High Adventure

by Donald E. Westlake

  Four years ago, when Kirby had first met Manny, the skinny little man with the happy smile and the brightly shining eyes was one of life’s more cheerful losers. A subsistence farmer on rough land that had been stripped in the nineteenth century by the lumber industry, he was—like most of the other rural people in this comer of Belize—also a marijuana farmer in a very small way, tending his little field, turning over the occasional bale of really fine sinsemilla for some really fine greenbacks. To Kirby, then, Manny had been simply another Spanish/Indian local supplier in torn workpants, with gaps between his teeth, the only difference being that Manny Cruz tended to smile more than most people, so his tooth-gaps were more memorable.

  But then the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration from the United States, in one of its doomed, humorless, arrogant, sporadic efforts to force the Belizean government to dry up the finest source of foreign exchange in the whole country, compelled the local authorities at least to make a gesture, arrest somebody, destroy some patch of marijuana plants, and poor Manny turned out to be the last one standing when the music stopped. The next thing anybody knew, his pot crop (and part of Estelle’s com crop as well) had been burned, his 18-year-old International Harvester step-in van (still reading Lady Betty on the side, under all the newer coats of paint) had been confiscated by the law as having been involved in the transportation of drugs, and Manny was sentenced to 20 years in Lynam Prison down by Dangriga.

  Well, the whole thing was a shock to everybody in the area. The taking of the truck, the Cruz family’s only means of travel to and from civilization, seemed as Draconian to most people as the removal of Manny from his children for a term longer than their childhoods. They would all be married by the time he got out.

  A kind of unofficial Cruz family welfare program started up among the other farmers in the area, as well as some of the merchants from around Orange Walk and some of the middlemen in the marijuana trade and even a few of the North American pilots who fly the stuff out, including Kirby. At that time, Kirby had been around the scene only about five months, and was still settling in. He had an unsatisfactory relationship going with a legal secretary in Homestead, he was beginning to be interested in Belize as a place rather than merely a cargo stop, and he saw a way he might both help the Cruz family and introduce a little stability into his own life.

  Estelle Cruz, as short and skinny and brown and gnarled as a cigarillo, had at first thought Kirby was suggesting a sexual relationship between them during the term of her husband’s incarceration, and she was edging toward the machete before he managed to make his proposition clear. What it came down to was, he wanted a home.

  There was a pasture in front of the Cruz house that could serve as a landing strip for Cynthia—better than some of the jungle strips he normally used—and a good grove of trees at one end in which to park her. A mule shed on one side of the house could be enclosed for a separate apartment for himself. Estelle could cook and clean for him, the children already knew better than to tell their business to strangers, and Kirby would have a real base of operations at the Belize end of his route.

  What he offered in exchange was, in effect, the twentieth century. The Cruz family homestead was too far off the beaten track to tap into the public power lines, and they’d never been able to afford their own gasoline-powered electric generator. Kirby promised to supply electricity, and the appliances to be run by it. No actual cash would change hands between himself and the Cruzes, but he would provide them with things and they would provide him with a home.

  It was a fine deal for everyone. While some Cruz and Vasquez (Estelle’s family) relatives built the addition onto the house, complete with a concrete floor and glass in the windows, Kirby brought in load after load of matériel. His southern flights had always been cargoless—except for wads of greenbacks, with which to pay for the northbound cargos—and money at that time seemed no problem (he hadn’t yet met Innocent St. Michael), so down came two composting toilets, an electricity-generating windmill, four solar panels, a gasoline-driven generator for emergencies, a washing machine, a television set, a refrigerator, three air conditioners, four blue-light bug zappers, assorted lamps, and a Cuisinart. And from a dealer in Belize City came the used pickup, which Estelle could use whenever Kirby didn’t need it, replacing the confiscated van.

  Even without the Cuisinart, Estelle had been a wonderful cook, and modem appliances simply made her output more lavish. In Belize, Kirby ate better than ever before in his life, and when he looked out his window he could see the spot where his food had been growing until earlier that same day. The Cruz family was company without being intrusive (he was gradually learning rudimentary Spanish and Kekchi from the kids), his quarters and clothing were kept scrupulously clean, and during those extended intervals when he was up north he knew his goods were safe.

  When, in the middle of all this, the Belizean authorities released Manuel Cruz from prison after less than nine months of his term—the DEA apparently at last looking the other way—it changed nothing. Kirby and Manny hit it off very well, Kirby teaching Manny cribbage while learning from Manny an Indian game involving small stones and a number of cups, and Manny sometimes helped out in small ways.

  Bringing the pickup truck to town today, Manny had carried a shopping list from Estelle—cloth and thread for the girls’ school dresses, salt, filters for Mr. Coffee—so he’d spent the afternoon downtown while Kirby was off showing the temple. After dropping Witcher and Feldspan at their hotel, Kirby had given the pickup to Manny and gone to see a fellow about a shipment to be taken north on Friday. For security’s sake, they’d had their conversation in the fellow’s Toyota, driving around and about for a while, there being some disagreement about money. Finally, consensus having been reached, the fellow dropped Kirby at the Municipal Airport, from which Manny and the pickup and the dishwasher and the other goods had long since departed.

  Feeling weary from his long day, and a bit cranky because of arguing about money with a man in an air-conditioned Toyota, Kirby had flown north and west, less than 60 miles, and when the familiar design of the Cruz homestead had spread out below he had smiled and relaxed, not even caring that Manny hadn’t yet had the pasture cleared.

  Estelle, who was very short, always looked up at Kirby with adoration glistening in her eyes. For a while he’d been awkward with her, thinking her feelings toward him were sexual, but everything became all right once he understood her passion was religious. On the surface a rational modern woman, who enjoyed the Guatemalan and Mexican television stations as much as the kids did and who frequently talked back at the announcers during news broadcasts, somewhere in her deepest soul Estelle was still a pre-Columbian artifact herself, an unreconstructed Maya. Kirby was the creature who dropped out of the sky, bringing electricity and magic, bringing comfort and riches. What was the name of such a creature? Exactly.

  Now, with the usual light in her eyes, Estelle approached Kirby with a bottle of Belikin beer in one hand and a piece of notepaper in the other. “Cora brought it home after school,” she said, extending the paper. Since there was no telephone line out here, Cora, the eldest, picked up Kirby’s few messages at the store in Orange Walk.

  Kirby took the beer with more pleasure than the message, which must have shown on his face, because Estelle said, “You look tired, Kirby.”

  “I’m very tired.”

  “I hope you got a good appetite.”

  “I’ve always got an appetite, Estelle,” Kirby said, and swigged beer, and looked at his message.

  Shit and damn! Whitman goddam Lemuel!

  Last month, three days after the disaster at the Soho gallery, when that irritating pest had queered his pitch, Kirby had run into Lemuel unexpectedly at another party—this one on Park Avenue in the 90s, in the apartment of a rich and avid collector of pre-Columbian art—and on that second try he had succeeded at last in landing his fish. Yes, Whitman Lemuel was interested in previously unknown Mayan artifacts. Yes, his museum had the f
unds to support that interest. Yes, they were prepared to be casual about the provenance and prior ownership of items they bought. YES, he would come to Belize to look at an undiscovered Mayan temple!

  Next week, next Thursday. It had all been arranged, with an exchange of phone numbers and a writing down of dates. And now here was a message from Whitman Lemuel, bland as could be, saying he would arrive tomorrow! “Know you’ll understand my impatience. Wouldn’t want anyone else to beat us. Will be on afternoon Miami plane. Fort George Hotel reservation confirmed.”

  No; it’s not possible. On Friday, day after tomorrow, Kirby had another shipment to fly north, the very topic of his discussion this afternoon with the man in the Toyota. But that problem paled next to the real worry: Tomorrow Witcher and Feldspan would still be here, also at the Fort George.

  Estelle looked worried on Kirby’s behalf, saying, “Kirby? Bad news?”

  “Bad news,” Kirby agreed. “I’m sorry, Estelle, maybe I don’t have such a good appetite after all.”

  Witcher and Feldspan. Whitman Lamuel. It was not acceptable that they meet.

  6

  THE MISSING LAKE

  When the driver steered his cab into a cemetery, Valerie was certain some sort of mistake had been made. “But I want to go to Belmopan,” she said.

  “Oh, sure,” said the driver. “This is the road.”

  It was the road. Cemetery flanked them on both sides of the meandering two-lane blacktop; very white stones, very red ribbons wrapped around bright sprays of flowers or around gaunt remnant clusters of sticks. Off to the left two sinewy black men, stripped to the waist, dug a grave in the heavy red clay. At one point, the road bifurcated, making an island of thick-trunked short trees intermixed with more grave markers; tree roots had pushed up through the blacktop, forcing the cab to slow to five miles an hour as they jounced by.

  It’s like the beginning of a horror movie, Valerie thought, except that it wasn’t, really. The sun was too bright, the sky too large and beautiful and blue, and the cemetery itself too cheerful and festive. And the air coming through the taxi windows—apparently, the air conditioning in all Belizean taxis awaits a part—was too soft and languid, too full of the sweet scents of life.

  Most of the world was still theoretical to Valerie Greene, who was painfully aware of how many places she hadn’t been. Her pursuit of Mayan sites through the computers of UCLA and the foundation grantors of New York had been spurred—beyond her natural enthusiasm as a scholar—by her need to travel, to get out into what her colleagues called “the field,” to get out into the world! It was time, Valerie thought, that she and the world got to know one another.

  Her father, Robert Edward Greene IV, was a minister in southern Illinois, a fact Valerie found embarrassing without knowing exactly why. Her older brother, R. E. Greene V, was an English teacher in a high school 11 miles from their father’s church, and it was Valerie’s considered opinion that Robby would never travel. Nor marry. Nor do anything. An R. E. G. VI seemed exceedingly unlikely. And, in truth, unnecessary. Redundant. Even otiose.

  It was to be different for Valerie. Archaeology was endlessly fascinating to her, and not only because of the travels to remote comers of the globe that the discipline implied. In her mind, she traveled as well into the past, the remote and unreachable past, in which the people and the cities and the civilizations were so different from southern Illinois. If asked, as she rarely was, what had led her to archaeology in the first place, she invariably answered, “I’ve always loved it!” since she herself had forgotten how profoundly she had been influenced, at the age of nine, by Green Mansions. (Rima the bird girl! Rima! Rima!)

  After the cemetery, Belize City was left behind, and the Western Highway settled down to being an ordinary two-lane bumpy potholed country road. It was 52 miles to the new capital at Belmopan, all of it ranging very gradually uphill, and within just a few miles of the coast the broad-leaf tropical greenery gave way to scrub forest, intermixed with weedy fields and intense patches of cultivation. Small unpainted shacks housed families, usually with many children.

  There was little traffic on the road: the occasional lumbering large truck (sometimes with Mexican license plates); the small farm truck with half-naked men standing in the back, sometimes waving or making other gestures to Valerie; and every once in a while a chrome-gleaming horn-honking high-speeding closed-windowed big American car with Belize plates, transporting some government official between the nation’s capital and the nation’s city.

  Certainly the nation’s capital was no city, when they reached it an hour and a half later. Invented in self-defense in the 1960s, after one hurricane too many had leveled the original capital, Belmopan has so far failed to become very real. Official efforts to force-breed a city tend to be more official than human, and that’s what happened in Belmopan. Whenever buildings remind you irresistably of the artist’s rendering, something has gone wrong somewhere.

  The driver, who had been very uninterested in conversation (Valerie eventually having become quite nostalgic for yesterday’s chatterbox), also had no idea where Innocent St. Michael’s office might be found. “Maybe there,” he said, pointing vaguely either to the structure that looked like a prison camp’s administration building or possibly at the outsized World War II pillbox beside it.

  The pillbox was too intimidating; in the other building Valerie found many people, some typing, some talking, some reading, some chewing thoughtfully on various kinds of food, all in many small offices to both sides of a central corridor. A woman darning with tiny stitches a boy’s white school shirt, the shirt almost completely covering the typewriter on the desk in front of her, said, “Oh, Mister St. Michael, that’s Land Allocation, that’s upstairs.”

  Upstairs another woman, this one leafing through a recent issue of Queen, directed Valerie to an office where a slender young black man stood up from behind his desk and said, “Oh, yes, Miss Greene, you have an appointment with the Deputy Director.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  Glancing at his quartz watch—perhaps flashing it a bit more than necessary—the young man said, “I’m afraid you’re a bit early.”

  “Actually,” Valerie said, looking at the large white-faced clock on the wall, “I’m three minutes late.”

  “Yes, well,” the young man said, with a here-and-gone smile. “The Deputy Director isn’t quite here yet.”

  “Oh,” said Valerie.

  The young man looked bright-eyed, saying, “I’m the Deputy’s deputy, as it were, his Senior Secretary. Vernon is my name; perhaps I could be of help?”

  Wondering if Vernon were his first or last name, Valerie said, “Well, I did want to talk to Mr. St. Michael about exploring some land.”

  “Oh, yes, Mayan temples,” Vernon said, nodding, patting his palms together, silently applauding one or the other of them, perhaps both. “I recall replying to one of your letters. Fascinating things, computers. I have a great interest in them myself.”

  “It’s mostly the Mayan temples I care about,” Valerie said.

  “Yes. If you could tell me the area of your interest, I could have the proper surveys, maps, whatever you’ll need, out of the files and on tap when the Deputy Director arrives.”

  “Oh, that’s fine,” Valerie said. Opening her attaché case on his desk, she brought out her own maps, first the large one of the general area, then the smaller one with the specific target site. She pointed, describing this and that, and he nodded, frowning, moving the maps slightly by grasping their very edges between the tips of thumb and finger. “Right there,” she said at last, pinning down the putative temple beneath her thumb.

  “Oh, yes, I see where you are,” he said. When she lifted her thumb he moved the map again, infinitesimally, raising his head to look down across his cheekbones, pursing his lips. “But that’s,” he said, shaking his head. “No, no, that’s no good.”

  “It’s there, I mean,” Valerie said, poking the map once more.

  “Yes,
I see that, I see what you have in mind,” he said, “but it’s not possible. You won’t find any temples there.”

  “Oh, I’m certain I shall,” Valerie said, becoming more formal in the face of opposition, wondering why this fellow was making trouble. She had heard that some Third-World people wouldn’t cooperate unless they were given a bribe or a tip; did this Vernon want money? Theoretically she understood the concept, didn’t even have any true objection, but in real life she had never actually bribed anyone, and she found herself now too embarrassed to make the attempt. “I’m certain it’s there,” she insisted, thinking that Mr. St. Michael, when he arrived, would be above such petty money schemes.

  “But it can’t be, Miss Greene, I’m sorry,” Vernon said. Moving across the room, he gestured to her to follow, pointing at a large map on the side wall and saying, “Let me show you on this topographical map.”

  A bit reluctantly, she crossed to stand beside him and watch his slender fingers move across the map. “Here is your site,” he said. “You see how the higher land is around your land on three sides?”

  “The mountains, yes,” Valerie said. “It’s just where the mountains start that we’ll find our settlement.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” he said, blinking at her somewhat owlishly, looking far too earnest to be interested in bribes. “Something the map does not show,” he said, his fingers moving, “is an underground fault that runs along just about here, under your site and east, coming out in these two streams down here and this one over here. Now, the situation is,” he said, taking a professorial stance, nodding at her, “all of these first line of mountains here drain down through your parcel of land, all of them. It is the narrow end of the funnel, you see, the bottleneck in the watershed.”

  “I don’t see what you’re getting at,” Valerie confessed. (She had now come to the conclusion that he was, however misguided, essentially serious.)