I said no to the rum, mindful of his file. He was a drunk when he had the chance. Just the same I could have used a shot of the Barbancourt.
“Duppy’s got the booze,” I told him. “And Duppy is going to keep it until this is over. Time enough for drinking when that happens, and when you’re out of Haiti. Then you can drink yourself to death, for all I care.”
We couldn’t see each other in the dark, but I roughened my voice. “I mean that, Willard. You foul me up and I’ll let you rot here!”
“All right, Sam. Okay! No use getting steamed about it. I just thought a little drink wouldn’t hurt any.”
He dropped it and went on telling me how the B25 hadn’t had a bomb sight — his employers not being able to afford one — and he had dropped his bombs by dead reckoning. Missing the Palace, and Papa Doc, and hitting the Iron Market and a garbage dump.
He snickered. “Goddamn bombs were duds anyway. Probably weren’t even armed. Christ only knows where they bought them.”
I wanted to keep Hank Willard happy, and loyal to me. A Sten gun will throw 550 rounds a minute and the time might come when I would need that. I pretended an interest in his misfortunes.
“Wasn’t that part of your job, Hank? To inspect the bombs before you took off on that wild ass flight?”
He laughed. “I don’t know anything about bombs. I was a fighter pilot, for Christ’s sake. I never flew a bomber before. I told them I had, when they recruited me, because I was broke and needed the dough. I got it, too. Five thousand bucks, less what I had to give the blacks for hiding and feeding me. Right here in a money belt.”
“That should get you to Hong Kong,” I said.
“Your screwing A, it will. And Mai Ling. Jesus — I dream about that broad every night.”
I sighed and shook my head. Hank was a case of arrested development. A kid still fighting the Korean war. Still using the outdated slang of that time. All in all, I admitted, we were a pretty sad little army. A nut like Willard, Lyda with her dreams of grandeur and revenge, me trying to do the impossible because Hawk said do it.
Duppy was another matter. Duppy — Diaz Ortega — knew exactly what he was doing.
Just then he said, “Okay, back there. You blancs. Let us move it, huh. Got to get there and hide before the sun coma up, for sure. Or we dead mens.”
We made it. We stopped in a tangle of damp jungle, thick and vine-grown. Even Duppy sighed with relief as he dropped his gear and Lyda’s pack. Hank flopped down, moaning about his leg, and went to sleep. Lyda, too. I eased off my pack and the musette bag, but kept the machine gun cradled in my arm. Duppy did the same.
He came and squatted beside me and said it was all right to smoke. “We all right for now, blanc. We on the end of a shoulder that push out from the mountain into the valley. We got a tree house, I show you when it light enough, and we see all up and down the valley. See inside the fence and a lot of P.P.’s land. Even see his house and his swimming pool, see the zombie quarters, see a lot from that old tree.”
The acrid fumes of his Splendid drifted in my eyes. I brushed smoke away and said, “Back to the zombies, eh? What is it, Duppy? What’s the real pitch? If we’re going to work together, going to snatch this Valdez, I think I should know everything you know. How about it?”
I waited. As alert as I have ever been. I had taken pains to see that his Thompson was on safety and now I waited for a snick and it didn’t come. He didn’t speak for a minute. I watched his cigarette glow in the dark.
Then he laughed, a deep basso rumble. “Lemme tell you something, blanc. Just for hell of it. Something happen to me. One time I a wise alec, like you, and I say to a voodoo man that it all a lot of nothing. Like you.
“He just look at me, this man, and he say go and find an egg. Any egg. Take it from under the hen, you want. Then you bring it me here.” I laugh but I do it. I find egg okay from a friend of mine, and I know that egg just hatched. So I give it to the voodoo man and he say that I get a glass of cold water. Cold water.
“I do it. Then he tell me put the egg in the glass of water. He not touch the egg. Never. Then he pass his hand over the glass and he say some voodoo stuff and look at me and he say — now break egg.” So I laugh and I break egg.
“That egg hard boiled, blanc!”
Duppy paused, waiting for my reaction. The story had been well told, his deep voice coloring the nuances just right I wondered what he sounded like when he wasn’t affecting the uneducated half Creole, half black pidgin, that he used I with me. Diaz Ortega had been educated in Moscow.
“A good story,” I said. “And if it’s true I’m impressed. But I don’t see what it has to do with P.P.’s zombies, if any.”
He laughed again. “You a hard man convince, blanc. I not try no more. Wait till light and let you see for self. Now old Duppy gonna sleep a little. This place safe enough, but don’t go moving around. Fall off a cliff maybe, and break your neck.”
He sounded hopeful. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I that I had no intention of falling off a cliff.
I heard him settling down, rustling and thrashing about for a spell, then begin to snore lightly. He hadn’t snored the night before. It was only a crazy hunch but I decided to play it. I got on my hands and knees, moving lightly and without sound, and then I faked a couple of snores and a little heavy breathing.
Duppy played the game for ten minutes. Then he stopped snoring and I could feel him listening. I gasped and snorted and sawed a small log. I convinced him, because after a minute I heard him moving away, his big boondockers scraping on the rock. I went after him on my hands and knees, with extreme caution, moving only when he did. Twice he stopped dead, listening, and I froze. I was back on the caliche now and the pebbles and shards slashed at me.
He made more noise on the caliche and it was easier to follow him. Then he vanished. No sound. No anything. I crouched, breathing shallowly through my mouth, and wondered if he had used voodoo to sprout wings?
I heard him again. Over me. Up in the air. The bastard was in a tree!
I remembered what he had said about a tree house and I began to feel around in the dark, just off the path. I got lucky and found it in less than a minute. A thick trunked, smooth boled tree that had wooden cross-pieces nailed to it for climbing. I stood up, counted four of the cross-pieces, then dropped to all fours again and crawled ahead on the path so I could get a good look at the tree from in front.
I was just in time to see the flickering eye of his small flashlight from high above. It blinked white and fast, stuttering out the Morse, and then it went out and that was it. O.K.
O.K. Beamed in the direction of P.P.’s estate. What in the hell was okay?
I had no time to think about it then. I heard him coming down the tree and I scuttled back down the trail, still on my hands and knees. I was back in my place, gurgling and snoring again, when he came back and stood listening, then flopped down and really went to sleep. He didn’t snore.
I didn’t sleep a wink. I made tapes of all recent events, from the first phone call from Hawk right down to the present, and let them spin through my mind. I cut and edited and patched and extrapolated and in the end I came up with a pretty weird montage. I did a lot of guessing, some of the educated variety, some of the way out type, and when dawn came seeping through a copse of ackee trees I knew just about what I had known before. Duppy was playing some devious game of his own. On his own. Lyda didn’t know about it. Hank Willard didn’t figure in it; he was happen-1 stance, extraneous to the situation. That meant it was between Duppy and me. He had known that from the first. I had only suspected, but now I knew it, too.