Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 Read online

  High Adventure

  Donald E. Westlake

  You are in the jungles of Belize.

  You pick your way carefully along the overgrown trail until you come to the clearing. There, above you, rest the ruins of a Mayan pyramid. Is that a stone whistle at your feet? An idol of a bat-god? Riches surround you and Kirby Galway will be more than happy to smuggle your finds up to the United States in a bale of marijuana. Aren’t you glad you met Kirby?

  If you are Innocent St. Michael, wily Belizan bureaucrat, you’re not. After all, you sold Kirby the worthless land and know that there are no treasures—not to mention pyramids— on it. If you are Lemuel the curator, you’re not. After all, these artifacts should be protected— by you and in your own way. If you are St. Michael’s assistant Vernon, you’re not. After all, you are involved in a plot to overthrow the government and all the visitors Kirby is bringing in are making your job more difficult.

  Perhaps you are one of the two homosexual antique dealers with a secret to keep hidden, or maybe you are Valerie—loved, kidnaped, ordered to be executed and otherwise getting in the way. If you are, meeting Kirby didn’t do anything for your disposition, either.

  Now it is your turn to meet Kirby Galway and begin the most hilarious adventure of your life.

  High Adventure

  Donald E. Westlake

  The Mysterious Press New York

  This rumpus is for

  Emory and Elisa King, and for

  Stewart and Lita Krohn, and for

  Compton Fairweather, all of whom

  may recognize a tree or two in passing;

  and for Abby Adams,

  who walked this line.

  “Hey, Dad, This Is Belize!”, by Emory King Copyright 1977, Emory King Tropical Books, Belize City, Belize used by permission of the author

  Beka Lamb, by Zee Edgell Copyright 1982, Zee Edgell Heinemann Educational Books, Ltd, London used by permission of the author and Heinemann Educational Books

  High Adventure. Copyright © 1985 by Donald E. Westlake. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address The Mysterious Press, 129 West 56th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019.

  The characters in this story are fictitious, and any resemblance between them and any living person is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Catalogue Number: 84-62912 ISBN: 0-89296-123-6/Trade Edition 0-89296-124-4/Limited Edition

  FIRST EDITION

  Designed by Michael Stetson

  Dust Jacket painting by David Tamura

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  THE FAMOUS PLANE

  1 THE CRESCENT EMPIRE

  2 FLIGHT 306

  3 FER-DE-LANCE

  4 NEW YORK MONEY

  5 MEETING AT FORT GEORGE

  6 THE MISSING LAKE

  7 TO LIVE FOREVER

  8 THE QUESTION

  9 THE BLACK FREIGHTER

  10 OUT OF THE PAST

  11 THE WARNING

  12 THE BLUE MIRROR

  13 WANTED!

  14 THE UNKNOWN LAND

  15 WARRIORS AND MERCHANTS: A PRELUDE TO DISASTER

  16 SUNRISE

  17 HASTE TO BE RICH

  18 WINDING TRAILS

  19 SATISFACTION

  20 THE LOST CITY

  21 REUNION

  22 HALF A LEAGUE

  23 CURRENTS OF PASSION

  24 WHEN, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AIR

  25 THE SAPODILLA NARRATIVE

  26 THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  27 THE BEACON AND THE VOICE

  28 BUT NOT IN COROZAL

  29

  30 BEFORE THE STORM

  • INTERMISSION •

  PART TWO:

  TINGS BRUK DOWN

  1 JADE NOR GOLD

  2 THE END OF THE WORLD

  3 CYNTHIA TAKES IT OFF

  4 FATHER SULLIVAN DRIVES BY

  5 BOOTS AND SADDLE

  6 SAND AND SAIL

  7 GLIMPSES

  8 NORTH GUATEMALA: ME TAUGHT RON

  9 A SMALL FORTUNE

  10 TOTAL RECOIL

  11 THE MYSTERY OF THE TEMPLE

  12 IT HAPPENED ONE AFTERNOON

  13 SOME ASPECTS OF PHARMACOLOGICAL EXPERIENCE

  14 SAME AGAIN ALL AROUND

  15 DEVIL DANCE

  16 PILLOW TALK

  17 THE SECRET ROAD

  18 THE HARMONICA PLAYER

  19 THE ROLE OF THE ANTI-HERO IN POSTWAR AMERICAN FICTION

  20 INSIDE THE JUNGLE THE LAND IS RICH

  21 ZOTZ

  21 CHICKEN ESTELLE (SERVES FOUR)

  23 HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN REAL ESTATE

  24 PRESENT IMPERFECT

  25 CROSSROADS OF DESTINY

  26 SAILING DIRECTIONS (EN ROUTE) FOR THE CARIBBEAN SEA

  from HEY DAD, THIS IS BELIZE! by Emory King (abridged)

  The Atayde Brothers Circus visited Belize in the late twenties. It was around the same time Lindbergh flew into Belize City with his famous plane. They set up their tent near Memorial Park, and when the people of Belize saw what was inside they rushed the place by the thousands.

  Animals! Boys, there were elephants, camels, show horses, polar bears, lions, tigers from India, and even giraffes. On the 10th of September the circus band marched through the streets and we almost had a riot.

  And a regular band it was too. All the members had uniforms with gold braid and wore high hats and marched like soldiers. The leader of the band was a Mexican Army Major named Ismael G. Amaton. He was on the wrong side in some revolution in Mexico in those days and had been forced to run away and join the circus to keep from being killed.

  Every weekend people came from all over to see the circus. There were clowns, performing horses, acrobats from El Salvador, trapeze artists, beautiful German girls dressed all in spangles and tights, who rode bicycles. It was a sight for the people of Belize.

  Well boys, the circus stayed around Belize City for about two months, giving shows every weekend to packed audiences. But a funny thing happened. The circus went broke.

  Nobody knows why. Maybe someone ran off with the cash. But the circus did not have the money to move on. Little by little, a few of the circus people left. Some went to Honduras and Guatemala. Some went back to Mexico. A few stayed on in Belize.

  When there was only about 50 people left, with all the animals and equipment, they decided to sell what they could and rent a boat to take them to Progresso.

  A storm came up when the boat, which looked like Noah’s Ark, got as far as Caye Caulker’s northern point. They could not go out to sea, so they came up to San Pedro and landed.

  Well, if you ever saw a circus it was that day. The boat got as close to shore as possible, and they put the poor beasts into the sea to get ashore as best they could.

  It was a downhearted bunch of people and a sad bunch of animals. Imagine giraffes and elephants, and dancing horses on the beach.

  Of course, we villagers did everything we could to help. Water and meat and food for the animals soon put the town in trouble, but somehow we fixed them up alright. The circus people were nice, and put on a couple of shows for us in the main park.

  Oh those were the days, boys. Ever since then, whenever we Belizeans hear of a big project that is going to do great things in the country, we say: Bigger circus than this come to Belize and broke up.

  PART ONE

  THE FAMOUS PLANE

  1 THE CRESCENT EMPIRE

  The girl was a real pest. “I think it’s terrible,” she said.<
br />
  Kirby Galway nodded. “I think so, too,” he murmured, jiggling ice cubes in his glass. Around them the party brisked along, intense meaningless conversation on all sides, mammoth paintings of house parts—a keyhole, a windowsill—visible above and between all those talking heads. In the middle distance, receding ever farther from Kirby’s grasp, was his target of opportunity for this evening, one Whitman Lemuel, assistant curator of the Duluth Museum of Pre* Columbian Art, here in New York on a buying expedition, here at this Soho gallery party as a form of relaxation and a story to tell the home folks in Duluth.

  Kirby had just this morning learned of Lemuel’s presence in New York, had burrowed out Lemuel’s evening plans by late this afternoon, and had come down through the snowy city to crash the party early, so as to be ready when his mark arrived. Tall and handsome and self' assured, proud of his luxuriant ginger moustache, dressed with casual impeccability, Kirby was yet to find the party he couldn’t crash. And in Soho? He could have come here straight from the jungle, in his hiking boots and oil-stained khakis and battered bush hat, and still they would have swept him right on in, assuming he was either an artist or an artist’s boyfriend.

  He was neither. He was a salesman, and his customer this evening was one Whitman Lemuel.

  Or was to have been; things were looking decidedly worse. Was it the door Lemuel now angled toward?

  It had begun well. Kirby had introduced himself in tried-and-true fashion, by actually introducing the other fellow: “Aren’t you Whitman Lemuel?”

  Non-famous people are always delighted to be recognized by strangers. “Why, yes, I am,” said the round-faced Lemuel, eyes benign behind round glasses, broad mouth smiling over polka-dot bow tie.

  “I want you to know,” Kirby said, “I was really impressed by that upper Amazon show you put together a while back.”

  “Oh, yes?” The smile grew broader, the eyes more benign, the bow tie brighter. “Did you see it in Duluth?”

  “Unfortunately not. In Houston. It traveled very well.”

  “Yes, it did, really,” Lemuel agreed, nodding, but his expression very faintly clouded. “Still, there were parts of it that couldn’t leave the museum, simply not. I’m afraid you didn’t get the full effect.” “What I saw was definitely impressive. I’m Kirby Galway, by the way. ”

  As they shook hands, Lemuel said, “Are you connected with the Houston museum?”

  “No, no, I’m merely an amateur, an enthusiast. I live in Belize now, you see, and—”

  “Ah, Belize!” Lemuel said, brightening even more.

  “You know it?” Kirby asked, with an innocent smile. “Most people’ve never heard of the place.”

  “Oh, my dear fellow,” Lemuel said. “Belize. Formerly British Honduras, independent, now, I believe—”

  “Very.”

  “But, I tell you, Mister, umm ...”

  “Galway. Kirby Galway.”

  “Mister Galway,” Lemuel said, excitement making him bob slightly on the balls of his feet, “I tell you, Belize is fascinating. To me, to someone in my position, fascinating.”

  “Oh, really?” Kirby said. His smile said, fancy that.

  “It’s the very center, ” Lemuel said, gesturing, slopping his drink on his wrist, not noticing, “the very center of the ancient Mayan world.”

  “Oh, it can’t be,” Kirby said, frowning. “I thought Mexico was—”

  “Aztecs, Aztecs,” Lemuel said, brushing those Johnny-come-latelys aside. “Olmecs, Toltecs,” he grudgingly acknowledged, “but comparatively little Mayan.”

  “Guatemala, then,” Kirby suggested. “There’s that place, what is it, Tikal, where they—”

  “Of course, of course.” Lemuel’s impatience was on the wax. “Until very recently, we thought those were the primary Mayan sites, that’s true enough, true enough. But that’s because no one had studied Belize, no one knew what was in those jungles.”

  “Now they do?”

  “We’re beginning to,” Lemuel said. “Now we know the Mayan civilization covered a great crescent shape, extending from Mexico south and west into Guatemala. But do you know where the very center of that crescent is?”

  “Belize?” hazarded Kirby.

  “Precisely! Coming up out of Belize now, there are pre-Columbian artifacts, jade figures, carvings, gold jewelry, that are just astonishing. Wonderful. Unbelievable.”

  “Well, now, I wonder,” Kirby said thoughtfully, baiting the hook. “On my land down in Belize there’s—”

  “Mayan?” said an assertive female voice. “Did I hear someone say Mayan?”

  It was the girl, introducing herself, inserting herself, spoiling Kirby’s aim just as he was releasing the arrow. Damn pest. As annoyed as any fisherman at the arrival of a loud and careless intruder, Kirby turned to see an unusually tall young woman in her middle 20s, perhaps only two or three inches shorter than Kirby’s six feet two. She was attractive, if sharp-featured, with a long oval face and straight hair- colored hair and eyes that flashed with commitment. Her paisley blouse and long abundant skirt and brown leather boots all seemed just a few years out of date, but Kirby could see that the heavy figured-silver chain around her neck was Mexican and the large loop earrings she wore were Central American, probably Guatemalan, native handicraft. He sensed trouble. Damn and hell, he thought.

  Whitman Lemuel, obviously finding the presence of a good-looking young woman taller than himself an even more exciting prospect than the thought of long-dead Mayans, was welcoming her happily into their enclave, saying, “Yes, are you interested in that culture? We were just talking about Belize.”

  “I haven’t been there yet,” she said. “I want to go. I did my postgraduate work at the Royal Museum at Vancouver, classifying materials from Guyana.”

  “You’re an anthropologist, then?” Lemuel asked, while Kirby silently fretted.

  “Archaeologist,” the pest answered.

  “Slim pickings from Guyana, I should think,” Lemuel commented. “But, ah, Belize now—”

  “Despoliation!” she said, eyes shooting sparks.

  Kirby had never heard anyone use that word in conversation before. He gazed at her with new respect and redoubled loathing.

  Lemuel had blinked at the word, as well he might. Then he said, doubtfully, “I’m not really sure I . . .”

  “Do you know what they’re doing down there in Belize?” demanded the pest. “All those Mayan cities, ancient sites, completely unprotected there in the jungle—”

  “For a thousand years or more,” Kirby said gently.

  “But now;,” the pest said, “the things buried in them are suddenly valuable. Thugs, graverobbers, are going in there, tearing structures apart—”

  This was the worst. Kirby couldn’t believe such bad luck, to have this conversation at such a moment. “Oh, it isn’t that bad,” he said, determinedly interrupting her, and attempted to veer them all away in another direction by introducing what ought to be a sure-fire new topic of conversation: “What worries me down there is the war in El Salvador. The way things are going—”

  But she wasn’t to be that easy to deflect. “Oh, that,” she said, dismissing it all with a colt-like shake of her head. “The war. That’ll be over in one or two generations, but the destruction of irreplaceable Mayan sites is forever. The Belizean government does what it can, but they lack staff and funds. And meanwhile, unscrupulous dealers and museum directors in the United States—”

  Oh, God. Please make her stop, God.

  But it was too late. Lemuel, looking like a man who’s just had a bug fly into his mouth, stood fiddling with his bow tie and shifting from foot to foot. “Well, my drink, umm,” he said. “My glass seems to be empty. You’ll both excuse me?”

  Now, that was unfair. The girl wasn’t Kirby’s fault, and it was really very bad of Lemuel to lump them together like that and march off. It meant Kirby had no polite choice but to stay, at least for a minute or two, and if he did manage to make contact with Lemuel
again this evening it would be more difficult to get to the point of his sales pitch in a natural way.

  Meanwhile, the girl seemed just as content to deliver her diatribe to an audience of one. “My name is Valerie Greene,” she said. She extended a slim long-fingered hand for Kirby to either bite or shake.

  He shook the damn thing. “Kirby Galway,” he said. “It’s been very—”

  “Did I hear you say you live in Belize now?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And are you an archaeologist, by any chance?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.” Then, because Valerie Greene’s bright-bird eyes kept looking expectantly at him, he was forced to go on and explain himself: “I’m a rancher. Or, that is, I will be. I’m accumulating land down there. At the moment, I’m a charter pilot.”

  “What company do you work for?”

  “I have my own plane.”

  “Then you must be aware,” she said, “of the pillaging that is taking place on archaeological sites in Belize.”

  “I’ve seen some things in the paper,” he acknowledged.

  “I think it’s terrible,” she said.

  “I think so, too,” he murmured, watching Whitman Lemuel recede not toward the bar but toward the door.

  Terrible. But not fatal, he consoled himself, not necessarily fatal. In fact, Lemuel’s obvious unease when artifact theft was mentioned simply confirmed Kirby’s belief that the man was a definite prospect. If Kirby failed to hook him tonight, there would always be another time, in New York or in Duluth or somewhere. Today was January 10th, so

  there were still almost three weeks before he was due to return to Belize; plenty of time to find two or three Whitman Lemuels. And in any event, he already had a couple of fish on the line.

  “The people who do that sort of thing,” Valerie Greene was saying, continuing doggedly and blindly to plow her own narrow field, “have no sense of shame.”