“And Kirby Galway here.”
“Oh, good! We’re all set, we’ll be right down.” There were mutters in the background; sounding annoyed, Witcher said, “Would you hold on, please? Just one second.”
“Sure,” said Kirby, and spent the next several seconds listening to muffled conversation and a repeated thumb-thumb. Oh, of course; Witcher had covered the mouthpiece by pressing it to his chest, and Kirby was listening to his heart.
Then his voice: “Gerry wants to know,” Witcher said, with worlds of meaning, “if your friend is anywhere down there.”
Kirby grinned. Got them both, by God! “No,” he said. “He’s gone away up-country. There’s a fella up there he says is cheating him. He took a couple local boys and left first thing this morning.”
“Oh. ” Witcher didn’t seem to know what to do with all that information. “Just so he’s not in the lobby.”
“You’re safe,” Kirby assured him.
“I’ll tell Gerry,” Witcher said, putting the charge of cowardice back where it belonged.
Hanging up, Kirby went over to the broad front doorway and looked out at the peach-colored Land Rover, which was just leaving via the ENTRANCE. The girl, in front beside the driver, was slipping sunglasses on. The floppy-brimmed hat, a very sensible defense against the tropic sun, kept him from seeing much of her face. Her jaw was perhaps a little too strong. Then the Land Rover was gone, and a stir in the lobby recalled him to business.
Kirby helped the bellboy load luggage into the back of the pickup while Witcher and Feldspan checked out, and then they came outside, both behind large-lensed dark glasses. Witcher looked irritable, Feldspan hung over. Good mornings and handshakes were exchanged, and Feldspan said, “We’ll make the plane, won’t we?” His voice was shaky; behind the dark glasses, his eyes asked for pity.
“Plenty of time,” Kirby assured him.
“Of course there is,” said Witcher. “Get hold of yourself, Gerry.”
Gerry didn’t; nevertheless, they all got into the pickup, jounced away from the hotel, and made their way back through the sunny town. Once on the road out to the airport, Kirby took a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket, handed it across Feldspan to Witcher, and said, “This is the place we’ll meet.”
Opening the paper, Witcher read aloud: “Trump Glade, Florida. Route 216 south eight point four miles from movie house. Left at sign reading Potchaw 12. Dirt road. Fifteen point two miles to red ribbon on barbed wire fence.” Witcher nodded. “And that’s where you’ll be, I take it.”
“Rent a car,” Kirby told him. “Don’t take a cab.”
“Certainly not.”
“And it’s just you two there,” Kirby said, “or I don’t get out of the plane.”
“We understand,” Witcher said. Between them, in the middle of the seat, Feldspan lowered his head, raised a quaking hand to his brow, and faintly moaned.
“When I’ve got something to deliver,” Kirby said, “I’ll cable you in New York and give you a day and a time.”
Witcher said, “What if you have something too large to bring out that way? The jaguar stela, for instance. That could be eight or ten feet tall, and it would weigh a ton.”
“We’d have to do that by ship,” Kirby told him. “There’s places up the coast where we can bring in a small boat at night. It’s expensive, and a lot trickier, but if we’re careful it’ll be okay. I tell you what; if I have anything too big to fly out, I’ll take Polaroids of it, give them to you guys, and once you have a buyer we’ll arrange to get it out by boat.”
“Fine,” Witcher said.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Feldspan said.
“Gerry,” Witcher said, through clenched teeth.
Kirby angled across the empty road and parked on the left verge, beside the easygoing Belize River. “Better here than in the plane,” he said.
So Witcher, disapproval etched in every line of his being, got out of the pickup, and helped Feldspan out and walked with him down to the river bank. Kirby whistled quietly to himself and looked out at the pleasant day. If he were a man who fished, he’d want to fish right now.
A horn honked. Kirby looked over as Innocent St. Michael went by in his dark green Ford LTD, heading toward the airport, waving at Kirby from his air-conditioned luxury. Kirby grinned and waved back. Innocent sure did like to visit the airport.
When Feldspan returned, he was paler but somehow better. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Happens to us all,” Kirby assured him. The line of Witcher’s mouth said it didn’t happen to him.
There were no more events till they reached the airport, where Witcher insisted on unzipping his bag atop the pickup’s tailgate, so he could remove two Sony Walkmans from it, one of which he extended toward Feldspan, saying, “You know this will make you feel better, Gerry. ”
Feldspan looked with repugnance at the Walkman before him, then seemed to remember something. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yes.” He flashed Kirby a guilty glance through his dark glasses as he accepted the Walkman, hooked it onto his belt, and put the earphones in place on his head. Now he looked like something from “The Wizard Of Oz.”
Kirby grinned at him, amused. So these boys were smuggling something out of Belize in their Walkmans, were they? And they didn’t want their pal Kirby to know about it. Idly, he wondered what they’d found, idly decided it was probably marijuana.
Extending a hand, Witcher said, “We’ll hope to hear from you.” His earphones were draped around his neck.
“Two or three weeks,” Kirby promised, shaking his hand. Then he shook Feldspan’s. “Have a nice flight,” he said. Feldspan smiled gamely.
“Come along, Gerry,” Witcher said, hefting his bag. His earphones were now in place on his ears.
Kirby stood by the pickup and watched them walk to the small terminal building. Witcher was swaying and snapping his fingers and just slightly boogalooing to the sounds coming into his ears. After several steps Feldspan started to do the same, in pale and shaky imitation.
In a shaded spot at the comer of the building, working on his molars with his slender gold toothpick, stood Innocent St. Michael, also watching Witcher and Feldspan. His eyes looked very interested. It was hard to be sure with his hand up in front of his mouth that way, but he might have been very faintly smiling.
Hmmmmmm, thought Kirby.
19 SATISFACTION
Gerry plodded manfully along, can rying his heavy bag, snapping the fingers of his free hand in some sort of rhythm, nodding his head metronomically to the sound of Kirby Galway, in his earphones, saying, “A lot of Americans are coming down here, because there’s just so much available land.”
The worst part of travel is travel. To get out of Belize, there was so much red tape to overcome: forms to fill out, lines to stand in with other passengers, documents to display, questions to answer. And all taking place without benefit of air conditioning, among bodies that could only have been improved by a flash flood. Gerry just suffered through it all, remembering to nod his head and tap his toes, following Alan’s lead as he listened to his own voice say in his ears, “I had an aunt in New Jersey once, but she went to Florida and died.” We’re going to Florida now, he thought. What does it all mean?
As Kirby Galway had suggested might happen, their luggage was given a quite extensive search by a large and menacing Customs person, who made them put their Walkmans on the counter with their suitcases and then took a positively unhealthy interest in the contents of their luggage. Some of the more stylish garments produced from this individual various grunts and snarls absolutely out of a zoo. “What you call dis?” the fellow demanded at one point, holding up an object from Gerry’s bag between thumb and finger.
The indignity of it. “It’s called sachet,” Gerry said, enunciating carefully, reminding himself it’s best to be gentle with the lower orders. “It’s to keep the bag sweet^smelling, you know.”
The Customs man held the small sealed packet to his nose
and noisily sniffed. “Could be dope,” he said.
“Certainly not.” Stomach churning, mind rattled, Gerry struggled to remember the contents of sachet, saying, “It’s—Oh, rose petals, cloves, lavender ...”
“Passports,” said a sudden harsh voice from a new and unexpected quarter; that is, from behind them. Gerry and Alan turned, in some surprise, to see a short impatient scowling woman standing there, holding out her hand for their passports.
Was this right? While Alan briskly turned over his own passport, Gerry had to search himself like a policeman frisking a suspect, having no idea what he’d done with his passport, not expecting to need it at just this juncture . . .
The roar of the descending plane was heard. The woman was actually snapping her fingers. Gerry, third time through his shirt pocket, found the passport and handed it over. In lieu of a thank you, the woman said, “Tickets.”
Well, that was all right; Alan had them both. He turned them over to the woman, who barely glanced at them before shaking her head, saying, “Not this flight.”
“What?” Gerry thought he would die, he actually thought he would die.
But not, apparently, Alan, who did some barking of his own, telling the woman, “Of course it’s this flight.”
“SAHSA flight,” the woman said.
“That’s right,” Alan told her. “SAHSA is exactly what it says on those tickets.”
“Not today.”
“Oh, really,” Alan said. “It is our flight, it is this airline, it is today.”
Gerry moaned faintly, hoping no one would hear. The plane was waiting outside. Passengers behind them on line were getting upset. Off to one side, a stout man being disgusting with what seemed to be a gold toothpick appeared to enjoy the show.
Then, all at once, it was over. With one last firm nod, as though she’d solved a knotty problem for them at last, the woman handed the passports and tickets back to Alan and said, “You can go now.”
“I can go now? After you’ve—”
“The plane is waiting,” the woman said, with urgent shooing gestures. “Hurry, hurry.”
The plane was waiting. The other passengers were waiting. The Customs man had finished pawing through their personal possessions and sent their luggage on to be loaded. Their Walkmans and carry-on bags awaited them on his wooden counter. Over by the door to the plane, a uniformed man gestured urgently at them, repeating the impatient woman’s, “Hurry, hurry.”
They hurried, out of the building and into the blinding sunlight, Alan jogging ahead across the tarmac. Jouncing along in his wake, head and stomach both terribly upset, Gerry couldn’t get the Walkman back on his belt until they were actually going up the steps and into the plane. The stewardess pointed Alan toward their seats, and Gerry followed, adjusting the earphones and fiddling with the Walkman’s controls as he trailed Alan down the aisle. Ahead, Alan was also still setting up his Walkman.
Then abruptly Alan stopped, and Gerry almost ran into him. Alan turned about as though to run back off the plane; he stared wide-eyed at Gerry, his mouth open in shock. The aisle behind them was full of boarding passengers. The stewardess was closing the door. It was too late.
Gerry also at last had turned on his Walkman, and now he returned Alan’s horrified stare as, “I can’t get no,” Mick Jagger wailed in his ears, “no no no.”
20 THE LOST CITY
“The map is not the terrain,” the skinny black man said.
“Oh, yes, it is,” Valerie said. With her right hand she tapped the map on the attache case on her lap, while waving with her left at the hilly green unpopulated countryside bucketing by: “This map is that terrain.”
“It is a quote,” the skinny black man said, steering almost around a pothole. “It means, there are always differences between reality and the descriptions of reality.”
“Nevertheless,” Valerie said, holding on amid the bumps, “we should have turned left back there.”
“What your map does not show,” the skinny black man told her, “is that the floods in December washed away a part of that road. I see the floods didn’t affect your map.”
Valerie was finding this driver very difficult. He had a mind of his own, and an almost total disregard for Valerie’s opinions. He drove rapidly and rather recklessly, and from the beginning he had disdained Valerie’s maps and charts and directions and suggestions and everything. He wasn’t her driver so much as she was his passenger, the excuse for him to take his Land Rover out for a spin.
He wouldn’t even tell her his name. “Hi, I’m Valerie Greene,” she had greeted him back in the lobby of the Fort George. “I’m your driver,” he’d responded, then had turned on his heel and marched outside, leaving her to follow as best she could, carrying all her own gear. Hurrying after him, she’d been aware of some man over by the house phones staring at her, probably thinking she must be a very silly woman to let her driver—her servant, technically, provided by the Belizean government itself—treat her like that.
The vehicle, this peach-colored topless Land Rover, was a perfect match for the driver. It too was all hard edges and businesslike bluntness. What the driver lacked in politesse, the Land Rover lacked in springs. The driver’s absence of small talk and common courtesy was echoed in the Land Rover’s uncushioned gray metal seats. The driver’s skinniness and blackness found their counterpart in the Land Rover’s metal and tubing, painted the colors of an aircraft carrier’s corridor. Peach and gray, heavily rusted, rough to the touch.
Valerie felt unwanted emotion rising within her. She wasn’t exactly sure why it was that girls weren’t supposed to do things “like a girl”— throw a ball like a girl, cry at every little thing like a girl—but she did know that was the rule, and so she fought down the tremulousness that frustration had built within her. Only the tiniest bit of it showed when she said, “I thought we could stop for lunch along that road. There’s supposed to be a really beautiful little stream there.”
“That’s what flooded,” the driver said. “Besides, there’s no stores down that way.”
“I have food.” Valerie gestured back at her canvas bag, now bounding around like a basketball in the storage well. “I had the hotel make some sandwiches,” she explained. “Plenty for both of us.”
“You still have to buy beer.”
“I don’t want beer,” Valerie said.
“I do.”
Valerie stared at him, while several sentences crowded into her brain, beginning, Well, I never— and, Of all the— and, If your superiors— What kept all those sentences incomplete and unspoken was the driver’s absolute self-assurance. He wasn’t being calculatedly arrogant, or deliberately hostile toward her, or playing testing games with her, or actually behaving toward her at all. He was merely being himself, which Valerie understood,, unfortunately, and which kept her from wasting breath trying to get him to be somebody else. You might as well tell a cat to turn around and walk the other way.
And this was who she’d picnic with; what a waste.
They rode on in bumpy silence, Valerie thinking about all the reasons she had left southern Illinois in the first place, all the vague hopes and dreams inspired by her determination to see the great world, and the unpleasant contrast between all that and this reality. Here she was, flopping about in this hard-edged biscuit tin beside a self-absorbed and utterly unappealing man, and not even going to have the picnic she’d planned.
So far, in fact, the great world really wasn’t showing Valerie Greene very much. Yesterday’s encounter with Innocent St. Michael had certainly been enjoyable, but there’d been very little of the romantic in it; the mode of that scene had been mostly comic. And this driver today was as much a washout as (according to him) the road they weren’t taking.
All her hopes now were pinned on the lost Mayan city. It would be there, it must be there, where she and the computers had decreed (and despite the nay-saying of Innocent’s man Vernon), and from the instant of her discovery of it everything in her life wo
uld change. Archaeologists would write her respectful letters, asking for details of her methodology. Reporters would gather for news conferences. Governments would take her seriously. She herself would lead the expedition to clear away a millenium of jungle and free the ancient city to thrust its towers once again into the air.
A buzzing sound caused her to lift her head. A small blue-and-white plane was flying by, rather low, not much faster than they, and heading in the same direction. Probably it was actually following the same road, there being very few landmarks in the jungle. Valerie found herself eyeing that plane wistfully, envying whoever was in it, no matter what their purpose or destination. There was romance, soaring above the jungle, sailing through the sunlight.
An airstrip beside the lost city spread its scythed green carpet in her mind, and she smiled after the plane. But then, before it was out of sight, she was recalled to earth by the driver abruptly braking hard, the Land Rover bucking to a stop.
Valerie lowered her gaze and looked around, as the dust of their passage caught up with them, making a gray-tan haze in the air. They had stopped at an intersection, where their oiled gravel “highway” crossed a meandering dirt road. To their right, a small building was covered with tin soft drink signs. “Coca Cola,” said one, and beneath that in Creole, “quench yu tus.”
The driver switched off the engine. In the sudden silence, dust slowly settled. Valerie said, “What’s this?”
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 Page 12