I didn’t say anything and this brought a note of irritation into Duppy’s tone. “Well, blanc? What you say to that? They zombies or ain’t they?”
I was puzzled, and uneasy, and when I’m like that I can be mean. I put the spurs to him a little. “Maybe they’re all catatonics, Duppy. Or P.P. is running a spa and they’re arthritic patients. Anyway I can’t see their eyes at this distance. Isn’t that the way you tell zombies — by their eyes?”
“I seen their eyes, blanc. Up close. Bad as obeah, those eyes on them. No color. No nothing. Just white stare at you. Dead eyes. I know. I seen.”
I knew he was telling the truth. “How did you get close enough to see their eyes, Duppy?”
Silence. I listened for the movement, for the swing of his hand toward the Tommy gun at his side. I gambled with the odds on my side. Gunfire would louse up the deal, and I didn’t think he was ready for that yet.
He said: “Nem mind how I knows, blanc. I does, is all. But you ain’t gonna believe, so forget. You see what they doing down there?”
I saw. “They’re planting mines along the inside of the fence. Staggered at intervals of ten feet. That fence electrified, Duppy?”
“I disrecollects.” Sullen now. Then: “Seems to me it ain’t, though. Reckon P.P. don’t think he need juice, with them guards and dogs and mines. And zombies!”
I began studying the terrain beyond the fence. A wide graveled road led upward through heavily flowered and wooded slopes to a large flattened mesa. I could make out one wing of the house, three stories of glittering white stone fronted by a wide terrace and a balustrade of the same stone. Huge urns, amphorae, flaunted long tendrils of lush tropic flowers. Trevelyn loved flowers more than he liked people.
Off to the left, separated from the house by neatly hedged gardens and clipped topiaries, was the biggest goddamned swimming pool I had ever seen. An acre of pellucid blue water surrounded by tile. One side was sheltered by a glass canopy. There was a float and high and low diving boards and various inflated plastic birds and animals. There was sparkling white sand at each end of the pool, hauled all those miles from the coast, and on the sand near the high board a man was lying. A dark-haired white girl was rubbing suntan lotion on him. I twiddled the focusing screw for a better look.
Even with the inevitable foreshortening I had, for a few moments, a good look at the billionaire bastard. I never doubted that it was P.P. Trevelyn. He looked the part. It was type casting, but perfect type casting.
He was on his back with his hands interlaced beneath his head. He wore huge black sunglasses. A long brown cigar drooped from a mouth like a loose anus, his nose was a blobby button, and his skull was a tanned cue ball with & swatch of dirty gray over each ear.
P.P. didn’t have much chest but his paunch was a miniature mountain. The girl was anointing it. She poured oil and rubbed and the paunch swayed and quivered like a mound of jelly. I turned the binoculars on the girl’s face for a moment. Expecting, even hoping for some nutty reason, to find distaste written there. Even disgust.
She was a beautiful girl, supple and long limbed with, I I thought, the developed legs of a dancer. She wore a tiny bikini that let her breasts spill over and she must have shaven her pubic area or I could have seen hair. Maybe P.P. liked it that way.
The girl was the real zombie. Her eyes were half closed and her lips moved as she talked and there was absolutely no expression on her lovely face as she rubbed oil into that mountain of old guts. I felt a flash of pity for her, and knew it undeserved. She knew what she was about. Billionaires don’t grow on trees.
I crooked a finger at Duppy. “Here. Take a look. Is that P.P.?” It had to be, but I wanted confirmation.
I came as close to liking Duppy then as I ever would. He took a look and his thick lips moved in what could only be disgust and hatred. “That the man,” he muttered. “That the son of a bitch for sure. He just come out since I look last. Jesus God—1 wonder how that blanc girl stand to touch him. I bet he smell like a trench.”
I took back the glasses. “When you got a billion, Duppy, it. doesn’t matter how you smell.”
His mouth twitched and he gave me a cold dark stare. His eyeballs were jaundiced and inflamed by red spider webs. He ignored me and rolled back to his Tommy gun and began to clean and field-strip it.
I put the glasses back on the swimming pool in time to see P.P. saying something to the girl. She nodded, without expression, and tugged at his swim trunks. Then she bent over him, her red mouth agape, and in a moment his paunch began to quiver.
I felt a little sick and I didn’t want to see anymore, there was a lesson in it, and I let it register. The absolute ultimate in confidence. His house, his pool, his guards, his privacy and his own girl. P.P. Trevelyn didn’t give a good tinker’s damn who saw him doing what! He owned the joint He owned the world. He thought.
I studied the new road that twisted up slopes and through cuts and around bluffs to the Citadel some ten miles away. The road was narrow, only jeep wide, of gravel and crushed stone and it was one hell of an accomplishment and must have cost a million to build. Several parties of the denim-clad “zombies” were still working on it, tamping and rolling, and watering truck was crawling along, spraying water to bind the foundation.
There was no sign of the black uniforms on the road. The guards here were Tonton Macoute, and they rode the truck and watched from jeeps with .50 caliber machine guns mounted on them. The denim-clad laborers worked with the same stiff and awkward motions of the men around the gate. Zombies? But why? Why go to all the trouble to stage this farce?
Then I knew. I was a little stupid or I would have caught it before. The “zombies” were just another precaution, another way of keeping curious, or angry blacks away from this place. It was good psychology. No simple peasant will get within a hundred miles of a zombie if he can help it.
The missile made a thin searing streak as it left a launching ramp on the Citadel and arched over the valley. Duppy grunted and rolled to my side. We followed the blur of burnished metal as the missile slowed, faltered, went off course and smashed into a hill in a welter of wracked metal Duppy chuckled.
“Ain’t worth a gourde, them things. I been spying long time now and ain’t never seen ‘em hit anything they shoot at. Don’t see why Swan so worry. Nothing to be afraid of there! Take ‘em hundred years to make them missile work.”
I had the binoculars on the Citadel ten miles away. The Citadel took a giant leap toward me and I could see tiny dots moving about on the ramparts and I thought I saw steel ramps gleaming in the sun. I could make out long rows of rusty cannon and triangular mounds of cannon balls. Cannon that had never fired a shot.
Another missile left the Citadel and swooshed into the sparkling air. It broke up in midair, exploding in a cloud of black smoke and metal rain.
I said: “Did it ever occur to you, Duppy, that maybe Valdez isn’t really trying? Maybe he’s stalling, sabotaging, hoping that something will happen — like us coming in for him.—”
“No, blanc. I think Dr. Valdez do his best. Papa Doc and P.P. see to that — they ain’t fools. Dr. Valdez try to stall and they torture him to death real fast, I think. Take long time die. Trouble is Haiti, Papa Doc, ain’t ready for missiles yet. Still in the jungle, blanc. The Doctor he only one man and can’t do it all — and even bastard P.P. can’t buy brains come to this place.” Duppy laughed in basso.