Donald Westlake - High Adventure

“Belize?” hazarded Kirby.

“Precisely! Coming up out of Belize now, there are pre-Columbian artifacts, jade figures, carvings, gold jewelry, that are just astonishing. Wonderful. Unbelievable.”

“Well, now, I wonder,” Kirby said thoughtfully, baiting the hook. “On my land down in Belize there’s—”

“Mayan?” said an assertive female voice. “Did I hear someone say Mayan?”

It was the girl, introducing herself, inserting herself, spoiling Kirby’s aim just as he was releasing the arrow. Damn pest. As annoyed as any fisherman at the arrival of a loud and careless intruder, Kirby turned to see an unusually tall young woman in her middle 20s, perhaps only two or three inches shorter than Kirby’s six feet two. She was attractive, if sharp-featured, with a long oval face and straight hair- colored hair and eyes that flashed with commitment. Her paisley blouse and long abundant skirt and brown leather boots all seemed just a few years out of date, but Kirby could see that the heavy figured-silver chain around her neck was Mexican and the large loop earrings she wore were Central American, probably Guatemalan, native handicraft. He sensed trouble. Damn and hell, he thought.

Whitman Lemuel, obviously finding the presence of a good-looking young woman taller than himself an even more exciting prospect than the thought of long-dead Mayans, was welcoming her happily into their enclave, saying, “Yes, are you interested in that culture? We were just talking about Belize.”

“I haven’t been there yet,” she said. “I want to go. I did my postgraduate work at the Royal Museum at Vancouver, classifying materials from Guyana.”

“You’re an anthropologist, then?” Lemuel asked, while Kirby silently fretted.

“Archaeologist,” the pest answered.

“Slim pickings from Guyana, I should think,” Lemuel commented. “But, ah, Belize now—”

“Despoliation!” she said, eyes shooting sparks.

Kirby had never heard anyone use that word in conversation before. He gazed at her with new respect and redoubled loathing.

Lemuel had blinked at the word, as well he might. Then he said, doubtfully, “I’m not really sure I...”

“Do you know what they’re doing down there in Belize?” demanded the pest. “All those Mayan cities, ancient sites, completely unprotected there in the jungle—”

“For a thousand years or more,” Kirby said gently.

“But now, ” the pest said, “the things buried in them are suddenly valuable. Thugs, graverobbers, are going in there, tearing structures apart—”

This was the worst. Kirby couldn’t believe such bad luck, to have this conversation at such a moment. “Oh, it isn’t that bad,” he said, determinedly interrupting her, and attempted to veer them all away in another direction by introducing what ought to be a sure-fire new topic of conversation: “What worries me down there is the war in El Salvador. The way things are going—”

But she wasn’t to be that easy to deflect. “Oh, that,” she said, dismissing it all with a colt-like shake of her head. “The war . That’ll be over in one or two generations, but the destruction of irreplaceable Mayan sites is forever. The Belizean government does what it can, but they lack staff and funds. And meanwhile, unscrupulous dealers and museum directors in the United States—”

Oh, God. Please make her stop, God.

But it was too late. Lemuel, looking like a man who’s just had a bug fly into his mouth, stood fiddling with his bow tie and shifting from foot to foot. “Well, my drink, umm,” he said. “My glass seems to be empty. You’ll both excuse me?”

Now, that was unfair. The girl wasn’t Kirby’s fault, and it was really very bad of Lemuel to lump them together like that and march off. It meant Kirby had no polite choice but to stay, at least for a minute or two, and if he did manage to make contact with Lemuel again this evening it would be more difficult to get to the point of his sales pitch in a natural way.

Meanwhile, the girl seemed just as content to deliver her diatribe to an audience of one. “My name is Valerie Greene,” she said. She extended a slim long-fingered hand for Kirby to either bite or shake.

He shook the damn thing. “Kirby Galway,” he said. “It’s been very—”

“Did I hear you say you live in Belize now?”

“That’s right.”

“And are you an archaeologist, by any chance?”

“No, I’m afraid not.” Then, because Valerie Greene’s bright-bird eyes kept looking expectantly at him, he was forced to go on and explain himself: “I’m a rancher. Or, that is, I will be. I’m accumulating land down there. At the moment, I’m a charter pilot.”

“What company do you work for?”

“I have my own plane.”

“Then you must be aware,” she said, “of the pillaging that is taking place on archaeological sites in Belize.”

“I’ve seen some things in the paper,” he acknowledged.

“I think it’s terrible,” she said.

“I think so, too,” he murmured, watching Whitman Lemuel recede not toward the bar but toward the door.

Terrible. But not fatal, he consoled himself, not necessarily fatal. In fact, Lemuel’s obvious unease when artifact theft was mentioned simply confirmed Kirby’s belief that the man was a definite prospect. If Kirby failed to hook him tonight, there would always be another time, in New York or in Duluth or somewhere. Today was January 10th, so there were still almost three weeks before he was due to return to Belize; plenty of time to find two or three Whitman Lemuels. And in any event, he already had a couple of fish on the line.

“The people who do that sort of thing,” Valerie Greene was saying, continuing doggedly and blindly to plow her own narrow field, “have no sense of shame.”

“Oh, I agree,” Kirby said, watching the white-painted fire door close behind Whitman Lemuel’s back. “I couldn’t agree more. Well, goodbye,” he said, smiled with sheathed hatred, and walked away.

Pest.

On a bright sunny afternoon in early February, the temperature 82 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale, a man named Innocent St. Michael drove out from Belize City to Belize International Airport to watch the plane from Miami land. His lunch — with a fellow civil servant and a sugar farmer from up Orange Walk way and a chap interested in starting a television station — sat easily under his ribs, eased down with Belikin beer and a good cigar. The air conditioning in his dark green Ford LTD breathed its icy breath on his happy round face. His white shirt was open at the throat, his tan cotton suit was not very wrinkled yet at all, and in the cool of the car he could still smell the sweet tangs of both his aftershave and his pomade. How nice life is, how nice.

Innocent had been graced by God with 57 years of this nice life so far, and no immediate end in sight. A man who loved food and drink, adored women, wallowed in ease and luxury, he was barrel-bodied but in wonderful physical condition, with a heart that could have powered a steamship. The efforts of assorted Mayan Indians, Spanish conquistadores, African ex-slaves, and shipwrecked Irish sailors had been combined in his creation, and most of them might have been pleased at the result of their labors. His hair was African, his mocha skin Mayan, his courage Irish, and the deviousness of his brain was all Spanish. He was also — and this is far from insignificant — both Deputy Director of Land Allocation in the Belizean government and an active real estate agent. Very nice.

The road out from Belize City to the International Airport is somewhat better maintained than most of the thoroughfares in that nation, and Innocent sprawled comfortably on the seat, two thick fingers resting negligently on the steering wheel. He honked as he drove past the whorehouse, and the girls at the clothesline waved, recognizing the car. A moment later he turned left onto the airport road.