“But of course, Mister Farley,” Innocent said, thinking, Is this fellow a pansy-boy, too, like his friends? Yes. More subtle about it, not noticeable at all if you aren’t looking for it, but yes. On the other hand, shrewder than his friends, tougher. Not an easy fellow to take advantage of.
Farley was saying, “Mister St. Michael, I’ll level with you. After my friends threw in the towel, I looked around, asked around, trying to find somebody else with a connection in Belize. Do you remember a man named Rodemeyer? William Rodemeyer?”
The name rang a distant bell, no more. Innocent frowned, saying, “I’m not sure ...”
“This would be several years ago. You sold him a piece of land in Ladyville.”
Ladyville was the little community next to the International Airport. Its future was in fact quite promising for commericial properties, should Belize ever become a considerably larger and more bustling nation than it now was. Innocent had owned different parcels out there over the years . . .
Rodemeyer! It came back to him now, the man with the odd name. “The magazine man!”
“That’s right,” Farley said. “He wanted to found a weekly business magazine for the English-speaking Caribbean basin.”
“Yes, I remember that man,” Innocent said. “He wanted land out by the airport, to build offices and his own printing operation out there, distribute by air through the Caribbean. Very ambitious project.”
“Too ambitious, as it turned out,” Farley said.
“Bigger circus than this come to Belize,” Innocent told himself.
Beg pardon?”
“Nothing. Seems to me that man went bust.”
“Yes, he was undercapitalized.”
“That’s the big trouble in the Caribbean,” Innocent agreed, nodding like a statesman.
“He’s back in New York now, Rodemeyer is,” Farley said. “Working for Barron's.”
“Aristocrats pay pretty good, I hear,” Innocent said.
“I understand he sold the land back to you before he left, for rather less than he’d paid for it.”
“Very depressed real estate market, just at that moment,” Innocent murmured.
“Yes,” agreed Farley. “The point is, Bill Rodemeyer told me he met several people in Belize, but you were the one I should see. He said you were the shrewdest, toughest con man he ever met in his life, but you were important in the government, and if there was something in it for you I could probably get you to work with me on this smuggling story. ”
“I have never had anything but the nicest remarks to make about Mister Rodemeyer,” Innocent said, putting on a faintly insulted air.
Farley laughed. “And why not? You made a pretty penny off him.” Becoming more serious, he said, “I’ll let you personally break the story in Belize, and I’ll feature you prominently in the write-up in Trend. We give each other an exclusive. My information plus your local contacts, and we expose these smugglers together.”
By now, Innocent’s mind was functioning simultaneously on two completely different levels. On the surface, operating out of long practice and engrained habit, he listened to Hiram Farley, heard his ideas, decided how to play this latest fish on his line. But underneath, his mind was full to overflowing with thoughts of Valerie Greene. And where the two thoughtstreams converged was at Kirby Galway.
Kirby the smuggler. And Kirby the murderer.
“So you want to expose these smugglers in your magazine,” he said. “You want to catch them in the act, you mean, with photographs and all.”
“That would be best,” Farley agreed. “I can handle all that part of it myself. What I need from you, if you think it’s a good idea, is help on the ground.”
“To catch the smugglers,” Innocent said, brooding. To catch Kirby the smuggler; yes, that would be a good thing, with this man Farley along to get the evidence that would stick. But what about Kirby the murderer?
Farley said, “Do we have a deal, Mister St. Michael?”
“Let me think about this, Mister Farley,” Innocent said. Kirby the murderer is up to me, he thought. Inexorably he was sliding toward a decision that was very unlike him, very out of character. And yet, there it was. And still he hung back from it.
Tomorrow, he promised himself. Tomorrow I’ll choose; Farley or Kirby. “I’ll get in touch with you by tomorrow afternoon, Mister Farley,” he said, “at the Fort George.”
Farley was surprised. “How do you know I’m staying at the Fort George?”
Innocent laughed, though his mind was full of Kirby the murderer. “Every American I do business with is at the Fort George, Mister Farley,” he said.
10 TOTAL RECOIL
“Seven,” said Kirby.
“Fourteen for two,” said Manny.
Kirby grinned, and laid down a third seven. “Twenty^one for six,” he said, and moved his back peg forward six spaces on the cribbage board. Only then did he look up to see every tooth gap in Manny’s head gleaming at him; the man smiled like a tunnel entrance. “No,” said Kirby.
“Yes,” said Manny, and gently placed the fourth seven on the table. “Twenty^eight for twelve.” He leaned forward to study the board. “And the game.”
It was true; the 12 points put Manny out. “At least it wasn’t a skunk,” said Kirby, whose lead peg was 11 spaces from victory.
“What’s the score now?”
Kirby turned the board over, where ink checkmarks in groups of five ran in battalions down two strips of masking tape, which were themselves laid over previous strips bearing previous battalions.
Making another mark with his ballpoint pen, Kirby said, “You’re ahead, as you damn well know.”
“How much? How much?”
“Three hundred twenty^nine games to two hundred seventy-eight.” Shaking his head, Kirby turned the board over. “I should have taught you checkers instead.”
“Teach me now.”
“You sound too eager,” Kirby told him, and glanced over as a couple of the dogs—who had been peacefully watching Guatemalan televb sion with Estelle and the kids—got up and turned around and looked at the door.
“Somebody coming,” Manny said.
“Could be Tommy.”
Manny liked Tommy Watson well enough, but Estelle always got pursedipped when the Indian was around, as she did now, remaining silent but giving Kirby a quick look. “I’ll talk to him outside,” Kirby promised.
And in fact he had something to tell Tommy. Yesterday’s expedition to San Pedro had been a bust, at least from a business point of view, but when he’d flown in here just before noon today—not wanting to miss Estelle’s lunch—there had been a message waiting which Cora had brought down from Orange Walk. It was Witcher and Feldspan’s answer to his cable, and it assured him Sunday would be just fine for taking delivery on the first shipment. So Kirby’s message to Tommy would be, Produce some Zotzes! Let’s start these new customers off right, with a nice platoon of devibgods. No more excuses about how everybody’s too superstitious and afraid to make the damn things.
Estelle still looked disapproving—she felt Tommy’s mere existence was a bad influence on the children, whom she had dreams of civilizing some day—so Kirby got to his feet and said, “Okay, okay, I’ll head him off.” While Manny sat shuffling the cards like the scraggliest cardshark in history, grinning faintly to himself, Kirby went out to greet his faithful Indian companion.
Except it wasn’t. Squinting in the outer sunlight, Kirby first saw the gray Land Rover over near Cynthia, and then saw it was Innocent St. Michael who was clambering out of it. And not only that, but he was clambering out of the driver’s seat; he’d come here alone.
Here? Innocent St. Michael, here?
Kirby walked over toward the heavyset man, noticing that Innocent seemed rumpled, troubled, very unlike his usual smooth self-confident self. Innocent saw Kirby approach and reached back into the Land Rover to pick something up off the passenger seat. Kirby was just calling, “What’s happening, Innocent?” when In
nocent turned around with the gun, pointed it more or less toward Kirby, and started shooting.
The gun was a British-made revolver, the Webley and Scott Mark VI, weighing two pounds six ounces, length eleven and a quarter inches, six-shot capacity, firing a .455 calibre cartridge, and famous in the British Army and in many police forces around the world for a whole lot of recoil. Wherever Innocent had gotten this monster, the thing clearly had not come with instructions, nor had he taken it around the block for a few practice spins ahead of time. He clenched his jaw, squeezed the trigger, the gun made a sharp explosive sound flattened in the surrounding air, and the bullet went up over Kirby and over the house and headed out on a rising line toward the coast.
“Hey!” said Kirby.
Innocent’s second bullet whizzed up and away southward, climbing into the sky, straining toward a far-off tree just inland from Punta Gorda.
“What the hell!” said Kirby.
Innocent’s third shot went almost straight up into the empyrean. Some time later, in fact, it landed unnoticed between Kirby and the house.
“Jesus Christ!” said Kirby.
Innocent, looking intent, exasperated, determined, flustered, enraged, grieving, and bollixed, grabbed the goddam gun with both hands and wrestled its barrel back down to point at Kirby’s nose.
“Ahhhr said Kirby.
The fourth bullet whispered in Kirby’s left ear on the way by.
“DON’T!” said Kirby.
Innocent mumbled something and stepped closer, holding the gun out in front of himself with both hands, as though it were an angry cat. The cat spat, and bullet number five made a scratch—but cauterized it immediately—on the skin above Kirby’s left clavicle, or collarbone, which is the top of the pectoral arch, extending from the breastbone to the shoulderblade.
All of this was happening very fast, so it wasn’t until now that Kirby got around to taking appropriate action, which was to scream and hit the dirt, so that bullet number six passed through the air where the middle of Kirby’s head had recently been, then continued on its way to chunk into the door frame just as Manny opened the front door to find out what all that popping was about.
Manny looked at the spot where the bullet had said “thup” going into the wood of the frame. He looked at Innocent with the gun, and Kirby on his face on the ground. He stepped back and closed the door.
Kirby rolled over and looked up. Innocent, closer, stood over him with the expression of a man seating himself for the first time in front of a word processor; he will dope this damn thing out. Both Innocent’s hands clasped the gun, which now looked to Kirby like a roundmouthed gray metal snake with a crest (the front sight). Innocent’s right forefinger squeezed the trigger, and the Mark VI said, “Tsk.”
Neither Innocent nor Kirby could believe it. They both looked at the gun. Innocent aimed it at Kirby and pulled the trigger. “Tsk,” it said.
“Shit,” said Innocent.
“Oh, boy,” said Kirby, and rolled madly away, over and over across the dusty bumpy ground. When he sat up, filthy and dizzy, he was some yards from Innocent and the Land Rover. Shaking his head, trying to focus, he saw Innocent hurry back to the vehicle, saw him reach inside it and come out with a small cardboard box, saw him fumble the box open onto the Land Rover’s hood. A few cartridges rolled away across the hood and plopped onto the ground. “For God’s sake, he’s reloading,” Kirby said.
Somebody, unfortunately, had explained to Innocent how to open the cylinder. As Kirby struggled to his feet, still dizzy, and tottered across the open ground, Innocent pushed bullets business end forward into the cylinder. More cartridges rolled about and fell on the ground.
Innocent saw Kirby coming and backed hurriedly away, stumbling a bit, pushing just one more bullet home, struggling to close the half-full cylinder and scramble backwards at the same time, and all the while watching neither his hands nor the world behind him. Kirby, pursuing, cried, “Innocent, why? Why7.”
“You killed her,” Innocent said, and slammed the cylinder shut, pinching one finger nastily in the process. He put that finger in his mouth and pointed the gun at Kirby.
Who had stopped a few paces away, too bewildered to be either scared or smart. “Killed? Who?”
“Wallawa Weeng,” Innocent said.
“Who?”
Innocent took his finger from his mouth. “Valerie Greene,” he said, “and you’re going to die for it!”
“Tsk,” said the Mark VI, as Kirby threw his arms up to protect his head.
“God damned bastard!” Innocent cried.
“I didn’t!” Kirby yelled. “Innocent, I’m innocent!”
“Tsk.”
“Shit! Where are they?”
“I didn’t do it!”
“Boom,” said the shotgun in Manny’s hands in the doorway of the house, and a number of leaf bits and twig mulch pattered down onto the tableau of Innocent and Kirby.
Innocent, wide-eyed, looked over at Manny who, untroubled by recoil, was lowering the shotgun barrel from his aim at the tree branches to a new sighting on Innocent’s torso. This piece of armament was a Ted Williams Over-and-under shotgun with 28-inch barrels, 48 inches overall, weight seven and a quarter pounds, firing either two and three-quarter or three inch standard or magnum shells in 12 gauge, available at Sears stores. Manny’s finger had already moved from the front trigger, which had just fired the modified choke lower barrel, to the rear trigger, which at any instant could unleash the contents of the full choke upper barrel.
Having no idea what Manny planned to do next, hoping against hope he wasn’t running into a blast of shotgun pellets, Kirby dashed forward, grabbed the Mark VI out of Innocent’s slack hands, and ran away holding the gun in both his hands, yelling, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
Innocent stared after him in frustration and aggravation: “How can I shoot? You took my gun!”
“Manny!” Kirby yelled in explanation. “Manny, don’t shoot!”
Manny came out of the house, the Ted Williams butt still nestled into his shoulder, cheek still lying against the hand-checkered walnut stock, right eye sighting down the ventilated rib, directly at Innocent. Estelle came out after him, looking stem, in her right hand the cleaver she used for quartering chickens. A couple of the dogs came out and trotted over to Innocent, sniffing him in search of the tastiest parts. A few children came out and arrayed themselves to one side, as audience. Innocent looked pained.
Kirby, at a safe distance from everybody, looked at the weapon of destruction lying across his palms. He turned it around, held it in his right hand like people in the movies, and pointed it down at the ground. He squeezed the trigger. “Bang!” it said, and the recoil slammed up into his arm bones hard enough to jolt his whole skeleton. “Jesus,” he whispered. One tsk from eternity.
Innocent was now looking merely weary, rumpled, and resigned. Kirby glanced at him, and walked toward the house. He passed Manny, who said, “Kirby? What do you need?”
“A drink,” Kirby said. His right shoulder hurt.
11 THE MYSTERY OF THE TEMPLE
The Indians didn’t expect the plane, Valerie could tell that from their reaction when it buzzed low over the village late in the afternoon. They loved it, of course; they seemed to love everything Kirby Galway did. They came scampering out of their huts and, driven by curiosity, every last one of them went hurrying out of town and up and over that nearby scruffy hill to meet Galway where he’d be landing. Driven by her own curiosity, Valerie followed, keeping some distance behind.
She had never been up this way before. The Indians had told her how dry and lifeless the land was over here, fit for nothing but an airstrip, and she’d noticed they themselves never came up this way except that one earlier time to meet Galway. Now, she labored up the hill and it wasn’t until she reached the top and looked down the other side at the plane taxiing across the flat land in this direction that she suddenly realized where she was.
It had to be, had to be. Sh
e and the kidnapper/driver had come in from that direction, way over there. The airplane had been parked exactly where Galway was now parking it. Her confrontation with him had taken place down there below the right flank of the hill. So this place, this place, had to be . . .
. . . the temple?
Valerie gazed about herself, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, bewildered. This was no temple. This was merely an arid brown hill, covered with a stubble of dead brush and dying stunted trees.
Could this ever have been a temple? Unlike the Egyptian pyramids, which had been actual buildings filled with rooms and spaces, the Mayan temples had been mere stone skins veneered onto existing hills, so, in the few short days after she’d first seen this place, could Galway possibly have stripped it completely, every stone and every stela, every corbel arch, every wall, every terrace and stair?
No.
Having done that one impossibility, could Galway then have gone on to remove every trace of what he’d done, every mark and indentation, every touch of the ancient Mayan builders’ hands?
Again, no.
Impossible. In fact, absurd.
“But ...” Valerie said aloud, and continued to stare this way and that in total befuddlement. She had seen the temple, with her own eyes. She had stood down there, and looked up here, and had gazed upon an undoubted temple. Exactly where the computers had said it would be. Exactly where she had known it would be. And Kirby Galway had been so upset at her finding his secret temple that he’d gone absolutely berserk, threatening her with a machete, hopping up and down, throwing his hat on the—
Movement down by the plane attracted her attention. Kirby Galway himself had climbed out and was talking and gesticulating with Tommy Watson and Luz Coco and Rosita while the other villagers stood around watching, wondering as much as Valerie what was going on. But now a second person was clambering awkwardly out of the plane, making his way to the ground with the help of several Indians. Valerie’s breath caught. It was Innocent St. Michael!
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 Page 22
