Estelle glared at Valerie, who gaped at her accuser in shock. Manny said, “This is Sheena! So she is alive.” He didn’t sound happy about it.
“That’s right,” Galway said. “The temple scam is dead, everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket, and I’ll probably have to move out of this country.”
The Cruzes were both terribly shocked. Estelle looked as though she might leap on Valerie and claw her to death, while Manny said, “Move from this house, Kirby?”
“It isn’t her fault, Manny,” Galway said. “She didn’t do it on purpose; she’s just stupid and ignorant.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Valerie said.
“She thought she was doing right,” Galway went smoothly on, “so I don’t blame her. And now she can help me in one little way, and that’s why I brought her here, to tell her the whole story, and I’m sure she’s going to want to help out.”
Valerie looked at them all suspiciously, even Estelle, whose manner was just as mistrustful as her own. “I won’t commit any crimes,” she said.
Galway gave her an enigmatic look: “If I were going to commit a crime, Miss Greene,” he said, “you’re about the last person I’d ask to be my accomplice.”
If that was an insult—and it did seem to have been intended as such—it had to be one of the strangest insults in history. Feeling mulish and put-upon, Valerie said, “That’s all right, then.”
Manny said, “Whadaya want her to do, Kirby?”
“Let’s talk over lunch,” Galway said. “I’m starved.” Looking at Valerie, he said, “How about you?”
Dear God! Her stomach! In all the excitement and activity and confusion, she hadn’t even noticed, but all of a sudden her stomach gave her such a hunger pang she actually gasped from it. Food? When was the last time she’d eaten? Nothing at all today, nothing since last night, on the run, when she’d eaten those tortillas.
The very thought made her head swim.
“Right,” Galway said, correctly reading her expression. “We’ll just wash up and then eat out here, Estelle, okay?”
Estelle nodded, tentatively smiling again, waving at the outdoor table beside the house.
Galway said, “Kids all in school? Just the four of us? What are we having?”
“Escabeche,” said Estelle.
ESCABECHE (Ess'ka-bet-che)
One hen.
Two large onions.
Spices.
Kill, pluck and separate the hen. Stew in water one hour, adding cloves, pepper, and chopped-up chilis to taste.
While hen is stewing, prepare tortillas in usual manner, and thinly slice onions.
Add onions to stew for the last 15 minutes.
Serve stew in large bowls. Place napkin in bottom of basket, place tortillas in basket, close napkin across top, place in center of table.
Place small bottle of Pineridge Hot Pepper Sauce on table.
Open four bottles of Belikin beer, place on table.
Stand back.
“Oh, my, this is good,” Valerie said.
“There’s more,” Estelle told her, beaming from wrinkled ear to wrinkled ear.
“More beer?” Manny asked. “Kirby? Valerie?”
“Oh, yes,” everybody said, and Valerie was surprised to find herself smiling at Kirby, who grinned back and reached for another tortilla.
Kirby. Valerie. They were on a first-name basis now, ever since he had shown her into his susprisingly neat and Spartan apartment to clean up before lunch and she’d said, “Which door is the bathroom, Mister Galway?” and he had looked at her and said, “I don’t like to be called Mister Galway except by the police, and I refuse to call you Miss Greene any more, so what shall we call each other? Shall I call you Fido, and you call me Spot?” So that was that.
Sunlight gleamed on the yellow hair on Kirby Galway’s arm as he raised his spoon and ate. She kept glancing at him, thinking he had a good laugh and an easy self-confident manner, and it was too bad really that he was such a villain. If, in fact, he was a villain.
Was he not a villain? At his most furious with her, when he was waving that sword about, he hadn’t actually used it on her. A villain— and Valerie had met some villains now—would certainly have sliced her head off at that point, and thought no more about it.
Nor was he even a vile seducer. The contrast between this lunch and the eating of conch with Innocent that time was so extreme it almost made her laugh out loud. Innocent had been so smooth and so accomplished, and had just filled her mind with thoughts of sex. Kirby Galway laughed and told jokes and ate his escabeche and didn’t try to manipulate her at all, made not the slightest effort to fill her mind with thoughts of sex.
And if her mind was filled with thoughts of sex, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, making her blush—they’ll think it’s the hot sauce, and it almost is—she knew enough psychology to know it was merely a mormal reaction to being in safety after a period of (extreme danger and extended physical stress.
And, of course, the sun gleaming on the yellow hair on Kirby’s arm.
He looked up and caught her eye and grinned, and she looked down at her bowl, suddenly flustered. Then, afraid she’d given herself away, she looked over at him again and he was frowning slightly at his own bowl, thinking about something.
Time to change the subject. “Listen, Kirby,” she said. “You wanted to tell me something.”
“Right.” He nodded at her, his brow clearing. “You’re right, Valerie,” he said. “It’s time I told you what’s been going on.”
“Good,” she said, and went on eating while he talked.
23 HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN REAL ESTATE
Kirby told her the truth, almost every last little bit of it. “My big mistake,” he started, “was when I bought some land from Innocent,” and then he went on to tell her about the land, his finances, his meeting with Tommy Watson and the other Indians, his invention of the temple and the Indians faking the artifacts under Tommy’s direction, and Kirby himself going off to find his suckers in America to buy the fakes. “They think they’re breaking the law, so they don’t tell anybody about it.”
“So what I saw,” Valerie said, with a wondering expression, “was your fake temple.”
“A little bit of it, from a distance.”
“It was very good.”
“That was mostly Tommy’s doing. Anyway, when I first met you,” and he went on to describe Valerie’s inadvertent foiling of his first attempt to snare Whitman Lemuel, mentioning it with hardly any visible resentment at all, and then went on to tell her about the Indians dismantling the fake temple just as soon as she’d seen it, because everybody knew she was on her way back to Belmopan to report her discovery.
At that point, Valerie took over briefly, and told Kirby about her experiences with Vernon and the skinny black man and her wanderings in the wilderness, all of which had apparently been very difficult and frightening, though she was brave about it in the recital.
Kirby then took over again, saying, “Well, anyway, you were lost, and Innocent kept going back and forth between believing you were alive and believing you were dead, and if you were dead then he was sure I was pulling some con to persuade him you were alive for some reason, and back and forth like that. Also, he was going crazy about that hill and is there or isn’t there a temple.”
“We were all going crazy, Kirby.”
“Well,” Kirby said, “I offered him a deal. Buy the damn land back from me at the same price I paid for it, and I’d tell him the absolute truth about you and the temple, whether you were alive or not, and what the temple scam was.”
Valerie looked quite interested: “Did he say yes?”
“He did.”
“Well, that was very sweet,” she said, looking doe^eyed. “That Innocent would worry about me that much.”
“Sure,” Kirby said. “But that’s why I didn’t take you back there just now. Innocent and I no sooner shook hands on the deal when you showed up alive, so he already has that part. Tha
t’s half my deal gone already. Now, with what you already knew about my land and the people in South Abilene, and with what Innocent already knew, he could have put together for himself what I was doing with my temple scam, not needing to pay me to tell him about it, and that’s the other half. So why does he need me any more?”
“Oh,” Valerie said.
“If I know Innocent—and I do—at that point he would have found some way to weasel out of buying back the land.”
“So you don’t want me to talk to him,” Valerie said, “until fie has the land and you have your money.”
“That’s right.”
Her expression was extremely enigmatic: “Do you mean I’ve been kidnapped again?”
Feeling a bit uncomfortable, Kirby said, “I was hoping, after I explained the whole thing, you’d sort of see it my way and agree to wait a little while. Not long. I mean, nobody’s pinning your arms down or anything.”
“Mmm,” she said, and folded her arms across her breasts to sort of pat her own biceps.
“It would just be for a day or two,” Kirby assured her.
“Mmm,” she said again, and then she yawned, covering her mouth with her hand. “I’m too tired to think now, Kirby,” she said. Raising her arms over her head, she arched her back and strrrretched. She was, Kirby noticed, very interesting when she stretched. “Lunch was delicious,” she told Estelle lazily, “but it made me so sleepy.”
“That’s good,” Estelle said. “You just sit, I clean up.”
Looking over at Kirby, her eyes round and guileless, Valerie said, “Your little apartment looked so cool and comfortable. Maybe I could just go there and take a nap.”
“Sure,” Kirby said, getting up from the table. “I’ll walk you over.”
She smiled, looking up at him from under her lashes as she rose.
Sex. How about that? If he and Valerie Greene got a little something on together, maybe she’d be more on his side in re Innocent. He had no idea where that idea came from, it was just suddenly there, just sort of popped up into his mind.
He ignored Estelle’s giggle as he escorted Valerie around the comer of the house.
24 PRESENT IMPERFECT
Saturday morning and Innocent sat in his office in Belmopan, his old self again, playing the telephone like a virtuoso, taking care of business he’d let go all to hell, covering his ass in every conceivable direction, and primarily seeing to it that none of the mud from the Vernon affair would stick to his own voluminous skirts.
Vernon. Who would have guessed? “I trusted that boy,” Innocent muttered aloud, yet even as he said it he knew that wasn’t the really accurate way to describe the situation. Innocent hadn’t exactly trusted Vernon, it wasn’t in Innocent’s character or training to throw something like trust around with a lavish hand, but what he had done was something that had the exact same effect as misplaced trust: he had underestimated Vernon. Patronized him, condescended to him, assumed that Vernon had no importance.
“And all along he was selling me out.”
Selling out his nation, too, of course, but that was secondary. He had betrayed Innocent, which meant Innocent had been unwary enough to get into a position where betrayal was possible. Now, among all the other things he was taking care of today, Innocent was going through Vernon’s desk and correspondence files, seeing what other unpleasant surprises might be in store, while down in Belize City Hospital Vernon was busily spilling what guts he had left, telling everything he knew about everything, naming every name.
“He could hurt me, that boy, if I’m not quick.”
“Talking to yourself, Innocent?”
Innocent looked up, frowning, not liking to believe he was the sort of person who talked to himself, certainly not wanting to be caught at it, and there was Kirby, grinning in the doorway, dressed for flying business in his open-neck shirt and khaki slacks and sturdy boots. “Well, Kirby,” Innocent growled, seeing nothing in that doorway that pleased him, “and what the hell happened to you yesterday?”
“Saved a village,” Kirby told him, grinning. “Went home to rest.”
“And what about Valerie?”
“Here she is.” Kirby stepped into the office then, and Valerie followed, looking happy and healthy and just a bit sheepish.
That son of a gun took her to bed, Innocent thought. There was pain in the thought, but also release. One of the things he’d been trying not to think about ever since Kirby and Valerie and the plane had all flown away yesterday from South Abilene was what he would feel—and what Valerie would feel—the next time they saw one another. The gradual suspicion had been forming inside him that the great life-changing love he had felt for Valerie was perhaps easier to maintain when she was dead or disappeared, a great mythic figure, than when she was an actual flesh-and-blood girl. The epiphany that Kirby had claimed Innocent was having the night before last in South Abilene had been a great shaking and cleansing of his system, long overdue he now believed, but it probably wouldn’t have been possible if Valerie had not been both (1) good, and (2) unobtainable.
So what should their relationship be, now that she was no longer among the missing and he’d already had his apotheosis? To go on being obsessed by her when she was present would be kind of silly, but what was the alternative?
On the other hand, even if she were no longer a goddess on earth but merely a woman, she was still quite an intriguing woman, and that pleasant afternoon spent in Vernon’s house—Vernon! by God, he knows so much!—was something Innocent would not at all mind repeating. Just how long would it take to get used to and bored with this great big tall girl with her happy enjoyments? It would be fun to find out.
But it was not to be. One look at Valerie, and a second look at Kirby, confirmed it, and a moment of sadness and nostalgia and regret passed over Innocent, like the final tremor when you’re getting over the flu. But then it was washed away by a sudden flood of relief: He would not have to follow through on his protestations of love after all. He would not have to behave toward Valerie present as he had sworn he wanted to when she was Valerie absent. He could have his epiphany, and get away with it!
“Well, come on in, you two,” he said, rising from behind his desk, beaming at them, coming all over avuncular. “Looks to me like you’ve buried the hatchet.”
“We straightened out one or two things,” Kirby agreed.
“We talked it all out,” Valerie said, smiling softly, “and we understand one another now.”
“But what we’re here for, Innocent,” Kirby said, “I want to make good on our deal. You already know about Valerie, but I promised to tell you about the temple.”
“Oh, you don’t have to, Kirby,” Innocent said, just as smiling and open and friendly as anything. “What I saw in South Abilene, and talking with Tommy Watson, I’ve got it pretty well figured out by now. ”
“Hmm,” said Kirby. He didn’t seem pleased.
“And then the tape, that helped,” Innocent said. “But you haven’t heard the tape, have you?”
“What tape?”
So Innocent got the tape out of the locked desk drawer and put it in the cassette player, and once again those sounds and words filled his office: “This way, gentlemen. Watch out for snakes.” Throk. “The noise keeps them in their holes.”
Valerie just looked bewildered, but Kirby stared at the cassette player as though it were his ancestors’ form of Zotzilaha Chimalman. The words and the sound effects went on, and Kirby just stood there and stared and listened until his own voice said, “Do you know how many people there are in New Jersey?” and that other voice said, “No one I know.”
“Witcher and Feldspan!”
Innocent hit the STOP button. “They recorded every conversation with you, Kirby.”
“Holy Christ! Those two?”
“Never underestimate people,” Innocent said: Vernon.
“But— They’re legitimate antique dealers!”
“That’s right. Doing undercover reporter work for a fr
iend of theirs named Hiram Farley, editor of a big American magazine called Trend. Ever hear of Trend, Kirby?”
“Those dirty bastards.”
“I managed to have them lose these tapes at the airport,” Innocent said, “or otherwise you and your temple would be all over Trend magazine by now. You didn’t know I was helping you like that, did you?”
“Didn’t want me blown out of the water,” Kirby said, “until you figured out what I was up to and how you could horn in on it.” “You always think the worst of me, Kirby,” Innocent said, and risked a smile at Valerie, telling her, “I hope you won’t be like that, Valerie.”
“I always say nice things about you, Mister St. Michael,” Valerie said.
Innocent almost laughed out loud. Oh, good, Kirby, you have no idea what you’re hooked onto here. He said, “The point is, Kirby, if you think of dealing with those fellas again, just remember these tapes.”
“Oh, I will,” Kirby said grimly, “but the deal I most want to talk about, Innocent, is ours. We did shake hands on—”
“Kirby, Kirby, do you think I’d try to reneg?”
Kirby frowned at him: “You won’t?”
“Certainly not. It’s true I know Valerie’s alive without you having to tell me; there she is, as beautiful as ever.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And it’s true I know all about your fake temple without you telling me. But, Kirby, I’d like to think I’m an honorable man. Why, I’ve been doing nothing at all this morning except put together this paperwork on our transaction.” And he handed over the manila folder.
Kirby, looking dubious, settled into one of the side chairs, opened the folder, and started to read. Innocent said to Valerie, “I am glad you’re safe, Valerie.”
“So am I,” she said, smiling.
“I keep remembering that lunch we had together, and how much you liked the conch. You did like the conch, didn’t you?”
She giggled, a sound Innocent would long cherish. “I liked it a lot,” she said.
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 Page 28