Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43

by High Adventure (v1. 1)

  “Rosita says hello,” Tommy said, tired of waiting for Kirby to catch his breath. “She says is your wife any better,” he added solemnly.

  “Alas, no,” said Kirby. “She had two more violent spells, they had to put her in the strait jacket again. It’s looking pretty bad.”

  “I’ll tell Rosita,” Luz said, straight-faced. “She’s very interested in the condition of your wife.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Tommy said, “Those two customers from yesterday; they making trouble?”

  “No, no,” Kirby said. “They bought the story all right. I’ll see them this afternoon, make the final arrangements. The problem is the next guy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I got a message yesterday. He isn’t due till next week, but all of a sudden he’s coming in today.”

  Tommy translated this for the others, and everybody looked distressed. Luz said, “Asshole.”

  “Exactly,” Kirby said. “But it’s too late to stop him, he’s on his way. So I’ve got to stall him somehow in Belize City, and keep him from meeting the other two, and then bring him up here tomorrow. So you’ve got to get the place ready by then.”

  “Not much to do,” Tommy said. “The last guys didn’t dig around a lot, like some of your people. Just the jaguar stela, basically.”

  Luz said, “They didn’t even find the stone whistle.”

  “The main problem is the field,” Kirby said. “The place shouldn’t look as though it gets a lot of traffic, but you can really see Cynthia’s landing tracks there.”

  “So we’ll mush them up a little,” Tommy said.

  “Right.” Kirby looked serious. “And, Tommy,” he said, “don’t do your little peeking-out-of-the-bushes number any more, okay? If one of those guys had seen you yesterday, he’d have had a heart attack right there. It’s bad business to kill the customers.”

  “I never have any fun,” Tommy said.

  8 THE QUESTION

  “Do you like the conch?” Innocent asked, pronouncing it conk, as in conk on the heady and Valerie said, “Very much.” Innocent smiled. “I take all my girlfriends here,” he said. “Before sex, after sex. They always like the conch. They like it better after sex.”

  Valerie didn’t quite know how to answer that, nor did it seem possible to eat the firm white conch immediately after such a remark, nor drink some more of the Italian white wine, so she filled her mouth with salad instead.

  Delicious salad. Very nice restaurant at the back of a private house, more outside than in, the widely spaced white tables surrounded by the flowers and plants of a nursery, that being the proprietors’ other business. Hanging plants, lengths of tall picket fence, moist dirt floor beyond the tiled part, areas roofed with sheets of translucent plastic.

  Tropical flowers are so much more blatant than the flowers of southern Illinois. In southern Illinois, the flowers aren’t all in hot, hot oranges and yellows and reds, and they don’t all look like human genitalia. Idealized male and female parts hung in the air and protruded from clay pots and peeked with false modesty out of veils of shiny green leaves.

  The waitress came over to see how they were doing, and Innocent put an arm around her hips, his hand caressing her leg. “So you’re working here now, huh?” he said.

  “Just for a little while.” She was short, plumpish in a jolly way, with a very pretty face and reddish-brown flesh. She seemed not to mind Innocent’s hand on her leg. “I got tired being cooped up in an office all day,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go back to Belize.”

  They were, of course, already in Belize, and it took Valerie a minute to realize the girl meant Belize City. (In just the same way, people in Mexico say they’re going to Mexico, not Mexico City, and people in New York State say they’re going to New York, not New York City.)

  Innocent grinned at Valerie. “Susie liked the conch after the sex.” Squeezing her leg, he said, “Didn’t you, baby?”

  Susie giggled. Innocent winked at Valerie. “But she liked the sex better. ”

  Susie gave Valerie an arch look, woman to woman. “These men,” she said. “They all think they’re the best, right?” Imitating a little boy, pressing one fingertip to her cheek, she said, “Wasn’t I great, honey? Ain’t I the best you ever had, honey? Don’t I beat all the other fellas, honey?” Then she became a schoolmarmish sort of woman, humoring the little boy: “Oh, you were wonderful, dear. Such a great big thing.” As Innocent guffawed, she held up her hands, palms facing each other, like a fisherman describing an extremely small fish.

  Valerie had to laugh. She also had to eat conch. The question was, did she have to go to bed with Innocent St.Michael?

  Not have to, that wasn’t the word. It wasn’t as though sex would be his kind of bribe, the gift to the Third Worlder to gain cooperation. That wouldn’t be Innocent’s way. Valerie wasn’t too awfully wise in the ways of the world, but she did understand that Innocent was merely permitting the subject of sex to float in the air all around them, giving her the opportunity to decide whether or not to go to bed with him, and suggesting without too much blatancy the reasons why she should.

  Generally speaking, Valerie was confused about sex. The gropings and kissings and sweaty fumblings of her early teenage years had seemed somehow off the mark, irrelevant to the hunger that certainly did exist. The idea that these nervous jackrabbit boys might have the solution to the problem, might be able to guide her into understanding and contentment, was absurd on the face of it. And when, at 16, she had finally “done it” on the floor of a living room where she was babysitting, the boy had been so nervous, so overly eager, so inexperienced and gawky, that in some ways it had been worse than learning to dance.

  Her experiences since then had been infrequent, but varied. Most of the time, she hardly thought about sex, and on those occasions when it did become a part of the agenda she mostly just tried to retain some dignity. She did learn something nearly every time, but many of the lessons were depressing. She now knew there were self-confident and capable young men in the world, who could stop thinking about themselves long enough to think about the girls they were with, but there were dam few of them. On the other hand, older men could sometimes be just as jumpy and inept as any callow youth. It was impossible, doggone it, to tell what a man was going to be like in bed just by looking at him.

  Or was it? Here was Innocent St. Michael, deliberately and smoothly filling her head with thoughts of sex, then actually bringing out a previous girlfriend to give him a reference; which she had done, too, even though in a backhanded way. He would not be the first dark-skinned person she’d gone to bed with—if the previously unthinkable were actually to occur—but he would probably be the oldest. And maybe the heaviest; would that matter much?

  He has me considering the idea, Valerie thought, astonished at herself. And he knows it, too; look at him there, smirking and winking across the table, smacking Susie’s behind, telling the girl, “You just want to keep me for yourself, that’s all.”

  “Keep you?” Susie slithered out of his grasp; moving away toward the kitchen, she said, “I caught you once, and threw you back.” He can be kidded about sex, Valerie thought as she drank more wine, because he’s so very sure of himself.

  Innocent beamed at her. “You like the conch, Valerie?”

  She giggled, like one of his women.

  9 THE BLACK FREIGHTER

  “This stela,” Witcher said, while the skinny black man looked out the hotel room window, “could be very valuable. Depending on the condition of the rest of it.”

  Directly below the window was the hotel’s swimming pool, in which no one was swimming. Just out of sight to the pool’s left were the large ocean-facing windows of the dining room. From where he stood, the skinny black man could not quite see the dining-room windows, but he knew who was there.

  “There’s a bunch of them here,” Kirby said casually, while the two cassette tapes turned, steady and unromantic. “Let’s go on.” The voices stopped, to be re
placed by the panting and rustling sounds of hill-climbing.

  The skinny black man glanced over at the dresser top, where the linked cassette players squatly sat, each with its own red eye. Then he looked down again, vaguely regretting that he couldn’t quite see into the dining room where at this moment Kirby, Witcher, and Feldspan were having lunch and continuing their discussion. Were Witcher and Feldspan taping this meeting, too? Would he be sent back to copy another conversation?

  If so, he would hear Kirby say, “The deal is, then, I’ll get the stuff out of the country, whatever we find inside the temple. You guys sell it through your contacts, and we split fifty-fifty.”

  “You’ll have to trust us,” Witcher pointed out. “Though I suppose you know the general value of such things.”

  “Fairly well,” Kirby said, shrugging the problem away. “Besides, we have to trust one another, don’t we? You have to trust me not to give you fakes.”

  Feldspan looked surprised, but Witcher merely amused, saying, “For Heaven’s sake, why would you? There’s a whole temple of real things there, probably enough to make us all rich; why jeopardize the relationship?”

  “Exactly,” Kirby said. “And you fellas have the same motive to give me a straight count.”

  “Of course.”

  Feldspan said, “The only problem, really, is getting the material out of the country.”

  “I have my methods,” Kirby said, and stopped, because the waitress was bringing them their main courses. Silence reigned at the table until she was done, the three men looking out the window at the empty swimming pool and, beyond it, the open sea. Out there, a black freighter stood at anchor; some nosy British Coast Guard people had grabbed it a few weeks ago, north of here, finding it full of marijuana. They’d impounded it (like Manny Cruz’s step-in van), and now it was waiting to be auctioned by the Belize government.

  Upstairs, the cassette on the dresser said, in Kirby’s voice, “None of us can ever say a word about this temple. Not here, and not in New York, and not anywhere.”

  The waitress left at last, and Witcher said, “Americans have been caught, you know, trying to get out of Belize with carvings or whatnot. Caught and jailed.”

  “That’s why,” Kirby said, “in this operation, you’re dealing with the right man.”

  Feldspan said, almost timidly, “I don’t suppose you could tell us your smuggling method.”

  “Why not?” Kirby grinned. “Truthfully, I’m proud of it. You see, there isn’t just one smuggling business out of Belize, there’s two. There’s Mayan antiques, that’s one, and the other one is marijuana.”

  Feldspan smiled reminiscently,, and Witcher said, “You’re involved in both, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve combined them both,” Kirby told him. “The government comes down hard on the artifact smuggling, as you know. In fact, they’ll probably search your luggage on the way out, since your passports say you’re antique dealers.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Feldspan. He and Witcher exchanged a troubled glance.

  “It’s only pre-Columbian stuff they care about,” Kirby assured them. “As for the marijuana trade, the British and the Americans make a little trouble if they can, but locally nobody gives a damn. It brings in a lot of U.S. cash, it’s all on a small-time basis and a lot cleaner and less violent than Colombia or Bolivia with their cocaine industries, and it makes a good back-up crop for the sugar farmers up around Orange Walk. I’ve flown a lot of bales of pot out of this country, and nobody’s ever looked at me twice. In fact, after lunch I have to see a fellow about that side of it.”

  Witcher and Feldspan both looked agog. Leaning forward, speaking much more confidentially than when they’d been discussing the smuggling of valuable Mayan artifacts, Feldspan said, “You mean a dealer?”

  “A middleman,” Kirby told him. “An American, he’s coming in on the plane this afternoon.” Then, as though afraid he’d said too much, he too leaned forward and dropped his voice, saying, “Listen, this is a very bad man up north. If he thought I was talking about him, we’d all be in trouble.”

  “We wouldn’t breathe a word,” Witcher breathed.

  “If you see me with him,” Kirby said, “just pretend you don’t know me.”

  “Absolutely,” said Witcher, nodding solemnly, a co-conspirator.

  “Okay,” Kirby said. “Here’s my little stunt. I get in my plane, I fill it up with bales of pot, everybody knows what I’m doing, nobody gives a damn, off I go to Florida.” Leaning forward, winking, he said, “Now, what if there’s Mayan antiques inside the bales?”

  “When we get back to Belize City,” the cassette with Kirby’s voice told the other cassette, “I will blow your head right off your shoulders.” Then it giggled with Feldspan’s voice, and its red light clicked off. The skinny black man yawned, stretched, walked away from the window, and punched the buttons to rewind both cassettes.

  “Brilliant!” breathed Feldspan.

  Kirby smiled, nodding, appreciating their appreciation.

  “I’m stealing wheelbarrows,” Witcher said.

  “Exactly,” Kirby said.

  Feldspan said, “The Purloined Letter. The Trojan Horse.”

  “I never said I was original,” Kirby said, getting a trifle nettled.

  Witcher said, “And when you get to Florida, out they come!”

  “Right,” said Kirby. “Now, that brings up another question. When I reach the other end, will it be you two meeting me, or somebody else?”

  “In Florida, you mean?” They looked at one another, and Witcher said, “I think we have to do it ourselves.”

  “Yes,” said Feldspan. “You just let us know where and when.”

  “Okay,” Kirby said. “Then I won’t deal with anybody else. In fact, I won’t even get out of the plane unless I see one of you guys.”

  “I suppose you have to be very careful,” Feldspan said. “In your business.”

  “Careful is my middle name,” Kirby told him.

  The skinny black man put the talking cassette player back where he’d found it, pocketed the listening cassette player, and let himself quietly out of Witcher and Feldspan’s room.

  10 OUT OF THE PAST

  Whitman Lemuel obediently fastened his seatbelt, then pressed his right temple to the cool lucite window and looked down past the wing at Belize. Far away to the west were lavendar mountains, blurry and faded, blending and tumbling into greener hills, smoothing down toward a pale band of beach on which a white foam line ran and spread and vanished and ran again. Blue-green water, as clear and gleaming as new stained glass, spread out from the shore, the color deepening into blue, then breaking at a broad white irregular gash running parallel to the coast, a few hundred yards off shore; the barrier reef, second longest in the world, running for 175 miles north and south, separating the Belizean coast from the Caribbean deeps.

  Ahead, where a blue scribble of river cut through the greenery to the coast, a clustered, cluttered, colorful town had grown. The harbor was full of small boats, and a black freighter stood off shore.

  Lemuel’s eyes moved away from the town, back toward the jumbled greenness of the nearer mountains. Somewhere in there was Kirby Galway’s temple. He stared, unaware of the lucite’s vibration against his brow.

  The stewardess distributed landing cards to be filled out, and Lemuel wrote, without hesitation, “teacher” and “vacation.” He had been a teacher in the past, and technically his current job with the museum could also be described that way. Knowing the Belizean government’s parochial attitude concerning antiquities, he saw no reason to call attention to himself by putting down his actual job title, and he certainly wouldn’t describe his true reason for being here: “to save irreplaceable Mayan artifacts.”

  The Mayan sites, except for the few largest, were not being properly cared for. Much had already been lost forever, and much more would soon be gone. Even if Third'World governments like that in Belize had the will to save what had not yet been destroyed, they
would never have the money or knowledge or resources for the job. Frequently, as well, in these parts of the world, there was corruption among the very officials charged with the task of preservation.

  Governments like Belize’s should welcome men like Whitman Lemuel, scholars, historians, restorers, men selflessly devoted to preserving the best of the past, in carefully controlled environments with prescribed public access, allowing the people of today to experience for themselves the mystery and wonder of the long-ago. It was only ignorance and naivete, combined with backward peoples’ inevitable jealousy of the better-educated and the better-off, that made it necessary for Whitman Lemuel, who knew himself to be a decent and honorable and law-abiding and well-educated and intelligent and reasonable man, to sneak into Belize as though he were a thief, as though he were planning to do something wrong.

  Take this fellow Kirby Galway. On the surface a plausible chap, an American, but underneath the glib exterior what was the fellow but a smooth thug? It had been a very fortunate accident that Lemuel had met him again, that second time, and they’d had their little talk, very7 fortunate indeed, because there was no question in Lemuel’s mind that Galway would be prepared to sell the objects from his temple to anybody, just anybody. Galway was the sort of person the Belizean government ought to concentrate on, not honest scholars like Whitman Lemuel.

  But if he was to be honest about it—and Whitman Lemuel was rigidly honest—he had to admit there were Americans too who completely misunderstood the situation, as though scholars like himself were here for profit, as though they were somehow stealing something that belonged to someone else rather than preserving the past—which belongs to all mankind—to be handed on, selflessly, properly catalogued and annotated, to generations yet unborn. He remembered with particular distaste that tall young woman who had interrupted his first conversation with Galway, squawking words like “despoliation.” Such individuals, unhampered by facts, took on moral positions just for the good feeling that comes from being holienthan' thou.