Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43

by High Adventure (v1. 1)

  Outside the window, the turning Earth approached, red roofs stood out among the colors of the town, individual trees waved to him, and in a sudden rush and jolt the plane was on the ground, hurtling past the tiny airport building, reluctantly slowing, then turning, coming back.

  Lemuel was among the few passengers getting off. He always felt a little nervous when he entered a basically primitive country; who knew what ideas these people might get in their heads? Shuffling slowly through Customs & Immigration, he kept craning his neck, looking for Galway, but didn’t see him. His bow tie constricted his neck in this unaccustomed heat, but he wouldn’t remove it. All clothing is a uniform, and Lemuel’s uniform made clear his status: American, college^educated, nonviolent, intellectual. Nevertheless, he was ordered to open both his suitcases, and the black Customs inspector fingered his Brut aftershave as though he would simply confiscate it. In the end, he merely made an annoying long scrawl of white chalk on each suitcase lid, and sent Lemuel on his way.

  Outside, blinking in the dusty sunshine, still not seeing Galway anywhere—he wouldn’t have reneged at the last second, would he?— Lemuel fought off the persistent taxi offerers with just as persistent head shakes, until he realized one of the men was calling him by name: “Mister Lemuel? May I take your bags, Mister Lemuel?”

  Lemuel frowned at him, seeing a short and skinny Indian type, with bright black eyes and a big smile showing gaps between his teeth. “You know me?” he said.

  “I am from Kirby Galway.” The man had an accent that was nearly Hispanic, but not quite. “I am Manuel Cruz.”

  “I expected Mister Galway himself,” Lemuel said, prepared to be irked.

  “There were little problems,” Manuel Cruz told him, more confidentially, flashing looks left and right as though afraid to be overheard. “I’ll tell you in the truck.”

  “Truck?” But he permitted Cruz to carry both his suitcases and to lead the way over to an incredibly filthy, battered, rusty pickup truck. When the suitcases were thrown in back, onto all that rust and dirt, the Customs chalkmarks became irrelevant.

  The interior of the pickup was at least roomy and fairly comfortable. Cruz was a bit too short for the controls, which only increased his childlike aura; also, he drove in sudden jolts and hesitations, his feet playing the floor pedals like a pianist, hands struggling the wheel back and forth, back and forth.

  Out on the empty blacktop road, Cruz settled down to a less fitful driving method, and explained, “Kirby, he had to see some other men. You know about the gage?”

  Lemuel didn’t. “Gauge?”

  “Pot,” said Cruz. “Weed. Tea. Smoke.”

  “Oh, marijuana!”

  “That’s it,” Cruz said, happily nodding.

  “He smuggles it into America,” Lemuel said, with some distaste. “Yes, I know about that.”

  “Okay. Now, some men come down from up there,” Cruz said. “Kirby, he didn’t know they were coming, you know? But these kinda men, they come down, they say, ‘We gotta talk,’ you say, ‘Okay, sir, yes, sir.’”

  “Ah,” said Lemuel, nodding at this glimpse of what was under the rock.

  “So Kirby, he sent me down, pick you up, say he sorry.”

  “I see,” said Lemuel.

  “I take you to the hotel. Kirby, he call you later, he take you out there tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? Not today?” One of the reasons Lemuel had decided to come down to Belize a week early—in addition to the honest excitement and anticipation he’d cited in his message—was the fact that he didn’t entirely trust Kirby Galway. He didn’t know what sort of scheme Galway might be able to perpetrate against him, but perhaps if he were to show up a week early it might keep the man off balance and give Lemuel some advantage. But now Galway was begging off until tomorrow; was that significant? Was there anything Lemuel could do about it?

  Probably not. Still, it was worth a try. “My schedule is pretty tight,” he said. “Perhaps I should talk to Galway right now.”

  “Oh, no,” Cruz said, looking a bit frightened. “Kirby, he told me, ‘Don’t let Mister Lemuel come talk to me when I’m with these men. Tell Mister Lemuel to pretend he don’t even know me.’ That’s what Kirby said.”

  “Why?”

  “These are very bad men,” Cruz said. “They got—whatchu call it— front, some kinda legitimate life up in the States, they don’t want nobody know what their business is. They kill a man if they got to.” Lemuel, of course, had heard of such people, as who of us has not? The drug world quite naturally drew them, and yes they would kill rather than have the seamy truth exposed to their families and neighbors. “I see,” he said.

  “If you go to Kirby with those men,” Cruz went on, “if you say, ‘Hi, Kirby,’ then you and Kirby and me, we all in terrible trouble. If those men know you know Kirby, and they got to know you from the States just to look at you, then they figure you know Kirby’s in the gage business—you know, the marijuana—”

  “Yes yes,” Lemuel said. “Gauge. I do remember.”

  “Well,” Cruz said, as they drove down the tom streets of Belize City, “they got to protect their lives, you see? Their front.”

  “So if I see Galway with any Americans,” Lemuel said, a bit amused at the cloak-and-dagger aspects of the situation, “I should just pretend I don’t know him.”

  “Oh, you’ll probably see him,” Cruz said. “Kirby, he’s with those men at the hotel right now.”

  “Oh, is he?” Lemuel hoped he would see Galway and his mobster friends; curiosity and a faint prickle of danger made his eyes light up, and he rode the rest of the way trying to imagine what the “very bad men” would look like.

  The hotel itself was decent enough, the staff competent, the room large and cool and pleasant. Lemuel undertipped the bellboy, then removed the constricting bow tie, opened his shirt, strolled over to the window, and looked down at the swimming pool, wondering idly why no one was in it. He had brought a bathing suit; perhaps, after he’d unpacked, he would go for a dip himself.

  An el of the building was to the left, with large windows on the first floor through which he could see the dining room, where he would undoubtedly be eating tonight. At one of the window tables sat three—

  Galway!

  Lemuel pressed close to the louvered window, looking down. Galway and two men, just finishing their lunch. The other two were hard to make out, at this angle and from this far away, but they were certainly white men, undoubtedly Americans.

  The three stood, pushing back their chairs. Galway said something and laughed. All three men wore moustaches; a change in male style that Lemuel had failed to notice just as thoroughly as he’d missed the demise of the bow tie.

  What could he make of Galway’s companions? They didn’t look like mobsters out of a George Raft movie, but of course they wouldn’t. These were drug dealers, a new breed of criminal, used to working with huge amounts of cash, trading with rich and influential people. They were dressed a bit flamboyantly, but not too much so, and Lemuel remembered what the man Cruz had said about them being men with a front back in America. Record company producers, perhaps, or with a business in commercial real estate.

  Galway shook their hands; first one, then the other. A few more words were exchanged, rather sinister smiles formed under the moustaches, and then Galway left. The other two remained standing a moment longer beside the table, murmuring together, one with his hand on the other’s elbow. Menace seemed to hover about them. They both turned to look out the window, and Lemuel flinched back, suddenly afraid.

  Had they seen him?

  11 THE WARNING

  What a lot of different positions he likes, Valerie thought as she rested on knees and shoulders and left cheek. If she lifted her head slightly to look down her own length, the parts of Innocent St. Michael that she could see framed by her arched legs dangled comically, but the feelings he was inducing through her body were not comical at all. “Again?” she asked, surprised, and the answer came in a
rush.

  This time, Innocent joined her, and after a brief spell of intense thrashing they lay beached together on the sheet, companionably side by side, catching their breath. Above, a slowly turning fan made absolutely no difference.

  Shortly, Innocent heaved himself up off the bed and padded out of the room. Perspiration slowly drying on her body, Valerie rolled onto her back and stretched, long and luxurious, from her down^pointing left big toe through her happily achy body to her upthrust right wrist, her knuckles brushing the rough stucco wall.

  They were in one of the small houses in Belmopan’s sterile residential area. At the restaurant, Innocent had excused himself to make a phone call, then had driven her here in his large green Ford LTD with the icy air conditioning. “I know there’s nobody home,” he’d said. “Belongs to a friend of mine.” The bedroom was small, filled by its double bed, the perimeter cluttered with laundry and books and magazines.

  Marcia Ettinger, an older woman at the Royal Museum at Vancouver, had warned her about this, she really had. “You want to be careful,” she’d said. “There’s something that happens to young single women the first time they’re in a really foreign place all by themselves. It’s as though all restraints are gone, none of the rules matter any more, and you find yourself going to bed with the first man who asks you.” Valerie had pooh-poohed that, of course: “I’m my own person,” she’d said. “I make my own decisions.”

  Had she made this decision? Smiling, stretching the other way— right toe through arching waist to left wrist—she told herself the decision had been a good one, no matter who had made it. At the very least, she would endorse it.

  Innocent came back, water beads sparkling coolly in his hair. He was smiling—he was always smiling, wasn’t he?—and when he sat on the bed he bent over to kiss her left nipple. “What a big girl you are,” he said.

  “I was always tall.” She knew her capability for small talk was minimal, and hoped she would improve with time and experience. Experience.

  “Unfortunately,” Innocent said, “we can’t stay here forever.” “No.” Valerie sat up, looking around. “I suppose the person who lives here will come back after a while.”

  “Not with my car in the driveway,” Innocent said.

  The encounter suddenly took on an unpleasant public aspect. “I’ll get dressed,” she decided, rising from the bed.

  He patted her rump. “Tomorrow morning, very early,” he said, “I’ll have a Land Rover and a driver pick you up at your hotel back in Belize and drive you out to that land you want to see.”

  “Thank you.” Sudden doubt, insecurity, awkwardness, made her say, “He—the driver. He won’t know about this, will he?”

  Alarmed, concerned, almost shocked, Innocent bounded to his feet with a surprising agility. “Valerie, Valerie!” he cried, holding her elbows, his manner totally serious for the first time since she had met him. “We aren’t enemies! I would never embarrass you, humiliate you!”

  “But you tell everybody everything, don’t you?”

  Releasing her, he said, “You mean Susie, at the restaurant?” He grinned, relaxing, a happy bear, shaking his head. “When I have lunch there with a businessman,” he said, “or someone from the government, do you think I tell him, a man, ‘I had that waitress?’ What would Susie do to me?”

  “Pour your lunch on your head,” Valerie suggested.

  Innocent laughed. “You misunderstand Susie,” he said. “She would stick a knife in my neck.”

  Valerie believed him. He would preen in front of women, but not in front of other men. It made him somehow more likeable, and at the same time more juvenile. “All right,” she said.

  While Valerie visited the tiny rust-spotted bathroom, Innocent dressed and went out to start the car, so that when Valerie was ready to leave she entered a vehicle already well chilled. Innocent got behind the wheel, patted her knee in fond familiarity, and said, “If you can wait half an hour, I’ll drive you back to Belize.”

  “But my taxi is waiting.”

  “Oh, I already paid him off and sent him away.” Steering toward the clumped government buildings, he said, “Now, tomorrow, you pay good close attention to everything you see, and I’ll be in Belize when you get back.”

  “All right.”

  Again he patted her knee. “Good rooms at the Fort George,” he said. “Air-conditioned. Very nice.”

  12 THE BLUE MIRROR

  “Oh, dear,” Gerry said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”

  Alan had spread the blue trunks and the silver-and red trunks on the bed, side by side, and stood back, knuckles under chin, trying to decide which to wear for their dip in the pool. Now he looked over at Gerry, who was frowning into his open dresser drawer. “Lose something?”

  “The recorder was moved.”

  “You put it in there yourself,” Alan said, misunderstanding. “I saw you. ”

  “I put it under the leather vest,” Gerry said. “I very specifically remember doing that, because the black case of the recorder would be less noticeable under black leather.”

  Alan, a faint vertical frown line forming between his brows, came over to stand beside Gerry and also look into the open drawer. Both men were naked; in the blue-tinted wide mirror above the dresser they looked like a rather crude parody of Greek temple sculpture. Alan said, “Are you sure?”

  “Al-an,” Gerry said, which was what he always said when he felt Alan was insulting his intelligence, which was what he felt rather frequently. “I already told you.”

  The leather vest was folded neatly on the left. Gerry had turned back the little stack of ironed white T-shirts, and there was his recorder. Alan said, his voice a little scared, “Is anything missing?”

  “My jewelry’s still here.” Picking up the recorder, Gerry turned it around and said, “The tape’s still in it.”

  “The same tape?”

  “Oh, my gosh.” Gerry pushed PLAY. After an interminable period of faint shushing sounds, Kirby Galway’s voice said, “This way, gentlemen. Watch out for snakes.” Sighing with relief, Gerry pushed OFF and then REWIND.

  Alan looked over at his own recorder, on the bed with his crumpled lunchtime clothes. “We’ll have to find a better hiding place,” he said.

  “But they didn’t take anything,” Gerry said, putting the recorder under the leather vest. He looked fretful.

  “The maid, maybe,” Alan suggested. “Just interested in something new, to look at it.”

  “I don’t know,” Gerry said. “Maybe this isn’t such a fun idea, after all.”

  “We cant chicken out now,” Alan told him. “Hiram would just simply laugh us to scorn.”

  “It seemed a lot different in New York,” Gerry said, taking out his ecru fishnet trunks and stepping into them. “Here, it’s getting scary.”

  “Well, we did promise,” Alan said. “And we’ve started, we’re here, so we might as well go ahead and finish. You ready for the pool?”

  Gerry said, “I’m not the one with his little thingies hanging out.”

  So Alan chose the silver-and-red trunks and put them on, while Gerry went over to look out the window to see if the pool were still unoccupied. “Alan!” he said, a shrill whisper.

  “Now what?”

  Alan joined him at the window, and they looked down through the louvers at the pool, beside which two men were standing; Kirby, fully dressed, as they’d last seen him at lunch, and a man in a very large yellow boxer-type swimsuit. This man was middle-aged and round-shouldered, very pale in the tropical sun, with a round pot belly, a round balding head, and very large round dark sunglasses. He stood with hands on hips; despite being older, and physically out of shape, and a bit foolish-looking in those great ballooning trunks, he gave off an aura of self-assurance and command. There seemed to be a vague echo down there of old movie scenes of Italian mobsters conferring in the local steambath; not Gerry and Alan’s kind of steambath, the other kind.

  “The drug dealer!” Gerry whisp
ered.

  They watched Kirby and the man confer, both of them intent and serious. The drug dealer seemed irritated by something, Kirby placating and reassuring him. The awareness that this was a man who could order a murder with a snap of his fingers seemed to send a ripple of chill breeze across the blue pool water.

  Kirby and the man shook hands, Kirby left, and the man walked around to the shallow end of the pool, where he went down the steps slowly, wincingly, as though entering ice water. Ribcage deep, he rested his back against the side, then abruptly looked up, the huge dark sunglasses staring directly at them.

  They both flinched; they couldn’t help it. “He saw us!” Gerry said.

  Alan recovered first. “He has no idea who we are,” he pointed out. “Come on, let’s go down, I want a better look at him. Shall I bring my recorder?”

  “Ai-an, are you crazy?” Gerry glanced down again at the pool and the enigmatic man behind his black sunglasses. “We can’t fool around with the likes of him,” he said.

  13 WANTED!

  Kirby awoke when the pickup left the road. “Jesus!” he cried, as trees plunged past the windshield. Grabbing dashboard and windowsill for support, he straightened in the passenger seat, glared at Manny, and said, “Give me a little warning, will ya?”

  “It’s okay,” Manny told him, grinning, flashing his tooth-gaps. “All under control.”

  All under control. The Northern Road was behind them, already obscured by trees and shrubbery. The dirt path corkscrewed ahead, twisting deeper and deeper into wilderness, so that you could never see more than twenty feet before the next sharp curve presented a wall of green. Already the trail was so narrow that dusty leaves touched the fenders on both sides as they pushed through, and Manny couldn’t steer around the larger stones and deeper ruts but had to plow right over them. He grinned broadly as he drove, and every once in a while, when they crashed against some particularly large obstruction, Kirby could hear the clack as Manny’s remaining teeth cracked together.