He bowed gracefully to them then, and turned to stroll away through the trees. Arceneaux said, “Conjure.” Duplessis turned slowly again at the word, waiting. Arceneaux said, “You ain’t come back all by yourself, we took care. You got brought back-take a conjure man to do that. Which one-Guillory? I got to figure Guillory.”
Duplessis smiled, a little smugly, and shook his head. “I’d never trust Guillory out of my sight-let alone after my death. No, Fontenot was the only sensible choice. Entirely mad, but that’s always a plus in a conjure man, isn’t it? And he hated you with all his wicked old heart, Jean-Marc, as I’m sure you know. What on earth did you do to that man-rape his black pig? Only thing in the world he loved, that pig.”
“Stopped him feeding a lil boy to it,” Arceneaux grunted. “What he do for you, and what it cost you? Fontenot, he come high.”
“They all come high. But you can bargain with Fontenot. Remember, Jean-Marc?” Duplessis held out his hands, palms down. The two little fingers were missing, and Arceneaux shivered with sudden memory of that moment when he’d wondered who had already taken them, and why, even as he had prepared to cut into the bound man’s flesh…
Duplessis laughed harshly, repeating, “My insurance policy, you could say. Really, you should have thought a bit about those, old friend. There’s mighty conjuring to be done with the fingers of a loup-garou. It was definitely worth Fontenot’s while to witch me home, time-consuming as it turned out to be. I’m sure he never regretted our covenant for a moment.”
Something in his use of the past tense raised Arceneaux’s own single brow, his daughters’ onetime plaything. Duplessis caught the look and grinned with the flash of genuine mischief that had charmed even Arceneaux long ago, though not ma Sophie, never-she knew. “Well, let’s be honest, you couldn’t have a man with that kind of power and knowledge running around loose-not a bad, bad man like Hipolyte Fontenot. I was merely doing my duty as a citizen. Au ’voir again, mon ami. Mon assassin.”
Watching him walk away, Arceneaux was praying so hard for counsel and comfort to Damballa Wedo, and to Damballa’s gentle wife, the rainbow Ayida, that he started when Garrigue said beside him, “Let’s go, come on. We don’t let that man out of our sight, here on in.”
Arceneaux did not look at him. “No point in it. He want us to follow him-he want us going crazy, no sleep, no time to think straight, just wondering when… I ain’t go play it his way, me, unh-uh.”
“You know another way? You got a better idea?” Garrigue was very nearly crying with impatience and anxiety, all but dancing on his toes, straining to follow Alexandre Duplessis. Arceneaux put his hands on the white man’s arms, trying to take the trembling into himself.
“I don’t know it’s a better idea. I just know he still think we nothing but a couple back-country fools, like he always did, and we got to keep him thinking that thing-got to. Because we gone kill him, Rene, you hearing me? We done it before-this time we gone kill him right, so he stay dead. Yeah, there’s only two of us, but there’s only one of him, and he ain’t God, man, he just one damn old loup-garou in a fancy suit, talking fancy French. You hear what I’m saying to you?”
Garrigue did not answer. Arceneaux shook him slightly. “Right now, we going on home, both of us. He ain’t go do nothing tonight, he want us to spend it thinking on all that shit he just laid on us. Home, Rene.”
Still no response. Arceneaux looked into Garrigue’s eyes, and could not find Garrigue there, but only frozen, helpless terror. “Listen, Rene, I tell you something my daddy use to say. Daddy, he say to me always, di moin qui vous lamein, ma di cous qui vous ye. You tell me who you love, I tell you who you are.” Garrigue began returning slowly to his own eyes, looking back at him: expressionless, but present. Arceneaux said, “You think just maybe we know who we are, Compe’ Rene?”
Garrigue smiled a little, shakily. “Duplessis… Duplessis, he don’t love nobody. Never did.”
“So Duplessis ain’t nobody. Duplessis don’t exist. You gone be scared of somebody don’t exist?” Arceneaux slapped his old friend’s shoulder, hard. “Home now. Ti-Jean say.” They did go to their homes then, and they slept well, or at least they told each other so in the morning. Arceneaux judged that Garrigue might actually have slept through the night; for himself, he came and went, turning over a new half-dream of putting an end to Alexandre Duplessis each time he turned in his bed. Much of the waking time he spent simply calling into darkness inside himself, calling on his loa, as he had been taught to do when young, crying out, Damballa Wedo, great serpent, you got to help us, this on you… Bon Dieu can’t be no use here, ain’t his country, he don’t speak the patois… got to be you, Damballa… When he did sleep, he dreamed of his dead wife, Pauline, and asked her for help too, as he had always done.
A revitalized Garrigue was most concerned the next morning with the problem of destroying a werewolf who had already survived being sliced into pieces, themselves buried in five different counties. “We never going to get another chance like that, not in this city. City, you got to explain why you do somebody in-and you definitely better not say it’s cause he turn into a wolf some nights. Be way simpler if we could just shoot him next full moon, tell them we hunters. Bring him home strap right across the hood, hey Ti-Jean?” He chuckled, thinking about it.
“Except we be changing too,” Arceneaux pointed out. “We all prisoners of the moon, one way another.”
Garrigue nodded. “Yeah, you’d think that’d make us-I don’t know-hold together some way, look out for each other. But it don’t happen, do it? I mean, here I am, and I’m thinking, I ever do get the chance, I’d kill him wolf to wolf, just like he done Sophie. I would, I just don’t give a damn no more.”
“Come to that, it come to that. Last night I been trying to work out how we could pour some cement, make him part of a bridge, an underpass-you know, way the Mafia do. Couldn’t figure it.”
Garrigue said, “You right about one thing, anyway. We can’t be waiting on the moon, cause he sure as hell won’t be. Next full moon gone be short one loup-garou for certain.”
“Maybe two,” Arceneaux said quietly. “Maybe three, even. Man ain’t going quietly no second time.”
“Be worth it.” Garrigue put out his hand and Arceneaux took it, roughness meeting familiar lifelong roughness. Garrigue said, “Just so it ain’t the little ones. Just so he don’t ever get past us to the little ones.” Arceneaux nodded, but did not answer him.
For the next few days they pointedly paid no attention to Duplessis’s presence in the city-though they caught his scent in both neighborhoods, as he plainly made himself familiar with family routines-but spent the time with their children and grandchildren, delighting the latter and relieving the men of babysitting duties. Garrigue, having only sons, got away without suspicions; but neither Noelle nor Arceneaux’s daughter-in-law Athalie were entirely deceived. As Athalie put it, “Women, we are so used to men’s stupid lies, we’re out of practice for a good one, Papajean,” which was her one-word nickname for him. “I know you’re lying, some way, but this one’s really good.”
On Saturday Arceneaux, along with most of his own family, accompanied Garrigue’s family to the Church of Saints Philip and James for Manette Garrigue’s First Communion. The day was unseasonably warm, the group returning for the party large, and at first no one but Arceneaux and Garrigue took any notice of the handsome, well-dressed man walking inconspicuously between them. Alexandre Duplessis said thoughtfully, “What a charming little girl. You must be very proud, Rene.”