Donald Westlake - High Adventure

The mission. If she were to go to the mission, surely she would be safe? But then she thought again about the man she was dealing with, Innocent St. Michael, an important government official, a rich and powerful man, and she realized two frightening things: First, he must know she had the evidence to bring him down. Second, he must know his henchman had failed to silence her.

Wouldn’t a man like Innocent St. Michael have spies all over the country? Even assuming the absolute probity and integrity of whatever priests or doctors or nurses might be at the mission, wouldn’t there be other people there as well, locals who could betray her? And how safe from Innocent St. Michael would she be in a small and isolated mission deep in the jungle?

The same fears kept her from telling the truth to her benefactors, the Indians of South Abilene. At first she claimed to be suffering amnesia, but that piqued their curiosity too much, so at last she let them understand she was a rich girl who was running away from a marriage arranged by her father. She had been flying her own small plane when an unexpected storm had dashed her against a jungle mountain. The rest they knew.

They were delighted by that story, and made her tell it over and over, with more and more details. She added yachts, a severe limp to the elderly wealthy groom, a dipsomaniac mother helpless to save her daughter from being sold to the highest bidder. (Her Kekchi improved and improved.) They lapped it up, wide-eyed, loving every minute of it, and agreed the best thing she could do was stay here in South Abilene until her father would be so amazed and relieved to see her still alive that he would allow her to call off the wedding.

“And you’re a pilot,” Tommy Watson said.

“That’s right.”

“We got a pal who’s a pilot. Nice fella. You and him, you’d get along terrific.”

“Wait a minute,” said one of the young women, whose name was Rosita Coco. “Just wait a minute, okay?”

Her brother Luz told her, “Just for friends, that’s all.” (Luz and Rosita and Tommy were the only ones who talked to Valerie in English.)

“That’s right,” Tommy told Rosita. “They could talk pilot talk together.”

Instead of which, in the days ahead, Valerie and Rosita talked girl talk together, and when Valerie heard the story this pilot had told Rosita she was just outraged. Wasn’t it like a man, every time? Valerie put Rosita straight on that fellow, and though Rosita didn’t want to believe her pilot was lying, the evidence was pretty clear.

Generally speaking, Valerie got along with all the South Abilenos, male and female, young and old. They accepted her at once, shared their small bounty with her, and — encouraged no doubt by her knowledge of their tongue — allowed her to enter at least as an observer into their social lives. What an ideal position for an idealistic young archaeologist!

The one fly in the ointment in all this was marijuana. The whole village appeared to be addicted to it, and spent most nights puffing themselves insensible. In order not to appear prudish, Valerie begged off by claiming a respiratory disease that prohibited her from smoking in all its forms. “Poor Sheena,” Rosita said, “I make you some pot tortillas some day, blow you right out of the tree.” Valerie managed a smile and an expression of gratitude, but so far, thankfully, nothing had come of the offer.

Actually, for Valerie these days marijuana would be superfluous. She was high already, high on just being alive and high on this wonderful village in which she found herself. Her initial fears that she might be sexually mistreated faded rapidly when she saw how thoroughly this was a family village; life here was too open and monogamy too ingrained for any hanky-panky. (Had a few of the boys first met Valerie away from town it might have been a different story, of which she remained happily ignorant.)

But the point was, these were Mayas, true Mayas. Unlike the other archaeologists Valerie had known, her teachers and her contemporaries, she had gone through the time barrier, had actually entered into the ancient civilization the other scholars only studied. It is true these people were no longer temple builders, were merely the decayed remnant of a once flourishing culture, but their clothing (apart from the inevitable blue jeans) bore echoes of ancient themes, ancient designs, ancient decoration. The faces of the people were the same as the faces on bowls and stelae a thousand years old.

And they still made the old artifacts! When Valerie first stumbled on their little factory, where stone whistles and bone statues and terracotta bowls were being manufactured by men and women alike, they seemed almost embarrassed at having her know, as though wanting to practice the ancient crafts in secrecy and privacy. But when she extolled their abilities, when she spoke knowledgeably of their sources and their craft — hurriedly inventing an archaeologist boy friend in college, to explain the rich girl’s sudden expertise — when she expressed her true admiration, they lit up, smiled together, almost shyly showed her examples of their work.

“But this is wonderful!” she said, over and over.

“Do you really think so?”

“But yes, yes! Why—” turning a bone statuette of a leaping jaguar “—you could put this on display in any museum in the world, and no one would guess it was anything but a thousand years old!”

“I’m really glad to hear you say that, Sheena,” Tommy said. “That makes us all feel really good.”

What charming people. What a delightful simple lifestyle; except, of course, for the addiction to marijuana. Civilization with its medicine and information was as near as the mission, and otherwise their lives were idyllic. I wonder how long I’ll stay, Valerie thought from time to time, and every reminder that she must eventually leave this Eden saddened her, made her turn her mind to something else.

But now Kirby Galway had appeared! Out of the blue, quite literally out of the blue.

Earlier today Tommy had come by to say, “Listen, Sheena, there’s a guy coming today to pick up some stuff. We make some goods for market, you know, tourist stuff.”

Valerie could imagine: glossy mahogany statues of Maya priests, cheap pieces of decorated cloth. The sort of thing primitive people do all around the world, debasing their culture for currency, hard cash.

“Probably,” Tommy had gone on, “you ought to stay here in town. You don’t want this guy spreading the word there’s a white woman hiding out in South Abilene.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Valerie said, and stayed out of sight when the plane first came over. Then some time later she heard it leave, and came out of the hut, and was walking around waiting for everybody to come back when all at once there was the plane again, diving right down at the village! Into the nearest hut she had run, the image of the plane burned into her mind, and at once she remembered where she’d seen that plane before. It was Galway, Kirby Galway.

Which Rosita confirmed, when she came back: “You know Kirby?” she asked.

“Kirby Galway,” Valerie said, excited, “that’s right, that’s his name!”

Rosita’s eyes got very wide. “You know him, Sheena?”

Oh-oh. The implications could be very bad. Kirby Galway’s relationship with these Indians could be simple and benign — merely flying their tawdry commercial gewgaws to town and no doubt cheating them mercilessly — but nevertheless Galway and the Indians were aligned. Did Valerie at this point dare tell the truth?