High Adventure

1 The Crescent Empire

The girl was a real pest. “I think it’s terrible,” she said.

Kirby Galway nodded. “I think so, too,” he murmured, jiggling ice cubes in his glass. Around them the party brisked along, intense meaningless conversation on all sides, mammoth paintings of house parts — a keyhole, a windowsill — visible above and between all those talking heads. In the middle distance, receding ever farther from Kirby’s grasp, was his target of opportunity for this evening, one Whitman Lemuel, assistant curator of the Duluth Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, here in New York on a buying expedition, here at this Soho gallery party as a form of relaxation and a story to tell the home folks in Duluth.

Kirby had just this morning learned of Lemuel’s presence in New York, had burrowed out Lemuel’s evening plans by late this afternoon, and had come down through the snowy city to crash the party early, so as to be ready when his mark arrived. Tall and handsome and self-assured, proud of his luxuriant ginger moustache, dressed with casual impeccability, Kirby was yet to find the party he couldn’t crash. And in Soho? He could have come here straight from the jungle, in his hiking boots and oil-stained khakis and battered bush hat, and still they would have swept him right on in, assuming he was either an artist or an artist’s boyfriend.

He was neither. He was a salesman, and his customer this evening was one Whitman Lemuel.

Or was to have been; things were looking decidedly worse. Was it the door Lemuel now angled toward?

It had begun well. Kirby had introduced himself in tried-and-true fashion, by actually introducing the other fellow: “Aren’t you Whitman Lemuel?”

Non-famous people are always delighted to be recognized by strangers. “Why, yes, I am,” said the round-faced Lemuel, eyes benign behind round glasses, broad mouth smiling over polka-dot bow tie.

“I want you to know,” Kirby said, “I was really impressed by that upper Amazon show you put together a while back.”

“Oh, yes?” The smile grew broader, the eyes more benign, the bow tie brighter. “Did you see it in Duluth?”

“Unfortunately not. In Houston. It traveled very well.”

“Yes, it did, really,” Lemuel agreed, nodding, but his expression very faintly clouded. “Still, there were parts of it that couldn’t leave the museum, simply not. I’m afraid you didn’t get the full effect.”

“What I saw was definitely impressive. I’m Kirby Galway, by the way.”

As they shook hands, Lemuel said, “Are you connected with the Houston museum?”

“No, no, I’m merely an amateur, an enthusiast. I live in Belize now, you see, and—”

“Ah, Belize!” Lemuel said, brightening even more.

“You know it?” Kirby asked, with an innocent smile. “Most people’ve never heard of the place.”

“Oh, my dear fellow,” Lemuel said. “Belize. Formerly British Honduras, independent, now, I believe—”

“Very.”

“But, I tell you, Mister, umm...”

“Galway. Kirby Galway.”

“Mister Galway,” Lemuel said, excitement making him bob slightly on the balls of his feet, “I tell you, Belize is fascinating. To me, to someone in my position, fascinating.”

“Oh, really?” Kirby said. His smile said, fancy that.

“It’s the very center,” Lemuel said, gesturing, slopping his drink on his wrist, not noticing, “the very center of the ancient Mayan world.”

“Oh, it can’t be,” Kirby said, frowning. “I thought Mexico was—”

“Aztecs, Aztecs,” Lemuel said, brushing those Johnny-come-latelys aside. “Olmecs, Toltecs,” he grudgingly acknowledged, “but comparatively little Mayan.”

“Guatemala, then,” Kirby suggested. “There’s that place, what is it, Tikal, where they—”

“Of course, of course.” Lemuel’s impatience was on the wax. “Until very recently, we thought those were the primary Mayan sites, that’s true enough, true enough. But that’s because no one had studied Belize, no one knew what was in those jungles.”

“Now they do?”

“We’re beginning to,” Lemuel said. “Now we know the Mayan civilization covered a great crescent shape, extending from Mexico south and west into Guatemala. But do you know where the very center of that crescent is?”

“Belize?” hazarded Kirby.

“Precisely! Coming up out of Belize now, there are pre-Columbian artifacts, jade figures, carvings, gold jewelry, that are just astonishing. Wonderful. Unbelievable.”

“Well, now, I wonder,” Kirby said thoughtfully, baiting the hook. “On my land down in Belize there’s—”

“Mayan?” said an assertive female voice. “Did I hear someone say Mayan?”

It was the girl, introducing herself, inserting herself, spoiling Kirby’s aim just as he was releasing the arrow. Damn pest. As annoyed as any fisherman at the arrival of a loud and careless intruder, Kirby turned to see an unusually tall young woman in her middle 20s, perhaps only two or three inches shorter than Kirby’s six feet two. She was attractive, if sharp-featured, with a long oval face and straight hair- colored hair and eyes that flashed with commitment. Her paisley blouse and long abundant skirt and brown leather boots all seemed just a few years out of date, but Kirby could see that the heavy figured-silver chain around her neck was Mexican and the large loop earrings she wore were Central American, probably Guatemalan, native handicraft. He sensed trouble. Damn and hell, he thought.

Whitman Lemuel, obviously finding the presence of a good-looking young woman taller than himself an even more exciting prospect than the thought of long-dead Mayans, was welcoming her happily into their enclave, saying, “Yes, are you interested in that culture? We were just talking about Belize.”

“I haven’t been there yet,” she said. “I want to go. I did my postgraduate work at the Royal Museum at Vancouver, classifying materials from Guyana.”

“You’re an anthropologist, then?” Lemuel asked, while Kirby silently fretted.

“Archaeologist,” the pest answered.

“Slim pickings from Guyana, I should think,” Lemuel commented. “But, ah, Belize now—”

“Despoliation!” she said, eyes shooting sparks.

Kirby had never heard anyone use that word in conversation before. He gazed at her with new respect and redoubled loathing.

Lemuel had blinked at the word, as well he might. Then he said, doubtfully, “I’m not really sure I...”

“Do you know what they’re doing down there in Belize?” demanded the pest. “All those Mayan cities, ancient sites, completely unprotected there in the jungle—”

“For a thousand years or more,” Kirby said gently.

“But now,” the pest said, “the things buried in them are suddenly valuable. Thugs, graverobbers, are going in there, tearing structures apart—”

This was the worst. Kirby couldn’t believe such bad luck, to have this conversation at such a moment. “Oh, it isn’t that bad,” he said, determinedly interrupting her, and attempted to veer them all away in another direction by introducing what ought to be a sure-fire new topic of conversation: “What worries me down there is the war in El Salvador. The way things are going—”

But she wasn’t to be that easy to deflect. “Oh, that,” she said, dismissing it all with a colt-like shake of her head. “The war. That’ll be over in one or two generations, but the destruction of irreplaceable Mayan sites is forever. The Belizean government does what it can, but they lack staff and funds. And meanwhile, unscrupulous dealers and museum directors in the United States—”

Oh, God. Please make her stop, God.

But it was too late. Lemuel, looking like a man who’s just had a bug fly into his mouth, stood fiddling with his bow tie and shifting from foot to foot. “Well, my drink, umm,” he said. “My glass seems to be empty. You’ll both excuse me?”

Now, that was unfair. The girl wasn’t Kirby’s fault, and it was really very bad of Lemuel to lump them together like that and march off. It meant Kirby had no polite choice but to stay, at least for a minute or two, and if he did manage to make contact with Lemuel again this evening it would be more difficult to get to the point of his sales pitch in a natural way.

Meanwhile, the girl seemed just as content to deliver her diatribe to an audience of one. “My name is Valerie Greene,” she said. She extended a slim long-fingered hand for Kirby to either bite or shake.

He shook the damn thing. “Kirby Galway,” he said. “It’s been very—”

“Did I hear you say you live in Belize now?”

“That’s right.”

“And are you an archaeologist, by any chance?”

“No, I’m afraid not.” Then, because Valerie Greene’s bright-bird eyes kept looking expectantly at him, he was forced to go on and explain himself: “I’m a rancher. Or, that is, I will be. I’m accumulating land down there. At the moment, I’m a charter pilot.”

“What company do you work for?”

“I have my own plane.”

“Then you must be aware,” she said, “of the pillaging that is taking place on archaeological sites in Belize.”

“I’ve seen some things in the paper,” he acknowledged.

“I think it’s terrible,” she said.

“I think so, too,” he murmured, watching Whitman Lemuel recede not toward the bar but toward the door.

Terrible. But not fatal, he consoled himself, not necessarily fatal. In fact, Lemuel’s obvious unease when artifact theft was mentioned simply confirmed Kirby’s belief that the man was a definite prospect. If Kirby failed to hook him tonight, there would always be another time, in New York or in Duluth or somewhere. Today was January 10th, so there were still almost three weeks before he was due to return to Belize; plenty of time to find two or three Whitman Lemuels. And in any event, he already had a couple of fish on the line.

“The people who do that sort of thing,” Valerie Greene was saying, continuing doggedly and blindly to plow her own narrow field, “have no sense of shame.”

“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 barrel-bodied 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 attaché 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 barn 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 learn 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 well-worn 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 trees, 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.)

“Lava Sxir Yt,” Feldspan echoed, reverently, as though the words were an incantation to call up an ancient savage Mayan priest.

Kirby said, “Let’s go on up.”

Witcher carefully replaced the stone, and they continued up the slope, soon coming to partly cleared steps, obviously part of the temple’s outer wall. Witcher and Feldspan chattered happily over that discovery, until Kirby shepherded them on upward. Near the top, where they could already look back over the jungle canopy to the tiny blue-and-white plane parked toylike in the field below, they came upon what at first appeared to be a low tombstone, perhaps two feet wide and six inches thick, jutting less than a foot from the ground, tilted slightly forward. The top and sides had been squared off by rough chisel-work, and some sort of scratches were etched deeply into the forward side.

This really got to Witcher and Feldspan, who fell to their knees in front of the stone, Feldspan spitting on it and spreading the wet with his fingertips, the better to see the etched-in scratches, while Witcher clawed away at the loose dry soil at the thing’s base, revealing more of it. “Jaguar,” breathed Feldspan, tracing the lines. There it was; the topmost portion of a typical stylized Mayan drawing of a jaguar’s head. The lines continued down into the area Witcher had cleared, and presumably some distance below.

“Scorpion,” said Kirby mildly.

They both jumped backward, scrabbling in panic on the weed- grown steps, struggling to their feet. “Where?” cried Witcher.

“No, no,” Kirby said. “I just meant to look out for them. I wouldn’t dig barehanded around here, believe me.”

“Oh, I see,” said Feldspan, beginning to recover his poise. “You’re absolutely right.”

“This stela,” Witcher said, pointing at the stone, “could be very valuable. Depending on the condition of the rest of it.”

“There’s a bunch of them here,” Kirby said casually, watching Witcher and Feldspan exchange a quick hungry look. “Let’s go on.”

This time they continued all the way to the top, where they found a mostly flat weedy area about 12 feet square. In one comer the old paving stones were completely uncovered. Walking back and forth, alternately staring down at the paving stones and out at the view of jungle and clearings and, in the western distance, the bluish hulking shapes of the Maya Mountains, Witcher and Feldspan were clearly caught up in the myth and the magic of it all; here were they, two New Yorkers, sophisticates, antique dealers, used to the ways of the most modem of civilizations, and they had traveled in the course of one day more than a thousand years into the past. The blood of human sacrifice must have soaked these paving stones. The few visible steps in the overgrown sides of the temple would have been lined with savage worshipers in their bright cloaks and feathers. Here — here — the priest would have waited, the rough stone knife held high over his head.

“The temples,” Witcher said, and was overcome by emotion, and started again: “The temples were painted red. In the old times, when the Mayans were here. Imagine; from miles and miles away in the jungle you could see the great red temple rearing up into the sky.”

“Fantastic,” breathed Feldspan.

“Must have been something,” Kirby agreed. His job was to be slightly the rube, to their greater sophistication, just as he was meant to be a bit less honorable than they and a bit more dangerous. He enjoyed all parts of the game, including this one.

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.

4 New York Money

“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 sun-yellowed 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 attaché 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 air-conditioning.”

“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 Sawyer-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, “Anzan 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 attaché 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. I 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.

I know that man, Valerie thought suddenly. The face, the smile, the easygoing manner, the being rather too sure of himself. She knew she’d met him somewhere, but couldn’t think where. As the cab pulled forward and the green-jacketed bellboy came out to open Valerie’s door, she frowned at the departing pickup and the vagrant memory. Somewhere, somewhere. She got out of the cab, holding her attache case, and turned to watch the pickup drive away, back toward the center of town.

All she could remember was that she had seen that face before, and that she felt... she felt...

Trouble.

5 Meeting at Fort George

Kirby circled while they took in the laundry, far below. Watching, waiting to land, lightly touching Cynthia’s controls, he repeatedly yawned.

It had been a long day, now rushing toward sunset; the shadows of the Cruz family and their wind-flapping laundry stretched long and black over the stubbly pasture. Bright purple or orange sheets; red, black, or green shirts; modest white underpants; the ubiquitous blue jeans; and finally the line itself was unstrung. The smallest Cruz children had meanwhile chivvied the goats into their log pen, and at last Kirby’s earphones spoke in Manuel Cruz’s Spanish-accented voice: “Sorry, Kirby. All set now.”

“Thanks, Manny.”

The Cruz kids always loved a little acrobatics, so Kirby turned Cynthia up and over on her left wingtip, power-dived directly at the eastern end of the pasture — the laundry having told him the wind was out of the west — brought the nose up at the last possible instant, and walked Cynthia like a bride across the bumpy pasture to the grove of sapodilla.

There were only five Cruz children, but at moments like this they seemed like 50, swarming around the plane, chirping with excitement, asking a million questions, demanding the right to carry some package from the plane to the house. “But I don’t have anything,” Kirby kept telling them, elbow-deep in kids. “Your goddam old man brought it all out in the truck.”

The pickup truck, in fact, was parked in its shed beside the chicken house, with the dishwasher still in it. The other boxes were gone, however, and Kirby was not surprised, on entering the house, to find Manny listing slightly, a happy smile on his face and a glass of red liquid in his hand.

Manny Cruz did love Danish Marys. Whenever Kirby was gone for a while to the States, he would bring back, along with clothing and toys and appliances and cookbooks for Estelle, a few bottles of aquavit for Manny. To mix with it, Estelle grew tomatoes year-round in the kitchen garden, and the necessary spices were for sale eight miles away in Orange Walk.

Four years ago, when Kirby had first met Manny, the skinny little man with the happy smile and the brightly shining eyes was one of life’s more cheerful losers. A subsistence farmer on rough land that had been stripped in the nineteenth century by the lumber industry, he was — like most of the other rural people in this comer of Belize — also a marijuana farmer in a very small way, tending his little field, turning over the occasional bale of really fine sinsemilla for some really fine greenbacks. To Kirby, then, Manny had been simply another Spanish/Indian local supplier in tom workpants, with gaps between his teeth, the only difference being that Manny Cruz tended to smile more than most people, so his tooth-gaps were more memorable.

But then the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration from the United States, in one of its doomed, humorless, arrogant, sporadic efforts to force the Belizean government to dry up the finest source of foreign exchange in the whole country, compelled the local authorities at least to make a gesture, arrest somebody, destroy some patch of marijuana plants, and poor Manny turned out to be the last one standing when the music stopped. The next thing anybody knew, his pot crop (and part of Estelle’s com crop as well) had been burned, his 18-year-old International Harvester step-in van (still reading Lady Betty on the side, under all the newer coats of paint) had been confiscated by the law as having been involved in the transportation of drugs, and Manny was sentenced to 20 years in Lynam Prison down by Dangriga.

Well, the whole thing was a shock to everybody in the area. The taking of the truck, the Cruz family’s only means of travel to and from civilization, seemed as Draconian to most people as the removal of Manny from his children for a term longer than their childhoods. They would all be married by the time he got out.

A kind of unofficial Cruz family welfare program started up among the other farmers in the area, as well as some of the merchants from around Orange Walk and some of the middlemen in the marijuana trade and even a few of the North American pilots who fly the stuff out, including Kirby. At that time, Kirby had been around the scene only about five months, and was still settling in. He had an unsatisfactory relationship going with a legal secretary in Homestead, he was beginning to be interested in Belize as a place rather than merely a cargo stop, and he saw a way he might both help the Cruz family and introduce a little stability into his own life.

Estelle Cruz, as short and skinny and brown and gnarled as a cigarillo, had at first thought Kirby was suggesting a sexual relationship between them during the term of her husband’s incarceration, and she was edging toward the machete before he managed to make his proposition clear. What it came down to was, he wanted a home.

There was a pasture in front of the Cruz house that could serve as a landing strip for Cynthia — better than some of the jungle strips he normally used — and a good grove of trees at one end in which to park her. A mule shed on one side of the house could be enclosed for a separate apartment for himself. Estelle could cook and clean for him, the children already knew better than to tell their business to strangers, and Kirby would have a real base of operations at the Belize end of his route.

What he offered in exchange was, in effect, the twentieth century. The Cruz family homestead was too far off the beaten track to tap into the public power lines, and they’d never been able to afford their own gasoline-powered electric generator. Kirby promised to supply electricity, and the appliances to be run by it. No actual cash would change hands between himself and the Cruzes, but he would provide them with things and they would provide him with a home.

It was a fine deal for everyone. While some Cruz and Vasquez (Estelle’s family) relatives built the addition onto the house, complete with a concrete floor and glass in the windows, Kirby brought in load after load of materiel. His southern flights had always been cargoless — except for wads of greenbacks, with which to pay for the northbound cargos — and money at that time seemed no problem (he hadn’t yet met Innocent St. Michael), so down came two composting toilets, an electricity-generating windmill, four solar panels, a gasoline-driven generator for emergencies, a washing machine, a television set, a refrigerator, three air conditioners, four blue-light bug zappers, assorted lamps, and a Cuisinart. And from a dealer in Belize City came the used pickup, which Estelle could use whenever Kirby didn’t need it, replacing the confiscated van.

Even without the Cuisinart, Estelle had been a wonderful cook, and modem appliances simply made her output more lavish. In Belize, Kirby ate better than ever before in his life, and when he looked out his window he could see the spot where his food had been growing until earlier that same day. The Cruz family was company without being intrusive (he was gradually learning rudimentary Spanish and Kekchi from the kids), his quarters and clothing were kept scrupulously clean, and during those extended intervals when he was up north he knew his goods were safe.

When, in the middle of all this, the Belizean authorities released Manuel Cruz from prison after less than nine months of his term — the DEA apparently at last looking the other way — it changed nothing. Kirby and Manny hit it off very well, Kirby teaching Manny cribbage while learning from Manny an Indian game involving small stones and a number of cups, and Manny sometimes helped out in small ways.

Bringing the pickup truck to town today, Manny had carried a shopping list from Estelle — cloth and thread for the girls’ school dresses, salt, filters for Mr. Coffee — so he’d spent the afternoon downtown while Kirby was off showing the temple. After dropping Witcher and Feldspan at their hotel, Kirby had given the pickup to Manny and gone to see a fellow about a shipment to be taken north on Friday. For security’s sake, they’d had their conversation in the fellow’s Toyota, driving around and about for a while, there being some disagreement about money. Finally, consensus having been reached, the fellow dropped Kirby at the Municipal Airport, from which Manny and the pickup and the dishwasher and the other goods had long since departed.

Feeling weary from his long day, and a bit cranky because of arguing about money with a man in an air-conditioned Toyota, Kirby had flown north and west, less than 60 miles, and when the familiar design of the Cruz homestead had spread out below he had smiled and relaxed, not even caring that Manny hadn’t yet had the pasture cleared.

Estelle, who was very short, always looked up at Kirby with adoration glistening in her eyes. For a while he’d been awkward with her, thinking her feelings toward him were sexual, but everything became all right once he understood her passion was religious. On the surface a rational modern woman, who enjoyed the Guatemalan and Mexican television stations as much as the kids did and who frequently talked back at the announcers during news broadcasts, somewhere in her deepest soul Estelle was still a pre-Columbian artifact herself, an unreconstructed Maya. Kirby was the creature who dropped out of the sky, bringing electricity and magic, bringing comfort and riches. What was the name of such a creature? Exactly.

Now, with the usual light in her eyes, Estelle approached Kirby with a bottle of Belikin beer in one hand and a piece of notepaper in the other. “Cora brought it home after school,” she said, extending the paper. Since there was no telephone line out here, Cora, the eldest, picked up Kirby’s few messages at the store in Orange Walk.

Kirby took the beer with more pleasure than the message, which must have shown on his face, because Estelle said, “You look tired, Kirby.”

“I’m very tired.”

“I hope you got a good appetite.”

“I’ve always got an appetite, Estelle,” Kirby said, and swigged beer, and looked at his message.

Shit and damn! Whitman goddam Lemuel!

Last month, three days after the disaster at the Soho gallery, when that irritating pest had queered his pitch, Kirby had run into Lemuel unexpectedly at another party — this one on Park Avenue in the 90s, in the apartment of a rich and avid collector of pre-Columbian art — and on that second try he had succeeded at last in landing his fish. Yes, Whitman Lemuel was interested in previously unknown Mayan artifacts. Yes, his museum had the funds to support that interest. Yes, they were prepared to be casual about the provenance and prior ownership of items they bought. YES, he would come to Belize to look at an undiscovered Mayan temple!

Next week, next Thursday. It had all been arranged, with an exchange of phone numbers and a writing down of dates. And now here was a message from Whitman Lemuel, bland as could be, saying he would arrive tomorrow! “Know you’ll understand my impatience. Wouldn’t want anyone else to beat us. Will be on afternoon Miami plane. Fort George Hotel reservation confirmed.”

No; it’s not possible. On Friday, day after tomorrow, Kirby had another shipment to fly north, the very topic of his discussion this afternoon with the man in the Toyota. But that problem paled next to the real worry: Tomorrow Witcher and Feldspan would still be here, also at the Fort George.

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.

6 The Missing Lake

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 two-lane 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!. 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 two-lane 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 broad-leaf 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 half-naked men standing in the back, sometimes waving or making other gestures to Valerie; and every once in a while a chrome-gleaming horn-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 attaché 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.”

“Ah, here’s the Deputy Director now,” Vernon said, smiling, gesturing for Valerie to turn about and look.

The man she saw was an inch or two shorter than herself, barrel-bodied, older than 50, with tightly curled black hair, skin the color of milk chocolate, eyes and teeth that flashed with pleasure at the sight of her, and a strong aura of self-confidence, mastery. Without being offensive about it, he would dominate any room he entered.

As he dominated this one, approaching Valerie, thick-fingered hand out to be shaken as Vernon performed the introductions: “Deputy Director St. Michael, this is Miss Valerie Greene, an archaeologist from the United States.”

“Delighted,” St. Michael said, closing her hand briefly in both of his. (His hands were warm, not unpleasantly so.)

“You recall, Deputy Director,” Vernon was saying, “the correspondence concerning undiscovered Mayan ruins, possibly to be traced by computers at the University of California at Los Angeles.”

“Yes, of course.” St. Michael beamed at her, as though he’d just this minute invented her. “Miss Greene, of course. And how is Los Angeles?”

“Actually,” Valerie said, “I came here from New York.”

“Ah, New York! I love that town.” St. Michael’s beam turned reminiscent, then waggish. “Cold up there right now,” he said, “but give me a New York restaurant any day. Even in January. Has Vernon been helpful?” (Which didn’t help much in the first-name-last-name question.)

“Very,” she said. “Though he has been trying to discourage me.”

“Oh, I hope not.” St. Michael waggled a finger at Vernon, saying, “Never discourage our friends from the north.”

“I don’t think Miss Greene can be discouraged,” Vernon said. “She showed me the area where she expects to find the temple, and I had to tell her the problems.”

“Problems?” Even this St. Michael reacted to with an undercurrent of waggish humor. Valerie was surprised to realize the man was — despite all the obvious differences — reminding her of Orson Welles in “The Third Man.” She half-expected him to call her Holly.

“Well, here, sir,” Vernon was saying, pointing to the topographical map again, “you know this piece of land, you’ll see the difficulty right away.”

“I do?” St. Michael strode over to the map, he and Vernon consulted for a few seconds, and then St. Michael thumped his finger against the map, saying, “Here, you mean?”

“Right there, yes, sir.”

“I see.” St. Michael brooded at the map, suddenly very thoughtful. Valerie took a step closer.

Vernon said, “I did explain about the drainage problem, the underground fault—”

“Yes, yes, Vernon, of course,” St. Michael said, still thoughtful, still brooding at the map. But then, his good humor regained, he smiled roguishly at Vernon, saying, “But the Mayans had minds of their own, didn’t they? No telling what the buggers might do.”

“But, sir,” Vernon protested, pointing at the map, “no one could possibly—”

“Abandoned their own cities,” St. Michael said, overriding his assistant, plowing blandly on, “going off into the jungles for no rhyme or reason.” Turning to Valerie, he said, “Isn’t that right, Miss Greene?”

“That’s the great unsolved mystery of the Mayan civilization,” Valerie agreed.

“Exactly,” St. Michael said. To Vernon he said, “Disease didn’t get them. Not war, not famine. They were healthy, civilized, doing very well for themselves, then one day, up they got and marched off into the jungle, and a thousand years later most of them still haven’t come back. Just walked right out of their cities.”

“Not all at once, though,” Valerie pointed out. “It happened in different places at different times, over hundreds of years.”

“But sooner or later,” St. Michael prompted.

“Oh, yes,” she agreed. “Eventually, they turned their backs on their entire civilization.”

“You see?” St. Michael opened his arms in triumph, smiling at his assistant. “If those people would leave a city for no good reason, who’s to say where they wouldn’t build one?”

Vernon was clearly not entirely convinced by this logic, but an assistant knows when to retire and leave the field to his number one. “You might be right, sir,” he said, with only the slightest visible reluctance.

“Or I could be wrong,” St. Michael cheerfully replied. “I expect Miss Greene will soon be able to tell us.” He smiled again at the map, thinking about something or other, then turned to Valerie, saying, “I do know that piece of land, though not well. I know its owner.”

“Oh, yes?”

“He’s a compatriot of yours, named Kirby Galway.”

The name meant nothing to Valerie. She said, “Would he object to my going out there?”

“Now, why would he? As a matter of fact, Miss Greene,” he said, moving away from the map at last, coming over to stand just a bit too close to Valerie, looking for a quick instant at her breasts before gazing her frankly and openly in the eye, “as a matter of fact, it’s possible we could be of help to one another.”

Valerie thought, Why does he make me nervous? She said, “Of course, if I can.”

“I’ve been interested for some time,” St. Michael said, “in what Kirby Galway plans to do with that land. In my position here, you can see I would be.”

“Ye-ess.”

“But also because of my position,” St. Michael said, shrugging slightly, smiling at himself, “I can’t really ask him the Question Direct. He might be afraid of government interference, red tape, that sort of thing. I don’t want to pester people, I want development of our Belizean land. My department wants it. This is just a... personal curiosity. Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so,” Valerie said.

“You could go in there,” St. Michael said, “no official connection, no interest in anything but Mayan ruins, and when you came back, you could tell me what else you. saw.”

“Do you mean,” Valerie (who read the newspapers) said, “marijuana?”

St. Michael seemed honestly startled, then amused. “Oh, Miss Greene, not at all! Oh, no, the conditions there would be completely wrong.”

“As I said,” Vernon put in quietly.

“No, I’ll tell you what I have in mind.” St. Michael reached out to lightly touch her forearm. “Nothing criminal, nothing like that at all. Miss Greene — Valerie, is it?”

“Yes.”

“May I call you Valerie? And you must call me Innocent.”

What an idea. Valerie stared at him, speechless.

“We have here in Belmopan,” Innocent St. Michael said, squeezing her arm gently, “just one excellent restaurant, called the Bullfrog. Not up to New York standards, but very nice. Please permit me to treat you to lunch at the Bullfrog, where I will tell you exactly how I hope you will be able to help me.”

In the background, Vernon looked knowing. In the foreground, Valerie felt confused. “Thank you very much,” she heard herself saying. “That sounds nice.”

7 To Live Forever

From the air, Kirby could see the wheel marks of yesterday’s landing; scuffed paler streaks through the grass and clover of the field. And here he was, about to make a second set of the same stripes. Another irritation; somehow, all those lines would have to be obliterated by tomorrow.

He flew on, up and over the hill — from the air, his temple wasn’t visible at all — and buzzed the Indian village in the cleft beyond, to let the boys know he wanted to see them. Bare-assed kids between the low brown huts waved at him as he circled overhead. He waggled his wings in reply, then flew back to the field and landed.

He had already walked partway up the cleared temple side — about at the spot where Witcher and Feldspan had yesterday discovered the jaguar carving — when the group appeared above him, rising up onto the flattened temple top. They were half a dozen short, chunky men in rope-soled shoes or barefoot, wearing old work pants and home-dyed shirts. Four carried machetes loosely at their sides. They had the flat, blunt, enigmatic faces of Maya Indians, and they waited in silence for Kirby to climb the rest of the way to the top.

“Well, Tommy,” Kirby said, when he reached the top. “Hiya, guys. Let me catch my breath.”

Tommy, whose shirt was several shades of green, said, “Something wrong, Kimosabe?” His joke.

“Nothing we can’t handle,” Kirby told him. “Not us guys.”

Luz — red shirt, badly tom — said to Tommy, “He means us guys.”

Kirby grinned and looked out over his mousetrap. It was better, and the world was beating a path to his door. His temple door.

This is where he’d been standing, just under two years ago, when he’d first met Tommy and the others, and when their unusual alliance had begun. Of course, the top hadn’t been cleared then; there was no temple.

Kirby stood panting atop the low scrubby hill in hot sunshine and gazed out in disgust over his land. His land. “Innocent St. Michael,” he muttered, looking out over the blasted heath and his blasted hopes. He had never felt so low.

In the six weeks he had owned it, this land had undergone a ghastly transformation, like a vampire left out in the sun. The grassy field down there on which he had first landed was now a cracked dry moonscape, pale tan, as lined and creased as W. H. Auden’s face. Even the corpses of the grass so recently growing there had dried to ash and blown away.

The upper slopes of his land were, in their way, even more terrible, having become a landscape from Hieronymus Bosch. Gnarled and twisted trunks produced leathery sharp-edged leaves. Yellowish grass in long razor-sharp clumps stubbled the rise. Nasty fork-tongued creatures that only a luggage maker could love moved in and out across a landscape of rocks and boulders and scaly dry dirt. Birds cawed in derision as they flew westward, toward the verdant hills, the blue shapes of the Maya Mountains, lush with rich dark soil, fecund with greenery. “Fuck you,” Kirby told the birds.

They went on, their laughter fading, and in the silence he could almost hear the land as it dried, as new seams and cracks opened in the dead skin of his ranch. Cynthia, baking in the sunglare down below, looked ready to fall into one of those lesions and disappear into the baked dry bowels of the Earth. Kirby was of half a mind to join her.

Movement attracted his attention down the opposite slope, where he saw half a dozen wiry-haired Indians making their slow way up toward him, little dust-puffs rising from each step. Good, he thought, now I’m gonna get killed for my watch.

He put his watch in his pocket. Too bad he couldn’t put his boots in his pocket. Put his whole self in his pocket. Maybe he could trade them; they’d let him go, and he’d give them Innocent St. Michael. They could rend him down for a lifetime supply of lard.

The Indians, squat tough-looking men with hooded eyes and gleaming machetes, reached the hilltop and stood gazing at him. One said, “Hello.”

“Hello,” said Kirby.

“Nice day.”

“If you say so,” said Kirby.

“Cigarette?”

“No, thanks,” said Kirby.

“I meant for me,” the Indian said.

“Oh. Sorry, I don’t smoke.”

The Indian looked disgusted. Turning, he spoke to his friends in some other language, and then they all looked disgusted. Shaking his head at Kirby, the spokesman said, “It used to be, the one thing you could count on from Americans was a couple of cigarettes. Now you all quit smoking.”

“They want to live forever,” suggested one of the other Indians.

Was that a veiled threat? Kirby said, “I’ve got some gage in the plane, if you’re interested.”

“Now, you’re talking,” said the spokesman. The one who’d made the possible threat translated for the others, who all managed to perk up while remaining essentially stoic; it was like seeing trees smile. Meanwhile, the spokesman told Kirby, “We’ve got some home-brew back in the village. Make a dynamite combo.”

“Where is this village?” Kirby asked. He was thinking, maybe they’re on my land, maybe I could charge rent.

“Back that way,” the spokesman said, negligently waving his machete, not quite decapitating any of his friends.

“How much shit you got?” asked the perhaps threatened

Kirby said, “How big’s your village?”

“Eleven households,” the man said seriously, as though Kirby were a census taker.

“Then I’ve got enough,” Kirby said.

The spokesman smiled, showing a lot of square white teeth. “I’m Tommy Watson,” he said, extending the hand without the machete.

“Kirby Galway,” Kirby said, taking the hand.

Nodding at the alleged threatener, Tommy Watson said, “And this is my cousin, Luz Coco.”

“How you doing?”

“Sure,” said Luz Coco. “Let’s go get your stash.”

They all walked down the hill together, and Kirby got the two Glad Bags out of the pocket in his door. “I don’t have enough papers for everybody.”

“That’s okay,” Tommy said. “We’ll get some toilet paper from the mission.” He spoke to his friends again, and a disagreement took place. Hefting the Glad Bags in his palms, Kirby leaned against his plane and waited it out. What the hell, there was no hope anyway.

Kekchi is a language containing a lot of clicks and gutturals and harshnesses even when people are being friendly with one another; when they’re arguing about who has to go over to the mission for toilet paper and therefore miss the beginning of the party it can sound pretty hairy. But eventually two of the group acknowledged defeat and went sloping away, glancing mulishly back from time to time as they went, and Kirby joined the rest of them in a walk over his sun-bleached hill and halfway up the next slope and around into a green and cheerful declivity in which the 11 wood-and-frond huts were placed higglety-pigglety on both sides of a swift-moving, clear, cold, bubbling stream. “You bastards even have water,” Kirby said. They were by now well away from his land.

Tommy looked at him in wonder. “Jesus God,” he said. “So that’s what you’re hanging around for. You bought that swamp.”

“Desert, you mean,” Kirby said.

“You haven’t seen it in the rainy season.”

“Hell and damn,” Kirby said.

But there was little time for self-pity. Kirby had to be introduced to all the villagers — fewer than a hundred people, none of whom had more than a smattering of English — and the party had to be gotten under way. The home-brew, which came out in a variety of recycled bottles and jars, was a kind of cross between beer and cleaning fluid, which in fact went very well with pot.

Tommy said the village was called South Abilene, and maybe it was. Most of its residents were actually very shy, prepared to accept Kirby’s presence — and his donation — but otherwise staying well within their stoic dignity, though they did express amusement when their two friends came back from the mission all out of breath, carrying rolls of toilet paper and pamphlets explaining the Trinity.

These were the descendants of the people who had built the temples. Their relationship with the world had narrowed since those glory days; now, they were farmers, jungle dwellers with only a tangential connection to the modem age. Small villages like this were scattered through the Central American plains and jungles, their Indian residents clinging to a simple self sufficiency, almost totally separate from the technological civilization swirling around them. They had given up both temple building and war; they neither fought nor praised, nor even very much hoped; they subsisted, and survived.

Tommy Watson and Luz Coco were the only South Abilenians fluent in English and, so far as Kirby could tell, the only sophisticates in the crowd, whose conversation and manner betrayed a wider knowledge of civilization. With their half-mocking existential hip form of the traditional Indian fatalism, they were like a couple of Marx brothers wandering through a Robert Flaherty documentary. They were so total a contrast, in fact, that Kirby would have loved to know their story, but they insisted he tell them first how it happened that he had bought the farm.

“It looked great when I saw it,” Kirby said. “St. Michael was just representing the real owner, some big aristocrat up in Mexico. The aristocrat couldn’t take back a mortgage on account of taxes, so the price was right because I could pay all cash.”

“Fat man?” Tommy asked. “Happy with himself?”

“That’s Innocent St. Michael,” Kirby agreed.

“It was his land,” Tommy said. “He’s been looking for a first-class fish for years.”

“I appreciate that information, Tommy,” Kirby said.

“So you’re a rich man, right?” said Luz. “You can afford a mistake.”

“Rich men,” Kirby told him, “don’t risk their ass and twenty years in jail flying pot to the States. That’s how I got the money. Oh, Jesus,” he said, remembering.

Tommy swigged home-brew and puffed pot and said, “Something else, huh?”

Kirby swigged and puffed and swigged and puffed and said, “I just gave the rest of my money to a guy in Texas for some cows.”

Luz laughed. Tommy tried to look sympathetic, but he was grinning. Kirby swigged and puffed, and then he too laughed. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’m not as smart as I think I am.”

“Nobody is,” Tommy said. “But what the hell, we can still enjoy ourselves.”

They enjoyed themselves. Various anonymous foods — some animal, some vegetable — were consumed, all liberally laced with hot peppers and other explosive devices. The home-brew cooled the throat while the marijuana cooled the brain. A plastic radio picked up a salsa station from Guatemala, fading in and out while the sun went down and the breeze whispered funny stories among the leaves in the upper branches, to which the stream chuckled and giggled below. Various people showed what they looked like dancing on uneven ground while both drunk and stoned. Night fell, and so did many of the villagers. Fires were started; in the orangey-red light, black ghosts whipped by, and people spoke to them in their native tongue.

Kirby lay on the cooling ground, head propped on an empty inverted clay stewpot, half-empty jug in one hand and faintly smoldering joint in the other, as he watched the moon come up over his mountain. Seated cross-legged beside him, dark face stony and rough-sculpted in the moonlight, Luz Coco told his story: “I was a kid,” he said, “my Mama took up with an oilman.”

“Rich oilman?”

“That’s what he said.” Luz spat at the fire, which spat back. “Just a ragged-ass geologist, is all, wanted somebody with him in his sleeping bag. Looks for oil in these hills around here, works for Esso. They called it Esso then.”

“There’s oil here?” Kirby was trying to find his mouth with the unlit end of the joint.

“Lotta good it does,” Luz said. “Oil’s got to be in lakes, down underground, or it’s no use. This limestone around here, the oil’s just in millions of little bubbles, not worth shit. Cost too much to pull it up.”

“You know all that, huh?”

“I grew up with it,” Luz said. “That’s the story. The village threw my Mama out, we went to Houston.”

“Back up a little bit,” Kirby said. “I don’t think you touched all the bases.”

“These assholes around here,” Luz said, waving an arm to indicate each and every resident of South Abilene, “they’re very strict, man. Specially about sex. You fuck around the wrong place, you’re in trouble.”

“I get it,” Kirby said. “Your mother was sleeping with this geologist—”

“And my Daddy wasn’t dead yet,” Luz pointed out.

“So the tribe threw her out.”

“The village threw her out.”

“Okay,” Kirby said. “I buy that.”

“She took us kids along,” Luz said, “mostly because she was pissed off. I was nine, Rosita was one.”

“Rosita?”

“My sister. You met her before.”

“Okay.”

“So we went to Houston, and Cary’d forgot— Did I tell you? His name was Cary Smith.”

“Really?”

“He was John Smith,” Luz said, “my Mama’d never found him. But she got him. We went up through Mexico, we tracked into the States, got to Houston, and old Cary’d forgot to mention Mrs. Smith.”

“Whoops,” said Kirby. “So then what?”

“Mama signed on as the maid. Lois didn’t give a shit.”

“That was Mrs. Smith?”

“She was okay,” Luz said. “Had three kids of her own, older than us. We all grew up together, big fucked-up family. Tommy come to visit a couple of times—”

“Wait a minute. Tommy Watson?”

“Yeah, he’s my cousin.”

“He came up from South Abilene to visit?”

“Naw,” Luz said, “South Abilene didn’t want to know about us. Tommy was in Madison, Wisconsin.”

“Wait a minute,” Kirby said. Surging to his feet, he reeled away into the darkness. He propped himself against a tree for a while, listening to the splash, then found another jar of home-brew and came back and fell on the ground again beside Luz. “Madison, Wisconsin,” he said.

“You from there? Cold, man.”

“Tommy was there.”

“Sure,” Luz said. “His old man was with the college, the scientists took him up. He knew all that carving stuff, you know, the old arts and crafts baloney from the old days, he taught it and, uh... What do you call it when you say this thing’s okay, this thing’s a piece of shit?”

“Validate?”

“That’s cars.”

“Authenticate,” Kirby decided. “Say if it’s real or fake.”

“That’s it. Tommy’s old man did that. Tommy could do it, too, but he’s like me. We’ve seen the world, man, you can have it.”

“How’d you both wind up back here?”

“Tommy’s old man died, is how with him,” Luz said. “Tommy brought the body back, he was nineteen, he felt relaxed here, he never did like that snow shit, he was home again.”

“Same with you?”

“Naw. I’m sixteen, Rosita’s eight, Mama gets mad at Cary, we go off to L.A., get into some very weird scenes. Mama’s dealing, we’re into all this heaviness, Chinamen, Colombians, I took it three years, I said, I got to get out of this. I got in the car, head south, turns out Rosita’s hiding in the trunk, she can’t stand that shit either. So we go down to San Diego, sell the car, come on down south.”

“Where’s your Mama now?”

“Alderson, West Virginia.”

“That’s a funny place to be.”

“Not that funny. It’s the Federal pen for women.”

“Oh,” said Kirby. He thought a few seconds, and then he said, “Luz?”

“Present.”

“If these people here are so moral...”

Some time went by. Luz said, “Yeah?”

Kirby woke up: “What?”

“So what’s the question?” Luz said. “If these people here are so moral, what?”

“Well,” Kirby said, taking a hit as an aid to thought, “to begin with, how about all this pot?”

“What’s immoral about pot?” Luz wanted to know.

“Good point,” Kirby said.

“You go on south,” Luz told him, “you got people down there, all these mushrooms, these button things, they got peyote coming outa their pores, man. You got people down there, nobody’s seen their eyes in years.”

“Okay,” Kirby said. “Okay.”

“Pot and brew, now, you just relax. Sex, now, that’s family, it’s property, people’s feelings, it’s, uh, it’s, uh, it’s politeness.”

“Got it,” Kirby said. “Sexually conservative, makes sense.”

“So your question is,” said Luz, “how come these simple, conservative, primitive assholes put up with spoiled goods like Tommy and Rosita and me. Right?”

“I guess so,” Kirby said.

“Everybody’s cousins,” Luz said. “That’s number one. And our Mama, Tommy’s daddy, they took us away, and on our own we came back, that’s number two.”

“Okay.”

“Everybody knows we’re different, cause we were out there, but we’re still family.”

“That’s nice.”

“We just lay back,” Luz said. “Tommy and Rosita and me, we just coast with it.”

“Go with the flow,” Kirby suggested.

“You got it. Where else we gonna do that? Play by our own rules and they accept us, man. Listen, I’ll be right back.” Luz rolled over, and left. On all fours.

Kirby slept, or maybe not. Maybe those weren’t dreams. The white moon rolled slowly across the blacktop sky. Then a form slid between him and the moon, and collapsed in a flutter of skirts. “Hello,” she said.

This was the sister of Luz, Kirby remembered that now, and if the moon weren’t revolving in those slow circles up there he’d probably even remember her name. “Harya,” he said.

“Rosita,” she said.

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right.” He remembered her now. She was as short as the rest of them, but skinnier, with the wiry spareness of the born neurotic. Her eyes were large and liquid brown, cheekbones strong, mouth broad and sensual, skin like warm cocoa. She moved like a puma.

While Kirby watched the way moonlight silvered her earlobe, she took the joint from his fingers, made inhaling sounds, put the joint back where she’d found it, leaned down over him, kissed him, and exhaled smoke into his mouth.

It took a major effort of will neither to throw up nor bite her tongue in half, but he managed, and when he obediently inhaled while she exhaled, then exhaled while she inhaled, it turned out the moon was making those slow revolutions inside his head.

After a while, she lifted up and said, “You sleep out here all night, the bugs gonna bite you to death.”

“True. True.” It was a sad thought.

“So come inside,” Rosita said.

So they went inside, and soon it was morning and his body and brain were in terrible difficulties. He had a rash like poison ivy on the surface of his brain, he knew it, he could tell. He felt as though he were being digested, his whole self shriven and melted by the gastric juices inside the whale that had eaten him.

He crawled out to a sun that had approached much closer to Earth overnight, was now about 11 feet from the ground. He peered around and was not surprised to see that the rest of the human race was as stricken as he. Was there hope for mankind?

Some. Coffee, bacon, more coffee, tortillas, more coffee, a joint, and a brief retirement with Rosita all helped. The villagers doctored themselves in similar fashion, and in the afternoon the party started again. Rosita explained to Kirby how she’d always felt maybe she’d left the States a little too soon, before she’d really experienced the place, given it a chance. She was just a kid, really, when she came back. She’d always thought, she told Kirby, it might be nice to go back there some time, spend a while; with the right companion, you know. “Uh huh,” Kirby said, and went off to wander around town.

He found Luz and Tommy together, and joined them, and that was when the conversation turned to the heritage of the Maya Indians, and the mystery of their past. “At least,” Tommy said, “you fucked your own self—”

“With Innocent St. Michael’s help,” Kirby said.

“Still, you were there. We were screwed out of our rights by our ancestors. A thousand years ago, our people lived in some really class cities. Duded themselves up with gold and jade and all that stuff.”

“Human sacrifice,” Luz said, and grinned like a wolf.

“Then our people left,” Tommy said. “Property values went to hell. You got to maintain a temple, or pretty soon it’s just a pile of rocks.”

“Especially in the jungle,” Kirby said.

“That’s right. The dirt piles up, things grow, die, rot, more dirt, more things grow. Rain eats out the mortar between the stones, the whole thing goes to hell. Used to be a temple, now it’s just a hill, you can’t even see it any more.”

“Listen,” Kirby said, “you guys both used to live in cities, you gave all that up, remember?”

“Madison,” Tommy said, with curled lip. “Houston. I’m talking about our cities. Lamanai. Tikal. Colorful places.”

“Colorful ceremonies,” Luz said, with that grin again.

“I don’t know,” Kirby said. “Not to insult your ancestors, but I don’t think I’d like to live in places where they do human sacrifice.”

Luz frowned at him: “Why not?”

“I’m a human.”

“Hmmmm,” Luz said, and they grew quiet for a while, silently comtemplating the various functions of spectator and participant.

The next day, Kirby sobered himself up and kissed Rosita and flew away to become a cargo pilot again and start to dig himself out of the hole Innocent St. Michael had walked him into. And two weeks later, eyes shining, he had flown back to his dried-out land and carried two more Glad Bags up into South Abilene, and told Tommy and Luz his scheme.

“Rosita says hello,” Tommy said, tired of waiting for Kirby to catch his breath. “She says is your wife any better,” he added solemnly.

“Alas, no,” said Kirby. “She had two more violent spells, they had to put her in the strait jacket again. It’s looking pretty bad.”

“I’ll tell Rosita,” Luz said, straight-faced. “She’s very interested in the condition of your wife.”

“Yes, I know.”

Tommy said, “Those two customers from yesterday; they making trouble?”

“No, no,” Kirby said. “They bought the story all right. I’ll see them this afternoon, make the final arrangements. The problem is the next guy.”

“Yeah?”

“I got a message yesterday. He isn’t due till next week, but all of a sudden he’s coming in today.”

Tommy translated this for the others, and everybody looked distressed. Luz said, “Asshole.”

“Exactly,” Kirby said. “But it’s too late to stop him, he’s on his way. So I’ve got to stall him somehow in Belize City, and keep him from meeting the other two, and then bring him up here tomorrow. So you’ve got to get the place ready by then.”

“Not much to do,” Tommy said. “The last guys didn’t dig around a lot, like some of your people. Just the jaguar stela, basically.”

Luz said, “They didn’t even find the stone whistle.”

“The main problem is the field,” Kirby said. “The place shouldn’t look as though it gets a lot of traffic, but you can really see Cynthia’s landing tracks there.”

“So we’ll mush them up a little,” Tommy said.

“Right.” Kirby looked serious. “And, Tommy,” he said, “don’t do your little peeking-out-of-the-bushes number any more, okay? If one of those guys had seen you yesterday, he’d have had a heart attack right there. It’s bad business to kill the customers.”

“I never have any fun,” Tommy said.

8 The Question

“Do you like the conch?” Innocent asked, pronouncing it conk, as in conk on the head, and Valerie said, “Very much.” Innocent smiled. “I take all my girlfriends here,” he said. “Before sex, after sex. They always like the conch. They like it better after sex.”

Valerie didn’t quite know how to answer that, nor did it seem possible to eat the firm white conch immediately after such a remark, nor drink some more of the Italian white wine, so she filled her mouth with salad instead.

Delicious salad. Very nice restaurant at the back of a private house, more outside than in, the widely spaced white tables surrounded by the flowers and plants of a nursery, that being the proprietors’ other business. Hanging plants, lengths of tall picket fence, moist dirt floor beyond the tiled part, areas roofed with sheets of translucent plastic.

Tropical flowers are so much more blatant than the flowers of southern Illinois. In southern Illinois, the flowers aren’t all in hot, hot oranges and yellows and reds, and they don’t all look like human genitalia. Idealized male and female parts hung in the air and protruded from clay pots and peeked with false modesty out of veils of shiny green leaves.

The waitress came over to see how they were doing, and Innocent put an arm around her hips, his hand caressing her leg. “So you’re working here now, huh?” he said.

“Just for a little while.” She was short, plumpish in a jolly way, with a very pretty face and reddish-brown flesh. She seemed not to mind Innocent’s hand on her leg. “I got tired being cooped up in an office all day,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go back to Belize.”

They were, of course, already in Belize, and it took Valerie a minute to realize the girl meant Belize City. (In just the same way, people in Mexico say they’re going to Mexico, not Mexico City, and people in New York State say they’re going to New York, not New York City.)

Innocent grinned at Valerie. “Susie liked the conch after the sex.” Squeezing her leg, he said, “Didn’t you, baby?”

Susie giggled. Innocent winked at Valerie. “But she liked the sex better.”

Susie gave Valerie an arch look, woman to woman. “These men,” she said. “They all think they’re the best, right?” Imitating a little boy, pressing one fingertip to her cheek, she said, “Wasn’t I great, honey? Ain’t I the best you ever had, honey? Don’t I beat all the other fellas, honey?” Then she became a schoolmarmish sort of woman, humoring the little boy: “Oh, you were wonderful, dear. Such a great big thing.” As Innocent guffawed, she held up her hands, palms facing each other, like a fisherman describing an extremely small fish.

Valerie had to laugh. She also had to eat conch. The question was, did she have to go to bed with Innocent St.Michael?

Not have to, that wasn’t the word. It wasn’t as though sex would be his kind of bribe, the gift to the Third Worlder to gain cooperation. That wouldn’t be Innocent’s way. Valerie wasn’t too awfully wise in the ways of the world, but she did understand that Innocent was merely permitting the subject of sex to float in the air all around them, giving her the opportunity to decide whether or not to go to bed with him, and suggesting without too much blatancy the reasons why she should.

Generally speaking, Valerie was confused about sex. The gropings and kissings and sweaty fumblings of her early teenage years had seemed somehow off the mark, irrelevant to the hunger that certainly did exist. The idea that these nervous jackrabbit boys might have the solution to the problem, might be able to guide her into understanding and contentment, was absurd on the face of it. And when, at 16, she had finally “done it” on the floor of a living room where she was babysitting, the boy had been so nervous, so overly eager, so inexperienced and gawky, that in some ways it had been worse than learning to dance.

Her experiences since then had been infrequent, but varied. Most of the time, she hardly thought about sex, and on those occasions when it did become a part of the agenda she mostly just tried to retain some dignity. She did learn something nearly every time, but many of the lessons were depressing. She now knew there were self-confident and capable young men in the world, who could stop thinking about themselves long enough to think about the girls they were with, but there were dam few of them. On the other hand, older men could sometimes be just as jumpy and inept as any callow youth. It was impossible, doggone it, to tell what a man was going to be like in bed just by looking at him.

Or was it? Here was Innocent St. Michael, deliberately and smoothly filling her head with thoughts of sex, then actually bringing out a previous girlfriend to give him a reference; which she had done, too, even though in a backhanded way. He would not be the first dark-skinned person she’d gone to bed with — if the previously unthinkable were actually to occur — but he would probably be the oldest. And maybe the heaviest; would that matter much?

He has me considering the idea, Valerie thought, astonished at herself. And he knows it, too; look at him there, smirking and winking across the table, smacking Susie’s behind, telling the girl, “You just want to keep me for yourself, that’s all.”

“Keep you?” Susie slithered out of his grasp; moving away toward the kitchen, she said, “I caught you once, and threw you back.” He can be kidded about sex, Valerie thought as she drank more wine, because he’s so very sure of himself.

Innocent beamed at her. “You like the conch, Valerie?”

She giggled, like one of his women.

9 The Black Freighter

“This stela,” Witcher said, while the skinny black man looked out the hotel room window, “could be very valuable. Depending on the condition of the rest of it.”

Directly below the window was the hotel’s swimming pool, in which no one was swimming. Just out of sight to the pool’s left were the large ocean-facing windows of the dining room. From where he stood, the skinny black man could not quite see the dining-room windows, but he knew who was there.

“There’s a bunch of them here,” Kirby said casually, while the two cassette tapes turned, steady and unromantic. “Let’s go on.” The voices stopped, to be replaced by the panting and rustling sounds of hill-climbing.

The skinny black man glanced over at the dresser top, where the linked cassette players squatly sat, each with its own red eye. Then he looked down again, vaguely regretting that he couldn’t quite see into the dining room where at this moment Kirby, Witcher, and Feldspan were having lunch and continuing their discussion. Were Witcher and Feldspan taping this meeting, too? Would he be sent back to copy another conversation?

If so, he would hear Kirby say, “The deal is, then, I’ll get the stuff out of the country, whatever we find inside the temple. You guys sell it through your contacts, and we split fifty-fifty.”

“You’ll have to trust us,” Witcher pointed out. “Though I suppose you know the general value of such things.”

“Fairly well,” Kirby said, shrugging the problem away. “Besides, we have to trust one another, don’t we? You have to trust me not to give you fakes.”

Feldspan looked surprised, but Witcher merely amused, saying, “For Heaven’s sake, why would you? There’s a whole temple of real things there, probably enough to make us all rich; why jeopardize the relationship?”

“Exactly,” Kirby said. “And you fellas have the same motive to give me a straight count.”

“Of course.”

Feldspan said, “The only problem, really, is getting the material out of the country.”

“I have my methods,” Kirby said, and stopped, because the waitress was bringing them their main courses. Silence reigned at the table until she was done, the three men looking out the window at the empty swimming pool and, beyond it, the open sea. Out there, a black freighter stood at anchor; some nosy British Coast Guard people had grabbed it a few weeks ago, north of here, finding it full of marijuana. They’d impounded it (like Manny Cruz’s step-in van), and now it was waiting to be auctioned by the Belize government.

Upstairs, the cassette on the dresser said, in Kirby’s voice, “None of us can ever say a word about this temple. Not here, and not in New York, and not anywhere.”

The waitress left at last, and Witcher said, “Americans have been caught, you know, trying to get out of Belize with carvings or whatnot. Caught and jailed.”

“That’s why,” Kirby said, “in this operation, you’re dealing with the right man.”

Feldspan said, almost timidly, “I don’t suppose you could tell us your smuggling method.”

“Why not?” Kirby grinned. “Truthfully, I’m proud of it. You see, there isn’t just one smuggling business out of Belize, there’s two. There’s Mayan antiques, that’s one, and the other one is marijuana.”

Feldspan smiled reminiscently, and Witcher said, “You’re involved in both, aren’t you?”

“I’ve combined them both,” Kirby told him. “The government comes down hard on the artifact smuggling, as you know. In fact, they’ll probably search your luggage on the way out, since your passports say you’re antique dealers.”

“Oh, dear,” said Feldspan. He and Witcher exchanged a troubled glance.

“It’s only pre-Columbian stuff they care about,” Kirby assured them. “As for the marijuana trade, the British and the Americans make a little trouble if they can, but locally nobody gives a damn. It brings in a lot of U.S. cash, it’s all on a small-time basis and a lot cleaner and less violent than Colombia or Bolivia with their cocaine industries, and it makes a good back-up crop for the sugar farmers up around Orange Walk. I’ve flown a lot of bales of pot out of this country, and nobody’s ever looked at me twice. In fact, after lunch I have to see a fellow about that side of it.”

Witcher and Feldspan both looked agog. Leaning forward, speaking much more confidentially than when they’d been discussing the smuggling of valuable Mayan artifacts, Feldspan said, “You mean a dealer?”

“A middleman,” Kirby told him. “An American, he’s coming in on the plane this afternoon.” Then, as though afraid he’d said too much, he too leaned forward and dropped his voice, saying, “Listen, this is a very bad man up north. If he thought I was talking about him, we’d all be in trouble.”

“We wouldn’t breathe a word,” Witcher breathed.

“If you see me with him,” Kirby said, “just pretend you don’t know me.”

“Absolutely,” said Witcher, nodding solemnly, a co-conspirator.

“Okay,” Kirby said. “Here’s my little stunt. I get in my plane, I fill it up with bales of pot, everybody knows what I’m doing, nobody gives a damn, off I go to Florida.” Leaning forward, winking, he said, “Now, what if there’s Mayan antiques inside the bales?”

“When we get back to Belize City,” the cassette with Kirby’s voice told the other cassette, “I will blow your head right off your shoulders.” Then it giggled with Feldspan’s voice, and its red light clicked off. The skinny black man yawned, stretched, walked away from the window, and punched the buttons to rewind both cassettes.

“Brilliant!” breathed Feldspan.

Kirby smiled, nodding, appreciating their appreciation.

“I’m stealing wheelbarrows,” Witcher said.

“Exactly,” Kirby said.

Feldspan said, “The Purloined Letter. The Trojan Horse.”

“I never said I was original,” Kirby said, getting a trifle nettled.

Witcher said, “And when you get to Florida, out they come!”

“Right,” said Kirby. “Now, that brings up another question. When I reach the other end, will it be you two meeting me, or somebody else?”

“In Florida, you mean?” They looked at one another, and Witcher said, “I think we have to do it ourselves.”

“Yes,” said Feldspan. “You just let us know where and when.”

“Okay,” Kirby said. “Then I won’t deal with anybody else. In fact, I won’t even get out of the plane unless I see one of you guys.”

“I suppose you have to be very careful,” Feldspan said. “In your business.”

“Careful is my middle name,” Kirby told him.

The skinny black man put the talking cassette player back where he’d found it, pocketed the listening cassette player, and let himself quietly out of Witcher and Feldspan’s room.

10 Out of the Past

Whitman Lemuel obediently fastened his seatbelt, then pressed his right temple to the cool lucite window and looked down past the wing at Belize. Far away to the west were lavendar mountains, blurry and faded, blending and tumbling into greener hills, smoothing down toward a pale band of beach on which a white foam line ran and spread and vanished and ran again. Blue-green water, as clear and gleaming as new stained glass, spread out from the shore, the color deepening into blue, then breaking at a broad white irregular gash running parallel to the coast, a few hundred yards off shore; the barrier reef, second longest in the world, running for 175 miles north and south, separating the Belizean coast from the Caribbean deeps.

Ahead, where a blue scribble of river cut through the greenery to the coast, a clustered, cluttered, colorful town had grown. The harbor was full of small boats, and a black freighter stood off shore.

Lemuel’s eyes moved away from the town, back toward the jumbled greenness of the nearer mountains. Somewhere in there was Kirby Galway’s temple. He stared, unaware of the lucite’s vibration against his brow.

The stewardess distributed landing cards to be filled out, and Lemuel wrote, without hesitation, “teacher” and “vacation.” He had been a teacher in the past, and technically his current job with the museum could also be described that way. Knowing the Belizean government’s parochial attitude concerning antiquities, he saw no reason to call attention to himself by putting down his actual job title, and he certainly wouldn’t describe his true reason for being here: “to save irreplaceable Mayan artifacts.”

The Mayan sites, except for the few largest, were not being properly cared for. Much had already been lost forever, and much more would soon be gone. Even if Third-World governments like that in Belize had the will to save what had not yet been destroyed, they would never have the money or knowledge or resources for the job. Frequently, as well, in these parts of the world, there was corruption among the very officials charged with the task of preservation.

Governments like Belize’s should welcome men like Whitman Lemuel, scholars, historians, restorers, men selflessly devoted to preserving the best of the past, in carefully controlled environments with prescribed public access, allowing the people of today to experience for themselves the mystery and wonder of the long-ago. It was only ignorance and naivete, combined with backward peoples’ inevitable jealousy of the better-educated and the better-off, that made it necessary for Whitman Lemuel, who knew himself to be a decent and honorable and law-abiding and well-educated and intelligent and reasonable man, to sneak into Belize as though he were a thief, as though he were planning to do something wrong.

Take this fellow Kirby Galway. On the surface a plausible chap, an American, but underneath the glib exterior what was the fellow but a smooth thug? It had been a very fortunate accident that Lemuel had met him again, that second time, and they’d had their little talk, very fortunate indeed, because there was no question in Lemuel’s mind that Galway would be prepared to sell the objects from his temple to anybody, just anybody. Galway was the sort of person the Belizean government ought to concentrate on, not honest scholars like Whitman Lemuel.

But if he was to be honest about it — and Whitman Lemuel was rigidly honest — he had to admit there were Americans too who completely misunderstood the situation, as though scholars like himself were here for profit, as though they were somehow stealing something that belonged to someone else rather than preserving the past — which belongs to all mankind — to be handed on, selflessly, properly catalogued and annotated, to generations yet unborn. He remembered with particular distaste that tall young woman who had interrupted his first conversation with Galway, squawking words like “despoliation.” Such individuals, unhampered by facts, took on moral positions just for the good feeling that comes from being holier-than-thou.

Outside the window, the turning Earth approached, red roofs stood out among the colors of the town, individual trees waved to him, and in a sudden rush and jolt the plane was on the ground, hurtling past the tiny airport building, reluctantly slowing, then turning, coming back.

Lemuel was among the few passengers getting off. He always felt a little nervous when he entered a basically primitive country; who knew what ideas these people might get in their heads? Shuffling slowly through Customs & Immigration, he kept craning his neck, looking for Galway, but didn’t see him. His bow tie constricted his neck in this unaccustomed heat, but he wouldn’t remove it. All clothing is a uniform, and Lemuel’s uniform made clear his status: American, college-educated, nonviolent, intellectual. Nevertheless, he was ordered to open both his suitcases, and the black Customs inspector fingered his Brut aftershave as though he would simply confiscate it. In the end, he merely made an annoying long scrawl of white chalk on each suitcase lid, and sent Lemuel on his way.

Outside, blinking in the dusty sunshine, still not seeing Galway anywhere — he wouldn’t have reneged at the last second, would he? — Lemuel fought off the persistent taxi offerers with just as persistent head shakes, until he realized one of the men was calling him by name: “Mister Lemuel? May I take your bags, Mister Lemuel?”

Lemuel frowned at him, seeing a short and skinny Indian type, with bright black eyes and a big smile showing gaps between his teeth. “You know me?” he said.

“I am from Kirby Galway.” The man had an accent that was nearly Hispanic, but not quite. “I am Manuel Cruz.”

“I expected Mister Galway himself,” Lemuel said, prepared to be irked.

“There were little problems,” Manuel Cruz told him, more confidentially, flashing looks left and right as though afraid to be overheard. “I’ll tell you in the truck.”

“Truck?” But he permitted Cruz to carry both his suitcases and to lead the way over to an incredibly filthy, battered, rusty pickup truck. When the suitcases were thrown in back, onto all that rust and dirt, the Customs chalkmarks became irrelevant.

The interior of the pickup was at least roomy and fairly comfortable. Cruz was a bit too short for the controls, which only increased his childlike aura; also, he drove in sudden jolts and hesitations, his feet playing the floor pedals like a pianist, hands struggling the wheel back and forth, back and forth.

Out on the empty blacktop road, Cruz settled down to a less fitful driving method, and explained, “Kirby, he had to see some other men. You know about the gage?”

Lemuel didn’t. “Gauge?”

“Pot,” said Cruz. “Weed. Tea. Smoke.”

“Oh, marijuana!”

“That’s it,” Cruz said, happily nodding.

“He smuggles it into America,” Lemuel said, with some distaste. “Yes, I know about that.”

“Okay. Now, some men come down from up there,” Cruz said. “Kirby, he didn’t know they were coming, you know? But these kinda men, they come down, they say, ‘We gotta talk,’ you say, ‘Okay, sir, yes, sir.’”

“Ah,” said Lemuel, nodding at this glimpse of what was under the rock.

“So Kirby, he sent me down, pick you up, say he sorry.”

“I see,” said Lemuel.

“I take you to the hotel. Kirby, he call you later, he take you out there tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Not today?” One of the reasons Lemuel had decided to come down to Belize a week early — in addition to the honest excitement and anticipation he’d cited in his message — was the fact that he didn’t entirely trust Kirby Galway. He didn’t know what sort of scheme Galway might be able to perpetrate against him, but perhaps if he were to show up a week early it might keep the man off balance and give Lemuel some advantage. But now Galway was begging off until tomorrow; was that significant? Was there anything Lemuel could do about it?

Probably not. Still, it was worth a try. “My schedule is pretty tight,” he said. “Perhaps I should talk to Galway right now.”

“Oh, no,” Cruz said, looking a bit frightened. “Kirby, he told me, ‘Don’t let Mister Lemuel come talk to me when I’m with these men. Tell Mister Lemuel to pretend he don’t even know me.’ That’s what Kirby said.”

“Why?”

“These are very bad men,” Cruz said. “They got — whatchu call it — front, some kinda legitimate life up in the States, they don’t want nobody know what their business is. They kill a man if they got to.”

Lemuel, of course, had heard of such people, as who of us has not? The drug world quite naturally drew them, and yes they would kill rather than have the seamy truth exposed to their families and neighbors. “I see,” he said.

“If you go to Kirby with those men,” Cruz went on, “if you say, ‘Hi, Kirby,’ then you and Kirby and me, we all in terrible trouble. If those men know you know Kirby, and they got to know you from the States just to look at you, then they figure you know Kirby’s in the gage business — you know, the marijuana—”

“Yes yes,” Lemuel said. “Gauge. I do remember.”

“Well,” Cruz said, as they drove down the tom streets of Belize City, “they got to protect their lives, you see? Their front.”

“So if I see Galway with any Americans,” Lemuel said, a bit amused at the cloak-and-dagger aspects of the situation, “I should just pretend I don’t know him.”

“Oh, you’ll probably see him,” Cruz said. “Kirby, he’s with those men at the hotel right now.”

“Oh, is he?” Lemuel hoped he would see Galway and his mobster friends; curiosity and a faint prickle of danger made his eyes light up, and he rode the rest of the way trying to imagine what the “very bad men” would look like.

The hotel itself was decent enough, the staff competent, the room large and cool and pleasant. Lemuel undertipped the bellboy, then removed the constricting bow tie, opened his shirt, strolled over to the window, and looked down at the swimming pool, wondering idly why no one was in it. He had brought a bathing suit; perhaps, after he’d unpacked, he would go for a dip himself.

An el of the building was to the left, with large windows on the first floor through which he could see the dining room, where he would undoubtedly be eating tonight. At one of the window tables sat three—

Galway!

Lemuel pressed close to the louvered window, looking down. Galway and two men, just finishing their lunch. The other two were hard to make out, at this angle and from this far away, but they were certainly white men, undoubtedly Americans.

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?

11 The Warning

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.”

12 The Blue Mirror

“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 can’t 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?”

“Al-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.

13 Wanted!

Kirby awoke when the pickup left the road. “Jesus!” he cried, as trees plunged past the windshield. Grabbing dashboard and windowsill for support, he straightened in the passenger seat, glared at Manny, and said, “Give me a little warning, will ya?”

“It’s okay,” Manny told him, grinning, flashing his tooth-gaps. “All under control.”

All under control. The Northern Road was behind them, already obscured by trees and shrubbery. The dirt path corkscrewed ahead, twisting deeper and deeper into wilderness, so that you could never see more than twenty feet before the next sharp curve presented a wall of green. Already the trail was so narrow that dusty leaves touched the fenders on both sides as they pushed through, and Manny couldn’t steer around the larger stones and deeper ruts but had to plow right over them. He grinned broadly as he drove, and every once in a while, when they crashed against some particularly large obstruction, Kirby could hear the clack as Manny’s remaining teeth cracked together.

All under control. Back in Belize, at the Fort George, were two customers at the same time, one individual and one team, and Kirby could only hope they wouldn’t happen to get into conversation. If only there were another first class hotel in Belize City, one with air conditioning and reliable hot water, he would have managed somehow to switch Lemuel over to it, lessening the danger; but there was not.

Well, at least it was only for the one night. Tomorrow morning, he would put Witcher and Feldspan on the Miami plane. Tomorrow afternoon, Lemuel would be shown the temple. By sometime tomorrow, if Kirby’s luck held, everything actually would be all under control.

But what would happen, what could happen, if his customers chanced to get into conversation tonight? The odds were against it, and even further against any of them talking about a contemplated grand larceny with a stranger, but say it happened, say everything fell out wrong. What was the worst-case scenario? The scheme would be destroyed, of course, permanently killed. Could Kirby himself go to jail? Probably so, probably in more than one country. Belize and the U.S. might very well vie with one another for the pleasure of putting Kirby Galway away.

How nice to be wanted.

At a seemingly impassable spot in the surrounding wilderness, Manny swung the wheel hard left and the pickup veered away from the diminishing dirt track, made a tight turn around a thick, scarred tree trunk, and bumped and skidded down a long brush-covered slope to a narrow muddy stream, where Manny pumped the brakes — his short legs stretching and stretching, sandaled toes pointing down — until they slued to a stop. Kirby climbed out, slid the two long planks out from under a lot of bushes and vines, and dropped them into position across the stream. Manny drove on over, the planks sagging down into the water, then accelerated up the other side, the pickup throwing mud clots out behind it like a bucking bronco. Kirby, to avoid the hurled mud, waited on the near side until the truck was some distance away, then trotted across on one of the boards, hid them both in their places on this side, and made his way up to where Manny was waiting, the pickup’s engine gasping like an overworked beast of burden.

There was one other stream to cross, somewhat larger, but here the locals had long ago made a porous causeway of logs and stones, which the pickup could cross with a lot of side-slipping and potential disaster. After that, it was merely the impossibility of the hilly jungle-covered terrain that slowed them, until at last they came out in the clearing behind the Cruz’s house, next to the kitchen garden. Home.

(There was an easier route down from Orange Walk, which they took whenever carrying anything large or delicate, but that meant driving all the way north to Orange Walk first, then doubling back south, which could add almost an hour to the journey. It was better to be knocked about a bit harder, but for a shorter period of time.)

Estelle would be cooking now, while the kids and the dogs watched television, so when Kirby climbed awkwardly out of the pickup, feeling stiff and tired, he went around to his own entrance. The combination lock on the door was meant primarily to thwart the curiosity of children, since Manny and Estelle both knew the sequence. Yawning, stretching, Kirby spun the dial, opened the door, entered the living room, and switched on his air conditioner.

Kirby’s apartment was two rooms and three closets. His living room was small and square, with windows in two walls, reed mats over the concrete floor, a rough home-made table in the center where he and Manny played games, several mismatched small chairs, a few lamps, and one big, comfortable easy chair. On a shelf mounted on the wall opposite the easy chair were a TV set and a Betamax; the videotapes were in a rickety bookcase underneath.

The other room, which was smaller, contained his bed and two large wooden trunks and another rickety bookcase, this one half filled with books. A few air charts — sections of Burma, Madagascar, the Aleutians — were on the walls for decoration. The three closets were all off this room; the first was for clothing, the second for a shower stall, the third for the composting toilet.

Kirby, still yawning as he removed his shirt, entered the bedroom, kicked off the rest of his clothing and stood in the shower awhile, until he no longer felt like a horse that had just been sold for glue.

Twenty minutes later, happy in crisp clean clothes and old moccasins, Kirby went back around to the Cruz side of the house, where he and Manny played cribbage while Estelle ran the Cuisinart and the kids and the dogs watched “Rio Grande” on TV, dubbed into Spanish. (“Rio Grande” in Spanish is “Rio Grande”.) At one point, when John Wayne made a rather spectacular leap from a running horse, Kirby nodded over at the set and said, mildly, “That’s my father.”

Manny looked up, in mild surprise. “John Wayne?” He turned to look at the set.

“No,” Kirby said. “My father did that jump off the horse.”

Estelle had come over from the Cuisinart to frown at the TV, where a close-up of John Wayne now showed. In Spanish, John Wayne had the deep gruff voice of an old man missing some teeth. “He looks like John Wayne,” she said dubiously.

“Not there,” Kirby said. “Only in the long shots, doing the stunts.”

“A stunt man!” Manny said, pleased at knowing such esoteric English.

“That’s right,” Kirby said.

“Very brave, stunt men.”

“Kind of foolhardy,” Kirby said, and shrugged.

“You grew up around the movies, huh?” Manny was bright-eyed from more than Danish Marys; Kirby didn’t often open up about his background.

“I would have,” Kirby said, “only things went wrong.” He looked at his cards, not liking them very much, then glanced up to see Manny and Estelle both watching him, expectant. “Oh, well,” he said. “It was one of those things. My father was a stunt man, my mother was an actress.”

“A big star?” Manny asked, and Estelle told him, “Hush.”

“No, just an actress,” Kirby said.

Estelle, hesitant, nodded shyly toward the TV. “Is she in this ‘Rio Grande’ movie?”

“No. They always wanted to work together, but they never did. Then they had a chance to, on a circus movie, in Spain. What they called a runaway production. I was only two, so I don’t really remember it.”

“You went with them, in Spain?”

“Sure.” Kirby sighed, and dropped the cards on the table. Might as well go ahead and tell it. “They only had one scene together,” he said, “on a rollercoaster. It was supposed to be safe, but it wasn’t.”

Hushed, Estelle said, “They were killed?”

“Yeah. I got shipped home to my aunt in upstate New York.”

Manny said, “So you didn’t know them, like.”

“Not really,” Kirby said, but in his mind’s eye he could see the pictures of his father and mother all over his Aunt Cathy’s house. Old-maid Aunt Cathy, his mother’s sister, had had a lifelong crush on Kirby’s father and had transferred it to Kirby. From the time he could first remember, Aunt Cathy was saying things like, “Oh, you’ll be a devil with the girls,” and, “You’ve got your father’s wildness, I can see it in your eyes.” He’d been spoiled rotten, and he knew it.

Manny maybe had some inkling of Kirby’s thoughts. He said, “You think you’re like him, your old man?”

“Some ways, some ways.” Kirby shrugged. “I think I’ve got more interest in a real home somewhere; they never much cared where they lived. The other thing is—” Kirby picked up his cards again, studied them, seemed reconciled “—I stay away from rollercoasters.”

14 The Unknown Land

“We must drive the corrupt profiteers out of government,” Vernon said, as he changed the sheets on his bed, “or we’ll never get the profit.” Above, a slowly turning fan made absolutely no difference.

“Hush,” said the skinny black man, holding up the cassette recorder. “Listen to this part.”

“I don’t think you get the picture,” Kirby’s voice told Vernon, as he tossed the rumpled sheets into the hall and snapped the clean lower sheet into the air, holding it by his fingertips; gently, the sheet settled onto the bed, guided by Vernon’s hands. “What he’s going to do is,” Kirby said, “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.”

“What do you think of that?” the skinny black man asked.

“Greedy bastards,” Vernon said. “Most of the tomb robbers just burrow a hole in, they don’t knock the son of a bitch down.”

Vernon finished making the bed while Kirby and his customers talked about the destruction of the temple. Then he carried the dirty sheets to the back of the house, the skinny black man following, holding up the recorder. After tossing the sheets in the big laundry sink, Vernon went to the kitchen, got two bottles of beer, and he and the skinny black man went to the living room to sit and listen to the rest of the tape. At last Feldspan giggled his giggle, the skinny black man pushed OFF and REWIND, and Vernon said, “Jail.”

“For somebody,” the skinny black man agreed.

“St. Michael,” Vernon said, with savage hope.

“I don’t see it yet,” the skinny black man told him.

“St. Michael’s a crook,” Vernon said.

“The sun rises in the east,” the skinny black man said.

“He’s in my way. He stands between me and, and, and...”

“The pot of gold.”

“Do you have to give him that?” Vernon asked, pointing at the cassette.

“You know I do. I can play it for you, in here, nobody knows about it, but now I gotta go give it to St. Michael.”

“Maybe the tape got loused up some way,” Vernon suggested.

The skinny black man shook his head. “You don’t want me to lose my job,” he said. “Think about it.”

“I need to hear it again,” Vernon said, making a fist, punching his own knee in his frustration. “If I could have a copy.”

The skinny black man looked around at the underfurnished tiny living room. “You don’t have anything to make it with,” he said. “Or play it on.”

Vernon stared furiously around his room, blinking; with every blink, he was seeing something else he didn’t own. “I want,” he said, through clenched teeth, “I want...”

“Yeah, man,” the skinny black man said. “So do I.” He got to his feet. “I got to go, man, I’m taking too long as it is.”

“Wait a minute,” Vernon said. “Tell me about these guys, the ones on the tape. Who are they?”

“They’re what they say,” the skinny black man said, shrugging. “Antique dealers from New York City.”

“They couldn’t be federal agents?”

“No. Federal agents don’t travel with K-Y jelly.”

“Then why are they taping Galway?”

“I don’t know, man. Maybe they’re just afraid they’ll get cheated, they want some kind of record.”

“To go to court with? That?” Pointing at the cassette.

“I got no answer,” the skinny black man said. “Vernon, I got to go.”

“Wait,” Vernon said, jumping to his feet. “It’s St. Michael and Galway, isn’t it? We’re agreed on that, right?”

“Seems that way.”

“They’re in on something together,” Vernon said, “only they don’t trust each other.”

The skinny black man laughed. “Why should they?”

“So St. Michael has you search those guys’ room, and you come up with the tape, and St. Michael gives you the machine, says make a copy.”

“And now I got to go give it to him.”

“I need to hear it again,” Vernon said. “Maybe there’s a clue.”

“To who the guys are? Why they made the tape?”

“Not so much that. Where they were when they made it.”

The skinny black man was surprised. “Galway’s land, isn’t it?”

“No, that’s the goddam point. I’ve been there, with St. Michael, back when he still owned it. There’s nothing there.”

“Maybe it was all overgrown. You know the way those temples get.”

“I’d have seen it,” Vernon insisted. “St. Michael would have seen it. Do you think that man — or me either — do you think we could have walked around on a mountain of gold and jade and precious stones and not know it? Do you think St. Michael’s going to sell that land without he already squeezed it with those big hands of his, just to see what comes out?”

The skinny black man frowned at the cassette player in his hand. “Then I don’t get it,” he said.

“That’s the point,” Vernon said, and then more quietly, as though in a conscious effort to calm himself, “that’s the whole point. Galway goes off like it’s to his own land, but it isn’t. Somewhere up in those mountains, don’t ask me how, maybe he saw something from the air, just lucked on it, who knows, but somewhere up in those goddam fucking mountains Kirby Galway has found a Mayan temple! A brand new undiscovered temple, nobody knows about it!”

“Jesus,” breathed the skinny black man, and looked at the cassette player with new respect. “So that’s the news I’m taking to St. Michael,” he said.

“God damn it, I don’t want that bloated son of a bitch to know!” Vernon stomped around his tiny living room, driven mad by frustration and poverty and greed and spite. Anybody he’d have bitten at that moment would have died.

“An unknown temple,” the skinny black man said. Belizean dollar signs danced in his eyes. “Riches,” he said. “Beyond the dreams of whatchamacallit.”

“Not beyond my dreams,” Vernon assured him. “This is what I hate about this,” he said. “I got to get the goods on St. Michael, I got to expose his corruption and get him thrown out and put in jail and me to replace him. But the closest thing I got to proof right now is that goddam record you’re gonna—”

“Cassette.”

“Record, goddamit!” Vernon’s eyes were big round circles. “But if I get rid of St. Michael by using this temple, then I lose the temple!”

“Ouch,” agreed the skinny black man. “But if we could get there first—”

“That’s just it,” Vernon said, pacing the room, punching his own thighs and shoulders. “Where is the goddam thing?”

15 Warriors and Merchants: a Prelude To Disaster

At night, tall ivory-colored curtains are closed over the dining room windows at the Fort George Hotel, eliminating the featureless, dark, infinite, eternal, perhaps unsettling view of the nighttime sea. The lights are dimmer, the tablecloths are thick and soft, and the chunky waitresses in dark green move silently on the carpeted floor. The room is no more than half full, conversations are muted. Tourists smile at one table, businessmen look serious at another, the occasional solitary traveler reads a magazine while spooning his soup.

Whitman Lemuel looked up from his magazine and his soup when Valerie Greene entered the dining room, and his first lightning-quick thought process, almost too fast for memory, involved a series of rapid vignettes: “We’re both alone. Why don’t we eat together?” “I don’t want to be mysterious, heh, heh, but I really can’t talk about what I’m doing down here in Belize.” “But why is a beautiful woman like you alone in such an out-of-the-way place?” “Oh, my dear, I am sorry, it must have been dreadful for you.” “Don’t cry, here’s my handkerchief.” “I do have some vodka in my room.” There then followed an amber-toned scene, which crumbled and liquefied when, as Valerie followed the hostess past Lemuel to a table in another comer, recognition came.

My God! Her! “Despoliation!” “Unscrupulous museum directors!” He didn’t remember her name, but he was unlikely to forget her face. Or her voice. Slopping soup onto the snowy tablecloth, Lemuel raised his magazine up in front of his face, showing all the world that he was a reader of Harpers.

Unaware that the stir she had caused was anything other than the normal erotic ripple that followed her everywhere and which no longer very much impinged on her conscious attention, Valerie took her seat, glanced toward the draped windows with a slight passing regret for the lack of a sea view — the limitless ocean at night, heaving away, held no terrors for Valerie — accepted the large menu, and answered the hostess’s question with, “Just water, thanks.”

Behind his magazine, Lemuel gulped his vodka sour.

Witcher and Feldspan, arriving then, obediently waited by the lectern for the hostess to finish with Valerie. They glanced around at the lack of imagination displayed in the conversion of this large rectangular room from a warehouse manque to a restaurant, and then Feldspan gasped and whispered, “Alan!”

“What now?”

“It’s him! Behind the magazine!”

“Oh, my Lord,” Witcher said. “You’re right. Don’t look at him!”

“I’m not looking at him. Don’t you look at him.”

Witcher was always the first to recover. “Well, why wouldn’t he eat here?” he said. “He’s staying here, the same as us.”

“But who’s he hiding from?” Feldspan asked. “Surely his type doesn’t actually read Harpers.”

“Well, maybe he does,” Witcher said, becoming a little testy at Feldspan’s nervousness. “He has to read something, doesn’t he? And I really doubt there’s a Drug Dealers Digest published anywhere.”

“Hush!” Feldspan said, because the hostess was approaching, a smile on her face, her arms full of menus.

The hostess led them to a table along the right side wall. She was a good hostess, who didn’t believe in crowding the customers together in one area of the room for the convenience of the help, but who believed in spreading the customers out as much as possible for their own convenience and privacy and enjoyment of their meals. Therefore, once she had placed Witcher and Feldspan, the situation was this:

Among a scattering of other patrons, Witcher and Feldspan were a short way into the room, against the right wall. Lemuel was midway down the room, one table in from the left wall. Valerie was most of the way down the right side, one table in from the side, one back from the non-view. In this triangle, Valerie and Lemuel were seated so as to face one another directly, while Witcher and Feldspan, opposite one another with the wall beside them, were situated out of Valerie’s line of sight but so that Feldspan offered Lemuel a three-quarter profile and Witcher gave him a view of his right ear and the back of his head.

Lemuel simply couldn’t stand it. Every time he peeked over the top of his magazine, there she was, across an uncrowded room, facing him. And he daren’t let her see him, dare not.

She would know, she would have to. He had identified himself to her at that party back in New York as a museum curator. They had spoken about Belize; the subject of antiquity theft had come up, had most certainly and emphatically come up. She would see him, and she would immediately know what he was doing in Belize.

Then what? Given her vehemence in New York, Lemuel knew exactly what would happen next; she would inform the police. Most likely, she would leap to her feet right here in this public restaurant, point a finger rigid with virtue, and denounce him to diners and help alike.

What could he do? His main course hadn’t even arrived yet; to get up and flee the restaurant now would merely call attention to himself. But to sit directly in that woman’s line of sight was simply not possible; he couldn’t hold Harper’s up in front of his face indefinitely.

He peeked over the magazine’s top, to see that she was holding the large menu up in front of herself much as he was holding Harper’s. If he were to do anything, improve the situation in any way, it would have to be now.

What if he were to face in the opposite direction? But to stand, walk around the table, move everything with him to the opposite side, all of that would also attract too much attention. Besides, there wasn’t even a chair over there. The only other chair at this table was to his left.

Well, a partial move would certainly help. Quickly but smoothly, while Valerie continued to study the menu, Lemuel slid from his chair and, without rising, made it into the chair to his left. He drew the soup, the silverware, the bread plate and the glasses over with him, and laid the magazine on the table to the right of his setting. In reading the magazine now, his head would quite naturally be averted from Valerie, showing her much less than a profile. With the dim lighting, and at this distance, she was most unlikely to recognize him. Feeling much better, he looked up, and found himself staring directly into the eyes of one of Kirby Galway’s drug dealers.

The waitress asked Valerie if she were ready to order, and she said yes.

“He’s staring at me,” Feldspan said. There were little white spots under his eyes, and he spoke in a harsh whisper, not moving his lips. “My God, Alan, he moved around at the table so he could stare at me.”

Lemuel, seeing the drug dealer glare at him while muttering to his partner without moving his lips, looked down in fright and gazed unseeing at Harper’s.

Valerie ordered the shrimp cocktail and the chicken parmigiana.

Witcher, as though suddenly interested in the non-view, turned to gaze at the curtains at the far end of the room. His eyes swiveled to look at Lemuel, who was reading his magazine and not staring at anybody at all. Witcher’s mouth curled in the expression of contempt he was about to show Feldspan.

Lemuel looked up, and they were both glaring at him, grimacing at him.

Valerie thought she might have a glass of white wine as well. But no more; she’d had too much to drink, really, at lunch.

The waitress, in asking Lemuel if he were done with the soup, interposed herself between him and the table containing Witcher and Feldspan. “Yes!” said Lemuel. “Could you hurry the duckling, please, I have to leave soon.”

“The chef is working on it, sir. You can’t really hurry a duckling.”

Witcher and Feldspan looked at one another. Witcher said, “It doesn’t mean a thing, Gerry.”

“Al-an, he moved! He was sitting the other way, and he moved around that way so he could stare at me! He knows!”

“For Heaven’s sake, Gerry, what does he know?”

“He saw us looking at him,” Feldspan said, “when he was out by the pool with Galway.”

“It’s a public place,” Witcher pointed out. “And he was still there when we went for a swim; he didn’t act like anything was wrong then.” “He left right after we got there.”

“A few minutes later.”

“Al-an,” Feldspan said, leaning forward, “why did he move?”

The waitress having departed, Lemuel could see the one drug dealer leaning forward to speak tensely and grimly to the other one. Were they talking about him? They’d come down to the pool this afternoon, decadent creatures, reeking of crime and unholy knowledge. Drug dealers tended to be addicts themselves, didn’t they? Those two weren’t like oldtime mobsters at all, they were like the criminals in recent French films; civilized in a sneering way, secure in their power, spouting philosophy, utterly cold and emotionless. Lemuel had waited just a minute or two after their arrival, not to call attention to himself, and then had hurried back to his room.

The waitress asked Feldspan and Witcher if they were ready to order. “I don’t think I can eat,” Feldspan said.

“You should take Lomotil,” the waitress told him.

Witcher said, meaningfully, “Gerry, don’t call attention to yourself.” To the waitress, he said, “We would both like a very dry Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks, please.”

“I don’t think that’ll help,” the waitress said.

Lemuel, at a loss for what to do, turned his head, gazed this way and that, and found himself staring directly into the eyes of Valerie Greene. A small involuntary moan escaped him.

I know that man, Valerie thought. Isn’t that odd; the short time I’ve been here, and I’ve already seen two men I think I’ve met before. First the driver of that pickup truck outside the hotel, and now this man. It’s probably just that people look like other people; or maybe this man was on the same plane coming down, though I don’t seem to remember him from then.

I’m going to die, Lemuel told himself, and the thought was not entirely unpleasant. He stared at a page in Harper’s in which the art department had decided to snazz things up a bit by tilting the illustration at an angle; down to the left and up to the right, to indicate happiness. (The reverse tilt indicates mental imbalance.) Unconsciously, Lemuel tilted his head to match the illustration, and stuck a breadstick into his cheek.

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-cover-of-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 after-dinner 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.”

16 Sunrise

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.

17 Haste To Be Rich

At Georgeville, 15 miles west of Belmopan and 12 miles before the Guatemalan border, the Western Highway crosses two tiny roads. The northbound road winds just a few miles into the scrub before it stops at the hamlet of Spanish Lookout — the English-speaking people of Belize have anticipated trouble from the Spanish-speaking nation to their west for a long long time — while the southern road climbs steadily into the Maya Mountains, toward the Vaca Plateau, twisting and turning past San Antonio and Hidden Valley Falls and on past the small airfield and forest station at Augustin. For mile after mile the road continues on, chopped out of a pine and mahogany forest, over gorges and around the shoulders of mountains, ending at last at Millionario, 19 miles south of the Western Highway as the crow flies, more than twice that by road.

Vernon wasn’t traveling that far. A few miles south of Augustin he turned his coughing orange Honda Civic right onto a logging road that might have led him eventually to Chapayal or Valentin Camp, except that he stopped at a place where it was possible to park to one side of the twin-rutted track.

Driving out from Belmopan, Vernon had been dressed as though for the office, in white short-sleeved guayabera shirt and dark gray slacks and black oxfords, but now he stood beside the car and changed completely, putting on baggy green army fatigue pants, tall hiking boots, a M*A*S*H T-shirt, a lightweight gray-green windbreaker and a camouflage-design billed cap which he’d bought in a five and dime in Belize City. On branches above and around him, toucans and macaws watched with round rolling eyes, skeptical and amused but still astonished. The squeals and squawks of the jungle ricocheted from high branches through angled pillars of sunlight. It was 9:30 in the morning and the air was damp, not yet too hot. Vernon moved methodically, rigidly, his face expressionless, as though firmly repressing all doubt, all second thoughts. Locking the Honda, staring around one last time at a teeming world in which he was the only human being, he turned away and set off along the narrow spongy trail through the jungle toward the place where he intended to sell out his country.

The jungle grows quickly, and its leaves retain the night’s moisture. As Vernon strode along, brushing dangled branches aside, his head and arms and windbreaker became increasingly wet, so that he glistened as he passed through sunny patches. He had brought no machete, but this trail was in frequent use and was never overgrown to the point where he had to make a detour. From time to time he passed evidence of recent logging, and twice he heard the sounds of human activity from elsewhere in the forest: once, the faraway buzz of a chain saw, and the other time an abrupt laugh from somewhere off to his right.

He froze at the laugh. The one danger here was to be discovered by a British patrol. Because Guatemala claimed the entire nation of Belize as its own long-lost province, stolen from it by the British in the nineteenth century, and because various Guatemalan leaders over the years had vowed to reclaim their property by force, one strange element of Belize’s independence was that 1,600 British troops (plus two Harrier jets) remained for what the British-Belizean agreement called “an appropriate period” on Belizean soil, guarding the 150-mile Guatemalan border. Patrols through the mountains and jungles were mostly carried out by Gurkha troops, tough chunky little Asian soldiers from the mountains of Nepal, with a reputation for ruthlessness and bravery.

Vernon did not want to be found here by a British patrol, whether of Gurkhas or not. They wouldn’t let him go until he had indentified himself, and he could provide no convincing reason for his presence on this remote trail. It would all get back to St. Michael, who would not be satisfied until he found out what his assistant had been up to. Vernon hunkered down on the trail, listening, as wide-eyed but not as brightly colored as the jungle birds overhead, but the laugh was not repeated, and after a while he straightened, and cautiously moved on.

After half an hour’s walk, he crossed an invisible line on the Earth and was no longer in Belize. He couldn’t tell precisely where that point was, but eventually he knew he was safely in Guatemala and away from possible discovery — except for the return trip, of course — and 20 minutes later he came out to a dirt road, not far from the Guatemalan town of Alta Gracia. To his right, a tall stocky man in high-ranking military uniform stood pissing on the left rear tire of a dusty black Daimler. The man’s head turned, he gazed through extremely dark sunglasses at Vernon, and he nodded a hello as he went on with his tire wash.

Vernon waited quite a long while, watching the Colonel piss. He was aware of two people in the car — a soldier-chauffeur in the separate driver’s compartment in front, and a woman with a mass of black hair in back — but the Colonel was the only one who mattered.

This was Colonel Mario Nettisto Vajino, of the Army of Guatemala, until recently a vice minister of defense in the last government but one. The Guatemalan political system alternates rigged elections with American-sponsored coups, but no matter the route of accession the man at the top is always an Army man, always a general, and usually a previous minister of defense. Colonel Nettisto Vajino could reasonably expect to become minister of defense (and a general) in some future government, if he weren’t assassinated along the way.

This was not the colonel who had once publicly said that Guatemala would deal with the large black population of Belize by “expanding the cemetery,” nor was he the colonel who had dealt with the problem of peasant Indian sit-in strikers in the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City on February 1st, 1980, by sending the police and army to firebomb the embassy, killing 38 people inside, peasants and employees and visitors alike, everybody but the Spanish ambassador himself, who got out with his clothes on fire and left for Spain as soon as he could. This was a different colonel, but not very different.

The Colonel shook himself, paused briefly to admire himself, tucked himself away in his trousers, zipped up, and approached Vernon, saying, “You’re a bit late.”

Reflecting how lucky it was that the Colonel didn’t regard him as an equal, and would therefore not offer to shake hands, Vernon said, “I thought I heard a patrol.”

Nettisto Vajino grimaced, unwillingly looking eastward, toward the lost province. There were no colonels of his sort over there. There was no such thing as a Belizean army as such, only the rather casual Belizean Defense Force, the BDF — known locally as the Bloody Damn Fools — a mere 300 strong. There were policemen as well in Belize, but they didn’t carry guns. In Guatemala, on the other hand, there was the ordinary Army, plus various unofficial private armies, plus three police forces, every one of them armed to the teeth. The busy death squads in their woolen masks and army-issue boots were also well equipped with guns. But when Nettisto Vajino looked eastward, what his mind’s eye had to see was the British peacekeeping force and the Gurkha patrols and the Harrier jets and the memory of the Falkland Islands, and no wonder he grimaced. How Guatemala would love to spread its culture and democracy to Belize!

Nettisto Vajino shook his head, returning his attention to Vernon, saying, “You’ve brought me something?”

“Yes.” From a long pocket in the left leg of his fatigue pants, Vernon took a map, which he opened out to a square almost three feet on a side. “I circled the camps in red,” he said.

“Mm.” Nettisto Vajino carried the map back to the Daimler, where he spread it on the large curved trunk and pursed his lips as he studied it. Vernon, standing beside him, was extremely aware of the woman in the car looking through the rear window at him. She was exotic looking, like Rita Hayworth in “Gilda,” but wilder. She never looked toward the Colonel at all.

Vernon was also acutely aware of the large Colt .45 in its holster on the Colonel’s right side. It had been his fear — one of his fears — since the beginning of this relationship, that the Colonel would some day pull that gun and simply shoot Vernon dead, as a way of ending the association. Once his usefulness was over.

Well, his usefulness wasn’t over yet. And when the time came, Vernon was determined that he would resign in his own way. He’d be very quick about it, too.

Nettisto Vajino tapped his knuckles on the map. “These are all new settlements?”

“Within the last six months,” Vernon assured him. “That’s what you asked for.”

The Colonel grunted, continuing to brood at the map, his mind working in some slow and labyrinthine way. Vernon wished he knew what the Colonel’s scheme was, but he didn’t dare ask about it directly. Out would come the Colt, no question.

What Vernon had brought the Colonel today was a large topographical map of Cayo District, one of Belize’s six districts, one of the three next to Guatemala. The new capital of Belmopan is in Cayo and so was all of Vernon’s trip today until he’d crossed the border. In recent years, refugees from Central American bloodshed, mostly from Guatemala and El Salvador, have made their way in the thousands to Belize, where they have been offered land free for the tilling and have started tiny new communities, mostly in the southern half of the country. The Department of Land Allocation, in which Innocent St. Michael was Deputy Director, was of course involved with this aspect of the immigration, so it hadn’t been hard for Vernon to collect the data on the most recent arrivals.

“Very good,” the Colonel said, though noncommittally, as though it were merely a polite kind of cough he’d learned. Folding the map, his hooded eyes unreadable behind the dark glasses, he said, “And the pictures?”

“Oh, yes, certainly.”

From a shirt pocket Vernon removed a roll of Kodacolor film, in its gray-capped black plastic canister, which he placed in Nettisto Vajino’s waiting palm without a word. Why the Colonel wanted photos of Gurkha soldiers and Gurkha patrols, with details of uniform and equipment, Vernon neither knew nor cared. Sufficient that the pay was good, and that by pretending to be a tourist he had received the amused cooperation of his subjects.

The fact was, Vernon, like most Belizeans, was convinced the Guatemalan claim was just nonsense, old history. The Belizeans wouldn’t permit Britain to give their land away, and the British wouldn’t permit the Guatemalans to just come in and grab it, so that was that. So if some crazy Guatemalan Colonel shows up with money in his hand, willing to pay for a lot of dumb things like maps and photographs, why not take his money? Vernon knew what was going on here was a simple con job, himself giving worthless trash for real cash, but he also realized that to an outsider it could possibly look like, give the impression of, even appear to be...

... well, treason.

Expressionless, the Colonel closed his hand around the film roll, making a casual fist. “Wait there,” he said, and turned away, returning to his car. When he opened the right rear door of the Daimler, Vernon caught a glimpse of long bare legs against the black plush. His heart ached in his breast. He wanted to live in a country where he could be a colonel. Maybe the crazy Guatemalans would pull this off after all, and he...

No. That wasn’t a future he could think about.

The driver’s door of the Daimler opened and the blank-faced soldier came around the rear of the car with a white envelope in his hand. He gave it to Vernon, turned about, and went back to his place in the car, while Vernon lifted the flap and looked at the sheaf of U.S. greenbacks inside. He couldn’t count it now, not with them still here. Lifting his eyes, he saw the woman looking at him again out the back window. She didn’t gaze with normal curiosity, as one human being looks at another, but with a flat and feral expression, as though she were an animal staring out of its cage. Or was he the animal, and she among the humans?

The Daimler backed in a half circle, then drove away. Vernon stuffed the envelope into the pocket that had contained the map, and started the long walk back. The sun was higher, the day hotter, the jungle smells stronger. The money was heavy in his pocket.

18 Winding Trails

Parking in the forecourt of the Fort George Hotel, Kirby stepped out of the pickup and nimbly dodged a peach-colored topless Land Rover with official license plates, which had rushed in the EXIT side of the hotel’s circular driveway and now slammed to a stop at the entrance. Its driver, a skinny black man, hopped out and strode briskly inside, and a moment later Kirby followed, strolling into the cool dim lobby and seeing the driver in converse with the desk clerk.

The house phones were around to the side. Kirby called Lemuel first, let it ring six times, and was about to give up when there was a click and Lemuel’s voice, hushed, suspicious, frightened, said in a half whisper, “Yes?”

Kirby was used to his customers being a little spooked, since they weren’t used to the criminal’s life, but Lemuel was overdoing it. His manner as soothing as possible, Kirby said, “It’s Kirby Galway, Mister Lemuel.”

“Galway!” Lemuel managed to sound both relieved and aggrieved. “Where are you?”

“In the lobby. I just have to take, um, those people... You know?”

“I certainly do.”

“To the airport. Then we’re done with them.”

“Good!”

“You might as well wait in the room until—”

“Believe me, I will!”

Smiling, pleasantly surprised at how well his drug-dealer yam had gone over with this one, Kirby said, “We’ll both breathe easier once they’re gone. I’ll give you a call when I get back, we’ll have lunch in the hotel before we go out to the site.”

“I’ll wait right here,” Lemuel promised.

Kirby broke the connection and was about to dial Witcher and Feldspan’s number when he was briefly distracted by seeing, out of the comer of his eye, the passage through the lobby of what appeared to be a good-looking woman. He turned his head, but she was already past, striding rapidly in the wake of the skinny black man from the Land Rover; so she was his passenger. There was only time to register that she was tall, with brown hair under a large floppy-brimmed hat, and that she was dressed for hiking, in khaki shirt and new blue jeans and tall lace-up boots. She carried a gray attache case in her left hand, and a large and apparently heavy canvas shoulder bag bumped along on her right haunch. Then she was gone, and Kirby dialed the other room number, and Witcher answered on the first ring: “Alan Witcher here.”

“And Kirby Galway here.”

“Oh, good! We’re all set, we’ll be right down.” There were mutters in the background; sounding annoyed, Witcher said, “Would you hold on, please? Just one second.”

“Sure,” said Kirby, and spent the next several seconds listening to muffled conversation and a repeated thumb-thumb. Oh, of course; Witcher had covered the mouthpiece by pressing it to his chest, and Kirby was listening to his heart.

Then his voice: “Gerry wants to know,” Witcher said, with worlds of meaning, “if your friend is anywhere down there.”

Kirby grinned. Got them both, by God! “No,” he said. “He’s gone away up-country. There’s a fella up there he says is cheating him. He took a couple local boys and left first thing this morning.”

“Oh.” Witcher didn’t seem to know what to do with all that information. “Just so he’s not in the lobby.”

“You’re safe,” Kirby assured him.

“I’ll tell Gerry,” Witcher said, putting the charge of cowardice back where it belonged.

Hanging up, Kirby went over to the broad front doorway and looked out at the peach-colored Land Rover, which was just leaving via the ENTRANCE. The girl, in front beside the driver, was slipping sunglasses on. The floppy-brimmed hat, a very sensible defense against the tropic sun, kept him from seeing much of her face. Her jaw was perhaps a little too strong. Then the Land Rover was gone, and a stir in the lobby recalled him to business.

Kirby helped the bellboy load luggage into the back of the pickup while Witcher and Feldspan checked out, and then they came outside, both behind large-lensed dark glasses. Witcher looked irritable, Feldspan hung over. Good mornings and handshakes were exchanged, and Feldspan said, “We’ll make the plane, won’t we?” His voice was shaky; behind the dark glasses, his eyes asked for pity.

“Plenty of time,” Kirby assured him.

“Of course there is,” said Witcher. “Get hold of yourself, Gerry.”

Gerry didn’t; nevertheless, they all got into the pickup, jounced away from the hotel, and made their way back through the sunny town. Once on the road out to the airport, Kirby took a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket, handed it across Feldspan to Witcher, and said, “This is the place we’ll meet.”

Opening the paper, Witcher read aloud: “Trump Glade, Florida. Route 216 south eight point four miles from movie house. Left at sign reading Potchaw 12. Dirt road. Fifteen point two miles to red ribbon on barbed wire fence.” Witcher nodded. “And that’s where you’ll be, I take it.”

“Rent a car,” Kirby told him. “Don’t take a cab.”

“Certainly not.”

“And it’s just you two there,” Kirby said, “or I don’t get out of the plane.”

“We understand,” Witcher said. Between them, in the middle of the seat, Feldspan lowered his head, raised a quaking hand to his brow, and faintly moaned.

“When I’ve got something to deliver,” Kirby said, “I’ll cable you in New York and give you a day and a time.”

Witcher said, “What if you have something too large to bring out that way? The jaguar stela, for instance. That could be eight or ten feet tall, and it would weigh a ton.”

“We’d have to do that by ship,” Kirby told him. “There’s places up the coast where we can bring in a small boat at night. It’s expensive, and a lot trickier, but if we’re careful it’ll be okay. I tell you what; if I have anything too big to fly out, I’ll take Polaroids of it, give them to you guys, and once you have a buyer we’ll arrange to get it out by boat.”

“Fine,” Witcher said.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Feldspan said.

“Gerry,” Witcher said, through clenched teeth.

Kirby angled across the empty road and parked on the left verge, beside the easygoing Belize River. “Better here than in the plane,” he said.

So Witcher, disapproval etched in every line of his being, got out of the pickup, and helped Feldspan out and walked with him down to the river bank. Kirby whistled quietly to himself and looked out at the pleasant day. If he were a man who fished, he’d want to fish right now.

A horn honked. Kirby looked over as Innocent St. Michael went by in his dark green Ford LTD, heading toward the airport, waving at Kirby from his air-conditioned luxury. Kirby grinned and waved back. Innocent sure did like to visit the airport.

When Feldspan returned, he was paler but somehow better. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Happens to us all,” Kirby assured him. The line of Witcher’s mouth said it didn’t happen to him.

There were no more events till they reached the airport, where Witcher insisted on unzipping his bag atop the pickup’s tailgate, so he could remove two Sony Walkmans from it, one of which he extended toward Feldspan, saying, “You know this will make you feel better, Gerry.”

Feldspan looked with repugnance at the Walkman before him, then seemed to remember something. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yes.” He flashed Kirby a guilty glance through his dark glasses as he accepted the Walkman, hooked it onto his belt, and put the earphones in place on his head. Now he looked like something from “The Wizard Of Oz.”

Kirby grinned at him, amused. So these boys were smuggling something out of Belize in their Walkmans, were they? And they didn’t want their pal Kirby to know about it. Idly, he wondered what they’d found, idly decided it was probably marijuana.

Extending a hand, Witcher said, “We’ll hope to hear from you.” His earphones were draped around his neck.

“Two or three weeks,” Kirby promised, shaking his hand. Then he shook Feldspan’s. “Have a nice flight,” he said. Feldspan smiled gamely.

“Come along, Gerry,” Witcher said, hefting his bag. His earphones were now in place on his ears.

Kirby stood by the pickup and watched them walk to the small terminal building. Witcher was swaying and snapping his fingers and just slightly boogaloosing to the sounds coming into his ears. After several steps Feldspan started to do the same, in pale and shaky imitation.

In a shaded spot at the comer of the building, working on his molars with his slender gold toothpick, stood Innocent St. Michael, also watching Witcher and Feldspan. His eyes looked very interested. It was hard to be sure with his hand up in front of his mouth that way, but he might have been very faintly smiling.

Hmmmmmm, thought Kirby.

19 Satisfaction

Gerry plodded manfully along, carrying his heavy bag, snapping the fingers of his free hand in some sort of rhythm, nodding his head metronomically to the sound of Kirby Galway, in his earphones, saying, “A lot of Americans are coming down here, because there’s just so much available land.”

The worst part of travel is travel. To get out of Belize, there was so much red tape to overcome: forms to fill out, lines to stand in with other passengers, documents to display, questions to answer. And all taking place without benefit of air conditioning, among bodies that could only have been improved by a flash flood. Gerry just suffered through it all, remembering to nod his head and tap his toes, following Alan’s lead as he listened to his own voice say in his ears, “I had an aunt in New Jersey once, but she went to Florida and died.” We’re going to Florida now, he thought. What does it all mean?

As Kirby Galway had suggested might happen, their luggage was given a quite extensive search by a large and menacing Customs person, who made them put their Walkmans on the counter with their suitcases and then took a positively unhealthy interest in the contents of their luggage. Some of the more stylish garments produced from this individual various grunts and snarls absolutely out of a zoo. “What you call dis?” the fellow demanded at one point, holding up an object from Gerry’s bag between thumb and finger.

The indignity of it. “It’s called sachet,” Gerry said, enunciating carefully, reminding himself it’s best to be gentle with the lower orders. “It’s to keep the bag sweet-smelling, you know.”

The Customs man held the small sealed packet to his nose and noisily sniffed. “Could be dope,” he said.

“Certainly not.” Stomach churning, mind rattled, Gerry struggled to remember the contents of sachet, saying, “It’s— Oh, rose petals, cloves, lavender...”

“Passports,” said a sudden harsh voice from a new and unexpected quarter; that is, from behind them. Gerry and Alan turned, in some surprise, to see a short impatient scowling woman standing there, holding out her hand for their passports.

Was this right? While Alan briskly turned over his own passport, Gerry had to search himself like a policeman frisking a suspect, having no idea what he’d done with his passport, not expecting to need it at just this juncture...

The roar of the descending plane was heard. The woman was actually snapping her fingers. Gerry, third time through his shirt pocket, found the passport and handed it over. In lieu of a thank you, the woman said, “Tickets.”

Well, that was all right; Alan had them both. He turned them over to the woman, who barely glanced at them before shaking her head, saying, “Not this flight.”

“What?” Gerry thought he would die, he actually thought he would die.

But not, apparently, Alan, who did some barking of his own, telling the woman, “Of course it’s this flight.”

“SAHSA flight,” the woman said.

“That’s right,” Alan told her. “SAHSA is exactly what it says on those tickets.”

“Not today.”

“Oh, really,” Alan said. “It is our flight, it is this airline, it is today.”

Gerry moaned faintly, hoping no one would hear. The plane was waiting outside. Passengers behind them on line were getting upset. Off to one side, a stout man being disgusting with what seemed to be a gold toothpick appeared to enjoy the show.

Then, all at once, it was over. With one last firm nod, as though she’d solved a knotty problem for them at last, the woman handed the passports and tickets back to Alan and said, “You can go now.”

“I can go now? After you’ve—”

“The plane is waiting,” the woman said, with urgent shooing gestures. “Hurry, hurry.”

The plane was waiting. The other passengers were waiting. The Customs man had finished pawing through their personal possessions and sent their luggage on to be loaded. Their Walkmans and carry-on bags awaited them on his wooden counter. Over by the door to the plane, a uniformed man gestured urgently at them, repeating the impatient woman’s, “Hurry, hurry.”

They hurried, out of the building and into the blinding sunlight, Alan jogging ahead across the tarmac. Jouncing along in his wake, head and stomach both terribly upset, Gerry couldn’t get the Walkman back on his belt until they were actually going up the steps and into the plane. The stewardess pointed Alan toward their seats, and Gerry followed, adjusting the earphones and fiddling with the Walkman’s controls as he trailed Alan down the aisle. Ahead, Alan was also still setting up his Walkman.

Then abruptly Alan stopped, and Gerry almost ran into him. Alan turned about as though to run back off the plane; he stared wide-eyed at Gerry, his mouth open in shock. The aisle behind them was full of boarding passengers. The stewardess was closing the door. It was too late.

Gerry also at last had turned on his Walkman, and now he returned Alan’s horrified stare as, “I can’t get no,” Mick Jagger wailed in his ears, “no no no.”

20 The Lost City

“The map is not the terrain,” the skinny black man said.

“Oh, yes, it is,” Valerie said. With her right hand she tapped the map on the attaché case on her lap, while waving with her left at the hilly green unpopulated countryside bucketing by: “This map is that terrain.”

“It is a quote,” the skinny black man said, steering almost around a pothole. “It means, there are always differences between reality and the descriptions of reality.”

“Nevertheless,” Valerie said, holding on amid the bumps, “we should have turned left back there.”

“What your map does not show,” the skinny black man told her, “is that the floods in December washed away a part of that road. I see the floods didn’t affect your map.”

Valerie was finding this driver very difficult. He had a mind of his own, and an almost total disregard for Valerie’s opinions. He drove rapidly and rather recklessly, and from the beginning he had disdained Valerie’s maps and charts and directions and suggestions and everything. He wasn’t her driver so much as she was his passenger, the excuse for him to take his Land Rover out for a spin.

He wouldn’t even tell her his name. “Hi, I’m Valerie Greene,” she had greeted him back in the lobby of the Fort George. “I’m your driver,” he’d responded, then had turned on his heel and marched outside, leaving her to follow as best she could, carrying all her own gear. Hurrying after him, she’d been aware of some man over by the house phones staring at her, probably thinking she must be a very silly woman to let her driver — her servant, technically, provided by the Belizean government itself — treat her like that.

The vehicle, this peach-colored topless Land Rover, was a perfect match for the driver. It too was all hard edges and businesslike bluntness. What the driver lacked in politesse, the Land Rover lacked in springs. The driver’s absence of small talk and common courtesy was echoed in the Land Rover’s uncushioned gray metal seats. The driver’s skinniness and blackness found their counterpart in the Land Rover’s metal and tubing, painted the colors of an aircraft carrier’s corridor. Peach and gray, heavily rusted, rough to the touch.

Valerie felt unwanted emotion rising within her. She wasn’t exactly sure why it was that girls weren’t supposed to do things “like a girl” — throw a ball like a girl, cry at every little thing like a girl — but she did know that was the rule, and so she fought down the tremulousness that frustration had built within her. Only the tiniest bit of it showed when she said, “I thought we could stop for lunch along that road. There’s supposed to be a really beautiful little stream there.”

“That’s what flooded,” the driver said. “Besides, there’s no stores down that way.”

“I have food.” Valerie gestured back at her canvas bag, now bounding around like a basketball in the storage well. “I had the hotel make some sandwiches,” she explained. “Plenty for both of us.”

“You still have to buy beer.”

“I don’t want beer,” Valerie said.

“I do.”

Valerie stared at him, while several sentences crowded into her brain, beginning, Well, I never— and, Of all the— and, If your superiors— What kept all those sentences incomplete and unspoken was the driver’s absolute self-assurance. He wasn’t being calculatedly arrogant, or deliberately hostile toward her, or playing testing games with her, or actually behaving toward her at all. He was merely being himself, which Valerie understood, unfortunately, and which kept her from wasting breath trying to get him to be somebody else. You might as well tell a cat to turn around and walk the other way.

And this was who she’d picnic with; what a waste.

They rode on in bumpy silence, Valerie thinking about all the reasons she had left southern Illinois in the first place, all the vague hopes and dreams inspired by her determination to see the great world, and the unpleasant contrast between all that and this reality. Here she was, flopping about in this hard-edged biscuit tin beside a self-absorbed and utterly unappealing man, and not even going to have the picnic she’d planned.

So far, in fact, the great world really wasn’t showing Valerie Greene very much. Yesterday’s encounter with Innocent St. Michael had certainly been enjoyable, but there’d been very little of the romantic in it; the mode of that scene had been mostly comic. And this driver today was as much a washout as (according to him) the road they weren’t taking.

All her hopes now were pinned on the lost Mayan city. It would be there, it must be there, where she and the computers had decreed (and despite the nay-saying of Innocent’s man Vernon), and from the instant of her discovery of it everything in her life would change. Archaeologists would write her respectful letters, asking for details of her methodology. Reporters would gather for news conferences. Governments would take her seriously. She herself would lead the expedition to clear away a millenium of jungle and free the ancient city to thrust its towers once again into the air.

A buzzing sound caused her to lift her head. A small blue-and-white plane was flying by, rather low, not much faster than they, and heading in the same direction. Probably it was actually following the same road, there being very few landmarks in the jungle. Valerie found herself eyeing that plane wistfully, envying whoever was in it, no matter what their purpose or destination. There was romance, soaring above the jungle, sailing through the sunlight.

An airstrip beside the lost city spread its scythed green carpet in her mind, and she smiled after the plane. But then, before it was out of sight, she was recalled to earth by the driver abruptly braking hard, the Land Rover bucking to a stop.

Valerie lowered her gaze and looked around, as the dust of their passage caught up with them, making a gray-tan haze in the air. They had stopped at an intersection, where their oiled gravel “highway” crossed a meandering dirt road. To their right, a small building was covered with tin soft drink signs. “Coca Cola,” said one, and beneath that in Creole, “quench yu tus.”

The driver switched off the engine. In the sudden silence, dust slowly settled. Valerie said, “What’s this?”

“You can get the beer in there,” he said.

“I get the beer?”

Pointing to the left, he said, “Then we take that road. There’s a place to stop and eat down a few miles.”

“In a swamp, no doubt,” she said, becoming irked.

He looked at her with mild surprise but calm willingness: “You wish to eat in a swamp?”

“No, no.” Even sarcasm was lost on this creature. Looking at her map, as an excuse to regain her poise, she said, “I can’t tell where we are.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I know the way.”

Valerie sighed, realized how inevitable that answer had been. Acknowledging defeat, she opened the attaché case and stowed her map in it, then put the case back in the storage well with her canvas bag. Beer, she thought in fatalistic irritation, as she clambered out of the car. And she might as well get beer for herself, too; this place wouldn’t have white wine.

21 Reunion

Lemuel found the whistle. “Now, this is something!” he said, holding it at arm’s length, staring at it.

Kirby was just as pleased as Lemuel about the discovery. He never prodded his customers, never directed, always permitted them to make their own way across the terrain, and as a result only about half found the whistle. Which was a pity, because it was a beauty.

About eight inches high, made of limestone carved with primitive stone tools, it was the figure of a priest in a high headdress, with arms straight out at his sides and a long skirt over slightly spread feet. A hole bored through from the top of the headdress to the bottom of the skirt between the feet had originally made the whistle, but when Lemuel now tried to blow through it nothing happened. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said, wiping his mouth. “It’s too old.”

“To do what?” Kirby asked, parading his ignorance.

“This is a whistle,” Lemuel explained, his amiability lightly sheathing his condescension. Lemuel was a changed man now that the dread drug dealers were gone. During lunch, over a vodka and tonic, he had reconstructed his academic armor, had got himself back under control, and during the flight out had even discoursed on his few encounters with marijuana, reminiscences occasioned by Kirby having pointed out cultivated fields of the stuff down below, orderly rows of fuzzy light green among the jumbled thousand greens of the jungle.

Lemuel, in fact, had become so thoroughly the academic and the expert that he’d even shown some early indications of skepticism as Kirby had led him up the side of his extravaganza. “Hmmmmm,” he’d said, when he’d come to the shaped building block, and, “Odd this should be out here in plain sight like this.”

“It was farther up when I found it,” Kirby told him. “I did some digging here and there, test-boring for a septic system, and that thing rolled down.”

“Hmmmm,” Lemuel repeated, and when Kirby pointed out the silhouette of temple steps against the sky on the right side of the hill Lemuel had said, slowly, “Possible, possible. Could be a natural formation, or it might mean something.”

But all skepticism had vanished once Lemuel’s foot, in poking into the hillside in search of purchase, had dislodged the whistle. Brushing dirt away, turning it around and around, even trying to blow through it, Lemuel had to know that what he was holding was the real thing.

Real, but not particularly valuable. There were certainly hundreds, possibly thousands of similar whistles legally for sale among antique dealers and curio shops around the world, most of them priced at less than $200. The one Lemuel was turning this way and that way in his hands had most recently sold for $160 U.S.

But value here wasn’t the point. This small artifact was real, it was honest-to-God one thousand and two hundred years old, the lips of priests had encircled that blowhole, the hands of real-life ancient Mayans had held that whistle just as Lemuel was holding it right now. The whistle was legit, and Lemuel had to know it.

He did. “A whistle,” he repeated. “Late Classical Period, I would say, prior to 900 AD.”

“You know a lot more about it than I do,” Kirby assured him.

Lemuel held the whistle up so the little priest faced Kirby, arms spread wide, like an infant recognizing its father. “This would have been used in religious ceremonies,” he explained, and then frowned past Kirby, saying, “What’s that?”

Kirby turned. They were just high enough so they could look over the intervening jungle at the meadow — visibly drier today, by the way — where the plane waited and where now a coiling column of brown dust spread out and away from behind an approaching vehicle. “Hey, wait a minute,” Kirby said.

Lemuel’s nervousness had shot back into existence, and in full flower. Stepping back a pace, his eyes getting rounder and rounder behind his round glasses, he looked from Kirby to the oncoming car and back to Kirby, saying, “What is this? What’s going on here?”

“I don’t know,” Kirby said, “but I’ll damn well find out.” This remote place didn’t get visitors. Below, the vehicle had paused at his plane, but had not stopped, and now came rapidly on, bounding and bumping over the rough dry land, moving at an angle that would take it around to the easier slope, the one Kirby and the Indians used but which he never showed the customers. “You wait here,” Kirby said. “This is my land, goddamit.”

Lemuel’s one sartorial concession to a trek in the wilderness had been to wear Adidas sneakers with his usual gray slacks and pale blue shirt and light cotton sports jacket. Till now, his garb had merely made him look slightly foolish but, with fright blotching his face and agitating his limbs, he looked exactly like the victim in some sadistic tale of a city man strayed among brutes; possibly by Paul Bowles. Staring fixedly at the machete held loosely in Kirby’s right hand, “I demand to know what’s going on,” he cried, spoiling the effect when his voice broke on the word demand.

“So do I,” Kirby told him. He knew nothing about that onrushing car except it was none of his doing and was therefore trouble. “Wait here,” he repeated. “Play with the goddam whistle while I get rid of — whoever they are.”

He hated having to take the easier path in full view of the client, but there was no choice if he were to stop the interlopers before they actually reached the base of the temple. Running diagonally down the hill, around to the right side, he kept catching glimpses of the car between vines and tree branches, and be God-damned if it wasn’t the peach-colored Land Rover from the hotel this morning! That, or one exactly like it.

This morning’s Land Rover had had government licence plates.

“Hell and damn,” Kirby muttered, running harder. Innocent has something to do with this, he told himself, but he was moving too fast to think about the question.

A knot of vines was in his way. He swung the machete with both hands, teeth gritted, wishing it were Innocent’s neck. The vines fell away, grudging him a foot or two at every swipe, until all at once the hole was open, the Land Rover was dead ahead, and Kirby hurtled out and down onto the barren flat, waving the machete over his head and yelling, “Stop! Stop!”

The Land Rover veered. There were two people in it, the driver black and male, the passenger white and female. They were the people he’d seen at the hotel this morning. He saw them, the driver blank-faced and the woman yelling something, as the Land Rover angled around him, not even slackening speed.

What were they up to? Kirby turned, panting, the machete sagging at his side, and saw the Land Rover’s brake lights go on as it suddenly jolted to a stop. The woman was waving her arms, now yelling at her companion. The back-up lights flashed as the Land Rover came sluing and sliding backward, slamming to a stop beside Kirby, where the woman glared at him through her large sunglasses from under her floppy-brimmed hat and yelled, “Who are you?”

“Who am I? Lady, what the hell are you—”

“There’s a temple here!” she cried, astonishingly, horribly. Kirby gaped as she clambered out of the Land Rover, some sort of map or chart flapping in her left hand. Behind her, the driver sat immobile, taking no part.

“Oh, no, there isn’t,” Kirby said. “No, no. No way.”

“But there is! There must be!” Waving the map at him, she insisted, “It’s all worked out! All I have to do—” She started around him, headed for the slope.

“Wait! Wait!” Kirby ran to get in front, to stop her. “You can’t just— You can’t— This is trespassing!”

“I have authority from the Belizean government!” She stood even taller than her normal six feet when she said this, and her eyes flashed.

Innocent. Has to be Innocent. Damn, damn, damn the man, what was he up to and why? Kirby said, “This is private land, this is my land and you can’t—”

But now she bent almost double, looking upward past Kirby’s right elbow, whipping off her hat so she could see better. “There!” she cried.

Oh, God. Kirby reluctantly turned, also crouching a bit, and right there, through the hole he’d just this minute himself cut through the vines, was framed the top fraction of the temple. Steps, stela, flattened platform at the top. It was like a picture from a textbook. “No,” Kirby said.

“The temple,” breathed this miserable pest of a woman, and Lemuel appeared in the opening, carrying the whistle.

Shit. Kirby came around again to stand close in front of the woman, trying to block her vision, praying Lemuel would have the sense to stay away. “Cut this out now,” he insisted. “This is my land, this is private property, you can’t just barge—”

“I know you,” she said, staring at him, and all of a sudden he knew her, too. Oh, this is impossible, he thought, this is unfair, this is beyond anything. This pain in the ass can’t queer my pitch with Lemuel twice.

Yes. Lemuel did not have the sense to keep out of it, because here he came, carrying the goddam whistle, looking frightened and suspicious and determined and fatuous, saying, “Galway, I have to know what’s going on here, I have a reputation to—”

“You!” cried the woman. The pest. Valerie Greene; the name returned unbidden to Kirby’s mind. Valerie Greene, twice in one lifetime.

Lemuel also recognized her, if belatedly. His jaw dropped. “Oh, no,” he said.

She saw the whistle in his hand. She pointed at it, rising up taller than ever, seven feet tall maybe, eight feet, nine. “DESPOLIATION!” she cried.

Now everybody acted at once. Valerie Greene thundered into her historical-preservation speech, Kirby yelled uselessly for everybody to shut up and go away, and Lemuel backtracked, flinging the whistle away backhanded, like a small boy caught smoking. “I won’t— This isn’t—” Lemuel sputtered, “I can’t— Kirby, you have to—” And he turned and ran pell-mell toward the plane.

“National treasures— Priceless antiquities— Irreplaceable artifacts—” Valerie Greene was in full cry now, orating to a stadium of 60,000.

Kirby held the machete up in front of this virago’s face. His eyes were on her throat. “One,” he said.

22 Half a League

“Two,” said the crazy man.

Valerie backed away. Was he counting to ten... or to three?

The crazy man’s face was very red. Veins stood out on his neck, reminding Valerie irrelevantly of Michelangelo sculptures, and he raised the machete even more menacingly, like Reggie Jackson seeing a fat one come across the plate. He didn’t say three.

“I—” Valerie said, back-pedaling. “You—”

She hadn’t realized the Land Rover’s engine was off until she heard, behind her, the driver switch it back on, nrnrnrnrnr, cough, CHUG.

Would he leave without her? Would the one in front chop off her head? Men! Valerie turned about and scampered to the Land Rover, leaping in as the skinny black man shifted into low; so she would never know if he’d been waiting for her or if she’d just made it. The Land Rover jolted forward, the driver spun the wheel in a hard right which took them in a loop around the crazy man, and from the safety of the moving vehicle Valerie yelled at him, “I’ll report you! I’ll tell Mister St. Michael!”

Something, probably the threat, possibly the name, drove the crazy man over the edge. With a mighty oath, he flung his machete to the ground, where it bounced in a sudden jump of pebbles and flutter of dust. Tearing his bush hat from his head, he hurled that atop the machete, then jumped on the hat with both feet.

Twisting around in the metal bucket seat as the Land Rover sped back the way they’d come, Valerie saw the crazy man jumping up and down on his hat and machete, then pausing to pant and cough in all the dust he’d raised, then shaking his fist after Valerie, then shaking both fists at heaven. All at once, he stooped, picked up a handful of pebbles, and threw them after the Land Rover, though they were far out of range by now.

Valerie looked up, and there it was, serene, silent against the blue sky, indomitable: the temple, looking like nothing more than a hill from this distance. Covered by a millenia of jungle growth, a thousand years of accumulated earth, growing plants, rotting flora and fauna, nature’s heavy veneer disguising the works of man. “Do you know what that is?”

The driver looked in his rearview mirror: “A very angry man.”

“No,” Valerie said. “The temple. I was right!”

The driver veered, jolting Valerie almost out onto the hard dry ground covered with dead and dying grass. She faced front, and saw they were angling around the airplane, where Whitman Lemuel — oh, she remembered him — stood holding his jacket up over his head like arrested numbers runners in newspaper photographs. “I know you!” Valerie yelled, shaking her finger at him on the way by.

And to think, to think, she’d been embarrassed at dinner last night, afraid he would notice her!

The driver leaned forward, squinting at the rearview mirror. “That hill?” he said. “That’s really a temple?”

“Over a thousand years old,” Valerie told him, awed by its existence, its reality, her own astonishing brilliance in rescuing it from oblivion. “A Mayan temple.”

“Well, that’s pretty good,” the driver said. “And nobody knew it was there.”

“The world is going to know, just as soon as I get back to Belmopan,” said Valerie.

“Uh huh,” said the driver.

23 Currents of Passion

“Not back yet?” Innocent shook his head, smiling at the desk clerk. “Women,” he said. “Never on time anywhere.”

The desk clerk answered the smile; he and Innocent St. Michael had known one another a long time, in a limited but satisfactory way. “But what could we do without them, eh?” he said.

“Bugger all,” said Innocent. Before the desk clerk could decide whether that had been idiomatic or literal his switchboard lit up and he had to excuse himself, being the only person on duty at the desk at this time.

Innocent studied his watch: a Rolex, a birthday gift from his wife, selected and paid for by himself, gift-wrapped by the girl in the store. Two minutes to five, it said; by the time he got to the bar, the sun would definitely be over the yardarm.

“Yes, yes,” the desk clerk was saying. “I’m doin the best I can, Mister Lemuel, but it just may not be possible. Oh, yes, sir, I’ll go on trying.” Hanging up, he turned back to Innocent, shaking his head and saying, “It always be Americans. Impossible.”

Innocent had heard the name Lemuel and his ears had pricked up, because he knew who that was. Another of Kirby’s strange visitors from the States; a teacher on vacation, he claimed. “What’s this one want?” he asked.

“The Earth and all,” the desk clerk said. “He registered here for two more days, but now in a rush his plans all different. He run in here an hour ago like the end of the world, had to be on a plane today, had to be out of Belize this very minute, sudden urgent message from home. Foo,” commented the desk clerk. “If this man got any sudden urgent message from home, I’d know it, wouldn’t I? I’d hand it him, wouldn’t I?”

“Of course you would,” Innocent said, thinking, Hmmmmmm. “Sounds like he picked up the running shits,” he said.

“I don’t know what that man’s problem be,” said the desk clerk. “I done all I can. I told him, there’s no more flights out to the States today, so then he wants a charter, he won’t spend another night in Belize. I told him, he already got to pay for tonight at the hotel, it way too late to check out, he don’t care ’bout that. I tell him, any charter out of the country, there’s all kinds of paperwork, Customs clearance, police, all that, now he’ll take a flight anywhere, he don’t care. Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, all the same to him. Now, you know there’s nothin I can do bout that.”

“So he’ll spend the night,” Innocent said, “and go out in the mornin.”

“Complainin, complainin,” commented the desk clerk. “Well, I go off at six.”

“Let’s hope my little lady’s back by then,” Innocent said. “I’ll be in the bar.”

“I be sure to let you know,” the desk clerk promised.

On his way back to the bar, Innocent paused at the public phone booths to make three calls. In the first, he said, “There’s a man at the Fort George called Whitman Lemuel. Just a couple minutes after six, you call him, tell him you hear he’s looking for a charter flight, tell him to meet you at the Municipal Airport right away to make the arrangements, you’ll get him right out tonight. No, you don’t have to go to the airport.”

In the second call, he said, “There’s an American fella named Whitman Lemuel gonna be out to the Municipal Airport around six- thirty, looking for some charter flight. Arrest him on twenty or thirty technical charges. No, no, you won’t have to defend them.”

In the third call, he said, “There’s an American name of Whitman Lemuel gonna be comin in around seven. He’ll be spendin the night. Don’t hurt him, but do scare him. I’ll be comin down in the morning to rescue him, and I’m hopin to see a grateful man.”

Smiling, well pleased with himself, Innocent went on to the bar, where he ordered a gin and tonic and sat on one of the low broad swivel chairs, looking out at the view over the tame swimming pool at the feral sea. The pool, in the hotel’s late afternoon shadow, looked cold, but the sea, glistening in amber sunlight, looked warm. The impounded black freighter still stood in the offing, awaiting auction. White sails far out moved toward the barrier reef.

White sails. Valerie’s round white behind. Innocent smiled, content to wait.

24 When, in the Middle of the Air

When, in the middle of the air, Kirby saw his land and temple again, it was just 5:00 o’clock, and he’d been flying into the sun for half an hour. As though he weren’t annoyed and irritated and angry and irked and furious enough already.

Lemuel had been absolutely unsoothable on the flight back to Belize City, had refused to talk rationally, had alternated between moaning about his lost reputation and bitterly accusing Kirby of being responsible for blighting his career. At the Municipal Airport, he’d flung himself from the plane the instant it stopped rolling and went galloping off toward the operations building, yelling, “Taxi! Taxi!”

And now Kirby was back to his mousetrap, the sun in his eyes and ashes in his mouth. Skimming the temple top, he flashed down the other side, buzzed the Indian village low enough to cool soup, rotated Cynthia on her left wingtip, snarled over the hill again, hurled the plane to the ground as though he hated her, and stomped up the slope to the temple roof, where Tommy and Luz and the others were grouped about, gazing at him wide-eyed. “That was pretty close, Kimosabe,” Tommy said.

“You don’t know what close is,” Kirby told him, disgusted. “There was a goddam archaeologist here a little while ago. She’s on her way to report she has just found a previously unknown Mayan temple.”

“Shit,” said Luz.

Tommy said, “On her way where?”

“We can’t stop her,” Kirby said, “and it doesn’t matter who in particular she talks to, what matters is that this goddam pestiferous woman is honest.”

“Ugh,” said Luz.

“I hope she can’t bring back reinforcements tonight,” Kirby said, looking over his shoulder at his blasted plain. “But she’ll certainly be back tomorrow. She thinks I’m here to despoil the temple.”

Luz said, “Do what?”

“Steal,” Tommy explained. To Kirby he said, “So what do we do? Hold them off?”

“We’re not talking about General Custer,” Kirby told him. “We’re talking about policemen, reporters, photographers, archaeologists, government officials—”

“The whole shmeer,” Tommy finished. “Too bad; Custer we could have handled.”

Kirby looked about, shaking his head. “I hate this,” he said, “but we’ve got to dismantle it.”

“Shit,” said Luz.

Everybody looked concerned. Tommy said, “Forever?”

“Christ, I hope not.” Kirby sighed, gazing upon his masterpiece. “But at least until the fuss dies down. She’ll come back here with a lot of people, she’ll point, but there’s nothing here. With luck, everybody says she’s crazy.”

“It’s her period,” Luz suggested.

“Exactly,” Kirby said. “We wait a while, it blows over, we start up again.”

“Maybe,” said Tommy.

Adversity made Kirby philosophical. “Maybe’s the the best we can hope for in this sad world, boys,” he said.

25 The Sapodilla Narrative

“The alternative,” the skinny black man said reasonably, “was to let her tell everybody about the temple.”

“So you brought her here?” Vernon demanded.

Here was a small loggers’ cabin above the Sibun Gorge, a deep narrow winding groove through the Maya Mountains, gouged out over the millenia by the busy Sibun River. The cabin itself, low and slant- roofed, like a lean-to, was 30 years old or more, rank with mildew and the sweet smell of rotting things. Dirt-floored, lacking any furniture, it was built of horizontal pine-slabs nailed to upright posts pounded into the ground. Apparently it had once been half its present size, just one room, but then a second room was added, making the original front wall a dividing wall. There were no windows in either room, but plenty of air circulated through the uneven cracks between slabs. From the outside the place looked like the log cabin on a maple syrup label, but inside it looked like the attic in your grandmother’s house after she moved out. The logcutters who had built this rough shelter had long ago departed, on to other parts of the forest, and in the intervening years it had been occupied only rarely, by hunters or fugitives or lovers. And now by kidnappers and their victim.

“Where else?” the skinny black man demanded, giving Vernon a challenging look. Clearly, he had expected praise for his initiative, not all this carping. “Not to my house,” he went on. “Should I have taken her to your place?”

“She can identify you anyway,” Vernon pointed out.

“Not if she never sees me again. I can just disappear for a while, it’s happened before.”

“Well, I can’t,” Vernon said. “I have a job to protect.”

“Tied down by things,” the skinny black man commented, with the smug superiority of the ne’er-do-well.

“All right, all right,” Vernon said, struggling to subdue his fury. The thing to do was accept the situation, he told himself, as he paced back and forth past the open doorway, where gnats and dust motes practiced football plays in a shaft of orange sunlight. Lord, give me the strength to change that which can be changed, he thought, the patience to live with that which cannot be changed, and the wisdom to tell the difference. Lord, he thought, I’m up to my ass in shit, Lord!

Too many things going on, too much happening. Now he was somehow responsible for the kidnapping of an American woman, which would probably become an international incident, with the Sixth Fleet making a show of strength off St. Georges Caye and U.S. Marines walking around Belize City giving people chewing gum.

(Earlier in this century, after the world market in mahogany faltered, chicle, being the latex sap of the sapodilla tree, used in the making of chewing gum, became for a while Belize’s primary export to the United States.)

There was no furniture in this place, no objects but an unlit candle stuck in a beer bottle in one corner, nothing to kick but the pine-slab walls. Punching his own thighs, Vernon paced back and forth, thinking many different thoughts, until the skinny black man said, easily, “If you’re that worried about her, we can always...” He drew a line with his finger across his throat.

That was it, that was the thought Vernon had been avoiding and denying, circling around and around. In his mind and in his heart, he had committed many, many murders over the years, both of individuals and of groups, but out on the griddle of reality he had never even hit anybody very hard. Was this what a decisive man would do at this juncture? Just shoot the woman right off the—

He didn’t have a gun.

All right, stab her just as quick as—

He didn’t have a knife with him, either, except his imitation Swiss Army knife (imitation! how that galled!), which might eventually do the job, but not with one clean quick slice.

All right, all right, strangle the goddam...

He looked down at his hands. He imagined a face between them, gargling. The eyes get bigger and bigger, red veins standing out on the whites. The tongue protrudes from the begging mouth, growing thicker, flopping like a red fish. The feeble fingers grope in agony at his hands. Drool pours from the mouth, snot oozes from the nostrils, the eyes bulge as though they would explode like grapes, the flesh turns mottled, purple...

Vernon thought he might be sick.

“Well?” said the skinny black man.

Vernon swallowed, looking out the open doorway at the heavy jungle and the fading day. “Uhhhh,” he said. “We’ll decide that later. First I have to question her.”

“About what?”

“About the temple!” Vernon spun around, furious again. “Was that really and truly Galway’s land?”

“Looked that way on the map. She seemed to think it was. And the temple was there.”

“You saw it. You saw the temple.”

“I told you already, I saw a hill with some rocks on it. Come on, man, make a decision.”

The loneliness of command. Vernon bit his cheeks, he punched his knuckles together. All at once, it occurred to him, like a light shining from heaven, that he wouldn’t actually himself have to do the, uh, crime personally. Leaving here tonight, he could simply say (out of the comer of his mouth), “Take care of her,” and his partner, untroubled by conscience, unaffected by imagination, unthinking of consequence, would do the dirty deed.

“What do you want, Vernon?”

Vernon looked at the closed door to the inner room. The partition having originally been an exterior wall, it was still covered with bark, and the pine-slab door itself was thick and solid. It opened inward, but there was a rusty old hasp lock fixed in place with a broken-off piece of branch. “I’d better go question her now,” he decided, and sighed.

Taking the pillowcase from his pocket, he slowly and deliberately unfolded it, then slipped it over his head. It was a yellow pillowcase with a large sunny flower design; the eyeholes so he could see had been cut into the center of two daisies.

“Take the candle,” the skinny black man advised. “It’s dark in there.”

So Vernon lit the candle in the beer bottle, the skinny black man undid the hasp and opened the door — a scurrying sound came from within — and Vernon stepped through into the other room, peering through the damn eyeholes, stumbling a bit because he couldn’t see his feet. Behind him, the door was closed, the hasp lock rasped.

Valerie Greene stood tall — very tall — against the rear wall, arms at her sides, chin up in a posture of defiance. “You won’t get away with this!” she cried.

“I’ve already gotten away with it,” Vernon told her, sneering a bit. (He’d seen the same movies.)

“When I get out of here—”

“If you get out of here,” he said, and was gratified to see her blanch a bit, one hand lifting, fingers curled, the knuckles just touching her chin. “All you have to do,” he told her, “is cooperate.”

Her eyes flashed. “What does that mean?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said, scornful and superior, “I have no designs on your maidenly virtue. I know how important that is to you Americans.”

“You do?” In the flickering candlelight her expression was difficult to read.

“I am here,” he said, “to talk about the temple.”

“Despoliation!” She took an aggressive step forward, almost as though to launch herself at him. “You, a Belizean, and you don’t care what happens to your own heritage!”

“What makes you think I’m a Belizean?” he asked, trying on a Texas accent.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “I know who you are.”

“You may think you know—”

“There is one thing I wish you’d tell me,” she said.

This interview was getting out of control — now she was questioning him — but there seemed no way to get back to the original path: “Yes?” “Is Vernon your first name or your last?”

Behind the door, someone snickered. She heard us talking! Dammit, dammit, through all these cracks in the wall. Vernon said, in a stage-Irish accent, “It is none of me names. You can’t see me face, you can’t identify me voice, you can’t prove a thing.”

“We’ll see about that,” she said, and folded her arms beneath her proud bosom.

“Listen,” he said, stepping closer, “you talk about heritage, but what do you think Kirby Galway’s doing up there? He’s selling stuff!”

“That makes you no better.”

“All right,” Vernon said. “I’ll tell you the truth. I am Belizean.” “Of course you are, I know that.”

“I want to rescue the temple from Kirby Galway,” Vernon went on, looking guiltless and pure-minded under the pillowcase, “so I can protect it for my people.”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, “or you wouldn’t lock me up in here. You and Innocent St. Michael. Boy! Was I ever taken in by your boss!”

Oh, ho, Vernon thought, she thinks St. Michael’s part of this scheme. That’s good; somehow or other, it’s good. He said, “Never mind all that. The point is, that was Galway’s land you went to, is that right?”

“Of course it was,” she said. “The temple’s just where I said it was, all along, and you were wrong with your drainage and faults and all that.”

Vernon resisted the bait: I am not Vernon, he reminded himself, and said, “Is it valuable? Rich things there?”

She gave him the exasperated look of the professional faced with the amateur. “How am I supposed to know that? I haven’t investigated the site, that man drove me off with a sword!”

“A sword?”

She made swishing gestures, saying, “You know, that thing, you know.”

“Machete,” said the skinny black man from the other room.

“You keep out of this!” Vernon yelled. With his free hand, he punched his hipbone. Inside the pillowcase, his head was getting hotter and hotter, in more ways than one. Everything was out of control. There was no way to buy this woman off, or force her silence, except...

Ohhhhh, ohhhhhh. How had he gotten into this? “That’s all for now,” he said, backing away to the door. He thought, I’ll go to the land, I don’t know how we all missed the temple, but it must be there, I’ll go there, I’ll hunt around right now, tonight, if I’m lucky I’ll find some jade, maybe some gold, a couple hundred thousand worth (U.S.), I’ll skip the country tomorrow. Start all over again somewhere else, where nobody knows me, change my name, do things right this time. At the same time, he knew he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t go there tonight, and even if he did he wouldn’t find anything useful by stumbling around in the dark, and even if by some insane chance he did happen upon something valuable he still wouldn’t flee Belize.

Where would he go? What would he do there? Who would he know there?

“Leave me the candle,” Valerie Greene said.

“What?” he asked, disturbed from his reverie.

“It’s dark in here. I need the candle.”

“Oh, no,” he said. He’d seen that movie, too. “You’ll set fire to the place and escape.”

“I just wanted some light.”

“You don’t need light,” he said ominously, holding the candle closer to himself, not quite igniting the pillowcase. He pushed on the door, and nothing happened. His partner had locked it. So much for his exit line; hating the sense that he was somehow becoming a figure of fun, Vernon resignedly knocked on the door.

“Who goes there?”

“Oh, open the goddam door!”

The hasp rasped, the door swung open, and Vernon glared back through the pillowcase eyes at Valerie Greene: “I’ll see you later,” he said, and this time made his exit.

“I have to go to the bathroom!”

The skinny black man shut and locked the door. The sun would soon be setting; orange rays crossed almost horizontally from the doorway to soften the roughness of the dividing wall. Vernon put the candle down in its comer, still burning. “I have to get back,” he said.

The skinny black man nodded at the locked door. “Do I take care of that?”

“Well, of course, man, you brought her here, didn’t you?”

The skinny black man leveled on Vernon a cold and impatient gaze, and waited.

Vernon dithered. Unwillingly, he said, “We can’t have her walking around the streets now, can we?”

“Say it out, Vernon. Say what you want.”

There was to be no escape from responsibility. Vernon looked aside, out the doorway at trees, brush, vines, heavy greenery turning black in the orange light. He shook his head. “She has to die,” he muttered, and hurried away.

26 Through the Looking Glass

Home.

An accumulation of mail. No burglaries, thank God. The cats and plants had been taken care of after all by Richie from across the hall; what a relief. Sour milk in the refrigerator, but otherwise fine in there. Seltzer gone flat, so the homecoming Cutty Sarks had to be splashed with water from the kitchen sink. And among the messages on the answering machine was the hearty robust cheerful voice of Hiram: “Hanging by my thumbs down here, can’t wait to hear all. Give a buzz the instant you get in.”

“Oh, dear,” Gerry said. “I’m not sure I can face him.”

Back on home ground, Alan was less judgmental, more compassionate. “I know what you mean,” he said, “but we might as well get it over.”

“Can’t I at least shower first? We just walked in, we haven’t even unpacked.”

“You go shower,” Alan told him. “I’ll call Hiram and tell him to give us half an hour, and then I’ll unpack.” (Alan was feeling a bit guilty at the memory of his tension-caused snappishness down there in Belize.)

“Oh, I do appreciate that,” Gerry said. “Thank you, Alan.” The Scotch had made him feel better already, and so had Alan’s supportive mood, and so had the very fact of being home, here among the things he loved.

Before showering, and while Alan made the call to Hiram’s apartment three floors below, Gerry went back to the living room simply to drink in the atmosphere for a moment; the reassurance of one’s own nest. Coming in from Kennedy in the cab through the evening rush, smears of wet dirty snow beside the roadway, Gerry had yearned to be home, and now at last here he was, in his own living room.

On a basic motif of French Empire gilded furniture, Gerry and Alan had overlaid an eclectic mix of other items, all a little outrageous, and yet all coming wonderfully together, like a perfect little ragout. The nineteenth century English rhinoceros horn chair, for instance, made a blunt masculine statement that eased somewhat the overly pompous and delicate Napoleonic pieces, while the heavy window treatments of fringed green velvet against the slightly darker green of the lacquered walls created an inferiority, a hereness saved from claustrophobia by the leopard skin casually thrown on the Aubusson rug. The dark Coromandel screen in the corner served as a focus for the room’s objets; teakwood Balinese demons grinning at brass many-armed Indian goddesses under the baleful gaze of English cathedral stone gargoyles and medieval icons, lit by Tiffany lamps.

Home!

Actually smiling, for the first time in who knows how long, Gerry went on through to the bedroom, hearing the murmur of Alan on the phone in the office, and if the eclectic living room had soothed him the bedroom, designed for comfort and solace, made him almost weep with pleasure. The pattern here was English pastel flowered chintzes, basically in soft pinks and blues on a setting of cream. The king-size bed stated the motif, with a chintz spread tossed with lacy pillows, each in its own patterned cover reflected elsewhere in the room. The walls were sheathed in the softest and most delicate of cloth, with a slightly stronger statement made by the thick chintz window draperies sweeping the floor, backed by lacy sheers. The only strong note in the ensemble was a brass-legged glass table, flanked by low broad armchairs, very overstuffed beneath their chintz covers, soft and squishy and wonderfully comforting to sit on.

Gerry and Alan hadn’t gotten around to doing the bathroom yet, unfortunately — they wanted to get it exactly right before calling in the workmen — so it still reflected the taste (for lack of a better word) of the landlord. Still, the shower was as wonderful and restorative as anticipated.

Thirty minutes later, wearing a black muumuu decorated with dragons, and carrying a fresh Scotch and water in a wide, heavy-based glass, Gerry answered the doorbell to let in Hiram Farley, a tall barrel-chested balding happy man, an important local magazine editor, which means a man who found it impossible to take life seriously. “Gerry, my darling, you’re tanned!” Hiram said, grabbing Gerry by both cheeks and tilting his face down so he could be kissed on his tanned brow. “How beautiful you are,” Hiram said, “and how beautiful that drink looks.”

“No soda, I’m afraid. Plain water all right?”

“Fish fuck in it,” Hiram said, “but on the other hand birds fuck in midair.”

“Hiram,” Gerry said, “was that a yes?”

“The day I say no to a drink,” Hiram said, “any drink, that’s the day for you to arrange for the six black horses, and the six good men well- hung and true.”

Hiram’s words generally went by Gerry like traffic; in the pauses, he crossed the conversational street: “I’ll make your drink.”

“Thank you, sweetness.”

They bifurcated, Gerry moving kitchenward, Hiram toward the living room, Gerry saying, “Alan will be right in, he’s just finished his shower.”

When Gerry returned to the living room, in fact, carrying Hiram’s drink as well as his own, Alan was already there, dressed in his black- sashed white kimono and seated crosslegged on a white-and-gold chair. Hiram had, as usual, settled his bulk onto the chair framed in rhinoceros horn, which made him look like the white villain in a Tarzan movie. Gerry’s spot was the Madame Recamier.

“To your happy return,” Hiram said, raising the glass Gerry had handed him.

“Here, here,” said Alan, and everybody took a ritual sip.

Hiram smiled hopefully at his hosts. “And to a successful trip?”

“Not entirely,” Alan said.

“Not at all,” Gerry said. “In fact, a disaster.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” Alan said. “We know a lot more about how it’s done. You’re too pessimistic, Gerry.”

“The tapes are gone!”

“Hold on,” Hiram said. “Do what the King of Hearts told Alice to do, and what I tell writers every blessed day, ink-stained wretches, prose from amateurs, talentless bastards.”

Gerry blinked. “Pros from amateurs?”

Hiram leaned forward, assuming a pedantic yet royal posture. “‘Begin at the beginning,”’ he quoted, gravely, “‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’”

Alan said, “Everything seemed fine until the very end.”

“And then it wasn’t,” Gerry said.

“No, no,” Hiram said. “Listen more carefully this time. ‘Begin at the beginning—’”

“Oh, Hiram!” Gerry said, at wit’s end. “The tapes are gone, okay?”

Alan said, “Wait a minute, Gerry. Hiram’s right.” Turning to Hiram he said, “From the beginning, then,” and went on to give a mostly coherent account of their time in Belize, fictionalizing only their reaction to the presence of the mobster at their hotel, and finishing, “Now, obviously somebody knew we’d made those tapes, and guessed we’d try to sneak them out in our Walkmans.”

Hiram nodded, thinking about it. “Galway, do you think?”

“I just don’t know,” Alan said. “There wasn’t the slightest hint of such a thing, he doesn’t seem the type to be able to dissemble that well, and yet, who knows, really?”

“Oh, it was Galway, all right,” Gerry said. “He’s very devious, that one.”

“Well,” Hiram said, “if Galway has those tapes, that’s that.”

Alan said, “Must it be? We remember exactly what he told us, the whole method to smuggle everything out and all that, what he’s going to do to that poor temple—”

Gerry said, “I was a bit tempted, I must say. Just go ahead and do it; we could make a lot of money.”

Alan gave him an arch look. “Yes, I could tell what you were thinking.”

“Well,” Gerry said, “after all, we could, couldn’t we? I mean, we’re not police, are we?”

“You’re good citizens,” Hiram told him. “Remember how sickened you were when I showed you those pictures of the looted graves?”

Gerry laughed, with a negative hand-wave. “Oh, I don’t mean I was seriously tempted,” he said. “Just a little bit.”

“Anyway,” Alan said, “we still have the facts, even if we don’t have the tapes. Wouldn’t that be enough?”

Hiram shook his head. “Your unsupported word,” he said. “Even if the lawyers would let us publish, I wouldn’t. It’s just hearsay, puffed up. If we don’t nail a villain, we don’t have a story.”

“It’s too bad, really,” Alan said. “I was rather enjoying being a spy.”

Hiram looked as wistful as a large heavyset bald man can: “An exposé of illegal art smuggling, leading right here to New York. What a nice change of pace that would have been. I can’t tell you guys how tired of it all I get. The fifty-seven best pizza parlors in the Hamptons; your guide to a chiropractor on the West Side; questions raised about real estate developers. And here we had something real for once: antiquities, villains, airplanes, clandestine meetings in cornfields—”

“I think it’s some kind of ranch,” Alan said.

“Same idea,” Hiram told him. “Trickier footing, of course. Well, it’s all over now.” He sighed, and swigged half his drink. “You’ll never hear from Kirby Galway again.”

27 The Beacon and the Voice

I can still call those two guys in New York, Kirby thought, as he lifted the too-full Cynthia over the mountains in a great looping half circle. Just so that damn woman’s story doesn’t hit the wire services, I can still call them in three or four weeks and start making deliveries, whether I have a temple set up down here or not.

Around and behind him the marijuana bales made small squeaking and scraping sounds as Cynthia labored through the moonlit night. The first few trips with this sort of cargo, Kirby had thought the grass was infested with bugs, but then he came to realize it was just the bales shifting and adjusting as air currents toyed with the plane.

The only way to make a living at all carrying this sort of bulky cargo in this small plane was to overload it and hope you were as good a pilot as you thought you were. More than once, waddling along some bumpy pasture or a potholed secondary road toward a line of trees dead ahead in the darkness, Kirby had thought he’d overdone it this time — and wouldn’t that be a penny-ante way to die — but so far luck and skill and vagrant breezes had conspired to help him rise above all those trees and his own foolhardiness as well.

But now that he had the temple scam, he was doubling the risk. Having loaded the plane, having said farewell to the contact here at the Belizean end, he struggled Cynthia into the sky, set off northward and, once securely out of sight and sound of the men to whom he’d just waved goodbye, turned around in a long ungainly loop, hugging the treetops, Cynthia straining all the way, all so he could fly back south to his own land for an extra landing and takeoff.

Again tonight. He flew on south, mostly by feel, as clouds rolled in to block the moon. Coming in over the former temple, the world below him unrelieved black, he switched on his landing lights at the last possible instant, to see Luz and a couple of the others scurry out of his path. His land was even dryer than this afternoon, the first cracks appearing among the brown stubble.

Chunk! went Cynthia, hitting hard, the whole plane groaning in complaint. Kirby turned, flashed his landing lights briefly once more to find the Indians, then pushed Cynthia over to where they stood gathered around a couple of large cardboard cartons.

The loading didn’t take long; they’d done all this before. Out of the cardboard cartons came smaller or larger parcels wrapped in recent Belizean papers, mostly the Beacon and the Voice. The smallest parcel was no bigger than a coffee mug, the largest about the size of a table lamp without the shade. “Careful with this one,” Tommy said, handing over a medium-sized piece, “it’s broken.”

“Right,” said Kirby, stuffing it gently into one of the marijuana bales.

It was now a little past midnight, and he had nearly 800 miles to travel, most of it over water. Depending on winds and weather, the trip would take between five and seven hours; in any event, it would be before dawn when he landed. Stowing the last parcel, he yawned and said, “You get the temple put away?”

“Oh, yeah,” Tommy said. “The hill’s a little scuffed up, that’s all. You can see there’s been digging.”

Luz said, “I’m lookin forward to those assholes. They’ll shit when they get here and don’t see any temple.”

“Just so that ends it,” Kirby said, and yawned again. “I’ll see you guys next week some time,” he said. “When I get back from this trip, I’m just gonna hibernate.”

Innocently, Tommy said, “What’s hibernate?”

Kirby said, “What bears do in winter.”

Tommy said, “What’s winter?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Kirby said, and flew away with the music of their laughter in his ears.

28 But Not in Corozal

Nine A.M. Saturday morning, and the first thing Innocent saw when he walked into his suite of offices in Belmopan was his faithful assistant, Vernon, elbow deep in paperwork. “Well, good morning,” Innocent said. “Working on a Saturday?”

Vernon looked up from his graphs and lists: “I had to see the dentist yesterday, so I came in to get caught up.” He looked as though he still had the toothache.

“I have some phone calls to make,” Innocent said, “then an appointment down in Belize.” He grinned, thinking about his appointment. How happy he was going to make Whitman Lemuel, by rescuing him. For a price.

Vernon reached for his phone. “Who do you want to call?”

Good old reliable Vernon. “Transportation,” Innocent told him. “I signed out a Land Rover yesterday, I want to know if it’s back.”

While Vernon made the call, Innocent reflected again on yesterday’s unsatisfactory conclusion. Having arranged for the harrying of Whitman Lemuel, he had sat in the bar of the Fort George, one G and T after another in his hand as he’d watched daylight fade over the ocean. In air conditioning, behind glass, he had seen the slowly changing colors of sky and sea as a huge television production, slow but vast, put on particularly for him. Occasionally, a dusty cartop was visible, passing by on the dirt road beyond the hotel property’s stone wall. But none of those cars contained Valerie Greene.

Full night turned the windows into mirrors, and the view of himself sprawled on the low dark chair, drink in hand, waiting hour after hour for some woman who never appeared, finally irritated Innocent to the point where, a little after 7:30, he went back out to the phone booths, called a friend in the police, asked one or two guarded questions, and was assured no government vehicle of any kind had been involved today in an accident. (A rare day.) He then called Belize City Hospital, where no female U.S. citizen had been admitted in the last 12 hours. Likewise the Punta Gorda and Belmopan hospitals. He didn’t phone the hospitals up in Corozal and Orange Walk because that was the other end of the country; Valerie had been traveling south.

At that point, he could have taken a room at the hotel for himself, and there were any number of women he could have phoned to come join him, but he just didn’t feel like it. His appetite had been set for Valerie Greene, and he wanted no substitute. Besides which, he was somewhat surprised to realize, he liked that girl, and wanted to be sure she was all right. So he ate alone in the hotel dining room, facing the curtains that close out the night view, and when she still hadn’t returned he left a simple message for her with the night clerk: “I’ll phone in the morning. Innocent.” Whereupon he drove home, took a quick moonlight swim in the pool to get the kinks out of his body, and slept like a baby.

This morning, as promised, he phoned from the house, but Valerie Greene had never returned to the hotel. Her possessions were still in her room, as though she expected to come back, but the girl herself had been neither seen nor heard from.

His first appointment today was to have been with Whitman Lemuel, but the disappearance of Valerie Greene changed all that. The amount and kind of telephoning he had to do would not be possible at home, where he was surrounded by hostile spies with his blood in their veins. So he must first come here to the office in Belmopan.

Where the loyal Vernon immediately took over the dog’s body work, making the call, saying, “No, nothing’s wrong,” hanging up, saying to Innocent, “It’s still out.”

“Hell,” Innocent said.

Vernon looked alert, ready to be of assistance. “Something the matter?”

“That archaeologist woman,” Innocent said.

“Oh, yes. Is that the car?”

“She didn’t come back.”

A cloud passed over Vernon’s face; perhaps his tooth twinged him. He said, “Who was the driver?”

Innocent looked and felt uncomfortable; this was the real problem in the affair. “You know that fellow I use,” he said, gesturing vaguely.

Vernon looked shocked. “Him?”

“I needed someone...” Innocent paused, but then went on, since he kept very few secrets from Vernon. “I needed someone to report to me,” he said. “Someone I could trust to keep his mouth shut.”

“Someone you could trust with a woman?” Vernon asked.

“Oh, I don’t think he’d...” But Innocent’s voice trailed away. In his heart, he had to admit he wasn’t sure about that part of it.

“Is he back?” Vernon asked.

“He isn’t on the phone.”

“Where does he live?”

“Teakettle,” Innocent said, naming a tiny hamlet a few miles away toward the Guatemalan border. “But I have to get down to Belize.”

“I’ll go out there,” Vernon offered, “see if I can find him. You can phone me here later.”

“Thank you, Vernon,” Innocent said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

29

In Which Is Recounted Lemuel’s Arrival In Belize, His Traveling To The Temple With Galway, The Unexpected Appearance Of Valerie Green, Galway’s Astonishing Behavior Thereafter, And Lemuel’s Decision To Have Nothing More To Do With The Whole Dubious Affair

“Mistah Whitman?”

Lemuel rose from a sweaty unrestful humid sleep, up out of discomfort and nightmare into worse discomfort and much worse reality. Jail. Fetid odors fixed in the dank air like flies in amber. Something dripping far off, against some ancient stone. The night’s clamminess just giving way to the day’s heat. Jail; a foreign jail.

Gray light seeped through the filth on the barred window, illuminating the concrete walls and floor, the bare thin ticking without sheet or mattress in which Lemuel had tossed and turned in sleepless terror all night, only to fall into exhausted unconsciousness at the first hint of dawn. And now he was startled awake by a voice, rasping his name:

“You dere, wake up. You Mistah Whitman?”

Sitting up, dazed with fear and lack of sleep, Lemuel blinked at the silhouette beyond the barred door. “Lemuel,” he said. His tongue felt swollen, against his furry teeth. “My name is Lemuel.”

“You no Mistah Whitman?” The silhouette wore a uniform of some sort, must be a guard.

“Whitman is my first name.” Trying to wake up, trying to collect his scattered wits, Lemuel dug knuckles into his sandy eyes.

“Huh,” said the guard, and rattled papers. “Whitman be you Christian name?”

“Yes.”

“And Lemuel, now. Lemuel be you family name?”

“That’s right.”

The guard chuckled, rattling his papers. “There be many a strange name in this world,” he said philosophically. Keys rattled now, clanged in the lock, and the door squeaked open. “Well, Mistah, Mistah Lemuel, Mistah Whitman Lemuel, you got a visitor.”

A visitor? What could it mean? Who knew he was here? After hours last night of struggle and protest, hours of being lied to or intimidated or merely ignored, Lemuel had finally given up hope of ever getting a message through to the American embassy, or the hotel, or anyone anywhere in the world who might be able to help him escape this sudden tropic Kafka. So who could this be, coming to visit him here in this awful place? Lemuel asked the guard: “What visitor?”

“The man who want to see you.”

“Who? Who is he?”

“You don’t want no visitor this morning?” The door squeaked again, ominously, as though with the idea of closing. “You want me, I tell him you be too busy for visitor this morning.”

“No no!” Anything would be better than this verminous cell. Rising too hastily, Lemuel was engulfed in dizziness and had to lean a moment against the wall, under the eye of the impassive guard. Then he moved on, out to a concrete hall being mopped by a small and toothless inmate. The guard led Lemuel toward the front of the building, but veered them into a small side office where a large stout chocolate-colored man in a light gray suit and pale green open-neck shirt stood leafing through a wall calendar from Regent Insurance Company, taking a great deal of interest in the months ahead. Translucent louvers in both windows were slightly open, letting in light and air without permitting a view of what lay outside.

“Mistah St. Michael,” said the guard, with some odd combination of deference and jocularity, “this be Mistah Whit-man Lem-uel.” Shooing Lemuel into the office, the guard snicked the solid door shut with himself on the outside.

Mr. St. Michael dropped the year and turned to brood upon Lemuel, who keenly felt his own griminess, his wrinkled clothing and unwashed body and unshaven face. St. Michael, for such a big man in such a hot climate, was absolutely dapper. A thousand sentences rushed through Lemuel’s mind — greetings, queries, demands, supplications — but none seemed precisely suited to the situation, so he remained silent, not even trying to alter the look of desperation and bewilderment and fear he knew to be on his face.

It was St. Michael at last who spoke, in a mellifluous radio announcer’s voice, saying, “Well, Mister Lemuel, I’ll say this for you. You don’t look a crook.”

So it was, that was it, his worst fears realized, the Kirby Galway situation, that was it. The terrors that had kept him awake all night were justified; reputation ruined, a dank jail cell his portion forevermore. “Oh, no, sir,” Lemuel said, in that moment a broken man, “no, sir, I am not a crook.”

“We have heard Americans say that before,” St. Michael told him.

“It was Galway,” Lemuel said, all in a rush. “Kirby Galway, he lied to me, said all he wanted was my expert opinion, there wasn’t the slightest hint of impropriety until it was too late, I was already there, right there at the temple, the first time he made the suggestion, that’s the—”

“At the temple?” St. Michael’s eyes gleamed; his interest had been captured. A super-detective, that’s what he must be, a manhunter thrilling to the chase.

Well, Lemuel wanted no part of it. Let this manhunter chase Kirby Galway, and let Galway try to weasel out of it later, try to pin any of the blame on a respectable scholar like Whitman Lemuel, just let him try. “I don’t know what the girl told you,” he began, “but I was out there strictly—”

“The girl? Valerie Greene?”

“Is that her name? Whatever she said, I assure you—”

“Wait, wait, Mister Lemuel,” St. Michael said, suddenly accommodating, reassuring. “Sit down here. Begin at the beginning, please.”

There was a small mahogany desk in the room, and a pair of armless wooden chairs. Lemuel and St. Michael sat across the desk from one another, and Lemuel told him everything, every single thing from his first meeting in New York with Kirby Galway and the girl — Valerie Greene, yes, both there, but they gave no indication they were together at that time — through the subsequent meeting with Galway alone in New York, Lemuel’s agreement to come to Belize to inspect Galway’s temple, his arrival, their traveling out together, the unexpected appearance of the girl, Galway’s astonishing behavior thereafter, and Lemuel’s decision to have nothing more to do with the whole dubious affair. He gave St. Michael this entire history, and almost everything he said was the absolute truth. Only in one small detail did he lie; in his version of events, Kirby Galway had approached him exclusively as an expert, had asked for an opinion as to the value and authenticity of the material he had found on his land, and had not suggested smuggling or the illegal sale of Mayan antiquities until they were already standing on the temple itself, until, in fact, just before the girl arrived.

“So it’s there, in other words,” St. Michael said, when Lemuel was done. “The temple is there.”

“Well, yes, of course.”

St. Michael brooded some more. Did he believe Lemuel? If he didn’t, it was still possible that Lemuel was too unimportant to bother with further. Particularly if Lemuel volunteered to be, to do — what was the legal term for selling out your partners? Oh, yes — to give evidence for the prosecution, that was it. “I’ll be happy, if necessary,” Lemuel said, smiling a bit as man to man, “to give evidence for the prosecution, though of course, with my reputation at stake, I’d prefer to have as little to do with this sorry mess as—”

“Tell me about,” St. Michael interrupted, as though he hadn’t heard Lemuel talking at all, “tell me about, mmmm—” He withdrew a flat white envelope from his inner jacket pocket and consulted something written on its back: “Witcher and Feldspan.”

“Who?”

“Alan Witcher and— Here, see for yourself.”

St. Michael tossed the envelope across the table. It landed face up, and Lemuel had time to see that it was addressed to one Innocent St. Michael at some Belizean government department, and that the printed return address was a bank in the Cayman Islands. But then St. Michaels reached out, turned it over, and tapped the pen notations on the back, saying, “That side.”

“Yes, of course.”

Lemuel drew the envelope closer, to read what was written there: Alan Witchery Gerrold Feldspan, 8 Christopher Street, New York, NY 10014. “Who are these people?”

“That’s what I am asking you, Mister Lemuel. Who are they, and why did they tape-record their conversation with Kirby Galway?”

“But I have no idea, I’ve never heard—”

St. Michael’s big palm boomed down onto the desktop with a crack of doom, so forceful that everything in the room jumped, including Lemuel, who very nearly went over backwards out of his chair. His large round face all thunderclouds, St. Michael roared, “Do not toy with me, Mister Lemuel, or it will go very badly with you, I assure you. You can spend a month in that little cell, if you think you’d like it, if you—”

“No, please!” Lemuel leaned forward, gasping for breath, ribcage pressed against the rough edge of the desk. “I’m telling you the truth! I swear I am! I’ll tell you anything you want, anything you need to know!”

“Tell me about Witcher and Feldspan, then, and stop wasting my time!”

“But I don’t know them! Honest to God, oh, God help me, oh, what am I going to do, I should never have, it’s all Galway’s fault, he kept saying this and saying that, and that girl, I don’t know what she told you, she’s as bad as he is, they’re in it together, I know they—”

“Oh, be quiet,” St. Michael said, all his fury gone as abruptly as it had arrived, like a summer storm. Shaking his head, he said, “You’re telling the truth now, all right. You don’t know any more than you just said.”

“That’s right!”

“So Kirby brings down those pansy boys. And then he brings down you. And he knows Valerie Greene, but he don’t like her so much. And when you see her, you get the wind up, you figure you gonna be arrested for what you planned, stealing our antiquities, you try to run—”

“I never, never had any—”

St. Michael pointed a thick finger at Lemuel. “You come down here, at your expense, because Kirby’s got no money to throw away on strangers, your expense, just to play expert, that’s all it is. You tell that story, Mister Lemuel,” St. Michael said, and smiled a thin and dangerous smile. “You tell that story in a Belize court, Mister Lemuel.”

“It’s the truth,” Lemuel said weakly. But the Belize court loomed in his mind, as foreign as Brobdignag, as implacable as the Inquisition.

“Mister Lemuel,” St. Michael said, “I can arrange to have you released now, send you back to the hotel. You take a shower, calm down, check out like anybody else, get on the plane, go back to the States. You can do that, Mister Lemuel.”

“Oh, thank God,” Lemuel said.

“But, do you know,” St. Michael went on, “do you know what you can’t do, Mister Lemuel?”

“Wha... what?”

“Get within two blocks of the American embassy,” St. Michael said. “That you can’t do. Don’t even think about turning your head in that direction.”

“Oh, I won’t,” Lemuel said, in utter sincerity. “Believe me, Mister St. Michael, I’ve learned my lesson. You’ll never—” His voice broke; he started again: “You’ll never ever hear from me again.”

30 Before the Storm

When the alarm went off, Kirby moaned, thrashed about in the confined space, smacked gummy lips, and reluctantly opened gummy eyes just long enough to find the damn wind-up alarm clock on Cynthia’s dashboard and push in the button to stop the awful noise. His sticky eyelids immediately squeezed shut again, but too late; he had seen the clock face, he knew it was 9:30 tomorrow morning, he knew he was awake.

Hell and damn. The smell of marijuana all about him was hot and dry and pungent. Only a part of the plane was under the tree branches, and the metal fuselage had conducted heat forward from the sun-drenched tail section. He hated to sleep in the plane, anyway; there was never enough room for his long rangy body, and he always awoke stiff and sore, with aches that would take hours to fade. Still reluctant to accept consciousness, pawing in his door pocket for his sunglasses, he looked out and around at this little comer of the world.

The Florida Everglades. East of Cape Romano, south of Fort Myers, the Everglades was a flat and soggy confusion of land, some of it still pristine uncleared swamp, some dry scrub covered with dwarf pines and dusty shrubs, some reclaimed into citrus groves, some dried to grazing land, supporting horses or cattle. Kirby was parked at the narrow end of a long paper-airplane-shaped pasture flanked by bog, hemmed in by gnarled trees. Horses used to graze here, unfenced except at the wide farther end, held in by the swampy footing on both sides, but the land had changed ownership a couple of years ago and now it lay deserted.

Or almost deserted. Three young deer, adolescent males, grazed around Cynthia’s nose, looking up without much interest when Kirby began to move around inside the plane, but then bounding off into the swamp when he opened his door.

A hot day already, and quite humid. The insect repellent he’d put on three and a half hours ago, when he’d landed here in darkness and set the alarm and tried to get caught up on some of his lost sleep, had faded by now, and he had a few nice fresh bites under his eyes and between his knuckles. Itchy, hungry, irritated, weary, aching all over, he clambered awkwardly out of the plane and down onto the faintly spongy ground, where he held one of Cynthia’s struts and did some not-so-very-deep knee bends to limber up.

The bog on the right side of the field was stagnant, but on the left ran a narrow course of moving cool water, in which Kirby washed his face and hands, brushed his teeth with his finger, soaked his hair, and gargled. With water running down his neck and under his shirt, feeling slightly better, he walked back to the plane and ate the food he’d brought along: an apple and a health-food carob candy bar. He was just finishing when he saw the car approach from the wide end of the pasture.

The right car: a white Cadillac Seville with Dade County plates. Nevertheless, Kirby felt the same tension he always did at this point. He was dealing in stolen goods, and in things of great value; at least, that was the perception. People in such occupations sometimes were killed by their partners or their customers. Kirby had tried to be careful in his choice of clients, but one could never be absolutely certain. Not absolutely certain.

There seemed to be one person alone in the car, which was the way it was supposed to be. The Cadillac approached, moving slowly on the soft uneven ground, and Kirby squinted as he looked through the windshield, at last recognizing the driver. His name was Mortmain, he was somewhere the wrong side of 70, and he was dapper and elegant, from his full head of carefully waved white hair over a broad-browed, deeply tanned face set off by humorous blue eyes, through the white ascot and navy blue blazer and white slacks and white shoes which were his habitual costume. He was “retired,” Kirby didn’t know from what, and he was the go-between for a customer of Kirby’s in Los Angeles, an artist/designer/interior decorator/antique dealer whose clients were mostly celebrities, people for whom smuggled Mayan statuary was not the only illegal material from Latin America to be of more than passing interest.

Kirby walked around to the right side of the Cadillac as it came to a stop. Glancing first into the rear seatwell to be certain no one was hiding there — an automatic reflex by now — he slid into the air conditioned interior. “Morning, Mister Mortmain,” he said.

“Good morning, Kirby.” Mortmain must have been quite a burly man in his prime, and was still pretty big, with a deep mellow voice and large-knuckled tanned hands on which the liver spots could almost have been youthful freckles. Reaching to his blazer’s inside pocket, bringing out a thick white envelope, he said, “Bobbi apologizes for the amount. He swears it was the best he could get. The recession and all that.”

“Mm-hm,” Kirby said, taking the envelope. As usual it contained, in addition to his share of the sales, in cash, Xeroxed copies of Bobbi’s customers checks to Bobbi (their famous names and signatures discreetly blacked out), so Kirby would know he was getting a full count. Of course, there was no reason for Bobbi not to ask his customers to pay him in two checks; he could mention some vague tax reason, for instance. But that was all right; Kirby assumed his clients would cheat a little, it was part of the game.

While Kirby opened the envelope, counted the cash and looked at the checks, Mortmain carefully backed and filled, turning the Cadillac around and backing it into Cynthia’s left armpit, where the car’s trunk would be nearest the pilot’s door.

“No,” Kirby said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Mister Mortmain, but no.” This time, Bobbi had gone too far.

Mortmain looked mildly surprised, politely concerned. “Something wrong?”

“This is way too little,” Kirby said. “There’s another man I was talking to, he says he can get me a lot better prices.”

“People always make promises, Kirby,” Mortmain said.

“Maybe. Or maybe the recession didn’t hit as hard in Chicago.”

“Is that where your friend is?”

“I can’t give you this shipment,” Kirby said.

Now Mortmain was surprised. “You’ll fly it back with you?”

“No. I’ll leave it’with friends in Florida, and call the other guy.”

Mortmain sighed. “Well,” he said, “that’s up to you, of course. I know Bobbi will be very disappointed.”

Kirby didn’t know the precise relationship between Mortmain and Bobbi, whether Mortmain were merely a messenger, or somehow a partner, or possibly even the brains of the operation. It was hard to negotiate with somebody who might not even be present. Nevertheless, Kirby said, “Bobbi won’t be as disappointed as I am right now. I’ll tell you what I think, I think Bobbi’s getting second checks from people. I thought he was honest, but now I don’t know.”

Was Mortmain amused? Kirby’s occasional displays of naivete and stupidity were believed precisely because no one could imagine him deliberately painting himself in such colors. Mortmain nodded in perhaps exaggerated solemnity, considering what Kirby had said, and then said, “Kirby, I don’t think Bobbi would do a thing like that but, to be honest, I couldn’t swear to it.”

“I’m sorry,” Kirby said, and reached for the door handle. The air conditioning in here was very nice.

“Wait a minute,” Mortmain said. “I can’t let it end like this. Could you wait for me to go phone Bobbi?”

“I can’t,” Kirby said. “I still have to deliver that other stuff.”

“Of course.” Mortmain considered. “I’m going out on a limb here,” he said. “I can’t really speak for Bobbi, but I think I must. He’s done very well from your relationship.”

“He sure has,” Kirby said, sounding bitter.

“Well, so have you,” Mortmain pointed out. Gesturing at the envelope in Kirby’s hand, he said, “How much more do you think you should have had?”

“A thousand dollars would just begin to cover it.”

“Split the difference with me,” Mortmain said. “Don’t end the relationship now. I promise you I’ll talk with Bobbi, and I’ll tell him I guaranteed you another five hundred dollars from the last shipment. And I’ll tell him about your friend in Chicago, and say he’d better find some more generous customers from now on.”

Kirby would accept this offer, of course, there being no friend in Florida with whom to stash the goods, and the $500 being a bonus he hadn’t expected, but he let Mortmain watch him brood about it for a while. Mortmain could see his furrowed brow, could see him gradually overcoming his sense of grievance and deciding to take the offer. “All right,” he said at last.

“I’ll talk to Bobbi this afternoon,” Mortmain promised.

“Fine.” Kirby gave him a frank look: “I’ll tell you the truth, Mister Mortmain, I wish it was you I was dealing with.”

Mortmain gave a modest laugh, and Kirby got out of the car.

Prong said the Cadillac’s trunk, opening itself as Kirby came around; Mortmain had pushed the button in the glove compartment. Kirby unloaded all the parcels, stowing them carefully in the clean empty trunk of the Cadillac, aware of Mortmain’s eyes on him in the rearview mirror. Finished, he slammed the lid and waved to Mortmain through the rear window. Mortmain waved back and the Cadillac rolled slowly away.

From here on, it got easier. Cynthia being almost out of fuel, she was much lighter now, and lifted easily from the pasture. Nine miles and seven minutes later, he was circling over another field, where the two slat-sided farm trucks and the half-dozen men were waiting.

This part of the job was all cut-and-dried, the negotiations having been completed long ago, nobody here but low-level peons. While Cynthia was unloaded and her fuel tank refilled from jerry cans brought out on one of the trucks, Kirby lay in the shade of his baby’s wing, and thought about life. It was complicated, he decided, but amusing. All in all, not bad.

A little trouble in Belize right now, of course, with Lemuel getting spooked and the Greene woman making a fuss, but that would sort itself out. Or, it wouldn’t; in which case, he would tip his hat and go away. In any event, he wouldn’t worry about it now.

The truck engines started up, waking him from a light nap. A few clouds had sailed into view, dark with cargoes of rain. His clothing was stiff and heavy with perspiration. “Take me home, Cynthia,” he said, as he climbed back into his seat. “I’m gonna sleep a week.”

Time for a breather.

from BEKA LAMB, by Zee Edgell

“Nothin’ lasts here, Beka.” Gran’s eyes looked funny. “Tings bruk down.”

“Ah wonder why?” Beka asked, bringing the conch and minced habanero peppers to the stove.

Her Gran leaned the fork carefully against the frying pan, pushed the window over the back stairs, and propped it open with a long pole. Then she said,

“I don’t know why, Beka. But one time, when I was a young girl like you, a circus came to town. I can’t remember where it was from, and don’t ask me what happened to it afta. The circus had a fluffy polar bear — a ting Belize people never see befo’. It died up at Barracks Green, Beka. The ice factory broke down the second day the circus was here.”