Donald Westlake - High Adventure

Air Base Camp was to his right, the British military installation, where two Harrier jet fighters crouched like giant black insects beneath their camouflage nets, dreaming of prey. Perhaps they were among those which had gone south not long ago to play in the Falklands war. They were here as part of a 1,600-man British peacekeeping force, the last true colonial link, made necessary by neighboring Guatemala’s claim that Belize was in fact its own long-lost colony, which it had threatened to reabsorb by force of arms.

However, since the world recently had seen the result of Argentina’s belligerence in its own similar territorial dispute with Great Britain, Guatemalan rhetoric had begun to ease of late, and a settlement might yet be found. This prospect Innocent approved; although war iself is good for business, threats of war sour the entrepreneurial climate. Innocent St. Michael had lots of land he wished to unload on eager North Americans, and it was only the possibility of war with Guatemala that had so far delayed the land rush.

Belize International Airport is a single runway in front of a small, two-story, cream-colored, concrete-block building without glass in its first-floor windows. Taxis and their drivers make a dusty clutter around the building, sun glinting painfully from battered chrome and cracked windshields. Innocent steered around them and parked in the grassy area marked with a rough-hewn sign: VISITORS. He slid the LTD near the only other vehicle there, a crumbling maroon pickup he thought he knew. So Kirby Galway was back, was he? Innocent smiled in anticipation of their meeting.

Kirby himself was around on the shady side of the building, hunkered down like a careless native boy but dressed for business: short-sleeved white shirt, red and black striped necktie, khaki slacks, tan hiking boots. “Welcome home!” Innocent said, approaching, hand outstretched, beaming in honest pleasure. Seeing Kirby reminded Innocent of his own wit, intelligence, guile; the thought of how he had snookered Kirby Galway could always make him happy. “I was afraid you were gone forever,” he said, squeezing Kirby’s hand hard, pumping it up and down.

Kirby squeezed back; the young fellow was surprisingly strong. With his own smile, he said, “You know me, Innocent. The bad penny always turns up.”

If there was one thing that even slightly marred Innocent’s pleasure in having clipped Kirby, it was that for some reason Kirby never seemed to mind. Where was the resentment, the grievance, the sense of humiliation? Just to remind him, Innocent said, “Well, you know me, Kirby. Good or bad, if there’s a penny around I want some of it.”

“Oh, you’ve had enough from me,” Kirby said, with an easy laugh. One more shared squeeze and they released one another’s hands. “Selling any more land?” Kirby asked.

“Oh, here and there, here and there. You back in the market?”

“Not yet.”

“You be sure to let me know.”

“Yes,” Kirby said, with a slight edge in his voice, and looked up.

The plane from Miami? Innocent couldn’t yet hear it, nor could he see anything when he gazed skyward, but Kirby apparently could. “Right on time,” he said.

“Meeting someone?”

“Just a couple of fellows from the States,” Kirby said. Moving off, he said, “Nice to chat with you, Innocent.”

“And you, Kirby.” The fact is, Innocent thought in happy surprise, we do like each other, Kirby and I.

There was the plane. Innocent could see it now, and a moment later hear it, making a great easy purring loop in the sky, like some cheerful iceskater just fooling around. Then all at once it turned businesslike, pointing its no-nonsense nose at the runway, seeming to accelerate as it neared the ground, the big blue-and-white plane surely far too large for this tiny airport, these little scratches in the dirt surrounded by the lushness of the forest a month after the end of the rainy season.

The plane growled as it touched down and raced past the building toward the far end of the runway. Then it roared quite loudly, decelerating, as though warning lesser creatures that the king of the skies was come.

Innocent was not here to meet anyone in particular; he just liked to know who had both the money and the need to travel by air. Absentmindedly grooming with his gold toothpick, he stood in the shade of the building and watched the plane trundle back, a tamed tabby now, an outsized toy. It stopped, and 15 or so passengers got off, to be herded toward the building by Immigration officials in odds and ends of uniform.

Innocent classified the arrivals as they went by: several North American tourists, heading most likely to Ambergris Caye and the offshore barrier reef, where those who like that sort of thing said the scuba diving was unparalleled. Innocent himself wouldn’t know; the largest body of water in which he ever intended to immerse himself was his swimming pool, in which he could be sure he was the only shark.

Three serious young men in suits and ties and white shirts were local boys, continuing their studies in the States. The University of Miami is now as important as any British school in turning out lawyers for the Carribean basin. A couple of slightly older fellows in neat but casual clothing would be expatriates, gone north for the advantages of American wage scales, home on a visit to show off their solvency, and incidentally to get some relief from the horrible winters of Brooklyn, where so many expatriate Belizeans made their home.

A pair of white Americans in sports jackets, carrying attaché cases, but not apparently traveling together, would be either businessmen or functionaries at the embassy; in the former case, they might eventually be of interest to Innocent. And the pair of pansy-boys were undoubtedly the “fellows” Kirby was here to meet.

Definite pansy-boys. They were both in their 40s, quite tall and almost painfully thin, and both unsuccessfully trying to hide an intense nervousness. The one in designer jeans and an alligator’d shirt apparently had grown that absolute forest of a pepper-and-salt moustache to make up for the fact that he was completely bald on top, with thick curly hair standing out only around the sides, resting on his ears like a stole. The other had a slightly less imposing moustache, russet in color, but the top of his head luxuriated in long wavy orangey hair, atop which perched sunglasses. He was got up in a safari shirt and khaki British Army shorts and cowboy boots decorated with stitched bucking broncos. He carried a small olive-drab canvas shoulderbag that tried to look like some sort of military accoutrement, but which was in fact a purse.

Those were the ones, all right. But what did Kirby want with them? And what was making them so excessively nervous? Money is going to change hands, Innocent told himself. He wanted to know all about it.

Remaining outside the building, he glanced through its glassless windows, seeing the sheeplike processing of the arrivals. Out on the runway, luggage extracted, doors shut, the plane snarled and turned aside, at once hurrying back up some invisible ramp into the sky, busily on the way to its next stop, Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras.

Innocent watched Kirby, inside the building, watch the pansy-boys clear through Immigration, then watched him shake their hands, one after the other. No squeezing hard with those two. They collected their luggage — Louis Vuitton for the bald one, a large black vinyl thing with many zippers for the other — and Kirby escorted them out to the sunlight and over to his pickup.

He would be taking them to his plane, yes? Perhaps a hotel first, but then his plane. Even though Belize is a very small country, and even though Belize City is no longer its capital, it is a city possessing two airports. Commercial international flights moved through this one here, but the charter planes and the small locally-owned craft were all back in town, at the Municipal Airport built on landfill beside the bay. Kirby would take them there, and fly the plane... Where?