Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (19 page)

 
          
“Not
back yet?” Innocent shook his head, smiling at the desk clerk. “Women,” he
said. “Never on time anywhere.”

 
          
The
desk clerk answered the smile; he and Innocent St. Michael had known one
another a long time, in a limited but satisfactory way. “But what could we do
without them, eh?” he said.

 
          
“Bugger
all,” said Innocent. Before the desk clerk could decide whether that had been
idiomatic or literal his switchboard lit up and he had to excuse himself, being
the only person on duty at the desk at this time.

 
          
Innocent
studied his watch: a Rolex, a birthday gift from his wife, selected and paid
for by himself, gift-wrapped by the girl in the store. Two minutes to five, it
said; by the time he got to the bar, the sun would definitely be over the
yardarm.

 
          
“Yes,
yes,” the desk clerk was saying. “I’m doin the best I can, Mister Lemuel, but
it just may not be possible. Oh, yes, sir, I’ll go on trying.” Hanging up, he
turned back to Innocent, shaking his head and saying, “It always be Americans.
Impossible.”

 
          
Innocent
had heard the name
Lemuel
and his
ears had pricked up, because he knew who that was. Another of Kirby’s strange
visitors from the States; a teacher on vacation, he claimed. “What’s this one
want?” he asked.

 
          
“The
Earth and all,” the desk clerk said. “He registered here for two more days, but
now in a rush his plans all different. He run in here an hour ago like the end
of the world, had to be on a plane
today
,
had to be out of
Belize
this very minute, sudden urgent message from home. Foo,” commented the
desk clerk. “If this man got any sudden urgent message from home, I’d
know
it, wouldn’t I? I’d
hand
it him, wouldn’t
I?”

 
          
“Of
course you would,” Innocent said, thinking, Hmmmmmm. “Sounds like he picked up
the running shits,” he said.

 
          
“I
don’t know what that man’s problem be,” said the desk clerk. “I done all I can.
I told him, there’s no more flights out to the States today, so then he wants a
charter, he won’t spend another night in
Belize
. I told him, he already got to pay for
tonight at the hotel, it way too late to check out, he don’t care ’bout that. I
tell him, any charter out of the country, there’s all kinds of paperwork,
Customs clearance, police, all that, now he’ll take a flight anywhere, he don’t
care.
Honduras
,
El Salvador
,
Jamaica
, all the same to him. Now, you
know
there’s nothin I can do bout that.”

 
          
“So
he’ll spend the night,” Innocent said, “and go out in the momin. ”

 
          
“Complainin,
complainin,” commented the desk clerk. “Well, I go off at six.”

 
          
“Let’s
hope my little lady’s back by then,” Innocent said. “I’ll be in the bar.”

 
          
“I
be sure to let you know,” the desk clerk promised.

 
          
On
his way back to the bar, Innocent paused at the public phone booths to make
three calls. In the first, he said, “There’s a man at the
Fort
George
called Whitman Lemuel. Just a couple
minutes after six, you call him, tell him you hear he’s looking for a charter
flight, tell him to meet you at the Municipal Airport right away to make the
arrangements, you’ll get him right out tonight. No, you don’t have to go to the
airport.”

           
In the second call, he said,
“There’s an American fella named Whitman Lemuel gonna be out to the
Municipal
Airport
around six- thirty, looking for some
charter flight. Arrest him on twenty or thirty technical charges. No, no, you
won’t have to defend them.”

 
          
In
the third call, he said, “There’s an American name of Whitman Lemuel gonna be
comin in around seven. He’ll be spendin the night. Don’t hurt him, but do scare
him. I’ll be comin down in the morning to rescue him, and I’m hopin to see a grateful
man.”

 
          
Smiling,
well pleased with himself, Innocent went on to the bar, where he ordered a gin
and tonic and sat on one of the low broad swivel chairs, looking out at the
view over the tame swimming pool at the feral sea. The pool, in the hotel’s
late afternoon shadow, looked cold, but the sea, glistening in amber sunlight,
looked warm. The impounded black freighter still stood in the offing, awaiting
auction. White sails far out moved toward the barrier reef.

 
          
White
sails. Valerie’s round white behind. Innocent smiled, content to wait.

 
          
When,
in the middle of the air, Kirby saw his land and temple again, it was just
5:00 o’clock
, and he’d been flying into the sun for half
an hour. As though he weren’t annoyed and irritated and angry and irked and
furious enough already.

 
          
Lemuel
had been absolutely unsoothable on the flight back to
Belize City
, had refused to talk rationally, had
alternated between moaning about his lost reputation and bitterly accusing
Kirby of being responsible for blighting his career. At the
Municipal
Airport
, he’d flung himself from the plane the
instant it stopped rolling and went galloping off toward the operations
building, yelling, “Taxi! Taxi!” And now Kirby was back to his mousetrap, the
sun in his eyes and ashes in his mouth. Skimming the temple top, he flashed
down the other side, buzzed the Indian village low enough to cool soup, rotated
Cynthia on her left wingtip, snarled over the hill again, hurled the plane to
the ground as though he hated her, and stomped up the slope to the temple roof,
where Tommy and Luz and the others were grouped about, gazing at him wide-eyed.
“That was pretty close, Kimosabe,” Tommy said.

 
          
“You
don’t know what close is,” Kirby told him, disgusted. “There was a goddam
archaeologist here a little while ago. She’s on her way to report she has just
found a previously unknown Mayan temple.”

 
          
“Shit,”
said Luz.

 
          
Tommy
said, “On her way where?”

 
          
“We
can’t stop her,” Kirby said, “and it doesn’t matter who in particular she talks
to, what matters is that this goddam pestiferous woman is
honest.”

 
          
“Ugh,”
said Luz.

 
          
“I
hope
she can’t bring back
reinforcements tonight,” Kirby said, looking over his shoulder at his blasted
plain. “But she’ll certainly be back tomorrow. She thinks I’m here to
despoil
the temple.”

 
          
Luz
said, “Do what?”

 
          
“Steal,”
Tommy explained. To Kirby he said, “So what do we do? Hold them off?”

 
          
“We’re
not talking about General Custer,” Kirby told him. “We’re talking about
policemen, reporters, photographers, archaeologists, government officials—”

 
          
“The
whole shmeer,” Tommy finished. “Too bad; Custer we could have handled.”

 
          
Kirby
looked about, shaking his head. “I hate this,” he said, “but we’ve got to
dismantle it.”

 
          
“Shit,”
said Luz.

 
          
Everybody
looked concerned. Tommy said, “Forever?”

 
          
“Christ,
I hope not.” Kirby sighed, gazing upon his masterpiece. “But at least until the
fuss dies down. She’ll come back here with a lot of people, she’ll point, but
there’s nothing here. With luck, everybody says she’s crazy.”

 
          
“It’s
her period,” Luz suggested.

 
          
“Exactly,”
Kirby said. “We wait a while, it blows over, we start up again.”

 
          
“Maybe,”
said Tommy.

 
          
Adversity
made Kirby philosophical. “M
aybe he's
the best we can hope for in this sad world, boys,” he said.

 
          
“The
alternative,” the skinny black man said reasonably, “was to let her tell
everybody about the temple.”

 
          
“So
you brought her here?”
Vernon
demanded.

 
          
Here
was a small loggers’ cabin above the Sibun Gorge, a deep narrow winding groove
through the
Maya
Mountains
, gouged out over the millenia by the busy
Sibun
River
. The cabin itself, low and slant- roofed,
like a lean-to, was 30 years old or more, rank with mildew and the sweet smell
of rotting things. Dirt-floored, lacking any furniture, it was built of
horizontal pine-slabs nailed to upright posts pounded into the ground.
Apparently it had once been half its present size, just one room, but then a
second room was added, making the original front wall a dividing wall. There
were no windows in either room, but plenty of air circulated through the uneven
cracks between slabs. From the outside the place looked like the log cabin on a
maple syrup label, but inside it looked like the attic in your grandmother’s
house after she moved out. The logcutters who had built this rough shelter had
long ago departed, on to other parts of the forest, and in the intervening
years it had been occupied only rarely, by hunters or fugitives or lovers. And
now by kidnappers and their victim.

 
          
“Where
else?” the skinny black man demanded, giving
Vernon
a challenging look. Clearly, he had
expected praise for his initiative, not all this carping. “Not to
my
house,” he went on. “Should I have
taken her to your place?”

 
          
“She
can identify you anyway,”
Vernon
pointed out.

 
          
“Not
if she never sees me again. I can just disappear for a while, it’s happened
before.”

 
          
“Well,
I can’t,”
Vernon
said. “I have a job to protect.”

 
          
“Tied
down by things,” the skinny black man commented, with the smug superiority of
the ne’endo^well.

 
          
“All
right, all right,”
Vernon
said, struggling to subdue his fury. The thing to do was accept the
situation, he told himself, as he paced back and forth past the open doorway,
where gnats and dust motes practiced football plays in a shaft of orange
sunlight. Lord, give me the strength to change that which can be changed, he
thought, the patience to live with that which cannot be changed, and the wisdom
to tell the difference. Lord, he thought, I’m up to my ass in
shit
, Lord!

 
          
Too
many things going on, too much happening. Now he was somehow responsible for
the kidnapping of an American woman, which would probably become an
international incident, with the Sixth Fleet making a show of strength off St.
Georges Caye and U.S. Marines walking around
Belize City
giving people chewing gum.

 
          
(Earlier
in this century, after the world market in mahogany faltered, chicle, being the
latex sap of the sapodilla tree, used in the making of chewing gum, became for
a while Belize’s primary export to the United States.)

 
          
There
was no furniture in this place, no objects but an unlit candle stuck in a beer
bottle in one corner, nothing to kick but the pine^slab walls. Punching his own
thighs, Vernon paced back and forth, thinking many different thoughts, until
the skinny black man said, easily, “If you’re that worried about her, we can
always ...” He drew a line with his finger across his throat.

 
          
That
was it,
that
was the thought
Vernon
had been avoiding and denying, circling
around and around. In his mind and in his heart, he had committed many, many
murders over the years, both of individuals and of groups, but out on the
griddle of reality he had never even hit anybody very hard. Was this what a
decisive man would do at this juncture? Just shoot the woman right off the—

 
          
He
didn’t have a gun.

 
          
All
right, stab her just as quick as—

 
          
He
didn’t have a knife with him, either, except his imitation Swiss Army knife
(imitation! how that galled!), which might eventually do the job, but not with
one clean quick
slice
.

 
          
All
right, all right, strangle the goddam . . .

 
          
He
looked down at his hands. He imagined a face between them, gargling. The eyes
get bigger and bigger, red veins standing out on the whites. The tongue
protrudes from the begging mouth, growing thicker, flopping like a red fish.
The feeble fingers grope in agony at his hands. Drool pours from the mouth,
snot oozes from the nostrils, the eyes bulge as though they would explode like
grapes, the flesh turns mottled, purple . . .

 
          
Vernon
thought he might be sick.

 
          
“Well?”
said the skinny black man.

 
          
Vernon
swallowed, looking out the open doorway at
the heavy jungle and the fading day. “Uhhhh,” he said. “We’ll decide that
later. First I have to question her.”

 
          
“About
what?”

 
          
“About
the
temple!”
Vernon
spun around, furious again. “Was that
really and truly
Galway
’s land?”

 
          
“Looked
that way on the map.
She
seemed to
think it was. And the temple was there.”

 
          
“You
saw it. You saw the temple.”

 
          
“I
told you already, I saw a hill with some rocks on it. Come on, man, make a
decision.”

 
          
The
loneliness of command.
Vernon
bit his cheeks, he punched his knuckles together. All at once, it
occurred to him, like a light shining from heaven, that he wouldn’t actually
himself have to do the, uh, crime personally. Leaving here tonight, he could
simply say (out of the comer of his mouth), “Take care of her,” and his
partner, untroubled by conscience, unaffected by imagination, unthinking of
consequence, would do the dirty deed.

 
          
“What
do you want,
Vernon
?”

 
          
Vernon
looked at the closed door to the inner
room. The partition having originally been an exterior wall, it was still
covered with bark, and the pine-slab door itself was thick and solid. It opened
inward, but there was a rusty old hasp lock fixed in place with a broken-off
piece of branch. “I’d better go question her now,” he decided, and sighed.

 
          
Taking
the pillowcase from his pocket, he slowly and deliberately unfolded it, then
slipped it over his head. It was a yellow pillowcase with a large sunny flower
design; the eyeholes so he could see had been cut into the center of two
daisies.

 
          
“Take
the candle,” the skinny black man advised. “It’s dark in there.”

 
          
So
Vernon lit the candle in the beer bottle, the skinny black man undid the hasp
and opened the door—a scurrying sound came from within—and Vernon stepped
through into the other room, peering through the damn eyeholes, stumbling a bit
because he couldn’t see his feet. Behind him, the door was closed, the hasp
lock rasped.

 
          
Valerie
Greene stood tall—very tall—against the rear wall, arms at her sides, chin up
in a posture of defiance. “You won’t get away with this!” she cried.

 
          
“I’ve
already gotten away with it,”
Vernon
told her, sneering a bit. (He’d seen the
same movies.)

 
          
“When
I get out of here—”

 
          
“I’ll
you get out of here,” he said, and was gratified to see her blanch a bit, one
hand lifting, fingers curled, the knuckles just touching her chin. “All you
have to do,” he told her, “is cooperate.”

 
          
Her
eyes flashed. “What does
that
mean?”

 
          
“Oh,
don’t worry,” he said, scornful and superior, “I have no designs on your
maidenly virtue. I know how important that is to you Americans.”

 
          
“You
do?” In the flickering candlelight her expression was difficult to read.

 
          
“I
am here,” he said, “to talk about the temple.”

 
          
“Despoliation!”
She took an aggressive step forward, almost as though to launch herself at him.
“You, a Belizean, and you don’t care
what
happens to your own
heritage
!”

 
          
“What
makes you think I’m a Belizean?” he asked, trying on a
Texas
accent.

 
          
“Oh,
don’t be silly,” she said. “I know who you are.”

 
          
“You
may
think
you know—”

           
“There is one thing I wish you’d
tell me,” she said.

 
          
This
interview was getting out of control—now
she
was questioning
him
—but there seemed
no way to get back to the original path: “Yes?” “Is
Vernon
your first name or your last?”

 
          
Behind
the door, someone snickered. She heard us talking! Dammit, dammit, through all
these cracks in the wall.
Vernon
said, in a stageTrish accent, “It is none of me names. You can’t see me
face, you can’t identify me voice, you can’t prove a thing.”

 
          
“We’ll
see about that,” she said, and folded her arms beneath her proud bosom.

 
          
“Listen,”
he said, stepping closer, “you talk about heritage, but what do you think Kirby
Galway’s doing up there? He’s
selling
stuff!” “That makes you no better.”

 
          
“All
right,”
Vernon
said. “I’ll tell you the truth. I am
Belizean.” “Of course you are, I know that.”

 
          
“I
want to rescue the temple from Kirby Galway,”
Vernon
went on, looking guiltless and pure-minded
under the pillowcase, “so I can protect it for my people.”

 
          
“Oh,
no, you don’t,” she said, “or you wouldn’t lock me up in here. You and
Innocent
St. Michael. Boy! Was I ever
taken in by your boss!” Oh, ho,
Vernon
thought, she thinks St. Michael’s part of
this scheme. That’s good; somehow or other, it’s good. He said, “Never mind all
that. The point is, that
was
Galway
’s land you went to, is that right?”

 
          
“Of
course it was,” she said. “The temple’s just where I said it was, all along,
and
you
were wrong with your drainage
and faults and all that.”