Donald Westlake - High Adventure

They were in one of the small houses in Belmopan’s sterile residential area. At the restaurant, Innocent had excused himself to make a phone call, then had driven her here in his large green Ford LTD with the icy air conditioning. “I know there’s nobody home,” he’d said. “Belongs to a friend of mine.” The bedroom was small, filled by its double bed, the perimeter cluttered with laundry and books and magazines.

Marcia Ettinger, an older woman at the Royal Museum at Vancouver, had warned her about this, she really had. “You want to be careful,” she’d said. “There’s something that happens to young single women the first time they’re in a really foreign place all by themselves. It’s as though all restraints are gone, none of the rules matter any more, and you find yourself going to bed with the first man who asks you.” Valerie had pooh-poohed that, of course: “I’m my own person,” she’d said. “I make my own decisions.”

Had she made this decision? Smiling, stretching the other way — right toe through arching waist to left wrist — she told herself the decision had been a good one, no matter who had made it. At the very least, she would endorse it.

Innocent came back, water beads sparkling coolly in his hair. He was smiling — he was always smiling, wasn’t he? — and when he sat on the bed he bent over to kiss her left nipple. “What a big girl you are,” he said.

“I was always tall.” She knew her capability for small talk was minimal, and hoped she would improve with time and experience.

Experience.

“Unfortunately,” Innocent said, “we can’t stay here forever.”

“No.” Valerie sat up, looking around. “I suppose the person who lives here will come back after a while.”

“Not with my car in the driveway,” Innocent said.

The encounter suddenly took on an unpleasant public aspect. “I’ll get dressed,” she decided, rising from the bed.

He patted her rump. “Tomorrow morning, very early,” he said, “I’ll have a Land Rover and a driver pick you up at your hotel back in Belize and drive you out to that land you want to see.”

“Thank you.” Sudden doubt, insecurity, awkwardness, made her say, “He — the driver. He won’t know about this, will he?”

Alarmed, concerned, almost shocked, Innocent bounded to his feet with a surprising agility. “Valerie, Valerie!” he cried, holding her elbows, his manner totally serious for the first time since she had met him. “We aren’t enemies! I would never embarrass you, humiliate you!”

“But you tell everybody everything, don’t you?”

Releasing her, he said, “You mean Susie, at the restaurant?” He grinned, relaxing, a happy bear, shaking his head. “When I have lunch there with a businessman,” he said, “or someone from the government, do you think I tell him, a man, ‘I had that waitress?’ What would Susie do to me?”

“Pour your lunch on your head,” Valerie suggested.

Innocent laughed. “You misunderstand Susie,” he said. “She would stick a knife in my neck.”

Valerie believed him. He would preen in front of women, but not in front of other men. It made him somehow more likeable, and at the same time more juvenile. “All right,” she said.

While Valerie visited the tiny rust-spotted bathroom, Innocent dressed and went out to start the car, so that when Valerie was ready to leave she entered a vehicle already well chilled. Innocent got behind the wheel, patted her knee in fond familiarity, and said, “If you can wait half an hour, I’ll drive you back to Belize.”

“But my taxi is waiting.”

“Oh, I already paid him off and sent him away.” Steering toward the clumped government buildings, he said, “Now, tomorrow, you pay good close attention to everything you see, and I’ll be in Belize when you get back.”

“All right.”

Again he patted her knee. “Good rooms at the Fort George,” he said. “Air-conditioned. Very nice.”

“Oh, dear,” Gerry said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”

Alan had spread the blue trunks and the silver-and red trunks on the bed, side by side, and stood back, knuckles under chin, trying to decide which to wear for their dip in the pool. Now he looked over at Gerry, who was frowning into his open dresser drawer. “Lose something?”

“The recorder was moved.”

“You put it in there yourself,” Alan said, misunderstanding. “I saw you.”

“I put it under the leather vest,” Gerry said. “I very specifically remember doing that, because the black case of the recorder would be less noticeable under black leather.”

Alan, a faint vertical frown line forming between his brows, came over to stand beside Gerry and also look into the open drawer. Both men were naked; in the blue-tinted wide mirror above the dresser they looked like a rather crude parody of Greek temple sculpture. Alan said, “Are you sure?”

“A l -an,” Gerry said, which was what he always said when he felt Alan was insulting his intelligence, which was what he felt rather frequently. “I already told you.”

The leather vest was folded neatly on the left. Gerry had turned back the little stack of ironed white T-shirts, and there was his recorder. Alan said, his voice a little scared, “Is anything missing?”

“My jewelry’s still here.” Picking up the recorder, Gerry turned it around and said, “The tape’s still in it.”

“The same tape?”

“Oh, my gosh.” Gerry pushed PLAY. After an interminable period of faint shushing sounds, Kirby Galway’s voice said, “This way, gentlemen. Watch out for snakes.” Sighing with relief, Gerry pushed OFF and then REWIND.

Alan looked over at his own recorder, on the bed with his crumpled lunchtime clothes. “We’ll have to find a better hiding place,” he said.

“But they didn’t take anything,” Gerry said, putting the recorder under the leather vest. He looked fretful.

“The maid, maybe,” Alan suggested. “Just interested in something new, to look at it.”

“I don’t know,” Gerry said. “Maybe this isn’t such a fun idea, after all.”

“We can’t chicken out now,” Alan told him. “Hiram would just simply laugh us to scorn.”

“It seemed a lot different in New York,” Gerry said, taking out his ecru fishnet trunks and stepping into them. “Here, it’s getting scary.”

“Well, we did promise,” Alan said. “And we’ve started, we’re here, so we might as well go ahead and finish. You ready for the pool?”

Gerry said, “ I’m not the one with his little thingies hanging out.”

So Alan chose the silver-and-red trunks and put them on, while Gerry went over to look out the window to see if the pool were still unoccupied. “Alan!” he said, a shrill whisper.

“Now what?”

Alan joined him at the window, and they looked down through the louvers at the pool, beside which two men were standing; Kirby, fully dressed, as they’d last seen him at lunch, and a man in a very large yellow boxer-type swimsuit. This man was middle-aged and round-shouldered, very pale in the tropical sun, with a round pot belly, a round balding head, and very large round dark sunglasses. He stood with hands on hips; despite being older, and physically out of shape, and a bit foolish-looking in those great ballooning trunks, he gave off an aura of self-assurance and command. There seemed to be a vague echo down there of old movie scenes of Italian mobsters conferring in the local steambath; not Gerry and Alan’s kind of steambath, the other kind.

“The drug dealer!” Gerry whispered.

They watched Kirby and the man confer, both of them intent and serious. The drug dealer seemed irritated by something, Kirby placating and reassuring him. The awareness that this was a man who could order a murder with a snap of his fingers seemed to send a ripple of chill breeze across the blue pool water.