"Van Lustbader, Eric - Dark Homecoming(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

He awoke in a sweat to find the midnight blue cigarette already tied up at Bennie's private dock. Scrubbing his hands across his face, he rose. He wondered if he'd dreamed Sonia's entire funeral. For a moment he watched his friend hose down the cigarette. "Bennie, what exactly do the Bonita twins want?" Bennie wiped his hands on his trousers. "Huh, they're mad as hatters. Who can say what's in the minds of madmen? Their hearts have been, like, burned to fuckin' ash by their insanity. In that event, they are beyond understanding."
"Sometimes, yes," Croaker said. "But sometimes madness has a purpose. It used to be my job to find it."
"They, maybe, want me dead." Bennie waved a hand. "Forget maybe-definitely. But they're like gods, you see? Those whom the gods destroy they first make mad. They want to drive me mad."
"Are they mad, Bennie?"
Bennie took up his flight bag and climbed out of the cigarette. He lit a cigar while Croaker followed. "You know, in the old days, when the world was less, like, complicated, hat makers were slowly poisoned by the mercury used in making hatbands. It, like, seeped into their fingertips while they were hand-working the satin an' felt, an' eventually they went, like, nutso, insane." He blew out a cloud of aromatic smoke. "I religiously believe something of that nature happened to the Bonita twins. They were poisoned in their mother's womb by evil spirits, who the fuck knows what."
He turned away abruptly and went up the marble stairs toward the house.
In Bennie's huge dining room they shared a charbroiled three-inch-thick porterhouse Bennie ordered from a place in Miami. With it came cottage fries that Croaker knew even as he was eating them would give him indigestion. Ravenous, he ate them anyway. Afterward, Bennie brought out the mescal, but by that rime Croaker had had more than enough altered awareness.
Coffee he could deal with, and as Bennie went about fixing espresso from scratch, Croaker said, "I'd like to know something."
Bennie was grinding the dark, rich beans. "Shoot."
Croaker took a breath, exhaled it slowly, "When the Bonitas delivered your sister's head, were there symbols like the ones we found in Sonia's refrigerator?"
Bennie's hand slipped and he had to fumble with the Off button. "Why d'you ask?" He was facing the kitchen cabinets and Croaker could not see his face.
"Because when you took Sonia's head to wrap it you wouldn't look at those symbols." Croaker stood next to his friend. "I took that to mean they had some significance for you."
"Amateur shrink." Bennie dumped the ground beans into the top of the espresso maker.
"I know you well enough to see that you don't ever necessarily say what's in the back of your mind."
Bennie turned the espresso maker on. Then he stood quite still. Even so, Croaker could feel emotion emanating from him in waves.
"Okay, well..." Bennie broke off, took up a paring knife, and began to deftly peel away the rind of a lemon in thin strips, "See, the thing is... those symbols..." He bit his lip. "Those symbols, they are, like, the cornerstones of my grandfather's world." The scars on Bennie's face shone livid in the light. "I mean they're central to his beliefs, the magic he ... the magic he taught the Bonitas."
For a long moment, there was only stark silence in the vast house. The sudden hiss of the espresso maker made them both start.
"The Bonitas were pupils of your grandfather's?" Croaker said.
Bennie nodded unhappily as he got out tiny cups, dropped a curl of lemon rind into each. "He initiated them in the Guarani healing arts of the indigenous people of my country. It is called by the Guarani Heta I, which in loose translation means Many Waters." Bennie's eyes were wide and staring, as if his sight extended through the fixed past into the unknowable future. "But what they did, Lewis, was unforgivable. They took the healing arts and in their madness perverted Heta I into a terrible force for evil."
Croaker thought about this chilling new strand to what was fast becoming a far-reaching web as Bennie poured the espresso. He said, "What do the symbols mean?"
"They're power gatherers. There's one for each cardinal point in the compass. When you have them all together there is a summoning of the spirits, a nexus of power."
Croaker accepted a cup. "But there were only two in Sonia's refrigerator."
Bennie nodded. "The third is a cross within three concentric circles; the fourth is the outline of a human eye with two irises." He took up his cup but he didn't drink. "See, each initiate takes a symbol as his or her own. The two-irised eye was my grandfather's symbol."
Croaker felt a small chill creep down his spine. He told Bennie about seeing that symbol in his vision and in his dream.
Bennie slowly put down his cup and walked out of the kitchen. Curious, Croaker went after him. Bennie opened a slider and went out onto the side porch. When Croaker came up beside him, he saw that his friend had gone pale.
"Bennie, you okay?"
Bennie seemed to think about this a long time. At last, he said, "To be truthful, Lewis, I'm not at all sure." He gripped the railing and stared out at the reflections of lights swimming like electric eels in the water. "When my grandfather died, it rained for ten days without a break. I was fifteen an' I can remember sitting in that rain. It was a cold rain. My grandfather died on the coldest day of winter. He was pulled from the Paraguay River by fishermen. He lived by the river. He was very old by then, past ninety, and everyone said, he must've, you know, lost his balance in the dark and fallen in, hit his head on the rocks. I never believed that, though. My grandfather was so surefooted he could, like, catch fish with his feet. I saw him do it many times. It always made me laugh."
Bennie's arms were like steel beams as he leaned against the railing, and he hadn't yet regained his color. "Anyway, my grandfather, being a healer, had to be burned. We built a funeral pyre and placed him on top of it. We slaughtered his favorite horse, cooked its flesh, and ate it to honor him while the pyre burned. The wood burned despite the rain. Everyone said it was a miracle."
Bennie put his head down. His chest was heaving as if he were having an asthmatic attack. Croaker heard the crickets and the tree frogs as if from far away. "I sat in a tree," Bennie said, "an' watched the body burn. My grandfather, he always told me he was part animal. Once, when I asked him which one, he smiled an' said, 'When I die you watch me closely. You'll find out.'"
Bennie shook his head. "You have to understand something, Lewis. When my grandfather died, I was terrified. See, he wanted to initiate me-he wanted me to keep the traditional Guarani ways alive. I refused. I don't know why. Maybe I didn't want the responsibility that would, like him, tie me forever to Asuncion. He had so many people who depended on his healing. I already had money on my mind, and an unquenchable itch to see the world." Bennie took out a cigar, stared at it. "Better to admit to that than the alternative: that maybe, deep down, I didn't really believe."
Bennie looked away and shrugged. "So my grandfather, he turned to Antonio an' Heitor. God hears me, they needed a strong hand. Their father died when they were young an' their mother, well, the best that was ever said of her was that she was highborn. That she was, but she was also some kind of witch. My grandfather, I think he, like, felt sorry for them. He passed the traditions on to them, tried to give them some kind of sense of family."
"Why were you afraid when he died?" Croaker asked.
Bennie stared at his cigar for some time. "Oh, well, you know..." He tried to smile, but when he looked up he had a kind of haunted look in his eyes. "I was pissed at him-for, you know, making me feel guilty, for being who he was, I guess. I don't know. Anyway, shit, I stopped talking to him. So when he died... Jesus, I was beside myself."
"So what happened?"
Bennie lit his cigar. The ritualistic motions seemed to calm him somewhat. When he'd got it going to his satisfaction, he said, "I sat in the tree, you know, watching the flames defy the rain. I was scared and, like, entranced at the same time. I kept my eyes on that charred body because I was sure I'd see his spirit emerging as, like, a bird or something. I mean, birds were sacred to us."
"But you didn't."
Bennie blew out a cloud of smoke. His voice had taken on an odd inflection, rising in pitch as if he were again that teenager in Asuncion. "See, there needed to be a lot of water. That's why it rained for ten days without letup."
"Why, Bennie?"
"Because when my grandfather's spirit finally did emerge it wasn't as a bird or a horse or an ocelot." He turned to look into Croaker's eyes and the light from inside the house made his face shine like the moon. "What he had become, Lewis, was a shark."
"Bennie-"
"No, no. I saw what I saw." Bennie waved a hand. "That beast rose from the flames, from the white-hot ashes an' it, like, swam into the torrent of rain, Like smoke, it vanished into the black clouds." He took the cigar out of his mouth. "That tiger shark that took my wahoo yesterday, the symbols-my grandfather's symbol-that came to you during Sonia's funeral ... I told you we were vulnerable to spirits." He put his hand on Croaker's shoulder. "You killed the shark, Lewis, an' now, God hears me, my grandfather's spirit, he's here." Bennie pressed the fingertips of his other hand into the muscle above Croaker's heart. "That tiger shark was no coincidence. Of all the fishermen on the ocean he found us." Bennie leaned into Croaker as he whispered, "Lewis, my grandfather's, like, trying to tell us something."
"Such as?" Croaker said.
Bennie squeezed Croaker's shoulder. "Like, maybe, who killed him. He can't pass fully into the netherworld until his murderer's found an', like, brought to justice."
Croaker stared at Bennie. The truly curious thing, he thought, was that in the aftermath of everything that had happened this evening, the profound spirituality of Bennie's grandfather's world seemed perfectly believable. He shook his head. Maybe it was the residue of whatever he'd inhaled on the cigarette or maybe he was just going nuts. In any case, it was getting late. He glanced at his watch.
"You gotta split?" Bennie asked.
Croaker nodded. "Yeah. I've got to get to the hospital, check up on Rachel."
They walked slowly back inside the house.
"'Bout that..." Bennie paused as they came to the front door. "I've been thinking 'bout your niece." He took Croaker's hand in his, laid something in it.
It was a dark green stone, perfectly oval, worn smooth in the way only centuries of water could accomplish.
Croaker looked up at him. "What's this?"