Gerry said, “I was a bit tempted, I must say. Just go ahead and do it; we could make a lot of money.”
Alan gave him an arch look. “Yes, I could tell what you were thinking.”
“Well,” Gerry said, “after all, we could, couldn’t we? I mean, we’re not police, are we?”
“You’re good citizens,” Hiram told him. “Remember how sickened you were when I showed you those pictures of the looted graves?”
Gerry laughed, with a negative hand-wave. “Oh, I don’t mean I was seriously tempted,” he said. “Just a little bit.”
“Anyway,” Alan said, “we still have the facts, even if we don’t have the tapes. Wouldn’t that be enough?”
Hiram shook his head. “Your unsupported word,” he said. “Even if the lawyers would let us publish, I wouldn’t. It’s just hearsay, puffed up. If we don’t nail a villain, we don’t have a story.”
“It’s too bad, really,” Alan said. “I was rather enjoying being a spy.”
Hiram looked as wistful as a large heavyset bald man can: “An exposé of illegal art smuggling, leading right here to New York. What a nice change of pace that would have been. I can’t tell you guys how tired of it all I get. The fifty-seven best pizza parlors in the Hamptons; your guide to a chiropractor on the West Side; questions raised about real estate developers. And here we had something real for once: antiquities, villains, airplanes, clandestine meetings in cornfields—”
“I think it’s some kind of ranch,” Alan said.
“Same idea,” Hiram told him. “Trickier footing, of course. Well, it’s all over now.” He sighed, and swigged half his drink. “You’ll never hear from Kirby Galway again.”
27
THE BEACON AND THE VOICE
I can still call those two guys in New York, Kirby thought, as he lifted the too-full Cynthia over the mountains in a great looping half circle. Just so that damn woman’s story doesn’t hit the wire services, I can still call them in three or four weeks and start making deliveries, whether I have a temple set up down here or not.
Around and behind him the marijuana bales made small squeaking and scraping sounds as Cynthia labored through the moonlit night. The first few trips with this sort of cargo, Kirby had thought the grass was infested with bugs, but then he came to realize it was just the bales shifting and adjusting as air currents toyed with the plane.
The only way to make a living at all carrying this sort of bulky cargo in this small plane was to overload it and hope you were as good a pilot as you thought you were. More than once, waddling along some bumpy pasture or a potholed secondary road toward a line of trees dead ahead in the darkness, Kirby had thought he’d overdone it this time—and wouldn’t that be a penny-ante way to die—but so far luck and skill and vagrant breezes had conspired to help him rise above all those trees and his own foolhardiness as well.
But now that he had the temple scam, he was doubling the risk. Having loaded the plane, having said farewell to the contact here at the Belizean end, he struggled Cynthia into the sky, set off northward and, once securely out of sight and sound of the men to whom he’d just waved goodbye, turned around in a long ungainly loop, hugging the treetops, Cynthia straining all the way, all so he could fly back south to his own land for an extra landing and takeoff.
Again tonight. He flew on south, mostly by feel, as clouds rolled in to block the moon. Coming in over the former temple, the world below him unrelieved black, he switched on his landing lights at the last possible instant, to see Luz and a couple of the others scurry out of his path. His land was even dryer than this afternoon, the first cracks appearing among the brown stubble.
Chunk! went Cynthia, hitting hard, the whole plane groaning in complaint. Kirby turned, flashed his landing lights briefly once more to find the Indians, then pushed Cynthia over to where they stood gathered around a couple of large cardboard cartons.
The loading didn’t take long; they’d done all this before. Out of the cardboard cartons came smaller or larger parcels wrapped in recent Belizean papers, mostly the Beacon and the Voice. The smallest parcel was no bigger than a coffee mug, the largest about the size of a table lamp without the shade. “Careful with this one,” Tommy said, handing over a medium-sized piece, “it’s broken.”
“Right,” said Kirby, stuffing it gently into one of the marijuana bales.
It was now a little past midnight, and he had nearly 800 miles to travel, most of it over water. Depending on winds and weather, the trip would take between five and seven hours; in any event, it would be before dawn when he landed. Stowing the last parcel, he yawned and said, “You get the temple put away?”
“Oh, yeah,” Tommy said. “The hill’s a little scuffed up, that’s all. You can see there’s been digging.”
Luz said, “I’m lookin forward to those assholes. They’ll shit when they get here and don’t see any temple.”
“Just so that ends it,” Kirby said, and yawned again. “I’ll see you guys next week some time,” he said. “When I get back from this trip, I’m just gonna hibernate.”
Innocently, Tommy said, “What’s hibernate?”
Kirby said, “What bears do in winter.”
Tommy said, “What’s winter?”
“Oh, fuck you,” Kirby said, and flew away with the music of their laughter in his ears.
28
BUT NOT IN COROZAL
Nine A.M. Saturday morning, and the first thing Innocent saw when he walked into his suite of offices in Belmopan was his faithful assistant, Vernon, elbow deep in paperwork. “Well, good morning,” Innocent said. “Working on a Saturday?”
Vernon looked up from his graphs and lists: “I had to see the dentist yesterday, so I came in to get caught up.” He looked as though he still had the toothache.
“I have some phone calls to make,” Innocent said, “then an appointment down in Belize.” He grinned, thinking about his appointment. How happy he was going to make Whitman Lemuel, by rescuing him. For a price.
Vernon reached for his phone. “Who do you want to call?”
Good old reliable Vernon. “Transportation,” Innocent told him. “I signed out a Land Rover yesterday, I want to know if it’s back.”
While Vernon made the call, Innocent reflected again on yesterday’s unsatisfactory conclusion. Having arranged for the harrying of Whitman Lemuel, he had sat in the bar of the Fort George, one G and T after another in his hand as he’d watched daylight fade over the ocean. In air conditioning, behind glass, he had seen the slowly changing colors of sky and sea as a huge television production, slow but vast, put on particularly for him. Occasionally, a dusty cartop was visible, passing by on the dirt road beyond the hotel property’s stone wall. But none of those cars contained Valerie Greene.
Full night turned the windows into mirrors, and the view of himself sprawled on the low dark chair, drink in hand, waiting hour after hour for some woman who never appeared, finally irritated Innocent to the point where, a little after 7:30, he went back out to the phone booths, called a friend in the police, asked one or two guarded questions, and was assured no government vehicle of any kind had been involved today in an accident. (A rare day.) He then called Belize City Hospital, where no female U.S. citizen had been admitted in the last 12 hours. Likewise the Punta Gorda and Belmopan hospitals. He didn’t phone the hospitals up in Corozal and Orange Walk because that was the other end of the country; Valerie had been traveling south.
At that point, he could have taken a room at the hotel for himself, and there were any number of women he could have phoned to come join him, but he just didn’t feel like it. His appetite had been set for Valerie Greene, and he wanted no substitute. Besides which, he was somewhat surprised to realize, he liked that girl, and wanted to be sure she was all right. So he ate alone in the hotel dining room, facing the curtains that close out the night view, and when she still hadn’t returned he left a simple message for her with the night clerk: “I’ll phone in the morning. Innocent.” Whereupon he
drove home, took a quick moonlight swim in the pool to get the kinks out of his body, and slept like a baby.
This morning, as promised, he phoned from the house, but Valerie Greene had never returned to the hotel. Her possessions were still in her room, as though she expected to come back, but the girl herself had been neither seen nor heard from.
His first appointment today was to have been with Whitman Lemuel, but the disappearance of Valerie Greene changed all that. The amount and kind of telephoning he had to do would not be possible at home, where he was surrounded by hostile spies with his blood in their veins. So he must first come here to the office in Belmopan.
Where the loyal Vernon immediately took over the dog’s body work, making the call, saying, “No, nothing’s wrong,” hanging up, saying to Innocent, “It’s still out.”
“Hell,” Innocent said.
Vernon looked alert, ready to be of assistance. “Something the matter?”
“That archaeologist woman,” Innocent said.
“Oh, yes. Is that the car?”
“She didn’t come back.”
A cloud passed over Vernon’s face; perhaps his tooth twinged him. He said, “Who was the driver?”
Innocent looked and felt uncomfortable; this was the real problem in the affair. “You know that fellow I use,” he said, gesturing vaguely.
Vernon looked shocked. “Him?”
“I needed someone …” Innocent paused, but then went on, since he kept very few secrets from Vernon. “I needed someone to report to me,” he said. “Someone I could trust to keep his mouth shut.”
“Someone you could trust with a woman?” Vernon asked.
“Oh, I don’t think he’d …” But Innocent’s voice trailed away. In his heart, he had to admit he wasn’t sure about that part of it.
“Is he back?” Vernon asked.
“He isn’t on the phone.”
“Where does he live?”
“Teakettle,” Innocent said, naming a tiny hamlet a few miles away toward the Guatemalan border. “But I have to get down to Belize.”
“I’ll go out there,” Vernon offered, “see if I can find him. You can phone me here later.”
“Thank you, Vernon,” Innocent said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
29
In Which Is Recounted Lemuel’s Arrival In Belize, His Traveling To The Temple With Galway, The Unexpected Appearance Of Valerie Green, Galway’s Astonishing Behavior Thereafter, And Lemuel’s Decision To Have Nothing More To Do With The Whole Dubious Affair
“Mistah Whitman?”
Lemuel rose from a sweaty unrestful humid sleep, up out of discomfort and nightmare into worse discomfort and much worse reality. Jail. Fetid odors fixed in the dank air like flies in amber. Something dripping far off, against some ancient stone. The night’s clamminess just giving way to the day’s heat. Jail; a foreign jail.
Gray light seeped through the filth on the barred window, illuminating the concrete walls and floor, the bare thin ticking without sheet or mattress in which Lemuel had tossed and turned in sleepless terror all night, only to fall into exhausted unconsciousness at the first hint of dawn. And now he was startled awake by a voice, rasping his name:
“You dere, wake up. You Mistah Whitman?”
Sitting up, dazed with fear and lack of sleep, Lemuel blinked at the silhouette beyond the barred door. “Lemuel,” he said. His tongue felt swollen, against his furry teeth. “My name is Lemuel.”
“You no Mistah Whitman?” The silhouette wore a uniform of some sort, must be a guard.
“Whitman is my first name.” Trying to wake up, trying to collect his scattered wits, Lemuel dug knuckles into his sandy eyes.
“Huh,” said the guard, and rattled papers. “Whitman be you Christian name?”
“Yes.”
“And Lemuel, now. Lemuel be you family name?”
“That’s right.”
The guard chuckled, rattling his papers. “There be many a strange name in this world,” he said philosophically. Keys rattled now, clanged in the lock, and the door squeaked open. “Well, Mistah, Mistah Lemuel, Mistah Whitman Lemuel, you got a visitor.”
A visitor? What could it mean? Who knew he was here? After hours last night of struggle and protest, hours of being lied to or intimidated or merely ignored, Lemuel had finally given up hope of ever getting a message through to the American embassy, or the hotel, or anyone anywhere in the world who might be able to help him escape this sudden tropic Kafka. So who could this be, coming to visit him here in this awful place? Lemuel asked the guard: “What visitor?”
“The man who want to see you.”
“Who? Who is he?”
“You don’t want no visitor this morning?” The door squeaked again, ominously, as though with the idea of closing. “You want me, I tell him you be too busy for visitor this morning.”
“No no!” Anything would be better than this verminous cell. Rising too hastily, Lemuel was engulfed in dizziness and had to lean a moment against the wall, under the eye of the impassive guard. Then he moved on, out to a concrete hall being mopped by a small and toothless inmate. The guard led Lemuel toward the front of the building, but veered them into a small side office where a large stout chocolate-colored man in a light gray suit and pale green open-neck shirt stood leafing through a wall calendar from Regent Insurance Company, taking a great deal of interest in the months ahead. Translucent louvers in both windows were slightly open, letting in light and air without permitting a view of what lay outside.
“Mistah St. Michael,” said the guard, with some odd combination of deference and jocularity, “this be Mistah Whit-man Lem-uel.” Shooing Lemuel into the office, the guard snicked the solid door shut with himself on the outside.
Mr. St. Michael dropped the year and turned to brood upon Lemuel, who keenly felt his own griminess, his wrinkled clothing and unwashed body and unshaven face. St. Michael, for such a big man in such a hot climate, was absolutely dapper. A thousand sentences rushed through Lemuel’s mind—greetings, queries, demands, supplications—but none seemed precisely suited to the situation, so he remained silent, not even trying to alter the look of desperation and bewilderment and fear he knew to be on his face.
It was St. Michael at last who spoke, in a mellifluous radio announcer’s voice, saying, “Well, Mister Lemuel, I’ll say this for you. You don’t look a crook.”
So it was, that was it, his worst fears realized, the Kirby Galway situation, that was it. The terrors that had kept him awake all night were justified; reputation ruined, a dank jail cell his portion forevermore. “Oh, no, sir,” Lemuel said, in that moment a broken man, “no, sir, I am not a crook.”
“We have heard Americans say that before,” St. Michael told him.
“It was Galway,” Lemuel said, all in a rush. “Kirby Galway, he lied to me, said all he wanted was my expert opinion, there wasn’t the slightest hint of impropriety until it was too late, I was already there, right there at the temple, the first time he made the suggestion, that’s the—”
“At the temple?” St. Michael’s eyes gleamed; his interest had been captured. A super-detective, that’s what he must be, a manhunter thrilling to the chase.
Well, Lemuel wanted no part of it. Let this manhunter chase Kirby Galway, and let Galway try to weasel out of it later, try to pin any of the blame on a respectable scholar like Whitman Lemuel, just let him try. “I don’t know what the girl told you,” he began, “but I was out there strictly—”
“The girl? Valerie Greene?”
“Is that her name? Whatever she said, I assure you—”
“Wait, wait, Mister Lemuel,” St. Michael said, suddenly accommodating, reassuring. “Sit down here. Begin at the beginning, please.”
There was a small mahogany desk in the room, and a pair of armless wooden chairs. Lemuel and St. Michael sat across the desk from one another, and Lemuel told him everything, every single thing from his first meeting in New York with Kirby Galway and the
girl—Valerie Greene, yes, both there, but they gave no indication they were together at that time—through the subsequent meeting with Galway alone in New York, Lemuel’s agreement to come to Belize to inspect Galway’s temple, his arrival, their traveling out together, the unexpected appearance of the girl, Galway’s astonishing behavior thereafter, and Lemuel’s decision to have nothing more to do with the whole dubious affair. He gave St. Michael this entire history, and almost everything he said was the absolute truth. Only in one small detail did he lie; in his version of events, Kirby Galway had approached him exclusively as an expert, had asked for an opinion as to the value and authenticity of the material he had found on his land, and had not suggested smuggling or the illegal sale of Mayan antiquities until they were already standing on the temple itself, until, in fact, just before the girl arrived.
“So it’s there, in other words,” St. Michael said, when Lemuel was done. “The temple is there.”
“Well, yes, of course.”
St. Michael brooded some more. Did he believe Lemuel? If he didn’t, it was still possible that Lemuel was too unimportant to bother with further. Particularly if Lemuel volunteered to be, to do—what was the legal term for selling out your partners? Oh, yes—to give evidence for the prosecution, that was it. “I’ll be happy, if necessary,” Lemuel said, smiling a bit as man to man, “to give evidence for the prosecution, though of course, with my reputation at stake, I’d prefer to have as little to do with this sorry mess as—”
“Tell me about,” St. Michael interrupted, as though he hadn’t heard Lemuel talking at all, “tell me about, mmmm—” He withdrew a flat white envelope from his inner jacket pocket and consulted something written on its back: “Witcher and Feldspan.”
“Who?”
“Alan Witcher and—Here, see for yourself.”
St. Michael tossed the envelope across the table. It landed face up, and Lemuel had time to see that it was addressed to one Innocent St. Michael at some Belizean government department, and that the printed return address was a bank in the Cayman Islands. But then St. Michaels reached out, turned it over, and tapped the pen notations on the back, saying, “That side.”
High Adventure Page 15