There was confusion at the gate house and the lights went out. Someone screamed in pain. The concealed searchlights kept swiveling around, and kept missing me and the hole in the wire. I prayed that this state of affairs would continue and began making my way up the hill toward P.P. Trevelyn’s modern palace. A prong of yellow moon lifted over the Citadel to the east. Two men were working down the hill toward me.
I crouched at the base of an ancient mahogany and snicked the haft of the stiletto down into my right hand. The threesome on the ridge were keeping up a steady fire. By the red flashes and the sounds I knew they had separated and were triangulating the gate.
Slowly, without sound, I put the Tommy gun and the musette bag on the ground beside me. The two men were close now, talking in hoarse whispers. I moved a little way around the thick tree bole, so it was between me and the approaching guards. Sounds fool you at night, but I thought they were about ten feet apart. They should pass on either side of the tree. I was counting on that. I made myself small. Not an easy thing, because I am not small. I wasn’t looking for trouble at the moment. I just wanted them to pass me by.
It was not to be. His luck was bad and he chose that particular moment in space and time to answer nature. By now the moon was bright enough for him to see the big mahogany tree and he just had to come to it. A real son of a bitch.
I was in a fold of shadow cast by enormous roots that broke ground. I gave him a chance but he didn’t want it. He was within six inches of me and then he looked down and saw the musette bag and the Tommy gun. He caught his breath, his last one, because I had an arm around his neck and the stiletto in his heart from the rear. I squeezed back all sound and let him down gently and dived back into the shadow of the tree. Fifteen seconds at most.
I waited. The other man stopped moving and called softly: “Carlos? Where are you, man? What the hell you doing?” Soft, slurring Creole.
I waited.
He began to move slowly toward the tree. When he spoke again he sounded nervous. “Carlos? You big fool, man. You play games with me? Carlos — you cut it out and answer me, man.”
He stepped into a shaft of moonlight and I raised the stiletto to ear level and a little back of my shoulder. When I saw what it was I hesitated for a split instant and in that time he sensed my presence and tried to bring up his rifle. He wore a denim uniform and his eyes, in the pale wash of moonlight, were a blank staring white. A zombie.
There was nothing zombie-like in the way he moved. My stiletto was just a whisper faster. It took him in the throat below his Adam’s apple. I leaped at him and slammed a fist at the rifle. It spun away. I clobbered him on the temple with my right fist and reached for the stiletto haft with my left hand. He made agony sounds, trying to scream and couldn’t, and I ripped the stiletto around and his throat opened and the hot blood gushed over my hand. He went to his knees. I snapped out the stiletto and stepped back and kicked him the rest of the way down.
I faded back into shadow and listened for a moment. They were firing back from the gate now. Soon they would get organized, and then Duppy and Lyda and Hank Willard would have to cut out and run for it. I hoped they ran fast and far and long enough, but I didn’t count on it. Duppy would have his wits about him by this time, and I didn’t know what he would do. Only God and Duppy knew that, and I didn’t have time to worry about it now.
It had been, like all good executions, silent. I went to the zombie and turned him over with my foot. I knelt and took a good look. Those eyes?
Contact lens. Milky white contact lens. That was the trick that made instant zombies to scare away timid natives. I had an idea then and I thumbed the staring bits of glass out of his eyes. I held one up to the moon. From the user’s side it was transparent enough. Some bit of scientific flummery gave a clear view. I wiped the stiletto on his denim jacket and dragged him back into the shadows.
I worked fast. The gunfire on the ledge was thinning now, and growing in volume near the gate. Moving away from the gate. P.P.’s men had been reinforced and had guessed at the paucity of the attackers and were starting to move out. Later, when they fitted all the bits and pieces together and made sense out of the hole in the fence, they would come looking for me. But that was later.
I stripped us both and put on his bloody denims. I had used contacts many times for disguise and that was no sweat, though I could have done with a vacuum cup. I smeared his blood on my face until I was an abstract horror in scarlet, something of a bogyman myself.
I dragged both bodies into the root maze of the big tree and started up the slope again. Behind me the gunfire was beginning to taper away. I heard a whoosh and a hollow pop and a hot white magnesium flare hung for a moment over the ridge and began floating down, a penetrating balloon of luminous flame. I went to ground again.
The three stopped firing. I hoped they were running for it and that at least Lyda was obeying my instructions.
I had the terrain fixed in my mind. I bore left, going as swiftly as I could without sound and skirted the wing of the house I had seen that afternoon through the binoculars. It was blazing with lights and I could hear men talking on the terrace. P.P. and his stooges should be a little upset about now. I kept going into the hedged gardens and came to the vast swimming pool. It was dark and calm and a mirror for the rising moon. I circled it and came to the strip of sand at the far end.
I thrust my arm into the loose sand, still warm from the sun, and it was deep enough. I buried the submachine gun and the musette bag and the Colt .45, keeping the Luger and the stiletto. The Luger, and the ammo for it, were waterproofed. I had smoothed sand over my cache and crawled to the pool and slipped into it with nary a ripple, as silent as a crocodile going after a meal. Now the waiting began. I had to be patient until the worst of the uproar was over and I had to hope that Lyda and the others were leading P.P.’s men and the Tonton Macoute on a wild goose chase.
I paddled over to a low board and clung to the ladder. The water was limpid, soft, warm with sun and had a therapeutic effect. It was crazy, but I found myself wanting to sleep!
Only two patrols passed in all the hours I spent in that pool. They never did turn on the pool lights. I heard the patrols coming, well in advance, and went in under the diving board and, at the last moment, went under and flattened against the side of the pool. Buoyancy was a problem — I didn’t dare exhale and make bubbles — but I clung to rough unfinished concrete at the bottom and managed okay. I counted seconds and stayed under three minutes. Each time, when I stuck my nose above water, I was alone.
About midnight the lights began to go off in the big house. The swiveling searchlights gave up. There hadn’t been any shooting for a long time and I figured that the three had either gotten away or were dead by now. I came out of the pool. I wasn’t cold, but the flesh of my hands and feet was soft and puckered into ridges. I stripped off the denims and wrung them out and put them back on, because it is hard to move quietly when you are dribbling gallons of water. I would have traded my next pay raise for a smoke and shot of Barbancourt.
I dug up my gear and the machine gun and checked through the musette bag a last time to make sure I had all my nasty little trinkets. Then I cradled the Tommy gun in my elbows and started working toward the terrace on my belly.
There was a light on the terrace, over an enormous door studded with nails. A black-uniformed guard with a rifle was pacing a beat alongside the balustrade. There was no dog and that made me happy. A dog would have spotted me immediately.
I settled in between two almond trees and tried to puzzle it out. I had to get through that door, and I had to do it without raising an alarm. I watched the guard.