from among the ruins, enticing me into byways where not even the faintest blush of moonlight revealed the way.
Fright woke me. I sat up in bed, listening to the near-total darkness, but nothing in it rustled or creaked, or whispered. After a minute, I stood my pillow on end against the headboard and leaned back, waiting for my heart to stop knocking like a horse’s hooves on cobblestones. In a while, I could hear the distant traffic noises of the city at night trembling against the window glass.
My dream of fluidly shifting locations and unspecified monsters was too vague to be prophetic. All of it had been just the phantasms of the sleeping mind, and I knew that if ever I were stalked by an enemy of murderous intention or enticed into a moonless dark where Death waited, the fatal moment would not occur in any of the eerie landscapes from which I had awakened.
I harked back to my conversation with Mr. Yoshioka after he had said that in time I would suffer greatly.
Why would she take those things from the candy tin—the picture of me sleeping, the stuffed-toy eye?
In part to unsettle you, to say to you that by her possession of them, she will remain aware of you.
In part? Why else?
Since our previous tea, in which you raised the subject of juju, I have researched the issue—juju in Africa and the variation that in the New World is called voodoo. If this woman truly believes in black magic, she might keep the photograph of you for use as an effigy.
A what?
Like a voodoo doll. An effigy. A representation of you. She might believe that if she sticks pins in it, she can torment you long-distance.
That’s bad.
Do not worry, Jonah Kirk. There is nothing true about juju or voodoo. Neither works. It is all nonsense.
That’s what my grandpa says.
Then you should listen to him and not worry.
Okay, but why did she take the stuffed-toy eye?
I do not have a theory. This Eve Adams, this Fiona Cassidy, is perhaps a psychopath, in which case we have no hope of understanding her motives or her mind.
That’s not very comforting, sir.
No, Jonah Kirk, it is not.
Our little get-together to mark the woman’s departure had taken on a decidedly solemn note for a celebration. When we found ourselves sharing dour silences more than conversation, I decided it was time to leave. As I opened the door, Mr. Yoshioka handed me a plain white business card that featured only his name, and centered under it a single word in italics, tailor, and under that a telephone number.
That is my work number. If I am not at home, you can call me there in an emergency.
What emergency?
Any emergency, Jonah Kirk.
Maybe there won’t be one.
Maybe there will not.
But I kinda think there might be.
I think so as well.
36
1966 had been a year of growing tumult. Escalating war in Vietnam. All those murdered student nurses in Chicago. The Austin tower sniper shooting down—and down upon—people as though he were a mad god on a high throne.
Race riots had rocked Atlanta and Chicago, and our city, too. In the civil-rights arena, sober men like Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy advised change by peaceable means, while Stokely Carmichael found threats effective, and more radical groups like the Black Panthers advocated violence. As you might assume, Grandpa Teddy’s sympathies were entirely with the advocates of nonviolence, as were Grandma Anita’s and Sylvia’s.
Anti-war protests were growing. In our city, on October 18, bombs went off during the night in two military-recruiting offices. No one was killed or injured. Police released an artist’s rendering of a suspect based on eyewitness accounts of a man seen lurking in the vicinity of one of the targets. I’d never seen him before … and yet something about him was familiar and intriguing. In fact, after my mother dropped the newspaper in the trash, I quietly retrieved it and clipped out the police artist’s portrait and put it in my La Florentine box.