Not in Uncle Eli’s room where the door of the wardrobe remained half ajar and the carpet showed dark stains in evidence of Sir Duffin’s fantastic and fatal escapade.
“She must be hiding!”
I choked because I knew that wasn’t true. I chased down both sides of the balcony above the hall, crashing into one room after another, shouting blindly into the fusty emptiness of long-shut chambers where the sound of my voice started echoes and the opening of the door brought down fogs of atticky dust.
“Pete — for God’s sake!”
I skated down the staircase four at a time, hurdling the Widow, slipping on a greasy step and hitting the bottom alongside Toadstool with a screech that brought Tousellines out of the office as if shot from a cannon-mouth. I got away from the dead darkey to catch the live one by the windpipe.
“Miss Dale’s not upstairs!” I shook him. “She must have come down. Where could she go?”
“Ma’mselle is not in her room?”
“Don’t stand staring — I tell you, she’s gone! We’ve got to find her — They” — I had to confess the thought at last — “they may have caught her — they may be killing her — ”
His eyes were zeros. He could merely stand panting like a cocker spaniel, tongue flapping on his bulged lower lip, sweat sliding on his skin like liquid shoe-polish. I knocked him aside, poked my own useless face into the office under the stairs, yelled, swore.
Then I dashed across to the library, flung the sliding doors and glared helplessly at books asleep on shelves, at black-robed shadows gathered to mourn the doctor and Englishman, side by side to start their journey into dust.
After that I banged into the storeroom where Ti Pedro lay in a faint smell of burnt hay with a hole in the top of his head. On sickened legs I visited the billiard room where Ambrose sprawled, cue in heart, Number Three Ball in his teeth, his pink eyes sightlessly watching the ceiling. On to the dining room where flies swarmed in buzzing hordes across the uncleared breakfast table, and I stood in icy dismay listening to Tousellines pattering through the rooms at back, the kitchen, the pantry.
He rejoined me, whimpering, “Not there! Not there!”
I pulled the black revolver from my hip pocket; shifted the repeating rifle to my right hand. “We’ve been through every room?”
“Every room in the château,” he groaned.
Cold beads were streaming on my face as I whispered, “God knows what happened to her while we were down here in the hall. You don’t think the Cacos — ”
“Not yet. We would have heard them coming.” His tongue clicked for breath. “They would attack first those huts at the foot of the compound.”
“If you don’t do as I say, I’ll kill you,” I told the little black man very quietly. “Go down to those huts and see if Miss Dale is there or has been seen. If you should see her — or Manfred or the En-sign — yell. Yell like hell. Send back two horses. I’m going around the outside of the house. Get started.”
I watched his coat-tails flagging down the hall; then turned and ran through the dining room into the courtyard where the marble cupid with the fractured head was idiotic in a shower bath. I was soaked to the marrow in a second. The court was swept as if by a firehose. Puddles boiled over my shoelaces; wind-thrown bucketfuls took me in the face.
Beating through plungy, blinding cascades, steamy and tasting salt, I clanged through an iron gate and waded along the rear wall of the château. A steep hill banked up behind the house, the upper heights buried under a sailing battle-fleet of thunderheads. Freshets came leaping and squirting down the muddy slope, cutting channels in the mire, pouring as a river around the château. A dyke had broken in the sky. Swashed in brown paste and warm water, the sullen old house seemed adrift on the hill, as if its darkened wings were cruising along in the rain-scud and I was standing motionless. The thunderheads were ships closing in. Lightning flashed an aerial broadside, dazzling across the roofs. Thunder made the blast of a thousand cannon. Rain fell with redoubled velocity and the smash of broken glass.
Pete couldn’t be out in this, I told myself, and I’d never find her if she were. My own heel-tracks remained no longer than bubbles in the wake of a dolphin. Leaning into it like a diver on sea-bottom, I reeled through mats of blown vine, aqueous clumps of bougainvillea and uprooted palmetto, keeping close to the wall and squinting to see five feet ahead. Rain spouted from my ears, pasted my hair, slashed my eyes and mouth. My boots were sucked to the ankles in quaggy gardening. A day for narwhales, never for murder and a girl disappeared from an old dark house.
God, if that neck-cracking sailor, that German butcher had kidnapped her — the thought tied knots in my heart. Murder, then! and I’d play it at its own game. Shoot first and not bother to ask afterwards. I’d kill them this time. Blast their living heads off! If those jackal inheritors, Six and Seven, had laid a finger on Pete —
A waterspout gushed me around a dim corner of stone, and I was stopped. I froze. Crouched. Held breath. Atrophied under the flowing eaves of the side verandah. With the vine screen at my elbow running like a mill-race, it was like hiding in the Cave of the Winds under Niagara.
Someone was moving through a dense growth of plantain now two yards in front of me. Someone hunched low to the ground, creeping through the wedge of guttering tropical leaves with animal stealth, a shadow bent by the downpour.
I knotted in my blind of shrubs, cautiously elevating the rifle. In the plantain the shadow stirred, began to separate the glistening fronds with a long, shiny stick as it lifted its head through the green in a turtlelike scrutiny. No sound came through the rain. No sound came to me save the rush of heart-pounds to my eardrums. I knew that shadow. That head was turned away from me, but I knew every feature of that coppery, accordion-pleated neck, and I had to bite my lip to keep from blurting the En-sign’s name. He didn’t see me, but continued to direct a searching regard on a stand of coconut palms some fifty feet distant from the house across a field of flattened weeds.
All at once I saw something else; something that resembled a stalking crocodile inching belly to mud through puddles behind the palm grove. Manfred! Flat in the rain, the big German was nosing over the mire, for all the world a man-headed saurian sliding along in the ooze, his lizard eyes glittering at the house, his field gray Roche uniform melted against the terrain.
As I watched, he reared his squat head and scanned the brush where I hid. His features were blurred, but his strawberry cheek was livid as a new brand, and his teeth grinned pirate-fashion, holding in their clutch a curved banana knife, a machete the size of a scimitar.
God knows why he didn’t spot me, for his eyes were piercing through the rain-swirl bright as dots of acid. Nor did he spy the shadow in the plantain clump.
From his position in the plantain, the En-sign could not see Manfred behind the palms. I could see them both, and it was a sight to hold me mesmerized on bent legs, lungs stifled and ready to burst. Watched through the leaden rainpour, the picture was dim, flickery as an antiquated cinema film. The whole thing was unbelievable as Episode Six of the Perils of Pauline. Ladies would please remove their hats. Reel Two will follow immediately.
The En-sign spied Manfred’s advance and congealed in a squat. Seeing what was up; I could have howled. That murderous navy deserter was stalking Manfred, and the German wife-killer (unbeknown to the sailor) was angling him!
What a dandy little game of hide-and-seek that was! I was watching a finesse of hatred, cross-purpose and secret attack that would have made the underground cheatings of European diplomacy almost Christian in comparison. The process of elimination was going on. Manfred’s teeth laughing on his butcher knife; the Ensign’s fist lifting a long, tapering lance, the tip sharpened like the point of a pencil. The sailor had taken a cue from Ambrose’s killer, and Manfred was going to get it!
The Ensign studied the movement under the coconut palms with all the taut-spring intensity of a tiger judging the distance to its lunch. Oblivious to this peril,
Manfred squirmed and scouted toward the verandah like a hunting reptilian.
Carnivore and crocodile! I watched in dreary fascination. Slowly the cue uplifted in the En-sign’s hand; I saw his torso unlimber, come upright; saw him shift, grip, balance for the throw, spear aimed at his prey. Strangling for breath, I waited for the rocket to go. It paused. Hung fire. Then the lance was lowered; I blinked rain from my eyelids and glared in stupefaction. Manfred was nowhere visible!
Incredibly he was gone, knife and all. Absorbed by the waterfall? Whisked out by the rain? Sensing sudden jeopardy, that man-headed crocodile had vanished as completely as if the sheeting downpour had spirited him off in particles of mist.
Flesh pinched on my neck, for I’d seen those feldgrauen Boche uniforms vanish atop a trench in much the same way, and I knew the man couldn’t be far. Gripping my rifle in anxiety, I searched the palms, the weeds under them for a glimpse of an eye, a strawberry mark, a knife-glint. Blinding, gray-white, the rain went battering through the palm boles and off into space. A baffled exclamation crackled from the plantain where the En-sign nested. I could see his spear poking fiercely the pad-thick leaves, his red neck screwing, twisting this way and that as his eyes sought that lost target. Another second and he’d see me in ambush. I could have shot him through his profile, but Manfred’s disappearance had scotched my part in the game, and I didn’t want that banana knife buried in my back. My first objective was finding Pete —
He saw me! Those wicked Alice-blue eyes gazed straight into mine. He was not a jump away, and his pupils blazed through the rain like heated needles blow-piped at my head. I could hear his breath snap as he whipped to a stand, waist deep in the plantain, arm cocked for the throw. “You lily-faced— !”
I screamed, “Have one on me!” and squeezed the trigger in my wet clutch. Chickety-chickety-chick! To this day I can hear the appalling sound of that repeating rifle clicking like a sewing machine, the ghastly soundlessness issuing from the muzzle. I can see myself drowning, writhing, pumping that empty gun at the railway-signal lights of the En-sign’s eyes turned green in the scarlet of his face, and I can hear his laugh. Rrrrah-ha-ha-ha-ha! His laughter was the roaring of a thousand Neros belly-rocked by human torches on a coliseum stage. I was the funniest sacrifice.
And that billiard cue would have come flying smack through my heart if the man’s arm hadn’t been struck by lightning out of the rain. Slam-slam-slam-slam-slam! A fusillade pouring from the verandah vines almost at his shoulder. Fire jerking and lashing through the moss-green screen, shattering the cocked elbow, spotting his throat, his jaw, the side of his head with crimson holes! The En-sign, who had wanted his share of Morne Noir, got it!
His spear looped out of his fingers, flew sideways, fell in the weeds like a defective squib. Blood scattered from his lips like Dubonnet, and he dropped as if the mud had opened under him. On the following instant there was a crashing among the palms across the field — a wild face reared above the scrub — Manfred burst out of hiding like a brontosaurus flushed from a primal swamp. One look he gave at the vine-screened verandah; the blade dropped from his teeth; twin shots crashed — slam! slam! — and the German shrieked and fled down the juicy field.
“Gott in Himmel! Ach, Gott in Himmel!” Arms up-flung to the sky; legs working like scissors to cut him a path through the rain. The python routed out of Eden never had such eyes. The man was baying like a terrorized hound.
I think I squalled Pete’s name. If that departing War Lord heard me, his mind was on another matter. Stark staring as a madman, he rushed across the side yard, hurled himself off down the storm-thrashed compound and out of sight. A final and astonishing shot lashed through the vines masking the verandah. Slam! That bullet pruned a leaf from a creeper touching my cheek, and for forty-two seconds I was too stunned to move.
Unable to see through that curtain of vines, I could only hug shivering to the mud and listen to the marksman running away. Footfalls fled down the verandah, going fast. Not the heavy tread of a man, but a quick, light-footed scurry fading toward the verandah at the front.
I discarded the rifle, set a grip on the black revolver, plunged out of the boscage, only faltering for a side glance at the En-sign’s smashed face reddening the green, and tore through the vines to the porch. The verandah’s long deck was deserted. I raced to the front verandah. Nobody. But the doors under the firebox globe were standing wide, and I made the hall just in time to hear a ratty scuffling in the office under the stairs; and I made the office just in time to see a panel glide shut in the wall behind the roll-top desk.
The desk had been shoved to the center of the den; I couldn’t reasonably believe that strip of wall had moved. Blindly I attacked it, filling the dim cavity under the staircase with dust and bedlam and the oaths of courage that mantle fear. Mahogany splintered under my punching gun-barrel. Slivers sheared away. Then the whole panel crushed inward in a shower of kindling. Open sesame! Dunce-headed, I was staring down a corridor black as an anthracite shaft, uninviting as the entry to a forbidden Egyptian crypt.
Age has an odor all its own, and that passage was old. Out of that pitchy throat came the breath of a hundred and ten staled years, a smell as fusty and dusty as a cast-off tragedian’s wig. And scurrying on that dry-rotted, nostril-clogging wind, the echo of quick-slippered running feet.
Whoever it was, that gunman had finished the En-sign with the bloodthirstiest dispatch and only missed finishing me by the proverbial hair.
And where was Pete?
With her name on my lips and a shiver for the tunnel, I swung up my gun and jumped through.
X.
Process of Elimination
We ran. The rabbit gone mad pursuing the ferret. I started by falling down a flight of loose flagstones, head-over-teacup in a carpet of loose, soft dust. Dust that turned to black cement on my sopping cuffs, choked my mouth, eyes, filled my hair. Throttled, spitting, I bad to hunt my dropped gun. I’ll never know how near I came to dying in that rat-hole. Who was ahead of me in there? I couldn’t see.
The dark of that place got into my head. Most of the way the passage seemed on an upward slant; blackness ate up the last of the light at the first turn, and there were countless turns after that, each ten degrees darker than its predecessor. I tallied those bends on my jaw, stubbing my chin against corners of invisible masonry and scalping myself on low-lofted beams as I ran full tilt into hairpin curves.
Roots were invisible hands grabbing from the earth walls to tear at my sleeves. Twice I was thrown headlong. Staggering to my feet I could catch that molelike scurry up ahead, and I trailed it blindly up a corridor as tortuous as the buried track of an abandoned roller-coaster — blindly and furiously. If that tunnel wasn’t hell, it was going there. Narrower than a channel laid for a sewer pipe, choked with the dust stirred by the flying feet in the lead. Elbows skinned raw by the close-pressed walls, face battered by uncharted corners, I staggered on running legs and coughed through the swimming black. Burrowing into subterranean night where every step might throw me a mile down, every next turn might greet me with blazing gunfire. Certainly it wasn’t courage that relayed me through that maze. It was Pete. She was gone and I wanted to get my fingers on the throat of her abductor, that was all. I wanted to get my fingers on the mystery behind that day of massacre and tear it to pieces. I think I was a little mad as I rushed through the blindness of that tunnel. I’m sure I was.
That underground chase seemed to last for miles and years. The passage, airless, writhed as if for breath, upward, downward, on and around, a vein of ink on its way to the dark heart of Haiti. I’d like to find out about the sappers who engineered that job; an earthworm couldn’t have planned it. They must have been probing for China.
Thud-thud-thud, I could hear my boots running into exhaustion and out of exhaustion, dogged and on and on like Volga boatmen too tired to stop. Dirt hung in cakes on my pasted clothing. The revolver ached in my fingers. My eyes burned without light. That noisome dust, dry as po
wder shaken from a mummy, got into my chest. My nose was bleeding for want of air. I ran. Pete was gone, and the fugitive ahead of me had tried to kill me — there were those slippered feet loping down the asphyxiating black, scuff-scuff-scuff, heard when they were out of step with mine and always a turn beyond reach.
I wanted to cry out, to order them to halt. I couldn’t muster the wind for a yell.
Then I struck my head against a hanging bulge of ceiling and brought down a terrifying shower of slag around my shoulders. My shout of alarm was suffocated almost as it got away, but the runner ahead must have heard, for a laugh came twisting back through the dirt-filled dark that turned my heart to a goose-egg. The En-sign’s Nero guffaw was nothing to that cackle. I’d once heard a mad woman laugh like that as she stood in the train-tracks in the Times Square subway station, and the sound melted the marrow in my bones. Ten minutes later in that smothering tunnel my ears were curdled with that raw-head-and-bloody-bones screeching, the echoes dragged it jittering away, and if that laugh had been repeated, I’d have turned and fled like a mouse.
All in all, I must have followed that earthworm corridor for half an hour before we came to the stretch where the bends straightened out and the tunnel took a bee-line to wherever it was going. Now the walls scraping my elbows were of wood; I could hear my heels hammering a floor of timber. Invisible in front of me, the runner had lengthened the scurry to a stride. Pat-pat-pat, the author of that diabolical merriment was drawing away from me. Thud, thud, thud, I set my teeth together and pumped numbly on.
Queer how we locked step in a sort of rhythm, faster, faster, running together, so that the pounding of heels joined in the dark and the sound was as of one man sprinting in the passage. For a hundred yards it was straightaway and echoed like a single pair of flying heels — suddenly I slowed with every nerve throbbing, exposed.
Murder On the Way! Page 15
