High Adventure

by Donald E. Westlake

  “My God!” cried the mobster, recoiling.

  Gerry would have slammed the door in a trice if his own feelings of shock and terror had not been so vividly mirrored on the mobster’s face. A mobster displaying shock and terror?

  “The drug dealer!”

  Oh, dear, oh, dear: Gerry had cried that out, but the mobster had also cried it out, at the same instant, pointing at Gerry, who now said, “But you’re the drug dealer!”

  Wide-eyed, the mobster said, “Kirby Galway told me you—”

  “Kirby Galway told us you—”

  “Gerry, for heaven’s sake, who is it?” Alan called, from deeper in the appartment.

  “It’s—It’s—I don’t know!”

  “I am Whitman Lemuel,” the ex-mobster was saying, extending his card. “I am assistant curator of the Duluth Museum of Pre-Columbian Art.”

  Gerry took the card. He looked at it with a sense that the world was spinning, the entire Earth flipping on its axis. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “I think I’m beginning to,” said Whitman Lemuel. “I was given a real run-around down there in Belize—”

  “Oh, so were we!”

  “I was told your names, and asked questions about you, by a man named Innocent St. Michael.”

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Consider yourself lucky.”

  “Oh, my God!” Alan cried, putting in an appearance, staring at Whitman Lemuel.

  “Alan, Alan, it’s all right,” Gerry said, clutching at Alan’s arm, stopping him from fleeing back to the nearest phone.

  “All right? All right?” Alan pointed a trembling finger at Whitman Lemuel. “How can that be all right?”

  “Kirby Galway lied to us.”

  “To all of us,” Whitman Lemuel said. “After I got back to Duluth, I started to think about things, and it seemed to me maybe I hadn’t entirely understood everything that went on down there.”

  Gerry was showing Whitman Lemuel’s card to Alan, saying, “See? Look.” Turning back, he said, “Mister Lemuel, I think we all should sit down and have a talk.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Lemuel said, and came into the apartment.

  “Well, for God’s sake,” Alan said, staring at Lemuel’s card.

  “And to begin with,” Gerry told their guest, “there’s a cablegram we just got that you will find very interesting reading.”

  6

  SAND AND SAIL

  The sun rose out of the Caribbean, pouring blue on the black water, lighter blue on the great vaulted dome of sky. The islands awoke, palm trees nodding good morning, all the way from Trinidad and Tobago in the south up to Anguilla and Sint Maarten in the north. The sudden tropic dawn moved westward toward Jamaica and beyond, out over the flexing waters, winking next at the tiny dots of the Cayman Islands. Hundreds of miles of open sea awoke with yawning mouths until the sun reached the great barrier reef along the Central American coast; nearly 200 north/south miles of coral reef and tiny islands called cayes, just offshore from Belize. Hurrying to that coast, in a rush to get inland and raise the great green hulks of the Maya Mountains, the sun met a tiny plane coming the other way.

  Kirby yawned, squinted in the sunshine, and settled himself more comfortably at the controls. Dew dried on Cynthia’s wings, removing her jewelry. Eggs and tomato and coffee made themselves comfortable in Kirby’s stomach.

  Out ahead was the coast. The sea was shallow between here and the reef, the green water so clear as to be invisible from the air, so that you seemed to look down on an exposed world of sand and grass and coral formations all in shades of gleaming green. Only when you flew very low could the surface of the water be made out, as a kind of pebbled glass through which you studied the airborne ballet lessons of the schools of fish.

  At the northern end of the great reef lies Ambergris Caye, largest of the islands, 30 miles long and two blocks wide, containing a dozen small hotels and a little fishing village called San Pedro, with a single-runway airstrip. Kirby rolled in there at 7:45, Cynthia’s shadow landing on the grass swath beside the strip. He parked her with the half dozen one-or two-engine planes already waiting here, checked in at the office shack, and strolled into town, looking for a live one.

  Much of Belize’s small tourist industry is centered on Ambergris Caye. Fishing, snorkeling, scuba diving, all are at their best along the barrier reef. The hotel bars boast a mix of local entrepreneurs, sunburned American tourists, tipsily smiling remittance men, crew-cutted British soldiers on R&R, whisky-voiced widows, and pale-eyed leathery people who forgot to go home 30 years ago. There are always a few large private boats from Texas or Louisiana tied up at the hotel piers, and up and down the long skinny island are a scattering of the vacation homes of well-off Americans.

  Some of these Americans were in business in a small way in Belize, running tourist hotels or exporting mahogany and rosewood or dealing in real estate or owning farms over on the mainland. Every once in a while, one of them could be persuaded to do a deal in pre-Columbian artifacts.

  San Pedro starts early and finishes late. Kirby strolled through the bright morning sun to Ramon’s Reef Resort and had a cup of coffee at the open-air bar with a couple of fishermen; doctors from St. Louis, not in quite the right league. Their guide and boat arrived, they left, and Kirby wandered down the beach to the Hide-A-Way, had an iced tea there—the day was getting hot—and headed back to town. He had lunch at The Hut with a pilot he knew and a real estate man he was just meeting, heard some gossip, told some lies, heard some lies, told some gossip, and went strolling again.

  In the bar at the Paradise, north end of town, most elaborate of the cabana-style hotels, he got into conversation with a Texas girl of about 30, whose daddy’s boat was moored at the end of the hotel pier. Three-story-high boat, gleaming white with gold trim, tapering from a wide, comfortable below-deck to a high, teetery-looking bridge. On the stem in golden script was its name and home port: The Laughing Cow, South Padre Island, Tx. “There’s a cheese called that,” Kirby said. “A French cheese, La Vache Qui Rit.”

  “It’s Daddy’s favorite cheese spread,” she said. She was an ash blonde, tanned the color of human sacrifice, with something just a little vague in her pale eyes and just a little loose around the edges of her generous mouth. She had the look of someone who wants something but can’t quite remember what it is, or what it’s called. She herself was called Tandy.

  Kirby said, “Your daddy named his boat after a cheese? I figured he was a rancher or something.”

  “Oh, he is,” Tandy said. “Up home in Texas, we got a big spread. Get it?”

  “I guess I do,” Kirby said. “Funny thing, I once named something after that cheese, too. La Vache Qui Rit. Except I spelled it differently.”

  “You want to see the boat?”

  “Sure.”

  They carried their glasses of rum and grapefruit juice across the burning sand and out the weathered pier to The Laughing Cow. It was Daddy that Kirby was most interested in, but he wasn’t aboard right now. “He’s gone ashore to raise some supplies,” she said. In the bar she’d been wearing white shorts and a pale blue polo shirt, but now she put down her drink, stepped out of her clothes, and revealed a dark blue bikini on the kind of body it was designed for. “This is the main cabin,” she said, pointing at the main cabin, picking up her drink again.

  Tandy took him through the boat, telling him what every thing was: “That’s the refrigerator,” she’d say, pointing at the refrigerator. “That’s the shower. That’s my bunk.”

  They made their way by stages to the bridge, where Tandy finished the tour by pointing at the wheel and saying, “And that’s the wheel.”

  “And there’s the Caribbean Sea,” Kirby said, nodding at it.

  “Oh, look at the sailboat!”

  Just offshore, a sloop with two white sails slid peacefully northward. Shading his eyes, Kirby said, “Yeah, I know that boat. It’s full of sand.”

  Tandy
looked ready to laugh, just in case there was a joke somewhere inside there. Kirby looked at her, serious, and said, “No, no fooling. It’s full of sand. On its way up to one of the construction sites farther up the island.”

  Tandy frowned. “Where is this sand from?” she asked.

  “The mainland, down below Belize City.”

  Tandy looked back at the Paradise Hotel: a half-circle of cabanas and other buildings on raked white sand. She looked at Kirby again, and her expression now said she was getting a trifle irritated. “Just why, Kirby,” she asked, “would anybody haul sand from Belize City to out here?”

  “River sand,” he explained. “This sand here is coral, it’s powdery, they don’t like to use it for mixing up cement. So that boat there goes back and forth, usually brings sand, sometimes gravel. All by sail-power, no engines.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “Five to six hours out, four to five back. They’ll shovel it out tonight, head back early in the morning, load it up again when they get to the mainland, lay over the night, and head back this way day after tomorrow.”

  She looked out again at the sloop, now beyond them, making better speed than it looked. “Shit,” she said, “and I thought it was romantic.”

  “It is romantic,” Kirby said.

  She thought about that. “I see what you mean,” she said.

  “Just sailing and sailing,” Kirby said. “A few hours shoveling at each end, that’s not much of a price to pay.”

  “No price to pay at all,” she said, sounding bitter. “When all you got to shovel is sand.” She knocked back her drink and looked at him. “How about you, Kirby?” she said. “You romantic?”

  “Very,” Kirby said, and a hoarse voice shouted, “Tandy?”

  Daddy was back, with three San Pedrans carrying cardboard cartons. Daddy barked orders and distributed U.S. greenbacks, while Tandy took Kirby’s glass and her own and made fresh drinks in the galley. Daddy and the drinks were finished at the same time, and Tandy made introductions: “Daddy, this is Kirby Galway. I just picked him up in the bar there.”

  If that was supposed to be provocative, Daddy ignored it. Sticking his hand out, staring at Kirby hard, he said, “Darryl Pinding, Senior.”

  “How do you do, sir?” (It seemed to Kirby that Darryl Pinding, Senior, would enjoy hearing “sir” just once from a younger man.)

  “I do fine, Kirby. And yourself?”

  “I have nothing to complain about,” Kirby told him.

  “Good. Tandy, did you make me a drink?”

  “I will now.”

  She went off to do so, and Darryl Pinding, Senior, gestured at the blue vinyl, saying, “Sit down, Kirby, take a load off. What business you in?”

  It was fun talking with Darryl Pinding, Senior. He was a rich man who thought his money proved he was smart. He knew a lot about three or four things, and thought that meant he knew everything about everything. He liked to spray his imperfect knowledge around like a male lion spraying semen. He was a big man in his 50s, probably a football player in college, now gone very thick but not particularly soft. Sun, sea, high life, and skin cancer had turned him piebald, particularly on his broad high forehead, where Kirby counted patches of four separate shades of color, not counting the liver spots.

  Tandy grew grumpy when it became clear that Kirby was not going to cut short the conversation with Daddy. She threatened to leave, then left, while Kirby and Darryl (they were both on first-name terms now) chatted on.

  It was established early that strict legality had never been an absolute prerequisite in Darryl’s life; a plus. Somewhat later it was made clear that Darryl had done a bit of smuggling for profit in his life—a boat like this, why not?—and had enjoyed the raffish self-image as much as the money; another plus. Treading slowly, Kirby established that Darryl did know something about pre-Columbian artifacts, though by no means as much as he thought he knew. Darryl also understood vaguely that the southern governments were trying to stem the flow of antiquities northward, and he thought they were damn fools and pig-ignorant for taking such a position; a major plus.

  But then came the down side: “Let me tell you something, Kirby,” Darryl said four or five drinks later, hunkering a bit closer on the vinyl. “My son is a faggot. Do you hear what I’m telling you?”

  “Uhh, yes.”

  “I don’t know how it happened. God knows he didn’t have a domineering mother or an absent father, but there it is. Darryl Junior is gay as a jay.”

  “Ah,” said Kirby.

  “He’s an artist,” Darryl said, with an angry sneer in his voice. “Out in San Francisco. Artist. These pre-Columbian things, statues, all this stuff. You know what it all is?”

  Kirby looked alert.

  “Art,” Darryl said. “It’s all art.”

  “I guess it is,” Kirby said.

  “I hate art.” Darryl nodded. “Nuff said?”

  “Nuff said,” Kirby agreed.

  He had dinner at El Tulipan with a girl named Donna who ran one of the gift shops in town. They had drinks after at Fido’s, listening to Rick play the piano, Rick announcing to the world at large, “I’m getting drunk, but I never make mistakes.” Donna had to retire early, so Kirby roved on, not expecting much, having used up his psychic energy on Darryl Pinding, Senior, just fooling around now.

  Back at Fido’s around midnight, there was Tandy at the bar, talking with two American college boys. She left them, carried her glass over to Kirby, and said, “You and Daddy all talked out?”

  “Your father’s a forceful personality,” Kirby said.

  “I didn’t see you fight him off much,” she said.

  Kirby looked at her. “Honey,” he said, “if you haven’t got ahead of him in thirty years, how do you expect me to do it in an hour?”

  She blinked. She frowned. “Twenty-eight,” she said, and knocked back some of her drink.

  “My apologies.”

  “The sun ages you,” she said, forgiving him. “Every fucking thing ages you, come to that. Where are you staying?”

  “Nowhere yet.”

  Surprised, she managed to focus on him, saying, “You don’t have a hotel room?”

  “Not yet.”

  She laughed, a throaty chuckle that suggested the baritone she would be in 20 years. “You’re a damn beach bum!” she said.

  “I told you earlier,” he patiently explained, “I flew in this morning, thought I might fly out again this afternoon, never got around to it.”

  “That’s right, you’re a pilot, I forgot. Come on and sleep on the Cow.”

  He considered that. “Daddy?”

  “When Daddy sleeps, Daddy sleeps. That’s one place, Kirby, where I will not put up with trouble.”

  He gave her an admiring grin. “Tandy, you’re an interesting woman. You have depths.”

  “Check it out,” she said.

  If Daddy slept through all that, his subconscious must have thought they were sailing through a hurricane. Tandy’s elegantly cramped quarters were below, a long isosceles triangle beneath the foredeck, while Daddy slept in the convertible sitting lounge above. A small air conditioner competed with the capacity of two active human bodies to generate heat, and lost. Everybody’d had a bit too much to drink, Tandy refused to permit any light at all, and The Laughing Cow bobbed and rolled in its mooring in arhythmic sequences that Kirby could never quite adapt to. The whole thing became as much an engineering problem as anything else, but one well worth the solving. Slippery rubbery flesh slid and tumbled, muscles moved beneath the skin, arms and hands reached for purchase and slid away. “I think it goes like this,” Kirby said.

  “Oh, Jesus. That’s the way, that’s the way.”

  Kirby chewed on a nipple that tasted of salt. Breath in his ear sounded like far-off surf. The rhythms of sea and man merged and separated, merged and separated. “God, I’m thirsty!” Tandy cried, and collapsed like a sail, in the calm after a storm. Kirby had never heard a woman say precisely that
in such a situation before.

  A lot of elbows woke him, some of them his own. Cool darkness, the hush of a nearby air conditioner, all these elbows and knees and—ouch—foreheads in this too-small bunk. Memory came to his rescue just as Tandy patted him all over, hoarsely whispering, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Kirby Galway,” he told her. “I’m the pilot. One of the better guys.”

  “Shit,” she said, “you probably are, at that.” She laid her hot dry head on his chest, and he put an arm around her vulnerable thin shoulders. “What a life,” she said, and they slept.

  7

  GLIMPSES

  The sun that had greeted Kirby in the sky early that morning had a little later peeked down through the moist layers of leaf and branch and vine and foliage to the jungle floor in the Maya Mountains near the Guatemalan border where it caught glimpses of a hunched hurrying figure in camouflage fatigues, moving west, staring about himself, nervous, flinching from every jungle sound, occasionally staring up in anguish at the watching sun, as though it were a hawk and he a vole.

  Vernon panted as he moved, more from fear than exertion. He hadn’t expected another summons from the Colonel so soon, nor had he realized before last night just how completely he was in the Colonel’s power. He could no longer refuse the man, was no longer his own master. The Colonel could destroy Vernon at any time, not by reaching into his holster for that big Colt .45, but simply by passing on to the British Army or the Belizean government the proof of Vernon’s …

  … treason.

  “It means nothing,” Vernon gasped, hurrying to meet his master. Guatemala could never invade, could never capture Belize. Taking the Colonel’s money was dishonorable, yes, chicanery at worst, because it was not within Vernon’s power, or anyone’s power, to sell Belize to Guatemala. And yet, and yet …

  Everything was coming together at once, in the most terrible way. He had murdered Valerie Greene, yes he had, he had murdered her just as surely as if he had done it himself with his own hand. But he was not cut out to be a murderer; too late he understood that. He wanted to be a man with no conscience at all, and he was riddled with conscience as another man might be riddled with leprosy. The sting of his petty treason was as nothing to the savage burn of his guilt as a murderer.