The Black Death

by Nick Carter

  Lyda, Duppy and I had come down the side of the mountain into the valley as soon as it was dark enough. Duppy found a trail and led us up the next mountain for a way, then we turned into a narrow ravine that led into another ravine and then another. Beyond the last ravine there was a large clearing with one hut and a scattering of palm-thatched lean-tos. A small fire smoldered in a circle of stones. Around the fire were a dozen blacks and Hank Willard.

  Duppy and the girl conversed in soft Creole with the blacks, in a dialect not familiar to me, though I caught a word now and then. The blacks were getting ready for a voodoo ceremony, or so I guessed, because there was a vever drawn in ashes and cornmeal near the fire. On each side of the vever a stake had been driven into the ground. On one stake was a skull, on the other was tied a silver crucifix. There is a lot of Christianity in voodoo, though not of the sort approved by the Church.

  . I stayed in the background and watched. I thought it was all a lot of crap anyway, a waste of time, and said so, but Lyda agreed with Duppy that it was worthwhile. Later we might need help from these blacks.

  There was one other woman, a slim black girl in a red calico dress and a blue bandanna on her oiled hair, and red handkerchiefs knotted about both her arms. The local houngan, an old man with hair like gray steel wool, made a mark on the girl’s forehead with oil and ashes and handed her something. The drummer, not far from me, began to tap his F goatskin stretched over a hollow stump. Not so much tapping at first as rubbing it. A muted, sullen, slithering sound that pricked at my nerves.

  There was a goblin moon, round and yellow and showing a blue skull in it, shining directly into the clearing. The girl held up the thing the houngan had given her and I saw that it was a doll figure. Very crude. Just a swatch of rags on a stick, with a face drawn on an egg, and a few strands of hair stuck to the egg. Nobody had to tell me who the figurine represented, but someone told me anyway. Hank Willard.

  He sidled up to me, limping badly. He had broken a leg when he crashed the B25 and whoever set it for him had bungled it. He cadged a cigarette and puffed and looked at me sideways, speaking softly.

  “They’re going to put an obeah on P.P. Trevelyn.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said, “that that is going to worry old P.P. a hell of a lot.”

  “Skeptic, eh?”

  I said nothing. He smoked for a moment and then said, “Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not as skeptical as I was, I know that. I’ve seen some damned queer things since I’ve been hiding in this screwing jungle. But that ain’t what I want to talk to you about.”

  Here it came. I watched the girl, who I figured was a canzo, an apprentice voodoo priest, as she crooned over the little ragged doll, then spat on it and raised it over her head and shook it furiously. The drumming stepped up.

  Hank Willard was whispering. “You’re not Sam Fletcher. I know Sam. I had a letter from him just before I flew that wreck in here—Sam was heading for Umuohiagu in Biafra and he wanted me to join him. Said the pay was damned good. But I had already signed a contract with some crazy bastards to invade this stinking place, and I keep my word I’m not very bright at times. No brains.”

  They were passing the doll around among the blacks. Each one spat on it and passed it to the next. Lyda and Duppy were off to one side, watching and whispering.

  “My guess is that you’re CIA,” Willard said. “Here to look into those missiles that P.P. and Papa Doc are trying to perfect. Am I right?”

  It was a way out and I took it. I already knew that I was stuck with Willard, so I might as well use him as best I could. Maybe it wasn’t so bad at that. Another Indian on my side might come in handy.

  So I nodded, playing the mysterious bit, and said, “Okay. So you guessed it. How come you didn’t give me away?”

  “You wanta sit down? This leg kills me if I stand on it too long.”

  He sank to the ground and I squatted beside him. The doll had almost reached Lyda and Duppy.

  “I got to get out of this screwing country,” Willard said. “I been lucky, but it can’t last forever. All the rest of the invasion party are dead, hanged, and Papa Doc has got a hell of a price on my head. I want out of this place and to get back to Hong Kong where Mai Ling is spending all my dough. Mai Ling is my permanent girl. Eurasian and one hell of a dish. All I do here is think about Mai Ling.”

  I said I wasn’t much interested in his love life, or lack of it. “What do you want from me, Willard?”

  He cadged another cigarette and whispered between cupped hands as he lit it. “I want out of this hole. You help me and I’ll help you. I know that you CIA guys always have ways of getting out. You take me with you, and I’m your man. Anything. I don’t give a damn what it is. I’m a pretty good man with a gun.”

  I stared at him. “What makes you think there is going to be any gun play?”

  Willard’s pale gray eyes held mine for a moment and he chuckled. “Hell, man! You come in here loaded for bear, with Duppy who I know is a killer, and the Black Swan—I know about her too—and you ask me that! But I could be wrong, I guess. Maybe you come to build a dam for the blacks, huh?”

  I made up my mind. “Okay, Willard. You’ve got a deal. But understand one thing—you take orders from me!”

  “Sure—sure. But there is one other thing.”

  “There always is. What?”

  “Even if I get out of this I’m going to be in a little trouble with the State Department.”

  That was an understatement.

  “You CIA people pack a lot of powder, I hear tell. You think you can fix it for me with State? So they won’t lift my passport?”

  I was really surprised and showed it. “You mean they haven’t already?”

  He grinned at me and suddenly I found myself liking the guy. He had a tooth out in front, and a scraggly ginger beard, and he looked like a not too smart all-American boy who had somehow gone wrong. An innocent. Something of a lout, but basically sound. None of this was true, of course.

  “I’ve been lucky,” he said. “But this time State is going to nail me to the cross for sure. Unless you help me.”

  Hawk can work miracles when he sets his mind to it. I i said: “All right. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  That was all we had time for. The black girl brought the doll to us and we both spat on it and handed it back to her. Her sleek dark face was shiny with sweat and she showed a lot of white eyeball as she looked at me without, I think, seeing me at all.

  She took the doll back to the houngan and handed it to him. Lyda caught my eye and beckoned me into the group. I joined them, with Willard hobbling at my side.

  The houngan took a silver spoon out of his pocket and began to dig a hole near the circle of stones. It took me a I moment to realize that he was digging a tiny grave.

  A crucifix made of twigs was planted at the head of the j little grave. Upside down. The houngan made a pass over the ragged doll and muttered something. I made out the word— Rutibel.

  Lyda had moved away from Duppy and stood at my elbow I now and she was whispering in my ear.

  “Rutibel is a demon. One of Satan’s helpers. This is real powerful obeah.”

  I was a little impressed myself, but I said out of the corner of my mouth: “Sophisticated lady. Columbia grad. Worldly wench. Impressed by voodoo gimmicks.”

  She squeezed my arm. “Don’t! Don’t talk like that. Not now. Not here.”

  Hank Willard said, “I’m just happy that I’m not old P.P. tonight. Even if the son of a bitch is a billionaire. That’s his real hair on that egg, you know. One of his servants smuggled it out.”

  They were all some kind of nuts and at the moment maybe I wasn’t much better. I looked up to catch Duppy’s stare on me. They were cold and searching, those red-stained eyes, and his thick lips moved in a half sneer. Duppy, I thought, isn’t much impressed by all this voodoo crap. Duppy is thinking about me, wondering if he is going to have to kill me. I knew the look. But why? That I didn’t know.r />
  The houngan put the doll in the tiny grave and covered it over. More passes and incantations. Rutibel this and Rutibel that.

  The girl came back with a crock of excrement. A big gourd cut to bowl shape and filled with human excrement. The houngan dumped the stuff on the little grave and muttered more of the curse, the obeah. Nobody said a word. I felt a sudden insane desire to laugh, but I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t have anyway. It would have been most impolitic.

  The drum rolled a vibrant tattoo, and the girl leaped over the grave and then began to dance around it I nudged Lyda. “Isn’t that drum dangerous? So loud?”

  She shook her head without looking at me. She seemed fascinated by the dancing black girl.

  “No. P.P.’s guards won’t come in here at night. Neither will the Tonton Macoute—they’re Haitians too, you know. They’re all afraid of obeah. Especially Rutibel obeah. We’re safe here.”

  I was a little on edge and it showed in my voice. “All right,” I gritted. “Let’s get Duppy and be on our way. I want to be outside P.P.’s gate when the sun comes up. Enough of this is enough.”

  Lyda reached for my hand. She began to stroke it. The way she had stroked it that night in the voodoo church in New York. Her cool fingers brushed my palm.

  “Not just yet,” she said. “Wait a little. Just watch—watch the girl dance and see what happens.” There was a breathless quality about the words, as though she were forcing them. I felt her tremble suddenly.

  What the hell! Another orgy? With time getting away from us.

  The black girl had somehow gotten naked. She danced around and around the grave, sweat gleaming on her satiny flesh, her head thrown back, eyes half closed, her sharp breasts bouncing up and down. The rest of the people closed in to make a tight little circle. They began to clap their hands softly in time to the drum.

  The girl made a sound, half moan and half shriek, and fell shuddering to the ground near the grave. She lay spreadeagled and writhing, humping her pelvis.

  There was a sound like the sound a stallion makes as he approaches a mare. Duppy leaped into the circle, shoving the blacks aside with his massive arms, and dropped on top of the girl. He slammed into the writhing black girl and she screamed and then came up to meet him and grabbed at him with her long thin legs and the watching people sighed like a small wind and kept on clapping as they watched. The drum began to match Duppy’s thrusts.

  Lyda bit my ear. Her breath was on fire. She tugged at me. “Come on,” she said. “Just come on! You. Oh, you man! Come on.”

  She led me back into the brush and fell down and pulled me down on her and it couldn’t have lasted two minutes. But what a two minutes!

  When it was over and she stopped heaving and sighing and moaning and talking she lay for a minute or two with her eyes closed. Then she gave me a sort of cold look and said, in a sort of cold little voice, “You’re right. We can’t waste any more time here. We better get started.”

  That was my girl. Do it and forget it. Put on a dry pair of panties and get on with business.

  I thought that if I did get out of this, and did make a report to Hawk, I would leave this bit out. The Old Man would never believe it anyway.

  Chapter 10

  Dawn was still three hours away when we came down the far side of the mountain. The bloody moon, paling as the night grew old, sank into the valleys and we did the last two hours in total darkness. Duppy took us along a narrow caliche trail that twisted and turned like a crazy snake, and did it with the aplomb of a native New Yorker crossing Times Square. Lyda walked behind him, while I lagged back to give Hank Willard a hand now and then. I had seen his leg, with the newly healed bone grotesquely malformed. It cost him a lot to keep up, but he did pretty well. He didn’t have much gear to lug—just the clothes he stood in and an old British Sten machine carbine. He had a shopping bag full of 9mm ammo for the gun. The shopping bag was from Macy’s Herald Square. I asked him about that. During one of the few breaks that Duppy gave us Willard explained. If you could call it an explanation.

  He shrugged and gave me his broken toothed grin. “A screwing laugh, ain’t it. Those crackpots that invaded with me must have handled their supply and logistics through Mad Magazine. I know for a fact they bought some bazookas from a junk dealer in New Jersey. None of them worked. I never did know where they got the relic I was flying, but just before I take off they hand me this Sten and half a shopping bag full of ammo. In case, they tell me, I get shot down and have to fight my way out. Any chance of me getting a shot of that rum, Sam. This damned leg is killing me.”

  I said no to the rum, mindful of his file. He was a drunk when he had the chance. Just the same I could have used a shot of the Barbancourt.

  “Duppy’s got the booze,” I told him. “And Duppy is going to keep it until this is over. Time enough for drinking when that happens, and when you’re out of Haiti. Then you can drink yourself to death, for all I care.”

  We couldn’t see each other in the dark, but I roughened my voice. “I mean that, Willard. You foul me up and I’ll let you rot here!”

  “All right, Sam. Okay! No use getting steamed about it. I just thought a little drink wouldn’t hurt any.”

  He dropped it and went on telling me how the B25 hadn’t had a bomb sight—his employers not being able to afford one—and he had dropped his bombs by dead reckoning. Missing the Palace, and Papa Doc, and hitting the Iron Market and a garbage dump.

  He snickered. “Goddamn bombs were duds anyway. Probably weren’t even armed. Christ only knows where they bought them.”

  I wanted to keep Hank Willard happy, and loyal to me. A Sten gun will throw 550 rounds a minute and the time might come when I would need that. I pretended an interest in his misfortunes.

  “Wasn’t that part of your job, Hank? To inspect the bombs before you took off on that wild ass flight?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know anything about bombs. I was a fighter pilot, for Christ’s sake. I never flew a bomber before. I told them I had, when they recruited me, because I was broke and needed the dough. I got it, too. Five thousand bucks, less what I had to give the blacks for hiding and feeding me. Right here in a money belt.”

  “That should get you to Hong Kong,” I said.

  “Your screwing A, it will. And Mai Ling. Jesus—I dream about that broad every night.”

  I sighed and shook my head. Hank was a case of arrested development. A kid still fighting the Korean war. Still using the outdated slang of that time. All in all, I admitted, we were a pretty sad little army. A nut like Willard, Lyda with her dreams of grandeur and revenge, me trying to do the impossible because Hawk said do it.

  Duppy was another matter. Duppy—Diaz Ortega—knew exactly what he was doing.

  Just then he said, “Okay, back there. You blancs. Let us move it, huh. Got to get there and hide before the sun coma up, for sure. Or we dead mens.”

  We made it. We stopped in a tangle of damp jungle, thick and vine-grown. Even Duppy sighed with relief as he dropped his gear and Lyda’s pack. Hank flopped down, moaning about his leg, and went to sleep. Lyda, too. I eased off my pack and the musette bag, but kept the machine gun cradled in my arm. Duppy did the same.

  He came and squatted beside me and said it was all right to smoke. “We all right for now, blanc. We on the end of a shoulder that push out from the mountain into the valley. We got a tree house, I show you when it light enough, and we see all up and down the valley. See inside the fence and a lot of P.P.’s land. Even see his house and his swimming pool, see the zombie quarters, see a lot from that old tree.”

  The acrid fumes of his Splendid drifted in my eyes. I brushed smoke away and said, “Back to the zombies, eh? What is it, Duppy? What’s the real pitch? If we’re going to work together, going to snatch this Valdez, I think I should know everything you know. How about it?”

  I waited. As alert as I have ever been. I had taken pains to see that his Thompson was on safety and now I waited for a snick and it didn’t come.
He didn’t speak for a minute. I watched his cigarette glow in the dark.

  Then he laughed, a deep basso rumble. “Lemme tell you something, blanc. Just for hell of it. Something happen to me. One time I a wise alec, like you, and I say to a voodoo man that it all a lot of nothing. Like you.

  “He just look at me, this man, and he say go and find an egg. Any egg. Take it from under the hen, you want. Then you bring it me here.” I laugh but I do it. I find egg okay from a friend of mine, and I know that egg just hatched. So I give it to the voodoo man and he say that I get a glass of cold water. Cold water.

  “I do it. Then he tell me put the egg in the glass of water. He not touch the egg. Never. Then he pass his hand over the glass and he say some voodoo stuff and look at me and he say—now break egg.” So I laugh and I break egg.

  “That egg hard boiled, blanc!”

  Duppy paused, waiting for my reaction. The story had been well told, his deep voice coloring the nuances just right I wondered what he sounded like when he wasn’t affecting the uneducated half Creole, half black pidgin, that he used I with me. Diaz Ortega had been educated in Moscow.

  “A good story,” I said. “And if it’s true I’m impressed. But I don’t see what it has to do with P.P.’s zombies, if any.”

  He laughed again. “You a hard man convince, blanc. I not try no more. Wait till light and let you see for self. Now old Duppy gonna sleep a little. This place safe enough, but don’t go moving around. Fall off a cliff maybe, and break your neck.”

  He sounded hopeful. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I that I had no intention of falling off a cliff.

  I heard him settling down, rustling and thrashing about for a spell, then begin to snore lightly. He hadn’t snored the night before. It was only a crazy hunch but I decided to play it. I got on my hands and knees, moving lightly and without sound, and then I faked a couple of snores and a little heavy breathing.

  Duppy played the game for ten minutes. Then he stopped snoring and I could feel him listening. I gasped and snorted and sawed a small log. I convinced him, because after a minute I heard him moving away, his big boondockers scraping on the rock. I went after him on my hands and knees, with extreme caution, moving only when he did. Twice he stopped dead, listening, and I froze. I was back on the caliche now and the pebbles and shards slashed at me.