Donald Westlake - High Adventure

“Yes, well,” the young man said, with a here-and-gone smile. “The Deputy Director isn’t quite here yet.”

“Oh,” said Valerie.

The young man looked bright-eyed, saying, “I’m the Deputy’s deputy, as it were, his Senior Secretary. Vernon is my name; perhaps I could be of help?”

Wondering if Vernon were his first or last name, Valerie said, “Well, I did want to talk to Mr. St. Michael about exploring some land.”

“Oh, yes, Mayan temples,” Vernon said, nodding, patting his palms together, silently applauding one or the other of them, perhaps both. “I recall replying to one of your letters. Fascinating things, computers. I have a great interest in them myself.”

“It’s mostly the Mayan temples I care about,” Valerie said.

“Yes. If you could tell me the area of your interest, I could have the proper surveys, maps, whatever you’ll need, out of the files and on tap when the Deputy Director arrives.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” Valerie said. Opening her attaché case on his desk, she brought out her own maps, first the large one of the general area, then the smaller one with the specific target site. She pointed, describing this and that, and he nodded, frowning, moving the maps slightly by grasping their very edges between the tips of thumb and finger. “Right there, ” she said at last, pinning down the putative temple beneath her thumb.

“Oh, yes, I see where you are,” he said. When she lifted her thumb he moved the map again, infinitesimally, raising his head to look down across his cheekbones, pursing his lips. “But that’s,” he said, shaking his head. “No, no, that’s no good.”

“It’s there, I mean,” Valerie said, poking the map once more.

“Yes, I see that, I see what you have in mind,” he said, “but it’s not possible. You won’t find any temples there .”

“Oh, I’m certain I shall,” Valerie said, becoming more formal in the face of opposition, wondering why this fellow was making trouble. She had heard that some Third-World people wouldn’t cooperate unless they were given a bribe or a tip; did this Vernon want money? Theoretically she understood the concept, didn’t even have any true objection, but in real life she had never actually bribed anyone, and she found herself now too embarrassed to make the attempt. “I’m certain it’s there,” she insisted, thinking that Mr. St. Michael, when he arrived, would be above such petty money schemes.

“But it can’t be, Miss Greene, I’m sorry,” Vernon said. Moving across the room, he gestured to her to follow, pointing at a large map on the side wall and saying, “Let me show you on this topographical map.”

A bit reluctantly, she crossed to stand beside him and watch his slender fingers move across the map. “Here is your site,” he said. “You see how the higher land is around your land on three sides?”

“The mountains, yes,” Valerie said. “It’s just where the mountains start that we’ll find our settlement.”

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, blinking at her somewhat owlishly, looking far too earnest to be interested in bribes. “Something the map does not show,” he said, his fingers moving, “is an underground fault that runs along just about here, under your site and east, coming out in these two streams down here and this one over here. Now, the situation is,” he said, taking a professorial stance, nodding at her, “all of these first line of mountains here drain down through your parcel of land, all of them. It is the narrow end of the funnel, you see, the bottleneck in the watershed.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” Valerie confessed. (She had now come to the conclusion that he was, however misguided, essentially serious.)

“What I’m getting at is,” he said, “in the rainy season, in the wet six months of the year, this is all swamp through here, bog, simply impassable. There’s no way to change it, not the sluice at the bottom of an entire watershed.” Then, chuckling a bit, his pointing fingers making an arc westward of her site, he said, “Oh, I suppose a billion dollars to put a dam across here between these mountains might help a little, but even so it wouldn’t work, you’d still have ground seepage, all these other mountains draining. So you see the difficulty; for six months of the year, total swamp.”

“But the Mayans specialized in clearing swamp,” Valerie objected. “Along the coast, there are evidences of milpa farming two thousand years ago where now it’s all swamp again.”

“The Mayans never tried to divert the runoff from eleven mountains,” Vernon said drily. “But even so, there’s the other problem, the underground fault. Without it, your site would be perfectly fine, it would contain perhaps Belize’s only lake, but as things are the land can’t retain the water, it all just runs right through, to these two streams and that one. So, for the dry six months of the year, the swamp becomes almost a desert. No lake, no water, nothing will grow, nothing at all can exist there.” Tapping the map with his hard fingernails, he said, “No, I’m sorry, Miss Greene, this is the one parcel of land in all Belize where not even the Mayans ever lived.”

Valerie, despite herself, was a bit daunted by what he had said, but she did have the computer results to buoy her, and the faith of the two New York foundations, and the results of her own study, so she said, “I’m sorry, um—” not knowing whether to call him Vernon or Mister Vernon , therefore calling him um instead of either “—but I really want to go see the place for myself.”

“Of course, that’s your privilege,” Vernon said, smiling at her to show it was no skin off his nose. “In fact,” he said, “if you were to go there now, just today, the area would look very nice indeed. The rainy season ended a few weeks ago and the water is still draining away, so the vegetation hasn’t all died yet but the ground is dry.”

“I would like to see the place,” Valerie said firmly, aware of the office door opening behind her, “and as soon as possible.”

“Ah, here’s the Deputy Director now,” Vernon said, smiling, gesturing for Valerie to turn about and look.

The man she saw was an inch or two shorter than herself, barrel-bodied, older than 50, with tightly curled black hair, skin the color of milk chocolate, eyes and teeth that flashed with pleasure at the sight of her, and a strong aura of self-confidence, mastery. Without being offensive about it, he would dominate any room he entered.

As he dominated this one, approaching Valerie, thick-fingered hand out to be shaken as Vernon performed the introductions: “Deputy Director St. Michael, this is Miss Valerie Greene, an archaeologist from the United States.”

“Delighted,” St. Michael said, closing her hand briefly in both of his. (His hands were warm, not unpleasantly so.)

“You recall, Deputy Director,” Vernon was saying, “the correspondence concerning undiscovered Mayan ruins, possibly to be traced by computers at the University of California at Los Angeles.”

“Yes, of course.” St. Michael beamed at her, as though he’d just this minute invented her. “Miss Greene, of course. And how is Los Angeles?”

“Actually,” Valerie said, “I came here from New York.”

“Ah, New York! I love that town.” St. Michael’s beam turned reminiscent, then waggish. “Cold up there right now,” he said, “but give me a New York restaurant any day. Even in January. Has Vernon been helpful?” (Which didn’t help much in the first-name-last-name question.)

“Very,” she said. “Though he has been trying to discourage me.”

“Oh, I hope not.” St. Michael waggled a finger at Vernon, saying, “Never discourage our friends from the north.”