“I hadn’t seen Romera for a week,” Lyda said. “He hadn’t come to the apartment, or called, and whenever I called at his place or his office he was out. Or no one answered. I was worried sick and I was afraid — afraid that it was all over, that he was tired of me. But I had too much pride to go to his apartment, or his office on the campus, and confront him. I just suffered for a week.
“Then one afternoon I saw him on the campus. I had just come back from renting my cap and gown for graduation and I was on Broadway and he was coming out of a bookstore on the corner of 116th and Broadway. I waved at him and shouted — making a perfect fool of myself — and started to run toward him. I suppose I was a hundred feet or so from him. He turned to look at me and he seemed startled— then he swung away from me and crossed 116th and went down to the subway. Walking very fast. I still remember that, how fast he walked, as though he didn’t want to see me or talk to me. I stopped on the corner and watched him disappear and my knees were trembling and I thought my heart would stop beating.”
Lyda smiled faintly and looked at me with half-narrowed eyes. “That’s how young I was, Nick. Romera was my first love, the first man I had ever taken with consent. I thought the world had ended.
“It had ended, the world I had known until then, but that I didn’t grasp until later. I went back to my little apartment and locked myself in and cried. I suffered. I didn’t eat anything for two days, and I drank rum and got drunk and sick, and I played all the records we had enjoyed together, and I was really miserable. On the third day I had courage enough to call him at his office. This time he answered.”
She turned away from me and stretched her lithe brown body and buried her face in her arms. “Jesus God — when I think of it now! I must have terrified the poor man and made him sick, too. I cried and I begged and I even think I threatened him — said I would tell the whole campus, the newspapers, the world, about our affair. Anyway he promised to come and see me that evening. I can remember his exact words — he didn’t sound at all like himself, tense and hoarse and nervous — and he said that he had been ill with a virus.”
Something flickered in my brain, a microsecond of intuition that flared out before I could grasp it, a shadow with no substance to account for it, a pinprick without pain or blood that vanishes as it begins. A fourth generation computer would have caught and pinned it. I couldn’t.
Yet I asked, “Exactly what did he say?”
“He said, ‘You’re acting like a child, Lyda, and you mustn’t. Everything is all right. I have been ill and working hard, and I’ve been worried about something. Something you don’t know about. Nothing to do with you. But I’ll come tonight and we’ll talk it all out and get matters straightened around. I’ll be there at nine sharp. Be sure you’re alone. I don’t feel like seeing anyone else but you.’ ”
I flipped my butt overboard. I said I was a bit skeptical.
“You remember all that? Exactly? Verbatim? After five years?”
She nodded without looking at me. “I do. Just as he said it. Every word. He never arrived at my place, because they took him that night, and I think that fixed the words in my mind. Later I understood what he was worried about, and why he had been staying away from me. Romera had been writing a series of articles against Papa Doc, for the New York Times, and he didn’t want to involve me. I think he had a premonition that the Tonton Macoute would get him. But he must have expected them to murder him, not kidnap him and smuggle him back to Haiti.”
I kicked it around in my mind for a couple of minutes. On the surface it appeared logical enough, to make sense, yet something was missing. But there was nothing to come to grips with and I brushed it off.
Lyda said: “I waited and waited. He never came. Somewhere between his apartment — he had a place near Barnard— and my place they got him. It must have been easy. Romera was such an innocent. He didn’t even know how to protect himself.”
Yes, I thought. It would have been easy. A man walking down busy, crowded upper Broadway on a limpid June night. A car pulling over to the curb and a couple of goons leaping out and grabbing him and shoving him into the car. It would have been smoothly and efficiently done. Once he was in the car it was all over. They had probably taken him straight to some banana tramp at a pier in Brooklyn or Staten Island.
The sun had gone and the short purple twilight of the sub-tropics fell like a gauzy net over Sea Witch. Lyda Bonaventure lay with her eyes closed, breathing deeply, half between sleep and waking, and I knew she was through talking. No matter. I knew the rest of the story. Most of it was in the AXE files and some I had picked up from Steve Bennett, the CIA man who had been killed in the voodoo church.
I picked her up and carried her into the deckhouse and put her on the divan. I patted her cheek. “Catch a little nap, kid Not for long, because we’re taking off as soon as it’s dark.”
I stowed the two extra machine guns in the deckhouse and took the third with me when I went forward to make up our packs. I didn’t want to show a light and I had to hurry. The dusky light seeping in the ports was already clotting into darkness.
I rigged two surplus Army packs, and two musette bags, and prepared two web belts with canteens and mess kits and a couple of Swiss tool-knives and compasses. All this junk was helter-skelter in one big crate and as I sorted it out I picked up the story of Dr. Romera Valdez where Lyda had dropped it.
There had been one hell of a stink about it in the papers. The Times especially, for which Valdez had been doing the articles, had played it big. Both in the news columns and on the editorial page. Net result — a big zero. Papa Doc sat tight and denied everything, or ignored it, and after two or three weeks the story petered out. Nobody came forward. Nobody had seen Valdez abducted. Nobody had seen anything. He had stepped into a manhole and disappeared down a bottomless canyon.
Not quite. The FBI went to work on it — we had their stuff in our files — and found that a small tramp steamer, a vintage rustpot, had left Staten Island the morning after Valdez’ disappearance. She was La Paloma, registered in Panama. The CIA, when they took over, traced her ownership to Haiti and that was where the trail stopped. Ostensibly La Paloma was owned by the Bank of Haiti. Papa Doc.
There wasn’t a damned thing the United States could do about it. Valdez had never become an American citizen. It took the CIA a year to find out that he was being held in the dungeons under the palace. That was all they could find out — that Valdez was alive and apparently well treated. Now, according to AXE files, this P.P. Trevelyn had him somewhere on his estates near Sans Souci. That figured, if Valdez was working on atomic warheads for the missiles Papa Doc was supposed to have. They would need space and privacy, something you couldn’t get in Port-au-Prince.
I filled another musette bag with ammo and carried the lot back to the deckhouse. I had enough ammo for a small war, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it. I also had a dozen each of gas, smoke, and fragmentation grenades. I was tempted to take one of the recoilless rifles and a mortar, then I laughed at myself and forgot it. We would be laden enough as it was and we had to travel fast and far.
I wakened Lyda, and we ran out of the cove without lights and turned into the channel between Tortuga and the mainland. She squatted in the cockpit and read the chart by the light of the instrument board. We were into it now, in Haitian waters and past the point of no return, and if one of Papa Doc’s patrols spotted us it was all over.