High Adventure Page 13

  Lemuel’s one sartorial concession to a trek in the wilderness had been to wear Adidas sneakers with his usual gray slacks and pale blue shirt and light cotton sports jacket. Till now, his garb had merely made him look slightly foolish but, with fright blotching his face and agitating his limbs, he looked exactly like the victim in some sadistic tale of a city man strayed among brutes; possibly by Paul Bowles. Staring fixedly at the machete held loosely in Kirby’s right hand, “I demand to know what’s going on,” he cried, spoiling the effect when his voice broke on the word demand.

  “So do I,” Kirby told him. He knew nothing about that onrushing car except it was none of his doing and was therefore trouble. “Wait here,” he repeated. “Play with the goddam whistle while I get rid of—whoever they are.”

  He hated having to take the easier path in full view of the client, but there was no choice if he were to stop the interlopers before they actually reached the base of the temple. Running diagonally down the hill, around to the right side, he kept catching glimpses of the car between vines and tree branches, and be God-damned if it wasn’t the peach-colored Land Rover from the hotel this morning! That, or one exactly like it.

  This morning’s Land Rover had had government licence plates.

  “Hell and damn,” Kirby muttered, running harder. Innocent has something to do with this, he told himself, but he was moving too fast to think about the question.

  A knot of vines was in his way. He swung the machete with both hands, teeth gritted, wishing it were Innocent’s neck. The vines fell away, grudging him a foot or two at every swipe, until all at once the hole was open, the Land Rover was dead ahead, and Kirby hurtled out and down onto the barren flat, waving the machete over his head and yelling, “Stop! Stop!”

  The Land Rover veered. There were two people in it, the driver black and male, the passenger white and female. They were the people he’d seen at the hotel this morning. He saw them, the driver blank-faced and the woman yelling something, as the Land Rover angled around him, not even slackening speed.

  What were they up to? Kirby turned, panting, the machete sagging at his side, and saw the Land Rover’s brake lights go on as it suddenly jolted to a stop. The woman was waving her arms, now yelling at her companion. The back-up lights flashed as the Land Rover came sluing and sliding backward, slamming to a stop beside Kirby, where the woman glared at him through her large sunglasses from under her floppy-brimmed hat and yelled, “Who are you?”

  “Who am I? Lady, what the hell are you—”

  “There’s a temple here!” she cried, astonishingly, horribly. Kirby gaped as she clambered out of the Land Rover, some sort of map or chart flapping in her left hand. Behind her, the driver sat immobile, taking no part.

  “Oh, no, there isn’t,” Kirby said. “No, no. No way.”

  “But there is! There must be!” Waving the map at him, she insisted, “It’s all worked out! All I have to do—” She started around him, headed for the slope.

  “Wait! Wait!” Kirby ran to get in front, to stop her. “You can’t just—You can’t—This is trespassing!”

  “I have authority from the Belizean government!” She stood even taller than her normal six feet when she said this, and her eyes flashed.

  Innocent. Has to be Innocent. Damn, damn, damn the man, what was he up to and why? Kirby said, “This is private land, this is my land and you can’t—”

  But now she bent almost double, looking upward past Kirby’s right elbow, whipping off her hat so she could see better. “There!” she cried.

  Oh, God. Kirby reluctantly turned, also crouching a bit, and right there, through the hole he’d just this minute himself cut through the vines, was framed the top fraction of the temple. Steps, stela, flattened platform at the top. It was like a picture from a textbook. “No,” Kirby said.

  “The temple,” breathed this miserable pest of a woman, and Lemuel appeared in the opening, carrying the whistle.

  Shit. Kirby came around again to stand close in front of the woman, trying to block her vision, praying Lemuel would have the sense to stay away. “Cut this out now,” he insisted. “This is my land, this is private property, you can’t just barge—”

  “I know you,” she said, staring at him, and all of a sudden he knew her, too. Oh, this is impossible, he thought, this is unfair, this is beyond anything. This pain in the ass can’t queer my pitch with Lemuel twice.

  Yes. Lemuel did not have the sense to keep out of it, because here he came, carrying the goddam whistle, looking frightened and suspicious and determined and fatuous, saying, “Galway, I have to know what’s going on here, I have a reputation to—”

  “You!” cried the woman. The pest. Valerie Greene; the name returned unbidden to Kirby’s mind. Valerie Greene, twice in one lifetime.

  Lemuel also recognized her, if belatedly. His jaw dropped. “Oh, no,” he said.

  She saw the whistle in his hand. She pointed at it, rising up taller than ever, seven feet tall maybe, eight feet, nine. “DESPOLIATION!” she cried.

  Now everybody acted at once. Valerie Greene thundered into her historical-preservation speech, Kirby yelled uselessly for everybody to shut up and go away, and Lemuel backtracked, flinging the whistle away backhanded, like a small boy caught smoking. “I won’t—This isn’t—” Lemuel sputtered, “I can’t—Kirby, you have to—” And he turned and ran pell-mell toward the plane.

  “National treasures—Priceless antiquities—Irreplaceable artifacts—” Valerie Greene was in full cry now, orating to a stadium of 60,000.

  Kirby held the machete up in front of this virago’s face. His eyes were on her throat. “One,” he said.

  22

  HALF A LEAGUE

  “Two,” said the crazy man.

  Valerie backed away. Was he counting to ten … or to three?

  The crazy man’s face was very red. Veins stood out on his neck, reminding Valerie irrelevantly of Michelangelo sculptures, and he raised the machete even more menacingly, like Reggie Jackson seeing a fat one come across the plate. He didn’t say three.

  “I—” Valerie said, back-pedaling. “You—”

  She hadn’t realized the Land Rover’s engine was off until she heard, behind her, the driver switch it back on. nrnrnrnrnr, cough, CHUG.

  Would he leave without her? Would the one in front chop off her head? Men! Valerie turned about and scampered to the Land Rover, leaping in as the skinny black man shifted into low; so she would never know if he’d been waiting for her or if she’d just made it. The Land Rover jolted forward, the driver spun the wheel in a hard right which took them in a loop around the crazy man, and from the safety of the moving vehicle Valerie yelled at him, “I’ll report you! I’ll tell Mister St. Michael!”

  Something, probably the threat, possibly the name, drove the crazy man over the edge. With a mighty oath, he flung his machete to the ground, where it bounced in a sudden jump of pebbles and flutter of dust. Tearing his bush hat from his head, he hurled that atop the machete, then jumped on the hat with both feet.

  Twisting around in the metal bucket seat as the Land Rover sped back the way they’d come, Valerie saw the crazy man jumping up and down on his hat and machete, then pausing to pant and cough in all the dust he’d raised, then shaking his fist after Valerie, then shaking both fists at heaven. All at once, he stooped, picked up a handful of pebbles, and threw them after the Land Rover, though they were far out of range by now.

  Valerie looked up, and there it was, serene, silent against the blue sky, indomitable: the temple, looking like nothing more than a hill from this distance. Covered by a millenia of jungle growth, a thousand years of accumulated earth, growing plants, rotting flora and fauna, nature’s heavy veneer disguising the works of man. “Do you know what that is?”

  The driver looked in his rearview mirror: “A very angry man.”

  “No,” Valerie said. “The temple. I was right!”

  The driver veered, jolting Valerie almost out onto the hard dry ground c
overed with dead and dying grass. She faced front, and saw they were angling around the airplane, where Whitman Lemuel—oh, she remembered him—stood holding his jacket up over his head like arrested numbers runners in newspaper photographs. “I know you!” Valerie yelled, shaking her finger at him on the way by.

  And to think, to think, she’d been embarrassed at dinner last night, afraid he would notice her!

  The driver leaned forward, squinting at the rearview mirror. “That hill?” he said. “That’s really a temple?”

  “Over a thousand years old,” Valerie told him, awed by its existence, its reality, her own astonishing brilliance in rescuing it from oblivion. “A Mayan temple.”

  “Well, that’s pretty good,” the driver said. “And nobody knew it was there.”

  “The world is going to know, just as soon as I get back to Belmopan,” said Valerie.

  “Uh huh,” said the driver.

  23

  CURRENTS OF PASSION

  “Not back yet?” Innocent shook his head, smiling at the desk clerk. “Women,” he said. “Never on time anywhere.”

  The desk clerk answered the smile; he and Innocent St. Michael had known one another a long time, in a limited but satisfactory way. “But what could we do without them, eh?” he said.

  “Bugger all,” said Innocent. Before the desk clerk could decide whether that had been idiomatic or literal his switchboard lit up and he had to excuse himself, being the only person on duty at the desk at this time.

  Innocent studied his watch: a Rolex, a birthday gift from his wife, selected and paid for by himself, gift-wrapped by the girl in the store. Two minutes to five, it said; by the time he got to the bar, the sun would definitely be over the yardarm.

  “Yes, yes,” the desk clerk was saying. “I’m doin the best I can, Mister Lemuel, but it just may not be possible. Oh, yes, sir, I’ll go on trying.” Hanging up, he turned back to Innocent, shaking his head and saying, “It always be Americans. Impossible.”

  Innocent had heard the name Lemuel and his ears had pricked up, because he knew who that was. Another of Kirby’s strange visitors from the States; a teacher on vacation, he claimed. “What’s this one want?” he asked.

  “The Earth and all,” the desk clerk said. “He registered here for two more days, but now in a rush his plans all different. He run in here an hour ago like the end of the world, had to be on a plane today, had to be out of Belize this very minute, sudden urgent message from home. Foo,” commented the desk clerk. “If this man got any sudden urgent message from home, I’d know it, wouldn’t I? I’d hand it him, wouldn’t I?”

  “Of course you would,” Innocent said, thinking, Hmmmmmm. “Sounds like he picked up the running shits,” he said.

  “I don’t know what that man’s problem be,” said the desk clerk. “I done all I can. I told him, there’s no more flights out to the States today, so then he wants a charter, he won’t spend another night in Belize. I told him, he already got to pay for tonight at the hotel, it way too late to check out, he don’t care ’bout that. I tell him, any charter out of the country, there’s all kinds of paperwork, Customs clearance, police, all that, now he’ll take a flight anywhere, he don’t care. Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, all the same to him. Now, you know there’s nothin I can do bout that.”

  “So he’ll spend the night,” Innocent said, “and go out in the morin.”

  “Complainin, complainin,” commented the desk clerk. “Well, I go off at six.”

  “Let’s hope my little lady’s back by then,” Innocent said. “I’ll be in the bar.”

  “I be sure to let you know,” the desk clerk promised.

  On his way back to the bar, Innocent paused at the public phone booths to make three calls. In the first, he said, “There’s a man at the Fort George called Whitman Lemuel. Just a couple minutes after six, you call him, tell him you hear he’s looking for a charter flight, tell him to meet you at the Municipal Airport right away to make the arrangements, you’ll get him right out tonight. No, you don’t have to go to the airport.”

  In the second call, he said, “There’s an American fella named Whitman Lemuel gonna be out to the Municipal Airport around six-thirty, looking for some charter flight. Arrest him on twenty or thirty technical charges. No, no, you won’t have to defend them.”

  In the third call, he said, “There’s an American name of Whitman Lemuel gonna be comin in around seven. He’ll be spendin the night. Don’t hurt him, but do scare him. I’ll be comin down in the morning to rescue him, and I’m hopin to see a grateful man.”

  Smiling, well pleased with himself, Innocent went on to the bar, where he ordered a gin and tonic and sat on one of the low broad swivel chairs, looking out at the view over the tame swimming pool at the feral sea. The pool, in the hotel’s late afternoon shadow, looked cold, but the sea, glistening in amber sunlight, looked warm. The impounded black freighter still stood in the offing, awaiting auction. White sails far out moved toward the barrier reef.

  White sails. Valerie’s round white behind. Innocent smiled, content to wait.

  24

  WHEN, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR

  When, in the middle of the air, Kirby saw his land and temple again, it was just 5:00 o’clock, and he’d been flying into the sun for half an hour. As though he weren’t annoyed and irritated and angry and irked and furious enough already.

  Lemuel had been absolutely unsoothable on the flight back to Belize City, had refused to talk rationally, had alternated between moaning about his lost reputation and bitterly accusing Kirby of being responsible for blighting his career. At the Municipal Airport, he’d flung himself from the plane the instant it stopped rolling and went galloping off toward the operations building, yelling, “Taxi! Taxi!”

  And now Kirby was back to his mousetrap, the sun in his eyes and ashes in his mouth. Skimming the temple top, he flashed down the other side, buzzed the Indian village low enough to cool soup, rotated Cynthia on her left wingtip, snarled over the hill again, hurled the plane to the ground as though he hated her, and stomped up the slope to the temple roof, where Tommy and Luz and the others were grouped about, gazing at him wide-eyed. “That was pretty close, Kimosabe,” Tommy said.

  “You don’t know what close is,” Kirby told him, disgusted. “There was a goddam archaeologist here a little while ago. She’s on her way to report she has just found a previously unknown Mayan temple.”

  “Shit,” said Luz.

  Tommy said, “On her way where?”

  “We can’t stop her,” Kirby said, “and it doesn’t matter who in particular she talks to, what matters is that this goddam pestiferous woman is honest.”

  “Ugh,” said Luz.

  “I hope she can’t bring back reinforcements tonight,” Kirby said, looking over his shoulder at his blasted plain. “But she’ll certainly be back tomorrow. She thinks I’m here to despoil the temple.”

  Luz said, “Do what?”

  “Steal,” Tommy explained. To Kirby he said, “So what do we do? Hold them off?”

  “We’re not talking about General Custer,” Kirby told him. “We’re talking about policemen, reporters, photographers, archaeologists, government officials—”

  “The whole shmeer,” Tommy finished. “Too bad; Custer we could have handled.”

  Kirby looked about, shaking his head. “I hate this,” he said, “but we’ve got to dismantle it.”

  “Shit,” said Luz.

  Everybody looked concerned. Tommy said, “Forever?”

  “Christ, I hope not.” Kirby sighed, gazing upon his masterpiece. “But at least until the fuss dies down. She’ll come back here with a lot of people, she’ll point, but there’s nothing here. With luck, everybody says she’s crazy.”

  “It’s her period,” Luz suggested.

  “Exactly,” Kirby said. “We wait a while, it blows over, we start up again.”

  “Maybe,” said Tommy.

  Adversity made Kirby philosophical. “Maybe’s the bes
t we can hope for in this sad world, boys,” he said.

  25

  THE SAPODILLA NARRATIVE

  “The alternative,” the skinny black man said reasonably, “was to let her tell everybody about the temple.”

  “So you brought her here?” Vernon demanded.

  Here was a small loggers’ cabin above the Sibun Gorge, a deep narrow winding groove through the Maya Mountains, gouged out over the millenia by the busy Sibun River. The cabin itself, low and slant-roofed, like a lean-to, was 30 years old or more, rank with mildew and the sweet smell of rotting things. Dirt-floored, lacking any furniture, it was built of horizontal pine-slabs nailed to upright posts pounded into the ground. Apparently it had once been half its present size, just one room, but then a second room was added, making the original front wall a dividing wall. There were no windows in either room, but plenty of air circulated through the uneven cracks between slabs. From the outside the place looked like the log cabin on a maple syrup label, but inside it looked like the attic in your grandmother’s house after she moved out. The logcutters who had built this rough shelter had long ago departed, on to other parts of the forest, and in the intervening years it had been occupied only rarely, by hunters or fugitives or lovers. And now by kidnappers and their victim.

  “Where else?” the skinny black man demanded, giving Vernon a challenging look. Clearly, he had expected praise for his initiative, not all this carping. “Not to my house,” he went on. “Should I have taken her to your place?”

  “She can identify you anyway,” Vernon pointed out.

  “Not if she never sees me again. I can just disappear for a while, it’s happened before.”

  “Well, I can’t,” Vernon said. “I have a job to protect.”