Donald Westlake - High Adventure

“Oh, it was Galway, all right,” Gerry said. “He’s very devious, that one.”

“Well,” Hiram said, “if Galway has those tapes, that’s that.”

Alan said, “Must it be? We remember exactly what he told us, the whole method to smuggle everything out and all that, what he’s going to do to that poor temple—”

Gerry said, “I was a bit tempted, I must say. Just go ahead and do it; we could make a lot of money.”

Alan gave him an arch look. “Yes, I could tell what you were thinking.”

“Well,” Gerry said, “after all, we could, couldn’t we? I mean, we’re not police, are we?”

“You’re good citizens,” Hiram told him. “Remember how sickened you were when I showed you those pictures of the looted graves?”

Gerry laughed, with a negative hand-wave. “Oh, I don’t mean I was seriously tempted,” he said. “Just a little bit.”

“Anyway,” Alan said, “we still have the facts, even if we don’t have the tapes. Wouldn’t that be enough?”

Hiram shook his head. “Your unsupported word,” he said. “Even if the lawyers would let us publish, I wouldn’t. It’s just hearsay, puffed up. If we don’t nail a villain, we don’t have a story.”

“It’s too bad, really,” Alan said. “I was rather enjoying being a spy.”

Hiram looked as wistful as a large heavyset bald man can: “An exposé of illegal art smuggling, leading right here to New York. What a nice change of pace that would have been. I can’t tell you guys how tired of it all I get. The fifty-seven best pizza parlors in the Hamptons; your guide to a chiropractor on the West Side; questions raised about real estate developers. And here we had something real for once: antiquities, villains, airplanes, clandestine meetings in cornfields—”

“I think it’s some kind of ranch,” Alan said.

“Same idea,” Hiram told him. “Trickier footing, of course. Well, it’s all over now.” He sighed, and swigged half his drink. “You’ll never hear from Kirby Galway again.”

I can still call those two guys in New York, Kirby thought, as he lifted the too-full Cynthia over the mountains in a great looping half circle. Just so that damn woman’s story doesn’t hit the wire services, I can still call them in three or four weeks and start making deliveries, whether I have a temple set up down here or not.

Around and behind him the marijuana bales made small squeaking and scraping sounds as Cynthia labored through the moonlit night. The first few trips with this sort of cargo, Kirby had thought the grass was infested with bugs, but then he came to realize it was just the bales shifting and adjusting as air currents toyed with the plane.

The only way to make a living at all carrying this sort of bulky cargo in this small plane was to overload it and hope you were as good a pilot as you thought you were. More than once, waddling along some bumpy pasture or a potholed secondary road toward a line of trees dead ahead in the darkness, Kirby had thought he’d overdone it this time — and wouldn’t that be a penny-ante way to die — but so far luck and skill and vagrant breezes had conspired to help him rise above all those trees and his own foolhardiness as well.

But now that he had the temple scam, he was doubling the risk. Having loaded the plane, having said farewell to the contact here at the Belizean end, he struggled Cynthia into the sky, set off northward and, once securely out of sight and sound of the men to whom he’d just waved goodbye, turned around in a long ungainly loop, hugging the treetops, Cynthia straining all the way, all so he could fly back south to his own land for an extra landing and takeoff.

Again tonight. He flew on south, mostly by feel, as clouds rolled in to block the moon. Coming in over the former temple, the world below him unrelieved black, he switched on his landing lights at the last possible instant, to see Luz and a couple of the others scurry out of his path. His land was even dryer than this afternoon, the first cracks appearing among the brown stubble.

Chunk! went Cynthia, hitting hard, the whole plane groaning in complaint. Kirby turned, flashed his landing lights briefly once more to find the Indians, then pushed Cynthia over to where they stood gathered around a couple of large cardboard cartons.

The loading didn’t take long; they’d done all this before. Out of the cardboard cartons came smaller or larger parcels wrapped in recent Belizean papers, mostly the Beacon and the Voice . The smallest parcel was no bigger than a coffee mug, the largest about the size of a table lamp without the shade. “Careful with this one,” Tommy said, handing over a medium-sized piece, “it’s broken.”

“Right,” said Kirby, stuffing it gently into one of the marijuana bales.

It was now a little past midnight, and he had nearly 800 miles to travel, most of it over water. Depending on winds and weather, the trip would take between five and seven hours; in any event, it would be before dawn when he landed. Stowing the last parcel, he yawned and said, “You get the temple put away?”

“Oh, yeah,” Tommy said. “The hill’s a little scuffed up, that’s all. You can see there’s been digging.”

Luz said, “I’m lookin forward to those assholes. They’ll shit when they get here and don’t see any temple.”

“Just so that ends it,” Kirby said, and yawned again. “I’ll see you guys next week some time,” he said. “When I get back from this trip, I’m just gonna hibernate.”

Innocently, Tommy said, “What’s hibernate?”

Kirby said, “What bears do in winter.”

Tommy said, “What’s winter?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Kirby said, and flew away with the music of their laughter in his ears.

Nine A.M. Saturday morning, and the first thing Innocent saw when he walked into his suite of offices in Belmopan was his faithful assistant, Vernon, elbow deep in paperwork. “Well, good morning,” Innocent said. “Working on a Saturday?”

Vernon looked up from his graphs and lists: “I had to see the dentist yesterday, so I came in to get caught up.” He looked as though he still had the toothache.

“I have some phone calls to make,” Innocent said, “then an appointment down in Belize.” He grinned, thinking about his appointment. How happy he was going to make Whitman Lemuel, by rescuing him. For a price.

Vernon reached for his phone. “Who do you want to call?”

Good old reliable Vernon. “Transportation,” Innocent told him. “I signed out a Land Rover yesterday, I want to know if it’s back.”

While Vernon made the call, Innocent reflected again on yesterday’s unsatisfactory conclusion. Having arranged for the harrying of Whitman Lemuel, he had sat in the bar of the Fort George, one G and T after another in his hand as he’d watched daylight fade over the ocean. In air conditioning, behind glass, he had seen the slowly changing colors of sky and sea as a huge television production, slow but vast, put on particularly for him. Occasionally, a dusty cartop was visible, passing by on the dirt road beyond the hotel property’s stone wall. But none of those cars contained Valerie Greene.

Full night turned the windows into mirrors, and the view of himself sprawled on the low dark chair, drink in hand, waiting hour after hour for some woman who never appeared, finally irritated Innocent to the point where, a little after 7:30, he went back out to the phone booths, called a friend in the police, asked one or two guarded questions, and was assured no government vehicle of any kind had been involved today in an accident. (A rare day.) He then called Belize City Hospital, where no female U.S. citizen had been admitted in the last 12 hours. Likewise the Punta Gorda and Belmopan hospitals. He didn’t phone the hospitals up in Corozal and Orange Walk because that was the other end of the country; Valerie had been traveling south.