The Black Death

Chapter 10

Dawn was still three hours away when we came down the far side of the mountain. The bloody moon, paling as the night grew old, sank into the valleys and we did the last two hours in total darkness. Duppy took us along a narrow caliche trail that twisted and turned like a crazy snake, and did it with the aplomb of a native New Yorker crossing Times Square. Lyda walked behind him, while I lagged back to give Hank Willard a hand now and then. I had seen his leg, with the newly healed bone grotesquely malformed. It cost him a lot to keep up, but he did pretty well. He didn’t have much gear to lug — just the clothes he stood in and an old British Sten machine carbine. He had a shopping bag full of 9mm ammo for the gun. The shopping bag was from Macy’s Herald Square. I asked him about that. During one of the few breaks that Duppy gave us Willard explained. If you could call it an explanation.

He shrugged and gave me his broken toothed grin. “A screwing laugh, ain’t it. Those crackpots that invaded with me must have handled their supply and logistics through Mad Magazine. I know for a fact they bought some bazookas from a junk dealer in New Jersey. None of them worked. I never did know where they got the relic I was flying, but just before I take off they hand me this Sten and half a shopping bag full of ammo. In case, they tell me, I get shot down and have to fight my way out. Any chance of me getting a shot of that rum, Sam. This damned leg is killing me.”

I said no to the rum, mindful of his file. He was a drunk when he had the chance. Just the same I could have used a shot of the Barbancourt.

“Duppy’s got the booze,” I told him. “And Duppy is going to keep it until this is over. Time enough for drinking when that happens, and when you’re out of Haiti. Then you can drink yourself to death, for all I care.”

We couldn’t see each other in the dark, but I roughened my voice. “I mean that, Willard. You foul me up and I’ll let you rot here!”

“All right, Sam. Okay! No use getting steamed about it. I just thought a little drink wouldn’t hurt any.”

He dropped it and went on telling me how the B25 hadn’t had a bomb sight — his employers not being able to afford one — and he had dropped his bombs by dead reckoning. Missing the Palace, and Papa Doc, and hitting the Iron Market and a garbage dump.

He snickered. “Goddamn bombs were duds anyway. Probably weren’t even armed. Christ only knows where they bought them.”

I wanted to keep Hank Willard happy, and loyal to me. A Sten gun will throw 550 rounds a minute and the time might come when I would need that. I pretended an interest in his misfortunes.

“Wasn’t that part of your job, Hank? To inspect the bombs before you took off on that wild ass flight?”

He laughed. “I don’t know anything about bombs. I was a fighter pilot, for Christ’s sake. I never flew a bomber before. I told them I had, when they recruited me, because I was broke and needed the dough. I got it, too. Five thousand bucks, less what I had to give the blacks for hiding and feeding me. Right here in a money belt.”

“That should get you to Hong Kong,” I said.

“Your screwing A, it will. And Mai Ling. Jesus — I dream about that broad every night.”

I sighed and shook my head. Hank was a case of arrested development. A kid still fighting the Korean war. Still using the outdated slang of that time. All in all, I admitted, we were a pretty sad little army. A nut like Willard, Lyda with her dreams of grandeur and revenge, me trying to do the impossible because Hawk said do it.

Duppy was another matter. Duppy — Diaz Ortega — knew exactly what he was doing.

Just then he said, “Okay, back there. You blancs. Let us move it, huh. Got to get there and hide before the sun coma up, for sure. Or we dead mens.”

We made it. We stopped in a tangle of damp jungle, thick and vine-grown. Even Duppy sighed with relief as he dropped his gear and Lyda’s pack. Hank flopped down, moaning about his leg, and went to sleep. Lyda, too. I eased off my pack and the musette bag, but kept the machine gun cradled in my arm. Duppy did the same.

He came and squatted beside me and said it was all right to smoke. “We all right for now, blanc. We on the end of a shoulder that push out from the mountain into the valley. We got a tree house, I show you when it light enough, and we see all up and down the valley. See inside the fence and a lot of P.P.’s land. Even see his house and his swimming pool, see the zombie quarters, see a lot from that old tree.”

The acrid fumes of his Splendid drifted in my eyes. I brushed smoke away and said, “Back to the zombies, eh? What is it, Duppy? What’s the real pitch? If we’re going to work together, going to snatch this Valdez, I think I should know everything you know. How about it?”

I waited. As alert as I have ever been. I had taken pains to see that his Thompson was on safety and now I waited for a snick and it didn’t come. He didn’t speak for a minute. I watched his cigarette glow in the dark.

Then he laughed, a deep basso rumble. “Lemme tell you something, blanc. Just for hell of it. Something happen to me. One time I a wise alec, like you, and I say to a voodoo man that it all a lot of nothing. Like you.

“He just look at me, this man, and he say go and find an egg. Any egg. Take it from under the hen, you want. Then you bring it me here.” I laugh but I do it. I find egg okay from a friend of mine, and I know that egg just hatched. So I give it to the voodoo man and he say that I get a glass of cold water. Cold water.

“I do it. Then he tell me put the egg in the glass of water. He not touch the egg. Never. Then he pass his hand over the glass and he say some voodoo stuff and look at me and he say — now break egg.” So I laugh and I break egg.

“That egg hard boiled, blanc!”

Duppy paused, waiting for my reaction. The story had been well told, his deep voice coloring the nuances just right I wondered what he sounded like when he wasn’t affecting the uneducated half Creole, half black pidgin, that he used I with me. Diaz Ortega had been educated in Moscow.

“A good story,” I said. “And if it’s true I’m impressed. But I don’t see what it has to do with P.P.’s zombies, if any.”

He laughed again. “You a hard man convince, blanc. I not try no more. Wait till light and let you see for self. Now old Duppy gonna sleep a little. This place safe enough, but don’t go moving around. Fall off a cliff maybe, and break your neck.”

He sounded hopeful. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I that I had no intention of falling off a cliff.

I heard him settling down, rustling and thrashing about for a spell, then begin to snore lightly. He hadn’t snored the night before. It was only a crazy hunch but I decided to play it. I got on my hands and knees, moving lightly and without sound, and then I faked a couple of snores and a little heavy breathing.

Duppy played the game for ten minutes. Then he stopped snoring and I could feel him listening. I gasped and snorted and sawed a small log. I convinced him, because after a minute I heard him moving away, his big boondockers scraping on the rock. I went after him on my hands and knees, with extreme caution, moving only when he did. Twice he stopped dead, listening, and I froze. I was back on the caliche now and the pebbles and shards slashed at me.

He made more noise on the caliche and it was easier to follow him. Then he vanished. No sound. No anything. I crouched, breathing shallowly through my mouth, and wondered if he had used voodoo to sprout wings?

I heard him again. Over me. Up in the air. The bastard was in a tree!

I remembered what he had said about a tree house and I began to feel around in the dark, just off the path. I got lucky and found it in less than a minute. A thick trunked, smooth boled tree that had wooden cross-pieces nailed to it for climbing. I stood up, counted four of the cross-pieces, then dropped to all fours again and crawled ahead on the path so I could get a good look at the tree from in front.

I was just in time to see the flickering eye of his small flashlight from high above. It blinked white and fast, stuttering out the Morse, and then it went out and that was it. O.K.

O.K. Beamed in the direction of P.P.’s estate. What in the hell was okay?

I had no time to think about it then. I heard him coming down the tree and I scuttled back down the trail, still on my hands and knees. I was back in my place, gurgling and snoring again, when he came back and stood listening, then flopped down and really went to sleep. He didn’t snore.

I didn’t sleep a wink. I made tapes of all recent events, from the first phone call from Hawk right down to the present, and let them spin through my mind. I cut and edited and patched and extrapolated and in the end I came up with a pretty weird montage. I did a lot of guessing, some of the educated variety, some of the way out type, and when dawn came seeping through a copse of ackee trees I knew just about what I had known before. Duppy was playing some devious game of his own. On his own. Lyda didn’t know about it. Hank Willard didn’t figure in it; he was happen-1 stance, extraneous to the situation. That meant it was between Duppy and me. He had known that from the first. I had only suspected, but now I knew it, too.

Who had he been signalling to inside P.P. Trevelyn’s 5000-acre compound? Why?

How in hell did you make a rational picture out of such disparate pieces? Duppy — Diaz Ortega — was KGB. Commie.; P.P. and Papa Doc were Fascists and Commie haters. In the end it was like the old joke — who was doing what to whom, and who was paying for it? I fell asleep as the dawn crept in, and I didn’t have any answers.

One thing I knew — Duppy had been doing the leading so far. That had to stop. I had to take over and lead, push him a little, see if he would make a mistake.

I slept until noon. When I got up, stiff and cold and in my usual foul waking mood, there was no sign of Duppy and Lyda. Hank Willard was heating a canteen cup of instant coffee over a can of Sterno. I joined him and fixed myself some coffee.

When I got the first gulp of hot bitter stuff down I looked at Willard. “Where are they?”

He nodded upward, then pointed with a skinny dirty finger. “In the tree house. Spying out the lay of the land, I suppose. I was invited, but I ain’t climbing any trees with this leg.”

Last night, in the dark, it had seemed like a mile to that tree. Now I saw that it was about thirty yards. The tree was a soaring, slanting coco palm nestled in a thicket of ackee and conifers and ironwood. Wild cotton grew around the trunks. I looked for the tree house and at first I couldn’t see it.

Hank scratched and grinned through his ginger beard. “Speaking of the lay of the land, I remember one time—”

“Shut up,” I told him. “Too early for that crap.” I scalded my mouth with the lousy coffee and went on searching for the tree house and at last I spotted it.

Cute. Very clever. Someone had used steel cables and turnbuckles to pull the surrounding trees in around the coco palm and make a sort of lacy green cage. And it wasn’t really a tree house at all, but a flat platform, about 10 x 10, fixed two thirds of the way up the palm tree. The cables and turnbuckles were painted green. It was a good professional job and I wondered how long it had been there. And why? Somehow I didn’t think the local blacks were responsible. Work like this, and the planning that went with it, was a little beyond them.

I went back in the scrub to relieve myself and while I was at it I checked the Luger and the stiletto and the Colt .45. When I got back I picked up my Tommy gun and went to the palm tree. Hank Willard, looking bored, was playing mumbelty peg with a broken-bladed Scout knife. He gave me a cautious grin and kept silent. I shook my head as I passed. But for the Sten gun by his side the illusion might have been complete: aging Eagle Scout playing at camping. Again I flirted with the notion that this was all fantasy, that this snafued and fubared mission wasn’t really happening. The phone would ring any moment and I would wake up and answer it and Hawk would have a real mission for me.

Lyda was coming down the tree like a lovely monkey as I approached. Her long legs just matched the cross-pieces.

I grabbed her by the waist and lifted her down. She beamed and kissed me. She was excited.

“I saw him. I really saw him, Sam. Romera Valdez. He was in a jeep, under heavy guard.” She pointed to the east. “They were taking him up to the Citadel, I think. There is a new road, just built. Goes all the way to the peak. He must work at the Citadel every day and come back here, to P.P.’s place, at night.”

I put my arm around her shoulders. “You sure it was Valdez?”

Lyda looked up at me. “What makes you ask that? It’s almost as if you were—”

She broke off and frowned, her nether lip caught in small white teeth.

I tightened my hold on her shoulder. “As if I what?”

Her smooth brown face crinkled in puzzlement. “I, oh, I don’t really know. I’m confused right now. After all I haven’t see Romera in five years. But — it’s like you were reading my mind.”

I held her away from me and pushed up her chin with my fist and made her look into my eyes. “You aren’t sure that the man you saw really is Romera Valdez? Isn’t that it, Lyda? Come on. Spill it.”

She nodded, a bare inclination of her head on that long swan’s throat. “Maybe. I just don’t know. Duppy says it is Valdez. And he should know — he’s been spying from this place for a long time. H — he says that five years make a big difference and that maybe Valdez has been sick, or been mis-treated, even tortured, and that would account for it.”

“Meaning?” I knew it wasn’t Dr. Romera Valdez. They were using a decoy for some reason.

She leaned against me and put her head on my shoulder. “He looked so much older. And somehow different. And the way he sat in the jeep, so stiff and not looking around at anything. His face was right, though, what I could see through the glasses. It’s just that something seems to be wrong and I don’t know what it is. Duppy says I am being a fool.”

“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe not. You go think about it for a while. How is our friend Duppy this morning?”

He answered that by calling down from the tree platform in a hoarse whisper. “Come on up, blanc. I show you some zombies.”

I looked a question at Lyda. She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know about that, either. They do look like zombies. I mean they look the way I’ve read that zombies look. You go look and then tell me.”

I climbed the tree. Duppy’s thick black bulk was stretched on the planked platform. He had the binoculars screwed into his eyes. At his elbows was an empty Cration can with a plastic spoon in it, and a canteen cup still half full of coffee.

He extended the binoculars back without looking at me. “You have a good sleep, blanc?”

I growled an affirmative and made a careful study of my surroundings. A cunningly contrived piece of work: we were on the tip of a high narrow peninsula, an extension of the mountain shoulder, a heavily overgrown salient pushing into the wide valley. A net of cables held a sheltering screen of trees around the palm tree and the platform, but a skillful clipping and pruning job allowed a wide and unobstructed view of the valley below and to the east. It was like a trick mirror — we could see out but they couldn’t see in. Unless they were hanging 300 feet in the air and looking directly down our throats.

I adjusted the focus on the binoculars. I said, and meant it, “Very clever. Sweet. Until the day that helicopter spots it.”

He grunted. “We here, ain’t we? Worry about that when the time come. Now, blanc, you look down by gate and tell me what you see.”

The binoculars were excellent and the scene leaped into being with the depth and clarity of a diorama. There was a large, brick gatehouse and a steel and wire gate and black-uniformed guards, all of the latter heavily armed and some with dogs. Two of the black uniforms stood near the gatehouse, talking and consulting papers on a clipboard and paying no attention to the others. The others were half a dozen guards and three separate knots of workmen. Two guards to a group. The workmen wore blue denim uniforms, pants and jacket, and on the back of each jacket were stencilled white letters: P.P.

I cursed softly and Duppy misunderstood and chuckled. “Matter, blanc? Some of your notions get upset?”

I had been cursing P.P. Trevelyn. The arrogance of the bastard! His own prisoner-of-war camp, even to the stenciled letters. They did look that way, like PWs. I’d seen thousands of them all over the world.

But I had never seen PWs move like these men. Slow, stiff, foot-dragging motions. They never turned their heads. They turned their whole body with agonizing slowness, with their heads craned forward and their shoulders sagging. Zombies? I didn’t buy it for a minute, but something damned queer was going on.

I didn’t say anything and this brought a note of irritation into Duppy’s tone. “Well, blanc? What you say to that? They zombies or ain’t they?”

I was puzzled, and uneasy, and when I’m like that I can be mean. I put the spurs to him a little. “Maybe they’re all catatonics, Duppy. Or P.P. is running a spa and they’re arthritic patients. Anyway I can’t see their eyes at this distance. Isn’t that the way you tell zombies — by their eyes?”

“I seen their eyes, blanc. Up close. Bad as obeah, those eyes on them. No color. No nothing. Just white stare at you. Dead eyes. I know. I seen.”

I knew he was telling the truth. “How did you get close enough to see their eyes, Duppy?”

Silence. I listened for the movement, for the swing of his hand toward the Tommy gun at his side. I gambled with the odds on my side. Gunfire would louse up the deal, and I didn’t think he was ready for that yet.

He said: “Nem mind how I knows, blanc. I does, is all. But you ain’t gonna believe, so forget. You see what they doing down there?”

I saw. “They’re planting mines along the inside of the fence. Staggered at intervals of ten feet. That fence electrified, Duppy?”

“I disrecollects.” Sullen now. Then: “Seems to me it ain’t, though. Reckon P.P. don’t think he need juice, with them guards and dogs and mines. And zombies!”

I began studying the terrain beyond the fence. A wide graveled road led upward through heavily flowered and wooded slopes to a large flattened mesa. I could make out one wing of the house, three stories of glittering white stone fronted by a wide terrace and a balustrade of the same stone. Huge urns, amphorae, flaunted long tendrils of lush tropic flowers. Trevelyn loved flowers more than he liked people.

Off to the left, separated from the house by neatly hedged gardens and clipped topiaries, was the biggest goddamned swimming pool I had ever seen. An acre of pellucid blue water surrounded by tile. One side was sheltered by a glass canopy. There was a float and high and low diving boards and various inflated plastic birds and animals. There was sparkling white sand at each end of the pool, hauled all those miles from the coast, and on the sand near the high board a man was lying. A dark-haired white girl was rubbing suntan lotion on him. I twiddled the focusing screw for a better look.

Even with the inevitable foreshortening I had, for a few moments, a good look at the billionaire bastard. I never doubted that it was P.P. Trevelyn. He looked the part. It was type casting, but perfect type casting.

He was on his back with his hands interlaced beneath his head. He wore huge black sunglasses. A long brown cigar drooped from a mouth like a loose anus, his nose was a blobby button, and his skull was a tanned cue ball with & swatch of dirty gray over each ear.

P.P. didn’t have much chest but his paunch was a miniature mountain. The girl was anointing it. She poured oil and rubbed and the paunch swayed and quivered like a mound of jelly. I turned the binoculars on the girl’s face for a moment. Expecting, even hoping for some nutty reason, to find distaste written there. Even disgust.

She was a beautiful girl, supple and long limbed with, I I thought, the developed legs of a dancer. She wore a tiny bikini that let her breasts spill over and she must have shaven her pubic area or I could have seen hair. Maybe P.P. liked it that way.

The girl was the real zombie. Her eyes were half closed and her lips moved as she talked and there was absolutely no expression on her lovely face as she rubbed oil into that mountain of old guts. I felt a flash of pity for her, and knew it undeserved. She knew what she was about. Billionaires don’t grow on trees.

I crooked a finger at Duppy. “Here. Take a look. Is that P.P.?” It had to be, but I wanted confirmation.

I came as close to liking Duppy then as I ever would. He took a look and his thick lips moved in what could only be disgust and hatred. “That the man,” he muttered. “That the son of a bitch for sure. He just come out since I look last. Jesus God—1 wonder how that blanc girl stand to touch him. I bet he smell like a trench.”

I took back the glasses. “When you got a billion, Duppy, it. doesn’t matter how you smell.”

His mouth twitched and he gave me a cold dark stare. His eyeballs were jaundiced and inflamed by red spider webs. He ignored me and rolled back to his Tommy gun and began to clean and field-strip it.

I put the glasses back on the swimming pool in time to see P.P. saying something to the girl. She nodded, without expression, and tugged at his swim trunks. Then she bent over him, her red mouth agape, and in a moment his paunch began to quiver.

I felt a little sick and I didn’t want to see anymore, there was a lesson in it, and I let it register. The absolute ultimate in confidence. His house, his pool, his guards, his privacy and his own girl. P.P. Trevelyn didn’t give a good tinker’s damn who saw him doing what! He owned the joint He owned the world. He thought.

I studied the new road that twisted up slopes and through cuts and around bluffs to the Citadel some ten miles away. The road was narrow, only jeep wide, of gravel and crushed stone and it was one hell of an accomplishment and must have cost a million to build. Several parties of the denim-clad “zombies” were still working on it, tamping and rolling, and watering truck was crawling along, spraying water to bind the foundation.

There was no sign of the black uniforms on the road. The guards here were Tonton Macoute, and they rode the truck and watched from jeeps with .50 caliber machine guns mounted on them. The denim-clad laborers worked with the same stiff and awkward motions of the men around the gate. Zombies? But why? Why go to all the trouble to stage this farce?

Then I knew. I was a little stupid or I would have caught it before. The “zombies” were just another precaution, another way of keeping curious, or angry blacks away from this place. It was good psychology. No simple peasant will get within a hundred miles of a zombie if he can help it.

The missile made a thin searing streak as it left a launching ramp on the Citadel and arched over the valley. Duppy grunted and rolled to my side. We followed the blur of burnished metal as the missile slowed, faltered, went off course and smashed into a hill in a welter of wracked metal Duppy chuckled.

“Ain’t worth a gourde, them things. I been spying long time now and ain’t never seen ‘em hit anything they shoot at. Don’t see why Swan so worry. Nothing to be afraid of there! Take ‘em hundred years to make them missile work.”

I had the binoculars on the Citadel ten miles away. The Citadel took a giant leap toward me and I could see tiny dots moving about on the ramparts and I thought I saw steel ramps gleaming in the sun. I could make out long rows of rusty cannon and triangular mounds of cannon balls. Cannon that had never fired a shot.

Another missile left the Citadel and swooshed into the sparkling air. It broke up in midair, exploding in a cloud of black smoke and metal rain.

I said: “Did it ever occur to you, Duppy, that maybe Valdez isn’t really trying? Maybe he’s stalling, sabotaging, hoping that something will happen — like us coming in for him.—”

“No, blanc. I think Dr. Valdez do his best. Papa Doc and P.P. see to that — they ain’t fools. Dr. Valdez try to stall and they torture him to death real fast, I think. Take long time die. Trouble is Haiti, Papa Doc, ain’t ready for missiles yet. Still in the jungle, blanc. The Doctor he only one man and can’t do it all — and even bastard P.P. can’t buy brains come to this place.” Duppy laughed in basso.

I kept the glasses on the Citadel. It had been rotting since 1830 and was still an impressive sight. It thrust out from Cape Bishop like the prow of a ship, battered by time and still immutable. Twenty thousand men died in the thirteen years it took to build it. Walls 12 feet thick, three hundred cannon, quarters for fifteen thousand” soldiers. Never used. Never had to withstand an attack. In the end Henri Christophe killed himself with a silver bullet, and the cannon rusted, and the wind and rain and rats took over. The Citadel brooded through the years, neglected and yet indomitable, thrusting its blunt prow into seas of tropical greenery, damped by clouds fluttering from its turrets like sails. Waiting.

Its time had come again. In all Haiti there was no better site for missile launching.

No more missiles were fired. My eyes ached and watered and I put the binoculars down and looked at Duppy. He was back at work on his machine gun, fitting it together with practiced hands.

I lit a cigarette. “Valdez goes to the Citadel every morning, comes back here every night. Under heavy guard. That right, Duppy?”

He rubbed his piece down with an oily rag, not looking at me. “That right, blanc. Heavy guard. One jeep in front, one jeep behind, and Dr. Valdez in middle. Guards is Tonton Macoute. Bogymen. Mean bastards. When they gets here to gate they turns him over to P.P.’s men.”

I smoked in silence for a moment.

Duppy said: “I know what you think, blanc, and it don’t work. Not try it No chance. We just get our tails shot off and let the whole world know we here.” His laugh was cynical. “Not that make much difference to us then. We dead mens.”

He had been reading me correctly. Or very nearly. I wasn’t about to let Duppy know what I was really thinking.

I watched the ebony matte features closely and said, “You don’t think we could do it? Snatch Valdez somewhere on the road between the gate and the Citadel?”

Duppy hawked, spat, and glowered at me from his red-yellow eyes. “No, blanc. I told you! Can’t be done that way.”

“We’ve got grenades. I’ve got some plastique. All four of us have automatic weapons.” I was baiting him a little, and enjoying it, and I made myself sound a little superior and pompous.

“I think that it would be perfectly feasible to set up an ambush on that road. We would have the advantage of surprise. There are only four of us, I know, but if we plan it carefully we could—”

Without haste he turned the Thompson gun so it covered me. One hand, like a bunch of black bananas, curled near the trigger assembly. He made no effort to conceal this, but his gap-toothed smile was white and amiable for a change and it put ice down my spine. I had a hunch that when Duppy smiled and looked friendly he was prepared to kill you.

He wasn’t, quite yet, ready for that. You can’t silence a Tommy gun.

Duppy, still smiling, narrowed his eyes at me and said: “You got a lot to learn, blanc. One thing is that you isn’t boss here. Swan boss. If Swan say make the ambush I do it — but Swan ain’t gonna say that. She not so dumb like you.”

I nodded and matched his smile and his amiability. “All right. I’m a man who will listen. What’s wrong with my plan?”

He sighed and shook his massive black head. “Noise! That the worse thing wrong with it. Even we pet Valdez we still got to make it to the coast and you boat. Never do it, blanc. Papa Doc have his air force out, his coast patrol looking, his army combing the jungle. Be Tonton Macoute ever where. P.P. have his black uniforms after us. No chance, blanc, no chance at all.”

I pretended to study his words. He was right, of course. It was a lousy scheme and I had just been trying it on for size.

“ ‘Nother thing, blanc. There ain’t four of us. Swan stay out of all gun fighting. We need Swan for uprising, for invasion.

Swan dead, everything dead. No. We don’t put Swan in no danger.”

“There is still Hank Willard.” I wanted to keep Duppy talking.

He spat and laughed, a genuine and full-throated laugh of contempt. “That skinny ant! What good he? Anyway he crippled. He also scared and just want out of Haiti and this ain’t his fight no how. Hank be no good at all, blanc.”

I didn’t agree with him, but I kept my mouth shut.

Duppy held up his hand and began counting on those black banana fingers. “So that really only make two of us. Me and you. Now in front jeep is five Macoute, in back jeep is five Macoute, in middle jeep wid the Doctor is four Macoute. All jeeps got 50s on them. Macoute got submachine guns same as we. P.P. got tracking dogs. You still want try it that way, blanc?”

He was one hell of an actor. So am I when I have to be. I fidgeted and hemmed and hawed a bit and allowed that maybe I was wrong. My idea stank.

There was a long silence. He lit one of his Splendids and stared at the sky. Then, as if it were an after thought, he said: “Anyway you forgetting, blanc. You the stud! We decided that, I recollect. You getting paid all money. You the one got to go over that fence and into P.P.’s compound and bring Dr. Valdez out. We help you plan it, and we cover you, but you the one do it.”

He was so right. I had known that from the beginning. I was the one who had to go in and get killed. Because Duppy wanted it that way. Duppy was going to plan and arrange it that way when the time came. For reasons of his own. Reasons that stemmed from KGB orders. Straight from the Kremlin.

The sun was warm melted butter on my face. I closed my eyes and let myself hover on the edge of sleep. I was not too discontented. I had part of the puzzle worked — but there were gaps, big gaps, and only time and events would fill them. The time was very near.

Lyda came up to the platform with lunch. Crations and instant chocolate in cold water. She had found a spring-fed pool and taken a bath and her hair was still damp. She nestled down between the two of us and took the binoculars and studied the valley for a long time. We talked and made tentative plans. I went along with them on everything, only demurring now and then to make it look better and avoid Duppy’s suspicion. I had my own plan. All I had to do was wait until precisely the right moment to put it into effect.

It came before I was quite ready for it. The sun was still an hour high when there was a bustle around the gate and we saw them gathering the “zombies” and marching them in and counting them. Lyda pointed to a dust cloud that was drifting down the road from the Citadel. Three jeeps.

She grabbed the binoculars from me. “They’re bringing Valdez back now. I want another good look at him. Maybe I was wrong this morning.”

“You wrong,” Duppy growled. “That Valdez all right. Certain. You just don’t know what five years being prisoner do to a man, Swan.”

I thought he was lying, and I wondered why he bothered. I was sure that the man Lyda had seen was a decoy, a fake Valdez. The real Valdez was too precious to risk on a long open drive twice a day. That was an open temptation, an invitation to—

The hidden gunner accepted the invitation. The crack of a high-powered rifle drifted to us across the valley.

Lyda, with the glasses trained on the middle jeep, flinched as though the bullet had struck her. She gasped, “Oh Christ! Oh, MY GOD! He’s been shot. They’ve shot Valdez!”

Duppy cursed and grabbed for the glasses. I moved softly toward the back of the platform and then stood up. My eyes are a little better than perfect and I could see well enough.

All three jeeps had jammed to a halt. Tonton Macoute were running all over the place, angry and confused and staring and pointing up at the mountain side. That gunner had better be well on his way.

A little knot of Tonton Macoute gathered around the middle jeep. They were looking at something on the ground. A couple of them were kneeling and working on the man. I saw a white Panama hat lying in the dirt off to one side. My guess was a telescopic sight and a head shot. An expert marksman. I moved a little closer to the wooden stairs leading down the palm tree.

I had to crane to see now. One of the Tonton Macoute, obviously an officer, straightened up and made a gesture of disgust. Shook his head and flung his arms wide and I could almost hear the word: “Mort!”

Duppy said, “They kill him, Swan. Some dirty bastard kill your Dr. Valdez.”

Lyda was in shock. She had forgotten me. She clung to Duppy’s massive bicep and stared and said over and over again, “Why? But why? Why would they want to kill him?”

Time to go. I started down the tree, making no sound. As I went I heard Duppy saying: “Depend who they is, Swan. Not P.P. or Papa Doc — they never kill valuable man like Valdez. But I know who do want him dead, Swan. CIA want him dead. Them miserable American bastards want Valdez good and dead, you bet. They do it, Swan. CIA do it!”

I smiled as I reached the ground. Another piece of the puzzle in place.

I heard Lyda give a muted little scream of rage and anguish. I picked up my musette bag, already packed, and kicked the dozing Hank Willard in the ribs. He came up swearing, and I clamped a hand over his mouth and whispered for thirty seconds.

Willard’s eyes widened and his mouth opened, and he began to spit out protests.

“What the screwing hell, Sam? You’re looking to get me killed. I’m an airplane driver, not a screwing—”

Time was precious. Every second was uranium. I put my hand in his ginger beard and twisted. “You do it,” I hissed. “You do it right. You ever expect to see the States again, or your girl in Hong Kong, you do it! Fail me and I’ll kill you.”

He gasped and nodded and clawed at my hand. “Okay— okay. But Jesus — I—”

I shoved him away. “Do it! Right! I’ll see you. Whether you get dead or rewarded is up to you.”

Time to go. I dove into the thick brush and started working my way down the slope. It would be dark soon, and I didn’t think Duppy would come after me. He would have his hands full with Lyda for a time.

Duppy’s dream world was beginning to come apart, and I was the demolition expert.