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or prisons.”
    “Adam?” I asked.
    “It seems likely, Mr. Loyd. Besides, this story dovetails nicely with the fact that your ex-wife hasn’t had as much trouble as might be expected domesticating—taming—her habiline. Although he seems to have returned to feral habits while scrounging his way up through Florida while avoiding large population centers, his early days on a tiny island off the coast of Haiti made him familiar with a few of the trappings of civilization. Your wife, although she doesn’t know it, has been reminding Adam of these things rather than painstakingly writing them down on a blank slate.”
    For a time, we sipped our beers in silence. I pondered everything Nollinger had told me. Maybe it explained how Adam had come from Haiti (of all places) to western Georgia, but it did not explain how several representatives of Homo habilis , more than 1.5 million years after their disappearance from East Africa, had ended up inhabiting a minuscule island off the larger island of Hispaniola. Did Herr Professor Nollinger have an answer for that objection, too?
    “Working from Caroline’s informant’s story,” he replied, “I did some discreet research in the anthropological and historical holdings of the Emory library. First, I found out all I could about the island off Hispaniola from which the wealthy Haitian had conscripted his crew. It’s called Montaraz, Mr. Loyd—originally a Spanish rather than a French possession. But in the mid-1820s, an American named Louis Rutherford, a New England aristocrat in our diplomatic service, bought Montaraz from a military adviser to Haitian president Jean Pierre Boyer. This was during the Haitian occupation of the Dominican Republic, which had declared its independence from Spain in 1821. The Dominicans regard their twenty-two-year subjugation to Haitian authority as a period of barbarous tyranny; still, one of Boyer’s real accomplishments was the emancipation of Dominican slaves. But on Montaraz, in Manzanillo Bay, Louis Rutherford reigned supreme, and his liberal sentiments did not extend to releasing his black, mulatto, and Spanish-Arawak laborers or to paying them for their contributions to the success of his cacao and coffee plantations. He appointed a proxy to keep these enterprises going and divided his time between Port-au-Prince and the Vermont family estate.”
    “I don’t see what this has to do with Adam, RuthClaire, or me.” In another hour, my first customers for dinner would be coming through the door. Further, at any moment I expected Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, and Molly Kingsbury to report, with my two evening-shift waitresses close behind. Nollinger was ignorant of, or indifferent to, my business concerns; he wandered into the kitchen to help himself to another beer and came back to our table swigging from its can like a skinny athlete chug-a-lugging Gatorade. He had his wits about him, though. He tilted the top of the can toward me and soberly resumed his story:
    “In 1836, Mr. Loyd, Rutherford was sent to the court of Sa’īd ibn Sultan, Al Bū Sa’īd, on the island of Zanzibar off the East African coast. We Americans were the first westerners to make trade agreements with Sa’īd and the first to establish a consulate at his commercial capital in the western Indian Ocean. Rutherford went along because of his ‘invaluable experience’ on Hispaniola, where he had had to deal with both conquering Haitians and defiant Dominicans, a situation that some U.S. officials felt had parallels on the East African coast, where Sayyid Sa’īd was attempting to impose his authority on the continental port cities of Mombasa, Kilwa, and Bravanumbi. Moreover, British moral objections notwithstanding, Zanzibar had a flourishing slave market; and Rutherford, as his American colleagues knew, recognized the commercial imperatives that drove even kindly persons like Sayyid Sa’īd and himself to tolerate the more sordid aspects of the institution . . .