Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43

by High Adventure (v1. 1)

  White sails. Valerie’s round white behind. Innocent smiled, content to wait.

  24 WHEN, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR

  When, in the middle of the air, Kirby saw his land and temple again, it was just 5:00 o’clock, and he’d been flying into the sun for half an hour. As though he weren’t annoyed and irritated and angry and irked and furious enough already.

  Lemuel had been absolutely unsoothable on the flight back to Belize City, had refused to talk rationally, had alternated between moaning about his lost reputation and bitterly accusing Kirby of being responsible for blighting his career. At the Municipal Airport, he’d flung himself from the plane the instant it stopped rolling and went galloping off toward the operations building, yelling, “Taxi! Taxi!” And now Kirby was back to his mousetrap, the sun in his eyes and ashes in his mouth. Skimming the temple top, he flashed down the other side, buzzed the Indian village low enough to cool soup, rotated Cynthia on her left wingtip, snarled over the hill again, hurled the plane to the ground as though he hated her, and stomped up the slope to the temple roof, where Tommy and Luz and the others were grouped about, gazing at him wide-eyed. “That was pretty close, Kimosabe,” Tommy said.

  “You don’t know what close is,” Kirby told him, disgusted. “There was a goddam archaeologist here a little while ago. She’s on her way to report she has just found a previously unknown Mayan temple.”

  “Shit,” said Luz.

  Tommy said, “On her way where?”

  “We can’t stop her,” Kirby said, “and it doesn’t matter who in particular she talks to, what matters is that this goddam pestiferous woman is honest.”

  “Ugh,” said Luz.

  “I hope she can’t bring back reinforcements tonight,” Kirby said, looking over his shoulder at his blasted plain. “But she’ll certainly be back tomorrow. She thinks I’m here to despoil the temple.”

  Luz said, “Do what?”

  “Steal,” Tommy explained. To Kirby he said, “So what do we do? Hold them off?”

  “We’re not talking about General Custer,” Kirby told him. “We’re talking about policemen, reporters, photographers, archaeologists, government officials—”

  “The whole shmeer,” Tommy finished. “Too bad; Custer we could have handled.”

  Kirby looked about, shaking his head. “I hate this,” he said, “but we’ve got to dismantle it.”

  “Shit,” said Luz.

  Everybody looked concerned. Tommy said, “Forever?”

  “Christ, I hope not.” Kirby sighed, gazing upon his masterpiece. “But at least until the fuss dies down. She’ll come back here with a lot of people, she’ll point, but there’s nothing here. With luck, everybody says she’s crazy.”

  “It’s her period,” Luz suggested.

  “Exactly,” Kirby said. “We wait a while, it blows over, we start up again.”

  “Maybe,” said Tommy.

  Adversity made Kirby philosophical. “Maybe he's the best we can hope for in this sad world, boys,” he said.

  25 THE SAPODILLA NARRATIVE

  “The alternative,” the skinny black man said reasonably, “was to let her tell everybody about the temple.”

  “So you brought her here?” Vernon demanded.

  Here was a small loggers’ cabin above the Sibun Gorge, a deep narrow winding groove through the Maya Mountains, gouged out over the millenia by the busy Sibun River. The cabin itself, low and slant- roofed, like a lean-to, was 30 years old or more, rank with mildew and the sweet smell of rotting things. Dirt-floored, lacking any furniture, it was built of horizontal pine-slabs nailed to upright posts pounded into the ground. Apparently it had once been half its present size, just one room, but then a second room was added, making the original front wall a dividing wall. There were no windows in either room, but plenty of air circulated through the uneven cracks between slabs. From the outside the place looked like the log cabin on a maple syrup label, but inside it looked like the attic in your grandmother’s house after she moved out. The logcutters who had built this rough shelter had long ago departed, on to other parts of the forest, and in the intervening years it had been occupied only rarely, by hunters or fugitives or lovers. And now by kidnappers and their victim.

  “Where else?” the skinny black man demanded, giving Vernon a challenging look. Clearly, he had expected praise for his initiative, not all this carping. “Not to my house,” he went on. “Should I have taken her to your place?”

  “She can identify you anyway,” Vernon pointed out.

  “Not if she never sees me again. I can just disappear for a while, it’s happened before.”

  “Well, I can’t,” Vernon said. “I have a job to protect.”

  “Tied down by things,” the skinny black man commented, with the smug superiority of the ne’endo^well.

  “All right, all right,” Vernon said, struggling to subdue his fury. The thing to do was accept the situation, he told himself, as he paced back and forth past the open doorway, where gnats and dust motes practiced football plays in a shaft of orange sunlight. Lord, give me the strength to change that which can be changed, he thought, the patience to live with that which cannot be changed, and the wisdom to tell the difference. Lord, he thought, I’m up to my ass in shit, Lord!

  Too many things going on, too much happening. Now he was somehow responsible for the kidnapping of an American woman, which would probably become an international incident, with the Sixth Fleet making a show of strength off St. Georges Caye and U.S. Marines walking around Belize City giving people chewing gum.

  (Earlier in this century, after the world market in mahogany faltered, chicle, being the latex sap of the sapodilla tree, used in the making of chewing gum, became for a while Belize’s primary export to the United States.)

  There was no furniture in this place, no objects but an unlit candle stuck in a beer bottle in one corner, nothing to kick but the pine^slab walls. Punching his own thighs, Vernon paced back and forth, thinking many different thoughts, until the skinny black man said, easily, “If you’re that worried about her, we can always ...” He drew a line with his finger across his throat.

  That was it, that was the thought Vernon had been avoiding and denying, circling around and around. In his mind and in his heart, he had committed many, many murders over the years, both of individuals and of groups, but out on the griddle of reality he had never even hit anybody very hard. Was this what a decisive man would do at this juncture? Just shoot the woman right off the—

  He didn’t have a gun.

  All right, stab her just as quick as—

  He didn’t have a knife with him, either, except his imitation Swiss Army knife (imitation! how that galled!), which might eventually do the job, but not with one clean quick slice.

  All right, all right, strangle the goddam . . .

  He looked down at his hands. He imagined a face between them, gargling. The eyes get bigger and bigger, red veins standing out on the whites. The tongue protrudes from the begging mouth, growing thicker, flopping like a red fish. The feeble fingers grope in agony at his hands. Drool pours from the mouth, snot oozes from the nostrils, the eyes bulge as though they would explode like grapes, the flesh turns mottled, purple . . .

  Vernon thought he might be sick.

  “Well?” said the skinny black man.

  Vernon swallowed, looking out the open doorway at the heavy jungle and the fading day. “Uhhhh,” he said. “We’ll decide that later. First I have to question her.”

  “About what?”

  “About the temple!” Vernon spun around, furious again. “Was that really and truly Galway’s land?”

  “Looked that way on the map. She seemed to think it was. And the temple was there.”

  “You saw it. You saw the temple.”

  “I told you already, I saw a hill with some rocks on it. Come on, man, make a decision.”

  The loneliness of command. Vernon bit his cheeks, he punched his knuckles together. All at once, it occurred to
him, like a light shining from heaven, that he wouldn’t actually himself have to do the, uh, crime personally. Leaving here tonight, he could simply say (out of the comer of his mouth), “Take care of her,” and his partner, untroubled by conscience, unaffected by imagination, unthinking of consequence, would do the dirty deed.

  “What do you want, Vernon?”

  Vernon looked at the closed door to the inner room. The partition having originally been an exterior wall, it was still covered with bark, and the pine-slab door itself was thick and solid. It opened inward, but there was a rusty old hasp lock fixed in place with a broken-off piece of branch. “I’d better go question her now,” he decided, and sighed.

  Taking the pillowcase from his pocket, he slowly and deliberately unfolded it, then slipped it over his head. It was a yellow pillowcase with a large sunny flower design; the eyeholes so he could see had been cut into the center of two daisies.

  “Take the candle,” the skinny black man advised. “It’s dark in there.”

  So Vernon lit the candle in the beer bottle, the skinny black man undid the hasp and opened the door—a scurrying sound came from within—and Vernon stepped through into the other room, peering through the damn eyeholes, stumbling a bit because he couldn’t see his feet. Behind him, the door was closed, the hasp lock rasped.

  Valerie Greene stood tall—very tall—against the rear wall, arms at her sides, chin up in a posture of defiance. “You won’t get away with this!” she cried.

  “I’ve already gotten away with it,” Vernon told her, sneering a bit. (He’d seen the same movies.)

  “When I get out of here—”

  “I’ll you get out of here,” he said, and was gratified to see her blanch a bit, one hand lifting, fingers curled, the knuckles just touching her chin. “All you have to do,” he told her, “is cooperate.”

  Her eyes flashed. “What does that mean?”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said, scornful and superior, “I have no designs on your maidenly virtue. I know how important that is to you Americans.”

  “You do?” In the flickering candlelight her expression was difficult to read.

  “I am here,” he said, “to talk about the temple.”

  “Despoliation!” She took an aggressive step forward, almost as though to launch herself at him. “You, a Belizean, and you don’t care what happens to your own heritage!”

  “What makes you think I’m a Belizean?” he asked, trying on a Texas accent.

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “I know who you are.”

  “You may think you know—”

  “There is one thing I wish you’d tell me,” she said.

  This interview was getting out of control—now she was questioning him—but there seemed no way to get back to the original path: “Yes?” “Is Vernon your first name or your last?”

  Behind the door, someone snickered. She heard us talking! Dammit, dammit, through all these cracks in the wall. Vernon said, in a stageTrish accent, “It is none of me names. You can’t see me face, you can’t identify me voice, you can’t prove a thing.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she said, and folded her arms beneath her proud bosom.

  “Listen,” he said, stepping closer, “you talk about heritage, but what do you think Kirby Galway’s doing up there? He’s selling stuff!” “That makes you no better.”

  “All right,” Vernon said. “I’ll tell you the truth. I am Belizean.” “Of course you are, I know that.”

  “I want to rescue the temple from Kirby Galway,” Vernon went on, looking guiltless and pure-minded under the pillowcase, “so I can protect it for my people.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, “or you wouldn’t lock me up in here. You and Innocent St. Michael. Boy! Was I ever taken in by your boss!” Oh, ho, Vernon thought, she thinks St. Michael’s part of this scheme. That’s good; somehow or other, it’s good. He said, “Never mind all that. The point is, that was Galway’s land you went to, is that right?”

  “Of course it was,” she said. “The temple’s just where I said it was, all along, and you were wrong with your drainage and faults and all that.”

  Vernon resisted the bait: I am not Vernon, he reminded himself, and said, “Is it valuable? Rich things there?”

  She gave him the exasperated look of the professional faced with the amateur. “How am I supposed to know that? I haven’t investigated the site, that man drove me off with a sword!”

  “A sword?”

  She made swishing gestures, saying, “You know, that thing, you know. ”

  “Machete,” said the skinny black man from the other room. “You keep out of this!” Vernon yelled. With his free hand, he punched his hipbone. Inside the pillowcase, his head was getting hotter and hotter, in more ways than one. Everything was out of control. There was no way to buy this woman off, or force her silence, except . . .

  Ohhhhh, ohhhhhh. How had he gotten into this? “That’s all for now,” he said, backing away to the door. He thought, I’ll go to the land, I don’t know how we all missed the temple, but it must be there, I’ll go there, I’ll hunt around right now, tonight, if I’m lucky I’ll find some jade, maybe some gold, a couple hundred thousand worth (U.S.), I’ll skip the country tomorrow. Start all over again somewhere else, where nobody knows me, change my name, do things right this time. At the same time, he knew he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t go there tonight, and even if he did he wouldn’t find anything useful by stumbling around in the dark, and even if by some insane chance he did happen upon something valuable he still wouldn’t flee Belize.

  Where would he go? What would he do there? Who would he know there?

  “Leave me the candle,” Valerie Greene said.

  “What?” he asked, disturbed from his reverie.

  “It’s dark in here. I need the candle.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. He’d seen that movie, too. “You’ll set fire to the place and escape.”

  “I just wanted some light.”

  “You don’t need light,” he said ominously, holding the candle closer to himself, not quite igniting the pillowcase. He pushed on the door, and nothing happened. His partner had locked it. So much for his exit line; hating the sense that he was somehow becoming a figure of fun, Vernon resignedly knocked on the door.

  “Who goes there?”

  “Oh, open the goddam door!”

  The hasp rasped, the door swung open, and Vernon glared back through the pillowcase eyes at Valerie Greene: “I’ll see you later,” he said, and this time made his exit.

  “I have to go to the bathroom!”

  The skinny black man shut and locked the door. The sun would soon be setting; orange rays crossed almost horizontally from the doorway to soften the roughness of the dividing wall. Vernon put the candle down in its comer, still burning. “I have to get back,” he said.

  The skinny black man nodded at the locked door. “Do I take care of that?”

  “Well, of course, man, you brought her here, didn’t you?”

  The skinny black man leveled on Vernon a cold and impatient gaze, and waited.

  Vernon dithered. Unwillingly, he said, “We can’t have her walking around the streets now, can we?”

  “Say it out, Vernon. Say what you want.”

  There was to be no escape from responsibility. Vernon looked aside, out the doorway at trees, brush, vines, heavy greenery turning black in the orange light. He shook his head. “She has to die,” he muttered, and hurried away.

  26 THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  Home.

  An accumulation of mail. No burglaries, thank God. The cats and plants had been taken care of after all by Richie from across the hall; what a relief. Sour milk in the refrigerator, but otherwise fine in there. Seltzer gone flat, so the homecoming Cutty Sarks had to be splashed with water from the kitchen sink. And among the messages on the answering machine was the hearty robust cheerful voice of Hiram: “Hanging by my thumbs down here, can’t wait to hear all. Give a buzz
the instant you get in.”

  “Oh, dear,” Gerry said. “I’m not sure I can face him.”

  Back on home ground, Alan was less judgmental, more compassionate. “I know what you mean,” he said, “but we might as well get it over. ”

  “Can’t I at least shower first? We just walked in, we haven’t even unpacked. ”

  “You go shower,” Alan told him. “I’ll call Hiram and tell him to give us half an hour, and then I'll unpack.” (Alan was feeling a bit guilty at the memory of his tension-caused snappishness down there in Belize.)

  “Oh, I do appreciate that,” Gerry said. “Thank you, Alan.” The Scotch had made him feel better already, and so had Alan’s supportive mood, and so had the very fact of being home, here among the things he loved.

  Before showering, and while Alan made the call to Hiram’s apartment three floors below, .Gerry went back to the living room simply to drink in the atmosphere for a moment; the reassurance of one’s own nest. Coming in from Kennedy in the cab through the evening rush, smears of wet dirty snow beside the roadway, Gerry had yearned to be home, and now at last here he was, in his own living room.

  On a basic motif of French Empire gilded furniture, Gerry and Alan had overlaid an eclectic mix of other items, all a little outrageous, and yet all coming wonderfully together, like a perfect little ragout. The nineteenth century English rhinoceros horn chair, for instance, made a blunt masculine statement that eased somewhat the overly pompous and delicate Napoleonic pieces, while the heavy window treatments of fringed green velvet against the slightly darker green of the lacquered walls created an inferiority, a hereness saved from claustrophobia by the leopard skin casually thrown on the Aubusson rug. The dark Coromandel screen in the corner served as a focus for the room’s objets; teakwood Balinese demons grinning at brass manyarmed Indian goddesses under the baleful gaze of English cathedral stone gargoyles and medieval icons, lit by Tiffany lamps.