Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43

by High Adventure (v1. 1)

  All under control. Back in Belize, at the Fort George, were two customers at the same time, one individual and one team, and Kirby could only hope they wouldn’t happen to get into conversation. If only there were another first class hotel in Belize City, one with air conditioning and reliable hot water, he would have managed somehow to switch Lemuel over to it, lessening the danger; but there was not.

  Well, at least it was only for the one night. Tomorrow morning, he would put Witcher and Feldspan on the Miami plane. Tomorrow afternoon, Lemuel would be shown the temple. By sometime tomorrow, if Kirby’s luck held, everything actually would be all under control.

  But what would happen, what could happen, if his customers chanced to get into conversation tonight? The odds were against it, and even further against any of them talking about a contemplated grand larceny with a stranger, but say it happened, say everything fell out wrong. What was the worst-case scenario? The scheme would be destroyed, of course, permanently killed. Could Kirby himself go to jail? Probably so, probably in more than one country. Belize and the U.S. might very well vie with one another for the pleasure of putting Kirby Galway away.

  How nice to be wanted.

  At a seemingly impassable spot in the surrounding wilderness, Manny swung the wheel hard left and the pickup veered away from the diminishing dirt track, made a tight turn around a thick, scarred tree trunk, and bumped and skidded down a long brush-covered slope to a narrow muddy stream, where Manny pumped the brakes—his short legs stretching and stretching, sandaled toes pointing down— until they slued to a stop. Kirby climbed out, slid the two long planks out from under a lot of bushes and vines, and dropped them into position across the stream. Manny drove on over, the planks sagging down into the water, then accelerated up the other side, the pickup throwing mud clots out behind it like a bucking bronco. Kirby, to avoid the hurled mud, waited on the near side until the truck was some distance away, then trotted across on one of the boards, hid them both in their places on this side, and made his way up to where Manny was waiting, the pickup’s engine gasping like an overworked beast of burden.

  There was one other stream to cross, somewhat larger, but here the locals had long ago made a porous causeway of logs and stones, which the pickup could cross with a lot of side-slipping and potential disaster. After that, it was merely the impossibility of the hilly jungle-covered terrain that slowed them, until at last they came out in the clearing behind the Cruz’s house, next to the kitchen garden. Home.

  (There was an easier route down from Orange Walk, which they took whenever carrying anything large or delicate, but that meant driving all the way north to Orange Walk first, then doubling back south, which could add almost an hour to the journey. It was better to be knocked about a bit harder, but for a shorter period of time.)

  Estelle would be cooking now, while the kids and the dogs watched television, so when Kirby climbed awkwardly out of the pickup, feeling stiff and tired, he went around to his own entrance. The combination lock on the door was meant primarily to thwart the curiosity of children, since Manny and Estelle both knew the sequence. Yawning, stretching, Kirby spun the dial, opened the door, entered the living room, and switched on his air conditioner.

  Kirby’s apartment was two rooms and three closets. His living room was small and square, with windows in two walls, reed mats over the concrete floor, a rough home-made table in the center where he and Manny played games, several mismatched small chairs, a few lamps, and one big, comfortable easy chair. On a shelf mounted on the wall opposite the easy chair were a TV set and a Betamax; the videotapes were in a rickety bookcase underneath.

  The other room, which was smaller, contained his bed and two large wooden trunks and another rickety bookcase, this one half filled with books. A few air charts—sections of Burma, Madagascar, the Aleutians—were on the walls for decoration. The three closets were all off this room; the first was for clothing, the second for a shower stall, the third for the composting toilet.

  Kirby, still yawning as he removed his shirt, entered the bedroom, kicked off the rest of his clothing and stood in the shower awhile, until he no longer felt like a horse that had just been sold for glue.

  Twenty minutes later, happy in crisp clean clothes and old moccasins, Kirby went back around to the Cruz side of the house, where he and Manny played cribbage while Estelle ran the Cuisinart and the kids and the dogs watched “Rio Grande” on TV, dubbed into Spanish. (“Rio Grande” in Spanish is “Rio Grande”.) At one point, when John Wayne made a rather spectacular leap from a running horse, Kirby nodded over at the set and said, mildly, “That’s my father. ”

  Manny looked up, in mild surprise. “John Wayne?” He turned to look at the set.

  “No,” Kirby said. “My father did that jump off the horse.”

  Estelle had come over from the Cuisinart to frown at the TV, where a close-up of John Wayne now showed. In Spanish, John Wayne had the deep gruff voice of an old man missing some teeth. “He looks like John Wayne,” she said dubiously.

  “Not there,” Kirby said. “Only in the long shots, doing the stunts.”

  “A stunt man!” Manny said, pleased at knowing such esoteric English.

  “That’s right,” Kirby said.

  “Very brave, stunt men.”

  “Kind of foolhardy,” Kirby said, and shrugged.

  “You grew up around the movies, huh?” Manny was bright-eyed from more than Danish Marys; Kirby didn’t often open up about his background.

  “I would have,” Kirby said, “only things went wrong.” He looked at his cards, not liking them very much, then glanced up to see Manny and Estelle both watching him, expectant. “Oh, well,” he said. “It was one of those things. My father was a stunt man, my mother was an actress.”

  “A big star?” Manny asked, and Estelle told him, “Hush.”

  “No, just an actress,” Kirby said.

  Estelle, hesitant, nodded shyly toward the TV. “Is she in this ‘Rio Grande’ movie?”

  “No. They always wanted to work together, but they never did. Then they had a chance to, on a circus movie, in Spain. What they called a runaway production. I was only two, so I don’t really remember it.”

  “You went with them, in Spain?”

  “Sure.” Kirby sighed, and dropped the cards on the table. Might as well go ahead and tell it. “They only had one scene together,” he said, “on a rollercoaster. It was supposed to be safe, but it wasn’t.”

  Hushed, Estelle said, “They were killed?”

  “Yeah. I got shipped home to my aunt in upstate New York.” Manny said, “So you didn’t know them, like.”

  “Not really,” Kirby said, but in his mind’s eye he could see the pictures of his father and mother all over his Aunt Cathy’s house. Old' maid Aunt Cathy, his mother’s sister, had had a lifelong crush on Kirby’s father and had transferred it to Kirby. From the time he could first remember, Aunt Cathy was saying things like, “Oh, you’ll be a devil with the girls,” and, “You’ve got your father’s wildness, I can see it in your eyes.” He’d been spoiled rotten, and he knew it.

  Manny maybe had some inkling of Kirby’s thoughts. He said, “You think you’re like him, your old man?”

  “Some ways, some ways.” Kirby shrugged. “I think I’ve got more interest in a real home somewhere; they never much cared where they lived. The other thing is—” Kirby picked up his cards again, studied them, seemed reconciled “—I stay away from rollercoasters.”

  14 THE UNKNOWN LAND

  “We must drive the corrupt profiteers out of government,” Vernon said, as he changed the sheets on his bed, “or we’ll never get the profit.” Above, a slowly turning fan made absolutely no difference.

  “Hush,” said the skinny black man, holding up the cassette recorder. “Listen to this part.”

  “I don’t think you get the picture,” Kirby’s voice told Vernon, as he tossed the rumpled sheets into the hall and snapped the clean lower sheet into the air, holding it by his fi
ngertips; gently, the sheet settled onto the bed, guided by Vernon’s hands. “What he’s going to do is,” Kirby said, “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.”

  “What do you think of that?” the skinny black man asked.

  “Greedy bastards,” Vernon said. “Most of the tomb robbers just burrow a hole in, they don’t knock the son of a bitch down.”

  Vernon finished making the bed while Kirby and his customers talked about the destruction of the temple. Then he carried the dirty sheets to the back of the house, the skinny black man following, holding up the recorder. After tossing the sheets in the big laundry sink, Vernon went to the kitchen, got two bottles of beer, and he and the skinny black man went to the living room to sit and listen to the rest of the tape. At last Feldspan giggled his giggle, the skinny black man pushed OFF and REWIND, and Vernon said, “Jail.”

  “For somebody,” the skinny black man agreed.

  “St. Michael,” Vernon said, with savage hope.

  “I don’t see it yet,” the skinny black man told him.

  St. Michael’s a crook,” Vernon said.

  “The sun rises in the east,” the skinny black man said.

  “He’s in my way. He stands between me and, and, and ...” “The pot of gold.”

  “Do you have to give him that?” Vernon asked, pointing at the cassette.

  “You know I do. I can play it for you, in here, nobody knows about it, but now I gotta go give it to St. Michael.”

  “Maybe the tape got loused up some way,” Vernon suggested. The skinny black man shook his head. “You don’t want me to lose my job,” he said. “Think about it.”

  “I need to hear it again,” Vernon said, making a fist, punching his own knee in his frustration. “If I could have a copy.”

  The skinny black man looked around at the underfumished tiny living room. “You don’t have anything to make it with,” he said. “Or play it on.”

  Vernon stared furiously around his room, blinking; with every blink, he was seeing something else he didn’t own. “I want,” he said, through clenched teeth, “I want ...”

  “Yeah, man,” the skinny black man said. “So do I.” He got to his feet. “I got to go, man, I’m taking too long as it is.”

  “Wait a minute,” Vernon said. “Tell me about these guys, the ones on the tape. Who are they?”

  “They’re what they say,” the skinny black man said, shrugging. “Antique dealers from New York City.”

  “They couldn’t be federal agents?”

  “No. Federal agents don’t travel with K-Y jelly.”

  “Then why are they taping Galway?”

  “I don’t know, man. Maybe they’re just afraid they’ll get cheated, they want some kind of record.”

  “To go to court with? That?” Pointing at the cassette.

  “I got no answer,” the skinny black man said. “Vernon, I got to go.” “Wait,” Vernon said, jumping to his feet. “It’s St. Michael and Galway, isn’t it? We’re agreed on that, right?”

  “Seems that way.”

  “They’re in on something together,” Vernon said, “only they don’t trust each other.”

  The skinny black man laughed. “Why should they?”

  “So St. Michael has you search those guys’ room, and you come up with the tape, and St. Michael gives you the machine, says make a copy. ”

  “And now I got to go give it to him.”

  “I need to hear it again,” Vernon said. “Maybe there’s a clue.” “To who the guys are? Why they made the tape?”

  “Not so much that. Where they were when they made it.”

  The skinny black man was surprised. “Galway’s land, isn’t it?” “No, that’s the goddam point. I’ve been there, with St. Michael, back when he still owned it. There’s nothing there.”

  “Maybe it was all overgrown. You know the way those temples get.” “I’d have seen it,” Vernon insisted. “St. Michael would have seen it. Do you think that man—or me either—do you think we could have walked around on a mountain of gold and jade and precious stones and not know it? Do you think St. Michael’s going to sell that land without he already squeezed it with those big hands of his, just to see what comes out?”

  The skinny black man frowned at the cassette player in his hand. “Then I don’t get it,” he said.

  “That’s the point,” Vernon said, and then more quietly, as though in a conscious effort to calm himself, “that’s the whole point. Galway goes off like it’s to his own land, but it isn’t. Somewhere up in those mountains, don’t ask me how, maybe he saw something from the air, just lucked on it, who knows, but somewhere up in those goddam fucking mountains Kirby Galway has found a Mayan temple! A brand new undiscovered temple, nobody knows about it!”

  “Jesus,” breathed the skinny black man, and looked at the cassette player with new respect. “So that’s the news I’m taking to St. Michael,” he said.

  “God damn it, I don’t want that bloated son of a bitch to know!” Vernon stomped around his tiny living room, driven mad by frustration and poverty and greed and spite. Anybody he’d have bitten at that moment would have died.

  “An unknown temple,” the skinny black man said. Belizean dollar signs danced in his eyes. “Riches,” he said. “Beyond the dreams of whatchamacallit. ”

  “Not beyond my dreams,” Vernon assured him. “This is what I hate about this,” he said. “I got to get the goods on St. Michael, I got to expose his corruption and get him thrown out and put in jail and me to replace him. But the closest thing I got to proof right now is that goddam record you’re gonna—”

  “Cassette.”

  “Record, goddamit!” Vernon’s eyes were big round circles. “But if I get rid of St. Michael by using this temple, then I lose the temple!”

  “Ouch,” agreed the skinny black man. “But if we could get there first—”

  “That’s just it,” Vernon said, pacing the room, punching his own thighs and shoulders. “Where is the goddam thing?”

  15 WARRIORS AND MERCHANTS:

  A PRELUDE TO DISASTER

  At night, tall ivory-colored curtains are closed over the dining room windows at the Fort George Hotel, eliminating the featureless, dark, infinite, eternal, perhaps unsettling view of the nighttime sea. The lights are dimmer, the tablecloths are thick and soft, and the chunky waitresses in dark green move silently on the carpeted floor. The room is no more than half full, conversations are muted. Tourists smile at one table, businessmen look serious at another, the occasional solitary traveler reads a magazine while spooning his soup.

  Whitman Lemuel looked up from his magazine and his soup when Valerie Greene entered the dining room, and his first lightning-quick thought process, almost too fast for memory, involved a series of rapid vignettes: “We’re both alone. Why don’t we eat together?”

  “I don’t want to be mysterious, heh, heh, but I really can’t talk about what I’m doing down here in Belize.”

  “But why is a beautiful woman like you alone in such an out-of-the-way place?”

  “Oh, my dear, I am sorry, it must have been dreadful for you.”

  “Don’t cry, here’s my handkerchief.”

  “I do have some vodka in my room.” There then followed an amben toned scene, which crumbled and liquefied when, as Valerie followed the hostess past Lemuel to a table in another comer, recognition came.

  My God! Her! “Despoliation!” “Unscrupulous museum directors!” He didn’t remember her name, but he was unlikely to forget her face. Or her voice. Slopping soup onto the snowy tablecloth, Lemuel raised his magazine up in front of his face, showing all the world that he was a reader of Harpers.

  Unaware that the stir she had caused was anything other than the normal erotic ripple that followed her everywhere and which no longer very much impinged on her conscious attention, Valerie took her seat, glanced toward the draped windows with a slight passing regret for the lack o
f a sea view—the limitless ocean at night, heaving away, held no terrors for Valerie—accepted the large menu, and answered the hostess’s question with, “Just water, thanks.”

  Behind his magazine, Lemuel gulped his vodka sour.

  Witcher and Feldspan, arriving then, obediently waited by the lectern for the hostess to finish with Valerie. They glanced around at the lack of imagination displayed in the conversion of this large rectangular room from a warehouse manque to a restaurant, and then Feldspan gasped and whispered, “Alan!”

  “What now?”

  “It’s him! Behind the magazine!”

  “Oh, my Lord,” Witcher said. “You’re right. Don’t look at him!” “I’m not looking at him. Don’t you look at him.”

  Witcher was always the first to recover. “Well, why wouldn’t he eat here?” he said. “He’s staying here, the same as us.”

  “But who’s he hiding from?” Feldspan asked. “Surely his type doesn’t actually read Harpers.”

  “Well, maybe he does,” Witcher said, becoming a little testy at Feldspan’s nervousness. “He has to read something, doesn’t he? And I really doubt there’s a Drug Dealers Digest published anywhere.” “Hush!” Feldspan said, because the hostess was approaching, a smile on her face, her arms full of menus.

  The hostess led them to a table along the right side wall. She was a good hostess, who didn’t believe in crowding the customers together in one area of the room for the convenience of the help, but who believed in spreading the customers out as much as possible for their own convenience and privacy and enjoyment of their meals. Therefore, once she had placed Witcher and Feldspan, the situation was this:

  Among a scattering of other patrons, Witcher and Feldspan were a short way into the room, against the right wall. Lemuel was midway down the room, one table in from the left wall. Valerie was most of the way down the right side, one table in from the side, one back from the non-view. In this triangle, Valerie and Lemuel were seated so as to face one another directly, while Witcher and Feldspan, opposite one another with the wall beside them, were situated out of Valerie’s line of sight but so that Feldspan offered Lemuel a three-quarter profile and Witcher gave him a view of his right ear and the back of his head.