Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43

by High Adventure (v1. 1)

  “That’s tomorrow,” the man said. By now, two of the others, including the group’s lone woman, had also stopped talking and were looking at Vernon, wondering what entertainment or news value he might possess.

  “I am here tonight,” Vernon told them. “I am introducing myself, and I will spend the night in the hotel, so we can get an early start tomorrow. ”

  “Well, good fellow!” the sharp-nosed man said. “Johnny on the spot, that’s the ticket. Introducing yourself, are you?”

  “My name is Vernon.”

  “And how do you do, Vernon? You’ll find that I am Scottie. This ravishing lady to my left is Morgan Lassiter, a world-class lesbian and ace repor—”

  “Just because you never got any,” Morgan Lassiter told him, but calmly, as though she were used to him—or possibly to his type. Her accent was anonymously Midlantic, as though she’d learned English from machines, on Mars. She nodded in a businesslike way at Vernon and said, “Nice to see you.”

  “And you, Ma’am.”

  “This lot,” Scottie said, and interrupted himself to bang his whisky glass on the table, crying, “Shut up, you berks! Vernon’s here to introduce himself. And here he is, our driver, Vernon. Bright and early on the morrow he shall whisk us from this hellhole here out to the other hellhole over there, and then back again. Back again is included, am I right, Vernon?”

  “Yes,” said Vernon.

  Scottie gestured this way and that. “Over there is Tom, a fine American photojournalist, just chockablock with all the latest American photo journalist technological advances, isn’t that right, Tommy?”

  “Fuck you in the ass,” Tommy said.

  “Chahming,” Scottie said. “Next to him is Nigel, the dregs of humanity, not only an Australian but an Australian newspaperman, until he forgot himself once, told the truth, and was exiled to Edinburgh.”

  “What Tommy said,” said Nigel.

  “Never does his own research,” Scottie commented. “Here beside me we have Colin, the demon scribbler of Fleet Street, and beside him is Ralph Waldo Eckstein, who won’t tell anybody why the Wall Street Journal fired him, and—”

  “What Tommy said.”

  “Yes, yes. Now, Vernon, lad, you’ve probably been told we are a party of six, is that not right?”

  “That’s right,” Vernon said.

  “But here we are, as you can plainly see, a party of seven. Did Morgan give birth? Perish the thought. In fact, perish the little perisher. No, what has happened is that even here in this pit of nullity, this farthest outpost of Empire which Aldous Huxley quite rightly said was on the way from nowhere and to nowhere, journalists seek one another out, come together for comfort and liquor and the latest lies. That gentleman over there, with the truly wonderful moustache, is one Hiram Farley, an editor if you please with a most famous American magazine called Trash. No, I beg your pardon; Trend. ”

  Hiram Farley leaned forward with his meaty forearms crossed on the table and looked unsmilingly at Vernon. He said nothing. He seemed to be exploring Vernon’s eyes, looking for something, traces of something. A cold finger touched Vernon’s spine. He knows, he thought. But he can’t know, get hold of yourself. Vernon blinked.

  Scottie said, “Mr. Farley would very much like to come along with us tomorrow, if he may. Busman’s holiday and all that, the old fire company horse hearing the bell. Please say yes.”

  “Yes,” said Vernon.

  15 DEVIL DANCE

  Twenty little devil-gods stood on the rattan mat, knees turned out to the sides and deeply bent, arms flung wide to show their bat webs, eyes glittering with evil, mouths stretched back in a violent smirk out of which forked tongues curled, poised to strike. In the flickering candlelight, the massed group of 20 demons seemed to move, shimmer, almost to dance, their eyes staring back at Kirby, who blinked, cleared his throat, and said, “Fine, Tommy. Very effective.”

  “They get to you, don’t they?” Tommy held the candle lower, the movement causing the creatures to alter their knee bends and roll their eyes, while their shadows magnified and swooped on the far wall of the hut.

  “They’re real good, Tommy,” Kirby said. Behind him, outside, a low-key party was under way, partly in hospitality at the presence of Kirby and Innocent and partly a vigil, waiting for word of Valerie Greene. Rosita and a couple of the others were still out there in the darkness somewhere, occasionally calling, but everyone knew they wouldn’t find their Jungle Queen tonight. At first light they’d look again, hoping nothing bad had happened to her, reeling around stoned and lost in the darkness.

  Innocent was in another hut right now, being shown some of the blankets and dress material the villagers had made and dyed themselves, so Tommy had taken the opportunity to bring Kirby here and show him he’d actually been at work making the promised Zotzes.

  Zotzilaha Chimalman, replicated 20 times, danced in the candle-light on the rattan mat. Each figure was about 10 inches high, seven inches wide, formed from clay, hollowed out as an incense burner. Buried and dug up again, all of them had been knocked together a bit to simulate age and rough treatment, each one subtly different, showing the specific touches of the half dozen artisans who had worked on them.

  Fakes. Mockeries. Tiny clay imitations of an ancient long-dead superstition, but still brimming with the potency of dread. Zotzilaha Chimalman hated mankind and had the power and the genius to do something about it. Kirby had never been a Maya, but nevertheless he felt uneasy in the presence of this naked malevolence. He could understand why it was so hard for Tommy to turn his hand to the creation of such a being, and even more so for the other villagers, whose straightforward relationship with life and the spirits and their ancestors had never been corrupted by exile to the outer world.

  Over the candle flame, Tommy’s eyes gleamed at Kirby almost as gleefully as the demons’: “Had enough, Kimosabe?”

  “They’re fine, Tommy,” Kirby said, calm and dignified. “Thanks. And, uh, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Tommy chuckled, and they went outside to a clear night full of stars, with a moon about seven months pregnant. The villagers liked to party, but were troubled by the disappearance of their Sheena, and therefore merely sat in groups, murmuring together. The little plastic radio had been turned off; no salsa music from Guatemala tonight. A horizontal scrim of marijuana smoke hung at nose level. Jars of home-brew clinked against stone. The mountains that had swallowed Valerie Greene were black against the western sky.

  Innocent was no longer admiring materials but sitting on them. A bulky old mahogany armchair had been brought out of one of the huts and set near the largest fire, then draped with colorful cloths; black-and-white zigzags over red or rust or orange, bright red and deep blue diamonds in alternating patterns, representations of flora and fauna so stylized by centuries of repetition as to have lost all hint of their original realistic nature. Upon this soft throne sat Innocent, smiling upon the fire and the shyly smiling villagers, in his left hand a large Heilman’s Mayonnaise jar mostly full of what to drink.

  Crossing toward him, Kirby thought at first it was merely the ambiguity of the firelight that made Innocent’s face look so much softer and less guileful than usual, but when he got closer he saw it was more than that. “Innocent?” he said.

  Innocent turned his smiling face. He wasn’t drunk, and he wasn’t participating in the gage that was being passed around. It seemed as though he was just, well, happy. “How are you, Kirby?” he said.

  “I’m fine.” Kirby looked around for something to sit on, found nothing, and sat on the ground beside Innocent’s left knee, half turned away from the fire so he could continue the conversation. “How are you, Innocent?”

  “I’m all right,” Innocent said, with a strange kind of dawdling emphasis. “I’ve had a very strange day, Kirby.”

  Kirby ruefully touched his shoulder, where Innocent’s bullet had kissed him. “Haven’t we all,” he said. Around them, the Indians conducted their own conversations in t
heir own language, nodding or smiling at Kirby and Innocent in hospitable incomprehension from time to time. Tommy and Luz were at some other fire, waiting for Rosita to give up and come home.

  “This morning,” Innocent said, “I was in despair. Would you believe that, Kirby?”

  “You seemed a little hot under the collar.”

  “That, too. But it was mostly despair. When I got out of bed this morning, Kirby, I was prepared to throw my entire life away.”

  “Not to mention mine.”

  “Mine, Kirby,” Innocent insisted, but still with that same new languid manner. “I didn’t take my laps in the pool this morning,” he said. “Can you imagine that?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I never skip my laps in the pool. I didn’t eat breakfast. I didn’t eat lunch.”

  “Okay,” Kirby said. “That’s a couple of things I can’t imagine.”

  “It was love that did it to me, Kirby. At my age, after all these years,

  I fell in love.”

  “With Valerie Greene?”

  “Strange thing,” Innocent said, “until just now I couldn’t even use the word. Love. I could say I missed her, I was angry about her loss, I liked the idea of her, but I couldn’t use the word love. I could plan to shoot you because of it, but I couldn’t say it. Plan to throw my entire life away without ever saying that word.”

  “My God, Innocent,” Kirby said, “you’ve had an epiphany.”

  “Is that what it is? Feels pretty good.” Innocent smiled and sipped a bit from the jar.

  “But,” Kirby said, hesitating, not wanting to spoil Innocent’s good mood or changed personality or whatever the hell this was, “but, Innocent, are you sure? I mean, how well did you know Valerie Greene?”

  “How well do I have to know her? Kirby, if I knew her better, would it make me love her more?”

  “It wouldn’t me,” Kirby said, remembering his own less than satisfactory last sight of Valerie Greene.

  “I spent one afternoon with her,” Innocent said. “Just Platonic, you know. ”

  “You didn’t have to say that, Innocent,” Kirby said comfortably. Innocent chuckled. “I suppose I didn’t. Anyway, I expected to see her again, and it didn’t happen. I was thirsty, and the water went away. ”

  “You’re a wonder, Innocent,” Kirby said. “I never knew you were a romantic. ”

  “I never was a romantic. Sitting here now, thinking about it, I think maybe that’s what was wrong. I was never a romantic, never once in my life. Do you know why I married my wife?”

  “No.”

  “Her father had the money I needed to buy a certain piece of land. ” “Come on, Innocent, there must have been more to it than that. There were other girls with fathers with money.”

  “There were two other potential buyers for the land,” Innocent said. “I didn’t have time to fool around.”

  “So why Valerie Greene?”

  “Because,” Innocent said, “there was nothing in it for anybody concerned. She’s an honest girl, Kirby, she’s the most completely honest girl I ever met in my life. And smart. And earnest. And something more than just out for a good time. But the main thing is, no matter what she does, where she is, what’s going on, she’s always one hundred percent honest.”

  “You know a lot about somebody you spent one afternoon with,” Kirby pointed out.

  “I do, that’s right.” Innocent smiled, remembering something or other. “She wants to give happiness and receive happiness,” he said. “She’s not out to buy or sell anything. She doesn’t try to get an edge.” “You’ve got it bad,” Kirby told him.

  “I’ve got it good,” Innocent said. “And now that I believe you and these people here, now that I’m in this nowhere little nothing village and I know for sure Valerie’s out there, not far, not dead, now that I know she’s not dead, it’s just fine, isn’t it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “She’ll be back,” Innocent said. “Some time tomorrow she’ll be found, these eyes will look at her, this mouth will say, ‘Hello, Valerie.’” He beamed in anticipated pleasure.

  “Innocent,” Kirby said, with wonder in his eyes and in his voice, “you’ve regained your innocence.”

  Innocent pleasantly laughed. “I suppose I have. Never knew I had one to lose. Kirby, maybe this would have happened anyway, maybe it’s that man’s change of life thing, but it needed somebody good to bring it out, and that was Valerie. This is a whole new person you’re looking at, Kirby.”

  “I believe you,” Kirby said.

  “He was tucked away inside me all the time, I never knew it.” “The love of a good woman, huh?”

  “Go ahead and laugh, Kirby, that’s okay.”

  “I’m not laughing, Innocent,” Kirby told him, in almost total sincerity. “I think it’s great. So this is the Innocent I’ll be seeing around Belize City from now on, is it?”

  Innocent’s smile was sleepy, comfortable, self-confident. “I know better than that, Kirby,” he said.

  “You mean it won’t last?”

  Innocent said, “Kirby, did you ever visit someplace that was really nice, a place that made you happy, so you started to think maybe you’d like to just stay there forever?”

  “Sure.”

  “But then after a while you realize it isn’t your place, you don’t fit in except as a visitor, you don’t belong there and you never will. So you go home, where you do belong, and where you’re happy most of the time because it’s the right place where you ought to be.”

  “Okay, Innocent.”

  “From time to time,” Innocent said, “you remember that other place, and how nice it was to visit, but you don’t make the mistake of thinking you can go back and live there. So that’s what’s happening now, Kirby. I’m visiting some other me, a real nice me that I never knew before.” That lazy smile softened Innocent’s features once more. “But don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll go home to the real me when the time comes.”

  “In that case,” Kirby said, now completely sincere, “I’m glad I was here to meet the other fella.”

  16 PILLOW TALK

  Voices. Murmuring voices.

  Valerie opened her right eye and followed the progress of an ant as it tottered along the dark damp ground, carrying a big piece of chewed' off leaf above itself like a green sail. Her left cheek was pressed against that ground, so her left eye remained closed, while her right eye tracked the ant and her right ear received the input of those murmuring voices without attempting to decipher.

  Mouth: dry. Body: extremely stiff. Head: painful. Knees: stinging. Hair: matted. Brain: semiconscious.

  Her right arm was bent up at some little distance from her face, lying on the ground, leaving a miniature arena in which that ant^sail bobbed as though on a dark brown lake. Valerie watched the pale green triangle until it reached her thumb, reversed, turned right, reached the knuckle at the base of her thumb, reversed, turned left, and carried on out of sight, into the great large ocean of the world.

  Human beings—much larger than ants—went by. Valerie’s working eye swiveled upward, sighted over her hulking shoulder, and glimpsed the two men moving away, talking. Camouflage uniforms. Curved knives in black leather sheaths at their waists. Gurkhas.

  It was coming back, slowly and erratically. The eye swivel had been unexpectedly painful, so Valerie shut the lid, retired into darkness, and permitted memory to work its will upon her.

  Indian village. Airplane with Kirby Galway and Innocent St. Michael. Flight, with tortillas. Great confusion as darkness settled, her mind adrift—what had that all been about? Had terror unhinged her? But she didn’t remember feeling that frightened, certainly not after she’d gotten some distance from the village. She’d even paused beside a stream, she remembered, sitting there a few minutes to catch her breath and drink water to wash down her first tortilla. After that . . .

  After that, wandering in darkness, much of it mere confused imagery in her mind. Had she
been laughing uproariously, pretending to be an automobile, talking out loud like Donald Duck? Surely memory was wrong. Or had there been something in the stream? “Don’t drink the water,” isn’t that what they say?

  But then— Rescue! A Gurkha patrol, bivouacked for the night, and she had literally fallen among them. So now, after all the perils and dangers of the last weeks, finally she was safe, amid her rescuers, whose murmuring voices were all around her. Not speaking English, of course. What would it be? Something Asian. Nepalese, was that right, for people from Nepal?

  “. . . kill . . .”

  Weariness spread through her body, a kind of outflowing unconsciousness, padding all around her aches and sores, moving toward her brain.

  “. . . attack the village ...”

  Awake too early, wrong to be conscious before her body had knit up its wounds. Soothing, soothing sleep. The darkness flowed.

  “. . . take no prisoners ...”

  Strange. Understanding their words, but not in English. She’d never understood Napalese before.

  “. . . kill them all ...”

  Valerie’s right eye shot open. Kekchi! She could understand them because they were speaking Kekchi! Not the dialect she’d originally learned, nor the somewhat muddier version they spoke back in South Abilene, but some other sharper version, more guttural and glottal, but comprehensible nevertheless.

  Why would Gurkha soldiers speak Kekchi to one another? “When do we kill the woman?”

  Valerie’s entire body clenched. Her open eye stared at her wrist, her ear dilated.

  “When we get there.”

  A slight unclenching, but eye and ear both still wide.

  “Why not shoot her now? She’ll slow us down.”

  “No shooting. What if somebody hears and comes to look?”

  “I could cut her with this knife.”

  “And if she screams?”

  (Oh, I’d scream, yes, I would.)

  “I know you. You’re just in such a hurry to kill her because she scared you so much last night.”