Donald Westlake - High Adventure

Now, with the usual light in her eyes, Estelle approached Kirby with a bottle of Belikin beer in one hand and a piece of notepaper in the other. “Cora brought it home after school,” she said, extending the paper. Since there was no telephone line out here, Cora, the eldest, picked up Kirby’s few messages at the store in Orange Walk.

Kirby took the beer with more pleasure than the message, which must have shown on his face, because Estelle said, “You look tired, Kirby.”

“I’m very tired.”

“I hope you got a good appetite.”

“I’ve always got an appetite, Estelle,” Kirby said, and swigged beer, and looked at his message.

Shit and damn! Whitman goddam Lemuel!

Last month, three days after the disaster at the Soho gallery, when that irritating pest had queered his pitch, Kirby had run into Lemuel unexpectedly at another party — this one on Park Avenue in the 90s, in the apartment of a rich and avid collector of pre-Columbian art — and on that second try he had succeeded at last in landing his fish. Yes, Whitman Lemuel was interested in previously unknown Mayan artifacts. Yes, his museum had the funds to support that interest. Yes, they were prepared to be casual about the provenance and prior ownership of items they bought. YES, he would come to Belize to look at an undiscovered Mayan temple!

Next week, next Thursday. It had all been arranged, with an exchange of phone numbers and a writing down of dates. And now here was a message from Whitman Lemuel, bland as could be, saying he would arrive tomorrow! “Know you’ll understand my impatience. Wouldn’t want anyone else to beat us. Will be on afternoon Miami plane. Fort George Hotel reservation confirmed.”

No; it’s not possible. On Friday, day after tomorrow, Kirby had another shipment to fly north, the very topic of his discussion this afternoon with the man in the Toyota. But that problem paled next to the real worry: Tomorrow Witcher and Feldspan would still be here, also at the Fort George.

Estelle looked worried on Kirby’s behalf, saying, “Kirby? Bad news?”

“Bad news,” Kirby agreed. “I’m sorry, Estelle, maybe I don’t have such a good appetite after all.”

Witcher and Feldspan. Whitman Lamuel. It was not acceptable that they meet.

When the driver steered his cab into a cemetery, Valerie was certain some sort of mistake had been made. “But I want to go to Belmopan,” she said.

“Oh, sure,” said the driver. “This is the road.”

It was the road. Cemetery flanked them on both sides of the meandering two-lane blacktop; very white stones, very red ribbons wrapped around bright sprays of flowers or around gaunt remnant clusters of sticks. Off to the left two sinewy black men, stripped to the waist, dug a grave in the heavy red clay. At one point, the road bifurcated, making an island of thick-trunked short trees intermixed with more grave markers; tree roots had pushed up through the blacktop, forcing the cab to slow to five miles an hour as they jounced by.

It’s like the beginning of a horror movie, Valerie thought, except that it wasn’t, really. The sun was too bright, the sky too large and beautiful and blue, and the cemetery itself too cheerful and festive. And the air coming through the taxi windows — apparently, the air conditioning in all Belizean taxis awaits a part — was too soft and languid, too full of the sweet scents of life.

Most of the world was still theoretical to Valerie Greene, who was painfully aware of how many places she hadn’t been. Her pursuit of Mayan sites through the computers of UCLA and the foundation grantors of New York had been spurred — beyond her natural enthusiasm as a scholar — by her need to travel, to get out into what her colleagues called “the field,” to get out into the world!. It was time, Valerie thought, that she and the world got to know one another.

Her father, Robert Edward Greene IV, was a minister in southern Illinois, a fact Valerie found embarrassing without knowing exactly why. Her older brother, R. E. Greene V, was an English teacher in a high school 11 miles from their father’s church, and it was Valerie’s considered opinion that Robby would never travel. Nor marry. Nor do anything. An R. E. G. VI seemed exceedingly unlikely. And, in truth, unnecessary. Redundant. Even otiose.

It was to be different for Valerie. Archaeology was endlessly fascinating to her, and not only because of the travels to remote comers of the globe that the discipline implied. In her mind, she traveled as well into the past, the remote and unreachable past, in which the people and the cities and the civilizations were so different from southern Illinois. If asked, as she rarely was, what had led her to archaeology in the first place, she invariably answered, “I’ve always loved it!” since she herself had forgotten how profoundly she had been influenced, at the age of nine, by Green Mansions. (Rima the bird girl! Rima! Rima!)

After the cemetery, Belize City was left behind, and the Western Highway settled down to being an ordinary two-lane bumpy potholed country road. It was 52 miles to the new capital at Belmopan, all of it ranging very gradually uphill, and within just a few miles of the coast the broad-leaf tropical greenery gave way to scrub forest, intermixed with weedy fields and intense patches of cultivation. Small unpainted shacks housed families, usually with many children.

There was little traffic on the road: the occasional lumbering large truck (sometimes with Mexican license plates); the small farm truck with half-naked men standing in the back, sometimes waving or making other gestures to Valerie; and every once in a while a chrome-gleaming horn-honking high-speeding closed-windowed big American car with Belize plates, transporting some government official between the nation’s capital and the nation’s city.

Certainly the nation’s capital was no city, when they reached it an hour and a half later. Invented in self-defense in the 1960s, after one hurricane too many had leveled the original capital, Belmopan has so far failed to become very real. Official efforts to force-breed a city tend to be more official than human, and that’s what happened in Belmopan. Whenever buildings remind you irresistably of the artist’s rendering, something has gone wrong somewhere.

The driver, who had been very uninterested in conversation (Valerie eventually having become quite nostalgic for yesterday’s chatterbox), also had no idea where Innocent St. Michael’s office might be found. “Maybe there,” he said, pointing vaguely either to the structure that looked like a prison camp’s administration building or possibly at the outsized World War II pillbox beside it.

The pillbox was too intimidating; in the other building Valerie found many people, some typing, some talking, some reading, some chewing thoughtfully on various kinds of food, all in many small offices to both sides of a central corridor. A woman darning with tiny stitches a boy’s white school shirt, the shirt almost completely covering the typewriter on the desk in front of her, said, “Oh, Mister St. Michael, that’s Land Allocation, that’s upstairs.”

Upstairs another woman, this one leafing through a recent issue of Queen, directed Valerie to an office where a slender young black man stood up from behind his desk and said, “Oh, yes, Miss Greene, you have an appointment with the Deputy Director.”

“Yes, I have.”

Glancing at his quartz watch — perhaps flashing it a bit more than necessary — the young man said, “I’m afraid you’re a bit early.”

“Actually,” Valerie said, looking at the large white-faced clock on the wall, “I’m three minutes late.”