Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (37 page)

 
          
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.

 
          
“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.

 
          
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
“VaaaalllLe
rie,” 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.”

 
          
Innocent’s
agitated face suddenly cleared, as though a storm over a pond had gone, leaving
the surface smooth and blank. Even his eyes showed nothing as he said, “A deal,
Kirby? What sort of deal?” “Buy that land back,” Kirby said.

 
          
“Why?”

 
          
“Buy
it back for exactly what I paid you, and I’ll tell you the full honest truth
about Valerie Greene
and
the temple.”

 
          
“Lava
Sxir
Yt
.”

 
          
“Oh,
you know its name, do you?” Kirby said, and smiled his admiration.

 
          
Very
faintly Innocent frowned. “That’s not a deal,” he decided. “It is if we shake
on it.”

 
          
Innocent
considered. He glanced over at the blighted hilltop. He studied Kirby. He said,
“The truth, Kirby? How much of the truth?”

           
“I’ll answer every question you
ask, as long as you keep asking.”

           
“Then I’ll have the land
and
your con, whatever it is, and the
truth about Valerie.”

 
          
“That’s
right.”

 
          
Again
Innocent considered. “There were some expenses involved in the land transfer,”
he said.

 
          
“You
eat them.”

 
          
“Hmmm.”
Innocent brooded, and then faintly smiled. “I’ll never know what the trick is
until I say yes, will I?”

 
          
“It’s
up to you, Innocent.” Kirby maintained a poker face, tried not to even
think
about anything. The instant
Innocent had mentioned the temple, Kirby had known the scam was doomed, it was
about to become necessary to move on to something else. But here was a way to
get out of it whole, get his money back and get rid of that scabrous hill,
trade it all for a live girl and a dead racket. Not bad. Only don’t think about
it yet, don’t let it cross your mind. It wouldn’t surprise Kirby if Innocent
were telepathic.

 
          
At
last Innocent nodded. “All right,” he said. “You have a deal.” He put his hand
out.

 
          
“Fine.”
Permitting himself only the tiniest of smiles, Kirby took Innocent’s hand and
they both squeezed down hard to seal the pact.

 
          
“You!”
cried a familiar voice.

 
          
They
turned, hands separating, and watched Valerie Greene leap with unconscious
grace across the stream and come running toward them. Flushed, out of breath,
quite dirty, somewhat ripped and tom, hair a mare’s nest, she was rather
astonishingly beautiful. Stopping in front of Kirby, chest heaving, hands on
hips, she cried, “I know how bad you are, I know you’re a terrible person, but
nevertheless you’re the only one I can turn to. Innocent people are going to be
massacred, and
you
have to help!”

 
          
“Sure,
lady,” Kirby said.

 
          
Valerie
Greene turned to frown in bewilderment at Innocent. Still on his feet though
sagging, open-mouthed, glassy-eyed, shallow of breath, he seemed to be doing a
Raggedy Andy imitation. “What’s the matter with him?” she said.

 
          
“He
just bought the farm,” Kirby told her.