“She didn’t know he was here, Paul. He got here about fifteen minutes ago. He followed us from the cottage.”
Tentatively, Brian approached. As if afraid that I might leap forward to bust him in the chops, he halted about five feet behind RuthClaire. The wispy Fu Manchu that he had shaved off before showing up at Abraxas for Adam’s first formal exhibit was back again, but two or three days’ growth of patchy stubble had started to encroach upon it. In another few days, his beard would cover most of his lower jaw, with only the Fu Manchu’s dubious head start to mark it out from the newer sprouts. His hat, the kind that an African big-game hunter might wear, continued to turn in his hands—I was reminded of a bus driver trying to escape a crowded parking lot.
“That’s true,” he said. “I have a French motor scooter, very quiet and economical. I’d been watching the Montaraz beach cottage ever since Blair got here. When he left yesterday, I feared Adam had canceled any plans to come up here again. Why would a restaurant owner or a vacationing sociologist want to visit the Rutherford Remnant? But I hung on through the night, and this morning, pop! a habiline woman appeared at your cottage and five of you piled into a Jeep and drove up here. For once, I found the damned turnoff. Three or four earlier times, you gave me the slip. It’s the turnoff that flummoxes me. I keep puttering by it. It’s just a tear in the roadside foliage.”
“We knew you were on Montaraz,” RuthClaire said. “But we thought you were working on the Austin-Antilles coffee plantations.”
“I am. How do you think I bought a motor scooter down there at import prices?”
“You’re supposed to be in the Dominican Republic,” Caroline said, “doing demographic studies of the canecutters. To take that job, you left Atlanta without even telling me goodbye.”
Christ, I thought. Caroline’s really cleaning out her psychic cupboards today….
“Caroline, I wrote you about not saying goodbye, and I did do demographic work in the Dominican. But I took that job to escape a bad situation at Emory and to position myself close enough to Haiti to do independent research on the Rutherford habilines. As soon as I could, I finagled a transfer from the Austin-Antilles sugar operation to the coffee ranches here on Montaraz.”
“Doing what?” Caroline asked. “Installing punch clocks for the peasants?”
“Supervising the construction of concrete drying platforms, Caroline. They’ve had them since the thirties on Haiti itself, but the workers here on Montaraz have always resisted the washing and drying process. Austin-Antilles was afraid to push them too hard for fear of provoking work stoppages. About three months ago, I implemented an education program with the help of the Pan American Development Foundation. A month ago, we actually got platform construction under way.”
“What’s demographic about that, Brian? Where does your anthropological background come in? How does it help the laborers themselves?”
“Not much maybe, but it’s the job that got me transferred over here. It’s valuable work economically, Caroline—it benefits the company. But my ulterior motive was to find Adam’s people. I’ve searched this island many times since March, using my work as cover, and when the Montarazes settled here, I knew it was only a matter of time. Blair came. And then, icing on the cake, you and—” He gestured at me.
“Caroline’s husband,” I said.
“Icing on the cake?” Caroline mocked. “Because you could finally get what you wanted, namely, unauthorized access to the habilines.”
“With you and Mr. Loyd along, it wasn’t hard to follow you up here, if that’s what you mean. Mr. Loyd was so slow I had to sit down every couple of minutes to keep from stepping on his heels. Finally, he cracked up and went down on his fanny for a couple of hours.” He put his hat on, tightened its draw string under his chin, and stuffed his hands into his bush-shorts pockets. “I’m glad you’re okay, Mr. Loyd. I hung back a while, to figure out what was going on—but when Caroline returned to you and the two of you started arguing, well, it didn’t seem fair to sit there listening, so I made a big circle around you and came on up here to Habiline City.”
“Prix-des-Yeux,” RuthClaire corrected him. “You think following people without their knowledge is less despicable than eavesdropping on them?”
“Ma’am?”
“Why didn’t you come to our cottage, knock on the door, and ask us to bring you here? Didn’t that ever cross your mind?”
“I knew you didn’t want to see me, Mrs. Montaraz. You ducked me in the market one day.” He shook his head. “Don’t deny it. Don’t apologize. Anyway, if I’d done that, if I’d come to you and asked you to bring me up here, would you have done it?”
“Of course not,” RuthClaire said.
Brian Nollinger shrugged, then glanced about to see if anyone was sneaking up behind him to knock him senseless with a monkey-coco club.
I glanced about, too. On the sides of the houngfor sat squatter’s huts of cardboard, plywood, scrap metal, palm thatching, and broken cinderblocks. These dwellings might have been transported in from Shantytown in Rutherford’s Port—except that whoever made them had refrained from using any tin or glass, and had not employed any scrap metal on their roofs—because the habilines had no wish to disclose their village’s location to searchers in small aircraft. And so Prix-des-Yeux had an earthy drabness and a natural green canopy concealing its modest environs from aerial snooping.
“Now you’re here,” RuthClaire asked Nollinger, “what do you intend to do?”
“Study the habilines. With your permission, I’d like to do field work here.”
“With our permission? You did all you could to avoid asking for it, mister!”
“But now that I know where the Rutherford Remnant makes its home, surely you’ll let me follow up. I admire Adam. I’m sympathetic to his people’s desire to live out their lives as an autonomous community. Most of my work has been in primate ethology, yes, but that’s not an inappropriate background for such research. I’m strong on method, a good organizer, and can do whatever I put my mind to, given a chance. Supervising the construction of coffee-drying platforms proves that. Moreover, I’m able to—”
“Brian, old boy, you’ve got a job,” I said. “So just skip the self-serving resume.”
“What you lack,” RuthClaire told him; “is discretion and a basic regard for others’ feelings. To you, these people—” waving at the temple and nearby shanties, a township barren of visible inhabitants—“well, they’re nothing but subject matter. As I’m nothing but an obstacle to research and Adam’s only a means to personal advancement.”
“Forgive me, but that’s not fair. Remember when I showed up at Abraxas to apologize? Mr. Loyd here hustled me off, but I was sincere in my intentions.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Caroline told RuthClaire.
“Caroline!” I said.
Brian hurried to add, “Can you blame an anthropologist for being obsessed with Adam? The secret of our origins may rest with these persecuted habilines, ma’am.”
RuthClaire slipped her hands into the pockets of her jeans and walked several steps away from our mutual nemesis. “Suppose you do your precious ‘field work’ here. Suppose Adam gives you a free hand. What then?”