Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43

by High Adventure (v1. 1)

  “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.

  The correspondents streamed by, talking at one another. The American photojoumalist named Tom stopped to say, “Give us ten minutes and we’ll be ready.”

  “Mm,” Vernon said, nodding his head with the papaya in it.

  “Your vehicle’s out front?”

  “Mm.” More nodding.

  “See you there.”

  “Mm.”

  Scottie went by with the extra man, the editor from Trend named Hiram Farley. Scottie was saying, “Tell me now, Hiram, old son, we’ve known each other all these many hours, what do you think of me, eh? Eh?”

  Farley, with a judicious expression, said, “I would describe you as tiresomely witty.”

  “By God, that’s succinct! Don’t pay by the word over on Trend, I’ll bet!” Scottie said, and clapped Farley on the back with a sound like a gunshot. Vernon blinked, and swallowed his papaya.

  18 THE HARMONICA PLAYER

  The letter read:

  Hiram,

  You’ve gone away, you bad boy, without telling us a thing, and now we have this very interesting cable from Kirby Galway, which we’ve enclosed. Well, of course we cabled him right back that the answer is yes, and we’re on our way to sunny Flo at this very mo, with cassettes. And this time, believe us, nothing will go wrong. We may even get some actual Mayan treasures for you to photograph, wouldn’t you like that? We’ll be home by Monday, so call us as soon as you return from wherever you’ve gadded, and we’ll certainly have good news for the old newshound.

  Love and kisses, Alan and Gerry

  “A very dry Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks, please,” Gerry said.

  “Gerry,” Alan said wamingly.

  “Just one,” Gerry said.

  The stewardess said, “I think the only gin we have is Gordon’s.”

  “Oh, well,” Gerry said. “All right, I suppose.”

  “So that’s one martini,” the stewardess said.

  “Gibson.”

  “The onions didn’t come aboard this trip.”

  “Oh, well. All right, I suppose.” Sadly, Gerry turned away and gazed out at cloudtops; they looked dirty.

  “Sir?” the stew said, turning her acrylic attention on Alan, in the middle seat.

  “The same,” Alan said. “Whatever it was.”

  With a thin smile, the stew turned to the curator from Duluth, Whitman Lemuel, in the aisle seat: “Sir?”

  “A Bloody Mary.”

  The stew beamed her appreciation at a man who understood airline drinking, and turned away. Shortly she turned back, the tray tables were lowered to a position just above knees, drinks were exchanged for cash, and they were left in peace, each in his own narrow pocket in the egg carton flying them Floridaward.

  Lemuel raised his glass of red foulness: “Confusion to our enemies.”

  “Oh, my, yes,” said Gerry.r />
  “I’ll drink to that,” said Alan, and they did, and Alan made a face. “Swill,” he said.

  “Better than nothing,” Gerry told him, and took another tiny sip of his own drink.

  The truth was—and Gerry would go to his grave without revealing this to anyone—the truth was, Gerry had no real sensitivity to the tastes of alcohol. If something were really very sweet, like Kahlua, or very bitter, like Campari, he could tell the difference, but in the range of gin drinks and vodka drinks and all of that he was very little aware of distinctions of taste, so this prepackaged martini here with the defrosted pimento olive was about the same to him as the finest ever Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks which a superb Upper East Side bartender would have prepared without even slightly bruising the gin. But one was expected to know the right things to drink, and appreciate them, and so on, and one of the ways to show that sort of sophistication was to say, “A very dry Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks, please,” so that’s what Gerry said whenever the suject came up, and everything worked out fine.

  He wondered sometimes if Alan really knew or cared about the distinctions in booze. Impossible to ask, of course.

  As for Whitman Lemuel and his Bloody Mary, there must be something so liberating about being a provincial, not having to keep up a front of sophistication.

  What an odd alliance theirs was, after all. Brought together inadvertently by Kirby Galway, they’d had just scads of lies and deliberate confusions to clear out of the way before they could begin to understand one another, but then they’d realized at once what a golden opportunity lay before them. From what Lemuel had said about his encounter with the apparently quite frightening Innocent St. Michael, it wasn’t Galway after all who’d stolen the tapes, so they were probably safe in going ahead with the original arrangements. As for the legality, morality, all that, Lemuel had explained to them at passionate length that it was practically their duty to buy Kirby Galway’s loot and see it got proper homes in the United States among people of refinement and taste, people who could appreciate and preserve such irreplaceable treasures.

  Much better than playing Woodward and Bernstein for Hiram. And more profitable, too.

  Gerry had been rather surprised and thoroughly delighted when the conversation with Lemuel had shown that Alan also was more than ready to forget Trend and actually deal with Galway.

  But cautiously, cautiously. That Galway had been engaging to deal with both of them, behind one another’s backs, and undoubtedly planned later to use each other’s existence to create a bidding situation for the more valuable pieces, showed the sort of slippery customer he was, as if they needed any further proof. Besides which, there was surely still more to the goings-on in Belize than any of them knew. Who could guess what intricacies, what wheels within wheels, might exist even further below the surface?

  That was why they’d left that letter for Hiram; in case there was any trouble at all with the law—an idea that made Gerry’s heart flutter in his breast—the letter and the cable would prove that Gerry and Alan had had no intention of actually becoming accomplices of smugglers.

  On the other hand, if everything went well, Lemuel would take away the first shipment from Galway, Alan and Gerry would arrange to pick up the second shipment and then return to New York, and when they next saw Hiram they would tell him Galway had never shown up and they’d decided to abandon the whole project.

  How oddly things worked out. But that, Gerry thought with some self-satisfaction as he sipped his premixed Gordon’s martini, is another mark of sophistication: the ability to deal with truly complex patterns, whether in art or in life. A simpler person like Whitman Lemuel, for instance, no matter how dedicated he might be to the preservation of pre-Columbian artifacts, was still essentially—

  A man walked down the aisle. He was about 40, not very tall but barrel-bodied and bull-necked, his large head stubbled with a gray crewcut, his face mean and disgruntled-looking, with down-turned thick lips and cold piggy eyes. A brown string tie hung down on a yellow shirt tight across his chest. He was so muscular he seemed to have trouble walking, his thick shoulders working massively back and forth. His tan jacket was too small for him, hanging open, with strain creases around the armpits.

  What made Gerry notice this creature was that he was staring at Gerry. He looked mean and angry, as though something about Gerry just simply enraged him. Helpless to look away, Gerry sat openmouthed and watched the man go by, their eyes locked as though with Krazy Glue. Gerry’s head turned like a ventriloquist’s dummy until at last the man removed his own glare to face forward, and as Gerry looked to his left, over Alan’s head, still compulsively staring, that open jacket swung out and back and something glinted inside it at chest level, and then the man was gone.

  Something glinted.

  A badge.

  A policeman.

  They know.

  “Ohh,” said Gerry faintly.

  Alan gave him a look: “What now?”

  “I’m going—” Gerry swallowed loudly “—to be sick.”

  Alan glared. Sotto voce, he hissed, “I can’t take you anywhere.” “I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to be home.”

  The man went by again, in the opposite direction, giving Gerry one withering glance before continuing on, his jacket taut across his back.

  “You had to sit by the window,” Alan said. Turning away, jawline eloquent with rejection, he icily explained to Whitman Lemuel that they would all have to get up so Gerry could be sick.

  “Ho—” Gerry said. “Unk— Ho-ome.”

  Still, everything might have been all right if the lavatories hadn’t all been occupied.

  19 THE ROLE OF THE ANTI-HERO IN POSTWAR

  AMERICAN FICTION

  Kirby spent a few minutes watching the Indians wrap Zotzes in Beacons and then went back outside to a sunny day and a stormy Innocent, who rose from his mahogany throne to say, “Well, Kirby?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Aren’t you ready yet to give it up?”

  Kirby frowned at him. “Give what up?”

  “I don’t see any Valerie, you know.” Innocent put his hands on his ample hips and gazed around at the timeless morning scene: Indians squatting over fires in front of their huts, nursing their hangovers. Rosita’s distant unremitting call of “VaaaalllLerie,” sounded from time to time across the sunny clean air like the cry of some local bird.

  “They’ll find her,” Kirby said, somewhat impatiently. Last night’s Innocent had been a lot easier to get along with.

  “It’s almost noon,” Innocent said. “She won’t be back, and we both know it. Stop the playacting, Kirby.”

  “You believed me last night, Innocent, you said so yourself.”

  “I talked a lot of nonsense last night.”

  “You had an epiphany.”

  “I believe what I had,” Innocent said, “was the shortest nervous breakdown on record. The disappearance of a fine young woman looked like what caused it, but it was really brought on by overwork, male meno-whatever-it-is—”

  “Pause.”

  “That’s my problem, I never did. Just work work work, I thought I was tough enough to go on forever. ” He looked angry when he said all this, and Kirby was gradually coming to the realization that Innocent was partly angry at himself.

  But not entirely; there was plenty left for Kirby. Glowering at him, Innocent said, “And smart fellas like you, Kirby, coming along all the time, looking for that edge, trying to put something over on me.” Betraying a bit of his grudge, Kirby said, “The way I put over that land deal on you, right?”

  “What have you been doing with that land, Kirby?” Innocent stared at him round-eyed, leaning forward, alive with curiosity and frustration. “That’s what caused this whole thing! That land up there—” he flung his hand toward the barren hill in question, just visible from the village “—isn’t worth shit, Kirby!”

  “That’s not the way you talked when you sold it to me.”

  �
�What are you doing with it? What is all this goddam temple about?” Kirby took a step back, head cocked, giving Innocent a wary look. “Temple, Innocent? Which temple is that?”

  “That’s what I want to know, dammit! You bring all these Americans down, give them some song and dance about a temple, there isnt any temple!”

  “That’s right.”

  “Valerie comes down, comes to me, Kirby, says she has computers up in New York tell her there’s a temple on your land. Wants to go out to see it. That’s where it all starts, Kirby. I wanted to know what you were up to.”

  “So you sent Valerie Greene out to see.”

  “She was coming anyway, that isn’t the point.”

  “No,” Kirby said, seeing it. “The point is, you made that creep of yours her driver.”

  “I regret that, Kirby,” Innocent said. “I regret it bitterly. But I blame you as much as me.”

  “What? You turned that girl oyer to that hoodlum, and it’s my fault?”

  “I had to know what was going on,” Innocent said. “What you were up to. That was the only driver I could trust.”

  “Some trust.”

  “Kirby,” Innocent said, coming a step closer, calming himself by an obvious effort of will. “It’s time to tell the truth, Kirby,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  “Time for you. I know you didn’t kill Valerie Greene, just as surely as I know poor Valerie is dead. I know my own driver killed her and then ran away, so you don’t have to put on this game any more.” “No game, Innocent,” Kirby said, trying to look sincere. “Honest.” “Don’t use words you don’t understand, Kirby. I’m not even mad at you any more. All you have to do is give up all the playacting, admit this is just one more of your cons, and we can go home.”

  “But it isn’t. Valerie Greene actually was here, but now she’s gone.” “If I know anything for certain in all of this, Kirby,” Innocent said, “it is that you’re lying.”

  Kirby paused, thought things over, and then said, “All right, Innocent, I have a deal for you.”