Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  John Ranier moved his eyes in disbelief. Fog floated in silent curtains through the window ten feet away, but a thrown knife would have struck with a whack, and stuck. John Ranier knew the technique of knives. John Ranier knew cold steel had gone through that chair in one quick, expert stab; been yanked out deftly and with no more commotion than a butcher-blade through butter. John Ranier could recognize craftsmanship with a blade. That knife-wielder had touched the right vertebra to paralyze his man.

  BUT WHAT WIZARDISH operator had done the thing? He’d been watching this room in the mirror for at least half an hour. That incision through chair and spine looked less than twenty minutes old. Yet for the past half hour not a soul in the room had walked behind the stabbed man’s chair.

  You could hear the stabbed man’s faint, paralytic breathing.

  You could hear the faint, paralytic breathing of everyone in the room.

  It was Kavanaugh, breaking from amazement with an oath, who caught the sitter by the armpits, swung him up from the red-backed chair. The taffy head lolled and the man’s shoes scraped the floor.

  The Irishman’s voice began to crash, “Don’t stand around pop-eyed, you fools! Haarman’s been badly hurt; we can’t wait to find out how. We’ve got to get him to a doctor!”

  John Ranier moved forward. “I’m a doctor.”

  Supporting the limp body, Kavanaugh looked over its shoulder with a hard-eyed stare. “Get out of the way,” he told Ranier in a brittle voice. “You’re drunk.”

  Anger hazed across Ranier’s vision. “The words may be right, but I don’t like your tone. I’ve had something to drink. Not enough to keep me from seeing that man will die if his bleeding isn’t stopped.”

  He blocked Kavanaugh’s way to the door. A quick impression the others were crowding up on three sides; Brown’s pie-face gone to crust; Carpetsi’s Italian eyes unpredictable; Coolidge lumbering close with the expression of a menacing Airedale.

  Ranier directed, “I’ll pack that wound, and someone better call the police. He was stabbed right here at your table. One of you must have the knife. One of you must have done it!”

  Kavanaugh’s lips were a pair of scissors, shearing out: “One of us must have done it? For all we know, you may have done it, yourself.”

  Ranier stared.

  Marcelline’s face swayed forward, glistening in lamplight, complexion gone from maple-walnut to vanilla. Under the rim of his Panama his eyes were circles of terror. He was pointing a finger at the window. His mouth flew wide and went, “Waaaaaaaah!”

  CHAPTER III

  CALL FOR DR. EBERHARDT!

  Hyacinth Lucien’s Blue Kitty Café was no glittering emporium at the corner of any Broadway and Forty-second Street, but a lamplit thatch-roofed obstruction on a fan of beach some distance from a fog-drowned Haitian village. Small Haitian villages are not lighted at night; the pedestrian walks the mud lanes armed with a small flashlight, a winkering beam against pitfalls of geography and the spirit; the sailor who knows his way about would never go venturing ashore without his pocket torch. Ranier’s flashlight was in his hand before he crossed the doorsill.

  Fog foamed up against the building’s front, noiseless, turgid, heavy with the breath of tropic vegetation, the dead fish smell of a warm-water beach. Seaward the vapors had packed like cotton wadding, and conch shells were blowing. Inland, the night was blind as a cataracted eye. Ranier’s mind, raw with that Haitian’s scream in its nerve centers, calculated the distance to the wharf and the time it would take to row out to the anchored steamer, while his eyes followed the flashlight beam into mist. A searchlight couldn’t have penetrated the whiteness, whatever Marcelline had seen would be evaporated.

  “A face!” the Haitian was bleating. “It looked dead—straight at me through the window—eyes—eyes like the shark—waaaaaah—!”

  Ranier plunged out across the verandah; started around the corner of the building. Voices clamored after him. Oaths. Shouting. The blond woman had fainted, plopped to the floor. Kavanaugh, trying to catch her, had dropped the Dutchman’s body, thump! Ranier was relieved to discover no man among the party had followed him out of the café. His shins collided with an unseen bench, and he sidejumped, dancing, the pain clearing his head. He thought, “Great Lord, I couldn’t have—!” then sprang back from a looming shadow, swerving the startled flashlight.

  Angles of polished metal reflected through the mist—a big black sedan parked under a tree. Must be the car Marcelline had hired for the shore party; a gawky, antiquated seven-passenger Winton, high-roofed as a hearse, with a squeeze-bulb horn at the driver’s seat and pre-Prohibition brass-rimmed headlamps.

  Ranier stepped to the car; switched on the lamps. Cones of weak light spread out in the billowing steam, illuminating a scant area of ground at the side of the building. Hurriedly Ranier scouted the approach to that yellow-lit side window. Tracks! He swore under his breath. His own tracks straying past the window where he’d limped in somnambulistic daze. And—he scanned them in excitement—the tracks of someone who had walked around the big sedan and stood facing that side window, looking in, stationed almost where Ranier was standing now. He could see the prints clearly in the soggy earth. Too clearly!

  For that second set of prints had gone no farther; had come to a stop within six feet of the sill. Then whoever had stood there had retraced his steps around the car, skirted the tree and entered the café by the front door. These tracks had been made, then, by Marcelline when he’d fetched the car a while ago.

  Ranier made a frantic and swift inspection with his flashlight. The soft loam near the window would have recorded the prints of a cat. And there were no other prints. Marcelline’s had stopped six feet from the sill; and, as he’d feared, his own tracks were glaringly under the window that had been open at the stabbed man’s back. And the only ones there!

  For five seconds John Ranier stood tense in the fog, listening. Voices babbled in the café; he could see into the lighted room, but, screened in vapor as he was, those inside could not see him. If Marcelline, looking out, had spied something, then it must have been nearer the window. What could the Haitian have seen? No prints to show what it might have been. Nothing.

  WHEELING, RANIER SENT his light in fast looping circles about the sideyard. Toward the building’s rear a chicken run, a mass of glistening green banana plantain, the dripping boles of cocoanut palms. Stinkweed and ilex. Nothing had disturbed this boscage. In the steamy heaviness not a leaf stirred.

  Hedging the yard, a dense thicket of tall, pole-straight bamboo, too closely wedged for a snake to worm through. From previous visits he could remember a sheer limestone embankment walling up behind the bamboo, steep mountainside beyond. Anything might fade off undetected in this fog but there’d certainly be tracks. Only approach to the café was the donkey road along the beach, and the only tracks there were those imprinted earlier in the evening and by the Winton.

  Ranier explored the chicken run; hurried to the rear yard. Goat-pens and garbage. Nothing there. He groped his way along the waterfront side of the building, fumbling through a smell of dead fish toward the verandah. His own tracks under that window! If he could only remember! If he could only remember what he’d been doing in that blank interval between the time the German threw him off the verandah and he struck his head, and the moment his mind cleared there in that side yard. Out on his feet, of course. Wandering semi-conscious. Blotto from that head-crack and alcohol. And he couldn’t have—

  He thought, “Or could I—?” Then pulled himself up, snarling aloud, “Don’t be a fool, you left that sailor’s-knife in your cabin aboardship, and the man was talking when that tourist crowd came in!” One of them did it. One of that crowd yelling in there did it, but the police—ten to one!—would try to fasten it on him. Steered, of course, by the guilty party.

  Inside the café the voices were exploding like a package of firecrackers. “Give him air!”—“I tell you, messieurs, I saw a face!”—“Sit down! Sit down!”—“Look
here, Brown, you was sitting at his left!”—“I tell you, I never left my chair for a—!” “I’m goin’ back to the ship and tell the—!” “Right through his back! Right through his doggone back!”—“It was a dead face at the window, messieurs! Ah, Sacré Nom de Dieu! A dead face—!”

  “The devil it was,” Ranier had to say, stepping through the door. “Nothing out there in the soup. If Marcelline saw anything, I’m afraid he imagined it.”

  His glance scorned the bulgy woman reviving with dramatic energy in a corner; fixed coldly on the body on the floor. Mr. Kavanaugh, Mr. Brown and Mr. Coolidge were kneeling over the wounded man, struggling to remove his coat. Carpetsi cowered near the door, his sable eyes glowing fear in his olive face. In the background, Monsieur Marcelline mopped almost Aryan features with an unsanitary handkerchief, gasping incoherencies. The thin professor of entomology walked as if caged, wringing womanish hands.

  John Ranier snapped, “Hyacinth! Bring water!” at the goggle-eyed Negro behind the bar; crossed the floor, shucking his white coat. He was thinking as he rolled up his sleeves, “The Dutchman hasn’t a chance in hell. Lost about three quarts of blood. Whoever nailed him with this bunch at table, then sat tight while he was bleeding to death, is a cool customer.” It made his neck ache. He was aware of Carpetsi’s scared black eyes on his face.

  “What you gonna do about it, Doc?”

  “Try to stop that hemorrhage.” He was about to add, “And you go call the police!” but his lips made a dry, thin line instead. After all, it was none of his business. If one of this bunch wanted to knock off a fellow-tourist in a mosquito-port in Haiti, what was that to John Ranier? Let the ship’s captain worry, or the Secretary of State, or whoever it was had jurisdiction over crazy American tourists on foreign soil. The Garde d’Haiti would come soon enough. Stick to his own racket—doctor. Seasick pills and tomato juice for nauseated tourists.

  But the man on the floor wanted something more than pills and tomato juice. John Ranier observed coolly, looking down, “He’ll have to have a transfusion!” and he didn’t care much, remembering that clip on the chin. Maybe the bird had clipped somebody else on this trip; got what was coming to him.

  He said in a professional tone, “He’ll have to go to some local doctor and go fast. Too far to row him out to the ship, and personally I’m not prepared.”

  “That’s what I told you in the first place.” Kavanaugh’s tone was flat, metallic, authoritative. The Irishman regarded Ranier steadily with cold blue eyes that disliked Ranier’s face and told him so. The stare implied Ranier was in need of a shave and clean linen; implied Ranier was a small time ship’s doctor unable to manage a practice ashore, probably an alcoholic incompetent. The cold eyes scanned the shoddy sea cap, the soiled uniform; settled on John Ranier’s foot. “That’s what I said in the first place. He’ll have to go to a doctor. You’re too lurching drunk to be of—”

  Quick crimson flamed in Ranier’s cheek. “Lurching, am I? It just happens, mister, that instep was shot out by a Boche machine gun in ’18. And by saying I wasn’t prepared, I meant I hadn’t come ashore prepared to give a transfusion to a man stabbed in the back by a murderer!”

  Breath made a sucking noise through the Irishman’s teeth. There was a sputter from the blonde; a bitten-off oath from Mr. Coolidge. John Ranier met a battery of angry glares with a shrug. They didn’t like that word “murderer,” it seemed. He’d pay this smart harp, too, for mentioning his bad foot.

  BUT THE FLUSH cooled from his face as his temper relaxed. What did it matter if they thought him an incompetent pill-disher relegated to a ship? Nothing mattered when nothing was worth doing because nothing was worth anything. If anything was worth the trouble, right now, it was getting rid of this knifing affair before the police lost the point in a game of questions and answers.

  He said to Kavanaugh with professional brusqueness, “This hardly seems the time to bicker, does it? If you wouldn’t mind lending me a clean handkerchief, and I’ll donate my shirt. All of you gentlemen. You there, Professor, if you’ll rescue that basin from Hyacinth before he slops it all. Mr. Brown, will you lift his head? We can lay him on the table—”

  The wound proved interesting.

  Ranier managed a compress with skilled hands while his mind revolved on the puzzle of how a man could have been stabbed like this at a crowded table. Powerful blow to drive a blade so deep; knife double-edged, razor-honed, and must have been buried to the hilt. Short-circuited a vertebra to cut off the brain telegraph, ossifying the body to stone.

  Slumped there full of aguardiente, the Dutchman mightn’t have made a sound, anyway, and this toadstabber had gone in like a bullet, paralyzed him stiffer than rigor mortis. By the looks, it wouldn’t be long before rigor mortis, either.

  “He’ll be with the angels by midnight,” Ranier observed with forced geniality, looking up at the blond woman as he tied a bandage. “I don’t suppose you’re carrying any iodine or mercurochrome in your handbag?”

  Lips compressed, she shook her head. He wondered what she was carrying in that bead bag gripped in her hands. Her hands, he noticed, were a lot older than her face. Looked, somehow, like her lips—compressed, defensive. It would take a lot to open her lips or that bag if she didn’t want them opened. But a bloody knife would have leaked a stain through the bead-mesh; and even if she had been sitting at the Dutchman’s end of the table, a little nearer than Brown who’d been at his other side, she couldn’t have done it. No woman could reach around behind a man’s chair and drive in a knife like that. Or could one?

  But her build looked flabby as the mumps, and that blade had been powered with muscle.

  “No antiseptics among you?” Ranier’s dried smile traveled to Brown—that moon face sweating like icebox butter. He’d seen men sweat like that before. From strain. And anybody was entitled to go yellowish when the man at his elbow has just been quietly stabbed.

  Or had Brown put that glad hand of his around behind this Dutchman’s chair? Then thrown the knife out of the window? Ten feet to the sill, though, and certainly such a toss would have been seen. No knife out there in the mud.

  “Great Maker!” the fat man blurted. “He was sitting right next to me. Right there at the head of the table. It might’ve been me. Me—!”

  “I’d like something to pour on this stab wound,” Ranier interrupted the outcry. “You wouldn’t have some American whisky in your coat, Mr. Brown. Any of you? Then I’m afraid I’ll have to use this impure Haitian stuff. God knows what’s in it.”

  Kavanaugh moved around the table. “God knows there’s plenty of it in you!” he snapped at Ranier. “You realize if the man dies from this delay you’ll be held responsible?”

  “You mean one of you will be held responsible. Fellow’s almost certain to die of tetanus in this country, even if he does survive hemorrhage.” Turning his back on the Irishman’s showy belligerence, he put an ear to the wounded man’s chest. Not much blood left in that faint-tapping pump. He studied the Dutchman’s white, unconscious face. “Transfusion or not, I don’t think he’ll live out the night. We can move him as soon as the bleeding stops.” He looked around curiously. “He was going with you on a motor tour, wasn’t he?”

  “At my invitation,” Kavanaugh said harshly. “Or, rather, he asked if he could join us. Professor Schlitz wanted to come, and since Haarman was sharing the professor’s stateroom—”

  The thin man’s mouth opened in a high-pitched outburst that dislodged the pince-nez from his nose. “I didn’t do it. He was my cabin-mate, but I didn’t do it! No, no, no! I hardly conversed with the man at any time on the cruise. I never saw him before until the first night on board. Why did I beg to come on this shore excursion? I’m an insectologist—yes!—my first vacation in years—from Upsala College—I don’t know him—I didn’t do it—” Sinking to the edge of a chair, he mopped his narrow face, staring wildly. “You don’t think I did it, do you?”

  “I didn’t ask who did,” Ranier reminded coolly.


  Brown panted out, “None of us knew him before this cruise. In fact, I never seen any of these people until the cruise, myself. I—we—” He swallowed, looked about apprehensively.

  RANIER TOOK A bottle of rum from the table, shook his head doubtfully; shifted the wounded man’s position, poured the liquor into the crimson-soaked bandage. From the corner of his eye he noticed an interesting expression on the face of Mr. Coolidge. Doorknob ears, goldplated teeth, squinty eyes, the face followed Ranier’s every move with the brute concentration of a mastiff watching a cat that might jump. The squinty eyes caught Ranier’s surveillance. The big man sidled up, and put a hand the size of a ballplayer’s mitt gently on John Ranier’s shoulder.

  “You don’t think one of us knifed this guy in hot blood, do you, pal? You wouldn’t be thinkin’ nothin’ like that? It would get on my nerves.”

  “Certainly not, Mr. Coolidge.” Ranier didn’t look around. “You can see for yourself; Mr. Haarman tried to commit suicide.”

  The fingers on his shoulder tightened viciously. “Don’t get funny, Sawbones. This dinge Marcelline says he seen a face out there in the fog. A face, get it? There’s th’ mug who dunked a knife in Haarman. Pitched it through the window at him, see?”

  “And it jumped back out of the window, Mr. Coolidge.”

  Ranier was whirled to face the man’s brilliant teeth. “Listen, quack! If you’re gonna start a story that one of my friends here was playin’ mumbledy-peg with Haarman, I’ll slap your damn—”

  Kavanaugh shouted, “Shut up, Coolidge!” catching the big man’s elbow, jerking him aside. “We’ll talk to the right authorities when we see them.”