Donald Westlake - High Adventure

But not entirely; there was plenty left for Kirby. Glowering at him, Innocent said, “And smart fellas like you, Kirby, coming along all the time, looking for that edge, trying to put something over on me.”

Betraying a bit of his grudge, Kirby said, “The way I put over that land deal on you, right?”

“What have you been doing with that land, Kirby?” Innocent stared at him round-eyed, leaning forward, alive with curiosity and frustration. “That’s what caused this whole thing! That land up there—” he flung his hand toward the barren hill in question, just visible from the village “—isn’t worth shit , Kirby!”

“That’s not the way you talked when you sold it to me.”

“What are you doing with it? What is all this goddam temple about?”

Kirby took a step back, head cocked, giving Innocent a wary look. “Temple, Innocent? Which temple is that?”

“That’s what I want to know, dammit! You bring all these Americans down, give them some song and dance about a temple, there isn’t any temple!”

“That’s right.”

“Valerie comes down, comes to me, Kirby, says she has computers up in New York tell her there’s a temple on your land. Wants to go out to see it. That’s where it all starts, Kirby. I wanted to know what you were up to.”

“So you sent Valerie Greene out to see.”

“She was coming anyway, that isn’t the point.”

“No,” Kirby said, seeing it. “The point is, you made that creep of yours her driver.”

“I regret that, Kirby,” Innocent said. “I regret it bitterly. But I blame you as much as me.”

“What? You turned that girl oyer to that hoodlum, and it’s my fault?”

“I had to know what was going on,” Innocent said. “What you were up to. That was the only driver I could trust.”

“Some trust.”

“Kirby,” Innocent said, coming a step closer, calming himself by an obvious effort of will. “It’s time to tell the truth, Kirby,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“Time for you . I know you didn’t kill Valerie Greene, just as surely as I know poor Valerie is dead. I know my own driver killed her and then ran away, so you don’t have to put on this game any more.”

“No game, Innocent,” Kirby said, trying to look sincere. “Honest.”

“Don’t use words you don’t understand, Kirby. I’m not even mad at you any more. All you have to do is give up all the playacting, admit this is just one more of your cons, and we can go home.”

“But it isn’t. Valerie Greene actually was here, but now she’s gone.”

“If I know anything for certain in all of this, Kirby,” Innocent said, “it is that you’re lying.”

Kirby paused, thought things over, and then said, “All right, Innocent, I have a deal for you.”

Innocent’s agitated face suddenly cleared, as though a storm over a pond had gone, leaving the surface smooth and blank. Even his eyes showed nothing as he said, “A deal, Kirby? What sort of deal?”

“Buy that land back,” Kirby said.

“Why?”

“Buy it back for exactly what I paid you, and I’ll tell you the full honest truth about Valerie Greene and the temple.”

“Lava Sxir Yt.”

“Oh, you know its name, do you?” Kirby said, and smiled his admiration.

Very faintly Innocent frowned. “That’s not a deal,” he decided.

“It is if we shake on it.”

Innocent considered. He glanced over at the blighted hilltop. He studied Kirby. He said, “The truth, Kirby? How much of the truth?”

“I’ll answer every question you ask, as long as you keep asking.”

“Then I’ll have the land and your con, whatever it is, and the truth about Valerie.”

“That’s right.”

Again Innocent considered. “There were some expenses involved in the land transfer,” he said.

“You eat them.”

“Hmmm.” Innocent brooded, and then faintly smiled. “I’ll never know what the trick is until I say yes, will I?”

“It’s up to you, Innocent.” Kirby maintained a poker face, tried not to even think about anything. The instant Innocent had mentioned the temple, Kirby had known the scam was doomed, it was about to become necessary to move on to something else. But here was a way to get out of it whole, get his money back and get rid of that scabrous hill, trade it all for a live girl and a dead racket. Not bad. Only don’t think about it yet, don’t let it cross your mind. It wouldn’t surprise Kirby if Innocent were telepathic.

At last Innocent nodded. “All right,” he said. “You have a deal.” He put his hand out.

“Fine.” Permitting himself only the tiniest of smiles, Kirby took Innocent’s hand and they both squeezed down hard to seal the pact.

“You!” cried a familiar voice.

They turned, hands separating, and watched Valerie Greene leap with unconscious grace across the stream and come running toward them. Flushed, out of breath, quite dirty, somewhat ripped and tom, hair a mare’s nest, she was rather astonishingly beautiful. Stopping in front of Kirby, chest heaving, hands on hips, she cried, “I know how bad you are, I know you’re a terrible person, but nevertheless you’re the only one I can turn to. Innocent people are going to be massacred, and you have to help !”

“Sure, lady,” Kirby said.

Valerie Greene turned to frown in bewilderment at Innocent. Still on his feet though sagging, open-mouthed, glassy-eyed, shallow of breath, he seemed to be doing a Raggedy Andy imitation. “What’s the matter with him ?” she said.

“He just bought the farm,” Kirby told her.

Inside the jungle the land is rich, almost black, fed over thousands of years of growth and decay, well- watered and fertilized. The lower slopes of the mountains are so lushly overgrown that a man with a machete is lucky to make five miles a day through its tangle, and each day the jungle grows in again behind him, so that a week or a month later he would still need his machete to follow his path back out.

The Espejo and Alpuche families had once lived in Chimaltenango Province, west of Guatemala City, but that became in the 70s one of the hottest areas of the revolution and the counterrevolution and the death squads and the army raids, so when the owner of the land where they sometimes harvested crops offered them a new life far to the east in the peaceful Peten, they accepted. They were sorry to leave their people and their land, but life was too frightening now in Chimaltenango, so they got on the trucks along with nearly a hundred other Quiché Indians, entire family groups, and drove for days over the rough roads, northeast above Guatemala City, through Salama and north through Coban into Peten Province, where they would live from now on.

None of them had ever had any formal schooling, but from time to time they had heard speeches on the radio about Belice, the province just to the east of the Peten. Belice was the Lost Province of Guatemala, stolen a long time ago by the British but some day to be recaptured by the brave young men of Guatemala. In the meantime, a state of not-quite-war existed between Belice and the rest of Guatemala, though the Indians imported from the west into the Peten were never actually aware of it.

The war they were aware of was the war they thought they’d left. The landowners had tried to get away from the revolution by moving into the underutilized and almost unpopulated Peten, a plateau of good plains land just waiting for the plow, but when they had imported workers from the west they’d imported the revolution as well. After a while, some of the Indians disappeared into the bush. Tourist buses heading up to the Mayan ruins at Tikal were attacked. Some Army jeeps were blown up and some soldiers ambushed and killed. Soon the death squads were roaming the area by night, as in Chimaltenango, savaging the innocent stay-at-homes since they couldn’t find the actual revolutionaries.