Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43

by High Adventure (v1. 1)

  But if there was no Mayan temple here—and there was no Mayan temple here—then what the hell was everybody so excited about? What had that expert Lemuel thought he was looking at? What was that conversation recorded by Witcher and Feldspan all about? And what had Valerie seen, when she’d come here?

  Valerie. Poor sweet Valerie. Poor sweet dead Valerie. Though Innocent tried to continue to hope against hope, by now, 11 days after she and her driver and her vehicle had all disappeared, what other possibility was there?

  All right, it wasn’t the end of the world. Well, it was the end of her world, obviously, but it wasn’t the end of Innocent’s. It was time to get back to his own concerns. And if, in dealing with his own concerns, it so happened he could poke a sharp stick into the eye of Valerie’s probable murderer, so much the better.

  Meaning Kirby Galway.

  It all fit. According to Lemuel’s story, there had been a minute or two when Kirby had been with the people at the Land Rover before Lemuel joined them; he could have paid the driver then to do the job. Or, after unloading Lemuel in Belize City—by air, remember, by air— Kirby could have flown back and intercepted the Land Rover still on the way.

  Which was, of course, why Kirby had been so thoroughly out of sight the last 10 days. Naturally afraid his plot would fall through, or be exposed, he’d lain low until he was sure there was no more danger. And now here he was again, walking the streets of Belize City as big as you please, cocky and smiling, going so far as to taunt Innocent that he should retire! Retire!

  Surly, unhappy, unwilling to admit that his confidence in himself had been shaken, Innocent glowered after the departing Kirby. “Retire,” he muttered. “I’ll show you a thing or two about retiring.”

  His real estate office was over on Regent Street. Walking there, feeling unusually heavy, oddly stiff in his joints, he went in to find a telephone message from Vernon in Belmopan. “Hmmm,” he said, and went back to his office, switched on the overhead light and the ceiling fan, sat down at his mahogany desk, and phoned.

  “Oh, Mister St. Michael,” Vernon said, sounding terrible, worse than ever, “the police called.”

  Innocent’s eyes widened. He sat upright, hand squeezing the phone. Which of his many many plots and scams had come unglued? “Yes?” “They have found that Land Rover,” Vernon said. The man sounded as though he were actually weeping. “You know the one I mean, the one we—”

  “I know the one! They found it?”

  “In pieces.”

  “An accident?” Innocent was flabbergasted.

  “No no,” Vernon whimpered. “Taken apart. Somebody took it apart all last week, down by Punta Gorda. They sold the parts down there, to different people. The police got onto it Saturday night when there was an accident, and the radiator—”

  “Yes, yes, never mind police procedure. Do they have the man?” “No, sir. They think they got about a quarter of the parts now, they want to know should they go on looking.”

  “What do I care?” Innocent yelled, raging. “Am I their nanny?” He slammed the phone down on Vernon’s mewling, and sat glaring at the maps of nation and city decorating the opposite wall.

  Punta Gorda. The city at the very southern end of Belize, where eastern and western national borders fold toward one another, meeting at the Bay of Honduras. From Punta Gorda it is no distance at all to the border. From the border it is 30 miles across Guatemala to Honduras. And from there lies the entire world.

  The driver was gone. He fled in the Land Rover, disassembled it and sold the parts in Punta Gorda to finance his flight, then left the country. He would never return.

  The last dim hope was gone. Valerie Greene was dead.

  3 CYNTHIA TAKES IT OFF

  Cynthia stood on her left wingtip and looked down through the warm air to the top of Kirby’s barren hill. Then Kirby slid her out of the roll, eased down the far flank of the hill, and pushed the knotted face towel out the small side-flap window as he approached South Abilene. Dancing children came scampering up out of the huts, chasing the towel as it tumbled down through the sky. They would bring it to Tommy, who would already know the message inside, but who would carefully undo the knots anyway, open the towel, find the little plastic film canister, pop the top off that, and read the scrawled note on the tom-off piece of manila envelope: “Bring out the goods.”

  Feeling fine, Kirby flew around a little more, watching the clot of children find the towel, fight over it briefly, then race it back en masse to town. Twice he buzzed the huts, not too low, just for the hell of it, but when he saw the Indians start to file out of the village and up the hill, each one carrying a sack or bag or parcel, he angled away, flying high and higher into the pale blue, then dive-bombing his damn property, pulling out of the dive low enough to cause dust-devils on the hill’s eastern flank, then landing on the cracked dry plain, creating great billows of tan dust in his wake. He turned Cynthia and she trundled over as close as possible to the base of the hill, her wings jiggling gently over the uneven ground.

  The dust had all settled and Kirby was hunkered in the shade of Cynthia’s left wing, scratching a picture of a horse in the dry dirt (it looked like a dog, or maybe a frog), when Tommy and the villagers arrived. “Well,” Tommy said, “you’re feeling pretty good about yourself, huh?”

  “Pretty good,” Kirby admitted. “We’re back in business.”

  “You mean we get to put the temple back up?”

  “Sure. I’ll be around Belize City this week, maybe go out to San Pedro, find a live one, or go up to the States for a while. We’re full time in business again.”

  Luz said, “You bring any gage?”

  “Not this time. You don’t want too much of that anyway, Luz, it’ll rob you of ambition.”

  Tommy turned to look at Luz, squinting, trying to visualize him robbed of ambition.

  Kirby had opened the cargo door at the left rear and the passenger door behind the copilot’s seat on the right, and the villagers methodically stowed all the packages they were carrying, then each one stolidly headed back to South Abilene. Mostly they didn’t look at Kirby at all, but if he did catch somebody’s eye that person would give him a shy smile and a nod and that was all. Tommy and Luz were the link between Kirby and the Indians, and nobody ever tried to bridge the gulf.

  Kirby wasn’t even sure, in fact, why the Indians went along with this scam. They liked the money, obviously—most of it went into colorful clothes and sweet processed foods from town—but he had the impression they could get along just as well without it. It seemed sometimes as though they did it for its own sake, that they found it fun to recreate their ancestors’ art and artifacts. The shyness linked up with that idea, the modest appreciation of his appreciation of their skills.

  Watching as Cynthia was loaded, Kirby said, “I hope you gave me a lot of Zotzes.”

  “Well,” Tommy said reluctantly, “actually, no.”

  “Not a lot? How many?”

  “Well,” Tommy said, “actually, none.”

  Kirby gave him an exasperated look. “Come on, Tommy, you know how they love Zotz in the States.”

  “Maybe so,” Tommy said, “but down here old Zotzilaha is bad news. People don’t like to make him.”

  Luz said, “These are very primitive assholes here, you know. They do Zotz, they figure Zotz maybe gonna get them.”

  Kirby understood the problem, but it was still a real annoyance. Zotzilaha Chimalman, the bat-god of the ancient Maya, was the most fearsome of the Mayan demons, a grinning evil creature who lived in a gruesome cave surrounded by bats. One of his tasks was to divert the souls of the recently dead from the path leading to Mayan paradise and send them instead to the eternal darkness of hell. In “Popol Vuh,” the great Mayan creation myth, Zotzilaha appears as Camazotz, the enemy of man. After less than 400 years of Christianity, the Indians still found their ancient gods potent, and none more so than Zotzilaha Chimalman, the powerful personification of evil, the bat-god who flies, who owns
the night and who destroys human beings out of sheer joy in his own viciousness.

  It was easy to understand why the villagers didn’t like creating images of Zotzilaha, but the problem was that naturally the great demon-god was extremely popular among Kirby’s customers. Give a sophisticate a devil to play with any day; heros are boring. “Tommy,” Kirby said, “I really need some Zotzes.”

  “I’ll talk to my troops,” Tommy promised.

  “Why don’t you do some yourself?”

  Tommy looked vague, his eyes wandering away as he shrugged and said, “I’ve been busy.”

  “Jesus, Tommy. You, too?”

  “You’ll get your Zotzes,” Tommy said defensively. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Not wanting a fight with Tommy, Kirby made a point of going over to the plane to watch how the loading was coming along. Luz’s sister Rosita came over to Kirby and said, “You ain’t been around.”

  “Been busy, been busy.”

  “How’s your wife?” There was some sort of edge in Rosita’s voice, some sort of glint in her eye.

  Kirby pretended not to notice. “Worse,” he said. “She keeps seeing spiders on the wall.”

  “Maybe there is spiders on the wall. Most walls got spiders on them. ”

  “Not these walls,” Kirby assured her. “It’s a very clean hospital, completely clean.”

  Rosita nodded, scuffing her filthy toe in the dirt. By daylight she was, paradoxically, less attractive and more interesting. The wild girl tends not to be too interested in personal grooming. “Sheena says—” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.”

  Oh; a comic book. “Sorry,” Kirby said. “What does she say?”

  “She says she figures you don’t got a wife at all.”

  Kirby stared. “She what?”

  “She says she figures you’re some kinda con artist,” Rosita said. “Well, that’s what you are, huh?”

  “Not with you, Rosita.”

  “Huh.” The glint in Rosita’s eye was on the increase. “What Sheena says, she says you just don’t wanna get married, or maybe you just don’t wanna marry me, so you make up this wife in the crazy hospital, you can’t get a divorce unless she gets sane again.”

  “That’s what Sheena says, is it?” Kirby was beginning to get a little irritated.

  “Yeah. That’s what she says.”

  “You talk to Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and she talks back to you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, you tell Sheena,” Kirby started.

  “Tell her yourself. She’s over in the village.”

  What Kirby might have said next he would never know, because Tommy and Luz came over then and Tommy said, “Come on back to the fort, Kimosabe, let’s party.”

  “Can’t today,” Kirby said. “I’ve been letting things slide. I’ve got to get moving again.” The truth was, he was too impatient right now for partying. A week and a half sitting around was more than enough.

  Luz said, “We got a surprise for you.”

  Rosita said, “I already told him about it.”

  They all frowned at her, Kirby in bewilderment, the others in exasperation. “Asshole,” her brother Luz commented, and Tommy said, “What did you do that for?”

  “I don’t owe him no favors,” Rosita said, and went away with a straight back and a little whip-switch movement of the behind.

  They all watched her go. Tommy said, “Kirby, I got the feeling your wife just died.”

  “Somebody put some ideas in that child’s head,” Kirby said. Maybe somebody at the mission, he was thinking. He was very bitter. “I really better not come back to town this time.”

  Tommy and Luz agreed. Cynthia was loaded by now, so Kirby climbed aboard, waved, and waited till the Indians were partway up the hill on their way home before he started the engine, not wanting to strangle them in dust. Then he turned his trusty steed aside, got up to a gallop, and became once again airborne.

  He wasn’t happy with the way he’d left things; turning down their party invitation, getting static from Rosita and not dealing with it very well. Circling around in the sky like a lazy wasp, he decided to go over and buzz them once more, waggle his wings, let them know everything was still basically okay.

  The line of Indians, single file, had crested the hill and started down the other side. Kirby flew east, then came back low, right down on the deck as he crossed the dry plain, leathery snakes ducking their heads, the hill looming up ahead. He ran up the hill, Cynthia’s wheels just yards above the scrub, and burst with a roar over the top, suddenly visible and extremely audible to the people on the other side.

  The Indians loved it. They fell around laughing, holding their sides, pointing at Cynthia as she circled, waggling her wings. Even the plane seemed to grin.

  Kirby rolled over them once more, then headed down and around for South Abilene to give the shut-ins a treat. The cluster of huts came into view and a figure ducked into one of them, out of sight, as Kirby flew over. He gave them some throttle, stood Cynthia on her tail over the village, and heard some of the cargo shift around. Deciding to quit endangering the merchandise, he leveled out and turned north-northeast, toward the Cruzes and home.

  Nice day. Nice lot of artifacts aboard to sell to Bobbi and to Witcher and Feldspan. Nice to be in motion again.

  A memory tugged at him as he flew along, the many dark greens below, the pale blue high above. The memory of that figure who had run away into one of the huts as he’d come over town. In his memory that figure was awfully pale. And had his eyes deceived him, or had the figure been female?

  Sheena?

  Queen of the Jungle?

  4 FATHER SULLIVAN DRIVES BY

  Valerie stuck her head out the hut door and watched the nasty little plane buzz away at last. “Him again!” she said.

  The tribespeople were coming back into the village, all laughing and talking and slapping one another’s shoulders. They’d loved being endangered by that airplane, Valerie could tell. Only Rosita looked less than delighted by it all. Could it be . . .

  Valerie went over to Rosita, and pointed toward the now^gone plane. “Him?” she asked. “Is he the man you told me about?” “You bet,” Rosita said grimly. “And I just give it to him straight, what you said to me, and he got pretty shifty. I bet you right all along.” “I know I’m right! That man?”

  Rosita looked alert. “You know Kirby?”

  “Kirby Galway, that’s right, that’s his name!”

  “You know him, Sheena?”

  Valerie had long since given up trying to get the tribespeople to quit calling her Sheena and call her Valerie. Even though her hair wasn’t blonde, and even though her remaining rags of clothing bore no resemblance at all to a tiger skin, and even though she had never swung from vines in her entire life, nevertheless when she had stumbled into this village a week ago the man called Tommy Watson had at once dubbed her Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. And so had everyone else, deeply amused, once he’d explained that comic book character to them. In fact, it was during his description of the comic book Sheena, in Valerie’s presence, with some of the comparative details becoming rather personal, that Valerie had let them all know she understood Kekchi and wished they wouldn’t talk about her in quite that manner.

  “She speaks our language!” Tommy had cried, in delight and wonder. “She is Sheena!”

  In fact, the variant of Kekchi spoken in this village was not at all the same as the pure language she had so doggedly learned, but at least it was similar enough so she could understand most of what was said to her, unless the person spoke very fast.

  And as to their calling her Sheena, after three days and nights of wandering through forest and jungle and swamp and desert Valerie would have agreed to any condition in return for a full meal and a safe bed. That the only condition imposed was that she answer to the name of Sheena was odd, but not difficult. Sheena she became, Sheena she had been for a
week, and Sheena she would go on being for . . .

  . . . who knew how long?

  She didn’t dare go back to civilization, at least not yet. Who knew how many more of them were in that rotten racket together? Kirby Galway; the driver who had locked Valerie in that filthy hut; the man Vernon who had come to give the driver his orders. And of course Innocent St. Michael must be the ringleader, the brains behind the whole scheme.

  She had been foolish to let Vernon know she recognized him, because that was what had tipped the balance at last and made them decide they had to commit murder. Even though that nasty dark room had been very hot and humid, a chill had gone through her when she’d heard the driver say, “Say it out, Vernon. Say what you want,” and Vernon answer, “She has to die.”

  After Vernon left, Valerie stood quaking in the darkness of the inner room, wondering if she had the strength to fight off the driver, knowing she did not. It was so dark in here she couldn’t see if there might be a stick or something lying around that might help.

  Was there anything in the structure itself that might become a weapon? Valerie made her way to the rear wall and, partly by sight, partly by touch, made out that the slabs were nailed to vertical two- by Tours, a foot and a half apart, with here and there a horizontal two- by-four for extra support. Perhaps one of those horizontal pieces could be worked loose? She tried one, just at eye level, pried it a bit, pushed on it, and the two-by-four with the whole slab behind it, six feet long, simply fell off the building, with a clatter that made Valerie go rigid. Her head turned to stare at the closed door, but nothing happened, so the driver hadn’t heard or was possibly out somewhere.

  Digging a grave.

  It was then just a matter of moments for Valerie to force an opening large enough to eel through, ripping her left sleeve on a nail stuck out of the boards. The sky ahead was completely black, with visible stars. Above, it modulated through bruised-looking blues and sullen reds to become orange on the far side of the shack. So east must be straight ahead, which meant that north—and Belize City—-were to her left. Miles and miles and miles away to her left.