Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43

by High Adventure (v1. 1)

  “Lava Sxir Yt,” Feldspan echoed, reverently, as though the words were an incantation to call up an ancient savage Mayan priest.

  Kirby said, “Let’s go on up.”

  Witcher carefully replaced the stone, and they continued up the slope, soon coming to partly cleared steps, obviously part of the temple’s outer wall. Witcher and Feldspan chattered happily over that discovery, until Kirby shepherded them on upward. Near the top, where they could already look back over the jungle canopy to the tiny blue-and-white plane parked toylike in the field below, they came upon what at first appeared to be a low tombstone, perhaps two feet wide and six inches thick, jutting less than a foot from the ground, tilted slightly forward. The top and sides had been squared off by rough chisebwork, and some sort of scratches were etched deeply into the forward side.

  This really got to Witcher and Feldspan, who fell to their knees in front of the stone, Feldspan spitting on it and spreading the wet with his fingertips, the better to see the etcheddn scratches, while Witcher clawed away at the loose dry soil at the thing’s base, revealing more of it. “Jaguar,” breathed Feldspan, tracing the lines. There it was; the topmost portion of a typical stylized Mayan drawing of a jaguar’s head. The lines continued down into the area Witcher had cleared, and presumably some distance below.

  “Scorpion,” said Kirby mildly.

  They both jumped backward, scrabbling in panic on the weed- grown steps, struggling to their feet. “Where?” cried Witcher.

  “No, no,” Kirby said. “I just meant to look out for them. I wouldn’t dig barehanded around here, believe me.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Feldspan, beginning to recover his poise. “You’re absolutely right.”

  “This stela,” Witcher said, pointing at the stone, “could be very valuable. Depending on the condition of the rest of it.”

  “There’s a bunch of them here,” Kirby said casually, watching Witcher and Feldspan exchange a quick hungry look. “Let’s go on.”

  This time they continued all the way to the top, where they found a mostly flat weedy area about 12 feet square. In one comer the old paving stones were completely uncovered. Walking back and forth, alternately staring down at the paving stones and out at the view of jungle and clearings and, in the western distance, the bluish hulking shapes of the Maya Mountains, Witcher and Feldspan were clearly caught up in the myth and the magic of it all; here were they, two New Yorkers, sophisticates, antique dealers, used to the ways of the most modem of civilizations, and they had traveled in the course of one day more than a thousand years into the past. The blood of human sacrifice must have soaked these paving stones. The few visible steps in the overgrown sides of the temple would have been lined with savage worshipers in their bright cloaks and feathers. Here—here—the priest would have waited, the rough stone knife held high over his head.

  “The temples,” Witcher said, and was overcome by emotion, and started again: “The temples were painted red. In the old times, when the Mayans were here. Imagine; from miles and miles away in the jungle you could see the great red temple rearing up into the sky.”

  “Fantastic,” breathed Feldspan.

  “Must have been something,” Kirby agreed. His job was to be slightly the rube, to their greater sophistication, just as he was meant to be a bit less honorable than they and a bit more dangerous. He enjoyed all parts of the game, including this one.

  You take a man out of the world he knows, you sing him your song, you tell him about the mermaids, you put on your shadow show, and if you do it all well enough he believes the whole thing. And then you make your sale.

  Witcher said, “When can we begin?”

  “We’ll have to wait a few weeks,” Kirby told him. “The ground back toward the coast is still too wet for the bulldozer, and there aren’t any roads around here.”

  Looking around, Feldspan’s expression grew pensive. “It’s too bad, really,” he said.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Kirby told him, as well he did; he’d helped the occasional customer through pangs of conscience before. “What we’re standing on here isn’t merely treasure,” he said, “not just gold and jade and valuable carvings. It’s the heritage of a people.”

  “That’s true,” Feldspan said. (Witcher too was now looking a bit abashed.) “You phrased that very well, Mister Galway,” Feldspan said.

  Why not; he’d had enough practice. “I have the same feelings you do,” Kirby said, “and I wish there was some better way to handle things. If I had the money— Listen, I feel I know you two guys well enough now, I can level with you.”

  Witcher and Feldspan looked alert, ready—depending on the revelation—to be amused, sympathetic, outraged on his behalf, or generally male-bondive. Kirby gazed out over his private jungle and said, “When we met last month, I told you I was a charter pilot, and I am, but there aren’t that many jobs for a private pilot down here. Not legal ones, anyway.”

  “Ah,” said Feldspan, though it wasn’t clear what he thought he saw.

  “What I mostly fly in that plane down there,” Kirby said, nodding at it, “is marijuana.”

  Witcher nodded. “I’d suspected as much,” he said.

  “There was a certain faint . . . aroma,” Feldspan added.

  “I wouldn’t do it if I could afford anything else,” Kirby said. “I have expenses. Mortgage on this land,” he lied, “payments on the plane,” he lied, “various other expenses. That’s the only reason I make those runs. ”

  “Of course,” murmured Feldspan.

  “And it’s the only reason,” Kirby went on, “I’d even consider selling this Mayan stuff.” Permitting himself to sound defensive, he said, “I did go to the government first, but they wouldn’t listen. Nobody’s paying me to preserve all this.”

  “That’s true enough,” said Witcher.

  “That’s why I was glad to run into you fellows, back in New York,” Kirby said. “I knew you were decent guys, well-connected with people who would really care about these Mayan things.”

  “Oh, absolutely!” said Feldspan, flushing with pleasure at being thought both decent and well-connected.

  “It’s not like we’re destroying it all,” Kirby said.

  “Certainly not!” Witcher agreed.

  “Of course,” Kirby said, “there’s no way to do it without some destruction. ”

  Both dealers looked troubled. Kirby sighed. Witcher, looking about, said, “But nothing that’s really valuable.”

  “The site itself,” Kirby told him. “That’s why we have to be absolutely sure we can trust one another. We’re taking a big risk here, and I don’t know about you two, but I don’t have any real desire to see the inside of a Belizean jail.”

  Witcher appeared to consider the idea briefly, but Feldspan was appalled: “Jail! Certainly not!”

  “Let me tell you what’s going to happen here,” Kirby said. “As soon as the ground to the east is dry enough, a friend of mine from Belize City will bring his bulldozer in. He’s an old pal, we can trust him.”

  They both looked relieved.

  “What he’ll do is,” Kirby said, pointing to the base of the hill, “he’ll doze around from the bottom, just knocking the temple steps out of the way so we can get at what’s underneath; tombs, carvings, all the rest of it. When he comes to big stelae like that jaguar down there, he’ll scoop the whole thing out in one piece.”

  Witcher said, “Will he really be able to work that far up the side of the temple?”

  “I don’t think you get the picture,” Kirby told him. “What he’s going to do is, he’s going to knock the temple down. You come back a year from now, this’ll be just a jumble of rocks and dirt.”

  “Oh,” said Witcher. They both had the grace to look embarrassed.

  Kirby said, “That’s why we have to be able to trust one another. They aren’t tough about much in this country, but destruction of a Mayan temple is one of the few things that can make them really mad. ”

  �
�Yes,” Feldspan said, “I suppose it would.”

  “None of us can ever say a word about this temple,” Kirby said. “Not here, and not in New York, and not anywhere. All you can tell your customers is, they’re getting guaranteed pre-Columbian pieces from Mayan ruins. That’s it.”

  Feldspan nodded solemnly. Witcher said, “You have our word, Mister Galway.”

  This was the critical point, every time, with all the customers. He had to make them understand the seriousness of the laws they were about to break, and the totality of the destruction he planned on their behalf, and then he had to make them accept their shared responsibility for that destruction. Once they agreed, they were guilty in their hearts, and they knew it. They would never talk, partly out of fear of the law, partly out of fear of him, and partly out of shame.

  “Okay,” Kirby said, his song done. “Seen enough?”

  “I feel as though I could stand here forever,” Witcher said, gazing around at the day and the jungle and the temple, “but yes, you’re right, we should go.”

  As they turned to retrace their steps, Kirby looked down the far slope and saw peeking out at him from the jungle growth down there a face that would have looked at home in these parts a thousand years ago, when all the temples were red and all the people short, mocha- colored, flat-faced, and utterly unknowable. A Mayan Indian face, male, possibly 30 years old, peering bright-eyed up the slope. The wide mouth grinned, like an imp. The right eye winked.

  Behind his back, so Witcher and Feldspan wouldn’t see, Kirby gestured for the face to disappear. Queering the deal for jokes! The face stuck out its tongue, then faded from view.

  As the trio made their way down-slope toward the plane, Feldspan said, with his own impish smile, “I suppose you must have access to some pretty good pot yourself down here, Mister Galway.”

  “When we get back to Belize City,” Kirby promised him, “I will blow your head right off your shoulders.”

  Feldspan giggled.

  4 NEW YORK MONEY

  “I’ll sit up front with you,” Valerie said.

  The cabdriver, finished stowing her luggage in the trunk, seemed pleased by that idea. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Sure ting, Miss.” Running around his big rusty green Chevrolet, he opened the right front door and giggled with embarrassment, saying, “I just clear some junk first, just some m>count junk.” He tried to shield the girlie magazines with his body, throwing them and the plastic coffee cups and the beer bottles and the wads of crumpled wax paper and the smvyellowed newspapers with their thick black headlines—FARM MINISTER CALLED “IGNORANT”!—over the seatback in a shower of trash onto the rear seat and floor. Behind them, on the other side of the airport building, the plane from New Orleans roared as it flew away.

  “All okay now, Miss,” the driver said, stepping back, holding the door open. His round face beamed with happiness in the late afternoon as his eyes swiveled toward his envious colleagues clustered around the other taxis, shooting him dark looks. A great big six-footer American woman with nipple bumps on her shirt, and she’s going to ride up front. Probably perform fellatio on the way to town.

  Valerie, only faintly aware of the stir she was causing, and blessedly not suspecting the deep depravity in the minds all about her, lowered herself onto the fairly clean sagging seat and lifted her long blue' jeaned legs in, placing her Adidas on the suburb of trash on the floor. Her attache case she laid on her lap. The driver, fat and soft'bodied, beaming, perspiring, carefully closed her door, trotted around to his own side, clambered in behind the wheel, and said, “Okay, now. All set now.”

  “Fort George Hotel, please,” Valerie said.

  “Oh, sure.” He started the engine, which coughed and cleared its throat and wheezed pitiably, while the car shook all over. He turned the wheel several times this way and that before actually shifting into Drive to force the laboring engine to do some real work, and then they bumped and sagged away from the airport building and out onto a blacktop road with jungle on the right and what looked like an army base on the left.

  “It’s hot,” Valerie said.

  “Oh, yes,” the driver said, nodding, keeping his eye on the absolutely empty road ahead. “Hotter before. When de Miami plane came, very hot. Cooler now.”

  So that was another reason in favor of her having taken the later plane, connecting through New Orleans. Not only had she given herself an extra two hours in New York to finish squaring things away, and not only was her appointment with Mr. Innocent St. Michael not until tomorrow morning, but she had also avoided the hottest part of the day in Belize. The temperature in New York had been 27 when she’d left.

  Nevertheless, it was still quite hot here, probably nearly 80. Pointing to the controls on the dashboard, Valerie said, “Maybe we should have the ainconditioning.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, sounding sorry, “but dat’s broken. Completely entirely not functioning. Not even de little fan.” Then he looked at her with such intense sincerity that even Valerie understood he was about to tell a lie. “We’re waiting for a part,” he said.

  “I see,” she said.

  They drove in warm and fairly companionable silence for a while—a sluggish Tom Saucer-like river now on the right, jungle alternating with shacks in clearings on the left—and then the driver said, “You goin’ on to Ambergris Caye?”

  “No, I’m not,” she said. “What’s there?”

  He seemed surprised. “You don’t know our barrier reef? Beautiful reef, beautiful water. We get many people come down to Belize just to go to dat reef.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Photography, you know? Beautiful fishes dere. Scuba diving. We get lots of people. And sailboats!” he added, as though it were the clincher in an argument.

  “Sounds lovely,” Valerie said, to be polite. “If I have time, maybe I’ll visit.”

  He gave her a quick glint-eyed look and away, then said, “You’d be very good, uh, diving. Good long legs.”

  “I suppose so, yes,” said Valerie.

  “Good long strong legs,” the cabdriver said, nodding, staring through the windshield at some vision of his own. “Very good in diving. I like a woman witt good long strong legs.”

  Feeling the conversation was moving into murky areas beyond her comprehension, Valerie said, “Actually, I’m an archaeologist.”

  He brightened right up. “Oh! De Mayans!”

  “That’s right,” she said, smiling, pleased that he was pleased. “Dat’s me, you know,” he said, his simple good humor returning. Leaning a bit toward her, smiling, he patted his chest. “Mayan.” “Oh, really?” She said, “Anzan kayalki hec malanalam.”

  He gawped at her, then straightened, returned his hand to the wheel, looked at the road, looked at her: “What’s dat?”

  “Kekchi,” she told him.

  He frowned: “You mean, like a song?”

  It was her turn to be confused. “A song?”

  “People say, ‘Dat song, dat’s catchy.’”

  “No, no,” she said, laughing. “It’s the Mayan language, the principal Mayan tribal tongue in this area. Kekchi.”

  “Ohhh,” he said, getting it. “Indian talk. No, I’m not, I’m not all Mayan.” Grinning at her, this time he patted his kinky hair, saying, “Creole. I gotta lotta Creole, too. Dat’s what I talk. English and Creole.”

  “I see,” she said, not seeing at all.

  He said, “You going out to de ruins, huh? Lamanai, maybe?”

  “No,” she said. “Actually, what I’m doing is rather exciting.”

  He looked interested, potentially excited, potentially impressed: “Oh, yes?”

  “I think,” Valerie said, unconsciously spreading her palms atop the attache case containing her documents and maps, “I think there is a significantly important Mayan site that has never been discovered!”

  “Up in de jungle, you mean,” he said, and nodded sympathetically. “Oh, it’s very hard to get up in dere.”

  “Th
at’s just it,” she said. “Belize is still so primitive, so largely unmapped—”

  “Oh, now, Miss,” he interrupted. “We ain’t primitive, now. We got movie houses, radio, we gonna get television most any day—”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Valerie said, “I do beg your pardon, I didn’t mean primitive like that. 1 mean so much of the country is still virgin jungle.”

  “Virgin,” he said, as though it too were a Kekchi word. Then he gave her a quick sharp look and nodded faintly to himself.

  “What I did at UCLA,” Valerie explained, “I got the statisticians interested. There are so many Mayan sites discovered, new ones still being found; what if we did a statistical analysis of site locations, with dates of original settlement and final abandonment? Would that show us where new sites should be?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the driver said, nodding like a metronome. “Dat’s pretty impressive stuff.”

  “Well, we ran it through the computer,” Valerie said, smiling in remembered joy, “with a lot of other statistical data, too, of course, rainfall and elevation and all that, and the computer said we were right!”

  “Smart computer,” the driver said.

  “It showed an area that has been missed by just everybody! So I went to New York—”

  “It’s in New York? De Mayans?” The driver had thought he was more or less keeping up, but this latest turn in the story had thrown him.

  “No, no,” Valerie said. “The money’s in New York.”

  “Lots of money in New York,” the driver said, grateful to be on solid ground again. “My brudder’s in Brooklyn. He works for Union Gas.” “Well, I spent almost three months in New York,” Valerie said, “and I finally interested two foundations, and they are funding me to come to Belize and test my theory! So that’s why I’m here.” “Well, dat’s pretty good,” the driver acknowledged. “You gonna need a driver while you’re here?”