The Spy's Little Zonbi Page 15

  A drunken Doctor Bam would sing snatches of “Sweet Emotion” in his thick accent at the dinner table—the part about a big woman with a man’s face—raising his glass of clear liquor to the light. “The lyrics prove Steven Tyler knew many Iranian women!”

  Bamdad Hami was a short man, with a thick head of black hair, a perennial five-o’clock shadow no matter how often he shaved, and the growing belly of someone who loved his vodka and kabob.

  Doctor Bam explained he hadn’t needed to sneak out of Iran under the cover of darkness. Nor did he have to purchase fake credentials or slip through secret border crossings to find his way onto an America-bound airplane. In fact, the university board members were both delighted and relieved to help him secure a special visa and all the accompanying paperwork for a one-way trip to the United States. His habit of throwing open his classroom window and shouting at the revolutionary protesters that Saddam Hussein should gas their mothers made the regents nervous.

  “Awaladi kus mashk!” the doctor would proudly scream at the protesters, which he claimed translated to something like “son of a woman with a gigantic vagina.”

  When Doctor Bam became distracted with his collection of vinyl records during their visits, Mitra would tell the part of the story about the young girl caught up in Doctor Bamdad’s madness. Without a mother, little Mitra was something of a mascot around the University of Tehran science wing. She spent so many hours in the building that one of the secretaries brought in a mattress so she could nap in one corner of the doctor’s office. Most of the child’s toys were fashioned from scientific instruments. Her tea sets were test tubes and beakers. Her erector sets were really DNA and molecular models. Her stuffed animals were actual stuffed animals. The ingenious little girl would set up various jars of aborted and preserved fetuses all around, then read them to sleep from lab manuals.

  Her favorite pet was an old anatomical display labeled Common House Cat, in which the tabby had gone through a preservation process prior to being cut in half the long way and placed under a glass frame. The wonderful teaching tool was turned into an even better pull toy after Doctor Bam attached small wheels and the string from a discarded lab coat.

  What had become of the girl’s mother was never discussed by her father.

  “The subject was taboo. Late at night, when Dad would tuck me into the bed in his office, I’d sometimes ask about my mother. I remember being snuggled in with my pet frog safely sealed in a jar of formaldehyde, looking up at his huge hairy face. ‘I am your mother,’ he would always tell me. ‘I made you from an experiment. Go to sleep now and may your dreams be sweet, my little sugar plum.’ ”

  Doctor Bam and his little girl arrived in New York City on November twenty-second, his frozen dugong following two weeks later on a cargo ship. All took up residence in the Trenton State College science department for the spring semester of 1980. The nearly extinct dugong went from a crate of ice to an enormous tank of its own formaldehyde, while the good doctor and his nine-year-old girl found their very own house in Newtown, Pennsylvania, an easy commute to the college.

  “Dad’s never gotten used to these winding country roads. He runs over animals all the time and feels just terrible. Like with the dugong. And he always stops, always picks them up and rolls them into a newspaper and brings them home. The refrigerator freezer is packed. You should see the freezer chest in the garage.”

  “What does he do with them?” Chase asked, and Mitra frowned while looking at her father pulling records from sleeves to blow away dust.

  “Dinner parties for his Intro to Biology sections,” she said. “The vegetarian kids get off easy.”

  “No kidding? He eats them off the road?”

  “I loved the parties when I was little. I helped marinate the squirrels and things. We wore lab coats for aprons, pan-frying pigeon hash with diced onions and garlic. He taught me how to make fried chipmunk cakes. Each patty needed the meat from at least a dozen squashed rodents.”

  “They are the delicacies of our new homeland!” Bamdad cried out happily from beneath the record player, a half-empty bottle of vodka perched next to the turntable.

  “Yes, Dad, your students loved every bite,” she said, then lowered her voice. “I was allowed to play dress-up for his students. Colorful silk Persian robes I imagined my mom had worn.”

  Mitra described her castoff scientific toys as she eyed the eighteen and nineteen-year-old students from various dark corners, Steven Tyler’s “Uncle Salty” blaring in the background.

  To little Mitra, all the commotion in the house was wonderful. Such was the life of a girl born on a microscope slide, cultivated in a test tube, and raised in a series of Petri dishes before being set free to walk on two legs. She loved her strange father like any child of a strange father would.

  “I never knew anything different.”

  Mitra had no remnants of an accent, and not a single family photo album or any other artifacts from her past, besides her toys. It was as if she’d been born and raised in a reasonably sterile laboratory. She seemed to exist just as a twenty-seven-year-old biochemist, with dancing as her only diversion.

  As with her father, the line between Mitra’s work and personal life was blurred. She had a bed in her laboratory break room. Some people crow about being workaholics, with their seventy or eighty hour work-weeks. Mitra explained that before meeting Chase, she’d quietly spent a hundred or more hours each week at her lab in a cancer research center. Other than her dance nights, she didn’t have anything particularly interesting to go home to, especially since her dad had stolen a mattress out of an unoccupied dorm room and delivered it as a gift to his hard-working sugar plum.

  She found time for her real passion, the one thing she claimed made her feel alive. It usually came sometime around midnight on the vibrating air in front of banks of speakers. It was the frantic bedlam that moved her body from the inside, and the pounding bass that took her breath away. Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, OMD, and Ministry were some of her favorites. And the passion she felt for them was the reason she had always danced alone. A partner, she said, got in the way of the magnificent feeling she got from the fusion of sound and light.

  “And then I danced with you,” she told Chase on the way home from breaking the news of their marriage, and he loved her more than ever.

  They danced and made love, while Chase still tried to keep an eye on the Iranians. But they’d apparently been especially frightened by their City Gardens encounter with the bouncers. They were playing more living room videogames than ever. Fine, thought Chase.

  ***

  Everything had been falling into place until an email assignment landed in Chase’s inbox. It was a feature story on a Haitian pot farmer who was raising money for a run at the presidency.

  Mitra’s dad had insisted on going with them to the Philadelphia airport, scooting them along in his little pickup down Route 95 with Chase’s stuffed backpack bouncing around in the back bed. Doctor Bam worried about Mitra’s ability to drive because she’d been crying steadily ever since Chase agreed to the assignment.

  “You have to come back,” she managed to say from the middle of the front seat. Chase’s shirt was wet from her tears. “You can’t go there and get killed. We just got married.”

  “I promise I’ll be fine.”

  “Haiti is a shit place, lousy murderers running around everywhere,” Doctor Bam announced, which made his daughter cry more. They bounded down the highway in relative silence, past the Betsy Ross and Benjamin Franklin Bridges, past the baseball stadium and the Naval Shipyard, and on to the airport exit.

  In the terminal Doctor Bam shook Chase’s hand, then gave the couple room to say their goodbyes. He went to poke around at a postcard display, while Mitra crushed Chase with a long, last hug.

  “You have to come back. Promise you’ll come back to me.”

  Chase’s plane was called for boarding as he promised to return in one piece and gave her a final kiss. He hoisted his backpack ov
er one shoulder and headed for the gate.

  “I love you,” she said from behind.

  “I love you, too.”

  “If he doesn’t come back, you can marry a scientist,” Chase heard her dad say.

  Chapter 17

  The bullets fired in his dream left the black steel rifle barrels in slow motion. They worked like heat-seeking missiles, able to change course while tracking the running boys. Chase held a clipboard, the pencil in his right hand checking off each child’s name as they were struck dead. Stoney was arguing with him, something about wanting to add new players to replace the ones being slaughtered.

  “There are thousands of boys,” Stoney was saying. “We’ll never run out. We can keep getting more.”

  Chase had finally relented, allowing Stoney to blow the dented whistle to bring on reinforcements, little black boys screaming and darting in blind hysteria. But the bullets never missed, not even the boys who’d slithered into nooks among the growing piles of dead flesh. Stoney kept blowing and blowing, and the soldiers kept firing.

  “I don’t know their names!” Chase had begun panicking, willing to make up names because it was suddenly important that they didn’t die anonymously. Stoney would keep blowing the whistle until Chase woke up, right hand cramped from squeezing an invisible pencil. A stewardess brought Chase a plastic cup of water without being asked.

  During his junior year of college, Chase had raided the campus library for every book on Haiti, quickly earning a reputation as the jerk who left deserted coffee cups everywhere. This opportunity to create a recreation program for Haitian kids was too good to be true, the perfect escape for an entire semester. He remembered thinking what a breeze it would be. He’d abandoned the smoldering bong in his dorm and pored over every relevant book. He’d even learned to use the microfilm machine to filter through Washington Post stories. The application to his Department Chair was going to be so compelling that it would overshadow the slacker reputation he had earned by association with his roommate.

  Stoney had ridden shotgun to a D.C. bookstore that sold international newspapers and maps from around the world. Chase had boned up on Haiti’s past and present politics, the diseases and the long, crazy history of voodoo. Stoney had bought a stack of zombie comic books from a shop in Georgetown for his own research. The trip with Stoney had begun with powerful emotions. It was filled with hope and charity, until the first shot. Chase’s return was lonely and disorienting. His row was empty, no reek of hash oil or spilled gin wafting off a trusted friend.

  When Chase’s plane rolled into the terminal, nothing was familiar. His first trip—the one that ended with boys being exterminated like a pack of rabid dogs, then the rush to the airport in a police Jeep—might have happened in a movie. The walkway carpet was clean and new, bright orange. People were in a hurry but smiling. Voices were loud but not shouting.

  Chase had spent hours reading through the file emailed from DB6. He also had to retrieve a small package crucial to the assignment at the Post Office. According to the file, the ranch owner had political aspirations with plans to overthrow the current government led by René Garcia Préval. The rancher, who was being referred to more and more as a rebel leader—a dangerous moniker to have in any country—wished to make an official statement to the world with an exclusive interview provided to the Associated Press. But first the winter marijuana crop on his mountain farm needed to be fully dried, packed, and distributed to his small army of dealers from Port-au-Prince to Santo Domingo.

  The file made no mention of Jean Luc Moreau’s motive in risking a thriving drug business, other than the usual hunger for power. President Préval still had the authority to order farms such as his raided and burned, so it was assumed Moreau was offering the government the usual payoffs and profit-sharing. Any income would surely be welcome because of the heavy-handed sanctions imposed on Haiti by the U.S.

  The geopolitical section of Chase’s file included a rehash of what he’d learned his junior year. Nothing seemed to have changed. Maybe it had gotten worse. Deforestation was nearly complete—a few clumps of pines in the mountains and mangroves in the swamps remained. The forests were dying at the hands of the poor, who pillaged wood and sold it for charcoal. Once cleared of trees, rains began carrying the soil, the lifeblood of Haiti, into the sea at the rate of fifteen thousand acres each year. All the native animals had been hunted to extinction except for a few stray caiman and flamingos. An outbreak of swine fever had killed the pigs, leaving farmers to scratch out an existence in dead soil, raising sugarcane, coffee, and sickly cotton plants.

  The humans hadn’t fared much better than the native animals, with ninety percent of the population living in poverty. Expanding neighborhoods of cardboard shelters were built around growing mounds of human feces. And with brutal dictator after brutal dictator, it was no wonder so many Haitians grew up wielding machetes on their way to a voodoo-injected version of the Roman Catholic Church. The file read like a depressing novel, only with no surprises.

  Moreau’s plantation on Montagne Terrible, north of Port-au-Prince, thrived because he could afford to import tons of Mexican bat guano, rich in nitrogen and perfect for early vegetative growth.

  Roughly translated, an old Haitian voodoo saying refers to the native soil as being as “dead as a zombie at a salt lick.” Salt was the only known cure in Haiti for anyone unlucky enough to be turned into a zombie by a local bokor, or voodoo sorcerer. Pot farmers, according to the DB6 file, were infamous for using zombies to protect their crops from poachers. The file claimed Moreau had created and posted hundreds of zombies to protect the perimeter of his ranch, an actual crime under Article 249 of the Haitian Penal Code.

  Chase had pored over the zombie literature in the campus library, sharing the best parts with Stoney. He’d used it to keep his roommate from backing out at the last minute. The books described how a living person could be turned into a zombie by the introduction of two special powders, usually through an open wound. The first powder, a toxin called terodotoxin, was found in the puffer fish and left the victim in a near-death state, barely breathing and seemingly without vital signs. The second powder, composed of datura, removed free-will and allowed the bokor to take charge of the new zombie.

  Terodotoxin worked by blocking the sodium channels to the muscle and nerve cells. Once salt was introduced to the subject, the zombie was said to simply drop dead. Thus, the “dead as a zombie at a salt lick” saying. Stoney had proposed they make t-shirts.

  “The entire George Mason University cheerleading squad,” Stoney had said. “Imagine the possibilities.”

  The books had described the most brutal former Haitian dictator of all, Papa Doc Duvalier, who was believed to have had a secret zombie army called Tonton Macoutes. A devout voodooist, Duvalier had promised to come back from the dead to rule Haiti forever, which is why, after his fatal heart attack in 1971, authorities posted a guard outside his tomb. It was believed that his son, the ousted dictator who had assumed his father’s rule, grabbed his father’s still dead corpse before fleeing to the South of France fifteen years later. All that was left of his grave in Port-au-Prince was a jumble of white bricks and a shattered tomb.

  “We have to go!” Stoney had said. “I gotta have one of those bricks.”

  ***

  Chase missed Stoney more than ever. This new destination was a ranch of swaying green marijuana fields on a plateau of Montagne Terrible, a place his friend would have surely braved the zombies to see. Chase was met at the airport by two of Moreau’s men, loaded into the back seat of a freshly washed and waxed green Jeep Wrangler, and whisked north, into the hazy afternoon sun. He was traveling light, carrying just the one backpack loaded with two camera bodies, lenses, film, notebooks, microcassette recorder, several sets of socks and underwear, and a few shirts. The top was rolled down and he leaned back to enjoy the fresh wind, but buckled up tightly as the Jeep sped along the blacktop, passing buses and slow-moving trucks even on blind curves. The driver
was either feeling invincible or suicidal. Happy and in love, Chase was also feeling pretty invincible.

  The only tricky part of this job—which included killing Moreau and ending the coup plans that would completely destabilize the nation—would be slipping out of the country. Aside from authentic papers, Chase had a hidden pouch sewn into his pack that contained a clean passport under a different name, as well as three separate plane tickets to Puerto Rico departing on consecutive days. Even if things got hot, he’d still have a good shot at getting back out through the main airport. A secondary plan was to sneak across into the Dominican Republic, but recent reports said those roads were currently controlled by machete wielding bandits.

  The most critical item in Chase’s backpack was from the package picked up at the Post Office. It was a can of Planters Mixed Nuts that had been tampered with by the CIA lab people. This particular can, with a smiling Mr. Peanut tipping his top hat, contained an extra type of nut beyond the normal six—Moreau’s favorite, Macadamia nuts. Five average-sized Macadamias, each containing a lethal dose of LSD, were positioned at the top of the nut pile. The container was then resealed with the original aluminum protective top. Chase had been assured that no acid would leech into the other nuts, so it would be safe for him to munch a few pecans should Moreau insist on sharing the reporter’s gift.

  The lysergic acid diethylamide, according to the DB6 file, was chosen for Chase’s safety because it would mimic the more mild poisoning symptoms of the voodoo potions already in use at the pot ranch. They’d include rampant hallucinations, but have a more measurable dosage because it was a synthesized drug. LSD is one of the most potent drugs available; a typical dose is equal to one-tenth the mass of a grain of sand. Chase’s Macadamia nuts each held two hundred times the normal dose, but in various time-release coatings. Moreau would start with a euphoric acid trip lasting a few minutes. The file described how his hallucinations would intensify, ramping up in stages, likely resulting in seizures before death. The plan was to make Moreau’s death look accidental, or like an inside job because of the drug’s similar properties to those his people were already using.