Color Him Dead

by Charles Runyon

  Drew’s mind was racing. Lord, here he’d been squatting on the island, feeling so goddam clever and inconspicuous, and all the time he might as well have been wearing a neon sign on his back saying: I’m up to no good. Chaka’s information had so far been chillingly correct.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Later I found your gun, and I ask myself: Why he didn’t kill Doxie? Then I understand. Doxie is the little one, the barracuda, and you saving you stren’th for the shark.”

  “Ian Barrington?”

  “Weh.”

  Drew smiled thinly in the dark; he was not surprised. Given the same circumstance, with nothing more than surface appearances, he might have drawn the same conclusion. But now Chaka was waiting. What to do? Confirm or deny? Neither, he told himself, let it ride, play along, and hope to hell you’re not getting sucked into quicksand.

  “You mentioned help,” said Drew.

  Chaka leaned back into a more relaxed position. “There is a small French island thirty miles from here. When you ready to leave, I take you there and give you the papers you need to stay.”

  “After I knock off Barrington,” said Drew.

  “Weh.”

  “Can’t you kill him yourself?” asked Drew.

  “With this—” Chaka held up one hand with fingers curved “—I could crush his head like a dry gourd. But he knows me, and I cannot get near enough. No black man gets near him.”

  Drew felt as though he were teetering on the edge of a snake pit. Already he knew enough to be dangerous to Chaka. More knowledge could only make it worse. Still if he accepted the identity of Barrington-killer, he’d have to pretend an interest in the other’s motives. “Why do you want him dead?”

  “You know the man, and you ask this?” The question was rhetorical, for Chaka continued without pause. ”Coutay, once I work for Ba’ngton, like my mother and father and their fathers before them. Always we have been Ba’ngton’s, like animals in the pen. But special, you see, because one Ba’ngton a hundred years ago liked to watch his slaves fight. He say to himself, I will breed a team of giant fighters. He never think that someday a giant may step on his master.” Abruptly, he turned to Drew. “You know this name, Chaka, where it coming from?”

  “No,” said Drew.

  “T’ch’ka,” pronounced Chaka, clicking his tongue against his palate. “Ruled the Zulu empire a hundred years ago. I took his name when I left Ba’ngton, where I was called Albert. Now I call myself Chaka because these people cannot speak the Zulu. I am a chief, but only of a few charcoal burners and fishermen. I command them to fish, they fish. Mend nets, they mend. Bring rum, yes, and carry the guns which I buy with money from the rum. But fight against the whites? Ah, their eyes go round, they have fear. Always the soldiers have come when white man’s blood runs. But they will learn this is no longer true. The Federation is dead, and the British will not fight for this poor island. With Ba’ngton gone, the others will not stay, and there is all that land to divide among my people.”

  “Are you a communist?”

  “You wish me to be a communist? All right, I bow to Moscow. You wish me to be Ras Tafari, I bow to Addis Ababa. You wish me to bow to a dead dog, I do that too if it will help my people.”

  Drew released a yawn which was not all assumed. Nervous tension was boiling inside him; he couldn’t think in the presence of this hulk—he wanted to get away without having to make a definite commitment to help. He pleaded a headache, remarked to Chaka that he would sleep now and talk more later, since there were many things yet to be worked out. Chaka reluctantly agreed, and Drew stepped out of the cab. The engine started with a cloud of blue smoke and Drew remembered: “Hey, my bullets!”

  The truck moved forward and Chaka’s arm came out of the window. The lead pellets clattered over the highway. Drew picked them up, thinking of trust and friendship. Neither of those could exist between black and blanc; only marriages of convenience and passion, like his and Chaka’s, his and Leta’s.

  He hobbled up the path as dawn filled the eastern sky with a color of spoiled salmon. Tall palms arched overhead, rising from the lighter green of banana leaves. Here and there a cocoa tree stood with pods appended to its trunk like afterthoughts.

  Chaka’s project receded to the back of his mind, and once again he was filled with the purpose which had sustained him for so many years. Edith’s memory … that was his problem now. What was her doctor’s name? Ainslee, Aintree? Close enough, Leta would know where to find him.

  He dreaded leaving the bush and going to the capital. Nature was constant; grass knew no fashion, it was always green, and birds sang the same songs forever. But cities changed, new gadgets appeared, new idioms, new mannerisms. And people … God, he’d have to stay out of sight. Leta’s barbering had made him look exactly like the picture on his wanted poster.

  FIVE

  Ainslee was the kind of physician you call Doc instead of Doctor—a bullock-headed man with a red face, curling sandy hair, blond mustache, and a basketball-sized paunch which hung over the belt of his green Bermuda shorts. His bedside manner would have been improved by a shave and some breath-sweetener, but Drew was relieved when Doc accepted Drew’s story that he’d received the leg injury—and by implication, the cheek scar—in a car wreck. Doc pulled his swivel chair up to the examining table, palmed Drew’s leg, poked it so that it swung like a limp, dead tentacle, then leaned back and ignited a foul cigar butt. “I think you’ve got a Pott’s fracture. Can you fly to Trinidad for X-rays?”

  “No. What’s a Pott’s fracture?”

  Doc leaned over, grunting as he settled his paunch between his thighs, and held the glowing end of his cigar uncomfortably near Drew’s ankle. “You have two bones in your lower leg, the fibula and the tibia. When the break occurs simultaneously in both bones just above the ankle joint, that’s a Pott’s fracture. That’s what happened to you. Obviously it wasn’t properly splinted, and the flesh was badly torn. The lack of sensation indicates nerve damage as well. Come into the hospital. We’ll immobilize the leg in traction—”

  “No.”

  Doc frowned at Drew through a haze of smoke, then shrugged. “I can bind it with tape to give it strength, but I’m not optimistic—”

  “Okay, tape it.”

  While Doc applied the spiral of tape, Drew tried to think of an unobtrusive way to bring Edith into the conversation. But it was Doc, finished with the leg and fingering Drew’s battered scalp, who provided the opening:

  “Contusions, lumps, cuts, nothing serious. Where did you run into Doxie?”

  Drew kept his voice casual. “On Barrington’s Isle. I was spear-fishing, ran across Mrs. Barrington, we talked, Doxie ordered me off, but I didn’t like his tone. We fought.”

  Doc nodded. “I knew I’d seen that kind of head injury before. Those sharp little heels have brought me more than one patient. One of his victims died, another drools at the mouth and has to be fed by his wife.” Doc threw his cigar butt at a cuspidor and missed. “Can’t hate the poor bugger, I suppose. Years ago he got into it with a man’s wife, and the man fixed Doxie with his cutlass. Brutal job. He came to me once for help, but there was nothing left—”

  “Yes.” Drew wanted to get back to Edith. “Mrs. Barrington told me you’d treated her for amnesia two … three years ago.”

  Doc reddened, coughed, fluttered his fingers searchingly over his shirt pockets, then opened his desk drawer. His voice was gruff and defensive. “Two years ago September.” He lifted out a cigar and glared at Drew. “Brought to me with a simple breakdown due to extreme emotional shock. Therapy called for rest and sympathy, but Ian hustled her off and they shot a lot of blasted electricity into her skull.” Doc lit the new cigar, just as foul as the old one. “You owe me two dollars,” he said, then added in a tone of mild apology: “It’s against my policy to discuss other patients.”

  Drew pulled out his wallet and pretended to search through a sheaf of garish West Indian currency. Hoping his voice was casual, he as
ked: “In a case like hers, how do you bring back the memory?”

  “You wait. You might speed it up with gentle reminders of the past, relive pleasant things she’s done before. But only pleasant things. An unpleasant shock might send her off the deep end again.”

  In the street, Drew found that his taped leg now bore a small fraction of his weight. The black wool suit Leta had borrowed from her cousin pinched his crotch and held his shoulders in a full-nelson. But he felt good; he knew what to do about Edith. He would bring back her memory; she would be fully alert to the evil she had committed, and she would understand the revenge he was exercising. She was a witch, and she must confess her witchery before she was tied to the stake and the faggot lit beneath her….

  But first he had to learn what had set her off.

  Inside the tiny Carnegie library, Drew shuffled through a dusty file of two-year-old newspapers and found nothing which might have shocked Edith out of her mind. But two were missing: September 5 and September 21. A yellow woman, who looked as dusty as her shelves, suggested that the Voice of St. Patricia could fill the gap. Drew shrank from submitting himself to the professional curiosity of newspapermen. Perhaps Leta knew someone on the Voice editorial staff.

  The little rum shop where he’d left her seemed dark after the glaring sun of the street. A red-cheeked cable ship crewman sat at the bar with his knees caught between those of a chocolate girl in a white jersey. Leta sat at a corner table, shredding a napkin and rolling it between her fingers. He wondered how she felt, waiting for him in the place where she had once awaited girl-hungry sailors and yachtsmen.

  Her eyes lighted up as she saw him, then filmed over with a guarded wariness, as though she were not sure what changes had come over him during his absence. He sat down across from her and asked if she knew anyone with the Voice of St. Patricia. Yes, she said, she knew an American who worked on the paper. She’d known him for two years, and he’d once given her a pair of red panties and silver earrings.

  If the man had been here two years, Drew reasoned, he would not have seen that incriminating photo which hung in three thousand post offices. He explained what he wanted and asked Leta either to bring the papers or the man himself. She left and returned with a tall man in his middle twenties with a waxy strand of blond hair in his eyes. He sat down without invitation and said he couldn’t understand how Drew had escaped notice, since any white man on the island rated a line of copy each time he sneezed. He pulled a notebook from his pocket. “Name, occupation—?”

  Drew stretched out his hand and took the pad. “I’m on a secret government mission. Did you bring the papers?”

  Blinking as though a bright light had been flashed in his eyes, the man drew the rolled up newspapers from his hip pocket and laid them on the table. “Whatever’s in there, it’s the biggest coverup since Pompeii. I sneaked these out of the editor’s file.”

  The issue of September 5 was a chronicle of death and grief. Four members of a family of six had died of food poisoning, and the police had arrested the cook, said to be a practitioner of Obeah. A pan man in a steel band had died of fever, and a colleague had said, “Well, he’d served his time.” Two missing fishermen had been given up after two weeks; a stowaway had died of pneumonia in the refrigerated hold of a banana ship; two fourteen-year-old servant girls had died in a fire—

  He opened the second paper and found the same recital of death and accident. He was scanning the legal notices when Edith’s name leaped out from a column of agate type:

  ASSIZES

  Edith Barrington not guilty by reason of insanity in deaths of Millicent Henry and Princella Duplessis.

  He stared at it for a long time, trying to remember where he’d seen those names before. Of course! Those two fourteen-year-olds who had died in the fire. How had Edith gotten mixed up in that?

  He needed more information, but he didn’t trust the newspaperman. He handed the papers back and thanked the man. When he’d gone, Drew turned to Leta.

  “I want a lawyer. A barrister, that is, who isn’t tied up with the government or with Ian Barrington.”

  She looked thoughtful. “There is a black man, Guillard D’Arco. Sometimes he speaks in the savanne, tells the people about Abraham Lincoln and asks them to vote for him, instead of as the blancs say. Sometimes he calls Barrington names which make the people walk away from fear to be near him. One time, when Doxie kill a banana worker in a fight, Guillard take him before the judge and Barrington must pay the family—”

  “He’s the one I want. Bring him here.”

  Leta was back in ten minutes without the man, but with instructions to meet him in a rum shop called The Cabaret. Drew found it huddled against the rear of a banana shed smelling of fish and copra, noisy with the chant-and-shuffle of banana loaders. He stepped into a musty interior containing a wooden bar and shelves filled with unlabeled rum bottles. Above the bar protruded a girl’s head, topped by a black beret. She gave him a sullen, sleepy look when he asked for Guillard D’Arco, then pointed toward a door at the rear of the shop. A sign above it read: do not sleep on these tables.

  He pushed open the door and found himself in a dimly-lit room with a half-dozen scattered tables. Without warning, a meaty forearm clamped him around the neck and jerked him against a massive chest. Drew kicked backward with his good leg, but the grip tightened until he could no longer breathe. He let himself go limp, felt the hands slapping his pockets, felt his belt pulled loose and his trousers jerked down to his knees. He struggled silently and ferociously against the grip, and in a moment he was free, on his hands and knees. He looked up at the black mountain who stood with Drew’s gun holster in his hands, its two broken straps dangling.

  Panting, Drew groped for his crutch and spoke through clenched teeth. “Chaka, why don’t you buy your own goddam gun?”

  Chaka showed no sign of his recent exertion. “Why you leave Marie’s? You think you can move on this island without my people seeing you?”

  Drew got to his feet and jerked up his pants. “I was thinking it over.”

  “You think better in town?”

  “Yes.”

  Chaka frowned, then shrugged. “So what do you say?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  The giant smiled. “You say that now that your gun is gone.”

  “I’ll kill Ian Barrington for you. Okay? Now give my gun back.” Chaka started to take out the magazine and Drew said: “Loaded.”

  Chaka shook his head, and Drew felt a crawling impatience. “Look, you’re acting like a thumb-fingered dolt. If it’s going to work, I’ve got to operate without you breathing down my neck. That means you’ve got to trust me. You might as well start now, otherwise I walk out.”

  Chaka looked at him but made no move to return the gun. Drew turned his back and took two steps toward the door, his back tingled. A new voice froze him in his tracks.

  “You’ve reached an impasse, Chaka. My turn now.”

  The voice was deep, with a musical lilt, as though the speaker were not only mocking the world but himself as well. Drew turned to see a tall slim man almost invisible in a black suit. His ebony face had sharp, Caucasian features. He kept one hand in his jacket pocket; the other held a cigarette lighter to a cigarette between his lips.

  “I am Guillard D’Arco,” he said, stepping out of the shadows. “Call me Gil. Chaka told me about you, and when Leta said you wanted to see me, I thought to relieve Chaka’s worry at the same time.”

  “You’re the real leader, then?”

  Chaka broke in. “No.”

  “Each of us has an independent following,” said the tall man. “Chaka’s people are young and violent, mine are—”

  “Women and old men,” said Chaka.

  Guillard smiled without looking at Chaka. “—are willing to accept slower success with less risk. I’ve been attempting a legal approach through the Independence Party. People come to rallies, but only to listen. Half the men owe their livelihood to Barrington, and nobody votes fo
r me who values his job. So, until I can destroy this money power, my aims have temporarily merged with Chaka’s.” He waved his hand negligently. “You understand that, having told you all this, we must have your co-operation—or your silence.”

  “Hell, I said I’d do it. But only under certain conditions. First the gun.”

  “The gun, the gun. Give him the gun, Chaka, then let’s sit down and hear his conditions.”

  Seated on a bench at a scarred table, Drew felt better with the gun weighting his side pocket. Chaka rumbled an order in patois, and the girl slouched in with a rum bottle and three glasses.

  Drew poured rum into his glass and thought of the revolution: Fire, riots, chaos … a man who expected it could work unseen and get away before anyone knew what had happened.

  “About those other conditions,” he said. “I have only three days left on my visa. Can you fix it up for another month?”

  Guillard looked at Chaka, who nodded. “Thomas arrange it. Give me the card.”