by Otto Penzler
Kavanaugh said from the side of his mouth, “The wop? What for?”
“He’s got something to say. You might be interested.”
A hippogrif’s shadow formed at the gate, moved forward on squee-geeing wet shoes and came into focus as Mr. Coolidge, cap mopping a worried forehead, serious sobriety in his eyes. He puffed, “I heard you pagin’ Carpetsi. He ain’t in the car. He ain’t there.”
John Ranier didn’t like the way he said it. Kavanaugh demanded, aiming a finger, “What do you mean, he ain’t there?”
“Angy ain’t waitin’ in the car,” the big man informed glumly. “Couple minutes ago he told me he was a mass of nerves, and when I looked around to answer he wasn’t nowhere in sight.” His eyes slid sidewise from the tableau behind Ranier. “Don’t say as I can blame him for takin’ a run-out powder, or that louse-collector, either. See, they ducked in the fog. Angy’s gone.”
Kavanaugh bawled, “Get him!” thunderously; jabbing his gun-barrel finger into the big man’s solar plexus to send him in an arm-swinging backwards stagger, dissolving into shadow as he went, out through the gate. “Bring back that ginzo! He can’t have gone far in that soup out there. Get him!” He spat at Ranier, “So the slicker had something to spill, did he? Give you an idea what it was?”
Ranier’s eyes strained at the curdled darkness of the road where Coolidge’s boots could be heard galloping along invisible macadam. The big man was hallooing, “Hey, Angelo! Angy! They wantcha back here!” in a hide-and-go-seek quaver, striking futile safety matches that drowned in the surfed murk like sparks in a quiet ocean.
“He said he’d be killed if he told,” Ranier muttered.
“He’ll be killed if he doesn’t,” the Irishman proposed flatly. “I knew that spaghetti-swallower was keepin’ something back. Yeah. This isn’t the time, by all that’s holy! for any of—hey, Coolidge!”
Boots on the road had stopped. Stopped as if the clattering truck driver had been snuffed out by a wand-touch in the mist, brogans and all.
“Coolidge?” Kavanaugh stretched his neck with a shout. “Are you there?”
About forty paces from the parked police car a match spluttered feebly, exhibiting the Coolidge face as a spoiled cabbage, disembodied and afloat in the toadstool-colored eddy. The match signalled frantically, and the big man’s face, blue in distress, was screwed up like an infant’s gathering breath for a colic howl.
“Where’s Carpetsi?” Kavanaugh could have been heard in India. “Did you get him?”
The match expired to a spark that floated groundward. The face disappeared, and the howl came from Nothingness where it had been.
“He’s been got!”
GOT! IT WAS a mild word for what had happened to Angelo Carpetsi.
A sickly euphemism flattering the thing that had overtaken the Italian youth out there in the glucose-thick woolpack of the road; the red butchery that had struck in silence, stealthily, without mercy, feeling its victim and tip-toeing off, unseen in invisible mantles of mist.
There had been no struggle. Nothing. Fifty feet down the roadway waited the shadow-shape of Polypheme’s car, its myopic eye pouring light at the churchyard gate. Nearer, parked in the opposite direction, the blacked-in shade of the driverless police car. Not a pebble-throw distant, no more than a curtain-fog between, was the churchyard, moon-drugged with its own noisome mystery. And while Ranier and Kava naugh had been stalking that moon-lit stage-set of death and tombstones, here in the dank darkness of the wings, obscured by ambient night, it had happened.
“He’s been got!”
On the dewy black macadam Angelo Carpetsi, face up, stomach arched, fingers curling on the unyielding road-surface. Looking up into the flashlight’s ray, the eyes already losing their Latin lustre. The agonized lips were lemon-color; the forehead, under a shock of polished hair, painted battleship gray. The shirtfront was dyed a deeper hue of pink; the high-waisted trousers mud-stained; and the patent leather shoes that had attempted escape were splayed as if the ankles had broken—had tangoed their last dance. Feebly they kicked for traction as the curled fingers strove to push up, but the road there was slippery. More slippery than any dance floor.
Ranier whispered, “Good God! It’s an artery!” and it seemed an hour, the minutes dragging by in chains, he stood there staring, fettered by the horror of the scene. The fog. The silence. The prostrate figure bleeding to its death. Coolidge squatting at the dying man’s head, babbling like a child over a broken doll, lamely attempting to stem that arterial gusher with a handkerchief. The big man’s hands were red mittens, his coat polkadotted maroon. As well have tried to cork a Holland dyke with a Dutch boy’s thumb.
Ranier had to wait thirty seconds. Thirty seconds for his marrow to thaw. Was that murderer lurking off-side in the fog, watching, gloating at his handiwork, selecting his next subject? Better turn his back on that thought. That terrible spurting must have clocked a dozen minutes already on the bill, and it was slowing as if the power was being turned off. He saw there was nothing he could do; then he did it.
Thrust his flashlight into Kavanaugh’s hand. Shouted at the girl, “The car! We’re rushing him to the hospital!” Shed his jacket, peeled his shirt, ripped bandage out of the cotton sleeves. Drove the blubbering truck driver aside with a blow; attacked death with a shirt sleeve, blindly, mechanically going through the motions. Amazing Carpetsi had survived this long—amazing, in this red-fogged olla podrida of necrology and murder, any of them remained alive.
“Who did it! Who the hell?” That was Kavanaugh, pacing, juggling the flashlight, teeth bared, eyes feral, a panther caged by the fog.
“Ohmygod!” That was the fainting blonde.
“Holy Jumpin’ Judas!” Coolidge, making faces at his hands.
“Crccccch!” The Model T streaking to a standstill beside the victim. The voice of Laïs Engles, “Hätte ich es doch gewusst! I saw him run off—!” The pulse thumping in the night. Whispering mist. Weaving light. Ranier’s own voice speaking, unfamiliar, rusty, care-worn. “Lift him now. We’re taking the flivver. Kavanaugh—you and the others in that gendarme’s car. Better follow us to the hospital with—”
“Hospital, hell!” With a ferocious expletive the tall man swooped at something glinting in the road. Something that had been lying beneath Carpetsi’s body. Something the Irishman snatched up, held in grassy fingers under the mist-drenched ray of the pocket torch. “Hospital, hell! Do you know whose glasses these are?”
There was blood on the black silk ribbon. The little gold nippers between the eyes had been crushed as if at some time underheel, and from the right lens a piece had been broken to leave a crescent of optical glass, a pixie scimitar of crystal, sharp-edged as a razor. Ruby gleams shimmered on the razor-edge.
“Aw,” Coolidge mourned. “I never did trust that goof.”
“Where—” Kavanaugh wrenched his head from left to right, lips flattened over his teeth. “Where is that college professor?”
The thin insectologist wasn’t there. He gave no answer from the fog. In those mephitic vapours Professor Schlitz had gone, leaving behind his glasses. Had those glasses cut the throat of Angelo Carpetsi from ear to ear? He’d been going to tell who had played Going to Jerusalem with those corpses. He wouldn’t talk, now. He was Going to Jerusalem, himself.
CHAPTER XVII
THE BENEVOLENT SPY
Nervous systems in human bodies are made to withstand a certain voltage. Push shock beyond that point, and the nerve-ends are burned out, the system electrocuted, reflexes may go in reverse. So coroners chuckle at their work, sophomores from divinity school shriek laughter shooting at other sophomores from divinity school in bombing planes, ladies giggle at funerals, and hangmen smile at the sight of hemp.
On that ambulance run to the hospital, starting from a churchyard where a ghost from the Wilhelmstrasse sat guard over a dead Haitian gendarme in an Anglican missionary’s grave—racing through fog past a burial ground for U.S. Marines where the missionary u
surped the coffin of a topkick—on past the woodsy cemetery in which the sergeant napped at the old lady’s tomb—sixty an hour through a black steam-bath with Carpetsi’s head, glaucous and dying, in his lap—on that midnight race alive with ghosts and the implacable threat of drums, John Ranier felt he’d reached the voltage limit.
Carpetsi’s carotid severed by the professor’s spectacles! Another gag like that and a man might begin to laugh. There is a point where Horror the Tragedian becomes Horror the Clown. Someone in this charivari of terrors must have a sense of humor.
Ranier discovered his lips curled up in a gibbous grin. Part of this joke was on him. Wanting escape from himself, from doctoring, from tourists and women, he’d come ashore tonight for a quiet bout at the bottle and landed splash in the middle of a devil’s broth confected of medicine and tourists and himself with a frightened girl. A witch’s brew of embalming fluid and blood (the line occurred to him), made in the shade, stirred with a spade.
Opening with the taffy-haired Mr. Haarman, German-American artichoke dealer, stabbed by an unseen knife in a lighted roomful of people. Reference to a Dr. Eberhardt in the victim’s pocket and a cryptogram composed of boxcar figures. Mr. Haarman going (by chance?) to that same Dr. Eberhardt’s hospital, locally at hand in Haiti.
Then Eberhardt’s mysterious laboratory and more mysterious absence, and the bogey resemblance of the Haarman corpse to a web-footed German Navy man buried with a company of plague-victims in Haiti fourteen years before. The girl’s war story of a lost Amazon expedition, a stolen suitcase, a homeless child on a burial party. Kavanaugh’s accusations and his own self-suspicion dispelled by darker mystery—the dead Mr. Haarman’s vanishment.
Then the menace of a Voodoo uprising; a cemetery chase, hare-and-hounds across fog-swathed graveyards; a series of resurrectionisms trademarked by little green frogs; a parade of the long-buried dead and an acrostic of mixed epitaphs, mounting to the murder of a Haitian gendarme within sight of a disinterred envoy from Unter den Linden, and this throat-cutting with a pair of pince-nez glasses.
Leading up to what? Ranier didn’t know. The answer slumped beside him with its throat cut. Proof enough that Carpetsi had known the answer. Someone had known of the Italian boy’s knowledge and thought it best to silence his gutturals for good. Ranier cursed himself for doubting the Italian’s intentions, muffing a lead that might have ended this creeping hecatomb. Part of the answer he’d learned for himself in the marine cemetery under that monstrous-rooted tree. Learned from a handful of that richly-seeded earth, from the gnarled forest giant, from the missionary’s misplaced remains. That had told him how. But, why? and who? Angelo Carpetsi, who might have told him, was dying.
BUT IT WAS no good crying over spilt blood. Nothing he could do. The wrist between his fingers had almost stopped ticking; when they reached the hospital he’d better give the girl the hypo, instead.
“Too late,” he shouted above the wind-cry. “He’s going fast. Tell that black boy to slow down before he jumps a cliff. And tell me again who was standing around the car when Carpetsi wandered off.”
He could see the gray oval of her face turning to look back at him. Dark refractions of fear from her eyes. “I was there with the woman in the party—she was fainting. The college professor had run down the road. The big man, all mud, said he had better go after the thin one, it was dangerous to be alone on the road. He ran a little way after the Professor. It was then—I think—the Italian fled. In the fog I could not see. Nein, I did not expect—!”
Ranier put his face near the girl’s. “You saw nothing else, heard nothing in the fog out there?”
“Nothing! The Herr Professor with the big man after him, they went south on the road. The poor Italian ran north—off by himself. In the mist they—they disappeared. I was looking at the churchyard, then.”
The car skated on a curve, zigzagged wildly, decided to remain upright and let the girl go on.
“In a few moments the big man returned. He said the Herr Professor was gone and he did not dare remain alone in the fog. With the woman we waited at the gateway, watching you. Aber, I thought the professor and the Italian boy would come back—”
Ranier assured her grimly, “The Professor will come back. If anyone can land that insectologist, the Irishman can. How far from that Morne Cuyamel mission is Bois Legone—the place where you say the colonel was buried?”
Her answer drifted back, “Perhaps a kilometer.” But five-eighths of a mile could be a thousand on this blindfolded coastal highway where murder was marching to the boom of Afro-Caribbean drums. Would Kavanaugh and Coolidge, the blonde propped howling between them, ever reach the next village? Driving off, back there, in the dead gendarme’s car, the Irishman’s promise had been virulent.
“Don’t worry, Ranier, we’ll get him. That spindle-legged school teacher can’t murder a guy in hot blood under my nose! We’re goin’ to Bois Legone and take a slant at what’s happened there, and I’ll call out every cop in the place. I’ll get that killer for this if I have to burn down Haiti to do it! Wait at the hospital! Be with you in half an hour!”
Half an hour. Ranier calculated the distance in what was left of his mind. Measured it as three miles between the hospital and the English mission, an added kilometer to Bois Legone. Four miles. An empyreumatic four miles littered with the bones exhumed by someone, bloody-handed, bent on digging up the past. Someone celebrating a Satanic holiday with the femurs, clavicles and drum-sticks of those plague-victims buried by Dr. Eberhardt and a small German orphan on the night of January 3, 1922. Somebody looking for someone? Who? And for whom?
Yaaaaaahaaaaaa! The blatt of the automobile horn and a hare-brained swerve to avoid some visitation in the road, flung Ranier off the rear cushions, tangling with Carpetsi on the floor. But it was only a cow meandering in the mist; and another race-track curve, wrenching of metal and screeching brakes brought them alongside the verandah of the hospital, docked in the fog at Dr. Eberhardt’s front steps.
If the doctor was in, the yellow upper window, the water-logged lower extensions of the villa gave no sign. In the pale entrance hall, spookshadowed, silent, with its prowling staircase and dim second floor balcony, Ranier deposited his soggy burden on the settee near the hatrack and told the girl to wait with Polypheme. Damp-fingered, he took the gun that had belonged to Sergeant O’Grady from his pocket, and scouted the back hall, the emergency room. He found the bandage and cotton he wanted; scurried back to give them to the girl; mounted the stairway to the second floor, expecting anything to happen. But the laboratory was as he had last seen it save for the minor detail of the cat which was, when he entered the room, scrooched on the center table industriously eating the frog left impaled on the spike.
When he returned to the lower hall with a dressing and antiseptics, he found Carpetsi dead.
And Polypheme, looking like a worn-out umbrella, with a Winchester 30-30 in his hands.
Laïs Engles was gone.
A WITNESS TO that scene—the little Haitian Negro ambushed under that colossal straw hat with a rifle almost as long as he was tall; the haggard ship’s doctor, heavy-handed with bottles and gauze and jammed automatic, stymied at the feet of a dead man, eyes fixed on the place where the girl had been—a witness might have had difficulty telling which man was most scared. The black man, the white man, the dead man—fear identical in the eye of each.
Rrrrrrr- bong! Rrrrrrr- bong! The wall clock, itself, striking two in that appalled charade of silence, had to clear a nervous throat before speaking.
Then Ranier broke from lethargy with a roar, dropping things from his hands to make a lightning snatch at the black man’s unexpected gun. “Where is she?” twisting the Winchester loose with a savagery that almost brought the houseboy’s fingers away with the barrel. “I’ll kill you if you’ve harmed a hair of her! Where’s that girl? Where’d she go!”
The Negro’s lower lip hung and jiggled while his butterplated eyes brayed silently at the fury on Ranier
’s face. Ranier shouted, “Miss Engles! Miss Engles!” and his voice choked out in the hospitalized silence, leaving a medicinal hush in the echoes’ train. He swung back the rifle, golf-club posture, keeping his eye on Polypheme’s palsied face.
“What’ve you done with her? By God, I’ll bat your head off, you—!”
“Dr. Ranier—!”
He saw her, then, in a door that had opened down the hall. Towel on wrist, basin in hand, she ran quickly forward; seized his arm.
“Was ist’s? What is wrong?”
He lowered the rifle shakily, expelling a breath of relief. She was all right, except for those woeful circles under her eyes, and now that he could see her there it occurred to him he’d been bellowing like a movie hero over the girl, too concerned about her presence or absence. This midnight Hallowe’en was getting him. Somebody walked around a corner and his nerves popped like roman candles. A flat feeling in his stomach angered him. Liquor dying in his digestion and the shock of the girl’s disappearance had left him a little sick. Ranier found a second to marvel at his concern for her safety. He wondered, sardonically, what had happened to the hard-boiled ship’s doctor who’d been impervious to everything.
He told Laïs Engles almost sullenly, “Don’t do that. Walk off like that. Not in a place where anything can happen. Where’d the black boy get this rifle?”
“Unkle Doktor,” she indicated an anteroom across the dim hall, “kept it in there. I told Polypheme to wait with the gun while I—” Her glance went to the settee, and her explanation concluded on a stifled, “Oh!”
“He’s dead,” Ranier bluntly agreed, giving Angelo Carpetsi a farewell scowl. Propping the Winchester against the bannisters, he stooped to collect the grave-robbed army automatic, bandage and a bottle of merthiolate from the floor. He stowed gun and medicaments into his pocket, then turned to take the basin and towel from the girl.
“The ginny can’t use any first aid where he’s gone.” Ranier covered the staring face with the towel; confronted Laïs Engles in swift decision. “And we’re leaving, too. I’ve got some things to do. Come on, we’re checking out of here.”
