Donald Westlake - High Adventure

Lemuel raised his glass of red foulness: “Confusion to our enemies.”

“Oh, my, yes, ” said Gerry.

“I’ll drink to that,” said Alan, and they did, and Alan made a face. “Swill,” he said.

“Better than nothing,” Gerry told him, and took another tiny sip of his own drink.

The truth was — and Gerry would go to his grave without revealing this to anyone — the truth was, Gerry had no real sensitivity to the tastes of alcohol. If something were really very sweet, like Kahlua, or very bitter, like Campari, he could tell the difference, but in the range of gin drinks and vodka drinks and all of that he was very little aware of distinctions of taste, so this prepackaged martini here with the defrosted pimento olive was about the same to him as the finest ever Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks which a superb Upper East Side bartender would have prepared without even slightly bruising the gin. But one was expected to know the right things to drink, and appreciate them, and so on, and one of the ways to show that sort of sophistication was to say, “A very dry Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks, please,” so that’s what Gerry said whenever the subject came up, and everything worked out fine.

He wondered sometimes if Alan really knew or cared about the distinctions in booze. Impossible to ask, of course.

As for Whitman Lemuel and his Bloody Mary, there must be something so liberating about being a provincial, not having to keep up a front of sophistication.

What an odd alliance theirs was, after all. Brought together inadvertently by Kirby Galway, they’d had just scads of lies and deliberate confusions to clear out of the way before they could begin to understand one another, but then they’d realized at once what a golden opportunity lay before them. From what Lemuel had said about his encounter with the apparently quite frightening Innocent St. Michael, it wasn’t Galway after all who’d stolen the tapes, so they were probably safe in going ahead with the original arrangements. As for the legality, morality, all that, Lemuel had explained to them at passionate length that it was practically their duty to buy Kirby Galway’s loot and see it got proper homes in the United States among people of refinement and taste, people who could appreciate and preserve such irreplaceable treasures.

Much better than playing Woodward and Bernstein for Hiram. And more profitable, too.

Gerry had been rather surprised and thoroughly delighted when the conversation with Lemuel had shown that Alan also was more than ready to forget Trend and actually deal with Galway.

But cautiously, cautiously. That Galway had been engaging to deal with both of them, behind one another’s backs, and undoubtedly planned later to use each other’s existence to create a bidding situation for the more valuable pieces, showed the sort of slippery customer he was, as if they needed any further proof. Besides which, there was surely still more to the goings-on in Belize than any of them knew. Who could guess what intricacies, what wheels within wheels, might exist even further below the surface?

That was why they’d left that letter for Hiram; in case there was any trouble at all with the law — an idea that made Gerry’s heart flutter in his breast — the letter and the cable would prove that Gerry and Alan had had no intention of actually becoming accomplices of smugglers. On the other hand, if everything went well, Lemuel would take away the first shipment from Galway, Alan and Gerry would arrange to pick up the second shipment and then return to New York, and when they next saw Hiram they would tell him Galway had never shown up and they’d decided to abandon the whole project.

How oddly things worked out. But that, Gerry thought with some self-satisfaction as he sipped his premixed Gordon’s martini, is another mark of sophistication: the ability to deal with truly complex patterns, whether in art or in life. A simpler person like Whitman Lemuel, for instance, no matter how dedicated he might be to the preservation of pre-Columbian artifacts, was still essentially—

A man walked down the aisle. He was about 40, not very tall but barrel-bodied and bull-necked, his large head stubbled with a gray crewcut, his face mean and disgruntled-looking, with down-turned thick lips and cold piggy eyes. A brown string tie hung down on a yellow shirt tight across his chest. He was so muscular he seemed to have trouble walking, his thick shoulders working massively back and forth. His tan jacket was too small for him, hanging open, with strain creases around the armpits.

What made Gerry notice this creature was that he was staring at Gerry. He looked mean and angry, as though something about Gerry just simply enraged him. Helpless to look away, Gerry sat open-mouthed and watched the man go by, their eyes locked as though with Krazy Glue. Gerry’s head turned like a ventriloquist’s dummy until at last the man removed his own glare to face forward, and as Gerry looked to his left, over Alan’s head, still compulsively staring, that open jacket swung out and back and something glinted inside it at chest level, and then the man was gone.

Something glinted.

A badge.

A policeman.

They know .

“Ohh,” said Gerry faintly.

Alan gave him a look: “What now?”

“I’m going—” Gerry swallowed loudly “—to be sick.”

Alan glared. Sotto voce, he hissed, “I can’t take you anywhere .”

“I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to be home.”

The man went by again, in the opposite direction, giving Gerry one withering glance before continuing on, his jacket taut across his back.

“You had to sit by the window,” Alan said. Turning away, jawline eloquent with rejection, he icily explained to Whitman Lemuel that they would all have to get up so Gerry could be sick .

“Ho—” Gerry said. “Unk— Ho-ome.”

Still, everything might have been all right if the lavatories hadn’t all been occupied.

Kirby spent a few minutes watching the Indians wrap Zotzes in Beacons and then went back outside to a sunny day and a stormy Innocent, who rose from his mahogany throne to say, “Well, Kirby?”

“Well, what?”

“Aren’t you ready yet to give it up?”

Kirby frowned at him. “Give what up?”

“I don’t see any Valerie, you know.” Innocent put his hands on his ample hips and gazed around at the timeless morning scene: Indians squatting over fires in front of their huts, nursing their hangovers. Rosita’s distant unremitting call of “Vaaaallll -erie,” sounded from time to time across the sunny clean air like the cry of some local bird.

“They’ll find her,” Kirby said, somewhat impatiently. Last night’s Innocent had been a lot easier to get along with.

“It’s almost noon,” Innocent said. “She won’t be back, and we both know it. Stop the playacting, Kirby.”

“You believed me last night, Innocent, you said so yourself.”

“I talked a lot of nonsense last night.”

“You had an epiphany.”

“I believe what I had,” Innocent said, “was the shortest nervous breakdown on record. The disappearance of a fine young woman looked like what caused it, but it was really brought on by overwork, male meno-whatever-it-is—”

“Pause.”

“That’s my problem, I never did. Just work work work, I thought I was tough enough to go on forever.” He looked angry when he said all this, and Kirby was gradually coming to the realization that Innocent was partly angry at himself.