I was very late, which meant one of two things: Monsieur Tatagani would be awake and would beat me, or he’d have barred the door before going to sleep and I’d have to risk a night out on the street. I could see, as soon as I turned onto the dirt road that led to Monsieur Tatagani’s house, that the lights were out. But he was waiting for me on the stoop. Moonlight edged the saucer of bone on the top of his head.

I had no saucer of bone to give me away under the moon, so I had time to figure out what to do. Simplest would be to press the case into Monsieur Tatagani’s hands, tell him that whatever was inside could pay off my debt, and leave in the morning. The fact that the case was stolen would not matter; all he’d care about would be whether its contents were valuable enough.

Hiding behind a tree, I propped my head on clasped hands and stared at the glimmering metal briefcase. Its corners were reinforced, the combination lock sturdy as a stone, the dial engraved with numbers. Unable to resist, I tugged at the clasps, but they didn’t give at all.

There was no way I was going to be able to get it open — not while I was outside in the dark without any tools. I’d been so focused on getting the case that I hadn’t given a single thought to how to open it.

I crept around the back of the gnarled, lonely tree. An iboga bush grew alongside it, and when I nestled the case within its leaves it was out of view of anyone passing along the street. Heart pounding, I headed to Monsieur Tatagani’s house.

The moment he saw me, he rose to his feet. “Why are you so late?” he asked. His voice was controlled, with no sign of irritation. “And why are you coming from that direction?”

“You saw me leaving the bar with the Arab, papa. I took him to the Hôtel Beverly Hills.”

A smile, empty of happiness, spread on his lips. “Yes, I did see that.”

“I thought he might have work for me to do,” I said. An image of the case forced its way into my thoughts. I hoped Monsieur Tatagani couldn’t see it flickering behind my eyes.

He laid a hand on my neck, like he was figuring out the force he’d need to break it. “And did he? Find work a boy like you could do? Are you finally going to pay back the thousands of francs it’s taken me to keep you alive?” He laughed in his gray way. I could smell palm wine on his breath.

I shook my head, hoping to loosen his fingers. They only tightened.

“Is that so?” Monsieur Tatagani said, shoving me so I tumbled past the open front door and into the main room. I managed not to fall to the ground, which I knew would have invited more anger. Blocking the moon, Monsieur Tatagani was a figure cut out from the night, a beast come for a boy who’d stayed out too late. “You didn’t ask for a coin for carrying that Arab’s bag? You didn’t slip a hand into his pocket and see what you could find?”

He flicked on a light, and the leer on his face was more ferocious than I’d expected.

Heart skipping in terror, I remembered that I had gotten something out of Prof that I could give Monsieur Tatagani. My trembling fingers searched through my pocket. There was a hole in the threadbare fabric, but the coin was too big to have fallen out, even during my flight.

“Here,” I said, holding it out in my sweaty palm. “He gave me twenty-five francs.”

Monsieur Tatagani looked skeptical. “Twenty-five? And all that weird old man asked you to do was carry his bag?”

I nodded, and the coin was gone. Having that much money taken from me would have been agony before, but all I felt now was relief.

“Maybe sacrificing so much to keep you alive wasn’t a mistake,” Monsieur Tatagani said. “You’ve finally paid for a tiny part of your keep. Go to bed. I’ll wake you before dawn so you can get back to the Hôtel Beverly Hills before the Arab wakes up. You’ll do whatever he desires, and you’ll bring me thirty francs this time.”

He nodded, and I ducked through to where I slept. Monsieur Tatagani had separated a drafty mud-walled room from the house with an old housedress that he’d hung as a divider. This was where he kept his boys. Monsieur Tatagani lived his life — cooking, sleeping, drinking with guests — on the other side of that tattered housedress, while we listened in nervous silence.

Two wooden benches lined either sidewall, and it was on those that I and the other boy who’d been with Monsieur Tatagani longest slept. The rest of the orphans were lined shoulder-to-shoulder on a rubber mat on the dirt floor.

The room was so silent that I knew they were all awake and listening, eyes scrunched shut, making no noise so as not to attract Monsieur Tatagani’s anger. Pierre, the youngest, had taken advantage of my missed curfew and laid out on my bench. “It’s okay,” I whispered, lying alongside him. We fit, barely. “There’s room for two tonight.”

“Have you already had your pee outside?” he asked.

I nodded. We weren’t allowed out of the room at night, but there was a can in the corner that we could use. Pierre claimed that the smell kept him awake.

On a shelf above my bench was a plastic basin that contained my few possessions. I reached up and took it down, taking advantage of the lamplight to examine the worn-rough ridge of the plastic, the frayed rope handles. I imagined my mom’s and my sister’s fingers on them.

Most of the boys paid their keep by hunting rodents and monkeys out of the bush that Monsieur Tatagani could sell to the market vendors. When they had a good day we’d eat the extra meat, but usually Monsieur Tatagani boiled up rice, shallow wooden bowlfuls for which he’d add a few francs to our debt. Whoever returned last got the sludge at the bottom, a cooked-down rice water that was gray and foamy. It looked like what you’d get if you milked a monster, but it was plentiful and filled the belly. I took a plastic bag from a hook on the wall and held the snipped-off tip to my lips. Some of the cooled dregs dribbled into my mouth, and I swallowed them and then some more.

Back when my mother had been alive, dinner had been fruit and a heavy slice of manioc bread, eaten at a sloping wooden table overlooking our field. My father was a road builder and almost always far away, laying pavement. There was never a lot to eat, but there was always enough, because when none of our crops were ready we’d find a neighbor who’d harvested. Other times we’d return the favor, so there was usually company at our table. When my mother got sick and my sister stopped growing, we had to move to Franceville for its hospital. I was too young to work, so I’d beg meals from the few family members we had here. But they were my father’s family, and it had been years since he’d last been seen. Once they gave up on him, they gave up on me, and my meals became bar scraps and the milk of the monster.

I didn’t usually allow myself to stew on the time when my parents had been around, but that night had been so strange — between Prof and the metal briefcase and the calls I thought I’d heard from the mock men — that I was cracked open. As I lay on the bench, I wished that my mother could place a blanket over me, like she’d once done. But she was gone. Even the blanket was gone. So instead I lay my arm across Pierre, blanketing him.

What I needed most was to get some sleep. But all I could think about was the metal briefcase and what it would look like placed alongside the rest of my possessions inside the plastic basin. Its four corners would just nest inside. Once that basin had held my sister, until she’d stopped growing and shrunk to nothing instead. Tomorrow it would hold this different treasure. Making soft tuck-tuck sounds, I turned the basin in a slow circle, the way I’d once done to coax Carine into sleep. I stopped only when Pierre fidgeted.

I allowed myself to dream. In my new life I could use whatever the case held to buy a hut and a plot of land. Once I had that, I could pay Pierre’s debt and he could live with me. Or maybe my father, once he heard I was set up somewhere, would finally return. I could have a family.