Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 Read online

  “Oh, I agree,” Kirby said, watching the white-painted fire door close behind Whitman Lemuel’s back. “I couldn’t agree more. Well, goodbye,” he said, smiled with sheathed hatred, and walked away.

  Pest.

  2 FLIGHT 306

  On a bright sunny afternoon in early February, the temperature 82 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale, a man named Innocent St. Michael drove out from Belize City to Belize International Airport to watch the plane from Miami land. His lunch—with a fellow civil servant and a sugar farmer from up Orange Walk way and a chap interested in starting a television station—sat easily under his ribs, eased down with Belikin beer and a good cigar. The air conditioning in his dark green Ford LTD breathed its icy breath on his happy round face. His white shirt was open at the throat, his tan cotton suit was not very wrinkled yet at all, and in the cool of the car he could still smell the sweet tangs of both his aftershave and his pomade. How nice life is, how nice.

  Innocent had been graced by God with 57 years of this nice life so far, and no immediate end in sight. A man who loved food and drink, adored women, wallowed in ease and luxury, he was barreLbodied but in wonderful physical condition, with a heart that could have powered a steamship. The efforts of assorted Mayan Indians, Spanish conquistadores, African ex-slaves, and shipwrecked Irish sailors had been combined in his creation, and most of them might have been pleased at the result of their labors. His hair was African, his mocha skin Mayan, his courage Irish, and the deviousness of his brain was all Spanish. He was also—and this is far from insignificant—both Deputy Director of Land Allocation in the Belizean government and an active real estate agent. Very nice.

  The road out from Belize City to the International Airport is somewhat better maintained than most of the thoroughfares in that nation, and Innocent sprawled comfortably on the seat, two thick fingers resting negligently on the steering wheel. He honked as he drove past the whorehouse, and the girls at the clothesline waved, recognizing the car. A moment later he turned left onto the airport road.

  Air Base Camp was to his right, the British military installation, where two Harrier jet fighters crouched like giant black insects beneath their camouflage nets, dreaming of prey. Perhaps they were among those which had gone south not long ago to play in the Falklands war. They were here as part of a 1,600-man British peacekeeping force, the last true colonial link, made necessary by neighboring Guatemala’s claim that Belize was in fact its own long-lost colony, which it had threatened to reabsorb by force of arms.

  However, since the world recently had seen the result of Argentina’s belligerence in its own similar territorial dispute with Great Britain, Guatemalan rhetoric had begun to ease of late, and a settlement might yet be found. This prospect Innocent approved; although war iself is good for business, threats of war sour the entrepreneurial climate. Innocent St. Michael had lots of land he wished to unload on eager North Americans, and it was only the possibility of war with Guatemala that had so far delayed the land rush.

  Belize International Airport is a single runway in front of a small, two-story, cream-colored, concrete-block building without glass in its first-floor windows. Taxis and their drivers make a dusty clutter around the building, sun glinting painfully from battered chrome and cracked windshields. Innocent steered around them and parked in the grassy area marked with a rough-hewn sign: VISITORS. He slid the LTD near the only other vehicle there, a crumbling maroon pickup he thought he knew. So Kirby Galway was back, was he? Innocent smiled in anticipation of their meeting.

  Kirby himself was around on the shady side of the building, hunkered down like a careless native boy but dressed for business: short-sleeved white shirt, red and black striped necktie, khaki slacks, tan hiking boots. “Welcome home!” Innocent said, approaching, hand outstretched, beaming in honest pleasure. Seeing Kirby reminded Innocent of his own wit, intelligence, guile; the thought of how he had snookered Kirby Galway could always make him happy. “I was afraid you were gone forever,” he said, squeezing Kirby’s hand hard, pumping it up and down.

  Kirby squeezed back; the young fellow was surprisingly strong. With his own smile, he said, “You know me, Innocent. The bad penny always turns up.”

  If there was one thing that even slightly marred Innocent’s pleasure in having clipped Kirby, it was that for some reason Kirby never seemed to mind. Where was the resentment, the grievance, the sense of humiliation? Just to remind him, Innocent said, “Well, you know me, Kirby. Good or bad, if there’s a penny around I want some of it.”

  “Oh, you’ve had enough from me,” Kirby said, with an easy laugh. One more shared squeeze and they released one another’s hands. “Selling any more land?” Kirby asked.

  “Oh, here and there, here and there. You back in the market?”

  “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 attache 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 bam 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 he’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 leam 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 welbwom 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 t
rees, 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.)