Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (4 page)

 
          
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.”

 
          
“Ah,”
said Feldspan, though it wasn’t clear what he thought he saw.

 
          
“What
I mostly fly in that plane down there,” Kirby said, nodding at it, “is
marijuana.”

 
          
Witcher
nodded. “I’d suspected as much,” he said.

 
          
“There
was a certain faint . . . aroma,” Feldspan added.

 
          
“I
wouldn’t do it if I could afford anything else,” Kirby said. “I have expenses.
Mortgage on this land,” he lied, “payments on the plane,” he lied, “various
other expenses. That’s the only reason I make those runs. ”

 
          
“Of
course,” murmured Feldspan.

 
          
“And
it’s the only reason,” Kirby went on, “I’d even consider selling this Mayan
stuff.” Permitting himself to sound defensive, he said, “I
did
go to the government first, but they wouldn’t listen. Nobody’s
paying
me
to preserve all this.”

 
          
“That’s
true enough,” said Witcher.

 
          
“That’s
why I was glad to run into you fellows, back in New York,” Kirby said. “I knew
you were decent guys, well-connected with people who would really
care
about these Mayan things.”

 
          
“Oh,
absolutely!” said Feldspan, flushing with pleasure at being thought both decent
and well-connected.

 
          
“It’s
not like we’re destroying it all,” Kirby said.

 
          
“Certainly
not!” Witcher agreed.

 
          
“Of
course,” Kirby said, “there’s no way to do it without
some
destruction. ”

 
          
Both
dealers looked troubled. Kirby sighed. Witcher, looking about, said, “But
nothing that’s really valuable.”

 
          
“The
site itself,” Kirby told him. “That’s why we have to be absolutely sure we can
trust one another. We’re taking a big risk here, and I don’t know about you
two, but I don’t have any real desire to see the inside of a Belizean jail.”

 
          
Witcher
appeared to consider the idea briefly, but Feldspan was appalled: “Jail!
Certainly not!”

 
          
“Let
me tell you what’s going to happen here,” Kirby said. “As soon as the ground to
the east is dry enough, a friend of mine from Belize City will bring his
bulldozer in. He’s an old pal, we can trust him.”

 
          
They
both looked relieved.

           
“What he’ll do is,” Kirby said,
pointing to the base of the hill, “he’ll doze around from the bottom, just
knocking the temple steps out of the way so we can get at what’s underneath;
tombs, carvings, all the rest of it. When he comes to big stelae like that
jaguar down there, he’ll scoop the whole thing out in one piece.”

 
          
Witcher
said, “Will he really be able to work that far up the side of the temple?”

 
          
“I
don’t think you get the picture,” Kirby told him. “What he’s going to do is,
he’s going to knock the temple
down.
You come back a year from now, this’ll be just a jumble of rocks and dirt.”

 
          
“Oh,”
said Witcher. They both had the grace to look embarrassed.

 
          
Kirby
said,
“That’s
why we have to be able
to trust one another. They aren’t tough about much in this country, but
destruction of a Mayan temple is one of the few things that can make them
really mad. ”

 
          
“Yes,”
Feldspan said, “I suppose it would.”

 
          
“None
of us can ever say a word about this temple,” Kirby said. “Not here, and not in
New York, and not anywhere. All you can tell your customers is, they’re getting
guaranteed pre-Columbian pieces from Mayan ruins. That’s it.”

 
          
Feldspan
nodded solemnly. Witcher said, “You have our word, Mister Galway.”

 
          
This
was the critical point, every time, with all the customers. He had to make them
understand the seriousness of the laws they were about to break, and the
totality of the destruction he planned on their behalf, and then he had to make
them accept their shared responsibility for that destruction. Once they agreed,
they were guilty in their hearts, and they knew it. They would never talk,
partly out of fear of the law, partly out of fear of him, and partly out of
shame.

 
          
“Okay,”
Kirby said, his song done. “Seen enough?”

 
          
“I
feel as though I could stand here forever,” Witcher said, gazing around at the
day and the jungle and the temple, “but yes, you’re right, we should go.”

 
          
As
they turned to retrace their steps, Kirby looked down the far slope and saw
peeking out at him from the jungle growth down there a face that would have
looked at home in these parts a thousand years ago, when all the temples were
red and all the people short, mocha- colored, flat-faced, and utterly
unknowable. A Mayan Indian face, male, possibly 30 years old, peering
bright-eyed up the slope. The wide mouth grinned, like an imp. The right eye
winked.

 
          
Behind
his back, so Witcher and Feldspan wouldn’t see, Kirby gestured for the face to
disappear. Queering the deal for jokes! The face stuck out its tongue, then
faded from view.

 
          
As
the trio made their way down-slope toward the plane, Feldspan said, with his
own impish smile, “I suppose you must have access to some pretty good pot
yourself down here, Mister Galway.”

 
          
“When
we get back to Belize City,” Kirby promised him, “I will blow your head right
off your shoulders.”

 
          
Feldspan
giggled.

 
          
“I’ll
sit up front with you,” Valerie said.

 
          
The
cabdriver, finished stowing her luggage in the trunk, seemed pleased by that
idea. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Sure ting, Miss.” Running around his big rusty
green Chevrolet, he opened the right front door and giggled with embarrassment,
saying, “I just clear some junk first, just some m>count junk.” He tried to
shield the girlie magazines with his body, throwing them and the plastic coffee
cups and the beer bottles and the wads of crumpled wax paper and the
smvyellowed newspapers with their thick black headlines—FARM MINISTER CALLED
“IGNORANT”!—over the seatback in a shower of trash onto the rear seat and
floor. Behind them, on the other side of the airport building, the plane from
New Orleans roared as it flew away.

 
          
“All
okay now, Miss,” the driver said, stepping back, holding the door open. His
round face beamed with happiness in the late afternoon as his eyes swiveled
toward his envious colleagues clustered around the other taxis, shooting him
dark looks. A great big six-footer American woman with nipple bumps on her
shirt, and she’s going to ride
up front
.
Probably perform fellatio on the way to town.

 
          
Valerie,
only faintly aware of the stir she was causing, and blessedly not suspecting
the deep depravity in the minds all about her, lowered herself onto the fairly
clean sagging seat and lifted her long blue' jeaned legs in, placing her Adidas
on the suburb of trash on the floor. Her attache case she laid on her lap. The
driver, fat and soft'bodied, beaming, perspiring, carefully closed her door,
trotted around to his own side, clambered in behind the wheel, and said, “Okay,
now. All set now.”

 
          
“Fort
George Hotel, please,” Valerie said.

 
          
“Oh,
sure.” He started the engine, which coughed and cleared its throat and wheezed
pitiably, while the car shook all over. He turned the wheel several times this
way and that before actually shifting into Drive to force the laboring engine
to do some real work, and then they bumped and sagged away from the airport
building and out onto a blacktop road with jungle on the right and what looked
like an army base on the left.

 
          
“It’s
hot,” Valerie said.

 
          
“Oh,
yes,” the driver said, nodding, keeping his eye on the absolutely empty road
ahead. “Hotter before. When de Miami plane came, very hot. Cooler now.”

 
          
So
that was another reason in favor of her having taken the later plane,
connecting through New Orleans. Not only had she given herself an extra two
hours in New York to finish squaring things away, and not only was her
appointment with Mr. Innocent St. Michael not until tomorrow morning, but she
had also avoided the hottest part of the day in Belize. The temperature in New
York had been 27 when she’d left.

 
          
Nevertheless,
it was still quite hot here, probably nearly 80. Pointing to the controls on the
dashboard, Valerie said, “Maybe we should have the ainconditioning.”

 
          
“Oh,
I’m sorry,” he said, sounding sorry, “but dat’s broken. Completely entirely not
functioning. Not even de little fan.” Then he looked at her with such intense
sincerity that even Valerie understood he was about to tell a lie. “We’re
waiting for a part,” he said.

 
          
“I
see,” she said.

 
          
They
drove in warm and fairly companionable silence for a while—a sluggish Tom
Saucer-like river now on the right, jungle alternating with shacks in clearings
on the left—and then the driver said, “You goin’ on to Ambergris Caye?”

 
          
“No,
I’m not,” she said. “What’s there?”

 
          
He
seemed surprised. “You don’t know our barrier reef? Beautiful reef, beautiful
water. We get many people come down to Belize
just
to go to dat reef.”

 
          
“I
didn’t know that.”

 
          
“Photography,
you know? Beautiful fishes dere. Scuba diving. We get lots of people. And
sailboats!” he added, as though it were the clincher in an argument.

 
          
“Sounds
lovely,” Valerie said, to be polite. “If I have time, maybe I’ll visit.”

 
          
He
gave her a quick glint-eyed look and away, then said, “You’d be very good, uh,
diving. Good long legs.”

 
          
“I
suppose so, yes,” said Valerie.

 
          
“Good
long strong legs,” the cabdriver said, nodding, staring through the windshield
at some vision of his own. “Very good in diving. I like a woman witt good long
strong legs.”

 
          
Feeling
the conversation was moving into murky areas beyond her comprehension, Valerie
said, “Actually, I’m an archaeologist.”

 
          
He
brightened right up. “Oh! De Mayans!”

 
          
“That’s
right,” she said, smiling, pleased that he was pleased. “Dat’s me, you know,”
he said, his simple good humor returning. Leaning a bit toward her, smiling, he
patted his chest. “Mayan.” “Oh, really?” She said, “A
nzan kayalki hec malanalam.”

 
          
He
gawped at her, then straightened, returned his hand to the wheel, looked at the
road, looked at her: “What’s dat?”

 
          
“Kekchi,”
she told him.

 
          
He
frowned: “You mean, like a song?”

 
          
It
was her turn to be confused. “A song?”

 
          
“People
say, ‘Dat song, dat’s catchy.’”

 
          
“No,
no,” she said, laughing. “It’s the Mayan
language
,
the principal Mayan tribal tongue in this area. Kekchi.”

 
          
“Ohhh,”
he said, getting it.
“Indian
talk.
No, I’m not, I’m not
all
Mayan.”
Grinning at her, this time he patted his kinky hair, saying, “Creole. I gotta
lotta Creole, too. Dat’s what I talk. English and Creole.”

           
“I see,” she said, not seeing at
all.

 
          
He
said, “You going out to de ruins, huh? Lamanai, maybe?”

 
          
“No,”
she said. “Actually, what I’m doing is rather exciting.”

 
          
He
looked interested, potentially excited, potentially impressed: “Oh, yes?”

 
          
“I
think,” Valerie said, unconsciously spreading her palms atop the attache case
containing her documents and maps, “I think there is a significantly important
Mayan site that has never been discovered!”

 
          
“Up
in de jungle, you mean,” he said, and nodded sympathetically. “Oh, it’s very
hard to get up in dere.”

 
          
“That’s
just it,” she said. “Belize is still so primitive, so largely unmapped—”

 
          
“Oh,
now, Miss,” he interrupted. “We
ain’t
primitive,
now. We got movie houses, radio, we gonna get television most
any day—”

 
          
“No,
I’m sorry,” Valerie said, “I do beg your pardon, I didn’t mean primitive like
that.
1 mean so much of the country is
still virgin jungle.”

 
          
“Virgin,”
he said, as though it too were a Kekchi word. Then he gave her a quick sharp
look and nodded faintly to himself.

 
          
“What
I did at UCLA,” Valerie explained, “I got the statisticians interested. There
are so many Mayan sites discovered, new ones still being found; what if we did
a statistical analysis of site locations, with dates of original settlement and
final abandonment? Would that show us where new sites
should be?”

 
          
“Oh,
yeah,” the driver said, nodding like a metronome. “Dat’s pretty impressive stuff.”

 
          
“Well,
we ran it through the computer,” Valerie said, smiling in remembered joy, “with
a lot of other statistical data, too, of course, rainfall and elevation and all
that, and the computer said we were right!”

 
          
“Smart
computer,” the driver said.

 
          
“It
showed an area that has been missed by just everybody! So I went to New York—”

 
          
“It’s
in New York? De Mayans?” The driver had thought he was more or less keeping up,
but this latest turn in the story had thrown him.

 
          
“No,
no,” Valerie said. “The
money’s
in
New York.”

           
“Lots of money in New York,” the
driver said, grateful to be on solid ground again. “My brudder’s in Brooklyn.
He works for Union Gas.” “Well, I spent almost three months in New York,”
Valerie said, “and I finally interested two foundations, and they are funding
me to come to Belize and test my theory! So that’s why I’m here.” “Well, dat’s
pretty good,” the driver acknowledged. “You gonna need a driver while you’re
here?”

 
          
“Oh,
thank you, but no. Where I’m going, there won’t be any roads. I have a contact
in the Belizean government, he’ll supply me with whatever I need.” I hope, she
added silently.

 
          
They
were coming into Belize City now, a small picturesque port town, somewhat
dilapidated, with small scenic bridges over narrow canals used in lieu of a
sewer system; prettier to look at than to smell. Most of the buildings were
low, almost all wood-framed, with sweet touches of latticework and carpenter
Gothic. Built along both sides of the mouth of Haulover Creek where it enters
the Caribbean Sea, and extending both north and south along the shore, Belize
City looks as perhaps New Orleans did when Andrew Jackson was defending it from
the British in the War of 1812, or as any number of pirate towns around the
Caribbean basin looked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The concrete
or stucco buildings of downtown, with their clothing shops and supermarkets,
seemed to be the anachronisms, rather than the fanciful cupolas Valerie saw, or
the large airy porches, or the potholed plowed-field streets. Her cab jounced
and creaked and complained along these streets, where most of the vehicles
around them looked just as dusty and battered, except for a British Army jeep,
dark gray, efficient-looking, containing a couple of red-faced soldiers wearing
shorts.

 
          
Ahead
of them after awhile was a beat-up maroon pickup truck with three men visible
inside, all bouncing up and down together as the pickup struggled along what
had become more of an obstacle course than a thoroughfare. But then, with the
pickup still ahead, they passed through downtown and came to a
better-maintained street that ran along the north side of Haulover Creek. The
water was to their right, while larger, well-painted wooden residences were to
their left; they were coming, evidently, to the better part of town.

 
          
“
Fort
George
Hotel
,” announced the driver, and Valerie looked
out at a modem but rather shabby building, three stories high, motel style, but
with an elaborate curving entranceway.

 
          
Unfortunately,
the pickup pulled in ahead of them and stopped in front of the steps to the
main door, causing a delay. All three men got out, the driver on one side and
the passengers on the other. The driver walked around the front of the pickup
to shake hands with his passengers, both of whom were very tall and thin. The
driver, who seemed more robust, exchanged a word or two with them, and then the
passengers went into the hotel while the driver trotted back around his pickup,
waved an apology for the delay at Valerie’s cabdriver, and climbed up into his
vehicle.