Murder On the Way!

by Theodore Roscoe

  Where electric light should have dispelled mystery it merely cast deeper darkness through my head. Pete was hurrying me on, hugging the Springfield, and I was sopping with a perspiration not entirely inspired by heat. Once she paused to look around.

  “Are you sure somebody ran ahead of you — ”

  “I tell you, I saw the panel closing. I could hear his feet. I was right behind most of the way. There was a laugh.”

  “But there’s no way he — if you were behind him — ”

  “I know,” I muttered. “Let’s get out of this.”

  I’d had enough of it. Unseen gunmen can’t disappear like so much breath, even in black tunnels under Haiti. Neither was Tousellines camouflaged as was Manfred in protective coloration. I couldn’t have dreamed those shots that slew the En-sign, or fancied that hyena laugh. I’d followed somebody into that dead-end chamber and somebody wasn’t there and it had to be the little black lawyer, there or no.

  “That guy dodged me somehow. Maybe dropped to the floor and scuttled under my legs.”

  “Watch out for these flagstones,” Pete warned. “It goes down here.”

  A little farther now and we’d be in the death house. Bodies tarnishing behind closed doors, littering a mahogany staircase. In the drowned afternoon, the En-sign nesting under plantain leaves, his smashed face grinning up at rain. Storm-water chasing the last of daylight down the Morne. Already I could catch the beat of Haitian drums penetrating underground in the leaden cadence of taps from a sunken submarine.

  We ascended a flight of trippy flagstones.

  “Here’s the house,” Pete said with a sigh.

  Our flashlight exposed a frame of splintered paneling; streamed on into the ghostly cavity of the office. I helped Pete through the wall, stumbled over kindling after her, and we stood in the office listening to rain and drums. I steered the light at the office door. The door was closed. It opened.

  The hail was pumpkin-yellow with the glow of many candles, and three men stood in the office door. Spirits of ‘76! There was Lieutenant Narcisse of the Garde d’Haiti, wearing a bandage the size of a turban on his head, an expression of acute indigestion on his face, Thompson automatic pistol in his hand. There was the honk-lipped Corporal Louis. And there was Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines, LL.B., Comte de Limonade!

  “Thunder of God!” the Haitian officer barked at us. “We have spent the last hour, Tousellines and I, looking for you! Where have you been?”

  “You spent the last hour — you and Tousellines — ” I had to find support against the desk. I leaned on drunk legs and swallowed air, looking from the lieutenant to Pete to Tousellines and back to the purple countenance of the little darkey lawyer again.

  “We looked everywhere!” Tousellines cried.

  “Everywhere!” Narcisse flung out. “I returned to the château after you and discovered Tousellines in the huts down the compound seeking ma’mselle. He told me she had disappeared from the house. Then he said he had heard shots in the rain and feared you had been murdered.”

  “C’est ca!” The lawyer’s cry shook the wattles under his chin. “Hearing those shots I ran up the compound only to find the En-sign — that one! — lying dead near the verandah. After which I fled back to the huts to call Cornelius who had heard nothing and was all afternoon with the field hands at the funeral dance. Then it was the police arrived.”

  “We searched the grounds,” Narcisse complained, shaking water from his cuffs. “Tousellines said you were outside. We could not find you, nor is Manfred anywhere to be found. Where then have you been?”

  Stepping to one side, I turned the flashlight at the aperture in the wall behind me.

  “Down the rat-hole after a ghost,” I said insanely, “but it seems it turned into a loaf of raisin bread.”

  Eyes luminous, Pete whirled at me. “Stop it, Cart! Raisin bread — ”

  “I’m not at all mad,” I corrected snappishly. “You know that’s all we could find down there. On that kitchen table. Half a loaf of — ”

  “Why, but — and I never noticed it,” she cried at me. “Cart, do you mean it? Good heavens! Raisin — ”

  “Ma’mselle! M’sieu!” Lieutenant Narcisse unleashed a megaphone roar in the doorway. “Sacré Dieu! you choose the wrong moment for jest.” He marched at me bellowing, eyes bright with fury under the folds of the turban.

  “Do you know the Caco bandits are everywhere? Are you aware Haiti is at this moment afire with revolution? Even now these cut-throats may be marching on Morne Noir. My Gardes cannot hold! The army is coming from Port au Prince but cannot be here in time. Our president has declared martial law. The bandits, they sweep the jungle as wolves. Wolves!”

  He was an excited war correspondent loud-speaking news from the front. Voice strident with interference from bad weather. In a minute he would shout “O-Kay, Chicago!” and the Bull Watch Company would drawl the correct time. But it seemed the clock was running away and there was no time. News flashes still coming —

  “The Cacos, we must stop them before they kill us all! It is uprising! Uprising led by a zombie! Do you comprehend? My men have captured a Caco who tells us they were led last night by the zombie of Eli Proudfoot,” — he screamed the announcement as if we were miles away — ”the zombie of Eli Proudfoot who rode the night wind with dead eyes of flame, who rides even now to summon the bandits. The police at Cap Haitien, they saw it, too. The zombie of Eli Proudfoot!”

  Pete cried out, “Uncle Eli?”

  Tousellines waved a boneless arm, “But we do not believe such things — ”

  “Non! Non!” Narcisse bellowed impatiently. “It is rumor to incite the peasants, but we must stop this story, we must prove at once that your murdered uncle is dead!” About-facing, he pointed like a statue of Heroism at the door. “We go to resurrect the body on the hill. I bring this corporal of gendarmes to stand guard in the château with ma’mselle. All others must come. I have summoned the Christian field hands. M’sieu, you will come as my prisoner. All hands must help in the digging, and we depart at once!”

  XI.

  Zombie!

  “Cacos coming!” — “Bandits led by the zombie of Eli Proudfoot who rode the night wind with dead eyes of flame!” — “We go to resurrect the body on the hill and prove it dead!” — “All hands must help in the digging!” Skipping and jumbling, the shouted headlines herded themselves jigsaw through my head, and I was given no time to collect the pieces for sober calculation.

  I remember stumbling out of the office with Pete; staring insensibly around the hall. The corpses had been removed from their staircase. The library doors were wide, a lantern posted on the threshold and a row of stiff feet and sheeted bodies faintly visible beyond the tide of light — some with shoes, some without — suggesting a bad accident.

  Down the hall the front door was open; a crowd of tarry faces struggled and surged beyond the verandah where resin torches glowed. A Negro lynch mob? I’d heard in Haiti they sometimes tried to even up the score. But this was the reverse. The graveyard detail.

  I heard the old clock on the stairs. It couldn’t be right. Nine o’clock. The afternoon and evening had been killed, too. Narcisse was answering some question I had stammered, blattering in my ear.

  “Oui! Oui! When I left with my men this afternoon we rode straight for Cap Haitien. The road is washed out ten miles down, forcing our horses to a detour. It was then we were met by gunfire, attacked by the Cacos. Two gendarmes killed. Police from Le Cap arrived in time to save us, and we slew the guerillas, all but the one who told us of the zombie — the zombie of M’sieu Proudfoot that had led them last night — ”

  “Did you see the zombie?” Pete cried in a shocked voice.

  Narcisse panted, “It is only superstition. But the Cap Haitien police — they think they saw it, and that is just as bad. Last night it was. The captured Caco declared it promised to return and lead them again tonight.”

  I swore, “ — and blankety blank rot!”<
br />
  “True,” the officer panted, “but the mountain blacks are of the most fanatic. This story, it will spread like the disease. We can stop then only by producing the dead from the grave, proving it a corpse. We must have him out by the time they get here. It is our one chance — ”

  “The Cacos have gone mad,” Tousellines echoed.

  There weren’t enough corpses in Morne Noir. We must dig up another. I didn’t want to leave Pete behind in the château, under guard or the contrary, but she shook her head bravely and said she didn’t want to come. No, thank you! Not to that “digging.” I saw her upstairs to her room, and I think I told the hare-lipped Louis I’d kill him with my bare hands if anything happened to ma’mselle while we were gone. The corporal saluted. If he thought anything of my threat, if he thought anything, he didn’t show it.

  Then someone thrust a spade in my hand, and I couldn’t think, either. We departed at once; and in that dark harlequinade made up of torchlights and shovels, voodoo drums, mule-hoofs, gun-shine and moonshine and mud and the barking of dogs, a Rodin’s Thinker couldn’t have thought. And if Dominicans could be sniped off bull’s-eye through the top of the head, duelling pistols appear out of nowhere, guns fly through shutters into a widow’s hand, and tunneling fugitives laugh and turn into loaves of bread, why shouldn’t I go brainlessly running through night with an inquisitive grave shovel?

  The rain had quit in despair. A melon-rind moon sailed high and anemic in a yeasty smudge of clouds. Bent on its noisome enterprise, the parade slogged off in moonlight and mire; down the compound where I could look back and see light barring yellow the shutters in Pete’s room, the yellow dusk of the opened hall. Water lay in fiat, gleaming sheets down the terrace, the whole compound was awash, abscessed with puddles, the jungle hedging around made the disturbance of a million leaking faucets. Feet squashed on the march like the Russians going across their death-swamp to Tannenberg. It was as gloomy as Russia and might have been Russia save that the air was warm, humid, tropical and smelled green.

  “Avant!” Narcisse yelled.

  I won’t forget that foraging party. Black mules jingling in the lead. Narcisse with his bandaged cranium, ghostly as an Arab atop his horse. Four gendarmes exploring the shrubbery along the way with nervous rifle barrels. The batch of “Christian field hands” dog-trotting in line, their stevedore faces reddened by the resin flares, shovels swinging, lippy mouths chanting to the drum-rune from the huts and the sound anything but Christian. I walked next to last; and Tousellines brought up the rear, handkerchief to forehead, eyes all over his face, twitching along like a hysterical turkey.

  Last night’s funeral had been no stroll down lover’s lane. This party of resurrectionists, out to undo the funeral lent it downright gaiety by contrast.

  I looked back at the château, shadowy on the slope.

  I could only snarl, “Listen to me, Tousellines, if anything happens to Miss Dale while were gone, I’ll kill everybody!”

  My tone must have carried conviction this time, for he shrank back four steps, crossing himself vigorously.

  We couldn’t leave the compound, though, before the night dealt us another shocker. The swimming pool. Spurring on ahead, the police lieutenant clattered off abreast the concrete bassin. I saw him rein in with a vicious jerk that reared his mount on hind legs; saw him swing from saddle, draw sabre from scabbard, and go stiff-legged to edge of the pool. Then he staggered back with an “Alt!”, and the parade stopped short, jarring down its length like a string of freight cars.

  Shovels hit the ground and mouths flew open. It was Manfred. He was in the pool, but it wasn’t any moonlight swim. Not in that weedy natatorium. He was to be seen, if one cared to look, floating along the bottom, his birthmarked German face magnified by the water over it, eyes peeping suspiciously under heavy lids, mouth agape, hands like flippers in the weeds; sleeping on his back like a crocodile in its lair.

  “Waaaaah!” the field hands bawled.

  “Drowned!” Narcisse spat.

  “The château,” announced Tousellines thickly, “belongs to ma’mselle.”

  “Move on!” the lieutenant squalled.

  We moved on. Those darkey gravediggers weren’t the only ones who wanted to bolt. I could have steeplechased. The parade curled through a ferny thicket, followed the black mules into a forest of drooling trees, marched into cotton-thick night. My flesh crawled. Tousellines aside, that Prussian Blue Beard had made the last possibility. Drowned in a swimming pool. Then who had lured me into that dead-end tunnel?

  Parade Master Narcisse reined in at the pathside; waited for me to come up with him; then leaned down from his saddle and desired to know how I had drowned so neatly big Manfred. We didn’t go into it because we had something more immediate to go into. Up ahead the mules were skidding, floundering on the miry hill. The slope was guttering fudge; men and teams going down in the paste. Narcisse roweled his horse, raging forward to hurry the mules. With a muffled cracking of whips and calling of creole oaths, the animals were again started up the insecure rise.

  High at the crest I could distinguish the aged silk cotton tree and the heavenly sentinel mounting guard on the grave. Watching that angel grow against the windy, scudding sky, my eyes swam and my stomach knotted. Manfred. The En-sign. Widow Gladys. Toadstool. Ambrose. Ti Pedro. The Englishman. Seven bloodhounds killed, and the doctor for good measure. Twenty-four hours of murder, matricide, infanticide, drowning; a château turned to an Aceldama; an island country hemorrhaging. An old man’s will had read like a death list and his funeral-initiated pogrom. I hadn’t done it. And Pete —

  Suddenly I had to see what was under Eli’s pierre tumulaire! I had to know what lay under that gravestone. The parade reached the hilltop and gathered under the tree. Tackle screeled, whips smacked, the moonlight echoed to a circus-lot clamor as black men and mules struggled to dislodge the giant stone angel from his outpost. The watcher silently resisted the depredation; then slithered away so abruptly a dozen mules went down. But the celestial colossus was hauled to one side and out of the way; and when I saw the iron stake in the earth, I laughed and remembered and cursed myself for a fool and spat on my hands.

  No time to lose. Cacos were coming, and we wanted Uncle Eli. Had a little bird told me who was going to be in that rosewood casket, I’d have laughed no laugh, nor set to work with such will. But the only little birds on that hilltop necropolis were the graveyard birds, only a little darker than myself, getting to work with their spades.

  Shovels whacked in, and sods thudded. A chain was hitched to the stake, the mules strove, the iron post uprooted with a sepulchral belch. The spades worked. The trench dropped foot-deep, ankle-deep, knee-deep. An earthy smell mingled with the musk of sweat and the pungence of torch smoke. The night watched us and we watched the night.

  The flares held aloft in a red, smoky ring. The tarred faces melting under them. Jungle shadows creeping uphill to look. Wind whispering off the night-veiled Caribbean. The horned moon nesting in the dank upper branches of the silk cotton. Four gendarmes patroling the lower dark. The marble angel playing onlooker (I’d watched Radio City excavations with that same expression of inanimate stupidity). Narcisse, major domo in his muslin turban, sword in one hand, Tommy-gun in the other, pacing, cursing, bossing the job. “Allons! Faster!” The nodding backs of the shovelers. Whistling lips. Shiny foreheads. Sweat-gleam on licorice muscles. A gobblelike chant to time their swinging spades with an echo out of Africa — I would like to paint that picture.

  Fume-red and fog-green, blue-dark and a patch the color of an old man’s bald spot in the sky, a-swim in dusk and black. But you can’t paint the smell of island night after rain, and no brush could put down that gravedigging torch song. And sensation goes beyond color, unless one thinks of pale green. I don’t mean blisters on the palm and an ache in the spine. I mean a cavity inside and ice box skin. Exhuming the dead in that lofty cemetery surrounded by a murder mystery and the night holding its breath for a bandit attack
— the original John Ghoul of London would have looked over his shoulder.

  “Dig!” Narcisse instructed. “By Damballa’s Oath! Dig!”

  We dug. The sod had been packed hard. We worked in gangs of four. It’s easier to fill a grave (on my word!) than empty it. I dug like a gopher for twenty minutes, then spelled off with Cornelius who had brought his scared face from somewhere.

  When we spelled off, I leaned against the angel, sweating, picked a cigarette from my opened vest, tried to drag some sedative from the tobacco, and watched the château below in the bowl of the valley. The roofs were sinister and moon-silvered, the house a crouching shadow on the slope. The swimming pool lay like a pane of blue glass dropped on the flat field of the compound; the outhouses below were points of light where the drum family was continuing its uproar.

  I was glad Pete hadn’t come, but I didn’t like to think of her down there. Our path to the graveyard had made a roundabout, circling route down the Valley and up again to detour a wedge of swamp; I couldn’t get a bearing on the house to discover where her window light should be. At times I was certain I heard something down there; then the singsong from the opening grave obsessed my ears and I couldn’t be sure. But nothing could happen to her with that gendarme on guard. Everyone else in the place was dead.

  Narcisse’s black eyes were on me as mine were on the château. Standing by his picketed horse, he trailed me with a glance when I moved, shifting the gun like a magnet needle. I yanked what was left of a handkerchief out of my hip to scrub my sore hands and take a peek at Tousellines. He was standing with his Abe Lincoln hat clapped to his bosom, upright at the foot of the grave. The hole was hip-deep.