He quickly counted seventy smaller objects-busts, heads, vases, an egg-along with a dozen full-body statues, three room-size tapestries, and nine boxes of varying sizes. Pretty much every one of the objects depicted, in one form or another, exotic figures wearing bejeweled robes, or warriors in full headdress. Cooper sensed a sort of recognition, a familiarity, with the faces depicted by the figures-and then, when his eyes had adjusted well enough to make out the features of the individual faces, a sudden anger swelled in his throat.
The surge made him want to yell, to scream out a string of obscenities and brutally trash the display Roy and his boys had so carefully arranged.
He swallowed back the odd impulse, wondering whether he might have just gone insane, whether it was in this one moment that he had finally lost it, crossing over the line of lunacy: Goddamn statues, I’ll kill you, who am I, I’m hearing voices, WHO AM I? But then, as quickly as it had come, Cooper’s bout with madness retreated.
He had a fleeting sense of the source. It had to do with the familiarity he’d felt before the swell of rage had come-he knew the faces on the idols on display in the room, or at least descendants of the people portrayed by them. The high, thick peaks of the cheekbones, the slope of the forehead, the teardrop orbs of the eyes…it had been people with faces something like these who had once imprisoned and tortured him, and who continued to torment him even today, by way of a recycling nightmare circuit that rarely neglected to make its overnight visit.
There you have it-you’ve just racially profiled a bunch of gold statues.
Walking around the building to examine the artifacts with a more rational eye, Cooper guessed the faces portrayed in the works were Central American Indian-similar, though not identical, to the faces of his onetime captors. He pegged the look of these faces as a pure ethnic strain of what had appeared in his captors as one watered-down dose among many.
The full collection of artifacts was in mint condition, polished to a degree rivaled only by Roy’s shoes. Eight large, opened wooden crates stood in one of the back corners of the Barn with cardboard spaghetti and other padding paraphernalia strewn about them. In seeing this, Cooper was reminded of what he’d read about that old King Tut hauclass="underline" anybody foolish enough to dig up somebody’s sacred burial ornaments, plus anybody foolish enough to come into contact with them down the line, was said to be subject to a curse. With death generally befalling those who caught it.
Cooper considered he wasn’t exactly in a death-curse kind of mood-and that meant it was time to call off whatever Roy had in mind for his latest in a long line of bullshit stunts. The chief minister could keep whatever money he was offering, and recruit somebody else to handle whatever questionable task Cooper had been ferried over to undertake.
“Catch,” Roy said from behind him.
Cooper turned and instinctively caught the foot-high idol Cap’n Roy had just tossed him. As Cooper began to object, Roy threw him a second, smaller statuette-and then a vase. Half-juggling those he’d already caught, Cooper snatched each from the air as they came before realizing what he’d just done.
Great-whatever curse has befallen the robbers of this tomb’s bounty now rests squarely on your own shoulders.
“Seem to me,” Roy said, flashing his pearly whites, “you find the right buyer, that ought to add up to two-fifty large. Maybe even two fifty-two.”
Cooper examined the goods he held in his hands. The dull clunk resulting from contact between the sculptures confirmed that they were, in fact, solid, and they certainly looked like gold to him.
Thinking, Well, you’ve already got the damn curse, he looked over at Roy.
“I’d put these three at one seventy-five, tops,” he said.
After standing expressionless for a moment, Roy nodded sharply, reached down to retrieve an ornately carved gold box, then tossed this too in Cooper’s direction. Cooper caught it in the crook of his elbow.
Roy said, “There you go, mon,” appearing pleased enough to worry Cooper to the extreme.
Cooper nodded.
“Which begs the question,” he said, “of what it is you’re paying me to do.”
“Yeah, mon.” Roy found a canvas bag at the base of the wall nearest him, came over to Cooper, and held it open while Cooper deposited the idols, vase, and box within. Roy zipped the bag shut and handed it to him.
“Come on down to the office,” he said, starting out of the Barn, “and we talk about that.”
After a few steps through blinding sunshine, Cap’n Roy led him into the Marine Base headquarters, a single-floor boathouse Roy had remodeled into a reception-cum-squad room, complete with hallway, holding cell, interrogation room, unisex restroom, and, mainly, a massive corner office for himself. Roy’s personal office featured, among other luxuries, a vast expanse of windows affording him an entirely unobstructed view of the bay. He rarely used it now, but still retained it solely for his own use.
Roy removed his cap, reclined in the chair behind his desk, and placed both hands behind his head. From this seat, he could see much of his kingdom. Cooper took the assigned guest chair, a wooden creaker he assumed Roy had rescued from the town dump. From his seat Cooper could see nothing but Roy and the series of marine steering wheels and anchors affixed to the wall behind.
The idols clunked inside the bag as Cooper set it on the floor.
“Coast Guard task force come with them heavy guns, but no jurisdiction,” Cap’n Roy said. His eyes were on the harbor. “Anytime your boys come into the BVIs, rule says the drug war need to live slow for a bit.”
“My boys?”
“And yet,” Roy said, “once in a while, it seem some unavoidable circumstance result in a fracas like the one we seen today. This happen, mon, and it put us in a gray zone. And that about where we be now: one big, fat gray zone.”
Cooper knew this to be Roy’s favorite sort of zone.
“Homeland Security, they okay with us keepin’ the boat. Better for us to do the disposin’, you see. But they prefer the contraband, of course, remain wit’ the U.S. of A. Sometime back, in an unrelated matter, we hold a little discussion ’bout this and come to a compromise: drugs or weapons, we hand ’em over. Anything else, and that contraband be confiscated-public property of the BVIs, mon. Belongin’ to the islanders.”
Cooper saw no need to speak.
“Still, we like to keep your boys playin’ by the rules, and sometime that take some encouragement. And this time, we got ourselves a bit o’ leverage. It seems there one survivin’ smuggler, and we got the man in custody-right here in the building.”
“That so.”
“Yeah, mon, and the Coast Guard want him. Our position be, Coast Guard take the boat and we keep the loot-only then we consider handin’ over the smuggler. Sure you can see my reasonin’-that boat worth nothing to me, burned half to a crisp. Them artifacts, well, that be another story.”
“When you say the boat’s worth nothing to you,” Cooper said, “it’s the public property of the British Virgin Islands ‘you,’ correct?”
“Oh, yeah, mon, nothin’ but.”
“Just clarifying the rules of the gray zone.”
“And ain’t that nice of you, mon. You know, it turn out, after a bit o’ interrogation, this smuggler tell me the contraband you just took fifteen percent of is one shipment among many in a pipeline of antiquities flowin’ south to north. He takes a few transport deals, stays out of it other than that.”
“Out of curiosity,” Cooper said, “you planning on telling me anytime soon what it is you want me to do?”
Roy, smiling, made a sweeping gesture toward the sprawling, sunlit view of Road Town. “Take a look-lovely place, ain’t it? Yeah, mon.”