Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

“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.”