by Otto Penzler
Ranier retreated, backing slowly down the path, step by step. Shadows retreated with him, gesturing maniacal motions with their arms, colliding and bumping in precipitate retreat, bombarding the rancid dusk with senseless cries.
Ranier was glad to get back to the road, let the fog pull the wool over his eyes. People stumbled and shouted around him, hugging the car for safety, darting wild glances off at the wallowing white night. Kavanaugh had his automatic clutched in his hand, and his long-jawed face seemed infuriated. Moving his head from side to side, he stood against the running board of the car like a captain defending a quarter deck against an expected rush of mutineers. When the insectologist made a leap to gain the back seat, the Irishman struck him aside with an elbow and a look of annoyance, snarling:
“Nobody’s going yet! Nobody’s going yet!”
The blond Daisy woman pushed back her picture hat, put her face in her hands, began to bawl. Angelo Carpetsi’s teeth were audible in a flour-and-water face; and the big Mr. Coolidge walked up and down the road’s edge, panting, “Holy Jumpin’ Judas! Holy Jumpin’ Judas!” towelling his face on his cap, revolving ox-like eyes.
Unconsciously, Ranier had halted beside Laïs Engles who was standing in suspended animation, canvas shoes rooted in the myrtle at the bottom of the path, one hand to her throat, white face averted from that object in the weeds. He couldn’t look at her. Not yet. He could only stand with fingers clenched in dry palms, his mind quivering, his ears only half aware of the uproar breaking around him like the clamor of a hundred skunk-panicked hens, his eyes held by that scene in the fog-hemmed glade.
Then Kavanaugh snapped, “Everybody wait!” in sudden decision, and, ramming pistol into pocket, sprinted up the path for another look. They could see him scouting around the rectangular crater, stooping to scrutinize the vacant longbox, peering gingerly at the mummy beside the box. He snatched back his cuff to examine his strap watch, then glared off toward the highway in the direction they had come. He struck a match on his shank, held a palm-cupped glimmer above the marble headstone, as if convinced the moony light from the car had played tricks with the epitaph; read the name on the stone aloud. Then he skirted the sand pile, kicking at the fresh-turned loam.
He called, “Footprints, but too smudged to make out. Might be one man or ten. You, Coolidge,” aiming his forefinger, “come up here.”
Grudgingly the big man ascended the path. Kavanaugh handed him a penny box of matches, and they knelt over the excavation; conferred in quarrelsome whispers while the Brooklyn truck driver scratched and held wax matches over the trench.
WATCHING THAT SHADOWPLAY, not looking at the girl, Ranier fumbled for her wrist, fastened his fingers around it, pulled her craftily to him so that their shoulders touched.
“Talk low. That’s the marine?”
“Yes,” she breathed.
“Who fired the plague ship from Brazil? Who died of the mauve death that night your German expedition landed in Haiti?”
“Yes.”
“The mate, Adolph Perl, was buried first in that cemetery down by the village; the old lady we saw there tonight was buried here?”
“Yes—I—”
“This marine, those others who died that night together, they were all buried in different cemeteries by Dr. Eberhardt and Polypheme because the doctor didn’t want a lot of new graves together, didn’t want the Haitians to know there’d been the plague—?”
“Dr. Eberhardt feared a panic among the natives who were hostile to his work and—”
“Eberhardt and Polypheme,” Ranier nodded toward the Negro huddled in the car, “buried those people? Polypheme would remember?”
“He drove the wagon with the rough-boxes. Filled the graves that night—fourteen years ago. He would remember that.”
“Would he remember the people who were buried?”
“No—he—he did not know them. He did not see them that night before they died.”
Ranier suggested in a low, grinding mutter, “But Dr. Eberhardt might have remembered them. Dr. Eberhardt tended them before they died, laid them out, managed that midnight funeral. Do you see what I’m driving at?”
He could feel her arm harden in his grasp. She whispered, “No.”
“Listen,” his eyes were directed straight ahead, but his murmur deflected at the girl, “you’ve got to tell me everything you know about Eberhardt and tell it quick. That tourist Haarman who was stabbed in the Blue Kitty Café and died in your hospital—that murdered man had an envelope in his pocket with Eberhardt’s name scrawled on it and the figures, ‘one million m, four million dollar sign.’ Make anything of that?”
She shook her head.
“Haarman was stabbed this evening some time around seven-thirty. Was Dr. Eberhardt in his hospital at that hour?”
“I don’t know. I go to bed at seven because I am on night duty with the patients. He was in his laboratory then.”
“So he might’ve ducked out without you knowing it,” Ranier deduced, rubbing the words off his lips with the back of his hand. “And some time in there his lab was scuttled. Where’d he usually spend his evenings?”
“Laboratory. Tonight he planned to stay in; let Polypheme take the car. He was very engrossed—experimenting—” Her voice trembled.
“Experimenting.” Ranier nodded soddenly. “Adrenaline, you said, Reviving—trying to revive—dead cells. And a man who looks like a dead man comes to Haiti and is murdered. Then his body disappears. The body of the man he looks like is exhumed, missing. An old lady, disinterred, is transferred to that grave and we find this marine at hers. All the while Eberhardt’s missing. It doesn’t rhyme. It’s crazy as hell. But there’s this much. Eberhardt’s the only one in Haiti who might mistake Haarman for Perl; the only one, besides you, who knows the location of all these victims who were buried that night in 1922.”
HER PAINFUL BREATHING came to a stop, and there was a momentary silence between them when she might not have been there. Her stricken inertia, impelled by his last statement, filled him with new uneasiness; and at the same time he became aware of Angelo Carpetsi’s regard, noticed the Italian youth had sidled nearer in the fog to eye him covertly from where he stood beside the stalled car. But Carpetsi could not have heard much, what with the incoherent wailing of the blonde collapsed against a fender, and the falsetto obligato of Professor Schlitz demanding someone to tell him over and over again why he had ever quit the cruise steamer to go motor-touring at night down this baneful Haitian coast.
Detecting the Italian’s baleful espionage, John Ranier kept his eyes fixed on the fog-blurred pair conferring in mid-graveyard, and tugged the girl’s sleeve to back her along the road’s edge into deeper shadow. The fog drank them in. Beyond the car light they were in that outer void, known by the sailors of Columbus to have been in these latitudes, where the night begins. The moony graveyard with its moony inhabitants, the parked car and the people there like a frenzied accident-crowd, were in another world. In the fogbank Ranier stopped just in time. Another step backwards and he might have gone over the Edge.
Standing with him, there, the girl was weeping. Tears of quicksilver moving in silence down the shine of her cheek. She was looking up at him, lips moving, and her husked words struggling against sobs, barely reached his ear.
“I know what you are thinking. I cannot help it—I did not want to tell you. Dr. Eberhardt—from that terrible night when all my friends died and left me homeless on this coast—has been a father to me. He saved me from the mauve death that night. Brought me up, taught me nursing—I was going to study medicine—some day take over his work. Oh, I cannot tell this of him— I cannot—!”
Ranier whispered, “You must! What are you trying to tell?”
“Last summer,” she breathed. “Fever. He has been ill. Worked so hard, no rest, miles to see his patients, night after night with the sick, operations—fighting disease, ignorance, poverty among the mountain people—all by himself and no money to do it with and never
stopping—locking himself in that laboratory. I’ve begged him to let up, and he would laugh. No time to let up in medicine, he would say. A doctor never lets up.”
Ranier’s lips twitched at the corners, husking, “Then you think—?” and she put an arm across her forehead as if to fend off the idea, shaking her head unhappily. “I cannot think. Tonight before supper he was—all right. But so worn, so white—ate nothing. Rushed up to his experiments on the verge of exhaustion. Lately—sometimes—he has done strange things—”
“What things?”
“Forgotten where he left his instruments. Misplaced prescriptions. Violent headaches, too.”
Ranier thought, “Migraine,” and averted his eyes from the pain reflected in the girl’s. She was whispering miserably, “And he talks strangely about—about death. Serums to revive the dead—believes science will some day do it. Oh,” her whisper broke, “it is horrible of me to imply—I was not going to tell you. But when I saw his laboratory tonight—his papers scattered, cultures spilled, those hands, that frog on the spike where he was always so careful to leave me a note where he has gone—Lieber Gott! but one night last summer when he was in a delirium of fever he wandered off without—we found him walking in that cemetery where—”
He breathed, “Wait!” and put a restraining hand on her arm with a false, “Don’t be afraid, Miss Engles, the Gardes will be coming and everything’ll be all right!” amplified for the benefit of Kavanaugh who was loping down the sandy path, followed by Mr. Coolidge.
SOME OF THE sand might have lodged in the Irishman’s teeth. Addressing Ranier, he stood sucking in his cheeks with haggard breaths, his mica eyes shifting between Ranier and the girl. “We aren’t waiting for any police,” he gritted out. “Brown mayn’t get to ’em until morning.” His eyes burned, then, steadily at the girl. “Listen. That U. S. Marine up there is the mauve death victim you told us about?”
Ranier answered for her, “I was just checking on it. She says it’s the same one—Sergeant O’Grady.”
“It’s a pip!” Kavanaugh exploded. “A pip! That grave was opened about three hours ago by the looks. Footprints all over the bottom, but try to make ’em out! Smeared. No go. Not a clue but that damned Greenback tied to his belt same as the one tied to the old lady. It’s her grave according to that tombstone.” Triggering his finger at the girl, “You’re sure you saw the old woman buried in this spot?”
“I remember. Old Gramma Sou—”
“Who put up that slab for her?”
“I,” Laïs Engles whispered. “For all of them—those Germans from my uncle’s ship who died for their Fatherland. Each has the same—the little quotation. But the marine and the—the missionary who died with them, they were cared for by their own people. Dr. Eberhardt bought the stones for—mine.”
Kavanaugh deflated his cheeks, and green cords bulged along his jawlines to match green highlights in his cheekbones. “Someone,” he lifted his sand and gravel voice for all to hear, “dug up that Perl guy and the old dame and the leatherneck early this evening. They put the leatherneck here at the old lady’s grave and dropped her off at Perl’s. That’s how it looks to me. And we got to find the body of that guy Perl.”
He paused to let his words drift through the fog, sink in. “We got to find Perl,” he went on in a flattened snarl, “because we can’t get the answer on Haarman till we do. And we got to get the answer on Haarman or we’ll all be up for his murder. My hunch is that Doc Ranier, here, was right. Find the bird who snatched the Perl stiff and we find the guy who killed Haarman—God knows how!—because, maybe, he looked like Perl. So we’re going!”
“Going?” The fife-shrill screech was recognized as Professor Schlitz, trilling from the doubtful haven of the car. “Going? Going? Where are we going now?”
“To this marine’s graveyard, you fool. And we’re sticking together, don’t forget that!” Making a pistol of his dexterous hand, the tall man cocked the thumb-trigger and levelled the finger-barrel at Laïs Engles’ breast. “Let’s have it, girl! Where was this non-com laid away?”
Clasping anguished hands, she shrank against Ranier as if afraid of the Irishman’s pantomime. “It is not far—to the soldier’s grave. A little way, on up the road. You will see the barracks of the marines.”
“Holy Jumpin’ Judas!” Coolidge unexpectedly roared. “Y’mean to say there’s leathernecks somewhere up the pike? Marines? U.S. Marines?”
Kavanaugh lashed out, “Why the devil didn’t you tell us there were some United States soldiers—”
“There are no soldiers there,” Laïs Engles cried. “There are no soldiers who can help us. The marines were removed from Haiti when Herr Roosevelt became president in America. The Haitians did not want them, and the occupation was ended three years ago. The barracks you will see standing empty, deserted. There is a little graveyard back of the parade ground. No one has been there for three years.”
Kavanaugh’s greenish cheekbones glimmered, blistered with perspiration. He snarled, “Someone was there this evening! Someone who fetched this dead-head from that graveyard to this. We’re going to have a look at this marine’s grave. Maybe Perl’s body is there!”
But the body of Adolph Perl was not in the little marine cemetery up the road where the little marine who was in the old lady’s cemetery should have been.
CHAPTER XV
GOING TO JERUSALEM
Ghosts were there. Ghosts that trailed the rattletrap Model T driven by Polypheme of the incandescent eyes. Ghosts that rode in, and clung to, the car—an Irish sugar merchant, a Brooklyn mug, an authority on insects, a peroxide blonde, a swart Italian—the ghosts of tourists on a Caribbean cruise. The ghost of a girl with fear’s dark light in her eyes; and the ghost of a surgeon who had died young of bitterness and become a frayed ship’s doctor soaked in aguardiente. Live ghosts.
There were the ghosts of the World War, summoned by Laïs Engles’ story to that foreign field—the sailors of the Kronprinz Albrecht, blockade runner that had ended its secret mission up the Amazon four years too late, and brought its ghostly survivors—shadelings of the Imperial Navy and the Wilhelmstrasse—here to die. Ghosts that refused to be laid.
There was the ghost who had slain Haarman; and the ghost of Haarman, web-footed, vanished in the night; and the ghost of unseen Dr. Eberhardt who might be foaming mad.
The night, itself, was a ghost, fuming and blowing, trailing its gauzy veils across field and road, stalking in moist white cerements through the jungle, blindfolded with eerie bandages, muffled in cotton, embracing with clammy half-liquid arms the earthy ghosts of black Haiti. You could hear its bloodless pulse when the car engine stopped, and in that moment when everyone waited for someone else to move. Pulsations faint as the first heart beats starting life in a chicken’s egg.
Ranier stared at that abandoned marine barracks and knew they had found the headquarters of all loose banshees. Here was the spot. The house was haunted, and most of the spectres were home.
Set back from the road the low frame building, seen in fog, was like a carcass half consumed in a spider web, its framework showing in skeletal patches where the tar paper covering had been eaten away. The building—like American intervention—had not been favored by the tropics. Damp rot had spoiled its lumber. Its flesh-and-blood defenders had been withdrawn, and the spirits of Haiti had attacked the outpost, pried off the door to force an entry, and staved in the roof. The corral was overrun with weeds, outbuildings undermined and ambushed, the jungle closing in. You could see the spectral inmates passing and repassing behind the broken shutters, floating about the empty rooms; and when the car turned into the dooryard a horde of shadows fled around the corner, escaping into a boarded-up mess hall.
The ghosts here were American. Ghosts from the days of Benoit Batraville and Guillaume Sam and the Caco insurrections. Shades of Smedley Butler! Fog foaming across the weed-grown parade ground was the smoke of Springfields in a soundless battle of wraiths; and Ranier almost listened fo
r a faint bugle echo to summon phantom stalwarts of the Corps, red-skinned and roaring, the words of “Mademoiselle” on their curse-baked lips, charging the fog with reckless bayonets.
Rounding the corner of that abandoned outpost in Haiti, he would have welcomed a few marines. Light from the one-eyed flivver didn’t go very far in the surrounding fog. The girl indicated a footpath leading across the parade ground, and there was no telling what might greet them on that steamed-over field. You couldn’t see five inches through the churning cream, and somebody’s voice jittered, “Whoosh! Bats!”
BUT BATS HADN’T left those boot-tracks in the mud. Visitors had been on that path before them; heel-marked the way. But the spongy loam had bleared the prints so that it was impossible to guess whose or how many shoes had been up that path ahead of them.
Kavanaugh swore at the smudged tracks: “They been here and gone!” yanking out his .45 to snap off the safety catch. “Everybody together, now. Where’s the grave?”
“At the end of the path,” the girl pointed, “across the field. You will see the crosses under a big silk-cotton tree.”
Ranier hoped those early birds had gone. Or had one man left those splotched prints? Or was it a man? He cleared his throat, training the flashlight on the obscure footpath. “I’ll go first. Come on.” Swinging the girl into position behind him, he led off at a jog, and the others followed single file, invisible in the obliterating mist in a way that lifted the dog-hairs on Ranier’s neck. He reached back to grasp Laïs Engles’ hand; marked Kavanaugh’s muttery oaths behind the girl, the others bringing up the rear, Indian fashion. Nobody stayed behind at that haunted barracks.
Somewhere in mid-field the Irishman drew abreast of him, scouting the fogbanks ahead with wary gun. And a few paces farther in the clouds, he heard someone take a header in the weeds, Daisy May uncorking a scream and the professor bawling like a calf, “Wait for me! Wait for me! I can’t see!” The trotting line jarred down its length like a string of jolted freight cars, there was a scramble somewhere in the rear, then Coolidge’s bellow, “S’all right, go ahead. I’m justa mass of nerves!”