“What now?” I asked Hammond.
“Mr. Montaraz writes the checks, addresses the envelopes, and gives them to me to mail from a letter box in downtown Atlanta. And then you two fellas wait.”
“Two weeks?” Adam asked. “Another two weeks?”
When I reached the West Bank later that morning, Livia George came at me out of the kitchen with a section of Sunday’s paper rolled up like a rolling pin. She knocked me into a chair by the door with it.
“You tole me they was fine! You tole me Adam was healin’ up real pretty ’n’ evverthin’ else was hunky-dory too!”
“Hey, I thought it was.”
“Their marriage done broke and you think that’s a up-tight development? Where you get your smarts, Mistah Paul? A Jay Cee Penney catalogue?” She laid the newspaper down, flattened it in front of me, and read aloud the story of Adam’s decision to forsake his family for an intense period of study at the Candler School of Theology. “I nevah figgered him a no-’count, Mistah Paul. Not for half a minute. Whyn’t you talk him out o’ this scheme while you was up there?”
“He was bandaged from his operation. Neither let on they were having trouble.”
“Poo!”
“Livvy, they waited till I’d left town to divulge their story to the press. That was deliberate. They hoodwinked me—to spare me the agony of their agony.”
“You go ’phone that crab-walkin’ Mistah Adam and tell him to get his fanny on back to his woman ’n’ chile!”
“Nobody knows where he is, Livia George. He’s moved out.”
For the rest of the day, my cook behaved like a woman infinitely sinned against, slamming pots and pans around and muttering. Once, she came out of the kitchen to glare at a red-haired man who’d returned his Continental Burger as oniony and overcooked.
“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.
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.”