Donald Westlake - High Adventure

She could always tell when she was behaving badly in that fashion; men walked away from her. In the normal course of events, men walked toward her, but when she was carrying on about her crusade they walked away from her. That night in New York, at that party— Why, that poor man had probably thought she was accusing him of stealing ancient treasures!

Oh, she thought, I do hope he doesn’t recognize me.

“Miss,” Feldspan said, to the passing waitress, “may I have another Gibson, please?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Gerry, are you crazy?”

Valerie’s chicken was placed in front of her. She ducked her head to eat it, hoping the man across the way was too absorbed in his magazine to look around and recognize her.

Lemuel, wiping his messy hands, waved the napkin at the wrong waitress, who sent him the right waitress. “Check, please.”

“No dessert? We have ice cream, cheesecake—”

“No, please, just the check.”

“Nice tropical fruit, very—”

“Just the check, please.”

“No coffee?”

“Check!”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Alan, give me the room key.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to throw up.”

“Gerry, you’re just too emotional.”

Lemuel, blinking, watched one of the drug dealers leave the restaurant and the other one stay. It’s a pincer movement, he thought. One is in front of me now, and the other behind me. His mind filled with visions of what might happen when he opened his room door. Why hadn’t he asked for his check earlier, or just simply left the restaurant at the beginning, no matter what they thought?

“Miss, my friend and I were wondering if we could buy you an after-dinner drink?”

Valerie looked up at the tractor-tire salesman and smiled. She had seen Lemuel ask for his check, and she knew her ordeal would soon be over. “No, thank you,” she said. “But I do appreciate the thought.”

The waitress brought Feldspan’s last Gibson, and looked at the empty chair. “I knew these things wouldn’t help,” she said.

“That’s all right,” Witcher told her. “Just leave it, I’ll find something to do with it.”

“Will your friend be back?”

“I trust not.”

She picked up the plate of barely-touched shrimp. “Shall I put these in a bag for you?”

“Good God, no.”

Lemuel signed his check. I can’t go to the room, he thought, not by myself. I’ll tell the desk clerk I’m having trouble with the air conditioner and insist on a bellboy to come with me and look at it. If no one’s there, I’ll just lock myself in for the night. And I’ll stay in the room until Galway comes to pick me up tomorrow to take me to the temple. And now I know I never should have involved myself with a man like that in the first place.

Valerie was so pleased to see Lemuel get up to leave that she almost changed her mind and said yes to the tractor-tire salesman after all.

Witcher watched Lemuel go by, noticing the grim set to the mobster’s jaw. Most likely, the man did suspect something, and he’d moved to that other chair to warn them to mind their own business. Well, they certainly would mind their own business, wouldn’t they? And tomorrow morning they would get on the plane and leave this place.

Lemuel felt Witcher’s eyes burning into his back as he left the room.

Valerie asked for tropical fruit for dessert.

Witcher, knowing that Feldspan would have disgustingly passed out in the room by now, dawdled over the final Gibson, but eventually he signed the check and departed.

“Thank you,” Valerie said to the waitress as she left. “It was a lovely dinner.”

When the sun rose, Innocent St. Michael stepped nude from his house, smiled, stretched, walked across the cool dew-damp lawn (emerald green, aglisten in the orange birth of day), and then over the cool terracotta tiles to the pool’s edge. There was only the faintest of breezes, turning the water into pale blue-green brushed chrome. “Nice,” Innocent murmured, and dove like a dolphin into the water, swimming strongly beneath the surface to the far end, where he burst up into the air like a walrus blowing, releasing breath with an exuberant, “PAH!” and shaking water drops from his hair in a great fan around his head.

Ten laps in the pool; rest a while, floating; ten more laps. Meantime, the sun rose higher in the eastern sky, the vault of heaven lightened from charcoal gray through smudged ivory to palest blue, and the St. Michael house began to stir with activity.

It was a large house, though not as large as its model, Monticello. Three stories high, broad, white, pillared, the house stood on a broad knob of hill, facing north. The pool behind the house was in sun all day, though shade trees were handy to both sides. Within the house were Innocent’s wife Francesca and their four daughters: Elizabeth, Margaret, Catherine, and Patricia. All now in their teens, they were a lot of little prigs, raving feminists who utterly disapproved of their father. Well, he had wanted respectability, and the detestation of one’s children was apparently one of the prices to be paid.

The house also contained several servants, one of whom — the stout motherly sort that Francesca preferred — came out as he was finishing his laps. She laid a snowy white terrycloth towel and a clean fluffy terrycloth robe of Virgin Mary blue on one of the wrought iron white chairs beside the pool. “Good morning, sir,” she said to Innocent’s passing churning form in the water, and returned to the house.

Innocent ate with a good appetite, under the censorious glares of Margaret and Patricia, then dressed in seersucker and a wide-collared white shirt, kissed short, fat Francesca goodby, spoke cheerfully to a sullen Catherine, and went whistling to his car, which had been buffed clean since he’d last driven it yesterday. His house, on a private road north of the Western Highway, between the ranches of Beaver Dam and Never Delay, gave ready access to both Belmopan to the west and Belize City to the east. This morning, he turned east.

He listened to the tape for the third time on the drive to Belize, occasionally stopping the recorder, running it back, listening to a sentence again, sometimes listening to one bit several times. For instance, the point early on where Kirby said, “I bought this land as an investment. Good potential for grazing, as you can see.” Good potential for grazing was word for word what Innocent had said to Kirby when selling him that parcel. And what other land did Kirby own? None. So it had to be the same.

But on the other hand, it couldn’t be. Innocent knew damn well what was and wasn’t there, and it didn’t include any goddam Mayan temple. Another sentence he listened to a lot was Feldspan’s, “Look! A paving block! This has been shaped !” Then Kirby says that nonsense about checking with the government — he never had, of course — adding, “everybody said there’s just no Mayan cities or temples or anything at all like that in this area. They said it’s all been studied and checked out, and there’s just nothing here.”

Well, if the conversation were taking place on the land Innocent had sold to Kirby, “everybody” was absolutely right. But Kirby’s statement was immediately followed by Witcher’s breathed, heartfelt, awed, “They’re wrong.”

Then the next bit was also a problem. Feldspan: “What’s the name of this place?” Kirby: “Probably nobody for a thousand years has known the name of this temple. The Indians around here call this hill Lava Sxir Yt.” Then he carefully spelled it.

Lava Sxir Yt? There was no such place. Innocent would have some friends check among the up-country Indians, but he doubted they’d find anything. It was just some goddam exotic-sounding name Kirby had made up, that’s all. His own personal private Shangri-la.