“Ma’am?”
“What would you do with the results of your research?”
“Publish them, of course. That’s essential.”
“To whom?”
“To Nollinger,” I said. “He’ll one-up the entire paleoanthropological community, not excepting its high muckety-muck, A. P. Blair.”
“And destroy the Rutherford Remnant in the process,” RuthClaire said. “It was a small miracle they outlasted the first onslaught of scientific fortune hunters. Like their ancestors in Zarakal, they had to go underground—literally—to survive that dismaying siege. Montaraz is a small island, but their cunning and nimbleness, an inherited ability to lie low, saved them. A published account of their culture would be its death knell and eulogy. That’s not alarmism, Dr. Nollinger, but a realistic assessment of the likely results of human curiosity and greed.”
“Including yours,” I told my wife’s ex-beau.
“What if I refuse to pinpoint the location of this village?” Brian said. “It’s almost impossible to find it without prior knowledge. After all, thousands have suspected the existence of a habiline hideaway, but no one’s ever found it.”
“Until today,” RuthClaire said. “And that exception doesn’t prove the rule—it sabotages your entire argument.”
“You were careless, Mrs. Montaraz. You let a habiline woman visit your cottage, and then put her in a Jeep with your two foreign house guests. You took off as if going on a three- or four-day picnic. You never tried a single dodge to see if anyone was following you. And once on foot, you let Mr. Loyd and Caroline yak like school kids on a weekend field trip. Without such carelessness, I wouldn’t be here now.
“Well, you don’t have to be careless,” he went on. “Do things differently. Insure the site’s total anonymity. Keep doing so even after I’ve issued my monograph.”
RuthClaire spoke to the blue Haitian sky: “Too bad I don’t believe in murder. I could end this whole mess by putting a bullet in Dr. Nollinger’s brain.” She stared at her tormentor. “Do you think anybody’d ever find your body, mister?”
“Probably not,” he admitted.
“Your bones, maybe—two million years from now. But only by a conjunction of skill and luck. Too bad murder’s not in my behavioral arsenal.”
“Where’s a bloodthirsty Tonton Macoute when you really need one?” Caroline asked RuthClaire. She added, “Why don’t you talk to Adam? Brian may be just the man to write an ethnography of the Rutherford Remnant… if anyone’s going to do one. I can vouch for his character.”
“And the Pope could vouch for Colonel Khadafy’s,” I said. “Never mind that he’d be an idiot to do it.”
Pointedly, the two women ignored me.
Where was Erzulie? Where were her fellow citizens of Prix-des-Yeux? For that matter, where was Adam?
RuthClaire led us across the clearing to the houngfor. Inside, we found Adam seated at the base of the poteau mitan, the central post of the roofed part of the temple called the tonnelle. Down this post, the gods of the voodoo pantheon, known individually and collectively as loa, descend upon the service from their spiritual abode in “Yagaza,” meaning either “Africa” or “the immaterial world beyond death.”
But Adam, still in his Baron Samedi costume, was not alone in the tonnelle. Facing him at the foot of the spirit pole sat Erzulie, legs crossed lotus fashion and hands clasping Adam’s in the same viselike manner that couplings on railway cars achieve an unbreakable grip. Adam had shut his eyes, and when we went deeper into the peristyle, walking cautiously beneath its hanging gourds and trinkets, we saw that Erzulie had shut hers too. The wizened habiline and her well-traveled grandson were communing through the agency of trance. What addled me even more than their abstraction from the present moment, though, was the fact that providing a weird Laocoön link between them was the sinuous body of a twelve-foot python. It curled about Adam’s torso, made a spavined loop around his and Erzulie’s arms, and, after lazily girdling the woman’s waist, rested its flat, evil-looking head atop her grubby scarf.
“My God,” Caroline said. “Are they all right?”
“They’re fine,” RuthClaire said. “We just can’t talk to them for a while.”
“But the snake—”
“It’s nonpoisonous, Caroline. Haiti has no poisonous snakes.”
Brian said, “It’s a local kind of python called a couleuvre. Islanders revere them because they eat rats. I’ve been in Dominican and Haitian homes where they put out food to attract the blesséd things: saucers of milk, fresh eggs, dishes of flour. You’re lucky if you have a couleuvre, Caroline.” He tilted his head to look at it. “Pretty, no?”
Even in the shade, the python glinted bronze and garnet. Its eyes sparkled like beryls. No one could dispute its prettiness, but it stank. The unmistakable odor of serpent drifted through the tonnelle like a thin gas. I covered my nose and turned aside.
“Cripes!” I said. “How do they stand it?”
RuthClaire regarded me with some sympathy. “It hit me that way, too, at first. You get used to it, just as you get acclimated to Montaraz.”
“But what are they doing?” Caroline asked.
“View the three of them as a symbiotic unit of old Arada-Dahomey spirits—Papa Guedé, Erzulie, and Damballa. There are plenty of other loa in the voodoo pantheon, but on Montaraz, that’s the Big Three. Damballa’s personal symbol is the serpent. He’s the god of rain, a guardian of lakes and fountains. Erzulie is Damballa’s mistress. Adam says when they link up like this, they make a metaphorical conduit between past and present, Africa and the New World, the spiritual and the material. The python’s the flow—the electricity—necessary to convey the gist of their messages.”
I was standing just inside the temple’s door again. “That doesn’t sound like Adam, RuthClaire. It sounds like superstitious gobbledegook.”
“The gist of what message?” Nollinger demanded. “What kinds of information are they supposed to be communicating?”
RuthClaire said, “The kinds that can’t be verbalized.”
“That’s appropriate,” I said. “Erzulie can’t talk much, the snake’s probably no orator, and Adam’s natural eloquence is lost on their likes.”
“Telepathy?”
“I wouldn’t call it telepathy, Dr. Nollinger. That has an unsavory paranormal ring. Mostly, though, it’s inaccurate.”
“How about witchcraft?” I said. “When it comes to savoriness, witchcraft takes the cake. Give me witchcraft over telepathy any day.”
“You’re making fun,” RuthClaire said, “but witchcraft implies an element of mysterious interplay that telepathy lacks. To explain what’s going on here, that element has to be accounted for. It’s religious, Paul, not crassly materialistic.”
“Wow. With you and Adam, everything’s religious.”
“Try holy. Or sacred. That’s even better.”
Avoiding the cabalistic vevés that had been laid out on the floor with cornmeal, flour, and colored sand, Caroline picked her way across the temple and crouched behind the center post to look at Adam and Erzulie. The couleuvre flicked its tongue. She drew back so quickly that she had to put her hand behind her to keep from falling on her butt. Recovered, she shifted but kept staring at the habilines. Without looking up, she said, “Can’t you give us a general idea of what they’re not talking about?”
“It’s hard to say,” RuthClaire said. “Details of Adam’s life on Montaraz before ego-crystallization. Maybe some stuff about habiline history both here and in the Lolitabu catacombs. It may go as far back as the beginning of the species. In fact, Adam says it does. Erzulie’s knitting him back into the unraveling fabric of his people without tearing him out of the life he’s made with me. He does this at least once every time we come up here. In a way, I envy him.”