Donald Westlake - High Adventure

A path. Yes? Yes. A narrow path angling downward, slightly to the left. Pitch black, can’t see your face in front of your head. Walk down the path, swing the arms, the last two tortillas stuck to her skin.

Ow! Tripped right over that log, fell on a man! A man? Roll away — not with me you don’t, buster!

Flashlights came on, men’s voices, they’d been asleep or resting or what, Valerie gaped around at them, her little pinprick eyes staring in the flashlights, seeing the camouflage uniforms on the chunky little bodies, the weapons, the bush hats. Soldiers, British, Gurkhas. Gurkha patrol, is that a song? “Rescued!” Valerie said in cheerful surprise, and smiled happily, and her eyes rolled back in her head.

For a moment after he switched off the van’s engine, Vernon sat on in darkness, staring at the wall of the Fort George Hotel directly in front of himself and willing himself to be calm. He was going to do this, he was going to come out the other side, it was all going to be all right. All of it. All right. The chicken and rice he’d eaten for dinner at J.B.’s on the way down from Belmopan sat like an auto accident in his stomach, unmoving.

If only the village had not already been selected — the one the journalists would be visiting tomorrow. Vernon had done his best, but he’d been too late. The village had been selected, and it was not the one the Colonel had insisted the journalists must see.

What choice had he had? He was racing across a tightrope, high above the rocks with no net, already off balance, running forward as fast as he could because it was the only way not to fall. The other side, the other side, sooner or later he had to reach the other side. In the meantime, he could only keep running, keep improvising, try not to miss his step.

The wrong village. With great difficulty Vernon had arranged to be made the driver for tomorrow’s expedition. Then, using the absent Innocent St. Michael’s authority, he had also arranged to be ordered to come to Belize City tonight, ahead of time, staying at the Fort George along with the journalists, ostensibly so they could begin early tomorrow morning but actually so that Vernon would be beyond any countermanding orders. He would be the driver, and that’s all.

And he would make a mistake. An honest mistake. He would take the journalists to a different village, not the one the government had selected but very similar. A simple mistake that anyone might make. And then it would all be over, he would have reached the other side of the abyss, no more tightrope, firm ground at last.

Vernon whimpered, a little mewling sound. Behind him, the dozen empty seats of the van were filled with the ghosts of wrong turnings. He shuddered, and took the key from the ignition and his overnight bag from the floor space between the front seats, and got out onto the blacktop.

The desk clerk was both cold and obsequious; obsequious because Vernon’s room was being paid for by a government department, suggesting power and authority, and cold because Vernon himself was so clearly nothing but a minor clerk. When I’m rich, Vernon thought, but this time the thought wouldn’t complete itself. Where was his rage? Sighing, he filled out the registration form, then showed his list to the desk clerk, saying, “These are journalists staying here, I must see them in the morning, you’ll—”

“I believe they are in the bar,” the desk clerk said, coldly and obsequiously.

So Vernon went to his room and unpacked, and went to the bathroom, and washed his hands and face and the back of his neck, and went to the bathroom, and took some antacid pills, and went to the bathroom, and changed his shirt, and combed his hair, and went to the bathroom, and washed his face, and turned out the light, and went down to the bar, where two of the large round black formica tables were occupied. The four silent gloomy beer-drinking fellows at one table with their big red faces and big red knees jutting from both ends of their short-trousered British Army uniforms were certainly not journalists, whereas the seven oddly assorted people clustered around the other table, all talking at once, nobody listening, certainly were. Vernon went over and stood beside that group, waiting for a simultaneous pause in all seven monologues, or for someone to notice him.

Someone noticed him; a skinny sharp-nosed gray-faced man in a safari shirt and bush jacket and U.S. Army fatigue trousers and Hush Puppies, who looked up, saw Vernon, and in an East London accent said, “Right. Same again all round, then.”

“I’m not a waiter,” Vernon said.

“No? Then be off with you.” The man turned back to his chattering companions.

“I’m your driver,” Vernon said.

“The hell you say.” The man looked him up and down. “And where am I going, then?”

“Requena,” Vernon said. The settlement was called that because it was the last name of the majority of the settlers.

“That’s tomorrow,” the man said. By now, two of the others, including the group’s lone woman, had also stopped talking and were looking at Vernon, wondering what entertainment or news value he might possess.

“I am here tonight,” Vernon told them. “I am introducing myself, and I will spend the night in the hotel, so we can get an early start tomorrow.”

“Well, good fellow!” the sharp-nosed man said. “Johnny on the spot, that’s the ticket. Introducing yourself, are you?”

“My name is Vernon.”

“And how do you do, Vernon? You’ll find that I am Scottie. This ravishing lady to my left is Morgan Lassiter, a world-class lesbian and ace repor—”

“Just because you never got any,” Morgan Lassiter told him, but calmly, as though she were used to him — or possibly to his type. Her accent was anonymously Midlantic, as though she’d learned English from machines, on Mars. She nodded in a businesslike way at Vernon and said, “Nice to see you.”

“And you, Ma’am.”

“This lot,” Scottie said, and interrupted himself to bang his whisky glass on the table, crying, “Shut up, you berks! Vernon’s here to introduce himself. And here he is, our driver, Vernon. Bright and early on the morrow he shall whisk us from this hellhole here out to the other hellhole over there, and then back again. Back again is included, am I right, Vernon?”

“Yes,” said Vernon.

Scottie gestured this way and that. “Over there is Tom, a fine American photojournalist, just chockablock with all the latest American photo journalist technological advances, isn’t that right, Tommy?”

“Fuck you in the ass,” Tommy said.

“Chahming,” Scottie said. “Next to him is Nigel, the dregs of humanity, not only an Australian but an Australian newspaperman , until he forgot himself once, told the truth, and was exiled to Edinburgh.”

“What Tommy said,” said Nigel.

“Never does his own research,” Scottie commented. “Here beside me we have Colin, the demon scribbler of Fleet Street, and beside him is Ralph Waldo Eckstein, who won’t tell anybody why the Wall Street Journal fired him, and—”

“What Tommy said.”

“Yes, yes. Now, Vernon, lad, you’ve probably been told we are a party of six, is that not right?”

“That’s right,” Vernon said.

“But here we are, as you can plainly see, a party of seven. Did Morgan give birth? Perish the thought. In fact, perish the little perisher. No, what has happened is that even here in this pit of nullity, this farthest outpost of Empire which Aldous Huxley quite rightly said was on the way from nowhere and to nowhere, journalists seek one another out, come together for comfort and liquor and the latest lies. That gentleman over there, with the truly wonderful moustache, is one Hiram Farley, an editor if you please with a most famous American magazine called Trash. No, I beg your pardon; Trend. ”