Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (14 page)

 
          
Witcher
ordered food for himself and Feldspan, who had been unable to concentrate on
the menu. “You know you like shrimp,” Witcher said, after the waitress
departed.

 
          
“I
won’t taste a thing,” Feldspan said.

 
          
Valerie
took from her purse a paperback edition of Maya:
The Riddle And Rediscovery Of
A
Lost
Civilization
, by Charles Gallenkamp, and began to read chapter 13,
“Warriors And Merchants; A Prelude To Disaster”.

 
          
Feldspan
gulped his Gibson.

 
          
As
one waitress brought Valerie her shrimp cocktail and glass of white wine, the
other brought Lemuel his duckling. “And a glass of red wine,” he said. “No,
wait! Never mind.” I dare not get drunk, he thought.

 
          
Feldspan
gulped Witcher’s Gibson.

 
          
“Gerry,”
Witcher said, “get hold of yourself.”

 
          
While
reading her book, Valerie ate her shrimp cocktail with her fingers, licking her
fingers after each shrimp. Two businessmen at a nearby table watched her
intently, all talk of tractor tires forgotten.

 
          
Lemuel
tried to call the waitress without attracting attention to himself.

 
          
The
other waitress brought two more Gibsons to Witcher and Feldspan, saying,
“Feeling better?”

 
          
“Not
yet,” Feldspan said.

 
          
The
waitresses passed one another. “Some really weird ones tonight,” said the one.
“Mm-mm,” said the other. Then, seeing Lemuel’s hand waving discreetly next to
his ear, she veered away in that direction: “Sir?”

 
          
“On
second thought,” Lemuel said, “I believe I’ll have another vodka sour. No, wait
a minute, make it a vodka on the rocks.”

 
          
“Water
on the side?”

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
“He
could be bribing the waitress,” Feldspan said. “They’re awfully chummy over
there.”

           
Bribe her to do what?”

 
          
Feldspan
leaned forward. Three Gibsons on an empty stomach had turned his eyes into
cocktail onions. “
Poison us,”
he
whispered.

 
          
“Gerry, please.”

           
Valerie finished the last shrimp.
For the last time, she inserted a finger into her mouth, pursed her lips around
it, and drew the finger slowly out, freed of red sauce. She read her book. The
businessmen discussed tractor tires.

 
          
In
his nervousness, Lemuel crunched duckling bones, eating the little wings
entire.

 
          
“He’s
eating
bones,”
Feldspan said.

 
          
“Gerry,
stop looking at him.”

 
          
Feldspan
blinked. He wanted Witcher’s Gibson, but Witcher kept holding it. He said, “He
looks like Meyer Lansky.”

 
          
“He
does not,” Witcher said, though he didn’t turn around to look. “Meyer Lansky
was about a hundred, and Jewish.”

 
          
“He
could be Jewish.”

 
          
“Gerry.”

 
          
“Meyer
Lansky wasn’t
always
a hundred. It’s
just like
The Godfather;
they almost
look like normal people, but they have dead eyes. It’s because their souls are
so black.”

 
          
Valerie
looked up from her book, and her face suddenly suffused with a bright red
blush. The waitress, removing the empty shrimp cocktail goblet, glanced at the
blush and at the book and went away, shaking her head.

 
          
But
it wasn’t the book that had done it; there’s nothing in Maya:
The Riddle And Rediscovery Of
A
Lost Civilization
to make any damsel
blush. Valerie had just remembered where she’d seen Lemuel before.

 
          
Lemuel,
peeking around his own left shoulder, looked off toward Valerie and found her
staring directly at him, wide-eyed. “She’s recognized me!” Hunching down,
shielding his face with his shoulder and arm, he ate frantically, hurriedly
gnawing at his dinner, trying to finish it and get out of here.

 
          
“He
eats like an
animal,”
Feldspan said.

 
          
“Gerry,
will you please eat your nice shrimps, and stop looking at that man?”

 
          
Maybe
she isn’t absolutely sure it’s me, Lemuel thought. If I can just get out of
here— He picked up his fresh vodka with greasy fingers, and drained half.

 
          
It
all came back to Valerie in a rush of mortification. She’d had a little bit too
much to drink that time, too, and she’d gotten on that hobby horse of hers
about stolen antiquities. Of
course
it was a problem, worldwide, ranging from the current Greek demand that the
British return the Elgin marbles to the recent pillaging'Under' covenof-warfare
at Angkor Wat. But still Valerie knew she tended to take it all a bit too
personally, and that she could very easily become a bore on the subject, and
loud as well. Particularly at parties.

 
          
She
could always tell when she was behaving badly in that fashion; men walked away
from her. In the normal course of events, men walked
toward
her, but when she was carrying on about her crusade they
walked away from her. That night in
New York
, at that party— Why, that poor man had
probably thought she was accusing
him
of stealing ancient treasures!

 
          
Oh,
she thought, I do hope he doesn’t recognize me.

 
          
“Miss,”
Feldspan said, to the passing waitress, “may I have another Gibson, please?”

 
          
“Certainly,
sir.”

 
          
“Gerry,
are you
crazy?”

 
          
Valerie’s
chicken was placed in front of her. She ducked her head to eat it, hoping the
man across the way was too absorbed in his magazine to look around and
recognize her.

 
          
Lemuel,
wiping his messy hands, waved the napkin at the wrong waitress, who sent him
the right waitress. “Check, please.”

 
          
“No
dessert? We have ice cream, cheesecake—”

 
          
“No,
please, just the check.”

 
          
“Nice
tropical fruit, very—”

 
          
“Just
the check, please.”

 
          
“No
coffee?”

 
          
“Check!”

 
          
“Certainly,
sir.”

 
          
“Alan,
give me the room key.”

 
          
“Why?”

 
          
“Because
I’m going to throw up.”

 
          
“Gerry,
you’re just too emotional.”

 
          
Lemuel,
blinking, watched one of the drug dealers leave the restaurant and the other
one stay. It’s a pincer movement, he thought. One is in front of me now, and
the other behind me. His mind filled with visions of what might happen when he
opened his room door. Why hadn’t he asked for his check earlier, or just simply
left the restaurant at the beginning, no matter
what
they thought?

 
          
“Miss,
my friend and I were wondering if we could buy you an afterdinner drink?”

 
          
Valerie
looked up at the tractor-tire salesman and smiled. She had seen Lemuel ask for
his check, and she knew her ordeal would soon be over. “No, thank you,” she
said. “But I do appreciate the thought.”

 
          
The
waitress brought Feldspan’s last Gibson, and looked at the empty chair. “I knew
these things wouldn’t help,” she said.

 
          
“That’s
all right,” Witcher told her. “Just leave it, I’ll find something to do with
it.”

 
          
“Will
your friend be back?”

 
          
“I
trust not.”

 
          
She
picked up the plate of barely-touched shrimp. “Shall I put these in a bag for
you?”

 
          
“Good
God, no.”

 
          
Lemuel
signed his check. I can’t go to the room, he thought, not by myself. I’ll tell
the desk clerk I’m having trouble with the air conditioner and insist on a
bellboy to come with me and look at it. If no one’s there, I’ll just lock
myself in for the night. And I’ll stay in the room until
Galway
comes to pick me up tomorrow to take me to
the temple. And now I know I never should have involved myself with a man like
that in the first place.

 
          
Valerie
was so pleased to see Lemuel get up to leave that she almost changed her mind
and said yes to the tractor-tire salesman after all.

 
          
Witcher
watched Lemuel go by, noticing the grim set to the mobster’s jaw. Most likely,
the man did suspect something, and he’d moved to that other chair to warn them
to mind their own business. Well, they certainly
would
mind their own business, wouldn’t they? And tomorrow morning
they would get on the plane and
leave
this place.

 
          
Lemuel
felt Witcher’s eyes burning into his back as he left the room.

 
          
Valerie
asked for tropical fruit for dessert.

 
          
Witcher,
knowing that Feldspan would have disgustingly passed out

 
 
          
in
the room by now, dawdled over the final Gibson, but eventually he signed the
check and departed.

 
          
“Thank
you,” Valerie said to the waitress as she left. “It was a lovely dinner. ”

 
 
          
When
the sun rose, Innocent St. Michael stepped nude from his house, smiled,
stretched, walked across the cool dew-damp lawn (emerald green, aglisten in the
orange birth of day), and then over the cool terracotta tiles to the pool’s
edge. There was only the faintest of breezes, turning the water into pale
blue-green brushed chrome. “Nice,” Innocent murmured, and dove like a dolphin
into the water, swimming strongly beneath the surface to the far end, where he
burst up into the air like a walrus blowing, releasing breath with an exuberant,
“PAH!” and shaking water drops from his hair in a great fan around his head.

 
          
Ten
laps in the pool; rest a while, floating; ten more laps. Meantime, the sun rose
higher in the eastern sky, the vault of heaven lightened from charcoal gray
through smudged ivory to palest blue, and the St. Michael house began to stir
with activity.

 
          
It
was a large house, though not as large as its model,
Monticello
. Three stories high, broad, white,
pillared, the house stood on a broad knob of hill, facing north. The pool
behind the house was in sun all day, though shade trees were handy to both
sides. Within the house were Innocent’s wife Francesca and their four
daughters: Elizabeth, Margaret, Catherine, and Patricia. All now in their
teens, they were a lot of little prigs, raving feminists who utterly
disapproved of their father. Well, he had wanted respectability, and the
detestation of one’s children was apparently one of the prices to be paid.

 
          
The
house also contained several servants, one of whom—the stout motherly sort that
Francesca preferred—came out as he was finishing his laps. She laid a snowy
white terrycloth towel and a clean fluffy terrycloth robe of Virgin Mary blue
on one of the wrought iron white chairs beside the pool. “Good morning, sir,”
she said to Innocent’s passing churning form in the water, and returned to the
house.

 
          
Innocent
ate with a good appetite, under the censorious glares of Margaret and Patricia,
then dressed in seersucker and a wide^collared white shirt, kissed short, fat
Francesca goodby, spoke cheerfully to a sullen Catherine, and went whistling to
his car, which had been buffed clean since he’d last driven it yesterday. His
house, on a private road north of the
Western Highway
, between the ranches of Beaver Dam and
Never Delay, gave ready access to both
Belmopan
to the west and
Belize City
to the east. This morning, he turned east.

 
          
He
listened to the tape for the third time on the drive to Belize, occasionally
stopping the recorder, running it back, listening to a sentence again,
sometimes listening to one bit several times. For instance, the point early on
where Kirby said, “I bought this land as an investment. Good potential for
grazing, as you can see.”
Good potential
for grazing
was word for word what Innocent had said to Kirby when selling
him that parcel. And what other land did Kirby own? None. So it
had
to be the same.

 
          
But
on the other hand, it couldn’t be. Innocent knew damn well what was and wasn’t
there, and it didn’t include any goddam Mayan temple. Another sentence he
listened to a lot was Feldspan’s, “Look! A paving block! This has been
shaped
!” Then Kirby says that nonsense
about checking with the government—he never had, of course— adding, “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.”

 
          
Well,
if the conversation were taking place on the land Innocent had sold to Kirby,
“everybody” was absolutely right. But Kirby’s statement was immediately
followed by Witcher’s breathed, heartfelt, awed, “They’re
wrong.”

 
          
Then
the next bit was also a problem. Feldspan: “What’s the name of this place?”
Kirby: “Probably nobody for a thousand years has known the name of this temple.
The Indians around here call this hill Lava Sxir Yt.” Then he carefully spelled
it.

 
          
Lava
Sxir
Yt
? There was no such place. Innocent would have some friends check among
the up-country Indians, but he doubted they’d find anything. It was just some
goddam exotic-sounding name Kirby had made up, that’s all. His own personal
private Shangri-la.

 
          
So
what were the possibilities here? One: Kirby had found an entire Mayan temple
on the land Innocent had sold him, even though Innocent knew every inch of that
land and it contained no temple.

 
          
Two:
Kirby, possibly while flying over the terrain or one time when he landed in the
jungle to pick up a load of marijuana, had found an undiscovered Mayan temple,
and was lying to his customers, telling them it was his land when it was not.

 
          
Three:
Kirby and the two pansy-boys were involved in a complex con game—possibly aimed
at Innocent himself, but more likely at someone else—in which they just walked
around some dumb piece of bush somewhere and read from a script; there
was
no temple, in other words. (Which
would also explain why the pansy-boys had made this infuriating tape in the
first place.)

 
          
Of
the possibilities, Number Two seemed the likeliest, though Number Three also
suited what Innocent thought of as Kirby’s character and style. As for Number
One, Innocent just found that impossible to believe, but if it were true it
raised a fresh problem, and that problem was Valerie Greene.

 
          
Let
us say, let us just say for argument’s sake, that Innocent St. Michael at one
time owned a Mayan temple without noticing the fact. Let us further say that
Innocent innocently sold this land to one Kirby Galway, who managed to see
something there that Innocent had not. Clearly, with shaped stones and jaguar
stelae lying about in plain sight (according to this damn tape), Kirby has done
some preliminary excavation here, just enough to see what he’s got.

 
          
So,
when Valerie Greene, an archaeologist and a girl of undoubted honesty and
probity—and a sweet ass, but that’s another story—goes to this land today she
will
see
the temple. This sight will
vindicate her theory, which is all well and good for her, but it will also
make public
the temple. Kirby will no
longer be able to rape it at will, and Innocent will no longer have the
possibility of cutting himself in on the action.

 
          
On
the other hand, if he didn’t send
somebody
to Kirby’s land, there never would be a way to prove or disprove possibility
Number One. Besides which, he’d already promised Valerie cooperation; his
driver would be picking her up at her hotel this very morning, before Innocent
reached the city. Presumably, Innocent could still stop Valerie from going out
there this morning, but if he did so it might look bad later, if and when the
whole story came out. And Valerie, a determined girl if he was any judge, would
manage to get to the site with his cooperation or without.

 
          
No,
there were other and better ways to deal with the problem, which was one of the
reasons Innocent was driving to
Belize
this morning. His first stop would be at
the law office of his good friend, sometime partner, and old crony, Sidney
Belfrage, where the preliminary steps would be taken to prove that the original
sale of land to Kirby Galway had been invalid; a lawyer with
Sidney
’s brains and experience would have no
trouble finding grounds. No real legal action would be taken as yet, but the
first steps would be put in train, so that, if indeed there
was
a temple on that land, Innocent
would be able to demonstrate that he had, in all good faith, been attempting to
correct a legal wrong for its own sake, starting when he still thought the land
was worthless,
before
the temple was
discovered.

 
          
So
that was to be his first stop today, but not the only stop, because there was a
second problem created by the existence of this tape, and the second problem
was
the tape
. Done by the pansy^boys.
Whoever and whatever they turned out to be, and whatever their reason for
making the tape, those two would have to be neutralized, wouldn’t they?

 
          
It
was an odd position Innocent found himself in; he smiled as he thought of it,
speeding toward
Belize
, listening to the tape. In order to keep some control over the
situation while finding out exactly what was going on, he had no choice but to
protect Kirby Galway.