“Oh, thank you, but no. Where I’m going, there won’t be any roads. I have a contact in the Belizean government, he’ll supply me with whatever I need.” I hope, she added silently.
They were coming into Belize City now, a small picturesque port town, somewhat dilapidated, with small scenic bridges over narrow canals used in lieu of a sewer system; prettier to look at than to smell. Most of the buildings were low, almost all wood-framed, with sweet touches of latticework and carpenter Gothic. Built along both sides of the mouth of Haulover Creek where it enters the Caribbean Sea, and extending both north and south along the shore, Belize City looks as perhaps New Orleans did when Andrew Jackson was defending it from the British in the War of 1812, or as any number of pirate towns around the Caribbean basin looked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The concrete or stucco buildings of downtown, with their clothing shops and supermarkets, seemed to be the anachronisms, rather than the fanciful cupolas Valerie saw, or the large airy porches, or the potholed plowed-field streets. Her cab jounced and creaked and complained along these streets, where most of the vehicles around them looked just as dusty and battered, except for a British Army jeep, dark gray, efficient-looking, containing a couple of red-faced soldiers wearing shorts.
Ahead of them after awhile was a beat-up maroon pickup truck with three men visible inside, all bouncing up and down together as the pickup struggled along what had become more of an obstacle course than a thoroughfare. But then, with the pickup still ahead, they passed through downtown and came to a better-maintained street that ran along the north side of Haulover Creek. The water was to their right, while larger, well-painted wooden residences were to their left; they were coming, evidently, to the better part of town.
“Fort George Hotel,” announced the driver, and Valerie looked out at a modem but rather shabby building, three stories high, motel style, but with an elaborate curving entranceway.
Unfortunately, the pickup pulled in ahead of them and stopped in front of the steps to the main door, causing a delay. All three men got out, the driver on one side and the passengers on the other. The driver walked around the front of the pickup to shake hands with his passengers, both of whom were very tall and thin. The driver, who seemed more robust, exchanged a word or two with them, and then the passengers went into the hotel while the driver trotted back around his pickup, waved an apology for the delay at Valerie’s cabdriver, and climbed up into his vehicle.
I know that man, Valerie thought suddenly. The face, the smile, the easygoing manner, the being rather too sure of himself. She knew she’d met him somewhere, but couldn’t think where. As the cab pulled forward and the green-jacketed bellboy came out to open Valerie’s door, she frowned at the departing pickup and the vagrant memory. Somewhere, somewhere. She got out of the cab, holding her attache case, and turned to watch the pickup drive away, back toward the center of town.
All she could remember was that she had seen that face before, and that she felt . . . she felt . . .
Trouble.
5 MEETING AT FORT GEORGE
Kirby circled while they took in the laundry, far below. Watching, waiting to land, lightly touching Cynthia’s controls, he repeatedly yawned.
It had been a long day, now rushing toward sunset; the shadows of the Cruz family and their wind'flapping laundry stretched long and black over the stubbly pasture. Bright purple or orange sheets; red, black, or green shirts; modest white underpants; the ubiquitous blue jeans; and finally the line itself was unstrung. The smallest Cruz children had meanwhile chivvied the goats into their log pen, and at last Kirby’s earphones spoke in Manuel Cruz’s Spanish^accented voice: “Sorry, Kirby. All set now.”
“Thanks, Manny.”
The Cruz kids always loved a little acrobatics, so Kirby turned Cynthia up and over on her left wingtip, powendived directly at the eastern end of the pasture—the laundry having told him the wind was out of the west—brought the nose up at the last possible instant, and walked Cynthia like a bride across the bumpy pasture to the grove of sapodilla.
There were only five Cruz children, but at moments like this they seemed like 50, swarming around the plane, chirping with excitement, asking a million questions, demanding the right to carry some package from the plane to the house. “But I don’t have anything,” Kirby kept telling them, elbow-deep in kids. “Your goddam old man brought it all out in the truck.”
The pickup truck, in fact, was parked in its shed beside the chicken house, with the dishwasher still in it. The other boxes were gone, however, and Kirby was not surprised, on entering the house, to find Manny listing slightly, a happy smile on his face and a glass of red liquid in his hand.
Manny Cruz did love Danish Marys. Whenever Kirby was gone for a while to the States, he would bring back, along with clothing and toys and appliances and cookbooks for Estelle, a few bottles of aquavit for Manny. To mix with it, Estelle grew tomatoes year-round in the kitchen garden, and the necessary spices were for sale eight miles away in Orange Walk.
Four years ago, when Kirby had first met Manny, the skinny little man with the happy smile and the brightly shining eyes was one of life’s more cheerful losers. A subsistence farmer on rough land that had been stripped in the nineteenth century by the lumber industry, he was—like most of the other rural people in this comer of Belize—also a marijuana farmer in a very small way, tending his little field, turning over the occasional bale of really fine sinsemilla for some really fine greenbacks. To Kirby, then, Manny had been simply another Spanish/Indian local supplier in tom workpants, with gaps between his teeth, the only difference being that Manny Cruz tended to smile more than most people, so his tooth-gaps were more memorable.
But then the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration from the United States, in one of its doomed, humorless, arrogant, sporadic efforts to force the Belizean government to dry up the finest source of foreign exchange in the whole country, compelled the local authorities at least to make a gesture, arrest somebody, destroy some patch of marijuana plants, and poor Manny turned out to be the last one standing when the music stopped. The next thing anybody knew, his pot crop (and part of Estelle’s com crop as well) had been burned, his 18-year-old International Harvester step-in van (still reading Lady Betty on the side, under all the newer coats of paint) had been confiscated by the law as having been involved in the transportation of drugs, and Manny was sentenced to 20 years in Lynam Prison down by Dangriga.
Well, the whole thing was a shock to everybody in the area. The taking of the truck, the Cruz family’s only means of travel to and from civilization, seemed as Draconian to most people as the removal of Manny from his children for a term longer than their childhoods. They would all be married by the time he got out.
A kind of unofficial Cruz family welfare program started up among the other farmers in the area, as well as some of the merchants from around Orange Walk and some of the middlemen in the marijuana trade and even a few of the North American pilots who fly the stuff out, including Kirby. At that time, Kirby had been around the scene only about five months, and was still settling in. He had an unsatisfactory relationship going with a legal secretary in Homestead, he was beginning to be interested in Belize as a place rather than merely a cargo stop, and he saw a way he might both help the Cruz family and introduce a little stability into his own life.
Estelle Cruz, as short and skinny and brown and gnarled as a cigarillo, had at first thought Kirby was suggesting a sexual relationship between them during the term of her husband’s incarceration, and she was edging toward the machete before he managed to make his proposition clear. What it came down to was, he wanted a home.
There was a pasture in front of the Cruz house that could serve as a landing strip for Cynthia—better than some of the jungle strips he normally used—and a good grove of trees at one end in which to park her. A mule shed on one side of the house could be enclosed for a separate apartment for himself. Estelle could cook and clean for him, the children already knew better than to tel
l their business to strangers, and Kirby would have a real base of operations at the Belize end of his route.
What he offered in exchange was, in effect, the twentieth century. The Cruz family homestead was too far off the beaten track to tap into the public power lines, and they’d never been able to afford their own gasoline-powered electric generator. Kirby promised to supply electricity, and the appliances to be run by it. No actual cash would change hands between himself and the Cruzes, but he would provide them with things and they would provide him with a home.
it was a fine deal for everyone. While some Cruz and Vasquez (Estelle’s family) relatives built the addition onto the house, complete with a concrete floor and glass in the windows, Kirby brought in load after load of materiel. His southern flights had always been cargoless— except for wads of greenbacks, with which to pay for the northbound cargos—and money at that time seemed no problem (he hadn’t yet met Innocent St. Michael), so down came two composting toilets, an electricity-generating windmill, four solar panels, a gasoline-driven generator for emergencies, a washing machine, a television set, a refrigerator, three air conditioners, four blue-light bug zappers, assorted lamps, and a Cuisinart. And from a dealer in Belize City came the used pickup, which Estelle could use whenever Kirby didn’t need it, replacing the confiscated van.
Even without the Cuisinart, Estelle had been a wonderful cook, and modem appliances simply made her output more lavish. In Belize, Kirby ate better than ever before in his life, and when he looked out his window he could see the spot where his food had been growing until earlier that same day. The Cruz family was company without being intmsive (he was gradually learning rudimentary Spanish and Kekchi from the kids), his quarters and clothing were kept scrupulously clean, and during those extended intervals when he was up north he knew his goods were safe.
When, in the middle of all this, the Belizean authorities released Manuel Cruz from prison after less than nine months of his term—the DEA apparently at last looking the other way—it changed nothing. Kirby and Manny hit it off very well, Kirby teaching Manny cribbage while learning from Manny an Indian game involving small stones and a number of cups, and Manny sometimes helped out in small ways.
Bringing the pickup truck to town today, Manny had carried a shopping list from Estelle—cloth and thread for the girls’ school dresses, salt, filters for Mr. Coffee—so he’d spent the afternoon downtown while Kirby was off showing the temple. After dropping Witcher and Feldspan at their hotel, Kirby had given the pickup to Manny and gone to see a fellow about a shipment to be taken north on Friday. For security’s sake, they’d had their conversation in the fellow’s Toyota, driving around and about for a while, there being some disagreement about money. Finally, consensus having been reached, the fellow dropped Kirby at the Municipal Airport, from which Manny and the pickup and the dishwasher and the other goods had long since departed.
Feeling weary from his long day, and a bit cranky because of arguing about money with a man in an air-conditioned Toyota, Kirby had flown north and west, less than 60 miles, and when the familiar design of the Cruz homestead had spread out below he had smiled and relaxed, not even caring that Manny hadn’t yet had the pasture cleared.
Estelle, who was very short, always looked up at Kirby with adoration glistening in her eyes. For a while he’d been awkward with her, thinking her feelings toward him were sexual, but everything became all right once he understood her passion was religious. On the surface a rational modern woman, who enjoyed the Guatemalan and Mexican television stations as much as the kids did and who frequently talked back at the announcers during news broadcasts, somewhere in her deepest soul Estelle was still a pre-Columbian artifact herself, an unreconstructed Maya. Kirby was the creature who dropped out of the sky, bringing electricity and magic, bringing comfort and riches. What was the name of such a creature? Exactly.
Now, with the usual light in her eyes, Estelle approached Kirby with a bottle of Belikin beer in one hand and a piece of notepaper in the other. “Cora brought it home after school,” she said, extending the paper. Since there was no telephone line out here, Cora, the eldest, picked up Kirby’s few messages at the store in Orange Walk.
Kirby took the beer with more pleasure than the message, which must have shown on his face, because Estelle said, “You look tired, Kirby.”
“I’m very tired.”
“I hope you got a good appetite.”
“I’ve always got an appetite, Estelle,” Kirby said, and swigged beer, and looked at his message.
Shit and damn! Whitman goddam Lemuel!
Last month, three days after the disaster at the Soho gallery, when that irritating pest had queered his pitch, Kirby had run into Lemuel unexpectedly at another party—this one on Park Avenue in the 90s, in the apartment of a rich and avid collector of pre-Columbian art—and on that second try he had succeeded at last in landing his fish. Yes, Whitman Lemuel was interested in previously unknown Mayan artifacts. Yes, his museum had the funds to support that interest. Yes, they were prepared to be casual about the provenance and prior ownership of items they bought. YES, he would come to Belize to look at an undiscovered Mayan temple!
Next week, next Thursday. It had all been arranged, with an exchange of phone numbers and a writing down of dates. And now here was a message from Whitman Lemuel, bland as could be, saying he would arrive tomorrow! “Know you’ll understand my impatience. Wouldn’t want anyone else to beat us. Will be on afternoon Miami plane. Fort George Hotel reservation confirmed.”
No; it’s not possible. On Friday, day after tomorrow, Kirby had another shipment to fly north, the very topic of his discussion this afternoon with the man in the Toyota. But that problem paled next to the real worry: Tomorrow Witcher and Feldspan would still be here, also at the Fort George.
Estelle looked worried on Kirby’s behalf, saying, “Kirby? Bad news?”
“Bad news,” Kirby agreed. “I’m sorry, Estelle, maybe I don’t have such a good appetite after all.”
Witcher and Feldspan. Whitman Lamuel. It was not acceptable that they meet.
6 THE MISSING LAKE
When the driver steered his cab into a cemetery, Valerie was certain some sort of mistake had been made. “But I want to go to Belmopan,” she said.
“Oh, sure,” said the driver. “This is the road.”
It was the road. Cemetery flanked them on both sides of the meandering twodane blacktop; very white stones, very red ribbons wrapped around bright sprays of flowers or around gaunt remnant clusters of sticks. Off to the left two sinewy black men, stripped to the waist, dug a grave in the heavy red clay. At one point, the road bifurcated, making an island of thick'trunked short trees intermixed with more grave markers; tree roots had pushed up through the blacktop, forcing the cab to slow to five miles an hour as they jounced by.
It’s like the beginning of a horror movie, Valerie thought, except that it wasn’t, really. The sun was too bright, the sky too large and beautiful and blue, and the cemetery itself too cheerful and festive. And the air coming through the taxi windows—apparently, the air conditioning in all Belizean taxis awaits a part—was too soft and languid, too full of the sweet scents of life.
Most of the world was still theoretical to Valerie Greene, who was painfully aware of how many places she hadn’t been. Her pursuit of Mayan sites through the computers of UCLA and the foundation grantors of New York had been spurred—beyond her natural enthusiasm as a scholar—by her need to travel, to get out into what her colleagues called “the field,” to get out into the world1. It was time, Valerie thought, that she and the world got to know one another.
Her father, Robert Edward Greene IV, was a minister in southern Illinois, a fact Valerie found embarrassing without knowing exactly why. Her older brother, R. E. Greene V, was an English teacher in a high school 11 miles from their father’s church, and it was Valerie’s considered opinion that Robby would never travel. Nor marry. Nor do anything. An R. E. G. VI seemed exceedingly unlikely.
And, in truth, unnecessary. Redundant. Even otiose.
It was to be different for Valerie. Archaeology was endlessly fascinating to her, and not only because of the travels to remote comers of the globe that the discipline implied. In her mind, she traveled as well into the past, the remote and unreachable past, in which the people and the cities and the civilizations were so different from southern Illinois. If asked, as she rarely was, what had led her to archaeology in the first place, she invariably answered, “I’ve always loved it!” since she herself had forgotten how profoundly she had been influenced, at the age of nine, by Green Mansions. (Rima the bird girl! Rima! Rima!)
After the cemetery, Belize City was left behind, and the Western Highway settled down to being an ordinary twodane bumpy potholed country road. It was 52 miles to the new capital at Belmopan, all of it ranging very gradually uphill, and within just a few miles of the coast the broaddeaf tropical greenery gave way to scrub forest, intermixed with weedy fields and intense patches of cultivation. Small unpainted shacks housed families, usually with many children.
There was little traffic on the road: the occasional lumbering large truck (sometimes with Mexican license plates); the small farm truck with halfmaked men standing in the back, sometimes waving or making other gestures to Valerie; and every once in a while a chrome' gleaming hom'honking high'Speeding closed'windowed big American car with Belize plates, transporting some government official between the nation’s capital and the nation’s city.
Certainly the nation’s capital was no city, when they reached it an hour and a half later. Invented in self-defense in the 1960s, after one hurricane too many had leveled the original capital, Belmopan has so far failed to become very real. Official efforts to force-breed a city tend to be more official than human, and that’s what happened in Belmopan. Whenever buildings remind you irresistably of the artist’s rendering, something has gone wrong somewhere.
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 Page 4