I shut my eyes. Agarou inhabited the darkness, as did the hyena-headed godling of the habilines, and a vast, expanding interior light that I recognized as the signature of the Mind Beyond Time that had brainstormed all three of these apparitions. What had I to do with Beulah Fork, Atlanta, or Montaraz’s frigid caves? In Caroline’s loving grasp, I was bound for a temporal union with the source of all being. There, freed from my time-bound prejudices, I would meet and embrace the dead—from spiritually inclined australopithecines to materialistic Bolsheviks. Agamemnon. Cleopatra. Francis of Assisi. Queen Elizabeth. Montezuma. Feodor Dostoevski. Jesse Owens. My parents. Elvis Lamar Teavers. Tiny Paul. Nancy Teavers. Craig Puddicombe. Toussaint. They’d all be there, frozen in the timeless medium of God’s compassionate, all-encompassing, and unifying Thought….
Adam was talking to Lieutenant Bacalou, explaining that this exquisite habiline cave art needed a champion. Why not the lieutenant himself? Surely, he could convince Philomé Bobo to forget what he’d seen here, or to pretend to forget. As for the pair of Tontons Macoutes still in Prix-des-Yeux, the lieutenant need not tell them that he and Philomé had seen these caves. Instead, they’d found me wandering the mountainside or huddled in a rock shelter several hundred yards below the summit. To reveal the presence of the caves would unleash on this lovely peninsula the full apocalypse of development, exploitation, advertisement, and ruin. What good would that do anyone?
“None,” Lieutenant Bacalou said. “But it is my duty to do so. It need not happen as you say.”
“But it will,” Adam said. “You and I, we both know that.” He spotlighted another incandescent historical mural, another sculpture. The hallucinatory rapture of protracted cave-crawling had overtaken us all, even the miserable lieutenant. He was beside himself with awe and indecision.
“What must I do?” he asked.
Adam intuited that a bribe might work. It would present Bacalou with a material rationale for (a) shirking the stringent dictates of duty and (b) surrendering to the call of his own natural decency. A bribe would preserve the man’s self-respect. Succinctly, then, Adam explained that Caroline and I would take a number of habiline paintings back to the States and sell them as the work of a Haitian naif by the name of Francoise Fauver. Bacalou could pretend to be Fauver. For this imposture, he would receive a commission on every painting sold. If the work of “Fauver” proved especially popular, Adam would see to it that Bacalou toured North America with an exhibition of “his” paintings. Further, to keep Philomé Bobo from revealing this ruse to anyone, Adam would finance Bobo’s complicity in it by outfitting him as Bacalou’s amanuensis and valet. Otherwise, Bacalou might have to kill Philomé or frame him as a Castroite bent on the establishment of a Marxist regime in Haiti. “But Philomé hates Castro,” Bacalou told us.
“Then persuade him to be your valet,” Adam said. “You can both resign from the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale. I will use my influence to help you do so. Your lives as an artist and his traveling secretary will enrich you beyond telling—in a spiritual, as well as a monetary, sense.” Adam added that they would both be able to take great private satisfaction from the knowledge that they’d delayed, if not forever prevented, the commercial despoilment of the caves.
After pondering a moment, Bacalou said, “I dislike the name Francoise Fauver. It has, I think, the ring of phoniness.”
“What do you prefer?” Adam said.
“Why not my own? My real name, I mean, not my nom de guerre.”
“And what is that?”
“Marcel Sam,” the lieutenant said. “I have not used it since I was a boy, but it’s a real name, not an invention, and pretty too, ne pas?” He looked at Caroline. “An artiste should have a pretty name.”
“Very well,” Adam said. “Marcel Sam it is.”
But Marcel Sam’s happiness in this solution began to evaporate. He struck his forehead with an open palm. “Philomé is married. He has seven children. It’s not going to be easy for him to resign and become a traveling valet.”
“Then kill him,” I said impatiently, half meaning it. “Frame him as a Castroite.”
Adam shook his head. “Nothing as desperate as that is necessary. We will think of something, Monsieur Sam.”
And, in fact, we did. We went back down to Prix-des-Yeux with the erstwhile Lieutenant Bacalou in our pocket and his partner persuaded that what he had just seen was a subterranean annex to the Duvalier family’s secret banking and warehousing system, whose existence on Montaraz he dare not bruit about. He could talk of it only at peril to his wife and seven children. For the time being, at least, Bobo, too, was in our pocket, a dupe of a story too plausible to dismiss as fantasy.
The unpleasant banal truth is that every story of individual consciousness—except perhaps God’s—concludes with a death. Toussaint was dead. What had I really known about the little man? Almost nothing. Of the five surviving habilines who’d tried to make a community-in-hiding on Pointe d’Inagua, Toussaint had made the least impression on me. Hector, Erzulie, Dégrasse, and Alberoi all had physical handicaps or personality quirks that quickened them in my affection and my memory. By contrast, Toussaint was a cipher, a pot-bellied, middle-aged little man with no obvious talents and no ingratiating idiosyncrasies. (He could paint, Adam assured me, but June was not his month to do so.) Back in Prix-des-Yeux, then, it surprised me to find that RuthClaire had wrapped Toussaint’s bullet-riddled body in clean linen and knelt beside him in the tonnelle to stroke his cold brow and cry a little over him. To me of scarcely more consequence than someone’s pet dog, to RuthClaire this dead habiline had been a person of sacred worth. His private story had ended, but it continued in the impact, whether forceful or modest, that he had had on others.
A banal truth. A banal consolation.
Like enemies observing a holiday cease-fire, the Tontons Macoutes and our own party cooperated in giving Toussaint a funeral and burial. Mud and mire impeded our labors, but at last we got him into the ground so that an evil houngan or bocor could not resurrect him as a zombie. Alberoi and Dégrasse, who had fled earlier, did not return to help us, but I had the feeling that, from some hidden vantage, they were watching and carefully evaluating our methods.
Lieutenant Bacalou assured his fellow volontaires—Philomé, Charlemagne, and Jean-Gérard—that they had no charges under which to hold Toussaint’s companions. He assured Adam that for our promise not to report the unfortunate shooting of the habiline (who, in any case, had no certifiable status on the island), he would not mention, in his mandatory summary of tonight’s events, the discovery of Prix-des-Yeux. Officially, then, the incident had never happened. We all depended on one another to keep the lid on this tragic collision of purposes and personalities.
Lieutenant Bacalou led his men down the mountain ahead of us. Alone again, our own party puttered back and forth between the houngfor and the huts trying to tidy up after the rain. We were going back to the Caicos Bay beach cottage—all of us but Hector and Erzulie—and I gave myself the task of gathering the paintings of “Francoise Fauver,” to be known henceforth as Marcel Sam. I rolled each canvas as tightly as I could, removing from their frames those that were stretched taut and tacked down. I was inserting these paintings into my backpack when Brian Nollinger came into the shanty and wordlessly began to help me. My stomach did a queasy flip-flop.