Nick Carter: The Black Death

Six-foot-plus of whipcord strength, and he has something in his head besides bone. He has an almost phenomenal memory; a knowledge of many places, people, enemy weaponry and techniques. He doesn’t just love sex, he enjoys it enormously. He prefers to like the women he goes to bed with. He has inherited the mantle of the late Ian Fleming’s James Bond. He’s America’s Number One espionage agent and he mixes mystery, mayhem and loving in equal doses. He stands for counter-intelligence of the highest order.

Code-named Killmaster, his real name is Nick Carter.

It was only the faint, barely discernible tremor of a far-off subway train, — the sound imagined rather than heard, that kept my mind in New York. My guts and my heart were in a dark rain forest somewhere in Haiti where the drums muttered sullenly, the night pressed in and where things that could not be were.

I had drunk from the cup that had been passed about before the ceremony began, as had the girl beside me and the CIA man, Steve Bennett, and all the others in the small audience — and I knew I had been drugged. Only mildly, but drugged. I had expected it. It wasn’t too bad, and when the stuff started to hit me I put it down as either mescaline or peyote. Maybe psilocybin. I hadn’t had much time to figure it out. Things move pretty fast in a voodoo church, even one on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The drum softened into a skein of vibrance in the big dark room. The drummer was in darkness. Someone began to strike a spike against a horse-shoe with a regular little clanging. The air was fetid and hot, and I had been sweating for a long time. The girl’s hand was cool. Cool and long-fingered. She kept stroking her fingers against my palm, over and over, and her hand remained cool — almost cold — while I sweated.

I peered across the girl at Bennett, the CIA man. I could barely make him out, sitting on his pillow on the floor and staring at the altar where the papaloi had just raised a hand. The drum stopped. The clink of nail on horse-shoe died away. The papaloi stood illuminated in a single narrow bar of misty blue light. He raised his hand again and the whispering stopped. The breathing stopped. The guy was good. The whole damned setup was good and, as far as I knew, authentic. I don’t know all that much about voodoo. My fault, of course. I should have been up on voodoo. When Hawk called from Washington and told me to make the CIA contact, I must have had at least an hour and a half to brush up.

The girl squeezed my hand in her cool one. She leaned toward me and her lips brushed my ear.

“This is it,” she whispered. “The big scene. What they’ve been building toward all night. You’ve never seen anything like this in your life!”

I squeezed her hand in my big sweaty one. Her name was Lyda Bonaventure and she was Haitian. I knew something about her that she didn’t know I knew. Among her own people, and the Haitian underground, she was known as the Black Swan. She looked the part. As beautiful and graceful as a swan — and as dangerous if you got too close.

The papaloi spoke: “Dans nom tout Dieux et tout Mystfere.”

Something about in the name of the Gods and the Mysteries. His French was too good, too pure, to be Haitian Creole, so I figured him for a local product. They say you can find everything in the world in New York and they’re right!

The blue light went out and for a moment the darkness was total. The girl stroked my hand with her long cool fingers. Steve Bennett whispered at me in the gloom: “What in hell did they put in that drink, Nick? I’m beginning to believe all this stuff.”

“Relax and enjoy it,” I said softly. “It was free and, in our case, legal. Don’t look a gift trip in the mouth.”

He grunted at me, but before he could answer another light came on. It was a tenuous bar of bloody mist, filtering in from behind and above us, and in it the mamaloi sat cross-legged before the altar. She was alone, halfway between the altar and the intricate vever drawn on the floor in corn meal. She was black and thin and moved like she was made of wire. Her head was wrapped in a red bandanna, she wore a sack-like dress and she had stumpy yellow teeth clamped around a short pipe. She was one real good bit of casting. I could understand how Steve Bennett was starting to believe it.

The mamaloi — she had been introduced as Maman Denise — sucked in her cheeks and her face looked like a black skull.

She made a hissing sound, and I could feel a snake in the room.

From a pocket of her dress she took two small vials and, leaning forward, poured them on the headless chickens that lay within the vever. A red cock and a black cock. Earlier the papaloi had twisted off their heads and spun them about and as a result I had chicken blood on my $300 suit.

A vial of oil and a vial of wine. The mamaloi poured them slowly onto the headless roosters. She shuttled her hands so the oil and wine mixed and formed a pattern in the cornmeal of the vever. When the vials were empty she cast them away and threw back her head to stare upward. Slowly she raised both hands. A single drum began to tremble in the gloom softly… softly…

“Damballa,” said the mamaloi. “Oh, God Damballa! Great and fierce and loving and punishing God, Damballa! Permit and bless this thing we do, for we do it in your name, Damballa, and for you. Damballa — Damballa!”

The drum stepped up its tempo. The light went out again. Darkness. The girl stroked my hand. The CIA man muttered something that I did not catch. The whispering moved about me like a miasmic breeze. I sweated.

Light again. A broader light, this time pale greenish, limned the girl and the black goat. The mamaloi was gone.

The girl was very young. In her teens and nubile. Very black and very beautiful. She wore a single garment, a short white shift that clung to her body and covered but did not conceal. Her feet were bare. Her eyes were long, almond, slitted now as she began to dance slowly around the goat. The drum began to pick up the beat. Faster and a little faster.

The goat was not tethered. It stood in the center of the vever, quietly, watching the girl dance about it. It was a big goat, with shiny curved horns. It had been well combed and brushed and blue and red ribbons tied into its fleece. It watched the circling girl. The goat’s eyes, in the soft, hot, green light, were large and round and lambent gold. It slowly turned its head to watch the girl.

The girl danced back into darkness and when she emerged into light again she had something in her mouth. A sprig of greenery. Leaves. She fell to her knees and crawled slowly toward the goat The animal stood unmoving, watching her with those yellow eyes.

I shifted position just a bit to ease the Luger where it was biting into me. I curled my fingers into my cuff to feel the tip of the chamois sheath housing the stiletto on my right forearm. The feel of both weapons was reassuring. Something had touched my instinct just now, and I was beginning to get a little nervous.

The black girl crawled toward the goat. The animal moved for the first time. It took a step toward the girl and it made a sound. A human sound.

That goat was crying and moaning like a human child.

Steve Bennett muttered. I had a rod of ice along my spine. I knew that I was half drugged and that it was all trickery, but still I was half frightened. And nervous. I get a feeling about these things.

The girl began to bleat like a goat, softly, piteously, imploring something of the animal that was now more human than she. She crawled on all fours until she was face to face with the goat. They stared at each other, the girl’s eyes dark and slitted and the goat’s eyes flaring golden in the gloom. The girl had the sprig of leaves and twigs in her mouth. She leaned close, closer, and her mouth touched that of the goat. The animal took the leaves from her mouth and began to munch slowly, always watching the girl.