The Black Death

Chapter 3

The Sea Witch was a Pembroke, a 57 footer, and she was a living doll. About $150,000 worth of sea-going express cruiser. When the girl said “boat” I hadn’t known what to expect — maybe anything from a skiff to a schooner — but I wasn’t prepared for the sleek glistening beauty that swung at double anchor a hundred feet out from the end of docking.

We went out to her in a metal dinghy that had Sea Witch stenciled on the stern in blue paint. No one paid any attention to us. The Basin was fairly crowded, with a couple of houseboats moored close in to shore, and the usual scatter of small craft bobbing like ducks on the tide. There was a black-painted schooner in, a real beauty, showing no lights, and a steel ketch where they were having a party. The music was very go-go, and by the sound of laughing and shouting they were going to make a night of it.

Lyda Bonaventure sat quietly in the stern as I rowed us out. She didn’t say much until I rounded the bow of the black schooner. Just ahead the Sea Witch tugged gently at her fore and aft moorings:”

“Her real name is Toussaint,” she said. “But of course we couldn’t call her that. It would be a dead giveaway, you see.”

She was calmer now, having cast the die and decided to trust me, and for the first time I noted the soft cultured tones, the absence of drawl, the almost too perfect diction that indicated that English might not be her first language. At this stage I knew little about her, but I did know that she was Haitian mulatto, descended from one of the old and elite families that Papa Doc Duvalier kicked out when he came to power. She would have been a kid then, I reckoned, because she couldn’t be over 25 now. Old enough to hate. Old enough to know what a double or triple cross was. I was going to have to watch her. And work with her. Those were my orders.

We came alongside the big cruiser, and she went swarming up a ladder, showing a lot of textured pantihose. I noted, absently, that she had a very interesting behind. I hitched the dinghy to the ladder and went up after her.

There was a jangle of keys as she went about unlocking things. “Let’s not waste any time,” she said. “Not a minute. Let’s move her, Nick. Do you know any place we can take her that will be safe? For tonight at least?”

She sounded scared again and I decided to play along. Maybe she did know what she was talking about. In any case I knew I wasn’t going to get anyplace, or get her to do any real talking, until the pressure was off and she was at ease. Then, if I could get a few drinks into her, I might start making some sense out of this mess.

“All right,” I said. “We’ll move her. Just give me a few minutes to survey her, huh? You don’t just come aboard a strange craft and take off the next minute.”

We went through the deckhouse and into the owner’s stateroom. She pulled curtains over the portlights and flicked on soft indirect lighting, then turned to give me a luminous brown stare. “You said you knew how to handle a boat, Nick.” Accusatory.

“I do. I’ve been around boats, off and on, most of my life. I still need to look her over before I take her out. You just let me handle it my way, huh? And let’s get one thing straight — I’m captain and you’re crew. I give orders and you obey. Got it?”

She frowned at me, then smiled and said, “Got it, Captain. The truth is that I don’t know anything about boats, and so I have to depend on you.”

“I was wondering about that,” I told her. “If you knew.anything about boats.”

She moved gracefully across the wall-to-wall carpeting to a tiny bar. “I don’t I just admitted it. I was — I was planning on having someone else to run her for me.”

I took off my jacket and my hat and tossed them into a chair. There was a blue yachting cap on a table, atop a pile of charts. The cap was soft topped, easily shaped, and bore two crossed golden anchors. I put it on, and it fitted me perfectly. A playboy’s cap, not a working garment, but it would do. I rolled up my sleeves. I had already had chicken blood on the London suit, and I figured that a little marine paint and engine grease couldn’t hurt any.

Lyda was making clinking sounds at the bar. She stopped and looked at the Luger in the belt holster and at the stiletto in the chamois sheath on my right arm. She opened her mouth and licked her lips with a pink tongue.

“I suppose I have been a fool,” she told me. “Not to trust you, I mean. You did kill two of them tonight! You — you wouldn’t have done that unless you are on my side — unless you are who you say you are.”

I had shown her my credentials. I seldom carry credentials that a layman would recognize, but tonight I had. Bennett had introduced me as Nick Carter. Hawk wanted it that way. This was no undercover job — he was not even sure there was a job — and I was to play it straight all the way. At least until matters developed and the picture was clarified.

Matters were developing, all right, but so far there wasn’t much clarification.

Lyda had mixed martinis. She poured two now and wriggled a finger at me. “With the captain’s permission, sir, can we have one drink before we go to work? Do you know something, Mr. Carter? You look like a pirate in that cap.”

I went to the bar and picked up the cold glass. I sipped. She made a good martini.

“One drink,” I told her. “Then you change into something else and we go to work. And you might keep in mind what — you just said — I am a pirate when I have to be. I hope I don’t have to make you walk the plank, Lyda. For both our sakes.”

She raised her glass to me. There was a hint of mockery in the gesture. Yellow flecks stirred and moved in the brown eyes as she smiled. “Yes, sir!”

She leaned forward suddenly and kissed me lightly on the mouth. I had been waiting for the chance and now I reached swiftly under her mini-skirt, my fingers just brushing her inner thigh, and snatched the little pistol from a garter holster she wore high and near her crotch. I had spotted it when she climbed the ladder.

I cradled the toy in my palm. It was a .25 Beretta with ivory butt plates. I grinned at her. “Now that you have decided to trust me, Lyda, you won’t be needing this. You let me worry about the guns, eh?”

She regarded me calmly over the rim of her glass, but her mouth tautened and the yellow sparks swirled in her eyes.

“Of course, Nick. You’re the captain, darling.”

The captain darling said: “Okay. Now finish that drink and get changed to something you can work in. I’m going to look around. I’ll be back in ten minutes and we’ll move this hulk.”

I went back to look at the engines. Twin V8 diesels, Cummins, and I figured around 380 horsepower. She should cruise at about 22 knots, with a top of 25 or so.

I went on checking, using a flashlight I found on a tackle box near the engines. It had to be a fast job, but I knew what I was looking for and I was pretty thorough. She had a beam of 16 feet as against an overall length of 57 feet. Oak frames under bronze-fastened mahogany. Honduras mahogany and varnished teak trim in the superstructure. She carried 620 gallons of fuel and 150 gallons of water. You can go a long way on that much oil and water.

The deckhouse was full of crates, long and flat, and I wondered what kind of guns they were. I didn’t have time to find out now and I really wasn’t all that interested. Later I might be — if those guns were to be used in an invasion of Haiti. That was just one of the pleasant little jobs Hawk had given me — to stop an invasion of Haiti if, and when, it appeared imminent. The old man hadn’t given me any suggestions as to how I might do this. Just do it. Those were the orders.

I pulled the dinghy around and put it in tow. I had decided to slip the anchors instead of fooling with them, being so short handed, so now I slipped the stern line and let her swing around as she wanted to. I went back to the engines and started them and they began to purr softly in neutral. I found the switches and put on her running lights. She had dual controls, but I decided to take her upstream from the fly-bridge. I could con her better from there and I was still just a trifle nervous; a strange boat is like a strange woman— until you get acquainted anything can happen — and the Hudson traffic and channels are nothing to fool around with.

Lyda Bonaventure came up behind me as I was studying the glowing instrument panel. She had changed to slacks and a thick cable-stitched sweater that muffled her large, soft breasts. She kissed my ear and I remembered the way she had touched me at the voodoo church, and it took some concentration on my part, even though I knew she was playing games and had figured I was a sucker for the sex play, to tell her to go and slip the bow anchor. She did know enough to do that.

A minute later we were making it upstream against the tide, with the big diesels chortling softly and the wake coming up narrow and creamy. I listened to the engines for a moment and knew they were in good shape. I flicked on the white running light ahead of me. Lyda lounged near my chair while I explained about channel buoys and how to spot them and what they meant. She listened and nodded and came to stand behind the chair and stroke my cheek with her long cool fingers. Now and again she would say yes darling this and no darling that, and I wondered just how big a sucker she thought I was. We had gotten to the darling stage pretty damned fast; I wondered what she had in mind beyond that. As long as it didn’t endanger the business at hand old Barkis was willing!

“Where are we going, Nick?”

I was keeping my eye on a tanker coming downstream to port. “About forty miles up the river,” I told her. “There’s a marina there, near a place called Montrose. It’s run by a guy named Tom Mitchell, and we used to be pretty good friends. We can lay in there for a time, and there won’t be any questions asked.”

“I like that,” she agreed. “No questions asked.”

“Except by me, that is.”

She patted my cheek. “Of course, darling. Except by you.”

I spotted a channel buoy and slid to starboard. Just ahead of us the George Washington Bridge was a glittering arc with the white moving shafts of car lights shuttling and weaving a brilliant tapestry of nothing.

I thought I might as well improve the quiet hours, milk the journey for what I could.

“About that voodoo bit tonight, Lyda. How authentic was it? I mean was the goat really going to—”

She was standing with her hands on my shoulders, breathing into my ear. I could smell that expensive perfume and the not unpleasant odor of dried female sweat on tan flesh.

She laughed softly. “Yes, darling, that goat was really going to. It’s a regular part of the show. It is one of the ways we raise money for our cause. You and Mr. Bennett, poor man, got in free but those tickets usually cost a hundred dollars.”

We were under the bridge now and edging into the relative darkness beyond. “In other words,” I said, “it was just another dirty show? Like the pony and the woman, or the dog and the woman, or a threesome or foursome? The sort of thing you see in the Place Pigalle?”

I felt her shrug. “I suppose you could call it that. But it’s been a big money maker, we screen people very carefully and we never do stags, just mixed couples, and we have been careful not to overdo it. About the voodoo — some of it was authentic enough. It depends on what you mean by authentic.” She laughed again and bent over to nibble on my ear. I realized that she wasn’t just kidding me along, though that might be part of it. She was genuinely excited, sexually aroused, and I could understand that. That voodoo ceremony, phony or not, and the killing and the blood, and the running and the escape to a boat on a dark flowing river with soft April in the air — these were all powerful aphrodisiacs. I was feeling them myself.

Lyda perched on the coaming again, watching me in the dim running light. She squinted at me and ran a finger over her full lips in a way she had.

“There are really three kinds of voodoo,” she said. “The real voodoo, which strangers almost never get to see, and the tourist voodoo which anyone can see — and our kind. The kind you saw tonight. Phony sex voodoo.”

She sighed. “It was good while it lasted. We made a lot of money for the cause out of it.”

I took a pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket and tossed them to her. I have them made in Istanbul — very long and slim, latakia, perique and Virginia, with NC embossed in gold on the filter — and they are one of my very few vanities.

“Light us up,” I told her.

I watched her inspecting the gold NC as she lit them from the instrument panel lighter. She blew smoke through her straight little nose and handed me mine. “I’m impressed,” she said. “Truly impressed. And relieved. I’m beginning to really believe that you are Nick Carter.”

We were past the Harlem River by now. I took her out a little more toward midstream. For now we had had the river to ourselves except for a string of barges over near the Jersey shore, moving like phantoms against the high rearing of the Palisades.

“You’re a hard woman to convince,” I said curtly. “But never mind — what was in that drink tonight?”

“Nothing much. Just a little LSD.”

I nodded. “That’s nice to know. Just a little LSD, huh? Good. I was worried about that — I thought it might, be something powerful or dangerous.”

She pushed her hand into the light from the instrument board. Her nails were long and well kept and the color of blood. She measured off a micro-dot on her thumb nail. “Just that much. A tiny smidgeon — not enough to hurt anyone. We found that it helps the illusion, makes it sexier, gets people more excited. So maybe they come back again and spend another couple of hundred dollars. Just good business, that’s all.”

“Sure. Just good business.”

She blew smoke at me, narrowed her eyes, then put a hand over her mouth and laughed beneath it. “You sound like you don’t approve. What are you, Nick Carter, some kind of a moralist?”

She sort of had me there and I had to grin. She took her cue from the expression on my face.

“You killed two men tonight — or one for sure — and most people would say that makes you a murderer. Or doesn’t it?”

“That was in the line of duty,” I said. “I am an accredited agent of AXE, which is in turn an agency of the United States Government.”

There seemed no point in telling her that I carried rank, with top seniority, and that I had killed more men than she had years. I doubted that she had ever heard of AXE, anymore than she had heard of Nick Carter before eight o’clock tonight.

All laughter fled. She could change moods the way a chameleon changes colors. She cupped her chin in one hand and stared at me with that yellow glitter in her eyes.

“What I do is in the line of duty, too. You were right— I am the Black Swan! I don’t have any official standing, and it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference. Sooner or later I am going to lead my people back into Haiti, and we are going to take back what belongs to us. I personally am going to arrange for that stinking black bastard, that Papa Doc Duvalier, to be banged in front of his own palace in Port-au-Prince! What do you think of that, Mr. Carter?”

I laughed at her. “It is going to be later, Miss Bonaventure. Not sooner. Part of my orders are to see that there are no invasions of Haiti. Absolutely none! Uncle Samuel has just had a very bad time in the Dominican Republic and he is not looking to repeat it in Haiti. Uncle has a great longing for peace and quiet in the Caribbean and that is the way it is going to be. And what do you think of that, Miss Bonaventure?”

She threw her cigarette butt overboard. She stood and put her hands on her hips and stared down at me in the conning chair.

“I rather thought that was it,” she said, all soft and sweet and reasonable. “As a matter of fact it isn’t anything new, this attitude. Steve Bennett told me the same thing.”

“He was so right,” I murmured.

“Bennett was my contact with the CIA, as you know. I don’t know what really goes on, any of the inner workings, or why you people — AXE? — are taking over from the CIA, but I do know that Bennett and I made a deal. A bargain. Are you going to honor that bargain, Mr. Carter?”

I was non-committal. “Depends on the bargain. What did you and Bennett agree to?” I knew, because Bennett had filled me in briefly, but I wanted to hear her version.

She was behind me again, rubbing those cool fingers over the back of my neck. “I was to call off any invasion attempt, not to try it, and the CIA was going to go into Haiti and bring out Dr. Romera Valdez. You know that Papa Doc kidnapped him, right out of Columbia University, and has been holding him for five years?

I knew. She was telling it about the way Bennett had told it to me. Yet I had to stall her. I couldn’t make any firm committments until I had talked to Hawk. And Hawk, of course, had to get clearance from The Man.

Still I wanted to keep her happy and keep her from trying any monkey business while I sorted this thing out. Those bogymen had loused up a lot of things when they started shooting.

I said: “I think we are going to honor that bargain, Miss Bonaventure. I say think, because I can’t make you an absolute promise at this time, but the chances are pretty good that we will try and get this Dr. Valdez out for you. But you will have to be patient. A deal like this takes time to set up — otherwise we’ll just get our heads shot off the way so many of your friends have. You have any idea how many invasions of Haiti have been tried in the past ten years?”

I didn’t know the exact number myself, but there had been a lot. All failures. Papa Doc was pretty tough on his own turf.

She massaged my neck. “Bunglers,” she said. “Fools and cowards and half wits. Cretins! It wouldn’t have been that way with my invasion.”

I liked her use of the subjunctive mood. Maybe she was going to play it my way after all.

I said: “So let’s leave it that way for now, huh? You be a good girl, be patient, and leave everything to me. I’ll see what can be worked out and 111 do it fast. Like tonight. But you keep your nose clean, honey. No tricks and no double-crosses. You try anything with me and I’ll have you in jail and this boat, and cargo, confiscated so fast you won’t know what hit you. Deal?”

She nuzzled my ear. She put her tongue in my ear and then she bit it a little. “Deal,” she whispered. “To tell you the whole and entire truth, Mr. Carter, right now I am not very interested in an invasion of Haiti or even in Dr. Valdez. Later I will be again, but I never mix business with pleasure, and that is a thing that works both ways. Just now I am fascinated by the pleasure principle. Your pleasure and my pleasure. Our pleasure. I believe that as soon as possible we should inflict pleasure on each other to the very limit — as much as each can bear. What do you say to that, Mr. Carter?”

The lights of the Croton Yacht Club slid past to starboard. It wasn’t far now to Tom Mitchell’s marina. I craned my head back to stare up at her. Our faces were very close. For an instant I had the impression of a beautiful African mask hanging in midair: hair dark and smooth-glinting back from the high, pale, tan brow; eyes wide-set and long and umber with yellow pin wheels swirling in them: the nose straight and fragile and the mouth a trifle wide and full lipped and moist red with teeth glistening like porcelain mirrors. She moved to press her large tender breasts against me.

“Well, Mr. Carter?”

I nodded up at her. “Deal,” I said. “Within limits Mr. Carter is a yea-sayer beyond compare.”

She made a mock frown. “No limits! I do not like limits. I do everything to you and you do everything to me. Deal?”

We both laughed then, a spontaneous explosion that sounded wild in the April dark. I moved my face against her breast. “Deal, Lyda! I only hope you’re up to it. I can play pretty rough when I get started.

She bent to kiss me. Her mouth was hot and moist and she thrust her tongue into my mouth for just an instant and then took it away.

“So do I,” she told me. “So do I play rough, big man. And now I am going to go mix some more martinis. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She went and I wondered. I thought the sex bit was genuine — she was a passionate girl and she was aroused and she had to do something about it — but you can never be a hundred per cent sure. Women are born knowing how to sucker men, and Lyda Bonaventure was no different. In any case it didn’t really signify — if she did have a genuine case of hot pants she would be just as tricky, as dangerous, after I cooled her down. Maybe more so, because the sex thing would be out of the way for a time and she could concentrate on skullduggery.

Just what skullduggery I didn’t know, but she would probably come up with something. Right now she needed me. She was afraid of the Tonton Macoute—more so than she was letting on — and at the moment I was her best chance of survival. That shoot-out at the voodoo church had been pretty convincing. It sure as hell convinced me and I don’t scare as easily as most.

Another thing was that I knew her secret — I was sitting square in the middle of about a million dollars worth of boat and illegal arms — I hadn’t begun to explore that angle yet but I knew they were there — and I was the only insurance she was likely to get. All in all, I thought, I should be able to trust her for a time. Like the next few hours.

She came back with the drinks and we clinked our glasses and drank. The Sea Witch rounded a point and I saw the dim lights of the Montrose Marina ahead. The yellow dock lights showed a couple of small cabin cruisers and a yawl, nothing else. It was still a little early in the season for the real trade.

I finished my drink and put the glass on the deck. “Just for the record, Lyda, who owns this boat? What about the papers?”

She was lighting cigarettes for us. “Everything is in order there. She’s registered to a Donald Campbell who lives in Stamford and works on the Stock Exchange. He doesn’t exist, of course.”

“Where are the papers, just in case?”

“In a drawer in the stateroom. You want them?”

I shook my head. “No. Not tonight, but maybe later. I know the guy that owns this marina. We won’t have any trouble here.”

She put a cigarette in my mouth. She ran her fingers over my chin and felt the slight stubble.

“Don’t you shave,” she told me. “I like men to have a little beard sometimes.”

I said that shaving had not entered my mind.

“Please do whatever it is you have to do and get it over with,” she said. She patted my cheek. “And hurry back. Lyda is getting a little impatient.”

That made two of us.