by Otto Penzler
“The coffin—the coffin that had Adolph Perl’s body in it!” Dr. Eberhardt shouted.
“No,” Ranier said.
• • •
THERE WAS A long, stunned pause.
“What is that you say?”
Slow ribbons of smoke drifted from Ranier’s nostrils as he said, “Dr. Eberhardt, do you remember what happened that night fourteen years ago when you laid out those people who died of that plague?”
A flush of exasperation, anger, bafflement crimsoned the plump face under the yellow sou’wester.
“You do not make sense. Nothing tonight makes sense. Am I going mad? Do I hear this? Just now you tell me Adolph Perl—number one coffin—is put by mistake in the mausoleum of Captain Friederich—number six—aber, then you tell me—”
“I asked you if you recalled what happened that night you buried those people. Something disappeared, Miss Engles told me.”
“A suitcase!” the red face blurted. “A suitcase of valuable—a dispatch case owned by the German government which I have returned to Berlin if Adolph Perl, the mate, should die. It was stolen. It was stolen by a sailor—”
“The sailor, Hans Blücher,” Laïs Engles helped him in a breathless tone.
Ranier said roughly, “This Blücher ran out of the door. Perl went after him to bring him back. Perl came back alone, crawled up on the operating table, saying he was dying, he’d contracted the plague.”
“That is so,” the girl whispered.
“He asked Dr. Eberhardt to lay him in the hall so that he might die beside his officers. Dr. Eberhardt went out to the barn to fetch the coffins. You, Miss Engles, ran upstairs, hid for a while—”
The little doctor roared, “What? What is this about?”
“The body of Adolph Perl was not in that coffin in the mausoleum.”
Laïs Engles sobbed, “But it was! It was! I saw it there when the lid was nailed on—saw his hand—the scar—”
Ranier leaned across the seat, eyes squinted, stern. “Dr. Eberhardt! You know what was in that suitcase owned by the Wilhelmstrasse. The case that secret mission intended for the Chilean diplomats in exchange for Chilean help—to buy explosives from Valparaiso. What was it?”
“Documents,” the old man muttered. “Papers from the Kaiser.”
“That’s not all!” Rainer’s tone was iron.
“Nein,” came the thick-throated whisper. “Also there were jewels. The neutral powers would not take paper money. Germany had no gold. There were jewels in the suitcase, heirlooms, the last hopeless donation of a beaten people. Four million marks’ worth of jewels.”
“Four million marks,” Ranier said harshly, “equalled one million dollars. There were a million dollars’ worth of jewels, gems wrapped in packets of oilskin, in Adolph Perl’s coffin, but Adolph Perl’s body wasn’t. The body in that coffin was that of a smaller man, thinner, a scar painted on his hand—I’d guess with iodine from your laboratory—a body exchanged in the dark while the little girl was upstairs and you were out in the barn with Polypheme. That body had four million marks’ worth of jewelry stuffed up its sleeves, its trouser-legs, under its sweater—Adolph Perl’s clothing, incidentally—to make it look heavier and give it weight. I suppose it was too dark with the lights out to see the face, but you should’ve examined it more closely, there in the hall, Dr. Eberhardt. More closely, before nailing on the lid. That body had been smashed on the back of the head. I saw the fractured skull. It had this in its teeth.”
With numb fingers he fumbled from his pocket a handful of pearls, a string of bitten cherry-sized globules that rolled about on his palm and shone skim-milk blue in the morning light.
“In the skull—” Dr. Eberhardt choked. “In its teeth—!”
“A man suffocating might bite his own arm,” Ranier said huskily. “Hans Blücher woke up in that coffin. Hans Blücher was entombed alive.”
CHAPTER XXVI
END OF THE TRAIL
It spoiled an orange sunrise that flamed with tropic flamboyance down the eastern mornes, painting a panorama of crinkly green-brown mountains, blazing blue gulf, the Jim Crow roofs of Port-au-Prince like litter on a beach, the tall masts of the wireless station incongruous on a skyline as luminous, exotic and gaudy as a macaw.
Haiti yawned by on a mule, going to market. Highways into town were clogged by circus parades of oxen, burros, dogs, goat-carts, trick bicycle riders, minstrels in bright costumes, jugglers balancing great baskets of fruit on cannon-ball heads, pickaninnies, turbanned crones, parrots and Nubians; cackling, mooing and shouting to create an impression of activity in a republic of sloth, a celebration to Morning after Night.
Ranier silently cursed slow traffic, his eye on the sprawled confusion of the waterfront where the Swastika-painted stacks of a great German touring liner overshadowed the town, placidly smoking in preparation for departure. She was, Ranier recognized, the ship which had moaned its way down the gulf last evening when the fog began. Other than a tangle of small fishing vessels, the only ship in port.
His own hooker wasn’t due till noon, but he took the Model T from Polypheme and didn’t spare the horse-power, racing for the municipal pier. Grim-jawed, tense, he drove; shifting his eyes but twice from those three black-and-white funnels, when he turned his head to answer two questions.
Laïs Engles asked in an odd, stiff voice, “Then—then Mr. Haarman was Adolph Perl?”
“Yes. The webbed foot settled it in my mind. Too rare an abnormality for coincidence. I had to assume he was the mate on your uncle’s schooner; then figure out who it was you saw in that coffin, instead. Had to be the other sailor, of course. Blücher, panic-stricken in that quarantined hospital, would naturally try to run for it. Natural enough for Adolph Perl to’ve gone after him, but it wasn’t so natural for Perl to come back, the place a death-house as it was. No, he must’ve come back for something more than patriotism in a cause long since lost.
“We’ll never know the truth of it, but Adolph Perl caught Blücher from behind, cracked him with a gun-butt probably, and my guess is he tucked Blücher into that cupboard, that same cupboard in the hall where he himself was stuffed fourteen years later. Then he played the big dying scene for Dr. Eberhardt, faking the symptoms and pulling a phony death-rattle. And Dr. Eberhardt took it for granted the man was dead.”
“Herr Gott!” the old physician blurted. “How could I make such a mistake?”
“I can see how.” Ranier’s tone was without censure. “An epidemic bursting out on you like that, late at night, excitement, one death after another—and anybody’d be up in the air. You gave Adolph Perl a hasty once-over, maybe hurriedly felt for a pulse, in the darkness and all his acting deceived you.
“Besides, if that mauve death was as contagious as you say, you’d instinctively be pretty leery of close contact. Anyway, he wasn’t dead, and when you hurried away to build him a coffin, as he knew you’d do, he got busy. The little girl had run somewhere to hide, the lights were out, it was a cinch to change clothes with the body in the cupboard, paint that artificial scar, smear up the face. A long chance of course, but a million dollars is a long shot anywhere. And it worked. Adolph Perl emptied that suitcase, stuffed the packets of jewelry into the clothes he’d put on Blücher, and fled.
“A perfect scheme in its way. German agents would be looking for Blücher, not Perl. He couldn’t have passed a suitcase loaded with four million marks’ worth of jewelry through the customs, either. So he’d buried his treasure; all he had to do was hide out till the uproar blew over, then come back to Haiti with a batch of grave-diggers, exhume the loot and smuggle it back to Germany. What I can’t understand is why he waited fourteen years.”
Dr. Eberhardt mopped a stricken forehead. “Himmel! To think that man, Blücher, was only unconscious when I nailed up the coffin. I was excited that night. Worn out. I feel as if I had murdered—”
“Not you,” Ranier corrected, kindly. “Haarman—Perl—killed him.”
“The arac
hnid!” the professor condemned learnedly. “The dirty solpugid!”
Laïs Engles breathed fiercely, “They must all be punished! Do you think we will catch them at the pier?” And Ranier turned his head the second time to smile at her thinly and answer by a shoulder-lift.
THEN, WITH THE ship’s iron hull towering up alongside like a long dark cliff against the sun, midgets gazing down from a lofty focsle head, officers bright trifles on the bridge, tugs fussing under her nose, sailors standing by the lines—all the hustle, bustle and dock-halloo of sailing time, Ranier was certain he’d backed the wrong hunch.
Customs police met him at the pier gates with negative headshakes. Gendarmes greeted him with shrugs and empty hands. A line official accompanied the car down the long jetty to the gangway where tourist passengers were straggling up the roped incline, and a white-and-gold purser, passenger-list in hand, was examining the papers of a party anxious for cabin-space.
An ultramarine sky heated overhead, and the crowded pier, cramped between ship’s hull and walls of a warehouse, was baking. Ranier fried in perspiration and impatience, waiting a word with this Nazi-moustached ship’s purser who was tied up with red tape at the gangway’s foot. The purser tried to speak bad French, and his prospective passengers were trying to speak bad German. Ranier gave the group a quick scrutiny.
The man of the party, French and elderly, stoop-shouldered in dark cutaway, pointed Vandyke beard and green sun glasses, was excitedly hunting for mislaid visas and demanding to know if German pursers thought Frenchmen were stowaways. The German was fussy about details. There were three women in the Frenchman’s party, standing by in gloomy silence, all dressed in the sombre black of deep mourning, heavily veiled in tragedy, and the Frenchman wore the black arm-band of bereavement on his sleeve; but the ship’s purser was a stickler for rules. Nobody could have escaped his eagle eye to stow away on board, tragic or no.
No, he finally found time to answer Ranier’s question, there were no other new passengers embarking. Those who were going aboard were German tourists who had come on the cruise. Ja, all the tour people were now aboard, and so soon as he could straighten out the difficulty with this Frenchman and his party, the only newcomers so far, the liner would sail.
“Man and three women.” Ranier shook his head glumly at Dr. Eberhardt, waiting in the shadow of the godowns. “Only ones going aboard from here. Guess I’ve missed the turn. But there are other ports in Haiti, and the Garde d’Haiti, this morning, is watching every one.”
“Cable pour m’sieu.” A line official touched his arm.
Ranier ripped open the envelope, read sullenly, handed the missive to Professor Schlitz. The cable read:
Man Answering Your Description, Scar, Webbed Foot, Sentenced State Prison Auburn, N.Y. August 1922, Second Degree Murder Conviction, Killing in Utica, Under Name Gustaf Tropmann. Released Auburn January 1936.
“There’s your spider for you, Professor. Another murder, soon as he could reach New York from Haiti. Auburn Prison. So that’s why he was delayed. Explains his pallor on the cruise, too. I took a long chance and wirelessed a friend of mine in the New York police. At first I thought he was a consumptive, remember? I—”
He choked on a smoking oath.
Watching him, Laïs Engles gasped, “What is the matter?”
He’d been going to ask the professor to recall how, on pointing out Haarman’s pallor to Kavanaugh, the Irishman had stopped him on the syllable “con.” Had Kavanaugh known Haarman to be a convict?
JOHN RANIER NEVER voiced that speculation, or answered the girl’s query. Brushing his three companions aside, he leapt away from the sheet-iron wharf-wall where they had been standing; went threshing across the pier like a small whirlwind, elbows going like pistons, boots kicking a path. Stevedores, porters, darky dock wallopers struggled to make elbow room. People saw the steely eyes, the purposeful jaws and ugly pallor of this man battling to reach the gangway, and trampled to get out of range. Somewhere sailors were yelling, the khaki gendarmes were running from the customs gate. Clamour broke loose in the sunshine.
The ship’s purser, in voluble argument at the gangway’s foot, did not notice Ranier’s approach, but the Frenchman with the parted Vandyke and smoked glasses saw him coming, whirled in spry alarm, cried out to the three veiled women.
Ranier punched with everything he had, uppercutting the man’s neat beard a blow that tore it loose by the roots. Crack! Vandyke and sun glasses went flying.
Everything whirligigged around him as his fingers found the man’s throat and they locked together. He could hear himself squalling, “Kavanaugh! Kavanaugh!” while white faces shouted and boiled around them, police whistles shrilled, Germans bellowed down from the ship’s upper decks, riot churned on the pier.
Kavanaugh’s complexion was goose-color save where adhesive had peeled the skin from his jaws. His eyes squeezed shut and his tongue poked blue from his teeth. John Ranier would have choked him to death, gripping like a bulldog, if it hadn’t thundered. Not exactly thunder. A gun jabbed under his arm went bonk! The bullet scorched cloth under his armpit; hit the unmasked Irishman in the liver.
Kavanaugh died against him, and he had to fling the body off, leaping around just in time to catch a revolver by the barrel and deflect a second bullet into planking at his feet. Black cloth and a woman’s funeral veil ripped in his clawing right hand; then he was waltzing furiously with a lady in black, an astonishing lady who breathed hoarse profanity on an odor of strong tobacco at his face, and kicked his shins like a soccer player.
With a violent wrench he wrested the gun from this enemy’s grip; drove a knee into a corseted midriff; the astonishing widow went down, skirts tearing to the hip, exposing golf stockings and plus fours. Ranier removed hat and veil with a soccer-kick of his own, and Mr. Brown looked up at him with a dislocated grin and popping unconscious eyes.
Gendarmes were chasing a second black figure down the jetty. Afterwards he wondered whether she fainted or tripped on stretched hawser; but he saw her veil tear loose as she fell; saw that half-second glimpse of blowzy peroxide hair, shrieking baby-mouth, horrified googoo eyes; saw her plunge in a roil of pink underwear and skirts down between ship and pier.
An oily geyser spouted up the ship’s side.
Somewhere Professor Schlitz was screaming, “Mish May! Mish May!”
Somewhere Laïs Engles screamed, “Look out!”
Another gun was banging; people were running past him, running from that third black figure in funeral weeds which was standing against a sheet-iron warehouse wall and firing indiscriminately at everything.
“Come and get it!”—(Bang!) “Come on, you dingy lugs, and get it!”—(Bang-bang!) “First guy that touches me is it!”—(Bang-bang-bang!)
It was strange. Strange to stand there frozen at that deserted gangway, staring at that black figure against the bright wall as if at the personification of death come to take him in broad daylight. A sort of magic had cleared the pier. In a twinkling the crowd had gone, the douane become deserted, the faces vanished from tier on tier of deck-rails in the ship’s wall behind him. People were crouched behind cotton bales, salt bags, mounds of luggage, loading trucks, and he was left in the open like the Last Man, a dead Irishman and an unconscious fat man between himself and Death. Death waiting there in the sunshine, grotesque and clownish in appropriate mourning costume, black skirts, black veils, a tub-shaped black hat dowdily over the forehead. Death aiming an automatic pistol in one hairy big-knuckled hand.
“SO IT’S YOU?” Death was addressing him in a buttery chuckle. “Gummed the works for us after all, didn’t you, Doc? Well, I missed you last night in the fog, but I ain’t gonna miss you this time.”
A big paw cleared the veils before the eyes, and the Coolidge face looked humorous in its masquerade; eyes like merry carbuncles, jaws grinning a gorilla display of gold-plated teeth. The countenance of a Mack truck decked in the feminine elegance of a Parisienne funeral-hearse, First Class. He winked
at John Ranier over the levelled gun, his expression mischievous.
“I’m sorry,” he said amiably, “because I kind of liked you, Doc.” He paused to wipe suds from the corners of his lips. Said plaintively, “You hadn’t oughta upset me just now when I’m a mass of nerves.”
Ranier had a feeling of everything in suspended animation. His arm hung volitionless. There was a gun in that hand, but it would take a thousand years to aim and fire, and the gesture would mean suicide. Facing Mr. Coolidge in yellow sunlight, Mr. Coolidge like some huge urchin having fun in his aunt’s bustle—facing that gold-toothed grin and hair-trigger gun, Ranier felt heavily depressed.
Everything, now, was over. Something inside him had finished.
Tomorrow he would be a bum ship’s doctor dealing seasick pills and tomato juice to American tourists on an endless cruise. Tomorrow he’d be on his way from bar to bar, aguardiente to aguardiente, a little duller, a little grayer.
Funny, wasn’t it? All night expended in an effort to prove there were no such phenomena as the “living” dead? He perceived he’d been chasing the wrong man. He was the zombie—
He said wryly, “I’m sorry, Mr. Coolidge, because I kind of liked you, too.” Deliberately he raised the gun.
The revolver was heavy and his hand was slow. He could see his shabby cuff climbing past the lower buttons of his tunic. Years went by. When his wrist came even with the fourth button, the big man opposite him fired. Ranier heard the explosion, but he never saw the flash. Laïs Engles’ scream was simultaneous with gunroar, her movement fast as a shadow blown by wind. Like a shadow she was there, flying from obscurity near the gangway behind him to throw her arms about Ranier and bring him to his knees at the moment of Coolidge’s shot.