“Yes yes,” Lemuel said. “Gauge. I do remember.”
“Well,” Cruz said, as they drove down the torn streets of Belize City, “they got to protect their lives, you see? Their front.”
“So if I see Galway with any Americans,” Lemuel said, a bit amused at the cloak-and-dagger aspects of the situation, “I should just pretend I don’t know him.”
“Oh, you’ll probably see him,” Cruz said. “Kirby, he’s with those men at the hotel right now.”
“Oh, is he?” Lemuel hoped he would see Galway and his mobster friends; curiosity and a faint prickle of danger made his eyes light up, and he rode the rest of the way trying to imagine what the “very bad men” would look like.
The hotel itself was decent enough, the staff competent, the room large and cool and pleasant. Lemuel undertipped the bellboy, then removed the constricting bow tie, opened his shirt, strolled over to the window, and looked down at the swimming pool, wondering idly why no one was in it. He had brought a bathing suit; perhaps, after he’d unpacked, he would go for a dip himself.
An el of the building was to the left, with large windows on the first floor through which he could see the dining room, where he would undoubtedly be eating tonight. At one of the window tables sat three—
Galway!
Lemuel pressed close to the louvered window, looking down. Galway and two men, just finishing their lunch. The other two were hard to make out, at this angle and from this far away, but they were certainly white men, undoubtedly Americans.
The three stood, pushing back their chairs. Galway said something and laughed. All three men wore moustaches; a change in male style that Lemuel had failed to notice just as thoroughly as he’d missed the demise of the bow tie.
What could he make of Galway’s companions? They didn’t look like mobsters out of a George Raft movie, but of course they wouldn’t. These were drug dealers, a new breed of criminal, used to working with huge amounts of cash, trading with rich and influential people. They were dressed a bit flamboyantly, but not too much so, and Lemuel remembered what the man Cruz had said about them being men with a front back in America. Record company producers, perhaps, or with a business in commercial real estate.
Galway shook their hands; first one, then the other. A few more words were exchanged, rather sinister smiles formed under the moustaches, and then Galway left. The other two remained standing a moment longer beside the table, murmuring together, one with his hand on the other’s elbow. Menace seemed to hover about them. They both turned to look out the window, and Lemuel flinched back, suddenly afraid.
Had they seen him?
11
THE WARNING
What a lot of different positions he likes, Valerie thought as she rested on knees and shoulders and left cheek. If she lifted her head slightly to look down her own length, the parts of Innocent St. Michael that she could see framed by her arched legs dangled comically, but the feelings he was inducing through her body were not comical at all. “Again?” she asked, surprised, and the answer came in a rush.
This time, Innocent joined her, and after a brief spell of intense thrashing they lay beached together on the sheet, companionably side by side, catching their breath. Above, a slowly turning fan made absolutely no difference.
Shortly, Innocent heaved himself up off the bed and padded out of the room. Perspiration slowly drying on her body, Valerie rolled onto her back and stretched, long and luxurious, from her down-pointing left big toe through her happily achy body to her upthrust right wrist, her knuckles brushing the rough stucco wall.
They were in one of the small houses in Belmopan’s sterile residential area. At the restaurant, Innocent had excused himself to make a phone call, then had driven her here in his large green Ford LTD with the icy air conditioning. “I know there’s nobody home,” he’d said. “Belongs to a friend of mine.” The bedroom was small, filled by its double bed, the perimeter cluttered with laundry and books and magazines.
Marcia Ettinger, an older woman at the Royal Museum at Vancouver, had warned her about this, she really had. “You want to be careful,” she’d said. “There’s something that happens to young single women the first time they’re in a really foreign place all by themselves. It’s as though all restraints are gone, none of the rules matter any more, and you find yourself going to bed with the first man who asks you.” Valerie had pooh-poohed that, of course: “I’m my own person,” she’d said. “I make my own decisions.”
Had she made this decision? Smiling, stretching the other way—right toe through arching waist to left wrist—she told herself the decision had been a good one, no matter who had made it. At the very least, she would endorse it.
Innocent came back, water beads sparkling coolly in his hair. He was smiling—he was always smiling, wasn’t he?—and when he sat on the bed he bent over to kiss her left nipple. “What a big girl you are,” he said.
“I was always tall.” She knew her capability for small talk was minimal, and hoped she would improve with time and experience.
Experience.
“Unfortunately,” Innocent said, “we can’t stay here forever.”
“No.” Valerie sat up, looking around. “I suppose the person who lives here will come back after a while.”
“Not with my car in the driveway,” Innocent said.
The encounter suddenly took on an unpleasant public aspect. “I’ll get dressed,” she decided, rising from the bed.
He patted her rump. “Tomorrow morning, very early,” he said, “I’ll have a Land Rover and a driver pick you up at your hotel back in Belize and drive you out to that land you want to see.”
“Thank you.” Sudden doubt, insecurity, awkwardness, made her say, “He—the driver. He won’t know about this, will he?”
Alarmed, concerned, almost shocked, Innocent bounded to his feet with a surprising agility. “Valerie, Valerie!” he cried, holding her elbows, his manner totally serious for the first time since she had met him. “We aren’t enemies! I would never embarrass you, humiliate you!”
“But you tell everybody everything, don’t you?”
Releasing her, he said, “You mean Susie, at the restaurant?” He grinned, relaxing, a happy bear, shaking his head. “When I have lunch there with a businessman,” he said, “or someone from the government, do you think I tell him, a man, ‘I had that waitress?’ What would Susie do to me?”
“Pour your lunch on your head,” Valerie suggested.
Innocent laughed. “You misunderstand Susie,” he said. “She would stick a knife in my neck.”
Valerie believed him. He would preen in front of women, but not in front of other men. It made him somehow more likeable, and at the same time more juvenile. “All right,” she said.
While Valerie visited the tiny rust-spotted bathroom, Innocent dressed and went out to start the car, so that when Valerie was ready to leave she entered a vehicle already well chilled. Innocent got behind the wheel, patted her knee in fond familiarity, and said, “If you can wait half an hour, I’ll drive you back to Belize.”
“But my taxi is waiting.”
“Oh, I already paid him off and sent him away.” Steering toward the clumped government buildings, he said, “Now, tomorrow, you pay good close attention to everything you see, and I’ll be in Belize when you get back.”
“All right.”
Again he patted her knee. “Good rooms at the Fort George,” he said. “Air-conditioned. Very nice.”
12
THE BLUE MIRROR
“Oh, dear,” Gerry said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”
Alan had spread the blue trunks and the silver-and red trunks on the bed, side by side, and stood back, knuckles under chin, trying to decide which to wear for their dip in the pool. Now he looked over at Gerry, who was frowning into his open dresser drawer. “Lose something?”
“The recorder was moved.”
“You put it in there yourself,” Alan said, misunderstanding. “I saw you.”
“I put it under the leather vest,” Gerry said. “I very specifically remember doing that, because the black case of the recorder would be less noticeable under black leather.”
Alan, a faint vertical frown line forming between his brows, came over to stand beside Gerry and also look into the open drawer. Both men were naked; in the blue-tinted wide mirror above the dresser they looked like a rather crude parody of Greek temple sculpture. Alan said, “Are you sure?”
“Al-an,” Gerry said, which was what he always said when he felt Alan was insulting his intelligence, which was what he felt rather frequently. “I already told you.”
The leather vest was folded neatly on the left. Gerry had turned back the little stack of ironed white T-shirts, and there was his recorder. Alan said, his voice a little scared, “Is anything missing?”
“My jewelry’s still here.” Picking up the recorder, Gerry turned it around and said, “The tape’s still in it.”
“The same tape?”
“Oh, my gosh.” Gerry pushed PLAY. After an interminable period of faint shushing sounds, Kirby Galway’s voice said, “This way, gentlemen. Watch out for snakes.” Sighing with relief, Gerry pushed OFF and then REWIND.
Alan looked over at his own recorder, on the bed with his crumpled lunchtime clothes. “We’ll have to find a better hiding place,” he said.
“But they didn’t take anything,” Gerry said, putting the recorder under the leather vest. He looked fretful.
“The maid, maybe,” Alan suggested. “Just interested in something new, to look at it.”
“I don’t know,” Gerry said. “Maybe this isn’t such a fun idea, after all.”
“We can’t chicken out now,” Alan told him. “Hiram would just simply laugh us to scorn.”
“It seemed a lot different in New York,” Gerry said, taking out his ecru fishnet trunks and stepping into them. “Here, it’s getting scary.”
“Well, we did promise,” Alan said. “And we’ve started, we’re here, so we might as well go ahead and finish. You ready for the pool?”
Gerry said, “I’m not the one with his little thingies hanging out.”
So Alan chose the silver-and-red trunks and put them on, while Gerry went over to look out the window to see if the pool were still unoccupied. “Alan!” he said, a shrill whisper.
“Now what?”
Alan joined him at the window, and they looked down through the louvers at the pool, beside which two men were standing; Kirby, fully dressed, as they’d last seen him at lunch, and a man in a very large yellow boxer-type swimsuit. This man was middle-aged and round-shouldered, very pale in the tropical sun, with a round pot belly, a round balding head, and very large round dark sunglasses. He stood with hands on hips; despite being older, and physically out of shape, and a bit foolish-looking in those great ballooning trunks, he gave off an aura of self-assurance and command. There seemed to be a vague echo down there of old movie scenes of Italian mobsters conferring in the local steambath; not Gerry and Alan’s kind of steambath, the other kind.
“The drug dealer!” Gerry whispered.
They watched Kirby and the man confer, both of them intent and serious. The drug dealer seemed irritated by something, Kirby placating and reassuring him. The awareness that this was a man who could order a murder with a snap of his fingers seemed to send a ripple of chill breeze across the blue pool water.
Kirby and the man shook hands, Kirby left, and the man walked around to the shallow end of the pool, where he went down the steps slowly, wincingly, as though entering ice water. Ribcage deep, he rested his back against the side, then abruptly looked up, the huge dark sunglasses staring directly at them.
They both flinched; they couldn’t help it. “He saw us!” Gerry said.
Alan recovered first. “He has no idea who we are,” he pointed out. “Come on, let’s go down, I want a better look at him. Shall I bring my recorder?”
“Al-an, are you crazy?” Gerry glanced down again at the pool and the enigmatic man behind his black sunglasses. “We can’t fool around with the likes of him,” he said.
13
WANTED!
Kirby awoke when the pickup left the road. “Jesus!” he cried, as trees plunged past the windshield. Grabbing dashboard and windowsill for support, he straightened in the passenger seat, glared at Manny, and said, “Give me a little warning, will ya?”
“It’s okay,” Manny told him, grinning, flashing his tooth-gaps. “All under control.”
All under control. The Northern Road was behind them, already obscured by trees and shrubbery. The dirt path corkscrewed ahead, twisting deeper and deeper into wilderness, so that you could never see more than twenty feet before the next sharp curve presented a wall of green. Already the trail was so narrow that dusty leaves touched the fenders on both sides as they pushed through, and Manny couldn’t steer around the larger stones and deeper ruts but had to plow right over them. He grinned broadly as he drove, and every once in a while, when they crashed against some particularly large obstruction, Kirby could hear the clack as Manny’s remaining teeth cracked together.
All under control. Back in Belize, at the Fort George, were two customers at the same time, one individual and one team, and Kirby could only hope they wouldn’t happen to get into conversation. If only there were another first class hotel in Belize City, one with air conditioning and reliable hot water, he would have managed somehow to switch Lemuel over to it, lessening the danger; but there was not.
Well, at least it was only for the one night. Tomorrow morning, he would put Witcher and Feldspan on the Miami plane. Tomorrow afternoon, Lemuel would be shown the temple. By sometime tomorrow, if Kirby’s luck held, everything actually would be all under control.
But what would happen, what could happen, if his customers chanced to get into conversation tonight? The odds were against it, and even further against any of them talking about a contemplated grand larceny with a stranger, but say it happened, say everything fell out wrong. What was the worst-case scenario? The scheme would be destroyed, of course, permanently killed. Could Kirby himself go to jail? Probably so, probably in more than one country. Belize and the U.S. might very well vie with one another for the pleasure of putting Kirby Galway away.
How nice to be wanted.
At a seemingly impassable spot in the surrounding wilderness, Manny swung the wheel hard left and the pickup veered away from the diminishing dirt track, made a tight turn around a thick, scarred tree trunk, and bumped and skidded down a long brush-covered slope to a narrow muddy stream, where Manny pumped the brakes—his short legs stretching and stretching, sandaled toes pointing down—until they slued to a stop. Kirby climbed out, slid the two long planks out from under a lot of bushes and vines, and dropped them into position across the stream. Manny drove on over, the planks sagging down into the water, then accelerated up the other side, the pickup throwing mud clots out behind it like a bucking bronco. Kirby, to avoid the hurled mud, waited on the near side until the truck was some distance away, then trotted across on one of the boards, hid them both in their places on this side, and made his way up to where Manny was waiting, the pickup’s engine gasping like an overworked beast of burden.
There was one other stream to cross, somewhat larger, but here the locals had long ago made a porous causeway of logs and stones, which the pickup could cross with a lot of side-slipping and potential disaster. After that, it was merely the impossibility of the hilly jungle-covered terrain that slowed them, until at last they came out in the clearing behind the Cruz’s house, next to the kitchen garden. Home.
(There was an easier route down from Orange Walk, which they took whenever carrying anything large or delicate, but that meant driving all the way north to Orange Walk first, then doubling back south, which could add almost an hour to the journey. It was better to be knocked about a bit harder, but for a shorter period of time.)
Estelle would be cooking now, while the kids and the dogs watched televisio
n, so when Kirby climbed awkwardly out of the pickup, feeling stiff and tired, he went around to his own entrance. The combination lock on the door was meant primarily to thwart the curiosity of children, since Manny and Estelle both knew the sequence. Yawning, stretching, Kirby spun the dial, opened the door, entered the living room, and switched on his air conditioner.
Kirby’s apartment was two rooms and three closets. His living room was small and square, with windows in two walls, reed mats over the concrete floor, a rough home-made table in the center where he and Manny played games, several mismatched small chairs, a few lamps, and one big, comfortable easy chair. On a shelf mounted on the wall opposite the easy chair were a TV set and a Betamax; the videotapes were in a rickety bookcase underneath.
The other room, which was smaller, contained his bed and two large wooden trunks and another rickety bookcase, this one half filled with books. A few air charts—sections of Burma, Madagascar, the Aleutians—were on the walls for decoration. The three closets were all off this room; the first was for clothing, the second for a shower stall, the third for the composting toilet.
Kirby, still yawning as he removed his shirt, entered the bedroom, kicked off the rest of his clothing and stood in the shower awhile, until he no longer felt like a horse that had just been sold for glue.
Twenty minutes later, happy in crisp clean clothes and old moccasins, Kirby went back around to the Cruz side of the house, where he and Manny played cribbage while Estelle ran the Cuisinart and the kids and the dogs watched “Rio Grande” on TV, dubbed into Spanish. (“Rio Grande” in Spanish is “Rio Grande”.) At one point, when John Wayne made a rather spectacular leap from a running horse, Kirby nodded over at the set and said, mildly, “That’s my father.”
Manny looked up, in mild surprise. “John Wayne?” He turned to look at the set.
“No,” Kirby said. “My father did that jump off the horse.”
Estelle had come over from the Cuisinart to frown at the TV, where a close-up of John Wayne now showed. In Spanish, John Wayne had the deep gruff voice of an old man missing some teeth. “He looks like John Wayne,” she said dubiously.
High Adventure Page 8
