Nick Carter: The Black Death

A minute later we were making it upstream against the tide, with the big diesels chortling softly and the wake coming up narrow and creamy. I listened to the engines for a moment and knew they were in good shape. I flicked on the white running light ahead of me. Lyda lounged near my chair while I explained about channel buoys and how to spot them and what they meant. She listened and nodded and came to stand behind the chair and stroke my cheek with her long cool fingers. Now and again she would say yes darling this and no darling that, and I wondered just how big a sucker she thought I was. We had gotten to the darling stage pretty damned fast; I wondered what she had in mind beyond that. As long as it didn’t endanger the business at hand old Barkis was willing!

“Where are we going, Nick?”

I was keeping my eye on a tanker coming downstream to port. “About forty miles up the river,” I told her. “There’s a marina there, near a place called Montrose. It’s run by a guy named Tom Mitchell, and we used to be pretty good friends. We can lay in there for a time, and there won’t be any questions asked.”

“I like that,” she agreed. “No questions asked.”

“Except by me, that is.”

She patted my cheek. “Of course, darling. Except by you.”

I spotted a channel buoy and slid to starboard. Just ahead of us the George Washington Bridge was a glittering arc with the white moving shafts of car lights shuttling and weaving a brilliant tapestry of nothing.

I thought I might as well improve the quiet hours, milk the journey for what I could.

“About that voodoo bit tonight, Lyda. How authentic was it? I mean was the goat really going to—”

She was standing with her hands on my shoulders, breathing into my ear. I could smell that expensive perfume and the not unpleasant odor of dried female sweat on tan flesh.

She laughed softly. “Yes, darling, that goat was really going to. It’s a regular part of the show. It is one of the ways we raise money for our cause. You and Mr. Bennett, poor man, got in free but those tickets usually cost a hundred dollars.”

We were under the bridge now and edging into the relative darkness beyond. “In other words,” I said, “it was just another dirty show? Like the pony and the woman, or the dog and the woman, or a threesome or foursome? The sort of thing you see in the Place Pigalle?”

I felt her shrug. “I suppose you could call it that. But it’s been a big money maker, we screen people very carefully and we never do stags, just mixed couples, and we have been careful not to overdo it. About the voodoo — some of it was authentic enough. It depends on what you mean by authentic.” She laughed again and bent over to nibble on my ear. I realized that she wasn’t just kidding me along, though that might be part of it. She was genuinely excited, sexually aroused, and I could understand that. That voodoo ceremony, phony or not, and the killing and the blood, and the running and the escape to a boat on a dark flowing river with soft April in the air — these were all powerful aphrodisiacs. I was feeling them myself.

Lyda perched on the coaming again, watching me in the dim running light. She squinted at me and ran a finger over her full lips in a way she had.

“There are really three kinds of voodoo,” she said. “The real voodoo, which strangers almost never get to see, and the tourist voodoo which anyone can see — and our kind. The kind you saw tonight. Phony sex voodoo.”

She sighed. “It was good while it lasted. We made a lot of money for the cause out of it.”

I took a pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket and tossed them to her. I have them made in Istanbul — very long and slim, latakia, perique and Virginia, with NC embossed in gold on the filter — and they are one of my very few vanities.

“Light us up,” I told her.

I watched her inspecting the gold NC as she lit them from the instrument panel lighter. She blew smoke through her straight little nose and handed me mine. “I’m impressed,” she said. “Truly impressed. And relieved. I’m beginning to really believe that you are Nick Carter.”

We were past the Harlem River by now. I took her out a little more toward midstream. For now we had had the river to ourselves except for a string of barges over near the Jersey shore, moving like phantoms against the high rearing of the Palisades.

“You’re a hard woman to convince,” I said curtly. “But never mind — what was in that drink tonight?”

“Nothing much. Just a little LSD.”

I nodded. “That’s nice to know. Just a little LSD, huh? Good. I was worried about that — I thought it might, be something powerful or dangerous.”

She pushed her hand into the light from the instrument board. Her nails were long and well kept and the color of blood. She measured off a micro-dot on her thumb nail. “Just that much. A tiny smidgeon — not enough to hurt anyone. We found that it helps the illusion, makes it sexier, gets people more excited. So maybe they come back again and spend another couple of hundred dollars. Just good business, that’s all.”

“Sure. Just good business.”

She blew smoke at me, narrowed her eyes, then put a hand over her mouth and laughed beneath it. “You sound like you don’t approve. What are you, Nick Carter, some kind of a moralist?”

She sort of had me there and I had to grin. She took her cue from the expression on my face.

“You killed two men tonight — or one for sure — and most people would say that makes you a murderer. Or doesn’t it?”

“That was in the line of duty,” I said. “I am an accredited agent of AXE, which is in turn an agency of the United States Government.”

There seemed no point in telling her that I carried rank, with top seniority, and that I had killed more men than she had years. I doubted that she had ever heard of AXE, anymore than she had heard of Nick Carter before eight o’clock tonight.

All laughter fled. She could change moods the way a chameleon changes colors. She cupped her chin in one hand and stared at me with that yellow glitter in her eyes.

“What I do is in the line of duty, too. You were right— I am the Black Swan! I don’t have any official standing, and it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference. Sooner or later I am going to lead my people back into Haiti, and we are going to take back what belongs to us. I personally am going to arrange for that stinking black bastard, that Papa Doc Duvalier, to be banged in front of his own palace in Port-au-Prince! What do you think of that, Mr. Carter?”

I laughed at her. “It is going to be later, Miss Bonaventure. Not sooner. Part of my orders are to see that there are no invasions of Haiti. Absolutely none! Uncle Samuel has just had a very bad time in the Dominican Republic and he is not looking to repeat it in Haiti. Uncle has a great longing for peace and quiet in the Caribbean and that is the way it is going to be. And what do you think of that, Miss Bonaventure?”

She threw her cigarette butt overboard. She stood and put her hands on her hips and stared down at me in the conning chair.

“I rather thought that was it,” she said, all soft and sweet and reasonable. “As a matter of fact it isn’t anything new, this attitude. Steve Bennett told me the same thing.”

“He was so right,” I murmured.

“Bennett was my contact with the CIA, as you know. I don’t know what really goes on, any of the inner workings, or why you people — AXE? — are taking over from the CIA, but I do know that Bennett and I made a deal. A bargain. Are you going to honor that bargain, Mr. Carter?”

I was non-committal. “Depends on the bargain. What did you and Bennett agree to?” I knew, because Bennett had filled me in briefly, but I wanted to hear her version.