by Otto Penzler
Ranier gave the churchyard scene a side-glance, and almost piled the flivver against the stone wall. When he steadied the shimmying front wheels back to mid-road, the tail light in the lead had disappeared. Rounding a quick road-bend, he picked it up again, this time so far in advance it was barely visible through the wrack.
Grimly he yanked the gas lever, goaded to frenzy by the thought of his assailant’s escape. It was touch and go, racing a car through the packed fog on a dangerous mountain highway. Beyond Morne Cuyamel the Haitian coast might have been obliterated. The road climbed into a night that had no sky, no earth, no boundaries. Patches of jungle sailed by. Boulders adrift at the roadside. Around the next bend there could be anything or nothing. But Ranier held his eye to that scarlet bull’s-eye in front of him and drove in pursuit like a madman, chasing the fugitive spark that stayed ahead of him, climbing, dipping, dodging like some malevolent star racing off through the Milky Way. Nothing phantom about that tail light, though. That car ahead was driven by someone real enough.
But drive as he would, Ranier couldn’t close the gap between himself and the gunman’s car. In the night’s black swirl the tail light was growing smaller and smaller. Now, far ahead and above him, it was seen as a tiny pinprick soaring through invisibility. He shouted oaths, starting the Model T up a dizzy ascent. The car labored and slowed. Tap-tap-tap! Cylinders knocking, exhaust pipe glowing crimson under the floor boards. Single headlamp dimming as the engine struggled. Fog pressing in, churning over the hood in frothing rush, quick to take advantage of the failing headlight.
RANIER CURSED THE engineers who had made that grade. The road went up and up. Too steep for antiquated carburetors and spark-coils. Too black. Snorting, pounding, rattling every bolt, fluttering its rust-eaten fenders as if they were striving wings, the senile flivver would never achieve the top. Ranier thrust his head from the window and could no longer make out a red spark in the lead. Ahead steamed Nothingness. Directly in front of the car’s mist-hemmed, fainting light was a patch of macadam surrounded by Void. Where daylight might have showed mountain scenery sweeping to distant massifs or the far blue of the Gulf of Gonaives there was oblivion. Ahead of him, around him, behind him walls of fog. The car crawled.
He cursed the stalling motor, leaning far out of the window with his flashlight, trying to find the edge of the road. Finding it, he yanked in his head with a yell. That road’s edge was closer than he had expected. His wheels were on it. The flashlight’s ray, torching ahead of the front tires, had dropped out into space in a way that put a film of frost on John Ranier’s forehead. That wasn’t the nothingness of fog out there. It was the nothingness of nothing. The light had fallen over the road’s rim and dropped to Infinity.
He stopped the car; peered. Wind passed across his face and brushed a rift through the vapour. Moonlight shafted through a hole in the cloudbanks and brought to momentary view the face of a cliff, a silvery alpine precipice that dropped a sheer two thousand feet in two seconds to a glimpse of beach below. Palm trees down there were no bigger than geraniums, a strand of sand no wider than a string of rice, the surf miniature as cream on a glass of beer. Staring down at that apparitional view, as if at a morsel of land seen from a balloon high in the stratosphere, Ranier felt the strength go out of his marrow. The pull of that abyss made him cry out. Another ten inches forwards on this fogged curve above that drop and the front wheel would have gone over.
Clouds boiled over the hole and he was gasping down at thunderheads with moonbows on their upper surfaces. A rush of rain slapped the windshield. Mist swarmed over the car. Night. The abyss vanished, but he could feel its awful magnetism there. His hands felt like leaves of lettuce, twisting the steering wheel away from the edge, driving the car at snail pace along the inside of the curve.
Putting his teeth together, he went on. If that gunman could make the grade, a look over a cliff-edge in Haiti wouldn’t stop the chase. After what had happened earlier tonight, Ranier was certain his nerves would have calloused at a Chinese water-torture. Swearing helped. Slowly the numbness drained from his fingers. Anger, returning, warmed him like wine. Wine? He ran his tongue across gritty teeth. He would have traded his soul to Satan for a glass of aguardiente. And for a gun—
Two minutes later, engine picking up speed, the car gained the summit and hit a stretch of gravel. Here the fog had thinned to a consistency of cigarette smoke and streaks of moonlight showed roadway ahead, black-green escarpments of jungly timber on either side. Ranier yanked the gas, two-wheeled the flivver around a bend, jammed on the brakes with a snarl.
The road forked.
There was no sign of the car he had been hounding.
But there were other signs. A decaying signpost stood sentinel at the road-split, pointing its rickety arms in laconic direction. To the left the gravel went smoothly uphill into night. Port-au-Prince. 105 Km. To the right the road was a discarded washboard bending off through black trees. Bois Legone. 1 Km.
There were recent tire marks on the road to Port-au-Prince, and wheel-tracks as fresh on the muddy side road to Bois Legone. But something was hanging to the Bois Legone pointer on the signpost. Something that looked, in the lunar dimness, like a yellowed hornet’s nest dangling on a string. Ranier saw it swaying under the signpost’s wooden arm, revolving slowly on a breath of damp wind. He speared it with the ray of his flashlight the better to see.
It was an old ivory. A human skull hanging on a length of string that went through the eye-sockets. The wind wound it up slowly, and then it unwound. When it had stopped spinning it was grinning in the direction of the pointer above its polished head. Bois Legone.
Ranier drove his car up the washboard road through the black trees.
CHAPTER XIX
DAGGER IN TH E DARK
Night, in that forest of mahogany, sablier, mapou and cedar, was an oppression of blackness only emphasized by the feeble cone of the car light and shafts of moon-ray that seeped through occasional rifts in the foliage overhead. The road was a tunnel, its walls shored up by the boles of giant trees, their upper limbs forming a roof that supported a sky of coal. Gourd vines dangled in loops and spirals, slapping the top of the car. A wormy mahogany that might have crashed of its own weight, lying prone at the roadside, its rotting bulk a feast for parasite fungi and huge toadstools, narrowed the path to the bare width of the car wheels. Ranier squeezed the old sedan between fallen trunks and wedges of timber that loomed like a canyon’s side. Perfect spot for an ambush.
The road not even paved with good intentions. Washboard that became a brown paste. Muddy as a quagmire. The tires spun and slewed as the wheels fought for traction. The fog became a drizzle, turned to sooty rain, turned to fog, swarmed out from under the trees in clouds of stagnated steam. Then the car began to chug through breaks in the vapour, openings known to sailors as “fog dogs,” where the moon could be seen as a blue-white globe caught in the inky forest-tops, and the trees, tiger-striped, glistening, assumed threatening shapes.
Ranier supposed this nightmare tour of Haiti in blackness, shadow and fog could go on for years. How long since he’d left that beach café to start this hare-and-hounds, this murder-chase across graveyards, through hospitals, uphill and down-dale across a Caribbean limberlost that had no compass, along the ledges of terrible chasms, into forest roads pointed out by skulls? Now the excitement of chasing a visible quarry was over, he suffered a letdown. His stomach and his mind began to turn. He was conscious of an ache in his bad foot and pain in his ear, but the bullet wound was nothing, the lobe had stopped bleeding. Only it reminded him of that close call and that his unknown enemy was playing for keeps.
He fought off a reaction of cold fright, forcing his attention to fix itself on the road ahead, his mind grappling with the problem. One thing was certain. That gunman hadn’t fired on him by mistake. He’d stood clearly exposed before the assassin’s headlamps, and that gun had fired a direct fusillade that had only missed killing him by the grace of God. Which meant t
he would-be killer had been on an errand. Premeditated homicide, and out to get him.
Why? Because he’d rushed the dying Carpetsi to the hospital? Had the secret hand which cut the Italian’s throat back there on the Morne Cuyamel road tried to slaughter him, Ranier, thinking the Dago on a last gasp might have talked? Then who, other than tonight’s tourist party, knew him to want to kill him. If that gunman were one of the tourists—
There were Marcelline and Brown, reported as being at that village back down the coast. But the murder car had come from, and fled in, the direction of Bois Legone. Kavanaugh, the blond woman and Coolidge had left, or said they were leaving, for Bois Legone. Had one of them finished the others and doubled back to silence the ship’s doctor?
Professor Schlitz, too; could the vanished thin man be behind this hecatomb? Or had it been Dr. Eberhardt, criminally insane, introducing himself with gunfire?
For the hundredth time since Haarman’s impossible stabbing, identification as a man fourteen years dead and subsequent disappearance, John Ranier’s brain whirled over the incidents of the past six hours, sorting, deciding, rejecting. Hard to think in a straight line and keep an eye peeled for sudden ambush at the same time. Concentration was difficult when every hair on your skin was crying, “Danger! Danger!” on a road like a spider’s dream, and the puzzle turned on impossibilities to begin with.
• • •
PRYING INTO BLACKNESS ahead, his eyes glittered in febrile suspense, while his mind raced in a frantic hunt for answers. Four things he did know. He knew who Haarman was. He knew how those hopscotched bodies came to be at graves where they didn’t belong. He knew there was more of method than madness in this morass of abominations; that a deep cunning rooted under the surface. And he knew Laïs Engles couldn’t have fired the broadside which almost killed him twenty minutes ago.
But he didn’t know how Haarman could have been stabbed in the back, unobserved; or whose fist had directed the blade. He didn’t know how Haarman, scar-marked, web-footed, could be who he was; what had become of his body. Dr. Eberhardt’s whereabouts and why remained unsolved. A motive for this welter of resurrectionism remained buried if its subjects didn’t. He didn’t know the whereabouts of the gunman who had almost murdered him. He didn’t know at what moment this Haitian limbo would explode from the concussion of those angered devil-drums.
Was the girl safe?
He cursed himself now for having deserted her, and drove the old car bouncing, jolting, a wild race through the forest; his mind a whirl of confused intentions. To reach Bois Legone and summon some kind of help. To rouse the first house he saw, ask the way to a telephone, and call Port-au-Prince, the American consul, the Garde d’Haiti. To locate the Bois Legone cemetery and find out what had become of Mr. Kavanaugh, his girl friend and Mr. Coolidge.
The flivver bounced down a gully steep as a staircase, and he would have been through the mountain village without knowing it, if a brown cow hadn’t appeared before his headlamp, forcing him to a jarring stop. Ranier flicked his flashlight; discovered he was in town. Not a streetlamp in the place, much less a telephone pole. Jackdaw fences and tin can shanties littered along a mud-rutted alley. Shabby brown walls, shuttered windows, silent doors locked against night. Two-thirty A.M. was not a likely hour in that Haitian community. The huts did not look asleep. There was an air of desertion about those soundless doorsteps that made Ranier wonder if the entire population had gone away. Some bony hounds, surprised by his flashlight, struggled up out of the gutter and crept off in hangdog silence, their starved tails between their legs.
Ranier cut the engine; listened. Not a leaf was stirring. Not a snore. Nothing but the persistent, far-wandering tumpy-tump-tump from the night, fog-swathed, tree-muffled in this forest fastness, something that might have been in a vein under his temple. His flashlight made a ghostly white circle, desperately running down the alley from door to door. Nobody home?
He wondered as he waded across the alley toward a hut if he might not be greeted by a blast of gunfire. Had the gunman, who’d tried to eliminate him back there near the hospital, chosen the road to Port-au-Prince or come to this world’s end? A number of cars had ploughed the alley mire, and not so long ago, by the looks. Well, he’d have to chance it.
He pounded cautiously on a shuttered window. A scurry on the inside might have been a mouse; then silence. He slogged to the next hut and recklessly belabored the door with a gun-butt. As well have tried to rouse the Sphynx. A wan moon crept out of some black treetops, dragging tresses of greenish cloud, and floated slowly like the face of a drowned woman that had drifted out of weeds. Its rays were like the shafts of light at a pond-bottom, and the scene was done in shades of black, green-black, purple and silver; the buttressed masonry of a church at alley’s end coming to view, its outlines watery and blurred as one of those little castles in a fish globe. Keeping in shadow, Ranier sloshed down the alley, shaping his course for the church. Somebody ought to be there.
Somebody was!
NOT IN THE church, but in a park to the left where the fog wreathed in orchid tints across untended grass and billowed around the base of a ghostly monument. A thick green hedge, shoulder high, rambled in ragged silhouette around two sides of the park; steep mountain swooped up behind; the church was a gray eminence standing by, and both church and park were fronted by an open square cluttered with deserted market stalls.
Ranier had emerged from the alley mouth and started across the square when he caught that shadowy movement in the park. He flattened against a stall, instantly alert. Around the base of that park monument, as noiseless in the mist as a swimming fish, came the shadow of a man. The shadow hesitated. Advanced into moonlight. Stood with hunched shoulders, intently watching the glooms where Ranier crouched. Ranier could not see the man’s face, but the figure was familiar, the sun helmet a give-away.
Professor Schlitz!
And then John Ranier was staring in tripled astonishment, for the professor, evidently convinced he was unobserved, made a quick about-face, turned his back on the village square and went tip-toeing off across the park toward that silhouetted hedge, his torso bent, knees bowed, moving in the gingerly caution of someone stepping on eggs. Thefting toward the hedge as if, net in hand, he had sighted on that wall of foliage some rare and extraordinarily nervous butterfly.
Then, as if he himself were a collector and the insectologist of prize bug, Ranier dodged away from the vegetable booth and went after the professor. It was not until he had crossed the No Man’s Land of the square that Ranier discovered the park monument was no Haitian national hero but the angel Gabriel, he had to look sideways at one slab that had remained standing in the granite celestial’s lee. He couldn’t have spied it from the square.
There was the headstone—
HIER RUHET IN GOTT
OBERST JOACHIM OTTO
GEST. 3 JANUAR 1922
ICH HATTE EINST
EIN SCHONES VATERLAND
There was the familiar pattern of opened grave, mound of steaming clods, broken long-box, something which had once been human spraddled in the trampled grass at graveside. Something which had once been human, but had never been a Colonel Joachim Otto.
Ranier only had time to recognize the Imperial German Navy in the cobwebby sea cap arranged at a jaunt across the skull’s left eye. He muttered, “Captain Friederich!” and hastily shifted his attention to the shadow of Professor Schlitz stealing off into the fog. Moving without sound, Ranier trailed across the graveyard after his quarry. No time to wonder what had become of Kavanaugh and his party. No chance to worry about the night that crouched like a waiting, watching animal behind his back, or guess the meaning of the insectologist’s presence in this vandalized cemetery. Another minute and the thin man would be in that hedge.
Ranier inhaled the word, “Now!”
The professor was about five feet from the bushy backwall, and Ranier some twenty paces behind the professor’s unsuspecting coattails.
Ranier
shouted, “Put them up, Schlitz! I’ve got you covered!”
The man whirled, throwing up frightened hands. He whinnied: “Oh my! Dr. Ranier—!”
Dog-legged, bristling, Ranier walked at him slowly, menacing with empty gun. “One move and I’ll blow your head off! Caught with the goods, by Judas! I saw you sneak around from behind that monument where the grave is dug—”
He couldn’t see the face under the sun helmet, but he could see the eyes. The thin man squeaked, “No, no! It was like that when I got here!”
Eighteen paces from the man. Ranier took another step at him, slow-motion, vigilant for a break. “What’s the game, then? How’d you get here from Morne Cuyamel after you cut Carpetsi’s throat?”
“I didn’t!” Professor Schlitz squealed. “I didn’t kill the Italian.”
Fifteen paces from the man, fixing him with unswerving eyes. “You didn’t kill him, eh? Your eye-glasses. You shouldn’t have left them under the body like that.”
He could see the man writhe, lifting one foot and then the other like someone cornered and in a hurry to go somewhere. “Eye-glasses? Eye-glasses?” shrill as a piccolo on a sour key.
“You killed him,” Ranier’s words were slow as his next step forward, “because you heard him tell me, back there in the marine cemetery, he was going to spill the works. So you waited for him out there on the road at Morne Cuyamel and when he—”
The thin body squirmed, “But I—why—I lost my glasses in that marine graveyard. Yes, yes! Dropped them in the grass. Mr. Coolidge bumped into me on the path and in the darkness I dropped them.”
“Keep up those hands, you!”
“Don’t shoot!” the other gasped. “I didn’t kill Mr. Carpetsi. Good God! You’re making a mistake. I was hiding out on the road, crouched by the stone wall, when Carpetsi ran by. I’d been going to run away, but I was too frightened to move. A little while later I heard Mr. Coolidge call out. He’d found the Italian’s body.”
