High Adventure

by Donald E. Westlake

  Within four years, it had all turned very bad for the Espejo and Alpuche families. There were so few of them to service the owner’s land that they were worked harder than at home. They were given no cash money, and less time than before to work their own plots of land for food. They were separated from the support systems of their families and their tribe. They were away from their ancestral land, on some alien land they didn’t know or understand. They were worse off than before they’d moved.

  One day the owner made everybody come listen to a speech by an Army colonel who told them he intended to crush the revolution and slaughter every last revolutionary. He told them that if any of them were even suspected of aiding the revolutionaries they could expect no mercy. He told them to go on working for the owner, to never complain, to keep silent, and to do their duty and they would be safe. He told them that if any of them was thinking of running away to Belice they should forget it because they would be shot down and left in the jungle to rot if they tried it. Don’t even think about running away to Belice, he told them.

  On a clouded night two weeks later the 27 members of the Espejo and Alpuche families, 12 males and 15 females ranging in age from 53 years to three months, left their two one-room clapboard shacks and turned their faces east.

  A 27-year-old woman who had always been sickly died along the way. They buried her.

  They ate fruit, nuts, berries, roots, flowers, sometimes fish, less often birds or iguana or coati-mundi. They moved from the Peten plain into the Maya Mountains, traveling as far as they could each day, always frightened and always exhausted. They had no idea when they would leave the Peten and be in Belice, so they just kept going. On the 24th day they found a road ahead of them, crossing from north to south. While the rest of the family waited, two of the young men—an 11-year-old Espejo and a nine-year-old Alpuche—made their way to the two-lane blacktop road and hid beside it. Soon a truck came by. Its license plate was black with white numbers preceded by a large A and along the bottom it said Belize. Both young men were illiterate, but the 11-year-old had seen “Belice” on maps and remembered it.

  Three automobiles went by over the next half hour, all with license plates having black lettering on a white ground, starting with the letter C and with the word Belize along the bottom. The man and woman in the third automobile, well dressed and laughing together, were quite obviously black people, which was the final proof: in Guatemala, black people are not encouraged. The scouts went back and reported their conclusion: they were in Belice.

  The families retreated a bit farther from the road, found a fairly level place in the jungle, and cleared a small patch of land. The trunks and branches and fronds they cleared away were used to make three huts. More land was cleared and the seeds they’d brought with them were planted: com, yams, beans.

  Four months after arrival they were a going village, 28 people strong, two of the women having made the trip pregnant. They were harvesting crops, they were hunting successfully. Having found a few similar tiny settlements around them in the jungle, they had done some trading and now had two piglets, one male and one female, which were guarded with great care.

  One day a pair of strangers came in from the road, bouncing in a Land Rover up the rough trail the people had made. They were a man and woman who spoke a crisp kind of Spanish, hard to understand, and who said they were from the government of Belize. Seeing the fright this caused, they promised not to make any trouble, but said they had come only to find out if the people needed help in any way. No, the people said, they needed no help. Well, if they ever needed anything, the man and woman told them, medical help, for instance, anything like that, all they had to do was go out to the road, turn right, and about 11 miles south they would find a town with a police station. “The police don’t have guns, and they aren’t mad at you,” the woman said, smiling.

  The people didn’t believe the man and woman, but on the other hand these strangers seemed to have no ulterior motive, so they smiled and nodded and thanked them for the information. The man and woman said the town also had a weekend market if they ever had excess produce to sell, and had a Roman Catholic church, if the villagers were interested. (They were.) And a school for the children. (Maybe later.)

  Cautiously, after that, the people broadened their contacts with this new land. A few occasionally went to the Catholic church, though they weren’t yet ready to talk to the priest, who was nothing they’d ever seen before, being neither Indian nor black nor Spanish. A sale of yams in the market had produced cash; crumpled pale-green Belizean dollars with Queen Elizabeth II on them and frail-seeming Belizean coins, which they kept in a sack in one of the huts, not sure yet what to use them for.

  The man and woman, in the meantime, having returned to the capital at Belmopan, had entered this new settlement of refugees onto a map. The two families by chance happening to be of equal strength there, the man and woman named the settlement Espejo-Alpuche.

  21

  ZOTZ

  “Valerie,” Innocent said, “what do you expect us to do about it?”

  The false Gurkhas, irritated and uneasy at the disappearance of the tall American woman, hacked their way northward through the jungle.

  “There isn’t time to radio for help!” Valerie cried.

  No one in the van noticed Vernon moaning and shaking his head and punching his thighs as he drove, because Scottie was telling a story involving female Siamese twins, an Israeli Nazi-hunter and a one-kilo package of uncut cocaine in a box marked Baking Soda.

  Kirby stood frowning westward, thinking hard, brooding at those tumbled dark mountains. “It’s worth a try,” he said.

  The false Gurkhas came to a gravel road and boldly crossed it. A British Army jeep went by as they did so, bluish gray, and the two uniformed Brits inside it waved as they passed, the false Gurkhas waving back.

  “Tell me what to do,” Valerie said.

  Kirby said, “I need thin cloth, cotton, the thinner the better, and a lot of it.”

  Tom, the American photojournalist, called out, “Vernon, how the hell much farther is this damn place?”

  “Oh, twenty-twenty-twenty minutes, no more,” Vernon told him, showing an agonized smile in the rearview mirror.

  Innocent stared at the dancing leering Zotzes: “What are those things?”

  “Devils,” Tommy told him.

  Halfway up the slope, Kirby stopped to look back. Valerie and Rosita and Luz Coco were cutting and hacking the sheets into squares or rectangles or ovals, a foot and a half or two feet across. None of them were making the circles he’d asked for, but it didn’t really matter. Half the village was running in and out of huts, looking for string. Tommy and Innocent came together out of one of the huts, each carrying a cardboard carton; they started this way.

  Kirby nodded, and hurried on over the hill to start Cynthia.

  One of the young men of the village came into the clearing. “Soldiers coming,” he announced.

  Everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at him or move closer to him or ask, “Who? Which soldiers? What kind of soldiers?”

  “Gurruhs,” said the young man, which was as close as they’d come so far to the word Gurkha.

  Twice in the last several months Gurkha patrols had moved through here, short black-haired men who held their shoulders proudly and handled their strange severe weapons confidently and yet smiled with amazingly bright teeth. The Gurkhas were a different kind of soldier, without the sullenness and fear and cruelty and tendency toward petty crime—and sometimes major crime—of the soldiers of their previous world. When the young man said, “Gurruhs,” they all smiled and relaxed. That kind of soldier. Fine.

  Valerie, her arms billowing with cloth, came over the barren hilltop and saw Kirby Galway just getting into his plane. Innocent and Tommy were partway down the slope, carrying their cartons. Rosita and Luz followed Valerie with the rest of the cloth, and a half dozen villagers straggled up the slope in their wake, carrying bits of string, cord, t
wine and rope.

  Is this going to work? Valerie frowned, thinking of the innocent villagers about to be slaughtered. Against murderers and machine guns, this? But what else is there to do?

  She hurried down the farther slope.

  Crouched on the blacktop in front of the van, Vernon shook open the map, holding it by its very edge with his fingertips as he guided it to the ground. It slipped from his grasp; he slapped at it. Just out of sight in the brush, Scottie had found a hollow log to piss resoundingly against. Across the road Morgan Lassiter, the woman journalist, was out of both sight and hearing for the moment, having gone discreetly away with a handful of Kleenex. The other news gatherers strolled around the empty road, yawning and stretching. Hiram Farley, the Trend editor, came over to place his Frye boots beside the map and say, “You know where this place is, do you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Vernon said, looking up at him, squinting as though he stared into the too-bright sun. Farley’s face showed nothing, his eyes were level and patient. Why do I feel he knows my soul? But that’s just foolishness; if he knew the truth, he’d stop me.

  There was some wistfulness in that idea.

  “Everything’s fine,” Vernon said.

  Innocent said, “Kirby, this is a crazy idea.” With some difficulty he had climbed up on the wing and was leaning in at the plane’s open door so he could talk to Kirby above the engine noise. Wind whipped at his clothing, and the plane trembled all over. “A crazy idea,” he said, more loudly.

  Kirby, studying his instrument panel, gave Innocent an impatient look: “Do you have a better one?”

  “Radio the police. Radio the British soldiers at Holdfast,” meaning the small British Army detachment out near the Guatemalan border.

  “I’ll do that, once we’re airborne, but it won’t do much good. If Valerie’s right, there isn’t time to send for help. At the very worst, maybe we can slow them down.”

  Innocent looked past Kirby at Valerie in the other front seat. She was riding with him because she was the only one with a hope of leading him back to where she’d been. Now, her head was bent forward, she was busily tying strings to cloth. Her profile rang like a gong in Innocent’s soul. “By God, she’s alive,” he said.

  “And our deal still holds,” Kirby told him.

  Was there something underhanded about the deal if Valerie were not dead? No; nothing you could put your finger on. Innocent sighed. “I suppose it does,” he said.

  The false Gurkhas entered the village.

  Valerie looked up from her knot-tying as the plane suddenly jolted forward. She looked at Kirby, then out at the Indians backing away from the plane. Innocent St. Michael was out there, waving, offering her a kind of sad smile. She hesitated, then smiled and waved back.

  Had she been wrong about him? Was Innocent not the arch villain? His almost pathetic pleasure in seeing her alive—she was sure for just one second she had seen a tear in his eye—could not possibly have been pretense. The plane taxied forward, and Innocent was left behind, out of sight. But if Vernon and the skinny black man had not been obeying Innocent’s orders, then whose? Who was the mastermind behind the plot?

  This man Kirby, coming so promptly to the rescue of poor endangered Indians he’d never even met, couldn’t be the ringleader. All you had to do was look at him when he wasn’t waving a sword in your face to see he wasn’t the type.

  Who, then?

  There came into her memory again the last words she had heard between Vernon and the skinny black man in that filthy shack where they’d been holding her prisoner. The skinny black man had said, “Say it out, Vernon. Say what you want.” There had been a pause, and then Vernon had said, so low she could barely hear it, “She has to die.”

  It had been his order.

  Vernon was the ringleader? He’d certainly been the one to make that particular decision, but somehow the idea of Vernon as Mister Big …

  The plane had swung about, and now it suddenly raced madly out across the dry and bumpy ground, shaking itself to pieces. The angle of the plane was such that from inside it they couldn’t see the ground out the windshield but only the sky; how could Kirby be sure there was nothing in front of them?

  The roar, the speed, all were so much more present than in a big sensible airliner, and then all at once the trembling stopped, the roar grew somehow less frantic, and out the side window Valerie could see the ground falling away below.

  “Tie knots!” Kirby yelled.

  “Oh! Yes, sorry.” She bent her head, tied knots, then paused to look at his profile. He was reaching for the microphone, turning dials on the instrument panel. She leaned toward him: “Do you know someone named Vernon?”

  He frowned at her. “Vernon What?”

  “Never mind,” she said, and went back to tying knots. He gave her an irritable confused look, then started talking into the microphone in his cupped hand.

  “It will be along here,” Vernon said, the van moving slowly as he watched the right-hand verge. The jungle was deep and green and moist, tumbled and piled up high on the right. Behind him, the journalists started gathering their paraphernalia.

  “Yes, there it is.”

  Vernon braked to a stop, then turned the van very slowly off the road and onto an up-tilted patch of eroded rutted ground, cleared barely as wide as the vehicle, with stones and dirt and roots under its wheels. Engine roaring, the van struggled up the slope, branches and vines scraping both sides. Vernon clutched hard to the steering wheel, as boulders tried to deflect the wheels and drive him into tree trunks or ditches. Even at two or three miles an hour, the van jounced so badly that everybody in it had to hold on.

  Too narrow; too steep; impossible. Vernon stopped the van, switched off the engine. In the sudden humming silence, he said, “We have to walk from here.”

  “Hold on, chum,” Scottie called. “The idea was, this place is accessible.”

  “It’s just up ahead there,” Vernon said, pointing out the windshield. “We just walk up to it.”

  “Accessible by vehicle, old son.”

  “Not past here.”

  Tom, the American photojournalist, leaned forward to look past Vernon’s shoulder, saying, “A Land Rover would make it.”

  “Too many of us for a Land Rover.” Vernon’s eyelids were fluttering, he was aware of black-and-white pinwheels at the extreme edges of his peripheral vision.

  Scottie, all jollity gone, called, “There’s no villages easier to get to than this?”

  “Oh, come along, Scottie,” Morgan Lassiter said. “Work some of that lard off your gut.” And she slid open the van door to climb out.

  That did it. With a woman to lead the way, the men all sheepishly followed, climbing down out of the van, pushing past the leaves and branches, hanging their canvas bags of equipment on their shoulders.

  “This way,” Vernon said. His legs were trembling, his knees were jelly, but none of it showed. “This way,” he said. Soon it will be over. “This way.” He started up the hill.

  Why am I doing this? Kirby wondered. Of all the brainless things I have ever done in my life, this has to rank right up there among the best of them. Buying Innocent’s land, for instance; this could conceivably be even dumber than that.

  In the first place, there’s no reason on Earth for this stunt to work.

  In the second place, the woman I’m helping, this Valerie Greene riding along with me on this rescue mission, is the primary cause of all my recent trouble, and is someone I dislike so intensely I’m amazed I’m not at this moment shoving her out of the plane.

  In the third place, whether the stunt works or not, the end result of trying it must be that the temple scam is blown permanently and forever. Innocent already knows too much about it, Valerie Greene is going to figure things out any minute now, and even the people on the ground are likely to catch on, once the fun is over.

  In the fourth place, some of those people on the ground have machine guns and could possibly even shoot Cynthia out of the
sky.

  In the fifth place, it isn’t my fight.

  Valerie, busily tying knots, said, “I really appreciate this, Mr. Galway. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “It’s nothing,” Kirby said.

  The Quiché Indians of western Guatemala are not among the tribes who speak some variant of Kekchi. It was in a different language entirely—mixed with some Spanish—that the people welcomed the Gurruh soldiers, smiling at them, nodding, gesturing for them to sit a moment, offering them water.

  The Gurruh looked around, not seeming to know what to do. They talked to one another in their incomprehensible tongue, they smiled rather meaninglessly at the people, and they wandered around the outsides of the three huts, gazing at things. One of them picked up the female piglet and held it high with one hand around its neck, the piglet squeaking and its pink hoofs thrashing the air as the Gurruh said something to the other soldiers and laughed. Then he put the piglet down again.

  There was some strangeness about these Gurruh, all the people sensed it. They weren’t like the first two groups, they didn’t exude the same air of self-sufficiency and disinterested amiability. One of them went into a hut uninvited, picked up an orange without asking, and came out eating it.

  A young man of the village, an Alpuche, had been looking toward the trail that led down to the road. “Someone else is coming,” he said.

  “Can you circle just once more!” Valerie Greene asked. She was tying nooses now.

  Kirby, a bit annoyed, banked Cynthia hard and made a gliding swooping turn over the tumbled land below. “You’re the one says it’s urgent.”

  “I just want to be sure.” Noose in hand, she peered down at that disorderly maze of greens and browns. “Yes! There’s the stream where I—That’s the stream from this morning. See it?”

  Kirby rolled Cynthia over and came back, while Valerie clung open-mouthed to her seat. “Got it,” he said. “Due north from there they said?”