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After a while, he said, “Mr. Loyd?”

“Yeah?”

“What are you going to do with all your photos? Of the caves and so forth.”

I wanted to reply, What the hell’s it to you?—but instead said, “File them until the last of Les Gens has died.” I looked him in the eye. “I don’t intend to publish them.”

“Alberoi’s younger than you, Mr. Loyd. He could outlive you. He could outlive you by a great many years.”

“I hope he does.”

In the muggy damp of the hut, poor Brian looked down. The rolled painting in his hands was trembling.

“You’re afraid he might outlive you, too, aren’t you?” I said. “Well, that’s a possibility I’ve got my fingers crossed for.”

“I was going to do an ethnography of this wretched place. I wasn’t going to reveal its location, just record the lifestyle of these last habilines under oppressive conditions: a rigorous scientific study of a lost race of only five individuals. It would have been good, Mr. Loyd. It would have been an unparalleled—an unduplicatable—piece of work.”

“Buck up. You’ve still got your coffee-drying platforms to build.”

“The stupid Tontons Macoutes ruined everything. They barged in, shot Toussaint, and now, to preserve the fiction that he never existed, we’re all having to abandon Prix-des-Yeux. Doesn’t that offend you?”

“Not half so much as the death of Toussaint.” (A noble sentiment. Had I not seen RuthClaire crying over him, though, I might never have thought to utter it.)

“They ought to be exposed and made to pay for their arrogance and cruelty.”

“Exposing the macoutes means exposing the habilines, but that’s what you want, isn’t it? Once the world knows that the Rutherford Remnant is real, you can publish your I-was-there-when-they-victimized-Toussaint memoirs without a twinge of conscience.”

Brian sighed. “You’re really going to stick those photos in a drawer somewhere?”

“Why not? Did you want them to illustrate your paper? Text by Brian Nolo Contendere, pictures by Judas Loyd?” I chuckled. “Of course, you could leave my name out altogether. There’s precedent, isn’t there? You once took credit in the Atlanta papers for a photo of mine.”

“I meant to do you a favor. I was trying to keep your name out of a controversy that might’ve—”

“Do me another favor and shut up.”

He shut up. The damp canvas backpack held as many rolled paintings as I could stuff into it. To get those still remaining in the homemade filing cabinet, we would have to make a second trip. I hoisted the pack, squared it across my shoulders, and bounced it a couple of times to make sure I could carry it.

“Do you remember when RuthClaire told you that murder wasn’t in her behavioral armory, Brian Old Boy?”

“Yes, but—”

“Shut up. Well, it may be in mine. It’s my bewildered belief that if you try to make capital of what you’ve seen here by publishing anything, down to and including a squib in Reader’s Digest, I’ll go to great pains to find you and do you malicious bodily harm. You’re the only person in God’s creation I feel that way about, Brian, but the down-and-dirty grunginess of that feeling just can’t be gainsaid or whitewashed. Believe me, Brian, I’d do it.”

“Bullshit,” he said, but the bleakness in his eyes told me I’d really scared him.

“I’m talking about the States. Here in Montaraz, it’s Lieutenant Bacalou you’ll have to be wary of. If you make any noises about the habilines while still a guest of Baby Doc, expect a late-night knock. Expect the key in your motor scooter’s ignition to trigger a bomb. Expect your next shower to greatly gratify the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock.”

“You’re all talk, Loyd.”

“Maybe, but Bacalou, well, Lieutenant Bacalou you can’t write off so easily. He knows who you are, and he’s bayoneted babies for breakfast. He’s a butcher, a trained assassin. Just because you think I might hesitate to cut your liver out, don’t sell Bacalou short. That’d be a terrible, terrible error.”

“Don’t you care what light Adam’s people can shed on our species’ history?”

“I’m more concerned that we let Adam’s people—Les Gens, thank you—live out their own histories in peace. I’m more concerned those caves up there remain a habiline secret until there ain’t no more habilines to keep it.” I looked him square in the eye again. “What about you, Dr. Nollinger?”

He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed their lenses on one of the front pockets of his bush shorts. “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, okay, okay!” he sang in annoyance. “I’ll lock everything I know in a vault in the back of my brain and let it molder there until the Montarazes relent and let me bring it out again. Not you, Mr. Loyd, the Montarazes. You’re hardly even a walk-on in this.” He put his glasses back on. Distractedly, he pulled an original Fauver/Sam from the crate, rolled it, and began tapping it lightly but obsessively on the cabinet’s edge. A voodooist coaxing Arada-Dahomey rhythms from some arrhythmic recess of his soul. I grabbed his wrist to make him stop.

“There’s one thing about you I’ll never understand,” I said.

His expression was neutral. I could explain myself or not explain myself—it made no difference to him.

“I’ll never understand what Caroline saw in you.”

“You’re of the wrong generation,” he said indifferently. “And you really don’t get people, anyway.”

I let go of his wrist and stalked out of the hut, my legs as flimsy as licorice braids. My backpack contained more than a major portion of the habilines’ output in acrylics: the weight of everything that had happened. I needed help getting down the mountain, but I needed none falling asleep on the featherbed in the guestroom of Adam and RuthClaire’s cottage on Caicos Bay. The white noise of the surf ebbed and flowed through my sleep like the hydrogen hiss interconnecting the myriad stars….

The following evening, Adam and I were sitting on the L-shaped porch of his cottage, darkness thickening around us. On the beach, visible as lithe silhouettes, RuthClaire and Caroline were building a bonfire. They planned to bake yams deep in the accumulating coals and barbecue several varieties of fish on a smutty grill that RuthClaire had found in the storage shed. Adam and I were supposed to prepare exotic tropical drinks, but the women—who had chosen bonfire-building over tending bar—were gathering driftwood and poking at the feeble flames licking up through the scrap lumber that we had helped them drag down there earlier. It would be a while before we ate, but no matter, for in our anticipation lay much of our pleasure.

Adam said, “Alberoi and Dégrasse joined Hector and Erzulie in the caves today. They’re all well—the last of Les Gens, the last of my people.”

I said nothing. Prix-des-Yeux was going to have to be abandoned and torn down. Maybe we had dealt effectively enough with Bacalou and Bobo in delaying the disclosure of the caves’ existence—but, with their own eyes, the other two macoutes had seen the habilines, too. Chances were good that they’d tattle. Rumors would spread, and Pointe d’Inagua would become a popular vacation site, a mecca for rock hounds and hikers and amateur naturalists.

Shifting in his rattan chair, Adam said, “Agarou carried you to revelation? You saw God?”

“I saw something. The prehistoric creature who gave your ancestors a divine validation of their survival struggles. It didn’t look particularly holy, Adam. It was a kind of monster, in fact.”

“All gods, Mister Paul, are monsters in human eyes. That is to say nothing very terrible against it.”