Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  “By that time I was certain one of the tourists killed Haarman, but I didn’t know who and there seemed to be no motive. The mystery of the laboratory appeared to make it a Voodoo job, though. And Miss Engles’ story had me down. We got up to the laboratory; Kavanaugh accused me of Haarman’s murder. A door banged downstairs. The Irishman went down, came back, said Haarman’s dead body had walked off. Well, we knew where the body walked off to—into that cupboard in the hall. But who put it there? I’d think Kavanaugh put it there—to further scramble the mystery and make us believe Haarman a zombie—but he was upstairs when that door banged. Unless—”

  Fingers in his hair, Ranier stiffened up; glared at Laïs Engles. “By George! That cat!”

  “Meine Katze?”

  “She was downstairs in that room. She could have brushed the door. Or wind could have slammed it. Then Kavanaugh, running downstairs to see, could have hidden the body, and rushed back saying it was gone. So the zombie angle is established and we’re addled out of our wits, providing it was a trick played by Kavanaugh. We don’t know yet. We don’t know.”

  Ranier glared at countryside passing the window, fields of millet, thatch-roofed huts, thick-leafed banana plantain gray in early light. Fog was lifting on the Gulf of Gonaives and soon there would be some sky. He waited for the tires to screech on a long flat curve; smoking impatiently. His listeners in the back seat were coming out of shadow like negatives forming on a film.

  “We do know,” he went on sternly, “what happened after that. Polypheme, driving back from the village to tell us Hyacinth was rounding up a mob, saw a dead body sitting by an open grave in the cemetery by that road. Adolph Perl’s grave, as it turned out. The boys with the death records had located Perl’s headstone. Who disinterred that coffin?

  “We know Brown, Marcelline and Coolidge never reached the village Gendarmerie. Coolidge said Marcelline wrecked the Winton in the fog. Did he? Did he ditch the car to get rid of Coolidge and Brown, and open that grave by himself? Or did Coolidge help him with the shoveling, and Brown, too. Or was Brown, innocent, left dead in the jungle somewhere?

  “I’m sure of one thing. There were pick-axes, spades and ropes under the seats of that Winton, and Monsieur Marcelline worked on that grave. And then, with everything running like hot oil, the machinery blew all to pieces. Smashed up right there in the light of those shaded lanterns in the fog. It was Adolph Perl’s headstone, all right.

  “But a little old lady in taffeta and bonnet was in his coffin!”

  “Was ist das? Was ist das?” Dr. Eberhardt’s puffed eyes blazed at Ranier, cheeks swelled, purpled. “You try to say an old lady was at the grave of Adolph Perl instead of—! Who put her there?”

  Ranier shook his head.

  “Nobody put her there. She was there.”

  “Aber, nein! I, myself, buried her—ja, with Polypheme’s help, in a little cemetery the other side, at the east, of my hospital! Fräulein Laïs will tell you—”

  “She did tell me,” Ranier ground out. “She did say that, Dr. Eberhardt, and so did your death records! So did the headstone over the grave. When we found an old woman’s body at that grave marked for Adolph Perl—I thought she’d been transferred. But she wasn’t transferred. She was there last night when those ghouls exhumed that coffin. They didn’t expect to find her in that coffin under Perl’s headstone. You bet they didn’t! And it smashed this secret machinery of theirs, this dirty underground machinery they’d stolen from Haarman—smashed it to hell!

  “I’d like to’ve seen their faces, I tell you! If Haarman had been alive to engineer the thing himself, he’d have dropped dead. We thought we were crazy when we saw the old woman’s body at Perl’s headstone, but those rats who dug her out from under must’ve had twice the shock.”

  RANIER’S VOICE CRACKED in excitement, crying at his stunned audience.

  “And if you think those grave-diggers had a shock, if you think I had a shock—I’m sorry, Miss Engles, it was horrible for you!—think of the blow it handed the rest of the gang, the ones who’d stayed there with us in the hospital, expecting everything was running smoothly and on schedule. What did they think? Carpetsi, for instance. Well, he thought he’d been double-crossed by this double-crossing mob. He thought his jackal pals who’d done that bit of digging had pulled a fast one, tricked up the grave with this old lady’s corpse, hidden the body that should have been there, and pulled a sneak with the spoils. If Kavanaugh is in on this racket, that’s what he thought, too. The Italian was all for chasing after Coolidge and Marcelline and Brown, right then. But his idea was wrong. His gang hadn’t double-crossed him. They’d found Old Gramma Sou there in the first place.

  “Now the machinery was off the track, if you understand me. Way off! Those grave-diggers didn’t know what to do. They had to work fast, too. Marcelline probably clawed through the death records and found the location of the old lady’s grave.

  “That Haitian was clever. Fearing his own countrymen, knowing the Haitian penal code strictly forbids tampering with graves—knowing, too, the superstitious fear of his people—he leaves a frog tied to the exhumed body, enough to scare the police galley west. That’s why he’d appropriated a jar of frogs from the laboratory. Good protection.

  “The next step is to dig up Old Gramma Sou’s grave—maybe the prize they’re looking for is there, since she’s (for reasons they can’t fathom) here. Can you follow this, Miss Engles?”

  The girl whispered, “I think so, but I do not understand.”

  “Let’s follow the grave-diggers. Marcelline was one of them, if Coolidge and Brown were the others, I don’t know. They raced, unseen in the fog, to the old lady’s grave. Don’t think they didn’t work fast. If that soil hadn’t been dry sand underneath we’d have caught up with them in a hurry. But what happens? Under the old lady’s stone they find the body of the U.S. Marine. The machinery of their plan is wrecked again. Nothing for it, but they’ve got to open the grave of that marine. Foiled again. A celluloid collar. The missionary in the grave of the marine. So on to the grave of the missionary.”

  “Then they did not,” Laïs Engles breathed, “move the bodies from one cemetery to another?”

  “Angelo Carpetsi thought that was what they were doing. So did I, at first. God knows what the rest of this gang thought. There are two gangs working now, see? The ghouls, racing from cemetery to cemetery, following that list in the death records—that list who were buried fourteen years ago on that night of the plague. And there was that half of the gang which was pursuing the work of the ghouls, didn’t know what was happening, couldn’t figure the game any more than you and I were able to figure it.”

  Ranier paused for breath, then went on.

  “Do you recall what happened at Adolph Perl’s supposed grave? Coolidge turned up. Was he one of the grave-diggers, or did Marcelline really ditch that Winton and drive on, alone, in another car? Coolidge said the Winton was wrecked and he didn’t know where Brown and Marcelline were. But what did he tell Kavanaugh when they walked off in the fog by themselves? Did he tell Kavanaugh to wait around a while, then hit for the old lady’s cemetery and keep stalling on the mystery angle? Anyway, that’s what happened, wasn’t it? We beat it to the grave of Old Gramma Sou; saw the marine; beat it to the grave of the marine; found the missionary—exactly as those diggers ahead of us had. But I hit on something at the marine’s grave.” Ranier made a white fist and considered the knuckles grimly. “I hit on something on that grave under the big tree where the missionary’s bones were in that soldier’s coffin—”

  He paused for breath, mopping a glaze from his grimed face. Smoke hurt in his throat, and his tongue, dried, was reluctant to go on. A stiff glass of aguardiente would have been venison at this point—why had he ever left that café in the first place?

  He resumed thickly: “That grave under the tree wasn’t sand. It was wet earth loam, easy digging, a compost of leaf-mould, damp and absorbent soil. So there was little left of the coffin; not much
left of the bones; hardly more than that clerical collar. See the point, Dr. Eberhardt? Those other bodies, buried in dry sand at an altitude generally dry, had—had almost mummified. Like those mummies you see in Mexico—at Guanawato, bodies turned to leather by atmospheric condition. But in that compost under the big tree, the leaf-droppings of a thousand-year-old forest giant—decay, yes. There was the proof. The missionary had been buried in the marine’s grave from the first. The marine in the old lady’s. The old lady in that one marked for Adolph Perl.

  “Then while I was staggered with that discovery, more mystified than ever, we heard shots on Morne Cuyamel at the missionary’s mis-marked headstone. The ghouls, of course, had exhumed the body of Colonel Otto. And their wrecked machine hit another snag. A gendarme, driving by the mission house, saw them at work. They shot first.” Ranier sighed.

  “MURDER HAS A way of developing like cancer. After you’ve killed once, I suppose, another homicide or two makes little difference to the hangman. That secret machine Haarman had set in motion was fueled on a murder at its inception. Those grave-robbers were desperate. They shot the Haitian Garde with a U.S. service automatic they’d found on the buried marine; planted it in the fist of your Colonel Otto; dumped the gendarme into the grave and lit out for Bois Legone—”

  He punched out his cigarette on window-glass pale with a suggestion of day. “I’d like to know why nobody in the vicinity roused at that shooting. Loud in that fog as stones banged underwater. Doesn’t anybody live in that Morne Cuyamel mission house?”

  Dr. Eberhardt grunted, “The Reverend Waldo Claphouse. Aber, he is down with dhangi fever. The natives would not dare put their head out of doors near a cemetery. On a night of fog—”

  “It was thick on that Morne Cuyamel road, all right. Thick enough for another murder. Angelo Carpetsi’s. Convinced he was being double-crossed, the Italian gave me a whisper, told me he was going to talk. Somebody overheard him, and from then on he was marked for a tonsillectomy.”

  “On my eye-glashes!” Professor Schlitz gagged. “The glashes I losht when I fell down in that marine graveyard. Hish throat—my glashes—!”

  “Somebody,” explained Ranier, “picked ’em up. Piece broken from a lens. Good gag to leave behind. But it took a blade to cut a throat that might be talkative. If Angelo hadn’t lost his nerve and tried to run away, if he’d stayed with me, there, he might not be a handful of ashes back in that hospital. But that Morne Cuyamel stage-set was too much for Carpetsi. Took a cue from the Professor’s exit, and tried to exit himself. He did. Miss Engles says,” he looked across his cigarette at Dr. Eberhardt, “she saw Mr. Coolidge start off in the fog after Professor Schlitz.”

  The girl said tightly, “That is what I saw.”

  Ranier speculated, “But couldn’t he have changed direction without being seen? Everybody was staring at the graveyard. Couldn’t he have sneaked a wide circle, steering clear of the car lights, and caught up, say, with Carpetsi? Perhaps it was Coolidge who picked up those pince-nez of yours, Professor. Left them under the body to frame you. But he used a razor-blade.”

  “You mean to shay—you mean Misher Coolidge cut—?”

  “Jugular vein and carotid artery.” He was staring at a little splash of sunlight, crimson over his head, that had come through the windshield.

  He heard the insectologist protesting weakly, “But Misher Coolidge was Misher Carpetshi’s friend. On the boat they—they were thick as fleas.”

  He suggested dryly, “Thicker, perhaps. But, Professor, you ought to know about fleas. If Coolidge didn’t cut the Little Angel’s throat, who did? Did you? No,” he waved off a gum-spluttered denial hurriedly, “you wouldn’t leave your spectacles, I imagine. That was a dumb attempt to throw suspicion on you. However, at the time I didn’t know. Still don’t. Maybe somebody else did it, somebody who was behind us all the time we were behind the grave-digging crew.

  “We weren’t far behind those ghouls, either, at Morne Cuyamel. Sand or not, all this shoveling had slowed them. I think I’d have overhauled them if I’d gone straight to Bois Legone, but Carpetsi was still alive, there was a chance to sew him up and a doctor can’t let a man die. Miss Engles and I,” he told Dr. Eberhardt, “rushed this Italian back to your hospital. I’ve an idea our gangster friends weren’t sorry to see us go. They weren’t sorry Professor Schlitz was gone, either. We were a problem, and this scheme of theirs, haywire as it was, was driving them crazy. Three murders, now, and still no prize in sight.

  “So Coolidge, Kavanaugh and Miss Daisy May set out for Bois Legone to find out what capers had been cut at Colonel Otto’s tombstone. Incidentally, Professor Schlitz attached himself to their car—the car that murdered gendarme had driven up in. They find the grave at Bois Legone is vandalized; Captain Friederich’s body, there, where the colonel’s should’ve been—”

  LAÏS ENGLES PUT her face in her hands.

  A hoarse roar from Dr. Eberhardt.

  “You—you are crazy! I do not believe a word of this, nein! Fräulein Engles’ uncle, the captain of that ship, we put him in a mausoleum high on the mountain. A mausoleum built by a French planter who was lost at sea before he could use it. I bought it, myself, when I first came to Haiti, and I gave it to Fräulein Engles for her—”

  “Just the same,” John Ranier said evenly, “Captain Friederich’s body was in Bois Legone at Colonel Otto’s grave.”

  “I shaw it,” Professor Schlitz put in, drearily. “It wash there, all right. Wish a shea cap on itch head.”

  “Meanwhile,” Ranier pursued, “the grave-digging detachment, scotched again, have gone up the mountain to that last cemetery. Kavanaugh, Coolidge and Miss May follow. What happened from there on is in the dark; all I can do is guess by the evidence, I know the workings of the machinery, not the engineers. I think Kavanaugh and party caught up, there, with the grave-diggers. If Kavanaugh wasn’t one of the gang—he’s dead. The blonde is dead, too. Or if Coolidge isn’t in the gang, he’s dead. I’m not worried about Mr. Coolidge, though. Carpetsi was his cabin-mate, his pal. Birds of a feather.

  “Anyway they’re up with the grave-crew. Can that be Brown and Marcelline? We haven’t seen a sign of Mr. Brown all night. Who helped Marcelline shovel? At all events, Marcelline was sent as an emissary on horseback. My guess is, the Haitian guide had been leading the chase in the Winton which was never wrecked at all. But he returned to Bois Legone on a horse he’d picked up somewhere—cattle walk all over these damned roads. Why? To pick up a hat he lost by accident while digging that Bois Legone job. Fatal for the gang if that hat was found. For Marcelline, anyway. He wanted that Panama.

  “And somebody else was dispatched on an errand. Given a gun and the dead gendarme’s car. The errand being to stop me from any investigation I might be making on the sly. This gunman caught me on the road near the hospital.”

  “You were shot?” Laïs Engles gasped through her hands.

  “Shot at. The fellow missed. I suppose I’ll never know who it was.” He described the chase through the fog. “Of course he took the fork going toward Port-au-Prince, to join his gang at the cemetery on the mountaintop. I went to Bois Legone, wrong choice. Lucky for Professor Schlitz, though. Marcelline, coming on a back trail, had reached Bois Legone and sneaked up on horseback behind a hedge that bordered the cemetery. And he stabbed the Professor through the hedge, just as the Professor was going to tell me about seeing that Panama hat. Stabbed him right in front of me. I didn’t see how, in the fog. But the same weapon he’d used on Haarman, remember. Thinking he might need such a weapon, Marcelline had cut himself another pole and lashed his knife to the tip. The hedge spoiled his aim.”

  “My shoulder!” the insectologist, his wound suddenly remembered, exhaled a loud groan. Then straightened up to gasp, “In that case—who was the rider who killed Marshelline?”

  “Marcelline,” Ranier said through his teeth. “Hoist on his own petard, by God! Talk about justice. Racing back up the mountain, he came out on the main r
oad for better speed, spurred to rejoin the gang. Horse hit that roadside ditch, full speed. Marcelline was thrown. Pole hit that big tree, jamming the knife up to the hilt. Other end, splintered, went through the Haitian like a lance. Score one for fate. And we’re getting,” Ranier promised, “to the end of that trail.”

  It was almost light in the sedan. He could see their faces; the girl’s expression masking a fear that had never left it since a moment, there, in the hospital when he’d unlaced a dead man’s shoe; the insectologist’s, greenish, somehow like that of a magnified mantis on its stalk-thin neck; the purpled cheeks, marble eyes, sea-cow moustaches of Dr. Eberhardt in a mutiny of disbelief—he could see their faces, and he could see his own reflection, ugly with soot, black quills on his chin, hammocks under his eyes, blood on his ear, tousled, beaten, haggard, looking back at him from the rear window. The lips snarled back, showing teeth, and he was saying:

  “Those curs found what they wanted in Captain Friederich’s mausoleum. It had to be there. Their underground machinery was off the track, but it was following a certain course, and they finally guessed the reason. So did the gangsters following the grave-digging crew. So did I, as I told you, at that grave under the big tree. Listen, Dr. Eberhardt. Your death records were wrong.”

  “Whaaat!”

  “That night you buried those six plague victims. January the third. 1922. Fourteen years ago. Those coffins lined up in the hall. You turned out the lights so the natives wouldn’t see what you were doing. You sealed the coffins. Polypheme helped you carry them out to the car. Miss Engles told me you wrote the names in pencil on the roughboxes. You were working fast, in the dark, putting those bodies down from cemetery to cemetery—”

  “Ja, ja! I buried them myself, I tell you. I—”

  “You were one ahead each time on the list,” Ranier said slowly. “Think. There was Adolph Perl, number one. The old lady, number two. The marine, Sergeant O’Grady, as three. Missionary, four. Colonel Otto, five. Captain Friederich, six. But you jumbled them in your haste, understand? You buried the old lady first. Number three in her plot. Number four at number three’s. Colonel Otto at number four’s. Captain Friederich at Colonel Otto’s. And in Captain Friederich’s mausoleum you put—”