High Adventure Read online

  “Not yet.”

  “You be sure to let me know.”

  “Yes,” Kirby said, with a slight edge in his voice, and looked up.

  The plane from Miami? Innocent couldn’t yet hear it, nor could he see anything when he gazed skyward, but Kirby apparently could. “Right on time,” he said.

  “Meeting someone?”

  “Just a couple of fellows from the States,” Kirby said. Moving off, he said, “Nice to chat with you, Innocent.”

  “And you, Kirby.” The fact is, Innocent thought in happy surprise, we do like each other, Kirby and I.

  There was the plane. Innocent could see it now, and a moment later hear it, making a great easy purring loop in the sky, like some cheerful iceskater just fooling around. Then all at once it turned businesslike, pointing its no-nonsense nose at the runway, seeming to accelerate as it neared the ground, the big blue-and-white plane surely far too large for this tiny airport, these little scratches in the dirt surrounded by the lushness of the forest a month after the end of the rainy season.

  The plane growled as it touched down and raced past the building toward the far end of the runway. Then it roared quite loudly, decelerating, as though warning lesser creatures that the king of the skies was come.

  Innocent was not here to meet anyone in particular; he just liked to know who had both the money and the need to travel by air. Absentmindedly grooming with his gold toothpick, he stood in the shade of the building and watched the plane trundle back, a tamed tabby now, an outsized toy. It stopped, and 15 or so passengers got off, to be herded toward the building by Immigration officials in odds and ends of uniform.

  Innocent classified the arrivals as they went by: several North American tourists, heading most likely to Ambergris Caye and the offshore barrier reef, where those who like that sort of thing said the scuba diving was unparalleled. Innocent himself wouldn’t know; the largest body of water in which he ever intended to immerse himself was his swimming pool, in which he could be sure he was the only shark.

  Three serious young men in suits and ties and white shirts were local boys, continuing their studies in the States. The University of Miami is now as important as any British school in turning out lawyers for the Carribean basin. A couple of slightly older fellows in neat but casual clothing would be expatriates, gone north for the advantages of American wage scales, home on a visit to show off their solvency, and incidentally to get some relief from the horrible winters of Brooklyn, where so many expatriate Belizeans made their home.

  A pair of white Americans in sports jackets, carrying attaché cases, but not apparently traveling together, would be either businessmen or functionaries at the embassy; in the former case, they might eventually be of interest to Innocent. And the pair of pansy-boys were undoubtedly the “fellows” Kirby was here to meet.

  Definite pansy-boys. They were both in their 40s, quite tall and almost painfully thin, and both unsuccessfully trying to hide an intense nervousness. The one in designer jeans and an alligator’d shirt apparently had grown that absolute forest of a pepper-and-salt moustache to make up for the fact that he was completely bald on top, with thick curly hair standing out only around the sides, resting on his ears like a stole. The other had a slightly less imposing moustache, russet in color, but the top of his head luxuriated in long wavy orangey hair, atop which perched sunglasses. He was got up in a safari shirt and khaki British Army shorts and cowboy boots decorated with stitched bucking broncos. He carried a small olive-drab canvas shoulderbag that tried to look like some sort of military accoutrement, but which was in fact a purse.

  Those were the ones, all right. But what did Kirby want with them? And what was making them so excessively nervous? Money is going to change hands, Innocent told himself. He wanted to know all about it.

  Remaining outside the building, he glanced through its glassless windows, seeing the sheeplike processing of the arrivals. Out on the runway, luggage extracted, doors shut, the plane snarled and turned aside, at once hurrying back up some invisible ramp into the sky, busily on the way to its next stop, Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras.

  Innocent watched Kirby, inside the building, watch the pansy-boys clear through Immigration, then watched him shake their hands, one after the other. No squeezing hard with those two. They collected their luggage—Louis Vuitton for the bald one, a large black vinyl thing with many zippers for the other—and Kirby escorted them out to the sunlight and over to his pickup.

  He would be taking them to his plane, yes? Perhaps a hotel first, but then his plane. Even though Belize is a very small country, and even though Belize City is no longer its capital, it is a city possessing two airports. Commercial international flights moved through this one here, but the charter planes and the small locally-owned craft were all back in town, at the Municipal Airport built on landfill beside the bay. Kirby would take them there, and fly the plane … Where?

  These were not marijuana buyers. And if they were, they would meet Kirby in Florida, not here.

  Pocketing his toothpick, Innocent went inside to chat with the Immigration man who’d checked the pansy-boys’ passports. They were named Alan Witcher and Gerrold Feldspan, they lived at the same address on Christopher Street in New York City, and each listed his occupation as “antique dealer.”

  Innocent went back outside, frowning slightly, feeling a bubble of gas in his stomach. The pickup was gone. He wished he could fly. Not with a plane or a helicopter, but just by himself, like Superman. Except that he wouldn’t like that foolish posture with the arms over one’s head, as though diving. Arms folded, perhaps, or hands casually in jacket pockets, he would like to be able to lift into the sky like an airship, like a dirigible, and float along behind Kirby, unknown, unseen.

  What was Kirby’s business with those two? Where was he taking them? To his land? “There’s nothing there,” Innocent grumbled aloud.

  He should know.

  3

  FER-DE-LANCE

  “Sweeeeeeeettt,” said the tinamou.

  “Kackle-icker-caw,” said the toucan.

  “Bibble bibble ibble bibble bibble,” said the black howler monkey.

  “Sssssss, sss,” said the coral snake.

  “This way, gentlemen,” said Kirby. “Watch out for snakes.” He thumped his machete on a fallen tree trunk, which said throk. “The noise keeps them in their holes,” he explained.

  Witcher and Feldspan, having long since abandoned their earlier pretense at heterosexuality, had been nervously holding one another’s hands since before Kirby’s little six-seater Cessna had landed. Now, at talk of snakes, they pressed shoulders together and gazed round-eyed at the deceptively peaceful green. Well, it gave them something other than the law to be nervous about.

  “I bought this land as an investment,” Kirby explained, which was true enough. “Good potential for grazing, as you can see.”

  Witcher and Feldspan obediently looked about themselves, but were clearly still thinking more about snakes than about grazing land. (A fer-de-lance slithered by, unnoticed.) Nevertheless, at the moment, at this particular moment, the land was very plausible indeed. It began on the east with the fairly level grassy field where Kirby had landed, the slowing plane shushing through knee-deep grasses and clover, the whole area just crying out for a herd of beef cattle. Westward toward the Maya Mountains was the jungly upper parcel into which he was now leading them; at the moment it was rather too overgrown with trees and vines and shrubbery, but a person with vision could imagine it cleared, could visualize the trees themselves being used to build a barn just over there, could just see the white sprawling manor at the top of the ridge, like something out of a Civil War novel, commanding a view of all this rich grazing land below.

  It had been just this time of year when Innocent St. Michael had shown Kirby this land, and when Kirby had scraped together every penny he could find or borrow to buy it. Just this time of year, two years ago, and Kirby was still struggling to get out from under the mess h
e’d made of things. But he’d do it, he’d make it. He had the system now.

  A self-assured and easygoing fellow of 31, who made his living mostly by flying marijuana bales from northern Belize to southern Florida, Kirby had always thought of himself as pretty sharp. In Belize he had seen the growing influx of American immigrants, attracted by the good climate, the stable government, the cheap and plentiful land. In Texas, where he had worked for a while flying bales of feed to cattle on a ranch which was itself rather larger than the entire state of Delaware, he had seen how the combination of good grazing land and herds of beef cattle could provide its owners incredible wealth.

  Texas land, of course, had all been gobbled up well over a century ago. But here was Belize, and here was Kirby in on the ground floor, and the vision of himself as a cattle baron was a pleasing one. (Satin shirts; he’d learn to ride a horse.) Not bad for a boy from Troy, New York, who had been taught to be a pilot by the United States Air Force, but who was of too independent a mind either to stay with the military or work for one of the commercial airlines. His Cessna, which he had named Cynthia, had been bought used from a dealer in Teterboro, in New Jersey, and flown south in easy stages, Kirby finding different temporary jobs along the way. He had met some sharpies, and had dealt with tough guys on both sides of the law, and had never been stung. He was a sharp bright boy, and proud of it.

  And then he met Innocent St. Michael.

  “A lot of Americans are coming down here,” he told Witcher and Feldspan, leading them deeper into the jungle, “because there’s just so much available land. Here we are in a country the size and shape of New Jersey, and there’s a hundred fifty thousand people here. Do you know how many people there are in New Jersey?”

  “No one I know,” said Witcher. He was recovering from the thought of snakes.

  “I had an aunt in New Jersey once,” said Feldspan, “but she went to Florida and died.”

  “There are seven million people in New Jersey,” Kirby said. “And only a hundred fifty thousand here.” He throkked another tree bole, to punish them for being flip, then chopped his way through some dangling vines. There was a well-worn path he and the Indians used, but the customers found it more dramatic if Kirby hacked a fresh path for them through the jungle to the site. And the customer is always right.

  “This is awfully wild country, isn’t it?” Witcher said, clutching Feldspan’s elbow with his free hand.

  “Just unpopulated,” Kirby said. “Human beings haven’t lived here since—Well, you’re about to see it, aren’t you?”

  “Are we?” They looked around again at the increasingly dense flora, seeing nothing but shiny green leaves and ropy vines and tree trunks still garbed in their green rainy-season mold. Kirby had led them the long way around through the thickest part of his personal jungle, and now he pointed the machete ahead and slightly to the left, saying, “Just through there. Wait; let me clear some of this stuff out of the way.”

  Chop; slash; whack. Vines and branches fell away, creating a window in the bumpy wall of green, through which the partly cleared hilltop could be seen, rising steeply upward another 60 feet or more from where they stood. Stippled with a stubble of grasses and brush and a few twisted dwarf trees, the slope ended at a bare conical top. “There,” Kirby said, stepped back, smiled, and let the boys have a look.

  They looked. They stared. All thought of snakes was forgotten, all thought of the laws they were here to break was swept clean out of their heads. Hushed, Feldspan said, “Is that it?”

  Kirby pointed again with the machete. “You see there on the right, about halfway up?”

  They saw; they had to. “Steps,” breathed Feldspan.

  “The temple,” breathed Witcher.

  “Let’s have a closer look,” said Kirby.

  “Oh, do let’s!”

  Kirby laid about himself with the machete, enthusiastically clearing a path up through the thicket to the clearer part, where he paused, tinked an artfully casual foot-square stone with the machete tip, and waited for the city boys, a bit out of breath, to catch up. “Like I told you in New York,” he said, “I’m no archaeologist, I don’t know much about this kind of thing, but what I guess is, the temple probably starts right around here.”

  Feldspan was the first to notice the stone. “Look!” he cried, excitement quivering in his voice. “A paving block! This has been shaped!”

  Kirby nodded in thoughtful agreement. “It was seeing a few of those blocks around that first got to me. Then I went down to Belmopan and talked to the government people there, and everybody said there’s just no Mayan cities or temples or anything at all like that in this area. They said it’s all been studied and checked out, and there’s just nothing here.”

  “They’re wrong,” breathed Witcher. The paving stone must have weighed 40 pounds, but he had picked it up anyway, stood tilted forward a bit, gazing at the stone, turning it slowly and awkwardly in his hands.

  Feldspan said, “What’s the name of this place?”

  “Probably nobody for a thousand years has known the name of this temple,” Kirby told him. “The Indians around here call this hill Lava Sxir Yt.” (He pronounced it “Lava Shkeer Eat,” and then spelled it.)

  “Lava Sxir Yt,” Feldspan echoed, reverently, as though the words were an incantation to call up an ancient savage Mayan priest.

  Kirby said, “Let’s go on up.”

  Witcher carefully replaced the stone, and they continued up the slope, soon coming to partly cleared steps, obviously part of the temple’s outer wall. Witcher and Feldspan chattered happily over that discovery, until Kirby shepherded them on upward. Near the top, where they could already look back over the jungle canopy to the tiny blue-and-white plane parked toylike in the field below, they came upon what at first appeared to be a low tombstone, perhaps two feet wide and six inches thick, jutting less than a foot from the ground, tilted slightly forward. The top and sides had been squared off by rough chisel-work, and some sort of scratches were etched deeply into the forward side.

  This really got to Witcher and Feldspan, who fell to their knees in front of the stone, Feldspan spitting on it and spreading the wet with his fingertips, the better to see the etched-in scratches, while Witcher clawed away at the loose dry soil at the thing’s base, revealing more of it. “Jaguar,” breathed Feldspan, tracing the lines. There it was; the topmost portion of a typical stylized Mayan drawing of a jaguar’s head. The lines continued down into the area Witcher had cleared, and presumably some distance below.

  “Scorpion,” said Kirby mildly.

  They both jumped backward, scrabbling in panic on the weed-grown steps, struggling to their feet. “Where?” cried Witcher.

  “No, no,” Kirby said. “I just meant to look out for them. I wouldn’t dig barehanded around here, believe me.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Feldspan, beginning to recover his poise. “You’re absolutely right.”

  “This stela,” Witcher said, pointing at the stone, “could be very valuable. Depending on the condition of the rest of it.”

  “There’s a bunch of them here,” Kirby said casually, watching Witcher and Feldspan exchange a quick hungry look. “Let’s go on.”

  This time they continued all the way to the top, where they found a mostly flat weedy area about 12 feet square. In one comer the old paving stones were completely uncovered. Walking back and forth, alternately staring down at the paving stones and out at the view of jungle and clearings and, in the western distance, the bluish hulking shapes of the Maya Mountains, Witcher and Feldspan were clearly caught up in the myth and the magic of it all; here were they, two New Yorkers, sophisticates, antique dealers, used to the ways of the most modem of civilizations, and they had traveled in the course of one day more than a thousand years into the past. The blood of human sacrifice must have soaked these paving stones. The few visible steps in the overgrown sides of the temple would have been lined with savage worshipers in their bright cloaks and feathers. Here—here—
the priest would have waited, the rough stone knife held high over his head.

  “The temples,” Witcher said, and was overcome by emotion, and started again: “The temples were painted red. In the old times, when the Mayans were here. Imagine; from miles and miles away in the jungle you could see the great red temple rearing up into the sky.”

  “Fantastic,” breathed Feldspan.

  “Must have been something,” Kirby agreed. His job was to be slightly the rube, to their greater sophistication, just as he was meant to be a bit less honorable than they and a bit more dangerous. He enjoyed all parts of the game, including this one.

  You take a man out of the world he knows, you sing him your song, you tell him about the mermaids, you put on your shadow show, and if you do it all well enough he believes the whole thing. And then you make your sale.

  Witcher said, “When can we begin?”

  “We’ll have to wait a few weeks,” Kirby told him. “The ground back toward the coast is still too wet for the bulldozer, and there aren’t any roads around here.”

  Looking around, Feldspan’s expression grew pensive. “It’s too bad, really,” he said.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Kirby told him, as well he did; he’d helped the occasional customer through pangs of conscience before. “What we’re standing on here isn’t merely treasure,” he said, “not just gold and jade and valuable carvings. It’s the heritage of a people.”

  “That’s true,” Feldspan said. (Witcher too was now looking a bit abashed.) “You phrased that very well, Mister Galway,” Feldspan said.

  Why not; he’d had enough practice. “I have the same feelings you do,” Kirby said, “and I wish there was some better way to handle things. If I had the money—Listen, I feel I know you two guys well enough now, I can level with you.”

  Witcher and Feldspan looked alert, ready—depending on the revelation—to be amused, sympathetic, outraged on his behalf, or generally male-bondive. Kirby gazed out over his private jungle and said, “When we met last month, I told you I was a charter pilot, and I am, but there aren’t that many jobs for a private pilot down here. Not legal ones, anyway.”