“A condor dropped him. A circus train derailed. I don’t care, Dr. Nollinger. What’s pertinent to me is his presence out there, not the weird particulars of his arrival.”
“All right, but I think I know how he got here.”
We each had another beer. My visitor sipped moodily at his while I explained that the best approach to RuthClaire might be Nollinger’s masquerading as a meter reader for Georgia Power. While ostensibly recording her kilowattage, he could plead a sudden indisposition and ask to use the bathroom or lie down on the sofa. RuthClaire was a sucker for honest working people in distress, and Nollinger could buy a shirt and trousers similar to those worn by Georgia Power employees at Plunkett Bros. General Store right here in town. Once he got into the house, who could say what might happen? Maybe RuthClaire would introduce him to her hirsute boarder and a profitable rapport spring up between the habiline and the anthropologist. Twirling the silver-blond twists of his almost invisible Fu Manchu, Nollinger only grunted.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“I might do better to go out there as an agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” he said, somewhat high-handedly. “I think a strong case could be made for regarding Adam as an illegal alien.”
“How so, Herr Professor?”
Nollinger embarked on a lengthy explanation. Purely on impulse he had shown one of his closest friends at Emory, Caroline Hanna, a young woman with a doctorate in sociology, three or four of my photographs of Adam. Nollinger was seriously involved with Caroline, and he knew that she would not betray his confidence. The photographs had had a strange effect on her, though. They had prompted her to reveal that in her after-hours work with Cuban detainees in the Atlanta Penitentiary she had met one hardened Havana street criminal from the 1980 Freedom Flotilla who confessed that he belonged in prison, either in Cuba or in los Estados Unidos. Indeed, Uncle Fidel had released this cutthroat from a Havana lockup on the express condition that he emigrate and commit fifty-seven different varieties of mayhem on every American capitalist who ran afoul of him. Instead, he fled down the northern coast of Cuba in a stolen army Jeep and later on foot to Punta Gorda, where, after hiding out for two weeks, he commandeered a fishing vessel piloted by a wealthy Haitian with strong anti-Duvalier sympathies and the strangest three-man crew that the cutthroat had ever seen.
“What was a Haitian doing in Cuban waters?” I asked Nollinger.
“Probably running communist guns back to the ill-organized guerrilla opposition to Duvalier in the wilderness areas around Port-de-Prix. Caroline says the Cuban told her the vessel hadn’t yet taken on any cargo when he surprised the gunrunner near Punta Gorda. He knifed the Haitian and threw him overboard. In the process, he became aware of three half-naked enanos—dwarfs, I guess you’d say—watching him from behind the fishing tackle and cargo boxes in the vessel’s stern. They reminded him of intelligent monkeys, not just animalistic dwarves, and they made him intensely uncomfortable. With a pistol he found concealed in the pilothouse, he stalked and mortally wounded two of these three mute witnesses to his crime. Their small gnarly corpses went overboard after their captain’s fleshy mulatto body, and the cutthroat set his sights on the last of the funny little men scurrying about the boat to escape his wrath.”
“The gunrunner’s crew consisted of habilines?” For the first time that afternoon, Nollinger had piqued my curiosity.
“I think it did, Mr. Loyd, but all I’m doing now is telling Caroline’s version of the Cuban thug’s account of his round-about trip to Key West. Draw your own inferences.”
“What happened to the last crew member?”
“The Cubans the Haitian gunrunner had planned to rendezvous with to make the weapons transfer pulled abreast of the vessel and took the killer into custody. They also captured the terrified hominid. They confiscated the Haitian’s boat. Our detainee in the Atlanta pen says these mysterious Cuban go-betweens—they were all wearing lampblack on their faces—separated him and the surviving crew member and shipped them both to Mariel Bay for the crossing to the States. Caroline’s informant never saw the funny little man again. Nevertheless, he’s absolutamente cierto this creature reached Florida in one of the jam-packed charter boats making up the Freedom Flotilla. You see, there abounded among some of the refugees rumors of a small hairy mute in sailcloth trousers who kept up their spirits with his odd mimes and japery. As soon as the crossing was made, though, he disappeared into the dunes before the INS authorities could screen him as they finally did those who wound up in stateside camps or prisons.”
“Adam?” I asked.
“It seems likely, Mr. Loyd. Besides, this story dovetails nicely with the fact that your ex-wife hasn’t had as much trouble as might be expected domesticating—taming—her habiline. Although he seems to have returned to feral habits while scrounging his way up through Florida while avoiding large population centers, his early days on a tiny island off the coast of Haiti made him familiar with a few of the trappings of civilization. Your wife, although she doesn’t know it, has been reminding Adam of these things rather than painstakingly writing them down on a blank slate.”
For a time, we sipped our beers in silence. I pondered everything Nollinger had told me. Maybe it explained how Adam had come from Haiti (of all places) to western Georgia, but it did not explain how several representatives of Homo habilis, more than 1.5 million years after their disappearance from East Africa, had ended up inhabiting a minuscule island off the larger island of Hispaniola. Did Herr Professor Nollinger have an answer for that objection, too?
“Working from Caroline’s informant’s story,” he replied, “I did some discreet research in the anthropological and historical holdings of the Emory library. First, I found out all I could about the island off Hispaniola from which the wealthy Haitian had conscripted his crew. It’s called Montaraz, Mr. Loyd—originally a Spanish rather than a French possession. But in the mid-1820s, an American named Louis Rutherford, a New England aristocrat in our diplomatic service, bought Montaraz from a military adviser to Haitian president Jean Pierre Boyer. This was during the Haitian occupation of the Dominican Republic, which had declared its independence from Spain in 1821. The Dominicans regard their twenty-two-year subjugation to Haitian authority as a period of barbarous tyranny; still, one of Boyer’s real accomplishments was the emancipation of Dominican slaves. But on Montaraz, in Manzanillo Bay, Louis Rutherford reigned supreme, and his liberal sentiments did not extend to releasing his black, mulatto, and Spanish-Arawak laborers or to paying them for their contributions to the success of his cacao and coffee plantations. He appointed a proxy to keep these enterprises going and divided his time between Port-au-Prince and the Vermont family estate.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with Adam, RuthClaire, or me.” In another hour, my first customers for dinner would be coming through the door. Further, at any moment I expected Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, and Molly Kingsbury to report, with my two evening-shift waitresses close behind. Nollinger was ignorant of, or indifferent to, my business concerns; he wandered into the kitchen to help himself to another beer and came back to our table swigging from its can like a skinny athlete chug-a-lugging Gatorade. He had his wits about him, though. He tilted the top of the can toward me and soberly resumed his story:
“In 1836, Mr. Loyd, Rutherford was sent to the court of Sa’īd ibn Sultan, Al Bū Sa’īd, on the island of Zanzibar off the East African coast. We Americans were the first westerners to make trade agreements with Sa’īd and the first to establish a consulate at his commercial capital in the western Indian Ocean. Rutherford went along because of his ‘invaluable experience’ on Hispaniola, where he had had to deal with both conquering Haitians and defiant Dominicans, a situation that some U.S. officials felt had parallels on the East African coast, where Sayyid Sa’īd was attempting to impose his authority on the continental port cities of Mombasa, Kilwa, and Bravanumbi. Moreover, British moral objections notwithstanding, Zanzibar had a flourishing slave market; and Rutherford, as his American colleagues knew, recognized the commercial imperatives that drove even kindly persons like Sayyid Sa’īd and himself to tolerate the more sordid aspects of the institution… to turn a profit. It was the perfect assignment for Rutherford.