High Adventure

by Donald E. Westlake

  The waitress asked Feldspan and Witcher if they were ready to order. “I don’t think I can eat,” Feldspan said.

  “You should take Lomotil,” the waitress told him.

  Witcher said, meaningfully, “Gerry, don’t call attention to your-self.” To the waitress, he said, “We would both like a very dry Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks, please.”

  “I don’t think that’ll help,” the waitress said.

  Lemuel, at a loss for what to do, turned his head, gazed this way and that, and found himself staring directly into the eyes of Valerie Greene. A small involuntary moan escaped him.

  I know that man, Valerie thought. Isn’t that odd; the short time I’ve been here, and I’ve already seen two men I think I’ve met before. First the driver of that pickup truck outside the hotel, and now this man. It’s probably just that people look like other people; or maybe this man was on the same plane coming down, though I don’t seem to remember him from then.

  I’m going to die, Lemuel told himself, and the thought was not entirely unpleasant. He stared at a page in Harper’s in which the art department had decided to snazz things up a bit by tilting the illustration at an angle; down to the left and up to the right, to indicate happiness. (The reverse tilt indicates mental imbalance.) Unconsciously, Lemuel tilted his head to match the illustration, and stuck a breadstick into his cheek.

  Witcher ordered food for himself and Feldspan, who had been unable to concentrate on the menu. “You know you like shrimp,” Witcher said, after the waitress departed.

  “I won’t taste a thing,” Feldspan said.

  Valerie took from her purse a paperback edition of Maya: The Riddle And Rediscovery Of A Lost Civilization, by Charles Gallenkamp, and began to read chapter 13, “Warriors And Merchants; A Prelude To Disaster”.

  Feldspan gulped his Gibson.

  As one waitress brought Valerie her shrimp cocktail and glass of white wine, the other brought Lemuel his duckling. “And a glass of red wine,” he said. “No, wait! Never mind.” I dare not get drunk, he thought.

  Feldspan gulped Witcher’s Gibson.

  “Gerry,” Witcher said, “get hold of yourself.”

  While reading her book, Valerie ate her shrimp cocktail with her fingers, licking her fingers after each shrimp. Two businessmen at a nearby table watched her intently, all talk of tractor tires forgotten.

  Lemuel tried to call the waitress without attracting attention to himself.

  The other waitress brought two more Gibsons to Witcher and Feldspan, saying, “Feeling better?”

  “Not yet,” Feldspan said.

  The waitresses passed one another. “Some really weird ones tonight,” said the one. “Mm-mm,” said the other. Then, seeing Lemuel’s hand waving discreetly next to his ear, she veered away in that direction: “Sir?”

  “On second thought,” Lemuel said, “I believe I’ll have another vodka sour. No, wait a minute, make it a vodka on the rocks.”

  “Water on the side?”

  “Yes.”

  “He could be bribing the waitress,” Feldspan said. “They’re awfully chummy over there.”

  Bribe her to do what?”

  Feldspan leaned forward. Three Gibsons on an empty stomach had turned his eyes into cocktail onions. “Poison us,” he whispered.

  “Gerry, please.”

  Valerie finished the last shrimp. For the last time, she inserted a finger into her mouth, pursed her lips around it, and drew the finger slowly out, freed of red sauce. She read her book. The businessmen discussed tractor tires.

  In his nervousness, Lemuel crunched duckling bones, eating the little wings entire.

  “He’s eating bones,” Feldspan said.

  “Gerry, stop looking at him.”

  Feldspan blinked. He wanted Witcher’s Gibson, but Witcher kept holding it. He said, “He looks like Meyer Lansky.”

  “He does not,” Witcher said, though he didn’t turn around to look. “Meyer Lansky was about a hundred, and Jewish.”

  “He could be Jewish.”

  “Gerry.”

  “Meyer Lansky wasn’t always a hundred. It’s just like The Godfather; they almost look like normal people, but they have dead eyes. It’s because their souls are so black.

  Valerie looked up from her book, and her face suddenly suffused with a bright red blush. The waitress, removing the empty shrimp cocktail goblet, glanced at the blush and at the book and went away, shaking her head.

  But it wasn’t the book that had done it; there’s nothing in Maya: The Riddle And Rediscovery Of A Lost Civilization to make any damsel blush. Valerie had just remembered where she’d seen Lemuel before.

  Lemuel, peeking around his own left shoulder, looked off toward Valerie and found her staring directly at him, wide-eyed. “She’s recognized me!” Hunching down, shielding his face with his shoulder and arm, he ate frantically, hurriedly gnawing at his dinner, trying to finish it and get out of here.

  “He eats like an animal,” Feldspan said.

  “Gerry, will you please eat your nice shrimps, and stop looking at that man?”

  Maybe she isn’t absolutely sure it’s me, Lemuel thought. If I can just get out of here—He picked up his fresh vodka with greasy fingers, and drained half.

  It all came back to Valerie in a rush of mortification. She’d had a little bit too much to drink that time, too, and she’d gotten on that hobby horse of hers about stolen antiquities. Of course it was a problem, world-wide, ranging from the current Greek demand that the British return the Elgin marbles to the recent pillaging-under-cover-of-warfare at Angkor Wat. But still Valerie knew she tended to take it all a bit too personally, and that she could very easily become a bore on the subject, and loud as well. Particularly at parties.

  She could always tell when she was behaving badly in that fashion; men walked away from her. In the normal course of events, men walked toward her, but when she was carrying on about her crusade they walked away from her. That night in New York, at that party—Why, that poor man had probably thought she was accusing him of stealing ancient treasures!

  Oh, she thought, I do hope he doesn’t recognize me.

  “Miss,” Feldspan said, to the passing waitress, “may I have another Gibson, please?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “Gerry, are you crazy?”

  Valerie’s chicken was placed in front of her. She ducked her head to eat it, hoping the man across the way was too absorbed in his magazine to look around and recognize her.

  Lemuel, wiping his messy hands, waved the napkin at the wrong waitress, who sent him the right waitress. “Check, please.”

  “No dessert? We have ice cream, cheesecake—”

  “No, please, just the check.”

  “Nice tropical fruit, very—”

  “Just the check, please.”

  “No coffee?”

  “Check!”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “Alan, give me the room key.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to throw up.”

  “Gerry, you’re just too emotional.”

  Lemuel, blinking, watched one of the drug dealers leave the restaurant and the other one stay. It’s a pincer movement, he thought. One is in front of me now, and the other behind me. His mind filled with visions of what might happen when he opened his room door. Why hadn’t he asked for his check earlier, or just simply left the restaurant at the beginning, no matter what they thought?

  “Miss, my friend and I were wondering if we could buy you an after-dinner drink?”

  Valerie looked up at the tractor-tire salesman and smiled. She had seen Lemuel ask for his check, and she knew her ordeal would soon be over. “No, thank you,” she said. “But I do appreciate the thought.”

  The waitress brought Feldspan’s last Gibson, and looked at the empty chair. “I knew these things wouldn’t help,” she said.

  “That’s all right,” Witcher told her. “Just leave it, I’ll find something to do wi
th it.”

  “Will your friend be back?”

  “I trust not.”

  She picked up the plate of barely-touched shrimp. “Shall I put these in a bag for you?”

  “Good God, no.”

  Lemuel signed his check. I can’t go to the room, he thought, not by myself. I’ll tell the desk clerk I’m having trouble with the air conditioner and insist on a bellboy to come with me and look at it. If no one’s there, I’ll just lock myself in for the night. And I’ll stay in the room until Galway comes to pick me up tomorrow to take me to the temple. And now I know I never should have involved myself with a man like that in the first place.

  Valerie was so pleased to see Lemuel get up to leave that she almost changed her mind and said yes to the tractor-tire salesman after all.

  Witcher watched Lemuel go by, noticing the grim set to the mobster’s jaw. Most likely, the man did suspect something, and he’d moved to that other chair to warn them to mind their own business. Well, they certainly would mind their own business, wouldn’t they? And tomorrow morning they would get on the plane and leave this place.

  Lemuel felt Witcher’s eyes burning into his back as he left the room.

  Valerie asked for tropical fruit for dessert.

  Witcher, knowing that Feldspan would have disgustingly passed out in the room by now, dawdled over the final Gibson, but eventually he signed the check and departed.

  “Thank you,” Valerie said to the waitress as she left. “It was a lovely dinner.”

  16

  SUNRISE

  When the sun rose, Innocent St. Michael stepped nude from his house, smiled, stretched, walked across the cool dew-damp lawn (emerald green, aglisten in the orange birth of day), and then over the cool terracotta tiles to the pool’s edge. There was only the faintest of breezes, turning the water into pale blue-green brushed chrome. “Nice,” Innocent murmured, and dove like a dolphin into the water, swimming strongly beneath the surface to the far end, where he burst up into the air like a walrus blowing, releasing breath with an exuberant, “PAH!” and shaking water drops from his hair in a great fan around his head.

  Ten laps in the pool; rest a while, floating; ten more laps. Meantime, the sun rose higher in the eastern sky, the vault of heaven lightened from charcoal gray through smudged ivory to palest blue, and the St. Michael house began to stir with activity.

  It was a large house, though not as large as its model, Monticello. Three stories high, broad, white, pillared, the house stood on a broad knob of hill, facing north. The pool behind the house was in sun all day, though shade trees were handy to both sides. Within the house were Innocent’s wife Francesca and their four daughters: Elizabeth, Margaret, Catherine, and Patricia. All now in their teens, they were a lot of little prigs, raving feminists who utterly disapproved of their father. Well, he had wanted respectability, and the detestation of one’s children was apparently one of the prices to be paid.

  The house also contained several servants, one of whom—the stout motherly sort that Francesca preferred—came out as he was finishing his laps. She laid a snowy white terrycloth towel and a clean fluffy terrycloth robe of Virgin Mary blue on one of the wrought iron white chairs beside the pool. “Good morning, sir,” she said to Innocent’s passing churning form in the water, and returned to the house.

  Innocent ate with a good appetite, under the censorious glares of Margaret and Patricia, then dressed in seersucker and a wide-collared white shirt, kissed short, fat Francesca goodby, spoke cheerfully to a sullen Catherine, and went whistling to his car, which had been buffed clean since he’d last driven it yesterday. His house, on a private road north of the Western Highway, between the ranches of Beaver Dam and Never Delay, gave ready access to both Belmopan to the west and Belize City to the east. This morning, he turned east.

  He listened to the tape for the third time on the drive to Belize, occasionally stopping the recorder, running it back, listening to a sentence again, sometimes listening to one bit several times. For instance, the point early on where Kirby said, “I bought this land as an investment. Good potential for grazing, as you can see.” Good potential for grazing was word for word what Innocent had said to Kirby when selling him that parcel. And what other land did Kirby own? None. So it had to be the same.

  But on the other hand, it couldn’t be. Innocent knew damn well what was and wasn’t there, and it didn’t include any goddam Mayan temple. Another sentence he listened to a lot was Feldspan’s, “Look! A paving block! This has been shaped!” Then Kirby says that nonsense about checking with the government—he never had, of course—adding, “everybody said there’s just no Mayan cities or temples or anything at all like that in this area. They said it’s all been studied and checked out, and there’s just nothing here.”

  Well, if the conversation were taking place on the land Innocent had sold to Kirby, “everybody” was absolutely right. But Kirby’s statement was immediately followed by Witcher’s breathed, heartfelt, awed, “They’re wrong.”

  Then the next bit was also a problem. Feldspan: “What’s the name of this place?” Kirby: “Probably nobody for a thousand years has known the name of this temple. The Indians around here call this hill Lava Sxir Yt.” Then he carefully spelled it.

  Lava Sxir Yt? There was no such place. Innocent would have some friends check among the up-country Indians, but he doubted they’d find anything. It was just some goddam exotic-sounding name Kirby had made up, that’s all. His own personal private Shangri-la.

  So what were the possibilities here? One: Kirby had found an entire Mayan temple on the land Innocent had sold him, even though Innocent knew every inch of that land and it contained no temple.

  Two: Kirby, possibly while flying over the terrain or one time when he landed in the jungle to pick up a load of marijuana, had found an undiscovered Mayan temple, and was lying to his customers, telling them it was his land when it was not.

  Three: Kirby and the two pansy-boys were involved in a complex con game—possibly aimed at Innocent himself, but more likely at someone else—in which they just walked around some dumb piece of bush somewhere and read from a script; there was no temple, in other words. (Which would also explain why the pansy-boys had made this infuriating tape in the first place.)

  Of the possibilities, Number Two seemed the likeliest, though Number Three also suited what Innocent thought of as Kirby’s character and style. As for Number One, Innocent just found that impossible to believe, but if it were true it raised a fresh problem, and that problem was Valerie Greene.

  Let us say, let us just say for argument’s sake, that Innocent St. Michael at one time owned a Mayan temple without noticing the fact. Let us further say that Innocent innocently sold this land to one Kirby Galway, who managed to see something there that Innocent had not. Clearly, with shaped stones and jaguar stelae lying about in plain sight (according to this damn tape), Kirby has done some preliminary excavation here, just enough to see what he’s got.

  So, when Valerie Greene, an archaeologist and a girl of undoubted honesty and probity—and a sweet ass, but that’s another story—goes to this land today she will see the temple. This sight will vindicate her theory, which is all well and good for her, but it will also make public the temple. Kirby will no longer be able to rape it at will, and Innocent will no longer have the possibility of cutting himself in on the action.

  On the other hand, if he didn’t send somebody to Kirby’s land, there never would be a way to prove or disprove possibility Number One. Besides which, he’d already promised Valerie cooperation; his driver would be picking her up at her hotel this very morning, before Innocent reached the city. Presumably, Innocent could still stop Valerie from going out there this morning, but if he did so it might look bad later, if and when the whole story came out. And Valerie, a determined girl if he was any judge, would manage to get to the site with his cooperation or without.

  No, there were other and better ways to deal with the problem, which was one of the reas
ons Innocent was driving to Belize this morning. His first stop would be at the law office of his good friend, sometime partner, and old crony, Sidney Belfrage, where the preliminary steps would be taken to prove that the original sale of land to Kirby Galway had been invalid; a lawyer with Sidney’s brains and experience would have no trouble finding grounds. No real legal action would be taken as yet, but the first steps would be put in train, so that, if indeed there was a temple on that land, Innocent would be able to demonstrate that he had, in all good faith, been attempting to correct a legal wrong for its own sake, starting when he still thought the land was worthless, before the temple was discovered.

  So that was to be his first stop today, but not the only stop, because there was a second problem created by the existence of this tape, and the second problem was the tape. Done by the pansy-boys. Whoever and whatever they turned out to be, and whatever their reason for making the tape, those two would have to be neutralized, wouldn’t they?

  It was an odd position Innocent found himself in; he smiled as he thought of it, speeding toward Belize, listening to the tape. In order to keep some control over the situation while finding out exactly what was going on, he had no choice but to protect Kirby Galway.

  17

  HASTE TO BE RICH

  He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.

  Proverbs, XXVIII, I

  At Georgeville, 15 miles west of Belmopan and 12 miles before the Guatemalan border, the Western Highway crosses two tiny roads. The northbound road winds just a few miles into the scrub before it stops at the hamlet of Spanish Lookout—the English-speaking people of Belize have anticipated trouble from the Spanish-speaking nation to their west for a long long time—while the southern road climbs steadily into the Maya Mountains, toward the Vaca Plateau, twisting and turning past San Antonio and Hidden Valley Falls and on past the small airfield and forest station at Augustin. For mile after mile the road continues on, chopped out of a pine and mahogany forest, over gorges and around the shoulders of mountains, ending at last at Millionario, 19 miles south of the Western Highway as the crow flies, more than twice that by road.