“Overcooked?” she said, loud enough for the patron to hear. “’F I had me a pasty face like that fella’s, I wouldn’t eat nothin’ that wasn’t burnt to a crumbly char. He get a taste of underdone raw evver time he bite his bottom lip.”
Only by natural charm could I herd her back into the kitchen, and only by waiving his tab could I mollify the red-haired man she had insulted.
In my heart, though, I blamed the whole situation on Craig Puddicombe.
To forestall Craig’s using the Montarazes’ failure to comply with all his demands as an excuse to hurt their baby, Adam wrote this letter to the Atlanta newspapers:
In your pages this past Sunday, a story suggests my wife and I have separated because of my interest in theology. Although in so saying, Miss RuthClaire says a partial truth, it is ONLY a partial truth. In whole truth, I have broken this marriage because a person of my subhuman species has no right to marry a Caucasian representative of Homo sapiens sapiens. I rue the bad example I have set the youth of this nation. I urge them very hard not to give in to the temptation to marry outside their species.
Further, Miss RuthClaire is too fine a person to continue sharing her bed with subhuman murderer such as I. The parents of the late E. L. Teavers of Beulah Fork, Georgia, know of what I speak, as do his Brothers, Sisters, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, and unhappy Widow, Nancy, to all of whom I extend heartfelt apologies for surviving the murderous fall that for Mister Elvis Lamar was very fatal. I am sorry, I am sorry.
Finally, I hereby surrender myself to any police or government body that wishes to arrest and prosecute me for the evil homicide of E. L. Teavers. Please, O police chiefs, sheriffs, or special agents, publish in this Letters to the Editor column your desire so to do, and I will surrender myself to you in the lobby of the Journal-Constitution building at 9:30 A.M. on the day after this desire has been printed. This I solemnly swear and promise.
Adam Montaraz
The letter appeared in the Constitution on Thursday morning and in the Journal that afternoon. Adam had not let anyone read it beforehand, and although it technically fulfilled all the ransom demands not yet complied with, I was afraid its tone and turn of phrase might backfire on all of us. The letter seemed to embody the first extended use of irony and sarcasm that Adam had ever essayed.
Special Agent Hammond visited Paradise Farm shortly before midnight on Thursday. He told us that Niedrach had doubts similar to mine about the efficacy of Adam’s “Apology & Confession.” If Craig were in a touchy mood or if he thought Adam had played him false, T. P. might suffer the consequences. Or the letter might lead Craig to contact the Montarazes, thus multiplying the clues about his and Nancy’s whereabouts and inadvertently laying the groundwork for their capture.
Southern Bell Security had cooperated with the GBI in setting up a trap on my telephone by installing a pin register—a device capable of holding a line open even after the caller has hung up—in the office of the Beulah Fork exchange, but had not bothered to put a trap on the phones in the Montaraz house on Hurt Street because of Atlanta’s prohibitive number of exchanges. So I did not see how Hammond could say another call from Craig might prove his ruin. Besides, it was hard to imagine him calling Paradise Farm. He’d have to have a sudden prescient hunch about Adam’s hiding place.
“What in my letter could give offense?” Adam asked Hammond.
For someone able to grasp the metaphysical depths of various spiritual issues, Adam was curiously obtuse on this score. I told him his expression of regret felt tongue in cheek, his apology a clever indictment of Teavers, and his offer to give himself up a parody of genuine confession.
“You’ve complied with the letter but not the spirit of Craig’s demands.”
“How can I comply with the spirit of demands which I abhor?”
“You can’t,” Hammond said. “But you can pretend to.”
“I am no good at this pretending,” Adam growled. A tear formed in his eye. He blinked, and the tear slid moistly down the gully between his cheek and his habiline muzzle. “I can no longer make-believe I am happy apart from my wife. I can no longer make-believe my praying is helpful. I can no longer make-believe the God of Abraham and also of the converted Paul cares very much about my family’s dilemma.”
Hammond said, “We’re here, Mr. Montaraz, caring as much as we can.”
Seated at my dinette table with a bottle of Michelob, Adam broke down. He sobbed like an affronted toddler, his fragile lower face scrunching around alarmingly. I feared he was about to undo some aspect of the surgery that had “humanized” him.
“You should read the Book of Job,” Hammond said.
Adam shrugged aside the special agent’s hand. “Quiet the hell up!” he wheezed at Hammond. “My people have known two million years of trial, even to the need of hiding from our own descendants—but not even as free person in U.S. of America can I escape further tribulation. So I beg you most imploringly, ‘Quiet the hell up!’ ” He flung his beer bottle between Hammond and me at the fridge. By some miracle, it failed to break, but amber liquid sloshed everywhere, and the habiline got up and left the room.
“Touchy tonight,” said Hammond, not unsympathetically.
“Have you guys made any progress up there? What about Craig’s family here in town? Have you talked to them?”
“We haven’t talked to Puddicombe’s mother or any of his other family members because if we did, they’d try to tip him off. It’s that kind of family.”
“What’s Niedrach doing? And Davison? And their FBI liaison? Nothing’s happened since that letter came.” I was mopping spilled beer with paper towels.
Hammond tore two sheets of toweling from the roll and knelt next to the refrigerator to help. “They’re working. We’re all working. Sometimes you need a lucky break.” He carried the pieces of sopped toweling to the waste basket. “By the way, your friend Caroline Hanna told me to tell you hello. She’s over there with your ex-wife every moment she can spare away from her work—a friend indeed, that lady.”
God, I thought, they’re comparing notes. “Thanks. So what do we do now?”
“Sit tight, Mr. Loyd. Sit tight.”
Adam and RuthClaire had written the ten checks demanded by Craig’s letter for five thousand dollars each. Although these were big contributions by the standards of most American taxpayers, none by itself would seem remarkable coming from national figures of the Montarazes’ suspected wealth. The GBI agents had dissuaded them from writing any check for an amount conspicuously larger than the others for fear that Craig would use this disparity as an excuse to make further demands. He seemed to enjoy the game he was playing, as if the rush of making complex demands and having them carried out was a well-deserved bonus for his pursuit of “justice.”
By the end of the week, we learned, the Montarazes’ bank in DeKalb County began making payments on some of these drafts. STORC, the Klairvoyant Empire, the Rugged White Survivalists, the Methodist Children’s Home, and Aubrey O’Seamons had wasted little time cashing their checks. As a result, it might be possible to put all ten canceled checks in that display case in Lenox Square a few days ahead of schedule. Late Friday night, in fact, exactly one week after the kidnapping, Hammond informed Adam and me that the FBI had taken several discreet steps to have the checks in place by midweek. There was no sense delaying their availability to the kidnappers until the second Monday in August if they had already cleared. Whether Craig would let T. P. go before Monday was problematic, but we all agreed that it was worth a try. Meanwhile, video surveillance equipment had been concealed in front of Rich’s by specialists working in the mall after regular business hours.
Adam and RuthClaire traded letters during their separation. Bilker mailed them from random sites around the city, while I sent all of Adam’s billets-doux to Caroline Hanna’s apartment so she could carry them to Hurt Street when she visited RuthClaire. We took these precautions because Niedrach believed that Craig would interpret any sign of contact between the M
ontarazes, even from afar, as a violation of their promise to live apart. Phone calls were also out.
Caroline and I were under no such ban. So long as I placed my calls to her from the West Bank rather than Paradise Farm, no one objected to our talking to each other. Also, Caroline took pains to call me only at the restaurant. If she phoned during business hours, I clambered up to my sweltering second-floor storage room to take the call on the extension there. Downstairs, Livia George would hang up, and Caroline and I would jabber like furtive teenagers. The heat of the storage room, with its low musty cot and its listing pyramids of cardboard boxes and vegetable crates, heightened my sense of the illicitness of our hurried conversations. But I liked that feeling. It was absurd, feeling like a teen again, but it was splendid, too, an unexpected benefit of T. P.’s kidnapping that in full daylight I could in no way square with the horror of that event.
On Saturday night, Caroline called at 11:30, just as Hazel and Livia George were about to go out the front door. But with only an ancient rotating floor fan to keep me from collapsing of heat stroke, I took the call upstairs, anyway.
“Talk to me, kid.”
“Not for long, Paul. Listen: we’re hanging on, and Ruthie’s unbelievably self-possessed. Me, I’m done in.”
“Me, too. Frazzled. Big crowd tonight.”
“Adam?”
“I’ve begun to worry about him, Caroline. His odd amalgam of religious beliefs—his faith, if you want to call it that—seems to be deserting him. He walks around my place like Roderick Usher, morose and supersensitive. Know what he told me this morning? ‘I’m a lightning rod for human cruelty.’ His exact words.”
“That doesn’t sound like him. It’s self-pitying.”
“It is and it isn’t. I think he was expressing a degree of concern about the people around him. It bothers him that so many people—RuthClaire, me, Bilker, the cops and special agents, and you too, probably—are endangering themselves trying to help him. He feels responsible.”
“Well, he could just as easily say, ‘I’m a lightning rod for human charity.’ He’s looking at things backwards, Paul.”
“Is he any different from the rest of us? He takes the good for granted. Evil thoroughly confounds him.”
Caroline said, “Oh!” as if a 100-watt bulb had gone on over her head.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“Do you recall how Adam may’ve got to the States? How he was one of three habiline crew members on a fishing boat running guns from Punta Gorda in Cuba to the guerrilla opposition to Baby Doc in Haiti? Only that boat never made it back to Haiti. The Cuban I interviewed in the Atlanta Pen—Ignacio Guzman Suarez y Peña—well, Ignacio murdered the captain of that vessel and two of Adam’s fellow habilines. That’s another instance of violence that haunts Adam, another reason he keeps seeing himself as a ‘lightning rod for human cruelty.’ We keep forgetting he has a past antedating his first appearance in Georgia.”
I started to object, but Caroline cut me off:
“RuthClaire does, of course, but the rest of us have no strong sense of the hardships he’s already survived.”
“I love you, kid,” I said. Only the faint idiot singing of the wires—the roaring of the voiceless inane—still linked us. I shifted on the sagging cot, sweat lubricating my flanks. “You still there, Caroline?”
“You might have had the decency to tell me that last Saturday morning.”
“What’s wrong? Everything was okay yesterday, wasn’t it? Between us, I mean.”
She let the wires sing a few seconds. “Paul, I got a letter from Brian today.”
“Nollinger?” My heart sank.
The very one, she admitted. The letter had come from a city called Montecristi in a northeastern province of the Dominican Republic. In it, good old Brian spent several paragraphs justifying his abrupt departure from Atlanta. His position in the anthropology department at Emory had steadily deteriorated. His well-publicized quarrel with the Zarakali paleoanthropologist Alistair P. Blair had put him on mushy ground with his colleagues, most of whom revered the cantankerous old fart. Nor had Brian improved their opinion of him by accusing the artist RuthClaire Loyd of making Adam Montaraz, the habiline refugee from the Caribbean, her personal “slave,” when, in fact, the two had freely married each other. Unleashing an agent of the INS on Adam had been yet another regrettable mistake.
“He made plenty of ’em. Glad to know he’s begun to regret them.” Caroline shushed me. Gradually among Brian’s colleagues, she continued, paraphrasing the letter, there had grown a perception that he was trying to milk the habiline controversy of every last drop of career benefit. (And ineptly missing the pail.) He had further compounded his problems in the department by belatedly developing scruples about some experiments, with primates, at the field station north of Atlanta. Did these experiments serve any essential research purpose, or were they only a convenient means of generating grant money for ethologists who might otherwise lack employment? At last, chagrined by his own complicity in this system, he had made loud noises about the inhumanity of his long study with stub-tailed macaques. Never again would he exploit innocent primates for research purposes, no matter how noble the cause. Colleagues with funded experiments of their own had interpreted Brian’s newfound scrupulosity as a holier-than-thou slap in the face. His reputation as a limelight-seeking cad had grown into a behemoth.
“He deserved that reputation.”
“Maybe. He says that since last summer he’s been a waking nightmare. He says if it hadn’t been for my affection and support, he would’ve overdosed on sleeping tablets by Christmas.”
“That’s touching. Considering the debt he feels he owed you, why do you suppose he never bothered to tell you goodbye?”
“He apologizes for that. He feared if he came to say goodbye, he’d chicken out and stay. When he learned he’d landed a research position with an American concern in the Dominican Republic, he didn’t know whether to cheer or what. It was such a drastic break with his own past: a Georgia boy with advanced degrees in anthropology and primate behavior. He turned his back on all that. He didn’t know if he could do it, Paul.”
“It looks like he managed.”
“Relax, will you? I’m not buying an airline ticket to the Dominican. I don’t love Brian. I’m just relieved to know he’s okay.”
I did relax. She no longer loved the man. Why, then, had she been so tentative about telling me he’d written? Well, my attitude toward him precluded comfortable talk about her former lover. She’d been afraid to mention Brian’s name, much less tell me about his letter. Also, she’d felt that to hold back word of the letter would be to sabotage whatever degree of trust we had so far created between us.
“What the hell’s he doing down there, anyway?” I blurted.
“He’s a sugar-industry hire.” I heard Caroline shuffling the pages of Brian’s letter as I’d once heard Puddicombe uncreasing his list of ransom demands. “The plantations on which he’s to work are owned by the Austin-Antilles Corporation. They’ve asked him to look into the conditions of Haitian canecutters. The canecutters are hired on a lottery basis by the local sugar-harvesting network. Brian’s supposed to propose cost-efficient ways of improving their lot—without destroying the economic base of the Haitian or the Dominican government.”
“Cripes. “
“What? Brian says he’s already begun spotlighting the squalid conditions of the canecutters. He’s excited. He thinks finding a way to channel some of Austin-Antilles Corporation’s money to these folks will be a challenge. He’s using his anthropological background for a humane sociological purpose.”
“Caroline, it’s a shortcut to crucifixion.”
“Why?”
“Don’t kid me. You’re the one who’s worked with Cuban and Haitian refugees.”
“Not down there. Only here. What’re you getting at?”
“Haitian politics are nasty. Dominican democracy is fragile, and Austin-Antilles is a multination
al conglomerate that’s never shared the wealth with peons. The reverse, in fact. From what little I know, it sounds to me as if your friend Brian is getting caught in the middle of a canecutting public-relations ploy. Haitian workers always get the shitty end of the stick.”
“Brian thinks he may be able to do some good.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t end up with nails in his feet and palms.”
Caroline chuckled mordantly. “That’s the first time you’ve wished him anything less fatal than hanging at dawn, isn’t it?”
Probably, I admitted. I also told Caroline that if Brian did his job too well, and if Austin-Antilles did not fire him for his presumption, he’d surely be transferred to a less controversial company enterprise elsewhere. That was how the Big AAC did business.
For a moment, inarticulate arias of static. Then my caller said, “I love you, too,” and hung up. I sat there in the heat, stunned, savoring her words.
At Paradise Farm, Adam was vegetating. If he wrote RuthClaire a letter, he forgot to give it to me to mail. If he started a crossword puzzle, he soon lost interest. His books on theology, religious history, the philosophy of religion, and contemporary creation theory sat untouched in their boxes in the second-floor studio. Neil Hammond did not come by with news, and on Sunday morning, too wrought up by Caroline’s declaration of love to sleep late, I was the one who turned on Great Gospel Giveaway.
Maybe I had a hunch that McElroy would mention a recent $5,000 contribution from Adam Montaraz. Bingo. He acknowledged it just as an army of cleancut ushers began filing toward the altar to pick up the collection plates. Adam, too busy trying to think of a nine-letter word for “false piety” to glance at the set, made no sign he’d heard McElroy acknowledge the donation.
That afternoon, however, he fell asleep while watching a Braves game on Channel 17. I turned off the set without rousing him, a notable achievement because he usually slept as lightly as a cat. McElroy’s sermon had been called “Energizing Commitments,” and that was what Adam seemed to need. Unfortunately, he had not listened to the man.
Ancient of Days Page 22
