Innocent’s agitated face suddenly cleared, as though a storm over a pond had gone, leaving the surface smooth and blank. Even his eyes showed nothing as he said, “A deal, Kirby? What sort of deal?” “Buy that land back,” Kirby said.
“Why?”
“Buy it back for exactly what I paid you, and I’ll tell you the full honest truth about Valerie Greene and the temple.”
“Lava Sxir Yt.”
“Oh, you know its name, do you?” Kirby said, and smiled his admiration.
Very faintly Innocent frowned. “That’s not a deal,” he decided. “It is if we shake on it.”
Innocent considered. He glanced over at the blighted hilltop. He studied Kirby. He said, “The truth, Kirby? How much of the truth?”
“I’ll answer every question you ask, as long as you keep asking.”
“Then I’ll have the land and your con, whatever it is, and the truth about Valerie.”
“That’s right.”
Again Innocent considered. “There were some expenses involved in the land transfer,” he said.
“You eat them.”
“Hmmm.” Innocent brooded, and then faintly smiled. “I’ll never know what the trick is until I say yes, will I?”
“It’s up to you, Innocent.” Kirby maintained a poker face, tried not to even think about anything. The instant Innocent had mentioned the temple, Kirby had known the scam was doomed, it was about to become necessary to move on to something else. But here was a way to get out of it whole, get his money back and get rid of that scabrous hill, trade it all for a live girl and a dead racket. Not bad. Only don’t think about it yet, don’t let it cross your mind. It wouldn’t surprise Kirby if Innocent were telepathic.
At last Innocent nodded. “All right,” he said. “You have a deal.” He put his hand out.
“Fine.” Permitting himself only the tiniest of smiles, Kirby took Innocent’s hand and they both squeezed down hard to seal the pact.
“You!” cried a familiar voice.
They turned, hands separating, and watched Valerie Greene leap with unconscious grace across the stream and come running toward them. Flushed, out of breath, quite dirty, somewhat ripped and tom, hair a mare’s nest, she was rather astonishingly beautiful. Stopping in front of Kirby, chest heaving, hands on hips, she cried, “I know how bad you are, I know you’re a terrible person, but nevertheless you’re the only one I can turn to. Innocent people are going to be massacred, and you have to help!”
“Sure, lady,” Kirby said.
Valerie Greene turned to frown in bewilderment at Innocent. Still on his feet though sagging, open-mouthed, glassy-eyed, shallow of breath, he seemed to be doing a Raggedy Andy imitation. “What’s the matter with him?” she said.
“He just bought the farm,” Kirby told her.
20 INSIDE THE JUNGLE THE LAND IS RICH
Inside the jungle the land is rich, almost black, fed over thousands of years of growth and decay, well- watered and fertilized. The lower slopes of the mountains are so lushly overgrown that a man with a machete is lucky to make five miles a day through its tangle, and each day the jungle grows in again behind him, so that a week or a month later he would still need his machete to follow his path back out.
The Espejo and Alpuche families had once lived in Chimaltenango Province, west of Guatemala City, but that became in the 70s one of the hottest areas of the revolution and the counterrevolution and the death squads and the army raids, so when the owner of the land where they sometimes harvested crops offered them a new life far to the east in the peaceful Peten, they accepted. They were sorry to leave their people and their land, but life was too frightening now in Chimal- tenango, so they got on the trucks along with nearly a hundred other Quiche Indians, entire family groups, and drove for days over the rough roads, northeast above Guatemala City, through Salama and north through Coban into Peten Province, where they would live from now on.
None of them had ever had any formal schooling, but from time to time they had heard speeches on the radio about Belice, the province just to the east of the Peten. Belice was the Lost Province of Guatemala, stolen a long time ago by the British but some day to be recaptured by the brave young men of Guatemala. In the meantime, a state of not-quite-war existed between Belice and the rest of Guatemala, though the Indians imported from the west into the Peten were never actually aware of it.
The war they were aware of was the war they thought they’d left. The landowners had tried to get away from the revolution by moving into the underutilized and almost unpopulated Peten, a plateau of good plains land just waiting for the plow, but when they had imported workers from the west they’d imported the revolution as well. After a while, some of the Indians disappeared into the bush. Tourist buses heading up to the Mayan ruins at Tikal were attacked. Some Army jeeps were blown up and some soldiers ambushed and killed. Soon the death squads were roaming the area by night, as in Chimaltenango, savaging the innocent stay-at-homes since they couldn’t find the actual revolutionaries.
Within four years, it had all turned very bad for the Espejo and Alpuche families. There were so few of them to service the owner’s land that they were worked harder than at home. They were given no cash money, and less time than before to work their own plots of land for food. They were separated from the support systems of their families and their tribe. They were away from their ancestral land, on some alien land they didn’t know or understand. They were worse off than before they’d moved.
One day the owner made everybody come listen to a speech by an Army colonel who told them he intended to crush the revolution and slaughter every last revolutionary. He told them that if any of them were even suspected of aiding the revolutionaries they could expect no mercy. He told them to go on working for the owner, to never complain, to keep silent, and to do their duty and they would be safe. He told them that if any of them was thinking of running away to Belice they should forget it because they would be shot down and left in the jungle to rot if they tried it. Don’t even think about running away to Belice, he told them.
On a clouded night two weeks later the 27 members of the Espejo and Alpuche families, 12 males and 15 females ranging in age from 53 years to three months, left their two one-room clapboard shacks and turned their faces east.
A 27-year-old woman who had always been sickly died along the way. They buried her.
They ate fruit, nuts, berries, roots, flowers, sometimes fish, less often birds or iguana or coati-mundi. They moved from the Peten plain into the Maya Mountains, traveling as far as they could each day, always frightened and always exhausted. They had no idea when they would leave the Peten and be in Belice, so they just kept going. On the 24th day they found a road ahead of them, crossing from north to south. While the rest of the family waited, two of the young men— an 11-year-old Espejo and a nine-year-old Alpuche—made their way to the two-lane blacktop road and hid beside it. Soon a truck came by. Its license plate was black with white numbers preceded by a large A and along the bottom it said Belize. Both young men were illiterate, but the 11-year-old had seen “Belice” on maps and remembered it.
Three automobiles went by over the next half hour, all with license plates having black lettering on a white ground, starting with the letter C and with the word Belize along the bottom. The man and woman in the third automobile, well dressed and laughing together, were quite obviously black people, which was the final proof: in Guatemala, black people are not encouraged. The scouts went back and reported their conclusion: they were in Belice.
The families retreated a bit farther from the road, found a fairly level place in the jungle, and cleared a small patch of land. The trunks and branches and fronds they cleared away were used to make three huts. More land was cleared and the seeds they’d brought with them were planted: corn, yams, beans.
Four months after arrival they were a going village, 28 people strong, two of the women having made the trip pregnant. They were harvesting crops, they were hunting succ
essfully. Having found a few similar tiny settlements around them in the jungle, they had done some trading and now had two piglets, one male and one female, which were guarded with great care.
One day a pair of strangers came in from the road, bouncing in a Land Rover up the rough trail the people had made. They were a man and woman who spoke a crisp kind of Spanish, hard to understand, and who said they were from the government of Belize. Seeing the fright this caused, they promised not to make any trouble, but said they had come only to find out if the people needed help in any way. No, the people said, they needed no help. Well, if they ever needed anything, the man and woman told them, medical help, for instance, anything like that, all they had to do was go out to the road, turn right, and about 11 miles south they would find a town with a police station. “The police don’t have guns, and they aren’t mad at you,” the woman said, smiling.
The people didn’t believe the man and woman, but on the other hand these strangers seemed to have no ulterior motive, so they smiled and nodded and thanked them for the information. The man and woman said the town also had a weekend market if they ever had excess produce to sell, and had a Roman Catholic church, if the villagers were interested. (They were.) And a school for the children. (Maybe later.)
Cautiously, after that, the people broadened their contacts with this new land. A few occasionally went to the Catholic church, though they weren’t yet ready to talk to the priest, who was nothing they’d ever seen before, being neither Indian nor black nor Spanish. A sale of yams in the market had produced cash; crumpled pale-green Belizean dollars with Queen Elizabeth II on them and frail-seeming Belizean coins, which they kept in a sack in one of the huts, not sure yet what to use them for.
The man and woman, in the meantime, having returned to the capital at Belmopan, had entered this new settlement of refugees onto a map. The two families by chance happening to be of equal strength there, the man and woman named the settlement Espejo-Alpuche.
21 ZOTZ
“Valerie,” Innocent said, “what do you expect us to do about it?”
The false Gurkhas, irritated and uneasy at the disappearance of the tall American woman, hacked their way northward through the jungle.
“There isn’t time to radio for help!” Valerie cried.
No one in the van noticed Vernon moaning and shaking his head and punching his thighs as he drove, because Scottie was telling a story involving female Siamese twins, an Israeli Nazi-hunter and a one-kilo package of. uncut cocaine in a box marked Baking Soda.
Kirby stood frowning westward, thinking hard, brooding at those tumbled dark mountains. “It’s worth a try,” he said.
The false Gurkhas came to a gravel road and boldly crossed it. A British Army jeep went by as they did so, bluish gray, and the two uniformed Brits inside it waved as they passed, the false Gurkhas waving back.
“Tell me what to do,” Valerie said.
Kirby said, “I need thin cloth, cotton, the thinner the better, and a lot of it.”
Tom, the American photojournalism called out, “Vernon, how the hell much farther is this damn place?”
“Oh, twenty-twenty-twenty minutes, no more,” Vernon told him, showing an agonized smile in the rearview mirror.
Innocent stared at the dancing leering Zotzes: “What are those things?”
“Devils,” Tommy told him.
Halfway up the slope, Kirby stopped to look back. Valerie and Rosita and Luz Coco were cutting and hacking the sheets into squares or rectangles or ovals, a foot and a half or two feet across. None of them were making the circles he’d asked for, but it didn’t really matter. Half the village was running in and out of huts, looking for string.
Tommy and Innocent came together out of one of the huts, each carrying a cardboard carton; they started this way.
Kirby nodded, and hurried on over the hill to start Cynthia.
One of the young men of the village came into the clearing. “Soldiers coming,” he announced.
Everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at him or move closer to him or ask, “Who? Which soldiers? What kind of soldiers?”
“Gurruhs,” said the young man, which was as close as they’d come so far to the word Gurkha.
Twice in the last several months Gurkha patrols had moved through here, short black^haired men who held their shoulders proudly and handled their strange severe weapons confidently and yet smiled with amazingly bright teeth. The Gurkhas were a different kind of soldier, without the sullenness and fear and cruelty and tendency toward petty crime—and sometimes major crime—of the soldiers of their previous world. When the young man said, “Gurruhs,” they all smiled and relaxed. That kind of soldier. Fine.
Valerie, her arms billowing with cloth, came over the barren hilltop and saw Kirby Galway just getting into his plane. Innocent and Tommy were partway down the slope, carrying their cartons. Rosita and Luz followed Valerie with the rest of the cloth, and a half dozen villagers straggled up the slope in their wake, carrying bits of string, cord, twine and rope.
Is this going to work? Valerie frowned, thinking of the innocent villagers about to be slaughtered. Against murderers and machine guns, this? But what else is there to do?
She hurried down the farther slope.
Crouched on the blacktop in front of the van, Vernon shook open the map, holding it by its very edge with his fingertips as he guided it to the ground. It slipped from his grasp; he slapped at it. Just out of sight in the brush, Scottie had found a hollow log to piss resoundingly against. Across the road Morgan Lassiter, the woman journalist, was out of both sight and hearing for the moment, having gone discreetly away with a handful of Kleenex. The other news gatherers strolled around the empty road, yawning and stretching. Hiram Farley, the Trend editor, came over to place his Frye boots beside the map and say, “You know where this place is, do you?”
“Oh, yes,” Vernon said, looking up at him, squinting as though he stared into the too-bright sun. Farley’s face showed nothing, his eyes were level and patient. Why do I feel he knows my soul? But that’s just foolishness; if he knew the truth, he’d stop me.
There was some wistfulness in that idea.
“Everything’s fine,” Vernon said.
Innocent said, “Kirby, this is a crazy idea.” With some difficulty he had climbed up on the wing and was leaning in at the plane’s open door so he could talk to Kirby above the engine noise. Wind whipped at his clothing, and the plane trembled all over. “A crazy idea,” he said, more loudly.
Kirby, studying his instrument panel, gave Innocent an impatient look: “Do you have a better one?”
“Radio the police. Radio the British soldiers at Holdfast,” meaning the small British Army detachment out near the Guatemalan border.
“I’ll do that, once we’re airborne, but it won’t do much good. If Valerie’s right, there isn’t time to send for help. At the very worst, maybe we can slow them down.”
Innocent looked past Kirby at Valerie in the other front seat. She was riding with him because she was the only one with a hope of leading him back to where she’d been. Now, her head was bent forward, she was busily tying strings to cloth. Her profile rang like a gong in Innocent’s soul. “By God, she’s alive,” he said.
“And our deal still holds,” Kirby told him.
Was there something underhanded about the deal if Valerie were not dead? No; nothing you could put your finger on. Innocent sighed. “I suppose it does,” he said.
The false Gurkhas entered the village.
Valerie looked up from her knot'tying as the plane suddenly jolted forward. She looked at Kirby, then out at the Indians backing away from the plane. Innocent St. Michael was out there, waving, offering her a kind of sad smile. She hesitated, then smiled and waved back.
Had she been wrong about him? Was Innocent not the arch villain? His almost pathetic pleasure in seeing her alive—she was sure for just one second she had seen a tear in his eye—could not possibly have been pretense. The plane
taxied forward, and Innocent was left behind, out of sight. But if Vernon and the skinny black man had not been obeying Innocent’s orders, then whose? Who was the master^ mind behind the plot?
This man Kirby, coming so promptly to the rescue of poor endangered Indians he’d never even met, couldn’t be the ringleader. All you had to do was look at him when he wasn’t waving a sword in your face to see he wasn’t the type.
Who, then?
There came into her memory again the last words she had heard between Vernon and the skinny black man in that filthy shack where they’d been holding her prisoner. The skinny black man had said, “Say it out, Vernon. Say what you want.” There had been a pause, and then Vernon had said, so low she could barely hear it, “She has to die.”
It had been his order.
Vernon was the ringleader? He’d certainly been the one to make that particular decision, but somehow the idea of Vernon as Mister Big . . .
The plane had swung about, and now it suddenly raced madly out across the dry and bumpy ground, shaking itself to pieces. The angle of the plane was such that from inside it they couldn’t see the ground out the windshield but only the sky; how could Kirby be sure there was nothing in front of them?
The roar, the speed, all were so much more present than in a big sensible airliner, and then all at once the tiembling stopped, the roar grew somehow less frantic, and out the side window Valerie could see the ground falling away below.
“Tie knots!” Kirby yelled.
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 Page 26