by Nick Carter
I watched her eyes. “When was that? The last time you were here?”
“About three months ago. I told you that once. I come and go in Haiti whenever I please.”
She had told me, come to think of it.
I said: “You were setting up an invasion even then?”
Her dark eyes were candid and cool. “I was. I knew even then that Duvalier wasn’t going to ransom Dr. Valdez, that he was only playing us along.”
I nodded. “Good. Then we do it the way we planned. We use your invasion people, and the invasion route, but without the invasion. What are you going to tell your people? We have to use them without them knowing they are being used.”
Lyda frowned at me and wet her lips. “I know. That could be a little tricky, even dangerous. I might have to lie a little.”
I grinned at her. “No problem for you, kid.”
She ignored that and said, “I can handle it, Nick. I’ll tell, them that this is a last reconnaissance before the actual invasion. But I’ll have to make up a story to explain you.”
I put on a tee shirt and the fatigue jacket and checked the Luger and the stiletto. I strapped on the web belt with the .45 Colt snug in its old worn holster.
“Tell them anything you like,” I said. “Just be sure that I know what you tell them. Okay. That’s it for now. I’ll get her underway. I want to be in that creek and hidden before the sun comes up.”
At the companionway leading up to the deckhouse I glanced back at her. “Wear your fatigues and the cap, if you want, but leave off your star. And find yourself a weapon—a hand gun that you can handle. A light gun. If you can’t handle it I’ll give you a couple of lessons.”
I went back to the engines and started them in neutral. I hauled in the sea anchor that was holding Sea Witch into the wind. As I got under way again, running without lights, I wondered if I was being smart—using her invasion setup for my own purposes. I shrugged. It was better than going ashore and floundering around in the jungle with no contacts at all. I just had to watch her every second, even closer than I had been doing. See that she didn’t kill me, or have me killed, and then stage her invasion anyway.
When the sun came up and gilded the one low mountain on Tortuga—the chart said 1240 altitude—Sea Witch lay snug in the creek under a thick canopy of coco palms with plenty of water under her. Lyda, so excited that she was jittery, got ready to go ashore and find her people. She was wearing the green fatigues and cap, without the brigadier’s star, and she carried a little Smith and Wesson .32 and some spare cartridges in a belt pouch. I would have bet she had a knife on her somewhere. I couldn’t see it and I didn’t ask her.
Just before she went ashore I told her, “Stay out of trouble. If I hear gunfire I’ll wait ten minutes, no more, then m run for it. You got that? Ten minutes.”
She laughed and pressed herself against me and gave me a wet kiss, sticking her tongue in my mouth. She writhed against me, and she was so excited and hotted up that she wouldn’t have minded taking a quickie right there on the deck. I pushed her away, tempted as I was.
“Get going. Come back as soon as you can. Make a little noise when you come back and whistle before you get too close. I’d hate to kill you by accident And don’t bring anyone back with you.”
She gave me a smile and a snappy little salute and dropped over the side. The creek ran so deep here that I had been able to snub the boat right into the bank. A moment later she vanished into a thicket of wild cane. I listened and I couldn’t hear a thing. I marked that. She moved in the thick growth like a ghost.
The funny thing was that I missed her. I had grown accustomed to this lovely, slim wench. I made a pot of coffee, spiked it with a shot of booze, and then went forward. I selected three of the most modern machine guns from our arsenal, pawed through a crate until I found the right ammo, then took the guns back and laid them out on the deck close to hand. There are always a million things to do on a boat and now I kept busy so the time would go faster and I wouldn’t get nervous.
After an hour or so it began to rain, big bullet-sized drops spattering silver on the deck. I took my guns and went in the deckhouse.
Noon came and no sign of her. The rain stopped and the sun came back and the jungle began to steam. I monkeyed around with the engines. From the stern I could see down the creek and across the cove to open sea, and once a coastal sloop boat beat across the inlet under full sail. A snatch of Creole song reached me, and then the sloop was gone.
I sat with my legs dangling over the side, a machine gun in my lap, and watched parrots flutter in a tangle of wild orchids. A big lizard came to the bank and eyed me, decided he didn’t think much of me, and went slithering off.
The drums started. Somewhere to the south and east, a deep vibrating basso, a nervous and irregular dum-dum-dum? dum. After five minutes or so the first drum stopped and another one picked up the beat. They talked for half an hour, back and forth, then hushed abruptly.
A long green snake with yellow markings came sliding past the boat. I eyed him and made a little sound and he stopped and arched his head to peer at me.
“The natives are restless today,” I told the snake. “Beat it.”
It began to rain again. By three o’clock it was still raining, and I was as nervous as a whore in church. Where in hell was she?
At ten after three I heard the pistol shot. It sounded like the .32, a light whip of sound from not far off. I snapped the safety off the machine gun and ran for the shelter of the deckhouse. I crouched out of sight and laid the muzzle of the gun across a port ledge and waited.
Dead silence. That one shot had hushed everything in the underbrush. Not even a bird moved. I peered into the scrub growth and the wild cane and I couldn’t see a damned thing.
She whistled in Morse as we had arranged. Two shorts, two longs, two shorts. Ditty-dum-dum-ditty. Question mark. Everything okay?
I whistled back a K. Long, short, long. Dah-de-dah. Come on in.
She came out of the cane and walked toward the boat. There was an odd, tight look about her and she was carrying the .32 in her right hand. I went to meet her with the machine gun cradled across my left forearm and my finger on the trigger.
She made a little sign and said, “It’s all right now. I killed him.”
I gave her a hand and swung her aboard. “You killed who?”
She was sweating a little, silver beads popping out of her tan skin. Her stare was grim. “One of my own people. Or so I thought until a few minutes ago. He disobeyed orders and followed me when I started back here. Strictly against my orders, Nick! I wasn’t sure at first, but he was clumsy and I kept hearing him behind me and I set a trap and he walked into it.”
I nodded. “What did he say when you jumped him?”
Lyda gave me a very odd look. “Say? He didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask him anything. I just shot him. His name was Tomaso—one of the blacks.”
“You’re sure he’s dead?”
She nodded. “I’m sure. I checked that.” She let out a deep shuddering breath and sat down abruptly on the deck. “Now that it’s over I’m not so sure. Maybe he was just curious. Nosey. He would know that I wasn’t alone.”
“And maybe he was working for Papa Doc,” I said. “Forget it. You did the right thing. Just so you’re absolutely sure that he’s dead.”
“Right between the eyes at ten feet,” she said coldly. “I told you. He’s dead.”
I accepted that. I was a little worried about the shot but there was nothing I could do about it. We had to stay where we were until dark.
“Give me a cigarette,” Lyda said, “and get me a drink. I need it.”
I did and also brought the maps out on the deck. When she got the drink down and had a couple of puffs I said, “All right. What’s the score?”
The drink had helped her. Her hands stopped trembling and she smiled at me and said, “Everything is all right so far. A man, one of the fishermen, is on his way to the mainland to set it up f
or tonight. Here, I’ll show you on the map.”
She took my pencil, studied the map for a moment, then made a small black X halfway between Port de Paix and Cap Haitien.
“We go ashore here. Somebody will be waiting for us. The coast is desolate, rain forest and jungle—there’s not a road for miles—and it’s only about 25 miles inland to Sans Souci and P.P. Trevelyn’s estates. There are a few villages, but the only town of any size is Limbe and we can swing around that and come in from the west. There is another town, Milot, to the east of Sans Souci, and Papa Doc has a lot of troops in there.”
I studied the light pencil tracings on the map. “There’s a main highway just beyond this town? Milot.”
“Yes. My people tell me it is heavily patrolled just now. Troops and Tonton Macoute all over the place.”
When she said Tonton Macoute she stopped and looked at me and I saw the terror in her eyes as I had seen it before. It was as good a time as any.
I said: “What is it with you and the Tonton Macoute, Lyda? I know they’re rough and miserable bastards, but why do they scare you so? You don’t seem to be frightened of much else, but the Tonton have got the sign on you. How come?”
For maybe thirty seconds she didn’t answer. She didn’t look at me. Then, in a whisper that I could barely hear, she K said, “They raped me when I was a little girl. I was fifteen. It was just after Papa Doc came to power—the Tonton Macoute came to arrest us one night. We were brown, mulattos, and we owned a lot of land and we lived well and they hated us. They wanted our land and our house.
“That night they beat my father up and hauled him off to prison. He died a week later. They made my mother watch while six of them raped me on the floor of the living room. Later, a whole lot later, I got away from them and left Haiti for the States. I had some American friends and they managed it for me. I took my mother with me and she died insane in Bellevue. I—I hadn’t any money for a private hospital. I hadn’t any money at all.”
She was crying softly, remembering. I kept silent. This was the first time she had ever really let her hair down about her personal life and I wanted to hear it. How I wanted to hear it! The more I knew about what made her tick the better chance I had of staying alive and bringing the mission off.
Lyda wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her jacket and kept talking. For once I felt that she was telling the absolute and I exact truth.
“There were quite a few Haitians in the States. Mulattos and blacks, all running from Papa Doc. Most of them were poor and they weren’t organized. There were two little ghettos—might as well call them that—one in Brooklyn and one on the west side up close to Columbia. We were in the States on sufferance and we were poor and we did menial jobs and got by the best we could. I was lucky. I was working as a waitress in a bar at 113th Street, and one night Dr. Valdez came in with some friends. He heard me speaking to another waitress and knew at once that I was Haitian. He didn’t say much that night, but a few days later he came back to the bar, alone, and we got to be friends.”
“Did you know that Valdez was a Communist?”
She was doodling on the edge of the chart with a pencil. She bared her teeth at me and gave a snorting laugh. “Communist? Hah I Romera Valdez was an innocent, a political innocent! My Christ, he was naive. He could even see some good things about Papa Doc. Romera was a parlor Commie, a fellow traveler that didn’t know what it was all about, a gentle man that hated to swat a fly. He used to make me so furious that I wanted to kill him, the way he always wanted to turn the other cheek.”
I had her talking and I didn’t want to break the spell, but I had to ask the question. “Were you in love with Valdez?”
She nodded quickly, and for a moment quicksilver glinted in her eyes again. She found a handkerchief and dabbed.
“I was mad about him. We went to bed for the first time on my 17th birthday and I lived with him for three years. I kissed the ground he walked on. He was a father and a brother and a lover all in one. A husband, too, though we couldn’t get married. His wife is still alive, somewhere in France, and he’s a Catholic.”
I lit another cigarette and kept quiet. She hadn’t finished. There was more and I wanted to hear it.
“Romera got a little apartment for me, on 115th Street near the Drive, and I entered Columbia. I had been to school in Paris and Switzerland—I was home on vacation when the Tonton Macoute came that night—and I passed a special examination and Columbia admitted me. Romera was a full professor by then and whenever we met on the campus we had to pretend to be strangers. I didn’t have him for any classes, of course—he was far too advanced for me and he only taught graduate students.”
Lyda finished her drink and held out the glass. “A little more, Nick darling. Then I think I’ll sleep for a while.”
When I came back with the drink she was stretched on the deck with her eyes closed and the sun on her face, her big soft breasts moving rhythmically up and down. For a moment I thought she was asleep, but she held out her hand for the drink and gulped it eagerly. Then she began to talk again.
“It was fun for a time, sneaking around like that I was only a kid, and it was mysterious and intriguing to pass Romera on the campus, me with an arm full of books, and just give him a cold little nod and keep going. All the time laughing inside and thinking of what we had done in bed the night before. We saw each other nearly every night and on weekends, though we had to be very careful. Then five years ago it happened. Five years this June. The week before my graduation.”
She was silent for a long time. I didn’t push her. I picked up one of the machine guns and went forward. The creek ran silent and deep and deserted and birds flashed brightly in the wild cane and my friend the lizard had brought a buddy with him to see the strangers. Things looked and sounded right in the jungle and after a minute I went back to the girl and squatted with the machine gun across my knees. The sun was lowering to the west and the palm trees were reflected in tall dark shadows striping the boat.
“I hadn’t seen Romera for a week,” Lyda said. “He hadn’t come to the apartment, or called, and whenever I called at his place or his office he was out. Or no one answered. I was worried sick and I was afraid—afraid that it was all over, that he was tired of me. But I had too much pride to go to his apartment, or his office on the campus, and confront him. I just suffered for a week.
“Then one afternoon I saw him on the campus. I had just come back from renting my cap and gown for graduation and I was on Broadway and he was coming out of a bookstore on the corner of 116th and Broadway. I waved at him and shouted—making a perfect fool of myself—and started to run toward him. I suppose I was a hundred feet or so from him. He turned to look at me and he seemed startled— then he swung away from me and crossed 116th and went down to the subway. Walking very fast. I still remember that, how fast he walked, as though he didn’t want to see me or talk to me. I stopped on the corner and watched him disappear and my knees were trembling and I thought my heart would stop beating.”
Lyda smiled faintly and looked at me with half-narrowed eyes. “That’s how young I was, Nick. Romera was my first love, the first man I had ever taken with consent. I thought the world had ended.
“It had ended, the world I had known until then, but that I didn’t grasp until later. I went back to my little apartment and locked myself in and cried. I suffered. I didn’t eat anything for two days, and I drank rum and got drunk and sick, and I played all the records we had enjoyed together, and I was really miserable. On the third day I had courage enough to call him at his office. This time he answered.”
She turned away from me and stretched her lithe brown body and buried her face in her arms. “Jesus God—when I think of it now! I must have terrified the poor man and made him sick, too. I cried and I begged and I even think I threatened him—said I would tell the whole campus, the newspapers, the world, about our affair. Anyway he promised to come and see me that evening. I can remember his exact words—he didn’t sound at all
like himself, tense and hoarse and nervous—and he said that he had been ill with a virus.”
Something flickered in my brain, a microsecond of intuition that flared out before I could grasp it, a shadow with no substance to account for it, a pinprick without pain or blood that vanishes as it begins. A fourth generation computer would have caught and pinned it. I couldn’t.
Yet I asked, “Exactly what did he say?”
“He said, ‘You’re acting like a child, Lyda, and you mustn’t. Everything is all right. I have been ill and working hard, and I’ve been worried about something. Something you don’t know about. Nothing to do with you. But I’ll come tonight and we’ll talk it all out and get matters straightened around. I’ll be there at nine sharp. Be sure you’re alone. I don’t feel like seeing anyone else but you.’ ”
I flipped my butt overboard. I said I was a bit skeptical.
“You remember all that? Exactly? Verbatim? After five years?”
She nodded without looking at me. “I do. Just as he said it. Every word. He never arrived at my place, because they took him that night, and I think that fixed the words in my mind. Later I understood what he was worried about, and why he had been staying away from me. Romera had been writing a series of articles against Papa Doc, for the New York Times, and he didn’t want to involve me. I think he had a premonition that the Tonton Macoute would get him. But he must have expected them to murder him, not kidnap him and smuggle him back to Haiti.”
I kicked it around in my mind for a couple of minutes. On the surface it appeared logical enough, to make sense, yet something was missing. But there was nothing to come to grips with and I brushed it off.
Lyda said: “I waited and waited. He never came. Somewhere between his apartment—he had a place near Barnard— and my place they got him. It must have been easy. Romera was such an innocent. He didn’t even know how to protect himself.”