by Otto Penzler
“Authorities will never catch he who used knife.” It was Marcelline’s voice, mediumistic in his blue-shadowed throat. The Creole was crystal-gazing at the door where the fog creamed, his features gray as stale fudge. “It was a dead face I saw, messieurs. Mort de bon Dieu! A face all streaming hair—sightless eyes—”
John Ranier pointed the empty rum bottle angrily. “Rot! There wasn’t anybody out there nor anywhere near the café. The knife that stabbed Mr. Haarman must be somewhere right here in this room!”
SOMEWHERE RIGHT HERE in the room, perhaps nestling under somebody’s sport coat or cuddling up a sleeve, waiting, watching, biding its time, measuring the distance to John Ranier’s own spinal cord. He didn’t fancy that. It didn’t mix with aguardiente, and his digestion was beginning to feel it. He suppressed a hiccup, shifting his position so that his back was toward nobody in the vicinity, and found himself confronted by Mr. Kavanaugh who was facing him combatively, feet apart, eyes directed from under slanted hat brim, levelling that finger at Ranier in the manner of a “You Buy Liberty Bonds” poster.
Mr. Kavanaugh did not say, “Buy Liberty Bonds.” He said flatly, “The knife ought to be around, Dr. Ranier, but it seems that it isn’t. While you were outside just now, we made a search. Mr. Brown, Mr. Coolidge and Mr. Carpetsi permitted me to go through their apparel; and Professor Schlitz allowed us to search him. Since Marcelline was sitting at the far end of the table, he is obviously eliminated. I’ll stand personally responsible for Miss May, here; she’s quite unarmed. And since we’re all going to be under suspicion in this mess, I allowed my friends to frisk me. Is that right, Brown?”
The plump tourist gulped, “That’s a fact. There ain’t so much as a penknife on any of us.”
Kavanaugh aimed his finger at John Ranier’s chin. “No, we didn’t find any knives. What we did find out may interest you. Our friend the bartender there,” he tossed his chin obliquely to indicate the bar, “our friend the bartender crashed through with the information that you were in the café here when Mr. Haarman first came in. The bartender says he was out in back, but he heard you havin’ a quarrel. That was a half hour or so before the rest of us got here. The bartender says you went outside in front for a while, and then you came back in and sneaked into that alcove, there, where nobody could see you. Interested?”
“No,” Ranier said. “Hyacinth was partly right. Mr. Haarman swaggered in here like a boiled owl and took a pass at me. Matter of fact, got pretty ugly. Shoved me out on the verandah. I didn’t sneak back into that alcove, but walked there to avoid further annoyance and mind my own business. Haarman sat right here where he was sitting when you came in. He was all right when you met him here, wasn’t he?”
Kavanaugh said in a hard voice, “He looked bad when we got here.”
“He looked a hell of a lot worse after you’d been here a while,” Ranier countered evenly. “And he looks rotten, now. But I’m not interested. It’s none of my affair which one of you stabbed Mr. Haarman. As ship’s doctor, I’m responsible to you people only when you’re aboard; but I’ll be called as a witness and expected to make a report on this case, and I’m going to make one.”
He didn’t tell the tall man his stomach felt gone because he’d hunted through the wounded man’s clothing under pretense of physical examination, and the knife wasn’t concealed on Haarman, either. It made his diaphragm contract when he turned his back on Kavanaugh; bent over the table to inspect the bandaging. When he rounded on the Irishman again, he was holding two rumpled envelopes in his hand. One of the envelopes was smeared as if by red ink.
“These letters were in Haarman’s hip pocket. He doesn’t seem to have a wallet, but there’s fifty gourds change in his trousers. I’ll turn these letters over for Haarman’s identification when I go aboard ship.”
LIFTING THE STAINED envelope toward the light, he read the typewritten address, postmarked ten days before in New York—Leo Haarman—Murray Hill Hotel. He was about to tuck the letter in his pocket when his eye caught a name scrawled in pencil across one blood-stained corner, some jotted figures. The pencilled name was “Eberhardt”; and the jotted figures looked like stock market quotations—“4,000,000 m.—1,000,000 $.” Hastily, and without reading these cryptic jottings to his audience, he stowed the letters in his tunic.
“You’ll witness my taking them. I’ll turn them over to the captain when I go aboard. Meantime,” he told Kavanaugh, “I’ve done all I can for Mr. Haarman. One who did this job can rest assured the assassination’s a success. He won’t survive this phlebotomy, if you know what I mean.”
The blond woman said hoarsely, “Ohmygod—ohmygod—!” closing her goitrous eyes as if she knew what he meant; and John Ranier turned for a last inspection of the Dutchman’s pulse. Packing had stopped the hemorrhage, but the man was probably bleeding internally. Ranier picked up the almost lifeless hand. Dangerous to move him with the count that slow. Almost out. He stooped over the dying man’s wrist, suddenly curious about a scar, brown and faded, on the man’s damp palm.
Cut by a knife a long time ago, the scar looked like a brand. As if someone had branded that palm with the letter Z. Ranier moved stony eyes to the Dutchman’s death-mask face. Violence in the past had marked his palm; had that deadly pallor of Haarman’s—no whiter now than it had been on shipboard—come from fear or tuberculosis?
He pinched the man’s index finger between his own thumb and forefinger. You could sometimes detect tuberculosis by a splayed condition of the finger-tips.
He said, without looking up, “I think this man was a con—” meaning to say “a consumptive”; but the sentence was rudely short-circuited by a hand collaring his neck-nape; wrenching him about-face from the table.
It was Kavanaugh’s hand, and the Irishman behind it looked mad. Slanted hat brim and outthrust jaw; eyelids almost closed, and the pupils glinting like nail-heads centered in the iris.
“What do you care what he was? Don’t you think you’ve stalled around here long enough? Trying to let the man die? We’re getting him out of here now—right now!” the tall man gritted out, releasing his hold on Ranier to flash a hand into his waterproof, extract a wallet, snap out a card.
“My name and address if you happen to think you want to bring any charges. David C. Kavanaugh, Caribbean-American Sugar Company, New York. Get this, Ranier. I’m due on important business in Port-au-Prince tomorrow. I’d arranged to drive overland tonight and these tourists—Haarman included—were going with me for the ride. You can check all this with the purser on the ship, but you’re not going to muff this murder affair any longer.”
He jabbed his finger at the doorway. “If you’re smart you’ll hike out of here and report what’s happened to the ship’s captain. You can also report you were in here stewed when this happened and in no condition to handle an emergency case. If you don’t report at all—I guess we’ll know who did this job. If you do go back, tell your skipper I took charge. I’ll see these people are under proper surveillance, and we’ll all go together to the police; but first I’m takin’ Haarman to a hospital, and the whole crowd’s going with me.”
He trained his finger at Marcelline. “You! Go out an’ start that car! You—” at the black man saucer-eyed behind the bar—“where’s the nearest hospital in this mud hole? The nearest doctor?”
“Hôpital Médecin?” Hyacinth Lucien ogled the body on the table; groaned. The man’s black face shone like a dancing shoe while his fingers dabbled prayerfully with a little cloth packet of castor-beans, hair, rooster feathers and toenail parings—an ouanga charm suspended under his throat. “But there is one hospital, monsieur, five miles on the road that runs north from the village. Half way up the morne. The doctor, a white man, has been there many years. The name is Dr. Eberhardt.”
Kavanaugh started for the door. “Brown—Carpetsi—Coolidge! For God’s sake, don’t just stand! Let’s get Haarman under way! Daisy, go out and get into that car. Professor, you go with her!” Over the shoulder at
Ranier, “Are you going, or not? Somebody ought to row out to that barge and bring back the captain. She was posted to sail at nine, and you won’t have much time, either. We’ll be waiting at this hospital—Dr. Eberhardt’s. Get it?”
John Ranier nodded calmly. He was thinking: “Eberhardt? Eberhardt?” wondering where he’d heard the name before. There was a commotion at the table as Brown struggled with Haarman’s inert shoulders, and Coolidge and Carpetsi wrestled with the Dutchman’s soggy legs.
Then Kavanaugh was shouting again. “I told you to start the car, Marcelline! What in hell are you waiting for?”
Ranier looked up to discover that something had happened to the well-dressed Haitian’s urbanity. Posed in the doorway, Monsieur Marcelline was peering out at the night, his lower lip hanging, body bowed forward, one hand cupped behind an ear. The sclerotics of his eyes were yellow butterplates beneath the brim of his Panama; his voice a ventriloquial squeak from the pit of his stomach.
“Listen—!”
FAR OUT IN night, echoes muffled in fog, a pulse had started beating. A pulse almost as faint as the heart beat of the man who was dying on that café table. When the wind stirred the fog to cloudy churning, the sound loudened; when the breeze petered out and the fog hung in the torpor of yeast, there was scarcely more than a tremor in the night.
Tumpy-bum-bum—Tumpy-bum-bum—
“Drums!” Marcelline whispered. “Drums of Damballa! Drums to ward off the un-dead dead who walk the jungles on silent feet! Drums to ward off zombies—!”
“Dave,” the woman called Daisy screamed, “I’m going to scream!”
“You fool!” Kavanaugh’s palm went stiff-armed into Marcelline’s shoulder, catapulting the Haitian across the doorsill. “Get out there and drive that car! Come on, the rest of you! We’re taking Haarman to the hospital!”
A floundering rush as Carpetsi, Coolidge and Brown, hats awry, faces sweat-oiled, hustled Haarman’s sagging body out of the door. Kavanaugh’s sharp commands rapping out through the mist. Doors banging on the Winton. Cough of an engine breaking into a rhythmic chugging. With that uproar outside, the café seemed empty as a hall.
In quick stealth Ranier dropped to one knee, sped a glance under the long table. The knife he had expected to find jabbed into the underside of the table, tucked under one of the chairs, somewhere on the floor, wasn’t there. A last hurried scrutiny of the room; blank adobe walls, two lizards on the ceiling, Hyacinth Lucien rooted like a black cigar-store Indian behind the bar, the room’s mirrored picture in that dim back-bar looking glass. No place for a knife to hide. Nothing.
He swerved; went swiftly to the door.
Out on the fog-smothered road the clumsy sedan was backing to turn around. Gears clashing. Saffron eyes wheeling in mist. A glimpse of scared faces crowded behind glass. Daisy’s voice falsetto, demanding, “Dave Kavanaugh, if you’re jamming me into this car with a murderer—!” A window cranking down, and Kavanaugh’s face glaring out at Ranier.
“I advise you to bring back that captain! Don’t forget! Dr. Eberhardt’s—”
Eberhardt!
Something clicked in the foreground of John Ranier’s memory. That was the name jotted on the envelope from Haarman’s hip pocket. Along with that notation—four million m, one million dollar-sign. Had Haarman, himself, scribbled that cryptogram? An untutored German might write a million dollars like that. A million dollars! Eberhardt! Name too unusual for coincidence—
Sea-ward the fog gave echo to a deep-throated, funneling rhooooooom! The call hung trembling in the waterlogged air. Half hour to sailing time! John Ranier cried to Kavanaugh, “I’ll get to the ship! See you later!”
The Winton lunged by his vision, going into second with a clashy roar. Mud spouted in brown streaks from the wheels. Kavanaugh jerked his head. A clot of mire spatted Ranier across the mouth as the Winton’s rear end rocked by, sending him back in a recoil. Then he flung himself forward as if launched from a springboard. Head lowered, arms stretched; threw himself through flying mud at the ruby tail light of the sedan, catching with sure hands the spare-tire frame.
Not for nothing had John Ranier spent a boyhood on the streets of a city clogged with taxicabs. As the Winton spurted into high, he was sitting in the spare tire, back wedged as if in a life preserver, neck bent, arms hooked around the rim, knees pulled up, heels skimming the road. Fog whirled in the car’s wake, and the doorway of Hyacinth Lucien’s Blue Kitty Café was a banana-yellow adrift in mist, diminishing down the beach.
Nobody in the car was looking back, so John Ranier was the only one to see Hyacinth Lucien’s shadow flick out of the café door and go racing off towards jungle and invisibility.
CHAPTER IV
THE GIRL AT EBERHARDT’S
Haitian roads were never surfaced for joy-riding. This one following the beach was little better than a wagon track, deep water-filled ruts and unexpected potholes threatening any minute to overturn the skidding sedan. On one side, banks of foliage and sharp palmetto lashed at the fenders; on the other, the beach sloped down-grade into blackness and combing surf. The headlights gave glimpses of phosphorescent water slopping along the sand under the fog. Decaying marine life smelled dank green.
John Ranier, clinging to the spare tire of a 1919 Winton—a sedan occupied by a dying man and his murderer—told himself he was a fool. Aguardiente and that hieroglyphic notation had gotten him into this—the name Eberhardt plus the one million, dollar-sign. That fatal suggestion of money! A million dollars! Anybody ought to know by this time there wasn’t that much money in the world, and those figures pencilled on that envelope probably meant no more than the jotted name. Haarman, before coming ashore tonight, had doubtless asked the ship’s captain the name of the local doctor; written it down. As for the figures, people were always scribbling. As for the aguardiente—that was bad. Bad.
If he could only see through that blind-spot where he’d been wandering while outside that open window. Hyacinth might tell the police that quarrel story; Kavanaugh certainly would. That settled it, right there. He’d have to stick with this surprise party to clear himself, as much for his own peace of mind as anything. Not that he could’ve stabbed Haarman, but—you could do strange things while you were unconscious.
But a minute later he was regretting the decision, cursing himself for a fool. He spat a mouthful of wet sand as the Winton took a curve, and clung to his scanty perch with numb arms. Puddle water, gravel, dead fish, seashells all blew up between his knees, and his troublesome foot throbbed. Why the devil had he obeyed an impulse to grab this car? Footprints under a window weren’t circumstantial evidence to anything. Thing to do was drop off in the village and go straight to the Gendarmerie.
The superstitious Haitian at the wheel was driving like a maniac. . . .
If big money was behind this fandango Ranier figured he was a double sucker for sticking in his oar. Whoever had poked that knife into Mr. Haarman, then vanished the blade under the noses of his table companions back there in that café, was not only a magician but a chap who meant business. A killer familiar with his stuff. Someone in this sedan was laughing with a knife up his sleeve, while his other sleeve was probably supporting his victim.
It was as good a theory as any other possible one.
Ranier cranked his bent neck to look up at the sedan’s rear window. Curtain was down. He could visualize the jam in there; Haarman doubled up on the rear cushions; the others crouching together, shoulders colliding as the car bounced over the ruts, eyes glaring at each other. He could hear nothing but the streaming wind, the spinning whine of the tires above the roar of the exhaust. Clutching his sea cap, he waited hopefully for a chance to drop off—the hell with this. But the Winton wasn’t slowing down.
He could see nothing of the Gulf of Gonaives, and he wondered if the bay was still there. No sign of the cruise ship’s gangway lights. Either the vessel had wheeled in the tide, or she was already standing out to sea. The Old Man wasn’t the skipper to hold up saili
ng for late arrivals. He couldn’t have made the ship, anyway, with a mile’s row to her anchorage, but he might have had sense enough to keep clear of this sedan.
So he hung on. Weaving like an ark in a storm, the clumsy car swerved on a break-neck curve, wheeled through a cloud of mud, hit a stretch of gravel, roared across the loose planks of a bridge.
THE VILLAGE WAS gone before John Ranier realized they were beyond it. Crooked windows yellow with misty candlelight; pale adobe walls leaning at crazy angles; thatched roofs. Loose-hipped Negroes lounging in dim doorways, watching the car go by with the whites of their eyes. Dark storefronts gray-shuttered against the fog, their slatternly galleries overhanging the wooden sidewalks, kinky-headed Negresses looking down. Mules lined up at a hitching rail. Bureau de Poste. A weed-grown parc where the statue of Toussaint L’Ouverture clapped a cockaded hat to breast and sadly regarded the village’s neglect and decay. The arched doorway of a brasserie where Haitians in straw sombreros looked up from marble-topped tables to gape at a white man hanging to a spare tire. “Blanc!” John Ranier caught snatches of outcry. “Cochon! Tiens la—” Black shadows and shanties huddled like toadstools.
In the weaving mist everything steamed, dripped. Palm-fronds were islands suspended in watery upper currents and patches of candleshine came through cracked shutters and seemed to float. Some scared pickaninnies huddled around the cinnamon smudge of a bonfire. An enormous Mammy with a kerosene can perched on her turban, a rooster under her arm, hugged against a Mother Goose picket fence and shook her fist and Creole imprecations after the speeding car. Swaying recklessly on a turn, the fender at Ranier’s elbow scraped the hub of a two-wheeled cart, and Ranier cursed almost as frantically as the crone who shrieked from the driver’s seat. Bankety-bank-bank-bank across a second bridge. A fleeting glimpse into the blue-walled courtyard of a building marked Gendarmerie where a black soldier in faded brown canvas leaned yawning on his rifle. A vine-covered railway shed and wham-slam across the glistening metals of a grade crossing; then the car was tunneling white night on open road, jungle sweeping by on both sides.
