Ancient of Days (48 page)

“What are you going to do?” Adam asked him.

“For a man in this kind of work,” he said, “I have too much education. I am not ruthless enough.”

“Philomé is,” Caroline said. (Thank God Philomé had no English.) “Maybe you should let him do a ‘defense of the self’ against all three of us.” She smiled at the
volontaire
to imply his name had not been taken in vain . . . even though it had.

“Let me see more of this,” Bacalou said, ignoring Caroline’s barb. He marched into the rotunda at the end of the righthand corridor. We followed. Both Philomé and the lieutenant splashed their flashlight beams on the ceilings and walls of this vast chamber, and Adam used his battery lamp to supplement their feeble lights. For a long time, no one spoke. The macoutes were wonderstruck. Caroline slipped her arm around my waist and supported me because I was falling prey to dizziness, the peculiar sensory lag of one recently possessed.

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.

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 . . . .