Donald Westlake - High Adventure

The vehicle, this peach-colored topless Land Rover, was a perfect match for the driver. It too was all hard edges and businesslike bluntness. What the driver lacked in politesse, the Land Rover lacked in springs. The driver’s absence of small talk and common courtesy was echoed in the Land Rover’s uncushioned gray metal seats. The driver’s skinniness and blackness found their counterpart in the Land Rover’s metal and tubing, painted the colors of an aircraft carrier’s corridor. Peach and gray, heavily rusted, rough to the touch.

Valerie felt unwanted emotion rising within her. She wasn’t exactly sure why it was that girls weren’t supposed to do things “like a girl” — throw a ball like a girl, cry at every little thing like a girl — but she did know that was the rule, and so she fought down the tremulousness that frustration had built within her. Only the tiniest bit of it showed when she said, “I thought we could stop for lunch along that road. There’s supposed to be a really beautiful little stream there.”

“That’s what flooded,” the driver said. “Besides, there’s no stores down that way.”

“I have food.” Valerie gestured back at her canvas bag, now bounding around like a basketball in the storage well. “I had the hotel make some sandwiches,” she explained. “Plenty for both of us.”

“You still have to buy beer.”

“I don’t want beer,” Valerie said.

“I do.”

Valerie stared at him, while several sentences crowded into her brain, beginning, Well, I never — and, Of all the — and, If your superiors — What kept all those sentences incomplete and unspoken was the driver’s absolute self-assurance. He wasn’t being calculatedly arrogant, or deliberately hostile toward her, or playing testing games with her, or actually behaving toward her at all. He was merely being himself, which Valerie understood, unfortunately, and which kept her from wasting breath trying to get him to be somebody else. You might as well tell a cat to turn around and walk the other way.

And this was who she’d picnic with; what a waste.

They rode on in bumpy silence, Valerie thinking about all the reasons she had left southern Illinois in the first place, all the vague hopes and dreams inspired by her determination to see the great world, and the unpleasant contrast between all that and this reality. Here she was, flopping about in this hard-edged biscuit tin beside a self-absorbed and utterly unappealing man, and not even going to have the picnic she’d planned.

So far, in fact, the great world really wasn’t showing Valerie Greene very much. Yesterday’s encounter with Innocent St. Michael had certainly been enjoyable, but there’d been very little of the romantic in it; the mode of that scene had been mostly comic. And this driver today was as much a washout as (according to him) the road they weren’t taking.

All her hopes now were pinned on the lost Mayan city. It would be there, it must be there, where she and the computers had decreed (and despite the nay-saying of Innocent’s man Vernon), and from the instant of her discovery of it everything in her life would change. Archaeologists would write her respectful letters, asking for details of her methodology. Reporters would gather for news conferences. Governments would take her seriously. She herself would lead the expedition to clear away a millenium of jungle and free the ancient city to thrust its towers once again into the air.

A buzzing sound caused her to lift her head. A small blue-and-white plane was flying by, rather low, not much faster than they, and heading in the same direction. Probably it was actually following the same road, there being very few landmarks in the jungle. Valerie found herself eyeing that plane wistfully, envying whoever was in it, no matter what their purpose or destination. There was romance, soaring above the jungle, sailing through the sunlight.

An airstrip beside the lost city spread its scythed green carpet in her mind, and she smiled after the plane. But then, before it was out of sight, she was recalled to earth by the driver abruptly braking hard, the Land Rover bucking to a stop.

Valerie lowered her gaze and looked around, as the dust of their passage caught up with them, making a gray-tan haze in the air. They had stopped at an intersection, where their oiled gravel “highway” crossed a meandering dirt road. To their right, a small building was covered with tin soft drink signs. “Coca Cola,” said one, and beneath that in Creole, “quench yu tus.”

The driver switched off the engine. In the sudden silence, dust slowly settled. Valerie said, “What’s this?”

“You can get the beer in there,” he said.

“ I get the beer?”

Pointing to the left, he said, “Then we take that road. There’s a place to stop and eat down a few miles.”

“In a swamp, no doubt,” she said, becoming irked.

He looked at her with mild surprise but calm willingness: “You wish to eat in a swamp?”

“No, no.” Even sarcasm was lost on this creature. Looking at her map, as an excuse to regain her poise, she said, “I can’t tell where we are.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I know the way.”

Valerie sighed, realized how inevitable that answer had been. Acknowledging defeat, she opened the attaché case and stowed her map in it, then put the case back in the storage well with her canvas bag. Beer, she thought in fatalistic irritation, as she clambered out of the car. And she might as well get beer for herself, too; this place wouldn’t have white wine.

Lemuel found the whistle. “Now, this is something!” he said, holding it at arm’s length, staring at it.

Kirby was just as pleased as Lemuel about the discovery. He never prodded his customers, never directed, always permitted them to make their own way across the terrain, and as a result only about half found the whistle. Which was a pity, because it was a beauty.

About eight inches high, made of limestone carved with primitive stone tools, it was the figure of a priest in a high headdress, with arms straight out at his sides and a long skirt over slightly spread feet. A hole bored through from the top of the headdress to the bottom of the skirt between the feet had originally made the whistle, but when Lemuel now tried to blow through it nothing happened. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said, wiping his mouth. “It’s too old.”

“To do what?” Kirby asked, parading his ignorance.

“This is a whistle,” Lemuel explained, his amiability lightly sheathing his condescension. Lemuel was a changed man now that the dread drug dealers were gone. During lunch, over a vodka and tonic, he had reconstructed his academic armor, had got himself back under control, and during the flight out had even discoursed on his few encounters with marijuana, reminiscences occasioned by Kirby having pointed out cultivated fields of the stuff down below, orderly rows of fuzzy light green among the jumbled thousand greens of the jungle.

Lemuel, in fact, had become so thoroughly the academic and the expert that he’d even shown some early indications of skepticism as Kirby had led him up the side of his extravaganza. “Hmmmmm,” he’d said, when he’d come to the shaped building block, and, “Odd this should be out here in plain sight like this.”

“It was farther up when I found it,” Kirby told him. “I did some digging here and there, test-boring for a septic system, and that thing rolled down.”

“Hmmmm,” Lemuel repeated, and when Kirby pointed out the silhouette of temple steps against the sky on the right side of the hill Lemuel had said, slowly, “Possible, possible. Could be a natural formation, or it might mean something.”