Donald Westlake - High Adventure

When the silence in the clearing ended, filled up instead by the growing buzz of the airplane, the last four of the false Gurkhas faded away into the jungle.

The plane roared overhead again, and gone, and Vernon opened his eyes. Through his pain and tears he could see the villagers clustered around their three fallen relatives, the journalists gathering around Scottie. Hiram Farley, separate from both groups, bent to pick up one of the figures that had fallen from the plane.

Vernon closed his eyes. Everything he saw was red. The pain in his stomach was duller and his brain seemed to move more slowly.

When he opened his eyes again, Hiram Farley was standing over him, hefting the little statue in his hand. “Well, Vernon,” Farley said.

Vernon slowly blinked. With his mouth open to breathe, dirt was filtering in, coating his tongue and teeth.

“Now why, Vernon,” Farley said, “would Asian soldiers be afraid of a Central American devil? Something tells me you can answer that question.”

Vernon looked at Farley’s dusty boots. He mumbled something.

“What was that, Vernon?”

“ ‘They didn’t even kill me,’ I said.”

“That isn’t south Abilene,” Valerie said.

Kirby Galway turned the little plane in a long slow parabola, out and around, while down below a man and woman chased goats from the long green field surrounded by forest. At one end of the field was a squat brown house with several additions, and behind it patches of cultivation. “No, it isn’t,” Galway said.

She gave his bland profile an extremely suspicious look. “What is it, then?”

“Where I live.”

“Why are we going there?” After all she’d been through, must she now defend herself from this man’s attentions?

Galway made minor adjustments with the plane’s controls; its nose was aimed now at that long field, with the tiny house and the tiny people at the far end and the goats all cleared away. He said, “I want to talk to you before you talk to Innocent.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you when we’re on the ground.”

She watched him, but he had nothing else to say. But wasn’t what he’d already said significant, didn’t it mean once and for all that Kirby Galway was not in league with Innocent St. Michael? If there was some secret he wanted to keep from Innocent — and what else could he be planning? — it meant they weren’t partners in crime after all.

So which one was the criminal?

And what was the crime?

It was all too confusing. She had seen the temple, exactly where it was supposed to be, where she and the computers had both predicted it would be, and then two weeks later, at the precise same spot, it was gone. She had seen Kirby Galway with Whitman Lemuel from that museum and had known it meant they were stealing rare Mayan treasures and smuggling them out of the country, but when she’d at last held several of those treasures in her hands she’d found herself doubting they were real. She had thought Vernon was working for Galway or Innocent or possibly both of them, and now it seemed to turn out he’d been working only for himself. And what had Vernon been trying to do? Get his hands on the (fake) treasures of the (nonexistent) temple? She shook her head, and spoke her frustration aloud: “What is everybody up to?”

He laughed. “I’m actually going to tell you,” he said, and the plane bounced on the uneven turf, bounced again, landed, settled, and slowed to a sedate roll as they neared the house, where the man and woman stood waiting, smiling.

“I’m beginning to remember,” Valerie said slowly, “that you’re a very bad man. You are, aren’t you?”

“Extremely bad,” he said, and the plane turned toward a copse of trees on the right.

“Except when you’re rescuing people,” she acknowledged.

“My one saving grace,” he said, and the plane stopped in tree shadow. Galway switched off the engine, and the silence flowed in like a wave.

There was no door on her side. She had to wait while he unstrapped and climbed out, then follow him, crawling across his seat and accepting his hand to balance her as she made it down to the ground.

The air here was very warm and heavy after so long in the plane, and she found herself stiff and sore when she tried to walk. The couple had come over to greet them — the man short, the woman much shorter — and Galway led Valerie around the wing to make the introductions: “Estelle Cruz, Manny Cruz, this is Valerie Greene.”

“How do you do?”

“Hello, hello, hello.”

When Manny Cruz smiled, he had many more spaces for teeth than he had teeth, but somehow that merely made his smile look happier. And for such a gnarled little woman, Estelle Cruz’s smile was surprisingly shy and girlish.

Galway removed both those smiles by then saying, “Miss Greene is an extremely annoying woman who has absolutely loused up everything I’ve been doing here.”

Estelle glared at Valerie, who gaped at her accuser in shock. Manny said, “This is Sheena! So she is alive.” He didn’t sound happy about it.

“That’s right,” Galway said. “The temple scam is dead, everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket, and I’ll probably have to move out of this country.”

The Cruzes were both terribly shocked. Estelle looked as though she might leap on Valerie and claw her to death, while Manny said, “Move from this house , Kirby?”

“It isn’t her fault, Manny,” Galway said. “She didn’t do it on purpose; she’s just stupid and ignorant.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Valerie said.

“She thought she was doing right,” Galway went smoothly on, “so I don’t blame her. And now she can help me in one little way, and that’s why I brought her here, to tell her the whole story, and I’m sure she’s going to want to help out.”

Valerie looked at them all suspiciously, even Estelle, whose manner was just as mistrustful as her own. “I won’t commit any crimes,” she said.

Galway gave her an enigmatic look: “If I were going to commit a crime, Miss Greene,” he said, “you’re about the last person I’d ask to be my accomplice.”

If that was an insult — and it did seem to have been intended as such — it had to be one of the strangest insults in history. Feeling mulish and put-upon, Valerie said, “That’s all right, then.”

Manny said, “Whadaya want her to do, Kirby?”

“Let’s talk over lunch,” Galway said. “I’m starved.” Looking at Valerie, he said, “How about you?”

Dear God! Her stomach! In all the excitement and activity and confusion, she hadn’t even noticed, but all of a sudden her stomach gave her such a hunger pang she actually gasped from it. Food? When was the last time she’d eaten? Nothing at all today, nothing since last night, on the run, when she’d eaten those tortillas.

The very thought made her head swim.

“Right,” Galway said, correctly reading her expression. “We’ll just wash up and then eat out here, Estelle, okay?”

Estelle nodded, tentatively smiling again, waving at the outdoor table beside the house.

Galway said, “Kids all in school? Just the four of us? What are we having?”

“Escabeche,” said Estelle.

One hen.

Two large onions.

Spices.

Kill, pluck and separate the hen. Stew in water one hour, adding cloves, pepper, and chopped-up chilis to taste.