Cooper sat, choosing the couch. As he did he observed that as with Manny’s old buddy Ocholito, the man behind the desk had fingernails that were painted in high-gloss black. Alphonse took one of the chairs; Cooper could see the kid was spooked. Their escort closed the front door and stood inside with his back against it.
“We never seen you before,” said the man behind the desk. He spoke in unaccented English, his voice deep, making Cooper think of Barry White on some old Motown television special. The accent made it sound like the guy had been born in Ohio, or Pennsylvania.
Cooper said, “Correct.”
“We don’t get too many strangers ’round here.”
Alphonse flicked his eyes at Cooper, then back at the man behind the desk. Cooper thought about what it meant, this being the richest guy in town, the only guy with painted walls and fingernails plus a backyard generator, undoubtedly the only guy speaking fluent English on top of it. Pulling his mug shot photo, Cooper stood, walked over to the desk, dropped the picture on it, and came back to the couch and sat.
“Friend of yours?” Cooper said.
The man’s eyes flicked over to the snapshot, lingered, then refocused on Cooper.
“What it is you looking for, you better off looking somewhere else,” he said.
Cooper, getting tired of this room and the people in it, met the man’s dead-eyed stare with a bankrupt look of his own, thinking, Match this thousand-yard stare, priest-man. Cooper could feel Alphonse’s nervous energy beside him.
“Are you familiar with the person in that photograph?”
“I don’t know nothing ’bout what you asking.”
“You’re sure.”
“We have nothing for you,” the man said, “and you are not welcome to remain here.”
Cooper nodded, rose, crossed the room, retrieved the picture from the desk, and returned it to his pocket. Standing beside the desk, he could see a few things that might otherwise have been hidden from view: papers, pens, pencils, a file drawer unit, what looked like a key-locked fire safe, a cellular phone-older, bulkier, but still a cell phone out here, at least seventy-five miles from the nearest tower. Its charger was plugged into an extension cord Cooper figured hooked up to the generator out back.
While he found this stash of goodies mildly interesting, Cooper figured it wouldn’t do any good to ask any more questions of the semimute Bizango medicine man. Anyway, he’d stirred up all the trouble he needed to-all he had to do now was hang around and wait for the reaction.
He tapped the desk, said, “All right, Barry. Live slow and easy now,” turned, and walked to the front door, where he made sure to brush his shoulder against the wiry escort who had brought them here.
“Guide me out of here, Kareem,” he said on his way out the door.
15
Cooper showed the mug shot to every visible man, woman, and child in town. It wasn’t a pleasant sight, what people saw in that picture, but Cooper didn’t much care. All the better: if somebody knew who the man had been in life, chances were Cooper could catch the look of horror on the face of even the most secretive citizen of the Valley of the Dead, confirming his suspicions while he figured out what to do about Barry the witch doctor with his lightbulbs, cell phone, and generator. Alphonse did whatever translating Cooper needed, Cooper watching the kid grow more uncomfortable with every encounter. If any of the locals they were meeting recognized the person in the picture, they did a good job of hiding it; maybe, Cooper thought, they were just disgusted with him showing the picture around and didn’t want him to know whatever it was they knew-if they knew anything at all.
He began to notice the handful of local men following them around, keeping their distance but watching them just the same. Cooper wasn’t sure whether they were following for surveillance, intimidation, or robbery purposes, but he assumed it was a little of each. Sure, he’d flashed those big, fat ten-dollar bills around, but Barry the witch doctor was probably practiced at scaring people out of their wits with his evil eye and collection of zombie-branded trinkets. Maybe, Cooper thought, Barry’s M.O. included dispatching a team of shadow-men, the very presence of whom implied that zombification couldn’t be far off.
They could watch him all they wanted, but if the toughs came too close he’d consider redrawing the radius of personal space they were being granted by way of the FN Browning.
It was late in the day, nearing dusk, when a young woman approached. Cooper put her around sixteen; she was emaciated like most of the town’s other citizens, rough and sinewy, but there was something about her-watching her shuffle across the dusty trail in bare feet and a dress that looked like something medieval farmworkers might have worn, Cooper felt a surge of sexual excitement. He experienced the odd sense of suspecting he knew what she tasted like, could imagine with no effort the scent of the body oils in her hair; as his mind was picturing her worn fingernails scratching at his back, he decided to rein it in and veer off the path the pervert in him appeared to want to take.
She was next to him now, head down as though in shame.
“Bonswa,” she said.
Cooper skipped Alphonse. “Bonswa.”
She asked if it were true-that they were the men showing the picture around. Alphonse started to translate, but Cooper waved him off and handed the girl the picture.
“Wi,” he said. “Sekonsa. C’est ça, là.”
Alphonse had a look on his face that made it pretty clear the journey he’d envisioned was more akin to the trek over the mountain. Not this.
The girl stared at the photograph for a long while. She seemed to be examining the picture the way most everyone had, lost in a kind of mild confusion. There was the possibility that many of them had never seen a photograph, but after his glimpse of the cellular phone in the witch doctor’s house, Cooper found some difficulty buying that explanation.
“Wi, c’est li,” she said, and handed the picture back. Still looking confused.
“Hold on,” Cooper said. “That’s him? Who?”
Alphonse watched.
“Li rele Marcel,” she said.
Cooper became more aware that they were standing out in the open. “Who-who was Marcel?”
“Mwen fiancé,” she said.
“You’re sure? It must be difficult to tell,” he said, Cooper trying to adjust to the local version of Creole, “looking at that picture.”
“Hard, yes,” she said. “I don’t understand. How can you have that picture?”
“It’s a photograph,” Cooper said, “a picture, taken with a camera-”
“Yes, I understand a picture,” she said, shaking her head, frustrated, “I mean where did you make it? It is not possible.”
Cooper looked at Alphonse for a moment. The kid was shifting his weight from foot to foot. He stopped when he saw Cooper looking at him.
“Why not?”
“Where,” she said. “Where did that picture happen?”
Cooper said, “On a beach. On Tortola. In the British Virgin Islands. A few hours from here by boat.”
She started shaking her head.
“Non?” Cooper said. “Poukisa?”
She looked at him, had to look way up, and Cooper saw a glint of green in her otherwise brown eyes. “Because he is dead,” she said.
Cooper said, “Well, yes,” relieved, having felt some trepidation at the prospect of breaking this news to her. But if she were right, and the body from Roy’s beach had been her late fiancé, it all got rapidly very complicated.
“Look,” he said. “You sure about this? You’re sure that’s Marcel.”
He held out the snapshot, but she didn’t take it again, only shook her head in the affirmative and said, “Wouldn’t you be?”
Cooper blinked, appreciating the sophistication of the response.
“How did you know he was dead?”
“How? Because I watched his funeral.”