The Black Death

by Nick Carter

  He made more noise on the caliche and it was easier to follow him. Then he vanished. No sound. No anything. I crouched, breathing shallowly through my mouth, and wondered if he had used voodoo to sprout wings?

  I heard him again. Over me. Up in the air. The bastard was in a tree!

  I remembered what he had said about a tree house and I began to feel around in the dark, just off the path. I got lucky and found it in less than a minute. A thick trunked, smooth boled tree that had wooden cross-pieces nailed to it for climbing. I stood up, counted four of the cross-pieces, then dropped to all fours again and crawled ahead on the path so I could get a good look at the tree from in front.

  I was just in time to see the flickering eye of his small flashlight from high above. It blinked white and fast, stuttering out the Morse, and then it went out and that was it. O.K.

  O.K. Beamed in the direction of P.P.’s estate. What in the hell was okay?

  I had no time to think about it then. I heard him coming down the tree and I scuttled back down the trail, still on my hands and knees. I was back in my place, gurgling and snoring again, when he came back and stood listening, then flopped down and really went to sleep. He didn’t snore.

  I didn’t sleep a wink. I made tapes of all recent events, from the first phone call from Hawk right down to the present, and let them spin through my mind. I cut and edited and patched and extrapolated and in the end I came up with a pretty weird montage. I did a lot of guessing, some of the educated variety, some of the way out type, and when dawn came seeping through a copse of ackee trees I knew just about what I had known before. Duppy was playing some devious game of his own. On his own. Lyda didn’t know about it. Hank Willard didn’t figure in it; he was happen-1 stance, extraneous to the situation. That meant it was between Duppy and me. He had known that from the first. I had only suspected, but now I knew it, too.

  Who had he been signalling to inside P.P. Trevelyn’s 5000-acre compound? Why?

  How in hell did you make a rational picture out of such disparate pieces? Duppy—Diaz Ortega—was KGB. Commie.; P.P. and Papa Doc were Fascists and Commie haters. In the end it was like the old joke—who was doing what to whom, and who was paying for it? I fell asleep as the dawn crept in, and I didn’t have any answers.

  One thing I knew—Duppy had been doing the leading so far. That had to stop. I had to take over and lead, push him a little, see if he would make a mistake.

  I slept until noon. When I got up, stiff and cold and in my usual foul waking mood, there was no sign of Duppy and Lyda. Hank Willard was heating a canteen cup of instant coffee over a can of Sterno. I joined him and fixed myself some coffee.

  When I got the first gulp of hot bitter stuff down I looked at Willard. “Where are they?”

  He nodded upward, then pointed with a skinny dirty finger. “In the tree house. Spying out the lay of the land, I suppose. I was invited, but I ain’t climbing any trees with this leg.”

  Last night, in the dark, it had seemed like a mile to that tree. Now I saw that it was about thirty yards. The tree was a soaring, slanting coco palm nestled in a thicket of ackee and conifers and ironwood. Wild cotton grew around the trunks. I looked for the tree house and at first I couldn’t see it.

  Hank scratched and grinned through his ginger beard. “Speaking of the lay of the land, I remember one time—”

  “Shut up,” I told him. “Too early for that crap.” I scalded my mouth with the lousy coffee and went on searching for the tree house and at last I spotted it.

  Cute. Very clever. Someone had used steel cables and turnbuckles to pull the surrounding trees in around the coco palm and make a sort of lacy green cage. And it wasn’t really a tree house at all, but a flat platform, about 10 x 10, fixed two thirds of the way up the palm tree. The cables and turnbuckles were painted green. It was a good professional job and I wondered how long it had been there. And why? Somehow I didn’t think the local blacks were responsible. Work like this, and the planning that went with it, was a little beyond them.

  I went back in the scrub to relieve myself and while I was at it I checked the Luger and the stiletto and the Colt .45. When I got back I picked up my Tommy gun and went to the palm tree. Hank Willard, looking bored, was playing mumbelty peg with a broken-bladed Scout knife. He gave me a cautious grin and kept silent. I shook my head as I passed. But for the Sten gun by his side the illusion might have been complete: aging Eagle Scout playing at camping. Again I flirted with the notion that this was all fantasy, that this snafued and fubared mission wasn’t really happening. The phone would ring any moment and I would wake up and answer it and Hawk would have a real mission for me.

  Lyda was coming down the tree like a lovely monkey as I approached. Her long legs just matched the cross-pieces.

  I grabbed her by the waist and lifted her down. She beamed and kissed me. She was excited.

  “I saw him. I really saw him, Sam. Romera Valdez. He was in a jeep, under heavy guard.” She pointed to the east. “They were taking him up to the Citadel, I think. There is a new road, just built. Goes all the way to the peak. He must work at the Citadel every day and come back here, to P.P.’s place, at night.”

  I put my arm around her shoulders. “You sure it was Valdez?”

  Lyda looked up at me. “What makes you ask that? It’s almost as if you were—”

  She broke off and frowned, her nether lip caught in small white teeth.

  I tightened my hold on her shoulder. “As if I what?”

  Her smooth brown face crinkled in puzzlement. “I, oh, I don’t really know. I’m confused right now. After all I haven’t see Romera in five years. But—it’s like you were reading my mind.”

  I held her away from me and pushed up her chin with my fist and made her look into my eyes. “You aren’t sure that the man you saw really is Romera Valdez? Isn’t that it, Lyda? Come on. Spill it.”

  She nodded, a bare inclination of her head on that long swan’s throat. “Maybe. I just don’t know. Duppy says it is Valdez. And he should know—he’s been spying from this place for a long time. H—he says that five years make a big difference and that maybe Valdez has been sick, or been mis-treated, even tortured, and that would account for it.”

  “Meaning?” I knew it wasn’t Dr. Romera Valdez. They were using a decoy for some reason.

  She leaned against me and put her head on my shoulder. “He looked so much older. And somehow different. And the way he sat in the jeep, so stiff and not looking around at anything. His face was right, though, what I could see through the glasses. It’s just that something seems to be wrong and I don’t know what it is. Duppy says I am being a fool.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “And maybe not. You go think about it for a while. How is our friend Duppy this morning?”

  He answered that by calling down from the tree platform in a hoarse whisper. “Come on up, blanc. I show you some zombies.”

  I looked a question at Lyda. She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know about that, either. They do look like zombies. I mean they look the way I’ve read that zombies look. You go look and then tell me.”

  I climbed the tree. Duppy’s thick black bulk was stretched on the planked platform. He had the binoculars screwed into his eyes. At his elbows was an empty Cration can with a plastic spoon in it, and a canteen cup still half full of coffee.

  He extended the binoculars back without looking at me. “You have a good sleep, blanc?”

  I growled an affirmative and made a careful study of my surroundings. A cunningly contrived piece of work: we were on the tip of a high narrow peninsula, an extension of the mountain shoulder, a heavily overgrown salient pushing into the wide valley. A net of cables held a sheltering screen of trees around the palm tree and the platform, but a skillful clipping and pruning job allowed a wide and unobstructed view of the valley below and to the east. It was like a trick mirror—we could see out but they couldn’t see in. Unless they were hanging 300 feet in the air and looking directly down our throats
.

  I adjusted the focus on the binoculars. I said, and meant it, “Very clever. Sweet. Until the day that helicopter spots it.”

  He grunted. “We here, ain’t we? Worry about that when the time come. Now, blanc, you look down by gate and tell me what you see.”

  The binoculars were excellent and the scene leaped into being with the depth and clarity of a diorama. There was a large, brick gatehouse and a steel and wire gate and black-uniformed guards, all of the latter heavily armed and some with dogs. Two of the black uniforms stood near the gatehouse, talking and consulting papers on a clipboard and paying no attention to the others. The others were half a dozen guards and three separate knots of workmen. Two guards to a group. The workmen wore blue denim uniforms, pants and jacket, and on the back of each jacket were stencilled white letters: P.P.

  I cursed softly and Duppy misunderstood and chuckled. “Matter, blanc? Some of your notions get upset?”

  I had been cursing P.P. Trevelyn. The arrogance of the bastard! His own prisoner-of-war camp, even to the stenciled letters. They did look that way, like PWs. I’d seen thousands of them all over the world.

  But I had never seen PWs move like these men. Slow, stiff, foot-dragging motions. They never turned their heads. They turned their whole body with agonizing slowness, with their heads craned forward and their shoulders sagging. Zombies? I didn’t buy it for a minute, but something damned queer was going on.

  I didn’t say anything and this brought a note of irritation into Duppy’s tone. “Well, blanc? What you say to that? They zombies or ain’t they?”

  I was puzzled, and uneasy, and when I’m like that I can be mean. I put the spurs to him a little. “Maybe they’re all catatonics, Duppy. Or P.P. is running a spa and they’re arthritic patients. Anyway I can’t see their eyes at this distance. Isn’t that the way you tell zombies—by their eyes?”

  “I seen their eyes, blanc. Up close. Bad as obeah, those eyes on them. No color. No nothing. Just white stare at you. Dead eyes. I know. I seen.”

  I knew he was telling the truth. “How did you get close enough to see their eyes, Duppy?”

  Silence. I listened for the movement, for the swing of his hand toward the Tommy gun at his side. I gambled with the odds on my side. Gunfire would louse up the deal, and I didn’t think he was ready for that yet.

  He said: “Nem mind how I knows, blanc. I does, is all. But you ain’t gonna believe, so forget. You see what they doing down there?”

  I saw. “They’re planting mines along the inside of the fence. Staggered at intervals of ten feet. That fence electrified, Duppy?”

  “I disrecollects.” Sullen now. Then: “Seems to me it ain’t, though. Reckon P.P. don’t think he need juice, with them guards and dogs and mines. And zombies!”

  I began studying the terrain beyond the fence. A wide graveled road led upward through heavily flowered and wooded slopes to a large flattened mesa. I could make out one wing of the house, three stories of glittering white stone fronted by a wide terrace and a balustrade of the same stone. Huge urns, amphorae, flaunted long tendrils of lush tropic flowers. Trevelyn loved flowers more than he liked people.

  Off to the left, separated from the house by neatly hedged gardens and clipped topiaries, was the biggest goddamned swimming pool I had ever seen. An acre of pellucid blue water surrounded by tile. One side was sheltered by a glass canopy. There was a float and high and low diving boards and various inflated plastic birds and animals. There was sparkling white sand at each end of the pool, hauled all those miles from the coast, and on the sand near the high board a man was lying. A dark-haired white girl was rubbing suntan lotion on him. I twiddled the focusing screw for a better look.

  Even with the inevitable foreshortening I had, for a few moments, a good look at the billionaire bastard. I never doubted that it was P.P. Trevelyn. He looked the part. It was type casting, but perfect type casting.

  He was on his back with his hands interlaced beneath his head. He wore huge black sunglasses. A long brown cigar drooped from a mouth like a loose anus, his nose was a blobby button, and his skull was a tanned cue ball with & swatch of dirty gray over each ear.

  P.P. didn’t have much chest but his paunch was a miniature mountain. The girl was anointing it. She poured oil and rubbed and the paunch swayed and quivered like a mound of jelly. I turned the binoculars on the girl’s face for a moment. Expecting, even hoping for some nutty reason, to find distaste written there. Even disgust.

  She was a beautiful girl, supple and long limbed with, I I thought, the developed legs of a dancer. She wore a tiny bikini that let her breasts spill over and she must have shaven her pubic area or I could have seen hair. Maybe P.P. liked it that way.

  The girl was the real zombie. Her eyes were half closed and her lips moved as she talked and there was absolutely no expression on her lovely face as she rubbed oil into that mountain of old guts. I felt a flash of pity for her, and knew it undeserved. She knew what she was about. Billionaires don’t grow on trees.

  I crooked a finger at Duppy. “Here. Take a look. Is that P.P.?” It had to be, but I wanted confirmation.

  I came as close to liking Duppy then as I ever would. He took a look and his thick lips moved in what could only be disgust and hatred. “That the man,” he muttered. “That the son of a bitch for sure. He just come out since I look last. Jesus God—1 wonder how that blanc girl stand to touch him. I bet he smell like a trench.”

  I took back the glasses. “When you got a billion, Duppy, it . doesn’t matter how you smell.”

  His mouth twitched and he gave me a cold dark stare. His eyeballs were jaundiced and inflamed by red spider webs. He ignored me and rolled back to his Tommy gun and began to clean and field-strip it.

  I put the glasses back on the swimming pool in time to see P.P. saying something to the girl. She nodded, without expression, and tugged at his swim trunks. Then she bent over him, her red mouth agape, and in a moment his paunch began to quiver.

  I felt a little sick and I didn’t want to see anymore, there was a lesson in it, and I let it register. The absolute ultimate in confidence. His house, his pool, his guards, his privacy and his own girl. P.P. Trevelyn didn’t give a good tinker’s damn who saw him doing what! He owned the joint He owned the world. He thought.

  I studied the new road that twisted up slopes and through cuts and around bluffs to the Citadel some ten miles away. The road was narrow, only jeep wide, of gravel and crushed stone and it was one hell of an accomplishment and must have cost a million to build. Several parties of the denim-clad “zombies” were still working on it, tamping and rolling, and watering truck was crawling along, spraying water to bind the foundation.

  There was no sign of the black uniforms on the road. The guards here were Tonton Macoute, and they rode the truck and watched from jeeps with .50 caliber machine guns mounted on them. The denim-clad laborers worked with the same stiff and awkward motions of the men around the gate. Zombies? But why? Why go to all the trouble to stage this farce?

  Then I knew. I was a little stupid or I would have caught it before. The “zombies” were just another precaution, another way of keeping curious, or angry blacks away from this place. It was good psychology. No simple peasant will get within a hundred miles of a zombie if he can help it.

  The missile made a thin searing streak as it left a launching ramp on the Citadel and arched over the valley. Duppy grunted and rolled to my side. We followed the blur of burnished metal as the missile slowed, faltered, went off course and smashed into a hill in a welter of wracked metal Duppy chuckled.

  “Ain’t worth a gourde, them things. I been spying long time now and ain’t never seen ‘em hit anything they shoot at. Don’t see why Swan so worry. Nothing to be afraid of there! Take ‘em hundred years to make them missile work.”

  I had the binoculars on the Citadel ten miles away. The Citadel took a giant leap toward me and I could see tiny dots moving about on the ramparts and I thought I saw steel ramps gleaming in
the sun. I could make out long rows of rusty cannon and triangular mounds of cannon balls. Cannon that had never fired a shot.

  Another missile left the Citadel and swooshed into the sparkling air. It broke up in midair, exploding in a cloud of black smoke and metal rain.

  I said: “Did it ever occur to you, Duppy, that maybe Valdez isn’t really trying? Maybe he’s stalling, sabotaging, hoping that something will happen—like us coming in for him.—”

  “No, blanc. I think Dr. Valdez do his best. Papa Doc and P.P. see to that—they ain’t fools. Dr. Valdez try to stall and they torture him to death real fast, I think. Take long time die. Trouble is Haiti, Papa Doc, ain’t ready for missiles yet. Still in the jungle, blanc. The Doctor he only one man and can’t do it all—and even bastard P.P. can’t buy brains come to this place.” Duppy laughed in basso.

  I kept the glasses on the Citadel. It had been rotting since 1830 and was still an impressive sight. It thrust out from Cape Bishop like the prow of a ship, battered by time and still immutable. Twenty thousand men died in the thirteen years it took to build it. Walls 12 feet thick, three hundred cannon, quarters for fifteen thousand” soldiers. Never used. Never had to withstand an attack. In the end Henri Christophe killed himself with a silver bullet, and the cannon rusted, and the wind and rain and rats took over. The Citadel brooded through the years, neglected and yet indomitable, thrusting its blunt prow into seas of tropical greenery, damped by clouds fluttering from its turrets like sails. Waiting.

  Its time had come again. In all Haiti there was no better site for missile launching.

  No more missiles were fired. My eyes ached and watered and I put the binoculars down and looked at Duppy. He was back at work on his machine gun, fitting it together with practiced hands.