Who had he been signalling to inside P.P. Trevelyn’s 5000-acre compound? Why?
How in hell did you make a rational picture out of such disparate pieces? Duppy — Diaz Ortega — was KGB. Commie.; P.P. and Papa Doc were Fascists and Commie haters. In the end it was like the old joke — who was doing what to whom, and who was paying for it? I fell asleep as the dawn crept in, and I didn’t have any answers.
One thing I knew — Duppy had been doing the leading so far. That had to stop. I had to take over and lead, push him a little, see if he would make a mistake.
I slept until noon. When I got up, stiff and cold and in my usual foul waking mood, there was no sign of Duppy and Lyda. Hank Willard was heating a canteen cup of instant coffee over a can of Sterno. I joined him and fixed myself some coffee.
When I got the first gulp of hot bitter stuff down I looked at Willard. “Where are they?”
He nodded upward, then pointed with a skinny dirty finger. “In the tree house. Spying out the lay of the land, I suppose. I was invited, but I ain’t climbing any trees with this leg.”
Last night, in the dark, it had seemed like a mile to that tree. Now I saw that it was about thirty yards. The tree was a soaring, slanting coco palm nestled in a thicket of ackee and conifers and ironwood. Wild cotton grew around the trunks. I looked for the tree house and at first I couldn’t see it.
Hank scratched and grinned through his ginger beard. “Speaking of the lay of the land, I remember one time—”
“Shut up,” I told him. “Too early for that crap.” I scalded my mouth with the lousy coffee and went on searching for the tree house and at last I spotted it.
Cute. Very clever. Someone had used steel cables and turnbuckles to pull the surrounding trees in around the coco palm and make a sort of lacy green cage. And it wasn’t really a tree house at all, but a flat platform, about 10 x 10, fixed two thirds of the way up the palm tree. The cables and turnbuckles were painted green. It was a good professional job and I wondered how long it had been there. And why? Somehow I didn’t think the local blacks were responsible. Work like this, and the planning that went with it, was a little beyond them.
I went back in the scrub to relieve myself and while I was at it I checked the Luger and the stiletto and the Colt .45. When I got back I picked up my Tommy gun and went to the palm tree. Hank Willard, looking bored, was playing mumbelty peg with a broken-bladed Scout knife. He gave me a cautious grin and kept silent. I shook my head as I passed. But for the Sten gun by his side the illusion might have been complete: aging Eagle Scout playing at camping. Again I flirted with the notion that this was all fantasy, that this snafued and fubared mission wasn’t really happening. The phone would ring any moment and I would wake up and answer it and Hawk would have a real mission for me.
Lyda was coming down the tree like a lovely monkey as I approached. Her long legs just matched the cross-pieces.
I grabbed her by the waist and lifted her down. She beamed and kissed me. She was excited.
“I saw him. I really saw him, Sam. Romera Valdez. He was in a jeep, under heavy guard.” She pointed to the east. “They were taking him up to the Citadel, I think. There is a new road, just built. Goes all the way to the peak. He must work at the Citadel every day and come back here, to P.P.’s place, at night.”
I put my arm around her shoulders. “You sure it was Valdez?”
Lyda looked up at me. “What makes you ask that? It’s almost as if you were—”
She broke off and frowned, her nether lip caught in small white teeth.
I tightened my hold on her shoulder. “As if I what?”
Her smooth brown face crinkled in puzzlement. “I, oh, I don’t really know. I’m confused right now. After all I haven’t see Romera in five years. But — it’s like you were reading my mind.”
I held her away from me and pushed up her chin with my fist and made her look into my eyes. “You aren’t sure that the man you saw really is Romera Valdez? Isn’t that it, Lyda? Come on. Spill it.”
She nodded, a bare inclination of her head on that long swan’s throat. “Maybe. I just don’t know. Duppy says it is Valdez. And he should know — he’s been spying from this place for a long time. H — he says that five years make a big difference and that maybe Valdez has been sick, or been mis-treated, even tortured, and that would account for it.”
“Meaning?” I knew it wasn’t Dr. Romera Valdez. They were using a decoy for some reason.
She leaned against me and put her head on my shoulder. “He looked so much older. And somehow different. And the way he sat in the jeep, so stiff and not looking around at anything. His face was right, though, what I could see through the glasses. It’s just that something seems to be wrong and I don’t know what it is. Duppy says I am being a fool.”
“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe not. You go think about it for a while. How is our friend Duppy this morning?”
He answered that by calling down from the tree platform in a hoarse whisper. “Come on up, blanc. I show you some zombies.”
I looked a question at Lyda. She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know about that, either. They do look like zombies. I mean they look the way I’ve read that zombies look. You go look and then tell me.”
I climbed the tree. Duppy’s thick black bulk was stretched on the planked platform. He had the binoculars screwed into his eyes. At his elbows was an empty Cration can with a plastic spoon in it, and a canteen cup still half full of coffee.
He extended the binoculars back without looking at me. “You have a good sleep, blanc?”
I growled an affirmative and made a careful study of my surroundings. A cunningly contrived piece of work: we were on the tip of a high narrow peninsula, an extension of the mountain shoulder, a heavily overgrown salient pushing into the wide valley. A net of cables held a sheltering screen of trees around the palm tree and the platform, but a skillful clipping and pruning job allowed a wide and unobstructed view of the valley below and to the east. It was like a trick mirror — we could see out but they couldn’t see in. Unless they were hanging 300 feet in the air and looking directly down our throats.
I adjusted the focus on the binoculars. I said, and meant it, “Very clever. Sweet. Until the day that helicopter spots it.”
He grunted. “We here, ain’t we? Worry about that when the time come. Now, blanc, you look down by gate and tell me what you see.”
The binoculars were excellent and the scene leaped into being with the depth and clarity of a diorama. There was a large, brick gatehouse and a steel and wire gate and black-uniformed guards, all of the latter heavily armed and some with dogs. Two of the black uniforms stood near the gatehouse, talking and consulting papers on a clipboard and paying no attention to the others. The others were half a dozen guards and three separate knots of workmen. Two guards to a group. The workmen wore blue denim uniforms, pants and jacket, and on the back of each jacket were stencilled white letters: P.P.
I cursed softly and Duppy misunderstood and chuckled. “Matter, blanc? Some of your notions get upset?”
I had been cursing P.P. Trevelyn. The arrogance of the bastard! His own prisoner-of-war camp, even to the stenciled letters. They did look that way, like PWs. I’d seen thousands of them all over the world.
But I had never seen PWs move like these men. Slow, stiff, foot-dragging motions. They never turned their heads. They turned their whole body with agonizing slowness, with their heads craned forward and their shoulders sagging. Zombies? I didn’t buy it for a minute, but something damned queer was going on.