Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  It couldn’t have happened. None of it could have happened. At the Gendarmerie in the fishing village five miles back the Gardes had not noticed a tall white man, a stout woman with blond hair, and a big man all mud going by since four o’clock in any car. Non, they had seen no fat American in short pants driving for Portau-Prince. Oui, this was the only road, and cars go by with much frequence, but then there had been the fog. A fire? Oui, they had seen red sky and heard drumming on the mountain. “But such things are common in Haiti, monsieur, and on a night such as last—”

  Besides, the telephone line to the west had not answered. Doubtless, Caco bandits had cut the wire. But yes, monsieur could telephone Portau-Prince from here. Monsieur and his party were in distress? A pity they did not have time for breakfast, a jug of clairin, perhaps a glass of aguardiente.

  Ranier had only had time for the aguardiente and two cryptic long-distance phone calls to the capital. One to the All America Cable office. One to general headquarters of the Garde d’Haiti.

  It couldn’t have happened, but here was Polypheme at the steering wheel beside him; a pale girl in nurse’s costume and a little walrus in Cape Cod oilskins and an insectologist without his glasses in the back seat. Ranier had waited for calm while Dr. Eberhardt re-bandaged the professor’s wound and hysteria died. In the gray light he could see his passengers, haggard, bewildered, sitting in limp exhaustion; the doctor’s beaver eye had not been off him for a minute. The girl’s quiet sobbing had stopped long ago. Hugging the cat, she watched him too.

  RANIER TURNED TO face the back seat, and was saying: “To begin with—I was there in Hyacinth Lucien’s café when this tourist came in. I suppose,” narrowly, “you know the place, Doctor?”

  “Aber, that swine will never run it again with his black neck broken from that jump like we saw!”

  “He’s out of it now,” Ranier banished him grimly, “but Hyacinth had nothing to do with what happened there. He merely used that stabbing in his bar as propaganda to incite a race riot and burn your hospital. Probably been laying for you a long time for cutting into his witch doctoring racket. Getting back to the café—this tourist Haarman walked in and saw me a little tight. That must’ve been about quarter to seven last evening.”

  “Tight?” The old German snorted.

  “Means a few drinks. Enough to put me on edge,” Ranier described, “and at the same time make me wonder if what happened afterwards wasn’t my imagination. Haarman ordered me out, and, when I didn’t go, took a punch at me, getting me unawares. I went off the verandah and hit my head. Woke up wandering in a daze some minutes later, and saw Haarman sitting at my table inside.

  “Haarman looked queer, then, but he’d always been deathly pale on the ship, and I figured he was one of those dipsomaniacs who think they can beat up the world when they’re liquored up. He’d been drinking my aguardiente, I saw, and I suppose he’d had plenty before he came ashore.” Ranier turned his glance on the insectologist. “He was oiled on shipboard yesterday afternoon, wasn’t he, Professor?”

  “In the ship’s bar before dinner,” the thin one remembered. “We were all there talking of the motor drive. He wash drinking heavily then.”

  “I’ll bet. Who,” Ranier narrowed his eyes at the wan face under the sun helmet, “bought him those drinks?”

  “Carpetsi, moshtly. I bought him one.” The man’s toothless mouth puckered as if he might cry. “He’d ashked me to join the drive and I felt obligated. Obligated! Oh, my! I don’t know why he ashked me. No, I don’t.”

  Ranier said, “I do,” grimly. “But we’ll come to that. Well, Haarman was walking on his heels when he came to Hyacinth’s café. The rest of you were to meet him there, is that right?”

  “Yesh. He went there a half hour ahead of ush.”

  “Or, maybe, he was sent on ahead. I’ve an idea he got there early for reasons other than his own. Perhaps to see if the coast was clear. At any rate, he didn’t like my company, and he wasn’t diplomatic about asking me to leave. From the look in his eyes, I’ve a hunch he may have been doped. I could see his face in the back-bar mirror, and he seemed to pass out. Then some time after seven o’clock,” Ranier directed his words to Dr. Eberhardt, “about the time you got your R.F.D. call, I should judge, this tourist party from the ship showed up at the café. I was a trifle woozy, myself, by that time—from that knock on the head, I guess—but these tourists walked in and ordered a round of drinks with Haarman. Professor Schlitz can check me if I’m wrong.”

  The professor groaned an affirmative to this, and Ranier waited for the wheels to take a curve before going on.

  “From the alcove I could watch this bunch at table in the middle of the room. They’d all come down from New York together on the cruise, except Marcelline, who’d boarded ship at Cape Haitian. This Marcelline sat at the bar-end of the table; the others ranged along the side. A Mr. Brown from Ohio; the professor, here; an Italian named Carpetsi, now dead; a Mr. Coolidge.

  “On the opposite side, a blond Broadway relic, and her Irish boy friend, Mr. Kavanaugh. Our Mr. Haarman was at the far end of the table, sitting with his back to an open window and about ten feet from the sill. Dense fog outside, and he was pretty fogged, himself, by then. He’d cooked his own goose by drinking that aguardiente. So there’s the set-up; the victim anaesthetized, the café a good quiet place to put him on the spot, and the fog just suited their scheme.”

  Professor Schlitz cried, “Their scheme? Whosh?”

  RANIER LEANED OVER the back of his seat to fire a cigarette, watching three faces in the match glare.

  “The ones who maneuvered Haarman to that out of the way café,” he shook out the match, “to kill him. The ones in that little tourist party who were in the know. Maybe most of them—maybe only a couple of them—I’m not sure which ones, but it won’t be long before I find out.

  “Anyway, this innocent little jaunt across Haiti by motor was to have been something more than a jaunt, and not so innocent. The original plan, the scheme behind this motor trip, was Haarman’s. Kavanaugh claims he was driving to Port-au-Prince on business and wanted company. Whether Haarman and his crowd attached themselves to an innocent party remains to be seen. But the big idea was Haarman’s game. He had helpers. They double-crossed him.”

  Ranier pointed his cigarette at the insectologist.

  “This underground game of Haarman’s calls for a gang. I knew there was more than one on the job from the first. You can’t stab a man at table and nobody see it happen, sitting at close quarters like that. Prepared with alcohol, Haarman didn’t know it when the knife went in; never made a squeak. But someone at your table had to know it. Someone must’ve seen it. Someone was holding out. Well, Carpetsi, for example, saw it. He was in on the scheme, one of the gang. He was going to squeal, later. That’s why his throat was cut.”

  “The Italian boy,” Laïs Engles cried.

  “One of the gang,” Ranier snapped. “There was a gang when the thing started. A gang that left New York together and sailed to Haiti, playing tourists on a Caribbean cruise. A gang headed by Haarman, who came to Haiti after something Haarman knew about. As I say, Haarman was double-crossed; knifed by one of his pals. You’re lucky, Professor. I think the knife was originally intended for you.”

  The insectologist grabbed himself by the throat.

  “Me?”

  “I can only guess on this point. You were invited on the so-called motor tour as a fall guy. A blind. A dupe to make the drive look innocent. Besides, this scheme called for a stooge, somebody to be wounded to give the gang a chance to call on Dr. Eberhardt’s hospital. Wait—” He apprehended an explosion of German from the gnome-face under the sou’wester. “I’ll explain that when I come to it. The point is Professor Schlitz was picked—maybe I’m wrong—to be this accident-victim. It would look quite natural. Party of American tourists driving cross-country to see Haiti at night. A white man mysteriously injured in a waterfront dive. Rush to the nearest doctor. The gang, I believe, h
ad planned this accident for Professor Schlitz. But something went wrong. Haarman, himself, got the works.”

  Ranier exhaled smoke. Then he continued:

  “Why? I can only speculate again. Suppose that devil, Hyacinth, recognized Haarman when the crowd came into the café? Suppose Hyacinth recognized Haarman’s scarred hand when he served him a drink, and Haarman’s gang realized it? Or just suppose it was opportunity for a fast double-cross—Haarman was soused, sitting with his back to a window, fog handy—a good chance to knock him off and grab his major share of the profits—”

  Ranier drew a sharp lungful of cigarette smoke; expelled it through his teeth. “I think that’s it. They wanted his share. Anyhow, this scheme that mushroomed out of Haarman’s brain turned into a toadstool and killed him. His gang was tougher than he was. He was stabbed.”

  THE SPEEDING CAR hit a jolt in the road, and Dr. Eberhardt, bounced; exploded. “But all this is impossible! Donnerwetter! Impossible! How could this man you call Haarman be in that café last evening? How can he have a gang, as you say, and come on your ship from New York? How can he be alive in the first place? When he is one Adolph Perl! When he is a man who came to Haiti in 1922 and died of a plague, and I, myself, saw him in his coffin fourteen—”

  Professor Schlitz shrilled, “Then he wash a living dead man—”

  Ranier shouted above voices, wind and tires, “He was a living dead man, perhaps, but not the kind you think. A living dead man from the minute he trusted a gang with his dirty work, and put his back to that window in the café last night. This is what happened.

  “Everybody at the table was chattering about the fog, the proposed motor drive. Marcelline, the guide—he wasn’t a guide, by the way, but one of the gang—Marcelline went out to see about the Winton he’d hired. About ten minutes later he came back into the room. During that time, Haarman was stabbed.”

  “But I wash at the table,” the insectologist gasped. “Nobody at the table made a move.”

  “No.”

  “Then how—”

  Ranier made a red circle with his cigarette. “I’m a fool or I’d have guessed it at the time. Only I wasn’t looking when it happened, and when Haarman did get my attention, I was seeing a reflection in the mirror behind that bar, so the angle there didn’t give me a clue. You,” he pointed the cigarette at the thin man, “didn’t see it because your attention was probably snared in another direction. Afterwards I saw tracks outside the café, but they stopped six feet from the window. Haarman was stabbed through that window just the same.”

  “But if he sat ten feet from the sill on the in-shide—?”

  “A long reach.” Ranier shook his head. “But so has bamboo. Ever see these Haitians cutting down ripe cocoanuts? Then recall that splintered pole we found in Marcelline’s ribs.”

  “Good God!”

  “Good weapon. Stiff bamboo. Knife lashed to the tip. A quick jab; exit knife through window curtained with fog; enter murderer through door talking about the weather. He occupies the conversation, holding attention to his end of the table with a discourse on Voodoo. No one is more astonished to see Haarman unwell. In the ensuing hue and cry, he spies a face at the window. Maybe it was his conscience, but I doubt if Marcelline had any.”

  “Marshelline!” Not many hours before, the professor had mashed the name through his gums on a similar cry. “Marshelline shtabbed Misher Haarman?”

  “His tracks outside. Who else left the café and went around by that window? Remember that thicket of bamboo out there? Afterwards he chucks the pole, hides the knife in the Winton—not the only tools he’s stowed in that ‘hired’ car—and comes back into the room; no blood on his shirt. Two birds killed with one stone. The gang has cut Haarman out of his share of the spoils, and they’ve got their accident-victim. Now the secret machinery is under way, they’ve ditched its inventor, and they’re going to run the machine for themselves. First stop: Dr. Eberhardt’s hospital.”

  CHAPTER XXV

  RANIER’S EXPLANATION

  A road sign whizzed by the window. Ranier craned his head to read it in the coming daylight. Port-au-Prince—53 Km.

  He picked up the story harshly. “But before the machine gets out of the café, there’s a cog in the gears. That’s me. They didn’t know how much I’d seen, and they had to let me walk out and work on Haarman—they couldn’t kill me with the Professor and Hyacinth Lucien looking on. Professor Schlitz was another cog—what to do with him? Well, they took him along to get him later—he could add to the confusion at the hospital, and that’s what they wanted. Confusion. They got it when Miss Engles recognized Haarman. I don’t suppose they counted on the girl being there.”

  Dr. Eberhardt hunched forward from the back seat. “Am I going mad? Still you talk about this man Haarman as if he had been alive! I tell you, he was a German sailor named Adolph Perl, who died—”

  “Fourteen years ago. 1922. And was buried in a graveyard three miles down the road west of your hospital.” Ranier nodded wearily. “Miss Engles identified him, too. By the scar on his hand, by the webbed foot she’d seen when he was a sailor on her uncle’s War expedition up the Amazon. That was a cog in my machinery, when I heard that. I thought Miss Engles was lying.”

  He shifted his eyes to the white dimness of her face. For the past ten miles she hadn’t stirred; had sat white and strained, cat in arms, her eyes unswerving on him as he talked. An expressionless headshake refused a cigarette. He told her huskily:

  “And you were an unexpected wrench in this gang’s machinery. I don’t suppose they’d been told about that little girl who was on your uncle’s secret expedition for Germany. If they were, you were probably described as a little girl because people forget children grow up. More likely the supposition was you’d been sent back to Germany long ago. You were a cog in the gears,” Ranier gestured, “but not too dangerous a cog. This gang could use your story, as a matter of fact, to advantage. Make it seem like Haarman’s a zombie. Cloak their machinery under a mask of Voodoo magic.

  “It was all right, after all, because it scared the hell out of everybody, myself included, and the gang was plenty anxious to get rid of me when I turned up in the hospital. They had to work fast in that hospital.”

  “I do not understand. Nein! Why should anybody come to my hospital,” Dr. Eberhardt panted. “Who are they? Why?”

  “Haarman, stabbed in the back, dying, was used as an entreé. An excuse to get in. I think,” Ranier guessed, “the idea was to get you, Dr. Eberhardt, busy in the emergency room. Keep you downstairs. The gang had been told about the layout of the hospital. Haarman knew the rooms; knew your desk was in the upstairs laboratory—”

  “Heilige Gott! But he was Adolph Perl, I tell you!”

  “He was dying, all right, in your emergency room last night. But Dr. Eberhardt was unexpectedly out on a call. The ones who killed Haarman didn’t care. Remember, Professor, who carried Haarman into the hospital?”

  “Brown and Carpetshi carried him in. Kavanaugh and hish blond woman and I followed after.” The thin man rinsed sweat from his forehead; leaned back groaning. “We put him on the operating table.”

  “Leaving Coolidge and Marcelline outside in that Winton. And while the rest of you were inside, and I was around in back looking through the window, the laboratory upstairs was wrecked.

  “Can you guess who shinned up the gallery and did the job? Well, I wouldn’t put it past Coolidge, but we don’t know yet. Marcelline was in it, that’s certain. The lab wasn’t just smashed up, either, but left as a set-up to make it look like the work of Haitian vandals. Dissected hands over that Bunsen flame. Frog left on that spike as a Voodoo sign. That’s why Miss Engles didn’t find her message from Dr. Eberhardt. One of those rats found it, saw the doctor was out, stole the note. But I didn’t know what this gang was after until that battle with the mob hours afterwards. Dr. Eberhardt’s records, that’s what they were after. Dr. Eberhardt’s death records.”

  “Himmel herr Gott!”
the little physician choked dramatically. “What for?”

  Ranier lifted himself on an elbow to growl, “Haarman wasn’t able to tell his crew of criminals where Adolph Perl was supposed to’ve been buried. That’s what they had to know. They wanted to find the grave that belonged to Adolph Perl. And they knew you’d kept a record of it somewhere in your files.”

  “Perl’s grave? Perl’s grave? A dead man comes back to life and has to have my files robbed to find his own grave—?”

  “I tell you, Coolidge or Marcelline, or both of them, ransacked your desk, wrecked the lab, stole the death records and got back to the car parked in the driveway. Down in the emergency room Miss Engles kept ringing for you. You didn’t come. She ran upstairs to find out why you didn’t answer; she saw the mess in the laboratory and screamed.”

  THE GIRL SAID to the gnome in German, her voice low, toneless, “I thought you had been abducted by the natives. I thought you had been killed.”

  Dr. Eberhardt panted, “I do not understand any of this. Shades of Kaiser Wilhelm! What does it mean?”

  “Curiously enough,” Ranier told him, giving him a hard stare, “the shades of Kaiser Wilhelm were in your hospital last evening, Doctor. In those death records, too; the ones stolen from your files. Of course, when the girl screamed upstairs and I dashed around to the front, Coolidge and Marcelline were there sitting in the car. They followed me into the hospital and played amazement at sight of that upstairs room. Meanwhile Haarman died on the operating table downstairs. Hemorrhage. The gang inherited his profits; had the death records in their possession; the machine was running smoothly except for my reappearance.

  “Everything conspired to their advantage, though. Miss Engles was terrified, telling her astounding story about Haarman. Your absence, Dr. Eberhardt, played up the mystery. The fog outside made it perfect because it would keep the natives indoors with their heads under their pillows. Kavanaugh sent Coolidge, Brown and Marcelline back to the village to bring the police. Then he started a murder investigation on the Haarman stabbing.