Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(18)
And throughout it all is Santa Muerte. There are shrines to the Bony Lady in half the stalls. You can buy small resin statues of her, candles, incense burners. Every botánica has prayers to her printed on fake parchment, rolled up and tied with a bow. Spells for love, vengeance, money, happiness. She is death and sex and magic and salvation. A dark reflection of the Virgin of Guadalupe, her only promise being that one day she will come for you. Even if there were no shrines to Santa Muerte in Tepito she’d be in the very fabric of the place.
I get stares as I wander through the streets. The out of place gringo. Some are curious, some sizing me up. To the ones who look like they might be trouble, I lower my sunglasses and give them a good, long look at my eyes. They scurry along like rats after that.
I don’t know where Tabitha might be in this chaos. I gravitate toward the shrines, the stalls with life-size statues dressed in hot pink wedding dresses, gold and black fabric, dollar bills pasted to their plaster robes.
I ask about a Korean woman and get pointed in half a dozen directions. To the locals anyone Asian is Chinese. A while back a slew of Chinese immigrants showed and started buying up stalls and storefronts. Now they own most of the place. None of them are Tabitha.
A couple hours of wandering and my body tells me it’s either time for food or more Adderall. I opt for the food. I hit a cart and pick up a Coke and a bowl of migas, garlic soup with pork bones and day old bolillos. I’m leaning against a light post, staying clear of the wires and cables snaking up from the stalls into the lamp to pirate power, finishing my second bowl when I see it. A small, unobtrusive carving in the post of one of the permanent stalls across from me. A tiny pentagram with two wavy lines beneath it. If you didn’t know what it was, you probably wouldn’t notice it.
The stall is a botánica selling folk remedies, prayer candles. But the carving tells me it sells other things, too. A woman, old, with skin cracked and brown like gnarled teak, sits behind the table watching me run my finger over the carving. I toss the paper bowl and plastic spoon in a trash can, or at least I hope it’s a trash can, it’s a little hard to tell out here, and walk over to her.
The magic set likes to keep things quiet, so when practitioners sell to other practitioners they use symbols based on old hobo signs. The pentagram with the wavy lines means this woman sells potions. It’s only about the width of my thumb.
Of course, she could just be manning the stall and the real mage is out. There’s a simple way to get to the bottom of that. I take a sip of the local pool of magic, taste its tang of chaos, its thickness of human sweat, the draw of money. Her eyebrows shoot up as she feels the pull on the magic. She does the same. It’s a quick and easy way to identify other mages. It’s not like we walk around wearing robes and pointy blue hats with stars and moons on them. And it’s more polite than acting like dogs and sniffing each other’s butts.
Now that we’ve established our bona fides I pull a wad of 200 peso notes out of my pocket and put them on the table. She smiles when she sees the bills, showing cracked and yellow teeth. “I’m looking for someone,” I say. And the smile goes away.
“I don’t know anybody,” she says. She looks away from me.
I ignore and press on. “I’m looking for the type of someone who might be interested in your sorts of wares.” She doesn’t have any other customers, but the stalls are so close to each other that anyone could easily overhear our conversation so I keep it cryptic. Above all else, we don’t want to scare the straights.
Her eyes lock onto mine, and I can tell she’s pissed off. I’ve crossed a line. “I don’t talk about my customers.” I pull a U.S. hundred dollar bill so that only she can see it and slip it under the peso notes. The last thing I need is somebody trying to jump me for my cash. I already stand out, I don’t need to grab more attention.
“How about a slightly different question? Have you seen anyone around recently who you think might be a potential customer? Somebody like me?” I lower my sunglasses so she can get a look at my eyes. She scowls at me. She knows I’m human. When something that isn’t draws power from the pool it feels different.
She thinks about it a second, then sweeps the bills to her side of the table making them disappear faster than you can say abracadabra. “End of the street. Girl’s got a storefront. She does fortunes. Felt a draw on some power coming from that direction a little while ago. So if it’s not her, it’s somebody close.”
“Much obliged.”
“Don’t tell her I said anything,” she says. “She frightens me.”
“Why?”
“She smells like death,” she says, crossing herself. “The same way you do.”
Yep. That’s Tabitha.
The storefront is right where the woman said it would be, in a white brick building with blacked out windows. Hand-painted in bold, red letters above the door is a sign that reads ADIVINADORA. Fortuneteller.
Well, then. Let’s go see what the future holds.
A little bell rings when I open the door and step inside. The sounds and sights of Tepito disappear behind me and it takes me a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. When they do I can see what look like carnival sideshow banners hanging from the walls, brightly colored paintings with words beneath each one. LA LUNA showing a smiling, crescent moon, LA MUERTE showing a skeleton, and EL CORAZóN showing an anatomical heart with veins and everything. I’ve seen these before but I can’t quite place them.