Color Him Dead (19 page)

Doc had left the hospital at two
P.M
., so Drew taxied to his home atop the
Morne.
He waited on a breezy terrace under waving palms, where a barefoot girl brought him a cold rum punch and said the master would be right out. Drew could see the two greenish-yellow humps of Barrington’s Isle rising from the sea eight miles to the north. It looked sere and barren in the afternoon sun.

Doc came onto the terrace barefoot, yawning and scratching his belly under a red-striped jersey. “How’s the leg?”

“It holds me up part of the time.”

Doc lowered himself into a deck chair and stifled a yawn. “We’ll change that tape before you leave. You should swim a lot. It’ll strengthen the leg without straining it.”

Drew nodded. “Could you lend me a book on mental illness?”

Doc frowned. “Only one I’ve got is in the office. What’s your problem?”

“Amnesia.”

Doc gave him a long, narrow look. “Lad, you’re playing with a loaded bomb. Better walk off and leave it.”

“Is that what you do when you find somebody with malaria? Walk off and leave it?”

“That comes under a different heading. You can die from malaria. Amnesia is just forgetting, and forgetful-ness can be a great healer. If she’s happy remembering nothing of her past life, then let her—”

“She isn’t turning cartwheels.”

“But she isn’t committing murder.”

“Neither am I. Or you. We lack motive, opportunity—”

“That isn’t what I meant. In a case like hers you sometimes get a personality change. Basically it’s the same person, but the dominant trait is submerged and a recessive trait comes through. I remember Edith as a charming but thoughtless woman … sort of an overaged, beautiful brat. I felt like turning her over my knee and spanking her bottom, not entirely for disciplinary reasons, I admit.” He winked and reached up for the drink the girl had brought him. “From all accounts she’s now less aggressive, less excitable, more amenable—”

“Beat is the word you’re looking for, Doc. She’s been beaten down by her husband.”

Doc raised his brows. “And you feel you should lift her up?”

“Maybe.”

“Seright, I want no part of it.”

“Just tell me this, does the memory come back all at once, or gradually?”

Doc took a long slow drink. “Both.”

“Okay, so you won’t tell me.”

“No, seriously, it’s … progressive. You recall one thing, it leads to other recollections. You’re … oh, for example, whittling a stick. Then you remember another time when you whittled a stick. Then you remember why you were doing it, and what you did immediately before and immediately after. This is the way it will come back to her. Once the first barrier is broken, it stimulates other memory associations. Over a space of time it all comes back.”

Drew felt a tingling excitement in his veins. Edith had already begun remembering….

“How long does it take?”

“A few weeks—”

“Oh.”

“Or a few days. It’s impossible to predict. It could be a few hours.”

Drew got up. “I’ve got to go, Doc.”

“Aren’t you forgetting what you came for?”

“What—? Oh yes, the leg.”

“This way,” said Doc, getting up. “I’ve got a small examining room inside for private patients.”

It was far cleaner than the room in the hospital; there was even white linen on the operating table. Drew tingled with impatience to get back to the island while Doc went through a frustrating ritual of lighting a smelly cigar and tightening the set-screw on his tape shears. When at last he approached the leg he wanted to talk.

“You’ve been causing us a lot of trouble here in town, Seright.”

Drew stiffened.
“Me?”

“You beat up Doxie. One of our steel bands made up a song about it and played it in the streets. People got excited, broke some windows in Barrington’s drug store and police came in swinging their clubs. Our police chief is some racist imbecile Ian imported from South Africa. His boys swung too hard, and one man was killed. Our liberal lawyer, Guillard D’Arco, made a funeral oration in the
savanne,
the substance of which was that the police chief should be bound hand and foot with his own intestines and shipped back to South Africa. This fool Afrikaner threw him in jail, banned all public celebrations for the next two weeks, and cancelled Carnival.

“These people had been working on their costumes for months; steel bands had practiced new songs in garages. They didn’t like it. This morning at four I got an emergency call; one of Ian’s foremen was found in the middle of Powerhouse Road with his belly slit open. Rats were already starting on him. I could have sewed him up, but it was a job for the undertaker. That’s why I’m dead for sleep.”

He yawned again. “So our police chief threw a cordon around Powerhouse Road and arrested everyone who didn’t have an alibi for the time of death, between two and three
A.M
.” He chuckled. “There were twenty-two men and fourteen women, and I’ll wager most of them just don’t want to admit whose bed they happened to be in. So there’s more trouble coming. You notice when you go down the streets; the police stand around and beat their clubs against their palms and glare at the people. The people glare back. The girls don’t even giggle when you pinch them.”

“What’s Barrington doing?”

“Sitting in Diamond Estate, the center of his web. If you twitch it too much, Seright, he’ll come out and sting you.”

“You’ve dragged my name into it twice, Doc. What did I do?”

Doc straightened and relit his cigar, frowning at Drew. “People here don’t move until a white man shows the way. When you beat up Doxie, you made a dent in Barrington’s authority. That’s fine with me, though I wish you’d done a more thorough job.”

“On Doxie? I thought I put him out of action.”

“Not for long. It looked like simple nerve shock, or at worst a detached retina. He’ll get his sight back. Ian flew him to the States, but it could have been handled in Caracas, or even Trinidad. So I assume Ian had a job for Doxie in the States….”

Drew left as quickly as he could. Ian’s business in the States could mean checking into the little enigma of William Seright’s past. Even if it didn’t, Doxie’s return would mean a new enemy on his back—just when he needed to give all his attention to Edith.

He had a nervous moment on the way home, when he saw a yacht anchored in the channel midway between Petty-lay and Barrington’s Isle. He relaxed when he saw the flag was neither British nor American; it wasn’t the police—yet. He started up the stairs to Edith’s room, but stopped when he heard the hum of her sewing machine. All was serene. He could tell her his plan tomorrow.

Supper was a stingray which Leta had made into a clamlike chowder, plus the staples of West Indian cookery: boiled breadfruit, fried plantain and rice. Afterward he lit the lantern and sat at the table with his rum. Leta sat across from him playing solitaire with a limp and raddled deck of Bicycles. Twice her knee touched his tentatively, then drew away. Insatiable little savage, thought Drew; she was so much like Edith they might have been twin sisters sharing the same glands.

Tomorrow he and Edith would go down with the tanks, swim along the underwater ridge, and surface on the other side of Whale Rock. On the rock there would be privacy, and he would see if the ultimate intimacy stimulated her memory. He felt a warm anticipation in the pit of his stomach.

Leta looked up suddenly. “Men comin'.”

Drew heard only the hiss of the Coleman. Still, her ears were more acute than his. He was reaching to turn down the lamp when a voice throbbed from the door: “You live in rustic simplicity, Seright. Mind if I share it?”

Drew knew those round, rolling tones and the sardonic lilt. He went to the door but saw only blackness outside. “Guillard, you should wear
something
white. Where the hell are you?”

A shadow moved forward, and Drew saw the white flash of teeth. “As an old night fighter, I have ingrained sartorial habits.” He moved inside and dropped carelessly into a chair near the wall. He was dressed satanically in a black suit and black shirt.

“Could I trouble you to close your shutters?” he asked with a half-smile. “I have a harmless but imposing companion.”

Drew frowned, then nodded to Leta, who rose and pulled shut the wooden hurricane shutters. A moment later Chaka filled the doorway like a huge black boulder rolled into place. He also wore black, but his costume was made even more sinister by a holstered .45 automatic hanging from his belt. It looked ridiculously small and superfluous on Chaka.

Chaka glared at Drew, then stooped and entered the room. He leaned against the wall and squatted on his haunches. Even then his eyes were on a level with Drew’s.

“You did a beautiful job on Doxie,” said Guillard.

“He did it to get close to the woman,” rumbled Chaka. “That was helping himself, not us.”

“Nevertheless, Chaka, it made your job of recruiting much easier.”

Chaka grunted, and Guillard smiled at Drew. “He does not agree. He doesn’t see that it is sometimes better to make an enemy ridiculous than to kill him.” Abruptly he sobered. “How is the job?”

“Fine,” said Drew.

Chaka broke in. “So fine that you forget what you will do?”

Drew frowned at Chaka; the man’s hostility made him edgy. “I haven’t forgotten.”

“You forgot our meeting tonight.”

Ah, so that was it. In his preoccupation with Edith, the assignation had faded from his mind. He thought quickly. “We set no time, Chaka. I was just about to go down.”

Chaka and Guillard exchanged a knowing look which did nothing to help Drew’s nerves. Then Guillard asked: “Did you know that Carnival has been canceled by our police chief?”

“I heard as much.”

The barrister smiled. “I wish there were more whites here like this Afrikaner. He thinks he can treat us like the Bantu sheep he left in his homeland; thus he makes our way easy. The hostility which might have been vented in Carnival by singing and dancing can now be put to more effective use. Of course it means a change in schedule.”

A hard, painful knot of tension grew inside Drew’s stomach. He could feel the bad news coming—another problem to swerve him from his purpose. He looked across the table at Leta, who had dealt herself another hand of solitaire and was peering under the cards, cheating shamelessly.

“She is safe,” said Guillard. “Speak freely.”

The words made Drew glance quickly at Guillard, then at Leta, who did not raise her eyes. He had a sudden feeling of exclusion; an intense awareness of his white skin. These three shared something he couldn’t touch: a lifetime of servility on the island.

“You mentioned changing the schedule,” he said to Guillard.

“In two nights there will be a
fête
at Government House. Ostensibly, it is to be a birthday party for the governor’s daughter, and plans are being made for a cruise to Tobago the following day. The curiosity of this is that not only all the island’s white children will be going, but
all
the mothers, and a couple of old men. We must assume that some word of our plans has leaked out, and the island is being cleared for action—against us.”

Drew felt cold fingers playing along his spine. He had wanted no part of this doomed rebellion from the beginning.

“You’d better cancel your plans,” he said.

“
Cancel?
Friend Seright, this is not the opening of a Broadway play; we will not stand by and draw unemployment until the next opportunity. For us there will be jail, and in jail there will be accidents. Chaka and I have no desire to become martyrs for the next group. No, we merely move up the date. Tonight we distribute the guns to their hiding places in the bush, in warehouses, rumshops and homes. Tomorrow night we plant our explosives. Chaka has managed to acquire two Algerian
plastiquers
from Martinique, who will blow up the ships in the harbor. The following night is the night of the
fête.
Our enemies will be like little white rabbits in a pen. We will be near Government House, waiting for your signal that Barrington has joined his ancestors—”

“Now wait a minute! In two nights who knows where the hell Barrington will be? Barbados, Trinidad—”

“He will be in Diamond Estate, entertaining a new girl; a slender, long-haired virgin of thirteen, with skin like black velvet. He will not relinquish his
jus prima noctae—
”

“You expect me to depend on the appearance of a thirteen-year-old girl?”

“I have arranged it with her.”

“You trust her?”

“Implicitly.” Guillard’s lips were gray around the edge. “She’s my eldest daughter.”

Drew felt an icy shock. He was dealing with fanatics; like Drew himself, the lawyer had pushed all his chips into the game and now had nothing to lose. He knew they had gone beyond reason, but Drew made one more try.

“I’d never get out of Diamond alive.”

“You have a chance. Leta knows the estate; perhaps she knows an escape route.”

Drew looked at Leta, who was staring at Guillard, a half-turned card forgotten in her hand. “Do you, Leta?”

Her eyes flickered over him and then dropped down to the cards. “There is a small river which pass under the wall. Sometimes a girl swim through to meet her lover-boy who wait in the bush.”

“You see?” Guillard looked triumphantly at Drew. “She will show the route. If you kill silently, with a knife, you may get away.”

Drew stood up. “Gentlemen, when I agreed to do this, I understood that I’d do it my own way. Now you’ve changed the time, the place, and the method. In my book that cancels the agreement.”

Guillard sighed and waved his hand. “Chaka? Your turn.”

The giant’s eyes looked like glowing coals beneath the shelf of his brows. “Many people will be killed, Seright. Many blacks, a few whites. If Barrington lives, you die. I myself will do it. If I die first, all my men know your face. They will finish you.”

Drew knew that he was being given a choice which was really no choice at all. These men were seeking to create a vacuum of power by killing Ian, then filling that vacuum themselves. In their revolutionary dialectic, all means were moral which led to the desired end. Drew knew that if he killed Ian, they would assume he had done it in order to seize Ian’s wealth through Edith. His would then be the next throat for the cutlass; he was marked for death no matter what he did.