Donald Westlake - High Adventure

Kirby, looking dubious, settled into one of the side chairs, opened the folder, and started to read. Innocent said to Valerie, “I am glad you’re safe, Valerie.”

“So am I,” she said, smiling.

“I keep remembering that lunch we had together, and how much you liked the conch. You did like the conch, didn’t you?”

She giggled, a sound Innocent would long cherish. “I liked it a lot,” she said.

“Wait a minute,” Kirby said. “This isn’t even half what I paid you.”

“Read on,” Innocent urged him. “You’ll see it makes sense.”

“Not if I’m— What? I’m taking back a mortgage ?”

“That’s right,” Innocent said, with his blandest smile.

Kirby looked outraged. “People don’t give mortgages on land .”

Innocent shrugged. “All the trouble there’s been lately, I’d have a hard time right now getting my hands on that much cash. But I didn’t want to let our deal fall through just because I didn’t have enough cash money, and I knew you’d want to get all this settled and have some money to take with you when you leave, so—”

“Leave? Where am I going?”

Innocent gave Kirby a friendly but troubled look. “Don’t you know what your situation right now is, Kirby?”

“I’m being shafted by you, as per usual.”

“No no no. Kirby, you’re a hero .”

Valerie smiled and said, “Isn’t that nice?”

“Well, yes and no,” Innocent told her. “Unfortunately, Kirby’s the sort of hero who would be very smart to be modest and avoid the limelight.”

Kirby said, “Tell me about it.”

“Your radio calls to Holdfast and the police,” Innocent said, “meant help got there within thirty minutes of you breaking up the massacre. Two villagers dead, five terrorists dead, three captured and talking. Those little statues you threw out of the plane are being studied right now by a whole lot of experts. An American photojournalist on the scene managed to get some very dramatic shots of your plane coming through the clearing, in which your registration number is clearly visible.”

“Oh,” Kirby said.

“Right now,” Innocent went on, “Kirby Galway is the brave pilot who saved the defenseless village. However, I happen to know several people who are out and around Belize looking for the hero, because there’s just one or two questions.”

Kirby sighed. Valerie said, “Mister St. Michael, what does this mean?”

“It means if Kirby’s smart,” Innocent told her, “he’ll leave Belize. Just for a while, till it all blows over. Say three or four years.”

Kirby sighed again. Innocent smiled amiably and said, “That’s why I worked so hard to get you just the best deal I could before you leave. A nice ten-year mortgage. And if you add up the purchase price and all the interest payments over the ten years, you’ll find it comes out to precisely what you paid me for the land in the first place.”

“And you get to write off interest payments and...” Kirby shook his head, disgusted. “You’ll put the whole amount in a high-yield investment, make my payments out of the interest, and it’ll never cost you a thing. And you’ll have the land. You’ll make money on this!”

“You’ll have your purchase price back, Kirby,” Innocent pointed out, and spread his hands. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

Kirby gave Valerie a long-suffering look. “Valerie,” he said, “if you ever see me even talking to this fella again, run over and knock me down.”

Valerie laughed, her eyes gleaming as she watched them both, enjoying herself.

Innocent pointed to the folder. “And down in there, Kirby,” he said, “you’ll find a check for the first month’s payment. How’s that?”

“Terrific,” Kirby said bitterly. Then he shook his head again, and sighed, and said, “Okay, Innocent, you win. Where do I sign?”

Trump Glade, Florida. Route 216 south 8.4 miles from the movie house. Left at the sign reading Potchaw 12. Whitman Lemuel peered out the windshield of the rented car and there it was, a battered old metal sign, shot to death by any number of retarded louts but still discernibly reading, “Potchaw 12.” And the odometer showed exactly eight point four miles since he’d passed the movie house in Trump Glade.

The Potchaw sign included an arrow, which pointed off to the right, where a blacktop road ran away between orange groves, but Kirby Galway’s directions said to go the other way, so Lemuel spun the wheel and the rental turned left onto the dirt road meandering out across the flatness of Florida’s scrub.

Now it was supposed to be 15.2 miles on to where he would find a red ribbon on a barbed wire fence. Turning up the air conditioning slightly, Lemuel relaxed a bit against the seat, and drove slowly but steadily toward his meeting with Kirby Galway.

Of course Galway expected those two New York merchants, Witcher and Feldspan, but he would certainly be willing to make his arrangements with Lemuel instead, once he understood that Witcher and Feldspan were now out of the picture completely.

The memory of Feldspan on that airplane, and the revolting horror he’d created up and down those aisles, came back suddenly into the forefront of Lemuel’s brain, complete with sensory elements, and his lip curled in remembered disgust. It was better those two were out of it, much better.

Actually, Alan Witcher would have been prepared to go forward, but Gerry Feldspan was just too nervous for the job. Some other passenger had looked at him wrong and the result was absolute chaos; fortunately, Feldspan at least did manage to be sick at one point on the passenger who’d started all the trouble, apparently ruining a quite valuable harmonica.

But the upshot — well; perhaps we’ll find a better word — the result of it all was that, in the Miami Airport, Feldspan absolutely shrieked that he was never going to commit another crime, he wanted nothing to do with smugglers, on and on and on, it was a miracle he didn’t get the entire terminal arrested. Witcher, alternating between icy embarrassment and quite touching concern for his friend’s well-being, at last agreed it was impossible for them to go forward, they would have to abandon the project forever. They would turn around at once and fly right back to New York — “And get back that letter somehow,” Witcher had said mysteriously — and leave the field to Lemuel.

Which they had. So here he was, driving 15.2 miles down this dirt road to his first rendezvous with Kirby Galway.

It was better for it to end this way, really. Witcher and Feldspan, apart from their rather nauseatingly blatant homosexuality, were merely merchants, the exact kind of money-grubbing art-denying dealers who had given the import of precious antiquities such a bad name, so it was just as well they wouldn’t be getting their greedy little hands on any of the treasures from Galway’s temple. As for Galway himself, the man was merely a thug, wasn’t he, personally beneath contempt but useful as a tool in rescuing these treasures from the ignorance of the Central Americans and the venality of the likes of Witcher and Feldspan, so he could turn them over to selfless, dedicated, intelligent, learned, honest, unimpeachable scientists like himself.

He was the only truly decent character in the whole story, and he knew it.

And, as happened far too rarely in real life, this time the decent character was going to win. The meeting with Kirby Galway would happen in just the next few minutes, and whatever Kirby Galway was bringing to give to Witcher and Feldspan he could dam well just give to Whitman Lemuel instead.