High Adventure

by Donald E. Westlake

  Fakes. Mockeries. Tiny clay imitations of an ancient long-dead superstition, but still brimming with the potency of dread. Zotzilaha Chimalman hated mankind and had the power and the genius to do something about it. Kirby had never been a Maya, but nevertheless he felt uneasy in the presence of this naked malevolence. He could understand why it was so hard for Tommy to turn his hand to the creation of such a being, and even more so for the other villagers, whose straightforward relationship with life and the spirits and their ancestors had never been corrupted by exile to the outer world.

  Over the candle flame, Tommy’s eyes gleamed at Kirby almost as gleefully as the demons’: “Had enough, Kimosabe?”

  “They’re fine, Tommy,” Kirby said, calm and dignified. “Thanks. And, uh, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Tommy chuckled, and they went outside to a clear night full of stars, with a moon about seven months pregnant. The villagers liked to party, but were troubled by the disappearance of their Sheena, and therefore merely sat in groups, murmuring together. The little plastic radio had been turned off; no salsa music from Guatemala tonight. A horizontal scrim of marijuana smoke hung at nose level. Jars of homebrew clinked against stone. The mountains that had swallowed Valerie Greene were black against the western sky.

  Innocent was no longer admiring materials but sitting on them. A bulky old mahogany armchair had been brought out of one of the huts and set near the largest fire, then draped with colorful cloths; black-and-white zigzags over red or rust or orange, bright red and deep blue diamonds in alternating patterns, representations of flora and fauna so stylized by centuries of repetition as to have lost all hint of their original realistic nature. Upon this soft throne sat Innocent, smiling upon the fire and the shyly smiling villagers, in his left hand a large Heilman’s Mayonnaise jar mostly full of what to drink.

  Crossing toward him, Kirby thought at first it was merely the ambiguity of the firelight that made Innocent’s face look so much softer and less guileful than usual, but when he got closer he saw it was more than that. “Innocent?” he said.

  Innocent turned his smiling face. He wasn’t drunk, and he wasn’t participating in the gage that was being passed around. It seemed as though he was just, well, happy. “How are you, Kirby?” he said.

  “I’m fine.” Kirby looked around for something to sit on, found nothing, and sat on the ground beside Innocent’s left knee, half turned away from the fire so he could continue the conversation. “How are you, Innocent?”

  “I’m all right,” Innocent said, with a strange kind of dawdling emphasis. “I’ve had a very strange day, Kirby.”

  Kirby ruefully touched his shoulder, where Innocent’s bullet had kissed him. “Haven’t we all,” he said. Around them, the Indians conducted their own conversations in their own language, nodding or smiling at Kirby and Innocent in hospitable incomprehension from time to time. Tommy and Luz were at some other fire, waiting for Rosita to give up and come home.

  “This morning,” Innocent said, “I was in despair. Would you believe that, Kirby?”

  “You seemed a little hot under the collar.”

  “That, too. But it was mostly despair. When I got out of bed this morning, Kirby, I was prepared to throw my entire life away.”

  “Not to mention mine.”

  “Mine, Kirby,” Innocent insisted, but still with that same new languid manner. “I didn’t take my laps in the pool this morning,” he said. “Can you imagine that?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I never skip my laps in the pool. I didn’t eat breakfast. I didn’t eat lunch.”

  “Okay,” Kirby said. “That’s a couple of things I can’t imagine.”

  “It was love that did it to me, Kirby. At my age, after all these years, I fell in love.”

  “With Valerie Greene?”

  “Strange thing,” Innocent said, “until just now I couldn’t even use the word. Love. I could say I missed her, I was angry about her loss, I liked the idea of her, but I couldn’t use the word love. I could plan to shoot you because of it, but I couldn’t say it. Plan to throw my entire life away without ever saying that word.”

  “My God, Innocent,” Kirby said, “you’ve had an epiphany.”

  “Is that what it is? Feels pretty good.” Innocent smiled and sipped a bit from the jar.

  “But,” Kirby said, hesitating, not wanting to spoil Innocent’s good mood or changed personality or. whatever the hell this was, “but, Innocent, are you sure? I mean, how well did you know Valerie Greene?”

  “How well do I have to know her? Kirby, if I knew her better, would it make me love her more?”

  “It wouldn’t me,” Kirby said, remembering his own less than satisfactory last sight of Valerie Greene.

  “I spent one afternoon with her,” Innocent said. “Just Platonic, you know.”

  “You didn’t have to say that, Innocent,” Kirby said comfortably.

  Innocent chuckled. “I suppose I didn’t. Anyway, I expected to see her again, and it didn’t happen. I was thirsty, and the water went away.”

  “You’re a wonder, Innocent,” Kirby said. “I never knew you were a romantic.”

  “I never was a romantic. Sitting here now, thinking about it, I think maybe that’s what was wrong. I was never a romantic, never once in my life. Do you know why I married my wife?”

  “No.”

  “Her father had the money I needed to buy a certain piece of land.”

  “Come on, Innocent, there must have been more to it than that. There were other girls with fathers with money.”

  “There were two other potential buyers for the land,” Innocent said. “I didn’t have time to fool around.”

  “So why Valerie Greene?”

  “Because,” Innocent said, “there was nothing in it for anybody concerned. She’s an honest girl, Kirby, she’s the most completely honest girl I ever met in my life. And smart. And earnest. And something more than just out for a good time. But the main thing is, no matter what she does, where she is, what’s going on, she’s always one hundred percent honest.”

  “You know a lot about somebody you spent one afternoon with,” Kirby pointed out.

  “I do, that’s right.” Innocent smiled, remembering something or other. “She wants to give happiness and receive happiness,” he said. “She’s not out to buy or sell anything. She doesn’t try to get an edge.”

  “You’ve got it bad,” Kirby told him.

  “I’ve got it good,” Innocent said. “And now that I believe you and these people here, now that I’m in this nowhere little nothing village and I know for sure Valerie’s out there, not far, not dead, now that I know she’s not dead, it’s just fine, isn’t it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “She’ll be back,” Innocent said. “Some time tomorrow she’ll be found, these eyes will look at her, this mouth will say, ‘Hello, Valerie.’” He beamed in anticipated pleasure.

  “Innocent,” Kirby said, with wonder in his eyes and in his voice, “you’ve regained your innocence.”

  Innocent pleasantly laughed. “I suppose I have. Never knew I had one to lose. Kirby, maybe this would have happened anyway, maybe it’s that man’s change of life thing, but it needed somebody good to bring it out, and that was Valerie. This is a whole new person you’re looking at, Kirby.”

  “I believe you,” Kirby said.

  “He was tucked away inside me all the time, I never knew it.”

  “The love of a good woman, huh?”

  “Go ahead and laugh, Kirby, that’s okay.”

  “I’m not laughing, Innocent,” Kirby told him, in almost total sincerity. “I think it’s great. So this is the Innocent I’ll be seeing around Belize City from now on, is it?”

  Innocent’s smile was sleepy, comfortable, self-confident. “I know better than that, Kirby,” he said.

  “You mean it won’t last?”

  Innocent said, “Kirby, did you ever visit someplace that was really nice, a place that m
ade you happy, so you started to think maybe you’d like to just stay there forever?”

  “Sure.”

  “But then after a while you realize it isn’t your place, you don’t fit in except as a visitor, you don’t belong there and you never will. So you go home, where you do belong, and where you’re happy most of the time because it’s the right place where you ought to be.”

  “Okay, Innocent.”

  “From time to time,” Innocent said, “you remember that other place, and how nice it was to visit, but you don’t make the mistake of thinking you can go back and live there. So that’s what’s happening now, Kirby. I’m visiting some other me, a real nice me that I never knew before.” That lazy smile softened Innocent’s features once more. “But don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll go home to the real me when the time comes.”

  “In that case,” Kirby said, now completely sincere, “I’m glad I was here to meet the other fella.”

  16

  PILLOW TALK

  Voices. Murmuring voices.

  Valerie opened her right eye and followed the progress of an ant as it tottered along the dark damp ground, carrying a big piece of chewed-off leaf above itself like a green sail. Her left cheek was pressed against that ground, so her left eye remained closed, while her right eye tracked the ant and her right ear received the input of those murmuring voices without attempting to decipher.

  Mouth: dry. Body: extremely stiff. Head: painful. Knees: stinging. Hair: matted. Brain: semiconscious.

  Her right arm was bent up at some little distance from her face, lying on the ground, leaving a miniature arena in which that ant-sail bobbed as though on a dark brown lake. Valerie watched the pale green triangle until it reached her thumb, reversed, turned right, reached the knuckle at the base of her thumb, reversed, turned left, and carried on out of sight, into the great large ocean of the world.

  Human beings—much larger than ants—went by. Valerie’s working eye swiveled upward, sighted over her hulking shoulder, and glimpsed the two men moving away, talking. Camouflage uniforms. Curved knives in black leather sheaths at their waists. Gurkhas.

  It was coming back, slowly and erratically. The eye swivel had been unexpectedly painful, so Valerie shut the lid, retired into darkness, and permitted memory to work its will upon her.

  Indian village. Airplane with Kirby Galway and Innocent St. Michael. Flight, with tortillas. Great confusion as darkness settled, her mind adrift—what had that all been about? Had terror unhinged her? But she didn’t remember feeling that frightened, certainly not after she’d gotten some distance from the village. She’d even paused beside a stream, she remembered, sitting there a few minutes to catch her breath and drink water to wash down her first tortilla. After that …

  After that, wandering in darkness, much of it mere confused imagery in her mind. Had she been laughing uproariously, pretending to be an automobile, talking out loud like Donald Duck? Surely memory was wrong. Or had there been something in the stream? “Don’t drink the water,” isn’t that what they say?

  But then—Rescue! A Gurkha patrol, bivouacked for the night, and she had literally fallen among them. So now, after all the perils and dangers of the last weeks, finally she was safe, amid her rescuers, whose murmuring voices were all around her. Not speaking English, of course. What would it be? Something Asian. Nepalese, was that right, for people from Nepal?

  “… kill …”

  Weariness spread through her body, a kind of outflowing unconsciousness, padding all around her aches and sores, moving toward her brain.

  “… attack the village …”

  Awake too early, wrong to be conscious before her body had knit up its wounds. Soothing, soothing sleep. The darkness flowed.

  “… take no prisoners …”

  Strange. Understanding their words, but not in English. She’d never understood Napalese before.

  “… kill them all …”

  Valerie’s right eye shot open. Kekchi! She could understand them because they were speaking Kekchi! Not the dialect she’d originally learned, nor the somewhat muddier version they spoke back in South Abilene, but some other sharper version, more guttural and glottal, but comprehensible nevertheless.

  Why would Gurkha soldiers speak Kekchi to one another?

  “When do we kill the woman?”

  Valerie’s entire body clenched. Her open eye stared at her wrist, her ear dilated.

  “When we get there.”

  A slight unclenching, but eye and ear both still wide.

  “Why not shoot her now? She’ll slow us down.”

  “No shooting. What if somebody hears and comes to look?”

  “I could cut her with this knife.”

  “And if she screams?”

  (Oh, I’d scream, yes, I would.)

  “I know you. You’re just in such a hurry to kill her because she scared you so much last night.”

  “Me? Who had to change his pants? Was that me, or was that you?”

  “Yeah, I thought you were gonna drop dead, you were so scared. You thought a real old-time devil came to get you.”

  “I didn’t go run and hide in the woods like some people.”

  They discussed this further, bristling a bit, each accusing the other of being more superstitious, more prey to fears connected with the old Mayan gods and devils, while Valerie lay silent and unmoving, taking little pleasure in the irony: They had been afraid of her.

  Then at last they got back to it, one of them saying, “So what do we do about the woman?”

  “She thinks we’re Gurkhas, taking her back to camp. So she’ll come along, no trouble. When we get to the village, we gag her, wait till the people come out from the city. When we shoot the villagers, we shoot her, too.”

  “What about the people from the city?”

  “We kill the driver. We wound one white man, it doesn’t matter which one.”

  “Why don’t we kill them all?”

  “Because they’re the people who write the stories.” (There is no word for reporter in Kekchi.) “When they go home, they’ll write all about how the Gurkhas killed all the people in the village.”

  “Then we go back across the border?”

  “And the Colonel gives us our money.”

  Valerie continued to lie there, feigning sleep, while the false Gurkhas continued to talk. They discussed for some time whether to rape her, finally deciding not to do so yet but wait till they got to the village and then play it by ear. (The idioms are somewhat different in Kekchi.) Then one of them said something about how they should get started soon, the village was a good hour’s hike north of here, and Valerie decided it was time to wake up. She made a moaning sound, stretched, rolled over, sat up, looked around wide-eyed at the group of men seated and standing all about her, and said, “Oh, my gosh!”

  They looked at her. One of them said, in Kekchi, “Smile at her. Show her we’re friendly.”

  A cluster of ghastly smiles were beamed her way. Valerie smiled back and said, “You rescued me!” Her performance was based on Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz”.

  They nodded and smiled. Apparently, none of them spoke English.

  With some difficulty, Valerie struggled to her feet. The dozen men watched her, smiles still pasted on their faces. Looking around, she said, “Where can I wash up?”

  “What does she want?”

  “Food, maybe.”

  Valerie made hand-washing gestures and face-washing gestures.

  “She wants the stream.”

  “She wants to piss and wash her face.”

  Three or four of them pointed past some trees at the edge of the clearing.

  “Oh, thanks,” Valerie said, her own ghastly smile still firmly in place, and turned away.

  “I say we definitely rape her.”

  “Not before we get to the village.”

  Valerie paused at the first trees to look back, smiling and wagging her finger. “Don’t peek now,” she said.


  17

  THE SECRET ROAD

  Vernon couldn’t eat. He pushed the fruit around in the bowl and looked gloomily at the coffee, while over at another table the seven journalists wolfed down everything in sight, Scottie going so far as to pretend to bite the waitress’s arm. She offered him a professional smile, refilled his coffee cup, and came over to ask Vernon if everything was all right.

  “Fine,” Vernon said.

  Vernon was at a small table to one side of the large dining room at the Fort George, with the ravenous correspondents in front of him and the view of the timeless sea beneath a timeless sun off to his right. (The black freighter still stood at anchor in the offing, the paperwork on its eventual auction suffering the usual timeless bureaucratic delay.)

  What is going to happen in the village?

  I didn’t ask that question, Vernon told himself. I don’t want to know the answer. I only want to survive to the other end of the tightrope. I don’t want to know what links together the Colonel’s various demands of me.

  Refugee settlements.

  Photos of Gurkhas.

  The refugees flee Guatemala, flee the Colonel and the government he serves. They become lost to the Colonel, protected by borders, by international law, by the British, by the wandering Gurkha patrols. The refugees come to trust the Gurkhas, short dark men who come from so far away but who look so like themselves. British intelligence in this part of the world is excellent, mostly because the refugees and the other Indians will tell things to the Gurkhas that they won’t tell any normal Brit. (When, in 1979, Guatemala started a secret road westward through the jungle into southern Belize, it was the Indians who told the Gurkhas, and the Gurkhas who advanced through the jungle and stopped the road.) Faith and trust in the Gurkhas emboldens the refugees, protects the refugees, swells the tide of refugees, and at the same time increases the embarrassment and frustration of the government the Colonel serves.

  The journalists at last had finished their breakfasts, were rising. Vernon put a piece of papaya in his mouth, but couldn’t chew it. The fruit was cool at first, but warmed slowly in his mouth.