men in pressed clothes, which meant they were more than police.
They would find nothing, of that Barak Moore was certain.
If Walter Piersall had accurately described his caches.
And Barak could not wait any longer. It would be a simple matter to retrieve the oilcloth packet - he was within a hundred and fifty yards of it at the moment - but it was not that simple. He needed Charles Whitehall's total cooperation - more than Whitehall realized - and that meant he had to get inside Piersall's house and bring out the rest of Piersall's legacy. The anthropologist's papers.
The papers. They were cemented in the wall of an old, unused cistern in Piersall's basement.
Walter Piersall had carefully removed several cistern blocks, dug recesses in the earth beyond, and replaced the stones. It was in one of these recesses that he had buried his studies of the Halidon.
Charles Whitehall would not help unless he saw those papers. Barak needed Charley-mon's help.
The Trelawny police got into their vehicles; a single uniformed guard waved as the patrol cars started down the road.
He, Barak, the people's revolutionary, had to work with Whitehall, the political criminal. Their own war - perhaps a civil war - would come later, as it had in so many new lands.
First, there was the white man. And his money and his companies and his unending thirst for the sweat of the black man. That was first, very much first, mon!
Barak's thoughts had caused him to stare blindly into the binoculars. The guard was nowhere in sight now. Moore scanned the area, refocusing the Zeiss Ikon lenses as he covered the sides and the sloping back lawn of Piersalls house. It was a comfortable white man's home, thought Barak.
It was on top of a hill, the entrance road a long climb from George's Valley to the west and the Martha Brae to the east. Mango trees, palms, hibiscus, and orchids lined the entrance and surrounded the one-and-a-half-storeyed white stone structure. The house was long, most of the wide, spacious rooms on the first floor. There was black iron grillework everywhere, across the windows and over the door entrances. The only glass was in the second-floor bedrooms; all the windows had teak shutters.
The rear of High Hill, as the house was called, was the most striking. To the east of the old pasture of high grass, where Barak lay, the gently sloping back lawn had been carved out of the forests and the fields, seeded with a Caribbean fescue that was as smooth as a golf course; the rocks, painted a shiny white, gave the appearance of whitecaps in a green sea.
In the centre of the area was a medium-sized pool, installed by Piersall, with blue and white tiles that reflected the sun as sharply as the blue-green water in it. Around the pool and spreading out over the grass were tables and chairs - white wrought iron - delicate in appearance, sturdy in design.
The guard came into view again, and Moore caught his breath, as much in astonishment as in anger. The guard was playing with a dog, a vicious-looking Doberman. There had been no dogs before. It was a bad thing, thought Barak... yet, perhaps, not so bad. The presence of the dog probably meant that this policeman would stay alone at his post longer than the normal time span. It was a police custom to leave dogs with men for two reasons: because the district they patrolled was dangerous, or because the men would remain for a relatively long time at their watches. Dogs served several purposes; they were alarms, they protected, and they helped pass the hours.
The guard threw a stick; the Doberman raced beyond the pool, nearly crashing into a wrought-iron table, and snatched it up in his mouth. Before the dog could bring it back the policeman threw another stick, bewildering the Doberman, who dropped the first retrieval and went after the second.
He is a stupid man, thought Barak, watching the laughing guard. He did not know animals, and a man who did not know animals was a man who could be trapped.
He would be trapped tonight.
Chapter Eighteen
EIGHTEEN
It was a clear night. The Jamaican moon - three-quarters of it - shone brightly between the high banks of the river. They had poled a stolen bamboo raft down the rushing waters of the Martha Brae until they had reached the point of shortest distance to the house in Carrick Foyle. They manoeuvred the raft into a pitch-black