by Lou Cameron
Gaston peered into the darkness and could just make out a tinkling fountain in the dark patio as he realized the flare of his match had betrayed the fact he was standing outside. He dropped his cigar and stepped on it as he put a thoughtful hand inside his jacket and called out, quietly, “Claudette?”
A voice whispered to him from the gloom, hissing, “Yes, inside, quickly. You may have been followed!”
Gaston hesitated, then shrugged and moved inside the archway leading to the patio, eyes narrowed and one hand gripping his pistol in its holster as he asked, “Where are you, M’selle?”
The heavy slab of oak slammed shut behind Gaston as the patio lit up like a Christmas tree and a fusillade of hot lead slammed into the oak backstop and through the space Gaston had just been standing!
But the wiry little soldier of fortune hadn’t reached his advanced years by moving slowly and at the first suspicious creak of hinges he’d thrown himself headlong to the patio flags and was rolling sideways for the cover of some potted hibiscus bushes. He made it, barely, for the ambusher, manning what had to be a machine gun, traversed his weapon to tap dance slugs off the flagstones after Gaston and blew the pottery to shards, covering him with leaves and hibiscus blooms as Gaston threw a desperate round at the muzzle flash across the patio before rolling on and wedging himself between a stouter fig tree bole and the wall it was almost growing against. Shooting up the hibiscus had filled the air with dust as well as greenery and as the machine gun fell silent, Gaston lay doggo while a voice asked, “Did you get him?”
Someone else said, “I think so. He’s down behind those pots. Wait ’til the smoke clears. He’s not going anywhere, either way. Where the hell’s the other one?”
Gaston sincerely wished he knew, too, as he tried to make himself even smaller behind the fig tree’s buttress roots. The smoke and dust were starting to clear, now, and he could see all too clearly what a fool he’d been. The bastards had strung electric light bulbs all along the eaves around the patio and they were set up across the way on the veranda in front of the main entrance to the house. They’d opened and shut the doorway with ropes he could now see crossing the patio, and anyone whispering could sound like a woman, and where in the devil was Captain Gringo?
Gaston couldn’t make out the ambushers in the shadows over there, but he knew they’d spot him any moment. One of them said, “I don’t think he could be behind those pots, Mike. You shot away most of the cover and ...”
And then all hell broke loose!
Somebody staggered out of the shadows as a pistol went off from the doorway behind him. So Gaston happily shot the son-of-a-bitch again as he heard Captain Gringo yell, “Gaston, stay down!” A half dozen men popped out into the light, running for the way out as if the devil incarnate was after them, and they were right!
Captain Gringo had sized up things and slipped down in the dark to get inside the house behind the ambushers on the veranda via a pantry window. He’d shot the machine-gunner and his belt man right off, of course, and as the others panicked and ran across the lighted patio, the tall American simply dropped behind the machine gun, sitting on the dead gunner, and proceeded to mow them, down with their own weapon while Gaston held his face flat against the earth behind the fig tree until it was all over.
It didn’t take long. Captain Gringo cut their legs out from under them with his first traverse and then swung the hot muzzle back to finish off the couple who tried to rise with short savage bursts. The blood and brains spattered on the flag stones looked more like tomato sauce in the garish electric light. As he rose, pistol in hand, and stepped out to have a closer look at the results, he said, “You can come out now, you dope. What in the hell made you come inside like a big ass bird? I thought I’d shit when they opened up on you like that!”
Gaston got to his feet, feeling his crotch gingerly, and said, “I am proud to say I only pissed a few drops. They tricked me with a whisper I took for M’selle Claudette. I assume we shall not find her here after all?”
Captain Gringo rolled one of the cadavers over with his foot and answered, “She’s not in the house and these guys were jabbering in English.”
“Ahah! So this was not the right address, as you suspected!”
Captain Gringo shrugged and said, “Her outfit’s supposed to be French and these guys are wearing American shoes. That guy across the street in the white hat looked like a Yank, too. There’s a couple of ways to read this. The guy in the white hat, or somebody with him, could have followed Claudette, saw where she was going, and doubled back to write a fake number on this place’s entrance. But that would call for them being mighty lucky about being on the same street. So it’s more likely this outfit has been watching Claudette’s outfit and, seeing a chance to lure us into this ambush—”
“Try it my way,” Gaston cut in. “Maybe Claudette intended us to do just what we did just now, save for surviving, of course. They chalked the number to make sure we would see it. She simply gave us the address and went home to some destination I see no need to search further for, hein?”
Somewhere in the night a police whistle was blowing. Captain Gringo said, “We’d better talk about it on the fly. The neighbors seem to have been complaining about the noise we’ve been making!”
Gaston nodded and headed for the street entrance. But Captain Gringo snapped, “Not that way, you jerk-off! The streets will be crawling with cops in a minute! Follow me!”
They went inside and found a switch to plunge the patio and it’s grim contents in darkness. Then they returned to the flat roof and moved silently across other rooftops to the end of the block before the tall American risked a peek over the edge and said, “Okay. Let’s hit the pavement and try to look casual as we stroll on, right?”
Gaston waited until they were doing just that and seemed alone on a dark narrow lane before he sighed and said, “Eh bien, we would seem to be well clear. Now, are you going to listen to some fatherly advice, or do you have some insane idea about finding that damned Claudette?”
“Well, we did take her money and we don’t know she set us up. I’d like to see what she has to say, at any rate.”
“Merde alors, I know what she would say. She would say she had nothing to do with that ambush, whether she did or not. You have enjoyed her body and you have her money. When are you going to learn to quit while you are ahead?”
Captain Gringo chuckled and said, “Right about now. Even if she’s on the square, her idea’s pretty suicidal even without another outfit reading over her shoulder, and we just found out they were, unless she was in on it and … shit, it’s just too damned complicated to mess with, either way! This is one time I’m going to be smart enough to just take the money and run!”
Gaston said, ‘That’s my boy! For once you are making the sense, Dick. From what I know of the Dreyfus Affair, her tale is sheer madness. Captain Dreyfus is only Jewish by birth and an agnostic by conviction. I don’t think Claudette is a Jewess either. Certainly not a French Jewess.”
“Ahah! I noticed the way you practiced some quick French on her back there. She didn’t have a Jewish accent, right?”
Gaston shook his head and said, “Very few French Jews speak French with a noticeable accent. Dick. There are very few of them in the first place, and those that are have been more assimilated than the Eastern European Jews you may remember from the States. Poor Dreyfus is typical of the French variety. He should have known better, but he would seem to be one of those unfortunates who, how you say, bust the gut trying to pass for the French officer and gentleman. Alas, my country is trés anti-Semitic, whether one uses the correct silverware or not.”
Captain Gringo was more interested in the mysterious girl at the hotel than any officer in jail at the moment, but he’d never gotten Gaston’s views on the subject. So before asking his further opinion on Claudette, he decided he’d like a quick rundown on how Gaston felt about her religion, if it were her religion. He said, “I heard you Frogs were sort of nasty to Je
ws. How about you, Gaston?”
Gaston shrugged and said, “We were too poor in the part of Paris I grew up to have long tedious philosophical discussions. There was a Jewish boy in the street gang I used to run with. He used to help us steal when we invaded Les Halles. We had no feelings one way or the other about his religion, since none of us prayed too often in any case. Eh bien, any sensible person knows it is better to have an honest Jew for a neighbor than a Christian chicken thief. But the French high command is not run by sensible people.”
“Okay, so we can both take Jews or leave ’em. Tell me why you didn’t think Claudette was Jewish if she had no accent.”
Gaston shook his head again and said, “You were not paying attention. I never said she had no accent. She speaks French, a very, how you say snooty French, in a manner that hints at formative years in a trés aristocratic convent!”
“She talks like a nun? No wonder she thought that crack about Eskimo nuns was such a belly buster! But a runaway nun makes even less sense than a Jewish girl trying to get Dreyfus out of that lockup on Devil’s Island. Could it be some sort of Catholic conspiracy?”
“One tends to doubt this,” Gaston said, adding, “considering the background of Captain Dreyfus. I did not say she had to be a nun. Many of the less aristocratic but upward climbing French families send their daughters to convent schools to give them the supposed advantages of that funny French they teach. We know she is not a true aristocrat simply because you don’t meet girls like that in a modest hotel in Cayenne. It’s possible for a wealthy Jew to send his daughter to a convent school, but in that case she would hardly have come out a Jewess. Conversion is the price of admission and the teaching nuns make sure the conversion, how you say, sticks? To have been there long enough to talk like she does, Claudette would have to know her Latin Mass forward, backward, and sideways, hein?”
Captain Gringo started to mention the Sephardic name she’d used to sign the hotel register. But that was dumb. He’d seldom signed his right name to anything since jumping the Mexican border with an army hangman after him.
Gaston was saying, thoughtfully, “Of course, as in the case of Captain Dreyfus himself, we may be talking about a most assimilated person of Jewish ancestry. But in that case this business about an international Jewish group working to free him makes little sense. The only such group I know of is the Zionist Movement and they would seem to take their religion trés serious. So why should they wish to intervene for Dreyfus, a man who turned his back on them in an attempt to be an accepted French aristocrat?”
“Forget it,” Captain Gringo said. “We’re not getting mixed up in the crazy scheme, whatever it is. Where do you suppose this street leads? It’s dark as hell and we seem to be running out of pavement.”
They stopped under the last street lamp to stare thoughtfully into the pitch blackness ahead. The blank walls of houses wrapped around inner courtyards stared dimly at them from both sides of the street. Somewhere a bush full of crickets was chirping at them with a very rural sound. Gaston said. “One would assume we are near the city limits.”
“Thanks. I never would have figured that out by myself. Damn it, Gaston. You’ve been here before. How far west can we make it on foot?”
Gaston took out a cigar, lit it, and blew a puff into the darkness before he said, “Not far. As I recall, there is only a narrow coastal strip of cultivated plantations and small holdings. Beyond that the land rises to meet trés formidable jungle. Despite the optimism of the colonial maps, most of the Guiana back country is unexplored. One hears it is most unhealthy for white men a few miles inland from the coast.”
“Swell. What makes it so unhealthy, the usual snakes and fevers?”
“Oh, they have them, too. But the Bush Negroes would seem to be the real menace. Most of them seem to be Ashanti, a rather truculent tribe.”
Captain Gringo lit a smoke for himself as he digested this. Then he frowned and asked, “Ashanti? In South American jungles? I must have missed something in geography. I thought the Ashanti were a West African tribe?”
“Oui” Gaston said, nodding. “They’ve been killing French and British troopers with monotonous regularity over there, too. I told you they liked to fight. You may have noticed the climate here tends to be trés fatigue, so the early would-be planters imported many slaves, seized on the west coast of Africa, hein? The experiment did not work as well here as it did in places where the somewhat reluctant plantation labor had no place to run to. The hills and jungles of Guiana are almost exact duplicates of the ones the Ashanti left behind in Africa. So they took to them as the duck takes to water. After all, who is going to stand there like an idiot cutting sugar cane when a green wall of familiar forestry beckons to him from a few short steps away?”
Captain Gringo agreed. “Right. So these Bush Negroes are like the Cimmarons in Jamaica, hiding out in the woods after escaping from the planters, right?”
“Wrong. We are not speaking of the usual runaway slaves. The ones out there in the jungle are pure unadulterated Ashanti, Kru, Ibo and so forth. They did not see fit to cut cane long enough to pick up any of their master’s habits, good or bad. They, how you say ran off lock, stock, and barrel, taking along their women, witch doctors, and drums. At the moment they seem unaware that they are runaway slaves. They are African warriors. They seem dimly aware that sometime in the past the white people along the coast made trouble for them. So they regard all whites as enemies. They don’t feel like fugitives on the land they grew up on. They think of it as their tribal kingdoms. They know it as well as anyone else knows his own tribal territory and seem determined to hold it against all intruders. So while white survey expeditions occasionally go in to chart and explore, they never seem to come out.”
Gaston blew some more smoke and added, “All in all, Dick, there has to be a better way out of here.”
“Come on,” Captain Gringo said, “I led you through Jivaro infested Amazon jungle, didn’t I?”
“Oui, it was very noisy as I recall. But Ashanti are not Jivaro and they make Colorados look like schoolboys. There were already tribal Indians in that jungle to the west when the Bush Negroes moved in, Dick. The black warriors chewed them up and spit them out. Or, at any rate, some of them did. The Ashanti are not cannibals, but they say some of the Bush tribes are. They would kill us if we were Indians. That blond hair and your big blue eyes is an open invitation to what they call a spear washing. Besides, even if we somehow managed to avoid the Bush Negroes, the country that way is too rugged. There are unmapped mountain ranges between here and anywhere anyone would want to go. I am discussing steep mountain ranges with mile high cliffs and waterfalls that drop from the constant cloud cover clinging to their tops. The rivers are all white water, and running the wrong way. The constant dampness covers every tree and rock with thick green slime and leeches are big as your cock. You go that way if you want to. I would find it less fatiguing to simply put a gun to my temple if I wanted to die that much!”
“Well, we can’t stay here,” Captain Gringo admitted. “The Dutchman’s pals are probably searching the waterfront for us. Claudette’s spooky pals are watching our hotel. And if we don’t go some damned place the local cops are going to ask us what the hell we’re doing any minute now.”
He headed west, into the dark. Gaston fell in beside him, but protested, “Merde alors, were you listening to anything I just said, Dick?” Captain Gringo nodded and said, “Sure. The jungle’s a ways off. We’ll see if we can find a cow path running the same way as the coast. How far are we from Dutch Guiana?”
“Too far, and they call it Surinam. It’s at least a hundred and fifty miles to the Dutch border, Dick! These countries may look small on the map, next to Brazil, but let us not be carried away with this walking business! No trail we might find will lead that far. Each coastal settlement is surrounded by distressing amounts of salad greens. There are mangrove swamps between here and the next French settlements at Sinnamary!”
“Okay, ho
w far is Sinnamary? Maybe we can hop a coastal schooner there.”
“Idiot! I just told you it’s jungle swamp, and over fifty miles even if it wasn’t!”
“Hell, is that all? Things are looking up. We’ve walked fifty miles in a night before and it’s early yet.”
Gaston was starting to puff as he tried to keep step with the longer legs of the younger American. “Slow down,” he gasped, “you species of racing camel! Even if one is intent on wading through a mangrove swamp for some reason I see no need to run all the way there! What in the devil is your hurry, Dick?”
Captain Gringo replied, “Butterflies in my guts, I guess. I didn’t like this place even before people started playing games with us. There’s something wrong, Gaston. I noticed there was no paseo in the main part of town this evening. I’ve noticed we don’t seem to see anybody at all on the streets after dark in any part of town and it’s early yet.”
Gaston sighed in relief as they slowed down a bit, and said, “Oh, that is no mystery, my old and rare. This is a penal colony. There’s a nightly police curfew. Didn’t I mention it to you when we arrived?”
“No, but I know it now! What in the hell are you using for brains, Gaston? What the hell are we wandering around in the dark like this for in the middle of a curfew?”
Gaston chuckled, “I thought it was your idea. The curfew only applies to the prison population. You and I have the trés droll passports we managed in Venezuela, non? The police seldom stop anyone who is not wearing those white pajamas they issue the prisoners.”
“I noticed a lot of trustees in town. But where are all the rest of the people?”
“There are not many rest of the people, Dick. I told you they could not get the Blacks to work for them here, so they had the practical idea of sending the scum of French prisons to fetch and carry for the very few free Frenchmen mad enough to want to live here. I would say the population of French Guiana was eighty or ninety percent prisoner at the moment. A situation hardly calling for an active nightlife. The planters and officials wall themselves in as they pursue the usual social activities of wining and dining and seducing one another’s wives, hein?”