High Adventure

by Donald E. Westlake

“Happens to us all,” Kirby assured him. The line of Witcher’s mouth said it didn’t happen to him.

  There were no more events till they reached the airport, where Witcher insisted on unzipping his bag atop the pickup’s tailgate, so he could remove two Sony Walkmans from it, one of which he extended toward Feldspan, saying, “You know this will make you feel better, Gerry.”

  Feldspan looked with repugnance at the Walkman before him, then seemed to remember something. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yes.” He flashed Kirby a guilty glance through his dark glasses as he accepted the Walkman, hooked it onto his belt, and put the earphones in place on his head. Now he looked like something from “The Wizard Of Oz.”

  Kirby grinned at him, amused. So these boys were smuggling something out of Belize in their Walkmans, were they? And they didn’t want their pal Kirby to know about it. Idly, he wondered what they’d found, idly decided it was probably marijuana.

  Extending a hand, Witcher said, “We’ll hope to hear from you.” His earphones were draped around his neck.

  “Two or three weeks,” Kirby promised, shaking his hand. Then he shook Feldspan’s. “Have a nice flight,” he said. Feldspan smiled gamely.

  “Come along, Gerry,” Witcher said, hefting his bag. His earphones were now in place on his ears.

  Kirby stood by the pickup and watched them walk to the small terminal building. Witcher was swaying and snapping his fingers and just slightly boogalooing to the sounds coming into his ears. After several steps Feldspan started to do the same, in pale and shaky imitation.

  In a shaded spot at the corner of the building, working on his molars with his slender gold toothpick, stood Innocent St. Michael, also watching Witcher and Feldspan. His eyes looked very interested. It was hard to be sure with his hand up in front of his mouth that way, but he might have been very faintly smiling.

  Hmmmmmm, thought Kirby.

  19

  SATISFACTION

  Gerry plodded manfully along, carrying his heavy bag, snapping the fingers of his free hand in some sort of rhythm, nodding his head metronomically to the sound of Kirby Galway, in his earphones, saying, “A lot of Americans are coming down here, because there’s just so much available land.”

  The worst part of travel is travel. To get out of Belize, there was so much red tape to overcome: forms to fill out, lines to stand in with other passengers, documents to display, questions to answer. And all taking place without benefit of air conditioning, among bodies that could only have been improved by a flash flood. Gerry just suffered through it all, remembering to nod his head and tap his toes, following Alan’s lead as he listened to his own voice say in his ears, “I had an aunt in New Jersey once, but she went to Florida and died.” We’re going to Florida now, he thought. What does it all mean?

  As Kirby Galway had suggested might happen, their luggage was given a quite extensive search by a large and menacing Customs person, who made them put their Walkmans on the counter with their suitcases and then took a positively unhealthy interest in the contents of their luggage. Some of the more stylish garments produced from this individual various grunts and snarls absolutely out of a zoo. “What you call dis?” the fellow demanded at one point, holding up an object from Gerry’s bag between thumb and finger.

  The indignity of it. “It’s called sachet,” Gerry said, enunciating carefully, reminding himself it’s best to be gentle with the lower orders. “It’s to keep the bag sweet-smelling, you know.”

  The Customs man held the small sealed packet to his nose and noisily sniffed. “Could be dope,” he said.

  “Certainly not.” Stomach churning, mind rattled, Gerry struggled to remember the contents of sachet, saying, “It’s—Oh, rose petals, cloves, lavender …”

  “Passports,” said a sudden harsh voice from a new and unexpected quarter; that is, from behind them. Gerry and Alan turned, in some surprise, to see a short impatient scowling woman standing there, holding out her hand for their passports.

  Was this right? While Alan briskly turned over his own passport, Gerry had to search himself like a policeman frisking a suspect, having no idea what he’d done with his passport, not expecting to need it at just this juncture …

  The roar of the descending plane was heard. The woman was actually snapping her fingers. Gerry, third time through his shirt pocket, found the passport and handed it over. In lieu of a thank you, the woman said, “Tickets.”

  Well, that was all right; Alan had them both. He turned them over to the woman, who barely glanced at them before shaking her head, saying, “Not this flight.”

  “What?” Gerry thought he would die, he actually thought he would die.

  But not, apparently, Alan, who did some barking of his own, telling the woman, “Of course it’s this flight.”

  “SAHSA flight,” the woman said.

  “That’s right,” Alan told her. “SAHSA is exactly what it says on those tickets.”

  “Not today.”

  “Oh, really,” Alan said. “It is our flight, it is this airline, it is today.”

  Gerry moaned faintly, hoping no one would hear. The plane was waiting outside. Passengers behind them on line were getting upset. Off to one side, a stout man being disgusting with what seemed to be a gold toothpick appeared to enjoy the show.

  Then, all at once, it was over. With one last firm nod, as though she’d solved a knotty problem for them at last, the woman handed the passports and tickets back to Alan and said, “You can go now.”

  “I can go now? After you’ve—”

  “The plane is waiting,” the woman said, with urgent shooing gestures. “Hurry, hurry.”

  The plane was waiting. The other passengers were waiting. The Customs man had finished pawing through their personal possessions and sent their luggage on to be loaded. Their Walkmans and carry-on bags awaited them on his wooden counter. Over by the door to the plane, a uniformed man gestured urgently at them, repeating the impatient woman’s, “Hurry, hurry.”

  They hurried, out of the building and into the blinding sunlight, Alan jogging ahead across the tarmac. Jouncing along in his wake, head and stomach both terribly upset, Gerry couldn’t get the Walkman back on his belt until they were actually going up the steps and into the plane. The stewardess pointed Alan toward their seats, and Gerry followed, adjusting the earphones and fiddling with the Walkman’s controls as he trailed Alan down the aisle. Ahead, Alan was also still setting up his Walkman.

  Then abruptly Alan stopped, and Gerry almost ran into him. Alan turned about as though to run back off the plane; he stared wide-eyed at Gerry, his mouth open in shock. The aisle behind them was full of boarding passengers. The stewardess was closing the door. It was too late.

  Gerry also at last had turned on his Walkman, and now he returned Alan’s horrified stare as, “I can’t get no,” Mick Jagger wailed in his ears, “no no no.”

  20

  THE LOST CITY

  “The map is not the terrain,” the skinny black man said.

  “Oh, yes, it is,” Valerie said. With her right hand she tapped the map on the attaché case on her lap, while waving with her left at the hilly green unpopulated countryside bucketing by: “This map is that terrain.”

  “It is a quote,” the skinny black man said, steering almost around a pothole. “It means, there are always differences between reality and the descriptions of reality.”

  “Nevertheless,” Valerie said, holding on amid the bumps, “we should have turned left back there.”

  “What your map does not show,” the skinny black man told her, “is that the floods in December washed away a part of that road. I see the floods didn’t affect your map.”

  Valerie was finding this driver very difficult. He had a mind of his own, and an almost total disregard for Valerie’s opinions. He drove rapidly and rather recklessly, and from the beginning he had disdained Valerie’s maps and charts and directions and suggestions and everything. He wasn’t her driver so much as she was his passenger, the excuse
for him to take his Land Rover out for a spin.

  He wouldn’t even tell her his name. “Hi, I’m Valerie Greene,” she had greeted him back in the lobby of the Fort George. “I’m your driver,” he’d responded, then had turned on his heel and marched outside, leaving her to follow as best she could, carrying all her own gear. Hurrying after him, she’d been aware of some man over by the house phones staring at her, probably thinking she must be a very silly woman to let her driver—her servant, technically, provided by the Belizean government itself—treat her like that.

  The vehicle, this peach-colored topless Land Rover, was a perfect match for the driver. It too was all hard edges and businesslike bluntness. What the driver lacked in politesse, the Land Rover lacked in springs. The driver’s absence of small talk and common courtesy was echoed in the Land Rover’s uncushioned gray metal seats. The driver’s skinniness and blackness found their counterpart in the Land Rover’s metal and tubing, painted the colors of an aircraft carrier’s corridor. Peach and gray, heavily rusted, rough to the touch.

  Valerie felt unwanted emotion rising within her. She wasn’t exactly sure why it was that girls weren’t supposed to do things “like a girl”—throw a ball like a girl, cry at every little thing like a girl—but she did know that was the rule, and so she fought down the tremulousness that frustration had built within her. Only the tiniest bit of it showed when she said, “I thought we could stop for lunch along that road. There’s supposed to be a really beautiful little stream there.”

  “That’s what flooded,” the driver said. “Besides, there’s no stores down that way.”

  “I have food.” Valerie gestured back at her canvas bag, now bounding around like a basketball in the storage well. “I had the hotel make some sandwiches,” she explained. “Plenty for both of us.”

  “You still have to buy beer.”

  “I don’t want beer,” Valerie said.

  “I do.”

  Valerie stared at him, while several sentences crowded into her brain, beginning, Well, I never— and, Of all the— and, If your superiors—What kept all those sentences incomplete and unspoken was the driver’s absolute self-assurance. He wasn’t being calculatedly arrogant, or deliberately hostile toward her, or playing testing games with her, or actually behaving toward her at all. He was merely being himself, which Valerie understood, unfortunately, and which kept her from wasting breath trying to get him to be somebody else. You might as well tell a cat to turn around and walk the other way.

  And this was who she’d picnic with; what a waste.

  They rode on in bumpy silence, Valerie thinking about all the reasons she had left southern Illinois in the first place, all the vague hopes and dreams inspired by her determination to see the great world, and the unpleasant contrast between all that and this reality. Here she was, flopping about in this hard-edged biscuit tin beside a self-absorbed and utterly unappealing man, and not even going to have the picnic she’d planned.

  So far, in fact, the great world really wasn’t showing Valerie Greene very much. Yesterday’s encounter with Innocent St. Michael had certainly been enjoyable, but there’d been very little of the romantic in it; the mode of that scene had been mostly comic. And this driver today was as much a washout as (according to him) the road they weren’t taking.

  All her hopes now were pinned on the lost Mayan city. It would be there, it must be there, where she and the computers had decreed (and despite the nay-saying of Innocent’s man Vernon), and from the instant of her discovery of it everything in her life would change. Archaeologists would write her respectful letters, asking for details of her methodology. Reporters would gather for news conferences. Governments would take her seriously. She herself would lead the expedition to clear away a millenium of jungle and free the ancient city to thrust its towers once again into the air.

  A buzzing sound caused her to lift her head. A small blue-and-white plane was flying by, rather low, not much faster than they, and heading in the same direction. Probably it was actually following the same road, there being very few landmarks in the jungle. Valerie found herself eyeing that plane wistfully, envying whoever was in it, no matter what their purpose or destination. There was romance, soaring above the jungle, sailing through the sunlight.

  An airstrip beside the lost city spread its scythed green carpet in her mind, and she smiled after the plane. But then, before it was out of sight, she was recalled to earth by the driver abruptly braking hard, the Land Rover bucking to a stop.

  Valerie lowered her gaze and looked around, as the dust of their passage caught up with them, making a gray-tan haze in the air. They had stopped at an intersection, where their oiled gravel “highway” crossed a meandering dirt road. To their right, a small building was covered with tin soft drink signs. “Coca Cola,” said one, and beneath that in Creole, “quench yu tus.”

  The driver switched off the engine. In the sudden silence, dust slowly settled. Valerie said, “What’s this?”

  “You can get the beer in there,” he said.

  “I get the beer?”

  Pointing to the left, he said, “Then we take that road. There’s a place to stop and eat down a few miles.”

  “In a swamp, no doubt,” she said, becoming irked.

  He looked at her with mild surprise but calm willingness: “You wish to eat in a swamp?”

  “No, no.” Even sarcasm was lost on this creature. Looking at her map, as an excuse to regain her poise, she said, “I can’t tell where we are.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I know the way.”

  Valerie sighed, realized how inevitable that answer had been. Acknowledging defeat, she opened the attaché case and stowed her map in it, then put the case back in the storage well with her canvas bag. Beer, she thought in fatalistic irritation, as she clambered out of the car. And she might as well get beer for herself, too; this place wouldn’t have white wine.

  21

  REUNION

  Lemuel found the whistle. “Now, this is something!” he said, holding it at arm’s length, staring at it.

  Kirby was just as pleased as Lemuel about the discovery. He never prodded his customers, never directed, always permitted them to make their own way across the terrain, and as a result only about half found the whistle. Which was a pity, because it was a beauty.

  About eight inches high, made of limestone carved with primitive stone tools, it was the figure of a priest in a high headdress, with arms straight out at his sides and a long skirt over slightly spread feet. A hole bored through from the top of the headdress to the bottom of the skirt between the feet had originally made the whistle, but when Lemuel now tried to blow through it nothing happened. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said, wiping his mouth. “It’s too old.”

  “To do what?” Kirby asked, parading his ignorance.

  “This is a whistle,” Lemuel explained, his amiability lightly sheathing his condescension. Lemuel was a changed man now that the dread drug dealers were gone. During lunch, over a vodka and tonic, he had reconstructed his academic armor, had got himself back under control, and during the flight out had even discoursed on his few encounters with marijuana, reminiscences occasioned by Kirby having pointed out cultivated fields of the stuff down below, orderly rows of fuzzy light green among the jumbled thousand greens of the jungle.

  Lemuel, in fact, had become so thoroughly the academic and the expert that he’d even shown some early indications of skepticism as Kirby had led him up the side of his extravaganza. “Hmmmmm,” he’d said, when he’d come to the shaped building block, and, “Odd this should be out here in plain sight like this.”

  “It was farther up when I found it,” Kirby told him. “I did some digging here and there, test-boring for a septic system, and that thing rolled down.”

  “Hmmmm,” Lemuel repeated, and when Kirby pointed out the silhouette of temple steps against the sky on the right side of the hill Lemuel had said, slowly, “Possible, possible. Could be a natural formation, or it mig
ht mean something.”

  But all skepticism had vanished once Lemuel’s foot, in poking into the hillside in search of purchase, had dislodged the whistle. Brushing dirt away, turning it around and around, even trying to blow through it, Lemuel had to know that what he was holding was the real thing.

  Real, but not particularly valuable. There were certainly hundreds, possibly thousands of similar whistles legally for sale among antique dealers and curio shops around the world, most of them priced at less than $200. The one Lemuel was turning this way and that way in his hands had most recently sold for $160 U.S.

  But value here wasn’t the point. This small artifact was real, it was honest-to-God one thousand and two hundred years old, the lips of priests had encircled that blowhole, the hands of real-life ancient Mayans had held that whistle just as Lemuel was holding it right now. The whistle was legit, and Lemuel had to know it.

  He did. “A whistle,” he repeated. “Late Classical Period, I would say, prior to 900 AD.”

  “You know a lot more about it than I do,” Kirby assured him.

  Lemuel held the whistle up so the little priest faced Kirby, arms spread wide, like an infant recognizing its father. “This would have been used in religious ceremonies,” he explained, and then frowned past Kirby, saying, “What’s that?”

  Kirby turned. They were just high enough so they could look over the intervening jungle at the meadow—visibly drier today, by the way—where the plane waited and where now a coiling column of brown dust spread out and away from behind an approaching vehicle. “Hey, wait a minute,” Kirby said.

  Lemuel’s nervousness had shot back into existence, and in full flower. Stepping back a pace, his eyes getting rounder and rounder behind his round glasses, he looked from Kirby to the oncoming car and back to Kirby, saying, “What is this? What’s going on here?”

  “I don’t know,” Kirby said, “but I’ll damn well find out.” This remote place didn’t get visitors. Below, the vehicle had paused at his plane, but had not stopped, and now came rapidly on, bounding and bumping over the rough dry land, moving at an angle that would take it around to the easier slope, the one Kirby and the Indians used but which he never showed the customers. “You wait here,” Kirby said. “This is my land, goddamit.”