I kept the glasses on the Citadel. It had been rotting since 1830 and was still an impressive sight. It thrust out from Cape Bishop like the prow of a ship, battered by time and still immutable. Twenty thousand men died in the thirteen years it took to build it. Walls 12 feet thick, three hundred cannon, quarters for fifteen thousand” soldiers. Never used. Never had to withstand an attack. In the end Henri Christophe killed himself with a silver bullet, and the cannon rusted, and the wind and rain and rats took over. The Citadel brooded through the years, neglected and yet indomitable, thrusting its blunt prow into seas of tropical greenery, damped by clouds fluttering from its turrets like sails. Waiting.
Its time had come again. In all Haiti there was no better site for missile launching.
No more missiles were fired. My eyes ached and watered and I put the binoculars down and looked at Duppy. He was back at work on his machine gun, fitting it together with practiced hands.
I lit a cigarette. “Valdez goes to the Citadel every morning, comes back here every night. Under heavy guard. That right, Duppy?”
He rubbed his piece down with an oily rag, not looking at me. “That right, blanc. Heavy guard. One jeep in front, one jeep behind, and Dr. Valdez in middle. Guards is Tonton Macoute. Bogymen. Mean bastards. When they gets here to gate they turns him over to P.P.’s men.”
I smoked in silence for a moment.
Duppy said: “I know what you think, blanc, and it don’t work. Not try it No chance. We just get our tails shot off and let the whole world know we here.” His laugh was cynical. “Not that make much difference to us then. We dead mens.”
He had been reading me correctly. Or very nearly. I wasn’t about to let Duppy know what I was really thinking.
I watched the ebony matte features closely and said, “You don’t think we could do it? Snatch Valdez somewhere on the road between the gate and the Citadel?”
Duppy hawked, spat, and glowered at me from his red-yellow eyes. “No, blanc. I told you! Can’t be done that way.”
“We’ve got grenades. I’ve got some plastique. All four of us have automatic weapons.” I was baiting him a little, and enjoying it, and I made myself sound a little superior and pompous.
“I think that it would be perfectly feasible to set up an ambush on that road. We would have the advantage of surprise. There are only four of us, I know, but if we plan it carefully we could—”
Without haste he turned the Thompson gun so it covered me. One hand, like a bunch of black bananas, curled near the trigger assembly. He made no effort to conceal this, but his gap-toothed smile was white and amiable for a change and it put ice down my spine. I had a hunch that when Duppy smiled and looked friendly he was prepared to kill you.
He wasn’t, quite yet, ready for that. You can’t silence a Tommy gun.
Duppy, still smiling, narrowed his eyes at me and said: “You got a lot to learn, blanc. One thing is that you isn’t boss here. Swan boss. If Swan say make the ambush I do it — but Swan ain’t gonna say that. She not so dumb like you.”
I nodded and matched his smile and his amiability. “All right. I’m a man who will listen. What’s wrong with my plan?”
He sighed and shook his massive black head. “Noise! That the worse thing wrong with it. Even we pet Valdez we still got to make it to the coast and you boat. Never do it, blanc. Papa Doc have his air force out, his coast patrol looking, his army combing the jungle. Be Tonton Macoute ever where. P.P. have his black uniforms after us. No chance, blanc, no chance at all.”
I pretended to study his words. He was right, of course. It was a lousy scheme and I had just been trying it on for size.
“ ‘Nother thing, blanc. There ain’t four of us. Swan stay out of all gun fighting. We need Swan for uprising, for invasion.
Swan dead, everything dead. No. We don’t put Swan in no danger.”
“There is still Hank Willard.” I wanted to keep Duppy talking.
He spat and laughed, a genuine and full-throated laugh of contempt. “That skinny ant! What good he? Anyway he crippled. He also scared and just want out of Haiti and this ain’t his fight no how. Hank be no good at all, blanc.”
I didn’t agree with him, but I kept my mouth shut.
Duppy held up his hand and began counting on those black banana fingers. “So that really only make two of us. Me and you. Now in front jeep is five Macoute, in back jeep is five Macoute, in middle jeep wid the Doctor is four Macoute. All jeeps got 50s on them. Macoute got submachine guns same as we. P.P. got tracking dogs. You still want try it that way, blanc?”
He was one hell of an actor. So am I when I have to be. I fidgeted and hemmed and hawed a bit and allowed that maybe I was wrong. My idea stank.
There was a long silence. He lit one of his Splendids and stared at the sky. Then, as if it were an after thought, he said: “Anyway you forgetting, blanc. You the stud! We decided that, I recollect. You getting paid all money. You the one got to go over that fence and into P.P.’s compound and bring Dr. Valdez out. We help you plan it, and we cover you, but you the one do it.”
He was so right. I had known that from the beginning. I was the one who had to go in and get killed. Because Duppy wanted it that way. Duppy was going to plan and arrange it that way when the time came. For reasons of his own. Reasons that stemmed from KGB orders. Straight from the Kremlin.
The sun was warm melted butter on my face. I closed my eyes and let myself hover on the edge of sleep. I was not too discontented. I had part of the puzzle worked — but there were gaps, big gaps, and only time and events would fill them. The time was very near.
Lyda came up to the platform with lunch. Crations and instant chocolate in cold water. She had found a spring-fed pool and taken a bath and her hair was still damp. She nestled down between the two of us and took the binoculars and studied the valley for a long time. We talked and made tentative plans. I went along with them on everything, only demurring now and then to make it look better and avoid Duppy’s suspicion. I had my own plan. All I had to do was wait until precisely the right moment to put it into effect.
It came before I was quite ready for it. The sun was still an hour high when there was a bustle around the gate and we saw them gathering the “zombies” and marching them in and counting them. Lyda pointed to a dust cloud that was drifting down the road from the Citadel. Three jeeps.
She grabbed the binoculars from me. “They’re bringing Valdez back now. I want another good look at him. Maybe I was wrong this morning.”
“You wrong,” Duppy growled. “That Valdez all right. Certain. You just don’t know what five years being prisoner do to a man, Swan.”
I thought he was lying, and I wondered why he bothered. I was sure that the man Lyda had seen was a decoy, a fake Valdez. The real Valdez was too precious to risk on a long open drive twice a day. That was an open temptation, an invitation to—
The hidden gunner accepted the invitation. The crack of a high-powered rifle drifted to us across the valley.
Lyda, with the glasses trained on the middle jeep, flinched as though the bullet had struck her. She gasped, “Oh Christ! Oh, MY GOD! He’s been shot. They’ve shot Valdez!”
Duppy cursed and grabbed for the glasses. I moved softly toward the back of the platform and then stood up. My eyes are a little better than perfect and I could see well enough.