He tapped the desk, said, “All right, Barry. Live slow and easy now,” turned, and walked to the front door, where he made sure to brush his shoulder against the wiry escort who had brought them here.
“Guide me out of here, Kareem,” he said on his way out the door.
15
Cooper showed the mug shot to every visible man, woman, and child in town. It wasn’t a pleasant sight, what people saw in that picture, but Cooper didn’t much care. All the better: if somebody knew who the man had been in life, chances were Cooper could catch the look of horror on the face of even the most secretive citizen of the Valley of the Dead, confirming his suspicions while he figured out what to do about Barry the witch doctor with his lightbulbs, cell phone, and generator. Alphonse did whatever translating Cooper needed, Cooper watching the kid grow more uncomfortable with every encounter. If any of the locals they were meeting recognized the person in the picture, they did a good job of hiding it; maybe, Cooper thought, they were just disgusted with him showing the picture around and didn’t want him to know whatever it was they knew-if they knew anything at all.
He began to notice the handful of local men following them around, keeping their distance but watching them just the same. Cooper wasn’t sure whether they were following for surveillance, intimidation, or robbery purposes, but he assumed it was a little of each. Sure, he’d flashed those big, fat ten-dollar bills around, but Barry the witch doctor was probably practiced at scaring people out of their wits with his evil eye and collection of zombie-branded trinkets. Maybe, Cooper thought, Barry’s M.O. included dispatching a team of shadow-men, the very presence of whom implied that zombification couldn’t be far off.
They could watch him all they wanted, but if the toughs came too close he’d consider redrawing the radius of personal space they were being granted by way of the FN Browning.
It was late in the day, nearing dusk, when a young woman approached. Cooper put her around sixteen; she was emaciated like most of the town’s other citizens, rough and sinewy, but there was something about her-watching her shuffle across the dusty trail in bare feet and a dress that looked like something medieval farmworkers might have worn, Cooper felt a surge of sexual excitement. He experienced the odd sense of suspecting he knew what she tasted like, could imagine with no effort the scent of the body oils in her hair; as his mind was picturing her worn fingernails scratching at his back, he decided to rein it in and veer off the path the pervert in him appeared to want to take.
She was next to him now, head down as though in shame.
“Bonswa,” she said.
Cooper skipped Alphonse. “Bonswa.”
She asked if it were true-that they were the men showing the picture around. Alphonse started to translate, but Cooper waved him off and handed the girl the picture.
“Wi,” he said. “Sekonsa. C’est ça, là.”
Alphonse had a look on his face that made it pretty clear the journey he’d envisioned was more akin to the trek over the mountain. Not this.
The girl stared at the photograph for a long while. She seemed to be examining the picture the way most everyone had, lost in a kind of mild confusion. There was the possibility that many of them had never seen a photograph, but after his glimpse of the cellular phone in the witch doctor’s house, Cooper found some difficulty buying that explanation.
“Wi, c’est li,” she said, and handed the picture back. Still looking confused.
“Hold on,” Cooper said. “That’s him? Who?”
Alphonse watched.
“Li rele Marcel,” she said.
Cooper became more aware that they were standing out in the open. “Who-who was Marcel?”
“Mwen fiancé,” she said.
“You’re sure? It must be difficult to tell,” he said, Cooper trying to adjust to the local version of Creole, “looking at that picture.”
“Hard, yes,” she said. “I don’t understand. How can you have that picture?”
“It’s a photograph,” Cooper said, “a picture, taken with a camera-”
“Yes, I understand a picture,” she said, shaking her head, frustrated, “I mean where did you make it? It is not possible.”
Cooper looked at Alphonse for a moment. The kid was shifting his weight from foot to foot. He stopped when he saw Cooper looking at him.
“Why not?”
“Where,” she said. “Where did that picture happen?”
Cooper said, “On a beach. On Tortola. In the British Virgin Islands. A few hours from here by boat.”
She started shaking her head.
“Non?” Cooper said. “Poukisa?”
She looked at him, had to look way up, and Cooper saw a glint of green in her otherwise brown eyes. “Because he is dead,” she said.
Cooper said, “Well, yes,” relieved, having felt some trepidation at the prospect of breaking this news to her. But if she were right, and the body from Roy’s beach had been her late fiancé, it all got rapidly very complicated.
“Look,” he said. “You sure about this? You’re sure that’s Marcel.”
He held out the snapshot, but she didn’t take it again, only shook her head in the affirmative and said, “Wouldn’t you be?”
Cooper blinked, appreciating the sophistication of the response.
“How did you know he was dead?”
“How? Because I watched his funeral.”
Cooper thought about this for a moment and decided to give one more shot at seeing whether the scenario he wasn’t too comfortable acknowledging could be eliminated.
“Listen,” he said. “Do you understand where Tortola is?”
“No. It is not possible you saw him somewhere else. He has never been anywhere else. He was born here, he lived here, he died here. He never went to this place, this Tortola.”
Cooper stood there, out in the middle of main street in the Valley of the Dead, taking a moment to think about this. Alphonse had begun fidgeting again. Cooper reached out and wrapped his fingers gently around the girl’s arm, just below the shoulder.
He said, “Kouman ou rele?”
She gave him half a smile and said, “Simone.”
“You were there when they buried him?”
“Wi,” Giving him those brown-green eyes.
“Could you take us there?” he said. “Can you show me his grave?”
Painted on a stake, driven into the earth, was a name: MARCEL S.
Just the s.-no last name. Cooper wondered if these people even used last names. If not, perhaps there had been another Marcel in town, or, as in Asia, the citizens of La Vallée des Morts might put the surname first, S. being short for his given name.
Simone was pointing at the stake.
It was one grave among a few dozen. They were in a clearing located about a quarter mile into the petrified forest, here in the graveyard that told him nothing about the body from Roy’s beach other than this: if the corpse beneath the stake was actually the kid named Marcel S., then the girl was wrong-it hadn’t been Marcel on the rocks in Road Town.
He found the concept that occurred to him next disturbing.
Leaning down, he thanked Simone and told her he was sorry about her loss. He told her he’d be leaving town now. Simone looked at him, her brown-green eyes as confused as when she had first seen the picture.
“Mési,” she said, turned, and padded back to town.
Cooper watched until she vanished behind a grouping of trees. Then he counted the rest of the cash in his wallet-just under eight hundred bucks-pulled out ten fifties, and handed the five hundred dollars to Alphonse.
“Your fee,” he said.
Alphonse eyed the cash, but remained still. “Poukisa?” he said. “Two-fifty when I bring you this place, yes? The rest-not yet, non?”
“Time for you to go home.” Cooper found the key to the pickup and shoved it and the money into Alphonse’s rail-thin abdomen. “Take the truck. It’ll make the trip a little easier on the way down. Drive back and forth, all right? Zigzag.”