Donald Westlake - High Adventure

At that point, he could have taken a room at the hotel for himself, and there were any number of women he could have phoned to come join him, but he just didn’t feel like it. His appetite had been set for Valerie Greene, and he wanted no substitute. Besides which, he was somewhat surprised to realize, he liked that girl, and wanted to be sure she was all right. So he ate alone in the hotel dining room, facing the curtains that close out the night view, and when she still hadn’t returned he left a simple message for her with the night clerk: “I’ll phone in the morning. Innocent.” Whereupon he drove home, took a quick moonlight swim in the pool to get the kinks out of his body, and slept like a baby.

This morning, as promised, he phoned from the house, but Valerie Greene had never returned to the hotel. Her possessions were still in her room, as though she expected to come back, but the girl herself had been neither seen nor heard from.

His first appointment today was to have been with Whitman Lemuel, but the disappearance of Valerie Greene changed all that. The amount and kind of telephoning he had to do would not be possible at home, where he was surrounded by hostile spies with his blood in their veins. So he must first come here to the office in Belmopan.

Where the loyal Vernon immediately took over the dog’s body work, making the call, saying, “No, nothing’s wrong,” hanging up, saying to Innocent, “It’s still out.”

“Hell,” Innocent said.

Vernon looked alert, ready to be of assistance. “Something the matter?”

“That archaeologist woman,” Innocent said.

“Oh, yes. Is that the car?”

“She didn’t come back.”

A cloud passed over Vernon’s face; perhaps his tooth twinged him. He said, “Who was the driver?”

Innocent looked and felt uncomfortable; this was the real problem in the affair. “You know that fellow I use,” he said, gesturing vaguely.

Vernon looked shocked. “Him?”

“I needed someone...” Innocent paused, but then went on, since he kept very few secrets from Vernon. “I needed someone to report to me, ” he said. “Someone I could trust to keep his mouth shut.”

“Someone you could trust with a woman?” Vernon asked.

“Oh, I don’t think he’d...” But Innocent’s voice trailed away. In his heart, he had to admit he wasn’t sure about that part of it.

“Is he back?” Vernon asked.

“He isn’t on the phone.”

“Where does he live?”

“Teakettle,” Innocent said, naming a tiny hamlet a few miles away toward the Guatemalan border. “But I have to get down to Belize.”

“I’ll go out there,” Vernon offered, “see if I can find him. You can phone me here later.”

“Thank you, Vernon,” Innocent said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

In Which Is Recounted Lemuel’s Arrival In Belize, His Traveling To The Temple With Galway, The Unexpected Appearance Of Valerie Green, Galway’s Astonishing Behavior Thereafter, And Lemuel’s Decision To Have Nothing More To Do With The Whole Dubious Affair

“Mistah Whitman?”

Lemuel rose from a sweaty unrestful humid sleep, up out of discomfort and nightmare into worse discomfort and much worse reality. Jail. Fetid odors fixed in the dank air like flies in amber. Something dripping far off, against some ancient stone. The night’s clamminess just giving way to the day’s heat. Jail; a foreign jail.

Gray light seeped through the filth on the barred window, illuminating the concrete walls and floor, the bare thin ticking without sheet or mattress in which Lemuel had tossed and turned in sleepless terror all night, only to fall into exhausted unconsciousness at the first hint of dawn. And now he was startled awake by a voice, rasping his name:

“You dere, wake up. You Mistah Whitman?”

Sitting up, dazed with fear and lack of sleep, Lemuel blinked at the silhouette beyond the barred door. “Lemuel,” he said. His tongue felt swollen, against his furry teeth. “My name is Lemuel.”

“You no Mistah Whitman?” The silhouette wore a uniform of some sort, must be a guard.

“Whitman is my first name.” Trying to wake up, trying to collect his scattered wits, Lemuel dug knuckles into his sandy eyes.

“Huh,” said the guard, and rattled papers. “Whitman be you Christian name?”

“Yes.”

“And Lemuel, now. Lemuel be you family name?”

“That’s right.”

The guard chuckled, rattling his papers. “There be many a strange name in this world,” he said philosophically. Keys rattled now, clanged in the lock, and the door squeaked open. “Well, Mistah, Mistah Lemuel, Mistah Whitman Lemuel , you got a visitor.”

A visitor? What could it mean? Who knew he was here? After hours last night of struggle and protest, hours of being lied to or intimidated or merely ignored, Lemuel had finally given up hope of ever getting a message through to the American embassy, or the hotel, or anyone anywhere in the world who might be able to help him escape this sudden tropic Kafka. So who could this be, coming to visit him here in this awful place? Lemuel asked the guard: “What visitor?”

“The man who want to see you.”

“Who? Who is he?”

“You don’t want no visitor this morning?” The door squeaked again, ominously, as though with the idea of closing. “You want me, I tell him you be too busy for visitor this morning.”

“No no!” Anything would be better than this verminous cell. Rising too hastily, Lemuel was engulfed in dizziness and had to lean a moment against the wall, under the eye of the impassive guard. Then he moved on, out to a concrete hall being mopped by a small and toothless inmate. The guard led Lemuel toward the front of the building, but veered them into a small side office where a large stout chocolate-colored man in a light gray suit and pale green open-neck shirt stood leafing through a wall calendar from Regent Insurance Company, taking a great deal of interest in the months ahead. Translucent louvers in both windows were slightly open, letting in light and air without permitting a view of what lay outside.

“Mistah St. Michael,” said the guard, with some odd combination of deference and jocularity, “this be Mistah Whit- man Lem -uel.” Shooing Lemuel into the office, the guard snicked the solid door shut with himself on the outside.

Mr. St. Michael dropped the year and turned to brood upon Lemuel, who keenly felt his own griminess, his wrinkled clothing and unwashed body and unshaven face. St. Michael, for such a big man in such a hot climate, was absolutely dapper. A thousand sentences rushed through Lemuel’s mind — greetings, queries, demands, supplications — but none seemed precisely suited to the situation, so he remained silent, not even trying to alter the look of desperation and bewilderment and fear he knew to be on his face.

It was St. Michael at last who spoke, in a mellifluous radio announcer’s voice, saying, “Well, Mister Lemuel, I’ll say this for you. You don’t look a crook.”

So it was, that was it, his worst fears realized, the Kirby Galway situation, that was it. The terrors that had kept him awake all night were justified; reputation ruined, a dank jail cell his portion forevermore. “Oh, no, sir,” Lemuel said, in that moment a broken man, “no, sir, I am not a crook.”

“We have heard Americans say that before,” St. Michael told him.

“It was Galway,” Lemuel said, all in a rush. “Kirby Galway, he lied to me, said all he wanted was my expert opinion, there wasn’t the slightest hint of impropriety until it was too late, I was already there, right there at the temple, the first time he made the suggestion, that’s the—”