by Otto Penzler
“Oh, sure. Suicide. Nobody did it. Nobody’s doing any of this. Same as that body that dug itself up back there in the grass.”
Hitching closer, Ranier had to stretch his lips in an ugly grin. Some motes of eerie moonlight drifted under the brim of that tourist sun helmet, illumining a false-face underneath; a professorial parody, bilious green, dripping perspiration. What struck Ranier funny was thought of his own face, bluffing above a scotched gun.
“I didn’t do it,” the false-face was chattering. “Then I saw you driving away with Carpetsi. Mr. Kavanaugh and the others were taking the dead gendarme’s car. I heard them say they were going to look for me, and I didn’t know what to do. Then I remembered about you—”
“About me!” Ranier halted his advance.
“How you clung to the spare tire of our car on the way to the hospital. So I ran out of the bushes where I was hiding, and caught the spare tire of the gendarme’s car. Mr. Kavanaugh drove straight to this village. To this cemetery.”
“You came up here with Kavanaugh?”
“They didn’t see me,” the false-face panted. “I dropped off in the market place, there. When they left the car and ran into the cemetery, here, I crept around by the church. I heard them shouting, then they ran back to the car and drove away, leaving me behind. I ran into the graveyard to see what was here.”
“How long ago did they leave?”
“It couldn’t have been half an hour. I tell you,” excitement overcame fear in the thin man’s windpipe, releasing his voice in a sudden blurt, “—I tell you, I’ve found out something. Something important. I should have run all the way to the hospital to tell you, but I feared I would never find the road, and then I thought—”
His blurting tapered into a strangely, wolflike howl.
Nine paces from the man, facing him squarely and limping toward him, Ranier was caught completely by surprise when it happened. Caught by surprise, and, for a piece of a second, stunned to stone by the change that leapt across Professor Schlitz’s face. Jekyll never altered to Hyde as swiftly as did the professor. The features under the foolish sun helmet screwed in a terrible paroxysm. Eyes crossed. Cheeks went out of shape. Lips flattened back and upper teeth popped out like sprouted fangs.
In that background of moonlight, fog and cemetery it would have chilled the veins of a witch. Uttering that half-throttled howl, the thin man flung out his hands and plunged straight at Ranier, charging from a standstill like a dummy thrown from a springboard. Ranier had only time to think, “Schizophrenia! Dual personality!” and fling the gun.
The weapon missed; sailed crashing into the hedge. Missed because the charging man lost his footing, tripped, fell. Hands reaching for Ranier, he stumbled and went down, his tongue flapped out, a plate of artificial teeth jarred from his mouth. Sprawled in front of Ranier, his fingers just touching the toes of Ranier’s frozen shoes. Shuddered violently, and then, as if the paroxysm had worn itself out, relaxed face down in the grass, fainted away.
Ranier stumbled out of the boneyard, carrying Schlitz.
Empty-handed, staring, John Ranier could have fainted away himself. His eyes swerved, shooting glances around that swivelled and swerved, shooting glances around that sleeping burial ground as if to see a thousand enemies there. Save for himself and the man at his feet there was no one in sight. Ants crawled on his skin as he glared at the spot where Professor Schlitz had been standing at bay. Five feet beyond the place where the professor had stood was the brambly black-green wall of hedge, fence-high, thick as a small dyke, a thorny if porous barricade against the forest’s intrusion. Too high to jump, too dense for a cat to get through, it would have demanded sealing. But no one had gone over that wall. And no one could be hiding in the thin wisps of vapour straggling and uncoiling through moonshine.
John Ranier, shifting his glare to the unconscious body at his shoes, could have been no more thunderstruck if the granite Gabriel five graves distant in the gloom had flapped his stone wings and cracked the cemetery silence with a blast on his immortal horn. No more appalled if the unearthed residue of Captain Friederich had swooped to a stand beside that open grave, croaked, “I don’t belong here!” and stalked off, creaking, through the mist!
“Professor!” Ranier gasped.
From the body in the grass came no answer. But a tomato-colored juice was spreading across the flattened shoulders. Ranier saw it had been no manic-depressive violence which had scrambled the man’s features and inspired his reasonless rush. His snap diagnosis had been wrong.
Professor Schlitz had gone livid with pain, and his charge had been impelled by a blow from behind. Facing Ranier, standing there with his hands in the air, Professor Schlitz had been stabbed in the back!
CHAPTER XX
TO LAY A GHOST
The insectologist was not heavy. Clutching the man’s grasshopper frame in his arms, Ranier raced across the cemetery, speeding over the flat white marble slabs as Eliza might have sped across the ice. The skull of a German sea captain grinned as he went by, and the angel Gabriel watched his departure with a lofty frown. The market place, a blur of empty vegetable bins. The alley of sleeping doorways. The Model T parked before the discontented cow.
Ranier deposited his burden on seat cushions, previously stained by Italian blood, then slammed the rear door, sprang to crank the engine. A witness to his actions would have guessed them to be the irrational maneuvers of a madman. Flinging into the driver’s seat, he played with the gas lever, reviving the motor until the car shook on motionless wheels. Blue smoke bulged from the rear as he slowed the motor to a drone, then switched off the ignition, lights out. Shading his pocket torch under his hand, he climbed from front to back seat; fumbled hospital bandage, cotton, bottle of merthiolate from his pocket; set to work in the close gloom. A minute sufficed to stem the bleeding. Another to bandage the wound. He stooped to catch the man’s snuffly breathing. That was all right. The savant from Upsala would live.
Opening and closing the tin door, Ranier’s fingers made no sound. Two silent leaps to skirt the front fender, and he was disengaging the crank. Iron felt good in his fingers. He weighed the solid bar in his fist, grinning at the darkness, daring its next move. Once, in the old ambulance-riding days, he’d stitched the rhinocerous skull of a taxi driver cracked by a similar weapon. Crank in fist, he began to run.
“Damnation!”
The sound broke loose as he reached alley’s end, jolting him to a stockstill. Somewhere in the vicinity of that night-drugged, mountain-lost village a horse was running. Hell-bent for leather. Explosion of hoofbeats spattering out in the dark Rat-a-pat! Rat-a-pat! Rat-a-pat! Rat-a-pat! He hadn’t expected that answer to his hoaxed departure, and he listened to galloping hoofs in raw dumbfoundment. Startling the nocturnal silence, the echoes might have issued from Sleepy Hollow. Any minute now and the Headless Horseman should go by.
But the hoofbeats were drifting away; fading off through the night—Ranier traced the direction with an oath! They went off somewhere behind the cemetery.
Ranier peered from the alley-mouth, wary of some ruse. Then, at a break-neck gallop of his own, he crossed the moon-shadowed market place; but instead of entering the graveyard as before, he ran around the front of the church, sprinting into the shadow of a buttressed wall, following a wing of old masonry that threatened to crumble under the ray of his flashlight.
A brass plate on an ancient door said God and the bishop were home, but he couldn’t stop now to call on either of them.
Chasing the flashlight’s ray, he discovered a monkish footpath that rambled behind the church, and this brought him to the rear of the neighboring cemetery.
Here he could follow the outside wall of the hedge, clawing through entanglements of plantain, berry and gourd vine which crammed the narrow aisle between hedge and forest. Moonlight couldn’t get in there, but a horse had. A mile off in the night the hoofbeats were melting away, but the prints were left behind, a design of horseshoes stamped in the soft loam
. Ranier spotted them with his pocket torch; sent the white circle playing up and down the hedge; swore. There was the gun he’d thrown at the professor. Sergeant O’Grady’s automatic, imbedded in the bushy wall like a raisin in a sponge cake. Which meant the professor, when hit, had been standing on the cemetery side of the hedge at this point. And on this side a horse had stood, trod the leaf-mould, curvetted, galloped off through trees.
Dunced, open-mouthed in bewilderment, Ranier glared down at printed horseshoes there, while his memory somersaulted back through fog to a waterside café, a dank room jaundiced in lamplight, tourists at table, a taffy-haired man sitting back to an open window, stabbed in the spine. Te n feet from that window Haarman had been, there’d been tracks. Man-tracks—
Now, deep in the mountain forest, echoing from what sounded like a ridge, hoofbeats were expiring away. But even a horse couldn’t reach five feet through a hedge of briar to stab an insectologist in the back!
WHEN RANIER REACHED the car, revived it with the crank, slammed into the driver’s seat and kicked the gears, he was winded by something more than running. Professor Schlitz squawked to life as the wheels struck the uphill grade; in the rear-view mirror Ranier could see eyeballs, white-circled and frantic, glowing in the back seat dark as if a current in the sockets had been turned on. Ranier pulled his mouth sideways, keeping his own eyes on the road.
“Have a good sleep?”
His passenger struggled to bounce upright; opened his mouth; closed his mouth; clapped a horrified hand to the lower part of an ashy face; began to paw wildly at the cushions.
“I’ve—I’ve losh my teef!”
“In the graveyard,” Ranier shouted. Another time and he could have chuckled. “Sorry. I didn’t have time to look for them.”
“Wha—wha happened?”
“You caught a knife back there in the cemetery. Remember?”
“Haaaaa—” Professor Schlitz grabbed his bandaged shoulder as if he feared somebody might steal it, exhaling in pain.
Ranier shouted above engine-roar, “Don’t move that left arm any more than you can help. It’s not fatal. Fleshy part of the shoulder; went through clean without severing any muscle. Just a slice under the skin, and tell me if it starts bleeding. You’re a damn sight luckier than Angelo.”
“I’m dying.” White-rimmed eyeballs revolved in the man’s contorted face. “Who did it, Doctor? Who?”
“The Devil!” Ranier grinned at the windshield. “I heard his hoofs.”
“Hoofs?”
“Running away.”
“Thash it!” The insectologist leaned forwards, clinging to the front seat. Under the simian concavity of his upper lip the man’s toothless gums, pink in the gloom, yawped at Ranier’s clipped ear. “Thash wha I was going to tell you about in the graveyard. I remember! Yesh! Hoofs! It was after Mr. Kavanaugh and his Aspasia and Misher Coolidge had driven away—p’raps fifeen minutes after.”
His hot-potatoed words spluttered out above the thousand-tongued rattle of the car. “I’d been shtanding there wondering wha to do, right beside thash awful open grave, and shuddenly I was sure I heard a horsh walking behind the hedge. You know how a horsh walks? Yesh, I was sure! Nexsh minute I thought I heard a car shtop in the village, but I couldn’t shee anything, so I shtarted for the hedge again. Great heavensh! I thought it was a horsh!”
“It was,” Ranier snarled. “A horse hiding back there, and it stabbed you through the hedge. Make anything of that?”
“No!”
“So do I. Anyway, I did see the tracks. After I lugged you back to the car, it cut and ran.”
“Where?” the professor gasped.
“How far can you see in this black fog?”
“I can’t shee anything,” the professor, chin hooked over Ranier’s shoulder, was staring at the vacuum ahead of the windshield as if all the spectres of Tophet were concealed at the next turn. “Where are we?”
“On the dirt road leaving Bois Legone somewhere in Haiti. Can you pull yourself together and quit breathing in my ear long enough to answer a couple of questions?”
“Yesh,” the man breathed in his ear. Breath that rose to a howling gale as the car missed a tree, swayed through clouds of brown puddle-water, hit a corrugated stretch of straightaway. “Why? Why did I ever leave Upshala and come on this gashly Haitian cruise?”
“Funny,” Ranier shouted. “That was one of the questions.”
“I’ll never take another shabbatical year! Never! To think I wash going to Arizhona to shtudy the Cimex lectularius! Inshtead I come to Haiti to shtudy the grave worm! The grave worm!” Professor Schlitz repeated in the low C of a mouldy pipe organ. “The grave worm of Haiti is—”
RANIER WAS WILLING to dispense with the subject, pertinent as it was in that locality. Certainly the professor had come to a graveworm-hunter’s Paradise. Ranier cried hastily, “All right. All right. Then have you got any idea who tried to dent your spinal column back in that deserted village? Know anyone who might want to kill you?”
“I feel as if shomeone had,” the insectologist wailed. “My God, aren’t there already enough corpshes in thish miserable country? Who could want to kill me?”
“Mr. Coolidge, Mr. Kavanaugh, his Aspasia as you call her, Mr. Brown, Monsieur Marcelline, Dr. Eberhardt or his adopted niece or that Senegambian house-boy with the radio eyes. Or Hyacinth Lucien, or half a million Voodooed Haitians,” Ranier ticked the possibilities hoarsely off his tongue. “Right now it looks as if your bête noir was a horse. I might want to kill you myself,” he concluded bitingly, “if you don’t come through with the truth.”
At least it served to get that mouth out of his ear. Professor Schlitz flopped back on the rear cushions with a terrified snort. Twinged his shoulder. Caterwauled. Yelped as the car rocked around a curve, “Troof? I’ll tell the troof! I schwear I will! What do you want to know?”
“Why you pulled a fade-away at Morne Cuyamel,” Ranier called back at the shrinking man. “How you got to this neck of the woods, Colonel Otto’s grave, by yourself.”
“I told you. I told you the troof. I came on the back of Misher Kavanaugh’s automobile. He blamed me for Carpetsi’s murder—I heard him shay I did it. Because my glashes were under the body. I don’t know how they got under the body. I didn’t kill the Italian. I never killed anything exshept a few Stylopyga orientalis and Zeuzera pyrina and Stagmomantis carolina speshimens and—”
“Naturally. Wanting to hide from Kavanaugh, you hooked a ride on his car.”
“But I couldn’t shtay behind! Not on thash road by that mission housh! Besides, I thought on the shpare tire—he’d never shink to look for me so closhe behind, and when he drove away—owwow—!”
“Keep off your left arm. What then?”
“There I hung,” the insectologist described with a graphic groan. “What could I do? They didn’t shee me. All the way up thash dreadful road, thinking every moment would be my lasht, the way Misher Kavanaugh drove. Like you’re driving now! Oh my God—there’sh a shkull!”
He was leaning over Ranier’s shoulder again, blowing in his ear, pointing a finger of dread at the windshield, at something discovered by the car light in the creamed night ahead. Ranier hadn’t forgotten that semaphore-armed signpost with its gewgaw decoration. Apprehension filled him as he saw it now. It confirmed a suspicion that he had, thirty minutes ago, chased a gunman to this road-fork in the mountains, and maybe what had happened afterwards in Bois Legone wasn’t his imagination. So the mush-mouthed hunter of Stagmomantis carolina and grave worms, squawking over his shoulder, was real! Just when he’d decided the whole thing was a midsummer night’s dream.
SIGNPOST AND SKULL streaked by. Car and professor screeched at the strain as Ranier took the fork, top speed, wrenched the front wheels out of a shimmy, missed a jaywalking pig, and raced up the graded gravel. On through the night. Port-au-Prince. 105 Km. Well, the girl had said it was on this main road, and it wouldn’t be long now.
Ranier shouted at th
e man behind him. “If that’s your story, stick to it. You drove with Kavanaugh to Bois Legone. Then?”
“I told you how it wash. They didn’t shee me, and Misher Kavanaugh drove shtraight to that village back there and parked in the market place. I wash terribly frightened. There washn’t a soul in schight, and I wash afraid they’d shoot me. But Misher Kavanaugh and Misher Coolidge and thash woman, they climbed out and ran right into the shemetery.”
“What’d you do?”
“I jumped off the car and ran and hid by the schurch. I could shee them, but they couldn’t shee me.”
“What’d they do?”
“They shtood,” the professor swallowed a gurgle, “—they shtood looking at thash awful open grave—just like all those others we shaw. Misher Kavanaugh shair, ‘By God, itch Captain Friederish’s body here at the Kraut colonel’sh grave. Itch the girl’sh Dutch uncle!’ He began to shwear, and Misher Coolidge looked schared and began to shwear. Mish May shtarted in shreaming and shwearing and cursing at Misher Kavanaugh—‘Itch your fault! Itch your fault!’—calling him names. Never have I heard sush language from a lady! Never! I tell you, sh’sh a terrible woman! Yesh! Misher Kavanaugh just went black in the face. He told her to shut up or he’d give her shomething to bellyache about, and when she continued shreaming, he struck the woman in the nose and knocked her into the grave. To think I’ve been ten days on shipboard wish sush terrible—”
“Go on! He knocked her into the grave—”
Professor Schlitz pulled an elbow across his boneless upper lip. “But thash all. Only when Mish May climbed out of the hole, all wet sand and weeping, she had shomething in her hand. She shaid she found it down there. Misher Kavanaugh snatched it away from her. I heard him shay to Misher Coolidge, ‘Well, thish proves he was here, all right!’ ”
“What?” Ranier, half listening, his attention bent on a zigzag treacherously fogged, pulled up sharply. His hand leapt from the wheel to snare his passenger’s lapel. Dragging the man unceremoniously up and over, planting him upright in the seat at his side, he cross-questioned him fiercely, “Kavanaugh said that? Who was he referring to?”