Bitter Spirits (Roaring Twenties #1)(68)

The smoke was thicker here, nearly choking. Coils of burning incense hung from the pagoda’s ceiling. Temple employees sold incense sticks and bundles of joss paper. Beneath the pagoda, visitors carried their offerings while chanting prayers.

• • •

Winter’s gaze lit on a table where two women were distributing cylindrical bamboo cups. THE KAU CIM ORACLE: CHINESE FORTUNE STICKS, as the sign proclaimed. Querents knelt on their knees in front of the shrine and held the cups sideways, shaking them until a single stick fell onto well-worn cobblestones. The sticks were numbered, each one corresponding to a fortune. People carried their fallen stick to a small canvas tent in the corner of the courtyard, where a fortune-teller provided interpretation.

His fortune-teller. The goddamn pissant who poisoned him.

“That should be our man,” Bo confirmed.

Winter nodded. “Let’s have our oracle read.”

After a customer exited, Winter ducked into the tent’s opening under a line of gold fringe and found himself inside a dim space not more than six or seven feet wide. An oil-burning lantern sat on a small portable table, behind which sat a wizened man dressed in a black ceremonial robe with gaping sleeves. A long gray queue lay braided across one shoulder.

“Please, sit,” the man said without looking up from writing something. He waved his hand toward two folding chairs in front of his table. A flat box containing slips of paper, numbered fortunes, sat near his elbow. A placard off to the side identified the man as Mr. Wu.

Aida took a seat while Winter unbuttoned his suit jacket and sat beside her, stretching out his legs in the small space as best he could. Bo untied the tent flap and closed it behind them.

“Your fortune stick, please,” the man said, then glanced up at Winter and flinched.

“I’m here to get some information about my past, not my future, Mr. Wu. Or should I call you Black Star?”

A muscle in the man’s eye jumped. “What do you want?”

“I want to know why you tried to poison me with Gu.”

Knobby fingers tightened around the pencil he was holding.

“Know who I am, now?” Winter asked. “Or do you poison so many people that you can’t remember?”

“Magnusson,” the man whispered.

They held each other’s gaze as discordant sounds from the temple seeped under the heavy canvas of the tent. “You drank the Gu but are unaffected?” The old man was genuinely surprised.

“Another magic worker removed the curse.”

Shadows clung to bags of loose skin beneath his eyes. “I should’ve never taken that job.”

“You really shouldn’t have.” Winter moved his jacket aside and watched Wu’s gaze settle on the gun strapped next to his ribs.

The old man gave him a dismissive wave. “I lost my wife ten years ago, and with her passing, the will to live, so threatening me is futile. I am looking forward to the afterlife far too much to worry about dying. Save the violence for someone younger who is still under the illusion that there is happiness on this plane.”

If anyone understood apathy born of grief, Winter did. And when he pictured harboring that kind of hopelessness for an entire decade, he almost pitied the old man. But not enough to excuse him. “Your problems are your own. I just want information.”

“All you had to do was ask—I have no loyalties. What would you like to know?”

“Everything.”

Wu leaned back in his seat. “I was hired to do a job, and was told that an anonymous party was interested in ensuring that you do not work anymore. That you have a family history of mental instability—that you had inherited your father’s fragile mind. I was asked to make a potion that would draw ghosts to you and make you crazy.”

He hadn’t inherited his father’s mental illness. The doctors said it could be genetic, but no one else in his family had showed any signs of it. His father had been ill since he was young man—Winter’s mother knew about it when she married him. It just didn’t get out of hand until a few years ago, when the frenzied episodes worsened.

“So you are telling me that someone paid you to mix up a poison that would draw ghosts to me because they believed this would drive me insane,” Winter said. “And when the poison didn’t work, you were hired to conduct additional spells to draw ghosts to me with coins and buttons.”

“I just found out from you that my Gu was unsuccessful. I was hired to make the poison, nothing more. That is my speciality.”

“What about Parducci? You make any poison for him?”

He looked at Bo and began speaking rapid Cantonese.

“He doesn’t know Parducci. Says he was hired by an old Chinese man in May,” Bo interpreted. “He came to his tent, gave no name. Asked for the poison and paid him half up front, half when he came back to pick it up two weeks later.”

“Talk to me, not him,” Winter said to the old man, patience wearing thin.

“He mentioned your name specifically—no one else’s,” he replied in English. “The poison is custom-brewed for one individual. Can’t be used on everyone.”

If that was true, and Wu was a hired gun, then it stood to reason other magic workers were being hired for their specialties. Maybe whatever had been done to Parducci was a different kind of magic.