Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (6 page)

 
          
Estelle
looked worried on Kirby’s behalf, saying, “Kirby? Bad news?”

 
          
“Bad
news,” Kirby agreed. “I’m sorry, Estelle, maybe I don’t have such a good
appetite after all.”

 
          
Witcher
and Feldspan. Whitman Lamuel. It was not acceptable that they meet.

 
          
 
 
          
When
the driver steered his cab into a cemetery, Valerie was certain some sort of
mistake had been made. “But I want to go to Belmopan,” she said.

 
          
“Oh,
sure,” said the driver. “This is the road.”

 
          
It
was the road. Cemetery flanked them on both sides of the meandering twodane
blacktop; very white stones, very red ribbons wrapped around bright sprays of
flowers or around gaunt remnant clusters of sticks. Off to the left two sinewy
black men, stripped to the waist, dug a grave in the heavy red clay. At one
point, the road bifurcated, making an island of thick'trunked short trees
intermixed with more grave markers; tree roots had pushed up through the
blacktop, forcing the cab to slow to five miles an hour as they jounced by.

 
          
It’s
like the beginning of a horror movie, Valerie thought, except that it wasn’t,
really. The sun was too bright, the sky too large and beautiful and blue, and
the cemetery itself too cheerful and festive. And the air coming through the
taxi windows—apparently, the air conditioning in
all
Belizean taxis awaits a part—was too soft and languid, too full
of the sweet scents of life.

 
          
Most
of the world was still theoretical to Valerie Greene, who was painfully aware
of how many places she hadn’t been. Her pursuit of Mayan sites through the
computers of UCLA and the foundation grantors of New York had been
spurred—beyond her natural enthusiasm as a scholar—by her need to travel, to
get out into what her colleagues called “the field,” to get out into the
world
¹
.
It was time, Valerie
thought, that she and the world got to know one another.

 
          
Her
father, Robert Edward Greene IV, was a minister in southern Illinois, a fact
Valerie found embarrassing without knowing exactly why. Her older brother, R.
E. Greene V, was an English teacher in a high school 11 miles from their
father’s church, and it was Valerie’s considered opinion that Robby would
never
travel. Nor marry. Nor do
anything. An R. E. G. VI seemed exceedingly unlikely. And, in truth,
unnecessary. Redundant. Even otiose.

 
          
It
was to be different for Valerie. Archaeology was endlessly fascinating to her,
and not only because of the travels to remote comers of the globe that the
discipline implied. In her mind, she traveled as well into the past, the remote
and unreachable past, in which the people and the cities and the civilizations
were so
different
from southern
Illinois. If asked, as she rarely was, what had led her to archaeology in the
first place, she invariably answered, “I’ve
always
loved it!” since she herself had forgotten how profoundly she had been
influenced, at the age of nine, by
Green
Mansions.
(Rima the bird girl! Rima! Rima!)

 
          
After
the cemetery, Belize City was left behind, and the Western Highway settled down
to being an ordinary twodane bumpy potholed country road. It was 52 miles to
the new capital at Belmopan, all of it ranging very gradually uphill, and
within just a few miles of the coast the broaddeaf tropical greenery gave way
to scrub forest, intermixed with weedy fields and intense patches of
cultivation. Small unpainted shacks housed families, usually with many
children.

 
          
There
was little traffic on the road: the occasional lumbering large truck (sometimes
with Mexican license plates); the small farm truck with halfmaked men standing
in the back, sometimes waving or making other gestures to Valerie; and every
once in a while a chrome' gleaming hom'honking high'Speeding closed'windowed
big American car with Belize plates, transporting some government official
between the nation’s capital and the nation’s city.

 
          
Certainly
the nation’s capital was no city, when they reached it an hour and a half
later. Invented in self-defense in the 1960s, after one hurricane too many had
leveled the original capital, Belmopan has so far failed to become very real.
Official efforts to force-breed a city tend to be more official than human, and
that’s what happened in Belmopan. Whenever buildings remind you irresistably of
the artist’s rendering, something has gone wrong somewhere.

 
          
The
driver, who had been very uninterested in conversation (Valerie eventually
having become quite nostalgic for yesterday’s chatterbox), also had no idea where
Innocent St. Michael’s office might be found. “Maybe there,” he said, pointing
vaguely either to the structure that looked like a prison camp’s administration
building or possibly at the outsized World War II pillbox beside it.

 
          
The
pillbox was too intimidating; in the other building Valerie found many people,
some typing, some talking, some reading, some chewing thoughtfully on various
kinds of food, all in many small offices to both sides of a central corridor. A
woman darning with tiny stitches a boy’s white school shirt, the shirt almost
completely covering the typewriter on the desk in front of her, said, “Oh,
Mister St. Michael, that’s Land Allocation, that’s upstairs.”

 
          
Upstairs
another woman, this one leafing through a recent issue of Queen, directed
Valerie to an office where a slender young black man stood up from behind his
desk and said, “Oh, yes, Miss Greene, you have an appointment with the Deputy
Director.”

 
          
“Yes,
I have.”

 
          
Glancing
at his quartz watch—perhaps flashing it a bit more than necessary—the young man
said, “I’m afraid you’re a bit early.” “Actually,” Valerie said, looking at the
large white-faced clock on the wall, “I’m three minutes late.”

 
          
“Yes,
well,” the young man said, with a here-and-gone smile. “The Deputy Director isn’t
quite here yet.”

 
          
“Oh,”
said Valerie.

 
          
The
young man looked bright-eyed, saying, “I’m the Deputy’s deputy, as it were, his
Senior Secretary. Vernon is my name; perhaps I could be of help?”

 
          
Wondering
if
Vernon
were his first or last name, Valerie said, “Well,
I did want to talk to Mr. St. Michael about exploring some land.”

 
          
“Oh,
yes, Mayan temples,” Vernon said, nodding, patting his palms together, silently
applauding one or the other of them, perhaps both. “I recall replying to one of
your letters. Fascinating things, computers.

 
          
I
have a great interest in them myself.”

 
          
“It’s
mostly the Mayan temples I care about,” Valerie said.

 
          
“Yes.
If you could tell me the area of your interest, I could have the proper
surveys, maps, whatever you’ll need, out of the files and on tap when the
Deputy Director arrives.”

 
          
“Oh,
that’s fine,” Valerie said. Opening her attache case on his desk, she brought
out her own maps, first the large one of the general area, then the smaller one
with the specific target site. She pointed, describing this and that, and he
nodded, frowning, moving the maps slightly by grasping their very edges between
the tips of thumb and finger. “Right there,” she said at last, pinning down the
putative temple beneath her thumb.

 
          
“Oh,
yes, I see where you are,” he said. When she lifted her thumb he moved the map
again, infinitesimally, raising his head to look down across his cheekbones,
pursing his lips. “But that’s,” he said, shaking his head. “No, no, that’s no
good.”

 
          
“It’s
there, I mean,” Valerie said, poking the map once more. “Yes, I see that, I see
what you have in mind,” he said, “but it’s not possible. You won’t find any
temples
there
.”

 
          
“Oh,
I’m certain I shall,” Valerie said, becoming more formal in the face of
opposition, wondering why this fellow was making trouble. She had heard that
some Third'World people wouldn’t cooperate unless they were given a bribe or a
tip; did this Vernon want money? Theoretically she understood the concept,
didn’t even have any true objection, but in real life she had never actually
bribed anyone, and she found herself now too embarrassed to make the attempt.
“I’m certain it’s there,” she insisted, thinking that Mr. St. Michael, when he
arrived, would be above such petty money schemes.

 
          
“But
it can’t be, Miss Greene, I’m sorry,” Vernon said. Moving across the room, he
gestured to her to follow, pointing at a large map on the side wall and saying,
“Let me show you on this topographical map.”

 
          
A
bit reluctantly, she crossed to stand beside him and watch his slender fingers
move across the map. “Here is your site,” he said. “You see how the higher land
is around your land on three sides?”

 
          
“The
mountains, yes,” Valerie said. “It’s just where the mountains
start
that we’ll find our settlement.”

 
          
“No,
I’m sorry,” he said, blinking at her somewhat owlishly, looking far too earnest
to be interested in bribes. “Something the map does
not
show,” he said, his fingers moving, “is an underground fault
that runs along just about here, under your site and east, coming out in these
two streams down here and this one over here. Now, the situation is,” he said,
taking a professorial stance, nodding at her, “all of these first line of
mountains here drain down through your parcel of land, all of them. It is the
narrow end of the funnel, you see, the bottleneck in the watershed.”

 
          
“I
don’t see what you’re getting at,” Valerie confessed. (She had now come to the
conclusion that he was, however misguided, essentially serious.)

 
          
“What
I’m getting at is,” he said, “in the rainy season, in the wet six months of the
year, this is all swamp through here, bog, simply impassable. There’s no way to
change it, not the sluice at the bottom of an entire watershed.” Then,
chuckling a bit, his pointing fingers making an arc westward of her site, he
said, “Oh, I suppose a billion dollars to put a dam across here between these
mountains might help a little, but even so it wouldn’t work, you’d still have
ground seepage, all these other mountains draining. So you see the difficulty;
for six months of the year, total swamp.”

 
          
“But
the Mayans
specialized
in clearing
swamp,” Valerie objected. “Along the coast, there are evidences of
milpa
farming two thousand years ago
where now it’s all swamp again.”

 
          
“The
Mayans never tried to divert the runoff from eleven mountains,” Vernon said
drily. “But even so, there’s the other problem, the underground fault. Without
it, your site would be perfectly fine, it would contain perhaps Belize’s only
lake, but as things are the land can’t retain the water, it all just runs right
through, to these two streams and that one. So, for the dry six months of the
year, the swamp becomes almost a desert. No lake, no water, nothing will grow,
nothing at all can exist there.” Tapping the map with his hard fingernails, he
said, “No, I’m sorry, Miss Greene, this is the one parcel of land in all Belize
where not even the Mayans ever lived.”

           
Valerie, despite herself, was a bit
daunted by what he had said, but she did have the computer results to buoy her,
and the faith of the two New York foundations, and the results of her own
study, so she said, “I’m sorry, um—” not knowing whether to call him
Vernon
or
Mister Vernon
, therefore calling him um instead of either “—but I
really want to go see the place for myself.”

 
          
“Of
course, that’s your privilege,” Vernon said, smiling at her to show it was no
skin off
his
nose. “In fact,” he
said, “if you were to go there now, just today, the area would look very nice
indeed. The rainy season ended a few weeks ago and the water is still draining
away, so the vegetation hasn’t all died yet but the ground is dry.”

 
          
“I
would
like to see the place,” Valerie
said firmly, aware of the office door opening behind her, “and as soon as
possible.”