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a profitable rapport spring up between the habiline and the anthropologist. Twirling the silver-blond twists of his almost invisible Fu Manchu, Nollinger only grunted.
    “What do you think?” I asked him.
    “I might do better to go out there as an agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” he said, somewhat high-handedly. “I think a strong case could be made for regarding Adam as an illegal alien.”
    “How so, Herr Professor?”
    Nollinger embarked on a lengthy explanation. Purely on impulse he had shown one of his closest friends at Emory, Caroline Hanna, a young woman with a doctorate in sociology, three or four of my photographs of Adam. Nollinger was seriously involved with Caroline, and he knew that she would not betray his confidence. The photographs had had a strange effect on her, though. They had prompted her to reveal that in her after-hours work with Cuban detainees in the Atlanta Penitentiary she had met one hardened Havana street criminal from the 1980 Freedom Flotilla who confessed that he belonged in prison, either in Cuba or in los Estados Unidos . Indeed, Uncle Fidel had released this cutthroat from a Havana lockup on the express condition that he emigrate and commit fifty-seven different varieties of mayhem on every American capitalist who ran afoul of him. Instead, he fled down the northern coast of Cuba in a stolen army Jeep and later on foot to Punta Gorda, where, after hiding out for two weeks, he commandeered a fishing vessel piloted by a wealthy Haitian with strong anti-Duvalier sympathies and the strangest three-man crew that the cutthroat had ever seen.
    “What was a Haitian doing in Cuban waters?” I asked Nollinger.
    “Probably running communist guns back to the ill-organized guerrilla opposition to Duvalier in the wilderness areas around Port-de-Prix. Caroline says the Cuban told her the vessel hadn’t yet taken on any cargo when he surprised the gunrunner near Punta Gorda. He knifed the Haitian and threw him overboard. In the process, he became aware of three half-naked enanos —dwarfs, I guess you’d say—watching him from behind the fishing tackle and cargo boxes in the vessel’s stern. They reminded him of intelligent monkeys, not just animalistic dwarves, and they made him intensely uncomfortable. With a pistol he found concealed in the pilothouse, he stalked and mortally wounded two of these three mute witnesses to his crime. Their small gnarly corpses went overboard after their captain’s fleshy mulatto body, and the cutthroat set his sights on the last of the funny little men scurrying about the boat to escape his wrath.”
    “The gunrunner’s crew consisted of habilines?” For the first time that afternoon, Nollinger had piqued my curiosity.
    “I think it did, Mr. Loyd, but all I’m doing now is telling Caroline’s version of the Cuban thug’s account of his round-about trip to Key West. Draw your own inferences.”
    “What happened to the last crew member?”
    “The Cubans the Haitian gunrunner had planned to rendezvous with to make the weapons transfer pulled abreast of the vessel and took the killer into custody. They also captured the terrified hominid. They confiscated the Haitian’s boat. Our detainee in the Atlanta pen says these mysterious Cuban go-betweens—they were all wearing lampblack on their faces—separated him and the surviving crew member and shipped them both to Mariel Bay for the crossing to the States. Caroline’s informant never saw the funny little man again. Nevertheless, he’s absolutamente cierto this creature reached Florida in one of the jam-packed charter boats making up the Freedom Flotilla. You see, there abounded among some of the refugees rumors of a small hairy mute in sailcloth trousers who kept up their spirits with his odd mimes and japery. As soon as the crossing was made, though, he disappeared into the dunes before the INS authorities could screen him as they finally did those who wound up in stateside camps