I made up my mind. “Okay, Willard. You’ve got a deal. But understand one thing — you take orders from me!”
“Sure — sure. But there is one other thing.”
“There always is. What?”
“Even if I get out of this I’m going to be in a little trouble with the State Department.”
That was an understatement.
“You CIA people pack a lot of powder, I hear tell. You think you can fix it for me with State? So they won’t lift my passport?”
I was really surprised and showed it. “You mean they haven’t already?”
He grinned at me and suddenly I found myself liking the guy. He had a tooth out in front, and a scraggly ginger beard, and he looked like a not too smart all-American boy who had somehow gone wrong. An innocent. Something of a lout, but basically sound. None of this was true, of course.
“I’ve been lucky,” he said. “But this time State is going to nail me to the cross for sure. Unless you help me.”
Hawk can work miracles when he sets his mind to it. I i said: “All right. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”
That was all we had time for. The black girl brought the doll to us and we both spat on it and handed it back to her. Her sleek dark face was shiny with sweat and she showed a lot of white eyeball as she looked at me without, I think, seeing me at all.
She took the doll back to the houngan and handed it to him. Lyda caught my eye and beckoned me into the group. I joined them, with Willard hobbling at my side.
The houngan took a silver spoon out of his pocket and began to dig a hole near the circle of stones. It took me a I moment to realize that he was digging a tiny grave.
A crucifix made of twigs was planted at the head of the j little grave. Upside down. The houngan made a pass over the ragged doll and muttered something. I made out the word— Rutibel.
Lyda had moved away from Duppy and stood at my elbow I now and she was whispering in my ear.
“Rutibel is a demon. One of Satan’s helpers. This is real powerful obeah.”
I was a little impressed myself, but I said out of the corner of my mouth: “Sophisticated lady. Columbia grad. Worldly wench. Impressed by voodoo gimmicks.”
She squeezed my arm. “Don’t! Don’t talk like that. Not now. Not here.”
Hank Willard said, “I’m just happy that I’m not old P.P. tonight. Even if the son of a bitch is a billionaire. That’s his real hair on that egg, you know. One of his servants smuggled it out.”
They were all some kind of nuts and at the moment maybe I wasn’t much better. I looked up to catch Duppy’s stare on me. They were cold and searching, those red-stained eyes, and his thick lips moved in a half sneer. Duppy, I thought, isn’t much impressed by all this voodoo crap. Duppy is thinking about me, wondering if he is going to have to kill me. I knew the look. But why? That I didn’t know.
The houngan put the doll in the tiny grave and covered it over. More passes and incantations. Rutibel this and Rutibel that.
The girl came back with a crock of excrement. A big gourd cut to bowl shape and filled with human excrement. The houngan dumped the stuff on the little grave and muttered more of the curse, the obeah. Nobody said a word. I felt a sudden insane desire to laugh, but I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t have anyway. It would have been most impolitic.
The drum rolled a vibrant tattoo, and the girl leaped over the grave and then began to dance around it I nudged Lyda. “Isn’t that drum dangerous? So loud?”
She shook her head without looking at me. She seemed fascinated by the dancing black girl.
“No. P.P.’s guards won’t come in here at night. Neither will the Tonton Macoute—they’re Haitians too, you know. They’re all afraid of obeah. Especially Rutibel obeah. We’re safe here.”
I was a little on edge and it showed in my voice. “All right,” I gritted. “Let’s get Duppy and be on our way. I want to be outside P.P.’s gate when the sun comes up. Enough of this is enough.”
Lyda reached for my hand. She began to stroke it. The way she had stroked it that night in the voodoo church in New York. Her cool fingers brushed my palm.
“Not just yet,” she said. “Wait a little. Just watch — watch the girl dance and see what happens.” There was a breathless quality about the words, as though she were forcing them. I felt her tremble suddenly.
What the hell! Another orgy? With time getting away from us.
The black girl had somehow gotten naked. She danced around and around the grave, sweat gleaming on her satiny flesh, her head thrown back, eyes half closed, her sharp breasts bouncing up and down. The rest of the people closed in to make a tight little circle. They began to clap their hands softly in time to the drum.
The girl made a sound, half moan and half shriek, and fell shuddering to the ground near the grave. She lay spreadeagled and writhing, humping her pelvis.
There was a sound like the sound a stallion makes as he approaches a mare. Duppy leaped into the circle, shoving the blacks aside with his massive arms, and dropped on top of the girl. He slammed into the writhing black girl and she screamed and then came up to meet him and grabbed at him with her long thin legs and the watching people sighed like a small wind and kept on clapping as they watched. The drum began to match Duppy’s thrusts.
Lyda bit my ear. Her breath was on fire. She tugged at me. “Come on,” she said. “Just come on! You. Oh, you man! Come on.”
She led me back into the brush and fell down and pulled me down on her and it couldn’t have lasted two minutes. But what a two minutes!
When it was over and she stopped heaving and sighing and moaning and talking she lay for a minute or two with her eyes closed. Then she gave me a sort of cold look and said, in a sort of cold little voice, “You’re right. We can’t waste any more time here. We better get started.”
That was my girl. Do it and forget it. Put on a dry pair of panties and get on with business.
I thought that if I did get out of this, and did make a report to Hawk, I would leave this bit out. The Old Man would never believe it anyway.
Chapter 10
Dawn was still three hours away when we came down the far side of the mountain. The bloody moon, paling as the night grew old, sank into the valleys and we did the last two hours in total darkness. Duppy took us along a narrow caliche trail that twisted and turned like a crazy snake, and did it with the aplomb of a native New Yorker crossing Times Square. Lyda walked behind him, while I lagged back to give Hank Willard a hand now and then. I had seen his leg, with the newly healed bone grotesquely malformed. It cost him a lot to keep up, but he did pretty well. He didn’t have much gear to lug — just the clothes he stood in and an old British Sten machine carbine. He had a shopping bag full of 9mm ammo for the gun. The shopping bag was from Macy’s Herald Square. I asked him about that. During one of the few breaks that Duppy gave us Willard explained. If you could call it an explanation.
He shrugged and gave me his broken toothed grin. “A screwing laugh, ain’t it. Those crackpots that invaded with me must have handled their supply and logistics through Mad Magazine. I know for a fact they bought some bazookas from a junk dealer in New Jersey. None of them worked. I never did know where they got the relic I was flying, but just before I take off they hand me this Sten and half a shopping bag full of ammo. In case, they tell me, I get shot down and have to fight my way out. Any chance of me getting a shot of that rum, Sam. This damned leg is killing me.”