by Otto Penzler
Instantly the whole pier semed to blow up. Fire flashed and banged from the liner’s bridge, from the foredeck, from portholes under the deserted railings. Spurts of flame from behind bales and crates near the cargo booms, from luggage-stacks on the jetty, from doors in the douane. A blizzard of bullets raked across the pier, beating against the sheet-iron warehouse wall. Germans are invariably good marksmen, and the Garde d’Haiti once took second place with their Olympic Games rifle team.
When the smoke finally cleared, the sheet-iron wall looked like a sieve.
Mr. Coolidge was a mass of nerves.
John Ranier sat on the gangway holding a slim girl in nurse’s costume in his arms, cursing a scarlet blotch spreading under her crumpled collar.
THE GONG WAS going damn-damn-damn-damn to voice his thoughts, and the ambulance, hitting fifty, seemed to crawl. Somehow he drove Dr. Eberhardt, Professor Philemon Schlitz and a scared Negro interne to the front end of the swaying white compartment; then, outwardly cool, worked deftly with calm hands over the unconscious girl. By pretending this was Philadelphia, a traffic accident, he could ignore the white pain on her face and steady his touch.
“I’ve stopped the hemorrhage, Dr. Eberhardt. She’s going to be okay.”
“Gott sei dank!” The old man was wringing his dry sou’wester in dripping hands. “She will not—she will not die?”
Ranier gave him an upturned grin. “Not her. Bullets don’t stop her kind. Bullets are for those rats back there on the pier.”
Professor Schlitz burst out with: “But how did you recognishe them when you did? How did you know it was Misher Kavanaugh and—”
“The Mick put over his disguise all right,” Ranier said. “Probably learned the art of make-up in prison shows at Auburn. They must’ve had those costumes in their luggage. But you can’t change a habit overnight, even if you can change your face. Kavanaugh gave himself away. I recognized him when I saw him pull that habitual cocked-finger gesture of his at the ship’s purser.”
“The Schweinhund!” Dr. Eberhardt swore. “Dogs! They shot my little girl—my poor little girl—!”
John Ranier snarled, “Cheer yourself on this, Doctor. Think how those rats must’ve felt when they found Captain Friederich’s mausoleum already opened when they got there—opened when the first gang of grave-robbers arrived. Hijacked, see?”
“What is that you say? What is that?” The old physician took his eyes from the unconscious girl; yelled.
“I say Marcelline and Brown, the grave-digging crew, found the tomb already opened when they got there from Bois Legone. Somebody’d beat them to it.” Ranier lifted his voice above the ambulance gong. “Somebody’d been there ahead of them and rifled the coffin. Some job to explain to Kavanaugh, Coolidge and the blonde, when they arrived on the scene and wanted their share. I’ll bet there was a row. But Kavanaugh and his gang never got those jewels at all.”
“How do you know?” Professor Schlitz was half out of his leather seat. “How do you know those crooks didn’t get the—”
“Because they didn’t have the loot at the pier,” Ranier told him. “I telephoned ahead to the Garde d’Haiti and told them to examine every last piece of baggage going aboard that German liner. That’s what the argument was about at the gangway. But the pier officials didn’t find the stuff at the customs gate, and told me so when we arrived at the pier. I thought I’d missed my guess. But—”
“But who got the jewels?” Dr. Eberhardt burst out. “Who robbed the mausoleum first?”
“A nice question.” Ranier mocked a frown. “Kavanaugh, Coolidge and the dame didn’t get them, and the grave-digging crew didn’t get them. Must be someone else, then. Someone who guessed where they’d be from the way that game of Going to Jerusalem was progressing. Someone say, who didn’t go from Morne Cuyamel to Bois Legone, but cut Bois Legone from the itinerary and jumped straight to that last cemetery on the list. Someone, say, who rode as far as the fork in the highway on the back of Kavanaugh’s car, dropped off at the road fork and, maybe, picked up a stray horse. Then beat the grave-diggers to the mountaintop, broke into the tomb with a shovel or pick such as might be left lying around; smashed the coffin and got the goods.”
“YOU,” RANIER SWITCHED the pronoun, “then circled back to Bois Legone; ducked the horse somewhere, and waited around in that graveyard, knowing I’d turn up and you’d have an alibi story as well as protection. Marcelline was sent back to get his Panama, but he was also sent back to get you and when—”
The thin man’s leap did not take Ranier by surprise. Truly and with ferocity he drove his fist to the man’s boneless mouth, reducing Professor Schlitz to a heap on the ambulance floor.
John Ranier had never, in his surgical career, so astounded an audience or worked so miraculous an operation. A gastroenterostomy that produced from under the prone man’s vest an amazing viscera of precious stones, strings of amethyst, pearl necklaces, a diamond tiara, loops of azure light and vermillion brilliance, a handful of sapphires and a chain of topaz. Diadems, lockets, bracelets, brooches. Opals and three emeralds and moonstones. A tumor under the belt produced a flow of jade. Rubies were blood.
The ambulance was stopping under a vine-cooled arch, and Ranier saw the calm white facade of a quiet hospital. The professor could tell a pair of gendarmes leaning in the entry about his operation.
John Ranier straightened up to dump a million dollars’ worth of jewelry into Dr. Eberhardt’s stunned lap. He was thinking of Wilde’s comment on the price of everything and the value of nothing. Which was true in some cases, but not in the case of four million marks’ worth of jewels which the German government would pay plenty for; and not in this ambulance case.
He saw Laïs Engles was conscious, smiling gamely at him through white pain. He took her hand in his.
“You’ll be all right,” he promised gently, smiling down. “I’ll have that piece of lead out of you before you know it, and I’m going to take care of you, myself. I’ve just done a million dollar job, and I’m appointing myself Dr. Eberhardt’s new assistant. We’ll start work rebuilding his hospital as soon as you’re on your feet.”
John Ranier knew he was grinning foolishly, unprofessionally, but he couldn’t stop it. He’d found something worth doing, something he wanted to do. There was no such thing as a zombie, after all.
“Bringing the Family” by Kevin J. Anderson. Originally published in The Ultimate Zombie, edited by Byron Preiss and John Betancourt (New York, Dell, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by Wordfire, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Kevin J. Anderson, president, Wordfire, Inc.
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“Mission to Margal”
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“League of the Grateful Dead” by Day Keene. Originally published in Dime Mystery magazine, February 1941. Copyright © 1941 by Popular Publications, Inc., copyright renewed 1969 and assigned to Argosy Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
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The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1981. Copyright © 1981 by Lisa Tuttle. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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“The Crawling Madness” by Arthur Leo Zagat. Originally published in Terror Tales magazine, March 1935. Copyright © 1935 by Popular Publications, Inc., copyright renewed 1963 and assigned to Argosy Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.
ENDNOTE
1. Machila—a stretcher slung on a pole—the standard means of transport in the “bush.”
Table of Contents
Otto Penzler: INTRODUCTION
W. B. Seabrook: DEAD MEN WORKING IN THE CANE FIELDS
David A. Riley: AFTER NIGHTFALL
Hugh B. Cave: MISSION TO MARGAL
Chet Williamson: THE CAIRNWELL HORROR
Arthur Leo Zagat: CRAWLING MADNESS
Lisa Tuttle: TREADING THE MAZE
