Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (11 page)

 
          
The
three stood, pushing back their chairs. Galway said something and laughed. All
three men wore moustaches; a change in male style that Lemuel had failed to
notice just as thoroughly as he’d missed the demise of the bow tie.

 
          
What
could he make of Galway’s companions? They didn’t look like mobsters out of a
George Raft movie, but of course they wouldn’t. These were drug dealers, a new
breed of criminal, used to working with huge amounts of cash, trading with rich
and influential people. They were dressed a bit flamboyantly, but not too much
so, and Lemuel remembered what the man Cruz had said about them being men with
a
front
back in America. Record
company producers, perhaps, or with a business in commercial real estate.

 
          
Galway
shook their hands; first one, then the other. A few more words were exchanged,
rather sinister smiles formed under the moustaches, and then Galway left. The
other two remained standing a moment longer beside the table, murmuring
together, one with his hand on the other’s elbow. Menace seemed to hover about
them. They both turned to look out the window, and Lemuel flinched back,
suddenly afraid.

 
          
Had
they seen him?

 
          
What
a lot of different positions he likes, Valerie thought as she rested on knees
and shoulders and left cheek. If she lifted her head slightly to look down her
own length, the parts of Innocent St. Michael that she could see framed by her
arched legs dangled comically, but the feelings he was inducing through her
body were not comical at all. “Again?” she asked, surprised, and the answer
came in a rush.

 
          
This
time, Innocent joined her, and after a brief spell of intense thrashing they
lay beached together on the sheet, companionably side by side, catching their
breath. Above, a slowly turning fan made absolutely no difference.

 
          
Shortly,
Innocent heaved himself up off the bed and padded out of the room. Perspiration
slowly drying on her body, Valerie rolled onto her back and stretched, long and
luxurious, from her down^pointing left big toe through her happily achy body to
her upthrust right wrist, her knuckles brushing the rough stucco wall.

 
          
They
were in one of the small houses in
Belmopan
’s sterile residential area. At the
restaurant, Innocent had excused himself to make a phone call, then had driven
her here in his large green Ford LTD with the icy air conditioning. “I know
there’s nobody home,” he’d said. “Belongs to a friend of mine.” The bedroom was
small, filled by its double bed, the perimeter cluttered with laundry and books
and magazines.

 
          
Marcia
Ettinger, an older woman at the Royal Museum at Vancouver, had warned her about
this, she really had. “You want to be careful,” she’d said. “There’s something
that happens to young single women the first time they’re in a really
foreign
place all by themselves. It’s as
though all restraints are gone, none of the rules matter any more, and you find
yourself going to bed with the first man who asks you.” Valerie had pooh-poohed
that, of course: “I’m my own person,” she’d said. “I make my own decisions.”

 
          
Had
she made this decision? Smiling,
stretching the other way— right toe through arching waist to left wrist—she
told herself the decision had been a good one, no matter who had made it. At the
very least, she would endorse it.

 
          
Innocent
came back, water beads sparkling coolly in his hair. He was smiling—he was
always smiling, wasn’t he?—and when he sat on the bed he bent over to kiss her
left nipple. “What a big girl you are,” he said.

 
          
“I
was always tall.” She knew her capability for small talk was minimal, and hoped
she would improve with time and experience. Experience.

 
          
“Unfortunately,”
Innocent said, “we can’t stay here forever.” “No.” Valerie sat up, looking
around. “I suppose the person who lives here will come back after a while.”

 
          
“Not
with my car in the driveway,” Innocent said.

 
          
The
encounter suddenly took on an unpleasant public aspect. “I’ll get dressed,” she
decided, rising from the bed.

 
          
He
patted her rump. “Tomorrow morning, very early,” he said, “I’ll have a Land
Rover and a driver pick you up at your hotel back in Belize and drive you out
to that land you want to see.”

 
          
“Thank
you.” Sudden doubt, insecurity, awkwardness, made her say, “He—the driver. He
won’t know about
this,
will he?”

 
          
Alarmed,
concerned, almost shocked, Innocent bounded to his feet with a surprising
agility. “Valerie, Valerie!” he cried, holding her elbows, his manner totally
serious for the first time since she had met him. “We aren’t enemies! I would
never embarrass you, humiliate you!”

 
          
“But
you tell everybody everything, don’t you?”

 
          
Releasing
her, he said, “You mean Susie, at the restaurant?” He grinned, relaxing, a
happy bear, shaking his head. “When I have lunch there with a businessman,” he
said, “or someone from the government, do you think I tell him, a man, ‘I had
that waitress?’ What would Susie do to me?”

 
          
“Pour
your lunch on your head,” Valerie suggested.

 
          
Innocent
laughed. “You misunderstand Susie,” he said. “She would stick a knife in my
neck.”

 
          
Valerie
believed him. He would preen in front of women, but not in front of other men.
It made him somehow more likeable, and at the same time more juvenile. “All
right,” she said.

 
          
While
Valerie visited the tiny rust-spotted bathroom, Innocent dressed and went out
to start the car, so that when Valerie was ready to leave she entered a vehicle
already well chilled. Innocent got behind the wheel, patted her knee in fond
familiarity, and said, “If you can wait half an hour, I’ll drive you back to
Belize.”

 
          
“But
my taxi is waiting.”

 
          
“Oh,
I already paid him off and sent him away.” Steering toward the clumped
government buildings, he said, “Now, tomorrow, you pay good close attention to
everything you see, and I’ll be in Belize when you get back.”

 
          
“All
right.”

 
          
Again
he patted her knee. “Good rooms at the Fort George,” he said. “Air-conditioned.
Very nice.”

 
          
“Oh,
dear,” Gerry said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”

 
          
Alan
had spread the blue trunks and the silver-and red trunks on the bed, side by
side, and stood back, knuckles under chin, trying to decide which to wear for
their dip in the pool. Now he looked over at Gerry, who was frowning into his
open dresser drawer. “Lose something?”

 
          
“The
recorder was moved.”

 
          
“You
put it in there yourself,” Alan said, misunderstanding. “I saw you. ”

 
          
“I
put it under the leather vest,” Gerry said. “I very specifically remember doing
that, because the black case of the recorder would be less noticeable under
black leather.”

 
          
Alan,
a faint vertical frown line forming between his brows, came over to stand
beside Gerry and also look into the open drawer. Both men were naked; in the
blue-tinted wide mirror above the dresser they looked like a rather crude
parody of Greek temple sculpture. Alan said, “Are you sure?”

 
          
“Al-an,”
Gerry said, which was what he always said when he felt Alan was insulting his
intelligence, which was what he felt rather frequently. “I already
told
you.”

 
          
The
leather vest was folded neatly on the left. Gerry had turned back the little
stack of ironed white T-shirts, and there was his recorder. Alan said, his
voice a little scared, “Is anything missing?”

 
          
“My
jewelry’s still here.” Picking up the recorder, Gerry turned it around and
said, “The tape’s still in it.”

 
          
“The
same tape?”

 
          
“Oh,
my gosh.” Gerry pushed PLAY. After an interminable period of faint shushing
sounds, Kirby Galway’s voice said, “This way, gentlemen. Watch out for snakes.”
Sighing with relief, Gerry pushed OFF and then REWIND.

 
          
Alan
looked over at his own recorder, on the bed with his crumpled lunchtime
clothes. “We’ll have to find a better hiding place,” he said.

 
          
“But
they didn’t
take
anything,” Gerry
said, putting the recorder under the leather vest. He looked fretful.

 
          
“The
maid, maybe,” Alan suggested. “Just interested in something new, to look at
it.”

 
          
“I
don’t know,” Gerry said. “Maybe this isn’t such a fun idea, after all.”

 
          
“We
cant
chicken out now,” Alan told him.
“Hiram would just simply laugh us to scorn.”

 
          
“It
seemed a lot different in New York,” Gerry said, taking out his ecru fishnet
trunks and stepping into them. “Here, it’s getting scary.”

 
          
“Well,
we did promise,” Alan said. “And we’ve started, we’re here, so we might as well
go ahead and finish. You ready for the pool?”

 
          
Gerry
said, “I’m not the one with his little thingies hanging out.”

 
          
So
Alan chose the silver-and-red trunks and put them on, while Gerry went over to
look out the window to see if the pool were still unoccupied. “Alan!” he said,
a shrill whisper.

 
          
“Now
what?”

 
          
Alan
joined him at the window, and they looked down through the louvers at the pool,
beside which two men were standing; Kirby, fully dressed, as they’d last seen
him at lunch, and a man in a very large yellow boxer-type swimsuit. This man
was middle-aged and round-shouldered, very pale in the tropical sun, with a
round pot belly, a round balding head, and very large round dark sunglasses. He
stood with hands on hips; despite being older, and physically out of shape, and
a bit foolish-looking in those great ballooning trunks, he gave off an aura of
self-assurance and command. There seemed to be a vague echo down there of old
movie scenes of Italian mobsters conferring in the local steambath; not Gerry
and Alan’s kind of steambath, the other kind.

 
          
“The
drug dealer!” Gerry whispered.

 
          
They
watched Kirby and the man confer, both of them intent and serious. The drug
dealer seemed irritated by something, Kirby placating and reassuring him. The
awareness that this was a man who could order a murder with a snap of his
fingers seemed to send a ripple of chill breeze across the blue pool water.

 
          
Kirby
and the man shook hands, Kirby left, and the man walked around to the shallow
end of the pool, where he went down the steps slowly, wincingly, as though
entering ice water. Ribcage deep, he rested his back against the side, then
abruptly looked up, the huge dark sunglasses staring directly at them.

 
          
They
both flinched; they couldn’t help it. “He saw us!” Gerry said.

 
          
Alan
recovered first. “He has no idea who we are,” he pointed out. “Come on, let’s
go down, I want a better look at him. Shall I bring my recorder?”

 
          
“Ai-an,
are you crazy?” Gerry glanced down again at the pool and the enigmatic man
behind his black sunglasses. “We can’t fool around with the likes of him,” he
said.