Donald Westlake - High Adventure

“At the temple?” St. Michael’s eyes gleamed; his interest had been captured. A super-detective, that’s what he must be, a manhunter thrilling to the chase.

Well, Lemuel wanted no part of it. Let this manhunter chase Kirby Galway, and let Galway try to weasel out of it later, try to pin any of the blame on a respectable scholar like Whitman Lemuel, just let him try. “I don’t know what the girl told you,” he began, “but I was out there strictly —”

“The girl? Valerie Greene?”

“Is that her name? Whatever she said, I assure you—”

“Wait, wait, Mister Lemuel,” St. Michael said, suddenly accommodating, reassuring. “Sit down here. Begin at the beginning, please.”

There was a small mahogany desk in the room, and a pair of armless wooden chairs. Lemuel and St. Michael sat across the desk from one another, and Lemuel told him everything, every single thing from his first meeting in New York with Kirby Galway and the girl — Valerie Greene, yes, both there, but they gave no indication they were together at that time — through the subsequent meeting with Galway alone in New York, Lemuel’s agreement to come to Belize to inspect Galway’s temple, his arrival, their traveling out together, the unexpected appearance of the girl, Galway’s astonishing behavior thereafter, and Lemuel’s decision to have nothing more to do with the whole dubious affair. He gave St. Michael this entire history, and almost everything he said was the absolute truth. Only in one small detail did he lie; in his version of events, Kirby Galway had approached him exclusively as an expert, had asked for an opinion as to the value and authenticity of the material he had found on his land, and had not suggested smuggling or the illegal sale of Mayan antiquities until they were already standing on the temple itself, until, in fact, just before the girl arrived.

“So it’s there, in other words,” St. Michael said, when Lemuel was done. “The temple is there.”

“Well, yes, of course.”

St. Michael brooded some more. Did he believe Lemuel? If he didn’t, it was still possible that Lemuel was too unimportant to bother with further. Particularly if Lemuel volunteered to be, to do — what was the legal term for selling out your partners? Oh, yes — to give evidence for the prosecution, that was it. “I’ll be happy, if necessary,” Lemuel said, smiling a bit as man to man, “to give evidence for the prosecution, though of course, with my reputation at stake, I’d prefer to have as little to do with this sorry mess as—”

“Tell me about,” St. Michael interrupted, as though he hadn’t heard Lemuel talking at all, “tell me about, mmmm—” He withdrew a flat white envelope from his inner jacket pocket and consulted something written on its back: “Witcher and Feldspan.”

“Who?”

“Alan Witcher and— Here, see for yourself.”

St. Michael tossed the envelope across the table. It landed face up, and Lemuel had time to see that it was addressed to one Innocent St. Michael at some Belizean government department, and that the printed return address was a bank in the Cayman Islands. But then St. Michaels reached out, turned it over, and tapped the pen notations on the back, saying, “That side.”

“Yes, of course.”

Lemuel drew the envelope closer, to read what was written there: Alan Witchery Gerrold Feldspan, 8 Christopher Street, New York, NY 10014 . “Who are these people?”

“That’s what I am asking you, Mister Lemuel. Who are they, and why did they tape-record their conversation with Kirby Galway?”

“But I have no idea, I’ve never heard—”

St. Michael’s big palm boomed down onto the desktop with a crack of doom, so forceful that everything in the room jumped, including Lemuel, who very nearly went over backwards out of his chair. His large round face all thunderclouds, St. Michael roared, “Do not toy with me, Mister Lemuel, or it will go very badly with you, I assure you. You can spend a month in that little cell, if you think you’d like it, if you—”

“No, please!” Lemuel leaned forward, gasping for breath, ribcage pressed against the rough edge of the desk. “I’m telling you the truth! I swear I am! I’ll tell you anything you want, anything you need to know!”

“Tell me about Witcher and Feldspan, then, and stop wasting my time!”

“But I don’t know them! Honest to God, oh, God help me, oh, what am I going to do, I should never have, it’s all Galway’s fault, he kept saying this and saying that, and that girl , I don’t know what she told you, she’s as bad as he is, they’re in it together, I know they—”

“Oh, be quiet,” St. Michael said, all his fury gone as abruptly as it had arrived, like a summer storm. Shaking his head, he said, “You’re telling the truth now, all right. You don’t know any more than you just said.”

“That’s right!”

“So Kirby brings down those pansy boys. And then he brings down you. And he knows Valerie Greene, but he don’t like her so much. And when you see her, you get the wind up, you figure you gonna be arrested for what you planned, stealing our antiquities, you try to run—”

“I never, never had any—”

St. Michael pointed a thick finger at Lemuel. “You come down here, at your expense, because Kirby’s got no money to throw away on strangers, your expense, just to play expert, that’s all it is. You tell that story, Mister Lemuel,” St. Michael said, and smiled a thin and dangerous smile. “You tell that story in a Belize court, Mister Lemuel.”

“It’s the truth,” Lemuel said weakly. But the Belize court loomed in his mind, as foreign as Brobdignag, as implacable as the Inquisition.

“Mister Lemuel,” St. Michael said, “I can arrange to have you released now, send you back to the hotel. You take a shower, calm down, check out like anybody else, get on the plane, go back to the States. You can do that, Mister Lemuel.”

“Oh, thank God,” Lemuel said.

“But, do you know,” St. Michael went on, “do you know what you can’t do, Mister Lemuel?”

“Wha... what?”

“Get within two blocks of the American embassy,” St. Michael said. “That you can’t do. Don’t even think about turning your head in that direction.”

“Oh, I won’t,” Lemuel said, in utter sincerity. “Believe me, Mister St. Michael, I’ve learned my lesson. You’ll never—” His voice broke; he started again: “You’ll never ever hear from me again.”

When the alarm went off, Kirby moaned, thrashed about in the confined space, smacked gummy lips, and reluctantly opened gummy eyes just long enough to find the damn wind-up alarm clock on Cynthia’s dashboard and push in the button to stop the awful noise. His sticky eyelids immediately squeezed shut again, but too late; he had seen the clock face, he knew it was 9:30 tomorrow morning, he knew he was awake.

Hell and damn. The smell of marijuana all about him was hot and dry and pungent. Only a part of the plane was under the tree branches, and the metal fuselage had conducted heat forward from the sun-drenched tail section. He hated to sleep in the plane, anyway; there was never enough room for his long rangy body, and he always awoke stiff and sore, with aches that would take hours to fade. Still reluctant to accept consciousness, pawing in his door pocket for his sunglasses, he looked out and around at this little comer of the world.

The Florida Everglades. East of Cape Romano, south of Fort Myers, the Everglades was a flat and soggy confusion of land, some of it still pristine uncleared swamp, some dry scrub covered with dwarf pines and dusty shrubs, some reclaimed into citrus groves, some dried to grazing land, supporting horses or cattle. Kirby was parked at the narrow end of a long paper-airplane-shaped pasture flanked by bog, hemmed in by gnarled trees. Horses used to graze here, unfenced except at the wide farther end, held in by the swampy footing on both sides, but the land had changed ownership a couple of years ago and now it lay deserted.